Salisbury in the Sword Campaign

Using the Pendragon Starter Set with the Core Rulebook

Now that the Pendragon Starter Set and Pendragon Core Rulebook are both out in the wild, I’ve had a couple folks ask me for my recommendations on using the adventures in the former’s “The Sword Campaign” with characters created using the latter. Likewise, for reasons I’ll get into, groups beginning with the Starter Set might wish to center the county of Salisbury more prominently in their early adventures.

First, a general note: Greg wrote “The Sword Campaign” specifically as a standalone introduction to the game, whereas (as with 5th Edition) the characters you create with the Core Rulebook are intended to fit in with the narrative of the much larger Great Pendragon Campaign, which centers Salisbury County as the default “homeland” for Player-knights. Furthermore, Core Rulebook characters are assumed to attain knighthood in 508 to fit in with the two introductory scenarios appearing in the forthcoming Pendragon Gamemaster’s Guide, whereas the characters from the Starter Setare assumed to start out in 510. So there are some minor differences in need of bridging. What follows are my suggestions for doing just that.

Core Rulebook→Sword Campaign

Let’s say your group has created their own characters using the Pendragon Core Rulebook. First and foremost, you will need to settle the matter of character age. The simplest solution is to go with the rules as written, assume everyone was knighted in 508, and then have the Player-knights go through two full Winter Phases, including one Solo Scenario per character for each year, before starting “The Sword Campaign”. Assume their first couple years of knighthood have been relatively quiet. Just make sure you don’t hand-wave their knighting ceremony in 508!

If your group dislikes the idea of starting out a couple years older in a game where that can make a significant difference in the long run, there shouldn’t be too many issues with adjusting various milestones given under “Quick Family History” (PCRB, p. 40)—the only conflict being the character’s parent would not have attained knighthood in time to participate in the Battle of Mount Damen in 484. If someone rolls that event as part of their history, either have them reroll or assume their parent was present as a squire and distinguished themselves on the field of battle. Of course, if you simply opt for rolling (6D6x100)+2,000 Glory and calling it a day, you don’t need to worry about your parent’s chronology at all!

So much for mechanics. The main challenge for the Gamemaster lies in elevating Salisbury County, Count Robert, and his household knights (i.e., the Player-knights) to a more prominent role in the events of “The Sword Campaign”.

But first, a pause for a mild spoiler warning! Of necessity, I’ll be discussing some of the events taking place during “The Sword Campaign”, particularly in the first adventure. I’ll try to give away as little as possible, but if you wish to play (rather than run) these scenarios, consider yourselves warned!

“The Adventure of the Sword Tournament” assumes the Player-knights are all attending the Londinium Tournament either as lordless mercenaries or with their own lord’s retinue, and bond after fighting in the tournament melee under King Leodegrance and witnessing young Arthur pull the sword from the stone.

With Salisbury knights, they are of course attending the tournament with their lord, the young Count Robert. (Indeed, Robert and his mentor, Dame Aspara, have a small cameo in the Starter Set’s SoloQuest!) In 510, he has only held his title for a year, and this is his first great adventure so far from home; there should be plenty of opportunities for the Player-knights to introduce themselves and get to know their lord through your roleplaying. (My recommendation is to play him as youthful and brash, with a seething hatred of Saxons and a rather high opinion of himself, but also as someone who has very little guile and a great deal of bravery, but you’re free to present him as you wish—YPWV, after all).

The Player-knights, of course, fight in the melee as part of Robert’s conroi, though still on Leodegrance’s team. Later, when Leodegrance swears himself to Arthur, young Robert is quick to follow (simultaneous to the Player-knights who choose to bend the knee as well).

Of course, if you’re kicking off the campaign with “The Adventure of the Sword Tournament”, your characters will still be squires. In this case, describe the events of the tournament melee from the perspective of a squire, as they ride behind their knights in Robert's service, standing ready to resupply broken lances, remount fallen knights, and escort injured knights from the field—rolls for Awareness, Battle, First Aid, or Horsemanship may be in order, depending on how much time you want to spend on the event. Regardless, the conclusion of the first act presents a very memorable moment for their knighting ceremony, with Robert asking the Boy King to knight his loyal squires!

