Tidbits III: Convert-sations

This may just be me, but I've never considered converting supplements to the system I use from a system I don’t the horrible, barely-possible chore a lot of gamers think it needs to be.

I'm not a RPG rookie, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to pick up a game, thumb through the rules, and figure out quickly enough what means what.  "Might 80" means you're a strong dude, "6th Circle" means you can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan, "Evocation of Violet Tumescence" appears to be the system's list of temporal spells, and "21 XYW" means you're an outstanding fireballing pitcher with control issues ...

(Oh, wait, I just lapsed into APBA baseball speak.  Anyway ...)

Converting this isn't tough.  I know, in GURPS, what a strong dude looks like: he's got ST of 13-15.  I know what someone who can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan looks like; we're talking maybe 350-400 pts.  I know how to make up a wizard with a good command of temporal spells; that'd be a dozen Gate spells, say.

(Alright, I might need to take some time to replicate a 21 XYW pitcher.  Hrm.  The guy led the league in ERA that season by a giant whopping margin, as well as strikeouts/inning, but he also led the league in wild pitches by nearly twice as many as the 2nd worst.  In short, you're screwed if he hits you with a thrown missile, but he's not the most accurate guy in the world.)

I refuse, and always have refused, to worry about whether I get the equivalencies "exactly" right.  The guy who wrote the original supplement isn't running the adventure, I am.  If the original NPC could beat down three starting characters in that system 75% of the time (not that anyone's particularly run the numbers), and the eventual NPC in my system could do it 50% of the time, who's to know, and who's to care?

Filing off the serial numbers

1) You discover a human skeleton, one hand wrapped around a shining spear with a brilliant silver head -- plainly magical -- the other grasping a crumbled ball of deerhide. What's left of his clothing is badly raked and bloodstained, and one leg stretches out at a very unnatural angle. A moldy backpack is nearby, but not much in it is intact, although you find a hunting knife and matching hatchet that’s only slightly rusted and a handful of slightly tarnished silver pennies. Not too far away is the skeleton of a mountain lion. Unfolding the ball of deerhide, there are crude letters written in charcoal on it. "Hey stranger," it reads, "Being of sound mind and bust legs, I will all to whatever finds me.  Gods hope it ain’t no orc.  I gots the creetur what got me.  Hope I died game.  Buy the boyz down at the Post a drink on me. Anyway I am dead.  Yours, Hatchet Nath."

2) A vast crashing upslope ... and the startling sight is of a person screeching and waving a big sword, chasing a large bear, both whom dash past you without a second glance. Even more startling is about a half minute later, when you see the bear chasing the person back uphill!

3) There's a human head, at ground level, in the middle of the trail. Only it still seems attached to a living body, but ALL you can see is the head ... buried up to the chin.  The person sings out to you, cheerfully, as if lacking a care in the world.

4) The hamlet -- there were only a few homes -- was attacked and burned out yesterday, it seems. Pretty much everything portable was looted. There are no survivors, save for a child who's something like six or seven, numbed and mute with the things the child saw.

5) You encounter a small tribe of backcountry hunters, who despite a significant language barrier, have indicated that the hunting is good, that they're settling down for the evening, and you're invited to dinner. If you accept, there's no chicanery or ill-intent, and there's a pleasant feast and some singing (it turns out that you know a couple tunes in common, even if you have different words for the lyrics). When you wake up in the morning, you're informed that your own contributions to the feast require recompense.  You are now married to this cute nubile teenager (of your preferred sex, at least) over here, huzzah! Glowers and snarls are the result of any reaction on your part short of unqualified delight ... ("You turn down this gift, they'll slit you, me, Caleb and the horses from crotch to eyeball with a dull deer antler!")

6) Your path takes you through a sacred burial ground of the local indigs, where their deceased are exposed on platforms for so-called "sky burial" with their weapons and treasured possessions.  Frontier rumor informs you that your presence here is sacrilegious, but tall defiles make going around difficult, and near-impossible if you've got mounts.

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

Now.  While this could be the start of a list of interesting wilderness encounters (and it comes from a forum thread of the same), the punchline is that I took the inspiration for all of them from a TV movie I saw in my youth: Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford as a mountain man in the Rockies in the mid-19th century.  Something of a labor of love on the part of Redford and director Sydney Pollock, it’s very evocative, well-done, and faithful to the hardships great and small of wilderness life.

It also had a bunch of pretty nifty “encounters,” which happened in the order I’ve put them, and drove a fair bit of the plot.  #6 set up this next encounter:

7) Your path takes you back through that sacred burial ground, a few days later ... only there’s a new addition.  A necklace and other trinkets, all of which you know full well: you gave them to the teenage spouse you acquired in Encounter #5.

This turns out about as well as you’re imagining it did.  Cue the plot of the whole rest of the movie.

Unless your players saw the movie (and the oldest of my players was 7 years old when this movie aired in 1972) you could just about run those encounters straight and they'd never know the difference.  The way #6 actually spun out in the movie is that Jeremiah’s asked to lead a cavalry detachment to Point B, the way goes through the burial ground, Jeremiah knows that it’s a bad idea, knows that the Crow will take deep offense, but the cavalry officer is insistent and wants to waste no more time breaking trail around the site.

Easy enough to file off the serial numbers, though, which the encounter as depicted above does.  And for what movie or book couldn’t you do that?

Player Agency

"No sweat.  We're the PCs, right?  Of course we got this!"

Once upon a time, in a MMORPG in which I spent far too many years, there was a scenario revolving around the “Griffin Sword” – a legendary artifact around which the fate of the world revolved, etc etc.  Several dozen players were wrapped up in the scenario for many months, jumping through many prescribed hoops to do so.  Ultimately, the good guys won, involving the permanent sacrifice of a few.  Ave atque vale.

This is where it becomes a cautionary tale.

Several years later, management in their infinite wisdom decided upon “Griffin Sword Saga II.”  Lo and behold, the Sword was returned, this time in several pieces, and setting deity vs deity and player vs player – with the “evil” group seeking to reunite the pieces and forge the sword, and the “good” group seeking to prevent this.

I hated it.

For one thing, the scenario was heavily based around the city that was the game’s RP epicenter.  There was no neutral ground – you either were part of the “Dark Alliance” or the opposition ... or else you were on the firing line between the groups.  Being friendly with both sides was difficult at best, eventually impossible.  Constant PvP, constant betrayals, constant backstabbing ... and the scenario was a constant presence.  There weren’t many days off.

