Because It Bears Repeating Often

"Although the rules have been thoroughly play-tested over a period of many months, it is likely that you will find some part that seems ambiguous, unanswered, or unsatisfactory. When such a situation arises settle it amongst yourselves, record the decision in the rules book, and abide by it from then on. These rules may be treated as guide lines around which you form a game that suits you. It is always a good idea to amend the rules to allow for historical precedence or common sense--follow the spirit of the rules rather than the letter."

Chainmail by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, p. 8, 3rd Edition

Stonehell Campaign Map

Over at The Savage Sword of Scadgrad, there has been a player’s map posted for scadgrad’s online MapTool campaign. Done in the style of “your crazy, adventuring uncle left this to you on his deathbed,” the map shows just how easy it is to drop Ol’ Stony into any campaign world. Check out the post here.

And speaking of megadungeons, Kesher’s posted a great quote over at the Original Dungeons & Dragons Discussion forum, having found it at The Alexandrian. Having been working on and running Stonehell for more than two years now, I both identify with this remark and heartily agree with it.

In many ways, I feel like a megadungeon becomes the DM's character. And I play my megadungeon much like I would play a PC. Before play begins, I don't really know what my megadungeon is going to do: But my random encounter tables generate 2d4 anubians just after the PCs raid the depths, and I know the anubians have sent a team of assassins to hunt them down. Black-eyed cultists are holding a ritual on Level 2 and I suddenly know the sin day they're celebrating. Lizardmen show up in the anubian sections of the dungeon and I know tensions are erupting between their tribes. Then the minotaur shows up to determine why tribute is not being paid and... and... and...

And a story gets told.

Random Character Color

I found the following scribbled on the back of a fighter's character sheet--a sheet of notebook paper to be precise. I have no memory of actually running this character, but I apparently had some idea that he came from the grim Scandinavian skald school of combat.

Warrior’s Prayer

Though I may be about to die,
I shall not fear.
For combat is the Great Purifier
Where the worth of all creatures is decided
By the skill of their arms
And the strength of their minds.
War is the Great Predator
That culls the weak and the sick from our ranks
So that only the strong shall remain.
To live is to show one’s worth;
To dies is to show one’s faults;
To retreat is to suffer the foulest of failures
And to burn in the pits of Orona’s darkest Hells.

A Matter Of Completely Prurient Interest

From Wikipedia's entry on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser:

A sex scene from The Swords of Lankhmar, cut by editor Don Wollheim ("Good Heaven, Fritz, we're a family publisher...") was published in Fantasy Newsletter #49 (July 1982)

So my question is: Where can I get a hold of a copy of the July 1982 issue of "Fantasy Newsletter"? ;-)

News for a Very Narrow Demographic

If you are a bibliophile, a gamer, an art enthusiast, a medievalist, and/or live in or will be visiting the tri-state area in the next few weeks, here’s something you might find interesting. As I said, it’s a narrow (but eclectic) demographic.

The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry
On view in the Robert Lehman Wing
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
March 2-June 13, 2010

The Belles Heures (1405-1408/9) of Jean de Berry, a treasure of The Cloisters collection, is one of the most celebrated and lavishly illustrated manuscripts in this country. Because it is currently unbound, it is possible to exhibit all of its illuminated pages as individual leaves, a unique opportunity never to be repeated. The exhibition will elucidate the manuscript, its artists-the young Franco-Netherlandish Limbourg Brothers-and its patron, Jean de France, duc de Berry. A select group of precious objects from the same early fifteenth-century courtly milieu will place the manuscript in the context of the patronage of Jean de Berry and his royal family, the Valois.

Note: The Met "suggests" a contribution of $20 but will let anyone in with any contribution. Two dollars, for ex., will let you in. Don't be intimidated!

A Post By Lord Byron

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;--a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful--was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir'd before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

One of the benefits of having an English Lit degree is being well-versed in poetry. I was searching out "Ozymandias" when I rediscovered the above poem by Lord Byron. I'm certain old George Gordon didn't know it at the time, but he graciously gave me the name of the new campaign in this piece--to paraphrase line 10, the campaign will be known as "Watchfires and Thrones," both of which appear in abundance in the sword & sorcery literature that I'm drawing inspiration from.

