Drop in D&D in Edmonton, DIY / Old-School style, as inclusive as we can. Most Monday nights at the black dog, Thursdays online on discord, all welcome.
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Dungeon crawling game set in a domain where the law of the land states that all hoards, troves, sacred relics, cursed rings, talking swords, and other unclaimed treasures are the property of the Crown, with the retrieving party being entitled only to a modest finder's fee, and also it uses XP-for-gold advancement specifically pinned to the percentage of retrieved articles' value the character in question is able to legally claim; much of play thus consists of fabricating legitimate-seeming provenances for retrieved treasures in order to obscure the fact that they were pried out of a dungeon and thereby defraud the King.
(No, this is not "yet another tax fraud premise". Circumventing state ownership of unclaimed hoards is a different thing – more forgery and less math, for one!)
Concept: You have magical powers, but all of your spells need to be cast in rhyme. If the metre is wrong, it won't work. If the rhyme almost rhymes but not quite, it won't work. You can reuse the same constructions and just substitute in new names as needed, but the more you do this, the less powerful it will be. Simple cantrips can be basic rhyming couplets, but the more complicated your spell, the more elaborate your poetical structure needs to be.
Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider has basis in western magic
Jupiter is correspondent with lead, which can decrease mental acuity.
Jupiter is the planet of expansion, the boys are getting more stupider, expanding their stupidity.
Historically speaking the boys did not literally travel to Jupiter. They engaged in a form of fasting and sleep deprivation to trigger an altered state of consciousness, at which point the would experience a descent to an "inner" Jupiter.
The choice of Jupiter is also meaningful. The celestial spirit of Jupiter is equated with both cronos and Demeter, and thus functions as a negative spirit, a being of unraveling and unmaking. This stripping away of smartness in the pursuit of getting more stupider is likely influenced by late Platonist philosophy. Plotinus places particular emphasis on the stripping away of misconceptions which in turn allows for proper cultivation of noesis; a process equated with rising back up to the sublunary realm. This is likely the context in which "going to Jupiter to get more stupider" was devised.
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There's a whole book or even multiple sagas to be written around the question of "why do adventurers exist in this world at all". I hate the term "murderhobo" with a passion but there is a lot, a lot to talk about what kind of society hires wandering questing warriors to solve problems and where do those "adventurers" come from and what role do they have in society.
Lots of people have talked about this but I would like to point out this essay on ACOUP that starts with seemingly a semi-related matter (why gold coins in fantasy don't make sense in historical societies) and ends with a very revealing insight... gold isn't the reward that "fantasy adventurers" should seek. It should be power and influence, noble titles, a comission in the local army, land.
This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and ro
As usual and expected from a blog titled A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, it does take a long (but very interesting and worth reading) read to get to that point, but I'll point out the interesting thing in this context:
Here, "Big Man" is a stand in for the nobles and rulers and landowners of agricultural societies. While more urbanized and industrial societies may have a use for coinage, what do these societies based in interpersonal relationships can give you as a reward for a quest, as a reward for solving a problem? Social power; a title, a relationship, a promise of support. And not only that, but this isn't often a reward but a necessity in the first place. To have a horse, to have armor and weapons and the means to wage war (go adventuring) in the first place, you don't go to the medieval store and buy them with 20gp, you often have people supporting you and even , you are a man-at-arms, part of a noble retinue a noble yourself, maybe part of a holy order, or in more early-modern scenario, part of a mercenary group.
However, this doesn't happen often in fantasy because of these reasons reasons:
The idea of the selfless hero who doesn't choose glory or fame but instead continues questing endlessly to do good or defeat an ultimate evil. Making a hero have a patron feels like selling out (but I will address that)
Even with those characters who aren't selfless and would probably take the power and titles, it seems to tie them down to a place or obligation and this makes adventures boring (but I will address that!)
