This article contains spoilers for a number of Luka Rejec games, in particular Longwinter and Witchburner.
This article’s been in the oven for so long I have no idea how good it is. It’s actually like three articles Frankenstien-ed into one big blog post. It’s rambling in only the way Caravan Crawl can provide. Enjoy!
I was shouted out for some games I’m designing and some beer I brewed for the Wrong Room podcast a while back, which is hosted by three real rad dudes. One of them writes tabletop stuff here, one of them DMs stuff here, and one of them just seems to be a real chill dude. If you haven’t, I recommend you listen to it. It’s the Cumtown of tabletop roleplaying podcasts. Well, “ostensibly a tabletop roleplaying podcast,” at least.
As mentioned in the podcast (exactly which episode I don’t remember, this article has been in the bin for months), I have an idea for a game combining all the works of Luka Rejec (specifically Witchburner and Longwinter), and just wanted to carve out some time to write up my thoughts on what I’m doing recently.
It also gives me a chance to discuss some of the tabletop drama floating around the scene with the OneD&D news (like I said, this article has been in the bin for months). A buddy of mine noticed with some skepticism that One D&D is being shortened to OD&D, potentially as a way to muscle in on the name Original Dungeons and Dragons, which is hallowed OSR ground. It’s like that THAC0 character in Wild Beyond the Witchlight all over again, calling all of us grognard clowns and mocking our scene! Not to mention how many changes in the rules are the result of Wizards of the Coast attempting to create a system that’s easy for use in their virtual tabletop and hard for DMs to make subsystems on the fly while at the same time retaining enough similiarity to old content for them to sue anyone who attempts to take a shot at the king. Anyway, before I can talk about what I’m working on, I’ve got to talk about scene.
And… Scene!
Like most of my articles, I have to make a running start at it, and the place I want to start is the scene. (I fully recognize this is like starting a pole vault from outside the stadium.) I am a old school player at heart, looking at the new ways D&D is innovating itself in mild frustration. I was having a beer with a former coworker and I mentioned that in some of the systems I’ve run there was no distinction between “race” or “class,” that in the games I usually run “race is class.” He told me he couldn’t even comprehend how that would work, to which I proceeded to really blow his mind and described Burning Wheel to him. But it raises an important question: what does it mean to be part of a scene?
A scene is an intellectual space that exists for a time and then vanishes. Be it poets or painters or wargaming nerds, there’s a time and place for innovation in a particular art, and it is demarcated mainly by its horrific bloody end. The blogs links are broken, the big players are shown to be either jackasses or criminals, the OSR is dead, long live the OSR! But more seriously: I am a DM adherent to a style of running games that for the most part has lost its place in the larger RPG conversation. In some ways I’m like a martial artist during the Progressive Era in China, or an artist in the Progressive Era in the West unfortunate enough to die or become whatever Ezra Pound was up to.
Speaking of artists turning to fascism, it’s funny to me that there’s this push against using race in the TTRPG space because of its racial or ethnic connotations, but not a push against class because of its political or economic connotations. However, personally I’m coming around on “heritage” and “profession” for those game terms. An entire subsect of RPGs uses profession as the marker for skill generation for characters from the Warhammer Fantasy line. For Long Rim, a part of the character creation is rolling what religious faction you’re aligned with, even if your character isn’t all that much of a believer (at least it was, this is a section of character generation that can be dropped for more setting-neutral play). As I wrote in this article years ago now, what makes up a character is their debt and what they do to get out from under that debt. Into the Odd’s Electric Bastionlands does this the best, I think: rolling up the debt is part of the character creation process, and the group is bound together because they all owe the same organization something. However, both Bastionlands and Ultraviolet Grasslands miss the mark for me just because they provide all these crazy goofy professions when I literally just want something like the profession list in Dungeon Crawl Classics or Black Powder, Black Magic (or Boot Hill!): people have ordinary jobs and they’re entering an extraordinary world. If they’re already weird, how do the players relate? (I understand there’s an argument here about gatekeeping the goofy, that the fun comes from diving into the crazy right away, but it always gets in the way I run my own games. To each his own, I know.)
