Why the City?

"All I wanted was a repeating hand crossbow!"

Continuing the discussion about urban supplements and adventures ...

Cities and towns are ambiguous places in fantasy adventure roleplaying games.


They are safe places where parties can expect to rest, refit, do business, and train in a predictable way.
They are boring places where the above activities take place, between real adventures, with little fuss or muss.

BUT

They are dangerous places of adventure, crime, fights, intrigues, in the tradition of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser and dozens of other fantasy sources.
They are interesting places full of local color and characteristics.

Because of this dual role, and other characteristics such as their non-linear, fractal organization, cities are easy to get wrong in play. Players just want to trade and heal up, but the GM comes barging in with plots and names and scenery and thieves and murderers. Players want to get involved in the city, but the GM doesn't have details, or has so many details that there's no place to start. The encyclopedic organization of nearly every city book ever produced, including the one we looked at last time, doesn't help with this at all.

If you want the city to be safe and boring, in fact, there's no need for any special material about the city, other than a name, location, and approximate size to gauge the availability of goods and services.

Otherwise, it's useful to think about four kinds of "actions" in urban play.

Player-to-GM, mandatory. Players expect they can do a number of things in a decent city or town. Find an inn to rest, a temple to heal, various shops to buy equipment and sell loot, places to train. An urbanity without any of these features is damaged and in need of explanation, as when you buy a sword that is prone to break at the first blow.

Player-to-GM, optional. A lot of urban play revolves around players asking for goods and services that are not standard or listed in the rules. "Can I buy a repeating crossbow? Can I commission one? Can I find an arena fight? Is there a wizard who wants to trade spells with me?" The GM can agree, flatly refuse, or put some kind of test or adventure in the way.

GM-to-player, optional. GMs can also insert clues or hooks to tempt the players into adventure as they go about their mundane business; strange buildings, odd happenings in the street, the old man in the corner of the inn. Or, the players can just get things done and move on to the next dungeon.

GM-to-player, mandatory. This is when characters, plots and situations force themselves on the players. Guards barge in, thieves sneak in, wizards demand their time, the neighborhood is on fire; a thousand ways for the city to compel adventure.

Now, this scheme can help coordinate GM and player expectations about what they think is fun about cities, with players being able to talk about their need for more or less GM involvement at any point in the campaign. But it also suggests a better way to organize books about cities.

• You start, literally, with the party at the city gates, describing what they see and what they have to do to get in.
• You list the most common targets of Player-GM Mandatory play -- inns, shops, temples -- how to find them, and any "color" peculiarities about them (the temple has a dragon's skull for a dome! the inn has a goblin barkeep!) The players can stick to that shallow level of interaction, or dive in deeper.
• You then describe ways to satisfy a number of Player-GM Optional requests, including things they may not have thought of themselves. The unusual goods and services in the town, and what they have to do to access them.
• You give hooks and encounters that are GM-Player Optional, things they may see in the street. This is how you introduce factions: start with visible signs in society, later the full story of who is involved, and how these interact behind the scenes.
• Finally, some strong moves that are GM-Player Mandatory. These can proceed logically from the party's other business (they see something they shouldn't have seen, so assassins are sent after them; a messenger from the Red Wizard Guild tries to talk them out of further business at the Blue Wizard Guild store). They can introduce contingencies, countermoves, campaigns.

The first two of these are kind of what I was getting at in the Street Guide Without Streets years ago. It's also a similar structure to the functional method of room description in adventures. With a little thought about what's useful, writers can satisfy both the GM's need for accessible information, and the player's variable needs for involvement with the goings-on in a city.

Star Wars, Dying Earth, and the Programmed Setting

This contains discussion of Star Wars VII, no major plot spoilers but some general criticism. (Also, it's five weeks in, so see the damn film already.)

Robin Laws' Dying Earth RPG is not just a role-playing game set in Jack Vance's literary world. It also tries to codify the essential elements of that world - game as criticism. According to Laws the elements of a Vancian picaresque tale are: odd customs, crafty swindles, heated protests and presumptuous claims, casual cruelty, weird magic, strange vistas, ruined wonders, exotic food, and foppish apparel. The system also handles such Vancian happenings as being persuaded against your better interest, and winning great wealth only to lose it all ("All is mutability!")

And Episode VII for me was also a recombination of the elements of "Star Wars": you could see the boxes being checked off, with "doomsday machine", "terrifying monsters", "lightsaber duel", "alien cantina" and so on. But really that is nothing new. I remember reading more than one Star Wars novel in the 90's that seemed like a reshake of elements from the first three movies. Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy featured a doomsday device called the Suncrusher. There were monsters, dogfights, lightsaber duels and star lowlife a-plenty.





Also: if you tried to do a love story, a police procedural, a picaresque in the Star Wars universe, it might work, but would it be "Star Wars"? The hesitation in the answer reveals that, like the Dying Earth, Star Wars is a programmed setting. It not only provides character types, artifacts and settings, but dictates the plot and action. Compare this to a setting that has become unprogrammed, like the Wild West. While at one time there might have been a stock plot for the cowboy yarn, over many generations its expansion and reinvention has left room for social commentary, horror, preposterous steampunk action-adventure, etc.

Meanwhile, things might have gone differently if the second Star Wars trilogy's attempt to expand the repertoire with political drama, noir elements and romance had been at all convincing. But it wasn't. George Lucas caused a lot of buzz recently defending that trilogy and how he populated it “with different planets, with different spaceships – you know, to make it new.” It's a shallow view, but one that by omission acknowledges that the other "new" elements were failures, that the only things that stand up in those films are the laser duels, space battles, and spectacle. This is probably what sent J. J. Abrams running back to formula, from the potential of a universe to the safety of a program.

