Under The Skin and The Need for Real Humans

I watched Under the Skin the other week. It was worth a watch, because apart from anything else it is beautifully well-made: it's like the best put-together music video you've ever seen. But it's ultimately unsatisfactory because at a certain stage about two-thirds of the way through it steadily becomes ridiculous. I wouldn't want to reveal spoilers, but people who've seen it will probably know what I mean. It unravels from being an interesting and creepy film about an alien abducting men for some unknown purpose and turns into, "No, I don't buy it" - chiefly because the way the real people in the film behave is totally unbelievable.

An SF story can have weird aliens and incomprehensible technology and things can happen which are literally impossible, but it is unforgivable when the human beings involved don't act like real human beings would when interacting with those aliens/technology/literally impossible things. Doubly so when you consider that the raison d'etre of most SF is to think about what it means to be human by imagining how humans would behave if we postulate aliens or light-speed or time-travel or whatever.

The same is true of fantasy. I can forgive a fantasy book any sin when it comes to letting imagination run wild. But I can't accept it when what the characters do does not ring true given the circumstances. You can come up with any magical spell or bizarre monster or physical impossibility you like, but the reader knows human beings, so woe betide you if you don't get that right.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that most of the SF and fantasy books I've read which I think have failed have been those in which the behaviour of the characters is not credible based on what I know and understand about human beings and the way they act.

Revisiting Localism

A while ago I mused at some length about 'localism' in gaming. To summarise, I think setting games in your local area, or creating settings that are heavily inspired by your local area, allows you an intimacy, familiarity and level of detailed knowledge that can't be matched with a game set in an exotic/historic/mythological place and era, like Athas, the 13th Century Outer Mongolia of Genghis Khan, Ancient Greece, or New Zealand. Certain elements of setting which DMs struggle with (particularly the little intangible things like weather, scenery, geography, and so forth which give a setting a genuine feeling of place and verisimilitude) come ready-made, baked into your own brain.

I moved up to the North East of England about 18 months ago for a work. It's an area of the country I'd never been to before and, to be frank, I'd never had much intention of visiting. If you're not from the North East of England you tend to forget it exists. It's not on the way to anywhere. The cities are small, mostly poor, and isolated from other conurbations by swathes of sparsely populated countryside full of defunct, slowly de-populating former mining villages. Now and again you watch Match of the Day and the highlights of a Newcastle game come on and you might think to yourself, "Oh yeah, Newcastle. That's a city and it exists." But otherwise it doesn't occupy much of a space in the national psyche. Unless you're a fan of brown ale.

Which is a bit of a shame, because this corner of the country (well, Northumberland anyway) has a lot to offer - incredible scenery, beautiful little market towns and picturesque villages, castles by the dozen, Roman ruins, great local cuisine, hidden treasures like Holy Island - and ought to be a complete tourist trap. Though on the other hand, a large part of me quite likes the feeling of living in one of Britain's best-kept secrets.

I do a lot of hiking and today as I was walking around I started thinking about running a game of D&D incorporating the things that are typical elements of the Northumberland countryside. The game wouldn't be set in actual Northumberland, but would be strongly inspired by it - imbued with it. What might these things be?

• Sheep. Northumberland is hilly, wild, barren. It's sheep country. In this game of D&D, "orcs" would be gangly sheep-headed humanoids carrying weapons of stone and possessing cruel, ovine eyes with long, horizontal pupils that would remain horribly emotionless as their owner skinned you alive.
• Gorse. You see a lot of gorse bushes when out hiking. Impenetrably thick and totally unforgiving: hardy survivors of the plant world. In Northumberland D&D, "goblins" would be little people made of wiry, spiny, bitter, nasty, gorse. Waiting in the scrub motionless for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, for a lonely traveller to come by....
• Wind. Northumberland must surely be England's windiest county. It comes barrelling down from the North Sea bringing the Arctic air with it to chill the very land itself right down to its roots. D&D Northumberland is a place of wind spirits - air elementals, sylphs, tempests, etc.
• Ghosts. The border between Scotland and England is soaked in blood thanks to century on century of war, border raids, feuds, cattle-rustling and unpunished murder. Northumberland D&D would not have 'Scotland' and 'England' but it would have layer upon layer of violent history - and the ghosts that history had bequeathed.
• Clerics. Northumberland is sometimes called the "cradle of Christianity" because it is where Christianity first took root in England. Again, Northumberland D&D wouldn't have 'Christianity' but it would have an overabundance of abbeys, monasteries, shrines and other holy places, full of monks singing strange chants and scratching with ink-and-quill in scrolls and weighty tomes for hour after hour by candlelight. At theme might be the conversion of unbelievers to a revolutionary new religion - or the resistance to it.

