The Master of Monster Descriptions

Zelazny does not get enough attention in general in RPG circles, but in particular for his excellent, efficient descriptions of monsters. He may be the single most influential author on me in that regard. Some examples:

It looked like something that had started out to be a man but had never quite made it. It had been stepped on, twisted, had holes poked into the sickly dough of its head-bulge. Bones showed through the transparent flesh of its torso and its short legs were as thick as trees, terminating in disk-shaped pads from which dozens of long toes hung like roots or worms. its arms were longer than its entire body. it was a crushed slug, a thing that had been frozen and thawed before it was fully baked. (The Borshin, from Jack of Shadows)

There was something unusual about their appearance... For one thing, all had uniformly bloodshot eyes. Very, very bloodshot eyes. With them, though, the condition seemed normal. For another, all had an extra joint to each finger and thumb, and sharp, forward-curving spurs on the backs of their hands. All of them had prominent jaws (and) forty-four teeth, most of them longer than human teeth, and several looking to be much sharper. Their flesh was grayish and hard and shiny. There were undoubtedly other differences also, but those were sufficient to prove a point of some sort. (The shadow creatures of Fiona, from Nine Princes in Amber)

Morgenstern was six hands higher than any other horse I had ever seen, and his eyes were the dead color of a Weimaraner dog's and his coat was all gray and his hooves looked like polished steel. (Morgenstern, from Nine Princes in Amber)

Head something like a croc's, only bigger. Around forty feet long. Able to roll itself into a big beachball with teeth. Fast on land or in water - and a hell of a lot of little legs on each side. (The Boadile, from This Immortal)

Her hair was green, though streaked with silver, and her eyes were round of moons of jade and her brows rose like the wings of olive gulls. Her mouth was small, her chin was small; her cheeks were high and wide and rounded. A circlet of white gold crossed her brow and there was a crystal necklace about her neck. At its tip there flashed a sapphire between her sweet bare breasts, whose nipples were also bare green. She wore scaled trunks of blue and a silver belt, and she held a scepter of pink coral in her hand and had a ring upon every finger, and each ring had a stone of a different blue within it. She did not smile... (Moire, Queen of Rebma, from Nine Princes in Amber)

It's the little things, really, that do it: the careful but frequent reference to vivid colours and simple adjectives (shiny, dead, sweet, sickly); the arch observations ("a thing that had been frozen and thawed before it was fully baked"); and the wry humour ("there was something unusual about their appearance"). But it's very clever and incisive use of language, too - there's so much communicated in that very simple last sentence: "She did not smile."

Above all, what I like is that Zelazny is very comfortable with you, the reader, not having a clear picture in your head of what the monster is like - not so that you fill in the gaps yourself, so much as that you are given an impression in the artistic sense: a replication of what it would be like to encounter the thing being described. If you came across Morgenstern you wouldn't be jotting down every detail of his appearance. You'd notice the size, the eyes, the hooves - and then you'd run, or look away, or hide, or do something else. Capturing that in text is what Zelazny does at his best.

Gygaxian Scientasy

I have a lot of affection for a phenomenon which I am here going to call "Gygaxian Scientasy", or "scientasy" for short. (Terms which I would have preferred - "scientism", "scientificism", "scienciness" and so on - are all taken as words used to describe the application of scientific language and dogma in non-scientific domains like the humanities or social sciences to bestow a veneer of  false truthiness. "Scientasy", which is something slightly different, will have to do for my purposes.)

Scientasy is the mixing of the scientific and the fantastical - or, perhaps put more accurately, the handling of fantastical things in a non-expressionistic, quasi-positivist way. In Gygax's D&D, while there are magic, different planes and other worlds, monsters, alignments and so on, there is also a sense in which those fantastical elements are the subject of academic and pseudoscientific inquiry within the fiction itself. (Making Gygaxian Scientasy something a little different from the problem of banalifying systematization I have written about before, which is very much a case of nerds imposing order on the supernatural in order to make it into something usable in a game.) There are sages who study the world. And, moreover, there is a world for them to discover: there is an objective reality to all of this fantastical stuff - it is empirically verifiable that there are inner planes, that there is something called alignment and there are 9 varieties of it and it actually affects things, that there are deities and they have different "spheres", that there are different categories of magic, and so on. Despite its weirdness and wonder, Gygax's D&D is ultimately a positivist's universe. If you tried hard enough, thought hard enough, studied hard enough, investigated hard enough - you could actually understand how it all works.

