NPC of the Day: The "errantry kids"

So ... I've been having private runs for my wife's powerful wizard-princess for a few years now.  One of the customs of the elven empire in which she now lives is "errantry" -- in your youth, you get together with your best buds and go wandering about for a season or two, all under assumed names like "Snowviolet" or "Morningstar" or "Nightflame," and Do Worthy And Good Things, only traveling with what they can carry and accepting no pay for their deeds.  While the tales have it that people on errantry are fighting dragons and battling for the rights of the downtrodden, the elven empire has secure internal borders and good government, and the authorities aren't crazed about young folk wandering across into the truly scary lands beyond them.  So, for the most part, those on errantry wind up teaching schools, helping farmers bring in the crops, building barns and the like ... which is rather the true lesson behind it all.

Some folk make errantry their life, and indeed go out to take on monsters and warring against the over-mighty.  As far as the rest goes ... well, sometimes the teenagers get uppity and want to go out too.  So Princess Elaina, with some restless teens on her own estate, decided to do the local landowners a favor and announce that she was leading a pack of teenagers out on errantry for two summer months: who was in?  Well, damn near everyone, but in the end, she set out with thirteen.  And, much to their dismay, led them to the task she'd already arranged in advance -- helping a village heavily damaged by the spring flood to rebuild.

I did this cheat sheet for the pack, which is far preferable to doing up individual NPC sheets for what is, after all, a group of relatively nondescript teenagers.  It summarizes their race, age, manor of residence, parental background, a couple key skills, and (teenagers being teenagers) whether they particularly Like! or Dislike! those cute kids of the opposite gender, that being in terms of GURPS Reaction Rolls (high is good, low is bad).

The three for which there's scarcely any info are from Elaina's own manor, so I didn't particularly need cheats for them.  But for a pack of NPCs, for which nonetheless you need to RP them and come up with a personality trait or two, this is a good approach and doesn't take all that much work.

NPC of the Day: Tas

So okay, I'm a packrat.  That's the character sheet (well, filecard) of my first character.  "Tas the fighter" was very much playing against type, but I had fun in the first heady rush of the new hobby.  He was an Empire of the Petal Throne character, and something of a stolid warrior.  He made a brilliant political marriage (fueled by his movie-star looks) to the daughter of a high official in the imperial government, and wangled a post in the Omnipotent Azure Legion, something of a coup for a foreigner in xenophobic Tsolyanu.

A lot of the above is straightforward.  "Eyes," in EPT, are technological artifacts that function, effectively, as magical items: the Excellent Ruby Eye places the target in indefinite stasis (barring another use), and the Eye of Indefensible Apprehension casts a fear spell.  The magic dagger on the right was something like a light saber -- it would flicker out a beam of force extending its range to that of a rapier, and it was Tas' go-to weapon.  The "parrah" on the lower right was a fetish of the GM's -- they're tribble-like familiars which he pretty much insisted every PC have.  Mine was, by parrah standards, a tough hombre.  The "bronze ingot hand" was a bronze ingot which, when palmed, turned the hand into solid, living bronze: great for hand-to-hand brawls or dangerous manipulative tasks.

I traded him out after a while for a wizard, which I preferred -- damn that random gen.

Tidbits: A troika of bulletpoints

Hey, sometimes I have short rants!  (No need to use ten paragraphs to say something when two will do!)

*  There's a personality problem troubling your game?  All too often, people kvetching to gaming forums about them want the readers to tell them how to solve them without actually having to open their mouths.  In a hobby where most of a GM's job, for several hours in a row, is communicating with the players, I'm constantly flabbergasted at how many of them claim that they have trouble doing so.  This magical thinking -- that there's some way to make evildoers just Get Better without a word being spoken -- is all too common.

There is no way, none at all, to change your players' behavior other than to have an open, adult conversation about your concerns.  Any other way of "nudging" people in one direction or another does not work.  Never has worked.  Never will work. The clueless don't notice, the jerks don't care, and the ones waiting for the aforementioned open, adult conversation resent what they see as clumsy manipulation attempts.

* On gender and same-sex relationships:  It is not my bloody job to dictate to any player the gender and sexual preference of a character. It is my job to provide – and portray – the NPCs with whom the PCs interact. These will be male or female, straight or gay, romantically interested or not, as circumstances dictate.  My masculinity is unthreatened when I play a gay NPC.  Or a female NPC having a relationship with a male PC.  Or a female NPC having a relationship with a female PC. Whatever.  Because I'm not six years old any more, and I see no reason for my reflexive 1960s prejudices to affect my grown-up life.

Screw the squick factor. If a PC wants to murder someone else, do I go all squeamish on him and tell him he can't do it? If he wants to torture someone else, do I go all squeamish on him and tell him he can't do it? Beatings, theft, torture, racism, genocide, slavery, sacrilege, arson, drug use, maiming, murder retail or wholesale, I can set the table for all of it. Torch a village, desecrate a temple, debauch virgins, kick puppies, slit throats, most of us are cool with all of that, but almost uniquely, tabletop gamers draw the line on portraying male-on-male romance?

* “You’re/He’s ruining my fun.”  I stay far, far away from that turn of phrase, if I can possibly help it.  For one thing, "You're ruining my fun" far too often is a code phrase for "I'm a self-absorbed solipsist, and I take failure to conform to my prejudices and whims as a personal attack." It's hauled out as a trump card perceived to end all debate, without examination of how that behavior actually might be "ruining" the speaker's fun, or whether the speaker's POV is reasonable.  I see no reason why it should be used as an excuse to dictate to players what otherwise-legitimate character creation and play choices they’re permitted to pick.

NPC of the Day: Lady Datia

My wife put in a request for some of her favorites, but I figured I'd ring in an interesting Big Bad.  (Sorry, love!)

Lady Datia, third daughter of the great lord Teraeth val Linix, is tall, willowy, beautiful.  She was the wife of a country squire whose holdings are a day’s ride from the capital, and had a three year old daughter.  Though always careful to display the proper decorum, Datia yearned for the high life, and sought – vainly – to convince her husband to relocate to the capital for the social whirl.

The shenanigans that ensued wound up getting rolled into a plotline, and the party drew her ire when they busted up what she thought would be a permanent gig, forcing her to flee one step ahead of the authorities and leave behind her husband and daughter.  Her pattern since has been to marry rich men, under a false identity, take them for what they're worth and split. 

Feeling vengeful, Datia went to work and learned about the party.  She supplied damaging information about the rogue's father to the rogue's mother, causing the breakup of their marriage.  Her next target was the old alchemist on the corner who was a favorite of theirs, and in marrying and ditching him clipped a heap of gold and a bunch of high-powered alchemical poisons, which she used to great effect -- through cutouts -- in taking out or sickening several folks near and dear to them.  On two other occasions, the trouble coming to the party was provoked by her, unbeknownst to them.

Datia's only significant magical item is a stolen religious relic of some power, much of which she can't use; the key power she can use is that it renders her immune to scrying or divinations. She's a good actress and deft at disguise.  She also has some modest arcane powers, but no one outside of her estranged and embarrassed family remembers that she had a brief wizardly apprenticeship in her teens, and she never lets anyone know.

Beyond that, she’s smart and focused. She doesn't have a gang to betray her.  She's very likeable, and folks trust her instinctively and talk freely in front of her.  If she needs help, she'll beguile a fellow and wrap him around her fingertips, but she'll never let that fellow know where to find her, and she will always have a bolthole and a fast mount available.  She won't let herself get suckered into a confrontation, direct or otherwise.  She doesn't leave trademarks or mocking Ba-Ha-Ha notes.  If a plan looks like it's blown, or she thinks a situation is spiraling outside her control, she'll cut her losses and bolt, and if possible has a secondary mark in hand to take the fall.

In short, she's read the Evil Overlord Rules.

RPG groups, by and large, suck at detective work.  They rely heavily on their widgets and spells, and they count on the bad guys making predictable, cliched mistakes or having blatant, exploitable character flaws. They don't often do patient, and they can't often handle patient.  A hundred times more of these scenarios end because the GM has placed a finite limit on them (and, of course, the PCs always win in the end, right?) or from the foregoing factors than not.

I was proud of her.  It's easy for a GM to beat down a party with overwhelming force, zowie! powers like teleportation or insubstantiality, by a NPC's Epic Uberness, or by a torrent of widgets.  Doing so with guile and misdirection, with a hard-keyed scenario (hey, if they had made all the right guesses and been a little lucky, she could have been nailed much sooner), that's harder.

