d&d is inspired by westerns

March 11th, 2013

In Men & Magic, Gary Gygax says that D&D is “strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard’s Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste.”

Re-reading Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars recently, I was struck with how explicitly it’s a Western. John Carter fights savages on dead sea bottoms, gropes through caverns looking for treasure, and fights weird monsters. And that’s all before he goes to Mars. The first episode of the novel is a shoot-em-up Arizona adventure which encapsulates all the rest of the book. Mars is Arizona writ large, with bigger and drier deserts, more savage natives, more accurate guns, faster horses, and more faithful dogs. In structure, the book is a lot like the Wizard of Oz movie: a reasonably plausible day, followed by a fantasy dream sequence version of the same events.

The second of Gygax’s sources, Howard’s Conan, is similar. Howard was a Texan who wrote Westerns along with his fantasy stories, cowboys-in-the-Middle East stories, and boxing stories. It’s frequently argued that Conan is a Western hero. His martial skills allow him to triumph over the lawless savages and over the decadent “civilized” folk of his wild land. That’s what cowboys do.

That’s two of Gygax’s Big Four. De Camp & Pratt and their characters are highly-educated scientists and historians, and Leiber and his heroes are urban goofballs. D&D is inspired by no one tradition. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll find that D&D is as much Boot Hill as it is Tolkein.

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OD&D cursed items that are horrible

March 8th, 2013

As a late-edition player, I’m finding a lot to like in OD&D, but there’s also a lot that mystifies me. The cursed items from the Greyhawk Supplement are solidly in the latter category. Finding some of these items is the narrative equivalent to the DM saying “You have a heart attack and die.”

Consider these items:

Horn of Collapsing: An instrument which seems to be a Horn of Blasting, but when it is winded it will cause the ceiling immediately above the user to collapse upon him, causing from 6-60 points of damage. If blown in the open it causes a rain of rocks to fall from the sky upon its user, and from 5-30 of such missiles will shower down, doing from 1-3 points damage each.

This one is not only a literal “rocks fall you die” item, it has annoying mechanics. If you’re inside, you take 6d10 damage. Hilarious. If you’re outside, though, the DM is supposed to roll 5d6, add that up, and then roll THAT NUMBER of d6 (an average of 18 dice), dividing each die total by two? Does that curve really vary meaningfully from, say, 6d10, which does about the same average damage?

Necklace of Strangulation: A device which is identical to a Necklace of Missiles, but when placed about the neck will strangle and kill its wearer in 2-5 turns, it requires a Limited Wish or Wish to remove it.

Oh, look, it’s not just an insta-death item because it can be reversed with Wish and Limited Wish! Well, guess what: so can any death. (In the description of the Wish spell: “Wishes that unfortunate adventures had never happened should be granted.”) Might as well just come out and say the necklace “immediately kills the wearer, no save.”

Poisonous Cloak: A cloak indistinguishable from others which are magical. When it is put on it immediately kills its wearer by poison. No saving throw is possible.

There you go. Honesty!

Scarab of Death: A scarab which appears to be any of the other types, but when it is held in the hand for a full turn, or when it is placed in a pack, a bag, or some other place near a person’s body it turns to a horrible burrowing monster which digs directly to the person’s heart and kills him.

DM: You find a magical scarab.
Player: I’m not using any magic items until I’m back in town, standing next to a cleric with Water Breathing, Neutralize Poison, Cure Disease, Remove Curse, Wish, and Limited Wish! Making sure not to touch it directly, I’ll wrap the scarab in several layers of cloth and throw it in my backpack.
DM: It turns into a horrible burrowing monster which digs directly to your heart and kills you. No save.
Player: …

There are many more cursed items; the schtick is that every type of magic item (scarab, horn, etc) has a cursed item, so you never know for sure if a magic item is going to kill you. In fact, sometimes the deadly version of the item is much more common than the helpful one. According to the random treasure tables, more than half of all bowls are Bowls of Watery Death. 75% of all carpets are of Smothering. Half of necklaces are Necklaces of Strangulation.

What recourse do the players have here? In Grayhawk, the Identify spell hadn’t been invented yet. I guess spellcasters could cast the 5th level spells Commune and Contact Higher Plane every time they found a magic item, but I’d think the gods would get sick of that. (Anyway, Contact Higher Plane has a good chance to drive the caster insane.) And Raise Dead is a 5th level spell anyway, so might as well just wait and cast that instead.

