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.

Explanation of NPCs: footnote

I do play GURPS, and I'm not going to take the time to convert characters to other systems ... especially since I really don't know other systems (other than Fantasy Trip, a long out-of-print system that doesn't precisely have more players than GURPS).

But you should have a handle on what some of the numbers mean, so you have a good idea what these NPCs can do and how well they can do it.

(Caveat: the explanations are my own perception, usually.  Not every GURPS GM shares my take.)

Stats:  Stats are Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity and Health.  There are also secondary stats such as Fatigue, Speed, Move, Perception, Will and Hit Points, which are all figured off of the main stats.

10 is the system default for "average" -- unless there's a racial modifier, every character starts with 10s in each of the main stats.  Improving stats is expensive in GURPS, so stat numbers that a D&D player might perceive as only decent are in this system quite good.  Almost all physical skills are bought off of DX, and almost all mental skills are bought off of IQ; in consequence, GURPS characters tend to be created with variations on 11-13-13-11 numbers, even after the major revision in 4th edition that jacked up the point cost on improving DX and IQ while leaving ST and HT alone.

7 is the lowest stat the system allows, and 8 is the lowest I allow: it's pretty much the lowest you can get and still be a viable adventurer.  Still, a stat of 8 sucks, and over the years several of the players who've blown through my warnings have traded out characters once they realize exactly how much it does suck.

12 is, IMHO, a pretty decent stat.  13 is very good indeed, and it's about what I encourage PCs to use for their go-to stat -- "prime requisite" in D&D terms.  14 is outstanding, something that a beginning PC might have as a "prime requisite" stat with some sacrifice; looking over my records, people manage with a single stat less than half of the time.  

More than that?  In the 37 years † I've been GMing GURPS, only nine characters have had a stat of 15 or more.  All but one of them started before the 4th edition cost revision, and six of them played a race that gave a stat boost.  One intrepid dwarf had ST 15/DX 15, and was otherwise a blithering idiot with just a half-dozen skills.

Skills:  Basic premise -- in GURPS, beginning characters are competent.  This isn't D&D, where a character can only be reasonably expected to succeed at a skill half of the time.  A skill of 12 (which is okay at best for a PC) has a 74% chance of success.  A skill of 13 has 84%.  A skill of 15 has 95%.  Penalties apply -- if you're trying to shoot someone in the countryside at midnight, from 30 yards away, you had damn well better not count on hitting him with that 14 roll -- but even so.
 
A level of -8-9 is better than the default level for not knowing a skill at all, but it's not very good; a good example is that Broadsword-8 means you've just finished boot camp, and you were clumsy to begin with.  (The minimum DX you can have and have Broadsword-8 is 9.)

-10-11 is okay.  It'll do for routine, non-emergency, non-combat uses.  Think of an apprentice in a craft, or someone of decent physical prowess just getting through basic weapon training.

-12 is the nominating level for "can make your living with this skill," and -13 is "... and you're actually good at it."  -11-12 is where a newly-genned PC should have routine, secondary skills in the "It's Good To Have Someone In The Party Who Knows Something About History" camp.

-14 is quite good, and -13-14 is about where a newly-genned PC should have important skills.  A warrior-type with a lead weapon skill of -14 will be alright.

-15 is where I place an expert, and a newbie with this for his or her go-to skill is doing just fine.  A newbie swordsman with DX 12, for instance, is allocating a significant number of points to get Rapier skill this high.

-16-17 are quite expert, and these are levels that newly genned PCs will only reach with serious sacrifice, and that I'll allow a newbie to take only if I'm in a pretty good mood.

-18 is my nominating level for master, and few PCs ever push numbers this high or above.

-21 is my nominating level for "best in the region," and I won't let PCs reach this without long training, serious sacrifice and some excellent explanations.  (You don't get to be the best swordsman in the kingdom by going on adventures.  You get to be the best swordsman in the kingdom by working out four hours a day, every day, with weapon masters in the salle.)

