Big Good Guy Monsters Reviewed and Ranked

The D&D Silver Age (the period beginning at the end of the 80s and segueing into the mid-90s) were my formative years as far as the hobby goes. I was raised on 2nd edition, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun and Planescape. 

This was the era when narrative was everything and an RPG campaign was idealised as resembling a sort of interactive high fantasy novel. And as such, it created an implicit category of creature which I think of as the 'big good guy monster' - a sort of combination of Gandalf the Grey, the dragon from Neverending Story, and Yoda, who was supposed to exist to rescue the PCs from danger if a deus ex machina were required, give them quests, and/or dispense wisdom or plot advice. 

These guys are peppered throughout the AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual. Generally they are of a similar type. They tend to be able to fly (so as to appear at a moment's notice); to be able to heal, dispense wishes, and things of that nature; and to be able to find or 'know' things as needed. They also tend to be powerful, so as to be able to act as an ally in a desparate battle against a red dragon (or whatever). 

Here, I review and rank them. My criteria are:

• The Big Good Guy Monster must have 7 or more HD
• The Big Good Guy Monster must be lawful good, neutral good or chaotic good (and not merely have a chance of having such an alignment)
• The Big Good Guy Monster must be L size or greater 
• The Big Good Guy Monster must not be a dragon (because otherwise the list would be dominated by dragons)

The creatures which meet these criteria, by my count, are: couatl, djinni, firbolg, reef giant, storm giant, ki-rin, lammasu (lesser and greater), werebear, guardian naga, phoenix, shedu (lesser and greater), androsphinx, titan, treant. I was in half a mind to discount treants arbitrarily because they didn't quite seem like a Big Good Guy Monster initially, but then I reflected on how ents treants appeared in The Two Towers to save the day in various guises, and changed my mind. 

They are here rated for interestingness, originality, and usefulness, with the latter defined on the basis of its usefulness for a typical Silver Age campaign, if one were of a mind to run such a thing (I emphasise I am not - this is just for fun):

Couatl - This is a vaguely central american monster that is supposed to put us mind of Quetzalcouatl and all that jazz. It inhabits jungles, deploys psionics, and is described as 'one of the most beautiful creatures in existence' (an assertion that is not exactly borne out by the illustration). It is a good place to start, as it is in many ways archetypal as a Big Good Guy Monster. It is powerful, super-intelligent, can fly, is telepathic, can go invisible, etc. It has all the characteristics one would want in a creature that you wish to use to deploy in a 'The eagles are coming!' moment, or as an otherwise powerful DM Mary Sue-style ally. It is a bit boring, though: all we're really told is it is intellectually curious, hates evil, and is generally left alone in its jungle home.

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins; originality: 4 bec de corbins, usefulness: 4 bec de corbins

Djinni - We all know what a djinni is. This perhaps suffers from bearing the great weight of immense baggage - it either conjures images of the 1,001 Nights, or of Barbara Eden, or of Robin Williams, or perhaps of (boo, hiss!) Will Smith. In this respect it is a bit difficult to take it seriously. Boringly, there is nothing in the description about lamps or granting wishes. Rather, the djinni is described as a creature of elemental air which is able to perform various magical feats such as creating illusions or summoning whirlwinds. It does, however, have a suit of handy abilities when acting as a sidekick for the PCs, as would able to transport them around, create fake gold and treasure, and so on. 

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Firbolg - This is a sort of giant hairy woodsman a little like Beorn but without the shapeshifting ability - or, perhaps, like the Ghost of Christmas Present from the Muppet Christmas Carol. I can't say it is particularly impressive or interesting. It can do various tricksy things like creating fools gold or altering itself, and is 'cautious and crafty'. One can imagine the PCs discovering a friendly firbolg village in the forest and relying on its inhabitants for age in a very generic Silver Age campaign. 

Interestingness: 1 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

Reef Giant - This is one of the better of the giants, occupying both an interesting cultural niche (imagine a gigantic member of the front row from the Tongan rugby union side) and a useful in-game one (being the only Big Good Guy Monster suited for an aquatic or coastal campaign). Reading the description one imagines a kind of combination between said rugby player, thingy from Moana, and Ariel's dad from The Little Mermaid - a trident wielding solitary figure who inhabits a great underwater mansion. Reef giants lack many abilities though - they mostly create whirlpools.