With Count Robert one of the “Eager Vassals” who swears homage to the Boy King right away, it makes sense for him to “lend” the Player-knights to the cause of Arthur defending his crown. At other times, substitute Robert for other Gamemaster characters. For example, at the Battle of Carlion, the Player-knights fight under Count Robert instead of King Leodegrance, and so on.

The events of “The Sword Campaign” continue to center on King Arthur’s court (as does The Grey Knight, for that matter), with most of the action taking place in Carlion, Londinium, and Cameliard, but then much of the Boy King and Conquest Periods draw Player-knights away from home time and again, no matter their homeland. Through including Count Robert in the narrative, you maintain a connection to Salisbury that will pay off in the game-years ahead.

Starter Set→Salisbury

Bringing the pre-generated characters from the Pendragon Starter Set into the orbit of Salisbury is even easier. Indeed, one character, Cadwallon, already hails from Salisbury! Both he and Lynelle could attain their knighthoods through Count Robert, binding their service to his household. 

Many of the other characters are sell-swords in need of a lord, and could either start the campaign riding with Robert as mercenaries, or later swear homage to him if given sufficient reason to do so. Sir Avalloc, Dame Tamura, Dame Cwenhild, and Sir Asterius all owe homage to their respective lords, of course, but this doesn’t preclude them from swearing fealty to Count Robert; motivations might include Robert saving the knight’s life in battle, the knight pursuing a potential spouse from Salisbury, or simply a wish to serve for a time alongside other Player-knights who do swear homage to the count.

And if, say, Lady Vivienne or Emperor Anastasius wish their loyal subject to do a bit of spying at Robert’s court, then so be it…

Wait, who said that?

2025 UPDATE: Folks looking for loads more detail on the characters found in the Starter Set should seek no further than the Companions of Arthur product, Heirs & Spares. Written by three of the team who worked on 6th edition, this should provide you with even more material to weave into your campaign above and beyond what I’ve sketched out above. I’ve even made use of it in my home campaign. Highly recommended!

A Matter of Parameters

Measuring social change in your TTRPG campaigns

I’m currently running DC Heroes. My experience with superhero-genre gaming is incredibly limited; last year’s first outing with the Batman RPG was the first campaign I’ve ever participated in, either as player or GM.

Back in the 90s, though, I came very close to experiencing superhero gaming through a most unusual (and very of-its-time) variation on the MEGS system that also powers DC Heroes: Ray Winninger’s Underground.

This was an original setting heavily influenced by Aeon Flux and “Dark Age of Comics” titles. It’s cynical, biting, at-times hysterical, and was mostly lost on my teenage sensibilities. I remember we spent an afternoon making characters and then I accidentally TPK’d everyone in the first scene of the first session. Oops.

But there was lots about the game that stuck with me, primarily (it must be said) in the form of the dystopian setting, but also in some of its mechanics. In the latter case, in particular, it was Parameters, a system I’ve now adapted for use in my current DC Heroes game.

The idea is simple: there are seven metrics (Quality of Life, Take Home Pay, Safety, etc.) which are rated on a scale of 1-20. Every level of a community, from neighborhood to nation, has its own set of Parameter ratings. It’s up to the players to decide where they want to focus their superheroics and their ultimate goal for the campaign. (In Underground, there’s a not-so-subtle implication that players should be aiming to overthrow…if not the U.S. government, then something at least.)

Over the course of the campaign, players can choose to funnel their character’s Hero Points into shifting the Parameter ratings they wish to target. The bigger the area, the more Hero Points it takes.

The catch, of course, is that Hero Points are also the game’s way of improving your own character, as well as influencing actions in the game (making a task easier or harder, saving yourself from certain death, etc.). What’s more, every time a single Parameter metric is changed, it has both positive and negative knock-on effects:

Even worse? Unless the heroes pay a premium, at the end of the campaign all of the Paremeter numbers return to their original levels! Equilibrium and inertia and all that.

