How I handle humanoids ...

As a haughty RuneQuest player in my youth, I looked on D&D with a certain disdain: chiefly for the incoherence of its bestiaries. I've since come to view that aspect of the game much more fondly, but I think there's still a problem. If you take the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II and whatever their modern offshoots may be, you've got heaps of creatures that appear to fill exactly the same ecological niche and are scarcely differentiated in appearance: norkers just look like angry, underdressed snirfneblin, after all.

Where does it all stem from?

Well, one source, I think, is that line in The Hobbit where Gandalf talks about the slopes of the Grey Mountains being "simply stiff with goblins, hobgoblins and orcs" of the worst description. Now, what Tolkien's doing here is indulging in a rhetorical trope of repetition: in this case, calling the same thing by several names. "Goblins, hobgoblins and orcs", if we follow Tolkien's own notes, simply means "goblins, big goblins and goblins".

That sort of repetitio is perfectly suited to a children's book. We might imagine Gandalf talking about somewhere else being "simply stiff with bandits, brigands and footpads of the worst description". If he did so, he wouldn't really be describing three separate classes of criminal, but just peppering his description with synonyms for elegance and effect.

Tolkien (or Gandalf) loves that sort of effect. Later in The Hobbit, we get "they ride upon wolves, and the wargs are in their train". But we can be pretty sure (from when we first learn of orc/warg cooperation) that all the wolves involved are wargs.

A second source is, of course, the original set of D&D booklets. The bare-bones descriptions of humanoid monsters seem to map fairly well onto the titles for character-class levels. So, just as we have "veteran/warrior/swordsman/hero ...", we have "kobold/goblin/orc/hobgoblin/gnoll ...".

And just as the fighting-man titles are often synonyms, the humanoid names are pretty much exactly synonyms: kobold and goblin share a common root and are also German/English translations of each other; goblin and orc are synonyms according to Tolkien; hobgoblin is just a variation of goblin that at different times meant a small goblin or a particularly fearsome one; and gnoll is a misspelling of gnole, about which all we can say is that it's an evil creature of some type.

I'd suggest that the multiplication of humanoid types in later forms of D&D comes from this initial distinguishing of synonyms. There's a kind of nerdy impulse in doing this sort of thing; Tolkien succumbed to it himself, with the character of Gandalf arising from the question of what a "wand elf" (Gandalfr) was doing in the Edda's list of dwarf names. Of course, dwarfs and elves often seem to cross over in the Edda, with "dark elves" and "black elves" most likely being synonyms for "dwarfs". But that doesn't please a certain sort of systematising mind.

In the original D&D booklets, there's at least the ghost of the suggestion that the different names are fairly loose characterisations based on size and might. A goblin king and his bodyguards "fight as hobgoblins"; hobgoblin heavies fight as ogres; and gnoll leaders are trolls in statistical terms.

That's the way I like to go in my games - to the extent that pretty much all humanoids get referred to as "goblins" or "orcs" indiscriminately. The distinctions are between tribe rather than type; so that the pale cave goblins of the mountains range from dwarfish creatures to towering ogre-sized beasts; and members of the blue-grey Black Skull tribe are generally somewhat smaller than man-size, but feature both tiny imps and hulking brutes.

I think it's simply more evocative to have the players talk about "that huge bastard" or "those little wretches" than picking out some humanoid sub-type from an exhaustive taxonomy. Or even better, "Black Skulls!" and "Bloody Tusks!".

This approach also allows me to get plenty of variety in tactics, motives and appearance without requiring the players (or me) to commit all the subtypes to memory. It creates a world in which heraldry is more important than hit dice. And that, I think, is just as it should be.

Dwarfs are villains ...

... or at least they should be a great deal more.

Dwarfs in Norse myth and Germanic folklore tend to be surly at best and downright wicked at worst.

They issue curses, lust for goddesses, betray heroes, resemble corpses and turn to stone.

They murder sages, work magic, commit fratricide and become dragons.

They are black elves and dark elves and groan before their stone doors.

They are the maggots of Ymir and, through the works of George MacDonald, as much the ancestors of Tolkien's orcs as any folkloric goblin.

