We played Storming the Wizard's Tower, and it was a blast!

Now I'm going to brain dump my questions and observations.

Prep took quite a long time (about 4 hours), but most of that was town creation. Next time should be much shorter. Our town was a prosperous trade city on the Silk Road in fantasy Afghanistan, about a generation after the death of Alexander the Great. Our town is dependent on seasonal caravans and limited water supplies. The character classes are caravan guard, Western bloodline (descendents of Alexander's people), Hill folk woodsman, People of the Stones (ancient natives of the region), despoiler (basically a tomb robber).

Ben plays Bareil, the grumpy retired caravan guard with his wolf pelt armor
Lukas plays Ihl Ram, the ambitious son of a highborn Western family
Lesley plays Shirat, the young desploiler
Kingston plays Za Eli, the taciturn mountain man

The town’s water supply is befouled by something vile. A young girl is sick and near death. The town turns to its best and bravest to take the mountain trail to the Monastery near the spring that sources the town water. In the monastery there is fear and starvation. After falling sick, the abbot has morphed into a gargantuan bloated caricature of himself. He hides himself in the catacombs and bellows continually for more food. Awful crow-things haunt the skies. The heroes must brave the trail, harried by crow things, convince the reticent monks to let them in, find out what’s going on, and confront the abbot.

Setup is pretty awesome. The structure of the game gives me a living, breathing town, PCs who have a reason to care, and hazards that are naturally integrated with the setting.

Each character has a town connection. It’s just begging for an early scene that reinforces the PCs’ tie to the town. I don’t get this right at first, until a scene with Ben. Bareil wants his foreign wife to prepare a charm to protect him from shadow magic. How do I make this into an interesting scene. Of course! The wife doesn’t want her husband to risk himself. The scene is short, sweet, and even a tiny bit touching. That helped set the tone. I’m disappointed I didn’t get a good setup scene for every player.

Ambushed in the mountains, my players throw me my first curve. Za Eli’s been asking about what the animals on the trail are doing, which is just the right question to spot the coming ambush by crow-things. He uses his familiar spirit to scout the way, grabbing dice for a perception roll through his danger sense to spot the ambush, rolling into his rallying at the start of combat, handing a giant mound of dice around the table. Someone’s been reading the rulebook. As far as I can tell, you’re supposed to do that sort of thing in this game, so I’m not worried about it, and anyway, the fight still turns out to be pretty challenging. There are lots of tactics and terrain rolls involved.

This party makes great use of rallying and tactics. A lot of dice are going around. They have an alarming ability to chew through monsters. Monster creation is a challenge. Later the PCs will handily dispatch the abbot-monster in a single round, even though he’s almost the same XV as the difficult crow-things. Rallying seems quite strong, too. I’m a little worried it will become the dominant tactic, but time will tell.

Later, the heroes have gained entrance to the monastery, where the starving monks are trying to put a good face on things and ignore the horrible distant bellowing that occasionally shakes the caverns. There’s a heated conversation. Some PCs want to help, but the rules don’t seem to offer many ways to do it. It looks like a conversation is primarily one-on-one. Am I missing something here?

One of my favorite moments: “what would it take for him to trust me?”
“You’d have to be a monk.”

Also, one player suggests another useful question might be “what would I have to offer them to get them to do what I want?” I guess you can just make up a question for heated conversation and if the GM agrees, go ahead and use it. Does this sound reasonable?

Later the PC’s traverse the labyrinth (they’ve already dispatched the abbot-monster). Bareil wants to use his first-hand account here. But earlier he used the first-hand account to know something about magically befouled streams. Can he use it now to help with the labyrinth? I decide he can, but on later thought I’m not so sure. How many times can you use a map? Once it becomes described in the fiction, is it locked in for the rest of the session? Maybe forever?

Here’s how I want to handle it: once per session, when you use it, you describe it in the fiction, explaining how it’s relevant. That description stays for the rest of that session. Sound good?

