Sidequest: The Curse of Xanathon Part 1

As I previously mentioned, I was finally able to become a player in a Swords & Wizardry campaign adventure.  These sessions were run by Brian, one of the players in our gaming group that has been going strong since 2009!

Brian ran classic TSR adventure: X-3 Curse of Xanathon!

Like I said, I had a great time playing my thief, McDagger and we all had a lot of laughs with this adventure, as any good group of sessions should have, but the Curse of Xanathon, as an adventure module, has it's 'issues'.

This adventure was written in 1982, around the time adventure modules evolved from a sandbox environment into more of a story-based adventure. Being X-3, you can see the evolution of that through the X series of modules.

X-1, The Isle of Dread (by David Cook and Tom Moldvay) is a crazy open sandbox in a pulp fantasy lost island in the middle of the sea.  It's open ended and the players can determine their own fate by their choices.  There is no real 'plot' or linear story. Just an anything goes fantasy.  It's a classic in it's own right.

X-2, Castle Amber (by Tom Moldvay) was another open ended "fun-house" adventure with a loose plot of the D'Amberville family. It's essentially a classic mega-dungeon crawl.  This one is slightly more rail-roady in that the PCs would be 'trapped' in the castle until they figure out the way to escape.

The Curse of Xanathon (by Douglas Niles) breaks with that free-form openness and railroads the party into 5 plot-points (scenarios) that need to be hit to move the story along. It involves a curse upon the duke of the town of Rhoona and a cult worshiping a chaotic god and an 'invincible' priest and an powerful pirate working in tandem with the priest to control the Duke.  Oh, and a time limit of an invading dwarven army that the Mad Duke pissed off, all this to support the underlying concept of a civil war in the town to weaken it and allow for an invasion from the steeps.  This all sounds like the making of a great fantasy story - and it is, but as an open adventure, it doesn't work very well.

The general problem with 'story' based adventures such as this is always having the critical need for players
to hit the plot-points to move the adventure along. You can't kill the wrong NPC, or stray from the path, or  just blow-up the Duke's castle and be done with it, or what if you don't find the exact key to defeat the evil priest? or just saying, this town is fucked, lets rob the castle and get out of here.  To reveal the 'story' as the author intended, you need to do everything in the way the author needs to you to do it. And for a group that is use to open ended adventures where the stories evolve themselves this was quite rail-roady.  I mean, why should a group of traveling rogues care about this town or this Mad Duke? I guess outlawing ale would do the trick, right?

All that said, we had a good laugh at some of the forced plot points.  Many of the encounters were quite enjoyable and I really loved the dungeon/shrine. This would be a challenging module to run for even veteran DMs but Brian rolled with this adventure with his usual dry humor and twisted charm which leveled this module up from an attempted mysterious drama to a romp that involved fire-balling the barracks.

I guess you can't keep a good party down.

A brief word about the author, Douglas Niles. He was part of the early second group of TSR employees after the initial explosion of the game. He came on board in '82 as a game designer. He ended up writing Top Secret (one of my favorite non-D&D games) and the first three Forgotten Realms novels.  He also wrote the B-5 Horror on the Hill adventure, a less rail-roady adventure which I worked into our campaign way back and was pretty fun. He has some chops but Curse of Xanathon just didn't cut it.  It's obvious he had a story concept in mind that he translated into an adventure module which doesn't quite work as a stand-alone.  I suppose that if you used the town of Rhooma as a starting point for an entire campaign with level 1 characters and then you could slowly build up the story and plot points so that when the characters were powerful enough they could tackle the 'story adventure' organically with the stakes being higher, that probably could work.

More on the actual session recaps coming next.

Another, more thorough, dive into this module over at RetroReview

Adventures in Playing

Yes, your Warlock has been gone for quite a while and it may have seemed that the campaign was on indefinite hold, but lo', it was only an illusion!  We actually continued with Swords & Wizardry but with me, your wonderful warlock, as a player and the DMing duties having been passed on to our long time player Brian.

I needed a break from running sessions and Brian wanted to give DMing a try.  The timing was right for a switch.

When I first got involved in D&D waaaay back in the Holmes Blue Book days, I was the oldest of our group of friends. Being all of 10 years old, 'learning the game' and running things kind of fell to me.  Believe it or not, I rarely was ever a player in a D&D game.  I probably only played a PC no more than three times, only two of which I can truly remember. As we all got a bit older and others could take the reins, we had moved on to other games like Boot Hill, Top Secret, Champions, Traveller, and other board games.  All of that was great fun, but I really never got to experience some good old fantasy role playing.

Even these days, I had played in a very fun play by post game run through the OD&D boards almost 10 years ago now.  That was great as it was classic D&D and my dwarf had some good times. However, it was still a play by post and not a face to face table game.

When I was looking to find a face to face group, I ended up in a D&D 3.5 game.  I really enjoyed being a player but the 'on the track' railroading of the adventure was a real drag, not to mention the two hours + long combat sessions. I longed for the free-form, anything goes old-school style game that I grew up with and wanted to experience as a player.

Getting our current game group together is now history. It is here that I was able to run our classic style campaign.  And with a group of great friends this group has become, we were able to branch off into other RPGs including Savage Worlds, ICONS, White Star (Star Wars), Robotech, all of which I was able to be a player in.  All of that was great but I still never quite had that swords and sorcery fantasy player experience.... until now, when Brian ran his side campaign.

This side campaign, we agreed, was to take place within the current S&W campaign world that we were playing in. Some of the players used their current characters while others created new ones.  All of this was to help build PC to take on the final quest of the main campaign.