Scientasy reached its apogee in 2nd edition, with the Spelljammer and Planescape campaign settings and the publication of the Complete Psionicist's Handbook. There is no more scientastical approach to D&D than that presented in Planescape, with its rigorous in-universe classification and taxonomization of infinity; it's not that the multiverse is carefully and circumspectly divided into different planes for different alignments or elements, and the deities and demigods categorised into different levels of power, and philosophies put into neat little boxes, and so on, just for the purposes of DMs and players - it's that all those different clades exist within the fictional world itself, where everybody knows about them and acts upon their absolute veracity. The very stuff of the multiverse comes pre-categorised.

I enjoy the scientastical approach because it seems so redolent of a late renaissance/early enlightenment understanding of the universe as something that could be got at by inductive reasoning but which, by the way, included angels, philosophers' stones, birds that go and live under the sea in winter, Blemmyes, sea dragons, and so on. Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton would have been entirely at home in your average D&D campaign setting: they would have loved trying to figure it all out. (And, of course, since our universe must surely be just another part of the Prime Material Plane, it's entirely possible that they are living somewhere on the Outlands as petitioners doing precisely that. Now there's an adventure module for you: a journey through the D&D multiverse in search of Issac Newton.)

Plane as the Nose on Your Face

There are two models for the Inner Planes. Let's call them the purity model and the playability model.

The purity model is the one adopted by Monte Cook et al for 2nd edition Planescape. Here, each inner plane is comprised of the pure essence of whatever the core element is. The Plane of Earth is an infinite expanse of earth. The Plane of Air is an infinite expanse of air. The Quasielemental Plane of Salt is an infinite expanse of salt. And so on. There is no "up" or "down" - just endless [Element X] in all directions. In the Plane of Air, or Water, this means you are able to float up and down and side to side more or less freely, but in, say, the Quasielemental Plane of Salt you would have to burrow in those directions through solid crystals of salt in order to get anywhere.

Some concession to making those planes accessible to PCs came in the notion that there could be a bit of "bleed" from one into another, so you might get floating islands of earth in the plane of air, or bubbles of air in the plane of water, and so on. But otherwise most of the Inner Planes would be entirely hostile to PCs up to the very highest level, without cheats like Rings of [Element X] Resistance and whatnot. As soon as you appear in Salt you dehydrate and die; as soon as you appear in Radiance you go blind and insane and your face melts (something like that anyway), etc.

The playability model is the one adopted most memorably in my mind by Weis and Hickman in their lesser-known series, the Death Gate Cycle. Here, the world was divided into different elemental planes, but they were still livable to human beings: Air was a big void of air but it had islands floating in it which you could fly between on dragons; Earth was a big volcanic rocky place with tunnels in it but also a surface; Fire was a massive jungle with vegetation so thick you couldn't get to the ground; Water was a big globe of water which (if I recall correctly) you could breathe and which had floating Zaratan-like beast-islands in it. Here, while the different planes had different elemental characters, you could still, if you wanted to set an RPG there, have 1st level PCs adventuring quite happily.

The purity model is superficially the more interesting of the two in the sense that it's quite cool to try to imagine what kinds of things would exist on the Quasielemental Plane of Such-and-Such, but I wonder whether in fact this is true: it's probably more of a tricky, challenging and rewarding imaginative task to try to create a Plane of Salt/Ooze/Radiance/Earth/Mineral/Whatever which human beings could readily live in. What would a habitable plane of salt be like? How could you make such a place enough like a "real world" that it could plausibly be the home of human civilizations while still retaining the essence of a plane of salt? This seems to me to the interesting task, but the designers of Planescape sadly avoided it.

The Problem of Sport

I play a lot of sport, I watch a lot of sport. With the sole exception of golf, I can enjoy almost any sporting activity you could name. But I've never played in an RPG which has sport as its focus. I can think of a number of reasons for this.

1. A lot of nerds don't like sport. Thinking about it, most of the people I've played RPGs with over the years have been of the two-left-feet, "it's just eleven men running around on the grass chasing an inflated pig's bladder", last-to-be-picked-for-team-games-during-gym-classes subspecies of geek (which I think is probably the dominant variety).

