Map Porn

I am going to be very busy with work for the next few weeks. Posting may become sporadic. Here, have some map porn, and click to enlarge:

Map of steam-boat routes around Dutch New Guinea, early 20th century

Map of the Khanate of Khiva, later 19th century

On Bathos

I think what I appreciate most in D&D is bathos: perhaps the overwhelming narrative characteristic of the game, insofar as it has any such characteristics. Random encounter tables, rolling dice in the open, taking results as they come, and resolute avoidance of illusionism or pallete-shifting of any kind - all of these elements of 'old school' D&D play contribute to the development of the bathetic.

People who like "narrative" games and prefer things to make "dramatic sense" usually miss this. 

An example of bathos from last night's game: Eki Ulele had just survived the most difficult and bloody encounter the party had yet had, in which 8 bandits and 2 hireling retainers had died and one of the PCs dying. He had been through, in many ways, his toughest moment. He had faced down the bandit leader and bluffed him into retreat, then survived a nerve-wracking chase through a pitch black forest, with no weapons or magic and only flasks of oil to aid him. He had led the opposition away from his wounded friends, buying them time to escape.

He survived all this, and if I was interested in trying to develop the "plot" of the campaign, as if it was a story, this would have been a defining episode for his character - the making of him. He would have gone on to better things, and grown as a person because of what happened to him at the bandit lair. Or perhaps he would have died bravely in one final showdown with the bandit leader, going out in a blaze of glory, remembered for ever more.

But the dice said otherwise: the next day he got an unlucky result and had a wilderness encounter; he got an unluckier result when it turned out to be giant bees; and an even unluckier result when he failed his surprise roll. He died a meaningless and ignoble death alone in the forest, stung to death by mindless insects. Bathos.

Yet this has its own narrative sense. Bathos and absurdity are proud and important traditions in drama and comedy. They may not be "emotionally satisfying", but they have their own value. The next time somebody makes out that you should fiddle or ignore dice rolls in the name of maintaining some sort of narrative consistency, remind them of this: "I prefer it bathetic, darling".

Tuesday Night Yoon-Suin: Session 5

[I've mostly avoided Actual Plays in the past, but I've decided it would be nice to have a log of my ongoing Yoon-Suin campaign for posterity's sake, and this is as good a place to keep it as any. It's largely for my own benefit because I know Actual Plays are incredibly dull 99% of the time unless you were at the table. I've not kept it for the first 4 sessions, but will do so from now on.]

Adventurers Present: 

• Marich, Level 1 Human Magic-User [played by David]
• Anil, Level 1 Human Cleric (eunuch) [played by Patrick]
• Eki Ulele, Level 1 Slug-man Magic-User [played by Nathan]
• Retainers: Asha (spear-wielding ex-whore), Surya (sabre and short bow), Bam (sabre and short bow)

In the previous sessions, the adventurers Damodar, Marich and Eki Ulele had sought employment with Nepsydaz, a sage at the guild of sages, who had paid them 500 gold pieces each for bringing them the Old King, a mad eunuch roaming the forests to the South of Silaish Vo. This they had done, after employing some peasants to help them, seeking the aid of a monkey-faced Mountain Spirit, and tangling with Renaudip and Binod, two rival adventurers they eventually killed. They also discovered a clay automaton hiding in the Old Watchtower, who it is said was created by Gulvedra, an arch-mage who lives far to the South - and they also irked Ui Yi, Eki Ulele's father/mother, from whom they stole horses.

After this, they had begun to explore the ancient Dwarf citadel of Sangmenzhang, discovering a group of strange almost-humans they later learned were called Hohools. These they killed, and recovered some treasures, although they lost Damodar [Patrick's first PC] and their cleric henchman, Sanjam. In return they rescued a poor kidnapped eunuch named Anil [Patrick's next PC], a cleric of Manpac, god of mazes. Back in Silaish Vo they secreted their treasures in their lodgings at the Madrassa of Arcanea, after avoiding the Oligarch's tax men.

