“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” -Genesis 2:2 (NIV)

Craft show season has begun.

For those who aren’t aware, my wife makes her living sewing and selling purses at craft shows, and those run from about May-November. They also tend to last for entire weekends. Because I am taller than my wife and have a bit more upper-body strength, in the early spring I turn into a craft show roadie for a weekend or two every month until around Thanksgiving.

It’s not a bad gig a lot of the time. My wife is generous and she earmarks a small percentage of the proceeds of shows I help with for hobby spending as a thank-you for giving up my weekend. I tend to acquire a number of new gaming books during show season, and thanks to a bunch of time during the business hours of show being slow, I often have time to read them, too.

But the shows are definitely work. There are early mornings on days when I could normally sleep in, and lugging enough stuff to fill a 10′ x 10′ tent (merchandise, fixtures, heavy concrete weights to hold the tent down in winds, and the tent itself) to and from the car is definitely a workout. And one of the more important things I do is provide an extra pair of hands when the weather turns bad, which can happen very quickly. On the other hand, we can sometimes make money equal to one of my biweekly paychecks in a day.

But this often means that by the end of a weekend, I’m pretty wrung out.

Going through that this weekend got me thinking about rest and fatigue in gaming. One thing that often happens with heroes in a lot of fiction is that they seem basically tireless. Many superheroes in particular lead double full-time lives where they do a demanding, professional job all day, then apparently run home, probably eat a quick meal and then head off to fight crime until at least 2 or 3 a.m. Then get up for work and do it all over again.

Even if I was twenty, that sounds exhausting. I’m forty.

You see the same thing with fantasy heroes too, only with them, if anything, the pace is even more intense. The heroing thing is their job, and they’re putting in a solid 80-90 hours of it a week. Trekking through the wilderness, fighting monsters, and dealing with injuries sustained in that process. And as you probably know, being in pain is tiring.

I think most games don’t track that kind of run-off-your-feet exhaustion because it’s no fun being tired and many of us put up with it in our daily lives, but it’s worth thinking about when your 5e character takes a level of exhaustion and whenever the party in basically any game gets some down time.

It’s especially important to remember because our culture devalues rest and glorifies pushing yourself. The American drug of choice is caffeine, which helps with fatigue. Phrases like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” get thrown around with a lot of bravado. Employers often look at a desire for work-life balance as a character deficiency or even cause for disciplinary action. One must always be grinding, pushing, producing.

These are viewed as heroic, virtuous things. And so a lot of our fiction heroes do them too. Double lives. Long days of heroing. I remember one campaign I ran where the PCs started at level 5 and ended at level 21. They found a lost civilization, saved the world multiple times, and took down an evil deity.

The campaign lasted for less than three months of in-game time. Those poor PCs were burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. But that’s the fantasy. Do more, get more, create more. Rest is a waste. Go go go.

It’s unhealthy. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable and truly necessary. Sometimes there’s an emergency or the needs of supporting a family demand more labor than we wish we had to give. But it’s worth remembering that even God rested when he finished with creation. Stopping for a while should not be an automatic cause for guilt.

Like story, rest is a holy gift. We would do well to remember it.

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Penfield is another small town located in the Yuthi desert, and is named, somewhat uncreatively, for the massive private prison in the middle of a flat plain that dominates the the town. The pen in the field, if you will.

Origins

Penfield grew up out of a need for the small and medium-sized communities in the Yuthi (and some in surrounding regions) to house prisoners over the long term. Most of the Yuthi is civilized enough that capital and corporal punishment aren’t used for things like theft and assault (at least, not by the legitimate governments) but housing prisoners is expensive and somewhat staffing and space intensive.

About 60 years ago, the founders of the Yuthi Incarceration Corporation saw an opportunity in all of the overcrowded holding cells and hotel rooms with locks on the outside the various towns were using for prisoner storage and acted on it. Construction of the prison took eight years, and when it was finished, they immediately began accepting inmates. At any given time, the prison is usually around 95% capacity, and YIC’s sales team is active in ensuring that this remains the case, offering discounted rates to cities with overflow populations if too many cells are vacant.

YIC was founded by Maxim Blacksteel, a dwarf and construction company owner descended from Citadel lineage and Sevistha, a naga security expert that had been doing freelance work for several of the towns and companies in the Maghali Da Bina area at the time. The goal of YIC was to found a prison that was as self-sufficient as possible, secure, humane, and rehabilitative. YIC has been more successful with some of these goals than others.

The Facility

The prison is definitely secure and humane. Cells are about 150 square feet and are single-occupancy, resembling a tiny, but comfortable, apartment with a number of larger cells available for prisoners with unusual physiologies such as nagas, centaurs, and prisoners that need to be submerged in water to survive such as merfolk and sahuagin. The entire grounds (so the facility itself and a quarter-mile of open ground in every direction, including up into the sky and underground) is a massive artificial dead-magic area. This dead-magic area is maintained by triple-redundant pylons powered by multiple, also-redundant generators. The dead-magic zone is powerful enough to even suppress the breath weapons of dragons and the enchantments on magic items. It’s even able to dissipate curses on items and people, which has been useful more than once.

The prison’s security measures include guard towers, seismometers to monitor for digging, high walls, barbed wire, and a very limited number of entrances and exits. Prisoners grow a lot of the food used by the prison in on-grounds vegetable gardens that use techniques purchased from Lithlien’s greenhouse farm in Lostant. Medical treatment for sick and injured prisoners is provided at a field hospital right on the outskirts of the dead magic zone. There’s a dedicated, underground roadway that leads to it, and it has no exterior exits. The infirmary has normal magic levels (to allow for healing spells) but is warded against destructive, travel, summoning, and scrying magic.

Life Inside

Life inside the YIC facility is mind-numbingly boring, but generally safe. YIC sorts prisoners by aggressiveness and physical formidability rather than length of sentence or severity of crime and keeps the worst actors separated. YIC also has some very strict rules about how prisoners are to be treated and they do not do hard labor, torture, prolonged solitary confinement, or executions and are proud of these things. Nutrition is adequate, if unexciting. Rehabilitation programs are available and heavily encouraged, but due to expense are often not as valuable as those running the prison would like them to be. (A common criticism is that what should be spent on rehabilitation is instead listed as “profit” in YIC’s ledgers.) One of the worst ongoing failures of YIC is that they’ve been unable to lower the recidivism rate much. Prisoners generally come out of YIC knowing that it’s not that bad inside and without much in the way of new skills or contacts. It’s very easy to fall back into crime, and YIC is happy to have them back.

The Town

Penfield itself is a pretty dreary, bleak place. It has no real history or culture of its own and essentially exists entirely to support the prison. The residents tend to be an insular and somewhat sullen lot and nothing is particularly homey or even eye-catching; buildings tend to be plain, functional steel-frame constructions with no real architectural interest or even much in the way of color. The streets are laid out in a grid fashion, and building codes actually take lines of sight from the prison’s walls and guard towers heavily into account. This combination gives the whole town a kind of soul-sucking, oppressive quality. There’s very little reason to stay, and everyone here knows it.

Adventure Possibilities

The order of St. Iri seems like an obvious choice of patron organization to get the PCs involved in Penfield. It’s not a dangerous place, but it’s a very desolate and hopeless one. The order of St. Iri exists to bring hope, and they’re both good at it and frequently sneaky about it.

Jail break stories are always a fun option. If the PCs somehow wind up in the care of YIC, they’ll have the additional challenge of not being able to use their magical abilities at all. Everything magical is suppressed down to nothing in the dead-magic zone.

As currently presented, YIC is a relatively honest and benign organization as private prisons go, but all it would take is a management change to get much worse. Private prison abuse and corruption get pretty nasty in the real world, so if you decide you want to tackle this topic, do your homework and approach with sensitivity

What if someone decides they want to breathe a little life into Penfield? What kind of trouble would that stir up?

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I’m still working on the setting (I may have some new material in that series as soon as next blog post, in fact) but I’ve also been contemplating how to use some of the stuff I’ve backed on Kickstarter over the last 18 months in a new game. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how to use the Arcana of the Ancients and Strongholds and Followers material.

And, oh yeah, the 5e Cthulhu book from Petersen Games.

You might think this is going to be a post about weaving together disparate source material at this point, but it’s not. This week, I want to talk about using source material of dubious origin, in particular the Cthulhu/Lovecraft mythos.

H.P. Lovecraft was a horrible, malignant racist, and not just by today’s standards. He was a horrible, malignant racist by the standards of his own time, which was the early 20th century. His cat was named, unironically, after a racial slur, and he was a fan of Hitler when he came to power. He hated basically anyone who wasn’t of Anglo-Saxon descent, and found inter-racial relationships (even between different nationalities of white people) to be abhorrent. In addition, he also took a dim view of religion as a whole, and had an atheistic (or maltheistic, take your pick) view of the cosmos. Waypoint Radio did a pretty in-depth analysis of all of this a while back. (Warning: lots of NSFW language.) Overly Sarcastic Productions has a much funnier treatment you can find here. It is very much worth your time.

He was not a great guy.

But he was also one of the most influential horror writers in the history of the genre, and his work is largely in the public domain, which means that anyone can use it. Even when he was alive, he encouraged other writers to work in the mythos and so there’s this incredibly detailed and in-depth bunch of weird cosmic horror created partially by him and partially by other folks like August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, and Clark Ashton Smith that’s been immensely influential on modern gaming settings.

So what to do with that?

My planned answer is “use it in a way that would make Lovecraft mad.”

First of all, I don’t have a problem with the cosmic horror genre, per se, but my preferred flavor is more influenced by Mass Effect than Lovecraft himself. (Spoiler warning for the Mass Effect series.) In Mass Effect, there are horrible, evil cosmic entities out there that have been wiping out incredibly advanced civilizations for millennia, but it is ultimately possible to prevail against them. The victory is extremely costly, but at the end of the trilogy, the Reapers are no longer a threat in 3 out of 4 possible endings.

The key difference there is “astoundingly difficult” vs. “actually impossible.”

So that’s one point of subversion.

Cosmologically, Lovecraft’s universe was a place where all higher powers were malignant and all human religious thought was ultimately controlled by evil beings like Nyarlathotep. My answer to that is “nah.” I like the way Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy handles such things; there are absolutely horrible, evil things out there, and some of them are powerful and rightly terrifying. But there’s also goodness, and it will, in the end, prevail. The worst thing is never the last thing.

Two points of subversion.

Of course, it bears mentioning at this point that I’m not actually giving money to Lovecraft or people like him. The folks in the gaming industry that make games based on the Cthulhu mythos are people like Kenneth Hite, Robin Laws, Sandy Petersen, and the late (and much beloved) Greg Stafford. Ken Hite is a Presbyterian. Sandy Petersen is LDS. Greg Stafford was a shaman. And while Robin Laws is an atheist, the worldview similarities between him and Lovecraft end there. None of those people are (or were) hateful, bigoted people.

Ironically, the people in charge of steering Lovecraft’s creations, in the gaming industry, anyway, are much better people than he was and don’t share his hateful worldview.

Three points, but I can’t take any credit for that one, happy as it makes me.

And finally, some of my plans for the story involve a character of mixed heritage as one of the people who will ultimately fix things, something Lovecraft would never go for. In fact, he’d be aghast. The whole idea of Deep Ones is that racial impurity is bad.

Four points

The idea here is not to be spiteful (though with someone like Lovecraft, it’s admittedly really tempting) but to take something classic and influential that also has some fundamental problems and address those problems while still taking the good. Lovecraft and his contemporaries did come up with some pretty spectacular monsters and lore. Shoggoths, Hunting Horrors, Yithians, Hounds of Tindalos, Bholes and Dholes are all fantastically interesting, creepy, scary creatures that feel like a genuine threat. It will be genuinely fun to use them.

But I’m under no obligation to be faithful to the vision of the guy who created the mythos those creatures inhabit, and you aren’t either. Lots of classic genre fiction has racist or other ugly elements in it. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge and then pointedly discard that stuff as we’re integrating it into our games.

In fact, if we’re going to use that material, I think that’s what we should do.

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That can be a good thing. I tend to chase plot hooks and want to engage NPCs. It also means that sometimes I can be a little too forceful and wind up monopolizing or even closing out a scene when other players aren’t done with it.

Like I did on Saturday.

Saturday’s game session went pretty well, but toward the end of the evening, we were questioning a hostile NPC who had been involved in some violent sabotage against a restaurant that the PCs were investigating. The warforged character and Nassir scared him a little, he grudgingly gave up some information and we handed him over to the watch.

Later that evening, after the game was over, one of the other players contacted me privately on Discord and asked why I’d rushed out of the scene so quickly. As it turned out, she’d had some other questions she’d wanted to ask – some really astute, useful, intelligent questions that hadn’t even occurred to me – and I’d basically just charged through the scene and shut it down. She was very courteous and pleasant about it (more than she needed to be given how much I’d shut her down, albeit without meaning to), but she was a little confused as to why I’d rushed out of the scene and a bit frustrated about not being able to question the NPC as much as she’d have liked.

We talked back and forth a bit and I came away with some important take-aways.

1. I’ve known for a while that I can be a little bit of a steamroller at the table, but I hadn’t been thinking of it actively on game nights much, so I need to be more conscious of that. A reminder of these known issues can be good, especially when it’s delivered as kindly as this one was.
2. The player who contacted me has a lot of good ideas and I need to make sure she gets into scenes more. If there’s a constructive use for the forceful “alpha gamer” personality, it’s making sure to hand the spotlight around actively. I didn’t do that on Saturday, and the game was worse for it.
3. In particular, given both her mindset and skillset away from the table and her character’s background and skill list, I’m thinking we should make the PC of the player who came to me with concerns one of the people who handles interrogations and interviews on the regular. As I said above, she had a whole raft of things she wanted to ask the NPC about that I didn’t even think of.
4. I have really nice, mature friends who will have a pleasant and civil conversation about things and give specific, constructive, actionable feedback. I am a lucky gamer.

The reason I bring this exchange up here in the blog at all is that it’s a good example of away-from-table discussion that can make games better. There was no hostility or animosity, just some honest, constructive feedback. The conversation I had with the other player was cordial and there was a bit of humor injected. It wasn’t this big, drama-filled thing.

We spend a lot of time in the RPG advice sphere talking about “adult conversations” and that often has a potential to come off as something like getting an annual performance review at work: hyper-serious, stressful, and uncomfortable to get through. And sometimes, if someone has done something truly awful, those conversations need to happen.

But most of the time, things can go much more like they did on Saturday, with one friend asking another if they’d do something a little differently in the future, the other pledging to do so, and that being that. Approach in kindness and respond in humility. You’re friends, after all.

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The topic du jour was evil characters or those serving evil masters (particularly evil dieties or beings powerful enough to be warlock patrons) and one of the things that struck me about the conversation was the point that evil characters are kind of boring on a fundamental level a lot of the time. They’re narcissistic and sociopathic. They often care about only themselves. Even if they ostensibly care about something else, it’s often purely because of what that thing can do for them. In Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos, he makes the observation that most mythos cults are fundamentally self-serving. Evil really is banal a lot of the time, even if it’s horrifying. Truly interesting and compelling villains often are interesting because there’s a spark of twisted good in there – to use some comic book examples, Magneto is significantly more interesting than Carnage. Magneto believes he is trying to achieve a noble end, and he’s mostly right, but it’s corrupted and harsh. The cinematic version of Eric Killmonger is compelling for the exact same reason. Carnage, by contrast, is pure malice, bloodlust and sadism. He’s scary, but he’s not interesting.

By contrast, I find good characters much more interesting – what has pushed this person past normal human decency into service, perhaps risky, costly service? Why have they chosen to do good in the way they do? How do they find the strength to keep going? I think a big part of it is that good is also inherently relational. Good is, almost by definition, the care of and concern for other creatures and places around you. It is externally-focused. When scripture tells us how to behave, it’s almost always in regards to other people – particularly in the teachings of Jesus.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Matthew 25:35-40

However, that external focus, because people are limited, tends to itself be limited, or at least specialized. When ministries or charitable endeavors are started, they typically focus on a specific type or at least a related cluster of types of need, and good characters tend to do the same thing. That difference in focus provides variety and interest.

It’s why I can play three different neutral good clerics in three different consecutive D&D games (The colony game, City on a Hill, and the Eberron game) and not get sick of them. And despite the similarities, I’ve come to realize that Lambert, Bertrand, and Nassir are actually very different people, and I have found some roleplaying challenges along the way because of those differences.

Lambert was easy, in a lot of ways. If he’d been a character in a short story or novel, you could call him an “author insert.” He was definitely an Idealized Self character, but in a lot of ways he was also a Doppelganger Self character. Lambert had a lot of my own personal issues. Intensity, the tendency to take everything seriously, the sense that he was responsible on some level for the actions of those around him, impostor syndrome, and a bit of a guilt complex. I didn’t have to stretch myself very far to portray him consistently because he was basically me, in better shape and with clerical magic, in a fantasy setting. I’ve written about him at length, and instead of trying to summarize here, I’ll just link you back to previous posts.

Bertrand and Nassir are proving to be more challenging.

Bertrand

Bertrand, somewhat to my surprise, has shaken out as a supremely-confident person and a bit of a smart alec. He’s undoubtedly a good guy, but he’ll stare three armed orcs down alone and act like he’s doing them a favor by not starting a fight. Because, really, if he wins, they’re going to get hurt, and he really doesn’t want that. He’s kind and friendly, but he’s also wary and a little suspicious. His confidence also extends to the other folks around him, though he finds Trather’s naivety a little amusing. I’m enjoying playing him a great deal because, again to my surprise, he’s turned out to be a very different kind of character from the other two clerics or even Desilav, the paladin I have running around the City on a Hill setting of Celansar from the episodes I guested on in season 1. Bertrand is giving me a chance to play a good person who doesn’t angst over it as much as Lambert (or I) tended to do.

And to me, that makes him interesting and a bit of a challenge. Because Bertrand is good kinda just ’cause why wouldn’t he be? He doesn’t even take it all that seriously. He’s had a decent life, he’s gifted with some skills that he can use to help people, and he likes to see other people happy and in good places. Minor acts of repair and healing are trivially-easy for him. He doesn’t put forth a lot of effort to seek out a cause to support because he doesn’t have to – all he has to do is walk down a random street and a bevy of opportunities to help will be right there. If they’re not, he’ll pick a street in a poorer part of town and try again. He doesn’t have to exert that much effort to help people in a lot of cases, so he just does it without thinking – that wagon wheel is broken and I’m right here, might as well cast mending on it, right? It’s literally six seconds out of his day. He probably won’t even be able to find a gap in the crowd that soon. He’s only level three, but in a lot of ways, he’s got an outsize ability to affect the lives of those around him for the better, and as he grows in power, that will only get more pronounced. This isn’t to say his care isn’t genuine, but it’s far less conscious than that of Lambert, Desilav, or Nassir. In some ways, that’s aspirational for me too – it’s the kind of goodness I see in people like my parents, and I desperately want to get so good at it that I don’t even think about it any more.

Bertand, despite his outwardly self-confident air, represents a very humble sort of virtue. He’s not really thinking about himself or even the condition of his own character. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, he is not thinking about humility. He’s very often not thinking about himself at all.

Nassir

Nassir is way outside my experience. He’s three times the age of the oldest humans in the real world, and he’s been through a tremendous number of ups and downs. His central point of caring is for the poor and the downtrodden. Nassir, rather than being Diligent like Lambert, Kind like Desilav, or Humble like Bertrand is Generous as his central virtue. He is a “have” and feels a strong pull to lessen the suffering and raise the station of the “have nots” in the world, to the point where he’s sometimes a little ridiculous about it. He hands money out freely and knows Charlie (the party’s resident fire sorceress) because of his charitable work.

But he’s also something of a meditation on mortality and death. Nassir is very old, and is also very dangerous. Moreso than any other PC I’ve played since I started in 5e, he is a lethal warrior if the circumstance demands it. (And he’ll get really deadly at level 5 when he takes the Revenant Blade feat) He is not just ex-military, he is the closest thing the world of Eberron has to an actual commando, and after his time in the military of Valenar, he did a stint as “security contractor” for House Denieth. He’s functionally a former SEAL who then went and worked for Blackwater for a few years. In addition, he is tied very strongly to the Undying Court, which feeds his benevolence, but also makes him very closely acquainted with death. He has ravens and broken chains tattooed on his arms, he carries a skull mask, and he is generally … pretty Goth if I’m going to honest.

Nassir’s goodness is at least partially motivated by the fact that while his life is long (and is likely to be much longer, perhaps even near-immortal if he winds up as a member of the Undying Court himself some day) the lives around him are often tragically short. He sees human lifespans like unto the way we in the real world see the lifespans of our dogs and cats that we’re especially fond of – just when you really get bonded to them and really love them deeply, just when the relationship is at its apex, they’re gone.

I’m still trying to get a handle on him, but I think at least a chunk of his goodness is motivated by grief, and some part is probably also informed at least a bit by moral injury (he fought for Valenar after all). He’s seen way too many good people die, he may even have killed a few in the Last War, the millions of lives around him are like smoke, and he just wants to make sure they’re not as horrible as they are ephemeral. At the same time, his 300+ years of life and movement from belonging to isolation and back again multiple times has given his a great deal of calmness and perspective.

So his compassion and his skills as a warrior exist in a kind of uneasy balance. He’s very willing to accept surrenders and even provide healing to downed enemies (in the first fight we had with living people, Nassir used Spare the Dying on the one enemy that was dropped in the fight) but he’s still extremely capable of being an embodiment of death, not just a student of it. That constant tension in his person makes him very interesting to me. He wants to alleviate suffering and give people around him good lives, but he can also kill in the blink of an eye and he himself isn’t completely at peace with that dichotomy.

Inversion

I find these characters interesting and fun to play over the long term because they have traits that interact with the rest of the world in interesting ways. By trying to make things better, they inevitably bring change – in their environments, in those around them, and one can hope, anyway, in themselves.

An unrepentantly, unambiguously evil character gets none of that. If a good character is like an artist, shaping and creating beautiful things in the world, then an evil one is an arsonist. That house may have been burned down for sadism, because it was in the way, or to commit insurance fraud, but in any case, there’s just a pile of ashes now.

If Bertrand was evil, he’d just be another harsh, greedy, grudge-bearing dwarf with a bunch of fire and metal spells. But there’d be no reason for his beautiful shield of stained glass, his sense of humor, or any of the other things that make inhabiting him fun and cool.

If Nassir was evil, he’d be another tiresome BloodSkullDeathMurder edgelord character. A pitiless killer who could slaughter innocents with a yawn before collecting his fat paycheck. He’d still look cool, but the things that make him fun, challenging, or endearing would be absent.

There can definitely be some value in playing less-moral characters. They let you work things out, examine the consequences of immoral actions and so on. But to me, the really interesting stuff lies in playing characters who are, or at least want to be, a force for good in the world.

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After the ball of pain and controversy that was February, I am so glad to be getting back to less unpleasant topics. Let’s take a look at Eisenstadt’s military forces and law enforcement.

Armed and Ready

Because Eisenstadt is a free city, it is solely responsible for its own defense. It’s not part of a larger nation-state that can draw upon large reserves of population to send. That said, the city is naturally-fortified and there is precedent for powerful non-military organizations lending a hand in times of crisis.

However, it would be foolish for a tempting target such as Eisenstadt to rely on such an informal scheme for the whole of its defense, and so they have a standing military.

The military is organized into a no-frills three-branch structure with land forces (army) sea ones (navy) and aerial ones (air force). In places where both specializations are required (for example, paratroopers or amphibious landing troops) there is an inter-branch agreement rather than each branch maintaining forces that overlap with another’s specialty.

The cosmopolitan nature of the city makes for some interesting challenges, however. What do you do when your latest batch of new recruits contains humans, dwarves, gnomes, elves, a bugbear, two centaurs, three different types of dragonborn, some merfolk, a couple of fugitive kuo-toa, nine different types of birdfolk, a squad’s worth of tieflings, and an a awakened mud golem?

In Eisenstadt, the answer is “put them where they’ll play to their strengths.” The initial recruitment process makes it very clear to those signing up that they will be placed as their unique criteria will best contribute strength, not liabilities. So the birdfolk will wind up in the air force and navy. The mud golem won’t be going anywhere it can fall in the water. The bugbear will probably get a job as a security officer where their imposing physical presence will be most useful. This leads to a lot of “stereotypical” placement, but it also means that whether you’re fighting Eisenstadt on land, in the air, or out over the water, their troops will likely be more at home in that environment than whoever they’re fighting is. This gives them a sort of “permanent home court advantage.” In addition, officers are given detailed briefings on the unique capabilities of any soldiers under their command, and are expected to account for them in combat.

In addition, because of the comparatively large force size to territory ratio, soldiers are a ubiquitous sight in Eisenstadt, and can be called on to assist with law enforcement concerns, a thing that the criminals of the city are acutely aware of. Military aircraft fly overhead in regular patrols and naval vessels can be found easily in an area roughly 100 miles out from Eisenstadt’s harbor.

Standard Issue

The military of Eisenstadt has standardized on a few common weapons. The mainstay of almost all troops is the Hadzeir-Ironbeard I-27 rifle, a functional design with a reliable bolt-action and a heavy .35 caliber cartridge. The principal advantage the weapon has over competing designs is that it’s manufactured in Eisenstadt from materials mined out of the surrounding area and the propellant is a waterproof alchemical variety, allowing it to be used without being concerned about keeping it dry. Underwater forces can use a special propellant-only cartridge with an attachment similar to rifle grenades to convert it into a spear gun, which makes it much more effective underwater at the cost of having to carry a bunch of spear rounds and manually reload one after every shot.

In game mechanical terms, it’s a rifle that does 2d8 piercing damage, holds 5 shots, and has a range of 80/240. Using the spear gun adapeter shortens the range to 60/180, requires a reload after every shot, and makes the damage 2d10, while enabling it to be used underwater at a range of 60/100.

Other standard-issue gear includes pump-action shotguns, revolvers, and a heavy sniper rifle. Melee capability is provided by bayonets and entrenching shovels which are often sharpened (in trained hands, treat as a battle axe). Specialized units tend to carry more melee weapons; longswords and rapiers are common among scouting units, as are bows and crossbows because they lack the noisy report of a firearm.

Eisenstadt has a pair of single-engine fighter planes, the Peregrine and the Osprey. The Peregrine is land-based and has a slightly heavier armament, a larger engine, and can function as a fighter-bomber. The Osprey is lighter and is designed for carrier deployment, and also has a magically-sealed fuselage that’s enchanted to be bouyant. In a pinch, they can land and take off from open water. Both are armed with dual liquid-cooled machine guns in the wings for strafing and dogfighting. The air force also has an assortment of cargo planes (the Goose and the Pelican are the two most common varieties – the Goose being armed and modified for use with paratroopers) and a heavy bomber, the Meteor.

Land forces have two variants of a standard tank design, the Lion and the Manticore. The Lion is a very standard tank design with thick armor and a heavy gun. The Manticore replaces the gun with an evocation spell lens. Destructive magic cast through the lens by spellcasting crew members is cast as if it was using a slot four levels higher for the purposes of calculating damage. Range is also 10x greater. (This can exceed the usual limit of 9th level). Unfortunately, the spell lens uses a great deal of magical energy, and spellcasters must “charge” the lens with a number of spell slot levels equal to the spell being cast prior to casting through it. (So for instance, if a crewman wishes to cast a 7th-level spell, they can sacrifice spell slots of any combination adding up to 7. A first-level spell slot, second-level spell slot, and a fourth-level spell slot, for example. The spell slots need not all be provided by the same crew member, however.) In addition, only direct-damage spells that produce a projectile, line, or cone may be used. (So fireball and lightning bolt will work, but not meteor swarm.) Cantrips may be cast freely through the lens, and function as if they were cast by a character 4 levels higher. For this reason, the tank is usually crewed by a warlock who knows Eldritch Blast and can recover spell slots more easily a Wizard or Sorcerer with a more diverse selection of more potent spells in addition to a driver and spotter.

The navy has a dizzying variety of watercraft, including several battleships and destroyers, three aircraft carriers, an undisclosed number of submarines, and a large number of PT boats. Maritime security is taken very seriously by Eisenstadt, and ships are routinely boarded for inspection before being allowed access to the port.

Slowing Down A Little

That’s it for the military of Eisenstadt, and this will probably going to be the last setting design post for a while. We’ve discovered that more topical/thoughtful posts about gaming and faith have been getting more interest and discussion around them than my homebrew setting material has been, so I’ll be trying to bring the blog back around to its earlier days a bit. I’ll still continue to write these setting design posts (if for no other reason than I find them fun) but I’ll be branching out to a wider range of topics in between them.

So with that in mind, I’ll see you again in two weeks, hopefully with something interesting!

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Two weeks ago, I wrote about brokenness in gaming. And now I have to write about it in the church. This is an ugly season we find ourselves in. You have no idea how much I wish I could just be writing more 5e stuff right now, but that’s not how things are going.

As I type this, the United Methodist Church – the denomination I belong to – is flirting with schism.

I know from interacting with our listenership over the years that we come from a broad swath of different denominations. The hosting staff, too, for that matter. If we go back through the entire run, we’ve had a Presbyterian (Grant), a Methodist (Me), a Seventh-Day Adventist (Branden), a Southern Baptist (Mike), and an Anglican (Jenny) as regular hosts. I know from talking to listeners that we have LDS, Catholic, and various other traditions represented. And that’s just among the couple dozen who interact with us through social media or Discord.

We also have some listeners and friends who aren’t Christians at all. Jack Berkenstock is a Buddhist. Kris Newton (of Gameable fame) is an atheist. And we’ve spoken to and gamed with many others in the last six years. Agnostics, at least one Hindu, various types of pagan, and probably some others I don’t even know about have sat at the table and we’ve been glad to have them there.

It’s an incredibly broad swath of humanity, and it encompasses a wide range of beliefs and life experiences. And yet, I’d love to have even more. I am very much of the belief that God as represented in Jesus loves everyone. More than I do, frankly, try as I might. But God loves even the people that annoy me, infuriate me, make me uncomfortable, and do things that bother me.

And I further believe God has the audacity to want me to love them too. I am to welcome them to the table, whether that’s the gaming table or the table set for the Lord’s Supper.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. – Ezekiel 36:26

I have come to believe this message of radical welcome in larger part than ever before because I am a United Methodist.

Joining this denomination has been instrumental in changing my faith from something fundamentally self-centered into something more fundamentally selfless. During my time in the UMC, I have been exposed to the works of theologians both ordained and lay like Adam Hamilton and Richard Beck, but also to the teachings and examples of kind, godly UMC pastors like our friend Derek White and my local pastors (due to UMC clergy rotations, there have been three – Keck, Bob, and Doc).

UMC laity have poured into me and given me opportunities to serve that I never had before, and I’ve had opportunities to actually be involved in my church rather than just showing up. My faith has become more of “the life that really is life” as Adam Hamilton would say. I feel like it asks more and expects more of me – kindness, mercy, generosity, and love. I pray and study both scripture and general Christian books more than I ever have in my life. And it has, of course, contributed to me being involved with Saving the Game from the outset.

I am a stronger Christian – I am just plain more of a Christian – than I ever have been before in my life.

I’m not holding myself up as some exemplar or standard, by the way. There is significant room for growth. But I feel like I am growing, for the first time in a long time. My heart of stone has been traded for a heart of flesh. I love this denomination, for so many reasons.

During my time in the UMC, I have re-examined and re-considered my beliefs about a lot of things. You’ve heard my grappling on the podcast and seen it on this blog, if you’ve been watching for it. I’ve come to different viewpoints on violence and power, just to name two big ones. I’ve learned to consume media that isn’t explicitly Christian with my “Christianity goggles” on in much the same way that I watch media with my “gamer goggles” on, which is why I call Losing my Humanity “prophetic” despite the fact that the members of Kobra and the Lotus aren’t members of any particular faith tradition(s) – at least not that they talk about. I have learned to see God in more places.

And in my time in this tradition, I have also shifted pretty radically on what I think the role of LGBTQ people in the church should be. Why and how that happened is a long story, but here are the salient points. First, I met some LGBTQ people. I have a bisexual person and a lesbian in my family. I worked with two gay men and two trans men at B&N. I have shared gaming tables with a gay man, a lesbian woman, and a trans woman. Two of those people were parts of long-running gaming groups.

Not all of these people are my closest and most dear friends, but some of them are. My lesbian aunt and her partner are two of the nicest people you’d ever have the privilege of meeting. The lesbian woman I know through gaming is a kind, warm, decent person who went full “mother hen” on me when I was sick and works in mental health as her day job. I consider her a good friend. One of the gay guys I worked with at B&N was another “supergeek” and I spent a lot of breaks and lunches talking about Magic: the Gathering and comic books with him.

These people are welcome presences in my life. I am glad to know them.

This caused a lot of tension with what I learned growing up. I come from a very conservative tradition, and was exposed to a lot of very conservative church media growing up as well. I listened to Moody radio and Focus on the Family as a kid and a young adult. (I still have a soft spot for certain pieces of music from that era of my life; in particular, to this day I still listen to old Petra albums.) The message from all of these sources was very clear – LGBTQ identities, or by some reckonings even feelings in that general direction were not simply sinful, they were so bad that there was no place in the church for “those people.” LGBTQ folks were painted as hopelessly lost and misguided at best and subhuman degenerates worthy of wrath at worst.

Quite the contrast to the kind, funny, ordinary people I know personally.

It’s worth noting here that I am as cishet as the day is long, which makes understanding the LGBTQ perspective unintuitive for me. I’ve never felt like I was anything other than male, and despite not being into certain traditionally male things like alcohol and sports, feeling unmasculine has never been a significant struggle for me. I’ve never felt even a twinge of sexual attraction to another man. So it was very easy to uncritically let what I’d been taught sit there and not think about it very much. It was like Lithuanian politics – very important to some people, but not to me, and not to anyone I knew personally.

At least, not until family members started coming out.

(To be totally blunt, I still don’t like thinking or talking about it very much. I have inherited some of the puritanical sensibilities of my forefathers and I can say with complete seriousness that I really hope that once I hit “publish” on this post, it’ll be months or maybe, if I’m really lucky, even years before I feel like I have to weigh in on something sexual in nature. The Adultery episode, the Zak S thing from a couple weeks ago, and now this are really testing the limits of my fortitude in talking about sexual topics. I don’t have an enormous amount of personal skin in this game. I’ve been married to my wife for almost 15 years at this point. I could easily put my head down, shut my trap, and nobody in the church would bother me about my orientation because it’s the “default.” And for years, I basically did that, because of the aforementioned puritanical sensibilities. But I feel like this has reached a point where I can’t any more, much as I’d like to.)

To get back on topic, however, I’ve come to agree with some of the theological arguments I’ve seen – some from other United Methodists – that a loving, mutual LGBTQ relationship is certainly no worse than any of my sins and may not even be sinful at all. To summarize badly: there are 5-8 verses in the Bible that can be (and are) interpreted as anti-LGBTQ. By contrast, there are several hundred verses that refer to slavery. Of those, a single-digit number can be interpreted as being anti-slavery. Yet we as Christians almost unanimously agree that slavery is evil. And there are old-testament verses that refer to eating crab in the same terms as one of the anti-LGBTQ verses. Yet most of us eat shellfish, too. (Crab is delicious, after all.) There is room to conclude that certain things that were normal at the time when scripture was being written are not the timeless word of God.

There’s also reason to believe that the specific behaviors the old testament writers and Paul were referring to had more to do with brutality, power dynamics, and pagan worship than mere sexuality. I have listened to sermon series and read entire books on scriptural interpretation that have pointed me to some of these conclusions. If this has piqued your interest (or made you wonder what the heck I’m even thinking), check out The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns and Making Sense of the Bible by Adam Hamilton. Those books spell out the “lens” I’m seeing through better than I can as a small part of a post about a larger issue. (It’s also worth noting I’m not way over on the end of the spectrum where I think casual sex and porn are fine, but I’m not exactly sinless myself, so I’m not going to be chucking any rocks anyone’s way.)

You may not agree with this reasoning. If my general sense of our listenership is accurate, a significant number of you don’t. You know what I have to say to that?

“I still consider you my brother/sister in Christ.”

And that sentence above is the essence of the One Church Plan. The idea there is that deeply-committed, sincere people of faith can disagree about this and other issues, but we can agree on much more and share a church together as long as we all agree to love one another. Agree to disagree by way of Galatians 3:28, if you will. That’s the plan I’ve most been hoping for.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. -Galatians 3:28

In essence, it’s asking those who think the 5-8 anti-LGBTQ verses in scripture represent God’s timeless directives to consider LGBTQ conduct the same type of sinful as things like violent media, gossip, tattoos, wearing skimpy swimwear, cheating on taxes, pirating copyrighted works, unkind words, lying, and all of the other “normal” sins – part of the human condition and not cause for exclusion from the church.

Is there something on that list that you don’t think is sinful? That’s kind of my point. I have changed my mind on at least a couple of those. I’m unsure on a couple more.

One reason I’ve been hoping for the One Church Plan is that one of the things I like about the UMC is that it’s not an echo chamber. Even in my local congregation, I am regularly in discussions – and fellowship – with people I don’t agree with. Men’s breakfast, Bible Study, and so on. And I think that’s good for all of us. Because regardless of what the zealots of any given position will tell you, there’s not universal consensus on much in Christianity, and we have the zillions of denominations and two millennia of recorded thought to prove it. Saints and brilliant theologians stand in direct opposition to one another in non-heretical positions. Passing the One Church Plan would preserve that and give the broad spectrum of Christianity that exists in the UMC continued access to one another. Considering we follow a guy who had both Simon the Zealot and Matthew the Roman tax collector among his inner circle, that seems very appropriate to me

The traditionalist plan that looks like it’s going to pass takes a much harder line, though. It essentially ejects anyone LGBTQ from the church and tells them they are not welcome back, requires public denouncement of LGBTQ people as a condition for retired clergy to continue collecting their retirement benefits and lays out a host of other punitive measures designed to enforce what is seen by those in support of it as proper orthodoxy. Reading a summary of it left me feeling like I’d been punched in the face. It shoves whole congregations out of the denomination. It allows no debate, no disagreement, no wrestling with scripture … and no mercy for those who identify as LGBTQ and yet still love God enough to have done the considerable work to become a UMC pastor with all of its student debt, being shuffled from church-to-church, and intense congregational demands.

Frankly, me just writing this blog post is possibly grounds for being sent away. That plan is severely worded indeed.

This, rather predictably, has a lot of moderate UMC laity (like me) and clergy pretty upset, and the more progressive elements even more so.

To give one particularly immediate example: the pastor of my little church and a couple of the laity do a weekly show called “Holy Happy Hour” every week where they discuss various things. It’s usually lighthearted and fun. This week’s episode was not.

So in the light of all of this, I have two humble requests:

1. Pray for us. Pray for us hard. This affects the livelihoods of a lot of sincere, godly pastors and their families and the church homes of a lot of deeply-committed Christians. The outcome of this general conference could literally destroy the UMC in the United States.
2. Continue to show the kindness and welcome toward outsiders and new folks and those who disagree within our community that I know you all have shown in the past. StG listeners are a beacon of hope and a tiny picture of The Kingdom of God for me. Even if my denomination cannot survive this debate, I sincerely hope the StG community continues to be the ecumenical big (gaming) table we’ve always been.

Finally, those who may read this in the coming days who are LGBTQ of one stripe or another: I don’t want you to feel “less than.” You are a child of God and worthy of love. You are welcome in fellowship and at the gaming table with me.

Hopefully in two more weeks, I can actually put out another setting design post. That would really make me happy.

-Peter

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

As I type this, certain segments of the tabletop RPG industry are essentially on fire. Late last night, a statement from Mandy Morbid and two other women was released detailing a long period of abuse, harassment, and manipulation at the hands of Zak Smith, better known as Zak Sabbath in the industry. Content warnings for basically everything. Seriously, that statement is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in ages, but I’m going to link it anyway much like I did with the stories that prompted another post about harassment I wrote. That said, it’s not a fun read. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t exactly new information, but rather sufficient “critical mass” of credible accusations where it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to ignore it any more.

Mercifully, as you’d expect, we’re not tied to this individual or his projects. Jenny in particular hadn’t even heard of the guy. However, this is going to have some far-reaching effects in the industry. Several big names (notably including Kenneth Hite) have come out with apologies for associating with Zak S and/or statements condemning him or distancing themselves from him. I would imagine in the weeks and months to come, we’re going to see lots more of that.

I’m not going to spend a lot of words on the gory details of that specific story, however. If you want to know more, as I said earlier, social media is lit up like a burning fireworks factory about it right now. I want to talk about some more practical stuff.

So you probably already know the first thing I’m going to say: people are more important than games, and that’s true on both the professional and playing sides of the equation. Zak S got away with being awful for a long time because people liked the content he made. He’s won multiple Ennies. Apparently a lot of people think he’s talented. None of that matters if he’s actively harming people, and that goes for other game creators too.

The thing is, Zak isn’t anywhere near the only bad actor in the industry. The LARP community has a term for folks like him: “missing stair.” The short version is that a “missing stair” is a person who is known to be bad or even dangerous but gets a pass due to to status, longevity, or prestige of some kind. People “manage” them rather than dealing with the problem.

With that in mind:

1. Obviously don’t let this be you. Treat people with respect and dignity. Don’t exploit, manipulate, abuse, or harass them. If you’ve done those things in the past or covered for those who did, apologize and seek to atone. Sometimes relationships are destroyed by our sinfulness and we have to accept it. Sometimes amends can be made. You have to be ready for either outcome if you’re the wrongdoer.
2. Keep an eye out for bad behavior and especially do your best to make sure conventions and game stores do the same. There’s a whole sticky situation around this with GaryCon this year. That could be an entire separate blog post, but for now this will have to suffice: if you decide to go someplace with a bit of a controversial reputation, make sure you’re safe and if at all possible, be a force that makes others around you safer. We have friends from Innroads going to GaryCon this year and so is Derek White. I feel pretty confident saying they’ll be a force for good.
3. Try, really hard, not to be skeptical as a knee-jerk reaction to the accounts of people who have survived abuse. People have been using prestige within communities as a shield for bad behavior for as long as we’ve had communities. It happens in gaming and it happens in the church, and most of the time, accusations aren’t fabricated.
4. Do your best to support good actors, not bad ones. There are some really great people in the games industry. A lot of them, in fact. Channel your support toward them, not the people who have hurt others.
5. Though this is culturally-unpopular advice, we as Christians are called to forgive. However, there needs to be repentance on the part of the offender, and in some cases, an individual may be deemed too great of a risk for full inclusion in the community as a whole. There can be forgiveness and healing, but things can never be as they once were.
6. Continue to make sure the spaces you have influence over – your gaming table, your church, clubs you lead, organizations you volunteer with, and so on – remain safe and beneficial places. Be especially aware of how anyone on the “outside” is treated. New people, folks from unfamiliar demographics, and the vulnerable in particular tend to be the preferred targets of bad actors. Be vigilant.

The gaming industry and games as a hobby still have a long way to go, but I’m confident that those of you reading this are among the good ones. This world and our hobby are full of the broken and wounded. Let’s be about the business of restoration.


Photo by Harlie Raethel on Unsplash

We’ll be getting back to Eisenstadt soon, but I thought I’d take a break to show off some new character options this week.

Fantastical Kinds of People

One thing that you can count on finding in almost any setting except for the very grittiest, most human-centric ones is fantastical kinds of people. Call this race, species, or ancestry, but it’s something other than human, and playing one has various benefits and drawbacks. They’re a fun part of character creation and I want my world to be no exception.

The default 5e rules have two types of bird people available as characters. The flightless, mimicry-focused Kenku, and the flight-capable, bird-headed Aaracockra.

For this world, however, I wanted a wider variety of bird-derived peoples and so I’ve taken the ideas I used for the custom race for Jenny’s PC and changed, refined, and spread out from there.

The biggest change is that I’m planning to have most of the birdfolk in this world be flight-capable, or at least winged (penguinfolk or ostrichfolk won’t be getting fly speeds). I also wanted to have some room to cover a variety of different types of birds. So for example, owlfolk should be able to see in the dark. Corvidfolk should be smart. Hummingbirdfolk should be able to hover. And so on.

This comes with a set of challenges you’re probably starting to see already: birds are a really diverse bunch! Even breaking them down more by “what do they do in game terms” rather than by biological considerations leaves you with a lot.

• You have fast, powerful balls of flying violence like raptors and ospreys. This translates into a fly speed and some talons. Exceptional examples like the Peregrine Falcon might have a faster flying speed than most or even a “dive bomb” attack.
• You have beautiful, often somewhat ridiculous colorful specimens usually found in tropical environs like peacocks, parrots, toucans, and lyrebirds. This seems like Charisma bonuses, the ability to mimic sounds, and possibly a situational penalty on stealth.
• You have waterfowl of all kinds – everything from cranes and swans to ducks and seagulls. Swim speeds are the obvious pull here.
• You have smart, thinky little guys – mostly in the corvid family but some overlap with parrots, too.
• You have terrifying landlocked balls of violence like ostriches and cassowaries that can Just End You with powerful kicks
• You have penguins and puffins, who don’t fly, but are basically immune to cold and are fantastic swimmers.
• You have hummingbirds, which are small and quick and can also hover in place.
• There needs to be some room for variation within each of the categories for customization. For example, for the raptorfolk category to work, there needs to be an option for darkvision (owls), carrion-eating (vultures) and really steep, fast, damaging attacks (most of them, but especially hawks and falcons).
• Finally, the setting has some variation between different head types. Some, like Eteri (Jenny’s PC) have recognizable humanoid features but with feathers instead of hair. Others, like Satifa Nightfeather, the new Sheriff of Lostant, have humanoid-sized bird heads.

All of this variation combined has me looking at a set of choices to make as the way to model the birdfolk – character-race-as-flowchart, if you will. And I’ll probably carry this idea forward on the serpentfolk, insectfolk, and so on.

Birdfolk Racial Traits

Walking Speed: 30 ft.

Ability Modifiers: Choose +2 Dex or +2 INT

Racial Traits: Choose Gliding Speed 30′ or increase walking speed to 35′

Racial traits 2: Choose Darkvision 120′ and Light sensitivity or Mimickry

Racial traits 3: Choose Wis +1 or Cha +1

Racial Traits 4: Choose Swim speed 20′ or Claws that do 1d4 + Str or Dex slashing damage (chosen at character creation) on an unarmed attack.

Description: all birdfolk are somewhat birdlike, but it varies. Choose a description for your birdfolk – it should match up to a known species of bird. Your head may be humanoid or birdlike.

This mix allows for a pretty good cross-section of different birds and then some of the really powerful stuff like actual flight, carrion-eating, cold resistance, and so on can be handled by feats at later levels.

Not Done Yet

This is a rough take on this ancestral cluster and while I don’t think it’s too exploitable, I may very well be wrong. more even than usual, I’d welcome some feedback

Next time I’ll either dig into some birdfolk feats or get back to Eisenstadt. I haven’t quite decided yet (if you’ve got thoughts on that I’d love to hear them, too).

Photo by Ryan Grewell on Unsplash

One of the things you can count on in any large population center is crime, and Eisenstadt is no exception. The massive amount of money, people, and goods flowing through the city at any given time present a tempting target for the opportunistic, and the grinding gears of any large city chew up some portion of the population, pushing them into poverty and from there into desperation where crime is one of only a few means of survival.

At the same time, the presence of both wealth and magic allows for those who would carve out underworld empires to extend their reigns beyond the limits of normal lifespans, and so the Undying Families have been born in Eisenstadt.

The Undying Families collectively refers to a number of crime syndicates headquartered in Eisenstadt whose leadership have achieved immortality (or at least extraordinary longevity) through a variety of means. This week’s blog post will deal with one of these organizations: the Iron Ranks.

Ageless as Metal

The leader of the Iron Ranks is simply known as “The Statue.” It’s unknown exactly how The Statue managed to transfer their consciousness into the body of an iron golem, but they did, and they have been in there for some 200 years. It’s also unknown as to who The Statue was or even what their gender was, and admittedly now that they occupy an animate pile of iron, it’s less relevant now than perhaps it used to be.

The Statue is an old-timey crime boss, which is to say while it and its minions engage in all sorts of criminal activity, they try to do so in a somewhat honorable and civilized manner. The Iron Ranks keep mostly to a couple of blue-collar neighborhoods on the northeastern side of Eisenstadt and maintain a more-or-less permanent truce with the Candle Street Hustlers, the nearest gang still based inside the city. Most of the people living in their territory are humans, half-elves, and dwarves, and all three races and a smattering of others are found in The Iron Ranks; they are more of a geographic crime family than an ethnic one.

Members of The Iron Ranks are typically easy to spot, as they combine heavy (or medium) metallic armor, particularly plate mail, splint mail, and breastplates with specially-tailored business suits. The Iron Ranks “look” is typically a dark suit jacket over such armor.

The Iron Ranks engage mostly in illegal gambling, large-scale robbery, protection rackets (though their protection actually means something more than “giving us money will protect YOU from US”), and various forms of graft and corruption such as ghost payrolling. They are not particularly patient about people abusing the folks on their turf, and they tend to look out for the people who live there.

Some of this may be altruistic, but The Statue has also decided it’s simply good business. The loyalty of the residents in The Iron Ranks’ neighborhoods has the kind of shielding effect you would expect it to have. Witnesses didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, and got there after everything interesting had already happened. Key pieces of evidence go missing, and so on.

The same can also be said for anyone The Iron Ranks don’t like, including people who are just a poor fit for the neighborhood. More than one person who rubbed their neighbors the wrong way has turned up floating in the harbor or disappeared entirely, never to be seen again.

In terms of relative strength, The Iron Ranks are one of the nastier and more dangerous criminal groups in the city. In addition to their obsession with armor, they tend to be very well-armed and distressingly well-trained, functioning almost as well as a military unit. When expecting trouble, they actually go out on the streets with scouts and varied squad compositions mixing ranged and melee fighters. In addition, they are somewhat expansionistic and have been known to force weaker gangs out or even to slaughter them wholesale, though the latter treatment is typically reserved for especially cruel gangs or ones tied up in life-ruining vices such as drugs imported from Alchova.

The organization is not terribly magically-inclined, other than The Statue, who most agree probably contracted the service that transferred it from its former body into the one it currently occupies. Though their turf isn’t anywhere near that of The Arcane Gentlemen, the two gangs don’t get along at all, though given the cruelty of that gang, it’s not terribly surprising.

The Iron Ranks enjoy a better relationship with the police than many of the other gangs, as any cop from one of their neighborhoods is likely to have favorable impressions of them from growing up and they tend to do a good job of facilitating corruption in a way that’s not super risky for the cops involved in it. That makes it extra seductive, and probably about 70% of the officers patrolling the territory of The Iron Ranks are on the take to them to at least a small extent.

Residents outside of their territory mostly know The Iron Ranks for their involvement in repelling an attack by a kraken and its horribly warped army of aquatic creatures about 70 years ago. While a lot of the other criminal organizations hid or even worse, committed opportunistic crimes, The Iron Ranks fought alongside the city’s military and police against the horrors swarming out of the harbor. This was another PR move that got them lasting goodwill.

It’s rumored that The Statue is planning something big that may spend some of the social capital it has built up in the city, but so far nothing concrete has emerged and there’s no unusual variance in the organization’s behavior. Only time will tell.

Photo by James Garman on Unsplash

The Who’s Who Doing What’s What

Eisenstadt, as you’d expect, is an exceptionally busy place. The vast amount of trade coming and going from its various points of ingress and egress keeps millions employed and an almost incalculable amount of money in play. It should therefore be self-evident that the city is home to numerous organizations, both legitimate and criminal. In this post, we’ll examine two legitimate organizations: companies that have their headquarters in the city and what they do there.

A quick note: this is not intended to be anywhere near an exhaustive list of the companies and organizations in Eisenstadt, but rather some highlights of ones adventurers might interact with. For example: South Shore Chemical is a large, wealthy company based in Eisenstadt, but they don’t cause any trouble, don’t hire adventurers, and mostly sell various cleaning products to normal people all over the world. So unless an adventure revolves around enormous vats of middle-of-the-road laundry detergent, there’s not much reason to include them or the hundreds of other companies like them that do very mundane things and never do anything dangerous or exciting on purpose.

Commerce and Industry

Maxandra Financial: Maxandra Financial is the city’s largest financial institution and also the owner of its tallest building, a massive spire that exceeds the height of its neighbors by a solid fifteen floors. It functions as a full-service bank and investment company, handling everything from personal bank accounts to mortgages and stock portfolios, commercial real estate ownership, personal and commercial lines of credit, and more. Basically, if it’s a financial product or service, Maxandra offers it.

Maxandra financial is owned by Maxandracargan, an ancient red dragon and keen financial mind. She’s also a terrible boss. Like a lot of red dragons, Maxandracargan is primarily motivated by greed and tends to assume everyone else is too.

This means that while Maxandra is an awful place to work, with grueling 80+ hour workweeks, abusive management, dubious ethical practices, and harsh punishments for minor mistakes. Despite all of this, the company never lacks for staff because they pay extremely well. Maxandra employees make anywhere from half again to double the going rate for their positions and that’s before you factor in the long hours, all of which are subject to the city’s overtime pay laws. Far from generosity or benevolence, the high rate of pay is intended to secure obedience and give leverage over employees so they can be pushed into actions that may be in the company’s best interest, but not theirs with a minimum of fuss and effort from management. As a result, even a short stint working for Maxandra can solve a lot of a person’s financial issues, but they’re exposing themselves to substantial legal and mental health risks by doing so.

Maxandra tends to keep itself out of the most scandalous legal territory through systems designed to shift risk and blame onto lower-level employees through high-pressure management tactics and “ethics” rules that leave anyone who gets caught twisting in the wind. The company still pays a fortune in fines every year, but they also handle the finances of a great many of the higher-ranking city officials because at the end of the day, they are very good at turning massive piles of money into even larger massive piles of money.

The company has tight security (both to deter theft and fraud and to keep its employees in line) but they aren’t a private army. Maxandracargan keeps a solid line between the workings of Maxandra Financial and her personal projects, but she does lair atop the building, where she has the top ten floors entirely to herself.

In her personal time, she does get into all kinds of shady business involving evil artifacts, mercenary armies and bankrolling crime syndicates, she just does it through intermediaries and shell companies legally disconnected from Maxandra Financial. This isn’t for any sort of benevolent reason; Maxandra Financial is a significant income stream for the dragon and she doesn’t want to lose the revenue.

