Doing in the Wizard?

I've been pondering, of late, what "Low Magic" really means. Yes, the easy answer is to say "Look at D20 3.x edition and cut that by 75%." It's also a bit tounge-in-cheek, I suppose, and irreverent, but whatever, it's fun to mock games that we don't like and don't play. So my answer has always been that I like a low magic gaming experience, or at the very least, a game in which remains magical, whatever that means.

It's not just as simple as a single scale with D20 gonzo magic on the one hand and a completely mundane world on the other. It's not just the amount of magic, but the level of magic seen, how flashy it is, how spectacular it is versus how subtle it is. Another aspect of the issue in my mind is the cost. The typical fantasy game - or at least the modern day and age where we feel we are entitled to anything we want without consequence - have trained us to look at magic as "just another tool to be used" and that there are few if any downsides. The endless arguments recently online among the younger gamers who look at Vancian magic as some sort of cheat and that a wizard just isn't being wizardly unless he's throwing spells every single round as if he were carrying some sort of Star Trek phaser that only runs out of power when it's convenient to the plot.

So just the other day, I pulled out of my gaming closet a copy of the old Game of Thrones RPG from the defunct Guardians of Order. (Yes, he's going to talk about those novels again!) Those of us familiar with the books will know that magic is extraordinarly rare and low key, if it even exists at all most of the time. What magic we know does exist for sure is fraught with peril and exacts a terrible price for whatever boon it might grant. The game captures this motif by effectively removing magic entirely except for a vague and difficult to interpret chapter that gives a general outline of how to handle magic. Essentially, it's governed by what you want to do and what tools you have and is very symbolic, i.e., bathing a child in hot ox blood to grant him strength and courage. And it always comes with a price and a high chance of something going terribly wrong.

So, my question for whomever actually still reads this thing I can so rarely update, is this: what would the effect be if I were to "tune out" a great deal of the magic level of even a low magic game? Would I be entirely unfair if I were to consider doing this for real?

If I removed permanent items (all those lovely +1 swords, magic carpets, and cubic gates) and simply left expendable items like potions, low charged wands, and scrolls, how would everything else have to be changed? Obviously, creatures like gargoyles and others that required magic weapons to affect would be significantly more dangerous. It'd become a requirement for a wizard or priest with some appropriate spells to deal with them as even the most powerful warriors in the world wouldn't even be able to put a chip in them. OF course, I could compensate by removing the requirement for a magic weapon to hit and instituting a version of D20's Damage Reduction mechanic instead. So yes, a powerful fighter could harm a gargoyle, but it'd be tough going for him. I could create a spell or two for the wizards and priests to temporarily empower a mundane weapon with the power of magic. At this point, spellcasters become far more powerful relatively speaking, and perhaps even an integral part of life as every community would need one or three to defend them against the horrors of the wilds lurking on all sides. Every community might host a caster and travelling casters might find themselves made honored guests as locals conive to keep him there, perhaps marry him off to unwed daughters and anchor him in place.

Taking it another step, I've often thought of how the matter is handled in D20modern (yes, another D20 game, but at the moment they serve as decent models) wherin casters are "prestige classes" that cannot be taken until later in the career of an adventurer. It might be possible to follow the same kind of model with 0D&D or AD&D by adjusting the spells per level of the wizard and priest classes to decrease the number of spells and push off gaining new spells to later levels. Perhaps even limiting what spells are available. No more magic missile, fireball, and meteor strike. Instead, only lower key spells are available. Or perhaps only certain schools such as necromantic and diniation (the concept of a character reading bones or entrails to helop the party out entertains me somwhat). I'm pretty sure that at this level, even the oldest old school gamers would start objecting.

But what I'm really interested in at this point, is how people would react to the GM removing magic almost in entirety? There are no casters, no permanent magic items excpet, perhaps, for ancient holy relics that come with enough attached strings to make even the most foolhardy players think twice about picking them up. No potions, scrolls, wands, or staves. No easy access to healing and disease curing. The only magic that would be allowed would be intricate and dangerous rituals that are intended to accomplish one set aim, such as trading a life for a life to hopefully raise a needed hero from the dead to fight one last time to protect the innocent. How would this function in terms of a D&D game model? Or would the system simply not be able to handle it?

I'm curious to listen to the thoughts of others on this.

Kingdoms of Kalamar

Since not enough people seemingly know about this, I'm bringing it up here and doing my little bit to schill for the Kenzer guys. The Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting is something that I think should be more popular than it is today. In my view, this is a setting that learned all of the best lessons of Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms and produced one of the best campaign settings for sale today. And yes, I'm a great fan of it, why do you ask?

Since Dave can say it better than I can, I present you with his own words on the matter.

From my perspective, what draws me the most about it, is simply the campaign setting book. It's a mark of its quality, I think, that I can open the book to just about any page at random and pick out at least a dozen adventure ideas and long term campaign plans. Liberating the dwarf stronghold Karasta, recently conquered by the resurgent Kalamaran Empire of the Vast. Fighting the slavers and priests of the Overlord of Pel Brolenon, a city where more than 75% of the population is in bondage. Exploring the remains of Kolokar's Barrier, a great wall built to hold back the invading barbarians. There's just so much in every page that, frankly, I actually get giddy with ideas for running a game in this world, and that's what it is, a world. It's not just a campaign setting, it's a fully realized world in so many ways.

The greatest aspect is, in my view, that just about any adventure type is supported. Political and cultural adventure types are the setting's forte for sure, but at the same time, it's easy to shove that into the background and just hurl oneself into dungeon crawling and monster slaying. God killing? Yeah, you can do that.

I recommend it to all the Old Schoolers, Middle Schoolers, and New Schoolers out there that the CS is worth a look, even if you only pick up the PDF copy of the campaign setting and Atlas (currently with 4e mechanics in it, but so few you could count the instances on one hand and still have fingers left over), or grab a used copy of the book from Amazon or NobleKnight. It's definately worth your time.

And now, I'll refrain from further shameless displays of fanboyism.

How Fantastic is Fantasy?

I know I shouldn't, but it's a bit like a dog worrying at a bone. On those dull days in the office when no actual work seems to happen, but a lot of "station keeping" goes on, I typically surf over to the forums (usually at Giant in the Playground since they're terribly entertaining and infuriating at times and the Kenzer & Co. boards since Dave and Jolly and their crew are just so damned cool for refusing to be just "another turd in the pot" company) and pick on the New School folks. It's a bit hypocritical, I know, since I'm not really and Old School kind of guy, but sometimes they just tickle me.

Today and yesterday, though, they actually got me to thinking on a couple of things. Primarily, the discussion of what level of the fantastic is "right" for a game. Just how strange, fantastic, or downright odd do things get before one draws the line? As things on the internet go, there was no real room for moderate views in this discussion. You were either for, what was termed, dull and "Tolkienian" fantasy, or you would permit anything and everything (specifically, everything and anything that a player wanted, but that's another argument entirely). The example that got dredged up from the fevered recesses of somebody's mind was that you could either be playing Greyhawk with nothing but the core Human, Elf, Dwarf etc. core races and classes, or you would play in a game where the players could create a sentient squirrel wizard riding in the "cockpit/wand turret" of a constructed flesh golem mobile platform.

I swear on all that is holy that I'm not making that last bit up. See for yourself.

My first reaction has got to be . . . why the fuck would you want to play such an absurd character? What possible interest would you have in it? I mean that seriously. What connection could you make to even access such a concept as anything other than a monster? Why would it not simply be swarmed by folks the instant it stepped into public and slain for the abomination that it is? And of course, the opposite would be just ye olde boring D&D campaign right?

