Bloody Rose shows how to Rock & Roll some Dungeons & Dragons

I recently read Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames, a brilliant fantasy book about a band of misfits who travel around the land killing monsters. It’s exciting and it’s funny (I laughed for whole minutes at one point that I can’t tell you about without spoiling it), and the characters are badass and flawed and relatable. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in modern high fantasy literature. For reasons I’ll explain in this blog post, I’m also convinced that it should be added to the next version of D&D’s recommended reading (the 5th edition Appendix E version of which I have previously reviewed on this blog).

Now, I’m pretty sure that Bloody Rose is neither an official Dungeons & Dragons tie-in novel nor set in a D&D campaign world, but it clearly draws on D&D for inspiration. It’s got the standard ingredients: the aforementioned groups of monster slayers; non-human sentient races; magic weapons; a vaguely medieval setting with a map; a stark divide between human civilisation and monstrous wildlands; cataclysmic threats; heroics; bards to sing the tales. It’s even got some monsters straight out of the Monster Manual, including D&D-originals like owlbears, mariliths, and hyena-faced gnolls.

But the thing I’m most fascinated by in Bloody Rose is the spin that it puts on the heroic fantasy genre: what if adventuring parties were like rock & roll bands? It must have been done before, right? Does anyone know where and how? Regardless, I’ve never seen it before, so this is the story that made me wonder how to incorporate that idea back into D&D.

If you want to play a D&D campaign in which the adventuring parties were rock & roll bands, how would that work?

RPGaDay 2017, Day 13: Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

RPGaDay is an annual celebration of tabletop roleplaying. This is the first year I’ve tried to do it.

Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

This example might seem a little shallow, but the Dungeon World campaign that I ran in 2015 was when I really decided that accents are great and that I should use them more often. There’s a rundown of some of the accents I used in that game in my blog post 10 things I learned running Dungeon World (part 1). It wasn’t the first time I had used accents in a game, but I’ve used them regularly since, particularly as a player character. For example:

• Pheric, my cowbell-playing Pathfinder barbarian, sounded like Christopher Walken the Bruce Dickinson;
• G’Wayn, my Knight of the Round Table in CAMELOT Trigger, had a Scottish accent, which forced the GM to affect three different Scottish accents for other members of G’Wayn’s family;
• Ted Bracegirdle, my Hobbit in The One Ring, has a West Country accent inspired by the best Hobbit of all.

You better watch out: Festive monsters for your Christmas dungeon crawl

It’s December, my weekly Unknown Armies game has had its annual Christmas special, and I’ve been listening to a reading of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather.

As a result of one or more of these things, I’ve found myself thinking about a dungeon crawl that drops a band of adventurers in a wintry ice fortress and pits them against an evil Santa Claus and his Christmassy minions. Here are some monsters that might populate such a dungeon crawl, which you can use for a game of Dungeon World if you’re so inclined.

Enjoy…

My (red) kryptonite: Mind control in Smallville RPG

Mind control is a staple of genre fiction. It appears in fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It’s used an awful lot in superhero stories. As such, it’s hard to avoid in any roleplaying game that tries to emulate any of these genres.

But mind control is rooted in the idea of removing someone’s agency, and playing a character without any agency is just not very fun. Ask anyone who has had their D&D character under the influence of Dominate Person for round after round after round…

Smallville RPG includes mind control, at least in part because it was based on a TV show that was chock full of mind control and other forms of mental alteration. Given Smallville RPG’s commitment to the concept that no player can ever dictate another character’s choices, mind control could have been a fascinating addition to the game. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s either so weak that it can be ignored, rendering it meaningless, or it’s so overpowered that it violates the game’s core principle of protecting player agency.

In short, mind control in Smallville blows harder than Clark Kent’s super breath.

In this blog, I will describe various ways that we could hack Smallville to make mind control work better, taking inspiration from some other roleplaying games. The different strategies are not mutually exclusive, and two or more could be combined in the same game. Maybe even all of them together.

10 things I learned running Dungeon World (part 2)

2015 was a pretty good year for my roleplaying, all told. It’s the year I started this blog. It’s also the year I started attending a monthly RPG Book and Brunch Club, which introduced me to games like Breaking the Ice, Sorcerer, and Swords Without Master (plus games I never reviewed, like Microscope). I’ve run and played a variety of games, both one-offs and campaigns.

And, of course, it’s the year I started and finished running my campaign of Dungeon World, which I started reviewing in my previous blog post.

10 things I learned running Dungeon World (part 1)

Last night I ran the finale session of my Dungeon World campaign, and boy did it end on a high note. The first half of the session was relatively sedate and character-focused, and the second half was an all-out battle against a monstrous dragon.

There were three player characters at the end of the campaign:

• Clovis the Giant, later Clovis the Dragon-hearted, a halfling barbarian from the great desert to the north-west who longs to kill the Great Horned Dragon that wiped out his people.
• Rurgosh, a bald dwarven cleric of the god Fade, who presides over rocks and forgotten things. Rurgosh secretly longs for fame and glory, despite the precepts of their god.
• Enrico, elven bard of Lothlorenza, who is composing the Ballad of Clovis the Giant upon his father’s mandolin as they travel.

(There had originally been a human wizard named Morgan, but he left before they became famous.)

These characters, with their hirelings and a local town of (skeleton) civilians, came together in the final session to defeat the Great Horned Dragon. ‘Twas truly a tale for the ages.

The campaign started in January, so it ran for almost exactly a year. In that time, I’ve learned (or been reminded of) a few tricks not just for Dungeon World, but other roleplaying games too. Here are the top 10 things I learned from the game.

Here’s the Kicker: Character creation and plot hooks

Last weekend I had my first experience of the game Sorcerer by Ron Edwards. Sorcerer was originally self-published in 1996, and it was at the vanguard of the indie RPG movement. I’m not going to discuss the game extensively, but there was one thing in particular that got me thinking.

I want to talk about Kickers.

A Kicker is an unexpected event that shakes up a player character’s life. It forces the player character to react, but does not dictate how they should react. It is the set-up for the player character’s opening conflict during play.

Kickers in Sorcerer

As defined above, Kickers are not new and not revolutionary. They are basically just plot hooks. Most long-running campaigns start with something similar, usually at the start of the first session of play, to get the players invested and the characters moving. Even the standard D&D trope of being commanded by the local ruler to sort out those bandits chop chop almost meets the definition (except for not dictating how the players should react).

But what Sorcerer did that was new and was revolutionary was this: it put the Kicker into the hands of the player.

“Why do I hang out with you again?”: The importance of group character generation

I am a huge believer in doing group character generation at the start of a new RPG campaign. I don’t just mean getting all the players in the same place to do character generation, but actually doing it together. Of the RPGs I’ve played in, nearly all of the ones I’ve enjoyed most have made character generation a group activity.