Wargaming in 3D

Dissatisfaction with the current state of tabletop wargames is something of a recurring theme on the internet. People complain about how they don't like the new rules, the obsolescence of their minis, the necessity of buying the latest spat books, how constrictive the splat books are, and other ways the hobby is set up to milk gamers for cash. A recent Google+ thread rehashed all these issues and more.

Every time the conversation starts up I'm taken back to my beginning in the hobby in the 1980s. Back then, the only thing we needed to play was the rulebook. One rulebook full of options for building armies and manoeuvring them on the battlefield for epic battles.

I started playing with the third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle from Games Workshop that my friends and I picked up at the local comic store. It wasn't long before the owner of the store was playing with us and then adding tables with terrain. Tabletop wargaming has only grown in Sudbury through the years since then.

When we started there were no restrictions on minis for "official play" or any of that nonsense. Any mini was a potential combatant. We used the GW minis because they were often the best available at the time but most armies included minis from Grenadier, Ral Partha and others. About the only thing holding the rag-tag forces together were fantasy race themes and uniform colours.

For our first games we didn't even use miniatures. We started out with coloured cardstock cut into bases. Even after we embraced the painting and modifying miniatures part of the hobby, it was still normal to see to cardstock minis with pictures or descriptions written on them fielded along side painted and unpainted miniatures.

Those early games were pretty wild. There were high elf armies fielding huge trebuchets, mixed forces that made no sense, and a list of other things that violated our assumptions about the fantasy setting the battles took place in. That all changed with the release of the Armies book in 1988. 

The Armies book had lists of troops that fit the theme of each race and rules for allied forces and hiring mercenaries. The flavour of the setting informed 

the rosters without throwing everything out of balance. For example, elves didn't have access to heavy artillery but they did have dragons. The restrictions gave each army its own specialities and strong points. It made the choice of forces more interesting than before. It did not stop us from using non-GW minis. If anything, our needs for cheap masses of things like wood-elf spearmen only increased with Armies book. As a joke I even fielded a tree from a train set with googly eyes stuck on it as a treeman miniature.

It feels like there were less rules back then and it made for more fun. The only real problem was the magic system. It was so random. There were spells in the lists that were battle-winners. The "Vorpal Hurricane of Chaos" could devastate an army and make it impossible to fight with anything other than long range missile weapons. 

The rules have changed over the editions. There have been so many editions of WFB and 40K, the biggest challenge when I play is remembering which of the rules in my head apply to the current game. The rules have improved a little but mainly it has tweaked things such as shifting focus back and forth from missile combat to melee combat. 

Certainly magic has gotten better since those crazy games in the 80s. I think the best version of magic was the one that used the card decks for the different kinds of magic and a power deck to represent the ebb and flow of magic on the battlefield. It made magic an important part to any strategy without allowing the game to turn on it. Almost all of the handful of spells available to a wizard would be useful. It was random without being stupid. 

Still, with the army splat books pushing the envelope farther with each release the special rules appear to escalate in a vicious circle. The last few editions have been less about improving the rules and more about wiping the slate clean to re-establish balance between the available forces.

The love affair with splat books probably came out of the success of the two Realms of Chaos books. These books are notorious for the amazing art and over-the-top craziness for content. Not buying these is my one regret from those days. I picked up Warhammer Siege which we ended up using well into the later editions, but the Realms of Chaos were something that Games Workshop never did again. They never pushed as far or as high as it did with those books. My friend had them and I read through their copies but didn't buy my own because I didn't play Chaos. Sadly, I had no idea what a rare thing it was to have dark fantasy explored so deeply and so well in game form. I could write pages about the art but it's all been said before elsewhere on the gaming blogosphere.

Despite all of the complaining, tabletop wargaming appears to be in something of a resurgence. There are more games to choose from now, with War Machine in particular taking some serious ground in the hobby. I even seen some reports of people playing H.G. Wells' Little Wars. I hear doom and gloom about Games Workshop, but the local store still sells a tonne of it and hosts multiple game nights filling all the tables so even the complainers are still playing it.

For me, what I really want is the excitement of those early games where the rules helped us have crazy fights on four by eight foot areas of carpet blocked off in chalk and covered in a mishmash of train set and fantasy terrain. I miss those loose games where fielding a model like a dragon could be a critical hard point in the battle line or an awful waste of points depending on how things came out with the tactics and dice.  I don't want to play the old game though. I still have the books but I don't want to use them because years of play has taught me a thing or two about how rules shake out at the table. My involvement with the OSR for RPGs has also convinced me that sometimes stepping back to earlier editions and then stepping forward in a new direction with the benefit of years of development can yield some awesome results.

The first time I encountered the complaining about GW was three or four years ago. I decided I could do better so I spent a few months designing a new wargame. I built in the flexibility to use a wide variety of miniatures and settings, from gonzo steampunk fantasy to historical re-enactment. That recent thread on G+ brought it back to me as something others might enjoy too. The first time I shared the playtest document I didn't have the blog as a reference point for development of it and it basically petered out as I became busy with other things.

