A ten-year-old's take on At the Mountains of Madness

For the past four months, my son's been working on his first RPG scenario. He based it on Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness after reading first the graphic novel and then the story itself.

Using Fimo, tin foil, cocktail sticks and hot glue, he made all the monsters himself. He also painted up miniatures for the player-characters (in a single afternoon after school!) and made floorplans from cardboard, white glue and loo roll. He drew designs on index cards to show the carvings on the complex's walls.

This Sunday, he ran the game for four friends. It seems to have been a hit, and he's planning to repeat it with a couple of other groups of friends. The giant penguin - in lieu of the group of merely large sightless albino penguins in the story - was my sole contribution to the set-up. It's a Hobbycraft papier-mache shape with some added extras in Milliput.

I'm sure we'll find ways of recycling the monsters in other games. There are three Elder Things:

The Whistler in the Darkness (an original creation):

A captive Mi-go:

And - of course - Shoggoths:

My son also drew this to encapsulate the scenario:

All in all, it somewhat outstrips my efforts at a similar age; those were largely confined to graph paper.

Down in the dungeon with Song of Blades and Heroes

I got back into gaming through Ganesha Games' Song of Blades and Heroes, which I bought to play with my kids. Since I gave my son a batch of painted miniatures for his birthday a few years ago, we haven't looked back.

We hadn't played SBH for a few months, but last night, we got a dungeon-based skirmish going. My son laid out a quick dungeon using D&D tiles, and then we identified a couple of areas (a temple and a sorcerous circle) as objectives. We assumed a god's eye view, just to keep things simple, and marked out a few areas for wandering monsters. Then battle commenced.

Wandering monsters are a regular feature of our SBH games, reflecting creatures drawn by the noise of battle or the prospect of carrion. What we usually do is have each player roll a d6 at the end of their turn. If it's a six, a monster turns up. Before each game, we set up a row of six monsters, so when one appears, we roll a d6 and take the appropriate one (rerolling if that monster has already been used). A 'monster' could be a wandering owlbear or a band of goblins or anything else from the deepest recesses of the Cabinet of Shame. They typically attack the nearest player-controlled characters, with the other rolling for them. Each monster (or group: they act as one) rolls activations on three dice; two failures does not end the monsters' turn, as each individual or group is treated separately. The monsters are generally inimical to each other.

This works pretty well - especially with the more spectacular monsters. In the past, we've had some climaxes reminiscent of Harryhausen films in which two monsters fight to the death. In one memorable game, these monsters had killed or driven off all the player-controlled characters, so what began as orcs versus lizardmen ended as griffon versus tyrannosaur.

In last night's game, though, we decided that all the dungeon monsters would be on the same side. As the game progressed, we got through the whole batch: a mindflayer, a demon, a gorgon, an alzabo, a flesh golem and a meriod. As the mindflayer ("brain eater" in the Song of Gold and Darkness book) had the Leader trait, the other monsters benefited from his presence when they were nearby.

In the battle between orcs and snakemen, the orcs eventually prevailed, helped by greater numbers and the presence of two leaders. But it was a close-run thing - and a nice way to dust off a superb ruleset again.

Down in the dungeon - with Whitehack and The Black Hack Second Edition

Although I often run RPGs without miniatures, I find them useful for new players, games with children and - especially - for games with lots of players. The third category often comprises the first two, making miniatures and floorplans especially useful.

Last weekend, I ran two games - the first for first-time players (my colleagues) and the second for my kids and their friends. I used the same scenario: a dungeon-crawl with an intro stolen wholesale from Jack Vance's The Eyes of the Overworld. 

For the first game, we used the second edition of The Black Hack. I loved running this. The player-facing rolls keep everyone involved, and the system's nicely intuitive (basically, everything's a d20 attribute check). I was very impressed with how the new armour system works. The degradation of armour's much easier to track than in the first edition, and gives the players lots of risk/reward decisions to make.

The Whitehack game was a blast too. It remains my favoured version of D&D for campaigns, because it allows a bit more subtlety and because there's a little more parity between players and NPCs. While I love The Black Hacks' dice-burning system for armour, traditional armour class allows you to fiddle around with monsters a bit more. For example, in Whitehack, I occasionally confront the PCs with brass automata who have AC 10 but only a single hit point each. That makes them tricky opponents without being overwhelming, and involves no bookkeeping whatsoever. It might be hard to achieve the same in The Black Hack.

I did, however, import The Black Hack's usage dice into Whitehack. These are very useful for rations,  ammunition and the like. They ensure that resource management and uncertainty remain core parts of the game.

For both weekend sessions, I used hand-drawn floorplans. These are my preferred option for miniature-based RPGs. They're quick to make, they afford much more design freedom than commercial tiles, and they're 'what you see is what you get': if I've drawn a troglodyte hide staked out on the floor of a room, then that's what's there when the PCs enter.

Drawing out the floorplans means that the 'master map' can be very sketchy. I started with a rough scrawl and then drew out a clearer fair copy once the floorplans were finished. The advantage of this approach is that all your effort is visible for the players (and the crudeness of the GM's map makes it almost unintelligible to players should they happen to glimpse it. 

I add 3D terrain where I have it, but I draw it in quickly in case I forget or misplace the scenics:

With ...

... and without

In the second game, we had eight players. The party split up, with two tackling the lower entrance while the rest headed for the orc outpost above. The floorplans were a huge help here, as it was easy to coordinate the action and for the players to visualise (eventually) how the two parts of the complex connected.

Another advantage of floorplans is that they speed things up. It's easy to glance at the table at the end of each turn and work out how far unseen monsters attracted by noise or scent will advanced through the dungeon. And of course it's far faster than drawing out rooms and corridors on a mat as you go.