The Single Class Campaign

I have never run a single-class campaign (defined as one in which all the PCs are of the same class: everything is magic-users; everything is paladins; everything is thieves.) But I would like to.

I suppose you could call me single-class-campaign-curious.

The interesting thing about the single-class campaign is that, in closing off many old possibilities, it opens up new ones. A campaign in which all the PCs are magic-users is not going to involve a lot of combat. It is going to be one in which they have to use their wits to get by. It is going to revolve around searching for spellbooks and scrolls as much as treasure. A campaign in which all the PCs are paladins is going to involve heroism and unreconstructed good-guy antics (because the PCs are going to have to stay paladins). A campaign in which all the PCs are thieves is going to involve a lot of sneakery, deception and plotting, because that is how the PCs are going to get treasure and hence XP. One in which they are all fighters is going to be combat-intensive, but will also revolve around resource management and good relations with NPC healers. And so on. 

The tone of the single-class campaign partly derives from mechanical incentives, of course. An all magic-user campaign will naturally be low on combat because the players will avoid it - their PCs are fragile. But it will also derive from tone. D&D is a roleplaying game; if the PCs are all paladins (or whatever), the players will act accordingly.

As well as setting their own specific tones, single-class campaigns would also seem to provide their own justifications and origins. The magic-users are all members of a secret cabal; the thieves are a Heat/Ocean's Eleven style joint criminal enterprise; the paladins are a band of holy avengers cleansing the world of evil; the fighters are a band of warriors trying to get by in a high-magic world; the clerics are all members of the same faith, seeking to gather disciples; and so on. 

The only class that I would find too cringeworthy for a single-class campaign is bards. A "band" of wandering minstrels is just too on the nose for me and too ripe for jokes and Mick Jagger impressions - as long term readers will recall, I'm firmly of the view that D&D has to be the straight man. 

[Review] The Anatomy of Adventure

A few years ago I was browsing some books in a bric-a-brac sale outside somebody's house in rural Suffolk, when I came across a copy of Lord Denning's Landmarks in the Law. Denning is probably the best-known judge in the country's history (and an absolutely terrible one in practical terms), so I bought the book on the assumption that it would provide special insights into his judicial philosophy. 

It did not. A more accurate title for the book would have been Lord Denning: Great Judgments Wot I Have Handed Down. It is nothing more than a catalogue of reminscences concerning what Denning perceived to be his greatest juridical hits, shorn of any insight into his character or beliefs (except in regard to the size of his ego). It is like listening to a rather obnoxious uncle buttonholing you at a party: "And another brilliant dissenting judgment I gave was...."

I felt a little bit like this reading MT Black's The Anatomy of Adventure, which bills itself as some "thoughts on adventure scenario design for roleplaying games" from an apparently famous and successful designer, but which in reality consists mostly of some vague reflections about writing a litany of fabulous 5th edition adventures, liberally sprinkled with self-congratulation. ("As it happened, my next adventure would succeed brilliantly in this genre..."; "It is a platinum best-seller and currently has a 94% approval rating"; "[It] is one of my most popular adventures, having sold thousands of copies and enjoying a rating of 96% from nearly 50 reviews"; "The feedback has been consistently excellent ever since I released it"; "[T]he editor at Dragon+ got in touch with me and asked if they could feature the adventure in the magazine..."; "The success of this adventure, and the delight it has brought so many people, is one of the reasons I will never apologise for riffing on past classics"; "[S]oon after I wrote this adventure, I began earnestly using another idea-generating tool, one that proved to be immensely powerful", and so on...and on...and on. It is always a bad sign when a writer describes passages of their own work as "harrowing" or "poignant" and the like, and we get that in spades, here.)

So, it is safe to say MT Black is never backwards about coming forwards when it comes to the subject of his own talent. Who knows? This may be justified; he can certainly write clearly and effectively, judging by this volume, and that's more than can be said for about 99% of people writing RPG adventures. But hearing about how wonderful the author's adventures are is not, I suspect, the chief reason why anybody would buy a book about "The Anatomy of Adventure". Where, then, is the beef?

