Play Report: Through Ultan's Door - Session 2

We had another fun session of dungeon crawling in Through Ultan's Door #1. I can't recommend this module highly enough!

This session, the PCs got caught in a bear trap, found a one-shot Web item in a hidden drawer, fought a glistening dream-pudding, and eventually made their way back to the lair of the giggling white swine.

Player A: "I'll use Spider Climb to climb above the pigs and throw the web down on them."
Player B: "That's the perfect plan because pigs can't look up."
Me: "I... what?"

With some quick Googling, the players managed to convince me that pigs cannot, in fact, look up, and therefore could never see an enemy approaching from the ceiling. After some more research post-game, I think that this is basically a myth, but it was good enough to work in the moment.

So the PCs webbed the swine in their lair, then poured oil on the web, then set it all on fire and wiped out the swine completely. The only one left was the gigantic swine-mother, who has 90hp but no attacks of her own. She was helpless as the PCs summoned their friends from the last session (the mute Guildless of the city of Zyan) and together they butchered and cooked the sow queen.

One thing that came up in this session was the question of whom the enemy would attack each round. Specifically, it mattered a lot whether the Oneiric Pudding would keep on attacking the same PC, or shift to attacking a different PC who had just dealt it damage. This question made the difference between life and death, and I had no real 'objective' way of determining it. I decided to just roll a die, which worked out OK. Nevertheless it makes me think it could be useful to note down a monster's attack pattern along with its stats. Most patterns could be reduced to a few words:

"Attacks weakest"
"Attacks greatest perceived threat" (e.g. Magic-Users)
"Attacks nearest" (but who is 'nearest' is often pretty vague in my games)
"Attacks last attacker" (which might lead to the PCs juggling around their turn order to ensure optimal chance of survival. This doesn't seem like a bad thing necessarily)

Lastly, I've noticed that the way I'm running initiative now is: "The party rolls 1d6 and the enemy rolls 1d6. Whoever rolls highest gets to go first. If it's a tie then we'll reroll". This is functionally identical to a coin flip. Technically in LotFP's rules there is a chance of the combatants all acting simultaneously. But that just seems like a headache to run. So I'm thinking of paring it down to just a bag with a white stone and a black stone. Whichever side draws the white stone gets to go first this round. This would also help with another minor problem, which is that sometimes I forget when one round has ended and it's time to roll initiative again.

Race-as-Class vs. Race-as-Race, And a Proposed Synthesis

In D&D-like games, is it better to have Race-as-Class (the idea that non-human races each have their own character class that defines their abilities) or Race-as-Race (where Race is a separate axis to Class)?
Here I will lay out some arguments in favour of either approach and then propose a hybrid.

THE QUESTION OF RACE

Ok, so first of all - the phrase "Race as Class" just makes me cringe every time I write it. It sounds like something you would read about on Stormfront. Most of my IRL players are not familiar with the history of D&D like I am, and I'm pretty sure that if I started talking to them about Race-as-Class then their first reaction would be: "Umm. What?"

Their second reaction probably wouldn't be that much better. The whole concept of Race-as-Class is basically a mechanically codified way of stereotyping the Other: Humans are a diverse group who can choose all kinds of different professions. Non-humans, on the other hand, are all fundamentally homogeneous. The fact that we're talking about wholly fictional 'races' softens the blow a bit, but it still feels wrong to me. And that's assuming your non-human races are wholly fictional and not just thin paint-overs of real world cultures.

Now, I think I can present a logically sound argument why Race-as-Class isn't (or doesn't have to be) stereotyping an entire race. It's like this: character generation is an inherently metafictional mechanic, and its primary concern is not realism but game balance. Race-as-Class is saying "All playable Dwarves are fundamentally the same", not "All Dwarves in this game world are fundamentally the same". If you think it's saying the latter, then by the same logic you would have to conclude that all humans in the game world are either Fighters, Clerics, Thieves or Magic-Users, which obviously isn't true.

So I can make a case for why it isn't racially insensitive, but that won't get rid of the initial gut reaction people are going to have.

THEME: THE SELF AND OTHER

However, there are a few arguments in favour of Race-as-Class which can explain why it has stuck around for so long.