-25 is my nominating level for "one of the best in the world."  I've let exactly two PCs in my campaign's four-decade history reach this with a single skill apiece.  The first was the best healer in my campaign's history, and the second is not merely the most powerful wizard (and highest point total character) in my campaign's history, she's legitimately one of the world's most powerful wizards. 

(These levels are my personal takes, mind you.  Sean Punch, the GURPS Line Editor, opines that -18 is "best in all the land" and over -21 puts you in the running for "best of all-time."  A number of GURPS setting books, by contrast, are really free with tossing out -15s to potters and militia weekend warriors.)

† - as of 2022, anyway.  Yes, that would date before the system was published; I was one of the playtesters. 

NPC of the Day: Grogondo

I've mentioned my predilection for a "viewpoint" NPC a couple times before.  While Kardo, at eleven years straight and counting, is by far my longest standing VNPC, this was really my earliest: before this fellow, my players tended to have one or two key hirelings apiece who were, to a large extent, one-dimensional cyphers played by them as silent, almost faceless adjuncts.  This character, who made his debut in 1980, was a key step in my evolution as a GM.

In many a campaign, Grogondo would have never gotten off the ground: as you can see, he's an orc.

(That's actually what he looked like, too; it's part of the cover of my first published gaming book, and the artist, Denis Loubet, not only did a great job on the cover, but depicted four characters from my main group and more or less got them right.  I'm afraid that Denis and Hannah Shapiro spoiled me for collaboration with artists.  In any event, I digress.)

Obviously, in that first few years of the hobby, orcs were already staked out as the Klingons of RPGdom -- the evil, dishonorable, baby-munching enemy, to be whacked on sight.  But ... there was a difference.  Most of the players in my two groups, at the time, were friends I brought into the hobby.  They hadn't yet absorbed some of the prejudices that gamers had generally, and they didn't know that they were supposed to reflexively mistrust and hate this guy.

ST: 12     IQ: 10     DX: 13     HT: 13/16    Per: 12    Will: 12    Speed: 6.5     Move: 6  

Advantages:  Combat Reflexes; Contacts / Low-level criminals, 9-; Night Vision+3; Outdoorsman+1; Reputation / +2, as hardcore killer, among local lowlifes; Very Fit

Perks:  Improvised Weapons; Neck Control; Weapon Adaptation

Disadvantages: Bloodlust; Bully; Code of Honor (Stays Bought); Colorblindness; Odious Personal Habits+1 / "Broken" speech; Reputation-1 as uncouth & barbaric; Short Life Span; Social Stigma: Minority Group; Struggling; Ugly

Skills: Brawling-14; Climbing-15; First Aid-10; Hiking-14; L: Altanian (B/-); L: Avanari (N/-); L: Talendi (B/-); Packing-10; Riding-12; Seamanship-11; Shortsword-12; Singing-13; Spear-14; Staff-13; Stealth-14; Streetwise-10; Survival-14; Swimming-14; Tactics-10; Thrown Weapon: Spear-13; Tracking-15

Maneuvers: Feint-15

Quirks:  CB: Vandalism; Deliberately inarticulate; NOT intolerant of elves; Recreational drug user; Skirmisher mentality

Grogondo pretty much projects the stereotype of the second-tier mercenary thug.  He's not an experienced regimental soldier, he'll pretty much do what he's paid to do, and he throws his weight around as far as he can manage.  Local lowlifes know him, and fear him more than a little bit, although he's never really worked for criminals except as an occasional bodyguard.  He's inarticulate, and speaks with broken syntax -- "Ya, Gro-gondo do 'dis t'ing.  Gro-gondo kill f' you now?"  Stereotypical thug orc, in a land where orcs are second-class citizens at best and no one expects better.

This is somewhat deceptive.

