This is Bat Country!

Here's a little actual play recap from the game I ran last weekend. Despite my light reskinning of the whole affair, some of you might recognize elements of the adventure from a certain published work.

Our heroes (?):
Jamcat Wildthorne Hawkblade, a Thief who crowbars everything because he doesn't know how to pick locks (played by Justin)
Marceline, a wizard of the "Eat this fucking fireball you fucking fuck!" variety (played by Karma)
Zarl Goldberg, a wizard of the "Look at my illusions while I steal your shit" variety (played by Jesse)
Zyril Goldberg, Zarl's estranged, Ranger step-brother (played by Spencer)
Zigg, a former squire who's reconnecting with his Barbarian roots (played by Devin)

They met up with their contact, Vincenza "Vinny" Vicente at her favorite watering hole, "The Lusty Strumpet." She gave them a lead on a job; if they brought in a wanted wizard named Dejezerit, they'd clear a cool 2,000 silver reward.

It was implied that Dejezerit had some ties to a fearful local figure known only as "The Angel of Need". Creepy.

Unimpressed, our adventurers took the gig. Vinny gave them her inside info that Dejezerit had "acquired" info about a nearby estate, and was probably planning to loot the place. They set out for that locale forthwith.

On arrival, they peeped three very rundown buildings, a big effin’ statue, and a crapload of dead bodies surrounding said statue. Investigating the smallest building first, they found a couple of oxen who appeared to have taken up recent residence. Zarl and Zyril promptly removed the dumb bulls from their lives of relatively well-fed comfort to hide them in the woods. In the process, they disturbed some friendly neighborhood feral dogs who were trolling for corpse-meat. Lucky for them, the reaction roll birdy told me that the dogs couldn't give a fuck less about these guys.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party checked out the next largest building, which turned out to be some kind of temple. Atop the central altar was a wooden statue of a young woman wearing a toga, carrying a large hammer, and possessing a crown shaped very much like the teeth of a key. On the floor, they discovered the destroyed remnants of an urn, and the ashes it once contained. Marceline swiftly scooped up some of the ashes in a bag. I don’t know why, ask her yourself.

After an unnecessary, crowbar-assisted break-in through a door that wasn't even locked, they searched the first floor and cellar of the main estate. The adventurers found a note reading, "The third one is false", a locked safe that they never did a damn thing with and a secret room chock full of skeezy shackles, bloodstains, and a bronze chest full of crusty murderblades. They inexplicably decided to move the bronze chest up one flight of stairs, and then abandoned it there, ostensibly for reasons.


Growing impatient, our erstwhile protagonists adjourned to the out-of-doors again. Zarl Goldberg climbed the statue in the courtyard, and spotted something shiny on the roof of the estate. Finally given a flimsy excuse to use his grappling hook,Jamcat Wildthorne Hawkblade climbed the hell out of that building to get a closer look at the bling. The good news: he found a message inlaid in silver that read, "Follow the sun. Ignore the moon." The bad news: he woke up the bat-leech things that lived in the attic of the estate. After a somewhat pitiful battle that involved the description, "so, you fail to stab the thing that’s attached to your own neck", our heroes had murderized the five bat-things that had attacked them, and Jamcat had set the entire attic ablaze. Burning everything to the ground is standard "murder-hobo" protocol in our group. In the process, Marceline was drained of so much blood by one of the bats that she nearly lost consciousness.


I can't wait to see what these jokers do next. I really hope it involves the cremated lady's ashes.

In Stock at the Fantasy Shop

First up, I have to thank Charles Akins over at Dyvers for diving into the vast sea of OSR blogs to give a short review/overview of what's out there. It really was an honor just to be nominated.

Now, on to the content. A while back I wrote a post about using DIY tokens to track item consumption in D&D games. Even though there's a serviceable Avery template for printing the tokens out ahead of time, I still needed a way to print out "blank" tokens on which to swiftly write things like "severed bear's head" on the fly at the game table. Hence, this:

I settled on a 1.5 x 1.7 size so that the tokens would be a little taller, which makes them poke out of the top of the page for easier retrieval. 

Then, I thought, "might as well stock up the local town merchant while I'm at it." At first, I was using text-only tokens (because my artistic abilities are limited to remarkably lewd stick figures), but then I decided that they needed a little visual panache. Fortunately, the tremendous Telecanter of recedingrules.blogspot.com and the rip-roaring Roger of rolesrules.blogspot.com  have both made some nifty Creative Commons/Free Use artwork available. I also ganked a particularly saucy picture of a potion from ackegard.com by Hakan. Don't worry, I printed a link to Hakan's site on the token card. I'm a helper.

Open these in a new tab to marvel at the delicious fruits of my labor. Or just, y'know, download them. If they prove useful, I'd love to hear about how you used them in your campaign.

I'm a long way from being done with the basic set of dungeon-delving equipment, but this seems like a decent start. I hit a snag when the best source of equipment images I've found turned out to be a bunch of scans from the 3.5 Edition Player's Guide. So, does anyone know of a great source for free-use images of dungeony gear?

Your "Identical" Duplicate is Really...

"You're a goody-two-shoes!"

