GIUSEPPE ROTONDO

OLD SCHOOL
GAMING IN
SAVAGE WORLDS
&
Gold
Glory
 Old School Gaming
in Savage Worlds
by
Giuseppe Rotondo

Credits
A Space Orange 42 production

Producer: Gionata Dal Farra

Layout and Graphic Design: Matteo Ceresa
Editing: John Marron
Cover and Interior Art: Francesco Saverio Ferrara
Cartography: Dyson Logos

&
Gold
Glory

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Old School Gaming in
Savage Worlds

Introduction
Gold & Glory - Seven Deadly Dungeons lets you play the probably dishonorable
stories of ill-fated treasure hunters who’ll soon bite off more than they can chew…
unless they manage to return home with enough gold to carouse wildly until their
next expedition!
Gold & Glory is a method, and a toolbox, to enjoy the Fast, Furious and Fun rules
of Savage Worlds in a game of classic dungeon exploration.
The spirit of the rules and subsystems presented in the book owes much to the
innovative ideas and analyses produced by the RPG Old School Renaissance
community, and as such it may feel strange or, on the contrary, appear very
familiar, depending on your familiarity with that community.

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 Gold & Glory

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Old School Gaming in Savage Worlds

&
Gold
Glory
as...

7
 ...As a Classic
Dungeon Game

This guide is aimed at explaining the core concepts of “Classic Dungeon

Games” and how they interact with the Savage Worlds rules, through the Gold
& Glory book!
Gold & Glory has been designed from the start to bring to the table a very
specific experience: a classic game of dungeon exploration, with as a quick as
possible a set up.
This is the experience all the bits, tables and setting rules aim to, when used
together. So what is this “classic game of dungeon exploration”, exactly?
The Old School Renaissance movement has discussed, explored and developed
the idea of the original role playing games of the seventies to great length. A
general consensus has been found on a few basic concepts which, for the most,
revolve around player skill and player agency.

Player Skill: The Random Character

Random character generation was very common in the earliest role playing
games. Playing a randomly generated character might be horrible if you plan to
enjoy an epic, story-driven campaign. If, on the other hand, the game will be a
light-hearted romp through monster infested dungeons, where your wits will be
your best ally, playing a character that you didn’t choose proves to be perfectly
aligned with a basic, simple concept of classic games: a focus on players’ skill
(rather than characters’) to solve challenges. The character becomes, to all effects,
one more challenge for the player, inasmuch as it offers only some skills to best
face the dungeon.

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Dungeon Difficulty
Classic, location-based adventures have no linear progression, no predetermined
end, and no “balanced encounters”: opposition is just there, regardless of the
party’s strength. Following this approach, “the end of the adventure” usually is the
moment the party decides to retreat, and “difficulty” is self-regulated as a matter
of “penetration”: a Novice group will face two, three, four encounters, and grab
the treasure they can, while a Veteran (or higher!) party will probably storm the
dungeon and actively look for the most dangerous foes and richest loot, and have
their strength tested on such a longer run.

Player Skill: Notice Vs. Actual Inspection

Classic role playing games focused on players’ skill (rather than characters’) to
solve challenges. This means that, when the group enters a new dungeon room,
the players are expected to listen carefully to the GM’s description and figure out
if anything is odd and might be interesting, useful, or dangerous, and to further
investigate the environment by stating what they want to do and how. This,
instead of a simple “I roll Notice”, makes players directly responsible for their
successes (and failures!). Most entries in the Seven Deadly Dungeons describe traps
and other hazards with a format that states what can be easily seen, and what
can be found out with further inspection. If this is the style of play you choose to
adopt, no further roll should be required: the player should always be rewarded for
figuring things out without letting a die decide the result, provided that a) the way
the character inspects the situation is reasonably appropriate to the purpose and
b) an actual reward was there in the first place, be it a treasure or a danger that the
player has figured out how to disarm, avoid, or exploit against enemies.

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Player Skill: Risk and Reward

Classic exploration-based role playing games focused on players’ skill (rather than
characters’) to make meaningful decisions. This includes evaluating situations in
terms of risk and reward, with players deciding all the time whether to push on or
retreat, based on two factors: resource management and information.

