U is for Urban Decay

[over the course of the month of April, I shall be posting a topic for each letter of the alphabet, sequentially, for every day of the week except Sunday. Our topic this month? Things necessary to take your D&D campaign from “eh, fantasy” to “kick ass.” And who doesn’t want that?]

U is for Urban Decay, something found at the stinking and depraved centers of "civilization" within the fantasy world.

I suppose there are some campaign settings where some or all of the towns were as idyllic as the village of Threshold in the Mentzer Expert set. Especially for players that started with the 1983 BECMI sets (and learned that D&D was about being “heroes”) the smurf-like, fairy tale village is probably par for the course. Protecting these idyllic settings will not only allow you to preserve that peaceful, small town life, but give you XP (and a reason to kill orcs) to boot. Think of yourselves as hobbits defending the Shire.

That’s not the urban setting I’m used to in Dungeons & Dragons.

I’ve always taken my cue from the DMG, specifically the Ride of Emrikol the Chaotic. Twisted, cobblestone streets, taverns where people are all too quick to grab their swords, and bodies burning in the street. Basically something like the Wild West spliced with pre-Renaissance Europe. Filth and corruption and squalor.

That’s what civilization is like in MY campaign settings.

It’s one of the reasons I so enjoyed the Warhammer Fantasy setting…when I picked up my copy of WFRP in the early 90s, it was like returning to my D&D roots. Not the shininess of Mystarra and 2nd edition, but the stinking mess of 1st edition with back-alley assassins and wandering harlots. Hey, my cues were taken from Robert Aspirin’s Thieves World anthologies…not to mention Gygax’s own Gord the Rogue tales. For me, Sanctuary was Greyhawk with warmer weather.

And really why wouldn’t civilization be down and dirty and rotten and awful? I mean, how easy could life be that the best and the brightest would risk life and limb down some ancient ruin looking for treasure instead of doing something productive with their lives. Really! Greed is one thing, but in D&D real treasure is NOT easy to come by.

Ask my players.

No, your character may have been born to a high social status but that doesn’t mean your life isn’t sordid and small in the steaming stink of things. Ruling over a pig sty, how could you NOT turn towards an opportunity…ANY opportunity…to build your own story book Camelot some day.

If only you can pull enough gold out of the tomb.

Back in my day, going to town was an adventure in and of itself, rarely as easy as provisioning up and finding an inn in which to rest and heal. No, town was where you went to get into trouble. To get mugged, or rolled, or pick up some disease that would make you appreciate the party cleric all the more. If you were smart, you might stop by the local (pagan) temple and use some of that wealth to sacrifice a bull to Ares (or whomever your blood god of choice was). Then, if you had money left, you might head down to the docks to try to build your petty cash into something more, trying your hand at dice or cards in the local gambling house.

After which you could blow any winnings on archaic drugs, booze, and the aforementioned wandering whores.

Back then, thief skills were the prized “extras” any PC wanted to have. Thieves, thief-acrobats, assassins, thief-multi-classes (usually magic-user or illusionist), 1st edition bards, dual-class characters with a couple levels of thief…usually all the players were making sure they had some backstabbing and concealment ability for use in town. “It takes a thief to know one” and “no honor among thieves” were phrases that got passed around quite a bit…plus being able to “climb walls” sure helped getting into and out of buildings through ways other than the front door.

Urban adventures. Urban decadence. I don’t remember anyone ever making a big haul of loot in any particular urban setting. Oh, there was a raid on the assassin’s guild of Willip, but that was payback and personal, even if there was some treasure that came out of it.

No, I think our urban adventures were mainly just due to PCs being tired of sleeping in the woods.

As a DM, urban adventures were always desirable…nothing says player killer like high level (human) NPCs and one usually runs out of good reasons to have human opponents in weird or fantastic “dungeon” settings. If you WANT to pit characters against tough adventurer-types, the concrete jungle is the place to encounter them. In all their splendor.

In all their decay.

One should be wary of any walled sprawl that greets visitors with a few heads on spikes. It was not a “gentle” age, this mythology that has helped inspire so many ugly-faced fantasy films of the “B” variety.

