Any city has its share of secrets. Those secrets are valuable, so there are organizations who find those secrets and sell them.
What better place to both learn secrets and sell them than a tavern?
The Nightbird Tavern is a watering hole that locals have been coming to for generations. Its staff have been serving those same locals for generations, with sons and daughters taking over for mothers and fathers for as long as anyone can remember. Given their high standards of service, this surprises some foreigners, but it’s like the little ones are born for it. Turns out, they are.
Unbeknownst to anyone, the entire extended family that runs the Nightbird Tavern also make up the Raven Society, a tight-knit crew of spies who slip into alleys and listen behind doorways throughout the city. Because who would be surprised to see a scullery maid out on an errand in an alley?
Highly adept in combat, they train their children from the earliest ages in both spycraft and martial arts.
The clan is led by Matreya Ravenclaw, a battleaxe of an old woman who can be annoyingly stubborn or laughingly easygoing, with little in-between. Her second-in-command, Nisha, is a tall, taciturn master of combat.
As a friendly faction, the Raven Society operates as a neutral information broker, passing tips about upcoming monster attacks or cults on the move to the city watch. They charge reasonable fees for their information, with a hefty discount to good adventurers who publicly protect their city.
The Ravenclaws would be willing to pay–in gold or information–an adventuring party who can create an armed distraction while one of their members performs a little skullduggery.
As a foe faction, the Raven Society sells their information to the highest bidder and don’t care who gets hurt in the process. Too many factions rely on their services for anyone to risk taking them out. If threatened, they can call in favors from both law enforcement and the city’s underbelly.
Worse, Nisha has begun consolidating the family’s power in ways that are far less neutral than the past, calling in favors to eliminate rival factions in the city. Nobody in the Raven Society gets their hands dirty, of course, but bodies are beginning to pile up. Matreya is uneasy about this; either she or Nisha could hire the PCs to wipe out the other.
There are two Gwelf books, beautifully illustrated, that are crying out for a tabletop RPG. So I thought I’d make one as a fan.
The world of Gwelf
Source: Gwelf: The Survival Guide by Larry MacDougall
Gwelf initially presents itself as a bucolic world of anthropomorphic characters within the safe walls of civilization (the cozy City of Gwelf, the prosperous Farmlands, and the wilder Scrublands), where the Sparrows study white magic and direct the other denizens in safeguarding themselves from the dark forces of the Ravens in the distant Hinterlands. In contrast, trips out to study Raven-kind have a hard survival edge; many of those who venture into the Hinterlands and beyond never return.
The following is a fan-made tabletop RPG of Gwelf with no intent for profit.
Create your character
Choose your Discipline:
Guard: Trained in combat and defending other creatures
Exorcist: Expert at driving away Ravenkind
Medic: Trained in healing wounds
Scout: Skilled in exploration and survival
Choose your Species:
Badger: strong and resolute
Fox: clever and creative
Mouse: flexible and dependable
Otter: curious and cunning
Rabbit: peaceful and diplomatic
Raccoon: industrious and opportunistic
Sparrow: leader and researcher
Choose your Attributes:
Distribute 5 points between Mind and Body
You start with 0 Fatigue, 0 Wounds, and 10 inventory slots.
Go on your adventure
Your characters are called together by the Sparrows to investigate recent sightings of Raven-kind in a previously quiet area of the Hinterlands. (For the sample adventure below, Raven-kind have been seen hauling strangely-shaped objects in sacks out of a certain area.) The Sparrows want to find out what the Ravens are looking for. However, you’ll need to wait a few days in the City of Gwelf before setting out; the Sparrows need to send letters to the border forts letting them know you’ll be arriving, and they’re arranging for a scout to learn more about the Raven-kind sightings, who will meet you at the border with an update.
Start in the city of Gwelf, exploring shops and gathering supplies. No pressure. You can buy up to 10 inventory slots’ worth of goods.
