I recently had fun dusting off and refining my No Fear Psionics rules for Dragonslayer RPG. Now it's time to add the psionic monsters to the Dragonslayer roster - and that means an opportunity to reconsider these (largely underused) critters and their contribution to D&D over the years. Most of these monsters are familiar from the revered 1st edition Monster Manual (1977), although Githyanki and Githzerai turned up in the later Fiend Folio (1891). However, many of these monsters pre-date AD&D. They first appeared in 1976's Eldritch Wizardry supplement along with the first rules for psionics. In fact, Mind Flayers go back even further, to the first issue of Strategic Review in 1975. So, whatever you might think of psionics (and most people seem to think very poorly of psionics), these are 'core monsters' who perhaps deserve a little more love. Perhaps. The 'Psi Pests'is a suite of monsters who function more as traps than as combat encounters. Think of them as 'psi pests' - the grit in the ointment of psionicism, inconveniences you have to take account of once you've become psi-aware.
In AD&D, these beasties drain your psionic defence points at quite a rate. You can't psionic them back: you have to dig them up and splat them (they've only got 1hp) or run away. Much merriment as the psionicist writhes, screaming 'Get them out of my MIND!' while the rest of the party grabs shovels to dig out these rodents and play whack-a-mole. Much less merriment if the victim is someone using psionic-style magic, in which case there's a solid chance of permanent insanity. It's a bit hard to imagine placing these creatures in a dungeon or wandering monster table: if you're not using your powers, they do literally nothing; if you are, then non-psionicists might end up losing a PC to them, while actually psionicists probably only face losing a lot of points that they can restore by resting. Cerebral parasites are mere annoyances. They attach themselves to you if you're using psionics or psi-magic while they are nearby and they drain your psionic power. Cure disease gets rid of them once you know they're there, so keep a cleric or paladin handy. I could imagine a cruel DM placing these things on a magic item or an infested monster, so the PCs acquire them during looting. Players will quickly realise what's going on as their psionic strength drains away - so if you don't like psionics but a PC has got them, infesting them with parasites is a great way of making sure they can't use their powers . The psi-variant grey oozes and yellow molds are entertaining twists on familiar monsters. Their psionic powers are pretty much one-shot-and-done, but I like the idea of a mold dominating a hapless psionicist and using them to attract more victims.
I've allowed Tower of Iron Will to count as an partial defence against thought eaters, just so that experienced psionicists can do something against these things - otherwise, ditch your armour and run away. Mid-Level Mind Menaces
The point is, if the psionicist accidentally summons these things with a mental shriek, her non-psionic comrades will be less than impressed!
Stross's original Githyanki were really just high level human fighters and magic-users (with a few anti-paladin bosses), hanging out on the Astral Plane, wielding OP magic swords, and riding red dragons, plus pretty fulsome psionic powers The Githzerai were boring by contrast - but then, pretty much anything is boring by contrast with that. I've toned down the swords (I mean, why would you make them intelligent as well?) and devised a simpler table for randomly generating a Gith band and their equipment. Essentially, this is a slimmed down version of the two grouos suitable to be 'psionic wandering monsters.' I've made the Githzerai into monks and illusionists, to distinguish them somewhat from the Githyanki, and given both groups a resistance to mind flayers' anti-magic (otherwise, why on oerth would they specialise in being spellcasters?). Naming the silvery material they forge into swords and armour as orichalcum is a nod to medieval alchemy.
Next, it's those tentacles, which slurp your brain 1d4 rounds after a successful hit, no save.
I've toned mind flayers down a bit. Tower of Iron Will is pretty good against psionic blasts, forcing the MF to roll to hit AC 0 against everyone protected by it - and then saving throws for the non-psionicists too. I allow you to whack the tentacle that's reaching for your brain, forcing it to withdraw. I've made their anti-magic a flat 1-5 on a d6 immunity - and I think PC spellcasters should be able to take a Feat like 'Astral Magic' that overpowers magic resistance, reducing its effectiveness to 1 in 6.
These monsters raise questions in my mind about what the original designers intended for psionics. Psionic combat gets very unbalanced when someone is outnumbered, which is probably why all of these monsters only turn up in groups of 1-4. Heaven help you if you end up in a Githyanki lair, because no individual can resist multiple competent psionicists coordinating their attacks. Mind flayers and intellect devourers seem to be designed to force you to engage with them psionically. MFs are practically immune to magic and the tentacles deter anyone from entering melee combat with them. IDs are pretty much immune to anything you can throw at them besides psionics. In other words, if you don't use psionics in your campaign, you can't reasonably deploy these iconic monsters, at least not RAW. Top Tier TelepathsWhen Eldritch Wizardry first introduced demons, a number of them were revealed to be powerful psionicists. It doesn't really hang together for me. Demons and devils seem to be the embodiment of clerical magic or sorcery, not SF-themed psionics. Psionics fit well with the alien mind flayers and their githian rebels. Why do infernal beings have psionics? Some case could be made. Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics (1980) concludes with a fantastic psionic duel between the hero Alodar and the demon lord. TV's Supernatural features demons who fling people about telekinetically, in a way that feels very psionic. The idea of demons tempting and influencing people on a psychic level fits better with innate psionics than casting spells. I dunno, it still feels 'off.' Perhaps Gary Gygax just made demons and devils into psionicists to prevent psionic PCs from being able to overpower his favourite bad guys - we know Gary could be petty in this way, because that's why Yeenoghu exists. If the embodiments of evil are psionicists, then the good guys need to be psionic too. Coatl, shedu and ki-rin get psionic powers and titans are entirely immune to psionic attack. Then the Monster Manual goes and gives titans psionic attack modes too, which is dumb. So, titans can wander into the infernal realms and psionically clobber demon lords are arch-devils and there's nothing the bad guys can do to them in return. Silly.
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Through The Hedgerow is a RPG inspired by fairy tales, albeit odd ones. Four of the types of Player Characters are Fays. They are eldritch beings of the Otherworld who find themselves travelling the highways and bridle-paths of the Old Shires, carousing in roadside inns, hiding in ruined monasteries, or ruling their estate from ivy-crusted manors. How do you roleplay a Fay being? What are their motives and goals? Since they have their origin in fairy tales, here is the first of four tales to introduce the Fay Gentries of the Old Shires. Through The Hedgerow Buggeber by Peter Johnston The Tale of King Alfred and the BuggeberOnce upon a time, but not so far away, there was a King named Alfred, who had lost his Kingdom. The Kingdom was Wessex, which in those days was part of the Old Shires, and King Alfred had fought many battles to defend the Old Shires against their enemies. One by one, his friends and family died or deserted him, until eventually King Alfred could fight no more. Alone and humiliated, he fled to the fens of Athelney to hide himself. With night falling, King Alfred arrived at the house of the Fenwitch. He knocked on the door and the Fenwitch spoke from within: "Who's there?" Alfred replied: "It is Alfred, your King, armoured and armed to defend this land, and I need shelter to hide from my foes." "My little house is too low for so high a guest as a king," said the Fenwitch, "so you must set aside your crown if you would enter in." This Alfred did, though it daunted him to set aside his crown. "My little door is too narrow for so broad a guest as an armoured warrior," the Fenwitch continued. "Take off your mail byrnie and set it aside if you would enter in." This Alfred did, though it misgave him greatly to set aside his mail byrnie. "My little bones are too fragile," the Fenwife said, "to endure the presence of a guest armed with a sword. Lay your weapon down if you would enter in." Alfred debated with himself concerning this, for his sword Goldenhilt was an heirloom of his grandfather, who slew Beornwulf of Mercia. Runes were upon its hilt and jewels upon its pommel. Nevertheless, he laid it down. Entering the house, Alfred beheld a cauldron in which a meat broth was cooking, and an oven in which seed cakes were baking. art by Peter Jackson ©Look & Learn "What would you have, O King?" demanded the Fenwitch. "My broth is sustenance for a warrior, but my seed cakes are dainties for a land at peace. Choose." Alfred gazed upon the chunks of meet that bobbed within the broth. They were most appetising to him and the smell of it set his mouth watering. Nevertheless, he answered in this wise: "I have been a King of war and met only with misfortune. I will sample the dainties of peace, though it seems your cakes are still awhile to bake." The Fenwitch seemed pleased with this answer and instructed him thus: "Tonight must I go to visit with my sister in Cernyw. Abide you here, until my cakes are ready. But beware, for this night shall a monster visit this hall, the troll named Buggeber that hungers for mortal flesh. He does not wait on invitation. Do not let him sup from my cauldron, for if he does, he shall grind your bones to make bread for his broth." Alfred cried, "How shall I oppose such a fiend, having set aside my crown, my mail, and my sword?" But the Fenwitch made no reply, for she was gone, and Alfred was alone in the darkening hall. The long watches of the night passed slowly for the unhappy king. How he hungered to sup from the broth, but he remembered his choice to break his fast upon the dainties of peace. He prayed to the All-Ruler, but in this haunted place his prayers were mute. Then, at the darkest hour of the night, the Buggeber entered in. Old he was, that Buggeber, born in the ancient darkness, they say: one of the children of Cain, who carry the sign of the Murderer upon them to trouble a sinful world. Like steel were his long claws, like the pelt of a bear were his matted hairs, upon his neck there was no head, save only a maw of many teeth that gnashed and drooled. "Step aside, mortal man," the creature roared, "for I hunger. I hunger for blood, I hunger for flesh, I hunger for bones, bones, bones!" The Buggeber reached for the cauldron, his long tongue lolling down his chest. Up spoke Alfred, and these were his words. "I have a sweetmeat for you daintier than a witch's broth. A tall warrior, whose golden hair sways in the summer wind. Struck down, he is, by a sharp blade. Into the ground, his bones are laid. Then behold, he rises again." "Where is this wondrous warrior?" muttered the Buggeber. "For I see only you here, with no armour nor sword. Bring this warrior before me and I shall rend him with my claws." Then Alfred said, "It will avail you nothing, for he will rise again wherever his bones are laid. But look, I have captured him and crushed him and placed him in a small cell. Will you sate your hunger upon him now?" "Right willingly!" roared the Buggeber. "Bring me the warrior's body!" Whereupon Alfred took up a pair of iron tongs and withdrew from the oven the skillet bearing the seedcake. "But what is this?" howled the Buggeber. "This is not a warrior's flesh, but a cake of flour." Alfred answered him this: "The wheat is a warrior who sways in the summer wind. The seeds are his bones that rise again in spring. This cake is his body. Will you share with me now the dainties of peace?" Then Alfred and the Buggeber broke their fast together upon seed cake. In the morning, the Fenwitch returned to find her cauldron undisturbed and the fierce Buggeber now as meek as a newly baptised infant. She carved for him a face from a turnip in her garden. The Fenwitch counselled Alfred, "You have sojourned here a night, but a season has turned in the affairs of mankind. Behold, your kinsmen and vassals come seeking you. An army assembles: the men of Somerset, the men of Wiltshire, the men of Hampshire. Leave now, Alfred, you have a kingdom to rule." King Alfred departed from Athelney and lo! his army waited for him in the Somerset Levels. And it is said that the Buggeber went alongside him, who was now the most loyal of all the King's knights. Jack O Bear by Jrusteli on DeviantArt Buggebers as PCsRoleplaying a fairytale monster is cool, even more so if the monster is a hairy troll with claws and a carved turnip for a head. Not everyone will flee in terror when you approach. The Glamour is a magic that stops mortals from recognising Fays. Most humans see you as big and imposing, perhaps rather savage-looking and hairy, but they only see the monster if they look shrewdly, or with the eyes of Innocence, or if they brandish Cold Iron at you. Buggebers start off as Martial characters who can acquit themselves in a fight - especially with their size and claws. They are also Arcane characters with an affinity for Dark Sorcery, so they can use some of the more destructive spells without penalty. Roleplaying a Buggeber revolves around your Appetites, which are the things you yearn to eat. Each character has their own selection of appetites, which are all quite abstract: for example, a wild beast, something that's been dead for a long time, something that's been specially prepared. Given the game's themes of riddles and illusions, you can match these descriptions in odd and imaginative ways. Something with the insignia of a wild beast might satisfy you - or something that share the same name as one. Like other Hedgerow PCs, a Buggeber will have a Doom: this is a tragic or bittersweet destiny. 'Mastered By The Beast' means you will destroy yourself recklessly while 'Defying the Heavens' means you renounce the Light. Acting in a way that aligns with your ultimate Doom is empowering for your character: every time you do this your Doom Die gets bigger until eventually it increases past d12 size and your Doom is upon you. For Buggebers, the Doom is usually related to their status as demons of the Dark who have been co-opted by the Light. You are one of the 'good guys' now, but perhaps not willingly. You need to decide, how did your character end up serving the Light? Was she 'converted' by a powerful figure from history or folklore like Merlyn or King Alfred, Robin Hood, Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, William Wordsworth, or Winston Churchill? Did you 'defect' from the Dark after failing in a mission - or because you were troubled by the first stirrings of conscience? Related to this is your second question: what's your character arc going to be? In Through The Hedgerow, every PC is growing in power until their Doom comes calling for them. AS a Buggeber, you might be experiencing a redemption arc, where you discover friendship, love, or atonement - or an antihero arc, where you betray your comrades at the end and go back to serving the Dark. When your Doom arrives, you and the Judge must collaborate to decide what happens - so get thinking about it ahead of time.
