Cypherize

I'm really digging the new Cypher edition. I can't wait to get my hands on all the books and other goodies, but the PDF of the player guide is certainly enough to get my mind racing about the possibilities. I'm not saying that I would or should do this, but after reading that PDF, I feel as though I could convert my last two campaign settings -- Shattered Realm and the venerable Druid Cycle -- from Fifth Edition D&D to Cypher. All campaigns and settings linked by a common ruleset? And all characters, locations, and other elements recorded in a single spreadsheet? It's a tantalizing prospect...

32 Wolf Man

We're getting close to the end of this phase of the boys' Shattered Realm campaign, in which their high-level characters are undertaking a mission to help save the Druid Cycle world from a multiverse-level threat. In the penultimate combat of this storyline, the heroes needed to crash an evil queen's military rally, rescue some hostages before they could be executed, and obtain the magic item neeed for them to help their compatriots in the Druid Cycle world. Matthew's elf rogue manage to shoot the queen with his bow in the first round of combat, but the real challenge was saving the hostages, who were out in the open in the middle of the town square with enemy soldiers closing in on them from all directions. 

Enter...32 Wolf Man!

Nathaniel has long been toying with combat tactics focused on conjuring large numbers of creatures. He's been referring to this idea as "32 Wolf Man," because, using a ninth-level spell, he could conjure a ridiculous 32 wolves at once. And that's exactly what he did in this situation. Wildshaped into an earth elemental, Nathaniel's druid burrowed under the town square, popped up from below ground, and conjured this army of wolves around the helpless hostages. Now forced to hack their way through these two fill rings of celestial beasts, the enemy soldiers were delayed long enough for the heroes to figure out an exit strategy in which they retrieved the magic item from the queen's body and got away with as many of the hostages as they could.

Cypher Musings

With a new edition of the Cypher System on the way this summer, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on how it's worked out in Front Porch campaigns over the past year. The first thing to note, however, is the small sample size. To date, we've done one in-person Cypher campaign (Vanguard Saga, with three players) and two email-based campaigns (another Vanguard Saga storyline and the revamped Torchlight, each with one player); compare those numbers to decades of D&D -- Druid Cycle, Shattered Realm, and so much more. That said, I think I have enough experience with Cypher to make some general observations about the rules and how we're using them. 

The most important point is that I'm very satisfied with Cypher as the default game system for the Front Porch multiverse. It's fast and easy, very flexible across genres, and well suited for narrative games. Long-running campaigns like the Druid Cycle setting will always be D&D, but at this moment I can't really imagine starting a new campaign that didn't use Cypher. My upcoming Vesper project, for example, is going to be our test run for the new Cypher edition.

So what else have I learned about Cypher from a year's worth of gaming? Below are some observations about how the experience at our table differs from the rules as written. 

• Back when I was just getting started with Cypher, Matt suggested a minor house rule to help ensure that ranged attacks at close range were not unequivocally superior to melee attacks. This house rule has worked out very well.
• In our family Vanguard campaign, Nathaniel created an android speedster whose many ways to ease Speed defense rolls has made him virtually untouchable by conventional attacks. Not everyone is out there trying to break the system, of course, but Nathaniel showed that even with a system designed by the best of the best in the gaming industry, it's quite possible to build unbalanced characters. 
• To help address the aforementioned problem, I created a house rule that enables certain low-level characters (such as troops who are part of a unit) to "gang up" on a single target more effectively. Nathaniel's android still runs circles around everyone, but at least now he has to be wary of large groups of foes taking aim at him all at once.
• No one remembers cyphers. I know it's supposed to be a big deal in the Cypher System, and it's right there in the name of the game, but cyphers still feel like a clunky add-on and not a core part of the game mechanics. 
• I love coming up with nasty GM Intrusions when players roll a 1 on their d20 checks, but all other GM Intrusions feel forced. When should something be an Intrusion rather than just a regular challenge for the PCs to overcome? Maybe I should think about Intrusions as "optional" encounters that players can either take on for the XP, or pay XP to avoid? Well, I guess, but that leads me to the final point...
• Players only use XP for advancement. In Cypher, players can spend XP for rerolls, for Player Intrusions, to avoid GM Intrusions, etc., but in practice, I've found that players don't use XP for any of these things. Only once -- and quite memorably -- did a player spend XP on a Player Intrusion, and that was when an NPC's life was at stake. Similarly, I think we've only had one or two instances when a player spent XP on a reroll. I guess it's nice to have these options in your pocket, but our experience is that players hoard XP for advancement. That realization, of course, has changed how I hand out XP; when players don't use it for all these other purposes, I have to slow down the XP rate or the characters will advance too quickly.