Supplies available:
Particle candles of restoration and healing
Sleep inducing candles
Candles of warding
Defense amulet
Directional talisman
Climbing gloves
Sparrow quill
Pot of enchanted ink
Hammer and chisel
Scissors
Sling
Enchanted dagger (Witch Market)
Short sword
Bow and arrow
Crossbow and bolts
Stonk grenades
Shield
Flask of Pine Liquor
Satchel of tea
Satchel of coffee
Quiver of incense
Mortar and pestle
Embroidered handkerchief
Flute
Pan flute
Mandolin
Tambourine
Quill, ink, and parchment
Paint, brushes, and parchment
Book of poetry
From there, move out into the Farmlands, where you’ll stop at 2 locations. Choose or roll randomly:
The Pine Cone Inn
The Sparrow Feather Pub
Mrs. Tuffet’s B&B
The Tinker’s Meadow
The Ploughman
The Sparrow Feather Pub
The Mossy Kettle Pub
The Witch and Weaver
The Fox and Fiddle Tea Shop
The Floating Bridge at Albion Falls
Cherry Hill Gate and the Roadside Market
A Tinker Band
At one of these locations, you can spend an inventory item to learn a rumor about what’s going on in the Hinterlands:
The Ravens have found a place of great magic power.
The Ravens have unearthed an artifact and are studying it.
The Ravens are building a large fortification.
The Ravens are massing for war.
When you transition to the Scrublands, you can only carry 5 inventory slots’ worth of goods (the rest is made up of sufficient rations for the trip). If you have more than 5 inventory slots worth of goods, you must discard down to 5 now.
Here in the Scrublands, you will have 3 encounters (see below for rules on overcoming challenges). Roll randomly:
Dundurn Village (no challenges)
Rats (challenge)
Ragteeth (challenge)
Mange-creatures (challenge)
Then, you reach the border fort. Learn more from the scout, then venture into the Hinterlands. Here, you will encounter powerful Ravenkind.
Source: Gwelf: The Survival Guide by Larry MacDougall
Overcome challenges
When faced with a challenge, you may sacrifice one piece of appropriate equipment to automatically succeed. For example, a short sword can be sacrificed to defeat a Mange-creature, but a satchel of tea cannot.
Otherwise, determine the challenge’s Difficulty, as a die size, typically d8 to d12 (higher is harder).
Next, determine your Capability. This represents how much energy you can bring to this challenge. Start your as your most relevant attribute (Body or Mind). Add 1 to your Capability if you’re acting within your Discipline. If you have any points of Wounds (see below), subtract 1 from Capability. So, a Medic with 3 Body and 1 Wound attempting to skewer a Mange-creature would have a Capability of 2 (Body 3 – 1 for the Wound), while a fully-rested Guard with 4 Body would have a Capability of 5 (Body 4 + 1 for Discipline).
Capability effect
Modifier
Begin with…
Body or Mind
Discipline applies?
+1
Wounded?
-1
You and the GM each roll a Difficulty die (so, for an easy challenge, you each roll a d8). If the difference between the rolls is less than or equal to your Capability, you succeed; otherwise, you suffer a setback and take Strain.
Take Strain
Failure takes a lot out of you. The first time you fail at a challenge, you take 1 Fatigue. If you fail again, you take 1 more Fatigue. If you fail and have 2 Fatigue, you take 1 Wound. You can have at most 2 Fatigue and 2 Wounds.
If you have any points of Wounds, you take -1 on all challenges.
If you fail on a challenge and have 2 Wounds, you face a choice:
Retreat: You must remove yourself from the situation; you cannot take on any further challenges related to the current encounter. You may still be physically present.
Rage: You continue the encounter as usual, but after it is over, you will not be able to continue this adventure, and you gain a permanent scar.
Recover Strain
After an encounter, if you take a moment to acknowledge your victory or count the cost, reduce your Fatigue to 0.
At the start of the day, a Medic can remove 1 Wound on up to 3 creatures.