Dungeons & Dragons
People say that every generic fantasy world is inspired by Tolkien but I will argue that he's the grandfather of modern fantasy, the father is Gary Gyax. The ideas baked in D&D have been present in ALL over popular fantasy for decades now, even more prominently than Tolkien (and of course D&D 'borrowed' a lot from Tolkien). Now what this means in this particular case is the idea of wandering "adventurers" solving problems for "gold" in "dungeons", often with the undertone of a frontier or decaying civilization full of monsters and bandits to be killed and tamed into civilization (some other people have written about this better than me)
Nevertheless, even beyond the setting implications, there are deep gameplay implications that have filtered down popular fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons is a survival/combat game. It's a survival game because you have to rely in your abilities and limited equipment (which you buy with gold) to survive in a dungeon, through combat. Of course you can do a lot more than that, but this is the core of the game, what it was designed for: buy equipment, go into a dungeon, survive, get treasure, use it to buy equipment, go into another dungeon. Here "dungeon" can mean many things... combat, travel, puzzles, but the loop is clear.
There is no "gain a patron and get social capital" loop in the game, though it might be simulated, it isn't fun. So there is a lack of interest on exploring this, or really, anything beyond the "quest". And since again, it's D&D, not Tolkien, that shapes most popular fantasy, we see popular fantasy repeating this deeply baked in idea of fantasy once and again and again and again. Sometimes even making them into actual, literal points inside the world: making literal worlds with Adventurer Guilds and Dungeons and Quests and sometimes even Levels and XP as part of society (they're only lacking the dice... and that's because D&D is also the main influence behind videogames).
Is EVERY SINGLE FANTASY WORLD like this? No, not at all. But I want to talk about where does this idea of "gold" and "adventures" comes from, and it's NOT medieval or historical inspiration, and it's NOT even Tolkien. It's D&D.
I told you I would address the idea that having a patron or a story based on one's social standing could be boring or at least incompatible with "adventure", and there are many cases that I could point out, but I want to point to a very interesting one: Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid Campeador.
El Cid is both a real person who lived a very interesting life and a folklore figure, and both are very interesting as inspirations for fantasy "adventurers". El Cid was considered (by the social standards of the time) as an ideal knight and a tragic figure. But his whole life is defined by the society he lived in and, as any knight (or noble warrior in general), how he walked the interrelationships of his society; his back and forth of loyalty and betrayal with King Alfonso, his loss and recovery of honor, his service to the Muslims rulers of Zaragoza which indeed gave him his title (these constant intercultural interactions were very common in medieval Iberia, which makes it a very unique and underused setting inspiration), his rulership over Valencia. Over time, El Cid changes and seeks patrons and his changes in his social status (and his dependence on them) are a major part of the story both in real life and fictionalizations.
But this doesn't mean that the life of El Cid is boring or lacking in combat and travels. He gets "adventures" all over the place, he travels and fights over the whole breadth of Iberia, he has countless legends to his name. He wasn't a "murderhobo" that got gold from each adventure and then went to the store to buy a new sword, he took command of armies and he even took power and governed his own realm, but his life wasn't lacking from excitement, he didn't just sit and became a paper-pusher. I need to be very clear I'm not saying El Cid was a hero, I'm saying he led an exciting, interesting life, worthy of most fictional adventurers, but he wasn't just going from place to place asking for gold... well, technically yes, but this involved his status, his honor and his place in society. Which makes for a rich story.
And he's not the only one, Medieval Iberia is full of stories of these characters that navigated the social networks of their time, a place where cultures interacted with each other in multiple complex ways and kingdoms and taifas often employed these wandering "adventurers". Maybe if you want to get inspired to write about adventurers, don't look to D&D for inspiration. Read about Al Andalus sometime.
stop doing traps in isometric crpgs. its never been good. its never been fun. ive never played a crpg where Traps have been anything other than a shallow statcheck and an oportunity for the game's invariably bad pathfinding to fuck you over for no reason
i mean one basic quality of life element that somehow i've never seen a game implement is to make the party automatically pathfind around traps you, the player, know are there. making all my movement in tiny increments because if i tell my guys to just walk to the door theyll notice a bear trap and then step on it anyway doesn't make me feel like i'm ''searching for traps'' or ''being cautious'', it makes me feel like my time is being wasted.
apart from that, to try and make them actually good...
