Because I could not stop for Death

"You play Conan, I play Gandalf. We team up to fight Dracula." —Jeff Rients, describing D&D.

Strahd’s Black Carriage.

We played through the final session of our Curse of Strahd campaign last weekend. The game was a blast from first to last, and I really wasn’t sure we would survive, even after Strahd finally went down—I kept expecting him to have one last nasty trick to play on us.

Our group was unusual in composition but well balanced. There was Akelic, ”Witness to Uriel,” an Aasimar Paladin; Fidelis Altor, a Warforged Fighter; Wilfan Liadon, a Half-Elf Wizard; and my Human Cleric, Brother Powell. By the end, we had been joined by Kasimir Velikov, a Dusk Elf Wizard who was originally an NPC in the adventure but ended up being run by two different players.

It had been a long time since I had a chance to play in a full-blown campaign and I love being on the other side of the DM screen. I had owned the original TSR module I6 Ravenloft (1983) and ran it for a couple of different groups back in the heady days of High 1e. I have many fond memories of the adventure—I believe my first TPK was in the catacombs of the castle, as the PCs were ambushed by an invisible Strahd and wiped out.

The original Ravenloft contained several important innovations. The amazing isometric map of Castle Ravenloft was maybe the first published D&D castle to actually resemble a “real” gothic castle. An interesting fortune telling mechanism shuffled up the key elements of the adventure, making each run of the module a little different. But maybe its biggest innovation was the embrace of the gothic horror genre, as filtered through popular cinema.

D&D, with its zany eclecticism, had always borrowed heavily from the classic Universal and Hammer horror movies for monsters such as mummies, vampires, and werewolves. These creatures sometimes felt a little incongruous beside the classic pulp or high Tolkien fantasy monsters. But with Ravenloft, suddenly these monsters seemed very much at home in the game. 

And Ravenloft had a great villain in the form of Strahd. By turns cruel and tragic, pathetic and villainous, Strahd incorporates many different takes on Dracula and in some ways anticipates the semi-sympathetic portrayal that Francis Ford Coppola would use in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

Ravenloft would prove so popular that it spawned a sequel, Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill (1986) and would eventually be spun off into an entire D&D “world” in 2e. I never dove too deeply into the setting lore around the Domains of Dread, but I did have a few books from the line and they seemed generally well done.

Given my history with Ravenloft, I was looking forward to exploring a new setting with (mostly) fresh eyes. Our DM had played through the Curse of Strahd a couple of times, so he brought a solid understanding of the adventure as well as a lot of enthusiasm for the material. I’ve only had a chance to look at about half of the WotC hardback adventure books, but Curse seems to be one of the strongest. I think it greatly benefits from focusing on PC levels 1–10 rather than the full 15 levels of Out of the Abyss. It tooks us about eight months of weekly Roll20 sessions to play through the adventure, which is long enough to feel substantial, but not so long as to ever feel like a grind.

The nature of Strahd’s demiplane also helps create a “circumscribed sandbox.” You can wander all around the map in any order you like, but you are limited to locations on the map. This creates an open environment with lots of choices but also some hard constraints.

Knowing that we were doing Ravenloft and that I was expected to play a cleric, I was initially stumped as to how to approach my character. I wasn’t interested in a Van Helsing type and I didn’t want to create a character who was too goody-goody, given that he would be thrust into a dark world of gothic horror. (And as it turns out, such a character would have been much too similar to our party’s paladin.)

A couple of Kris Kristofferson songs, "Why Me Lord,” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down” really helped me figure out Brother Powell, a poor, itinerant preacher who was a bit of a con man, a drunk, and a coward, but also someone who was genuinely ashamed of himself and wanted to be a better man.

I was a little inspired by Father Callahan, the priest from Salem’s Lot who doesn’t quite make it through his encounter with a vampire, and I was also thinking about the Reverend Harry Powell, the villain from Night of the Hunter. (However, after re-watching Robert Mitchum in the great 1955 adaptation I realized that the Reverend was much, much darker than I remembered and far darker than I wanted to take my character.)

