TPK: Post-Mortem
Nine sessions into my latest game and the hammer came down.
A TPK.
Yes, at least one of my players would object to me saying that, since their character managed to flee the conflict wounded, reach an island, and crawl beneath their overturned rowboat as the buzzing of a group of stirges approached.
And as is always the case I wonder what went wrong.
Yes, there were bad decisions and bad dice rolls, and one night we should’ve called the game at a cliff-hanger point instead of pressing on – but things happened as they happened. Now everyone’s making new characters (and we’re changing the rule set while staying in the same setting), but as is the case it’s time for introspection and dissecting the game to see what worked and what didn’t.
Here we go…
THE BASICS
Rule set: Through the Sunken lands by Flatland Games. It’s a retroclone and one I’ve used before.
Characters: A Pirate Captain, the Goblin’s Child, and the Student of the Dark Arts (players could pick playbooks from either Through Sunken Lands or Beyond the Wall). This ended up being a fighter/thief, a fighter/thief/mage, and a mage. The playbooks are fun, but they can be disappointing when the rolls don’t go your way. Despite two fighter types I don’t think anyone started with a strength above 13.
House Rules: The use of fortune points was expanded. Spend two to shrug off a spell effect. Spend a fortune point to regain a HD of HP on a short rest.
Advancement: XP was a combination of pop quiz style (each adventure offered a basic amount of XP for accomplishing certain goals) and XP for loot. Loot however needed to be spent in town. A carousing table was used.
Since characters got XP for loot, there were instances of one character splitting off from the party, getting very lucky, and getting loot the other characters never knew about. (The players knew and rolled their eyes in disgust… or at least I imagine they did. We play online without any cameras, but I swear I could hear the eye rolls.) This also meant times where the party had loot they needed to convert to XP, but had to travel to a bigger settlement to spend it. This was the situation before they died. Still I liked this mechanic and the mix of XP awards. But it did incentivize a certain selfishness among the players (or at least it did in that one heel player). This, however, fit the sword & sorcery vibe in my opinion. Whether the selfishness led to the TPK is debatable. The party never really came together as a group loyal to each other and able to strategize together.
Equipment: Inventory slots and a usage die. Both of these worked well, but they did seem to have an infinite amount of rope.
THINGS THAT MAYBE DIDN’T WORK
Nothing. I’m perfect.
Uhhh… I mean…
Time Management: You get a feel for the game and when something tells you this is a good point to end the session, end the session. It’s okay to finish 35 minutes ahead of the usual time. Better too short than too long. If the game had been cut early one night, then players would’ve had a week to prep/ask questions before going into the encounter that killed them*.
Avoid Bullet Time: There’s a tendency to want to play out every moment of game time. That’s not always necessary. The loot mechanic of get back to town to gain XP maybe encouraged some bullet time, since if the game ended with them making camp, the next session would then be them getting back home. Often a random encounter would happen that would then thwart their objective to get home and send them deeper into danger and deeper into turns and bullet time.
Telegraph Threats: It’s fun to make things weird and unpredictable, but (as an example) giving a goblin a breath weapon where they can vomit out a slurry of jagged gravel that does D6 damage to everyone in range may be fun, but A) it induces paranoia in players, which can lead to analysis paralysis, B) it also makes it difficult for players to determine what they should worry about.
Information Economy in the Fog of War: Is it punishing the players by withholding information about their current mission, because they spent their one opportunity to research things researching some other information they thought was more important? Is that a failure on the GM’s part for not telegraphing what details are important? Should the GM even worry about this? Are players supposed to say (hell, even know!) the magic words that will trigger an NPC to give the relevant information or should players just be given the damn information that might be relevant? In other words…
Should players hear about a thing (that may be relevant) even if they never ask about the thing?
Questions. Questions.
* Yes, that character made it back to the beach so the campaign actually ended with the lone survivor cowering under an overturned rowboat and a fade to black as buzzing approached.
Mysthead #4
And here it is…
Mysthead #4, a system neutral micro-setting for seafaring fantasy adventures.