Inspirational Passages: Putting the “Fun” Back in Fungi

Fungi creeps me out, which is why I find it hard to resist including it in my games. I even dedicated an entire entry to the stuff in The Dungeon Alphabet. If you’re looking for something truly alien here on Earth, fungi is your best bet for high weirdness and general creepiness.

Unfortunately, D&D craps out in the fungi department as far as I’m concerned. It’s got enough monsters built on a fungus base, but most of them fall short of the mark of truly unnerving. With myconoids, violent fungus, russet mold, ascomoids, and phycomids to choose from, you’d figure at least one would be enough to give you the shudders. Don’t get me started on shriekers, who make an appearance on my Top-10 List of Despised Monsters. Even making yellow mold psionic didn’t help. Zygoms get closest to what I picture a crafty referee should be doing with homebrewed fungi creatures.

When it comes down to it, I’m hanging with Lovecraft on the subject. Fungi should get under your skin (literally) and make you shun mushrooms on your pizza for at least a month after running into the stuff in a game. The best example of role-playing game use of fungi in my mind has to be in H.P. Lovecraft’s Dunwich, one of the 1920’s sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu. The mental picture of a haggard man opening his mouth to revel the pale white gills of a mushroom clogging his mouth and throat is the sort of image that I’m shooting for whenever I decide to play the fungi card in a game.

Here, far underground, the fungi were stranger even than those on the surface. It was if the House saved its most delicate and cherished outgrowths for this hidden realm. And it was obvious that they needed no light, for many of them glowed with an evil light of their own making.

A broad, dark pool, full of floating scum, had formed where the floor had actually sunk or collapsed near the east wall of the great cave. Water trickled steadily over and down a broad area of slimy rock, for this wall was unfinished, indeed hardly even smoothed down by the craftsmen of long ago. An underground spring must have burst forth in ages past and still flowed into the pool, leaving by some hidden outlet.

Around this sinister tarn, which was many yards in extent, there grew a forest of tall, gently tapering spires of soft, living matter. Several men’s height they were, colored with pallid and crepuscular shades, ugly, faded violets, insipid yellows, and debauched, bleached oranges. On top of some of them glowed round areas of foxfire and dim phosphorescence. This was the light, the priest realized, which he had glimpsed far off when they first entered the cavern.

- Hiero’s Journey by Sterling E. Lanier

Inspirational Passages: Give Your Players Enough Rope

One of the things I’ve learned over the years, which is also one of the primary reasons that the old style of gaming has such an allure to me, is that I’m not a big fan of the huge, mega-plot, “we must save the world,” style of adventuring. I think it’s important that everyone gets to play one of these at least once just for the experience, but once was enough for me. I’m much more a fan of the “collection of short, unrelated events” method of rising in level and developing a character. I guess this is why the Adventure Path idea was lost on me.

I won’t begrudge you if you like that form of gaming. Adventure preference is a highly-subjective thing, after all. But for me, I prefer the “story” to be something that can only be determined in retrospect by collating the events of previous adventures and letting the ramifications of such endeavors lead to the next series of events in the campaign world. Although I’m sure it may be possible given the right referee and players, I have trouble picturing the following conversation (or something similar) occurring in a game where the characters weren't allowed to attempt to forge their own destinies and to suffer the consequences of being able to choose what they wanted to pursue each week.

“I see we're expected,” the small man said, continuing to stroll toward the large open gate in the long, ancient wall. As if by chance, his hand brushed the hilt of his long, slim rapier.

“At over a bowshot distance how can you –“ the big man began. “I get it. Bashabeck’s orange headcloth. Stands out like a whore in church. And where Bashabeck is, his bullies are. You should have kept your dues to the Thieves Guild paid up.”

“It’s not so much the dues,” the small man said. “It slipped my mind to split with them after the last job, when I lifted those eight diamonds from the Spider God’s temple.”

The big man sucked his tongue in disapproval. “I sometimes wonder why I associate with a faithless rogue like you.”

The small man shrugged. “I was in a hurry. The Spider God was after me.”

“Yes, I seem to recall he sucked the blood of your lookout man. You’ve got the diamonds to make the payoff now, of course?”

“My purse is as bulging as yours,” the small man asserted. “Which is exactly as much as a drunk’s wineskin the morning after. Unless you’re holding out on me, which I’ve long suspected. Incidentally, isn’t that grossly fat man – the one between the two big-shouldered bravos – the keeper of the Silver Eel tavern?”

The big man squinted, nodded, then rocked his head disgustedly. “To make such a to-do over a brandy tab.”

