One-Page Dungeons Galore

Philippe-Antoine "Chatty DM" Ménard and Michael "Chgowiz" Shorten have released the One-Page Dungeon Codex 2009 and One-Page Dungeon Compendium for download. These are early "hobbyist" versions of the PDF; they plan to do a much fancier version soon. All of the PDFs are free, although I believe they will be offering print versions for a low price as well via one of the print-on-demand services.

My one-page entry, Shrine of the Savage Jungle, is in there (page 34) as an honorable mention of Best Dungeon Crawl. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, and not just dungeons; there's a "One-Page Dungeon Manifesto" by Santiago Luis Oria that I agree with 100%. In fact, I swear, right here, right now, to make the improvised kingdom and wilderness supplement I've been planning to fit into the one-page philosophy: the goal of The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms will be to describe the entire region on one page, each kingdom on one page, and each habitation on one page.

Game Opinions

Update on getting the LBBs: they weren't in any easily-accessible box in my storage unit. I did find Supplements III and IV in the location I expected to find the rest. Either the LBBs are buried at the bottom of a huge stack and would take a lot of work to get to, or I had them with me all along and just don't know where they are.

So I don't have much energy for a creative post tonight, and decided instead to give a run-down of a few games I've played, with a few thoughts on them as well.

OD&D: Duh. I started playing this before I ever saw the LBBs. About 1975 or '76, a fried of mine who learned how to play from a math teacher taught me and another friend. He didn't have the LBBs, just mimeographed charts, which I retyped by hand so I could run D&D, too. Turns out there were tweaks to the magic system, because when I bought Holmes later, I wondered what happened to "Piety" and "Magical Conductivity". Since I didn't have the books, the only description of the monsters I had was the table from Monsters & Treasure; I had to fill in details from my own readings in fantasy and mythology. Although I later drifted far from this approach, it's what I've returned to.

AD&D: When I bought Holmes, the Player's Handbook was coming out and I bought that, too. A friend bought the Monster Manual and the LBBs, then I bought the DMG when it finally came out. Like many others at the time, we improvised with the two systems together. We didn't see them as different games. We maybe tried to use the weapon vs. AC chart once or twice, but otherwise ignored it. Still, at the time I liked the huge amount of detail for spells and monsters. I don't really like that approach any more, but had fun with it in the most recent game I played in.

The Fantasy Trip: This was the first skill-based, level-less system I ever saw. I liked the minimal approach to attributes, the all-d6 chassis, and how easy it was to add dice when the difficulty increased, but had misgivings about the pluses and minuses to target numbers.

Rolemaster: A friend ran us through this a couple times. The amount of detail in the many charts was certainly attractive, but the many charts were the game's downside as well. Plus, the 100-level spell charts turned out to be a lie: Rolemaster spells increase in power and complexity on a much finer scale, so that 25th level spell turns out to be the equivalent of a 5th level D&D spell.

GURPS: When I first riffled through a GURPS sourcebook (Horror,) I immediately had a hunch it was a descendant of TFT. I began buying huge numbers of GURPS books and ran some Yrth games for a while and a few other settings, and played in some GURPS Traveller. I like the flexibility of GURPS and the simplicity of the core system, but eventually came to dislike large numbers of modifiers for special situations, as well as the intense detail of the build system. I had a pretty much identical experience and conclusion when I played in HERO (Danger International.)

oWoD: I played briefly in a Vampire game, but never got into it far. I briefly ran Vampire/Werewolf (with a mummy, too,) but that was a GURPS conversion. I think there are problems with the way powers are presented and I tend to dislike large-dicepool games, but as far as character construction goes, it's much more manageable than the GURPS approach. Unless there's some obscure skill or power with a different point-buy... Setting is interesting but overdone, and unlike some people, I think the the layout and internal design is crap.

ORC: These are the Vajra Enterprises games: Tibet, Fates Worse Than Death, In Dark Alleys. (I haven't played Kidworld.) The designer is a friend of mine, runs a great game, and his settings are very interesting; I recommend them. However, they are still "detailed build system" in focus, although it's maybe less overboard than GURPS. For those who like that kind of system, they're great, but I just can't get into them. I just read the setting material, and let my friend run the game.

