I’m sitting on the hotel bed with my laptop after a day of cross country skiing and my wife is sitting at the small table, doing French lessons. I’m tired and I should sleep, but I keep thinking about role-playing games.
If you’ve been following my blog (and not just the RPG tag, which comes with a separate feed), you’ll have noticed the German posts about Helmbarten. Before I write about the thing I want to write, let me talk about Helmbarten for a moment. Helmbarten is an older German word for Halberd. I sometimes like to think as my campaigns taking part in a world informed by the landscape I know. This is why my favourite map generator generates Alpine maps. And this is why I sometimes look towards Swiss history for inspiration. This is why the rules don’t have armour: only the first rows of the Gewalthaufen, the main mass of soldiers, actually wore armour, and wearing armour was not popular: it slowed you down and put you at a disadvantage if you wanted to plunder the fallen. There are records of reprimands and armour (cuirasses and helmets) being sent after the army on the move because they had been conveniently “forgotten” when the soldiers left. And I use the weapons and names that aren’t typically D&D style: instead of “sword” I use “small sword” (Degen), instead of “dagger” I use “knife” (Messer), instead of “spear” I use “pike”, and instead of the various polearms I use “halberd” (Hellebarde → Helmbarte).
Soldiers with long spears stabbing each other
From a drawing by Hans Holbein von Augsburg, working in Basel, 1497-1543, showing a battle between Swiss mercenaries (Reisläufer) and German mercenaries (Landsknechte). – Villmergerkriege 1656 und 1712
Villmergerkriege 1656 und 1712
Furthermore, based on my experience in previous campaigns, I’m no longer all that interested in the multitude of D&D monsters. Instead, I had great fun with an all-human Traveller campaign, and I think back to old campaigns where my players avoided dungeons and adventured in the wilderness, where we might find hordes of orcs, maybe, but all the discussion around orcs and racism makes me feel uncomfortable and therefore I prefer to just drop orcs instead of stepping into that quagmire, given that I’m writing a new game. I mean, my existing old setting generator tables are full of D&D monsters. But the new campaign will have the kinds of monsters you’d expect from reading the story of the Nibelungen Ring: giants, dragons, and fey (dwarves or elves, it doesn’t matter).
So what I did is I added a table to generate those monster types, inspired a bit by the animal encounter charts in Traveller. These monsters also don’t work like regular Traveller characters. Regular characters have six attributes, each rolled using 2d6. The first three of them are your physical attributes. If one of them drops to zero, you fall unconscious. If two of them drop to zero, you’re dead. Endurance also determines how many attacks you can make in the fight. That’s right, once you run out attacks, you might as well flee. Regular weapons do 2d6 damage and the name-giving halberd gives 3d6 damage.
Here’s how monsters work: pick category, roll up some stats, and then stick to them. In the Helmbarten rules I have goblins riding on giant spiders, i.e. fey creatures on mounts. Let’s roll up some goblin stats: damage-3, endurance-1, life-5, attack-5, flee-4, number-7; giant spiders: damage-15, endurance-16, life-12, attack-9, flee-7, number = number of goblins. And that’s it: goblins always do 3 damage, giant spiders always do 15 damage. That makes the spiders deadly! Think of it as extra poison. Endurance is how much damage they take until they fall unconscious, life is how much extra damage you need to do to kill them, attack is what they need to roll (or less) to successfully deal damage, flee is what they get to roll (or less) to flee if given the opportunity before a fight begins.
+-----+-----------+--------+-----------+------+--------+-------+--------+ | 1d6 | Monster | Damage | Endurance | Life | Attack | Flee | Number | +-----+-----------+--------+-----------+------+--------+-------+--------+ | 1 | Fey | 2W6 | 1W6 | 1W6 | 1W6+4 | 1W6+3 | 2W6 | | 2 | Predators | 2W6 | 3W6 | 2W6 | 1W6+5 | 1W6+2 | 2W6 | | 3 | Undead | 2W6 | 3W6 | 4W6 | 1W6+6 | 1W6+0 | 2W6 | | 4 | Mounts | 3W6 | 6W6 | 3W6 | 1W6+4 | 1W6+2 | 1W6 | | 5 | Giants | 4W6 | 8W6 | 4W6 | 1W6+3 | 1W6+0 | 1W6 | | 6 | Dragons | 6W6 | 10W6 | 5W6 | 1W6+2 | 1W6+0 | 1 | +-----+-----------+--------+-----------+------+--------+-------+--------+
Anyway, I added some referee advice to the rules, it includes the suggestion to roll up twelve major characters for the beginning area and to draw connections between them, some of them contradictory, somebody’s best friend is somebody else’s worst enemy; two of them want a treasure item but only one of them can have it. I also suggested adding giants and dragons to the setup. My initial campaign example includes three dragons and three giants. Some of them are protected by bandits, some are protected by fey creatures, or undead. And so on.
As you can see, however, there is not a lot of subtlety about the stats, no special abilities except how much damage they can deal and how much damage they can take. As I said elsewhere, I’m rarely interested in the tactics of winning a fight. Instead, characters can use the Tactics skill to setup ambushes, or to avoid ambushes. What I care about is the strategy: when do we fight, how do we prepare for the fight, how do we make sure we’ll win the fight. I find that all it takes is a deadly system where luck is a big factor and automatically fights are treated the way I want to treat them. I guess the alternative is players taking a look at the rule, throwing up their hands and saying “this is lame!” – fair enough. These are just the rules for the game I want to play.
Anyway, with all of that said, the actual point I wanted to make is extremely small in comparison: I find that now that I have a Helmbarten character generator, and tables for how to roll up monsters, and I’ve decided that all the magic items are more like artifacts and relics, not items that give players a particular bonus or anything like that, it might actually be easy to generate a mini-setting without a geographical map. I could roll up those twelve characters, three giants, three dragons, names for the ruins, towers, castles, villages, mountains, forests, swamps and bogs where they all reside, maybe also lakes and rivers, and relics and artifact names, and generate a messy relationship map and a description thereof instead.
And the question I have now is whether spending time on writing such a starting situation generator would be time well spent, or an indication that I don’t get to play enough. Aye, there’s the rub.
the RPG feed of this blog, if you’re interested
#RPG #Traveller #Halberts #2d6
Indeed, Worlds Apart, Mercator, Cepheus Engine – plenty of options exist. But they are long, and in English, and I am looking for something small, and in German to play with my wife.
