More like Night of Dud, am I Right Fellas?

 
Classic? More like ass-ic... I'm sorry everyone

.About a year ago I decided I wanted to give the game Warlock! a go, because it seemed to combine my love of rules light systems with something very much like WFRP. I like WFRP a whole lot and even once ran the Nightwick Regulars through it for a while, but ultimately we decided the combat got to long for a game that mostly took place in a megadungeon full of mindless freaks that want to kill you. After reading up on Warlock!, I thought maybe it would be a system I could use for the World of Nightwick that wouldn't give me the same kind of headache.

I first tried running a Zzarchov dungeon I had played in before and remembered enjoying, but it turns out taking a dungeon meant for a system you've never run before and trying to run it with a different system you've never run before is too many variables. So I switched gears and decided to run the "classic" Warhammer adventure, Night of Blood. Warlock! played its part amiably, but the scenario less so.

Having run it, I am convinced that Night of Blood is a classic mostly because of the amazing Russ Nicholson art in the original. Admittedly, it could be the atmosphere of the adventure, which seems very good but is ultimately marred by the structural problems of the thing.

Night of Blood sees the characters travelling through the forests of the Empire on a dark and stormy night. I said it was Walpurgisnacht because A) it actually was Walpurgisnacht when I ran it* and B) While I know there is an Old World equivalent, I wanted to possibly say later the adventure had taken place in the World of Nightwick. The first encounter is possibly with a group of beastmen - which exist in some form in both the Old World and Nightwick - but it's also where the first problem is. The encounter only occurs if the players decide to stop when they hear the sounds of hunting beastmen. 

As it exists, the beastmen hunt is merely a trap for idiots. Which I guess is fine, but it's a lot of detail for something most groups I've played with would respond to with "ok we keep going." Other options include having the beastmen set up an ambush, which works especially well if the characters are in a coach or on a riverboat, but there's also not really a reason in the scenario to have it. Except to kill idiots.

This summarizes the entire problem with the adventure: it is written as though the characters will make the stupidest possible decision at every point. The characters will eventually arrive at a coaching inn where mutants have slain some of the guests and the proprietor and are preparing the rest for a summoning ritual. They are, in the meantime, poorly pretending to be the proprietor and guests. The adventure emphasizes at various points that these men are acting very suspicious, and that's all well and good. I do this kind of thing all the time. In fact, I have run several adventures where I lampshade the fact that the PCs are in this kind of horror movie situation and they know the guys are acting suspicious and the guys know they know but keep acting that way anyway out of decorum.

The problem is that the adventure then proceeds to describe what happens when they eat drugged food. Why any PC would eat the drugged food in this case is beyond me, assuming the GM has been following the instructions on how to run the NPCs. A smart party would know to fake eating it or some other action in order not to get drugged.

Now if the module provided anything to facilitate that kind of player action, this post wouldn't exist - or rather it might exist as "hey this adventure Night of Blood is really good you should play it. Great atmosphere!" But the amount of words spent describing the players getting drugged and then awakening as the cultists successfully summon the demon is very lengthy, and the part where they describe what the players can do to avoid this fate and how to make that an interesting session rather than just "they don't eat the food and try to leave" is nonexistent.

Admittedly my session wasn't boring, but everything I did was just my interpreting from the initial setup of the Hooded Man inn. I ended up relying on about 3 pages of a 9 page adventure. It's a neat setup, but the assumption about player activity means there's no actual guidance for what any players with two brain cells to rub together are going to actually do.

*I want to make this a yearly thing, and my preparing to run a game on this year's Walpurgisnacht is what reminded me of how mad I am at this adventure.

Magic in the World of Nightwick

I realize with the writing of this post that I am putting myself, and perhaps the world, at great personal risk, but wedding my desire for Vancian magic and my desire for magicians to be manipulating the threads of reality against the will of God. Hopefully this schema will quiet the Voices.

 

In time out of time before there was time, there was Nothing, and in Nothing there could have been anything. There could have been, but there never was. Endless potential but with nothing having to face the shame of having to be. Then the God of Law sounded like a great bell, and the tone spread throughout Nothing and made it a myriad of Somethings: land and see and rivers and trees and stars and demons and fires and angels. All these somethings were, it is said, from the mind of God, but since the God of Law had only the Nothing to make them out of they are imperfect.  The rest of this story is told elsewhere.

