Some DMs have a gift for coming up with the perfect name on the spot. Others flip through Xanathar’s Guide or another name list. Then there’s me: given a minute to think, I can come up with a plausible fantasy name, but in the heat of the moment I might just blurt out a clunker like “Huckabear“.

5e Inspiration has a random NPC generator with a massive name list built into it. I’ve been collecting fantasy names for as long as I’ve been playing D&D, and I’ve brainstormed a lot more for the app. Right now my name list has something more than 6000 NPC names – more than twice the number of names in Xanathar’s Guide.

I’ve vetted all the names in the Inspiration app, which means I’ve said each one aloud to make sure it doesn’t rhyme with something dirty, and I’ve googled it to make sure it’s not a well known trademark or something. (The gold standard for googling a fantasy name: you come up with less than 50,000 hits, and on the first google page is a link to someone’s World of Warcraft character. Then you know you’ve got a keeper.)

How many half-orc names are there?

It’s easy for me to tell you that my name list has 6000+ entries: however, it’s quite difficult to count how many names are in any given category. For instance, how many possible half-orc names are there?

Because Inspiration is an app, I can do more than just create a d100 name chart for each race/gender category. Sure, I categorize names by race and gender, as the Xanathar’s Guide list does – though more than half of my names are nongendered – and also by class. But there are also lots of crossovers and references: on the ranger name list are entries like “roll on the elf name list”.

Inspiration also includes lots of non-NPC names. The app can be used to generate dungeons, treasure, encounters on the land and sea, neighborhoods, and overland maps, so there are big name lists for magic items, ships, taverns, villages, rare books, various categories of monsters, etc. These lists link with the NPC name lists too.

The base half-orc name list might have only 2 entries: one “roll on the orc name list”, and one “roll on the human name list”. Drilling down one level to the orc list, we might have 200 entries, of which ten are like “roll on the evil magic item name list”, to get sonorous names like “Ur Kagal” or “Katak”. The evil magic item name list, in turn, might have a few rolls on the pirate ship name list, for entries like “Winter Wolf”, “Howler,” or “roll on the naval ship name list”. So it’s hard to count exactly how many orc names there are. Do I just count the core human and orc names? The 200 evil magic item names, each a twentieth as likely to come up as a core orc name? The 200 pirate ship names, each a hundredth as likely to come up?

That’s not to mention the possibility of rolling an orc with a barbarian-style name, with all the different name formations that involves: X Y-slayer, X daughter of Y, X Ybane, X Yborn, etc.

That’s all to say that if you use the app to generate 10 random NPCs per weekly game session for 10 years, you might see a random NPC reappear once, but probably not twice.

In a further post I’ll talk about how I generate D&D-style fantasy names. Until then, here’s my orc name list:

Orc Names Roll d20 to select a line. If the line contains 10 names, roll d10 to select the name.

Sign up for the Inspiration beta test!

Read more about the Inspiration app

As part of the Inspiration app, I’ve varied treasure by writing up alternate versions of the 350+ SRD magic items. I’ve come up with something like 2000 variants.

My magic item variants can be divided into 3 types:

Here are some examples of my magic item variants, for the amulet of proof against detection and location, broom of flying, and holy avenger.

amulet of proof against detection and location variants (roll 1d6)

1: a heart-shaped locket scribed with the phrase “thinking of you.” It contains a portrait of the last person to try to magically detect or locate its wearer
2: a necklace with a pendant that looks like an open eye. When found, the necklace’s power is inactive. If the Thieves Cant slang for “night” is spoken, the eye closes and the power activates. The Thieves Cant word for “day” deactivates the necklace and opens the eye.
3: a necklace of 10 glass beads: one bead shatters each time it blocks a scrying or divination attempt. The necklace is nonmagical after all the beads are broken
4: an ostentatious signet ring which once belonged to a princess who disappeared a generation ago
5: a black hooded cloak
6: [miscjewelry] bearing the sign of the god of trickery. This item can also be used as a holy symbol by devotees of that god

In the above examples, I include an item with an extra story power (the locket which identifies the culprit behind divination attempts), and a re-skinned item (the cloak). I didn’t include a cursed version because the Amulet is only useful in a limited number of stories anyway; no need to make it any less attractive. However, since the Amulet is essentially a narrative item, I did include a variant with extra story hooks (the signet ring).

A note on the holy symbol: My app replaces the tag [miscjewelry] above with a random type of jewelry, so you could potentially find an earring or bracelet of proof against detection.

broom of flying variants: roll d8

1: hobby horse with a unicorn head
2: umbrella: its power operates when it is opened
3: articulated brass hang glider
4: winged crown
5: flying horse statue which is activated by turning a brass key. The key may be hidden nearby or in the possession of a nearby monster
6: variant: flying wild boar statue, as above
7: flying shield that the owner surfs on
8: flying throne

I like the broom of flying’s power just as it is – I didn’t include any cursed or extra-powerful versions for this item, just reskins. It’s great seeing an armor-clad fighter astride a broom, but even better than that is seeing the entire party flying cross country via a motley collection of different flight methods – the wizard with a fly spell, a guy with boots of levitation who’s being towed by a griffon rider, and other party members on a broom, a hang glider, winged boots, and maybe Baba Yaga’s mortar. Flying is a cool mid-level power and there’s room for a lot of ways to get it.

holy avenger variants (roll d8)