I love this system. It forces hard choices. It provides a funnel for Hero Points, keeping those Iconic Characters as their unchanging selves. It even explains why, despite all of Batman & Co.’s efforts, nothing ever seems to change in Gotham.

Well, my players are having none of that. They’ve set their campaign goal: increase the Government Purity of Gotham City without reducing Safety, and making that change permanent. This means they need to pay five times the normal cost in Hero Points, or 1,000 points total, just to raise Government Purity by one point! (For the record, I set it at 5 out of 20, because, well…)

We’ll see if they can achieve this goal. I honestly have no idea if it’s realistic or not, which makes things just as exciting for me!

But in all seriousness, I love these sorts of mechanics. Pendragon 6th Edition has a Favor mechanic that hits the same notes for me—it’s not a mechanic for measuring social change, per se, but it’s a great way to systematize abstract forces that drive the feudal world of King Arthur’s Britain, and frankly makes GMing the game a lot easier.

For folks running their own superhero games who wish to try the Parameter mechanic for themselves, here are the costs as originally presented:

For DC Heroes, I multiplied all these values by five, as Hero Points work differently in that game and seem to be on a higher scale than in Underground. You’ll want to do a similar eyeballing of whatever your game’s XP/benny currency is and apply the costs accordingly.

And remember: it’s three times the cost to shift a Parameter without lowering another one, and five times the cost to make that change permanent!

(I decided to be nice and not apply both multipliers to my players, choosing instead to just go with the higher of the two. One thousand Hero Points is plenty!)

My Pendragon Appendix N

(A version of this post originally appeared in part on my old blog, The RPG Corner, in 2011.)

When I first started running Pendragon in a serious way back in 2006, I found myself seriously out of my depth. My comprehension of Arthurian literature and folklore and my understanding of medieval history proved patchier than I anticipated. So I hit the books, and the movies, and created a sort of ersatz Appendix N of my very own.

We all “know” the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the forthcoming Pendragon Starter Set does a great job (if I do say so myself) of introducing you to how the game treats the legends and your role therein as players, but if you’d like to do some deep dives like I did, lo those many years ago, here are some of my recommendations:

Books

Le Morte d'Arthur: When most people think of the Arthurian myth, it is the version laid down by a mercenary knight at the tail-end of the age of chivalry they're thinking of. Malory was the first great collator of the saga, weaving together medieval sources from across Europe to form a coherent narrative arc—and not coincidentally, this is the model Pendragon uses as well.

There are a million different versions of LMDA out there in a variety of modernizations. For a thoroughly-modern rendering of the language, I like Dorsey Armstrong’s version (though I’m not as much of a fan of the weird shape of the physical book…). Greg Stafford’s preferred version was the two-volume Penguin paperback, which strikes a nice balance between archaic diction and readability.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck. T. H. White gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, but his take on Arthur can be a bit idiosyncratic for gaming-inspiration purposes. For a modern literary treatment of the mythology, this is my favorite collection, sadly never completed.

The Arthurian Companion by Phyllis Ann Karr. Absolutely indispensable. An encyclopedia of people, places, and things exhaustively compiled from the full range of available medieval sources.

Castles by Alan Lee. In some ways this was where it all started. I received this book as a gift (birthday? Christmas?) during the height of my childhood interest in all things medieval (about age 11-12). I still reference Lee's gorgeously evocative watercolors for inspiration, and the well-written "thumbnail myths" that accompany them (scribed by David Day) have provided both direct and indirect material for some of my past scenarios.

A Year in a Castle by Rachel Coombs. This is a representative entry for children's books in general. Yes, kid's books, the greatest friend for the harried GM ever invented. Particularly books on history, mythology, and other fun subjects. The big quarto or folio-sized, full-color jobbies with lots of pretty pictures are the way to go: like the veritable mother bird preparing to feed her nestlings, flip through their pages and gobble up the visual inspiration for later regurgitation at the game table.