Now that the thought's been rattling around in my brain, slowly eating at my sanity (if it weren't for my horse, I would not have gone back to school that year . . .), I have to ask myself at this point whether there's a real difference between such a . . . thing . . . and the concept of wizards conjuring fireballs from thin air and giant winged reptiles with terminal halitosis hoarding coins and magical items? I like to say often that there's a difference between suspending your disbelief, and hanging it by the neck until dead, and that this clearly falls on that side of the line, but why is that on one side, and the dwarf on the other? Huge metropolitan campaigns where everybody plays as their favorite monster race on that side, and the race preference charts on the other? I mean hell, I'm in the middle of working through some material for Thylia, and I stumbled across a line where I traced a particular artifact to extra-terrestrials, and I'm OK with that, but still something that wierd as even the sentien necromantic rodent sticks in my craw.

James has talked about this in passing over at Grognardia (and I'm not throwing up a link because I'm far too lazy and if you read this you're most certainly familiar with his work) as it concerns that notable module about and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Gamma World. He termed it Science Fantasy, and I think it's fair to say that in its original inception, D&D was, as much as Gamma World, a science fantasy game rather than a strict fantasy game. In the end, I find myself much more comfortable on the Fantasy side of that equation, even so far as to prefer fantasy literature that reads less like fantasy and more like medieval period pieces - A Song of Ice and Fire as case in point.

Am I wrong to sit here and strip out such things from "my" game? Am I hammering D&D into a mold that it doesn't really entirely fit? The answer is, I don't know. What I do know, though, is that the more strangeness (specifically, the more breaks from our own reality that we are forced to make) in a game, the harder it becomes for the players and the DM to insert themselves into the world and interact with it. It becomes less about exploring, and more about constnatly trying to keep your feet and learn about the next thing that's been changed. The wierder things get, the more quickly I, as a player, get thrown out of immersion.

And I suppose that I'm a real fuddy who should just hang up his dice because in browsing through a PDF of The Savage Frontier supplement for the Forgotten Realms, I'm forced to admit that, while the background material is excellent, most of the interesting locations that they call out to attention just drive me creatively up the wall. The stronghold of Ascelhorn, now fallen after its occupants had dealings with Hell in order to preserve their power, now known as Hellgate Keep (or something like that): good. It's interesting, and provoking. It then goes on to say that the keep is now ruiled by a type VI demon with hordes of minion demons and undead and that it is a terrible place on the brink of conquering the entire North: not so good. As much as I like demons and devils, and I really do, for some unidentifiable reason, this just . . . ugh. And it's largely the same for much of the Forgotten Realms. It seems that magic and "fantasy" are just leaking out of its pores, every page screaming D&D adventure. If anything, the best way I can describe it is that the Realms are just too . . . well . . ."too D&D." They're too heavily influenced by the way the game works, allowing mechanics and rules books to shape the realm than letting the rules serve the world setting, as I see Greyhawk doing for the most part.

I honestly have no conclusion here, other than to say that this is bothering me with some absurd shame about not being fantasy enough. Am I wrong here? Where do others draw their line between what does and does not make it into a D&D, or any other system's campaign?

Fear and Insanely Brave PC's

Last time, I talked briefly about fear and horror in RPG's (D&D specifically) since it was so close to Halloween. Since I rarely am not thinking about horror stories (both movies and books really), and since I watched the excelent Dracula and His Brides the other night, I've further refined my thinking on this in terms of RPG's.

One of the most difficult realities to face when trying to run a horror campaign, or a campaign with horrifying elements in it, is that players tend to treat their characters as if they were absurdly brave. Of course, compared to the average inhabitant of any world, PC's truly are brave. It takes real courage to face down the average monstrous threats from bugbears to orcs, from kobolds to great wyrms, and most of the inhabitants of the Monster Manual: the average peasant runs in terror while the PC's stand their ground. Which is entirely appropriate in most instances. After all, most of us really do have the itch to play a heroic character seeking glory and riches (or maybe just riches).

But there are times when such courage becomes a little ridiculous. Whether you're actively trying to frighten the players/characters or they simply should be frightened, most likely the players simply are not. It's frustrating even if you manage to build up an unsettling atmosphere that it becomes just like any other action centric session once the veils are torn away and the center of the mystery is unveiled.

The comment (singular) from the last post recommended treating it like a horror movie, at least in part: turn the players into a passive audience for short times. This I cannot agree with. Simply put, this is a role playing game, not a horror flick. Part of, perhaps the main part of, the fear rests in the choices the players make, or are forced to make. It's about looking at your list of choices and knowing that there isn't a "good" choice and a "bad" choice, merely choices and few, if any of them, wholly worthy of the risk or likely to repair the problem(s) at hand. You've killed a vampire and taken his powerful magic item from him, but the local powers that be (a pack of wolfwere bards who run the nearby city and university) are in front of you and want that item. You don't know what they'll do with that magic item, but you can only assume that it will be nothing good, but keeping it from them means a fight and there's nothing at all you can do to stand up to them, at least for the moment. What, precisely, do you do here?

Is that horror? Or is that not? I'm not entirely sure, honestly, but it's something that certainly horrifies me, the thought of trying to do something good (yes, for the most part I, as a player, tend to create and run characters motivated a little less by the money and more by the thought of improving the world in some small way) and instead having merely transitioned the danger/evil from one place to another, or even worse, increased the danger inadvertaintly. Of course, the danger here is in pushing it too far and refusing the players any level of success instead of simply moderating or corrupted success. After a certain point, it feels pointless and the fun gets drained out of it all.

This is also, incidentally, where I believe the concept of fear and horror checks rests. These little "tools" for the DM out of Ravenloft the setting are there to tell the players how their characters feel. While certainly useful at times, it tends to be something with all the subltety of a hammer. They can be useful to be sure and can, in some cases, give cues to players who like to get into the swing of things to have a lot of fun, but most often they feel contrived and more like something that overrides player choice in favor of a "desired result." Something that results from too much faith and emphasis on plat rather than story as well.

One of the best methods for putting a little fear into players that I've found is in the monsters. No, not in finding stronger and more terrifying monsters, but in using them properly. Nothing puts a crimp in players' styles quicker, at times, than a monster that refuses to "play fair" by simply standing there and dying politely. More than likely, the monsters have plans and goals and are going to act to further them even when, or especially when the players aren't ready for them. Moreover, monsters don't play fair and limit themselves to attacking "military targets. Wanna upset a player? Take an NPC that they've become attached to, who has sheltered them or provided aid in some way, and have a frustrated opponent who can't strike directly at the players kill them or turn them instead.

Another great tool is monsters that "violate" the PC's, or do something just "wrong" enough the get past the character/player filter. I love Goblyns (spelled with a "y") for this. Nothing says scary like a moderately tough humanoid that will eat your face off the first chance it gets (literally). And for added fun, see what you get when you add just a little bit of low level telepathy or instant communication as they did in Castles Forlorn.

There have to be better ways of communicating genuine horror if not actual fear than turning the players into an audience and perfuse purple prose.

Mildewed Thoughts

Just getting a few things out of my brain before I suffer a stroke over them.

1. I wonder if it's possible to make a living by actually working reasonble hours. I've done nothing other than sleep and work for about a month and a half now, and it's inexorably pushing me towards a psychotic break. You wouldn't like me when I'm crazy.

2. Thoughts of late turn, naturally, to horror. In the D&D world, that naturally leads to thoughts of Ravenloft the campaign setting. There's a nice little review of Ravenloft's history over at Advanced Gaming Theory, from the first module all the way through the horrors that were inflicted on us by crappy writers and the bitch in charge of TSR at the time. I agree with most of it, but I'll say that there are a few of the modules that were really excellent, most notable among them was Castles Forlorn, a madening little twist of insanity involving time travel and a bad guy to drive you loopy.