1. named Gentle Correction. Once per day, as part of a hit with this weapon, the wielder may cast Command, DC 17, on the target
2. named Angelis. This sword has a white hilt with an angel-wing crossguard. 1/week, the wielder can cast Conjure Celestial
3. named Vow of Poverty. The blade resembles stained glass, and depicts knights giving money to the poor. When the wielder draws this weapon, all the coins they are carrying disappear, distributed among the poor of the world
4. its name Blazing Justice is written in glowing gold on the blade. on a Smite, it does 3d6 extra fire damage and bursts into Continual Flame until sheathed
5. named Crusader. This sword is sentient (Int Wis and Cha 16), telepathic with its owner, and hates demons. If the sword helps slay a demon of CR 10+, the sword learns how to cast level 1 Cure Wounds 3/day on its owner.
6. black-bladed sword named Blackbane that exudes an evil aura. Attunable only by blackguard paladins, it does +1d10 necrotic damage on every hit, +3d10 slashing damage to celestials, and doesn’t do extra damage to fiends and undead
7. named Cloudwalker; decorated with angelic symbols. An attuned wielder can cast Fly, self only, 3/day
8. named Honor Bright and covered with binding runes and holy symbols: 1/day, if someone touches the weapon and makes a promise, that promise becomes a Geas

With the holy avenger, I leaned hard into unique variants with extra powers. The holy sword is an integral part of the paladin’s story; a paladin doesn’t want an off-the-rack holy avenger, but a unique sword that was destined for the paladin’s hand. Since it’s a late-game, legendary item, I’m not too worried about slathering on some extra powers.

A few of these variants, like Crusader, are inspired by historical D&D modules. Others are original. Vow of Poverty is drawn from my home game; as a DM, I’ve had a lot of fun with its associated “curse” (or convenience? depends on the paladin).

As I’ve mentioned, I’m working on a D&D app that’s a content generator of all kinds: it spits out encounters, NPCs, treasure, and cool locations.

One makes a random generator by coming up with a bunch of lists, each as large as possible, and crashing them into each other. The bigger each list is, the more depth and reusability your generator has.

How do you know when you can stop adding to a random table? That’s important to me because I don’t just want to make a random generator that looks cool the first time you use it; I want it to provide useful stuff one, two, ten years from now.

the birthday paradox

Maybe you’ve heard this classic math puzzle: in a room of 25 people, what are the odds of at least 2 of them sharing a birthday?

Unintuitively, even though the odds of any 2 people sharing a birthday is only 1/365, the odds of any shared birthday among 25 people is more than 50%. In a room of 60 people, you’re almost guaranteed (99%) to find at least one shared birthday. That’s weird, right? It’s true because we’re looking for ANY shared birthday. The odds of anyone in the room sharing YOUR birthday are still fairly small.

Here’s the full explanation.

You can use this same math to determine how many rolls on a chart you expect before you get a duplicate. A room with 25 people looking for shared birthdays is analogous to rolling 25 times on a chart with 365 entries. On a d20 chart, you can expect to roll a duplicate after only 6 rolls. On a d100 chart, you need only 13 rolls before you’re more likely than not to roll a duplicate. It’s amazing how quickly those duplicates start arriving!

Of course, a chart isn’t totally useless just because you rolled one duplicate. But at some point the diminishing returns may start seriously reducing the value of the chart.

Brute-forcing the birthday paradox calculations further, we find the following:
-If you roll 25 times on a d100 chart, you’re likely to have seen about 22 unique table entries. 3 of your rolls (12%) will have resulted in you seeing a result you’ve already seen.
-If you roll 50 times on a d100 table, you’re likely to have rolled around 40 unique entries. 10 of your rolls (20%) will have generated recycled results.
-After 75 rolls, you will have seen 50 of the table results. 25 of your rolls (33%) will be duplicates.
-After 100 rolls, you will have seen 65 different results and 35 duplicates.

Thus, in total, after 100 rolls on a d100 table, you will have seen something new 65% of the time, and had the experience of seeing recycled material 35% of the time. To adopt the language of rottentomatoes.com, your experience has been 65% fresh.

These percentages hold true for any number of items on a table, just so the proportions of entries to rolls is the same; so after your first 50 rolls on a d100 table, or your first 500 rolls on a d1000 table, you can expect your experience to be 80% fresh.

We have a judgement call to make here, but to me, unless all the entries are highly reusable, a “65% fresh” table feels stale; therefore, if I plan to use a table 100 times over its lifetime, I probably need way more than 100 entries. Let’s choose “80% fresh” as an arbitrary cutoff. At 80% fresh, you see something new on 4 out of every 5 uses of a table. To hit this target, you need to follow this rule of thumb: if you plan to use a random table N times, you need more than (N times 2) table entries.

This seems like a useful thing to know as a D&D designer, and it gets us most of the way towards knowing how big a dice chart or random generator needs to be to do its job. There’s still one more piece of the equation.

reusable vs one-use

When creating a generator, I try to distinguish between reusable and one-use list items.

Reusable items can come up many times and they don’t make a nuisance of themselves. They’re not obtrusive. They also tend to be rather vague and nonspecific. For example, as part of 5e Inspiration, I’m writing a list of random desert locations. “Dunes of golden sand” is a reusable item: over the course of a long desert journey, you’d expect it to come up frequently. “Sandstorm” is a reusable item too. Although it should come up with less frequency than sand dunes, you don’t begrudge multiple sandstorms over the course of a few desert adventures.

One-use items are specific enough that they feel unique. They tend to be more interesting than reusable items. Unfortunately, they don’t wear well. One-use items are the mechanism by which a random generator ages: once you have seen a few of them twice, you’re hitting diminishing returns for the whole random generator. One-use examples from my desert encounters list:

As a player or DM, I’d roll my eyes if I saw any of these twice.

A generator with no one-use items is evergreen, but rather dull. A generator with all one-use items, according to the birthday paradox math we did above, needs to be big enough that most of its entries will never be rolled.