For the dice mechanic it uses a variant of my 3D System. I always found the rolling of one die per mini (to hit and another to wound and then another for an armour save...) to be tedious. I understand that the large number of dice made chance less of an issue since the odds would wash out with more dice, but it makes for a slow game with unit fights taking too long. It means battles had to be fought between limited numbers of units if the players had any hope of finishing. To fix that I used rolls of three six-sided-dice totalled with all modifiers for each unit. One throw per side, per turn for each unit in combat speeds everything up and still mitigates the luck factor with the results curved on the three dice.

I've tested it a bit and the point spreads seem balanced so far. The rules have worked well enough for me but I haven't had much feedback from others on how their games went with it. I'm still not sure about the rules for flying creatures so I'd like to hear about how that's worked out in play for others. The magic system is pretty basic, but fits the rules-light system well. The magic makes the wizard models a flexible tactical piece that can affect the battle without turning the game in to a wizard's duel. Success seems a little difficult for larger effects though so I'm toying with lowering/removing some of the modifiers or dropping down the base target numbers for success. Again, any feedback about how it goes in play would be appreciated.

I'm attaching the link to the original playtest document. The game hasn't changed much from this original version. There's about 12 pages of actual rules here. The first page you can ignore. It's old text explaining what I was trying to accomplish with the game and contact info for feedback. The rest of it is a rough draft of the Open War Fantasy Battle game. Give it a try. Let me know about any holes or things that don't work in your games. I'm aware of the typos but I'd like know if the language is difficult to understand in any way. I had originally envisioned a pocket mod version of the game, but I don't see that happening ever. Too much detail would be lost.

So give the alpha version of Open War Fantasy Battle a whirl and let me know how it works out!

Thanks!

Playing Boardgames Wrong!

Last week I went out to an evening with friends that revolved around playing some boardgames. There was great food, drink and a couple of copies of Settlers of Catan.

Settlers of Catan is a popular board game, largely because its design keeps almost everyone at the table in the running for the win until the last turn. It's often a close win, keeping tensions high and making it exciting to play. I love it for these things as well as the multiple levels of strategy that allow a nimble thinker to change direction and pull off a win even when it looks like all is lost. Dog-piling on the front-runner is rare, since you never can be sure who the points-leader actually is. The players tend to need each other so the game is cordial and burning someone is something to be entered into carefully.

The place where Settlers is lacking is the instructions. They are pretty terrible. There are on-line resources that are useful but you need to be careful about whether those are official rules or interpretations. The rules in the box are not helpful. My friends who hosted the evening played their first game of Catan with my wife and I. They fell in love with the game, bought their own copy and immediately introduced it to more people. What they didn't do is read the rules. They had played with us and thought they knew them. The people they taught to play learned from them so almost everyone at the party was "cheating."

It would be more accurate to say they were all playing with the same house rule. As a player of Table-top RPGs I am used to and comfortable with house-rules so after teasing them a bit for being cheaters I accepted their method and we started the game. While we were playing I was observing the mechanics of the game and thinking about how the change disrupted the balance of play. In an RPG balance is not terribly important because the lack of structure allows so many variables into the play that balance is largely irrelevant. In a board game, the structure of play is fixed. All of the options are proscribed under the rules and flow of play. The variables allowed are strictly controlled features like die rolls or card draws. The trading element of Catan is another variable, but even it has specific rules. The board is also random but its set-up is still carefully structured.

In the set-up phase of Catan where players are placing their pieces they will collect resource cards only from the second (and last) settlement piece they place. On Wednesday, players were collecting resource cards from both settlements. I resisted this cheaty method of starting the game, but couldn't form a compelling argument against their logic that this was more fun and accelerated game play.

It certainly accelerates game play, but it gives the people playing first and second a huge advantage. The regular rules temper the advantage of placing settlement pieces first by making the first players choose the territory that gets them their resources last. It also tempers the advantage of playing earlier by making certain that first couple of players have fewer resources to work with. The cheaty resources for the everything house-rule disrupts this balance completely.

Sadly, I didn't understand the effect of the rule completely until after I had won the game. At the time I was excited that I had one in spite of the house rule, but now I realise I likely won because of it since I went second.

What I've taken away from this experience is a new appreciation for the elegant design of one of my favourite boardgames. Settlers of Catan is a well-crafted experience for any group that I would heartily recommend. It is balanced and fair. Chances are when I play over at their place they'll want to play their way so all this musing only serves to increase my appreciation for the magic of the game design. I doubt it will change anyone's mind about how they play.

I've never considered board game design before. It presents some interesting challenges. Who knows? Maybe this look behind the curtain of Catan will inspire me to follow though on some crazy idea for a board game if the muse ever strikes me.