Resources
While delving, the group’s resources dwindle slowly but steadily: they can be
actual resources the characters are aware of, like oil for lanterns or ammunition, or
elements outside the characters’ world, like Bennies, or something in between, like
Power Points, Wounds and even Encumbrance. So “pushing on” means deciding to
continue exploring despite running out of Bennies, with wounded characters, or
without Power Points available. In other words: accepting an increasing level of
risk, in order to get more rewards. All of this is already built-in within the Savage
Worlds rules, and is further reinforced within Gold & Glory via the setting rules
for Encumbrance, Prepared Spells, and Power Points Recovery.

Attrition Combat, Savage Worlds, Old School

“Attrition” is the word that defines the slow depletion of combat resources such
as Hit Points, and Attrition Combat is the type of combat that they produce, where
heroes and monsters slowly chip away each other’s Hit Points. This allows for
“balanced” but routinary, slow, predictable outcomes, and is a staple of the modern
iterations of the world’s most played role playing game. Was it the same in the
earlier editions? Not so much. Starting characters had very, very few Hit Points
(and they increased slowly with advancement) and many monsters, spells and
effects had the heroes just one roll away from instant death.
This should look reasonably familiar to anyone used to Savage Worlds’ swingy,
unpredictable (and exciting!) combat.

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Information
Reduced resources play against the decision to push on. Information, on the other
hand, is what plays for it, insomuch as the players know, or can make informed
hypotheses about, what lies ahead, be it danger or treasure.
In Gold & Glory, this is achieved on three different levels.
The Rumors tables for the Seven Deadly Dungeons anticipate some of the
dungeon features, allowing players to choose any useful gear to bring along,
which spells to prepare, some of the specific dangers that they might have to face,
and some of the interesting treasures that might be hidden within the dungeons.
Rumors work on a global level. At the other extreme, room descriptions almost
always include clues to hidden traps or trap-like features, as well as several
instances of clearly visible dangers such as open chasms, pits full of snakes, and
so on, which means the heroes get to choose whether to try and navigate the
obstacle, or even try to use it against monsters, for example pushing them down
an open chasm.
Chasms also work as a “distancing device” that allows to see what is down there
and decide if, and plan how, to interact with it.
Unique locations, such as the lairs of very dangerous beasts, are usually
“scripted” so that their entrance can be recognized by (clever) players. Other
special, “scripted” dungeon features include iron bars that separate one room from
another, again distancing the group from treasures or monsters that can only be
reached if they find a suitable route to the room behind the bars (or avoided by
steering away from that part of the dungeon!).

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 ...As a Toolbox
in Your Games

Gold & Glory can be used as is, or as a toolbox for your fantasy campaigns.
The most useful tools are the random character generation system and the
Dungeon Deck.

Wild Draw Characters

The Wild Draw Characters generation is designed to provide ready heroes in a
minute, and as such is a great tool to also generate random NPCs, as long as you
are fine with the races and “classes” the system offers, which are fairly generic
fantasy staples.
In order to use it in settings which are not that generic, you should make a
further step and customize the system to include the races and character types
of your world. This can be as easy as rewriting the races and classes table to suit
your needs!
It doesn’t have to be a full rewrite, of course: you might just swap in and out a
few races, or change the “classes” to more accurately reflect the hero types your
game supports.

Connections
The Connections optional rules are as generic as possible, and as such may be used
out of the book to enrich any character’s background and to create interesting
relationships in virtually any game.
All you need to consider is if two characters can be considered “same class”, i.e.

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they have at least one similar area of expertise; in a world such as the Deadlands
Weird West, where all characters are humans, the “same race” may apply to
characters coming from the same area or region (the Union, for example, or the
Sioux Nations). And if none of those applies, the “different race, different class”
table will still work!