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 3 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Storm Giant - Storm giants are meant to invoke Zeus, but also - in common with many Big Good Guy Monsters, Gandalf. They are big blokes with big beards who live in castles in the clouds (or occasionally underwater) and have many weather- or lightning-related abilities. Again, one imagines that the position one would occupy in a campaign is a sort of free-standing powerful ally who the PCs might request to intervene in battles with Big Bad Evil Guys or, who, perhaps, commands them to do quests necessary for the saving of the world. The image of a cloud castle is itself a nice one, and I do quite like the idea of having a map with a Storm Giant palace on it somewhere. There is nothing wrong with Big Good Guy Monsters, even in an OSR campaign, if they are billed as stand-offish, mysterious, powerful entities one would do well not to cross. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Ki-rin - The ki-rin is a kind of celestial Chinese reptilian unicorn with golden scales (fun fact: in Japanese kirin is also the word for a giraffe, presumably because of its resemblance to the mythological creature). Its D&D iteration, however, is one of the ultimate Mary Sues - it is a perfect flyer, telepathic, psionic, magical (as an 18th level magic-user) and extremely powerful in a fight. And it also possesses all sorts of other useful abilities, including being able to create magic items, go to the Ethereal and Astral planes at will, create perfect and near-permanent illusions, and so on. And they are more or less designed with the Silver Age model in mind. We are told in the description that 'Ki-rin come to the aid of humanoids if asked properly or if such beings are faced with a powerful, extremely evil being. Ki-rin believe in self-improvement, though, and do not casually come to a humanoid's aid except in the most dire of circumstances.' We are also told that 'Ki-rin spend most of their time pursuing their own affairs. They often monitor the activities of powerful evil creatures and beings. If such beings become too malevolent, the ki-rin act against them. Ki-rin may reward allies or needy individuals by creating food and valuables.' If that doesn't scream RECURRING PLOT DEVICE to you with the volume turned up to 11, you must be stone deaf. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 2 bec de corbins (it is really just a rehash of other similar beings), usefulness: 5 bec de corbins

Lammasu (lesser and greater) - The Lammasu is cursed with a faintly ridiculous-looking piece of art (how could they mess up such great source material as real-life pictures and statues of lammasu?) and, I have to say, a too-transparent shtick. Lammasu are more or less written into the game to provide the D&D with a Get Out of Jail Free card if he feels the PCs are in too much danger and their plot immunity is threatened.   Hence, 'Since lammasu are concerned for the welfare and safety of good beings, they almost always enter combat if they see good creatures being threatened, in the way least likely to cause harm to the good beings.' A lot more could have been done with the concept, frankly. They can heal people, fly, and do telepath....... zzzzz

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Werebear - A bit of a change of pace. Werebears, controversially, do not fly and are not telepathic. They exist to perform a Beorn-function, or else possibly act as a powerful sidekick: 'Only the rare individual (usually young) can be coaxed into joining a band of adventurers. Werebears may join an adventuring group as guides, provided the money is right and the job is agreeable.' I'm sure that this device exists in ten thousand fantasy novels, though right now I can't quite think of one.

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbins, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Guardian Naga: There are scholars and sages who may dispute whether the guardian naga qualifies as a Big Good Guy Monster. The description is terse: it guards the treasure of 'a like-aligned being's treasure or some evil'. But it does meet the criteria, so I shall include it. And it must be said that the idea of a lawful good guardian acting as sentinel over some ancient evil is an intriguing and highly evocative one. Again, I could see myself putting that in a dungeon or on a hexmap somewhere. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 3 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Phoenix - Phoenixes er, fly and are telepathic. Other than that, they are almost unfairly powerful - 20 HD, many, many spell-like powers, etc. With all of that said, they are rescued from a by-the-numbers feel by two things: the self-immolating mechanic and rebirth, and also the fact that their feathers can be used to make magic items or sold for vast sums. Clearly the phoenix has a Mary Sue element to it, but it is intrinsically a much more interesting concept than, say, the ki-rin or coautl, especially given the somewhat melancholic, even tragic nature of its death-and-rebirth cycle.

Interestingness: 4 bec de corbins, originality: 3 bec de corbins, usefulness: 3 bec de corbins

Shedu (lesser and greater) - The Shedu is cursed with an even worse-looking piece of art than that for the lammasu. In fact it may be one of the worst pieces of D&D art in existence. Even the designers seem to have struggled with this one - almost the entire description consists of reams of psionic abilities. Shedu, wait for it, can also, er, fly and do telepath...zzzzz

Interestingness: 1 bec de corbin, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

Androsphinx - The androsphinx may not really be the best example of a Big Good Guy Monster, as their description reveals them to be, frankly, a bit twattish. They don't like female sphinxes because the latter are more intelligent, despise humans, hate riddles, and do little of note. They are like the Victor Meldrew of sphinxes. But they are Chaotic Good and satisfy the other criteria, so they have to be in the mix.

Interestingness: 2 bec de corbin, originality: 2 bec de corbin, usefulness: 1 bec de corbins

Titan - It is difficult to know exactly what to make of titans. They are, we are repeatedly told, 'godlike' and 'like gods', but 'not gods', albeit that they are 'in all ways godlike' and often 'mistake[n] for deities'. I'm glad to have cleared that up for you. They are like a giant 20th level fighter mixed with a giant 20th level cleric and a giant 20th level magic-user, with lots of other spell-like abilities thrown in, and especially deadly melee attacks. They each also have their own unique abilities, which the DM is presumably supposed to make up. They would be necessary to have in an Ancient Greece-themed campaign, I think. Otherwise, they fulfil a similar function to a storm giant, ancient gold dragon, and so on. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbin, originality: 2 bec de corbin, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

Treant - You know what treants are. They're Treebeard. They are very powerful in a fight, and can control trees to aid them in battle. 'Treants (regardless of size) and treant-controlled trees can inflict structural damage when attacking a building or fortification.' So watch it, Saruman. 

