The Coin, and its sides

One of my oldest friends said something the other day that stuck with me. He was talking about how its interesting to be surprised by the course of events of in older styles of RPGs; the fact that you are not really assumed to be victorious. The words he said went something like this: "It's good. But the other side of the coin is, you can die a horrific death for no reason." That's true. Those are the two sides of the AD&D coin, and I, for one, think its worth the risk of ignominious death to have the chance of strange and glorious victory.

For what victory can there be if the chance of destruction does not loom? Death in AD&D (and many older games) is a Sword of Damocles that hangs uneasily above the necks of the players. Every action may result in it, every NPC may be capable of dealing it. Wariness and caution are watchwords, but they do not dominate every encounter, particularly as the characters grow in level.

Death, meaningless, horrific, and vile, awaits us all. Unless you are a legitimate romantic and you think that your own death will forward some kind of theme or be important in some kind of cause, you already know that. Death is always senseless, death is always unkind, and death is usually unwanted. Decrying that death in an RPG is too harsh, too senseless, is the same as decrying that in life. Of course, now the legions of "but games are games and life is life" fans will crawl out of the woodwork to complain that they play pen and paper roleplaying games to escape the inevitability of death and its implications, to which I say: Go forth and prosper, just don't do it at my table.

I particularly like this image of the coin, who's face represents glorious but unexpected developments and who's obverse represents complete and utter failure. Of course almost no plans in AD&D work out exactly one way or the other (short of the party being slaughtered by golems or something) but that is the underlying structure, the very essence of risk/reward, that elevates older games above mere wish-fulfillment.

So, my advice to you? Flip that coin, and pray your side comes up.

The New Death (and others), a review

Start with some Ray Bradbury. You'd better have some H.P. Lovecraft on hand, and a heady dose of Robert E. Howard to compliment it. Of course, there's a place for some Essence of Vance in this recipe, and you'd do well to use a lot of it. Mix them just right, add in some extra cynicism and a healthy helping of Groucho Marx, and you'll be approaching the composition of James Hutchings' 2011 book of short stories, poetry, and flash fiction: The New Death, and others.

This collection is a truly enviable concoction, switching with ease and grace between tried and true Sword and Sorcery and postmodern humor, sometimes within the same story (such as the Jeweled City). Hutchings has a talent for writing in a classically fantastic manner, evoking the ancient Hyperborean worlds of Howard; yet he also captures satire and modern settings with the aplomb of Bradbury.

While it may be said he owes much to other authors that came before him, the new constellation of meanings is completely original. Witty, sometimes bitter, and knit together with a constant theme of sarcastic scorn, there are nevertheless truly heartfelt sections of the New Death. His reinterpretations of Lovecraft, Howard, Ashton Smith and even Dunsany, echo with an attention to poetic concerns that has been, in my mind, hitherto ignored amongst modern poets. Syncopation, rhythm, structure, and rhyme have been carefully arranged in a way that defies the modern-day fascination with blank verse.

The collection opens with a meditation on the theme: the Gods of the Poor, which introduces us to a host of anthropomorphized characters who will return again and again throughout the writing. If there was one thing I would change about this collection, it is that these gods and anthropomorphic concepts don't always seem to be the same people: in some shorts, Death is a woman. In others, a man; as these interstices seem to present the binding motif throughout, it would have been nice if, in addition to being standalones, they had also articulated a wider understanding of the characters.

That having been said, the collection in no means suffers by this lack. Each individual story, whether sharply political (the Enemy Within, the Face in the Hill, Rumplestiltskin) or simply wondrous strange (How the Isle of Cats Got Its Name, The Moon Sailed Sadly Through the Sky, The Bird and the Two Trees) is extremely evocative. Some of the satire may be a little light in comparison with the droughts of fantasy to be imbibed, but they offer a refreshing change of pace.

Indeed, if Master Hutchings can be said to excel at one thing above all others, it is the skilled way in which he mingles the classically fantastical and the hopelessly mundane. Elizabethan speech patterns share stories, sometimes share paragraphs, with the flaccidity of modern speech and both are improved by the relationship.

So, if you're looking for a satirical collection of fantastic tales, or a serious one that has some less serious elements, or even if you buy it solely for those stories that are all brooding and no jokes, the New Death is eminently worth it. Indeed, its meager price of 99 cents may be an insult to the matter within, as it is worth much more than that. So I urge you, if any of the people that went into the New Death's style interest you in the least, go out and take a look at it. Check out the sample at smashwords. Buy it! But whatever you do, don't let it pass you by.

