Issue 5 and a package deal!

Issue 5 has arrived!

Well LoSS has officially made it. The Lair issue is available for all!

Buy it here:  LoSS Hardcopy Prints

For those of you just hearing about it, Lair of Sword & Sorcery (or LoSS) started about a year ago and has been published one glorious chunk at a time.

A game of Sword & Sorcery adventure in a land of Ice and Snow. Thrill as your heroes battle through hordes of enemies, or twist their way through the treacherous tunnels of the Winterlands.

The Lairs issue pulls together the last little bits of the game with rules and guidelines for creating your own campaigns and adventures for LoSS (Stories and Lairs in the LoSS parlance).

I hope you all enjoy the finished LoSS product as much as I did.

But that's not all!

Special Package Deal

Now that the game is complete I'm starting up a package deal where you can order all 5 issues of LoSS for only $26.00 including shipping (you save $16.50 wow!)

Pay what you want pdfs

As usual you can get the pay what you want pdf's here: Get LoSS on Gumroad

Thanks everyone for this wild ride.

P.S.

There's still openings to play in the LoSS homegame on Roll20, just send your email into spookyroomproductions@gmail.com and I'll get you set up.

Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen in the great communities here on google+

~Ripley

Home game...

For those of you in my home game, This next story is fantastic! The demon boards aren't as intricate but the contents are chock full of adventure! And for those of you that really like the multilevel lairs there's a couple of those too in here.

My new templates work great! I'm going to post them after making a few updates. Need to add few things (movement and enemy rank!) as well as moving around a few things from the back to the front and vice versa.

But the main objective of the sheets still holds up. Create a lair in an hour, complete with balanced encounters, multilevel areas, unique areas, enemies and items. Oh and they all have to fit into a larger campaign and each "Lair" must be completely optional to allow players the ability to roam free.

This last bit is really helped out with the story worksheet. Worked great on the first try! I wish I had made these kind of templates up back in my Call of Cthulhu days, would have saved a lot of time.

Once I complete this next batch of Lairs I'll put the files up for download, and I think you'll really like them.

Also for all you OSR people, they could be fairly easily adapted for your own uses. I'll post a version with OSR stat blocks if you guys request it.

May Saturday find you all drenched to the elbows in your enemies blood, or doing yard work, whatever.

~Ripley

Lair Templates work!

Yes indeed, the new templates work great (see yesterday's post).
I ended up watching The Devil Rides Out and was able to set up the campaign flowchart and four lairs with contents, enemies, maps and all.
Yes indeed you can throw together a lair in 20 minutes, and still have it be pretty cool, half an hour for awesome.

Since I find the Heroes can rip up a Lair in an hour, 2 hours if they "roleplay". then this isn't too bad at all.

This means that instead of spending a whack of time with bookeeping, balancing encounters, and all that other junk I can spend my time coming up with cool crap for the "special features".

So yeah, we are cooking.

As for the "Sorcery" side of Lair of Sword and Sorcery I've been thinking alot on the past post on the subject on the mystery of Sorcery.

I think I may just leave that in the realm of the Demonlord and not have a plyaers issue for that subject, or I may just post a list of guidelines for Sorcery on the site. I will wait to see how I integrate it in my own game in the next couple of sessions to decide.

We'll see how the players react and act accordingly.

So yeah Lair is alive and well after much grunt work on the backend.

I'll fully discuss and post the templates along when I upload the current scenarios.

~Ripley

Prepping a "dungeon" for Lair

I've been trying to prep this next group of scenarios in Lair and I keep going round and round. If this were D&D, or OSR, or something other similar I would have done my usual.

Spend a couple of weeks prepping the Setting, maps, background, basic feel of the areas in the land.

Then I would spend about a week coming up with some content that's a little different from the norm.

After that I'm usually set up enough that I can run a game on Friday and over Saturday and Sunday I can prep the next week's game.

This type of thinking is how I set up the Background of Kartharka when I first started it up (It has grown considerably since then) and how I set up the Adventures for it.

This is also how I set up the Blind Burrower scenarios (coming soon, soon).

But now that I'm starting on the next one I'm finding it difficult to do that.

I've gone round and round and spent weeks and weeks trying to figure out how to do something that takes a couple of days in a couple of hours.

Lair is about quick and dirty fun

I wanted Lair to be something different, something where the DemonLord can scrawl a few notes on a page, do a quick hand drawn map and the system will pick up the slack. I wanted the demonlord to have use their time to come up with awesome villains and weird traps, not spend their time filling in pages and pages in a notebook.

I wanted Lair to be Low Prep and quick.

So I thought that maybe the key was the format of the scenario.

