The Inside Scoop on Gaming

The Living City Campaign is the RPGA's (Roleplaying Gamers' Association) setting for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The RPGA, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an organization that runs a variety of games across the country (and even out of the country). A person can bring a single character to these games and use it at any RPGA event no matter its location. The character's status is recorded by player and then verified via a signature by the game judge in charge.

But my purpose isn't to review the RPGA itself--just one the Living Campaigns it controls. A Living Campaign is, as I explained the previous paragraph, a game where you can the same character anywhere where a Living event is played and what happens to that character is officially for all like games. The Living City campaign uses Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2^nd Edition) and is set in the Forgotten Realms. More specifically, most adventures take place in either the cities of Procampur or Raven's Bluff (the latter being older with more games set there).

It is increasingly obvious that those who edit and publish these Living City modules are complete idiots. I have choicer words than that to describe them, but such language is unbecoming and probably wouldn't see the light of day on RPG.NET. Most publishers have a habit of rejecting work filled with poor prose, clichés, and cheesy ideas. Those who decide which modules will be used for Living City events have decided to do the opposite and only publish modules that have those three criteria.

The vast majority of Living City adventures are, as a result, poorly plotted, terribly written, and have a level of quality bordering on an Ed Wood movie (only his stuff was better). Plots inevitably involve either solving a weak mystery (where insufficient clues are provided) or to go on a quest to recover something. And somewhere during the adventure PCs are ambushed, usually by thugs in an alley. That says it all for the adventures themselves (although my reviews of two of them should appear at the same time as this review).

Strangely, it's not the modules that make Living City so bad. A bad module can still be all right if the DM rewrites half of it (gee, I would never have done something like that…) or is really good at running bad modules and making them fun. No, what makes Living City so unbearable is its bad house rules. In Living City, you see, you can't do anything evil. You can't do much of anything at all. Need to fight the bad guys? Well, don't bring out any fire spells. Causing fires in the city will lead to your arrest. Thieves, take it from me and my own experience: it isn't a good idea to steal anything. You might be put in jail (and won't be able to play your character for a period of real and not game time). In fact, break any rule, and your character is likely to be fined or put in jail. I had a character that had a psychological problem and, as a result, flashed people. He nearly went to jail for it!

Of course the city's laws aren't the only concern. If there's an AD&D rule that's useful, it will be disallowed in Living City. Greek oil and poison are forbidden. A character with exceptional strength can't even get the full damage bonus with missile weapons if the weapon's damage is less than the bonus itself. And that's just the beginning of the bad house rules. I'm sick of typing them, so onward I go.

Let's get into rewards. One of the things that makes AD&D fun, beyond actual roleplaying (which is the point), is getting the cool treasure at the end. Cool treasure being magic, not money. In the distant past Living City gave out good magic items. Now, for reasons unknown, they give out crap. Swords +1 abound. Magic items that don't usually have charges do now. I have a pair of gloves of missile snaring and the DM wouldn't allow me to use them to their full potential because…well, I don't really know why he wouldn't. Had something stuck where the sun doesn't shine, I suppose.

As for the players and people running the actual games…well, best not make it personal. I don't need more hate mail. I get enough of that as it is.

Ultimately, the Living City campaign is a wasted effort. I rarely, if ever, play the games. Instead I run them in an effort to make them better and thus more enjoyable for everyone. In fact, that is why I do it. It's a personal challenge to see if bad adventures can be made fun. But I won't put people in jail and they can't make me!

I write this review, but the way, in hopes that Wizards of the Coast (who many see as the Antichrist for some peculiar reason), being a company who's not as worried about offending people, will lax the restrictions and make Living City fun to play once more.