Another nice moment: Shirat wants mountain heather for her apothecary friend, but the monks think it’s kind of sacred. Shirat decides to bring something on the journey to trade to the monks. I ask her what she wants to bring. After mulling it over, she decides on a big jar of honey. Later, negotiating with the starving monks, food turns out to be just the perfect thing to have on hand. This epitomizes the way that the gear rules mesh seamlessly with the fiction. What it is and how it’s described explains how it impacts gameplay. This is as much a matter of how Vincent has written he rules as it is of the mechanics.

And while I'm thinking about it, a few questions...

So when the party XP reaches 50 or so, we're ready for level 2. We played with a big group, and I missed the part where you said limit the adventure to 20XV. We now have 22 XV from one adventure. A bigger party means more monsters, means more XP, means faster advancement. I'm a little concerned that 3 adventures will probably put us to level 2. Should I be worried, or is this about right?

When you're setting up an adventure, there are things you put in that are obstacles for the heroes, but aren't monsters per se--like the obstinant monks who won't give answers. The players spend time getting around these, but they don't get any XP for it. Am I understanding this correctly?

Excellent! Hooray.

I'm going to try to hit your questions in order. If I miss any or get lost, just ask again.

Helping in conversations: When we played at GenCon, there was this cool conversation where John's, Ed's and Brandon's characters all participated. John rolled command to make the swamp guy stay in the conversation; Brandon didn't have the command to keep the swamp guy from just storming out. Brandon had the perception to get info out of him, though, where John didn't. And, um, Ed used up John's hits by giving the swamp guy grief (challenging his commitment), which was funny.

In a big group conversation, you can have everybody who wants to roll perception, and all ask their own questions, for instance. There isn't any straight mechanical helping, like passing your hits to someone else, by default. As GM you could create an ability or treasure that lets them do that though.

"What would I have to offer them to get them to do what I want?" Consider it added. I'm definitely interested in what questions playtesters wish were on that list.

Reusing maps: I just wrote about this on the Storming blog, I'll quote it:

How I GM it, most of the time: it’s a set of childhood memories, like a set of lockpicks. It’s not single-use, but it is single-subject. I make exceptions case by case.

The rule is, as GM you have to make judgments about whether this particular map is useful under this particular circumstance, every time. If there’s a principle you like better - if you prefer maps to be single-use, for instance - then go with that as the basis for your judgment, and make exceptions case by case.

tonyd wrote:
This epitomizes the way that the gear rules mesh seamlessly with the fiction. What it is and how it’s described explains how it impacts gameplay. This is as much a matter of how Vincent has written he rules as it is of the mechanics.

XV should probably scale with the number of players. Why not just divide it between them? It's the same thing as your 3/n thing, except you, uh, don't multiply by three beforehand.

yrs--
--Ben

One way to do it, espcially with a large, somewhat rotating group of players, is let people spend XP on finding the Wizard's tower. Once the party has spent a certain amount of XP, you all level up. That lets them choose when they're ready for second level.

Speaking of which.... how long before we see the rules for level 2?  :)

Oh, and where I talk about gear and meshing with the rules is simply a comment on how, when you want to know whether something is useful or not, you go straight to what it is, rather than to some rule about it. I like rules that bring everything around to common language. Your text deals with it nicely by explaining the use of gear as a straightforward and commonsense procedure.

We played another session last night, this time with 5 PCs! It was quite a crowd and got very hectic at times. Bareil the caravan guard was resting for the day. In his place we had Aziz, a high born Western warrior mage, played by Andres, and Osim, a caravan guard played by Guy.

It's caravan season in Miltar, but there's a problem. The first large caravan of the year is turning around and heading back to Ikhrain! It appears that caravan members have been disappearing in the night. The caravaners believe that a malignant Djinn is haunting the trade route and they want nothing of it. Someone must solve this mystery.

The PCs soon determine that a mysterious traveler named Tufiq has likely desecrated a tomb in the desert, calling down some kind of spiritual retribution on the region. In the process of establishing these facts, Za Eli the mountain man promises to smuggle the caravan master's lovely young wife out of the caravan and hide her at the house of his reluctant ally, the town healer.