If you grew up with AD&D in the late '70s and early 1980s, creating a new character always concluded with a grim little ritual: rolling percentile dice to see if your character had 'psionic potential.' A roll of 00 would be cheering for the player, but elicited groans from everyone else: from other players, because their PCs were about to be overshadowed by a super-powered psionicist; from the DM, because an appendix full of fiddly rules was going to be imported into the first gaming session. Psionics were always an unhappy addition to early D&D, but they go back before my time, to 'Original' D&D (OD&D) and its third supplement from 1976, Eldritch Wizardry. The fateful appendix from the AD&D Players Handbook and (left) the source of all the mischief, Eldritch Wizardry The inclusion of psionics in OD&D is a bit mysterious, given that Eldritch Wizardry is mostly about Eldritch stuff (demons, relics) and wizardry (or at least, druids). It probably owes its existence to the influence of a certain sort of literature on 1970s fantasy fans: planetary romances like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels and going back to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. These stories freely blended fantasy and science fiction tropes. Early D&D happily spliced high fantasy with SF or post-apocalyptic settings: an alien spaceship was the setting for a 1980 module and there were rules in AD&D for crossing over to Gamma World. For me, the perfect blending of psionics with high fantasy occurred in the pages of the UK Hulk weekly comic, which between 1979-80 featured The Black Knight, written by Steve Parkhouse and drawn by Paul Neary and John Stokes. This rather wonderful story placed the Black Knight in the Arthurian landscape he belonged in, resurrected (literally) the character of Captain Britain, and featured a dragon's pearl that granted psionic powers, culminating in a dramatic psionic duel over King Arthur's grave. I'm going to survey the original psionic rules for D&D, then offer my own 'No-Fear' Psionics rules for OSRPGs, in particular Dragonslayer. Psionics in Eldritch Wizardry
After that, there's more percentile dice rolling to generate your degree of psionic potential score and whether you get a minor psionic discipline or two, which are themed by character class. You get a single Attack Mode called 'Psionic Blast' (but no Defence Mode yet). As you go up levels, you can roll to get more psionic powers, including truly awesome major powers called 'Sciences.' As you acquire more of these, you gain more Attack and Defence Modes too. You also suffer penalties to your main class: Fighters lose Strength, Thieves lose Dexterity, spell-casters lose spell slots. Excelling at psionics means you don't excel at the other adventuring stuff. Psionic combat involves each side choosing their Attack and Defence Mode then cross referencing them on a table to see how many psionic strength points you both lose. Eventually, someone runs out of points, cannot defend themselves any more, and gets mentally whacked. Since strength points are used to power psionic disciplines, it's quite likely PCs won't be at full power when they run into a psionic enemy. Psionics in AD&DAD&D gets rid of psionic bans for certain classes and invites Halfings and Dwarves (for some reason) to join in the fun.
In many ways, Psionics is more powerful in AD&D, but only if you qualify for it (which is harder) and roll lucky (also harder). Psionic characters start off combat-worthy and able to use a minor power, but they won't get those major powers till they hit 'Name Level.' The disciplines are also more costly to use than they were in Eldritch Wizardry. Psionic combat works the same way as before, except it makes clear everyone uses the best Defence Mode they've got against whatever their opponent attacks with. The penalties for losing a psionic duel can be minor (dazed), severe (confusion), very severe (permanent idiocy, loss of powers) or outright death. The Pros and the ConsThe biggest objection to all this is theme. If you're not running a SF/fantasy hybrid game, then Psionics don't really 'fit' into D&D and their existence rather undermines clerical faith and wizardly scholarship. But if you're playing 5th ed. D&D and you've made your peace with Sorcerers then you won't care about that. The other objection is in the rules for Psionics themselves: not just their fiddliness (but that too!), but rather the jarring sense of disunity between the way Psionic combat and disciplines work (with its point-spend mechanic) and the way everything else in D&D works (with fire-and-forget spells and Hit Points as the universal constant). I object to another aspect of Psionics: the way they reward characters who are already lucky and powerful! If you've got 16+ in Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, you've already rolled well (to say the least). Why should a character like that get even more perks? Then there's the percentile roll to see if you're gifted with psionics. Most PCs won't make it, but a lucky few will. Psionics isn't something you can build into a starting character, maybe at the expense of developing him in other ways. No, it's a flukey add-on that might be acquired by a character who never envisaged such an aspect - but unluckily denied to another character who was hoping for it. On the other hand, Psionic powers have their own appealing aesthetic - especially psionic duels. And of course there are entertaining psionic monsters that only come into their own if one of the PCs is psionically active.
Fen Orc's No-Fear PsionicsThese rules have been tweaked for Dragonslayer but will work with minimal tweaking for any D&D retroclone like Labyrinth Lord or White Box. The first step is to tie psionic potential into my system for Feats. Most PCs get to choose a Feat at 3rd level, but Humans get a compensatory Feat at 1st level, so could start with psionic potential right from the get-go. This potential isn't much: just a single Attack and Defense Mode, but since the Attack Mode is Psionic Blast you could use it to mind-whallop non-psionic monsters. After that, whenever you are eligible for another Feat (3rd, 5th, 7th level, etc.) you can choose a Psionic Feat that widens your abilities or strengthens you as a psionic combatant. This means Psionics powers come at the expense of other useful perks that could make your character more powerful or distinctive. Rather than fiddly points that score in the hundreds, you get a single Psionic Stress point whenever you use your powers (or 1d6 stress points if you use Psionic Blast to do the mind-whallop on non-psionic monsters). Whenever your Stress increases, roll a d6 and if you match or roll under your current Stress score, something bad happens. The bad thing that actually happens is a conversation you need to have with the GM when you choose Psionics - and it's based on the rationale for psionic powers in the campaign. Three options for Psionics Maybe psionics are a biological inheritance or a mutant gene. If so, the penalty might be simple exhaustion: you've pushed yourself too far and you can't use psionics again until you've had a good long rest. Maybe instead, psionics are blended with madness and accessed through taking strange narcotics or subjecting yourself to ineffable rituals. In which case, the penalty is that you go insane in some colourful way, until you rest properly and calm down. However, at least you can still use your psionics (erratically). Or perhaps psionics are achieved through Jedi-style training in some esoteric order, which inducts the young psionicist into the Mind Wars going on beyond ordinary perceptions. In this case, the penalty is that you've alerted hostile psionicists or psionic monsters: they perceive you and now they're coming for you. Whatever the bad thing is, the upside is that you remove an amount of Stress equal to the die roll that triggered it. Psionic Combat I wanted to keep the distinctive Attack Modes versus Defence Modes mechanic, but ditch the book-keeping point expenditure. Instead, cross-reference the Modes to find out the AC you are rolling to hit. If you hit your opponent, they gain a Stress Point; if they hit you, you add a Stress Point. As usual, roll a die when anyone's Stress Points increase but the penalty is determined by the Attack Mode used against them: confusion, stunned, charmed, coma, or dead. This sort of combat can be swing-y and very fast. Not just fast as in, it's all resolved and over before the fighter has drawn his sword or the magic-user has pronounced his spell. No, fast as in, it could end in a single exchange if a combatant gains a Stress Point and then rolls a '1.' To counteract this tendency, there is the option of increasing the size of your Stress Die (to d8, d10, or d12) and gaining 'psychic decoys' which can be expended to avoid defeat penalties - quite important to prevent a mighty Balor demon being mind-whalloped by a 1st level character who rolled lucky. Why Bother? Good question. If you feel that Psionics don't fit the fantasy vibe of your campaign, then keep them out. But if you're like me, then the presence of Psionics in the earliest iterations of D&D will tease your imagination. Part of the fun of OSR-style play is recreating the drama of the early days of D&D - and Psionics was part of that drama. The turn-off, as far as I was concerned, was in the fiddliness and book-keeping required and the unfair advantage psionics bestowed on already-privileged characters. I hope, by reducing the fiddly book-keeping and dependency on lucky d100 roll, this 'No-Fear' system will tempt a few gamers back into Psionics.