“Especially when it couldn’t have been much more than a yard long,” the small man agreed. “Of course there were those two full casks of brandy you smashed and set afire the last night you were brawling at the Eel.”

“When the odds are ten to one against you in a tavern fight, you have to win by whatever methods come easiest to hand,” the big man protested. “Which I’ll grant you are apt at times to be a bit bizarre.”

He squinted ahead again at the small crowd ranged around the square inside the open gate. After a while he said, “I also make out Rivis Rightby the swordsmith…and just about all the other creditors any two men could have in Lankhmar. And each with his hired thug or three.” He casually loosened in its scabbard his somewhat huge weapon, shaped like a rapier, but heavy almost as a broadsword. “Didn’t you settle any of our bills before we left Lankhmar the last time? I was dead broke, of course, but you must have had money from all those earlier jobs for the Thieves Guild.”

“I paid Nattick Nimblefingers in full for mending my cloak and for a new grey silk jerkin,” the small man answered at once. He frowned. “There must have been others I paid – oh, I’m sure there were, but I can’t recall them at the moment. By the by, isn’t that tall rangy wench – half behind the dainty man in black – one you were in trouble with? Her red hair stands out like a…like a bit of Hell. And those three other girls – each peering over her besworded pimp’s shoulder like the first – weren’t you in a bit of trouble with them also when we last left Lankhmar?”

“I don’t know what you mean by trouble,” the big man complained. “I rescued them from their protectors, who were abusing them dreadfully. Believe me, I trounced those protectors and the girls laughed. Thereafter I treated them like princesses.”

“You did indeed – and spent all your cash and jewels on them, which is why you were broke. But one thing you didn’t do for them: you didn’t become their protector in turn. So they had to go back to their former protectors, which has made them justifiably angry at you.”

“I should have become a pimp?” the big man objected. “Women!” Then, “I see a few of your girls in the crowd. Neglect to pay them off?”

“No, borrowed from them and forgot to return the money,” the small man explained. “Hi-ho, it certainly appears that the welcoming committee is out in force.”

“I told you we should have entered the city by the Grand Gate, where we’d have been lost in the numbers,” the big man grumbled. “But no, I listened to you and came to this godforsaken End Gate.”

“Wrong,” the other said. “At the Grand Gate we wouldn’t have been able to tell our foes from the bystanders. Here at least we know that everyone is against us, except for the Overlord’s gate watch, and I’m not too sure of them – at least they’ll have been bribed to take no notice of our slaying.”

“Why should they all be so hot to slay us?” the big man argued. “For all they know we may be coming home laden with rich treasures garnered from many a high adventure at the ends of the earth. Oh, I’ll admit that three or four of them may also have a private grudge, but –“

“They can see we haven’t a train of porters or heavily-laden mules,” the small man interrupted reasonably. “In any case they know that after slaying us, they can pay themselves off from any treasure we may have and split the remainder. It’s the rational procedure, which all civilized men follow.”

“Civilization!” the big man snorted. “I sometimes wonder –“

“- why you ever climbed south over the Trollstep Mountains and got your beard trimmed and discovered that there were girls without hair on their chests,” the small man finished for him. “Hey, I think our creditors and other haters have hired a third S besides swords and staves against us.”

“Sorcery?”

- The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber

The chance to have conversations like this in character is one of the reasons that I play, and love, this game of ours.

I'm entertaining family this week and plan to spend an awful amount of time playing "Uncle Mike" to my nephew who I don't get to see nearly as much as I'd like. Needless to say, when it comes down to either blogging or family, my family wins. I've got some posts similar to today's lined up, so there's fresh content prepared for the week. Just don't expect anything groundbreaking in house rules or design philosophy for the next few days.

