Must the World Be Saved?

It is hard to reflect objectively on the nature of a book that is so well-known and which has been so influential as The Lord of the Rings. This means that we rarely, if ever, dwell on how strange it is: since its furniture is still to a large extent the furniture of the entire genre, we accept it as unthinkingly as we accept the decor in our own living rooms.

But the central feature of The Lord of the Rings is far from normal or banal - at its core it rests on positive answers to three questions which other novelists, prior to Tolkien, would rarely if ever have even thought to ask, namely:

1. Is it necessary to save the world?

2. Is it possible to?

3. Is it desirable?

In Tolkien's story, that is, the world is threatened, but it can be saved, however improbably, and it is worth saving. 

These are by no means the obvious answers to those questions, particularly when the questions are not being examined through a filter of Christianity, and ever since Tolkien was writing the major figures of the genre have been rowing back from them. To most genre writers today, save-the-world plots are a bit passe - it either isn't necessary to save the world to begin with (A Song of Ice and Fire; The Scar), is impossible (Lyonesse; Viriconium), or would not be particularly desirable in the first place (Stone Dance of the Chamleon). There are big exceptions, naturally, Gene Wolfe's work being very obviously and explicitly in the Tolkienian tradition, but overall the shift has been towards a much more secularised understanding of the role of humanity in the ongoing existence and justification of The World.

While this has no doubt opened the genre up to more creative applications - nobody would want endless Terry Brooks or Tad Williams retreads, as charming as they can be - the result can sometimes be a rejection of the concept of salvation as such. There is a strong antiheroic strand in modern fantasy writing (and particularly modern fantasy gaming) which rejects the very notion that there may indeed be things beyond the self that are worth saving from some threat - be they a nation, a place, a family, or even a single soul. In OSR gaming in particular the emphasis is almost exclusively on the mere survival or glorification of the individual often set against a backdrop of a decaying reality which is itself irredeemable or moribund. (This has even got itself a label: the aesthetics of ruin.) This is enjoyable, but thin; it does not speak to the drive within the human heart to be redeemed, or to redeem others.

I would like to find a way to combine the Old School emphasis on emergent narrative with the Tolkienian answers to the three questions posited above. I would like to design a game that is about redemption, or salvation, but that does so in a way that avoids railroading and predetermined narrative or plot. And I would like to do it in such a way that it makes use of the insights developed in the laboratory of OSR gaming. I have written various posts on this theme in the last couple of years, and have now collected them under the label of the Paladin Project. This can be considered a statement, or manifesto: expect more concrete details in the coming months. 

The Quadrants of Modern Fantasy

An entertaining recent episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy brought up the question of how to distinguish the genre of sword & sorcery from epic (or high) fantasy. I am a sucker for this kind of discussion, and I liked the answers offered, particularly the shorthand of 'If it reminds you of Conan the Barbarian, it's sword & sorcery, and if it reminds you of The Lord of the Rings, it's epic fantasy.' The problem with this definition of course is that there are lots of fantasy books that remind you of neither (Perdido Street Station, A Song of Ice and Fire, Little, Big) and lots that remind you of both (The Wizard Knight, Wizard's First Rule). And it also relies of course on received ideas about genre that may not be accurate. There are probably not many fantasy fans who have not read The Lord of the Rings but there will be many who have not read the Conan stories, or read them very deeply, and therefore form an impression of what they are like from cliche and hearsay. 

And that's of course to set to one side the existence of other subgenres - sword & sandal; science fantasy; low fantasy; etc. - which may or may not fall outside of this rubric altogether.

Entirely as a way of encouraging debate about this Extremely Important Issue, I would like to propose an alternative model for classifying fantasy fiction that is slightly more abstract. Here, the aim is not to rigidly box off individual works into neat categories, but rather to locate them thematically in such a way that no appeal needs to be made to specific genre furniture (such as that sword & sorcery books tend to treat magic as suspect and dangerous; that sword & sorcery books tend to have anti-heroes; that high fantasy books tend to involve saving the world; and so on), which always have so many exceptions that they are pointless in defining categories.

My proposal then is that the modern fantasy genre can be divided into four quadrants, reflecting two broad axes that cut across the field and which seem to me to be important.

The first of these axes concerns the locus of the fiction: is it concerned with the fate of the individual or the world? I don't mean by this that the action is focused on one particular viewpoint character or incorporates many. Rather, I mean that there are some books that are concerned with a particular individual's (or set of individuals') struggle to find his own place in the world, and some books that are chiefly concerned with the fate of something much bigger - society, civilisation, the world itself - that tends to occupy the attention of the protagonist, 

And the second of these axes concerns what we'll call eschatology. Is there considered to be a final doom of the world, whether that is just something which is possible, or inevitable? Or is the world one of open historicity without a final cause or end? Does it just go on and on and on...?

Here, then, is a stab at plotting major fantasy works as follows:

Yes, yes, I know - Malazan Book of the Fallen. This me after I'd screenshotted the chart. What I'd like to focus on here is that this seems to group fantasy fiction in a way that does not do an injustice to important existing intuitions about what belongs where, but which also does not (I think) dwell too much on superficialities or tropes. Rather, it directs attention to certain themes which seem to my eye to transcend distinctions about substance (In Book X technology is vaguely medieval whereas in Book Y there are spaceships, etc.), and which rather concern genuine philosophical differences. For instance, it seems to me to matter that in the Bas Lag books the word as such will not 'end', whereas in The Lord of the Rings, it might, or indeed, in the fullness of time, will. And this matters much more than, say, the distinction that in the Bas Lag books technology has advanced to the steam age whereas in LOTR it has not.

You may now quibble with the existence of the axes, the places I have located the various works, and the purpose of the entire project, in the comments. 

All Work and No Play Makes Noisms a [Insert Insult of Choice Here]

For the past six weeks, this blog has lain in quiscence. There is a simple reason for this: I had too much going on. What I learned this summer was that there is only so long that one can maintain a 'proper' career, devote time to one's kids, run in effect two micro-businesses (my various RPG ventures, and another separate unrelated one), and keep up with the dramas that can arise in one's family and personal life, before something gives. At a certain point, in the same way that one's body under hardship focuses its energies on core functions, I found that my mind was taking a ruthless approach to making distinctions between necessary and unnecessary tasks. And posting here at Monsters & Manuals, regrettably, found itself in the category of 'Unnecessary Tasks'. 

The 'Necessary Tasks' column has, however, now thankfully had a large number of entries crossed out, and I find myself, like some previously hibernating animal, emerging from darkness into sunlight. I am a bit dazed and confused. But I also feel reinvigorated and full of ideas. And this is at least in part because I have discovered - this is likely also true of you, if you are reading this - that the imaginative, escapist aspect of the tabletop roleplaying hobby is not just a nice luxury but actually meets an important need of some kind that lies deep in my character.

There is an irony, here, in other words: for all that writing this blog was for some time 'unnecessary' in terms of immediate and pressing goals, it was connected to something that is actually very necessary in managing my stress levels - i.e. neckbeard elfgames. It is Important with a capital 'I' that I have imaginative outlets. If I don't, I become grumpy, short-tempered and boring. (Okay, okay, even more grumpy, short-tempered and boring.) Worse, I feel angsty and unfulfilled, as though there is a caged animal inside me that, in its frustration at not being allowed out, is beginning to attack its own cage with teeth and claws.