i think you have to make them managable without the 'trap stat'. like, every game i've played you just make sure one party member levels sleight of hand/whatever The Trap Stat is in that game (and also usually the lockpicking stat) and then her around forever. it feels like an advancement tax, not a reward for specializing. so i think like traps should be noticeable through enviromental clues, to reward you as a player actually looking for them, and anyone can disarm them. and then, if you've invested in The Traps Stat, you get a special bonus, right, you can have them highlighted or you can set them to go off on enemies or you can get special resources from disassembling them, so it feels like you're actually getting a reward for specializing instead of just avoiding an annoyance
and i think secondly traps need to have more interesting effects. out with all that shit that just damages you, esp. shit that can kill you, bc it means that missing a trap just means 'reloading ten seconds'. environemntal traps that, like, open up a trapdoor and you have to escape a little snake pit area, or that add an environemtnal effect or change to map geometry to the area your;'e in a way that makes a later figfht a bit harder, i think stuff like that that actually shapes how you engage with a dungeon could be a lot more interesting and lead to stuff than just a damage check or a status effect. like, i feel like 'oh i triggered the trap on the first level so i released the Ice Daemon' is a like, story, that would be fun to tell and think about and feel like a part of the storytelling and adventure of that dungeon, rather than "my party took 30 Pierce damage"
so tldr they have to be 1. not a straightforward statcheck and 2. not just a bunch of damage or a til-rest status effect
I review every single room (and some non-rooms) in the original funhouse dungeon and describe what makes them work or not work and what is w
The best trick rooms in dungeons provide toyetic obstacles for which many solutions are possible. A recurring problem with White Plume Mountain is that it wants to hem in the possible solutions. This room goes to great lengths to forestall possible solutions. The slipstuff is “totally unaffected by any force, magical or otherwise”, so good luck washing or burning it off. The spells fly, levitate, jump, dimension door, blink and teleport simply don’t work in this room. Why? Go fuck yourself, that’s why.
Good post! I think White Plume Mountain is a terrible dungeon with a handful of absolute banger ideas, so this room-by-room review is a wonderful playful idea. This quote is close to my take on the Tomb of Horrors.
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I feel like every year the girl names get more boyish like what do you mean you are a teenage girl named Ian??
And this leads to an escalation on the boy name front where like, once upon a time shit like Hunter was something parents in the Bush era made up to reassure ppl there was no fag shit going on with their kids and now the most famous trans woman in country is named Hunter so p soon we are gonna need to call the boys shit like Blade and Laser
The text in the original White Box heavily implies a reading where saving throws were not just a generic mechanic that applied to all creatures equally but were a special exception given to player character types. Only player characters get a saving throw table (there is to my knowledge no saving throw table that applies to monsters) and none of the spells or other effects mention a saving throw as far as I can tell.
What I think this achieves is make player character Magic-Users less prone to misfires. Sure, they can still only go once before they need to lie down, but when they do shoot their shot it's going to work automatically. Which is nice. But it also does make the player character distinctly heroic.
Some creatures seem to have specific saving throw numbers mentioned, including unicorns who save against spells as 11th level Magic-Users, but I'm willing to still assume that this is a specific case of an NPC type having access to a specific type of saving throw and not something that should necessarily be taken to mean that ALL creatures have access to saving throws.
One of the curious inventions of Swords & Wizardry, despite its claims to be a retro-clone, is giving monsters saving throws that are simply really bad! Low to mid level monsters almost always fail, since their save is 19-HD. Meanwhile, powerful bosses have around a 50% chance.
Since starting up with this many years ago I have considered whether or not to simply do away with them and return to the OD&D source. But since starting to treat “magic resistance” as just getting to roll twice, and figuring out how to give sorcerous monsters better saves (level per the xp table instead of hd), I think I’m stuck with them. I also find incentivizing charms etc to be used against lower level minions is good.
Regardless, making monster saves terrible or nonexistent is good design. Magic-users need their spells to work!
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Anyway ultimately justifications based on "well that's how it is in the setting" about stuff in any media will ring hollow if the criticism is approaching it not from the point of view of interrogating it through in-setting logic but from the point of view of an actual human being making a conscious decision to make it like that.
