Corporate Role-Playing Games

   This is called “Go,” and it is a Chinese game. There are no extensions, no patches, no DLC and no booster packs. It’s just the board – a 19×19 grid – and those black and white stones. That’s it.

   And it’s great.

   This game has endured for twenty-five hundred years without a Second or Third or Fourth or Fifth Edition, and without Twitch.

   What am I getting at, you ask?

   When I was thirteen years old, my dad put me up in a private school, and the other kids there had expensive pastimes like alpine skiing or tennis or bike racing with 10 speed Carbolite Peugeot bikes. Luckily, there was also a D&D club. I chose role-playing games because it wasn’t as expensive a hobby. Three core books – yay!

   Lots of things have changed since.

   There was this little debate on Twitter about a year ago: Was it possible to play D&D for free? At first, I thought it was a joke. Of course you can play D&D for free – or any other role-playing game, for that matter.

   Spend Money Regularly to Stay Engaged in Your Hobby is a blatant marketing model, and it is contrary to almost everything Gygax and Arneson envisioned in the very beginning. Granted, these guys were no businessmen – not in the corporate sense, that is. We must remember how Gygax, in the beginning, was opposed to the idea of published adventures. In his own vision of D&D, you were supposed to stay engaged with the hobby through your very own creative process and imagination. The merchandise line itself was named Products of Your Imagination.

   Imagine that.

   I’m still running First Edition AD&D. To be frank, I feel both satisfied and guilty at the same time. Satisfied, because those consecutive editions are nothing but an attempt at making more money. Guilty, because I clearly don’t do anything to “help my hobby,” as they say.

   Then again, where does that notion of helping your hobby even comes from? Is my dad helping chess in any way? He still plays with his old chessboard and pieces from the sixties – and he only ever plays with his friends and a few neighbors. My dad really isn’t helping the hobby of chess.

   I don’t think the hobby of chess needs any help from anyone.

   Now, there is a major difference between role-playing games and Dungeons & Dragons. Role-playing games are like chess – they don’t belong to anyone, and don’t need any help. Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, belongs to Hasbro, and Hasbro’s purpose is to make money. Thus, D&D needs help. It’s weird, I know.

   Imagine how weird it’d be if chess belonged to Hasbro and suddenly needed “help.”

   People buy stuff. It’s what they do. It’s their voice. When they’re happy, they buy. When they’re unhappy, they buy something else. If they agree, they buy, and they buy differently if they happen to disagree. That hasn’t changed. People keep buying.

   What’s actually changed is: small ain’t beautiful no more.

   Or rather, because of the Internet, small can sometimes get blown to stratospheric heights, like Matt Colville’s Strongholds and Followers. a simple homebrew idea put up on Kickstarter that suddenly collects over two million dollars. In this case, small is so beautiful it becomes HUGE.

   But then, “small” business people feel threatened by smaller bloggers or non-profits. That, also, is contrary to Gygax and Arneson’s original vision. Someone told Jeff Berry that his amazing blog was “a detriment to their business interests.” Man, oh man.

   There are way too many business interests in this world and definitely not enough genuine people like my friend Jeff / Chirine ba Kal.

   If you remove the Internet from this equation, it’s 1980 all over again: every Dungeon Master developing his or her own campaign, some DMs sending their work over to Dragon Magazine and crossing their fingers – and once in a blue moon, a lucky one like Lawrence Schick (White Plume Mountain) seeing his creation published.

   Nowadays, anybody can be Lawrence Schick, write his or her own White Plume Mountain, and sell it. Unless you put your stuff online for free, that is – and then you become a detriment to somebody else’s business interests…

   And is there really more variety now?

   Maybe, maybe not.

   When White Plume Mountain came out in ‘79, everybody played that adventure simultaneously. Same thing with Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, one year later. At one point, every AD&D character I came across in the club owned a blaster rifle, wore a suit of powered armor, or wielded the sword Blackrazor. Party #1 and party #2 and party #3 met at the Green Dragon Inn, and it ended in a Star Wars gunfight. Everyone had had the chance to explore a spaceship; an entire friggin’ fleet had crashed in Western Flanaess.

   Most of us still play the same adventure at the same time in 2018. Think Tomb of Annihilation.

   Sly Flourish said to Chris Perkins that he shouldn’t spoil the ending of Tomb of Annihilation in his streamed game. To which Perkins politely replied, “But you can always change the ending!”

   Well, yes. And now we’re back to square one, aren’t we? Or rather, we’ve come full circle. It’s your homebrew game. Like in 1980.