RPG Adventures in Space and Time or, Dogs in the TARDIS

It never ceases to amaze me the depth of creation in the world of RPGs. There are rules and  systems created for virtually every kind of play and to cover every eventuality and possibility at the table somewhere. The result doesn't always match the intention and sometimes you get the perfect system to play one game already completed in another.

Licensed properties are a special case because every time a new company acquires them they need to update the rules system to be consistent with their own brand, differentiate it from an older version of game or capture an aspect of the intellectual property the new designers think is more important than others who have worked with the same fiction.

Few intellectual properties exemplify all of these circumstances better than Doctor Who. There are a host of games out there for it with Cubical 7's version as the currently available, award winning choice. I haven't played Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space but I've heard some great things about it. The fact is I live in Canada and it's produced in the UK. Between the high price of everything in the UK and the cost of shipping from there to here the total cost of the thing is just too much for me. Lucky for me I already have a set of rules on my hard drive that will work with Doctor Who quite well.

"Doctor Who Space Travel" by David Hoffricther

D. Vincent Baker released Dogs in the Vineyard back in 2004. Since then countless people have used it to play religious cowboys going from town to town to root out evil and get into gunfights with sinners. Baker says he created the conflict resolution mechanics to create tension in social situations because, as a GM, he felt he was allowing his NPCs (non-player-characters) to agree with player character requests far too often. His solution to that problem gave us a game that fits the feel of the conflict you would find in a typical episode of Doctor Who.

Conflict in Doctor Who usually involves talking, running and getting captured. The running in particular has drawn attention over the years but in the newer series it is something writers have embraced and really, well, run with.

Cubical 7 uses initiative to encourage talking and roleplay over going straight to violence. The order of action places weapons use last and talking first so weapons are downplayed as a tool for players and allow the better play to keep the players one step ahead of the violent, oafish NPCs. It fits the feel of the series well as characters always have a chance to say something or run away before they are killed by the bad guys. It also explains why Captain Jack never actually uses his wonderful sonic pistol and Leela never gets to stab anyone.

Despite the fact that Cubical 7 clearly has a good handle on Doctor Who as an RPG, there's a few reasons why I think Baker's game is well suited to play a Doctor Who style RPG campaign. Dogs in the Vineyard's conflict resolution system works on a process of escalation that typically also begins with talking and moves upward as characters resort to other means to add to their dicepool in order to win the conflict. The emphasis on talking to open any interaction compliments the material the same way as Cubical 7's initiative system, but it's the way the conflict can end that really works. The dice pools are added to the conflict two at a time until someone has to use more than two to match the opponent's score (and suffers consequence because of it) or someone decides to Give.

The Give mechanic allows the character to avoid the consequences by accepting a loss of whatever was at stake. Accepting this loss allows the character to hold onto the highest die in the pool to use in the next conflict. In a Doctor Who game, Giving probably results in capture but that extra die is helpful in getting the big bad to explain the master plan and/or escaping.

"Yes, that sounds like a great plan. It's a good thing you didn't tell anyone about it."

A typical scenario would feature the Doctor uncovering an area in the basement that has a technology far beyond the period and locale the episode is set in. He starts prowling through the high-tech lair and is confronted by a Sontaran. That's bad news for the Doctor as he just figured out it was Sontaran technology and he has no way of warning his companions upstairs. The player knows talking is his strong suit but the Sontarans have a habit of escalating to violence so he just runs for it so he can warn the others and come up with a plan.

The conflict becomes a chase through the corridors of the secret base with the Sontaran shooting its big, honking space gun to get some extra dice. The Doctor is quickly outclassed in this conflict so he pulls out his Sonic Screwdriver to try to close and lock a door behind him and add 2d10 to his pool for this wonderful little item. The player locks the door well but holds his best roll (a 7) back in case the Sontaran has any tricks of his own. Turns out the Sontaran has a big, excellent explosive device in its equipment and makes short work of the door. The Doctor immediately Gives so he can keep his best roll (the 7) and have the advantage in the coming interrogation with the Sontaran commander of the secret base so he can find out what is going on and hopefully get away back to his companions upstairs.

Giving certainly fits in well with Doctor Who, but what about the consequences mentioned earlier when the stakes are too high to stop? That tends to happen quite a bit in the new series. The Fallout could be the loss of an important item. NPCs can fall into that category and we can see a high body count in the odd episode where the stakes are particularly high. If things get too rough the Doctor might be injured and forced to regenerate. That means new character generation and maybe a conflict of its own. For a Companion maybe it means being left behind or traumatized to the point they can't travel with the Doctor any more.

The raise and see conflict resolution with escalation is a great system for a Doctor Who RPG, but what about the rest of the game? The premise of Dogs in the Vineyard is a group of people wandering from town to town uncovering demonic influence and sorting out trouble. There's a system for town creation in the rules that helps keep things interesting and allows the GM to easily present a variety of challenges.