I think there's also a reason for the greater popularity of programmed settings over unprogrammed in roleplaying. The Standard Renfaire-Tolkien Setting, with its cozy taverns, dour dwarves, righteous paladins and hen's egg sized diamonds, is a convenient backdrop against which the slightest departure from custom - be it to invoke a different culture, a different genre or just something different - blazes forth like a star of creativity. And on the players' side, a solid and well-known backdrop gives a basis for their own creativity and improvisation.

Dwarves and Weather

It makes sense that a civilized underground race like the Dwarves would treat things we take for granted like the sun, moon and weather as we treat arcane astronomical phenomena. This means:

• Advanced dwarven settlements often have an above-ground observatory with wind gauge, rain meter, mercury column, smoked glass for observing the Sun, and other such equipment.
• Ouranology is the civilization advance responsible for maintaining an objective, sun-based standard of timekeeping, because dwarven settlements with a sleep-cycle-based calendar diverge greatly over long periods of time. But timekeeping by the moon? Weird, occult, something humans and elves do.



Very advanced ouranologists observe the clouds up close

• Superstitions spring up about fate and basic personality depending on the state of the sun and moon at  time of birth (So you're an Afternoon Waning? Far out, so am I)
• Dwarves who venture above ground are seen as cosmonauts of sorts, and there is fussing about the optimal weather conditions and possible catastrophes that seems baffling and neurotic to humans.
• Continuing the analogy, dwarves with lots of above-ground experience have physiological adaptations (no longer blinded by sunlight, losing their agoraphobia) akin to the effects of zero-gravity, that make them a little strange to those in their native habitation.
• When dwarves name things after the "Day" and "Night" (like the Day and Night Kings in Monte Cook's Ptolus, which brought this whole topic to mind) it's a lot more arcane and cosmic to them than when humans do.
• Dwarves sneer at any science or magic that gives importance to the stars or planets. Size matters, and the biggest things in the sky are clearly the sun, moon and clouds.

Sample Setting in 32 Encounters

This is page number 50 of the 52 pages. It's a slightly less-than-generic medieval town-to-village-to-dungeon of the kind I describe on this other page. Page 51 will be the sample dungeon. I wish I could put an example of play in as well but I think page 52 will have to be more general GM advice.

What's important with these encounters is to make most of them lively - to work implicit action into that short one-line description. One last-minute feature I thought of: instead of d8, roll d10 or d12, and on a result of 9 of higher roll 2d8 and have the party walk in on an encounter between those two.

Another idea: give each area a "boss" that is encountered instead of the first encounter that would be a repeat. It might be a tripping druid in the woods, a shy wererat in the village, the river god's daughter on the river, or the Baron in town. This means the setting has the feel of slow discovery as the characters settle in it.

The Mississippi Sea

As Joe Bloch has observed, the Greyhawk map has a lot of interesting coastline, unlike boring maps like Middle Earth. This is, perhaps, just a conscious design decision made by Gary Gygax as he transitioned his Greyhawk campaign from the map of North America to an actual commercial product. In place of a big chunk of land in the Flanaess' equivalent of the US South and Midwest, we have a great two-armed sea.

Great maps by Anne B Meyer.

Could be this a homage to the great inland sea that spread over the Midwest in Cretaceous times? Perhaps, but only indirectly. In fact, the sea was far to the west of the present-day Great Lakes. Still, the idea of a North American inland sea would have been known in the 60's from archeology. Its receding phase as the Pierre Sea, shown below in a map by Ron Blakeley, presents an intriguing profile in the spirit of the Greyhawk map.

A geographically closer influence, perhaps, is the idea that the Mississippi Plain which stretches up to southern Illinois, surrounded by hills and bluffs on every side, is in danger of becoming submerged. Although mass media often focus on the possibility that California might drown or become an island from the activity of the San Andreas Fault, another equally severe seismic zone is located along the Mississippi. The New Madrid earthquakes in 1811-1812 were the strongest and most extensive recorded in North America.

Perhaps on the basis of this anxiety, a series of psychics since at least 1983 have produced remarkably similar-looking visionary maps of the future North America with huge inundations of California and the Mississippi Valley, often connecting the Great Lakes with the Gulf of Mexico. A risen Atlantis, accounting for sea level rises elsewhere, is optional. A handy compilation of these is provided by a diligent poster on the David Icke forums, although the bloom somewhat goes off these prophecies when you notice that they were all predicted for different dates ranging from 1994 to 2012. Although a little late to have influenced Greyhawk, Gygax had avowedly read up on Theosophy and may have come across the 1940's cataclysmic geographical prophecies of the psychic Edgar Cayce, who attributed his "future map" with a marine Mississippi to a coming pole shift:

Of course, geological facts make the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys the most low-lying parts of the Midwest, so it is no great stretch to imagine them as the basis for a more watery continent. Indeed, extreme global warming scenarios also put Chicago - the location for Greyhawk in the early campaign - in a position to trade between lakes and sea, with the Ozarks standing in for the Pomarj peninsula:

Conspiracy believers, however, generally reject global warming and see the coming Mississippi Sea as the plot of a purposefully evil government, with levee demolitions, sinkholes and FEMA preparations all pointing to the cataclysm, in which a polar shift may or may not be involved. Thus we stand in the 21st Century.

