Session Report: Cosmic Wound 2

Players

Ald Sunhelm, thief and cooper
Dravein, traveling outlander
Glühbirne, mercenary strong-man
Maeric Fairwind, itinerant folk mage
Osric, the holy initiate of the Order of the Luminarch

Events

The adventurers continued through the forest to discover the small village of Gothi.
They witnessed dozens of villagers going about their day-to-day
In the center of town, a ceremony was being conducted, where a large ash pole, topped by a mirrored crest of two wolves was being pivoted and paused between the cardinal directions.
They entered into the village, and convinced the peasants to take them to the village elder, a yellow-eyed wiseman known as Gaedra.
Parleying with the priest, they learned that their liege’s family had made a pact with pagan wolf spirits, offering a sacrifice of live young, to be raised by the wolves.
Since Thane Oswyn was remiss in his side of the bargain, the village has taken village children by force, citing blasphemy to those that resist.
The characters decided to make their way out of the village before any trouble could begin.
Returning to Oswyn, the Thane decides to call for the strong folk of his domain, and conduct a ceremony under the watch of his wisewoman, Beoth.
Maeric and Ald take part in the ceremony, making boasts of harming the wolf spirit patrons of the village of Gothi.
The others follow the words of the Thane’s priest, citing it to be tempting fate and taking power from demonic forces. They have the priest bless their weapons in the morning.
Six men-at-arms join the party, although they suffer a hangover by drinking too deeply at the ceremony.
Venturing back into the woods, the party tracks towards the den of these primordial wolves, and stumble upon a Gothi villager posing as a woodsman.
After seeing through this villain’s ruse, the party jumps him before he is able to alert the village, bound him and toss him in a cart.
The troupe discovers a cave being guarded by four brawny looking villagers, and they can see faint light within the cave, and the scent of incense from Gaedra’s hut.
Attempting to draw these guards out, Dravein shoots at them, but when the struck guard immediately fells, the remaining guards retreat into the cave.
Glühbirne charges the guards, and the party, along with their henchmen enter into melee within the mouth of the cavern.
As their adversaries, and the hung-over men-at-arms being to fall, a disembodied voice emanates from deep within the cave, and the fallen warriors begin to arise as the hungry undead.
Combat continues to unfold, and once the revenant’s numbers are thinned, Gaedra appears, seeking a parley.
We end the session there.

After Thoughts

A fun session. We had a bit of back and forth, and I think I was able to introduce to the players more of the folklore-ish tone of the setting. As always, the players either saw through traps ands conflicts, or were able to figure out ways to leverage the odds, which is always a fun experience for a referee, in my opinion.

reCalled From Action: Primeval Edition

Recently Sahh and a few other folks put together a blog bandwagon topic called reCalled From Action where bloggers describe a fight scene from a source of media, and try to frame it as if it were an at-the-table play session.

There have been several posts for this challenge so far, including Sahh’s, Havoc’s, diregrizzlybear’s, and Mr. Mann’s. I’ll try to remember to update this with additional entries that I hear of, but I make no promises, so apologies to anyone I have missed.

I will be using the fight from Berserk that inspired the challenge, the fight between ~~Harvey Berkman~~ Guts and Lord Zondark. For rulestext, I’ll use Primeval 2d6 for the resolution mechanism. I will also be posting images and describing the scene from the comic, which has hefty violence and gore, so feel free to skip this post if that is an issue.

The Battle Begins

Towards an Interaction Model

I have been chatting with several people about my last post, MDA for Tabletop Adventure Games. In particular, Sam Sorensen posted his thoughts on the framework—suffice to say, he is not a fan and does not feel the model applies to tabletop games and, in many cases, not even video games.

I appreciate the discussion I’ve had on this subject – and I’m a big fan of Sam’s and find many kindred points in his post, especially in his New Simulationism pamphlet, which purports a play perspective very close to my own and many of us flag-waving in the FKR (although I am a fan of dropping pretty much all terminology that got associated with the Forge, of course “Simulationism” predates that place, so it is very much ingrained into the hobby and I need to get over myself about that).

Speaking of FKR, a big reason I’ve been gung-ho about that gaming culture and why I even posted about MDA was that I am specifically interested in discussing how interactions elicit different emotional responses among people. The interaction of coordinating play tests in video games that held MDA (at least lightly) reminded me of how I view referees and players iterating over the techniques they use at the table.