A game about a group of people wandering through time and space uncovering alien incursions and sorting out trouble is a pretty good description of Doctor Who. The actual locales that any given episode is set in is usually no bigger than a town so that's not a problem. The town-creation system would need some tweaks to make it fit Doctor Who but with all of time and space to choose from it should be easy to come up with an exciting variety of challenges to keep a campaign rolling for years.

For character generation all the cultural stuff from the game can be tossed out but relationships certainly continue to be useful. Family seems to get dragged into conflict in the new series often enough and certainly the relationship between the Doctor and the Companions should be worth some big dice. The Doctor is at his most dangerous when one of his companions is in mortal danger and certainly they have been full of surprises when he needs help.

Character creation in Dogs in the Vineyard also includes playing out a conflict as part of the character's background. I'd modify this conflict to always be about how the companion met the Doctor. For the Doctor it should be the theft of the TARDIS.

For my campaign I'd likely have another renegade Timelord, like the Doctor, as the PC that drives the TARDIS and gathers the rest of the party, rather than have the players playing the actual Doctor and his companions. A "Doctor's" name is as menaingless as the Doctor's so it makes sense for them all to take a title such as Head, Traveller, Professor, Elder, Inspector or even Doctor (just not that Doctor).

Honestly, it fits so well I'm surprised I haven't seen a Dogs in the TARDIS hack before now. It's not like there aren't a good number of Dogs in the Vineyard Hacks to use as guides. I'll have to put this on my list. Message me if you do it or find another one first!

Birtwhistle's Portal of Temporal Convenience #raggisrejects

A while back James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame put a call out for magic items that fit the particular feel of the LotFP universe. Most of them were rejected for one reason or another and people are posting them to the web under the tag #raggisrejects

The following is my reject, Birtwhistle's Portal of Temporal Convenience:

This door appears to be of ordinary size and made of a hard, red wood. Whether the red is its natural colour or it is stained that way is a mystery. Tiny, shallow carvings of arcane symbols cover both facings of the door and seem to swirl around the ornate, silver doorknob.

If this door is placed in a doorway it will swell or shrink to fit the door frame within 1d12 rounds. Once it fits the door its silver hinges will attach themselves to the door jamb within another 1d6 rounds unless someone takes action to do it themselves first. Once the door is hanging and closed the magic activates.

Opening the door converts the room beyond into a temporal anomaly. Anyone entering the room before it is closed will share the same time travel experience and be able to perceive each other. If the door is closed and opened again subsequent people entering the room will see the room as empty and have a different time travel experience requiring its own roll. The door remains for 8 hours after the first time someone uses it to enter the room and then disappears until the occupants exit the room.

To use the Portal of Temporal Convenience a person needs only to open the door, enter the room beyond and close the door. Once inside the person must remain there for 8 hours (the same as the door remains). If anyone opens the door and leaves before the allotted time has passed within the room, they will exit at the same moment they enter. The collision of two versions of the same person will cause a paradox, resulting in a catastrophic implosion sucking everything within the blast radius out of time and existence. To find the blast radius simply multiply the height, width and depth of the room to which the door leads.

If the occupant or occupants of the room remain there for at least eight hours before leaving roll a D30. The result is the number of days forward in time they have travelled. If a one is rolled the Referee must roll 1D6, two D12s, Percentile Dice (D100) and another D30. The D6 indicates the direction in time the party moves: 1 or 2 indicates they will go backward in time and a 3 through 6 indicates they move forward through time. The D12s indicate the month of the year the party arrives in. Choose the result on the die that is closest to the spring. The result of the Percentile Dice indicates how many years the party has travelled. The D30 indicates which day of the month they arrive.

If the door is removed from the outside during the 1D6 hours it exists after the party enters or it is removed by someone else who has used it for a temporal experience that ends before the party inside, the door simply will not open for the remaining party. They can try to exit the room through another door or window but that will result in the same mishap as rolling a one on the D30. The magic of the door makes the doorway safe. Travelling through an untreated portal is dangerous. Any person doing so will take 1D6 damage for every 10 years or part thereof travelled. The only advantage is another portal can be used as an exit before the eight hours has elapsed with no chance of a time paradox implosion.

It is possible that the door will open in a time where the room does not exist. The door frame and the room beyond it will exist as long as the door is open or until eight hours have past. The room can be seen and even returned to through the doorway while it exists. Once the door closes or after the eight hours have past, the door frame disappears and the door falls to the ground.

Edgar Birtwhistle was a wizard whose hatred of winter was only matched by his disgust with travel and foreigners. To solve his problem he spent decades researching and experimenting with forbidden magics and time manipulation before finally creating his Portal of Temporal Convenience. Exactly when the door was created and even when Birtwhistle lived is a mystery as his life is scattered throughout three different centuries. It is believed he lost possession of the door and disappeared out of time when it was removed from its frame by a disgruntled apprentice sometime in the 16th century. The current physical and temporal location of Birtwhistle’s Portal of Temporal Convenience is unknown.

