The Complete Works Of Zorin Greystar

Part 4

The One With No Whales

OK, back to Zorin. No weird self-imposed deadlines, just me writing until I get tired of it, some desultory editing, and then posting. (Note: Wrote this on Sunday, now it is Wed, so this is the ‘desultory editing’ phase. If I post again next Sunday, I’m still on schedule. Go me!)

On the off chance someone wandered here by accident (OK, honestly, that’s more likely than someone ending up here by choice), this is Part IV of my walkthrough of a mid-80s unofficial D&D supplement, from an era where they were dwindling off. While once they roamed the gamestores in massive herds, filling the shelves, they were fading in favor of fantasy heartbreakers and more professional material. Yet they persisted, much as I persist in working on this antiquated mode of internet communication. Should I just condense all my opinions to 300 characters, perhaps accompanied by a Spongebob gif? No! I shall rage, rage, against the dying of the light!

(Watch, now the next update will be six months from now.)

Lessee, we last left off with a look at the Weapon Breakage Chart, whose layout also broke my soul (such as it is), because it’s seems that the physical limits of whatever tools they were using for layout (at this point (1984), odds are good they were analog, though that’s not certain) could have made that chart, and several others, legible, but for some reason, the choice was made not to bother.

That is the past. Let us turn to the future! (And by ‘the future’, I mean, ‘the next page’).

And as we step into the future, we must also keep one foot in the past, as I see another example of the weird type of typo that pervades this book. The correct term is “lacunae”, meaning a missing word in a text (among other definitions), a word I’ve known since about 10th grade, but which I have had almost no cause to use in an appropriate context.

Specifically:

If a shield is used, there is a 20% chance that the ??? will take the damage rather than the armor.

(The ??? shows the missing word, if that wasn’t clear. They’re not literally in the text. I know I shouldn’t have to explain this, but I’ve social-media induced PTSD about needing to state everything explicitly.)

This runs against my earlier assumption that this pattern of missing words in the magic section was due to a search/replace error. I am used to a lot of normal typos in books of this (or any era), or “Page XX”, or contradictory rules for various reasons, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen lacunae this frequently in a single work. It’s a puzzle¹, and it gnaws at me, more so knowing I’ll never have the answer, because there’s no way I’m going to be the kind of asshole who will try to track down someone 40+ years after the fact and ask them about their editing. (In the unlikely event any of the creators are reading this, I’d be happy to hear your feedback, comments, and corrections, perhaps on a piece of paper wrapped around a brick you hurled through my window.)

Go Ahead, Make Your Little Saving Throws

(I was sure I’d used that reference before, as it’s trite and obvious, but I couldn’t find it by searching this site. Weird.)

Now we get to the new saving throw system. At the end of the prior part, I suspected there would be math. Let’s find out together, shall we?

Yep, there’s math, and once again, it’s made more complex by the explanation than it needs to be. It takes a page and a half of text to say “For every 3 full levels of the spell, increase the save by 1; for every 3 levels of difference between the caster and the target, increase or decrease by 1.”

So if you’re 10th level and have a base save vs. spell of 15, and an 11th level magic-user casts a 5th level spell at you, your save is at -1 due to the spell level. (If it were a 6th level spell or the MU was 13th level, it would be a -2. If both were true, -4.)

This is pretty simple (honestly, it’s simpler than a similar system I am playing with in my own old-school variant rules), and doesn’t seem exceptionally unbalanced. It will be unusual to be encountering enemies more than 3 levels above or below yourself, so most of the time, that adjustment is 0, and with only 9 spell levels (I assume… but these type of supplements often go On Beyond Zebra, that is, 10+ level spells), you have only 4 possible modifiers (0-3). It would be more complex if you didn’t round down until after you’d added in any dangling thirds, which are like dangling participles except for math. You also need to calculate your base save every time you go up a level, but again, only on multiples of 3. (Magical armor adds, or rather subtracts, its plusses, in that +1 armor makes your base save 1 less.)

(It becomes much simpler, and the math is the same, if you change everything to a modifier to the roll, not to the target number, which is how D&D finally did it by 3e.)

 There is, thus, one chart for base saving throws by class and type.

Fumbles!

 

Everyone loves tripping on an invisible tortoise that isn’t there, breaking your skull, and dying, right? (If you know what I’m talking about, yeah, you’re Old School. And probably, you’re just plain Old.)