Based on your mix of one-use items in your generator, and how many times you want it to be used, you can determine how much work you need to put into coming up with new entries.

Most of the random tables I write are a mix of fairly generic, multi-use results and rare, interesting, one-use results. To figure out how that impacts a table’s “freshness” calculation, ignore the number of die rolls that are likely to return a generic, multi-use result. For instance: If you’re rolling 100 times on a d100 chart, but half of the chart’s results are generic and reusable, treat it as if you are rolling only 50 times on the table. Thus, for 100 rolls, your half-generic d100 table is 80% fresh.

the freshness calculator

Here’s a “freshness” calculator you can use to figure out how big your random table needs to be to meet your desired level of interestingness. This calculator uses brute force, simulating results 1000 or so times.

what about multi-table random results?

Not all random generators are a single die-roll chart. Many are in the format “roll once on table A, once on table B, etc”. For instance, a tavern name generator could be a single d100 chart where you get a complete name like “The Golden Goose” if you roll a 36, but it’s more likely to be 2 d20 charts, where you roll the “The Golden” on table 1 and “Goose” on table 2. How do you evaluate the freshness of these grouped tables?

I think that for multiple tables, you evaluate each of the tables separately, and then you use the worst result. People are really good at spotting patterns. Once the party has been to The Golden Goose, The Red Goose, and The Unnamed Goose taverns, you just can’t have any more goose tavern names. It doesn’t matter that you never rolled a duplicate on table 1. The repetition on table 2 makes the whole game world feel more creaky and procedural.

how do 5e tables fare?

Now, let’s use this procedure to evaluate a few of the random tables that come in the 5e Dungeon Masters Guide.

5e has been around since 2014. Assuming you’ve run a weekly game for the past 5 years, how “fresh” are the following tables?

The official 5e magic item properties tables. There are 4 tables, ranging from d8 to d20, with 60 properties total. The instructions are to “roll on as many as you like.” Let’s assume you’ve rolled on only one table per magic item, and only for major magic items: say, one die roll every two sessions. By now, you’ve rolled about 120 times, and there’s only 60 entries, so you’ve hit a lot of dupes (43% fresh). Chances are you’ve given up on these charts already. I bet you rolled for magic item properties 10 or 15 times, hit a few duplicates, used the charts as inspiration lists a few more times, and then stoped altogether. That’s roughly what I’ve done, anyway.

How many random magic item characteristics would you need to provide, say, an “80% fresh” experience for 125 rolls over the course of 5 years? Plugging in numbers into the freshness calculator, it seems that 300 characteristics would just about do it. That’s a far cry from the 60 that are provided.

The NPC traits charts. There’s a d20 chart for NPC appearance. How many of the items are reusable and how many are one-shot? I’d say it’s maybe 50/50, with “flamboyant clothes” and “bald” being reusable, and “nervous eye twitch” and “missing fingers” being unique. If I ran into 2 NPCs who were missing fingers, I’d suspect they were the same doppelgänger.

If you’ve used this chart to make just 1 NPC per week for the last 5 years, you have 12 folks running around your campaign world with missing fingers. Clearly this table is not big enough. To provide specific and fresh results for 250 NPCS over 5 years, you probably want a d500 table at least.

the DMG vs the Inspiration app

OK, it’s not completely fair to judge the DMG charts this way. They’re clearly meant to provide inspiration – to teach you how to customize your magic items and NPCs. After rolling on the charts for a few sessions, you’re supposed to be able to do your own homework before each session – spread your creative wings and fly!

Well, that’s bully for the DMG. I, on the other hand, am not here to help anyone learn to fly. I’m here to do your homework for you! The Inspiration app currently has about 500 NPC characteristics, many of them evergreen, and about 2000 magic item variants. It should be able to provide you dungeon mastering freshness for the next 10 years at least.

Next week, let’s look at some magic item variants from the app.

Sign up for the Inspiration beta test!

Read more about the Inspiration app

This week I’ve been working on boring-but-necessary pieces of the Inspiration app to get it ready for playtesting, such as a way to share a dungeon’s random number seed so several people can test/play the same dungeon.

But for this week’s post, I want to give you a gameable slice of the app, translated into random tables that you can roll on with real dice.

Below are the Inspiration encounter tables for the cloud giant. It’s a high level monster, so it’s not as exhaustively detailed as a more commonly-encountered critter like a kobold or a hobgoblin, but on the other hand, I like cloud giants, so it’s not sparse either.

table 1: signs of nearby cloud giants in the hills/mountains: roll d20

table 2: behavior of a single cloud giant in the hills/mountains: roll d20

table 3: behavior of 2 cloud giants in the hills/mountains: roll d20

table 4: behavior of 3 or more cloud giants in the hills/mountains: roll d10

My “Inspiration 5e” app has two modes: “inspiration mode” and “exploration mode”.

inspiration mode

Inspiration Mode is the default mode. It’s for when you’re browsing for ideas to fill out a pre-existing or partially complete adventure. A random encounter in the jungle? A 17th-level treasure hoard? A ranger NPC? Whatever you want. If you like one of the suggestions, you can swipe right to save it for later. If you want to generate a new suggestion, swipe left. Inspiration mode is like Tinder for DMs.

Inspiration mode doesn’t presume anything about your adventure. It just presents ideas to you as fast as possible. It doesn’t ration out the interesting stuff: every location has an inhabitant, every monster has treasure. You loaded up the app because you wanted something, not because you wanted nothing.

exploration mode

Exploration mode is for when you want the app to design a whole dungeon crawl or hex crawl for you. Maybe your PCs ventured into an area you haven’t prepared; maybe you’re playing solo and want to be surprised; maybe you’re running a zero-preparation, all-improv game; or maybe you just don’t feel like doing cartography today.