This is not meant to be dismissive, but in many of these conversations, I almost feel like we sometimes get stuck in the whole “self-reference” Russel Paradox of set theory. The details of this paradox aren’t super important to this discussion, but suffice it to say that it is easily circumvented through axiomizing the details. If we have a problem of “who shaves the barber!?” given the condition that “the barber shaves all men who don’t shave themselves,” – create a new theory where you add an exception to this, and see if anything breaks down.

Coincidentally, when working in research and development for video games, I often dove into this kind of discussions quite a lot. I would cite something for potential reference, usually an experimental game or toy, and the first response I would receive would be, ” But is it a game?” To which I’d shrug and say, ” Whether it is or not, by whatever definition you have, I still wanna look at it for potential influence.” Determining what is a game can be enlightening, fun, whatever – it’s just not something that currently interests me.

I honestly couldn’t care less about “defending” MDA from a strict “does everything in this paper line up with what we now know” standpoint. I think it was born out of a very specific context, and while it was doing a lot of trailblazing, I do not think every statement contained within was ironclad. I am more interested in looking at my personal experiences with the model and asking, “Can I extrapolate/adapt this to make running games more fun for me and my players?” Maybe yes, maybe no.

Defining an MDA-like

So, given what I said about definitional arguments, let me post how I see an MDA-like (or MDA– or MDA++ or pMDA or however you wanna phrase it – I care absolutely nothing if people see this as an extension/adaptation of a theory or something else) working for tabletop adventure games.

Note the emphasis on adventure games, if whether or not this is applicable to story games or solo games or lyrical games, or anything else is not my current concern. This is not to disparage these games, they’re just not in scope of what I am thinking about.

Also note that in game studies, there is generally no consensus on what things like a “game” or “rule” is, so I am not proposing these are universally definitional, rather just short hand for the following ideas when talking in this context.

So an Adventure Game is outlined by Retired Adventurer in this post.

The word Game in this model refers to an instance of play. Sometimes we’ll use “game” as shorthand to refer to the idea of, general assumed rules and procedures, and culture of a particular adventure game title (eg. the “game” of Dungeons & Dragons), but really all that matters is what is living at the table (and to a lesser degree, how it is discussed/remembered in retrospect).

To me, every player and referee in an adventure game is a Designer. I don’t think there’s any special privilege to anyone who has produced a rulestext. Every game being a social interaction obviously changes dependent on who is involved – each game is designed by the participants, even if this “design” is just how they make rulings out of pre-existing rules, or if they’re coming up with their own defined rules (or many more cases).

Mechanics are all the rules, procedures, ludemes, fictional facts, etc. as they exist – on paper, or in peoples’ heads, or anywhere else. I know Sam wanted to distinguish mechanics as mechanisms as “instrument of play,” but I think we all kind of know that is not how roleplayers refer to mechanics, and honestly fit with the definition as I learned it in my game design courses (as well as many books on the subject). Things like “Roll a d20 and add your to-hit bonus, compare to your opponent’s armour class, and if you meet or succeed you hit” is an example of this. Also “falling into lava kills you,” as well as “the referee describes the world – ask questions to clarify then declare intent.” Basically its the idea of how anything gets resolved in game.

Dynamics are the actual reified moments of play where humans interact with each other and the Mechanics. So “rolling to hit” as outlined above is not a Dynamic, but when Joanna says what she’s doing, the referee asks her to roll to hit, and then she does is a Dynamic.

The way we perceive these Dynamics produce emotional responses, which are fine to call Aesthetics. I copied the original eight kinds of fun in my previous post – I certainly don’t think they are exhaustive, and I think when applied to tabletop there’s quite a few interesting bits of overlap and places we split some “types” of fun, and call out particularly interesting, recurrent unions between multiple types.

Note that Mechanics and Dynamics are definitely infinite, and they are mutable, within the same Game, sometimes even moment to moment. In one instance you may decide to use a traditional D&D to-hit roll in combat. In the following instance you may decide that in the current world context, or even social context (eg. its getting late let’s wrap this up we can imagine how its going to go) and elide this roll or use an entirely different mechanic. Sometimes you use rules to “zoom in” and de-abstract procedures, other times you “zoom out” and do the reverse.

