Let Slip The Dogs Of War (Part II)

In which I continue to describe the games I ran at Cauldron 2025, spoiling secrets and providing insights into the mind of a geezer DM...

SATURDAY NIGHT BLOCK: Ship Of Fate

The rousing success of Caul’s Dark Citadel…as well as the final three runnings of the tourney module in Saturday Block II...led to dinner being a boisterous affair, especially at my table. Everyone at Cauldron was in a fine mood and, plied with copious amount of alcohol, a lot of money ended up being shucked out at the auction, with much backslapping, congratulating, and toasting of each other.

A lot of palinka. A lot of whisky.

Thus the set-up for the so-called “night block:” a 9pm to WHENEVER affair (no time limit). At Cauldron 2023 I had skipped this (to my later chagrin), instead unwinding and bantering a bit before calling it an early night. THIS year, I had originally left the slot open hoping to get into one of Prince’s epic night-festivals…and then he decided not to run a game in the block! “Sorry, man, there are games I want to play in,” is he wrote to me last month.

SO determined not to miss out, I decided I would be the one to fire up a big-ass, high level adventure into the wee hours. Enter Ship of Fate, a high level extravaganza I wrote for Prince’s NAP II contest (get it HERE if you like).

Ship of Fate is quite obviously inspired by (and heavily based on) Michael Moorcock’s Elric story Sailor on the Sea of Fate. If you haven’t read it…um, why not? Elric stories are pretty much required reading for high level AD&D play, especially Elric of Melnibone, Sailor, and Stormbringer. But, yeah, I know some people think D&D is supposed to top out around 7th level. *sigh*

Good read.

I digress…Ship of Fate is an adventure designed to be played by from four to 16 players, four of whom take the part of high-level lady and gents (the “Heroes”) and 12 of whom are mid (7th – 10th) level “Companions.” The idea being that each Hero has three Companions. The kicker is that all 16 of these characters were once actual player characters, played either by myself of by my friends…however, I’ll note that – with regard to the high-level guys – they’ve been considerably “toned down” from their original stature and abilities. *AHEM*

I have only had the chance to run Ship of Fate one time…for my home group…and we did not finish more than five or six encounters due to an abbreviated session. Alas, we never returned to it because, being a one-off with pre-gens, it held a lot less “spice” for us than using our regular, organically grown PCs; such is life in a living campaign. Because of this, I wasn’t exactly sure how the adventure would play out. Certainly it was much too big for a standard 4-hour time slot. But we were in NIGHT BLOCK, baby! There aren’t any rules! Go all night like when we were 14 and high on caffeinated drinks!

[it’s possible I was a little drunky when I decided to register this game, pre-Cauldron] 

So, unsure of how I was even going to seat 16 people around the table I’d been assigned, I found myself somewhat relieved when “only” nine people showed up to the game. And then while handing around the pre-gens I immediately lost one of the four “Heroes” (the 12th level fighter)…noooo!

[I might have been a little drunky…again]

Fortunately, Tom still had his 14th level fighter pre-gen from Settembrini’s earlier high-level game. I knocked two levels off, reduced the hit points to a reasonable amount (they were set something like 2 points below max), and axed a magic item or two, but most of the character was allowed to stay.

And we were off!  Just organizing such a group was a bit of an ordeal, but it wasn’t too long before they got it together and decided to send the thief into the first cavern and…

Oh, wait…what’s the point of the adventure?

So, in Ship of Fate the heroes are sailed across the Dunkle Zee…a kind of phantom ocean that connects the various planes of the multiverse…to an island nexus where two sibling wizards (brother and sister) are using a rift in the space-time fabric to drain power from all the planes in existence, gradually snuffing them out. Players are supposed to find the building at the center of the island, kill the wizards, and then fire the building using special magic firebrands designed for the purpose. The ship has a cargo hold full of gold for the players after success in their quest and the wizards themselves are likely to have treasure, too. However, they also have many minions and protectors.

SO…big ass building (like the length of three football fields). Players did spend a flare trying to burn the place down with the wizards in it, but the structure…a monstrous, twisted behemoth that looked something like an amalgamation of alien machine and melted giant humanoids…simply extinguished the flame itself. Which the players had been told it would do which is why they needed kill the wizards FIRST. Amateurs.

A couple entrances suggested themselves to the PCs…a large cave, overhung by vines OR a large stairway leading up. They sent the thief down into the cave where he was soon filled by needles from the needleman forest inhabiting the cavern. Retreating, the party had the wizard nuke the plants with a fireball before proceeding. Into the troglodyte caves.

Those proved nightmarish to try to map, let alone explore in a coherent fashion [it’s possible the players were a little drunky] and the group eventually decided to give it up and go up the grand staircase to the “main gate” (as they called it). At this point, James (the guy playing the 12th level cleric) gets a brilliant idea: “Why don’t I use a find the path spell to locate the wizards?” Can’t…the spell can’t target living beings.

“What about the nexus rift? We know it’s there…and the wizards are likely to be with it!” That seemed reasonable and the spell immediately starts pulling the cleric (who leads the party) the way of the shortest route to the object desired.

Which worked pretty well for a while, as it ignored or helped bypass several encounters, while revealing secret doors and hidden passages. Great stuff; great use of available resources! Plus, it lasted a good long time (12 turns!) meaning they were covering a LOT of ground. No sweat, guys, we got this!

Then it led them through the cavern of the shadow demons.

Mean.

Now, I'd guess there are a lot of us for whom the phrase "shadow demon" conjures to mind the little toadie/spy who follows Venger around the D&D cartoon like a whipped dog. Yeah, no. Shadow demons are highly intelligent, vicious 7+ hit die creatures that are 90% undetectable and can leap and claw and tear at opponents while also having the abilities to dowse lights (darkness 15' radius), cast fear, and magic jar opponents. In this particular instance (not a mandatory encounter, by the way...just the shortest path to the wizards!), it turned into a nightmare scenario for the PCs. Their lights were dowsed, and then the attacks from the shadow demons ended up preventing casters from turning on the lights: every time they lost initiative...or won by too low an initiative amount....they'd get attacked and have their spells interrupted. Fighters were swinging away in darkness and hitting their companions. Two characters blew their saves against fear attacks and fled into the darkness, never to be seen again (one of those blundered into a room full of spectres and was sucked dry in the darkness; I think the other just went to bed). 

They eventually managed to overcome the demons, but it was a brutal toll: only three PCs (all Heroes) had survived. Sonka (now playing Tom's fighter, as he decided to go to bed), Ollie (as Lucky the 12th level magic-user), and James continued on, the find the path spell still functioning. They made it to the nexus chamber, but no wizard was present (50% chance, and missed the roll). However, some minor exploring found her in her workroom, toiling away at constructing flesh golems, with three completed. No surprise, everyone attacked!

Again...pretty brutal encounter. The cleric was felled by a fistful of magic missiles, the wizard badly damaged while the fighter tried to fight his way through flesh golems and mirror images. Tired of having his spells interrupted, the wizard backed off to use his scroll on monster summoning VI, conjuring a pair of weretigers...who did not appear for a couple rounds. Meanwhile, the fighter was stunned with a power word and the flesh golems proceeded to curb stomp him in a fashion unseen in Germany for four score years.

[too soon?]

However, Ollie/Lucky managed to hold on and the were-tigers finally showed up. Something happened to neutralize Giz-Kala (though that part is hazy...perhaps yet another hold person spell?) and the golems bereft of an order-giver allowed the much reduced party to escape, the fighter left with three hit points to his name. 

Deciding "stealth" was now the order of the day, the two utilized a potion of polymorph and a polymorph self spell to change into rodents, with which they finished their exploration of the main chamber, were-tigers in tow. They found the other wizard, laying in a comatose torpor of slumber, and slit his throat. "Now how the hell do we get out of here?!" Neither had been mapping.

