Using CraftWork to Make NPC Groups

I needed a group of rangers or scouts for an encounter, one of those times where you think the NPCs are going to hang around for a while so you want them a little more fleshed out than you might otherwise. I began to use CraftWork in a more deliberate way, using the crafts as ingredients for the group that I envisioned in this particular area. This pushes the procedural piece farther down the decision tree, so that the randomization is adding flavor to a structure rather than providing the framework itself.

I started with level and figured three level three characters. Each one will have one level of Wildcraft, with one of them adding in at least another. The second will have a layer of Thiefcraft and a layer of Warcraft. The third will have a level of Seer and one of Sorcery. They'll all start with some sort of missile weapon, with skills and spells rolled randomly.

What I ended with was a trio well acquainted with this bit of country, and with a variety of skills that would serve the party in their time of need. It is a dangerous passage for the group, so any of the three could be a substitute character if one of the player characters fails to make it, interesting enough to be fun to play for a short period of time, and maybe someone they would want to be for longer.

Broadened Accessibility

I listened to a nice interview with Brian from Dungeons on a Dime, and, while most of the interview was focused on various products, he offered up a lovely, expansive view of accessibility that resonated with my own. Funnily enough, it is similar to the view some folks in the disability community are taking with regard to Accessibility and Intersectionality.

Some Questions

Is the work available in a wide variety of formats? 

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If it is a video work, is there close captioning? Audio descriptions?

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If it is a written work or PDF, is there a plain text version? Are the photos or illustrations tagged and described? Have the producers checked it themselves for readability with regard to screen readers?

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Are there free or community copies available? If not, what are your thoughts or plans to help folks who can't afford the product access the product?

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Thoughts about translation to other languages?

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Are you, the creator or publisher, accessible to those who purchase or access the work to answer questions, hear feedback, etc?

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Paper source? Printing? Other materials? Are they easily accessible? Easily sourced? Recyclable? Low impact?

Growing up With D&D

Thinking about my history of gaming after listening to Trying to Be Kind (Season 2, Episode 2), especially a bit Fiona put forward about learning the game in the early days of D&D. As related in another post, I started playing with friends the year it came out and we developed our own interpretations and play styles in response to the loose system presented in the three books. 

However, it wasn't too long before we began joining other games, with older players, both college students in Urbana, Illinois, and older gamers, early adopters, friends of TSR, college professors, etc. It was at once an intoxicating scene for it's interest in the games we played, and to be in that orbit was amazing! But it was also one where we were marked outsiders: young and, more critically, playing The Game in what was clearly becoming a non standard way. We were outsiders, not on the mailing list, too young to attend any but local conventions, to drive, to fully engage in the expected ways. 

So, the 'OSR', whatever it is, is, in some ways, referencing a conversation or frame we were two steps away from. We played all the games, voraciously, but rejected, in many ways, those that pushed us and our playstyles aside. We moved quickly towards punk and anarchy in an era of massive RPG growth. All those convention goers and box set purchasers of the late '70s and early '80s were symbolic of capitalism's worst excesses and seemingly a betrayal of our game's roots.

Gaming was about taking the slimmest of seeds and constructing an artifice of imagination around it. The premade adventures, the dueling iterations of advanced versus basic, and the artifice of the right way to play, well, that was as alien then as it is now.

CraftWork Hacks!

With CraftWork out, there are a couple hacks I find helpful when using the procedural character generation sequence. What does a good hack need more than a hack!?!

Mustering Out

I often call a Character done after 5 or 6 levels, even if they aren't. They are full of possibility and personality at that point! There are dice sequences I could use to force this, but it seems unnecessary.

*Wizardry*

Wizards gain casts every level but they memorize spells from a spell book. I suggest waiting until the character rolling is done before filling out the spell book, and putting in 1D4 spells per level attained (eg a level 2 wizard would have 1D4 1st level spells and 1D4 2nd level spells.) I often add 1D4 spells of the next level, just because I want that NPC to be aspiring to something (and if they happen to *cough*cough* lose the spell book then it gives the finder some additional goodies.)

