I’ve been reading Jason Sholtis’s Dungeon Dozen blog, which provides a different d12 chart every day or so, for a couple of months now. For every list of 12 ideas, there are always a couple that make me laugh out loud and a couple that make me want to DM them RIGHT NOW.

I’m wondering: if I had a book version of the site, with one d12 chart per page and, say, 256 pages, could I just sit in the DM’s chair, flip to a random page, and never have to prepare an adventure again?

Jason: put your site into a lulu book. I will buy it.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve…
-Shakespeare, The Tempest

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 lately. This game’s art direction tends towards big architecture: tall towers and titanic moss-covered walls. It made me think about the number of ruins that would collect on a D&D landscape.

As has been noted before, D&D, and sword&sorcery in general, is post-apocalyptic: people live amongst the detritus of who knows how many forgotten empires. There’s a whole class of people, adventurers, who make money by plundering ancient dungeons.

Given all those dungeons, it’s strange to say that my D&D campaign needs more ruins. I guess what I mean is that I should describe nearly every setting – not just adventure destinations – as littered with monuments of fallen empires.

How many ruins are there? It depends on where your campaign falls on the age-of-the-world continuum: is it closer to R. E. Howard’s Kull of Atlantis or Jack Vance’s Dying Earth?

Let’s say that the typical D&D world is much older than real Earth (which only has a few thousand years of monument-building empires). It’s quite possible that nearly every five-mile hex will contain some abandoned, possibly monolithic structure – maybe not a full dungeon, but maybe a collapsed bridge or aqueduct or something. Encounters will be more common in ruins, because most provide some sort of shelter or lair. Maybe a lot more random wilderness encounters should take place among the wreck of ancient splendor.

For a dying-earth hex crawl, here are some charts to roll on every time you have a wilderness encounter. (For a less gonzo, more typical D&D setting, you could roll once per five-mile hex instead of once per encounter.)

MY ENCOUNTER TAKES PLACE NEAR THE RUINS OF A (roll 1d20)
1 cloud-capped tower
2 gorgeous palace
3 solemn temple
4 monumental aqueduct or dam
5 great wall
6 mighty citadel
7 borderlands keep
8 gilded city
9 Ozymandian statue
10 ruler-straight highway, broken bridge, or mountain-spanning stair, depending on terrain
11 cursed tomb (or barrow, pyramid, ziggurat, or graveyard)
12 forgotten dungeon
13-18 No ruins. This is an unspoiled nature setting.
19-20 Roll d12 on this chart and SUPER SIZE IT!

To further characterize your ruin, I’d populate a second table with 6 or 8 ancient empires with distinct architectural styles. Here are some from my fairly generic D&D setting:

MY RUINS WERE BUILT BY (roll 1d8)
1 the empire of giants (everything is 5x size, including doors and stairs)
2 the empire of high magic (floating buildings, immortal servants and walls of golden light)
3 the recent empire obsessed with lions (pretty standard medieval ruins with lion statues everywhere)
4 the empire of the gods (unblemished white walls, lingering curses on those who disturb it)
5 the empire of the demons (runes crawling over disturbing jagged architecture; also this random encounter is going to be really bad)
6 the elven empire (couldn’t build a frigging toolshed without incorporating at least one flower motif)
7 the empire of madmen (roads zigzag in non-Euclidean directions and all buildings are designed using the Random Dungeon Generator)
8 some one-off empire forgotten by history: structures are made of lava or skulls or bird bones or or bee honeycomb or something

I think ancient and medieval Africa is a great D&D inspiration: I’ve written about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. So I’m pretty excited to see that Kevin Crawford, who did Stars Without Number, is kickstarting an Africa D&D-type game. Check it out.

I’ve heard that Stars Without Number is pretty solid, but I’m even more excited about an African setting. And even better: while most Kickstarter projects (like mine, for instance) take a while between donation and fulfillment, Kevin says that this one is already written. “You will have the beta game PDF in hand as soon as I get the backer information from Kickstarter.”

I made some cosmetic changes to the Mearls game:

I’ve been DMing the Mearls crowd-sourced D&D game for a week, and one thing is clear: the PC, whose every turn is controlled by a committee of up to 50 or so players, has that elusive quality “player skill”.

The communal player avoided a trap; killed two and charmed one orc without ever hazarding personal combat; and has been steadily pilfering everything of value, despite the watchful eye of the orc ally. The player has been creative, greedy, and hasn’t made a single rash decision. It would be interesting to run a Mearls through a true Tomb of Horrors-style deathtrap dungeon or an old tournament module. I have a feeling that we’d do better than most human parties.

Watching the votes come in has been fun. While the first-offered alternative has a slight edge in the voting, it’s been interesting to see that a late-suggested, but clever, option frequently wins the voting.

There’s accepted wisdom about committees making bad decisions. On the other hand, there’s a famous story about the “wisdom of the crowd”. In a contest to guess the weight of a bull, the average of all the guesses was within .1% of the true weight.

It’s been fun to run this D&D game: there are plenty of mindless little CRPG games you can use to waste the odd ten minutes at work, but nothing’s quite like reacting to a real person (or real people) in a true RPG. I’d judge the experiment a success, and I’m thinking of keeping it going.

Here’s what I propose:

When I invent a time machine, the obvious first application is to play D&D with my favorite 19th century writers.

If I were to DM a game for, say, Jane Austen (and I would like to! In fact, Jane Austen, I hereby extend to you a CHALLENGE to play at my table! YOU WILL HAVE FUN) I wouldn’t try to cobble together some 19th-century setting involving dance halls and drawing rooms. I also wouldn’t run a straight D&D game either. I’d play Al-Qadim.

Tolkien revolutionized the fantasy imagination, giving us the dwarves and elves that we now associate with fantasy. But there was been fantasy literature for a long time before there were hobbits.

In the English-speaking world, at least, the Lord of the Rings of the 18th century – the book that directed literary fantasy, juvenile escapist power fantasy, and the hunger for the exotic and sublime – was the 1001 Nights. When 18th and 19th century Europeans thought about evil wizards and magic rings, they also thought about djinni, flying mechanical horses, and trees that grew jewels like fruit. They were so hungry for fantasy that 1001 nights weren’t enough nights for them. They wrote their own “arabesques” – original fantasy literature using 1001 Nights trappings, much of it worse than the original.

Nowadays, rich nerds with too much money build castles. Then, rich nerds, like William Beckford, built arabesque mansions. William Beckford also wrote Vathek, an arabesque copping its style and themes from the 1001 Nights. In a way, William Beckford is the Richard Garriott of his day.

Here’s Charles Dickens talking about 1001 Nights:

Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on top; trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to throw down into the Valley of Diamonds, that the precious stones may stick to them, and be carried by eagles to their nests, whence the traders, with loud cries, will scare them.

That sounds to me like guy who is going to FREAK OUT the first time he plays D&D and the DM announces that he found a magic ring. OK, Charles, you’re in the group.

OK, so here are the guys I’d invite to my game table: