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Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy: the Bard as a Spy, Cryptography and the Fantasy Espionage Team

October 4, 2014 / / 7 Comments

The party stands before the Duke and he gives them a charge: march up the mountain to a nearby kingdom and slay the Arch-Lich who lurks there.  The Duke provides the party with maps to the mountain, a summary overview of what they might find (high level henchmen, nasty guards, a dragon chained in the basement) and offers useful magical equipment for the adventure. And God Speed, the Duke tells the party: the Kingdom and its people depend on you.  Defeat the Arch-Lich and forever be written into the annals of history!

Off they go into the mists of tale.  But this is not a story about the party heading off to grand heroics.

This is the story about the intrepid spies who stole the maps.

Even guards in evil kingdoms need to eat.  It’s a funny thing about the bard driving the food cart.  She spent her life learning to play all the roles for the stage and the role of her life is selling a bag of apples and a barrel of beer to an evil guard quartermaster in charge of feeding the rest of the evil underlings and cultists who surround the Arch Lich.  She must build trust.  She’s all about the confidence game – a natural-born grifter.

This is the core of a bard.  Yes, the bard can sing songs to buff up a team and work support, but what the Knowledge Bard, a graduate of the Bardic College is good at are skills: the languages, the persuasion, the investigation, the perception, the stealth and the performance.  She can carry out a role.  She can track down a mystery.  This knowledge-based bard is a master of languages.  She has no communication barrier, not even with the evil races.  She knows funny stories about everyone.  She can sing a couple of songs.  She is the master of selling roles to her audience of one and persuading them to trust her.  She can run a con like no one’s business.

Outside in the courtyard of the Arch Lich’s compound, the bard and the evil quartermaster get along like lifelong friends.  Next thing she knows, the quartermaster is inviting her in for tea.  Then she bribes guards on the inside with treats.  Evil guards are treat-deprived because they serve an evil Arch Lich and evil Arch Liches don’t go in for tiny sweet cakes.  It’s not a sweet-positive atmosphere.  Who is going to turn down a muffin?  Are you that evil?  Gratis, you know, between us.  And don’t mind my two friends over there – they help to unload the cart.

Then, she has her team in.  The bard schmoozes and builds up her network.  She gets a few people to talk, and they introduce her to bigger people who will know more information.  This is a long con.  Be the role, sell the roll, and don’t get caught.  After a while she’s one of them, part of the trusted inside. She’s always been there.  She’s the one who brings the muffins. Getting caught means jeopardizing the job and blowing cover and possibly getting killed.  Now she needs her team to steal information about the fortress and the Arch Lich’s plans.

This is a high risk, high reward sort of job.

The spy bard works her wits, her skills and her spells. While the bard spell list looks nearly unusable for standard dungeon-crawl murder-hobing, it’s fantastic for gathering human (or in-human) intelligence. She doesn’t have the big boom fireball or lightning bolts but her bardic spell list allows her to survive in the hostile environment beyond enemy lines where compromise is a constant risk. 

The best of the best on the bard spell list:

  • Message – The ultimate spy cantrip, Message’s singular ability is its ability to travel through a ceiling to the next floor or around corners.  It’s bounded by 120 feet (12 floors assuming 8 foot ceilings) or 3 feet of wood (about 6 floors, total, assuming joists).  Working with a team, Message can get alerts – I’ve been nabbed! – through a building, a palace or a decent sized compound instantly.
  • Illusory Script– Essentially short term “cryptography by magic,” Illusory Script will encode one message that only decodes for the target. Highly useful for making copies of documents before they’re properly encrypted.  This spell assumes the message will not pass through the hands of any creatures with True Seeing like, say, an Arch Lich, so use judiciously.
  • Unseen Servant – An easy way to perform a lengthy, repetitive task, like encrypting a message by hand; see below.
  • Magic Mouth –  For passing along cryptographic keys, locations of dead drops, names of contacts and warnings, Magic Mouth is the perfect spell for communicating information between team members securely in a close and dangerous locale.
  • Non-Detection – Non-Detection is the diviner-busting spell.  For 10 minutes, the target of non-detection can get through any magical scrying or divination defenses.  The perfect spell for that high risk break-in, highly sensitive conversation or that Mission Impossible theft.  Essential for pulling off a job.
  • Zone of Truth – Need to get absolutely accurate information out of a contact?  The downside of Zone of Truth is the target knows they’re in a Zone of Truth.  Using the spell will burn a contact, but if the information is critical to the safety of the Kingdom and all those innocent people…
  • Sending – More powerful than Message but less easily cast (as it is 3rd level), Sending gets 25 words anywhere, to anyone.  25 words is enough to transmit a key to a much longer bit of ciphertext to a receiver or reveal emergency information.  25 words is a tweet! It’s the SMS of spells.
  • Clairvoyance – Clairvoyance is an alarm system.  For 10 minutes, the bard gets a sensor on a door that detects intrusion.  That’s how long she has to meet with her network contact to get information, or commit a quick murder, or perform a little larceny.  10 minutes to get in and get out with a reliable watch. 

Spells aren’t enough to infiltrate and share information about a high risk target.  A good run against a target requires spells and skills – mostly involving data.  Encrypting information by hand has a few strong advantages over the spell Illusory Script or a Sending: it is longer than 25 words, it lasts longer than 10 days, it cannot be detected by a Detect Magic, cannot disappear with Dispel and cannot be instantly broken by a creature with True Sight – which, well, Arch Lich.  Or a high level Diviner in the Lich’s employ. 

The bard is a cryptographer and an a cryptanalyst.  The Linguist feat enables the bard to master most languages and cryptography is manipulating language to make it indecipherable with a secret key – or crack the enemy’s codes. 

This is the essential tension between the game of intrigue and the spy bard. The spy bard’s network needs information to effectively deploy military resources and those being spied on must intercept and break codes to further their interests. It’s information and intelligence providing internal security and external offense against the enemy.  Bards have the skills, the motives, and the creativity to keep one step ahead of the enemy’s current technology. 

The stronger the key, the stronger the algorithm, the more unbreakable the code.  The bard needs unbreakable codes – her life and the lives of others hang in the balance. As the spy bard lacks a computer (it’s fantasy), she has two classes of ciphers she can roll by hand at her disposal: alphabetic ciphers and one-time pads.

Alphabetic ciphers include the classes of substitution ciphers.  The spy bard knows enemy bards on the other side who intercept her messages can trivially crack simple monoalphabetic ciphers with frequency analysis.  She has to assume her messages can – and will – be intercepted by fate or by violence. If the enemy catches and deciphers her messages, the intelligence is lost and she’s probably one dead, or undead, spy bard.  They can’t be deciphered. 

She employs a whole bag of techniques that come with her Linguist feat to slow and befuddle her enemies and increase the difficulty of her ciphers: she can insert random characters, she can encode spaces and ‘nulls,’ she can encode syllables instead of single letters, she can use codes inside her encoded text, and she can layer the cracking process with nasty little traps.  She can get very clever and use variations on the monoalphabetic cipher by using multiple alphabets to encode the message.  If she has time or tools, she can even use the Vigenere Cipher, a nasty polyalphabetic cipher extremely difficult to break by hand without time and a good way to guess the key.  Breakable, yes, but perhaps not before the spy bard and her team can get away.

The other option, and a favorite of spy bards, is one-time pads.  One-time pads are virtually uncrackable without the key because they are completely random – the ciphertext gives no footholds in the sheer, icy cliffs of cryptography for enemy bards to crack with frequency analysis.  It works like so:

  1. The bard takes a highly sensitive message and one of her favorite plays or songs. 
  2. She works through the work of art and gives every word a number. 
  3. She replaces the letters of her message with numbers, each number corresponding to the first letter of a word in the work. 
  4. She delivers a big list of numbers on a page.
  5. Using Sending or Magic Mouth, she drops a message about the work of art to her teammate or a bag man – in effect exchanging the key in 25 words or less at a time delay.

No Diviner, no enemy secret agent, and no magic spell will crack that code if it’s intercepted.  However, this technique has two major weaknesses: 

  1. The bard somehow give the key to the intended target of the ciphertext.  If she cannot cast spells, or is not high enough level to use messaging spells, she will need to rely on a back channel.
  2. This work can never be used in another one-time pad so the bard needs a nearly inexhaustible supply of plays and songs.  Luckily, she is still a bard.

As a quick bard hack — Cryptography is a labor-intensive and slow process by hand unless one has unseen servant.  Much of the task of enciphering and deciphering is rote – look up the chart, look up the key, look up the ciphertext, write the ciphertext down. Repeat.  Unseen Servant is a short duration programmable spell which performs a task a human servant can do – like writing down letters or looking up charts.  As difficult as it is, the bard can automate much of the labor for efficient communication and gain critical minutes using magic. 