For another, there was next to zero player agency.  As with the worst brand of OSR dungeon crawls, what gimmicks the players tried didn’t matter worth squat: unless the right person made the right guess at the right time, when the GMs running the scenario wanted them to do so.  (If no GMs were watching -- a common occurrence in MMORPGs, after all -- then failure was automatic, and gimmicks pointless.)  

Nor did much of the "plot" solve anything.  There was a great deal of figure-this-out so that the players could move on to figure-that-out, interspersed liberally with find-the-dingus so that ... the can could be kicked down to the next stretch of make-work-for-the-sake-of-making-work.

Finally, I was the last of the original questers.  I was very bitter that all that sacrifice and hard work came to nothing, meant nothing.  It didn’t help that one of the characters sacrificing herself the first time around was my character’s mentor, her daughter my character’s one-time wife ... and that the player herself had died at the age of 40, just a couple years before.

And Round II lasted for FOUR YEARS.

Four years.  That’s forever for a plot arc in tabletop.  Online, that’s an eternity.  Very few of those who were in at the start were still in the game at the end.  Burnout was endemic, real life friendships ended, the city that was once a haven for roleplay was a smoking, depopulated hole in the ground.  I don’t even recall how the scenario ended, but there sure wasn’t any sense of triumph.  Just exhaustion, ennui ... or people having long since left the game for greener pastures.

Several of my blog posts give my philosophy on GMing – what to do, what not to do.  But the first and foremost rule remains: we should all be doing this to have fun.  And the keystone of this is player agency.

More than anything else, I feel this is why people roleplay.  So very many of us have little agency in our real lives.  We do what our bosses tell us to do, how they tell us to do it, when they tell us to do it.  The clerk or the manager shrugs and says that it doesn’t matter what reason you have for not having done X or having X documentation in your hands: without it, your request is rejected, so sorry.  Cast a vote for national office, and you’re just one ballot among millions.  The rent just got doubled, pay it or leave, we don't care.   Our ability to change our zero-tolerance world isn’t often more than trivial: to dye one’s hair, to get that tattoo, to wear a black top instead of a white one.

(Spiffy.  We’ve struck a blow for freedom and individuality.  Just like all the hundreds of thousands of other people who’ve dyed their hair turquoise.  Go us.)

Only yes: in a RPG, you get to change the world, in ways great and small.  You get to defeat evil.  You get to right wrongs.  You get to punch out the opposition.  You get to save lives.  Your choices matter.

A GM in for the long term cannot, cannot, must not ignore this.  If the players can’t make real choices which lead to meaningful, lasting outcomes ... that’s how you turn an eager group into a “meh” group, sitting back and waiting for you to pull the puppet strings.

How best to do this?  Less storytelling: to the degree they are a passive audience, the players lack agency.  Sometimes they make boneheaded decisions.  Let them make them all the same.  Less fudging: if you’re tweaking the action to produce the “right” results, the players lack agency.  Sometimes they roll critical failures.  Sometimes the bad guys roll critical successes.  Let them cope with it.  Less Mary Suing:  If the Awesome NPCs are bailing them out (or calling the shots), the players lack agency.  They ought to be doing their own problem solving, and if they’re not good enough to cope, the adventures need to be less strenuous.

But but but ... what do I NAME it??

 Running out of names?  Not remotely close.

First off, Wikipedia is your friend here, and all you need to do is (for example) pull up a list of provinces of Moldova.  Hm, I see on this page a list of all the municipalities down to the village level, all 1681 of them.  Must be able to find some interesting names to call that random village in the middle of nowhere.  I think I'll call it Vranesti (a teensy village on the Romanian border, as it happens).

Beyond that, look.  English language naming conventions are pretty simple: so many placenames are composites.  My area seems to have an obsession with “-field,” for instance: Greenfield, Springfield, Northfield, Westfield, Deerfield, Ashfield, Pittsfield, Hatfield, Sheffield, Brimfield, Sandisfield, Plainfield, Middlefield, Enfield, Litchfield, Chesterfield, Bloomfield, Mansfield, Suffield, they’re all municipalities. † (Heck, for all I know, Vranesti means “Eastfield” in Romanian.)  

For the record, Vranesti's sole landmark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A number of random name generators you can find on the Internet will throw such composites at you, but you can do it yourself.  Just close your eyes, turn around, point outward, open your eyes.  What are you pointing at?  Great, do it again.  There’s your composite name.  “Blueblanket,” alright, fair enough.  I missed pointing at my cat by inches.  The village of Bluecat?  Okay.  Not exotic enough?  Fair enough, let's let Google Translate render "Bluecat" into Romanian, say: "Pisica Albastra."  

Want a different route?  You have famous people in your gameworld, right?  Name something after them.  There are towns near me named for renowned Colonial and RevWar figures: Washington, Amherst, Otis, Monroe, Hancock, Adams, Boylston, Warren, Webster.  Some enterprising Aquilonian colonists must have founded a “Conanburg” or three, and I bet Gondor has a “Bagginstown” by now.

For people?  For starters, I don't feel the need to come up with a unique name for every NPC I've ever created.  I’ve made up, as is the case in the real world, a list of common names, both female and male, and at this point I've got variant lists for different cultures.  About five or six names in each list are the very common ones that are my world's equivalent of "Joe" and "Mary," 25 are pretty common, 70-75 are uncommon, and about 150 are unusual but not unheard of – the moral equivalent of "Xavier" or "Clarinda."  I keep a chart where if I use a name as a throwaway during a session, I rotate between the four sections, then strike it out ... obviously, I have multiple lines through Columns A and B!  

(The practice has given rise to a catchphrase: "Nath, Naghan, Larghos and Ortyg," being among the most common male names in my world, has come to mean a bunch of faceless mooks.)

Yes, this means that long-term players encounter the same name for key people more than once, but I don't think they're entitled to find this any more jarring than that they happen to know multiple people -- or have multiple relatives -- named "Anne" or "Bob."  It certainly isn't any weirder than that the lead long-term characters of my first and second wives are named "Elena" and "Elaina" respectively, and that the character of my IC-fiancee in a LARP was “Elana.”  Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Surnames?  If you need them, you've got various routes.  You already have your given names down, right?  So there are patronymics: Verella Elainasdaughter.  Pick a half dozen clans for that local village, and your NPC is from one: Verella Waflo.  Or a descriptive English composite from above: Verella Goldhand.  Or else a geographic name: Verella of Redwave.  Or an occupational name: Verella Smith (well, her father is one of the world's best armourers, at least).  Short of "Verella Hey You," that covers the bases.