Time Travel and Explaining Your Character is a Super Hero

Our Marvel Super Heroes game is into its fifth week now and we've already run into a serious problem with time travel.

(Inspector Spacetime by Graffitihead)

Our characters travelled back to 1963 to find out who really killed JFK. The reasons for this move are somewhat obscure and possibly not very good. It started well as our invisible super hero team set up to observe, but things unravelled almost immediately. Player Characters should not be allowed anywhere near actual history. If there is a historical event that players can derail and just plain mess up, things will go badly for history. This is the lesson our group learned on Tuesday when we foiled the assassination of JFK.

I haven't run a game featuring time travel yet, but I've been planning an adaptation of an RPG to make it work as an episodic time travel game for a while now (that post is still half done). In an historical setting or time travel game I think the history should be interacted with on a small, personal level. There are people who live there who are affected by the normal progress of history who can also be affected by the presence of the characters. Cool things can happen when those two forces interact.

Having the players derail the major events of the historical setting causes so much trouble for the GM! The effects turn into this awful butterfly wings chain of events, turning everything on its head. I don't know what our GM, Chris, is going to do now that we stopped the JFK assassination. We can only hope that the failed first attempt will force whoever is behind it to show their hand on a second attempt so we can figure out who did it and get back to our own time. Otherwise, our party is doing exactly the wrong thing and will never see our home time again.

One fun problem with time travel is interacting with people outside of your timeline who know about you and drop weird hints with their questions about where the character is in his or her timestream: "Are you married yet?" That's one of those small scale interactions that can be a lot of fun.

Another problem we encountered that was specific to our Supers game is the need to explain what we are since there are no supers in the time we've entered. Thanks to that situation, "I'm a super-hero, bitch!" might become the catch phrase for our campaign.

It will be interesting to see where we take it from here. We've committed to playing the Marvel FASERIP game for 6 months, so if we can't make it work in the alternate timeline we've created we may be rolling up characters again soon.

Our Marvelous Adventures are broadcast over youtube as we play in google+ hangouts, so they are easy to find if you want to check out our super-powered shenanighans in detail.

New Class for LotFP: the Monk

Last post I was talking about moving LotFP forward from the Early Modern Era to a Weird Wild West setting. One trope that is often revisited is the idea of the oriental monk in the old west. There's no reason not to have a Monk Class in the Early Modern Era since travel between continents is viable and cultures are mixing through trade. The main inspiration for the class as I have it here is the monk travelling the old west.

I've been pretty disappointed with the Monk Class in the past. It's often a half-assed thief with super fighty powers bolted on top. The beauty of the LotFP system is the point system for skills is more flexible than the percentages for thief skills so there is no reason to feel bound by any of that stuff. The Lamentations adventure Qelong has the Lotus Monk but it's for NPCs only and is basically a mystical fighter with magic powers. It is not a great fit to make a player character in the old west.

LotFP has a system in place to avoid power creep and protect the Fighter's place amongst the classes. The only class that increases in attack bonus is the Fighter, all the others have the +1 attack bonus they start with. I don't think the Monk Class needs an attack bonus to still have the flavour of a mystic/unstoppable warrior.

Monks are incredible athletes, performing amazing feats of balance and withstanding terrible punishment that would drop lesser people. Taking that into account, the best LotFP class to use as the base for the Monk is the Dwarf. The Monk would use the Dwarf experience table and saving throws. The Architecture Skill would be replaced by both Climb and Stealth. None of the other Dwarf abilities would apply and the Monk would use the D8 hit die of the Fighter and use the Fighter minimum hit points for first level to represent their physical resilience. At tenth level the Monk uses a +3 and no constitution modifier instead of additional hit dice.

(The Climb skill for the Monk Class)

Climb is not the careful scaling of sheer walls the Specialist would do but more of a leaping, acrobatic bouncing from surface to surface to ascend bare walls. Stealth is an obvious choice for a monk.

Despite the obvious vitality of monks the Constitution modifier the Dwarf gets is not entirely appropriate. Much of the monk's abilities come from a greater connection to the world and their training is centred around that. The Monk Class gets a +1 Wisdom Modifier.

To embrace the mystical aspect of the monk, add the total wisdom modifier to Open Doors rolls to show how their connection to the world around them gives them power over it and allows them to punch through doors and whatnot. The Referee can apply any necessary modifiers for different materials but I would likely let the Monk PCs break harder and harder materials as they level up.

The monk in Qelong adds level to AC, attack bonus and so on. With this setup, the Qelong monk becomes absolutely ridiculous around level 8. The LotFP Rules are designed to avoid power creep so I think the standard +1 attack bonus is sufficient and no AC improvement ladder is necessary.