Interestingness: 3 bec de corbins, originality: 1 bec de corbin, usefulness: 2 bec de corbins

THE RESULTS

The final ranking, averaging all of the marks across the three criteria for all Big Good Guy Monsters, is as follows. You may provide you own drum roll, possibly by tapping your fingers on the table in front of you:

1 = Couatl: 3.333 bec de corbins

1 = Ki-rin: 3.333 bec de corbins

1 = Phoenix: 3.333 bec de corbins

4 = Guardian Naga: 3 bec de corbins

4 = Reef Giant: 3 bec de corbins

6 = Storm Giant: 2.666 bec de corbins

7 = Djinni: 2.333 bec de corbins

7 = Titan: 2.333 bec de corbins

9 = Lammasu: 2 bec de corbins

9 = Werebear: 2 bec de corbins

9 = Treant: 2 bec de corbins 

12 = Androsphinx: 1.666 bec de corbins

12 = Firbolg: 1.666 bec de corbins

14 = Shedu: 1.333 bec de corbins

So there you have it. shedus are shit and should live in sheds. Couatls are cool, ki-rins kick ass, and phoenixes...er....pheel it. Here endeth the lesson, 

5e-splaining the OSR

I recently watched an interesting YouTube video in which Ben Milton and somebody I have not heard of before called Daði discuss, among other things, OSR lethality:

This apparently stems from another video which Daði, a 5e DM, made, in which he put forward some claims about OSR lethality and how it can lead to player disengagement. The thesis (which has some validity to it) is that high levels of PC turnover can make the entire exercise seem throwaway, and that also - I think this is just implied - there is a phoneybaloney 'I'm really tough because I play a form of elfgame in which characters die a lot' element to the OSR player base that gets very tiresome very quickly. 

In this conversation, Ben makes the useful claim that in the early levels (really just level 1) an OSR dungeon expedition is like a heist - the PCs are so fragile they are just trying to get in, get some treasure, and get out again. I had never heard of things put that way before, but it's really an excellent word for describing what an OSR campaign feels like at the table; the 'lived experience' of play at level 1 is, more or less, exactly that.

Ben goes on to point out, however, that as soon as PCs in an OSR game gain levels they become a lot less fragile. And the game indeed very rapidly moves through the gears. Being a murderhobo in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam is a very short phase. Once a PC is 4th level the campaign looks very different.

I think Milton is here hitting on a very important point which OSR enthusiasts tend to undersell. The reason why I like playing OSR D&D is not really because I'm METAL and like PCs dying. (Though I do really like the element of jeopardy that is present during the D&D-as-heist period of a campaign.) It is rather that, if anything, it gives the players a sense of achievement which games which presume plot-immunity cannot match. The feeling of having successfully navigated a level 1 PC to level 4 or so is truly satisfying because it is genuinely difficult and nothing is guaranteed. And this, if anything, I would suggest forges a greater and more geniune sense of connectedness to a PC than those generated by a more 'silver age' 5e playstyle.

That is, the central proposition - that 'your character doesn't matter' in an OSR game whereas it does in a 5e one - is, I think, based on a flawed premise that perhaps results from people not playing OSR campaigns of sufficient length. I have never found that characters 'don't matter' in OSR games. Rather, I have found that they start off by not mattering very much, but quickly become important by dint of how much energy and time and thought has been dedicated to trying to make sure they survive. They come to matter a great deal, and that is what the process of low-level play is really all about. 

There is a tendency, in other words, to slightly oversell the difference between people who like playing 'mainstream' D&D and those who prefer the OSR playstyle. No doubt there are important differences and we could, if we wanted to, spend a long time listing them all if it hadn't already been done to death in 2008. But the emphasis on the importance of character is not, I think, one of them. OSR players love their PCs too (once you get past the 'my veins are as cold as ice and I care nothing for your special snowflake character' shtick). It is just that the relationship between player and PC is forged during play rather than during the process of generating the character.

Get Busy Writing or Get Busy Dying

I have never read David Gemmell - his oeuvre somehow passed me by. But I have been inspired to do so by a recent article in the Telegraph which caught my eye. It is sadly paywalled, but here are the main bits:

David Gemmell is our greatest fantasy author since Tolkien – but is being written out of history

In 1976, journalist David Gemmell received the devastating news that, at age 27, he might be dying of cancer. “I felt ill. A lot of weight was gone. I was passing blood,” Gemmell would recall. “It’s not a nice thought, cancer of the kidneys.” 

There was a two-week wait until the tests came back. It was the longest fortnight of Gemmell’s life, during which he did not know whether he would live or die. But rather than brood, he sat at his typewriter and wrote what was to become one of the most important British fantasy novels of the Eighties, the gritty blockbuster eventually published as Legend. 

Gemmell did not, as it turned out, have cancer. Yet those two weeks of sheer, existential terror would be the furnace in which was forged one of the most distinctive fantasy voices of his generation. More than distinctive: his grim, cynical take on the JRR Tolkien school of heroic storytelling arguably influenced subsequent generations of authors, not least Game of Thrones’s George RR Martin, whose unflinching style echoed Gemmell’s stark world-view. 