These things make them much more interesting than short, brawny Scotsmen or half-sized Vikings.

No one fights with a backpack on ...

A bit overladen for fighting ...

I've rambled on about encumbrance in RPGs before, but I'm going to do it again.

In our most recent Whitehack session, the loot-laden PCs were attacked by bestial inhabitants of the Blackwold Forest. They had camped out and had secreted much of their stuff in trees. When the encounter began, only those on watch were (lightly) armoured and none had their other stuff on their person. And when battle broke out, the PCs' manoeuvres left their loot vulnerable to theft; sure enough, a hairy, dwarf-like creature ran off with some of the booty.

Once the beast-people were slain, the chase led the PCs to the lair of the ettin Brug and Brag, whose ogre henchmen they had previously dispatched; the hairy creature was another of the ettin's servants.

I'm making two points here. First, PCs shouldn't want to fight loaded down with all their equipment if they can possibly help it. Second, the placement of gear and plunder leads to plenty of options for story-telling.

Let's take the first point. No one in their right mind would engage in hand-to-hand combat with a rucksack on. The first thing you'd do would be to dump it (a free action, I'd suggest). I'm suspicious of "backpacks" in a medieval-ish setting in the first place, but my players have all bought them from the equipment list already, so hey ho. In future campaigns, I might insist they stick to sacks. In any case, anyone trying to fight with a pack full of stuff should be at -3 to hit and damage (with a minimum of 1). I think the damage reduction is realistic here; it's really hard to get a good swing with a weapon if there's something heavy on your back.

Nor would someone sleep with their armour on, unless it was just a gambeson or something like that (I think padded jacks and gambesons are what most RPGs really mean when they say "leather armour"). Recovery should be impaired for any character who does so, and lack of sleep/comfort might impose a -1 penalty on all actions and tests for the remainder of the day (cumulative for each successive night).

What about the second point? Well, as our last session showed, stuff that's not being carried is vulnerable to being snatched.

This has interesting implications. It gives the PCs something to defend. The most obvious stratagem would be to dump their stuff in one spot and form a ring around it. That's interesting, because it potentially limits their tactical options. They've got to stay in one place, and you can't have an archer or a magician picking off the enemy from behind more heavily armoured friends if they're facing the wrong way.

It also raises the possibility of the PCs being driven back from their gear. Whitehack gives characters in "the Strong" class (i.e. fighters) the option of driving foes back in combat. I give this to certain monsters too, as it creates more dynamic and interesting tabletop melees. The more movement the better: static fights can be terribly boring, especially in D&D-style d20 systems, which lack the colourful skewerings and leg-loppings of Runequest and its ilk. So the dumping of backpacks can serve as a reminder to keep combat dynamic.

Imagine a band of orcs charging into a room. If there's a burly chieftain at the front (almost man-size, perhaps ...), he might well be able drive one or more of the PCs out of their line, creating a breach into which his followers could pour - and allowing back-rankers to make off with the PCs' stuff.

If the PCs survive, they've then got a motive to raid the orcish quarters. Perhaps all the assailants except a few imps were slain. But there are probably plenty of bigger and nastier orcs waiting back at base.

It's also easy to envisage scenarios where the PCs do the driving back and then pursue their routing foes. But what if some dungeon scavenger has devoured their stuff in the meantime, before retreating to its lair?

And when the PCs cut their losses and decide not to bother retrieving the carved wooden totems they recovered from the beastmen? Why, they might discover that those offer protection from the demons that patrol the lower reaches, and so are well worth retrieving after all.

Essentially, penalising PCs for fighting with their packs on is an engine for separating players from their stuff. And that, it seems to me, should be a crucial part of a dungeon-crawling game. In our campaign, the Drinker has passed through the hands of three PCs, two of whom have died. It was the object of the party's last raid on the Devil Warrens, as they were paid to retrieve it. Little do they know that it's now in the hands of a very nasty NPC indeed ...

Rogue Planet, Mayhem and Havoc

Rotters!

I painted up these portly gents for a spot of Rogue Planet this week. A friend and I managed a couple of games on Tuesday night, first pitting his space marines and inquisitor against my motley alien pirates and then deploying my freshly painted rotters and some demons and beasts against the marines.

