Snowballing Future

About a month ago, I played my first session of Delta Green. The experience was merely okay. My pre-gen ended up "going Rambo" at the end, in the words of another character. The group played another session a week later, where I rolled my own. The experience was fantastic, probably the best of playering all year (~40 sessions), so good that within two weeks (with the help of a player absence on the regular day) I was running the same module and my first Delta Green for my main group. This a) fits with my theory that "modules matter" more than systems, most of the time, and b) compounds the difficulty of consuming all the "future funs" that might be available to me. The great module was actually the very short "Last Things Last" scenario in the Delta Green quickstart, modified a bit by my GM and myself in play. 

After running a single game, I'm already collecting materials and stewing over ideas about a Delta Green campaign. 

Delta Green would be, at best, the tertiary campaign with the group I GMed, and maybe quaternary is a more accurate label. The bigger problem is that, by rough count, I already have twelve major campaigns and seven minor campaigns planned, not to mention several one-shots, that I would like to do. Two of these major campaigns even would require hacking together systems, to get something I'd want to run. How am I going to finish all these projects before I die? (This is not including finishing my heartbreaker.)

Probably shouldn't be a player in any new systems any more.

Modules played in this year, and will I run attempt to them later:

"Last Things Last" --> Yes

"Convergence" --> Maybe

Whatever the Dragonbane box starter campaign is called (Misty Vale?) --> No

Shadow of the Dragon Queen --> No

"The Isle" --> Yes

Mike's Dungeon --> No

Stonehell --> No

A knockoff of B2, I'm not sure which --> No

"Shadow of the Manticore" --> No

"Kidnap the Archpriest" --> Probably

How I Prep (Xyntillan Campaign)

During each of the last five years, I have run forty or more RPG sessions, peaking at 119 last year, in 2024. I have just hit my 40th refereeing for this year, and was supposed to be running the 50th--and maybe ultimate--session of a "Castle Xyntillan" campaign today, but that has been postponed by real-world events for two of the players. To fill what had been reserved gaming time I've joined Weird Writer's prep description challenge, as announced on the rainbOSR Discord server.

Prep as Player

Campaign prep effectively started two years ago, even if I didn't know it at the time. I was scouring the Roll20 game offerings that were not Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, and by amazing luck, found an OSE Advanced Fantasy  "Castle Xyntillan" (CX, henceforth) open table that was just about to start. The GM was a Swede living down under, who ran for strangers an east-coast USA Friday night game from his own Saturday morning. As soon as the PCs stepped into the Castle, and the GM started impersonating the first Malévol family member, I knew I wanted to stick around for the campaign.

The other two players both lost characters that first night, and my initial PC died during the second session. My second character, and ultimate "main," Uctred the Chicken Priest (4 hp at 4th level), was there at the end. Over twenty players joined the table over the course of the campaign. Thirteen PCs perished, as did five retainers, and something like five dozen hirelings. I attended 39 of the 47 total sessions, including once playing from Seoul at 7 am, because I hated missing the weekly so much. I got deeply into the stories that our Company created and into uncovering the mysteries of the Castle. This was my initial prep for running CX. If possible, if I ever run another kilo- or mega-dungeon, I'd very much like to play through the adventure first. This gives one a familiarity with the material which, no matter how limited it is by a player's perspective, makes running such a complex entity easier.

Prep Prior to the Campaign

When that CX campaign concluded, and with my online DCC open table ("East Dredges") Whimdark campaign faltering (19 sessions before petering out), I sent out invites to sixteen persons to gauge interest in a focused kilo-dungeon campaign. A few players declined, a couple never answered, but ten expressed at least some interest. (Seven ultimately played.) I began a furious period of preparation as a GM. Because I am currently a high school teacher, one of my children is grown, and the other is old enough to be largely self-sufficient, I had a substantial amount of free time during the summer.

To prepare, I read the CX book, of course. Even being well-acquainted with more than half the dungeon, I had some misconceptions from the a player's point of view. I also read the online campaign reports by A Distant Chime, Streets and Spores, and especially Vague Countries, largely focusing on the advice about running. My GM had taken the "historical Europe, western Alps, 1525 CE" setting from Vague Countries, and I followed suit. With this in mind--I was once a historian, teaching mostly collegiate world history, but not a Europeanist--I did some very date-specific world-building research for events of 1525 that might be newsworthy enough to reach PC ears.

My GM had used a partial, human only OSE Advanced Fantasy class list, and I expanded it to include human "cognates" of some of the demi-human classes ("miner" for dwarf, e.g.), especially that I might have streamlined "multi-class" choices (the elf and half-orc cognates for F/M-U and F/T). This idea I took directly from the houserules of "Fish," who was already running his own Xyntillan Discord (that campaign seemed to have faltered in late 2024). I did not include the Gnome, Half-Elf, or underdark "races" in the choices, but offered to create an M-U/T if anyone desired such a thing. No one did. I have always been dissatisfied with some of the B/X ruleset, so I wrote my own house rules that created a few more variants for PC leveling, added some LotFP-ish combat options, improved to-hit chances, reduced saving throws to one number a la Swords & Wizardry, changed damage rolls to reflect class HD like in Dungeon World, stole the spell channeling idea from Greg Gillespie's ruleset, adapted the Tales of Argosa crossbow rules, wrote my own firearms rules, deployed the Carcass Crawler thief skills and slot encumbrance rules, and replaced initiative entirely with a Mothership-esque system. I also began re-writing magic-user research and death and dying rules, the latter to be a little more forgiving, though I was never satisfied with what I produced and sometimes forgot them during play. I rewrote from scratch the OSE equipment price list, using Grain into Gold as guidance, altering a few costs to make cost-benefit analyses produce no single best option. I adopted the silver standard and put all prices in sp (or denier).