I also wanted Powell’s god to be a little distant and unknowable, maybe Lawful Neutral or Neutral Good in outlook. Looking through the Forgotten Realms pantheon, I really didn’t find a god that quite fit the bill. They all seemed a little too clearly good or too clearly evil. I finally settled on Ilmater, the Broken God, though at first I was unsatisfied with the choice, as Ilmater is a pretty wholly Lawful Good deity.

But as the game evolved Ilmater turned out to be a much better pick than I realized. In the Realms, the Broken God was the god of “those who suffered, the oppressed, and the persecuted, who offered them relief and support, encouraged them to endure, and who encouraged others to help them, to take their burdens or take their places.” The poor folk of Strahd’s realm were clearly suffering, and Brother Powell gradually came to believe that he had been chosen by the Broken God to ease their burden. 

Brother Powell was loads of fun. The cleric, like all the other 5e classes I’ve played, is pretty versatile without having so many abilities as to be a chore to run. The Brother would sometimes backslide if the pressure got too great, or the group suffered a failure. But by the end, he was all done with running and ready to stand his ground against Strahd.

I won’t say too much more about the campaign to avoid spoiling anything, but it’s got some great set pieces. The Amber Temple is one of the best dungeons I’ve seen in a long time, with some very… intriguing areas. And Castle Ravenloft was every bit as creepy and cool as I remembered.

Our final session began with our band hiking down the old forest road, bound for Castle Ravenloft. Strahd was kind enough to dispatch his own Black Carriage to fetch us to his home, which is a pretty damned boss move. We decided to ride the rest of the way and save our strength.

In the end, our group played smart and we were more than a little lucky. That final battle was a true bitch and had the dice gone cold for us we might have lost a couple of characters or been wiped out by the vampire. Brother Powell survived, even though he was convinced that he was fated to fall to Strahd. All-in-all, this was a great campaign, a worthy successor to the original module, and I’m more than a little sad to have it end.

One Year of COVID Gaming

The last year has been incredibly challenging for so many people in so many ways, and while my small little world hasn't been completely untouched by COVID-19, I’ve also been incredibly fortunate that things have mostly been OK. And I feel extremely thankful for that.

A strange silver lining of the pandemic has been that I have probably played more Dungeons and Dragons in the last year than I’ve ever played in my entire life. And I’ve played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. It looks like I’ve logged about 240 hours in the last year, which represents two different weekly games that normally run about 2 to 2-½ hours per session.

Evidently, I’m not alone based on a spate of recent media pieces like “Dungeons & Dragons had its biggest year ever as Covid forced the game off tables and onto the web.” It’s been a very sweet outlet, allowing me to see good friends and family a couple of times a week, and I hope we can continue playing well past the epidemic. Although a weekly game requires a decent amount of effort, I find the experience much more rewarding than a less frequent game. You establish a rhythm and momentum that just can’t be sustained even playing every other week.

I have certainly gained a much greater appreciation for 5th Edition, which is probably the strongest version of the game yet. I am still learning some surprisingly basic things: because the game is so streamlined and so similar to past editions, I have missed many important changes. I don’t know how long we played before I realized I didn’t understand how critical hits worked in 5e: you roll damage dice twice and add modifiers once, which is the opposite of how it’s done in 3e. Just a couple of weeks ago I realized that shield is now a reaction to cast. Shield! As basic a spell as you can get. (I think this is a great change, and makes the spell distinct from mage armor.)

I’ve also increased my proficiency with Roll20, which we use in conjunction with Zoom. Although I have some occasional frustrations with the platform, it has the benefit of being incredibly flexible and reasonably easy to use. My biggest wish would be for Roll20 to develop an integrated chat client that actually works for all of my players.

So here’s a roundup of my year of COVID gaming:

Out of the Abyss: This was the game that started it all. We played two face-to-face sessions in December of 2019 followed by single sessions in January and February. Our last in-person game concluded in dramatic fashion, with Demogorgon rising out of the Darklake. But on March 29, 2020 we pivoted to Roll20 for our ninth session—and at that point the characters were mostly 5th level. We’ve been playing ever since and the campaign is still going strong. There was a fairly steep learning curve and probably took us until September before the campaign really kicked into gear. We just completed our 46th session, with most characters at 11th level and the game is clearly moving into the final stages. At the current pace we should be wrapping up some time in June or July, and my great hope is that we’ll be able to finish this campaign out with an in-person game.