The answer is that, sadly, there is very little. It would not be fair to say that there is nothing useful in the text. MT Black does have some interesting observations about marketing, and his comments in support of the use of random tables to spur creativity are bang on the money, and, I would imagine, an important contribution within the sphere of 5th edition adventure design. But advice is otherwise thin on the ground. What we have instead is, for the most part, a collection of breezy accounts about how some of MT Black's adventures came about, broad descriptions of what happens in them, some reflections on what he would have done differently, and back-patting about the results. Not so much Stephen King's On Writing - more along the lines of an interview with a minor pop star on the release of a "Best of" collection. 

Not recommended. 1 1/2 becs de corbins.

There is Life in the Old Blog Yet

One of the features of the OSR blogosphere is relatively frequent handwringing about the death/decline of blogs. Here is a graph of my blog's stats, beginning around 2011.  (The blog started in 2008; I think at that time Google didn't own Blogger so the stats for that period are not available.)

Peaks and troughs, but a clear, steady, linear ascent. I don't see a drop-off in readership; if anything I see  the opposite. It's not as rapid as I'd like, but there is clearly still a growing appetite to read all of this nonsense.

But what does that mean? 

I think, probably, that just as newspapers didn't kill books, and radio didn't kill newspapers, and TV didn't kill radio, and the internet didn't kill TV, the move to more immediate platforms such as Twitter and Discord has not killed blogs. The older technologies hang around, and can indeed have a very long and productive shelf-life. Blogs are not the cutting edge anymore, but they have matured into an independent and perhaps permanent, and permanently useful, medium.

The Big Campaign

I am interested in the prospect of prospects for campaigns involving miniaturised PCs or gargantuan settings. 

My ‘Three Mile Tree’ campaign is an example of this: a tree that is three miles high, which the PCs explore. Castle Gargantua was another. I can think of no others (although my knowledge of the field is hardly exhaustive). I don’t believe we have scratched below the surface of the possibilities in this region.

During summer I visited the ruin of Byland Abbey, one of the many monasteries destroyed by Henry VIII, in this case in 1538. Despite the fact that the buildings have practically been levelled, what remains is still impressive, and walking among the ruins one still gets the feeling of being dwarfed beneath a great and complex construct whose vast scale one cannot properly fathom. 

It got me thinking that a megadungeon set within a real-scale ruin, but with PCs who are only 1cm high, would be interesting. 

What I like about this idea most (and what I also like about the Three Mile Tree, as it happens) is that it expands the scope of exploration. One is not limited to the horizontal plane, but can combine it with the vertical: the PCs do not have to go downwards, interacting with a series of flat dungeon levels, but can climb vertical or near-vertical surfaces in order to reach new areas. 

They can, for instance, climb walls and insert themselves into gaps which presumably lead to extensive caverns and burrows: 

They can ascend and descend huge staircases, each step of which may be in effect a dungeon-level of its own: 

They can go into really fucking massive caverns:

And walk amongst really fucking massive obstacles:

And they can explore ledges, wall-tops, sills, and the like, on which people of similar size to them have built little towers, citadels, villages, tombs, and hey, even abbeys, of their own: 

What is being achieved here, I suppose, is an additional exploratory field, between the dungeon level and the regional/hex level. What the ‘BIG Campaign’ does is insert an area map which links together lots of mini-dungeons, all at different levels and altitudes, but is more compact and detailed than a hex map proper, and with a unified theme/architecture.

The Campaign Which Runs Itself

I'll keep this entry simple. The ideal campaign - regardless of setting, regardless of genre, regardless of system - is one which runs itself.

A campaign that runs itself is defined as one which, after the initial setup, creates its own adventures.

What this requires is really just four things:

1. Loose ends. The dungeon, hexmap, city, etc., in which the campaign is set needs to be liberally peppered with questions which you, the DM, do not yet know the answer to. At some point, the PCs will ask one of these questions. Because you do not know the answer, the range of possibilities is open-ended, and has no conclusion. What does this symbol on a dungeon door mean? The PCs ask the local innkeeper. He doesn't know, but he tells them there is a witch who lives on an island up the coast who might. What will the witch want in order to give the answer? When they get there, the PCs discover her son has gone missing, and will give them their answer if they can help find him. The PCs discover the son was kidnapped by pirates... And so on. 

2. NPCs/monsters with motivations. If most NPCs, dungeon denizens and so on are pre-prepped with motives or goals, adventure follows. If the gnolls are not just gnolls but have a rivalry with the local grimlocks, and are afflicted with a nasty disease, encountering them becomes not just a matter of "kill the gnolls, take their stuff", but a source of further adventure. And, of course, new motives and goals can arise. If the PCs kill some of the gnolls, or steal a treasure the gnolls had their eye on, the gnolls suddenly have powerful new motives.

