Well, this is new.

Last time on Lamentations of the Qualinesti Princess, the brave heroes (Qualinesti elf red mage, hill dwarf priest, and kender bardess) decided to lure Dragon Highlady Kitiara into a trap. This went... relatively well, meaning that now the heroes and Kitiara work together. The warrior woman with a crooked smile sent the heroes south from Tarsis to find a Dragon Orb. 

I keep trying to make the original Dragonlance modules more interesting. In Tarsis, I used Vornheim to make the city more like a city. In the Plains of Dust, I used the Book of Jerks for random encounters. I do love how the whole fight against animated statues was resolved by the mage shrugging and casting Turn Rock to Mud. Creative casting is the proper way to do it. 

Now, in the frozen wastes of Ice Wall, the heroes (who are now four - a kender druidess joined the company) have met a Dragon Highlord (a half-elf who hates his elven relatives because they treated him like dirt), defeated an army of minotaurs using the hacked Pendragon mass combat mechanic, and enjoyed the spoils of victory. Namely, they found a flask with a potion that the bardess immediately drank. 

It turned out to be a love potion that made the drinker fall in love madly with whoever harmed her last. Thing is, in the end of the battle, the bardess sang a song that was so horrible, so painful that it hurt everyone in the battlefield, herself included. 

Now the kender bardess is deeply narcissistic. 

Then, following the original module, the company found a dragon and a knight frozen in a dungeon. The druidess used her Speak With Dead Animals spell (we used the Quick LotFP Druid), and asked the dead dragon several questions about the Orb, and also if dragons are good to eat. 

"Yeah, little one, dragons are delicious". 

"Have you eaten a dragon?" 

"Oh, many times". 

"Do you mind if we eat your body?" 

"Hey, I'm dead, I don't care". 

So, after burying the knight, for the first time in the history of Krynn, a dwarf, two kenderesses, and three dogs ate a dragon. 

The elf refused to partake. 

***

This weekend, I'm hosting some LotFP games at Terminal City Tabletop Convention. It'll probably be crazy. I cannot promise that we'll eat a dragon, but you never know. 

See you there.

The General Theory of Dragons

 As Zak put it here: 

One thing I really don't like about D&D's dragons is the symmetry of the original dragon scheme: good metal dragons on the left--evil colored dragons on the right. 

 The symmetry is suboptimal. It works, more or less, if you're doing some sort of epos/wargame where armies of dragons are basically the same kind of dragon, only there's many of them. 

But it decreases the value of an individual dragon. Dragons in the epic of Silmarillion are just one of Morgoth's armies, but Glaurung is cunning, cold, and horrible. 

 Dragons in Witcher books are somewhat different. There are several colours, which seem to be similar to human races - there are white dragons who live in the cold climates, there are "red" and "black" and "green" who are actually various shades of brown and grey, and then there's the gold dragon who's unique, a legend, different from all the others. He also presents the closest thing to alignment that is encountered in Sapkowsky's books while drinking beer with a monster slayer and two half-naked warrior women, which is doubtlessly the best way to discuss such things. Anyhow - a unique golden dragon is interesting, a subtype of golden dragons who are all similar is less so. 

And in Dragonlance, dragons are kind of a big thing. There's many of them. Onyx and Pyros are supposed to be individuals and interesting, but having another dozen of black or red dragons right next to them kind of gets in the way. 

So while I'm recreating Tarsis for my players, I'm thinking about dragons. 

And I'm thinking that, while I despise D&D alignment system, dragons could work really well with my colour-coded system. 

Dragons know all about the Colours. They see how the Red grows in times of war, how Green prospers in the forests, and how Black and Blue struggle for influence. 

And as they grow, dragons attune themselves to the Colours that they prefer. Dragons, like mages, carry their Colours openly. 

Dragons are born yellow, and filled with the Colour of youth, joy, and curiosity. As they grow, some stay forever young and curious, and these become brass dragons. 

Others change as they age, and pick their paths in life. As their interests and desires grow, the dragons grow stronger with particular Colours, and it affects their appearance. Those who crave riches and power turn black, and gain the ability to summon and control darkness and shadows. Their breath corrupts the very air. Those are the black dragons. 

Those who value freedom and the joy of flight most of all turn blue, and become able to turn the sky itself against their enemies, raining lightning on them. 

The metallic dragons (besides the brass ones) are those who keep a specific aspect of White as well as other Colours - they are governed by honour. 

The white dragons are cold, and proud, and honourless - this separates them from the silver dragons. 

Green dragons are careful and good at hiding and avoiding conflicts. They are sensitive and wise in the ways of nature, and like nature itself, they are cruel and shameless. 