Anyway! All of this suggests a slightly different look to the North American Greyhawk map. Greyhawk and Dyvers reclaim their positions as Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively, and some combination of seismic activity and sea level rise produces this geography, on a scale of 125 miles to the hex:

The three cities of the Greyhawk campaign, here, are a buffer between the proud kingdom of Acrondy and the plains realms to the west, while also profiting from north-south trade in raw materials from the woods and mines of the Lakes region. Ashland, from the etymology of Nashville, is a secretive realm ruled by druids and bards, where something real bad happened to blast the mountains in the east. The Four Winds kingdom is a nod to the etymology of Kansas, while Acrondy is a breakaway state from the declining Great Kingdom over the mountains. And somewhere in Manitoba, Iuz weaves his plots ...

This Is Fair Use, Right?

The mashup: Moominera.

For Your Seacrawling Consideration

Is this not the most remarkable, extraordinary adventure location?

* An island owned by some kind of high-level evil rogue/fighter/beastmaster-by-intimidation (Bluto, in the role of Sindbad)
* The average, everyday, boring guard monsters are vultures, war dogs, lions, apes, snakes, and dragons
* The lieutenant-grade guard monsters are an ettin and a roc
* A chest of diamonds, undoubtedly the least of the treasures
* A cave, huge castle, chasm, steep stairway, skull-shaped rock formations, canyon, and active volcano in the vicinity
* Furthermore, the whole shebang sits on the back of a giant whale
* An enchantment renders combat damage into highly implausible ouchie-effects, with several additions to this excellent table.
* Popeye, aided by no useful henchmen to speak of, rolled over the whole place in ten minutes flat.

The Half-Stork Brings Half-Orcs

Ah yes, the eternal conversation on the sexual background of Half-Orcs.

The sexual background of Halford is a far better topic.

Why is this even an issue? Why was it seen as such an inevitability, that 2nd edition D&D purged half-orcs altogether from the core game? Why does Pathfinder leave this one aspect of sexuality in canon, rather than take the much wiser approach that the individual group should be free to turn the dial on this particular topic?

To reduce it to absurdity ...

DM: All right, this setting is a fantasy version of medieval Europe. You can choose your national background, or roll.
Player 1: I'll roll ... hey, I'm Irish ... and with Viking ancestry! The blood of the Lochlannach flows in my veins!
Player 2: Yeah, you know that means a Viking raped your mom, right?
Player 1: Excuse me?
Player 2: What do you think, they asked for her hand in marriage? I'm sorry, but it's just a fact of medieval life. Your character is a bastard conceived by force.
DM: That's not necessarily true. The Viking blood could have come from an earlier generation ...
Player 2: Who still got raped. I don't know why you're acting so shocked at these natural facts that are necessarily part of the setting.
Player 1: I dunno. Do I have to ...
Player 2: Yes. It's historical canon!
DM: Player 2, what kind of GM did you play under before that gave you the impression it was OK to act this way?
Player 2: Someone who didn't knuckle under to the political correctness brigade. Hey, my own character was a product of rape due to the setting and I handled it all right.
DM: Do tell ...
Player 2: You see, logic demands that evil creatures can only reproduce through the most evil kind of sex there is. My backstory called for my father to be a necromancer and my mother an anti-paladin. They had no alternative but to rape each other.
All: They what?
Player 2: It happens. Charm spells were involved in this case. You see ...
DM: Okay, okay, let's move on.

For those completely bereft of imagination, and who don't want to make a stand on a dubious setting detail that's about as productive as random ass-boils, here are six other ways half-orcs can come into being while keeping orcs evil.

1. Humans sometimes seek out orcish partners out of decadence and perversity.
2. The orc is the most evil race there is. Those who actively promote evil willingly breed with orcs on ideological grounds.
3. Humans are not born orcs, but become that way through mutation or evil deeds. A half-orc is one who has willingly or otherwise arrested his or her orcish development.
4. Half-orcs are artificially bred by test-tube wizards.
5. Inbreeding leads to half-orcism. Inbred half-orcs in the past produced full-orcs.
6. Half-orcs are part of the normal genetic variation of orcs - they happen  to look sufficiently human, if ugly, to "pass" in human communities. Likewise, there are very ugly humans who can "pass" as half-orcs.

The Business of Settings: Also Dysfunctional

Steve Winter (via Grognardia) posted some very apt thoughts on the inherent self-destructiveness of the business of selling RPGs. Because most buyers are players, the optimal economic move is to market more and more options to them, until the game eventually collapses under the weight of rules and choices and requires a reboot.

My reaction at first was, "That's true for games like D&D that focus on their mechanics and largely let players come up with setting material. But what about games like Vampire or Legend of the Five Rings that are strongly tied to a story or setting? Won't players buy setting-related material just because of curiosity and desire to follow the story?"

Then I realized that this "exception" actually proved the rule in a big way. Settings, too, are prone to glut. As more and more canon details are filled in, there is less and less room for maneuver in actual play, less potential for the surprise and discovery that is a major drawing card of this kind of game. In place of a sense of wonder, you get lengthy forum screeds from canon nerds pointing out the atrocity of Shareena, Fire Guardian of the Blood City, having a daughter in supplement X-22, when in AG-14 it clearly states that Fire Guardians of the Blood City are sworn to perpetual virginity.

I mean, have you seen a map of Greyhawk lately? (And they're wonderful ... but also restrictive canon in that once-wide-open world).

So the GM forbids players to buy setting books, or read setting material. Leaving aside the enforceability of that, it also undercuts the business case, because setting material goes back to being the less lucrative GM-only kind. And if the GM announces that the game is a home-brew and nothing canon should be taken for granted, then what's the point of the players buying the official material?

Eventually - and this isn't just in RPGs, but any world that generates a massive crust of setting detail - the need to purify and cauterize the setting takes hold, and you get the likes of the New World of Darkness. And the cycle begins anew ...