Chug-a chug-a

My reading of James Hutchings' book of flash fiction, short stories, and poetry is taking a little longer than I anticipated. Either tomorrow or friday, expect a review!

Amalric Ogusson and the Fimbul Queen

Danny Perdue, the fella who plays Oloz (formerly Oloz Slave-taker, now Oloz the Satyr) has painted me up a cover for my selection of short stories, Amalric Ogusson and the Fimbul Queen. I'm pretty excited about this, so I figured I'd share it; it also feeds into what I'm going to do tomorrow, which is review a book of short stories called The New Death.

So, for true, go and check out Amalric Ogusson. Tomorrow I'll have a review of a different ebook, one that I didn't write, up.

One Shot, One Kill

There's something seductively attractive about one-shots. I first started designing one-shots with Call of Cthulhu, and for a very long time it was my tradition to design and run a Call of Cthulhu game once per summer and once per winter, resulting in 1-2 one-shots a year. When my blood was up I could design both of them at the same time and even tie some hints from the first into the second and give revelations that spanned both games. It was an interesting time, but I was extremely unschooled at the art and I found that every time I designed a game it was too damn big to be run in a single marathon session.

I can imagine D&D one-shots would be much the same, since a whole module takes quite some time to run. I've never actually been to a game run at a Con (though the idea doesn't appeal to me simply because of the general rules of a convention and my predilection for being in control of every aspect of the game) so I don't know how other people handle this issue.

Myself, I've been slowly sliding from pure Lovecraftian CoC games into a Borgesian nightmare space replete with House of Leaves style touches. I've found myself trimming red herrings and extra little twists of plot because I just know that it won't fit into one night. I stopped running them (due to the evaporation of my normal playing crew, my normal playing space, etc.) before I could get a real handle on what was possible in one 8- or 10-hour session.

But there is something intoxicating about one-shots. It frees you from many of the normal restrictions of design. Everything can be even more deadly, terrible secrets can be integrated right into your PC's background and you can unstopper every cork. You can turn all your dials to eleven and beyond, and still be left with a game that will horrify, terrify, or do whatever it is you want it to do.

This is mostly where I have spent time with theories as to how to scare players. What frightens them? I've discovered that the monsters of Lovecraft must be handled with extreme care, as the master himself handled them perhaps. They cannot be overused or revealed immediately, they have to be carefully horded and a real immense fear of them cultivated before they ever show up. How do you do that?

I try to establish an environment of oppressive ancientness, almost the way one might in a horror movie. Mouldering apartment rooms, old houses, and a general sense of dismalness. Following that, generally, I attempt to build the horrific nature of the creatures or secrets or reveals by using handouts and manuscripts uncovered through research (though research really has to be truncated for a one-shot, I find, since I like to follow Aristotle's Unity of Time for the most part). Only in the very climax do I ever reveal a full creature for display.

Somehow, though, I feel like the new Borges House-of-Leaves stuff I'm going to be pulling in on my next design (the first one in many years) is going to be even more horrifying than any deep one or colour out of space could ever be.

The magic of magic

Magic. What makes it magical? What makes it anything other than an arcane science? This is a question that D&D has tried to grapple with before, but for some it has never been sufficiently answered. There are problems with treating magic in a purely mechanical way; we don't want an alternate science, but rather a mysterious and powerful force that is deserving of being called an Art.

The way that I approach magic is to highlight how little like scientific pursuits it truly is. I can no longer recall where it was, but in the bowels of some Second Edition sourcebook there is an instruction that set me down this path and has served as my watchword ever since I read it those many many years ago. It goes something like this: "Spells are not utilitarian. They do exactly what they were designed to do. You cannot, for example, using a magic missile to knock over an object, nor cast a featherfall spell on a dead body. Magic is not science."

Why not, and how does that make magic not science? Well, there are rules but they aren't necessarily rules of logic. Magic follows rules of theme and poetry. As an Art it has a sensibility of the poetic about it, rather than the mundane. It's not a workhorse, it's a powerful, strange, and sometimes badly understood force. To help give structure to this weird world of magic, I spent a lot of time developing an internally consistent (I hope) philosophy of magic to go with the setting of the 10th Age. I understand how and why, broadly, it functions, and it is not a functioning of set rules and regulations that interact according to hard laws.