TOON: This was great fun the one time I ran it, but we were also on shrooms, so perhaps my opinion isn't as relevant here.

Burning Wheel: Played it twice at a con. First time didn't go very well, second one was better. There's a lot of BW that resembles detailed-build games, even if it's a different approach than GURPS/HERO, so I'm not really enamored of the system.

InSpectres: I ran the UnSpeakable variant at a con and it was fantastic. InSpectres/octaNe is what I would run in situations where other people would pick Risus or Wushu. I don't want all my games to be high-improv, collaborative, narrative-focused games, but it's definitely the kind of game I like to break up traditional-style role-playing.

I've played a couple other games -- some homebrews and playtests (mine and others) and even original Traveller, but I don't have much to say about them right now. Maybe another time...

LBB Longing

I have nothing substantial to post about today, because I'm too tired. As I've mentioned, my OD&D LBBs and Supplements I-IV are in storage. Why, I don't know. They're small, so I should have kept them with me. I suppose it was because I was moving to the Portland area to stay with people whom I knew wouldn't play OD&D, ever. But of course, once there, I kept wanting to refer to the original books as I read some OSR blogs, and now that I've moved back from the Portland area, I've finally decided "I need those NOW."

And so, I went on a little expedition that went wrong in just about every way possible, for hours on end, ending with me almost getting to the storage unit... when I realized I'd left the key to the padlock behind. Since it was already late in the day and would take another 3-4 hours to go back, get the key, and set out again, I just said, "Screw it. I'll try again tomorrow."

Which is why I have nothing to say today.

Eerie Gaming

I have supposed a Human being to be capable of various psychical states,
with varying degrees of consciousness, as follows:

 a. the ordinary state, with no consciousness
    of the presence of Fairies;

 b. the eerie state, in which, while conscious
    of actual surroundings, he is also conscious
    of the presence of Fairies;

 c. a form of trance, in which, while unconscious
    of actual surroundings, and apparently asleep,
    he (i.e. his immaterial essence) migrates to
    other scenes, in the actual world, or in
    Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence
    of Fairies. 

Lewis Carroll, preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

A post on Society of the Torch, Pole, and Rope reminded me that I wanted to do a couple posts about surreal gaming, as opposed to fantasy, horror or occult gaming, and in particular about the setting and concept of JAGS Wonderland. It's a big topic, because it's one that interests me greatly, so it can't all be done in one post. This post will be an introduction.

I've long been interested not just in surrealism but in what I call "surreal tales", for lack of a better term. That is, fantasy, horror, adventure, or character studies that don't just use surreal elements as a literary or dramatic technique, but are themselves about characters who experience surreal perceptions. The defining feature of a surreal tale for me is that the affected characters doubt their sanity or the reality of their experiences, or have their sanity or veracity called into question. some or even most of the events in the story are left ambiguous as to whether they happened at all. The surreal tale is thus about madness, perception, and the nature of reality.

My favorite example from TV is the old "Twilight Zone". If you watch several episodes of the original series in a row, you'll notice that in practically every episode, there's a question of whether the events are a dream or a sign of insanity. There are a few exceptions that are straight-forward science fiction, but even in some of these, like the famous "It's a Good Life" (where Bill Mumy wishes people into the cornfield,) reality itself is plastic. The canonical examples of the surreal tale in literature, on the other hand, are Lewis Carroll's Alice stories and his less-well-known Sylvie and Bruno stories. In addition, there are a huge number of ghost stories that aren't so much about horror as they are about an impossible glimpse into a lost life; for example, "The Demoiselle d'Ys" by Robert W. Chambers.

RPGs have occasionally touched upon dreams and madness, but early examples were frequently just dreams as super powers/magic. The Call of Cthulhu's Dreamlands supplement is perhaps first game to focus on dual realities with uncertain connections; another would be Mage: The Ascension, with its periods of Unquiet. My own attempts to capture a little of this began in 2002, with my first draft of The Court of 9 Chambers, in which surrealist painters studying numerology develop the ability to enter a dreamworld in a waking trance and begin fighting each other with artistic motifs in order to reach some Ultimate Secret. I tried a couple other games that played with false reality, such as the drug-crazed hippie game Head Spaces and the B-Movie universe game Out of Frame. I've seen some other people design reality-twisting games, like Dev Purkayastha's Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously and Andrew Kenrick's Lost Days of Memories and Madness.