For us it suffices to know that everything that is something is two things: that which exists in the World and that which exists in the Law. Magic, then, is the manipulating of one of these two things. The Church of Law and its clerics wield magic by asking for the God of Law, one of His saints, or His angels, to intercede on their behalf. Typically this involves changing the thing in the World by realigning it with the Law. A man is healed by remembering who they are in the Law. A stick is made a snake by changing whether it references the Law for sticks to the Law for snakes. And so through piety are miracles worked.

The magic of the magician is different. Magicians learn as much about the forms which exist in the Law as they can, absorbing arcane formulae which bring parts of their brain in line with the strange thoughts of a thrumming sphere at the top of space. The human mind is fragile and can only contain a small number of these forms and as soon as they are utilized they are expelled until study again realigns their synapses to the thrum. However, they do not align the thing in the World with the Law. Instead, they change the thing in the World to the idea within their own head, changing its accident in the World to mirror their thought in an arrogant act of self-creation. In this way it is a reverse of the eucharist of Earth's Catholicism. A magician could not make the bread into the body of Christ, but they could make it smell and taste and feel like human flesh.

Demons are of particular use to the magician, for they remember the Nothing and the pang of the Law and how all things were rendered into existence. They have a unique perspective on the Law for they alone remember the world without it. As such demons commonly know a wide variety of spells and may teach them to mortals who agree to join them in their attempts to dethrone the God of Law and pitch him into the pit in a final act of suicide.

Some magicians crave this final act of self-destruction, for they too burn against the World and against the God of Law for making it, but most merely see this path as a way to enjoy riches and knowledge in life. And why wouldn't they? Even the most minor of familiars can instruct a magician in a variety of spells that normally only the most advanced scholars may learn. And besides, is not being really that different from returning to the mind of the Sphere?

The World is a Haunted House

 

Some time ago I was in a conversation with Cole about Nightwick in the very pretentious way I sometimes do and the topic veered into the definition of "Dark Fantasy." It's a genre which I think there is no question that the World of Nightwick occupies, even if it's not always serious. It's also a genre which, 13 years after I first started running Nightwick still has a lot of cultural cachet. If anything it's gotten bigger in this post-Dark Souls/post-Elden Ring world, and I think for someone who works in that medium, even if it's all hack work, it's worth thinking about what it is. 

Normally it is defined as "fantasy with horror elements," but very commonly Moorcock's Elric saga is included in Dark Fantasy and I wouldn't say it has horror elements. Cole provided a definition that I think does the wonderful job of including the things people would want to include and excluding what they wouldn't while also being very evocative: Dark Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a world that is haunted.

What does it mean to be haunted? Probably at least in part because of my history background, I am going to be using "haunted" here to mean that it bears the scars of the past - a psychic shock that causes the memories of the dead to cluster there like bats in a cavern and for them to weigh as a nightmare upon the brains of the living. In thinking about this topic outside the realm of games, I have come to see history writing as a sort of ghost story. The crimes of the past have a long reach and haunt us today as much as any specter from the mind of MR James.

In our fantasy game worlds, or fantasy worlds in general, we can achieve this sense of being haunted through the numinous. The psychic scars of the past have physical and spiritual manifestations on the world. In the world of Nightwick, immediately to the northwest of Nightwick Village, is the Mire of Princes - created when the blood of an army facing the Sword Brothers so suffused the ground that it became a marsh ever after. More distantly there is the Blood Red Sea - stained that color after the demon Moloch pitched the men of ancient Acheron into it. And of course there is Nightwick Abbey itself.

Within Nightwick Abbey's hall, the sins of the Sword Brothers live on in twisted and exaggerated form. Tortures carry on forever, heedless of the death of both torturer and tortured. Hochmeisters of the past walk evermore beneath its ruins, returning again if slain for they are trapped forever. Even what was once a lavatory has taken ghastly shape in hideous memory of the room's previous purpose. Nightwick is, after all, a mythical underworld. 

If you want to run something that's Dark Fantasy, as seems to still be in vogue, that's how you do it. Think about the history of the setting and how its crimes gnaw away through time into the present. It is a mode of thinking that should be easy to all of us now.