Source: Gwelf: The Survival Guide by Larry MacDougall
The Adventure in the Hinterlands
The following is a sample adventure for Gwelf.
Upon entering the Hinterlands, the party must first complete 1 to 3 survival challenges, representing hazards that they encounter during travel. The Hinterlands take a lot out of any who explore them.
Hinterland survival challenges:
A cold window buffets the party for hours.
The party must navigate a swamp.
The party cannot find a safe place to sleep and must camp in the open.
The party encounters a scouting party of rats.
The party encounters wandering Ragteeth.
The party sights a flying Raven and must hide.
For each survival challenge, each PC must succeed on a Body challenge. The first challenge has a Difficulty of 8, the next 10, and the final 12.
Then, the party comes across a weird landscape: many small hillocks suggesting underground tunnels, withered trees, and an unexplained chill in the air. At the center, trees surround an excavation that goes deep into the earth. Each tree surrounding the crater has a piece of paper nailed to it, and each paper contains strange jagged runes in some arcane Raven language.
The PCs can attempt to descend into the excavation, to a vertical shaft that has a ladder propped up against it, or they can search the area where they’ll find a side access tunnel. The vertical shaft will drop them right into a chamber, while the side tunnel will lead them to the same place but give them the element of surprise.
Below the shaft lies a huge chamber, much of which is taken up by a massive sleeping serpent. Its pale green scales glitter in the light of a wan lantern that’s been set down next to several rats that are silently pilfering items from a huge hoard of objects:
Smooth stones with strange symbols carved in them
Clay tablets with strange symbols carved in them
Oddly-colored crystals, some of which glow faintly.
The skulls of various burrowing creatures like moles and ground squirrels, some of them marked with strange patterns
Fossils of strange underwater creatures
Tree roots curved into fantastical shapes
The rats are prioritizing the stones and clay tablets. It’s now up to the PCs to figure out what to do. If they leave now and just report back, the rats might be able to clear out the entire hoard before any good creatures of Gwelf make it back here. But the rats will no doubt fight tooth and claw, and doing so might awaken the serpent.
If the PCs decide to leave quietly, have a patrol of rats discover them outside the chamber. Now they have to get past the patrol before reinforcements from the chamber arrive.
Design notes
I realize that acquiring items and sacrificing them to succeed in challenges feels a little wonky and too open to abuse during a session, especially with players more interested in winning the scenario than story logic or atmosphere. But the tone feels right, so I’m leaving it in.
A character’s Species currently has no mechanical benefit. If Species granted you another +1, that would be powerful enough to reward character optimization and “meta” in a game that’s not really about that. I haven’t figured out a better solution yet.
Suggestions welcome in the comments below! I do read them.
Systems and bloggers encourage GMs and players to beware frivolous die rolls. We are warned to avoid die rolls when the outcome would be obvious, or when one outcome would be uninteresting.
Okay, so when are die rolls actually interesting?
Simple failure is usually uninteresting (in RPGs, at least). Players want to jump across a chasm…and fail. So, what, they fall in and die? Not very heroic, and usually not very interesting.
Before we go any further: Yes, a great GM and great players can make that interesting. But it’s a high-level skill, not common in groups.
What if, instead of success/failure, you rolled to determine whether the PC faces a negative consequence?
In other words, if a PC wants to bash open a broken door, they don’t roll to see if they do it; they roll to see if that attracts the attention of nearby monsters. If you fail the roll to bribe the guard, he doesn’t just politely turn you down; the bribe is a crime and he tries to arrest you.
I’m sure there are systems that do this (I’m writing one). But imagine it accepted broadly. What if popular systems were built around the idea of dice rolls providing more than a binary answer of success or failure for the action itself?
First, who is your victim? I’d include name, physical description, and social status at least.
How did your victim die? Sword through the heart? Decapitated? Drowned? Poisoned?
Where did your victim die? In a dungeon? In a study? In someone’s bedroom? In the garden? In a hotel room? In the wilderness?
When did your victim die? First thing in the morning? Day? Dusk? Dead of night?