   Corporate is the new norm. Anything that was original and one-of-a-kind becomes corporate sooner or later. For instance, Person of Interest told the story of one man and his offstage efforts to change the world all by himself, or at least make it a better place – with no government oversight, no sponsors, and no investors. Wisdom of the Crowd was a corporate rehash of Person of Interest.

   Same thing happened with The Mentalist. This guy was gifted, knowledgeable, very charismatic, and always did his own thing on his own terms. Bull is nothing but a corporate retelling of The Mentalist.

   Everything geeky has now become something corporate and (most of the time) entirely unrelated. Google searches are fascinating.

• “Greyhawk” is a consulting firm
• “Palantir” is a technology company
• “Orthanc” is a medical imaging server

   Take the next fresh new thing, and turn it into a corporate thing.

   Role-playing games aren’t any different. D&D once was an edgy, fresh new thing. Arneson and Gygax didn’t intend for this hobby to perpetually need its player’s influx of cash.

   Irreconcilable conundrum?

   It’s a blessing, in fact. Cheaper than Peugeot bikes, remember? Anyone can role-play. And I really do mean anyone. Pick up a few dice or one of those dice rolling apps, choose a system – Tri-Stat, Black Hack, whatever – and start a game. The wine remains the same, even though they keep pouring it into a different container every ten years or so. Companies are containers. Big corporations are bound to be nothing more than scattered footnotes in the checkered history of tabletop role-playing games.

The Truth About Maps

   Maps are a universal staple of tabletop role-playing games. Everybody loves maps. But I recently came to the realization that maps are, in fact, almost useless. And here’s why.

   For four years now, I have been running a First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in Greyhawk, 150 years before the Nyrond / Great Kingdom split. After fourteen game sessions and 9 different adventures, the player characters still don’t own a map of their region – and they don’t seem to need one. The ranger knows how to get from point A to point B most of the time, and even my own “DM’s map” is nothing more than a sketch made in 2015, onto which I keep adding details and numbers as the campaign progresses.

   One cannot even compare my lousy DM sketch to the gorgeous map of the Sword Coast people use when they run 5E. But honestly though, I don’t think I need much more than this little sketch. If the PCs ever leave the area and head for Rauxes, Irongate, or Greyhawk, I’ll just make another sketch, and continue the story.

   In The Lord of the Rings, the heroes don’t have maps – they have guides, which is much more reliable. Gandalf knows a shortcut to get from Rivendell to Lothlórien. Aragorn knows the way from Lothlórien to Edoras. Gollum knows how to get into Mordor without going through the Black Gate...

   “Hold your horses,” I can hear someone say. “Tabletop role-playing games stems from Tolkien and Robert E. Howard – and these books had maps!”

   Sure, I say. There’s no denying it: we are a visual generation. The Lord of the Rings have beautiful maps, but they’re meant for the reader. Aragorn himself don’t have these maps, and never will. What kind of mapping do people in a medieval world really have access to? Think about it. Drawing accurate maps is a hard thing. Even good old Italy is a misshapen blob on most medieval maps – and Italy is a rather straightforward peninsula! If they couldn’t even get Italy right, what about the rest?

   Even Florida (and that is after the end of the Middle Ages) is fucked up on some sixteenth-century maps. Florida is even simpler than Italy, and they still couldn’t get it right until 1820!

   If I ever provide my players with a map of Rel Mord and its surroundings, it’ll be full of hilarious mistakes and wildly inaccurate, believe me.

   And what about those beloved dungeon maps? As Dungeon Masters, do we really need such maps or could we possibly do without them? The Caves of Chaos, that is okay. The Tomb of Horrors, alright. But what about sprawling megadungeons like the Tekumel Underworld or the Underdark – who needs a complete and accurate map of that?

   In my First Edition AD&D game, I no longer map my dungeons. I build interesting rooms and passages – bottleneck locations where fighting is bound to occur, and that’s it. The only other thing I need is an intuitive chart of what that labyrinthine complex might look like. A “dungeon flowchart,” if you will.

   The Three-Tiered Room is a complete diorama, and so is the Obelisk Chamber. The Duergar Throne Room and the Shrine of No Spells both use the same basic terrain, only with different bits and accessories. The Duergar Maze and the Deep Lakes don’t have fixed, pre-assigned terrain. And all remaining areas can be described orally. I don’t need a map.

   “You went through eleven different rooms, nine of them smallish and all of them empty except for excessively thick dust and a few pieces of decayed furniture. No secret doors and no scattered bones anywhere.”

   “Can you map these rooms for us?”

   “You go right ahead and do it yourselves. The nine small rooms are more or less clustered around the two larger rooms, separated by various short passages.”

