Starting my new 5e D&D campaign...

"I've always wanted to play D&D and never had the chance."

This phrase implies a barrier to play that I have never known. Based on what I've heard from others I was lucky that no one stopped me because I was too young or doing it wrong or whatever. I don't understand the wall that keeps someone from our silly little hobby but I am happy to cut a hole in it and wave them on through.

Last Monday was full of firsts. It was the first session for my new group. It was my first time running Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. More importantly, it was also the first time ever that my new group played an RPG.

We went with fifth because they have copies of the 5e Players Handbook and wanted to play the latest, greatest version of the world's most popular role playing game. As far as the editions go, fifth edition is probably my favourite. It has a good balance of streamlined rules and extra parts that can be used or not without breaking anything. If I have to run D&D (and for these guys I did) I'd rather run 5e than any of the older versions.

The character building system for 5e really shines with new players. It presents solid choices and each choice leads to another. I found the background section particularly useful. It allowed them to quickly flesh out their characters, giving them a grounding in the world. We ended up using the suggested bonds as inspiration, creating a shared history that bound them together.

(The Gazetteers and old adventures print up into a nice A5 booklet!)

After we got the characters all done I asked them about what they wanted out of the world. For people steeped in the genre like we are, the possibilities are virtually endless. As newcomers they were looking for a "Traditional D&D" experience. They wanted all the D&D stuff like elves, goblins, dwarves and dragons. Intrepid heroes pushing into the uncivilized wilderness to explore forgotten temples in search of adventure and treasure!

As we talked I got a feel for what they wanted and suggested we play in the "Known World" that was used as a backdrop fro the "B" and "X" D&D modules. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos was my introduction to the world of D&D so it's a joy for me to share it with them. It features pockets of civilization stretched across a vast expanse of untamed wilderness full of monsters, ancient ruins and mystery. The open nature of the original setting fits the modern style of sandbox play I prefer and it will give them control over their characters' fates. It also gives me plenty of room to place some of my favourite locations and adventures from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. To give them a balanced experience, I plan to use the better classic adventures like (B2) Keep on the Borderlands along side the best the OSR has to offer like Death Frost Doom. Other play will be stuff of my own and the things that develop out of their decisions. I'm wicked excited about this campaign! I don't know how long it's going to last, but I can keep us going for years!

The group is excited to play the Keep on the Borderlands. Our next game will start with them heading up the Duke's Road from the Barony of Kelvin. Perhaps on the way they'll come across a cornfield that is suspiciously lush for the time of year and investigate. Maybe they won't investigate and I won't get to use Tales of the Scarecrow after all. Who knows?

(Some of the stuff my players could stumble into over the course of the campaign.)

I'm looking forward to leaving trails of rumours and other breadcrumbs to all the corners of the sandbox. The classic modules already have their place in the Duchy so I just need to dust them off (or print them out) and read through them before they get there. That's settled, but the stuff I have from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, especially the older adventures that don't fit the new assumed real-world historical setting, can be placed anywhere.

Some of them are obvious choices. The town of Pembrooktonshire is crying out to be placed on the edge of the Black Peak Mountains north of Threshold. The hidden country of Voivodja (A Red & Pleasant Land) needs to be cradled in the Altan Tepes mountain range. Nestled between the Duchy, the Empire of Thyatis, the Emirate of Ylaruam and the Republic of Darokin, it is well positioned to secretly influence the many countries of the Known World. Rumours of the ruins of the great palace of the vampire lords that ruled Karameikos during the dark age point toward those mountains. There might be stories of gardens full of treasure for anyone brave enough to follow the Volaga river to its source.

Speaking of the Republic of Darokin, Vornheim needs a home. Corunglain, the northernmost city, seems a natural spot. Foreboding and dreary, next to the Broken Lands while sitting astride important trade routes. That's the locale that mixes melancholy and wealth together to produce Vornheim! The mountains that border Darokin and Rockhome is probably the best place for The Hammers of the Gods, an old LotFP adventure centred on the Dwarves. I bought it strictly to find out the big, bad secret of the dwarves. Maybe I'll get to use it and my players will find out too.