Arcanius: Arcanius is a magical and alchemical R&D company. Unlike Maxandra, it is a very ethical company that strives to improve the lives of people the world over with magical research. It is particularly concerned with more potent and reliable magical medicine, and there is an ongoing partnership with the orders of both St. Azar and St. Gertiana in the fields of magical medicine and protective warding.

Arcanius is also deeply involved in magical engineering, agriculture, and consumer goods. Basically if there’s a benefit to putting a little magic into something, Arcanius is there trying to make it workable and affordable.

Arcanius is also privately-owned, and the president and CEO is a high elf named Rithien Dorasha. Rithien is a former military wizard and officer from Eisenstadt’s military arm and founded the company after retiring from active service. He is a brilliant man, but also a kind-hearted and warm one and his estate is a surprisingly-modest one. He also tries to get either himself, his company, or both involved in virtually every charitable venture in the city, even if it’s just some illusion magic to snazz up the proceedings or a small donation.

The building itself is a beautiful example of neo-elven architecture with sweeping, twisting lines, living greenery, massive stained glass windows, and carefully-managed magical lighting. A large part of the building is actually alive; the elven art of treeshaping has been imported from the Tashvarn, and significant portions of the building were grown.

There’s a lot of living wood among the stone and glass, and the heavy use of both that and large windows makes the inside of the building very light and airy feeling. There are a few sublevels where high-security magical R&D labs are located, but for the most part, the building is a huge administrative center and those who work there are not of a sorcerous bent.

However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t interact with magic daily – as previously mentioned, there’s a lot of magical lighting and construction in the building, and in addition, a lot of the facilities management is magical in nature. Rooms tidy themselves on a set schedule due to embedded prestidigitation spells, flying carpets supplement elevators and stairs as a way to get around the building’s interior, and some of the higher-ranking executives have access to teleportation-based commuting. Casting detect magic within a block of the Arcanius building is a great way to wind up with a nasty migraine.

Probably the most well-known and popular product of Arcanius is the “mercy wafer,” a small square of enchanted rice paper about an inch square with a low-intensity healing pattern woven into it. The wafer can be placed on the tongue of a critically-injured person (or in a pinch, directly into a bleeding wound) and it will dissolve and stabilize them for up to an hour so they can hopefully be transported safely to a place where they can get more complete treatment. It also provides significant pain relief.

Just Getting Started

There’s lots more to Eisenstadt, and we’ll keep digging in for the next few blog posts. See you then!

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

The Big City. No Bigger Than That!

Eisenstadt is the New York, London, Tokyo, and Bombay of my setting, all rolled into one. It is an enormous, teeming metropolis of some 15 million souls, and the largest and most powerful free city in the world. The city center sits inside a huge meteoric crater some 30 miles in diameter that was created back in primal antiquity and also happens to sit at the mouth of a river, directly downstream from where it merges with two more. The crater is about 3/4ths on land and the rest forms a convenient highly-porous perimeter of islands around an equally-convenient harbor. The walls of the crater reach up some 200 feet in height on average and close to 250 at their highest points. Magical terraforming and plain old luck has ensured that despite the walls of the crater, the rivers and harbor are both extremely accessible, and numerous road and railway tunnels have been cut through the walls as well.

Out over the harbor, a solid 50′ off the water, floats a trio of magically-suspended islands, and outside the walls of the crater is even more city. The surrounding countryside is lush and fertile, although a lot of what used to be prime agricultural land has been extensively built up. Numerous “suburbs,” more like boroughs than truly distinct communities, sprawl out from the massive city center and the city’s territory reaches roughly 50 miles beyond the edge of those, covering a large number of farms and some land that’s used for industrial logging.

More Infrastructure Than You Can Shake a Stick At

Eisenstadt, thanks to its ludicrously-ideal location, is a trade hub of a sort that doesn’t even exist on most worlds, but there’s even more to it than you can see from the surface. In addition to the extensive network of river, ocean, road, and rail traffic, Eisenstadt has three airports and a pair of sub-surface trading posts. The first is inland and underground, and connects to the underground tunnel-roads of the dwarves of the comparatively-nearby Greenside Mountains. The other is underwater and facilitates trade with aquatic races such as merfolk.

The city is also crisscrossed with light rail lines,  which cover numerous above- and below-ground routes, some of which would be impossible without the use of magic. These rail lines primarily move passengers, but they also include some “courier cars” that carry small amounts of valuable (or at least urgent) freight. The price for freight on these cars is exorbitant, but they’re almost never empty, which makes passenger tickets extremely reasonable, as the city subsidizes passengers with freight. One of the most impressive of these light rail routes is the one connected to the largest floating island out over the harbor.  The rails that lead to it are held aloft by the same enchantment used to make immovable rods, albeit on a much larger scale.

Speaking of those floating islands, the smaller two are movable, and can slowly float out over the ocean to points about five miles away from the larger island (which is stationary). The mobility of the islands factors prominently into the defense plans of the city.

In addition, the closer you get to the center of the crater (and therefore the city), the more expensive real estate becomes and the more vertical – and interconnected – the buildings get. Light rail lines spiral up clusters of skyscrapers via cog lines with stops on different floors, and walkways or even full-sized roads stretch between buildings. Eisenstadt’s most wealthy citizens travel around via flying carpet or on the backs of various flying creatures, and there are landing decks for these modes of conveyance at regular intervals around the city. Some of the inter-building bridges have become buildings in their own right, and one of the most prestigious restaurants in the entire city sits at the intersection of two of the highest building. The entire dining floor of the restaurant is a thick sheet of glass, and patrons can use enchanted sections of flooring to zoom in on the streets below.

All of this city requires an enormous amount of power, and the city has alchemical reactors (taking advantage of the unique alchemical properties of an estuary that exist where the rivers empty into the sea) hydroelectric plants, geothermal reactors, various combustion power plants, and even some modest wind power at the top of some of the taller buildings (mostly used as a backup for the executive levels) dotted around the city and along the river. The floating islands contain the largest alchemical reactor and massive pipes reach from the island down into the harbor.

Also vitally-important is Eisenstadt’s massive sewer system. The city has sanitary and storm sewers, and the former is filled with various disgusting monsters that feed on the waste. Networks of heavy-duty fencing protect workers from the monster population, at least in theory. In practice, some areas are safer than others. The sewers are so extensive they have their own special ultra-light rail system (very similar to a mine cart network) for maintenance workers to use.

More to See

Because Eisenstadt is such a massive and important place, this is only the first of what will be a small series within a series about it. Eisenstadt, as you might imagine, has a lot more to it. Check out later installments for information on organizations and factions, military and law enforcement, the areas around the city, and more.

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

An Increase in Scope

Those who follow everything we do very carefully may remember me alluding to a writing project I was doing during NaNoWriMo both on the blog and the podcast. I wasn’t writing a novel, but I wasn’t quite ready to talk about what I was actually doing.

I was hoping to have more success to report – sadly November kicked the stuffing out of me. One of our cats gave us a health scare (he’s fine, but our bank account took a real beating), and various other commitments ate up a bunch of time. I only wound up hitting around the 26,000 mark for NaNoWriMo, which is just over half the goal. That was disappointing.

But despite the lackluster word count from November, I think I’m going to go ahead and announce what I’m doing, if for no other reason than it’s kinda crummy to tease something and then never follow through.

And what I’m doing is going against my earlier intentions and trying to eventually make this world into a book that I can sell.

I have no idea how long that will take, but the the answer is almost certainly “years, plural.” The average setting book for an RPG has several hundred thousand words in it, and I’m not there yet. In addition, what I have right now is a bunch of ideas I’m happy with, but the formatting is all over the place, I don’t have a map, my setting is very low on history and… …the name is one letter off from the name of Matt Mercer’s world. My working title has been Exadria, his world is ExaNdria. Way too close for comfort, so I’ll need to come up with something else. And while I like what I have, I need more of everything. I have two good civilizations, three evil civilizations, a desert full of small communities, a magic tree, a huge free city full of crazy amounts of stuff (I’ll probably start on that next in the posts), and some other odds and ends. It’s a start, to be sure, but lots more work needs to be done.

So what does this mean for the blog? The short answer is “nothing bad.” I’m going to continue to post stuff here as I work on it and that will eventually include some new races and class archetypes and eventually even some entire new classes. In particular, I’ve got some ideas for a vehicle specialist, a non-magical medic, and an engineer of the Team Fortress 2 variety who can set up sentry guns and the like in play. Once I do start getting that stuff together, I’ll be interested in having folks playtest it, and at some point, I may even solicit players to run through fights and so on using the new material. (But don’t get too excited, I make no promises about when any of that will happen!)

It does, however, mean that what I’ve written so far isn’t set in stone. What started out as a project with the luxury of using the material of other companies now no longer has that luxury, so I’ll need to cook up a lot of stuff that I didn’t need to worry about when this was just a “fan project.”

I suppose the other obvious question is “why?” The answer to that one is “I think I have something sufficiently different from everything else out there to feel like it’d be interesting.” The world I’ve been detailing is not another traditional fantasy world, which I feel like should be enough for people to either really enjoy how different it is … or maybe turn their noses up and give it a hard pass. Either way, it won’t feel like another Greek- or Norse- inspired setting or a world that’s attempting to replicate the success of Greyhawk, Faerun, Blackmoor, and so on. The closest contemporaries would be Eberron and the Iron Kingdoms, and there are significant differences between this new world and both of those.

So that’s my big creative project for the foreseeable future. I’ll probably post the occasional meta-update like this one when significant progress gets made, but starting with the next of these posts, I want to get back to talking about the world itself.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even come up with a name I can actually use for it.

Origins

Lambert Colvin started out, as I’ve mentioned on the podcast, as a creation of necessity. During my time playing D&D and its descendents across all editions, I have played more clerics than all of the other classes combined. I initially decided that for this game I’d like to try something different. But when Krissi and our third player decided to play a rogue and a fighter, respectively (and both were extremely invested in their respective backstories) I took a step back and rather reluctantly made yet another cleric.

In an effort to do something I hadn’t done before, I picked the Nature domain for Lambert, and took the Hermit background, using these two items to create cleric from a monastic background with a strong focus on compassion and caring for creation as well as traditional religious roles. Lambert’s Monastic order had basically trained him as a sustainability consultant by the time he left the monastery, and his mind was full of information about how to engage in actions such as mining, logging, and farming without burning out the local ecosystem – knowledge important to a colony established on an island and expected to be self-sufficient for an unknown amount of time.

I hit an additional point of uncertainty when I realized that both of the other PCs were going to be Chaotic Neutral to Lambert’s Neutral Good, and we had a discussion about how that contrast was going to be important in play. And in that moment, the first piece of what would become the true essence of Lambert clicked into place.

A lot of the time, “Chaotic Neutral” in D&D translates into “selfish, nihilistic, contrarian jerk,” but that description fits neither Aster nor Garm. Both of them had come from difficult, traumatic backgrounds with just barely enough kindness to keep them from sliding all the way into the darkness. Aster had grown up on the streets and Garm had been fighting to the death since he was barely old enough to walk and never had a clue who his parents were.

And as Lambert discovered both of these things (to his growing horror) he privately resolved to do whatever he could to undo as much of the damage caused by those pasts as he could, not because Aster and Garm weren’t productive enough citizens and needed to be corralled and brought into line, but because they had suffered and he cared. This was a major departure from previous characters I’ve played, if perhaps not terribly obvious from the outside. Almost all of my past PCs were honorable and trustworthy, but most of them were significantly more hardened and cold than Lambert. A number of them were friendly, but none of them were as genuinely kind as Lambert, and furthermore, none were nearly as adverse to violence as Lambert was. For a long time, I had enshrined a sort of “righteous ruthlessness” as a character trait for my PCs, borrowing pretty heavily from characters like Batman and Daredevil. With Lambert, I did my best to let that go.

True Nature

As I mentioned earlier, I built him as a Nature cleric originally, but over the course of playing him, it became apparent that the Nature domain fit poorly with Lambert’s personality and way of doing things. In fact, aside from the nature skill, the extra druid cantrip he received at first level, and the heavy armor proficiency, Lambert never used a single one of the archetype abilities of the Nature domain. He never cast the spells, he never used the ability to dominate wildlife, and so on.What he did do a lot of, from the jump, was healing and feeding people. Even in the opening sessions of the game, Lambert was using magic to purify seawater so the colony had enough to drink. His care for others and his compassion became two of his dominant traits pretty quickly. And so late in the game, with Grant’s permission, I rebuilt him as a Life cleric instead.

Lambert would not exist but for my time as a host on Saving the Game, and without having spoken to some of the guests we’ve had on the podcast, I would lack the proper language to describe him or the impact that playing him has had on me as a person outside the game and away from the table.

One of these people is Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman, an RPG and LARP researcher who is particularly interested in the subject of bleed. As a quick refresher, bleed is when your emotional state or values as a player affect your character (bleed in) or when events in the game affect your emotional state outside the game (bleed out).

Dr. Bowman has also written a book called The Functions of Role-Playing Games, which I would recommend. Toward the end of the book, she goes into detail about a number of different archetypes of player character that people tend to make. One of those is The Idealized Self.

Regardless of whether or not the character acts heroically, role-playing characters often present the Idealized Self, a persona that possesses qualities the player wishes he or she had. -The Funtions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity by Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman pg. 172

Lambert is a textbook Idealized Self character – he is more courageous and more self-sacrificing than I am, and I have used him to explore the edges of my feelings about violence in particular as previous blog posts have attested. He is still a pretty flawed person, though. His anger can take over when he’s confronted with enough evil and under those circumstances, he becomes merciless and violent, making sure, for example, that straggling gnolls don’t escape alive. Some of that was present on a meta level – Lambert was a D&D character, after all, but unlike previous characters of mine that saw themselves as righteous avengers cleaning up the scum of the world and never really thought to be regretful about killing bad guys, Lambert tended to wrestle a lot more with the violence he’d done, even when it was absolutely necessary.

Internality and Self-Examination

One of the defining moments of the game, to me, anyhow, was after the rescue of Fort Formidable and all of the gnoll-killing that entailed. As soon as the party and the remaining colonists from the fort were back safe at the main colony, Lambert went and found the other cleric in the colony and gave him his confession. And then he went off and cried for a while.

The breakthrough for me with Lambert, I think, was not simply deciding that my PC was a good guy and that was that, but that he wanted to be good, in a serious, down-in-his-bones way. He struggled and agonized and considered and tried, and the motivation for that came from a well of compassion and love rather than one of anger or even dignity. And while he didn’t always get it right, I feel like he was better for the struggle than he ever would have been in arrogance. I feel like I am better for letting him struggle and be conflicted, certainly, because his angst, difficulties, and getting it wrong mirror my own.

In fact, more than once, I have deliberately thrown Lambert into situations where I can use him to examine things. I mentioned violence earlier, and that’s been a key one, because my real-world feelings about it have shifted pretty dramatically.

When I was younger, (and not that much younger, either, as recently as my early thirties) I held the position that violence was morally-neutral and the reasons for and targets of it were what mattered from a moral standpoint. If someone was doing something bad and you were reasonably certain talking wasn’t going to work, then going straight to force was justified and okay. Furthermore, I also believed that in those situations where it was warranted, it wasn’t even worth feeling bad over. It was just a thing you had to do. Over the last decade or so, I’ve come to the understanding that such a view isn’t particularly Christian. While I haven’t become a complete pacifist, I have definitely softened a lot on violence, and Lambert has helped me find the borders of that, because I do still feel it’s sometimes warranted – the case of Auntie Bloat is the notable one from our game. (Also, “it was going to eat me” is a valid reason for killing something, and I don’t think there’s any moral issue with hunting or ranching for food.) In fact the position that Lambert eventually came around to that violence is never something to celebrate but may occasionally be necessary is a pretty close fit with my own.

Privilege, and What to Do With It

One of the other major facets of Lambert was what he did with his privilege, which was extensive. And this also mirrors my own experience.

Two quick notes on privilege: the first is that all it means is that someone has some kind of unearned advantage. It can be anything, and it doesn’t necessarily speak poorly of the person possessing it at all! Born attractive or with a nice voice? That’s privilege! There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does mean that, for example, you have additional career paths open to you. If you’ve got the musical talent of someone like Mozart, it’s going to open doors in your life. Second, I think a lot of the time “privilege” comes with the assumption that it’s an ethnic and/or class thing, and that certainly can be the case. On the whole, lighter-skinned people and people from affluent backgrounds have a much easier go of it in the world. However, that’s far from the only form of privilege that can exist – and in my particular case, as well as Lambert’s, the biggest advantages – by far – were love and stability. I grew up with two wonderful, loving parents who cared for me deeply and modeled kindness and compassion to not just me and my sisters, but also each other and the world at large. They are still happily married after over 40 years together, and that environment and the set of examples that came with it are valuable beyond compare. And the nature of that advantage gets more clear all the time when I see some of the rough backgrounds people I know come from.

It was the same with Lambert. Unlike the other two party members, Lambert’s early life and early adulthood were not filled with struggle and danger. The younger of two sons from a middle-class family of kindhearted merchants, he was raised with love and kindness, and with neither want nor luxury. When he was in his mid-twenties, he felt the call to religious service and went off to a monastery where he spent fifteen years in beautiful natural surroundings, living a life of study, contemplation, honest physical labor, and peace. He never had to wonder if he was going to have to fight a friend to the death the next morning like Garm. He never had to wonder where his next meal was coming from like Aster. And the one time he was seriously injured, he had compassionate and skilled medical treatment and some low-level magical healing to help him through it. He didn’t give it much thought until he started becoming friends with Aster and Garm, at which point he started thinking about it pretty regularly and in some depth.

In Lambert’s mind, his background, with its peace, security, and care for others as assumed conditions served as a baseline for what the experience of all people everywhere should be – a life where helplessness, fear, and suffering were the exception, not the daily rule. His worldview could easily be summed up as “Nothing I am and nothing I have is special, and it should not be treated that way. Everyone deserves to have a life like I had, and I will do what I can to ensure that as many people as possible get that without subjecting one people group to privation so another can thrive.” This closely mirrors my own view of my own privilege – I’m not wealthy, never have been, and likely never will be. The relatively-small audience of Saving the Game is the closest thing I’ve ever had to fame. But I have never wondered where my next meal was coming from, never wondered if my parents loved each other and me, never had to worry about random violence directed at me because of where I live or who I am. And Lambert is the same way – his time in the monastic order even mirrors my time at Barnes & Noble – around 15 years of relative comfort and peace that was disrupted when I took a different path.

That desire to be good and the linked desire to give people what he’d had lead to a lot of interesting roleplaying moments. His pathological hatred of slavery wasn’t just based on the fact that Garm was a slave. (Garm was gifted to Aster by her absentee father as a bodyguard – something that Garm was comfortable with but neither Aster nor Lambert was.) It was grounded in the idea that making others suffer so you could enjoy leisure was one of the more horrible things you could do, and he took it out on every slaver he found, though not always with violence. The grungs in particular he just cowed into giving up their slave after the first visit. There is a moment early on Pathfinder: Kingmaker (the video game, not the TTRPG adventure path it’s based on) where you’re confronted by a group of slavers from the Technic League. The Lawful Good option in the dialog tree that presents itself is to say “No negotiations with slavers!” and attack immediately. That was Lambert.

A Bittersweet Goodbye

It bears repeating that none of this would have been possible without the rest of my gaming group, both in character and out of it. As much as I’ve gone on about the inner life of both Lambert and me while playing him, almost everything that made everything that came before actually work in play is to the credit of the other players and Grant as GM. As Krissi mentioned during Episode 139, she started Aster out as wanting to impress her NPC father. By the time the campaign ended, that desire had shifted to wanting to impress Lambert and make him proud instead. That revelation came as a bit of a shock to me the first time I heard it, because I hadn’t realized Lambert had gotten through to her that much. But it’s par for the course with the gaming group – the “core four” (Grant, Krissi, our anonymous player, and me) have been together for about six years now. Our newest additions (Jenny and our new player) have fit in well with the dynamic, and we actually get to explore the character and RP stuff. And not just on a surface level; we get to engage with it in depth, and over time.

That really was driven home for me when we started briefing Jenny on the colony game to introduce her to it. The three of us who had been playing went on for a really long time and in significant depth about what had happened and how the characters all felt about it (and each other) as part of bringing her up to speed. It stretched on for what would have been pages if it hadn’t been a string of messages in an app. None of that goes away just because the game has run its course.

And so, with a heart both heavy and full of gratitude, I bid you farewell, Lambert Colvin. May the new monastery you started in the colony bear a fruit of mercy and compassion, and may the unity you tried to create take hold among the residents of the new world. It was a joy to play you, and I am better for the experience.

Previous posts about the concluded colony game:

Pulled From the Flames
Happy Horvu
The Horror of Prejudice and the Grace of Welcome
Getting Over It
Making Preparations
Justification for Violence
One Foot in Front of the Other
A Sense of Menace
Heroic Legacies
Morality, Privilege, and Redemption
Campaign Report: Player Perspective, Part 1
Campaign Report 4: Into the Witch’s House
Campaign Report 3: Exploration & Narrative Railroading
Campaign Report 2: The Ancient Monastery
Campaign Report: Supplemental Content: Meet the PCs
Campaign Report 1: Playing Sharks and Daggers
The Classics are Classics for a Reason

However, it’s also Thanksgiving this week, so I’d like to take advantage of the season of to express my gratitude for the podcast and all that’s come with it. I’ve become a better gamer, person, and Christian than I used to be. I’ve made some solid friendships, both with my co-hosts, with other folks in the geeky faith community, with our listeners, and with some other podcasters.

I’m enjoying the best gaming group I’ve ever been a part of, and the industry itself is in a golden age (with actual plays bringing in more people all the time) and crossover between the gaming sphere and things that genuinely benefit those involved in it has never been more vibrant. We have ministries like the podcast sphere the three of us are fortunate to be part of, academic research being done on the hobby, and therapeutic applications being developed.

This week, I thank God for all of our guest hosts, all of our friends in ministry, and all of our listeners for being the wonderful folks you are. You have blessed me, stretched me, made me grow, and helped me process. I am truly, deeply thankful.

That means this year, I’m tackling the challenge of trying to write 50,000 words in a month.

I’m not doing a novel, per se, but writing stuff as long as a novel that isn’t actually a novel is a time-honored NaNoWriMo tradition. As a result of this intense focus on the monthly writing project, this blog post will be shorter than usual but the next one should make up for it. It’s not my NaNoWriMo project, but it’s been in the works for a while and I want to do it right before publishing it.

If this whole thing sounds cool to you and you want to give it a shot, too, the website for NaNoWriMo is here. There really aren’t a lot of hard-and-fast rules; people write in different ways and into different resources. My project is a collection of Google Docs, but some people use a traditional word processor or a tool like Scrivener.

I would strongly recommend that if you start on this that you make sure it’s backed up, though! I can think of few things that would be as disheartening as losing a manuscript with a five-digit word count partway through the month due to computer problems.

The other thing I’d suggest is that if this sounds like something you’d like to try: DO IT. Writing, like any skill, improves with practice. You may not make a masterpiece the first time, but being able to say you’ve written 50,000 words in a single month is a pretty noteworthy accomplisment all on its own.

Note: this post, like other stuff dealing with Alchova, is pretty dark and creepy. In particular, towards the end it gets into weaponized fiendish possession. I suppose you can consider this a “Halloween post” but I figured a warning was appropriate.

Step-by-Step Construction

I thought it’d be fun this week to walk through the creation of one of the antagonist groups from Exadria that isn’t just some history and background on stuff from the core books.

One of the running themes you’ll see here is taking ideas from other sources and re-purposing them. We’ve often referred to this tactic on the podcast, but I don’t know that we’ve ever done any sort of worked example. I thought that providing one would be cool, particularly since with these bad guys I have taken ideas from nature, a third-party game publisher, a video game, one of my own players, and from my job.

Alien and Terrifying

One of the iconic fixtures of Alchova is its hive patrols – silent, ruthless insect-like humanoids that sweep out of nowhere to punish and oppress.

Originally when I was working on the setting, I used the Tosculi race from Kobold Press’s Midgard setting, and I’ve used the monster stats out of Tome of Beasts for the one fight my PC group has had with them so far, but going forward I’d like to make them into something a little more unique.

First of all, instead of just a “generic waspfolk” race, I am planning to base them specifically on the bald-faced hornet.

I’ve included a picture of one to the right for convenience.

Let me back up a little bit, though: when I decided that I wanted to do something custom for the setting, I started looking up various types of stinging insects. I kind of wanted to get away from the stereotypical black-and-yellow stripes of the honeybee, bumblebee, and yellowjacket, both because it’s kind of stereotypical and because I don’t find a bunch of yellow stripes to be all that sinister looking. So I started looking at varieties that had different coloration. An early front-runner was mud daubers. They’re jet black, very sleek-looking, and have these long, weird, almost cricket-like legs. They look almost like what you’d get if you crossed a wasp with a stealth fighter.

However, I wound up not using them for a few reasons: first of all, they’re pretty delicate-looking and I wanted the hornetfolk to be a more intimidating physical presence. The second is that they really aren’t very aggressive. We have them around where I live, and while they’re kinda freaky-looking (my wife calls them “ninja bugs”) I’ve never had one try to sting me when it’s gotten into the apartment. They really just seem interested in getting back outside. So with that pair of disqualifiers, I looked elsewhere and settled on the bald-faced hornet.

There are several things I liked about the bald-faced hornet as the template for an antagonistic species. The first is that they are menacing-looking little monsters. The white markings on their faces are vaguely skull-like and their black bodies are also pretty scary looking. Like most hornets and wasps, they’re fairly aggressive, particularly in defense of their nests, which feeds well into them being the basis for an evil army.

But the real clincher was this: like most hornets and wasps, they have a nasty stinger that they can use, but unlike many other types of hornet and wasp, they also have the ability to squirt blinding venom into the eyes of those they attack. That was the thing that ultimately sold me; not only are they a little more unusual-looking than your standard stripey yellow bee/wasp/hornet, they have an additional mode of attack! It’s just too perfect. Bald-faced hornets it is.

As an added bonus, their nests (see the image to the left) are suitably creepy-looking to work as the basis for hornetfolk hives grafted onto the sides of buildings, which is also a nice touch. So from a biological standpoint, I’m all set; I have nasty-looking, stinging, venom-spitting bugs with black bodies and white, skull-like facial markings. Blow them up to the size of a human, give them functional hands on the ends of their legs, and kit them out with rifles and some web gear and you’ve got a scary, alien enemy that’s perfect for the setting.

However, at this point they’re just another monster, and while that can be okay, it’s kinda boring. And if these are going to be recurring enemies (and I plan for them to be), they’re going to need a bit more texture than that. This is a good starting point, but right now we’re looking at pure “cannon fodder” instead of a memorable enemy force.

So let’s start digging into some of those other influences I referenced in the intro. The Hornetfolk that make up The Hive Patrol have, well, a hive mind. But this being fantasy, it can be more than simple pheromones and instinct, so I decided to ramp it up a bit with magic.

And this is where the job, video game, and player influences come into the story.

Distributed Evil

The hive mind of the hornetfolk works a little like a client-and-server model and a little like distributed computing. Rank is something inherent in the hornetfolk, and the “officers” aren’t exceptional individuals with special training and status- they are biologically and magically different from the lower-ranking drones. The individual drones are telepathic and communicate that way, but it’s not like every Hornetfolk body alive shares a single consciousness, though I might do that for some other monster some day. Instead, the drones are networked back to an officer who is networked back to an officer above it, etc.

The seed of this idea actually came up in play when Jenny tried using a mind-affecting spell on one of the lower-ranking hornetfolk. It made its save, and she wondered aloud if because of the hive mind, the other members of the unit would also be affected by the spell if it had failed its save.

A quick aside: this was one of those times where the ACTUAL answer to her question was, “I hadn’t even considered that yet!” She tried again, and thankfully that one made its save too, which allowed me some time to think about it because everything else in the dungeon was undead tomb guardians (they’re exploring some Klaridian ruins) and those all behave pretty differently from the Hornetfolk. I liked the idea a lot, but wanted to make it interesting. So I gave some thought to how I wanted it to work, and this is what I came up with.

Each member of a Hornetfolk “squad” is connected in what’s essentially a telepathic “mesh network.” For those unfamiliar with network topologies, a mesh network is simply one where every individual device is directly connected to every other individual device. In this case, the “devices” are individual hornetfolk soldiers. This close, constant connection gives them several advantages and disadvantages.  The biggest of the advantages is the sharing of resources; members of a squad all know what the others know and get already-processed sensory information directly from each other on an as-needed basis in real time. That means that if one of the hornetfolk is on one side of a wall and can see enemies, another on the other side of the wall can shoot through the wall with pinpoint accuracy because it can “see” the targets in its mind. They all share everything they know and this means that if a squad learns something, the only way to keep them from reporting back up the chain of command is to slay them all. They also can share brainpower, making them better able to solve problems and work as a team. Additionally a spellcasting officer can cause a spell they cast to emerge from any of the drones under their control.

It’s not all upside for the hornetfolk, though, because a single mind-affecting spell or ability can spread throughout an entire squad. If the initial casting target makes its saving throw, nothing happens to the others. If it fails, however, the rest of the squad needs to save against the same spell or ability. The officer gets a +5 bonus on the save, but if it also fails, it can pass the effect up the chain of command to its officer (which gets a +10 bonus). If IT somehow fails, its superior gets a +15 bonus and so on. There have been a few very rare documented cases of a single , particularly-potent mind-affecting spell cascading through a significant chunk of a Hornetfolk army before petering out. This works in reverse, too – if an officer is hit with a spell, the units under it are also affected (but again with a +5 bonus). The same spell can only go in one direction, however – if a soldier fails and then the officer fails, it doesn’t cascade back down to the soldiers again.

Out of the structure of individual field units, connections are more sparse, following more of a fat tree network topology. Furthermore, the connections aren’t “always on,” either. A hornetfolk officer has to actually initiate a connection to its commander and report in, and while the process is quick if the squad isn’t fighting, it’s hard for them to relay a full information dump and fight at the same time. This doesn’t stop them from trying, but while higher command levels usually get a good sense that a unit has been lost in combat and their last location, they don’t get all of the squad’s knowledge going back to individual members’ first moments of consciousness. However, outside of combat, a hornetfolk officer can elect to “upload everything” and depending on their individual squad’s mission, they typically do so anywhere from twice a day to once a week.

At this juncture, it’s worth noting some things: as much as I’ve been using computer and networking terminology for the hornetfolk, they aren’t actual computers but mortal beings with brains, albeit very alien ones. They can get things wrong, forget, and don’t have everything they know constantly at the forefront of their minds all the time. Individual squads can kind of “think as one” because of the close telepathic connection, but it doesn’t go for the entire race, especially because the hornetfolk don’t all come from the same hive.

It’s also worth noting that hornetfolk are individuals rather than just copies that run a common personality, but their individuality is almost immediately suppressed by the hive mind as soon as they gain consciousness. A new hornetfolk starts out as an egg, grows into a larva, and finally hatches as a fully-formed hornetfolk of whatever type the hive needed when the egg was planted. The process takes about a month, during which the larva is telepathically imprinted into whatever squad it will be part of and fed a diet of ground-up protein. By the time it becomes fully conscious and self-aware it has already had its squad’s communal knowledge imprinted into its brain, which largely subsumes its own desires and personality. If an individual hornetfolk is cut off from the hive mind, usually by its squadmates and officer dying, it becomes a single self-aware individual. It still has all of its previous knowledge, but no longer has to act in accordance with the demands of the hive.

A Fiendish Connection

And this is where the video game influence comes in. Anyone who has played Mass Effect 2 knows that the phrase “assuming direct control” means things have just gotten serious. Each hive of hornetfolk is ruled and controlled by a single, incredibly powerful queen … and all of the hive queens in Alchova are in turn fused with a powerful fiendish spirit. The combination of the hornetfolk’s unique biology and fiendish possession means that at any time, the fiend can choose to take over any lower-ranking hornetfolk from the same hive. This causes the hornetfolk to undergo a significant, dramatic, and very swift physical transformation (what that looks like varies from hive to hive). It becomes the Fiend type and gains a bunch of additional abilities based on the nature of the controlling fiend. The fiend can only do this with a single hornetfolk at a time … at least in most cases … but it allows the hellish overlords of Alchova to project power to a remote and disposable vessel in the blink of an eye should they choose to do so.

It also means that the Hive Patrol aren’t the natural state for the hornetfolk. If a queen could be exorcised and moved out of the city, over time the hornetfolk from that hive would eventually become whatever alignment she wound up as rather than the Lawful Evil that they are due to fiendish influence. (Because of the incredibly-collective nature of the hornetfolk, they’d almost certainly be some sort of Lawful, however). Though it sounds simple, simple is not the same as easy; that would not be a trivial task! The possessing fiends have amplified the power of the already-powerful individual hive queens significantly and they are guarded by elite groups of both hornetfolk and fiends. Still I’m thinking such a task might be a fun high-level “inverted dungeon crawl” (work your way up a skyscraper into the nest at the top and exorcise the queen) for a party of PCs inclined to do so.

Steal Flagrantly, Unrepentantly, and With Both Hands

…er, when we’re talking about inspiration and gaming ideas, anyway. Please don’t apply that advice in every possible situation. Anyway, hopefully you found both the Hive Patrol and the creative process behind them to be interesting! As usual, I’m always interested in your thoughts or feedback.

The pictures in the body of the article are from the wikipedia article on the bald-faced hornet.

Reexamining Assumptions

Designing a setting in a vacuum can be (and has been!) fun, but there’s no substitute for bringing it out and using it in play, even for the design process. If it’s embraced, it can be a real boon to the creative process, but sometimes it also shows you certain things that aren’t working. And, as it turns out, one of the things that isn’t working in Exadria – kind of, anyway – is the whole County/Grim City/Wilds dichotomy.

For those that haven’t read the earlier posts or that need a quick refresher, here’s how that was supposed to work:

• Counties were civilized areas where The Kingdom of God has basically broken through, and people live in peace with each other, comfortable, safe, and secure, if not in lavish luxury. The pop culture touchstone I had for this was Stardew Valley.
• Grim Cities were civilized areas that had fallen prey to humanity’s (or elvendom’s, or whatever fantasy races are predominant) baser impulses and where things were really, really bad. This idea is a hard lean into the setting’s heavy metal influences – in particular, album covers like the one from Megadeth’s album Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying? with iconic metal mascot Vic Rattlehead filling the leader of Grim Lord.
• The Wilds were areas where there was no civilization and people were at the mercy of nature.

A Second Look

Some of the readers of this post have probably spotted some of the problems I’ve been having already. But for the record, let me break down what I’ve been seeing in play.

Counties are too safe to be interesting adventure sites most of the time. In order to really have a good D&D-style adventure in a County, you have to undermine what it’s supposed to be, which means you’re raising the stakes higher than they perhaps should be. A manticore attack in a sleepy, out-of-the-way place like Lostant is a problem, but it doesn’t call the entire nature of the place into question. The same attack in Maghali Da Bina is going to seem a lot more serious, because the whole nature of that society is that it’s been made very safe for the people who live there. That isn’t to say Counties are worthless, however; they can be good places for character moments like the steak dinner my PCs went to upon arrival in Maghali Da Bina, but you don’t normally find villains there.

On the other hand, Grim Cities are terrifying places that PCs shouldn’t even think about setting foot in until they’re at least level 8-12. And they won’t really be prepared to start doing some damage until they’re close to the level cap.

That means you’re left with The Wilds, which would be fine except one of the major features of the setting is that it’s far more technological than the D&D baseline, and having all of civilization either be too safe for adventuring or too dangerous to survive is leaving a lot on the table, narratively speaking. It also leans away from the themes of corruption and redemption I wanted to at least have as part of the setting’s palette by making the entire world into a bunch of static camps of good or evil. That would be useful for a strategy board game, but all of the very complex, human characters my player group brought to the game are frankly kind of insulted by such a simplistic, dualistic world. It cheapens the struggles of the PCs to be better and deal with their baggage and also implies that redemption or falling are always near-instant processes. It also leaves the world in a very hardened, non-malleable state, which makes it hard for the PCs to have a meaningful impact on the setting.

Necessary Changes

So what to do with this knowledge? The answer right now is “add more stuff.” I still like the idea of Grim Cities and Counties as a way of showing the truly exceptional places in the world (both good and bad), but there needs to be a lot more gray in the middle. I’m currently working on two such areas, both of which should provide interesting urban environments for PCs to visit.

The first is Eisenstadt, a major fortified free city and trade hub. Eisenstadt is built inside and around a massive coastal meteor crater, and trades in all directions. It has a major seaport, rail lines, an airship dock, two standard airports, a subterranean trading post to trade with underground races, and an underwater trading hub to trade with aquatic ones. The city is a huge, busy place with all sorts of people constantly coming and going, a significant organized crime problem and some neat fantasy geography (islands floating in air over the harbor, for example). On the spectrum defined by Counties and Grim Cities, Eisenstadt is close to the middle. There’s a lot of good, and a lot of bad, and a huge amount of stuff in between. It’s also full of interesting set pieces and factions, because I discovered with Lostant that I really like those in my setting as a thing for PCs to bounce off of.

The second is Strathilwood, the ancestral home of the elven “1%” and a huge finance city. I’ve channeled all of my outrage at hypocritical ivy league alums, callous bankers, and so on into this very corrupt, but also very classy-looking, opulent, and aesthetically beautiful place, and while it’s well on its way to becoming a Grim City, it’s not quite there yet.

More is planned – the continent with the locations I’ve described so far on it is just one of several, but I think the setting will be easier to design and much more enjoyable to play in if I just let go of the dualism a bit.

Meet the Bad Guys

Up until this point, I have been focusing on the places in Exadria and some of the more benign organizations. The one real exception to this rule is Grim Cities, but even those have gotten a grand total of three posts out of the 27 prior to this one. And if one thing is true in an RPG setting, especially one being used with some version of D&D, it’s that the heroes need someone to fight.

It’s also nice if the small-time bad guys one encounters in the opening sessions of a campaign can bite off more than they can chew every once in a while, and that is exactly how the Black Triad came to be.

If you read the posts about Lostant, you will remember that the villains of that arc were the corrupt Wallstone family. The Wallstones, while racist, lazy, and parasitic on the town, are not exactly textbook BBEG material. The fact that they’re rich jerks, however, meant that they could hire those people, and did. And that’s where the Black Triad came in.

A Violent History

The Black Triad, at the most basic level, are a group of dragonborn mercenaries descended from black dragons. In particular, they are from the general family tree of the dragon Ralathumicax.

Ralathumicax was a somewhat special black dragon. While he was every bit as vicious and cruel as a lot of other black dragons are, he was also much more of a leader and a strategist than a solitary apex predator. It was clear to him, even as a wyrmling, that he would get much more of what he wanted if he started working through intermediaries, and what better way to come up with intermediaries than grow your own? And so the Ralathumicax dynasy was born. Once he’d built up a good number of half-dragons and dragonborn loyal to him, he organized them into a mercenary company called The Gray Fangs and immediately started taking the nastiest, dirtiest mercenary work he could find. Ralathumicax found the concept of morality irritating and only behaved with honor when it was clearly smart to do so. For example, he paid his troops well because they could betray him and tended to stick to contacts because they could lead to future business, but he would not hear talk of “rules of engagement” or “noncombatants” or “humane treatment.” Over time, the Gray Fangs got a fearsome reputation as pitiless killers who could be counted on to get the job done, and the power, influence, and size of the company all grew rapidly. They eventually established a series of forts in the Delathun swamps, and that was when it all came unraveled.

Ralathumicax was an ancestor of most of his forces (though a few non-dragonborn mercenaries joined up over time) and his bloodline carried the same ruthlessness and lust for power that he possessed, so it should have come as no surprise to Ralathumicax that one of his officers, a powerful cleric of The Adversary named Olinjada decided she could do a better job running things and slew the dragon in a vicious battle that wrecked two of the forts and wiped out nearly a third of The Gray Fangs’s full strength.

Olinjada had counted on massive casualties and spent weeks raising as many of the fallen as she could as undead, including Ralathumicax himself, who now serves as her mount and is very much in her thrall.

The remaining, surviving mercenaries split off into several different groups and spread out throughout the world, taking work where they could find it. One of these groups, which has been known as the Shadow Kings, the Broken Axe, and the Bloody Claw as leadership shifted, eventually moved into the area east of Alchova and started taking jobs that pit them against the considerable might of the Grim City.

Just because they were fighting an evil enemy didn’t suddenly make them the good guys, however, and they quickly had almost as fearsome of a reputation as The Gray Fangs. The current leadership took over ownership of the company about 15 years ago, renaming the organization The Black Triad and sending a bunch of the more troublesome members off to the west under the leadership of an ambitious evoker named Hazorax and his lieutenant, a cleric of The Adversary named Tarhun. Hazorax and Tarhun’s troops were the ones hired by the Wallstones that touched off the events that began the game, and even if they were interested in doing so, they are unlikely to pick up the trail of the PCs any time soon, as they were stopped by the RRF from Maghali Da Bina as the PCs entered that city. However, Hazorax and Tarhun are still out there, as is the rest of the Black Triad and Olinjada’s undead army.

There is still plenty Ralathumicax’s influence can do to make things difficult in the world.

This week’s blog post is going to cover a small, but important location in the setting. But before I get to that – after months of writing these posts, I have finally settled on a name for the world: Exadria. You’d think I’d have come up with a name for the world back at the beginning of this process, but one just was not coming. That’s not nearly as interesting as the main part of this blog post, however, so let’s get on to The Iron Tree.

Roots of Steel, Leaves of Copper

The Iron Tree is exactly what it sounds like: a living tree made of iron with copper leaves and a steel root system. It grows in a remote spot at the foot of Xavidar mountains where the salt flats of Sadrogia meet the ancient ash fields from the extinct volcano that is Mount Tethrum. It is, as far as anyone knows, the only tree of its kind in the entire world. Attempts to plant or cultivate its metallic fruit have been futile, as have occasional attempts to destroy the tree itself. Even if it is torn out by the roots, it eventually regrows in the same place. The tree doesn’t look all that remarkable at a glance – the black iron trunk has a dull finish and roughly the same texture as normal tree bark, and the copper leaves have a green patina which makes them look like normal leaves unless examined closely. It stands about 40 feet tall and looks very much like a normal coniferous tree in a lot of respects.

The tree itself has a few noteworthy properties. It always attracts lightning strikes in the area, though this may have more to do with being a 40-foot high object made of metal than any magical property of the tree. It requires no water to grow, and the soil it grows from is a mix of salt flat and volcanic ash, and while the volcanic component is highly fertile, the salt makes it completely inhospitable to any other plant life. And, as previously mentioned, if damaged or destroyed, it always grows back. Feeding the tree metal seems to stimulate its growth, and the tree is currently the largest it’s ever been as far as any historical record knows.

But by far the most remarkable thing about the tree is the fruit it provides.

Hanging from the branches of the iron tree are a number of pomegranate-sized (and shaped) fruits made of metal. The metal itself varies from fruit to fruit, and certain types of fruit can be “encouraged” by burying metal objects in the root system of the tree. Over time, the objects are absorbed by the tree, any magical effects on them are negated, and the metal from them eventually falls as fruit. The Iron Tree is utterly implacable in its consumption of metal in the soil around it – powerful artifacts have been destroyed by giving them to the tree. In addition, the tree is completely unfazed by the nature of the items buried in its soil. Corrupted swords of pure evil or holy relics from ancient cathedrals have been absorbed as blithely by the tree as piles of scrap bronze and old iron horseshoes. However, powerful magical items take longer to be absorbed by the tree than simple nails and dinnerware. An ancient artifact may take centuries to be consumed by the tree and turned into fruit, though after 24 hours or so there’s a significant measure of security provided by the tree’s steel roots which will wrap around the object in a loose “cage,” slowly tightening and expanding around the object to completely envelop it by the time it’s been buried for a year. The fruit resulting from alloys is always a “pure” metal; for example, bronze items buried in the soil around the tree will eventually produce copper and tin fruit. Multiple fruits can be combined to make alloys as usual and the results are always excellent, unless one of the fruits was pried off the tree before its time. (See below.)

When one of the fruits from The Iron Tree falls to earth, it can be forged into any number of objects (depending on its composition) and whatever is made from a fruit of the iron tree is automatically of superior quality and also takes enchantments exceptionally well.  The metal from its fruit is a joy to work with, and almost seems to want to help the craftsman. A number of legendary weapons, suits of armor, ceremonial objects, precision instruments, and other important items, including a significant number of artifacts, began their existence as a fruit from The Iron Tree. The fruit cannot be plucked early – anything made from fruit that is pried off the tree before it is “ripened” never seems to turn out right. The metal is always pitted and brittle, corrodes easily, and is especially susceptible to metal fatigue. Even trying to make simple things like nails or eating utensils turns out poorly. Returning items from “bad fruit” to the soil around the tree’s roots allows the metal to be absorbed again with no ill effects, and it will eventually form another piece of fruit, no worse for the wear.

In addition, a piece of fruit can be added to a larger volume of ordinary metal of the same type or a type that can be alloyed with it and many of the same benefits will be conferred, albeit at a lower intensity. However, even a little of the metal from a pried-off piece of fruit will spoil the entire batch. Legends of warriors taking a small bud from the tree and throwing it into the forge of an enemy army as an act of sabotage exist in the world, though the most recent ones are ancient.

Leaves and branches taken from the tree are ordinary copper and iron, respectively (the steel roots seem to be a direct result of the high carbon content in the soil and are also ordinary if separated from the tree). The exceptions to this rule are those that fall from the tree after a lightning strike. Those leaves and branches are especially useful in applications involving electricity, from weapons that do lightning damage to electrical wiring.

An Important Place

As one would expect, the Iron Tree is seen as a priceless and important treasure, and the tree itself and the area around it have been claimed by The Church. For centuries, the tree was watched over by the order of St. Kylah, but in recent years, they have been joined by the order of St. Basdav. (Both orders are detailed here.) The Kylans provide security (often armed with weapons and armor made from the gifts of the tree) and the Basdavites oversee the metal put into the tree’s roots and experiment with applications for its fruit. The grounds of the tree include barracks, an R&D facility, some comfortable general living quarters, and a small, modest chapel decorated with fallen branches from the tree. Both orders are careful to select only the most trustworthy and vigilant members, as fruit (fallen or pried) from the tree could be used for any number of nefarious purposes.

One thing that the Basdavites have started to do in recent years is dumping shavings and filings of rare and valuable metals like Adamantine and Mithral into the roots, and some small fruits of those metals have been observed slowly growing on the upper branches.

As one might imagine, the fruit, regardless of its composition, is incredibly expensive and not provided to just anyone, regardless of what they can pay, and enough metal (typically a single fruit) to forge a sword from is a rare and highly-prestigious gift; a great honor in addition to being an exceptional material. The church has sold or given a limited amount of the fruit to certain trustworthy third parties, however. For example, the MSEA has some of the fruit which has been used in various prototype applications and The Palace of the Seers has a number of instruments for scrying that were made from the tree’s fruit in its halls.

Rules and Mechanics

Attempts to forge, cast, or otherwise shape the (fallen) fruit of The Iron Tree into objects are automatically at advantage. The fruit is incredibly receptive to being forged and shaped, and once formed holds its shape well and resists wear and tear. Weapons made from the fruit of The Iron Tree should be at least +1, and seriously consider adding a minor beneficial property or two.

In addition, armor made from or with (at least 25% by volume) fruit from the iron tree can be worn by druids without violating their oaths. The druid can sense this merely by touching the armor; one who does so gets a brief vision of the tree and the fruit being worked into the armor.

“They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.” -2 Kings 25:7

One of the things that happens in my games that I imagine is pretty common is that places in the setting the game takes place in automatically become richer and more detailed as soon as the PC group visits them. Lostant was basically a name on a map before my PCs went there and as they move on, the “names and places” document I keep has acquired over two dozen names from the events there. And there are a few NPCs (like the grouchy gnome veterinarian) that the PCs never met.

The PCs aren’t in Lostant any more, though – they’ve taken Melgar, a fearsome wrecking machine of a black dragonborn to start a new life as a paladin in service to the order of St. Kylah after Kallista spoke to him several times while he was in jail and convinced him to turn over a new leaf. They drove through the largely-abandoned industrial city of Pylesville (think of a smaller version of Detroit) without much incident but were ambushed by Melgar’s former teammates south of Maghali Da Bina (also known as Highflats). That was a session-long knock-down, drag-out fight that really let the PCs all do their thing (with the exception of the poor ranger, who had some lousy dice luck). After the ambush, they piled back into their vehicles and hightailed it for Maghali Da Bina. And there they encountered the first of the new things that I added to the city: the Maghali Da Bina military unit known as the Rapid Reaction Force.

Swift Guardians on the Wind

The Rapid Reaction Force (or RRF) is exactly what it says on the proverbial tin – a specialized military unit that can respond to problems very quickly – specifically with 2 minutes’ notice or less. They are a necessity for Maghali Da Bina because of its relative proximity to both Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor and Alchova means that the areas around its borders are swimming with both troublemakers and people who need help dealing with troublemakers. The PCs found themselves in that position shortly after the ambush when the rest of the Black Triad unit that wanted Melgar back VERY badly showed up in their rear view mirrors not far outside of the city. The Lostant police they were escorting radioed for help, and because Maghali Da Bina is a County … they got it. A kind of shadow came off the top of the mesa in the middle of the city and as it got closer, they could tell it was a flight of Raptoran soldiers. About the same time, a group of armored vehicles sped past them in the other direction. I didn’t even bother to narrate exactly what happened next – because they didn’t stick around to find out. The deputies from Lostant hit both the gas and the lights and sirens and made for the city.

Idyllic and Safe

Maghali Da Bina is a really nice place to be. One detail I added between my collaborative session with Jenny and the PCs visiting the city is that because the city includes both forest gnomes and rock gnomes, it makes sense to have a lot of green space incorporated throughout the city as well as technological advancements as a byproduct of the large gnome population. One thing that’s been consistent throughout my GMing career is that I portray gnomes as bundles of boundless enthusiasm – and that means that there are a bunch of druid-tended green spaces in basically every neighborhood of the entire city.

In addition, the strong focus on safety and quality of life in the city (and the prestige that comes with advancing those things) has ensured that the city is extremely clean and well-maintained. The gnomes are decades ahead of everyone else in pollution control, and the air quality in Maghali Da Bina is second-to-none for a city of its size. Streets are broad and well-maintained (the gnomes use concrete for everything, eschewing blacktop and other less-durable paving materials entirely) and intersection construction is done in such a way that parked vehicles do not impede visibility.

Perhaps just as importantly, it’s a prosperous enough place to support a variety of specialized small businesses. The PCs visited a small local steakhouse; I had Jenny do some more impromptu worldbuilding and she described a small, nice restaurant with very good steak and an extensive collection of craft beers. That lead to some interesting character moments as Kallista became overwhelmed with the niceness of the place and more than one beer option, Hala asked about the wine list, and Traven and Rowan (who share a backstory) reminisced and jokingly sniped at each other. (Rowan is the PC of our new player in my game.)

A Few More Details

Some additional notes that came up talking with Jenny about Eteri’s backstory, but don’t really fit with the above: there’s a mandatory service program in Maghali Da Bina, but it has multiple “tracks.” The military is the largest one, but there are also city watch and fire/rescue tracks. Every citizen of the city, regardless of their species, undergoes one of these after high school, which means that almost everyone in the city has at least some training in crisis response and first aid and the population is less helpless than the norm. This feeds into the general culture of safety – if there’s an accident, everyone knows first aid, if there’s an attack, everyone knows what to do. If there’s a natural disaster, everyone has training in keeping a cool head.

Now Leaving Maghali Da Bina

I doubt the city will be getting too much more detail for a while, however, because it’s too nice of a place to hold much in the way of adventures. Maghali Da Bina, like the other Counties, is designed to be an example of where things have gone right for a long time and continues to do so. But that means I need to get the PCs out of the city soon, which means that I’ll probably have something else neat to write about soon.

Thanks to some pretty extravagant patron generosity and us finally getting around to cleaning up our Patreon tiers, rewards, and goals, we have an expanded explanation of how our streaming will work and some slight changes to the schedule.

As long as we stay over the $60 mark on Patreon, we’ll do a weekly stream. If we stay above the $45 tier but don’t hit $60, it’ll go back to being a biweekly stream. We haven’t been below $45/month in quite some time, so if you enjoy the stream, it should be pretty safe to expect it at least biweekly thanks to the amazing and consistent generosity of our Patreon backers. This, combined with the fact that we record the podcast on alternate Thursdays means we’ll be moving our streaming day to Friday, effective this week.

The obvious follow-up question to this announcement is: why not just produce more podcast content, since that’s our primary focus? The answer is “time.” Podcast planning, recording, and editing means there is a block of about 5-7 hours of work you don’t hear for every hour you do. Planning and recording require all three of us, and streaming comes with none of that extra labor due to its nature. So it’s significantly easier for us to stream than to make extra podcast episodes, especially since streaming only requires one of us at a time!

The timing and content of the streams will be the same as indicated in the introductory post. We’ll be starting around 7-8 in the streaming host’s time zone (Central for me, Eastern for Jenny and Grant) and going for about an hour. The content will be a mix of game streaming mixed with various TTRPG prep from Grant and/or me on occasion. In addition, one of the other things we have planned is a series where Grant, and possibly other people, teach me to play Minecraft because shockingly, it’s 2018 and I’ve never tried it. We’ll put out notifications via Facebook, Twitter, and our Discord as a reminder before the stream starts.

As previously mentioned, we also reserve the right to stream more than this post indicates! Grant will probably continue to stream editing as the opportunity presents itself, and we may do some other special events and whatnot now that we’ve got it all ironed out.

That means for the month of August, our three stream dates are:

Friday, August 17

Friday, August 24

Friday, August 31

Looking forward to seeing you all on the stream chat!

-Peter

However, sometimes that also just means “friend of a friend who is going through some awful life stuff and could really use some gaming therapy.”

This past Saturday, our gaming group decided to do just that.

A close friend of one of the group members has been going through some awful, traumatic life nonsense lately. Bad enough that the group member in question has made multiple trips to said friend’s residence to help them in various ways with the awful, traumatic life nonsense. Because we’re a tight-knit group of friends in addition to being a gaming group, the group member has kept us updated on the friend’s situation, and that has come with a powerful, almost overwhelming desire to help this person out on the part of, well, all of us. Our whole group.

