Expedition D&D Dev Log Part 2: Basic Expedition Rules

In the second post, I want to dive into the details of the expedition system itself. Following on the Source of the Nile rules, I want to have two base units you can hire: soldiers and bearers.

Soldiers are going to be pretty much the same by default. I’m thinking of the DCC retainers, maybe amping them up a bit because Simple D&D has higher HP. So I’ll set them at 4 HP, +0 to hit, and dealing damage by weapon (typically d6).  Their armor class is set by whatever armor they wear, and they have zero bonuses to their stats—generic mook-type characters.

Bearers, on the other hand, have no combat abilities at all. If a fight breaks out, they’ll run, scatter, or hide.

Next, I want to establish some carrying capacity limits. I love the way Source of the Nile handles this. Each bearer can carry about 10 units of supplies. Bearers don’t have weapons or armor, so they can always use their full carrying capacity for supplies.

For the soldiers, we’ll make a tradeoff. They will also have a base capacity of 10 units, but their weapons, armor, and other gear will count against that total. If you want to bring along a lot of supplies, you’ll need more bearers, because your soldiers will be partially loaded down with their own equipment.

For the heroes, I’m considering tying their carrying capacity to their strength score, like in Shadowdark. But I’ll put a pin in that for now.

Next, let’s get some numbers for food. Regarding food, I found a few sources from the Roman army; one says between 59 and 78 lb per man per month, while another gives 2.5-2.8 lb/day. I’m going to assume this didn’t change much. As our baseline for supply I’ll approximate 10 units ≈ 100 lb, so we’re at something like 1-2 units of food per unit per week. I decided to keep it simple at 1. Maybe this is generous to our expeditions, but I like how easy it will work in game.

For water, the sources say anywhere from 2-12 L/day (depending on conditions). The daily ration in WWI was 4.54 L/day, Vietnam was 3-5 L/day, but could go to 10 for certain duties. With 1L = 2.2 lb, that is something from 4-10 lbs daily. We’ll be generous again so that our expeditions can stay in the field longer, and say 1 unit of water daily per two individuals. But, we’ll give this multipliers, noting that multipliers up to 8x are historically plausible. Maybe we’ll have some rules to apply these in hot environments.

Finally, I want to make some other decisions about water. First, I don’t want to track containers. Caravaneer did this, and it worked only ok because it was a video game and I can’t imagine doing it by hand. Second, I don’t want to track it while you are along a water source. I like the idea of what this system will do for water tracking. It will be really demanding in terms of weight to carry water, so it will be hard to move away from water supplies. I like that idea and I’m excited to see it play out.

So there are our working Rules:

Bearers: Do not fight. Carrying capacity of 10
Soldiers: HP 4, AC and attacks as equipment (+0 to hit). Carrying capacity of 10.
Food: Each unit eats 1 unit/week
Water: Every two units consumes 1/day. Subject to multipliers of up to 8x according to condition. Do not need to carry if next to fresh water supply.

Development Log: Expedition D&D (Part 1)

 I'm going to start blogging about the OSR system I'm creating, which I'm calling "Expedition D&D". 

My goal looks back at the long history of adventure storytelling—a genre that stretches all the way back to some of the earliest recorded stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Odyssey. Over time, that tradition evolved through tales like Beowulf or the Arabian Nights. It came to America with Last of the Mohicans and then the pulp fantasy of the 1920s and ’30s, with authors like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. And you can trace that DNA right up to modern adventure films like Indiana Jones or The Mummy.

This kind of adventure storytelling leads directly to what folks like Ben Milton call “adventure gaming”. I love that term because it places these games in the context of that literature and history. The adventure is the heart of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Modern D&D usually focuses on a small cast of characters, one for each player. Each one of these is a hero in their own right. It's like a Mission Impossible team where everyone crucial to the mission.

But the scope of adventure storytelling permits larger parties, which I'll call "expeditions". Think back to the Odyssey: it isn't just Odysseus alone, but Odysseus and his group of soldiers. I also like Michael Crichton's Congo, or Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, or the historic Lewis and Clark expedition (the pair had some 40 people in support). 

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To make this work, I want a system that supports three types of play. The first is expedition play, which is your overland travel. You're controlling heroes, but also a number of generic soldiers or porters, some perhaps with special abilities, who are part of the journey. Here you'll do hex-crawling: you’re exploring new places, dealing with hazards, managing the morale of your team, ensuring everyone’s fed, and keeping track of resources.