A Medieval Church Inventory

Although I’ve been known to harp on the fact that I believe reality should never stand in the way of a good gaming experience, this doesn’t mean that I won’t reference actual historical sources in order to inspire and improve the game world. One of my favorite tricks for coming up with memorable weirdness in-game is to see what sort of bizarre hi-jinks humanity gets up to in the real world. Weird reality is too much fun not to use. In addition to the real but bizarre, I keep an eye out for itemized lists and inventories that date from the medieval period. These come in handy when it’s time to flesh out a location, dungeon room, or town business.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Life in a Medieval Village by Francis and Joseph Gies. That book details life in an English “open field” farm village circa the 12th and 13th centuries. Amongst the pages of that book was the following passage, which I found to be very useful in detailing what exactly might be found inside a church or temple in a pseudo-medieval setting:

In 1287 Bishop Quinel of Exeter listed the minimum furnishings of a church: a silver or silver-gilt chalice; a silver or pewter vessel (ciborium) to hold the bread used in Communion; a little box of silver or ivory (pyx) to hold the remainder of the consecrated bread, and another vessel for unconsecrated bread; a pewter chrismatory for the holy oils; a censer and an incense boat (thurible); an osculatorium (an ornament by which the kiss of peace was given); three cruets; and a holy-water vessel. The church must have at least one stone altar, with cloths, canopy, and frontal (front hanging); a stone font that could be locked to prevent the use of baptismal water for witchcraft; and images of the church’s patron saint and of the Virgin Mary. Special candlesticks were provided for Holy Week and Easter, and two great portable crosses served, one for processions and one for visitation of the sick, for which the church also kept a lantern and a hand bell. To these requirements a list dictated by Archbishop Winchelsey in 1305 added the Lenten veil, to hang before the high altar, Rogation Day banners for gang week, “the bells with their cords,” and a bier to carry the dead. Conspicuously missing were benches, chairs or pews; the congregation stood, sat on the floor, or brought stools.

The church was supposed to have a set of vestments for festivals and another for regular use. Bishop Quinel recommended a number of books to help the priest: a manual for baptism, marriage, and burial; an ordinal listing the offices to be recited throughout the church year; a missal with the words and the order of the Mass; a collect book container prayers; a “legend” with lessons from the Scriptures and passages from the lives of the saints; and music books, including a gradual for Mass, a troper for special services, a venitary for the psalms at matins, an antiphoner for the canonical hours, a psalter, and a hymnal. Books and vestments were stored in a church chest.

It’s an inventory like this that makes one of the more difficult aspects of refereeing a breeze – coming up with treasure. It’s always nice to spice up the treasure list of a dungeon with something other than yet another gold necklace or ruby the size of a fist. Taking a look at the above passage, we can see a plethora of objects that are just begging to be gilded, bejeweled, or adorned and thereby bump up their market value. This is also a good starting place for determining what exactly might be found in your name level clerics stronghold/church once it’s time to start detailing those things out. Although this inventory is for a small church of the Christian faith, it’s not too difficult to adjust it to fit any sort of religion – real or imagined – that may exist in your own campaign.

Inspirational Passages: Magic

Like many role-playing enthusiasts, I am also a reader; possessing an appetite for books that is both voracious and omnivorous. The “Current Inspirational Reading” title displayed to the right of this page is usually only a single example of what I’m devouring at any given time.

Unlike a lot of readers though, I read accompanied by my commonplace books at my side. As I make my way through the pages of a new book, I regularly take the time to make notes in my commonplace books of any interesting fact, bit of trivia, or seeds for adventure ideas that I might come across. In most cases, these are abbreviated notations that will serve as a simple reminder or provide a germ from which to grow grander things.

Still, I sometimes come across entire passages in books that I find too evocative to be ignored but too lengthy to be included in my commonplace books. When such an event occurs, I’ll make a notation of the page and later copy that passage into a Word file for later consultation. Since I find these passages inspirational, I thought that others may benefit from exposure to them as well. As a new and occasional feature of this blog, I’ll post such passages from time-to-time to allow others to glean some wisdom or creative inspiration from them. In order to whet your appetites for the upcoming “Magic-User’s Week” here at the Society of Torch, Pole and Rope, I’ve posted a passage concerning magic and the powers of the gods. I hope you find it as much to your own liking as I did.

Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, “I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.

“I know a charm that will heal with a touch.

“I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.

“I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.

“A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.”

His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone, gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious ritual, or remembering something dark and painful.

“A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.

“A seventh charm I know: I can quench fire simply by looking at it.

“An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.

“A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.

“Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.

“For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.

“An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.

“A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.

“A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.

“A fourteenth. I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.

“A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”

His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the plane’s engine noise.

“A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.

“A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.

“And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no man knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”

He sighed and stopped talking.

Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night. - Neil Gaiman, American Gods

I like that passage for several reasons but foremost is because so many of Wednesday's charms are duplicated in the spells available in D&D. One would be hardheaded indeed to believe that Gary and Dave were making up those spells out of wholecloth.