Owlbear Run

Today, Owlbear Run was published in Dungeon Magazine #213.

Chris Perkins commissioned the adventure last fall. I sketched out some ideas, and Chris gave me some specifics in regard to what he wanted. I drew some rough maps, and Chris sent me back refined and clean versions of those ideas. I wrote the adventure over the month of December 2012 (which seems like something of a miracle now, considering all the holiday travel).

Owlbear Run isn't typical of most of the published adventures I've read. That's not to say it's ehrmagawd awezomezz or in any way spectacular. Rather, it probably runs more like one of my own home games, the type I used to run in college when I was in my late teens and early twenties. It's lighthearted and random instead of moody and dramatic. There's a lot of role-play, puzzle solving, plotting, and strategy. It's in no way straightforward, and its success is largely reliant on what the DM and players bring to the table. When I ran it for my group, I told them not to worry much about their stats, but encouraged them to come to the table with characters who had interesting personalities. We ended up with:

- a paranoid, once-mighty wizard, who had forgotten more spells than most mortals ever know
- a dwarven union boss striving to bring equality to the tunnelers of the Phantom 309 union
- an eladrin orphaned in the world: beautiful, elegant, cusses like a sailor
- a kobold prince setting out to forge his legend
- an heir to the dung-shoveling business with deep mafia connections

Before I ran the adventure, I reminded myself that an adventure is mostly what the characters say and do when they encounter the plot. It's not a stage where the DM has to dance-monkey-dance for the players' entertainment, with the success or failure of the session hinging on the DM's brilliant plot. This is a good way to approach Owlbear Run. The adventure's there as a guideline, a structure for play. The rest of it is playing pretend, playing make-believe with the weird ideas you and your friends come up with.

Using Owlbear Run with Other Fantasy RPGs
Before I close, I feel like I should address a comment I made on Twitter about how I felt that Owlbear Run could easily be adapted for another fantasy game like Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, 13th Age, Dungeon World, etc. Here's how that works...

In Owlbear Run, the characters have to choose an owlbear and sponsor pairing. They do this by interviewing sponsors and investigating the owlbears to make their best choice.   They can converse with the competing teams, or challenge them. During the race, they'll have to force or charm their owlbears into cooperating. They'll encounter a number of puzzles, NPCs, and some fights. When the PCs fail a challenge or fail to get their owlbear to cooperate, the NPC teams have a better chance of moving ahead in the race. None of these things, with the possible exception of 4e monster stat blocks, necessitates heavy, edition-specific mechanics. The monsters in Owlbear Run have parallels in all the other popular fantasy RPGs. And since the race's mechanics are specific to the adventure itself--and not intrinsic to 4e--the adventure's form, outline, and encounters can be applied anywhere else. Just swap any 4e stat blocks or skill check equivalents to what they would be in the system you're running.

There will be some variation, since every system plays differently. In Dungeon World, for example, you'll be rolling 2d6 to charm your owlbear, succeeding on a 10+, succeeding with consequences on 7-9, and getting the adventure's failure results on 6 or less. In 13th Age, minion monsters turn into "mooks," which behave in a slightly different way, and the escalation die will keep fights brief (you could probably even come up with a way to use the escalation die mechanic in the race as a bonus, propelling certain teams forward). The crazy number of options in Pathfinder or in more free form games like AD&D or (by extension) Dungeon Crawl Classics or Barebones Fantasy will likely have players plotting and experimenting to gain an edge in the race--which the adventure encourages the characters to do.

Sure, you can do this for any number of adventures. It's just that, comparatively, Owlbear Run's encounters don't rely on a specific system in order to translate well.

In my opinion, anyway.

A Few Dwarven Forge Sets for Sale

For anyone who's interested, I've put some sets up on Ebay in order to make room for the Kickstarter stuff. Limited space and no basement means I can only own so many sets.

