Adventurers of the Uknown

If you like minimal old school rules and haven't run across Searchers of the Unknown - you're welcome. This is a collection of rules and hacks based on the idea that a PC doesn't need to be any more mechanically complex than an old school monster stat black.

Here is my personal edit of the original, plus supplements for spell casters and demi-humans that I've named Adventurers of the Unknown. Teaser: 

 

If a Goblin stat block is

AC13 MV12 HD1-1 4hp #AT1 1d6

Why make PCs more complex? Character comes from role play, deeds, and loot acquired, not character building.

Clerics heal in temples. Wizards study magic in towers. Only Adventurers fight monsters and loot treasure from dungeons.

Short Term Goals

The Problem with Hoard of the Dragon Queen (Spoilers!)

One of the problems of the D&D 5E adventure module Hoard of the Dragon Queen is the goal is too grand at the outset. The adventure is slightly unclear when it should be revealed to the players that the ultimate goal is to stop the dragon cult from raising Tiamat from hell, but it seems to be no later than chapter 3 of the first book when the players are about third level. Yet, the resolution of that goal is not until the end of the second book, Rise of Tiamat, when the PCs are around fifteenth level.

Not knowing that, any reasonable party asks themselves - how do we stop the cult from raising Tiamat? Shockingly the adventure assumes the party will be content to spend the first eight levels of play simply tracking the treasure to find out where it goes and what the cult intends to do with it, but never finding the answer.

It's also unclear whether preventing some amount of treasure from reaching its ultimate destination will slow or stop the cult, or what the PCs could possibly do besides follow the treasure to find out more. It also assumes that the PCs are more motivated to stop the cult than to take a large amount of treasure for themselves and leave.

What I Learned

Running this module taught me a few things about adventure writing and what the word "adventure" should mean.

Most adventures should reach a satisfying conclusion within a few sessions.

Players need to feel a sense of progress. Don't put a goal in front of the players that they cannot do anything meaningful about within a reasonable amount of time. A major milestone or satisfying conclusion should be attainable within a few sessions of play, certainly every character level.

Plot threads should vary in length.

Players should feel natural oscillations between tension and resolution in every session. In addition to 1-2 session adventures, sprinkle in more wandering monsters and random encounters - challenges unrelated to the adventure that can be resolved or circumvented immediately.

I don't mean to fuel edition wars, but when even simple combats started taking 30+ minutes to resolve, we sacrificed wandering monsters and random encounters. We compromised short plot threads and fast oscillations between tension and resolution. When D&D leans heavily into the narrative journey of the heroes, we need to cram the whole Campbellian Monomyth into a reasonable amount of time. The result is we prune anything not immediately pertaining to the main story, and lose all of the shorter plot threads.

What's worse, when we prune the shorter threads and the un-related random encounters, everything feels critically linked to the plot - like the PCs are at the center of a vast conspiracy. That can be fun, but it can also feel like both a quantum ogre and slog. No matter where the PCs go they encounter the main plot and over 15 levels of play every milestone is a baby step in a swamp.

Wait on campaign-level villains.

Don't reveal campaign-level villains or plots too early. In fact, don't even develop them. Many GMs have brilliant, intricate plots fit for an epic fantasy novel. But in an RPG you don't control the protagonists, so you can't control what they're interested in. It's very difficult to keep up the machinations of an ultimate villain in the background of a campaign and the payoff the GM is hoping for ("He was there all along pulling invisible strings and making your lives miserable - the shadow lurking behind every villain you've faced!") is rarely worth the effort.

It's far better to play a sequence of loosely linked adventures and let a grand villain emerge. You could never have foreseen how much the party would despise that NPC, nor how frequently they would reappear and escape again. When your campaign is mature and you're ready for one final adventure, only then do you choose the final dastardly villain.

Conclusion

In short, HotDQ is one, long, linear adventure that offers little in the way of milestones or satisfying resolution. Both it and your adventures could be vastly improved by discrete, non-linear locations and events and seasoned with variable-length plot threads and random encounters. The movements of the cult make an excellent backdrop for an otherwise unrelated game that the party could choose to involve themselves in. Save the campaign-level plots and villains for when the game has actually progressed into something resembling a campaign and the characters are high enough level to do something meaningful about them.