2. There aren't many RPGs that concern sport, and the ones that do are not popular. This is undoubtedly causally related to reason 1.

3. Sport is hard to operationalise for RPG purposes. This is for two sub-reasons:

a.  If you want the actual sporting events to be the main focus, what you will essentially end up doing is playing out the minutiae of matches in extended form with bits of role-playing in between, so that ultimately you may as well just play a table-top sport game such as Blood Bowl.

b. If you want it to be more to do with role playing, you would either end up with a very proscribed and railroady sort of experience in which the PCs mainly do the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways (playing different teams in different places every week, repeat ad nauseum), or with a game which is mostly about the adventures the PCs get up to between games, in which case why not just have them be adventurers?

4. It's hard to think up new sports that make sense (just ask JK Rowling) and existing ones are really complicated to model. Games Workshop did a stunningly good job with Blood Bowl, which is ridiculously fun to play while also kind of making sense as a mixture of rugby league, American football and Warhammer. But that may be the exception that proves the rule.

That said, I don't think all of these problems are insurmountable. In order to work, the game would have to be both compelling in the sense of being very enjoyable and tense to play through a match/bout/event, while also having a method of generating interesting random events to take place during downtime, together with a way of rewarding PCs for spending time training or learning new skills. You would have to make both elements of the game equally rewarding and deep, in other words, and that would require a lot of effort.

Oddly enough, the "builds" mentality of 3rd edition D&D marries well to the idea of sport: it would perhaps be quite straightforward to develop a gladiatorial version of D&D 3.5, and I suspect many people have. Old School D&D, not so much - indeed, the general trend among storygamers and D&D enthusiasts alike is, I think, towards being rules-lite rather than crunchy, and if sport is to be done well there needs to be a good amount of crunch.

Harlan Ellison, Cognitive Dissonance, and Defaulting to Openness

Harlan Ellison died recently. He was by many accounts (his own included, probably), a difficult character. While respecting his work, I was never a huge fan. I love "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". Most of the rest of his stuff I can take or leave, and a lot of it I think is pretty awful. (Having read Dangerous Visions fairly recently, I was struck by the weakness of his own contribution to the volume when stood up against the other giants of the field, and it must be said that his mini-editorials almost ruin the entire project; but on the other hand, nobody else would have been able to pull the whole thing off, which I suppose sums up the man pretty well, overall.)

But already the usual suspects are starting to wring their hands about whether or not it's problematic to like Ellison's work because, well, he wasn't a terribly nice man.

What I think is this. Sometimes, very often in fact, you will in life come across people who don't share your views, who have done bad things, or who you otherwise consider to be odious for some reason, and yet are capable of creating or doing brilliant, amazing things. This will create cognitive dissonance, and that will cause you discomfort. How can it be that Eric Gill was a sex abuser of quite startling extent and yet created some of the nicest typefaces and most beautiful public art seen in the 20th century? How can it be that Gaugin created such wonderful paintings while simultaneously being, basically, a filthy old pervert and a sex tourist? How can it be that Orson Scott Card has Wrong Opinions but wrote something as great as Ender's Game? How can it be that Scott Adams has produced some of the greatest satire of the modern workplace while also being, well, really fucking weird? How can John Lennon have been so cruel to the people close to him? How can Richard Dawkins have written such fantastic books while thinking such objectionable things about people with Down's syndrome? The examples are endless. And you are going to have to find a way to deal with the issue, because if it matters to you that people whose work you admire also be good people who think the right things, your life will end up being greatly impoverished because - it turns out - extremely creative and capable people tend not to be perfectly nice all the time.

In some cases, escaping this form of cognitive dissonance is easy, because the person in question doesn't produce work which is actually any good. It's easy not to listen to Gary Glitter - as well as being a sex offender who has rightly faced criminal consequences of his behaviour, his music was crap.

It can also be easy when the person in question is dead. It's easy to use Gil Sans as your favourite typeface, because Eric Gill is long gone.

The hard bit is when you can't escape through either of those routes. Do you still want to enjoy Kevin Spacey's performance in Glengarry Glen Ross or American Beauty? Do you still want to enjoy the Harvey Weinstein-produced Pulp Fiction? (Assuming the two men are guilty of what they've been accused of.)