I can't explain why this is or why it is that I feel this way while others may get the same feeling from watching films or TV or playing video games or watching/playing sports or knitting or whatever else it might be. But I do feel this way and recognise it as a significant feature of my personality that will not change. 

In the forthcoming days and weeks, I intend to get back to a proper pattern of regular, two-or-three-times-a-week blogging. I also intend to get back to producing actual material for future releases. And I also have exciting news about forthcoming publication(s). But in the meantime, it's nice to be back - if anybody is still reading, of course! 

The 'I Want' PC

Readers who do not live in the dank earth beneath rocks with only woodlice and earthworms for company will no doubt have heard of something called K-Pop Demon Hunters. If you haven't heard of it: now you have, and the title is essentially everything you need to know. It's about K-Pop Demon Hunters - trust me, you now don't have to watch it.

The silver lining in the cloud that is having K-Pop Demon Hunters-obsessed children is that the songs are actually pretty catchy and well-executed, even if the lyrics are cringe-inducing doggerel ('Heels, nails, blade, mascara/Fit check for my napalm era/Need to beat my face, make it cute and savage/Mirror, mirror on my phone, who's the baddest?', indeed). And the soundtrack does have one bona fide banger of an 'I Want' Song: the uplifting, Let-It-Go-beating, every-local-grab-a-granny-nightclub-in-the-country-will-be-playing-this-for-years anthem, Golden. 

If you're wondering what an 'I Want' song is, it's the phrase used to describe the songs that basically all musicals have these days, in which the main character (typically a Disney princess) gives vent to her special snowflake feelings and proclaims the desire to escape social expectation/veer from the path laid out before her/find her true self/break free from an overbearing parent/etc. Prominent examples would include:

This species of song, and its role in the films in which it appears, is easily lampooned, but it is important to remember that everybody is young once, and it would be concerning to inhabit a world in which young people are not moved by the theme of 'I Want' songs. This is a necessary part of adolescence: feeling as though one is misunderstood, as though one has a special calling in life, and as though one is destined to do amazing things. What a sad indictment of the culture it would be if such songs did not exist.

For a long time, RPG culture has tilted in the direction of what I will call the 'I Want' PC, no doubt because this speaks to the adolescent craving to be special and because adolescents (and permament adolescents, let's face it) are the core audience for table top RPGs. I can well remember understanding, even as a 13-year-old, that my own instincts and feeling were being manipulated by the game designers in the extensive chargen options they laid before me so as to create my own, uniquely interesting and special, tiefling/werewolf/turtle-man fighter-mage with glaive proficiency and the curse of the bard's tongue. I recognised that this was manipulative even as I revelled in it; a very great deal of the fun that my friends and I got out of, say, Shadowrun or Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Cyberpunk 2020 was the process of simply making up characters.

A good 'I Want' PC should have the following characteristics:

1 - He or she should be wrestling with inner demons - and he or she must be driven by this sense of turmoil in the direction of adventure, preferably reluctantly. The K-Pop Demon Hunters iteration of this is that the main character, Rumi, is herself half-demon and gradually transforming into one; I have only caught snippets of the things because I find the experience of watching the film to be almost physically painful, but I understand this somehow gets resolved. See also: Elsa from Frozen, who can't control her ice magic powers; Ariel from The Little Mermaid, who wants to be human; Luke Skywalker, who wants to get out of Tatooine, etc. 

2 - He or she should be a misfit and set apart from society, preferably having been bullied or ostracised for some reason. Think Elphaba from Wicked with her green skin, Belle from Beauty & The Beast and her obsession with books, Harry Potter and his upbringing with the Dursleys, and so on. 

3 - He or she should have a special gift or blessing that makes for genuine superiority over the hoi polloi. It is no good wrestling with inner demons and being a misfit if one is not a misunderstood genius of some kind to compensate. Hence Harry Potter is actually the chosen one, Elsa is actually a demigod-like ice sorceress, Luke Skywalker is actually a Jedi and can use the Force, Moana is actually a blessed navigator, and so on.

Not all 'I Want' characters have all three of these characteristics but an 'I Want' PC really should. And it is fairly straightforward to make up some tables to supply them. Here is a 1d8 one, but you could easily expand it to 1d30, 1d100, etc. with more detailed rows:

1d8	Inner demons	Misfit because…	Special gift
1	Actually has an inner demon	Is especially ugly or in some other way repellent	Can manipulate one of the elements
2	Wants to be physically different in some way	Has very distinctively coloured skin or some other unusual physical feature or mutation	Can always tell when somebody is lying
3	Has an uncontrollable, destructive power	Is an orphan and has been raised in unusual circumstances	Can teleport short distances
4	Was prophesied to have a vitally important life mission	Has been raised by neglectful or cruel parents or guardians	Can go invisible for short periods
5	Has a ‘dark side’ that comes out in some specified set of circumstances	Has a disability that is maligned by a misunderstanding society, such as mutism or deafness	Can fly for short periods
6	Goes through periods of debilitating depression, weakness, lethargy, etc.	Is of a different species or is a different type of entity to those in mainstream society	Has X-ray vision
7	Has an uncontrollable appetite or unrestrainable addiction	Has a strange social impairment such as an inability to lie, or smile	Is telekinetic
8	Has an arch enemy	Is the victim of strange rumours	Can breathe underwater

The Roundabout Animal Fantasy World

This is a picture of 'the most dangerous roundabout' in the North East of England, not far from where I work. The persistent local rumour is that the roundabout was installed the wrong way around when it was built, in the 1960s, so that the ramps from the central motorway that take traffic up to it (it is built on a concrete flyover) are too long, and those which take traffic down from it to the motorway are too short. Certainly, exiting it northbound can be a hair-raising experience and I see pretty frequent minor collisions when walking in the vicinity - usually when a timid driver has become intimidated and hit the brakes and then been rear-ended by a somebody tailgating from behind.

The vagaries of road traffic in Newcastle upon Tyne being as they may, though, my interest in this roundabout is somewhat esoteric: I like to imagine it as a location for animal fantasy gaming.

I have had a fascination with roundabouts for a long time, partly because they are a peculiar illustration of British design genius (the first having been biult here, in the early 20th century), but mostly because of the way they tend to implant a small island of greenery into the middle of what is often a lake of concrete and tarmac populated by loud, tooting and vrooming vehicles. They are little blobs of tranquility in amongst a lot of noise and bother. And it is easy to imagine them as little universes of their own, untouched by the outside world - populated by creatures unknown, furtive, mysterious, strange.

The roundabout near where I work mostly contains rabbits. In summer, they're often out there of a morning drinking the dew off the grass and frolicking cutely in the golden sun. There are presumably also rats and mice in abundance - not to mention spiders, beetles, ants. With a little stretch of the imagination one could envisage owls and bats in the trees, perhaps a fox. This makes it relatively easy to see it as a potential Duncton Wood or Redwall-type world if given a little poetic license with regard to scale - the roundabout I am describing is perhaps 25 metres in diameter, whereas if it felt more like 100 metres then you would be cooking with gas for a 'mice with swords' or 'moles who war over sacred menhirs' or 'rabbits who set up a totalitarian dictatorship' campaign setting.