Practices & Circles

StageCraft and SeerCraft both have interior specializations. When a character returns to either one, do they stay with the one they started or do they switch to a new one? As someone who both likes both breath and depth, this can be a hard question! The way the book is set up, you just roll and the luck of the die will take you to new spaces or familiar ones. However, you could also use a different dynamic, say a 1D6 roll with 1 to 3 being stay, and 4 to 6 being switch. Sometimes I will roll straight up and then decide, as if I have been offered a position in the new specialty; what does the growing character want to do? Which feels more authentic to this little fictional person?

Character Sampler!

In honor of the Official CraftWork Sale Launch:

Another Character

Well, this one went in a cool direction! Two levels as a juggler and then two in WarCraft. Whaaaat? A knife thrower?  An elite sideshow performer?!?

M'Jeh

Background: Farmer, Refugee, Human 

Level 4

Str 11 | Dex 16 | Con 8

Int 13 | Wis 12 | Cha 7

HP 23

Proficiency 3

4 items in the air!

Skills

History, Tracking

Juggling, Jumping, Other Ranged Weapons

Improved Critical, Improvised Weapons

Abilities

Encore - Immediately repeat a successful action (Shtick: 3 Uses)

'Dark Dagger' Elemental Weapon (+1D6 Necrotic Damage) (1 Use)

Magic

Set List 5 Spells

Adept: Dancing Lights, Magic Hand, Prestidigitation, Accuracy

Pro: Animate Object, Befuddlement

Significant Possessions

Throwing Knife set

Potion of Healing

Salve of Slipperiness

Emerald Ring

M'Jeh left the Hooroon Highlands after the Red Purge, when their family fled west. They adjusted, joining a performance group as cooks and wagoneers. Young M'Jeh quickly took to the stage side, learning juggling and spells of distraction, as well as a quick hand in defense of the troupe. 

They are definitely combat oriented, but not in the thick of things, popping off spells and flinging deadly objects into the fray. 

CraftWork Launch!

At the risk of sending people into a crazed internet infinite loop, here's a link to the CraftWork sale page on Exalted Funeral. I am very excited about the launch, equally excited about how the book looks, and more than excited about next steps and publications. So much to consider: website, development schedules, other projects, more authors, and increased accessibility!

CraftWork purchase page

CraftWork, B/X & OSE Saves, and Character Optimization

So, all this Craft stuff is cool, but I don't really see how it works with the class-based save system in my game. If I am a third level Fighter, then that dictates my saves. How does that work if I have two levels of fighter and one level of thief, for example?

Solution #1

Use the total number of levels in your predominant craft to determine your save chart. Your save chart will switch around as you progress, but probably not as much as you might think, generally once or twice over the course of a character's life.

Solution #2

Use the save chart that you started with as a class and continue using that one, referencing total levels, all the way through your Character's career. You could say that this represents natural tendencies, or you could rationalize by looking at the total number of saves you'll actually take throughout the characters life. The percentage difference is not high.

 

Okay, so then I should probably start off with the best chart, because that will give me an advantage. Yeah, you could, and you could optimize your movement through the Crafts to get the best set of skills and the most uses of abilities. That might be kind of fun to work out (It actually IS kind of fun to work out!), but it also is not much fun to play, especially over time. CraftWork is an easy system to exploit from this perspective, but at the end of the day it is built to develop characters not caricatures.

One Potential Introduction to The Dim

The Dim is what I call my campaign world and reflects how I like to play. It is multiple times in the history of a particular place.

It is an evolving history and story of a place which bends and weaves with the players actions. 

It is a setting where players and characters are on an equal footing with regard to their knowledge of the world. Too often it seems players are expected to know what their characters know, and inhabiting a character feels like skin that is too loose, with too much space between you as the player and the character you are playing. With the players as strangers, travelers, released prisoners, or such, there is little reason for them to know much about the world, and much reason to wonder about the things they encounter. The players and the characters are building a knowledge of the world and building the world along with me and along with each other.

It is a campaign, but it is not scripted, and the maps and writings produced are not fiat. They are possibilities. By creating a world, I create a set of possibilities, a loom, on which everything is woven at the table.

CraftWork in Action!

So, a cleric, two thieves, and a wizard walk out of a bar, having completed a scourging of the ghosts that were leaking into the back room. Proud of their accomplishments and with their purses a little heavier, they're ready to level up!