Age of Worms: We were able to pick up and complete an abandoned adventure path. Well worth the effort and one of the more satisfying parts of the year.

Into the Interface: My Roll20 Traveller game never did quite reach escape velocity and got crowded out by too much D&D goodness. I haven’t given up on it, and in fact was able to run a pretty strong session back in February. It’s on my 2021 to-do list.

Lost Mine of Phandelver: Probably 95% of my D&D experience has been on the DM side of the screen. One of the great pleasures of the last year has been the chance to participate as a player. One of my friends ran us through this excellent adventure, and I played a bard—which is a lot of fun in 5th edition. Although we completed the main story line, we went back to finish out a couple of side quests and got ourselves way, way over our heads. I’d never really lost a character I liked so much before. 

Curse of Strahd: The same friend offered to run us through this adventure, and I lept at the chance to play again. I’m not sure why, but everyone committed to playing character classes they hadn’t played before (or at least not in a while). My cleric of the Broken God, Brother Powell, has been a blast to run and so far the adventure has very much lived up to its reputation. I really find myself looking forward to this game each week. The PCs are all 8th level and we are preparing for our journey to dread Castle Ravenloft.

Blogging: My summers are usually pretty busy and so most of my blogging gets done in the winter months. I’ve been able to maintain a pretty good pace for posting, mostly focused on Traveller, and seem to be attracting readers. While I expect the pace to slacken with warm weather, I’m hoping to post more regularly this year than in summers past. 

Miniatures: I had genuinely thought that the pandemic would give me an opportunity to catch back up on my painting backlog, but I really haven’t made much progress. In part, I’ve just been too darned busy running and playing D&D and blogging about Traveller. But in part, without face-to-face games, I’ve got far less imperative to get these models painted.

Here’s hoping the COVID situation improves over the next year, and we all have many more opportunities to play face-to-face. While Roll20 has been great, there is just something about sitting down around the same table with good friends that I miss dearly!

End of Summer Update

It’s been a strange summer with COVID-19, and although this blog has fallen fallow I’ve actually been gaming as much as ever. I’ve been running two weekly Roll20 games so most of my spare time has been spent prepping and refereeing those campaigns. And I’ve even had a chance to play a bit, which I always enjoy. A quick recap of what’s been going on:

Age of Worms. Our 1e Pathfinder conversion of the classic Dungeon adventure path, explicitly set in Greyhawk, is drawing near its end. The PCs are all 20th level and have only a few final encounters before taking on the dreaded Wormgod, Kyuss. This game has been a lot of fun: I’m so glad we picked this back up and are finishing it out. But that said, high level 3e/PF is just brutal to run, even for the players. The experience has been a good reminder of all the things I loved—and hated—about that edition.

Rage of Demons. This 5e adventure path has been a really good contrast to Age of Worms, though I sometimes feel a bit of whiplash moving back and forth between ultra-complicated high level 3e and lower level 5e. The group is almost halfway through the campaign; a couple of months ago Wizards began offering a Roll20 module of the book, which has made prepping and running the game much easier.

Lost Mine of Phandelver. A friend of mine ran this 5e module about a month ago and we had a blast. It’s a very nice introduction to the game, with an exciting mix of wilderness, town, and dungeon adventuring. All the players opted for character classes they had never or rarely played, so I had a chance to play a bard—which is actually a very versatile and effective class in 5e. 

The Ruined Tower of Zenopus. Speaking of nice introductions to the game, I recently bought Zach Howard’s 5e conversion of the sample dungeon from the 1977 Holmes’ Basic Set. Howard carefully updated and expanded his brief source text into a very nice adventure, brimful of iconic D&D encounters.

