Taking the Weather with You

So apparently, despite my best efforts to hide from bullshit weather, it manages to find me wherever I might hide. This time I brought tornadoes to Texas.

Sorry.

That reputation, of course, being guns. Lots of guns.

In wake of this disaster (and the growing possibility that I may, in fact, be cursed) I went to help out with the relief effort. There, I learned a couple of things. First and foremost, of course, that this is still definitely not New Jersey.

Maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise, but I'm a cynic. Most of these people are goddamned nice. And very, very religious. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. It's just not really the New Jersey way of doing things. We're more likely to hate everyone and everything and blame all our problems on the government. The rest of these people... well, Texas lives up to its reputation.

I've also learned that not even something as apparently simple as disaster relief is bogged down with bureaucratic stupidity. They seemed really organized (they being some faith-based relief group I'd never heard of that I felt a little weird signing on with, but sure, whatever, I'll help wherever when shit's bad) and they seemed like they wanted to help.

And then they handed out these work order forms. We went through this whole little orientation thing on how to deal with debris and where to put it and organize it and how to help, and then were told that we'd mostly be going around and talking to people today. Talking. And handing them paperwork.

Seriously?

"And this is where the tarp would go, if my house still existed."

I don't even like paperwork when everything is good. These people just had their homes thrown halfway across town by a tornado. And we're walking up to the door with a work order form that says 'hey if you need some tarps or something just let us know and we'll get it to you like tomorrow or something.' And this assumes their house is even still there at all. Several were just gone.

Meanwhile, there's a tree through what's left of the front of his house and he's sitting there with a box of stuff he dragged out today without getting crushed by the collapsing roof. I don't think he gives a crap about said tarp or the papers that go with it. Everyone--everyone--declined aid from the stupid paperwork. They don't need help later. They need help now.

So after about 30 minutes of wandering about doing fuckall, we threw the papers into the nearest truck and got to work actually doing something. Still wearing the shirts for this organization that, as far as I could tell, wasn't actually doing anything. Maybe our little team wasn't doing what we were supposed to. Maybe sitting down and helping one or two people down the street wasn't really as effective as getting everyone on the street's number and assessment.

But you know what? It sure felt more productive. Handing bullshit paperwork to people who just lost everything does nothing more than promise aid that may never even show up. Why should I entrust this organization I don't even know (but totally gave me a free shirt, so they're probably okay) to help these people who are looking to us, the volunteers walking down the street, for help?

And, in true Jersey fashion, I wouldn't. If I wanted to push papers, I'd get a normie job. The only reason I walked about with that stupid paper for 30 minutes is because the team leader thought that maybe, somehow, we could help by doing that. 

We didn't. I just hope all the other volunteer teams (of which there were many) tossed out the bureaucracy, too.

Into the Lairs: Self-Flagellation Edition

As promised, I said I'd talk more about the process of building my encounter and what I thought went well, poorly, or somewhere in between.

From an encounter standpoint, I knew I wanted to do something that wasn't always 100% associated with deserts. Gnolls and their ilk were immediately out. While I'm also a diehard supporter of humanity (my friends will vouch for my preference of human over almost every other race), I didn't think a group of human bandits milling about the desert were particularly interesting either.

Kobolds are always a favorite of mine because they're not quite so socially inept they can't talk to you a bit. They might hate you and try to steal your stuff and actually be a little nervous when you start waving your sword around, but they're silly little lizard men and their use of traps and trickery is pretty fun to toy with. I also feel like kobolds are too often trapped (puns, doho~) in their little caves and never get to see the light of day. They're cold-blooded little dragonmen, so why wouldn't they hang out in the sun like lizards in the desert?

It was then I remembered that the desert-themed dragon was the blue scaled fellow. This one never really sat well with me, because if the dragon is anywhere except the clear blue sky he just looks completely out of place. I made my dragon and dragonmen red. The rocks are red, it's hot as hell, it's probably a good place for a guy with some fire resistance to hang out.

When I was building the encounter, I knew I wanted the ambush to be a little challenging... but not overwhelming unless the PCs really asked for it. I tried to set up the map in such a way that there were lots of ways to evade line of sight from the cliffs and plenty of room to duck around and have an almost guerrilla-styled battle across these narrow passages. The addition of a few cheap pit traps that aren't actually pits only helps break up the flow of combat, keeping the PCs moving up and down around the terrain while getting plinked away at by some kobold crossbowmen... and their reinforcements!