Why not skip cursed items, and just say this: “Whenever someone gets a new magic item, flip a coin. If it’s tails, they die! There’s nothing they can do to lower this risk!”

I get that death is common in OD&D. I get that sometimes the player dies through no fault of his or her own. But I don’t see how it’s fun for the DM to place an item, knowing that there’s a 100% chance it will kill a character. I just can’t get it out of my spoiled, 4e, everything-is-padded head that PC death should involve, at minimum, one of a) an attack roll, b) a saving throw, c) a bad decision, or d) a missed clue.

Here’s my challenge: Can anyone contribute an anecdote about a time they used one of these insta-death items, and it was fun?

Next week: OD&D cursed items that are not that bad!

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Haven comic book

March 4th, 2013

Have I shared this? This is a tiny comic book I scrawled a couple of years ago right after I awoke from a weird, cinematic, sci-fi dream. It’s as close to the dream as possible: all the images are straight from the dream, as is, I think, the Mayor’s awesome dialogue on page 2. The dream featured voice-over narration, which I paraphrased as best I could in the narration boxes. As I drew more and more of the comic, and my memory grew more and more hazy, the paraphrasing gets more and more loose. And I forgot all of the events of the dream after page 2! Maybe I was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock.

I’ve used some pieces of this dream in my D&D world. The spiked towers of Setine are based on the walls of Haven. The spikes have also appeared as artillery in my home campaign. I also like the idea of rooks: mobile towers that float over a hostile, Night Land-like continent.

Sorry about the scan – I never bothered to ink it.

Transcript:

PAGE 1

[A busy dock.] Ships have always plied the sea, even when the roads were closed.

[Two men clasp hands. One has a mustache and sideburns, and the other has a beard and a trucker hat.] Food comes from the sea, trade comes from the sea, and bargains are struck on the piers.

[A few stragglers trail a levitating tower, topped by a glowing spike.] Some caravans and rooks travel the roads, but not many.

[A wall and spike-capped tower in the foreground; an ocean dotted with ships in the background.] Many people stay within the great walled cities by the coast – closed to the land but open to the sea. And the greatest of these cities is:

[Overhead shot of a giant city, ringed by an absurdly tall wall with spike-topped towers. In the center of the city, a single great tower opens like a flower.] …HAVEN

PAGE 2 [This is where I started to lose my way.]

[A mug shot of a smiling, mustached mayor.] Page 2 of “Haven” centers on the mayor of Haven.

[The mayor shaking hands with the trucker-hat guy.] He was seen on page 1, shaking hands with that guy with the hat.

[The mayor wheeling a crate.] He is a great mayor and always does manual labor at the docks and has a cheery word for everyone.
MAYOR: Hey Jonas!

[The mayor wincing in pain.] But he also has a sensitive stomach, and is never happy with the food his wife cooks him.

[The mayor railing at a woman with a bowl.] MAYOR: You know I don’t like fatty foods, they give me a stomach ache!

[The mayor continues to rail at the woman.] MAYOR: You know I can’t eat sugars, they make me grumpy!

What adventures lie in store for the mayor?

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6 magic inks

March 1st, 2013

The Lensman was rocked to the heels, but did not show it. Instead, he took the captain’s pen – his own, as far as Willoughby was concerned, could have been filled with vanishing ink – and wrote George Olmstead’s name in George Olmstead’s bold, flowing script.
-E. E. Smith, First Lensman

In 1950, when Doc Smith wrote the sci-fi novel First Lensman, disappearing ink was still reasonably hi-tech: it had been a major espionage tool as recently as World War II. Now it seems a little quaint and dated, which means it’s time for it to make the transition from SF to fantasy.

Not only is disappearing ink a good trick for a RPG character’s reportoire, ink itself seems like a fruitful avenue for new magic items, untapped by the standard D&D magic-item list.

Here are some ink bottles that might be available at the local apothecary. Each ink bottle can be used to write a dozen pages.

Disappearing ink: Twelve hours after you write with it, the writing disappears. Great for messages that must not fall into the wrong hands, and signing contracts that you don’t want to keep. It’s entirely alchemical so it doesn’t radiate magic.

Burning ink: Twelve hours after you write with it, the ink catches fire, burning the paper it’s on, along with anything flammable nearby, unless it’s caught. Even better for signing contracts you don’t want to keep. It radiates faint magic: a suspicious notary/wizard using Detect Magic will have to make an Intelligence Check to notice it.

Exploding ink: As soon as the ink is dry, any writing turns into Explosive Runes. Great for wizards on the go. The ink and the runes radiate strong magic.