When I run a new game of Ultraviolet Grasslands straight, I’ve been starting the party in the Azure Ruins in the Bluelands, not technically in the Grasslands proper. This way, I can set the tone: there’s some strangeness going on in the former Bluelands, mostly cultish mischief styled after rampant sectarianism, but for the most part it’s typical black powder fantasy. When they get to the Purple City and meet the talking cats and drug smoking biker-slavers and the Lime Nomads they know “oh, this is weird.” If the craziness is set to 10 at the very beginning, there’s no place for it to ramp up. It’s also one of the reasons I’m both excited and worried about UVG 2E and the expansion of the map east, up past the Circle Sea. On the one hand, more content, on the other, more gonzo weirdness to balance. I’m also sure that my setting of Long Rim has the perfect fix for the UVG map: habitable band of a tidally locked planet, link the maps top to bottom.
My setting of Long Rim is kind of built on this, taking some inspiration from games like Destiny and Anthem. I really like this “lost archeo-tech new world” feel some of the games have, something that is easy to depict in art and hard to showcase in gameplay. Of course, this comes with the caveat that both of these games are bad, in two ways. The first is how the gameplay rarely reaches the level of the ascetic, and the second is the missed potential of the ascetic for the story. Destiny has this “fighter thief magic user in space with guns and melee weapons,” “fantasy as scifi” feel to it, not to mention the crawling around ancient ruins of a past human golden age, and Anthem has this “robot fantasy,” “real people living in the ruins” feel, and both just fuck it up. I mean, that’s what the Obscured Goddess is all about: she’s an AI who’s taking the place of a D&D deity, her temple is a server room. Spending time figuring out why they don’t work is important for what I want to do with Long Rim.
Luka Rejec Fanboi Hours
Considering I have been talking about his work, it should come as no surprise to find that I am a Luka Rejec fanboy. I kickstarted Ultraviolet Grasslands (which was a horrible decision that haunts me every time I pick up that hardcover rulebook), I followed Red Sky Dead City closely, I have hard copies of both Witchburner and Longwinter, I followed his blog back when SEACAT had old Black Hack rules… hell, I follow him on Twitter. Considering that using Twitter is probably a sin at worse and a herion addiction at best, this is a Big Deal™. The only thing I don’t do is support him on Patreon, which… I mean, you should if that’s your thing… it’s not mine yet. And it’s with a heavy heart I realized that there’s a lot of stuff Rejec has put out that I don’t like.
Now, don’t get me wrong, he’s great, and I came into the OSR scene at a time where there were major players to be followed, so checking his blog for what he’s working on feels like the good old days. However, I have two major complaints about Rejec. The first is more general, applying to all indie and industry game developers, and the second is more specific to him.
Buying Products for Play
I buy an adventure, an campaign, a dungeon, in order to cut down the time spent in prep. It’s not that I can’t do the work, it’s that I don’t want to.
I don’t know if I’ve talked about the False Trinity of Game Design on this blog, but if so, here’s a quick refresher: people imagine there’s three pillars of tabletop RPG design, the player, the DM, and the game designer. The game designer creates the rules system for the entire game, the DM adjudicates those rules for his table, and the player enjoys the ride. However, this idea isn’t true: there’s actually just the player. The DM is a type of player, and the game designer is not as required as he makes you think because his role requires you to give him money. Because of this false trinitarianism, a lot of people struggle with how to properly arrange themselves in the RPG space. Playing a tabletop game is not like reading a book or watching a movie, regardless of how bad WotC wants to transition to being a consumable digital medium.