Inside you will find multiple generators, a local region and the many peoples who live there, several unique curiosities, a hexflower encounter matrix for seafaring events, and more!
You can find it at DrivethruRPG (affiliate link) or here at itch.io: https://myxomycetes.itch.io/mysthead-4
Enjoy!
Coming Soon: Mysthead #4
Mysthead is my occasional tabletop rpg fanzine. Issue #4 is on schedule for a December release. It’ll be 48-pages and detail a micro-setting for nautical swashbuckling adventure. In fact the setting I’m using in my current games!
Navigate the seas beneath the Vortex Maelstrum!
Learn the secrets of the Midnight Squid!
Cower before the head of Dead-Eyes Anderton!
And more…
You’ll be able to find it on my itch.io page when it’s done: https://myxomycetes.itch.io/
The Next Mysthead
So I’m putting together another zine. This one is going to be inspired by my current D&D* game: a swashbuckling, island hopping sword & sorcery game. But it’s also going to be a toolkit for running similar type games with generators for vessels, islands, cargoes, and travel rules like the above hexflower encounter matrix. My goal’s to finish it by the end of the year, but I’m on schedule to finish it sometime before that. When it’s done I’ll post it over on my itch.io page.
If you’d like to support its creation and get sneak peeks of its progress (along with other stuff) please consider supporting me on Patreon.
Thanks for reading!
* It’s not D&D but a different system. It’s just easier to call all role-playing games D&D.
Invasion of the Spider Things
I made a little pamphlet of six generators for your tabletop role-playing games. It outlines an invasion of alien spider things from another world. How they came here? What they want? Where they lair? And what makes their webs so strange.
Use it in all your paranoid little games.
Find it here: https://myxomycetes.itch.io/invasion-of-the-spider-things
Mysthead 2 // Who or What Is the Boss?
Hey all,
I’ve put together another issue of “Mysthead” my RPG fanzine. You can get it and the first issue by supporting me on patreon. CLICK THIS TO GO THERE. In this issue you’ll find lore about Mysthead’s elf and goblin populations, a playable gossiping spider race-class (“The Rumormonger Spider”) for Old School Essentials, and tables to generate whispering skulls, hot spider gossip, and elf-goblin political structures. So as not to make this post a complete advertisement, I’ve included the elf-goblin political structure generator below.
Take care for now!
***
Elves and goblins often have peculiar ways of governing themselves. While all manner of geases may determine what actions may or may not be taken when within either ones domain, there is usually some higher authority consulted in times of great peril or confusion. Often these have a clear criteria they follow: the most cunning, the eldest, those who achieve some renown. Other times the criteria is more obscure.
Below you will find an assortment of odd sovereigns to rule over your goblins and elves. Roll, choose, and/or mix and match:
- A class of astronomers who seek advice from the stars. Their wisdom is renowned.
- An ancient tree at the center of the Arkenwyld and served by an order of life-bound guardians.
- A sacred book that rewrites itself every day.
- A great elder abstracted with age and lingering on the brink of stupor.
- A young sovereign wrestling with their first bout of nostalgia.
- Your mom. My mom. Every body’s mom. The literal All-Mother
- An ancient ethernaut stranded in this world by the vortex shoals.
- A squabbling court of siblings intriguing against each other and eager to find allies.
- A council of ancients, so old they resemble cicadas. Time has no meaning to them.
- A singing harp, whoever can master its song rules for a decade.
- A council of white-coated priests who read the movements of rats in a maze.
- A set of bone dice kept locked in a vault. They bear no numbers or glyphs and can only be read by a trained seer.
- A human child, obnoxious and utterly spoiled. The child’s about eleven.
- Three gnomes in a trench coat. It started as a gag but now they’re in too deep.
- A spider of epic proportions that feeds on secrets and makes its lair in a darkness beyond reason.
- The movements of some infernal or divine beast like a hen or a pig. It is attended by priests and kept within a heavily guarded enclosure.
- The winner of an extreme athletic event done without assistance and far from sober. Not all who attempt it return.