Just because we wanted to help doesn’t mean it was easy, though. We’re spread out over a significant amount of territory. If you were to start at the residence of one of the group members and take a road trip to meet all of the others, then loop back to where you started, you’d put almost 4,000 miles on your vehicle before you were done. Multiple time zones and an international border would be involved. There’s not much we can do in the form of physical presence.

What we can do, however, is open our proverbial online home up, and in our case, that’s the gaming table. Or rather, the gaming Roll20 site and Google Hangout that goes with it.

Fortunately, the friend in question was receptive (enthusiastic, even) to the idea of gaming, so after some back-and-forth, we set the member who was local to them to the task of helping them build a character and Grant got to work on an adventure, since it was his game the friend would be able to attend, scheduling-wise.

Our new player had only a couple days to roll up their first character, and they chose a sorcerer—not the easiest choice for a new player, especially starting at seventh level. Primary spellcasters in D&D have a lot to keep track of and sorcerers have even more than the other primary spellcaster classes do – they have a resource called “sorcery points” that can be used in a whole bunch of interesting ways, but absolutely create additional record-keeping. Bear this information in mind as you read on.

Game day rolled around and I will admit, I had some twinges of uncertainty. I told the group member who was bringing this new player in that their friends were my friends, even if I hadn’t met them yet. I meant that statement, but I’m an introvert and can be a little shaky on my social feet around new people. Still, this was one of those opportunities to live what I say I believe, so instead I leaned into the idea of giving the new player as much spotlight time as possible, even reaching out to a social media group for some good helpful cleric tactics that were still effective, but kept me out of the spotlight since I know I can be a bit of a forceful presence at the table.

I needn’t have worried.

Grant really brought his “A” game – the session was a fun, light-hearted romp full of faerie dragon shenanigans, overmatched grungs out for revenge against the party and a tense fight against a banderhobb. Furthermore, with the addition of Jenny and this new player, we’ve gone from having no primary arcane spellcasters in the party to having two. That will open up a lot of interesting story and combat options that were closed off to us previously, and that should be a lot of fun.

More significantly, however, the new player took to gaming like a duck to water. The character build they brought was extremely solid – a sorcerer with stealth, tons of social skills, and massive amounts of arcane firepower that can be shaped to exclude friendlies from blasts. The first major combat act of the new PC was to obliterate a small crowd of grungs with a single fireball. In addition, the new player is a genuinely nice person and was comfortable enough to do some actual roleplaying on their first session of gaming. At this point, I hope they stick around (which looks likely) because they seem to be a natural fit for the group.

Probably most importantly of all, however, was that we seemed to achieve the therapeutic effect we’d been going for and the new player got some relief from the life stuff for a couple of hours.

It’s nice to have the right thing and the fun thing be the same thing on occasion.

So here’s the basic breakdown:

On non-recording Thursdays (so every other week, starting with this Thursday, August 2, 2018) one or more of us will be streaming something gaming-related. That could be one of us playing a video game, or it could be some form of prep work for one of our weekly games since Grant and I are both running one now. It’s unlikely to be the same host two weeks in a row and it’s unlikely to be the same thing two weeks in a row, which should give us some good variety.

As the stream goes on, we’d love to hear feedback from you all about what you especially enjoy (or don’t) and we’ll be able to refine from there.

For the month of August, our stream dates are August 2, August 16, and August 30. Grant is taking the first shift, as it were. You can find the link to our twitch channel here. Start times will probably be somewhere between 7pm and 9pm in the host’s time zone and run for about an hour. We’ll announce start times on Facebook, Twitter, and in our Discord server’s General channel once they’re determined and issue reminder messages an hour or so before we start and at the start time.

One issue I ran into during the first stream is that we have a pretty hefty delay baked in, which I, at least, would like to get rid of so interactions are a bit more natural.

It also bears mentioning that this is a minimum schedule you can expect from us. There will probably be additional, if intermittently-scheduled streaming from us. For example, Grant is still planning to stream editing on occasion, and probably some games after he’s done editing for the night. You may also see the occasional “bonus” stream from Jenny or me as well.

Note: this material is a bit more “adult” than most of the other posts in this series. Krissi is exploring some heavy, messy, difficult stuff with her character, and while it makes for really interesting and worthwhile material, a certain level of maturity is advised for some of the themes in this particular post. Specifically: drugs, sexuality, psychological trauma, and what spending a lifetime of fighting does to a person will get touched on here – nothing is going to be especially graphic, and it’s in no way gratuitous, but just be aware of what will come up. -Peter

A Life Redeemed

Kallista is definitely the most wounded of the PCs in my party. A former soldier from Alchova, she was left for dead after a mission gone bad and recovered by some “missionaries” who specialize in rescuing people from the Grim Cities about a year ago. From there, she went through a recovery process, some paladin training (where she excelled) and then out into the world as a freelance paladin; one of many knights errant in service to The Church.

What her life was like leading up to that point, though, was horrific.

No Place to Grow Up

Alchova doesn’t really acknowledge childhood. Parents don’t get any time off at all to care for children or even to have them, and falling behind on productivity numbers can be deadly. Nevertheless, children do happen in Alchova. In addition, there is no one specific origin of tieflings – they can arise from genetics (the usual, implied means from the PHB), infernal bargains, moral corruption, simple proximity to evil magic, and so on. As one might imagine, none of these permutations are particularly uncommon in Alchova. Child abandonment is high due to to desperation and parents going off to work one morning and never coming home is also common. This means that a lot of the time, children who do “make it” are raised by resistance cells, grow up on the streets, or both.

And once they’re grown, not a lot of options exist for them.

While Krissi and I haven’t discussed Kallista’s early years yet, what we have discussed is that at age 16, she enlisted in the Alchovan military.

A Grim Business

Alchova’s military provides some things that being a civilian does not: higher rates of pay, guaranteed shelter, and meals provided (and better quality than the usual insect protein and hardtack). All it requires in return is that you turn into a drug-addicted thug that’s willing to bully civilians, commit atrocities, and who will probably die in a suicide mission when a member or members of your squad does something that annoys one of the powers that be.

That does not, however, mean that everyone who winds up in service to Alchova is a vicious, sadistic monster, and as they say, birds of a feather flock together.

Kallista wound up in an all-tiefling unit called The Hellblades, and they became the closest thing she had to a family for a long time.

However, to truly appreciate how that worked, I have to lay some groundwork first. The Hellblades are an elite military unit and also an illustration of what military life is like in Alchova. Alchova’s military is essentially used for three purposes: putting down internal resistance, raiding neighboring territories for slaves and supplies, and fighting with competing powers, both inside the city and out. Because Alchova borders the Yuthi desert, skirmishes with the forces of the Dragon Tyrants  of Klaridia, the Dry Tusks, and the Tomb Guradians of Klaridia are a regular occurrence. They tend to leave the smaller towns like Lostant, Penfield, and Elsrin alone, because they’re well aware that an actual war of conquest would create an alliance they’re not prepared to fight, but that hands-off approach only extends to about a mile outside the city limits of the towns themselves. Convoys and lone travelers are occasionally picked off and hauled back to the city to serve as slaves or are slain outright for the cargo they carry (or occasionally because a patrol is angry or bored).

Worse are the internal operations. Units will be sent to take down rival powerful figures in Alchova by whomever is commanding them, and oftentimes these missions are horrific meat grinders involving savage room-to-room fighting in skyscrapers or building-to-building fighting across industrial districts. Given the savagery of fighting involved and also the wide range of ways of inflicting damage available in the setting, these fights can get nasty indeed.

This leaves the military of Alchova with some problems. Regardless of how little they may value their soldiers as people, training them is costly, and therefore throwing them away completely isn’t something they can afford to do. At the same time, battlefield medicine isn’t an area Alchova has any sort of edge in. Places like Laraloch-Thistivuel, Highflats, and even some of the larger independent towns can count on having field hospitals filled with clerics from groups like the orders of St. Lessara, St. Argan, and St. Gertiana (and Gertianan triage specialists on top of that) to care for the wounded and keep casualty numbers down. But that level of restorative magic and skill is the exclusive purview of The Church. Clerics of The Adversary exist, but they’re nowhere near as good at healing people as Clerics of God, and they’re also often fewer in number and tend to be leaders, not followers. Bards can pick up some of the slack, but they’re seldom trained as dedicated healers, at least not in Alchova. You’ll sometimes see dedicated healer bards in groups like the Pellicane Scribes, but even there, they’re few and far between. So what does Alchova use instead?

Drugs.

Lots and lots of nasty, addictive combat drugs.

In game mechanical terms, Alchovan military units will have a Medic (from Ultramodern5 by Dias Ex Machina Games) instead of a cleric as their combat medic. In addition to stitching people up and setting bones, they also dispense all of the various combat drugs the Alchovan military makes use of. The primary “cocktail” is a mix of Adenopur (a steroid-like drug that enhances physical strength and endurance), Feltane (a powerful stimulant that increases reaction time and wakefulness), and Daraxacin (an analgesic that lowers inhibitions and pain response). All three are somewhere between “mildly habit-forming” and “horribly addictive” and all three have nasty side effects and withdrawal symptoms, which means that the entire Alchovan military is basically a huge force of drug addicts (which makes motivating and punishing them very easy for their fiendish overlords). Spellcasters also get a powerful mental enhancer called Kinophine that enhances the senses (sometimes painfully – ear plugs and dark glasses are common) so they can better target enemies with their magic. In addition, a lot of the units that are less-enthusiastic about the nasty nature of their work tend to use other drugs to forget when they’re off-duty, which the medics also tend to be in charge of (you don’t want your marksman to OD, and die between fights, after all). Common choices there include multiple forms of alcohol, a hallucinogen called Twist, and a strong narcotic called Roots.

Specific side effects of the drugs provided by the military include increased libido, increased aggression, sterility, deadened nervous system (particularly the senses of taste and smell), tinnitus, paranoia, and severe anxiety. This leads to a “friends with benefits” arrangement among squadmates a lot of the time and incentivizes the use of the other drugs to both forget the horrible things that have been seen and participated in and to deaden the side effects of the combat cocktail. It also means that if a soldier is off his or her “combat cocktail” they’re a miserable, neurotic mess unless they manage it with something else.

And unfortunately for the soldiers, it means that they spend their entire lives, from the time they enlist to the time the violence finally decides it’s their turn for a trip to the afterlife under the influence of something and often stoned halfway out of their minds.

(Quick plug: I got the names of all of the fictional drugs above from a fictional medicine name generator you can find here and a drug name generator you can find here. Both are part of this site, which has over 1200 name generators all told. It’s an amazing resource.)

The soldiers have some advantages the civilians don’t have, however – namely each other. Like the soldiers in real-world armies serving tyrannical regimes, not everyone who puts on an Alchovan uniform is universally evil-aligned and cruel (to cite my sources: go give a listen to the Ghost of the Ostfront series from Hardcore History). And like-minded individuals tend to find each other, no matter the context.

Family of Choice and Circumstance

The Hellblades, despite their fearsome name, are probably more noteworthy for world-weariness and signs that they aren’t evil than anything else. I could try to summarize, but I don’t have to. Below you will find the actual text of the NPC document Krissi gave me. A quick note: Mathim Eligos is another escaped tiefling soldier from Alchova that has also trained as a paladin. He is something of a mentor figure to Kallista.

Andras Seir – Squad Leader. Andras looks out for his squad as much as possible, but will follow orders that promise to go badly for them because he knows from brutal experience that disobeying orders will be worse. He seems somewhat resistant to the narcotic effects of the combat drugs, and his off-duty drug use is more casual/social than a result of addiction. He tends to keep the rest of the squad from dangerous excesses with help from his second in command.

Glasya Labolas – Second in command; sniper. A master of compartmentalizing, when on duty Glasya is a stone cold killer. She executes her tasks with efficiency and precision, taking pride in a job well done or a shot well-placed, and shows no remorse for any action she takes while under orders. Off-duty, she warms up somewhat with her squad, and even considers them friends. She seems to have an inability to empathise with others, which works in her favor given her line of work but makes it difficult for her to understand her squadmates’ escapist behaviors. She thinks their debauchery is a waste of time and money, but Seir allows it, so she considers “designated sober person” an unofficial part of her job.

Damaia Gremory – backup Mechanic, Kallista’s best friend in the squad. Damaia is a career soldier with a quiet demeanor that masks an iron core. Most who have never seen her in combat would not believe what she is capable of when pressed. She is a fierce combatant and cunning enemy, but would defend the handful of people she truly cares about to the death. Kallista and Damaia enlisted at roughly the same time and have been together since basic training.

Rieta Marchosias – Medic. Rieta is the squad medic, and as such she administers all combat drugs during shifts (and generally provides and administers the non-combat ones as well). She has an instinctive gift for healing, but as a combat medic her bedside manner is nonexistent. Her techniques prioritize speed over finesse, but Rieta will calmly point out that an ugly scar beats being dead as she roughly stitches you back together. She’s more likely to curse you for your epic stupidity while patching you up enough to get back and fight than show any compassion or concern, but is often the first one to get high and the last one to sober up when off-duty.

Nemia Orias – Scout. Along with her twin brother, Nemia is in charge of recon for missions outside the city.  Inside the walls, their job is to keep an eye on the ebb and flow of local politics, looking for any information that might give their squad an advantage in the constant shifting of allegiances in upper management or warn them of potential backstabbing. They are also in charge of acquiring anything the squad needs or wants that isn’t regulation issue or available at the commissary. They share the uncanny bond that can show up in close twins, and have learned to use it to their advantage in combat.

Ekemon Orias – Scout (see above). Ekemon works with Nemia to acquire information that can be used to the squad’s benefit, but he is not above selling what he digs up for personal gain. He has expensive tastes and habits that a military salary just doesn’t fully fund. His sister looks the other way most of the time, but usually steps in if she thinks he’s going to get the squad in some kind of trouble. Still, there is no doubt that he has leaked some things he probably shouldn’t have and ruffled some feathers. If they figure out he is the source, he could be in some trouble.

Mordai Eligos – Younger brother of Mathim, Mordai is a brutal fighter known for his outbursts of temper and lack of restraint on the battlefield. He is highly sensitive to the combat drugs, and often goes into an almost berserk state when in danger. When off-duty he is more controlled, but his anger issues are innate, so the squad tends to handle him carefully and steer him towards sedatives instead of stimulants.

Amnon Havres – The stereotypical “big dumb guy” of the squad, what Amnon lacks in critical thinking he makes up for in brute strength. Although one of the most destructive members of the squad, he is not evil per se; Amnon will follow any order without question because it would never occur to him to do otherwise. He can use firearms, but is happiest when he can be up close and personal smashing things. If nothing more interesting has presented itself (he is quite fond of the ladies) he can usually be found in the gym trying to show up whoever else might be working out at the moment.

Aleister Raum – The firearms expert on the squad, Aleister is Kallista’s other close friend (and frequently “friend with benefits”). He has the skills to be a sniper, but prefers to be closer to the action. Also, Glasya would probably shoot him if he touched her gun. Aleister, like Kallista, has some impulses towards good buried deep down inside, but one has to know him very well to see past the mask of indifferent violence he has cultivated most of his life. He probably recognized Kallista as a kindred spirit bothered on some level by their work, since he was the one who introduced her to the mind-altering substances she came to rely on as much as he does.

Damakos Agares – The intellectual of the group, Damakos is a philosopher at heart.  He is also a self-declared “student of life” and is often found obsessively hyper-focusing on whatever has caught his attention this week. His enthusiasm for most topics never lasts long, and in a week or so some new shiny will catch his attention, but he finds uses for a surprising amount of his knowledge, and is always happy to share with anyone who will listen so that he can show off his brains. The week he was intrigued by bomb-making was an especially tense time for the squad, and more than one of them carries a scar from what he claimed was “an honest mistake.”

Leusis Allocer – Unlike most of the others, Leusis loves his job. His family carries some clout that he leveraged to get in and stay in, and he couldn’t be happier. He revels in the power and violence, and if he were a less petty, self-centered, unambitious person he would make a good candidate for rising through the ranks. Unfortunately for him, his tendency towards self-aggrandizement and a stunning inability to work with a team has rubbed most of the higher-ups the wrong way and he is frequently re-assigned because his squad leader eventually gets sick of his shit. The HellBlades is his latest stop, but it is a poorer fit than usual and the rest of them are looking forward to the day a spot opens up in a team where his arrogance and wanton cruelty will be more at home.

Conclusion

It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that I have some narrative plans for this group of soldiers. And this is one of those times where I REALLY WISH I COULD TALK ABOUT THEM, but I can’t, because my players read this blog.

Suffice it to say, though, that I was impressed by the honesty and maturity with which these people were described to me, and I really hope I can do them justice. I wrestled with putting this post up for a while because I was a little worried about how some of the subject material would be received. However, I think this is a perfect example of how acknowledging something and endorsing it are two different things. One of the things that I really appreciated about the original document was how you could see just by looking at a few lines of text how most of those characters could be really different and perhaps even heroic people if something had been different.

That “if something had been different” is key. This is not a glamorous, desirable situation to be in. It is multiple, interlocking layers of misery and unhealthy means of coping with it when no healthy means are made available. As I mentioned back in the Moral Universe posts (parts one, two, three, and four) at the beginning of the series, evil is something that can worm its way into people, but it’s also something that people can be rescued from – and reading over the original document Krissi gave me really got me thinking about the ways these people would be aching for a better life and a better way of looking at the world. The PCs may or may not save some number of these characters.

But I’m definitely going to give them the opportunity to try.

Playlist

Beast and the Harlot by Avenged Sevenfold. This video carries some of the same content warnings as the rest of the post – some risque costuming and themes are in there, right from the opening frames, in fact. However, it’s an absolutely perfect illustration of the way that evil entices and then destroys people – even its own messengers. Watch with discretion, but it’s extremely effective at conveying that message.

Photo by frankie cordoba on Unsplash

Where the Story Is

My players have been inhabiting the town of Lostant since the beginning of the campaign, and by now they have uncovered sufficient information about the place that I feel I can write a full blog post about it without either spoiling anything for them or being so irritatingly vague that the post is useless as both reference and reading material. I’ve actually been looking forward to being able to write this one.

Small but Thriving

Lostant is located in the Yuthi Desert, which was unanimously selected by my players as the area they wanted to start in. It’s not a big town by any stretch of the imagination; in fact the population is only about 3500. It sits at the intersection of a pair of large highways that lead through the Yuthi about halfway between Laraloch-Thistivuel and Alchova to the west and east and Highflats and Giant’s Hall to the north and south. Despite the small size, its economy is healthy both due to its role as a crossroads city, but also because the town’s largest employer, Lithlien’s Greenhouse Farm, is able to supply food to most of the other towns in the region. There are a number of other local businesses and institutions as well – and they’re busy enough to support some wealthy “town families” but the greenhouse farm is definitely the crown jewel of the town.

Demographically, the town is mostly made up of humans and half-orcs, but there is a good mix of elves and half-elves, dwarves, and a smattering of other races (kenku, naga, and gnomes are all present).

Law and justice are fairly rudimentary. There is a  Sheriff (the lazy and useless Coram Wallstone) with three deputies. One of the deputies is the sheriff’s younger brother Alberic Wallstone and the other two are much more honest and competent than their boss. One (Satifa Nightfeather) is actually running against Coram in the upcoming election. The town has three poorly-maintained holding cells at the sheriff’s office and a 5-cell jail that is currently vacant.

City government is limited to the mayor (currently Horace Platch, also one of the co-owners of the local car dealership), a few administrative staff and some city workers. Most of the work done by the city government is related to upkeep of the roads, power, water, and sewer systems, and other infrastructure. There’s a sales tax on everything sold in town, and an income tax that supports the schools.

The town has a small newspaper called the Lostant Gazette that is staffed by only three people, but that manages much higher standards of journalistic integrity and courage than could reasonably be expected of it, thanks in large part to the owner and lead writer, Kristoff Whelen. An attack on this newspaper was the inciting event of the whole campaign.

The local church is run by a new priest, Mother Kaddasha Grathorn, an imposing half-orc woman with a lot of tattoos and an unnatural hair color. While she initially got some strange looks, her genuine, vulnerable demeanor and passionate focus on charity has endeared her to a lot of the church-going folks in town. It is an open secret that she helps supply some resistance groups operating in Alchova when she can. (Mother Grathorn is also my shameless in-world nod to Nadia Bolz-Weber.)

Commerce and Industry

As previously mentioned, the largest business in town is Lathlien’s Greenhouse farm, and it is huge. The farm is row upon row of meticulously-maintained greenhouses that grow a huge variety of produce and other beneficial plants across a massive chunk of what would otherwise be un-farmable land. Thanks to a carefully-maintained combination of magic and industrial production, Lathlien’s is able to grow plants from a huge variety of different climate types, and the ability to sell things that only grow in vastly different climates under normal circumstances in the desert has turned out to be spectacularly profitable. The owner, Moira Lathlien, a middle-aged half-elf, is the epitome of a smart and fair business owner. She employs about 100 people all told on the farm, and they are well-treated, well-compensated, and given a good work-life balance. Moira is wealthy, but significantly less so than she could be, preferring to invest in her staff or her business rather than her lifestyle and savings. She was quick to hire the PCs to help her after a manticore attack left the two useful town deputies injured and several of her staff more than a little scared.

Abrams Kendrick runs Kendrick’s General Store, and employs a small staff of about ten. He pays less well than Moira does, but most of his staff are younger and all but two of them are part-time and they seem to mostly be there so he has someone to talk to. He is a kind-hearted, warm, and very extroverted old human and has forged a deep friendship with the local priest and supports her charitable efforts with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Dolgan Wallstone, the older brother of the sheriff, runs Dolgan’s Guns, and he is an unpleasant person, greedy and racist. At the moment, he is the primary local villain, if unintentionally so. His botched attempt to quash an exposé of his family’s lazy and somewhat parasitic influence on the town lead to a bunch of violence and other unintended consequences that he has been unable to walk back. The store itself is beautifully-appointed and exceptionally well-stocked, but despite the frequent business from travelers through a region that can be very unsafe giving him more than enough to hire a substantial staff, he relies mostly on a couple of delivery drivers, his younger brother Alberic (who works “security” on the night shift) and a handfull of constructs.

Harv’s Cafe is the premiere local eatery and is one of only two local businesses open 24/7 (the other is the gas station). During the day (6am – 2pm) and evening (2pm-10pm) shifts, the food and service are excellent. The night cook (10pm-6am) is not nearly as skilled, but the service stays good. The PCs have made the diner their primary “office,” meeting with clients and conducting planning options there.

The Sunrise Motel, where the PCs have been staying, is owned and operated by a kindly (if slightly nosy) middle-aged human woman named Agnes Guinefort who (on word from the town doctor) figured out that the PCs are a net positive in town and slightly undercharges them for their rooms. She has a serious crossword puzzle obsession and a tendency to call the doctor if the PCs look banged-up, whether they want her to or not.

Speaking of the doctor, Dr. Cassandra “Cassie” Larkin is a former (and decorated) member of the Solemn Order of St. Argan the Reverent and even has a white rose sword hanging in her office to show for it. She is a very kind and soft-spoken person, but she’s also trained as a paladin and a doctor and as such is no fool. She operates a clinic that is half of a business called “Man or Beast” with a gnome veterinarian the PCs haven’t met yet. (Both practices share a parking lot and some land, but not the same building.)

There is also a local car dealership, a bar, a second hotel, and a few other local businesses, but the PCs haven’t visited them yet.

Movers and Shakers

Lostant has three major “town families.”

The town’s only major dwarven family, the Wallstones own the gun shop and The Griffon Inn, as well as a bunch of small storefronts around town. In addition, Coram is the sheriff. There are four brothers – Dolgan, Coram, Herman, and Alberic and none of them are particularly great people. Unusual for dwarves, they tend to be lazy and selfish, but they’ve carved out a sizeable chunk of influence all the same.

The Platches, a well-established human family, own the car dealership and also hold the mayor’s office. They aren’t evil, but they aren’t particularly good, either. The family tends to be nepotistic, snobby, and lacking in empathy, but they’re a pretty large group and there is some granularity there.

A third local family, the Larkins (also human) is smaller but has a much more benign influence on the community. Two living generations (Cassie and her father, Clifford, now retired) of Larkins have served the town as doctors and have done so with kindness, fairness, and a very caring and patient bedside manner. And there were three prior generations before that, they’re just deceased. Clifford’s wife, Helen, is very involved in the local church, singing and playing the organ. She also organizes a bunch of local clubs that do various charitable things.

Moira Lathlien could easily be seen as a fourth, but she’s a family of one as far as the town is concerned. She has an adult daughter, but the daughter isn’t particularly influential.

Now Leaving Lostant

…at least for this post. I have a feeling that the PCs will be back here from time to time even as the campaign takes them to other places. I’ve generally been happy with the town, but I feel like it could have used a bit more fantasy stirred in with the mid-twentieth-century town tropes. Fortunately, I have some ideas for fixing that in future towns, but until my PCs visit them, I’m going to leave them un-detailed.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post.

They require a pretty surprising amount of work to put together, and they just weren’t getting much engagement. However, we’re not about to take something away without giving something back in return!

What we have decided to do instead is something involving streaming.

Grant has already experimented with streaming editing before, and he’s also streamed games of Tangledeep at least a few times, and I’m sure he’s got other ideas, too.

Now that I’m done with school and equipped with a new PC (funded by the sale of my magic collection) I’m in a good position to stream as well. In my specific case, I’ll be looking to stream either creative stuff for the game I’m running on Sunday nights (so mapmaking in Campaign Cartographer and/or Dungeon Painter Studio) or I’ll be streaming any of a variety of turn-based games I have and enjoy. Some early contenders for that list would be Darkest Dungeon, Invisible, Inc., Xenonauts, Dungeons of Dredmor, Hard West, and the Eador games, but there are definitely more – you can pretty much count on me streaming Phoneix Point when it comes out, for example. I’ll probably stay away from anything twitchy because Old Man Reflexes ™ and performance anxiety would combine to make a stream you could only enjoy for sheer schadenfreude.

Jenny actually has young person reflexes and might do something real-time, but I’ll let her speak for herself on this.

We are still hammering out the scheduling, but stay tuned. We’ll probably have something ready to go soon. And by “soon” I mean before the end of this month.

Specifically, Magic: the Gathering.

A quick disclaimer before I go on: I have genuinely enjoyed many games of Magic and there are some absolutely wonderful people working on it (James Wyatt, for one; Grant and I really enjoyed talking with him back in Episode 85) and there are also some equally wonderful people in the community (Shivam Bhatt springs immediately to mind, but there are tons of others).

Magic has a lot of nostalgia baked in for me. I originally started playing back in high school around the Ice Age block. I spent a lot of time as a junior, senior and young high school grad playing the game with friends, and that was a great thing to do as a teenager. I put it down right after the second set in the Urza block because everybody scatters to the four winds after high school and I had nobody to play with. I picked it back up again right around the Return to Ravnica block. That second time was when I got into Commander, which became my favorite format. I really liked the singleton aspect, the static commander, and the slower pace that it created.

But I’m still walking away. The reasons are multitude: that it’s a huge cash sink that infringes on other hobbies I enjoy more is a big one – I’d much rather throw my recreational budget after tabletop RPG products or even video games, and staying competitive enough to be engaged even on a “budget” level in M:tG requires significant financial investment. There’s also a constant “arms race” that requires a lot of mental engagement. Every time a new set comes out, one has to acquaint oneself with a bunch of new cards, how those interact with the old cards, and while that can be fun, it’s a lot of time. There’s this obsessive collection aspect to it, at least for me. I got into the habit of cracking packs for what I wanted instead of buying singles, and that turned into a sort of gambling-esque thing.

And then there are the twin elements of toxic community members and the M:tG Finance scene. Magic is very competitive, and it is also very much pay-to-win. A bunch of the most powerful cards are part of something called the Reserve List, which means that WotC has promised to never reprint them or cards that do the same thing (at the same power level). That means that those cards, if you have them, will constantly rise in price because there’s a finite supply of them that can never be replenished. (The most infamous of these is the Black Lotus, which, if in mint condition and graded as such can cost as much as a new car. I’ve never had one, and neither has anyone I know personally.) Add to this the hyper-competitive tournament scene and the fact that those same awesome cards are widely useful even in casual formats like Commander. This means that there’s some real money in play in collecting, and that fosters both a stock-like trading industry and some really toxic competitive spirit. Magic, in a lot of ways, is like amped-up poker and a number of M:tG pros are in fact either former or current poker pros. Once again, none of this is to say everyone involved is bad. But there definitely are some jerks. It also has the tendency to push everything toward hyper-competitive decks with four-figure price tags.

You can work around it to some extent, and I did. But I spent a lot of time keeping up with stuff that might be going up or coming down in price. For a while, most of my podcasts were Magic-related ones.

At some point, it stopped being fun and started to feel like an obligation. Moreover, it started to feel like a pretty unhealthy habit.

A quick aside about that: role-playing games, I have found, are a wonderful, healthy thing in my life. They draw me into community, help me maintain some of my closest and most treasured friendships, and give me a way to give back to geek culture and even the Church by way of the podcast and this blog. They foster my creativity, give me the means to explore moral, psychological, and philosophical concepts, and give me something to look forward to every week.

Magic did almost none of that. I enjoyed the game itself enough to keep playing, but the collecting, keeping up with things, and constant financial inventment really started to feel like a grind – I was putting a lot into the game and taking next to nothing out. This might have been different had I a local playgroup, but I never did. The closest place to play was a card shop a half hour away with a bunch of very competitive players who I didn’t really have a huge bond with.

That contrast became more and more apparent and it started to nag at me a bit. In fact, the nagging got stronger and the game (or at least the constant collecting, sorting, deckbuilding, and meta-concerns) started to feel sinful to me – I was spending a pretty healthy chunk of change on little colored pieces of cardboard, and it was preventing me from doing other things I enjoyed, but it also felt like hoarding.

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” -Luke 12:15

Interestingly, though, the specific sin felt more like Gluttony than Greed – I was spending all of these resources – time, money, and brainpower – on this thing with no real purpose in my life but more of the thing.

That went on for a short while and then one weekend I decided to take a break. I packed up the collection and stuck it in the closet, uninstalled the Magic Duels games from my computer, and systematically un-followed a bunch of M:tG social media. I didn’t talk about it much; I felt kind of unsettled about the whole business, if I’m going to be completely frank. The first 24 hours or so were kinda weird, but then?

I felt like a weight had been lifted off me.

As time went on, the collection stayed in the closet and several new sets came out. Looking over them online as a non-player has been an interesting experience. On the one hand, there’s definitely an aspect of coolness to it. Magic has always been a well-designed game and their art is second-to-none. On the other, I feel this weird aversion to spending any more time and money on the actual game itself. (Though interestingly, this does not apply to the lore and art – I was able to enjoy the beautiful artwork and nostalgic lore of the new Dominaria set more or less in a vacuum and I’m looking forward to picking up the art book for it – and the Plane Shift document that WotC will inevitably put out.)

That would probably be that, except the week before Fear the Con, I started feeling this weird “hitch” or “pulse” as I was driving my car. I thought it was maybe some bad gas or a bad spark plug or wire, but a local shop, based on my description of the problem, specific circumstances in which it occurred, and not seeing any warning lights, diagnosed the problem as a failing transmission pump. Transmission repairs are very expensive. We had enough savings to cover it, but our savings took a horrible beating last winter and I didn’t want to deplete them further. During the conversation around that, I brought up the idea of selling off my Magic collection, which my wife responded to with surprise, asking me if it wasn’t a “little drastic.” During the ensuing conversation, I realized that, no, it wasn’t all that drastic to me.

As it turned out, the shop that made the initial diagnosis was wrong. Since they don’t do transmission work at all beyond fluid changes, we took the car to another local shop that specializes in them and it turned out the problem was actually an improperly attached spark plug wire. The jerking feeling I was experiencing while driving was, in fact, an improperly-attached spark plug wire.

Vindication! Sweet relief! And more importantly, no regrets about going to Fear the Con. I went and had a great time.

Based on the circumstances, I could have just pulled back on the plans to sell the collection off, but I discovered I didn’t want to. That pile of card boxes taking up space in the closet really felt like dead weight to me. And so I decided to sell the collection. Allen and Ashley from Min/Max pointed me to a friend of theirs that’s just getting started in the online magic selling biz. He made a house call, looked over the collection, and we came to a price that left both of us happy.

And that was that.

I had a good run with Magic, and I may still do the occasional mock draft with friends, but as far as collecting, and more importantly, spending both time and money on it on a regular basis? I am done.

Again, I don’t intend this as a blanket judgment. There are plenty of perfectly wonderful people who can enjoy it and not get sucked in like did, or who have the disposable income not to make that side of it such a chore. I don’t think less of the wonderful people like The Professor or the LoadingReadyRun crew who are making M:tG content out there. I don’t think the game is inherently a blight on geekery, much less the Earth.

But for me, specifically? I’m going to stand here and enjoy the warmth of that bridge as it burns.

Jenny and Peter are at Fear the Con – if you’re in the St. Louis, MO area, come and say hi!

Weekend Reading will resume as normal in two weeks.

-Peter

Another quick note: Life Has Intervened, and while I’d still like to do collaborative blog posts with my other three players, they’re going to have to wait until things get a little less crazy.

Coiled Among the Rocks

The last time I detailed a Grim City, it was Alchova, one of the worst of them. (Possibly even the worst – it’s real bad.) But sometimes the rule of Evil isn’t quite as in-your-face as Alchova is.

Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor (Citadel of the Serpent’s Stone) used to simply be known as The Outer Wall – it is a surface community of dwarves that has grown up around an ancient fortified surface trading post, and the name “The Outer Wall” was intended to be more than a little tongue-in-cheek, as the rest of the city it was attached to was a traditional underground dwarven mine city. Life was fairly normal until a routine cavern expansion (the dwarves were in the process of expanding a university of theirs) broke into a nest of something terrible. Unknown to the dwarves, a malignant ecosystem of subterranean, mind-controlling plants and fungi had infected a hive of Kruthik (see Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes) and the resulting infected hive had inhabited a series of large, open caves near the the dwarves. The result was predictably bad. The initial work crew immediately inhaled a cloud of spores which overcame them as the fungally-dominated Kruthik swarmed past. Without an early warning, the casualties were horrific and before any sort of defense was mounted, the initial breach area was overrun and basically unassailable. The dwarves, being dwarves, fought valiantly, but the swarming menace seemed endless and their own fallen sometimes stood up as horrible fungal zombies. As they were pushed out of more and more territory by the seething horde, they grew more desperate and in their desperation, turned to mercenary companies.

One such mercenary company was the Hand of Shattered Stone. Led by a group of hardened medusas and their chained basilisks, the primarily human and naga mercenary company was hardened and ruthless, but they got the job done. They made significant headway against the swarming fungal menace by attacking them in a way that neutralized their fungal spores: petrification. They even managed to turn the swarm’s tactics against it to a limited extent by turning petrified kruthiks into Stone Cursed and sending them back against their fellows. The desperate circumstances and shared focus on stone overcame what would have normally been deep concerns about the mercenaries and the dwarves were able to evacuate most of their remaining civilians to the surface trading post. The swarm was seemingly endless, however, and after over two years of savage fighting the decision was made to collapse the mountain. A group of dwarves led by the king and his honor guard went into the city with the leadership of the Hand of Shattered Stone. Though the mission was successful with the mountain collapsing on the horde and sealing them off once again, only the mercenaries returned.

The collapsing of the mountain had another unfortunate effect: it cut off the only access road the city had enjoyed, and the massive rising cloud sent the signal for many miles around that “something horrible has happened here.” The city’s remnants and the mercenaries were safe, but they were cut off. Over the course of the next several years, a series of circumstances eliminated all of the rightful successors to the throne. One of the king’s sons died in battle. Another went crazy with “surface sickness” and was institutionalized, and the third was convicted of a series of horrible crimes and banished. The mercenaries “temporarily” assumed control of the city until “a suitable new king could be found,” but shortly thereafter , the infested kruthik broke free at the base of the mountain and assaulted the city again. While the incursion was smaller and more easily contained (they had walls between them and the enemy this time) the constant fighting left little time for matter of succession. In the time since then, the mercenaries have gradually assumed control of most aspects of the society, and their naga and human members have integrated with the dwarves. The society has never recovered from its siege mentality, however, and the military (which is now a blend of the old dwarven forces and those of the former mercenary company) gets the best of everything with the rest of society subsisting on rations.

That was about 150 years ago. In the intervening years, technology has advanced, the old walled trading post has been expanded into a massive walled city with a huge citadel overlooking it, and the medusas are still in charge. The siege mentality has not lifted, either. Patrols still walk the walls, the military still gets the best of everything, and the rest of the city makes do. In recent years, talk has turned to “reclaiming the ancestral halls” and the citadel has started experimenting with armored vehicles and gas masks to avoid the spores.

Morality

Pride/Humility: Indulger (-1) – There’s definitely a “we know best” attitude among the medusas.
Envy/Kindness: Monster (-2) – The leadership of the citadel seems to look at everything in the city with an attitude of “why doesn’t the military have this?” There’s also an extreme distrust of outsiders. People not from the city have no rights and are often subject to horrible treatment.
Wrath/Patience: Indulger (-1) – The city is extremely militaristic, and martial law is harsh.
Sloth/Diligence: Seeker (+1) – Even the ruling class is invested in the safety of everyone (who behaves) inside the walls. People tend to work hard.
Greed/Charity: Indulger (-1) – The population is given the necessities and just enough beyond that not to openly revolt. Luxuries are rare and concentrated more densely in the military, but even there they aren’t common.
Gluttony/Temperance: Seeker (+1) – There is a strong culture of efficiency and thrift and people see being responsible with resources as helping their society.
Lust/Chastity: Monster (-2) – The Citadel practices chattel slavery, and because of it, horrible abuses happen. With respect to my own personal lines and veils, that’s about as much as I feel like putting in the setting.
Overall Virtue Score: -5 (Evil) While not the over-the-top, crushing, all-encompassing evil of Alchova, The Citadel of the Serpent’s Stone is still not a place many people would choose to live.

Personality

Duty/Independence: Exemplar: Duty (+2) – The siege mentality pervades every aspect of life. People work grueling hours to prop up the military and don’t get much in return.
Efficiency/Artistry: Exemplar: Efficiency (+2) – Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor has basically become a massive military base. Everything is designed for maximum function and no thought is given to beauty.
Meticulousness/Expediency: Indifferent (0) – A careful balance is struck and maintained; both are valued, neither is neglected.
Satisfaction/Excitement: Favorer: Satisfaction (+1) – “Did you make it from sunrise to sundown alive? Yes? Then you had a good day.” -popular saying in Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor.
Sacrifice/Pragmatism: Exemplar: Sacrifice (+2) – Everyone and everything is expendable (even the leadership, or so they insist) in service of keeping the citadel safe.
Overall Personality Score: +7 (Lawful) – Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor is a place of heavy discipline and regimented living, all in the name of security.

Hard and Stoic

Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor is a place where things are evaluated on their necessity and utility. Art of any kind is usually seen as wasteful (though isn’t banned outright and simple serpent designs are common). Seasonings are not used in food with nearly the frequency they are in other places. Buildings receive windows with an eye to security (which means lower floors have smaller windows to deny alternate means of entry and upper floors have larger ones to better survey the surrounding area). However, the leadership of The Citadel realizes that its living being aren’t robots and makes some modest concessions to aesthetics, comfort, and so on realizing that if they make daily life too hard, the entire society could collapse.  This is typically done at the expense of outsiders and prisoners who are treated as resources rather than people.

Crime and punishment are harsh – military discipline is applied to everyone, even the very old and very young, the death penalty is common (though not as common or as sadistically applied as it is in Alchova), and the most common form of it is petrification, after which point the executed party’s “statue” is turned into building materials. Slavery is another common punishment and slaves are not treated well at all.

Perhaps unexpectedly, there is very little direct infernal influence in The Citadel. A few fiendish bargains have been made (though not by the medusas – yet, anyway) and there are a few clerics of The Adversary around, but you won’t see a bone devil while walking down the street. Additionally, the ruthless, paranoid authorities seem to be fairly above-board and honest, if terribly harsh. There isn’t a lot of double standarding, summary punishment, and cruel dominance behavior evident. What there is in its place is absolute callous indifference. You obey the rules and do what’s expected of you, or you either wind up as a slave or as bricks. The medusas weren’t nice people to begin with, and neither were the mercenaries, but as everyone involved saw it, they did the best they could in a terrible situation.

Well, except for the nagging matter of the royal family.

In truth, I haven’t decided exactly how scheming I’m going to make the medusas in the game – the loss of the king could have been them acting intentionally or a tragedy. The king’s sons likewise could have been machinations or simple misfortune. If you decide to run a game in this setting, that answer is absolutely up to you.

What I have decided is that the fungus-infested underground horde is a legitimate, independent threat. No parties involved in the history of Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor were involved in the creation of those monsters. Sometimes fantasy words just have terrifying things lurking in their corners, though they could have been something one of The Adversary’s captains came up with back in antiquity.

Notable Groups and Individuals

The Sisters of Shattered Stone: The city’s governing body is the group of eight medusas that ran the Hand of Shattered Stone mercenary company. Normally medusas are not very physically-powerful, but these ones are the exception. Built more like this Wonder Woman cosplayer than the art in the monster manual, they wear armor and carry heavy, smashing mauls with them – they will often petrify enemies and then smash the statue to prevent the enemy from being returned to their normal form. (And they work well as a team.) They are harsh, but by all appearances, they do actually try to be consistent in their judgments, not showing obvious favoritism and punishing even the highly-placed as harshly as the lowly. None of this diminishes the fact that they have gone around the lines of succession and set themselves up as absolute military oligarchs, however.

The Great Snake: The Hand of Shattered Stone has a number of serpentine monsters that it used as shock troops or living siege engines. One of the most imposing is a massive, scarred constrictor snake that stretches about 85 feet long and weighs just north of 3 tons. Through some sort of magic, it’s gained human-level intelligence and it can speak, though it rarely chooses to do so. These days it mostly goes out on exterior patrols, subsisting on mountain goats and the occasional wandering monster or prisoner who gets out of line. (It’s a Titanboa from Tome of Beasts with a boosted intelligence score.)

The Citadel Engineering Corps: A hardened unit of combat engineers (almost all dwarves) with heavy shotguns, massive armored vehicles, and gas masks, the Engineering Corps has the daunting job of going into the collapsed mountain and trying to recover what they can. The biggest prize would be the remains of the king and his honor guard, but valuable materials, tools, and writings (many of which were on metal plates and could be rendered readable again with mending spells) are also highly sought-after. They will occasionally run into a pocket of the fungal horde and have the means to fight them without joining their ranks.

The Trade Corps: The trade corps exist to bridge the gap between a prevailing attitude of severe, paranoid xenophobia and the very real need for things not found in the territory controlled by Klagaron Lach Dalan G’Nor. They are a serious bunch, and anything they trade for is inspected to an insulting degree before being sent back to the city, but their prices are fair (if generally inflexible) and they can be counted on to hold up their end of a bargain. Failure to do so on the other side of a transaction is likely to involve violence, however, and they have a pitiless group of killers as part of their organizational unit.

Berodic Daganal: The “insane” son of the old king has been quietly amassing allies from his confinement and seems to be planning something, but strangely, it doesn’t seem to be a reclamation of the throne. Due to some ancient laws that are still on the books an honored by the medusas, he is able to send and receive sealed correspondence, and most of what he’s been sending and receiving seems to be concentrated in Laraloch-Thistivuel.

Aynwal Dagnal: The other surviving royal heir was exiled over a century ago and his whereabouts are unknown, though some long-term governmental staffers occasionally report seeing envelopes for his brother written in what looks like his handwriting. Aynwal was a poet and a lover of nature and spent an inordinate amount of time on the surface for a dwarf, even before the invasion happened. His exile came as a shock to many.

Notable Locations

The Dark Road: The Dark Road is the name the Citadel Engineering Corps have given to the tunnel into the collapsed ruins of the old dwarven city from which The Citadel sprang. It is a massive, fortified, reinforced tunnel full of fallback points, heavy gates, remotely-triggered traps and several planned cave-in spots already rigged with explosives in case it needs to be collapsed again. The entire tunnel is lit with both electrical and magical light sources and is astoundingly bright, especially given the name.

Scalagan’s Perch: A newly-constructed watch post high up on the side of the collapsed mountain, Scalagan’s Perch is an ever-open eye from on high that stares down at the city and its surrounding environs alike. It’s only reachable via a long, long staircase or by the air, and most of the traffic up and down is on wyvern-back. There is a military wyvern breeding facility at the site, and wyverns of various ages can be found there being trained as mounts for the military.

Before I can get to that, though, I need to give some context. Though I’ve committed to two different actual play collaborations in the future (in one case, the very near future – I’ll be recording this Friday), I’ve long been very leery and anxious about doing actual play. I’ve gone into some of the reasons indirectly in other blog posts, but it boils down to messaging. I tend to feel a lot of anxiety about the rightness of whatever I do and also how it’ll affect those around me.

Other relevant pieces of context: Grant is an excellent GM and sometimes sets up messy, difficult decisions in his game and Grant and Krissi have two young children. What does that last piece of information have to do the with the first two, you ask? Usually nothing. In fact, until Saturday night, actually nothing.

What happened Saturday, then? Recently, the party rescued the surviving colonists from the missing second colony ship. Among their number is a very dangerous man named Gage who is basically Hernán Cortés with the serial numbers filed off. He is ruthless, politically-savvy, physically-powerful, combat-trained, a minor spellcaster, and is already starting to make power plays. He is bad news. The social situation is such where we can’t/shouldn’t move directly against him yet, but it’s clear that we need to start cutting off potential power levers for him so when he inevitably tries to make a play for leadership of the colony, he does so from as weak a position as possible.

And the biggest and most obvious of those levers is the wyvern that’s been on the island since session one and mated at the end of the Auntie Bloat arc.

It bears mentioning at this point that the wyvern hasn’t done anything to harm or menace the colony yet. It has stayed near its mountainous roost in the northwestern corner of the island, occasionally flying inland to snatch an ox-sized giant capybara and haul it off for dinner. It’s essentially equivalent to a mountain lion or a bear – a powerful predator that would be really dangerous to confront directly, but that won’t just attack the colony for fun like a troll would have, for example. However, it had mated recently, and unfortunately for us, it’s the female of the pair that mated.

We decided as a group that we absolutely, positively did NOT want Gage getting his hands on wyvern eggs, but that meant one of two things had to happen. We had to climb up to the wyvern’s lair and either kill it and smash its eggs or we had to figure out how to get a big, dangerous, not-terribly-bright creature to somehow take its eggs and leave.

And we were starting to debate how to solve this conundrum when Grant and Krissi’s oldest (still just under 6) couldn’t sleep and came to mom & dad for reassurance.

My anxiety spiked immediately. Now not only did we have to solve the original problem, there was a young child who liked dragons watching and if everything went south, I did NOT want to kill a mommy wyvern and her eggs in front of a kid. Furthermore, Grant was already playing up the “protective mother” angle.

I was going to feel bad about that if it happened anyway, I absolutely did not want to traumatize Grant and Krissi’s daughter by indicating such actions were even on the table. There are some things that I just don’t feel comfortable making a kindergartner witness or process. This was one of them. I actually found this so uncomfortable that I just flat-out told Grant and Krissi so and waited until their daughter had been sufficiently comforted and had gone back to bed before we proceeded. As it turned out from later discussion, Grant actually had similar concerns about hard-to-explain violence in front of his daughter and did the “protective mother” thing to nudge us toward a non-violent solution. He also didn’t want to run an improvised combat for something that’s been a low-level background threat in this game since literally the initial session – two real-life years ago. As he put it: “it and you deserved better.”

Ultimately, though, violence wasn’t how the scenario played out. We did some fairly risky and dramatic stuff which included Garm playing music in front of Lambert for the first time in the entire campaign. Hopefully that will make for some cool moments down the road because Lambert had no idea Garm played music at all until last session, never mind that he was as talented as he is. Speaking of Garm’s musical talent: the music he played lured the wyvern down from its nest and calmed it allowing Lambert to get in close and tag it with a Tongues spell which allowed it to communicate with us and we were able to negotiate terms for relocating the wyvern and its eggs to another island. It all worked out in the end and we had some good dramatic and comedic moments along the way. (Aster: “We could help you move the eggs.” Wyvern: “Notoucheggs!”)

But the knowledge that I might have another uncomfortable thing to live with and I would have to do it in front of a little kid who probably wouldn’t be super sympathetic to our actions? That kinda wrecked me.

It’s tempting to get self-flagellating about this and be like “if you can’t do it in front of children, you shouldn’t do it at all!” (which, by the way would be terrible advice that by implication ensures no more children will ever happen) but instead this just serves as a good illustration about my anxiety over actual plays. RPG campaigns are inherently lengthy and complex things in a lot of cases, and if we’d had to go the violent route with the wyvern, it would have, in the absence of context, seemed like a pretty malicious and brutal act – classic “murderhoboism” if you will. Though the situation was more complex than that, it’d be hard to tell without seeing what had gone before. And even with the context, it’d have had a gloss of icky-ness and tragedy to it.

And therein lies my AP anxiety – tabletop RPGs often have violence as a driver of the plot, and while that can be fun and perfectly functional, it can be fairly horrifying without the context for it. It’s not going to stop me from doing APs at all, but it should explain why I’ve been hesitant about them in the past.

YES HELLO HI I AM BACK HOW ARE YOU

No, seriously—sorry I’ve been absent from the past couple Weekend Reading posts. Things have been … intense … at work. But who cares? Let’s do this thing!

An old gem I found a while back: A Reddit thread with food historians explaining what “ethnic” restaurants were like in 19th-century America. And what the most popular foods were. And what public eating was like. All in all, absolutely fascinating.

“Restaurants” were a different type of eating establishment, and were, for the most part, inaccessible to the masses back in the mid-1800s, but that’s largely because back then, by definition, it was understood that a “restaurant” was a very specific type of French eating establishment that served French haute cuisine. In fact, at Delmonico’s in New York, recognized in the 1840s as the only “true” restaurant in the city, the entire menu was in French. Even the Astor House wasn’t considered a true restaurant because only part of its menu was French, while the rest of the menu consisted of American and English food.

And as you can see on that 1838 menu, part of what was considered American and English food even then were the dishes of “Boiled Cod Fish and Oysters” and “Turkey and Oysters” while among the French offerings are “Macaroni au Parmesan” as well as roast beef and more traditional French dishes.

So, really, the first ethnic kind of “restaurants” in America served French food since, by definition, a “restaurant” was originally an eating establishment that specifically served French food, just as much as a “ramen house” or a “tapas” establishment is a specific type of eating establishment today. But French food was far from the only food consumed outside the home. Most of what was available at “eating houses” was traditional English and American (with its English roots) food–a lot of boiled meats, potatoes, vegetables, bread, and soup.

Tires Tires Tires is just a fantastic story about writing, grace, kindness, and auto shops. Also clever marketing, if you’re the sort of person who thinks that way.

Then one day, I took my car in for new tires at Tires Tires Tires and magically blasted out like 5,000 words in their fabulous waiting room. It was incredible. Complimentary coffee that was actually delicious, comfortable seating, free cookies, friendly staff. I had found my mother ship!

That night, I told my sister of my great fortunes and she said, “You should go back! Don’t let the momentum stop! I need an oil change…take my car in!” 

So I did.

Finally—it’s not reading, but it’s about reading and that’s close enough! Two Ph.D’s—one of whom I can personally vouch for as an awesome person—have started a podcast dedicated to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy called Marooned On Mars with Matt and Hillary. It’s really cool and a great reason to read this remarkable piece of science-fiction if you haven’t done so yet.

Peter

The BBC has a really interesting piece on our (rather literal) need for stories as humans located here that’s worth a read.

Although we have no firm evidence of storytelling before the advent of writing, we can assume that narratives have been central to human life for thousands of years. The cave paintings in sites like Chauvet and Lascaux in France from 30,000 years ago appear to depict dramatic scenes that were probably accompanied by oral storytelling.

I enjoyed this short article from The Christian Century, because it sums up for me how (most of the time, anyway) the “geeky faith” community operates.There’s also some neat science about starlings in it.

Thanks to high-speed photography, researchers today know why starlings interact so coherently and how they avoid midair collisions. Each starling pays attention only to six or seven surrounding birds. There is no designated leader. Any bird can initiate a change of direction. A consensus among hundreds or even thousands of birds can emerge within 50 milliseconds.

Finally, Tribality has a nice breakdown of some useful information about the upcoming Pathfinder 2.0 playtest. Out of what’s in the article, the Ancestry mechanics sound the most intriguing to me.

The typical fantasy races found in Pathfinder such as dwarves and elves aren’t going anywhere, but this is more than just a relabeling of race as ancestry.

Jenny

I like jam, I like Newfoundland, and the card game Newfoundland Jam combines the two in a very adorable way.

Hi, I’m game designer Jason Anarchy, I make silly card games. I remember this one time when I was 9, my mom told me that she used to make jam when she was “back home” in Newfoundland. It was a heartwarming story that I remembered into adulthood and decided to make a game out of it!

As we will be talking about in an upcoming episode, I have caught the cosplaying bug. I did a very fun cosplay a couple weeks ago, and I want to do more. The Humble Book Bundle has put out a bundle of cosplaying guides and how-to’s, and I may have picked up all of them.

Work hard, cosplay hard! Build your dream project with the Humble Book Bundle: Cosplay 2.0. Featuring guides from Mood Designer Fabrics, Adam Savage, Kamui Cosplay, Punished Props, and others, this bundle will give you more skills than you can shake a staff at.

The Babylon Bee has put out a church name generator. I got “Diverse Tornado Collective.”

Deciding on the perfect name for your church can be difficult. As always, the Bee is here for you. This page contains a vast storehouse of super-relevant church names ready to be generated at the click of a button.

A Collaborative Effort

Credit where credit is due: this entire post, content and actual text, is a collaborative effort with Jenny. In fact this will be the first in a short series of posts where I work together with one of my players to present an aspect of the world that they’ve created, either on their own or in collaboration with me. The next post will be either Grant or Krissi, the post after that will be the other of the two of them, and then finally I’ll have one I do with our anonymous player.

When the group was talking over character creation prior to the start of the game, Jenny asked about playing a raptoran, which is a race I didn’t originally have in the setting. There was no good reason to say “no” however, so I dug my old copy of Races of the Wild out of my closet and did a conversion we agreed on.

But now Eteri needed a place to be from, and since I’ve collaborated with Jenny on the Gallistor twins already (our PCs for a planned collaboration with Min/Max and some other geeky faith folks) I knew we worked well together and played off of each other nicely when it comes to creative pursuits. It was a no-brainer to ask her to design her PC’s homeland with me. She agreed, and this area is the result of our shared effort.