The young half-dragon monitor lizard was thrown in there because I wanted some kind of diversity. All kobolds all the time is... meh. But a half-dragon kobold was equally meh. The overlap of templates kind of creates something that might not really match its CR, but I think it has an interesting set of abilities for a relatively low-power encounter. I also sort of wanted it to contrast the kobolds--it's slow and stupid, but more powerful than any of the kobolds individually and arguably more draconic than any of them as well. They sort of have a love-hate relationship with this little pet of their true master.

...Speaking of their true master, I feel like I also suffered from the 'I've got lots of cool stuff but it's not happening here' issue. There's a red dragon in the equation somewhere, and he's only tangentially influencing this particular group. And this group is only a small segment of the whole Red Rock Raiders. There's a whole lot going on beyond this simple encounter, and perhaps that's where I missed the mark. It was called the Lethal Lairs contest, and this doesn't really qualify as a lair by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe I just misinterpreted the directions ("design a Southlands encounter") too literally. Maybe I've been trained by RPGSS to build things in the wrong sort of direction. Whatever it is, I think I have the least lair-like of the entries, and that's definitely a mark against it.

The map itself is definitely one of my better ones. I'm super proud of it, even if its still kind of crap by most people's standards. It took way too long to get it even looking this good. I do not art. I love the little palm trees, though! They're so cute and palmy. The rest of it feels laid out fairly responsibly--the kobolds have built their trap around the spring, the traps feel like they're in the right spots to prevent people from approaching/fleeing, the little houses are far enough back to be hidden but close enough to keep reinforcements nearby, and I feel like everything is in the right spots. It's still not super pretty to look at, which obviously a problem when you're being graded on your map skills, but it's not like it fell down the ugly tree and hit every branch. It's readable and usable and that's a massive step in the right direction.

Structure-wise, though, I think the encounter comes off a little haphazard. When I'm building encounters for my home games, I sort of toss the experience budget out the window and just roll with what feels right. I also tend towards the 'level up when I say so' methodology in many of my games, so just ignoring the XP values lends itself towards that. Here, I knew what I wanted but was quickly chewing up experience without really getting, what I felt, was a challenging encounter. I ended up making the sandpit traps worth nothing because traps apparently don't go low enough in Pathfinder's CR system to represent a cheap CR 1/3 or 1/2 trap. That feels a little like a cop out, and probably not something a real developer would let fly. Conversely, I do feel like the terrain and the beasties and the traps lend themselves to a pretty diverse little encounter.

But is it memorable? Eh. I'm not sure. And I think that's probably what cost me the most here. The winner's encounter is absolutely memorable. Wyvern riders are cool, wyvern riders throwing you off a waterfall are even cooler. (That does call to attention the fact it doesn't really feel desert themed if the main hook is a waterfall, though that's beside the point.)

Into the Lairs

The voting has closed on the Lethal Lairs contest over at Kobold Press! While I did not take first place, I did manage to get second! (If only just barely. But let's not talk about that.) Since I don't have anywhere near 43 friends, I'd like to thank the people that voted for me but will probably never read this. You guys are awesome.

In the spirit of competition, I'd like to give the entries the RPGSS treatment and go through each on the pros and cons. Starting with our winner:

James Haeck's Monument to the Thunderer

Right off the bat, this one hits one of the most important notes: a compelling name. Without reading or knowing anything, this already sounds like a cool place. The map hits all the essentials: key, compass, and scale. It could probably use the map's name somewhere on it, but that's not a make or break detail.

Getting into the meat of it... there's a lot to like. The layout feels a little cramped, but the fight across the water and then up the monument makes for some really cool visuals. In fact, my only real problem with this encounter is there's so much distilling the coolness away from the wyvern riders. There's a bunch of mooks and a death dog. A trollkin that isn't particularly fond of his job. A half-dragon mage tossing spells. Environmental hazards. Clambering up the side of the mountain. And don't get me wrong--these are all good things. But I feel like the real selling point here is wyvern riders on a wyvern monument throwing people over a waterfall. The rest are just... I don't know. Maybe it's just too much in such a small area. It feels more like the assortment of cool things you'd find across a dungeon (or, dare I say, a lair?) rather than in a single encounter write up.