I half-wrote and discarded two massive background roll lists (social class, wealth, and starting equipment), and finally settled on a third version that split out social class/beginning wealth, and had 19 entries for most classes' beginning gear. Most of the cool ideas were taken from Gus L.'s starting equipment, Nobboc's "Get Your Gear" from the first Knock! anthology (p. 25), some online lists that I had curated earlier into my own for short-shots and may be lost to time and entropy, and Macchiato Monsters stuff, but I added some historically-specific weapons and armor and instruments for bards. I had only one bard who rolled a kora. PC social class was to be determined by a standard 2d6 table with modifiers linked to chosen character class (e.g., paladins had very low odds to come from the peasantry). I also wrote two hundred entries (dividing into starting and replacement) for a rumor table, as the module only came with thirty-six, not near enough. I sequestered all the false rumors into a separate small table for a liar source, or rewrote them to have a kernel of truth. Many of the new rumors were oblique clues to dungeon challenges that had no foreshadowing or tells written into the module, and were plausibly something that might be repeated outside of Xyntillan. I selected (from European historical records) a few hundred common names from the early modern period, a majority French, Italian, German, and English, but also Turkish, Arabic, Slavic, Latin, Scandinavian, and non-Slavic Balkan, and arranged them in alphabetical order for military hireling names. I selected several dozen names that all started with 'J' to be the names of porters. (When the party started hiring two per expedition, I always gave the pair similar monikers, like Jonah and Jonas.)

The longest portion of campaign preparation was getting the VTT (Roll20) materials ready. Although I could've used the very plain but perfectly serviceable maps that come with the adventure (VTT-ready, even), I prefer to let some of the image do my room description for me in most cases, so I created almost all of the maps I would need in Inkarnate. Taking weeks, this was pretty painstaking and divided between creating the image and the quicker application of features (lighting, walls, doors, a few other interactive objects) to the uploaded electronic map. (Someone else uploaded a Dungeondraft map of the whole Castle about 40 sessions in. Much of their map is better than mine, but some parts are not.) For the more generic wilderness maps I uploaded mostly "battle maps" from an artist whose Patreon I had joined, to give the region a singular appearance. I didn't finish the outdoor map before I started the campaign, so I began with Glasgow Spider's colorized map, replacing it in the first two months. I also sketched a vertical profile of the south and west faces of the Castle, because the illustration in the module does not match the structure, and I didn't want to have to explain that. When a player rolled an acrobat for his first character, I found and uploaded Castle Librarian's rooftop map of CX. I melded together some images, informational text and downtime procedures, and an old map to represent Tours and the starting (and ending) page for each session.

It looks better and spookier, with VTT lighting, I swear

Using Roll Advantage's Token Stamp 2, I made and uploaded tokens for most of the Castle's monsters, many of them taken from 16th-century (or thereabouts) woodcuts, plus some curated by A Groats-Worth of Grotesques, and created color tokens for all sixty (well, fifty-nine, there is a set of twins) of the Malévols, the family that rules CX. Scouring lots of black-and-white online fantasy art, I manufactured about one hundred tokens from black and white images for players to pick for their PCs. I made Roll20 OSE "monster sheets" for some of the Malévol family, all of the standard random encounter monsters, and some of the locational monsters (but not all, because this is a very tedious process, even considering how little time each takes). Someone had created AI'd images of the Malévol portraits, so I lazily laid those into the GM layer of the map in the places where the paintings hung, even though many were truly awful. I searched out and added at least forty medieval or early modern painting and fresco images to place in the dungeon's empty rooms, to provide clues about nearby chambers and add a little more flavor. I made a few (pretty crummy) medieval mash-ups to represent frescoes described in the module. For the three libraries I wrote a total of five tables of book titles (about half real historical works) that the players could roll on if they consumed time searching. I used a number of historical songs, poems, and epics (including Chanson de Roland), essays (including Martin Luther's), proclamations ("The Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants), and guidebooks, to flesh out certain documents found in the Castle, foreshadow certain situations, or to further immerse the campaign in the history.

I generated spreadsheets to track party encumbrance, hireling stats, random encounters, and the evolving relationship between the party and the Malévols. I pre-rolled the first twenty-five random encounters, so I would have them ready to "place on the table" quickly. I got 3d6DTL's Feats of Exploration spreadsheet, and used a few of the rewards (lore use, rumor confirmations, and room searches) to expand XP beyond just treasure recovery (I did not use monster kills for XP). I was given the between-session generator spreadsheet by King Kodok, although I ended up rolling almost everything by hand, with the exception of individual hirelings's qualities. I created a carousing table that was basically two hundred entries long (some with subtables), mostly borrowed from elsewhere, but some of my own, and some rewritten to fit the Xyntillan milieu.

