Chasing My Tail
October 3rd, 2011
Hello, and welcome to another Dark Designs. This week, I’m going to talk about something that helps every game designer, every DM, every writer, and quite possibly every craftsman and just plain every person move forward and grow. I’m talking about introspection, and re-examining your previous work. Of course, today is also going to be about expanding on that work, and, in specific, it’s going to focus a lot on a recent experience that I had here at Necromancers of the Northwest that involved a lot of re-examining previous work. Specifically, our recently released product, A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf II.
For those of you who don’t interest yourselves in our commercial sourcebooks, the original Marchen der Daemonwulf was one of the first few books we released under our current production model, with shorter books (averaging around 25 pages, or perhaps just over) being released every other week for $2.49 apiece. In fact, I believe it was the second such book, and only our fourth book that was released with a cost.
Marchen der Daemonwulf applied the “Liber Vampyr treatment” to werewolves. In other words, it provided ways for players to play a werewolf character, including support for a wide variety of different werewolf myths. This was accomplished with a base class, and, more broadly, through over 50 werewolf feats, which granted and improved upon various werewolf powers. The book was a blast to write, and everyone enjoyed writing it, and, in fact, at the time, I remember thinking to myself that this book was Liber Vampyr done right (there are a few things about Liber Vampyr that I would change, given the option; mostly I would want to make a much clearer divide between feats and blood powers, or just make them all feats, as in Marchen der Daemonwulf).
When we wrote Marchen der Daemonwulf, there were a lot of aspects of werewolf folklore and myth that we just didn’t have room to follow up on. We had lots of ideas for prestige classes and feats and spells and alternate class features and all sorts of different things which we never bothered to actually design and develop, because we knew we wouldn’t have room for them. Since our goal at the time was to have roughly 16-20 page books, and Marchen der Daemonwulf was 28 pages (including covers and legal pages, etc.) we already went a little long.
This means that when we finished Marchen der Daemonwulf, we knew we were going to want to do a sequel. The next thing we did, of course, was go on to write The Ebon Vault: Secrets of the Staff, and after that Ancient Warriors: Way of the Ninja, and generally proceeded to do other things. Finally, though, a few weeks ago (more, by the time this article gets posted), we decided it was time to revisit the curse of lycanthropy.
In deciding what we would include in Marchen der Daemonwulf II, we first had to consider what we liked and disliked about the original. We knew that we liked the actual werewolf feats: these had been praised by our critics, and we knew the concept was solid: you build your own werewolf monster using whichever feats you liked until the werewolf’s abilities matched the ones from your preferred werewolf mythology. Another full helping of feats would certainly be included.
Not all aspects of Marchen der Daemonwulf were unmitigated successes, however. The lycaonite class produced some very mixed results, with some people loving the novelty of the class’s lunar mechanic, and others feeling that it would be too complicated and cumbersome to use at the table, and concerned about the wild swings in power depending on the day of the month.
Looking back on the lunar mechanic, I think I ultimately stand by it. While it’s true that the mechanic does require a certain amount of paperwork, it’s something that only changes every game-week or so, which may be several sessions of play. Keeping track of the current state of the moon is something that becomes second nature after a little while, and you can just make a tally on your sheet. As far as the wild fluctuations in power, well…that was kind of the point of the mechanic. It’s true that not everyone might enjoy that kind of experience, but it’s not like the class tries to hide it. In the same way that you should probably avoid playing an assassin unless you want to ambush people, and you shouldn’t play a fighter if you want to cast spells, you shouldn’t be a lycaonite if you like stability. It’s a tempestuous class. Another example would be the factotum class from the 3.5 book Dungeonscape. It’s a perfectly solid class, but it tends to result in characters who are very powerful for the first two or three rounds of combat, but then aren’t very useful anymore. Some players enjoy that style of play, or at least like it as a change of pace, others would rather stick to a solid fighter.