I took my usual adventure preparation, reformatted it to a Lair scenario, and bam! It was indeed what I was looking for. Didn't have to go over my notes as I played, everything was right where I needed it when I needed it.

But that wasn't enough.

With the next game I was now thinking that since I was going to publish these I should try to come up with a way of laying out the maps better than just pictures of my own demonboard. I then found that the only thing that took longer than laying out all my maps on the Demonboard and taking pictures of them was doing all that and laying them out in a design program. It got very complicated quickly as I felt limited by only laying out what I could definitely build on the the Demonboard. 

So I ended up with something which was far more limiting and constrained then just having fund with blocks and cardboard on the table, I started to say things like, well it's okay if everything looks pretty similar, I mean I do only have blocks and cardboard.

That's when I knew I was on the wrong track.

The same went for the scenario design, exciting adventures ended up becoming a list of enemies on the board with some stats.

I kept saying things like "Well I guess they can fill in the blanks as they go" or "a good Demonlord would know how to prep this for actual play".

These are not the kind of things I wanted in my game and I just didn't want to live this way. Spending weeks doing what used to take me days, and limiting what my choices were to make them easier to publish and write up.

Nope, I might as well chuck the whole thing at that point and go play video games instead.

Back tot he Well

What I did instead was look to something else I already had.

Those of you with a keen eye may have noticed Lair is published by "Spooky Room Productions".

That is because I was originally working on a Horror Roleplaying game in the same vein as Lair turned out to be.

The big difference for that one was that I didn't have the DemonBoard yet. For that one I had envisioned a book full of full size hand drawn floorplans.

I also had some templates made up for my own use. Single double sided pages, on the front was the map and the basic plot points of the adventure, on the back was the map key and the stats for the "monsters".

I had done this to keep all the separate sections of the "mansion" well organized so that I would have all the information I needed for each specific location.

Anyone who has run a good horror roleplaying game will know that usually all the info is piled at the front of a scenario and the maps and keys at the back forcing a good gamemaster to either prep well and know the adventure inside and out, or make a lot of notes for each area detailing what needs to happen in each.

So I pulled out those templates, filled in the new headings for what I needed for Lair and BAM! I had exactly what I needed to create a Lair scenario in half an hour. That's what I was looking for in Lair and I had the damn thing stashed on the shelf all along.

But wait there's more!

As I've been writing this blog I've found more and more that Sword and Sorcery centred fantasy roleplaying has far more similarities to Modern Horror Roleplaying games than it does to classsic fantasy Roleplaying games.

In Lair and similar Ilk, Sorcery is mysterious, dangerous, powerful and corrupting. 

I had a few articles planned on pointing out all the similarities and the actual way of thinking about Sorcery in your fantasy games. But I hadn't thought about the format of presentation of the books and more importantly how to present it to the players during in game play.

This all came together this week as I realised one important thing. You have to plan an adventure for a sword and sorcery game in the same way as you would a horror game. They are very different breeds, the horror game less focused on the cut and thrust of combat and more on investigation, planning, learning.

But what if you changed the one important difference between the horror game and the fantasy game?

In most horror games combat doesn't work. You need to know the spell, the background info that will tell you to burn the painting, when the stars will be right, where the evil cultists will meet.

But what if Combat did work? If you really could just strangle the evil cultist before the ritual completes, or actually slay the evil monster conjured up with 3 feet of burnished copper blade?

Well then my friends, I think you would have Sword & Sorcery, in the true vein of the original Conan stories. What if you think of Conan as a reaction to these occult detective stories of the time, thin effete scholars who walk into a room with mystic words waving their arms about and lighting candles. (Solomon Kane may be a more apt response but not as useful for a fantasy game).

So if this is true, then instead of writing pages of notes for what will happen, and when, and when certain events will be triggered lets look to an old friend of the horror game prepper.

The flowchart

Horror preppers often make up a flowchart of the entire adventure as there are often a lot of moving parts.

So I made up a quick flowchart template I could fill in on the fly for Lair campaigns.

Now there are a lot of people out there who will begin to scream "railroading" again, and I hear you. Many feel the bane of the horror game is that if you do not do 1, then 2, then 3, then everyone dies.

Or at least the adventure never happens.

Well us horror people have been fighting that stigma for years.

Good adventure design will involve multiple "hooks" to get the players involved, use the "three-clue" model for every important plot point, where the same thing can be accomplished 3 different ways and in a game where all the characters can go insane half-way through you get used to characters doing random things and going "off the rails". 

Let's also look to the another big difference between Sword and Sorcery and Modern Horror. If the bad guy actually succeeds, no big deal. So the Sorcerer has summoned a demon of unknown power. It's no worse really than the lord one province over amassing an army of thousands of men to invade your town.

