Early Berth Campaign Notes
(From first Berth Document)



Initial Notes

The Dungeons and Dragons Campaign has grown in levels beyond the point where a reasonable adventure can be constructed to challenge a group the size and level of the Local 509. The time has come to retire that campaign and use it as a pickup campaign with the action centering around the House of Stone and not going any further with the Quest of the Fifteen. It is with great reluctance and regret that I make this decision, but after my Evil Tree taking almost 1800HP of damage in a single minute, I feel am forced to!

For about 18 months I've been working on combining the d20 rule vaients (D&D, Modern, Future, Past, Arcana, FX, Menace) to form a cohesive system that can be formed into a new game. Also, I've always wanted to ref a time travel game where all these varients can be used. I've thought about a single planet with different conetnents being on different time streams, different planets where each is at a seperate point in it's development (a la Traveller d20) and so on. Here are some of the decision points:
It a large party and this make intimate games that rely heavily on role playing are impractical.
Time travel where they start in one time period presents realism/practical problems as the skill set of the characters (and their race) will be initially limited to that time period. When they go to a new time, how do they learn the skills necessary to that period? A solvable problem, but a consideration.
With different planets you run into the Dr. Who problem of language, customs and such. A difficult but not impossible problem to solve.
At this point I think the best bet is to keep them on a new, alien (not Earth) planet where they can travel (but not alwys at their will!) through time.

The planet should have a wide a selection of climates, terrains and other features as possible.

A simple way of controling game balance is to limit knowedge to specific classes making advancing in a class beyond a certain point impossible. Travelling to a different time may change this and I'll wait until the problem arises as to wether you get to keep levels you gain in one time when you go to a more restricted time!

An interesting thought for an approach to this new campaign is to use the "mini game" concept. A specific varient or extension to the d20 rules are used to support a particular kind of adventure. The first example is extending the vehicle combat rules to support an adventure taking place in a "Mad Max" like post apochliptic landscape.
The adventures would be short (target around 10 or 15 game sessions) with little or no emphasis on role playing or in depth local color, but heavy in cinematic action and new wrinkles on familiar game elements and rules.

On one Saturday night, I cheated the crew into helping me with this effort instead of doing the regular game. It was really handy as they gave me a lot of ideas and things that need to be worked on before I presnt the rules to a larger audience. It was great!
One important thing was the means I would use to compensate character classes with special abiloities (like clerics and wizards) with corresponding feats or skills.

Although the party will be travelling through time, you have to start somewhere! I've called out the ages of the planet that are suggestions of a consistant succession of moral and philophical periods. The time I'm starting the players in is ... still somewhat in the air. I originally wanted to start in the near future, but I may not to cushion the transition from the old campaign for the players.

If I don't start the characters in the future, I will somehow get them to that period I want to target the the technology of the first adventure for about 2050 our time. The time period is The Sixth Age of this world (see below) Balance rules and the various factions of the battle for powrer is in a period of detante. The culture however is very different than ours.
For starters, there are many different races instead of just humans that are senteint.


Yesterday, I looked into the kind of planning and detail I would need to kick the campaign off. Everywhere I looked I found detailed middle age cities but I couldn't find a single detailed modern city. I'm sure they are out there somewhere, but their absence made me wonder why.
I came up with an interesting theory. Most D&D campaigns have a considerable amount interaction and have a fairly stable location with the characters interacting with the same merchants many times. Modern campaigns are much more mobile in nature and de-emphasize role playing in favor of rapid action.    Added to this is the complexity of the modern city and the rapid transportation. Creating a modern city is a daunting task. However, I think I can overcome most of these problems and create modern cities with the detail of medevil cities.
In modern cities, an overview of the terrain, a display of the city layout by district and details of main streets in the district will be all that is needed outside of any special plot driven locations.
Each of the districts should have shopping malls, strip malls and some small mom and pop locations. Beyond that, the flavor will be given by the details of the shops and not their location beyond their district.



