Der PigDog's PigBlog

I'm not a historian. If you want real knowledge, go to a historian. If you want something gameable, read on. The market in medieval times was not the supermarket of today. Obviously! People brought goods to market in market towns, about twice a week. On such days you can buy any common good, straight off, from a stall. If it's not a market day, you can still buy food, but you'll have to order other items from workshops. (Small towns have markets every week or every two weeks.) Prices are generally static throughout the medieval period, for a few reasons -- constant deflation from the trade balance with Asia, relative stagnation in the productivity of labor, and, most importantly, laws setting price ceilings on common goods, and trade unions setting prices for everything else. So you don't need to worry about modelling dynamic prices for goods. You do have to worry about the availability of goods, and the time it takes to produce them. Basic price list So if the gang wa

Session 6: Gliding through dark water, Lichway 1 Patrick and Fishbones. Patrick has a gift for character concepts. He pulled in a Knave necromancer with a hireling that had “big bones”, no doubt so he could reanimate the guy once he died. I asked if they wanted any hirelings and they took several, maybe 3 or 4. My memory of this session is dim so I’ll skip a lot of it. I want to focus on a few key situations. In the set-up, I had a really tough time explaining the geography of the situation. In part I blame the module, because the geography doesn’t really make sense. I also think I had some misleading word choices that caused a lot of confusion. There’s no concrete lesson in this. Describing things accurately is a skill, and needs a lot of practice. The dungeon has a lot of water features, and the players followed an underground stream through it, avoiding a lot of potential violence. They found themselves in the east branch of a four-way intersection. North and south lead apparently t

The following is a recollection of a fight from a session about a year ago, which I count as one of my worst gaming experiences. Not long after this I ended my tenure as referee in this ongoing game. It was particularly disappointing as I had had many of my best experiences in that same game in the previous three or four months. The game is Wolves Upon the Coast, a game inspired by OD&D (whatever that name means to the author of this game) with an integrated setting. In order to understand this play report, you need to know that: To attack, a character or monster rolls 1d20 and adds their attack bonus and their opponent’s armor class, both numerical values between 0 and 9, plus some kind of circumstance modifier, and tries to hit 20 or above. Characters and monsters have health points, 1d6 points per “hit dice”. Monsters get +1 to their attack bonus for every 2 hit dice Most attacks reduce a character or monster’s health by 1d6. Hits generally have no other effe

After I finished my stint as referee in a long game focusing on sailing, exploring the wilderness, and leading bands of warriors , I wanted to try something a little different. That game had risen to really great heights, with dramatic, difficult challenges for both myself and the other players, but also spent a lot of time, maybe too much time, on low-stakes travel and bookkeeping. I wanted to play shorter sessions, in a more accessible format, spending more time facing immediate challenges. I also wanted to see a bit more of classic dungeon commando gameplay. I’d never played a game with serious players that focused on dungeons, and I didn’t really know what the format was capable of. I was especially interested in the tactical possibilities of various spells and magic items. I also had some goals for my own development as a roleplayer: Improve play that involves precise locations in time and space Run an environment where creatures respond intelligently to enemy

The following is excerpted from the zine that Adam and I wrote, Reavers , about our campaign. It's necessary context for a few other posts I want to make, I'm copying it here. Progression Progression in Wolves Upon the Coast works a bit differently than in standard dnd, so I thought it'd be worth laying out how it normally works, and what effect that normal operation has, before discussing the difference wutc's progression system makes. In ordinary dnd, xp serves two purposes: it's a score, keeping track of achievement; and it's a pacing mechanic, gating mechanical benefits behind a length of gameplay.[^1] [^1]: I owe this latter insight to Simon Carryer.} In old-school dnd, we usually reward collection of treasure and (to a lesser extent) victory in combat. These activities are, to some extent, what the game is "about". If a player creates a character who only wishes to live a quiet life farming, why aren't they playing Wheat Harvest Simulator