The bard cannot pull off the entire savage burn on the evil Arch Lich without an infiltration team.  She’s a fantastic cryptographer, she speaks all the languages of evil, she can make friends with the Arch Lich’s closest henchmen and get them to spill their plans.  But she cannot get into the Arch Lich’s inner sanctum to steal the Lich’s phylactery alone.  She cannot get herself out if she gets into a fight.  She’s a Grifter.  She needs an Infiltrator.  She needs a Hitter.  She needs her crew. 

The Infiltrator is a Trickster Rogue.  Fast and intelligent, the trickster rogue is a master of the three finger discount.  The bard is the face of the operation; the trickster rogue is the action.  Her job is to break into bedrooms and steal plans, hide in ducts to overhear conversations, sneak into the dungeons to release high value prisoners, execute a couple of targets with backstab (and True Strike), get in, get out, and get away with the maps in her underwear.  She employs a subset of the Bard’s spy spell list –  she has Message to keep in contact with her party members – “Guard patrol on level 5,”- Disguise Self to meld in with the guards or the servants, a little Charm Person (“These are not the orks you are looking for,”) and, when detected, Sleep.  The Infiltrator uses Illusory Script as the microfilm camera of spells to copy plans and leave the originals behind. 

The Hitter is an Eldritch Knight.  A retrieval expert, her job is to protect the Bard and the Rogue when they get themselves into trouble.  She’s not a hired killer, but she will kill to get her teammates out of a rough situation. Having enough social skills to pass as almost anything, the Eldritch Knight can double up as a Grifter to back up the Spy Bard.  Her Mage Armor and Eldritch Sword means never having to carry weapons into a possible combat zone – she has them when she needs them.  One the job goes bad, the Infiltrator is on the run and the Spy Bard is talking her way out of being hung from the nearest rafter, the Hitter can reach out for her sword and start going to town. Hope the Bard has encrypted all the documents sufficiently when they get spotted while running away…

The three methodically plan out their the savage burn on the Arch Lich because that guy has to go down. He’s bad news.  The bard provides a cover for the team (“I’m a bard and these are my roadies!”), builds up her network of contacts, works a the human side of the intelligence chain, defeats the diviners the Arch Lich may have on his staff, and encrypts the data to smuggle out.  The thief lifts the plans about the Arch Lich’s army, his dragon in the basement, his phylactery, and makes off with the Arch Lich’s inexplicable pair of Boots of Striding and Springing.  The thief also performs a little covert ork and hobgoblin murder.  The Eldritch Knight smacks people in the face when it all goes bad because it always all goes bad.   Getting out is difficult; sometimes she stabs some former ‘friends.’ 

They are a highly trained team.  They work on hire.  They answer to no master – that anyone publicly knows about.  They coordinate on a job through well-placed Message, Sending, Magic Mouth, dead drops, and signals.  The job is to get in and get out.  Preferably without getting caught or setting the Arch Lich’s castle on fire. 

When a Kingdom needs help to deliver them from evil, these are who they call first.

In this particular example, we can assume the run went smoothly. The bard talked the team in under the nose of the Arch Lich and made some friends. The team set up dead drops in secure locations inside the Arch Lich’s compound. The thief bloodily murdered a few orks with death from above.  The team discovered the Arch Lich’s horrible plan. They snuck out by cart — “You’re out of beer!” – in the night.  The Eldritch Knight cleared out patrols on the way home. They smuggled their encrypted information to the Duke, who handed it to his cipher secretary for decryption.

Then the Duke called in the main hitters, the fireball wielders, the combat team and handed them the decrypted intelligence.  Here you go, a ready-made adventure for heroes to go roll an Arch Lich for the good of us all…  

Pre-Build Team:

The focus was mostly on the bard but the bard needs a posse.  To express the complex idea of how to build an infiltration team and how the spy bard works in practice, we put together some example characters. This pre-built 5th level infiltration team is a group of highly trained women operatives and mostly ready for play.  I didn’t write these – all credit for these character sheets goes to my research assistant (and husband!) by Eric Thornber.  

These PDFs are free for download.

Writer’s Note: This started as a discussion on twitter about D&D/Shadowrun cross-over.  This is less socio-economics and more world-building but gets at a long standing issue: the Bard – what good is she good for?  It turns out in D&D5e, she’s the lynchpin in a slightly different class of stories than the standard smash-and-grab murder hoboing.  Then I really enjoyed the idea.  Unfortunately, I ran out of words, so I may continue into a major Crypto Bard vs Diviner Underground War write-up next week.  This is less intrigue than I would have liked.

The team at the latter half of the article is based on Leverage’s Hitter/Grifter/Hacker/Thief combo with the Bard filling the role of the Grifter and the Hacker.  The Bard and Rogue are essential.  The Hitter can be swapped out for a Warlock and a Sorcerer, but the Eldritch Knight was the most fun.

While writing this I came across the Chevalier d’Eon, the best example history could give me of a transgender spy bard because awesomeness.

Fiat Magic Reagents, the God of the Market, and Modrons

September 27, 2014 / / 10 Comments

A bard dashes through the back rooms of a palace with secret plans in his hands.  The guards are after him.  The bards desires escape and the best way to slow the guards down is to throw Arcane Lock on this door and then go out the window.  It requires 25gp of gold dust.  With sweaty palms and heart thumping in his chest, and mere moments to go, the bard is not going to whip out Mordenkainen’s Guide to Commodity Prices Across the Realms for the current week (picked up wherever good books are sold!), flip to the G section for gold dust and look up the current market trade price of this baggy of dust in his hand to ensure the commodity market for gold has not significantly shifted since he entered this palace and got it on with the Duke’s daughter.  “Wait guys,” the bard could say to the guards, “Before we can do this, I need to check my actuary tables.”

But prices do change based on a whole host of conditions – sometimes very fast.  So we ask: without any market information, how does the spell know the gold dust was worth 25gp? 

I offer three possibilities:

Quick Sidebar: Tracking reagents by price instead of weight is a flaw in the game system.  For example, continuous flame requires “25gp of ruby dust, consumed on casting.”  How much ruby dust does 25gp?  1oz?  8oz?  1000lbs?  If the local economy prices 25gp at 1000lbs of ruby dust, no one is casting continuous flame.  “Just back up the dump truck here, George,” the wizard says. “I need to light this here torch. CONTINUOUSLY.”  After doing some quick calculations and looking up turn of the 20th century actuarial tables in Google Books and did a hand wave to allow $10 ~= 1gp, it takes 125lbs of patchouli to cast Legend Lore. 

We roll with this idea and its implications for fun.

#1 Least Interesting: Delusional Belief and Fiat Reagents

The spell-caster, who purchased a small diamond for a magic focus for chromatic orb for 50gp from a trusted jeweler, believes the diamond he uses for his spell is worth at least 50gp.  The wizard is confident in the price he paid for the diamond.  He casts chromatic orb.  His target takes 3D8 damage.

Maybe the diamond is actually worth 50gp.  Maybe it’s not.  Maybe the diamond is really a chip of elaborate glass sold by the Thieves’ guild and the wizard only needs to believe the focus is worth 50gp.  The unshakable belief in the original financial transaction powers reagent focus for the spell.  The wizard better keep his receipts.

Spell reagent effectiveness based on belief drives a perverse incentive for the Wizard Schools, especially the School of Evocation, to ensure all sellers of small diamonds sold for chromatic orb price them at a floor of 50gp regardless if a free market would also price the diamond at 50gp.  The Jewelers Guild must act as an “authority” on gem commodities, and through pressure and persuasion, the Jewelers price accordingly.

Wizards are not experts in rare gems.  They’re experts in spells.  They buy their focii from a “trusted seller” from the Jeweler’s Guild.  The trusted seller assures the wizard of the reagent’s price, despite the price being arbitrary, and performs the financial transaction.  Later, magic works. Yay!

Fixing the price of the small diamond suitable for chromatic orb at a floor of 50gp goes into a weird economic rathole of fiat reagents. A large, financially solvent entity, the School of Evocation, through “persuasion” implicitly backs any small diamond of suitable chromatic orb focus size at 50gp.  It’s safe.  It’s tradable.  Anyone can carry 50gp reagent-grade diamonds and exchange them for goods and services worth 50gp.  If Joe the Baker does not want to carry 50gp from making a large bread sale because it is heavy and obvious and a target for thieves, he can, instead, buy a chromatic orb reagent.  Then Joe can pass it on to George the Weaponsmith for a 50gp-worth sword. And George can pass the diamond on again – giving the diamond a little velocity – to the taxman for his 50gp bill.  No one needs to carry 50gp any more – not adventures, not anyone.  Instead they can trade in “orbos” – chromatic orb spells – and price everything in the very spells which needed fixed pricing. Now the school of evocation isn’t merely a fixer – they’re a central bank.