In Exploration mode, you’ll get a map to explore: a dungeon, an area of wilderness, a city neighborhood, or the like. The map is hand-drawn, procedurally stitched together, and populated with interesting locations and encounters, with every monster, trap, and treasure hoard marked. If you like a map, you can save it; that can be a piece of your campaign world now. This is full Tolkien worldbuilding mode.

Unlike Inspiration mode, Exploration mode provides content at a measured pace. There is the occasional empty dungeon room or deserted hex. While many weapons and armor have cool powers and variations, sometimes the party will just find a plain +1 sword. Treasure is doled out at around the by-the-book rate so that party treasure will match the 5e treasure assumptions.

In other words, Exploration Mode creates something close to a by-the-book D&D campaign (with the addition of hundreds of new monsters, thousands of magic item variants, and tens of thousands of unique encounter details).

exploration in the dungeon

Let me talk in greater detail about what “exploration mode” looks like for the dungeon. This will be completely testable in the first beta build. (“Exploration mode” civilization and wilderness hex-crawl maps will be in a later beta release.)

In Exploration mode, you can generate a complete, procedurally-generated, multi-level dungeon.

Each dungeon level comes with an explorable map drawn in the style of my Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map poster (but on a phone screen instead of a 3-foot-tall poster.) The map is created with a modified version of the Dungeon Generator rules, though I’ve tweaked them to provide consistency: I avoid overlapping rooms, make dungeons’ sizes consistent and configurable, guarantee stairs down to the next level, etc.

I’ve also modified the official random-dungeon rules to make an Exploration Mode dungeon as much like a human-designed dungeon as possible.

Each dungeon level has a level boss, and the whole level has a consistent theme appropriate to that boss. For instance, a “death knight tomb” will likely contain sarcophagi and other tomb trappings, and will feature many (but not exclusively) undead encounters. The climactic encounter with the death knight will be a difficult one for your level.

Each dungeon level will feature random encounters, tricks, traps, secret doors, puzzling room descriptions, and everything else you’d expect from an underground death trap.

If you like a certain dungeon, you can save your party’s location and return to it week after week. You might fight skeletons on level 1 one week, and a few sessions later be fighting trolls on level 6, all within the same dungeon.

Inspiration AND exploration

Ok, so Inspiration mode is Tinder for DMs – swipe left for new ideas – and exploration mode is Tolkien for DMs – instant keyed maps of any part of your world. Can you have both together?

Well, apart from the fact that you as DM can, and SHOULD, overrule anything and everything that the app suggests, the software allows you to combine both approaches. You can “swipe left” in exploration mode to reroll any encounter or treasure. Get to the end of the Death Knight dungeon and decide you don’t feel like running a Death Knight? Swipe left to reroll the contents of the room! Now it’s a blue dragon lair or whatever. Or, if you have a specific idea in mind – say you really want to run a demilich – you can tap the Search tab, look up Demilich, and run that instead. Nothing suggested by the app is immutable: you know your game world best, and what you say goes.

Now all of this is how the app works today. As I implement more of my ideas, and as a result of beta testing, lots of the app’s features will change. Speaking of which: Why not sign up for the beta test! Within a few weeks, I’m aiming to have stable iOS and Android versions ready for you to test. Sign up for the beta test!

Read more about the Inspiration app

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working on a phone app. It’s a DM tool: it’s meant to be a sort of Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map for your entire campaign world. I’m tentatively calling it “5e Inspiration.”

0% preparation, 100% inspiration

5e Inspiration is a tool for populating your game world with people, locations, monsters, and treasure. It can be used to supplement, aid, or even replace your game prep.

I’ve been using it to suggest random encounters, random NPCs, and random treasure to fill out my high-level, story-based, plane-hopping D&D campaign.

On the other hand, my buddy Rory has been using Inspiration for the past 6 months to randomly generate entire dungeons and wilderness treks in a procedurally generated West Marches campaign. Rory can both DM and play a PC because he has no foreknowledge about what the party is going to find when they leave town or descend into a dungeon.

5e Inspiration can also be a sort of an “in emergency, break glass” option for when you just don’t know what to do next. Maybe your players just wandered off the edge of the map. Or they just came back to town and are staring at you, waiting for the next adventure hook. Maybe it’s time to reveal the campaign villain and you lost the scrap of paper with his name on it, and the only name you can think of at the moment is “Smerdley.”

5e Inspiration also enables true solo D&D. With the app as DM and you as player and referee, you can play a complete game of D&D on your own. You can spelunk dungeons, wade through swamps in search of lost idols, pick up rumors in town, and race across city rooftops pursued by angry guards. The app provides the dungeons, swamps, rumors, and rooftops.

5e Inspiration also includes a dice roller and a built-in SRD reference, so you can DM with only your phone.

what this app is not

5e Inspiration is NOT an index of dozens of random generators. As a DM, I don’t want to browse or navigate through menus to find the table I want. You know what’s not fun for players? Watching the DM play with their phone.

In my vision, EVERYTHING YOU NEED IS ON THE SCREEN WHEN YOU LOAD UP THE APP: map, terrain, monsters or NPCs with their own agendas, and treasure, all suitable to your party’s level and location. If you don’t like the suggestions, reroll for new ones.

This app is NOT a D&D Beyond competitor. D&D Beyond is a complete D&D rules reference, aimed at both players and DMs, with an ever-expanding library of official content.

While my app includes a searchable SRD reference, its main function is to suggest D&D scenes that you can drop into your game session. It’s purely a DM tool. And it’ll have an ever-expanding library of unofficial content.

