The night is dark, and full of terrors... some are nameless things that haunt the shadows, and whisper on the winds. Some, though, are things we know. Things who are bound by rules and laws that can be used to remain safe from them... and in some cases which can be used to kill them. There is a night walker who feeds on the hot blood of the living, who cannot walk beneat the sun, and who cannot cross living waters. They cannot see their reflections, the sights and sounds of faith are anathema to them, and most importantly, they cannot enter without permission.
There have been a lot of RPGs about vampires... but May I Enter really does appear to be something different.
And the answer is, yes you may...
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So What Is "May I Enter"?
While I would highly recommend folks check out the Kickstarter for May I Enter to get a more complete answer to this, the short version is that it's a game based on Powered By The Apocalyse that takes inspiration from OSR-style RPGs where you all play vampires. However, while there is very much the same dark tone we're all used to in games where players take on the role of these infamous bloodsuckers, in May I Enter the game focuses on vampires who have been Bound. Helen of Troy (yes, that Helen of Troy) laid down a Binding that tied most vampires to a code they could not deviate from. And at the heart of this Binding are vampires who must serve, rather than command. Creatures who must ask, rather than take. And while you have great power at your disposal, and you wish to change the world for the better, you can only do that if others bid you to do it.
So, more "Forever Knight" than some vampire games...
Humans aren't the only things these Bound vampires have to content with, though. There are the Unbound members of their kind who are true monsters, dark fae with their strange word games and unfathomable logic, and a bevy of other things that haunt the dark edges of the world... except werewolves. They aren't real.
And at the core of it all there are primordial vaults that contain ancient, forgotten secrets that your vampires will need to recover... both to use them as tools, and to keep them out of the wrong hands. And these vaults often act as parallels to what is happening in the world above, invoking the ancient alchemist's balance of As Above, So Below... or perhaps it's the other way around?
So if you're someone who likes the idea of a vampire game, but you want something with more streamlined mechanics, a unique world setup, and where you get to play monsters who are trying to be the good guys without people looking down their noses at you, I would highly recommend checking out May I Enter. The Kickstarter has a few more weeks at time of writing, but don't let it pass you by!
Also, if the name Josh Heath looks familiar to you, and you're a fan of the game Vampire: The Masquerade, you've probably seen some of his other work before. And if you haven't (but would like to), I'd definitely recommend taking a look at the Dark New England Bundle, which has 5 one-page chronicle jumpstarts for your World of Darkness game!
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Adventure modules are the quintessential tabletop RPG supplement. While there are world guides, NPC lists, villain stat blocks, factions, and a thousand other things, the most common item folks often add to the base game book is an adventure to run with their shiny new roleplaying game.
However, while more of us can create adventure modules than ever before thanks to the nature of modern day publishing and programs like DMs Guild and Storyteller's Vault, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome. So if you're considering writing an adventure and putting it on the market, consider this week's tips from someone who had his share of rodeos under his belt at this point.
It's not as easy as it looks, I can tell you that...
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I talked about this a little while back in the interview I did with Isaiah Burt, but it really bears repeating; before you put a single word down on the page, make sure you have ALL your art assets in place and ready to go.
Art is the most expensive part of most RPG products, and modules require cover art, interior art, and maps to make sure that you have all the resources possible to run your players through this adventure. And since getting custom art is expensive, it's important to make sure you have all the art assets ready to roll before you come up with the story you intend to write... assuming you want to stay under budget, that is.
The Price of Iron, pictured above, was the first time I did this, and it made everything go a lot more smoothly than previous adventures I'd written. Additionally, if you are working with the art assets you have access to, it can often make you more creative as a writer. For example, when I sat down to gather assets for the Army Men mission module Assault on Outpost 13 I was looking everywhere I could for a map of a modern (or at least semi-modern) jail. I couldn't find one, though... all I could find was a bank. Which gave me the idea to canonically write the jail the PCs have to enter in order to protect a valuable prisoner an old bank that was converted to a jail during the revolution that led to the Styric Republic, thus allowing the map to make sense, while still being an asset that didn't cost me (or my publisher) any extra money to use.
Tip #2: Don't Hide Necessary Advancement Behind Checks
So, I don't know... I guess just keep rolling till one of you manages?
A method I've developed over the adventures I've written is to use "trap mentality" when it comes to designing the mechanical challenges in an adventure module. We all know how traps work, of course. A character looks for the trap, and if they meet the Perception DC they spot it before it goes off. This gives them the ability to try to avoid the trap, to disable the trap, or to knowingly set it off in some way. However, if they don't see the trap, then it goes off in their face and they have to try to save against it, or hope their armor and speed protects them.
The same logic should be applied to everything from gathering information, to Survival checks, to Stealth rolls, in that failing doesn't stop the players' progress going forward... it just means that progress is going to happen to them, instead of the other way around.