The most intriguing surreal tale RPG I've seen so far is JAGS Wonderland. I'm not at all interested in the JAGS system itself -- it's basically just another point-buy system reminiscent of GURPS or Hero. However, JAGS Wonderland is brilliant, because the game is not about horror or fantasy or adventure with just a touch of post-modernism or dreamlike details; it's about people afflicted with the usually involuntary ability to slip into another reality, but they (or their doubles) continue to act in the real world in a visibly insane manner. It's about the differences between what the characters perceive and what is "actually" happening, and what the characters are going to do about it. Will they learn to control it? Can they? Will they try to avoid it? Will they let it control them? And why is it all happening?

JAGS Wonderland's inspiration, of course, is Lewis Carroll, perhaps even that quote above from Sylvie and Bruno. There's also elements from Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask and Neverwhen, films by the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmeyer, Japanese horror films like Ringu, and probably a lot of other sources. And, I'm finding, the premise can be adapted to cover a number of other settings, which is something I want to touch on in a future article.

For now, I just encourage those of you who have never heard of JAGS Wonderland to download it and check it out.

Play Time

When I got up this morning, I had it all worked out what I was going to write. Then I read today's Grognardia post about keeping time in a D&D campaign, and it made me think. He quotes two things Gary Gygax wrote: in the AD&D DMG, Gary practically screams "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT", and in Book III of the LBB, he advises DMs to calculate the passage of time based on days (because characters heal 1 hp every other day) and weeks, thus:

Dungeon expedition = 1 week
Wilderness adventure = 1 move = 1 day
1 Week of actual time = 1 week of game time

Now, my gaming material is in storage, so I can't doublecheck this right now (maybe I'll go look for my LBBs next week?) Perhaps someone can doublecheck whether the books recommend recording the small units of time as well as the large? Because when I see articles or game aids related to time keeping, it's usually about keeping track of spell duration or when physical attacks occur during a round, or recording in-dungeon travel times. Perhaps movement was never meant to be more exact than "oh, you explored about 200 feet of corridor? That's about 3 or 4 turns at your movement rate of 6." Or just a good guess as to whether that protection from evil spell will end before the combat does.

It certainly fits in more with the way I play RPGs now.

Fictional Stuff Happens

This post is an aesthetic opinion post, but I feel I've been overly drone-y lately, so I plan on keeping it short. Or, at least, not as long as what I've written so far. I've come to the conclusion that the quintessential game mechanic that exemplifies what RPGs are all about isn't the "to hit" roll or skill roll or damage roll, it's the wandering monster table.

Board games, card games, and war games are about winning, or at least about showing off how good you are at the game. The rules of these games are designed to create an obstacle for players to overcome. Roleplaying games, with their combat encounters, their treasures and traps, and their puzzles, seem superficially to be like other games, but they aren't. RPGs are distinctive because of the fictional world the players participate in. RPGs are about Making Fictional Stuff Happen, as I commented on another blog.

When the DM in an old fashioned dungeon crawl rolls for a wandering monster, something happens that no one at the table was expecting. Sure, everyone knew it was possible, and the DM knew which monsters were possible, but that particular monster, at that particular moment, in that particular place in the dungeon? It's a new event. The "to hit" roll and damage rolls are important not because they allow one person to win or lose, but again because they cause Fictional Stuff to Happen that no one was expecting. So, too, do the reaction rolls, and the morale rolls, and obscure stuff like "% in lair". They make an RPG more than just a tactical exercise, more than a war game.

This is the spirit behind the various random tables in Dragon and other game magazines, or in the DM materials. They are not often the best-constructed or easiest to use mechanics, but in spirit, they are what RPGs are really about.

Armor Class Interface

A couple passing comments Jonathan Tweet made about the low design quality of old school games, in particular a comment about how ascending armor class scores are clearly better than descending scores, started a minor reaction among old school bloggers. (Fortunately for Tweet, a doom-and-gloom post has directed attention away from him to some extent.) I don't want to attack Tweet directly; who cares how he feels about descending ACs, as long as they work for the people who use them? The real question is whether ascending ACs are "clearly better" than descending ACs, and how this relates to a broader issue of interface design.