Looks like the best things in life are free .. or nearly so.

The Light Fantastic ... and Eight Other Fantasy Esthetics

Recently I was debating over whether or not to emphasize mundane abilities for wizards, finally making the call against. Then a number of other things blipped across my mental radar. Doing research on the history of D&D encumbrance rules, I flicked open the 2nd Edition Players' handbook for the first time in ages, marvelling at the mundane exactitude of its encumbrance rules and equipment lists. Zak had a long evisceration of a 4th Ed. module with special attention to the muddy art style. Then back to 2nd edition, trying to figure out what exactly galled me about the majority of the art pieces, and why that gall coalesced around the Elmore frontispiece ...

Yeehaw! All 7 feet of it!

Okay, one thing is that it's prosaic. There's actually some sly humor here if you look at it right. The adventurers are cast as a modern-day group of deer hunters or marlin fishers posing with their big prize. They've strung the dragon up - why, exactly? Who's taking the photo? It's a witty anachronism, but one that drags us away from the fantastic nature of dragons, into the realm of weekend warriors and twelve-point bucks.

The other thing that didn't match my gaming esthetic was the lightness of the piece. Not in terms of humor - humor can be dark, too. Rather, what I mean these are clearly a bunch of characters, blessed with 4d6-drop-lowest stats and maximum hit points at creation, who have just ganked what can only be a hatchling green dragon*. For this mighty feat the DM has seen fit to award a shoebox-sized treasure hoard. This piece conveys the exact opposite of "dangerous." The exact opposite of squaring off against a 30 foot high efreeti. The only sign that the party has faced danger are three little claw marks on the trouser leg of the hulking chainmailed fighter.

Call one axis, then, "light/dark". It's defined by danger - in a game system's mechanics and in the game's art. But what's the other axis? Going back to the first gripe, it's the fantastic versus prosaic. This is a hard distinction to define, especially in a genre where everything technically counts as fantastic. Let me throw out some examples that do it for me. In a prosaic fantasy world:

• The plot is motivated by material concerns, like trade routes or dynastic politics. 
• Full encumbrance rules are in effect.
• Magic may be rare or common, but it is normalized and understood, more like a science than an art.
• Character classes have "mundane" skills to go alongside their outstanding abilities.
• The equipment list is long and comprehensive. It illustrates the importance of using and managing material resources.
• The game system works like a textbook, with rules for every conceivable situation no matter how mundane. Halfway to this is the "almanac" apprach taken by first edition AD&D, where various micro-systems are sprinkled throughout as examples for DMs to improvise other material (and the first 10 years of Dragon magazine are packed with just this kind of improvised material).

The full esthetic alignment grid appears below; with "Tough" being in between light and dark (an environment that is difficult and dangerous, but ultimately surmountable through sheer force of will) and "Worlds Collide" being a commonly seen situation where prosaic characters are thrust into a fantastic universe. On it I've distributed a number of game systems and settings according to my overall sense of where they fall.

A couple of observations from this:

1. It's easy now to see why 2nd edition D&D was the way it was. TSR's mass-marketing of D&D, especially the kiddie market, required a diagonal flight from the Weird; a renunciation of the devils (and demons) and all their works. First to go were the BIG RED DEVILS on the core rulebook covers, then the comfy esthetic of 2nd edition followed suit in a big way. An important thing to realize is they didn't actually succeed in making D&D more attractive to kids, who always have reveled in stories, films, and comics full of blood, gore and evil. But they made it more attractive to parents. This is why I liked 2nd edition AD&D when it came out in my early twenties. I was trying hard to be a Grown-Up; the Light Prosaic, with its sober rules and materialistic detail, fit the bill.

2. I can't for the life of me fit 4th edition in here. There may be some kind of disconnection between its visual esthetics and its actual gameplay, though.

3. My current game is in the "Tough/Worlds Collide" sector, edging to Dark. What's your favored mode?


* Yeah, I know, a hatchling green dragon by the Monstrous Compendium has 7 Hit Dice despite being at most 5' long in the body. But that doesn't look like a 7HD monster.

Church World Triumphant

Of the three settings for D&D I proposed - the clericless Sorcery World, the polytheist Pantheon World, and the monotheist Church World - I chose the latter for my ongoing campaign. And I'm not regretting that choice.

Running off the D&D grid, with an old rule set, gives many freedoms. One that keeps getting spotlighted is the freedom to use all the red-blooded trappings of 1970's fantasy that were expunged in reaction to parental and Christian pressure groups. Demons, devils, half-orc assassin PCs, human sacrifices, naked lady pictures, naked lady human sacrifices ... Both Third Edition official content and Old School revivalism have produced intentionally notorious products, as returns of the repressed.

But ironically, another historical element purged from the game has never made such a loud comeback: the backdrop of medieval Christianity that gives us clerics, paladins, relics, and a spell list ripped straight from the Bible. In part, this is because the repression was self-imposed and subtle. No atheist or Jewish groups sought to expel D&D from schools because it promoted Christianity, even if the case that it promoted Satanism was equally ludicrous. The shift from a Church World of OD&D to a Pantheon World of 2nd Edition was gradual, and in keeping with the adoption of standard campaign settings, Greyhawk (especially the 1983 version) and Forgotten Realms. Those products, unlike the more open-ended 1980 Greyhawk, forced TSR's cards on the table regarding details of religion.