They returned to Sangmenzhang forthwith with new recruits, and tangled with some bandits on the way who they learned were led by a man named Manesh. In the citadel they encountered dwarf skeletons and discovered a vast underground lake filled with luminous jellyfish, which they traversed with a bamboo raft. Here, they fought with carnivorous lungfish and lost another of their retainers, the lowly Dev. Chased by a giant slug, they were then herded deeper into Sangmenzhang...

The session began with the players in a small room containing bones and rags and a large hole in the ceiling, which they established with the use of mirrors contained some sort of crustacean or insectoid being. Avoiding this hole, they left the room heading south, and discovered a long corridor with two rooms leading off it. The first of these was a circular pit-room decorated with murals that were mostly eroded by water damage, but seemed to depict dwarves in combat. The second, a little further along, was empty save for ancient bird bones covering the floor: in the ceiling was a long, narrow shaft leading up hundreds of feet to the outside world.

At the end of the corridor they discovered a cave which opened up onto the mountainside. This cave contained four Feathered Men: scrawny humans with wings for arms and beaks for mouths, who were apparently using this cave as a launch pad to the outside world. After a brief fight Eki Ulele was left unconscious but two of the Feathered Men were dead; one managed to fly free and make his escape, while another, injured, managed to climb down the mountainside from the cave mouth to safety in the tree-line. With Eki Ulele unable to continue the party returned to the shaft room, where they made camp for the night, barricading the door.

During the night their sleep was disturbed by more Feathered Men, who came looking for their missing fellows. They charged down the door and in a sharp exchange one of the Feathered Men was killed; the rest fled and the party re-barricaded the door. After a time it became clear the other Feathered Men were busy with some ruse outside; the party charged from the room to discover an effort to smoke them out. They fought a running battle back to the mountainside cave, where they killed six Feathered Men in total. But brave Surya's head was clubbed in by the enemy leader and he was slain. Marich and Anil mutilated the Feathered Man corpses and hung them from the mountainside as a warning to others.

With Eki Ulele eventually recovered, they pressed on, and discovered the treasure of the Feathered Men: 800 gold pieces in metallic urns. These urns, coated with poison, nearly killed the foolhardy Eki Ulele, and again the party was forced to retreat, climbing down the mountainside from the cave opening and working their way back to Sangmenzhang's entrance.

There, they discovered that their mule, Eko, who they had left outside, had been stolen. They immediately assumed Manesh's bandits were the culprits. After resting to lick their wounds they followed the trail of the stolen mule and after a day's travel discovered a secluded waterfall and river - Manesh's lair. Here, they ambushed a pair of wandering bandits and after killing one, tortured the other to reveal that Manesh's gang had 9 members. 

Without further planning, they hatched a scheme to bring Manesh and his men out from their cave lair behind the waterfall. This involved pretending to be the members of the bandit patrol they had ambushed - a ruse which was almost immediately foiled when a password was demanded. The party taunted Manesh with the further torturing of their captive. Six bandits sallied from the cave and a vicious fight ensued. Anil was sorely wounded and rendered unconscious, while Bam and Asha were slain, and all the six bandits killed (with Eki Ulele slicing the throats of three who Marich had cast into magical sleep). 

A standoff followed as Eki Ulele tried to distract Manesh the bandit chief and his two remaining men while Marich dragged Anil deep into the forest to safety. After some cat and mouse evasion in the dark, Eki Ulele too managed to make his escape, though in a different direction to Marich and Anil. Scattered and bloodied, the party rested in their separate locations, wondering how they might reunite.

The next day, Marich and Anil rested in an improvised bivouac. Eki Ulele, however, was set upon in the forest by giant bees and stung to death. And thus the session ended.

The Humble Sling

I've always thought slings are under-rated. If you ask me, there is something much more frightening about having a rock flung at you at supersonic speed than an arrow - something hideous and terrifying about the thought of a hefty chunk of stone hitting you FULL IN THE FACE and shattering teeth and bone. 

From Charles C. Mann's 1491:

Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made out of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enriquez de Guzman wrote, "with such force that it will kill a horse...I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a sling, break a sword in two pieces when it was held in a man's hand at a distance of thirty paces". (Experimenting with a five foot long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible though.) 