I don’t think this breaks the model by any regard – each of these instances are themselves dynamics, and they’ll produce various aesthetics among the players. How, and more importantly – why they do is worth looking at. Of course dynamics and aesthetics are fractal – one emotional response accumulates and attenuates a large emotional response of the session which does for the campaign (if playing in one) which then expands out to multiple campaigns with a play group, etc. I think these are all worth investigating among a group, as they continue to drive towards experiences they want to share together.

So the above may be small fry, and for anyone looking for deeper more philosophical theory, this will either be disappointing I have spent so many words on, or seem like nothing at all. Which is fine, I’m not trying to make any real philosophical statements or not.

Why I bring up MDA is because I want to start talking about specific interactions at the table and the responses they bring up. The “Dynamics” and the “Aesthetics” terms are suitable language to use as short-hand here.

Anyway, this was a messy, long post, but I thank anyone who read through it. Let me know what you think, especially if it includes how we can better talk about the actual, in-play interactions.

GaryCon 16 – Playing Blackmoor

I was at GaryCon a few weeks ago and had an absolute blast. I got to reconvene with friends, play a decent amount of games, and chat will all sorts of people. GaryCon has consistently been one of my favorite conventions to go to.

Probably the highlight of the convention was getting to participate in a “seminar” with Bob Meyer, an old Twin Cities gamer, and the man who had inherited Blackmoor from Dave Arneson, as well as play in a game with him and a co-GM of his.

I put seminar in quotes because it was really a discussion, several people sat at a table and Bob told us stories about how gaming got to where it is today. He encouraged people to ask questions and kept the whole ordeal very warm and casual. Ben Riggs of Slaying the Dragon was there recording the seminar, and I was certainly happy because I wasn’t the only one asking “deep lore” sort of questions of Bob.

I think the biggest concept Bob conveyed was that nothing in the early days of roleplaying was birthed entirely full-formed in any one place, nor can one draw a historical precedent to any singular activity, rather that everything tends to be the sum of many influences, failed attempts, random ideas, and mechanics taken from other games.

I asked him about the Troll game he participated in – the short version of this is that Dave Arneson wanted to run Blackmoor for Bob, and Dave told Bob that he would be a “hero.” Bob then ran into a troll under a bridge, charged the troll, and after a few failed attempts to dispatch the monster, the troll clubbed Bob’s character, killing him immediately. The mythology around this event tends to state two things – that this was run utilizing the Fantasy Supplement in Chainmail, and that Bob’s disapproval of the session (which Dave agreed with) led to the inclusion of hit points (from Don’t Give Up The Ship) into Blackmoor.

Bob did seem hesitant to crown this event as “where hit points came from” in Blackmoor, and in addition – Bob listed numerous implementations of hit and damage structures that were floating around the Twin Cities, that Dave had likely been planning on playing with. Nonetheless, it was very interesting to hear him recall these events.

Bob mentioned that a big part of his continuing to run these events, despite wanting to retire numerous times, is that he has seen more and more people adopt a “Blackmoorian” style of running games. He seemed pleased when I told him there was a whole sub-niche of nerds online who are pretty obsessed with this style, and he got a bit emotional that people would travel far and wide just to hear about his friends and their games.

In terms of the actual game, I cannot go too far into specifics, as Bob did not want any details recorded, as he felt the surprise and novelty was a part of the experience of playing in his versions of Blackmoor, so I will not say what happened in the adventure. For general setup – we had two tables, one run by Bob, and a second run by a co-GM (Bob specifically liked Game Master over Referee, as he felt Referee was “rules oriented”, and Dungeon Master because he said games were more than just dungeons). Each table contained a party, and we each had the same goals – we were essentially splitting up to cover more ground. The two parties could meet up throughout play, or even affect each other.

Bob starts by asking everyone why they, the players, are there. This led to short discussions of how everyone had heard of Blackmoor. For many it was obviously Secrets of Blackmoor, for a few of us it was First Fantasy Campaign or Adventures in Fantasy and just being into the old-school stuff. After this Bob asked us all about our characters and let us pick one unique ability – this could be magical, it could be a special item or expertise, anything really. My character could talk to spirits, and other examples at our table included a shapeshifter, as well as someone who could change the density of any object.