Things happen, the heroes move on to the next town, hopefully they will live long enough to maybe come back and take the bad guy out later.

To sum up...

Yep, I've got my scenario template, my flowchart template, a new way at looking at scenario design and I think I'm going to throw back a couple of beers tonight and see if I can set up a campaign in the time it takes to watch a Conan movie. And if I'm successful then I think Lair has a long future in my life. If not, maybe, I'll give that horror game another whirl...

Some Thoughts on Lairs

Was doing a bit of reading yesterday (Where do we find the time?) on the state of D&D in 5e.
I will preface this article with something you may not know from the tone of the site.

I love D&D.
I'll just put that out there along with the fact that I think 5e has the potential to be the best system since the Cyclopedia.
Do the math, look yourself square in the eye, face some hard truths and you'll agree, the Cyclopedia was the best flavor of D&D every produced. If it had been supported in the same way as the boxed sets in the 80's it would never have gone away (instead of being viewed as a gateway drug to "Real D&D")

Today I want to talk about Lairs.
For the last year or so I've been hearing alot of talk about the 5 Room Dungeon, and with 5th edition alot of talk about Lairs, encounters, and experience point Math.

I know these longer rambling posts tend to get skipped over a lot so I'll just put the main point up front here.

Lair of Sword and Sorcery is built from the ground up for "Lair" Encounters.

Those of you who know what that means will be interested enough to read on. For those of you who don't, in a nutshell "Lairs" represent the way people have been playing D&D all along if the DM is doing their job right and everyone is having fun.

History time, skip to the heading about "Lairs in Lair" if you already agree.

Go to your first edition handbooks, look in the Dms guide for how to make up your own Dungeon. Remember back to how we thought of "Dungeons" way back in the day. Not any particular published dungeon but that one that we all have striven for, the one we read about in the comic book ads for Dungeons and Dragons, the ones we imagined when we read the rules for Torch Duration, and when buying Iron Rations.

The massive sprawling, multilevel monster dungeon, where players went in level one, fought enough 1 hd monsters to level up, then went to level 2, fought enough 2hd monsters to get up to level 2 and so on.

Each level increasing in size to have enough encounters to level up again, with parts being added on periodically to keep things "fresh", wandering monster tables, "to keep you from wasting time", 

Huge randomly generated monstrosities with encounters in "30%" of the rooms, oh and don't forget to map everything, even in that massive 70% of barren nothingness or your party will become "lost".

We all dreamed of playing or running one of these behemoths, but the fact is, if we ever sat down to actually play it, it always came off a little pretty poor, unless the Dm really did his job.

And what was that?

In the huge warren of a dungeon you find a door, opening it you find a pile of bedding, a monster is about! Now that the players are on their toes they enter one of the two doors leading from this room, It's a cave with 3 orcs sitting over a cook-pot, interesting,

They kill the orcs, find that the pot doesn't contain anything and so go back and go through the other door, Here they find a fourth orc, about to butcher some poor adventurer for the stew pot. The kill the orc and question the adventurer. 

This brave knight had been on a quest to discover the great lost sword of whosiwhatsit, held by a brave knight venturing here to kill an evil cleric who's run off with the churches jewels. 

Careful searching of the rooms reveals a few coins and a letter from said cleric saying to meet him at the usual place by the well. Wait a minute there was a well just outside this door says one of the players. So they wait, kill the cleric but he does not have the treasure. They follow his trail around the corner to another grouop of rooms.

These rooms are clearly an evil temple, Finding a secret passage near the altar they brave their way to the inner sanctum, narrowly avoiding a fiendish pit trap in the dark.

In the inner sanctum they accidentally release a fiendish devil fromt he pits whom the evil cleric worshiped. 

Luckily they discover the magic circle in the floor which protects them while their cleric using a chalice found in the stolen churches treasure, banishes the demon.

The NPC gathers up his churches belongings, there is of course plenty left over for the players.

They killed some orcs, a mid level evil cleric, and even defeated a minor demon, depending on the system they will get xp for the gold or avoiding the pit trap as well. Not a bad haul.

They got to figure out some clues and the whole string of encounters was wrapped up in a single night, an accomplishment.

What they just defeated was a 5 room dungeon, or what could be considered the Lair of an eveil cleric and his minions. Just because it happened int he middle of a sprawling megadungeon does not change it one bit.

Now say you start that story off with an hour of wandering monster rolls, mapping endless empty corridors, tracking torches and rations on your character sheet, and then do the same thing on the way out.

Would that make it more or less fun? A good Dm would have handwaved all the bit at the beginning and the end saying "You are now at the place you left off last time", and at the end he would handwave again saying "you make it back to town safely".