But today, at a time when fantasy is dominated by the gooey milieu of “romantasy”, there is a case to be made that Gemmell – whose worth is now being celebrated with a new collection – is not nearly as well known as he deserves and has even been written out of history. He was absent from Time’s 2020 countdown to the 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time and was also missing from a similar list published by Penguin Random House. Shockingly, a David Gemmell forum on Reddit clocks up just 1,000 weekly visits, while that for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – the hot new saga in fantasy – has 275,000. Gemmell is the incredible shrinking giant of 20th-century fantasy. 

 

That’s despite an origin story almost every bit as striking as Tolkien’s admission that the opening lines of The Hobbit came to him in a delirium of boredom whilst he was marking exam papers. In the shadow of his cancer scare, Gemmell had written the first draft of Legend in two weeks – but left the ending open-ended. The novel was a metaphor for his illness, with the flinty hero Druss (modelled on his stepfather Bill Woodford) and sidekick Rek (an insert for the author) defending the crumbling fortress of Dros Delnoch against invading hordes of the Nadir – who symbolised the cancer he believed was ravaging his body. 

“It was so terrifying at that period – the only thing I could do to take my mind off the fear of dying was to write. I created a decaying fortress under siege from a terrible enemy,” he later said. “The idea was I would write in the two weeks I was waiting for the tests. If I had cancer, the fortress would fall.”

...

He was in his way, as significant a figure as Tolkien, says fantasy author James Worrad... “Someone once called him ‘English fantasy’s second wind’ and there’s some truth to that,” he tells me. “If you stand back far enough away it’s Tolkien and Gemmell you can make out, jutting up from the genre’s landscape like two mountains.”

I am sure that Gemmell's original draft of Legend was far from perfect, full of holes and inconsistencies, and read badly. But still - the idea of just sitting down and writing out a whole novel in two weeks is both an intimidating and inspiring prospect. Anybody can write a novel. You just need to sit down and write a novel. So why don't people do it more? Why haven't I done it? Why haven't you?

These thoughts chime with others inspired by an interview with Steve Jackson, of UK Games Workshop/Fighting Fantasy fame, which I recently read. In it, he describes how the other Steve Jackson, the American Stave Jackson associated with GURPS and The Fantasy Trip and others, came to London and ended up writing a fighting fantasy book:

Steve had flown over to London from Texas to talk to Ian and I about Games Workshop distributing his games in Europe. We’d mentioned Fighting Fantasy and how well it was doing. We also mentioned that competing publishers were beginning to publish their own gamebooks and, in response to this, Puffin wanted to publish a new gamebook every month. There was no way Ian and I could write an adventure a month, so we’d decided to sign up other authors to create new FF books. Anyway, the business side of things was sorted quite quickly. So we then asked Steve if he’d like us to take him to Stonehenge, or the Tower of London – all the places Americans want to see in the UK. But no. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He just asked for a desk and a typewriter. And he spent the next 3 days writing a Fighting Fantasy book!

That book apparently became Scorpion Swamp, which came out not long after. I am not sure whether he wrote the whole thing in three days, of course. But still - he did write it. He just sat down and did it. Anybody, in other words, can write a gamebook. You just need to sit down and write a gamebook.

Let me repeat, for the avoidance of doubt: anybody can write anything they like. You just need to write it. So what are you waiting for? What am I waiting for? What's stopping me? What's stopping you?

Lego Faces and the Death of Freeform Play

 

One of the saddest and strangest developments of my lifetime has been the gradual replacement of the generic Lego smiley face with those displaying fixed cartoonish expressions of various kinds. OK, it's not quite the invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis or rising inflation. But you know what I mean.

Let's take a step back for a moment in order to explain. I would like to coin a new word for you now: the word I am going to coin is genericism.

genericism, n.

The favouring of the standard, or the general; the avoidance of the specific, or the varied. 

Genericism has its benefits and its pitfalls - it is not a virtue in itself. But when it comes to toys which are to be used in imaginative play, it is important, because it allows the child (or the grown man or woman, indeed) to project whatever he or she wants into the toy in question. If all Lego faces are blandly smiling, then that is tantamount to them having any facial expression whatsoever, or none at all. They can therefore be angry, sad, happy, upset, tired, or whatever, depending on how they are being imagined in the moment. The fact that they are all generically blandly smiling means they can all readily be something else in the mind's eye.

However, when some or all Lego faces have distinctive facial expressions - when genericism is repudiated - this has the effect, perversely, of making them harder to play with. It is not impossible, of course, to imagine that this Lego figure with the permanently angry/scared/tired face is not angry/scared/tired in any given moment within the context of imaginative play. But it nonetheless feels awkward. It requires more of an imaginative leap. Within the mind's eye, the angry-faced Lego figure is angry. And it is harder to picture them as being scared, tired, or anything else.

Another way of putting this is that while the Lego creators seem to have deliberately walked down a path towards what they think of as creative variance, what they have actually really done is blandify their product. They have stopped thinking about it as a toy and instead chosen to focus on what looks good. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is deliberate - that the 'faceification' of Lego figures, if I can call it that, is part of a wider shift away from imagining Lego as a toy and re-conceiving it as a collectable that mostly sits on shelves looking nice. If so, it is perhaps to be expected, but rather a shame. And it is connected to something that I think is rather sad about modern childhood itself: all around me I notice that children's opportunities to use their imaginations are being squeezed. Lego ought to be one at the forefront of the battle against this. But the company seems not particularly to care. 