I intended on creating ambient playlists in Spotify that would be specific to Xyntillan, but mostly I just recycled my already-created standard D&D background playlists (ones with titles like, "Suspense," "Dread," and "Unholy Combat"). I did create a folk-songs-about-lost-love playlist and a bombastic and corny Halloween playlist to start the campaign, which led with Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." I added a few others' playlists to the folder, too, like the soundtrack to Under the Skin and ones named "H.R. Giger/Biopunk/Organic" and "Diablo Atmospheric."

Session-Day Before Prep

Since the play was tied to a real-world calendar and setting, I started each session with a pertinent Catholic Saint's feast or death day. Here I used real-world stories and myths which I had to look up. Mostly I just picked Saints whose lives and especially martyrdoms jibed thematically with Xyntillan. If a Saint celebrated on adventure day was mauled by dogs, you better believe that was who was being celebrated in Tours as the PCs left base. I learned quite a bit about the awesome and gruesome petty gods of Catholicism (I grew up in a very anodyne Protestant denomination). About every other session, the opening would also describe 2-3 appropriate European (or very occasionally American or Indian Ocean) historical events, sometimes loosely tied to goings-on at the Castle. 

I arranged all my necessary windows (about fifteen of them, including a pdf of the module) on my computer screen. I placed a paper time tracker and random monster pre-rolled hp by HD tracker and the Castle Xyntillan volume on my desk, with a box of d6s especially to roll "off screen" (so I didn't have to do the extra typing steps of turning rolls in the VTT to whispers). OSE Advanced sat on a nearby shelf, mainly for spell reference. I took running notes in a Google document. 

Session-Day After-Session Prep

Usually, right after the session ended, I would compile a "stats recap." This included fictitious participants, both PC and NPC, a list of kills and party casualties, a tally of resources used and treasure collected, an XP-tracking, broken down by type, and list of rumors heard. In my East Dredges campaign I had assigned this duty to rotating players, but that strategy required a lot of reminder emails and some gaps in information, so I just did it myself during this go round. I would also update the sheets: fresh rumors would fill learned-rumor slots in the spreadsheet; mercenary availability would be adjusted; the character-Malévol relationship tracker would be advanced. Then I would roll all the variable situations that Gabor Lux had set up in the base town, which were based on x-in-6 odds: Would one rumormonger lie to this expedition? Would a potion or two be available at the apothecary? Would the tavern be haunted by a ghost? What curios would show up at the antique shop? Would a passer-by be looking for a legendary treasure? Then I would update my at-the-Castle events sheet, nearly always determined by die roll: Would bodies be outside when the party next arrived? Would the bandits be waiting in ambush? How many ravens would be roosting? When the party substantially changed the ground situation or showed particular interest, new x-in-6 events were added and then rolled every week: Would one of the flying CX denizens be aloft during the party approach? Would the shambling mound they freed and fled be wandering a courtyard? Would a family ambush be set up to repel the party at entrance A, B, or C? Any downtime activities that hadn't been resolved were usually sorted out during this period.

Partway through the campaign, I would add a downtime summary page, arranged by PC. Because I am rarely good at improvising dialog, I added a sheet of quips for the more talkative Malévols, with Charles' selections being taken from Marx's writings, Maltricia's from Buffy's Darla, and the Beast's from, well, Beauty and the Beast. This required a bit of research. Initially, I added comments on recent party doings in the Castle to the rumors spreadsheet, but this only rarely produced timely feedback. The characters' actions were then added to short tables that would produce comments by the loquacious undead nobility who roamed CX's floors. As the party got more powerful, a separate magic item tracker was added. When one of the hirelings returned as a vampire, thanks to a morale failure and Table of Terror roll, a little time was needed to plot his ongoing depredations, which the players finally sought to end once they interfered with their carousing XP. For a while I rolled for restocking, and wrote random table replacements for Malévols killed by the party, like a mad hatter and a keeper of the frog, but neither was particularly fruitful, and I abandoned those efforts. A PC energy-drained by a wight was added to the random encounter table, too.

Mid-Week Prep

Usually I would finish the after-prep within an hour of completing the session, with one exception: the recap. That usually took at least four hours during the weekdays between sessions, the prose averaging a bit over 2000 words per session. Since it was an open table, I wanted to be sure everyone had access to all of the campaign events. The GM's recaps when I had been a player were quite important to me when I missed sessions.  

Other Preparations and the Future

The Xyntillan campaign is the most elaborate adaptation I have ever done, and also the most systematic preparation scheme. I will probably mimic some of the procedures I developed here in my future online campaigns, as the routine felt really good for organizing large amounts of information, and having it ready during play. My face-to-face games are a little more loosely prepared, although I spend many hours on miniature painting.

So ... anyone inviting to an Ave Nox, Arden Vul, or Blades of Gixa campaign?

VTT Landing / Downtime Page

Inner City D&D, Year Two

Having sworn off fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, I brought Dungeon Crawl Classics and “Lair of the Lamb” to the high school D&D club to start the second year. After the tediousness and difficulty of rolling fifth edition characters in the previous year, it seemed to me that having a zero-level funnel would make for a quick start, and a “training period” for the rules. There would be a char-gen session (rolls: 6 abilities, hp, birth sign, background DONE) and then some learning of combat rules, including the long critical & fumble tables, and death experiences. I brought photocopies of the crit charts. I made little colored post-it stickies for every item in the dungeon, to be placed in the slot encumbrance system. I figured we could even start playing the first day, and we did. The first PCs were named “Joe Mama III” and “Eric.” The player behind Eric was new to TTRPGs and searched for a light switch in a dark room a few minutes into the dungeon; he had no preconceptions about the setting. Enough kids showed up for two tables the first day, and most of the veterans shied away from the new system. The 5E table spent their entire session partly rolling characters. 