First off, he's smarter than the average orc.  (Stronger, tougher, faster too, come to that.)  If you're loyal to him -- and to Grogondo, "loyal" pretty much means "Don't screw me and pay a fair share and on time" -- he's loyal to you.  While in some ways he's a typical orc, he deals well enough with elves (who don't often return the favor), and his inarticulacy is a posture: he speaks the local language perfectly well, but chooses not to so as to encourage others to underestimate him.  It works.  He speaks smatterings of two other languages, and is illiterate.

He's an excellent and veteran outdoorsman, and is known to be one, which has led to a number of his jobs ... he might not know how to get you to the ruins of Castle Alvang in the mountains, but he'll keep you alive in the howling wilderness if you know to get there.  He's also an experienced caravan guard, and can do teamster work.  (None of this is impaired by his casual hemp smoking habit; he likes to get mellow, not stoned, and he really can stop any time he wants or needs to do so.)

But don't expect him to stand stalwartly between you and harm in battle: that's not his style.  He's a circle-around-and-flank-the-unsuspecting-foe guy, although he doesn't lack courage -- he just figures that frontal assaults are stupid, and will avoid them if at all possible.  He's also a take-no-prisoners chap -- to Grogondo, the only good enemy is a dead enemy, and dead enemies can't get revenge on him.  Employers who waver on these important values lose his respect, fast.  You might want to play close attention to his facial expressions: if he winces or sneers off to the side, it means he thinks your plan is dumb.  He doesn't work long for employers who make dumb plans.

* * * * * * * * *

The party leader of the group for which Grogondo was the VNPC was elven blood, sure, but the player was pretty ruthlessly pragmatic, and thought that Grogondo was the greatest thing since sliced bread; the characters became allies and fast friends.  Grogondo was around for a few years, and became quite experienced.  I present him here as a beginning NPC (at 125 pts, which is below a starting PC in my campaign).

(For those of you unfamiliar with GURPS:  the split health is Health/Hit Points, the +3 HP being an orcish trait in my campaign.  Very Fit confers high resistance to disease, poisoning, staying conscious, you lose fatigue at half normal, and recover it at twice normal -- pretty much, you're a triathlon type; Improvised Weapons means you can fight perfectly well with broken bottles, flagons and table legs; Neck Control gives large resistance to being choked or strangled; Weapon Adaptation in his case gives him the ability to use staff techniques with a spear and spear techniques with a staff -- usually he carries a spear.  Struggling means he doesn't own much: his spear, some substandard leather armor, camping gear, and that's about it.  The italicized items are orcish racial traits not otherwise reflected in the stats.)

For a further explanation of system numbers, check this link.

Adepts of the Doxology

“Are you alright, Sana?” I screamed, daring a glance back at the fallen wizard, that lizard of hers screaming like a tea kettle.  I didn’t hold out high hopes - that damn crossbow bolt was sticking IN her, and it sure didn’t look good.  For any of us - me, Dray, the four remaining sellswords, we were holding off Tellek’s band of renegades at the wall, and we’d done for a dozen of the bastards at least ... but there were a couple dozen more, and now they were pissed.

“Wolf Lord’s nut sack, here they come,” spat Dray.  I nodded and gripped my last two throwing knives, feeling in front of me to make sure the axe was there and ready.

S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!  The front wave was flattened, knocked down as if by Upuaut’s own scythe.  S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!  I stole another glance back, and there was Sana Avennia, staggering forward - that bolt still sticking out of her! - shaking her flail at the enemy line.  S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!  The bronze links rang in the night, and damn me for a civvie if it wasn’t a sweeter sound than temple bells.

“Eyes forward, Gwythar,” Avennia hissed, wiping the blood from her mouth with her free hand.  “We’re not done for yet, but neither are they.”  S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!

ADEPTS OF THE DOXOLOGY OF SAN DESTINAKON

(NB: This is one of the wizardly orders from my campaign, which some people have found interesting and poached for their own.  For those of you scoring at home, "Fristles" are cat people, "Khibils" are fox people, "San/Sana" is a term of respect applied to scholars in general and wizards in particular, and the system information below pertains to GURPS.  Adapt as you wish!)