Finally, just pick up a foreign dictionary.  I've had Finnish:English, Sanskrit:English and Gaelic:English ones for decades for just this purpose.  I don't even worry about finding the meaning of a word.  Hm, I think I'll call this rare find the "Tome of Sellainen."  And this is so much easier now with the Internet – no need to BUY a book for the purpose.


† - None of these are as much as 45 minutes drive from where I sit.  Some are in the Berkshires, on mountainsides ... seriously?

X-Cards

 “I’d like your help. Your help to make this game fun for everyone. If anything makes anyone uncomfortable in any way… just lift this card up, or simply tap it. You don’t have to explain why. It doesn't matter why. When we lift or tap this card, we simply edit out anything X-Carded. And if there is ever an issue, anyone can call for a break and we can talk privately. I know it sounds funny but it will help us play amazing games together and usually I’m the one who uses the X-card to help take care of myself. Please help make this game fun for everyone. Thank you!"

The X-Card has been a thing in the hobby for a number of years now.  Coming into vogue during convention runs, where a bunch of strangers get together for a Session Zero-less game under time constraints, it’s also a very controversial subject.  It works pretty much as described above: flash the card, the group is compelled to change an element, change the subject, fade to black, whatever.  I’m among the ones who don’t care for the concept.

I have always had an unusual number of female players, about a third of my player base over the years.  To my certain knowledge, a third of them were sexually assaulted/molested.  So I avoid rape tropes, beyond the abstract. A close friend of my wife's hanged himself on the main bridge in her hometown, so I avoid dwelling on hanging people.

But this is a hobby that involves a whopping lot of depictions of violence.  There's racism, and the whole spectrum of man's inhumanity to man.  A player who really does have "triggers" so deep that he or she's likely to freak out at their mere depiction around a gaming table has a responsibility to talk it over with the GM in advance.  Similarly, such players ought not be indulging in convention runs or one-shots, or if so need to pick out genres less likely to prove burdensome.  A Toon, an original Star Trek game, Golden Age supers, 1930s pulp, those are genres less likely to run into some of those problems.  

(While coming into others: Thirties pulp, run straight, isn't for those seeking to avoid casual and pervasive racism.  Or other elements: the times I've played Thirties pulp, some of the other players were baffled by my playing a chain smoker -- I'm very down on cigarettes as a filthy habit.  But, said I, look at movies set in the era.  Take the bar scenes in Casablanca -- two-thirds of the people on screen are holding cigarettes.)

Further, my wife’s take: she’s a special needs teacher who deals routinely with traumatized children.  (And we’re not talking “Oooh, I get squicked out at the subject of violence” kids.  We’re talking about kids who’ve been sexually assaulted from infancy, or kids who get smacked around by their abusive parents.  THAT kind.  The ones for whom violence is felt considerably more close to home than the sanitized kill-em-and-take-their-stuff one finds around gaming tables.)

She doesn’t have any use for X-cards.  She echoes that it is the responsibility of players who feel their traumas are so deep they cannot abide their depiction around a gaming table to be selective in their gaming.  She also says that squicked out players can just take a walk or choose that time for a bathroom break, that it strikes her as a very easily abused mechanic, that people with such traumas shouldn’t be gaming with strangers, and should hold Session Zero discussions.

There've been times, in the adventures I present, where PCs have found the severed heads of NPCs of whom they were fond. There've been times when the cute 8 year old died horribly.  There've been times when everyone in the sympathetic village has died of disease.  Like any other dramatist, I know and use the power of pathos, where and as I feel appropriate.  I would never think to question anyone who needs a more G-rated campaign for their escapism.  Never.  But they do need to find a table other than mine.

And my final thoughts are these:

* First off, it’s lazy.  People using such a mechanic aren’t attempting to mitigate their issues.  They’re not seeking out sympathetic GMs, or sympathetic genres, or – heck – avoiding the hobby altogether.  They don’t have to use their words (and this in a hobby utterly, entirely dependent on words).  And they’re unlikely to be seeking the professional help they really do need if their traumas bubble that hotly on the surface.  I am neither a therapist nor a psychologist: I can be compassionate, but tabletop gaming is not remotely the venue for a support group.

* Secondly, it’s aggressively abusive, as a lot of the “safe space/trigger warning" theorizing is: it allows one person to dictate the content of discourse for many.  That one person’s desire (however flighty or mild) to avoid mention or exploration of a particular subject automatically, unilaterally and without question or recourse vetoes everyone else’s interest (however strong or compelling) in doing so.

* Never mind being aggressively abusive; the concept is ripe for malicious abuse.  I've been spending time in online gaming forums since the mid-80s on GEnie.  Before then, since 1980 in the APAs.  Before then, on plain hack sessions in university clubs.  I've been listening for almost the entire history of the hobby, and I doubt I could guess the number of horror stories I've heard about How This Jerk Ruined Our Game For No Good Reason to the nearest hundred. (Quite aside from that my personal experience, from tabletop to MMORPGs to LARPs, is that there are a lot of malicious powertrippers out there who just love ruining things for others, for the sheer love of smashing.)  And now people want to give those jerks the unilateral power to disrupt gameplay, without even the fig leaf of needing to explain themselves?  Ulp. 

* Fear and discomfort are part of many genres and play styles.  Horror doesn't exist without it.  The whole gamut of White Wolf games become mere kill-em-and-take-their-stuff without it.  These are environments their adherents seek out, willingly and gladly.  (And oh, by the bye, how many of you would be enthused about someone using an X-Card to wave off combat, on the grounds that it's messy and icky and violent?  No?  Well, now.  Why ever not?)

* Finally, I don’t entirely buy it.  I have a strong phobia: a near-paralytic fear of falling.  It's been high school since I've climbed a tree as much as a couple dozen feet.  I’m white knuckled just driving up a mountain, on a graded, paved autoroad.  The bravest thing I’ve ever done?  I’ve done rescues in howling winter storms.  I’ve been between warring parties in a drive-by shooting.  I’ve been in knife fights.  But the real bravest thing I ever did was during a college party on the roof.  One gal was drunk out of her mind and dancing on the parapet, five stories above Huntington Avenue.  I was the only sober one up there, and I went over to drag her off.  The last ten feet, I was on my hands and knees, because I couldn’t force myself to stand.  (Probably if I hadn’t had a huge crush on her, I might not have been able to do it at all.)