Stuff I've posted:
- Room and passage set
- Room set
- Wicked Additions
- Wicked Additions 2
- Advanced Builder
- Advanced Builder 2

All are with bow ties except Advanced Builder 2.

Here's the resulting hole in my closet, hopefully big enough to accommodate my Kickstarter overindulgence... hopefully.

The Best Laid Plans of Dungeons & Dragons

I picked up my camera and shot this 1 minute video while the players were plotting their strategy during the playtest session of Owlbear Run.

I'm tickled by this video because it reminds me when this group got together every Saturdays from 2003-2005 and spent half the session planning their next move. Despite what they might claim, I don't think those plans ever survived contact with the adventure.

I used to let sessions run like that for hours. As the DM I didn't want to be obtrusive; I wanted the players have complete control over their actions.

Later, when I reflected on those years I came to feel that all that plotting occurred because I made the players scared of the game. That had been my goal from the start--to make sure they valued their characters' lives and took the story seriously--but I think I may have gone too far, or let that campaign go on too long. In later years, I learned to keep games moving; I learned to do stories in manageable arcs; I learned to vary the mood of the game and establish trust with the players so they understood I was on their side in telling the story, and that we were all telling it together.

We haven't played for a long time. Children come along, professional obligations, relationships... it's tough to keep things going. We played Owlbear Run as a gift from Shad Kunkle's wife on Superbowl Sunday. As a birthday gift, she set up a D&D day for him. Since I knew it would be a one-shot, and had just completed Owlbear Run, I figured that would be the best choice. It's also whimsical, lighthearted, and silly at points. When the adventure is published, I'll give it to Shad as a memento of his birthday.

The players aren't doing deep role-playing in this video; they're strategizing, casually planning. It's a one-minute window into what they did for hours. It ends fittingly, with Liz exploding over an innocuous comment from Shad.

Just like old times.

(I'm not sure why the video links to my entire YouTube channel, but whatever. Enjoy the cats.)

These past few months have been busy. Busy!

I've only been working on a couple projects, but those projects have taken most of my time, as usual.

The first one was Owlbear Run, an adventure for Dungeon Magazine that comes out this month (and gets the front cover!). This adventure was Chris Perkins's brainchild. I started working on it in October, sketching out ideas, running them by Chris. He had specific ideas about the adventure's execution, so I designed toward that model. We discussed the adventure extensively in November and I got started in early December and finished up on New Years Eve.

I had a short break in January and began working on the 13th Age Bestiary for Pelgrane Press in February, the project I just finished.

In the meantime, several pieces have appeared in DDI: Siege of Gardmore Abbey, Beyond the Crystal Cave, and Owlbear Run in Dungeon Magazine; Fey of Wind and Wood in Dragon. 

There are a few coming up as well: next month sees the release of Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign (I wrote a big chunk of the character backgrounds section and character generator). Later this year Steamscapes North America comes out, which includes the story I wrote for it, Songs without Words. I hope that game catches on; the alternate history is well conceived, and I poured everything I had into the fiction.

Today I feel a little bit like a dry sponge that's squeezed all the water out. I need to catch up on all the things that fell by the wayside while I worked toward my deadlines. Scrub the bathroom, set up routine appointments, give away old clothes, clean out our middle room and storage locker, sell some things on Ebay. Sometimes I need to focus to get that kind of thing done. Most of all I need to absorb new images and experiences so that I have raw material from which to create. I have a few small projects on the back burner that I'm especially looking forward to writing when the time is right.

Fey of Wood and Wind

Fey of Wood and Wind, a piece I wrote for Dragon Magazine #420, is out today.

Since it's St. Valentines Day I'll leave you with a hard learned lesson on love, drawn up for this article (plus, the beautiful illustration by Beth Trott, above).

To Hold The Wind

There was a lonely young shepherd who loved to watch the sky. As he lay in the heather, he imagined he saw the shape of a fair maiden dancing among the clouds. “If only she were mine,” the shepherd sighed. 