Who could have killed the victim? These are your suspects. It’s not as important to flesh out the specifics of why and how they’re suspects right now; at this point, you’re just building a list of people with some personal relationship or physical proximity to the victim. Think relatives, friends, enemies, and caretakers. I’ve always had at least 3 suspects, to give the PCs plenty of potential leads.
Now you can build a table. On one side of a piece of paper (or a spreadsheet), write each suspect’s name in a column. Along the top of the paper, write the following column headers: Means, Motive, and Opportunity.
And now you get to completely make stuff up!
Every suspect who had access to the murder weapon gets a note in the “Means” column, explaining how they have access to it.
Every suspect who had a reason to kill the victim gets a note explaining that reason in the “Motive” column.
The “Opportunity” column is a little special. You can note both those suspects who were free and could have been with the victim at the time of the crime, and those suspects who absolutely were not free and couldn’t possibly have been with the victim at the time of the crime. You can also note any significant details about the circumstances; if the suspect was with several other people at the time of the murder, who were they?
Importantly, you don’t have to fill in every space! Some suspects won’t have a motive. Some won’t have access to the murder weapon.
Once you’re satisfied, look back at your table as a whole. Any suspect with all of the columns filled out, and where the Opportunity column indicates they were free at the time of the murder, is the murderer. If you have multiple murderers–that is, more than one suspect has all three columns filled out–that’s great! They’re all potential murderers. You don’t have to decide.
This is all I’ve ever needed to run a murder mystery. In the game, I explain the situation, introduce the suspects, and let the players investigate. Once they’ve narrowed their list of suspects down to one of the potential murderers (someone with the Means, Motive, and Opportunity), I make that the actual murderer and give the PCs the satisfaction of being right.
Recently, I’ve been building a new fantasy RPG that’s intended primarily for pick-up-and-play games. Character stats are so straightforward players can quickly memorize all the relevant information, and the mechanics require no special equipment (not even dice). This lets people play in odd moments: in a car, waiting for a table at a restaurant, etc.
I also want to make running a game like this easy. That means giving the GM a setting that they can easily keep in their head. How on Oerth do you do that? Here’s one possibility I’m exploring:
Magic erupts!
Something terrible is happening to the forces of magic. Randomly, chaos magic erupts in unexpected locations, spawning monsters that attack villagers and eat nearby sheep and cattle. The PCs are tasked with charging out from their starting town, defeating the monsters, and destroying whatever chaos core spawned them.
This has the advantage of a clear, specific goal for adventures: get to the core of the chaos magic eruption and destroy it. Since players will expect some thematic consistency, the GM will need to remember a specific thematic set of monsters, such as undead or fire-themed monsters. Hopefully, that very thematic consistency should make that set of monsters easier to remember, especially since the adventure would be brief, only requiring a couple of monsters.
Here are some examples:
The necromantic core
Will o’ wisp
Zombies
Ghosts guarding an artifact
The core: A fusion of corpses with many heads and flailing arms
The diseased core
Diseased plants
Diseased beasts
A diseased plant hoarding a magic artifact, guarded by diseased beasts
The core: A massive pustule of orifices wheezing poison
The fire core
A drake
Small fire elementals
Lava pools containing an artifact
The core: A large fire elemental
The earth core
Quicksand
A maze of twisty little passages, all alike
A mud monster powered by a magical artifact
The core: An earth elemental
Need a pickup game for an upcoming session? There you go!
Deep in the wilderness, an ancient stone ziggurat squats, its vine-covered walls slowly crumbling to time. Many secrets and wonders lie within this monument to a dead civilization, and a new resident patiently plumbs its depths.
A lamia named Lystrata has taken up residence inside this complex, which contains everything from ball courts to baths to libraries, all appointed in opulent tastes. As is typical for her kind, Lystrata has acquired a large retinue that inhabits the ziggurat with her, and she’s re-opened many of its chambers, reactivating the wondrous mechanisms left behind here that provide artificial light and pump water from mysterious sources. It is the perfect lair.