The Revenant Lake

 

Looking around on wikipedia earlier today, as one does, I came across the entry for Tulare Lake. This is a lake in California which, although once the biggest lake by surface area west of the Mississippi, is now 'ephemeral'. It dried up in the second half of the 19th century but periodically reappears, for instance when there are high levels of snowmelt, or rain. The most recent such event was in 2023.

The photo above is from the wikipedia site and it has the arresting subtitle, 'Part of the revenant Tulare Lake near Alpaugh'. The revenant lake! God bless you, anonymous wikipedia uploader, for that turn of phrase and the image it conjures - a lake not just returned, but brought back in undeath to seek revenge on those who have wronged it.

I do not picture the revenant lake to be one from which a horde of zombies simply pours forth, although that might be a good premise for a film. Rather, what I imagine is that, long ago, there was a large lake (perhaps even a huge one like the now-almost-disappeared Aral Sea) which dried up for Wizard Reasons - probably because a powerful archmage needed to use all of the water for a spell or to power a mighty golem or something of that nature. It now lies bare and dry and salty, a little like modern day Moynaq without, of course, the Soviet-era fishing vessels:

But periodically, perhaps only every few centuries, the lake returns, bringing with it the ghosts of those who once lived in and around it (and in it!). For a year or so, a lost world is present. There are great fish, aquatic beasts and birds, serpents and water-dragons. And there are the people who long ago dwelt in and around the lake too - fishers, hunters, and also more organised groups whose civilisation was destroyed when the lake disappeared. 

The inhabitants of this lost world are, I think it is safe to say, hostile. When the lake disappeared their livelihoods and lives went with it. And so when the waters rise they emerge also, preparing to exact vengeance on the 'quick' for what their ancestors did long ago. But they had a civilisation of their own - old temples, palaces, and water-gardens - which they bring with them, and the trappings of this civilisation also return, ripe for exploration. 

When somewhere is ripe for exploration, what typically tends to happen in my experience is that D&D adventurers come and explore it. You may have found this too. When the revenant lake returns, the local people hide themselves away from its dangers. But PCs go where the locals fear to tread - and bring back with them whatever treasures, magicks, and ancient knowledge they can find...

The useful thing about this setting would be the opportunity to develop rules for underwater gaming, or even systematising a quasi-saltbox (freshbox?), both of which are in my list of 'incompletely systematised campaign types'. Anyonymous wikipedia uploader of photos - I salute you!

Why Nerd Games Matter

I was born in the opposite of a crossfire hurricane. My home town, New Brighton, lies at the end of a peninsula, and in the 1980s it felt like the end in every respect - the road to nowhere, literal and figurative. You may be familiar with Morrissey's song, 'Every day is like Sunday'? This is what it felt like to grow up where I grew up having been born in 1981:

Trudging slowly over wet sand 

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen 

This is the coastal town 

That they forgot to close down 

Armageddon, come Armageddon 

Come, Armageddon, come

Things have revived now, as is the way of things, and the old place has become something of a hipster boomtown, full of AirBnBs and microbreweries. But back then it was just pubs, houses, and the faded trappings of a near-derelict resort town gone past tawdriness and into sadness. 

The photographer Martin Parr famously captured the New Brighton of that era in a book called The Last Resort. To look at its contents is almost unbearably nostalgic for me, now - this almost literally is my childhood. But at the same time, the nostalgia is leavened by memories of how small and tough life felt back then. The world was warmer, because it was a world of community and togetherness - a world of 'popping in for a cuppa', a world of neighbours chatting over back garden fences, a world of people sitting on their front doorsteps watching life go by, a world of whistled tunes and flirting and shared jokes with strangers - and things have got gradually colder in the time since. But horizons were narrow and aspiration and inspiration were hard to come by:

That world felt as though there was nothing really in it except us.

To an imaginative kid growing up in that world, books mattered. My family had nothing back then, but there was a library not far away, and the library had things in it there were not from my world. They were from different galaxies. They had pictures on them of things like dragons, swords, and mountains. And they told stories about things like empires, jungles, volcanoes, and epic journey. And to somebody like me, reading them didn't feel like escape - it felt like release. It felt like being given license to imagine that there was more. Not just more physically (more than litter, fish and chip shops, football and the promenade), but more emotionally and even spiritually: adventure was a thing - adventure was something that you could do.

The best of these books were Fighting Fantasy books, because they were not just books; they made you the adventurer, and the experience of reading them was more visceral than any novel. To a 45 year old writing in 2026 the flaws are visible everywhere, but to a 9 year old in 1990 they were a super-drug far more potent even than The Lord of the Rings. You were not just watching but partaking, and in the partaking you were learning, almost through praxis, that you could reach above, and beyond, and outwards. D&D of course, when that became an option, only concentrated and focused that feeling, 

Fans of Fighting Fantasy and other nerd games may enjoy some YouTube video series I've recently been enjoying, in which the series is reviewed.