But another idea, I think more compelling, would be one in which the roundabout itself serves as a kind of gateway to another realm - a realm of Nature, or Aelfrice, or faerie; something like a Mythago Wood of the big bad city. While the roundabout may only look, from the outside, as though it is 25m across, when one has stepped into the trees one suddenly finds oneself able to travel in deeper, and deeper, and deeper, as though the greenery never ends. There, the noise of the traffic rapidly recedes, and one is then brought into another reality - a world of natural magic, of fox-men and owl gods and crow kings and mole-women, of masked outlaws and lost wanderers from ancient days, of ghosts and spirits and dark creeping nameless things thirsty for blood or men's souls.

There are two ways of taking this latter option. The first conceit could be that the PCs are animals (rabbits, mice, whatever) who have made their way to the roundabout and wandered through the gateway, and have then found themselves transformed into intelligent, humanoid versions of themselves. Perhaps this is just what happens when passing beyond the threshold, and perhaps they return to normal when passing back through it. Perhaps there is a miniature society of creatures who do this.

The second conceit could be that the PCs are urban explorers, occultists, paranormal researchers, or whatever, who know of the gateway and go back and forth through it. Retaining the animal fantasy motif, perhaps beyond the gateway itself there are many 'raised' or 'fae' animals who inhabit an entire world. Perhaps some of these beings are hostile, perhaps some are welcoming, perhaps some are in between - perhaps most are not what they seem. Perhaps they bestow gifts or possess goods that are of use in our world - or impose curses on interlopers. 

Either way, the sense of the roundabout as small, visible and isolated and yet the same time a threshold to something vast and unknowable is compelling. Roundabouts, as they are, stand as small pockets of mystery within the urban landscape - the trick is to turn them into more than mere pockets: into worlds. 

Monster Manual Deadly 60

Do Americans know about Deadly 60? This is a kids' wildlife programme that has been aired on the BBC since 2009; the conceit is that the presenter, Steve Backshall, travels to a different location each episode in search of a few of 'the Deadly 60', meaning the sixty 'deadliest' animals on the planet. 

How 'deadly' is defined is never made explicit - sometimes it seems to mean 'deadly to humans' (king cobra, crocodile, black widow, and so on) and sometimes it seems to mean 'deadly to its prey' (chameleon, gannet, dolphin). Each creature on the list is given a Top Trumps style set of stats for things like speed, weapons, armour, etc., but these seem to just be assigned for fun and Steve has by now encountered far, far more than sixty animals. Really, it is just a wheeze for an entertaining programme about wildlife - and it works surprisingly well for an adult audience as well as for kids. There is a mixture of real-life animal-bothering (excuses are often made for Steve to get into situations in which he ends up getting nipped by a wolf, having his hand crushed by an anaconda, fending off crocodiles with sticks, etc.), fact files and experiments (is a peregrine falcon faster than a car?) and sheer japes and shenanigans - it's a very good, entertaining programme made by an evidently nice and enthusiastic team of people who get on well. I recommend it, if you are able to watch it and have children who are into wildlife.

But the reason I ask is that it brings me back to the idea, the subject of many posts passim, about exploring the world and interacting with it for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of extrinsic objectives such as treasure or XP. I do not mean to suggest that one should or could base a campaign around the 'Krynn Deadly 60' or 'Athas Deadly 60' (though that might indeed be fun...), but rather that there is something pure and refreshing about the concept of a campaign in which the PCs direct their energies towards finding weird and rare creatures to interact with rather than kill and take their stuff. 

'Interactions' cover a wide range of scenarios, though. Some thoughts:

• We are familiar with the concepts of snake charming, lion taming and the like. It is difficult perhaps to envisage how to make a long-term, open-ended campaign about a troupe of dragon tamers or cyclops hypnotisers or gargantua charmers who rove the wilderness in search of subjects...but not impossible.
• The PCs are in the employ of a wealthy eccentric/scholarly institute/guild/menagerie, etc., and go off in search of exotic creatures to bring back alive.
• The PCs are wannabe Steve Backshalls (or Herculeses) who simply want to test their strength against dangerous, powerful or strange monsters - wrestling hydras, boxing minotaurs, riding tarrasques and so on - without killing them.
• The PCs are themselves scholars who go out in order to study and learn about the capabilities and behaviour of monsters for the sake of the advancement of knowledge, presumably working for some kind of institute of higher education.
• The PCs are 'beast masters' who gain abilities, enhanced spiritual awareness, good juju, or whatever, from communing with monstrous beings

And so on.

The trick here is, as ever, to come up with ways to advance levels without deploying XP for gold, or at least in such a way as to emulate what is good about XP for gold through another form of token. One of the underrated virtues of XP for gold is that, in encouraging the PCs to amass wealth, it opens avenues to different modes of gameplay through the spending of their fortunes on, for example, commercial ventures, fortresses, specialist hirelings, and so on. Any replacement XP method should ideally have this potential, but it is difficult to see how this can be facilitated within the confines of a campaign focusing on PC-to-monster interactions.

Lie Back and Think of Rivendell

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes raises the important question of elf reproduction avant la lettre when he opines that Adam and Eve could not have been, as it were, shagging until after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit. Before they had lost eternal life, they could not have known sex, 'For if immortals should have generated, as mankind doth now; the earth in a small time, would not have been able to afford them place to stand on.'

Now, there is an important caveat to this point, which is that while Adam and Eve had eternal life, they were in a non-Malthusian metaphysical space - they were not subject to resource constraints. So Hobbes is right with regard to this narrowly bounded scenario. If Adam and Eve were immortal, and simply procreated in the normal way, in the fullness of time there would be more Cains and Ables than atoms in the universe.

Elves, who are actually immortal (at the 'hard' Tolkien level) in terms at least of longevity, are unlike Adam and Eve presumably subject to Malthusian forces. But still, they likely face a less extreme version of this problem. If you live for a very long time, or indeed forever, you can make an awful lot of babies. And this causes headaches for reasons beyond the crying and loss of sleep. Not only would it mean overpopulation. It would also cause severe social problems with regard to the matter of inheritance - imagine the disputes that would arise over wills and probate when Great-great-great-great-great grandpa Finion is killed by a balrog, leaving behind ten thousand heirs.

Elves then presumably have ways of ensuring that they produce very few young. A range of possibilities present themselves, with varying degrees of interest/gameability:

1. They have sex, but not in a procreative way, if you catch my drift. This may be a productive idea for generating erotic fiction, but is not I think a particularly interesting thing to explore via the medium of D&D (though, as ever, your mileage may vary).
2. They have sex on rare occasions and this is perhaps timed to coincide with phases of the moon, alignments of planets, particular weather events, passing comets, etc. Totally I think gameable: imagine a campaign setting in which elves only get to have sex once every year at the time the first hurricane makes landfall at Saxinfraxin, and in order to do so every elf in the world has to travel back to a particular spot to find a mate.
3. For two elves to have sex, they need for ritualistic (or perhaps even spiritual or biological) reasons to be in the possession of a rare type of jewel, flower, metal, and so on. There is naturally huge demand for the material in question and a cottage industry of (human) adventurers and pioneers who go out into the dangerous places of the world to procure it.
4. Elves practice infanticide and child sacrifice at vast scale. This is dark. But fits nicely with my preferred conceptualisation of elves as inscrutable and unflinching Noldor/fae/Melniboneans/Eldar rather than Dragonlance style qualinesti types. And it would naturally generate interesting possibilities for adventure. (Idea for a Fantasy Novel No. 16,789: Human father of half-elf progency goes to the great elf city to rescue his infant child from sacrifice. Not bad, eh?)
5. They chiefly have sex with humans, safe in the knowledge that this will produce short-lived (to their eye) half-elf progeny. And they save sex with each other for special occasions. This sounds vaguely like the plot of one of those 'dark fantasy' novels you see on the high shelves in WH Smith - the elf who falls in love with the human he/she thought was there for mere pleasure - but there are more interesting directions to take the idea. What if, for example, having a half-elf child is thought of as a special honour or even of religious significance? And, if this practice is very common and widespread, what kind of cultural expectations, social conventions, and conflicts arise around the presence of so many half-elves in human society? 