I wrote about the Detective class and adapted it for White Box in a previous blog. But I'll cover it again here before suggesting a different way of adapting it for Dragonslayer. Marcus Rowland - a stalwart of the UK RPG scene - contributed the Detective class to White Dwarf 24 back in 1981. Marcus Rowland introduces the class in these terms: The detective is a new AD&D character class whose functions are the solving of mysteries and the restoration of Law. This rather nicely fits the Detective into the mythic world of D&D, especially the Law-versus-Chaos theme of early D&D. Rowland limits Detectives to being Human, Elven, or Half-Elven, but that seems weird to me, given the Elvish link to (albeit Good-aligned) Chaos. Halfings and Dwarves are far more likely to be mystical enforcers of Law, but I would allow Half-races to dabble with Detective work, if only to allow the possibility of a Half-Orc chewing a cigar and growling 'Just one more question!' in a bad Peter Falk impression. In the world of Dragonslayer, Detectives seem to fit well as a Cleric/Monk sub-class. Rowland's prerequisites cover all six abilities, which seems too strict. If we base them on Dragonslayer Monks, then Dex 12, Int 15, Wis 12 seems appropriate, with Intelligence and Dexterity as the prime requisites for experience bonuses. Ability Requirement: Dex 12, Int 15, Wis 12 Race & Level Limit: Human U, Half-Elf 6, Half-Orc 5 (or U, if Colombo-themed), Dwarf or Halfling 7 (or U if Hercule Poirot themed) Prime Requisite: Intelligence & Dexterity Hit Dice: d6 Starting Gold Pieces: 40-160 (4d4 x10) Detectives have an attack progression and save as Clerics/Monks. Rowland lets them use chain mail and shields, but I think the Thief restriction to studded leather fits better. Any one-handed weapon is allowed: I don't see why Detectives should not use "spears, lances, flaming oil, and poison" as Rowland proscribes. This table adapts Rowland's class, with progression slightly slower than Clerics at first, but getting faster at high levels. Spells kick in at 3rd level (rather than 4th as in the original).
+ 200,000 XP and +1 HP for each level after 10th. Spells follow the pattern of clerical spells from a level lower (i.e. 5/4/3/3 at 11th level, same as a 10th level cleric) Role: Detectives are secondary fighters and scouts. Weapons & Armour: Detectives may wear leather or studded armour. They may not uses shields or two-handed weapons (except bows). Language: Detectives learn an extra language at 2nd level and every level thereafter. These languages can include Thieves Cant and Ancient Common. Saving Throws: Detectives save at +2 versus charm or emotion-control (including fear) Thief Skills: Detectives can Hear Noise, Climb Walls, Find/Remove Traps, and Appraise as a Thief of the same level. Starting at 3rd level, they can Hide in Shadows, Pick Pockets, Move Silently, and Open Locks as a Thief two levels lower. They cannot backstab. Disguise: Detectives can Disguise themselves as an Assassin. Tracking: Detectives can Track opponents as a Ranger, but only in urban or underground environments. In urban environments they must have seen the target within 2 turns (20 minutes) of commencing tracking. Underground, the chance of Tracking is reduced by 10% every time the target uses a staircase or secret door and 25% every time there is a combat encounter. Sage: When Detectives reach 10th level, they become Sages: treat as the ability to cast Legend Lore but only from his or her study/library/laboratory. By tradition, there is only one 10th+ level Detective in a city; if another arrives, the two must engage in non-lethal competition and the loser either leaves or becomes a non-adventuring consultant. Spells: Detectives gain quasi-clerical spells at 3rd level with a focus on detection and mystery solving (plus some spells aiding in escape). Like clerics, Detectives may not memorise the same spell more than once per day without use of a magical item. I've adapted Marcus Rowland's spell list, drawing in some of the Dragonslayer spells, generally making the spells a bit more impressive and abolishing expensive material components. 1st Level Detective Spells Comprehend Languages - as the 1st level Magic-User spell Date Duration: 1 round Range: 10 feet Cast on evidence (e.g. a footprint, a bloodstain, a picked lock) this spell reveals how much time has elapsed since an event related to the evidence took place. Detect Charm - as the 2nd level Cleric spell Detect Evil - as the 1st level Cleric spell (may be reversed at will) Detect Enemies Duration: 1 Turn Range: 10 feet/level The caster senses the presence of creatures who have hostile intentions towards him or herself (but not creatures that are merely dangerous to all passersby, like dangerous animals or plants or mindless undead). Detect Illusion - as the 1st level Illusionist spell Detect Lie - as the 4th level Cleric spell but cannot be reversed Detect Pits & Snares - as the 1st level Druid spell Detect Secret Door Duration: 1 round/level Range: 30 feet The caster automatically spots secret doors or secret compartments for as long as the spell lasts (and the caster may move at combat speed while the spell is in effect). Escapology 1 Duration: 1 round Range: touch The caster or the person they touch is instantly freed from ropes or simple bindings. The spell has a verbal component so the caster m,ust be able to speak to cast it. Feign Death - as the 2nd level Cleric spell Grade Metals Duration: 1 round Range: touch The caster becomes aware of all the metals that an object is made up of and their relative proportions. This allows a Detective to use their Appraise power successfully on precious metals. It does not reveal whether metals are magical, but it will detect the presence of mithril. Know Alignment - as the 2nd level Cleric spell Snare - as the 3rd level Druid spell 2nd Level Detective Spells Detect Evasions - as Detect Lies, but reveals evasions and half-truths as well as outright lies Detect Invisibility - as the 1st level Illusionist spell Detect Magic - as the 1st level Cleric spell Escapology II - as Escapology I but also works on chains and metal fetters Locate Object - as the 3rd level Cleric spell Read Codes - this improved version of Comprehend Languages translates messages in code or cipher into something the caster understands Reflect The Past Duration: 1 round per level Range: special The caster enchants a mirror which reflects events happening in the past at its location (up to 1 hour ago per level of the caster). Demons, devils, and demi-gods might notice and react to observation by this spell. Speak With Animals - as the 1st level Druid spell Speak with Dead - as the 3rd level Cleric spell 3rd Level Detective Spells Escapology III - as Escapology I but allows escape from metal boxes, riveted manacles, or otherwise 'escape proof' captivity; it also releases the target from the clutches, gluey secretions, or tentacles of monsters that trap victims ESP - as the 2nd level Magic-User spell Forget - as the 2nd level Magic-User spell Knock - as the 2nd level Magic-User spell Speak With Plants - as the 4th level Cleric spell Suggestion - as the 3rd level Magic-User spell Truth Duration: 1 round/level Range: touch The person touched must respond to all questions with absolute truthfulness; this might require a roll to hit if the target is unwilling and not restrained and if the caster misses the spell is wasted. Only innately deceptive creatures (devils, some faerie beings, etc.) are allowed a saving throw. Ungag - as Escapology I but has no verbal components and causes a gag to fall from the caster's mouth, allowing the casting of further Escapology spells; it also frees the target from monsters which have choking/suffocating attacks Vision of the Past - as Reflect the Past but creates a 3-dimensional image in a cloud of smoke and reaches back 1 day per level. Water Breathing - as the 3rd level Druid spell 4th Level Detective Spells Escapology IV - as Escapology I but allows escape from magical prisons (such as a Maze spell) Find The Path - as the 6th level Cleric spell Maze - as the 5th level Illusionist spell, but the range is Touch and the target receives a saving throw Oracle of the Past - as Vision of the Past but reaches back one year per level of the caster; if the caster goes into a trance they receive a vision going back one century per level, but this reduces the Detective to 1d4 HP when they awaken and wipes all other spells from the mind. Polymorph Self - as the 4th level Magic-User spell Read Divine Magic - as the 1st level Cleric spell Speak With Monsters - as the 6th level Cleric spell Stone Tell - as the 6th level Cleric spell True Sight - as the 5th level Cleric spell
Most of us who love old school versions of D&D – or retroclones, as these rewritten versions of early D&D rule sets are termed - end up collecting them, but only using their particular favourite, if they use them at all. I’m a bit unusual, I suspect, floating between White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game, Blueholme, and Labyrinth Lord. But look out, there’s a new retroclone on the block: Greg Gillespie’s Dragonslayer. Dragonslayer has its origins in the OGL Crisis that engulfed the roleplaying hobby – or at least, the OSR end of it – in 2023. You may recall that Wizards, who publish D&D, leaked a plan to revise the ‘Open Gaming Licence’ under which countless indie publishers had been creating D&D-adjacent material for 20 years. Much ink was spilled on what the original OGL did or did not permit and much speculation ensued over what new terms Wizards would impose on indie publishers. Several of the larger publishers took fright and announced plans to release their own Fantasy RPG systems that were carefully (and legally) distinct from D&D, while being fully compatible with their own D&D-adjacent products. A new generation of retroclones was a-borning, to use Stan Lee’s deathless phrase. Early out of the traps is Dr Greg Gillespie, who has become a one-man industry creating highly-regarded megadungeons. I’m a big fan of his Barrowmaze dungeon and have sent parties of adventurers into it under several fantasy rules systems. Given his investment of time, creativity, and profitable Kickstarter campaigns, in the megadungeon business, Dr Gillespie was hardly going to hand over a chunk of his profits to Wizards for the right to publish stuff based on D&D. So here he is with his own bespoke old school RPG, Dragonslayer. Whisper it: it’s still D&D really! The premise behind these retroclones has not, as far as I know, been tested in any court of law, but it wins universal acclaim in the court of public opinion, and it is this: you cannot copyright rules, only the distinctive imaginative properties those rules govern, and there’s nothing distinctive about concepts like elves, fighters, and fireballs. Therefore, Dragonslayer is really just 1980s-style D&D with certain properties removed or renamed. No mind flayers, ‘Phase Panthers’ instead of Displacer Beasts, and ‘Bigby’ has been renamed ‘Koweewah’ in all those high level ‘Magic Hand’ spells. It's more than that, though. Rewriting D&D from the ground up is a fantastic opportunity to ‘correct’ its original game's skews and stumbles and impress your own ludic philosophy on things. Old School Essentials is admired for the clean and clear way in which it assembles the jumble of rules and tables that comprise the game. OSRIC brings the mad labyrinth of AD&D together in one easily-referenced tome. Blueholme takes Holmes’s Basic D&D and extends it from 3rd to 20th level of play. Click images to link to these products on drivethrurpg The ludic philosophy is where things get a bit controversial. There are simple enough decisions to make about whether you are ‘cloning’ original ‘white box’ D&D, early Basic D&D (in its three iterations), or Gygax’s AD&D in all its Baroque glory. But some of these decisions get a bit … political. Are we going to persist in referring to Elves as a ‘race’ and capping their advancement as fighters or magic-users? What about sex-based ability caps? Your design decisions on these things are used by unkind critics to infer your viewpoint on everything from trans rights to who should have won the Second World War. As we shall see… Get On With It!To Dragonslayer, then. A single book, running to 300 pages, with striking cover art by industry legend Jeff Easley and interior art that more than lives up to the high standard he sets. It’s a beautifully laid out book, with crisp and slightly retro fonts, and materials curated to fit into single page spreads where appropriate. But then, if you are familiar with Barrowmaze and other Gillespie products, you will expect no less. It’s not cheap but you can see where the money went. Appetisers: races and classesThe introduction sets out the ‘Six Tenets of Dragonslayer’ which amount to a familiar OSR manifesto: ordinary heroes, rulings not rules, the DM (sorry … Maze Controller!) is absolute sovereign. Roll a character using the ‘Classic Six’ attributes: roll 3d6 seven times and assign as you like. Abilities follow the Basic D&D gradations (13-15 grants a bonus, 16-17 a great bonus, 18 an amazing bonus, likewise penalties for scores below 9). First level characters start with maximum Hit Points. There’s Descending Armour Class and if you’re one of those people who never understood THACO, well, I have some bad news for you later. Now for Races – and it’s old fashioned Races, not lineages or heritages or (shudder) ‘species.’ I’m British, so the R-word doesn’t connote the Satanic tang for me that it seems to have for some Americans. There are half-races here too – Half-Elves and Half-Orcs. Yes, I’m familiar with all the arguments about this. I quite admire the way Blueholme Journeymanne comes out and says: your PC can be any type of creature you like, even Thri-Keen insect people! But part of the 'old school experience' for many players is adapting yourself to the very particular imaginative contours of the game as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So Half-Elves are a thing, but Half-Dwarves are not. There are some missteps, such as the big, dumb, one-eyed Cyclopsmen. Surely 'Cyclopsfolk' you say? Nope, Cyclopsmen. Deal with it. If you want to start deconstructing the game for sinister sentiments, then you start here, because these creatures are former slaves with limited IQ. They’re an unhappy inclusion (and in terms of the culture wars, a bit of an unforced error) since they have no prototype in early versions of D&D – and Half-Orcs already fulfil the big’n’brutal role. I guess they were part of Greg Gillespie’s homebrew campaign and he included them out of gratitude for the fun they brought to his table. I wonder if this was wise, given the proclivities of some critics to sniff ideological taint in things like this. The races all get randomised starting ages, height/weight tables, ability modifiers, their own base movement rates, and suggested languages for high-Intelligence characters, as well as some roleplaying hints. Darkvision is here, rather than the classic infravision, which may or may not please you. There are quirks. Gnomes have an affinity with being illusionists, so their spells last +3 rounds. It’s a bonus that will rarely make much difference to anything. Elves, meanwhile, enjoy +1 to hit with the longbow. Elves have lost their immemorial perk of being fighter/magic-users who can wear armour and cast spells. Dragonslayer seems to be a bit hostile to the idea of multi-classed characters. The concept gets a brief paragraph on p39, amounting to ‘It’s up to the GM (sorry - 'Maze Controller') whether it’s even allowed, but if it is, you get stuck with the most punitive armour restrictions of the classes you are combining.’ I’m deeply loyal to the idea of Elves in armour casting spells. My first ever D&D character (for Holmes Basic, back in 1978) was an Elf called Tristan with a Sleep spell. It seems to me there are two interesting ways to house-rule Dragonslayer. Maybe let all Elves use longbows, regardless of their character class, rather than the bonus ‘to hit’ which pretty much only benefits Elven fighters. Alternatively, let Elven fighter/magic-users wear armour (maybe limited to chain mail) – and why not let the Gnomish thief/illusionists wear leather armour while you’re at it – instead of these piddly little bonuses. But that’s just my 1sp. The character classes are incredibly well set out and the innovations here are astute. Each class fits on its own splash page, with saving throws, spells, class-abilities, and starting funds, as well as a set of ‘fast packs’ to equip starting characters. Clerics with Wisdom 15 get an extra 1st and 2nd level spell – as do magic-users with Intelligence 15+. Magic-user starting spells are rolled from an offence, defence, and a utility, with Read Magic and Detect Magic as standard. Clerics can trade in any spell they’ve learned to cast Cure Light Wounds and magic-users/illusionists can do the same to cast Read/Detect Magic. Druids don’t get this very sensible bonus – but they do start with 2 spell slots at first level, so I suppose they’re OK. Fighters get a ‘cleave’ power that gets them extra attacks whenever they kill an enemy in combat – an innovation that certainly adds momentum to combat. Thief powers strike me as enhanced: Move Silently 33% and Hide in Shadows 25%, compared to 23%/13% in Labyrinth Lord, and a ‘why-even-bother-trying?’ 15%/10% in AD&D back in the day. One alteration set me thinking. Dragonslayer’s clerics turn undead on a d20 (like AD&D) but can only attempt turning three times in a day. Pick your battles, right? I can see the rationale for this. Lots of scenarios won’t feature undead at all, or just occasional instances (wandering monsters, a dungeon room that’s a crypt), so often this restriction won’t matter. But if you’re running an undead-themed dungeon – like, er, Barrowmaze – then clerical turning becomes the boring default for every encounter. This forces PC clerics to weigh up whether undead can be dealt with by violence and use turning only after careful deliberation. Turn, Undead, Turn by CaptainNinja on DeviantArt There are two unexpected classes. Monks appear, but radically redesigned. These are not the Kung Fu martial artists of AD&D; no, they are very much medieval-style mendicants, more Friar Tuck than Grasshopper. One of these Monks is not like the other one! They even start off knowing ‘Ancient Common’ (which, I guess, means Latin). They don’t wear armour but their AC improves every level. They get combat feats with a quarter staff. They can chant. At higher levels, they get clerical spells and turning undead but also do Comprehend Languages at will. They feel a bit one-note to me, but at least they’re coherent. Barbarians are back, but these are the ‘Asbury Barbarians’ (referring to Brian Asbury’s prototype for the class published in White Dwarf long ago and discussed here). They are limited to light armour, fly into berserk rages, and get a few thief abilities, but they scorn magic. It’s a classic build and this seems to be a coherent iteration of it. The Main Course: spells, monsters, magic items - and a few rulesI won’t dwell on the spell lists. They seem to be the AD&D-via-Labyrinth Lord canon, with some renaming to throw the lawyers off the scent. The descriptions are even more concise than Labyrinth Lord, but I wish there were page references for them – or an index!!! – and this complaint recurs with the monsters and magic items. The monster bestiary is extensive. Dragons get good treatment (complete with a multi-headed ‘Mother of Dragons’ – ahem) and the coverage of Demons’n’Devils is refreshingly candid. I guess you can’t copyright Mephistopheles, but I’m surprised to find ‘vrock’ appearing as the lowest order of demonkind – these infernal naming conventions have been imported wholesale from the AD&D Monster Manual rather than reinterpreted. Presumably Dr Gillespie took good advice on that – or perhaps he figures that family-friendly Wizards aren’t going to get involved in a legal spat over legal ownership of demons!!! Oh, and the picture of a Hobgoblin on p170 is a delightful homage to David Sutherland’s iconic ‘samurai’ style for them. The magic items list is particularly good – unsurprising, since Gillespie shows himself to be a prolific inventor of magical gewgaws in Barrowmaze. Intelligent swords get a careful treatment, Dhurinium (mithril) armour is linked to the imagined setting in exciting ways, and there are lovely tables for randomly generating hordes – again, no surprise if you’ve seen Barrowmaze. What does come as a surprise is just how short the main rules section is: a couple of pages covers combat, dungeon exploration, and saving throws. This is testimony to how well-designed earlier sections were, drawing together the key information into the treatises on character classes and abilities, so it doesn’t need to be repeated here. You need a 20 to hit AC 0, and you get modifiers to make that easier as you go up in levels, rather than having complicated tables for each and every class. Strangely, the same minimalist approach is not adopted for saving throws. Missed opportunity there, I think. One effect of this is to de-power monsters, who also hit AC 0 on a 20 and follow the same bonuses as fighters, which means +1 to hit at 3HD and with every HD thereafter. This means 2HD monsters are no better than starting characters, which is bad news if you’re a Gnoll. The Dessert: good adviceThe last 30 pages offer some fantastic resources, such as advice on dungeon design, wilderness campaigns, excellent random tables to map and stock dungeons, and a cute time tracker with rest breaks and wandering monster checks included. So, Should You Buy It?Recommending Dragonslayer is complicated – it depends on what you’re looking for. If you collect OSR retroclones, then you’ll want to add this handsome book to your collection. If you are intending to play a retroclone RPG and you wonder if Dragonslayer might be the best purchase, then there are things to consider. Dragonslayer is quirky. It’s full of departures, great and small, from the pristine D&D rule set of yore. I’m not just referring to the regrettable Cyclopspersons or the way the game hybridises elements of Basic D&D with the classes and spells of AD&D. There are all sorts of ways in which Dragonslayer differs from the game that people were playing in 1978. Thieves actually have a decent chance of doing something useful at 1st level, for instance. But if you want to dust off some classic modules, like say, B2: The Keep on the Borderlands or G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, then perhaps you want that authentic early D&D experience without the innovations. May I direct you instead to Blueholme for B2 or OSRIC for G1. Or Advanced Labyrinth Lord if you want the hybrid rules without the novelties. It's only fair to add that you can pick up these earlier retroclones (with their royalty-free art and functional layouts) far cheaper. If you’re not looking for the authenticity, but you are shopping for an OSR rules set with a contemporary flourish, then Dragonslayer is a strong contender. However, there will be a post-OGL revised edition of Labyrinth Lord later this year, which author Dan Proctor promises will also break with the D&D mould in exciting ways; it looks rather beautiful and also has a cyclops PC race, if that’s a weird deal-breaker for you. Hexed Press previews Labyrinth Lord 2e The third consideration is whether you use Greg Gillespie’s excellent megadungeons. If you are playing Barrowmaze, for example, then Dragonslayer fits it like a glove. Indeed, several features of Dragonslayer seem to have emerged specifically in response to the design decisions in those dungeons (like the reconsideration of clerical turning). If you want to get into those big, daunting, exciting dungeoneering projects, then Dragonslayer is a no-brainer. Get on board. For me, the charm of Dragonslayer is its 'lived in' feel. Despite the speed with which it was brought to press, it doesn't feel rushed. You very much sense that this is the consummation of Greg Gillespie's own D&D campaign, with house rules and good practice developed over many years. Everything feels lovingly crafted and bedded in through recurring use. Despite being a new game, it feels like an old one, and that's praise that goes to the heart of what makes a retroclone appealing.