The Adventurers
The adventurers in the Dungeons and Dragons age will concentrate on a relatively small area and be traditional role playing in nature. Naturally, there will be a big dungeon, a interesting big city and many small surrounding towns nearby. The new races (see below) will add some new flavor to this setting as will some surprises.
Here are some sample adventures I'm considering:
The players are sent on a mission to take a black box to a man who lives about 200 miles away from the drop point. The time period is technologically much advanced and  Unfortunately, the continent they are on has been ravaged by a mutation plague that has created many monstrous mutations. The radiation will kill them all in 3 weeks unless they get back to the TT.
They are tasked with transporting a woman from one place to another. They are in a time period roughly like today, but during the time just after one of the moon meteor strikes destroyed the infrastructure of an area. They will dig up vehicles from the cache provided to them and find they are full of weapons. They must fight their way across the continent fighting off folks who will kill anyone to obtain the incredibly valuable vehicles.
They are sent to the far future where they are to receive a black box containing something valuable to the aliens. They meet their contact only to find the box has been stolen and take off planet. The party must find, follow and regain the black box traveling across the galaxy.

Your Input Requested
The First Question
Naturally, it's easy for a DM to design a player killer scenario. This is no fun for anyone, most of all me. My goal has always been to design an adventure that will make the players worry about the life of their characters without killing them. To this end, there have been many, many times where I have spared the characters from death because I think it would have had a negative impact on everyone's enjoyment of the game.
The one time I did not adhere to this rule of thumb, I regretted it. I still wish that Stallen had made his save against the Beholder and had not been disintegrated.
A prime example of this rule of thumb in action would be last week's game. When you were fighting the Flesh Jelly (the rolling bag of putrescent flesh), and failed the ST VS Fortitude, your HP were reduced to 0 and each round you spent inside you lost another HP. This was a modification of the rules. Actually, the engulfed creatures died. You fail the save, you die. Period.
So my first question is this:
Was I wrong to tweak the rules to spare player characters? In the next campaign I can stick more to the rules and kill more characters. Handling this should be a part of the rules.

Adventure Options
I asked for the input of the folks at the game where I discussed this what they would like to see as future adventures. I gave them some examples of themes or settings and asked what their interest level was. If you would, please rate your preference on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is "Very Interested"

Adventure Type
 Interest Rating
 Interest Rating
Spy adventure - 007

League of Gentlemen - Magic in Modern Times

Escape from N.Y.- Extraction from the prison island

Big Trouble in Little China - Magic in the current time

Escort Mission - Body Guards!

Heist - Steal the ... whatever

Alien Defender - Kill the invaders

Kung Foo - Pre magic psionics

Greek Mythology - High magic with deities

Sinbad - Magical Sea Voyages

Traveller - Starships and Plasma rifles

Psionic - Far, far future past star travel

Cyber Punk - Current time computer adventure

Alien - Escape the wily monster

Aliens - Traveller style search and destroy

Cowboy - Wild West without magic

Combat (WW2 style) - retrieve an art object

Pirates - Destroy them or be them?

Cavemen and Dinos - No tech, no magic, clubs and knives

A-Team - Modern Times with military grade weapons

High Magic - Increased number of spells available


Extra Credit Reading
If you are interested, here is a sketch of the rules for the setting.

The Game System
The game system used will be the d20 SRD (Standard Reference Document) issued by Wizards of the Coast as a "open source" game system that could be used with only licensing restrictions on publishing based on those rules. The Dungeons and Dragons rules from the Core books (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide and the Monster Manual) are an amplification of the SRD rules. For example, the SRD has no system for advancing in levels allowing the DM to determine the method. The DMG details the Experience Point system.
The SRD includes the spells, feats, skills and weapons exactly like the standard D&D game. It also includes all the rules for Modern and Future campaigns. I have made the additions to the system to allow it to be used smoothly for the same set of characters across time periods. I've already described how level advancement will work. I will also be using the Complete Rules book which is a more complete version of the rules than contained in the SRD but does not contradict it in any significant way.
The SRD includes the spells, feats and character abilities. It provides fewer options than the full set of D&D books. Specifically I will not be using the feats, prestige classes, new spells and class abilities from the d20 Dungeons and Dragons books. I may introduce modified versions of these options into the campaign, but I am not working on this right now. This has several advantages for the DM while it limits options for characters somewhat.
The reasons for this are:
By limiting the characters to the options in the SRD, I can freely publish my modifications to the game system without legal problems.
I want to come up with my own additions to the game system that will increase the options available to the characters in ways that are more in line with the campaign instead of changing my campaign to fit the options.
I want to introduce any new classes or spells as a part of the characters level advancement options.
It will enable me to better control the game balance by eliminating a lot of things that become too powerful at higher levels.