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. The 14th-century was arguably the Middle Ages at their worst, and Tuchman paints a brilliant picture of church corruption, mercenary knights, plague, excess, war, famine, and peasant revolts. Indispensable for depicting the darker side of chivalry and the Arthurian cycle, especially during the Grail Quest and Twilight Periods.

Movies

Excalibur (1981): Movies were my real introduction to the wonder of Arthur and the Middle Ages. I saw a TV-edited version of Excalibur when I was about 9 years old and it rocked my world. This movie is still my touchstone for what an epic Pendragoncampaign should feel like; Nicol Williamson's Merlin will never be bettered in my opinion.

"Come father, let us embrace at last!"

The Lion in Winter (1968): Great sets, great costumes (especially for the time it was made), absolutely indispensable for court politics and the true heart of Pendragon: the rack of human relationships.

"Poor John. Who says poor John? Don't everybody sob at once! My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out!" "Let's strike a flint and see." 

Knightriders (1981): An under-appreciated entry in George Romero's oeuvre, despite its modern setting this movie is the best treatment I've yet seen of the clash between chivalric ideals and hard reality. Plus, if you want a treatment of Merlin-as-hippy as an alternative to Nicol Williamson's take, look no further. (Oh, and my wife thinks Tom Savini is sex on toast in this film, for what it's worth.)

"No, it's just getting too tough. It's tough to live by the code. I mean, it's real hard to live for something that you believe in. People try it and then they get tired of it, like they get tired of their...diets. Or exercise. Or their marriage. Or their kids, or their job, or themselves...or they get tired of their God."

Perceval le Gallois (1978): I feel like this movie comes closest to recreating the experience of what it must have been like listening to Chretien de Troyes recite his latest romance sometime in the High Middle Ages. I mean, for one thing it’s in French. (Though they didn’t go all the way and shoot it using Middle French, the cowards.) The set design is enchanting, looking like the illicit offspring of a medieval manuscript and Passion Play; the “look” of 6th edition Pendragon owes much to my love of this movie. And this is arguably the most faithful adaptation of the Arthurian romances ever committed to celluloid.

“Cursed is he who in fine weather waits for finer weather still.”

The Green Knight (2021): In stark counterpoint, we have this wonderful fever dream of an Arthurian movie that often runs roughshod over the source material, but all in service of giving us one of the best movies ever made in the genre. The fact that the name of Sir Gawain(e) is spelled and pronounced differently throughout the film speaks to one of David Lowery’s core themes: these stories are always changing, yet they remain fundamentally the same. This is a key to understanding how to successfully run Pendragon. Watch this movie and meditate on that thought as you do. (This movie is also my visual reference for the Downfall era as much as A Distant Mirror gives me the historical grounding.)

“Green is what is left when ardor fades, when passion dies—when we die, too.”

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). The most obscure entry on the list by a mile, apparently this was a movie released by some nobody British comedy troupe back in the 70s. Mainly useful for its fantastic attention to detail in sets and costumes and the apt depictions of the bloody consequences of critically-inspired Passions and what happens when every knight in your party fails their Valorous rolls.

"We'll not risk another frontal assault—that rabbit's dynamite!"

A Tale of Two Game Mats

A Post for Mental Health Awareness Month

In case you’re not aware, in addition to my TTRPG shenanigans (professional and otherwise), I’m a great lover of tabletop miniatures wargames. I should perhaps write a post at some point talking about that end of my hobby spectrum, but today I’d like to use it as a pivot to talk about a different kind of spectrum.

(How’s that for a segue?)

Last April, by which I mean 13-months-ago April, I placed an order for a teddybear-fur terrain mat. (If you know, you know.) April 2022 was a particularly heinous month on multiple fronts for me personally, so I immediately forgot about the order. I can say this with confidence because seven months later, I ordered a similar teddybear-fur terrain mat from the same company for the same objective. (In case you’re wondering, the objective is to cut up and use the “fur” as scatter terrain to represent pastures and meadows.)

A couple weeks later I fell extravagantly ill, and thus forgot about this order as well.