   Players 1 and 2 come up with two very different maps. Roll INT checks. “Maybe the cleric was a little muddled. There is a slight stench in the air; spores, maybe, or weird unseen fungi... Anyway, the thief appears to be right. His map is fairly accurate. Now, what do you want to do?”

   If the players should ever decide to lure the Duergars away from their Throne Room and ambush them in some corridor where they can take them two at a time, no problem. I can whip up any stretch of corridor with modular dungeon walls. “You made enough noise banging shields together for five minutes – the Duergars are coming. You already see five or six of them. Do you prefer a straight corridor, a T-shape, or one with a 90-degree angle?” The Duergar Maze sector certainly has at least one straight corridor, one T-shaped passage, and many 90-degree angles. I’ll build whatever I need. What I don’t need is a complete blueprint of that rather large maze.

   Again, maps are a universal staple of tabletop role-playing games, and that ain’t going to change anytime soon. Everybody loves maps – and that includes Yours Truly. Because a beautiful fantasy map is like a beautifully painted Tiamat or Orcus figure: it’s pretty nice to have, but you can run memorable games and campaigns without it.

The Crazy Birthday Dungeon Dive

   If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll remember the megadungeon which required so much effort for my players to schematically map. You can read that post, The Great Halloween Dungeon Dive, in the archives, November 2016.

   In the real world, it’s my birthday. And on my birthday, I like to go big.

   In the game world, the valiant PCs are venturing back into “their” dungeon, because what’s the use of owning a unique map of a multilayered labyrinth if you don’t actually explore additional levels of it here and there?

   Last time, in The Dark Pillar (June 2017 in the archives), the party had to touch one of seven runes in order to “lock in” their next destination inside the megadungeon. At that point, there was only one character left standing: the cleric. So, he selected a rune at random..................

   This time, the party passes through the same old portal, but they appear in a chamber they’ve never seen before: a peculiar L-shaped chamber with remnants of ancient, torn down walls, and three large patches of black moss. The group immediately has to start making Saving Throws. Both magic-users fail to save vs Spell (ironic, I know) and lose all of their memories from the last 24 hours. The cleric of Boccob, Brother Thomas, also becomes amnesic. But that’s not all. The magic-users, the barbarian, and one NPC start experiencing a sudden, powerful thirst – and they are irresistibly drawn towards a lone cask further away in the L-shaped room, close to a pair of dark archways. Those who are not amnesic, or amnesic but not thirsty, try to keep the others from reaching that cask – it can’t be anything good in there, can’t it?

   One of the magic-users, Klynch, has an intelligent +3 dagger named Guthzan, and this cool 620-year-old weapon has seen a lot of dungeons and monsters. Telepathically, it says to its wielder, “Obliviax, also known as Memory Moss. To regain your memories and spells, you need to consume a tiny bit of the moss itself.”

   Klynch runs to the nearest patch of black moss and starts to chomp away. But it’s the wrong obliviax, and now he’s stuck with the cleric’s memories and healing spells.

   Meanwhile, the barbarian drinks from the cask while Landa, the cleric of Istus, tackles a thirsty NPC to prevent him from drinking. That is when a rust monster comes bolting in through one of the archways at the other end of the room. After drinking from the cask, the barbarian fails to save vs Polymorph, turning into a huge orc chieftain! That orc runs towards the rust monster and expertly grapples it to prevent it from getting to his (armor-clad) friends.

   The rust monster manages to hit the orc-barbarian’s great axe and the Hobbit bard’s chainmail. The axe is ruined, but the +2 chainmail saves. Brother Thomas refuses to attack the rust monster with a precious +3 mace that he brought back from Hell, so the bard casts shillelagh on his own instrument, transforming a guiterne into a magical wooden axe. With that axe, the bard strikes the rust monster.

   The second magic-user, Heir, drinks from the cask, but since he wears a Circlet of Proof Against Petrification and Polymorph, he’s fine.

   Brother Thomas had had enough of that damn cask and topples it single-handedly with an excellent STR check.

   Klynch drinks from the cask even though it’s now on the floor: he’s still thirsty as fuck, and urgently needs to wash down the vile taste of the obliviax. He successfully saves vs Polymorph, thus remaining his good old freckled, redheaded self.

   Then, a gauth shows up in the central archway – dispelling the two walls of stone masquerading as floors in the second half of the L-shaped room. PCs, NPCs, rust monster, toppled cask – everything and everyone falls down into a pit below, except for Brother Thomas who wears a Ring of Mary Poppins – I mean Feather Falling.

   Inside the pit they are greeted by giant ants, and something else emerging ever so slowly from a gaping cave-mouth.

   “Is that an otyugh?”

   “I recognize the stink...”