3. Staying a page ahead of the players. Each session, afterwards, sit down and take notes about what happened. Come up with two or three hooks or events stemming from this. Make the world responsive. The PCs killed a nest of kobolds. Ok - next time they come by, the room is infested with scavengers, or dangerous mold, feeding off the corpses; or, Mama Dragon has come to find out why nobody attended her birthday party.

4. Don't be afraid to steal the players' idle musings and run with them. Players often speculate out loud about meanings, motives, explanations, histories. Don't make use of all of these. But riff on them - again, after the session, when you've had a chance to mull matters over. 

The goal is to get to the stage that you only need to spend 10 minutes between sessions, essentially on caretaking tasks, like a well set-up garden that needs just a bi-weekly mow with the lawn and some dead-heading to keep it beautifully maintained. 

The Quest to Sell

It is hard to avoid allowing treasure to become just a means to an end - namely, of course, advancement. I have experimented in the past with having antiques, objets de vertu, incense, clothing, honey and the like as treasure, and the logistics of trying to get these objects out of a dungeon can be an interesting little challenge in itself. But what I'd really like to do is to try to get away from coinage (not entirely, of course) and towards an understanding of 'treasure' as more frequently comprising unique or near-unique objects which are often only really recognisable to particular types of collector, and which it takes something of an effort to sell.

Put more simply, I like the idea of PCs finding (say) a rare vase by a known designer or from a known tradition of pottery, and getting a comparatively large sum for it if they can succeed in what I will call 'The Quest to Sell' - that is, the mission of finding one of the eccentric and possibly secretive collectors of the type of treasure in question.

Jack Vance is the master at suggesting the existence of these large, dispersed, and largely unknown networks of collectors and connoisseurs operating in the background of his imaginary worlds. Take this passage from Ecce and Old Earth:

The Way of the Ten Pentalogues ran beside the Bartolo Seppi Canal, and was lined with bistros, cafes, flower stalls, booths selling fried clams and potatoes in paper packets. Along the sidestreets dim little shops dealt in specialty merchandise: curios, off-world artifacts, incunabula; rare weapons and musical instruments pitched in every key imaginable. Certain shops specialised in puzzles, cryptography, inscriptions in unknown languages; others sold coins, glass insects, autographs, minerals mined from the substance of dead stars. Still other shops purveyed softer stuff: dolls costumed in the styles of many times and places, also dolls cleverly programmed to perform acts which were polite and acts not at all polite. Spice shops vended condiments and scents, oils and esters, of an interesting sort; confectionaries sold cakes and bonbons available nowhere else on Earth, as well as dried fruits, syrops and glazes. A variety of shops displayed models of ships, ancient trains and automobiles; while others specialised in models of spaceships.

The idea of the PCs coming back from an adventure laden with rare puzzles, dolls, glass insects and a rare weapon and having to go in search of a buyer is a delightful one, not least because it opens up an underlying world of additional adventure hooks. Vance goes on a few pages later, after his main character, Wayness, has entered a shop selling 'tanglets':

Wayness turned to look at the glowing green buckles, or clasps - whatever they were - on display in the window, each on a small pedestal covered with black velvet. Each was similar but notably different from all the rest.

"They are beautiful little things; jade, I suppose?"

"Nephrite, to be exact. Jadeite gives a different feel: somewhat more coarse. These are cold and unctuous, like green butter."

"What are they used for?"

"I use them to sell to collectors," said Alvina. "All authentic tanglets are antiques, and very valuable, since the only new tanglets are counterfeit."

"What were they originally?"

"At first they were hairclasps, worn by the warriors of a far world. When a warrior killed an enemy he took the clasp and wore it on the scalp rope of his hair. In this way tanglets became trophies. The tanglets of a hero are even more; they are talismans. There are hundreds of distinctions and qualities and special terms, which make the subject rather fascinating, when you acquire some of the lore. Only a finite number are authentic tanglets, despite the efforts of counterfeiters, and each one is annotated and named and attributed. All are valuable, but the great ones are literally priceless. A hero's rope of six tanglets is so full of mana it almost sparkles. I must take extraordinary care; a single touch sours the sheen and curdles the mana."