Markets are nothing but a big confidence game.

This ends where Schools of Magic turn into National Banks issuing reagents as currency, builds the International Wizarding Fund and the World Wizarding Bank and give up chromatic orbing bugbears entirely because it’s more lucrative to run a global economy.

But this is all boring so we will look at possibility #2.

#2 More Interesting: Gods

This is simple for faith-based casters:  A cleric holds up his diamond and goes hey, God, will you take this in exchange for resurrecting my buddy? And the God says, wellllllll you put in 5000gp of effort and time and it’s a super nice diamond so sure. Here you go. Resurrect away.  Done.

But what about arcane spells?  They don’t go whizzing off to some designated God for a price check on Aisle 9.  The wizard casting chromatic orb might be a stone cold atheist.

Or do they?

Hidden in the Gray Waste there is a God who checks out arcane reagent pricing during spellcasting.  And this God’s name is Mike.

From what little is written about Mike from the Planewalkers who penetrated his Palace, his avatar manifests as a paunchy, 50-ish balding man with a striped knitted sweater, oversized glasses and a paunch.  This dour God-powered economist sits on his comfy chair surrounded by hoards of slobbering Yugoloths who wear green visors and counts piles of money and argue about externalities and incentives.  They make anyone who broaches the inner sanctum do math… for eternity.

Mike is not a God of Trade.  Mike is the God of the Market. He has a condo in Bytopia but mostly he dwells in Hades.

Long ago, when the worlds were young and enterprising experimental wizards discovered the spells and bound casting to focii and burnable reagents, Mike snuck in.  With the help from his clerics, Mike managed to get tiny prayers built into the ritual words for vocalized casting.  Wizards buy these reagents, right?  Reagent pricing ping off Mike and he responds with a confirmation.  That way Mike could ensure reagent pricing was fair and equitable.  Just all part of his sphere of influence.

The worlds didn’t turn out the way Mike envisioned.  He became small.  The Realms, locked up as they are with guilds and Wizard schools and monopolies and lords and feudalism, culturally resist his sphere.  Unleashed free markets would overturn order. Bring the mighty low and raise the low up.  Destroy the status quo.  Start wars.  Bring the revolution and lay waste to entire kingdoms. Invent the joint-stock corporation. Pollution. Mass consumption. Corruption. A new order.  Powerful human and God incentives keeps Mike where he is: small, glowering, and surrounded by actuarial Yugoloths.

Mike schemes.

Like any God, Mike has his cults.  Few and worshipped only in the darkest places of accountancy back rooms.  Mike directs his clerics to pry their way into the minds of the enterprising and seeds the plans to break down resistance to loaning money at interest.  His paladins, armed with an oath of vengeance, track monopolist guildhalls – good, evil, indifferent – and burn them to the ground in the name of freedom.  His cults back the secret underground black markets, the cottager networks, the rogue print shops, and anyone who dares to trade outside of Guild control. 

But good to his word from when the worlds were new, Mike still performs a price check on reagent pricing whenever it comes to him through arcane whispers and verbal ritual.  Every once in a while he fails a check because prices have drifted too egregiously or what the spellcaster uses as a reagent substitution is silly and the spell explodes in the spellcaster’s face.  “Wild magic surge,” they say. Or maybe Mike.

But maybe it’s not Mike or any God at all.  Maybe it’s…

#3 Most Interesting: Modrons! 

Imagine this:

  • Some describe an economy as a giant super computer with people and goods as their programs and subroutines to generate pricing and commodity information;
  • A fair percentage of spells across all spheres of magic have a material component with a fixed cost needing verification;
  • Spells with fixed cost also have verbal components;
  • When a spell-caster casts a spell with her focus, the verbal portion of the ritual transforms into an arcane network protocol which flies across the planes and terminates at Mechanus;
  • A Modron picks up the ritual like an inter-planar REST call and processes it;
  • The Modrons in concert check the price against their infinitely running algorithms and return a YES or NO;
  • The spell either works or explodes.

Enormous pricing table and indexes maintained by Modrons – not unlike Mordenkainen’s Guide to Commodity Prices Across the Realms with pseudo real time inter-Planar access.  Dammit, Modrons!

See, Modrons simulate everything in the planes in their giant Modron-based computation matrices within Mechanus.  Modron economics algorithms are perfect and predict price fluctuations of all possible goods and commodities with startling accuracy given a starting point.   Sadly, humans and other humanoid beings are not so predictable. Humans have an annoying habit of getting into wars, conquering each other, crashing their economies by basing them on chromatic orb spells, and other economic mayhem.  And while the Modron algorithms are without fault the data is often not; after a while the results begin to drift.

Every Great Cycle or 289 years, to recalibrate their systems with a fresh data set, the Modrons erupt from Mechanus in a great horde and walk the Planes – in the Great Modron Marketing Survey.  Modrons stop, buy, sniff, observe, and utterly destroy whatever they pass through.  They collect data about all the commodities on the Planes and build elaborate tables – which carefully promote to the highest level Modrons on the Marketing Survey for safety and CRC-32 data validation.  It may look like Modrons are burning down your peaceful peasant village but all they want is the current price of eggs.

While few low-level Modrons survive the march – Modrons often catch a bad case of adventurer –  the high level remainders straggle home and feed the freshly collected data into the rest of the great computation matrix of Mechanus via Primus.  They restart the machine and off it goes.

Once the data gets into the system, the spell-to-reagent prices are fixed.  A 25gp diamond for a chromatic orb is so big with such weight.  However, every 289 years, give or take a few years, as the data ages the prices drift.  Modron checks no longer reflect the correct prices of spell reagents.  The percentage of spell failure slowly climbs.  Then the Modrons march again and prices reset.  Again, as the spells ping their little mystic-networked and highly distributed checks off Mechanus, they cast again.

A simple, clean explanation.  With Planes wide destruction.

Bonus Content: A Heist to Run a Savage Burn on the Entire Universe

Someone discovered the truth of the Great Modron March and, through a series of events, has hired the adventurers.  They have a plan but they cannot execute it themselves.  The sponsor is old and likely frail and enormously powerful cleric.  They need a group of high powered adventurers who are willing to take great risks for enormous financial rewards.  They need adventurers to run a complex heist.

Here’s the thing: while the Modrons march, the Modrons freeze their pricing algorithms.  But as the Modrons return to Mechanus and right before the few stragglers report to Primus, they reboot the entire computational matrix.  At that precise moment, the matrix is open to a little data hijacking.  Yes, someone, at great length and great pain, has discovered a hackable timing vulnerability in Mechanus via the Great Modron March.  To make everyone richer than anyone else ever, all the party has to do… really just this… is to:

  • Pick a spell and its spell reagents;
  • Follow the Modrons on the last leg of the Great Modron March;
  • Sneak into Mechanus without being seen – clearly easy for adventurers of such great skill;
  • Kidnap a survivor from the great Modron March who, through the promotion scheme of the Modrons, is likely to be a high-ranking Modron;
  • Feed it the wrong information about said commodity;
  • Let the Modron go without being spotted so it uploads its bad data to Primus;
  • Go home and buy and/or sell like mad.

Any spells, magic, or economic data which relies on the Mechanus computation matrix will be wrong; every arcane spell-caster must adjust to a new value or have a critical spell fail until the Great Modron March begins again and resets.  If the adventurers and their backers are prepared, they’ll clean up and make more money than anyone else on the Planes – more money than imaginable.

A few small catches, though:

  • It’s not easy to sneak into Mechanus without being observed because it’s Modrons and they are all hey look people in Mechanus this is data must share so this will need an Oceans-11 like plan;
  • High level Modrons put up a hell of a fight;
  • Feeding information into a Modron is a little bit of an ‘undefined requirement’;
  • And the Modron has to be returned to the end of the march without being missed.

The payoff… the payoff is enormous… and it will run a savage burn on all the wizards in the universe.

But who gave out the truth of the Great Modron March and the timing vulnerability?  Deep, in the depths of the Great Waste, a forgotten God named Mike taps copies of a perfectly serviceable heist plan.

A Little Debt Financing Between Friends Goes A Long Way. Plus Pirates.