Like yeah we can sit and jerk off all day about how killing cultists is justified through in-game logic because they're literally trying to make Hell real, but when viewed with even a modicum of media criticism you can maybe start to wonder why cultists are such a common villain in medieval fantasy gaming.
Similarly, yeah, sure, in-universe orcs may have been created by an evil god and that's why they're predisposed to evil, but given the already racialized portrayal of orcs in the source material they come from plus the game further adding the reading that they're actually tribal savages, it suddenly puts into context some of the Fucked Up stuff that the author of the game said later in his life.
Anyway, none of this is to say that if you're not constantly thinking about this or flagellating yourself while engaging with the game you're somehow a bad human being, but like the stuff in fiction didn't just emerge out of The Void but came to as a result of someone's decision to dedicate it into the writing. Some people just enjoy thinking about this stuff in our free time, like I certainly do, and speaking for myself interrogating media like this rarely affects my ability to enjoy or engage with said media.
That's right, when you said "let people enjoy things" to my post interrogating how D&D is Fucked Up, did you even stop to consider that maybe I enjoy being a hater?
One of the ways in which D&D is Fucked Up is in how cultists are depicted. Yeah yeah in the context of the game's setting a cultist is just an Evil Follower of an Evil Religion, but as a trope it probably made its way into D&D via swords and sorcery fiction. I'm not entirely sure how it got there but I feel it's orientalism.
Anyway, D&D 5e is an interesting case where the art doesn't lean too heavily into some of the orientalist imagery sometimes associated with the figure of the Bad Cultist, but like. They default to using scimitars. Which, you know, makes sense when you think about the iconic fantasy cultist, it's all curved swords. But why?
And yeah, it's definitely not a case where whoever wrote that stat block was consciously thinking "dang I think the association between evil cults and Middle Eastern iconography rules" but more like. That iconography exists and the person who wrote the stat block was like "of course cultists have scimitars."
Anyway, while writing this I started thinking about the trial that led to the disbanding of the Knights Templar (I think?) and how it hinged on the probably false claim that they had been worshiping a demon called Baphomet (could have originally been a mistransmission of Mohammed, so like. They were at the same time accused of being demon-worshipers with a possible hint of them having turned to Islam), and I don't know now I'm thinking of a fantasy cult that is in appearance more like a Western European warrior society.
Maybe taking this on a tangent, but realistically, wouldn't it make more sense for cultists to just... look like everyone else? The scariest part of an "evil cultist" plot line is that they've either infiltrated the community, or were converted from within the community. But that doesn't really work if all of the cultists look like the Alik'r warriors in Skyrim while the setting itself is basically Yorkshire only less diverse. It's gotta be Thomas the butcher, whose family has been in this town for seven generations. Philip, the innkeeper who would've been the mayor if he hadn't turned it down. And of course John, the hedge knight who does a lot of charity work for the local temple of [insert good deity here].
It's like how ninjas always wear head-to-toe black in fiction, when in reality they dressed like normal people, because wearing a "ninja uniform" is kind of a dead giveaway.
Yeah, that's another thing: D&D doesn't really do hidden cults? I mean, the Temple of Elemental Evil does have agents in the town of Hommlet, but mostly the cultists just live in their temple where they wait for player characters to come and learn about their religion through spirited dialogue.
But I think you're absolutely right, but I think the explanation then would be that they only put their cultist clothes on during service. Which isn't entirely unprecedented as far as religious practice is concerned, but why do their cultist clothes come with a scimitar standard?
Also, I think it's important to note that cults in D&D have very little to do with cults in real life. Shocking, I know, but to be real for a second, irl cults tend to be societies focused around a charismatic leader that seek to isolate their members from the rest of society. Now, cults in D&D could be that, but what it actually often means is "people who worship the bad religion."
And like yeah I don't think it's fair to expect a game like D&D to portray cults with nuance. In the world of D&D people don't join the cult of the Elder Elemental Eye because they were ensnared by the cult leader and eventually isolated from the rest of their support network and now joining the cult was the only sensible option, they join the cult because they're Chaotic Evil and think the Elder Elemental Eye kicks ass.
