Creatures of Crowfield: The Sh'hemu

Truth be known, the Crowfield campaign is an attempt to have a fantasy game that emulates the sci-fi classic Traveller RPG. That is why the focus is on sand-box exploration, mercantile trade, and human-centric play.

One of the neat things about original Traveller is that it had a method of generating alien animals that an explorer might encounter when visiting a new planet. This was a clever solution to a problem: if a player might visit a hundred worlds, how do you have unique encounters on each planet without having a "monster manual" that contains thousands of unique beasts? You have tables that generates the beats for each world.

I decided to try to translate that table for my use. Below is the first creature that I rolled up. Let me know what you think.

Sh'hemu

Armor Class	11
Hit Dice	2
Move	120' (40')
Attacks	Hooves
Damage	1d6
Number Appearing	1d6
Morale	7
Treasure Type	special
Intelligence	Animal (2)
Alignment	Neutral
Monster Type	Normal Animal
Terrain	Desert
% in Lair	n/a
Special Attacks	Nil
Special Defenses	25% chance of Fear Aura
Magic Resistance	Normal
Size	M (220 pounds)

Reaction (1d20):

Roll	Reaction
1 - 17	Attacks
18 - 19	Flees
20	Waits

Sh'hemu (singular & plural) vaguely resemble small, brown and tan zebras with sharp teeth for rending flesh off of carrion. They are smaller than a zebra, and are approximately the same size as a North American white-tail deer.

Sh'hemu are carnivores, but they only hunt when truly desperate. They prefer to come across recently killed animals (or humans!), and use their numbers to scare off the original predator.  When more than 1 is encountered, they always attack in groups of 2 or 3 against any given foe.

As indicated, Sh'hemu aren't hunters. While aggressive, they only attack to protect themselves and their meal. They will stop attacking when their opponents retreat. They will not pursue fleeing opponents.

There's a 20% chance that any given pack contains a sh'hemu that emits a fear aura. Any creature that comes within 60' of such a Sh'hemu must make a saving throw or flee in the opposite direction at its max speed for 1d10 rounds. Sh'hemu are immune to the fear aura of other sh'hemu.

Treasure: Sh'hemu don't have treasure in the traditional sense, but a pelt is worth 2d6 × 10 gold coins. If the party takes special precautions during the fight, then a pelt can fetch 3d6 × 10 gold coins instead.  Special precautions means that every character attacking a given sh'hemu must accept a -4 on their attack roll and a -1 on their damage roll. It takes 2d6 × 10 minutes to skin a sh'hemu, potentially exposing the party to further random encounters.

Food value: Sh'hemu meat is potentially toxic to humans. Eating cooked sh'hemu meat requires a saving throw vs Poison, or the character will suffer from delirium (-1d6 to Intelligence and Wisdom). Characters who fail the saving throw are allowed a new one each day to see if the toxins have run their course. Recovery doesn't begin until then. Lost stat points will recover at 1 point per day.

Warrior, Rogue & Mage Fails the Test

In my last post you can see that I'm trying to decide which game I'm going to use for my upcoming Crowfield campaign. I had set my sights on Warrior, Rogue & Mage (WR&M for short). Unlike the other systems on the list, I wasn't really all that familiar with this one. I had read the rules and was impressed, but sometimes the way a game reads and the way it plays are very different. I mentioned to James that I wanted to run a quick combat, and he volunteered. I told him he would be fighting a skeleton.

Making the Character

The first step was for James to make a quick character. Because this was just intended for a test and not for long term campaign, I told him not to think about it too hard. This is what he came up with:

Nameless Character

Warrior 6
Rogue 2
Mage 2

Hit Points: 12
Fate Points: 2
Mana Points: 4
Base Defense: 8

Skills: Athletics, Awareness, Sword
Talent: Tough As Nails

Every character starts out with 250 silver. I told James that I got the impression that armor was very important in the game. He took my advice and bought "heavy plate", which was the best armor he could afford. On top of that he added a large shield and a sword. Together they were 140 silver, meaning he would still have another 110 to spend on normal adventuring gear if we were playing a campaign.