It was decided to risk teleporting to the exterior, despite having only observed the island terrain once. Fortunately, Lucky was high enough level to take the beefy fighter with him. The die roll was successful and they fired the dungeon from outside, the flames quickly consuming the structure, and declaring victory, agreeing to split the gold between them. The time was after 2:30am, the players still standing thanked me, and headed off to bed, as I cleaned the table and turned off the lights of the floor (we were the last group still going).

I did not bother to reveal how much treasure they'd left behind.

*****

SUNDAY BLOCK I: Ybarra Florin

Our final session of Cauldron, the "brunch block" took place only after breakfast and the award ceremony had been completed. Some of us (*ahem*) had continued to drink into the wee hours of the morning, by which I mean 5:50am. Given one hour sleep to work with I was...not in great shape.

Thus it was a good thing I chosen an easy adventure to run! The original idea had been to run my I3: Pharaoh re-work, Desert of Kartha, but it's not anywhere close to being finished, let alone prepped and cut to fit a four hour time block (I would have been running the thing with a few sketchy notes). So, realizing my ass would be dragging at the end of a long three days, I decided to go with something I've run several times before: Ybarra Florin.

Again, this NOT really a "Becker original." Kenneth St. Andre penned a short adventure called Tower of Yrkath Florn for the first edition of his Stormbringer RPG. It's a nice little introductory scenario, one I've run two or three times over the decades I've owned the game. About three years ago, I converted it to AD&D; but it's mostly unchanged in terms of layout and premise. Mostly.

A wealthy patron hires the party to go check out the ruins of a dead Melnibonean sorcerer, and bring back any relics you find. Of course, "Melnibonean" in my campaign world means "high elf," all of whom seem to have a Spanish bent to them (hence, the name change. Don't ask me why...).

[I'm not even the first one to do "Spanish elves;" see Aaron Allston's Principalities of Glantri]

The ruined tower is two levels of a once three-story structure that's been wrecked by an earthquake...in my world it's on the Olympic Peninsula, right off Dabob Bay near Quilcene. The St. Andre version of the adventure has a family of clackars...winged gorilla creatures...lairing in the lower portion of the dungeon. But, of course, AD&D doesn't have this monster...

[other than in the 1980 DDG with the Melnibonean Mythos, page 88: they have HD 8, 2x 1d12 damage claws (+rending), immunity to fear and surprise, etc., etc.]

...so I didn't something else for my conversion. Now, when I say "fur, feces, and feathers," does anything D&Dish spring to mind immediately? Of course it does.

I ran this adventure when we were introducing Maceo's younger brother, Winston, to the AD&D game. Of course, he was ripped to shreds. Later, their family took them to see the new Dungeons & Dragons movie and Winnie told his mom, "That's the thing that killed me! An owl bear! See I told you they were scary!"

ANYway, they're scary for adults players, too. Our group (another eight stalwart souls) brought not one but TWO paladins to the adventure. The first paladin was killed by the pair of juveniles in the first room of the main hall. As the rest of the party maneuvered to lure the creatures out into a killing area, the Papa Bear came out of a different door to investigate the sounds of battle (and smell of blood) that had disturbed its slumber. Things got very dicey for the group very fast, despite having a ranger who kept negating the "completely surprised" rolls of the party (without the ranger, it could've got real ugly...)

However, give bulk of the credit to Ludwig the magic-user for saving the party's bacon. Ludwig's pre-gen had a wand of wonder and he wasn't afraid to use it, luckily getting decent results throughout the session! A stinking cloud and failed saves from the 'bears allowed the party to move outside the tear gas and missile the critters to death before they had a chance to clear their nasal passages...a pretty fortunate outcome, all things considered.  After slaying the mother 'bear (combining a slow spell from the wand along with an insect swarm from Paul the druid), the party claim to the family's nest of eggs and young, all worth a pretty penny on the open (elven) market.

Then it was up to the second level and Old Ybarra's workroom, hidden behind a magical door. The door is unlocked but electrically jolts individuals crossing its threshold for some pretty gnarly damage; fortunately, it was Michal the (last) paladin who took the blast, thereby rendering the thing inert. Inside lurks a demon...the same creature that killed Ybarra two centuries before when an earthquake cracked the pentagram that contained it. For AD&D purposes, I used a Type II demon, which is about the right power level, despite being vulnerable to normal (iron) weapons, thanks to an excellent armor class and magic resistance. Using it was nice (it's been a while since I've dropped any demons in an adventure) and I should probably use them more often. In the end, it was defeated without inflicting a single casualty (although it did force both the paladin and druid to flee the tower in terror with its cause fear ability)...and while in retrospect it probably should have caused more casualties through the liberal use of teleport and gate, I will not blame my lack of tactical badassery on "going soft." The fact of the matter is: I forgot about these abilities.

One hour of sleep, remember?

SO...an easy adventure to run and only a light challenge (in my opinion) for the players, thanks to a little good fortune and a heavily hung over DM. And that's okay...the con had been a looong three days (not counting the 5,000 miles of air travel), and I was happy with how the session wrapped up. I even took the time to calc out the experience and treasure take for all surviving party members...per their request. It wasn't a bad haul for the ADDKON characters.

[to be continued...]

Also mean...

Anti-Clerics

So, yeah...after very little deliberation, I've decided to re-write DL2: Dragons of Flame for use in my home campaign. As has been detailed ad nauseum (here and elsewhere) the thing has problems, most due to DragonLance in general (duh) some for stuff I just find a little nonsensical; for example, there are not one but TWO chambers containing a huge, ancient red dragon, but no easy means of egress/ingress for either (no treasure hoard in their lairs either).  

[*sigh*]

However, I rather like the Big Bad Leader, "Verminaard" (well, except for his name). I'll admit I'm a fan of "dragon highlords" as a concept anyway, but an evil 8th level patriarch battle commander is right in my wheelhouse. 

[remember I'm also a fan of Jagreen Lern]

But the "battle commander" is the important bit. Waaaaaay back when I was a kid, before I even knew there was such a thing as "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" I don't remember ever having a cleric in our games...not until I got my hands on the Mentzer/Cook Expert set. Remember that my understanding of "D&D" as a concept was mostly informed by playground gossip/play (which featured fighters, magic-users, and assassins), the Dungeon! board game (elves, heroes, superheroes, and wizards), and the occasional comic strip advertisement (which, to that point, had yet to feature "Serena the Cleric" or whatever her name was). 

[films like The Hobbit, Clash of the Titans, and various Sinbad films also played a role in my understanding of "fantasy," of course]

But the cleric class? Um...huh? Doesn't really seem like Friar Tuck does it? Certainly didn't seem like my parish priest...my encounters with "the undead" at a young age were mainly limited to the occasional Dracula re-make on television...my parents did NOT expose me to a lot of horror stuff.

And so, since I didn't have a good grasp on the concept...well, it didn't see action in my games either. 

However, this changed when I got the Expert set. All Moldvay wrote as a description was:

Clerics are humans who have dedicated themselves to the service of a god or goddess. They are trained in fighting and casting spells. As a cleric advances in level, he or she is granted the use of more and more spells. However, clerics do not receive any spells until they reach 2nd level (and have proven their devotion to their god or goddess).

Yeah, why would I want to play THAT instead of an elf?

The Expert text, on the other hand, gets things fired up:

At the first 3 levels of experience, the power of a cleric is extremely limited. As characters advance to higher levels...[they obtain more spells of greater power, having proven their faith to their god or goddess. Because of this, it is very important for clerics to be faithful to the beliefs of their religion and alignment. Should a cleric behave in a manner that is not pleasing to his or her deity, the deity may become angered and punish the offender. This punishment could take many forms...[examples]. The DM may decide what punishment might be in such a case. To regain the favor of the deity, a cleric might find it wise to donate money and magic items to the religion, build a church or temple, gain large numbers of converts, or defeat some great foe of the religion...