But I’m a grown-ass adult.  I can withstand a GM talking about us climbing a mountain.  I can roleplay a mariner clinging to a topmast.  I’m not actually there, and I don’t actually see it, and even though the mere subject has me breathing shallowly and quickly – remembering that terrified young guy pulling Di off the parapet, 41 years ago – I don’t need to shut down the screen and play solitaire instead.

And if I just couldn’t mitigate it, couldn’t control those images, felt them so strongly that a casual mention of heights had me shaking ... then I’d be in serious therapy right now, and likely avoiding such a potentially damaging hobby as RPGs.

From the forums: Metagaming Monsters

Something I've done a whopping lot over the years is pontificate on gaming forums.  While the exchanges summarized below are about metagaming over NPC monsters specifically, the subject of metagaming generally is a hot button topic for me.  Read on for some modest ranting.

~~~~~~~~~

ForumDood: Whaddaya mean adventurers don’t know all the stats of monsters? Does your world have taverns?  Do adventurers stop by taverns to have a drink?  Do they talk to other patrons when having said drink?  If so, word has just spread in that town of the critters said adventurers have encountered.

"Alright, smart guy, what are its stats?"

 

These are, of course, taverns much akin to those in our own history.  You know, the ones where travelers swore that they'd seen dragons, hippogriffs, manticores, Amazons with their bow arm breasts cut off ... things like that.  Or, ya know, where the travelers blurted out, "It was TEN FEET TALL!!! Fangs like spears! Hide like steel! It ripped apart trees and boulders like they were PAPER!"  

Anyway, you just might be more sanguine about the honesty and reliability of your average drunk wanderer, trying to impress the locals, than I am.

For my part, no, of course not: players don't get to use their past knowledge any more than their PCs get to know the formula for gunpowder, who's really behind that death cult or how to rig a Leyden jar.

Beyond that, it's relatively simple: I don't feel the need to be bound by the sourcebook as far as critters go.

ForumDood2: How do you handle situations where the players know something the PCs don't, like a monster that has a weak spot if you hit it between the eyes or something.

Well, for one, GURPS makes provision for such skills.  Naturalist, Hidden Lore (Monsters), Occultism, Folklore ... they're all valid choices.  The better the roll, the more likely the info is both sound and useful.

For another, I'm not a huge fan of "This is an unstoppable juggernaut except for its left testicle, upon which a good shot will surely slay it" monsters. That smacks too much of the pull-the-right-lever-or-die dungeon fantasy BS I got past decades ago.  There are certainly useful strategies to engage certain beasts, and that's as far as that goes.  And even that doesn't mean some critters stop being tough -- sure, you made the roll, and you remember reading that giant crocodiles have relatively soft underbellies.  Awesome, but that's still a very tough, very tenacious 30' lizard with teeth the size of short swords, slithering on the ground so that it’s not showing you the underbelly, and it's comin' for you ...

ForumDood: Generic D&D-land assumes that critters like orcs and trolls are fairly common.

See, you're metagaming yourself: you presume that there's a certain density of monsters, that they all have unitary stats and abilities, and that these apply to every campaign out there.

I agree that "generic D&D-Land" is a thing, but sorry, that doesn't make any sense.  Some lions are a lot tougher and more capable than others, the same way that some humans are a lot flimsier and less capable than others.  I see no reason to presume that ANY foe of ANY kind always has 20 HP and always does 1d6+1 damage and always has the exact same move or armor protection, any more than were I to play D&D, I would presume that every enemy fighter I encountered was precisely 2nd level and had 20 HP and carried a bog-standard broadsword and sported AC 6.

ForumDood3: Do you suppose that people who live in an area where lions are a genuine threat to life would know a few things about lion habits, or would they be just as clueless as a zoo-goer like me?

It depends.  Do any of us really need to be told that human beings are very good at (a) thinking we know more about a subject than we really do, (b) swallowing the POV of the loudest, or the first, or the cutest, or the most eloquent speaker on a subject over that of acknowledged experts, and (c) blathering our inflated, flawed views to anyone who'll listen, except when they're (d) deliberately lying about the subject to get a rise out of the listeners?  How many parents, for instance, have rejected the all-but-unanimous advice of thousands of pediatricians, doctors and researchers on the subject of vaccination, on the strength of the word of the likes of Jenny McCarthy, whose credentials are that her boob job got her into Playboy a couple decades back?  (I won't even touch the subject of COVID anti-vaxxers, living in a land of compulsory childhood vaccination, except to observe that they tick off all the boxes above, and that I make zero apologies for schadenfreude every time another one of them wheezes its last from the disease they claim is a liberal media hoax.  To the degree their proselytizing emboldens others to follow their despicable example, they are each and every one of them murderers.)

Sure, a veteran herder or livestock farmer on the verge of lion-infested country would probably have a good handle on the habits of lions -- otherwise they wouldn't get to be veteran herders or livestock farmers.  Of course, those folks might be real willing to pull the chains of the outlanders ... "Aw, sure, yooze guys got nuttin' t'worry aboot.  Them lions be as meek as sheep.  Just toss 'em some raw candleroot, ye'll be fine. Where do ye find candleroot, ye ask? Why, happen I got some, right back in th' dryin' shed!  What's it worth t'ye?"

I would presume such skills of no one else.  A number of other folks might have such skills.  Did you pick such skills when you designed your character, by the way?  A number would not, beyond the basics of common sense practice for any scary-looking critter lurking about.  (I'm minded of the Sudanese NBA player Manute Bol, renowned for having killed a lion with a spear as a goat-herding teenager.  Far from being an epic battle, he stated that the lion was old, asleep, and that he'd snuck up on it from behind.  Otherwise, he opined, the lion would have eaten him.)

Otherwise?  Look.  You and I live in a world of mass media and mass education.  People in a medieval world didn’t grow up watching Animal Planet, or have access to Wikipedia articles or encyclopedias.  "Damn, that’s a huge cat.  You think that's one of those lions Farmer McHayseed was telling us about?" "I dunno. He didn't say they had stripes." "Never mind that.  Who's got the candleroot?" is the best I’d expect from medieval types.  

Make it an owlbear or a gelatinous cube, and “What the hell is THAT??  Mitra save us!” is more likely.

ForumDood4: Big furry cats who hunt. Are they social? Do they have a special diet? Are they different from those OTHER stories of cats? Fuck if we know.

And beyond that, there'll be the guy who is absolutely convinced to the marrow of his bones that he knows All About Lions, based on a dimly remembered conversation he overheard between two panther hunters a few years back.  And this is talking about something so basic and mundane as lions.  How will even expert naturalists manage to explain rare and bizarre monsters, comprehensively and accurately?  ("TEN FEET TALL, fangs like spears ..." yeah, yeah.)