This seems like a reasonable starting character.

As we said before, his base defense was 8. The armor adds +7 to his effective defense, and the shield adds another +2 . This means his effective defense was 8 + 7 + 2 = 17. Yowza!

The armor also gives an armor penalty of 9, but that only applies to spell casters. We can ignore that.

I pulled the stats for the skeleton straight from the book. I used the variant with rusted armor, just to add to the challenge.

The Combatants

Stat	Character	Skeleton
Warrior	6	3
Rogue	2	3
Mage	2	0
Hit Points	12	9
Fate Points	2	0
Mana Points	4	0
Defense	17	8
Skills	Athletics, Awareness, Sword	None
Talent	Tough As Nails	Half damage except from blunt weapons or axes

The Fight

Step 1: Initiative

There was no roleplay to lead up to this, so initiative would be determined by a die roll.

The skeleton rolled a 6! WR&M uses exploding dice, so it gets to roll again. The second roll was a 3. 6 + 3 = 9.

James has the Awareness skill, so he gets a +2. Still, he needs the dice to explode to beat the skeleton. He rolled a 3. 3 + 2 = 5.

The skeleton gets the jump on the character and gets to go first.

Round 1 (Skeleton)

The skeleton goes first. Right away I see that there's going to be an issue. The character's effective defense is 17. That means the skeleton needs to roll 17 or better to hit the character.

Let me repeat that: The skeleton needs to roll 17 or better on a d6 to hit the character.

I'm exaggerating a little. The skeleton has a Warrior rank of 3. That means +3 to the roll. So the actual d6 roll only needs to be a 14 or better. The only way for that to happen is if the skeleton rolls a 6, then rolls a 6 for the second roll, then rolls 2 or better on the third roll. Anydice.com tells me that there is an approximate 2.3% chance of this happening. This means that the skeleton will hit the character about once every 43 rounds.

Anyway, I roll the dice. It's a 4 (rolled) + 3 (warrior) = 7. It missed. No surprise.

Round 1 (Character)

The skeleton's defense is 8. Which means that the character needs to roll a 8 or better on a d6. But the character has a Warrior of 6, plus he's using his sword and has the sword skill, so he gets another +2.

Another problem.

The character needs to roll 1d6 + 8 and get an 8 or better. I don't need anydice.com to figure this one out: the character will never miss. WR&M doesn't even have a "automatically miss on a '1'" rule.

James gets a 5 (rolled) + 6 (Warrior) + 2 (sword skill) = 13. He hits. No surprise.

He rolled another 5 for damage, but it's reduced to 2 because of the skeleton's talent. The skeleton now has 7 hit points remaining.

Conclusion

We didn't finish the fight.

We didn't see the point. The character will never miss, and the skeleton will almost never hit. Dealing an average of 2 hp per round, the character will finish off the skeleton in about 4 rounds. I guess that means that there's a 10% or so chance that the character might have been hit at some point in the combat, but it wasn't enough risk to make things interesting.

The exercise wasn't a waste of time. It showed me that Warrior, Rogue & Mage will not be the game I use for the next campaign. I will look over the rules some more in case I made a mistake somewhere, in which case I'll give it another try.

If you're familiar with WR&M, leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know what I could have done to make it better. For now, though, I think I'm going to go with a D&D retroclone of some sort.

Help Me with My Next Campaign (Part 4): The Rules

First of all, thanks for all the feedback from last week's post. Even though there was only one message posted, I received several other responses. Universally (except for James), everyone thinks we should go with the "all three terrains" option, so that's what I'll do!

This week's quandary is the rules. Games needs rules, so I need to start deciding the game system that I'm going to use for this campaign.