Excerpt: Hereward's Tale

This is just a little bit from the novel that I'm trying to get published right now, Hereward's Tale.

On the third anniversary of coming to the tower, Ward felt that he had been there for a lifetime. His life in Whitton had faded away to a hazy memory. The only faces he could recall from that time were those of his parents, Erek Woodward, and Brynna. Even the once-hated face of Eduard Reeve had grown fuzzy and indistinct. The things he remembered of the reeve were his calloused hands, the golden buckle on his belt and the smell of its leather. The tower had become his world, encompassing him within it and yet allowing him the freedom to go to any corner of Arunë with the turn of a page. He could not imagine what his life would be like now where he still in Whitton.

That morning he discovered a new set of robes at his bedside. It was composed of a brown gown and a green mantle, which he tried on at once. It was embroidered with yellow thread that described patterns of swirling leaves along its edges. He felt good wearing it, powerful, wizardly, though he knew no magic. He left his room to do his chores and began to wonder where his master was. He was not in the library, nor in the practice rooms. It was only when all the cleaning was done that he checked the study, to find the old mage sitting in a chair and staring out the window.

Spring was on the swamp again, and something seem to be troubling him. Ward approached him slowly, his new leather shoes squeaking as he walked. “Master?” he asked.

People were short back then, weren't they?

For some reason there are all kinds of little bits of misinformation about the middle ages floating around out there. Most of them were started by Victorians and their romantic versions of history based on smatterings of data, but some were caused by badly researched fantasy or by things that have somehow unknowingly become tropes of the genre.

Here are some things that are not true.

People were shorter back then. Wrong. Archaeological evidence shows that people were just as tall at their full height. What may have led to this is that a poor diet may have caused people to take longer to grow to their full height, leaving many children to continue growing as late as 12 or 14.

People looked like they were super old at 30. Not sure how this one got started. Documentary and archaeological evidence shows us that people aged at generally the same rate (though perhaps a hard life of being a cotter could make you look a bit older earlier). Anyway, plenty of people lived to a ripe old age. The reason the "average age" is so low is that there were MANY stillbirths or child deaths, lowering the average. If you reached the age of five you were probably going to live for a fairly long time, but between 0-5 was a killer.

Knights wore plate armor. For MOST of the middle ages (600-1325ish) there was no plate armor. That means that chainmail was the most common form of armor throughout a huge period. Plate armor didn't begin to circulate again until the 14th century with the beginning of partial plate.

There was no change, development, or intellectual growth. That may seem true from the outside, especially since most of our sources from the early middle ages (the so-called "dark ages") are so thin on sources and later periods attack them for their ignorance. However, deep sea-changes in fashion, theology, technology and social formations happened continuously throughout the middle ages.

People never bathed. This is partially true. Noblefolk bathed more often than non-nobles, and the wealthy tended to wear pomanders filled with cloves and orange to mask their smell. However, never is a long time, and people bathed much more often than jokes and literature about the middle ages would have you believe.

The Nobility were a "class." Nobility was more like an adjective. Not until long after the middle ages in the pre-modern period did nobility become a closed class based on blood. People could "have nobility," and even "be gentle," but that did not preclude others from attaining access to this as well. Social mobility between the upper strata of freemen and the lower strata of nobility was actually fairly common, the barrier being at least semi-permeable.

Knights, chivalry, and courtly love ruled the day. Courtly love was an aspect of high medieval culture, and it has been greatly exaggerated in its importance. This is mostly the fault of C.S. Lewis, who loved courtly love. In fact, it may have just covered up affairs and the like, and either way was much less common than is generally supposed. In any event, the "practice" (hardly a set institution) was begun in the late high middle ages.

Peasants were all poor and benighted. Peasant is a word that signifies a free man of ignoble status. Peasants could be extremely wealthy, even landlords in their own right. The only thing "peasant" means it that they have no unfree (servile) duties to their own lords.

Fuedalism was the organization of society. Direct feudal links (where land was leased from the lord to his vassal) was less simple, sane, or useful than it is depicted. Many lords could owe vassalage to two or more other overlords. Most lords could keep their lands even against their overlord's will, and though kingdoms could disintegrate upon the death of their kings in early medieval society, as time went on various customs and appointed positions knit together the so-called "feudal state," giving it more cohesion than is generally assumed.

Classes from Zaan: the Lawful Cultist

As promised, here is the lawful cultist. Unfortunately, the list of Acts is incomplete, but that will be remedied in future Zaan posts. Of course, you could always cook up your own Lawful Acts and post them here!