If you were going to run a game set in your local region, what characteristics would it have?

Not Dead

Long-term readers of the blog will know that I have a bad habit of disappearing for weeks or months on end without updates. Basically, this is because as well as my day job I have a separate freelancing gig which sometimes results in me being very busy and also creatively and intellectually drained for extended periods. This is one of those periods. I apologise. I'm not dead (quite yet).

Good Dragonlance Sentences: Time of the Twins, Chapter 1

You may be wondering what has happened to the good Dragonlance sentences project. To be perfectly frank, Chapter 1 of Time of the Twins defeated me. I'd forgotten a number of things about the Legends, as I've read it fewer times than the Chronicles; in my mind it's a better trilogy, but that's if you forget (as I did) about Raf the Gully Dwarf (who can just about count to 3 but can always be relied upon to make 'hilarious' comments at opportune moments), the weird anachronisms (Tika saving up money to 'buy the business' of the Inn of the Last Home), the clumsy internal dialogue ("He knew me better than I know myself. He knew of the chaos that raged inside my soul. He knew I had a lesson to learn." Because that's how people actually think.) and the comedy that isn't funny ("'...I was...busier than a draconian drill sergeant!' That always got a laugh." Why?).

Sigh.

That's not to say that the writing isn't functional. It draws you in. You want to know what happens next. Like Dan Brown, I'm quickly remembering, Weis & Hickman have a great talent for never allowing the ending of a chapter to resemble anything like a conclusion. So you are lead inexorably onwards, like a boulder in full flight down a mountainside, chapter after chapter, heading ever lower and lower, unable to stop yourself, yanked on by the force of Dragonlance gravity, until you plough into a farmhouse and vineyard somewhere in the North of Italy.

 

Map of New Troy

I spent a hungover Saturday drawing this map of mundane New Troy. I used a combination of these gimp brushes, the wonderful mkhexgrid, and my own inept drawing skills. Names have been stolen without shame from The Matter of Britain, Le Morte d'Arthur, and other similar sources.

Not all of it is labelled, obviously. The action centres around the castle of Kinkernadon, which is close to two small walled towns, Wroxeter and Bedgraine, and sandwiched between two rivers - the Great Ouse and Little Ouse. To the South, the dark forest of Broceliande, known to be the haunt of the fae. To the East, Listeneise, dangerous hills in which lie the caves the lead to Muspel. To the West, Tinchebray, another deep wood in which, if you take a wrong turn or stray from the path, you can easily find yourself slipping into the faerie realm.

Dragons represent beasts; skull-and-crossbows are human dangers. Stars are portals to faerie. Single huts are hermits, witches, or similar. Two huts together are a sizeable village; on other clear hexes there will be farms and hamlets. Pickaxe and spades are mines. Towers are, er, towers.

I'll key it properly in the coming days. Following it will be a map of Faerie. The essential concept is that this mundane map is a 15x10 mile area with 1-mile hexes; the Faerie map will be a mirror reflection, except the hexes are 6-miles and the contents are twisted and strange. Both Gort's Friend and Adrian have made excellent comments on recent entries that I intend to incorporate.

The Nature of Faerie and Muspel

One of the advantages of having a distinct Underworld and an Otherworld is that things in those places don't have to particularly make sense. Indeed, the whole point is that they don't. What does this mean? RANDOM STOCKING.

Conveniently BECMI, which is always my system of first choice, has a random dungeon stocker, modified from the original Holmes.

Wilderness stockers have been discussed both here and here. Paolo and Brendan have perfectly workable systems which I like, but I would tweak things slightly. My position on hexes is something I have made clear in the past so there is no need to belabour the point, but assuming a default of 6-mile hexes, each hex should have at least one pre-rolled adventure site, not taking into consideration random encounter-based results that flesh out the map further in-game.

That said, I want there to be a distinct difference between Faerie and the "real world". Faerie is supposed to be where adventure happens; the "real world" is more mundane. I also want New Troy to be small, at least at first. Initially, the map is going to be 1-mile hexes. A final consideration is that I want New Troy to be overlaid by the map of Faerie: Faerie is a kind of mirror or reflection of New Troy, with a certain special twist.