"Poof!" said Wayness. "Who would know the difference?"

"An expert: that's who, and on the instant. I could tell you stories for hours on end." Alvina looked toward the ceiling. "I'll tell you just one, about a famous tanglet: Twelve Kanaw. A collector named Jadoukh Ibrasil had coveted Twelve Kanaw for many years, and finally, after complicated negotiations, took possession of Twelve Kanaw. On the same night, his beautiful spouse Dilre Lagoum saw the tanglet and innocently wore it in her hair to a fete. Jadoukh Ibrasil joined his wife, complimented her upon her beauty, then noticed the tanglet in her hair. Witnesses say that he turned white as a sheet. He knew at once what he must do. Courteously he took Dilre Lagoum's arm and led her into the garden and cut her throat among the hydrangeas. Then he stabbed himself. The story is usually heard only among collectors. The general feeling is that Jadoukh Ibrasil did what he had to do, and at this point the talk becomes metaphysical. What do you think?"

"I don't know," said Wayness cautiously. "It may be that all collectors are mad."

Apart from the charm of this story and the sense it communicates of a deeply layered and inhabited universe in which there are far more things than it is possible for one mind to contemplate, let alone catalogue, it also fills one's head with ideas - the PCs as tanglet thieves, the PCs as tanglet counterfeiters, the PCs digging for tanglets, the PCs searching for Twelve Kanaw. The act, in other words, of looking for somebody to sell treasure too itself becomes a rich vein of potential further adventure. This is the kind of thing that makes a campaign run itself: PCs find tanglet; PCs search for somebody to sell it to; PCs eventually discover that there are tanglet collectors; PCs sell tanglet; PCs go looking for more; NPCs try to steal tanglets from the PCs...and so on and so on for session after session after session.

Another writer expert in this kind of thing, these dark hints of hidden webs of collectors, traders, counterfeiters, burglars and fraudsters operating beneath the surface of polite society and occasionally glimpsed by those in the 'surface world' is William Gibson: I'm thinking in particular here of the subplot of Pattern Recognition suggesting a global network of people who collect Curta calculators, of course. I'm sure such people exist. I doubt many of them are eccentric billionaires engaged in a complex cold war of assassinations, burglaries and heists against one another, but it is nice to imagine that they are.

The Three-Mile Tree Campaign: Update 1

Patrick S was interviewed in this Joe Rogan style marathon, and spent some of the first section describing my campaign. I have avoided APs for this game, but thought I would do some semi-regular updates on progress. Not all of it will be interesting, I suspect, but I will conclude each update with sections on rules tweaks and lessons learned. Here is the first update, in any case:

I have been running a weekly campaign since roughly the end of January. We have missed, I think, only one or two sessions in that time. That makes just over 30 sessions so far.

It is now Day 72 of the campaign, in-game.  

The campaign is set around a megadungeon inside the trunk of a 3-mile high tree, and the town at the tree's base, Abermawr. The PCs have explored most of level 1 (70ish rooms), a tiny bit of level 2, and a bit more of level 3. They have also carried out a daring raid further up, to a horizontal tower position on the tree trunk. And they have explored some of the area immediately around the tree and Abermawr, going as far as the village of Tremadog, whose womenfolk all disappeared after running away one morning with an army of dishy, silver-handed drummers. 

The players are Patrick Stuart, Solomon VK, Dan Sumption, and Theo. [Come on Theo, start a blog!]

Character rosters:

Solomon VK

• Gnaeus, Roman Cleric, Level 4 [deceased]
• Xanthippe, Roman Fighter and wannabe Amazon, Level 3 [deceased]
• Aurelia, Brythonic Fighter, Level 3 [alive]

Dan

• Amyntas, Macedonian Fighter, Level 1 [deceased]
• Men-Kheper-Ra, Egypian Magic-User, Level 3 [?] [deceased]
• Kemnebi, Egyptian Thief, Level 5 [?] [deceased]
• David of the Web, Brythonic Thief, Level 1 [deceased]
• Finan of the Hammer, Brythonic Fighter, Level 3 [?] [alive]