An Unofficial Conversion

Raptorans are a race with mechanics deeply seated in the edition they appeared in, namely 3.5 D&D. I initially didn’t think that would be all that much of a problem and then I opened the book and started looking. 5e races generally fit on a section of page roughly the size of a 3×5 notecard. Just the rules for Raptorans in 3.5 fill up almost an entire page. They don’t have any attribute bonuses or penalties in that edition, and they have some very granular mechanics around their racial flight ability, unique benefits they get when taking spellcasting classes, a special racial weapon (the footbow) that was designed to be used while flying, and so on. I needed to make them fit with standard 5e races, so this is what I came up with:

Raptoran Racial Traits:
+2 WIS, +1 DEX
Walking Speed 30′
Glide speed 30′
Proficiency with the longbow and the ability to use it while flying
Darkvision 60′
Unerring Direction: Always knows which way is North.

In addition, I also created a raptoran-exclusive feat that allows the glide speed to be swapped out for a flight speed and a +1 bonus to DEX. The earliest that could be acquired by a PC is 4th level, which works for me.

The race may not be perfectly-balanced, but Eteri isn’t overpowered in our group and that’s close enough for me.

So Where Do They Live?

Those racial traits lead pretty naturally into the geography of Eteri’s home city of Maghali Da Bina, otherwise known as Highflats. Maghali Da Bina is kind of an odd, two-part city. The lower city, where most of the businesses and institutions are located and also where most of the gnomes that are the other dominant race in Highflats live, is situated right next to a massive mesa that is itself the residential area for the local raptoran population. On days where the weather is nice (and to a lesser extent, ones where it’s not) you can see groups of raptorans gliding to work. Wealthier and/or older raptoran families actually have homes built into the sides of the mesa with private “launching decks” that they can take off from. Getting back up the mesa at the end of the day is accomplished by a number of gnomish cog trains which run on regular schedules and save the raptorans who can only glide, not actually fly a lot of exertion in getting back home at night.

Culturally, this mix of gnomes and raptorans means that there’s a democratic government (an elected council) and that people tend to be very loyal and family-centric. It also means that between raptoran vigilance and gnomish engineering skill, Highflats is a profoundly safe place to live. Guard rails and warning signs are everywhere, workplace safety rules are looked at as a point of pride, and social safety nets are strong. It doesn’t have the warmth of Laraloch-Thistivuel, but anyone who walks into Highflats is shielded from harm in a myriad of interlocking ways that they probably will never even notice. Highflats is one of the smaller Counties – it’s basically a very nice city-state and several miles of surrounding countryside. Geographically, it’s located to the north of the Yuthi desert on some savanna land that abuts the wide and slow-moving Gebadar River.

It should also be noted that in this setting, much of raptoran language is based on or taken directly from Georgian. Jenny decided on this one partly because it’s not a language or culture commonly drawn upon for games, and also partly because many of the sounds made in the language can be mimicked fairly easily by birds, though raptorans do have mouths and voice boxes similar to humans. “Maghali Da Bina” translates to English as “high and flat,” thus the colloquial name “Highflats.” “Eteri” means “air/ether” in Georgian.
Along similar lines, gnomish linguistic culture is a mixture of Czech and English, generally with Czech first names, and last names composed of English word compounds. Because of these features, one can generally tell with the older businesses in town whether they were started by a raptoran family or a gnomish family.

Morality

Pride/Humility: Accepter (0) – People in Highflats are very proud of their society and what it’s accomplished, but that pride usually manifests itself in a strong desire to keep everything working as it should.
Envy/Kindness: Seeker (+1) – The clannishness of the raptorans factors in somewhat here, but at the same time, the cultural focus on safety and the public good means there’s not a lot of unchecked ambition.
Wrath/Patience: Saint (+2) – Justice is dispassionate and very fair. People tend to lean strongly toward restorative justice and reintegrating people back into the community as productive and whole members of society rather than exacting harsh retribution, and the gnomish influence meas people would often rather engineer a fix to a problem rather than punish someone for its existence.
Sloth/Diligence: Saint (+2) – Society in Highflats is a project with the goal of making society as good as it can be, and everyone is expected to play their part. People work hard, take responsibilities seriously, and look out for the public good at significantly higher rates than the world as a whole.
Greed/Charity: Accepter (0) – People in need are taken care of, but it’s often through bureaucratic channels and people don’t always invest much of themselves into it – there’s a strong mindset of “build a good system and trust it to work” and not a lot of “how can I, personally, do some good today?”
Gluttony/Temperance: Seeker (+1) – The pervasive mentality of civic responsibility makes people cautious about waste and excess, and where it exists, it’s often identified and very efficiently channeled to those who could benefit most from the excess.
Lust/Chastity: Seeker (+1) – The focus on strong family bonds tends to make people be serious about their relationships and valuing of their loves ones. Infidelity occurs at a lower-than-usual rate, general culture tends to avoid using sexual themes in order to turn a profit, and so on.
Overall Virtue Score: +7 (Good)

Personality

Duty/Independence: Exemplar: Duty (+2) – Highflats is all about a productive society. It is interwoven into every aspect of life.
Efficiency/Artistry: Indifferent (0) – Indifferent is the wrong word in this case – both are equally (which is to say highly) valued – doing thing right and efficiently is very important to the residents of Highflats.
Meticulousness/Expediency: Favorer: Meticulousness (+1) – The concern with safety and public good tends to make people double-check their work and look for signs of wear and tear in objects, systems, and one another.
Satisfaction/Excitement: Indifferent (0) – Raptorans tend to be more staid, whereas gnomes tend to be balls of enthusiasm. It balances out in sometimes amusing ways.
Tradition/Progress: Exemplar: Progress (-2) – Highflats is in a constant state of trying to do better. New designs are constantly put forth and evaluated, and ingenuity is especially prized.
Sacrifice/Pragmatism: Exemplar: Pragmatism (-2) – Highflats is a very practical place, and if something isn’t working, it’s usually replaced as soon as something that works better can be found. The one exception there, and it’s an important one, is that people are exempt from this, as they’re the entire point of the venture. The dehumanizing aspects of places like Alchova are entirely absent.
Overall Personality Score: -1 (Neutral)

Points of Interest

The Storied Archive: Home of the Pellicane Scribe order (detailed below), The Storied Archive is a massive, multi-level underground library that’s built into the side of and well underneath the mesa. Its archives stretch back much further than the Pellicane Scribes themselves do thanks to their dedication to preserving stories and lore. Due to the vast knowledge contained within, the entire structure is magically warded against fire and flood, and all light in the windowless sub-levels is magical in nature (magic being more reliable even than electricity). Upper levels contain the academy that trains the scribes and hosts cultural functions for the residents of Highflats. In addition to numerous reading rooms, it contains a number of huge lecture halls and a well-appointed theater.

St. Basdav’s Cathedral: The church dedicated to St. Basdav is also located in Highflats. While Basdav himself didn’t live in the area for most of his life, he did spend several years there learning some of the skills that made him such a legendary engineer. Unlike most structures made by gnomes, it’s actually in the upper city, on top of the mesa. The church itself is a relatively small part of a much larger structure used by St. Basdav’s order; in this case, one of the primary focuses of research is optics. The elevated position of the church makes it ideal for the observatory it contains, and a lot of the Basdavites here are astronomers by trade. New lenses are constantly being ground and tried in the massive telescopes in the structure, and decommissioned lenses are sometimes put to surprisingly innovative uses. One of the most prized (and unique) devices made from a collection of these repurposed lenses is Basdav’s Mercy, a massive magical amplification device that greatly boosts the range and potency of healing spells. There have been a number of incidents in the past where the Basdavites have seen some accident happen over a mile away down in the lower city and have remotely healed the affected parties while more conventional help was on the way.

Geladze Motors: The used car business operated and formerly owned by Eteri’s father, Temur Geladze. He established it as a small car lot on the southern edge of town shortly before marrying Eteri’s mother, Tsisia, and it steadily grew over the years to a medium-sized local business. The logo for Geladze Motors is emblazoned on the backs of many a child’s sports uniform, and the business is known for being involved heavily in the sponsorship of community events. Temur and his associates were known for being very fair in their dealings as well, never cheating anyone on a deal. However, Temur recently sold the business to Golden Valley Automotive, a much larger company known for buying up smaller dealerships in the wider region, slowly removing employee benefits, and turning workplaces to toxicity and corruption. It isn’t entirely clear to anyone why Temur made the decision to sell, or if it was entirely his decision at all, but this is what caused Eteri to cut ties with her family, especially her father.

Local People and Organizations of Note

Pellicane Scribes: A long time ago, the area that’s now Highflats wasn’t nearly as good of a place to live. In fact, it was well on its way to becoming a Grim City. That all changed with the arrival of a human bard named Ryan Pellicane. Pellicane was a singularly gifted orator and storyteller, and he also had no time for the corrupt and oppressive nobility that was slowly grinding down the local populace. Almost single-handedly, through the sharing of heroic stories and tales of life in other parts of the world that were nowhere near as bleak, he fomented a revolution that toppled the oppressive nobility, which set in in motion a series of events that culminated in him facing a malevolent force called The Beast of Sorrow that had been manipulating a number of the nobles from the shadows. Sadly, the confrontation ultimately cost him his life, but in his death, he sent forth countless others who would finish what he had started.

The heartbroken populace, already resisting their oppressors in small ways thanks to Pellicane’s influence, rose up and threw off their shackles, slew The Beast of Sorrow, and in the memory of Pellicane, created an order of scribes to carry on his legacy. The monument to Pellicane stands in front of a large stone building (known as The Storied Archive) which houses a massive library where the scribes are trained, and once they are, they travel out into the world to undermine oppression and cruelty wherever it can be found. Pellicane Scribes are normally Bards (College of Lore), but members of the order have also worked directly with the Order of St. Azar, particularly in building schools and preserving the oral traditions of smaller societies in remote areas. Non-bard Pellicane Scribes will always have the Sage background – their training makes them into some of the best researchers in the world. Pellicane Scribes, like the one they’re named after, believe strongly in the power of stories both real and fictional to inspire and create positive change, so new stories are periodically returned to The Storied Archive and from there disseminated to other Pellicane facilities.

A few of the scribes are also stationed at The Palace of the Seers in the Yuthi desert and they may be found in blue, white, or tan robes there. Pellicane scribes can be told apart from the rank-and-file by purple bands on the cuffs, collars, and hems of their robes, or by a purple sash. In addition, they maintain a number of smaller libraries and archives around the world, storing multiple copies of their findings so that nothing will be lost. The symbol of their order is a scroll with a compass where a seal would normally be. Though Pellicane himself was a human, the order is popular with raptorans, who have a strong oral tradition of family history themselves. The Storied Archive has a number of raptorans walking its halls at any given time.

The Maghali Da Bina Safety Engineers Association: A prestigious organization of safety engineers, the MSEA has created seat belts, parachutes, documentation of hazardous substances, spillproof containers, and thousands of other inventions that have saved lives both in Highflats and beyond. Their facility is a large complex in the lower city and they combine mundane and magical protections – a number of new specialized warding techniques (including those that protect The Storied Archive) have been developed by the MSEA’s tireless group of thinkers.

Bedisa Sudilaze: The oldest and most well-respected member of Highflats’s governing council is a sharp-eyed raptoran matriarch whose advanced years have dulled neither her keen mind nor her aerobatic prowess. She flies to and from work in all but the harshest weather and trains younger raptorans in aerial survival. She and her family are deeply plugged into the civics of Highflats, and can be found in all levels of government from teaching to infrastructure repair.

Finally Off the Starting Line

Because all of my players liked the Yuthi desert so much, the game has started there, specifically in a small desert town named Lostant. The game started with the PCs arriving in Lostant around 7:30 pm, with gas tanks running low and the temperature dropping as it does in the desert.

Lostant is not a big community – it’s about 3500 people or so, and it’s basically just a wide spot on a highway that runs through the Yuthi. It has a number of small businesses, but most weren’t open by the time they got into town. They passed a small newspaper, an auto garage, and a few other places on their way into town and finally came to the one open gas station which was manned by a tired and bored young half-orc who was busy with some homework and only paid half attention to them as they filled their gas tanks, then moved on to the local diner to get a meal.

Their meal went smoothly enough right up until their server was headed to the table with their checks.

At that point, a man (quickly revealed to be the server’s fiance, a typesetter and printing tech for the local newspaper they’d passed on the way into town) stumbled in, wounded and bleeding profusely. The server, predictably, freaked out.

The PCs, being PCs, reacted almost instantly and implemented some quick healing magic. As they were treating him, they took note of the number of shallow, straight, and incredibly clean cuts on the poor guy, shouted for the cook to call the doctor (which he did, immediately) and headed out to the building the local newspaper to find out what had done so much damage to this guy.

Nasty Paper Cut

Aftermath

With a wounded Kristoff (the newspaper owner) in tow, the PCs returned to town and went to the office of the town doctor, Dr. Cassandra “Cassie” Larkin. Krissi’s character is a paladin, so she noticed something unusual on the wall of the office: a White Rose Sword, the badge of office and favored weapon of the Order of St. Argan. Dr. Larkin was a little vague about her past with the order, but she revealed that she’d left on good terms and simply considered herself to be more of a healer than a warrior. She also revealed herself to be a considerate person and a thoughtful one, helping the PCs out with a bit of extra medical care and updating them on Bradley’s condition (stable).

While the PCs were there, she also mentioned she was treating two of the three deputies of the local sheriff who had been mauled in a recent manticore attack. By that point, it was getting on close to midnight and the PCs retired to a local hotel she recommended. Thanks to a note she sent, they received a discount on their lodging, and all four PCs turned in to sleep off the fight of the previous day.

Other Notes

Though the session was successful overall, I will admit to having struggled with Roll20 a bit, as this was my first time using it from the GM side of the screen. Also, as the ranger is kind of a sniper build, I need to be cognizant of the battlespace and give him some opportunities to pull back and snipe things. I described his sniper rifle as having been almost defeningly loud in the close confines of the printing room.

The players did find a bunch of useful features in Roll20 that we haven’t been using in Grant’s game and put them to use, though, so that was definitely cool. Hopefully, next session will go a little smoother, logistically-speaking.

It does feel good to be back in the GM saddle as well. Everyone seemed to have fun and the PCs have become involved in the goings-on in Lostant, so I’m going to call this first session a success.

Warming Up the Engines

After about six months of poking at this world (which I still haven’t named – shame on me) I’ve decided to try running a game set in it. Fortunately, assembling my PC group wasn’t all that difficult. I have the members of the group I’m in on Saturdays with Grant (Grant, his wife Krissi, and our player who likes to stay anonymous online) and added Jenny, which is cool because I haven’t gotten to game with her much. Once that was assembled, we sat down to discuss underlying assumptions, lines and veils, the flavor of story we wanted, and so on. The results turned out a bit differently than I’d expected, but I still think the resulting game is going to be fantastic.

Even Better Than What I was Expecting

As anyone who has been following the series has probably noticed, the setting is split pretty dramatically between Good and Evil, and I had originally expected some fairly black-and-white PCs with a lot of motivation to go find the nearest Grim City and start taking it apart, either from within or without. That is, at least so far, the implied default story arc of the setting. What I got instead (and should have expected, given the quality of the players I recruited) was a party full of much more complex and interesting PCs. Speaking of those PCs, meet them!

• Traven Chandler: Our anonymous player actually got the ball rolling by creating a character from a large family that’s associated with The Church and is very plugged into the “kindness and charity” side of things, but has a hard time with that himself. He’s still very motivated to fight the darkness of the world, but he wants to actually fight it. You know, with violence. He also decided to make this PC something of an “undercover good guy” with a fearsome, criminal reputation and a refusal to work for free … because he pays what he gets forward into his next effort to fight against evil. His huge family is in on the ruse and will cover for him, but doesn’t buy the fearsome rep. He’s a human ranger with the monster hunter archetype.
• Hala: Grant made a wood elf monk with the way of shadows archetype who has spent most of her adult life working as a breaking and entering specialist for organized crime and has come to the decision that she’d like out. Because of long elven lifespans, she likely has several decades’ worth of criminal connections and entanglements.
• Kallista Cimeries: Krissi chose a tiefling paladin who is a sober drug addict and an ex-soldier of one of the Grim Cities. Her PC is trying to earn forgiveness and atone for her past through good deeds and helping those who need it, but her former employer probably won’t just let her go. We haven’t figured out exactly what she’s addicted to or how long she’s been sober, but it’s definitely been a struggle for her character.
• Eteri: Jenny will be playing a raptoran bard who left home in a rage after her father sold the family business (a used car lot) to an unscrupulous large company. She still maintains contact with her brother, but there’s a pretty serious estrangement there with her parents. And due to the technological limits of the world, it may be some time before she gets a chance to start working on that estrangement.

In addition, during the back-and-forth leading up to the “session zero” planning discussion, a bunch of talk of motorcycles lead me to suggest that perhaps a four-person motorcycle gang would make an interesting group template, something the players all latched onto pretty quickly. In fact, they’ve all got specific motorcycles picked out already, which is a really cool bit of visual detail. They also were unanimous in their interest in the Yuthi desert region.

Homework Assignments

Because all four players gave me such interesting PCs, all of whom have some interesting hooks in their pasts, I’ve asked all four players for three NPCs with names and relationships to their PC by the time we have our second session on May 9th.I’m also having them work up their PCs using the virtue-based alignment system I created back at the very beginning of this.

The Starting Line

For the first session, I had to stretch myself a bit. I was initially expecting the PCs to start in a town in Laraloch-Thistivuel, and do things to fight against the influence of Alchova or maybe even try to find a way to bring down its fiendish overlords.

It appears my players gave me more credit than I was giving myself, because instead of some traditional heroic archetypes with combat stats, I got four very interesting characters with flaws and (in a couple of cases) some pretty deep wounds from their respective pasts. I was surprised, delighted, and a bit honored to have been handed so much dramatic material without even asking for it, really – and the homework I assigned was out of a desire to do justice to these amazing characters. (I did joke about feeling like the whole party needed a hug, though.)

Based on the player group’s wishes, I wound up creating a small desert town for them to start in. I would love to go into some detail about this town, but I can’t, because at least half of my players read this blog and it would spoil some story stuff I want to reveal. Suffice it to say for now that the town (Lostant) has a bunch of people with interlocking lives and various things that will create adventure, drama, or both. More importantly, it’s located in the larger region the PCs were most excited about.

I cannot wait to see what my four wandering troubleshooters on motorcycles are going to do to change this place. I suspect some of the locals will be very surprised by what happens.

As always, I am interested in any feedback or questions you have! I’ll probably be posting play reports once we actually get started.

A couple of notes: This post supersedes a couple of previous posts in the series. In particular, this covers the salvific events of the campaign world and its messianic figures, and it also removes Oath of Vengeance as an option for PC paladins. I tend to interpret Oath of Vengeance as Frank “The Punisher” Castle by way of Anton Chigurh (from No Country For Old Men), and it’s just too vicious and brutal to make sense as something The Church would train or endorse. This post also changes the list of cleric domains available slightly.

I also tried to come up with something that had a Christian “feel,” with messianic figures, obvious divine concern for the lowly and rejected, and a Pentecost analog, but that also wasn’t a direct analogy or re-skinning. I am not C.S. Lewis and I recognize my limits. Hopefully I did okay.

-Peter

Grace and Mercy to The Needy

As mentioned earlier in this series, the cleric and paladin classes are ancient, but not as old as some of the other classes in the world, dating back about 6500 years. The Church itself is much older still, going back tens of thousands. So where did the clerics and paladins come from?

For millennia after The Fall of The Adversary, he and his minions waged war upon creation, attacking the faithful in body and soul. Fiends and their minions sought to corrupt or, failing that, simply murder anyone loyal to God, and that conflict raged for a long time. People fought valiantly, but casualties were high and several thousand years ago, God sent a pair of twins to live among the mortals, fulfilling thousands of years of prophecy and tipping the balance of the cosmic struggle in dramatic fashion. The children of a tiefling prostitute and a half-orc thief, they were also the first aasimar, and the first to be redeemed by their ministry were their own parents.

Grace was a teacher, and she spoke of God’s love and willingness to forgive. She stressed the importance of knowledge and wisdom, and spoke of the ultimate justice and fairness of God. Mercy was a protector and a healer. He stood against violence against the innocent and stressed the value of charity and redemption through word and deed. Both were deeply compassionate and spent a lot of their ministry healing the wounded, the sick, and the afflicted. In the end, both were captured and burned at the stake, betrayed by a community of the faithful who had believed them to be false prophets. About a week after their execution, both were observed standing on the pile of ashes that had been the site of their deaths. They pronounced forgiveness and love upon those that had slain them, embracing their executioners, and those same executioners who had lit the blaze fell to their knees in repentance, becoming the first two clerics.

About a week later, across the realm, holy power settled upon those who had followed Grace and Mercy, and as the years passed, more specialized forms of divine magic appeared as saints and martyrs sought to follow God in their own specialized ways. Paladins arose out of a tradition of clerics also trained as soldiers to protect churches and communities from monsters of all kinds. Now, several thousand years on, there are a number of holy orders within the church, each with their own areas of specialization.

Below is a list of the various groups that make up The Church and the class archetypes associated with each.

The Mother Church

Cleric Domains: Life, Light, Knowledge
Paladin Oaths: Devotion, Redemption

Symbol: Lit torch with a crossguard like that of a sword directly beneath the burning head, the head surrounded by a halo of light.

The Mother Church is the main body of the Church and is devoted to no particular saint. These are the clerics, priests, and laity you will find doing the lion’s share of good works in most of the world. They operate local churches, perform weddings and funerals, teach up others in God’s ways and generally try to do as much good as possible. Most of the people who serve the Mother Church (or just The Church) don’t have any magical abilities at all, but the ones that do are are very “standard” holy types – healers and scholars devoted to the protection, redemption, and growth of all those around them. Vestments are very similar to modern Christian clerical garb – the black shirt, white collar seen on priests and pastors in our world is the normal identifier of ordained persons.

The Militant Order of St. Kylah the Vigilant

Cleric Domains: Tempest, War, Retribution (Compendium of Sacred Mysteries)
Paladin Oaths: Devotion, Resolve (Gunpowder Codex), Thunder (Midgard Heroes’ Handbook)
Rogue Archetype: Divine Herald (Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else)

Symbol: A sword, point-down with a stylized lightning bolt behind it.
Singular and plural nomenclature: Kylan, Kylans

St. Kylah was a literal fiend hunter, and her order seeks to emulate her example, going out into the world to fight the forces of The Adversary on their own turf. They are the most militant of the holy orders and are therefore watched the closest by The Church, but to their credit, this also means they watch themselves closely. Their goal is the safety of the innocent and the redeemable, not the extermination of any trace of evil from the world by violent means, which makes them very practical and far less accusatory and xenophobic than a lot of stereotypical fantasy crusaders. If a threat can be neutralized without violence, so much the better. They concern themselves mostly with aberrations, fiends, and the occasional dragon, but will fight others who threaten innocent lives. If violence is necessary, they are very, very good at it. Kylah herself was a dwarf, and the order is popular among dwarves, who, thanks to strong clan ties, find its protective aspect to be very appealing.

The Monastic Order of St. Lessara the Steward

Cleric Domains: Nature, Life, Ocean (Midgard Heroes’ Handbook)
Paladin Oaths: Ancients, Redemption

Symbol: A tree with a halo of light shining from behind its branches.
Singular and plural nomenclature: Lessaran, Lessarans

St. Lessara was an elven cleric who saw the beauty of God expressed in the natural world and sought to teach others to preserve that beauty and live in harmony with it. The order maintains a number of monasteries in areas of pristine natural beauty where its clerics and paladins learn their respective trades, but they are most often seen in civilized areas where they work hand-in-hand with local authorities to promote the responsible use of natural resources and work against damage to the environment. They enjoy good relations with benevolent fey and druidic orders as a sort of general rule and will happily work with them to preserve Creation from those who would despoil it. They strongly prefer nonviolent solutions to conflict but can be surprisingly dangerous if pressed.

The Solemn Order of St. Argan the Reverent

Cleric Domains: Life, Light, Grave (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything)
Paladin Oaths: Devotion, Grave (Dark Arts Player’s Companion), Radiance (Midgard Heroes’ Handbook)

Symbol: A white rose with a black stem.
Singular and plural nomenclature: Arganite, Arganites

St. Argan was an early human cleric and one of the first to confront the scourge of the undead that arose out of The Adversary’s attempts to counterfeit the resurrection magic of God’s clerics. They perform funeral rites, keep undead at bay, and maintain catacombs and cemeteries for the faithful. Their zealous hatred of all undead as depicted in the source material is tempered somewhat by the knowledge that even the unliving can sometimes be redeemed, but they typically will not bet that way. Argan’s teachings deal heavily with concerns of mortality and death, and Arganites are encouraged to make the most of this life so that when they die, it can be with few regrets. They discourage, but do not forbid, the use of resurrection magic, believing the dead should rest.

The Holy Order of St. Azar the Learned

Cleric Domains: Knowledge, Arcana, Fate (Compendium of Sacred Mysteries)
Arcane Tradition: Theurgy (Unearthed Arcana) – note that Theurgists may choose from the domains offered by The Mother Church as well as the order of St. Azar.

Symbol: An open book with a simple black-and white line art symbol of The Mother Church across its pages.
Singular and plural nomenclature: Azarian, Azarians

St. Azar was a centaur wizard of singular skill and devotion. He desired to see the hand of God in the workings of magic and through the study of creation, particularly history and astronomy, and also sought to understand God’s will as revealed in prophecy. His order maintains libraries and wizard schools and a number can be found in the Palace of the Seers. Unlike a lot of the other holy orders, they do not maintain separate facilities, working instead out of church archives and traveling the world in search of more knowledge. They also operate public libraries and teach at universities, seeing the spread of knowledge as holy and good in its own right.

The Benevolent Order of St. Iri the Subtle

Cleric Domain: Trickery, Love (Compendium of Sacred Mysteries)
Paladin Oath: Redemption
Rogue Archetype: Divine Herald (Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else)

Symbol: A white key on a black field
Singular and plural nomenclature: Irian, Irians

St. Iri was a poor tiefling orphan who eventually became a cleric. She had a hard early life and never forgot it, spending much of her time as a cleric ministering to the poor and outcast. Dedicated to reaching those most in need or, but often least receptive to, God’s message, Irians operate orphanages and soup kitchens, infiltrate criminal gangs, and set up shop in poor neighborhoods. They are unconcerned with appearances and normally don’t even wear clerical garb, preferring instead to dress in a manner that helps them fit in with those they are serving. They also do significant covert work against the slaving efforts of various Grim Cities. Humble and dedicated, they draw many of their number from the ranks of those they once served.

The Compassionate Order of St. Gertiana the Hopeful

Cleric Domains: Peace, Life, Love (Compendium of Sacred Mysteries)

Symbol: A roll of bandages with a sprig of blightbane (a powerful healing herb) laid across it
Singular and plural nomenclature: Gertianan, Gertianans

St. Gertiana was a singularly kind and gentle half-orc who worked as a nurse and midwife in the pre-clerical era and became one of the first clerics. She was renowned for her compassion and her willingness to heal anyone, even those who had wronged her and her loved ones. Unlike most of the other orders, Gertians do not maintain entire separate facilities, instead serving in clinics and hospitals almost exclusively. Members of the order also train extensively in non-magical medicine and crisis de-escalation, and most are pacifists. Even those who aren’t are extremely non-violent people. The order also trains special triage nurses who can evaluate what can be treated with normal medicine and what needs the magical touch of a cleric, and they can be found in medical schools all over the world.

The Inspired Order of St. Basdav the Prodigy

Cleric Domains: Forge, Desert (Compendium of Sacred Mysteries), Dust (Gunpowder Codex),  Clockwork (Midgard Heroes’ Handbook)
Paladin Oaths: Resolve (Gunpowder Codex)

Symbol: A smithing hammer over a large gear.
Singular and plural nomenclature: Basdavite, Basdavites

St. Badav was a desert-dwelling gnome member of the order of St. Azar and a brilliant engineer. He is credited with the construction of a series of canals and aqueducts that brought water to a number of desert communities, but that sort of civil engineering was far from his only area of interest. He created constructs, impressive clockwork machines that told time accurately, operated bridges, and even the prototypes for the first engines during his life. One of the newest of the holy orders, his order believes in bettering the lot of people through the responsible use of technology and engineering, particularly those in harsh environments. There is also a fierce, martial aspect to them. Basdav himself was an excellent marksman and used that talent to defend the communities he provided water to from a variety of vicious desert monsters. They maintain monasteries in desert locations that are one part typical monastery and three parts R&D lab.

The Equitable Order of St. Onaria the Just

Cleric Domains: Knowledge, Justice (Midgard Heroes’s Handbook), Order (Unearthed Arcana)
Paladin Oaths: Devotion
Rogue Archetypes: Divine Herald (Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else)

Symbol: White scales against the black silhouette of a raven in flight
Singular and plural nomenclature: Onarian, Onarians

St. Onaria was a kenku cleric known for her wisdom, fairness, and sense of justice in life. Her order functions as the ecclisiarchal police force and court system of The Church, and they hold The Church to a high standard. They maintain the law libraries of church conduct, investigate charges of corruption or abuse among clergy, and mediate disputes among aggrieved parties. They police themselves even more vigilantly than the rest of the church and enjoy a strong reputation for being wise, incorruptable, and fair. Their model of justice is restorative rather than punitive, but they will not hesitate to defrock a priest or cleric abusing their power or parishoners, and clergy accused of crimes in areas that are not ruled by malevolent forces will be turned over to civil authorities after an ecclesiarchal investigation. They have no patience for cruel or unjust laws, however, and will not lift a finger to preserve the safety or property of a Grim City’s ruling class.

Conclusion

That’s it for this one. I may have some play reports from this setting soon – I’ve managed to put together a game. Our first session is coming up soon. As always I welcome any thoughts or feedback you might have.

A quick cautionary note: this is a dark post in terms of its content. I’ve tried to keep it from being needlessly gratuitous, but Alchova is a bad place, -Peter

A Brutal, Stinging Prison

Alchova is not a nice place. In the terms of the setting, it is a Grim City, which means it is civilized, but Evil has taken over. In much the same way that bad things occasionally happen in The Counties, there’s the occasional good event or person here, but that is definitely the exception and not the rule. The insectoid, fiendish overlords of the city do everything they can to remind the residents that they have no rights and are worth keeping alive only as long as they produce. Alchova gets its name from Lathryn Chova, the founder of the city and one of its former Grim Lords. Lathryn was a human architect, and she had a grand vision for a modern city full of towering skyscrapers and wide streets where millions could live and work. A vision that would bring her fame and glory. Partway through achieving this vision, however, resources began to get scarce, and Lathryn made a deal with a mysterious figure who promised all the labor she could want to finish her project, free of charge. Of course, there were some riders on that deal…

The figure that Lathryn made her bargain with was Hivisith, the Hive Lord, a powerful and ancient fiend from the original Fall. True to his word, he provided all the labor and resources Lathryn could want, mostly in the form of waspfolk, and soon her glorious city was built. The finished city was a grand, regal place, with numerous towering art deco skyscrapers, sprawling parks filled with ponds and tall grasses, massive, cloverleaf highway networks and huge industrial complexes. And that was when Hivisith called in his side of the bargain. Telling Lathryn that her city needed to accommodate those who had built it, he set the waspfolk loose on the new city to do as they wished to make it comfortable for themselves. The waspfolk and their fiendish masters descended upon the city.

That was about sixty years ago. Alchova’s massive skyscrapers remain, but the skyline is marred by thousands of massive hives stuck to the sides of its buildings. Its beautiful parks have been transformed into swampy breeding pools for countless swarming insects. And its non-insect residents have become miserable slaves, brutally worked to exhaustion and pitilessly disposed of if they fall behind. Lathryn herself survived for about 30 years after the city was handed over to the fiends, but she ultimately tried to usurp Hivisith and was slain for her trouble, her body becoming one of the first Useful.

Morality

Pride/Humility: Indulger (-1) – Certainly there was significant Pride in the founding of Alchova, but it’s not the dominant vice here.
Envy/Kindness: Indulger (-1) – The hierarchy in Alchova is strict, but cutthroat. Power grabs are common.
Wrath/Patience: Monster (-2) – Alchova is a brutal, sadistic place and life isn’t just cheap, it’s nigh unto worthless. People are executed for things that wouldn’t merit a stern look in other civilizations.
Sloth/Diligence: Monster (-2) – The enslaved population is worked literally to death on a regular basis, but the ruling class barely lifts a finger.
Greed/Charity: Monster (-2) – If you need basically anything at all in Alchova and aren’t a member of the ruling class, you can expect the need to be “fulfilled” with your death.
Gluttony/Temperance: Monster (-2) – The ruling class revels in the despair created by shoving their opulent lifestyle in the face of their enslaved populace.
Lust/Chastity: Accepter (0) – There are a few Succubi/Incubi in the ranks of the fiendish elite of Alchova, but the populace is kept in check with horrific violence, deliberate privation and terror rather than seduction and guile.
Overall Virtue Score: -10 (evil) – Even by the standards of Grim Cities in general, Alchova is a bad place.

Personality:

Duty/Independence: Exemplar: Duty (+2) – Nobody has any inherent worth beyond what they can provide. In Alchova, if you can’t do what is expected of you, you die.
Efficiency/Artistry: Favorer: Efficiency (+1) – While you might at first glance think Alchova would be an area of incredible efficiency, the ruling class would rather cause misery and death over inefficiency than actually make things more efficient. Random executions and intentionally-disproportionate punishments for tiny infractions chew up a lot of good workers, a price the fiendish overlords are happy to pay by sending slavers into the surrounding areas to boost their worker population.
Meticulousness/Expediency: Exemplar: Meticulousness (+2) – Alchova is a finely-honed engine of oppression, suffering, cruelty, and despair.
Satisfaction/Excitement: Indifferent (0) – Nobody will ever experience either in Alchova if the leadership has their way, unless you consider terror to be excitement.
Sacrifice/Pragmatism: Exemplar: Pragmatism (-2) – Alchova is willing to do whatever it has to in the pursuit of making things horrible for its populace and opulent for its rulers and is very flexible about means. It also demands nothing be given up by its ruling class.
Overall Personality Score: +3 (Neutral) – Again, you’d think a city that’s overlapped with a fiendish hive would be a very orderly place, but oppression is more of a goal than structure. There is a slight favoring of order over chaos, but it’s less than one might expect.

Vile Territory

Alchova would be a magnificent city if not for all the insects, fiends, and half-starved, despairing people milling about. The buildings where the ruling class reside are kept in immaculate shape and are impressive edifices of brick, stone, steel, and glass. Rooftop spires are common. The former park areas are swampy and full of stagnant ponds full of filthy, insect-infested water. Roadways are functional and well-maintained, and usually filled with traffic day and night as the industry of Alchova pours luxury into its ruling class, suffering onto its populace, and raiding parties onto its neighbors. The exterior of the city center itself is surrounded by a high wall full of gun emplacements.

Alchova does allow certain companies that aren’t of its own origin to operate facilities within its borders, and these buildings are scattered around the areas closest to the wall and those districts could almost be mistaken for a normal city, if one with incredible amounts of security. The closer you get to the city center, however, the more horrible it gets.

Fresh water is drawn from the Salac river that flows through the center of the city. The water is relatively clean, if for no reason than the ruling class knows that rampant cholera would spoil its malicious fun. Food is bland and/or disgusting. The populace subsists mostly on insect protein and hardtack until you get into the upper echelons of society where exotic foods from all over the world are found on tables.

An Ancient Hatred

If there’s one thing that will get you killed quickly in a panic by Alchovan authorities, it’s anything to do with spiders. Spiders are the ancient enemy of insects, spinning webs to entrap them and feeding on their essence and also have a lengthy history as elven iconography used for a particular militant group that actively supports the resistance and fights Alchovan forces wherever they venture out of the city’s borders. Spiders and spider-like monsters are killed immediately with maximum surety whenever they’re found, and the local resistance has adopted a spider’s web as their calling card.

Notable Organizations

The Hive Patrol: The much-feared security forces of Alchova are made up of Waspfolk and Tieflings who keep the population cowed and in line through whatever means they see fit. Waspfolk warriors wear a special magical bracer that contains a suturefly (see Tome of Beasts by Kobold press for information) and carry rifles, using their flight to maximum effect. The Tieflings patrol on foot and typically wear heavy armor and carry shotguns and heavy melee weapons, engaging targets at close range. Most are fighters or rangers, but warlocks (fiend patron) or evil clerics (Order domain from Unearthed Arcana or Punishment domain from Compendium of Sacred Mysteries) are sometimes seen among their ranks as magical support. If they’re expecting an unusual amount of trouble, they may be backed up by giant insects and/or fiends of one type or another.

The Crimson Avengers: A cult that purports to be part of The Church, it is actually run by “angels” who are in fact erinyes devils. They train up brutal paladins of vengeance and conquest and use them as vicious elite enforcers and shock troops in external operations or to fight the resistance. The Crimson Avengers typically ride around in gray-and-red cars with high performance engines and some degree of mounted weaponry. They will often attempt to punish the original communities of misbehaving slaves, and will hunt down fugitives in The Wilds and The Counties. They are not unique to Alchova, but a lot of them reside there.

The Useful: Executed criminals with mostly-intact bodies (in other words, ones not fed to monsters) are turned into The Useful, a specialized type of mummy with a hollowed-out torso that’s been replaced with an insect hive, normally some sort of vicious, stinging wasp. They are used for additional security and certain key construction tasks, and may be found in the company of Hive Patrol units or Crimson Avengers.

The Resistance: Unsurprisingly, a horrible place that maintains its worker base through slaving has spawned a number of resistance movements, and their resistance enjoys a fair amount of outside support. On a number of occasions, entire shipments of “slaves” have been trained covert operatives, spellcasters and others who can blend into the normal population and cause problems. Despite this, they haven’t gained much popular support because the authorities generally retaliate to the tune of 20x their own losses and spread about half of that punishment out over the city as a whole rather than in just the area where the act of resistance occurred. This distributed punishment tends to make any “troublemakers” very unpopular. This means that a lot of resistance activity in recent years has been much more subtle. Rather than assassinating leadership and engaging in sabotage, resistance cells smuggle in food and medical supplies and smuggle out people being hunted by the authorities, documents showing the state of affairs, and the occasional defector from the Hive Patrol, Crimson Avengers, or Useful. This is often done through shipping resources belonging to the neutral companies that do business with the ruling class, but more straightforward escapes have happened as well.

Bug Eat Bug, Fiend Eat Fiend

As one would expect from a city ruled by evil insect monsters and actual fiends, the upper echelons of Alchovan society are basically a roiling mass of betrayal, one-upmanship, and power plays. Professional assassins make an excellent living, provided they are very good at their job, and those who can provide luxury of some type are also valued, if looked at as especially useful tools. The constant power jockeying occasionally gives the resistance some room to maneuver, but oftentimes the upper class will take its frustrations out on the lower classes regardless of whether they had anything to do with it. Innocence and non-involvement are no protection in Alchova.

Conclusion

That’s it for this set of areas. The next post will deal with The Church (I need a palette cleanser after writing this, frankly) and then from there I’ll probably move onto another batch of areas or maybe some organizations. As always, I welcome any feedback you might have.

As always, the full series is available here.

Untamed and Sun-Baked

The Yuthi desert is an area of The Wilds in terms of my three broad categories of place for the setting. As one might expect from a desert, it is hot, dry, and sunny, but it is also beautiful and surprisingly full of life despite its harshness. It’s closer to the Four Corners region of the American southwest than the Sahara in terms of terrain – arid, but more rocky and mountainous than just endless sand dunes. For reference, see the picture at the top of the post for reference – it’s a very close representation of what the place looks like. There’s quite a bit more to the Yuthi than just stark natural beauty, though.

The Desert Doesn’t Pick Sides

As with most areas of The Wilds, the Yuthi is unaligned. Nature is very much in charge here, and while there are good and evil beings in the region, there’s not enough organized society for there to be any sort of regional alignment or even personality that represents the region as a whole. Nature is impartial. It is, however, often quite beautiful. In addition to the magnificent, sandswept rock formations, some of the local fauna is breathtaking. In particular is a plant the locals call “fire carpet.” A hardy, low-to-the-ground flowering plant, it gets its name from its dense growing pattern and striking bio-luminescent flowers. Fire carpet can be found in a number of shades of red, yellow, orange, and pink, and they tend to blend together, giving the effect of sheets of flame, especially at night and at a distance.

Getting By

Like most deserts, the Yuthi is sparse, but not entirely devoid of life. In addition to normal wildlife like you’d find in a desert, such as owls, foxes, and lizards, one can also find a number of desert-dwelling monsters here, but you can also find a number of sapient races. A large Orc Tribe, the Dry Tusks, lives here in the Yuthi and are the largest and most powerful group in the region. They are nomadic, living in tents and traveling via beast of burden. Fuel is rare this far from civilization, so while the clan could theoretically use vehicles, it would be very impractical to do so. They subsist on desert vegetation and wildlife – on the vegetation side, there are a number of succulents that are edible, including a form of scrub grass that’s digestible to humanoids. The Yuthi has a couple of major rivers running through it, and a spring oasis here and there, so while rain isn’t plentiful, water can be found if one knows where to look.

Notable Locations

The Yuthi is vast, but it contains a lot within its borders.

Klaridian Empire Ruins: The Klaridian empire flourished millennia ago, but ultimately fell due to a series of civil wars and internal collapse. The remains of its great city-states still dot the landscape far from the trade roads that wind through the Yuthi. There’s still a significant amount of treasure to be had in the ruins, but it’s very hazardous to get at. The ruins are guarded by ancient Klaridian mummy warriors, an aggressive tribe of naga called the White Skulls, a family of territorial dragons, and the desert itself. Interestingly, it’s possible that those in significant need could make a deal with the Klaridian guardians – they aren’t so much intent on keeping everything where it is as they are intent on keeping things from being defiled through misuse and simple monetary gain. A group of heroes that approach the guardians in humility and good faith might find some allies in the ancient mummies. The naga are paranoid and concerned with the wellfare of their tribe, but aren’t evil, per se. They also might be reasonable. The dragons, on the other hand are typical blue dragons – arrogant, cruel, territorial, and violent. And they are also a mated pair. They share a personal fighting force of blue dragonborn and several wyrmlings they have sired together.

The Palace of the Seers: Atop a huge natural stone arch that just out from a gracefully-sloping stone mesa sits the Palace of the Seers. The palace contains three complimentary groups. Oracles are high-ranking diviners who try too learn as much as possible about the past, the future, and the world as it actually is through magical means. They wear white robes and a colored stole to indicate their rank. A black stole is an acolyte, one of the “apprentices,” but the seers have steep entry requirements, and even these low-ranking wizards are more than mere novices (about level 5). A gray stole indicates a seer, a full member of the ranks. They are typically about level 9. A white stole is a master seer, usually about level 13. There are only four who wear a gold stole, but they are powerful archmages (level 17 or higher) and incredibly wise and learned. They are simply called “wearers of gold.” The seers are aided by blue-robed scribes, who record findings, help to interpret prophetic visions, and handle day-to-day administration. A third group, in tan robes are known as the “Needles of Fate” and are trained as assassins, though they seldom act in that role. Instead they function as a security force and as messengers and couriers for the palace. Their high level of training and its nature speak to the importance of the palace’s mission.

The Giant’s Hall: So named for the regularity of several huge stone pillars shaped by erosion, the Giant’s Hall is the home of the Dry Tusks. The orcs have built an amazingly-organized and sophisticated semi-temporary city here. Most of the dwellings are yurts, but there are a few permanent structures that are used for about 75% of the year. The hall has easy access to the Ornag river, which, while hazardous due to its rocky riverbed and fast current is very clean and clear. The Dry Tusks have taken to cultivating fire carpet as a decorative plant and a functional one, and paths through the settlement are clearly marked even at night by softly-glowing lines of the pretty desert flowers. The orcs trade with the naga and dragonborn in the Klaridian ruins and the Palace of the Seers (very occasionally) and mostly keep to themselves otherwise. They are a very tight-knit, family-oriented society and want little more than to live in peace, but they can be fearsomely violent if attacked or taken advantage of.

Notable Individuals

Zalithragus and Voraxicalima: Known collectively as the “Dragon Tyrants of Klaridia,” the mated pair of blue dragons and their spawn jealously guard the vast expanse that used to be Vundorium, the capital city of the Klaridian Empire. Zalithragus lairs in the north, where he sends patrols of his dragonborn warriors to fight the naga and tomb guardians for magical knowledge and artifacts. Voraxicalima lairs in the south and relies more on her newly-hatched offspring, whom she mostly uses as a border patrol around the territory the pair has claimed. Zalithragus considers himself to be a consummate military leader and tactician (and has some credibility in this claim) and Voraxicalima considers herself to be more of a ruler and administrator and also a scholar and has been researching the means to become a dracolich in death. They are, despite their evil nature, very fond of one another and openly affectionate when together.

The Leaders of the Dry Tusks: The chieftan of the Dry Tusk tribe is known as Horag The Old Fox by his people and is approaching his seventieth year. Due to the shortness of the orc lifespan, he is hunched and frail, but he is also wise, if given to anger. His eldest daughter Ranya Who Sees the Invisible, the next in line, has actually spent time with the Palace of the Seers as an acolyte and earned her gray stole before returning home. She is far more patient than her father, but colder and more distant, perhaps as a consequence of her time with the seers. She is short and slight for an orc but carries herself with a confidence that makes her seem much larger. The tribe’s shamanic caste is led by a middle-aged orc named Draga Calls-the-Eagle. He is very frank and transparent about what he does and how it works, entirely eschewing the air of mystery tribal spiritual leaders often cloak themselves in. The hunters are led by Vonaya The Swift Arrow, a large, unpleasant-looking female orc. Despite her appearance, she is kind, boisterous, and effusively-welcoming while in town. She loves to greet visitors herself, loves to swap news of other places even more, and is usually quite generous with her hospitality. This belies her stealth and martial skill when “on duty” and while she is welcoming, she is also constantly on guard. Visitors with ill intent will seldom realize she is onto them before it’s too late.

The Leaders of the White Skulls: The naga are led by a mysterious leader known only as “The Pale One” who goes cloaked and only appears at night. The Pale One is an albino and is therefore very sensitive to sunlight and is also a Shadow Sorcerer. It is fair to its people, but intensely distrustful of outsiders, and will greet visitors frostily if it greets them peacefully at all. It is attended by a group of powerful naga warriors that call themselves The Strong Coils. This group in turn is lead by Ssassivoth, an imposing male naga with beautiful blue-green scales. Ssassivoth is fanatically-loyal to The Pale One and so are the Strong Coils, and they will not hesitate to die for their leader.  Ssassivoth and The Pale One are currently concerned with finding a way to lessen the pressure of the Dragon tyrants of Klaridia, and have started making overtures to the tomb guardians, so far with very little success.

Notable Figures among the Tomb Guardians: Most of the surviving tomb guardians are the remnants of the Knights of Rasz, an ancient order of magic-using swordsmen. They tend to be unsettlingly-clean and well-preserved due to magical means (prestidigitation and mending) and their equipment has stayed well-maintained and clean through the same means. They are lead by Audarius Justinius, a stern but ultimately-benevolent warrior who has seen far more service and battle than he ever wanted to. Occasionally a particularly noteworthy soul who lives among the ruins will be asked to join the Knights’ undying vigil, and there are some orcish and naga mummies and even a few dragonborn ones among their ranks. The original warriors were members of a long-dead elven subrace. The tomb guardians as a whole tend to be very honorable, if not always benevolent, but many of them are very short on patience after guarding the same places for thousands of years. However, a few have become corrupted over time and have formed a dangerous and rapidly-growing splinter group that calls itself the Scythe of Klar. This group is lead by the ruthless and brutal Quinnelius Severus. Quinnelius Severus has traded his traditional white wrappings for black ones, and he and his followers wear deep crimson and black clothing rather than the gold and blue of his former compatriots. The Scythe of Klar is murderously-hostile towards any of the living that they encounter, and also to the Knights of Rasz.

The Ancient Crawler: Beneath the desert lives a massive purple wurm known as The Ancient Crawler. Unique among its kind, it is not only massive and physically-powerful, but it is intelligent as well. Especially-brave members of the Palace of the Seers have been known to seek the creature out to speak with it about ancient events, which the creature is willing to do … provided a substantial offering of food (usually livestock) is part of the deal.

Notable Figures of the Palace of the Seers: The current Wearers of Gold are Hagival Mathras, an aged human from Laraloch-Thistivuel; Z’vivvizz, a waspfolk from Alchova that managed to break from the hive mind over 200 years ago; Lady Morithiel Sulathnas Iridlien, an elven noblewoman who abandoned her house to study the working of fate over 3,400 years ago; and Elgrik Bogglenocken, a serious old goblin matriarch of few words but prodigious magical skill. Most of the Seers, Scribes, and Needles are humans or elves, but as the Wearers of Gold themselves demonstrate, there’s a significant amount of diversity. The current leader of the scribes is Alorana, a very tired and world-weary couatl who also maintains the archives. The Needles are lead by the ruthless and professional Karad Misken, a human and a former royal spymaster. Karad has emphasized an even greater level of covert training than his predecessor did, and the Needles are seldom seen, but always present.

The Prophet of Stone: Far to the south, in the most mountainous part of the desert lives Blindel Godseeker, an ancient and kind-hearted storm giant. Blindel is a cleric and a prophet, a healer and a guide to whomever can reach his isolated home. Occasionally someone will seek him out with the intention of studying under him, but the giant always turns these petitioners away, preferring to heal those in need of it, provide some wisdom, and then send seekers off to find other teachers. He spends his days in quiet meditation and mapping the mountains he calls home, and the walls of his house are carved with beautifully-detailed three-dimensional maps of the surrounding mountains, prophecies, and sacred art honoring God.

We’ve dispensed a lot of GMing advice via the podcast and blog over the years, but we’re hardly the only useful resource out there, so here’s a list of resources for the aspiring GM.

This may look daunting, so let me stress something upfront: you do not have to absorb all of this material before you start GMing! In fact, a lot of these resources won’t be useful until you’ve gotten started. My personal advice would be learn the system you want to GM, preferably play in it for at least a few sessions to get comfortable, read Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering (only 32 pages) and then give GMing it a try.

Good luck! May you find GMing as rewarding and enjoyable as we do.

-Peter

Books: General

Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering by Robin D. Laws: Probably the very first thing an aspiring GM should read, for two reasons: first, it’s a short, non-daunting volume at only 32 pages. Second, those 32 pages include an enormous amount of good advice. If it’s the only piece of published GMing advice you ever read, it’s probably enough.

Hamlet’s Hit Points by Robin D. Laws: This shows you how to break media (and your games) down into story beats. It’s a pretty challenging read, not because the language is obtuse or overly-academic, but because it really challenges you to look at stories through an unfamiliar lens.

The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity by Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman: We had Dr. Bowman on episode 111 to discuss the psychology around gaming, but none of us had read her book yet at that point, so there wasn’t a huge amount of overlap. Having now read her book, I’d say it’s a good thing for a GM to read, with the caveat that chapters 1-5 will be very familiar to long-time gamers. Chapters 6 and 7, however, have a lot of useful material to keep in mind while you’re GMing, particularly the different player archetypes.

Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management by Phil Vecchione and Walt Chiechanowski: A system-agnostic book entirely dedicated to campaign management. As of this writing, I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s full of good advice so far.

Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters compiled by Martin Ralya: A collection of essays by the likes of Robin D. Laws, Kenneth Hite, Emily Care Boss, and Vincent Baker (and those are just my personal favorites) about improvising while GMing. Highly, highly recommended.

Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep by Phil Vecchione: Another one I haven’t finished yet but have been impressed by the beginnings of.

The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology: Not very new any more (out of print for decades, in fact) I like this one because it covers mythology from more than just the “usual places” of Greece/Rome, Egypt, and the Norse. Mythology books in general (and fairy tale collections as well) are good reference material for any GM, though, especially one running stories with fantastic elements.

Gaming Books

GURPS Horror, 4th Edition: Kenneth Hite does a fantastic rundown of the psychology behind various monsters. A fantastic read even if you never run a horror game or the GURPS system.

Hillfolk: Robin D. Laws’s Dramasystem shows up in here, and has a lot of useful advice for running dramatic scenes as opposed to procedural ones.

F.A.T.E Core System: Aspects and FATE chips are the two biggest takeaways here, but like Hillfolk, it’s also worth reading as an RPG that isn’t as combat-focused as some other popular systems (like D&D) are.

Microscope: Ben Robbins’s RPG is really more of a combination of story game and collaborative worldbuilding tool. That said: it belongs on every GM’s bookshelf! The process of building a setting together as a group is amazing.

Downfall: Caroline Hobb’s game is in the same general category as Microscope, but always includes a tragic end and it works differently. A neat game on its own and a handy way of building fallen civilizations for your game world.

YouTube Channels

Matthew Coville: There’s a lot to like about Matthew Coville. He’s an extremely experienced GM, which means he’s picked up a lot of tricks over the years, particularly if D&D is your system of choice. I also like how sincere (and often vulnerable) he is in his videos; you never have any reason to doubt his good faith. He’s also very engaging – his videos are very enjoyable to watch. The thing that I most like about him, though, is that he makes you want to GM so incredibly bad. The GMing itch gets just about unbearable watching his stuff, which is a good thing!

Geek and Sundry: These folks also have a lengthy video series from various experienced GMs such as Matthew Mercer of Critical Role. Also quite engaging and worth a watch.

Blogs:

The Angry GM: Angry is great. He gives out a lot of good advice, heavily leavened with humor and research. It’s fairly obvious that the vast majority of his fury is a persona, but that just makes it more entertaining.

Gnome Stew: A blog dedicated entirely to TTRPG topics. Well-written, interesting, and covers a great deal of different material. The authors behind Odyssey and Never Unprepared are regular contributors; Engine Press is the publishing arm of Gnome Stew.

Safety Concerns

Why Safety Tools Are Important To Me: Phil Vecchione covers a bunch of popular safety concepts in a nice, useful Gnome Stew post.

A Matter of Trust: Covers consent-based play and other safety concerns.

Playing Nasty Characters: Originally written for LARP, but contains plenty of good advice for playing villains without pushing it too far that applies to tabletop as well.