In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in camp fires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in mid-air. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counter attack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone...

I'm toying with bumping sling damage up to d6 for my games, or allowing two attacks at d4 damage to reflect the speed with which they can be fired.

They're also one of those weapons that no sensible adventurer should be without. The ideal D&D fighter, in my view, uses a hafted weapon - a spear or trident - and sling combination, probably also with a bola or net if the DM allows it, and a shield, of course. The spear or trident doubles up as a pokey-thing for poking stuff, which is one of the most crucial adventuring tasks. And the sling provides essentially infinite ranged attacks: if for some ungodly reason you can't find rocks to fire, you fling copper coins instead. If push comes to shove, you can also use it is a club by putting a big rock in the pouch and whipping your opponents.

Finally, there are records of troops in resistance movements in World War II using slings to fling molotov cocktails. No problems with flasks not breaking there, I think.

Dogs in Other Places

For those who don't know it, Dogs in the Vineyard is an RPG in which the players take on the roles of "God's Watchdogs", who roam from town to town in a sort-of Mormon Deseret dispensing justice, rooting out demonic influence, solving crimes, resolving conflicts, and generally sorting stuff out in whatever manner they see fit. The rules are tightly focused with that sort of game in mind, and they include a method for generating towns with the assumption that the players will be travelling from place to place episodically each session or so.

Like all rulesets that people call "tightly focused", Dogs really isn't all that tightly focused. It can be used, really, for any sort of game in which:

a) The players roam from location to location resolving conflicts
b) They are invested with the power and authority to do so
c) The way the conflicts are resolved is entirely open-ended
d) The conflicts are based around sin, corruption, decadence, and so on

Which means that, really, it would be almost criminally easy to rejig the system to run:

• Dogs in the Grimdark Future: The players are inquisitors travelling around a subsector of the Imperium in the year 40,000, rooting out daemonic influence
• Dogs in Canaan: The players are biblical judges in the Deuteronomic era, travelling from village to village, fighting against idolatory, oppressive kings, and the collapse of social order
• Shire Reeves in the Vineyard: The players are sheriffs or shire-reeves responsible for keeping the peace in a shire in Anglo-Saxon England
• Dogs in the West: The players are US Marshals in the American West - Clint Eastwood eat your heart out
• Inu in the Budouen: The players are samurai charged by the local Daimyo with law and order for a frontier province

And so on and so forth. 

Dungeons & Discoveries

One D&D variant I'd like to run would be a campaign I call Salomon's House, after Sir Francis Bacon's college of sages in his book New Atlantis. This institution, in Bacon's mythical utopia of Bensalem, was set up to "to discern between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts" by discovering "the works of Creation, and the secrets of them".

Salomon's House in the original is supposed to be a place where scientific experiments are conducted - it is sort of a blueprint for the modern research university - but in my version it would be about sending adventurers forth into creation, to discover monsters, strange beings, divers creatures and magicks, wondrous places, and mysteries of the universe. Things of that nature. Basically, a guild of sages who send groups out into fantastical wildernesses, ruins, and other planes, to bring back whatever they can for sages to study and analyse.

This would require rejigging the XP system, I think: the aim is not to gather gold and advance that way, but to gather knowledge. So XP would be awarded for mapping new locations, finding new archives and bestiaries, capturing new creatures, bringing back the bodies of bizarre life forms, exploring new experiences, eating new foodstuffs, trying new drugs, shagging new alien races, or whatever. This could just map to gold for XP, ultimately (the sages pay money for all this information) but I also quite like the idea of people doing it for the sake of knowledge. A little like a mixture of the Fraternity of Order and the Society of Sensation in Planescape, but more cerebral than the latter and more chaotic than the former. Perhaps a forerunner of the empiricists, though more interested in cataloguing and enumerating than experimentation. So you might have a system of XP awards for the importance of the discovery and the risks associated with it.