All that is heady, world-building stuff. This isn't just some dude with a list of healing spells and a weapon restriction...dude's got responsibilities to a god (or goddess). Failure indicates consequences! Compliances yields great rewards (like fanatically loyal FREE troops, and half-price strongholds!)! DMs are given major leeway to punish and persecute such characters, sending them on quests, whatever-whatever.

The first new character rolled up using the Expert rules (for my buddy Matt) was a cleric. I made sure of that. And because I was 10 years old and had no patience for waiting for someone to reach "name level," he was created as a 9th level character with a troop of devoted fanatics and a small stronghold. His first adventure: he and his men were ordered by his god to enter the desert and confront a blue dragon in its lair. Now, forty years later, I can't remember how the mission turned out (I suspect there was a lot of death by electricity), but I'm sure it was glorious. I know this: for the rest of the time my original group hung together (about five years, mostly AD&D), Matt nearly always played a cleric of some sort.

Fast forward to today.

I have some pretty solid opinions on the cleric class, basic assumptions on what it is, how it works/functions, and the justifications for various systems. These "solid opinions" have definitely changed/evolved over time, and I would happily enumerate their current standings if I thought anyone would really care terribly (I don't). However, I previously mentioned that one of my Lenten activities involved curating the PHB spell lists, and since the clerical list was the FIRST one I culled (and because it somewhat applies to Verminaard), I thought I'd detail a little of that particular bit.

In brief: I'm not using alignment these days. Lots of reasons for that. Nor am I using Deities & Demigods in my game, except for its rules on ability scores outside the normal range (and I'm thinking of cutting those as well). What then are clerics, and how do they function? Are they just a different type of spell-caster (i.e. another magic-user with a different list of spells and a different set of weapon/armor restrictions)?

No.

They are still clerics...priestly types, in other words. But there is no pantheon of deities/alignments to choose from. There are acknowledged "lords of light:" life-giving, creator gods (or God, depending on the particulars of one's religion). Clerics have access to a standard list of spells based on healing and protection and generally all the (non-reversed) usual spells available in the PHB. They don't get to animate dead or cause wounds or slay living creatures...none of those powers are granted by the lords of light. They are tasked with spreading light, fighting darkness, making a better world for all. 

Pretty simple, pretty straight-forward, pretty easy. It's more-or-less "acting in aid of The Good" which doesn't necessarily mean killing orcs and building civilization...in fact, sometimes it means saving orcs and destroying civilizations. But well-fed, harmonious communities growing in wisdom and acting with simple kindness to each other is...generally...the desired end result.

Then there are the anti-clerics.

Some folks just don't want to get along with others. They'd rather subjugate and destroy, dominate and command others and aggrandize themselves. Rather than follow the lords of light, they pray to diabolic or demonic powers, who can grant them many of the same powers. Many, but not all. 

Anti-clerics in my campaign world are clerics with a different spell list. They still have some of the lower level healing spells, but for the most part they use ONLY the reversed spells found in the PHB. The dark gods aren't big on creating light and life; anti-clerics cannot raise the dead for example (although they can animate corpses in a gross parody of life). In simple terms, anti-clerics are bad apples who, for whatever reason, have decided they'd rather have the power to inflict fear and death on others, though losing their soul in the process.

The whip is not an
edged weapon.

This then is Verminaard (or rather Hanse Werner...that's his name in my game world). Being an 8th level patriarch he has his own band of loyal followers (who will take the place of various draconian and hobgoblin denizens of Pax Tharkas). Seeking to carve out his own small kingdom, harboring ambitions of grand conquest, he works to rebuild an ancient elven fortress, from which he can launch attacks (especially raids for slaves and supplies) on the local communities. Control and conquest is his aim.

An adventure for 1st level characters.

Killing Gods, Final Thoughts

There's a lot to write about deities and their place in D&D...so much so that it would be the epitome of easy to allow this series to spiral endlessly down endless digressions. As such, I think it's time to bring it to a close; I'm sure I'll have the chance to revisit the topic in the future.

For ease of reference:

Part 1

Part 1 Addendum

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The initial impetus for this series was Prince of Nothing's (probably facetious) comment on an earlier post:

I think if you could manage to distill the right approach to portraying S&S style deities in DnD, complete with a few examples, you'd be doing the OSR a huge favor.

Never one to pass up doing a "favor" for the OSR (!!) I set out in my normal meandering fashion, throwing out the odd barb and jab as is my wont. While I despair of having distilled "the right approach" to the subject of S&S style deities, the series has at least helped me to distill my own thoughts. Here then is what I believe:

While D&D draws inspiration from the Sword & Sorcery genre, for long-term play it is probably best to draw parallels to long form fiction...which S&S ain't. S&S generally applies to short stories, dealing with a particular situation that a protagonist must face. Many of D&D's major influences (Leiber, Howard, Moorcock) wrote in this form...the books of Conan or Elric or Mouser are compilations of short stories rather than actual novels. A distinguishing characteristic of the novel is that a protagonist changes over the course of the book; such is not the case with the short story. Elric is much the same asshole at the end of the series as he is in the beginning; Bilbo or Frodo, on the other hand, are changed drastically by the course of events in their respective novels. D&D can be played like short fiction (i.e. in episodic fashion) but PCs that survive are forced to change by the very rule system by which we play (a 12th level wizard or fighter or thief bears no resemblance to a 1st level character with regard to capability or responsibility). 

S&S deities are reflective of the genre, i.e. they serve the needs of the situation at hand whether you're talking the mysterious entity encountered by Jirel in Black God's Kiss, Arioch's whimsical cruelty in Elric of Melnibone, or the soon-to-be-beheaded naga in God in a Bowl. Attention to continuity and coherence are of secondary importance to telling the story of the protagonist's particular adventure of the moment. For the same reason, there's no single particular way gods are portrayed in the S&S genre: Crom may be a mythical non-entity for all his appearances in Howard's work, while Death is an incarnate being in Leiber's Nehwon setting.

D&D, however, is meant to be played as a campaign over a lengthy (perhaps endless!) period of time, and thus a coherent cosmology is imperative to the setting, in order to facilitate the players' engagement with the game. If the rules for the cosmology shift constantly, depending on the needs of the DM's "story," it works to break the players' immersion and undermine their faith in the DM as a fair and impartial arbiter of the rules. 

And D&D has rules for deities baked into the game. Every edition I've played or read, with the exception of un-supplemented OD&D, has some version of "gods" inherent in the system, followed and worshipped by clerics (Mentzer's BECMI tries to take them out, but then adds the Immortal rules, many of which are named/modeled after the same gods found in historic religions of the world). Finding the "proper way" to portray gods in the game is a non-issue when the rules for modeling divinities are already hard-coded into the system.

Essential Reading

SO...if there is no specific S&S way to portray gods, and D&D already has rules for modeling gods in the game, and if (as I propose) the best way to play D&D is long-term with consistent attention to  setting cosmology (to allow maximum familiarity and, thus, immersion of the players), what then do I postulate is the best way to write gods into adventures?

