The Seven-Sided Die

I’m engaging in an old-school heresy: I’m not awarding XP solely for monsters defeated/outsmarted and treasure earned.

I’m also awarding 100 XP for player journal entries. I know that XP is an incentive system, and here are my thoughts on why such things should be incentivised with experience points:

• It rewards player engagement. A player who is willing to write a journal entry is a player engaging with the fictional experience of their character.

• It doesn’t do violence to the XP curve: early on the squishiness of characters ensures that incautious and unlucky characters don’t survive regardless; later, 100 XP is a drop in the bucket.

• It encourages reflection, which I can only hope results in a positive “study history lest you repeat it” effect that may directly contribute to improved player skills.

• It creates a tangible artifact of play that I can re-use within the game world. It would be neat for another party to find a page of a fallen adventurer’s journal.

• It’s better than them trying to hunt rats for that 1 XP needed to level up.

So is this heresy unforgivable? Must I burn my GM dice in atonement? Have you done something like this and had interesting effects on the game and player behaviour?

I’m in the early stages of setting up a sandbox setting for potentially multiple groups with variable player rosters. In brainstorming how I would organise my records for such a persistent setting independent of the PC parties, I realised I needed to create a calendar. I’d need to keep track of when things happened so that I could restock dungeons believably, track the progress of event lines the PCs neglect to interrupt, determine the likelihood of items on fallen PCs remaining where they died, and sundry little play logbook things I like keeping track of like local weather.

The last time I ran a game where bothering to track time made a difference I already had a calendar provided by the Forgotten Realms setting; the time previous was more than a decade back and I fudged with an expired real calendar for some year in the 1990s.

But I like building settings and the bits that make them unique, so I didn’t want to use a real calendar, and obviously I wasn’t going to be handed a published fantasy calendar.

I’m also lazy, and I wanted a calendar that was conceptually easy while not being dull. So here’s how I went about building one.

The calendar

So I built a calendar with 7-day weeks, six weeks to a month, one extra day-of-rest “feast day” per two weeks, 360 days to the year, two months to a season, and eight months to a year.

It’s not terribly exciting, but I wasn’t going for exciting. It accomplishes the primary goal of giving me something easily-understandable to write in the headings of each day’s entry in an adventure log.

As a bonus it has all these interesting “non-calendar” days for me to play with. Some of those days are going to be special: the one between Early Summer and Late Summer is obviously Midsummer’s Day; the last day of Winter (well, not really part of the Winter months nor part of the Spring months) is some kind of year-death or new year’s day. Similarly, there are obvious prospects for harvest festivals and holy days. Those non-calendar days that aren’t claimed by religions or seasonal celebrations are going to be plain old feast days or market days or whatever sort of day of rest is culturally appropriate to the setting.

You’ll notice the names of the months aren’t marked. There’s an early and a late month in each season, and to avoid the Marpenoth Problem I’m going to assume that the inhabitants of this world are pragmatic and never saw a need to name the months with anything especial or non-obvious. So we have Late Fall and Early Summer, or New Spring and Old Winter, as references for month names. Really, any fantasy-sounding names I created would, if I were being sensible about it, mean those terms anyway, so made-up names would just be imposing a barrier between the players and their ability to reference time.

If the inhabitants are that pragmatic, and since I’m making it all up anyway and might as well have the world be gameable where it’s not implausible, I figure the days of the month are just going to be tracked with numbers. For spice, I might have some people count “the 10th of Early Summer” and other people count “the 3rd of two of Early Summer”. I kind of like the sound of the latter, though, so I think I’ll count time by default with “the [day]th of [week number] of [month]”. That way, “the 8th” will always be the strange day, the feast day, the day of celebration. I can use the other way of counting days as a marker for a particular culture or nation being odd and foreign, with their 32nds of Old Summer and Twelfths of New Winter. I figure they’ll just count the feast days in there too, as the 15th, 30th, and 45th.

In preparation for a new sandbox campaign I've been pondering encumbrance systems. Encumbrance systems are usually more trouble than they're worth when you just want to get on with the plot or figure out whether you have a -1 or a -2 penalty in a fight. But, in a sandbox there is no overriding plot, and a player who has got their character into such a dicey situation that a 1 point difference matters will need to know which it is.