In terms of resolution, most of it was what you’d expect if you’ve followed any details on Bob Meyer – contested 2d6, the highest roll gets their intent. My whole Primeval 2d6 is written to basically explain how I run this style. Bob made lots of calls and had a great way of finding complications to almost any action. He had a very specific way of calling for the character’s action by pointing out when a player had put forth and intention but hadn’t clarified what they wanted to do. I found that interesting, and wondered if he had run into situations of players doing gotchas of “I said I wanted to touch the glowing skull, not that I did touch it.”

It was a very fun game, and one of those experiences that I will cherish for the rest of my life. The rest of the con was fantastic as well – I got to play in many great games. I had a very fun game of Wyvern’s Roost ran by directsun that had some of the top fantasy hijinks I’ve ever been in.

If you’re ever planning on heading to GaryCon, drop me a message and maybe we can meet up and get a game in!

Play (Fantasy) Worlds idea proposal

In a previous post, I mentioned that I felt the FKR had largely done a poor job of articulating its extremely accessible playstyle and communicating how adapting to a trust-oriented framework can improve the play at tables. In this accusation, I point many a finger directly at myself, as a large portion of my blog and presence in gaming spaces has been an attempt to promote these ideas.

I decided that I wanted to change my attempts, instead of attempting to drive the discourse on Discord, forums, and Reddit, I think we could band together as a community and make a sort of “how-to” run a fantastical world for your friends, something that could be given to someone with zero experience as a suitable starting point.

I’ve chosen to propose a sort of zine, or maybe a book, or who knows the format – as I have been writing some of the content and thinking of pieces I would enjoy having others contribute to or even propose, it certainly seems to be growing in scope, but I do think some kind of a lean toolkit would be best.

Here is kind of what I am thinking of, just to get ideas rolling – we would start with an example of play, hopefully, pulled from an actual session run by me or some other hypothetical contributor, perhaps even link to a recorded AP on some platform. I think the introductory “what is roleplaying”, especially from an old-school, FKR standpoint is always lacking. I know because I’ve written quite a few and failed to get the idea across, and many other writers have similar experiences.

Afterward, we would then kind of tackle “fantasy” as a genre or “milieu” – talk about different kinds, the different elements, and why it makes for one of the best (if not, the absolute top) styles of settings for roleplaying games, of course with lots of Appendix-N styled references – hopefully with a lot of diversity of authors, formats, and styles.

With introductions and setting-setting 😛 done, we’d move into the meat and potatoes of FKR – what it means to run a referee-oriented game, and discuss how and why a referee would choose to use a particular rule, or procedure, or make a ruling. We’d go over various methods for setting situations for the players to respond to vs. a more open-ended “I’m here to challenge whatever goals you have” style. We will compare and contrast various forms of character creation, from “write three interesting things on your sheet” to coming up with a very detailed and world-specific life path for communicating the world to players initially.

Following this, the bulk of the book will be tables, tools, and toys for people to use. Lists of magic powers, adventure seeds found in folk tales, d<WHATEVER> angry peasants, all the kind of system-neutral “content” one can pull at whim in a game to get a situation going or to find out how something develops. I am thinking of having people go wild with tables and such they would find useful for running any fantasy game, inspired by all the various OSR table supplements.

So I have a decent number of words put together towards the start of this, and what I am looking for is both feedback so far, and probably proposals for material anyone wishes to contribute. This would be a volunteer-only gig, and I know that is a heavy ask, but I do not intend to make any money off of this – I intend for such a thing to be completely free, and would we ever do a print run, all proceeds would go towards some cause all of the contributors feel comfortable with.

I am very open to ideas and proposals of all kinds, but I should clear the air on what I am not looking for. For one, no games – I don’t think any particular rules text can be FKR. I’ve mentioned many times before, but FKR is not a number of rules, it’s how the table plays with the rules they decide to use. I also do not want any theory whatsoever. I have gone to school for game design and while I understand the benefits some analytical lenses can have over gaming, I think roleplaying theory is for the most part extremely terrible, and I think the over-excitement of theory heads rushing to taxonomize the FKR like a bunch of vulturous wanna-be anthropologists has really been a detriment to the community.

I think this should also be obvious, but I am not looking for anything that “challenges” or “argues” against FKR and “first-principles” high-trust play. If you’re going to write that one must play “with training wheels” before approaching this style, I view you as antagonistic to this project’s goals. If you believe that formalized rules can overcome failures in the social health of the table, you’re the audience for this kind of book, not the authority on it.