And don't hide behind the platitude that you can separate belief from action. The attitude often presented in these kinds of situations is: "Well, I don't mind what people think or believe, but I draw a line in the sand when it comes to actions." Yeah, right: so you'd be entirely comfortable supporting the work of an open, ardent and genuine Nazi or committed advocate of pedophilia provided they "didn't act on it"? What would make you dislike somebody enough that you would not want to associate with their art?

You have a choice, essentially, when approaching this issue, that comes down to a very simple equation. Do you want your default position to be open, or closed? Is what's important to you purity, or experiencing art? Do you want to focus your energy on avoiding what makes you uncomfortable, or accepting it?

The decision I have made is that it is better to default to the latter over the former, because in the final analysis purity won't make you a better person: art will. Purity has a superficial allure - it makes you feel as though you are contributing to a better world if you refuse all contact with anything produced by "bad people". What you are doing in fact is limiting your own horizons and narrowing your mind, creating for yourself an isolation chamber in which all you are ever exposed to is the product of the like-minded. It isn't necessarily easy. But I think openness is the better path to follow.

(A postscript: this interview about Harlan is worth a listen.)

Why are there humans in Yoon-Suin?

The weekend is the witching hour for blogs. If posts only get a third of the number of page views on a Saturday or Sunday that they would get normally on a weekday, they only get a tenth of the number of comments.

This is the time for the silly, the experimental, the strange, the ill-advised, and the willfully obscure to sneak out of the window, climb down the drainpipe, and scamper out into the dark rain-damp streets to have their nefarious fun.

Today, I was thinking about the origin of Yoon-Suin and its place in the multiverse. Why are there humans there? I suppose the most sensible and natural explanation is that they have always been there, in the manner of fantasy races. Nobody asks where the elves came from in Mystara, or the dwarves in the Forgotten Realms. They're there because they are (or a god made them and put them there, etc.).

The second most sensible explanation is that humans came to Yoon-Suin from elsewhere. They were explorers, or would-be colonists, or refugees, or simply migrants. They came to Yoon-Suin, stayed, and proliferated. Now nobody even remembers that they're not actually native to the continent - except, perhaps, for some obscure monastic order somewhere in the Mountains of the Moon, and slug-man students of historical anthropology who have read the correct obscure tomes in the correct forgotten archives.

A third explanation: there is a rift somewhere in the fabric of reality that leads - or lead once - from Yoon-Suin to our world. In the ancient Australian outback, the deserts of Namibia, the Cheddar Gorge or the Lascaux Cave. Through it, slug-men once ventured and brought back slaves and captives for work, experimentation, pleasure, or perhaps merely to observe - and these slaves or captives, just like kudzu, Japanese knotweed, rabbits or the cane toad, found their new home much to their liking and spread with such rapidity it was as if they had always been there. As far as the slugmen are concerned, they really have: the introduction of humans happened so may eons ago that whatever forgotten archives may have documented it are long collapsed into dust and waste.

The latter two explanations raise further interesting questions: what was living in the Hundred Kingdoms, Sughd, the Mountains of the Moon, etc., before the humans came along and replaced them?

The Brothers Squamous: The Brothers' Golems

In the previous post in this series, there was some discussion about the different types of golems in the dungeon. Here are some more thoughts:

Each brother has two different types of golem servants (again, I don't want to over-egg the trifecta motif too much), but there are different sub-types of each, all formed to perform one specific category of task and all of whom cooperate with each other to a certain extent in doing so. The snag, of course, is that the dungeon no longer resembles the dungeon they were created to work in, and this results in many unintended consequences.

Oriens was the first brother to emerge from his egg, at dawn. Ever since, his interests have been in new beginnings, in births, in youth, in novelty, in the future, in the East, in openness, in revelation.

From the morning mist and the dawn light he created golems. Those formed from the dawn light are ethereal and quick; the mist golems are silent and still - but both are transient: they form, dissipate, and re-form continually, shifting in and out of existence as they go about their tasks.

Examples of different sub-types of these golems include:

• Sentinels - mist golems who watch 
• Stalkers - mist golems who follow intruders
• Revealers - dawn light golems who seek out things which are hiding or hidden
• Prospectors - dawn light golems who move more quickly than time itself 
• Reproducers - mist golems who create new mist golems, endlessly

Meridies was the second brother to emerge, at noon. His interests are in heat, in light, in the present, in action, in energy, in the sun.