More specifically here, in between TPS status reports, I've been pondering how a good horror campaign in AD&D would run without falling into the same traps that TSR's middle and late Ravenloft did. TSR, you see, noticed that most of our greatest horror movies and stories revolved around a central "bad guy" or antagonistic character. Dracula is mostly about the titular vampire and the efforts organized to defeat it. Frankenstein's tale is about the mad doctor's perverse disfigurement of the natrual cycles of birth, life, and death (and if you have forgotten just how perverse this really was, go back and read it again keeping in the front of your mind the image of a woman giving birth). Hell, in the end, even Halloween (our first and greatest slasher movie) became, in the end, mostly about Mr. Meyers. This is great, because the greatest horror, in my view, revolves around the concept of a single, charismatic damned soul and those caught up in its orbit or a very few other rare concepts.

But, of course, this doesn't make for a good roleplaying game. What scares us on the big screen just makes for crappy gaming, really, so what, exactly, is the composition of a good horror game? I suspect it has little to do with Ravenloft itself and more with understanding the underpinnings of what frightens us individually rather than what frightens us in the books and movies.

3. Thoughts of late also turn, for some unknowable reason, to The Peninsular War and the prospect of a game set in the style of The Richard Sharpe series. If you've not experienced this particular series, it behooves you to take some time and get into it. I think it'd be a great deal of fun to put together a series of "adventures" or more appropriately, missions, casting the players as members of a detached unit in either the military intelligence corps or part of the 95th Rifles. Of course, the trick would be to avoid the "Star Wars Syndrome" and keep major personalities out of the game. As tempting as it might be to put Welsey into play, I'd hate myself for doing it.

4. Thylia is log jammed in a corner of my mind, slowly developing a tumor that keeps me up nights. I find it becoming darker and darker in my mind and less and less like the original D&D, and even less like the morality play that 2nd edition can turn into. Bleak and hopeless wastes populated by men and women who's sole concern is to survive to the next day. I feel compelled, here, to quote "The Widening Gyre," but I shall resist such temptation for now. I'd like, more and more to actually assemble a group to give this world a twirl, but it's hard to set aside time to actually do that. Perhaps a Thursday or Friday night game, weekly or bi-weekly, but really, how many northern Jersey gamers are there?

Drow Part I

I don't like the Drow; which is to say that I do not like what the Drow have been turned into after 20+ years of D&D history and gaming. Somehow, somewhere along the line, they changed from an altogether creepy, consciously immoral race of evil elves broken from their kin and mutated by the mysterious radiations of the depths below the earth to an entire race of chaotic good rebels against a decadent and evil society of their peers. I suspect, perhaps too strongly really, that a certain TSR fiction character by a certain author who shall remain nameless, though I tend to think he rather "gave permission" to a practice that was already rampant by that time. After all, I'm sure that by the time D3 came out, there were more than a few persons chomping at the bit to sink their teeth into a Drow character.

Of course, there are other issues at work. First, and in my mind foremost, how many different brands of elf do we really need? There's already mechanically distinct flavors for wood elves, high elves, grey elves, and elves ad nauseum. Do we really need a special entry for "evil elves"? Granted, according to the grand D&D mythos, Drow aren't just evil elves, they're mutated by the magical radiation of their deep, subterranean lairs, but at times that just seems like an excuse for the next generation of gamers to play an "elf with bonuses" rather than anything else. In their first appearance in Gary's writings (I think they showed up in the Monster Manual, but I may be mistaken), they were little more than a legend, a foot note to a larger elf entry. It was the especially magic nature of Gary's underworld that had changed them, an artifact of setting rather than of sort, thus, I don't think that Gary ever intended all Drow to look the same on paper. They were a prime target for referee individualization and in that light, I'm gutting the Drow of all their magical gizmos and noisemakers. They are, from my perspective, holdover elements from the setting of Greyhawk and, worse yet, the Forgotten Realms and have little or no relavence on my conception of what a conciously evil society of elves would be.

Second, there are whole layers of unfortunate implications orbiting around the dark skinned Drow. Of course I'm not going to attribute racism where none exists, but seriously, the situation is ripe for misinterpretation. Which isn't to mention why a race living underground and far from light would have its skin turn black when, scientifically speaking, the opposite would be true. Of course I know that for Gary, the Drow's blackness was largely metaphorical, a blackness of the soul that was physically manifested as darkened skin pigmentation, but at the same time, I don't see the need for this, leastways because the moment a player catches sight of a dark skinned elf underground he knows precisely what he's in for. No, I see no need at all for dark skinned evil elves when there are other, more interesting ways to deal with physiognomatic ways of expressing inner darkness and spiritual rot. Salvatore from Name of the Rose springs to mind. Jeremy Irons as an "uber-morlock" even more so.

Of course, it's only natural from there to move on to the completely dysfunctional society. Honestly, has anybody seen a culture more rooted in backstabbing, betrayal, and self-gratification as the Drow are most often portrayed as? To the point of ineffectuality even. Nope, my Drow will work and play well, if not with others, than at least with each other.

Then there's the whole spider fixation. On the one hand, yeah, spiders creep me the fuck out. On the other, I'm really tired of Lolth and the dysfunction inspired by the whole premise. Honestly, here I'm torn about whether or not to pull it out entirely.

From what's left (a basic, pointy eared elf), I want to build up towards something that's not related to a certain wangsty character that's inspired millions of copy cats.

What's With All The Ruins?: or Fantasy Urban Renewal

If there's one surety in any D&D campaign, it's a surfeit of crumbling ruins, mysterious misplaced castles and towers, and vast, intricate, underground complexes. Those underground complexes are another issue unto themselves, but that's neither here nor there. My question today is: where the hell do all those ruins come from?

For the most part, these types of things are only haphazardly explained in most campaigns, or not at all. Which is fine since the real world is replete with abandoned and decaying structures the purposes of which are either long forgotten or not widely known. Hell, Eastern Europe is positively lousy with decrepit castles, monastaries, and stone structures. So it's not exactly a tremendous stretch to imagine a fantastic, medieval stasis type world positively busting with such things. After all, you know how wizards are: they must have some sort of fetish for non-Euclidian geometry in home decor . . .

But the problem for me is that the little Smeagol in me, in all of us really, starts to ask "where are they from?". Who built these places and why? Who was the original owner of the castle that the PC's evicted a tribe of goblins from? Why? Where'd he go? What came before this? I'm always, as a player, snuffling around looking for a root cause, an origin, a precurser, which drives my DM absolutely insane at times. "Sometimes a castle is just a castle" indeed.

It's not crucial to explain every single nuance of the world, and in fact doing so is detrimental in the long run, but a ref owes it to himself and his players to at least throw out a generic, overarching rational for the surplus of crumbling architecture. First off, it provides an easier way for the ref to fend off the overly curious players who look to make a bigger comotion out of relatively minor details. You have no damn clue why that particular castle is there, but if you can tell them something, anything, then they'll probably be satisfied on some level.

Second, and better, it provides a potential jumping off point for deeper explorations by the players. It leads those curious players deeper into the world even though it's only an illusion of depth and into that curious place where the players start helping the ref build the world around them. Tell them the tower is a guard post and the really good ones will start asking the next obvious question: a guard against what? Their speculations can lead to some pretty decent ideas that inspire new directions. Who the hell knew a great hobgoblin nation lay just on the other side of that winding valley path? Or that in the deepest pit of this place was a magicaly spawned portal into some insanity inducing realm responsible for some of the stranges things in the world. Hey, owlbears have to come from somewhere don't they?