Put another way, provide ways for players to fail forward, or ensure that success gives them a boon, but isn't required for progressing.
For example, there's a section in my murder mystery module False Valor where players get to ask around at the bar to gather information. A local girl was murdered, and the circumstantial evidence says it may have been done by factions of an elven nation in a nearby forest who once fought a war across this region. While everyone who asks around gets a base bit of information, for every additional success on a Persuasion check, the players get another tidbit of information. Those who succeed really well find out that the leader of a local gang who seems to be champing at the bit to avenge the death on the elves has a lot of ideas in his head about what the war was like... mostly because his grandfather told him a lot of lies about the glory and honor of the fighting.
Now, players don't need that information to find the answer to the mystery. If they don't hear that piece of gossip, they can still go investigate the murder scene, and even talk to the girl's family to try to gather information about the events leading up to her murder. And even if they don't do that, the perpetrators are going to end up ambushing them to try to make the party look like more casualties in an escalation of hostilities.
The only difference is the more information the party successfully gathers, the faster they can put the pieces together about what happened, and the less taken off-guard they're going to be when the confrontation occurs.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first... you cannot cover every, possible action the players might take. It isn't going to happen. The best you can do is set up the steps of the adventure, and how things are playing out for the Game Master, and then provide some suggestions for the most likely player actions.
What you can do, though, is create funnels to drive the players to certain events, and to provide a handful of descriptions based on these outcomes. A funnel is different from a rail. Rails are where players have to follow a specific course of events from A to B. A funnel is more like a particular event you need to get them to, one way or another, but which is more flexible with the journey overall.
For example, in The Curse of Sapphire Lake, the town is being terrorized by a massive figure in a bone white mask. Players will have a run-in with him, and whether it goes well or poorly, he retreats to his underwater lair. This funnels players to him, because waiting him out won't work; they have to go in after him. When they do they find a tragic situation at the end, and they're faced with a choice. Do they slay this figure, cutting him down? Do they allow him to live? And in either case, do they attempt to go back and tell the town chieftain what happened? Because depending on their actions there are at least 3 different ways the story could end... of course, GMs are free to add their own ending text, if the included ones don't cover enough options.
This can take some trial and error, and if you have the time (along with a dedicated playtesting group) consider incorporating some of these changes into the final product before you're ready to put it out to market!
Additional Modules
A last piece of advice I'll give is that if you want to write adventure modules you should study what other folks have done. Not just in terms of story and plot, but in terms of layout, how stats are presented, and even how maps are marked for certain incidents. Seeing what works, and what doesn't, is solid research for how to write your own modules.
And in addition to the ones I've mentioned above, I'd also recommend checking out:
- A Night At Breckon's Beacon (Army Men): Your squad is tasked with finding soldiers who went missing on patrol. Near the ruins of an old border fort, you find evidence they were here... but what happened to them?
- Ghosts of Sorrow Marsh (DND 5E): The town of Bracken is beset by something terrible. There's a bounty for those who save them from this lurking threat... but will you survive to claim the reward, or merely vanish beneath the waters of the Sorrow Marsh?
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That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!
To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Blue Sky, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!
Food is one of those things that a lot of us handwave away in RPGs. Just like we don't bother counting how many arrows the ranger has fired, or how many lute strings the bard has broken, we just assume that characters are drinking enough water and eating enough rations to sustain themselves as the adventure goes on. However, are you playing the sort of character who just walks around eating the fantasy or sci-fi equivalent of MREs whenever they're not in town? And does a single "ration" really satisfy both the willowy 85-pound halfling and his massive, 300-pound orc companion?
Because sure, we don't have to dig into this part of the game if we don't want to... but it can sometimes add a little extra flavor (pun very much intended) if we do!
How many calories does an orc need every day? Oh boy... that's a lot...
As always, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.
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How Much Do You Need To Eat To Stay Action Ready?
Now, I'm not going to pretend that I'm the first person to talk about this issue. After all, the popularity of Delicious in Dungeon has led to gods alone know how many adventuring chefs who are looking to cook and eat anything they manage to defeat in an encounter, and some of my most popular TTRPG supplements are 100 Fantasy Foods and 100 Sci Fi Foods respectively.
However, this is a topic that I've thought about a lot.
For those who don't know, I was an athlete when I was in high school, I spent the latter part of my 20s as a sword fighter (I didn't do any of the historical re-enactment, I just showed up for blade practice), and for the past half dozen years I've been an acolyte of the Rites of Iron (the cool fantasy-speak way of saying I lift a lot of weights to stay healthy). As such, I know that if you're someone who is doing anything active, you need to eat more than your average person. Not only that, but you need to have different foods depending on what goals you're aiming for, or preserving. Bigger individuals need more protein to maintain their muscle mass, for example, while carbs are extremely important for endurance activities (like walking overland for a dozen miles a day), and so on, and so forth. And everyone needs the proper amount of salts and hydration.