And, for this, I look to the early (pre-1982ish shift) adventure modules as my examples. Here are the conclusions I draw:

• Gods exist, they are immensely powerful (by PC standards) yet still fallible; there is no "eternal Supreme Being" in D&D, that role being taken by the Dungeon Master, who creates the entirety of the campaign setting, including the gods worshipped by the player characters.
• There are creatures that attempt to imitate and/or are worshipped as gods but who are not; likewise, there are priests that promote false practices and/or worship false deities. Such deceptions can be sniffed out by the simple fact that no spell powers are granted to these would-be clerics.
• Being that the gods exist, they may be encountered by the player characters. Being that the gods' power is an order of magnitude far greater than that of the PCs, the way and manner of such encounters should be commensurate with the capability of the characters, as defined by the game rules. Having the gods (mainly) inhabit the outer planes is an altogether practical approach, as planar travel is generally limited to high level characters.
• Divinities may still be encountered indirectly...through agents, avatars, and relics...even by low- to mid-level characters, and such encounters with divine forces often break standard rules (helping imply the immensity of the divinity's power). Examples include the chaotic chapel in The Keep on the Borderlands, the temples to the Elder Elemental in the Giant modules, the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and (of course) Lolth in Vault of the Drow. Being that D&D is a magical world and the PCs are bold adventurers, such indirect encounters may be more common than one might suppose...unlike actual encounters with divine entities.
• Given the rules as written, PCs can kill gods. Doing so should be damn near impossible, which is not the same thing as "impossible." The consequences of such a deicide would be profound: the permanent death of Lolth would eliminate the Drow as a meaningful threat both above and below ground (and would probably lead to their genocide at the hands of the other Underdark species). Such scenarios should never be taken lightly, and are probably best suited as a capstone adventure to a campaign that is coming to a close. Definitely nothing I'd want to see for PCs below name level.

And there it is: the end of this series. Probably NOT as specific as Prince wanted, but still some guidelines to follow. And I honestly feel I've said about all I have to say on the subject...for now. Though, as always, I am happy to field questions, comments, and discussion.

Pax.

: )

Killing Gods, Part 4

All right…that’s a long enough break since my last post on “killing gods.” More than enough. 

As a precursor, I need a moment to talk about the relationship between clerics and deities; I realize this will seem yet another digression, but it’s pertinent to the conversation. You see, this whole subject came up because I was unsatisfied with the way I feel (many) adventure designs of recent years have been unreasonable with their treatment of gods…but it’s quite possible that this trend (and my preferences) come in part from learning different styles of play. 

I will elaborate.

I’ve written before about the shift in perspective of What Exactly A Cleric Is that came about in 1983 with the publication of the Mentzer version of Basic. As I’ve recounted (often enough) this was NOT the brand of D&D by which I learned the game. The clerics in my first campaign (which I ran up till circa 1988) didn’t receive their spells from “the strength of their beliefs.” No. Un-uh. Spells come from the gods they worship…they are divine favors, pure and simple, miracles granted by higher powers. 

This is, of course, EXPLICIT in the text. The 1981 Moldvay Basic set described it thusly:

Since clerical spalls are divinely given, they do not have to be studied; the cleric need only rest and pray for them.

"Divinely given" is the key phrase here. I can understand if there is some confusion caused by the actual description of the cleric class in Moldvay; its text ("...they are trained in fighting and casting spells. As a cleric advances in level, he or she is granted the use of more and more spells...") could be interpreted as meaning that their magic is separate from their deity, that magical training is something only those who are initiated into the cult's higher secrets are taught. But unless Moldvay is speaking metaphorically (I don't think he is), the phrase divinely given in the Spell section makes clear just who is "granting" access to clerical magic...not higher level priests and patriarchs, but the god or goddess whom the cleric serves.

And Gygax is even more clear in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide:

It is well known to all experienced players that clerics, unlike magic-users, have their spells bestowed upon them by their respective deities.

The DMG text (page 38) goes on for more than half a page detailing exactly how clerics receive their magic directly from their gods, either by being divinely empowered (1st and 2nd level spells), bestowed upon them through intermediaries (saints, angels, demigods, etc. for 3rd through 5th level spells), or granted by direct communication with the deity itself (6th and 7th level spells). It is not a cleric's "inner strength," "strong beliefs," or "mystical training" that allows the character to create miracles...it is the god itself. A cleric with no god receives no magic. Period.

As said, Mentzer changes this in his 1983 Basic rulebook...a book I never owned until the 2000s, and certainly not the book I learned to play with. But a subtle shift in thinking is evident in TSR's publications as early as 1982. I refer here to two classic modules published that year: N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God and B4: The Lost City. I imagine both modules might be held up as inspirations for the works of recent designers I cited earlier, examples of "sword & sorcery" style adventures featuring "godlike beings" who are nothing more than actual (non-divine) monsters needing to be killed...respectively a spirit naga named Explictica Defilus and the tentacled monstrosity known as Zargon. These false gods, whether through longevity and fear or powerful mind control, have created cults of worship around themselves, followers who hold them in awe and carry out their "divine will, much as one might expect of followers duped by a charlatan.

And yet both modules include actual cleric followers of these monsters...clerics with the ability to access clerical magic. N1 has multiple clerics of Explictica using spells of up to 4th level (7th level clerics). B4 features Darius, a 6th cleric (also with access to spells up to 4th level) of the "cult of Zargon" as one of the Big Bads of the adventure. None of these characters make sense under the rules of the game; none of these characters should have ANY spells whatsoever.

Contrast this with the backstory found in the 1980 module C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan:

Eventually a new Archon mounted the throne in Pontylver, one who claimed [lawful neutral] Alia as her patron. The Temple of the Correct and Unalterable Way grew in followers and prestige, and as time passed, Myrrha noticed that her peers and superiors were becoming increasingly arrogant and arbitrary....Myrrha saw they were falling into the heresy of believing that law is concentrated in the individual and not the community. Investigating, she discovered a well-kept secret: many members of the ecclesiarchy were no longer able to cast high-level spells, thus proving their estrangement from their deity!

If N1 was properly designed (that is, written to follow the instructions laid out in the rule books), neither Abramo nor Misha would have access to clerical spells above 2nd level (and maybe not even those) and Gareth Primo would have no magic at all because a spirit naga is not a god and, thus, not capable of granting spells.

That is the game, folks, and I honestly don't think it's "open to interpretation." But...perhaps because of "satanic panic" pressure over the pretending to worship strange gods (see the 1982 Mazes and Monsters where Tom Hanks plays a batshit-crazy cleric)...TSR started to move away from its own rules. Started to say, hey, being a cleric isn't really about worshipping a god, it's about your character's training and "strong beliefs" manifesting powers...you're just a magic-user in priest's clothing and it doesn't matter whether you're worshipping the One True God or some tentacled space slug that crashed on the planet a thousand years ago. We aren't teaching children about the worship of strange pagan gods...heavens, no! There is no god except God, these are just strangely deluded fantasy priests. Pay no attention!

And you see that carried all the way down to today's designers. From Jason Sholtis's magnificent Operation Unfathomable:

...clerics operate under the delusion that their deities actually exist (they do not!). In truth, clerics are merely a distinct variety of magic-user, devoted to one or more of the ten thousand Gods of Order. Clerics manipulate chaos to achieve their results through the mental constructs of their religious practices, rather than rote memorization of arcane mummery.

From 2017's Lamentations of the Flame Princess (James Raggi):

Cleric magic is divinely inspired, and is granted to Clerics through prayer. Whether these powers are granted to Clerics by higher powers, if these higher powers are what the Cleric believes them to be, or if all Cleric spells are merely ritualized forms of sympathetic magic, are all subjects frequently debated...

I would include the 2018 adventure The Red Prophet Rises in this mix of confusion, in which a heretical priest (Khazra), mistakenly worshipping an ancient vampiric entity, still (inexplicably) retains access to the spells of a 6th level cleric of "the Bull God." Why? Is the Obelisk that Thirsts a divine entity? No. Does it serve the Bull God? No. One would think spells would be withheld from the priest, if only to inform him of his delusional apostasy.  Guy uses a sword in combat anyway.

These authors (and others) seem to have been influenced somewhat by these later (post-1982) influences when it comes to explaining the relationship between clerics and their gods. Which is to say, there is little relationship, if any. Any failure of clerical magic can simply be attributed to the cleric losing faith in herself: it is not the deity that withholds magic, but the cleric's own psychological barriers to accessing a purely internal mechanism. 