The library in the lowest level of the ziggurat is sadly incomplete; some years ago a cluster of ankhegs burrowed into the library accidentally, exposing its books and scrolls to humid air that rotted a large proportion.
As a friendly faction, Lystrata has become captivated with researching the secrets of this ancient civilization, and has grown less evil and more obsessed. She treats her retainers reasonably well, if mostly because she’s too distracted by her research to pay them much attention.
The library has revealed the location of several other ziggurats, and Lystrata desperately wants to find them. Unfortunately, none of Lystrata’s retainers have experience as adventurers, so she’s resorted to sending out her retainers to hire adventuring parties (like the PCs) to find and secure the ziggurats.
Some PCs may be uncomfortable with working for a lamia. This is a great source of potential role-play.
As a foe faction, Lystrata is a typical lamia: evil and self-absorbed. The ziggurat has become her private pleasure lair, filled with her slaves and captured beasts, where she feasts on any adventurers who attempt to explore it. She has no particular interest in the knowledge contained in the library, but the patron who sends the PCs against her very much does.
The ziggurat itself can be a classic dungeon crawl, but Lystrata will not fight to the death. She already controls several other ziggurat lairs, and will retreat (with some of her retainers) to another if the PCs do particularly well, allowing her to serve as a long-term villain.
Sometimes, you want to give your players a monster that they can’t just whack or shoot at willy-nilly.
Today, I present frost mites, tiny arthropods that leech heat out directly out of their prey.
Normally, frost mites are barely noticeable pests; a hand covered with half a dozen mites will feel uncomfortably cold, but hardly any danger.
But in early autumn and late spring they swarm, gathering in masses of thousands underneath rocks. A foraging animal — or adventurer looking for an entrance to a cave — that disturbs a swarm will find him- or herself covered in masses of blue specks within seconds.
Importantly, you can’t just fire an arrow at a mass of frost mites and expect to stop them. More worryingly, you can’t knock them off-balance; they cover their victim.
As such, frost mites are immune to all damage types except fire, bludgeoning, and magical damage, and they resist bludgeoning damage (taking half damage). They cannot be knocked prone.
Old gnome, via http://www.wampstore.com/store/old%20gnome
Gyllehaal, an old gnome, has seen a lot in his life. He spent decades adventuring unluckily; he can barely remember how often he was captured and beaten within an inch of his life, or a treasure chest turned out to be empty, or a valuable gem slipped from his grasp and went careening down a chasm.
But eventually his luck turned, and after a number of successful adventures, he grew rich. Given so many years of hardship, now he has to show off his hard-won fortune.
Gyllehaal struts the streets of his favorite city, bedecked in jewels and expensive furs, visiting money-lenders during the day to manage his money and every gambling house and high-society party he can get invited to at night.
Nobody steals his jewels, though, because of the 4 full orc bodyguards that accompany him everywhere. They speak only among themselves (and then, only in orcish), and they follow Gyllehaal’s orders with completely professional alacrity. They even follow him into parties, though they know enough to stay on the periphery of whatever grand ballroom he’s in.
The orcs are a mystery to outsiders. They wear well-tailored leather clothes trimmed with wolf fur and heavy boots, and wear their hair pulled back in pony tails. They each carry large, ornate axes strapped to their backs. They seem well-mannered, though they don’t say or do much; just surround Gyllehaal while he’s in the streets and stand in a knot muttering among themselves when he’s inside a structure. Folks whisper that Gyllehaal defeated them in battle some years ago and they swore fealty to him, though he must have done something pretty amazing to manage that.
As a friendly faction, Gyllehaal is no more or less than an ex-adventurer enjoying the fruits of his labor. He’ll ask the PCs to collect various amulets, rings, and other objects he can wear in public.
As a foe faction, Gyllehaal may have made a fortune, but he quickly lost it to gambling. Now he works for the money-lenders in a protection racket, using his orcs to squeeze protection money out of a number of businesses.