- An odd stone that weeps a slurry that induces visions. It’s not from this world, nor even this reality. The hangovers are abysmal, but it works.
- An elf sovereign exiled from another land. They are keen to get their revenge and regain their kingdom.
- An intelligent monster like an ogre magi, dragon, or sphinx kept as a prisoner. They are treated with reverence but know they live in a gilded cage and long for their freedom.
THE LOCAL CAMPAIGN // MYSTHEAD
Recently my game group wound down our D&D campaign for a bit of a breather. I’m the GM and we’re using Beyond the Wall as our rules. I’ve run Beyond the Wall before (here’s the first post about that game), but this time I leaned into its implied YA fantasy setting. The game had a teen delinquents and their up-tight friend solve/commit crimes and fight monsters feel to it.
Some notes and revelations:
- Magic. BtW keeps it scary and unpredictable, so much so a few times the party had beneficial items that they were too frightened to use. Also every mage the players encountered was awful or at the very least damaged in some way. A downside to this is that the spells veer towards the looser end and require negotiation between player and GM.
- Small setting. The furthest the players traveled from the village was four days away. Most of the time they were interacting with known people and places around town. Known dungeon sites got a bit of that Zone spice, never quite cleared out, but always there spooky and weird just beyond the edge of town. It also opens the calendar and locations.
- The Calendar. Some places are more powerful at certain times than others. Some locations only appear on nights of the full moon. The cult is having their meeting a week from now. If you hurry maybe you can get there. I wasn’t that strict with it, but I certainly made it a bigger part of the game than I’ve ever done in the past. One danger is it can become grindy as players try to divide turns down into rounds like they’re riding Zeno’s Arrow.
- Locations. Make places magic items. Light a fire in the old temple and no fire can harm you while you remain there. Stop by the local saint’s shrine before setting out and get a bonus. This is one way to keep magic limited and add a strategy element. This location has this effect. This other location has a different effect.
- Pesky Kids. I dug the teen detectives uncover secrets and solve crimes angle and played up the fact that except with few exceptions no adult was going to take the teens’ accusations seriously. I did this until one player asked me to stop because they found it triggering. By then they hated the home village (with its stupid adults) so much they had to be coaxed into protecting it.
- Reputation. Small town reputations provide a lot of pressure points for characters. At one point the delinquents got kicked out of their house by their guardians (the twins did burn a building down). They ended up having to pay rent at the inn. And they hated it! But I loved saying, “Master Barrelhelm wants his gold piece for the week.”
- Who Gave the Kid a Knife? Despite the characters being 18-year olds, the players weren’t and for some reason those with kids of their own were reluctant for their characters to give an NPC teen friend a bunch of weapons. Go figure.
- No Hirelings. It’s hard to hire a bunch of torch-bearers and Men-At-Arms to use as meat shields when you’ll have to see their widows and orphaned kids around town. Despite this the players had a couple of NPCs they could occasionally lean on.
If you want to read more about the game, here’s a link about its inspirations.
MYSTHEAD APPENDIX N / BEYOND THE WALL
This is for those random persons who enjoy reading about other people’s TTRPG games. Here’s a look at all the material that went into the recent game my group and I finished*. Expect a lot of links to wikipedia pages.
THE RULES USED
Beyond the Wall
We use all the Beyond the Wall material to date. Its roots are as a retroclone of D&D, but it welds on bits from AD&D (race and class) while keeping the rules loose enough. I’d love to see it overlap more with more narrative games like Dungeon World and Five Torches Deep. Also since BtW leans into YA Fantasy for its inspiration I could easily see another table mixing it up with Monster Hearts. For what it’s worth, BtW’s version of the Banshee has one of the best save or die mechanics.
The one bad thing about the rule set is that it’s scattered across multiple books. Personally, I’d love to see an omnibus “Rules Cyclopedia” edition published some day. Through Sunken Lands (the latest iteration of the rules) does this somewhat, but TSL has a different vibe. TSL is bronze age sword & sorcery, and not the high medieval YA fantasy we wanted.