I also don’t mean to gatekeep, but I would like contributors to be people who have experience running in this style. I want this to be a play-focused project with examples from people who have succeeded in playing this way. I hate hypothetical play almost as much as I hate theory 😛

Let me know your thoughts as I continue to write. Also – how would people like to organize? I was thinking of starting up a Discord server, but I honestly feel Discord is kind of a horrible platform for actual discourse and organizing. Maybe keeping the whole process distributed is preferable. I guess if people do wanna yell at me on Discord you can jump into my own little sleepy server here: https://discord.gg/xZpeCShTR8

Let me know what you think!

State pt. 2, Purity Tests

I have received many messages regarding my post from yesterday, quite a lot of corroborating of the state of the discourse, as well as many individuals wondering if and what can be done to salvage online discussion around games of this type. I should first clarify that while the driving factor for me to make these posts was a “final straw” so to speak in one particular community, I have been having issues with several “FKR” communities for a while now, some less recent than others. This is very much not a one-point issue and is instead a reflection, almost every year, of what the supposed FKR communities have become, situated around when the various Discord servers kind of popped off. If you speak with anyone who has known me for more than a month you’ll probably know that I have pretty much voiced my concerns since day one.

I have also seen concerns that my post is calling for some type of purity testing – that I want only TRV3 FKR, and that I am rejecting beginners and people with alternative playstyles alike, accepting only the most Rigid of… Not Rigid Kriegsspiel 😛

This couldn’t be further from the case, and if anything – I think the current state of discourse actually prevents beginners from discovering what I think is the most compelling and table-empowering playstyle, and I think it disallows us from actually growing FKR by any stretch as if we allow the playstyle to be “just vibes”, then there are no constraints, limitations, or unique features to follow, manipulate, and then break.

The FKR is one of the few communities I have seen where a beginner will ask for advice for getting into FKR, and while there are a few voices that want to lend aid because many of the communities are concerned with the vibe and getting along more than the playstyle, they also get the complete opposite recommendation – immediately a wet blanket will be thrown on stressing that “FKR isn’t for everyone” and that one must play with training wheels and instead pick up Misspent Youth, or My Life With Master, or study the methods of setting position and risk in Blades in the Dark.

Instead of being about playing worlds, we start suggesting rules. In an almost contradictory fashion people will say “It’s not about the rules”, and then the community will go back and say things like “PbtA can have a mature statement on violence… D&D can only express capitalistic colonialism.” And my beef with that last sentence has nothing to do with the particular games expressed or the descriptors used – you could swap them out with literally any other game or adjective and I would still say it’s just as bunk. It’s saying that the play outcomes are dominated by the rules text selected.

How does one rectify this with the idea that referees are to hold rules texts lightly, utilizing them as tools to portray a world? How can we claim that one game “requires” emotional connection, and another “punishes” with zero context of how the table is addressing any of this? How are we to ascribe moral qualities to the players of a particular game without being a part of the table they are at?

FKR is about relationships – to rules, to the conversation, to other players, and to play. Certainly, some tools are better than others at certain tasks, but the practice of actually playing is so unique to the individual table instance that I think any attempt to exalt or vilify any particular ruleset in a way where you ascribe unalienable moral, ethical, or societal qualities is not only missing the point to the highest degree – it is actively toxic to what FKR can become.

I do not bemoan anyone who does not like FKR – we can like different things. I also do not bemoan those who have different perspectives on what it is (within reason) – we definitely should be bringing our unique perspectives to the table. What I bemoan is the sadness I feel when I see people who have spent a sizeable amount of time in a place that many first feel excited and ecstatic to explore a playstyle so rarely discussed these days, and they are instead dampened by naysayers and carelords, such that many feel dissuaded from contributing.

Purity tests be damned, but can we at least talk about FKR from a positive, actual play experience before we try to establish theoretical hypotheticals where we argue that the rules text conveys or holds some authority? More “play worlds, not rules” like we’ve been saying for years now?

The State of FKR Discourse

If it hasn’t been obvious from some of my recent vague-posting, I have been pretty unhappy with the state of so-called “FKR” discourse. The term was used to describe an alternative to play where rules texts were given authority, and where the fiction was secondary to the mechanics. Where the idea that social issues, bad behavior, and aggressive game masters and players alike could be curtailed by somehow following the rules as some designer intended.

Instead, it refocused the game as being a representation of a fictional world, communicated and adjudicated by a referee to players taking control of characters in a world. The referee is free to use whatever means they see necessary to portray and resolve this world and the actions of the player, and no rules text, designer, or other set of people were seen as an “authority” over this.