Random Encounters

Go deep enough for meaning and wide enough to be surprised and inspired.
Determine number appearing, leaders, special items, and activity in advance.
Determine surprise and distance during play.
Don't improvise encounters with monsters you've never used before - they deserve a fantastic, memorable encounter demonstrating how they're unique.
The world can be generated/discovered during play, but the players must believe it exists prior to perceiving it, and what they discover must remain established. Locations shouldn't move.

Re-focusing on the Characters

As a DM I find myself spending far too much time tinkering with rules and reading or writing about adventures that have no players. This is of limited use. Adventures written in a vacuum have to assume a very bland, typical, balanced party and table - they must satisfy the lowest common denominator.

Instead, harvest these raw materials and use them to prepare a small sandbox area of your game world as it exists before the players get involved. Stop there and go no further until you find some players and have them make characters. That is the target audience for your work. Tailor it to them.

If you have one or more ongoing games, check yourself. How much of this dabbling will actually see play? Are you fantasizing about a hypothetical table instead of delighting your real one?

Think about the players and characters you do have. Siphon your RPG daydreaming away from these black holes and pour it into fancies too tempting to resist. You know your players and their characters. What possibilities could the next session hold?

How long does looting take?

The old trope - "I loot the body!" But how long does it actually take to pick a dead man's pockets, relieve him of his weapons and armor, and assess their value? How long does it take to gather up piles of scattered coins? Why can PCs instantly sort, count, and store coins of mixed denominations with no repercussions? Convenience?

Usually the tension in a dungeon crawl is the decision between exploring for more treasure, and retreating with what you have before you run out of light or food or run into a nasty wandering monster. Surely that tension is magnified significantly if it's between looting a hoard and fleeing?

I would like to see looting take some amount of time akin to a "turn" in an old-school dungeon crawl. Perhaps in a single "turn" (~5-10 minutes) each PC can examine and assess a single piece of armor or weaponry, sort through a pile of treasure for a gem or piece of jewelry, briskly scoop up some quantity of unsorted coins, or extract a smaller quantity of sorted ones. At the end of each of these turns the DM checks for wandering monsters.

Perhaps the perfect encounter is a treasure guarded by a trap that alerts nearby monsters.

The Escape Encounter

A common problem with Open Table or West Marches style play is that each session needs to end in a safe "base" so any new combination of players (and therefore PCs) can venture out together in the next session with no continuity errors. But if part of the game is navigating a dungeon or wilderness, the PCs need to leave themselves enough time to do so and that's hard to estimate if there's a risk of random encounters or getting lost. We also don't want to overly trivialize this travel. So what options are there?

1. Trivialize the Travel

You don't want to. But you could. If they're not in the middle of an encounter, this is the simplest option.

2. Escape the Dungeon Table

You could roll on a table to determine the fate of the party. The Alexandrian has a good post on this.

3. Escape the Dungeon Encounter

What if, in the event that the PCs are not already safely back in town near the end of the session, the DM mandates that there will be one final random encounter? Leave enough time to resolve that encounter - probably 30 minutes in newer editions, less in OSR or pre-3rd Edition games. Then do the following:

1. Roll on the Random Encounter table. If there are multiple routes back to town, perhaps the PC's choice of route affects what table is rolled on or what encounters are possible.
2. The DM places the encounter anywhere that makes sense on the chosen route - probably a choke point that requires the PCs to sneak past, or fight past and then retreat. This encounter should be basically impossible to avoid. (If there was a room that had some neat terrain features or a trap that went undiscovered, that's great. If the DM chooses to place the encounter in the wilderness, be sure to factor in any mounts, wagons, and hirelings left outside the dungeon.)
3. Set up and resolve the encounter as normal.
4. Once the PCs have snuck past, spoken peaceably with, bribed, fled, or killed the monster(s), whoever escapes automatically arrives safely back in town with whatever treasure and XP they brought with them.

There's a ton of reasons why this would be awesome.