Still, there are some things I would have done differently with the lunar mechanic, if I were doing it now. Mostly, I feel it was a mistake to release it without its own character sheet. We have since remedied that mistake, but I feel that not having it at the release may have damaged the class’s reputation somewhat. The reason is that the lunar mechanic does give you a lot of stats that change based on the phase of the moon, and that can get a bit confusing, if you don’t have a sheet of scratch paper, but the sheet gives you a handy way of tracking all of your bonuses and penalties at any given time of the month, as well as a convenient moon phase-tracker. Had it been released with Marchen der Daemonwulf, I think that a number of people who shied away from the class would have found it far more palatable.
My initial outline for Marchen der Daemonwulf II had a place for alternate class features for the lycaonite that would replace all of the lunar mechanics, in order to provide class support for those that don’t enjoy the mechanic (it’s true that, because of the nature of the feats, you don’t need to take lycaonite in order to be a Marchen der Daemonwulf werewolf, but it really helps). However, it was pointed out that a lycaonite without lunar mechanics is, essentially, a bonus werewolf feat every other level, plus the ability to make multiple bite attacks in a round. There wouldn’t be much point in calling it a “lycaonite,” when we could just make a new base class. Some thought was given to this, and we considered doing it, but ultimately we decided to go another direction instead. We may someday produce such alternate class features, or else an alternate class, but if that’s what you’re looking for in Marchen der Daemonwulf II, I’m afraid you won’t find it.
Instead, we decided to hit something that Marchen der Daemonwulf almost completely missed. In Liber Vampyr, in addition to the various vampire classes and prestige classes, we also provided a number of different vampire monsters, based on a variety (and sometimes a blend) of different vampire myths. Because Marchen der Daemonwulf was shorter, though, we skipped that and focused on getting werewolf support for players. This time around, we wanted to provide a little DM support in the form of alternate werewolves, which this book provides several of.
Another thing that you won’t find in Marchen der Daemonwulf II is more corpse-feeding feats. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the first book, the corpse-feeding feats are a series of feats that allow the werewolf character to gain a variety of benefits from devouring the corpses of sentient humanoids. The reason for their absence isn’t so much that we feel that they were bad. In fact, devouring corpses is a huge part of European werewolf lore (far more so than I had imagined when we began Marchen der Daemonwulf), and I’m glad that we represented it in that first book. Still, we know that it’s not something that everyone will want to do, or even feel comfortable with, and it didn’t really seem to be exciting anyone. We may revisit corpse feeding in the future, but we didn’t think it needed to be in this book.
In fact, one of the trickier parts of making the werewolf feats in Marchen der Daemonwulf II was not relying too much on the feats from Marchen der Daemonwulf. The reason for this is that technically the two are different products, and people who just buy Marchen der Daemonwulf II should still be able to make use of its contents without Marchen der Daemonwulf.
Since all of the werewolf feats require and build on the Curse of the Beast feat, we knew going in that we would probably have to reprint that feat. We also selected a few other feats, such as Hybrid Form and Greatwulf form, that we knew we would want to keep as well, plus a handful of feats that we were expanding on in the book: for example, this book features a number of new feats that grant werewolves greater utility from their Howl of the Night Hunter feat, and so we reprinted Howl of the Night Hunter, as well.
In some of these cases, reprinting the feat also allowed us to do something that a designer rarely gets the option to do: update his content based on hindsight. Mechanically speaking, we didn’t make any major changes to any of the feats we reprinted. In fact, we made no changes at all, in most cases. Most of the changes had to do with how we worded the feats, upgrading our parlance to be easier to follow and more in line with the Pathfinder rules. In a couple of cases small errata were included, but for the most part, they have the same message: we’ve just had the opportunity to rewrite it in a way that’s easier to understand and more precise, to boot.
I had talked at the beginning of the article about how this article would be about revisiting previous work. It did involve a lot of revisiting Marchen der Daemonwulf, but not a lot of talk about revisiting in general, and how it’s a useful tool and a wonderful luxury. I’m out of space for today, but I promise to revisit the topic of revisiting things sometime in the near future. Not next week, mind you, as we’ll be talking about banditry, but soon.
Thanks for reading, and have a great day.