All well made Mega dungeons are really just a series of  "Lairs" or 5 room dungeons strung together along a theme. The "dungeon" was originally just an easy way to get right to the adventure without having to write alot of backstory why the characters would be encountering this band of orcs and a cleric, "They're in the Dungeon" is all they needed. If this happened in the wild on a road the Dm would have to do alot of story crafting, once it's in a dungeon it's all readily accepted by the players.

Look at all the original modules, you would get a wilderness map which players would tromp through to make the trip to the dungeon more interesting (each dungeon does need a bit of history and backstory) but when you got there it would be a tower with 3 levels with 10 rooms each, half of which were empty, or to look at it another way, three 5 room dungeons each one harder than the next.

Lairs in Lair

In Lair of Sword and Sorcery the players all gather together and play a "Scenario". Every scenario takes place in a "Lair". The lair is laid out on the Demonboard, either all at once (for a "Skirmish" type scenario, ie a pitched battle between two groups) or one room at a time for a "Blind" Lair.

The Demonboard is a fixed size, no single Lair may be larger than the Demonboard.(22x28 squares).

At the end of one Lair they may find the entrance to another but all the action for this lair will occur on this one Demonboard.

The main difference between Lair of Sword & Sorcery and other Roleplaying games is that each Lair has an accompannying scenario which states some basic rules for this Lair (the same Lair may have different a different scenario if the players return to it however)

Each Lair must have the following things:

Scenario Objective:

This is what the players need to do to "Beat" the Lair. They may know the objective when they begin or it may be a secret which they have to discover within the lair.

Reward:

The lair must have a reward for beating it. If the Objective is killing the evil cleric the reward could be something simple like recieving his treasure. Or it may be something less tangible like recieving a blessing from the noble knight they saved, or they may be allowed to stay at his temple and recieve training, or the temple may owe them a favour to be cashed in later.

Sometimes the Reward could be something as simple as not recieving the punishment for failing, which is a reward in itself.

Punishment:

If the characters are not able to defeat the Lair then there will be a Punishment. This is a huge difference between Lair and other Roleplaying games. In your typical dungeon if you don't feel like going in the dank tunnel under the altar to see what's inside you can just leave. Or you can decide to go back to town, get a couple of strong lads and healing potions and come back to defeat the demon.

There is little sense of urgency to pressing forward in the dungeon.

In Lair things are different.

The Players are always in a Lair for a reason. The backstory will usually provide this but the punishment rule reinforces the urgency of the dungeon. The evil cleric may have kidnapped the children of the town and will sacrifice them if the players are not able to stop him first.

The punishment also need not be that dire.

In the evil cleric example above if the players decide to leave the lair without pushing on into the passage beneath the altar the next time they return they will find the passage has been entered by someone else, likely other orcs, and stripped of it's treasure, meaning the Knights temple will never recover their sacred relics. In this case the punishment was the lack of any reward, which is acceptable, though the temple may be a little standoffish to them in the future.

Special Feature:

Every Lair is Sword and Sorcery needs a special feature.

It will usually be tied into the Scenario Objective and possible the reward and punishment as well.

It is the mighty set piece of the Lair and will not have appeared in any Lair before (thought it may be reused later but not as a special feature). Every special feature requires rules for the players to interact with it.

In the Evil Cleric example the Special feature may be the "summoning room" that they enter. The rules would be that when any player first touches the circle the demon is summoned (demons are not special features, the room itself is). Another rule would be that the demon cannot enter the circle so the players are "safe" while there.

The players would not be told this when entering the room, finding out the special features rules is the biggest fun of the game.

Special features may be an incredibly devious trap or lock with many levers to pull, may be a special raised platform the final enemy hides upon dumping boiling oil on the players, a special item, a special creature, anything which the players have not encountered before. 

Ideally the rest of the Lair will be built around and lead up to the special feature.

By specifically stating that each Lair must have a special feature and that each special feature must have rules made up pertaining to it it actually takes a lot of work off of the Demonlord (DM in Lair parlance). Because frankly each dungeon should have something special, something unique, It doesn't have to be fantastically original, the oil dropping example above shows that a simple difference, with some rules attached to it will bring an ordinary encounter up to an epic battle with the players have to come up with whole new strategies to accomplish what would ordinarily be a straight up fight.

Using these in other games

These basic rules, Objective, reward, punishment, and special feature, can be used in any encounter, dungeon or lair in any game system you like. Simply applying these strategies when building your own D&D encounters make the sometimes tedious and boring task of crafting encounters fun again, and the reward punishment system may breathe new life into a campaign grown stale.

Please leave any Comments you may have positive or Negative I'd love to hear what you all think.

~Ripley