Naturally, this would make extensive use of random generators, so the DM is partially in on the act of discovery too. It would also have different character classes, because most of the standard D&D ones don't fit. Handily, Bacon supplies us with different categories of sages working at Salomon's House who have ridiculously cool 17th century names:

• Merchants of light
• Depredators
• Mystery-men
• Pioneers
• Compilers
• Dowry-men
• Lamps
• Inoculators
• Interpreters of nature

I don't know about you, but if I could play a character class called a "mystery-man" I would be all over it like a rash.

On Wickedness

The two most recent books I have read are Antony Beevor's The Second World War, and Empire of the Summer Moon. These two books are radically different in scope, one covering the biggest and most intense conflict in human history, the other a series of tiny skirmishes fought over decades in a near-empty wilderness. And yet they have one thing in common: they make you aware, in no uncertain terms, of the absolutely extraordinary extent of "man's inhumanity to man".

In Beevor's book we read of SS men at Treblinka picking young children up by their ankles and swinging them down like mallets to dash their brains out on rocks, Red Army soldiers gang raping and murdering Russian women who were enslaved by Germans and who they had just "liberated" on their invasion of East Prussia, Japanese soldiers from different units abducting each other to cannibalise, Soviet officers who have done nothing wrong being summarily shot by their superiors to instil discipline into others, Allied bombers flattening Dresden just because it was the only city in Germany they hadn't flattened, the USAAF judging the success of its missions in Japan on how many innocent Japanese women and children it had burned to death, citizens of Leningrad abducting and killing their own neighbours' children to eat during the winter of 1941....and so on and so on.

In Gwynne's, we read of Comanche raiders gang raping and scalping pregnant women; slicing off rival tribe members' noses, arms and legs and then burning them alive; cutting off the bottoms of captives' feet and making them walk around for their own amusement; Texan militiamen shooting Cheyenne women and children who surrender to them and then mutilating their corpses in horrific ways; Texas rangers killing thousands of head of horses in cold blood to stop them falling into Comanche hands; Ute women bludgeoning helpless octogenarian Comanches to death with axes...and so on and so on.

It's enough to make one wonder: if this is the kind of thing human beings routinely do to one another in certain circumstances, what kind of stuff would orcs do? And let alone orcs - what would demons and devils do? What, indeed, does "evil" really even mean, given what we know about history?

This is the main reason why I lean increasingly towards humans as the key protagonists and antagonists in my campaign settings. Anything an orc can do, we can do better. And who needs a goblin when the thought of being tortured to death by a fellow human being is so much more plausible and disturbing?

Only the Good Die Young

One of my favourite NPCs died tonight. You know how it is as a DM. Most of the time the NPCs you create are there for a purpose and you play them as best you can, but not with any special interest or enthusiasm. But every so often one comes along who you happen to really enjoy playing - and usually it's by serendipity; somebody who for one reason or another you and the players develop something of an attachment for.

Dev was one of these. A retainer who the players hired to accompany them to the dungeon for the grand sum of 5 gold pieces a month, my initial notes for him on my random hireling table were "about 15 years old, short bow, skinny, 2hp". He was generated alongside a woman called Asha, whose notes were "retired whore, one-eyed, spear, 5hp". I immediately decided that Dev was in love with Asha, but didn't know how to express it, and that Asha allowed him to 'pleasure her' whenever she wanted it. I didn't expect them to last very long, but they actually stuck around through a few delves, and Dev managed to get a few kills with that short bow.

What I liked best about Dev was the idea I hit upon that the only word he knew how to say was "okay". He would say it in an eager-to-please fashion in response to anything anybody said to him. This never failed to amuse me, especially in situations where he was asked a question.

In any event, Dev died tonight. It was a pretty ignoble death: crossing a subterranean lake in the ancient dwarf citadel of Sangmenzhang on a bamboo raft the PCs had brought along, he was savaged by a carnivorous lungfish and fell overboard into a swarm of tiny stinging jellyfish. He never stood much of a chance in the front row with 2 hit points.