Then there’s the hero play, your classic dungeon crawling. Those smaller scale adventures where the heroes are engaging in combat or exploration within a defined location.

Then, I want to have some support for mass battle play. If you have an expedition with 50 or 100 guys, you might end up in a large combat and the hero play rules won't work. 

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The simplest part is the mass battle element. For that, I’ll basically start off using the old Chainmail rules. If that ends up being a problem or not fitting perfectly, I’ll adjust from there.

For the hero play, there are a lot of great systems out there—OSR games, Shadowdark, and so on—but I’m going to use one called Simple D&D. It’s something I got from a friend named José. Characters start out strong enough to feel heroic, rather than super fragile at level one, and the progression slows down around level three. That means the heroes can become useful and powerful, but they won’t overshadow the rest of the expedition. They’ll still need to rely on their team and resources.

As for the expedition system itself, I have the least experience there. I'm going to start with the Source of the Nile rules. I actually played that game with one of the original creators, Ross Maker, who was part of the Blackmoor crew. David Wesley was the co-designer, so it has a nice link to RPGs. Source of the Nile is very expedition-focused—you have a hero, some soldiers, bearers, you track food and deal with environmental hazards—and I’ll be building on that as the expedition framework.

 

Adventure Review: DCC Convention Module 2019: The Inn at 5 Points (Level 2)

                  

It's a decent convention mod, but there are many better ones in the Goodman Games catalogue. 

The Inn at 5 Points suffers from a lack of direction & a way for players to learn the lore. The first half of the adventure is the journey to 5 points; there's a nice in medias res start battling the beast on the cover (the Wolf Wyrm), a flashback to meet a guy whose party was killed by said Wyrm, then a flash-forward to the combat. The guy tells you someone at the inn has a treasure map for sale, so you head to the titular inn and have a bit of roleplaying. Then in a twist that's in no way foreshadowed, a rat cult completes their ritual, the inn sinks into a massive crevasse, and the players have to defeat the cult.

The individual pieces work. The Wolf-Wyrm is a fun fight, the roleplaying has enough for players to grasp onto, there's a nice place for a break after the inn falls, and the last fight is enjoyable. But it's incoherent as a mod. The rat people are part of a lawful cult that wants to destroy the Inn because the Inn has a reputation for neutrality. But this lore isn't manifested in the plot; you have to use some of the NPCs to give an infodump, otherwise the players will be last. The Wolf-Wyrm isn't connected to the cult at all. At most, it causes the ground to shake when approach, and later shaking in the inn (right before it drops into the crevasse) will be interpreted as a second one approaching. 

There's no real inciting moment or goal. The convention mods that really work (Tower of the Black Pearl, Frozen in Time) start with something for the players to do--a ruin to plunder, a captive to save. In this, you're just wandering through the woods, you get a vague hook (head to the inn to get a map), and the players go along for the ride because they're good sports and get that this is a con game. 

The crevasse itself basically has one big boss fight and some side passages to explore. But in my experience, once the boss fight is over the mod effectively is and I describe the remaining rooms as part of the denouement. 

I made one big change: the guy you meet at the start (Dolmand Frey) wanted to join the party and get the treasure map, giving the players more of a connection to the plot and a possible backup PC. I had them run him as a retainer (level 0) unless someone died, in which case they'd run him as a level 2 warrior. I also made it so he didn't know the contact personally, so the players got to take the lead. 

This took about 3 hours to run, about 90 minutes to get to the inn falling and another 90 for the cavern.

This is $6.99 at the Goodman Games website.

My Experience: I ran this for one con game and for one game with my regular group.

Link: https://goodman-games.com/store/product/dcc-convention-module-2019-the-inn-at-five-points-pdf/

Price: $6.99 (PDF)

Adventure Review: DCC Free RPG Day 2021, Tomb of the Savage Kings (Level 2)

 

 

A decent adventure for a one-shot, but doesn't live up to its title. 

There's a trio of "savage kings" mods put out by Goodman, starting with DCC #17: Legacy of the Savage Kings and continuing in DCC #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings. Both of those mods are excellent, and the marketing in Tomb suggests more of the same. 

Unfortunately, the connection ends at the title. The previous two mods take place in temperate areas, swamps, fens, and forests, while Tomb transports the action to an Egyptian themed setting. It's a homage to the many Mummy movies, and gets the adventurers in as rescuers of a kidnapped heiress.