A couple years ago, I read The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It's about the psychology of the design of practical everyday items, like door knobs and door handles, water faucets, telephones, and car dashboards. One element he addresses is affordances, the components of everyday objects that enable us to act on them. There's a psychology to the shape of active components: buttons want to be pushed, levers want to be pulled, knobs want to be turned. One bad design mistake that rises again and again is making the shape of a control component suggest one kind of action -- turning, for example -- when the control requires a different kind of action entirely, like pulling. Another element the book addresses is the way the interface, especially the part that reports the results of actions, must either match the mental map of the people using the interface or give enough clues to let the users figure out the correct mental map. You don't place two buttons one above the other, but map the interface so that the top button lowers the temperature or volume; it's confusing.

The book made me rethink RPG design and inspired me in several ways. For one, it inspired my various mechanics that use the position of dice rolled on a character sheet or "dice map" to generate results. For another, it made me reconsider whether RPG design should be mainly about game design or interface design. But it's also been useful in considering why different games take different approaches to generating a particular result, and which approaches are best under which circumstances. If an ability score table notes plus and minus modifiers, the player expects to add and subtract these modifiers to and from something; it's an affordance. If you see a dice notation like "3d6", you expect to roll the dice.

OD&D had descending armor classes, 3e/4e have ascending armor classes. Both have you roll a single die, modify the result, and compare that to a target number. Which is better? From the new school perspective, it's better to use the AC as your target number directly than to look up a target number using the AC as a guide, so for a roll-higher mechanic, ascending ACs make more sense. But it's been pointed out that an old school shortcut is to add the AC directly to the die roll, along with a level modifier, and beat a fixed target number of 20, which is actually a little easier than having a variable target number. Clearly, math isn't the issue.

What's being neglected is the different mappings. In OD&D, the armor classes were originally fixed, non-overlapping shorthand descriptions of armor types. There were no modifiers to AC: Chainmail +1 adds +1 to your opponent's target number to hit, not to your AC. There were no AC 1, AC 0, or negative AC monsters. Since there were no negative ACs, and since the target numbers for the tables were derived from subtracting AC from 20 and modifying for character level, it made more sense to use a descending AC, especially if you used a house rule that made movement rate equal to AC. Under an OD&D "to hit" table approach, almost all modifiers are included in the table already, so there are only three things to be added or subtracted from any number in combat:

1. magical weapon bonus (+1 or +2,) added to the die roll;
2. magical armor bonus, added to the target number;
3. situational bonus of +/- 1 or 2, based on a DM's ruling.

In a sense it would have been better if old school ACs were letters rather than numbers, since having an AC 2 immediately made players imagine an AC 1, which lead to modifications in the game that eventually lead to THAC0 and tables with the repeated 20s. It was AD&D that increased the complexity and confusion by dissociating AC from actual armor type and treating AC as a number that could be modified, or a scale that could be extended in either direction. Once that was done, then clearly it made more sense to use ascending ACs as a target number, since that has a better mapping than positive and negative ACs used as a table look-up.

D&D Archaeology

I've been re-reading some AD&D rules variants I wrote years ago. It's all stuff I wouldn't do now -- far too complicated -- but there are some ideas in there that might work. But aside from being an idea mine, it's also been an opportunity think about my changing attitudes towards RPGs and towards D&D specifically.

I didn't date any of the fifty-some pages of notes in this notebook, but I know it's from a time when I was considering submitting something to The Dragon. The style of the notes are that of a very-thorough rough draft of alternate spells, character classes, and house rules. It's very clearly for AD&D (I even labeled it that way,) and is post-Unearthed Arcana, because there are references to UA ideas; my alternate character classes have 1-3 pre-first level training ranks on their experience progression charts, and there are a bunch of alternative ability scores patterned after Comeliness. However, I know these notes are pre-2nd edition, because the release of 2nd edition turned me off D&D for a while and I didn't think old 1st edition material would be of interest to anyone until the recent old school revival.

The material is much more complicated than my current approach; the alternative spells section includes traditional 1e spell blocks with range, duration, and required components for very specialized spells like Desalinate Water and Find Portal. Still, there are hints of an attempt to simply by using analogy to existing system components, such as my rewrite of the psionics rules that use the standard combat system as a model instead of the official percentile system. My general approach then still echoes in what I try to do now: look for patterns in the existing rules to inspire new variations, but pattern the new material after the old as much as possible to keep the system coherent.