The Adepts practice animation and body control magics.  While the order does not discriminate, a preponderance are Fristles and Khibils, both races native to the desert home of the order.  Further, all Adepts carry bronze flails which they use as foci for their magics.  However, the Adepts can and do also use the flails as weapons, and are some of the most skilled warriors among wizards.

Their schola is in the far-off western desert of Mycretia, and most Adepts train there, making wizards of this otherwise useful and well-regarded order more uncommon the farther from there one gets; along the Talendic coast, Adepts come to parity with Wizards of Fruningen in numbers, while it is quite rare to find an Adept beyond the Pazidani Peninsula.  Adepts are schooled in a demanding and punishing regimen which includes a degree of mysticism and ascetic practices unusual amongst magical orders.  Privation, starvation and mortification are known to be part of the training.  Self-flagellation is a notable part of their practices, commonly employed when Adepts believe they have failed or faltered in a task through carelessness, clumsiness or inattention.  Nothing beyond rumors exists of the private rituals they undergo.  “Listening to the Wind” is known to be an element of meditation, although what that means is unrevealed.

What is known is that the last stage of the Adept’s training involves the feared Desert of Blood, ringed with cruel mountains, where he must survive naked – with only the bronze flail for a tool – for one month.  There, in a haunted land where the flow of mana is slight, is where Adepts learn to cope with weak or erratic mana flows; this also stands them well in enchanting magical artifacts, something at which the order excels.  Adepts who survive leave the Desert with a familiar, almost always a winged dragonet slightly smaller than a house cat, believed by observers to be sentient.

Symbol: A bronze flail.

Garb: Adepts wear robes in a diamond checkerboard pattern, usually in brownish and black colors: brown, bronze, umber, tan, brass and so on.  It is usual to wear a mantle which covers the shoulders.

Template: In addition to the Mage and College of Mage Templates:

    Advantages: Ally [Familiar, at least 10+], Flagellant’s Blessing [1], Language [Hrestoli, full written and spoken comprehension, 6] and 2 points chosen between: Better Magic Items [1], Controlled Cantrip [1], Elixir Resistance [1], Far Casting [1], Improvised Items [1], Mana Compensation [1], Mystic Gesture [1], Quick and Focused [1], Rule of 17 [1], Staff Attunement [1], Willful Casting [1].  Include to those in the base Mage Template: +1 to ST or HT [10], +1 to DX [15], Fit [5], High Pain Threshold [10], Rapid Healing [5].   

    Disadvantages:  Disciplines of Faith/Mysticism [-5], Vow [Keep cult secrets, -5].  Include to those in the base Mage Template: Chronic Pain [varies], Wounded [-5].

    Primary Skills: First Aid (IQ+0) [1], Flail (DX+1) [8], and at least fifteen spells taken from the following colleges: Animation, Alteration, Body Control, Enchantment, Movement (ML+0/-1/-2) [all @ 1 apiece].

    Secondary Skills: Include to those in the base Mage Template: Area Knowledge (Mycretia, IQ+1) [2], Religious Ritual (IQ-1) [2], Survival (IQ+1) [2], Theology (IQ-1) [2].

Tidbits: GMing and Compromise

How far do I go by way of compromise in what I run? Not very.

What I run is a Renaissance-tech fantasy world, very loosely based on Kenneth Bulmer's Scorpio series, using GURPS.  I specialize in urban adventures and run a lot of nautical stuff.  I don't do dungeons, and my plot arcs are a lot more about geopolitics than Good Kingdom vs. Evil Empire.  I'm a realism bug.  PvP is strictly forbidden in my campaign.

That's the deal.  If you want to play D&D or Pathfinder, I'm not your guy.  If you want lots of interparty conflict, I'm not your guy.  If you want to do SF, well, I do a few months worth of Firefly every several years, but that aside, no, I don't do that.  If you want high entropy dungeon fantasy where the PCs' goal is to be the lords of creation, no, I don't do that.  If you can't handle that a single veteran soldier might be able to slap you around and that thirty orcs with spears definitely will slap you around, no, I'm not catering to you.  If you don't like that we're a friendly lot who break for lunch and spend the first 15-20 minutes asking about everyone's fortnight, well, shucky darn.