What they never did attempt was to trap her at the only spots of vulnerability: (1) There's only a finite number of rich, single guys out there who get swept up by a beautiful, cultured woman from Somewhere Else and who loves the city life; and (2)  She still had affection for her first husband and for her daughter.  It took the main party nearly five real years to catch her, and in the end only because they called in some major favors and brought some immense arcane powers to bear.

ST: 9     DX: 11     IQ: 13      HT: 10    Speed: 5.25      Move: 5  

Advantages: Acute Taste-Smell/1; Beautiful; Charisma/1; Comfortable wealth; Empathy; Magery (Body Control spells only)/2; Serendipity; Smooth Operator/2

Disadvantages: Callous; Greed; Minor Medical Ailment/migraines; Social Stigma: outlaw; Major Vow: Revenge!

Skills:  Acting-15; Administration-13; Area Knowledge: Warwik royal demesne-15; Baseball-13; Body Language-14; Current Affairs/high society-15; Carousing-15; Connoisseur/music-13; Dancing-12; Detect Lies-14; Disguise-15; Erotic Art-14; Fast-Talk-15; Filch-13; Forgery-13; Holdout-13; Knife-12; Mimicry (human)-14; Musical Instrument / lute-11; Needlecraft-10; Observation-13; Poetry-12; Poisons-13; Savoir-Faire-16; Search-14; Sex Appeal-17; Vajikry-13

Grimoire:  Arousal-13 †; Birth Control-13 †; Choke-15; Comfortable Seat-13 †; Fair Skin-14 †; Rapid Intoxication-13 †; Resist Intoxication-13 †; Resist Pain-13; Stun-15; Tears-15

Maneuvers:  Ruse / w/Sex Appeal-16

Quirks: "But wealth IS power;" Attracted to "bad" men; Fashion slave; Overestimates her luck; Soft spot for animals & kids

Explanations: Serendipity means something just goes seriously right for you, once per adventure: a tree branch breaks over the head of the guy who's about to run you through, the first box you break open in the warehouse has the Ark of the Covenant, that sort of thing.  Smooth Operator gives bonuses to social skills (which are figured in already) and you’re recognized as a suave person.  Migraines?  Make a HT roll every day.  If she blows it, she’ll have about two hours worth of -2 to everything, at some point (she's taken too many alchemicals over the years, and the headaches are a side-effect).  Yeah, they play baseball on my world, and it’s considered an avant-garde spectator sport in the capital.  Vajikry is a game that's something of a cross between checkers and Stratego.  Her Ruse maneuver basically drops a guy’s combat defenses by heavyweight vamping; letting her top fall open or off is a favorite.

I’ve invented a bunch of spells (well, a couple hundred of them); the ones marked † are the non-book ones.  Comfortable Seat prevents saddlesores and jostling in carriages.  Fair Skin keeps your complexion mild.  The others are self-explanatory, and I’m quite narked that SJ Games saw fit to exclude a birth control spell, which you’d think would be one of the more fundamental spells in any realistic culture.  If you prefer GURPS RAW, substitute others.

For further explanation of system stats, check this link. 

Tidbits: Special Snowflake -- A Modest Rant

"Special snowflake" is a term in common use on a number of gaming forums.  For those of you unfamiliar, it's a slur hurled at those who stand out among us for being oddballs.  Most often, it's aimed at characters who (theoretically, at least) are disruptive to the milieu.

I've always had a problem with the term, and my dislike for it -- for the syndrome, come to that -- has crystallized over time.

It's meant, considerably more often than otherwise, "someone or something that stands out in a way I don't like." Play a preteen character? "Special snowflake." Play an alignment different from ours? "Special snowflake." Turn in a two-page backstory? "Special snowflake." Fail to march in lockstep with my paradigm? "Special snowflake." Is more flamboyant than the speaker? "Special snowflake."

What especially bothers me is that this comes from this, of all hobbies. For pity's sake, we're all weird. We sit around making pretend that we're wizards and elves and cyberjackers and secret agents and barbarian warriors. We're all aware -- and in many cases, painfully aware -- that we're "special snowflakes" to most mundanes around us, playing that stupid nerd game that loser junior high school boys too scared to come within ten feet of a Gurrrlll played.

Now I can see why, in turn, we seek to find people within our own community whom we can viciously disparage and denigrate, but it doesn't make it right, and it happens quite a bit more often than the "special snowflakes" actually disrupt things.

Tidbits: ... and so are you.

A common slur flung around in gaming debates is “Elitist!” You take pains to design a coherent, sensible setting?  Elitist!  You think people ought to know the milieu they’re GMing?  Elitist!  Heck, you think it should be incumbent on people to bother to learn the rules of the game they’re playing?  Elitist!  At any level and in any aspect of gaming, anywhere someone could make some effort to improve, there’ll be people willing to jeer at you for it, especially if you're silly enough to publicly say that you think everyone can (or should) do the same.

I believe in excellence.  I don’t think there’s anything ennobling about mediocrity, and I don’t find anything about mediocrity worth praising.  I think, in the words of the old Army commercials (before they ditched the tagline as being, well, elitist) that we should all be the best we can be.  Yes, indeed, I’m an elitist.

What’s always amused me, in this anti-intellectual society of ours, is that everyone else is too.  If you’re (say) a football fan, and your team is a basement dweller, I’m sure you wouldn’t be thrilled to hear the players say that, well, they're just in it for the paychecks, so where do the fans get off on dissing their record?  I doubt you’d want your doctor, or your car mechanic, or your kids’ teachers to do any less than their elitist best, or that you’d accept mediocrity and good old college tries in place of the skilled service you believe to be your due.  From the kid who shovels our driveways to bank tellers to insurance adjusters to entertainers, we expect quality work in anything we care about, and we get downright frosty if all we get are people going through the motions.  It’s only when quality is required from us – or if the matter under discussion is something we don’t care one way or another – that we fling “Elitist!” around like a slur.

And gaming’s immune to it?  Please.  There are hundreds of threads on gaming forums, and tens of thousands of posts, about no-good players and no-good GMs and poorly written game systems which somehow didn’t measure up to our expectations. A fundamental element in almost all of our games is experience, which unless you give the same amount each and every time to each and every player, means that you judge the players on their performance.  And that isn’t, by any accepted standard, “elitism?”  I can’t imagine how.

Do I give more experience to some players than to others?  Yes, I do, when I judge their play to be superior in roleplaying, tactical acumen, getting the job done, and the obligatory extra 1 XP per session to the player who most doubles me over in laughter.  Oddly enough, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either.  In a chess game, someone generally does better than the other.  In a poker game, some players do better than others.  In a hockey game, one team does better than the other, fueled by players that perform better than others. I’d sure bust a gut laughing if someone shouted “Elitist!” at the TV showing a World Series of Poker match.

Gaming slang

Silly is good, I find, in small doses: it breaks up the mental palate.  Some time ago, I had cause to compile some of the insider slang that's been used over the course of my campaign.  So ... for your psychic sorbet of the evening, here 'tis:

Melonballing: A combat strike which takes out the genitalia. It got to be enough of a cliche that my wife bought a melonballer to hand out to whomever scored the most devastating hit in any given session.

Goat! Goat! Goat!:  So the party was in the worst dive on Tortage, the capital of the Pirate Isles, and the crowd was getting weird during the all-too-sexualized floor show. Goat! Goat! Goat! is now used at any time there's an unruly crowd scene or, well, when a goat makes a prominent appearance.

I pity tha fool!: Delivered Mr. T-style, this was used by a player who said, at perhaps a bad time to do it, "I pity tha fool who gives us a wandering encounter now!" I determined on the spot to do exactly that, and it was quite a hair-raising one. The phrase's meaning has morphed, consequentially, to mean a player who's about to do a very dumb thing.

Quail before the might of Larindo the Witherer!: Alright, the player had a reasonable expectation that the mooks would go knock-kneed before a necromancer in full battle array. Unfortunately, they all had stout, manly results on their reaction rolls, and the mook leader shouted, "Damn, dey got a wizard, kill 'im quick!" (Or some such: it was twenty years ago.) Current meaning: your ego is getting the better of you.

Bubble of Improbability: If a player can't make a session, the character just isn't there, and I don't bother parsing the which or the why; I say that the character has entered a "bubble of improbability." Beats the hell out of me why I settled on that turn of phrase, but it's well-understood.

