Google Plus Mixtape, Track 03: Savage World of Krül

 

I was on Google + for five years. I met so many of you wonderful people there. We shared practices, information, and bits of wonder, frozen starlight, passed gleefully from one outstretched elfin hand to another. I learned how to play Dungeons & Dragons with you, in rewarding and novels grownup ways. But now Google + is gone. So I made you this mixtape. I think you'll recognize some of the songs. I hope you like it.

At long last, I return the Google+ mixtape, my homage to the OSR scene on Google+. This mixtape seems unfortunately timely once again  as the app formerly known as Twitter--poor substitute for Google+ that it ever was--wobbles on its last legs. You can "listen" to track 01 here and track 02 here. In track 02, I pointed out that gaming groups on G+ were essentially superbands. All the players were DMs in their own fearsome games. Numerous campaigns were run where every participant was the most committed member of another group. I pointed out that you can also trace patterns of influence between them, which is connected to my point that the OSR was, more than anything, a play culture.

As Google+ lay on its deathbed, I frantically helped people to download the G+ communities that had served as the home of their amazing campaigns. I took the opportunity, with permission of course, to interview the players in the campaigns, with the idea of sharing some inside reflections on the longer running campaigns of G+, some better known, and others less. As it happens, I got hung up for TWO YEARS writing the post for Track 03, which was originally to be on Chris Kutalik's Hill Cantons campaign and the superband of players inaccurately called "The Nefarious Nine". But on some solid recent advice, I have decided to unstick myself by shuffling the order of the tracks. So I have elected to bump up the Savage World of Krül, the campaign of Robert Parker, player of the unforgettable ne'er do-well Manzifrain in Chris Kutalik's Hill Cantons campaign. (Now that I am unstuck, you will hear more about Manzifrain soon enough.)

Without further a'do I present to you:

The Best Kept Secret of Retro-Games

Having played alongside him during my brief stint in the Nefarious Nine, I can say that Robert Parker is an interesting player. In fact, he's the dream player for the kind of DM who is in to deep world building. For him, the great joy in playing in a sandbox game is coming up with theories, plumbing the depths of secrets, unravelling the mysteries in a campaign as they relate to the open-world goals of the party. Information is for him the real treasure.

I've also enjoyed talking with Robert. If I tell him what I'm thinking about running, he's always casually like, "Oh, that's what you're going to do? Have you read Brian Aldiss' Hothouse?" Or, "Oh, have you taken a look at the early cyberpunk zine Mondo?" Or, "Oh, do you know about Traveler's rules on animal encounters?" His recommendations invariably completely change how I'm thinking about what I"m working on. He's also been SUPER interesting to talk about on the topic of how to run sandbox games that are not focused on location-based adventures (i.e. dungeons). For instance, he can tell you how to run a sandbox supers game, or talk about how to run a mystery sandbox for Call of Cthulhu, or a planet-hopping Traveler sandbox game.

I'll let you in on another secret: he was a driving force behind Hydra Coop. To a not inconsiderable extent you have him to thank for the bounty that cooperative venture has provided to the retro-game scene. He also came up with some of the most interesting rules to Fever Dreaming Marlinko and the forthcoming Slumbering Ursine Dunes Completish Omnibus. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Robert is probably the most interesting guy you may never have heard of in the retro-game scene.

The Savage World of Krül

While a member in the Nefarious Nine, Robert ran an off again on again game from 2012-2014 called The Savage World of Krül. Other members of the Nefarious Nine played in it, including Chris Kutalik, Cole Long, David Lewis Johnson, and Michael Moscrip. When I interviewed his players about it in 2018, sometimes I got the feeling that I was watching a sketch with Stefon in Saturday Night Live. "If you wanted to have a wild time back then, the game to play was Savage World of Krül. This campaign had everything: He-Man style chest harnesses...Tex-Mex sorcerers...cyborg gangs...wax dungeons"

Robert described the campaign this way to me: "It was a colonial sword & planet gone to shit game. Lord of Light-style god-beings come from a sea of possible realities, enslave the local humanoid population, breed humans, and then it turns into ugly late capitalism before collapsing into a post-apocalyptic ruin of city-states ruled by the descendants of demonic entities and their inbred half-human spawn." The Appendix N for the game (in fact Appendix B in his ruleset) included entries like Zelazney's Lord of Light series, Kirby's Fourth World comics, Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure novels, Brian Aldiss' Nonstop, Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun, as well as the entirety of Leigh Brackett's work.