I'm slightly tempted to re-vamp some of the material for OSRIC and send it to one of the old-school zines. At least then, someone might actually be able to use it.

Science Fantasy: Psionics

Over on Critical Hits, there's a post about people's attitudes towards getting science in their fantasy, with the specific example of psionics in D&D. Now, I have nothing against SF; despite my focus so far on medieval fantasy, I've also been working on a '50s-style rocket patrol RPG and a few other SFish game materials. I don't even have a complete aversion to SF, or psionics specifically, in D&D in general. However, I've got a couple complaints about D&D psionics. One is the clunkiness of the mechanics: I'd prefer something quick and simple. But more important, D&D psionics as presented spoils the feel of fantasy.

It's not that sword & sorcery or epic fantasy can't have psionics. Clark Ashton Smith inserted serpent men with psychic hypnotic powers into a couple of his Hyperborean and Atlantean fantasies, for example. Other fantasies have the occasional character with an innate power that, for all intents and purposes, could be psionics. However, different settings have different feels, and how psionics are presented in comparison with magic has a critical effect on the feel of the fantasy. The usual presentation of psionics is as a spell-point alternative to regular magic, but slightly stronger on the low level and slightly weaker on the high level, and with no restrictions like dispel magic. Let's face it, it feels like something made for power-gaming.

Of course, psionics are presented as an optional system. However, they are intertwined with a few monsters and magic items, making it hard to completely disentangle psionics. A much simpler psionic system would be easier to tailor to individual settings and much easier to tone down in power level.

Tiny Kingdoms

I've said that the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms, the setting that gives this blog its name, is meant to be sword & sorcery with a medieval feel, and also that it would focus on broad strokes that could be used to improvise within the setting, instead of lists of medievalesque minutiae. I want to talk a little more about that.

Despite the medieval window-dressing, the implied setting of D&D is very modern. For one, D&D worlds feel too big. Many setting products contain a world map; even Hârn, which attempts to be truer to the medieval, has several continents and details on many large kingdoms. The history is "big", too, in the sense that medieval fantasy worlds often have detailed chronologies for thousands of years of politics and war.

In contrast, the world felt really small and young to the average medieval person. Contact with distant lands and cultures was indirect. Peasants travelled up to a day away maybe once a week, a week's journey once a year, a full month's pilgrimage once or twice a lifetime, if lucky. Merchants travelled farther more regularly, but their world is still small. Information and goods get passed from one hand to another in a long chain, with the information becoming more vague and fanciful the further it travelled. Individuals who travelled farther were so rare that their journeys were notable historic events, like the Crusades, the Viking expeditions to Vinland, and the journey of Marco Polo.

Most medieval Europeans lived in small, densely-populated areas separated by wilderness. I decided the best way to encourage this feel would be to have a large area of many small kingdoms, a dense forest a couple thousand miles across with many rivers, and with cities and settlements clustered along the rivers. Cities are small, maybe two to ten thousand people, and most kingdoms only have one, a few have two, and a very few have three. Roads connect villages, towns and cities within a kingdom, but not between kingdoms; overland travel is rare to nonexistent. Travel between kingdoms is by river; as a consequence, kingdoms very far upstream or downstream from where adventurers live are exotic, barely-known cultures.

I made the name "Nine and Thirty Kingdoms" from a similar expression in some Russian fairy tales. I've lost the exact reference, but I seem to remember seeing it in a tale about Koschei the Deathless. I picked the name because it suggests a very large number of small kingdoms, and because it sounds like a traditional expression: there may be far more than 39 kingdoms, but because no one knows and everyone has always said "the nine and thirty kingdoms", that's what they're called. Most people could only name five to ten, with scholars approaching the full number, but arguing about the exact names, or whether principalities and independent arch-duchies count as kingdoms.