Some new options will be available right off. For instance, in addition to the standard races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling, Orc), characters will be able to play new races introduced from the Traveller d20 rules. Vargr (dog men) , and Aslan (Cat men) will be available. Tenic is a new race of amphibious lizard people. Another new race called Mapinguari will be used only for NPC. They are a race of sloth-like creatures who are used mostly as sages and expert craftsmen. They are not usable as player characters due to their overwhelmingly nasty smell.
Speaking of smell, another change to the SRD rules will be the use of the 5 senses. They will be rolled as ability scores (4d6 drop the low) but may be modified by training. Each sense also has a skill associated with it. Various races will have pluses and minuses to the sense scores. The senses will be used as modifiers to other skill roles and as additional rolls where no skill currently exists. "Make a smell roll at a DC 12 to identify the kind of gas in the room".

Where we are now:
When you are designing an encounter for a party, there is a system for balancing it called Encounter Rating. You take the Challenge Rating (a score assigned in the rules to all creatures), add together the values for all the parties opponents, compare it against the sum of the parties levels, modify for special abilities and a chart tells you if the encounter is challenging enough without being over kill (check Pg 48 in the DMG). As long as you have your books out, look in the back of the monster manual for the chart displaying the monsters sorted by Challenge Rating. How many are there with a challenge rating of 18 or more? How many ot those are not outsiders?
The current party is off the chart powerful. It's to the point where I can't pack enough opponents into a dungeon room to challenge you. I tried to fix the problem by eliminating the parties magic items to reduce their power. It worked to a degree but it wasn't enough. I set the current adventure outside in the wilderness to try and address this difficulty, but with the spells and missile weapons of the party, you kill the creatures before they get close enough to menace you. This has a very  negative impact on the other players. It has been VERY rare for a creature approaching to allow hand to hand fighters a chance to do anything. When was the last time Zoe attacked anything?

Please don't get me wrong; I don't blame you guys for this. It is a flaw in the high level rules of the game. There are no challenging medium monsters with  HP and abilities that make them tough enough to be fun for you guys.

This is why I think it is necessary to retire the current characters and campaign and begin again anew. Believe me, this is not something I want to do, but I don't see an alternative that you folks would accept. I thought about removing levels, but I hate to take away something you folks have worked at for a long time. I don't think there is any way to do this that will be equitable for all the characters. Besides, it's very much in the tradition of D&D to retire high level characters to non-adventure status. I still plan on having them around and adventuring with them when small groups can get together.

The Rationale for the New Campaign
When we started the current campaign, D&D was about the only game in town. It was the game system that had the best rule set and the best selection of accessories for the party to play with. I designed the campaign to be very long running (the Quest of 15) and adjusted the EXP rules to restrict the level advancement of the party to allow for a campaign that would last far beyond what the rules dictate.
With the introduction of the d20 rules, several new possibilities became possible. Now adventures can take place in any time or place with or without magic in an integrated system that doesn't force a change of the basic rules. I want to take advantage of this to keep the game balanced and present the party with some different challenges. I've already experimented with these alternate rules with the Traveller and Weird West adventures. I won't call these experiments completely successful, but I think the problems encountered were the result of the adventure design and not the rules. I learned a lot about what worked and what didn't.
As you probably know, I've been working toward this d20 rule integration as a project for several years. I am satisfied that what I have now is sufficient to sustain another long term campaign.