Into the Interface. Unfortunately, all of the D&D games crowded out my Mongoose Traveller 2e game set in Magyar sector, which fizzled in early May. I’ve got some thoughts on what worked and what didn’t, so I would like to take another run at this game after Age of Worms wraps up.

Miniatures. I’ve really had no time to paint much of anything over the summer, which has left several very cool models sitting on my workbench gathering dust. It will probably be a few months more before I will get back to any of them. 

That is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie. On another note, it’s been a pleasant surprise to see the revival of the Grognardia blog, which has been sorely missed since its last entry back in 2012 (!). I think it’s great that James Maliszewski has just quietly resumed blogging without any fanfare, in some cases picking up on topics as if he never left. So much has changed in the last eight years and I’d really like to read his take on 5e, which incorporated many of the OSR philosophies he championed.

A Guide to the Stanko System

Stanko (Magyar 2810 A555649-C).

Like many gamers these days, we have turned to a virtual tabletop to keep playing. It’s not a completely new experience: I ran a pretty fun weekly Age of Worms campaign on Roll20 for a couple of years. The PCs had gotten all the way through the tenth adventure, “Kings of the Rift,” before real life intervened and we lost all momentum. I have been hankering for a more frequent game for a couple of years now, but just didn’t take the initiative until last week.

We played a session of our Into the Interface Traveller game last Thursday on Roll20. Well, “played” is probably being generous, as most of the session was spent tinkering with the technology and generally goofing around. We had previously used Google Hangouts for video chat, and that had worked reasonably well. Last week we tried Roll20’s native chat function and with six people the results were pretty terrible. I could only see two other players and hear two more. Also, people kept dropping on and off. After a while we switched to Discord for chat, which seems to be a popular solution.

Most of the rest of the session was spent setting up Discord accounts and playing around with that technology. But we did accomplish at least one thing: introducing two new PCs to the crew of the Starjammer: Sublieutenant Richy Jamoor, an ex-Navy officer, and Brogue, an ex-smuggler. The whole group is stuck on the agricultural world of Stanko while their ship undergoes routine maintenance and inspection.

Name Richy Jamoor		UPP 2C4CA3
Service Navy, 3 terms		Rank Sublieutenant
Birthdate 272-1068	Homeworld Kline (Magyar 3012 A642987-E)
Skills Admin 1, Athletics 0, Electronics (comms) 1, Electronics (sensors) 1, Engineer (J-drive) 1, Engineer (M-drive) 1, Engineer (power) 2, Flyer 0, Gun Combat 0, Gunner 0, Mechanic 2, Melee (blade) 1, Vacc Suit 1
Possessions cutlass, snub pistol		Money Cr10,000
Comments Richy attended the Imperial Naval Academy (Magyar Branch), located at Seloo (Magyar 2102 A4319BA-E). He was assigned to Flight branch, 109th Fleet. For most of his three terms he served on Gionetti-class light cruisers as part of the 180th CruRon. The 180th was occasionally used for cross-border raids into the Solomani Confederation

Name Brogue		UPP 7B5B65
Service Rogue, 6 terms		Rank N/A
Birthdate 301-1060	Homeworld Sinott (Magyar 2512 A431742-E)
Skills Admin 0, Athletics 0, Gun Combat 0, Gunner 0, Deception 2, Electronics (computer) 1, Gambler 4, Language 0, Recon 2, Stealth 2, Streetwise 1
Possessions wafer jack, submachine gun		Money Cr60,000
Comments “Lieutenant” Brogue had a long and successful career as a smuggler and occasional thief, evading authorities on both sides of border.

Stanko

Stanko (Magyar 2810 A555649-C). A wet, temperate, medium-sized agricultural world with a thin oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. The Stanko system is located on the Walpurgian Main in Anise subsector. The M1 V primary, Dot, has a very close M9 V companion, Dash, which orbits Dot at 0.04 AU every four days. The rest of the system orbits this stable binary pair.