All of this background could be described in about ten pages or less, so this is not really what the commercial or non-commercial product I may eventually produce will be about. It's basically a sandbox for wilderness adventures with a set of rules for randomly creating and improvising kingdoms and cultures. I've actually been working on kingdom generation recently, which is based around little coded labels like "H1Y" and "V5SH". It's not fully worked out yet, although I'll mention that V5SH is a three-city kingdom and H1Y is a one-city kingdom. I know what the codes mean, but haven't worked out the best way to generate them or everything that could be gleaned from the codes. It's a question of how far I can go without sinking into that dreaded minutiae. The point of the codes is to have a simple way to identify kingdoms that could be described in sketchy detail -- a couple short phrases at most -- and give DMs guideline to improvise an enormous land of endless adventure from those scanty details.

Leaping and Lingering

I want to finish up the topic of morality, gods, and cosmic forces in D&D-like games (previous installments were "Gods Against the Cosmos" and "Capital Morality".) This installment gets a little more practical and applies specifically to what I am planning for the namesake setting of this blog, the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms; it also incidentally addresses a passing thought Noisms expressed in today's Monsters and Manuals blogpost, on the subject of detail in gaming and fiction.

In yesterday's installment, I mentioned that the standard fantasy in many D&D-ish settings mixes medieval and classical influences, but leans more towards the latter than the former. D&D worlds tend to be superficially medieval, but with a pagan heart. If that is the intention, I argued, then why focus on Good and Evil as cosmic-level concepts, when that is so alien to polytheistic cultures? But the flipside to that example is to try for a more medieval feel, dropping the polytheism and having most NPCs worry about the state of their immortal soul, seeing demons everywhere. It's actually close to what I plan to do for the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms; I like the medieval-classical blended worlds, but I've long had a dream of a more medieval option as a break in the monotony.

There have been some products aimed at a more medieval setting, from Hârn to Yrth, but the approach of these settings seems all wrong to me. They seem to try for a medieval feel by looking up actual historical cultural details and listing them all, perhaps with some slight alteration to make a consistent, unique medievalesque fantasy setting. It's realism through enumeration. That can be useful for some, but a comment in Noism's post summed up how I feel about it: it's "obsession with the minutiae of the setting which categorises all geek pursuits from Star Trek to Dragon Ball Z and which sometimes feels like stamp collecting".

I call this the "rational detail" approach. The problem with it is that it's not very good for improvised or sandbox-style play. What I'd prefer is a handful general principles and themes that can be used to paint a setting with broad brushstrokes and give DMs a tool to improvise details within the boundaries of that setting. I call this the "leaping and lingering" approach, from the way descriptions work in Scottish border ballads: the writer leaps from scene to scene and focus to focus, treating each as if it were a snapshot of the total sequence of events, and lingers on a few details at each point to suggest the situation as a whole without enumerating every single detail within that situation.

To give a crude example of this approach in something more concrete than morality, consider dungeon design. Some first-time DMs make the mistake of just describing the monster, traps, and treasure in the room without any other detail. If a room has none of these, the DM describes it as empty, or gives a superficial detail to break the monotony of an empty room. Some designers try to help a DM avoid this situation by describing all the contents of a room in detail. A better approach, though, is just to label a room as "alchemist's storeroom" or "barracks", and list a few general points about the dungeon or its inhabitants that help distinguish them from other dungeons or creatures. Describing a dungeon as "ruins left over from the Bronze Age" allows a DM to improvise details suggest this: wooden features show signs of rot, metal tools and features are usually bronze or copper, and there's lots of rubble on the floor. If the players search the rubble in the "barracks", the DM can mention scraps of cloth and wool. In the "alchemist's storeroom", mention pot shards and powder residues. There are no lists made in advance, the DM just improvises based on the needs of the moment.

Back to the topic of medieval morality in a fantasy game, what we know or believe about Cosmic Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, becomes one of these general principles used to improvise details about the setting. Knowing that a particular creature type is aligned with the forces of Good, and that the stereotypical associations with Good include "light" and things like halos, pleasant odors, self-sacrifice, and service, we can improvise details about its appearance and behavior that suggests a Good creature. Likewise, we can improvise details about Evil-aligned creatures, like a hint of scaliness, or or the odor of brimstone, or a fondness for inflicting pain. We don't need all the details in advance, just the general sketch of Evil and how this particular creature differs from the Evil norm.