This new campaign should:
Last about 10 years of playing time at the maximum
First, I can't imagine that the logistics of aging will allow for playing much longer than that! The average duration for any d20 campaign is about half of that.
This means a level advancement of about 1 level per year as the d20 Modern rules only support characters up to that level. I think the designers realized that the levels about 10 for characters were not sustainable.

Provide a solution for the problem of players who's attendance at the games varied
This is a problem that again is the result of having such a large party. Not all of the players attendance is the same. The rules don't take this into account. Players who can't attend as regularly are penalized with a rapid reduction in level advancement which soon makes those characters unplayable in advanced adventurers.
To correct this, level advancement will be similar to what I'm using now as opposed to the EXP method. The entire party gains levels by completing an adventure. Not only does this this make sense from a book keeping standpoint (less book keeping), but it helps solve the next issue.
When an adventure is completed, all the characters who participated in the adventure will receive the same advancement measured in fractions of a level. A short adventure would gain the participants 1/4 of a level while a long adventure would advance them an entire level.

Avoid having characters get "stuck in a rut"
Some players love the challenge of creating a character that is very different than the character they have at the time. The d20 rules allow for a wide range of classes and abilities which are not explored when you play the same character for ever. The only option is to kill or retire the character.
The solution is to allow the characters to "remake themselves" using the same attribute scores, but in a different setting.

Increase the variety of adventure types
We have been playing the sword and sorcery variety of RPG for a long time. Even though it's everyone's favorite, I think introducing other adventure types, while retaining the Dungeons and Dragons adventures is ideal.

Reduce the contention for valuable items
I really, really hate it when a horde is discovered and the party begins to divvy it up. Players rightfully all want to own the most powerful items and are willing to argue to their point ad nauseous. Several different methods have been tried to overcome this, but none have worked. This isn't the fault of the players. It's built into the system. One solution is to only give out treasures that are roughly equal in power to one another. However this leads to a general depression of all magic items. No one would EVER get a really cool item.
The new campaigns solution is to make all items temporary. Whether it's a Wand of Infinite Goodness or the MegaPlasma rifle, the character would only get to use it in the current adventure. When the adventure is over, it goes away.

Make it as fun as possible for everyone including me
This is an almost impossible task. In fact, it is impossible on a game by game basis. Not everyone's skills and abilities ca be used on every game. By shifting the adventure type frequently and allowing the characters to remake themselves, the likelihood of a player being out of the adventure is much reduced. Even if a character doesn't find much use in one adventure, this can be corrected in the next adventure. Naturally, I will design the adventures to provide opportunities for as many characters as possible.  The old problem of "what will the thief do in a hack and slash adventure" will be solved by giving all the players change their capabilities for the next adventure

Make a page of tables describing the effects of modern drugs including battle drugs.


Additional communications!
Here is a document I sent out to the ploayers to get their reactions:
Hey guys!
As you probably know, I've been working on consolidating the d20 rules (D&D, d20 Modern, Future etc) into a single system. I think I've come up with something that can be expanded into a game system that will offer a unique playground for RPG players. It will be built around a planet specifically created for game system. Normally I would surprise you with the new information when we started and present it in a game format. This time, I would like your help as play testers and include you (somewhat) in the creation of the game system.

The week before last, I took a normal game period to discuss the new campaign and game system I am planning. As you weren't there, I thought I'd put together this e-mail to explain my plans and request your opinions on this subject. I hope you have time to take a look at this and provide some guidance or suggestions for what you would like to see in this new campaign. I know you will have questions. Bring 'em on! I know there are things I have not considered. For any of the points I make below, please feel free to object, cheer, boo,  or provide an alternative. You will be helping me make a better game!

I have a zip file that contains all the SRD information I'll be using. I'll be happy to mail you a copy so you can take a look.

Why the New Campaign
I have a more complete explanation below, but briefly
I want the option of publishing the system I'm working on
The current party is to powerful to create a challenging adventure using the existing D&D rules.
I want more flexibility in the kind of adventures I can use.
I want to keep the game interesting by adding variety.