I've been doing this for over three decades now, and I'm pretty set in my ways.  I GM two groups who like my way of doing things just fine, and those players who couldn't handle one or more of the above elements find other groups in which to play.  I've also long since made sure prospective new players know the score, in detail; sometimes they listen.

Sorry, but I’m not going to be one of those sadsack GMs who write to gaming forums complaining that they’ve been bullied into running a game system, a setting, a genre they didn’t like.  Life’s too short.

Tidbits: The Evil Prison

For my own part, I hate the "Everything Evil Has To Be Dressed In Black, Sporting Spikes, Dripping Ichor and have Grimdark Names" cliche.  I've liked to have Evil High Priests be genial old duffers, who beyond the necessity of sacrificing your souls to their dark gods see no reason to be cruel, discourteous, or stingy with their tea and cucumber sandwiches.  After we're done torturing you to death, sir, are there next of kin to whom you'd like your remains sent?

Your Evil Prison, therefore, shouldn't be a Gothic hellhole situated on a windswept crag in the ocean.

I'd name it something like Hollybrook.  The grounds are verdant and lovely, filled with stately trees and floral arbors.  The walls are of a pleasant cream-yellow stone quarried nearby, and the attendants – tall and handsome to a one, with open, broad smiles – are clad in robes of matching hue.  It is true that smoke billows from the chimneys no matter the season, but it is always the pleasing scent of wood smoke ... however much no lumber deliveries ever seem to be made.

Indeed, no deliveries of any kind – of provisions, of supplies – are made to Hollybrook. Only the prisoners ever come – in the bright cream-and-crimson lacquered carriages that are the familiar symbol of the prison throughout the Kingdom.  Sometimes they're even seen again, their gaze hollowed out with enduring horror, as they haltingly stumble through the riven shards of their lives.  But of what goes on behind the sun-washed walls of Hollybrook, no one has ever said.

The Gaming Store is DOOOMED!!!

I've lost count of the "OMG the FLGS ‡ is DOOOOOOMED!!" forum threads I've seen over the years. I saw them in amateur press compilations as early as the late-80s. 

Most of the rants stem from the writers’ favorite local outlet closing shop, and the rest base theirs on their FLGS undergoing one or more of the following trends which – in their sole and exclusive opinion – disqualifies the FLGS from being a "G":

* Those Damned Kids And Their Card Games;

* The clientele is full of people younger (or older) than the poster likes ... too many (or not enough) piercings, tats or black clothing? Lowlifes or fuddy-duddys, the lot of them;

* It doesn't stock a high enough percentage of the Right Games: too many of those stupid small-press games that waste space (if the poster doesn't play those), too much of that "corporate" swill (= any game that gamers outside of Internet forums have heard of, if the poster doesn't play those). None of that Warhammer crap (if the poster doesn't like the 40K crowd) ... etc etc. Nothing too old (if the poster only wants the Latest Edition of Everything) ... or with lots of bins of dusty – and heavily discounted – antiques (if the poster isn't a treasure hunter);

* It doesn’t have a large gaming space, for which the owner will never harass the players to buy things or put themselves out in any way, such as explaining to curious customers what we're doing or which game we're playing. The priority, of course, should be for the Right Games; or

* The counter help doesn’t have encyclopedic knowledge of the pros and cons of every item in the store / the owner doesn’t seem to be all that interested in RPGs, as opposed to Those Damned Card Games.

Toss in a healthy dollop of “OMG the Internet/Amazon is eating everything,” and there you go.