However, in keeping with the "leaping and lingering" approach, I would not want to predefine the plans of the forces of Good and Evil, or the events in the upcoming cosmic battle. In fact, the cosmic battle might not even happen in the characters' lifetime. It's better in my opinion improvise details as needed, in keeping with the general principles of what Good and Evil want. Furthermore, the aim of the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms specifically is a sword & sorcery setting with a medieval feel, so despite the fact that the inhabitants of the Kingdoms believe in a cosmic battle, the focus is more on individuals with personal concerns influenced by their feelings about Good and Evil, instead of on large scale maneuvers of the cosmic forces. Even in a setting informed by cosmic forces, it's easier to manage a narrower human-level focus than a broader universal one, and easier to understand as well.

Capital Morality

Continuing to discuss James Raggi's recent topic of Good and Evil in RPGs, I'd like to support his point about separating morality from divinity by pointing out how unrealistic a battle of Good versus Evil is. No, I don't mean that there is no Good and Evil, or that there has never been any battle between them. What I mean is that the whole concept of a battle between Good and Evil, in their capitalized forms, is not only somewhat inconsistent with a sword & sorcery aesthetic, it's a comparatively recent idea.

D&D and several other fantasy RPG settings are sort of a mish-mash of medieval-era and classical-era ideas. Although the technology, politics, and culture are medieval in flavor, the fantastic elements seem to mostly come from classical myth and legend; clerics and elementals are the most medieval of the fantastic elements in the original rules, with the rest -- magic scrolls and swords, dwarves, elves, most of the monsters and magic -- coming from Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic pre-Christian sources, sometimes by way of later literary works like Tolkein. In particular, D&D chooses polytheism as its religious model instead of monotheism.

And yet, the battle of Good and Evil comes mainly from monotheism. The Zoroastrians are the first to propose a moral battle between supernatural forces as an explanation for events of history and everyday life. The Hebrews absorb this concept into their religion after the Persians liberate them from Babylon; from there, the concept drifts into a couple fringe cults of Judaism, including one that becomes Christianity. This new form of Judaism breaks out into the rest of the world by focusing on Gentiles, and eventually one such Christian of the Arian sect founds a new offshoot, Islam. These two together come to dominate most of the world.

Polytheists, in contrast, did not believe in Evil as a huge, immanent supernatural force. There were terrifying acts of the gods, the same gods who could also give boons. There was sacrilege, blasphemy, oath-breaking, and the breaking of taboos by foolhardy human beings. The closest the ancients come to Evil are embodiments of chaos, such as Apep or Ymir or Tiamat or Typhon; Chaos is not so much immoral as dangerous and destructive and thus needing to be controlled.

Polytheists did not even believe in Good as a huge, immanent supernatural force. The first "good" is lowercase, in the form of good fortune or material blessings. The next "good" is virtue, which stems from piety and respect towards the supernatural combined with social graces that promote good fortune and material blessings, the first "good". The ancients do not talk about aligning yourself with Good, but with leading a good life.

My feeling on this, then, is that if I want to have a polytheistic culture and a more fantastic, classical-style setting, I should stay away from Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil and instead focus on more mundane versions of good and evil. Of course, there's another side to this coin, which I will deal with my next installment.

Gods Against the Cosmos

Over at Lamentations of the Flame Princess, James Raggi has been writing about divinity and morality in roleplaying games and has said a couple interesting things: about dissociating the moral system (alignment) from the deities, about the difference between cosmic forces and beings merely claiming to be gods, and ways of revamping the D&D cosmology to dissociate it from alignment as well. There's some things there that I agree with and others I want to think about and mull over here.

The general thrust, stripping gods of alignment, is fine by me on at least two counts. I prefer swords & sorcery to epic fantasy; morally ambiguous gods
certainly reflect s&s better than a rigid moral pantheon. I also like a different approach to alignment, stripping it of behavorial and even moral relevance entirely. I like the idea of using just a few alignments, such as Law and Chaos, as sides in a battle, with the majority of creatures being unaligned. Being aligned grants a few small benefits, but demands obligations and presents risks when encountering creatures, artifacts, or magic of the opposite alignment. In keeping with this, I've even been toying with merging the cleric and thief classes; I should develop this more and post about it.