Personally, I love it…but I understand that’s a subjective personal preference. I don’t think I’d let my children hang out in that particular campaign setting, but I wouldn't want my game to be any other way.
: )

B/X Norse

While I may not have got much blogging done over the weekend, I was able to get a fair bit of reading done…so much so that I’m nearly done with The Wizard and the Warlord; I’m either on the last or the second to last chapter. Which means I’ll be able to get back to Asimov’s Foundation series soon (which I am reading for the FIRST time). Loads o inspiration there for a Traveler campaign.

Anyway, reading the tales of the Alfar with an eye to incorporating the setting into B/X has been mui useful. Here’s the Norse treatment of magic and elves (Alfar) according to Boyer (a scholar of Scandinavian folklore):

• Alfar (elves) exist in a faerie realm parallel to the mundane.
• Elves are inherently magical (can do cantrip-type magic), but need training to pull off spectacular effects.
• Wizards are simply well trained in the use of magic, though magical training does not preclude them from fighting with arms and armor.
• Aside from their inherent magical nature, elves have the same foibles and weaknesses of human folk.
• Elves have neither “infravision” nor particularly keen senses, and they don’t speak a plethora of languages (presumably they speak Old Germanic).
  

The alfar are divided into two types: the ljosalfar (light elves) and the dokkalfar (dark elves). The dokkalfar cannot stand the light of day, although dokkalfar still require torches and fire for light and warmth, and there are dokkalfar farmers who (presumably) must toil a bit in daylight to grow crops(?). This latter may simply be an inconsistency in the author's writing, as elsewhere the dokkalfar are depicted as living in underground caves/ruins/forts. In at least one section, it states the dokkalfar are slain instantly by sunlight, being turned to stone as with trolls, though this never occurs in the book and may simply be a rumor.

The ljosalfar have no such weakness to darkness, they simply prefer the sun. Because of their war with the dark elves, they often patrol at night hunting trolls and dokkalfar.

Anyway, one thing that this book has gotten me thinking about, even more than “another way to perceive elves,” is the Magic-User class in general. Wizards in Boyer's book are one of three types:

- The young apprentice learning the trade.
- The mature wizard, powerful and arrogant.
- The wizened old man, knowledgeable but weakened with age.

These first two are portrayed as hale and hearty individuals…often relying on spells, but certainly capable of wielding swords in their defense (and presumably able to wear armor…little description of armor other than an occasional helm is ever given in the book anyway). To me, these “hale and hearty” wizards are much more like the Elf class of B/X D&D. It takes them longer to train in combat than a fighting man (because of their studies) but they are perfectly capable of learning spells like a magic-user AND fighting like a fighter.

The Magic-User class on the other hand represents the wizened old wizard or witch…the reason he can’t use armor or weapons has nothing to do with his class and everything to do with his AGE. His staff he leans on for support, his dagger is for cutting his meat or occasionally of use in ritual magic. He is too old to march long distances wearing armor…or even carrying a heavy backpack! And yet the aged wizard often has more magical might due to his time spent studying and poring over old tomes and scrolls.

There was a line in one of Robert Aspirin’s early Myth books that I always found noteworthy…Aahz is telling Skeeve (his apprentice) that the reason humans don’t study both magic AND fighting is that their life spans are so short, they rarely have time to master one, let alone both.

Certainly, this would be true of anyone “working the Elf class;” a race with a long life span (say, an actual elf) could accumulate more XP over hundreds of years than the average human adventuring as an “Elf.”

In a game world that mimicked the Norse mythology of Boyer’s books, one could make the following adjustments:

• Limit classes to Cleric, Dwarf, Fighter, Thief, Wizard (Elf), Aged Wizard (Magic-User). Non-dwarves may be mundane (scipling), ljosalfar, or dokkalfar.
• No class may progress past level 14.
• Only dwarves and dokkalfar have infravision; dokkalfar are precluded from using fire/light magic and suffer -1 to all rolls when in sunlight.
• Languages are determined by Intelligence only, not race (though dwarves will always speak both Common and Dwarvish); there is no “elvish” language; reading runes is a separate language.
• Norse Trolls = Bugbears (use bugbear stats rather than troll stats) and are rather plentiful. They die in sunlight (turned to stone).
• Magic items are rare and often have "strings attached" (curses or conditions).
• Limited armor (no such thing as plate mail).
  