One day a storm came, pelting the pasture with hailstones. When the storm had passed, the shepherd discovered a beautiful sylph lying in the field, her dragonfly wings tattered and full of holes. Her name was Levene, and the storm had broken her cloud and cast her down. 

In the weeks that followed, as the shepherd nursed the sylph back to health, Levene fell in love with her savior. “Stay with me,” the shepherd said, “for I have loved you since first I saw you.” 

Levene promised to stay on one condition. “I am a daughter of the wind,” said she, “and I must always have my freedom.” And because he loved her, the shepherd agreed. 

The sylph stayed with him, and their love grew as a gentle breeze fans spark to flame. But Levene was a spirit of the air and often traveled to faraway skies, and the shepherd soon became lonely again. Many solitary nights he thought about what he could do to keep his love at home, and at last he decided on a solution. “Marry me,” he said to her. And because Levene loved him, the sylph agreed.

On the day they were married, the shepherd slipped a ring of cold iron onto his wife’s finger, for he knew that only iron could bind the fey. “Now we shall finally be together,” he said. 

They remained happy for a time. But on windy days when Levene looked to the sky, her smile vanished like the sun behind a storm cloud. Slowly she began to diminish, and soon she dwindled into a frail wisp of a thing. 

“Why do you fade away so?” asked the shepherd. “Are you not happy by my side?”
“Happy, my love, but not free.”
“You roamed so far I feared you might never return.”
“To love another is to hold the wind,” said the sylph, “never knowing which direction it will blow.”
Ashamed, the shepherd removed the iron ring from Levene’s finger. “You are free to come or go as you choose,” he said. 

A great gust of wind filled the shepherd’s hovel, and the sylph kissed him once upon the lips before the wind bore her out the door and away. 

The shepherd ran after her. He reached out to hold her, but the wind swept Levene from his arms. He called out her name, but the wind tore it from his lips. Again and again he called, until her name was only a cry, like the bleating of a lost sheep—until his voice was lost in the tempest that carried the sylph ever farther away from him.

Fallen Angels: Ecology of the Succubus

Wow, it was a whole year ago that I wrote the article that appears in this month's Dragon Magazine (#417).

I picked Ecology of the Succubus from a list of topics that D&D was looking to have freelancers write. I like writing ecologies and this would be my third, following the Ecology of the Scarecrow and the Ecology of the Banderhobb. I think I'm averaging about one a year. I feel as though I've been one of the go-to authors for fey in D&D over the past few years, but the ecologies have given me a chance to do horror (scarecrow, banderhobb), and the Ecology of the Succubus and Demonomicon have provided an opportunity to explore wickedness and deviltry. I've enjoyed the variety.

As soon as I accepted the article, I began to regret it. How was I going to write about sex demons in a D&D-friendly manner? Why would I want to skirt the topic of what these creatures are about, diluting them to a clean, inoffensive, PG-13 article?

Furthermore, I soon realized that I'd taken on an even larger burden. Succubi come with edition baggage. They had been classified as demons up until the 4th Edition of D&D, when demons and devils were slightly recategorized. Some traditionalists have cried foul over the change. Did I want to involve myself in that debacle? Not a jot.

In the end, I decided to rise to the challenge as best I could. I wasn't going to shy away from the true version of the succubus--in fact I was going to embrace it. And I wasn't going to deny the previous editions either--I was going to embrace them. This made for a tall order, a big challenge.

In the end, I was pretty happy with it. Much of the article concentrated on bringing out the original mythological elements and justifying all the previous lore of the succubi and incubi across all the editions of D&D. It was a hard task, but one I'm glad to have done. You can check out the article here, if you like.

The illustration above was used for the article and is the handiwork of Mark Winters.

D&D Encounters: War of Everlasting Darkness

This happened. Happens. Is happening. Starting tonight.