The trouble with encumbrance systems is that they all seem to involve too much bookkeeping. Even if your group is fine with totalling pounds carried at the beginning of an adventure, it becomes a real pain to manage just as the adventure goes into full swing. Once their characters have collected some coins, used up some oil flasks, lost their collapsible ladder, and decided to lug around that life-sized stone head that they found knocked off a statue six rooms back[1. True story.], most groups either quietly let encumbrance tracking drop or they start grumbling about having to count coins just to swing a sword.

These things really matter in a sandbox, though. How much stuff you choose to lug into the wilderness is just one of many meaningful decisions that can make or break an expedition, and sandbox games thrive on a good ecosystem of meaningful choices for the players to make. I don't want to ditch encumbrance entirely, but I also don't want the dead weight of a pile of finicky rules that make only a small (yet meaningful) difference after a lot of work.

A lightweight encumbrance system

As an alternative to counting pounds, I'm going to use this alternative system that reduces encumbrance calculations to a judgment call, a die roll, and a handful of special cases.

1. Players note their gear as usual. Players can expend a bit more effort and note how each piece of gear is carried (such as in the sack, belt pouch #2, hanging from their belt, etc). They don't have to, but it will give them a psychological advantage in the next step and is often just a good idea for exploration-focused games.

2. The GM looks over the character's load and tries to picture the character hauling all this stuff. Determine whether they're carrying a modest load (a reasonable amount of stuff to carry around), or a heavy load (a lot of stuff). There's no middle category, so err on whichever side is appropriate for the style of game you're running (and be up-front about what that is), or err on the side of modest if they have their gear well-organised. This step is all judgment call, so just go with your gut. Of course, if they're carrying a negligible load such as nothing but a walking stick, a pouch of acorns, and the clothes on their back, then you can just skip the whole thing and say they're totally unencumbered. (In that case: Done!)

(This is where the system interfaces with your game of choice, so I'll be a little vague. I'll use Savage Worlds and D&D as the example systems for what my vague terms mean to me, but if you're decently familiar with your system of choice you should have no trouble figuring out how to handle the roll.)

3. The GM has the player make a roll to test a skill or stat related to raw power.[3. I'm not using Constitution or Endurance–type stats here deliberately. This is about how much you can carry comfortably in general, not about how far or for how long. You can tack on exhaustion and fatigue for lengthy marches orthogonally to this system.] Make the roll routine or of modest difficulty for modest loads and hard or of high difficulty for heavy loads. Stats like Strength or Power are good choices; skills like Soldiering, Sherpa, or Lifting Heavy Stuff are good choices. Whatever it is, be consistent and true to your system. In Savage Worlds I'm going to use a straight Power test, and modest loads will have a Target Number of 4, while heavy loads will be at TN 6. If I were using a WotC variety of Dungeons & Dragons I would have players make a d20 roll, adding their Strength modifier, against a DC of 12 or 18.

4a. If they pass the test, their load is well-packed and they can manœuver under its weight just fine. They are unencumbered so long as their load remains reasonably unchanged. Picking up a fallen purse is fine. Throwing a sack of potatoes over their shoulder is a change in load.

4b. If they failed the test, use the margin of failure to set the encumbrance penalty. In Savage Worlds I would use the difference between the TN and what was actually rolled as a direct penalty to combat rolls and other activities that would be hindered by being encumbered, such as swimming or running away from a hungry [[spinosaurus]]. Because of the TNs I set, this gives a penalty of -1 to -3 for modest loads (and the -3 is really unlikely), and a penalty of -1 to -5 for heavy loads. Also because the rolls are against fixed TNs, characters with higher Power are unlikely to get (much) of a penalty even for heavy loads while weak characters are likely to get a penalty for anything but negligible loads. In D&D I would use the margin of failure in 5-point chunks: within 5 points the penalty would be -2, within 10 points the penalty would be -4, and failure by more than 10 points would be -6 or -8. In an descriptive system the character may gain a condition such as Encumbered or Heavily Encumbered that can be mechanically exploited as usual.