When explaining what made the game memorable, Cole referred to the NPCs: "the flamboyant Tex-Mex magicians, the Clock King, and all these different crazy gangs with cyborg-surgery dues." He also dwelt on the disorientation induced by the setting, which seemed at first glance to be a gonzo planetary romance. That is, until the party found treasure like a wardrobe full of tuxedos, or came across an NPC running what was apparently an ancient photo booth. Was the World of Krül then somehow Earth? The disorientation they described reminded me of the signature effect of Gene Wolf, who carries you along thinking you know what the setting is in his novels, only to casually drop elements 100 pages in that, in combination with the increasingly suspicious narrator, throws everything you thought you knew about the setting into question.

Welcome to Mindfuck Dungeon!

Several players also described the game as sporting some of the most memorable dungeons they had ever seen. The central campaign dungeon was Mindfuck Dungeon (MFD). MFD was the watchtower of a powerful witch who had gone missing called the Clock King. It could be approached from above by paying a hefty entry fee to a gang called the Metal Fingers, or from below through undercity crawl from any of a series connecting locations. There was a central staircase that rotated between four dungeon quadrants on the second level, and could be controlled by finding missing clocks throughout the dungeon. You could only unlock the lower levels of the dungeon by finding all the missing clocks. (Although you could also approach the lower levels from the exterior or hidden elevators.) 

Although the theme was generally funhouse meat grinder, the dungeon was full of liminal spaces with different vibes. There were many sub-levels with distinctive aesthetics; one of cramped rough hewn spaces with pattering footsteps that could be accessed only by pit traps; one immaterial sub-level hanging in the air that only became tangible in the light of a certain kind candle; and there was a double-decker dungeon sub-level, where you would either be walking on the floor or the ceiling, depending on where you entered it. Hearing the dungeon described, it sounds like a giant 3D puzzle full of secrets that rewarded deep play. It also ground through PCs like nobody's business. Robert tells me that one player ran more than 20 different PCs in the campaign. The campaign had other dungeons with even wilder premises like the Waxworks, a living dungeon of shifting organs!

The Most Memorable PC Death

Several players, most of all Chris Kutalik, reported that the most memorable moment in the campaign was the death of Chris's character. Unbeknownst to the party, there was a DERO/anti-life infestation growing in the walls around level 2 of MFD, coiling around the level. It was occupied by malignant creatures who bedeviled the party on that level with the unnerving habit of suddenly appearing out of nowhere. When exploring level 2, one time the party triggered a floor trap. A panel opened in the ceiling revealing a magnet that sucked Chris' heavily armored character (and I believe Michael Moscrip's character as well) up into the ceiling, moving them along a track, and depositing them in the DERO sublevel, before sliding closed. Isolated, these characters found themselves in a space with a completely different ominous aesthetic of polished black walls with a red carpet that ate their feet if they stood still in one place. They were lost in unfamiliar territory trying to reconnect with the rest of the party, until their light source gave out. The party could hear their screams, maddeningly just behind the walls, powerless to help them, as they were hunted through the darkness by the malignant occupants of this hideous space. Giving up all hope, Chris' character ended up taking his own life to avoid being captured by the DERO. Everyone, including Chris, described this as a high point of the campaign.

A B/X Ruleset to Remember

The ruleset for the game, which circulated among players in PDF form, is a masterful B/X hack. My feeling is that these rules stands roughly to B/X as Gus' HMS Apollyon rules stand to OD&D. Both, working with the strengths of the chassis of their game of choice, spin it in creative way to support play in a particular campaign world. Everything in the ruleset conveys and reinforces elements of the setting. Robert's ruleset in particular is designed for long haul campaign shenanigans and play. Since the ruleset isn't published or generally available, I don't want to get into too much detailed, but it's such a glorious B/X hack that I can't resist saying something about. 

Character creation involved a selection two classes: fighting man/warrior woman & warlock/witch, with further hidden weird classes unlockable with a lucky roll or with character death. (Since there was so much PC death Robert wanted to throw a bone to those who perished again and again.) Each of the base classes had a lot of flavor. For witches and warlocks the flavor comes from the selection of 1 of 7 magical schools from this chart. 