For its part, the current region of Thylia being details (the northwestern region of the continent for those who actually care) was the site of a gradual invasion and assimilation by the distant Thelerite Imperium. A fleet of 4 ships made landfall on the western shore and promptly informed the local population (mostly cloistered dwarf communities who cared little for anything but their craft and semi-nomadic bands of humans) that they had been conquered and were expected to render unto the Imperium. The dwarves promptly ignored the invaders in typical dwarven fashion for, south of their home kingdom, they really didn't care a whit what some poncy Imperator had to say. The tribal humans found the whole thing terribly amusing and proceeded with business as usual, treating the Thelerites as a mild curiosity and occasional trading partner: their steel weapons were, after all, far superior to the copper and knapped flint still used by many. The Thelerites, satisfied that they had succeeded in claiming the land expanded ever eastward in waves, leaving in their wake long defensive lines of keeps, towers, and walls that the natives simply went around, under, or over as was convenient.

Around 350 years ago, however, the Imerium began to recede towards the coast again and before long, the carefully built civil structure that they had created was gone. Few, according to the dwarves, cared or even noticed the change.

Earthdawn Opinions?

Earthdawn has recently caught my attention, though I hesitate to shell out $100 bucks to look at the new edition just on the chance it might be interesting.

Has anybody who actually reads this blog seen this game in any of its incarnations? How does it play? Got any opinions?

There are, I see, three editions. What's the comparison across them?

Evil is Petty

Following on from good men doing evil for the greater good, I'm moving towards one of my favorite, touchiest topics in terms of good and evil.

One of the commonest mainstay fantasy fiction (and sci-fi fiction for that matter)is the Evil Overlord. So common, in fact, that he has his own list that's moderately famous around the internet. Typically, the control vast armies of evil (draconians, orcs/goblins, insert evil monster of the week here) and are hell bent on conquering the world and molding it in their own image, but spend a great deal of time brooding in their tent or castle like Achiles until the heroes of the story (in our case, the PC's) are ready for the confrontation. It's a concept that's at once familiar and comforting to our inbred sensibilities, that a face can be put on evil, that there's an apparatus it has built up around it. The ability to name and identify the evil and, more specifically, to identify it as "that one over there" is empowering for most people, not only because it builds up the image of a confrontable font of darkness, but it's pseudo-exoneration of those who would oppose it, even if only in principle.

The industrial sized, world threatening, archetypal evil lord is such a common image and device that I'm sure everybody here could name at least half a dozen of them, even excluding Morgoth/Melkor, Sauron, and Hitler (as a literary device, really, and not neccessarily the real life figure).

At a game level, the concept is tremendously convenient since it allows us to build everything around a single, larger conflict. Dark Lord McScarypants is threatening Utopiaville and all kingdoms of sweetness and light in a bid to conquer the world and oppress the innocent and kick little puppies on the street. It's up to the heroes to stop him! Everything else just writes itself into that framework and there's really nothing wrong with it.

When we try to break out of the stereotypical molds of games, we tend to do away with the conspicuous Dark Lords and replace them with "the Big Bad Evil Guy" or BBEG as he's commonly referred to on the mind numbing gaming forums. This guy is a bit like a demoted evil overlord. He gives us the convenience of an identifiable source of evil, or at least of the identifiable troubles, but he's somehow less hokey than the overpowering overlord ruling from his thrown of skulls and clotted blood in the land of shadows somewhere over that direction, but could you maybe look into this strange influx of goblins we seem to be having before you run off and take care of that? More conveniently, with the redefinition of "campaign" as a 1 year start to finish story by the newer editions of D&D, it's something that gives a strong focus to the game. The players are there to investigate the machinations and doings of some evil being who is causing troubles locally or globally or whatever. Over a 1 year time period, sandbox play really isn't that great and, it seems, that D20 type D&D requires a stronger focal point than simply wandering around and looking for adventure. The big bad(s) are a narrative tool, just on a slightly less cosmic scale.

As comforting and convenient as that all is, it ignores some specific and overt realities: and how I do love reality for inspiration. The issue is that evil is petty. Evil is, for the most part, small, relatively contained, and self-interested. World spanning and archetypal evils like that are relatively rare. Far more common are small things, like wife beating, child abuse, murder of local political opponents, and so on. Open up the news today, and you'll find an example of just what I mean. For the record, I find that particular news item extraordinarily unpleasant and the punishment leveled against the girl far insufficient.

For every Morgoth, there are ten Sharky's. For every Hitler inaugurating genocidal campaigns against hated ethnicities, there are a thousand Cheyenne Cherry's throwing kittens into hot ovens just to hear the cries of pain and fear it makes before dying. And more often than not, these evils are motivated almost entirely by self-interest and not some Moorcockian esoteric concepts of law and chaos, good vs. evil. The evil priest lurking at the outskirts of civilization sacrificing innocents in the hopes that his dark master will grant him immortality in the form of undeath as a lich or vampire or specter. A man who rapes and murders a woman who, in town council, blocked one of his pet projects.* A woman who bathes in the blood of her handmaidens in order to preserve her youth and beauty. These kinds of people are memorable simply because they are realistic and believable and because their crimes are far more personal than any plotting and scheming dark lord.

Why am I talking about this? Simply because, hand in hand with "all politics are local" goes "most evil is petty, small, and local." While there might be vast, brooding evil intelligences out in the game world, plotting the overthrow of order, the downfall of light, or whatever, far more effective game villains are of the smaller sort. These kinds of opponents tend to stick in players' minds when they are encountered and, as I said within the Bernardo Gui post, force the players themselves to confront something that is challenging or difficult for them.





*I'm very clear here that such topics are not always suitable for all games, nor am I encouraging those who don't want to deal with such unsavory topics to every include them in their games, nor should such topics EVER be treated lightly.

A Discussion: The Commodification of Fun

This is meant to be the introduction to a discussion. It's hardly original, I guess, as James Mal over at Grognardia has talked about this before (he called it "brandification" if I recall and I'm a little too lazy to go digging through his prolific writings to find the exact articles while I'm supposed to be earning a paycheck) and James Raggi over at LotFP has his truly infamous I Hate Fun article that links in here, and I'm sorry if I missed others as I know it's been a topic of discussion around here for a long time.

I suppose that this concept is at its most prominent in the WOTC advertisement and talking points about their new 4th edition, though as far as I can tell it's been somewhat pulled back lately, but it was very prominent with 3rd edition and 2nd edition as well. The powers that be at TSR and then at WOTC realized that selling modules to 1 out of 7 gamers (or, lets be generous and say 1 out of 4) just wasn't a good way to "grow the brand" and make money hand over fist. If only 25% of your targeted audience was going to be shelling out cash for your product, then you were essentially doomed to a niche of the niche market that is gaming. Not only that, modules have somewhat limited replay value: once you've played through The Tomb of Horrors once you won't be too surprised by the sphere of anihilation in the devil face.

The solution? Well, the solution for TSR/WOTC was two-fold. First, and most famously, was to publish books aimed not just at the DM, but at every player at the table. "Holy shit a complete book about elves with two hundred pages of elf specific mechanics and material?! I have to get one of those!" I don't, honestly, have a problem with this. Whatever your opinion of the quality of the material, I don't think anybody would begrudge the publishers the desire to sell something to more than just the DM. Not only that, it's this, I would argue, that kept D&D alive for some time and propelled it to being even more acceptable today than ever before even to the point of a prime time commercial advertising D&D.