Searching for the lost tomb, our heroes encounter the beguiling music of the Djinn, and Aziz willingly submits, leading them via a short cut to an ancient ruin, wherein they grapple with (and handily defeat) some nasty crossbow traps and a bunch of tomb scarabs.

Deep in the tomb they find the answer to the mystery. A guardian spirit of the tomb (AKA the Djinn) is angry because a tomb robber (Tufiq?), desecrated the body of the giant Cyclops king buried there. It has been luring people to the tomb in an attempt to use their body parts to repair the mummy (to no avail, since it's skull is missing). All hell breaks loose. The strange glowy gem is beguiling people, scarabs are carpeting the floor, and enthralled caravan folk are trying to strangle people. Finally they shatter the gem, breaking the influence of the guardian spirit, and exit the tomb burdened with treasure and leading the surviving victims of the Djinn.

Now for what we learned:

We used the card drawing mechanic instead of dice, and I think everyone found it less satisfying than dice. Two decks were not enough for fight scenes, so we had to use there, which was very ungainly to shuffle and manage. It also seemed slower than dice. I think that each player needed to have their own double-size deck of cards for this to work at all with five people.

Five people is a lot for this game. It worked, but it was a challenge. As GM, I found it very hard to stay on top of stuff. The adventure was 22XV. Much less would not have made a great challenge. Some heroes now have over 40 XV, meaning we'll be ready for level 2 after one more adventure. I think the XP definitely needs to be scaled to party size.

Designing monsters and encounters continues to be a challenge. That's not a complaint, just an observation. D&D 4E, for example, is similarly challenging, and takes 2-3 times as long in my experience. It's a skill I hope to improve through much repetition.

Mesmerize plus swarm is devastatingly powerful. When the Djinn had good cards, it meant that the whole party was in serious jeopardy.

That's all for now!

Has anybody been knocked out of the next session yet?

-Vincent

When we played the first time, I don't think that there was even the potential for anyone to be knocked out. A group of four characters seems basically capable of taking anything, as long as they have a basic understanding of the rules. Extra characters in StWT are force multipliers, rather than force-ads, which means that a sizeable group shouldn't have trouble.

yrs--
--Ben

In last night's session, it proved seriously difficult to challenge the PCs. In the final battle, two PCs were making endurance rolls. They were the two new characters. To do it, I had to throw everything I had at them and then some. The mesmerizing spirit was sapping half to all their white dice every round just to hang in. That encouner was 10XV.

By contrast, the party was able to defeat 3 scarab swarms in 1 round with 1 box of damage taken total. Scarab swarms are 3XV monsters with swarm, biting attacks, extra white dice, and extra endurance boxes.

Ihl Ram can easily muster 12 dice for rallying with his heroic command and tactician abilities. Za Eli routinely rolls 10+ dice when he can combine danger sense with feats of strenth.

So there's this problem where I build up a lot of tension for the eventual scarab attack, then excitement as everyone gets to do their cool stuff to deal with it, then a bit of disapointment as I annouce that the monsters are all dead.

My response to this is to drop 2-3 extra XV into each monster and spend it on endurance boxes. Maybe 1 of them goes into extra dice. This is what the monsters need to survive that extra round. If the fight can go 2-3 rounds, it feels like a real fight.

Balance feels just right for 3 characters. 4 is stretching it. 5 is a strain.

Okay! I'm hearing from everybody, online and off, that the cards aren't great. So I'm going to reopen that one in my head and see what I can do instead.

I do have a scaling fix for you to try, though. I just thought of it, it tackles (solves? who knows) both problems. As written, the baseline monster is worth 1XV and it has 3 abilities. Try this instead: the baseline monster is worth 1XV and it has as many abilities as there are players (excluding the GM).

-Vincent

Yeah, I think that might be it. Personally, I'd recommend spending the additional abilities on dice and endurance boxes. The monsters don't seem to need any additional woogie powers.

tonyd wrote: In the final battle, two PCs were making endurance rolls. They were the two new characters.

