The Old Gnomeland

The End of the Last War

After the mysterious destruction of Dragonscove, shortened to just "The Incident" in the treaty, leaders of all the major Dragonlander polities sued for a peace council to be held in First Watch, which was seen as relatively neutral ground due to its geographic position in the Dawnlands & its political position as an ex-colony.

Treaty Text (Gardenwarder's New Standard Translation)

In the name of the Sphere and the Twin Suns themselves: Be it known to all, and every one whom it may concern, or to whom in any manner it may belong, That for many Years past, [Discords and Civil Divisions] being stirred up on Our Sphere, particularly regarding the Kingdoms of the Lands of the Dragon, with their Allies and Adherents, and the ensuing hegemony of the Kritarchial Judgeship after the loss of Dragons' Cove, on the one side; And the various relevant Organizations who have traditionally occupied the Lands of the Dawn, the Fenmire, Elfheim, with their Allies and Adherents on the other side.

It has at last happened, by the stroke of Gnomish Luck, seconded by the Endeavours of the Long-suffering Giantfolk of the southern expanses, that all parties have formed thoughts of a Universal Peace.

THEREFORE LET IT BE RESOLVED:--

That there shall be a Universal Peace of Our Sphere, and a perpetual, true, and sincere Coöperation between ALLFOLKS of the Lands of Dawn, with their various governing structures, and the various Kingdoms of the Lands of the Dragon;

That there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty or Pardon of all that has been committed since the Reëmergence, in what place, or what manner soever the Hostilitys have been practiced, magickal, physickal, or faërie in Origin;

That the Disputes with the Giantfolk and their allies and adherents shall be amicably terminated,

That there shall come to be established within twenty moonths time two organizations, supported by local jurisdictions as appropriate, in order to to prevent another Incident [like the one at Dragonscove]:--

First, a Society organiz'd for the purpose of coöperating to advance magickal studies,

Second, a regular Meeting of the Undersigned and any other representatives of legitimately-appointed Politickal Power upon Our Sphere.

desperately, Our Sphere makes the hue and cry.

In EverQuest, in 1999, you could cast spells that would let you turn into a tree or a lamppost and you could just...be a tree. For hours. Without restriction. Harassing passersby.

It's hard for me to admit this, but ... I'm back into World of Warcraft. I've been out of the game since the sex crimes reports first surfaced, but I got Dragonflight & I'm enjoying it.

Oh, and it turns out that 100 page presentation package is still online too…

I have been disheartened lately by the widespread but relatively boring oracular practices present in the default Dice of Fate tables familiar to most OSR/NSR gamers: 1. Roll a die. (Or maybe two!) 2. High number is good. (Or maybe bad!)

This is just a probability curve! This is just another system that could entirely be replaced by DM fiat and few would notice a difference.

The advantage to this system which is actually a problem (hopefully, a problem more people will acknowledge in the light of Hasbro-Wizards legal actions), is that these Dice of Fate are so gameable, so simple, so implementable. So automatable. Read through your software EULAs sometime. Anyhow.

That leads me to my next topic: haruspicy, divination using the internal organs of animals. When you eviscerate a sacrificed sheep and examine its liver, you aren't just looking for good or bad on a one dimensional scale. (What would that even look like?) The internal organs of animals with shorter lifespans allows us to quite literally and physically inspect the state of many otherwise hidden variables, omnipresent in the environment but invisible.

I want to pause for a moment to recognize the possibilities this opens up for storylines involving elves or aliens or whatever who sacrifice humans in an attempt to detect a greater evil, and then move on.

For background, I've been rolling 2d6 every day at the beginning of the day for the last month or so. I've had all sorts of results: snake eyes on the day I got the updated Covid jab and flu shot; 10 on the day we went to the football game and our team won; more middling results than i care to imagine.

And what has hit me is something harder to encode in a copyrightable computer program, something I think the "tarot as oracle" folks hit on a long time ago. What was interesting about the Covid+Flu Jab Day result of "2" isn't that the shot went so bad that I lost my backpack and all my torches and died (although I did get a nasty bruise, unlucky!).

What hit me was that 1 and 1 look like two needles! Stay with me.

So this post is an attempt to do something paradoxical: systematize and therefore gamify an interpretive mechanism which gives the game's Host (and possibly the players too) a decidedly human sort of flexibility in consulting the fates. For me, this system either intersects with or sits on top of the simple numerical "high good, low bad" model so familiar to old school roleplaying. Or perhaps it's more tesseractical. Nevertheless, this section will be more "stream-of-consciousness"

I've already hinted at 1s -- 1s are needles, trees, limbs. Sticklike. 1 dimensional and rigid. Oh, my other brain is leaking in, this is a "classifier" system, in grammar. Classifier systems are often very flexible, sometimes individual speakers will use different classifiers to talk about the same thing. Put a pin here, return to this thought later.

In my setting there are 2 heroes of a widespread myth, 2 main continents, 2 suns; 2 is not a bad number. It reflects the structure of the universe back at us.

And perhaps 3s are stringlike. 1 dimensional but flexible. Adaptive. Vines, ropes, threads.

4 in my setting is also a magic number for reasons I don't want to get into here. I tend to treat a total roll of 8 as better if it's double 4 than if it's 5 and 3. 4 is a good good friendly number.

5 is solid. Inorganic material like stone, glass, ceramic. 5 is stoic. 5 is four plus 1. ✋. 5 is fingers on allfolk's hands. 5 is manipulation and handiwork.

And now they’ve risked alienating three generations of tabletop gamers while simultaneously losing their most popular content creators.

If you play a non-wotc ttrpg, get busy talking to your dnd-only friends about it.

In the Fenmire, Swampfolk hold the magic users who work with the dead in high regard. With the recent influx of Dragonlander families, this has caused tension in some of the communities along the Old Road, as the present author can attest.

Practices vary, but such Necromancers, as us Dragonlanders sometimes derisively call them, frequently adorn themselves with decorative bonewear or cremation ash, meditate on or among lifeless bodies, and ritualized postmortem cannibalism is reported by some scholars, although the present author will confess to never having witnessed such practices.

This is my basic goal:

Gnomecore comes down to two different desires. The first is that everything has a fittingness, a purpose, and a place. Objects are ornate, created with care, and always functional. But because gnomes are so small, the second principle then comes into play: the cozy domestic world of the gnomes comes from carefully working around whatever happens to be there. Purposefulness, making do: that’s gnomecore.

me in my head: "I just had the worst dungeon run. we wiped. i died in the final fight"