The Zocchi dice are playing the role of rubble

During the second week, my players managed to get very angry at a chicken-seller, and Eric was slain at the end. That player never returned. The 5E table managed to finish their characters and run one scene. A few teachers joined my table. I had realized that the scratch-off 0-level character sheets I had gotten in the DCC starter kit would be a very good tool for the game. One of the teachers got a character with a ‘3’ luck score, and became “Ovaltine the Unlucky.” The fifth week, none of my student players showed, and all the teachers sat in at the 5E table. We managed to start and finish a battle (the culmination of a short adventure), at least. From that point on, my table was the only one available, as the other teacher GM did not offer any new 5E adventures.

All but one of the students joined my table, the exception holding out hope that his semi-heroic campaign would be restarted (he had brought back his character from the previous year, and adored the mini I had painted for him). For a while I wondered if I’d made a mistake choosing a non-superheroic and even non-heroic system. The vibe of DCC adventurers certainly jibed with the students’ playstyle of being general scoundrels. Was I wrong in not offering them an escape of less-than-ideal real-life living conditions, a chance to be heroes in a more pleasant fantasy world? The students, however, are participants in their own fantasy constantly, as they nearly all play contemporary video games. (The holdout showed me his stats at the end 2023: he averaged more than eight hours per day for the entire year on a single platform.) They got to be NBA and NFL superstars, kung fu masters (Mortal Kombat & the literally cartoonish Smash Brothers), and spec-ops (Fortnite & Overwatch) on a daily basis, power fantasies all. Maybe the grimness of the dungeon was not the most psychologically healthy, but they did a good job solving the OSR problems of the Lamb.

A new kid joined with the idea of making a necromancer, and there just so happened to be an advancement in the dungeon that would give him the ability to level in that class. The mercurial magic that he rolled gave us an explanation for players’ appearance and disappearance, as one of his spells sent people randomly to a sequestered plane. Another completely new player joined, a girl, whose character was soon maimed (“Rolffa Half-Foot”), and who eventually stopped adventuring with the group, because her parents made her quit playing the “nerdy” game. Joemama III was killed by being too risky near the Lamb. He didn’t return for the rest of the year, either. 

I had fashioned a Lamb miniature out of quick-drying clay and a mini cow skull. It was almost as gross as I had hoped.

The Lamb was put down by a strike from Ovaltine the Unlucky, that also ended up spearing and ending the other PC “Anuk (the Unluckier)” during the killing blow. The students decided to use the monster’s intestines to rescue a woman in a pit, discovering and aborting the baby lambs inside the monster as they extracted the viscera. Some wore the prize guts as they escaped the lower level of the dungeon. Yeah, I picked the correct system.   

Highlights from the second level included the unlikely finding of a secret door, the huge relief finding a cache of arms and armor and more light sources, gaining the first magic weapon, and ambushing the talkative ghouls. There was great joy in determining an animated statue was definitely “racist,” as it wouldn’t stop attacking the demi-humans. The cheery player behind “Darkheart” from year one returned to the table, and kicked a wall of death in his first session, promptly killing his character, but freeing the party from the dungeon. (The student had been gone from school for months because he had been attacked in the lunchroom and concussed, for allegedly “talking shit” about the attacker’s girlfriend.)

* * * 

The “Reborn,” having escaped the horrors of the White Temple’s dungeon, fled far from the city of Lon Barago, for they knew the White Priests would have their revenge if they stayed after killing The Lamb. During their flight, the party heard tales of a band of sadistic adventurers called “The Head Collectors.” They had the oddest of names: Kyriee’ of the Eight Fingers, Samuél Dinosaur-Ducker, Sami the Cowardly Fox, Ragnar the Quiet, and Xopa the Selfish Shell. This foul-mouthed bunch were rumored to have killed a blood demon, burned down a village and a mansion, failed to protect a caravan against raiders, let a witch into a fortress, loved a shrub, and teleported through time and space. 

But that wasn’t what interested the “Reborn,” no. It was the story that the Head Collectors had disappeared in a place called … the Slaughtergrid. It didn’t sound very safe, but it was supposed to hold great treasures. Probably. Our heroes heard other stories about the dungeon. A man got out once, it was said, but he was changed forever. There was also the tall tale that the Slaughtergrid had eaten a town! Some old coot told them that a shield is a weapon, in the Slaughtergrid. It was almost as though some unseen force guided our party toward the ‘Grid. As usual, Arthur’s blink was acting up, and Akina, Thödius, Jax (né Modrin), Rolffa Half-Foot, and Ovaltine the Unlucky disappeared when the necromancer tried to raise up his little dead critters (and he failed, adding insult to injury).

* * * 

It was here, in the second mini-campaign of the year, that the hold-out player finally rejoined. I had arranged that he could play the mutated version of his character trapped in the Slaughtergrid (see my review), who would then attach to the party. The students relished killing their own former characters (or those of players that annoyed them). The kids laughed a lot at the mutations. The player whose PC suffered premature aging during the first year had the same thing (on a d100 table!) happen to his second year “main.” The players were surprised when the humanoids parleyed with the PCs, requested that the invading characters stop murdering them inside their home. From this encounter a détente was established, opening the lowest level and the possibility of escape. 