Second, and this is where I take umbrage, there arose a trend towards "official" materials for games. Official expansions to already existing worlds, the thing that utterly destroyed Forgotten Realms, almost in a literal sense as WOTC had to rain down an apocalypse on the setting in order to divorce itself from what had come before. Official expanded rules, officialy sanctioned methodology, and on and on until the coup de grace came when it seemed that WOTC attempted to convince us to buy official fun by convincing us that previous versions of the game were truly "unfun" (a word I have grown to absolutely despise over the years).

Lest I paint myself into a rhetorical corner here, I'm going to say now that I don't think that this is a phenomenon unique to those money grubbing bastards at T$R or the Coastal Wizards. If anything, it started with the Gary himself. I remember a Sage Advice column (I think it was Sage Advice at least) where he responded to a letter about alternate rules or house rules or something saying that anybody who wasn't playing AD&D according to the letter of the rules set down in the three core books simply wasn't playing the same game. Somebody, I'm sure, will remind me of the exact verbiage at some point. What I remember most about the whole thing was thinking what a pompous jackass the man was and if this guy was really the same one who had written about taking the rules and making them your own.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I understand what he was getting at in less than politic language, and even agree with him to a certain point, but it sparked a moment of worry that here was the creator of the game engaging in delineating the difference between official D&D/AD&D and "that other stuff" and going so far as to say that alternate rules not printed by him fell into the later category. In a strange sort of way, I think that Gary spelled his own doom at TSR in that way.

So now comes the question. Has D&D, the enjoyment of that game . . . has "fun" . . . become commodified? Become dependent to a greater or lesser extent upon continued purchasing of official published material? Is it to the detriment or benefit of the game at large? Where do these lines get drawn?

My inclination is to say that, in regards to the current incarnation of the "official" D&D game (i.e., fourth edition), the answer is yes most assuredly. More strongly so because WOTC's "expanded core" concept. It was just as true in 3.x when, in order to accord with whatever character concept somebody had, new material was continualy published to further refine and define these concepts to the point where a knight and a samurai weren't just variations of fighters, but were unique and individualized classes and, in the case of the samurai, several unique classes.

Is it a benifit or a detriment? This I don't have a real answer for. On the one hand, I will decry the vast majority of the schlock published over the last several years by WOTC as exactly what it is: bird cage liner. However, at the same time, I seriously doubt that D&D would have survived today in a continually published form if not for the books we today call crap and the money grubbing bastards that distribute them in expansion pack games.

Or am I just a lunatic?

Your thoughts?

The Best Mysteries Are The Ones Never Solved

One of the better dungeons - in terms of map, context, and content - is in DL8, Dragons of Despair, about midway through the much maligned DL series of modules. Of course, the plot that runs through this particular installment of the DragonLance modules is as horrific as any of the others, but the maps of the High Clerist's Tower illustrate again that, at least some of the time, the locations of these modules are worth pulling out and using even if you loathe and despise the plot hammer hanging over your head. The tower is big, convoluted, full of little traps and, if actively defended by an organized military force, an absolute terror to an invading party.

But that particular dungeon is not what this post is really about, at least not primarily.

Earlier today, I was chatting with a fellow in the office about DL8 and the High Clerist's Tower and how it was a great set of maps when he made the comment that (paraphrasing) "it's a shame because out of the context of the module, no players will figure out the mystery about the dragon traps on the lower level." My response (exact wording) was "so?".

Sometimes, there are mysterious things in dungeons, or in worlds, that may have nothing at all to do with what's going on, but they attract interest all the same. A great joy of mine as a DM would be having the players walk into the High Clerist's Tower and spend time and effort trying to figure out the nature of the dragon trap rooms, whether or not it actually mattered in the context I was using the dungeon. It gets them engaged in the goings on in the universe on a level greater and deeper than looking for the next ambulatory XP baloon to bust. It gives me an opportunity, even if there really is no mystery at all and that oddly shaped room at the end of the corridor is nothing but an oddly shaped room, to throw in some of the background material that I've put together by this time. "You've heard of Kethric the Mad, High Architect to Emporor Kabori, and that he used to build strangely shaped structures that were rumored to obey eldritch and arcane lines of force . . ." It might not have anything at all to do with Kethric, but if I wanted to add that story of the architect in, this is the perfect time to do it, a time when the players are more apt to actually listen to it and retain it for when Kethric becomes much more important somewhere else.

I think a great way to get the players to sit up and pay attention now and then, especially if their attention is starting to wander, is to throw in something wierd or strange: some fixture of the dungeon or a sound or a nameless monument that just begs for investigation, but is, in the end, nothing at all.

Of course, it could all go wrong and you could end up coaxing your players into spending three hours of valuable game time poring over a nothing, but players tend to do that anyway.

Some possibilities:

A standing stone at the approximate center of a meadow. Any dwarf or other stone crafty individual can tell that it is of a type of stone not found in this region for a hundred miles or more; it was obviously moved purposefully to this location long ago.

Deep within a labarythine dungeon, an imposing statue of a minotaur or other humanoidsh being points dramatically in a random direction, perhaps at a wall, or back down the corridor the PC's just entered by.

Every twenty feet or so, the color of the flooring of the corridor or room changes from a typical matte grey to a shiny ebony. No readily discernable pattern is evident, but who knows what can be discovered with an extended survey?

A large rectangular room with two foot square tiles arranged in a pattern as a chessboard.

As above, except tiles are set poorly in sand so that when one is stepped on it depresses while others around it rise up. (gleefully stolen from Kenzer's version of B2)

A gurgling sound, remeniscent of a bubbling stream or other running water is heard periodically. No such water source can be discovered with cursory exploration.

Falling In Love With Swords and Wizardry

I splurged recently and picked up copies of Knockspell #1 and #2, Swords and Wizardry, and the S&W monster book. Of course, I had my downloaded copy of the rules beforehand and had gone through them more than once, but in seeing it all out on paper, I feel inspired by it. I'm beginning to see Thylia more and more in the light of Swords and Wizardry and am rapidly coming to a point where I'll use it instead of AD&D 2e if and when Thylia becomes an actual game.

Now all I have to do is find a group of gamers.

And some free time.

Supplements and Sorcery

James over at Grognardia talks about there being, perhaps, too many supplements coming out now from the Old School and the possible negative effects of this. Specifically, that the market - such as it is - will be "flooded with a glut of product" that will only be read, never used in play.

Of course, he's right. Coming from the 2nd edition background that I do, I can't ever forget some of the worst symptoms of a dying TSR. Hell, no matter how hard I try, I can never forget about elfish prosthetic limbs, nor rangers that turn into trees and grow third arms out of their chests, or any of a hundred really bad ideas enshrined as "options" in the Complete Handbook series of supplements. Of course, this bred the most despicable attitude I can think of in D&D: that of player entitlement - the thought that if the player wants something, he should be allowed to have it and that the DM is nothing more than a rules reciter and wish fulfiller. Maybe that's a little extreme, but not overly in my experience.

There's a great deal of good that can be said for a game that can be played entirely out of one book. That's what made Gamma World 1e and 2e so fabulous. Not to mention the Rules Cyclopedia (maybe that one's cheating since it's half a dozen books under one binding, but still). That's what makes Swords and Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord so great. One book, some dice, some friends, and a lot of imagination. No official supplements, add ins, or do-majiggers.