Uncensored knights from Valdemar Miniatures

With the Satanic panic stinging, it's easy to see why TSR skirted monotheism by the length of a ten-foot pole. Ever since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for daring to suggest that God had created other worlds than ours, the relationship of speculative fiction to Christianity has been questionable. Any fictional or counterfactual treatment risks offending a religion whose truths are deterministic and rooted in historical time (see here, Experiment 5).

The Catholic Tolkien and Anglican Lewis famously finessed this point by placing their tales, respectively, in a world of virtuous pagans, and a world where Christ was represented in a plain allegory. But presenting an alternate monotheistic Church was not a path easily followed as TSR got bigger and more accountable. The typical North American paralytic reaction then set in, as seen elsewhere when handling issues of sexuality and race: better to burn out and bowdlerize, than to discuss, risking offense and dissension. The "cleric" took on a life of its own as an ahistorical pagan-Christian hybrid who wasn't sacrificing animals and casting auguries so much as healing, healing, turning and healing, all in the name of, uh, Odin or someone like that.

With freedom restored through the return of powers to the gamer, I see no reason to observe the taboo any longer. A monotheistic world has certain advantages. The cleric class gets a lot simpler - no more domain spells, or god-weapon lists. Clerics stick together rather than worrying about whether they should fight each other. The competing concerns of Church and State, moral and temporal, add variety to power struggles without the need to factor in 18 Churches.

Working in folk beliefs that take the Church "halfway to paganism" in some places also add variety, and a further moral question of toleration versus orthodoxy. In fact, I'll be showing off some of the folk-saints of Mittellus in the next series of posts, who are very much inspired by popular beliefs in Europe that represent a syncretism of ancient gods and Christian saints - Voudoun for white folks, if you will.

What's more, I think a fantasy-historical version of the Church can be presented without offending either believers or nonbelievers. The nature and origin of miracles, salvation, and reality can be debated in-world, without the GM needing to pronounce ex cathedra, and the historical Christian church offers enough examples from saints to simoniacs that both the good and the bad can be explored.

But, as with everything from rulings improvisation to in-game romance, this approach requires a knowledgeable GM with a mature and balanced attitude. And that's not something that can be easily extracted from a supplement.

Why's There A Dungeon Under Your City?

1. The city was flooded over 100 years ago. After the flood, the powers that be decided to raise the ground level 10-15 feet by importing massive amounts of earth. On top of the flood deposits, this buried - partially or completely - all the buildings in the flooded area. The underground rooms are the remains of completely buried buildings, cellars that once were ground floors, and tunnels that once were alleys and thoroughfares connecting them all. (Chattanooga, Tennessee)

2. The city is built on sandstone hills, with natural caverns underneath that were used for storage and cellars, and latter enlarged, connected, and linked with other chambers and complexes cut into the soft sedimentary rock. At one time or another the caverns have housed inns, taverns, breweries, bowling alleys, industrial shops, and sewage disposal. (Nottingham, England)

3. The city prospered at an amazing rate, but was hampered by natural barriers - rivers, gorges, steep rock faces. A bridge built across one of the dry gorges proved more popular as a place to settle under than to cross, owing to a superstitious incident that cursed the span in the eyes of the cityfolk.The bridge arches were walled and floored, and a series of vaults created, which held masses of the dregs of society living in appalling conditions. The vault-dungeon today is inhabited by a few degenerate hold-outs, the ghosts of murdered people, and whatever it was that caused the exodus of squatters some twenty years ago ... (Edinburgh, Scotland)

4. Followers of a persecuted religion needed a place to bury their dead. In the outskirts of the city, they tunnelled into deposits of soft tufa stone. A refuge in times of danger, these catacombs also housed rich treasures of devotional objects and grave goods. (Rome, Italy)

5. In the busy and disreputable seaport, captains who needed sailors could turn to gangs of waylayers, who used elaborate ruses and trapdoors to abduct able-bodied men. A network of tunnels, chambers and holding cells supported all kinds of kidnapping, forced prostitution and slavery. When contraband substances came to the city, the tunnels were not just the means of smuggling, but housed sordid vice dens where anything could be had ... for a price. (Portland, Oregon)

6. As the city grew, the stench grew intolerable until the king ordered a sewer to be dug. Later monarchs hired more and more sophisticated architects until the sewer network branched all over the city, on many levels, and with some tunnels big enough to drive a cart through. "Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws pursue or have pursued, have hidden in this hole..." Yes, and rats. (Paris, France)

Church World

The Universe
Between Heaven and Hell lies this Middle World, suspended in the Formless Void. The Lord of Heaven made the World, but suffered the Devil to rebel and keep the fires of Hell for all who make the Devil's choice. While the Devil and his infernal court form part of the Lord's plan, the free will of men is no less dangerous for spawning Demons, who lurk in the Void, awaiting the chanting of their names in ritual. There are other worlds and powers - Faerie, the Halls of Heroes, the ancient gods of the fallen Empire - their influence fading as the Revelation of the Church spreads.

The World
In the centuries since the Revelation and the fall of the Empire, the Church of the Lord has become the religion of nearly all civilized kingdoms and most of their inhabitants. Vast and sprawling, the Church has a complex hierarchy and a system of devotional Orders. Within the Church all tendencies can be found: the tolerant, the fanatical, the merciful, the severe, and sometimes the decadent and corrupt. At its best, the Church acts as the arm of the Lord on earth to fight the Devil and other dark forces. Among those forces, some would include those dwellers of remote and inhospitable regions who still follow the pagan Old Way, or who worship the old hero-gods.

Alignment
Beings can be either Good, Evil or unaligned. Beings from Hell, the Void and undead beings are unholy, and Evil if intelligent; beings from Heaven are holy, and Good if intelligent. The Church promotes Good but contains many who have fallen from that standard.

