1  INTRODUCTION

 
    This is a high-level overview, intended as an introduction to Plynck for players of all degrees of experience.  Those who have played before will undoubtedly find sections 1.1 and 1.3 repetitive (and possibly boring); feel free to skip over them.  Section 1.2 delves into the "why"s of running the world of Plynck in the way it is: and as such is recommended for those curious about that.  And section 1.4 is a tiny little bit of the Creation Myths -- since everyone on Plynck knows (and believes) this, it is useful background information to have.

    Contents of this chapter:
1.1 Fantasy Role Playing
1.2 Why Use AD&D 3.0
1.3 Adventuring
1.4 Mythos

1.1  Fantasy Role Playing

[2005 note: This section was initially written for an audience of neophyte FRPers.  Skip it if you want.]

    Dungeons & Dragons (and such variants as this) are role playing games involving large amounts of interaction between the players and the Dungeon Master (DM).  The DM is in charge of a world -- ambitious ones are in charge of an entire cosmos -- wherein magic works and characters run around having adventures, fighting, acquiring gold and magic, and occasionally dying.  The DM is responsible for "building" the world: creating the topology of the land, sprinkling monsters and treasure around, "running" the monsters when they are encountered by the party of adventurers, and all the other details of keeping an entire world going.
    The player is responsible for "rolling up" a character:  determining some basic characteristics like Strength and Intelligence, deciding a few things like Species, Gender, and Class; and most importantly, giving the character an individual personality and outlook on life.  This last will not happen immediately, but will develop as the character is run, and will continue to evolve over the life of the character.
    After all the players have created their characters, the characters get together and sally forth to find adventure, explore the wilderness, recover some stolen object, destroy the ring, whatever reason the group of characters collectively discovers for venturing out from the safe, tame, dull towns and farms they've come from: setting out under the thrill of possibly gaining immense wealth, or dying in the process.  These adventures generally cannot be fulfilled in just a few hours, so an adventure normally consists of  several runs.  Quite often enough new things have happened during these runs, that several other adventures sprout off, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish when one adventure finished and another began.
    Realism is sometimes a point of contention in FRP.  Obviously, with magic floating around everywhere, it is pointless to talk about making the game "realistic".  On the other hand, the more the players are helped into believing in the world as a workable entity, the less energy they will have to use to suspend disbelief, and the more they will be able to enjoy running.  On the third (luckily, this is a fantasy world) hand, too much realism takes too long to run and makes the game boring.  Hopefully, a balance between these extremes has been achieved in Plynck; please (at the least) bear with the conventions that have been developed to simplify some of the harder-to-deal-with-realistically aspects of the world.
    By the way, please do not think that death is a painless thing when it happens to "just a character".  A few runs worth of developing your character, and the two of you will become so well bonded that you will feel every scratch, rejoice at every victory, as much as if you were really there.  This is where the true enjoyment and enticement of FRP lies: in the self-absorption of your role as a character.  The game is not  a contest to see who can acquire the most gold or experience points, but rather an opportunity for the players to create and live a role which is interesting, exciting, and flatly impossible in the real world.  When FRP is played at its best, the DM and players join in living the creation of an adventure as captivating as the best fantasy epics.


1.2  Why Use AD&D 3.0

    As in, both: "Why not stay with AD&D 3.5?" and "Why stay with AD&D at all?"

    There are a number of reasons for moving, seemingly backwards, to AD&D 3.0.  The primary one is stability.  WotC is no longer doing anything with 3.0, beyond acknowledging its existence and, for now, continuing to maintain the webpages dedicated to it.  Everything new, exciting, evolving, changing, is going on in 3.5.  And on.  And on.  And on.  A new 3.5 rule book comes out every two or three months.  In my personal opinion, this continuous stream of new rule books, and the ensuing profit, is all the justification and purpose that WotC needs for doing this.  Stability is not a goal; stability would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
     After reading many of these supplemental books, I find them to be rushed, insufficiently integrated, and especially poor at game balance.  Many of the newer base and prestige classes are not at all reasonable, when placed side-by-side with the traditional classes.  Likewise, new spells are frequently assigned at seemingly random levels for the spellcaster, with inadequate consideration of how powerful these spells truly are, compared to others already at that level.  And new writeups of old spells -- or more accurately: new writeups of spells which coincidentally have the same name as previously existing spells -- pay no attention to what that change means, for any spellcaster who has permanently selected it as part of their repertoire.
    In fact, one huge badness with this non-stable, continuous outporing of new books, is that existing characters are unable to make use of much of the new stuff in the new books.  Oh, there are a few timid attempts to compensate for this, such as allowing one relatively low spell to be replaced at each up-level-ing.  But all of these are roughly as useful as shifting the order of the deck chairs on the Titanic.  The only way, within the expanding 3.5 universe, of having a character with repetoire full potential, is to roll up a new one any time a new book comes out. 
    Which, in an obvious corollary, means that those players with access to the new books will have the best characters.  Thus encouraging the target audience to rush out and buy each new book as soon as it is published.  Ka-chink!  [Actually, you have to admit that it is very clever of WotC's executives -- not good for the gamers, but really really good for the WotC stockholders.]
   