The lack of connection to the other Savage Kings mods makes it an awkward fit for campaign play. I bought it thinking I could link the three, but it didn't make sense to drop Tomb into my setting. It isn't a big deal, as the lore is pretty minor anyway. A shame. A mod with this title should naturally fit after DCC #66.5. (You could use this and not DCC #66.5 in your campaign, but the other mod is superior). It also includes some game breaking elements (like PCs being lost in the past permanently) that don't work that well for campaign play.

It's more serviceable as a one-shot--the players get the hook, and they're off for the tomb. There's a bit of intrigue; they're hired by Zita to find her sister, Isobel, who joined an adventurer named Ardeth in robbing the tomb. But the story isn't quite true: Ardeth doesn't exist, and Isobel was actually kidnapped by the mummy awakened by Zita's own tomb-robbing. Zita can't deal with it, so wants the PCs to help. 

The players have a chance to learn this backstory through a halfling companion, Wemble, who helped Zita's original mission and joins them on the trip. There are some clues to suggest Wemble isn't being forthright. But in my experience, it's easy for him to fade into the background and the PCs to not pick up on any of it. Even if they do, not much changes. It feels more intrigue for the sake of intrigue rather than something gameable. 

The tomb itself is solid, although I would have liked to have more combats early on. The combats are very easy until the final boss encounter, which is hard and will take a while. I don't like that for a one-shot, because then the players don't have the best grasp of their abilities going into the finale. 

It also gets negative marks for useability. When they enter the main hall, there are these panels with a bunch of pictures and hieroglyphs. They decipher the pictures, read the hieroglyphs, and learn the Tomb's history.  There's a nice picture of the walls in the book, but no handout. And it's spread over two pages and very printer unfriendly. I ended up combining the walls and inverting the colors manually to end up with something serviceable. The Judge will also want to print out the text of the hieroglyphs as a handout. If you don't, the PCs are relying on your (much less fun) descriptions, and there's a lot of information, so you'll end up describing it multiple times...

This adventure really needs a rival adventuring party, who knows about Whemble and can reveal that intrigue, robbing the tomb for their own purposes. Think "The Mummy (1999)" with Whemble cast as Beni. It would add some more roleplaying and combat opportunities. 

This took three hours for me to run; 2 for the main tomb, and 1 for the final combat.

This is $6.99 at the Goodman Games website.

My Experience: I ran this for one con game.

Link: https://goodman-games.com/store/product/dcc-rpg-tomb-of-the-savage-kings-free-rpg-day-2021-pdf/

Price: $6.99 (PDF)

Adventure Review: DCC #79.5, Tower of the Black Pearl (Level 1)

Tower of the Black Pearl is one of the best starter DCC mods. Pick this up if you're introducing players to the system or want to run a public game, like at a convention. 

I'll start with the premise: there's this tower far off-shore, which is only accessible one night every 10 years, and that night is tonight! There's a pearl of great value inside, but other pirates are on the hunt. The players make their way out there, then have to deal with a series of challenges: the pirates (combat or roleplaying) and some puzzles (a rotten staircase, a trapped room which will flood and drown you all). They'll finally make it to the room with the pearl where they extract it...flooding the entire tower behind them and forcing them to race to the surface. 

Then, the usability: it's very easy to pick up and play--the entire thing is about 20 pages, including art and handouts, and in a large size font. That helps the GM scan at the table. The whole thing takes ~20 minutes to read through. And it's fairly linear, so you can do a good job from a single read through. It'll have a similar length each time you run it; in my experience, 3-4 hours. You'll have no trouble getting this to the table. 

Then, as an introduction to the DCC system: it starts with an easy combat encounter (all starter mods should do this!) so the players have a chance to acclimate themselves and learn how their characters work before making consequential decisions. There's a nice mix of combat, puzzles, and roleplaying. The players will need creative solutions to the puzzles at the end (how to get the pearl from all the snakes?) and have important choices to make along the way (backstab the pirates, or side with them?). I'm not sure it would do well as part of a campaign. The candles, which provide a way to snuff out every lawful hero in existence, have too much potential to derail things. But it's fantastic as a one shot.

New DMs, be advised: the biggest challenge is not the pirates, and not the water trap--it's those damn stairs. Most everyone tries to make the jump, most everyone falls, and then ends up with broken bones or dead characters. 

This is $6.99 at the Goodman Games website.

My Experience: I ran this for several convention games.

Link: https://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-79-5-tower-of-the-black-pearl-pdf/

Price: $6.99 (PDF)