The Dungeon Deck

At its core, the Dungeon Deck can be seen as a location-based adventure generator.
Location-based adventure are enormously different from linear adventures that
are structured as a sequence of scenes from A to Z.
Linear adventures usually are heavily story-driven and “push” the characters
from one scene to the other via story devices (ambushes happen at the most
dramatic moment, the kidnappers are “programmed” to flee once their hideout is
discovered, and so on), with players being offered impactful choices on selected
occasions.
Location-based adventures usually have a backstory, but the players usually have
more freedom in navigating the scenario. Their freedom of movement within the
location means there is an “A scene”, but the following sequence is completely in
the players’ hands and, more importantly, there is no predetermined finale, or “Z
scene”.
This means the pace and direction of the adventure is set by the group. They get
to decide when to push on, when to take a pause, and when to retreat. And it also
means the location (i.e. the GM, playing the opposition to the group) is expected to
react to the group’s decisions.

The Dungeon Deck system can be easily adapted to any type of location-based
adventure: all you have to do is fill in the free Gold & Glory Dungeon Template
available on drivethrurpg.com with your ideas. In science-fiction campaigns you
can have derelict spaceships, abandoned industrial facilities, alien hive structures.
Horror games could be set in iconic locations such as infested mansions, zombie-
ridden hospitals, and even “non euclidean nightmare dimensions”.

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17
 ...At Its Best

Gold & Glory has been designed from the start to bring to the table a very
specific experience: a classic game of dungeon exploration. The essence of
it, the way it was played during playtests, demos at conventions, and at the
author’s table, is a unique mix of a roleplaying game and a board game.
It works as a roleplaying game in that the players have the “tactical infinity”
that is virtually unique to tabletop roleplaying games: they can interact with
anything that is mentioned to be in the game world, and can do it in any
way they can think of. Complementary to it, is the role of the GM that allows
tactical infinity to be in place.
Gold & Glory also works as a board game in that it needs close to no
preparation: you sit at the table with the book, sheets, dice and cards, and
you are ready to go. Now, this is perfectly true, and perfectly fun, as long as
the players and the GM are fine with two things: following the In for the Gold
setting rule (including keeping conflicts between characters out of the game),
and keeping most of the game happening inside the dungeon.
At our tables, two narrative procedures have proved particularly successful
in making Gold & Glory as close as possible to such procedures: the Flashback
Introduction and the Quick Downtime.

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The Flashback Introduction

The Flashback Introduction was born during demo games at conventions and
has quickly become the best way to get into the game as quickly as possible while
engaging the players and sparkling their curiosity. At first it was just the result of
the short time available for demo games, but it proved to work perfectly well in
any situation, if you want to keep the game focused on dungeon exploration.
So this is how it’s done. After the player characters are generated, the GM unfolds
the battlemat on the table, draws the entrance to the dungeon and places the
characters miniatures right behind the entrance of the first room and, while doing
all of that, he explains why the heroes are there, giving any information available
from the dungeon introduction: “you’ve prepared all your gear and now are ready
to enter the Moldy Caves where, according to rumors, a band of bandits hid their
stolen treasures”. After that, the GM runs the Rumors and Research phase, keeping
it as a flashback: “So that’s why in the last few days you attempted to find out more
useful information, at the local inns or libraries”. And then proceeds to ask players
what they attempted.
This might seem over-complicated, or even useless, but what it actually achieves
is to keep tavern brawls, shopping sprees, romantic walks and other detours, out
of the game! Are those things bad in themselves? Of course not! But they drive
the game towards something else: a bit farther from the quick game of dungeon
exploration Gold & Glory wants to provide, and a bit closer to a full-blown rpg
campaign with a wider scope (which, again, is perfectly fine, if that’s what you are
looking for!).

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Quick Downtime
Downtime as codified within Gold & Glory is the time the heroes spend Carousing
or making Magical Research or Offerings to Solis. It also includes restocking
ammunition and other supplies, as well as upgrading gear buying better armor
and weapons. It begins as soon as the heroes are out of the dungeons, and starts
with the conversion of Loot Tokens into actual coins so that the loot can be split
among the heroes.
Keeping it quick is the GM’s job, and it is best achieved with same assumptions
Savage Worlds sets for Quick Encounters: a quick description of each situation
and, if needed, a general description of each character’s intentions, so that action
and narration go straight to their consequences.
The “time frame” for such activities is, ultimately, the (natural) healing times
characters might need to recover any Wounds. It is also the amount of time
characters should pay for lodgings and food! After that, there’s no reason why
they shouldn’t be adventuring again!

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Old School Gaming in Savage Worlds

&
Gold
Glory