    I keep toying with trying to start up a group using mostly Albion rules.  And keep deciding "no" for two main reasons.  One is that everyone in this group is reasonably familiar with AD&D, and making them learn an entirely new system doesn't seem like a good use of our time.  The second is that AD&D 3.0 -- and even 3.5 initially -- are immensly better than AD&D 1.0; which the Albion rules came into existence as a protest against.
    There are a few changes from 3.0 to 3.5 which I think are improvements, and did solve problems.  I'd like to meld them in, as I find it possible to do so smoothly.  
    Beyond that, even with all the drastic improvements AD&D 3.0 has over earlier versions [*]  it still has not always caught up with the FRP system Nancy Prince evolved for Albion.  As I said above, I have no intention of importing all of Albion's rules: that's way too much work on all our parts.   But there are a few places where I think inserting Albion's improvements will be easy and unobtrusive.

[*]  Once upon a time, female characters were, by the rules, not allowed to be as strong as male characters - and there were long debate threads as to why this was appropriate - alternating with other entries as to why it was stupid.  This, and other original - and now discarded - idiocies, give me plenty of evidence that AD&D has gotten better.

    For more details on this topic, see "3.1 Limitations",


1.3  Adventuring

    [This section is mostly a general discussion on running.  It contains a few observations on the two most frequent types of adventures: Wilderness and Dungeon.  If you feel you already know all this, then there is no need to read about it again.]

    Basically, there are two types of runs: Wilderness or Dungeon.  Wilderness runs take several game days (or weeks) to complete and are relatively low keyed.  Encounters have a normal chance of happening which is much smaller than when in a Dungeon.   Thus the encounters are spread out, there is time for healing, and magic users can regain their spell slots.   Furthermore, at least in daytime, it is often possible to see the monsters a good distance off, and use missile weapons on them at little personal risk.
    Dungeons, on the other hand, are very intense.  The chances of encountering a monster are extermly high, and very frequent.  Spell slots dwindle rapidly in this environment, and there is usually no chance to stop and catch one's breath.  "Dungeon" is a generic term for this whole class of adventures, whether or not an actual dungeon is involved.  In general a Dungeon is either an old, infested ruin, or a building of some sort (above- or below-, or both, -ground); frequently with an Alpha monster, an "owner", who resides at the farthest level from the entrance (and who doesn't like visitors).  The owner will have stocked the dungeon with traps and monsters to discourage intruders (meaning you).
    The other main difference, between Wilderness runs and Dungeon runs, is the immediate goal of the players.  Most of the money is in various Dungeons, and these will simply have to be dared if the players want to become rich.  On the other hand, the Wilderness is a much safer place for acquiring experience points (XP) because of the recovery time between encounters.  Your character can survive being half-killed in each melee for a lot longer if the melees are days, instead of minutes, apart.  Of course, sometimes the group will have a goal which requires them to participate in a combination of both types.  Recovering some given magical artifact, for instance, could necessitate traveling a few thousand miles, and then invading an old castle.  And actually, as a general rule, the "best" Dungeons (those that haven't been picked over already) are nowhere near populated areas.


1.4  Mythos

    Lim-Pang Tung created the universe at the beginning of all things.  Also known as the White King, He fell -- after His exhausting effort -- into a deep sleep wherein He dreams all that is happening.  If ever He should Awaken, all that lives or moves or thinks for itself will cease to exist, disappearing as the veils of sleep when you wake in the dawn.  All that will be left will be the pretty toys, circling their colored lights; all of which He made before He slept.
    Thus all who exist in His dreams must be careful to not walk to hard, lest in the suddenness of their motion they wake Him whose very existence is theirs, but also their bane.  Lim-Pang Tung will wake again at the end of all time, when all but the Gods have long gone to an eternal slumber of their own.  Because of this the Gods are most extreme in their reactions to the situation, some angry because of their helplessness, and venting their frustrations on others (in their turn helpless against the Gods).  Others are accepting of the Tao as it is, and striving for a permanence which will outlast their own. 
    But all alike are careful to not indulge in the extremes of power usage, which might cause the White King to Awaken.  For when any one of them could, if forced into a corner, expend all his or her power self-destructively -- and thereby take the rest with him (her)  by causing an early Awakening -- it becomes imperative that a code of ethics be set up by the Gods and then followed precisely: so as to prevent any of their group feeling thusly threatened, and reacting strongly. 
    Because of this, there is only so much that a God will be willing to do in one place at one time: it being concentrations of expended power that run the risk of causing the Awakening.  For the most part, therefore, Gods do not intervene directly, but rather work through their subordinants, and especially through their holy servants.