September 14, 2014 / / 3 Comments

The party stands on a beach on the other side of the world facing down an army of 30,000 heavily armed but lightly armored orks.  And they wonder… how did we get here?

King Stephan II is at war with his neighbor.  He no longer remembers what the war was about or how it started.  It began in his father’s father’s time.  All King Stephen II knows is war is expensive and the Royal Treasure is heavily in debt to a number of incredibly dubious concerns.  He’s not worried about the debt, though.  King Stephen II is phenomenally concerned about a more pernicious virus working its way through his Kingdom: boredom.

When war is good it’s very good.  The realm has no professional standing army.  Instead, when it’s time to go to war, the King bribes his Dukes to mobilize their private armies.  The Dukes bribe their Barons, the Barons bribe their Knights, and the Knights rape and pillage the land to raise money for armor, weapons and horses which flows back to the Faires where the brokers make their cash. 

The military is a loose confederation of adventuring groups, mercenaries, Knights and their buddies looking to grab a well-paying hostage, Barons trying to get ahead, and Dukes eyeing the Throne.  Theoretically, all these groups show up at the same place at the same time after a fun trip through the countryside where they force local peasantry to fete their betters with enormous and locally expensive feasts.   If all goes well, they route the enemy. The victors grab as many hostages as they can reach, and the Knights go on a rampage burning down the local villages.  Everyone makes out well and the local treasury overflows with its cut from this heroic misanthropy.

The enemy has been busy with their own internal problems leaving King Stephen II with a multi-pronged problem:

  • Bored nobility.
  • His treasury holds dust and his creditors are circling.

The Good and Wise King can debase the coinage – he’s done this a few dozen times before – to raise more money for his treasury and squeeze the peasantry as the harvest is good.  But his real problem is the nobility.  King Stephen II is Half-Elven by some tangential definition of “Half Elven” – he claims an ancient ancestor was an elf and he possesses some great and noble elven blood.  So do almost all of his nobility, even the Duke of Shoral, even though that Great and Wise Duke is clearly a half ork.  (The Duke of Shoral claims not only an ancient ancestry of elven blood, he claims his half-orkness is a special expression of that blood.)  King Stephan II is in truth only a man and he needs his nobility entertained otherwise they will begin to entertain themselves with each other.  Nothing is worse than bored heavily armed personal militaries.

Wizards, or at least their agents, live on the Trade Nexuses.  The Glorious and Most Serene Republic of Bavoria is just such a trade nexus.  Built on the ruins of an ancient harbor left by the previous civilization who had excellent taste in city locations, Bavoria benefits from a wide, protected harbor, access to timber in the nearby foothills of the mountains, and excellent roads.  In the far-flung past, Bavoria mostly did trade in honey, wax, and wine.  Now it trades everything its network of brokers can buy from all over the world.  With trade comes money, and with money comes the academic trades – the writers, the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the philosophers, the alchemists, the libraries and the universities. With the universities and an access to expensive and rare reagents come the Wizards.  And the banks.

The Doge of Bavoria is a Transmuter and sits at the head of the Colainni family, an ancient family who were among those who built Bavoria in the mists of history.  The Colainni family was a proud family exclusively of wizards but today most of the family business is in finance and murder – much more lucrative than wizard’s robes and runes. And the hats? Oh, the amazing hats.  The Colainni family has managed to fuse the Merchant’s Guild with the Thieves Guild and Wizard’s Craft Guilds to build a small banking empire to Kings.  

Doge Uberto Colainni has a pirate problem.  He’s always had a pirate problem.  Before, they could be bribed to pay back a cut to him of what they stole but they’ve not paying up and they’re putting a dent in the profits.  Normally, he would send out the Bavoria fleet to take care of the problem but King Stephen II is in to him for 1.2M gold plus interest from the last little adventure in War five years ago.   The Doge knows the good King has an entire kingdom of Knights and brave adventurers who might be getting the hot idea to come adventuring right at him.  The Doge prepares a courier and sends a message.  In returning for forgiving a bit of that war debt – debt the good King will run up again – the Doge will send his Knights off somewhere that will keep them occupied for a while.

The King’s Men fan out across the Kingdom and position themselves in Inns offering adventure.  An old man wearing the King’s colors tells a thrilling story around the fireside of sun drenched cities and horrible pirates and a chance for glory and stuff. The King himself is calling adventures to join the cause.  The adventurers can keep any booty they find!  All the adventurers need to do is rendezvous with the contact in Bavoria – here’s a name – in a month’s time and they can take part in this, well, let’s not call it a crusade, really.  A fight for Chivalry.  Pirates are evil!  Rar pirates! Go good!  Fight evil!  Go over there so you stop draining our coffers!

And a bunch of Random Encounters later, the adventures find themselves in Bavoria.  A city of money!  A city full of crime!  A city where scoundrels will roll the party blind! But it’s also a city of wealth, of wild parties, of politics, of murder, and of ancient ruins the party can go through and level in if they are a little under-leveled.   The Guild of Diviners will identify magic items for quick cash but then we’re back to the problem of actually selling magic items. It doesn’t help that the diviners are also in the pocket of both the Thieves Guild and one of the other great families of Bavoria, the Campise, who is standing up a competing Thieves Guild-slash-Financing House, and now they know the party has magic items and of what size and what kind and from where… but first, pirates.  

Sure enough, Knights and Lords from all over King Stephen II’s kingdom filter into Bavoria.  They feted on the backs of peasants all the way from their capital city here.  And they are ready to kill pirates.  Oh are they ready to kill pirates.  Is the party ready to kill pirates?  The NPC knights are all about killing pirates! 

First problem: no one can take horses. The boats don’t have enough room for all the armor and the squires and the mercenaries and the adventures and tents and supplies and horses.  The boats are only so big. The horses must go, and due to a sudden glut of horses, they’re going at half price.  Now Bavoria has a lively but short-lived trade in horses!  A win for everyone!

Second problem: the clerics of King Stephen II’s Kingdom are slightly different from the clerics of the Republic of Bavoria so no one agrees on the right blessing. After an altercation and possible cleric-and-paladin fist fighting, the party has a problem to solve.  They can solve this however they see fit, including allowing the clerics to hit each other until they’re unconscious and then have the party cleric bless the mission. And clerics?  They’re mean.

Finally, everyone boards.  The boats cast off!  They float around on the sea for a while.  They fish.  They have fights on the sea with pirates!  And the party lands on shore surprisingly fresh.

Here’s where maybe someone should have asked a few questions. The Doge of Bavoria did not have King Stephen II or his Knight’s best interests in mind.

  • The pirate generator is an enormous walled city surrounded on the shore by a river and otherwise surrounded with desert.
  • If the party thinks to ask no, no one brought any siege equipment.  Why would we bring siege equipment?  What those walls?
  • The NPC Knights, however, did bring many barrels of wine.
  • The pirates, knowing the Doge was getting irate, called their buddies who called their buddies and they have bored warriors and mercenaries, too. Now just off the city is an army of 30,000 heavily armed orks on horseback.
  • The orks on horseback don’t seem interested in attacking. They mostly seem interested in sitting just out of range and laughing.
  • Also Knights?  In the desert?  In heavy plate armor?  Without horses?  All those good Knights and Paladins aren’t going anywhere fast.

This is where the party is at.  There’s all sorts of interesting possibilities the adventuring party can pursue:

  • The party can be super clever, figure out a way into the city through some ancient sewers and destroy the pirates from the inside.  The city is not a normal city full of people kept hostage.  It truly is full of nasty goblins, orks, evil demi-human races, hobgoblins and the occasional bugbear.  Meanwhile, outside the city walls, the NPC Knights will try to make a single siege weapons out of driftwood (which burns) and mostly die of heat exhaustion in their metal cans.
  • The party can have a throw down with the champions of the ork army after sets of skirmishes.  In some twisted ork tale of honor, if the two champions of two armies meet, the one set of champions who survives is the winner of the war. Winning will disperse the ork army.
  • The party can attempt to oust the useless head of the NPC Knights, one of the erstwhile Dukes but not the Duke of Shoral he was too smart for this, take over the army and actually hold a useful siege. But they won’t get any respect unless their head is also Nobility of King Stephen’s Kingdom.
  • The party can get back on boats and fight the pirate menace on the seas. Sooner or later they will meet a Pirate Boss who will give them an epic fight.
  • No doubt there’s all sorts of interesting exotic places to explore off the beaten path: other ruins, interesting trade cities with strange cultures, and more clusters of pirates.