But then again, there's a problem with it too. If your game only has one book and no continuing publications (a magazine, some modules, a supplement here and there), then like it or not, true or not, a good portion of the fan base is going to look at it and call it a dead system and walk away. Except for Fight On! magazine (if you even know about it), Labyrinth Lord is pretty much a single product with nothing new on the horizon. Why would I pick it up now wen there's just oodles of stuff coming out of every quarter supporting Swords and Wizardry? Hell, as James himself said, there's practically a metric buttload of stuff I can use to fiddle with and slap a great game together, or ignore entirely if I want, but the community around that game is live and vibrant as evidenced by the published material. Labyrinth Lord looks, at first blush, to be a little dead on the vine.

Don't get me wrong, I really like LL and have a copy next to my chair for nightly perusal along with a whole passel of other gaming books. It's just that I'd like to see a Labyrinth Lord companion or something like that hit the shelves. I know, I know, shut up and or put up.

The horrific glut of supplements over the course of 2nd edition did one thing really really well. It imagined the shit out of AD&D. Hundreds of ideas just thrown at the wall to see what would stick. Every time somebody had a brain fart that read along the lines of "wouldn't it be cool if . . .", it ended up in a book that sold for $20 each to thousands. Yeah, maybe the dross to gems ratio was a little out of rational whack, but one must admit that amidst all the bunk, there were some pretty damn cool ideas out there! And the great thing is, no two people will ever agree on just what was cool and what was crap!

Take it to the current day. We've got little digest supplements and adventures and everybody's little brain farts being thrown into print via the internet or Lulu or whatever format for OSRIC and Swords and Wizardry and whatever other system clone is out there and there's a real hunger to see more, to put money into the hands of the creators. That's nothing but a good thing in my book, even if you find that 50%, or even 90%, of it is junk. You don't have to use the junk. You don't even have to use the gems. It just warms the subcockle region of my heart to actually be excited over some of these things again.

The Old School is viable again, and it's because people are throwing their ideas on paper and throwing it against the wall to see what sticks. It gives me real hope that one day, I'll be walking through a book store or, better yet, a toy store and see one of these books on the shelf for sale and a kid begging his mother for the $15 to buy it.

Screw purity. Screw the fear that piles and piles of junk might obscure the great tidbits. Put it out there and imagine the hell out of D&D again.

Polyglotism

Language is difficult to learn. Not just those weird, foreign languages, but even our native language. Hell, I've been speaking, writing, and reading the English language for near 28 years now, and I still haven't got it down 100%. None of us has. That's why it bothers me that adventurers in many FRPG's seem to be flawless polyglots, able to speak a number of languages without difficulty that would give even the most skilled linguists today pause. Worse yet, literacy seems to be nigh universal in those intelligent enough to learn it in the first place (or, for that matter, in games who even make a distinction between them).

That's yet another reason that I like 2nd edition non-weapon proficiencies. They offer me, as the DM, to limit the polyglot issue. Learning to speak a language takes up a full slot. Learning to read/write said language take an additional slot. That's a slot taken away from other things, like fire starting, mountaineering, riding, etc. So, yes, you can create a character who knows twelve dialects of elfese, but you're going to have to devote a great deal of study to it.

Of course, that doesn't even approach my general dissatisfaction with the whole "common" language idea, or alignment tongues, but that's another issue.

Lost Technology in Thylia

Just recently, I managed to get my greedy claws on a first edition, first printing of GRRM's Tuff Voyaging for cheap from the local book depository. I think that the fact that it's a first printing, first edition, and that I bought it for a steal (less than I'd pay for a "Value Meal" at the local fast food joint) excites me more than the actual content of the book at this point, but I'm a bibliophile, it's to be expected. Which is not to say the book isn't good so far as of page 17.

I will say, though, that based on my admitted complete guess as to what this "Plague Star" is, I'm very happy. Based on what is said in the text thus far, and what is not said, I'm guessing that the thing is actually some lost bit of ancient phlebotinum from "the old times" and it has some biological effect on organisms exposed to it. Likely some form of experiment by less than scrupulous precursers or some such.

Just a quick aside and fair warning: anybody who feels the need to explain to me outright what the thing is and spoil the rest of the book for me can just bugger the hell right off. I'm looking forward to being surprised as GRRM usually does not let me down that way.

Ok, back on topic.

What I find more interesting, though, is that the locals of the planet around which this Plague Star orbit have worked its existance into their mythology over the, presumable, millenia that it has affected them. It's far less a matter of "Hey, what's that medieval peasant doing with a ray gun?!?!" and rather a reaction that seemed popular back in the day this book was written, that myth, legend, and religion grew out of sentient need to explain the perceived, but the incomprehensible. Thus, the natives perceive the Plague Star, and the fact that it wipes out large segments of the population every three generations, but have no way at all of determining objectively what it is (i.e., no telescopes or anything like that) and so it gets labeled and added to the mythology rather than dealt with in a "scientific" manner.

This is, I suppose, Martin's employment of one of Clarke's laws, that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. This, I think, is how ancient technology should be introduced into a fantasy campaign that eschews the gonzo aspect. In the end, I have no problem with high technology making its way into the Thylia campaign, but my desire is for the players to brush up against it and, afterward, to never be quite sure what it was that they came across: a mystery that they either walk away with shaking their heads, or which drives them to continue on, seeking the root of it.

The Dotheric Obelisk

Discovered in the deep taiga, only a few hours' march from the tiny halfling settlement of Dotheris, the obelisk stands nearly 7 meters tall in the center of an inconspicuously verdent glade. The monument has runes in a strange language round the base, runes that defy both mundane and magical means of translation. Many believe that these runes contain secrets from the ancient past when a race with power far beyond the comprehension of current scholars walked the world. This group calls themselves the Dotheric Brotherhood and they have devoted themselves to the study of the obelisk, sure that other examples of the writing or instructions on how to harness its powers must exist. They pursue any scrap of information that might lead to great understanding of the monument, funding quests to unearth other treasures of the age, and even going so far as to employing an entire clan of dwarves to excavate around the base of the monument, looking to catalog its whole dimensions.

The Brotherhood, to some degree, is correct. The obelisk is, in fact, an artifact left behind by a race that came to this world millenia ago, and left mysteriously sometime before recorded history began according to modern scholars. The thing is a device designed to transfer heat energy and water from deep within the planet and bring them to the surface, terraforming the world to more closely resemble the one from which the ancient beings originated. The runes scribed in its side defy translation attempts simply because they are not actually language, but mathematical equations and data that provides activation protocols to the obelisk. The obelisk radiates no magic and is slightly warm to the touch. If activated, it may prove powerful enough to remake this part of the world, or after many thousands of years, it may have malfunctioned or broken down.

Death Jewel

A small blood red gem in an ornate mithril like setting appearing almost as a fine lace netting surrounding envoloping the crystal, all together about the size of a song bird's egg. Legend states that it was originally discovered by Geforic, a trickster hero figure in legend, in the skeletal remains of a humanoid, but not human in the depths of a ruin. In order to keep it safe from the scurrilous thieves of the city (which city is hotly debated, many maintain that it was one of various legendary lost metropolises), he swallowed it, intending to retrieve the precious item "afterward." Unfortunately for him, upon arriving within the city gates, the citizenry began to fall victim to an horrific plague by the hundreds, never manifesting in quite the same way twice. Geforic fled the city while he could, but ill fortune caught up with him as a representative of the local thieves' guild, having witnessed Geforic swallow the Death Jewel, slew the man and claimed his prize. Since, the stone has appeared throughout history in stories, usually accompanied by the utter destruction of a city, or the death of an empire. It is considered a vastly unlucky artifact and no reputable man will willingly let it near him.