Classes from Zaan: The Warrior

Zaan is a pretty unpleasant setting, and the details of the human warrior class have been sort of worked out. It hasn't been playtested, so it might not be all that wonderful, but at least it has the ring of Zaanite nonsense to it. The Zaanite Mage is located here, so that's two classes in the hole. There is also a Zaanite cleric (only the lawful cleric is finished) which I will conceivably post tomorrow.

Beowulf, an Epic Musical

While purchasing records to melt into bowls to sell at flea markets the other day, I discovered this gem. I have every intention of hooking up a record player soon and listening to it. I'll let everyone know what it sounds like, maybe write a whole review, and certainly post at least a clip!

Information before the Information Age

We live in an age undreamed of, where anything we could want to know can be found with a simple expenditure of effort. Whether you forgot who the eighth president of the United States was or when the Magna Carta was signed, you can quickly and easily discover it. Saunter over to your computer or your smartphone and all is made well again with a few keystrokes. This is the world we live in, but it isn't the world people have always lived in.

Answering questions for us is easy. The further back along our timeline we go, however, the harder it becomes. What did we do before wikipedia? Well, you could go to a library and search for a relevant book on the subject. But what if your question is obscure or not simply phrased? You'll have to look for a little longer, perhaps doing some real research by skimming one book and using its footnotes to find another.

But what if the library isn't organized by the Dewey Decimal System? You will definitely need the help of a librarian and a master index that describes the organizational system of all the books. And what if the books don't contain footnotes? Now you're really getting into hazardous territory. You'll probably have to use the librarian as a living resource, relying on their knowledge of the contents of their library because they've read most of those books.

Flash, not substance

The mainstream rpg market, the one dominated by games like Paizo's Pathfinder and WotC's D&D, has changed a lot from the roots of the hobby. Where once most gamers would have been content with a photocopied manual made in their local library and purchased through the mail, the format of the books has become of greater and greater import to the people buying them. We want books that look good and have lots of pictures, presumably because our imaginations are no longer working on overtime, so we need to have illustrations on every page to remind us what our own particular fantasy worlds look like.

This is really an aspect of the DIY problem spilling over into book design. D&D, like most modern well-known and mainstream pnp games, isn't about coming up with your own stuff anymore but rather purchasing stuff that you find in a store. The shiny pages, the full-page artwork, and the strange layouts are themselves a selling point now with the content taking second place. The encyclopedic style of late-stage TSR  has been supplanted by a very simple and easy-to-read method of writing.

As the writing of the books has gotten less complex their layouts have taken up the slack. They are now shining examples of overdesign. Yes indeed! I said it once and I'll say it again! They have less content and more glamor than any books that came before them. Paizo is perhaps slightly less guilty of this (their Pathfinder book is as gigantic a paperweight as I've ever seen and I confess that I couldn't be bothered to read it thoroughly as I despise 3.x in all its incarnations) but WotC has taken this design schema to heart and so have many lesser companies following WotC's wagon train.

The Plight of Evermore

Yesterday we looked at how to make 0-level characters thanks to Viral of Viral Games. Today, we have an adventure co-authored by myself and Viral. To give credit where credit is due, he created the entire scenario, I just wrote up the encounter lists at the end.

(adventure after jump)

0 level characters, a Guide

This was originally going to be an article in The Grognard, but we know how that went the way of the dodo. It was written by the inestimable Viral of Viral Games, the creator of such crazy independent titles as Engine Heart and Joints & Jivers. This article describes how to run a 0-level adventuring party in AD&D which makes it much more akin to Harn.

A zero-level adventure co-written by myself and Viral will be available tomorrow.

(rules after jump)

The Devil and the Flavor

Settings are damned hard to design. However, we can look at people who came before us for guidelines on how to do it. Both previous rpg settings as well as other media (television, for example) can give us hints about what makes a setting work. Wherever you look, you'll discover one thing: it's the little details of a setting that make it stand out.

How's that, now? Overarching ideas can be interesting, they can be fun, and they can even be memorable. For example, as a sort of an aside while one of my players is unable to get online I've decided to devise an AD&D setting using a combination of Ravenloft and A Mighty Fortress to create a haunted fantasy version of Langeudoc in the 17th century;. That's a pretty high-concept idea right there, full of weirdness.