The head of the NPC Knights, a Duke of Canet, who claims descent from elves and the royal line of Kings, has little interest in anyone’s advice.  He will bat it away with one hand and drink hot wine under a hot sun in another.  To him, this is a big party and the longer it lasts, the better.  The siege entertains his men and occasionally one of the small skirmishes results in booty.  He has to milk this siege in a far away land for all it has.

Regardless, the NPC Knights after a long time of hanging around in tents with bright banners, screwing around, getting each other killed in skirmishes, and generally failing to do anything useful, will eventually tear down their tents, get on boats, and go home.  Unless the party manages to take the city and defeat the pirates themselves, the Knights return to Bavoria totally and completely successful in their own minds despite it looking pretty, well, like a huge failure.   

But someone wins in all this.  Who wins? 

  • The Doge wins because regardless what happens, the pirates back off a bit giving him a great financial victory which he will use to hire assassins and off members of rival wizarding families.
  • The pirates win because they still have their big army, their pirating base, and they made a bunch of knights look like jerks.  The tiny war thinned their numbers so the pirates back off for a bit but check out the recruiting propaganda they get in return!
  • The party wins because they get to go on cool adventures and take stuff.

King Stephan II gets rolled.  Sure, he gets his Knights out of his Kingdom for a while but the Knights didn’t return with much he could put into his treasury.  He’s still in debt to the Doge.  And his neighbor is still having its own civil war problems and can’t come fight him.  But the Doge is thinking of going to war with his neighbor, the Glorious Republic of the Iron Isle and could use some Knights. He’ll be happy to forgive some debt but King Stephen II will have to arm them… 

The moral of this long drawn out story: Maybe the old man in the inn giving out adventures doesn’t have the best of intentions.  Also, more importantly, wise rulers keep a constant war at the edges of their kingdoms far away from their central cities and bases of power.  Campaigns work best when they send adventurers out to the far reaches of civilization.  D&D is essentially a western.

As you can probably guess, this was all based on real history of the Crusades which were exactly as dumb as this.  And every bit as successful.

On the Unloading a Pair of Magic Boots and Troubles Therein

September 7, 2014 / / 6 Comments

While killing an ogre for the local Baron for a quick pickup of 100gp, the party offs the ogre’s buddy, a nasty little goblin.  This guy was a real jerk.  Once he was good and dead – the fighter stabbed the goblin extra for good measure – the party did what adventuring parties do.  They rolled the bodies.  Among the handfuls of copper pieces, a few unusable weapons and a convenient cache of crossbow bolts, the party discovers the goblin was wearing a pair of Boots of Striding and Springing. 

For whatever reason, the party decides it doesn’t want to keep the boots.  Perhaps it is a matter of taste.  The style is out of fashion.  The size is too small.  Also, as magic items go, boots of striding and springing are on the low-end of the interesting scale.  Regardless, the party takes the boots to the nearby peaceful peasant market town to unload them as one does with unused magic items.

The local cordwainer won’t accept the boots of striding and springing.  The cordwainer, a member of the local shoemaker’s guild in good standing, doesn’t recognize the boots as magic but he does recognize them as a different make than other boots made in the region.  Good quality, good make, but they’re not his nor one of his fellow guildmates so he cannot resell them.  He is not authorized to buy and sell foreign goods and if they’re left in his shop, he’ll get found out by the guild for hoarding strange makes of highly unauthorized footwear.  There’s a price list.  He likes being part of the guild, see.  They help him and his family out when he’s down.  His father was part of this guild. His grandfather was a grandmaster of the cordwainers of the peaceful peasant village.  And he doesn’t want any trouble.  Besides, he only pays in script and not in coinage.  The party needs to move along.

The local merchant doesn’t recognize the boots, either, but he recognizes them as magic immediately on inspecting them on the counter in his small shop.  The wizard’s craft mark is on the inner sole.  See that right there? These are wizarding shoes.  Great magic in wizarding shoes. The merchant’s guild in this region isn’t permitted in its charter to resell strange, foreign wizarding shoes.  They banged this charter out so the merchant can sell commodity goods here and the Baron stays over there where the town would like them and the Baron, well, he takes interest in these sorts of things.  Maybe the party took them off a wizard?  That’s a problem right there, too.  The merchant can’t pay for strange foreign wizarding things in his shop.  Brings nothing but trouble.  Besides, the town mostly works on script, ledgers, loaning and mutual debt.  The merchant can only pay in Bob the Baker’s bread.  Do you like bread? Bob’s bread?  Fantastic.

  • Forcing the merchant to accept the boots unearths the hard reality that the Merchant’s Guild of the town is also the Judge’s Guild, the local Mafioso Guild, and the Government Guild. This merchant?  He’s also the Mayor.  And the Head Judge.  The merchant will call in his friends and his friends will make sure the party doesn’t sell no weird, foreign, and possibly evil wizarding shoes in this town.  We won’t kill you right here and now because of the ogre business but maybe it’s time to go.  The locals are not much when it comes to fighting but leaving an entire town murdered over a pair of boots – there’s a slippery slope to neutral evilhood.  The party’s cleric might be irked.
  • Getting the local Baron involved brings up all kinds of ugly questions like: “Why are the lower folk walking around with a pair of magic boots?“  And then the magic boots will belong to the Baron because he needs to go on campaign and he doesn’t have magic boots.  Now he does. Yours.  Not a great plan.  Great guy until someone shows up with some magic items and then not such a nice guy any more.
  • Barding up the merchant or pulling out some merchant background can get a bit of “I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.”  Maybe there’s something the merchant needs for a bit of favor.  Besides, the guy trades in favors all day.  The local merchant is not of any help but there might be an upstream reseller.  Here’s a bit of a written introduction and a rough schedule for a Faire that moves around a number of cities.  Nomenally that faire sells cloth but an entrepreneaur can unload a pair of boots if the buyer is right and the place is right and the money is right.
  • Calling down on God or Gods is a thing that works because if there is anything a merchant needs, it’s a blessing to help him move those more mundane items in his shop.  But he still doesn’t handle foreign magic goods and he can only pay in what he owes to other townspeople.
  • Cutting the inner soles out of the boots to remove the wizard’s mark and leaving them with the local non-guild affiliated peddler with his jingle jangle wagon of assorted goods for a few copper will get rid of them quick but these boots are worth some serious scratch.  Always an option but no adventuring party is going to get rich off filing the serial numbers off magic items and unloading them on movable consignment stores.

No one in the town is going to buy the boots the local head cleric explains to the party on their way (hopefully) out of town.  And no one wants them. These are good people.  Godly people.  People who tithe regularly to their local Temple.  What the local head cleric, who is one of those nice guys affiliated with one of the local Gods of home and hearth, wants is the party to take the boots and leave. They will bring nothing but instability to this nice little community. If there’s anything the Gods want, its stability. 

A group of towns who want to become cities situated on ancient trade roads hold a rotating open market.  What it is, who hosts, and where it is held depends on the time of year.  The external appearance of the Faire is selling well-known commodity goods: one week is cloth, another is spices, another leather and other durable goods.  Merchants travel over incredible distances marked with the occasional Random Encounter to make it here to unload from all over the known world and over it all a rich and powerful Lord who makes it happen with the guarantees of security and law.  It’s his Law but his Law is he gets his tax.  As long as no one sets the entire town on fire and brings the Lord into it, he’s fine with whatever nonsense happens.

No one sells magic items in the open here, either, but the party can lay hands on some seriously upgraded pieces of mundane equipment if necessary.  At night, behind the tents and in the bars, people settle their accounts and the interesting goods exchange hands.

By knowing a guy, having a letter of introduction, getting the right people drunk, surviving a few fist fights, and generally running around depraved, it’s possible to find the magic items broker.  The party will bump into a bunch of other guys, too.  Nothing is ever simple on the quest to unload a pair of slightly magical boots:

Someone from one of the Wizard Craft Guilds is attending the Faire looking for the same sets of background deal brokers to unload their magic items into circulation.  (How else do they make their way into dungeons and random treasure tables?) The Wizard Craft Guilds aren’t like a small peaceful peasant village Shoemaker’s Guild.  These are guys with money, muscle, and agents to move their merchandise.  And these aren’t the Wizards themselves, of course – no self-respecting Wizard is going to come out of his tower to sell at some Faire. That would mean getting dirty.  This is a broker’s broker with his own set of thugs. And they want to know why this party is selling strange, foreign magic boots with a different wizard’s mark than their Guild into circulation.  

    • Is the party now magic boot-making competition? 
    • Is there a collect and resell effort from foreign points going on to dilute the list prices of magic items? 
    • Are the local wizards of the Wizard Craft Guild being scammed?