This idea was first proposed by one of the original players in Gary, Dave, and Phil’s games, and it was later adopted by further bloggers who ended up creating Discord servers and the like based around the acronym. It’s worth noting that this term was originally proposed on an OD&D forum, and the later Discord creators were posting a lot about the types of games that surrounded Arneson’s group. So traditional high-trust play.

There was a split in this community, as there often is. I certainly landed on the side I supported, but so did quite a few new people who were unfamiliar with these origins or goals, and seemed more inclined to foster a new identity around a term that had a very small, but growing amount of hype and recognizability around it. The conversation became less an exploration of the growing concept of FKR, and more a forcible reframing of what FKR was – which basically amounted to whatever the specific individual was playing.

I have mentioned before that it’s fine for things to be different – not every game, practice, or culture should fit under every label. What makes specific playstyles special is their unique approach, not that they are an umbrella. But this seems to be contrary in some FKR circles as of late. Instead, they claim that the FKR should be “just vibes”, only excluding the games that fall under a particular individual’s pet peeve. Which unfortunately is usually just old D&D or “traditional” RPGs. So we have gone in a few short years from an OD&D forum creating the term to people trying to gatekeep those that use the 3LBBs to only being able to “support” certain kinds of play.

Note here the emphasis on systems – folks are claiming that if one plays OD&D, or “trad” the particular rules text they are using dictates the play experience. If you understand anything about FKR at all, you will understand how this argument reveals the particular Edwardsian chauvinist has yet to understand the culture of play. Because instead of trying to understand it, they just attempted to hijack it.

A quote from one of the recent discords is as follows:

If there is no mechanical reason to be invested in the emotional story at large; there won’t be a real reason to be emotional attached to things in the game either.
– supposed “FKR” discord user

Of course, they’ll then try to do the “I am very smart” argument of citing the Lumpley-Care principle that by “mechanic” they really mean “anything by which you resolve the situation”, but this quote comes from a diatribe against traditional play in favor of storygames, so it’s pretty clear “mechanics” is precisely what the average person would think, not the Forgehead definition.

Now, I don’t think “FKR” as a term is “dead”, or any other such pretentious nonsense, but I think we should have more care in being stewards of this community. It is sad how this term has been circling around the RPG scene for about three years now, and supposed participants of the community still feel a need to play games “as they were intended.”

Despite all of this belly-aching on my part, I want some ideas on how we could be better stewards of this community: positively push forward the actual term, promoting healthy rpg conversation and high-trust tables.

I am thinking of trying to put together a zine or something similar, something I’m initially ~~ripping off~~ calling “Play Worlds.” The idea would be something like GURPS’s genre books, but obviously without the GURPS, and a little less dry. So we’d put together something like “Play Fantasy Worlds” that would be articles, advice, and tools that a table of any experience level could pick up, empower a referee to portray a world (of their own, their tables’, or another’s construction), and give players the best working advice for playing as characters in such a world with high degrees of player agency and the concept of tactical infinity (anything may be attempted, but not everything is as likely to succeed).

Let me know what you think, especially of the Play Worlds idea. Thank you!

Doomed Reach Session 4

Characters

Amon Amarth, the Dwarf Cleric of Holy Law
Kalos, the recently masterless Magic-User
Maur Stern, Cleric of Holy Law
Cirrel, Elven Herald
Florby, Elven Alchemist
Brother Murray, Cleric of the Light Above
Ki-Mun, the Dwarven dandy
Torin, the sneaky axe-wielder

Downtime

Our characters begin by recounting prior adventurers and shoring up an additional hireling to account for previous losses.

Florby convinces his hireling, who owned a Saint’s head, to put the head in a pot of water for a week. They then paid a street urchin to drink some of the water and found it to have a mild numbing effect.

Brother Murray continued teaching his pigeon and goat more adventuring tricks.

Cirrel was granted an audience with Lady Mecit, a new-to-the-Reach noble looking to reclaim her uncle’s manor after he went mad. He retrieved more information on the manor and promised expedition funding should the party agree to it.

Adventure

Our group returned to the very chaotic caves, witnessing a floating geode on the way that radiated a freezing field, wilting the plants it came across.