5. The result holds until the situation changes. No re-rolls may be made before the party sets out. We've all had the experience of thinking we'll be fine carrying that load, until we get halfway to where we're going and our arms are falling off. The players may know the encumbrance penalty as soon as the roll is made, but there's nothing they can do about it, except to wait for a chance to repack their load (see below), or dramatically reduce their gear until they're in the next lower category (or completely unencumbered). The results remain even as rations are eaten and arrows are expended. Small, incremental reductions in weight won't make an appreciable difference until the character has a chance to stop and repack and take advantage of the space freed up by the used-up stuff.

On the flip side, they won't have to re-roll either. They can unload it and camp for the night and pack it back up without having to test again if conditions haven't changed. (If they have to repack in a hurry while under fire and in the dark, well, that's a change of conditions!) They can go for days on the same roll, so long as they don't add anything significant to their load (like a stone head).

6. A re-roll is made only when conditions change. Big changes will be obvious and will usually result in starting above from scratch, so I won't bother to cover that. (You may have noticed that the whole system runs on common sense.) There are three special cases for changing your load so that a player can or must make a re-roll.

Repacking the load. Players will want to get rid of those encumbrance penalties by re-rolling. They can only do this by repacking their load after carrying it for a while. "For a while" is left to the GM's discretion to define, but I'm thinking of things like a day's travel, or the experience of fighting, climbing, or balancing across a slippery, narrow stone bridge over a raging waterfall while under the load. (Essentially, either time sweating under the load or terrifying moments really feeling the danger of being encumbered.) If "a while" has passed such that the character (not the player) could reasonably be expected to know that their packing job is not working out for them and if they have a decent amount of time to fuss about with their gear (an hour or during camp—it shouldn't be a trivial amount of time), then they can re-roll their initial Strength test to get a new result. If the player likes, they can instead roll their Smarts (or equivalent, such as D&D's Intelligence) in order to come up with a clever fix for their packing problem. (The GM may want this clever fix described if it seems to matter.) Either way, the new result will give you a new encumbrance penalty, possibly zero. The better of the original and re-rolled encumbrance penalty becomes the new penalty.

Don't use repacking the load if the character is also adding non-trivial stuff to the load. In that case, start from the beginning.

Picking up stuff. Characters just love to pick up stuff and take it with them. Whether it's a huge sack of jewels or a the severed head of a magical stone statue, characters will often pick up large things that make the GM wonder if they should be able to carry that without penalty, but not so great that they've obviously got into kitchen-sink territory. When they do this they make an immediate re-roll as if they were repacking their load, but they may not use Smarts and must take the worse penalty of the new and original rolls. So, if the player rolls well there's no change, but if they roll poorly then the new item is the straw that broke the adventurer's back. However, unlike the original packing roll, once the player has seen the new penalty they may opt to "quit while ahead" and drop whatever it was that forced them to make a new roll. If they choose to leave without the huge sack of jewels because otherwise they'd get a -5 penalty on all rolls, that's a meaningful choice (and perhaps a wise one, given the dangers often near huge sacks of jewels) that the player can make.

Note that if the party sits down on the dead dragon's tail to carefully pack up its hoard, don't use the picking up stuff rule. This is for when they just grab something, stuff it somewhere, and keep going. If they're taking the time to pack up gear and loot fresh, start over by looking at what they're carrying and judging how heavy or modest the load looks. Don't forget to raise an eyebrow of skepticism if they're planning to haul twenty-thousand coins with only a single canvas sack between them! How and where they're packing things becomes much more important when there is a fantastic amount of treasure involved. Getting that kind of haul back is its own logistical challenge.

Dropping the load. Players might have the good sense to have their characters drop their packs before wading into combat. (Technically this doesn't involve a re-roll, but this special case doesn't fit anywhere else.) Only a modestly loaded character may do this, since a heavy load isn't going to be located in a single, easily-dropped pack. This immediately drops their encumbrance penalty to zero, but at the risk that some of their stuff, left unattended, may be messed with.