To maintain a Good alignment, a being must uphold five principles by avoiding certain actions:

Life: Don't kill or torture a helpless sentient being.
Kindness: Don't harm, disrespect, or steal from a peaceful sentient being.
Courage: Don't back away from a fight against Evil that you can win.
Justice: Don't let crimes against Life and Kindness go unpunished.
Generosity: Don't hoard wealth; do what you can for your own security, then give to others.

A being is allowed a "flaw" - ignoring one of these five precepts at will - without losing Good alignment; such is the mercy of the Lord. If the being then breaks an additional precept, his Good alignment is in doubt.

To be unaligned rather than Evil, a being must refrain from two less restrictive actions:

Life: Only kill or torture a sentient being who would have killed or tortured you if it could.
Kindness: Don't harm, disrespect, or steal from someone you have a social tie to (adventuring party, village, guild, however defined)

Breaking these precepts puts unaligned status in doubt.

The rules about being in doubt about one's alignment are the same as in Pantheon World. For members of the Church, Atonement can come only through a high ranking priest of the Church, who may additionally impose a penance of wealth, pilgrimage or service.

Spellcaster Classes
To certain of His servants the Lord gives miraculous powers. These are priests; robed spellcasters, not trained to fight in armor. They observe the ancient sacerdotal taboo of never using a blade to cut or pierce. Evil priests serve the Devil and demonic forces, but some may have also infiltrated the Church. The Devil in particular sometimes gives his servants powers in imitation of the Lord's miracles. These can be told apart only by the uses to which the wicked priest puts them.

Priests of the Old Gods and Druids of the Old Way also gain powers from the spirits of the earth, and are less restricted by weapon taboos.

Militants are demi-priests of the Church trained to arms. Thus they are better at fighting, and train using armor and edged weapons (though their code of valor requires they not use missile weapons). They cast spells as a priest one less than their own level, but still get a bonus 1st level spell at level 1 if they have high Wisdom.

Priests and militants follow the spell rules from Pantheon World priests, but with different lists of spells. These spells and restrictions on the various Orders of priests and militants of the Church, as well as the followers of evil and the Old Ways, are detailed in the following table (next post).All priests of the Church must maintain a Good alignment, or be denied their spells and powers until they atone (or turn to the Devil for replacements).

Pantheon World: Table of Priesthoods

This Pantheon is based on the conceit of a pagan Middle Ages that still honors the Olympians of Greek myth, who should be familiar or at least easier to research. Some of these Olympians, in particular Athena and Apollo, also show signs of pseudo-Christianity, for those who cannot live without churches and holy knights. Various chthonic deities are also presented to round out the bunch.

Bonus for Apollo priests: that hat.

APHRODITE - Goddess of love, desire, beauty
Chaotic Good - Weapons: Staff - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All White, All Gold, 1 Green

APOLLO - God of the sun, light, healing, music
Lawful Good - Weapons: Bow and arrows, dagger - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Gold, All Orange, 1 White

ARES - God of war, the din of battle, turmoil
Chaotic Evil - Weapons: Sword - Armor: Chain or plate
Spells known/level: All Black, 1 Red

ARTEMIS - Goddess of the moon, hunting, maidens
Chaotic Good - Weapons: Bow and arrows, dagger - Armor: Leather
Spells known/level: All Brown, All Gold, 1 Purple

ATHENA - Goddess of reason, civilization, strategy
Lawful Good - Weapons: Spear, shield - Armor: Chain or plate
Spells known/level: All White, All Orange

DIONYSUS - God of wine, festivities
Chaotic - Weapons: mace (thyrsus), staff - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Brown, All Yellow

HADES - God of the dead, underworld, riches
Lawful Evil - Weapons: battle axe - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Black, 1 Purple, 1 Green

HECATE - Goddess of witches and crossroads
Evil - Weapons: staff, dagger - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Black, All Green

HERA- Goddess of marriage and women
Lawful (female) - Weapons: staff - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Gold, All Orange, 1 Yellow

HERMES - God of Trickery, Trade, Thieves
Chaotic - Weapons: Dagger, short sword - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Orange, 1 Purple, 1 Silver

PAN - God of wilderness, beasts
Chaotic - Weapons: Staff, sling - Armor: Leather
Spells known/level: All Brown, 1 Green, 1 Yellow

POSEIDON - God of the sea, horses
Unaligned - Weapons: Trident - Armor: Leather
Spells known/level: All Brown, 1 Yellow, 1 Blue

ZEUS - God of thunder, heaven, father of gods
Lawful (male) - Weapons: Mace (rod) - Armor: None
Spells known/level: All Orange, 1 White (Lawful Evil beings are not counted as unholy), 1 Red (energy is lightning)

Pantheon World

The Universe

Pantheon World lies suspended in a ring of planes and demi-planes representing the various combinations of alignments. It is there that the gods and demons dwell, and conduct their ceaseless, shifting struggles, with the nations and heroes of the World as pawns. Scholars can also muster evidence for a near infinity of other planes and gods, but the anchor points of the cosmos for all are the eternal truths of Alignment: Good and Evil, Law and Chaos.

The World

Kingdoms and empires, cities, races and fiefdoms, each take their side in the great struggle. The main war is between Good and Evil, but if the other side presents no seeming threat, the Lawful and Chaotic tendencies tend to fight within each alignment. Forbidden to enter this plane, the Gods work through magical powers they grant to their human servants, and through lesser planar beings that can pass the gates of the world.

Alignment

Unaligned people live by the morality of natural law. The first duty is to help, treat fairly, and not harm those you have personal bonds with – as a member of a village, warband, family, or adventuring party. The second duty is to respect the inherent authority of the leaders and traditions you are bonded with.

