Yareth's Pit

One of the stranger places in Andasso is a huge hole in the ground called Yareth's Pit. About 50 years ago, a foreigner named Yareth came to Andasso for unknown reasons. After traveling around the region for a few months, he began hiring all of the laborers he could find, stripping several villages of their entire labor force. For weeks, the laborers dug, completing one deep shaft straight down as well as several incomplete, shallower shafts. Then, abruptly, Yareth ordered them to stop and sent them all home. Yareth was never seen again.

The Pit, located miles away from the nearest village, resembles a dug-out quarry. The main shaft is about one hundred feet deep; the others range from a few feet deep to close to seventy-five feet deep. Much of the rock quarried in the digging remains piled nearby, although some has been taken over the years.

No one knows why Yareth did this, or why he abruptly stopped, or what became of him. Some believe that Yareth was from an entirely different world, and was digging to find a portal back to his home. Others think he was searching for some ancient artifact, and stopped the work as soon as he found it. Most people just think Yareth was a rich lunatic. Today, some of the diggers still share stories about Yareth and his pit.

And Andasso was its name-o

In my last post, I began talking about an old school-ish D&D game idea. I'm going to expand on that in this post, talking a bit about the setting.

Andasso is a medium-sized region sandwiched between two powerful nations: The Empire of the Unbroken Circle to the south, and Brennia to the north. It has remained mostly isolated from these nations for several reasons. Its geography is not conducive to invasion--it is bordered by the two branches of the wide and fast-moving Andasso river, and it is mostly dry hills and scrubland. The people of Andasso (who call themselves the Bisani; everyone else calls them the Andassans) have also fiercely resisted incursions by outsiders, and thereby gained a reputation as barbarians and even cannibals.

Five years ago, though, the Empire learned of a rich deposit of gold in the Andasso hills, so it dispatched its most skilled army into the region to conquer it. The natives resisted fiercely, preventing the Empire from establishing firm control. Then the Brennians intervened, ostensibly to help the Andassans, beginning a protracted and vicious three-way war in the region.

Since the Brennian intervention, Andasso has degenerated into chaos. The two major powers have exhausted themselves fighting each other and the natives. No significant organized government remains. When the Imperial and Brennian armies clashed at a place called World's End (so named because it was the last place created by the gods, according to local lore), both armies collapsed as organized fighting forces.

Now Andasso is chaotic and violent. Towns are usually run by a local warlord, and bandits roam the countryside. Some of the remaining soldiers want to keep fighting for their nation; most simply want to survive. And the people just want to be left alone.

If I were to run this campaign (and I hope to someday), the PCs would start as soldiers from one of the two invading armies. Just before the Battle at World's End, the PCs are instructed by their commander to travel to a nearby mine and retrieve some items that the commander left there for safekeeping. But after that, the PCs are on their own--their army no longer exists, and their commander is dead.

An Old School-ish D&D Campaign

I have decidedly mixed feelings about the so-called old school renaissance in roleplaying; I don't particularly want to get into that at the moment. One thing the movement (if you could call it that) has done, though, is made me think about playing an old school-ish D&D game ( I say "old school-ish" because it wouldn't be pure old school as defined by the OSR). And one particular setting/campaign has been percolating in my mind for a while now.

The setting is a mash up of sorts, combining D&D with Twilight: 2000. The basic idea is the same as T2K: a protracted and brutal war has shattered civilization (although in my game it'd only be in one region, not the whole world), and the PCs are the survivors of that war trying to make their way in the devastated aftermath. I like this idea because it allows for lots of PC freedom of action, and it gives what I think is a sensible context for a lot of the tropes of old school style D&D. I've even started to put together a map, some names, and some locations for the game. If only I had a chance to run it. Since I don't have that time right now, though, I will occasionally write about it here--not as good as playing, but better than nothing.

What I Don't Like About 4E

Fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons has generated a lot of controversy. Some people love, some hate it, and some go so far as to claim it's not really D&D. I have no real opinion about the game for the most part. From what I can tell, it's a good game for what it does, but that's not the kind of thing that I like. However, I haven't played it that much, so my opinions on it are not strong.

One thing, however, bothers the shit out of me about D&D 4E: Wizards seems to have done little (or bad) playtesting. Quite a few things about the original game didn't work very well, and had to be corrected. The most extreme example I can think of is skill challenges. Literally within a month or so of the first 4E books coming out, Wizards issued a set of errata that quite dramatically changed skill challenges. Given that Wizards is by far the biggest RPG company, and they had ample time to playtest it, this is inexcusable. They should've known that skill challenges as written in the original Dungeon Master's Guide didn't work. It seems like they just decided that they would have the players who paid for the game playtest it.

There are other examples as well. I've heard from a number of gaming podcasts and blogs that several classes have been rather significantly rejiggered because they didn't really work that well when they came out. And other people have said that basically the design team didn't seem to really understand class design until at least Players' Handbook II, almost a year after the original release of the game.

These problems all could have been discovered with adequate playtesting. I wonder, though, if Wizards did some of this on purpose. The big money maker for 4E isn't the books, it's the subscription the the online service Dungeons & Dragons Insider (DDI). One of the key benefits of a DDI subscription is that it has all the game rules available online--and they're updated regularly. This makes me wonder if the whole business plan is to sell people something that wasn't carefully playtested on purpose so they could make more money on the subscription with the correct rules. If that's true, then that's just scummy. And it shows that the design goals of 4E weren't about making a good game, but about making money.

I don't know if Wizards is that sinister; in general, I think you shouldn't attribute something to malevolence that could be the result of incompetence. At the very least, though, the original publication of D&D is flawed, by Wizards' own admission, and you have to keep paying them to get the corrected version. That's not something I want to be a part of.