I wrote this adventure with Shawn Merwin under the guidance of James Wyatt. It came in the mail on Monday and my wife said, "I don't even remember you working on that. You didn't complain about it or anything."

Because, you see, as I said last August in my brief ENnie thank-you speech, on just about every project my wife talks me down from catapulting myself into Lake Michigan while I struggle against the white space on the page near the beginning of the project and declare it all but impossible.

Anyway...

This project was a lot of fun and totally experimental. The idea was to create a D&D 4th Edition adventure in the style of a classic AD&D type adventure where a session might be made up of many small encounters, combat on a grid was optional, etc. I'd just finished running a handful of AD&D adventures so I was definitely in that zone at the time. It's going to be something of a departure from the traditional 4e game, but that might be a good thing. Who am I kidding? It'll be what the players and the DM at any given table make of it. I think it'll be fun. I remember putting in lots of choices, alternate ways of doing things, and inventing a few mechanics that I was pleased with. There's also some crazy "roll a die and see what happens" randomness in at least one session.

I designed sessions 4, 5, and 6 if I recall correctly. I designed an additional session (concerning werewolves!) that had to be cut when the season calendar/schedule was adjusted; it was the most tangential of all the sessions and therefore the easiest to cut from the adventure without losing anything. However, if you want to know about it, I'll reveal the details of the lost werewolf session in a future blog. (It was really, really tangential).

Perhaps my favorite session to write was session 6. Ameron of Dungeonmaster.com kindly says of it:

The session that stood out most for me was week 6. In this session the PCs have to help defend a town from the pending attack of a monster army. They have nine days in game to fortify the town and get things ready. Each of the town’s defenses (catapults, riders, town watch, etc.) has a battle value. As the PCs do things to prepare the town’s defenses these scores increases or decrease. When the attack finally happens the overall outcome is determined by the final battle value. The PCs being the heroes of the story have a fantastic confrontation with the monsters which has a huge bearing on the town’s final battle value, so the fate of things truly is in the hands of the PCs.

Thanks, Ameron!

While I'm sure similar mechanics have been used previously and elsewhere, I was ignorant of them, so this session was a challenge for me because I was inventing on the fly--trying to create a simple additional mechanic that would serve the session without complicating things. I was initially worried that creating a "battle value" term would confuse people (I hate to make up new terms to keep track of) but it seems like it works and you only use it in that session.

The other challenge for me was to create a siege/battle mechanic that worked differently than the one I used for The Siege of Gardmore Abbey (which you maaaaaay be seeing in real life sometime soon but I can say no more...).  It wasn't just about originality, but mostly about designing something that worked best for this session and its goals. At any rate, I was happy with it. By the way, if you're running that session or playing it, the key to success, imo, is to draw it out and play it as organically as possible--that is to say, role-play the living hell out of it. I think the structure's neat, but it's there as a skeleton for you to flesh out.

That's about all I have to say about it right now. I hope everyone has fun. 

Other news, since I haven't posted in a while:
- I wrote a big chunk for Pathfinder: Ultimate Campaign. I guess this book isn't a secret so there it is.
- Wrote a story for the upcoming Steamscapes North America; this is a Savage Worlds game put out by Pinnacle. It is probably the best thing I've ever written so far. At least in my opinion. The most finished.
- I'm working on a Dungeon adventure. For the April issue. And all that that implies. No joke(s).
- 13th Age. The Townshend. Rumor has it.
- At D&D XP last January, I announced a couple forthcoming articles. The succubus article (Fallen Angels: Ecology of the Succubus) should hit very soon in Dungeon Magazine (November).  The Wee Fey (I wrote 4 Bard Tales for it, and am super excited about them, I don't care if they are only a few hundred words apiece) should be in Dragon Magazine in early 2013. Granted, this news is old if you were at the new products seminar at D&D XP, but once these pieces are up they will be new!
- I continue to tear out my hair over personal writing projects, but this isn't news.

That's all the news that's fit to print!

Yours truly,

-The Townshend