What changes will the new edition bring? I'm eager to find out. Here's to another year of Cypher gaming!

What Happened to Dolorous Edd?!

As a guy who grew up doing some pretty spot-on (if I do say so myself!) voice impersonations of the Muppets and other pop-culture characters, I appreciate a good voice. I've always admired the work of voiceover actors like Frank Welker, Peter Cullen, and the guy with maybe the best voice in the history of humanity, Keith David. As a gamemaster, I like to incorporate custom voices for key NPCs in my campaign worlds, perhaps most notably in the Druid Cycle setting; Cyfrinach, Iskander, Cerdyn, Pyrrhus, and many others have had very distinctive voices. 

Over the past year, I've been listening to the Song of Ice and Fire series on Audible. The books were narrated by the late, great Roy Dotrice and -- wow! -- did this guy have an amazing reading voice! Over the first three books, Dotrice built an immense variety of custom voices for the main characters. His work on this series wasn't just a reading, but a true performance. 

I'm now getting into the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, and, well, it's a different experience. I understand that Dotrice wasn't available to record this book when it first came out and then returned to read it many years after he had narrated the others in the series. The result is pretty jarring. There are major changes in how he pronounces names like "Catelyn" and "Petyr", but also in the voices he uses for the characters. Some of the biggest changes are to major players like Arya and Petyr. The one that really hit me the hardest, though, was the voice of my absolute favorite supporting character, Dolorous Edd. A member of the Night's Watch and close friend of Jon Snow, Edd provides a lot of self-deprecating wit and comic relief. Dotrice's original voice for Edd always put a smile on my face, but the voice used in Feast is so bland and undistinguished that I almost wince when I hear it. 

If I ever screw up the voices in our campaigns, please call me on it. An unexpected change to the voice of a character can really take you out of the moment!

Gratitude

These days, I'm especially grateful for the opportunity to spend time with my family. We had a quiet weekend at home, and free time enough to play all three active campaigns: the revived Shattered Realm campaign with Matthew and Nathaniel, the Zoom-based Druid Cycle game with the boys and their cousins in Michigan, and finally the Vanguard Saga campaign with the boys and Amy. Any weekend we can get together around the ol' RPG table is a blessing.

Campaign Crossover

The boys wanted to get back to their old Shattered Realm characters, so I cooked up a bit of a campaign crossover with the upcoming Druid Cycle storyline. It's been fun to revisit so many fun Shattered Realm NPCs and locations!

DC League -- Season 5

After wrapping up baseball, I'll be switching over to soccer on my Evercade. Up next is Season 5 of the league set in my Druid Cycle campaign world. Perhaps megastar Agrippa will finally get that elusive championship!

A New Generation

With a spiffy new Front Porch Multiverse spreadsheet and Cypher System stats for hundreds of characters from over a dozen past campaigns, I'm excited to take the next step and start the first campaign of this new era. Now that Amy and the boys and I have wrapped up the zombie-battling Dark Enigma game, we'll get going with The Vanguard Saga. This setting dates back to when I was a young child and is my oldest fictional universe, predating the Druid Cycle world by a decade or more. Every few years, I update the timeline as well as the major NPCs who drive the storylines. As of today, I have a lineup of twelve amazing characters who will help me introduce this setting to my family and provide us with hours of fun storytelling in the months and years ahead. I've also taken the time to create full-color models of these characters using Hero Forge, so everyone will get to see what they look like in high-res detail!

DC Season 4 Awards

I've come to the end of the fourth campaign of my Druid Cycle league in Sensible Soccer. The Imperials finished in first place with the best regular season in league history (9-3-2). They were led by superstar striker Agrippa, whose 10 goals tied with Camedyr of the Defenders for the league lead; as such, these two gentlemen will share the Scoring Championship award. In a season of good-but-not-great performances by scorers and goalkeepers alike, the League MVP trophy goes to the Golden Dragons' Donnan, the best defender in the game. Donnan played top-notch defense in front of his keeper and also chipped in 4 goals (only one other defender in the league had as many as 2). Next up -- the playoffs!