Nike Ninja: Mook NPC fighters. Originally the term for one particular figure in my ninja set of minis, which out of a certain level of perversity I painted in US Army jungle camo pattern.

Nath, Naghan, Larghos and Ortyg: Bunch Of Faceless NPCs. These are four of the most common male names in my gameworld.

(steepling my fingers and touching my index fingers to my lips): This action, sometimes paired with the phrase “Is that what you’re doing?” when the room falls silent, has been a code phrase for “... and what you’re planning on doing is amazingly stupid” in my campaigns for decades.  I am pitiless in dealing with those who blithely ignore the message.

Gritty!:  I strive for a gritty, realistic, middling-level fantasy campaign; not quite Harnworld, but I'm not what you call cinematic or slapstick.  But one of the crosses I bear is that I'm a lifelong insomniac (as witness me posting this at 4:30 AM).  Sometimes I'm working on three hours sleep when the run starts, and I'm punchy from fatigue.  One player would -- if things got too silly -- turn to me and say "Gritty," in a flat voice, deadpan expression.  (He may have the best deadpan I've ever known.)  I would nod, and respond "Gritty," and more often than otherwise would sober up.

Hrm.  He was in my campaign for six years, and do you know, I never did know whether his catchword was subtle admonishment, a gentle reminder for me to get back on track, a moment of humor, or some or all of the above.  I remember it fondly, nonetheless.

NPC of the Day: Eve

I’ve watched a few war-related series of late: Band of Brothers, The Pacific.  My favorite is Tour of Duty, a critically-acclaimed Vietnam War series focusing on a platoon in the boonies.  I never saw it in first run; my household watched China Beach, its competing ‘Nam TV show.  Beyond that, we were St. Elsewhere fans, where ToD’s star – Terrence Knox – had been a scumbag.  Knox’s Sgt. Zeke Anderson is anything but on ToD, and it gave me some ideas.  (Okay, okay ... “Fantasy Effing Vietnam.”  Sue me.)

One of my two groups is based out of the mighty elven empire, which until recently was isolated in the far northwest of the world.  A few years back, they created a magical Gate on an island just off a whopping trackless jungle – and, not remotely coincidentally, smack in the middle of the world’s chief shipping lane.  For a bunch of reasons, they’re colonizing that jungle, which is pierced by a honking big river and watershed.  That’s where the Imperial Marines come in.  The "Blue Legs" are a riverine force (the empire’s still new to the concept of a deep sea navy), and they’re the grunts on the ground patrolling the interior.  They’re also a very insular, tight-knit bunch, respecting pretty much no one other than themselves ... which, considering that they’re usually unsupported in the middle of nowhere, with no more gear than they can pack on their canoes, makes good sense.  Anyway, that’s where the group came in, in accompanying a squad of Marines into the heart of darkness.

The unit’s commander is Eve, who’s the equivalent of a first sergeant.  She’s a hardbitten, hardcore lifer who’s seen it all, done it all, and takes no guff from anyone who hasn’t.  Like any good lifer non-com, she prefers that the officers tell her what they want done and leave her to handle the details.  She will rap you upside the head if you make any reference to her being stone-gorgeous, and will do the same if you insist on calling her “Dame Anevea” – she couldn’t very well decline being knighted by the Emperor, but she hates the formality, and pretty much no one much lower in rank than the Admiral of the Navy can get away with it.  Like most people of elven blood, she is a latent wizard, but has only recently learned her first spell – Insect Repellent.  She’s extremely experienced, extremely senior, doesn’t want to be an officer ... but the time’s approaching when it’s up or out. 

Eve’s team is a deep penetration unit; they scout, they do their objective, they get out.  She’s positively chary of taking casualties, and won’t do forlorn hopes or suicide missions.  Her move would nominally be good, but the team carries everything on their backs, and that can slow them down.  She prefers hatchets in combat, carries a brace of javelins for throwing, and is quite fond in battle of faking injuries, "accidentally" stumbling, that sort of thing.  One of their quirks, widespread in the Blue Legs in general, is to use a lot of slang taken from the indigs' language.

ST: 12    DX: 13    IQ: 12    HT: 13    Per: 12      Speed: 6     Move: Likely to be 5 or less.  

Advantages:  Ally / Marines, Beautiful, Combat Reflexes, Damage Resistance/2, Fit, High Pain Threshold, Legal Enforcement Powers/1, Magery/0, Rank-2/Ord-Matoc, Social Regard: Respected, Status-2 / Knight of the Sapphire Rose

Perks:  Armor Familiarity/1, Riverine Training, Penetrating Voice, Teamwork

Disadvantages:  Code of Honor (Soldier); Compulsive Behavior/wanderlust; Extra hazardous Duty; Sense of Duty: Marines; Struggling, Workaholic

Skills: Administration-11; Axe/Mace-15; Boating-13; Brawling-15; Brawling-13; Camouflage-13; Carpentry-12; First Aid-12; Knife-13; Leadership-15; Navigation-13; Public Speaking-13; Savoir-Faire (military)-12; Shield-13; Soldier-13; Stealth-14; Survival-13; Swimming-13; Tactics-12; Tarocco-12; Thrown Weapon: Spear-15

Spells: Insect Repellent-11

Quirks:  "Never tell the brass anything;" Collects interesting rocks; Doesn't want to retire; Uses Altanian jargon

By way of explanation, the Legal Enforcement Powers means, in shorthand, that she can hassle civvies, the Altanian outback being a military zone.  "Ord-Matoc" is a first sergeant, more or less.  Riverine Training differs from the Naval Training perk in so far that Eve doesn't really know from the deck of a ship, but she's pretty good at staying stable on a keelboat or a canoe.  In GURPS terms, a Duty is what you *have* to do; a Sense of Duty is something you *want* to do.  Tarocco is a card game; feel free to substitute the gambling game of your choice.

For further explanation of system stats, check this link. 

Mountain-combing 101

My current party just got out of a jaunt into the mountains, deep in the backcountry ... a semi-lawless area much like Appalachia, with isolated hamlets, mountain men, beleaguered trading posts, offbeat folkways and haunted ruins.

I don't like "wandering encounters," per se.  What I'd much rather do is compile lists like this one, pick one that suits me to throw in for local color, and then cross it off.  Likely I'll get to the end of the list in a dozen years or so.

Obsidian: An outcropping peeking through a blanket of moss, there are several hundred pounds available, in both glossy black and charcoal grey, with the occasional paler striation.

Old hut: Nobody has lived here for a while, but it has been used as an emergency shelter recently; there are a few logs of firewood, a small cache of a few pounds of smoked meat (only mildly rat-chewed), a bundle of tattered blankets on a wood frame bed, and the place has been swept and tidied.  It’s solid enough for decent shelter in a heavy storm, with a bit of patching up.

Mountain Man: Old as the hills, and his language is riddled with pithy slang.  His weathered packbasket is full of herbal forage and interesting colored stones.  If treated with courtesy – and especially if gifted with wares or foods from the lowlands – he'll be inclined to share his encyclopedic knowledge of the area for miles in every direction, and knowledge of everyone there is to know.

Children: Here for the fun of it, collecting nuts or rocks, scavenging herbs, or just playing; their holding or hamlet is within a mile. Whatever they're doing, they'll be annoying to the PCs.  If they're molested outright, they'll scream, scatter ... and the PCs will find out that at least one of them has a sling that very much is NOT a toy.

Hawk: The hawk seems to follow the party, and occasionally makes diving runs at them, without quite striking home.

Campsite:  The area has a number of campfire beds and a lot of trash, as if a hundred people had camped here, and only a day or two ago; the ashes are still warm.  They seem lavishly equipped, from the debris around, and are very careless with fire setting, sanitation and the concept of living lightly on the land.  The trail they took is thataway ...

Bearhunter: A man snores inside a decrepit lean-to, not willing to be awoken.  If he is rousted -- which he'll do if anyone approaches too closely -- he’s irascible, unwilling to deal with the party, and a vicious, deadly, veteran fighter.

Amphorae:  Four large capacity (30+ gallon) stone jars are half-buried in a gully. They look old and worn, and weigh over 50 lbs apiece.

Waterlogged saddlebag: This heavy 60-lb saddlebag has broken (or severed!) straps.  It contains sodden tradegoods -- with current tax and tariff seals -- some waterlogged clothing, and water-damaged letters.

Odd dirt:  The soil along this stretch is colored differently, strikingly so, than the prevailing soil in the region.