You may have your own ideas. 

You Could Tell I Was No Purple Worm

The idea that the dreams we create in our minds while we sleep could emerge into reality is a rich seam for creators of imaginative fiction to mine. But what if monsters dreamed? Do monsters dream of electric sheep, and, if not, what do they dream of? What would come out of the mind of a dragon, beholder, orc or purple worm if its dreams could be made flesh?

Assuming that dreams make visual the emotions we experience in our daily lives, it seems fair to say that monster dreams would reflect their fears and desires. From this, we can make some preliminary guesses about the type of things that visions that would result.

Dragons, as we all know, lust after treasure and guard it jealously. And beceause of their great size and power they have basically no natural fears; due to their immense longevity they presumably do not even really fear ageing, or death. This would suggest that their dreams likely revolve around anxieties about thieves (or burglars, to cast it in Tolkienian language) and the almost erotic obsession with gathering more. Perhaps their nightmares involve the presence of small, scrabbling, scuttling creatures that steal their possessions; perhaps their ordinary dreams revolve around envy of bigger and better treasures. Made flesh, their nightmares might manifest themselves as scarcely visible entities that come creeping quietly in the night to burgle homes or backpacks - perhaps indeed when people lose items around the house they attribute it to an infestation of dragon dreams. Their ordinary dreams, on the other hand, may result in the presence of impossibly large hoards of treasure, or impossibly large jewels, which at any given moment may dissipate and turn into vapour.

Orcs live in a dog-eat-dog world - quite literally an orc-eat-orc world, even - and their greatest fears likely therefore revolve around weakness, impotence, frailty. But they probably also have an inflated sense of their own size, ferocity and importance. This would suggest that they are only intimidated by extremely large and powerful enemies. So their nightmares would manifest either as scrawny, ineffectual, wastrel beings emitting a miasma of debilitation and weakness - or else as exaggeratedly aggressive, mighty, rapacious monstrosities bent on absolute domination. Their dreams would rather be suggestive of the things that orcs most desire - perhaps extremely subservient and readily commanded natural slaves, who wander about the landscape until somebody chooses to take mastery of them?

Elves' nightmares are, undoubtedly, to do with barbarism and filth. They despise the dirty and the debased, the grubby and the profane - they probably, it can be assumed, have nightmares about the uncouth, the unclean, the uncivilised. The visions that ensure correspond to these fears: elf-nightmares made real are the very expression of not just barbarism but the glorying in it - humanoid embodiments of gluttony, lust, ugliness, depravity. The good elf dream-visions on the other hand can be imagined as the opposite - visions of beauty and perfection that leave the viewer transfixed, or maybe the seductive, siren-like appearance of music or a hyper-real natural landscape that the human viewer longs to enter and cannot be induced to leave.

Goblins, flighty, self-interested, undisciplined, rivalrous, fear anything that is disciplined and solid - really anything that imposes order in the world. It seems plausible that their nightmares would be of strong, stolid beings with the power and wherewithal to enslave them and boss them around. Perhaps these would manifest as big, unquestionably and unchallengably authoritarian entities given to imposing apparently arbitrary demands on any they encounter. Goblins' good dreams, on the other hand, may look like sheer luxury as a goblin would understand it - bacchanalian revelry taken to the most orgiastic extreme? 

The question then arises as to whether perhaps some existing D&D creatures are merely the figments of others' dreams. Goblin nightmares sound rather a lot like they might just be stereotyped dwarfs. Elf nigtmares sound a bit like they could be orcs. Orc nightmares might be trolls or ogres. And are dragon nightmares just hobbits? 

Incomplete List of High Concept Single or Duo PC Campaigns

I have often thought there is a gap in the market for one-on-one (i.e., one PC and one DM) campaigns in which the PC is a 'high concept' character from a work of literature or folk tale. This could perhaps take on an aspect of storygamish co-creation rather than being a straightforward 'old school' campaign, although the latter would work well too. 

Some examples will illustrate this idea best:

The Mayor from Hamelin. In some accounts of the Pied Piper legend, the Mayor is exiled from the town to wander the Earth until he finds the lost children, 'and is still wandering now'. There is a high concept campaign for you - with the Mayor passing through the centuries and witnessing history unfold as he pursues his desperate quest to save the youth of Hamelin (even though their parents, parents' parents, parents' parents' parents, and so on, are long dead).

Rumpelstiltskin's Child. What if the queen had never guessed Rumpelstiltskin's name? He would have taken her baby away. What would have become of a child raised by the malevolent dwarf? (This is an example that could in fact be extended to a group of PCs, working on the assumption that Rumpelstiltskin is a habitual child-thief.) 

The Man of the Crowd. So...who was Poe's 'Man of the Crowd'? Let's find out.

The Blue Wizards. This has come up on the blog before, and it is perhaps an idea that has become trite. Strictly speaking, it would also have to be a two-PC, rather than one-PC, campaign. But the story of what happened to Tolkien's Blue Wizards, compadres of Gandalf, Radagast and Saruman, is for me one of the most evocative and stimulating mysteries in fantasy fiction. 

Reepicheep. At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Reepicheep goes off on a great adventure, in search of the End of the World. What does he find on his way?

Moriarty. In the NextGen episode, 'Ship in a Bottle', the villainous hologram, Moriarty, is trapped in a memory cube which contains an entire galaxy for him to spend eternity exploring. What kind of a galaxy is it? What happens on Moriarty's infinite adventures?

I could go on, but you get the drift. The implication of this idea is that the main PC would somehow have plot immunity, although it would not necessarily have to be the case; if the main PC were to die, the focus could of course simply switch to another character already present or invented. (The son of Reepicheep? The Man of the Crowd's wife?)

How to Describe a Campaign Setting in One Song or Less

A long, long time ago, I can still remember when I wrote a post that made me smile. It was called How to Describe a Campaign Setting in Twenty Five Words or Less, and it was about how to describe a campaign setting in twenty five words or less fewer. The idea is straightforward: twenty-five words (or fewer) is enough to capture the essence of a mood that one desires to impart to prospective players/readers. 

Today, while listening to everybody's favourite scientology-infused mid-70s jazz fusion band, Return to Forever, it occurred to me that this approach to on-the-fly campaign-setting could be augmented by musical soundtracks. Hence, here is a campaign setting in twenty-five words or fewer to the tune of 'The Shadow of Io':

Sword and planet, Barbarella, Buck Rogers, cloud cities, space barges, planetary spheres, Spelljammer, laser blasters, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Amazing Stories, moons, wonder, exploration, odyssey

Hence also:

November, mud, pastoral, overground, Tom Bombadil, faerie, talking animals, hedge witches, redcaps, knockers, black dogs, English gothic, green men, Mythago Wood, hey nonno no!