The X-Card: A useful tool for making sure the game stays comfortable for everyone.

Podcasts:

Fear the Boot: The longest-running RPG podcast out there has dispensed a lot of GMing advice over the course of its run.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Kenneth Hite and Robin D. Laws dispensing weekly gaming advice and talking about the sorts of stuff you’d want to put into your game like espionage and cryptozoology. Tons of fun and fantastic advice.

Obviously, we’ve also dispensed tons of GMing advice here on Saving the Game, too! (Both on episodes and in the blog.)

Websites:

World Anvil: A website designed to track and aggregate world building information for authors, GMs, and so on.

Inkarnate: A solid map-building tool.

Roll20: A useful tool purpose-built for gaming online. Our gaming group uses it for Grant’s weekly D&D game. It provides a collection of linked utilities for facilitating TTRPG play. We’re not even using half of what it can do and it’s still been phenomenally useful.

This List of GM links. Name generators, die rollers, system reference documents – it’s just a treasure trove of useful resources.

Peter

Gnome Stew has been running a series of letters to past selves with a gaming focus. This one speaks to a lot of the stuff we’ve discussed over the years at Saving the Game – using gaming not just as a tool for enjoyment, but as one for real, positive change.

This week at the Stew, some of us were inspired by a series of disparate recent events to send some love and sentiments out to young gamers, especially those who are marginalized. We wrote these letters to our younger selves, because in you, we see ourselves, and we hope that we can give you the words of encouragement we needed to hear. You are welcome in this space.

I’ll happily credit Derek White’s feed with this one, because that’s where I saw it. There’s a certain appropriateness to how Easter falls on April Fool’s Day this year, as this article explains.

In our celebration of Easter, in our encounter with the empty tomb, in our experience of the Risen Christ, we know that Death does not get the last laugh. If anyone plays the fool or the jester, it is Jesus. By his silence in front of Pontius Pilate, he reveals the kangaroo court for the sham that it is. By his submission to violence, torture, and death on a cross, he reveals these things as ultimately powerless. In spite of his lowly social standing, Jesus calls to account the religious and political authorities of his day.

Last year my pastor preached a sermon that paralleled the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and the resurrection of Jesus himself. At the end of that service, we watched a video set to this song. It’s very appropriate to the Easter season.

Finally, in the category of “stuff that should be in the next sci-fi setting you design, I give you … electricity-generating fabric? Popular Science has the article here.

The idea was to test an experimental material’s response to moisture. That’s why she doused the arm strap in tap water, hoping that the special electricity-generating fabric she and her team developed not only would keep producing power when wet but would become even stronger. It succeeded on both counts.

Jenny

An artist in London has made a cope for a priest out of discarded plastic from the River Thames. It’s part of her Profane to Sacred section for her final project at school this year, and she aims to bring awareness to the amount of plastic waste that ends up in rivers. The priest will be wearing the cope this Easter Sunday.

An art and design student has created a cope out of plastic waste from the River Thames, to raise awareness of the problems that pollution causes.

Sarah Wilson, who is working for a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at the City Lit, in London, has designed and made the cope out of the discarded plastic that she collected for her final project, which she called turning the “ordinary into the extraordinary”.

A few months ago, the CBC did an excellent piece on how D&D can be beneficial to children. It was a lovely read, and the article did (briefly) bring up that, no, this game is not devil worship.

It’s perfect for kids because it’s fun and requires a lot of imagination, but it’s also excellent for building skills and smarts:

• Literacy: Even if you’re not the Dungeon Master, getting into these games often requires players read a lot of rules, and there’s often a journaling aspect for recording what’s going on.
• Math: When you get punched by an orc or discover a potion, you will keep track of your character’s health points and magic use by adding and subtracting.
• Probability and Game Theory: If you’re rolling dice to determine whether you can jump over a bottomless pit, you want to know if the odds are on your side.

A lot of people associate RPGs with high schoolers or adults, but can they work with younger ones? And how can families new to this world get more involved?

Kotaku did a really interesting, and in a way quite touching, interview with the main game director of NieR: Automata, Yoko Taro. (WARNING: the article contains spoilers for the game.) I just got the game myself, and am looking forward to playing it, so it was interesting to see a little bit of the behind-the-scenes regarding the game director’s attitude to how development went overall, a year after release.

“Director is a job you really need a lot of energy to do, and a lot of other great directors in the world live a very powerful life. They’re very confident in what they do, so they pursue what they want to do. But I don’t think any of my scenarios are good. I still believe that way. But I think that kind of negativity was good for me, because I keep constantly changing the scenario because I don’t think it’s good. I think that might have helped me to get through it. So that kind of dark power I think was something that was necessary for me, which other directors don’t have.”

A Nice Place to Live

Laraloch-Thistivuel is a County in the terms of this setting, which means that it’s a civilized area where things are generally good. That doesn’t mean nobody ever has a bad day, but the rampant, crushing, sadistic brutality of the Grim Cities or the natural hazards of The Wilds aren’t a concern for the people who live here. It gets its name from a treaty between a large dwarven duchy (Laraloch) and a group of smaller elven estates (collectively known as Thistivuel) back about 3000 years ago. There has been significant immigration to the area, particularly humans and centaurs, but culturally, it is very dwarven with some elven influences. The local economy is stable, and there’s enough work to go around that people generally live comfortable, secure lives. Technology is advanced enough to keep plagues and starvation at bay, paved roads run between cities (and in this case, rail lines, too). Industry is productive, but very careful about both safety and waste. People of all social standings tend to be generous with what they have. Laws are enforced, but fairly and with mercy toward minor offenders. The overall “cultural alignment” of the area is Lawful Good, broken down as follows (see this post for details about the virtue-based alignment system).

Morality:

Pride/Humility: Accepter (0) – There’s not a lot of nationalistic zeal, but there is titled nobility, and folks from Laraloch-Thistivuel tend to be eager to tell you about it.
Envy/Kindness: Saint (+2) – There are dual and interlocking traditions with very significant cultural weight of both hospitality and nobless oblige here that go back at least centuries and probably millennia; people share stuff with those who need it. They also breathe air. They tend to consider one about as remarkable as the other and give both roughly equal amounts of thought.
Wrath/Patience: Seeker (+1) – Laws are fairly enforced and punishments fit the crime. There’s not a significant amount of cultural grudge-bearing, either, though there is definitely some of that old dwarven toughness ingrained in the people of this land.
Sloth/Diligence: Seeker (+1) – People tend to be grateful for what they have, work hard, and are appreciated by those who employ them, who compensate them fairly for their efforts.
Greed/Charity: Saint (+2) – As mentioned under kindness, if you are in genuine need and manage to stumble into a town in Laraloch-Thistivuel, you are very likely to be okay. People will expect you to help the next person in need who comes through, but they won’t remind you of it constantly, mock you for your weakness, or hold it over your head. That would be cruel.
Gluttony/Temperence: Accepter (0) – Because things are generally good, people don’t generally get too worked up about lavish feasting, drunkenness that doesn’t end with anyone getting hurt, and so on.
Lust/Chastity: Accepter (0) – People generally keep their bedroom activities to themselves. Advertising may feature the occasional bit of “nudge nudge, wink wink” content. People react with disgust and outrage to marital infidelity.
Overall Virtue Score: +6 (Good)

Personality:

Duty/Independence: Favorer: Duty (+1) – People here know things are good and are generally motivated to do their part in keeping them that way.
Efficiency/Artistry: Favorer: Artistry (-1) – There’s a definite undercurrent of elven influence that can be seen in architecture and the way everyday objects look – you’ll see little bits of filigree, pinstriping, or other adornments on things that don’t strictly need them. It’s not ostentatious, but it’s very widespread and commonplace. The overall effect is that almost nothing looks harsh or purely utilitarian.
Meticulousness/Expediency: Favorer: Meticulousness (+1) – This is another place where  dwarven influence is noticeable. There is a definite cultural influence toward doing things right and making sure that any potential problems are mitigated before calling something “done.”
Satisfaction/Excitement: Exemplar: Satisfaction (+2) – Laraloch-Thistivuel was formed by the uniting of communities of two very long-lived races, which means that there’s a deep, prevailing sense of “the long game” in virtually all aspects of life.
Tradition/Progress: Favorer: Tradition (+1) – The same thinking that pulls strongly toward Satisfaction also pulls toward Tradition. Dwarves and elves have cultural memories stretching back eons and a lot of that cultural memory is deeply treasured and has been shared with their neighbors.
Sacrifice/Pragmatism: Favorer: Sacrifice (+1) – The hospitality and nobless oblige traditions factor in strongly here. It is seen as virtuous not merely to help others, but to give of oneself while doing so.
Overall Personality score: +5 (Lawful)

Lay of the Land

Laraloch-Thistivuel enjoys a mild, temperate climate. There are four distinct seasons, each about three months long. Summers are warm, but not usually unbearably hot, with temperatures topping out around 85 degrees, even at the height of summer. Winters are snowy, but not usually bitterly cold, with temperatures reaching about 10 degrees at the coldest. The western end of the small nation is made up mostly of craggy foothills, which are the traditional dwarven homelands. These merge into a forest to the south that’s the ancestral home of the local elves. Most of the rest of the landscape is gentle rolling hills and wide, fertile plains. The region enjoys regular rainfall and a long growing season, which means crops are plentiful. The eastern border is mostly coastline, with several port towns and the capital city of Highshore.

On the Table

Local crops include wheat, corn, barley, a wide variety of vegetables (including potatoes, carrots, peas, peppers, tomatoes, and several varieties of bean), apples, pears, and some aromatics including garlic, onions, and leeks. Livestock includes cows (including a sizeable dairy cow population), pigs, and sheep. Most farms also raise both egg chickens and meat ones, and turkeys are also common. Wild game includes deer and pheasant. Beekeeping is common, so honey is widely available. Cheesemaking is subject of great regional pride and a number of both cow’s milk and sheep’s milk cheeses are available. Coastal areas have a wide range of seafood. Local fare tends to be rich, hearty, and highly-nourishing. Food is an important export.

Industrial Development

The cities and small towns have the sorts of businesses you’d expect them to have given the technology level of the setting but there are a couple of noteworthy, exceptional pieces of industry. The first is Stonefoot Motorworks, a dwarven vehicle company that makes everything from semi trucks to high-performance sports cars to motorcycles. Stonefoot Motorworks vehicles are famously overbuilt and reliable – dwarves don’t even consider a vehicle broken in until it has 100,000 miles on it. They’re also very reasonably for the build quality. Stonefoot is employee-owned and in addition to its general assembly operations, also has a small division that builds vehicles for customers with unique needs, such as those with disabilities or centauroid physiologies. The company was founded by dwarves but employs members of a large number of different races. The logo is a stylized gray footprint on a black background. If the PCs need a land vehicle, specialized or not, they can scarcely do better than a Stonefoot. One particularly unique model the stonefoot engineers are particularly fond of is the Chariot, a motorcycle-like vehicle designed for centaurs and alseids. It has a pair of wheels in the front and a single, large drive wheel in the back. The rider sits with their hind legs extended back slightly and their forelegs are used to steer. This leaves their hands free, a feature which has made the vehicle popular with adventurers who like to hold things like weapons while on the move, but it has also become popular with delivery companies.

The other is Highshore Harbor, a busy, heavily-industrialized harbor. A lot of the food that gets exported goes out through here, and imported goods flow in – the massive cranes never stop moving, and there’s a constant coming-and-going of trucks and trains. Magic gets used a bit to help things along by some of the companies doing shipping. While one company may use forklifts, another may use the Floating Disc spell. Ships are often staffed with armed security due to sea monsters and piracy, so this is a good place to pick up adventuring supplies. In addition, some of the import/export companies will sell goods salvaged from damaged containers in the Harbor Market, a kind of giant flea market immediately to the north of the harbor itself. Speaking of maritime security, those desiring the most skilled and well-equipped personnel can hire Trident Enterprises, which uses submarines to fight sea creatures and is largely staffed by tritons. The company enjoys a strong reputation for integrity and ethics. They also have a very high success rate.

Over in the slightly-smaller river city of Stoneford, you’ll find Zallacker Arms, a weapons company that tries very hard to ensure that they’re only serving the good guys. Zallacker weapons use special proprietary ammunition that can only be purchased (legally, anyway) directly from the company. Customers typically do not object to this practice, because the ammunition is well-made and actually slightly cheaper than the going rate (by about 3% – emphasis on the slightly in that statement). New orders receive a credit based on the return of spent brass casings given back to the company at the time of the order. Both the ammunition and the weapons that fire it are of better-than-average quality (In game terms, Zallacker weapons are less value to jam or misfire by a value of 1), and Zallacker does its best to make sure unaccounted-for shipments are recovered, their weapons don’t find their way into Grim Cities, and so on. There’s only so much a pre-digital company can do to control their inventory after it leaves their warehouses, but Zallacker is doing all of it. They also sell melee weapons and body armor. The company is privately owned by the estate of Archduke Thurgrim Zallacker.

Points of Interest

Laraloch-Thistivuel has a few other locations of note, as well.

The Stoneford Bridge crosses the Alagan river near its widest point, and is a marvel of structural engineering. It’s an old fortified tower bridge that is usually left open, though the gates have been upgraded as newer technology has become available and it has been kept in good repair. It is the first line of defense on a road that leads through the Yuthi desert and ultimately to Alchova. Most of the time, though, it’s an important cultural attraction. The bridge is usually hung with colorful banners and tours are available for about 5sp. Discounts and family days can get this down to 2sp at the right time, and school groups studying history, engineering, or architecture sometimes are invited to tour it for free.

The Thistivuel Botanical Guardians are among the most impressive of their kind the world over. In addition to hosting thousands of both domesticated and wild plants from dozens of different biomes, the gardens are also home to one of the most beautiful and enduring pieces of elven artwork in the entire nation. The Tree of Blossoms is actually a tree-shaped scaffolding covered in flowering vines that all bloom at different times of the year. This makes it a vivid, magnificent, and ever-changing thing that can be appreciated almost as a new piece every time a visitor sees it. As a place of exceptional and long-lasting peace and natural beauty, the gardens are a tether to the Feywild, and good-aligned fey can sometimes be seen strolling the grounds.

The Church of the Five Martyrs sits on an old elven site dedicated to five devout servants of God who held off an army led by minions of The Adversary until the community they belonged to could escape. The ruins of that community (called Ethliel) form the grounds around the church itself, which are located on the outskirts of Stoneford. Visitors can sometimes get audiences with the martyrs (all sainted now) themselves, and they are full of kindness and wise counsel. They do not, however have to put up with being pestered or trolled and hence they do not, manifesting only where there is legitimate need and vanishing as soon as they have done what they can to assist with it. They usually do not appear as a group. The church itself is a modest stone and wood building, but the windows – all of the windows – are beautiful stained glass of elven design in sharp contrast to the humble nature of the rest of the structure.

Notable Persons

Archduke Thurgrim Zallacker: The archduke is the latest in a long line of very well-regarded dwarves to bear the title of Archduke. In addition to owning Zallacker Arms, he has his hands on shipping (where he has done a great deal to promote worker rights and safety at great cost to his own profit margins) and logging (where he works with a group of elven druids to keep the operation sustainable). He is also deeply involved in a large number of philanthropic ventures, many of which he supports through actual action rather than just by bankrolling. He is an exceptionally principled man and is widely beloved by the citizens of the province. It’s considered exceptionally fortuitous that he is young by dwarven standards (he’s about 70) and has several hundred years of life ahead of him.

The Five Martyrs: The five martyrs of Ethliel were members of an elven militia that protected the town. They were:
St. Lathlien the Steadfast: Lathlien was a huge, powerfully-built elf in life, and is often depicted with a massive tower shield. He is well-regarded as a protector of the innocent and was the leader of the five martyrs.
St. Korinas the Gentle: Korinas was a reknowned healer and herbalist, and is well-regarded for his bedside manner. Tales tell of him healing the wounded and then playing soft flute music to help them relax and sleep afterward. He is depicted with a doctor’s bag and a flute, and his statues often depict him with a long elven sword at his side.
St. Selbiel the Implacable: Selbiel was a peerless warrior, well-trained in a variety of weapons and fighting styles. According to the accounting of the other four, she was the last to fall. She is depicted with a small shield and a broad-tipped spear, her weapon of choice in life.
St. Ennala the Swift: Ennala was scout and hunter. She warned the other four and the town of Ethliel, allowing many to escape. She is depicted with a bow in one hand and a lantern in the other.
St. Laganna the Knowing: Laganna was a wizard and scholar. She is always depicted in flowing robes and carrying a large, heavy tome. In life, she was a botanist, a theologian, and an architect in addition to her magical studies.
All five have been known to appear to visitors to the Church of Five Martyrs. When they appear, the are always in white robes and bear none of the wounds of their sacrifice. They often will dispense advice to those who need it in their area of expertise, but all of them, Korinas and Laganna in particular, have been known to appear for the sole purpose of comforting the grieving, the broken, or the conflicted.

Harbormaster Kelton Favre: Kelton is a centaur, which may seem out of place in a harbor, but he is exceptionally good at his job. A talented and fair-minded administrator, it is largely due to his efforts and his high standards that Highshore harbor continues to be such an efficient operation.

Conclusion

That’s it for the highlights of Laraloch-Thistivuel. Next post will be either the Yuthi Desert or Alchova. I haven’t decided yet. If you’ve go opinions on which you’d like me to tackle first, let me know!

Playlist

Waking Lions by Pop Evil – this was recommended to me by my dad over breakfast earlier this month. It’s a fantastic, uplifting song, with some nice heavy bits and some good melodic bits. Dad has great taste! It also feels like it fits perfectly with the ethos of a County – psych up and go confront the darkness.

Peter

This article is from over two years ago, and it’s kind of about Christmas, but I think the advice is timeless because it’s really more about themes in gaming than “holiday special” sessions at the end of the day. This is the good old Angry GM, writing back when the Mad Adventurer’s Society was still running. My one caveat to what he says is that those cornball trope mash-ups around the holidays can still be lots of fun. We had a great one of those during the Shadowrun campaign that we all enjoyed.

THAT’S theme. Theme is the secret thing that the movie or book or game is really trying to talk about. Everything that happens in the movie or book or game is just an extended metaphor. It’s a way of getting people to think about other issues.

I’m going to do two gaming-related things this week because I have a second one on here that I may very well use whenever I finish designing my setting. Apparently Trello can be used as an amazing campaign management tool.

So, I’ve been running the game, 6 or 7 sessions, trying to remember the names of the NPCs or exactly where on the map I put that organization’s base, all while looking through my half-unpacked gaming stuff to see where I threw those notes on that one list, and I finally realize how I should have been doing this all along – Trello. I use it for work, I use it for writing and art direction projects, I use it to organize my daily life, so why the heck am I not using it to keep track of my gaming stuff?

Hacking Christianity had an interesting blog post last year that makes an interesting companion piece to our episode about Consequentialism from a little while back.

Unlike Ness, Mal doesn’t sacrifice his integrity or values to commit to his beliefs (see previous Firefly post here). Rather, Mal realizes the only way to beat his adversary and the regime he props up is to go where his beliefs took him and make everyone else aware of his belief. He becomes a true evangelist…with a bit of violence in order to do it, unfortunately.

Grant

M. J. Young, chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild (which we’re naturally big fans of) published an excellent post recently entitled Faith in Play #4: Bad Friends. It definitely spoke to me as a parent, and as someone who’s seen people suffer through bad gaming groups and gaming members out of some weird sense of obligation, but was a little convicting as well:

I know it was sincere, and it was undoubtedly truly meaningful, but I’m afraid it is so cliché that I immediately noted to my wife, “You know, no one ever talks about their worst friend.” We laughed. I said that there must be a way I can use that for something, and we pondered how you would identify your “worst friend.”

A few hours later I shared the joke with my youngest son, who did not laugh but instead said that he knew exactly who his worst friend was.

There is something of an attitude in gaming groups that says we must be friends because we’re all gamers who get together to play […]

There’s a literary and musical concept called a motif which I feel we all underutilize in our roleplaying games. Little recurring elements give players a sense of continuity, and they suggest that the game world is real and grounded and not simply made up around the player characters (though of course it often is.) As such, we could all learn from Marshall University’s Jason Morrissette, who has made a study of the vending machines in over 2,000 video games:

“It’s remarkable how little details like soda machines—along with any number of other recurring props—can ground a game in a reality we recognize,” he said, “If video games are about creating a sense of place in which players can immerse themselves, something like a soda machine on a subway platform can go a long way toward making that happen.”

[Morrissette’s] paper takes a qualitative critical approach to answering these questions by identifying depictions of soda vending machines in video games and analyzing the various roles — aesthetic, ludic, and thematic — played by these machines. It goes on to argue that soda machines play a crucial role in grounding video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.

My last article features the most fascinating and tragic real person I’d ever suggest using as an NPC in a game. No, seriously. Life in the Tunnels: Inside the Underground World of Bucharest, Romania’s Sewer Kids is a ABC Nightline report from 2014, and it’s astonishing:

Now, an entire generation of children has grown up in the sewers. They fled underground in 1989 when the Communist regime was overthrown and Romanian orphanages were closed, releasing thousands of kids onto the streets. Many took refuge in the sewer tunnels, heated by steam pipes. They are lost boys and girls who have now grown into adults. […]

Drug addicts also live in the tunnels, and it can be dangerous. To be allowed inside their world, Robert said, we would need permission from their leader, an elusive and mysterious man known as Bruce Lee.

Lee has lived in the sewers for the past 24 years, and he is treated like a king by those who live underground. He has silver hair, which he paints with aurolac — a metallic paint popular on the streets as a cheap way to get high. He also wears jingling medals and keeps a large pack of dogs with him. […]

Speaking in Romanian, Lee said children come to the tunnels because “they have nowhere to go, but here they have food and water and heat.”

“I know them all,” he added. “I control everything down here. They used to do a lot of bad things. They didn’t have anyone to guide them to do good before me.”

Jenny

I recently stumbled across a set of quick start rules for a game called Nibiru. It’s about being on a scary space station where you’re all trying to get your memories back. The quick start can be bought for the low, low price of free, too, which is a big point in its favour. A Kickstarter will soon be launched to fund the release of the full rules in print.

You crawl away from the wreckage of your past.

You hang on tight to the last remnants of your previous life.

You wash ashore, on a beach of rust.

You observe yourself; your inner strife. 

The choice is yours; Remember, or Die.

There was a terrible movie I watched a bunch of years ago starring Heath Ledger called The Sin Eater. It was about this man who takes on the sins of others. I thought it was an awful job they made up for the movie, but no. Apparently it was a real job, and it was nothing like the way the movie portrayed it. Sin eating was typically taken on out of desperation, and it lasted a surprisingly long time.

 When a loved one died in parts of England, Scotland, or Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, the family grieved, placed bread on the chest of the deceased, and called for a man to sit in front of the body. The family of the deceased watched as this man, the local professional sin eater, absorbed the sins of the departed’s soul.

I really enjoyed the game Firewatch. If you enjoy walking simulators and nature and storytelling, you will probably enjoy it too. A teen in the northeastern US enjoyed it so much, he was inspired to join the Forest Fire Lookout Association, and saved an historical fire lookout post from being demolished.

Jack Kelley knew he wanted to play Firewatch since seeing the first pieces of artwork. After the game released in 2016, Kelley became fascinated by the real world lookout towers that inspired the game, culminating in the 14-year-old fan saving a historic lookout tower from demolition.

Up until this point, I’ve been writing about a lot of higher-level concepts, baseline assumptions, and other pipe-laying concerns, and while there’s still more of that to cover (various worldwide organizations, discussion of how various class archetypes fit into the setting, and so on) I think there’s enough material laid down at this point to start actually detailing some locations in the world. I still have a bunch of player-facing content to do in this series; in particular I have plans to outline the various Holy Orders that go with the cleric domains and dig into how some of the other class archetypes plug into the setting, but I think at this point, it’s probably helpful to have some actual setting with named people and places to relate to before I start getting into those types of details.

For this post and the next three, I’m going to go over a “matched set” of one area of each of the major three area types in the setting – a County, where civilization exists and is generally good, an area of The Wilds, where untamed nature and wilderness reigns, and an oppressive Grim City. What follows is an overview of the three regions. As I go forward, I’ll dig into more detail, describing the climate, history, terrain, communities, and important locations and groups within each region. There will be more of all three types of region, of course.

County: Laraloch-Thistivuel

Laraloch-Thistivuel is the name for a small nation-state that was created by a treaty between elves and dwarves about 500 years back in the setting’s history. It is filled with several small and medium-sized towns and a medium-sized city called Stoneford. It’s a fertile, temperate region with agriculture, fishing, mining, and some manufacturing industry. Paved highways connect the major cities and towns, but as you get to outlying areas, a lot of the roads turn to dirt. The region contains some foothills that are peopled by a dwarven clan (the source of the Laraloch portion of the name), but humans, elves (who originally occupied a small area called Thistivuel but have since spread out over the whole region), and centaurs are all reasonably common in Laraloch-Thistivuel. Government is a UK-style parliamentary democracy with noble titles still granted. The local nobility is known for a deep and seriously-held sense of noblesse oblige and they tend to be extremely generous and helpful with their resources, seeing themselves as important stewards of the public good.

Wilds: Yuthi Desert

The Yuthi desert is a beautiful, craggy, arid expanse full of harsh conditions and natural monuments. In addition to some absolutely spectacular rock formations, the region is home to a number a vividly-colorful flowering succulents. Society is mostly small tribal or clan groups. Most of the sapient residents of this region are humans, orcs, or naga. It includes one very specific and noteworthy location: the Palace of the Seers, one of the most important centers of magical learning and prophecy in the world. The region is also home to the ruins of an ancient, long-gone empire, so archaelogists and treasure hunters are sometimes drawn to it. Like a lot of deserts, temperatures can vary wildly over the course of a day, soaring into the triple digits during the day and dropping to below freezing at night.

Grim City: Alchova, the Great Hive

The rulers of this Grim City are insect lords, many of whom have ties directly to Hell. Architecturally, it resembles a 1940s city with massive hives for human-sized wasps stuck randomly to the sides of the skyscrapers. It is surrounded by swamps, and it swarms with insects constantly. The residents are pitilessly valued only for what they can produce and are ruthlessly (and often cruelly) disposed of rapidly if they fall behind. Everywhere you go, biting and stinging insects harass you and the constant drone of tens of thousands of wings can be heard. The city proper is walled and heavily-fortified, but it controls a bunch of outlying territory that supplies food for the city as well. The ruling class employs the brutal Toscali waspfolk as enforcers, but they also rely on insectoid fiends of various types to keep the population in line.

As always, I’m very interested in any questions or feedback you may have. One quick note, if you comment, I will often ask follow-up questions in my relies, so be sure to check back! I really enjoy the back-and-forth with those who take the time to reads these posts and respond to them.

Playlist

Losing my Humanity by Kobra and the Lotus – some good, challenging (I’d go so far as to say prophetic) lyrics and music that rocks. I really like this first sample of Prevail II.

Earlier in this series, I mentioned that the second major component of D&D cosmology is other planes – worlds that exist in parallel to and overlap with each other. The 5e baseline assumes over two dozen of them, which is a bit much for my taste. I’m going to pare the list down substantially for the setting I’m designing.

Realms Beyond

Outer planes are wholly separate from the material world and do not overlap with it. While it is possible to travel from one to the other, the means are extraordinary and it cannot be done accidentally under most circumstances.

There are two outer planes – Heaven and Hell. Heaven is the Throne of God, the home of the angels, and the final resting place of the innocent and the righteous. Evil is expelled forcibly from its borders, a trait that was most dramatically demonstrated with The Fall. In terms of its actual description, those who visit will say that it is beautiful, peaceful, and filled with joy, but specific details are fleeting, and the memories fade from the resurrected like memories of a dream. They come back knowing they were happy, at peace, and maybe with a few other key memories like being unified with loved ones, but details elude their memory, or at least their ability to describe.

Hell, on the other hand, tends to leave vivid memories on those who escape it. A horrific, warped place of endless suffering and cruelty, those who manage to escape it through resurrection often come back permanently traumatized by the experience, desperate not to go back. It is the home of demons and devils and the ultimate fate of the corrupt and the wicked. Those that have returned describe horrific torture that never ends, smothering darkness, choking fumes instead of air, and everywhere the sound of agonized screams.  Those are the ones who come back in a condition to talk, anyway. Some return catatonic, a final, twisted joke from their fiendish masters and a way (or at least an attempt) to deny them a chance at redemption. An aside about Hell’s denizens – there is no Blood War in this setting. Demons, Devils, and Daemons/Yugoloths are all part of the same infernal family. As creatures of pure malevolence, hatred, and cruelty, you can bet there’s infighting and power plays, but there’s no millennia-old war between alignment-based factions, and they all share the same terrible plane.

Right Next Door

Inner planes, on the other hand, overlap with the physical, material world. It is possible to wander from one to the other through certain types of locations or at least to access them with normal spells and class abilities available to mortals. There are three inner planes in the setting – The Feywild, The Beside, and The Howling Madness.

The Feywild is fairly close to the way it’s described in the cored D&D books. It’s the realm of the fey, and like the mortal realm, it’s been rent asunder and partially corrupted by the forces of darkness. There are places in The Feywild that are beautiful and full of peace, and there are nasty, dangerous places full of murderous creatures and sinister flora. All of it, however, is very deeply tied to nature. Buildings incorporate or are incorporated into nearby natural features, and no trace of industrialization is visible. The fey sometimes use more advanced technology, but it’s always crafted by hand. This realm of primal nature is also home to the various elementals, though they tend to stick to more remote areas. Time sometimes flows differently from the mortal realm here. A person can be out of the mortal realm for what seems like minutes and come back centuries later, or can be in the Feywild for what seems like a lifetime and return seconds after they left. Some of the more powerful fey can control this temporal distortion, deliberately sending people back at opportune or inopportune times.

The Beside fulfills the mechanical purposes of the Astral and Ethereal planes in “vanilla D&D.” The Beside is to creation what the command line is to a modern operating system or the water walls, access panels, electrical closets, and HVAC ductwork are to a building – a “back area” seldom accessed by normal folks that can be used for maintenance and behind the scenes work … or for nefarious purposes. It’s not a very exciting place. Flat, square gray surfaces run on endlessly toward a flat horizon, with occasional bits of detritus here and there. Dim silhouettes of the mortal world are visible at all times, giving a vague sense of place. The sky is a uniform light gray and the entire place is uniformly lit by light that’s bright enough to see clearly, but not as bright as sunlight. Time flows normally here, but travel can sometimes be much faster.

The Howling Madness is as bad as it sounds. The shattered, warped, twisted realm of aberrations, it is like an joint project of Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher taken in after being administered poisoned hallucinogens and taking a vicious blow to the head. The landscape is a cosmic mix of swirling blackness and colors, the ground shifts constantly, and the insane, indescribable noises will drive even the sturdiest mortals mad given sufficient exposure. It isn’t infinite, but it is massively vast, and attempting to explore it is futile, as it shifts and changes constantly. Making matters worse, it is infused with bizarre energies that warp and twist the body and mind of creatures trapped there for too long.

Getting Around

Moving from one plane to another can be accomplished by way of either specialized magic, or through conduits that match the ethos of the plane they’re connecting to. The idea is similar to the concept of tethers in the In Nomine RPG.  Celestial conduits (connected to Heaven) exist around exceptionally holy sites and places where great acts of self-sacrifice, restoration, or redemption occurred. Infernal conduits can be found at the sites of horrible atrocities or acts of cruelty and are occasionally created on purpose in Grim Cities. Fey conduits can manifest both spontaneously and subtly in especially beautiful, foreboding, and/or remote natural areas, and it can be hard to tell at what point one wandered into The Feywild. Conduits to the Howling Madness can be found in places where reality seems tenuous or insanity has been allowed to fester untreated and isolated for a long time. Finally, conduits to The Beside can be found in especially sterile industrial areas and are probably the rarest type.

Changelog

Just to summarize, the following changes have been made to the default D&D planar assumptions:

• All of the good-aligned outer planes have been done away with and their roles are covered by Heaven.
• All of the evil-aligned outer planes have been done away with and their roles are covered by Hell.
• Elementals have been transplanted to The Feywild and elemental planes have been done away with.
• The Astral and Ethereal planes have been replaced by The Beside.
• The shadowfell is gone completely, though some of its role is covered by The Howling Madness, which also fills the role of The Far Realm.
• Other standard D&D planes and alternate Material plane worlds aren’t part of the setting and have also been removed.

Since I wanted to focus primarily on the world the PCs will be inhabiting, I felt like paring down the cosmological complexity was a good way to go. However, if you have opinions to the contrary (or in agreement) I want to hear them! As always, I am very interested in your thoughts, questions, and feedback.

Peter

Gnome Stew has an article on Dominant Players. It’s a very good article, but it was also one of those things I read and went “Aw, crud. That’s me.” It’s a good reminder to try to be the sort who facilitates and brings others in rather than just hogging the spotlight.

Yeah, dominant can mean that guy too.

They’re easy to spot when you start playing. Confident and forthright or pushy and obstinate, they’re often the first voice the GM hears. You certainly can’t ignore them. Dominant players are difficult to miss and they end up being either a blessing or a bane at the table.

The Christian Century has a really good, and really fair, piece on the passing of the Reverend Billy Graham. As you’d expect in the case of a man like Graham, “fair” means acknowledging that he wasn’t perfect while honoring his amazing and singular legacy.

Graham capitalized on both inherited and acquired qualities. His Hollywood face, trim physique, million-dollar grin, and voice—aptly described as “an instrument of vast range and power”—came naturally, but he also tended them very carefully. More important were the personal disciplines he maintained. Fame never compromised his commitment to marital fidelity, financial transparency, honesty about numbers, and, with rare exceptions, refusal to criticize others. The historian William Martin said it well: Graham represented Americans’ “best selves.” Journalists took note.

Finally, there’s this absolutely fascinating article about bananas from Atlas Obscura that is ABSOLUTELY worth your time. Flavor, blights, and cloning are just some of the highlights. Seriously, give it a read.

It wasn’t always the case: The Gros Michel was once everywhere. When America fell in love with the banana, this is the fruit that captured its heart. The alchemist who first produced the banana split used a Gros Michel; the chemist who produced artificial banana flavor allegedly had it in mind as well. When Eddie Cantor sings “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” it is Big Mike he’s singing about.

Jenny

This article was posted about a month ago, but as the anniversary of his death was just this week, this article about Mr. Rogers’ theology was worth rereading for me. Mr. Rogers was not part of my childhood. (Mr. Dressup was, and to be honest I much prefer watching him to watching Mr. Rogers.) However a lot of the messages that he talked about in his show related directly to his faith.

He was a pastor on television in the golden era of televangelism, but unlike televangelists, Rogers’s focus wasn’t on eternal life, but our own interior lives. Christian evangelists were making a name for themselves preaching about the wickedness of mankind, but Rogers was more interested in his viewers’ inherent value and worth. Evangelists were finding ways the human race didn’t measure up to God’s moral standard. But Rogers said over and over again: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.”

Despite having played tabletop games for as long as I can remember, and having a decent level of literacy, I have a huge amount of difficulty interpreting rule books. I am a visual and tactile learner. If a rule book doesn’t contain diagrams for every possible action, I get VERY lost. I recently came across a webcomic sub-series associated with Up to Four Players called Ready to Roll. The comic tackles visual interpretations of several tabletop game rules with the intent of teaching the “WHY” behind the mechanics, and I am VERY happy about it.

Finally, an Atlas Obscura post about one of my favourite acquired (and apparently very Canadian) tastes: Tiger Tail ice cream.

Canadians love their tiger tail ice cream. Oddly enough, this retro favorite is almost impossible to find outside of the Great White North. Tiger tail doesn’t call for rare ingredients foraged from the Canadian Rockies, nor is it intellectual property of the government. It just doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone except Canadians.

Grant

So here’s an interesting project that’s cropped up in the United Kingdom. The government is partnering with rural churches to post 4G masts in church buildings and steeples. It makes a lot of sense—churches tend to be in the center of isolated communities, so this maximizes these access points’ effectiveness.

I’m a big fan of Trello for note-keeping and project organization, though I don’t use it anywhere near often enough. Gnome Stew has a pretty good article on how to use this tool to manage your campaign.

I’ve become a big fan of tools that let me organize my campaigns digitally. I’m familiar with Trello due to other ways it intersects with my life, but I’ve used programs like Basecamp, Google Drive, and Slack for campaigns as well. Trello is made to organize projects, and that dovetails nicely with the utility needed for organizing a campaign. The fact that it is free is, of course, a major selling point to being able to test it out and try it.

We all have an image of the Dead Sea in our heads, built off National Geographic photos and stories from the Bible. It’s disappearing due to environmental damage, but that hasn’t stopped modern hermits from taking advantage of its desolation:

Half the world is hi-tech. I’m with the other half,” said Mark, who did not give his surname and said he was about 60 years old. Often relying on the kindness of strangers for food, he has lived on the beach for the past 10 years, without electricity, or a mobile phone.

Many visitors to the Dead Sea come for the therapeutic properties associated with its minerals. Jade, a former fire-fighter from New York who did not want to give her full name, said she came for healing purposes and had planned to go back to her home in Jerusalem after a while.

She’s now been here over a year. Her Zula is lined with crystals, herbs growing in plant pots, books and packets of food she brings once a week on the bus from Jerusalem.

In the last post of this series, I promised I’d spend some time explaining how clerics and paladins in the setting are different from the D&D norm, so I figured I’d get that in before I forgot.

Hands of God

Good clerics could also be known as “true” clerics – they receive their power directly from God, and they use it for God’s purposes, however imperfectly. In game mechanical terms, they get access to the default cleric spell list and everything works as described with one key exception: clerics who get their powers from God do not have access to spells that make undead creatures or augment them specifically. Good clerics restore life, they don’t twist it into a perversion of its former self. This includes the few very rare examples where an undead has found redemption and become a cleric, by the way, though there’s another important exception: any sapient being who has been redeemed to the point where they have a good alignment will benefit from a good cleric’s healing spells. (If an undead is slain and is resurrected, they come back as the person they were before becoming undead.)

In addition, the healing magic of good clerics is purely restorative. Wounds close without scarring and without lingering effects, pain goes away with healing, and the magic itself is soothing and comforting. Good clerics still have access to offensive spells, but tend to stay away from spells that inflict disease or poison, and while spells that utilize necrotic damage appear on their spell list, the use of them is frowned on even when fighting truly evil foes. Some rare examples of undead who were redeemed and became clerics have actually been shocked to discover they have a pulse again after channeling a bunch of healing magic over time!

Good clerics can choose from a wide variety of domains, most of which have their own holy order associated with them. (The exceptions to this general rule are the Light and Life domains, which are the domains of the “mother church.”) In addition to all of the domains in the PHB, good clerics can choose the Forge and Grave domains from XgtE, the Arcana domain from SCAG, the Dust domain from the Gunpowder Codex, and the Celebration, Peace, and Retribution domains from Compendium of Sacred Mysteries.

Good paladins are trained by The Church, and can take the oaths of Devotion, Ancients, and Vengeance from the PHB and the Oath of Redemption from XgtE. They can also take the Oath of Resolve from the Gunpowder Codex.

Specific holy orders will get their own posts eventually, or at least a couple of posts detailing a few orders per.

It’s worth noting that there are a huge number of people who faithfully serve God and The Church with nary a spell or magic power to their name. Clerics and Paladins are a cut above normal priests and soldiers. However, clerics in particular are ordained ministers and will sometimes live out their lives as normal priests, taking up arms and spells only when necessary to help those around them. Church-operated hospitals usually have a number of clerics on hand for emergencies, but still practice plenty of what we’d call normal medical care, setting bones, prescribing normal medicines for aches and pains, allergies, chronic illnesses, and the like. Cleric just aren’t numerous enough to magic away all the medical problems of even a medium-sized town, but they will definitely step in to save lives and stop pandemics. Clerics stationed in hospitals usually work with specially-trained triage nurses and will run through any open spell slots on the worst cases in the place before going home for the day.

Claws of the Profane

Evil clerics have access to the twisted copy of divine magic supplied by The Adversary. While most of their spells work as advertised, they do not have access to the Lesser Restoration, Greater Restoration, Revivify, Resurrection, or True Resurrection spells. In addition healing magic they use is painful, leaves horrible scars, and is markedly less effective than that practiced by their good counterparts. All dice used in healing spells from an Adversary empowered spellcaster are rolled as if they had disadvantage – that is, for each die of healing, roll two dice instead and take the lower value. At the GM’s option, certain powerful evil clerics may also roll Inflict Wounds and Harm spells as if their damage dice had advantage – that is, roll two dice for each die and take the higher value. Those particular NPCs should be well along the road of corruption I described back in the 4th post of this series.

In addition, The Adversary grants a smaller number of domains. Adversary empowered clerics can pick from Tempest, Trickery, and War domains in the PHB, the Death domain from the DMG, the Entropy domain from Xanathar’s Lost Notes, and the Scorn, Venom, and Witchcraft domains from Compendium of Sacred Mysteries.

Evil paladins can choose from the Oathbreaker archetype in the DMG or the Oath of Conquest from Xanathar’s Guide. They can also use the Oath of Predation from Xanathar’s Lost Notes.

Unlike The Church, there isn’t much in the way of formal orders of these agents of darkness – they tend to either be master-apprentice groupings or solo operators, though the occasional cult definitely exists, and various Grim Cities have created their own “churches” as an additional means of exploiting or controlling the populace.

Next post I’ll probably get into some of the other planes that make up the setting – I’m hoping to pare the crazy number of extra planes down a bit from the D&D standard. As always, I love hearing your thoughts and questions! Please feel free to comment below.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. -Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

I am a ball of privilege.

I’m a heterosexual cismale. I’m white, from a middle-class family. I am significantly healthier than the norm with an immune system that greets pathogens with “DIE, INTERLOPER” a lot of the time, a body that heals quickly, teeth that have been described by my dentist as being “like rocks” and eyes that still don’t need corrective lenses despite the fact that I’m almost 40. I’m of above-average intelligence. I don’t have any major mental health issues. I don’t have any chronic physical issues at all. All four of my grandparents made it to at least the age of 90 and two of them are still alive. I’m a member of a mainline protestant church. I live in a small, boring town with virtually no crime.  And possibly most outrageously at all, on top of all of that, I have been far more fortunate than I could ever deserve with the quality of people in my life. My parents are two of the kindest, most decent people I have ever known, and I’ve been fortunate to have dozens of wonderful people around me throughout my adult life in particular. I am very, very fortunate.

That privilege has shielded me from a lot of very unpleasant things. It has also probably contributed to a certain sense of moral outrage about what happens to people who don’t have an impenetrable force field of privilege like I do. And one of the things that makes me the very angriest is hearing stories about what happens to women in tabletop gaming spaces.

I’m pretty soundly on the record as being very much in favor of women at the gaming table. Virtually every gaming group I’ve been in has had at least one or two women in it, and therefore it’s never seemed all that odd to me, but apparently this thing that seems obvious to me is not quite so obvious to everyone else. There is a nasty, festering tumor of something that goes beyond mere gatekeeping rotting away at the guts of the hobby. A malign cultural force that tells women and minorities that they are Not Welcome at the gaming table. And it disgusts me.

During the time when we were playing our Shadowrun game as a group, Grant and Krissi had to rely on a suboptimal audio set-up, which meant that the other player and I often couldn’t hear Krissi very well. Around the time we got our D&D game off the ground, they ironed out the audio issues and we can finally hear Krissi clearly now. And that has lead to more than one post-game conversation between the other player and me about what a heartbreaking tragedy it was that we gamed with her for years and didn’t get the full experience. Because Krissi, not to put too fine a point on it, is awesome. She’s an amazing tactical thinker. She rewrites Disney songs with lyrics about our adventuring party. And you don’t have to dig very deep into the blog posts about our game to see what an amazing roleplayer she is – Pulled From the Flames would never have happened without Krissi. The hopefully now-famous “arrow incident” that gave us all such good character development? Also down to Krissi.

And it’s not like Krissi, great as she is, is this rare, exotic creature. Jenny has been a fantastic addition to the hosting staff – Grant and I are both incredibly grateful for the level of experience and fresh perspective she provides. (She’s also great fun to game with, though I’ve only had the pleasure once.) Her own mom, Shannon, started her on gaming before she was even in school and runs amazing con games. Sarah Lynne Bowman has contributed a lot to gamer culture by becoming a serious academic and writing a bunch of very insightful articles (and a book that’s worth your time) about roleplaying. Katrina Ehrnman-Newton came on the show and did a fantastic episode about prophecy with us and routinely comes up with great ideas on the podcasts she does with her husband Kris Newton. Laura, my good friend and occasional editor is a dedicated and really fun gamer – and one I really wish we could add to our group’s regular roster (let’s have a moment of silence for the scheduling issues). Emily Care Boss is one of the most highly-regarded indie game designers working today and is also apparently a wonderful, gracious person. I’ve sat with dozens of other women at gaming tables, and on podcast episodes, and heard them speak about gaming or read what they’ve written about it and it’s all every bit as good as anything a male gamer, podcaster, or writer could produce.

By the way – I don’t have the level of first-hand experience with non-white gamers that I do with women, sadly. That force field of privilege and the social circles that come standard with it keeps good people out sometimes too, much as I wish it weren’t so. But I can point you to the excellent Backstory podcast for more exposure to diverse voices in the hobby (and all the awesome stuff they make and do). But the same principles apply. The conduct I’m angry enough to write an out-of-cycle blog post on sadly gets applied to other minorities, too.

Regardless of whether the person who is being made to feel like an outsider is getting that treatment because of race, gender, or some other consideration, the Christian response is pretty obvious, though: overcome hostility with welcome, and don’t allow that hostility to go unchallenged. See the scripture quote at the top of this post for inspiration, if need be.

I want everyone in this hobby. We need everyone in this hobby. The women and minorities who want to game are as much real gamers as I am. And if I catch you trying to chase off good, decent, well-meaning people who just want to enjoy our wonderful hobby, I will trap you in my force field of privilege and we’re going to have some Words.

This week’s image is from Michael Neel, used under Creative Commons.

Wellsprings of Power

One of the biggest challenges in designing a setting that’s explicitly monotheistic rather than a dualistic setting or one with a pantheon for a system like D&D 5e is “how do you explain everybody’s class abilities?” The problem is especially thorny if you want to leave most or all of the character options on the table; 5e is packed to the gills with character options that rely on a variety of different things.

At the base, at least by my reading, a setting for 5e that’s going to use the full spectrum of character options has to explain the following:

• Where do good clerics and paladins get their spells from?
• Where do evil clerics and paladins get their spells from?
• Where do nature-oriented spellcasters like druids and rangers get their spells from?
• Where do arcane spellcasters like wizards, bards, and sorcerers get their spells from?
• Where do warlocks get their pacts from?
• What is the origin of angelic beings?
• What is the origin of fiends?
• What is the origin of aberrations?
• What is the origin of undead?

Primeval Antiquity

I don’t have a super-detailed creation story just yet, but here are the broad strokes. God, the Creator is the ultimate source of everything and is a loving, benevolent, merciful God as we in Christianity understand God to be. Because the world isn’t Earth, there are some different assumptions in the creation story, however.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. -Genesis 1:1-2 (ESV)

The very initial part of creation maps pretty closely to the earliest parts of Genesis: first there was Nothing, God decided there should be Something and set about creating it. And for a long time (hard to say how long because time itself hadn’t been implemented yet) God was the only life and the only intelligence in all of Creation.

The first thinking beings created were the angels. Initially, they functioned as a sort of divine administrative staff, overseeing different aspects of creation. Though free willed, they were in the direct presence of God and worked with God in the later stages of creation. This was the point in the story where magic entered the picture – God provided power above the natural laws to aid in the building and maintenance of creation to the angels. Think of magic as the source code of reality or the factory and tools used to build and maintain it.

The second batch of intelligent created beings were the fey. They were a creation of a bunch of the higher orders of angels and were tied to the natural world. They were less powerful and wilder than the angels, but ultimately good as well. Inspired by their own creation, they made their own realm, a land of vibrant natural beauty known as The Feywild.

The next group to be created were the mighty dragons, a joint project of angels and the fey.

Finally, God created the mortal races and gave them free will as well, desiring the companionship of those who had a choice in the matter.

God and the angels deliberately left the clues necessary to work a limited form of magic in the world – this was known as “mortal magic” and is still in the world during the setting’s present – it is the magic practiced by wizards, sorcerers, bards, and other arcane spellcasters.

And everything hummed along beautifully for a while until one of the angels, now known as The Adversary, got a little too full of himself.

A Wrench in the Gears

The exact identity and responsibilities of the monstrous being of pure evil now known as The Adversary prior to his fall are known only to God and his former angelic contemporaries, but at some point, one of the first and most powerful angels rebelled and was cast down from heaven. As he fell, he and his co-conspirators were warped by their evil into the first fiends. The raw supernatural release also formed a twisted inverse of Heaven – a nightmarish plane of suffering and torment known as Hell. Sealed off from Heaven, the fiends turned Hell into a base of operations and set about trying to corrupt mortals, dragons, and fey alike. They achieved some measure of success. The fey split into two courts, one devoted to God and one to The Adversary and mortals, tempted by power, also fell victim to corruption. Some of the dragons became corrupted as well, their beautiful metallic scales fading to colored ones.

Some of The Fallen tried to create their own, new fey, but this failed disastrously. Later attempts to create new dragons had similarly-disastrous results. Instead of the wild, natural beings that existed in harmony with creation, the new beings were unnatural, twisted creatures of pure madness – the first Aberrations. The first of these beings created their own strange realms of madness and horror and retreated to them, emerging only occasionally, but always with malign effect.

And things were really ugly for a while. The mortals were pulled into the savage, multi-sided conflict and with only stone-to-bronze-age technology to work with and very little healing magic available to arcane casters, casualties were horrific for mortals. It was around this time that God anointed the first mortal clerics. Allowed to channel the pure, restorative, redemptive power given to them by God, they healed the wounded and sick, carried light into darkness and fought valiantly against evil.

The Adversary, desperate to keep up, created his own sinister copies, but while they were still effective, they lacked the restorative power of good clerics. (The specific differences will be explained in a later post.) Their disastrous attempts to replicate the life-restoring magic of the good clerics created the first undead, horrible perversions of once-living beings.

The fey, desiring to aid their respective sides in the conflict, empowered the first druids. Members of all factions started creating special mortal agents, giving rise to the first warlocks. (Certain very powerful beings, namely Archangels, Archfiends, Fey Lords and Elder Things in addition to the odd ancient undead or dragon are like pitchers of magical energy filling up from the bottom. At some point, they can’t hold any more, but they can give the overflow to someone else to use.)

Various orders of clerics and druids began to train more martial warriors, giving rise to paladins and rangers, respectively. The Church and its holy orders began to specialize in different types of holy power, and The Adversary’s cults began to do the same, albeit still as a shadow of the true clerics of God.

And a sort of equilibrium settled onto the world. Magic settled into predictable patterns and technology began to advance. Empires and nation states rose and fell. Prophets and kings contended with maledictors and tyrants for the collective soul of the mortal realm. Ages have passed, with their own history and events, but magic and its sources have stayed constant for untold millennia.

And that is where the setting the PCs will enter sits.

Playlist:

This Means War! by Petra

Peter

I’m pretty squarely on the record as finding playing evil characters to be distasteful. I think the main reason for that is I experience a lot of “bleed” and when I do something horrible to an undeserving party, even in a fictional context, I often experience very real guilt and remorse even though I know I was doing something fictional. I can detach more easily as a GM for some reason, but the one time I really tried an evil PC as a player still doesn’t sit terribly well with me, and it was over a decade ago. This makes playing “nasty characters” an unpleasant, stressful experience for me. However, I know there are lots of other folks who enjoy exploring more diverse character types, but still don’t want to actually hurt the people they’re playing with. With that in mind, I heartily recommend this article. It’s primarily aimed at LARP players, but I think a lot of the advice will be perfectly applicable to tabletop players and GMs. (There is some cursing in the article, just as an FYI.)

In this article, I will address some things to keep in mind when playing certain types of characters: villains, cruel bastards, heartless manipulators, unsympathetic types, mighty evil overlords or schoolyard bullies. For simplicity’s sake, I will just call them nasty characters. You might want to play such characters for various reasons, because the story needs an evil emperor as well as heroic rebels, or because you want to explore the psychology behind cruel actions. Or perhaps just because it’s a fun acting challenge.

More Richard Beck from me is hardly a surprise, but this little post is one of my favorite things he’s ever written and I find it incredibly profound, because the problem he describes is one I have with regularity.

I’ve noticed that, whenever we face hard choices and decisions, we tend to gravitate to the question “What is the right to do?”

More and more I’ve come to the conclusion that, as human beings, we rarely know what is the right thing to do. There are no guarantees. We cannot see into the future. There are things we may be missing.

Today (Friday, February 2nd) is Groundhog Day, and in honor of the movie by the same name (which was shot in Woodstock, IL, the town I grew up in!) And in honor of that, I share this very interesting and insightful article about what makes it such a unique, interesting, and good movie.

Groundhog Day succeeds as a film because of the way it plays with, subverts, and outright mocks the tropes of each of the genres it flirts with. While some people would call it a time travel movie, or a movie about small town America, or the most spiritual film of all time, or a rom-com, it is by breaking the rules of each of those types of films that it ultimately transcends genre entirely.

Jenny

I spent a large part of the middle school years playing flash games on various websites across the internet. One of my favourite ones was about a ninja making his way across a city to defeat his former master. If I recall correctly, it was a platformer featuring a grappling hook-based movement system. This game, Dandara, looks like it has a similar movement system, and also looks more challenging, and also looks like it’s about taking out an evil dictator, which I am all for. It’s coming out on February 6th, and I am very happy about it.

Dandara puts an interesting twist on your usual side-scrolling platformer. The titular heroine, Dandara, doesn’t actually walk or run, she jumps everywhere, clinging to walls, ceilings, and floors. Ricocheting through levels, you’ll encounter enemies and unlock attacks and secrets along the way. Combined with the topsy-turvy level design and a hectic environment, it’s highly exploratory and looks like a ton of fun to play.

One of the soapboxes I will probably die on is my Affordable and Efficient Housing soapbox. I don’t want to get onto that soapbox right now, but I do want to say that I think Rev. Faith Fowler of Detroit is doing a great job of showing how the church can do charitable works that last beyond a few meals, and contribute positively to communities in need of shelter. Here’s an article about how her church’s charity is building tiny, rent-to-own houses for homeless individuals.