 Andrew Harshman's The Matter of the Oasis

This name is... less exciting. I want to know what the matter is, but I'm not really sold. Likewise, the map is missing the critical components: no key, no scale, no compass. Yes, I don't really need any of those to interpret this map, but those are pretty industry standard. Creatures are also positioned on the map, which is generally a big no-no for anything that might decide to stand up and take a leak five feet to the right of where it's marked.

And while I'm on the bad news, the map in general doesn't really excite. It's a valley with some wet stuff in the middle and no really compelling reason to stand in it (fast healing 5 isn't worth the risk of breaking it!) If the PCs manage to move the oasis early, it just gets replaced with equally boring difficult terrain. The side passages are narrow caves that we've all seen and done before. The most exciting part of the map is the high plateau around the little valley thing--which is only really called attention to in the ways PCs might enter and doesn't do anything cool anywhere else.

Okay, enough abuse, I promise! I really like the layout of this entry. It's got the whole gamut covered. Background. Hook. Plot before and after the PCs get here. Options to diplomance your way. Options to sneaky snake your way in. Options to muck up everything and get screwed out of your pay. It's got intrigue to follow up, and strange rituals to investigate. (Though one has to wonder who the archmage capable of moving an oasis is that then leaves it in the 'capable' hands of his low level mooks.) This actually feels like a great set piece you can pick up and dump into any desert-themed adventure without any other work needed. There's a lot to be said for that adaptability. Conversely--and devil's advocatey--that means that a lot of your 'cool' isn't actually showcased in this entry, but stuff to come.

Zac Corbin's The Red Cliff of Akhal

Another pretty exciting name. I don't know who Akhal is or why he has a red cliff, but when I see the side view of this thing I'm already hype. The map is solid, but again misses the key and compass. Also, my first reaction was 'wow, these are some small rooms.' Then I realized that this was much bigger than the suggested size for the encounter map. This place is huge!

Which, I think, hurts the entry more than helps it. With so much text dedicated to explaining the place and plot, you're left with half the space to explain each room and each encounter within. This has gone well beyond a single encounter and gone straight to the lair! There's a crapload of dudes in this place, and they're not even all here! That all feels like a shame, because I really like the map. It's got a good layout and a nice spiraly structure that isn't super repetitive and the use of disadvantage in the cramped stairways is a clever little tidbit.

Unfortunately, I don't think that really does enough to make it stand out. There's the yuan-ti, but everything else just feels kind of standard. Gnolls in the desert. Bandits in a bandit-themed adventure. Rooms in a lair that (while nicely laid out) don't really feel very exciting. Again, I feel like that's more a problem with the fact this went for too much in too little space. If each of these rooms could have a few hundred words dedicated to them, I'd probably like this a lot more! Also, this earns props for not using water. Water was, apparently, the easy way out this time around.

Charlie Brooks' Ambush at the Oasis

Another half-sell on the name. Okay, so we're being ambushed and there's water but it's desert water. The map hits all marks: key, scale, compass. Small enough not to require numbers to name rooms, which I feel is a big part of making an encounter map for these things. I guess part of the issue is semantics when talking about encounter maps. Are we doing encounter scale (that is, scaled to 5-foot squares) or an actual encounter (being one single fight with whatever)? Regardless, I digress.

This is a pretty cool location with a pretty cool story. Unfortunately, the encounter itself feels sort of bland. The big ticket item here is the fact there's a lamia involved, but its grand strategy is to bring them to the water's edge. To do what? Drown them in a puddle? The water doesn't have any particular negative effect other than being wet, as far as I can tell. I guess drowning sucks, but who's going to stick their face in the water just because some holy woman asked really nicely? There's a lot of cool terrain features (The skeleton! Use the skeleton!!) but they don't amount to anything interesting.

There's also a lot of random mooks that will take a single hit to dispatch but pose really no threat to a group tackling a CR 9 encounter. The only thing anyone will fear here is the lamia and the barbarian. I do like the creature choice, and the use of jackalwere allies creeping about and looking totally innocuous is a smart addition of well-placed mooks. I also like the inclusion of a 'just in case' conclusion. I don't feel like enough things include that (though, really, we don't ever plan to fail) and too many times losing just equals death. Death is boring. I think this one also suffers from 'save my cool for later' with the dragon skeleton. It's such a cool setpiece that it is the whole reason the place exists. But for this encounter it does nothing more than 'bone colored fence.' That's pretty disappointing.

