Venger Satanis Questions Jeff Rients

 

Jeff Rients (here's Jeff's blog) was kind enough to let me Q&A him last month...

Thanks for indulging me, hoss.

Thanks for the invitation to bloviate. Hopefully you will enjoy the results.

How much do you rely on players picking up what you're laying down, running with the vibe, and just engaging with the world or campaign setting in order for things to go well at the table? 

What I’m laying down is usually some smelly old dungeon from the early Judges Guild or something like that. I try to remain completely open to the possibility that the players will say “fuck it” and go off and do something else. That happened last time I tried to run Tegel Manor. The players decided that wasn’t enough treasure in the world to justify fighting a mansion full of undead. They left and sought adventure elsewhere. So I try to maintain just coherent enough of a campaign world to always provide the party with some actionable alternatives. Sometimes they’ll just point blank ask a question like “Who has a castle we can kill and take over?” and I just improvise.

Do you have a default campaign setting or fantasy would where you normally set adventures?

Not for many years. I used both Greyhawk and the Known World / Mystara in the 80s and 90s. In the 00s, I ran a 3e campaign in Greyhawk that ended with the equivalent of Ragnarok. My last three successful campaigns were set in fantasy England, circa 1,140 A.D., a cosmic crossroads pocket dimension, and the stupidest fucking campaign setting I could come up with.

What house-rule do you find yourself using more and more these days? 

I have several house rules that have been stable for many years now. Natural 1’s and 20’s on the to-hit roll send you to fumble and crit charts. Monsters are worth 100xp per hit die (the OD&D rule, I can’t be bothered to look at a chart). 1d6 group initiative, ties go to the PCs. You can level up in the middle of play. Carousing. But my newest funtime is the adoption of a varient of Raggi’s alternate MU rules. From Vaginas are Magic!:

• THERE ARE NO SPELL LEVELS
• All spells are considered equally difficult, and the level of the spell’s power is determined by the caster’s level. 
• BEGINNING SPELLS
• Magic-Users begin with three randomly determined spells from the entire spell list of the campaign.

When an elf or MU levels up in my campaign, they roll on my custom spell list. This list is an ongoing effort of mine to include every wizard spell from every fantasy RPG product I can lay my hands on. It currently has 6,187 spells listed. Some of these spells are absolute campaign wreckers and some of them are useless crap. Most are somewhere in between. Nobody has any idea what kind of weird power their arcane caster will get next, including me. I love it.

I’ve heard of a d1,000… but how do you randomly determine spells from a list of 6,187?  The only thing I can think of is asking someone to pick a number between 1 and 6,187.

There are several ways to do it. If you truncate the list to just 6,000 its a snap with three d10s for the last three digits and d8-1 for the thousands columns (reroll if 8 comes up on the die). Or roll d7-1 if you are the kind of maniac who keeps a d7 handy.

You can also get the whole range with a series of d10 and percentile rolls. There are 62 groups of 100 available (rounding the last 87 up). Roll d100 until you get any result below 63. Now roll d100 again. So if you 51 on the first roll and 06 on the second, you end up with 5,106. If you happen to roll 62 on the first roll, just reroll any result above 87 that comes up on the second roll.

The easiest way to do it is electronically. In a Google Spreadsheet you can roll nearly any size die with the RANDBETWEEN function. IIRC Excel has an equivalent. If you have a lot of weird nonstandard die throws in your game setting up a custom die thrower in a spreadsheet can be very helpful.

Finally, what I actually do is use rolladie.net. You can specify a arbitrary number of die sides there. Though one time I held down the 9 key for several seconds then hit ‘roll’ and ended up crashing the page.

Is the OSR still vibrant, does it continue to serve a purpose, does it even exist anymore, and has anything credibly replaced it? 

I’m not sure. I don’t follow the scene much anymore. But there’s always been two important components to the OSR. On one hand is the commercial aspect. As long as Chris Gonnerman is putting out Basic Fantasy and Goodman Games is supporting DCC rpg and James Edward Raggi IV is making Lamentations of the Flame Princess stuff, that end of the operation is secure. And I’ve seen some younger folks doing stuff on itch.io that seem in line with that sort of thing.

But the more important part of the OSR is a central ethos. And that ethos is simply this: we don’t have to follow where the publishers lead, whether that’s TSR or WotC or even folks like Raggi and Goodman and Gonnerman. We will explore options that are no longer supported. We will run games that don’t align with corporate interests. We will follow the roads not taken. As long as that is happening at game tables, the OSR will never be dead even if it no longer the flavor of the month.