The fumble charts are labelled A through F. At first, I thought this was degree of severity, ala RoleMaster’s system, but rather, you roll on ‘A’ to determine which of the other charts you roll on. I would have used a different labeling system, but this is a minor peccadillo.

(Worth noting is that there was a prior admonition that the DM not be bound to anatomically impossible results, but to modify the given effects to some plausible equivalent. When dealing with as many body shapes and sizes as a typical fantasy RPG, this is wise. The alternative is increasingly complex hit location systems, or custom hit tables per creature, and then there are issues of size and angle. I rather like Hero system’s method where hit locations are arranged on the table top-to-bottom for a humanoid, and your size or angle of attack (a flying kick, or a gut punch) modifies the roll to bias results appropriately.)

Ah, the charts can chain. Interesting. And confusing. Each chart requires a percentile roll. OK so far. 98-99 on Chart B is “As above, but also roll on Chart C.” As above… what? Does that mean “reroll to get a result that doesn’t include ‘roll on another chart’, and then add that result to the effects of the next chart”? Let’s assume it does.

I’m going to include all of ‘A’ here, because it’s interesting – each of the sub-tables deal with a general category of ‘How You Fucked Up’. That is different from most fumble systems that include escalating tables, which tend to include a variety of conceptual errors in each table, and increase severity as you move up the scale. (Thus, a ‘Type A’ result might be ‘Weapon slips in your grip, -1 to your next attack’, while a ‘Type E’ could be ‘Your weapon flies from your hand, striking nearest ally’.)

(I also keep saying ‘critical’ when I’m looking at ‘fumble’. It’s actually odd to have scaled fumbles, even more odd to detail them before criticals, but neither is actually bad. Just unexpected. I like unexpected.) (Also, they’re not critical hits, they’re exceptional hits, which is a perfectly cromulent term, just not the standard vernacular. At least they’re not ‘Strikes of the Fourth Calling’ or some such. That’s a 90s thing.

Fumble Chart A
01-25 Lose balance, roll on Chart B.
26-40 Weapon may slip from grasp, roll on Chart C. If not possible, roll on Chart B.
41-55 Hit timing off, personal or weapon damage may result, roll on Chart D.
56-70 Weapon entangled, roll on Chart E.
71-90 Normal miss, but defense is impaired, roll on Chart F.
91-99 Poor aim, may hit others. Roll on Chart G. If not possible, roll on Chart B.
00 Very unlucky, random results. Roll on Chart H.

The charts themselves are straightforward, lacking the grisly humor common in such things. And, also, lacunae alert! The “E” chart includes “Make dexterity roll at 1/2, as ???” . “As above” is presumably what is meant.

It is possible to have an exceptional hit on yourself, but that requires a rather extraordinary run of bad luck.

Exception. Abort, Retry, Ignore?

And now we get to Critical, or rather Exceptional, hits. This follows a pattern similar to the Fumbles, in that there’s a kind of ‘master chart’ for location and then sub-charts for each, but there’s no equivalent labeling system. Sure, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin, or possibly the bugbear, of little minds, but there’s also no reason for the lack of parallelism.

So let’s look at the charts.

Hmm… first, they contain a bit more gore, which I like, but without the kind of morbid glee I’ve come to expect from this genre of game mechanic. Second, they have sub-charts in themselves — for example:

56-65 Head, general Brain varied results:

01-10 50%-100% of memory of memory lost
11-49 Death.
50-59 Incoherence: the victim is unable to think coherently; intelligence effectively lowered to 4.
60-69 Insanity: type and extent G.M.’s discretion.
70-79 Intelligence lowered 1-6 points
80-84 Motor ability (dexterity) lowered points.
85 No adverse effect.
86-90 Total paralyzation: all voluntary muscle control lost.
91-95 ??? loss: all speech is garbled stuttering.
96-00 Roll twice on this table

Lacunae Alert! I think 91-95 should be “Mouth” or “Jaw”.

Next time – Spells, and that should conclude this walkthrough.

---

1: Irony of ironies — while I was editing my sentence on missing words, I noted I had originally written “it’s puzzle”, not “it’s a puzzle”.²
2: Ironically, irony doesn’t mean what I’m using it to mean. Much like ‘literally’ now means ‘figuratively’, its meaning has shifted.