My own Rustrock Spring

I'd like to do a follow-up post on my own entry, evaluating what I did right and wrong and all that, and this is already a pretty long post (as I am apt to do). I'll keep this brief.

My name is bland. I'm not very good at naming things. For characters, a lot of times I just write random letters until I get something that sounds cool and then tweak it to look like an actual name. Bonus points for apostrophes and things. I do the same for places. "Well, the rocks are rusty and there's a spring. Done."

This is, by far, one of my better maps. I make it no secret that I cannot draw maps for shit. This looks almost passable, and hits the mapping essentials. I'm actually proud of this one, even if it still isn't great.

This feels like less of a lair than some of the other entries. I wasn't entirely sure making a lair was the point of the contest so much as the goal for winning the contest (that whole encounter semantics again) and went with what I knew with RPGSS--a single encounter with a set of dudes. I still really like my encounter, fuck the haters, because kobolds are awesome crafty little bastards and I wanted to showcase that in a desert rather than a cave.

More detailed self-critique (self-criticism?) to come in a day or two!

Running Aground in the Southlands

We interrupt the only-roughly-sort-of followed posting schedule for this announcement!

Kobold Press is running a small contest for a desert-themed bandit encounter set in their Southlands setting. While I must regret not having heard of this setting until the contest was linked to me by a friend, I seem to have placed among the finalists!

I'm quite proud that my extended efforts to make maps that are decidedly less shitty have resulted in the Rustrock Spring! So check out all the entries--they're all pretty cool, I think!--and place a vote for your favorite.

[I totally voted for myself.]
[I have no shame.]
[Sorry.]

Wandering: Austin Edition

Wow. How did this much time go by already? It's been a crazy month.

Between the fallout over Fallout and holiday madness and shopping madness and the whole 'uproot your life across the US' thing, the weeks just flew by.

So I've already commented on how very not-New-Jersey this place is. But I kept hearing people talk about Austin like it wasn't a city that should be in Texas. Which sounds exactly like the sort of place I want to go.

And that's exactly what I did. I spent a few days down in Austin and celebrated the T-Day with family at a restaurant that's arguably fancier than any place I should have been in. If I had known it was that sort of place, I might have actually considered shaving. Maybe. The food, at least, was amazing. Expensive and fancy, but awesome.

Which sort of describes my entire experience with food across Austin. Like any good city, they have an obsession with food trucks. Any Rutgers graduate (hell, anyone from Jersey) knows the importance of the grease trucks and the legendary fat sandwiches. They do indeed have a fat sandwich place, and though it isn't in a truck, the place is still right off the college campus and crappy looking enough that it probably could be a truck. The sandwich was, of course, amazing. My experiences with the actual trucks across the city were pretty much the same. Crazy coffee shops, Voodoo donuts... yeah, it's a good place to go eating.

Speaking of wandering around the city, holy crap does this place like murals. They've got everything painted up, and there's a massive graffiti wall where artists apply and reapply their mark on the world.

Which comes around to the city's slogan of "Keep Austin Weird." It certainly is a weird place, but someone gave me the quick tl;dr about it. Apparently the little local businesses united against having major franchises come in and take over the city, which is why so many strange little shops have managed to survive and thrive. Or something along those lines. Whatever it is, the place is strange. 6th Street borrows a page out of Bourbon Street's book (or Key West's Duval, since the two are basically the same place), and SoCo borrows a touch of SoHo in name and spirit. Still, they've got a whole life of their own and are totally worth checking out.

And then, of course, there's the capital building. Austin is still Texas, and they still do things big. Show this picture to someone who doesn't know better, and they'd think this was the US Capital. I think they said it's bigger, too.

And they keep the place frickin' spotless. Very impressive. More signs of people giving a crap about their jobs, which is something we totally do not do in the northeast.

All in all, a worthy stop on my journeys around the port of Texas. I'm still not entirely sure I can ever get used to people being nice, but at least Austin scratched that batshit crazy New Yorker itch. Cities that do that are few and far between!