This guy has been working his way through the Fighting Fantasy books, and the bulk of his reviews are of those, but he has reviewed some Lone Wolf volumes and others, too. His videos are pleasingly understated and genuine, with a very natural, conversational style.

This guy, on the other hand, is more polished and slick, and makes great use of visual aids; the downside is that he is taking his time getting from book to book, and has only so far covered the first half-dozen or so.

This guy, meanwhile, is short and to the point. English readers familiar with Match of the Day will see something of Martin Keown in him - he's intense, no-nonsense, makes everything sound important. Watching these videos is a bit like getting into a conversation with a passionate enthusiast in a pub. 

I sense kindred spirits in these fellas and give them plaudits and kudos. Maybe they were from places like New Brighton too. 

Ice, Jungle, Desert

Among my many sins, I once sat through the complete director's commentaries to the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. In my defence, these are fascinating artefacts in their own right. Much of the commentary is, somewhat eccentrically, provided by the Ben Burtt - the sound engineer - and he goes into exquisite detail about how many of the sound effects were captured. In between George Lucas himself appears, to offer pearls of gnomic wisdom and litigate old disputes (for example: it was an outrage that they wouldn't accept Frank Oz as a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his perfomance as Yoda in Empire), and every now and then up pops some other Star Wars luminary - Carrie Fisher, sounding like she's strung out on heroin; Lawrence Kasdan, hoping somebody realises who the fuck he is; Dennis Muren, talking about how it was that they made blaster shots look like they are moving; etc. The sheer amount of thought and effort that went into making the original Star Wars films is hereby revealed to have been extraordinary. It has been observed (I forget where) that the Big Hollywood Blockbuster circa 1980-2000 was a feat of human achievement akin to one of the ancient wonders of the world, marshalling huge amounts of energy, intelligence, craft and logistical energy over the course of years, and while this may be slightly hyperbolic, listening to Hollywood insiders talk about the process of film-making during that era makes you begin to see the point.

But I digress. What I wanted to talk about here was an observation George Lucas makes during the commentary on one of the films (possibly Return of the Jedi) in which he describes the trilogy as being dominated by three geographic themes - desert (Tattooine), forest (Endor), and ice (Hoth). I have always remembered this, as while it initially seemed a very banal point to make, its impact has grown on me. There is something archetypal about deserts, forests (particularly jungles) and icy wilderness. They function, at least to the civilised, developed-world mind, as exotic geographic 'others'. And we see them emerging a lot in fantasy literature and video games, where every setting seems to contain within it a deserty bit, a jungly bit, and an icy bit, alongside the typical, generic, bucolic temperate zone which tends to be where adventure begins.

(Indeed, while I can't think of an example right now, readers will be able to tell me about a raft of old platform games which even contained an 'ice level', a 'desert level', a 'jungle level', and so on.)

The OSR is quite light on straight up icy, deserty, or jungly settings. This is not to say that there are no products which are set in such environments, but they tend to be small-scale hexcrawls rather than deep, detailed settings-proper. 

I think this is for two key reasons. The first is practical difficulty. Arctic, rainforest and desert landscapes are unfamiliar and there is a sense with each that the environment ought itself to be a major driver of adventure and danger. This is difficult to systematise and make interesting (although there have been attempts to do it - The Bitter Reach being an example that pops to mind). 

The second is lack of familiarity. The Tolkienian tropes on which we still tend to rely do not seem to sit comfortably in non-Tolkienian environs. The furniture is just different. And therefore it feels as though the monsters, character classes, races, even magic systems ought to be different, too. This means extra work. 'My desert world is populated by desert orcs, desert dwarfs, desert elves and desert giants!' is boring - granted. So what is it populated by, then?

If I was to come up with such a setting, I think my approach would be to start with those issues in reverse order. What makes a setting really sing is its content, and the building blocks for that content would need to be gathered together first. 

And Step One in that process would I think be to get together the crew - who are going to be the main inhabitants of this world I am making up, and what is the relationship between them going to be?

An initial exercise here would just be coming up with some lists and seeing what fell together. And you could do a lot worse than just looking at what's already there. If one were to create a jungle setting, for instance, what might one jot down as likely inhabitants while flicking through the Monstrous Manual?

A trawl through the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual contains the following, what I would call, exclusively 'jungly' creatures (not including those which can be found 'anywhere', or bog standard things like giant insects and big cats): 

• Bullywug
• Catoblepas
• Coautl
• Black dragon
• Emerald dragon
• Ettercap
• Jungle giant
• Grippli
• Ixitxachitl
• Kirre
• Lizard man
• Locathah
• Weretiger
• Mold man
• Muckdweller
• Rakshasa
• Winged snake
• Tabaxi
• Tasloi
• Wyvern
• Yuan-ti
• Zaratan

Let's now thing about how we might use this list to inspire some setting ideas. I jot down these notes simply as I think of them, as it were in 'real time'; you can of course add your own.

1. Zaratans. Floating island turtles is too good an idea not to include in any tropical setting, and therefore my putative jungle setting would include them - probably within the context of a huge Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system which regularly floods. I would want these floating islands to be populated, maybe by Rakshasa sorcerer-lords who have a very decentralised, anarchic union, each family ruling one Zaratan together with their lizardman slaves. 