On the topic of cosmic forces vs. gods of a pantheon, things are a little bit murky. The default assumption in much of D&D is that the gods are really just very powerful monsters, which sort of fits with s&s, but not quite because of the way clerics and alignment traditionally works. The default assumption in general society is that pagan gods were personifications of elements in the universe -- sky, earth, sun, death. This is basically a 19th-century idea promoted by Max Müller, who claimed that myth was a disease of language. The post-Müller scholarly opinion is more along the lines of the gods as being endowed with these cosmic forces and even controlling them, rather than personifying them. After all, Zeus is not the Sky personified: that would be Ouranos. Kronos castrated his father the Sky, and gained its power, only to be overthrown by his son Zeus. So, according to Greek myth, killing or harming the Sky doesn't destroy the atmosphere, it just changes the natural order and puts someone else in charge. In fact, killing cosmic-level entities in general is a standard method of creation (see Odin and Ymir, or Marduk and Tiamat.)

Which is not to say that playing D&D with literally personified cosmic forces might not be interesting. However, I think I'm leaning more towards the personified cosmic forces as inscrutable supernatural entities acting indirectly on human life, with much more localized s&s-style godlings and demons being the focus of supernatural conflicts. So, for example, I would treat the Lord of the Fiery Green (from my 1-page dungeon in the previous post) more like a monster calling itself a god: powerful, aligned with Chaos, worshipped by jungle goblins, but quite mortal.

James Raggi's post inspired some other ideas, which I'll address in future posts.

Shrine of the Savage Jungle

Recently, RPG bloggers ChattyDM and Chgowiz ran a 1-Page Dungeon contest and received 112 entries. Three winners, six runners-up, and twelve honorable mentions will be published in a free PDF and distributed on the internet. My submission, The Shrine of the Savage Jungle, is one of the honorable mentions (Best Dungeon Crawl.)

I had been wanting to try out Chgowiz's 1-page dungeon template for a while. I'd also been testing various versions of a random dungeon creation process I've been developing for some time (ever since Kanthe.) Unlike other random dungeon approaches, this process involves a lot of interpretation: it's more like fortune telling than a set of tables indexed by dice rolls.

The Shrine illustrates this. The physical map was made using a technique best summarized as "roll dice on a sheet of paper, draw shapes around each die based on the pattern of dots on the die, then connect them together." As you can see, the most recent version of this technique creates a pretty decent dungeon, although it still needs tweaking. Since I needed a computer image and didn't have my scanner handy, I layed a translucent vinyl craft board with gridlines over my hand-drawn map and transcribed it into AutoREALM.

The trap and monster descriptions were "divined", as it were, using another dice technique that needs much more work. I created the monsters first by rolling dice on a pentagram labeled with five elements and five types of action and used the position of the highest result (or results) as a description of the creature's basic form; the position of the lowest result(s) described the creature's unusual feature, attack, or behavior in some way. Median results were used for random other descriptions like color. The process is still very crude, but I was able to come up with six creatures for a random monster chart, which I also used for stocking rooms. The unusually high number of "plant" or "green" descriptions gave me the idea of a jungle location, which I developed into the shrine backstory. I used a similar approach for traps and containers.

The map is intended for expansion. Secret doors or other passages leading off the map to another area could be added to almost any room except for the cluster close to the center. The upper ruins aren't detailed, nor the second level, other than a note that the former priestly occupants had sleeping quarters in the northeast part. The third level is mentioned but left completely wide-open. The backstory is intentionally sketchy, not only so that it can be modified to fit an existing campaign, but also so that it can evolve in play. How was the shrine defiled, and why? Who and what is Miazeim, the Lord of the Fiery Green? The answers to these questions should be different for every group that chooses to play this dungeon.

This is a blog about role-playing games.

I've blogged before about games I was designing or what I liked about other people's games, but I've long thought I should separate my role-playing material from my other material. This way, I can write in more detail about game matters without worrying about whether my readers are truly interested.

My planned topics are:

• Updates on games I'm writing (Kanthe, The Court of Nine Chambers, Malignment, etc.;)


• Rules variants and ideas for other RPGs, mainly D&D and InSpectres/octaNe;


• Setting material for a pseudo-medieval fantasy world called "the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms" (hence, the blog name;)


• Occasional comments on other topics circulating in the RPG blogosphere.

I don't plan on writing much, if anything, about RPG theory or politics. I want to keep this blog very concrete and task-oriented.