Theo

• Argyros, Greek Cleric, Level 1 [deceased]
• Bomilcar, Carthaginian Fighter, Level 1 [deceased]
• Another Carthaginian Fighter whose name I forget, Level 1 [deceased]
• Stymatos, Greek Magic-User, Level 2 [?] [deceased]
• Octavius, Roman Cleric, Level 3 [deceased]
• Flewyn, Brythonic Thief, Level 4 [alive]

Patrick

• Laren Dar, Etruscan Fighter, Level 3 [deceased]
• Pupli Artnli, Etruscan Cleric, Level 2 [deceased]
• Wolvela, Brythonic Fighter, Level 2 [?] [deceased]
• Padraig, Brythonic Fighter, Level 4 [alive, current Maru of Nortia]

The list of slain NPC hirelings and henchmen is truly too vast to catalogue, but the current roster is:

• Vultumma, war pig
• Bronwen, test pig
• Laren, horse
• Aron, adolescent boy, mostly looks after the party's house
• Endelienta, elderly maid, also mostly looks after the party's house
• Bolton and Regan, two of Finan's 'jumblies'
• Yauseen, level 4 Assyrian Dwarf henchman, entitled to a half share of proceeds
• Elen and Julitta, Aurelia's 'Amazons'
• Illtud, Marcus and Hywel, Flewyn's Celtic cronies
• Sal the Salamander, an amnesiac salamander

Sworn Enemies

• A tribe of shrew-men, now all slain (or are they????)
• A tribe of woodwoses - active enemies
• A tribe of earwigmen - on-again, off-again foes
• A crow-woman called Drest, lover of a crow-man wizard killed by the PCs
• Phersu's gang, an NPC party, now all slain
• Titus's gang, an NPC party, now all handed over as living sacrifices to the druidesses of Abermawr

Allies

• The wizard Tathyw, expert in identifying magic items and purchaser of giant insect corpses
• The wizard Alpin, rescued from robbers
• Psionic freshwater shrimp, set free from within the tree
• Salammbo, Carthaginian woman who owns the main hostelry in Abermawr
• Sophisbana, Carthaginian woman who trades in jewellery and gems
• Djem-Slen, a female elf spectre

Dubious

• The druidesses of Abermawr, who respectively venerate the tree's Rootedness, capacity for Growth, great Strength, Cyclical nature, and the fact that it is Home to Many Living Things, and to whom collectively the PCs pay an 8% tithe on all treasure brought back from the tree.

Incomplete List of Major Achievements

• Casting a porcupine-quilled demon into the sea
• Slaying a seal-woman pirate queen
• Ridding the lower reaches of the tree of foul invasive mold
• Founding a cult based on the prophecies and incorruptibility of the first Maru of Nortia, Pupli Artnli
• Rescuing the wizard Alpin, who was besieged by crow-man robbers
• Building a temple that attracts converts to the cult of Nortia

Rules Tweaks

I would not call these house rules, exactly, but I have fiddle with some of the knobs, so to speak:

• Death is at -1hp, unconsciousness at 0. I have previously sometimes allowed PCs to survive comatose beyond -1hp, losing 1hp/round until the negative respective value for their initial hit points is reached (so, for example, a character with 12hp would be unconscious at 0, dead at -12). I've decided that since this doesn't happen for monsters, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander, PCs should not have this 'grace period'. It has worked fine. Lots of PCs have died (almost one every two sessions on average), but this has just meant that the players have become invested in their overall enterprise rather than the fates of individual PCs.
• Random initiative: both sides roll 1d6 at the start of combat and the side which is highest goes first. If one side is surprised, they automatically lose initiative after the surprise round. This makes winning surprise rolls very important (as it means getting two rounds of free action before opponents can react), but if the PCs plausibly make preparations for not being surprised, they automatically are not. (For example, walking into a room with spears prepared to stab anything dropping from the ceiling would automatically mean not being surprised by a giant spider falling on their heads.)
• You have to bring treasure back to town to get the XP, rather than having to spend it, but you don't get XP for jewellery, magic items, etc., unless sold and converted into coinage.
• XP for monsters kills is awarded on return to town.
• Critical hits (natural 20) do double damage - roll once for damage and then double it, rather than two dice. This can make them super-deadly.
• If you get lots of XP in one go, you can go up more than one level. So, for example, if you are a level 1 Fighter and get 8,500 XP in one session (unlikely, but you never know) you can go straight to level 4. This is actually important in helping new PCs catch up a little bit, XP-wise, with the existing ones.