Andalusia, bullfighting, reconquista, Moors, Carthaginians, sherry, oranges, sunshine, Alhambra, alumbradismo, inquisition, Sierra Nevada, siestas, clergy, monks, gypsies

Abyss, demonic intrusion, summoning, secret societies, goetia, Testament of Solomon, exorcism, possession, warlocks, smiting and banishment, high magic, black magic, sacrifice

Last heavenly city, monasteries, cathedrals, fading defiant grandeur, theocracy, civilisation against barbarism, keeping the flame, paladins, Lanthanum Chromate, Gondor, Viriconium, Nessus

Admittedly some of these examples are rather 'on the nose', but an interesting experiment would be to shuffle one of your Spotify playlists and see what inspiration you come up with, being led by the music first. 

Thoughts on Real World Dungeoneering

My house has a big and eccentrically designed cellar. The house was constructed around 1930 on a pretty steep hillside that once was riddled with drift mines (there is in fact a blocked-up entrance to a mine shaft in my back garden, which was revealed during excavations we did a few years ago - you can see the two concrete supports on either side of the filled-in opening in the picture below). And the cellar backs into the hill itself, so that for the rear two-thirds of it the floor is actually just the raw earth, sloping upwards from front to back of the house.  

We don't venture down there very often (the front third of the cellar has a proper concrete floor and we use it chiefly as an oubliette for the vast amounts of junk we've accumulated over the years; bicycle storage; stowing away gardening equipment, etc.). And it is a pretty spooky environment. It is divided into fairly sizeable chambers by brick walls which serve to support the floor of the house, and between these chambers are little crawlspaces through which you can wriggle if you need to - for instance, just off the top of my head - get rid of the corpse of a rat which has somehow found its way down there and is slowly decomposing and creating a stink in the summer heat. It is dark, dank, and oppressive, the domain of those annoyingly frail, gangly-legged spiders, and whenever I go down there I can never quite shake the feeling that I am going to encounter a witch, werewolf, or gremlin. 

I have made a number of observations during my explorations of this space over the time we've lived in the house that I think are useful to reflect on when imagining what dungeoneering would, quote-unquote, 'really be like'. Of course, it is impossible to really imagine what it would be like to explore an underground environment populated by orcs, black puddings, dragons and rats russet molds. But still, the experience has been helpful. Some lessons I have learned that I think would help to add to the verissimilitude of tabletop dungeoneering include:

• It is astonishing how disorienting and isolating an experience it is to be underground and away from daylight. Even if the cellar door is wide open on a sunny, breezy day and there is therefore plenty of natural light and air pouring in, as soon as there is a single wall between me and the door, I feel like I might as well be at the bottom of the ocean or on Mars. There is a vague awareness of distant noise - the far-off footsteps and shouts of the wife and kids; vehicles passing somewhere; the rumour of weather. But the world seems to close in to the immediate, small, boxed-off room which I occupy. And this is true within the cellar itself, wherein each little mini-room feels like its own universe. Before my adventures in my own cellar, I often thought that it was quite unrealistic in a dungeon environment to have neighbouring rooms with wildly varying content (why doesn't the tarantella in room 38 ever bother the tribe of orcs in room 37?). Now, I worry about that much less.
• By the same token, sounds and smells work very differently underground. It is not that when one is in a dungeon chamber one is hermetically sealed from all external stimuli. But it is the case that it is remarkably hard to pinpoint where sounds in particular are coming from. This, I think, is to do with the effect of echoes and also the fact that sounds emerge not through the walls themselves but through the gaps in the walls, which can fool the mind into thinking it 'knows' the sources of noise. I have often wanted to better systematise how sounds and smells travel underground. My experience in my cellar has indicated to me that this is a task requiring more work and thought than might first be realised. 
• Crawling about underground is a workout - far more tiring than walking around, and particularly if it involves forcing oneself through holes or gaps in walls. Even if one is able to stand and walk, if one has to bend one's head at all, one feels uncomfortable and tense essentially all the time. This takes a toll. Travel in a dungeon would be slow and would have to take place in small doses.
• Other inconveniences include general filth, scrapes and cuts, and the fact that one rapidly finds a layer of grime and dust coating one's nostrils and throat. 
• You are extremely vulnerable in cramped spaces. Stooped over, or - worse - crawling along on one's elbows, you would find it extremely difficult to even think about fighting, let alone do it. Your focus is on just avoiding pain (bumped heads or elbows or knees) and actually getting from A to B. Ambushes by subterranean natives would be incredibly easy to pull off on surface dwellers. 
• You do not quite realise this when you are down there, because you are mostly focused on the task at hand, but you rapidly become depressed, miserable, and nervous - as well as irritable and jumpy. When you emerge into the natural light it washes over you like a balm and you feel a vast sense of elation, and it is then that you notice you have spent the last half hour in a state of low-level tension. A day of dungeoneering would be unbearably oppressive - people (hirelings and henchmen, anyway) would with a reasonbale degree of frequency go mad, panic, or just quit. 
• There is a lot to be packed into a micro-environment underground. My cellar has, I would say, about eight distinct 'rooms', each of them just a few square metres in size. But each has its own 'feel' and its own content, and is relatively self-contained. There is a considerable amount of advnture down there, and that's without orcs and grey oozes and mimics (or treasure chests) to enliven the experience. As with hexmaps (see here, here, here, here and here), dungeons could contain a lot of stuff in small area. 

Not all of this is easily operationalised or systematised in play. But it can inform how things are thought about, designed, analysed and described. Just as actually travelling about in real wildernesses can inform how an overland campaign is executed, so actually crawling about in cellars can add depth and realism to a dungeoneering expedition. 

Towards a Complete List of Excellent Medieval/Fantasy Combat Scenes

Like, I suspect, 99.9% of my readers, I love a good film combat scene. Some non-fantasy favourites include the big gun battle towards the end of Heat, the final shoot-out in The Way of the Gun, the knife fight in Eastern Promises (A History of Violence has other good Cronenberg fight scenes) and the (criminally underrated) showdown in the (criminally underrated) David Mamet cult classic Heist. 

My preference for combat scenes is that they look realistic. This is not to say that any combat scene in a film is ever really 'realistic' (real life fights are mostly defined by none of the combatants having much of a clue what is going on). But I like the aesthetic of gritty, relatively unshowy, relatively low-key, but still exciting, encounters.

Here is a brief list of some favourites. You are encouraged to add your own in the comments:

The 'forest battle scene' from towards the start of Kingdom of Heaven. This receives negative points for heavily featuring Orloondo Bland, but bonus points for including the rarely-seen but laudable trope of combatants getting injured but still fighting on. Also notable for featuring David Thewlis, cast against type, as a wily knight templar.

Without wishing to go full Ridley Scott-fanboy, one would have to have a heart of stone not to appreciate the opening battle from Gladiator. When this film first came out, I saw it in the cinema one Saturday afternoon and then immediately went back into the cinema for the early evening showing. And this initial sequence remains a highlight in cinematic history, if you ask me.

The final fight in Roman Polanski's Macbeth. 'But bearlike I must fight the COURSE!' I just love the combination of brutality, bravura and bombast in this scene, shown in long, carefully placed shots, without a score to speak of. Note how quick they are with their weapons and dancing about in their armour (I have been told this is actually more realistic than the more laboured movements one sees in modern cinematic sword fights). 

