Ed Balls

Ed Balls

#EdBallsDay

Who Lives In a House Like This?

Does new Doctor Who companion Belinda Chandra live in old Doctor Who companion Donna Noble's house? It certainly looks like it!

This is Donna's house from 2023's "The Star Beast":

This is Belinda's house from 2025's "The Robot Revolution":

So no, it's not the same house. I've seen some fans speculating that it's the same set, redressed, which is possible.

It does have a very similar layout though, right down to the same "alien back door".

From the Shadows, Dark

We have been playing Shadowdark, the current old-school darling. I've been running the gang through the quickstart adventure The Lost Citadel of the Crimson/Scarlet -- I kept forgetting -- Minotaur. In general, I think everyone enjoyed it, and it was a different experience for us, having not done much old-school gaming beyond the occasional LotFP playtest.

Here are my thoughts based on one adventure and a month of play:

Darkness and light: This is one of the big selling points of the game, with darkness bringing increased danger, and tracking light sources having increased importance, but in practice it was irrelevant. The players took steps to mitigate the risk and carried plenty of light sources, and tracking light started to feel more like busywork than gameplay; you could have reduced everyone's inventory capacity by one or two slots to account for torches and just assumed they could see.

The one time it should have been relevant, when the wizard ran off with the only light source in order to distract some enemies, the rest of the party was in what was more or less an outdoor area in full daylight. Oh well.

(I placed the dungeon within easy travel of a town where the player-characters could rest and restock; maybe light sources would have been more of an issue if they had been more isolated. One to ponder.)

Death saves and stabilisation: I'm not fully convinced by this mechanic. In the interests of honest playtesting, we followed the procedures through and the elf fighter expired after a number of failed attempts to revive him. Fix? I think in future I would rule that if the situation is "safe" -- at this point the enemies had left to pursue the wizard -- then attempts to stabilise a fallen character work without a roll.

Encumbrance: I like the simplified, slot-based system. It's easy, with a minimum of book-keeping, but there were plenty of times when the party had to make interesting decisions about what to take and what to leave behind.

Experience and treasure: The way Shadowdark tracks experience and treasure is weird, but once you get your head around it it feels quite elegant, and I prefer it to the meticulous counting of every single copper coin. Money did become a bit irrelevant, in part because there was nothing to spend it on, but I believe the full rules have more options for this. The adventure as written should have had the experience values for the treasure packets listed, but that's a presentation issue more than a problem with the game.

Random Levelling: I loved the idea of this, but in practice it wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped. I allowed the players to roll at second level -- as written they don't roll until level three -- in the interests of playtesting, and I think I would continue to do it going forward as it makes the first couple of levels more engaging.

Spellcasting: Shadowdark drops Vancian fire-and-forget spellcasting in favour of casting rolls; if you succeed you cast the spell and it's available again, but if you fail you don't cast and you forget the spell until you rest. The players seemed to prefer it, but I thought the wizard player was perhaps a bit demoralised on the occasions when none of his spell rolls succeeded. Fix? I am tempted to rule that spellcasters can pick one spell that they can cast without fear of failure.

Weapon limits: The "classic" weapon usage limits return and I've never liked them. If you want to be a wizard with a broadsword, then be a wizard with a broadsword. I'd probably fix this in my usual way: weapon damage equal to hit dice, regardless of weapon type, so that wizard's broadsword does 1d4 damage, but a fighter would do 1d8 with it. +1 for two-handed weapons. Shadowdark borrows the finesse weapon property from D&D5 and I think I would probably limit that to just fighters and thieves to reflect their better combat training.

I think everyone enjoyed playing something a bit different, and getting used to the different mindset of old-school play; more thinking outside the box in terms of fighting, negotiating, retreating, using the environment more than character abilities, that sort of thing. I'm in no hurry to play Shadowdark again, but if my group requested it I'd be quite happy to run it. With some tweaks.

Our plan is to play a short Old-School Essentials campaign in May. It will be interesting to see how that compares, as a more traditional approach to the same sort of play.

Shagrat Don't Surf

Hang on.

Sauron is Kurtz, sent into Middle-earth, gone native and setting himself up as a god-king.

Gandalf is Willard, sent by the Valar to deal with Sauron-Kurtz.

The Valar are clearly MACV-SOG.

Willard even has a "fellowship" -- Boromir is Chief Phillips, obvs -- although Willard doesn't try to outsource everything like Gandalf does.

This is the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night, if you were wondering.

Iä! Iä! Football Fhtagn!

On Sunday morning I went out to the middle of nowhere to watch the nephew's under-nines football team play. Across the road from the pitch was this building:

I don't think I've ever seen that word in the real world before.

Bloody Initiative

The "other day" Stuart and I played some Blood & Steel. It's a competent platoon-level wargame but doesn't feel much like the era and setting it's purporting to model. It does have some compelling mechanics, not least the initiative rules and I am always interested in interesting initiative rules.

(I tried to get more "i" words in there. I really did.)

In Blood & Steel you roll a number of d10s based on your army's size, one per discrete unit, at the start of a turn. A four or higher means that dice grants two actions, otherwise it's only one.

If you roll more ones than tens, something bad happens, which is generated from a random table. If it's more tens than ones, then you get a bonus, also from a random table. Some of the mishaps almost seemed like benefits, and vice versa, which I think is by design.

Then each player selects a dice -- in secret! -- and the players reveal their selected dice together. The player with the highest revealed dice goes first. One assumes that in multiplayer games, other players would go in order of results.

The winning player selects a unit and then takes one or more -- depending on the result -- actions, before handing over to the next player. Then the players select their next dice.

I like a lot about this. It has the basic simplicity of rolling high to go first, but the benefits/mishaps add a bit of extra randomness and surprise to it. The secret selection brings in a little bit of strategy so it's not totally random, and you can make plans even with a terrible set of rolls.

(I can imagine there are situations in which you might want to select a low roll, or even engage in a bit of bluffing. I don't really have the personality for bluffing, and in the game with Stuart, I kept rolling tens anyway, so it didn't come up.)

This seems like it would be easy to bolt on to other wargames, and I feel like it could probably be adapted to a role-playing game too.