1. End the session on an intense high-note. Great climax.
2. Speed and stealth become super important. Do the PCs risk taking off heavy armor? What type of mounts/wagons/hirelings did they bring?
3. It's an encounter where the default goal is not kill the monster and take its treasure. In fact, as it's a wandering monster, it shouldn't have any treasure.
4. If you can talk or bribe your way past the monster, high-charisma PCs and having treasure is super important.
5. If you have to fight, Morale becomes super important. You may not need to kill them, just scare them off. Undead, oozes, and constructs become really scary.
6. If you can't scare them off, positioning becomes super important. Charge through, use crowd control Spells, and execute that Fighting Retreat (a rule that affected attacks and AC in older editions).
7. Once you have an opening, flee! Use chase rules if your system has them. For once your speed matters and fast monsters are really scary. You might have to drop treasure, caltrops, flaming oil, or equipment to lighten the load!
8. Getting lost matters. Idk - I'm just making shit up now but perhaps if you're lost before the encounter or somehow get lost fleeing from the encounter something else bad happens!
9. If an ally goes down or gets stuck behind enemy lines - will you really stay and fight to the death?

All. Good. Shit.

The Problems with FKR

I'm a huge fan of the FKR RPG movement - the core of which, to me, is that play takes place primarily within the fiction and the common sense of the genre is applied first and foremost ("play worlds, not rules"). Then the DM can make ad hoc rulings when dice are needed to make a decision that should not be up to an individual. But I have to admit the problems I've encountered.

1. Unbounded choice can be overwhelming

FKR-style play is too open for some players. No, we don't need lots of mechanical crunch to resolve skills, attack rolls, etc. but how do you develop a character who is unique? How do we capture what abilities - magical or not - make this character special? FKR proponents say rely on the clichés of the genre, but that requires those clichés to be well understood and, in my experience, a concrete list of choices to start with ("classes", ancestries, equipment, spells, etc.) goes a long way.

To cling as close to FKR sensibilities as possible, these should be single phrases or ideas with no further explanation. If you start writing out what a cleric is, you're just writing a new ruleset. Instead, negotiate it with the player during creation.

"You want to be a cleric? What abilities do you imagine a cleric having? Ok let's pick 2-3 and start there." 

2. Ad hoc balancing

FKR-style play requires the DM to spin many plates at once - balancing PCs against each other and opponents, inventing mechanics on the fly, controlling the resolution scope (What can a PC do on a turn? What about in combat? What about called shots, combos, or special moves?), all on top of the usual resolution of whatever crazy things the PCs want to try. Some of this is up front as laid out in the previous section, but the point of FKR is not to invent a whole new RPG every time you play, it's to get the rules out of the way and play within the fiction.

Another option is to establish new abilities when the player attempts things and rolls well. But can just anyone try to Sneak Attack? Pick locks? What about Lay on Hands or cast spells? How many times can you try? What if what you're good at doesn't line up with your vision for the PC? What are the boundaries of that ability? Is it fair for the DM to balance these things ad hoc? Is it important that it is fair?

3. It requires an incredible amount of experience and trust

FKR-style play requires the referee to have sufficient experience to gain the trust of the players. The origins of FKR are in Prussian military training exercises where the war games they played were so complex - often leading to absurd outcomes - that some experienced officers began discarding the rules and relied purely on their experience to create a faster, simpler, more realistic experience. They could do this because they had years of actual experience leading and directing soldiers on a battlefield.

FKR-style play tries to capture the same benefits. The lack of rules is lauded as players must rely on and make moves purely within the fiction of the game. They cannot interact with or manipulate complex game mechanics, stats, or abilities on their character sheet if there aren't any. But with fantasy RPG Dungeon Masters - the only relevant experience is Dungeon Mastery in a particular fantasy world. There is no "real world" experience to call on as the Prussian officers did. If you're not an experienced DM - let alone an army general - what do you do?

I fear this style of play not only works best, but requires the mystique of the referee being a true master of both world and rules. The players need to believe that the referee's rulings are not only fair, but consistent and realistic. Even a whiff of arbitrary whim or capriciousness will break the illusion. Maybe I've seen too much behind the screen but this degree of verisimilitude, for me, would be very hard to achieve as much as I desperately want to experience it.

Conclusion

I still love many of the benefits that come with this style of play, but it's definitely not going to be for everyone. I think success with both this and even other OSR-type games will require me to continually bring new players, or players that haven't touched the game in a long time, to my table. It seems the more experience someone has with RPGs, the more resistant they'll likely be to this kind of thing.