   In the adjacent pit, two NPCs are confronted with a fire elemental and a moving wall of fire. Now it’s kicking into high gear – and really feels like old-fashioned AD&D.

   No magic missiles nor lightning bolts available, since the memories and spells of the two magic-users are still trapped inside the two remaining obliviaxes. Anyway, gauths can reflect spells back towards their casters, so it’s probably better this way. The barbarian – the orc chieftain, if you prefer – fires arrow upon arrow at the gauth, hitting home most of the time as barbarians are wont to do. The gauth’s eye-rays cause serious wounds on both Brother Thomas and the barbarian, and telekinesis on one of the NPCs (look for a flying dude somewhere in the next pics). After round four, a comically arrow-studded gauth retreats behind the wall, and human cultists come forth in lieu of their master. They start casting magic missiles down on the party.

   The otyugh is locked in savage combat with Brother Tom while Klynch, Heir and Landa are busy finishing off those pesky giant ants.

   And where is the bard in all of that? Well, he drank his Potion of Spider Climbing and got back out of that pit to collect pieces of the Memory Moss. Oh, and now he’s singing too – a special, enchanted song that can conjure up a wolf and a panther. Those magical beasts appear out of thin air six rounds later, just as the bard prepares to fling the pieces of black moss into the pit for his hapless friends to snack on. He commands the wolf and the panther to run along the top of the dividing wall between the pits, in order to attack the cultists and the gauth at the other end.

   Brother Tom is down to single-digit HP and has to heal himself with the three cure light wounds kept in his Ring of Spell Storing. The otyugh is still swinging, and the orc-barbarian steps in with his spare battle axe. “Damn rust monster!”

   The bard spider climbs back down into the pit and suddenly feels like he’s being touched inappropriately. It’s a stunjelly – appropriately voiced by Kevin Spacey.

   The wolf and the panther surge through the central archway and simultaneously jump right onto the cultists. Screams of terror and pain are heard.

   Heir gobbles up exactly the right piece of obliviax, instantly regaining his own memories / spells. Brother Tom swallows the remaining piece of moss, and gains Klynch’s magic-user spells. The cleric can cast magic missile? Welcome to the Twilight Zone!

   After they finish off that otyugh and the last giant ant, the party can finally breathe a little. They no longer hear anything coming from beyond the archway upstairs. Several cultists may be dead, but the bard’s wolf and panther are nowhere to be seen, either.

   Klynch heals some of his wounded comrades – and actually contemplates switching classes and becoming a cleric. The party breaks down a small wooden door in the corner of the pit, right next to the otyugh’s cave; they enter the corridor beyond, except for the barbarian. With one NPC to back him up, our favorite orc chieftain climbs towards the archway where gauth and cultists were last seen. It’s a ballsy move.

   Glyph of warding – ouch! Barbarian and NPC both take 10 points of damage. And there are more archways back there with (maybe) more glyphs of warding. They hesitate...

   Of all the PCs and NPCs who entered the corridor past the wooden door, any nonhumans are teleported into a room with churning, billowing cloud walls, and an old stone sarcophagus in the center. The other characters are transported into a room with extremely high walls and a colossal statue of a wildebeest in the center.

   The cloud walls apparently allow someone to perceive scenes from the past – or maybe other planes of existence. After a while, Landa sees a clear image of the Cat Lord standing alone in a forest glade, holding a shovel and trying to retrieve some lost treasure. The PCs pry open the mysterious sarcophagus to reveal an old skeleton, a broadsword, a shield, and two javelins.

   In the other location, the Humans soon discover that the room in which they stand will shift ever so slightly whenever they are all near the same wall. Plus, there is an exact, upside-down replica of the big wildebeest statue on the ceiling, about 120 feet above their heads. Only, there is an exit up there – a corridor. Heir casts spider climb and starts making his way up. The room keeps shifting some more as he climbs further up the wall. Soon the entire room becomes slanted enough for the other three characters to “climb” that same wall as if it were nothing more than a 30-degree stone ramp. They keep climbing and the room keeps shifting towards a perfectly horizontal position, with one colossal statue at each end.

   When Heir is just 10 feet away from the “ceiling,” and the rest of the party about halfway, five cultists jump inside the room from that lone corridor – and their added weight suddenly slams the whole room back into a vertical position. Everyone falls headlong à la Wile E. Coyote, except for the feather falling Brother Tom.

   Heir drops from a height of 10 feet and only takes 3 HP of damage. The two others take 12 HP of damage each after a 59-foot fall. Klynch – the party’s healer, for now – is out cold at 0 HP. Martigan the NPC fighter is at -4 HP.