What do they do? The cleric decides to stick with SoulCraft, and chooses a blessing to help with healing, as that was sorely lacking in their first adventure. One thief was the first to touch in ancient book in the decrepit subterranean chapel, and this encounter precipitated an awareness of necrotic magic, otherwise known as moving into MageCraft-Sorcery. The second thief, enamored of the clerics leadership and the power of his cult in this port city, decides to pledge his allegiance as well, and chooses a path of righteousness, armed with a powerful holy cudgel. The wizard, having appropriated the ancient book, adds a level and deepens their arcane knowledge.

This was a recent turn of events in one of my campaigns, and I thought it was a good illustration of how CraftWork can be used to reflect and build on events of the evolving story we are building together. All of these decisions made sense, and all of them spoke to directions the characters wanted to go. They all provide story hooks, motivation, and direction for character development in the future. It is also fun to see CraftWork in the wild, with players making decisions I never envisioned.

Vision and Design II

So, CraftWork is submitted, and we are starting to work on promotion at a scale appropriate to the project! I wrote a little bit at the beginning about the design process and some of the thoughts for me given my low vision, and I wanted to return to them a little bit now that we are on the other end of the process.

One of these is the process of letting go of some decisions, elements, and aspects of design, where I cannot make a fully visually informed choice because I cannot see or visualize the options. There is a evolving and increasing degree of trust in my collaborators both on this project and others.

This hinges on communication, obviously, so having some longer discussions about the parameters and feel of the project were really important. They set a scope and range for the collaboration, and also set some starting points for enacting the design. These are obviously important in any project, but It is harder to say, 'that doesn't work,' when you cannot see 'that'! It was also helpful to provide examples of what does and does not work in a design, so there was, slightly, less backtracking. This was relevant to level of grays, contrast, amount of text on a page, font size etc

At the end of the day, I think the process worked well, and I am proud of what we accomplished. I can't wait for you all to see it!

Crafted Characters II

So, this was an interesting build! They not only stayed in SoulCraft for all five levels, but they stayed in the same branch (Tempest!) and then mustered out. They also rolled no additional combat skills and no blessings, so their clerical focus is on themselves really, not on aiding others. I made a nudge in the possession rolls (choosing a wind focused icon).

Aguella 

Officiant of Wind: Shield of Faith

Background: Potter, Gnome, Eldest

Level 5

Str 15

Dex 17

Con 10

Int 9

Wis 13

Cha 8

HP 31

Proficiency 3

Devotion 8

Skills

Simple Melee Weapons, Pottery, Oratory, Climbing, Cartwright, Cryptography, Survival (Land), Wayfinding, Arcana

Holy Abilities

Lighting Staff, Storm Cloak, and Cyclone Shield

Miracles

Miracles of Fog, Wind, And Thunder

Significant Possessions

Refuge Chest, Unbreakable Staff, Icon of the Dawn Wind, Polymorph Potion, Map

From all this, Aguella is an accomplished crafter, probably able to build or construct relatively complex objects out of wood, as needed. There is definitely an element of the wanderer in them, given the survival  skill, the wind focus, and the clerical abilities that aren't particularly geared towards others. They could be a spy, or involved in outdoor espionage, so maybe they are used by the temple on particular long range missions, delivering or retrieving holy items from desolate places.

Vision & Running a Game

A couple more notes and thoughts about playing with low vision. I have adapted a great deal over the years to managing and running a game, and my toolkit is now pared down both for visual accessibility, simplicity, ease of operation, fast play, and group storytelling.

What I Bring to the Table

A rollout dice mat with an incorporated zipped dice pouch. This serves as a physical, tactile space where my dice and active note cards live.

A wooden block with slots to hold note cards upright. These are cards that contain the beats or points that the players might hit in the session, NPC mood levels, and other critical information. Given that it's a note card, there are never more than 4 to 6 items on the card. I make a new card for every session. There is another slot that often holde a wandering monster that is 'on deck'. 

A short stack of cards containing creatures, NPCs, and other encounters that might enter the session. These are sorted and created ahead of time so I don't have to comb through a book or other references in order to find details. They are easily shuffled to randomize draws and very specific to the particulars of the session.

My notebook, with relevant pages clipped or marked for reference.

Copies of the following small volumes: Monsters & and Mazerats. The latter is for its wealth of tables, especially for NPC motivation, and the former is a quick go-to for creatures when the players go in an unanticipated direction.