The first step is to identify what I want in a game:

• Free-ish: I want this campaign to be accessible to new players, and I don't want them to go out and spend money on a game. They should be able to freely and legally download enough of the rules to play. It doesn't have to be the full ruleset, just enough for them to have access to the information that they would need during play. That means, for example, that GURPS would be acceptable because it has a free version (GURPS Lite) that players can download for free.
• Fantasy: This is a fantasy game, so I want the rules to have baked-in support for things like magic.
• Resource Management: In my mind, resource management is a huge part of a game about exploration. The players get to make meaningful choices about how much food and other supplies to take with them, and how many hirelings to hire.
• Familiarity: I want to know the rules. It's so much easier to run a game when you're not trying to learn it at the same time.
• Short: I don't want to wade through 400 pages of rules.
• Fast character creation: Because I'm encouraging new players, and the open table, and I expect character mortality, I want the process of making a new character to be quick and easy.
• Simple game play: I don't want a tabletop miniatures tactical battle game.

So I considered a lot of rules, and these are the ones that made it to the "short list."

Game	Notes
Basic Fantasy	Kind of a clone of basic D&D but with some more modern sensibilities. Doesn't have alignment, and uses the stupid saving throw categories from the original game. At least it does ascending armor class.
Legends of the Ancient World	This is a sharp little game. It's kind of like a very stripped down version of The Fantasy Trip. One down side is that it's actually written for solo "choose you own adventure" type books, and not tabletop role-playing, but I think it could work. It also doesn't include travels rules, but I think those will be easy enough to write.
Tunnels & Trolls	While it's not a free game, there is a stripped down free version, and the PDF of the earlier versions are pretty cheap (1st Edition, 4th, and 5th).
TunnelQuest	Another sharp little game. This was my introduction to "only the players roll in combat." The magic system is a little wonky, but other than that, I like it.
Warrior, Rogue & Mage	A nice little rules light game that runs with a concept that I've been thinking about (though it did it years before I thought about it).
White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game	Another clone of OD&D. Nice and simple.

How about it? Do any of these make sense? Should I use my own game instead? Is there another one that I haven't thought of?

Help Me with My Next Campaign (Part 3): The Setting

For dramatic purposes, I want settlements to be few and far between. This forces the player characters to travel through "untamed wilderness" between towns. On Earth, this is a very unrealistic situation as people tend to clump together and spread out, but not too far from the nearest settlement. I came up with one obvious solution, with three different variations:

1. The Firelands: The world is a great barren desert, and settlements can only occur at oases. Most oases will have only a little water and thus only be able to support a small village. A few might be large enough to to support cities. In this world, players would be able to put together a caravan of camels to carry goods from one oasis to the next.
2. Tundra: Just like #1, but the world is a frozen wasteland. Frost and snow replace sand and dust. Instead of desert oases, we would have "geotherms"--spots where hot springs warm up the ground enough to grow crops and raise livestock. The camels would be replaced with reindeer or horses.
3. The Dreadwood: Just like #1, except the desert is replaced by a wild untamed forest. The forest itself is alive, and actively seeks to destroy settlements. Some say that just standing in place too long will cause the forest to entrap and envelop you in fast growing vines. The oases are replaced by glades. Instead of caravans of camels, the players would have a mule train.
4. Okeanos: Just like #1, except the desert is replaced by the sea, and oases are replaced by islands. Instead of caravans of camels, they players would have a ship. One downfall about this is that I would need some sort of ship combat rules, and I've never really seen any that I love.

I spoke to James about this and he really liked the Firelands better than any of the other options. As I was writing this, though, it occurred to me that There's really no need to just pick one. In fact if we look at the map of my gaming world, we can see that there's spots where these different areas meet:

(The green is the Dreadwood, the white is the Tundra, the tan/yellow is the Firelands, while the green dots in the Great Sea make up the archipelago of Okeanos.)

If I put it in the area with the red circle, players can cross between Firelands, Tundra and Dreadwood depending which way they go.

So what do you think? All three? Just one? If so, which one?