I like the monk as a fast, difficult to hit character in tune with the space surrounding him or her and able to use that connection to the world to fight with a preternatural speed.

Wisdom is a huge factor in the Monk's ability to attack and defend. When not wearing armour the monk adds the total wisdom modifier to Armour Class. This bonus is usable with a shield, while making use of cover and in addition to any modifier from dexterity. As long as the monk is only lightly encumbered s/he adds wisdom to his/her attack bonus in addition to any other modifier. These combinations make the monk pretty bad-ass out of the gates at first level, but if you are using the normal roll-three-in-order character generation it should not imbalance the game.

Monks are experts at evasion and grappling. When wrestling they add their level to the D20 roll instead of their attack bonus. A monk may also substitute the wisdom modifier for the strength modifier. Monks can use either wisdom or strength when wrestling, not both. You can fight smart or strong, but not both at once.

Monks are renowned for their ability to fight with and without weapons. The precision and speed of their strikes defy reason. To represent the flurry of of strikes landing in a single round and the improvement that only experience can bring, the Monk's hand-to-hand damage is determined by level rather than the weapon used. This starts at 1D4 at first level. It increases to 1D6 at second level. At fifth level it increases to 1D8. It increases to 1D10 at eighth level and finally to 1D12 at tenth level.

As a warrior of exceptional training, like the fighter, the monk can use the martial manoeuvres: Press and Defensive Fighting.

That sums it up. A simple version of the monk with a framework of rules that should allow a player to roll to do cool monk-like stuff without making and of the other classes redundant. The focus on the physical suits a more modern setting and will work well with the Weird Old West.

Lamentations of the Old West Princess

"I am thinking of running Death Frost Doom as a Western. Maybe set in the Bitternoot Valley/Mountains in about 1875." A friend of mine posted this on G+ and it blew my mind just a little bit. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it so the only cure is to write it out. (Death Frost Doom is the adventure that put Lamentations of the Flame Princess on the map as an RPG publisher who has recently rewrote and re-released it)

(Possible descendants of the three iconic LotFP adventurers: Alice, Michelle and the Flame Princess)

Right off the bat, the character of Zeke Duncaster fits the old west perfectly. The frozen mountain with an ancient temple that has no business being there is a cool thing to hook in the players exploring the frontier. There's no reason there could not be an ancient empire that the Aztecs or one of the early First Nations managed to destroy in the California mountains. Efforts to erase the cult have failed time and again over the eons in North America. In fact, the more I thought about it the more I realised a lot of the LotFP adventures could be adjusted to fit the old west.

The epic, time-sensitive sandbox Better Than Any Man (downloadable for free here), could easily be set in the south during last days of the American Civil War with only minor adjustments. The characters and their motivations fit the era just fine and the arrival of the Yankees with its puritanical officers would end the same as the army in the adventure.

With similar themes, No Salvation For Witches would fit into a town in the old west as easily as early modern era England. Minor adjustments of names and descriptions to improve the fit could be done on the fly.

The church from the God That Crawls could be located in California or Texas having changed hands from the Spanish Catholics that had settled the area to the protestant Americans who came later and took over. The documents the players found could even refer to Jesuits taking possession of the crawling god and moving him and the dangerous artefacts they found in the catacombs to the new world to keep them all far from civilization. It might have happened during the rise of protestantism in England under Henry VIII.

No Dignity In Death: The Three Brides could be reworked to fit the old west pretty easily as well. If anything, it would work better in early america than in the early modern area Europe. The town of Pembrooktonshire would need a new name, but other than that the insular community could have existed in the Old West. The Knights of Science would need to be reskinned into some kind of violent missionaries or travelling law enforcement like marshals, rangers or even Pinkerton men.

Tales of the Scarecrow would fit into the american west with no changes at all other than minor tweaks to the back story of the guys in the cabin. The cornfield has an american feel anyway.

Scenic Dunnsmouth might work best on the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana. All the hooks and reasons for going there still apply. The Elven spy could be changed to an inquisitor (cleric), possibly a weird magic user or diabolist studying the cult for his/her own purposes

Both Death Love Doom and Forgive Us could be set in any coastal town. Death Love Doom needs some massaging to fit the back story into a new time and place, especially the guys in the coach-house. I don't think Forgive Us needs as many changes to work. Really, the coast is not so important as the movement of trade goods in these two stories. They could be set in any prosperous town on a major rail-road route.

Fuck for Satan could be any damn place. Same with the Monolith From Beyond Space and Time. The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children (downloadable for free here) can also happen in any small town.

Likewise, The Tower of the Stargazer could be anywhere that a crazy wizard/scientist thought would be beneficial to locate his tower. Maybe near a (now abandoned) mine so Calcidius could build the roof of the tower on the cheap? A Single Small Cut could work in the old west with minor changes too.

Thulian Echoes could be found on the crossing from Europe or moved to the Caribbean.