As they climbed the peak above the caves, they witnessed that the cultists had rigged up some noise instruments attached to decapitated zombie heads in their wooden watchtower overlooking the gully, seemingly to drone noise when noticing nearby living. Torin snuck up to the tower and quickly dispatched the grotesque sentries.

Succeeded in preventing alarm, they went to the caves and saw a new trap rigged, a mechanism to shut a portcullis behind invaders, and opening one in the hallway to unleash zombies. Having been cautious, the party downed the zombies with ranged implements, but not before the foul undead could cause much noise.

Traversing to the south, they entered the circular chamber that held a vat of writhing, living gore. Florby begged that they determine if this monstrous flesh creature was sentient and evil. Amon Amarth interrogated the mass but determined its gasping and wailing to be that of a chaotic being.

Seeing bloody tracks on the ground leading out of the room and checking its direction revealed two giant spider beings wearing cloaks, medallions, and weapons. The adventurers engaged them in combat, casting light into one’s many eyes, blinding it, and dumping holy water and fire onto the flesh creature, which rose to strike the party.

After a short battle and only a few wounds, they chased the blind spider to a dead end. The cursed being told them it had recently been recruited by the cult with its brother and that only six other cultists remained, hurriedly trying to bolster their numbers. It also revealed to them a secret door to the outside, but this was not enough to save it, as the party imparted fatal justice to the creature.

They wandered the complex some more – finding the ruby skull room from the previous week reset, they also found a room full of bones and shattered skulls, and Cleric Stern was able to locate a small emerald within. They also retrieved some silver and a pendant from the pit of burned gore.

Progressing north, they found an altar room with black marble pillars depicting humans in agony and bronzed ritual implements, as well as a fine tapestry depicting the Sanguine Skull’s dominance. Continuing to delve, they ambushed four cultists in the middle of a ritual to empower a glowing red skull and smote these acolytes and the skull.

They finally stumbled upon a massive ritual room, with the undead head priest and his ghoulish assistants getting ready to call forth something from the dark. Amon Amarth stepped up and repelled the ghouls with his faith just before they could ring some hideous bell, while the rest of the party engaged the high priest and came out victorious, although slightly shaken by a fear spell.

The ghouls ran from the priest into a room full of skeletal statues similar to those in the ruby skull throne room. Deciding not to enter, they doused the room in oil and ignited the ghouls.

The party then went about stripping this floor of the dungeon bare of goods – tearing tapestries from the walls, plunging priests’ quarters for magical items, and returning to town with many artifacts to trade for silver, as well as the reward and praise from the Bishop.

Doomed Reach Session 3

Two-thirds of the party meet a grisly end.

Characters

Florby the Elven Alchemist
Wulfwig the Ponderous, Cleric of Light Above
Yarlexia the Elven Witch

Downtime

Throughout a week and a day, Florby decides to get completely blackout drunk, never having done so. They ask for Wulfwig to chaperone them, but the good cleric refuses. Yarlexia joins, and they meet a treasure seeker who found an ancient megalith about 40-50 miles to the southeast, ruled over by actual Harpies.

Wulfwig felt that the fortress did not have an adequate place for the followers of Light Above to worship, so he rented out a small plot of land near the market, and begin making plans to install a shrine.

Yarlexia continued to tell fortunes, and was graciously rewarded with a minor crystal ball by Lady Lecit, a residing noblewoman down on her luck.

Hirelings

Our group decided to interview quite a large number of hirelings, taking into service Hildo (lol name generators) the Aescetic, Carmox the cat-toting peasant, Fulco the Hobbit who worships a divine badger and seeks were-badger-dom, and Stalforth the archer who had been a slave to some inhuman monsters in the reach.

Yarlexia decided to sacrifice Hildo, who was noted as “having nothing” to summon yet another demon. She called out to a Prince of the Abyss, who was so offended by this offering he cursed her with a blunted intellect.

She resigned to resummoning Betsy, who gladly consumed the hireling.

Adventure

The adventurers made their way back to the caves, on the way encountered a small community of hobbits immigrating to the reach. Yarlexia paid them a sizeable portion of silver and pointed them towards the villages surrounding Fortress Solace, so they “blessed” the party by playing them a moving tune, and allowed each member to take a bite of their heirloom scone, baked ages ago and passed down through the generations.

