Gray’am Axesplitter: Hirin Dwarves – First Demi-Human Race For Hydra

Today I rolled up the first demi-human character in Hydra – the Hirin Dwarf, Gray’am Axesplitter. He’s a Hirin from the city of Xanth which lies in the mountains of the Elder Ones. I lucked out seriously in rolling up some of his attributes – particularly his Strength which ended up as Titanic. Even though he is a diminutive 3’9″ tall, he makes up for this with his sheer squat strength. He specialized in Hirinian Style Two Axe-Fighting and Hirinian Boxing – he’s an experienced and successful Pit-Fighter, so he’s pretty handy, nay, great with a battleaxe. He typically wields an Axe/Shield combo, and is well protected with Heavy Scale armour and chainmail. Alternatively he may switch to two Axes and use his Hirinian Two-Axe fighting style of which Gray’am is a good example in terms of skill. His PC Version Character sheet is as below. Hirinian Dwarves are now on the menu for player character material in the Hydra system. More demi-human races to follow!

And yes, sorry yet another change to the blog style, but in my defense I had to to accommodate the box.net download widget – so once again you can download copies of the character sheet. (Runs and hides behind sofa as rotten veg is thrown in his direction).

The Feisty Hirinian Dwarf from Xanth - the Noted Pit-Fighter Gray'am Axesplitter.

Introducing Moolsh – An Example DMC Stand-In

Moolsh of Lankhmar – a spy/thief of the Guild.

Moolsh is a guilded thief who works, sometimes, alongside Glendawynn. He works the patch/quarter next to Glenda’s and you can read a lot more about Moolsh if you check out the session write up’s number three, and four. He’s a DMC (that’s Dungeon Master’s Character) but he’s also my ‘stand in’ if one of the PC’s die mid-game. One way in which you can keep the player occupied if he dies mid-game, rather than sitting, brooding and watching everyone else survive and perhaps haul off loads of treasure and experience checks, is to give them a DMC/NPC to play. So, have one or two of your DMC’s well rolled out – making them, in my terminology ‘major’ DMC’s, as I consider the minor DMC’s not worthy of a full character sheet – they get a mini-potted version.

Here’s his Hydra character sheet so you can check out how a spy/thief looks in the game-system as it stands at the moment (this is a version 1.1.2 character). If you have a stand in character the player can take part, at the same time take some off the load off of you as DM – one less character to run – just don’t make it too major a character. They can then hand the DMC back to you for the next session, when they introduce the new character you have co-created with them, or it might turn out that they want to stick with your minor-DMC you’ve given them to take over for you in the game. This takes some of the aftermath of the immediate sting out of a character death, and is one way as a DM that you can enable a player to manage the ensuing transition from one character to the next.

A Bit About Hydra Character Generation.

Just to say some points about the differences between Hydra character generation 1.1.2 and 1.0 (not that you know much because all that interesting stuff remains ‘protected’ and I’m still writing it). First some of the attribute names changed. Just in an effort to make them sound more like how they should be, and what they are meant to be representing and capturing. You can see the differences if you look at an earlier 1.0 character sheet. Then work history or occupational development, I’ve just abandoned proscribed occupational skill lists as unnecessary thanks to rolling up Moolsh and leaving my occupational skill list behind. I realised that I had it so flexible anyway, that it is better to negotiate the skill selection based on thinking about ‘what would be reasonable for a Woodsman from the Lakes of Pleea to have developed?’ rather than slavishly following a list. The occupationally based skills was already flexible – you could discard and plug in skills you wanted with little restriction, and now its completely open ended overseen by the DM to maintain sense. The most important thing is how the work history years carves up the categorical increases pool (ooh revealing some mechanics here!), and this is subject to negotiation now rather than being in anyway proscribed. The end result is the same – a spread of skills based around different working histories, varying in depth according to lived experience opportunities, social background, location and length of occupation. Yummy!

Moolsh the Thief Spy of Lankhmar

Playing Other Species and Peppering your Role-playing with Humour

A Challenge of DM-ing – Playing All Those Roles.