If something untoward happens to the dropped portion of the load, the GM will have to decide exactly what gear is affected. If the player has noted what gear is stowed where this should be easy, but otherwise the GM can feel free to gleefully roll at random for the stuff in jeopardy, excepting things the character obviously wouldn't drop such as clothing and items used during combat. GMs should also keep in mind that when a character decides to pull out that stowed Wand of Firey Doom, apart from the time it takes to dig it out, it might also be in the dropped load if it hasn't been explicitly noted otherwise. Lots of other complications can be extrapolated from here, I'm sure. Don't be an evil GM, but don't make "I drop my pack" a meaningless choice, either.

(As a design note, dropping the load being limited to modest loads means that there is at least one good reason for very strong characters to not load themselves down like a pack mule.)

The point of the system

All that said, I haven't playtested this system. It looks good on paper, and there are a lot of nice synergies between the few moving parts that it has. Suggestions and criticisms are welcome, though keep in mind that the system's primary design goals are to be simple and fast to use, and to make encumbrance present meaningful choices and consequences that can be somewhat judged beforehand.

My intention is that players should be able to make meaningful choices about how much gear they want their characters to carry without having to slavishly tally every tenth of a pound carried. The system puts more emphasis on how and where something is carried than how many factions of a pound it weighs, which is an easier and more interesting thing for players to engage with, if they so choose.

The two (really three) major categories for encumbrance mean that a player can easily choose whether they will be dealing with the encumbrance system and how much it could potentially impact them. A player can have a restrained but decent load of gear and know what the worst penalty could be, as well as how likely they are to suffer such a penalty. The most significant dial in the system is in the players' hands. It does fall to the GM to judge exactly how a player have set that dial, but the coarse grain of the dial means that players should rarely have it set to a grey zone.

(For perspective, the average Power of d6 on a Savage Worlds character with a modest load means a 75% chance of no penalty, and only a 3% chance of the maximum -3 penalty. Not bad. However, with a heavy load it becomes a 69% chance of at least a -1 penalty, a 25% chance of at least a -3 penalty, and a 3% chance of the maximum -5 penalty. It should also be said that I didn't crunch any of these numbers until I needed them for this parenthetical aside. When I came up with my initial Target Numbers I only needed the basic system competency of knowing how to judge a Target Number.)

The system is fast. It may look like a lot of steps when it's broken down like this, but there's nothing to it really. The GM makes a judgment call, the player rolls a die, and you've got your encumbrance figured out just like that. The longest step is recording the initial pile of gear, which needs to be done anyway in the sort of game where you even care about encumbrance.

The system is also gives some pretty good results. Average characters with modest loads get modest penalties and with heavy loads get heavy penalties. Strong characters can more easily get away with carrying a lot of stuff without penalties, while weak ones almost certainly will suffer some penalties if they carry anything of significance. Note too that the penalties only apply to certain physical tasks, so an weakling apprentice mage might be carrying a heavy pack but they don't care since they're not about to swing a sword or go for a swim.

The system also makes encumbrance a significant consideration when choosing what to carry. Too much stuff and you might get away with it, but the risk of a penalty you'll be stuck with is enough to inspire caution. You only get one shot at the encumbrance roll, so you'd better be happy with what you've decided to pack. You have to commit to a certain set of gear and accept the encumbrance it comes with. No longer will the players be fudging a piton here or an iron ration there, because all the gear juggling is put on the characters' shoulders and abstracted away with a stat roll. The randomness of the penalty and the coarseness of the encumbrance categories means that there's very little gain in trying to game the system, which encourages the players to commit to their choice and move on.

The system also really likes bell curves. The repacking and picking up rules will tend to emphasise the position on the bell curve that the character's Strength occupies relative to the load they're carrying. A character carrying more than their fair share will not only be more likely to get a bad penalty initially, but when repacking they're unlikely to get a better penalty, and when picking stuff up they're likely to get a worse penalty. If you're on the other side of the curve you're likely to keep on truckin' without encumbrance penalty unless you get really ambitious.

It also (in theory) nicely handles incremental changes in encumbrance: if you have a -1 penalty already and you're in the middle of the bell curve or on the favourable side, picking up more stuff is likely to either make your encumbrance no worse, or to only increase it slightly to -2 (all Savage Worlds numbers, here). That still leaves you room to pick up some more stuff and maybe get a -3, at least until you start getting into the grey zone and the GM wonders whether you should really be testing for a heavy load. This possibly needs tweaking to prevent a "portable hole" effect where you can just keep picking up huge sacks of jewels without having your encumbrance penalty increase, perhaps by increasing the TN by one for each prior time that you invoked the picking up rule. but I won't know if this situation will come up often enough to bother until the system has seen a good amount of playtesting.