My classic "confirmation bias" adventuring anecdote comes from a combat LARP session.  We had a Raise Dead spell, and a second-event newbie (unable, per the system, to have the spell at all before his fifth event) was absolutely convinced that the spell worked a particular way.  Me, I was a "magic marshal" of twelve years experience and the Grand Master of the guild that taught the spell, I set him straight.

So I thought, anyway ... yeah, not so much.  The guy just wouldn't take my word for it.  Soon three other veteran magic marshals joined the conversation, each of whom had ten years or more experience teaching and adjudicating the system.  One of those marshals had invented the magic rules then in use.  Another was the guy who'd invented the previous magic system the then-current system had replaced.  The third helpfully had a pamphlet of the official rules on his person.  

The newbie just didn't care -- he was just one of those types who Knew What He Knew and no one could ever tell him any different -- and wound up being escorted off the event site when he started throwing punches.

 And guys like that can be found around gaming tables all over the land.

Helping the players out.

A couple forum threads about courtesy and status of PCs has provoked a bit of thought, which I'd like to share with my avid readers.  (Well, all few of you, anyway, even though I just went over 10,000 page views!)

In a lot of campaigns, the PCs are set up to be bumbling fools.  Even in the stereotypical "Dungeon Fantasy" games, with bog-standard cookie-cutter expectations players bristle if they don't find, too many GMs set them up to fail, socially.  Ignorant of customs the GM mentions only in passing if at all, ignorant of social cues and clues, a great deal of tension, angst and anger is often the result.

Now I think of all the customs and social cues I take for granted, as an American and lifelong New Englander.  You drive on the right hand side of the road, and you walk on the right hand side of the sidewalk.  The woman in the dark blue uniform, with a holstered pistol and nightstick, wearing a garrison cover and sporting a silver badge, is a police officer.  Someone dressed all in black, with a matching high collar with a small white rectangle in the middle, is a Catholic priest.  You greet newly met strangers with a handshake using the right hand, and "How do you do?" is a standard opening sally.  You cut meat at dinner with your knife in the right hand, transferring the fork back from your left to eat that meat.  You don't -- if you have pretensions to courtesy -- wear your hat indoors when visiting; you generally do keep your shoes on.

And so on.  So many of these cues are unconscious, reflexive and subtle that we only think about them in the breach.  So many of them are also deeply national or regional: not a single one I just listed pertains to traditional Arabic mores, for instance.

The way I see it, not even the best educated and informed among us are natives of the milieus most of us run -- or have worked out in realistic detail what all of the customs are -- and we don't have the level of immersion to notice what someone who isn't a 21st century Westerner gaming out of a comfy living room with a soft drink and a slice of pizza would. 

 There are any number of times where it's not merely the case that the PC should know a key bit of social/cultural information ("Okay, make a roll against your Savoir-Faire skill ... thankew") but would reasonably know it reflexively, and never normally botch or forget it. None of us need Savoir-Faire/IQ rolls to avoid spitting into open coffins, punching pregnant women in the bellies, saluting the dark skinned archbishop with "Yo, nigga," or failing to understand what the aforementioned blue-uniformed lady with the garrison cover, pistol, silver badge and nightstick is.

So I figure it's my duty to double-check when a player commits what I think is so egregious a social blunder -- well, short of the PC being portrayed as an ignorant lout -- that any informed member of the culture would reflexively avoid it, with a phrase along the lines of "You do understand that this is the Queen's throne hall, and her Chancellor is standing right behind you. Are you sure you want to do that?"

Campaign FAQ

I've found this a useful thing, over the years, in giving a quick precis about my campaign, my setting and the system I use.  I think all GMs should use something like this, and I know I would've avoided a couple of campaigns in my time if the GMs had handed me one of these:

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New Player FAQ                Celduin Campaign, RG Traynor, March 2015

Hello!  I’ve written this for prospective new players to clue you into what the style of our campaign is like.

What system do you play?  I was one of the original GURPS playtesters nearly thirty years ago – as well as a writer for Steve Jackson Games and several other gaming companies – and I’ve GMed it ever since. 

Ack!  Don’t they call that a hard system?  It isn’t nearly as tough or “math oriented” as its detractors make it out to be.  The real deal is that a dithering player can take forever over the choices available.  I recommend GURPS Lite, a 32 page free PDF from the Steve Jackson Games website, for a look at a stripped down version of the rules.  You don’t need anything more complicated.  Besides that, I require new players to sit down with me and tell me, in as much detail as they feel like, what kind of characters they want to play.  Character creation takes a great deal less time with me present to answer questions and give guidance.

Alright, I know GURPS.  Any changes I need to know?  A number of them, including new Advantages, Disadvantages and skills, templates appropriate to my campaign, and a few other fillips (such as that I still use BSII missile rules for simplicity’s sake).  A number of skills, Advantages and Disadvantages are restricted or disallowed.  I have some house rules for things, but the gist of it goes back to GURPS Lite, which substantively I run; I'm not inclined to slow down play hunting and pecking through rulebooks for every last little modifier.  I have an edited version of GURPS Lite on my campaign’s website, incorporating the house rules, which I urge new players to download.

What’s your campaign like?  I run a Renaissance tech fantasy world, very loosely based on Kenneth Bulmer’s Dray Prescot/Scorpio series.  It is now getting into the Gunpowder Age.  Realism is a hallmark of Celduin, and you won’t see magical streetlights, orcs carrying hundreds of gold pieces and flying cities.  The current party (an all-mage group, an experiment that’s been going on for a couple years now) is based out of a giant seaport, and maritime and urban adventures have traditionally predominated.  Characters ought to be able to get along in a city and at sea. 
            
What’s the play style?  We have a collegial, laid-back atmosphere with a bit of socialization and digression – someone expecting wall-to-wall Action!!! will be disappointed.  (Then again, someone who can’t hack two hours of rip-roaring combat will be disappointed too.)  We’re also a crew of mature grownups and like to see like-minded folks.  I run a character-driven game more than a plot-driven game; of course there’s plot, and lots of it, but I want the players to tell me what they’re going to do far more than I push the plot into telling the players what to do.

When and where?   I run on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month; it starts at 11:30 and wraps up around 6:00 PM.  Good attendance is strongly encouraged.

Anything else I need to know?  We have a cat and a rabbit, and anyone with serious pet allergies should take notice.  This is a non-smoking apartment, and we’re not much for drinking.

Burning Out