A single sheet with character and party notes, timeline, significant treasure, usage dice notes, or other things that I am tracking that the players may or may not be aware of.

If the situation warrants, there may be a map, or my new individual room cards, to lay out in the center of the table for reference and orientation.

That's it! Visually there is very little to keep track of, so little to lose. If I had a lot of notes or reminders, I would not see them during the game anyway, so they have been eliminated or condensed to that single card. All hit point or other record-keeping is done directly on the creature cards. Any other notes go on the party record sheet. 

CraftWork Character Sampler I

Some days I just can't stop rolling up characters. I have a box of hundreds of note cards from my first days of Traveler in the mid '70s, when I would sit for hours and roll up characters until they died or mustered out. CraftWork is equally satisfying!

Here is one from the upcoming Zine!  

Ajest (Level 7)

Human Thief-Sorceror

Core Stats: Str 8 Dex 13 Con 15 Int 12 Wis 8  Cha 14

Proficiency = 3

Reputation Maximum = 3

Casts = 6

HP = 42

Skills: Sling, Pole Arm, Simple Melee Weapons, Dirty Tricks, Light Armor, Forgery, Find Secret Doors, Listen, Find Healing Plants, Nature, and Brewing

Spells: Pass Silently (1), Fiery Step (1), Incite Smoke (2), Fiery Effect (X), Conjure Insects (3), and Personal Cyclone (3)

Abilities: I Know a Guy, Double Double, and Cunning

Using Ajest right now as a leader of a underworld faction in the city of Lapis. Unassuming, blends right in, nothing to tell you that the older guy at the end of the bar is not what he appears.

Magic Systems for CraftWork and Beyond

CraftWork is intended to be flexible and systems adjacent. This means that some hacking and adjustment will be needed to make it fit the way you want at your table.

Levels are a part of CraftWork, but they are also easily extracted in order to fit a levelless system such as Wonder and Wickedness or Knave. Levels make it super easy to adapt to 5e or OSE, since spell levels are baked into those magic systems.

However, for 5e you would need to convert casts into slots. You could do this per level, or you could just continue using the charts in the player's manual per level of MageCraft, ignoring the CraftWork notion of casts altogether. 

Some folks have asked, 'what about warlocks or what about specific schools of magic from 5e?' Within CraftWork, and at your table, just bake in one or two special rules to carve out space for these kinds of visions. Perhaps a character has more flexibility in casting closer to the Edge then is specified; that gets them closer to a 5e warlock. Whatever Being they have a pact with grants them an additional spell or ability, or a unique one. A Wizard accepted to the School of Evocation automatically gains the Sculpt Spell skill and a bonus to their fireballs or ice bolts.

You are folding things in, layering in specificity as it relates to the world that is growing at your table. Your game does not look like someone else's game, and your magic is your own.

My Gaming History to 1990

We were talking the other day about when we started playing particular games, so I started pitting memory against releases, gauging duration and intensity.

Personal RPG History

Dramatis Personae

Me: Will (1962 - Present)

Ted: my younger brother (1964-2017)

Dad: my father, Alan (1931-1996)

Mom: my mother, Anita (1939- 1975)

All the players: James, Bear, Mike, Tim, Randy, John, Rick, Tina, Bob, Natalie, Sho, and all my students.

Chainmail Dad purchased and gave Ted and I the copy, probably in '72, and we immediately transformed our train table into a fantasy battlefield.

D&D original brown books '74 Again, Dad purchased the box set, I don't remember where, and gave it to us in Urbana, Illinois. I was in a combined 7-8 grade at my HS. 

We played intensely with each other and with friends, filling graph and hex paper with our worlds.

Metamorphosis Alpha '76 I bought this at a record store (?) in C-U. We played this extensively, as it slowly supplanted D&D. We moved to the farm that year when my Dad remarried.

Traveller 77 I bought the original black box set that summer or fall and definitely moved away from D&D and MA, with D&D returning briefly in the 90's and then in 2018.

Little Wars came as a Christmas gift in 1977 and we adapted it to fantasy, using spring loaded cannons and a growing collection of miniature Fantasy figures (mostly Ral Partha), with Ted more involved than I, a trend that continued throughout our lives!

I bought Gamma World in '78, and played briefly, but Traveller was already my main campaign/game, since you could always have abandoned colony starships and devastated worlds inside Traveller, so MA & GW just became subsumed.