   While peacefully feather falling towards the action, Brother Tom casts stinking cloud on 4 of the 5 cultists. Heir then casts his fireball at the same spot, engulfing all 5 cultists and creating a brand new kind of D&D stench: the carbonized stinking cloud!

   Two of the cultists fail to save vs Spell, and die. The three survivors attack Heir. One cultist charges him with a dagger while the other two cast 4 magic missiles.

   In the “nonhumans’ room,” two more cultists emerge from the eerie cloud walls, accompanied by a displacer beast. They attack the Elf cleric, the Hobbit bard, and a Dwarf NPC. For some reason, the displacer beast avoids striking the Elf...

   And this is where we had to hit pause. Yes, it sucks, and I hate to be Captain Buzzkill. It was 5 PM on a Sunday, and the FLGS was closing – we were literally last out the door.

   Regular readers know that I no longer build my games on the traditional paradigm, with the boss fight at the end, Hollywood-style. It doesn’t work for my friends and I anymore. Our circumstances have changed since the eighties. Many, many times, we didn’t even get to that boss fight. Nowadays my game design model is, 1) introduction; 2) boss fight; 3) role-play + puzzles + lesser fights.

   In this game session, we sailed through two and a half of those three stages. What’s left is a little fighting, and some role-playing.

   The party did pretty well, all things considered. The session ended with everyone still standing except for Klynch and one NPC. The risk management in the opening scene made a real difference. That chaotic polymorph cask / obliviax / rust monster trio could have caused much more harm. When I play-tested it at home, it ended with the two clerics in their undergarments, chain or splintered mail gone, and Brother Tom turned into a hobgoblin. Klynch had been polymorphed into a troglodyte, and Martigan into an orc. The bard was amnesic, without any spells, and his short sword +2 was gone. Landa was also amnesic. It was fun.

   The unremitting mayhem was quite different in the actual game – the cask only polymorphed one PC, and the rust monster only destroyed a single, non-magical weapon, and no armor whatsoever!

   The player characters remained within 8 squares of each other 95% of the time. When they fell into the twin pits they all fell on the same side. Good for them – they didn’t have to fight the fire elemental; bad for me – I built the whole left side of that wicked room for nothing. But it is part of a DM’s job: the players never do what you expect them to do. Role-Playing Games 101.

   Stay tuned for the conclusions – plural, aye, since the party is now split in three!

Return to the Caves of Chaos

   July 29 was a big role-playing day for my friends and I. An entire afternoon / evening of old school tabletop gaming. It had been literally years since we last played anything longer than a six-hour game. We had twelve hours to game on July 29. So I thought, by Crom – an entire adventure must be prepared, right?

   Wrong.

   Twelve hours is nothing. Well, almost nothing. The guys selected pregen characters. We did a little intro. They met a few important NPCs. Then the dungeon exploration began: one hunting drake, one zombie, two ghouls, a group of evil adventurers, seven goblins and nine skeletons. That’s it. And then the big finish – a clash with the High Priest and his acolytes. But it was forced, and not the best part of the game. In my opinion, the best part was a weird and complex clash with a group of rival (and evil) adventurers. This picture shows the very beginning of it. A Jason action figure was added just for fun. But no. Undead Masked Storm Giant will be encountered some other time, maybe.

   I ran the classic module The Keep on the Borderlands. I had prepped everything – the characters inside the Keep, a little smuggling intrigue underneath the tavern, nasty things in the forest, plus an entire side quest for each and every entrance to the Caves of Chaos (except the owlbear’s and the ogre’s.) And of course the Chapel of Chaos itself, complete with beautiful high priest and acolytes figures from Otherworld Miniatures in the UK.

   The party didn’t even peek inside the owlbear’s lair or the ogre’s cave. They entered through “E” and never looked back. They explored a lot, fought some monsters, but didn’t go near the kobolds nor the orcs. I didn’t even take the trogs, hobgoblins, orcs and kobolds out of my miniatures container. When one of my friends, hungrier than the others maybe, said, “It’s seven, guys. Pizza time?” it hit me: we wouldn’t have enough time to go through even half of what I had prepared.

   Actually, I had to shortcut the whole thing in order to bust out my 4′ x 2′ Chapel of Chaos and play that big climactic finish. After squaring off against a group of slightly evil adventurers and acquiring some cool magical items, the party found a “secret” secret door that was not on any map, and reached the Chapel right away. It was already 9:45 PM when we started that big set-piece encounter.

   Anybody can run a good old First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game. But nobody can erase thirty-five years of wargames and board games and video games. Ergo, your good old First Edition AD&D session will be much closer to World of Warcraft than the First Edition AD&D you remember. The only way you could really do this is with three players who just woke up from 35 years of suspended animation. If you happen to know such guys, let me know – I’m curious to give this experiment a worthy try.