OTHER GAMES & SUPPLEMENTS
- Dolmenwood: For the vibe more than the particulars, although I did lift the Haunted Abbey from here and tweak it.
- Harn: I’m a fan but have little time for its level of detail. Doesn’t stop me from pillaging it for names and lore, especially its pantheon.
- B10 Night’s Dark Terror: One of the greatest D&D modules. A good story and mix of wilderness and dungeon adventures.
- The Gazetteer Series of D&D products. Again, it’s less the details and more the names and site tags.
- Carse and Midkemmia Press’s Cities supplement
MOVIES
Some provided plots, others only atmosphere.
- Night of the Demon: The cursed parchment, the hypnotism scene, the congenial devil worshiper, and the arrival of some inescapable doom at a certain time.
- The Old Dark House: Nobody scares like Brother Saul!
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Every fantasy game needs a backwoods clan of cannibals. My players rightfully called me out when I gave them southern accents.
- Phantasm: It, like my game, is stitched together from whatever seemed weird/cool at the moment.
- Harold & Maude: Maude’s the model for the elderly shield maiden having a fling with the party’s wizard.
- The Mummy // Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Do you need links to these? Both do a great job blending fantasy and naturalism. Okay, The Mummy doesn’t but the action’s fun and the props are bulky. It leans gracefully into the yakety sax.
- Rankin & Bass’s Tolkien and The Last Unicorn movies for their cute but grotty weirdness and because they’re deeply imprinted in my brain.
- Those Passolini Trilogy of Life movies set during the Middle Ages/Renaissance did similar imprinting from a different direction.
- Spaghetti Western // Hammer Horror // Shaw Brothers movies all mashed together and left to ferment and link mycelia. In my opinion these three genres meld very well together.
BOOKS // AUTHORS
- The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books by way of spoof covers.
- Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories
- The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter Beagle
- The Book of Goblins by Alan Garner (Yallery Brown!)
- One Thousand and One Nights (Especially that story where Sinbad gives a piggy-back ride to an awful man.)
- The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
- Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
- The Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Chaucer’s Knight by Terry Jones
- Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World by Erica Benner
OTHER STUFF
- Early American Serial Killers and Mississippi River bandits like the Harpe Brothers.
- Every European folklore page on Wikipedia. I would try Stargazey pie.
- Cherry picked bits of Medieval/Early Renaissance History.
- Cape Ann.
*It’s not done, but we reached a good pause point and I wanted to take a break and other people wanted to run games. The goal’s to come back to it before the end of the year.
What Games I’m Playing
What am I playing?
5e.
I ran a game for a bit until two TPKs got me a reputation in town as a killer DM. This made me sad, but my buddy took over the gaming duties. Now, I’m playing in his game and being the yahoo running amok. For laughs I’m a playing a goody two shoes who makes everyone’s life miserable.
I like 5e, but it takes forever to make a character and all the crunch gets to me.
(I’m also playing a f**kton of board games but that’s a subject for another post.)
What am I running?
Apocalypse World.
The Stars Without Number game stalled out, then I killed a few parties with 5e, and ran a Numenera one-shot that never really became more than that because two of the players left town (although I wouldn’t have minded if it had become a longer running game).
Apocalypse World has been fun, but it certainly takes more reading the table, than D&D ever did. Also, D&D has very clear role demarcations whereas Apocalypse World doesn’t, so if you have a player who wants to do everything and control every other player, they will try to. Generally, this same person outside of the game is a bit of a bore.
What do I wish I was running?
Beyond the Wall.
The more 5e I play, the more I fall in love with this retroclone. Yeah, the YA protag thing could be a bit annoying – but as a system this might be my favorite iteration of D&D.
Who does it suck to game with?
Two kinds of people:
The never played D&D before but loves Wil Wheaton nerd who sees D&D as a signifier of their nerd status. It’s not just a game, it’s a pop culture reference! If there are no Cheetos and Mountain Dew on the table they feel slighted.
Chess players. Chess players are the worst.
Yesterweird 