So the idea for stocking the New Troy map is as follows. First, I place the starting settlement plus a few others. Then, I stock the map with something like this table, rolling for each hex:

1. Opening to Faerie (tied to a certain natural landmark; may be known or unknown, permanent or temporary)
2. Beast lair (wolves, bear, boar, etc.)
3. Human mundane (thieves, knightly manor, village, etc.)
4. Human special (witch, monastery, hermit, etc.)
5. Ruin
6. Hidden or special place (crypt, cave, hollow tree, standing stones, etc.)

Once this is done, I overlay the New Troy map with the Faerie map, and flip it so that each hex in Faerie corresponds with the New Troy ones as follows:

1. Opening to Faerie -> Opening to New Troy
2. Beast lair -> Monster lair
3. Human mundane -> Faerie ('Mundane' seems the wrong adjective)
4. Human special -> Faerie special
5. Ruin -> Magical location (wizard tower, magical lake, toadstool circle, etc.)
6. Hidden place -> Transplant (a building, person or thing that has 'slipped' from New Troy into Faerie)

Then I decide where the opening(s) to Muspel are. I haven't tested this, so it may result in skewed results; we'll see.

More Thoughts on Mythic Underworlds and Mythic Otherworlds

[This post has been significantly edited from its previous version: due to circumstances outside of my control; i.e. my own stupidity, I had the mechanics the wrong way round. I've made the appropriate changes and also updated things slightly.]

Time moves faster in Faerie and slower in Muspel. I've established that, but there ought really to be a way to mechanise it.

Let's begin with Faerie. It is almost always the case in literature involving travel to other, Faerie-esque worlds that time moves more quickly there: think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for instance. The characters disappear to another world where they have spent years, decades, a lifetime...and return to find that almost no time has passed in our world at all. (A recent update to this story is, of course, the Next Gen episode "Inner Light", which is one of the all-time great episodes of TV in any age or genre.)

So the mechanism for the movement of time in Faerie is simple: on returning to the "real world", the DM rolls a d100 and divides the amount of time spent in Faerie by the number on the dice. So 7 weeks in Faerie, with a result of 50 on the d100, means they have only been away from the real world for a little less than a day. To model the extremes to which these stories can go (the children in The Lion... are in Narnia for what seems to them like decades, but return only minutes later), the results explode downwards. If the result on the d100 is 1-10, the DM should re-roll, but as a d1000 and divide. If the result there is 1-100, the DM should re-roll as a d10000...and so forth.

That's simple enough. In Muspel, of course, things are the other way round. There, time moves much more slowly than it does in the "real world". Again, this can be discovered in myth: in an extreme example, the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro, the main character stays at the palace of the dragon god for 3 days and returns to his home town to find that 300 years have passed.

So the mechanism for the speed at which time moves in Muspel is almost the mirror image of Faerie. The rule is, when the PCs return from Muspel, the DM rolls a d20 for however long they have stayed there (approximately), and multiplies that amount of time by the number on the dice. For instance, if they've been there 6 hours, a result of 12 on the d20 means they've been there 72 hours. If they've been there three days, a result of 12 on the d20 means it was actually 36 days. However, a roll of 18 or above explodes upwards. The DM rolls a second d20, but this time the result indicates a higher time bracket (hours become days, days become weeks, etc.). So if the PCs were in the Muspel for a day, and the DM rolls an 18, he re-rolls; if the second roll is a 12, they were away for 12 weeks. If the second roll is a roll of 18 or above, it explodes upwards again, moving to a higher time bracket once more. This can quickly result in many years passing, in extreme examples.

Now, the question(s) then becomes: won't all this result in an insane level of complexity for the DM? Won't he have to have it worked out in advance what will happen years into the future?

The answer is "No", thanks to two mechanics, which I have yet to quite figure out yet in their entirety. The first of these uses the Series of Unfortunate Events method postulated by Pseudoephedrine on therpgsite years ago; for each month the PCs have been away, the DM rolls to see what has happened generally in New Troy since. (This takes work, yes: it is probably only to be done between sessions.) The second of these would be a table of Personal Events which is rolled for each PC, including deaths of family members, wives or husbands running off with somebody else, and so on - although this would perhaps be done on a yearly, rather than monthly, basis.

Faerie is much easier, of course: there, time moves more quickly. The only complication here is what people think when you go away and come back a few hours later looking incredibly old and with a whole load of new possessions and abilities.

Five RPG-Related Internet Things Every Gamer Should Read

The other day I linked to Philotomy's Musings and made the, perhaps somewhat rash, comment that it is the best thing that has come out of "the OSR". It got me thinking about what else I would put on my Desert Island Discs of Things Gamers Should Read.