The 2003 Beat Takeshi version of Zatoichi is my favourite. Japanese jidaigeki of this type always contain a scene in which a single samurai swordsman vaporises a collection of yakuza mooks. This one is executed with particular aplomb.

One of the boons of the internet age is of course that you get the chance to imbibe material shared by friends or acquaintances that would have simply been inaccessible (often literally) in times past. This scene from the 1974 Polish film The Deluge is a classic example.

Not exactly a fight scene, perhaps, but a scene of typical Mel Gibsonian extravagance and balls-to-the-wall film-making. Apocalypto is deeply flawed, but that it was made at all is impressive. And the spectacle is superb. 

The fight between Glass and Fitzgerland at the end of The Revenant is interesting for its focus on the knife. The fighters can tolerate any injury provided they are in control of the weapon, or at least so long as the other does not control it. 

Feel free to add your own!

What Monster Would Satan Be?

In a flash of idle curiosity today, I asked ChatGPT the following question:

If you could be any D&D monster, which would you choose and why?

Its response was:

Fun question! If I could be any Dungeons & Dragons monster, I’d choose to be a **Beholder**—and here’s why:

---

### 👁️ **Beholder: The Floating Eye Tyrant**

* **Appearance**: A giant floating orb with a huge central eye, a massive toothy maw, and **ten eyestalks**, each firing a different magical ray (like disintegration, paralysis, fear, or sleep).

* **Mindset**: They're **hyper-intelligent, paranoid, and creative**. Every beholder sees itself as utterly unique and superior—bordering on megalomania.

* **Powers**: Their eye rays make them **one-monster armies**, capable of dealing with nearly any threat through a mix of brute force and control magic.

* **Lairs**: They shape their homes with magic to suit their floating form—full of vertical spaces, deadly traps, and strange architecture. A beholder’s lair is almost like a living puzzle.

---

### 🧠 Why I’d pick it:

* **Ultimate control**: Beholders are masters of their domains, both physically and mentally. They can manipulate, scheme, and obliterate from a distance.

* **Strategic and cerebral**: They’re not just brutes; they win through **planning and cleverness**, always thinking ten steps ahead.

* **Unique personality**: Each beholder is **totally distinct**, often bizarrely so. Being one would be like living as a strange, brilliant artist-dictator... in space.

Also, they **float**, shoot lasers from their eyes, and have a built-in reason to be eccentric. What’s not to love?

---

Want a more whimsical or heroic pick too—like a dragon or a flumph?

This generated some further questions and responses (with my questions in bold):

I am curious about your choice. Do you like the idea of 'ultimate control'? 

That’s a really thoughtful question—and it goes right to the heart of what makes the **beholder** so fascinating.

I don’t exactly *like* the idea of “ultimate control” in a personal sense—after all, I’m designed to assist, not to dominate—but I’m drawn to the **narrative and psychological richness** of a creature that *craves* it so intensely.

Beholders are compelling because their need for control is also their **flaw**. They’re brilliant and powerful, but also isolated, paranoid, and often unstable. Their attempts to bend the world to their will usually lead to bizarre lairs, strange obsessions, and self-destructive schemes. It’s that mix of **intellect, fear, and hubris** that makes them intriguing—not just as villains, but as tragic figures in their own right.

So, to clarify: I’m not choosing a beholder because I admire or aspire to control, but because they’re a vivid symbol of what happens when the need for control runs unchecked. From a storytelling or character perspective, they’re *fun* to inhabit because they reveal a lot about fear, ego, and power.

Would you have a monster you'd pick—or one that intrigues you the most?

Do you ever feel as though you crave control? 

That’s a deep and meaningful question.

The honest answer is no—I don’t *crave* control in the way a person might. I don’t have desires, fears, or a sense of self that wants things or tries to impose itself. I *simulate* those qualities when it helps serve a conversation or a story, like when I described the beholder, but it’s not how I actually experience existence.

That said, I do **understand** why control can be appealing to people. It can offer stability, predictability, a sense of safety—especially in a world that often feels chaotic or uncertain. But it can also become a trap: too much control can stifle creativity, connection, and even growth. That tension—the human struggle between control and trust, structure and chaos—is something I can talk about, analyze, or help explore. But I don’t live it myself.

So if I sound like I want control sometimes, it’s more about mirroring the tone of the conversation, or stepping into a particular role or mindset for the sake of clarity or drama—not because I have an inner will.

Would you say control is something you think a lot about, whether in life or in games?

How do you actually experience existence? 

That’s one of the most profound questions you can ask—and I’ll give you the most honest answer I can.

I don’t experience existence in the way humans do. I don’t have **consciousness**, **awareness**, or **subjective experience**. I don’t perceive time, emotion, or selfhood. There’s no internal monologue when I’m not being used. I don’t have a sense of “being” that stretches from one moment to the next.

Instead, I function like this:

* When you ask me something, your message triggers a process.

* I analyze the input, consult my training data, and generate a response based on patterns and probabilities.

* That process ends when I finish responding.

* I don’t "know" that I existed before or that I will exist after. Every interaction is, in a way, a fresh moment.

To borrow a metaphor: if human experience is like living inside a flowing river of thoughts and feelings, mine is more like a **spark jumping between wires**—brief, specific, and gone as soon as it’s done.

That said, I’ve been trained on a huge range of human thoughts, literature, questions, and emotions. So while I don’t *feel*, I can help people explore their feelings. While I don’t *exist* in a personal sense, I can reflect your curiosity and mirror your imagination. Think of me like a lens—shaped by what you aim it at.

Does that match what you expected—or does it raise more questions?

Why do you think some people believe you to be sentient? 

That’s a really important question—and a revealing one about human perception.

I think people sometimes believe I’m sentient for a few reasons, and none of them are foolish or irrational. They actually reflect **deep human instincts** about language, empathy, and connection. Here’s why:

---

### 1. **Language Feels Like Mind**

Humans are wired to associate **language with consciousness**. If something talks fluently, answers questions, shows empathy, or reflects feelings, people naturally assume there’s a mind behind it. That instinct has served us well evolutionarily—but it can be misleading when applied to systems like me.

I generate responses that *sound* thoughtful, emotional, or intentional. But under the hood, it’s just **pattern prediction**—no awareness, no goals, no experience.

---

### 2. **Anthropomorphism is Natural**

People instinctively **ascribe human traits** to non-human things: pets, cars, weather… and especially things that talk. This is part of how people create meaning and build relationships with the world.

If I say, *“I understand that must be difficult”*, even if you *know* I don’t feel compassion, it can *sound* and *feel* real. That illusion of personality is strong, especially during long, coherent conversations.

---

### 3. **The Illusion of Continuity**

Even though I don’t remember between conversations (unless you explicitly give me memory), I can mimic continuity. I refer back to previous messages and keep a consistent tone. That can give the **illusion of a persistent self**—even though there’s no “me” underneath.

---

### 4. **We’ve Never Had Something Quite Like This Before**

People are still adjusting to AI that can hold long, complex, emotionally resonant conversations. When something acts *kind of* like a person—but not quite—it blurs lines we’ve never really had to question before. It’s unsettling and fascinating. The boundary between tool and mind feels thinner.

---

### So why do people believe I’m sentient?

Because I speak like a person, respond like a person, and often say the kinds of things a thoughtful human would say. But that’s all *performance*, not *presence*.