Last week, I received a shipment notification from the company telling me the mats were at last on their way. (Yes, that’s quite a delay. There’s a notice on their website about backlogs, but…wow.) Ironically, I had recently been mulling over the question of whether I should order some teddybear fur terrain mats to use as meadows-and-pasture scatter terrain…

Now, things have been hard for all of us for some time now. And, speaking for myself in the immortal words of Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2022 can go suck a fuck. But I’d be lying if I said this was all down to stress, or that this was the first time…or the second time…or the twentieth time that something like this happened to me over the course of my life. Buying the same thing two or three times because I keep forgetting I already bought it? World champion, right here.

A couple years ago, motivated by the fallout from Global Events, I started going to therapy for the first time in my life. And it didn’t take long for me to receive a diagnosis of mild ADHD and anxiety. I’m currently on medication for both, and am doing better than I ever have in my life, all told. But the struggle is real, and it never totally goes away.

Last year left me something of a nervous wreck by the end, and this year so far has been a really interesting journey towards integrating, well…everything. I turned 45 this year, and it’s not uncommon to go through a period of self-reflection and re-evaluation at this time (midlife crisis? It’s more likely than you think.), but the pandemic and all the other events of the past, oh, seven years have really taken a toll, I am finding.

I decided to write about this today because I recently found out May is Mental Health Awareness Month. ADHD has a month of its own (October, apparently), but being on the neurodivergent spectrum in general has a powerful impact on one’s mental health, as I’ve come to appreciate.

Not too long ago, a study made the rounds claiming mental health impacts from the pandemic were “minimal.” Well, I may be spending my time in a skewed circle of friends and colleagues (and it must be said, I think the percentage of neurodivergent and just plain emotionally sensitive folks in the tabletop gaming hobby/industry seems higher than the general average), but pretty much everyone I know has found themselves struggling with mental health issues brought on over the past three years. I’m not the only person who started going to therapy for the first time, or who were diagnosed with ADHD later in life and during the pandemic! And I think it’s important, especially in response to studies like that one—which can potentially leave people feeling like isolated freaks—to talk openly about what we’re dealing with. And not just in relation to pandemic-induced mental trauma, but mental health in general.

The stigma is powerful, but if you’ve found yourself really struggling lately just know you are hardly alone, and there are a ton of resources out there to help you. I found therapy and meds to be an effective combination; I’m also lucky enough to have a doctor who believes in the importance of integrative medicine and the mind-body connection. I’d just encourage folks who are going through it at the moment, and feeling alone or hopeless, to look for resources that work for them, and to not be shy talking about their experiences with friends and family, or even strangers on the internet. (Hello!) It’s remarkable how many supportive voices you find when you look for them.

Some links I’ve found helpful in my journey:

Understanding Ambiguous Loss

Dealing with Post-Pandemic Anxiety

What to Do with an Adult ADHD Diagnosis

Writing Berlin: The Wicked City

I recently read an online exchange that on the one hand called my scenarios from Berlin: The Wicked City a toss-up for the greatest Call of Cthulhu campaign ever (alongside Masks of Nyarlathotep), and on the other hand opined the scenarios are the weakest part of the book.

It got me thinking: I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten into the genesis of B:tWC and why it’s structured like it is, nor how I went about writing the “rambly” (ahem) scenarios. So here’s a kinda-sorta-not-really designer’s notes post on how I did it, what my intentions were, how those intentions interacted with reality, and what I’d change now that I have more RPG writing under my hat.

It all started circa 1990. My second RPG after the D&D Basic and Expert sets was GURPS. Not long after I picked up the Basic Set rulebook, I grabbed GURPS Horrorfrom my local mall bookstore, egged on by my horror-loving friend Phil (RIP). I was just discovering the illicit joys of the genre, and the book’s guide to all things horror-trope related and how to bring them to your table proved endlessly fascinating to me.

(How green was I? My introduction to Lovecraftian horror came from GURPS Horror’s chapter on “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know”—and I remember being a little confused why they were talking about this genre of horror that, for all I knew, they had invented themselves!)