Not having played the game for at least a year, I was a little rusty on the Rogue Planet rules. We missed out a few things, including the option to take default action points and the penalties from multiple opponents in melee. And we were probably both a little hesitant in using counter-actions in the acting player's turn: interceptions, opportunity fire and so on. We did master the counter-charge, though, which resulted in plenty of collisions between monsters and machines.

Anyway, the evening whetted my appetite for more Rogue Planet. There's a great deal about the game that's fresh and liberating: unmeasured movement (as in Ganesha's terrific Battlesworn, another ruleset to which we periodically return); the freedom to build whatever units you wish to deploy; and the innovative use of miniatures, whether as "pawns" that represent a hero's abilities and endurance, or "groups" that allow the same stat line to be presented in radically different ways.

I can't think of any ruleset that matches Rogue Planet's ability to make you look at a collection of miniatures and dream up imaginative ways of deploying them on the table. The simplest way to do this is by designating them as pawns - hit points for a leader that also provide special abilities while they remain on the table. So, that huge alien beast could be an intimidator (reducing the opponent's command-and-control ability), that ferocious-looking mercenary could be a brute (enhancing the leader's combat ability) and that odd, striped vaguely dog-like thing could be a pet (allowing the leader to make instantaneous attacks on enemy forces anywhere on the table).

The game's also fast. This week's Rogue Planet session was a re-match after my first game of 40K since at least the early 90s. But we managed to get a couple of games in in far less time than the 40K game took, despite our lack of familiarity with the rules.

My son remembers the rules fondly - as a frenzy of charging lizardmen and dinosaurs, chiefly - so we'll aim to get in a game or two this weekend, if the good weather allows.

Other Bombshell games
Rogue Planet is one of several excellent wargames written by Brent Spivey of Bombshell games. The other two that we have are Mayhem (fantasy massed battles) and Havoc (fantasy skirmishes).

Mayhem is the one we've played the most. I have a couple of 10mm armies in progress for it, but we've generally played it with 28mm Hordes of the Things units doubled up. Mayhem units are squares, so two 60 x 30 HotT bases do the trick nicely. Like Rogue Planet, the game is innovative and quick to play.

The Achilles heel of both rulesets, however, is the build-your-own-unit aspect. I'm all for this in principle, as I dislike prescriptive rulesets that allow you to field only highly specific troop types (usually tied to a certain range of miniatures). My rule of thumb for any fantasy game is that it should allow you to field a goblin mounted on a giant lizard (or a dwarf on a giant bird, or a beastman on a giant beetle, or whatever ...). If not, then it's probably not for me. Both Mayhem and Rogue Planet certainly cater for goblin lizard riders.

The problem, though, is that it requires a little bit of work to stat up such units - and that there's little in the way of baselines to work with. That doesn't make the game itself any less satisfying - but it does require an hour or two's work to draw up two sets of rival forces.

This is a minor complaint, of course. And there are plenty of statted-up forces floating around on the net, as well as an app with Warmaster/Warhammer troop types rendered in Mayhem terms. But the absence of a sample lists does mean that we tend to play both Mayhem and Rogue Planet less often than they merit.

Here, I'd make a comparison with another excellent wargame, Ganesha Games' Song of Blades and Heroes. This is the skirmish game that got me back into all this malarkey when I bought it for my son's sixth birthday almost four years ago. We haven't looked back, and the RPG fires were swiftly rekindled. Song of Blades also allows you to stat up any model as you see fit, which is great. So goblins on lizards are no problem at all. But it does contain a handy list of non-prescriptive profiles. So you can look at the orc profile of Quality 4, Combat 3 and then make your particularly vicious and cunning-looking orc Quality 3 (lower is better) and Combat 4 (higher is better). And then you can layer on special rules as you see fit: Savage, Heavy Armour, etc. There's a handy warband generator on the Ganesha site, so you can have a printable roster sheet ready in a couple of minutes.

This "time to table" aspect is crucial in how often we play a given game. So I'm going to make an effort to preserve our Rogue Planet profiles so that they can be reused quickly - perhaps going to far as to print cards for each model or unit that we use. With the "time to table" problem solved, I think the game will get the playing time it deserves.