The app is NOT a strict recreation of the 5e random NPC, random encounter, and random treasure rules. That would be a useful app, but it would be a weekend project, not my obsession for a year.

Those 5e tables were a starting place. I’ve expanded and varied each of those, through obsessive brainstorming and editing every day for months, until the original rules are perhaps a tenth of the content in the app. I’ve created something that’s probably too big to be printed as a DND book.

For example:

D&D’s most original addition to fantasy is the dungeon: an underground nightmare maze, a place with alien rules that must be mastered if you are to survive, a place that has no good reason for existing, a place that you explore for its own sake.

In its 45 years, D&D has spawned a video game industry that’s worth more than either the movie or the book industry. Dungeons, dragons, leveling, character classes, and loot drops define video game design space. But books, movies, and TV shows haven’t absorbed much from D&D that wasn’t in Tolkien.

In medieval and modern fantasy literature, you’ll frequently find magic swords, but no magic armor; wizards, but no clerics; and dragons, but no dungeons.

It’s the dungeons I miss.

I’d watch a TV show or read a modern book about people exploring a torchlit, hostile megadungeon: solving puzzles, bashing down doors, fighting strange and terrifying monsters. I’m not talking about a show with a set-piece in a tomb or sewer: there are plenty of those. I’m talking about the dungeon as a main character.

There’s just not that much content like that. Even most of the D&D novels I’ve read are more likely to spend more time on Tolkienesque wilderness quests than on dungeoneering, with maybe a few set pieces in a tomb.

So here’s where I need your help. I just had knee surgery and I’m stuck in bed. I’m looking for book, TV, and movie recommendations featuring dungeons.

Here’s the well-known, post-D&D fiction that I can think of with dungeon-crawl settings. Let me know what I missed.

Labyrinth: This is a pretty pure example of the breed. It takes place almost entirely in a dungeon. There are puzzles and weird monsters. The rules of the labyrinth are consistent but weird.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: The series as a whole is a travelogue, although the dungeon sequences are so good that they transcend set piece. Still, Temple of Doom is the only installment which really can be described as a dungeon crawl.

Cube: Cube is set entirely in a classic death trap dungeon. It’s got the puzzle solving, the location as the main adversary, and the claustrophobic dread that comes from knowing you’re a first level character in a module for levels 8-12.

Stranger Things: (mild spoilers ahead) Stranger Things is explicitly about D&D, and in season 2 they do dungeons pretty well. The tunnels of the Upside Down teach you to keep an eye on the ceiling; to use a map instead of a trail of crumbs; and to bring lots of flaming oil. That’s pretty D&D. Still, the dungeoneering-per-minute ratio is low.

Dungeon series: During my D&D-obsessed youth, I started reading the Dungeon series, edited by Philip Jose Farmer. I couldn’t get into it. It’s called the Dungeon series, though, so I suppose it’s probably got dungeons in it?

Maze Runner: A young adult book where teens have to learn to navigate a dungeon. Fits the bill even though the protagonists spend a lot of time in the safe central camp, having teen feelings, and not out there runnin’ the maze like I want them to.

I have no clue about anime. I suppose there must be some show which is exactly what I’m looking for, right?

OK guys, what have I missed? What are the great examples of dungeoncrawl literature of the past 50 years? Again, I’m looking for something where the characters’ primary activity is exploring a series of dangerous interior spaces. Does literature like this exist?

I have to take a break from D&D content today to talk about what’s on all our minds in these dark times: Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 3. That’s the one with the battle of Winterfell. You know, the episode that looks like they forgot to take the lens cap off. Lots of spoilers ahead.

This episode was reasonably well-shot (despite being dark) and expensive-looking; it also had a number of good set pieces. Its only problem was that not a single DAMN thing made any DAMN sense.

That may sound like hyperbole. But if you are to understand me at all, you must know that I abhor hyperbole above all things. Please imagine me making earnest yet steely eye contact with you as I tell you, my voice quavering with sincerity, that I could spend a full and rewarding lifetime unpacking the preposterous things in GOTS03E08, and when I laid down my burden at the age of 95, I could still say, “There was so much more to do. If only I had more time…”

I never knew it before, but I’ve been training my whole life to be a S03E08 mocker, and I will give it my all. But the sheer weight of absurdity is too much for a single mortal to lift. That’s why I’m pulling in reinforcements. Like an army of implacable and unstoppable Dothraki warriors, Rory comes thundering to my rescue. Between the two of us, perhaps we can get through a recap of this episode.

Before we start: Some may object that the points we’ll make in this article are nitpicks. For the most part, I don’t think they are. I think that, from the point of view of in-world logic, the episode was incoherent. It only made sense as spectacle. Therefore, it was bad fantasy.

I believe that one of the attractions of good fantasy is that it rewards examination. A good fantasy text has a world of detail beneath the surface: fans can get lost in those details, inhabiting the world along with the author. You can have the highest budget, the best actors, the finest CGI, and the slickest production in the land, but a lack of reverence for the plausibility of your world is as intrusive as a boom mic in the shot.

Some may say, “Game of Thrones is popcorn fantasy, don’t sweat the small stuff!” But if you didn’t like excessive analysis, you probably wouldn’t be on this blog, right?

Let’s recap this episode, shall we, Rory?

0:00: The beginning of the episode is effective, tense, and absurdity-free. Nervous warriors await the coming of the undead army. Everyone heads to their posts: Bran to the godswood*, the army to the field*, the noncombatants to the crypt*, and Jon and Dany to a hill nearby*. We also get one shot of Jon’s wolf, Ghost. Cool, we haven’t seen Ghost in a while! Can’t wait to see him finally tear some undead dudes up!**

*Note: I said this part of the episode was absurdity-free, but technically, everything asterisked is pretty absurd. Which turns out to be be almost everything, actually. We’ll get into it later.