I'll throw an anecdote out there: as of 2014, of the five FLGSes I knew of in Metro Boston in 1978, each and every one is still in business. Have they changed over the years? Well, for one thing, they weren't 100% tabletop RPG outlets in 1978 either any more than they are today. The Games People Play in Cambridge was principally a traditional "game" store, then as now: fancy chess sets, cribbage, backgammon, card games, puzzles. Strategy and Fantasy World in Boston (the current Compleat Strategist) was heavily into board wargames: SPI and Avalon Hill games, that sort of thing. Hobby Bunker in Malden was (then as now) heavily invested in miniature wargaming. And so on.

Come to that, I've never seen a store that was a tabletop RPG outlet and nothing but. They've always had some other serious focus: SF/fantasy books, hobby modeling, wargames, comics books, miniatures, Eurogames, board games, computer games, CCGs, even radio-controlled thingies.  Something.

And gaming stores went out of business in the 70s, and in the 80s, and in the 90s as well. The RPGs/bookstore I first bought Fantasy Trip?  Spike McPhee's iconic Science Fantasy Bookstore, and it was priced out of the Harvard Square market by 1988. The FLGS in the town I went to college in 1982? Out of business two years later. Its replacement? Gone by 1989. (I don't remember its name, but curiously enough, I do remember that the partnership that owned it styled themselves "World Domination Enterprises.") The two FLGSs I first patronized when I moved to Springfield MA in the late 80s?  The Tin Soldier in Court Square was out of business by 1990, Dragon's Lair in East Longmeadow was out of business by '95.  The big box bookstores like Borders and Media Play that had large RPG sections?  Well, we know what happened to the big box bookstores.  This has always been a volatile business, the more so in that many of them were established by fans, not by businessmen.

The first two trends?  I’m bemused, remembering some history.  If you’re younger than fifty you wouldn't remember, but turn the clock back, and all the FLGSs we've known and loved were Friendly Local WARGaming Shops. The cutting edge companies filling their shelves were SPI and Avalon Hill, the games people talked about were Diplomacy, Kingmaker, Napoleon At Waterloo and Tactics II, the bookracks held dozens of illustration books so as to accurately paint your military minis in proper period fashion, and the featured magazines were Moves, Strategy & Tactics and The General.

And man, were those wargamers pissed at us. Their cozy little world, and their FLWSs, were invaded by a horde of geeky kids blathering on about elves and alignments and orcs and dungeons and lawful good clerics with +3 holy maces of defenestration.  Those Damned Kids weren't the least bit impressed by (or interested in) the oldbies' encyclopedic knowledge of the Peninsular Campaign or the order of battle at Gettysburg, they couldn't care less who Charles Roberts or Jim Dunnigan were, and within a short period of time, the wargamers slunk away in a collective huff. The owners of the shops saw there were heaps of money to be made off the backs of the RPGers and converted to suit.

That's the bottom line: these brick-and-mortar stores are no more our permanent, exclusive clubhouses than they were of the wargamers we supplanted.

Now, sure: there are plenty of reasons not to patronize a FLGS.  I actually happen to agree with most of them.  I can get a far larger selection, significantly cheaper, purchasing online.  I game out of my comfortable, quiet apartment, set up the way I like, playing the hours I want, rather than at rickety game store tables, subject to the store noise and wanderers interrupting us, dependent on the store hours and the goodwill of the owner, and with (understandable) pressure to Buy Stuff.  I can find players, on the rare occasions I solicit them, from online bulletin boards and game finders, without the dogeared notices on FLGS corkboards that never actually have worked.

But that’s just me.

Because the real subtext to "The gaming store is DOOOMED!!!" is that "The HOBBY is DOOOMED!!!"  Which is even sillier than the first premise.

 

‡ - "Friendly Local Gaming Store," a widely-used acronym standard to such discussions, for those of you scoring at home.

History Nuggets of the City

Something I just dredged up the other night was this list, part and parcel of one of those large forum collaborative lists.  This one was offbeat history nuggets that you could toss in to your City De Jour to provide local color, and these were my contributions to the list.  Enjoy!