Lessons Learned

• You can easily run a weekly campaign even in the modern grown-up world of supposedly busy diaries if you put your mind to it and have some self-discipline. Most of what you're 'busy' with is checking emails, dicking around on social media, or watching Netflix. Don't deny it.
• D&D is a lot better when run weekly, although the players still forget or misremember an awful lot in the gap between sessions.
• You can't teach an old dog new tricks. There are lots of bells and whistles with roll20 but I basically do the same thing I do when running a game in person: scrawl basic maps with the 'draw' function, using letters to indicate where people are (F for Finan, A for Aurelia, etc.) and blobs to indicate objects.
• Levels 3 and 4 may be the most 'dangerous' levels in that the players at that stage seem to become falsely confident about the robustness of their PCs, leading them to make foolish choices.
• The PCs will always end up building things very early in the campaign - basically, as soon as they have disposable wealth - and if what they build is not a pub, it will be a temple.

On Artpunk

"What is 'artpunk'?", Patrick S once notoriously asked. I don't wish to pick an argument, especially not 3 years after the fact. But I think we can come up with a better definition.

To me, the suffix "-punk" is hideously overused as a kind of shorthand for "you've seen this kind of setting before, but this is a cool/edgy version of it and the people in it have tattoos and piercings". (I'm not accusing Patrick of using it in that sense - just the people who come up with ridiculous neologisms like "islandpunk", "lunarpunk" and "mythpunk".)

What -punk, in the sense of cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, etc., really means - if it is to have any coherent, sensible meaning - is that the fiction is about the alienation from, and subversion of, the particular technology in question. Think of William Gibson's cyberpunk stories: these were tales about the have-nots - the people who had been dispossessed by advancing technology, the preserve of the haves - and their attempts to deploy that technology in illicit or unusual ways for the furtherance of their own agendas. It was not so much an aesthetic as it was a viewpoint (the future from the "belly up", as Bruce Sterling put it in his famous introduction to Burning Chrome). You might call it the use of the thing against itself.

Hence, a genuine steampunk setting is one in which steam technology has made a small percentage of the population very rich, but the fiction is about criminals, crooks, ne'er do wells, and rogues who cunningly deploy (or abuse) the technology to grab some of the 1%'s wealth for themselves.

What, then, is artpunk? Well, there is a lot of good art and layout around nowadays, even within so-called DIY D&D  - stuff that makes its creators comparatively large sums of money on big scale Kickstarters, and is expensive to consume. Think of that as a technological development in the sphere of art. If that is the case, then what is artpunk if not the subversion of that mainstream, glitzy, expensive-looking aesthetic - a deliberate eschewment of accepted artistic standards as a rebellious aesthetic choice of its own?

Seen in that way, Patrick and Scrap's stuff is probably the epitome of artpunk: it is art produced with exceptional skill and talent (in my view) but which goes out of its way to avoid looking pricey. At the same time, so are the entries to Prince of Nothing's "No Artpunk" contest, Mike's Dungeons and rather a lot of the things reviewed on tenfootpole: work by the artistic have-nots, who nonetheless are attempting to do interesting and perhaps deeply unartistic things with the art contained in their output.

In a funny sort of a way, the images in OD&D themselves bore the seeds of artpunk - protoartpunk, if you will. These are not the product of the artistic "haves". This is the work of the artistic "have-nots" who are going to have a piece of the action anyway. Now that's punk.

RPG Player Characters and the Patch Adams Problem

When I used to play RPGs as a young teenager (and, later, in PBEM and PBP iterations) the idea was always to come up with a PC who could essentially be the main character of a novel. They had backstories, they had detailed appearances, and they had personalities. "He's witty and incisive!" "She's grim and brooding!" "He's eccentric and strange!"

I understand that this is as big an element of the hobby as it ever was, perhaps more so, and that in fact creating interesting PCs is a significant chunk of the fun of things for a lot of people (indeed almost a hobby in itself).

The problem that I always encountered was that the PC as envisaged by the player during character generation is often a very different beast to that which emerges at the table. Put bluntly: maybe your PC as you imagine him is witty and incisive. But maybe you can't pull off witty and incisive. Maybe your PC actually comes across as a boorish, overbearing idiot. 

