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!