PSA: The Linked Post is Full of Lies and Misinformation

[UPDATE: February 12th, 2019: Given Mandy Morbid's claims about Zak and Patrick Stuart's substantiation of their likelihood, I no longer feel comfortable with a public post of support, but in the interest of transparency, I am not removing it. According to Mandy, the post linked below supposedly by her was actually penned by Zak, and is now inconsistent with what she supports. I have no idea if the Failforward piece is lying or not, but I  maintain my belief that the use of "kafkatrapping" is corrosive and wrong, so I continue to endorse that piece of this post. Feel free to contact me with any questions or to comment below if you'd like to learn more about my feelings on the matter.

To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

So, I don't have much time to comment on this, but this post from Failforward is chock full of lies, misinformation, and other untrue things. I don't know enough about the author to speak to intent, but it sucks. Read it only as a lesson in how not to make a point or as a lesson in how to destroy your own credibility.

http://failforward.co.uk/post/93348768153/how-dungeons-and-dragons-is-endorsing-the-darkest-parts

As an antidote to it, I post an earlier blog entry by Mandy Morbid, girlfriend to the Zak S mentioned in the first (lying, terrible) post and a more recent one spurred by the response to the terrible, lying Failforward post:

http://mandymorbid.tumblr.com/post/92910013775/more-reasons-people-found-to-hate-me

http://mandymorbid.tumblr.com/post/93368940635/people-who-hate-me-part-2

Finally, for an explanation of why the methods of faux-argumentation used in the (terrible, lying, and as far as I can tell wrong) Failforward article would be bad even if the article were right, here's a nice essay by Eric S. Raymond on disingenuous rhetorical techniques that use someone's assertion of innocence as evidence if their guilt:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122

Posted as a public service to people not familiar with the events or people in question. If you would like to learn more, or would like some, you know, evidence, either way, I'll try to point you to some useful sources.


WTF is that Goblin Wearing?


Okay, so in my game of Crapsack Goblins where most of the players are still running around in loin cloths, I realized it would be helpful to have some help in thinking up weird and hilarious clothing options for the goblins they encounter. Thus, the following table was born. It is intended so that you can either roll 1d20 and get a reasonably coherent (for a goblin) outfit, or you can roll for as many of the columns as you like. The "condition" can either be applied to the whole outfit or to each individual piece, depending on how detailed you want to get. Let me know what you think!

Automatic 1 Roll Results
Automatic Each Column with Condition

WTF is this Goblin Wearing?
ConditionShoesPantsShirtHat
1Raggedy AssNo shoesNo PantsNo shirtNo hat
2FilthyCloth SandalsLoin clothFleasMatted dreadlocks
3Full of holesHuman bootsBright colored striped pantsOversize tunicJaunty floppy hat with feather
4LousyRats for shoesFur pantsFur VestDavy Crockett Hat
5StainedGoblin-leather moccasinsLeather pantsSweet Long JacketPirate Hat
6Shit-coveredMetal-toe bootsTough canvas pantsCut-off sleeve tunicHelmet
7Strangely ImmaculateBurlap sacksBurlap pantsBurlap SackBurlap Sack Mask
8Faded blood stainsLeather SandalsOverallsBright colored striped shirtRobin Hood Hat
9StickyLong, pointy toesPoofy PantaloonsPoofy sleeve shirtSkullcap
10Falling ApartBandanas wrapped around feetSkirtMilitary DoubletBandana on head
11SturdyHuman SocksLiederhosenKnight's TabbardEyepatch
12Moth-eatenMud on feetCloth DiaperLong RobesPointy hat
13Flea-riddenNo shoesKiltLoose Cotton ShirtLong Flowing Hair
14GreasyHigh heels with bucklesHoseDressCurly Hair Wig
15FadedWooden SandalsSilk PantsKimonoTop Knot
16Worn-OutSandals with SocksTweed trousersHeavy Wool TunicBonnet
17Mostly CleanLeather ShoesCloth TrousersCollared, button down shirtTop Hat
18Heavily RepairedCloth SandalsBrightly Sequined PantsDishdashaAgal
19Fresh Blood StainsCowboy BootsMariachi PantsHeavily Embroidered Cloth ShirtSombrero
20Gently UsedSlippersNo PantsReligious RobesBishop Hat