Guy wrote:

tonyd wrote: In the final battle, two PCs were making endurance rolls. They were the two new characters.

And having looked over the rules again, I realized that we each had 11 XP from "new characters get half the group XP" to spend which we didn't, so throw in another couple cards for the PCs per round, and 5 PCs look even meaner.

Both sessions were a lot of fun.  I'm not sure how much substance I'll add to this conversation, but I'll touch on a few of my thoughts.

* Making monsters is fun!  I've spent quite a bit of off time tinkering around with them, even though I'm not actually running a game.

* As previously mentioned, scalability can be a bit of let down.  Our groups of both 4 and 5 players defeat 75% of our monsters in a single round.  Adding additional powers is a start, but if you're focusing on core stats (hit boxes and white dice, as Tony mentioned) adding two of one or one of each probably wouldn't have made an appreciable difference with the monsters we've fought.  It feels like hit boxes in particular need to be more abundant.  Perhaps making them a 2 for 1 XV purchase or scaling starting hit boxes based on group size would help as well.

* I love the three core non-combat rolls.

Again, the game has been a blast so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing Levels 2 & 3.  I'm also itching to run a game set in fantastical ancient Russia now.

Cheers!

Lukas wrote:
scaling starting hit boxes based on group size

Lukas wrote: * I love the three core non-combat rolls.

Just a quick observation today rather than a complete AP. We did a town episode last night, and it may have been the best session we've played yet. I love playing the various people in the town as they react to the PCs and the situation of the town. The players actually asked for more town play. Town play is also interesting because as the PCs become hugely effective at fighting monsters, their effectiveness in having conversations and giving commands doesn't got up quite as fast.

In last night's session, the heroes returned to town, only to find that Tufiq the renegade wizard had established him in town in their absence. Everyone in town seems to think he's wonderful (thanks to his magical charisma), and he's already maneuvering to get control of the local militia and get the town involved in a war! It's quite fun to watch the PCs runa round town trying to stave off the threat using their comparatively meager conversation and command successes. It was quite a lot of fun.

We’re done this game now, and I want to talk a bit about how we handled moving beyond level 1, since Vincent hasn't provided rules for this yet. Maybe this’ll be of some help. We were playing an earlier version of the rules, before there was any balancing for party size. We had a big group (4-5 players most nights), and they were all really, really buffed with lots of good special abilities that work well together to generate mad amounts of dice.

Having moved past level 1, I also wanted to step up the challenge and narrative a bit. With the defeat of Tufiq, the Wizard’s avatar, the threat of the Wizard was now clear and present to everyone in the town of Miltar. I decided that henceforth, the game would be more about the characters actively preparing to face the Wizard, rather than responding to individual problems in the town.

This seemed  to be a necessary move to me for a number of reasons. First, the story up to this point had the characters rising in stature from competent troubleshooters to, in some cases, literally become leaders of the town. Ilh Ram’s story arc had him replacing his father as commander of the city militia, for example. Second, there was a sort of regional story evolving about how the Wizard was destabilizing the various towns, setting them against one another, and paving the way for his own conquest.

The problem with this approach is the implication that the characters now take matters into their own hands and come up with a plan for defeating the Wizard. However, the game is more slanted towards the GM deciding what the challenge is, preparing it, and then presenting it to the players more or less by fiat. In the end is exactly what I did, telling the players that their next job was to go to the neighboring city of Ikhraine, find out why it was turning away trade caravans, and get Ikhraine on board against the Wizard. I was shooting for a “gathering of forces” theme, in the style of The Two Towers. I think the approach was successful in addressing that theme.

Next, I wanted to present a challenge commensurate with the party’s abilities. Here’s the story: the City of Ikhraine has fallen under the sway of an avatar of the Wizard called the Crone. The Crone has the princess of Ikhraine in thrall and is summarily dismantling its defenses. The ancient order of Lion Knights is a potential ally, but they have been ordered to refuse entry to envoys from Miltar. The heroes from Miltar manage to win the respect of the Lion Knights and call upon ancient laws and treaties to gain entry as a diplomatic envoy.