The seven tiny houses that dot the northwest Detroit street of Elmhurst are charming and unique. Each seems to have a personality.
While the batch of homes has become something of a mecca for architecturally curious tourists, their purpose goes far deeper than a trend.
The houses aim is to help low-income people, and specifically, formerly homeless individuals, attain an asset and begin to accrue wealth.

It is generally held to be a truth of gaming culture that gaming stories have a time and a place, and that time and place is generally during game night, with the party from which the story originated, and nowhere else. But every now and then, you come across the perfect group, or the perfect game, or the perfect story, and something magical happens, and you end up with a gaming story worth spreading. Such seems to be the case with Record of Lodoss War and its spin-offs, which are the anime and manga product of a long-term D&D campaign.

If you’re a long-time anime fan, you probably did a bit of a double-take at this season’s Record of Grancrest War. The title, and the setup, are more than a little like the now-classic Record of Lodoss War. And for good reason: both are the creation of writer Ryo Mizuno, and both — while in different universes — have a similar adventure flavor to them.
But there’s one more thing they have in common: they’re both built up from tabletop campaigns. Because not only is Mizuno a writer, he’s also an RPG developer and a Dungeon Master. With that in mind, let’s dive back into the earliest history of Record of Lodoss War: past Spark, past Parn and Deedlit, all the way back to a D&D game back in the mid-1980s.

Grant

These aren’t reading, but I’m still gonna recommend them! We’ve never had him on the show, but Hawke Robinson has been working on research into roleplaying games and their therapeutic uses since 1983. The founder of RPGResearch.com, Hawke’s got a ton to say about the subject and is a great resource. He’s also the guest on the latest episode of Dragon Talk, the ‘official’ D&D podcast from Wizards of the Coast. If you’re interested in the topic, I strongly recommend listening to it! In a similar vein, the Min/Max Podcast has been doing a series they’re calling ‘#MedicineCheck’ on gaming and mental health, in a somewhat broader sweep than we’ve done on our show. Episode 32 features Dr. Marsha Vaughn; Episode 33 features Rev. Dr. Cindy Wallace; and Episode 34 features longtime friend of the show Jack Berkenstock. Those three episodes are all well worth your time too.

I’m still a little bit shocked by the recent death of Ursula K. Le Guin. I haven’t read quite everything she’s written, but everything I have read has been powerful, and each work left me changed—always for the better. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, I can think of no better place to start than her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which can be found in its full text online. It displays in full her crisp, stark voice, powerful in its simplicity. I cannot recommend it enough, nor her other works.

[…] They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. […]

Finally, I recommend this article in The Guardian: “Prize launched for thrillers that avoid sexual violence against women”. The prize is funded by author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless, to counter this common, exploitative trope:

The Staunch book prize will disqualify any work that does not meet its criteria of no woman in the story being “beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”. It is open to stories across the thriller genre – crime, psychological, comedy and mysteries – and to traditionally published, self-published and not-yet-published works.

“I’m certainly not alone in getting increasingly fed up and disgusted with fictional depictions of violence happening to women in books, films and television. It echoes, exaggerates, fetishises and normalises what happens to women in the real world. But I know there are writers creating thrilling and complex work without going there,” she writes on the prize’s website. […]

Lawless acknowledged that not all thrillers depicting crimes against women are gratuitous or exploitative. “Of course, there are [good thrillers tackling this topic] but they are not for this prize,” she said. “How we see women depicted and treated in fiction does spread out to the wider world and how women are treated there. That battle is far from won, but there is definitely a climate change. People are fed up with it. Here’s my alternative.”

 Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. -Galatians 6:2 (ESV)

If there is one thing the Cleric class in D&D is good at, it’s keeping bad things from happening. Clerics get spells that heal injury, provide nourishing food and clean water, cleanse the body of poisons and disease, and erect protective wards. They can do all of this while wearing armor and carrying a shield. That generally means that if saving is happening and Lambert (my cleric PC) is in the situation, he’s probably the one doing the saving of some other party from something. He’s probably spent far more time casting spells that create food and water than is anywhere near the norm for clerics in D&D games, but because he’s had the ability to do so, the colony has benefited enormously. As I discussed in the post about Horvu, having just a few adventurers has made a massive difference for the colony.

This last session, however, Lambert desperately needed someone to save him and the other PCs stepped up in a big way.

To understand the magnitude of what actually happened, we need to back up a bit, though.

A few sessions back, after we cleared out a mine filled with a troll, a bunch of gricks, some grells, and various nasty forms of fungus, we opened a box full of magic items we’d found and inside was a sword. Aster already had a magic sword, and Garm preferred to use axes, so Lambert took the sword, since thanks to a feat I took during character creation, he’s proficient with it. And that was that … except it wasn’t. Grant pulled me aside for a private conversation after the session and explained the sword was a cursed item. Specifically, it was a Sword of Vengeance. A Sword of Vengeance has two primary effects. The first is it basically forces the person with it to use it. Using any other weapon requires you to roll at disadvantage, and the person attuned to it will feel compelled to keep it on their person. The second is that it influences anyone wielding it to basically fight an enemy who damages them to the death. Getting rid of the curse is as simple as casting the Remove Curse spell. As cursed items go, it’s fairly simple in mechanical terms.

However, cursed items like this are more fun if you lean into the narrative potential of them rather than stripping them down to mechanics. Or rather, they are when you know you can trust your group. If you’re current on the podcast, this will probably sound familiar. That’s because we discussed this exact item and the stuff around it back in Episode 121 and Episode 122. In fact, that the events of this post could happen at all are a testament to how much less battered our group has gotten over time. In any case, as I’ve mentioned before, Lambert, for all of his kindness, patience, and compassion, has a bit of a vengeful streak. The “flaw” entry on his character sheet reads “When the lowly are oppressed, justice must be uncompromising. (Lambert essentially becomes LN in his attitude toward you if you’re oppressing people.)” That flaw has come up with the Grungs and Auntie Bloat in particular. He tends to lose it when he finds flagrant, ongoing cruelty in the world. And that was just the handhold an evil sword needed to start twisting his behavior.

The changes were small, at first. Lambert started to get less uncomfortable with potentially violent situations and then started to take on some of the traits of a violent zealot, suggesting “cutting their way” through the gnolls to Fort Formidable whenever it was located, which was jarring to not just the PCs, but Governor Warwick as well. At first, the other PCs (both Chaotic Neutral) were fine with this. Some jokes about the “new and improved Lambert” got thrown around. But as the situation progressed, things got creepier. I mentioned eerie whispers coming from somewhere and described Lambert’s twisted, vicious expressions of anger on a couple of occasions. This, as I’d hoped, unsettled the other PCs. They started to get an inkling of what was going on, but didn’t act on it … until a bunch of vicious seagull-person berserkers forced their hand.

It’s important to note something here: the party is level 6. We are not a bunch of lightweights at this point – and so eight CR 1/8 Gull Berserkers and a CR 3 Gull Warleader (see the stats to the right) should have been a walk in the park. The party has gone up against far more dangerous enemies and prevailed pretty handily. In particular, the troll was a much, much nastier foe on paper than the Gulls were. Although, as it turned out, not more horrifying. See, Grant’s setting has the New World largely populated by “animal people” races. So far we’ve run across Kenku (raven people), Tabaxi (cat people), Lizardfolk (iguana people), Minotaurs (cow people), Grungs (frog people), Sahuagin (shark people), and we know Gnolls (Hyena people) are also in the world, though we haven’t encountered any directly yet. So when we stumbled upon what looked like a white Kenku on a small island we ran across during our search for the other colony, we assumed that what we were looking at was some kind of exotic Kenku albino who had been living alone on the small island. Lambert cast Tongues and hailed the individual in greeting.

And that was about the time we realized our error.

Kenku are based on corvids – and not to put too fine a point on it, but corvids are really cool birds. In my opinion, they are up there in the running with raptors for the coolest type of bird, in fact. They’re incredibly smart, to the point where you can actually befriend them, and they’ll do their best to reciprocate! The Kenku in Aua are no exception to this general rule. They’ve been good neighbors with the colony, they were allies against Auntie Bloat, and have just generally been nice to have around.

You can probably see where this is going. Seagulls are nasty, greedy, vicious, and nowhere near as smart as corvids are. And so one really couldn’t expect much better from humanoids based on them … which is good, because we didn’t get it. They came at us in a bloodthirsty, screeching mob determined to make the newly arrived organic matter into food. (Gulls, by the way, are a creation of Grant’s, at least on a flavor level. We found out after the session that they were just a re-skin and a few slight adjustments to the NPC foes in the back of the monster manual.)

Here’s how this sort of fight has typically gone down in the past: Aster (the rogue) runs off to one side and vanishes from sight, where she can start picking enemies off from the shadows with her sneak attacks. Garm (the fighter) pulls out his wand of Lightning Bolt and takes out any enemies that have been unfortunate enough to line up in some way, switching to his axe when they get close. And Lambert, depending on the strength of the opposition, starts by casting Bless, then possibly follows up with Spiritual Weapon and/or Spirit Guardians. (The latter will require him to drop Bless, but it makes up for it by doing automatic damage and slowing down enemies that get too close.) And then he generally casts healing spells whenever someone gets down to less than about half their hit points or so. The rest of the time, he uses a melee weapon and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Garm and tries to keep enemies off of Aster who has a lower armor class and fewer hit points. It’s a tactical template that has served the party well for many an encounter, especially since we don’t have an arcane caster or druid to do crowd control and damage magic.

That’s not how this combat went down, though. Oh, it started that way. Aster managed to get into some cover and Garm immediately took out three hostiles in one shot from the lightning wand. Then the Gull warleader managed to tag Lambert with a throwing axe, and Lambert failed the saving throw against the sword’s vengeful combat effect. At that point, he started trying to be a fighter, which did not work out at ALL. It didn’t help that I was rolling HORRIBLY during that session. I rolled dice 16 times over the course of the session, rolling a total of 18 dice.

Out of those 18 dice, I rolled eight values of 1 or 2, and only got above 10 on d20 rolls twice. In fact, if you want to see just how badly I was rolling, I direct your attention to the log at the left. It really was pretty horrific – I don’t think I can remember a night where the dice were more unkind to me than this past session. As awful as it was to roll so poorly, it definitely contributed to the overall feeling of things having gone wrong, and being unable to do basically anything effectively definitely ratcheted up the tension and frustration, which was serendipitous, but appropriate.

Normally, rolling badly isn’t such a huge deal for Lambert. If he’s having trouble tagging an enemy in melee, he just leans on his spellcasting and that sees the party through nicely; the reason this works is that spells go off automatically and put the onus on the other side to start rolling well in the form of saving throws to reduce damage or avoid detrimental effects. But because Lambert was a frothing, violently-flailing ball of rage due to the sword, he couldn’t do that, and the Gulls were rolling with advantage due to swarming in and getting an extra 1d4 added onto their attack rolls because of the warleader … who Lambert was fixated on, to the exclusion of the Gull who slipped around behind him and was jabbing away at him with a spear for 5 damage a round.

If Lambert had been able to do anything except swing ineffectually at the Gull leader – even turning around to get the other one off of him – the fight might have gone differently. But it didn’t. Garm was rolling better than he was, but he was also getting whittled down gradually, and Aster was looking at the whole situation with mounting dread. By this point, Garm and Aster knew something was wrong, because on any other day, Lambert would have cast something by now. Probably several somethings.

And then Aster did one of the most selfless and gutsy things she’s done all campaign long. She charged into the melee with Lambert and Garm, grabbed Lambert by the shoulders and screamed “Lambert! Healing!” at him. He broke out of the berserk fugue state (that’s the 12 above – he has a pretty insane Wisdom save modifier at +8), fired off a healing spell that can be cast as a bonus action … and was promptly cut down where he stood. It’s also worth noting that Krissi (Aster’s player) resorted to the grab-and-scream tactic after Grant informed her that Aster couldn’t throw herself in the path of a spear meant for Lambert. Aster is not particularly disposed toward acts of heroism. As I mentioned in a previous post, she comes from a world where she really didn’t have that luxury.

At this point, I thought I was going to be rolling up a new PC. Fortunately, the 5e rules aren’t quite as brutal as I thought at the time. You actually have to fail three death saves to actually die when you get cut down like that. But Lambert was out of the fight. Aster and Garm ultimately prevailed against the Gulls – Garm decided to stop messing around and blasted the gull leader with the lightning wand at point-blank range for 10d6 damage, and they were able to mop up pretty quickly after that. They both went into save-the-cleric mode and managed to get Lambert back to consciousness and 1 hit point, which he responded to by casting his most powerful healing spell – twice. And rolled poorly on that, too. (See entries 14 and 15 of the rolling log.) At that point Aster heard more Gulls off in the distance and decided it was time to go. The party swam back to the boat, but not so quickly that they didn’t see more gulls dragging their own fallen off to be eaten. Have I mentioned how terrible those things were?

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. -Philippians 2:3-4 (ESV)

That was the end of the encounter, but not of the session.

Back on the ship, Aster and Garm, who had figured out what was going on by now, waited for Lambert to fall asleep and promptly stuffed the offending sword in Aster’s Bag of Holding. When he woke up, they staged an intervention, and Aster guilted him by informing him that not only had he almost died, Garm almost had as well. That was enough for Lambert to get ahold of himself, and he used one of this daily spell slots to cast Remove Curse after which the sword went right back in the bag. When the party levels up to level 7, Lambert will gain access to the Banishment spell which will be able to “fix” the sword, driving the vengeful spirit out of it. Even so, after what happened with the sword, there’s a good chance they still won’t keep it. The colony owes 1/5th of all the magic items they find back to the mainland as taxes. I think that sword may be part of the first tax collection. Magic can make something safe to use again, but it won’t wash away bad memories.

More importantly, that wasn’t where things ended. Lambert was understandably pretty shaken up by the events that led to the breaking of the sword’s curse, and spent the better part of the day just staring out at the sea. Aster broke her normal rule about keeping people at arm’s length and briefly went up next to him and laid her head on his shoulder, which was the first time she’d done something like that. Both she and Garm kept others on the boat from bothering Lambert while he processed what had happened. Eventually he composed himself enough to thank them – they had, after all, saved him twice in one day. The events of this session will probably inform the PCs’ relationships with one another for the rest of the game.

I’m pretty consistently on the record as someone who requires good alignments from PCs when I’m in the GM’s chair. A lot of the time, even neutral PCs will do awful stuff that I don’t want to put up with. However, I’m also on the record that if I really trust you, the player, that rule has some wiggle room. The members of our current gaming group have earned that wiggle room.

A lot of the time, Chaotic Neutral is the “table troublemaker” alignment. People who want to troll the GM or other players, want to be able to act impulsively without justifying their actions or the damage they cause, and folks who want to steal from other party members and otherwise just mess with the experience of the game will often take Chaotic Neutral as their alignment. That has consistently not been a problem in this game, because both Aster and Garm are played by decent, mature human beings. We’ve also made the genuine friendship and respect among the party members something of a running theme in the game. They may not always agree on how to do things, but they are genuinely loyal to one another. In a lot of other games, the two CN characters would have left the NG cleric to die and been glad to be rid of the nuisance. But that’s not who Aster and Garm are.

When the chips were down, instead of running away, they ran through (metaphorical) fire to pull their friend from the flames.

Over the last three posts, I’ve been working my way through the various broad classifications of area in my setting; the untamed areas known as The Wilds, the peaceful bastions of benign civilization known as The Counties, and now it’s time to talk about the races found in the oppressive Grim Cities.

The term “Grim City” is a catch-all term for areas where evil is dominant. Because I’m leaning into themes of oppression and industrialism for my villains in the setting, that means that a lot of the areas where they hold sway will be urban – oppressed populations held down by force and misery, toiling away in service to cruel masters. That isn’t to say there’s nothing bad anywhere else in the world, or that the well-worn trope of a small town rules by sinister forces can’t exist. But Grim City is short and pithy and at this stage in my work on the setting, it’s good enough for what I’m trying to do.

The Children of Malevolence

In order for me to consider a playable race to be associated with the Grim Cities, it has to be from one such area or concentrated there. That does not necessarily mean that every member of these races (or even most of them!) are evil or dangerous. It’s just that in this world, for one reason or another, these races are unfortunate enough to be found in these realms of despair more than anywhere else.

Goblinoids are split into three distinct races: Goblins, Hobgoblins, and Bugbears. All three are statted out on page 119 of Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Goblinoids are, by accident or design, very likely to be found in Grim Cities. They may be minions or overlords, and some have even shaken off the influence of the Grim Lords and become members of various resistances. Their history goes back a long way, but at some point, the records just … stop. This has left the three related races unsure of their heritage and forces them to focus on the present rather than trying to live into some ancient cultural identity. Records of such an identity, if they still exist, might be an interesting macguffin for an adventure.

Kobolds are also found on page 119 of Volo’s Guide and, as in most settings, tend to gravitate toward dragons. They are often seen as the minions of powerful draconic overlords, but they can also be encountered in their own communities. Their quickness and small size makes them canny scouts and infiltrators.

Minotaurs are found on page 13 of Midgard Heroes by Kobold Press. They are an artificial race in this setting, created initially as super-soldiers for some long-dead Grim Lord. They have since been absorbed into a number of other societies. Because they are physically-powerful, they’re often used as enforcers or heavy labor, and tend to have hard lives.

Mummies appear on page 3 of the Dark Arts Player’s Companion. They are the most common form of self-aware undead and they do not have to be evil. Sometimes they are created as a form of punishment, sometimes they are leftovers from some bygone age and awakened accidentally. And some are old enough not to remember their own origins. A few are genuinely-heroic, being leftovers from an ancient empire that set them as guardians over terrible things they didn’t want finding their way back into the world. (Think of Tal Rasha from Diablo II.)

Wights on the other hand (they appear on page 4 of the Dark Arts Player’s Companion) are almost always bad news. A form of undead created through sheer stubborn malevolence, they tend to be vicious, murderous, and extremely violent. Still, not everyone who starts terrible stays that way. Redemption is possible even for the truly fallen. It’s not something one should count on, especially with wights, but sometimes an individual will surprise you. Maybe.

Dhampir, which appear on page 7 of Unlikely Heroes by Kobold Press, are associated with the darkness through no fault of their own. These offspring of vampires and living mortals have a rough time of it almost from the jump, and due to the fact that vampires don’t tend to do particularly well in The Wilds or The Counties unless they are exceptionally smart and lucky, Dhampir are a phenomenon of the Grim Cities. Much like Tieflings, they don’t have to be bad, but they do tend to make people nervous.

Tosculi, also known as waspfolk, are found on page 7 of Southlands Heroes by kobold Press. They are originally from Alchova, the Great Hive, and almost all of them are still there, serving as enforcers of the terrifying insectoid overlords of that place. They are usually bad news and only semi-individual, but some have broken free of the hive mind.

Gearforged can be found on page 7 of Midgard Heroes. A mechanical body animated by a formerly-living soul, they are somewhat analogous to undead. The crazed and twisted magic necessary to create them is a product of the Grim Cities and a recent one at that.

And with that, we’re done with this sub-series on the playable races of the setting. The next thing I’m planning on tackling is the setting’s cosmology, and I imagine that will probably require at least a couple of posts to get through. In the meantime, as always, I welcome any feedback or discussion that you have.

Playlist:
The Last Fight by Bullet For My Valentine – this is one of those songs that can be interpreted in a number of ways, but it seems like most of them would be appropriate for a hero that comes from a Grim City.

This post is the third part in what’s likely to be a four-part sub-series on the playable races of the setting. As with last post, this focuses on one of the specific categories of area found in the campaign world.

Like The Wilds, the classification of The Counties isn’t so much a specific location as a type of place. The Counties are places where things are generally good – people have enough to survive without having to work 12+ hour days, air and water are clean, communities care for each other, and authority isn’t tyrannical and crushing. Religion is charitable and kind, uncorrupted and practiced for its own sake rather than for some political end or as a means of power. Everyone has shelter and food.

The Counties aren’t perfect, but they are nice places to live. As I’ve mentioned before, my big touchstone for The Counties is Pelican Town from Stardew Valley. They have kind of an old-timey vibe to them, recalling an idealized past that’s really a patchwork of the best parts of many different eras. They also tend to be places where the mundane and the fantastic live side-by-side.

Ordinary People of Extraordinary Heritage

Many of the denizens of The Counties are familiar fantasy standbys like human, elves, and dwarves. However, these “mundane” fantasy races are joined by a number of more exotic and fantastical ones that nevertheless fit into the general feeling of benevolent civilization.

Aaracockra appear on page 4 of the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion. They’re a benevolent race of flying bird-people who remind me a bit of the Avens from various Magic: the Gathering worlds. They are described as valuing peace and solitude and also aren’t typically motivated by gold or glory. (Or, as I’d prefer to put it, Greed or Pride.) A bunch of trustworthy eagle-people living up on the cliffs by a settlement of land-dwelling races just seems too cool to pass up, though, and I don’t really consider a flight speed that doesn’t include hovering capability as that much of a problem in a game world with cars and planes.

Centaurs can be found on page 3 of Midgard Heroes by Kobold Press and they’re such a staple fantasy race that I was relieved that someone had come up with stats for them or I’d have had to do it myself. One thing that’s been a fun thought exercise for me is imagining what vehicle and building design looks like in an are where centaurs are a normal part of the population! That centaur farmer might be capable of pulling a plow on their own, but they will still want a tractor just as badly as a human does. What about cars, trucks, and buses? How do those look different to accommodate centaur physiology? And I’m enamored with the idea of a centaur postal carrier.

Aasimar show up on page 104 of Volo’s Guide to Monsters. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to handle them, lore-wise. I’m currently leaning toward Aasimar being creatures who are made, not born. Back in 3.5e, there was a supplement put out by Fantasy Flight Games that included a race called The Luminous that I completely re-skinned as a race of returned saints – people who had served a good deity faithfully in life but had died with a desire to do more and were sent back to guide more normal mortals after some time in that god’s realm. Since this is a more monotheistic setting, I am leaning more toward them being a sort of “anti-corruption” – lengthy, constant exposure to good magic, upright living, and acts of goodness may sometimes shape a normal person into Something More.

Tritons appear on page 115 of Volo’s Guide. They seem like they’d be fun in the same way as Aaracockra will be – good neighbors who live in an exotic environment somewhere nearby. Tritons bring up some similar questions to centaurs. With a common aquatic race around, how have vehicles adapted to accommodate them? Do buses have a “triton tank” in the back? Do Tritons have special areas in their communities for air-breathing vistors? Tritons also bring up the possibility of direct confrontation with Scary Things From The Deep, so there’s also that.

Feyblood can be found on page 47 of Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else. They’re kind of a faerie version of an Aasimar or Tiefling. The idea of fey intermingling (and possibly even intermarrying) with mortal races isn’t all that odd, and communities in The Counties will probably enjoy solid relations with good fey communities in their regions, so feyblood feel like about as much of a stretch as half-elves, which is to say “near inevitability” rather than “bizarre aberration.”

That’s it for the “exotic” residents of The Counties. Next time, I’ll discuss some of the races found primarily in the Grim Cities and that should cap off my setting’s playable racial options unless I pick something new up and it gives me more ideas that I don’t want to leave on the proverbial table. Until then, I’m always interested in feedback and discussion.

As always, the full series can be found here.

As I work through the playable races in the setting, I’ll be grouping them by where they are most likely to be found. In the last post, I covered the PHB races (minus Halflings and Drow, which won’t appear in the setting). In this week’s post, I’m moving on to supplemental material. I tend to lean on already-published material from both first- and third-party sources when world building, and this time will be no different.

I’ll be organizing this post and the next ones in the same series by region type. As I mentioned last time, there are three general “classes” of region I’m working with, at least initially. There are the Grim Cities, The Counties, and The Wilds. This post will cover the races found in The Wilds as their primary home. The Wilds is a catch-all term for untamed, uncivilized natural areas, regardless of specific climate. It isn’t a specific place, but rather a type of place.

Guardians of the Forest

The Wilds have both benign and sinister sides – let’s focus on the benign first. These races are generally friendly and welcoming toward outsiders and tend to only be dangerous if you’re doing something they feel they need to stop. All of them include individuals that deviate from the norm, of course, but as a general rule, you can typically count on these groups to be good neighbors and helpful to adventurers, if not adventurers themselves.

Firbolg are found on page 107 of Volo’s Guide to Monsters. They’re big, beefy humanoids that tend strongly toward goodness and have some limited ability to communicate with nature directly. They’re as good a place to start as any, and are definitely in the setting. I’ll probably even keep the tribal/clan structure. I like the idea of clans of nature guardians that will still help people out, and the somewhat exotic nature of their appearance when contrasted with the other races helps drive home the remoteness of the area they live in, or at least it could. They’ll generally try to keep civilization at arm’s length, but tend to be civil and peaceful about it unless given no other choice. Many Firbolg clans will negotiate mutually-beneficial agreements with communities in The Counties. They have no patience at all for the rapaciousness of the Grim Cities, however, and will fight like cornered animals against their minions.

Alseid are found on page 3 of Midgard Heroes by Kobold Press, and they’re best described as “deer-taurs.” They’re smaller and sneaker than centaurs, and have antlers and the body of a deer rather than the body of a horse. They’re also described as being nature guardians. Unlike the beefy, powerful Firbolg, they’re fast and stealthy. There’s a lot of room for a more individualistic nature guardian here – and the racial speed and stealth lend themselves to interesting class choices. On the one hand, one could lean into the speed and stealth and go with something like a Rogue or Ranger, but you could also make a pretty amazing Fighter or Barbarian, and a more fragile primary spellcaster like a Warlock or Sorcerer would probably benefit a lot from some sneakiness and the ability to “kite” enemies around. Alseid will either protect a relatively small area or will go on the road as adventurers, proactively taking steps to curtain the destruction of the natural world.

Orcs are statted out on page 120 of Volo’s guide. I’m kind of sick of them as bloodthirsty raiders, so I’ve decided to go a different route. Orcs are more like herding tribesmen – they’re tough and solid and you definitely don’t want to pick a fight with one for no reason, but on the other hand, they’re also not a bunch of bloodthirsty savages. These big, hardy people are mostly found in hilly or mountainous areas. They raise sheep, goats, and alpacas, depending on the local climate. Physically-speaking, they look much more like the orcs from the recent movie Bright than the ones depicted in the Monster Manual. There’s a surprisingly-active wizard culture among them. Orcish wizards tend to use layered sheets of hide draped over their bodies as a spellbook. Culture-wise, they’re semi-nomadic, moving through a circuit of about 3 areas over the course of a year. They aren’t so much nature guardians as nature dwellers. While they prefer a more remote and peaceful home to one closer to civilization, they’ll either adapt or move, rather than working against the spread of technological civilization into their lands.

Kenku appear starting on page 110 of Volo’s Guide. Honestly, after having played in Grant’s game for a while, I can hardly imagine not having them. However, they are also very metal. The black feathers and long beak, combined with the hooded garb they like to wear, evokes the image of a plague doctor. Culturally, they operate similarly to the Orcs; they generally prefer to live in remote areas and mostly keep to themselves.

Silva are described starting on page 3 of the Sprouting Chaos Player’s Companion. They are a humanoid plant race, and have some odd traits, like their ability to substitute 4 hours of sunbathing (and the photosynthetic processes that enables) for 8 hours of sleep and some food. Like Alseids, I view these folks as solitary and probably also driven at least somewhat by curiosity.

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

Nature also has a predatory side. Members of these races won’t necessarily be evil, but they tend to be more difficult to deal with than the ones above; where an Orc or a Firbolg will invite you in to share a meal and get to know you if you approach them as a friendly party, the races below may try to drive you off or may even look at you as food. Others may simply hide and try to avoid notice. Once again, though – members of these races are individuals and won’t all conform to some cultural stereotype.

Awakened Blights can be found starting on page 5 of the Sprouting Chaos Player’s Companion. They are just what they sound like – twig, needle, or vine blights that have been awakened to a higher level of intelligence. Unfortunately, this increased intelligence usually doesn’t change their disposition much. As products of evil magic, they do tend to be pretty nasty by default, and often enforce territory by killing interlopers. Fortunately, they tend to be loners or operate in small groups of 2-4.

Lizardfolk appear on page 111 of Volo’s guide. They aren’t so much hostile as just very alien in their thinking. Very deadpan and emotionless, they also are very low on empathy. If they’re hungry and a creature, even an intelligent one, might make a good meal, there’s a solid chance that creature will become food. They tend to band together in large groups and work well as a team, but their cold-bloodedness makes it hard to call them friends or allies. That same lack of emotion makes them very straightforward, however – most lizardfolk don’t see a lot of utility in being manipulative or subtle.

Shadar-Kai are described on page 6 of the Dark Arts Player’s Companion. They are a creepy, death-infused bunch that live out in the wilds. They are known to have dealings with the Grim Cities, often as mercenaries, but have very strong cultural taboos against tolerating the undead, which makes them somewhat choosy about which Grim Lords they will work for. They tend to work in small strike teams when employed as mercenaries, and these same teams make up patrols or hunting bands around their homelands. They are not very welcoming and will often kill others they come across without warning or stated reason.

Naga are found on page 21 of Planeshift: Amonkhet. Not to be mistaken for the Yuan-Ti (whom they despise) the naga are still dangerous folks to be approached with caution. Their arid homes are harsh and dangerous, and naga are used to fighting for their own survival. Many of them are suspicious of newcomers and wary of changes in their environment, and between their natural weapons and sudden bursts of speed, they can be absolutely lethal in a confrontation. They can be good, loyal friends to those they find trustworthy, but earning their trust isn’t easy. Unlike the description in the book, naga in the setting are honor-focused and gravitate slightly lawful alignments.

Playlist:

Life Finds a Way by Hellion Prime – the one and only song I know of about natural selection. Fun and catchy, but not what I’d call “deep.” Still, points for using a Jurassic Park quote?
Fury of the Wild – a pretty standard (by which I mean fun and awesome) Hammerfall song. Lots of fantasy theming – would work well as a theme song for a barbarian.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

What in the world is “Horvu” you ask? A reasonable question, to be sure. Horvu is a week-long festival/holiday celebrated by the kenku in Grant’s D&D game. It didn’t exist until the session we had on January 6, but odds are good that it’s going to inform the setting for some time to come.

To fully explain why, we need to back up a bit. The original colony mission had two ships, the Brazen and the Formidable. The PCs were all onboard the Brazen. During the final leg of the journey from the Old World to the New World, the ships were separated in a violent storm and lost touch with one another. The Brazen, with the PC group, ran aground on some sandbars just off the coast of the island the colony has been established on. The presence of the PCs has paid off enormously for the colony. Between the various party members, we have ability to identify what’s safe to eat, keep food and water stores stocked and safe via magic, scout things that may be dangerous unseen, and drive attacking saguagin back into the sea. We can heal the sick, take down large, dangerous threats, and engage in peaceful diplomacy.

In addition, the island the Brazen landed on is, by and large, a pretty nice place. The fishing is good, there is plentiful food on land (some of it very appetizing and some of it less so) and the native community is a village of kenku called Aua who have been good neighbors from pretty much the first moment we laid eyes on one of them. The same can also be said for the colony, and representatives from both Aua and Landing (the colony) worked together to bring down Auntie Bloat, a sea hag and the most evil threat present on the island. The soil is fertile, there’s fresh water available, and there is space to grow and spread out. The threats present on the island have been getting systematically removed by the PCs – when the ship landed, there was the aforementioned evil sea hag on the western coast that was stirring up trouble, an ettercap commanding an army of giant spiders to the south, various giant wildlife, and a wyvern to the northwest. The hag and the ettercap are gone, the wildlife has been cleared out of habitable areas, and the wyvern is mostly just an apex predator that’s part of the local ecosystem. We’ve left it alone for the moment as it doesn’t seem to range near the colony.

Finally, while the Brazen did take some damage, it washed up on a sandbar and has been repaired and has begun its journey back to the Old World.

The crew and passengers of the Formidable were nowhere near so fortunate. The Formidable crashed violently onto the shore of a rocky island, killing a bunch of passengers and colony leadership in the process. They immediately came under siege from gnolls and sahuagin. Their irreparably-damaged ship has been stripped for parts and transformed into a pallisade which they’ve had to hide inside, sending large, well-armed parties out for food when they can. In their desperation they did something bad enough to violently anger the local lizardfolk, which has the party scratching their heads in horror because the lizardfolk we’ve encountered have been deadpan to the point of barely being interactive. Due to the constant state of siege and low availability of food and medicine, the Formidable’s colony is down to less than half of its original numbers and that number continues to drop.

The gnolls, in addition to killing and eating colonists, have been selling a few of them into slavery to various grung villages (evil, slave-keeping frog people.) The only reason we know what we do about the situation is that we recently rescued one such slave, an elven carpenter named Therivol.

Therivol, as one would imagine, was in pretty bad shape when we found him. Malnourished, suffering from multiple infections, and traumatized, he was barely coherent when he was rescued and didn’t believe the party was real at first. Lambert spent a bunch of time healing and feeding the poor man on the way back to to colony, and by the time we arrived, he was in much better shape physically, but there wasn’t a whole lot we could do for his mental damage.

And that’s where Horvu came in.

We had several concerns about Therivol and his colony mates. The first and most pressing ones were for Therivol himself, of course – the kind of experiences he’d been through could shatter a person completely and we obviously didn’t want that to happen. But there was also a concern that unless we started actively working against it, we could wind up with a bunch of violent xenophobes in the colony, and anyone harming the kenku is not going to fly with the PCs. So with all of that in mind, once we’d delivered the initial reports to Governor Warwick, we brought Therivol to Aua … and arrived just in time for the start of Horvu. The plan was to give Therivol some “kenku therapy” and also to recruit Rishi, a village “wise man” and a close friend of the party to come along on the initial contact as a sort of diplomatic envoy from the non-homicidal population of the New World. (It doesn’t hurt that’ he’s a storm sorcerer, of course.) Our first sign that something was out of the ordinary was that Grant described the village as being “more decorated than usual.” After a brief search, Rishi’s apprentice brought us to a very festive (and slightly tipsy) Rishi who filled us in on the wonderful warmth and festive happiness that was Horvu. Poor Therivol got to spend a day surrounded by happy people, colorful decorations, wine, and music. That experience, particularly the music, did him some significant good.

In addition, it became fairly clear that the attitude of the kenku about Horvu wasn’t “This is our holiday, you dirty outsiders keep out!” but much more akin to “You’ve been wasting your life by not celebrating Horvu all these years?! What is WRONG with you people?” Festivities included feasting and drinking, telling stories, music, and making small clay figurines to honor important kenku figures of the past. And as previously stated, the village was decked out in colorful finery. There’s a good chance that when the party gets back to the colony, some effort will be made by the party to make Horvu a shared holiday that the colony can celebrate too, further cementing the bond between the people of Landing and Aua.

However, it also introduced a complication. Horvu lasts for a week, and for both personal and cultural reasons, Rishi was not going to leave his village while Horvu was going on. While that was understandable, the party didn’t have that kind of time. The other colony being in a besieged and desperate situation (and likely getting more amoral, xenophobic, desperate, malnourished, and smaller in number with every passing day) wasn’t something the party, particularly Lambert, were okay waiting a week before acting on. Rishi would have to stay behind.

The general gaming lessons to be taken from Horvu are as follows, at least as I see it:

First, more setting texture is always good. A lot of the time it’s easy to fall into the trap of making the whole world be about your adventure plotline. Holidays, festivals, important civic dates, and so on help to keep that at bay.

Second, it’s good and interesting to have something be helpful and hindering at the same time. Horvu came at just the right time to help Therivol out, but it also tied Rishi’s schedule up in an inconvenient way. It aided the PCs while reminding them that they aren’t the absolute lords of the setting.

Finally, don’t be afraid to introduce things on the fly, even major things. Horvu wasn’t part of Grant’s prep for the night – he himself stated that he made it up on the fly to keep us from relying on Rishi too much and also to help us with Therivol. However, it’s going to become part of the world’s calendar now – and it’s an inside joke/reference for our gaming group. We’ve already joked about Horvu parties, Horvu wine, and more.

[GM’s Note: Peter’s exactly right when he says I made up Horvu on the fly. Rishi’s a great NPC, but he also intimately knows the setting and has many ways of easily solving the PCs’ problems. He can easily undercut the whole premise of a game based on exploration and discovery of the unknown! I needed him unavailable for more than a day or so, and this ended up working splendidly. It was also inclusive rather than exclusive of the PCs, which was critical. I didn’t snatch Rishi out of the setting and hide him from the player characters. Rather, I made a big, obvious, non-destructive excuse for him to be unavailable; one which fit the existing setting (and Rishi’s character) and which the PCs could participate in and explore. That’s much less frustrating. And really, what sort of player character turns down free booze? — Grant]

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Who lives here?

So far in this series, I’ve covered the moral universe and technology. Now I think it’s time to start discussing PC races, because that will inform a lot of the rest of the setting. I tend to like settings that only have a very small number of playable races or I like a panoply of them, and this setting will fall squarely into the latter category.

Before I get too deeply into the specifics, though, I need to back up a bit. At this stage in the process, I have three main types of area in mind for the setting.These are working names, but they’re good enough for now.

• Grim Cities are places where evil has taken hold and people are ground down and oppressed by sinister forces. They’re also likely to be the most technological area overall. In addition, this is where you’ll find a lot of creatures with the types of undead, aberration, fiend, and monstrosity. Grim Cities tend to have a theme based on the Grim Lord(s) that rule them. For example, Alchova, the Great Hive has an insect theme – the ruling forces use creatures with an insectoid theme as enforcers and overseers, massive, multi-story hives can be found on the sides of buildings, and so on.
• The Counties are where things are generally pretty good. Shamelessly based on Pelican Town and its surrounding environs from Stardew Valley, you have civilization and technology here too, but there’s also a lot of green space and people are generally happy. There’s not a lot in the way of monsters to be found in this area, with two exceptions: intelligent, benign monsters may be around – for example, you may have a pack of blink dogs that hangs out on the outskirts of town – and you may also find domesticated unintelligent monsters kept as pets or exotic working animals (including mounts).
• The Wilds are untamed areas where civilization has not taken hold. This is where a lot of creatures with the types of beast, elemental, fey, giant, and plant can be found. This is also where a lot of Druids and Barbarians come from. There are brighter and darker areas out in The Wilds, but not much in the way of industry or tech.

First Pass of Changes

The logical place to start is with the Player’s Handbook, since those races are the ones everyone is most familiar with.

Dwarves fit the feeling of the setting perfectly, particularly The Counties. Dwarves tend to be good-hearted, civilized, and are craftsmen without peer. I see no reason at all to re-skin any of that. One of the things I did in a previous game that had great success was to put a human settlement on top of a dwarven one; there was a subway-like area connecting the two communities that was full of shops and shared spaces. I will probably do that again. I’m planning to use both Hill Dwarves and Mountain Dwarves.

Elves are also a good fit. The ties to the fey and the extensive history of them as a fantasy race makes them feel essential to me. I’m probably not going to use the drow subrace, but I will be using some spider elements – however, I’ll be inverting them from how they are normally used. Spiders, while creepy to a lot of people, are undeniably beneficial. They eat all sorts of problematic insects and generally keep to themselves unless provoked. In climates where biting insects such as mosquitoes carry diseases like West Nile and Malaria, they can be very helpful indeed. Being willing to protect innocent people even if you’re feared by them seemed both very spidery and very elven to me. High Elves will probably be found closer to The Counties and Wood Elves will stick mostly to The Wilds.

Halflings are going to be cut from the setting. Despite the fact that one of my favorite NPCs in Grant’s campaign is a fiery Spanish-inspired halfling Bard, they just feel too directly tied to the works of Tolkien to me. I could see a case to be made for them being a good fit for The Counties, but I’m just not feeling it.

Humans are, probably unsurprisingly, staying in. They’re also going to be the most numerous and widespread. Humans make for fantastic “setting glue” and they don’t come pre-coded with any real assumptions as to their culture or personality like a lot of other fantasy races do.

Dragonborn kind of annoy me, truth be told. They’ve always felt like the sort of race that a twelve-year-old boy who was obsessed with Power Rangers would design. Still, I have to admit, however grudgingly, that a big, scaly, powerfully-muscled humanoid with massive fangs and a breath weapon is about as Metal as you can reasonably expect a playable D&D race to be. And so I’ve decided to put my own negative bias aside and leave them in the game, especially given the themed nature of the Grim Cities. If I wind up making a dragon-themed Grim City, it seems only fitting that some of the enforcers in that city would be Dragonborn.

Gnomes are another one of the races I’ve been going back and forth on for a while, but I’ve ultimately decided to leave them in. The two different subraces make for interesting ties to The Counties and The Wilds, and I like to have the occasional “Q” (from James Bond) style NPC that provides PCs with gadgets and unusual magic items, and gnomes are phenomenal for that role.

Half-Elves are a natural consequence of a setting with inter-fertile humans and elves, and this is one such setting. They’re in, and that’s that.

Half-Orcs are a natural consequence of a setting with inter-fertile humans and orcs, but in this case, a bit more needs to be said. Orcs in this setting are going to be tied more strongly to The Wilds than The Grim Cities – I am definitely going more for the model seen in Warcraft or Bright than straight-up Tolkien. They’re a big, powerful, savage-looking bunch with as much capacity to be good or bad as humans and no more. That does two things: first, it allows for even more playable options and second it gets the problematic rapey backstory a lot of settings assume for half-orcs off the table, which is important to me. There’s no chance of cutting them, though – orcs are super metal. In terms of appearance, I’m stealing shamelessly from Bright. I like the mottled skin and prominent tusks on what are mostly human-looking frames and heads more than the exaggerated lantern jaws you often see.

Tieflings are also exceedingly metal, and they fit well with the themes of corruption that I discussed in part four of this series. I’m vacillating on whether to make them a byproduct of some ugliness from some early Grim Cities where fiendish blood got into human bloodlines or make them a result of the transformative corruption I described in part four. Or both. I’m leaning toward both.

So Who Lives Over There?

Future posts in this series will deal with races from supplemental products, both official and third-party. I assure you, I’ll make up for the choices lost by cutting Halflings (and Drow) many times over before I’m done with this series.

As always, I love hearing the thoughts of those who read this series or anything else I write on this blog. I’ve already implemented ideas and constructive criticism into this project and I’m not likely to stop any time soon.

Playlist:
Stand Up by All That Remains – the video is quite a bit more Grim City than the lyrics, which call to mind a group of diverse people standing together against a threat. The somewhat jingoistic tone and death imagery definitely put a cautionary note on it, though.

In the Middle of the Night by Within Temptation – specifically this GMV treatment of it. It depicts a wide variety of heroes (and anti-heroes) standing up against evil and fighting it back.

Frontline by Pillar – specifically about living the Christian life in a very Ephesians 6:10-17 context. Pillar is a Christian band and there are some very specific turns of phrase in the song that no doubt at all what they’re talking about.

Looking Good

Fashion is an often-overlooked part of setting design, and in truth, I went back and forth as to whether to cover it at all in here. I ultimately decided to, because certain clothing technologies can be surprisingly important. I originally thought this was going to be a short post. Oh, how wrong I was.

General Concepts

Fashion in the setting is probably best defined as classic 20th century with Victorian and Napoleonic influences. Pantaloons and voluminous sleeves are pretty much nonexistent in the setting, and things like practical pockets are a reality. Fabrics run up until just before the emergence of synthetic fabrics. That means no nylon, no polyester, no “performance fabric,” and no fleece. Rayon is made from cellulose fibers, so it’s available, but is extremely cutting-edge and is currently mostly only seen in upper-class circles concerned with high fashion. However, denim, canvas, leather, wool, and various cotton and linen weaves are all fine. Early ballistic fabrics exist, but are incorporated into more conventional armor designs as discussed in the last post. (This is largely due to the enduring presence of melee weapons in the world.)

As far as patterns go, plaids exist, as does tie dying, paisley, and any other number of interesting designs.

Specific Cases

Tactical clothing is starting to become prevalent, but is somewhere between WWI and WWII levels. That means that things like tactical harnesses with purpose-built pockets and clips for items like magazines and flashlights exist, but not full-on tactical vests. The biggest beneficiary of this particular technology is probably spellcasters. Instead of having to carry material components around in a spell component pouch, there are organized, easy-to-get-at harnesses and pocket collections that can be worn on easily-accessible areas of the body such as the chest and thighs. This means that while wizards may sometimes still wear robes as a nod to tradition, they’re often more like a long tabard that’s worn over normal clothing. Bandoleers are common and can be obtained in a bunch of specialized designs and made custom by merchants. “Shield organizers” are somewhat common among shield-using adventurers, allowing a spare weapon or some non-volatile spell components to be attached to the inside of a shield for easy access. Most shields come with some basic snaps or buckled straps to accommodate this, but they’re also easily removed.

Backpacks and shoulder bags are common and are advanced enough to be multi-pocket designs. Zippers, buttons, snaps, drawstrings, straps, buckles, and toggles all exist. Hook-and-loop fabric relies on plastics that are more advanced than the setting has and therefore does not.

Camouflage is just starting to exist, but it’s not to the point of providing mechanical bonuses yet and is mostly based on animal hide coloration. At player’s option, stealthy characters may wear it as a way of explaining part of a PC’s proficiency bonus to stealth in-game, but I’m definitely not going to require it.

Upper-class and formal clothing is a mix of late 19th-century and early 20th-century looks with a bit of 18th century thrown in. Suits are sharply tailored with long suit coats and both ties and ascots are worn by men. Women wear dresses, and the style is in the middle of a shift from voluminous ballgowns to sleeker, more form-fitting styles that support more mobile forms of dance. Either makes a statement. Folks looking to be extra fancy or formal still wear hats, and a variety of those are available as well. Tricorns are extremely traditional, but regarded as both classic and classy, whereas bowlers and tophats are newer and more “fashion forward.” Women wear wide-brimmed hats and elaborate floral designs, but often use hair ornaments instead.

Religious garb for The Church is widely varied by sect and order, but clerical collars are fairly common. Robes and cassocks are used during religious services, but not usually worn into the field if the ordained individual is also an adventurer. Stoles are often worn, sometimes even out into the field. They’re often embroidered in order-specific designs and some orders have different ones for different seasons.

Jewelry is about as common as it is in the real world. Both wristwatches and pocket watches are available.

There’s no stigma on wearing pants for women in everyday contexts – a woman who works as a police officer or welder will not be doing it in a skirt. A variety of kilts are available for men, though their use is heavily-dependent on culture.

Headgear in the field is more widely varied. Hooded cloaks are still worn, and traditional “wizard hats” can also be found, though they’re considered throwbacks. However, wide-brimmed styles that keep the sun off and/or obscure the face in shadow are common among adventurers. Heavier armor has evolved to accommodate a wide variety of faceplates and visors, and everything from a traditional sugar loaf helm to a skull motif is possible. A variety of cultural and religious headwear exists as well.

Staying warm relies on three primary substances: wool, fur, and down. Wool is woven into sweaters, knit caps, knit gloves, socks, and coats, and while a bit itchy, it’s very warm. Cable-knit sweaters are common in fishing villages and not terribly rare in other places. Fur is still used as a lining for cloaks, hoods, boots, and collars, and down linings are incorporated into leather or canvas coats for extra warmth. Heavier cotton waffle-knit weaves are also available. Waxed or oiled canvas is used to repel water. Scarves are available in both ornamental and super-warm varieties (as well as the shemagh). Mittens exist and are usually made of wool.

If you need to stay cool instead, silk, cotton, and linen are all available, although silk is very expensive. Different areas of the world have different feelings about modesty, but shorts that reach to about an inch above the knee or lower are pretty safe for both men and women in warmer climates in terms of propriety. Dressing for the weather is definitely the accepted norm; nobody wears suits in the desert during the summer because they feel like they have to.

Corrective eyewear (glasses and monocles) and protective eyewear both exist – the latter in both general (safety glasses and goggles) and specialized (welding masks) varieties. Sunglasses are available. Everything is made of actual glass, though; suitable polymers haven’t been invented. Occupation-specific clothing such as lab coats, a chef’s hat and coat, a mechanic’s coveralls, and welding aprons all exist. Uniforms for law enforcement, utility workers, mail carriers and so on are accepted and commonplace.

Leather gloves have been around for centuries, but soft, supple “driving gloves” in a variety of styles are available. So are specialized archery and shooting gloves.

Footwear is mostly leather with rubber soles, but traditional all-leather or wood designs are also available. Lug soles and various heel heights are available.

As far as hygienic products go, soap, shampoo (both wet and dry varieties), toothpaste, and deodorant all exist. People in civilized areas are expected to use all of them. Perfumes and colognes exist as well and are seen as optional except in the upper classes, where they, too, are expected.

Makeup exists and is used in a myriad of different ways. Hair dye is available in both natural and unnatural colors. (Yeah yeah, I know unnatural hair dyes are a relatively recent real-world advancement Whatever. I’m not going to say your PC can’t have bright blue hair in a heavy metal-influenced setting if you want them to.) Basic electricity means things like hair clippers exist, though they’re mostly found in barber shops. Combs, brushes, and safety razors are available, as are loud, heavy hair dryers, curling irons, and so on. (However you want your PC’s hair, makeup, or facial hair to look, you’re covered.) Tattooing and piercings are about as advanced as they are in the modern world. Hairstyles vary wildly, and have been experimented with enough that pretty much anything up to modern style exists.

Conclusion

That’s it for general fashion and clothing information for the setting. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

During my work on the setting I’ve been designing, I ran across a free third-party supplement for D&D 5e that I really liked. It’s called Sprouting Chaos, and it has a bunch of plant-themed character races, class archetypes, monsters, and spells. Everything looks nicely-balanced to use with official material. It’s also a very professional-looking piece of work and it’s available from this Reddit thread.

In the worlds of D&D, plant-themed creatures and classes are hard to come by. This supplement aims to change that, providing  new plant-themed options for player characters, as well as new plant creatures for those players to face. If your Dungeon Master allows, these options may be used in any of your campaigns.

I learned this week that China, of all places, is well on the way to having the world’s largest Christian population, and delegates from the WCC are going to be meeting with church leaders in China.

The delegation will visit Shanghai and meet with the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, as well as with the leadership and students at the East China Theological Seminary after the Chinese groups invited the WCC to visit.

They will also travel to Xi’an and visit Shaanxi Bible School and Jing Xin Church said the WCC which represents Christians mainly from the Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.

Finally, there’s a neat article in Popular Science about why it’s so much colder in the Northern Hemisphere in the winter even though Earth is physically closer to the Sun during that time.

There’s something about the geometry of space that’s never quite made sense to me. I know that the axial tilt of the Earth is the reason we have seasons, but if a slight angle away from the sun can make me see my breath in winter, why does being three million miles closer not make me melt in a pool of my own sweat? Is it really not any hotter when we’re at our shortest distance from our star? And if it is, then why should the 23.5° tilt to our axis matter at all?

Jenny

I found a really well thought out blog post that seems to be part of a series about how to make deeper, more interesting characters to play in RPGs.

This sort of “man with no name” who comes from nowhere setup is really common when it comes to our characters. We know who they are, what they can do, and we know their names… but we just sort of plunk them down in the world as if they sprang fully-formed from the ether. More often than not we talk about how far from home they are, or we make it a point that their family is dead, and they have no friends. They’re a lone adventurer, out on their own.

This is an archetype… but it often makes your character feel like they aren’t really a part of the world. It can make it harder to roleplay, and worse, it makes it harder for you to tell your story because you’re starting from scratch. If you want to make your life a little easier, all you have to do is give your character connections in the game setting.

I think it quite unfortunate that you can no longer go to the Floating Church of the Redeemer. It was exactly what it sounds like.

They brought the heavens to the seas.

In 1840s Philadelphia, the Churchman’s Missionary Association for Seamen wanted the Gospel to reach the dockworkers and sailors who worked on the city’s sin-soaked piers.

I found out about a really sweet walking-simulator story game recently called Storyseeker. It looks really sweet, and it’s free! (Funnily enough, I found out about the game because of some very cute gingerbread.)

Storyseeker is a minimalist narrative experiment driven by your curiosity. Follow the trails of weasels, talk to ghosts, cross the ocean. Find out what happened to a strange, quiet world.

Grant

First up: Two articles (conveniently linked by one article in Relevant Magazine) about Chen Si, who spends his weekend preventing suicides:

“Often it really is a life and death struggle. They’ve already climbed over the railings, and I’m left hanging onto them by an arm. I have to drag them back over,” Chen told NPR in 2006. “Sometimes after I’ve saved someone, when I’m not paying attention, they jump. And there are those I don’t reach in time.”

The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is one of the most frequented suicide sites in the world. Chinese authorities don’t report the total number of deaths, but estimates say there is at least one successful suicide attempt at the bridge each week. Chen travels over 15 miles from his home to patrol the bridge and speak to those he sees who might need help.

I’ll probably forget, and post about this again closer to Halloween, but 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s genre-defining novel Frankenstein. A group of folks are trying to push to get everyone to read (or re-read) Frankenstein on Halloween 2018, across the world, and that’s pretty cool. You can find out more at frankenreads.org.

Something I just found today: Wizards of the Coast published a free D&D adventure for their “Ixalan” Magic: The Gathering setting called X Marks the Spot. If you’re looking for some free D&D material, whether a full-blown adventure or a few monsters and ideas, this may be helpful.

Second, I’ve posted a list of the books (physical and digital) I’m using as reference material for this setting, but it’s not in this post. You can find it with the other posts in the series by clicking the link here. It’ll get updated as that becomes necessary, but as you can see, I have a pretty good-sized pile of material to work with, so I don’t see it growing too much. -Peter

In previous posts in this series, I’ve given a general overview and discussed on the moral universe of the setting (in significant detail) and now it’s time to shift gears a bit and talk about technology. This week’s post is going to focus on “functional” technology like weapons and vehicles. The next post in this series will focus on aesthetic technologies like architecture and fashion.

Since 5e doesn’t have its own vehicle rules, I’m planning to use the ones in Ultramodern 5 from Dias Ex Machina Games. I had originally planned on using rules from Hellscapes for modern tech, but the company that’s working on it has been the subject of some troubling controversy lately and it’s also not available yet – the aforementioned controversy has pushed the release date of the kickstarter rewards back a ways. I also think the modular nature of the Ultramodern 5 book is going to suit my purposes better anyway – there’s a lot in there that can easily be pulled out and used in a homebrew setting like this one with little or no modification necessary.

An Anachronistic Mess?