The Grinding Gear is another old one, with its goblins and stirges, that could be used as is anywhere around Threshold. Likewise the Black Peak Mountains could hold the little cottage from Death Frost Doom. I think I'll place it near the Lost Valley of the Hutaaka and weave into that story. Still, it might be better in the Altan Tepes Mountains, near the frost giants and Castellan Keep. I have time before I spring that one on them and I can put it pretty much anywhere if I wait until play delivers us a macguffin worth the effort.

The horror-show adventure Forgive Us could fit in any town in the Duchy on a trade route (nearly all of them). The same could be said for Death Love Doom, bu if I use that one it will be on the outskirts of Specularum. That adventure would be a good impetus to get the players to leave the Duchy for a while and head south to the Thanegioth Archipelago and the Isle of Dread (X4) or the Isle of the Unknown. Perhaps they would even go as far as the southern continent to find Qelong. I was going to put Qelong on the western edge of the map, on the other side of the Malpheggi Swamp where the Atruaghin Clans are supposed to be, but I'm thinking that's a better spot for the Slumbering Ursine Dunes (by Chris Kutalik and the Hydra Cooperative).

What I'm really going to have fun with is the God that Crawls. It can be placed in any remote location but instead of St. Augustine of Cantebury as the cursed monster prowling the maze it could be Halav, the first king and saviour of Traladara. Gnoll warlocks could have captured him after their defeat and used a ritual to transform him into the crawling monster. Zirchev would have captured him and placed him in the holding place for the cursed Blackmoor artefacts for everyone's safety. Petra built the original Traladaran temple on top of the maze so Halav could be cared for. That's probably the easiest way to work the adventure into the setting. The secret would not undermine the Church of Traladara if it got out because it only increases the suffering of Halav for his people, but it would completely destroy the Cult of Halav who depend on the idea of the Duke as the reincarnation of Halav. Halav can't be the Duke and a monster at the same time. But if he can be restored he could lead the Traladar back into a golden age. That's something the Thyatian ruling class might want to keep a lid on.

(Inside foldout image from The God That Crawls by Jason Rainville)

I'm hoping to get that one in right after they are done with the Keep on the Borderlands. It would be nice to do it earlier but I'm not sure they will take the bait and head off the Duke's road to some remote village while they have a goal in mind. It will likely depend on how things go in the first encounter.

I'm excited about this hybrid setting! All this material blends well and gives me a lot to work with before we add the influence of the players who may change things as they go knocking bout the world and looking for trouble and making assumptions about how things work. There's no better source for material than the paranoid musings of the players after all.

The rush of ideas came after I printed out the old Gazetteer for the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. I wanted to read through it to give the Keep a world to have a place in. The more of these old Gazetteer PDFs I read the more I am impressed with the Known World setting. It has its own rich history and intrigues but nothing is so important that it can't be tweaked or changed to taste.

My big challenge will be adapting the experience awards in the adventures to suit 5e. I'm reading through my new DMG in the hopes that I can figure out a fair way to assign experience since the adventures I'm using where designed to use treasure as the main source of XP rather than the conflict. I'm hoping there's something in there like the old Palladium System had or the 2e optional experience system that rewarded good ideas, RP and problem solving. If not, I'll come up with something based on what I've done in the past, test it out and we'll have an exciting blog post about experience points in 5e D&D!

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend here in Canada we won't have another session for a week-and-a-half. You can expect a session report sometime after that. Good or bad, I'll be talking about it.

A (sort of) new Class for your LotFP game, or how to get rid of those pesky elves!

I'm not a fan of elves. Not the tolkienesque ones we get in D&D at least. I like my fantasy elves as scary monsters that kidnap people and take them out of the world, only to get bored and return them after everyone they know has died. I like elves as evil bastards that can't make anything for themselves so they wrap themselves in illusions and steal what they can't craft from our world. This version, while completely awesome, is not really practical for player characters.