Maybe what the party needs is a visit from the broker’s local group of armed friends, in the cover of darkness, behind the bar.  Because while the party may not have to go, the boots certainly do. 

The black market gets whiff there’s some action in the magic items area and, unlike the rubes back home, these are guys who know how to move magic items and get them into the hands of discerning dealers.  Sure the party might be running from the thugs behind the Wizards Craft Guild but here’s a friend – really! a friend! – who only wants to get the best price for the boots for his quiet, discerning client.  This is safe. This is clean.  No Guilds involved at all except for Ours but you don’t need to know about that.  This will move the boots and sell them to a discrete buyer.  The Necromatic Arch Lich and his Legions of Terrifying Evil who simply need high quality footwear as they trample on the necks of the local populance.  You know how it is.

Running amok away from the thieves’s guild and the wizard craft guild, the party draws the attention of the local Merchant’s Guild who both try to turn a blind eye to all sorts of shenanigans but if inns start getting burnt to the ground, they’re both going to get wary. Luckily for the party, the local Merchant’s Guild is on a whole different playing field than the local Merchant’s Guild of the small town. These guys finance entire armies for rich patrons.  They have their own set of mercantile laws that have nothing whatsoever to do with local Law, or the Lord’s Law, or laws from the local Temple. These guys are judge, jury, executioner, and the entire local government.  We leave that for now, because the Merchant’s Guild wants to see if the party lives.  If they do, there might be something in it for them.

And after lighting some bar on fire while running out, the party hooks up with their guy.  They have wizard guild thugs after them.  Black market mafia thugs after them after breaking their deal to sell the boots.  They got beer all over their new leathers.  Letters of introduction are exchanged. In a room in quite another inn across town, the magic item broker looks at the boots, looks at the wizards mark in the sole, and he tells you his fee for moving the boots is 37%.  At a list price of 5500gp, he’s going to take a little over 2000gp from the party for the price of taking those boots off the party’s hands.  Good magic item laundering service is expensive.

In a time of craft guilds, merchant guilds, organizational guilds, nobility, and wizards in towers protected by armies of thugs, it’s hard to move foreign merchandise.  No one wants to accept the risk of explaining where the item came from.  And all the rich guilds have their form of muscle and protection.  This is all to say, one can get mileage out of a pair of boots rolled off a dead goblin. And maybe in the end it is easiest just to pull the soles and unload them on the peddler.  It’s cheaper that way. 

The Faire is based on the Champagne Faires, a thing that happened before the rise of the Hanseatic League and a tribute to the absolute determination, in the face of Kings and Guilds, to turn a buck. 

On Mid-Medieval Economics, Murder Hoboing and 100gp

August 31, 2014 / / 16 Comments

The party stands before the local Lord of the small town they’re passing through and responding to an ad:  Kill the local ogre in the hills for 100 gold pieces!  George the Ogre menaced the roads leading into the Lord’s holdings and villages so the Lord wants George gone.   You, the Murder Hobos, who breezed through go hey, we have weapons, we have skills, we have experience points, we can take out George.  And you do!  The local Lord hands out the 100gp (along with the party getting whatever experience points an Ogre was worth) and the Murder Hobos hobo along.

Where does the 100gp originally come from? 

Assuming the fantasy world our Murder Hobos inhabit is plausibly “Vaguely Western European Medieval” with some hand waving about elves, 90% of the population works in agriculture.  Sure expensive magic could make agriculture marginally more effective for the whole population but the structure of most of the countryside are manors of Lords overseeing combinations of bonded villeins and free peasants working the land. Even elves need to eat – or maybe they don’t, but people do.   Dotting along the road is the occasional inn and a few small market towns with functional marketplaces – and these are where our friends, the Murder Hobos, hang out.

Unless the Petty Lord in question owns a mine of some sort, he has few options to raise that 100gp:

  1. Squeeze the Peasants. Why bother to pay that 100gp himself to get rid of that ogre when his peasants surely have a few coins stashed under the floorboards somewhere?  This is what Sheriffs are for.  Go squeeze the villeins and free peasants – those free peasants are always good for cash.  Ever wonder why in old 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons the cash rewards would be in weird denominations? As long as it all adds up to 100gp, who cares the Lords squeezed the peasants a few copper at a time?
  2. Raid a nearby village.  Why squeeze one’s own peasants, who will surely resent being squeezed, when one can go burn down a rival’s village and force the peasants to cough up 100gp at swordpoint?  It really only takes the few buddies that live with the petty Lord, some horses, a few swords, and some flasks of wine… It’s one thing to knock over a few peasants, and it’s another thing to take on an ogre. An ogre is dangerous business.
  3. Squeeze the hostage. Hostage? What hostage? Where did a hostage come from? Surely at some point the petty Lord went on his campaign with his Lord. And that guy has a Lord above him — a Duke or Earl, perhaps. And that Duke got lucky on his last campaign when knocking over some other peaceful peasant villages. The petty Lord, with supreme luck, managed to take out a rival Knight and now has said rival Knight hanging around eating all the food. But the rival Knight’s family is another set of Lords with their own peasants to squeeze so our original magnanimous Lord with the ogre problem sends away for a bit of financing. And here it is.

Our party goes and rolls the ogre.  Possibly the ogre has some goblin friends, maybe a few orcs, and maybe if he’s a high charisma ogre a bugbear.  (Bugbear!)  The party rolls the enemy, collects a few trinkets, and saves the village.  Huzzah!  The peaceful peasant village is saved! They are heroes!  The petty Lord gives them 100gp to go away because he needs to get back to the pressing business of ensuring this year’s crop comes in to cover all his costs for his next year’s so-called war with his Lord. 

And the murder hobos do go away because they have 100gp burning a hole in a pocket and it needs to turn into stuff.

Medieval agrarian societies experienced little inflation over long periods of time.  Little money entered into the macroeconomic system to force prices to fluctuate and the pernicious guild system held prices artificially static.   The cost of wheat was the cost of wheat.  For prices to rise, someone dumps buckets of cash on the society as a whole.   Serfs had little money because they were serfs, Knights (petty Lords) had little money because they had to pay for the arms of war and kick up to their Lords… one had to crawl up the hierarchy before the murder hobos find concentrations of wealth.

But then a group of murder hobos would hoover 100gp out of one small community, find the nearest marketing town, and dump it all there like insane agents of the Invisible Hand.  100gp didn’t just buy drinks, it bought the entire bar.  The best thing for the entire community is if the murder hobos took their money and left.  Talk about acts of redistribution.

Since economic pressures put on groups of elves and dwarves in a Feudalistic society who take up arms to wander the country side and kill ogres interests me, I can game out some of the our party’s choices after spending their 100gp on whiskey.

1. Roll over to the next Lord and take another well-meaning good-aligned job they heard from the previous bar to rescue another peaceful peasant village.  The process starts anew, except this time the murder hobos ask for250gp instead of 100gp because the party leveled and they have more expensive equipment and reagent needs.   They continue along like this until they fight the big boss at the end of the module and destroy a small country’s carefully balanced economy by dumping the treasure on a small marketing town.  Perhaps once the adventure completes, the murder hobos become an upgrade: the murder mercenary company.  Why take out goblins when one can take out towns and knock over petty Lords themselves?  Cut out the middle man.

2. Climb up the ladder from petty Lords to big Lords and Churches. If anyone has money, it’s those local Temples that dot the countryside squeezing the local free peasants and moderately wealthy landowners for their cash (since they can pony up and don’t have their own private shrines.)  You Clerics you with your wealthy Sanctuaries and need for adventuring teams to go do things.  At higher levels, the murder hobos can shake down people who shake down people who squeeze the peasantry en masse.  Not only does it make more money and destabilize an agrarian society faster, it’s more efficient for higher levels!

3. Get thee to a city.  And hold onto that thought.

Once the petty and not-so-petty Lords get rolled a few times by the murder hobos, they have their own choices because they need to get their wheat to market, they don’t know how to figure in inflation, and seriously they have bills to pay and these guys need to move on.  They can (lists of threes!  lists of threes!):

1. Buy another murder hobo company and sic them, for another 100gp, on the first murder hobo company in hopes of mutual annihilation.

2. Militarily mobilize against the murder hobos – oh thank you for saving us now please go far away and stop hitting all the manors on the road for jobs please.  Maybe raising troops and mass mobilization is the best way to get right of the plague of lawful good adventurers who just want to help the poor and the oppressed against the legions of evil?

3. Join ‘em.  It’s more lucrative to murder hobo rather than run lands as Knight So and So of SuchandSuch.  Grab the sword, leave the gun, take the cannoli and surely they need an NPC fighter!  Who doesn’t?  There’s a Storm Giant menacing a village over the rise.