1.  Summers in the City can be very hot, and there are roofed-over viaducts, sunk halfway below ground level, linking many streets; these are walled with baked white clay from the river bank, and kept very clean as a rule.

2.  The City is home to the cult of a popular darkness goddess, and many businesses have hours deep into the night, because devout worshipers avoid stirring in daytime hours.  These businesses are marked with a silver medallion etched with a flaming candle.

3.  An old law, repealed nearly a century ago, required that all bricks bear the craft mark of the mason; the City’s buildings over a three century stretch can be reliably dated from the marks.

4.  The City is very old, and layer has been built on top of layer, raising the City at this point sixty feet above the surrounding plain.  Excavations for basements routinely break into ruins of earlier eras.

5.  A fundamental law is that no one can venture abroad after full dark without a torch- or lamp-bearer from the Linkmen’s Sodality, as well as having at least one person present with a bared blade.

6.  The City’s clock tower flies a green and gold streamer if the ruler is physically present in the City (not often; the nearest palace is ten miles away), and a plain purple streamer if a member of the ruling family is.

7.   All roads leading into the City’s main market square, as well as the first couple hundred yards of every road leading from the City’s gates, are especially wide.  The story is that during the Northwestern Rebellion two centuries ago, the rebels in the City held out for six weeks due to their ability to barricade the streets, and the ruler who rebuilt it swore she’d never let them do that again.

8.  The City has two principal market squares, North Market and Diamond Market.  They are in fierce competition, and partisan loyalties have arisen depending (in many cases) where your parents and grandparents shopped.  It’s not uncommon for family and friends of stall owners from one market to engage in petty spoilage and vandalism in the other.

9.  For the three years of the exile of the ruling family last century, the City’s mint produced silver pennies (thriftily enough) with dies of the previous ruler’s face, but defaced with a crude bar slashed across the dies.  Possession of coins of that period is just this side of illegal; flashing one is a well-known sign of anti-monarchical sentiment, and sending one anonymously to an aristocrat or government official a well-known warning to Beware.

10.  Many larger homes from last century have bricked-up windows, a relic of an unpopular “window tax” which assessed a surcharge for every dwelling with more than ten windows.  Some buildings from this era have extra-large windows, at a cost to the stability of the structure.

11.  Surviving wallpaper from five decades ago is flat white and hand-stenciled, a relic of an extortionate tax upon printed or painted wallpaper.

12.  From the point of an infamous massacre during the sack of the City four centuries ago, it has been considered very bad luck to bring dead bodies along any of the four main arteries entering into the market square.  Funerary processions go to tortuous lengths to avoid the route.

13.  Surviving wooden constructions from the City’s “colonial” period are uniformly a faded brick red, a dull blue-grey, a washed out golden-brown or a faint dove grey - relics, it is said, of the somber and austere religious beliefs of the day.  (In point of fact, the house painters of the day loved bright hues ... but over three hundred years, paint does fade.)

14.  Buyers and sellers in the market squares are champion hagglers ... but for some unknown reason, no one will haggle over barreled bulk beers, wines or spirits.

15.  Windowboxes for growing flowers is very popular in the City, and a complex “flower code” has arisen.  Connotations for certain combinations of flowers are well-known down to giving praise to the Gods for prosperity (rose, violet and marigold), prayers that a family member in military service will be safe (amaryllis, mayflower) or hope that a child will be conceived (morning glory, impatiens, poppy).

16.  The City stands at the confluence of three rivers, and has many bridges across them.  The bridges all are heavily overbuilt with water wheels for motive power, and craft shops taking advantage of the power fill every bridge.  In consequence, navigation both of the bridges and the rivers beneath them isn’t easy, and backups on both roads and rivers are endemic.

17.  Though the more squeamish and religious people disapprove, a custom predating the City’s incorporation allows shopkeepers to kill burglars on the spot, without recourse to the law, and display their severed heads outside of their shops as a warning to others.  There is no time limit to how long the heads can be on display, and some shops have century-old skulls outside.