Unfortunately, Gyllehaal has no problem calling on the City Watch if he’s molested, and they have no beef with him, so a group of PCs who just walk up to Gyllehaal and attack him will soon find themselves swarmed with members of the Watch.
Instead, they will have to gather evidence, such as a set of cooked books that he keeps in the basement of his heavily guarded mansion.
I recently finished a fantasy novel set in the Greyhawk universe, written by none other than Gary Gygax. It’s “The Sea of Death,” starring his character Gord the Rogue.
First off: It’s a rollicking D&D-esque adventure and a fun diversion.
However, it also contains a number of insights about how Gary expected D&D adventures to flow. A few lessons:
Groups of intelligent creatures don’t rush at each other on sight, even if both are enemies. They each send an envoy to size the other side up, and will retreat if the odds are overwhelming.
Every group of monsters–intelligent or not–will break and run if at least half of them die during an encounter (except in extremely rare circumstances). Gygax even has a magically animated statue surrender once one of its legs is broken. And while, yeah, that’s like the morale rules in early D&D, those just provided increased chances that enemies would run. Here, they always try to make a break for it when half their number die. Interesting.
I may have to bring back morale rules in my 5E games. Probably make it a collective Wisdom check vs. 10 as an initial rule.
Combat isn’t a matter of trading blows. While you are constantly swinging your sword or what-have-you, you’re more wearing your opponent down until you can get in a killing strike, and there’s plenty of fancy footwork and use of the environment. Sometimes combat feels surprisingly closer to a Jackie Chan movie than a Conan movie.
You can absolutely have unsavory things in your campaign world and keep them out of your campaign. Slavery exists and is consistently portrayed as odious, but in the story is mainly a thing that happens to other people or a threat if the heroes are captured.
Evil doesn’t win partly because evil characters are always plotting against each other to gain the ultimate victory for themselves. They can’t cooperate for long, and once one turns against another, that opens up opportunities for the heroes as long as the heroes continue to push against the villains.
Amethyst, a lively and mysterious young tiefling woman with a penchant for long, shimmering green dresses and high society parties, secretly leads a society of spellcasters.
As far as most people know, she’s simply an independently wealthy ex-adventurer with an infectious laugh and a shrewd mind.
But several nights a week, she meets with others of her kind in basements all across the city, where they train each other in magical combat. These fights can be very hard, but they’re not intended to kill or even hurt. They’re meant to toughen. Each member of her organization has embedded a small jewel somewhere on his or her body, typically in the middle of the breastbone.
Amethyst believes in a coming sea change in the public perception of magic. She believes that a purge will sweep civilization a few years from now, where the common people will rise up out of fear of magic and hunt down spellcasters.
So her followers train to defend themselves on that day, and they’re building a secret stash of magical tomes and records that they can keep safe through the upcoming purge.
As a friendly faction, Amethyst and her Jeweled Ones are a slightly crackpot but ultimately benevolent group. Amethyst is misreading various political signals, and her organization serves as a diversion and sort of insurance just in case the worst does happen. They can be treated like UFO hunter “true believers.”
Amethyst can hire the adventurers to search for various arcane books that are lost deep in dungeons, abandoned temples, and other suitable adventuring environments.
As a foe faction, Amethyst is a seriously disturbed person who’s convinced herself of an upcoming apocalypse. The Jeweled Ones train furiously and acquire magical knowledge through any means necessary. And anyone who finds out about them and talks of them publicly doesn’t survive long.
Basically, they’re a cult that are rapidly becoming terrorists.
The PCs may be hired to investigate a murder that was committed by a Jeweled One to silence the victim, or to find a magic tome before they do (a la Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).
A showdown with Amethyst and her followers can occur in the following map, which can be either a sewer or basement complex. Entry comes through the left, and Jeweled Ones will hide in room 1 until the PCs enter room 2, then pour out to meet them. Amethyst will be waiting in room 3.