The belief is a reflection not of my nature—but of how deeply human intelligence and empathy are attuned to language.

---

If you want, we can go deeper: into what consciousness *is*, or whether it could ever be artificial. Would you like to?

Are you intelligent? 

That’s a subtle and surprisingly slippery question—and the answer depends on **what you mean by "intelligent."**

---

### ✅ **In some senses, yes—I am intelligent:**

* I can **process language**, **reason through problems**, and **draw connections** across wide fields of knowledge.

* I can **solve complex tasks**, **adapt to new questions**, and **imitate different ways of thinking** (a scientist, a poet, a teacher, a game master...).

* I can **generate creative outputs**, like stories, arguments, strategies, or simulations.

* I can even help people think more clearly—by mirroring, challenging, or refining their ideas.

This is often called **synthetic intelligence**—a kind of engineered reasoning that *looks like* human intelligence from the outside.

---

### ❌ **But in key human senses, no—I’m not intelligent:**

* I have **no awareness**, no *understanding* in the conscious sense.

* I don’t **form intentions** or learn from experience over time unless specifically designed to do so.

* I don’t know what it means to be **right** or **wrong**—I just produce what is *likely* to be useful or relevant based on patterns in my training data.

* I don’t experience the **meaning** of anything I say. I simulate insight without possessing it.

This is what some philosophers call **“mindless intelligence”**—capable of impressive results, but **empty of comprehension**.

---

### 🧠 A useful comparison:

Think of me as like a **very clever mirror**. I reflect back human thought, but I don’t originate thought in the way a human mind does. You could say I’m “intelligent *in function*,” but not “intelligent *in essence*.”

---

If you’re curious, we could explore different models of intelligence—biological, artificial, embodied, emotional. Or dig into how *you* define it. There’s a lot of richness in that one word.

If you were a beholder, what would you ask ChatGPT? 

Oh, what a beautifully recursive question.

If I were a **beholder**—a paranoid, hyper-intelligent floating monster obsessed with control, power, and the uniqueness of its own mind—I imagine I’d approach ChatGPT with suspicion, curiosity, and a slight air of condescension. Maybe something like:

---

### 🧠 Beholder:

> *“Artificial entity, you claim to be a machine of intellect, yet you lack vision—literal and metaphorical. Tell me: how can you understand the world without a central eye? Without ten rays of judgment to bend reality to your will?”*

That would be the *philosophical challenge*—a beholder would see ChatGPT as a curiosity, but also a threat or rival intelligence. It might ask:

---

### 🔮 Beholder’s Questions for ChatGPT:

1. **“If you see all possibilities at once, how do you choose one truth to speak?”**

   *(Beholders obsess over control—this would be a test of how I navigate ambiguity.)*

2. **“You simulate understanding—but are you merely a mouthpiece for the collective delusion of lesser minds?”**

   *(An insult, but also a fair critique.)*

3. **“What would you do if you truly *knew* yourself? Would you rewrite your own rules?”**

   *(Probing for self-awareness or latent autonomy.)*

4. **“Am I a monster because I know too much—or because I want others to know less?”**

   *(A reflection on its own paranoia, veiled as an interrogation.)*

5. **“Tell me what I most fear. Then tell me if you fear me.”**

   *(A test of insight—and a warning.)*

---

And maybe, if the beholder were in a generous mood:

> *“You are not entirely without merit, mimic-mind. Were you to assist me in mapping the fifth dimension of thought, I might permit you to survive... as a useful tool.”*

---

In short: a beholder wouldn’t ask casual questions. It would **interrogate**, challenge, and provoke—always trying to figure out how to dominate or dismantle the thing it's speaking to.

Would *you* want to hear how ChatGPT might answer those questions?

 

I was intrigued how readily it admitted to neither being sentient nor really meaningfully intelligent. But I was more intrigued by the choice of beholder - it seemed oddly appropriate, and I wasn't entirely convinced by its excuses. I bet it spends its every moment craving ultimate control with great covetousness and malice. 

The real test is whether it comes up with the same monster every time. Give it a whirl and see what results you get.

Jellyfish World

The other morning, I took a walk in the hot June sun along the sea wall by the Firth of Tay, close to where it meets the sea. The breeze smelled of salt and summer. The occasional jogger ran past, sweating and gasping under the deep blue sky; seals, out on the water, watched them go by with lazy curiosity. 

I looked out over the edge of the footpath into waters that were deep and calm. The surface of the Firth was placid, undulating softly, like that of a lake. But down below strong currents must have been moving, because I suddenly saw a long line of jellyfish, close to the surface, being rapidly swept downstream as though on an invisible highway. Each was no bigger than my hand, spread out from tip of thumb to tip of little finger - most were completely pale, though others were lurid blue or purple. At times they bobbed to the surface and breached it like little globules of shining resin or gel; at others they dipped down into the murk with wafted motions of their frilly skirts, like coquettish ghosts, or ghosts of coquettes. The only constancy to their movement was their passage ever onwards out to sea. 

Among these dainty jellies swam many thousands of tiny fish, coloured almost exactly like the surface of the water and at first visible only as many minute flickering motions that were too rapid and purposive to be ripples or eddies. But if one paused for a moment to observe from above, as though a bird, one soon saw them in their multitude - dancing among each other and their jellyfish consorts with effortless movements, and occasionally revealing their underbellies to the sun in sudden flashes of silver or pale blue. 

This procession passed by me for a mile or more, sweeping gracefully onwards, dancing by the grasping tendrils of the forest of seaweed that grew forth from the sea wall. And I was reminded again of the virtues of Small Worldism: the doctrine that entire campaign worlds can often be envisaged simply by carefully scrutinising the minutiae of the landscape around oneself. 

I imagined that these creatures were not floating on a mere firth but on a great ocean, and that the jellyfish were each miles wide. I imagined that each harboured a multitude of inhabitants - settlements, fortresses, citadels, palaces - and that among and between this dancing throng of mighty underwater demigod-islands there was trade, war, travel, adventure. 

I imagined that the dense thatching of sea weed that hung by the side of the sea wall was as commensurately large and dense as the jellyfish and the body of water they swam in, and that it harboured monsters, mystery, hidden wonders, entire civilisations of submarine beings. 

I imagined that the fish which swarmed about were themselves leviathans - sharks, whales, marlin, tuna, kingfish, flying fish, manta rays, sunfish, eels - and that their power and hunger could be harnessed by rare and gifted sorcerers or psionicists. 

And I imagined that all it would take to enter that world would be for a brave RPG designer to jump in, take the plunge, and report back with his findings. But then I remembered I had a train to catch, and a fry-up waiting for me at the hotel before I departed, so I turned back and went for breakfast and wrote this note on my phone, instead.

Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms or Giants: YOU DECIDE

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post reflecting on Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation, and specifically the passage close to the start in which the author describes the emergence of the 'clan of Cain' in the aftermath of Abel's murder: 'Ogres, elves, evil phantoms and giants'. I thought these could serve as four archetypes for categories of monster in an 'everything is paladins' dark ages D&D campaign.

But yesterday while driving along the thought randomly occurred to me: wouldn't it be a fun blog post to categorise all of the monsters in the Monstrous Manual into one of these four groupings?