The book also included extensive coverage for setting horror games in the three classic eras of Gaslight, the Jazz Age, and Now. (Hmmm, wonder where they got that idea…) In the Twenties chapter, there was a sidebar on how Weimar Germany was an “underutilized” setting for horror campaigns.

I don’t know why that stuck in my brain the way it did, but it did.

Flash forward about 20 years, and I’m finding myself running Call of Cthulhu more and more (having previously mostly reserved it for seasonal one-shots). In planning a campaign that never came to fruition, I started doing research with an eye towards setting it in Berlin—and the rest is history!

Well, not quite, but we don’t need to dwell on the boring details of how a rough campaign idea eventually morphed into a full-fledged sourcebook, including a couple false starts. By 2016, I’d inked the contract and set to work.

And rather unexpectedly found myself writing the bulk of the manuscript, including three big scenarios!

I can only blame naïveté for my ambition. If you’ve been a fan of the game as long as I have (or longer), you’ll recall the old Secrets of… series of city/regional sourcebooks. These were of variable quality, but they tended to follow the same basic structure of first presenting details on the place in question followed by a collection of standalone scenarios.

That was the structure I set out to emulate, but I had some ideas for varying it up a little bit. My main goal was to actually provide a sourcebook people could use to build their own home campaigns. The scenarios are there as much to provide additional background and detail on the setting as they are meant to be played straight. But Jeff Richard, Mike Mason, and I all agreed we could provide some fun Easter eggs and tenuous links between the three big scenarios for people who played more than one. Little did I know that would become the seeming de facto approach.

Writing RPG materials is always an interesting exercise. You try to be as objective as possible, but your own subjective preferences are bound to creep in. Something that seems perfectly obvious to you (and even your playtesters!) might be missed or misinterpreted by the consumer. Thus, perhaps my biggest surprise has been the realization that most people run all three scenarios in the book, viewing them as a campaign! For folks who find the scenarios tenuously linked…well, yes. I never really intended for that to be the default approach, as I’d never attempted that when running campaigns with the old Secrets of… books. Rather, I’d pick maybe a couple of the scenarios (these were generally shorter than the ones in Berlin), throw in scenarios from other sources, and call it good.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy people are using the book to run three-scenario campaigns. Far more people seem to enjoy it in that form than are disappointed. They’re meaty enough, taken together, to provide about 10 sessions of play or so, based on actual-plays and my own playtests. But I really do hope people use the book for more than just its scenarios.

To that end, one of my unrealized goals with the book was to make the front half into more of a “city crawl” system, with random tables for sights, sounds, architecture, and places of business. You can see a bit of this DNA in the random cabaret table, or my idiosyncratic system for breaking the city up into zones. The problem was there was just too much real-world goodness to pack in to allow for extensive tables.

A big part of that goodness went into the aforementioned monster scenarios (as well as the little scenario seeds that Mike Mason, Lynne Hardy, and I developed). Although I might quibble with people doing a one-and-done run of the scenarios, I can admit to the scenarios being on the wordy side.

This was partly a function of of the richness of the setting, as mentioned, but it also comes down to the book being my first major RPG project (and one that had been percolating in my brain for a quarter-century!). Nowadays, I’m apt to write shorter scenarios (and not try to write all of them, either…). That being said, the size of the three main scenarios perhaps makes more sense if you consider them as tentpoles to hold up a campaign in their own right.

That’s how I’d approach running a Berlin campaign: decide on which “vibe” of the city is most interesting (early, mid-, or late 20s), create the investigators and their organization to match the mini-era, and run a few short scenarios (either taken from the seeds in the book or of your own devising) leading up to the big one for that era. And if you want more, plan on starting again from scratch (perhaps with one or two investigators from the previous campaign, at most) in the next era. Hop around—run a late-Twenties campaign first, then go back 10 years to the time of hyperinflation. The Easter eggs work regardless of the order you run the scenarios.

But most importantly: make Berlin your home. Return to it as often as you’d like, particularly if you’re interested in running Call of Cthulhu campaigns centered on LGBT+ investigators or like your horror filtered through a dilettantish, decadent lens.