And now our, oh, 7th or 8th level murder hobo group who has saved many peasant villages now have an entire chorus of ex-petty Lords helping them to right the wrongs while they ravage the countryside, and some Duke or Earl or even King will get smart and point them at their enemies for a bribe of, say, 10,000 gp ganked no doubt off the back of a hundred thousand peasants paying taxes…

Murder hobos are no good for a fine Western European Medieval economic climate full of elves.  So much for the long-term economic stability of the Hobbits of the Shire.

Cities – small, filthy and few as they are – are the only civic and economic structures with enough wealth to support the rapacious needs of the average, healthy, constantly leveling murder hobo.  A 100gp disappears into the cities dark streets like water after rain.  Guilds extort from one another.  Landed Churchmen run the heads of their Temples out of Cities.  Governments make their headquarters.    These are the guy with hard cash.  Where they got the hard cash is of no concern – they have hard cash.  Never mind with landed nobles. Those guys are broke.  There’s some Guild there who has long term grudges with another Guild and wants to get their pay and all they need is a group of murder hobos who have leveled up siphoning all the money out of the countryside. 

Imagine the rogue class of the Auditor who works for the Guilds with the Guild Artisan background who makes sure that now the team is part of the City they pay their kickbacks to the Guilds themselves….

When Guilds don’t have enough money, some Lord of a rich city state who doesn’t bother with such things as lands and rents but in real things like proto-banks and ports needs to have a rival sacked.  Here’s a scroll of fireball!  Gratis!  Go sack.  Hope you don’t come back!

Given an infinite amount of time and actual economic pressures, all adventuring groups become neutral evil. 

There’s a lot to this subject.  This doesn’t even touch money-lending and usury and rents.  This is a time with no real banking – where do the murder hobos store their cash? – and few mints churning out coin.  Lords pass off murder hobos based on IOUs they never intend to pay and then other Lords who will call those in.  Backstabbing guild politics of the highest order and free peasants willing to use murder hobos on their climb by their fingernails up the economic ladder so they can buy themselves a title.   And this is just what is rolling around in my head.   The murder hobos rely on an invisible system to support their need to Do Good: the wealth of the churches, the rent taking of the lords, the control of the guilds, the networks of small market towns destroyed in their wake by overindulgence of beer.

The White Company is the best of real history rapacious and completely gonzo mercenary adventurers who had some fun in 14th century France and Italy.   A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman describes the White Company and the role of mercenaries in medieval society in loving detail.

Anything on the Black Death is good for exploring what happens when disease upends a perfectly good Feudalistic system.  The history of printing gets one into guerilla warfare tactics between guilds and free enterprise (printing was never guild controlled) and the length they will go to blowing up each other.    Seriously, the history of printing and the printers wars with keeping out of guild control is the best historical story no one knows about. 

Debt: the first 500 years has a chapter on Western medieval economics in detail and describes what happens when one dumps huge amounts of liquid cash on a low cash velocity society.  (Hint: massive hyperinflation –just ask Spain!)

I am currently reading the Story of England by Michael Wood which describes life in a Medieval and Renaissance society in loving, personal detail.  Also, academics are jerks.   If you thought monasteries were bad they are nothing compared to a small Liberal Arts college in 1300AD.

Nothing coughs up ideas like real life.

In which I rant about Tieflings for no good reason

August 22, 2014 / / 4 Comments

Yeah, okay, of all the dumb rants there are in the world this is one of the dumbest and worse it is several years out of date but it’s one of those things boiling over into nerdrage and the entire point of this blog is to have a place for nerdrage so it is serving its purpose.

So.

Tieflings.

Back in the wild world of AD&D 2nd Edition we had a thing called Planescape and it was good. Well, it wasn’t good. But it was better than most. And Planescape introduced a nice place called Sigil that was full of kind people who liked to stab — each other, other people, you know, in general, stab. Stabbing was a thing in Sigil. In Sigil were these people called Tieflings. Since Sigil was the center of all the Planes all based on the 9 D&D alignments it made sense that the occasional Demon or Devil or Fiend would wander on through, leave a couple of babies with the local whores and barmaids, and wander on their way. Could the demons help it if they were good looking? No, probably not.

Tieflings were the closest thing that Sigil had to a native population. Each one was weird in their own way. Grandpa was a Cambian and Mom was some sort of nasty half-fiend so you’re just this freak with giant bulging red eyeballs and vestigial wings that go fwip fwip fwip and your poker buddy has 6 foot tall curving horns and hooves. But no one cared because over infinite time in Sigil everyone was a damned Tiefling. One assumed any Tiefling sorcerer who fell through a Door and ended up in someone’s campaign was only adventuring to get back to their goddamn poker game where they had a full flush high they swear and they leaned back in their chair and now here they are fighting goddamn orcs what the hell is this garbage. Old Tieflings were guys who had fireballs in one hand and cigarettes in the other and weren’t interested in that sword in that magical horde because they could do a thing. They were cool guys.

I was one of those people who liked Tieflings. And yes, I know they are lame.

Tieflings were like this in 3rd edition and survived that way through the patch but then were watered down into non-existence. Instead of an interesting background of some demon passing through town now it is a Mysterious Ancestor who Tainted a Bloodline and now all Tieflings are Generically the Same. They were gutted of all their interestingness into bland sameness with a Spooky and Mysterious Past that was Spooky and Mysterious. And they are all weird in the exact same way and have absolutely no knowledge about plains or Evil Grandpa George the Demon or extra-planar games of chance.

And because not everything can be awesome, in D&D 5th Edition Tieflings are still a race with a mysterious tainted bloodline with a tail and flamey eyes all in the same way.

So screw that. I have declared an Official House Rule that all Tieflings are Different, Dammit. They might not be from Sigil — a summoning could have gone wrong, someone hung around with Great Evil too long, who knows. Something interesting. Something interesting happened that was more than a vague and unspoken spooky evil that is strange and spooky. Something awesome happened. And that’s the whole point of Backgrounds. Something. Awesome. Happened. And I have declared it So for all Tieflings.

Life is too short for boring bland evil backgrounds.

On the D&D5e Starter Set

July 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Yesterday, we got together, went through character generation, and played several hours of the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Starter Set.  To paraphrase: I wasn’t a huge fan of 4th Edition because I am a habitual minis player and 4th Edition felt like a minis game.   I did love the board games – Wrath of Ashardalon and the like – because I love roguelikes and those games felt like the right balance between a roguelike and a ridiculous dungeon run.  4th Edition needed grids, minis, rulers, and careful measurements to play and combat bogged down.  It wasn’t the D&D I remembered so the books went largely unread and the game went unplayed.

D&D5e is not D&D4e. 

Character generation is good old fashioned D&D character generation.  Pick a race, pick a class, apply some bonuses, pick some weapons, fill out a form, and rock & roll.  I picked a Mountain Dwarf Fighter because smashing imaginary goblins with a two-handed maul is fun and because I love Violet from Rat Queens.  We all filled out our character sheets wrong in the same way – it’s the bonuses from the stats which count, not the stats themselves but because we were all trained by AD&D 2nd Ed we are still thinking the Fighter needs an 18/00 strength to be effective and, well…

Backgrounds shone.  We didn’t have many to pick from, this being the Starter Set, but I see a glorious future of entire splat books dedicated to backgrounds alone.  Two of us picked Soldier and one picked Criminal and we came up with some tenuous relationships between us.  Rolling randomized on tables to create character personalities came up with some mixed results but the concept of backgrounds works.

Combat is what we all care about.  Gone are the 5’ steps, the grid requirements, and the trappings of a minis game that starter in 3 and exploded in 4.  Combat was fluid and fast – we managed to get through 5 combats in less than three hours which might be a world speed record for D&D.  Granted, these are 1st level characters with 1st level character combats so they’re expected to be fast.  Goblins squish.  But there was a good balance of risk, reward, tension, and fast play to keep combat fun.  

The Advantage/Disadvantage system is a bit of genius.  It forces the players to think more tactically without the need of physical tactics.  Players want to get the drop on monsters to get those Advantages so they’ll work harder, think more, and work together to get those pluses while trying to stay away from situations which give them Disadvantages.  (For those not yet exposed to it, Advantages are when you can roll 2 d20s and take the best, and Disadvantages work the same way to the enemy’s benefit.)  This gives the combats more color and encourages teamwork. 