All of the other teachers dropped out, by this time. Three more new players joined, one bad sport who was only there to fuck with the other PCs, luckily for only one session. A very good sport joined, a senior who’d heard about D&D but had never had the opportunity to play before. He rolled up Hiro the Slug as his wizard’s familiar, whose spit turned the tide of more than one battle, and was hit with a rhyming curse for one of his mercurial magicks. The student would compose short rapped couplets whenever he would cast. An older sister joined, a very mild girl who I taught. She named her toadstool person “Sunny.” Sunny had a lot of difficulty with her deities, and sometimes Sunny was cruel and vicious.

The students had been through two OSR lethality gauntlets. The first was ameliorated by having the backup pile of sacrificial victims as replacement characters. Deaths had come from hiding in feeding troughs, challenging the Lamb straight on, pulling the acid shower lever, touching the trapped skeleton, swimming while under attack, pulling down a ceiling, getting stabbed by fellow party-member, and kicking the death trap. The second go-round allowed for insta-resurrection, with mutation.

The ultimate session of the second year saw the PCs battle “The Turtle,” the retired PC of the cheater from the prior year, who as an NPC had taken control of the shit and the slime and ruled the lowest level of the Slaughtergrid (replacing the misogyny monster). I openly cheated with The Turtle’s rolls in that conflict, and the vets understood what I was doing. The action economy, some nice spell rolls, and mighty deeds did in the foe, even though more than one “semi-hero” ended up face down in shit during the battle. The mushroom, the foxling, and the slug-master graduated.

I ran a one-shot on graduation day. One stalwart (rising senior) showed and five neophytes to RPGs played through part of The Incandescent Grottoes. They were creative–”Could we make these monkeys trigger the traps?”--and willing to experiment. None would join the club the next year, though.

A failed lure; they thought they were getting Uno!

"Butchery Afoot," A Session One (Novelized) Recap

Why am I the only human with this bunch of freaks? Ragnar thought to himself, because only a fool might say something aloud in the presence of so many armed associates. The assassin looked around at the group who was traveling with him in the forest. There were four—four!—reptiloids, an insect man (was it man? did insects have sexes? Ragnar wondered), a furred cat-fox that walked on two legs, and a fairy. He was trying to remember the names that they had told him.

The reddish dragonborn, the guy with big axe, barbaric for sure, not sure of its name. The other dragbonborn, the blue one with leather armor, and all kinds of weapons dangling loosely, that was Kyriee’, although Ragnar wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce the apostrophe, because he’d never learned the draconic tongue. The turtly one—another axe, I mean, how many big axes did a party need?—was one of those holy warriors, and maybe called Xopa; it was weird, like, you could see the abs through its under-shell. The last of the scaly ones was really small, not bulky like the other three, and had patches of what looked like dirty gold or maybe a shiny rash on his skin; he was Grazztttt. The fourth ’t’ was silent, Ragnar remembered that, and if he had to hear one more time about the greatworms that were coming to eat the earth, he was going to cut that little kobold’s throat, it didn’t matter who his dirt gods were or how he served them. The insect had six limbs, was a self-professed card shark named See-Ess Lewis-Hyde, if Ragnar had heard correctly, and surely he had, because the dang thing spoke right inside his head, not like normal. The pixie was called Cassia, was raised by birds, was all into nature, and had some alleged tragic backstory. You want tragic backstory? Ragnar’s backstory, now that was tragedy. The only other mammal was at least quiet, and liked to help people, and that was Sami. Ragnar had seen this foxling throw ice knives and frost and even sprout thorns from the ground, so that was cool, even if the weapon was a crummy old sling that was certainly no ginormous axe.

All this cogitating had made the journey fly by for Ragnar, and now they had arrived in a village, the most boring, generic village he’d probably ever been in. Wait. A. Minute. The door to the butcher’s was open. There was a bunch of red inside, moreso than usual for a meatmonger’s, and there was no movement visible. Strange.

Within moments this party, this great bunch of warriors and worshippers jammed their way heedlessly inside, rather incautiously considering the amount of blood on the walls of the place, blood without any obvious corresponding source. Within seconds, the kobold was licking the gore, and he said, “It’s a mix of two creatures’ fluids. Let us call them A positive and B negative. I cannot tell how long this has been here, but among the tall, fleshy ones, there’s always murder in places like this.”

Ragnar was offended by the short lizard, but he didn’t have time for dudgeon, because he was looking for the cash box. As this search was going on, the kobold’s eyes rolled back in his head and the door slammed.

It was then that the tortle suggested they should interview the villagers about this potential crime scene, but thereupon learned the door was somehow now locked. The paladin slammed its be-shelled body fruitlessly against the wood in a failed bid to escape. The red dragonman tried, too. While all this was going on, the creepy bug guy leaned up against the spattered walls, and Ragnar swore he disappeared. No, wait, there he was … just very hard to pick out, that carapace, or whatever you call it, mostly matching the texture and color of the surface.