Courtier’s ink: As you write, the words re-form behind your pen into elegant phrases and flowery compliments. Your handwriting is also slightly improved. Grants your letter a +3 to Charisma checks to anyone who is impressed by well-expressed sentiments. This is widely used at courts, and too expensive for the starving poets who covet it so very, very much.

Sewer Ink: The reverse of Courtier’s Ink turns any writing into a collection of shocking profanity, ill-turned phrases and deadly insults. It applies a -6 to Charisma checks. Unlike Courtier’s Ink, the writing does not re-form for twelve hours, and your handwriting is not altered. This ink is most often used for practical jokes and venomous plots.

Poison Ink: This oldie but goodie causes pages to slightly cling together so that readers must moisten their fingers to turn the pages. It’s also a deadly poison: twelve hours after a careless reader ingests the ink, he or she must make a saving throw or take 3d6 damage and be helpless for the next twelve hours. This saving throw is repeated every 12 hours until a successful save is made.

Characters may make a hard Wisdom or Intelligence check, or an easy History, Pulp Literature, Rare Poisons, Dastardly Plans, or other appropriate skill check to realize that the pages are poisoned.

Poison ink can also be used as a normal poison, on weapons or in food.

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healing poll

February 27th, 2013

Whenever HP or healing are brought up in D&D conversations, they tend to dominate the rest of the discussion, and no consensus is reached. I think the issue is confused because “healing” really means three different things:

  • per-round: How much healing should you get during a fight? Are you limited to a cure spell or two, or does everyone have second winds, potions, and wands of Cure Light Wounds?
  • per-hour: How much healing should you get between fights? Does the damage from the last fight significantly drain HP and healing resources, or is each battle a self-contained tactical challenge?
  • per-day: How much healing should you get overnight? If you’re really beat up, is it important to determine if you rest a day or rest a week to heal fully?

    I’ll misuse my Mearls software to make a quick poll:

    I’d love to know how you use each of these three elements in your game. Do you (or your DM) limit access to potions, or use easy fights to drain daily resources, or make the characters start a day of adventuring low on HP?

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    we can all use the same d&d history

    February 25th, 2013

    If you have players who memorize every D&D supplement but won’t read your ten pages of campaign background, try this: organize your game world’s history around D&D editions.

    I’ve mentioned that you can use the game year to denote what edition you’re running. Thus, if you’re playing 4e, your game is set in the Fourth Age, and the year is, say, 413. If you decide you’d like to try a first-edition campaign, you could play in the year 113, in the First Age of the same campaign world. Here’s a sample D&D history that would work in a lot of campaigns. You can weave your own campaign events around this chassis.

    PRIMORDIAL AGES:
    This is the realm of prehistory, before adventurers delved, and before humans were the dominant species on the earth. Here you can slot in millennia of rule by gods, demons, aboleth, god-emperors, chainmail-clad armies of giants, elves who ruled from Avalon Hill, and what have you.

    During this time is the fabled Golden Age – a time of great wealth and civilization, when platinum coins were minted and when all those +1 swords were forged. The people of the Golden Age guarded their treasures with the technological mechanisms so often found in dungeons: gas traps, teleporters, elevator rooms, etc.

    ORIGINAL AGES: Also called The Old Age or the Zeroeth Age. If you play OD&D, you’re adventuring in this time setting. In this era, swamps are filled with dinosaurs, and deserts are filled with Mars creatures like tharks. The Original Age can be further subdivided into ten epochs, based on the OD&D and Basic supplements: the Age of Origins, Age of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Demigods, Basics, Experts, Companions, Masters, and Immortals, each with its own historical events based on the new rules introduced in that supplement. For instance:

  • The Age of Men and Magic was the time of great heroes like Mordenkainen and Robilar. Adventurers first delved in dungeons, and few survived.

    In my campaign: In the Age of Eldritch Wizardry, elven experimentation with psionics triggered a disaster that turned their home into a ruin-covered desert. Many elves still live in the ruins, where they fight a constant battle with ghouls (thus, elven immunity to ghoul paralysis and secret-door abilities).

  • In the Age of Greyhawk, the first thieves guilds flourished, and many new magic items came to light. High-level spells were first researched.
  • In the Age of Blackmoor, the forces of good fought the Egg of Coot. The first monasteries and assassins guilds appeared.
  • In the Age of Eldritch Wizardry, psionics were discovered, and many artifacts were created.
  • So it goes, through OD&D and BECMI, until the Age of Immortals, when lich-kings ascended to godhood, leaving a ruined world in their wake.