Lost Mine of Phandelver: Review and Changes


So, for this review, I want to take a page out of Gus's book and provide a general overview, the stuff I liked, the stuff I didn't, and most importantly, what changes I would make to the adventure. I don't expect it will be anywhere near as interesting or creative as Gus's efforts, but hopefully somebody will find something useful here. Oh, and this will be totally spoilery, so please don't continue if you're hoping to play this. Also, I've only read, not played or run this, so take everything below with a grain of salt.

Overview

The purpose of this module, coming as it does in the Starter Set, is to introduce new DMs to running games and new players to D&D. For this review, I'm not going to focus on that stuff, and am instead going to focus on it as "just another adventure" since (presumably) I already know how to run a game, and most of you probably do too. So, when I get to "the bad" section, please keep in mind the disclaimer "this may or may not be useful in a beginner's module, but I don't like it for something I would run." Overall, I don't go into critiquing how well this adventure does (or doesn't) teach new DMs what to do, but I think that'd be an interesting exercise too.

The Good

So, I really did find a lot to like here, and a lot more to like than in most recent forays into introductory modules. For starters, despite the overarching plot of events going on, players have a lot of freedom of action, and not once does the adventure say "if they aren't doing what they're supposed to, steer them back on track" or some other railroady bullshit. There's a presumed course of events, and some locations and encounters assume certain other things to have happened, but mostly it just relies on dangling pretty obvious clues in front of players and then having multiple avenues to the "right" place. The central town of Phandalin and its NPCs/rumors/plot hooks serves as a nicely done home base that reminds me of a stripped down Hommlet in all the best ways.

One of my favorite things from this adventure was the use of factions/organizations. Especially in the town of Phandalin, but even in some of the other encounter areas, you meet people that represent various external bodies of power (The Harpers, the Zhentarim, the Dragon Cult, et cetera) and when they are described, most of them have something they'd like the players to do for them, and most of them are willing to recruit like minded PCs. That is absolutely fantastic future adventure fodder, and a great way to tie in the wider world. But even more than the useful nuts and bolts of secret societies asking you to go on missions, I really like that there's real choice there and it's based on philosophical differences - reminds me in a great way of the Planescape factions. There's some room for improvement here (see below) but hands down this is the best feature of the module in my book.

When it comes to encounter, even though there are a lot of combat encounters, especially in the final eponymous dungeon, there's a lot of advice given on avoiding, bribing, outsmarting, and otherwise dealing with encounters in ways beyond smacking the bajangus out of it. And advice is given on when enemies flee and how to handle prisoners and so forth. So that's all good. The dungeons are pretty well designed, most are non-linear and have multiple entrances, attention is paid to how adjacent areas interact with each other, and the "villains" have their own agendas that can be interacted with in ways other than killing him to stop it. The bad guy groups have internal tensions and animosities, which is also a nice touch, though I wish they had been made stronger. There's a decent mix of fights, traps, and things to figure out, but it skews heavily towards fights. There's also a lot of nice environmental stuff in the dungeons, like goblins blowing a dam to flood out intruders, or areas to fall into, and barricades to set up.

The treasure in these locations is mostly pretty good. More items than coins and a healthy dose of large, inconvenient mundane stuff with a dollar value (crates of provisions and such). There are also a number of old-school approved very hidden treasures that are unlikely to be found but reward careful exploration handsomely. My only real complaint there is that there's a lot of treasure. A lot.

So like I said, there's a lot to like here, and I really dig that. Nothing really earthshaking or extremely innovative, but some good stuff that is readily usable. Especially the maps: they are both very pretty and very usable.