Except, if that's all I did then that wouldn't be enough. I can name little french towns until I'm blue in the face, but that will never make them feel French. This is related to the concept that all worlds are alien; and that we must take great care to understand them and not simply assume that we know how people think or act simply because they're people.

In Honor of Ray Bradbury: Going Home

...in honor of Ray Bradbury, one of the parents of American science-fiction and tales of the strange and wonderful.

Fluted red pillars stood beneath a sky the color of hammered bronze. Ovas lingered between them, loathe to stray far from the pool they bounded. Water had become precious long ago; wars had been fought over it. Now, there weren't enough people left to fight wars over anything.

Ovas had been waiting all morning. The Elders were meant to come, to wander down through the burnished landscape of baked stone to the great reflecting pool. Sometimes they came early and sometimes late, but it was unlike them not to come at all.

In one hand Ovas held a long silver scepter, made from twining strands of metal. It marked his office as the First of Almath, the one most suited to treat with the Elders out of all the citizens. He was old, Ovas was, and getting older every day. He should have been an Elder himself, had not politics prevented it. He was tired of meeting with them, tired of bowing and scraping before them at the Pool of Mirth. There was no mirth left on all Envea. It had dried up with the water.

Generative Play

I haven't been able to play D&D recently. The player who plays Oloz, the now-transformed satyr, had a computer malfunction or breakdown that has prevented him from getting online for nearly a week so far. This is bad business for me, because I'm afflicted with a particularly strange creative disease that works in a feedback loop. That is, the more someone plays in a setting that I've designed, the more I want to design for it. The more I design a given setting, the more I want to play in it.

This is a phenomenon I like to refer to as "generative play," and it seems to be something that a lot of GMs do. I've never seen anyone talk about it though, so this is your chance. When I talk about generative play, what I mean is that players playing in the setting come up with questions you would never think about. Something like writing a text adventure and then going to see what weird questions or commands people try to give your parser and then writing answers to them, generative play forms a list of questions simply by virtue of its occurance.

This World's Got Character

I think I've hit upon one of the core issues I have with what I've been calling the Player Entitlement method of playing roleplaying games. That is, those people who believe that because they are players they deserve all manner of special treatment from the GM and from the setting itself. My problem is that there is, in all games, a character that you don't necessarily see or realize: the setting.

The setting is as much a character as any PC, and more than that it is the GM's character. The game must make room for the setting that the GM wants and, in a way, the GM is the most important player. Without the players of the PCs, the game would stop... for a while, until new players could be found. Without the GM, the game is gone. No one can play it, because each GM is in a sense the incarnation, the game-made-flesh. They carry inside them the dream-seed that is the setting and in some cases they are walking bundles of house-rules tailored just for you.

Scriptor Liberator

If you're a reader of my work, you can probably tell that I have more than just the average bit of elitism going on in. I've been possessed of a terribly elitist ethic since I was a child, probably because I first went to Catholic School and then to a private boarding school in Cheshire Connecticut. Those sorts of places breed a holier-than-thou attitude. However, I like to think I've done much in the way of distancing myself from some of that posturing.

Something I realized only recently is that I my elitist attitude still lingered when it came to the domain of writing. For a long time, I honestly felt that most people just shouldn't bother. I never understood journals or blogs: what do you get out of them? Who are you talking to? No one! Yet, after starting this blog of my own and discussing it with other people, I have come to the realization that I would continue to write it even if no one was reading it. Now, that's not an invitation to stop following me, since I would certainly become despondent and probably update less, but it remains true.

Monsters with Reason

From lingering around other people's games, it has become apparent to me that a lot of times monstrous demihumans are simply aggressors. When they are encountered, they may demand some gold, but more times than not they will attack just for fun. I think that there's something to be said for a good fight now and then, but there's also something to be said about giving your monstrous demihumans (and enemyhumans and regular demihumans) the power of reasoned thought. Most small parties of goblins, for example, should know better than to attack well-armed and well-armored adventurers unless they have a huge advantage in numbers.

Smart foes are the basis of a challenging game, and they also help to bring a sense of realism to the setting. Not every monstrous demihuman is a ravening beast that desires nothing but to bathe in the blood of their foes. Many are quite capable (and should be portrayed as such) of advanced tactical maneuvers, but also in judging the relative strength of their enemies and making a decision based on whether or not they think violence is the best solution. Hell, violence is almost never the best solution. Unless they are particularly bloodthirsty (gnolls might qualify here, and hungry orcs probably can as well) there's no reason to go out of their way to attack someone that they can intimidate instead.