Credit where credit's due

The encumbrance system I've brewed up was inspired by a number of systems. The Riddle of Steel introduced me to a revolutionary encumbrance system. Here's what I remember of it[2. My memory of the Riddle of Steel encumbrance system may be inaccurate. What I remember, and hence how it inspired my system, is really what matters.]: look at the gear carried and picture someone loaded up with all that. Compare it to a couple of pictures in the book ("moderately encumbered" has a guy with a moderate amount of stuff, well-packed and stowed; "heavily encumbered" is the stereotypical image of an over-loaded adventurer carrying everything but the kitchen sink and borne down by a bulging set of packs and bags), and then assign the character either the none, moderate, or heavy encumbrance penalty. From that I took the idea that you can just eyeball a character's gear and move on.

From the Burning Wheel I took the idea at the core of the Let It Ride mechanic, which forbids re-rolling a test until conditions have substantially changed. The essence is that you roll once to find out the results of the effort, and that result sticks so long as the character is trying to accomplish the same thing. The purpose of Let It Ride is first to keep the game moving, and second to keep the system fair—neither GM nor player can call for a re-rolls to try to get the failure or success that they want.

And finally, Savage Worlds inspired me in the first place to abstract encumbrance away with a single roll. The seed of the idea was planted when I re-read my post on Bookkeeping-free provisions and torches in AD&D, which was in turn inspired by a Rambling Bumblers post of Joshua's entitled Savage Bookkeeping. Doing bookkeeping in the spirit of Savage Worlds means getting the end result—a penalty or whatnot—without tediously counting arrows, torches, or pounds. Once you accept that you don't need to track everything to get the same effect, it becomes much simpler to make encumbrance matter without boring the players.

The short version

To recap, the Lightweight Generic Encumbrance System is:

• Players note the gear they're caring, and possibly where.
• The GM decides if that's next to nothing, a modest load, or a heavy load.
• The player rolls either an easy-to-moderate Strength test (for modest loads) or a hard test (for heavy loads). No roll is needed for negligible loads.
• The encumbrance penalty is the margin of failure of the test and applies to the usual physical tasks.
• Encumbrance tests cannot be re-rolled until conditions change very significantly. This happens when repacking a load, picking up significant stuff, or when the character sits down and packs an entirely new load. Dropping a pack is a special case that can temporarily remove encumbrance penalties.

Let me know what you think, what you would change, and especially what you think if you use this system yourself. Happy hauling!

There are a tonne—a metric megatonne, actually—of roleplayers on the Internet who have never picked up dice, who have never heard of E. Gary Gygax, and who wouldn't recognise what we call "roleplaying" as having any relation to what they do.

Trollsmyth recently wrote about the Harry Potter generation, who have never done any of those because they skipped right by traditional roleplaying and re-invented the wheel on LiveJournal, forums, and in chatrooms.

There is a huge number of kids out there reading, writing, and yes, even roleplaying right now. A sizeable groundswell of interest in fantastical fiction and play that crosses gender lines has risen up in the Harry Potter generation, the likes of which have probably never been seen before.

But you'll notice I mention nothing about games. Regular readers know what I'm talking about: fanfic and free-form roleplay. It's easy to laugh and dismiss this sort of thing (just as RPGs were laughed at and dismissed in my youth, when they weren't being blamed for suicide and devil worship), but here are a bunch of kids so desperate for roleplay that they have built websites and software and communities to facilitate their play. They've done it all on their own.

To be accurate it's not just Harry Potter roleplayers, of course. There are as many online roleplaying subcultures as there are fandoms. In fact, that's why there is little to no connection between "our" roleplaying culture and "their" roleplaying culture: being a natural outgrowth of the connective power of the Internet and the rise of vocal fandoms, fandom roleplaying is a creature without a trace of OD&D's genetic legacy.