Classes That Should Be NPCs

 All classes have some elements that make for good NPCs. But some classes often make better NPCs than PCs. As primary protagonists rather than side-kicks or support characters these classes can limit the adventures and challenges that the DM can present and still have an interesting game. The classes I'm talking about include bard, cleric, ranger, druid, and rogue.

Bard

Bards are traveling minstrels that spread news through performative story telling, acting, or song. Experienced in social graces, performance, and perhaps as con-artists, this archetype supports a party of adventurers by influencing the narrative, helping them make social connections, hiding in plain sight, or infiltrating the gates of high society. Without magic, they have little use in the wilderness or deep in a dungeon - which is likely why they were given magic in the first place. A typical bard will struggle as a primary protagonist outside of games focused on urban intrigue. Their services are better utilized on an as-needed basis - that is, when the party hires one to spread tales of their deeds or influence the perception of the general population.

Cleric

Clerics are a strange combination of religious and moral authority, zealotry, and... healing magic? If your adventure is not about fighting literal evil - the role of the cleric is also support. They're medics in the back of the party and generally do not hunger for treasure or glory, except for their deity. An adventure that does not specifically target the enemies of the deity (e.g. fighting undead, vampire hunting, cleansing unholy or cursed ground, etc.) makes a poor fit for a cleric as a primary protagonist. In this case, the role is best left to a supporting character - an NPC in town or perhaps for hire to heal wounds and maladies, break curses, etc.

Ranger

Rangers are ideal scouts, foragers, hunters, and guides. They are useful when traveling overland in familiar terrain and are otherwise a less-good fighter. Unless the majority of the adventure takes place in the ranger's favored terrain, they are better off hired as needed. This role supports the party getting safely to its destination and struggles as a primary protagonist unless the adventure is specifically about taming or protecting their favored terrain for a grander purpose.

Druid

Druids make poor protagonists for reasons similar to both Clerics and Rangers. If the majority of the adventure takes place outside of terrain familiar or important to the druid - their support as scouts, foragers, or guides become less valuable. If the antagonists are not in conflict with nature, their involvement makes little sense.

Rogue

Rogues are skilled assassins, thieves, and navigators of the underworld in both the literal and social sense. That being said, if the adventure isn't an assassination, heist, or urban intrigue - the rogue's usefulness is suddenly limited to picking locks and disarming traps in the dungeon. Not a bad party member to have, but again more of a supporting role rather than a primary protagonist.

Conclusion

Probably the worst offender is Ranger which, to me, should feel like having an Ace up your sleeve for overland travel (but how do you make that satisfying except in contrast to parties without one?) but otherwise you should be a subclass of Fighter at best. In the same vein, having an assassin, thief, or bard should feel awesome when you need one but can be useless when you don't. The con-artist Bard could really be another subclass of Rogue in my opinion.

I wouldn't not allow these classes in my game, but I feel compelled to homebrew or modify an adventure to let the PCs all shine as primary protagonists, or I would discourage players from these classes entirely if they don't fit the adventure.

Final thought: perhaps playable races, classes, backgrounds, etc. should always be tailored to the adventure? What you allow in your game implies things about the game and the world it's played in. Just because Fighter is a core class in your system doesn't mean you need to allow it in your Urban Intrigue campaign.

System Visibility

Engage the mechanics or engage the fiction? System mastery or player creativity? Mechanical skill, tactics, and verifiable fairness or total immersion?

Original D&D from 1974 was very much a toolkit, rather than a complete set of rules. The AD&D Player's Handbook released in 1978 was by far the slimmest of the 3 core volumes and Gygax explicitly states in the preface to the Dungeon Master's Guide:

"As this book is the exclusive precinct of the DM, you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worthy of honorable death. Peeping players there will undoubtedly be, but they are simply lessening their own enjoyment of the game by taking away some of the sense of wonder that otherwise arises from a game which has rules hidden from participants."

This reveals a concept oft-overlooked to modern players of D&D - that many of the rules of D&D were intentionally obscured from the players to create a sense of wonder and mystery.

We should bring that back. Also, the "hidden" rules could be way simpler because they are obscured and can't be min-maxed.