Serpents: Three large snakes sun themselves on a large, flat rock that’s underneath a break in the canopy.  While they’re venomous, they’re not aggressive, and will flee into the underbrush if approached.

Pillar: On a rocky outcropping is a tall, weathered marble pillar, 30' tall and with a flaring pedestal at the pinnacle.  It is carved in runes from a dead language, in the style of a bygone age.  Just getting out to the base, on the outcropping, is a technical climb of moderate difficulty, and it’s exposed to the weather.

Statue:  A weathered stone statue is set in a dell on the hillside.  The statue is well preserved considering its antiquity, but is greenish from the moss and algae in the area.  Locals like to leave flowers and gifts of fruits and nuts on it, believe it to depict a regionally worshiped deity, and will freak out if it's molested or in any way disrespected.

Sorrow: The still figure of a beautiful, auburn-haired woman, freshly killed by a deadfall that broke her back, is fallen couple dozen yards upstream from which the party was drinking, bathing or fording, just moments before – the water pooling around her.

Skinning knife:  An uncommon knife made by local hunters, sporting a twelve-inch blade (which seems to have been salvaged from long-ago blademasters’ work), of fine craftsmanship, the haft and sheath made of polished bear bone.  It can't have been lost long; the edge is keen enough for shaving.

Leviathan:  The skeleton of an unidentifiable creature of impressive size is calcifying, stretched across the mountainside.  Its fangs alone are the length of swordblades.

Bathers: Near a calm mountain pool, a group of naked bathers either wave, and invite the PCs to swim with them with suggestive comments ... or stare and cover themselves in embarrassment, whatever the opposite of the party’s prevailing mores suggest.  (The water, if PCs indulge, is icy cold; the locals are used to it.)

Forester: A woman appointed by the Crown to patrol for poachers and enforce the Game Laws; the territory is either beyond the scope of the local noble, or the noble is opposed to her actions, and eager for her to be taken down a peg.  She is an expert in the ways of the high reaches, and greatly knowledgeable – if not “book smart” – about natural philosophy.  That being said, the locals have no use for her, and will give the cold shoulder to PCs obviously friendly to her.

Black pool: A natural crude oil release leaves a sticky, warm, viscous residue.

Shield: This steel shield (fashioned in the style of a bygone age) is weathered, but the heraldry is still visible – though even a trained lowland herald couldn’t recognize it.  It's tarnished, but not rusty, which given the environment is flatly impossible.

Will O’The Wisp:  Just after sunset, the PCs see dancing lights on a misted ridgeline.

Cultists: A clutch of Shub-Niggurath cultists pray in the thicket. They do not take kindly to having their ritual interrupted.  Before turning irrevocably and implacably hostile, the cultists will demand (once only) that the party convert to their ways, and allow the Dark Deity’s holy soil to cover their bodies, in submission to the will of the earth.

Gravesite: A rotting plank, crudely carved, lists the names – so far as the locals knew – of a caravan slain to the last man near here.  It rests on a large barrow under which the victims were buried, and exhorts passersby to pray for their souls.  (PCs seen by the locals not to do so are treated as godless, and with suspicion.)

Look sharp!  A strong brisk wind coming in off the mountains. The clouds overhead are moving fast, but you can see bad weather on its way ... rolling in like an avalanche.

Fossils:  Fossilized stones and shells of common sea creatures, as well as ancient imprints of fabulous creatures long extinct.

Cache: A smuggler’s cache, marked by a strip of colored cloth (or a hatchet blaze) tied to a tree, allowing the smuggler to retrieve the goods at some later date.  These are either illicit, or subject to taxes the smuggler is dodging.
   
       

Why Play Tabletop RPGs At All?

It's a valid question, and one I've fielded more than once.  Even discounting the teeth-grating bastardization of the honorable term "roleplaying game" by computer companies wanting to make their console shoot-em-ups sound cooler, I've played most of the variants: MMORPGs, LARPs, storygames, free form, what have you.  I've played them a LOT: I played the same MMORPG character through various iterations for twenty-one years (seriously) and the same LARP character for fourteen.

My take is that no one style is "better" than the others: they're just different.  But since this is a tabletop blog, I'll post the comparison I did on a board some years ago:

1) Tabletop is nimble: If I need to clarify a rule, I can do it. If I need to invent detail, I can invent it. If I need to change anything I please, I can do that too. And I do all of that in moments. I don't have to have a team of coders spend six months on it and have the proposed changes pass QC and a dozen sticky hands, and I don't have to pass the changes through a LARP organization's headquarters, annual rules review or a consensus of a half-dozen GMs.

2) Tabletop is responsive: The GM-to-player ratio is far higher in tabletop than with LARPs, and infinitely higher than it is with MMORPGs. I have just a few players in my group, and I not only can give a great deal of relative attention to individuals, I'm not restricted to doing so on game days. Want to work out some details or interactions in e-mail or in IMs? Sure. Want to have personalized items? Sheesh, then hit up your local craftsman and place the order ... you don't have to wait for three-times annual merchant festivals and hope against hope you get a place in line, or reach Xth level and get the predetermined Xth Level bennie.

3) Tabletop can be broad-based: In a MMORPG, and to a lesser extent in a LARP, the milieu is fixed in granite: you're playing in the Preset World, in the Preset Area, and it's damnably difficult to change any of that, if it can be done at all. In tabletop, if my players want to shake off the dust of Warwik City, buy a ship and take up privateering, they can do that. (In fact, a group did that.)

4) Tabletop can be more freeform: Most MMORPGs work on a D&D-ish system with a limited palette of character classes and races. While a lot of tabletop campaigns work the same way, point-buy systems are out there where you can pick what you want and negotiate options and exceptions, things that are impossible to do in MMORPGs and often provoke screams of "special treatment!" in LARPs.

5) Tabletop can be less competitive: This might seem counterintuitive, but LARPs and MMORPGs are generally free-for-all PvP environments where the principal threat comes from other players, bragging rights over level and Kewl Itemz is immense, character advancement is often a zero-sum business where another player's gain only establishes him as a greater potential threat to you, and the role of a GM is more traffic cop and enforcer than game-enabler. Tabletop parties are also usually much closer together in power level, so a latecomer isn't automatically the punching bag of any powerful oldbie who wants to slap him around.

6) Tabletop is richer: It's very difficult in LARPs, and impossible in MMORPGs, for detail to be created in the same ballpark as in tabletop. I can make my descriptions for sites, NPCs, objects and events as lavish as I please, and since I'm not working with a visual medium, I don't have to back those descriptions up with the art or prop departments.

7) Tabletop can be crunchier: Complex, intricate, detailed rules are the death of LARPs, which function best lean and mean (and which far more than with other RPGs depend on all of the players knowing all of the rules), and don't work well in MMORPGs, where they require exponentially more coding time. 

8) Tabletop is cheaper!  Almost any MMORPG worth playing is fee-based or requires a buy-in of software.  The LARPs I've been in had at-the-door fees to defray the costs of props and land rental.  You don't need to buy anything in order to play tabletop.

There are a few more, but that'll do for openers.

How To Fix Religion In Your Game

It's long been a truism that gamers dislike playing clerics.  Most clerical PCs are the result of "We have to have one of everything" / "We can't adventure without a healer!!!" mindsets.  The people who play them, more often than not, are the weary volunteers, the folk who showed up late when it came time for chargen, the ones who were bullied or browbeaten into it, the ones for whom it was Their Turn To Play The Cleric.

A couple factors go into this.  Some claim it's because the world is becoming atheist, but I don't buy that: certainly in America, the notion that religion is less dominant than it used to be would be farcical, and the trend from the 70s on forward -- the entire history of the hobby -- is for the United States to become more religious.  But there surely is a marked nervousness about the concept in RPG circles.

This is, in fact, nothing new. RPGs have always, generally speaking, sucked at depicting religion and faith. Part of this is the OD&D dungeon fantasy mindset, where it was important to know what level your cleric was, what nifty magical toys he had, and oh, of course, what alignment he was, but pesky things like doctrine, dogma and ritual practice were afterthoughts at best. I had more than one conversation in the Seventies with players of D&D clerics where they could rattle off all the stats and items, but were shaky on the names of their gods ... except that, of course, the anonymous gods in question were "Lawful Good!"  In the game that Gygax built, clerics were just a different type of fire support unit.