   The Chapel of Chaos proved to be an anticlimax. The party put everything – and I mean, everything – on the Dwarf. He wore the Elven Brooch of Hiding From Undead, drank the Potion of Haste, and was the recipient of an obscurement spell cast by the druid. The Dwarf patiently advanced in those crooked tunnels, hacking enemies that couldn’t see him and needed to roll 20 in order to hit. The other PCs followed in the Dwarf’s footsteps, shooting a few arrows or darts, but mostly they admired the Chapel of Chaos and drew excellent charcoal renditions of the obelisk, gargoyles and Altar.

   The monk went a little crazy when he used his newfound Sandals of Jumping to leap past the giant tentacles pit and come face-to-face with two of the acolytes. That part was memorable, and honestly quite reminiscent of pre-Splinter Cell, pre-World of Warcraft, old-school Dungeons & Dragons.

   You know that feeling? When one character (usually the thief) breaks away from the rest of the party and just goes completely bananas? Good times.

   I did not remember how long these classic modules took. What we played on July 29 was nothing but a very rough outline of The Keep on the Borderlands. Playing through the entire adventure would take us something like 50 hours of gaming. Hours that we simply don’t have.

   Still, this special event was pretty darn cool. Next up: it’s my big annual birthday game at the FLGS, with 7 players and lots of guaranteed mayhem! Remember last year, when the party went to Hell – literally?

Miniatures

   This post is a collection of personal tips and analysis regarding miniatures. You may find it, or some of it, useful, and even interesting. As always, take what works for you, and leave the rest – that’s what the almighty blogosphere is all about.

   I first started to paint minis when I was 13 years old, and I still have a few of the figures I painted back in those days. Needless to say, they are ugly. But then again, the sculpts themselves were not that good, especially if you compare to the amazing figures available today.

   My painting skills improved over a period of five years, and then I quit painting minis because I started to play different games that did not really require them. Fast forward to 2014 and I picked up the brushes again, because I started to run a good old First Edition AD&D campaign, and who in their right mind would ever want to do that without some miniatures?

   Geeking out for real here.

1. THE PAINTING

   Painting miniatures is difficult. It’s far from being brain surgery, but still much more difficult than making toast. Don’t get deterred by the breathtaking stuff you see online. If you look things up on the Internet, honestly, you’ll never start anything new, ever. You won’t take up chess, because Garry Kasparov. You won’t take up sculpture, because Michelangelo. You won’t take up basketball, because Michael Jordan. And you won’t take up miniatures painting, because HopeRiver.

   Of course, if you type “Space Marines” into Google, you’ll get the best, most gorgeous Space Marines on the Internet. These guys are professional figure painters. The little ordinary painter won’t post pictures of his Space Marines. But trust me when I tell you – there are way more crappy Space Marines than there are professional ones.

   Whatever the heck it is that you do, somebody on the Internet is ten times better at it, and if everyone who played basketball quit playing after watching the NBA guys, that would be a damn shame. So keep playing, and keep painting. Just don’t obsess over it.

   Know that HopeRiver is out there, and that her work is awesome. If you ever need one important figure professionally painted, hit her up for a commission, you won’t be disappointed. But for the rest, don’t look at the Internet too much. Paint your own minis, and try to improve yourself over time.

   Start with the easy stuff. Paint some elementals, zombies, and werewolves. Elementals don’t carry equipment: they don’t have belts, pouches, backpacks, bracers, talismans or fur-lined cloaks. You’ll tackle these later. Begin by practicing on creatures with less detail. Zombies are excellent to practice layering – if the result is ugly, it’ll still work, because that ugly shade is rotting flesh and clothing.

   And when you put those figures on the table during a game, if there is one player who says, “Shitty paint job,” then you can reply, “Well, you know I do this for free, don’t you? I run three or four games a year for you guys, and also paint all the miniatures. I don’t get a buck out of it. When did you run your last game?”

   Professor Barker started to use miniatures in his campaign back in 1976, and he used to say, “Miniatures need only be good enough.”

   Start painting, take good care of your brushes, and persevere. The first ten figures will look like crap. Then you’ll get better. And you will know when you reach your very own “good enough”.

   For instance, this ettin is perfectly okay to put on the game table. When you pull it out, your players certainly won’t start admiring the shading techniques you used; they’re just gonna say, “Ettin, shit. You kill it, Eric. You’ve got your ranger damage bonus thing.”

