Thoughts on Elemental Evil

Iä! Shub-Niggurath!
Iä! Shub-Niggurath! 
The Black Fire of Chaos with a Thousand Flames!

"There are wheels within wheels in this village and fires within fires."

                                           - The Crucible

I've updated the Ultimate Greyhawk page. I realize that I barely wrote up a third of the locations in Hommlet, and yet I'm sure theres more than enough material to start playing this thing. So many hooks and mini adventures. And thats not even counting the whole Cult of Elemental Evil at the centre of things.

Speaking of Elemental Evil. Wizards has started to roll out their new 5e vision for it in the Realms. At first I recoiled from the idea. But now the more I think on it the more I approve. See the thing is I've always felt that the generic nature of the factions was weak. It was something I planned to fix in my personal take on the blog. The idea of strange mystery cults that draw in people of all walks of life, hidden in the wilderness plotting and planning really gets me excited. It's fresh and it's new. Change for change's sake is silly, but I think this is a move in the right direction. 

The other reason I've always felt that the cults needed more was because of Monte Cook. Some people believe that his vision for Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil was a bad one. I disagree with those people, but hey, they're entitled to their own opinions. Anyway, while Monte was working on RttToEE he was also running his Ptolus campaign. You can see the parallels between his Chaos Cults in Ptolus and the Elemental Cults. For me it really illustrated how while these groups all have a common goal they are all so different from each other. How much they hate each other, and just how much character they each have despite this common uniting factor. 

I think thats the secret to properly running any kind of ToEE campaign. In fact I'd go farther and argue that almost any campaign relies on the strength of it's NPC's and the organizations they represent. For me ToEE is all about secrets. It's about the PC's and who can they trust. There should be paranoia, fear and backstabbing. Running ToEE is like running a great Call of Cthulhu campaign. Each layer reveals a new one, and the process of reaching each layer bring the characters that much closer to losing their fucking minds. The cults of Elemental Evil are not about the Elements. Those are just the tools of madness. Worshipers of of Elemental Evil are all about CHAOS.

At some point I'll come back to all of this. The ToEE is one of those things that I always seem to come back to. I hope you've enjoyed what I've written so far. It's nothing spectacular, but it has been fun to do.

L33T Sk1llz

I wrote already of how Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved partly inspired the idea for the Digital Dark Age campaign. Since then Arcana Evolved has been on my mind quite a bit, so I decided to pull it off the shelf and refresh my memory. I haven’t settled on a particular system to run the Digital Dark Age campaign, though I've been strongly considering using Savage Worlds. My mind has hardly been made up and I’m still open to considering other ideas. Other ideas always seem to lead back to some version of 3.x sooner or later. Out of all the editions of D&D thus far, 3.x was the one that I played the most and thus my familiarity and comfort with the system has consistently drawn me back time and time again.

It's been ages since I’ve picked up anything based on 3e in a long time, the last thing being a Pathfinder game. The last actual D&D game I ran was a recent 4e campaign. I was while flipping through the pages of Arcana Evolved and looking over the section on skills that something started to dig at me. What it came down to was the different ways that skills were handled between 3.x and 4e D&D.

In 3e skills were one of those elements that players would agonize over trying to figure out how to allocate those precious points. Rogues got a ton of them, while fighters seemed to be destined to be dumb meatheads that were just supposed to swing a sword. This often created an odd situation where some classes could do something with a skill check, while others would never have a hope in hell. Nowhere was this more frustrating than when the group wanted to sneak through the enemies’ lair only to have everyone fail the check except the rogue. In addition the skill list was so large and specific that the rules as written seemed to imply that if your character didn’t have ranks in certain trained skills or not enough ranks he was incapable of doing certain tasks. Even if that task was something that might very well be logical for that character of that particular class to know or do.

4e substantially paired down the skill list. Each of these remaining skills became a broad stroke of a character expertise. Skill points were ditched, and now increased based on character level and a flat bonus applied if the character was trained or untrained. The DC checks also seemed to be scaled way back, and now based almost exclusively on the characters current level.

So the rub is this. I like how 4e have Skills and DC’s based on a characters level. I also like the simplification that skills are either trained or not. But I can’t help but feel that in 4e skills are trivialized and unless the player rolls like shit he’s almost guaranteed to succeed on a check. Which begs the question why the fuck even bother with Skills then? An ability check would work just as well.

On the other hand I feel that if you’re going to have Skills as an integral part of a characters class than it should be a meaningful and robust sub system. A system that allows the player the ability to freely customize and choose what kind of tasks his character is or isn’t skilled at, but not to the point that he's restricted in his ability to think of interesting and unique ways of using a skill. A middle ground needs to be found between the narrow and broad use of skills that a character can use to accomplish various tasks. In addition choosing and upgrading skills should be a relatively quick and painless process, and not an exercise in accounting.

It’s when I come to this conclusion that I can finally come to terms with how in pre 3e, or even 2e that the idea of a codified set of skills might be considered an unnecessary element to the old school crowd. It’s a case of rules being either so oversimplified that they become redundant, or so complex that they can become a straight jacket to what can character can and cannot do. Ultimately this lack of freedom can and often does, discourage the creative problem solving that can often lead to some of the most memorable and satisfying moments around the gaming table.

I’m still not sure of where I stand on this subject. It’s when I think about stuff like this that I hope that 5e will truly be the one edition to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. But I’m not holding my breath.