Finally being a player was great.  Brain ran a really fun adventure module (which needed a few tweaks, but he did right by those).  I ran a thief named McDagger.  He got himself into plenty of trouble - not at all times by choice!  Brian ran a pretty brutal campaign with a couple near TPKs which were saved by usually one lucky character.  The dungeon adventure had lots of tricks and traps and creatures that caused us all a lot of laughs and headaches. It was a blast to finally be a player in an extended campaign and I can't wait to jump in that side of things again.  I really wished I had summarized those sessions as well, but real life made that harder to do than usual.  I'll do my best to cover a brief summary in the next post or two just to keep the campaign complete.

For now, though, we have moved back to the main campaign this past Monday.  I'll get the session summary for that posted in the next week.

So, for now, thanks Brain and...

Best Movie About Role-playing: Westworld

Guide to role-playing

Back in the early 70's there was a small explosion of some true to genre science fiction films that Hollywood was cranking out, no doubt due to the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Planet of the Apes (which spawned four sequels).  Films like Death Race 2000, The Omega Man, Silent Running, Soilent Green, Logan's Run, Rollerball and many others.  These were true Science Fiction stories, and like all good true science fiction, posed questions about man's relationship to himself, the universe and machines.  All of this was shattered in 1977 when Star Wars, a science fantasy film, rolled over the genre like a Jawa Sandcrawler.

One of those early 70's sci-films was called Westworld a film about a resort that, for one thousand dollars a day, you can live out your fantasies in one of three fully-immersive environments, Medievalworld, Romanworld and Westworld.  The movie was written and directed by Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain) and introduced his 'theme-park horror story'.  The twist is that all the other participants in these 'worlds' with the exception of the guests, are robots.  Of course "Nothing can go wrong".

So what does this have to do with Role-playing?

Westworld has all the elements and is a perfect analogy of a role-playing game.  Spoilers ahead, so if you need to go watch the movie do so now.

Players and PC rolled into one

The move starts with two guests, played by James Brolin and Richard Benjamin, head to Westworld to live out their fantasy of living a real wild west experience.  Brolin had been to Westworld once before (the experienced role-player), for Benjamin, however, this was his first experience (a role-player newbie).  Once they don their western garb provided by the resort Brolin kinda helps Benjamin through the ropes of getting into this role of a fantasy experience.  Benjamin has a hard time of 'letting go' and getting into the fantasy.

Bad-ass NPC

Their first stop, like any good role players, is the saloon.  Here they run into the antagonist of Westworld, the Gunslinger played by Yul Brenner who challenges Benjamin.  Here it's great to watch Benjamin's character, a Yuppie from Chicago, attempting to get into this fantasy role of cowboy and finally guns down Brenner.

Once the two friends loosen up to this 'new' fantasy world they do what any good role-players do; they start drinking, whorin' and shooting up the town.

Six-Gun's Enough!

It's really great how the first two-thirds of the movie parallels the general path of most players actions in role-playing games.  With a free open 'world' the first things that happens is that players, get drunk, whore around and cause trouble in the towns they visit.  A great point to note here is that after Brolin and Benjamin kill the sheriff in a jail-break, the role of sheriff of taken over by none other than Dick VanPatten, another guest with thick  glasses (totally out of place in the western scene) bumbling about.  A great visual of players entering these archetypical roles and projecting personae onto their characters.  In Medievalworld, the guest there hits on the queen and voluptuous wench while eating and drinking to his delight of a no-consequence world.

Keep in mind here, the guests are having sex with robots.

Hitting on the tavern robot ..er.. wench

The robots in the town are all the NPCs that the players (the stars of the story) run into. They are there only for the guests (players) interaction with their stereotypical roles and dialogue and simple purpose - to add life and color to the guest's (player's) experience of the world.

Your Game Master's brain

The robots are controlled by a master control center that represents the Game Master.  Here they re-program the robots on the fly to adapt to the guest's (player's) actions; altering their preconceived 'storylines' to please the guests (players), but also tossing in pre-programed events such as the bar-fight.  All fantasy RPG tropes are visited here.  Note that GMing on the fly is displayed by the technicians of master control, allowing the guests (players) to do what they desire but reacting to it and keeping it contained within the 'safe' notions of the control center (GM).

The guests (players) revel in their fantasies as there are no true consequences to their actions.  Killing NPCs, sleeping around, breaking the laws, the guest loose themselves in these actions but their feet are still rooted in their real world.  It's quite well captured this dual existence of the player and the PC.

Random roles really begin to start messing up everyone's
preconceived ideas of the session.

But here comes the third act.  Here the guests (players) and the control center techs (the GM) are surprised at what happens next.  And what happens next is the unexpected.  Here the random dice rolls take over and surprise both groups of participants creating this fantasy experience.  Within the movie, the robots start acting on their own and begin killing the guests.  In game terms, the random dice start rolling events and actions that neither player or GM were expecting.  Here the movie rolls into unexpected territory - unplanned and deadly.  The guests (players) begin reacting uncertainly for their lives, the techs (GM) does their best to roll with what's happening trying their best to regain control of their 'game'.

At this point enough reality seeps into the fantasy world to make it interesting, thrilling and deadly.  It is here that the lone survivor, Benjamin being relentlessly perused by the Gunslinger, runs 'off map' and into the other 'worlds'.  It is here that he gets his $1000 a day role-playing value!

I saw this movie when I was a kid and Brenner's emotionless robotic Gunslinger scared the crap outta me.  Watching this movie now, sure things seem dated but in a retro fun way, but watching this with the eye of a role-player was a revelation.  The movie is a perfect parallel to the RPG experience and worth spending an hour and a half watching.  If any movie needs a modern reboot, this is the one.

Never trust a robot to do a man's job.