Anyway, the PCs pressed the momentary advantage they got from exploding the innocent village girl's corpse all over the vampire. As the skeleton warriors moved to attack, the spell casters immobilized them. The Cleric used the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind to completely immobilize Strahd, so the warriors could move in and begin pummeling the bejeezus out of him. 

The "battle" was so one-sided it wasn't even funny. They finished him off by forcing a Bag of Holding full of Holy Water down his throat. I didn't even bother to roll for damage. I described the vampire's body beginning to bubble, boil, and burn...

Honestly, watching them plan and execute such a crazy curb-stomp of a battle was so damn satisfying, I almost felt bad that I was about to pull the rug out from under them. 

That said, I also started running Ravenloft games back in the 90's. And I know damned well that the one thing that makes Strahd a memorable villain is that he's not an idiot. 

As the PC's were watching the vampire's face melt, I had one of them notice the illusion spell fail, revealing that the "Strahd" they'd just killed was a decoy: a lesser vampire spawn he put in place so he could quietly observe them from a distance.

From above, the PC's heard an amplified voice boom over the courtyard: "I was going to be honorable. But you allowed my bride to die. Worse, you desecrated her. For that crime, you will all pay."

A fireball then dropped into the center of the PCs formation. It delivered massive damage all around, thanks to a bunch of blown saving throws. Behind them, the gates of the castle slammed shut. And above them, the amplified voice issued a final, cold proclamation: "None of you will leave this place alive."

We ended the session right there, with the PC's trapped and without any ideas where to go from here.

This is D&D storytelling in a nutshell, folks. These crazy, unplanned moments that the players—and the DM—will still be discussing years from now. This is where the real magic of the game has always been: in watching the players come up with some crazy, over-the-top scheme, and try their damndest to execute it.

Real D&D storytelling has nothing to do with the DM, his campaign notes or (Gygax help us) "plot arcs." It can only happen organically. It's also entirely player driven. The DM can't force it, and the more he tries, the more he gets in the way.

If you truly want to create great stories in your D&D games, the only thing you need to do as a DM is put great obstacles in the players' way. Let them use their own ingenuity. Because when they come up with a plan, you get to do the best part.

You get to sit back and watch.

The DM isn't the story's architect in a D&D game. If anything, he's the set designer. But if he does a good enough job, he also gets to be the front row audience.

That's worth its weight in gold, folks.​

​Not that I plan to abandon the Beast that Tweets, mind you. It's been a remarkably good thing for me this past year. Among other things, it's introduced me to guys like Constantin and Mollison. And it was Mollison who helped inspire one of the biggest things I've got on the table for 2020. 

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, here.
 
Before I get into the things I have on the burner for 2020, I want to take a brief look back at what I learned from the wreckage of 2019's writing year.    

Longtime readers of the blog will remember that I wrote a similar "looking forward" post a year ago. I took myself to task for my failure to accomplish the previous year's writing goals, and I laid out my goals for the upcoming year. 

Of the four upcoming projects listed there, only one of them came to pass: more blogging, including the guest post over at DMR Books' blog.  

Blogging is about the only thing I'm going to put down as a win for 2019. I got barely any fiction written in 2019, and none published. But I did keep a fairly consistent blogging schedule. And that turned out to be a much bigger deal than I expected. 

Doing that forced me to create some regular columns, like my 'Pocky-clypse Now reviews and my Kitbashing D&D series. Both of those proved to be popular, and have managed to get me some regular readers. 

Several posts of mine got shared in regular PulpRev and OSR gaming blog roundups, like Castalia House Sensor Sweep, The DMRtian Chronicles, and Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog. Each time that happened, I've reached a wider audience and gained new readers. 

One of those posts--in which I discuss D&D's baked-in, apocalyptic assumptions—flat-out exploded in popularity, generating 10,000 unique page views, a 300+ comment debate on Facebook, and a comment on my site from Luke Gygax.

Before I get into this week's rules changes, I want to talk about a planned scheduling shake-up, and call attention to a cool thing that arrived in the mail.