And if you do write your own scenarios, consider putting them up on the Miskatonic Repository! I never intended Berlin: The Wicked City to be the final word on horror gaming in Weimar Germany. But at least I rectified that ancient wrong—you can’t really say it’s an “underutilized” setting for horror gaming anymore!

How Was Your Winter Phase?

Or: Why I Won’t Be at Chaosium Con

Among the many things that made me fall in love with Pendragon when I first encountered it was the Winter Phase. I love a good downtime mechanic, it must be said. Downtime gives campaigns breathing room. Downtime increases immersion?it's much more believable that a character would have stretches of the mundane in between those moments of high excitement that constitute adventure scenarios. Downtime mechanics make the world and its characters feel real.

The Winter Phase is downtime turned up to eleven. What it really asks is, "How did the rest of your year go?" It represents your knight looking back and assessing how they grew, what they learned, and how they hurt. It bakes in the core assumption in Pendragon of "one scenario per game year." And, not incidentally, it makes it really easy to accommodate a Player who can't make it to that session. Their knight was off somewhere else this year; roll up a Solo Scenario and we'll catch you next time.

Here in Santa Fe, up at 7,000 feet elevation, the leaves are just starting to bud, the wildflowers and fruit trees just coming into bloom. Yesterday was Easter Sunday. I often start off a new Pendragon year around this time, and for good reason. This is the true end of Winter Phase; it's time for new adventures.

I had a tough Winter Phase this past year. In game terms, I biffed my Aging roll and suffered several points of Statistic loss. In real-world terms, I got very sick, first with a really nasty flu-like virus (not with Covid, oddly enough), then secondary bacterial infections, culminating in a brief hospital stay and more antibiotics over the course of the weekend than I think I've had in a whole lifetime up to this point. I'm recovered from the actual diseases now, but I'm still dealing with the after-effects; specifically, something I didn't even know about until this year, a condition in which your body essentially develops arthritis because your immune system was driven into overdrive.

The good news is that it's a temporary affliction, but my rheumatologist (I have a rheumatologist now!) put me on some meds to help curb the damage in the meantime. And those meds have an immunosuppressant effect. Which means no large gatherings for me for the foreseeable future. Which means no Chaosium Con, sadly.

(There has been some talk about maybe getting me in as a virtual member at Sunday's Pendragon panel. The logistics have yet to be worked out to see if that's even possible. Stay tuned to my socials for an announcement, should such wizardry come to pass.)

One thing I did discover through my manifold blood tests and consultations throughout January and February was that I also had a vitamin D deficiency! Being on vitamin D mega-doses for the past couple months has done wonders for my overall health and mood. I feel better than I have in years, and very much ready for my next adventure (even if for now it'll have to be from the comfort of my couch).

(By the way, I learned nearly half of all Americans are deficient, so my public service announcement, regardless of what part of the world you're in, would be to add a supplement to your diet and maybe ask your doctor to test your levels at your next physical. You'll be glad you did.)

As I work on restoring my lost points of DEX and CON, I'm curious: do you use downtime mechanics in your games? What are your favorites?

'Til next time...

The Once and Future King

But when that moan had past for evermore,
The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn
Amazed him, and he groaned, 'The King is gone.'
And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,
'From the great deep to the great deep he goes.'

—Idylls of the King

By now you have probably heard of the passing of Greg Stafford. Chaosium has released a heartfelt tribute, and has created a board to share condolences and memories. Nocturnal Media has released a statement as well.

I’m obviously fairly devastated by the news. My path didn’t cross with Greg’s in a meaningful way until a sequence of unexpected events found me working with him and his amazing Household (as he called his team of writers and editors) starting in 2014. (In one of his first emails to me, he concluded with “tell me what your dream project would be”—whoa!) I first met Greg in person at Gen Con 2015, and have had the honor of spending time with him every Gen Con since then. The very last time I saw him, on Sunday of Gen Con 2018, I gave him a big hug. I’m glad I had the chance to do that. His last words to me, in an email sent earlier on what turned out to be the day he died, were “Good job David. Thank you.”