But this lack of, you know, sensible human motivations for the antagonists also speaks to something about how D&D has evolved over the years. Because the expected playstyle has evolved to such a point where player characters are expected to be unambiguously heroic, it has led to the loss of nuance. Sure, D&D has never been particularly nuanced, but I feel that older editions were, strangely enough, more nuanced, simply because there wasn't such a strongly encoded expectation of the player characters being unambiguously good and being only pointed against justifiable targets.
obviously, that nuance wasn't there in the first place. players were still encouraged to view themselves as heroic for wiping out an orc settlement (see Gygax's infamous "nits make lice" comment), but i think it's interesting to consider that the current mainstream D&D 5e player may be remarkably identical to the mainstream AD&D player of the '80s.
they're still expected to fight unambiguously evil foes who they don't need to question showing mercy to, the scenario writers just have to get more creative in how they justify it. everyone knows that slavering hordes of tribal orcs are racist, so how about slavering hordes of gnolls? they're literal demon spawn with an ever-gnawing hunger! nevermind the fact that their stat block says "humanoid" and not "fiend". the cannibalism and animalistic appearance further help insulate them from critical analysis to the casual player by way of the Small Penis Defense. "they're cannibalistic animals, they're not supposed to be a depiction of any real-world people." nevermind the fact that calling certain groups of real-world people "cannibalistic animals" was literally something that some of the people who inspired D&D actually did.
as you say with cults, they're having to strip away the overt imagery of the orientalist influences of the pulp fiction "cult" that is the basis to this day of D&D's use and depiction of the concept, but it's trivial to point out that only the imagery has changed, and that they still reinforce the idea of irrational fanatics of a belief that isn't familiar to you. that anyone who follows certain belief systems is, by default, a dangerous zealot, and that there are people who would even follow such a belief system.
the mainstream 5e player of today and the mainstream AD&D player of 40 years ago may fundamentally be working with pretty similar motivations. one just has to work a little harder to continue thinking they're playing a good person.
personally, i'm not necessarily saying to stop playing TTRPGs this way, or that you can't have some mindless dungeon-crawling fun now and again. after all, "it's both possible - and even necessary - to simultaneously enjoy media, while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects." what i'm saying is just... let yourself sit with the dissonance some. i think you can disconnect some of these tropes from their problematic origins, even without necessarily needing to change them as extremely as some work to do. hell, that may even be a better way to address it than trying to figure out ways to circumvent it. but in any case, it first requires acknowledging the connections that are there, how they hide, and what damage they can cause.
Malevolent religious worshipers are so much scarier when they resemble megachurch attendees more than anything. And if they're clearly inspired by upper middle class white people who want to beat you over the head with their holy book, you can murder the shit out of them guilt-free!
so fun fact, my last addition there was specifically about not learning to Other people. there is, in fact, no group of people who you can murder the shit out of guilt-free. for a little dungeon-crawly fantasy violence fun, you can pretend there are, but you have to understand that you're pretending, and think critically about who it is you're pretending, why, and what prejudices you might be building on and reinforcing.
This goes right back to one of my other posts on this very subject: oftentimes when D&D players investigate the implications in D&D's text and gameplay they will end up in a place of "I think it's actually not very cool how many of the evil humanoids carry implications that are very similar to the rhetoric of racialization and dehumanization," only to then go "And to address this, I will make sure not to use evil humanoid species, but instead use regular humans but only the bad ones as enemies: therefore, all enemies are now bandits and cultists," and not realize that in doing so they're also making an ideologically loaded statement that is not as neutral as they would like.
I think the main consideration you need to have is “will this kind of enemy cause interesting problems?” and not try to justify things. The reasons can be figured out later. The violence doesn’t need to be “okay” to make for good gameplay.
Yes it turns out that Gnolls are Protestant and despite being cursed to wear the heads of hounds for turning against the universal church, you will feel bad if you fight them. I mean, you also make your living outside the law and you didn’t exactly get along with the good baron’s tax collectors before, well you know what happened.
Found with the rest of the hoard, the handaxe pictured above was probably found either while digging his own hole for the treasure or maybe earlier in a precious bout of hoarding by some Romano-Briton who thought it was cool enough to bury along with all of his coins and Juliane's bracelet, because cool rock. This was absolutely the correct move.
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