Let’s paint a picture: if I was out clearing brush on a backwoods property, I could do that job with a pair of gloves and a machete. It would be long, arduous work, but it could be done. (In fact, there may be days where I might want to do that kind of work, labor where doing the labor is part of the enjoyment, looking back on a woodpile full of wood and going “yes, I have accomplished a task.”) But sometimes you want a tool to help you preform a task better. Imagine if I ordered a chainsaw online. A chainsaw is good, it accomplishes the task easier and faster and with less physical demand than I could do it with a machete. Now imagine that when the chainsaw was delivered it came unassembled and when I opened the instructions, it was full of encouragement that putting together the chainsaw was fun and exciting! Now, it might be, I’ve never mucked around with putting together a chainsaw beyond replacing a chipped chain, but the problem is that I didn’t order a chainsaw to put together a chainsaw: I ordered a chainsaw to clear brush. While they might seem like similar tasks (both involving chainsaws), they are not the same task. Putting together a chainsaw leaves you with a complete chainsaw and an overgrown field.
In this parable, the chainsaw is the anticanon adventure and the backwoods is the game at the table: you are selling me one thing, but I need another. The solution I have purchased is yet another problem to assemble. I don’t want you to give me permission to imagine elves in a different way than you’ve imagined, I already had that right before I bought the book. I do not require your consent to use the book however I want. There’s an introduction for one OSR adventure that explains that you could use the book as written, or parts of the book, or let the book inspire you for your own game, or even use the book to prop up a shaky table or use it to kill bugs. In the old days there was an understanding between the indie OSR writer and the DM that at the end of the day, the book was a complete thing, and it could be used or ignored at leisure.
When I buy a setting book what I want is how the setting works. Not “let your players do the heavy lifting,” not “it’s ambiguous and contradictory for a reason,” not “this is fun, trust us.” I want the thing you meant when you thought it and then I either go “wow, that’s so imaginative,” or I go “wow that’s neat, but at the table I think I’ll do this instead,” or I go “that’s dumb, I want to run Boot Hill.” Offering tables for what could be is nice, because a good random table prompts imagination, but now you’ve given me work. When I buy an RPG product, I want a complete thing, something that enhances me as a DM, not something that assigns more work. I’m purchasing a product to avoid doing work.
On a side note, this is also how you should respond to drama in the TTRPG community. The author is dead, the RPG author doubly so. If someone made a game and it turns out they’re a distasteful person, you should still be able use their stuff because even running straight from their book you’re going to make it your own as you run the content. Too many good blogs died because they hitched their wagon to a bad mule, when it’s always easier to just raise your own livestock. This metaphor is out of hand, help me.
Of course, now we get to the Wizard in the room. On the one hand, when I purchase a product I want it to work, but I also don’t want to sell my soul to a corporate overlord to play my tabletop games. A lot of the Systems Reference Document/Open Game License drama has blown over since I first started writing this blog post months ago, but it bears repeating: the game developer is an optional element to the activity of tabletop gaming. The DM is suppose to do the work of creating the game, all the tools he uses are just that: tools. If I buy a chainsaw to clear brush, that does not mean the chainsaw company has any right to the field that I own. It’s my field, your tool is optional. A corporation has as much right to tabletop gaming as a yarn company has a right to activity of knitting.
And I think many of the worries that were fostered by the OGL madness have been unfounded at worst and incredibly interesting at best. There was always a culture of using the Creative Commons to release content, and Pathfinder’s Piazo, a company born as the consequence of the 4th Edition War, is working on its own ORC to yet again exploit the division caused by the owner of D&D. But what’s really exciting is how this has prompted so many people to try a lot of third party games. Many people are beginning to recognize that there are more systems and settings than “superhero fantasy.” This mass exodus and doubling down on old rule systems is not unusual: the Edition War is but one of the ways God makes new grognards.
The other major complaint I have about Rejec is that he’s on the forefront of this idea in the scene to run anticannon games. There has always been this push since the days of the Forge to deemphasize the role the DM has in the running of the game. However, my response to this borders on political, so I’ll just say that an organization composed of individuals that consent to a developed hierarchy is not the same as being oppressed by hierarchy and move on.