There are times when I desire to run something where the world is less numinous - a lower fantasy where heroes of maybe a Howardian stripe come to grips with monsters of super science - but then I have to write dungeon rooms. It seems my brain is either too choked by the weeds of time and the study of past wrongs or too enamored with the gothic I engaged with in entertainment and saw in the woods where I grew up. But my dungeons are always haunted. Maybe I am too.

An OD&D Thief Rewrite

A bit ago I saw a discussion on twitter where Idle Cartulary and Marcia B were discussing the design differences between the original thief class - which anyone familiar with OSR discourse knows creates limits on other characters that didn't previously exist - and the paladin which largely creates new abilities only that class has. Marcie later posted her own thoughts on the original version of the thief, but I thought I'd weigh in not with thoughts on the thief but my third(!) attempt at a rewrite of it.

Note: unlike the version on my patreon, this is written with OD&D - or FMC or DD or whatever very close retroclone you want to use - in mind.  I wanted to make sure the mechanics either added things a thief could do better than another character and that tied into existing mechanics where possible.

Thieves

A player in the Nightwick campaign may wish to play a thief. This character type is open to  all races and any race may advance to any level as a thief. 

The prime requisite for the thief is DEX. If a character has a 16 DEX or higher they may opt to level as a thief for a given dungeon expedition in the same manner as an elf may switch between fighting man and magic user. Characters who do so retain their abilities from their original class but may not wear armor heavier than leather and still utilize their thief abilities.

Thieves may use any weapon and shield, but may only wear leather armor and no magic sword will ever deign to be used by you unless you also have attained at least the 4th level of fighting man.

Thieves possess a number of special abilities described below.

Hear Noise: Unlike other human characters, or even demihumans, thieves advance in their ability to hear noises as they level.

Hide in Shadows: While the thief will always be surprised if the party is, the referee must check separately to see if monsters are surprised by the presence of the thief even if they are not surprised for the party, for a thief may hide in the shadows cast even by a torch. At level four a thief gains a 3 in 6 chance of surprise and at level 9 they may attempt to slink back into the shadows even if they reveal themselves during combat.

Open Locks: If the referee determines a lock on a chest or door may be picked, a thief may attempt to pick a lock during a combat round by rolling the number indicated on the table below. They may also spend 1d6 exploration turns to automatically open a  lock given.*

Move Silently: Thieves whose party would not otherwise be given away by torch light or the clink of armor, may surprise opponents or otherwise move without being detected based on a roll described on the table below. This ability increases as they level.

Sense Traps: Thieves may intuit the existence of traps on a 1-2 on 1d6, much as elves do with secret doors.

Remove Traps: A thief has the same chance to disarm a trap per turn as they do Open Locks per round. No attempt to automatically disarm a trap may be attempted in a time segment shorter than an exploration turn. The referee may determine that a failure to disarm a trap automatically sets it off.

Sneak Attack: A thief attacking an opponent who is unaware of their presence gains a +4 to hit and does additional damage based on the table below.

Read Languages: If a thief is literate as determined by the referee based on their intelligence score, they may read treasure maps and other mysterious scripts without the use of a spell starting at the third level of experience. Once they reach level 9 they may then cast spells from magic user scrolls.

Thief Advancement

Level	Experience Required	Hit Dice	HN	OL/ RT	MS	SA	D	W	P	B	S
1	0	1	1-2	1	1	2d	11	12	14	16	15
2	1,200	1+1	1-2	1	1-2	2d	11	12	14	16	15
3	2,400	2	1-3	1-2	1-2	2d	11	12	14	16	15
4	4,800	2+2	1-3	1-2	1-2	2d	11	12	14	16	15
5	9,600	3	1-3	1-2	1-3	3d	9	10	12	14	12
6	20,000	3+1	1-3	1-3	1-3	3d	9	10	12	14	12
7	40,000	4	1-4	1-3	1-3	3d	9	10	12	14	12
8	60,000	4+1	1-4	1-3	1-4	3d	9	10	12	14	12
9	90,000	5	1-4	1-4	1-4	4d	6	7	9	11	9
10	125,000	5+1	1-4	1-4	1-4	4d	6	7	9	11	9

*Non-thieves have a 1 in 6 per exploration turn of opening a lock, provided they have the proper tools, but cannot make an attempt to do so within a combat round.