1.) Your mystical Nemesis, birthed from the cursed, Unseelie mirror-pools of Faerie. It is identical to you in every way, save for always being the equivalent of one experience level higher than you. It is intent upon your complete and total destruction. It will, inevitably, take its sweet time making your life miserable before deigning to end your worthless existence.

2.) Your worst enemy, polymorphed to look like you, with psionic impressions of all of your memories to complete the package. Speaking of "package", wanna guess who's going to be spending some quality time with your significant other tonight?

3.) The clone abortion that's gone completely fucking sideways. Like, this thing has P R O B L E M S. Think Bizarro, if Bizarro was three shades more retarded, had extra genitals in odd places, and was prone to shitting himself in the middle of violent outbursts.

4.) It really is you, but worse. This duplicate is from an alternate universe in which you are a completely worthless shit-heel. It has -1 to all of your attributes, and is functionally one level of experience lower than you are. It might not be evil, per se, but it definitely rains douchebaggery down in heavy torrents everywhere it goes. I'm sure that won't cause you any problems.

5.) A very convincing hallucination. This good-lookin' devil is one heck of a charmer. You can't, for the life of you, understand why no one else will admit to seeing them...

6.) A Shapeshifter or Master of Disguise who's running a loooooooooong con.

7.) A random person who, for reasons unbeknownst to either you or them, just looks remarkably similar to you. Perhaps there are some family secrets which need to be aired out.

8.) A perfect illusion/hologram of your current appearance, which mimics your every action. It's offset by a distance of about 5 feet. Enemies who want to do you physical harm are going to have to take their chances, 50% chance of hitting the insubstantial copy instead of you. Dinner party conversations are likely to become very confusing, however.

9.) A perfect clone, created from a sample of your DNA . It gestates for 12 Turns before being deposited in the very same spot where you stood. It's a blank slate who will imprint on the first sentient creature it sees, like a little duckling, following them around and learning everything it needs to know about life from them.

10.) Teleporter Malfunction: You're instantly transported 10 feet to the left of where you were standing. In other news, there's another you standing 10 feet to the right of where the "accident" happened. Both characters are identical, and neither knows which one is the original.

11.) It's you from the future! This duplicate can't (or won't) reveal important details about your future escapades, or those all-important winning lotto numbers. They are, however, two levels of experience higher than you, and more than willing to help you on your current adventure. In fact, it seems like they expected to be tapped for this. The GM should keep very detailed notes about what difficulties befall this dupe, since your character will undoubtedly be called upon to endure those same problems at some point in two levels' time.

12.)  It really is you, but better! This duplicate was transported from an alternate universe in which you're just a little bit more awesome. It has +1 to all of your attributes, and is a level higher than you, but is otherwise just like you, and shares all of your goals. High-five, identi-bro!

GM Screen of the Gods

Easel 3-Ring Binders

Great GM screen, or GREATEST GM Screen?

Seriously, just load up the side of the pockets that will face the GM with useful info, and fill the sides that will face the players with pictures of female fighters in unreasonable armor. I guess you could put in boring rules reminders and shit instead. I dunno. Whatevs.

Encumbrance vs. Inventory

Who doesn't love the simple encumbrance system that James Raggi gave us in Lamentations of the Flame Princess?

Dickheads, that's who.

Seriously. Calculating encumbrance was an exercise in tedium even for the slide-rule carrying dungeoneers in the early 80's. Besides, what RPG enthusiast isn't already well-acquainted with the first cousin of Raggi's system, the video game Inventory.

We grok this shit at the cellular level.

This elegant solution still suffers from a common problem at the game table, though. People forget to write crap down. A lot. Plus, brace yourselves for this, some buttface players will occasionally lie about what their character is carrying.

Others have attempted to tackle this problem before, notably Faster Monkey Games with their Tracker Tokens product. 

It's a good idea, but a little too static for my gaming needs. Players can't be counted on to carry exclusively predetermined items. I mean, they're tooling around a dungeon with backpacks full of goblin heads, blocks of demon-cheese, and pretty much any other frightening garbage that seemed like a good idea to pick up at the time.

Never fear, three-ring binders are here. More specifically, you can print out whatever inventory items you want on this free template from Avery, and have each player store those suckers in one of these inexpensive 30-pocket binder pages. 

What's that, you say? "Doesn't the LotFP encumbrance system have exactly 30 slots?" That's right, and you're welcome.

  +  

= easier organization than an OCD hooker.

The pockets and the template items are all exactly 1.5"x1.5", which is also conveniently the perfect size to hold poker chips. I'm having my players use poker chips to track the number of arrows left in their quivers. How many arrows fit in a quiver? Twenty. Do they make another binder page that holds exactly 20 chips? You're damn straight they do. 

I recommend printing tokens out on cardstock to make them more durable than mere paper. I still need to kludge together a blank template that just has a dark border around the edges of each token so that I can print out a bunch of blanks before the game. That way, I can just write random item descriptions directly on tokens mid-game, rather than having to type them up and print them out.

I have to say that I really enjoy the tactile element of handing a token or chip to a player when they purchase gear, and having them hand it back to me when it's been used up. You can even get cutesy with the players by using inventory items printed with custom templates, like this one that looks like it's dripping with blood.

Plus, there's a certain dark glee to be had when the party is five levels deep in the dungeon, and the players look down at their inventory sheets to discover that they're dangerously low on torches.

Good times, good times.