Rejec says one thing and does another. “We’re all friends here, building the world together,” he says, smiling, “everyone has an equal say in the creation of the game world,” and he assigns all the players part of the world to create and then he has the audacity to turn around and write shit like “There is no Witch” or “Winter comes and not only can the players can’t do anything to stop it, they can’t even find out it’s going to happen.” On the one hand, he offers players the opportunity to be part of the game creation, on the other the adventures he publishes railroads them hard. This might be an unfair analysis mostly because I’m not with the game design interview he gave here, but it’s like, dude. Come on.
(His adventure Holy Mountain Shaker gets a pass: spolier, but collapsing dungeon after dealing with the boss is a time honored gamer trope.)
Anticanon flows back into the first complaint a bit: at the end of the day I am buying a product. It has a purpose. If the idea is to give me things that might inspire me, okay I get it, but make that clear that “some assembly required.” Every time you give me something where I have to do more work, you have made a bad tool. Everytime I think about a hiccup I’ve had to overcome in UVG, I am reminded of the greatest dungeon/adventure ever put onto paper: Gradient Descent for Mothership. I know for a fact I’ve talked about it here so read that blog post, but I recently ran it for another group of gamers and I cannot stress just how usable and enjoyable it is to run that module. Everything you need to run the game is there in the book, and you don’t even really need to read it beforehand to run it at the table. It is the gold standard of dungeon design and everyone should own a copy.
The Ice Hell
SPOILERS FOR WITCHBURNER AND LONGWINTER BELOW
Okay, so you’ve complained about indie developers and corporate developers, what’s this game you’re planning?
So, I’ve spent I don’t know how much digital ink shitting on Luka Rejec, now I’m going to tell you how much I love him and his work. I ran Witchburner relatively straight, relatively recently, for the Monday Group and it was a lot of fun. There were some changes I made and some pitfalls I fell into running the game from the book, however. First, there was no witch. My players, who had spent weeks trying to figure out who the fuck the witch was, almost setting multiple people on fire (though they did burn the schoolhouse down), struggling and failing, were really upset at the reveal that it had all been for naught. (If only I had let them do some worldbuilding!) By running the game as is was designed to be run, as a DM I felt like I had failed them. If you run the game, I would recommend randomly rolling a witch, but see below.
Likewise, I didn’t constrain them with the drink rule (everyone offers the players brandy, making them roll charisma checks at disadvantage, which makes no sense for an investigation game) and I gave all the players the magic ability to make thier eyes glow purple and “see into a character’s past” so I could read verbatim the cool-as-hell backstories all the characters had to squeeze as much content from the book as possible. There was a weird moment where one of the side characters (not a suspect) was mentioned as being a “Republican shield maiden” but the way it was written the Republic was an civilization that stopped existing thousands of year ago and the players were like “it’s not a witch it’s a vampire we kill this borderline nameless NPC” and spent a session on a red herring. Arguably, the entire investigation is a red herring, but I’m trying to not be too negative here considering I’ve been so negative already in this post. I don’t think I would keep the architectural descriptions of each house either, but then again, see below. That’s also a problem in UVG, by the way, that there are these ages that you can roll on but what actually happened in those ages is unclear. I mean, I get it, it gives you a tool to generate something from the “Ming Dynasty,” to give treasure a sense of antiquity, but there’s got to be a better way to incorporate that into the game at large.
So, I am writing a game in the same way you would a three act play, using three different supplement settings to transition into each act until the bitter cold end. The goal is a complete and cohesive Ice Hell: players start with a small problem, that blossoms into a larger problem, that blossoms into escaping the Ice Hell. I want to use Witchburner, Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter, and Longwinter in a combined effort.