So first up is the Musings. What else?

I think this post by Zak S is incredibly perceptive and interesting, and is the type of thing which you read and think, "That's so obviously true that it's amazing nobody seems to have actually written it before." It was 2010 and the notion is by now well understood in the particular echo-box that I am in, but still.

Patrick, my friend, ran a D&D game for a group of teenaged boys who he only very tangentially knew (one of them is the nephew-in-law, or cousin-in-law, or second-nephew-once-removed-in-law, or something, of Nathan, who was also in our now sadly dismantled Liverpool game group). The posts he wrote about it are brilliant, but they are also a sort of microcosm of D&D, for me. We are grown-ups, and D&D was initially written by and for grown-ups, but for almost its entire history it has been the preserve largely of teenage boys. It's easy to forget that.

Jeff Rients' threefold model is funny, and feels like it's throwaway, but it is actually exceedingly perceptive. It also contains two single sentences which sum up D&D better than any I can possibly think of: "I suppose one could argue that Dungeons & Dragons fits the requirements to be Retro Stupidly Pretentious. But every RPG theory fails the moment D&D is taken into consideration, so I probably ought to quit while I'm ahead."

Benoist's epic megadungeon construction series. If it doesn't inspire you, you are sick in the mind and wrong in the head.

I think if you read those five things you are almost certainly good to go.

Random Ghost Generator

For Yoon-Suin, I came up with a little set of random tables for generating the ghosts which haunt the jungles of Láhág. Here they are:

A ghost created with this method:

Basic type: 5, Emotion: 6, Shape: 7, Appearance: 6, Method of Haunting: 4, Abilities: 18, 1, 11.

Mother Baxawalu. Mother Baxawalu haunts a vast Banyan tree growing at the bottom of a dark, ever-misty ravine. She appears as a naked old woman, carrying her own severed head in both hands. She tries to ensnare anybody unfortunate enough to stray into her ravine through the use of her sleep and hold person spells; once she has them in her power she ties them to branches in the Banyan tree and attempts to adopt and raise them as her own children, treating them like her family and trying to convince them of her undying love. Unless they escape, they typically starve to death or die of sheer terror and despair.  

Mother Baxawalu, it is said, was the mother of a zamindar of the town of Alipurduar, who was taken to the forest and beheaded by her own sons after they mistakenly assumed she had been unfaithful to their father. Stories of her haunting terrify local children, and the very sound of her cooing voice is enough to cause fear to any who have heard her tale. 

The Mythic Underworld and Mythic Otherworld

The working title for the new campaign setting is New Troy. This is purely because I've always liked the completely made-up notion from the Middle Ages that Britain was founded by refugees from the fall of Troy. This is a reality in which that, or something like it, happened. But it was long ago, and nobody really knows much about it at all - or what Troy is or was.

In New Troy, there are two other worlds, called Faerie and Muspel. (There is a third, called Elysium, but it remains inaccessible except to the dead.) Faerie is the realm of elves, changelings, and other beings that are by turns capricious, curious, benevolent or cruel. There, time moves more quickly than it does in New Troy, and nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Muspel is the underworld, the realm of evil spirits, giants, and devils. Sometimes it is like fire; other times like ice. There, time moves more slowly than it does in New Troy, and everything is what it seems: malevolent and depraved.

There are times, and places, where the boundaries between New Troy and the world of Faerie and the world of Muspel become blurred. For Faerie, these tend to be ever-shifting: a gate may exist on a certain hilltop for a hundred years before suddenly moving elsewhere or closing, while another may be found behind a waterfall for one day every decade. For Muspel, they tend to be fixed, eternal: caves, chasms, natural arches.

Faerie and Muspel are where adventure happens in New Troy. Muspel is the mythic underworld as described by Philotomy:

There is a school of thought on dungeons that says they should have been built with a distinct purpose, should "make sense" as far as the inhabitants and their ecology, and shouldn't necessarily be the centerpiece of the game (after all, the Mines of Moria were just a place to get through). None of that need be true for a megadungeon underworld. There might be a reason the dungeon exists, but there might not; it might simply be. It certainly can, and perhaps should, be the centerpiece of the game. As for ecology, a megadungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place
where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken. Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer.  

It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it.

Faerie is the mythic otherworld, the wilderness equivalent to the megadungeon. A world of trees, hills, rivers and rain, but where the normal laws of reality do not apply, and are bent, warped or broken. It may even be more dangerous than Muspel, because it resembles the real world so closely that you may not even realise you are in it. But it is not the real world: There are other things there.