Red dragons are creatures of passion and rage, and fire heeds their call. 

***

This means, among other things, that colour is not strictly hereditary among dragons - sure, many of them grow up just like their parents, but some of them don't. 

And it feels like, with this in mind, Takhisis and her followers were even worse than depicted in the books and modules - I mean the whole thing with corrupting the unborn dragons.

Played some Demon City...

Some notes: 

The rules for character making are simple enough that I managed to write up something playable in a couple minutes, in a crazy hurry, and without re-reading the rules  that I've last read about half a year ago. 

If you know how your character's skills work in real life, it's more interesting and rewarding to use them in the game.

When dealing with undead monstrosities, yelling "Everyone out of the water NOW!" is a much better survival tactic than suicide bombing. 

When suffering from threatening hallucinations, closing your eyes and trying to switch to echolocation is not the worst choice, even though it doesn't really help. 

Combat is fast and deadly.

We interrupt this program...

Before moving on with the description of how we played the classic Dragonlance adventure, I want to say that I'd probably never play tabletop RPGs if it wasn't for Zak S and his blog, and his books, and his show about how pornstars and strippers get together and play some D&D. 

And I probably wouldn't be a journalist if it wasn't for Zak and his factchecking, reasoning, and absolute refusal to let liars just keep lying. 

And I definitely wouldn't know about Lamentations of the Flame Princess if it wasn't for Zak and his reviews and the interview with James Raggi. 

My life wouldn't be the same. 

So screw everyone who spread lies about Zak (except people who made public apologies, I guess?) 

Screw then and corkscrew them and double and triple screw them. It's the evil liars that make the most horrible things possible. They're the rot that destroys societies from the inside, and stopping them is vital to the society's survival. 

Please think about that whenever you hear someone repeating a lie. 

We will now return to our program.

Get me Spider-Man, she said.

I wanna play.

That's it: I wanna play now. I want to play an RPG right away!

I am busy I am an adult. I do not have time for anything!

Zak S

I dunno if it's an ADHD thing, or if it's a "we all live in a country at war and last year we stopped playing and went into a bomb shelter because the alarm sounded", or if Zak is just right about what he says. 

But that's exactly how I often feel. 

Like today I had no plan, no books, no adventures to give to my players. We just agreed that they're agents of SHIELD and it's Marvel universe and let's pick the simplest way to write down your characters and play. 

So they are a dysfunctional team of spies, and Maria Hill wants them to recruit Spider-Man yesterday. 

Can we burn down New York City, m'am? 

And Hill says, I want Spider-Man and I don't care how you get him to me, but if you burn something or kill someone you'll answer because I don't even know you. 

And one of the spies has her memory all busted and she doesn't remember her teammates if she's separated from them for a couple hours, but she pretends to have memorized the whole Domino's menu and just makes up pizza names because she can't blow her cover. 

And the other spy runs into a burning building and suddenly remembers that he's taken some samples from Peter Parker's chemistry set, and tells the others "If I die, give the money from my jacket to the Director - the samples are on the banknotes". Then he runs into the fire. 

And the third spy looks  captain George Stacy in the eye and says "Look, officer, we're SHIELD - if we didn't have a damn good reason to take this boy down, we wouldn't even be in New York. Now let us do our job". 

And in the end of the day, they're not so dysfunctional. 

And they don't know everything that has happened, but they connect the dots and look at the patterns. 

And we play. Because that's the only thing we can do not to go crazy. 

Or is it just me?

Son of the Immortal Zoo of Ping Feng

The Immortal Zoo is my comfort zone. When I'm too depressed to invent something or to dig into a new adventure, this is the place that I know and like. This is where the characters find themselves. 

Things that make revisiting the adventure more fun: 

- A new player who hasn't been here before. 

The more experienced players have the pleasure of muttering "Aha, and now this!" - they know what's happening, but the new character - and the new player - doesn't. 

- There are things  that the players don't remember well - or things that they just didn't encounter in their previous visit. 

The Zoo is basically a sandbox with immortal creatures, you can explore it in a dozen different ways. 

- The characters have grown but this place has stayed the same. 

The Immortal Zoo was built to stay the same over the years, decades, centuries. It can give you this warm, fuzzy feeling inside when you step into the familiar corridors, and hear the rustling of the Narcissus Peacock's feathers. Well, this time you've got something special that you prepared for this birdie. 

- Or maybe the whole place had changed, too.

Because why not? If the whole world changes, so can the Zoo - there can be a new manager, new animals, new monsters. Even a twist to the Zoo's magic keeping everyone alive. 

And since we're playing "Edo-era Japan with antropomorphic animals", I changed things a bit. 