    FIRST AGE: You adventure in this age if you’re playing 1e AD&D.
    In the First Age, orc tribes established their own lands, and half-orcs became more common. Bardic colleges were established. Gnomes immigrated, bringing illusion magic with them. Humans first explored the underdark and met the drow, planar travel was perfected, and the Tomb of Horrors was built.

    SECOND AGE: The epoch of second-edition rules.
    City-states became great empires. New lands were discovered and carved up into nations. By the end of the age, many of the empires had become decadent, and were plagued with financial problems.

    In the Age of the Masters, badass dudes flew dragons!

    THIRD AGE: 3e, and, midway through the age, 3.5.
    In the third age, wizards took control of the crumbling empires. Prestigious warrior, religious, and wizard organizations became more important than nations. There was a proliferation of martial skill training traditions. Magic item shops were first established. In this age, the first warlock pacts were made.

    FOURTH AGE: 4e and Pathfinder.
    The great nations of the Second Age finally fell. Nothing was left but small communities, points of light against the darkness. Many ancient traditions were lost, including the old ways of magic first taught by Vecna. New traditions arose. Magical paths were discovered to the Feywild and the Shadowfell. In the chaos, there were many emigrations: tieflings and dragonborn arrived from faraway islands and deserts, and many civilized folk, seeking to preserve their old traditions, set sail on ships to a new continent. They called themselves the Pathfinder Society.

    FIFTH AGE: It’s currently the beginning of the fifth age and we don’t know how it will turn out. So far, it seems to be a time where democracies flourish: for the first time, city-states are beginning to determine their laws by vote. Like all ages, it will probably be a time that mixes great advances with tragic errors.

    And that’s as far as you can play, unless you get these RPGs:

    DRAGON AGE: Some future century will be called Dragon Age, and, according to the game’s subtitle, it will be a time of Dark Fantasy.

    THIRTEENTH AGE: Prophecy has it that the last age before the end of the world will be the Thirteenth Age. In that time, the Thirteen Icons will wage a final war for the fate of the world. (I hope that official D&D won’t get to 13th Edition for quite some time, so I’ll give this one to Tweet, Heinsoo, and company.)

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    D&D names from the 17th century

    February 22nd, 2013

    Here are some 17th century historical figures with D&D names:

    From Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver:

    On 16 August 1688, I met Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orleans, who is known to the French Court as Madame or La Palatine, and to her loved ones in Germany as the Knight of the Rustling Leaves, at the gate of a stable on her estate at St. Cloud on the Seine, just downstream of Paris.

    This is a pretty awesome name for a semi-exiled, itinerant princess. It seems to have been the real nickname of Liselotte von der Pfalz. From her letters, it seems that she was a tomboy princess who preferred hunting to fancy-dress balls, and, as she says elsewhere, swords to dolls. It would be pretty easy to fit Lisolette, the Knight of Rustling Leaves, into any D&D campaign.

    And how about this name? In a 1660 passage from his diary, Samuel Pepys mentions “Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Speaker for the House of Commons.” How about that name? It sounds almost aggressively, implausibly D&D, and I had to double-check that it was a real guy.

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    D&D Next healing idea: the “Soldier On” rule

    February 20th, 2013

    Mike Mearls recently confessed that the 5e design team is out of ideas for healing.

    Here’s my proposal for 5e healing. I’ll call it the “Soldier On” rule.

    In a short rest, you can bring your HP up to 2/3 of your max HP. Beyond that, your HP can only be raised through magic or through overnight healing. Overnight healing is old-school slow – say 1 or 2 HP per day.

    Basically, the top 1/3 of your HP is physical injuries. The bottom 2/3 is energy, luck, and will. Your last 1 HP is a mortal wound. This is not too far from a wounds/vitality system except that it doesn’t require you to maintain two different HP tracks: the only rule change from First Edition is that you heal up a little after a battle.

    This rule allows injured characters to soldier on indefinitely, at slightly-reduced efficiency. You can swig the warm Gatorade of partial healing anytime, but the ice-cold spring water of overnight or clerical healing are luxuries not to be squandered.

    The numbers could be tweaked depending on how serious you want injury to be. You could change the Soldier On threshold to be 50% or 75%. Ask this question: “At what stage of Hit Points depletion should we stop adventuring and go home?” and set the Soldier On threshold to a tiny bit above that.