The Bad

Despite a lot of good steps towards player agency, there is still a presumed sequence of events, and there are a few sections where it's like "if players skipped X, Y, and Z, they may be in trouble at this point". While there's a lot of different stuff to go do and see, almost all of it points back towards the central adventure, which is the Mine. Speaking of which, let's go ahead and get this out there: the only thing I dislike more than the name "Phandelver" is its use as a title throughout the adventure ("The Phandelver's Pact"). Much has been said on Forgotten Realms naming conventions, but I'm not much of a fan. I do enjoy the NounAdjective or AdjectiveNoun type place names, though (like "Neverwinter" and "Waterdeep").

The action depends a lot on villains doing bad stuff that needs to be thwarted. That's fine and all, but it does make the players more passive. And while some real stakes are given with these villains (killing hostages, selling innocent families into slavery) there does seem to be a presumption that the players can easily stop it, and that anything bad will hold off until the players have had a chance to at least try to stop it. If not from villains, then PCs can get "quests" from NPCs. This strikes me as pretty World of Warcrafty, but I guess I get that considering the target audience. I'd like to see a few more false rumors snuck in there for ignorant townsfolk. A few of the encounters are a bit quantum ogre-y: they will happen regardless, or their resolution will have a different flavor but will provide the exact same information no matter how they go. [edit: So, after reading Courtney Campbell's review, it looks like I was misusing the term "Quantum Ogre" here, because there are ways to avoid the encounters. I still think some of the advice to "steer" players towards certain encounters is shitty and agency-robbing, but there's not much of it and there's no hard and fast "this will happen no matter how the players try to avoid it" type encounters or events]

Some of the encounters that have the potential to be awesome and/or terrifying are strangely nerfed to make them newbie friendly. Like a banshee that will threaten players then simply disappear if they're not respectful instead of fighting. Having an encounter where you need something from an obviously evil and obviously powerful monster is really cool. Having it be all upside with no downside for playing it wrong is weak sauce. Likewise with the green dragon encounter: while it was a pretty clever way to make sure the "Dungeons & Dragons" starter set had a, you know, dragon in it, the encounter itself is a bit cheesey: the dragon runs away at half hit points no matter what.

A lot of the more interesting stuff in the adventure (like tension within the ranks of the bad guys, the potentially conflicting goals of "good" organizations, conflicts between the PCs' own avarice and sense of right and wrong) gets lip service but isn't developed very much. Even though PCs can go wherever they want, it's assumed that all roads eventually lead to the mine and even though NPC/Monster factions have internal tensions, its assumed those won't come up until after a good fight, if at all.

As mentioned above, there's a whole hell of a lot of combat encounters, and they pass out treasure pretty open handedly. I'd probably be a bit more parsimonious, but I'm well on working my way into being a crotchety old man.

What I’d Change

Okay, so as discussed, there's a lot of good stuff in here. Not groundbreaking, but good and usable, especially if you aren't tired of "standard" D&D fantasy tropes. Most of what I'd change is a matter of tweaking what's here rather than major sweeping changes. Almost all of those changes are geared towards maximizing the player-choice and freedom elements that are already present in nascent form. Oh, and I'd change all the names to stuff that didn't use "exotic" spelling to make things look phantastickal (<-- this is funny because "phantasy" actually has legitimate etymological roots, but you get my point, I hope).

First off, rather than presuming a mysterious villain is driving things and presenting some half-hearted mystery-solving (Gasp! Glasstaff the bad wizard is actually Iarno, the knight guy's friend?!), I would frame the entire adventure as a gold rush scenario. Tons of people and powers are seeking this lost mine. Phandalin is a smallish boomtown where these various forces are coming together for different reasons. This would nicely enhance the already pretty strong faction stuff going on in this module. Rather than Phandalin being a central base from which to launch investigations into villainy, it is instead the hub of exploration and prospecting going on in the region.

Speaking of Phandalin, I'd make the NPCs there a little more interesting. Most of them presented are just blandly nice, upstanding good people. I really like the "major NPC summary" section at the beginning of the Phandalin write-up, but it's shame it doesn't have anything more interesting going on here. Now, I know many people don't want the town to be the adventure, but if nothing else, I'd have each townsperson sympathize with one of the factions meddling in the region. I'd also mix in some false rumors with all of the "quests" going around, but would pair them with people you could discern were not to be trusted/treated as credible.