Elves as PCs in most games tend to be super-humans with all the timeless grace and beauty of old Hollywood.  They aren't really very different from humans, just prettier versions that are immune to ageing and charm. So what's the point? You can choose your character's age and appearance so the advantages of elfdom are few and not terribly interesting.

One of my favourite versions of "the world's most popular fantasy role-playing game" compounds this problem by placing its adventures in the early modern era of the real world. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has seven classes, one of which is the Elf. To play a human-only game would mean giving up nearly half of the payable classes. That means some reworking of what is there. Some of them are easy, the Dwarf class could be turned into a Barbarian just by replacing the Architecture skill with Climb and allowing them to be taller.

The Elf as a class is a lot more involved. It can fight well, cast magic, it has weird immunities and it's not quite in step with the world as it is. The best way to get all of these things and be human is voluntary demonic possession.

I like the idea of a Diabolist. A person who invites demons to share their bodies in exchange for power is pretty much the opposite of the idea of the elf while explaining all of the elfy class abilities. 

The way it would work is the character knows a ritual for summoning creatures from a dimension that borders on ours. Creatures that can't physically manifest but can inhabit willing and unwilling hosts. While they ride the edge inside a host they can interact with the world in some special way that looks a lot like the spells of other classes. It is a dangerous trade-off for power. Also, sharing a body with extra-dimensional beings would have a few side effects.

These side effects would explain most of the class abilities and add some flavour. Some of these side effects are positive. With all the extra voices in their heads, Diabolists notice more than the average person so they get an enhanced Search score. As the Diabolist advances in level the voices multiply and the control of them improves so the Search skill improves as shown for the Elf class. This same hyper-awareness makes them difficult to sneak up on, resulting in a one-in-six chance to be surprised instead of the regular two-in-six chance. Charm and Sleep would also be ineffective against them because it would be impossible to target the host's mind amongst all those others in there. As a possessed creature and the host to extra-dimensional beings bent the destruction of our reality the Diabolist is of Chaotic Alignment, is detectable as such and can be turned by a Cleric.

These demons hate our reality and our world. The reasons are unintelligible to us as their goals are so alien. Exposure to that hate makes the Diabolist aggressive. This aggression makes them fierce combatants and allows them to use all the martial manoeuvres available to Fighters (Press and Defensive Fighting).

Elfs look different, with exaggerated features, strange eye colours and pointy ears. Diabolists tend to look different from the average human as well. If they're lucky, they'll have pointed ears. The presence of demons in a body is going to cause some pressure, especially as they manifest their power. Diabolists are in a constant fight for possession of their own bodies. This internal conflict leads to changes in the Diabolist's appearance. Part of the inspiration for this class was this image I first saw a few years ago. The obvious loss of humanity in exchange for power needs a mechanical expression for LotFP. Tying it into the acquisition of spells and the option to push things a little too far is the cherry on top for the Diabolist Class.

(Update: Thanks to Zach Marx Weber and Wayne Snyder who let me know this awesome image was created by Doug Kovacs for the Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook. I'm going to need to check that out! You can find more of Doug Kovacs' art here!) 

For this I need a random chart. I don't have it yet, but I plan to put together a chart of mutations with three progressions for each roll of any single number. After three, repeated results mean two more rolls (which can just keep going if a player is particularly unlucky). An example of the three entries could be horns. The first time the horns would be relatively small and not difficult to hide. The second time they'd be grow to be larger and curl upward and possibly outward. Not impossible to hide, but certainly more difficult. The last result for horns would give the PC large horns like a big ram's that curl around the head and are virtually impossible to hide. Eyes could progress from strange colour, to glowing in darkness to glowing bright enough to show in the daytime. The farther down the line they get the more likely the PC will be burned as a witch. To get a good number and fit the situation I'd go with a D666 table. Using 3D6 with each die as a hundred, ten and single digit. So three ones (111) would be one-hundred-and-eleven. That gives 216 possibilities, which seems like plenty to me. Obviously three different colours would be useful, but a single D6 could just be rolled three times in a pinch. 