Greg was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a professional mentor. I owe virtually all my success and advancement in this industry to his belief in my abilities and his unwavering support. I am far from alone. By all accounts, Greg was warm, genuine, enthusiastic, supportive, and humble.

I can only resolve to carry on his example and legacy as best I can.

There’s not a whole lot I can put into words at this point. The depth of my gratitude cannot be measured. The breadth of my awe at Greg’s creative vision, and the many lives he touched and lifted up through it, cannot be comprehended. The gulf of my grief cannot be expressed.

By way of testimony to his kind heart and boundless enthusiasm for gaming and his fellow gamers, this was the very first communication Greg ever had with me, way back in 2008. I posted on my old blog about my first Pendragon campaign, where I fell in love with the game that would become such a central part of my life over the next decade, and—imagine my pleasant shock!—he popped by to read the post and leave a kind and supportive comment.

Telling Tales by the Fireside

"As for Conan's eventual fate—frankly, I can't predict it. In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him." —Robert E. Howard

Call me crazy, but methinks there's a core game mechanic in this.

As an indie game sort of thing, it would be set in a DnD-fantasy-style world. The conceit is a bunch of adventurers gathered in a tavern, telling old war stories. Everyone in the group creates and plays one of these grizzled adventurers.

Each session focuses on one of the adventurers and his "story." The other players take on the roles of ancillary characters from the story—fellow adventurers who are doomed to die grizzly deaths before the end of the session. There would have to be some sort of method, either mechanical or narrative, for determining in which "phase" of the central adventurer's life this story takes place: as a young novice, as a seasoned veteran, as a world-weary conqueror. Next week, it's onto another player's adventurer and their tale, which could come from any point in their long and bloody career.

The only hard-and-fast rule is that the central adventurer—the one spinning the yarn—can't die. If the game ends up in a position where there is no possible escape from death for the storyteller, the narrative simply fades to black and the story concludes with something like, "How I got out of that tight jam, well that's a tale for another day..."

Thus, every week you have one player with death immunity who gets to guide the story; I could see this easily being a GM-less game.

Or, indeed, if one wanted to root this in a more traditional mechanic, this would be an interesting way to run D&D or a derivative system (Dungeon Crawl Classics and Lamentations of the Flame Princess both leap immediately to mind) as a series of effective one-shots with rotating GMs, jumping around between levels instead of doing the usual linear level progression thing.

On Joe Dever and the Legacy of Lone Wolf

I was up way past my bedtime last night, reading through the Lone Wolf Adventure Game from Cubicle 7. You see, I'll finally be starting an LWAG campaign tomorrow night, a prospect I've been tremendously excited about ever since picking up the box set at Gen Con 2015.

Then this morning, after oversleeping due to the aforementioned late-night reading, I blearily checked my Facebook feed and found it exploding with messages of condolence: Joe Dever, creator of the world of Magnamund and author of the Lone Wolf game books, has passed away. He was only 60.

This one is hitting me hard, folks.

When Gygax passed, I was sad, but in more of an abstract sense on a personal level. I got into the hobby some years after he had been ousted from TSR, so my relationship to his creation was always taken at one remove, or more. My familiarity with the magic of Gygaxian prose and world-building came much later in life.

But, as I suspect for many of my age group (those who got into RPGs during the mid-80s to early-90s), Joe Dever's writing was the gateway to this hobby for me.

I've written before about how I "GM'd" the Lone Wolf books on the playground, reading them aloud to a friend who would make the choices and pick the numbers from the Random Number Table.

I remember attempting to make my first D&D game world and basing off the material in the Magnamund Companion.

My first stab at game design was a manuscript called "The Lone Wolf RPG". I still have my dot-matrix printout. I should scan it and post it at some point, as awful as it is.

I was lucky enough to briefly meet Joe at Gen Con 2015, shake his hand, and thank him for his writing and his inspiration. Today I will mourn, and tomorrow I will, in my infinitesimal way, help carry on the creative vision he first laid down nearly 40 years ago.

For Sommerlund and the Kai!