And while there aren't usually mechanics for this (aside from taking damage from starvation if you aren't eating at all) it can get really interesting the methods you find to address this in-game.
And this is before we talk about coffee consumption...
For example, if you're a dragonborn or a lizardfolk, do you eat massive meals, but digest them slowly, thus allowing you to wolf down a huge haunch of meat when your journey begins before crawling into the back of the cart to sleep off the coming days? If you're an orc or a dwarf do you have the ability to eat things that would be extremely harmful to other people, thus allowing you to eat poisonous plants, or even rotting meat, with no ill effects?
And aside from your creature type, there are so many weird resources that might factor into your diet. For example, are there alchemical nutrient blocks that are densely packed with all the calories, fiber, etc. one needs while on the road that are the fantasy equivalent of the protein bars gym bros always keep in their duffel bags? Are there specially-prepared types of bread that can keep you full on a bite or two a day? Are there spells that summon a healthy feast for the righteous, or magic items that let you subsist off sunlight and water? And what do these alternatives taste like, or feel like? Is magically summoned water the equivalent of pure spring bottled water, or is it always flat and tasteless? And if you happen to have someone with prestidigitation in your party, does that mean that every meal tastes like a feast when you have a spell that can make hot water in a canteen taste like cool juice, and even bland, tasteless gruel sing with notes of phantom cinnamon and sugar?
There's even the question of how you prepare your food, and what that means for your load out when you hit the trail. For instance, are you more of a Samwise who carries their pots and skillet hung off their pack, ready to be deployed whenever you make camp for the night? Does the barbarian with the flaming great ax also use the weapon as a portable grill, cooking long cuts of meat along its blade of an evening... and if they happen to be a tiefling or an ifrit, do they flip the meat over with their bare hands, barely bothered by the heat of the weapon? Does the bard sing while cooking, their song actually impacting the performance and flavor? Does the wizard cook using magic, or do they skip the cooking process entirely and just summon what they want to eat? Does the ranger harvest herbs and spices as they travel through the foliage, keeping them in wooden bottles looped inside their pack? Or do particular characters eat their food raw, either out of personal preference, or because that is the tradition among their people?
It's Just A Fun Exercise
Again, none of this is likely to have a mechanical impact on your game, barring rolls made to harvest meat from creatures who have poison sacks, or making Constitution checks for particularly poor choices of food. But it can add a lot to your characterization if you think about how much your character needs to consume in a given day, where they get their food from, and how they prefer to prepare it (or not). Whether it's the fighter grumbling about hard tack and trail rations because that's what he's used to, the cleric being given bountiful feats by their god, or the ranger and barbarian field dressing and fresh-cooking whatever they happened to bring down that day, just give it a few thoughts to see where your brain goes!
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That's all for this week's Fluff post. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!
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All of us are familiar with the first rule of RPGs (or the 0th rule, depending on how you count)... namely that if you don't care for a particular rule that you can just change it, replace it, or even toss it out entirely at your table. It's been my experience, though, that a lot of players and Game Masters take this as carte blanche to do whatever they want, but then they're surprised when the minor change they thought they were making ends up being the flapping butterfly wing that leads to a completely unexpected monsoon in another area of the game!
So, while you are absolutely free to change, ignore, or otherwise customize your gaming experience when playing an RPG, it's a good idea to ask why a particular rule exists in the first place, and how this alteration is going to affect things going forward.
No movement penalty? Oh I'm comin' for ya!
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Change The Rules, Change The Game
I will be the first to admit, rule changes are not inherently bad. Even the professionals sometimes get things wrong, or maybe you just want to simplify something in a way that doesn't boomerang back and smack you in the head as a GM because the deeper changes to the rules never have an effect on the monsters you use, or the characters and classes your players pick. But it is important to stop and ask why certain rules exist the way they do, and to ask yourself what removing those rules does to the challenge of the game, but also to the balance you're working with.
For example, let's talk about wizards.
Say you're running a wizard in the first edition of Pathfinder, or in the 3.5 edition of Dungeons and Dragons (this example might work for other games and other editions, but I don't want to make assertions I'm not fully confident about). So, you are a prepared caster, and you need your spellbook in order to properly prepare your spells every day. That spellbook is both your advantage (since you can learn new spells from other books, and from magic scrolls), but it is also your weakness. If something happens to that item, you are in deep shit, as you can't refresh your spells until you come across a new book.