After going through this exercise, I actually feel less incentive to change the Elf class in normal B/X play. I still like the “heroic elf” character; something between Tolkien's vision and the Alfar for a straight D&D campaign, but the above adjustments are good for a true Northern Reaches campaign of the Norse variety. While Boyer doesn't get into religious differences, the Norse gods are definitely present (dwarves, for example, consider themselves the "chosen priests of Thor") and I feel no qualms in including clerics of Odin (Law) or Loki (Chaos) or any of the other Aesir and Vanir.

This is pretty cool, actually...perhaps I'll do a similar treatment of Tolkien for B/X.

Blue Starred Mages and Goat F***ers

Anyone recognize this book?

I love Marion Zimmer Bradley (or MZB as she is affectionately known).  For all the skeletons and scandals in her closet, how can you not love a little old lady that channels antediluvian history, writes like a crack-addled wiccan, and helped found the SCA?  I mean that with all sincerity...I find her stuff great.  And she did A LOT to promote other authors (especially of the small scale, fantasy writing type).  You want to talk "old school?" Check out her Darkover novels for some real crosses of sci-fi and psionics with Sword and Sorcery pulp.

Of course, for my money I prefer Lythande...but we'll get to her/him in a second.

I do hang out with kids these days (of the under 17 crowd), and I see the kind of fiction kids are reading. I haven't read those Eregon books (written by a kid in Eastern WA) or the Twilight series (set in Port Angeles, WA land of my father's folk).  But I have read the entire Harry Potter saga and I say...this is the most popular fantasy series out there?  Wow.

Back when I was a kid I read a lot.  Steven King  and John Saul for horror and suspense; Piers Anthony, Robert Aspirin, and MZB for a lot of the rest.  I've grown out of the horror (though I did read the entire Dark Tower saga by King), and Anthony and Aspirin I've long since left behind (you start reading Moorcock and Anderson and you wonder why you ever bothered...you start reading the REAL Howard and Lovecraft stuff and Moorcock and Anderson start paling in comparison).

But Bradley was and still is great. The Mists of Avalon (which I didn't read until my 20s) is a great book, as is The Fall of Atlantis.  The Darkover series shares a lot with McCaffery's Pern, though just as gritty (if not moreso).  Hell, I even read Warrior Woman, though it is pretty weak, especially compared to Marvel's Red Sonja comics.

But Lythande was pretty badass.  Bradley created this character for a short story in Robert Aspirin's Thieves World anthologies, though the character only appeared once or twice.  Bradley wrote several short stories for the character outside of Thieves World, and all (to my knowledge) are compiled in the character-titled book.

Lythande is a warrior-mage, one of the Order of the Blue Star.  All the mages of the Blue Star have a blue star tattooed on their foreheads, and have access to great magical power...with one condition.  Each mage possesses a single secret, individual to that particular mage, that if ever revealed and spoken aloud by another, causes the mage to lose all of his power.  It's an extreme taboo that once broken, no amount of atonement will repair.

Lythande's secret is that she's a woman...the only female member of the Order.  And because it's her secret, she is forced to hide her sex for fear of being stripped of all power and left vulnerable to her enemies.

Quite fun really. The mages of the Blue Star are not a cooperative lot...in fact, they actively seek to discover other members' secrets so that they can slay them with impunity.  As one might surmise, many of the stories involve Lythande having to complete some adventure where her secret is in danger of exposure.  Rest assured, she always comes through thanks to sword, spell, and wit.

And sometimes luck...my favorite story is one in which she is in direct confrontation with another member of her Order.  While involved in an actual physical duel (note her two swords in the illustration), the opponent's are bantering back and forth and she hurls the epithet "goat f---er" at her foe...and his momentary hesitation and loss of composure clues her in that she has inadvertently discovered his occult secret.  Lythande stops and deliberately states "you have sex with goats," whereupon he loses all his powers. She then runs him through in cold blood.

Priceless.

Anyway, not a bad thing to mix into any particular home-brewed D&D campaign.  I have an upcoming post where I discuss allowing mages to wield any weapons (just like a fighter) with no expense of "game balance." Lythande is yet another example of the warrior-mage (like Elric or Gandalf).