OD&DITIES Issue 15!

The third issue of the OD&DITIES relaunch, Issue 15, is now on sale. I'm pretty excited about this one, and not just because – gas leaks and builders notwithstanding – OD&DITIES is somehow keeping to the schedule! As before, this issue is 25 pages long (plus one page for the obligatory OGL), and takes as its theme 'Elemental Magic'. This issue is special for two other reasons, as well – our first guest article, by Dale Cameron, and our first colour cover, by Steve Robertson.

So, what's in the box? Well, the meat of the issue is based around the Elements, and that is where a lot of the 'crunch' is concentrated. A new character class for Labyrinth Lord, the Elementalist, and one that is somewhat different to many of the other magic-wielding classes, as the class is heavily dependent on changing the nature of his environment, as well as summoning Elementals to do his bidding, of course...

This issue's contents, in total...,

A Touch of Class: The Elementalist (With six pages of spells!)
Walking the Dusty Trail (Preparing realistic encounters for the road.)
Resurrection: To Die, or Not to Die (An in-depth look at resurrection in Labyrinth Lord.)
Alternate Alignments (A new look at alignments, from an Elemental point of view.)
Elemental Beasts (Three pages of new Elemental creatures, and a brief look at the Quasi-Planes.)
'X' Marks the Spot (Preparing Treasure Maps on the fly.)
Mr. B's Last Word (As Always!)

The issue is available at: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=80732&src=FrontPage

Issue 16, on 'Lost Worlds' will be launched on May 24th.

Enjoy!

Criticals, Fumbles, and Near-Death Experiences

I like Critical Hits and Fumbles. The idea that rolling a '20' or a '1' has strong effects livens up games for me, and adds a lot of extra spice to a combat. What I don't like, however, is that they can too often prove fatal for low-level characters. 'I hit myself' for a first-level Fighter means that every time they attack, they have a 1 in 20 chance of committing suicide. Double-damage for a Goblin means that that poor Fighter once again buys the farm. I've seen it tear apart too many games, and cause too many TPKs, so this time, I decided to try something different.

On a '20', a PC has one of two choices. He can either inflict maximum damage with his weapon (not double, as we are simply talking about using the weapon to its maximum effect, rather than some super-blast), or receive a +4 to his next 'to-hit' roll. On a '1', the effect is simple – he cannot take any combat actions next round. He's dropped his weapon, he's ended up out of position, he fell over a log, something – he can take a action, so running away remains an option, but he cannot actually attack anyone.

Then we come to '0' HP. I usually say that if you hit -1, you are dead. End of game. Brutal, harsh, but I think fair. The -10 HP means that a low-level character will have more ability to survive while unconscious than while standing on his feet. Again, I've modified that for my current campaign. There is a 5 HP margin – you die at -6, and -1 to -5 represents unconsciousness. I have introduced a 'maiming' table, however. You get that badly wounded, and there is going to be a consequence. A D30 table, this one, with the middle ten options 'everything is OK'. So far, no PC has died, but a lot of them would be hard to recognise.

So how do you do this? I'm curious how other tables handle this, beyond the 'double damage or hit yourself' idea...

Enter the Elementalist

Sometimes, you come up with an idea for an article that just explodes out of all control. This has been the case for the last two days. I came up with what I thought was a simple idea for the latest in the 'Touch of Class' series of articles – the Elementalist. (So far, all of these have surprised me. The Illusionist by having about ten different versions coming out at the same time, the Puppeteer by being a far better NPC class than a PC class, and this one....)

The original concept for this class was a three-page article – one page detailing the class, and a few spells. It didn't quite work out that way, however. As I began to write the article, and delved into the ramifications of the class, it rapidly became apparent that I was biting off rather more than I expected. Simply putting the spell list together proved more of a trial than I had thought – very few of the spells I wanted were in Labyrinth Lord, and I decided a while ago that I would make OD&DITIES compliant with just Labyrinth Lord, with no other purchases required to use it. (Having said that, buy the Advanced Edition Companion. It is excellent. Nuff said.) This meant a lot more spells than I expected had to go into the article. Which has gone from three pages to six, with about thirty new spells included, some original, some modified from other SRD sources.