Some people argue that it's necessary to ensure that most of the adventuring party is made up of humans, which is desirable for thematic reasons. I totally get this. D&D to me is fundamentally a game about journeying from the Normal World to a mythic Otherworld. That journey has less weight if all of your player characters are already natives of the Otherworld. But, people still want to play as Dwarves or Elves. Trying to limit the number of non-humans in the party is an attempt at compromise, but ultimately it's a pretty clunky one. A better solution is to make sure your playable non-humans are coded as native to the Normal World. Give them more human-like cultures and psychology. Limit their knowledge of, and power over, the Otherworld: playable Dwarves should have only a small understanding of the Underdark, playable Elves should have little connection to the Fae, and so on.

Also, it's totally fine to say a hard No to a character concept that is definitely going to impinge upon your game's Otherworld. "Can I play as a dragon?" "No - for the same reason you can't play as Yog-Sothoth in a Call of Cthulhu game."

CHARACTER BALANCE

Another reason to use Race-as-Class is for the sake of player character balance. Here's why:
When someone chooses to be a Elf, there's a good chance that they want 'Elf Stuff' to be a major part of their character. So you, as the GM/game designer, want to give them a mechanical package of Elf Stuff to enable that.

If Race is separate from Class in your game, then the Elf Stuff package will have to be balanced against the Human Stuff package. And Human Stuff tends to be fairly weak because humans are the baseline.

If you're using Race-as-Class, though, the Elf Stuff is balanced against Fighter Stuff and Magic-User Stuff. Now you can put a lot of mechanical juice into the role of Elf.

I think this is the clearest reason why Race-as-Class remains popular, and in particular why OSR bloggers have written approximately 10,000 homebrew Racial Classes but barely any homebrew Races-Separate-From-Class. It's a framework that gives the designer more room to play around.

THE GRID

But - there's also a class design reason to prefer Race-as-Race. Having two axes of character choice is a really smooth and easy way to create space for creativity. Four classes and three races creates a grid with twelve boxes to fill, some of them obvious (everyone can picture a Dwarf Fighter) some more mysterious (what exactly does an Elf Cleric look like?)

One of my earliest roleplaying memories is of fiddling around with the character builder app for D&D 4th edition, slotting together combinations of races and classes and trying to come up with a backstory that made sense. (The grid was a lot bigger in that game - probably 20x20 or larger.) There is something inherently appealing about the formula of "X + Y", and it's particularly desirable for OSR play because it makes the characters more distinct without adding very much time to the chargen process.

SYNTHESIS

So those are the major arguments for and against Race-as-Class. With them in mind, I propose a synthesis that will hopefully provide the best of both worlds:
- At chargen, players choose their Race and then their Class.
- Certain Races, if they have powerful innate abilities, can be chosen as both a Race and a Class. Their Class features will then expand upon their racial abilities. In the fiction, this represents a character who has chosen to train their natural powers at the expense of learning any particular adventuring trade.
- If multiclassing is available in your game, then characters can potentially mix and match between a Class-Class and a Race-Class.
This means that PCs are not wholly defined by their race, but they can specialise into it if they want.

Here's a basic example:

1. Choose a race.
Human: You get +10% XP
Dwarf: You have darkvision.
Halfling: You can reroll one die per session.
Elf: You have one spell (from Wonder & Wickedness) that you can cast once per day.

2. Choose a class.
Fighter, Cleric, Specialist, Magic-User: Refer to LotFP corebook (or whatever text you're using)
Elf-as-Class: You may only choose this if your race is Elf. In addition to the spell you get for being an Elf, you gain one extra spell per level and one spell point per level, which you can spend to cast any of your known spells.

The whole 'casting with spell points' thing is untested and would need to be refined, but my aim is just to show how race and class interact mechanically. You can be an Elf Fighter, in which case your main thing is fighting but you also get one unique Elf spell. Or, if you want to lean harder into the Elf part of your character, you can level up as an Elf and get more Elf magic.

Lastly... I've typed the word 'Race' about fifty times in this blog post and it's made me realise that it rubs me the wrong way. In future I might try using a word like 'Kin' or 'Lineage' instead, even though they both sound somewhat clunky.