Consider a route you often walk, one you know well, going from home to work perhaps, or college, or to a friend's home. Doubtless, as you go along your familiar way, you pass a little lane or alley. It’s overgrown and clogged with weeds. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It just snakes between houses and disappears into leafy shadows. Probably it peters out among bin bags and barbed wire, or else ends with a ‘Private Property: Keep Out’ sign. You’ve have never abandoned your habitual journey to explore that lane. After all, why should you? But suppose you did! Suppose you went down that lane, leaving behind the noise of the traffic, the hum and clatter of modernity, and wrestled instead with the stinging nettles and the bobbing flies. Suppose you found grass under your feet and birdsong overhead. Imagine yourself recognising them by name: the old wren and whitethroat, the songthrush, the fierce yellowhammer. Imagine finding, at the end of that lane, overshadowed by the branches of hazel and sad yews, an upright stone, tilted, worn with age and furry with moss. And overhead, the song of the wren bubbles like a fountain from the treetops. Joy pierces your heart. Perhaps you stand a while, with your hand resting on that old stone. ‘I will come here again,’ you tell yourself, ‘when I’m not so busy, when I have more time.’ But you know that, search as you will, you shall never find this place a second time. Suppose, when you turn to go, you find you are not alone. Your companion is old, with a face as creased and crumbling as the stone from which he seems to have sprung. His coat is green as the creeping moss but his scarf is golden like the dappled sun and his eyes are merry as a wren’s song. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he says. Then, turning to step between the leaves and branches, he adds, “Follow me!” O, the child you used to be would not have hesitated. To step into the Hedgerow and out of this world, to follow the green man into strange centuries, no matter the peril: it is an adventure you have forgotten to yearn for. But if you have not abandoned yearning, well, I wrote this game for you. Step Into the HedgerowYou can follow any Hedgerow for miles, threading country lanes, crisscrossing fields and meadows. You can smell the foxglove and cow parsley and taste the blackberries and rosehips. Yes, but if only you could enter INTO the Hedgerow, what would you find inside? You would find a path, grass underfoot, bracken and thorns on either side, and a faint light from above, where the young leaves work their alchemy on sunlight – and ahead, drawing you on, the wren’s imperious summons. The path takes you through clearings and in each clearing there is a vision. A maiden weeps over a broken harp. Two crows feast on a dead knight. A statue points to a gravestone covered in vines and etched with runes: this too is in Arcadia. And overhead, the murderous cawing of the ravens gathers power. There is a Darkness in the Hedgerow that contends with the Light. The Hedgerow is really a Maze, you see: it is a Labyrinth connecting the centuries. Inside the Hedgerow you will meet other travellers who join your adventure: a scarecrow wearied with warding his acre, a soldier of fortune burdened with the immortality she never sought, a witch-girl bickering with a talking mouse, a cheerful troll with a turnip for a head. Some of Peter Johnston's stunning art for Through The Hedgerow When you leave the Hedgerow together, you have returned home but in a changed time. The invading Danes set flame to thatch while King Alfred hides in the marshes. Puritan mobs armed with muskets drag defiant women to the scaffold. A jilted fay stalks her paramour on a Victorian steam locomotive. A hag kidnaps children from the air raid shelters of wartime Britain. In all these centuries, the Dark is at work and the visions you witnessed within the Hedgerow will guide you in your mission to oppose it. To pass through the Hedgerow is to enter a war. It is a war that endures across the millennia, fought in every hayrick, under every stile, in the contested branches of every oak, in every sleeping byre. In this war the wren and the ouzel are your comrades against the basilisk and the vampyre and the witch-hunter with his cold iron chains. The shadows are lengthening. Time to take up arms. Inspirations for AdventureIf you’re my age, which is older than acorns but not yet an oak, you enjoyed a childhood of particular imaginative richness. There was Doctor Who of course: a source of primal terror and wild possibility as we peeped from behind sofas or barely parted fingers. We were too young to notice the shoddy sets. We just wanted time travel and monsters, but we got ecological fables and meditations on mortality into the bargain. Of course, the beloved face from Doctor Who returned in Worzel Gummidge, Jon Pertwee’s hero-fool now a scarecrow guarding a field in Sunnybrook Farm. Even in this lightweight fare, the enigmatic Crowman who makes all scarecrows hinted at a wider and more solemn legendarium. If you’re as far from an acorn as I am, the Crowman’s ancient eyes glinted with a faded memory: the actor Geoffrey Blaydon had played the time-slipped wizard Catweazle nearly a decade earlier. Who can forget Children of the Stones, a series which introduced us to a cold gnawing dread, so different from the visceral alarm of Doctor Who. The story made me (quite rightly, I believe) apprehensive about standing stones, thanks to the unearthly and atonal soundtrack by the Ambrosian Singers. A children's show with a theme tune to drive you quite mad Another show with a theme tune that sounded not of this world was The Tomorrow People: more troubling than Doctor Who, with its themes of puberty, repression, and magical outsiders hidden in plain sight in a society that feared them. It resonated with me far more than did the (similarly themed) X-Men, especially the idea of a group of friends utterly dependent on each other, but linked to a cosmic community of which ordinary humans could not guess. Come to think of it, it's the marriage of teasing monochrome imagery and that fantastic propulsive melody The love of rural folklore was mediated through repeats of Oliver Postgate’s strangely doleful Noggin The Nogg, later Ivor the Engine, and The Wombles. The Herb Garden, Parsley the Lion, and The Magic Roundabout established in my child's mind the important truth that there can be no more suitable place to meet with a godling or demi-demon than a walled garden. In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale... And those tales they tell are the stories of a kind and wise king and his people; they are the Sagas of Noggin the Nog. When the age for reading novels arrived, there waiting for me was Stig of the Dump, Five Children And It, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and Watership Down. But these were only setting the stage. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner subjects young Susan and Colin to a journey of nightmare and delight, hidden among the landmarks of Cheshire, where they must keep a mystical jewel out of the clutches of the Morrigan and her morthbrood conspiracy. Its apocalyptic sequel The Moon of Gomrath takes place on a numinous night: “one of the four nights of the year when Time and Forever mingle.” Frankly, it defies synopsis. Garner wrote other books and a case can be made for The Owl Service and Elidor. All have a sense of creeping menace, of ordinary relationships revealing pagan themes, of nightmares lurking in plain sight that only children can apprehend. Garner's books in turn were surpassed by Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising and the quintet it dominates: Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, discovers he is the last of the Old Ones to be born on Earth. His arrival unleashes a cascade of prophecy as the Dark rises amid the familiar farmlands of Buckinghamshire Cooper weaves King Arthur into the story (in an oblique way), the Wild Hunt, primal goddesses of the sea, and a quest to retrieval talismans of ancient power. As with Garner, ancient pagan cycles recur in modern families and innocuous folklore and village ceremonies are revealed as totems of dignity and dread. The scene in Greenwitch where Will and Merry confront Tethys the Ocean still shivers me. “Even in the darkest sea they knew they were observed and escorted all the way, by subjects of Tethys invisible even to an Old One’s eye. News came to the Lady of the Sea long, long before anyone might approach. She had her own ways. Older than the land, older than the Old Ones, older than all men, she ruled her kingdom of waves as she had since the world began: alone, absolute.” Brr-rr. Building The GameI wanted Through The Hedgerow to allow for a type of roleplaying quite different from high fantasy adventure, like D&D, or supernatural investigation, like Call Of Cthulhu. For one thing, I wanted a game where you can roleplay children alongside adult characters – and for the children to have interesting contributions to make. This means de-centring combat and violence and allowing wits, charms, riddles, jokes, and pranks to accomplish the stuff that other games demand you resolve with a broadsword or a gun – but still to allow for characters with broadswords and guns to do their violent thing. Tales From The Loop offered me good ideas about a children-only RPG that still featured adult themes and elements of horror and peril. The One Ring does a good job drawing together characters of very different power levels – an immortal Elf or battle-ready Dunedan alongside a Hobbit. Through the Hedgerow's Check & Challenge system was half of my solution – I’m not going to call it an elegant solution, but I think it’s an innovative one. I’ll cover the mechanics in a future blog. The other half of the solution is in the structure of the adventures themselves. The Player Characters arrive in a historical period where they know the landscape and are concealed by the mystical Glamour, but struggle to interact with the mortal inhabitants. This is a problem because the riddle they receive at the start can only be interpreted with the help of mortal NPCs. Moreover, only by taking Oaths to mortal NPCs do characters get the power boost they need to confront their enemies. This means the game contains a lot of befriending, questioning, offering help, trying to fix the life-problems of ordinary people (or at least, people who are ordinary enough for their period – the life problems of a Viking chieftain can be pretty hair raising by modern standards). You might create a character who can wrestle trolls, but you might find yourself trying to reconcile a dejected husband and his angry wife. Of course, you’ll get to wrestle trolls too. This gives a Through The Hedgerow scenario a distinctive pattern. Receive your ‘conundrum’ (as the mission is called). Investigate the NPCs in the local community to work out who you can help and what they can teach you. Then identify your mission target and claim victory. Except of course, the Dark is sending its emissaries abroad to beat you to it. The clock is very much ticking and revealing your Otherworldly nature to hapless mortals only advances the timer and invites the Dark to intervene, probably harming innocents. You need to make use of all the resources to hand. This includes mortal NPCs of course, but also the supernatural community, up to and including the enigmatic Old Gods who still haunt the landscape. Magical Herbs can help you, fragments of Elder Lore can be discovered and traded, and the power of Mythic Sites can be unlocked with world-changing consequences.