As a DM you get to populate your game world wherever that may be.  So when it comes to those ‘other people’ you know those who aren’t played by the player, um the player characters, – yep I know, bear with – then it’s played by you.  No-one else, is going to be doing it for you – unless you do as I do and get in the odd ‘guest star’ player for big roles sometimes (or bands of monsters in some cases – which is a fun thing to do, and I recommend getting another DM to do that for you in your game once in a while and see how much fun it is). So,  that means you have to be able to portray almost anything that can turn up in your game world. At the same time you are setting the scene, co-creating the mood, making time move on or slow down, rewinding moments when things don’t go as they should (and trying to avoid rewinds), making rule calls as needed, jogging players along when they are flagging and one hell of a lot of book-keeping usually. So you are busy when you are a DM. Bearing all this in mind – how do you player other species – those non-human ones and make them – umm, non-human?

Hartley the Troll, Brother of Riffkin

Fantasy DM’s (and do you know I’m thinking an alternative meaning for ‘DM’ could be ‘Drama Master, or Drama Maker’ – puns intended) have to be ready to play a necrotic zombie one minute and a familiar mouse the next. By this I don’t mean a mouse you know well, I mean one that some wizard or other has imbued with talents, abilities and spell-bound gifts. So it could be a talking familiar mouse – and that’s not an easy thing to portray convincingly if you are a newbie/novice DM. So – how do you get a group to go with the flow when you are trying out other species on them and retain the ‘wonder’ or believability of your roleplaying when what you are playing is radically ‘not you’ by a long stretch of the imagination? Here’s how.

Pointers for Getting Your Non-Humans – erm – Non-Human!

Confidence is key. If people titter at your portrayal – let them. Keep your portrayal as is. Get physical with your portrayal. If it is a familiar mouse get ‘itty bitty’ with your finges, hunch, be small, make your eyes beady if you can. Anything to get you to believe you are, for that moment, a mouse. So a bit of ‘method’ type acting within reason. Physical portrayal can help you feel more like the character you are playing. Keep your act going no matter what – be undeterred by negative reactions – or make a joke to lighten the mood if you are getting over-hammy.

Use Humour, be Playful.

This can make the tension lighter if you go for light relief if a serious attempt at playing a squeaky familiar mouse is bombing out. Comedy as a DM is a crucial element both of keeping a group interested and attention captured and being light-hearted about the roles you play. Hence I have legends evolving in my game such as that of the Warrior Poet Lord Brandreth of Hakesmere.

Lord Sir Gyles Brandreth of Hakesmere

So far, the players have encountered only his statue/fountain in the Conglomeration Square where the Cracked Head squats. Yep – do a re-read – that’s Gyles Brandreth. If you didn’t get that – better do a quick search in another tab of your browser and you’ll hopefully see where the humour lies in that.

If you have a ‘nothing to lose’ attitude, especially when it comes to your own ego, then you are more likely to be convincing in your portrayal. A little nerves is fine, it’s ok to be anxious especially with new players, new games, new roles, and you can use this as fuel. If you ain’t a teeny bit nervous then you probably have little passion or emotion behind your DM-ing. And you must have that. Conveying emotion is key to believability of playing roles. Otherwise it is just flat words grinding out and that’s DULL. Apologies for the thudding shout, but hey.

So to summarise the tips – get physical, ignore titters, go for light relief/comedy if it’s really panning, have a nothing to lose attitude, believe in yourself, practice in the mirror. Just some basic bits of advice to novice DM’s for crafting believable played DM characters in your world. Further notes include -vary your portrayal of your DMC’s – adopt different accents and voices – pitch, tone, timbre. Take a theatre class or drama class – can really help. Pace things differently. Pauses can be as good as a gabble of words. Use your whole body to act with.

Riffing Riffkin the Trollkin.