For fighting men or warrior women the player rolls on a background table. There are 17 backgrounds, split between wilderness and urban backgrounds, that add 1d6 to one of your stats and sometimes give you some other power. (There is also a small chance to roll on a hidden "weird class" subtable.) These stats serve in part as the basis of a system of checks that allows for your character to have something of the flavor of thieves, rangers, and the like as sort of sub-classes of fighters. You are also able to trade off stats against one another, allowing for a fair amount of customization. 

Equipment was treated by Robert as another opportunity for worldbuilding. In addition to the standard fare of swords and torches, there are very pricey items like gasoline, shotguns, and even dynamite. The system uses a piecemeal armor system that calls out to He-Man or swords & sorcery genres. Robert also had rules for gambling, a set of mini-games that are resolved in the first 10 minutes of every session for those PCs who wished to drop by Xita's House of Games, a seedy gaming house in the city's Low Quarter. There were minigames for  slots,  blackjack, as well as a clever lottery game. I imagine that starting each session with real life gambling sets a nice opening tone. 

Where the ruleset really shines though is in the downtime system. I'm frankly glad that I hadn't read these rules when I was working out my own system of downtime, because they're so good I think they might have captured my imagination. The baseline is a cost of living expense with different expense tiers, tied to different bonuses or penalties on your hit points--hit dice were rolled each session. (If you couldn't pay for any tier there was a table to roll on for being unhoused.)

The downtime actions  carousing, rumor mongering, gathering intelligence in a variety of modes, including research, door to door interviews, casing a joint, infiltrating an organization and so on. (There is also an elaborate set of rules for using stool pigeons, more on the gang rules below.) There is also a career downtime action, which involves finding or working at a job. The system lists several careers, from stevedore to lab assistant, and so on. It uses stat checks to see if you can land a job (some are open only to individuals with certain skills), or a keep a job, or get a promotion. Getting fired usually has negative consequences. If you have a job you must dedicated half your downtimes to working it, and you receive weekly wages. It's a tidy little system that has a lot of worldbuilding built into it with the different careers. I would love it as a player.  

In addition to this rich offering of regular downtime actions, one genius innovation the ruleset introduces is the idea of a special downtime action. Once per month, a player is allowed to write up a special downtime action that does not fit into the framework mentioned so far. These actions are handled on an ad-hoc basis. Robert explained the significance of limiting specialty downtime action to me in terms of the advantage freeform downtime gives to enterprising and pushy players. The idea is to limit it to 1 out of every 4 downtimes, both to limit the workload on a DM with a large player base, and also to make sure that no one was reaping massive advantages by sinking homework in between sessions. The flexibility of the idea of a limited specialty downtime action is enticing. Interestingly, Robert also allowed players to use the specialty downtime action to play a special 30 minute session (usually at the start of a regular game session), where the player character could try to quickly resolve catastrophes that had come up via downtime, e.g. getting captured by someone you were spying on or the like. 

Perhaps the most elaborate rules in the game were the rules for taking and holding territory and building gangs as the envisioned domain play for fighting men. Four years before Blades in the Dark was published, and far better suited to the OSR playstyle, these rules were a tour-de-force. They explained what you had to do to seize a territory; they had rules for how to handle the gang warfare during the struggle; as well as rules for the monies and other advantages you would receive by securing and holding territory. They also tied in with the downtime actions that involved recruiting and paying gang members suitable for different kinds of jobs, hiring stool pigeons, infiltrating enemy gangs, and so on. 

These rules are not available for public consumption. They are, from Robert's point of view, game ephemera specifically made for his campaign and not for public consumption. However, both the setting and rules were major influence on David Lewis Johnson's Gathox Vertical Slum, another member of the Nefarious Nine and a player in Savage Sword of Krül. You can also find some of them absorbed into the forthcoming Slumbering Ursine Dunes Completish Omnibus So you can get at least a taste of the setting flavor and rules by looking at these wonderful product. As we'll see it also influenced Cole Long's rules for Swords of the Inner Sea, which I'll be looking at in a later track. 

Pay your cyber-surgery dues and you can find me in Mind Fuck Dungeon until the next mixtape trakc drops! 

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