The Isle of the Unknown could be moved to the Caribbean as well. It could keep its French flavour as a former colony and a GM could spice it up with a some vodoo elements. The Greek statues become something of a mystery, but that's OK.

So all the adventures fit, but what about the rules? How much do the rules need to be altered to get the weird fantasy into the old west?

Lamentations of the Old West Princess or, Weird Weird West

So what about money? The silver standard is easily switched over to dollars at even money. Silver dollars are likely more popular on the frontier than paper money so that aspect of the game can be business as usual. The $50 gold coin was still in circulation in the 1870s so the gp value can be used with this coin in mind. There were also $20 and $10 gold coins but those can be specified, we can assume a gp is the $50 coin. The 2 cent copper was common enough that it can be used as the default "penny" for the campaign, keeping the ration of 1:50 for gp to sp and sp to cp.

The problem with the equipment list is some items are anachronistic and others are just way out of whack with the pricing of the day. The mass production capabilities of the settled areas of the North-eastern United States make a lot of items less expensive than the LotFP equipment lists. Catalogues from 1875 list wagons as only $50 as opposed to the 150 in LotFP. Mass-produced weapons like pistols are less than $5 and a shotgun can be bought for $15. The prices I found for rifles range from $20-$50. The ammunition was dirt cheap, selling for mere pennies. Buying something like a sword might be more difficult since you'd have to buy an old sabre from the war. Depending on the area, such products might be rare and expensive or so common they are worthless. A shortbow and arrows could be traded for or purchased from natives but a longbow or crossbow would not be available except as a collectable antique. Provisions become less of a hassle as canned goods and dried beef are plentiful.

Enough of the list matches up that it could be used for character generation at least and then prices out of old catalogues and some judgement could be used while resupplying in town.

There are some changes that need to be made to the rules...

Firearms

(Princess of the old west, Annie Oakley firing over her shoulder with a mirror)

There are all kinds of terrible black-powder muzzle loaders still kicking around the 1870s West so the normal LotFP firearms rules can be used for those. The muskets of the civil war era are much faster to reload and the use of caps to ignite the charge is much safer. These would function as arquebusses as listed with a three-round reload time and a misfire only on a one in twenty.

Armour penetration is still the same for all firearms with 4 points of amoured AC ignored by them.

These things are obviously more accurate than the antique weapons of the early modern era. I would just take the ranges for modern firearms and convert them to yards instead of feet. Short barrelled pocket pistols like derringers could continue to use feet for range and have the same doubling of penalties at range for the early modern unrifled pistols, but with a two shots and a single round for reloading. They also do only 1D4 or 1D6 damage because of the smaller calibre.

Shotguns use the same ranges as the old muzzle-loaders but instead of incurring penalties to hit at range it goes from 1D8 Damage at short range, to 1D6 at medium range, and 1D4 at long range. It has no armour penetration and reloading a single or double-barrelled shotgun takes one round.

Revolvers of this period are single action, allowing for a single accurate shot per round. They usually have a six round capacity and can be reloaded with cartridges in two rounds. Some revolvers don't use cartridges and the cylinders are loaded with a ball and black-powder. This takes a lot of time and users often carried multiple, pre-loaded cylinders. Switching out a cylinder takes one round loading a cylinder with ball and powder takes 18 rounds. Pistols still do 1D8 damage.

Revolvers can be "fanned" by holding down the trigger and slapping the hammer back. This desperate act adds +1 to hit for every three rounds expended.

Lever-action rifles are known as: "the guns that won the West." My google-fu is weak today so it was difficult to find any definite information on the magazine capacity of these weapons but five rounds seems to be the consensus. Apparently modifications could be made to expand that to 8 or even 13, but I leave that up to the judgement of the GM. I'll likely go with five.

Reload time should be one round of time for every three cartridges. Damage is the standard 1D8.

Lever-action rifles still had a chance to misfire because the tubular magazine caused rounds to go off inside the rifle from time to time. It was rare enough you can ignore depending on your game. Maybe even swap out one or two of the results on the optional D30 critical miss tables for an exploding rifle so it can still happen.

When using a rifle or shotgun in melee they do 1D6 Damage. A pistol is pretty heavy and can be used as a small club for 1D4 Damage.

Classes

The classes as written don't all fit the Weird West model so a few modifications need to be made.

The Cleric:

The 19th century cleric is more of the Solomon Kane type than the Crusader of the OD&D and LotFP rules. Taming the west with a bible and a six-shooter we can get that faith-based frontiersman with a few changes.

(Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider)

The first-level spell Turn becomes a reusable ability. It can be used against any unnatural creature such as a werewolf, undead or mutated thing. A result of Turned on the table means the creature is held at bay and cannot approach the Cleric or harm him/her in any way. A Destroyed result means the creature is actually turned as normal and must flee from the Cleric's presence. The Turn table could also be used to remove fear in a cleric's companions. Roll turn against the hit-dice of the fear causing creature or NPC and if it succeeds then 1D6 + the Cleric's hit dice in people of the group will rally. This group may in turn inspire others allowing another moral roll for hirelings and henchmen at +2.