But that's all background. My thought is that a lot of these roleplayers are good, and what's more a lot might really enjoy the sort of roleplaying that "we" play. I don't think that there's anything wrong with roleplay that has no connection to traditional pen-and-paper roleplaying or that there's some mythical "real" roleplaying that they're missing out on, but I do think that offering people more options is a great idea.

So why hasn't there been more outreach to this generation of roleplayers growing up under our collective noses? No—the better question is, what's stopping us?

At Places to Go, People to Be, Herb has an excellent thought:

Wouldn't it be great to see every theater with a midnight showing giving out a Harry Potter goody bag sponsored by local gamers. Along with the branded products it could include a version of the S&W quickstart with a more Harry Potter like adventure. Maybe a GORE quickstart (or CARE for Classic Alternative Roleplaying Engine) aimed at the same crowd with 2-3 adventures. Maybe a "welcome to tabletop adventures" website linked to with additional free and pay products building on those materials.

A crazy marketing nightmare? Maybe. It also might be an idea to help the hobby grew a new generation.

So really, the question I want to ask is: What would it take to make this happen?

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Greyhawk any more

First off, I have to disagree with Herb that an old-school quickstart and some HP-like adventures are a good introduction. I haven't talked here about my MU*ing days or the friends I know who do freeform roleplay on LJ, but those experiences and observations give me some immediate insights into how very different are the expectations of this crowd. Dungeon crawls, even featuring young wand-wielding wizards, are not going to be widely successful. These are people who cut their teeth on interpersonal drama, non-violent character conflict, and heavy emotional investment in their characters.

What would S&W look like to someone who's most familiar with player-driven plots and heavy internal roleplay? Some might be able to parse what they're looking at, but the majority are going to find it extremely heavy on rules and wonder what the point is, if they can even make heads or tails of it.

One long-running online roleplay site I know of[1. Otherspace, to be precise.] has (or did) for a long time use FUDGE as a lightweight conflict-resolution system. For online roleplay, even that is pretty heavy. For the purposes of a Harry Potter opening night giveaway, though, something lightweight and very friendly to stories heavy on the character drama would be necessary.[2. Yes, yes, I know you can roleplay with any system. Not every system explains how you can roleplay with it, though, let alone features a core system that makes it obvious how it can be used to play the kinds of stories you already play.] We like our crunch, but crunch is not what will impress this crowd.

So, that's one component such a goody bag needs: A simple, but evocative and flexible system. (Preferably something that uses d6 exclusively, since these are plentiful and familiar.[3. I read a design blog recently that made this point clear to me, and now I can't find it. If anyone knows, let me know in the comments.])

What the heck is this?

Secondly, but rather more importantly, such a goody bag would need a cover sheet that explained, as straightforwardly as possible, answers to the questions "What is roleplaying?" and "What's the point of rules: can't I just make up stories?"

There are some great (and many not-so-great) What Is Roleplaying texts out there among the many roleplaying games that have been published, but all of them assume that you are a complete stranger to roleplaying already. These people aren't the implied reader of those texts. Already being roleplayers, and possible quite sophisticated ones, these readers need to be addressed in the context of the roleplaying that they already do. We want to show off this hobby we enjoy as a new addition to the roleplaying they already enjoy. Talking to them like they're clueless won't fly, nor will any misguided implications that this is somehow "real" roleplaying and what they're doing isn't.

Of course, not everyone in line for a midnight opening of Harry Potter is going to have roleplaying experience. Though many will, the introductory sheet would need to explain things in novice terms as well. That's a tall order, but I think it could be done.

That's the second component needed: A novice-friendly introduction that still appreciates the breadth and depth of roleplaying experience they already might have.

Lend a helping hand

A roleplaying game, even with a good "What is Roleplaying?" introduction, is still going to baffle a very lot of people unless there's something to guide them. This is especially true of people who are already familiar with roleplaying and may not realise there are many different ways to play. An introductory scenario—I hesitate to use the genre-biased term "adventure"—or two that presents a possible template for play would go a long way.

Apart from offering a clear set of signposts to answer the "what now?" question, the included scenarios should also acquaint the players with novel concepts and meta-roles particular to pen-and-paper roleplaying: game masters and dice rolling instead of player consensus, playing a group story instead of a collection of interconnected personal stories, and world against player conflicts, to name just a few.