First, the cool thing:

Personally, I find that 70's rock and retro-70's rock inspires most of my D&D writing. Something about the aesthetic just gets me in the right headspace. Black Sabbath. Rainbow. The Sword. The Wizards. But as I've been writing this blog series, I've mostly been rocking out to Gygax. 

If you're unfamiliar with them, try to imagine a hard rock band that combines the music of Thin Lizzy with lyrics directly inspired by Old School D&D. I've been a die hard fan since their first release, 2015's Critical Hits. If you're a metalhead or a rocker of any kind, I highly recommend checking out their Bandcamp page. 

Anyway, Gygax released what is undoubtedly the coolest bit of band swag in the history of band swag—a limited edition Gygax Guild d20. 
​

Needless to say, I've already used this bad boy to launch a massive goblin assault, one that slaughtered an unwary wizard PC and sent the surviving party members running for their lives. 

Which leads me to the scheduling shake-up: 

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I've been at work on an Appendix N inspired science fantasy series, one that envisions what D&D fiction might have looked like if it followed the wilder literary roots of the game, rather than filling in the map of TSR and WotC's pre-fab fantasy worlds.
 
And while I still plan on writing that, the fact is my recent thought experiments on what Fantasy Effing Vietnam would look like have gotten a bit more attention. To the point that I've gotten several messages in public and in private expressing interest in a published print version.

Rule number one in this writing gig, folks. Never disappoint your audience. Especially when they're actively asking you for something. 

So, yes. A published print version of these rules is now in the works. 

To that end, I've been running some live play tests with two separate groups. Once that's done and all the obvious bugs are worked out, I've got two other groups tentatively lined up as my beta testers.

If all goes well, I'm hoping to have these rules pretty well ironed out in the next few weeks. Then it's going to be a matter of formatting, getting some art, and making it available on DriveThruRPG.

Hopefully, that won't take too long. 

In the meantime, I plan to keep these blog posts coming. They're a helpful way to "think out loud" about what I'm doing, as well as offer some insight into the ideas behind the rules choices I'm making. As I said way back in part one of this series, there is a guiding principle behind this project.

Fact is, I don't believe D&D's ruleset was ever intended as an all-purpose, generic fantasy adventure simulator. Each edition has been geared towards a specific, implied setting, and every subsequent edition and rules modification has made different assumptions about the world it aims to simulate.

And as we'll see in this week's post, "Fantasy Effing Vietnam" makes some very specific assumptions about the nature of combat.​

​It's an excellent counterpoint, and I want to thank him for bringing it up.

The main reason I'm aiming for a 1:1 analogy here—or as close to one as I can get—is that Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics already did a high lethality game with a bunch of low HP, press-ganged noobs. And as far as I'm concerned, they knocked it out of the damn park. 

Bottom line, there was no reason for me to retread that same territory. If I was going to write anything on the subject at all, I wanted to try and bring something new to the table. 

So started thinking about the idea of a Fantasy Fucking Vietnam in more literal terms, to see if I could come up with something a little more interesting. I started approaching it from the other side—the survivors, rather than the KIAs—to see if that would yield some more interesting results. That got me thinking about things like long term exhaustion, and battle fatigue. 

And then then I started to think of Jimi Hendrix, Huey Cobras, and weird shit.

Which brings me to today's post:

​
Purple Haze All in My Brain

For once, you drew the short straw. The other adventurers—normally prone to ribbing you and giving you a hard time when you pull a shit job on missions—won't even look you in the eye.

Not this time.

The other short straw goes to Bregan. The gruff dwarf doesn't say much. But then, he never does.

There isn't much to do except sit and wait at the ambush site while the others hike the three miles to the tunnel's main entrance. If all goes according to plan, in a few hours' time, they'll be flushing the gobbos out to you—and to your "allies" in the trees.

You settle in, keeping eyes on the gobbos' burrow. Your companions slip though the underbrush, silent as ghosts. 
 
"You see Kruppa?" Bregan asks.

"Yeah," you respond. "Bastard didn't even shake. First time I've seen him eager to go back underground." 

