Guardians of the Flame

[Speaker]

How many of you have taken inspiration for your campaign from Joel Rosenburg's Guardians of the Flame series?

As a brief synopsis of the first book in the series, titled The Sleeping Dragon, several college students sit down for a pseudo-D&D campaign, and end up being sent into a very grim and gritty campaign world by the DM. The series focuses on their exploits and encounters in this world, which I won't give up to much about--read the books if your interested.

To start this thread off, here s what I have learned from the Guardians of the Flame series, and applied to my DMing.

-PCs are not invincible if they are stupid. One of the PCs in the book dies off in the first few hours because of stupidity and overconfidence on his part. Even long-term characters are at risk.

-A number of my house rules are inspired from his writing. For example, a rule that governs blindness caused by sudden transition from darkness to light, or vice versa. Lets my players pull the 'I throw a torch into the oil barrel and use the cover to slip the dagger into my hand' trick. Very cinematic.

-Wizards keep their heads down during a siege or battle, because a lightning bolt slinger soon becomes the #1 target. Rosenberg comes closer to explaining how huge battles and castles can exist in the same world as teleporting, flying magic users.

-What can be done with magic if the casters really think it through. For example, a type of gunpowder that is actually super heated water compressed into a tiny pellet made unbreakable by magic- touch it with water, and it goes off. Pow. The conlfict between earth-introduced technology and magic is handled very well.

-His depiction of nobility. They have the power, and the corruption that comes with it.

Any other readers want to pitch in with what they thought of the series (and the related books, ex. Not Exactly the Three Musketeers )?

 

[Tiefling]

Isn't water incompressible?

 

[jgbrowning]

perhaps

Isn't water incompressible?

if you restrict yourself to that boring sience crap...

joe b.

 

[Reynard]

I am not sure how much gaming inspiration I have taken from the Guardians of the Flame, but I will say that it was the very first "grown up" fastasy series I ever read and I loved it. I have read those books like four times and am likely (thanks to this thread) go back and read them again, as it has been a couple of years. I though the characterization (of heroes and villains and those in between) was wonderfully done and the setting was *definitely* the kind I would like to be aplayer in: you have a huge, yet somewhat mundane, enemy to fight and all the magic and dragons and otherworldy tech on your side means nothing when you geta sword in your gut. I highly recommend the series to anyone who has not read it.

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

Isn't water incompressible?

Just what we need - Dehydrated water!

 

[Speaker]

Don't know if I had the details of the water gunpowder. Likely got it all wrong.

If not, put it down to exactly what I was talking about - the potential of what high level magic users can do.

 

[Ashy]

While I don't think that I've taken anything from the series in my games (other than blunt inspiration), I do love the series and have since high school, when I first read them. I have them all in hardback now and treasure them greatly... Well, maybe I did take the bit about how dwarves cannot swim due to their increased density, but other than that...

Wow - what a series - makes you really rethink slavery and slavers in a campaign, that's for sure....

 

[EOL]

It's interesting because I probably haven't thought about those books in many, many years, but another thread (The Mathematics of Survivability ) was talking about how spells like raise dead should be costly and not cast lightly nor frequently, and it reminded me of the resurrection from the first book, which was a major event. And then I looked at the board and amazingly enough there was a Guardians of the Flame thread, cool!

 

[Speaker]

Well, maybe I did take the bit about how dwarves cannot swim due to their increased density, but other than that...

I have always felt the need to make that a house rule, but never got around to it. Might bring it to the house rules board at some point, see if it could be balanced by some advantage...

I also like the way invisibility works for low level wizards. Since it makes everything inviable, minor invisibility spells prevent the subject from being able to see. Higher level wizards, of course, are able to negate that disadvantage by casting a second spell on the subjects eyes.

 

[Dr. Zoom]

I read the series long ago. I thought it was very entertaining. I named a dwarf fighter after the dwarf/paralyzed guy in the book, though I just took the first name (Ahira). He turned out to be one of my best and most fun characters.