The pixie started going on about the vibe of the butcher shop, and someone said, “It’s meat retail, that’s what the vibe is, plus there’s extra blood all over the place!” She was already peering behind the counters, though, and shouted, in her tiny voice, “There’s a grinder back here, but it’s … surprisingly clean.” 

No sooner than this happened the paladin was swaggering (as paladins tend to do) toward the icebox, where presumably the carved and dressed wares were stored in this store. Grazztttt drew his mace and Sami started swinging a sling in a tight circular motion. 

There was meat in the coldroom, but not the normal kind for a merchant. Two human bodies hung from the meathooks in there. Two bodies that were mixed and matched. Two bodies that had pieces from other bodies sewn in.

For being an assassin, Ragnar was remarkably panicky, and looked for a place to hide, almost bumping into Lewis-Hyde. 

All the reptile-folk were fascinated by this development, some of them literally licking their chops, and they crowded into that room, despite the issues that might cause considering their cold-bloodedness. “You got this, buddy,” the kobold said, patting the tortle’s shell, and the paladin sorted out, or rather, pieced together that these two corpses had originally been only two bodies, but certain parts had been removed and swapped and re-assembled. The blue dragonman said he wanted to put the cadavers back into their proper order.

It was then that two rats were noticed, one crushed and one cold, but living. At least half the reptoids started discussing the ingestion of the deceased rodent.

Suddenly the fairy was gone, and in its place was a third rat, “New-York-sized,” whatever that means, squeaking apparently in conversation. In the meanwhile, however, the kobold cleric had begun trying to speak with the creature via other means. “I’m pretty charming with rats,” he noted aloud. In a preternatural show of willpower, the non-wildshaped, non-expired rat resisted Grazztttt’s overtures, which worried the cleric inordinately.

“You, too, shall be devoured by the worms, rat!” he spat.

“Shush, you’re ruining this, I’m trying to have a conversation here!” the pixie yelled, but no one understood her because she was just another squeaking rat, if extra-large.

Kyriee’ asked if he could kill the living rat, and no one asked which one.  

All this talk of rats brought a weird question unbidden to Ragnar’s mind. How could you tell if a rat was male or female?

Cassia tried again, dropping into what she hoped was rodent idiom that would be familiar enough to loosen those rat-lips, “How long you been chillin’ here, bro?” 

The surviving rat looked totally traumatized. You could see it in his little rat face, if you, too, were a rat.

“A devil,” it squealed, “I saw a devil, I saw demons!”

“Hey buddy, why are you so wise?” Grazztttt couldn’t let it go. 

“A demon came into me, made me that way.” 

It kind of sounded like the living rat was bullshitting. The kobold told the rest what he had heard, and somehow the party also learned the information Cassia had extracted, even though she wasn’t telepathic like See-Ess.

The paladin, one of those god-botherers who loved demonic lore, got the cleric to ask the rat if he knew the fiends’ names, even though Grazztttt said, “Demon names are closely held secrets in Gehenna,” for besides his encyclopedic knowledge of the beasts of the soil, he also knew of the nature of the beings of the lower planes.

The maybe just plain-old-York-sized rat revealed the “demons didn’t have a mind of their own, though,” which seemed to be an important clue. It was then that nearly everybody was grabbing at this informative vermin, but when the dust settled, the rodent was stuffed inside the tortle’s shell.

It was just after that the barbaric dragonkind noticed a trail of carnage toward a back entrance, which remarkably not one person–if they were persons here, because let’s admit it is a reasonable categorization question under the circumstances–had registered earlier. There were dead trees and a hole, and before long the lot of them were clambering down the pit to where a pool of murky water lay, its contents unknown, until the kobold set alight the branch Ragnar was holding to make a crude torch, and the pixie had made the water transparent with some minor magic. Sami readied the sling.

There were bones in the water. And there was an eye. Staring at them. Nearly everyone tried to grab the eyeball, which proved to be attached to a withered skull. The reptiles all wanted to possess and/or consume the skeletal contents of the pool.

Ragnar again asked himself, Why am I in this group filled with freaks?

A tunnel continued onward. There was a light at the end. There was also a door, a bit unclear where.

Kyriee’ had a brilliant idea: he checked the passage for traps … and found one, or at least an alarm system made out of rattling bones. 

Sami readied the sling.

* * *

Tune in next time, when the mysterious geography might get sorted out, when we might find what lies at the end of the tunnel, and who or what exactly set the alarm, not to mention who exsanguinated and (re)arranged the nearly forgotten mixed-up corpses in the shop above. 

When we might also answer the questions … [answered later]

Will Kyriee’ trip the trap he found? [no, traps were pretty much avoided, and Kyriee' left the group for the time being]

Will we find out the red dragonborn’s name? [yes, Bron]

Will Grazztttt finally be allowed a delicious meat snack? [we will have to ask Mister]

Will Ragnar realize the value of teammates? [yes, to hide behind when a chain devil came out] 

Will Xopa roll less than a 17? [amazingly, no, against very long odds]

Will rat-Cassia change back forms? [yes]  

Will See-Ess un-camouflage? [yes]  

Will Sami ever launch a slingstone? [no]

Will the party magically split into two? [yes] 