Back in the day (college, and for a few years after) I ran an insane schedule.  There was a time I had four campaigns going at once – three fantasy campaigns with GURPS, one Champions campaign – and I was prone to frequent burnout.  I had to take a few months off every two to three years.

Then I discovered fantasy combat LARPing.  I'd been a GM for twenty years.  I'd done that about ten times as often as I was ever a player.  Not only did I want to play, but there was the sheer exhilaration of not merely sitting back in an armchair, holding dice and telling a GM what my character was doing, but by-God working my way through a forest, holding a cutlass and leading an actual attack against the bad guys.  For real.  Being physical again, as I hadn't been since I was a teenager.

It was full of awesome ... and it also took place on the weekends.  The summer I went full-on, starting a long stretch of 15-20 events a year, my carefully balanced two-weekends-a-month groups went blooey.  I called another "hiatus" -- this one lasted nearly a decade.

But ... combat LARPing is a young adventurer's game.  I'd been LARPing 13 years all told by the early 2000s, and I was a few years older than most of the others when I'd started.  The politicking had long since gotten to me, it was eating my life, and at age 42 (the oldest player in the game), the six hours of fight practice I was inflicting upon my deteriorating joints each week wasn't doing more than slowing the erosion of my skills. I got out.

So I wasn't being creative, I was bored out of my gourd, our social circle had almost all been in the LARP (and promptly vanished when we did), and my future wife suggested I haul the dusty crates full of papers and gamebooks out of the basement and GM again. That was eleven years ago.

And that's the way to do it.  Burned out?  Your game just isn't satisfying, and hasn't been for a while?  Take six months off and walk in the woods.  Take in some hockey or soccer matches.  Play board games.  Do that volunteer work your gaming schedule sabotaged. Catch up on your reading, go bowling, hit a museum a day a week, whatever.  The official rules of that LARP were ceremonially read before every event, and Rule #1 started with "We should all be doing this to have fun."

I keep that in mind.  We should all be doing this to have fun.  If we're not, we should do something that is, and if that isn't playing RPGs, then it isn't.  No harm, no foul.  Honest.

Seriously, your friends will understand.  Heck, two of the players at the end in 1994 came back, and are in my group today.

Tidbits: The Big Bad's Exit Strategy

My job, as a GM, isn't to preserve the life of the bad guy. It's to provide the players a fun gaming experience.

Take one of the classic plot elements: the party has run down a den of Evil Henchmen, destroying the operation and killing or otherwise neutralizing all of said henchmen. Huzzah, they take the clues and info they've gotten from the scene and have dashed off.

Flip that around: you're a PC. You've got some manner of base: either it's your home base, or it's some operation you have going, or it's the manor you were given when the Queen knighted you, or it's the business you bought with the proceeds from two adventures ago, hoping that it'd make some cash for you. And you drop in to check on it, and the place has been tossed and trashed. The staff you hired are all dead or vanished. The guards you hired are decaying piles of gore.

So what do you do? Shrug, murmur "That's life," and go on your merry way?

That's exactly what most PCs expect the Big Bad to do, in any event.

Hell with that. If I'm a PC, and my satellite operation was trashed and everyone killed, and I have no idea who did it, that's going to change real frigging fast. I'm going to hire a wizard to do divination magic/check security footage. I'm going to spread some coin around the neighborhood to see if anyone saw or heard anything. I'm going to do my level best to find out if there were any survivors, and I'm going to be very interested in speaking to any. I'm going to increase security on anything else I have going to the limit of my capability. I'm going to get some investigators on the pawnshops (or going through Craigslist ...) to see who might be selling my stolen valuables.

And I'm going to set the best ambush I can for those bastards, so that I can put their severed heads on the graves of my people, and prove to the survivors that no one screws with me or them with impunity. There won't be frontal assaults ... I have no problem with a crossbow/rifle in the back of the head at 50 yards as one of the bastards is walking down the street, or a spear coming up through the privy hole.

If I don't have the juice to do those things? Then I haul out my exit strategy. I hear Linalda's Pool is peaceful this time of year.

Random Reaction Rolls

I like reaction rolls for a particular reason, and it's exacerbated by my combat LARP experience.

Sitting in the GM's chair, in a comfy position, with a mug of steaming tea at my hand, I'm far removed from actually being in a stress situation. I know everything that's going on, I know everything that's offstage, I have unparalleled knowledge of the situation in a fashion we couldn't possibly have in real life.

But the world doesn't work like that. The fog of war is real. People don't always see what's going on, people don't always know what's going on, and people often guess wrong even if they have all the information.

In that LARP, I was one of the chief national leaders, and my character was the most powerful wizard in the game. I had to make a lot of decisions:

* Based on information that people told me, colored by their own prejudices or flawed insights.

* Based on the fact that I hadn't gotten any sleep the night before.

* Based on the fact that I hadn't gotten any sleep because the bastard, in my face and telling me I had to do something, was partying all night long two tents down the row.

* Based that I'd reinjured my chronically bad knee two hours before and it was hurting, a lot.
               
* Based on whether I trusted people or not, based on what I thought I could get away with politically or not.

* Based on my own prejudices, flawed insights, or whether or not I hated Soandso’s guts.
 
* Based on me just not knowing what I needed to know, and being forced to make a WAG.

Sometimes I got it right. Sometimes I got it wrong. Sometimes I played the odds exactly as I should have, and the odds just fell the wrong way.

Those are all variables impossible to calculate for each and every NPC. I just figure that no matter how smart someone is (or isn't), how capable someone is (or isn't), how well informed someone is (or not) ... sometimes they have bad days. Or very good days.

Heck, the last run I GMed was heavily colored by a NPC making a terrible reaction roll and thus reacting badly to the situation, no matter how much my wife's character was trying to talk sweet reason into him. Sometimes it happens. Random rolls are a good way to emulate that.

Yeah, but what if the NPC’s interacted with the party a number of times before.  So what?  Surely many NPCs have good days and bad ones. Heck, I'm very much a good day-bad day person. Catch me on a good day, and I'll be all accommodating about your request or inquiry. Catch me on a pain-filled day after a night of short sleep? I'm likely to be snarky, and sometimes stubbornly so.

Come to that, my first wife was even more capricious, and in all too many of our fights, I'd pull up short, incredulous that we were fighting as hard as all of that over such a petty thing, and ask "Alright, what is this really about?" Invariably, she'd pull up short, and reveal the subject which was really preying on her mind, something usually having nothing to do with me but about which I could be supportive and help defuse things.