Then I went to the monsters. The 'big deal' of the Elementalist is the ability he has to summon Elemental creatures, but again it became rapidly obvious that this wasn't going to fly. All there were in the book were the four basic Elementals with three different power levels, all far too powerful to put into the hands of low-level characters. Which leads to a whole other article I will be writing tomorrow, bringing the Quasit into Labyrinth Lord. One spur of the moment idea has turned into two articles, constituting about a third of Issue 15 – and gave me an idea for another 'one-page' article along the lines of 'Unusual Enemies' into the bargain!

Hope everyone likes Elementalists....

Keeping up a Blog.

Man, keeping up a blog is hard. I started this blog with the best of intentions – planning to write something every day – but somehow for two weeks now something has always cropped up. Part of it is to do with my 'day job'; I work rather insane hours. (One-week on, one-week off night shifts. I don't have a body clock any more.) Part of it is a lack of time. When I'm working, I have about half an hour for myself a day, and that just isn't enough to do anything much with. When I'm off, I'm working on OD&DITIES, and that has had the higher priority. (Yes, issue 15 is going along nicely. More work next week, but still on for April 24th as scheduled.)

I'm going to address this, however. I'll be doing a lot of writing for the magazine next week, with three articles to prepare. Once I finish each (one article a day for three days...), I'll post some writers' notes, while I'm fresh. I'm going to try and write a post every day I'm not working, from Monday onwards. There'll be a couple more blogs in the near future as well, I think. I'm thinking about starting an online campaign (though not decided what or when yet, though I'm thinking possibly Classic Traveller – LL is going well on Saturdays, and I don't want to run two games with the same system at once.) Another will probably focus on my other love – space and space exploration. I've been working on a book on the early history of spaceflight for four years (one of the reasons I moved back to OD&DITIES is because I had spent three years frozen stiff with writers' block. Going back to OD&DITIES again cleared it in about a day!)

So, er, my solution to not posting enough is two new blogs. A bit counter-intuitive, I suppose.

You can help as well – is there anything about OD&DITIES that particularly interests you? Anything you want to see?

Filling the Sandbox

So the first session of my new, “Borderlands” campaign (OK, so it’s not a impressively inspired title, but it does accurately express the feel I’m going for) took place last Saturday, two weeks ahead of schedule – a fact that I was actually rather glad about, as I was essentially ready to go by the time it became apparent that it would be starting earlier than I had planned. A report of the first session will hopefully soon follow (OD&DITIES 14 rather delayed things a little in this area…)

The plan was always to run an old-fashioned sandbox-style campaign, using the LL / B/X rule system (in the event, we had a huge variety of different books at the table – two ’81 Basic rules, a Cyclopedia, a Labyrinth Lord hardcopy and another printout, and even the rulebook from the ’91 black box set! (I ended up running using an ’81 Basic book and the ’83 Screen, largely because I finally got hold of a copy of the ’81 Basic and Expert boxed sets a couple of years ago and I’ve been desperate to use them in a game.) The Companion Expansion and Unknown Gods were the only two sourcebooks I brought, though in the event, only one of the ‘Unknown Gods’ was used.

Initially, when I began to work on the campaign, I started to draw maps – area, village, dungeon, but it rapidly became apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be able to provide a big enough sandbox to satisfy my players, so I moved to option 2 – which harkened back to one of the most successful campaigns I’ve ever run, back in ’03, which was where my current gaming group – the Kamikaze Dungeoneers – was formed. In that, I took a few modules and adventures from magazines, worked out what terrain features and locations were in each one, worked out which could do ‘double duty’ with a bit of adaptation, and then simply worked them all into a terrain map.

Well, I’ve got a lot more modules now, a lot of which I have been wanting to use for some time; specifically I have quite a few Judges Guild modules that have been sitting on my shelf for a while. So, I dusted them off and started to dump them on to the map. The Keep on the Borderlands was going to be a centrepiece of the campaign; I placed it at the top of the map, with the Caves of Chaos close by (guarded by a smaller, secondary keep designed to be a small base of operations for the PCs) and a small dungeon placed to fill the ‘Caves of the Unknown’ area. Quasqueton from B1 was placed south of the Keep, just beyond the swamps of the Lizardmen. I also dropped Badabaskor on the left of the map – and filled the top part of the map with an extensive mountain range, with the idea being that Badabaskor and ‘Castellan’ Keep were originally built to protect passes to the lands to the north from humanoid incursions. (Blizzard Pass also found its way in there, as well…that place has quite a reputation…) Castle Caldwell also got placed in there as a possible adventuring location.