In actuality, the item is a bit of high technology from an unknown source. When swallowed, it affixes itself to the person's digestive tract and remains there until death. While so implanted, it provides complete immunity to disease, poisoning, parasite, or similar effect (including rot grubs and violet fungus). It provides this benefit by changing the person's immune system from a reactive, internal process to an active, external, and predatory thing. White blood cells and other immunological organisms travel outside of the body to a radius of 50ft where they actively seek out any potential threat to the host body and eliminate it. Air born plagues, aforementioned rot grubs and violet fungus, green slimes, etc., will be destroyed at the rate of 1hp per round. Unfortunately, the effect also attacks any living organism that is currently infected by or is a carrier for any harmful pathogen and all such entities must succeed in a saving throw vs. disease or be found to have such an infection and become subject to the attack of the host body's external immune system, dying slowly at the rate of 1hp per day and unable to heal naturally. A cure disease spell placed upon such a victim will remove all traces of the disease and thus halt the attack of the immune system and spare the person's life.

Once swallowed and implanted, the device cannot be removed except by the death of the host, or by advanced surgicle techniques not present in Thylia today.

The Meanderings of My Brain

Over the last few weeks, in between moments of pure terror and wondering if I'll have a job in the next 3 months (yay economic troubles), I've had a few ideas rolling around in my head for campaigns/games other than Thylia.

1. Kingdoms of Kalamar: I long ago fell absolutely in love with this setting. To me, it's the crystalization of a middle school style campaign world. Loose and free feeling, but with plenty of threads to pick up if the DM likes them. I can't read a single page of the CS book without getting ideas for half a dozen nights gaming and long, drawn out campaigns. Very political as written, but certainly room for pure adventure style games as well. I'll also mention that I'm a tremendous fan of their pantheon of gods.


2. Alternity Dark Matter Secret Eugenics War: The concept has been rattling about in my brain for a while now, about a covert war fought by genetically enhanced humans to take control of the planet and the shadowy cabals either aiding or opposing them for their onw reasons. Yeah, it's a little Star Trek, but I think I can make it fun.

3. AD&D Ravenloft: Not actually set in the Ravenloft Campaign Setting, but a horror type campaign that makes use of some of the elements there to create a dark and terrifying campaign focusing on the horrifying aspects of the D&D game.

4. AD&D or Alternity American Gods: No, not a total rehash of the book, but the same concepts from the book ported over into a new thing. The idea of gods needing worship lest they face a slow diminution and eventual extinction in ignorance is appealing.

5. FRPG version Time War: Based off of a mishmash of the Chornomancy supplement from 2nd edition and Doctor Who, the concept is of a massive and far reaching time war taking place which the characters discover and either become embroiled in, or simply survive. I'd need to work out how time travel would work in the world, but I think it would be entertaining.

Now, if only I could organize my thoughts enough on Thylia to get together a decent post on it again.

Inherently Evil

The morality system of Dungeons and Dragons (in most of its incarnations) has been the source of lively debate since . . . well . . . pretty much ever. Put ten gamers into a room together and you'll have ten different views on how the alignment system "should be" interpreted, which version of the alignment system is "best," whether or not Gary Gygax was, indeed, taking controlled substances when he thought that this would be a good idea for a game, and at least three black eyes. Many, if not most, blogs even peripherally about D&D have long series of articles discussing the "true nature of alignment" and how it works and such a discussion has even made it over to the pop-culture repository of "knowledge" called TVTropes.org. It is, in my opinion, one of the best articles about the D&D style alignment system ever. A great many gamers decry the whole exercise and call it a straight jacket or some bizarre, ill-conceived attempt to shoe-horn a morality system into the game that wasn't needed.

The topic has gotten some play within the blog sphere: here and here for instance.

Whatever side of this discussion you fall on isn't important here, and I'm not going to weigh in entirely about it. The truth of the matter, though, is that it (the alignment system and its attendant assumptions) tend to pose some difficult questions for modern gamers, especially considering modern ethical and moral sensibilities. Specifically, the concept of an "always chaotic evil" or even "often evil" type monsters. Orcs, goblins, hobgoblins (my personal favorite humanoid), kobolds, and etc. were, if I recall the history of the game correctly) designed specifically as a a sequence of incrementally more powerful targets for the PC's to kill and loot without attendant guilt complexes. They were, in short, evil races and could be slaughtered with aplomb. Of course, no plan or mechanic, however ingenius, survives contact with gamers.

The concept of an entire race or species (and I've honestly been confused as to whether we're to consider the various non-human sentients in the game a species or a race, or if there's a difference in the first place) as being objectively inferior and identifiably and demonstrably inherently evil is one that truly grates against modern sensibilities. After all, such excuses have been used in our own world to justify some of the most horrific acts in history and it's natural that those of us raised in this world would be recoil from such a thought. Or course, that didn't stop many of us from assuming that anything in the game with a written XP total was there for us to kill and acting accordingly. According to Dave Kenzer himself, the humanoids in the new edition of Hackmaster are going to hearken back to this understanding, that they are all evil and the players have a right if not duty to slaughter them wholesale and further, that upon reading the descriptions of said monsters in the Hacklopedias (their version of the Monster Manual) that you'll actually want to.

One of the natural responses to the quandry is to create a rational for why such and such a race is evil. Orcs, for example, might be magically created things little more than self-replicating automata. A disease, almost, on the land. James over at Grognardia has reportedly taken this angle with his Dwimmermount campaign (linked above, see the comments) where orcs at least are the result of genetic tinkering by one of the precursor races that bestrode the world like giants in the long dark history of the world. This angle is great for Dwimmermount since blaming one of the older races who are already a part of the campaign for the horrific humanoids rampaging through the world and preying upon the innocent does not multiply entities at all. In fact, orcs in Thylia share a similar niche, though I feel with a particularly dark twist.

Of course, the LOTFP article linked above takes a different tack, playing with the uncertainty of players and characters as to what place in the metaphysical and moral place in the world humanoids occupy. The suggestions to play up this uncertainty is delightfully evil in and of itself and I plan on having child goblins and kobolds around to trip up the players' certainties.

I've never really had a problem with a race of beings being evil. It just doesn't bother me on the same level as it does others, I suppose seeing as I don't view "Good" as objectively superior in any way within the context of the game. Of course, within the game itself, "Good and Evil" are semantically loaded terms anyway as they both seem to coincide with, respectivly, what our modern society considers morally laudable and morally reprehensible, but I consider that to be terms of semantic limits: sometimes you just can't escape using a word that has strong associative meanings. However, within the context of the game world, good and evil are neither superior nor inferior in any way, they just are.

This isn't moral relativism, because evil is still evil, if that made any sense.

Why Can't We Have A Decent Fantasy Show Part Duex

Earlier, I lamented the fact that our latest concesion to fantasy entertainment was Krod Mandoon and afterword, I felt that I'd given the show short shrift. After all, I'd only ever seen one or two episodes (hard to tell whether that premier was two episodes pasted together, or if it was actually a double length episode). It's bound to get better right?

So I decided that the least I could do was give it another shot and see if it wasn't worth following. So, I watched last night's episode hoping for something to move beyond what the pilot had given us, and I'm impressed to say that it succeeded in going well beyond what it was, just in the wrong direction. Such stunning lines as the "mage" talking about his companions "little brown starfish" really set the tone early on as the "plot" was a thinly veiled excuse for an extended encounter with a so called "bi-clops" (a pansexual cyclops that is) and the entire episode devolved into a running series of sex jokes about Aneka and her . . . ahem . . . experience culminating in her riding off with the rival love interest carting a 2 quart gourd full of lube.

I will say, though, that Dongalore's little side trek to "rescue" the woman he had abducted only a few days earlier out of love was relatively good in comparison.