The First Act is directly inspired by Witchburner. The party, either explicitly or accidently, find themselves charged with finding a witch. Sometimes the game might start in the Longwinter city of Veldey, the one with the hot springs with the party getting a deed to a hot spring in a small town. Sometimes the game starts off straight: the party are witchburners, they’re here to burn a witch. Regardless, the first act is about getting the players to the village. It’s in a narrow valley in the middle of winter, and the villagers are convinced that there’s a witch. There are some typical witchsigns (dead cat nailed to a door, voodoo dolls, strange symbols in the snow), but a lot of the signs are winter themed (white ravens in the graveyard, dead flowers melting into snow, John gets attacked by a giant white moose in the woods and dies). It’s not clear what’s what. At the end of week one, an avalanche washes out the road into the village: players can leave, but it’s hard trekking through the winter backwoods. They can and skip out of the other two acts, which I think Rejec would approve of.
In the village, every villager has a secret, something that would take about three days to find out and is completely mundane and ordinary, but goes against the taboos or culture of the town. (Some of the default Witchburner ones were kind of suspicious, like, was that one guy a werewolf or not? What was the deal with the chick who body-shifted when she dreamed? What’s the difference between mundane folk magic and witchery?) Remove a lot of the magic, but play up the tribalism of the town: there are churchmen of the Green Moon and trade unionists, and the specter of separation is everywhere.
By the way, the Wild Child’s secret is that he fucking exists. Give out the sheets of the suspects to players and when one of them asks to see the Wild Child just go “who the hell is that?” and then when he shows up at the end of week two all the players can go “hello there.”
As players investigate the town, for every suspect they question, allow them to place a house on the map, using the resources in the back of Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter. It’s less about the architectural history of each house and more about letting them build a real place. Literally let them build the town as they explore it.
The point of the First Act is this: the players are given a bait and switch, though one that doesn’t cut as deep as the original Witchburner. There is a witch, there are strange occurrences, those occurrences are not just coincidences, but the source is wrong. The people of the town know that the winter weather is unusual and want to find a solution to the problem, and they believe the problem is a witch, which in some ways it is. However, everywhere in the region (though the players don’t know this yet), the same drama is unfolding, people trying to make sense of what’s going on. They see a small part of the puzzle, and imagine that they can fix it by fixing this village here.
The Second Act is directly inspired from Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter. The witch is burned (or found frozen in the middle of the woods), and the blizzard starts, and now the players have to keep the village alive. All of the surviving suspect villagers will pile into a larger home for warmth. They’ll probably use the Storemaster’s warehouse as the storeroom, after raiding the place for cold weather gear, extra blankets, and lanterns. If the Storemaster is still alive, she makes a point to record each and every piece of inventory leaving and who is using it, to charge the user later. It won’t matter. If the adventurers want all the villagers to stay in their homes, then they’ll all die separated and alone. They’ll realize their mistake after the third or fourth village they find frozen to their bed with all their firewood used up.
The players should not be forced to roll any sort of Constitution saving throws to collect resources or suffer damage from the frost. The winter snow isn’t here for them. For now. For now, the goal is simple: all these people the players have spent the last thirty days investigating, getting to know, growing to love or hate, all of them are going to freeze to death. This is dark. It’s bleak. It’s not for the faint of heart. I know I shouldn’t have to say this, but before running this, make sure your players know how heavy this game is going to get before you get to this point, preferably before you run a witch hunt with no witch.
You come back and one of the villagers is sitting apart from the rest of the group, holding a piece of ice to a bruised cheek and a black eye. When they see you, they try to jump up and talk but another villager leaps up to hit her again. “They’re a witch!” “No they’re not!” The other villager roars. “No one’s a witch! There wasn’t any witch! It didn’t matter! Don’t you understand how stupid we were? How because we were so preoccupied with stupid superstition now we’re going to freeze to death here!”
If you want to soften the blow, you can adjust the difficulty of surviving the winter. There should be some loss of life, but don’t make it the terror it could be yet.