The villains of the adventure become actors that are probably (but not necessarily) antagonistic to the players. Iarno Glasstaff goes from being a secretive figure to being an actual agent of the Alliance of Lords, and his redcloaks are semi-official deputies. He's just abusing the hell out of his power, and the Lords' Alliance doesn't technically have a claim on the town.

Nezznarr the Black Spider goes from being the mysterious puppet master behind all of the shenanigans to being a ruthless treasure seeker. Sure, he's still employing bugbears and goblins and stuff to chase off and/or kill rivals, but he's not pulling all the strings, he's not the goal of the adventure, he's just a competitor or potential (if treacherous) ally.

At least one of the factions, preferably one of the do-gooder ones, wants no one to find the mine and will stop at nothing to make that happen. Bonus points if they have a really good reason to. Speaking of which, the Mine itself needs something there worth racing for beyond "future mining profits". That would provide the time crunch needed now that we're not relying on the pressure of a villain holding people hostage.

Likewise, I'd make the dwarves just one more interested party, and I'd turn their dwarvishness up to 11 (so more greed and secretiveness than you see here). I'd put their discovery of the mine and murder/capture by Nezznar along a fixed timeline during the adventure, rather than an event leading up to it.

For actual encounters, I'd add more keyed encounters in the surrounding area, I'd make the abandoned town with the dragon in it bigger with randomized enemies rather than a teeny pseudo-dungeon, and I'd give the humanoids more of an agenda than "do what Nezznar tells them". I'd make them uneasy allies at best with internal squabbles, and maybe the goblinoids and the orcs are both eyeballing the same territory for conquest.

Finally, I'd trim down the wording in the whole module, eliminate boxed text, and generally compress a 50 page adventure to probably 10-15, tops. Hopefully most of that would be brief write ups of the different powers interested in the area and interested in recruiting players to their cause. 

Purchases and Acquisitions


These are rules.
These are commentary for the blog.

So, a few responses to previous posts have made me realize that not everyone finding these posts realizes they are part of a series. That link will take you to all the posts in this project so far, and will continue to take you to any more that come up. 

By way of a general introduction, I should point out that the structure of these rules owe a lot to Fantasy Flight’s Rogue Trader game. The rules for Profit Factor and Acquisitions were one of the few high points for me in a game that was otherwise too seemingly unnecessarily rules heavy for my tastes. That being said, they’re not a straight lift for a variety of reasons, but the basic structure of quantity, quality, and rarity, along with how those are stratified was very inspired by RT.

The Purchase Check
When a corporation wishes to make a purchase or otherwise acquire resources to send to a colony, the player controlling that corporation must roll equal to or under a purchase target number on 1d20. The target number is determined by applying all applicable modifiers from the following categories to the corporation’s wealth rating:
- Corporation’s resource modifier
- Quantity of items/units acquired
- Quality of items/units acquired
- Rarity of items/units acquired

Frequency of Purchase Checks
Purchase checks may only be made at the time of dispatching a voyage. No more than one check may be attempted per given Quality rating of the same resource or type of purchase. For example, one roll may be attempted for high quality mercenaries and one for average quality mercenaries, but a second roll for a different number of high quality mercenaries may not be attempted.

Method for Conducting Purchase Checks
Since there are multiple modifiers applied to each purchase check, it is recommended that you write down all desired purchases with their purchase target next to them, then go down the list and check off or cross out each entry, and only if the results are not as anticipated should further ad hoc purchase targets be determined. Other than one check per quality level per type of item checked, the only limit to the purchase checks you may make is the number of cargo slots available for the voyage being provisioned - once it is full, no more may be attempted.


General Modifiers Table

-3
-2
-1
0
+1
+2
+3
Quantity (Enough for)
Brigade (1000+)
Battalion (500-1000)
Regiment (100-500)
Company (50-100)
Platoon (10-30 People)
Group (3-5)
Individual
Quality
The Best
Superior
Good
Average
Poor
Awful
The Worst
Rarity
Near Unique
Rare
Scarce
Available
Common
Plentiful
Ubiquitous

Colony Resources
In addition to the standard modifiers from the chart above, corporations apply their resource-specific modifier to purchasing the relevant resource.