2. The Rakshasa sorcerer-lords probably I would make ape-like, rather than big cat-like. If they were big cat-like, this would clash with the flavour of tabaxi and weretigers.

3. Weretigers I would want to make more of than just occasional, werewolf-style individual 'baddies'. I would like there to be a weretiger polity in which the nobility can transform into tigers, and the hoi polloi - naturally, when you think about it - do their bidding. Would I reskin them as werejaguars? Very possibly. 

4. Any setting ought to have some region of the map which was once home to a great empire now ruined and debased, and populated by the degenerate former inhabitants. For some reason, I am struck by the idea that the setting once contained a tabaxi empire (think Maya temples and the like), but that this was conquered by a great grippli horde long ago, under the direction of a mighty couatl king. That conquest was short lived, however, as in the long-term the grippli could not be made to cohere into one whole, but split apart into many factions and minor kingdoms. Sooner or later bullywug warlords also moved in, and that entire region is now a very dangerous, chaotic jungle badland with no centralised authority. 

5. The Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system would also contain locathah and ixitxachitl polities, probably engaged in internecine warfare. Maybe the rakshasa sorcerer-lords use these aquatic beings as pawns in their own conflicts, playing them off against one another and deploying them where possible to make life difficult for rivals. 

6. Yuan-ti should clearly feature somewhere, but are such a distinctive concept that it almost seems pointless to fiddle with them. There is a Yuan-ti empire; it is hostile to all others. It exists in the background as a constant, looming threat, and it has agents throughout the rest of the setting.

7. Where do humans and jungle giants fit in? Some humans live in the weretiger policy I mentioned earlier. Many others are enslaved by the Yuan-ti. Others still live under the rakshasa. But perhaps also this setting contains a city-state (presumptively where adventurers start off) with a mostly human population but which is ruled by jungle giants. And perhaps the jungle giants are, in fact, akin to Amazons - tall, powerful, female rulers who hold sway over the humans but offer them protection. 

That would do for starters. I haven't really done anything with the tasloi or dragons, yet. Certainly, I could see space for an emerald dragon dwelling in a dormant volcano somewhere in the jungle. Perhaps he or she has a black dragon rival, too. But we see a setting take shape, and this would obviously be a productive way to approach designing icy/deserty settings too. 

'It Has Killing In It'

What was the first piece of media you consumed which 'had killing in it'? 

I ask because a certain girl I happen to know has recently been reading the Warriors or Warrior Cats series at bedtime. For those who don't know it - and I should stress I know almost nothing about it - it seems to be a sort of cross between Redwall, Harry Potter and Rainbow Magic. A coterie of authors writes the novels and they involve, well, warrior cats doing, er, warrior cat things. There are clans to which the characters all seem to belong, and the plot of the first book appears to involve a Muggle housecat who runs away from home and finds a new one with his wizard warrior compadres. There is not, I should make clear, a 'sorting collar' and the clans are not called Gryffinpuss, Slithermiaow, Hufflepurr, or Kittyclaw. 

Readers familiar with the books will be able to tell me if they are dreadful doggerel or surprisingly good, or somewhere in between. But what this post really occasioned was my daughter's remark, made to me last night, that she feels the books are very advanced because they 'have killing in them'.

I took this to mean that violent death is a feature of the books. And I reflected that she was probably right. There is 'killing' in Harry Potter. But most of the material she will have read up to this point, including things like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Lottie Brooks etc., will have been fairly milquetoast. There won't have been a lot of jeopardy or high drama. 

This set me off reminiscing about being a child. I think I too had this conception in my mind that there was a distinction to be drawn between kids' entertainment and that for adults, with 'having killing in' being an important aspect of the difference. The type of books I was reading at the local library aged 7 or 8 or so would not I think have had killing in them. But then I got onto The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Fighting Fantasy books, and so on, and this felt like a major watershed moment. Suddenly I was reading books in which people killed each other. I was a big boy, now.

What is curious about this is that the young child appears to have in his or her mind, even from toddlership, an idea that 'having killing in it' is a distinct category from fairy tale death. Fairy tales have death in. Admittedly many fairy tales are Bowdlerised these days to an absurd degree - the three little pigs befriend the wolf and teach him how to be a vegetarian, etc. - but you can still find versions in which characters are eaten, drowned, burned and so on. Yet children appear to be able to separate fairy tale death from acts of actual killing in their minds. It is only when one graduates to books that have killing in them that one has move beyond the fairy tale, which concerns death and yet which at the same time somehow doesn't.

I can't remember the exact moment I first encountered a book with killing in it, but I am fairly sure that it was The Hobbit, and I can vaguely remember the thrill it gave me when I realised that the cartoon violence with which I was familiar had been superseded by something much more serious and grand. This the point in a life in which one puts away childish things and starts reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A Rubicon has been crossed and there is no going back.