Beyond that, the bewildering array of deities most fantasy campaigns and settings had, combined with alignment, contributed to a bulletpoint view of religion. Sure, the Sea God's about water, uh-huh, uh-huh, and sailors worship him, uh-huh, uh-huh, and, like, dolphins are his messengers, uh-huh, uh-huh, and, well ... alright, alright, he's Lawful Good!  Okay??? Nothing about doctrine. Nothing about history. Is the clergy celibate? What does a wedding service look like? Are they in favor of slavery?

We never knew those things, and since there are twenty other gods, each with their sets of bulletpoints, we don't have any traction for what any other god is about either. Three gods, sure, we could get a handle. Thirty, and who can be bothered?  Nope: it comes down to "Bunsgrabber is the God of Partying Down.  His alignment is Chaotic Horny.  He is depicted as a young man with a great tan, wearing cutoffs of purest gold.  His priests always wear sunshades and strange caps with horizontal visors pointing backwards, and his High Temple is at the coastal fort of Lauderdale."

Beyond that, since there's a strong streak of distaste in some circles for any roleplay that gets in the way of tactical planning and execution, we can readily see where the conflict comes ... the more so in that cleric/paladin types in D&D and other such games are portrayed, more often than not, as humorless scolds blending the worst of medieval Catholicism and the Inquisition. Their faith never does seem to benefit the party ... the only impact it has is "Damn, we can't do X because the cleric will go into a tizzy."

There are ways to mitigate this, above and beyond the extensive advice I give in my Starting From Scratch: Faith Manages post:

* Slash the number of religions in your setting. By a lot. A half dozen is about what people can handle, at maximum.  Campaigns work fine with three faiths.  Or two.  Or even just one.

* Develop those religions. What do they believe ... comprehensively? What are their practices? How are they trained? What does the hierarchy look like? (And please, how about we not just parrot the Roman Catholic church?) Is there any similarity in temple architecture? What's their take on icons? Do they allow group marriages? Do they trouble over marriage at all? Give the players some meat to chew, here.

* Consider that in sharp contrast to how most GMs portray a polytheistic society -- as, in fact, henotheistic, where people worship only one god but ignore the others -- make it a genuine pantheon. It doesn't matter if I regularly attend services of the Sea God; if my daughter's getting married, I'm going to make sacrifice to the Fertility Goddess. I might recite a rote phrase to the Fire God when firing up my hearth. I'll surely sacrifice to the War Goddess before going into battle.

* Remember the posts where I talked about mages, and that the vast majority of them are going to be researchers, academics, in service, carrying out official duties and the like, as opposed to being enchanters doing nothing but churning out goodies-on-demand for PCs?  The same thing with clerics.  Priests should not be doing nothing but lazing on barcaloungers at their altars waiting to heal PCs.  They should be working on sermons and homilies, or in long prayers that can't be interrupted, or in the middle of holy ceremonies, or managing their parishes, or performing pastoral duties ... or off healing their parishioners.  (Seriously, I'm much more likely to have burned healing spells on my parishioner Rolf the carpenter, who just fell off the damn roof, or on his wife, who's having a rough time giving birth, or on their teenage son, who fell into the damn hearth and got badly burned trying to get Papa's supper going, than to be hanging onto them on the off-chance non-faithful adventurers wander by.)

* Turn off the god tap. Seriously, folks, faith ought not be a public utility. If you're not a worshiper of my god -- or at least pay lip service thereto -- my healing powers ought not work on you. If I'm a white light priest in a party of murderhobos, my powers ought not work at all. But, by contrast, if you roleplay some serious faith, perhaps the local priestess of the Fire Goddess should see that, and be more favorably inclined to you because of it. Give people some incentive to do this.  A character makes an act of devotion: attending a service, reciting prayers (the whole thing, not "My character recites the Creed of the Sea"), lighting devotional candles ... fair enough, the character gets +1 for the next important roll.

Doan want no time travel, no sirree

Our-modern-selves-popped-back-in-time-or-into-fantasy-worlds is a staple of gaming.  I was once asked how I’d handle being popped back into 1915 Germany.

My answer?  Get to the United States as soon as humanly possible, where I would die a very, very rich man.

I'd start with placing bets on the outcomes of the next couple World Series (I know the Red Sox win both), parlay that into the 1916 presidential election, change my investments into war industries in time for April 1917, then bet on the 1917 and 1918 World Series (the White Sox and Red Sox win, respectively) before placing a bet on the date of the Armistice. In the meantime, I win bets on the outcome of the National Hockey Association season in 1915 (Ottawa Senators), 1916 and 1917 (Montreal Canadiens), while the Toronto Blueshirts win the first NHL season in 1918. I get the hell out of Dodge and onto a remote Vermont farm in time for the 1919 influenza pandemic, win bets on the next few presidential elections, ride RCA in the stock market until my eyeballs fall out, and cash into gold holdings in early September, 1929.  Yes, I know the Great Crash was at the end of October, but there was some yoyoing before it, and I don’t want to be caught leaning the wrong way.

[Good call, just having looked it up.  The highwater mark of the NYSE was September 3rd, and the market started declining after, and cratering on the 18th.]

I promptly shift that gold to a secure trust based out of the Bank of Montreal (which off the top of my head I know survives to the present day) by no later than the summer of 1932: I forget exactly when Roosevelt made private holdings of gold illegal, but it can’t have been long after he was elected, so getting that gold to Canada (which never banned private ownership of gold) is crucial. Off to the races.

This is all information I know off the top of my head, and that might be critical: I'm minded of how Heinlein depicted time traveler Lazarus Long, who studied assiduously the time of his far-off youth -- the Kansas City and America of the time between the end of WWI and the beginning of the Depression -- preparatory to a long visit, only to be wrongfooted when he overshot and landed in 1916 in the run up to the United States' entry into the war. 

What's that you say?  Not very heroic?  I'm supposed to hang AROUND Germany?  Adventuring?? (shudders)  Even if we were, say, Americans, and therefore from a "neutral" country, it would be difficult to pass for Americans:

* Even if we were 1910s antiquarians, we wouldn't have a smooth, natural command of then-prevalent idiom.

* Our knowledge of current events would be scanty at best - quick, without looking it up, what were the top local issues in your city and state in February 1915? Who was your governor? Did the community in which you live even exist?

* Our knowledge of pop culture would be worse; how many of us could name, let alone hum, five popular songs from the 1910s? Who were the stars of your local baseball team?  What’s playing at the local picture palace?  Fair enough, a couple of you might recall that Birth Of A Nation, the most famous film of the silent era, was released in 1915.  Can you name any other film from 1915?  (No surprise if you can’t: Birth Of A Nation outgrossed the next ten films combined, tenfold.)

* Most damning, our knowledge of current technology is scanty. Off the top of your heads - by way of example - how many of you know how to start a 1915 model automobile?  This is an interesting scene in Heinlein's book about Lazarus Long going to the past and needing to start a car, with all the switches and settings one had to work in 1916.  I'm minded of my maternal grandfather -- born in 1902, three years before Heinlein -- telling me that horses and buggies were still making business deliveries well into his adulthood in our mutual hometown, Boston's immediate southern suburb ... and his wonder at having lived to see moon landings, supersonic transcontinental travel and computers.

(Or even pretty low-tech technology.  Long years ago, before Yankee magazine turned into a travelogue for rich people, its letter column encouraged entries -- and featured at least one a column, with accompanying illos -- based around "What's this weird farm implement I found in the barn?"  And the editor would reply, "Yeah, that's a potato dibber, and this is what it was for, pre-mechanization.")

But hey, look, what if I succeeded in convincing the locals that I was, truly, an Ami?  Great, now if I'm foolish enough to stick around for too long, I get interned when the United States declares war on the German Empire ...

"OMG I am teh OFFENDED!!!"

An occasional syndrome has come up in which someone seeks to play a historical or contemporary war scenario: WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, what have you.  Then, all of a sudden, Social Justice Warriors popsup screeching -- it's insensitive, you see, and "trivializes" the true nature of human suffering that goes on in such conflicts.  How dare people turn jihad and genocide into a game?

I note their opinion (barely) and move on.

If it sounds like I treat the notion cavalierly, yes, you'd be right; I do. There are many aspects of roleplaying that many people find distasteful for whatever reason ... heck, I've seen more than one player leave the hobby because they couldn't hack the casual and pervasive violence inherent in it.

And beyond that?  A very great deal of our popular entertainment, from books to movies to music to television, is disrespectful of societal norms of decency and fair dealing. But however much "geto rap" which glorify murdering police or beating women disgusts me, I'm not going to barge in on rap discussion boards moralizing at unsuspecting people minding their own business.