I've kept this in mind when having a NPC snark-out, and a few times the more empathetic PCs have asked, by way of being supportive of their friend and helping to defuse things, "Hey, Nath, you seem like something's got you well off your feed. Anything it'd do you good to get off your chest?" Nice hook for a sideplot ...

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.

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.
   
       

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.

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.

Sticking To A System

Not as a rule a habitue of gaming stores -- I've gamed out of my home almost exclusively since the mid-80s -- what I see about how other gamers think comes from a couple of online forums.  One of the common themes you see on such forums is the premise that a Real Gamer Tries Many Games, and threads about diversity in selection are frequent.  In particular, a number of people heavily tout a willingness to try many so-called "indie" games (i.e., self-published games of which 95% of the RPG public have never heard) as a needful virtue.

Being asked my own opinion, I reply that I started GMing The Fantasy Trip in 1983, flipped to its successor system GURPS when it was in playtest a couple years later, and have pretty much GMed nothing else since.  An answer considered unremarkable when the system you solely play is D&D (or, these days, Pathfinder), this bugs a surprising number of people.  What's the point of doing that? I've been asked.

For one thing, I don't dance around genres much. I've done some SF, done some Firefly (not quite the same as space opera), done some French Revolution. Mostly, though, I've been doing the same setting, genre and milieu since 1978.

This has its advantages. I know my gameworld to an eyepopping degree. I have DECADES of prepwork behind me. Detailed realms. MULTIPLE cities with hundreds of businesses apiece. Hundreds of NPCs, many of which have detailed notes. 20 page writeups for religions for the in-depth priest. Etc etc ad nauseam.

So tell me, why would I forfeit the sheer knowledge there to run Some Other Setting? I couldn't possibly do the same job. I don't have the time or the energy to duplicate all that work ... or at my age, the longevity left. I'd have to say "I don't know" a lot more often, and slow up play to think up an answer.  (And I'd sure get caught out a lot, when the players knew I was wrong, and was contradicting myself.)

That's how I feel about switching systems. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there is a setting I want to run, and that X System is "better" than GURPS for running that setting. (This being an argument made about a hundred times more often than it's been proven, and has always seemed to me an attempt at self-justification, but let's go with it.)

But I understand GURPS. I have long experience in creating characters, and long experience in shepherding others through character creation. I know how the combat system works. I know how the magic system works, and I've created hundreds of new spells to go with it. I don't have to refer to a rulebook very often at all during runs. I know the weaknesses of the system - or at least those elements I feel to be weak - and have come up with variations and houserules to cover the gaps.

So tell me, why would I forfeit the sheer knowledge there to run Some Other Game System? I couldn't possibly do the same job. I don't have the time or the energy to duplicate all that learning. I'd have to say "I don't know" a lot more often, and slow up play to look up the answer.  (And I'd sure get caught out a lot, when the players knew I was wrong, and was contradicting the rulebook.)  Never mind that once again, at my age, I just don't learn as fast or as easily as once I did ...

I don't have GM ADD, I'm not enough of a moron to feel that a game system which wasn't invented last year is "obsolete," I don't ascribe unique virtues to systems just because they're published by the creator, I'm not rich enough to drop hundreds of dollars on corebooks and splatbooks every switch, and I'm not insane enough to insist my players go through the same relearning process just because I have a short attention span.

There. That's the point.

So, backstories ...

"Gamer ADD" in action.

Most of us have run into GMs who’ve asked people to submit a couple biographical pages about their PCs – who they are, where they’ve been, what’s led them to adventuring, what might their motivations be.  Some gung-ho players turn these in to GMs, unasked.

It’s a surprisingly controversial subject, and discussions of it on forums – which invariably start with the topic creator shaking his fists at the notion – explode into many dozens of posts worth of tirade. 

For my part, I love them.  From a new player, it tells me – above all – that he or she is likely to be a strong roleplayer, certain to view the character as more than a piece on a chessboard.  It’s reasonable to assume that the player is going to be unusually interested in setting details, and I’ve got a very dense setting.  They provide plothooks, they provide motivations, they make it easier to introduce NPCs, they're good for getting past the awkward "Why in the heck do these people want to adventure together?" They aid me in helping the players create their characters - certainly even the one-line stories some have mentioned above like "I'm an ex-gladiator who bought his freedom" and "The king ordered the murder of my parents" suggest skill sets, advantages and disadvantages obvious to many of you.

Am I intimidated by them? Certainly not. Some are good, some are crap, some are too long, some don't tell me anything I couldn't have figured out from the character sheet ... yeah, I figure that someone with Farming skill and five weapon skills probably was a farmer who decided to go off to become a warrior, thanks ever so.

Now there are certainly campaigns where backstories are pointless.  High-mortality?  No need to write a background for a PC who’s going to be dead inside of three sessions.  Hack-n-slash?  If the campaign’s not about roleplaying, a roleplaying tool doesn’t make much sense.  But otherwise?  Allow me to dig into my archives and toss out some common complaints:

* So the players gave you different amounts of backstory?  I don't consider this any more of a problem than when Player B goes into extensive RP with the NPCs and the others don't, or when Player A uses sound, well-reasoned tactics and the others don't, or when Player C takes the trouble to learn the rule system and the others can't be bothered.  Yes, there are players who hate to put pen to paper. There are also players who hate to roleplay, players who hate to read so much as a page of rules and players who can't stand plans more complex than "I walk up to the dude I think is the bad guy and hit him with my sword." I don't go out of my way to nerf those who go to some trouble in order to provide lowest common denominator gaming for the lazy or the mediocre.  Players who put time and trouble into the game get more benefits than those who don't.

* So you can’t stand the player who wants to blather about the cool things his character did in the “past?” People do that a lot in real life. But it's not as if we neuter combat because there are players who are combat-obsessed, or eliminate loot because some players go completely over the top in treasure-grubbing, or eliminate character creation because some players get obsessive over that.  A GM who doesn't have "Nice try, but no," in his or her arsenal is hamstrung from Day One.

* So most backstories are written like bad fanfics? And I suppose GMs are all a combination of Frank Capra, John Grisham and Spencer Tracy? You're all expert plotters and character actors? I sure like getting a couple of well-written pages over a couple of poorly written pages, but c’mon?