I’ll devote a blog to each of these concepts in the coming weeks. The school where I work has run a competition for students to write a story inspired by a thought provoking photograph of the students and staff from 1918, with a melancholy figure of a young girl watching from the high window above - said to be a 'ghost.' It reminded me of the year I spent as the Daily Ghost, writing a ghost story every day. Here's my ghostly story inspired by the photograph and the school's war memorials. Sometimes they come back, but they don’t find the one who loves them. Mr Edgoose told me that, on the day my childhood ended. Of course, I had no way of knowing, when I heard those words, that the day would be so momentous. It was another school day and I was spending an idle hour before my train would arrive, roaming the school corridors, as I would have done with Jack. Except Jack was not there anymore. He was crossing the Rhine in his tank, racing to Berlin, to win the War. It said so in his letter, that I carried in my breast pocket. I paused in front of the school photograph from 1918 and looked at the smiling faces from a hopeful time. School folklore said – and the younger boys believed – that the girl in the window was a ghost, watching over the masters and students gathered on the grass below. That was when I heard the tap-tap of Mr Edgoose’s cane and soon the teacher’s crumpled silhouette came into view. I remembered him teaching Latin to me in the First Form, but he was not seen outside of his room much, especially since what my mother called ‘the Great Blow.’ His boy Raymond had died on a Normandy beach. Raymond had been in the form below Jack. Mr Edgoose stood stock still when he perceived me there. He called to me, but his voice was a dry croak. Then he approached, his cane tap-tapping, slowing as he drew near and recognised me. “It’s Cheney, isn’t it?” “Yes, sir.” “Cheney Junior?” “Yes, sir. My brother is Jack Cheney.” He seemed apologetic, as if he had mistaken me for someone else. “You’re very tall, Cheney.” I nodded. People often commented. I was as tall as the boys who had been conscripted. He joined me in contemplating the photograph. Mr Edgoose smelt of tobacco and boot polish and the salty-sweet odour of gin that used to cling to my auntie’s dresses. “Sometimes they come back,” Mr Edgoose said. I didn’t take his meaning, but supposed he was thinking of Raymond. But then he continued: “I arrived in the school just a year after that photograph, A year after the Great War ended.” It was curious to hear it called ‘the Great War’ now that it was just the first and the Second War was grinding to its conclusion. “I did not serve,” he added, tapping his cane to his shin by way of explanation. “I thought, as a teacher, I would contribute to the peace.” His voice became thick and syrupy. I felt the childish dread that an adult was going to cry right there in front of me. But he recovered his composure: “I came up for an interview with the old Head Master. I was met by a young fellow named Robinson. Wilfred Jenkins Robinson, his name was. Charming young gentleman. I couldn’t judge if he were Sixth Former. There was a sorrow in him and a dignity that you don’t find in the young, but of course war makes us all grow old too soon. When he offered to show me around, I decided he must, like me, be a junior Master, so I allowed myself to be led here, to look at this very photograph.” The girl in the photograph was framed by an oblong of darkness. There was something inexpressively sad about her expression. She wasn’t contemplating the happy crowd below. Her gaze was upon a distant horizon, far across the East Anglian Fens, across the grey seas, across the broken fields of Flanders. “The girl in the window was his sweetheart,” said Mr Edgoose, interrupting my thoughts. “More, they were affianced, although secretly. She was a maid at the school. Wilfred Jenkins Robinson spoke movingly of their separation, of the promises they exchanged, before he left … before he left for …” I said, “Before he left for War,” and my voice was louder than I intended and the word ‘War’ echoed along the corridor and around the empty classrooms. I thought of Jack’s leave-taking. He didn’t have a sweetheart. I remembered how he tousled my hair. “You’re the man of the household now,” he said, adding, “the pater familias,” because he was top of the form for Latin. I made him promise to come back. “I’ll meet you after class,” he said, “when the school bell rings.” The echoes faded and the silence became oppressive. “Did they marry, Sir?” I asked. Then, when Mr Edgoose didn’t reply, I asked: “Wilfred Jenkins Robinson and his sweetheart. Did they marry?” Mr Edgoose considered the girl in the window but his vision, like hers, drifted far away, to the shores of Normandy. At length, he answered: “They did not. It was very tragic.” Then he added, “She took her own life. She threw herself from that window when she heard the news.” He turned away and there was something about his manner, the stoop with which he walked and the tremulous tapping of his cane, that I felt I could not let the conversation end there. I trotted beside him until we reached the doors to the Hall, where the bronze plaque marked ‘Dulce et decorum est’ recorded the names of the schoolboys who died in the last War. Mr Edgoose paused there. He stared at the list of names. “Sometimes they come back,” he said. “But they do not find the one who loves them.” “Like Wilfred Jenkins Robinson?” I said. “He came back for his sweetheart, the girl in the window.” Mr Edgoose drew a deep breath and the phlegm rattled in his chest. He said, “I wanted to ask him how it happened, how he learned of it, why he was still here in the place where she had died. The distance he had travelled. The journey from that place of death to this place of life. Only to arrive too late. But the school bell rang and the corridor filled with young boys. The Head Master arrived. He had been looking for me, it turned out.” He drew out his pocket watch and inspected the dial. “Sometimes they come back,” he said. “But not today.” I stood for a while, thinking of the girl in the window who had killed herself, and Wilfred Jenkins Robinson who had come back to marry her, but too late. Then I saw the names on the plaque; the names of the glorious dead of the Great War: J.C. Morrison, M.S. Page, J. Palfreyman … And underneath them: W.J. Robinson. I turned to Mr Edgoose for an explanation, but he had gone, though I never heard his cane tapping down the empty corridors. Those corridors were dark now. It was March and winter still haunted the school. Where was Jack, who should be with me? Then I remembered that Jack was in Europe and my train would be here soon.
I ran from the baffling name on the memorial plaque. I ran to the station and my train, wheezing and smoking in the dusk. All the way home I read and re-read Jack’s letter. I heard again Mr Edgoose’s promise: Sometimes they come back. At home, the telegram had arrived. “We regret to inform you …” My mother in tears, the dog unfed, the hearth unswept. It was the day my childhood died. As Jack had promised, I had become the man of the household. That night, I dreamed of Wilfred Jenkins Robinson making his long journey back from the Fields of Flanders. He crossed the great wasteland. He made a raft from barbed wire and sailed the grey seas. In the high window above the school, he brushed a tear from his sweetheart’s cheek. I saw them together, clinging to each other in that oblong of darkness. I awoke before down, weeping, and watched the grey light creep across the ceiling of my room. I told myself that Jack too would return. The wide lands of the Rhine would release him and the beaches of Normandy would send him home and he would be waiting for me, at the end of the school day, his smile turned to sorrowful dignity, but still Jack. There are times, all these years later, when I think I see him. The school bell rings and a figure passes my doorway, or a voice calls from the corridor, and I rise from my desk, scattering ink and student essays. But it is only a tall Sixth Former loitering or a boy’s cry from the schoolyard. I lower myself into my chair, my bones creaking. I examine my wrinkled hands. I walk to the window. Below me stretches the lawn where masters and students gathered for their photograph in 1918. I stand, framed by the window, and stare out across the East Anglian fens, the grey seas, to Europe, and further. I think of the girl in the window, stepping into that oblong of light, to meet her lover, as the Apostle promises, in the air. But I do not follow her. I will wait another day for Jack. Back when I was 14, I wanted to branch out from ordinary D&D, the game that had burned through my adolescent soul over the previous three years. But I didn't want to branch too far. No d6-only Traveller where you died in character creation. Definitely no Petal Throne with its unpronounceable empires and goddesses. TSR, the creators of D&D, had brought out Top Secret the previous year and I thought: D&D, but you're spies, what could go wrong? In my day, RPGs came in boxes! with dice inside! with great cover art! and with an introductory module that came with its own screen. Then it turned out to be a d10-only system and I couldn't pronounce the name of the introductory module. Ah, but that introductory module! Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle. Beautiful. Baffling. Unplayable. How it haunted my dreams. Sadly, I put Top Secret away, thinking, I'm just not grown-up enough for a game that's D&D but you're spies. Well, now I'm 56 so it's time to return to Sprechenhaltestelle and Top Secret and this time nobody goes home till that module gives up its secrets! D&D, but you're spies!Back in the 1980s, games designers were still figuring out how the conventions of D&D could be adapted to other genres. Top Secret perhaps had the misfortune to emerge between 1978's Gamma World (basically, D&D, but you're mutants and the entire world is a post-apocalyptic dungeon) and 1981's Call of Cthulhu, which redefined the sort of adventure experience that was possible with RPGs. Call of Cthulhu proposed a mature style, with fragile investigators coming from real-world professions, onion-skin storytelling focusing on mystery rather than mayhem, and complete abandonment of the kill-things/level-up trope. It had the effect of making games like Top Secret redundant in a single stroke. That's a shame, because Top Secret moved away from D&D in important ways. Merle Rasmussen, tasked with creating Top Secret in that pre-Cthulhoid era, was innovative in many ways. The game has character classes (Assassins, Confiscators, Investigators), but these classes have limited relevance: they simply dictate what sort of missions you get bonus XP for completing. You gain XP and level up, but levels don't shape the game in a big way either: you gain Trait-boosts for XP as you earn it, so all hitting a level milestone means is that you gain another 'I'm not dead after all!' Fame Point. Traits are rolled on modernist d100s, with bonuses to ensure PCs are of heroic stature, then you calculate a bunch of secondary and tertiary Traits from these, including your Life Levels (HP). No, you don't gain Life Levels by going up levels, but from raising your core Traits with XP, causing the benefits to trickle down to derived scores like Life Levels. You get $400 and an equipment list to spend it on. The cool (i.e. deadly) guns and stuff are too pricey for beginning characters. So D&D. So SO 1980. Also "so D&D" is the focus on loot. You get paid money as well as XP for each mission that you do. In a way, this makes your rather more like mercs than spies. For example, a mugging is worth 100 XP and $50. An Assassin would get a +100 XP and +$25 bureau bonus. XP awards are divided by your level - so a 2nd level Assassin would claim 100 XP. Money awards are multiplied by your level, the target's level and a d10, so a 2nd level Assassin mugging a 3rd level NPC claims $450 multiplied by a d10. Yes, that's the difference levels make: loadsamoney. Money that you spend on guns and bombs and sports cars and gadgets. Most of the rulebook is taken up with combat, also so D&D. Gunfights are pretty deadly, with a huge advantage to the person who shoots first. They're also slow to perform, with a lot of changing calculations based on how fast you're moving, how fast your target is moving, your accumulated recoil, the day of the week, and the last time you ate a cheeseburger. It's manageable, if you can do mental arithmetic, but THACO this is not. Hand-to-hand combat is much more innovative, but no less ponderous. You choose your attack style (untrained, wrestling, boxing, judo, or martial arts). The attacker secretly selects an offensive tactic and possible a limb being used (left/right). The defender chooses two defensive tactics, possibly with limb choice. Reveal and compare on a big matrix. The defender chooses the better result for them, which might result in taking damage or escaping harm, gaining the advantage (and becoming the new attacker) or losing it, or possibly comparing Traits to see if someone has escaped. It's certainly different and infinitely preferable to the 'grappling' rules in just about any iteration of D&D. This system gives players interesting choices and exploits paying attention to whether your adversary is left-handed. It's adversarial, pitting GM directly against player - but that at least allows the GM to roleplay the NPC combatant's fighting style, perhaps choosing aggressive or timid manoeuvres rather than simply the optimal ones. It rarely involves any dice roles. There are inconsistencies. 