Most GMs aren't big enough dicks to deliberately target a wizard's spellbook, as that is a surefire way to upset and frustrate a player. However, even if you don't have goblins trying to snatch it away, or enemy wizards casting disintigrate on the book, there are a slew of other rules that we often ignore regarding this jarring weakness. For example, if a character winds up in the midst of an area of effect spell, like fireball, they're supposed to roll saves for particular possessions on their person... and for wizards, that often means a spellbook. There's also the question of what happens when a character's possessions are exposed to the elements, such as when they're thrown overboard into the ocean, trapped in a downpour, or just fording a river on their journey. All of these situations have rules that can affect character possessions (scrolls, black powder, alchemical items, rations, etc.), including one's spellbook.
This is the reason (not to shake my walking stick at the clouds) there were so many alternatives for wizards specifically, and for other prepared arcane casters in general. There were warded spellbooks, spellbooks made of specific materials, spells that kept your spellbook safe in a pocket dimension where it wouldn't be affected, tattooed spellbooks that would be safe as long as you didn't get your skin flayed off, and it was why some campaigns just gave you thick tomes of extra spells that you could use to copy over your existing spells, ensuring you had a copy back at the cart, the inn, your castle, etc. if something happened to your in-the-field grimoire.
A lot of us ignore these rules entirely for making separate saves for player equipment when they're exposed to particular hazards. And on the one hand, yes, that means wizards, magi, and similar characters don't have to worry about a single bad roll taking away an item they need. That also means they aren't spending their resources to ensure their books are safe from harm, and that they have back-ups in case something happens. It also means that the advantages of other casting classes like the sorcerer (who requires no spellbook, and often doesn't even require material components) are far less powerful by comparison.
I've run the numbers here... they check out.
This doesn't just apply to the one, specific example I listed. It also happens when you ignore rules that say spellcasters need one hand to hold a focus component, and one hand to make somatic gestures. This undercuts special class features and powers that let weapons, shields, etc. double as necessary components to free up a character's hands. Ignoring the requirements of a holy symbol for divine casters (something that is also subject to the above rules for environmental damage in many cases) devalues features that may give you tattooed or birthmark symbols that can't be destroyed so easily, or which may free up a character's hands for other actions. It happens when you completely ignore encumberance rules, and you have your party carrying a literal ton of magic and alchemical items into the next dungeon, and it happens when you don't bother keeping track of ammunition (special or otherwise), and you wonder why the long-ranged characters have such a major advantage.
Again, we can all run our games however we want to. It is important to remember, though, that game designers don't just make up rules to fill more pages and expand our book so it looks more impressive... rules are made to solve issues in the system. Kind of like the safety precautions you're supposed to follow at work. Yes, they might be annoying, or you might wish you could ignore them, but the powers-that-be required that rule because the boss kept putting barrels of toxic waste in the crew's sleeping quarters, or the machinery kept ripping off people's fingers... the alterations were made for a reason.
The easiest way to find out what that reason was is to ignore the rule, and see what happens as a result!
Players Change To Reflect The Rules
This isn't a white room thought experiment, either. If the rules shift, that has the potential to encourage players to use different avenues and mechanics to reach their goals. I told a story about this very thing happening in real-time in episode 34 of Discussions of Darkness, How Rule 0 Creates Ripples in Playstyles.
This warning is basically the other side of the coin. Because the examples I talked about in the previous section were all things that GMs could do to throw players a bone, and relieve the burden/pressure on certain classes or characters... however, when you institute rules to limit the effectiveness of particular options to control player behavior, players often find alternatives and workarounds in directions you might not have expected them to go.
For those who don't have time to listen to the full story in the video, it was about how Minds Eye Society limited the damage a single character could do in one strike. 5 levels of lethal damage was the universal cap, regardless of what someone's powers were, what magic items were play, etc. Whether it was a mortal security guard who got off a lucky shot, or a Promethean who threw an exploding tanker truck at someone, 5 levels of damage was the most that could be done... and since an average character has 7 levels of health, and 6 at a minimum, it became impossible to kill anyone outright with one attack. So players started investing in the ability to hire goon squads of their own, bringing teams of characters with tooled-up armories as back up and fire support. Because no one of them could deal a death blow... but if you have 10 elite troopers at your side, and you also get into the fray, well, now you've got superior firepower and a bunch of extra attacks on your side of the fight.
Change Requires The Whole Table
We usually think of rule changes as something the Game Master does, and that players have to deal with, for good or for ill. However, changing the rules of the game is something that should be done with the consensus of all players. If you want to change things up, explain why you think a rule isn't working, what you'd like to do instead, and make sure everyone has buy-in for it. Also, make sure that you make it clear that if this change doesn't work, or creates more problems than it solves, this is something you can come back to in the future and talk about more.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Everyone at the table needs to be playing the same game, and rule changes should be made with the consent of everyone so that each person believes this is more fun (and potentially more fair) than the system that's already in place. And while not every change is going to work, everyone should be onboard for it, and be part of the discussion for how to structure the game you're all playing.
That's all for this week's Crunch post! To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!
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