Inner City D&D, Year One

Academic joke I first heard in East Africa: What’s the dividing line between sociology and anthropology? Sociologists study those who wear pants. In case it’s not clear, the gag is a dig at how scholars themselves are unaware of their own biases, even with regard to the fundamental structures of their own disciplines. At the turn of the last century, I came up in African history–which incorporates a lot of anthropology and in fact a little sociology (postmodern/pants Africa!)--in the period when there finally was recognition about the academy’s role as a handmaid of empire and some of the hegemonic aspects of the modern state. This self-reflection included a reckoning about how subjectivity in data collection and theory had produced bodies of scholarship that were far from objective. You’ve probably learned this in reading about how “the Other” is created. This bit of throat-clearing is to show that I recognize my own position as a very middle-class outsider and author writing about people who–while sharing a lot of American culture–also have had profoundly different life experiences than me, my students. The data presented from the state is not meant to be definitive, but rather a scrap of information meant to help any reader to gain a grasp on the situation. The essay below is not meant to be a curiosity cabinet for bourgeois enjoyment, and especially not “poverty porn,” even though that is what postmodern nonfiction often is. 

Still, our parking lot

A Dungeons & Dragons club already existed in the inner city high school I started working at during 2022. The students at my workplace consider other parts of Philadelphia to be the “true ‘hood,” not their own area, but it is a Title I school. Officially speaking, roughly three-quarters of the students attending come from low-income families, and some city schools exceed 90% impoverished populations, so the students’ perceptions are more-or-less correct. Prior to my hiring by the school, coincidentally I collected census data in its catchment for more than a month in 2020, enough to get a fairly informed picture of the neighborhood’s access to resources. I had been teaching for some weeks when I went to the first club meeting, to observe how things were done, because I was curious and interested. I also wanted to lend my (some painted) miniatures for use; the club had a few dozen plastic pre-painteds, but mostly used little colored smooth stones to mark PCs and monsters on the battle map. 

The session zero was devoted to character creation. The situation was very chaotic, as many of the classrooms were and are in the school, far more chaotic than I was used to, coming from collegiate instruction, my own high school years being in the distant past. Most of the students had no idea how to create a D&D 5E character. Some of the players had substantial learning disabilities, and couldn’t add dice easily; by the terms set by the state of Pennsylvania, only a quarter of our students are proficient readers and 1/16 are proficient in high-school math. According to our main standardized test, the average reading level for the twelfth-grade classes I teach (which is a little below average for the school) is just under a sixth-grade beginner’s benchmarks. This being said, the inner city kids have often solved the same in-game challenges (ones that did not require skilled literacy or arithmetic) pretty much as rapidly as my largely middle class adult players’ circles–people with graduate degrees and bachelors from Duke, Purdue, and MIT, men who work as lawyers, accountants, government bureaucrats, software engineers, math teachers, and IT.

The club had several 5E PHBs (200,000+ words!), so I went around assisting character construction on that first day. It isn’t unusual for even well-educated RPG beginners to have trouble getting started in fifth edition. The head of the club and I gave pointers on which class each player might enjoy after a short verbal quiz that referenced video-game familiar fantasy archetypes and in-game mechanics: “Does smashing a monster in the face with a hammer sound fun?” The players chose the pre-packaged equipment sets, but only a couple wrote their inventory down on the character sheets. At the peak, four teachers would be in the room, one RPG neophyte and three veterans. (Another neophyte would join later.) One of the first things I observed was a student “vet” from the previous year cheating on the ability rolls (4d6k3x7d1, arrange) for her character. She was the only one who took the initiative to create her own character, and no one else cheated on their rolls, and she would later mock the other students for their “inferior” PCs. She was an nerdy, overweight white (non-Hispanic) senior girl (note: swap sex and definition of senior, and you have me), in a school that is less than 10 or 2 percent white, depending on how you count. The students do not conceptualize “white Hispanic” as the United States government does. Most of the other students participating were Hispanic by their own definition. 

I know my 7th-grade rolls weren't exactly honest, but sheesh

I asked the club sponsor–who had secured school funding for the PHBs, a few hardback WotC adventures, and dice enough for all–how he dealt with downtime and absences and such, as I was already quite familiar with student attendance and communication woes. Essentially, the club ran on the openest of open table policies. “I just put the party at the beginning of the dungeon, and when they’re finished, everyone appears at the entrance to the next dungeon. PCs come and go without any in-world consideration.” Downtime was neither role-played nor proceduralized. 

The second meeting saw new students show up, including my most troublesome student from my first period class, a kid (who looked angelic but) who tried to disrupt every single classroom activity. Just that morning he had provoked both of the powderkeg girls in the class (who had been ignoring me, but minding their own business at least), who both outweighed him and one of whom had just returned from a fight suspension. He kept staring, whistling, and smack-talking them, no matter how I tried to redirect him, not even quitting when one promised he would “accidentally” fall down the stairs between classes. His appearance was a huge disappointment that day, as I had hoped the club would be a refuge from my regular students, whose casual viciousness and complete disregard for middle-class social mores wore my psyche down every day. Yes, I know, looking for solace by playing a game about pretend killing pretend people is pretty silly. All the new players had to roll characters, and some of the session zero attenders missed this meeting, so the club waited until the third session to actually start an adventure.