I played a little bit of a Trollkin character – Riffkin – in the session the other day (yup – that post is coming up I have it laying about somewhere!). He is a child troll really – a kid by their standards. So he’s only about 7-8 foot tall, and can still get into human pubs. I had him loom. I described the shadow he cast over the table. I described the ‘tang’ of his body odour and how acrid it was. I leered over the table at the player. I adopted a bit of a gruff tone, and played him a little dumb, but not stereotypically dumb. He used colloquial words. I acted physically for him – doing his actions as I described them.

These were some of the techniques I used to give him a bit of life. And you know what – I hadn’t decided to use a trollkin until about a minute before introducing him. I had thought about the troll race before (I don’t think they are very Lankhmar but I don’t really care too much about that). They’re not racially stereotyped so this one is employed as an armourer – very good at bashing metal. So good to get an occupation/profession for the character, and some motivation for them. Think about what they want? Why are they interacting – what function does it serve. Then you can react on the fly thinking about these basic points.

Riffkin’s brother, Hartley is over 20′ tall and can’t go into pubs anymore – at least not human ones. Which is ironic. Not that Trolls in my game care much for alcohol – it’s far too expensive and takes an age to really hit their metabolism. They have their own drinks of course, which would be lethal toxins to humans, and they pretty much have to get alchemists to make them up for them. If they’re not brewing them up themselves. Oh, and they have very tough skin – don’t bother trying to bash them with a sword, unless you really are fed up with life. Or desperate. Or both.

Any questions or comments feel free, and if you have a topic you want me to expound upon – chuck me a comment or an e-mail. I’m sure I left my address on this site somewhere.

Hydra Playtest Session Set-Up

Sketch of the Cracked Head Tavern, Powder Alley, Lankhmar

The Play-Test Work So Far and How Much to Prepare?

Setting up the play-test has been my mission for the last week or so. We kick off tomorrow night. I have got two scenarios sourced and converted for the setting. I’ve got Major and Minor DMC’s pre-rolled, and I’ve also fleshed out descriptions and minimal stats for NPC’s who need that level of description. I’ve been reading my Lankhmar source material – still plodding my way through the Leiber back catalogue. Until I’ve read it all I’m relying more on third-party resources and just plain old imagination to get the flavour and spirit of the City right. I probably will need half-a-campaign to get the expertise in the setting to feel ‘authoratitive’ or ‘authentic’ or any of those other ‘auth’ words you can think of.

In terms of ‘preparation’, as a seasoned DM of about 27-28 years of DM-ing, I say this. The degree of preparation you need to do depends on you and your group. Some DM’s ‘wing it’ from start to finish. Others like meticulous preparation, people accounted for places prepped to the Nth degree. In the middle of this is where I sit. I like prepped stuff because it lends to security and you can really work on the experience/flavour. I like winging because you can be flexible, fit to the story, adapt to the player’s choices. So hence I advocate a middle route –  plan stuff but be prepared to not use it for that session. Be prepared to shelve it in favour of winging. Prepare places and people and be prepared to change names, times and so forth so you can slot it in and never lose out on what preparation buys you. And document your winging well if you don’t have a perfect memory so you can keep the consistency up. See my previous blurtings on name changes for similar stuff on how to keep your DM-ing consistent.

I like to prep maps, props and so forth – but have not had much time for this play-test (it’s a play-test that may lead to a campaign not a campaign in of itself) to do that. Having said that anything that happens events wise with PC’s and DMC’s will count as campaign world events for better or worse and will start to the world story flowing for future games. I’ve mainly been prepping the system and practising running it.

I’ve got lots of material to release with regard to this session, but it will come online post-game as it has yet to be played. I can tell you that the boldened keywords and phrases below will become linked to relevant material just so you can see the scope of the work. In the meantime I can reveal the little write-ups I have done for the player characters in advance of tomorrow so you can see how I have set some bits up. The accompanying materials will follow once the play-test is over and will form a basic scenario pack for the Hydra system once all the revision work is over. This will be an early release draft to whet appetites and hopefully show-case the Fusion quality.

Play-test back-story and lead-in for the PC’s.