The two dimensions of alignment – Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic – reflect moral thought beyond natural law. A being might have one alignment (for example, Lawful, or Evil), or two compatible alignments (for example, Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil). Mortals and supernatural creatures can have alignment, but only the latter (including undead) can be holy or unholy.

Good: This alignment extends the duties of care and justice from one’s personal associates to all living beings. It is forbidden to harm or steal from peaceful beings; to kill or torture a surrendered foe, except in certain justice for an individual crime; and to fail to fight Evil when you can win.

Evil: This alignment disdains the first duty of natural law, believing that each individual should look out for themselves. Any mutual aid is at best a temporary arrangement, oaths are to be broken, and bonds of passion and ambition are rightly stronger than the family or friendship. As an adventurer, Evil is not a recommended alignment to have in an adventuring party; you can play that way, but sooner or later, you will end up dead or on your own after one betrayal too many.

Lawful: This alignment requires its character to obey and respect, in this order: his or her own religion; his or her own political leader, if not opposite in Good or Evil; then any Lawful religion, and any Lawful political leader, if not opposite in Good or Evil. Lawful Good beings also have a duty to care for weaker beings who are Lawful and not Evil.

Chaotic: This alignment believes that individuals are to be judged by their acts, not their position in some social hierarchy. The king is only respected if he is competent; the elder only if she is wise; and by the same token, the poor and outcast are not to be despised. A Chaotic person only follows orders if they conform with his or her moral code, or with self-interest if Chaotic Evil. 

A player whose character is about to act against alignment, including the natural law of the unaligned, should be warned first by the DM. If the action is carried through, the character is in a state of doubt, and cannot advance in levels until he or she either carries out an act of atonement, or changes alignment. Atonement can be had with a donation of gold pieces equal to at least 10% of one's current experience points, a service done to reverse the original action, or an arduous pilgrimage or quest as required by the religion or leader offended. Any alignment change after the first carries an unrestorable loss of 10% of current experience points.

Spellcaster Classes

Magic-users, including specialist mages, function as in Sorcery World, but work from a spell list from which Black, White, Gold and Brown spells are excluded, and cannot learn those spells. Some non-player character magic-users, however, study Black sorceries, or otherwise bend the rules.

The priest class uses magic differently. Restricted by the same table of spells per day per level as the magic-user, those spells are not memorized ahead of time, but cast at will from a list of allowed spells according to one's religion, requiring a holy symbol. Each spell by name may still only be cast once a day. A good night's sleep preceded and followed by an hour of prayers is enough to restore full spell capacity to a priest. Exceptional Wisdom gives bonus spells to the priest in the same manner as exceptional Intelligence to the magic-user.

A priest must take on and maintain the alignment of his or her religion. A priest in a state of alignment doubt cannot use magic until he or she has atoned, or set out in good faith on a quest of atonement.

The colors of magic available to a priesthood range between one and three, balanced by differences in allowed weapons and armor. Priests may not learn the major first-level spells from the magic-user table.

Each DM will no doubt enjoy creating or adapting a particular pantheon for their campaign world, and each deity within that pantheon can have a priesthood - or multiple orders of priesthood. The following table gives a small sample pantheon based on some of the Greek gods. Note also that classes such as "paladins" and "druids" can be simulated in this system by variations on the priesthoods.

Next: The priests and pantheon of Pantheon World.

Sorcery World

This is the first of three worlds, three sets of minimal setting assumptions that support three different uses of my spell lists. The rules are compatible with most old-school clones and systems, and are capable of "mix and match" to some extent between worlds. I'll present them with minimal explanation and have a word about them afterwards.

Oparian Flaming God Human Sacrifice Ritual -- © 1918, ERB Inc.

The Universe
You dwell on a mote of order, floating in a sea of Primal Nothingness and dancing in a web of a million planes of existence. The Lords of Law hold their palaces in idealized, peaceful outer planes, and seek to defend the world against the Lords of Chaos. Those dread entities swarm from a myriad of hells, and seek at all times to relax the laws of nature and logic, making the world less predictable.

The World
Humanity is a cruel infant, crawling on the ruined pavements of the world's former masters. The Lords of Law and Chaos are known; some ignore them, some worship them, some strike bargains with them in the delusion they are equals. Those races, empires and kingdoms that follow Law or Chaos differ in style, but Law is not a guarantee of kindness or justice. Indeed, the extreme of Law is as harmful to human progress as the extreme of Chaos is to human well-being.

Alignment
The alignments of Law and Chaos exist, as well as unaligned status; unholy and holy status is also important for certain spell effects. Demonic creatures from the hells of Chaos, as well as intelligent undead, are always Chaotic and unholy, while the unintelligent undead are merely unholy. The servants of the Lords of Law are Lawful and holy.

Mortal beings can take on Lawful or Chaotic alignment, but these represent strong oaths and commitments to one side of the cosmic struggle, with no restrictions on behavior except this: Lawful and Chaotic beings do not associate with or aid beings known to have the opposite alignment, unless forced to. Breaking this restriction makes you unaligned. A being can change alignment twice in a lifetime, after which any further changes are to unaligned status, as he or she is proven forever inconstant and faithless.

Religions
The Lords of Law and Chaos are worshipped, as are numerous other godlings, demons, and unaligned Powers. Should one of these deities deign to speak to humanity - if indeed the deity exists, for many of these cults are frauds - it will send an avatar, who can only exist on this world for a short amount of time. These summonings are responsible for much of the strange sorceries that fall outside the list of spells commonly available to players.