**Note 2: Ghost never does anything at all in this episode.

0:09 Oh, cool, Melisandre the Red Woman arrives! Everyone looks surprised. She uses a magic spell! She sets the swords of all the Dothraki on fire! It’s really cool looking and still not absurd. Then she remarks to Davos, offhand, that she’ll be dead before the dawn. I guess she can see the future! And the future is grim!

0:14: The Dothraki, swords ablaze, ride off into the darkness, presumably to fight some wights they saw? Ser Jorah and Ghost go with them.

0:14:30: The distant fire-swords wink out one by one. The Dothraki are all dead. We get horrified reaction shots from everyone. No one, like, lifts a finger to help, though.

0:15: About 5 Dothraki run back on foot, along with Ser Jorah.

OK, let’s take a break and TALK ABOUT THE DOTHRAKI.

Paul: First let’s stop and go over what THE CHARACTERS know about the undead.

1. The wights (low-level zombies) and white walkers (high-level zombies) can’t be effectively fought with regular weapons.
2. They are only vulnerable to fire, dragonglass, and Valyrian steel.
3. The Winter King can raise dead people as wights. So if you lose a battle with wights, your numbers decrease and their numbers increase. That’s one of the horrors of fighting the implacable dead.

Again, the characters on the show all know this. Jon, Samwell, and Tyrion have discussed it ad nauseam. So what was their plan with the Dothraki charge? “LET’S SEND THE DOTHRAKI OUT WITHOUT FIRE, DRAGONGLASS, OR VALYRIAN STEEL.” We, the audience, can clearly see that the dothraki are using their traditional curved swords, no dragonglass in sight. And that Melisandre fire spell was a happy surprise! That was not part of the plan! So apparently the plan was to send them out, effectively unarmed, to be slaughtered, for what – so they could be raised to bolster the undead army? Who signed off on this plan? The Night King?

Rory: Also, and this is a common criticism at this point, but the Dothraki are basically light cavalry, and NO ONE uses light cavalry this way. Light cavalry typically use their mobility to flank enemies after infantry have already engaged, to charge or run down ranks that have already been broken or retreating, and to attack vulnerable and exposed forces, such as archers. Attacking a nebulous mass of undead at the start of a battle is probably the stupidest use for light cavalry one can imagine. If they had been a typical force of mortal spearmen, we could expect a similar result. Anyone who has played Shogun Total War or any of its sequels knows this, and the fact that it’s such a common criticism should be a sign that this isn’t exactly advanced military tactics. It’s really insulting to the audience.

Paul: By the way, what was the point of Melisandre lighting the Dothraki swords on fire? It DIDN’T DO ANYTHING. Melisandre sees the future! Granted, all the action happened offscreen and in the dark: I can barely tell what’s happening in this battle in the present. So maybe her future-reception was a little unclear. But still: why did she even bother to burn what had to be a level 7 or so spell? I guess the Lord of Light was like, “This seems like a good use of my power. I know it won’t do anything. But it will look cinematic at least.”

And that’s really why this whole scene happened. It was glitz at the expense of logic. We’re expected to forget the rules of the show, and to accept the characters forgetting the rules of their own world, in exchange for a cool one-minute-long set piece. Fantasy storytelling at its best!

Here are three ways the show runners could have improved this scene 1000%.

1. Show the Dothraki with dragonglass weapons.
2. While the Dothraki charge, have one of them yell “LEEROY JENKINS!” Then Sansa yells, “Oh no, those undisciplined Dothraki deviated from our plan! Hold your ground, everybody!”
3. Have Melisandre’s spell be part of the plan from the beginning.

Really, though, why were the Dothraki sent to the slaughter? Not for any really good in-world tactical reason. They were sacrificed for a dramatic reason: to demonstrate how scary the wights are. The triumph of dramatic logic over world logic is a theme in this episode that will return again and again and again and again. In fact, it may be the besetting sin of post-GRRM Game of Thrones.

Rory: I mean, the stated goal for all of this is not to win specifically, but to goad the Night King out of hiding. But you know what might actually do that? How about a force of highly mobile horse archers armed with Dragonglass arrows that could harry an army of undead who, for the most part, seem totally unequipped to deal with an enemy at range? That actually seems like the kind of thing that might annoy a white walker who is riding, literally, their only effective answer to a mobile force attacking at range. Like sure, the smart move is probably just to ignore the Dothraki anyway until they literally run out of ammo, but it does take a pretty disciplined commander to watch their forces torn apart with no repercussions and not wonder if there’s SOMETHING he could do. And you know what, if he has an answer I haven’t thought of or some hidden trick, that might actually be pretty satisfying.

Paul: So that’s why the Dothraki have to die. But why do the DOTHRAKI have to die? Well, here’s one ugly possibility. It’s a horror movie cliche to have the monster kill the people of color first. Usually it’s one or two individuals. But what about killing several THOUSAND people of color first? That’s not a cliche, right, and not weird at all? (by the way Ser Jorah and the albino wolf survive the charge). (Also these show runners wanted to make a show about what if the confederates had won)

Rory: Beyond the more generalized racism, I’m just pissed we’re seeing:

• The destruction of more or less an entire culture here. Jesus Christ. Way to not give that the weight it deserves, guys.
• Dropping the ball on literally years of build up for an INCREDIBLY throw away scene. When we first heard about the Dothraki in season 1, they’re painted as this unstoppable horde with only a narrow strip of sea between them and the domination of Westeros. King Robert literally said that if the Dothraki arrived in Westeros, all the nobility would wisely hide up in their castles since no one could face them in open battle while they ravaged the countryside and the people realized their leaders had forsaken them. Guess all that was just a set up for a scene where they fruitlessly charge some undead to set the stakes for the battle. Game of Thrones often plays with expectations, don’t get me wrong, but this wasn’t given the weight it deserve. It felt incredibly callous.