The mainworld has a resonant orbit at 0.23 AU with an eccentricity of 1.12 and an orbital period of 60.6 days. Each day on Stanko is 121.2 standard days in length. The 100-diameter limit of Dot is 0.47 AU, and a notable secondary world, Unkishi (HCAA524-7), a frozen glacier planet, orbits just outside this limit at 0.62 AU with an orbital period of 262 days. Ships looking for wilderness refueling usually opt for Makinis, the innermost of the system’s five gas giants, which orbits at 0.95 AU.

Known as Ishisi to the Vilani, Stanko has no natural magnetosphere and no known native life; consequently the planet was only lightly settled until the Third Imperium era. In 733 a magnetic dipole shield was deployed at the Stanko L1 Lagrangian point. This shield protects the mainworld from solar wind and radiation, allowing the planet to become an agricultural producer. The growing population never expressed much interest in the nascent Solomani Movement, and Stanko embraced the Imperium following the Solomani Rim War. Since then the mainworld has grown into a representative democracy with a population of 3.28 million, a high law level, and average Imperial tech, and is an important link on the revived Xboat network. Most of Stanko’s inhabitants live in and around the numerous small cities that ring the Sweitny Ocean.

Stanko controls the nearby world of Burvee (Magyar 2809 E557466-7). The current Imperial representative is the Baroness Leonila Folse. Although Stanko does not possess enough population to support its own system defense force, the Imperial Navy considers the world’s strategic location important enough to station a guard ship in system, the INS Anash, an Ershur-class battleship drawn from the 279th BatRon.

World Map Grid
World Name (and UWP) Stanko A555649-C	Subsector and Sector Location of World Anise/Magyar
Date of Preparation 107-1100	Hexagon Scale (km) 1,005
IS Form 8-E	Size 5 World Map Grid

Stanko Downport

The class A starport has no highport, just a large downport located outside the planetary capital of Racimir, which has a population of some 141,000. Allied Prefabricated Ships & Vessels owns and operates the adjacent shipyard, which primarily services small merchant vehicles. The port handles some 3 million displacement tons of cargo and 150,000 passengers per year, worth approximately GCr0.75 revenue.

Stanko Downport Directory of Services

Service	Location
Allied Prefabricated Ships & Vessels Shipyard	Concourse A
Astroburger	Main Court
Bang! (self defense supply)	Main Court
Cackomart (souvenirs)	Main Court
Chapel	Concourse B
Customs and Immigration	Concourse A
Dear Zosia (bar)	Main Court
Downport Data Terminals	Concourse A
Downport Freight Docks	Concourse A
Downport Message Center	Concourse A
Downport Passenger Assistance	Concourse B
Emergency Medical Services	Concourse A
Extravehicular and More (vacc suits)	Main Court
Hiring Hall	Concourse B
Hortalez et Cie (financial services)	Concourse B
Ikarkagi Loans (financial services)	Main Court
Imperial Consulate	Concourse B
Imperial Starport Authority	Concourse B
Interface Passenger Agents	Concourse B
Libertine Hospitality (entertainment)	Concourse A
LSP Medical (medical supplies and pharmaceuticals)	Main Court
Luksus Grand Hotel and Casinos	Main Court
Naasirka Assistants (robots)	Main Court
Odeon HoloAmusements	Main Court
Omega Fine Clothier	Main Court
Outworld Outfitters (survey and exploration equipment)	Main Court
Piwiarnia (fine dining)	Main Court
Racimir Cargo Market	Concourse A
Racimir Charters	Main Court
Racimir Transport Hub	Concourse A
Recruiting Office	Concourse B
Sarshikir (cargo brokers)	Concourse A
Scout Lounge	Concourse B
Sipsmith (bar)	Main Court
Solar Shipping Passenger Service	Concourse B
Solomani Association for Culture and Trade	Concourse B
Stanko Bureau of Commerce	Concourse B
Stanko Office for Tourism	Concourse A
Telecommunities (personal electronics)	Main Court
The Lone Star	Main Court
The Mainframe (computers and software)	Main Court
Tranquility Spa	Main Court
Transstar Bookings (cross-border passenger service)	Concourse B
Travellers’ Aid Society Services	Concourse A
Valiant Partners Cargo Brokers	Concourse A
Walpurgis Central Trust (commercial banking)	Concourse B

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