Being a priest is not a character class but a social occupation, like being a mercenary or merchant. Priests in a religion, or those pretending to be priests, wear distinctive garb and often study sorceries related to their deity's interests. They are often bound to a particular temple or subject to a hierarchy.

Spellcaster Classes
There is one main spellcasting class, the magic-user. Elves (using Basic-derived rules) are a class with moderate fighting abilities and the spellcasting abilities of a magic-user one level lower. Magic-users can be of any alignment, reflecting the debate as to whether sorcery is inherently Lawful or Chaotic.


The standard magic-user can know all spells from the complete, twelve-color list; by "known" it is meant that a known spell is written down in the caster's possession. Spells known start with a randomly determined power spell (roll d10) and two standard spells, plus one standard spell per bonus point from Intelligence. On gaining a character level, the magic-user gains an additional random spell of a level he or she can memorize, assuming time spent in a suitable training location. Spells may also be gained by exchange with other magic-users.

How many spells per day can be memorized is found in the Magic-User Spell Allowances table. Memorizing a full complement of spells for the day takes two hours, regardless of level, and requires study from one's spellbooks or scrolls where known spells are kept . Each spell memorized at any one time must have a different title; there is no duplication of spells allowed. Once cast, a memorized spell is expended and that "slot" may not be refilled with another spell until the magic-user has had a good night's sleep.

A magic-user with exceptional Intelligence can memorize additional spells - at +1 bonus point an additional 1st level spell, at +2 the 1st level spell plus a 2nd level spell when of high enough level to memorize such spells, and at +3 a 1st, 2nd and 3rd level spell.


Specialist magic-users have attended a school or studied in a priesthood dedicated to one particular color of magic. The cost of this is they are unable to know, memorize or use spells from some of the other color. The benefit is that they automatically learn all spells of their colorwhen they reach a level at which they can use them. Some specialisms have alignment restrictions.

Starting specialists also begin with a random 1st level standard spell from one of the other allowable colors (roll until one comes up). They gain another random usable spell of the highest level they can cast when they reach a character level that does not give them a new spell level.

Finally, there are benefits to specializing that apply to the effects of certain spells. These benefits, and the colors not learned for each specialism, are shown in the Specialist Schools table.

Next post: tables and spell listing for Sorcery World.

Dark Images

So, what image stands iconically for D&D? 

Okay, the straight answer for me is the Trampier dungeon master screen. But I didn't use that screen. I made my own out of heavy cardboard, with a strange collage of punk rock art, stuff from Readers Digest and Boys Life, ads for D&D and Time Magazine natural disasters. Half Winston Smith (the punk collage artist), half Max Ernst. And the charts pencilled in on the inside.

Unfortunately that screen was lost to the dust of ages and is no longer available for viewing.


But there's another set of images that I associate with teenage years and the promise of mystery I sought in D&D, though they never appeared in anything by TSR. The illustrations of Sidney Sime.

There was something about those dark, detail-clotted vistas, with tiny human figures skulking and avoiding inky perils - most of the time, without much success. The Lord Dunsany stories they illustrated, when not wonder-tales of imagined orientalist gods, were seedbeds for the larcenous imaginations of Vance and Leiber. The tiny figures were men, good, bad or indifferent, who sought treasure from that which was far beyond them.

At the time, like many teens, I sought mystery, but also its illumination and rationalization - with matrices of encounter tables and saving throws. We have met the Beast and its Hit Dice are 6+6. In a way, to have Sime's illustrations in the D&D books would be to offer a promise the rules could not fulfill - a world more fit for medievalist treasure-seeking using Call of Cthulhu rules, or a set even more deadly and opaque. The clear scenarios of Sutherland and Trampier, horrors front and center, were as Apollonian a monster combat as you could hope for, and even Erol Otus' weird visions made sure to delineate every eyeball and tentacle. A Dunsany terror in D&D rules would be something like "Save each turn vs. death ray or die, otherwise lose 1 level. No stats, can't hit it, can't hurt it."

An out-of-level encounter. A Green Devil Face. No raise, no save, no hope. "It is better not."

See George P. Landow's scans here, in particular the tales of Thangobrind, Nuth and the Gibbelins.

On Killing

What if ...

your fantasy world was all humans, intrigues, politics and naturalism above ground ... and only in the Underworld did monsters dwell?

And those monsters were there in large numbers, and killable without remorse, because ...

• they were less than human, and you needed their gold and experience points.
• they were intrinsically evil and needed to be wiped out.
• they were threatening the world above, and you needed to save the village.

I'm working out these three implications in a different context than games - an article  I'm co-writing in psychology, about how  terrorists, extremists, and other supporters of violence overcome the natural impediments against direct killing of another human being. I suppose there are other answers, such as ...

• the characters are sociopaths, born or made (viz. Raggi's fighter class in Flame Princess)
• the characters are heroes who need impediments to overcome
• the monsters deserve it; they chose to be monsters
• the characters do feel remorse; they lose Sanity or Humanity each time they have to kill a sentient being
• the whole situation is an ambiguous allegory in which each of these possibilities can be considered

I realize this topic has been broached before in a rather unsubtle style. Ultimately, of course, our visceral ban is against the physical act of violence. But the blur between imagined or viewed violence and actual violence has become deeper with technology; a man in Nevada kills another in Afghanistan. If reality is made a game so that violence may more easily be done, does this taint our games, or make them an even more vital moral arena?

I want to find the balance that Umberto Eco found, in one of his essays when he contrasted the very physical war games he used to play as a boy with the cold sadism of the entirely bloodless genocide, the future Auschwitz commandant playing with the Erector set.