So I’ve gone with the classic DM cheat for introducing a new party to each other of - start them all off in a pub (The Cracked Head, run by Fillestro in Powder Alley in the Eastern Quarter of Lankhmar). It’s an easy way of getting new PC’s started off, provides a lively setting to start with – with loads of NPC’s/DMC’s floating around and an easy way to get going. Yeah it’s hackneyed – but then, you haven’t been a player in one of my pubs in my city-based adventure. Here are the ‘lead in’s’ for each of the PC’s. This is literally what they get given to them to set the scene for why they are there and what they are doing.

Back story for Glendowynn of Lankhmar.

Glendowynn is currently seeking allies. She needs some dumb enough muscle, maybe someone-else to run distraction for a job she is planning. It’s going to be a big heist and for that you need some people you can truts. That is the challenging bit – finding people to trust. Murder in this city! In the meantime the fees of the guild are going up as per usual and the dormitory master Cripps has made it clear that if the subscriptions aren’t in on time then its going to be a severe rations reduction for those late paying. It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the guild. They look after you the guild but only if you look after them first. So, better check she has her license on her just in case that fruit-cake militia-man on Illumination Street tries to get fresh again, time to get on the streets and get busy getting her subs in.

She thinks that it would be a good idea to head over to the Cracked Head in Powder Alley – she’s heard rumour from Two-Eyed Joe of a fat cat shop-keeper trying to hire people out for several hundred gold pieces to find his lost kid. What could be easier money than that? You head over to the Head, talk to Fillestro who lets you use the back-room. That way you can have some space and use the facilities before tracking down this fat cat purse-holder who is going to sort out your subscription one way or another.

Back story for the ‘Bastard’ Swordsman from the Steppes.

The ‘Bastard’ is sat in the Cracked Head in Powder Alley. It’s a middle-of-the-gutter pub, but your favourite. You have ten-ton hang-over from last nights fun and games in the gaming rooms at the back of the ‘Head’. You also vaguely recall being hired to do some kind of job by Laurie Drover the creamy faced flour magnate. For the life of you – you have no idea what that is – only that you do have a small purse – a retainer on your person. You figure its best to take advantage of your cash in hand status and sop up your remainding alcohol (yes you are still drunk) with one of the Head’s infamous ‘all that doesn’t eat you’ breakfasts.

You are tucking in when you spot a nervous looking rat-faced guy obviously startle in his booth when a gorgeous girl walks into the pub. You watch half-heartedly as you see him make pretty obvious efforts to look invisible, but the girl whom you’ve seen once or twice before appears oblivious and walks determinedly to the barkeep, talk briefly and then head into a back room somewhere when the barkeep Fillestro lets her through with his key and a warm smile. Fillestro clocks you clocking her and gives you a big wink and then a cut-throat ‘no way – not her’ gesture. He wiggles an eye-brow and sends his new serving boy Tom over to your table to take your order.

Back Story for Antiva of Kutan.

Antiva is on his way to meet Klois ‘the Big Bang’ Klitheroe at the Cracked Head. It is the only pub in Powder Alley that’s still standing after all. Klois has been promising Antiva for sometime that he can get him some quality alchemical ingredients, and yesterday evening he sent a message to the School that he has nailed a killer supply contract with some fringe benefits. And those fringe benefits may well suit you – oh yes. So here you are in the nether regions of Powder Alley looking for the Cracked Head. It’s a dark part of the quarter and you’ve heard rumour that some pretty unsavoury types frequent this drinking hole. Still Klois has been a good source for stuff lately.

You knock on the small side-door at the prescribed time and a slot pulls open and a pair of eyes peer at you. After satisfying them that you aren’t the local militia or worse, you are let through into the warren of back rooms that is the back of the Head. The pub skivvy Tom, a small filthy urchin with a glint of trouble in his eye – only 13-14 years of age a mere child by your eye, leads you through to what looks like the regulars bar area at the side of the pub. “Klois has a back-room set aside for yer, ‘e’s paid for it but he ain’t here yet – so you can sit in here and I’ll send him to yer when he get’s here. What you want to eat and drink meester?”, says Tom in immaculate Low Lankhmarese. He cocks a look at you as if to say – and if you don’t have summat to eat and drink we’ll kick you out right now.