We "owe" it to the victims of the Holocaust no more to not play RPGs set in WWII than we owe it to them not to play Axis & Allies, War in the Pacific or any other wargame that purportedly "trivializes" their suffering. What indeed trivializes them is the notion that a handful of people sitting around a table with dice could somehow detract from what happened to them.

In one such debate, a poster flung at me the hypothetical of a campaign with SS Totenkampf PCs.   Would I support that?  Huh?  Huh?

Surprise, said I. If someone did want to play in an SS game, I was neither prepared to commit mayhem to stop them or to screech at their inhumanity.  There is an entire GAME system out there, one of the most popular there has ever been, in which PCs as a condition of survival feed on human beings. Gamers have been portraying torturers, cannibals, babykillers, rapists, death cultists, assassins, and monsters of every hue and description for the entirety of the history of RPGs. Somehow the world continues to turn, and I don't know of any gamers who march to protest Vampire games.  (Hell, show of hands: how many of you reading this could even count within a hundred how many sentient NPCs your PCs have killed in the course of your gaming career?  Your average long-term gamer's whacked out more people than Genghis Khan ever did.)

And, indeed, how many would pull this for other historical milieus? If someone was starting up a Scarlet Pimpernel game, would anyone imply they were monsters for trivializing the real human suffering and wanton butchery of an era that bequeathed the word "terrorist" to our language? Probably not ... but then again, that was ever so much longer ago, and the inhumanity to man has passed its sell-by date.

Anyway, a lot of gamers claim to feel such issues, deeply. This is another part of this syndrome that really bugs me ... that based on glancing at a headline or two or seeing a 15 second clip on the news -- and let's not pretend; that's about as much as 90% of gamers ever see -- people can claim to have some manner of "emotional connection" to a matter that "touches their lives."

Nonsense. That's on a par with claiming that having seen Bambi as a child gives one a deep understanding of hunting for game and all of its attendant issues.

Now, yes,: someone seeing a 15 second film clip of horror and war does have an emotional reaction. But it's shallow. The requisite "Oh, how awful!" and "Oh, someone should do something!" comes out, then the TV shifts to a commercial, followed by the weather and a clip on the giant pumpkin a local farmer grew, and man's inhumanity to man gets lost in the shuffle of ordering a pizza and settling down to watch the Bruins-Senators game. If that person gives Somalia another thought before the next news clip or headline, I would be very surprised indeed.

That, to me, is the really disrespectful bit, when the agony and violence of a region that's been suffering for decades is turned into a soundbite.

Scenarios They HATED

Every now and then it suits to put your PCs, if it can be managed, into a visceral hissing rage.

By way of example:

Champions campaign. The good guys are confronting the Big Bad in a hostage situation. Megaton is a known psycho and serial killer, and his particular power is an enormous point blank eruption of energy; Human Bomb-like, if you will. He has this sweet little blonde seven year old girl securely under his hand.

Anyway, the PCs negotiate to save the girl and the other hostages, and Megaton lets them go, finally starting to shove the little girl at them, saying "And here, you can have her too ..."

*** BOOM ***

... and Megaton vaporizes the tyke's head, the gushing torso stump flailing towards the party, splattering their costumes with gore. He's smiling like a Cheshire Cat as he finishes his sentence "... what's left of her. I recommend cutting her up for bouillon." * POOF * Big Bad teleports out.

The press and police are freaking out, the other kids are screaming, the girl's mother is howling ... and the players are all hissing, out loud, their faces contorted with fury.

The old ultraviolence, if used rarely and judiciously, sure packs a wallop.

===============  

Next General Player Hissing moment.

Here I had, for lack of a better term, an all-evil group; not just an edgy one, plain old full of predators. An old player was free on the all-evil night and wanted to come back to the campaign ... playing her old goody-two-shoes elven minstrel. So I thought about it some, and here's what I came up with: the elf's sister is a wild psi talent, was kidnapped, and ranged Laurelin from about a thousand miles away with a psychic "Helphelphelp!" Laurelin hires the blackguards to help.

Anyway, they follow the trail to a small time slaver in a port town, a genial old duffer who admits to buying Lindel from a kidnap ring, then reselling her to a caravan trader headed into the barbarian outback. Only then with a few mugs in him he cheerfully said how he'd never had himself an elf virgin before, recounted in obscene detail about the many times he and his men had raped her before selling her off, and finished up with ruminating about how she was probably the sex toy for the entire barbarian tribe by now. Hey, didja hear dat them Wolf Tribe warriors are hung as long as me forearm? 'Tis true, mates, I seen 'em meself!

Now having issues about rape in RPGs, I had never in any of the players' memories (nor, indeed, in the dozen years I'd GMed up to that point) thrown it in as an explicit element. Well, they were doing the hissing thing, and Laura herself was a fine shade of purple. They kidnapped the slaver later on that night, and for about 45 minutes of game time tortured the hell out of the fellow, leaving the still-living husk on the wharfside for his friends to find in the morning.

They seemed well satisfied in their retribution, and more was to come ...

Need a quick scenario?

One of my weapons is a magnificent book: the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Now I'm a folklorist generally, which is why I got the book, but I realized that it's a terrific tool for gaming. Alright, let me open the book to a random page, five times. I'm going to take the first motif listed on the second page revealed:

* Egg curing. This is a folk medicine technique wherein an uncooked egg is rubbed over the patient's naked body. If used to dissipate fever or evil curses, the malady is supposedly sucked into the egg, and it's then buried in a stream.  (I'd wager that it'd be bad to cook the egg and eat it.  Something might be made of that.)  If used for diagnostic purposes, the egg is split open and examined by a haruspex.

* Moonstone. An examination of the folkloric properties of moonstone; its divinatory properties, that in some cultures it brings good luck, that in others it brings terrible luck if it isn't your birthstone.

* Soul-bird. A bird born in the forest at the same moment an infant is born, and the fate of the one depends on the fate of the other.

* Lauma. The New Guinean belief that a soul leaves a man at death and has an independent existence thereafter, something that can also happen temporarily, causing illness in the living person.

* Eagle dance. An Indian dance mimicking an eagle's flight, often associated with weather or battle magic.

There. Anyone who can't whip up an evocative scenario incorporating all of those elements isn't trying hard.

(The book's out of print, but you can find it in abundance on Amazon for as low as $8.  That's less than you'd pay for a hamburger at a restaurant these days.  Heck, you can even find the 1949 edition for sale.)

Evil Deities? How come?

"I AM dark and evil!  Really!  Fear me!"

Forum D00d: "The one problem with D&D's presentation of gods was always to me - how the hell do the Evil Deities get worshippers? Why would anyone worship Cyric, for example? I admit that settings did somewhat try to explain that, but I always thought that either they should be granting simply more power to their priesthood/cultists (while usually, to keep the mechanical balance somewhat, they don't), or they should be enforced by sheer power."

Well, there are one of six possible explanations, presuming you don't just dismiss the concept of D&D "Good" vs "Evil" as the arrant bullshit it is:

* Did Hitler think he was evil? Did Stalin? Pol Pot? Almost surely not. Just because we have an OOC system mechanic -- or just because the winners write the histories -- that proclaims someone "evil" doesn't mean that they think of themselves that way.

* The dark gods will have their due. Failure to worship them will bring their anger down on the land, something that has been proven time and time again. The people in the pews might be trembling with fear, but they come nonetheless.  The dark gods need to be propitiated with sacrifice, with offerings ... or else.

* They attract the losers, the misfits, the powerless, the people with nowhere else to go, those who crave vengeance. The dark gods are real, everyone knows that. If you can't beat the ones who oppress and bully you, worship at the altar of someone who can.

* Factionalism is.  Of course power structures will develop around organized faiths, and power struggles revolve around them.  If my enemies are firmly entrenched in the local parishes of the white-light god, then what are my other options?

* Haven't we all seen decades worth of players commit all manner of bestial and violent acts, all in the ostensible name of "Lawful Good?" The light gods, they preach Good, and Truth, and Honor, and Love, but look at the depredations of their followers! Isn't it just a pack of lies after all? The dark gods, though ... sure, they might be "evil," and there might even be some justice to the charge, but at least they'll never lie to you. They're honest about who and what they are.