I'm not a big fan of that interpretation. It doesn't jibe with the D&D I learned to play. It is not the AD&D of Gygax; it runs counter to the DMG and the information found in Deities & Demigods. And while I'll be the first to admit to being a stodgy, groggy, grumpy old man when it comes to my D&D, I'd even say that it's not very "Sword & Sorcery," either...despite what (many of) these authors hope to emulate.

Because as discussed in my first post on the subject, much of D&D is inspired by fantasy fiction of the pulp variety...and in pulp fantasy you see PLENTY of deluded cultists following charlatans and false gods, but they aren't getting any magical powers by doing so. False priests don't get spells: they use tricks and psychoactive powders or rule through fear and tradition and superstition. Real magic linked to worship is generally called sorcery and rightly so, as it is linked to the favors granted by demonic entities...but such infernal divinities are still "divine," supernatural and extra-dimensional. Only divinities grant divine powers: when Jagreen Lern or Elric conjure in the names of their chaos gods, THEN magical stuff happens. 

But maybe I need to rein in a bit and bring this all back around to the subject at hand ("killing gods"). There is, I think, a certain prevalence or attitude or orientation in the Old School Role-playing circles that has wandered far afield from the game as it was originally envisioned. Maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. But here's how I see it:

• As Mike Mornard writes, the original designers "made up some shit they thought would be fun." It involved exploring strange environs, finding treasure, building worlds. It was inspired and influenced by adventure fiction, much of it "fantasy" in nature.
• As a game, D&D has a system; it has rules. It models something (a fantasy world of adventure) and the rules are applied to the thing it models (the fantasy world of adventure) up to and including things like "how/why a cleric gets spells" and "how many hit points a god like Zeus might have."
• That divine architect that Elric is always searching for? The supreme being that orders the lives of even the gods of his world? D&D has that, too: it's called the Dungeon Master. And just like Elric's "supreme being" (who would be Michael Moorcock...duh), the DM is not a creature to be encountered by the protagonists (in D&D's case, the player characters). The DM creates the world but is not OF the world. What will be encountered are game constructs, up to and including the gods that inhabit the game world.
• As a constructed fantasy world D&D has a cosmology. As a game that models a fantasy world, that cosmology can be exactly and minutely defined...right down to just how much damage Thor can do with a hammer blow, or how many greater devils inhabit the 3rd layer of the Nine Hells...should such info ever become necessary for play.
• The game (D&D) has parameters (structure) of play. It has assumptions and expectations of how play resolves.  These expectations of play resolution are determined by 1) the rules, 2) the way the rules model the world, and 3) the fiction that inspires the game...in that order. Don't (for example) tell me "well, Gandalf used a sword!" The inspiring fiction (#3) comes behind the rules (#1) and the modeled fantasy world (#2).

As originally conceived, Dungeons & Dragons was never about "telling stories." It was about playing a game of exploration and survival (adventure!) in a fantasy game world. However, some folks were quite unimaginative with how they worked within those parameters, creating murder-hobo funhouses of the poorest variety and this caused pushback in the form of front-loaded drama. We shall not wait for a story to emerge from our adventures! We shall make sure there is MEANING to these characters' (fake) lives!

Combine the success of that front-loaded drama (through company supported publications like Ravenloft and Dragonlance) with an imperative to cut anything perceived as controversial (i.e. impacting the bottom line) from a game now being marketed to children (this being the shift that began circa 1982), and one can readily see the consequences: we don't kill gods. We kill demons. We kill immortal liches. We kill creatures masquerading as gods. We kill surrogates in order to have our high stakes, high drama, emotionally invested play.

Because, originally, emotional investment in a character was mainly found in long-running (i.e high level) characters. And high level characters, by necessity, required greater challenges to stay engaged...tackling gods (modeled as part of the cosmology) and godlike beings (that giant ape from WG6) are a natural evolution of challenge for characters of the highest echelon, because lesser challenges don't cut it anymore. If you want to run a high level campaign, you're going to want to study up your copy of Sailor on the Seas of Fate because that's about "par" when it comes to suitable challenges. Good old Demogorgon has been a part of the D&D tapestry since 1976...and for good reason. 

[hell, I used to fight Demogorgon...on the playground...waaaay back before I ever laid eyes on ANY D&D book. Before I even opened my first box of the Dungeon! board game, even]

Not low level characters (I'm guessing).

Outside of WotC's latest-greatest editions, D&D designers have (mostly) moved away from front-loaded drama and railroad story arcs, but they've still passed some sort of threshold from which they can't seem to return. They want high stakes, high challenge, high weirdness in their adventure...but they don't want high level player characters. They want their players to continue playing "small ball" forever after, retiring (I suppose) should they ever, somehow, reach 8th or 10th level of play. "Too superheroic," is the refrain I hear. "The game is no fun after around 5th (or 6th or 7th) level."

Bull. Crap. But that discussion is for another post.

Throwing high level challenges (like godlings) into low level adventures is an attempt by designers to have their cake and eat it, too. It's an attempt to inject Elric-levels of amazeballs fantasy into the lives of grubby, Warhammer Fantasy-level adventurers in order to draw out low-level play while still keeping long-since-jaded players engaged with the game in front of them. Is that as bad as playing pre-generated snowflakes traveling the Dragonlance railroad? Absolutely not. But it's got to be grating after a while. It would certainly bug the shit out of me.

All right, that's it. I lied about this being the concluding post...just had too much more to say. The NEXT post will definitely be the conclusion to this series. 

Killing Gods, Part 2

Man, I've got a half-dozen Real Life Important things on my plate today and if I don't get this damn post started, I don't know that I ever will. SO, without further ado, let's get down to the deicide!

The first god I ever killed in D&D was Thor.

To be clear, I was DM'ing at the time, not playing, but I am far more responsible for Thor's death than any of my players. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I was absolutely responsible. This was circa age 10 or so, on the playground, which meant we were still only a couple years into D&D play; at the time we had not yet discovered there was separation between editions of the game, and I was running my game with a combination of B/X and the AD&D Monster Manual and (occasionally) the DMG. My buddy had just acquired a copy of Deities & Demigods (the post-Moorcock/Lovecraft version) and we were anxious to put it into play. Since one of my earliest PCs in the game had a rather high-level thief who had no problem whupping up on normal challenges, I figured Thor would be the perfect encounter to put the dude in his place.

Dead duck

Now, I can't remember the exact circumstances of the scenario (this was some 35 years ago) but I can remember the outcome: Jason managed to piss off Thor (probably after I had pissed off the PC), whereupon Thor used Mjolnr to hit the thief with a 100-die lightning bolt. The thief's ring of spell turning reflected the bolt, Thor failed his saving throw, and was utterly disintegrated by the thing. If I remember correctly, Sneakshadow looted the thunder god of his mystic hammer, but I am 100% certain he never wielded the weapon (he was a thief after all, and rather small in stature for a human). 

I can also recall, later, reading the ring of spell turning description in the DMG and its specific stipulation (unlike the Cook Expert set) that magic item powers could not be turned and thinking: "darn, I screwed that up!" However, at no point do I remember thinking to myself, "hmm, maybe I should not have sent a greater god to fight a player character."

Deities & Demigods isn't a Monster Manual, but it's written like one...it has alphabetical entries for gods, each with a little illustration, a brief description, and a stat block. This is the exact same setup as any of the AD&D monster books. I'm sure I never even bothered to read the instructional text at the beginning of the book (explaining 'this isn't a Monster Manual') because I can remember reading all that for the first time (and loving it) after I purchased my own copy of DDG later in the form of Legends & Lore, sometime around age 11 (i.e. in 1985, before my 12th birthday). By that time, Jason had become a "Born Again" Christian and was no longer allowed to play D&D...though, perhaps, if his mother had been aware of his history with destroying pagan deities, she would have relented a bit.