The only problem is the spells. Sure they could just sacrifice some little creature every morning for each demonic presence (spell) to prepare a spell in the same way a Magic User memorizes a spell from their book. That falls short of what could be done with the class though. A Diabolist should be a different sort of caster. With their own method of learning spells, their own spell list and custom descriptions to turn up the weird on the class. Diabolists are bad people. They have sold their souls for power in the worst way. Diabolists still need to concentrate to harness the power of the demons inhabiting them though, so all the regular limitations of spellcasting apply. Except that it doesn't require the intricate movements that Magic User spells do, so a Diaboist can cast spells when heavily encumbered and with only one hand free.

A Diabolist starts with three randomly assigned spells/demons and a random mutation. For every level a Diabolist gains the PC can use a ritual to add a new spell/demon. They don't have to use it right away. They can wait until they are higher levels in hopes of attracting a better class of demon and having more high-level spells, since they can only summon a demon with an ability of a spell level that they can cast. When they cast the ritual they need to sacrifice an innocent creature. Any animal will do. It is painful and likely to be loud so the PC will need some privacy for the process that will last the whole night. The player chooses the spell level. Fifty silver pieces per spell level needs to be spent on materials for the ritual as well. At the end of the night the player rolls a save verses magic minus the level of the spell. If they fail they get a random mutation but they also get a randomly rolled spell of the level they chose no matter what the result of the save. If they roll a spell they already have, they get to pick one.

If a player is ruthless they can use a human sacrifice to automatically pick the spell they want or roll for two spells of a given level. The extra anguish provided by a person allows the PC to have more control of the ritual and its results. It also means an automatic roll on the mutations table. The Referee should make sure these kinds of murders are recognizable and cause more than a little uproar in a community when discovered. Players should also keep in mind that the weird guy with the glowing eyes is definitely going to be blamed when people start mysteriously disappearing so there are plenty of good reasons to avoid this option.

Casting spells is the other departure from the regular rules. Diabolists would use the spell progression table for the Elf to get a total for spell levels that can be cast safely in a day. A first-level Diabolist would only have one spell level, but a fourth-level Diabolist would have six (1x2 and 2x2)! Diabolists don't need to prepare their spells, they can't forget with those demons bouncing around in their heads, but coaxing their passengers into doing what they want takes concentration and gets difficult the more often they access any one demon's ability. The first time in a day the PC casts a spell is costs as many levels as it is. Each subsequent time it is cast in a 24-hour period or without at least six hours of sleep its cost goes up by one spell level. 

For example, a fourth level Diabolist (let's call him or her Bob) has six spell levels per day. Bob casts Spider Climb (a level-one spell) and it uses up one of Bob's potential spell levels for the day, with five spell levels remaining. Bob casts it for a second time and it's harder, using two spell levels and only leaving three of Bob's total of six daily spell levels. That means Bob can cast Spider Climb one more time using all remaining spell levels without getting into trouble.

But what happens if the spell levels are just slightly over the daily allowance or the Diabolist wants to push their demons beyond the safe number castings in a day? That's where the 216 entries on the mutation table become important. If the caster has too few levels to cast a spell safely the PC can simply cast unsafely. They will receive a random mutation and must save verses Magic at a negative equal to the difference in levels or take 1D6 plus that difference in damage. Even if they fail the save the spell is cast successfully. For example, if Bob only has two spell levels left and wants to cast a spell worth four spell levels Bob needs to make a save against Magic at -2 or take 1D6+2 points of damage. If the caster has no spell levels left and wants to cast they take a random mutation and save against Magic or take the spell levels in D6s damage and the spell fails. So if Bob tries to cast a spell that costs three spell levels when he has no spell levels left it means risking 3D6 points of damage. A desperate move with no guarantee of success.

That's the basics of how I use the Elf class in my LotFP Early Modern Era Campaign. I'll add the spell list with custom descriptions later this week and maybe whip up the random mutation table too if there's enough interest.