Harlan Katz was one of the major NPCs in my old Blackwater Falls campaign. This campaign had something of a Jules Verne, steampunk atmosphere. Katz was a visionary machinist, totally ruthless, who believed that the future belonged to his mechanical creations, rather than the archaic and unreliable powers of wizards, and was constructing a utopia called Katzland. He built all kind of robots and golems which were frequent antagonists to the PCs (at least when I was refereeing).

Artwork by Me

My first post to this blog was about a campaign that was called Blackwater Falls. As I mentioned there, the game started using D&D rules, but was then transitioned to a custom system that we designed. I have come now to appreciate basic-style D&D rules much more, and I don’t think I would want to play again using this custom system, but I think it is interesting enough to sketch out what we came up with, at least the parts that I remember.

The basic design was inspired by the White Wolf system of combining attributes and abilities for task resolution. We really liked the idea that a character’s inherent makeup and training would combine to give a probability of success (really, this is a systematization of the idea of nature and nurture). What we didn’t like was the complicated multi-die plus target difficulty mechanic that White Wolf used. We wanted to be able to adjudicate things with a single die roll, like an attack roll in D&D.

Each attribute, skill, or power was rated from 1 to 10. In the case of attributes (like strength), 5 was average, 1 was incompetent, and 10 was world-class. In the case of a power or skill, 1 meant superficially trained or limited power and 10 meant mastery.

Any particular task resolution would be handled by combining an attribute with a skill or power. This is almost directly from White Wolf, which would have combinations like Strength + Brawl, Dexterity + Dodge, and Intelligence + Linguistics. In that system though, each score is rated from 0 to 5, and each point adds another d10 to your dice pool. Our system would yield a number between 1 and 20. This number would then be adjusted for situational difficulty, down for something hard, and up for something easy. Then we would try to roll less than or equal to it on a d20, like a D&D ability check.

I don’t remember every attribute we used, but I know they included Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intelligence, and Appearance. We used a linear point-buy system, and, like in White Wolf, new points in attributes and skills could be purchased with experience.

The skills selection was free-form. If you wanted your wizard to be able to cast a spell like burning hands or fireball, you would make up an appropriate skill or power that was not too general and take points in it. For burning hands, the power might be pyromancy. The power value would thus both determine what you were capable of (a single point might allow lighting a candle, or manipulating a natural fire, while a fireball might require 4 or 5 points). The referee would be required to rule on whether a particular effect was consistent with a skill value. A number of common permissible effects were quickly accumulated through use (similar to the precedent in law of past cases), but we never felt the need to codify or write down what particular skills could do, which left significant room for creativity. Special racial or supernatural abilities were also represented as skills and had to be purchased with points in the same way. One example of this was a character of mine that could switch heads (yes, you read that correctly). His name was Clair de Lune and he had a collection of heads in special glass cases and a magic scarf that he used to connect them to his body; this was related to some curse in his background story and mechanically he had some sort of skill which allowed him to harvest body parts from others. Most of our characters were not that odd, but the system seemed to support such concepts.

A health score was derived directly from stamina, though I don’t remember how. Full health might have just been equal to stamina. I have no memory of how we handled armor. I think it both made characters harder to hit and absorbed some of the damage points, in the process decreasing its own pool of structural points (or something like that).

I believe we called this system Puppeteer. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost all hard documentation.

You have received notice that the great sorcerer, Wolfgang Constantine, your patron and friend, has died in mysterious circumstances. The missive further indicates that you were included in the wizard’s will, and as such have been bequeathed a part of the Blackwater Falls estate.

So began one of the most successful RPG campaigns that I have participated in. This was in the late 90s. Some friends and I were tired of campaigns that did not last, so we wanted to put something together that would require a very small upfront investment in preparation, and would not require extensive referee work from any one person.

The principles of the game were as follows:

• Your character must have a relation to the archmage Wolfgang Constantine (this would also provide an easy way to introduce new characters as needed, since not all of the inheritors had been located)
• Referee duties would be rotated
• Multiple characters were allowed, but we had to pick only one to play at the beginning of each session (this also meant that we didn’t have to wait for one set of characters to get back before starting another adventure, particularly if different players were involved)
• Referees were not to use important NPCs created by others (this was to allow recurring villains and sub-plots)
• The world map began mostly unspecified and would be elaborated as needed over the course of play (it started as a college of wizardry, a town, and the Blackwater Falls mansion)
• The mansion itself, built into a cliff of black stone over which tumbled a waterfall, was huge and unexplored; no one knew how big it actually was, or what purpose it served
• In addition to the exploration of the mansion and its catacombs, the PCs would have to deal with tax and debt collectors coming after the great wizard’s heirs (Constantine was a big spender, but everyone was afraid to try to collect from him, since he was such a powerful and feared wizard)
• PCs must start and end every session at the mansion (if at all possible)

We called this a “house” game, since the PCs started and ended every session at the Blackwater Falls mansion. At the time we attributed the campaign’s ultimate success mostly to the idea of referee rotation and the “house” concept (which we borrowed from some older White Wolf gamers, though I don’t know if the term was in general use). Looking back on this now, though, I think that the real reason the campaign worked was that we had unwittingly stumbled upon many of the principles of old school gaming. The lack of initial setting specification. The megadungeon (in the mansion). The lack of too much pre-planned plot (mostly due to the rotating referee duties). In other words, we started with only the principles of what would make a successful RPG, and we ended up with old school D&D (the rules for adjudicating success and failure were different, but the way we played the game was remarkably similar). The only major principle we were missing was the use of random tables. The focus on treasure was even there, since all the characters started out poor, but needed to accumulate funds to pay off Constantine’s debts.

The game started using AD&D 2E rules (with some modifications to support a pseudo-Victorian and steampunk setting), but after some play was transitioned to a generic homebrew skill system based roughly on White Wolf games (after all, back then the smart kids were playing Vampire and Mage, not D&D). But the rules were mostly immaterial. It was the sense of exploration, at least for me, that made the game work.

That’s what makes the OSR so fascinating to me, getting back into this hobby. I’m currently running a 4E game (3 sessions in), more or less because that is the system my coworkers expect. I hope to make use of some of the old school ways though. In fact, I partly see this blog as an investigation into the following question: can an old school sandbox game be run effectively using a modern ruleset? I am greatly inspired by the empirical style of James Maliszewski’s Dwimmermount campaign. My experience so far is that combat is slow, clunky, and does not lend itself well to creativity and imagination. But I don’t yet consider this to be a fair appraisal, because I am still learning the rules (as the referee), and we are playing with at least one player who has never played any tabletop RPG before.