Play Report: Through Ultan's Door #1

I ran Through Ultan's Door #1 using Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The players were new to the system and to the concept of old-school dungeon crawls in general, but they seemed to grok the game immediately and had a lot of fun.

The PCs' first encounter was with the black-lipped Guildless. The players loved the idea of the Guildless communicating by flute music, and went to great lengths to make friends with them. To show good faith they left all their weapons at the door and allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. There were some great moments of tension as the players wondered if they were about to be butchered. They were horrified to find that the Guildless were apparently pickling barrels full of severed children's hands. But the players speculated: "Maybe they were some kind of evil children?" - which turned out not to be too far from the truth.

The Guildless shaman sent the party on a mission to kill the sinuous white swine. The party got into a big fight with a swarm of swine protecting their nest. They could very easily have been killed here, but the swine rolled poorly and the PCs managed to set their nest on fire, grab a bunch of gems and escape.

The module was a breeze to run. I didn't make any changes to it, but I did go through the text with a pencil and underlined the most obvious features of each room to help structure my narration. The room descriptions in the module are quite detailed, even florid, but I found them useful in play. For example, having the shaman offer to reward the PCs with "a pearl encrusted bandolier" was much more evocative than just saying "he'll give you 150gp".

The only thing I struggled with was running combat in a timely fashion. I started off trying to run it Theatre of the Mind style, but quickly realised I was losing track of everyone so I drew a quick map and broke out the minis. The OSR dream of running 4-6 combat scenes over the course of one session still seems unlikely, but it did move a bit quicker than Dungeon World and much quicker than D&D4e or 5e.

One thing that really struck me was how, despite my concerns, the players accepted all the old-school tropes without batting an eye. Nobody had any problem with simple initiative, rolling for stats, only getting four classes to choose from, or potentially dying from a single hit. I think I spend too much time reading the opinions of online people who are extremely picky about RPGs, which makes me forget that my real life friends don't know or care about any of that stuff.

Is There Logic Behind Old-School Saving Throw Tables?

In my last post I gave some reasons why I like the original D&D saving throws as a general concept. Wanting to make up my own setting-specific saves took me down the rabbit hole of looking over the old books and trying to figure out the logic behind the actual numbers that are given for different saves. I looked over my copies of the Rules Cyclopedia, the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The short answer is that I think it's all basically arbitrary, though I'd be interested to hear if anyone wants to correct me.

The long answer is this:

How do the classes compare?

- In RC and LotFP, which use race-as-class, the demihuman classes all have superior saves to any of the human classes. I guess this makes sense in RC where the demihumans are sort of like rare Pokemon due to their stat requirements. It doesn't make that much sense in LotFP, but I imagine that Raggi just copied it over for the sake of tradition.
- Halflings have the best saves in the game in both RC and LotFP. This makes sense in the same way as Dungeon Crawl Classics giving special Luck bonuses to Halflings - the logic being, if Halflings aren't supernaturally lucky, then why aren't they all dead already?
- AD&D separates race from class, so it only has four saving throw tables for the four 'core' classes.

- In all three books, there is a common theme of Thieves/Specialists having the worst saves, Clerics being middling, and Fighters starting out poorly but gaining saves at a faster rate until they eventually overtake the other core classes.

How do the individual saves compare?
Mostly, the numbers for each save seem to have been picked more or less at random. There are a few points of intentionality that stick out:
- Breath Weapon is consistently the hardest saving throw to make, across all classes. I suppose this was to make dragons especially threatening.
- Magic-Users often have the best saving throw against spells, implying they have a chance to counter the magic with their own. Clerics have the best saves against Poison/Death Magic, which also seems thematic. I can't see any other places where one class is notably good at a particular save. And even in the case of the Cleric, it's probably going to make a difference of 20% at most, on a roll that is not going to come up all that often over the character's lifespan.

How do the different books compare to each other?
- LotFP has roughly the same numbers as the RC, but they're usually better by one or two points. Maybe that was Raggi's idea of giving his players a break?
- AD&D's numbers are totally different to the RC's. For example, a first level AD&D Fighter has a Poison save of 16, whereas the same save in RC is 12. What's more, AD&D Fighters improve their saves every two levels instead of every three.