One of the things that’s going to become rapidly apparent as this post continues is that technology is all over the place, at least with respect to the real world. I am far more concerned with getting the feel of the setting right than I am about accurately modelling parallel technology development in a world that also has magic and mythical creatures running around. Plus, there’s also a long and noble tradition of picking and choosing different levels of technological advancement for setting flavor. (Fashion too, but that will probably be a different post.) Batman: the Animated series has  big, clunky computers along with 1940s style cars, and Darkest Dungeon puts the Highwayman and Crusader in the same setting, though their respective inspirations are several centuries removed from each other in history! Standard D&D also does this a bit – rapiers show up next to less-advanced forms of sword and speaking of rapiers, they and a lot of the polearms existed alongside at least primitive gunpowder weapons like the arquebus, which are conspicuously absent from many D&D games. A lot of D&D settings also have tall ships, but instead of cannons, they use ballistae or magical weapons of some kind.

All of this is a very long way of saying: this setting isn’t Earth and sure isn’t historical so the tech will be all over the place.

Minimum Maximum

This admittedly-confusing term is what I’m using to describe the general technological baseline of the setting. It describes the lowest possible maximum level of technology that players can expect to find in the setting for anything that isn’t spelled out here. For example, the minimum maximum for textiles is 1975, which means that if players are trying to find a specific type of fabric, the GM should assume that at least everything that had been invented by 1975 exists in the setting. (How available it is to PCs is another matter.) The general minimum maximum is late industrial revolution (1900 or so) for adventuring equipment and about 1965 for normal consumer goods.

Firearms

Even though guns aren’t the most advanced piece of tech in the setting, they’re one of the things that probably is going to feel the least fantastical to a lot of folks, so let me get those out of the way first. Firearms technology in the setting sits somewhere around 1910 or so. The world has cased ammunition, bolt-action rifles, revolvers, and pump-action shotguns (and preceding technologies like lever-action rifles). It also has heavy, liquid-cooled machine guns and some early heavy, air-cooled designs like the M2 Browning .50 caliber heavy machine gun. What it explicitly does not have is anything at all that is both man-portable and automatic. Assault rifles and submachineguns do not exist in the setting and neither, for that matter, do even primitive semi-automatic rifles like the M1 Garand or early semi-auto pistol designs like the 1911. The same is true for shoulder-fired missiles. Massive creatures like ogres or golems may be able to lug around a machine gun or cannon that would normally be mounted on a vehicle or tripod, but average line troops (and adventurers!) will have to make do with guns that fire one shot at a time and then need to be manually operated in some way to get the next round into the chamber. WWI-style artillery exists, including railway and naval artillery that can lob shells incredible distances, but let’s be honest: that’s mostly plot-device stuff.

As far as weapon accessories go, scopes, bipods, slings, and bayonets are available, but folding stocks, extended magazines, holographic sights, under-barrel secondary weapons (like shotguns and grenade launchers), and suppressors or silencers of any sort are not available.

One very important consideration: any sort of spell, class, or archetype that does something special to arrows or crossbow bolts can do it to bullets too, provided that the bullet (or its casing) can be touched just prior to firing. This means that any spells or class abilities that would normally create magic arrows of some kind can also be used with revolvers and bolt-action rifles. Interestingly, it also means those abilities do not work with primitive, muzzle-loading gunpowder weapons unless the effect is put on a piece of ammunition which is then saved until needed.

A lot of the roles filled by heavier man-portable weapons on a modern battlefield are instead filled by spellcasters. Who needs a frag grenade when you have spells like Fireball or Lightning Bolt? The setting has no suitable nuclear materials available for research, much less power or weapons. (I really just wanted to leave the entire question of nuclear weapons off the table.)

In terms of the actual 5e rules, this means that the Pistol, Musket, Revolver, Hunting Rifle, and Shotgun from pg 267-268 of the DMG are available, but none of the other firearms are. Gunpowder and Dynamite are the available explosives.

Other Weapons and Armor

Despite the availability of advanced gunpowder weapons, the full spectrum of melee weapons is still very much in use. Ancient martial traditions still teach the use of “ancient” weapons and there’s a lot of cultural weight behind using them. And also: pure rule of cool. This is a heavy metal setting, after all. Massive swords and axes are very much in-flavor! Bows and crossbows also get a lot of use by scouting units; bows and crossbows are still plenty deadly and they’re quiet. They require a lot more skill to use effectively than a gun, but highly-trained scouting and recon units and long-lived races like elves will put in the time.

Armor still follows ancient designs somewhat, and a combination of better underlay materials and magic keeps it relevant against bullets. In terms of rules, this means “no special armor considerations.” Just keep using armor as presented in the PHB.

Transportation

Land vehicles are markedly more advanced than firearms, comparable to about 1970s technology. Cars are large, made of steel, loud, fast, and not terribly fuel-efficient. They’re also relatively-simple, mechanically-speaking. Features like fuel injection, anti-lock breaks, air bags, traction control, and so on don’t exist yet (seat belts and windshield wipers do, though). Emissions are definitely not up to 21st century standards (which is a feature, not a bug in the context of this setting; vehicular pollution definitely is in line with the feel of the Grim Cities). Specialized designs like 4×4 vehicles and a variety of trucks from pickups all the way to semis exist.

Aircraft are more primitive than land vehicles, but still more advanced than firearms; the jet engine hasn’t been invented, and all aircraft are fixed-wing designs (so no helicopters). Rockets are primitive, unguided designs. Nobody has put satellites into space yet, let alone people. Military vehicles are a bit more varied. Armor is about as durable as WWII standards, but tank design is definitely stuck in a WWI mold. Jeeps and WWII style fighter and bomber aircraft exist.

Railway transportation is in the transitional period between steam and diesel and both are seen. Diesel tends to be closer to the the cities and steam is more prevalent out in more remote areas.

Naval transportation is mostly engine-driven, but more than one ship has found out the hard way that trivial factors like wind speed and direction will not keep the ghostly tall ship full of undead from catching up with you and boarding you anyway.

Paved roads, railway lines and canal systems all exist, but their quality and safety vary wildly.

Information and Communication

Communication technology is fairly advanced, with CB radios and landline telephones available. However, it degrades somewhat as you travel out into the country. Information technology is decidedly more primitive. There’s nothing resembling a modern computer anywhere in the setting, though room-sized monstrosities may exist. Engineering is still done on slide rules. Television and broadcast radio exist, but TV is black-and-white only and is limited to relatively small CRT screens. Payphones cost 1 SP/minute to use where they’re available. And of course musical instruments are up to 1985 standards or so. If the setting is based in part on heavy metal, it’s kind of a no-brainer that the tools to make it should exist in the setting!

Medicine

Like weapons, medicine also lags in a world with magic. It is around 1960s levels, with anesthesia, surgery, sterilization, antibiotics, and blood transfusions, but a lot of more serious ailments are treated with magic. Cancer is highly-resistant to ordinary healing magic, but high-level spells like Heal can still get rid of it. There’s a fair amount of “mad science” around the setting, and it’s intertwined with magic, so creatures the likes of which you’d expect people with name like “Moreau,” “Ludevic,” and “Frankenstein” to put into the setting definitely exist. Primitive bionics (heavily-dependent on magic) in particular can come from these mad science applications.

Materials

Plastics are in their early days. You’ll see plastic cases for radios and so on sometimes, but most are still made of metal. Plastic buttons and keys are definitely becoming more common on things like typewriters and radios, however. Bottles, jars, and windows are all still made of glass. The plastics you need for nylon clothing, polycarbonate windows, hook-and-loop fabric and so on haven’t been invented. The setting has the metal alloys you’d expect; brass, bronze, and stainless steel all exist, for example.

Conclusion

That’s it for this week’s blog post. As mentioned previously, next time I’ll dig into the way technology makes the world look, rather than just what it does. As always, I’m definitely interested to hear any thoughts you have. Previous listener/reader feedback has shaped the design of this setting already!

Playlist:
Burn the Witch by Angel Nation – this music video about excessive screen use does a pretty good job of showing one of the reasons why I didn’t use advanced tech in the setting. It tends to be dominating in ways that really alter the setting at the gaming table.
Devour by Shinedown – a fantastic peek at the feel of the Grim Cities and their militaristic, industrial oppression.

Official WotC Books:

• 5th Edition Player’s Handbook
• 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide
• 5th Edition Monster Manual
• Volo’s Guide to Monsters
• Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide
• Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
• Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes

WotC-Produced Digital Products

• Elemental Evil Player’s Companion
• Planeshift: Amonkhet
• Planeshift: Innistrad
• Planeshift: Kaladesh
• Planeshift: Zendikar
• Planeshift: Ixalan
• Planeshift: Dominaria

Third-Party Resources:

• Midgard Heroes for 5e (Kobold Press)
• Southlands Heroes for 5e (Kobold Press)
• Unlikely Heroes for 5e (Kobold Press)
• Midgard Heroes Handbook (Kobold Press) – rolls in most of the previous Deep Magic books I previously had included in this list
• Ultramodern 5 (Dias Ex Machina Games)
• Amethyst: Quintessence (Dias Ex Machina Games)
• Tome of Beasts (Kobold Press)
• 5th Edition Foes (Frog God Games)
• Deep Magic Series (all by Kobold Press)
  • Blood and Doom
  • Void Magic
• The Book of Lost Spells (Frog God Games)
• Sprouting Chaos Player’s Companion (Free homebrew project)
• Dark Arts Player’s Companion (Free homebrew project)
• Monstrous Races for 5e (DM’s Guild)
• Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else (DM’s Guild)
• Sylgar’s Guide to Everything Else (DM’s Guild)
• Gunpowder Codex (Free homebrew project)
• Compendium of Sacred Mysteries (Free homebrew project)
• Compendium of Forgotten Secrets (Free homebrew project)
• Weapons of Legacy (Dan Coleman Productions)
• A Touch of Class (EN Publishing)
• The Gunslinger Martial Archetype (Matt Mercer)
• The Bloodhunter (Matt Mercer)
  • Order of the Lycan (Matt Mercer)

Upcoming Releases (Likely to be Used)

• Faerie Fire (Astrolago Press)
• Creature Codex (Kobold Press)
• Epic Legacy Core Book (2CGaming)
• Strongholds & Followers (Matthew Coville)

The central fantasy of this game is being able to bring hope – the ability to look at suffering and pain and not just have to stand by helplessly as it continues. Player characters are intended to be the sorts of people who are not going to leave people to suffer, not because there’s some reward for it, and not because there’s some advantage in it, but because they can’t do otherwise.

Hey man. Metal isn’t subtle. If you’re going for heroism, might as well go the whole way.

Despair

A big portion of what makes the Grim Cities so unpleasant is crushing despair – these are places where evil reigns and not to put too fine a point on it, but evil sucks. In a literal fashion, really. It draws life, happiness, and empathy out of people and gives nothing back. People in the grim cities aren’t denied pleasure in any sort of a categorical fashion, but they are definitely denied meaning – even the wealthy ruling class wallows in hollow extravagance and no amount of gold or food or power or anything else is going to impart any sense of purpose or true worth. The best they can do is try to numb the pain. And it never works for very long. Like a drug addict, they keep needing a higher and higher dose, and it needs to be stronger and stronger stuff. And it feels emptier and emptier and emptier. At some point, they stop trying to numb the pain and start trying to vent it somehow; if they can’t stop hurting, others will hurt too. This is where “monster” ratings on virtue/vice pairs come from – after all, misery loves company. Of course, the company is usually the held-down lower strata of society, deliberately kept on the razor’s edge of desperation. That desperation focuses attention inward, and it gives way to hopelessness and despair.

In play that means that a lot of the time people who are victims are in too rough of shape emotionally to really help themselves.

For an example of how this can look, let me point you to another game. One of many non-musical pieces of media that’s influenced me a lot is the game This War of Mine, and it gives you an excellent and sobering picture of how bad this can get. For those who aren’t familiar with it, This War of Mine is a video game where you play a bunch of civilians trying to live through a war. One of the creators lived through the siege of Sarajevo back in the 90s. Note also that I said “survive,” not “fight.” In addition to keeping everyone warm, rested, and fed, you also have to deal with illness and the mental toll living in a war zone exacts on a person.  I once lost a run because my people gave into despair. They literally starved to death mere feet from a fridge full of food. One of the surest ways to succumb to despair in the game is to do bad things to survive. Another is to witness awful things and be powerless to stop them. There will be plenty of both in the Grim Cities.

Hope

Here’s where the Christian ethos comes back into play – because despair is an intolerable state to leave anyone in. The role of PCs (and heroic NPCs, for that matter) is to “knock holes in the darkness” and bring hope. A big part of that is meaning – and meaning comes from service, from the sense that your life is worth more than just marking time until you die. There’s a great line in the song Gone by Red that says “Is the air I breathe my only legacy?” to which the answer should be an emphatic “no!” Characters in this setting should be busy; there us a lot of darkness to knock holes in but – and this is the important part – they should always be able to. The whole point of this particular setting is relieving the despair and helping the helpless. It is not intended to be a place where you wallow in the darkness. That’s why from the outset I was thinking of Stardew Valley as a touchstone for places outside the cities; in order for this type of storytelling to work, there has to be a place of mercy and safety to bring people to.

The trick for PCs is going to be spreading that light and hope into the dark places of the world, or taking people out of them into the light.

Also, one of the most important parts of hope, or at least one of the most important things to hope for is redemption; for thoughts on that, see the last post in this series, but there are few more hopeful or uplifting concepts than someone who is able to truly change.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
 -Ezekiel 36:26

Mercy

One of the most important things about bringing hope is the willingness and ability to be merciful. A lot of RPGs tend to punish mercy – showing mercy either leaves you with an enemy behind you or a prisoner who is going to be constantly trying to escape. That’s not what I want to do with this game.

there needs to be some risk, but I’m going to be steering away from a “no good deed goes unpunished” feel because I don’t want the whole campaign to be grinding misery. While I’m hoping to deal with some heavy stuff, I don’t want to run a bleak game, I want the experience to be uplifting and fun along with being moral practice.

I’m not sure how I’m going to handle that in a logistical sense, but then again, I’m nowhere near done building this setting either.

Playlist:

Gone by Red – a well-made “warning song” about making your life count for something.
Light me Up by Kobra and the Lotus – as I alluded to earlier, this is one of the most beautiful, hopeful things I’ve ever seen that qualifies as heavy metal. You can see where it’s going pretty early on, but that really doesn’t make it any less powerful. You want to see a song about bringing hope? This is a song about bringing hope. The use of children as the characters adds some extra dramatic weight and emotional heft, too. Interestingly, a lot of the material from Kobra and the Lotus (at least from Prevail I) seems to be very uplifting and/or contemplative. I didn’t even know they existed at this time last week, so enjoy the discovery with me if you’re in the same boat? I have no idea what Kobra Paige’s worldview looks like in a formal or named sense, but there is a significant amount of empathy and virtue for its own sake in her song lyrics, or at least the limited sample I’m working with. (Take a look at “You Don’t Know,” “Soldier,” and “Forever One” for starters.)
The Light by Disturbed – easily my favorite song off of Immortalized, I still feel like they aimed a little low with the video (even though the video is solid). Relationships are great, but there’s more than that in the lyrics.

Peter

With Christmas coming up in just a few days, I figured I’d share two of my favorite Christmas videos, one humorous and one serious. The humorous one is these little peacock spiders. If you don’t think spiders can be funny or cute, please humor me and give the video a shot. The serious one is this beautifully-orchestrated Air Force band “flash mob” of musicians. The beginning of the video in particular. I love “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring” on the strings.

I’m going to use this platform as a soapbox for a moment. We lost one of our new cats, Gruffy, to FeLV (Feline Leukemia Virus) recently. He was only four. FeLV is one of the leading causes of feline death, and most shelters test for it, but don’t vaccinate for it. And as we found out in the most awful way possible, those tests can present a false negative. So if you adopt a cat, spend the extra $35 or so and get the little fluffball vaccinated. It’s not a panacea, but FeLV is a very fast death sentence. We had poor Gruffy for less than a year and that wasn’t nearly long enough.

Gnome Stew has a great article on using dreams in games. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I may get into dreams a bit in some future setting design post if I can get some more ideas together.

Most of us experience dreams as we sleep, but do your player characters have dreams? A dream can be a pleasant reminder of times past, a previously unexpressed desire or, possibly, an omen or a deeper, more troubling experience. Dreams are an opportunity for a GM to further character development in a “low risk” environment. A dream can be used to give the flavour of an impending encounter – especially if that encounter is one where the party is unprepared or has underestimated the hazard of the situation. A dream can also help a character examine their past or relive an important experience.

Finally, I thought this article on the world’s steepest railway was pretty cool. There are some pretty steep grades in the Swiss Alps, so the fact that they not only figured out how to get a train up one of them, but keep everyone inside vertical and comfortable for the trip is seriously cool!

Moving through the Swiss Alps, the new Stoos Bahn, which replaces the old Stoos Bahn, gets as high as 2,437 feet up as it moves along gradients as steep as 110 percent, which no funicular car has ever done before. The train travels through three tunnels and a bridge that stretches 1,640 feet.

Grant

Listen. I think we can all agree that 2017 has been … stressful. Thankfully, the Internet has developed an all-natural cure for stress: Funny pictures of animals! The best, of course, are the finalists of the 2017 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, which are both delightful and which encourage wildlife conservation. Enjoy yourself.

After that, it’s time for much heavier reading. The “Green Books”—more accurately, The Negro Motorist Green-Book, published annually—were guides for African-American motorists published from 1936 to 1966. Starting with New York and eventually expanding to most of North America, they outlined the dangers black motorists might face in various places as well as a practical guide to any place willing to serve black travelers, acting as a sort of almanac of segregation and violence. They’re a depressing read, but invaluable as historical social artifacts; and the 1947 Green Book has recently been republished in facsimile:

“The reaction to the book is very, very good … and when you can hand one to someone directly, it’s amazing. Unless they’re an older person of colour who lived through the era, they probably heard about this sort of segregation in school – at least, I hope they did – but that was as a very abstract thing. When they get their hands on a Green Book, you can see a dawning cross their face, because it really depicts a practical reality,” said Gertler.

“The heart of the book is a fairly short list of places where black people could have stayed. You look up your home town, and maybe there’s no places listed, or maybe there’s three … and two of them are ‘tourist homes’, basically the Airbnb of the day, private residences that would rent you one of their rooms to crash for the night. There’s this certain expectation that the book might be filled with angry polemics about how unfair this all is, or explaining why this guide was needed, but there’s little of that. The person buying this understood very well what the situation was, they were living it every day. So there were things like Victor Green writing about how he expected that some day this guide would no longer be needed – he didn’t live to see that day, alas – but for the bulk of the book it is just practical information, listings and ads.”

The Getty Museum’s blog “The Iris” has a really interesting rundown of the symbology of flowers in Renaissance art, focusing on seven favorites with specific Christian meanings:

This plant is particularly common within Renaissance manuscripts—though it’s not found in the Getty gardens. Strawberries stand apart from other “berry” varieties because of their three-leaved (trilobed) structure that was associated with the Holy Trinity. In the Renaissance, the strawberry fruit itself likely signified either the “kind deeds” of the Virgin or martyrdom, while the white flowers symbolize purity. Medicinally, the strawberry was believed to fight inflammation: the fruit helped with skin, while the leaves and roots cured ailments of the liver and kidneys.

Jenny

We quote C.S. Lewis quite frequently on the podcast and in blog posts here at Saving the Game. He was an excellent theologian, and is excellently quotable. So as much as I feel I know many of his works quite well, I am far less familiar with his letters to his friends. Here is a collection of excerpts from his letters in which he describes the ways in which George MacDonald affected the way he viewed spirituality.

“George MacDonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity.” References to MacDonald’s books run through C. S. Lewis’s correspondence. What starts as literary appreciation – discussed in lengthy exchanges with his childhood friend Arthur Greeves – becomes a spiritual touchstone. After C. S. Lewis’s conversion, and as he became increasingly well-known as a Christian apologist, he was frequently asked to recommend books that would help other seekers, and as often recommended George MacDonald.

I am a huge library nerd. It’s part of my job as a student of library and information technology. I have become increasingly worried about the ways in which digital storage formats become obsolete at an incredible rate, and I have also pondered the ways in which video game companies run their archives. Surely they have archives, yes? Well, apparently not. In fact many video game companies are actively trying to discourage the preservation of some games. This Kotaku article addresses many of the very niche, specialized issues that come with trying to preserve both physical and digital video game information.

“Time isn’t on our side,” archivist Andrew Borman said. Borman is a games historian who specializes in unfinished titles, recently discovering a canceled prototype for a Diddy Kong Racing sequel earlier this month. Borman notes that even recent media is degrading: DVDs and CDs from the mid nineties are at risk of decay.

“If we wait too long, there won’t be anything left to preserve.”

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Here are some paintings and excerpts of letters from “Father Christmas” to J.R.R. Tolkein’s children.

On December 24, 1920, J.R.R. Tolkien sat down in his study and wrote a letter to his three-year-old son, John, who had recently asked about Father Christmas. In spidery handwriting, in red ink, Tolkien replied as Father Christmas (the English folkloric figure now widely equated with Santa Claus), addressed from “Christmas House, North Pole.”

A howling evening wind picked up fallen snow and whipped it past the two men walking quietly toward the Kelst river. One was not yet out of his twenties, but he walked with his shoulders bent and his head bowed as if he carried some ponderous, invisible burden. The other was older, his beard and hair long since turned silver, but his gait was the easy stride of a man with nothing left to prove or fear. Both were dressed in the garb of the Lantern Knight Order to which they belonged: a padded undergarment, chain armor, and a thick brown tunic and trousers. The older knight also wore a dark blue tabard with the order’s simple lantern crest and a hooded, fur-lined cloak. Neither was wearing a weapon, but the older man carried an unlit lantern, a bundle which contained another tabard matching the one he wore and a newly-forged sword in its scabbard.

“What troubles you, Kyran?” the older knight inquired. “You walk as though the weight of the mountains presses upon you. The crossing is hard, but all who became Illumae have performed it.”

Kyran, the younger knight, was quiet for a while before he spoke. “I’m not like the other Illumae, Arlin. My father wasn’t a Lantern Knight. My fondest childhood dream wasn’t to be the protector of lost travelers. I didn’t grow up in this city, watching other knights haul poor lost souls in from the cold. I am one of those lost souls.” He held up his left hand and pulled off his thick leather gauntlet, exposing a tattoo of a chain encircling a bundle of blackened tree branches. “This is called a Mark of Condemnation. The chain means that I’m an exile. The branches mean I confessed my crime. They don’t mark people with these for stealing bread, Arlin.”

Arlin reached over and took Kyran’s wrist, drawing it closer so he could examine the tattoo. “Your self-awareness does you credit, Kyran, but which part of this indicates that within an hour of entering the city, you’d stop a potential murder? Because three of us saw you do that.”

Kyran opened his mouth to speak, but made no sound.

“Do you think you’re uniquely evil, Kyran? That your sin is somehow novel or noteworthy? That despite repeated assurances to the contrary, do you think that God has decided that you are the one He’s going to make an example of?” He sighed. “Of course you do. Everyone does. No man or woman that has walked those twenty feet through the river has ever been convinced that they were worthy to do so. Why do you suppose that is?”

Kyran looked hopelessly at the older knight.

“Because every single one of them was right. Evil’s borders wind through every soul, Kyran. None of us ever manage to stand on the side we wish to for our entire life. Cross the river, Kyran. You will emerge cleaner, and then I can give you these.” He hefted the lantern and the bundle meaningfully. “This is where we part for now, Kyran. Go with God.”

Kyran watched as the older knight turned quietly and walked away. It was about half a mile from where he stood to the bank of the river. The twilight had turned still, the wind from earlier had calmed, and he was far enough outside the city that he could not hear the familiar, comforting sounds of shops being closed.

He stood for a long while in the silence, alone, then turned back toward the Kelst and started walking.

As he drew closer, his thoughts became progressively more troubled. He had traveled far, both literally and figuratively, to stand here. But now the moment had come, and despite Arlin’s words, he felt unprepared, unworthy, and very, very afraid. That fear slithered through his guts like a malicious serpent, knocking shameful memories and old guilt free of their resting places. As memories of blood and screams clawed their way to the front of his mind, he tried to keep his face passive, but he knew that some of his trembling had nothing to do with the cold. Yet the road had led here, and it could lead nowhere he wanted to go unless he continued forward.

As he approached the river, he mused that the twenty feet of rushing water he had to cross looked a lot larger than the equal distance of clean snow between him and the river bank. The Kelst was not wide here, but its steep banks made it almost eight feet deep in the middle, and the current surged past rapidly enough to pull even a strong swimmer under. The clear, clean water looked almost black in the failing light of evening, and even here on the bank, he was chilled and shivering. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so cold. How could he possibly reach the other side in a full suit of chain? His training up until this point had included theology, medicine, languages, horsemanship, woodcraft, and swordplay. It had not included swimming, not that that would have helped him here. It had been years since he’d been in deep water, and that had been in the warm, safe waters of his boyhood home, far south of this frozen place.

As he took in the place where he was to cross, a note of despair rang in his mind. There was no way. There was no possible way that he could survive the crossing. The armor would drag him down, and if he didn’t drown, he’d almost certainly freeze. His gaze fell upon the other knights gathered on the far bank. Arlin stood with Elsora and Tamaril, the two most recent inductees into the Illumae. The younger knights met his gaze from across the river with knowing looks. They had been here recently enough to remember, and they knew what he was feeling. Kyran could almost feel their eyes pulling him across the river. He couldn’t back down now, not with them standing there.

Seeing before him his own mortality and regrets as much as the faces of his fellow knights, he took a step forward. Time seemed to slow as he trod slowly across the ten feet of pure, untouched snow between him and the river’s edge. Almost as if to underscore the finality of what he was doing, a few snowflakes began to drift lazily down from the sky. Three steps to the river.

Two steps.

One final step of dry land. The water churned before him. He fixed his gaze on the lanterns on the far bank and took his first step into the frigid water. Raw, icy pain stabbed up his leg immediately. His vision blurred as his eyes watered and he gasped involuntarily.

Another step. His right foot howled the same dirge of protest his left had just moments before. He gritted his teeth and willed himself forward, his already-numbed feet uncertain on the rocky riverbed. This was his final punishment, it must be. Arlin’s assurances must have been a ruse to lure him here. These noble and pure knights might have accepted him as an ordinary member, but he had been a fool to think he could become one of the Illumae. His soul was far too stained to stand among their hallowed ranks. There was no way they could be expected to accept a murderer.

The water tugged at his heavy, agonized legs, seeming all too eager to be his executioner. It was getting hard to move, so numbed was he from the cold. The spray of the river was already creating an icy crust on the parts of him still above the water, and his armor felt heavier with every passing step. This was to be his final judgment, then. To perish before he could prove himself, to go before the Father of All black of soul and unclean of conscience, a failure, unfit for His presence. He would perish, and Hell awaited him. The fear that had been tearing at him gave way to crushing guilt. He deserved this, and could not deny it. He raised his numbed left hand to just below the surface and looked at the Mark of Condemnation that had been tattooed there before he had been sent away from his homeland. He looked back toward the lanterns, weeping openly now, and sucked in a last, desperate breath before he took the step that would put his head below the water’s surface. The frigid air seared his lungs.

Feeling profoundly alone, he willed the feet he could no longer feel to take one more step, and the river closed over his head, and with it, crushing darkness. His cold-ravaged lungs burned fiercely, and the water pounded in his ears. His eyes reached for the surface, searched for the lights on the far shore. He strained toward the flickering light, which may as well have been miles away. He managed one more step before the current took him. His legs slid out from under him, and his armor pulled him down like the claws of the grave itself. His last conscious thought was a prayer for forgiveness, then the world went black.

***

Kyran awoke, only he wasn’t on the bottom of the Kelst anymore. He was somewhere warm and still and quiet. He also wasn’t wearing armor. His eyes still closed, he flexed his fingers, clenched a couple of muscles and found he could feel them and that there was no pain. He breathed deep and inhaled warm, clean air, scented lightly with what smelled like cinnamon and cedarwood. He felt comfortable. Safe. He opened his eyes. He stood on a grassy hill beneath a clear blue sky. A gentle breeze tousled his hair, and off in the distance, he could hear laughter and singing. He was calm, contented, at peace.

Suddenly a figure of pure light stood before him, impossibly bright. It was simultaneously the size of a man, and more massive than anything he could comprehend. Its brilliance tore everything else from his eyes. Its power washed his senses away. Its purity annihilated all else from his mind, and he could only gape in awe at the raw potency of it. He could not bear to look at it, but he could not stand to look away. Strangely, though, while he suddenly felt very small, he did not feel afraid.

And then it reached for him. Strong, loving, powerful, gentle arms wrapped around him in a tender, desperate embrace and pulled Kyran close, holding him, puissant and yet kind. His guilt, his pain, his fear washed away, and the words filled his senses, overwhelming all that was left in him. My child! My precious, beloved child! How I love you! How dear you are to me!

“But,” Kyran started, “I have-”

I know what you have done, dear one. Your debt is paid. It was paid before you stepped into the river, before you sought the Lanterns, before you knew it existed. I love you. I have always loved you. I will always continue to love you. Do not fear. Do not ever fear. One day, you will return here. But today, I must send you back, for you have work yet undone. Carry My light to the lost. Let them know I love them, that I forgive them. All of it, all of them. It is all paid. Go.

***

Tell them.

Kyran coughed violently, heaving up frigid river water, and the cold came surging back. He trembled, lying on the bank of the river as the two young knights hurriedly set down their lanterns and rushed to his side. Strong, armored limbs lifted him to his feet, wrapped him in a heavy fur cloak and pulled him towards the roaring bonfire where the other knights stood. They left him there, shivering by its flames, his armor and clothes already drying from its powerful heat. No one spoke. They knew better. He had so many questions, but he no longer had any doubts. Arlin had been right; he would never again be ruled by fear. For Kyran Semnir, there was nothing left to be afraid of.

The preceding work is Copyright 2013, by Peter N. Martin.

Grant

I don’t normally provide straight-up plugs here, but Andrew Harmon, creator of the now-Kickstarting Christian board game Portals and Prophets, personally reached out to me about his game. If you’re interested in a game of Biblical time travel and set collection, you might want to check this out!

Most long-time listeners likely remember our Historical Heresies series. It didn’t really gain a lot of traction, and was extremely difficult (if interesting) to research, so we gave it up. However, a recent discovery brought it to mind again for me. Biblical scholars at the University of Texas at Austin found fragments of the Gnostic text “The First Apocalypse of James” in the original Greek in the Oxford University archives. Previously, this work was only known from Coptic translations, so this is a pretty cool find.

With its neat, uniform handwriting and words separated into syllables, the original manuscript was probably a teacher’s model used to help students learn to read and write, Smith and Landau said.

“The scribe has divided most of the text into syllables by using mid-dots. Such divisions are very uncommon in ancient manuscripts, but they do show up frequently in manuscripts that were used in educational contexts,” said Landau, a lecturer in the UT Austin Department of Religious Studies.

The teacher who produced this manuscript must have “had a particular affinity for the text,” Landau said. It does not appear to be a brief excerpt from the text, as was common in school exercises, but rather a complete copy of this forbidden ancient writing.

Our old friend The Mad Cleric is back with a really interesting take on “The challenge and beauty of AD&D modules“, and how to use them properly:

We’ve all played in forgettable settings that left us with forgettable adventures.  But what we all want is a rich, engaging setting that players enjoy–one that gives them a desire to continue in that world.  Meanwhile, I’m convinced that AD&D modules cultivate “living” settings that players can expand and own.  So pick one out that you’re interested in and give it a shot!  Either use that module as a basis or an inspiration for your next adventure.  See if your players have the same experience that mine did.

Finally—by now, most fans of our show know that I’m sort of fascinated by conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. The amount of effort that goes into arguing nonsense, and the psychology of such belief, interests me greatly. These off-the-wall beliefs also tend to produce really interesting gaming material; sometimes for psychological horror games, sometimes for cyberpunk, and sometimes for fantasy. Forbes recently published an article on “Five Impossible Facts That Would Have to Be True If the Earth Were Flat“, and it’s useful in two ways. First, it’s genuinely interesting science, encompassing climatology, orbital mechanics, and more. Second, it’s a great primer on things to change if you’re setting your game in a flat fantasy world!

Peter

After some time away from Richard Beck’s Experimental Theology blog in the Weekend Reading, it’s time to bring it back. His latest series of posts on religious experiences is doing a good job of describing something I’ve been feeling for a bit but couldn’t quite put words to.

And if you cut yourself off from religious experiences, you cut yourself off from what makes faith vital, energized and passionate.

For many Christians–and especially post-evangelicals going through a season of deconstruction–faith is being increasingly reduced to political activism and ethics. And while politics and ethics are really important things, we need to bump into God from time to time if we want to sustain faith across the long haul.

Mysterious ruins can be a really cool addition to a gaming setting, but they needn’t even be super old for that to work – the Bayer’s Lake Mystery Walls are theorized to be only about a century or two old, but it’s still unknown what’s going on with them. In fact, in a lot of ways, newer ruins are more mysterious in a “how did that get built, used, and fall into ruin that recently, RIGHT OVER THERE and nobody noticed?” sort of way.

Constructed with flat-surfaced ironstone slate rocks, the Bayer’s Lake Mystery Walls have been protected under Nova Scotia’s Special Places Act since 1991, after they were discovered during development of the area. Various archaeological groups have since studied the structures, but the artifacts uncovered have been deemed too young to offer clues about their origins.

Finally – researchers have been trying for ages to come up with a way to mass-produce spider silk. It looks like the solution involves… …yeast? Wired has the details. I think this is especially cool because spider silk armor has been a staple in a lot of RPGs for ages and now spider silk clothing (if not armor) is looking like a real possibility!

Five years ago that would’ve been unthinkable. Spider silk is an ace of a material. It’s soft, flexible, and strong as steel. But it’s also a terror to produce en mass. Spiders, no surprise, tend to cannibalize each other before they crank out enough silk to be useful. Scientists tried BioSteel goats, animals that are genetically modified to produce the filament of a Golden Orb spider, but that proved untenable, too.

Jenny

Happy Advent, friends! Another new church year awaits us!
I know that a fair number of denominations don’t pay much attention to the old Church holidays as they aren’t marked on most calendars, but my church (as most Anglican churches I know) is throwing itself into a hectic month of celebration and preparation.
I learned recently of a set of Advent prayers called the O Antiphons. The reason they’re called that? All the prayers start with “O.” These prayers also happen to be the base for the Christmas carol “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” There are a couple other interesting poetic tricks hidden in these prayers as well.

The O Antiphons refer to the seven antiphons that are prayed immediately before the Magnificat during Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours (or the Divine Office). Each antiphon begins with the exclamation “O”, thus earning their popular name of the “O Antiphons.” They cover the special period of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas, from Dec. 17-23, with Dec. 24 being Vespers of the Christmas Vigil.

I’m having difficulty coming up with a preamble for this article, so check out this cool RPG I found out about called Weave! It’s a card and dice-based RPG that interacts with an app. I also think that the cards and dice could be used in a similar way to Rory’s Story Cubes, kind of like an ink blot test.

Weave is a small box packed full of surprises. When I first opened it up, I was confused. There sat a deck of tarot sized cards and a set of dice. That’s it. No instructions. No rule books. No character sheets. Kyle explained the game to me as “A roleplaying platform.” The game is run by a free app available on iOS and the Android App Store. The only physical objects you need are the cards and dice contained in the box.

I remember what it was like to try to learn to knit. It’s one of my fonder memories in fact, even though I absolutely hated knitting. The frustration of having to learn to both knit AND purl is apparently one common enough that someone wrote an article about how spooky knitting is.

I’ll just put it right out there: Knitting is spooky. It’s obviously impossible to do, and yet you see people doing it all the time. These people clearly are a superior life-form. If you doubt this, spend a day with a dozen of your friends. At the end of the evening, have a look around: Eleven of you will have cookie crumbs in your laps, and the knitter will have an entire sweater.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” -Matthew 4:8-9 (NIV)

My setting design series continues with further development of the moral universe. If you’re interested in seeing the previous entries in this series, here’s a link to the series.

This week, I’m going to cover something I’ve been hinting at for the last several posts but haven’t covered yet in the context of the setting I’m designing: corruption and redemption.

Corruption

Corruption is a big part of the moral universe in the setting, but unlike the alignment component, I’m a little hesitant to mechanize it. The reasons for this are twofold: first, if I mechanize it with corruption tables and attendant effects, that incentivizes anyone (even me!) who uses the reference I create to stick to just what’s in there; also, to be a bit less charitable, if I mechanize it with effects, that makes it tempting to “cheese” it at some point. The other reason is that I feel like there’s a lot of narrative potential there and don’t want to reduce it to a die roll.

So with that out of the way, here’s how corruption works in the game world: people (regardless of their mechanical race – dwarves, elves, centaurs, and hobgoblins are all as susceptible to this as humans) are a mix of good and evil, at least in terms of their impulses and drives. What people embrace and turn to can affect them in physical, external ways as well as internal ones.

Your average person, regardless of who they are or where they live, struggles on some level to do what’s right… …right up until they don’t. If you start to do things you know or don’t care are evil, at some point in time, some representative of primal evil will make your acquaintance. It probably won’t happen immediately, and it almost certainly won’t happen as a result of ordinary moral slips and failings. But if you start to embrace the darkness, the darkness will embrace back. This can look like several different things. An actual devil may show up with a contract, or maybe some dark power will grant you some magical abilities in exchange for unspecified services. Or not; maybe the power is just granted and you don’t know where it comes from. More often, though, a powerful evil character who themself has gone through this process will be the one making the bargains. Over time, this can manifest in any number of ways. Any “saint” ratings the character may have in virtue ratings will drop to “seeker” or lower – probably gradually. Often the justification for this will seem sound – pragmatism, shedding of naivety, realism, etc. The character will be able to convince others and often themselves that they haven’t really changed.

Once the character has shed all of their ratings of “Seeker” or better, they start to change more rapidly. Characters will take on the aspects of the undead, in some cases slowly transforming into one. The character can take on fiendish traits as well (perhaps transforming from a “normal” fantasy race into a tiefling) or weird unnatural ones (becoming something bizarre and Lovecraftian). The further the character walks down this road, the more of themself they lose, and their transformation will mirror their particular form of corruption. At some point, the character may be so far gone they look like one of the iconic metal “mascots” like Vic Rattlehead. That’s the point at which they’re the “furthest gone;” they might be theoretically redeemable, but – and this is the important part – have utterly lost the ability to resist whatever it was that started corrupting them. They might even want to on some dimly-remembered level, but they just can’t any more, at least not on their own. They’ll basically function as an exemplar of whatever vice or corruption they’ve fallen victim to. They’ll also get more powerful and amass more resources. Evil will be happy to pick up the bill, but power has a price, and that price is the terrible things they’ll do to make sure they get it. Characters this fallen will have at least one “Monster” rating in the morality axis of their alignment and may have several.

And at this point, they’re going to be the evil thing that makes the deal with other people being corrupted. And the cycle continues.

Redemption

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. -Micah 7:18-19 (ESV)

Fortunately, that isn’t the final word on the moral state of the world. What has been broken can be mended, what has been lost can be restored. An evil character that sincerely wishes to change – repents – can be redeemed and become whole again, no matter how far gone they are. They do not have to get there without help, though. Again, for emphasis: they do not have to get there without help. Some of the most successful redemption stories are those whose opening chapters were written by people who refused to relinquish someone they loved to the darkness.

They need not have loved that person for long.

A coworker of mine told me a story about their grandfather once, which I have stripped of identifying details for reasons I hope are obvious. A neighbor – not even a relative or really a friend – was struggling with addiction and the grandfather took this poor lost soul in. That person slept on his couch for years and was cared for by the grandfather. With the the aid and care of the grandfather, that person turned their entire life around.

If you prefer fictional examples, the classic I always go to is Jean Veljean and the Bishop of Digne. (And despite the fact that I’ve watched it dozens of times, I almost always tear up when I watch that video.) Jenny also has a version of this same iconic scene that she really enjoys – this one is in French (the original language Victor Hugo wrote in) and it’s here for your enjoyment.

If there are others who will not let the person go, or who can show the fallen some staggering act of mercy and forgiveness, there’s a chance to start the ascent upward out of corruption and back into grace. The process of rising looks a bit like the process of falling in reverse – “Monster” ratings will be discarded and traded in for less evil ones. Sometimes drastically less evil ones. If you reach for the light – for God – you will find strong arms reaching out to wrest you away from that which binds you.

There is no “typical” way this goes – sometimes people claw their way slowly and arduously out of the darkness, dragged steadily upwards by friends and loved ones. Some have a moment of clarity and cast evil off like a cloak. Whether their internal transformation is gradual or swift, however, their physical transformation will not be as swift or complete in many cases. To quote Minefield by Petra: “Some may feel they can wander out too far; they may heal but they may always wear the scar.”

However, that’s not the end of the story. The redeemed will almost always have to atone and make amends for what they did in their previous lives. This may be restitution or it may be far too late for that and they’ll try to pay things forward rather than back. And of course a moment of noble sacrifice is a time-honored trope in fiction, though I’d hasten to add it shouldn’t be the only tool you go to in these stories.

As Oscar Wilde famously said: every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Playlist:
Minefield by Petra – a favorite of mine about the dangers of corruption.
Gimme by Alice Cooper – probably one of the creepiest songs ever written and performed about temptation and corruption – this is how the Devil approaches us.
The Last Battle by Sabaton – one picture of what the start of atonement looks like. The song tells the story of a WWII German unit that went rogue and fought the SS alongside American troops at the very end of the war.

First, a bit of credit where credit is due.. One of my oldest friends is a PhD-in-training, specializing in the Holocaust. He helped me avoid an ill-advised analogy by tracking down some German-language resources about some obscure WWII events and one of the figures associated with them. It’s AMAZING to be able to occasionally call on an actual historian, so my sincere thanks to you, Chad. Your assistance tonight was greatly appreciated.

Second, if you’ve not played Brutal Legend and have a PC, it’s free on the Humble store for a very, VERY short time. If you remember the first post in this series, that game was one of my sources of inspiration for the entire project. If you see this post the first (or second, I think?) day it’s up, go grab it!
-Peter

This post was originally going to be something other than another setting design report, but then Doug Hagler commented on the previous post in this series and set off a chain reaction of thoughts in my brain. So: thanks Doug!

For this week’s post, I’m going to discuss the way alignment is going to work in the setting. Brace yourself, I’m going to put my game designer hat on.

The D&D 3×3 alignment grid is one of those venerable gaming artifacts that can be fun when used properly but spawns countless arguments. The biggest arguments tend to center around what defines good vs. evil and what defines law vs. chaos. Fortunately, I have a really good way of measuring good and evil at my fingertips: the Seven Deadly Sins and the corresponding Seven Heavenly Virtues. We covered these in our Virtues and Vices series on the podcast and discussed them more than I’ll be able to in a simple blog post.

Morality

For the purposes of this setting, I’m going to call the Good vs. Evil axis of the alignment grid a character’s Morality.

Using this system, each character will have a score in each of the virtues and vices. For each virtue/vice pair, a character will have a rating of Saint, Seeker, Accepter, Indulger, or Monster. A Saint rating means that this is a virtue that the character exemplifies and has consistently demonstrated, even in trying circumstances. They may be tempted in that particular area of virtue, but always resist. For example, a person with a “saint” rating on Greed/Generosity will be unfailingly, self-sacrificingly generous. These are the sort of people who think of what they have as property of the needy that they are merely managing until it can be given away – as soon and as extravagantly as possible.

Conversely, a Monster rating on a specific vice means that not only does someone unrepentantly indulge in that vice as often as possible, there’s an additional, especially destructive and cruel aspect to it. So for example, a person with a “Monster” rating in gluttony may especially enjoy eating lavish feasts in front of prisoners they’re deliberately starving.

A Seeker is a character that’s trying to overcome a particular vice and usually resists it, an Accepter is the human norm – not obsessed with the particular vice, but not especially troubled by it either. People with an Accepter rating in Sloth may be habitual procrastinators or the like, but they won’t complain about how having to put forth effort to not starve isn’t worth it unless it’s been a really bad day at the office. An Indulger is someone who is particularly susceptible to a particular vice and doesn’t even try to resist it a lot of the time. The guy that’s always getting into bar fights is an Indulger in Wrath.

Saint and Monster ratings are mutually-exclusive and limited to three traits at that extreme level per character, but otherwise a character can have a mix of any of the trait levels. (Primal creatures of Good or Evil like angels and fiends aren’t limited by this – an angel may well have Saint ratings in all 7 virtues and a fiend will almost certainly not limit itself to 3 Monster ratings.) By assigning Saint a value of +2, Seeker a value of +1, Accepter a value of 0, Indulger a value of -1 and Monster a value of -2, we wind up with a possible point range of -10 to +10. From there it breaks down as follows: -10 to -5: Evil, -4 to +4: Neutral and +5 to +10: Good. This allows for a wide spectrum of neutrality, flawed good characters and evil ones with redeeming traits.

Just as a refresher, the seven sin/virtue pairs are:
Pride vs. Humility
Envy vs. Kindness
Wrath vs. Patience
Sloth vs. Diligence
Greed vs. Charity
Gluttony vs. Temperance
Lust vs. Chastity

Personality

That’s all well and good for the good vs. evil side, but what to do about law vs chaos? Since law vs. chaos is more about how people do things than what they’re trying to do, I decided to call this axis “personality.” It works in much the same way as Morality with a few key exceptions: The ratings are Exemplar, Favorer, and Indifferent toward  the traits on here and they may be mixed and matched freely. For example: On the Efficiency vs. Artistry scale, a character may be an Exemplar of Artistry, but that same character may also be an Exemplar of Tradition on the Tradition vs. Progress scale. (In fact, that sounds a bit like a stereotypical samurai.) The “Law” end of the scale gets +2 and +1 for Exemplar and Favorer and the “Chaos” side gets -1 and -2, respectively. This gives a range of -12 to +12 which breaks down as follows:  -12 to -5: Chaotic, -4 to +4: Neutral, +5 to +12 Lawful.

The trait pairs I’m using for Law vs. Chaos in this game are:
Duty vs. Independence
Efficiency vs. Artistry
Meticulousness vs. Expediency
Satisfaction vs. Excitement
Tradition vs. Progress
Sacrifice vs. Pragmatism

Worked Example

Since he’s easy at hand, here’s how Lambert (my cleric PC in Grant’s game) would break down using this system.

Pride vs. Humility: Seeker (Humility) [+1] – Lambert tends to be very focused on the needs of those around him. He does take some satisfaction in his position of authority and can be somewhat bossy and scolding, however.
Envy vs. Kindness: Seeker (Kindness) [+1] – Lambert is willing to take significant risks to help people around him and is motivated to action by the suffering of others. He is definitely compassionate, if a bit stiff.
Wrath vs. Patience: Seeker (Patience) [+1] – Lambert isn’t perfect in this area, and if I had to drop one of his ratings to “accepter” this would be it – he doesn’t display it often, but he has a temper, as a number of evil creatures can attest to, or rather they could, if they were still alive. But he is trying, and he’s pretty good at not lashing out at party members and those around him unless he’s under significant stress.
Diligence vs. Sloth: Saint (Diligence) [+2] – Lambert is pretty much the avatar of Diligence. He has trouble stopping to care for himself, in fact, something that Rishi forced him to do through chemical means prior to confronting Auntie Bloat.
Charity vs. Greed: Seeker (Charity) [+1] – Lambert is generally pretty giving and helpful, but he is currently in possession of more magical equipment than the rest of the party.
Gluttony vs. Temperance: Seeker (Temperance) [+1] – Lambert is generally pretty good about not overindulging, bordering on a Saint rating for this, but it hasn’t been tested much.
Lust vs. Chastity: Saint (Chastity) [+2] – Lambert really doesn’t have much interest at all in having romantic or sexual contact with anyone in the world; he’s way too focused on his other goals.
Total: +9. Lambert is squarely on the side of good. He’s definitely not perfect, but he is doing his level best to honor God with his actions and he cares deeply for basically everyone he becomes aware of.

Duty vs. Independence: Exemplar (Duty) [+2] – Lambert is basically an extension of the colony and the Church – his personal goals all revolve around society and the protection and nurturing of community in the concrete and virtue in the abstract. He is a walking counter-narrative to the way real-world colonialsim often went.
Efficiency vs. Artisty: Indifferent [+0] – The name of the rating doesn’t really do his viewpoint justice – Lambert believes there’s a place for both and in roughly equal amounts. His appreciation for nature tempers his drive toward civilizing the new island somewhat.
Meticulousness vs. Expediency: Favorer (Expediency) [-1] – This may swing back in the other direction at some future point, but for the moment, Lambert has been strongly focused on just trying to get things done as quickly as possible. His life in the colony has been one of a troubleshooter and he’s basically been putting out metaphorical fires since the ship ran aground.
Satisfaction vs. Excitement: Exemplar (Satisfaction) [+2] – Lambert really would rather everything stay peaceful and calm, but he does have a bit of a drive to get things done and willingly hangs out with Aster and Garm, so there’s definitely some pull toward excitement in his life… …it’s just that almost none of it is internal.
Tradition vs. Progress: Favorer (Progress) [-1] – Lambert is from a large, traditional organization (his monastic order which is part of the larger church) but he’s deliberately trying to shape the society of the colony through example and the limited authority he has. First contact with the Kenku could have gone very differently in terms of their relationship with the colony, but Lambert has stubbornly made sure to acknowledge them as full equals of personhood since the initial meeting and will not let countering opinions go unopposed if he encounters them. He’s not a radical, though – he seeks to shape a good society, not rip the old one down entirely and start afresh.
Sacrifice vs. Pragmatism: Indifferent [+0] – Lambert is willing to give things up in the service of larger goals (particularly his own comfort and sleep) but tries to be smart about it and won’t do it for its own sake. He is a tactician at heart and prefers outwitting his enemy to heroically taking them on one-to-one.
Total: +2. Lambert is neutral with a slight lean toward Law on the Law/Chaos scale.

Would you use this system? Do you think it has any particular flaws (other than complexity, which I’ll freely acknowledge) or strengths? As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. -John 1:5

As I referenced in my previous blog post in this series, I’ve been gradually working on a new setting for some theoretical future campaign. Because I’m still waiting on some rules resources to actually be published and reach me (specifically Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and the Hellscapes books) I’m still on high-level themes and concepts. (One of the nice things about just doing the setting as something to use rather than something to sell is that I don’t have to do much in the way of actual game design.) There is plenty of that stuff to work out, however!

For this post I’m going to focus on the moral universe of the game.

A huge underpinning of the entire setting in an ongoing battle of Good vs. Evil (both capitalized on purpose). When one of your touchstones is heavy metal, there’s not a tremendous amount of benefit in shooting for subtlety, so I’m not going to bother. Instead, I’m going to focus on a set of contrasting principles that paint the moral texture of the setting and give some early thoughts on how I’ll depict those in the game. In kind of an inversion of D&D 4e’s “points of light” idea, I’m using what I’m tentatively calling “dark blots” (other names in considerations: spots of darkness, pits of darkness) where there are areas controlled by various evil forces that have carved out some territory for themselves. An acknowledged influence here is the Dark Lords of Ravenloft and their domains. A certain Ravenloft game I’ve referenced a few times on the podcast is definitely being farmed for material here.

Oppression and Peace

As I referenced in the last post in the series, one of the big things that Christianity and a lot of traditional heavy metal share in common is concern for the oppressed, so one of the big themes in the setting is going to be oppression and how to deal with it. One of the things Evil wants to do in the setting is create misery and suffering through grinding and suffocating want and violence – rather than simply wiping out a population, most of the evil powers in the setting would rather enslave it, either explicitly through chains and cruel slave drivers or figuratively through things like a company store that is deliberately set up to create debt slavery. The oppression and privation create desperation, which spawns cruelty. In a world that’s designed to crush you, people often opt for an “every man for himself” outlook, viciously protecting what little they have like a caged animal. But unlike the real world where these systems often come about via carelessness, unforeseen consequences, or through depraved indifference, in this setting these structures of oppression are almost always carefully engineered and meticulously deliberate.

Because the setting has some quasi-modern technology, this allows for factories and mines with big, scary machines and so on to factor into the visuals, and it also allows for the idea of large, concentrated populations laboring away for some overlord and that overlord’s minions. Partially bombed-out high-rise apartment buildings, shantytowns, and cyberpunk back alleys all strongly influence the urban aesthetic. By contrast, the forces of evil themselves enjoy overflowing, gilded opulence. Think of the palaces of Saddam Hussein in Iraq – ridiculous, bizarre luxury contrasted against the bleak, hardscrabble existence of the masses seething below them, ground down and whipped into line. This dichotomy is rubbed in the faces of the oppressed and it is often hinted or outright said that the difference is their own fault, and if they’d just get on board, the luxury could be theirs too. (This isn’t a complete lie, but as I’ll get to in a later post, that deal comes with some hefty strings.) I refer to these locations as the Grim Cities.

By contrast, I want good to be exemplified by places that are more like Stardew Valley. Things aren’t completely perfect, but there is a sense of security, peace, and perspective. People may not live in opulent luxury, but they have enough to feel safe and secure, and when hard times fall on someone in their community, they band together to support them and help. Religion is uncorrupted and a force for organized charity, therapy, and purpose, and people react to refugees from the city in much the way South Koreans react to North Koreans who escape to the South or West Germans reacted to East Germans who escape to the West during the Berlin Wall era – compassion and help to rebuilt (or just build) their lives. Those who have been hurt can heal. Those who have done hurt can atone. Those who are weary can rest. Those who are restless can work to do some good in the world.

And perhaps most importantly from a gaming perspective, those who want to go challenge Evil on its home turf have a safe place to fall back to so they can regroup.

In order for that to work, the better places in the world need to have some civilization too, but not as much as you might think. The Grim Cities turn a lot of the productivity they generate back in on themselves, expending a lot of resources crushing their own population, dumping yet more opulence on their ruling class, and and so on. This means that while the armies of conquest they send out are certainly nasty and nothing to be trifled with, this isn’t Reign of Steel or Midnight where the good guys have no chance either.

Still, that leaves the problem as to what this looks like. One example that springs to mind is the monarchy of Norway. My wife recently stumbled across some material about King Haakon VII of Norway, and I think the modern Norwegian monarchy may be a better go-to example than even the King Arthur legends of what a benevolent human monarchy looks like. There’s also a lot to be said for nature as a contrast to the concrete and steel of the cities. Natural beauty is great – but it should also be dramatic to fit with the heavy metal aesthetic – craggy foothills, breathtaking natural monuments, ancient forests with massive sequoia-like trees – all of these convey a sense of grandeur and awe without being sinister.