To understand the general tone of game play, go back to D&D 3rd edition and instead of shooting off into 3.5/Pathfinder, pull out everything that feels extraneous – most of the mechanics around Feats, measurements – and put in a more fluid saving throw, skill and combat system.  It is not AD&D 2nd Ed like people have claimed – there is no THAC0, the d20 is still king, it is still all rolling and adding – but there’s an essential AD&Dness mixed with the enormous improvements found in 3rd Ed to make 5th Edition.  It feels like Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s a super good game if you are in the mood for the kind of cheesy, ridiculous fun playing D&D brings.  And it has all the feel of murder hoboing without the overhead.

Will play again and will acquire the core books when they come out.

PAX East 2012

April 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I am blogging from the road! This is a unique experience but I wanted to type up our yearly PAX roundup before forgetting the details. Hopefully my formatting doesn’t suck.

The Good:

  • Diablo III – The console free play area this year not only was enormous – necessary for the huge League of Legends tournament going on – but for showing games in beta. We never did get to play Torchlight II but we did play Diablo III. My complaints about the game are still the same with the dumbed down skill tree and the always on DRM. But man. Blizzard, shut up and take my money.
  • XCOM – I was worried 2K would turn XCOM into some first person shooter. Nope, it’s a squad combat tactical RPG vs. aliens. Now with exploding environments! And on XBox! All good.
  • MC Frontalot – I thought my knee was going to disintegrate after standing for hours to get to the last act of the concert but powering through to MC Frontalot was worth it. The dude has so much energy on stage he might have exploded. The song ‘It is Pitch Dark’ is awesome live. Sure, Jonathan Coulton was fun but Frontalot was better.
  • Lords of Waterdeep – Yeah, okay WotC just take my money. Game is great board gamey fun. Just a well designed game.
  • Cards Against Humanity – With great embarrassment I admit I was introduced to this horrible game by WotC reps. Where they got it from who knows. It’s Apples to Apples for adults. And hilarious. The Cards Against Humanity guys sold out completely. At one time we walked past the tables in the Westin Mezzanine and there were 3 games going.
  • Rob’s Cortex Plus Tactics Hack – In which we had fun playing the Marvel Heroic Role Playing system as base classes from Final Fantasy Tactics with a bit of Two Guys With Swords.
  • Soul Caliber V – Bought and en route to the house.
  • Gazillions of friends – Holy crap PEOPLE! HI PEOPLE! I think I got to everyone!
  • The End of the Omegathon – They played…. Crokinole. It’s Canadian bar shuffleboard. At first we were like… What the hell is this? Then we got into it. We started cheering and commenting on the turns. The match went for an hour and a half! I was so happy Eric suggested we watch it from a theater instead of standing in the grand ballroom. YAY CROKINOLE. It was epic.
  • Bastion – The guys who made Bastion were manning the booth including the composer for the soundtrack and the kid (!!!) who did the VoiceOver. I felt the need to give them more money but I have the soundtrack so I bought a Bastion bandanna.
  • Playtesting Race to Adventure – It’s a super fun game and you will love it when it comes out. Trust me.
  • Celebrity Pictures – Rumor is that I made some squeeing noise on meeting Margaret Weis. That might be true. I have good pictures of Eric with MC Frontalot and Jonathan Coulton.
  • The Boston Westin – We will never stay anywhere else. They set up the Mezzanine for continuous overflow tabletop play. Service was great. Attached to the Conference Center. Only ~ $10 a night more expensive than the Marriott.
  • Getting Mark to play Magic – Rumor is this happened. Sadly no photographic evidence.

The Meh

  • Rock Band Blitz – It hurt my hands.
  • Nintendo 3DS – Finally played the 3DS and I had to turn off the 3D because the game was so fuzzy. I’ll stick with my XL.
  • Torchlight II – I got a good look at it in the PC Freeplay area and it’s Torchlight with multiplayer. Yeah I know it’s what we want…
  • Eminent Domain – Card game that is a cross between Dominion and Race for the Galaxy. Two games I like very much, yeah, but Eminent Domain lacked a personality of it’s own.
  • Zillions of MMORPGs – EVERYONE has an MMO and they all look the same. the SWTOR booth was so big it had its own lounge.

The Bad

  • Guy at Battlefield Booth – Felt the need to explain D&D to the girls. Note, I had no such issues with the WotC reps, who were infinitely cooler.
  • Missing all the Panels – Went to a convention and went to no talks. Sigh.
  • Too many people! I did not get to everyone. 🙁 Sorry peeps. Also, I am super bad with names… As many people learned.
  • PC Freeplay shutting down Dungeon Defenders. Meh.
  • Worn Out – We overdid it a bit and now we are trashed.
  • Expensive Boston food – Christ, I felt fleeced.
  • Bizarre survey guy in the Nintendo booth – He felt the need to take a survey about the 3DS before I had a chance to play it.

So that’s my roundup! Bye PAX East 2012 – you were awesome.

Reverb Gamers 2012 #10

January 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games.  I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill.  You can do it, too!  And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #10: Have you ever played a character originally from a book/TV/movie? How did the character change from the original as you played? If not, who would you most like to play?

Nope. Playing other people’s characters is not my thing.

Although…

If the Atomic Robo RPG (by Evil Hat! Of course!) has a stat block for Carl Sagan? It may persuade me to relent so I could say a very ponderous “billions“.

Reverb Gamers 2012 Post #9

January 10, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Atlas Games is hosting “Reverb Gamers 2012“ with 31 question prompts about gaming and gamers and games.  I’m going to answer all 31 questions for good or for ill.  You can do it, too!  And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #9: Have you ever played a character of the opposite sex. Why or why not? If yes, how did the other players react?

Yeah.  Anyone who knows me knows that 90% of my characters are male.  I have a two pronged answer to why this is.

Story #1:

By time I started gaming in earnest in college I was busy climbing to the crest of a grand and beautiful wave of open-throated misogyny.  The sand kicking in the face started back in High School with small but poignant reminders of the Harsh Reality (“you cannot take the AP Computer class because there’s only one slot and, well, you’ll never do computers anyway…”). In college it began to reach that glorious crescendo of assholery.  I’ve told these stories before so I shant rehash them again. Suffice they are legion and they are tiring and, back then, I made the mistake of living with it instead of doing what I do now, calling the bullshit to the carpet and not standing for any of it.

When it came to Fun Time Pretendy Games which were, above all, supposed to be fun, I had little interest in bringing all the baggage to the table.  So I made male characters.  In my world, men weren’t questioned why they wanted to be engineers or physicists or Starship Engineers in Starfleet or Jedis or Deckers.  Men didn’t have to justify why they were picking up a sword and going off to adventure or throwing around fireballs.  And to me, who had grown up on a steady diet of novels starring almost exclusively men in science fiction and horror, it was just easier.  It was an escape from having to deal with the stupid all the time.  

To all of their credit, my long suffering friends have put up with my quirk for many years.  

I prefer female characters in precisely two settings: one-off con games and Cthulhu.  At a con, I will not force random strangers to deal with my weird psychological hang-up from years of a faceful of crap.  

Story #2:

Online is different.  I will never play a female character in an online game unless it is in a private, closed chat room. I know the Internet. I know it is an open sewer. This is one of many common sense protection measures, like firewalls and anti-virus and using non-Windows machines.  I’m on to it, I know its tricks, and I take proper procedures to protect myself and others from the jerks.

In 1992, I was exposed to the wonderful world of MUDding.  Hey, I was on the University of Michigan Engineering UNIX boxes!  They could talk all over the world!  I just needed to type:

telnet blahblahdyblah.net 12345  

Bingo! Midgaard!  The game in question was a Diku.  It was named Alpha.  It was hosted in Finland.  This was miraculous.  I could go play a game in Finland.  With crazy Finnish people.

I made a female character and it was ~ two days before the propositions began.  And they were constant.  I suppose at the time they assumed, and rightly, female characters were men looking for online hookups and TS.  Why else would anyone make a female character?  I logged out, logged back in, made the exact same character with a different gender and… presto!

I achieved Enlightenment.

I played Alpha for a little while but, like all Dikus, it got boring real quick, especially in the face of LPMuds.   And MUSHing and MOOs.  And chatroom-based games, my very favorite.  We grow.  We evolve.  The Internet is what it is — the home for arguments and cats.

When people do meet me in person I guess it’s a bit of a jolt.  But hey, it’s the fucking Internet.  Here’s your beanie — it has a propeller!  For all you know, I’m a well-designed bot who spews out random blog postings via scraping up bits of this and that from other blog postings and rearranging them in mildly readable ways. 

Or, more likely, I’m a sentient can of Folger’s Crystals.  How could you tell otherwise?

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