It's at this point that I start to doubt that there was any real logic or maths happening behind the scenes when Gygax and other designers were choosing these numbers. I know that some people like to read into AD&D and find hidden nuggets of wisdom, but it seems just as likely to me that Gygax just made up a bunch of new numbers so he could say his game was different from Basic D&D.

Frankly, trying to wrap my head around all these tables feels like more cognitive effort than it's worth for the amount of impact it will have on gameplay. The complexity of the tables feels like a sham - an effort to keep the game's design mysterious by obscuring how banal and arbitrary it really is.

If I were going to write a new, setting-specific table of saving throws, I'd be inclined to just write one table that applies to all characters. However, I would take two lessons from my analysis of the old-school tables:
- You can emphasise a particular danger by making it a harder save (for example, dragon breath.)
- You can emphasise the 'luck' of a particular class by giving them a bonus to saving throws or a separate saving throw table. The latter is a bit more clunky, but I think it's worth it because it will make the player feel like their character is "breaking the game" in a cool way.

Why I Like The Original Saving Throws

Whenever someone sets about updating the classic rules of D&D, one of the game elements most commonly seen on the chopping block is the original list of saving throws. In the Rules Cyclopedia the saves are listed as “Poison or Death Ray”, “Magic Wands”, “Paralysis or Turn to Stone”, “Dragon Breath” and “Rod, Staff or Spell”. This rather haphazard list has been replaced in many modern iterations of the game by the simpler and more realistic “Reflex, Fortitude, Will”.

This change seems to make sense at first glance—but I can’t help feeling that something valuable is lost when the original saves are discarded. Firstly, they have the advantage of being traditional. Some people might see this as irrelevant or even as a negative point. It’s true that there are many cases (in gaming and in society in general) where tradition has to be swept aside to get rid of things that just aren’t working anymore, or never worked in the first place. But when a tradition is still serving its purpose and isn’t causing any serious problems, it’s worth trying to preserve it.

The clumsiness of the original saving throws is also what gives them their charm. If, as is commonly believed, the rules of the game were invented gradually through play, then these five phrases might very well be a list of the first five bad things that ever happened to player characters in a game of D&D. To my mind there is something rather beautiful about the idea that the game still contains a trace of the earliest days of the hobby, like tree-rings encoding the history of the seasons the tree has lived through.

It is not only the past that is encoded in the original saving throws, however, but also the future: they contain an implicit preview of the kinds of dangers that players can expect to face in the game. What better way to present the call to adventure than to say: “here is the number you will need to roll when a dragon breathes fire at you”?

Because the saving throw list can be seen as a kind of primer for the action that will happen in the game, it’s interesting to see how other games with D&D’s DNA have created their own unique saving throw lists. Flying Swordsmen, while hewing fairly close to the original five categories, has renamed them after the five Chinese elements (Wood, Water, Metal, Fire and Earth). And James Young’s extensive LotFP houserules have replaced the “Spells” and “Magic Wands” categories with “Chaos” and “Law” to emphasise the Moorcockian cosmology of his game world. I’d be curious if anyone knows of other examples like these.

I love the idea of different games or campaign settings having their own saving throw lists based on the most common (or most iconic) dangers present in the game world. A campaign based on Greek mythology might have a saving throw list like: “Poison, Gaze Attack, Madness, Transformation, Divine Wrath”. Carcosa’s list could be: “Mutation, Madness, Cosmic Fate, Tech Weapon, Energy Burst”. For a Paleolithic setting: “Fear, Weather, Disease, Nature Spirits, Evil Eye”.

Some Fantasy Races Based on Real Animals

Goat-people
Goat people are motherfucking ninjas. Hoary survivalists living in vertical villages clinging to cliff faces. Bandits with iron-dipped horns pronking down the slope towards you, whirling the skulls of their ancestors above their heads. Goat-monks balancing on mountain peaks or at the tops of trees, listening to the voice of the earth in tiny vibrations.

Hyena-folk (gnolls)
Hyena-folk are matriarchal. The hyena-men are slinking and submissive, scheming behind the scenes, wearing painted veils. The hyena-women are ruthless and cruel. They have both a phallus and a womb and so consider themselves 'complete'. Their word for 'male' literally means 'womb-lacker'. They worship a priapic mother goddess called the Autofecundator. The matriarchs prepare for war by impregnating themselves with powerful spells, which they then disgorge from their wombs on the field of battle.