The goody bag

We know what's in the goody bag now:

1. A novice-friendly introduction that still appreciates the breadth and depth of roleplaying experience they already might have.
2. A simple, but evocative and flexible system.
3. An introductory scenario to model play.

As lovely as the theory is though, is this something that the blogging community could put together? The work involved staggers me and my paltry free time, but the idea of being able to hand out a friendly, curiosity-piquing booklet to the adults and kids lining up outside the next big Harry Potter movie, and to know that the same is being done at theatres across the continent, would be a wonderful thing indeed. It's wonderful enough that my free time is slinking nervously into a corner as I get that look in my eye.

A stray comment left on post at Gaming Brouhaha[1. A post and comment which I can't find now, alas.] led me to a gem of the internet hitherto unknown to me: Strolen's Citadel. It's a community where creative GMs and writers can post, comment on, improve, and rate ideas for setting elements, creatures, plots, and everything else that goes into a game except for the actual play at the table itself. The data is categorised and tagged for easy searching, and their user account system encourages people to submit their own things and to comment on others' work, enriching the material there.

I can't emphasise enough how massive is this community-created store of great ideas, nor the evocative quality of the pieces. There is so much that you could create an entire campaign world of impressive richness just by carefully choosing and combining pieces from Strolen's Citadel.[2. This is something I'm actually contemplating doing.]

A few of my favourites so far which I've found just browsing around:

• Pegoran Doors — Round, tricky doors that guard special places and which are works of art unto themselves.
• The Twelve — In a vast plain, eleven indestructible statues to ancient gods are slowly chipped away by criminals and the enemies of the twelfth god who overthrew the rest.
• The Dolmens of Swaiar — Creepy shrines to a forgotten god, with subtly sinister influences.
• The Bastion - A Light Tower — An abandoned, automatic lighthouse in the middle of the ocean, with the lost refuge of a dead race beneath.
• One Hundred and Twenty One Islands! — A collection of uncharted, odd, dangerous, and interesting islands.

There's so much inspiration to be gained from Strolen's Citadel just by clicking around. In that way it's kind of like a deviantart for game masters.

Doctor Checkmate wrote a sort of review of Frozen Alive (aka Der Fall X701) and mused about the plot element that has the scientist wake up from stasis only to discover that he's suspected of murder. He mentioned frozen colonists as a plot element that might give more wiggle room for weakening the "but I was frozen during the crime!" alibi. I wrote the following as a comment there, but it became elaborate enough that it's worth posting here.

I immediately thought of the colonist idea too since I have Blue Planet right at eye level on the shelf here. You could get around the alibi by adding in mistaken identity. The "colonist" angle isn't really necessary for that, but it does imply that communication between origin and destination is tenuous and that presents many opportunities for fudged, missing, or swapped documents.

For Blue Planet, my thought expanded out to this: A corporate assassin is given extensive, expensive bio-sculpts and a new identity, then shipped as a popsicle through the wormhole with the expectation of picking up her full instructions once she's on Poseidon. She arrives and, lo, happens to be among that unlucky 5% (or whatever it is) that experience partial amnesia. She doesn't know who she is or why there are guns pointed at her, only that she has a mission brief to pick up planet-side.

As a further twist, it's not that the identity swap failed, but her new identity isn't what it was supposed to be, and that other person is a wanted criminal. Did her employer set her up? Was there a mistake made by the bribed emigration clerk? Is someone hijacking the assassin for their own use? Did a double agent intercept the ID swap? Does the assassin get her memory back? If she does, are they her memories? Can she get away and pick up her instructions? Can she trust her mission brief?

I've been thinking about how to handle pseudo-Vancian magic as it appears in D&D-based settings like Forgotten Realms. I want any magic house rules I come up with to maintain the spirit of Savage Worlds, so easy handling and bookkeeping is important. The important part I want to keep about Vancian magic is the thrill of discovering a cool new spell in a dusty tome, and the New Power Edge just doesn't do that.