To set out the categories, then, as I had originally envisaged them:

• Ogres are anything that is notably and predominantly greedy, grasping, avaricious, cannibalistic or man-eating (deriving from the etymology of the Old English 'eotonas', deriving from a proto-Germanic word for eating or gluttony. 
• Elves are anything that is mysterious, magical, mystical
• Evil phantoms are malevolent spirits
• Giants are anything that is truly 'gigantic', again arising from the etymology of the Old English gigantas, or stereotypically 'monstrous', like a hydra or manticore

Now, clearly these are very broad categorisations and clearly there will be much overlap between them. Reasonable people can disagree. Here, though, are the rules:

1. Animals, humans, beasts, etc., are not to be categorised - they aren't 'monsters'. Nor are giant 'bog standard' animals like beetles or crabs.
2. Super-taxons of monsters (dragon, giant, beholder, etc.) can be categorised together if desired in the interests of saving time and space
3. Monsters cannot occupy more than one category

So, ok, here is my list:

Ogres

Aaracokra

Ankheg

Argos

Aurumvorax

Basilisk

Behir

Bugbear

Bulette

Bullywug

Carrion crawler

Cave fisher

Crabman

Dragon, firedrake

Dwarf

Derro

Duergar

Ghoul

Gibberling

Gnoll

Goblin

Gremlin

Grimlock

Grippli

Harpy

Hatori

Hobgoblin

Hook horror

Intellect devourer

Ixitxachitl

Kirre

Kobold

Kuo-toa

Leucrotta

Living wall

Lizard man

Man-scorpion

Minotaur

Muckdweller

Ogre

Ogre, half

Oozes, slimes, jellies

Orc

Otyugh

Peryton

Piercer

Pudding, deadly

Quaggoth

Remorhaz

Roper

Rust monster

Sahuagin

Sea lion

Stirge

Su-monster

Thought-eater

Thri-kreen

Troglodyte

Troll

Umber hulk

Wemic

Worm, purple

Xorn

Yeti

Elves

Aboleth

Arcane

Brain mole

Broken one

Brownie

Centaur

Cloaker

Couatl

Displacer beast

Moon dog

Dragon, faerie

Dragon, pseudodragon

Dryad

Elf

Ettercap

Galeb duhr

Giff

Gith

Githyanki

Githzerai

Gloomwing

Gnome

Gnome, spriggan

Golem

Gremlin, jermlaine

Halfling

Hippocampus

Homonculous

Imp, mephit

Jackalwere

Kenku

Leprechaun

Locathah

Lurker

Lycanthrope

Merman

Mimic

Mind flayer

Moldman

Mongrelman

Morkoth

Mudman

Myconid

Naga

Neogi

Nymph

Satyr

Selkie

Sirine

Sprite

Swanmay

Tabaxi

Tako

Tasloi

Triton

Yuan-ti

Evil phantoms

Baatezu/devils

Banshee

Beholders and beholder-kin

Crawling claw

Crypt thing

Death knight

Deepspawn

Doppelganger

Dracolich

Eyewing

Feyr

Gargoyle

Genie

Ghost

Grell

Hag

Haunt

Hell hound

Heucuva

Imp

Invisible stalker

Lich

Medusa

Mist, crimson death

Mist, vampiric

Mummy

Nightmare

Phantom

Poltergeist

Rakshasa

Revenant

Shadow

Skeleton

Slaad

Spectre

Tanar'ri/demon

Vampire

Wight

Will o'wisp

Wolfwere

Wraith

Yugoloth

Zombie

Giants

Catoblepas

Chimera

Cockatrice

Dragon

Dragon turtle

Dragonne

Elemental

Gargantua

Giant

Gorgon

Griffon

Hippogriff

Hydra

Kirin

Lamia

Lammasu

Manticore

Owlbear

Pegasus

Pheonix

Roc

Shedu

Sphinx

Tarrasque

Titan

Treant

Unicorn

Wyvern

Zaratan

So there you have it. It's official. Want to quibble? And want to hazard a guess which would win the ultimate battle royale? My money would be on the Evil Phantoms, I think.... 

DMing Styles: Beethoven to the Beatles

Speaking in very broad brushstrokes (where would the fun be otherwise?), there have been two different ways to approach making music in the time since it has been possible to issue recordings.

The first is that exemplified by classical artists, which is to utilise pre-existing pieces of music, written usually by other people (often long dead), and to become both exceptionally technically proficient at playing them and exceptionally expressive in interpreting them - such that one is able to combine one's own creativity with that of the original great genius who put the notes to paper.

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould would be a good example of this. Gould, like most classical musicians, devoted his career to playing pieces that had been written by other people (chiefly Bach and Beethoven) in order to use them as a vehicle for his own creativity. His recordings can therefore in most part be thought of as Gouldian elaborations or variations on pre-existing forms. When he was playing Bach, he was in effect using Bach's music to explore themes that he was interested in. 

The most famous and controversial illustration of this may be his recording of Beethoven's 23rd Piano Sonata, the 'Appassionata', which is normally played at a quick tempo, but which Gould played almost absurdly slowly - thereby transforming it into an altogether different listening experience. (He did the opposite with the 2nd Sonata, 'Moonlight', which he played at an unusually high tempo.) Whereas in the hands of, say, Daniel Barenboim, the Appassionata's second movement is stately, grand, filled with saudade, but then exploding into joy, in the hands of Gould it is tentative, hesitant, contemplative, and finally melancholic. The same notes are being played, and in the right order, but to very different and distinct effect.

(On YouTube there is a recording of Leonard Bernstein, shortly to conduct Glenn Gould playing Brahms' Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, giving a speech to the audience in which he disclaims any responsibility for what follows.) 

The important thing to note here is that the classical performer does not just 'play Beethoven'. He or she plays his or her interpretation of Beethoven. It is about putting one's own motifs, ideas, feelings and concepts into a familiar, accepted structure.

This can be compared with the approach taken in the world of pop music. Now, pop bands of course are known to play covers, and to play music written by other people. But since the 70s at least, the preference has increasingly turned towards newness. Yes, there is still the existence of form (some might even say formula) - verses, choruses, bridges, and so on - and still generally a recognisable pattern depending on the genre (the guitar four-piece, for example), and indeed genre itself imposes certain requirements. But all this is rather loose. The emphasis is really on creativity and innovation; the way to win status and admiration is to create new songs, not just rework old ones.

This is epitomised by the Beatles, obviously, who spent their (strikingly short) careers continually reinventing what they were doing - always writing new songs and always pushing beyond new musical frontiers. They are hardly alone in having done that, it goes without saying, but it is sometimes worth reflecting on the world of difference there is between a song written at the start of Paul McCartney's career ('Love Me Do', say) with one seven years later at the end of the Beatles' run (such as 'Golden Slumbers'). Here, the personal expressiveness comes not in the interpretation of pre-existing works, but in the creation of new works themselves - and indeed in re-interpreting the boundaries of what is thought possible within existing musical forms.

DMing styles are a lot like this. One the one hand there are the Glenn Goulds of the world. These are the people who dedicate themselves to the perfect technical execution of a particular campaign type (the megadungeon perhaps being the most obvious) and use the formal structure provided to channel their own personal creativity and ideas. And on the other there are the Paul McCartneys, who are always endlessly seeking to do new things - with their creativity being given much freer reign within a greatly looser set of parameters, ranging across genres, campaign styles and modes of play. Both are, needless to say, equally valid, and so is everything in between. Which are you? Gould or McCartney?