I’ve decided that the “boss opponent” for a level two adventure will have a special ability that’s one step beyond the special powers in the book. It’ll be something that changes the fiction in a way that puts the onus on the characters to solve. The Crone will be able to project darkness at will. Under darkness, characters simply won’t be able to do anything that would normally require them to see. The Crone, of course, isn’t affected. The characters can make a roll (or, in combat, a “fighting while” action) to remove the darkness, but it’s up to them to come up with a plausible way of doing this. I don’t think up any solution to the problem before hand.

And I think the approach worked in this encounter. The party from Miltar managed to muscle their way (physically and diplomatically) into the presence of the Princess and the Crone. There’s some maneuvering and some dice rolls are made. Things come to a head, and the Crone’s hold on the princess is weakening. The Crone pulls out her kryss knife, and all goes black. Yata makes an amazing knife throw to pin the Crone’s knife arm to the wall (in the dark). Since she needs 1 success just to NOT hit the Princess, it’s a tense roll. Za Eli smashes the dome of the hall to flood it with sunlight (with help from a magic horn that lets him do feats of strength at a distance). It was a great climactic scene. The session ends with the Crone vanquished (but not, as they had hoped, captured). The Lion Knights sworn into the growing alliance against the Wizard.

OK, I'm almost done with this thread, but I do want to be sure and post about how we addressed moving beyond level 1, as it may be useful to Vincent. I’m going to skip a lot of the narration because I want to focus on some of the mechanical stuff.

We wrapped the game up a bit abruptly (I'd planned a few more sessions, but the time just seemed right). Refugees and caravans arriving in Miltar carried news that the Wizard was assembling a massive army deep in the desert to crush the town of Miltar once and for all. It was time for the heroes to assemble their own forces and face the Wizard.

There's a great thing that happens with this game. As your heroes develop, their relationships develop, and along with them the town and their relationship to it. These relationships ultimately point the way towards the final confrontation with the Wizard. They tend to start out being based around needs: the town needs the heroes to do something to secure its future; the heroes need someone in the town to help them achieve their goals. But they tend to evolve into partnerships of a sort.

Here are some illustrative examples:

Ihl Ram the inexperienced knight in his father's shadow, by succeeding in quests replaced his father as the head of the city militia
This relationship began as a way for me to get the party oriented towards quests (by relaying requests from the father to his son). As the son achieved success (and gained the militia as an ally treasure), he also gains a responsible role within the community, becoming responsible for, rather than subservient to his father.

Yata the archer got in the habit of going to the library to talk to Milla the Librarian. This relationship was motivated in part by the two extra dice Yata was getting for arcane rolls in the library. Over time it turned into a sort of a partnership where Milla, the NPC, became a lesser partner in the PC's quest to save the town.

Sometimes these arcs didn't quite take off as I had hoped. I struggled with some NPCs, and sometimes didn't give relationships as much meat as I thought PC's wanted. That's totally my failing as a GM.

In order to defeat the Wizard’s army, the PCs needed to assemble an army of their own. Even though they’ve already gained allies (as treasures), each alliance is tied up in the relationships between the PCs and some NPCs they’ve met in their travels. This led to some neat scenes as various bribes, commands, and heated conversations are required to get the Miltar army organized in good order. For example: Kezek is the NPC leader of the caravan folk, an ally gained when the PCs saved some of the caravan folk from a curse. But there’s also the small issue of how one PC “liberated” one of Kezek’s many wives from the harem. This little problem must be dealt with if the caravan folk are to fight alongside Miltar in the coming battle.

Each allied military unit must be led by a PC to participate actively in the battle, and also gives that PC a special ability (such as extra dice, or an ability substitution for the upcoming fight). Deciding which unit to lead into battle becomes a combination of tactical and narrative positioning. Some PCs elect for a particular ability, others just want to be near their loved ones when the battle comes down.