I would like to christen this the 'Patch Adams Problem'. Have you ever seen Patch Adams? Don't. While it is not perhaps the worst film I have ever seen, it is offensively bad, the least desirable kind of bad, not so bad that it's good, but so bad that it makes you feel a worse person for having watched it. Peter Sellers is once said to have replied, after being asked whether he would do anything differently if he could live his life over, "I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn't see The Magus." The experience of watching Patch Adams reminded me of that.

The film has many flaws. But at the heart of its badness is the character of Patch Adams himself. The creators of the film envisage our 'hero' as funny, intelligent, kind, beloved by children, esteemed by his peers as a charming eccentric, and filled with an optimistic passion to help others. And that is indeed the person that the cast of characters seems to be reacting towards. 

But this is not what we, the audience, see. What we see is actually an unfunny, obnoxious, creepy, lecherous, leering, sanctimonious, belligerent oaf, perhaps actively malevolent, but certainly narcissistic and blinkered, and bloody-mindedly focused on pissing off everybody around him for no good reason whatsoever. The film is littered with arguments between himself and others, and in almost literally every single one of these disputes, we find ourselves agreeing wholeheartedly with whoever Patch Adams is arguing against. Yet at the end, it is he who triumphs. It is a bit like a filmic version of A Confederacy of Dunces, except nobody who made it is in on the gag.

The point, of course, is that if you are going to pretend to be a funny, intelligent, brooding, menacing, insightful, charming or creative character, you had better actually be funny, intelligent, brooding, menacing, insightful, charming or creative when in character. And the one most certainly does not necessarily follow from the other.

The approach which old school play tends to favour, and I think by far the most sensible, is to begin as more or less a blank slate. One can paint in broad brushstrokes, certainly at the physical level. And the PC's stats may suggest lack of intelligence, a muscular frame, etc. But it is best for the PC's personality to emerge as you get to know her, and as events shape her. Often, it will turn out that her personality is a lot like yours. But at least if it is she will seem like a genuine person and not a poor copy of some figment of your imagination.

The Modern Dungeoneering Campaign Needs To Be Crunchy

Outside of my house there is what the locals nonchalantly call an old 'mine tap' - the entrance to a former mine. You wouldn't know it, as it is underneath the road and completely covered in tarmac. But it is there all the same, the mine itself having apparently been decommissioned in 1935. This worried us when we were first thinking of buying the place. Then we learned that the entire area is riddled with these old mines and, as the estate agent put it, if it was a problem for us it would be a problem for the approximately 10,000 other people who live around us too. I'm not sure why that reassured us, but it did.

In any event, it conjured up an image of an entire hillside (the town in which I live spills down the whole side of a steep escarpment) burrowed through with tunnels, the existence of which is at best at the fringes of the awareness of the locals, and which is accessible perhaps to a small circle of secret urban spelunkers. 

I was going to say that this screamed D&D to me, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It screamed 'modern dungeoneering', but D&D is a singularly bad system for modern settings. This is something I am sure have written about before, though I can't quite remember where, but the abstraction of D&D combat and the concept of hit points disintegrates once guns are involved, and the 'feel' in play of levels, XP and so on is all wrong for the real world; anyone who doubts this need only try to run d20 Modern, the game that time forgot. 

No: the closer an RPG setting is to our own experience, the more crunchy I think it needs to be. We can suspend disbelief about all manner of things when dragons and magic missiles are there to be imagined. When the game is set in our reality, in contemporary society, we are keenly aware of what is and is not possible. We want a system that reflects that - at least if action and derring-do are going to be involved. Our thoughts turn to GURPS, to CP:2020, to the Hero System, and so on. We want things to feel as though they matter, because to us the real world matters - we experience it not as imagination, but as 'lived experience', and loose approximation won't do. 

What lives in the old mines buried beneath a city? Ghosts, giant vermin, cultists, murderers? No doubt. A slumbering god? Quite likely. Demonic entities awakened by the sound of mining, Moria-like? For sure. But what is the PCs' aim? Not amassing gold, perhaps - not literally, anyway - but once one has access to the mines, the geography of the town is entirely rearranged; one is not bound by roads, walls, pavements, fences, but by the tunnels themselves, and the tunnels might go anywhere. The ability to appear and disappear as if from nowhere is surely a burglar's dream - not to mention an assassin's, paparazzo's, or private investigator's.