The dwarf almost laughs. "You blame him?"

You risk a glimpse up. You think you see a winged shape, flitting between the high branches. You suppress a shudder. 

Bregan leans close. "I tell you this, boy. I don't trust those tree-toppers. They're worse than the Chaos-damned elves. You hear me? Worse." 

In the months you've known Bregan, the only thing you've ever heard him call worse than an elf was a goblin. And even then, he said the distinction was small. 

You press him for reasons.

"Their magic is different," he says a last. "It gets inside your mind, boy. It'll drive you mad."

Hours pass. You take shifts watching the burrow for any signs of life. You even manage to get a little sleep.

You're on watch when you hear the sounds. They're faint at first. Distant. Hollow. A clash of steel. A shout. A flash and boom. Then, closer and louder, the noise of scurrying feet and the gibbering, croaking sound of the gobbos' language. You're up on your knees and drawing your knives before you're even conscious of the thought.

In the next second, the burrow is alive with activity. Dozens of goblins burst forth, crawling over each other like ants in their mad dash to escape. In seconds they're scurrying and running through the underbrush, scattering in so many directions you can't even begin to track them all.

It's a tactic, of course. One they use to overwhelm and confuse inexperienced hunters. 

It's then that you risk another glance up. A stupid, stupid risk... 

You just barely catch a glimpse in that half-second. The tree-topper has a slender, child-sized body. Its wings are large and colorful, like those of some exotic butterfly. And it seems to be scattering some kind of bright, purplish dust from its hands...

MASH on the Borderland

It's been three weeks, and four missions down in the tunnels. That smiling little swordsman from Dragonfall was the first to die. A rusty gobbo spear through the gut, then swarmed and hacked to death by a dozen of the little devils. He died crying for his momma. 

Bastards didn't even leave enough of him to box up and send back to her. 

You still haven't written home. You aren't sure what you can say. The borderland isn't anything like your old militia service back home. Twice-yearly pike drills in the village square didn't do anything to prepare you for this. 

How could it?

Last mission, you ended up separated from the party. A gobbo caught you and tried to pin you with one of those poison-tipped knives. You wrestled with him, staring into those hateful red eyes, smelling that rank breath. You only lived because you became more animal than he was. You sank your teeth into his neck, biting until you tasted his black, oily blood. 

"Dear Mom" your unfinished letter reads. You haven't gotten any farther.

Easing yourself out of the bed in the adventurers' barracks, you decide to go down to the infirmary. Stitches pull tight beneath blood-crusted bandages, bringing a wince of pain. Some of the newer wounds rip open again. The older ones hold tight, thank the gods. 

Three of you made it out of that last tunnel. The healers took good care of you, as always. They even found a bed for Kruppa, the party thief.

Kruppa... He was in bad shape when you got back. Almost didn't make it. The healers managed to stabilize him, but that was about it. Rumors said he stopped breathing last night, and one of the Sisters of Mercy had to perform their sacred "Kiss of Life" to revive him.

Fact was, Kruppa probably didn't have much time. And while forming attachments wasn't smart on the borderland—your first trip into the tunnels taught you that—you found yourself liking him.  

You see the gathered crowd from halfway across the courtyard. Off duty kingsmen, civilians, tradesmen... everyone not otherwise engaged in their duties is crowded outside the infirmary building.

You spy Bregan the dwarf, standing on a barrel and cursing to himself, trying to see over the crush. You approach and ask what gives.

"They brought in one of the healing Clerics," the dwarf says.

A healing Cleric? Gods... 

You've heard them. Holy beings, so the stories go. Mortals so touched with the divine they could call on miraculous healing powers. 

You only half believed they were real. 

You only half believed they'd be here, in this gods-forsaken hellhole.

All at once, a ghostly hush goes over the crowd. Something's happening. You try catch a glimpse through the infirmary's stone archway. 

What you see is something that looks so out of place you still aren't sure your mind didn't make it up. The woman is saintly-looking, with platinum hair and perfect features. There isn't a speck of dirt on her. For the briefest second, she locks eyes with you. They're the deepest blue you've ever seen. Like the sky itself...