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    hobbits are monsters of the week

    February 18th, 2013

    Sci-fi and fantasy serials are full of monsters of the week: introduced in one episode, forgotten the next. These creatures are, almost by their nature, unknown to most of the fictional society. No one has mentioned them before because the writers just thought of them! Just because Flash Gordon meets a tribe of rock-people in a cave doesn’t mean that the rock-people need to be fully integrated into galactic civilization.

    Hobbits fit perfectly into the monster-of-the-week pattern. They live in an isolated area, and, outside the local area, no one has ever heard of them. It’s clear that, during the course of Gandalf’s episodic travels, he had a fun interlude in the Shire. In most high fantasy, it would have gotten a chapter at most. But here is Gandalf’s (and Tolkien’s) brilliance: Gandalf thought, “I think these guys have surprisingly good stats. I want to start making a big deal out of them.” And so he started sending them on missions of greater and greater importance. The Lord of the Rings saga is like a crazy version of Flash Gordon where the rock-people tribe take over the narrative for the rest of the series.

    "Fool of a flint! Throw yourself in the well next time and rid of us your stupidity!"

    But every D&D campaign doesn’t have to be Lord of the Rings.

    Halflings are in a weird position in D&D: they’re one of the original four races (although Gygax didn’t like them very much). Therefore, they’re much more common in most D&D worlds than hobbits are in Middle Earth. They’ve grown in importance the same way Tatooine has in the Star Wars universe: instead of a backwater planet, it’s a ubiquitous stop on every video-game, novel, and prequel version of the galactic tour.

    There’s a lot of D&D history behind us, so it’s probably fine at this point to accept halflings as one of the defining elements of the game. But it might be worth remembering that halflings don’t NEED to be one of the Big Four races in your world. Maybe there’s a middle ground between “50% of all thieves are halflings” and “halflings are banned from my game world.” On this middle ground (or middle earth, if you will) the big players would be humans, dwarves, and elves. If someone wants to be a halfling, or a dragonborn, or a drow, the DM will probably allow it, but they are all what 5e is calling “rare races.” They’re monsters of the week, allowed as occasional PCs, but not necessarily important to the setting. It’s OK if they’re there in the world somewhere… but they’re generally overlooked. I don’t know about halflings, but that’s how hobbits would prefer it.

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    magic from the time of Newton

    February 15th, 2013

    Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is about the era of Newton, Samuel Pepys and the foundation of the Royal Society: it’s the transition period where you’d stop using D&D to model contemporary scientific belief and start using d20 Modern. From the point of view of fantasy fans, periods like this are productive. As magic goes under the microscope, its formulae are recorded in lab notes.

    Take this passage from Quicksilver, inspired by a real experiment conducted by the Royal Society:

    Sir Robert Moray came to visit, and ground up a bit of the unicorn’s horn to make a powder, which he sprinkled in a ring, and placed a spider in the center of the ring. But the spider kept escaping. Moray pronounced the horn to be a fraud.

    The description of this experiment, by which they prove that unicorn’s horn does not kill venomous beasts, raises some questions: where did they get the unicorn horn? Let’s put that aside. The D&D takeaway here is that, if magic does work, unicorn horns (and unicorns) should be very dangerous to venomous creatures. Let’s say that a touch from a unicorn horn forces a creature to make a save vs. its own poison or suffer its effects. A creature’s immunity to poison does not protect it against this effect. This is the sort of using-its-own-power-against-it magical judo you’d expect from a good-aligned creature like a unicorn.

    Daniel… read the graffiti cut in the stone by prisoners of centuries past. Not your vulgar Newgate Prison graffiti–most of it was in Latin, big and solemn as gravestones, and there were astrological diagrams and runic incantations graven by imprisoned sorcerers.

    One thing we know about the incantations of imprisoned sorcerers: none of them are Knock or Teleport. Here is one of the real Tower of London carvings, etched the sorcerer Hugh Draper in 1561:

    It looks just like the kind of thing I doodle in meetings. In D&D terms, it actually looks less like a spell and more like a spellbook: something you’d carve once, and then consult while doing innumerable astrological readings.

    The D&D inspiration I get from this carving: a spellbook is a collection of shortcuts and pre-computed values. A wizard can’t be permanently separated from his or her spellbook. Given enough time, the wizard can re-compute and re-draw the various calculations and diagrams necessary to cast spells, even with nothing to write with but a stone wall and a tiny piece of metal. I like to think that in 1562, after a year or so of turning his dungeon cell wall into a spellbook, Hugh Draper was able to memorize Teleport and get the hell out of the Tower.

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