During this time Ted bought a number of board games including Dragon Pass ('77 or 78), SPI's Wizards ('78? though it came out in '75), and Magic Realms ('79). The latter two saw heavier play than the first.

RuneQuest in either 78 or 79. Ted ran this extensively for several years until he switched to Call of Cthulhu. He gave RQ to me in '80 or '81, and I have run my world for 30+ years; It slowly eclipsed Traveler.

Call of Cthulhu became Ted's RPG of choice to run and collect when it came out in '81, but he was always drawn to miniatures and board games more than running RPG's. 

By this time we were both in college. I was running RQ, and less and less Traveller, weekly through the late 80's and playing in Call of Cthulhu and a Morrow Project homebrew with friends in Madison and Urbana. Ted and I played on vacations, summers, etc through the 80's.

Takeaways

My first is that for all of its veneration and iconization, especially recently, we really didn't play D&D for that long, hopping quickly to the next iteration, combining, and then settling in, in a way, to a couple different games.

My second takeaway is that we played worlds, not systems. Games and campaigns took place in worlds we built, designed, and evolved. Traveler was not the Third Empire; RuneQuest to me was never Glorantha. The game systems were always just starting points, rough frameworks or sets of possibilities with which to build worlds, and then flesh them out, test them, cement the possible into reality through the play at the table. Over time each game became a large collection of notes, maps, index cards, and character sheets, associated with a handful of xeroxed charts, cropped and assembled to serve our purpose.

To be continued!

This Game

The following bears repeating...

This is a game about interacting with this world as if it were a place that exists.

Killing things is not the goal.

There is nothing that is "supposed" to happen.

Unknowability and consequence make everything interesting.

You play as your character, not as the screenwriter writing your character.

It's your job to make your character interesting and to make the game interesting for you.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

The answer is not on your character sheet.

Things are swingy.

You will die.

(By Gregory Blair, Brian Harbron, FM Geist, Zedeck Siew, Brian Murphy, Dirk Detweiler Leichty and Daniel Davis)

To which I would add...

Roles/Goals

Make the world seem real.

Play to see what happens.

Make the player's lives seem dangerous, interesting, and heroic.

Support player safety.

Vision & Design

Embarking on this Zine project leads, once again, to an intersection of my vision loss, at this point with design. In conversations with the designer working on the project with me, the question of art direction obviously arose, and there were samples of other work that we looked at. The drafts I had rendered, ineffectually at best, had a very clean, sparse look to them, contrary to most of the samples. 

I buy a lot of zines, and the current trend in RPG design seems to be in an opposite direction, tending towards the dark, grim, and forboding, or towards highly designed and colorful interfaces. Because of my vision loss, the current aesthetic hotness ramps up inaccessibility, though I can definitely see the appeal!

So what to do? Do I follow the wave, even if it means not being able to fully appreciate, let alone fully discern, the graphic design of my own product? Do I push, or insist, on a design that is accessible to me, but that others find uninteresting or unappealing? How does accessibility, visual accessibility, fit with the world of Knock, Mork Borg, and other cutting-edge publications? What are the interesting, design forward, user-friendly, accessible models that I/we can lean on, or draw from, for this project?

The first example, and I'm sure there will be others after I post this, is Luke Gearing's Volume Two Monsters &. It is riffing off of traveler, but also hazy in the background, and this choice resonates throughout the work. It is direct, easy to read, and simple to operate.

Once, Again, Into the Brink

Well, five years, new name, new scene, less vision, radical shifting gaming approaches, and lots of new directions. Perhaps the biggest shift since I last posted has been the loss of vision. Miniature games are now few and far between, in part because of the pandemic, but primarily because I can no longer make out many of the details or figures on the board. I have stopped painting for the same reason.

However, as I have adapted in the past, I continue to adapt now. I have shifted over to role playing games primarily, running multiple groups through a new and evolving world, The Dim. I've put together a cool little Zine, CraftWork, to make manifest how I think about role playing games at the moment, and that should be out in the world within the next couple of months. More on that later!

As far as directions in this venue, I can definitely see using it as a place to post additional content for the Zine, to address new changes and adaptations and disability issues in gaming, and, obviously, to share other sources and approaches that I find interesting.