She lays a hand on Kruppa's forehead. She whispers something you can't hear. Then there's a flash. A white light like nothing you've ever seen. It will be weeks before you can even describe the feeling of warmth and love you feel in that moment. For a time, the memory of it almost makes the Hell of the borderlands seem tolerable. 

Almost.

"Kruppa's going to be okay," Bregan says. The crowd's beginning to break up now. You hardly even noticed.

The dwarf nudges you. "Come on," he says. "Patrol's headed north in an hour. Some FNG's out of Hooktooth. Told them we'd tag along. Should be an easy day's work. Earn earn enough for a bed and another meal."

A bed. Another meal. Gods. You remember when life meant more.

Don't you?

"An hour," you say absently. Your voice sounds hollow to your own ears. 

You're tired. Your wounds ache. You know you need at least a week to recover. But you don't have it. Right now, you have about forty five minutes. And you need all of it to sharpen your knives, pack your kit, and tie everything down so it doesn't make a sound when you walk.

Because right now, you have to go down into the earth and collect goblin ears.

After rolling 3d6 in order to determine stats—no cheating here—use the player's CON score to determine the number of hit dice the player rolls. Fighters and Dwarves use a d6. All others use a d4. 

So for example, a Fighter with with a 13 CON rolls 13d6, coming up with 46 HP. An Elf with with a 15 CON rolls 15d4, coming up with 38 HP. A Thief with 10 CON rolls 10d4 coming up with 27 HP, etc. 

Those hit points are all the hit points the character will ever have. Or rather, they're the character's permanent max. No more hit points are gained from leveling up. 

It's also important to note that when rolling, you shouldn't apply ability score adjustments for high or low CON scores to the die rolls. Those bonuses and penalties will come into play later, but not at character generation, and not for determining total hit points.

Other benefits to leveling up, such as THAC0 (or Base Attack Bonus if you're kitbashing with a different system), spells, skills, and saving throws, are all still in play. But in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam, characters start with all the HP they'll ever be able to accrue.

The next major change I'd make is that I'd remove Clerics as a player character option. In fact, I'd remove healing magic from the field altogether, except for at rear-echelon, MASH-type units. It would only be available in limited supply, and reserved for the gravest extreme. Most of the time, PCs would simply have to do without. 

This gets back to a point I made in the introduction, about how rules—and rules changes—should imply something about the setting. By striking Clerics from the list of available classes, I'm not just removing a bunch of player options. I'm saying something about the way the world around the PCs works. 

Clerics themselves could be rare individuals, to the point where no one would ever risk sending them out into the field on a combat operation. There may only be a few dozen of them in the theater of operations, and twice that in the entire world. They'd be highly protected, with 24 hour security details wherever they went. The death just of one would be a crippling blow to the war effort. If one ever fell into enemy hands, a rescue mission would be the area commander's top priority.

And if a long range recon mission happened to learn of the existence of Druids—another class I would disallow for the players—it would have far-reaching consequences. More healing magic, and potentially limitless ability to strike at he goblins on their own turf? Area commanders would undoubtedly hire the PCs to escort them deep into Druid territory, in an effort to negotiate an alliance with the Neutral Druids, hoping to gain a powerful ally in the war against the Chaotic goblins.

Of course, the Druids might not be too happy to see the intrusive humans from the borderland keep, with their unchecked logging and hunting practices. The Druids may see them no differently than they do the goblins.
 
So what does this mean for healing, then, if magic is effectively cut out of the equation? 

The way I see it, they have two options. The first is the Healing skill, detailed on page 83 of the Rules Cyclopedia. In short, a trained character can render first aid and heal 1d3 points of damage on one set of wounds, usually defined as Hit Points lost in one combat situation or encounter. 

The second option is recovering hit points through rest. Swiping a bit from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the characters recover 1d3 HP per full day of rest. But to put a house-ruled spin on it, this rest applies only when not in field conditions. Characters must be in a relatively sanitary and safe location, with the ability to keep their wounds clean and protected. 
​