Having just read Savage Worlds: Three Don’ts at Tales of Rambling Bumblers, I'm not in a hurry to settle on a system until I've got a decent number of play-hours with Savage Worlds under my belt, but I can speculate until then. I would love some feedback from any experienced Savagers and D&D grognards out there, especially those who count themselves as both.

Going old-School

What I've been pondering is making spells a purely in-game element that are acquired by character actions, such as transcribing them from an allied mage's spellbook, research, buying them, or (the most important) finding them in a long-lost spellbook buried in a treasure trove or clutched in the dead(?) fingers of an entombed wizard. Each spell would have a Power Point cost, a more SW-like duration, and a minimum Rank requirement, though this last might trend slightly low relative to D&D spell levels because of the disadvantage (relative to SW's Powers system) of having to search them out in the first place. A Spellcasting skill roll would be used just as with vanilla SW Arcane characters.

To make it work, I was thinking of having the Arcane Background grant access not to the New Power Edge, but instead to a New School Edge with a choice of one of the eight Schools of magic first introduced in AD&D 2nd edition. (For the non-D&D players that's Abjuration, Evocation, Divination, Conjuration, Illusion, Transmutation, Enchantment, and Necromancy.) To learn and cast a given spell would require having access to the spell's School of magic. The Arcane Background Edge would give spellcasters access to three such Schools to start, and more would require spending an advance on the New School Edge.

I'd like some feedback on that idea. I'm not wedded to that particular School-based setup, but I do think an Edge or set of them is necessary to keep D&D-style spellcasters working well in a SW system alongside non-spellcasters. Am I going astray? Is there a better way of representing a world full of many diverse spells without an explosion of Powers, most of which a given mage could never get with their limited number of Edges? I want to keep the awesomeness of Savage Worlds' rules, but I don't want to entirely re-write the parts of the Forgotten Realms that have been shaped by Vancian magic assumptions.

Further variations

I'm considering a couple of tweaks on top of that base, though I think these will happily co-exist with a variety of magic schemes, including vanilla SW Powers.

Using Levi's Overloaded! as a way to manage Power Points

Instead of having a total that goes down, spellcasters keep track of how many points they've cast. They can go over their 10 Power Points (or however many) limit whenever they want, but each spell cast that adds points while the mage is over the threshold triggers a Vigour roll to avoid Fatigue. The effect is that a spellcaster can go all-out if they want, but only with a significant risk of temporarily wrecking or maybe even killing themselves. The usual per-hour Point regeneration would instead bring the accumulated total down away from the danger zone.

Extending spell durations an order of magnitude or two

For example, a spell with a duration of 1 (being 1 round) would last 1 minute or even 1 hour. Buffs could be applied before combat and last long enough to matter; the 2nd order of magnitude change would mean the town priest could bless the heroes before they go to slay the dragon, and it would actually last long enough to matter.[1. I got this part of the suggestion from someone else's post about extending spell durations, but for the life of me I can't find the post to link to it now. Anyone know who I'm stealing from?

Update: I found the source of my inspiration. It's Chris Kucsera's short-but-sweet Hedge Wizards, Wise Women and Adepts: An Alternate Magic System for Savage Worlds, downloaded from Savage Heroes. After re-reading it, I'm thinking of adapting Chris' item-creation rules for my purposes too.] However! The catch is that casting time wouldn't be just an Action, and would be increased by the same order of magnitude. (Or so. A spell that lasts for hours might take ten minutes to cast rather than an hour. Details are for later.) Blessing a party would be an extended ritual, not just a perk tossed off in 6 seconds.

I'm detailing this backwards, since that's really not very D&D-style. To bring this back into line, the above can be mitigated by mages by casting spells with their original casting time (usually one Action). Spells cast like this would have the normal-magnitude spell duration. So, a well-prepared mage might get an entire dungeon's worth of fighting out of one Armour spell and save herself a lot of Power Points, but a mage who found the need for Armour only after coming under attack would be able to maintain it for a very short period of time. Of course Fireballs and the like aren't amenable to longer casting times and are rarely, if ever, useful when there is time for leisurely casting, so spells of Instant duration have round-magnitude casting times.

I really like this modification because it rewards deliberate mages and encourages the use of utility spells without making mages useless when caught unprepared.