Original Concept Sketch for Amberrh

Here’s the original concept sketch I did for Amberrh my DMC pint-pot barbarian princess from the Cold Wastes. She’s a pint-pot of fury, so don’t go upsetting her. I have a figure for her which is devoid of kilt, so I’m having to rethink her design as I like my RPG figures to match the character as far as possible. Once I have a new piccy of Amberrh I’ll pop her up onto the blog for general perusal. She’s a feisty girl!

Amberrh of the Cold Wastes

You can see that I’ve gone for a sort of scottish look with the tartan kilt, sporran (thats where the smerduks live), a broadsword carried in scabbard so she can fight with it in or out of the scabbard as needed. She wearing an open-faced plate helm which is basically a roman-type style. Then she also has a ringmail hauberk, with leather underneath of course. Bare legs, and a set of stout socks, with a belt-knife tucked in the socks. Finished off with hob-nail boots. And the obligatory cloak.

This is taken from my  DM’s “little-black-book” of rules, and is part of where I’ve figured out the encumbrance calculations rubrics for Hydra – hence the title in the top right.  She’s only 4’3″ can you believe it? So not part of the towering barbarian tribe of the north that Fafhrd is from, but from another tribe I think.

An Example Hydra Character – Amberrh the Barbarian Princess

This is one of the DMC’s, published in the hydra version 1.0 character sheet. Amberrh is the first character I rolled whilst developing hydra so she’s very dear to me. She’s a little pint-pot northern barbarian princess. Underestimate her at your peril because she’s a demon with her fists and feet. Not to mention she is mega charismatic and a barbarian babe.

This is published as if it were a player character, so in the way PC’s record their characters rather than the guts n all DM version. I’m very happy with my logo btw, the image is a medieval picture of – uh – an hydra!

Here is the first character ever generated with hydra version 1.0 - my DMC Amberrh!

Protected: DMC Cast List for the Lankhmar Campaign 2010

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Developing Non-Player-Characters

NPC development has always been really important to me as a DM. They are my characters – another way of talking about them is to call them DMC’s or GMC’s. One way of thinking about it is that every non-PC is a DMC – and of course the better you can develop your DMC’s the richer the world of characters is that the PC’s can interact with. Of course as a DM you get to play pretty much everybody and everything who is not represented by the PC’s, so you’d better chose whom you develop pretty carefully or pretty soon you will end up with a character sheet for every thing you play and that would be unmanageable.

So I have different levels of NPC’s or DMC’s in the Hydra system. Major DMC’s have a full character sheet as the DM’s version of the PC’s – that is with all the rules exposed. Minor DMC’s have mini-versions – enough to run them for that moment and so they are combat-ready – i.e. you can run them if they need to fight, but not much more detail than that. Beyond the Minor DMC’s are the rest of the NPC’s who have no character sheet at all beyond a description of their character. That could be in my head, or jotted down as a few words in my DM’s journal.

Which, for your non-edification I will be blogging here in the  private DM’s journal section. Unfortunately, unless you approach me and request a password for the DM’s journal, and I’m satisfied that you are not taking the mick and you are not one of my players in disguise you won’t be able to read the DM’s journal yet.  I won’t even issue you with a password even then. I have to keep some material safe from the prying eyes of players, and also until I have a resolution with regard to publishing rights – none of this is going to be available for public viewing on the internet. So, sorry for that tease. Unless you are someone interested in publishing what I have or you are contacting me to talk over the copyright of what you think is your material (i.e. you are an author of one of the systems I’ve mashed), don’t bother pestering me for releasing the material into the public domain. It won’t happen. Enjoy what you can get here which I’ve sanitized for public consumption and drool over what might lie inside the DMJ. Or a book yet to be published. (Hint, hint).