   Even if you paint the most subtle, exquisite nuances, who’s really going to enjoy them? You can’t even properly photograph miniatures unless you’re in a professional studio environment with the correct lighting and all that crap. Otherwise, there’s always gonna be a glare or something. You don’t want to have to become a professional photographer also.

   Tabletop gamers and professional miniature photographers are two separate things. Some professional miniature photographers are also tabletop gamers, sure – but it’s not an absolute rule.

   In my humble opinion, even ‘ardcoat is optional. It depends on the figure. Magma elemental: yes. Stone golem: no. Magma is shiny. Stone isn’t. And Citadel’s ardcoat is very shiny. So shiny in fact, it’ll make you lose part of your drybrush highlights. I won’t use ‘ardcoat on every figure. What’s up with a shiny bugbear? I have also decided not to use it on player character minis, either. I do not want PCs to shine (pun unintended).

2. PLANNING A GAME

   “Which figures do I absolutely want the party to encounter?” This is the first question I ask myself when planning a new session. Start with what you want to see on the table for sure, and then build around that and add other monsters / enemies that are less likely to make an appearance.

   This is one very important thing I’ve learned. The boss is not necessarily what I call the core encounter – or busiest encounter – of the game. Miniatures are nothing but a gaming aid meant to clarify chaotic / complex situations. From a miniatures point of view, your core encounter is the one where you have the most figures out on the table at the same time. I’ve got a lot of unpainted cultists: they’re going to be a core encounter sometime in the near future. I’ve also got a shitload of unpainted orcs: that’s gonna be a core encounter next year. Make yourself a painting schedule: it helps a lot.

   No monster is boring. This is a role-playing game, not a video game. Give this monster a story. Make it part of something bigger. I recently took simple skeletons and made them amazing by conjugating them with living frescoes à la Tegel Manor – they regenerated any broken bones from painted bones flying out of the frescoes, which were huge eternal battlefields scattered with bones. Players loved it.

   Some creatures are unpopular, and there’s not much we can do about it. Sculptors don’t think it’s even worth their time and effort. Don’t search for bandits: you won’t find any. I mean, real bandits – bare-chested, with rotten pants and matted hair and knives and clubs. Nobody makes them. And don’t try to find female undead, either. Ghoul, zombie, mummy or lich, nobody makes female versions of those. And don’t go looking for Lava Children, one of my favorite monsters from the original Fiend Folio. They don’t exist. Trust me. I checked. And you won’t find any figure of the first Cat Lord from Monster Manual II – and the logical replacement for it, Michael Jackson miniatures, are not available in 28mm.

3. MINIS OR NO MINIS?

   In the ‘90s, miniatures were “out”. Believe it or not, even Dungeons & Dragons was “out” between 1989 and 2000. Some folks thought it was a superior stage of evolution in role-playing games. I won’t dive into this topic here. No sir.

   I used to play in a campaign like that. Pure thought. Everything was only described to us orally. Never a single map. Never a handout. Never a picture. And I really mean n-e-v-e-r. Our brains are the most powerful computers, right?

   One day, we got into a big fight in the middle of the audience chamber of some petty Lord, and it was quite confusing. At the beginning of round three or four I said, “Hold on. When you say, ‘the two guards that initially stood by the door’, which door are you referring to exactly? The one we entered through, or the one the Lord used? And those three other guards hanging by the fireplace? You said the Lord went to stand close to the fireplace, right? How come I am currently fighting one of those ‘three other guards’, but am still ‘on opposite sides of the room’ in relation to that damn Lord? Man, lemme draw a quick little map here...”

   And I did.

   The other players were very glad to finally have an overview of what was happening. It made things less vague. “Theater of the Mind” is okay when it’s just the PCs against two big monsters, because each player knows if he or she is fighting Mr Ogre or Mr Troll. But when it’s 6 player characters against 5 guards plus 1 Seneschal and 1 Lord, you’ll definitely need something visual.

   And this, by the way, is also why you don’t need a Demogorgon miniature. When it’s “the entire party against one big baddie” you won’t need minis: it’s a static fight scene. Big baddie in the center, characters around it. No need for a visual. Players can process that.

   Even in those games that are not usually associated with miniatures, you will need to use miniatures – or at least a map – once in a while. One of my friends runs the Walker in the Wastes campaign for Call of Cthulhu. Most games, we don’t need miniatures. But there was this time at the end of chapter one – crazy, giant battle in the middle of an Inuit village – and that utter mayhem called for almost fifty figures on the table.

   Miniatures are to tabletop role-playing games what video replay is to professional sports. The game is the thing. Minis are nothing but a pretty cool gaming aid.