He created golems from the noon light and from plants, which flourish in it. Those formed from the noon light are hot and bright; those created from plants are inexorable and strong - both types are powerful and dangerous, exerting the hideous might of the natural world.

Examples of different sub-types include:

• Searers - noon light golems who cleanse entire chambers with their heat
• Structurers - plant golems who prevent the dungeon collapsing with their tensile strength
• Re-builders - plant golems who repair damaged corridors and chambers
• Constrainers - plant golems which hold things still
• Scorchers - noon light golems which blast and burn 

Vespara was the last brother to emerge, at dusk. His interests are in endings, in deaths, in the past, in slowness, in closure, in concealment.

His golems are made from the dusk light and from stone. Those created from the dusk light are creeping and hidden; those created from stone are implacable and resilient - both types are there to stop, to finish, and to close.

Examples of different sub-types include:

• Ambushers - dusk light golems who hide in shadow and strike at those who pass
• Barriers - stone golems who use their bodies to close off corridors and doorways 
• Concealers - dusk light golems who hide things Vespara specified must remain unseen
• Dismantlers - stone golems who collapse chambers and corridors 

The Homogenization of D&D

Ease of communication promotes assimilation. You only have to look around you for a few seconds to notice that. TV and the internet are bringing us all together at an astonishing rate. Whether you live in New York, Paris, London or Tokyo, your life experience is nowadays almost identical. The only differences are which paintings are in what museums and which language the street signs are in.

I exaggerate slightly. But not by much.

Since the World Cup is on at the moment, we can use football as an example. In case you're not familiar with the famous "Brazil/Zaire free kick incident" of 1974, watch this video:

At the time, it was widely believed that the player in question, Mwepu Ilunga, made this mistake because in Zairian football they didn't take free kicks as the "official rules" dictated. This story doesn't actually seem to be true: the player in question later said he did it hoping to get sent off, as a protest because he and his team mates weren't being paid properly by the Zairian footballing authorities. (There's also an apocryphal tale that gets bandied around holding that the Zairian players had been threatened with death by Mobuto Sese Soko if they lost the game by more than 3-0 and either the pressure got to Ilunga, or he was desperate to try to waste time and prevent the Brazilians scoring again.) But it illustrates a point: at that time, football was played quite differently in different parts of the world. It was rare for players to move overseas to play football, and there were radically different playing styles in England, Scotland, Italy, Brazil, and so on. It was only 20 years prior to the Ilunga free kick that Hungary had revolutionised international football by creating their new "WW" system and suddenly unleashing it on the unsuspecting English; it was possible for them to do this because nobody in England had a clue what was going on in Hungarian football. It was thus entirely possible for a viewing audience in 1974 to imagine that in Zaire they had different rules for free kicks: it's a reflection of how diverse the public understood international football to be. 

It wouldn't be possible nowadays. Football has globalized, and as it has globalized it has homogenized. I sit here writing this blog entry watching Brazil v Switzerland. Most of the players on both teams play together or against each other regularly in English, Spanish, German or Italian club football. Their club teams and international teams use the same or very similar formations. The two sides both emphasise the same qualities in players. In 1974 a tie between Brazil and Switzerland would have showcased two very different styles. Now, they're basically the same.

The same will happen with D&D. It is happening now. When I was a kid, the only frames of reference you had for understanding what D&D was actually like were the people around you who introduced you to the game, the page long "example of play" in the PHB, what you could glean from various hints and asides in the text of the rules themselves, and maybe the little "choose your own adventure" style intro in Red Box Basic. That was it. Other than that, you were on your own: D&D was what you and your friends made of it.

Think of a new player nowadays. You can go online and watch Will Wheaton, or a thousand other people, actually play sessions of D&D right in front of your very eyes. You can read forums, blogs, and other online resources discussing different play styles in intricate detail. You can directly contact many RPG designers through social media. You can go on Tumblr or Twitter and heap abuse on people who don't conform to what you think D&D is about. The texture of your introduction to the game, as a neophyte, is utterly different to what it was in 1985. 