* So you don't like getting a five page backstory? Quite aside from that many GMs have background handouts / webpages that run a hell of a lot more than five pages, and that I have little sympathy for GMs complaining that reading five pages at the start of a campaign will break them -- this while using a stack of 500 pages worth of corebook and splatbook rules -- there's a startlingly simple answer: no one's forcing you to read it.

* So you believe that backstories are stupid and every trait should be developed through play? Great. Don't write one, and develop all your PCs' traits through play. What? Your players might have different play styles and likes and dislikes than you do, and aren't necessarily going to play the exact same characters you would in the exact same way you'd choose?

* So a backstory might clash with your setting?  Ah, but there's this marvelous invention called a pen. When reading through a backstory, if there's a bit that clashes, take that pen and draw a line through the offending material. Hand it back to the player and tell her about the clash. Why, you've even informed your players more about your setting by doing so! Win-win.

* So you’re secretly worried that your world won’t be as awesome as what the player envisons?   Since when did this become a zero-sum competition, where people are so afraid of the possibility of excellence that it has to be banned?  Are players writing backstories really so self-absorbed that they're ignoring the other players, if not the whole rest of the setting, but at the same time are thinking "Aha! I'm going to stick it to those mediocre bastards, who of course can't possibly be as creative and skilled as I am, and show them who's the real author of the bunch! Take that!"

* So you’re puzzled that a player wants to introduce stuff into the game before play starts?  So what?  I don’t imagine someone who wants to be engaged with your setting before play won’t care any more thereafter, do you?  I've been creating for over thirty years now, and I'm not remotely close to done. I'm not only quite happy for players to take some of that burden off my hands, but to bring their ideas and concepts – ones I might not have thought up on my own – to the game. I'm also quite happy when they're thought out in more detail than three minutes of bull session around the dice and potato chips, and I'm somewhat at a loss to figure out why such creation taking place outside of game sessions needs to be reflexively disqualified.

* So you don’t like a player developing friends and family outside of play sessions and think that RP should solely be contained around the gaming table?   I'm likely to make a great many other choice that you yourself wouldn't make in my shoes. You might hate playing rogue/mercenary types. I like them. You might hate playing hardbitten survival experts. I like them. You might hate playing characters who fuss over equipment lists. I don't. You might have no use for characters who avoid frontal assaults. I do.  Sorry, but I don't want you choosing the degree I have insta-camaraderie with the group at the expense of the character's life to date, any more than I want you dictating the type of character I play as well as his personality traits. Come to that, I believe I can figure out for myself what constitutes a more enjoyable game experience.  If I believe that involves an elaborate backstory, that's my decision. I won't require my GM read it – at least I won't be any stuffier about it than he'll be about me reading his handouts – but I don't expect guff about the degree to which I pay attention to it and play according to it.

* So you think the character will change far beyond the realm of any backstory?  I agree: the person my character will be a year from now, or five years from now, will surely be different from what it is today. Any long term character of mine – and my two longest duration characters went for fourteen and twenty-three real time years respectively – will be affected by his experiences. No kidding.  But of how many of us can't that be said, in real life? Are none of us changed by our experiences? Does that therefore mean our pasts don't matter at all? If we were to sit down at a coffee house and get to know one another, how many of you would respond with "What I've done, what I've seen, what's happened to me, who I am; none of that matters worth a damn. All any of you need to know about me is what you observe from this moment forward."  To which I'd likely respond with an "Ooookay" and turn to the next guy, hoping he wasn't quite so weird and/or combative as all of that.

* So you think that players who submit backstories are pulling themselves out of interactions with the other players in favor of their own narratives?  Stipulating so, so what? My job as a GM isn't to get people to play the way I think they ought to play, but to have fun at my table. With the proviso that it's a cooperative genre, and that there's a point beyond which freelancing isn't possible, what a backstory does is to give the player more tools for roleplay. It is not only not my job to compel each player to deal only with the stimuli presented by the other players, no one has ever adequately explained why I'd want to do so.  Beyond that, you're talking something that's unenforceable. I'm not a mindreader. I have no idea what's going on in any of my players' heads. As long as my players are paying attention to the action instead of their electronics, well ... that's seemingly a tough enough thing for the 21st century GM to ask, from everything I see and hear. I decline to worry about Goodthink and Goodspeak.

* So you resent the time you “waste” reading them?  As a GM, I like to know things about characters. I don't require backstories, but I appreciate them, and backstories engender interesting plot tailored to them.  I don't require that they be expertly written; they're tools, not literary exercises, and I'm not grading on style.  Does that mean I "suffer" through turgid writing every rare once in a while?  I can't say so, because I'm not remotely enough of a whiner to complain about the two and a half minutes "wasted" in going over a four-page backstory (I just timed myself reading an example I'd saved) every year or two.  What was I going to do with those 150 seconds, get into another Internet discussion?

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Ultimately, my longstanding belief is that the hatred of backstories comes from fear. Fear that the player's somehow "better" than the GM, fear that he or she will demand more, fear that the player will somehow "take over," fear of anything not fitting into the paradigm. Because sure: there are drama queens out there who expect the world to conform to the backstory. I can even remember one player who was. That's ONE player, out of 176, over 43 years. And I dealt with that the same as I've dealt with other uncooperative players over the years. It would never occur to me to avoid backstories forever because ONE player tried -- and only *tried* -- to abuse them, the same way it would never occur to me to disallow mages (or aristocrats, or rogues, or character generation, or combat ...) because a couple players went off the reservation. 

I will accept the possibility that there are gaming circles out there riddled with drama queens and prima donnas, clutching their scripts with white-knuckled grips, and acting like a Hoffman or a Streisand towards anything or anyone daring to dent their preconceptions, while wimp GMs tremble in fear at the prospect of confronting them.  

But I don't swallow that the syndrome's endemic in the gaming world, nor that the term "backstory" imposes an obligation upon a GM or a gaming group of a script that must be followed to the letter.  Seriously, naysayers, grow up.