Havoc is the earliest Bombshell ruleset, I think, and the one we've played least. This isn't because it's a bad game; the one or two times we played it, we thought it very good. But the rulebook is thick and impenetrable. It could also do with a good proofread and edit. This isn't a problem with Mayhem or Rogue Planet; judging by the acknowledgements, Mrs Spivey deserves the credit here.

But Havoc does get round the "time to table" problem by having a list of preset profiles. You can still field a lizard with a goblin rider, but you'll use the profile for "rider" or whatever. And an orc with spear and shield will be identical, rules-wise, to a dwarf thus armed.

I don't mind that at all. It's a system that works very well in massed-battle games like Hordes of the Things, where a "warband" element might be large goblins or burly barbarians or excitable elves; the flavour of the army comes from the combination of the unit types rather than their individual powers. From memory, Havoc caters better slightly better to ancient and Renaissance-type profiles rather than high medieval; I don't think you can easily fit in a poleaxe-armed, plate-armoured man-at-arms of the Wars of the Roses sort, for example, as users of two-handed weapons are deemed to be lightly armoured like landsknechts or Dacian falx-wielders.

In essence, Havoc has what Mayhem and Rogue Planet need in its standard profiles. Mayhem and Rogue Planet have what Havoc needs, both in their brevity and clarity and (to a lesser extent) their ability to cater for any sort of profile.

Anyway, my experiences of playing both Mayhem and Rogue Planet have been sufficiently good to make the effort of force creation well worth it. If Bombshell were to produce a cleaned-up and stripped-down Havoc, I'd pounce on it like a half-starved polecat.

This is brilliant!

I love this sort of thing.

What Emmy Allen has done here is create a great little mechanic that adds a whole lot more to d20-based combat. It's terrific.

I haven't explored the rest of her blog in any depth, but a discussion of Machen's The White People - my favourite weird tale - bodes extremely well.

Another thing about The Black Hack

An interesting feature of The Black Hack is that, where most RPGs manage character creation up, it manages the stats down. How? When you roll a stat of 15 or above on 3d6, you roll the next one on 2d6+2. And then you're allowed to swap two stats round.

It's easy to see why the game uses this system. Because just about every roll in The Black Hack is based on the six core stats, it's important that characters aren't overpowered in those areas. Whether for a save, an attack or to dodge an enemy attack, you have to roll under (not equal to) the relevant stat on a d20. So universally high stats make for a duller game - hence the limits.

I love this. Low stats reflect the pathetic aesthetic that Dr Bargle outlines in his tremendous rant. They create a world in which risks are real, dungeoneering is dangerous and victory may simply be survival.

Whitehack and The Black Hack

Whitehack's been my go-to RPG for some time now. I use it for regular games with the kids and their friends, for family sessions (my wife can occasionally be persuaded to play) and for occasional games with my old RPG muckers. It's great - sleek and elegant, and with nice, intuitive mechanics. The "roll equal or under" system sits nicely with those of us who were raised on RuneQuest rather than D&D, as does the freedom afforded by the flexible character-class system. I've tweaked it a bit with regard to shields and weapons, and it works very well.

I've heard good things, though, about The Black Hack, another take on old-school D&D. Astonished to find that the rules cost less than two quid on DriveThruRPG, I bought them the other day. And I'm very pleased I did.

So how do the two compare? At the most superficial level, Whitehack is more expensive (and not for sale as a PDF). It's also edited to a professional standard, which The Black Hack isn't. Editing aside, though, both are well written and clear. There's nothing in The Black Hack that's hard to understand, and my quibbles about the editing could be resolved in a quick sweep for run-on sentences and awry punctuation.

But what about the systems? Both use a "roll under" mechanic, and both make extensive use of a character's actual stats - STR, CON, DEX and so on. I love this: it very quickly gives the characters some "shape", and means that a DEX 13 thief is not identical to a DEX 15 one when it comes to fiddly tasks. A reliance on modifiers, rather than raw stats, is a weakness of Dungeon World, another re-imagining of old-school D&D that I like.