The Wizard’s army is stattted as a terrain monster, bigX2, swarm, armored, with some additional damage boxes, attacks, white dice, and suspense. Suspense lets me threaten the welfare of NPCs in the Miltar army every time that the Wizard’s army beats a PC’s defense (heh heh).

For the battle, we put minis down on a map to reflect the locations of the units. Charging, bracing, and tactical constraints all mapped really nicely to this set up, with the line of battle shifting around quite a bit. We had units taking cover on terrain, executing pincer movements, and so on. Threatening NPCs was great fun, as PCs were faced with tough decisions whenever their relationships’ lives were put into danger. In the last round of battle, Ihl Rem’s father was struck down fighting in the forefront of the battle, tingeing victory with sadness.

As a side note, I think the final battle could just as easily have taken the form of a small scale quest (like Frodo’s journey into Mordor, rather than the battle of Pelennor Fields). I would like to try this some time.

Very cool!

Can you describe a little more in detail how you handled the battle?

Were the PCs leaders/generals on one side, issuing orders? Let's say they had a group of infantry attack. What would they roll, and how would the results be interpreted?

How did NPC death work, mechanically?

Thanks for the writeup!

Rules-wise, the battle was played out as a regular terrain challenge. I always try to make sure that when the PCs take an action in the rules, they narrate an appropriate action in the story. So, for example, a charge or brace would correspond to charging the enemy, or taking cover behind a terrain feature, for example. I drew a map of the battlefield ahead of time to help everyone visualize what was going on. In addition, the Wizard's army had cover behind a ruined wall, giving them 3 additional blue dice. Each time a PC-led unit beat the Wizard's army, they could push them back off the wall, robbing the Wizard's army of one of their bonus blue dice. I used miniatures to show where the PC and Wizard units were set up. That helped to focus narration a lot, because it made the narrative options clearer. When a PC took damage from the challenge, I would also narrate them getting wounded in battle, their forces being driven back, and so on.

As for threatening NPCs, each time the Wizard's army scored a wound (but only once per round of battle), I would narrate one of the attacking units being forced into a dangerous position. If a PC came to the aid of that unit in the next round, then I'd have to threaten somewhere else. If I could threaten the same unit twice, I could kill an NPC in that unit. I didn't really explain this to the players ahead of time, which was a mistake. I got wrapped up in the battle so much that I forgot to do a proper free and clear phase (I do that a lot, unfortunately). Nevertheless, I think it worked out well.

So, for example, at one point the PCs left the Miltar militia (led by Ihl Rem's NPC father Furmiss) to guard the oasis. The PC's had more units than they could lead at once, so some were left in reserve. For my threaten move, I narrated a flank attack on the oasis led by sneaky arcane rat-men. Ihl Rem elected to rush to their aid the next round. This left the Lion Knight of Ikhraine (whom Ihl Rem had been leading) alone on the center of the battle line, making them a prime target for the next threaten. There was one round where I didn't get to threaten, which made me sad, but was luck for the PCs.

In the last round of battle, the Miltar militia were again fighting on their own, now in the thick of battle, so I used my threaten for that round to inflict heavy casualties, one of which was Furmiss.

I think it's very important, especially in a game like StWT, that as GM I can make victories costly and difficult. This absolutely must happen in a way that feels fair. StWT gives the GM the tools to do this. There were numerous points in this game where I was able to pull off maneuvers that I have long wanted to bring to the table. As a GM, that was very satisfying indeed. The rules really helped me do it.

Also, apologies to the players if I spelled their character names incorrectly. As anyone will attest, my spelling is wanting.

This is great.

So you had a climactic battle and ended the game instead of going up to level 2? That's fun.

-Vincent

Very cool!

I'm still not getting an image of who rolled what, and when. How many dice? Based on who's ability?

Did the number of hits mean anything?

Can you give an example of a maneuver from the battle, and how it went down, in terms of what happened at the table, who rolled dice, etc?