For a kid to make such a mistake is pretty understandable...even older players can probably be forgiven for making lazy assumptions when confronted with a book with a similar format (and thus skipping over the pertinent parts of the introduction). The DDG was written the way it was to update the prior OD&D supplement Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes (Supplement IV) for the "Advanced" D&D format, and it is a decent emulation of the style in which Supplement IV was presented. So why did authors Rob Kuntz and Jim Ward provide god stat-lines when ambitious players were certain to treat them as challengeable monsters? The answer is in the Foreward to GDG&H:

This volume is something else, also: our last attempt to reach the "Monty Haul" DM's. Perhaps now some of the 'giveaway' campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are. This is our last attempt to delineate the absurdity of 40+ level characters. When Odin, the All-Father has only(?) 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?

There it is: the book was meant to be a crack-down on what was deemed to be some of the "excesses" (as they saw it) of certain campaigns. By providing statistical representations for both literary heroes (Elric, Conan, Vainamoinen, etc.) AND the gods of various pantheons, D&D players would have a scale of comparison against which to measure their own characters and campaigns.

Which, I suppose, could be an admirable goal...if D&D wasn't a completely different animal.

The first
"monster manual"

D&D didn't really seek to emulate/model a particular setting (with an implicit scale) nor, really, a particular genre of fantasy. Elric's multi-verse spanning adventures are very different from Conan's down-and-dirty conflicts, and both pale in comparison the the physical might displayed by John Carter on the surface of Mars. D&D sought to provide rules for creating fantasy adventures - and it succeeded at that! - but it never meant to constrain or limit the players' imaginations. Telling players three years after the fact that they were "doing it wrong" was a ridiculous attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. Scale should have been baked in from the get-go if that had been the intention, instead of assuming similar minds and attitudes...and who's to say the attitude wasn't similar anyway? Both Gygax and Arneson had plenty of "wa-hoo" in their own campaigns.

But back to the discussion: regardless of what one thinks about the outrageousness of fighting...and potentially slaying...divine entities, it is absolutely clear that the D&D game provides explicit rules for doing just that! At least up through 3rd edition (the last edition for which I purchased a Deities & Demigods book), textual instruction has been provided that enable DMs to run gods as encounters against player characters. Certainly, each edition to do so (OD&D, AD&D, BECMI's "I" rules, 3E) have made the prospect more and more daunting, giving divine beings ever greater abilities...and yet, the game has never simply come out and said "nope, can't be done." The gods remain ever vulnerable to mere mortals.

[forcing a deity to make a saving throw at all...even if the chance of failure is only the 5% probability of rolling a "1" on a D20...is saying that the being is as fallible as any human. 'To err is...' and all that jazz]

And as said, the D&D game supports this type of play. It's own fiction (I admit to only having read Dragonlance and the Gygax-penned Greyhawk novels) encourages this type of play. And multiple adventure modules from D&D's "golden era" (pre-1983) provide examples of how such play might be handled.

In a reasonable fashion.

And I guess that's the part that has (recently) found my prickly hide to be chapping...well, one part anyway. The unreasonableness of the encounters being given. Or...perhaps...not even the unreasonableness of the scenarios, but the disconnect I see between the game and the...the...

Hmmm. It's not "style." Or "fiction." It's more of an attitude or outlook. An orientation. Folks want to play D&D in a particular way, a particular fashion. Okay, that's cool...that's fine. It's still D&D. But then they want to have these god-encounters that aren't reasonable...at least not in the manner of the game as designed.  

Hmm...I'm having a hard time expressing this. 

Let me try a different way. I've heard people say: "If my DM put a wight in a first level dungeon, I'd punch him in the face" (or words to that effect). Okay, great...I get your point, and it's a reasonable one given the parameters of the game as written. Low-level adventurers don't have the abilities to confront such a creature. Low-level adventurers don't have the abilities to confront a LOT of creatures.

SO...why would you put a god or godling in any sort of low level adventure?

Halls of the Blood King (levels 3-5)

Palace of Unquiet Repose (levels 3-5)

The God That Crawls (levels 1-2)

Operation Unfathomable (levels 1-?)

There are others...of course there are others, there are always others. These ones just spring immediately to mind, and I'm too lazy to go hunting up others. 

[that's another part of the hide chapping: I've lost track of how many low-level adventures see players encountering godlike beings. It's become such a regular choice for scenarios, it could be included in Moldvay's list of standard scenarios (page B51) between "Fulfilling a Quest" and "Escaping from Enemies." Call it "Confronting Godling Made Flesh" or something]

An adventure that pits a party of 4th level characters against "The Lord of All Vampires" is not, to my mind, a reasonable execution of the D&D system as intended, nor is an adventure that finds a party of 1st and 2nd level characters accidentally wandering into the lair of "Shaggath-Ka the Worm Sultan." It belies the dynamics and expectations implicit in the game's design. Yes, I'm sure that some (like the authors of these adventures listed) would beg to differ...as I wrote previously, this is all my (strong) opinion. So, I'd imagine some folks (those I haven't hopelessly offended) are wondering what I'd put forward as a reasonable adventure involving a godling?

Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Q1 is not, of course, one's only tussle with Lolth, the demon queen of spiders...she first appears in Gygax's own D3: Vault of the Drow as a god made flesh, dwelling incarnate in the lowest level of her chosen people's greatest shrine (although why she's there is never explained). To be sure, Q1 is a flawed adventure, but I've found it to be a very fun adventure in play, and a rather solid example of possible "god fighting" in D&D. 

Note the high level: 10-14 is pretty darn high for AD&D. My very over-powered bard was something like 15th level (max levels for fighter/thief) when I tackled Q1, but the character's total x.p. was equivalent to a fighter of 11th or 12th level. 14th level spell-casters have close to 30 spells per day to play with (more, for high WIS clerics), and all such characters have a ton of resources, both magical and mundane, to draw upon. Attacking an arch-devil or demon prince (or queen) in its lair is a legitimate challenge for D&D characters that have otherwise grown too big for their britches.

Beefy monster

"Come on, JB, Sutherland's adventure is the height of cheesiness...you're just being nostalgic here!" Not at all. Given sufficient time adventuring, PCs will acquire resources such that normal logistical problems no longer apply: the ability to create food and water. Bags of holding and portable holes. Magical mounts and constructs that can carry immense burdens, rarely (if ever) tire, and that can bypass obstacles by flying. Magical means of entry and egress - or escape! - including teleportation, passwall, word of recall. And, of course, the power to bring fellow party members back to life whenever it suits them. Some Dungeon Masters recoil at the thought of their campaigns getting to such a level, it no longer resembling a game of "scurrilous rogues" in running battles with lizard people while trying to hide a gemstone up their nostril. That's right: it doesn't. High level characters have graduated from such grubby affairs and require larger challenges to test their abilities.

Planar travel becomes an option at high levels, and rightly so...because other planes provide the opportunity for DMs to throw the greatest challenges at PCs. And I'm not just talking encounters with gods and godlings...on other planes, all bets are off with regard to what might be thrown at PCs. Different physics, different rules, screwing with spell effects, reducing or limiting magical abilities. Pocket dimensions and demi-planes provide all sorts of justifications for strange, non-book monsters and unique, fantastic treasures. Q1's problem (in my opinion) isn't one of steam-powered spider ships; rather, it's too many damn bugbears and coin piles...the adventure could be even weirder and stranger than it is (though the demonweb map itself is a rather beautiful thing). Talking about D&D's literary roots, Moorcock's Elric stories provide excellent examples of just how weird and messed up things get when you start skipping around the multiverse...and just how much trouble PCs can get into when their magic and magical items stop functioning the way they're accustomed to on the Prime Material plane.