18.  The City’s populace is hungry for gossip and news, and an informal cadre of town criers known as “Moontalkers” has arisen.  A Moontalker wears a distinctive green tabard appliqued with crossed trumpets in yellow, and calls out the news at any place where streets intersect.  People gather to listen, often blocking traffic, but while the Moontalker is speaking and wearing the tabard, his or her person is sacrosanct no matter what he or she says, a practice enforced by the mob.

19.  Although the City is the major port for the region’s thriving indigo trade, it is considered unlucky to wear the color blue; few natives dare to do it.

20.  All the City’s temples and churches, from simple shrines on up, have their main entrances face to the northeast, and in mimicry, many private buildings do too.  There are conflicting stories as to why this is, but the most prevalent one is that departing souls find that the most congenial direction to the Holy Mountain, far to the northeast.

21.  There are a welter of deities worshipped in the City, and they all have devout followings.  Between them all, festival days celebrated by one cult or another are prolific, involving parades, holidays, peculiar customs and observances, and as a result, not a lot of business gets transacted, and any business which can’t be concluded in a day can drag on a looong time.

22.  Mercantilism is strong in the City, and everyone belongs to a sodality, confraternity or craft guild.  The guilds run, and are in control of, all cultural, political and social matters, and all inns and taverns are affiliated with a particular sponsoring guild.  A citizen’s status is strongly bound to the prominence of his or her guild.  Foreigners who belong to no guilds confuse the locals, who are unsure how they fit within their tight notions of status and propriety.

23.  Graffiti is common in the City, and the walls of alleys and small byways are liberally festooned with poems, raucous exhortations to eat at this place or that, that Soandso is a bastard born or that Suchandsuch cheats at cards, and the like.

24.  There are no street signs in the City, but there are a dozen roughly defined districts, each associated with a particular animal.   A pictorial representation of the animal is etched, engraved or stenciled into buildings at every street corner.

25.  The City’s New Year is celebrated on the birthday of the eldest child of the ruler.  When the ruler dies, the date of the New Year changes, creating much confusion among outsiders in terms of fiscal and historical records.  This has been made worse on the three occasions in the last few centuries of a newly crowned ruler being childless; in such cases, the City enters an intercalary period, not part of any year, until the day when the ruler declares his or her heir.

26.  Although silting of the river delta has caused the City to retreat fifteen miles from the sea in the centuries since its founding, and the riverside wharves can no longer accommodate deep sea vessels, the City is legally still a “Port,” with a full raft of harbormasters, wherrymen, “harbor” pilots, nautical guildsmen and other officials.  Most of these posts are sinecures for the politically well-connected.

27.  The City also maintains a Swan Warden, who is entitled to four assistants and four guardsmen paid for at the City’s expense, dating back to the days when swans were game birds reserved for the ruler’s hunting.  Since the Swan Warden is formally an official of the Crown, the appointment continues to this day.  (For practical purposes, this is either also a sinecure, an honor for an important personage, or a method to create a minister-without-portfolio.)

28.  While the laws require that anyone casting a spell be a duly paid-up member of the College of Mages, that law was promulgated when the City was bounded by its original walls.  Despite the fury of the College officials, they have not yet succeeded in getting the law extended beyond the Old City to the new neighborhoods sprawling past the old perimeter.

29.  The City’s fishing boats are almost all brightly painted in all hues of the rainbow.  This dates from a celebrated boatwright of fifty years ago, who discounted by 10% all boats she made that the buyers agreed to paint in such schemes.  Her fishing boats were of unusual quality, and between satisfied buyers and those who wanted to claim that their boats were of her crafting, the custom spread and stuck.

30.  The City has a law restricting people who aren’t liveried guard or in the Kingdom’s military from carrying double-edged weapons over eight inches in blade length.  Dodges to get by this include swords with blunted blades, rapiers, foils, non-edged weapons, and single edged swords such as falchions and scimitars.