   Know when to use this gaming aid, and when not to bother with miniatures at all. Also, know when there’s room for improvement in your painting technique, and when your figures are good enough. Chances are, they may be good enough already.

Strongholds & Followers

   When something this big happens, there is going to be a few blog posts about it. They say it is one of the top ten most profitable Kickstarters of all time. Two million dollars, just to write a game supplement – that is really something. Let’s do the math, shall we? Word count in a normal GURPS or White Wolf supplement hovers around 60K. Divide two millions by 60,000 and lo and behold – Matt Colville will earn $34 per word he types. It’s almost absurd. This right here is peak RPG profit margin if there was ever such a thing.

   Between Arneson and Gygax who both ended their lives in near poverty, and Steven Erikson who received one million dollars for his entire Malazan Book of the Fallen (ten tomes and over 2 million words total), this Strongholds & Followers thing looks like an aberration. Erikson earned 50 cents per word – which is already a very sweet deal for a writer.

   If Colville had been writing this blog post, he would have made $5,440 already.

   But how can his book ever live up to its landmark profit margin? It’s unimaginable. The end result is bound to be a disappointment. Yes, I admit I am curious to see that “two-million-dollar supplement”. At least one of my friends will buy it, since he buys everything RPG. But I don’t need to buy it, since I already have Lion Rampant’s original Ars Magica.

   Because that’s just it, isn’t it? Strongholds & Followers is really Ars Magica for D&D.

   Ars Magica is a role-playing game of political alliances, political borders, diplomacy, intrigue, public relations with the “mundanes”, tribunals, and basically managing the resources of a covenant. The magi have Companions and Grogs – in other words, followers –, and they seldom have to trade and interact with other covenants. My friends and I played Ars Magica for a solid ten years, and it was awesome. Here’s a confession: sometimes you will skip the tedious upkeep and go straight to the next adventure. Who around the table is going to make contact with that old beekeeper who lives downhill from the covenant? Who wants to role-play the boring negotiation scene with the local fishermen? Vincent, you up for it? Fuck that. Just roll percentile dice and be done with it.

   Sooner or later, the magi always end up going on yet another adventure anyway – and leaving the covenant into the (usually) capable hands of some NPC. So, the covenant or stronghold or temple isn’t the centrepiece of the game; embarking on adventures is still the centrepiece. True sedentary campaigns only work up to a certain point.

   And let’s not forget vis. What is an Ars Magica covenant without a source of vis? For those who are definitely not familiar, what we call “vis” is the main commodity in Ars Magica. Raw vis consists of physical, storable, tradable “magic points” that need to be harvested in remote magical places (for instance, a sacred glade or mysterious cavern) at exactly the right time of year. Covenants usually have jurisdiction over one such magical place. Some covenants can control two, three, or even four different vis sources. Very powerful / influential covenants may control five vis sources – we’re talking between 15 and 30 resident magi here. And of course there are some “disputed” sources of vis. These may be located halfway between covenant A and covenant B, or maybe there was a very old clause in that covenant’s charter about the magi from the neighboring covenant being allowed to harvest a fixed quantity of vis once every seven seasons – but the head of the covenant has been replaced in the meanwhile, and that new master refuses to honor that outdated clause. Clashes often ensue. Sometimes, the dreaded Mage Tribunals are needed to settle disputes – and the votes there can be bought... with vis, obviously!

   Now, tell me why in hell wouldn’t Matt Colville implement something eerily similar to vis in Strongholds & Followers, some kind of magic currency that will generate constant competition between neighboring Strongholds / Temples / Towers, and force the PCs or their followers to encroach upon the domains of rival Strongholds / Temples / Towers? I believe Colville would be crazy not to include that.

   In the end, bringing higher level D&D characters into a geopolitical Ars Magica adjacent setting is not a bad idea. It’s the sort of thing DMs do all the time in their home campaigns. I had a friend who ran an extensive, multigroup campaign of HârnMaster set in Middle-Earth’s Second Age; he called it “Middle-Hârn”, and it was a good idea. I myself once ran a King Kull campaign using Warhammer Fantasy’s system and career paths. That, too, was a nice idea. Dungeon Masters have been doing stuff like this since 1974. It’s called a homebrew.

   The difference now is that you can put your homebrew “idea” on Kickstarter, and pretend like Middle-Hârn is a fresh, never before seen take, while in fact it’s nothing more than Tolkien’s ideas plus HârnMaster.

   If you look up “plagiarize” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it says, “to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source”. I mean, look all around you. It’s everywhere. We have undeniably crossed the Rubicon––

   Midnight, Texas is Grimm.

   Deception is The Mentalist.

   The Emperor has no clothes.

   And nobody cares.