This all makes me uneasy about the upcoming (hopefully by Christmas) A Game of Thrones television series produced by HBO who did a marvelous job with Rome. Hell, if this series can do for fantasy literature what Rome did for, well, Rome, then I at least will be very happy. I worry, though, that this will end up junked and destroyed by the fact that it's an unpopular genre that seems to play better as parody than straight.

All that, and judging by what HBO did to True Blood, a by all accounts decent novel series, it's possible and even likely that this might turn into plot with porn. Or, for the less charitable than me, porn with plot.

One good rumor about the whole project, though, is that Peter Dinklage is the most likely to play Tyrion Lannister, which is a good thing.

One can only hope.

The Whacky and Wierd VS. the Familiar and the Pseudo-Real

There's something to be said for the wierd. Thool is a very cool place, what with a seeming dearth of the ordinary and an overabundance of "just plain wierd shit." Scott has managed to create a world that is new enough and strange enough to our modern way of thinking, and our way of perceiving even simple daily tasks, that he's emphasized the acts of exploration and discovery as ends in and of themselves. The players will spend, likely, as much time learning about the world around them as they do rooting through ancient dungeons to their greedy, shivled hearts' content. And that's a great thing.



Hargrave's Arduin - actually, technically speaking, it's The World of Khaas and I recommend that book to, well, everybody - is, in my estimation, the poster child of the whacky, wierd, and zany campaign worlds. As far as I can tell, it's just about the only place where anthropoid insects, weasels, and panda are standard player races. Not to mention Saurig (aka, lizard men), Kobbits (half kobold, half hobbit, with wings), and Throon (near giant sized four armed humanoids that are dumber than a box of rocks and especially fond of pumpkin). Then there's Rune Weavers, Star Powered Mages, and Techno's (the guys that get to play around with high technology while their buddies carry around sharpened sticks). And, of course, we can't forget that some of the most famous games of Arduin included elements adapted from (i.e. stolen en toto) popular sources including Jedi and Storm Troopers. It all merged together in a kind of pleasant and goofy mish-mash as a thing in and of itself. Once there, you wouldn't question why your 5th level Fighter is scrambling for cover from the orc mortar squadron freshly timewarped from an alternate WWII somewhere in the vast and strange multi-verse.

Of course, one can't let Mutant Future or Gamma World go by without mention either. Science Fantasy at its high point and, in my opinion, the true inheritors of the pulp fiction genre in gaming more so than D&D if only because they lacked the inhibitions that later got piled on.

Gonzo playstyle leads to great levels of creativity and can often avoid what can be yet another boring "might as well be Greyhawk" world. After a while, all but the most fantastic of fantasy worlds can become dull, and it's times like those that we run off in search of border bending stuff.

In the end, though, there are problems that I have with all of this, not least of which is that many of us . . . ok some of us . . . ok, maybe just me . . . have a near fetish level appreciation for verisimilitude and "realism." That's not entirely right as it's more along the lines of looking for plausible explanations. In the Forgotten Realms setting, there's a great desert in the middle of which rests of glacier. Supposedly, I suppose, that's supposed to spark creativity and interest in explaining/discovering why that glacier is there, or why that desert is there, or whatever, but in the end, it seems to boil down to "a wizard did it" which isn't any kind of explanation at all. It's baseless wierdness. This might be why I like Arduin to some extent, because the wierdness has a relatively plausible explanation behind it all - a massive tear in the space-time continuum leading to massive and repeated crossings between Khaas and pretty much everywhere else leading to a general rule of thumb "if it stands even a remote chance of being cool, go for it."

Another issue I find is that it often turns into scenery porn. Either the DM has spent more time pouring love into the setting than he has creating an actually interesting (or at least pursuable) adventure, or it's so strange that the players spend more time trying to get their bearings: how often can you worry about whether that large animal you ride on is a horse, or a warm-blooded reptilian spider before you start to lose interest? This is absolutely the reason why I'm a great fan of low fantasy, especially stuff like A Song of Ice and Fire. It's fantastic enough, but not so strange that readers spend more time flipping back and forth between the text and the mandatory glossary just trying to figure out what a "whojunkiz" is and why it's hurting somebody's "yambotheric."

Assimov said it best, I think, when he said at some point that his first rule of writing good science fiction was to ask the audience to believe only one unbelieveable thing. This applies just as much to Fantasy as it does to anything else. You could have the sun rise in the North and set in the East, but why? What purpose does it have other than to lend some faux exoticism? Those multiple suns in the Tatooinian sky were there only to let us know quickly (as if we hadn't figured it out by now) that the crew really wasn't just wandering around in Tunisia. Everything added above the "normal" should have purpose.

Taken too far, and it ends up turing the focus of the game towards experiencing strange new worlds rather than adventuring in them. For me, the focuse of D&D always was and always should be on the actions of the characters, whether they choose to make heroes of themselves, or whether they restrain themselves to merely robbing crypts for the gold and grave goods they might find. Or they might choose to become grand explorers, but then it's their choice rather than neccessity because the world is so disparate from the world that the players know that they spend more time trying to figure it all out rather than actually adventuring. Keeping things closer to the real world gives the players a metahporical leg to stand on before the wierd-shit-o-meter spikes.

The worst thing, I think, is when this turns into the gimmick settings. "It's like Greyhawk, but with . . ." Dark Sun is like Greyhawk, but with really dry weather and lots of psionics. Dragonlance is just like Greyhawk, but with lots of dragons and a super-simplistic view of morality and interpersonal relationships. Eberron is just like Greyhawk, but with "magical technology." The world becomes a shtick rather than anything living and breathing.

Why Can't We Have A Decent Fantasy Show?

Well, in watching Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire over on Comedy Central here in the US, it's clear that the show is a shallow parody of a genre that its creators don't enjoy or are even particularly familiar with beyond the basest elements. Don't get me wrong, it was amusing in a puerile sort of way - tastless gay jokes, sex jokes, gay sex jokes, and the occasional slapstick prevail throughout - and I will probably end up watching at least the next few episodes if only to see what they do to abuse poor John Rhys Davies and Eliza Dushku.

What is more amusing to me - though also just as disheartening in its own way - is that the show seems to be as much, if not more so, a parody of fantasy gaming as it is about the fantasy genre as a whole. Certain scenes seem to be built around tropes of D&D and its ilk such as Loquasto's firing into melee (and frequently hitting his friend Krod), taking a mulligan (which seemed almost a direct reference to dice rolling in its own amusing way), and the death of General Arcadius (I spent at least 30 seconds there counting off hitpoints from miltiple crossbow bolts and a spear to the chest).

The end result is a somewhat watchable show if you can get past the parts that bother you - and there most certainly will be parts that will bother you whether it's the, let's be kind and call her "promiscuous" Aneka or the over the top Bruce whom just about everybody with common sense will find offensive once he tells you the two ways in which his lover, the General Arcadius, transmitted the prophecy that supposedly will drive the show's plot, and that can be genuinely amusing at times.

But in the end, I have to wonder why we have to settle for this kind of thing. Why is it that the only halfway decent fantasy movie to make it to the big screen since the terrible Lord of the Rings trilogy is Harry Potter? Harry Potter poorly adapted no less. Why is it that fantasy movies made for television are consigned to the likes of the absolute drek that the Sci-Fi Channel (or should I say SyFy?) produces that aren't even watchable when extremely drunk. The Sands of Oblivion springs to mind here.

Why is fantasy reduced to being the ghetto genre of the Science-Fiction ghetto? Why the hell can't we get a decent show or movie made that isn't a shallow parody or just plain old terrible?