But that's not low-level stuff. Elric is sometimes accompanied on his extraplanar adventures by low-level characters and (spoiler alert) things usually go very, very badly for them; insanity and death are both par for the course. Which is as it should be. Your high level party isn't going to get any positive results out of taking a small army of men-at-arms into the demonwebs, nor should they. Soldiers have their place in the D&D world, but planar invasions of a demigod's home plane ain't one of them. Such an scenario shouldn't be a place for any character with less than a million experience points. Literally.

Okay, that's enough for Part 2. Part 3 coming up!

[here's Part 1 and Part 1b for those who missed them]

Old Time Religion (part 1)

Can I please get some gaming content in my blog-o-sphere?

[all apologies to Jeff Rients with his recent DCC adaptation]

Ugh…life has been rough lately, but no one wants to hear about it (not that they don’t care, it’s just that that’s not why they tune it). So now that we’ve passed the All-Star break and Seattleites can officially stop paying attention to pro sports (at least till September) it’s time to start leading by example.

Let’s talk clerics.

It’s funny: as a kid growing up I never played clerics as PCs. Not that they didn’t provide SOME interest to me. As a kid with his grubby hands on a Basic set, I have to say Sister Rebecca was no huge role-model (all apologies to Mrs. Moldvay)…the examples show her to be a secondary bludgeon and “Jimminy Cricket” type conscience to party members. Now if there’d been a turning example in the rules my feelings might have been different. Instead clerics just felt kind of “meh” to me…at least compared to the Elf (Silverleaf) and Fighter (Morgan Ironwolf) examples.

[and let me tell you, reading about the Dwarf and Thief getting off’d quickly didn’t endear me to THOSE classes either…though perhaps not as much as not seeing ANY examples of Magic-users and Halflings]

[note to self: need to put more examples in D&D Mine and make the characters interesting]
Now it was a different story when I got to the Expert set a year (or less) later. The ability of Name level clerics to inspire fanatically loyal followers is, frankly, awesome and had me absolutely invested in the idea of clerics as a viable class. The first “pre-gen” Expert character we made was a cleric for my buddy Matt (though less than 9th level) so that he could lead some hired mercenaries into a desert wilderness to fight a blue dragon. This character would go on to be his staple PC when we converted over to AD&D later.

Clerics in AD&D became even MORE awesome with spells up to 7th level and the fantastic Deities and Demigods rulebook. Man, there were a lot of bulls sacrificed on altars back in those days (and not just by the clerics)…a lot more than you find in your average 21st century D&D game anyway. I did write up a priestess of Thor (complete with poorly drawn picture with horned helmet), but it was a character I never had a chance to play.

As I said, I had some interest in clerics, but they just weren’t my normal “type.” Which is funny because the last couple years (ever since rekindling an interest in D&D) has found me playing a LOT of clerics. Well, two clerics and a paladin, but that’s three holy types out of a total of four D&D campaigns I’ve played in since I got back into this “old school thang”…75%? Pretty darn unusual considering my past track record.

[I’m NOT counting DCC play-testing as “D&D” by the way]

Now, I play clerics a little different from the way some folks do…I say this as a long time Dungeon Master who’s seen a lot of clerics pass through his campaigns (with varying degrees of success). I tend to be a “lead from the front” guy, rather than a “support/medic” person. Now part of this is due to my (generally) forward and abrasive personality, but part of it is my personal take on the cleric character class…and this is the only way I can justify the character concept.

Now let’s back up for a moment: why the heck am I talking about this? ‘Cause that’s pertinent to the discussion. Well, a guy over at the dragonsfoot forums asked a question about how XP was awarded for treasure and provided the following hypothetical:

“…let’s say the party willingly leaves treasure behind (the cleric doesn’t want to desecrate the tomb, as is often the case). What do you do then? Do you award any XP at all?”

The responses were many and varied. I provided my own answer – the B/X answer – that XP is only awarded for treasure recovered. Why? Because XP earned represents a character’s skill as an adventurer treasure hunter (which is why XP is awarded for treasure found). Part of my response included the following:

“If characters choose to leave a chest of gold behind because “it’s too heavy” or refuse to take a jade idol because it’s “sacred to someone’s deity” then they aren’t very good adventurers are they? The proficient, experienced adventurer (i.e. the one with the higher level) will demonstrate his or her ability at treasure retrieval. This is a PROFESSION…if they don’t intend to make money at it they might as well work as shop keepers or blacksmiths or fisher folks or whatever.”

What was not immediately apparent from the post (but what was explained later by the poster) was this:

“Indeed, no XP should be awarded for leaving treasure behind because it’s too heavy, but the Cleric example still strikes me as a potential problem. I understand that players should be adventurers (i.e. “treasure retrieval experts”), but there’s just something odd about a cleric robbing tombs. I’m not really arguing anything here; just making an observation. I guess he could just be an adventuring cleric.”

This seemingly innocuous question (at least, it appears the poster feels the question is innocuous) is…to me, at least…one with tremendous implication to one’s D&D campaign. I mean it strikes right at the heart of “what is this game all about?” And depending on how it is answered, it drastically changes the color of one’s game.

Well, it does if you care about such things or are even slightly introspective about your role-playing. I know there are plenty of people who don’t give a shit…but that’s a separate post.

There are two basic parts to this question, one general and one specific…and if you can’t reconcile the two you are going to run into disconnects between players and the game. Disconnects with regard to the underpinnings of the game’s “fantasy logic” anyway; I suppose you can still play D&D like an over-complicated version of Munchkin instead of an RPG.

[to be continued due to sheer bulk]

Happy All Saints Day!

And thank God it's the end of Daylight Savings Time...finally the rest of the State is back to MY biological clock. I was able to sleep in an hour and still get coffees and get home before the Seahawks game started.

Also, it means the beagles woke me an hour later than normal this morning...which is nice since we were out fairly late last night.

Back to normal, says I, and once again my thoughts are turning back to Dungeons & Dragons. For as many, many years November has always signalled a craving for D&D in my soul. Perhaps part of this is that my first RPG, Tom Moldvay's Basic Set, was gifted to me for 8th birthday many years ago (November 13th, 1981). Another part of this might be the amount of vacation time afforded to school kids in November...with Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving (two days!) there was a lot of looong weekends for game playing.

A third part has to do with the briskness of the weather which made outdoor play and chores a fading memory every November. And finally, November always brought a family trip to Montana and an opportunity to shop to my favorite used bookstore, inevitably finding something for the Dungeons and Dragons RPG.

Heh...I was at Half-Priced Books yesterday and actually found a copy of the adventure module A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity. A very rare find (besides the Internet), I was tempted to buy it...except that it wasn't half-price (in fact they were charging $15). I still might have picked it up except that I have owned it in the past and I KNOW that somewhere in my mother's house it is still lurking, crammed into some dusty book shelf or box of comics. I passed.

Reading the blogs this morning, I've become interested in the recent conversations on religion floating in a particular corner of the blog-o-verse. I won't bother re-posting my (rather long) comments, but it's got me thinking about clerics again...and alignments and mono-theism.

Now keep in mind that I play B/X D&D these days...originally (in OD&D and B/X) the cleric class was only available to humans. It could almost be considered an advantage human societies had over the demi-humans of D&D-land...they have the ability to commune with God and perform miracles and no one else does. Talk about manifest destiny!

But the original D&D had a dualistic cosmology. There were Lawful clerics (that had "good" spells: curing, resurrecting, etc.) and Chaotic clerics (that had access to "evil," reversed spells). Neutral clerics (at least in B/X) were required to choose whether their deity granted normal spells or reversed spells, not both.