The point of the Second Act is this: the players have spent a month investigating these characters, finding out their backstories, forming relationships, and making enemies. Now, the players get to watch as all these characters freeze to death. Finding the witch doesn’t matter anymore. In some ways, it never mattered.
The Third Act is directly inspired by Longwinter. The town is dead, frozen to death by a snowstorm that is not letting up. There is no food, no heat, and the only chance is to run. The players have to get out of the region alive.
You come accross one village, completely abandoned save for a massive bank, the village has all huddled in the vault, burning the paper money for warmth. They’re emaciated, and some are blankly staring at the fire, chewing on hundred dollar bills. In another, the remnants of a burned down beerhall, the signs of blackened bodies in the white snow. In a third, so very much like the village you’re fleeing from, with their own witch burned in the middle of their own courtyard, the same drama played out with different actors. The question blows through you like the arctic wind: how many times has this play been performed across the frozen hell you find yourself in?
The point of the Third Act is this: as the players leave the village and try to make it out, they come across other people, all who have experienced the same thing the players have over their own two months of frozen hell. Some are better than the players, some are worse. Scenes of horror are common. There are some points of light, some communities that survive with their souls intact, but most don’t. The call of the scapegoat is too strong. Now, it’s up to the players to respond. They’ll survive. Who they become after is the question.
Alas, Strict Time Records Must Be Kept
Oh my god, Caravaneer! You could’ve ended it right there! That’s such a strong close! “Who they become”? Powerful! Alas, that little voice in my head has been pestering me as I edited that last section that I actually haven’t provided any gamable content. And as such I have to at least try and pretend I game.
Witchburner breaks up its day on a four watches based on six hours each. For Forbidden Lands, it’s called a watch, and each travel action takes place on the four watches. Instead of making players roll for drunkeness every social interaction, I said that there were four watches to a day, but players had to spend a watch sleeping or take fatigue damage. It was a good choice, because one player always slept in the afternoon so he could wander around the village in the dead of night looking for the witch and one time a bunch of players decided to stay up with him and got hit with the fatigue because keeping a watch on someone’s house was more important than sleeping.
I’m sure people have seen this image of the “Proposed New Stardard Year,” made up of thirteen equal months made up of 28 days each. This is insanely impractical in the modern world and usually suggested by people who are equally ignorant of both agriculture and computer programming. However, in a world of elves and magic, whose to say that the optimal calendar couldn’t also exist?
Not to mention there are 28 day calendars in real life: there are lunar calendars, and lunisolar calendars that try and match up the sun and the moon. Not only is every Monday the first of the month, its also the full moon. By the way, here’s a section of a Wikipedia article about customary issues in modern Japan due to their calendar.
So, here’s something that you can steal:
Four watches a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month. The first day of every week is Monday (or whatever fantasy equivalent you want to use), every Monday has a phase of the moon. The new month is represented by the full moon. Day weather corresponds to the first two watches of the day, night weather corresponds to the last two watches. You can either roll it randomly every day or assign the weather beforehand. Columns on the left are for preplanned events: villagers going missing, witch signs being found, etc. Columns on the right are for player actions so you remember what every player did every watch, who they talked to, etc. One watch is spent sleeping. In small scale games, travel is broken up by watch: three watches to travel to the next village, a sack of supply fuels… eight watches? And speaking of sacks of supply:
A year calendar for UVG: four weeks to a month, three months to a season, four seasons to a year. Every week is another phase of the moon. A sack of supply is needed for surviving every week, travel in winter is hellish, and every season has a random event, like a region erupts in war or a plague hits. At the end of the year everyone ticks over a year in age, or let everyone roll 2d20 to determine when thier birthday is. (One of the things I realize looking at this spreadsheet is how I wish settling in for the winter was easier in UVG.) I have a third calendar combining these two types of calendar but its massive and unweildy.
Okay, this post is too long, so I’m calling it there. Good luck, have fun, game please.