 * Finally, there's just plain inertia: people worship where their parents worshiped, and their grandparents, and THEIR grandparents, and they don't give it much thought.  Let's face it: how many people in the United States actually are Christians?  You know, genuinely follow the precepts that Jesus sets forth in the Bible, all of that?  How many people really love their neighbors as themselves?  How many really reject wealth in favor of heavenly values?  How many people really turn the other cheek?  As opposed to just doing whatever the hell they want?  No.  There's a vast number of people who just show up of a Sunday, parrot what they're told to parrot, pay lip service to that which is socially required, ostentatiously sport a cross or a religious medal, all because that's what's socially acceptable, because let's face it, open pagans or atheists don't get all that far in back-country Alabama.  

(I definitely had a smile for the guest minister who, in his sermon, set forth the distinction between the faith OF Jesus and the faith "naming" Jesus.  I definitely didn't for the WaPo article quoting a Missouri megachurch member as saying that of course the Ten Commandments only applied to "our kind."  It's long since been my contention that the worst nightmare of the religious right would be to find out that Jesus was real, on the ground that if the anti-war, anti-wealth, anti-violence, pro-lower class Jesus of the Bible truly was in charge, the Second Coming would kick off with the words "Did you think I didn't actually mean anything I said?"  But I digress.)

And really, why would a fantasy world be all that different?  There's only the one temple in town, to Gibil the volcano god.  They only burn one person alive a season, and they usually find a criminal or buy a slave for that.  Everyone attends, and no one really pays much attention to the ritual words of "May the world burn, and I shall hold the torch" everyone repeats at the weekly services.  (Certainly no one actually DOES go out and set their neighbors' buildings on fire!)  They leave behind their offerings of coin in the obsidian bowl, and go their way.

So You Want To Write These Things Yourself?

Don't hold your breath, gamewriter.

People have odd notions of pros in this hobby.  I’ve come across some startling fanboyism.  When I came to gaming forums in 2003, after an eight year hiatus from tabletop, a fellow proclaimed in one thread of the inerrant truths of Ryan Dancey’s proclamations, was shocked that I’d neither heard of nor was impressed by him, and that I couldn’t be much of a gamer if I didn’t Know Who He Was.  That no one else in the hobby in 1995 had heard of Dancey didn’t really penetrate the poster’s shell.

(I reflect, with amusement -- and some irony -- that the gamer of today wouldn't know who in the hell Dancey was either, because he pretty much never did anything after 2003.  But I digress.)

But that's because participants in this hobby place a huge, disproportionate importance on it  — it's the same syndrome that has SF conventioneers quivering in ecstasy at the mere sight of authors who didn’t crack the New York Times top one hundred best-seller list with the most popular books of their careers.   Some people just gasp in horror that the names of the Big Name Authors of the Games They Play aren't engraved in gold in the consciousnesses of every gamer alive, and it's natural to go on from there to assume that these people are figures of monumental importance and wealth.

Now this is in ignorance of what most game designers make; for my own part, I was a frequent guest in the modest two-bedroom suburban apartment of the president of a game company that had one of the most hugely touted supplements of the 1980s, and he made almost ZERO money from the hobby — the family income was based on his day job as an environmental services executive.  There might not be more than a couple dozen people who make decent livings as full-time game designers.  There might not be that many.

There’s probably a hundred times that many people who’ve been a semi-pro at some time in their gaming careers, which leads into another syndrome. What sports fan hasn't sat up in his chair and cursed the blunderings of the home team, insistent that the player or the coach is a bum, and that he could do better himself? This derives from the fact that a majority of the men and a growing number of the women in this country at one point in their youths held a baseball bat, kicked a soccer ball or threw a football. It isn't THAT hard, they think, and so they figure they know all about it.

In like fashion, many GMs write their own scenarios and adventures. They have a notion how it's done, and they then read a product and mutter, "I could do a better job."  Now very few of you have book authors as personal friends (counting people who’ve had genuine national releases from major publishing houses, my total is two) ... but gaming?  Eight published authors of GURPS products alone have been regular players of mine, or else I’ve played in their campaigns.  That figure more than doubles for writers for non-GURPS products, and we won't even discuss those I’ve played with in one-shots, playtests or convention runs.

Now maybe there's a preponderance of game authors in New England, but what's more likely is that there's a whole lot of them out there period, and chances that every one of you who is a veteran gamer has played with at least one. So you look across the dice at the Sunday afternoon run, and there's Joe Blow, who wrote a module for D&D and a few articles for Vampire, and you say to yourself, "Sheesh, he's not any better a gamer than I am. What makes HIM so special?"  The mere implication that he's making dollars from the hobby can either be resentment making, or fill you with the certitude that you can do it yourself.

Fair enough.  Just don’t expect riches.  For the great majority of us, selling a gaming product meant some nice pin money. One sale got me the down payment on a new economy car. Another paid for a modest vacation.  One (split four ways for the co-authors) bought me my books and materials for my last semester of college.  I’ve got a dozen RPG publishing credits, and all of the money I ever earned from gamewriting doesn’t total up to a single year’s worth of a full-time minimum wage job.

Beyond that ... every single gamebook I ever wrote came through connections.  I met the aforementioned game company president at the local gaming club; he’d just moved to the Boston area, and we’d both joined the same dice baseball league.  There was the game company president who had a serious crush on my first wife's college roommate (true story!).  There were the people who recognized my name from long-time writing in APAs.  I started writing for GURPS because the baseball-loving game president had received a courtesy copy of the playtest rules from Steve Jackson, Rich didn’t have particular interest but knew I was a TFT GM, and handed them over to me – that got my name on the radar and into the GURPS corebooks.

This is how a number of game companies winnow down the hordes of energetic wannabe writers. Few game companies – if any – have people reading through slush piles. They often have specific projects in mind, fitting into existing product lines, and as in any other creative field they'll hire someone they know (or someone vouched for by someone they know) over those newcomers. They are not at all interested in OJT, and expect professional efforts written to their exact requirements, submitted on or before the deadlines, no excuses.

Starting your own deal from scratch? It can be done, and we know of folks who've done it. Unfortunately, many of them already had capital they were willing to invest to print their stuff, convention hop to push their stuff, and keep the bills paid while they were trying. And for every indie success, there've been twenty small press failures, and fifty no one's ever heard of beyond the local college's gaming club.

(I've two anecdotes to illustrate the syndrome. The first is from the mid-80s.  The gaming club at UMass-Amherst had a fellow who designed a board game, called Dawn of Islam.  Sorta a Diplomacy/Risk style wargame with unbalanced sides; the Byzantine position was by far the strongest.  Except ... the Islamic player, early in the game, received four tokens called "Army of the Faithful" which were damn near invincible, and of course to conquer the rest of Europe he'd have to go through the Byzantine player first.  Very intriguing, very well designed, very engrossing, there was a session damn near every week.  Everyone said that the designer ought to get it published.  He never succeeded at it, and the only reason I know the guy's name at this remove -- Roger Adair -- was in asking clubbies of the era on Facebook a couple years back.  Roger's passed away now, and no doubt his marvelous game's been at the bottom of a landfill for a couple decades.)

(Second one is, well, me.  I started veering away from D&D very early, and getting very very variant indeed.  Typed up the result in 1981, brought it to UMass with me the next spring.  I was something of a nine-day wonder that spring semester, had more players than I knew what to do with ... either I was that good a GM or everyone else was that bad, eh.  That was the only semester I was at UMass, life events taking me back to Boston, but one of my players had a xerox of the system, and Tom was enough of a fanboy to GM it.  He was doing it years later, something I found out at a SF convention down the road.  Having moved on to TFT and GURPS by then, I inwardly winced that someone was still GMing that godawful melange, but gave belated permission, and furthermore got into Tom's hands a copy of my spell manuscript, the part he never had.  The last I'd heard, he was still GMing it deep into the 1990s, many years more than I'd ever stuck with it.  Go figure.)

Not deterred? Fair enough ... give it a shot! Just make sure to keep your day job.

Baiting and Switching ... Not.

So there was a thread once, where the OP put forth a proposition, based on indig tribes of Southeast Asia such as the Hmong or the Karen: that orcs were similarly folk who were pushed out of the better, nicer lands, who lived on the fringes of civilization as a matter of course, and who were far more stigmatized as Those Barbarians than anything else.  This wouldn’t be readily apparent to the players, who’d hold – and be expected to hold, as All Civilized Folk ought – the classic prejudices about orcs being nasty evil beings needing extermination.

The OP somewhat presciently said that this would either work well or piss everyone off, and it did: starting with other posters, who raked coals of fire over the idea.  The OP was accused of “cheating,” of having a “social agenda,” of baiting-and-switching, and of breaking the expected D&D paradigm.  One poster, rather colorfully, compared the “humiliation and embarrassment” of the situation to showing up at your boss' wedding in a clown suit.