Amphiprions (clownfish-people)
They look mostly human, except for the eyes. They live in the Envenomed Wood, where there are 97 different types of venom & poison, from the trees to the snakes to the deadly black moths. The Anemonides expose their children to all the poisons to make them immune. If you get a transfusion of anemonid blood then you will gain their immunity for a few days.
 All of the children are born male; a single woman presides over the tribe. When she dies, the men fight for the right to replace her. The winner carefully removes her womb and inserts it into his own abdomen. There is only one womb and they have had it for as long as anyone can remember.

Crocodile-folk
Pirates of the saltwater estuaries. They live in floating villages that can be disassembled, wrapped in watertight skins, and hidden at the bottom of the river. When they face organised resistance in an area they simply leave, float out to sea, drift to another continent where their last appearance is barely remembered by the short-lived people of the land.
They can enter a death-trance where they need no sustenance for months. Sometimes one navigator guides an entire tribe across the sea while they are comatose, tied together with long lines.
They do not age, but grow larger with each passing year. The biggest are also the wisest. Their children cling to their flanks, build houses on their backs. These elders require massive amounts of food, so they enter the death-trance frequently. Eventually they choose not to wake up and slowly transform into giant logs. Then over years they are cut up to make tools and weapons for their descendants.
The biggest crocodile-folk are hundreds of years old and know many forgotten things. When they become wood, their secrets are inscribed like tree rings in their flesh.

Ant-orcs
 First there is the Queen, with a human upper body and a bloated abdomen. With her ovipositor she lays eggs in the fecund earth. Humanoid creatures are born from these eggs, each one a dull-eyed brute, empty of identity.
The Queen daubs a handprint of scented paste across the ant-orc's face. The smell gives it a purpose and a personality. Different smells make different types of orc: belligerent soldiers, cheerful labourers, anxious scouts, evasive diplomats. If the scent is wiped off the orc regresses to a tabula rasa and seeks to return to its mother.
Their memories are also scents - kept in blobs of jelly under their armpits. All orc bodies are interchangeable. If one dies then its memories can be scooped out from its armpits and stuck into a new body.
Splashing the ant-folk with strong smells will drive them insane. Mixing together different scent-identities creates strange hybrids, often hostile to their mother and/or wracked by existential confusion.

Aphid-folk
Their bodies are made of wet clay. They can clone themselves by moulding a new body out of fresh clay and spitting into its mouth to bring it to life. The clone retains the memories of its creator up to the moment it was brought to life.
They conceive of identity as a spectrum rather than a binary. Two clones recently diverged will consider each other to be almost part of themselves - like two limbs of the same body rather than two separate beings. They don't fear death of a single body, only annihilation of the entire lineage.
Their secret weakness is corruption of the lineage. If you can trick them into growing apart from their clone-siblings, then their sense of identity stretches like warm toffee... stretches, snaps, and then they fall to fighting each other, horrified by what they see in the mirror.

The Arid Pelagia

This summer I went to Koonya Beach on the Mornington Peninsula. There's not much sand there, just rockpools surrounded by wide shelves of stone. The stone is quite flat, coated in soft sea-moss and anemones; the waves roll over it at ankle height. Dotted here and there are deep blue rockpools, clogged with kelp, concealing the homes of crabs and octopuses. Elsewhere there are direct inversions of these holes - tall spurs of windweathered stone jutting up from the flat plain. It's an alien place, one of those places they would go to film sci-fi movies.

The Arid Pelagia is like that, but a hundred miles wide.

A stone plain with a film of restless water stretched over the top of it, where waist-high waves roll for miles without breaking. Where one false step can send you tumbling into shadowy caverns beneath the water's surface. Where there is no fresh water and no shelter from the sun. A wet, humid desert.



THE STORMS

At the far end of the plain is Mother Sea, who surges at the edge of the world. Every year she sends storms to cross the Pelagia. They come quickly, turning the bright blue sky to blackness, scouring life from the stone. Everything that lives in the Pelagia must have a way to survive the storms. The crabs and the flat-headed worms take shelter in the deep rockpools; the giant limpets adhere to the rock; the yellow gulls and the striders ride the wind to escape.