Quantity: Settlers are recruited at the numbers shown in the Quantity chart, food is scaled at an amount to feed that number of settlers for one month, and building materials is scaled as if it were food.

This calculation is potentially complicated enough to warrant its own table to break it out, or at least an example. But my thinking is that it takes 4 units of food to feed one settler for a month, so a “company” size food purchase is for 400 units of food. Likewise, a “company” size order of building materials is 400 units, because that is way easier than trying to determine the number of building units on average it takes to house that number of people.

Quality: Each resource affects the colony in a different way. These effects last for a month for each step larger than “company” they are in quantity (e.g. Enough food for a brigade will impact morale for three months).
Food: Food affects the colony’s morale rating by an amount equal to the opposite of its purchase modifier
Building Materials: Any buildings built in the affected time period have a hit point modifier equal to the opposite of the purchase modifier
Settlers: All resource collection in the affected time period is modified a number of units by the opposite of the purchase modifier

I’m actually pretty pleased with this little mechanic here (in the abstract at least, of course I haven’t tried it yet). I was trying to figure out a way to get quality of resources to matter that wasn’t too bean-county (different quality columns for each resource tracked, no thanks). My one worry is that a “work around” is to send small amounts of terrible food/building materials/people, but I figure the handicap of sending small amounts of needed resources on infrequent voyages will be strong enough to make it okay.

Rarity: All are assumed to have a rarity of “available”. Special instances should be treated reasonably, however (such as sending over a shipload of marble for the governor’s new palace or catering to decadent tastes of colonists grown jaded on common meals).

I figured for the most part there wasn’t a lot of game value in “rare” settlers or food or whatever that wouldn’t be better suited by more normal roleplaying.

Mercenaries
Companies apply their “population” resource modifier to any purchase check rolls made to recruit mercenaries.

For truly exotic mercenaries, consider using the rules for converting from equipment lists below.

Quantity: Is exactly as listed in the chart.

Quality: Each step of better quality than “average” increases the mercenaries’ level by one and one of the following for each mercenary group recruited: AC, HP, To-hit. Each increase may go to a different characteristic. Each step down in quality also reduce one of the three traits above by one, but in this case does not reduce level.

Rarity: Rarity of different kinds of mercenaries will depend on the setting, but in general, standard infantry are available, and each additional specification makes them one step rarer. So, mounted missile mercenaries would be two steps more rare (rare)

Converting from Traditional Equipment Lists to Purchase Checks
The default assumption for all purchases is that any individuals recruited come prepared with the standard equipment necessary to their role (so, cavalry have horses and sabers and armor and so forth). If desired, equipment can be converted to the purchase check system from existing equipment lists in the following manner.

Quantity: The number of the item in question needed to equip the number of people in the quantity ranks above.
Quality: As a rough guide, compare the item’s price in the standard unit of currency of the equipment list in question to the following table. Here “quality” is being used as the main means of determining how trivial a large, well-capitalized business would find it to purchase the item. Let common sense prevail over strict adherence to these numbers

Price
2501+
1001-2500
501-1000
201-500
51-200
11-50
1-10
Quality
The Best
Superior
Good
Average
Poor
Awful
The Worst

These numbers are HPRD (Highly Precise Rectal Data) with just about zero reference to actual equipment lists. I might go back and make sure I can’t do anything ridiculous like send 1,000 horses over without even thinking about it.

Rarity: Again, assume “available” except in cases where logic dictates otherwise.

Converting Purchases to Cargo Slots
Food and building materials take up one cargo slot per unit.

Human sized people and their (normal) gear take up 10 cargo slots.

Horses, pack animals, and other similarly sized creatures take up 60 cargo slots.

If the weight of an object is known, each cargo slot is roughly equal to 20 pounds (~9.1 kg). Round any fractional cargo slots up.