 

What are you currently running and/or playing at the moment? And how's that going?

The name of my current campaign is Dillhonker City. It is on a short hiatus at the moment as my work schedule is temporarily disrupting things. The rules are nominally Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but with enough house rules and DM whimsy to make that designation almost a fib.  I have found the game to be immensely entertaining, thanks primarily to the wonderful players. But we’re reaching PC levels (7th level elves, ninth or tenth level humans) that are harder to maintain challenges in a gonzo-style game. I think we might be approaching the end of this thing, but I’ve been wondering that for several months now and the game goes on.

 

What's something cool one of your players has made for your game recently? 

“Making stuff for the game” is a level of commitment I never, ever expect from players. If they show up and play hard for a couple of hours, I’m a happy clam. They could have literally no thoughts about the game between sessions and still be welcome at the table. That being said, I did enjoy recently that Zak posted his character sheet for all the world to see. He also occasionally posts reports specifically on James Raggi’s misbehavior in the game. This is going back over a year now, but Becami posted on her blog an illo of her PC Boomba the Dwarf (RIP) and her collected notes for the campaign. I think she keeps better track of the campaign than I do. And then there’s the secret session report at the end of one of James’s videos…

 

What's something you've been meaning to make or add to the game, but you just haven't gotten around to it yet? 

New critical hit and fumble charts. I’ve used Dave Hargrave’s Arduin crit hit chart for years, but it has its flaws. And Hargrave’s fumble chart has always been a little weird to me. You can roll a fumble and then still hit the foe for partial damage. What kind of fumble is that? I’d really like something egregiously large and complicated like you get out of Rolemaster or HackMaster, but tuned particularly for my kind of game.

 

Between two choices, the first awesome / hilarious but could potentially "kill" the entire game, or the second, sensible and steadfast... which do you choose? 

Choosing the sensible option is for real life. Go stupid or go home. In my current campaign one PC has a crown that allows them to summon a giant worm/snake that burrows between realities and another has the Ultimate Nullifier straight out of Marvel comics. I’m genuinely surprised they have yet to try to pick a fight with God.

 

How obsessive have you ever gotten about GMing, campaign world creation, or lore authorship?

The thing I have gotten more obsessive about in recent years is leveraging the fact that I play via Zoom. I’ve got the internet right there in front of me, so I’ve tried to incorporate that into play. The players decide to go find the Lost Dwarven City? I google up a map of Moria. Players interrogate a monster as to the nearest big treasure, I search my file of the dungeon for “gems”. That sort of thing. I don’t go for commercial online aids like Roll20, but running an online game exactly the way you play face-to-face strikes me as a missed opportunity.

 

What's one GMing, campaign creation, or lore blind spot you suffer from, where the details may as well be either handwaved or copy/pasted from A.I. because it's just your Achilles' heel? 

The Gygax phrase that haunts me is “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”  I have been very bad at tracking torches running out, the changes of seasons, the shifting phases of the moon, etc.

I take Gygax' strict time records as a call to set down campaign events somewhere before they vanish from one's mind.  I'm sure Gygax had fun monitoring game-time, day to day and week to week.  Sounds exhausting, though.

Exhausting, yes, but I quite like the range of situations that can only be produced by attending carefully to a timeline.

 

What's a piece of advice you wish you could give your teenage self about gaming? 

1.   Buy fewer game products. Write more stuff yourself, even though it is bad. In my youth I squandered a fair amount of money on games I never played or only played once.

2.   Skip Star Frontiers, go for Traveller.  I still like Star Frontiers, but there was no Star Frontiers scene where I grew up. Meanwhile, I lived about a 35 minute drive from GDW’s headquarters. A giant missed opportunity.

 

Are you writing anything now; any new product on the horizon?

I just finished my birth tables for the 2005 version of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. That was a bit of an undertaking. I ended up building a 1200 line spreadsheet with all the demographic data from the manuals in the boxed set. Since then, I’ve been working on a set of answers to my 20 Quick Questions for each of the 18 regions of the Wilderlands. The idea being that you could roll up a PC from anywhere in the Wilderlands and get a custom handout of what they know about the campaign world.

Also, I have been working on a stocked hexmap. Zak drew the map a while back and I have been slowly stocking all the hexes. I’d like to publish it in a future issue of Fight On! but it may be a tad too long for that venue when it is done. It’s basically an island designed for shipwreck-type situations; the PCs wash up on the shore and the adventure begins.