For the southern portion of the map, I turned more exclusively to Judges Guild for my inspiration. A big portion of the middle – and the starting location for the PCs – came from ‘The Illheidrin Book’, a module that technically was for AD&D, but which I have run under B/X with success in the past. To add a more urban setting should I wish, I dropped Modron on the south side of the map, sketching in a sea. It was then a question of just filling in the landmasses, which I decided should start with a sea at the south, running through agricultural land to foothills and then mountains in the north. I didn’t give too much thought to what lay beyond the map, just that the area was on the northern borders of an ‘Empire’ I was modelling on the Late Roman Empire in style, consisting of a large collection of loose counties, duchies, and other such states – I rather envisioned more of a ‘loose confederacy’ than a strong Empire, but deliberately left the details vague so I could change them if necessary.

This map remains flexible, for the moment. The party ended up with two Clerics, both worshipping different gods (out of an 84-strong pantheon cribbed from Unknown Gods), so now two new locations – temples for each of these gods – have gone on the map as places for the party to visit. There are a few other bits and pieces I’m thinking about dropping on from various sources.

I’ve ended up after this with a hugely-stocked sandbox, and wherever the players choose to go, the area is already fleshed out with locations, adventures, and dungeons – and I can easily drop in any new modules that I pick up without too much work. All of it expands the sandbox. (For the ultimate expansion – the Isle of Dread is about 800 miles south of Modron. I wonder if the players will end up going that far south!)

OD&DITIES Issue 14 is Out!

The second issue of the OD&DITIES relaunch, number 14, is now available through RPGNow, at http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=79916&src=FrontPage featuring 25 pages of material to support the Labyrinth Lord game. Compatible with all Basic and Expert material. This issue of OD&DITIES focuses on that well-loved backstabber, the Thief!

This issue's contents include:
The Many Tentacled Beast – The Thief's Guild as a Campaign Nemesis
Magical Miscellany – The Keys of Dolfa
The Trial of Skill – Creating adventures to test the unique abilities of the Thief.
Expanded Grimoire – Fleshing out the humble 'Magic Missile'
Playing the Godfather – A guide to starting your own Thieves' Guild.
Unusual Enemies – Playing with some of the less-used monsters...
A Touch of Class: The Puppeteer – Taking the Charm spells to new heights.
Mr. B's Last Word – He crept back in, once again...

Issue 15, focusing on the Magic-User, will be launched on April 24th!

Enjoy!

OD&DITIES Seeks Submissions!

On the threshold of the launch of Issue 14 of OD&DITIES (scheduled for Wednesday 24th), I can announce that as of Issue 15, we'll be looking for article submissions once again. There were some amazing submissions in the first incarnation of OD&DITIES, and I'm hoping and expecting that there will be some great ones this time round as well.

As for the nitty-gritty, I'm looking for articles between 500 and 2,500 words at the moment, (one to five pages of the magazine, to put that into context), and I will generally want them to match the theme of the magazine, which I will announce three issues 'in advance' henceforth.

Issue 15 will cover 'Magic-Users'.
Issue 16 will cover 'Lost Worlds'.
Issue 17 will cover 'Immortals'.

If you have anything else in mind, well, I'm still interested, as I don't want every article in the magazine to automatically match the theme, and will be looking for a nice mix of pieces. In terms of content, the floodgates are open here. Rules pieces, discussion and debate, adventures, even short stories could be of interest.

To submit, send a general outline of your planned article to me at methuslah1@yahoo.co.uk, and I'll give you the 'yay' or 'nay'. Payment for articles will be two cents a word, payable on publication; writers will also receive a contributors' copy of the PDF of the magazine on the day of general release.

I can't wait to see what we get!

Richard Tongue,
Editor, OD&DITIES