This is not an unusual reaction in gaming circles ... IMHO, more because their own worldview was threatened than any other factor.  Now, yes: if the OP's was running straight D&D, with published dungeon modules fresh out of the shrink wrap, and advertised a hack-n-slash campaign, then yes, messing with people's (completely OOC) preconception of How You're Supposed To Be GMing Those Races is railroading.  I'm equally willing to acknowledge that a number of game systems have fixed settings with defined notions of the setting's races. A Pe Choi in Empire of the Petal Throne, a troll in RuneQuest, a dwarf in Warhammer, a gargun in Harnmaster, we have a good idea how they're to be portrayed.

For my own part? I think the notion of orcs as the fantasy world's 'Yards is a smashing one. Beyond that, I'm a GM. I get to set the standards for my setting. I can adopt whatever moral standards I bloody well feel like adopting, I get to define my world's orcs however I please, I am not bound by any fictional source or player expectation when I do it, and all the rest of you get to do the same around your own gaming tables.

Beyond that ... not everyone plays D&D 4th with a (say) Forgotten Worlds setting.

Let me repeat that: not everyone plays D&D.

Orcs are presented in different fashions in other systems. GURPS has its own take on them. Harn has its own take on them. Warcraft has its own take on them. Shadowrun has its own take on them. Warhammer has separate spins depending on whether you're doing Fantasy or 40,000. The claim that orcs are monolithically, irredeemably evil throughout the RPG world is flat out false ... and doesn't even apply to D&D, which has had orcs as playable PC races in more than one edition.

(And for pity's sake, in what universe is ANY race monolithically "anything" at all?  Do "humans" have a monolithic culture?)

The notion, therefore, that "changing" how orcs work in your campaign is by-definition a bait and switch is bullshit.

And when this is a "reveal," and the whole point is that the general perception of the world might be wrong ...? Err. This isn't an epic screwjob. This is a plot twist.

How To Do Your Own Age Of Sail

The Mayflower II, the only ship in this article I've ever been on.

To the verisimilitude fan, published RPG settings get a lot wrong.  I’ve ranted about this a fair bit, but there’s no example so stark and startling as how badly and consistently gamers get ships wrong.

You’re all gamers, and you know how seafaring in RPGs is depicted.  It’s right out of Hollywood movies of the 18th and 19th centuries, classic Age of Sail tech.  To a degree, this is understandable: medieval and Renaissance depictions of Arthurian and Biblical legends put folks in clothing, armor and weapons that would’ve fit in perfectly in contemporary culture.  Moreover, filmmakers have budgets, and cinematic ships are almost always drawn from the pool of replica Age of Sail vessels out there.

This is reflected in gaming: ships are often depicted as huge, with 19th century cannon, ship’s wheels, sleek keel:beam ratios and all the trappings of the Age of Sail.

But we do know a lot about those earlier vessels.  Want to do it right?  Ditch damn near every movie you saw.

* First off, ocean-going medieval vessels are small.  The largest of them topped out at 200 tons, their accommodations could charitably be described as “spartan,” and they weren’t overwhelmingly seaworthy.  They didn’t hold that many sailors, nor that many provisions – the navigational standard was to coast hop.  Check out some of these links for examples of cogs, and carracks, caravels and fluyts that replaced them in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance eras.  Take the Mayflower II above, a Renaissance-era fluyt.  Being a Plymouth-area native, I've been aboard her several times.  Imagining over a hundred passengers AND their livestock AND their stuff AND the crew on that teensy vessel, for two months yet in the North Atlantic autumn, just blows my mind.

* Secondly, the science of shipbuilding hadn’t evolved very far.  The fad for medieval European shipbuilding was for very high “castles” both fore and aft, quite suitable for the boarding tactics of the time and reminiscent of land fortifications, and which survives in the nomenclature of today’s “forecastle.”  As cannon became common, they got jammed onto these top-heavy ships in appalling numbers and in appalling sizes – stability calculations being centuries in the future – and as you can imagine, an all-too-frequent occurrence was overburdened ships just toppling over and sinking on the spot.  They were not all that seaworthy, and even with celebrated mariners like the Vikings, it's estimated that a full 25% of voyages out of the sight of land resulted in ship losses.

* Thirdly, they were a lot fatter than you imagine.  Remember that ship deck plan you downloaded from that gaming site?  It’s almost certainly crap.  The keel:beam ratio (translation for you landlubbers: how long it is vs. how wide it is) runs as much as 7:1, which is about what you expect for 1870s extreme clippers that couldn’t possibly carry armament or a military crew and could do only one thing well – sail in a straight line, very very fast.  I don’t say it isn’t useful to the designers of gamebooks, who can jam three grid plans of a 7:1 ship onto a single sheet of paper.  It just bears no resemblance to reality.

The ratio for medieval ships were much more often along the lines of 3:1, and even as chubby as 2.5:1.  This made for a craft that could haul more cargo, and could handle rough seas better, but it doesn’t look very 19th century.

* Fourthly, a number of innovations hadn’t yet been invented.  Smaller ships (such as cogs) were steered with tillers, just as you’d see on modern-day pleasure boats, or with large and inefficient steering oars.  This didn’t work very well when ship sizes grew, and the whipstaff was invented – only in the 16th century.  (The modern day ship’s wheel wasn’t invented until the 18th century.)  The familiar anchor shape you think of wasn’t invented until well into the 1800s: medieval anchors didn’t have shanks, and the arms were straight instead of curved.  Stern-mounted rudders weren’t common until well into the Middle Ages.  Teredo worms, barnacles and seaweed made short work of hulls, and a 30 year old ship was an old one.  (It took until the 1780s to work out the kinks of copper bottoming, and even there it upped the price of a ship hull SIXFOLD -- only the British Navy gave it a serious go.)

(By the bye, all of this refers to European seafaring, with which players are likely to prefer for aesthetic reasons.  Chinese and Arabic seafaring of medieval times were much more advanced.  South Asian shipbuilding had access to woods like teak, with superior resistance to rot.)

I’ll touch on pirate ships, a major topic of gaming sail.  Contrary to popular belief, there isn't a particular ship design called "pirate ship." Pirates used just about any hull they could get their hands on, although they favored sloops for their maneuverability, speed and ease of repair.  Far more often than otherwise, these ships were usually small.  This flies in the face of Hollywood, which favors large replica vessels and broad decks onto which you can pack a satisfyingly large cinematic battle as well as cameras and tech crew, but there you have it. 

As to that, Spanish treasure galleons were very seldom used as pirate vessels; they could pack a whopping lot of men, but they were ponderously slow and needed outright shipyards for maintenance, something unavailable to most pirates. When galleons were used by pirates were in full scale assaults by outright fleets, more along the line of amphibious invasions than the normal run of piracy, and those assaults were things of legend that happened once or twice a decade.

Deckplans?  That’d be a bit of a problem.  NO library will have deckplans for a 17th century ship or earlier smaller than a third-rate -- about the size and armament of a USS Constitution-sized heavy frigate -- for that matter: the earliest sloop deck plan that has been uncovered so far dates from 1717.  (If by some miracle you have a genuine deck plan for an earlier ship, Mystic Seaport researchers would love to talk to you.)

A book I own and strongly recommend is Deane's Doctrine of Naval Architecture, published by the Naval Institute Press. Sir Anthony Deane was a prominent naval shipwright of the 17th century, and the Doctrine was written at the request of his patron, Samuel Pepys (the famous diarist, who was at the time the First Lord of the Admiralty), to explain ship design and building to the educated layman.  Peyps was hoping to better inform the Parliamentarians of the day of the price of admiralty, y'see ...

Among other things, the book has exhaustive statistics of every ship on the Royal Navy list in 1670, and I mean exhaustive – I can crack the book open and give you for every possible rate (and where listed, for each one of the ships in the Royal Navy) the length and number of every single scrap of rigging, how much it cost to completely rig or provision the ship, how many guns and anchors they had, every possible dimension ... to a degree that would blow the mind of the most anal dungeonmapper alive.

In particular, using Deane's stats and given the range of guns found on pirate ships of the day, the heaviest pirate ships would be around 90' by the keel and 28-29' by the beam (for a 40-gun ship that could man around 200 men), and generally getting no smaller than a 4-gun smack that could man about 30 men and measure around 44' by the keel and 11-12' by the beam.