THE WADERMEN

Natives of the Pelagia, nomads who drag their possessions behind them on bladder-sleds (flat bottomed boats that float with the help of inflated bladders). They wear grey djellabas and broad-brimmed hats; on their backs they carry tiny stills that make fresh water by evaporation. When the storms come and the waves grow tall, they puncture the bladders and their sleds become skiffs on which they ride out the storm.
They live by hunting game in the rockpools. Teams of naked divers, armed with bone spears, plunge into the kelp forests to hunt the giant white worms. They are also traders: every calm season they go to the edge of Mother Sea to meet ships from the Incomparable Isles, then return across the desert to sell rare goods to the people of the mainland.

THE WINDWROUGHT STONES

Stone outcrops rise from the plain here and there, scoured by the wind into twisted and fantastical shapes. The mystics of the Wadermen say that in these rocks they can discern the voices of the winds, who speak to the stone on geological timescales. The mystics identify ninety-nine distinct winds, but ultimately seek to go beyond these voices to hear the deep song of Mother Sea herself.
The Wadermen believe Mother Sea is angry with her children for abandoning her. Therefore she sends storms to wear away the land; eventually all the land will return to her, and the world will end. The Wadermen do not fear this, but they hope that before it comes they can finish their translation of the rock, which contains the sea's last message to her children.
Most of the windwrought stones are only small spurs, but a few are large enough to contain chambers within. These monoliths are taboo places for the Wadermen, but it is said that strange treasures can be found inside them, deep within caverns shaped by the voice of the sea.

THE BLUE HOLES

Most of the rockpools are small, but some are very large, up to a mile across. Some of them also connect to caverns underneath the plain. Each pool is its own tiny world: kelp forests and sandbars, twisting worm-tunnels, shell graveyards, and dappled grottoes where red crabs gather. As well as hunting, the Wadermen dive these caverns in search of rare opal-pearls, which are formed by a strange interaction between the sands, the tides and the refracted light of the midday sun.

CREATURES OF THE PELAGIA

The Wise Limpets: They never stop growing. The oldest are bigger than horses, and have many children and grandchildren clinging to their backs. They know many things, most of which humans cannot understand. The only way to communicate with them is to lie down at dusk beside them in the surf; at midnight they will crawl over you, suffocate yet sustain you, and speak to you in dreams. Make sure the limpet is your friend and not your foe before doing this, or you make never wake again.

The flat-headed worms: White, sinuous, fifty feet long with arrow-shaped heads and a ruff of venomous quills. They dwell in the blue holes but can also slither across the plain. One bull-worm can feed a tribe of Wadermen for a month. Their quills are used as spears and their proto-cartilaginous skulls as ceremonial breastplates. Every nine years they migrate to the largest pool in the Pelagia, where they breed in a massive loathsome tangle.

The Striders: Most feared creatures of the plain. Giant pondskaters on four insectile legs, they ride the surface tension to skim along the water at incredible speed. They spear victims with their legs and then impale them, still living, on barbs at their leg-joints. A successful Strider keeps a small menagerie of impaled prey in order to attract a mate. When storms come they unfurl four diaphanous 'wings' (actually more like sails) and ride the wind to safety. Thus the Wadermen say: "the only thing worse than a Strider charging at you is a Strider charging past you."

Shell Horrors: The motion of the tides collects countless small shells and deposits them in deep clefts in the rockpools. When these shells have been collecting and grinding into dust for a hundred years or more, then the cleft becomes choked with the ghosts of molluscs. They coalesce into an undead thing, an amorphous blob of sand that bristles with shells. It attacks by grazing the target, slicing their flesh with hundreds of shell edges. Shell Horrors are hungry but unable to eat, which in turn makes them angry and vengeful. If they can be lured into the open air they will quickly dry out and collapse into dust.

Among the other fauna of the Arid Pelagia are the blind crab-people who live in deep caverns and dress themselves with poison anemones; the murderous plaice that disguise themselves as stone; the blue-ringed octopuses and sly reef sharks; the rockpool-diving cormorants, the gulls and the albatrosses; the midges who breed in the salt water in summer, and the great turtles who come from the world's edge to lay their eggs.