Paul: I agree, it feels callous. That seems like a weird word to use in the context of Ned Stark and the Red Wedding. I think the difference is that, in early Game of Thrones, you had the sense that anyone could die because that’s just how the world is, man. In late Game of Thrones, you get the sense that certain characters have plot immunity until the show has given them the sendoff due to their station. In fact, the show runners mention that in their commentary on this episode. When (spoilers ahead) some characters die later in this episode, the show runners describe how each is given a special moment. Therefore, the grandeur of your death is a direct indication of how much the show runners value you.

Rory: Also, the Red Wedding had a certain “you reap what you sow” feel to it. Robb Stark selfishly marries for love and suffers the consequences. Catelyn thinks she can depend on ancient tradition to protect them only to realize the Freys care more about a slight than they do about their own honor. There was build up to that moment. Not so with the fruitless Dothraki charge.

OK, that has to be enough about the Dothraki charge. Let’s move on to other things. After all, we’re only on minute 16 here.

Paul: Hold on. That’s another thing. The engagement between thousands of Dothraki and unknown numbers of wights seems to have taken about 30 seconds – a handful of D&D combat rounds. GIT ‘ER DONE, right?

You may argue: maybe time was compressed for the sake of the show. Maybe we are skipping over 10 minutes or so of horrified reaction shots as the rest of the army continues to not lift a finger to help.

OK, now let’s move on here, for serious.

(more…)

Last month I wrote up 20 festivals suitable for dazzling your characters on their visit to the big city. Of course, city folk and country folk celebrate very differently, so I’ve also written up 12 country fairs, some of which are stranger and more dangerous than their urban counterparts.

Country Fairs (roll d12):

1. Pumpkin festival: This pastoral fair features pumpkin-eating, -tossing, and -growing contests, as well as prizes for the best pumpkin-related songs or plays. At dusk, everyone locks themselves inside their houses. This festival is also celebrated by goblins, who put pumpkins on their heads and invade human villages after dark, committing vandalism and mischief and trying to lure people out of their homes and carry them away. Possible encounters with entertainers, halfling scouts, pumpkin-tossing champions, and goblins with pumpkins on their heads.
2. Flower fair: a less watered-down version of the city Flower Festival: it’s usually, but not always, held in the spring. It features dancing, feasting, ancient traditions and songs that no one understands anymore. Bizarre, ancient activities include “Tie a Pig to a Goose” and “Wear as Many Lit Candles as Possible”. Druids choose two monarchs of beauty, who perform a secret rite to renew the seasons. Possible encounters with druids, green knights, village leader cult fanatics, and entertainers.
3. Bridal festival: It’s considered lucky to get married on this day: there are usually more prospective brides and grooms than officiants to perform the weddings. Any visiting cleric, druid, or paladin will be begged to perform at least one wedding. Other visitors may be proposed to.
4. Monster night festival: Soft city folk celebrate a jolly and toothless version of this festival, but in the countryside it’s the real deal. It’s taboo to hurt a monster on this day. Instead, villagers ritually praise monsters and leave sacrifices of food and coins near known lairs. In particularly bad years, a youth or two may be left for the monsters as well. Possible encounters: minstrel entertainers, priests, cult fanatics, and monsters of all types: particularly common are ogres, perytons, and hags.
5. Pie fair: Prizes for pie eating, throwing, and baking. People will do anything to get their hands on each others’ closely guarded baking secrets. Possible encounters: halflings, champion pie throwers, hags with a sweet tooth.
6. Mistletoe festival. Worshipers partake in druidic rituals, dances, and hunts, and, in secret, older and darker rites. Possible encounters: elves, druids, scouts, cultists.
7. Goblin market: a traveling fair run by elf and fairy folk of dubious morality. For sale are beautiful but inexpensive things and minor magic items. Items can be bought for gold or favors. Attracts elves, pixies, entertainers, alchemists, merchants, goblins, green hags in disguise, and wicked fairies.
8. The bastards’ fair: Uninvited and unannounced thugs, thieves, assassins, and other rogues descend on a community for a few days, expecting to be fed. Criminals use the fair to make underworld contacts, fence goods, and hire assassins.
9. The village games: Village champions are crowned in wrestling, racing, dagger throwing, wild horse riding, poetry, singing, and other contests. Usually features rivalries between local champions and itinerant adventurers.
10. Devil’s dance: People dress like devils and commit innocent mischief, acting rude and committing minor pranks. At dusk there is a country dance. In troubled villages which harbor actual cultists, green hags or evil warlocks, mischief can be anything but innocent and may claim lives.
11. Picklefest: Who can make or eat the sourest pickle? Who can best extol the virtues of the pickle in story and song? Pickles are hung from trees, given as gifts, and gathered in straw baskets by children. Possible encounters: hungry halflings, dwarves, and local champions with cast-iron stomachs, all eager to test their mettle in the pickle-eating championships; gamblers filling out their brackets.
12. The great hunt: On this day, sacred to a nature god, foresters hunt game such as deer, farmers hunt pests such as foxes and crows, and soldiers and nobles hunt monsters. Vengeful folk sometimes choose this day to hunt their enemies. The vengeful dead sometimes return as revenants. Possible encounters: scouts, nobles, assassins, revenants.