[yes, in B/X clerics ARE still able to use their opposite number...reversed spells for Lawful clerics, healing spells for Chaotic clerics...but ONLY in extreme circumstances]

In essence, choosing Lawful or Chaotic as your alignment determined whether you followed the Lords of Light or the Minions of Darkness...or to put it in Catholic terms, Yahweh or Satan. Being Neutral meant you still had to choose one of these powers (the Light or the Dark), but the alignment would simply seem to indicate the character was less than totally committed to the side (and interestingly, in OD&D, Neutral clerics were admonished for such fence-sitting and not allowed to advance beyond a certain level).

But somewhere between OD&D and AD&D this dualistic cosmology got lost and the game became polytheistic. The assumed game world was anything BUT Christian as supplements (starting with Supplement IV) provided numerous pantheons of divine hierarchies. I can think of several reasons for the idea:

- historical or "sword & sorcery" fiction often featured different pantheons of gods than the medieval Christian. What if someone wanted to play a Teutonic priest of Thor?

- not every player of the game was interested in a Christian duality that the basic game implied

- from a "story" point of view "rival gods" provide great causation for campaign world conflict

But ya' know, historically speaking I seem to recall that in most polytheistic religions all Gods were generally worshipped equally (at least in their own sphere of influence). I don't know...I'm not much of a historian, really. But the ancient Greeks (as one example) might have a patron god of their city-state (like Athena and the Athenians), but certainly wouldn't snub Poseidon when going to sea or Ares when going to war...or Hades when someone died.

Actually, I suppose that the tales of Greek mythology ARE a good example of conflict between certain rival gods...especially when one thinks of the Iliad. But even so, attributing human Alignments to the gods isn't especially helpful...the gods are what they are and they are concerned with their own affairs (a city they patronize, a sphere of interest), and while they may not always be fair or "just" they aren't necessarily evil.

There are definitely many different ways to run one's D&D campaign...probably a reason for the game's enduring popularity...but I can't help but think a return to the old dualistic philosophy (especially with regard to B/X play) isn't a bad little way to go. It sure makes things simpler, cosmology-wise. And I believe it allows for more "shades of grey" within the game world's societies than might occur with a more numerous pantheon of scheming, competing deities.

More on this shortly.

The Holy Grail!!!

So anyway...I was wandering around Greenwood (Seattle neighborhood), sipping coffee and contemplating chorizo and eggs for breakfast, when I stopped into my local game store (as I have done on a weekly basis for the last several years) and low-and-behold I found a first run copy of Deities & Demigods for sale in their used book section!  This is a book for which I've been searching...oh, about 25 years or so.  I've only held it in my hands a couple times, once a little more than a year ago when I found it in the same game shop...unfortunately, THAT copy was in terrible condition with black ink and/or crayon scribbled all over the pages.  I refused to pay $25 for it, but have been kicking myself a bit ever since.

Now, I feel completely vindicated.  For $30 I now possess an excellent copy of a piece of AD&D history...and one with my beloved Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythos lovingly detailed!

What a glorious day!

Seriously, I realize I could have bid for a copy of this on eBay and got it much sooner, but I hate doing that...prices get jacked up all out of whack and you never know what you're getting until it actually arrives.  I prefer to peruse books myself before purchase...plus I'm weirdly anachronistic in my tendencies anyway.  AND I like to support local businesses (no, I don't shop at Wal-Mart either).  

As of today, there's very few items of AD&D merchandise I'm still looking for.  A copy of S4 or N2, both of which I owned once upon a time, perhaps N1, or the Slave Lord series (the latter of which just for its historical value...plus I used to own the mega-module, but that vanished with S4 and N2).  But these are all relatively low priority.  I found Q1 at Half Priced Books three months ago, finally completing my G-Q series after many years (that's one I'd tried to purchase more than once on eBay and Amazon). 

Oh, such lovely memories this book brings back...it makes me want to start up an AD&D campaign, just so I can incorporate the Cthulhu mythos. Wow...does every god in that section have -7 Charisma?  No...just 3 out of 5 greater gods.  Ha!

Mmm...you know what?  There are a couple things I'm still missing that I wouldn't mind getting my hands on.  Not OD&D stuff (hey, I've got the monster book that still has the Balrog's stats!), though the supplements I-III would be valuable for the place in D&D history.  No...the Gazetteers from the BECMI days.  I'm missing three or four of them (particularly the Orcs of Thar) that would be good resources for a B/X campaign.

Wow...so cool.  I don't know what the copyright limits are for text that has been recalled, slashed, and burned (and in a book that's out-of-print to boot), but I'm a naturally cautious dude and so will probably not be posting any specific DDG text, much as I'd like to.  However, rest assured I'll be sharing Stormbringer's info in a later post (at the very least).  

To all you collectors out there: happy hunting!  And good luck!

When PCs Were Uber-Heroes; Killing Thor

Remember back when PCs used to take on gods and win?

Someone once wrote that simply by including stats for deities and gods, a designer invites players to pit their characters against said deities as extravagant monsters. This may have been Mark Rein-Hagen, creator if Vampire: the Masquerade who, rather famously, failed to include stats for his Antediluvian clan founders (and rather disingenuously, I may add since a possible theme of the game is diablerie of one’s elders). Or maybe not…one thing about the original VtM is it allowed individual Storytellers to define (or redefine) their own origins of the “vampire creation myth.”

But I digress…whoever initially said it, they were spot on. I can recall when I first laid hands on the AD&D Deities and Demigods (owned and borrowed from my buddy, Matt) and thinking it was basically a big ol’ Monster Manual. After all, it has the same basic set-up, right? Stat block, short description of deity, little picture? The gods all have hit points, so they can be fought, right?

So of course we put it to the test…or rather, I put the test to my players. Remember that back in those early days (circa age 9-10), I was still bumbling through many of the rules, and hadn’t yet realized that AD&D and B/X were two separate systems. One of the earliest players in my D&D campaigns was my buddy, Jason. His family was a bunch of soccer fanatics (players, coaches, fans) waaaay back before the MLS; his single-mom drove a full-on 1980s non-mini-van (brown, I believe, though I seem to remember them also have one that was blue-and-white striped…maybe they traded one in for the other?). Jason would change schools in the 4th or 5th grade around the same time his family would become Born Again Christians and I would stop being allowed to go over to his house by my parents (who were a little freaked out by how he and his mom would get down and “pray in tongues”). In middle school, he would become a heavy-metal head-banger with an electric guitar…but that was after he’d stopped hanging with our D&D group.

Anyway, in 1982 those days were still far off and he was playing one of the longest running characters in the campaign…a thief named “Sneakshadow.” Sneakshadow was probably in his late teens, or early 20s in terms of Level when he challenged Thor to a throw-down on the god’s own plane of Asgard. Not deigning to smite the infidel with mighty Mjolnir, he instead blasted the rogue with a 100 dice lightning bolt (per the DDG, Thor can project this 1/day from Mjolnir). Jason cheerfully showed me his ring of spell turning on his character sheet, Thor promptly failed his own saving throw, and the rest (as they say) is history.

I’m pretty sure we rolled all 100 dice, just to make sure…I seem to recall A LOT of adding (and nail biting!) as we tried to get closer and closer to Thor’s hit point total.

Actually, now that I think about it, it seems to me that Sneakshadow initiated the engagement by BACKSTABBING the God of Thunder. This is the kind of thing you do when you’re 9 years old and have no adult supervision in your D&D game. I wonder how he got to Asgard in the first place…rainbow bridge, perhaps…?

Later on, in reading the description of the Ring of Spell Turning in the DMG we discovered that it did not function against magical items (as if a mundane magic item would function against Mjolnir anyway!!), and I believe we ret-conned the whole thing.

Which probably made Thor very happy since, killing him on his own plane, we had ruled he was permanently dead. That kind of thing can really upset the celestial hierarchy, you know? Not to mention leave a gaping hole in the fight roster of Ragnarok.

I believe Sneakshadow’s patron was Loki...