'Feint' just never seems to be an optimal tactic. It seems almost impossible to bring about a wrestling take-down if the opponent doesn't want to participate. There are no rules for how hand-held weapons alter the outcomes. There are no rules for how this 5-second-round system interacts with the 1-second-phase gunfire system. The assumption seems to be that either everyone is shooting or everyone is brawling, but shooting into a brawl, or trying a judo throw on a gunman, causes these two sets of mechanics to confront each other, stymied. Interacting with NPCs is handled strangely. You compare your Trait with the NPC's Trait on a table and read off the result. For example, if you're trying to Fascinate someone and your Charm is 77 and their Charm is 34, the result is a one-third chance they will leave, a one-third chance they'll ask you to shut up, and a one-third chance they'll ask you to leave. Sounds like real life dating, for sure, but notice two things. First of all, your Traits have to be sky high before you can get a NPC to do a damn thing, and secondly the outcome is always the same, every time you interact in that way with that NPC. Certainly, this can be better than the old D&D reaction check, that could result in harmless gnomes attacking you in a psychotic frenzy while Nazgul find themselves moved to be helpful. But it needs house ruling. There are rules for sneak attacks and called shots, poison and deactivating security systems, surviving being executed and fencing stolen goods. What jumps out at you is that there's a different mechanic for everything. There's no movement towards a unified rules engine. So very D&D - and meanwhile, Call of Cthulhu is waiting in the wings with its tidy, rational 'Basic Roleplaying' architecture. House Rules You could drive yourself mad trying to house rule a game like this. For one thing, there's a 2nd edition rules set that corrects some things but (so I hear) creates new inconsistencies. Then there's Top Secret/S.I., a 1987 root-and-branch reinvention by Douglas Niles which is, by all accounts, very good. So why not just use that? The answer is simply that it's nostalgia I'm chasing here. Merle Rasmussen's 1st edition Top Secret was the game that broke my 14-year-old heart and this middle aged date is with that lady, not her easy-to-please younger cousin. That's why I'm GMing Merle Rasmussen's impossible Sprechenhaltestelle module with 1st ed. rules, no matter how many house rules it takes! It's a fixer-upper, like the Old Granville House. Operation: SprechenhaltestelleThe module that accompanied the rules has acquired a sort of legendary status. It sends a bunch of starting agents to the quirky Mitteleuropean town of Sprechenhaltestelle, a fictional waterfront district where just about everybody is some sort of spy. I have a sequel in mind ... Somewhere within Sprechenhaltestelle, two Soviet defectors are being held prisoner and your job is to find and free them. It's a sandbox spy adventure. It's an espionage dungeon crawl. It also feels like a lovely place to stay. This is Talinn, BTW. Merle Rasmussen used Mike Carr's seminal D&D module B1 (In Search of the Unknown) as a template. It really shows. A lot of the explanatory text is copy-pasted from that module, substituting 'agent' for 'adventurer' and advising players to write down a marching order. Another feature of B1 that Rasmussen adopts is the list of 'targets' (NPC antagonists) and 'object targets' (treasures) that the GM can choose to place at different locations. There is a map of Sprechenhaltestelle's surface and subterranean level. There's a rumours/legends table to roll on. There's a random encounter (wandering monster) table. The town has over 100 NPCs scattered through it, but they are all known by code numbers, sometimes by occupation. For example, C6 runs the tailor's shop so he must be the tailor. None is given a name or a personality, but most of them move around, going to different locations at night. A table at the end assigns passcodes to half of them, indicating their membership of one or more factions that get briefly described. You have to figure out yourself what they're doing. In other words, the module is itself a code to be cracked before it can be played. Thus, my adolescent confusion. Thus, also, a tendency to treat the module as a 'spy dungeon' in which a gang of armed PCs move round the map, bursting into properties, interrogating nameless NPCs at gunpoint or just straight-up shooting them, until they find the 'treasure' which is the kidnapped scientists. I guess this means Europeans are orcs! Deconstructing Sprechenhaltestelle There's always been a sense among players that we weren't quite doing it right, that Merle Rasmussen had loaded plotlines into Sprechenhaltestelle implied by all these NPC codes and movements, but just neglected to explain them to anyone. I came across a thread on RPGnet from ten years ago entitled Top Secret Module 001: Sprechenhaltestelle -- Analyzed [SPOILERS]. It blew my mind. It explained everything. Finally, finally, I thought I understood what was supposed to happen in that module. So I repurchased a copy of Top Secret and approached the nice people on Facebook's Top Secret RPG Fanpage for advice. Then I set about prepping the module. This is where the madness began. Because the RPGnet thread was incomplete - and occasionally inconsistent with the text. So I started a deep dive into the module, drawing relationship schematics for every set of NPCs, proposing theories about their connections and motives, discarding those theories, then going back to my earlier theories, then dividing by the number I first thought of .... What this left me with was a 100-page document called the Sprechenhaltestelle Companion, covering every NPC, every faction, every plot, and several different possible agendas for the big players. Because, you know what? It's not just a dungeon for spies. There's a detailed conspiracy going on that's dynamic and responsive to the players' choices. What I'm saying is, whatever the shortcomings of the Top Secret rules, Sprechenhaltestelle is an incredibly sophisticated scenario. Click the image to go to my Top Secret page and download the file. All of which is to say that I'm finally in a position to fulfil that boyhood dream of GMing Top Secret and the daunting Sprechenhaltestelle module like a PROPER GROWN UP. Four players have created agents. We're three sessions in. The PCs have had their first mass shooting. It's great fun: atmospheric, tantalising, dynamic, compelling. Even if the rules don't make as much sense as they should.
Ghost Hack was the first of my ventures into redesigning World of Darkness settings with Black Hack inspired mechanics. I just discovered it had been reviewed on Amazon - and what a fantastic review! Click the image above to go straight to the product page As Pete Dee says, Ghost Hack needs to get a better package - something combining rules and expansion material into a single volume, with a hard cover option.
While I'm at it, I can redraft the rules to bring them into alignment with Vampyre Hack and Magus Hack. This is the beginning of the World of Hackness! Hot on the heels of The Vampyre Hack (see blogs passim, such as here) comes its unholy spawn, a rather dense supplement covering mortals and almost-mortals that serve, traffic with, and hunt down the undead. The dynamic cover is ‘All Hope Is Lost’ © Gary Dupuis. The book is available as PDF from drivethrurpg or physical copies from Amazon. Like most sprawling endeavours, this book started as a modest project to provide some rules for human Witch-hunters, either as more developed antagonists or as Player Characters battling against NPC vampyres. But then I added in more detailed rules on the Familiars that serve vampyres ... and then I thought I ought to cover the half-vampyric Dhampirs who are born with vampyre blood in them ... well, I got carried away. I'll take this promotional blog as a chance to indulge in a bit more critical nostalgia about Vampire: the Masquerade in the 1990s, the directions it took, and the various ways I've stuck with or departed from that template. Ghouls Just Wanna Have FunGhouls were there in 1991, in the original V:tM rules set. They are humans given a sort of provisional immortality and a bit of a strength boost by feeding on vampire blood. If the immortality and the strength isn't enough of a motivation, they're usually victims of the Blood Bond, making them devoted slaves of the vampire that feeds them. You can use the background dots in Retainers to represent these guards and flunkies, a convention which established an anonymity about them which endured right through the product line. Subsequent expansions developed the vampire Clans massively, but never really got to grips with Ghouls, who surely outnumber actual vampires by orders of magnitude and were pretty essential for their functioning and safety. Ghouls: Fatal Addiction came along in 1997 to set things straight. The book was part of the Year of the Ally series, focusing on the sidekicks in all the World of Darkness games at that time. Its cover and interior art drew heavily on BDSM themes, making it feel like a release from the company's Black Dog imprint, specialising in mature themes. It's been replaced by similar supplements for later editions, but the original is still on driverthru in all its kinky glory. Ghouls:FA leans pretty hard into the idea of Ghoul-dom as soul-crushing addiction and debasing submission. The supplement actually has a lot of neat rules for Ghoul characters of different sorts, including settling lots of questions about the nuts and bolts of feeding on vampire blood and the effects of withdrawal. The only catch is that the theme of sexual fetish running through the art and a lot of the fluff fiction rather distracts from its purpose. What was needed was a book looking at Ghouls across the vampire world and the uses different Clans find for them. Instead, there's a rather relentless focus on sexual and kinky motivations, to the point of making you wonder whether the authors are venting some personal issues. Guy Davis' art is GREAT, but if your PC's Ghoul is a snooty cordon bleu chef or a garrulous taxi driver named Frank, you might wonder what all the leather and rubber is for. Making the Revenant Relevant & ResonantWhile the poor old Ghouls were being debased, another concept was emerging from the margins of the World of Darkness. A rather controversial supplement called Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (1994) introduced the idea of Revenants, which are humans born to Ghoul parents and granted long life and supernatural powers by the vampire blood in their veins. Yes, 'Revenants' is a bit of a stupid word for this sort of creature, since they haven't died and come back to life again. It's an odd misstep for White Wolf, who were normally so inspired in their naming conventions. But then, DSofBH is full of missteps and Revenants are among the few concepts introduced in that book to be adopted widely. DSotBH introduced three Revenant families bred by the Tzimisce vampires to serve the Black Hand: Enrathi child-snatchers, Marijava spies, and Rafastio witches. Ghouls:FA introduced a few more that serve the wider Sabbat: monster-wrangling Bratoviches, mortal-manipulating Grimaldis, scholarly