Phase 2 Complete!

With 555 named characters, my Front Porch Multiverse spreadsheet is a paltry 41.3% the length of my behemoth Druid Cycle character spreadsheet. Even if I added in all the Shattered Realm characters to the multiverse sheet, the Druid Cycle spreadsheet would still have nearly twice as many names as all other campaigns combined. Wow! 

Anyway, I now have Cypher System levels for all multiverse characters and, for most of them, stat blocks from the Cypher System Bestiary and other sources. All systems are go for the first campaign to use this ruleset!

Three Nations Kick-Off

Hockey's 4 Nations Face-Off has been a delight to watch over the past couple of weeks. It got me thinking that I might run a similar tournament in Sensible Soccer using the players from my Druid Cycle league. Thus far, each player has suited up for one of eight teams from cities across the three major human nations (the Kingdom of Teyrnas, the Empire of Troya Nova, and the Southern Principalities) of this campaign world. Why not have a best-on-best tournament that would allow the players to represent their respective homelands? Perhaps I'll set something up for after the completion of Season 4. It's an intriguing idea, and at the very least, it would be fun to see a stacked Troya Novan lineup with superstar rivals Belisarius of the Paladins and Agrippa of the Imperials playing side-by-side for the first time.

Monster Manual

Amazon says the new Monster Manual will be out on February 18. Once I have a copy, and I've read through it fully, I won't have any more excuses to put off converting the Druid Cycle world to 5.5. Let me make it clear, however, that I don't relish the thought of reviewing (and probably in many cases changing) the stat block for all 1312 named NPCs.

DC League Season 4

Sensible Soccer is one of my favorite retro games on Evercade, and lately I've been using it to play through a fourth season of my Druid Cycle soccer league. This league must take place in some sort of alternate version of the Druid Cycle campaign setting, however, or perhaps is set at some point in the future, because, as the PCs know quite well, it's not all fun and games on the continent of First Home these days. The looming threat of war hangs like a storm-cloud over the continent, and it seems inevitable that there will come a day when differences will be settled not on the soccer pitch, but on the battlefield.

Phase 1 Underway!

I mentioned last month that I've elected to use the Cypher System for my upcoming Vanguard sci-fi campaign and, ideally, all new campaigns in the Front Porch Multiverse going forward. (Side note: Big thank-you to my good friend Matt for really diving into the Cypher System rules!) One of the advantages of this system is that it's genre-agnostic, so it can be used for fantasy, modern, cyberpunk, or whatever. With a single ruleset, it will be super-duper easy for PCs and NPCs alike to cross over from one campaign to another. 

That got me thinking that I should pull together my notes from various campaigns -- names, places, storylines, adventure summaries, and the like -- and put them all into a single spreadsheet like the enormous one I created for the Druid Cycle campaign world. I have really great documentation from campaigns of the last few years -- Dark Enigma, Doctor Who, Tales of the Ternion -- so Phase 1 of my project is just to grab all that stuff and put it into one file. That's the easy part. 

Phase 2 is to go back to the not-so-well-documented campaigns of yesteryear, such as the Cyberwars series, and comb through my remaining notes for all the relevant info I can find. (Tim W, prepare to have your brain wracked!) The goal isn't to track down every last NPC name or obscure location, but essentially to mine those disparate records for anything that might help enrich future Front Porch Multiverse campaigns. 

Phase 3? I don't even want to think about it yet, but the final step is surely to merge the sheet created in the first two phases with the existing Druid Cycle spreadsheet to create one definitive repository of campaign data.

Waiting Game

I've been waiting patiently (well, not really) for my latest Evercade fix: Tomb Raider Collection 1 and the Legacy of Kain Collection. In the meantime, I've been catching up on some Warhammer painting projects and planning lots of encounters and subplots for the current Druid Cycle storyline. After years (decades) of campaigns focused on supervillain-type foes, it feels fresh and exciting to be building toward a very different kind of crisis: World War Druid Cycle!