The singing toad is an amazing creature in Vornheim, but it can be just a singing girl who happens to be a toad if your party consists of a fox, a pig, and a cat. I think Em, Becami and Zak discussed how replacing goblins in a dungeon with humans immediately changes the atmosphere. A maniac is scarier than a monster. Though in this case, I think the players were just creeped out by my singing every time - they never try to interact with the singing creature, they just sneak by and pretend they weren't there.

 

The goat-headed scorpion strangely fits right in our game. 

Keep some of the parts that make the creatures of the Zoo fun, and replace the other parts with something different but similar enough. The peacock became a capricious women wearing a magical kimono, the snail became a very Blue Caterpillar-like old man sipping tea. 

The drunk gryphon stays, though, he just acquired some personal traits from Zatoichi. 

Note 1: No, I don't know why did the kappa keep a copy of "What should a normal human have". He cares about his diet, I guess. 

Note 2: You think translating the song about little monkeys loving their red clothes from Japanese via English subtitles into Ukrainian is easy?!

A Fistful of Ryo

As I said before, the games we play are weird mixtures. Imagine the core system of Gold Rush's Usagi Yojimbo, the adventures written for LotFP, the characters that I pull out from every story, comic book or cartoon I've ever laid my eye on, and the names changing as we play because it's easier that way - the Sleeping Crane castle became Sleeping Buffalo castle (untranslatable wordplay between the king's English, the tyrant's Belarusian, and our own Ukrainian), which later became Sleeping Boobalo castle because I like boobs. 

And also the homerules that I also pull out of different places. Lucky numbers kung-fu from Zak, "spend XP - add dice" from Xena Roleplaying Game, weapons - I honestly can't tell anymore, I'm pulling weapons stats literally from everywhere. 

Anyhow, we played a Cube World adventure named "A Fistful of Silver". Which is a reference to a spaghetti western movie which was a plagiarism of Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" which was inspired by Dashiel Hemmett. I love it how eastern and western culture influence each other. "Fistful of Silver" takes place in the Land of Southern Daimyos, which is the closest thing to LotFP Japan that we have (since James E. Raggi the Fourth, life, prosperity, health, said there are currently no plans to publish adventures set in Japan). 

The lords are gathering in what became the Boobalo castle in our game to discuss the threat of invasion from the Emperor (who rules what is the closest thing we have to LotFP China). Coincidentally, several of the lords and ladies secretly want to hire the adventurers, each for their own reasons. One of them needs a bodyguard for his sweetheart. Another wants to start a civil war. And someone wants to side with the invaders. 

Miyamoto Usagi doesn't advise you to side with the invaders. 

Art by Stan Sakai

 

Zak's Cube World adventures are good material, in the way that "I don't necessary understand if and why this part is necessary, but when I use it, people at the table react in fun and interesting ways and the game goes well". I took the basics offered by Fistful of Silver and ran with them, and I must say that when the wounded princess mutters "I know who the traitor is...", it's very pleasant when the players gasp "Who?!" 

And it was even better when they realized that the clue to the traitor's identity that they found fits not one, but two people. 

Note: in the end, I'd say we only used about half the of the adventure's potential. You could play it like "Yojimbo", offering your services to one side and then the other and then confuse both and then hide underneath the floors while bleeding all over; you could be good little samurai and pick a lord to serve, and face the horrible consequences; or you could just steal everything and run. 

There's always a fun way to play it out when the material is good.

Not playing tomorrow...

 ... due to real life happening (not war-related). 

So I've been thinking about one of my favourite DIY D&D tricks, Zak's Lucky Numbers Kung Fu. 

Players liked it. By which I mean, they remembered that it's a thing most of the time, and went "AHA!" whenever they rolled it. 

And more than once they said "Oh! I rolled my kung fu number! Can I use it?" and I said "Well, you're rolling for charisma, so I dunno, unless you want to push your new friend out of the window or steal his purse or something..." 

So I thought, why not build up on that? Okay, it's a kung fu lucky number when you're fighting - it can become a stunning feat of agility when you're on the defensive, like one of the character managed to use it to catch arrows in mid-air - why not use it as some kind of zen enlightment when you roll for some intelligence-wisdom-charisma-related stuff? 

To keep it interesting, you might need to visit some specific place and level up there  in order to enhance your lucky numbers like this. Visit the Ancient Temple of the Unkindly Raven, train with the ancient sage - and voila, next time you roll a 5, you can have an insight and decypher the enigmatic scroll. Or understand the mercenary's body language enough to know he's lying because he's scared. Or something like that. 

Remind me to try it with the group next time we meet.