Filtered work by Jordan Penalva, cover for Gordon Dickson’s “Dorsai” when published by Ace.
I’ve been interested in Stargrave and while I have plenty of painted miniatures I have zero inspiration to create a crew, even less desire to puzzle over 52 powers, stat mods and what not. I want my friends to be empowered to start playing whenever we gather, not be blocked by record keeping before we even start.
Inspired by online RPG character generators (e.g. save vs total party kill) I’ve built a Google Sheet that randomly generates a Stargrave Captain & First Officer quickly. It produces things like…
There is a good deal of error checking here, but there could be a few bugs lurking especially on the 4th & 3rd powers for the Captain & First Officers respectively. I’ll continue to fine tune that section, but the tool works well enough for the stated objective.
Thank you to the Reddit user u/5eret who compiled the power list, that was my data set for this project. Without your work my task would have been much more difficult.
I have also done a 1st edition Frostgrave grimoire generator, which you can find here. It is an Excel document but you should be able to use it with Google Sheets or Open Office.
Wizards, Magic-Users, Sorcerers, and Spell Casters – what clearly makes them unique are the spells cast, enchantments woven, sorceries worked, and mysteries unlocked. Though many magic-users are painfully similar to any other when it comes to the spell book itself. Level 1 is more than likely to contain tried and true favorites: sleep, detect magic, protection from evil perhaps.
Campbell has already written eloquently on the subject and there is perhaps little I can offer when compared to this opus.
No Wizard is happy.
Imagine a doctor, years of study. Chooses to become a proctologist. There’s a reason. Yes: money, job security, comfort. Still, to devote so much time to assholes, looking at asses of mostly older men and women, thinking about what the health of a colon really means, nobody that has the opportunity to become a doctor would choose something like that if it didn’t resonate with them at least a little.
What I can offer is a tool that will provide access to over 2000 magic-user spells compiled over a 20 year period from a variety of AD&D resources. 254 level 1 spells alone, astonishing. Certain to bring some variation to any spell book.
In 1996 TSR produced the AD&D Wizard Spell Compendium, a remarkable summary of AD&D spells published during the period of 1975-1995 and now available digitally on DriveThruRPG.
In 2017 the blogger “Delta” published a .csv of key of the entire compendium, providing spell details along with some data analysis. Their work here.
My effort was to consolidate “Delta”‘s .csv & convert to a traditional “workbook”, while also adding some lookup funcitons for random spell selection by level.
With this tool magic now appears weird, unexpected, and new. I hope you too will find it so.
…Motorhead toured England, but more importantly for me White Dwarf No. 9 was published. This issue of a “new” bi-annual British tabletop game magazine included (as far as I can tell) the first ever dungeon published in a periodical: The Lichway by Albie Fiore. The Dragon magazine would follow suit a few months later in the a US. However, that dungeon offering would pale in comparisons to the White Dwarf material.
Fiore’s Lichway is a remarkable piece of work: multiple factions in a strange environment, well scaled for low level play, while offering useful awards, and a challenging puzzle. More importantly this a is an excellent example of how the game was played in earliest days. I knew that when I first glanced at the hand drawn map I had to run this this dungeon and share it with as many people as possible.
To that end I spun up a roll20 session: importing the map, laying out the dynamic lighting, sketching in a few key details for the rooms, adding monster tokens, and preparing both DM & PC handouts. For about a month a group of old school enthusiasts have on a near weekly basis to plunge the depths of the lichway. As the DM I have greatly enjoyed the process of studying the dungeon and considering the best way to present it to my players.
The bigger challenge has been how to share this with a broader audience. 1) the roll20 marketplace is a bit complex to setup and doesn’t fit with my personal model of “free” content. 2) could invite other DMs to use my existing roll20, but that could restrict the number of games and could result in unintended changes to the roll20 module. 3) publish an asset pack that would allow other DMs to setup their own lichway session, you can get that asset pack here.
What’s included:
a player map, with the room numbers removed
PC handouts for a boat, inscription, and demon
DM handouts covering an introduction, wandering monster table, a monster index, and an NPC index
a collection of VTT tokens to support online play, these sourced from game-icons.net
What’s not included – the dungeon key from White Dwarf No. 9. Hopefully that shouldn’t prove too difficult to locate on the internet.
Some notes about running the dungeon:
the interior of the dungeon does not include grid marks, which may be confusing for some players
the hand drawn nature of the grid makes alignment within roll20 challenging, I would suggest close enough is good enough
use tokens on the GM layer to indicate areas with strong or weak dronesong
the wandering monster table is my own creation, as the original key calls only for wandering monsters outside the the temple
the key itself is leaves plenty of room for DM interpretation & improv moments – go for it!
I’ll ask some of my players to leave their thoughts on the lichway here. I’d also be interested to hear your own group’s experience in playing this classic.
January 2021 Update
Have just finished laying out Albie Fiore’s “The Lichway” in Dungeon Scrawl. Dungeon Scrawl is an excellent online map making tool. Features include infinite canvas, infinite layers, and tools designed for dungeon mapping. Circles & arches are a bit tough but a creative approach can yield some useful result.
Zip package linked above provides a new player map suitable for use in your favorite Virtual Tabletop.
RPGs & Improv – isn’t that all about sitting around and talking in funny voices? Maybe, but not always. Talking in funny voices is one way for some players to feel more “in-character”, but that’s not really improv.
I believe that improv at the game table is more about not being constrained to one way of thinking about a scene in the story. In RPGs we all become, to some extent, actors in a scene. Many scenes are linked together and these scenes become stories.
Improv is more about principals; listening to your partners, respecting their choices & building upon previously established fiction. Doing this in such a way that allows smooth transitions from one to the other. At least that’s what I “think” it is…
Improv in RPGs provide for the holy grail of “emergent play” where the story is shaped and grows based on contributions from everyone at the table. Pre-conceived plots or story arcs are relegated to subordinate roles, allowing all players (PCs & DM alike) to be surprised & delighted in how the story takes shape around everyone’s contributions.
“Great!”, you say “How do I add improv to my RPGs?”
A good starting pointing is listening to my friend Glenn talk about this subject. For years Glenn has been part of a theater company with a strong tradition in improv. He also has a love of RPGs, and in August of 2020 he agreed to record the type of talk he would give at an RPG convention. Take it away Glenn…
78 Shrouded ornate mirror on one wall shows the PCs as hideous, all expect one who is stunning
November 2019, right around when I started this blog, there began a community sourced effort on the Audio Dungeon Discord server at creating d100 tables on a variety of topics: dungeon doors, wizard’s pockets, the frozen north, etc. Here’s one such effort on magic weapons.
I contributed a bit towards this work and was inspired by the creativity & imagination my fellow hobbyists showed for the task. Although, all these creative voices can create a bit of dissidence and it can become difficult to find a common theme even when collaborating on a common topic. That’s not bad, just noisy.
So I went it alone – I wanted a d100 table to deal with old school dungeon crawling “empty rooms”. When playing a traditional D&D game with players mapping based on GM descriptions I got tired describing a room’s dimensions & exits, only to then say “…and it’s empty”.
Empty? EMPTY! What are you talking about, EmPtY? There’s got to be something here a spec of dirt, some ratty old bones, something… So I set about creating a d100 table to deal explicitly with this topic of empty rooms. You can find that work here.
On the Tabletop 