DC Season 3 Championship

Riverton Racers (3rd place) vs. Troya Nova Paladins (4th place)

The Racers hosted their franchise's first home-field playoff game at the Circus in the Bankside district of Riverton. (Tim W's wizard Cathbad helped secure the funding for that facility many years ago -- I hope he found time in his busy adventuring schedule to catch the most important sporting event ever held in that arena!) It wasn't a battle of the league's best teams, perhaps, but a battle of the league's hottest teams. The match certainly did not disappoint. Vico scored on the game's first shot, and the Racers played with the lead for nearly 60 minutes. Midway through the second half, Apollonius scored to tie the game, but Gratian's inexcusable red card put the Paladins down a man heading into extra time. Who would emerge as the hero? Well, it wouldn't be the Racers' franchise savior, Vico, because he reverted to the kind of goonery that got him run out of Prospect and was hit with a red card of his own. Both teams played ten aside, therefore, as the game moved into the second half of extra time. With the minutes slipping away toward a dreaded decision by penalty kicks, Racers forward Mattias tallied the first playoff goal of his career. At the final whistle, it was 2-1 for the Racers, and the league's two-time cellar dwellers had claimed the Thaler Cup in Season 3!

Update Complete

I've now completed a massive update to my Druid Cycle notes based on the archives I discovered on the old Tandy computer at my parents' house. So much rich detail added to my spreadsheet! I think this information is really going to enhance the experience for this new generation of players.

Paladins Claim the Thaler Cup!

Donated by Thaler, the wealthiest merchant in the Druid Cycle campaign world, the Thaler Cup will be awarded to the winner of my fantasy soccer league each season. In this first campaign, the first-place Paladins duked it out with the second-place Golden Dragons for the inaugural Thaler Cup.

The championship game was scoreless through a full 90 minutes of play. The Dragons' keeper, Morcan, was phenomenal, as he kept his team in the game despite a 17-2 shot advantage for the Paladins during regulation time. In extra time, however, Gratian and Apollonius both scored to give the Paladins a 2-0 victory. (In keeping with soccer's FIFA World Cup, I'm using full periods of extra time and not a sudden-death "golden goal" rule.) The Paladins have won the first title, but the Golden Dragons have proven themselves to be a powerhouse as well. Looking forward to Season 2 and the addition of two expansion teams, bringing us up to six franchises.

First One in the Books!

With only four teams, and with each team playing their opponents only twice, the first season of my Druid Cycle soccer league (a custom league in Sensible Soccer) is already in the books. The Paladins paced the circuit with a 5-0-1 record. These lay brothers of Mithras led the league with 3.00 goals per game, and tied for the best goals-against average with 0.83 per game. In the championship game, they'll host the second-place Golden Dragons, who went 3-1-2. The Imperials (1-4-1) and the Racers (0-4-2) both have a long way to go before they're ready to compete for a title. 

For the individual awards, forwards Agrippa of the Imperials and Niall of the Golden Dragons tied for the league lead in goals with 6 apiece, so they'll share that trophy. The League MVP award goes to midfielder Nicephorus of the Paladins, who contributed top-notch offense (5 goals) as well as elite defense; he was arguably the main reason why the Paladins allowed a league-low 5.83 shots against per game. 

Next up, the championship match between the Paladins and the Golden Dragons!

The Lost Archives

Once upon a time, I was the proud owner of a Tandy 1000 SX. From Christmas in 1986 through my high-school graduation in 1995, it was the only computer I owned, and it held up remarkably well. My parents used it for many years after I left home, and then it sat in the basement for many more years. During our trip back to New York this past week, Nathaniel and I managed to get it running again. We found a treasure trove of old games -- Spy Hunter, anyone?! -- but most importantly, the mother lode of Druid Cycle archives. All of my adventure summaries, gamemaster notes, and well, everything I had ever typed up for that campaign world during its original development in the early '90s was still right there on that massive 20MB hard drive. The printer doesn't work anymore, and I had no way to export the data from the ancient PFS File program, but I took a photograph of every screen so that I can sit down one day and revisit all those old notes. There's so much I've forgotten since those early days, and I have absolutely no doubt that a deep dive into that material will yield tons of great stuff that I can apply to today's campaigns.