D&D will become like football. It's not that all games will be the same, and it's not that there won't be innovations. It's that we'll end up with largely the same play styles dominating (some people will prefer "narrative" style games versus "OSR" style games, just like some football teams play a 4-2-3-1 versus a 3-4-3 or play an attacking game versus a counter-attacking style, but they will deploy those styles in homogenous ways) and there will be much, much, much less variety than there once was.

What happens when your touchstone for "what D&D is like" ends up being Will Wheaton and not, say, your friend's older brother and his mates (which was my introduction to the game)? A more significant question than can be dealt with in a blogpost, probably. Switzerland have just equalised and it's got interesting, so I'll leave it up to you to deal with in the comments. 

The War-[x] Game

Put the word "chaos" in front of almost any animal name (or any object, pretty much) and instantly you get a monster idea. Try it. Chaos butterfly. Chaos dog. Chaos toad. Chaos cow. 

The same is also true of "war". War bat. War hippo. War heron. War owl. 

What I like about the "war-[x]" gambit is that you don't just get a cool-sounding monster name. You get an implied setting and culture surrounding it too. What society has war bats? Maybe a race of troglodytic jungle cave men who use their war bats, trained to fly into people's faces, to blind enemy warriors. What about war hippos? Clearly one that resembles Ancient Egypt, Nubia, or maybe Great Zimbabwe. Its elite warrior class, its knights, ride around on hippos and are even able to use them to travel up and down rivers (legends still tell of a famous battle in which an army of war hippos, together with knights, crossed the sea to sack a city of the Ancient Greece analogue in the setting). War herons are trained by a marsh-dwelling people to peck out the kneecaps or pierce the feet of intruders as they pass by thick reed beds. War owls are used by a society of nocturnal elves to scratch out the eyes of the foolish humans who enter their forests - or maybe to hunt down and devour pixies.

Try it and see. 

Lay a Little Egg for Me

Today we visited some friends in the countryside who keep, among other things, chickens. They have a flock of about a dozen of them, and the birds are free to roam across a large corner of an orchard which must be very close to chicken paradise: nice cool shade from the trees with a few spots of sun here and there, all the food and water they can drink, lots of grassy areas to roam around in, and shelter from the elements.

But chicken paradise, it turns out, is actually something close to HELL: a dystopian nightmare of viciously and vigorously enforced social hierarchy from which nobody can escape, characterised by unprovoked and brutal beatings, theft of food, sexual assault, and constant unrelenting low-level bullying and violence.

Animals do not have morals. But even within that context, chickens take amorality to the extreme.

They are also probably the scariest non-dangerous-to-humans farmyard animal. They are, to all intents and purposes, miniature velociraptors, and the link to the dinosaurs is absolutely transparent and clear as soon as you spend any time watching them - the only thing they really lack is teeth. The chickens at my friend's farm spent most of the afternoon stalking and catching flies through areas of long grass in their little domain. Watching them doing this was like a case study in efficient predation. Those flies had no chance. Each chicken was like a T-rex, striding back and forth with constant twitching head movements until it fixated on a fly landing on a blade of grass, whereupon it would dart its head forward with such speed that not even a blue bottle could escape. It wasn't hard at all to imagine what the results would be if those birds were 8 feet tall and became interested in the taste of human flesh. They would be ruling the planet within months and we would be laying eggs for them.

I missed a trick with chickens in Yoon-Suin. Our modern domesticated animals are descendants of the Red Junglefowl, a wild bird whose range almost directly maps to the regions of the world which were its geographic inspiration. I should have done something with that. In a fantasy setting, a race of chicken-men could be like orcs: a being with a society that prioritizes only selfishness, where might makes right, and where the only respected value is the pecking order - literally.

Chicken-man

HD 2+2
AC 5
#ATT 2
DMG 1d4/1d6 (peck/gouge)
Move 180
ML 7
*Chicken-men can fly clumsily for up to 60' but need to land and then rest for 3 rounds afterwards.
*Chicken-men attack with a peck and a gouge from a taloned foot. They can instead sacrifice making those attacks in order to either:
1) Use both feet to trample and pin a human-sized-or smaller opponent to the ground; if they hit successfully they pull their target to the ground and pin it. This does no damage but in subsequent rounds the chicken-man can peck the head, doing 2d4+2 damage. The chicken-man will let go if hit and wounded.
2) Buffet with the wings. This hits any enemy in a semi-circular arc in front of the chicken automatically, doing 1d2 damage.