Obertus, and party animal Zantosas. Other splatbooks, especially for Tzimisce, added many more - and the Tremere get their own Revenants, the wizardly Ducheski. There's no doubt that Revenants are a significant addition to the World of Darkness setting, shifting it away from 'real world with vampires in it' into a dystopia infested with half-human collaborators practising abduction, murder, and exploitation on a grand scale. Your mileage probably varies with this sort of thing. It's part of the mid-'90s 'Vampions' phase of the game where everything got lurid and nihilistic and the 1st edition's rather gentle and melancholic moral tone was binned. The designers seemed a bit ambivalent about Revenants. Perhaps aware of how their presence in a game could destabilise the power politics of the World of Darkness, they took pains to point out how most Revenant families survived only in remote parts of the world (this was the '90s: Eastern Europe or Central Asia might as well have been Oz) or worked solely for the Tzimisce, with their parochial Balkan obsessions. Vampire Hunting: what a difference a decade makesIn 1992 there was a delightful supplement for 1st edition V:tM called The Hunters Hunted which took the idea of mortal vampire hunters and turned them into player character options. Covers are so revealing, don't you think? Janet Aulisio's cover art for the 1992 original is full of atmosphere, as a geeky squad of amateur hunters peer by flashlight into a cellar, clutching their tomes of lore, stakes and a mallet. What's down there? Dare they descend? Will they ever come out again? By contrast the 2013 edition shows a bunch of dudes straight up staking a vampire on the floor. Something subtle has been lost along the way ... Hunters Hunted is maligned as a flimsy document that lacks ambition. It sets out motives for vampire hunting, gives some equipment and a few templates, and describes some organisations that hunt vampires, like the governmental NSA and CDC and the occultist Arcanum. It introduced the idea of 'Numina' or minor magical gifts, including the power of True Faith hinted at in the original rulebook and paths of 'Thaumaturgy' for mortals that were later re-branded as Hedge Magic. The main thing the book offers is a ton of theme and sensibility. Predating the cosmic scope of the later World of Darkness, it describes a setting in which vampires are the main - or possibly the only - supernatural threat and Hunters go after them armed with chutzpah and solid brass balls and not much else. Contrast 1999's release, with Hunters getting their own standalone game Hunter: the Reckoning. By the end of the '90s, the night has become a crowded place and Power Creep is well under way. Vampires are by now assisted by Ghouls in gimp suits and veritable armies of Revenants, not to mention all those Level 6+ Disciplines. New-look Hunters are called 'the Imbued' and they are honest-to-goodness superheroes with magic powers. Yup, that's where the game line ended up. So, what went wrong?In a sense, nothing went wrong. Vampire: the Masquerade was incredibly successful. It went from a little indie project to a world straddling publishing phenomenon, with spin off TV shows, card games, and video games. It beefed up, put on some muscle, lost its shyness, gained some swagger. The original themes of moral struggle and redemption got sidelined, in favour of horror, epic sweep, and Nietzschean bombast. It was following the fans in all of this. People got the game they wanted, which wasn't quite the same as they game they were originally pitched. The 1st edition rules had a story serialised in the illustrations, in which a a family man turned into a vampire by a seductive lover at a 'Midnight Michelangelo' exhibit finds the resolve to confront his creator and win back his humanity. Later editions abandoned this sort of sentimentality, in favour of torture-porn dominatrices and inhuman spiritual paths. Each to their own, but the later iterations of Vampire struck me as coarser than its first expression, for all that the setting became crowded, louder, more violent, and more dazzlingly diverse. There's a metaphor there, for postmodernism, or growing up, or something. Expanding the Vampyre HackThis book took a lot of writing. The Vampyre Hack adopted the framework of Matthew Skail's excellent Blood Hack and adapted it to thinly-disguised pastiches of the 'Classic 7' vampire clans from V:tM. It pretty much wrote itself. Bride of the Vampyre Hack was a bit more innovative, playing fast and loose with the independent and Sabbat Clans introduced in later V:tM supplements. More novelties required more thought, but the templates were still there to lean on. Both are on drivethru (click images for links) and as a bundle, while there's a complete physical edition called Tomb of the Vampyre Hack on Amazon. Spawn of the Vampyre Hack goes a lot further from the source material. First off all, there's a bunch of rules for mortals. Mortals can only get to 5th Level, they have to choose between increasing their Usage Dice or getting useful Talents, they suffer Hunger and Exhaustion and more formidable Out of Action (OofA) penalties. They're flimsy. Familiars Let's start with Familiars (aka Ghouls). In V:tM, any vampire can turn a human into a Ghoul. In Vampyre Hack, you need a Greater Blood Gift to do this or a Rank 2 Goetic Spell. Starting characters could recruit a single Familiar via a Lesser Blood Gift - and the lordly Sangrali can create Familiars for free as their class ability - but Familiars are generally rarer and a bit more precious as a commodity. They are an investment. You're also restricted to managing no more than one Familiar per level you have (twice that for Sangrali) which makes it important to choose them carefully. There will still be vampyres out there whose Familiars are sex toys, but the rules make you choose between such self-indulgence and more practical concerns. Of course, any vampyre can bind mortals to him using the Sanguine Fetter (i.e. blood bond) but Fettered mortals don't become Familiars: they still age, they don't get super powers, it's just not as useful. Out of your general pool (or Paddock) of Familiars, one is your adjutant, known as your Grimalkin. This Familiar is a cut above the rest: you've imbued her with your essence, she goes up in levels with you and acquires more powerful Blood Gifts. Grimalkins get the player character treatment. A Talent available to some Familiars is Unfettered, which weakens the Sanguine Fetter, allowing PC Grimalkins a measure of independence. It also explains the existence of Gallowglasses, who are Rogue Familiars struggling to preserve themselves by working for payment in vampyre blood. Alchemical Talents enable them to avoid the Sanguine Fetter by making blood donations last longer or even removing the enslaving effects. Familiars at 1st and 2nd Level can hold their own against a vampyre of the same level, but even with the extra powers that kick in at 3rd-5th Level, vampyres start to pull away. Unfamiliars Then there are the other Familiars that don't have it so easy. Blajini are the malformed creatures that higher level Zoltan vampyres create with their flesh-warping. They struggle to pass for human, but at least they aren't usually Fettered. Strega vampyres can't create Familiars with their blood and few of them know Goetic magic, but they summon ghosts and place them into corpses and their Zombies serve many of the same functions. Of course, the ghost has its own memories, attachments, and agenda, and the rules encourage Zombies to pursue a side hustle of dealing with the issues they died without fixing. Chorazin vampyres use Goetia to create Golems and Flesh Golems make tank-y alternatives to Familiars. Once again, the brain sourced for the Golem preserves fragmentary memories and desires from when it was alive, which PC Golems can fulfil when their masters aren't watching. Un-persons are the soulless victims of the Unlife that higher level Rakasha vampyres manipulate. It's not much fun playing one of these, but how about playing all of them? The Bhuta is the collective intelligence of the Un-persons serving a vampyre and it switches its consciousness between bodies in order to pursue its Weird - an alien agenda that the vampyre had better not find out about. Unfamiliars are an exotic option for experienced roleplayers, especially as they are hiding not just from humanity, but concealing their independence and intentions from their own vampyre masters. Dhampirs Dhampirs are what Revenants should have been called (though, to be fair, the World of Darkness applies the term to a different type of creature). Since Familiars and Unfamiliars can't beget life, something very odd has to happen for one of them to conceive a child who will be born with vampyre blood. I set about concocting reasons why this might happen. For example, the Ajakavas have their foetal soul replaced by a ghost thanks to necromancer and are born 'possessed' while the Grosvenors are descended from werewolves whose vitality overcomes the poisonous vampyre blood in their parent's body; Czernobogi are made fertile by a cthonic ritual in a sacred grotto while Harpagons have literally made a deal with a devil; the all-female Nafarroa have used their witchcraft to remain fruitful while the alchemist Darzis use potions. The Fae-touched Duvaliers, werecat Nunda, and leprous Jahangirs have similar backstories. Dhampirs are split between the Vassal Lineages who work directly for vampyres and the Mercenary Lineages who manage a degree of independence, selling their services without committing themselves. What I'm trying to do here is build the idea of Dhampirs existing independently (albeit very contingently) from vampyres. Part way between humans and the undead, they're a 'third force' in the setting, albeit a weak and disunited one. They function as powerful enforcers for the vampyric 'hegemon', but also potential allies PCs can go to that won't automatically turn the in to the Elders. They're not liminal figures like V:tM's Revenants, but they're independent and unreliable, and as likely to be the targets of vampyric plots as the instruments employed by them.. Witch-hunters Here are the Hunters that this supplement was supposed to be all about in the first place. There's a bunch of mortal character classes, like Clergy, Psychics, Shamans, Techies, and Special Agents that cover the broad templates from Hunters Hunted. The Fanatics and Paragons are a bit more like the 'Imbued' from Hunter: the Reckoning, since they are mortals whose life-changing traumas or supernatural benefactors confer powerful abilities. The Security Usage Die from Vampyre Hack is reinterpreted for hunting vampyres. You have to force the vampyre to roll Security by fulfilling investigative challenges until it shrinks and fully exhausts: then you've got him at your mercy. Yes, it'a a pretty clumsy system, but most of the time Players will roleplay their way to the showdown before the Die gets exhausted, which means a trap or ambush is in store. What has Spawn of the Vampyre Hack got goin' on?The Vampyre Hack is my part-apologetic, part-wistful, part-resentful love letter to Vampire: the Masquerade. Partly, it's a fun project to reinterpret the clunky handfuls-of-dice 'Storyteller System' into a simpler, more intuitive D&D-style game. Partly, it's a way to go back to vampire RPGs without the wider setting that V:tM acquired in the '90s, much of which I took issue with. It's a chance to approach the clans, lore, and institutions, like ghouls and revenants, afresh, saying to myself 'How would you rather this had developed?' Partly, it's an original creation, saying, 'Isn't this a novel and intriguing way of doing vampire tribes and their various undead and semi-undead apparatchiks?' TL:DR, Spawn of the Vampyre Hack concludes this project for the moment. I've got a scenario in mind and a solo rules set in development, but the old vampire itch has been scratched. If you play Vampyre Hack, with or without its Spawn, let me know how it goes! Next on the list, The Full Moon Hack, for werewolves and their ilk.
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THROUGH THE Hedgerow
Fen Orc
I'm a teacher and a writer and I love board games and RPGs. I got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set and I've started writing my own OSR-inspired games - as well as fantasy and supernatural fiction.. Archives
April 2024
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