Festivals make a great backdrop for adventures: they’re one of my most-used adventure elements. They’re a fun way to share your world-building with the players. There’s no better way to showcase a religion, city, or fantasy culture than through its bizarre celebrations.

Festivals often include contests, which give players a menu of optional things to do (what high-Con character can resist a pie-eating contest?). Contests are great because they’re one of the few ways you can introduce an NPC rival who doesn’t immediately die in combat.

Next time your characters head to the big city, have them wander into a festival. Here are 20 festivals, ranging from silly to sinister. I’ve tried to give each celebration a story hook, a contest or two, a threat, or something else for the characters to do.

City Festivals (roll d20):

1. Bonfire festival: A traditional time for dancing, firelight, and the occasional arson. Rival adventuring groups run an anything-goes relay race through the city, with each party member carrying the torch through a neighborhood: the race is lost if the party’s torch goes out. Possible encounters with entertainers, apprentice mages, thieves, and racing adventurers.
2. Festival of gift-giving: Everyone gives a present to a close friend. Merchants are everywhere. It’s easier than usual to find magic items and luxuries for sale, but they’re priced higher than usual.
3. Fortune’s fool festival: (Might instead be named after your pantheon’s trickster god.) Everyone wears masks. A traditional time for romances, assassinations, and practical jokes, each of which are generally accompanied by the festival’s irritating catch-phrase (such as “Fortune’s fool!”). Possible encounters with spies, assassins, entertainers, and slumming nobles in masks.
4. War festival: (Might be named after your pantheon’s war god.) Jousts and tournaments. Celebrants drape soldiers and adventurers with garlands. Anyone who defeats someone else in a joust, tournament, or duel may take the loser’s garlands. Possible encounters with knights, veterans, gladiators, and expert duelists.
5. Magical festival: The city is lit with Dancing Lights, Faerie Fire, Pyrotechnics, and dangerous alchemical explosions. Spellcasters are expected to entertain the citizens with dazzling magic shows. Possible encounters with mages, alchemists, and crowds demanding entertainment.
6. Flower festival: A traditional time for flowers and feasts. Each neighborhood chooses two Champions of Beauty to compete in a city-wide dance contest; the winners get money and their neighborhood gets glory. Possible encounters with entertainers, neighborhood leaders looking for contestants, and beautiful people of all walks of life.
7. Midnight festival: It’s a somber festival with lots of chanting. On the plus side, if the midnight rites are not interrupted, the city is safe from undead plagues for another year! Possible encounters with priests, acolytes, holy knights, and the occasional disruptive undead.
8. Festival of life: (Might be named after your pantheon’s life god.) Clerics are expected to cast healing spells for free on this day; people try to outdo each other in good deeds. Possible encounters with priests, holy knights, and sick and injured people looking for healing.
9. Festival of shadows: Honest folk stay indoors while thieves, vampires, necromancer mages, and the like rule the streets for the day.
10. Storm festival: (Might be named after your pantheon’s tempest god.) Rain or shine (preferably rain), there are war dances, feats of strength and drinking, music contests, and challenges to unarmed combat. Possible encounters with barbarian warriors, wrestlers, and skalds.
11. Day of mourning: A gloomy holiday commemorating a tragic historical or mythological event. Donations are given to worthy causes. Guards impose small fines for laughing, celebrating, wearing bright clothes, and the like. Possible encounters: Nobles giving alms, guards imposing fines, paladins in grim parades.
12. Victory festival: The city celebrates its founding or some historical success in battle. A day of parades, patriotism, and traffic. Parades sometimes turn into riots between rival groups celebrating different victories. Possible encounters: veterans, angry mobs, suspiciously well-armed parades.
13. Brewer’s festival: Beer is free. Traditionally a day for merry-making, drinking contests, brawls, and being robbed while unconscious. Possible encounters: drunkards, human soldiers, dwarves, tavern brawlers, and opportunistic thieves.
14. Topsy Turvy festival: Nobles wear rags and merchants provide feasts for the poor. A randomly-selected prisoner is pardoned, released from the dungeon, and made king or queen for a day, which is usually fine, but there have been occasions where it wasn’t fine. Possible encounters: nobles in rags, feasting crowds, kids bossing around parents, or the King for a Day: possibly a pardoned assassin, political prisoner, or an old enemy of the PCs.
15. Faerie festival: People wear masks and glitter, play practical jokes, and give anonymous gifts. Possible encounters: entertainers, nobles, and visiting faerie folk (good and evil) who are serious about practical jokes and gifts.
16. Hero’s feast: Veterans and adventurers are celebrated, feasted, serenaded, and showered with gifts by those they have helped in the past. Possible encounters: veterans and adventurers of all sorts, generous merchants and nobles, and archpriests who cast Hero’s Feast for worthy heroes.
17. Monster night: People dress up as monsters and wander in torchlit parades. Every year, a few people are killed by real monsters wandering the street undetected. Possible encounters: commoners dressed in realistic monster costumes, werewolves, goblins, and grimalkins (demon cats who can change into panthers).
18. Candle Night: After sundown, relatives who have passed away are remembered, ghosts walk, and death magic is at its greatest power. Carrying a candle is said to attract good spirits and ward against evil ones. The candles are by no means foolproof. Possible encounters: ghosts, zombies, shadows, necromancers
19. All gods day: The city’s business is at a standstill as each religion organizes a procession or parade. There are frequent brawls between the processions of rival faiths. Temples compete to exhibit the most impressive displays of divine magic. Attracts: high priests, holy knights, and parades that frequently devolve into angry mobs.
20. Country Fair: Roll on the Country Fairs table

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