They made their way back to the caves, where the fallen corpses had been stripped of flesh, but their bones remained. They made their way into the cult’s cave but found it strangely unguarded. To the south, where once lay a pit of zombies instead had a bubbling pit of gore, seemingly the flesh from the deceased turned into some unholy, roiling slurry. The group decided to not prod this, and made their way south to a large, vaulted room carved of dark stone. At the far end of the room sat a black throne whose seat held a large ruby, carved in the shape of a grinning skull – the symbol of the Sanguine Skull. All along the west and east walls stood twelve skeleton statues, painted red.

The party decided this was a trap, and thought to solve it after investigating the rest of the complex. Yarlexia instead convinced the demon Betsy to sprint in with her, grab the ruby and dash. As they made their way across the floor, a pit trap opened – Betsy falling to her apparent demise, while Yarlexia held onto the edge. The party intended to throw a rope to their Elven witch, but were shocked and surprised when the skeleton statues animated – they made their way over to Yarlexia and slew her, dumping her corpse in the pit. They also used their stone swords to knock Wulfwig to the floor, and then decapitated him. They also stabbed Solforth, who winced in pain and remained shocked as the party made a hasty retread back to the fortress.

Florby had grabbed Wulfwig’s head on the way out, and intended to place it in the cleric’s shrine. When the Elf confronted the Bishop Cadriel who had sent them on this mission, he was not pleased with the Bishop’s remote and uncaring response, cursing the priest and storming from the church.

Low Trust “Traditional”

I don’t know why I have been seeing a recent uptick in discussion on the “blorb” principles method of refereeing, but it seems like it has made its way back around Discord and the various microblog scenes as of late. This is not a style I would normally comment on – I see it very outside of what I like to play, especially when the author gave a very bad-faith hot-take on FKR.

But people have been making assertions about it that seem puzzling to me – they’re recommending it as an OSR prep style, for one, where I cannot fathom how it gets associated with the very emergent, high-trust style refereeing we strive for in various OSR communities.

blorb is extremely low trust – it’s a style that proposes a rigid hierarchy for the referee to follow, going so far as to hypothetically allow players to audit prep or a module to make sure that the referee didn’t supersede prep with emergent tools or fiat. It’s effectively the same sort of justification you see in communities that will allow for toxic play to flourish under the banner of “designer intent”, only the designer, in this case, is your prep.

The whole point of the referee in traditional roleplaying and adventure games is to utilize a source of higher fidelity rulings to step in when the mechanics or situation may produce fictionally inauthentic results. Or when they could use their experience, creativity, subject knowledge, and tools to arrive at a ruling quicker than mechanization could, often with a higher degree of specificity in that they as a human could take into context more elements than any rules text could.

Take for instance this example:

You have prepped a dungeon where a maniacal gnome has created a death trap dungeon. You placed a secret door to a treasure room off of some room – you have some reason why you selected this particular room and secret door setup.

Now let’s say in play that you realize your prior location is not suitable – maybe its in a place that would be generally inaccessible or dangerous for the gnome or its minions to reach. Maybe it does not line up with other emergent properties set forth by tools. Perhaps it doesn’t make structural sense once you examine the dungeon in play.

Now, you see a room that makes perfect sense for this. No sweat – the players have yet to find any hint of this secret door. They’re still at the entrance or fiddling with other elements – you can take a break and just shift the whole thing over to a place that will be more fictionally consistent with the dungeon, as well as the established elements of the gnome – such as it being an architectural genius.

By using your in-flight creativity and expertise around the fictional world you have course corrected a fictionally-inconsistent element into one that fits the setting and established lore. If you used blorb’s rigid adherence to prep you would be introducing fictional inconsistencies.

Having had this discussion with a few of the principles’ adherents, the argument I have received around this is pretty demeaning. It leverages the above as a critical mistake that the referee must work to improve (later… in other forms of prep, but never during the game). It plays into some impossible notion that one will never prep inconsistencies, or run a module that has mistakes in it.

All of this is hogwash, of course. What is better – to assume “perfection” (which I think is a demeaning way to phrase it and one that sorely misassumes the role of the referee), admonish “mistakes”, and force people to play a game that makes less sense in lip service to some arbitrary manifesto. Or is it better to allow for flexibility, trusting a referee to use whatever tools they have at their disposal, and to trust the players to converse, negotiate, and question elements to clarify the understanding of the world – to recognize that not everything is going to be perfect in prep or play, and to allow for the referee to follow their intended role and run the best game possible?