The Cleric is no miracle worker on his or her own. Clerics don't cast spells, but can use cleric scrolls as normal. These artefacts are ancient prayers written, illuminated and specially prepared in the past. The Cleric accesses the power of the prayer by reading it aloud. It takes one round to read for every level of spell cast from the scroll and the cleric can do nothing other than walk slowly during that time. After the cast the player rolls a save verses Spells to see if the scroll's holiness fades and the scroll is exhausted. The maximum spell level a cleric can cast from a scroll is equal to the maximum spell level available on the cleric's Spells Per Level section of the table on Page 11 of the LotFP  Rules and Magic book. Every level beyond that takes a -1 penalty to the Save verses Spell roll. So a fourth level cleric casting a fourth level spell from a scroll takes a -2 penalty to their Save roll because the normal maximum spell level they can cast is level two.

Scrolls don't need to be scrolls to work this way. It could get weird with something like a mummified saint's hand being invoked to cast cure light wounds and so on. There's no limit to the strange that could be applied here.

The Fighter:

The Old West is full of gunfighters, ex-soldiers and hardened mercenaries. Fighters stay the same.

The Magic User:

There's always someone willing to endanger their soul and study forbidden texts in exchange for knowledge, power or both. The god-fearing folk of the frontier would be quick to burn a witch or other heathen displaying any unnatural powers so a player needs to be careful. The class stays the same but the spell list would change slightly as even more has been lost in the face of modern progress. I'd remove Magic Missile and Sleep from the level one spell list and replace them with Summon for the purposes of creating the first spellbook. Other things I'd be tempted to remove are Fly and the Wall of X spells.

The Specialist:

(The Weird West Specialist has some new skills to choose from)

The specialist doesn't need to change but I would add medicine as a a skill. The barber surgeons and country doctors of the old west have the benefit of modern techniques that make it possible to save a character from what would have been certain death in the Early Modern Era. If a PC is reduced past the usual a person skilled in medicine can treat them if they are reduced to -4 hit points or worse. They must have surgical tools, sufficient light and time to operate.  They make their D6 skill roll as usual but take a -1 penalty for every three points of damage suffered past the negative three threshold. So a character with -9 hp could be saved with a medicine roll made at -2. The medicine skill could also be used as for first aid type actions made while resting after a fight. Patching up a character's would would mean they regain 1D4-1 (0-3) hit points for anyone with at least one point in Medicine.

The Dwarf/Wild One:

There are no magical craftsman living under the Rockies and trading fine axes and other goods with the humans of the surface world. Dwarfs simply do not fit this campaign setting in any way. I usually swap in Barbarians to fill this niche in a human only campaign but those are anachronistic and no better fit.

The main feature of the dwarf class is it is a survivor. It has amazing saves and the best hit points in the game. That's why it could be changed to the Wild One with only a couple of changes. The frontier was frought with dangers both natural and man-made. Mudslides, terrible winters, native attacks and simple bandits could mean any community or settlement. The Wild One is a sole survivor of some kind of disaster. S/he survived through luck, skill or sheer bloody-mindedness and has come through it even harder than before. A few seasons on his/her own before making contact with civilization again has made the Wild One a natural adventurer. The Architecture skill could be replaced with Climb or Bushcraft depending on the circumstances of the Wild One's origin. Tough as nails and used to relying on themselves for everything, the Wild One keeps the Constitution bonus and extra encumbrance allowance of the Dwarf.

The Elf:

There are no elves prancing through the Old West. You could replace them with the Diabolist Class I described in an earlier post. Another option to get something exotic into your campaign is to adapt the Lotus Monks from the Qelong adventure.

The Halfing/Native:

There are no magical little people farming hidden valleys in the Old West either. The easiest way to use this class as written is to reskin it as a Native. The excellent Saves represent their experience with the dangers of the old west and the resolve required to live there without modern conveniences. They rely on each other and their communities so they don't have the extreme hit points of the Wild Ones. The Dex bonus could be restricted to only when they are lightly encumbered. Bushcraft and Stealth fit the Native culture well enough for warriors and hunters of most tribes across north america.

The main problem with playing a Native character in the Old West is the terrible prejudice they face. The player and GM should really discuss how this will play before the game. Racism is not fun, but different people like to play through different things. Just talk it out during character generation.



There's not much that needs to happen to make LotFP fit the Old West or to make a Weird West campaign. I know there are other games out there but if we're adapting LotFP adventures and its weird, horror-based aesthetic to the campaign we might as well make these minor tweaks once and just roll on forward than constantly revise between systems during play. Besides, I already have copies of the LotFP Rules so I'd rather make these changes than buy Call of Cthulhu - Old West Edition or Deadlands or whatever.