The club director had given a short adventure he’d written to one of the seniors, who had promised to DM. We rolled out the wet-erase map and its markers, and I distributed minis–one teacher had chosen a thri-kreen based on my mini selection and another had rolled a fairy, which I had painted in the meanwhile. Despite the accessories available, the whole session was run by the novice DM as “theater of the mind.” There was no combat, anyway, in the 75 minutes. The DM asked everyone to roll initiative at the very beginning, and then ignored those results for the rest of the day. All the rolling for the session was in the form of checks and a couple saves. Lots of checks. I observed and took notes during play.

Admit it, you would pick the insect-man, too

When the mini is almost as big as the brush

Three teachers were players, including the guy who had penned the mini-module. If you’ve ever been to a country where people don’t queue, or really, most bars in my experience, that’s what it was like. Every loud person shoved their way into the conversation about the make-believe, and the quieter ones did not gain much access. Two of the teachers were just as boisterous as most of the kids. In all there were eight PCs, seven non-human, which was quite the load for a first-time DM. Almost every time he revealed a new bit of scenery, three or four people shouted “I grab/devour/lick it!” and the free-for-all then moved on whenever the next shiny was described. The one reserved teacher said it reminded him of his own high school years’ sessions, but he’s a generous soul. 

The set-up involved a butcher shop with a big, bloody mess, which included an exit the referee forgot to mention until much later. The action mostly revolved around inspecting the sinister scenery and a conversation with a rat (read the "novelization" here). The DM fudged a save for the rat during its interrogation, so that it might not divulge some information, which annoyed the author of the adventure. The final moments of the day were spent arguing over which PC got to possess the found skeleton in the tunnel underneath the building. It was nearly impossible to get the players to deploy their characters as a team, rather than a collection of individuals. This can be difficult in my adult, middle-class parties, too. I blame some of this on general American individualistic culture, but some on the structure of 5E, and its individual initiative. Attempts to work PCs in tandem are often made impossible by the rules-as-written, because someone has to go at each designated slot in the order. The problem could be solved by readied actions (à la the “peasant railgun”), but those can’t include any sort of readied movement.   

During the next play session, three new students arrived and some old ones didn’t show. Due to the mayhem of the first true play session, an executive decision was made to divide the adventurers into two tables with more manageable numbers for the DMs. The club sponsor ran the “heroic” table, which usually included two or three teacher PCs, a quiet girl whose faun liked to throw cream pies as a non-injuring weapon, and a second boy from my first period who wanted to run a (fantasy) chivalrous knight (who was pretty foul-mouthed, as nearly all the students are). A sweet, quiet girl with green eyes, who had rolled a druid with a green cloak and green eyes, and should’ve joined that table, never showed up again. Three of the four other teachers DMed at the heroic table over the course of the next six months. When things got rowdy at one table, the other one usually lost focus. I am neither a con person, nor a FLGS player, so I was not used to the extra levels of session noise and distraction. The students who favored harsh make-believe interrogations and harvesting pretend monster trophies became the “Head Collectors, Inc.,” and stayed at the student-DMed table. I mostly observed the Head Collectors. For a few weeks I painted like a fiend in the evenings to have monsters and PCs ready for the table.

Alas, no pie 

The second play session involved an underground exploration of tunnels filled with traps and creatures that spoke with New York accents (not the DM’s normal one). Every trap was apparently the same, the roll cheater (who always scooped up her dice before they came to a stop, announcing a result of 15+ every time) “disarmed” every trap with an identical explanation of discharging it with her weapon. She seized the one magic sword that was available and threatened the other PCs with it. (Her character class: paladin.) She claimed the wolf pet that the DM offered, even though there was a druid in the party. Another new girl had her character (an aasimar) fight back. The party met a talkative imp (well-run by the DM) and dismembered a lot of lesser monsters, squabbling over the body parts as prizes. One of the treasures found was a book of dad jokes.

Balance, schmalance

The original GM missed the third and final session of the mini-adventure. An honor-roll student, the kid who had been quietly playing a red dragonborn barbarian, took over the referee’s chair. He did not even understand the most basic concepts of the game, not even the d20 as attack/save/check. Suffice to say the fights vs. the chain demon and lesser beholder went very raggedly. There were two moments of high hilarity from my perspective. One body search query got this response, “Uh, he just has … another tray of meat and eyeballs.” After the victory over the creatures, the module closed with the heretofore barely described villagers awarding the PCs with statues for solving the butcher/demon problem. The girl who didn’t take any shit from the other asked for a statue spitting on the cheating girl’s monument, but that was the last time she showed up at the club.

Neither of the student DMs were prepared or present for the following play session, but I had come equipped with a module, and ran my first session for the kids. I had spun a short horror-fantasy adventure out of Ash Law’s killer doll scenario in “The Trajectory of Fear – or How to Use Horror Tropes Effectively in Your Game.” By the end of the year, I had run the Head Collectors through twenty sessions comprising four adventures, three (including the first) recycling premises my online groups had run through, and one pre-written, “The Waking of Willowby Hall.” The heroic table dwindled to two players, and then one, and ours finally absorbed the foul-mouthed knight, after he completed his last quest, which aged him substantially. The final session of the school year would force all the PCs to flee a T-Rex through a teleportal, which I hoped would work as an in-world explanation for the students taking their characters to new tables. I gave them their PCs' miniatures as parting gifts. During the final battle, I demanded that the cheater roll a saving throw without touching the die. Of course it came up '20.'

How to wrap up a campaign when out of time

So long Xopa, Sami, Ragnar, and Kyriee' of the Eight Fingers