The River and the River

Near the Amazonian city of Manaus there is a place where the Amazon proper (the upper section of which in Brazil is called the Rio Solimões) meets the Rio Negro, which flows in to meet it from Colombia. The Amazon is cooler, faster, and carries sediment from the Andes; the Rio Negro is slower, warmer, and full of decaying plant life. For a period the two run alongside each other in contrast, until they gradually integrate:

This is one of those places in the world which screams 'Make me into a setting for an RPG, you fool! Do it at once!', and the setting indeed almost writes itself. Clearly, the two rivers bring with them two very different sets of fantasy furniture, and where they meet there is a great city which incorporates both. Perhaps, indeed, that city is even a kind of neutral zone where two otherwise hostile ways of life can live alongside one another in something approaching harmony. And naturally, there's a megadungeon underneath.

The Dark River is organic, magical, sensual, amoral, ritual-based, and fecund. But it also partly originates in, and incorporates, death and decay; many of its inhabitants are undead. It is powerful in the sense in which a jungle is full of green vibrancy and dangerous life. 

The Light River is inorganic, holy, rational, moralistic, honour-based, and productive. It ultimately comes from the mountains; it is imbued with elemental energy. It is rich in the sense that mountains bring forth the wealth that is buried beneath the earth. 

It is too easy to say that the Dark River is feminine and the Light River masculine, or that the Dark River is yin and the Light River is yang, or that the Dark River is right-hemisphere and the Light River is left-hemisphere. But it is hard to get away entirely from those binaries and they exist for a reason and are enjoyable to problematise and poke and prod at. I would want the setting to hint at and echo them without trading on the distinction too obviously. The contrast between jungle energy and mountain energy seems more 'right' to me somehow. 

The peoples who dwell along the two rivers are mutually antagonistic for all manner of reasons, but the city imposes order on them. It is a city which I think ought indeed to be ruled by a race of giant warrior-women, the Amazons of legend, who forge the two river-worlds into an uneasy but cohesive polity. Presuambly, that city is situated on a river island around which they both flow. Maybe it is even situated on a river island that lies in the middle of a delta: maybe these two rivers come together only at the very point at which they meet the ocean:

What lies beneath? What do PCs who come to the River and the River explore? The science fantasy impulse suggests that buried beneath the island is an alien space vessel; the straight fantasy impulse suggests the ruins of a lost civilization; the horror impulse suggests the corpse of a dead river god, filled with demonic entities. The PCs venture down to bring forth what treasures lie buried there.

These are the thoughts which occur to me sitting in my office idling away when I ought to be working. What are yours? 

Why Build Worlds?

 

The creation of a world - mapping it, populating it, chronicling its history - is in itself a hobby. I suspect for a lot of DMs it is indeed actually the main purpose of RPGs. The game is really just an excuse to indulge in Tolkienian sub-creation. 

There is nothing wrong with this: I consider it to be my hobby too. But I would like to use this post as an opportunity to probe into where its pleasure comes from.

The first is generic to all hobbies: when engaged in some aspect of world-creation it is easy to get caught up in the activity and enter a flow-state which is in itself pleasurable. This is something akin to what lay people sometimes refer to as 'mindulfness', but it is really the absolute opposite of that. It is a state of being in which one truly presences, reflecting neither on one's physical self nor on one's thoughts, but simply being in the activity itself. One is allowing oneself to be carried along by the act of doing, as  though on a river. This is enjoyable for its own sake. It is a retreat from intrusive thoughts and quotidian activities, to be sure, but it is not merely escapist. There is a kind of happiness (dare I even say 'joy'?) in the feeling that one's conscious, subconscious, and physical self are all bent towards the same goal.

The second is that it is escapist, and there is nothing wrong with that. Life can be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short even when not in Hobbes' state of nature (Spinoza once said that we never leave the state of nature, anyway). And we therefore take what pleasures we can find. Drawing maps and thinking about elves is a lot more wholesome and worthwhile than watching TV, if retreat from the sheer banal horror of your humdrum existence is all that you are searching for. It is an opportunity to create something which, even if nobody else even looks at it or knows of its existence, can be pleasing to your eye, your mind, your soul. So why-ever not? 

The third is that it is a small act of rebellion against the inescapable and terrifying fact that there is only one world that you will ever live in. It is grotesquely unfair that, with an entire universe on our doorsteps, the best that any person can ever do is explore a small part of the surface area of one single planet. It is even more grotesquely unfair that there are many more universes that can be imagined and we will never be able to explore any of those. This - the fact that we are able to imagine places we can never go - is a monstrous constraint and one about which we should be outraged. Channel that rage into something useful: get as close as you can to possessing all of reality and all other realities as your oyster by, God-like, detailing your imagined corner of creation. 

The fourth is that it is also a small act of rebellion against the banality of small-mindedness. There are lots of people out there who not only want to stay swimming in their own tiny intellectual fishbowls and never go out into the ocean of the mind, but want everybody else to be the same way too. Well, remember Cinderalla's admonition - they can order you to do all kinds of things, but they can't order you to stop dreaming. 

And the fifth, related pleasure is that it is so liberating. Debbie Harry sang 'Dreaming is free'. I have always loved that line. Dreaming costs nothing. But it also frees us: in the world of dreams there are no constraints. It doesn't matter how poor you are, how crappy your home life is, how lonely you feel, how bored you are. You can get a piece of paper and a pencil and, within your relationship to those obejcts, make yourself free. 

The world needs a bit of subcreation here and there. So what, really, is stopping you?