It was a pitiful end to a rather pitiful session: tonight was one of those nights for my players. They lost 2 retainers, and twice PCs came a flukey dice roll away from death. They were forced to flee by a swarm of cockroaches, attacked by dwarf skeletons, and chased by a giant slug which they had to shut behind a doorway which was their only apparent escape route back to the surface. All they got was about 1000 silver pieces from inside the bellies of a bunch of lungfish, and a couple of rings with semi-precious stones, for their efforts. Oh well. Nobody ever said dungeoneering was easy.

A Plug (I don't often do these)

I don't often do this - in fact, I don't think I've ever done it - so I hope I can be forgiven for spamming your rss feed just this once.

Kelvin Green's "Horror Among Thieves" is being kickstarted on indiegogo at the moment. I'm sure plenty of you know of it already, but this blog has a wide readership and I'd like to spread the word. This is not an endorsement, because I haven't seen anything of this product except the blurb - it's merely to draw your attention. I hope I also don't need to say that nobody has asked me to do this, and I'm not associated with it in any way.


Kelvin is a thoroughly nice guy and a commenter in good standing on this blog, but that's not the reason I think this is worth backing: it's because Kelvin has proved himself to be a talented designer of game materials. Backing the project also comes with a number of other goodies, which I'm sure you can read about on the actual page.

The Exodus to, er, Made Up Worlds

I was listening to an old Econtalk podcast with Edward Castronova today while doing some house keeping, and immediately thought that it was worth blogging about, being both Relevant To My Interests and very educational. The blurb is as follows:

Edward Castronova, of Indiana University and author of Exodus to the Virtual World, talks about his provocative thesis that a growing number of people around the world will be spending more and more time playing multiplayer games in virtual reality both as a form of escape and as a search for meaning. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how this trend might affect government, religion, and our happiness.

I'm not an expert on multiplayer online games, because I literally don't play any of them: my only experience with online gaming of any sort is the odd blast of Dominate Game with the guys in my office and long-running PBEM games of Steel Panthers: World at War with 50-something fellow military history freaks in Texas and Virginia. So my comments ought to be taken in that light. It also needs to be said that Castronova was being interviewed here in 2008, and things have obviously moved on since then: they talk quite a bit about Second Life, which seems to have faded away (to my knowledge anyway), and they cite World of Warcraft dollars-for-gold-piece auctions as a $1 billion dollar per year concern, where I suspect today they are even bigger than that.

The most interesting issue they raise is the philosophical one: what are the consequences for society that a sizeable minority of people actually seem to prefer living in a virtual world than to the real one? And what does it say for society? It being Econtalk, which is probably the most cerebral podcast on the internet, they manage to steer clear of stupid pat answers like "blah, capitalism destroys the soul, people want to escape, blah". Instead they offer a number of different thoughts, foremost among them that modern society has to a large extent tried to shed myth, and in doing so it has left a core human need unsatisfied: history and anthropology suggest that myth is something that fulfils some sort of genuinely human requirement. They make the observation that World of Warcraft is like an exercise in myth-making which seems to fill this hole.

In any case, it got me thinking about table top RPGs. Are they part of the same process, the so-called "exodus to virtual worlds"?

It's a shame table top RPGs are so niche, because I think they can be productively analysed in relation to issues like this. RPGs are sort of like Second Life and World of Warcraft, because they involve the creation of a fantasy world, they are to a certain extent escapist, they resemble Nozick's Experience Machine to some degree though don't map perfectly. And yet at the same time they are different - because they are social in the "true" sense (you play them face to face) and very rooted in the real world of dice, pens, paper and, perhaps crucially, the written word.

I don't have any particular thoughts on the matter, though this notion of myth-making struck a chord with me. What myths we do have in the modern world - essentially, books, films, comics, etc. - are all passively partaken in. So although I'm prepared to buy the argument that nowadays films fulfil something of the function that mythology did, it isn't really correct to talk about watching films as being involved in myth making because nothing is being made by the audience. This contrasts with religious myth in particular, because religious myths involve an active response - they are supposed to be linked in some way to our behaviour. There is something more of that in table top RPGs: active engagement with issues of right and wrong, good and evil, and so on, and also just acting with some kind of in-game meaning as opposed to being an unengaged observer.