Where The Black Hack differs from Whitehack significantly, though, is in its combat system. Where Whitehack has an "attack value" stat modified by STR, The Black Hack uses the STR score itself. DEX is used for dodging and shooting, and INT or WIS for spell-casting. Saving throws are also done on the six stats rather than class-based derivatives.

Some might find this simplistic (while being strong helps in hand-to-hand fighting, surely the best swordsman isn't always the strongest?), but I can see it working just fine on the table. And it's easy to rationalise STR as including "strength-related skills" as well as raw brawn.

Like Dungeon World or Ganesha's Sellswords and Spellslingers skirmish game, The Black Hack has only the players rolling dice. Monster attacks are resolves by attempts to parry or dodge with STR or DEX; failure leads to the players rolling damage against themselves. Stronger monsters (i.e. those with more hit dice) give penalties to the roll. Like Whitehack, the Black Hack compresses a lot of information into the hit-dice number, but it goes further, so that armour, damage, hit points and penalties are all directly derived from a single number.

Spells are a major point of difference between the two games. Whitehack's "miracles" are created by the player through negotiation with the GM during character creation and cost hit points to cast. I like this; it captures the sense found in Tolkien and elsewhere that magic is physically draining (think of Gandalf after his initial encounter with the yet-to-be-revealed Balrog in Moria). The Black Hack has a spell list; a conjurer's chance of casting further spells that day falls with each casting. I like this too: it's got a nice unpredictability about it, so that you can't plan the use of magic too precisely.

The Black Hack also has a modern, dice-based system for encumbrance and supplies, including ammunition. You don't have to worry about counting individual arrows, but you'll know when your quiver's getting light. This is a bit like Dungeon World, I suppose, and a nice abstraction that might work well if imported to Whitehack.

Perhaps the most innovative element of the game is its approach to armour. Whitehack uses ascending armour class (0 is none, 6 is plate), which is clear and intuitive. In The Black Hack, traditional armour class is abandoned; instead, armour and shields act as a bank of "buffer" hit points that must be whittled down before wounds can be inflicted. This is highly abstract, of course, but no more so than hit points themselves. I like it: it means that heavily armoured warriors are more or less invulnerable at the start of a combat but become susceptible to injury the longer it lasts - and the more tired they get. Armour points regenerate after an hour.

It's easy to think of situations where this will strain realism; imagine, for example, two plate-armoured fighters who are just about to deal with the last of their orcish opponents when more orcs reveal themselves and start shooting. By the rules, I think, those fighters would be effectively unarmoured against the arrows if they've used up their armoured points. But of course you can easily rule that armour points renew themselves in such situations (perhaps fresh combatants replenish armour point automatically).

So what are the respective strengths of the systems? I think I'll stick with Whitehack for campaigns. It's a more subtle system, and its less rigid character classes allow for less stereotypical roles in the party. I'm increasingly flexible with the players, so that a Deft character can have a Wise miracle in return for forfeiting his attunement or something similar; a Strong character might forego one of the special fighting abilities in return for a miracle or a sneak-attack specialisation.

But I can see two clear roles for The Black Hack. First, we often play one-off family games on holiday or with visiting friends, and The Black Hack is perfect for that. Character creation is very quick, and the game has a tremendously no-frills approach. The set spells will work much better for occasional players than Whitehack's creative approach, and "time to table" is extremely short.

The other thing I'll be using The Black Hack for is out-and-out dungeon-crawling - games where the excitement comes as much from the rapid dwindling of your hit points as the coherence of the setting.  We've dabbled a bit in Descent, but I increasingly think that looking for the platonic dungeon-crawler board game is a fool's errand. Full-blown role-playing games simply do the job far better, giving you more opportunity for character individualisation and innovative problem-solving. Although The Black Hack is written primarily as a "theatre of the mind" game, with abstracted distances and ranges, it would work tremendously well as a miniature-based tabletop game. I occasionally lay out dungeon tiles for the kids on the premise that their characters have a map of the setting, and then let them work through it, with surprises coming from secret doors, treasure and - of course - inhabitants. The Black Hack looks ideal for that.

There are whispers, too, of demand for a one-off RPG session in my office. The Black Hack might just cater for that too ....