As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have!

Video Playlist:
Disturbed: Land of Confusion: Definitely watch the music video on this one – very much in the theme of oppression and fighting it.

This week’s photo is from Tom Barrett on Unsplash

The Steam Halloween sale is currently on, so if you’ve been eyeing something spooky on the PC, there’s a decent chance it’s on sale now. Gog.com is also doing a Halloween Sale. Out of the stuff on offer, I’d personally recommend Darkest Dungeon, Hand of Fate, F.E.A.R. 2, and Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines as stand-outs. Gog.com also has a bunch of old classic D&D PC games on sale. Steam also has Cabin in the Woods for about 6 bucks if the mention of that in Episode 118 piqued your interest.

This was written a while back, but since I’m on a bit of a video game kick this time anyway, please please take the time it’ll take you to read A Year in Stardew Valley. It’s one of the best pieces of games writing I’ve ever come across. (A little bit of coarse language, but not an excessive amount.)

Down by the river, also outside of the village, there lives a woman called Leah. Like me, Leah has given up her previous life and moved to Stardew Valley to be an artist. She paints and carves, working day after day trying to improve, and she spends a lot of her time alone. She’s humble about what she does and has nothing to prove to anyone, but I know what sort of things will happen if she spends day after day, week after week, practising her craft. She has a book on her bookshelf called “How to Deal with Overbearing People.” I want this book.

My last article covers a meeting of various Middle-Eastern deonominations of Christianity that happened in Germany recently. This really brings to mind Galatians 3:28.

“Never in the 112 years history of this Evangelical church building in the center of the German capital has the colorful variety of Christian faith been more obvious,” wrote Katja Dorothea Buck a journalist who covers religion and politics in Germany.

“Prayers, lectures and hymns were performed in Aramaic, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, English and German. Ethiopian, Armenian, Syrian and Coptic church choirs contributed with their respective liturgical music.

Jenny

To add on to what Peter said about the Steam Halloween Sale, I can also recommend Sunless Sea, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Night in the Woods very strongly. Sunless Sea (and Fallen London, the browser game from which it was derived) would make for an exceptional Call of Cthulu setting.

I’m a pretty big fan of Afrofuturism as a genre, as well as African-based fantasy. Western mythology gets a whole lot more spotlight than African mythology, and I think that can lead to a limited perspective on what fantasy and sci-fi have to offer. That’s why I’m excited to see what Bastion has to offer. (No relation to the excellent video game.)

Bastion is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game with an Afrocentric point of view, set in the last city at the edge of the world. A fantasy horror game where decay and the warping power of animated chaos twists everything it touches.
In the dying land of Ife Oodaye, Bastion is the last city of the free people. Its high walls shelter the survivors of the great devil that hungers to destroy them. It is here that the last embers of hope burn.

If you’d like a crash-course in biology, Canadian history, and a potentially really cool band name, have I got the article for you. One woman is responsible ~89% of cases of a particular type of blindness in Quebec.

So well-documented is French Canadian genealogy that professional geneticists and demographers use the data for research, too. Whenever a small group of people leave a large population (France) to found a new one (New France), they bring with them a particular set of mutations. Some of these mutations will by chance be more common in the new population and others less so. As a result, some rare genetic disorders disproportionately impact French Canadians.

One of these is Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, which causes vision loss, usually in young men. Recently, geneticists using French Canadian genealogy have reexamined the effects of Leber’s and found a striking pattern of inheritance: It seems to show a long-theorized but never-seen-in-humans pattern called the “mother’s curse.”

Life is neither easy nor fair. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and it seems that it must be relearned again and again. This article has been going around in my various social media circles, and I think it drives home the point quite nicely.

“God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” somehow flows from the lips of the one who wants to comfort, but who subconsciously knows nothing will.

But here’s the problem: Those words aren’t actually comforting to us the way you hope or intend them to be. So here’s a few reasons why many of us who are experiencing painful life chapters would *really* like you to plllleeeeaaase stop saying this to us…

Grant

Are we doing Steam Halloween Sale recommendations? I guess we are! Here’s mine: Antichamber (80% off, at only $3.99!), a tremendous puzzle game; Kerbal Space Program (40% off, at $23.99), for years of spaceship building and orbital mechanics learning; and Overcooked (66% off, at $5.77), for hilarious multiplayer that might also cause divorces. Good games, all.

Matt Civico over at Geekdom House recently published an excellent article on the Sabbath (which, you might recall, we talked about semi-recently as well.) “The Importance of Rest and Save Points” covers those same points excellently:

I can’t carry every burden that breaks my heart, but I don’t have to feel guilty for needing rejuvenation. Being in relationship with others means sharing weakness. Sometimes I need to ask for help, and be filled, instead of constantly fulfilling their needs. Sometimes I need take a break, and that’s hard. The truth is that I’m still learning this lesson, and I’m still suffering the consequences of ignoring the healthy limits of my abilities. It may hurt to remember how small and finite I am, but the alternative is a sure slide towards Game Over.

Tangentially related to Peter’s article about a cross-denominational meeting in Germany: Marc van Bulck’s Cringe podcast recently interviewed the members of Abraham Jam, and it was fascinating. Abraham Jam is a collaboration between musicians Dawud Wharnsby, Billy Jonas, and David LaMotte, who are each members of the different Abrahamic faiths—indeed, that’s the whole point of the project! (And no, this isn’t only me being a David LaMotte fan.) I strongly recommend listening to the episode, which interviews each member in turn and asks very interesting questions. It doesn’t hurt that Marc van Bulck is a pastor himself, and a great podcaster!

Neima Jahromi wrote an excellent article in The New Yorker on “The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons”. This is a topic that seems to be picking up steam in major media outlets lately—a sort of surprise that D&D is back—but the article is really quite good, focusing on a board game café that runs D&D games:

Freeman refused for a week or two—the game was too open-ended, and didn’t have a straightforward cognitive benefit—but the customer persisted, so he went up into his parents’ attic, dug out all his old D. & D. manuals, and wrote an adventure. “I tried to give them a little flavor of everything,” he told me, “A little dungeon crawl, a little fighting monsters. They ate it up.” Word got out. A few months later, a parent stopped him on the street with tears in her eyes. “What are you guys doing?” she asked him. Her son was dyslexic and had been role-playing at Brooklyn Strategist for a couple of weeks. Before D. & D., he couldn’t focus on writing for more than a few seconds. Now he was staying up all night to draft stories about his character. “Whatever it is, bottle it and sell it to me,” the mother said.

Finally, and completely unrelated to anything I usually post but utterly fascinating: Someone went to the trouble of visualizing all the different sorting methods programmers use to sort data, and it is mesmerizing. I mean, look at this!

Sorting Algorithms Visualized<

The party was exploring an area of our home island we hadn’t been to before, and we came across an ancient, abandoned mine. Some cursory exploration by the party rogue revealed a bunch of mined-out areas and the remnants of some good veins of iron – it looked hopeful that this could be a good source of iron in the future, provided the colony was willing to put in the elbow grease. Importantly, this also meant things like saw blades and nails, which meant houses made out of actual planks rather than the more primitive mud huts the colony is currently residing in. And that’s when the rogue spotted the troll.

Trolls are really nasty, vicious creatures in D&D; these aren’t the lumbering stone beasts you often see guarding bridges and rolling rocks around in some fantasy settings – they’re fearsome apex predators full of claws and teeth that enjoy ripping their opponents apart and can’t be permanently harmed without fire or acid. They are, however, sapient, if both stupid and evil. That combination threatened to be the Auntie Bloat angst all over again… …and in a moment of clarity I decided not to go there.

The reasons for that were several. First, I’ve been playing Lambert a little against the point of D&D; on a very basic level, D&D is about combat – the monster manual is full of big, nasty creatures that want to murder you and have you as a light snack (hopefully, but not always, in that order) and pretending otherwise is a bit futile and was starting to flirt with being pompous on my part. Second, and related, I got the impression that Lambert’s reluctance about violence was negatively affecting the other players’ enjoyment of the game, so I definitely didn’t want to push that any further than it had already gone. And there was also the final but my no means irrelevant meta level of occasionally needing to remind myself that if one of my PCs does something I wouldn’t do, that doesn’t make me a hypocrite because the PC is a fictional character. My PCs do not all have to share my own moral compass exactly, and it is indeed fine for me to make a PC who is more comfortable with violence than I myself am, especially because I don’t seem to have this issue in video games at all.

Fortunately, Grant also didn’t make the decision to pull out the weapons and wade in a particularly difficult or morally-dubious one. We found bones of other humanoids and some kenku beaks in a trash pile elsewhere in the troll lair and there was also the in-world consideration that if the troll found the colony, particularly at night and especially now that the three PCs live a ways outside of town, that could turn into a grisly horror movie scenario pretty quickly. A natural predator like the Wyvern we’re also likely to have to deal with might snatch the occasional colonist because it was hungry if it started ranging that far south, but trolls are chaotic evil, which means a sadistic slaughter for the sheer malicious fun of it is not even remotely out of the question.

The fight was an entertaining one and a handy victory for the party, and that was that. One less evil monster in the world, and some potential resources one step closer to being in the hands of the colonists.

It’s useful and educational to allow myself to get up in my own head about things on occasion, but there definitely also comes a time to stop staring at my own navel and just roll initiative already.

Peter

Shortly after I wrote this week’s blog post on setting design, Grant shared an interesting article about the King James Bible and heavy metal with me. I thought it was an interesting read, so I figured I’d share it with you.

The King James Bible has had an amazing impact upon all aspects of English-speaking culture. We all quote the KJV in our idioms and literature. There is no doubt that the KJV is a huge part of the English language, and many people recognize its influence upon traditional Christian music such as hymns. However, I have never heard of anyone who talked about the King James Version’s relationship with heavy metal music. In fact, many of the people who read the KJV are the same people who say that metal is the “devil’s music”. However, there are many examples of the KJV’s appreciation within metal, and I wanted to write a post that brought that to light.

Gamers with Jobs has a relationship with an actor by the name of Graham Rowat who is very, VERY good at conveying the emotion behind blog posts and articles written by their writing staff. It’s always something special when they get him to read something new; his rich voice and flawless delivery make for very compelling listening, and they’ve got all of his reading concentrated in a single place. If you’ve never listened to Gamers With Jobs, it’s a very good podcast in its own right, but these are highlights within a highlight.

Over the years Graham Rowat has graced us with readings of select articles on the GWJ Conference Call. We’re very pleased to catalog them for you so you can listen to outside the stuffy confines of the podcast. Enjoy!

Finally, there’s this fantastic article about the perspective of Christian faith amid the chaos of history unfolding.

But the world was always falling apart, as even the most cursory reading of history reveals. Sometimes a society’s demise came at the hands of an invading empire that wiped out government, commerce, worship, and culture. At other times, a deadly plague destroyed the known world. Or a devastating economic depression stripped people of their farms, jobs, and hopes for a future. Over the last few generations we learned to live with nuclear threats and terrorism. If we’re paying attention, we have to realize that the world as we know it is always a thread away from unraveling.

Jenny

When I lived in Newfoundland, I attended a High Anglican church there. As with most churches I attend, I was the only person in my age group there (apart from music students who were there for academic reasons,) and the lovely older ladies of the congregation descended upon me at once with love and compassion. But they were also constantly asking me how to get more people my age back to the church. This article by Rachel Held Evans for the Washington Post puts words to what I’ve felt for a long time, and it’s what I wish I could have said to the lovely people at that church.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, among those of us who came of age around the year 2000, a solid quarter claim no religious affiliation at all, making my generation significantly more disconnected from faith than members of Generation X were at a comparable point in their lives and twice as detached as baby boomers were as young adults.

In response, many churches have sought to lure millennials back by focusing on style points: cooler bands, hipper worship, edgier programming, impressive technology. Yet while these aren’t inherently bad ideas and might in some cases be effective, they are not the key to drawing millennials back to God in a lasting and meaningful way. Young people don’t simply want a better show. And trying to be cool might be making things worse.

A few days ago I learned about a board/roleplaying game adaptation of one of my favourite childhood movies: Willow. The movie itself has gotten a lot of flak over the years, but I love the campiness and cheese. Though I disagree with the claim that the Willow RPG is the only one that will have you turn into a possum (RPGs are full of near-infinite possibility) I am intrigued by the game. I can only see it going one of two ways: either amazingly well, or amazingly bad.

I also learned about the women who traveled Kentucky on horseback, delivering library books to remote areas.

The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren’t entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time.

Grant

I never thought I’d link to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog here, since it’s mostly political analytics, but they recently did a statistical analysis of all the D&D characters created over at the new D&D Beyond tools site since its launch. It suggests something interesting: Most D&D characters aren’t actually all that fantastic. Human Fighter is far and away the most common race-and-class combination, for example:

When I started playing “Dungeons & Dragons” five years ago, I never would have chosen the game’s most popular match: the human fighter. There are already enough human fighters in movies, TV and books — my first character was an albino dragonborn sorcerer. But these days I can get behind the combo’s simplicity: It lets you focus on creating a good story rather than spending time flipping through rulebooks to look up spells. Players who are more interested in the action than the storytelling might relish the technicalities of more arcane race and class pairings, watching the dice fall and arguing over whether they have full or half cover. You can play “Dungeons & Dragons” as a pure combat simulator, a murder mystery or even a dating competition. For decades, that open-endedness has brought players back to the table to fill out one more character sheet.

Friend of the show and Gameable Podcast host Kris Newton has been all over my podcast feed lately. For example, he’s recently appeared on two episodes of Pulp 2 Pixel‘s “Dial G for Gamer” podcast to talk about superhero roleplaying. The first was an episode on Palladium’s Heroes Unlimited superhero roleplaying game; and the second was to discuss the World of Darkness games and the superhero archetypes and possibilities of WoD characters. They’re both long, content-rich episodes filled with Kris’s usual gaming genius, and are highly recommended!

Finally, I want to plug something special: Our Discord server. It’s starting to build up a critical mass of users, so if you’re not familiar with it, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I’ve always wanted Saving the Game to develop a community of listeners that talks to each other and develops relationships with each other, rather than only talking to us, and this seems to be working quite well to foster that relationship. Come hang out, say hello, and join us!

For this week’s blog post, I thought I’d try something a little different. In the same vein as Grant’s campaign reports, I’m going to do a series of posts as I design a new setting for a D&D 5e game off somewhere in the nebulous future. And like Grant’s series of campaign reports, these are probably going to be somewhat infrequent, but I’ll try to make them fun and worth reading when they do pop up.

Now for some information that may come as a bit of a surprise for some of our listeners that don’t know me outside of the podcast: I enjoy me some heavy metal. I do “top out” before it turns into guttural screaming – I like the singer to actually sing even if it’s a growly singing and I’m fairly mainstream in my tastes (I’m definitely not a music snob and don’t consider myself to be anything even vaguely resembling an expert), but I really enjoy a lot of heavier music. Back when I was a younger man, this was responsible for at least one speeding ticket (oops!) because it’s very easy to speed to hard rock and heavy metal. The music’s energy is infectious, which is one of the reasons I like it so much.

I also enjoy a mix of explicitly-Christian music of the heavier variety and ordinary “secular” music in the same vein.

So what on earth does this have to do with gaming in general and setting design in particular? More than I’d have thought myself until about 9 years ago when I started seeing ads for Double Fine’s game Brutal Legend, a heretofore un-replicated mix of comedy, action, fantasy, and lots and lots of heavy metal tropes. Tim Shafer, the guy in charge over at Double Fine managed to make a game that got by on sheer enthusiasm alone, because as Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewer Alec Meer wrote about it when it finally came to the PC in 2013, it wasn’t a terribly coherent game – there were a lot of competing game systems, the story felt like acts 2 and 3 got abruptly cut from it, and it generally struggled to execute on any particular set of mechanics. And yet I, like Meer would still recommend it, for reasons Meer summed up very well in his review:

The game’s entire look is predicated on the belief that 80s metal was/is a crazed, anything-goes cartoon, not a tar-black statement of Satanic intent, and by God it’s infectious. I don’t usually feel anything for metal, but when I play Brütal Legend, I bloody love metal to the very pit of my gnarled and jaded soul.

As it pounds and thuds and screeches and bellows, I feel like it’s answering every question I ever had about anything, and afterwards I mourn that it didn’t play a part in my own adolescence, as it did Schafer’s. The game is a love letter to it, in appearance and ethos as much as in its soundtrack.

Brutal Legend was a great, fun, inspiring, idea-filled thing, but I prefer to let comedy happen organically around the table rather than baking it into the  setting itself, so a straight-up adaptation wasn’t the way to go. In addition where there are things in the ethos of some of the bands I particularly enjoy that I find redemptive and good, there’s definitely a lot of ideological baggage associated with the genre that I can do without. A significant amount of heavy metal is obsessed with hedonism and darkness for their own sake, and while this can be useful for villains, I have zero interest in running a game where that’s what the PCs are like.

System-wise, I have been enjoying the 5e game Grant is running a LOT, and as often happens when I’m a player in a new system I enjoy, the itch to pick it up from the other side of the GM screen takes hold.

I have a couple of fantasy settings under my belt already: the first was created for my successful D&D 3.5 campaign back in the early aughts, and the other one has only ever seen the light of day as the setting of my published short stories for the Sojourn anthologies, but neither one of those felt like it’d translate well to 5e. The 3.5 setting was a crazypants high fantasy steam-tech one that leveraged the shameless scraping of mechanics from an entire bookshelf of official and third-party d20 books. It had lightning trains, magical gatling guns, powered armor, city watchmen on giant flying gems, magical/steam-tech cyborgs, lost civilizations, entire continents ravaged by magical disaster, and all kinds of other bonkers stuff. The one from my writing is all the way on the other end of the spectrum; extremely subtle in its supernatural elements and is thus far confined to a single city and its surrounding environs. Spellcasting classes just wouldn’t work in that setting – that kind of magic just isn’t in there.

I wanted something different and new, purpose-built to be run in 5e rather than adapted. I am also an avowed lover of kitchen sink settings, so when the wheels started turning on a metal-inspired setting, the spark that started it was backing the post-apocalyptic 5e D&D toolkit called Hellscapes on Kickstarter. Finally, as I alluded to earlier, I’m an unabashed lover of some of the better Christian heavy stuff out there. Back when I was younger, I listened to a lot of Petra and Whiteheart, and these days I also add Skillet and The Letter Black to the list. This set of influences gives me a much larger helping of uplifting and redemptive themes I can stir into the setting, but some of the more mainstream bands (Disturbed, in particular) also are no slouch in the “redemptive themes” department.

So how does one stitch all of this disparate material into a game setting for 5e? Right now I’m on high-level themes.

On the broadest level is a setting with technology that existed on earth no later than the mid 20th century, but still a lot of traditional fantasy themes, classes, and enemies. That doesn’t do much justice to it though, because a lot of the ideas I have are tied up in themes. I want firearms somewhere between the old west and WWI, communications tech that allows for radio, but not cell phones and computers, and it will be a sad thing indeed if vehicle tech doesn’t include hot rods, muscle cars, and motorcycles alongside old-fashioned war horses and fantastic riding beasts. If one of my PCs is a wizard with a six-gun on a motorcycle, I have succeeded.

But that’s not really the “meat” of the setting. I’m looking to create a setting that draws on heavy metal and Christian themes, so a lot of what I’m going to want is less concrete than tech level and bestiary will indicate.

First of all, one of the themes that secular metal and Christianity agree on is a concern for the oppressed and a sense of outrage at oppressors.  There are a lot of angry heavy metal songs about how entrenched power structures unfairly grind people down, the injustices of the world, the futility of war, the callousness of wealth and so on. So the setting definitely needs some corrupt entrenched power structures and the PCs need the means to topple them.

Another theme I want to play with is corruption and bondage – start down a dark path and powerful evil forces will start to “help” you whether you want it or not, warping and shaping you as they do and taking more and more of your identity away in the process. This means that evil isn’t just something to fight against, but also at least sometimes something you can free the antagonists from, though they may always be scarred by it. This general idea allows me to account for the relatively gruesome and/or creepy nature of a lot of iconic heavy metal “mascots” like Megadeth’s Vic Rattlehead, but there’s also plenty of room to play with the idea that not everything beautiful is good and not everything frightening is evil – after all, the most common reaction to angels in scripture is terror, so that definitely needs to be in there. Again, this even shows up in album art and music videos. Disturbed’s “The Guy” is basically only ever depicted as a figure who destroys structures of oppression, either alone (quick disclaimer: David Draiman, Disturbed’s singer/songwriter is a Jew, so the use of “messiah” in that video does NOT have Christian context) or by helping ordinary people to rise up.

An overarching theme is that Evil takes and Good gives freely – freedom, life, safety and hope in particular. And this goes both for the cosmic powers and the mortal servants. Good gives life – in the form of healing spells and heroic sacrifice both, for example.

The setting is going to be monotheistic, but it’s going to take some doing to get my tropes right. Massive, towering cathedrals full of stained glass will definitely factor in, but I also want to convey that holy places are peaceful sanctuaries of hope and compassion and not merely the awesome-looking barracks avenging heroes are deployed from.

While I’m on specific things I want to account for, one of the things the Christian metal brings to the list is what I refer to as “Romans 7:19 songs.”

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. -Romans 7:19 (NIV)

There are solid pieces of music by Petra, The Letter Black, and Skillet about this theme. The fight against not only external evil, but against one’s own baser nature and the desire to do the wrong thing, even for the right reasons, definitely deserves to be in there.

Christian metal brings the concept that right makes might (rather than the other way ’round) and the concept that virtue can be something of a shield and power source. Actual theology about this gets far more complicated, but hey, this is a fun gaming setting and it’s a little off-the-wall anyway. It goes in!

To depart from the more spiritual/philosophical themes for a moment, hard rock and metal are high-energy and exhilarating. In gaming terms that means lots of action like fights, chases, or rushing to be somewhere on time, and it also means interesting descriptions. Source material like I’m using is dramatic so that’s a consideration. Thought will definitely need to be put into making things look cool and seem at least a little bit over-the-top.

I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on this project, especially early on as I am.

However, it’s undeniable that sometimes an NPC winds up in the party and sometimes it’s almost necessary for it to happen to cut down on GM headaches. A D&D party with no healer, a cyberpunk party with no hacker, and a spacefaring setting with no pilot are three stereotypical examples.

It’s certainly possible to work around these limitations. The D&D party can find a lot of extra healing potions and wands. The cyberpunk party can focus on jobs that don’t involve a lot of hacking like sabotage and HUMINT, and the spacefaring party can stick around a single space station or travel on transport ships.

But sometimes it’s just nicer and less work not to have to work around a missing role that game generally assumes is filled and you want to fill that empty slot with an NPC. In order to avoid having that party NPC turn into a GMPC, I would respectfully submit that this is what you need to do.

1. The NPC needs to be likeable and trustworthy. Interestingly, this means likeable to the players rather than their characters. A good example of this principle in action in Grant’s D&D game is Rishi, an NPC sorcerer we interact with on a regular basis. Rishi is fairly likeable to the PCs – he’s shown genuine concern for the well being of not only his village, but the colony and especially the PCs. And while he has certainly made a bunch of mistakes in his life, he is not the sort of person to ever, ever intentionally betray the party. At the same time, the PCs probably finds him a little less fun to have around than the players behind them do – Rishi is a loudmouth, a smart alec, and is prone to mild violence like thwacking people with sticks and (in one case) shoving them out of trees. In a number of ways, he is a lot like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back; undeniably friendly and helpful, but you’re sometimes kind of glad there’s a level of narrative separation between you and them. Of course, there’s nothing that says the NPC has to be any sort of pain in the neck at all – Kaylee Sanders from Firefly and Serenity is probably the most well-liked character in the entire crew and for good reason: not only is she an incredibly kind, sweet, and genuine person, she’s also an ace mechanic who keeps the ship flying even when the rest of the crew is hard on it and constantly pushing it to its limits in various ways.

2. The NPC should be a support character of some kind and also needs to protect the niches of the PCs. The party NPC role is no place for a class or archetype that’s going to overshadow one of the PCs in the thing they do. In D&D terms, not only would I recommend the NPC be a support class like cleric or bard, I’d recommend they lag a level behind the party and have an intentionally sub-optimal build. A multiclassed bard/cleric who serves a god of music or is part of a holy order that glorifies a monotheistic god through song will be interesting and chock full of support abilities, but there’s no danger that they’re going to one-up the fighter on the frontlines, the wizard in the spellcasting department or out-stealth the rogue. At the same time, if the NPC is good at making the PCs better at what they do via some sort of help (turning the rogue magically silent or invisible, bootsing the fighter’s armor and weapon with magic or putting up protective spells so the wizard is safer in a fight) that’s not only fine, but recommended. The trick is to make the character unable to use those same abilities on their own behalf – or at least unwilling. To put it a shorter way, they should be really good at making PCs better and not all that great at doing adventure-y stuff on their own; a hacker in a cyberpunk game should be the type who stays home and hacks in remotely, then gives the PCs the data they pulled for them to work with. A pilot should be good at piloting, but not a full-on Han Solo character who is also good at stealth, combat, and navigating the criminal underworld. And so on.

3. The NPC should be able to provide hints if asked (or if the party is clearly frustrated and stuck) but is not especially inclined to. This doesn’t mean the NPC should smugly lord “how obvious” the next course of action is over the PCs and make them beg for the knowledge. The NPC should instead be too shy, too taciturn, or too distracted to chime in unless asked. A cleric that’s actually a shy acolyte without a lot of self-confidence and a severe case of Impostor Syndrome, a hacker that is constantly browsing Reddit on his phone, or a pilot that’s an old-school “man of few words” type and sits there chewing a toothpick while everyone else is animatedly debating the next course of action are all good ways to handle this.

4. The NPC should be subordinate to the PCs, not their equal or boss. In addition to the NPC not being constantly chiming in with courses of action, the PCs should not be compelled to listen when they do. This isn’t to say the PCs can’t have a boss, but that boss should send them off to do things while they stay behind. Governor Warwick in Grant’s colony game is a good example: she sends the PCs off on all kinds of errand and they report in when they come back, but she never leaves the colony. She’s the governor! She’s a little busy to go galavanting off after monsters and treasure.

5. The NPC shouldn’t be a hindrance or a source of hosing for the party. In addition to being helpful, likeable, and trustworthy, it’s probably also a good idea not to have the NPC be so bumbling, hotheaded, impulsive, or curious as to get the PCs into trouble they didn’t make for themselves. Every adventure should not revolve around getting them out of trouble and dealing with their issues. In fact, very few if any should. They shouldn’t carry a contagious plague or curse. They shouldn’t be a wanted fugitive. They shouldn’t have somnambulism or Tourette’s Syndrome. If you make the game about the NPC constantly getting in trouble, either the game will become about them, or the PCs will rid themselves of the NPC somehow (or at least wish they could).

6. Perhaps most importantly, the NPC should be unimportant to the setting. You want the NPC to be interesting, with friends, relationships, a family, contacts, quirks and surprising things about them and that’s all fine. It’s fine if you’ve made it so if your NPC was to die, their funeral would be well-attended by a lot of sad people with a lot of kind things to say. However, in the big picture of your setting, they should not a figure of major historical significance. Things like prophecy, destiny, and lines of succession should be the purview of PCs, not some pet NPC. It can be tempting to keep the good bits for yourself as a GM, but resist the temptation and use it as more ways to make your PCs awesome. They also generally shouldn’t be special in some way the PCs can’t be. One of the most egregious examples I’ve run across online is a Star Wars GM banning all force powers for PCs and making their pet NPC the last Jedi in the setting.

7. Finally, you as the GM should have an exit strategy. If the NPC is ill-liked or starts taking over roles better left to the PCs, you should have a way of getting them off the stage, be that another job somewhere else or an unfortunate “adventuring accident.” Inertia should never be the reason you wind up with a toxic NPC your party can’t rid themselves of.

You can make an occasional or mild exception to these rules with a good enough reason; one of the PCs in a game I ran had a magic sword haunted by a ghost that was very friendly to the party and who wanted to help them. I didn’t make ghosts available as a PC option during character creation, but I compensated by having him mostly hang out in the sword like a genie in a lamp unless the party had want or need of him somehow. I also gave him an aura of intense cold that he couldn’t turn off. So while he could walk through walls like any ghost, if he did, he’d leave a silhouette of frost on the wall, which made using him as an invisible, wall-walking scout risky and something he wasn’t particularly keen on. Him being out of the sword also shut off its frost damage, so there was an incentive to let him stay in it. And he’d been stuck in the sword for so long that while he had some interesting things to say about history, he wasn’t very useful as a source of intelligence about what was currently going on in the world. His presence still wasn’t implemented perfectly, but it worked well enough. Also, it’s okay to have someone important in the party temporarily – escorting an important VIP is a time-honored quest archetype. But the rightful king, if he’s going to be in the party long-term, should be a PC. And if there’s a Chosen One that should definitely be a PC. Probably all of the PCs, really.

As always, I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with this stuff. What have you found works or doesn’t for an NPC that sticks with the party?

Auntie Bloat.

We’ve been through our initial fear, and our side quests of leveling up and even (in my case) our angst about it and the time has come to actually do something about it. In the last session before we went on our hiatus, Auntie Bloat escalated, poisoning the ocean near the colony and showing up to taunt the PCs in turn, goading them to attack the Kenku village for food. So last session was gearing-up time and off we marched to take her down for good. But it’s not those preparations I want to talk about, because they were somewhat mundane. We ran down a list of allies and rounded everyone competent enough to fight Auntie Bloat up and because the very stressed (and somewhat hot-headed) governor of our colony was out of patience, that was about all the preparation the party had time for.

No, what I want to talk about in this blog post is another type of preparation – we are preparing for the game to be about something else.

As I mentioned in the first post I linked, Auntie Bloat has become the villain of act one of our game – we started hearing about her right after we made contact with the Kenku village (like, literally hours later) and retrieving something she had that would greatly help the Kenku village was literally how we showed them we could be trusted and even counted on. Her scheming has pushed us through several adventures and now, hopefully in the next session or two, someone will knock the last hit point off of her and that arc will end.

Which begs the question: where does the campaign go from there?

I’m not sure, but there are plenty of places it CAN go.

First, it’s become clear to us that the island the colony is on is part of an archipelago, and there are things both dangerous and benign out there. There’s an island full of lizardfolk who have mysterious, dangerous ruins to the north. There’s an island with a banshee that almost killed us that’s going to have to be dealt with – Lambert in particular isn’t going to want to just leave it there for some hapless explorer to run afoul of. There’s a society of seafaring cat people who rarely set foot on land, but sail around trading with others. There was that bit with the pocket dimension and the hints about some powerful ancient dragon named Polychromax. There’s a huge wandering, floating mess infested with goblins that can cause problems. The sailors who brought the colonists to the New World (and who didn’t get along well with two of the PCs AT ALL) have repaired the ship and sailed back to the old world, which means pretty soon the first batch of taxes is going to be due, the first batch of mail is going to be delivered, and the first new batch of colonists is going to arrive. At a minimum.

In addition, Grant has expressed an interest in running some pregens through some old classic dungeons as a way of enacting stories one of our (and his!) favorite NPCs, the Kenku sorcerer Rishi is going to tell us during downtime. So there’s a lot to explore and look into, even if Grant stopped introducing new things, which I don’t expect him to do.

In short, the seeds of act two were sown in act one, which is how you want to do these things if at all possible. Throw out hints and show bits of setting while your PCs are occupied with something important, and then when they’ve dealt with what they had to, they’ll want to come back and check out what they missed. One of the biggest mistakes a GM can make in a long campaign is, I think, is leaving a world that’s supposed to be big and interesting populated with only what’s relevant to the adventure at hand. How much PCs get to backtrack and tie off old loose ends is always going to vary, of course.

But they should always want to.

Peter

This week, though the wonder of Atlas Obscura, I learned that the ancient persians actually had special buildings for making ice. In the burning desert. yes, really. The article is here, and while it’s not long, it IS fascinating.

Walls were often built to keep the water shaded as it was channeled in to the yakhchāls so it would freeze faster. Yakhchāls also served as places to store ice that was brought down from nearby mountains and often food as well. The extremely thick waterproof and heat resistant walls were made of a special mixture of sand, clay, egg whites, lime, goat hair, and ash called sarooj.

Gamechurch has a multi-article series on games from Gen Con with themes useful to Christianity. All of the entries are good – I just selected Part Two because I appreciated This War of Mine in digital form and that specific article features the board game.

We recently went to Gen Con, North America’s largest tabletop-game convention, where we set out on a quest to find board games that resonate with the life, message, or values of Jesus. To be completely honest, we think that most tabletop games mesh with the values of Jesus in the sense that they bring people together. This year’s Gen Con was the biggest in the convention’s fifty-year history. It was also incredibly diverse. In truth, this list should probably just be called “Gamechurch’s Favorite Games of Gen Con 50.” In our defense, however, we are convinced that the following games are special and that, given the opportunity to play them, Jesus would happily gather around the table with His disciples to roll their dice.

Finally, I point to Richard Beck yet again as he tackles the concept of grace in his Experimental Theology blog. It’s interesting, deep, somewhat heavy, and excellent food for thought whether you agree with his conclusions or not.

So is this works-based righteousness?

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that grace–God’s election–is what establishes the covenantal bond. God’s election poured out upon the unworthy is 100% God’s work and initiative. Truly, we didn’t deserve it and we were incapable of making contact with God.

But yes in that, once we have been welcomed into the covenantal family and given the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, we have ongoing obligations to fulfill, to both God and each other. Grace obliges you to love.

Jenny

I found out about a new RPG that is currently being Kickstarted called Westbound: Revolvers and Rituals. It’s a weird west game about being elves and dwarves and ogres exploring the land.

Westbound is the Tabletop-RPG of revolvers and rituals set in the fantasy wild west. Explore a vast western world while utilizing an intuitive and unique system for exploration and combat. Westbound was designed from the ground up expressly for Firearm combat, and includes a vast amount character options, an enterprising crafting system, and a fresh take on Magic and the Arcane.

One of the side effects of being part of a religious community within driving distance of Montreal, Quebec is that you have probably heard of or even been to the Notre Dame Basilica. I visited there once as part of a confirmation class trip. As beautiful and wonderful as the Basilica is, its fame sometimes overshadows other religious landmarks in the city, such as Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours (literally Our Lady of Good Rescue.) It’s also known as The Sailor’s Church, because of its shoreside location, and the numerous model boats hung from the ceiling.

I found a fascinating YouTube video recently titled Testing A Possible Origin To Alchemy: The Golden Rain Experiment. Basically, it’s this guy not only testing the “Golden Rain” experiment, but trying to figure out if this experiment in which lead iodide crystallizes could have been performed during the time when alchemical experiments began.

Grant

I’m the reason this is going up a little late today; my apologies!

First up, this painful and convicting blog post from Jared Witt at Castle Church Brewing—and yes, that’s both a brewery and a church, so I’m pretty much already in love. Jared doesn’t really pull many punches even in the title: “Christianity and Its Angry Cousin of the Same Name”.

Some of you, who might be reading this story, were raised into a kind and loving version of Christianity, and it’s strange to you that some people have this perception of your faith. I’m glad to hear that. For others, this is simply your story, and it’s perfectly reasonable that the burden of proof should be on 22 year old, pastor-in-training to prove that he is not an angry and spiteful person. Either way, let me try to put this in the starkest relief and then let it sink in for a moment:

My wife didn’t think Christianity was for her, because she loved people too much. […]

And, here, some Christians are still having internet debates about whether the reason for dwindling numbers of people in church pews has more to do with the music or the committee structure.

You may recall that we had James Wyatt on our show not all that long ago. He was recently on Dragon Talk—that’s Wizards of the Coat’s in-house D&D podcast—to discuss Plane Shift: Amonkhet and the process of designing their Plane Shift material. Since the Magic: The Gathering design department builds art books and setting books for internal design use, James figured that he could use those to produce D&D material too; and given how popular those have been, it looks like that tradition will continue for a while. If you’re a D&D player, this is a great resource for WotC-developed material that sticks to the theme of particular MTG planes. I’ll likely use some Amonkhet material in my own D&D campaign, for example—I need more animal-folk of different types, and the khenra (jackal people) are perfect for that.

Finally, this bafflingly weird article about a robot designed to cheaply automate and livestream … funerals. Hyperallergic’s “Japanese Company Creates Robot Priest to Administer Your Last Rites” describes the repurposing of Nissei Eco’s “Pepper” robot and its showcase position at Japan’s Life Ending Industry Expo—itself a ripe source for game material, no doubt.

A company spokesperson told Japan Times that its repurposed bot is part of a larger effort to innovate the funeral industry, as customers increasingly seek alternatives to traditional rituals. The robo-monk may also serve as a substitute to human priests when they aren’t available.

Buddhist monk Tetsugi Matsuo, however, questions whether the smiling machine can offer guidance that is spiritual at heart, rather than simply replicate the physical demands of these age-old duties. Pepper the Buddhist monk’s computerized voice, for instance, may not carry the emotion that some people may seek. And some will perhaps see the machine as an undignified presence at a service steeped in tradition.

There’s an old Latin phrase that’s been around in the church for a long, long time. It has a simple meaning, but profound implications. The phrase is found in the title of this blog post. “Ora et labora,” literally translated, means “pray and work.” It’s a callback to the old monastic tradition, and more practically means “pray about what troubles you, and then see if you can do something about it.”

“It is not so true that “prayer changes things” as that prayer changes me and I change things…Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in man’s disposition.” -From My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

This isn’t to say God never intervenes directly, but even when He does, it’s almost always through human servants. God didn’t spare the Israelites in the time of Jacob from famine by making the famine not affect them or with manna from heaven (even though both were within His power). Instead He used Joseph in Egypt to stockpile food and prepare for the famine. He didn’t rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt via a strike from an army of angelic forces, He sent Moses. And He didn’t show us how much He loves us and what His true nature is via telepathically burning that information into all of our brains Matrix-style, He sent Jesus.  And even though Joseph received miraculous dream-interpreting wisdom, Moses saw more miracles than he could count, and Jesus produced scores more, they all still did the majority of their work for God as human beings by showing leadership, wisdom, guidance, compassion, generosity, humility, courage, service, and love to those God called them to minister to.

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. -James 2:15-17 (ESV)

It’s incumbent on us as Christians to help when we can. The “can” is important, though. We are not all individually responsible for fixing everything that goes wrong in the world, and we shouldn’t be so prideful to assume we can be. However, when we’re thrust into a situation where things have gone horribly wrong and we are in the position to help, what we do or don’t do definitely points to the true state of our faith. Natural disasters are a particularly good example of this. A former pastor of mine once said something to the effect of “whenever there’s a natural disaster, if you look around in the aftermath, after all of the federal agencies have packed up and the immediate threats to life and limb are over, what do you see? Church vans. In a way we are God in those situations – we are His hands and His voice.” By helping in the wake of horrible catastrophes – or small personal ones – we honor our commitment to Christ and what He taught us.

So by all means – pray. We’re specifically told to. But once you finish, look around and see if you can use your abilities and your agency to serve. We are called His body, after all.

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. -Romans 12:4-8 (ESV)

This week’s image is from fireskystudios.com, via unsplash.

Grant

Everyone who reads these Weekend Reading posts likely knows that I’m a huge U2 fan. They’ve produced some tremendous albums over 37 years together. But when you’re trying to create for that long, and trying to reinvent yourself along the way (or perhaps, trying to find yourself over and over again), there’s bound to be a dud or two. Christ & Pop Culture has a fascinating take on the failed, but spiritually aching U2 album Pop, in John Graeber’s “The Case for Pop: U2’s Forgotten Dance Record”. And there’s a C. S. Lewis comparison to boot!

The album is the culmination of the decade of U2’s discontent that began with Bono lyricizing Judas in “Until the End of the World” and inhabiting MacPhisto, a shiny-suited devil during the Zoo TV tour. It ended with the band prostrate, literally begging the God they believed would change the world in the 1980s to do something, anything about the evil they saw all around them.

In “Wake Up Dead Man,” Bono openly questions whether God is even able to intervene:

Jesus
Jesus help me
I’m alone in this world
And a f*cked up world it is too

Jesus
I’m waiting here boss
I know you’re looking out for us
But maybe your hands aren’t free

It’s always interesting to hear a new, first-time GM talk about their experience running their first game. Emily Knight wrote up her first time running a game in pretty great detail, over at one of our listener’s blogs, and it’s a very interesting read.

I started wanting to be a DM as I ended high school. I started with a test run for my dad, where as per normal, he skipped parts of my carefully crafted castle and did stuff all not as intended, but it went well. Then, as my friends and I all graduated, I wanted to play D&D with them and figured that if they all hated it, we weren’t all forced to be in the same building for 8 hours a day, so it couldn’t go that badly.

Finally: It’s not quite reading, but it’s almost as good! Listen to BBC Radio 4’s Orpheus Underground, in which Neil Gaiman—yes, that one—converses for thirty minutes about the Orpheus myth of the ancient Greeks, with contributions from other tremendous authors (notably Margaret Atwood—yes, that one) and a few other artists.

Novelist Neil Gaiman explores the intricacies of the Orpheus myth, the timeless story of art’s place in trying to recover the dead.

Peter

One thing I’ve often said is that of all the classes I took back in high school, the one that stuck with me the most and the one I was most grateful to have taken is a root words and etymology course. So imagine my delight wen I came across this HUGE list of root words recently! In addition to this just being a handy resource for puzzling out unfamiliar vocabulary, you can also use these to come up with new terms for stuff in your game world.

Reddit just recently had an AMAA with a Catholic Priest. For those of you reading this (like me!) who come from a Protestant background, it’s a pretty cool read.  Just be aware, Reddit does have the occasional foul-mouthed commentor and/or jerk as you’re reading.

I’m a Roman Catholic priest here in the US. I’ve been a priest for over five years and I’ve been on reddit for quite a while. I believe with the Church and I love being a priest.

This is my somewhat annual AMA. I’m happy to talk about what it’s like to be a priest and other priest-specific questions, especially with some background music. If you want to know what we Catholics believe about something, then I suggest that you try /r/Catholicism or Catholic Answers or the Vatican’s website. If you need more music, then have this going and see how it goes.

Finally, how about a HUGE stack of content? Johnn Four has been maintaining a regular RPG tips newsletter for years and he’s collected it here. Enjoy!

I’ve been writing and publishing Roleplaying Tips since 1999. I produce books, courses, and an app to help game masters have more fun at every game.

Jenny

Alex Mar of Atlas Obscura has written quite an extensive article detailing The Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers of early Christianity. These women rejected the roles society had set out for them, instead choosing to live for Christ in some very extreme ways. It’s a pity that these women aren’t talked about more in church, because they were certainly instrumental in the church’s founding and success.

Many of the female leaders of Christianity—in the Catholic Church in particular, with its 1.25 billion followers around the world—are barred from being fully ordained and are closely overseen by men. But this was not always the case. Scores of early Christian women—like Marcella, the desert-dwelling Susan, or the scholars Melania and Paula—embraced radical lives, helping the young religion fan out across the Roman Empire and beyond.

One of my goals whenever encountering someone who wants to get into tabletop gaming is to make things as accessible for hem as possible, whether they’re neurotypical or neurodivergent, able-bodied or disabled. This hobby hasn’t always been the easiest to get into for everyone, with cramped gaming stores, dim lighting, and too much overwhelming noise.

I was very happy to see recently that Jack Berberette made models for braille dice available to be 3D printed for free via the DOTS the RPG project. He even included fudge dice! He also has a Shapeways page set up, in case you’d like to pay for them to be printed for you. I’ll be taking the designs down to my local maker space to be printed ASAP, because I think this is one of the coolest things.

The goal of DOTS the RPG is to bring about collaboration to create/translate braille rulebooks and associated gaming aids for the Visually Impaired. The goal of DOTS is to empower the Visually Impaired to run, play, and experience the magic of tabletop roleplaying with complete independence. There are a few tactile dice on the market, but there are no rulebooks, adventures, or character sheets produced in braille…DOTS is hoping to be the Stylus & Slate RPG Project that blows the doors wide open for this overlooked demographic. Join us and participate on our journey to open the world of tabletop gaming up for the Visually Impaired!

My father was very heavily involved in the aftermath of the Fukushima reactor meltdown. The event actually occurred just before our first foray to Fear the Con. (Dad would also like for me to note that when he visited Fukushima reactor #5 a couple years ago, one of the German scientists was able to measure his radiation doses before and after the visit, and he’d received more radiation during the flight to Japan than during his tour of the reactor.)  Well, it’s been a full seven years since then, and nature seems to be taking over the exclusion zone. A photographer went there and took some fascinating photos and video of the area just being completely taken over by vines and grasses.

Certainly, the both scripture and church tradition tell us to be welcoming of strangers; one of the oldest books of the Bible includes some extremely clear language about the treatment of foreigners:

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. -Leviticus 19:33-34 (ESV)

And of course Jesus also had some things to say in The Sermon on the Mount:

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, -Matthew 25:35 (ESV)

It’s fairly obvious what all of this means in the context of faith alone in response to racism. Don’t participate in it, don’t tolerate it when others around you do, and do your best to make your place of worship, your workplace, your home, and anywhere else where you have sufficient influence safe to those who aren’t like you. I think of Nadia Bolz-Weber serving communion to sex workers as she describes in her book Pastrix or churches offering services in different languages as prime examples of this. The message of the Church (capital “C” – as in “all Christians everywhere”) should always and above all else be “even if you are not like us, we care about you. You have inherent value because you are a person, which makes you a child of God. And all of God’s children are welcome here.”

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. -Matthew 22:37-39 (ESV)

All of this should be well-known to people who have been sincerely following Jesus (or trying to) for any length of time, but what does it have to do with gaming?

Plenty.

Listeners may remember a comment that Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman made about J.R.R. Tolkien and his contemporaries about “moral rearmament” in the episode where we spoke with her as a guest host, and she goes deeper into that in her book The Functions of Role-Playing Games. 

Tolkien believed that the narrative arcs of “fairy-stories” were transcendent of space and time. Fantastic narratives, for Tolkien, serve three major functions. They allow people to Escape the mundane in order to Recover a sight that was previously obscured. As a result of these processes, the participant in fantasy experiences a sense of Consolation, which Tolkien refers to as eucatastrophe. According to Brian Stableford, by eucatastrophe, Tolkien “means a climactic affirmation of both joy and light: pleasure alloyed with moral confidence.” He further makes a distinction between the fantasy genre and both speculative fiction and horror, claiming that the narratives in the second two classifications lead to a feeling of “despair” versus “moral rearmament.”  –The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity by Sarah Lynne Bowman, Page 56.

Now we’re going to have to cut Tolkien some slack on that last bit because he came to those conclusions in a world that didn’t yet include Star Trek or Hellboy, but his point is well taken. And Tolkien was further referring to art that was to be passively consumed, not participated in. Probably the most-quoted words in our podcast and this blog are a TL;DR of that same concept by C.S. Lewis as he reviewed Tolkien’s work:

“The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.” -C.S. Lewis

So we need some morally re-arming myths. This can be heavy and harsh if you’re in the mood for it; there’s a game out there called Dog Eat Dog that deals specifically with the mistreatment of the Other and puts people in the shoes of natives and colonists. There’s a fantastic and powerful review of it that SUSD did of it that you can find here. But it doesn’t have to be heavy and harsh. I know I personally have an easier time emotionally processing what it looks like when that type of evil gets thwarted before it really gets traction. Being forced to play out the oppression like SUSD did in Dog Eat Dog would, very likely, just make me non-constructively angry. Fortunately, that’s not the only approach!

The D&D game which Grant runs deals with a colony from a different perspective; with the truth of what happened to native populations firmly in the back of my mind, I’ve been working to make sure the narrative of the colony the PCs are part of doesn’t go the same way these things went in the real world with native populations being crushed by the colonizers. In fact, the story so far has mostly been an inversion of that – colonists show up, see problems (like incredibly evil sea hags, or slave-taking frog monsters, or vicious banshees) and at least try to help. (The banshee was a bit much for us, sadly.) It’s been interesting too that Grant has been using the evil forces in the game to try and goad the colony into some of the evils that real colonizing powers did over the years – like slaughtering native populations for their own benefit.

I keep coming back to colonial narratives here because that’s where the root of the problems we have with identity-based issues here in the West stems from, but that needn’t be the only way to tackle this. Bring in some traders or refugees from a far-off land into your game and let the PCs deal with them and the differences they bring. To get back to Tolkien for a moment, Legolas and Gimli are a great example of people from differing backgrounds that didn’t much like each other at first finding reconciliation and even friendship as their stories progressed. And neither one had to change to match the other’s expectations, either. They simply grew to appreciate each other and the good that they both brought to the table.

And then of course there’s the other scenario where the PCs are neither the insiders nor in power (like colonists tend to be by virtue of technological superiority) and have to function as the outsiders in a strange place. Show what it’s like to get the looks of suspicion, the shunning treatment from merchants and folks on the street and then have some compassionate party show them radical welcome so they can experience outsider status and being welcomed anyway from the other side.

This is important as Christians because welcome is, on an essential level, about God’s grace.

but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. – Romans 5:8 (ESV)

We also see that in the Parable of the Vineyard Workers; God is really completely disinterested in our human notions of “us” and “them” of “earned” and “unearned” of fairness and privilege. He wants everyone working for Him.

For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’ And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last. -Matthew 20:1-16 (ESV)

Despite the fact that as imperfect humans we are totally and essentially different from God, he sent Christ to show us that we are welcome in His presence, and whether you believe in penal substitutionary atonement or Christus Victor atonement, that is still true. Whether Jesus unlocked the gates of Heaven or Hell (or both!) he still opened the barrier(s?) between us and God.

Our games are a powerful and useful tool for Tolkenian-style “moral rearmament” and we should be taking advantage of that fact as much as we can without blunting the experience with artificial and forced didactism. And let’s not pretend like this is some sort of hardship or chore; what I’m really talking about on some level is making sure we aren’t lazy and make sure to use the really good stuff, narratively-speaking. Liberating oppressed people, building bridges between disparate cultures and people groups, healing wounds of the past and tearing down systems of oppression makes for awesome, compelling, and powerful storytelling and can be a much-needed break from Yet Another Dungeon and yet Another Rampaging Monster. Those elements are in everything from Robin Hood to Star Wars. Gaming as a tactical puzzle can be enjoyable and a nice break from a rough week, but I know I at least start getting bored when that’s all there is, and as Grant will confirm, I am quite the tactician in play.

Start telling more complex stories and working those moral muscles. Ideally, games serve as a way to make doing the compassionate, moral, oppression-opposing thing reflexive; there’s a lot to be said for building up good mental habits through play, if we’re ever going to bring about the Kingdom of God. It won’t get the job done all on its own, but it’s another step toward the world Dr. Martin Luther King laid out in his famous I Have a Dream speech:

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” -From the ‘I Have a Dream‘ speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 And the Lord turned to him and said, “Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?”  And he said to him, “Please, Lord, how can I save Israel? Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.” -Judges 6:14-15 (ESV)

My advice, if you want to do good or get involved in ministry is literally just this: get involved in a church that’s small enough for people to notice you’re there, find the people who are already involved, demonstrate that you’re dependable, and then don’t say “no” when they inevitably ask you for help. There may be more to it; heck, there almost certainly is, but it’s not part of my experience, and it has been my experience that if you’re around and available, ministries, charitable organizations, and even things like the podcast always need someone, and if you’re standing around, looking all dependable and possessed of free time, at some point, somebody is going to ask you to help with something.

But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” But he said, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.” Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, “Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart.  You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth and will teach you both what to do. -Exodus 4:10-15

Something else you should know: whatever opportunities you get to do good are probably going to be pretty unexpected. I was surprised when Grant asked me to join him to do Saving the Game. I was surprised when, as part of working on this post, I found out his wife Krissi was the one who had earmarked me as a possible co-host. I was surprised when the woman from my church asked me to join the board at the food pantry, and I was surprised when my pastor asked me to serve on the board of trustees. Jenny was apparently shocked when Grant and I asked her to join Saving the Game as a co-host. And boy, as you can see from scripture, were a lot of the saints of old shocked when God showed up and said “You, you’re going to help me do great things.”

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. -Jonah 1:1-3 (ESV)

People often speak of callings as these mystical, spiritual things, and they can sometimes be that. When God wants to start something new, He has to get the ball rolling somehow. For Saving the Game, Grant (or maybe Krissi) was the one who got that call; it certainly wasn’t me. But a lot of the time, being called to something is very literal and very concrete. The call to ministry is often an actual call from another person already involved, looking for help with what they’re already doing. God is an amazing delegator; He uses His people do do almost all of His work, including call each other to service. And it’s easy to say no. We’re all very busy these days, and as we get older, jobs, families, social engagements, and the sheer human need to have some small shred of time we can call our own just so we can relax and process all clamor for our time. And let’s not be coy about it: a lot of the time, these callings can be a lot of work, too. My service with the food pantry has been low-key of late, but when I first started, I spent a fairly significant amount of time working on computer projects around the place, doing my best to get everything working and talking to everything else, and that was before I was in IT, so my confidence level wasn’t exactly what you’d call “elevated.” I spent a lot of time hoping the stuff I’d gotten working would keep working after I walked away from it. Likewise, I wouldn’t trade my time with Saving the Game for anything, but I won’t deny that it’s been a fair bit of work. These blog posts often take several hours to get written, and I’ve done my share of editing, recording sessions are usually a couple of hours at least (and that’s not including our crazy outlines) and so on.

It’s also worth mentioning that sometimes something isn’t for you, or isn’t for you forever. I bowed out of the church’s board of trustees because I felt superfluous; there was an extremely dependable, competent, and highly-available core of people (including one heroically dedicated retired engineer) that took care of just about everything that needed to be done while I was at my day job every week. All I was doing and all I was really able to do was show up for meetings, and they’ve done just fine since I left. In fact, I almost wonder if I was unwittingly creating a logjam, because apparently some situations that were ongoing the whole time I was on the board are now resolved.

But here’s the thing I’ve discovered: because I didn’t say “no,” I got the opportunity to find out. One has to balance this, of course; there seems to be a certain momentum that builds up, especially in church leadership where you can wind up on every board and committee in the place if you don’t set some boundaries. (Or maybe that’s just a Methodist thing?) But I’m very grateful for the continued opportunity to serve on the board of the food pantry and I wouldn’t trade my involvement with Saving the Game for the world. My deepened friendships with Grant, Krissi, and Jenny, the interactions with our listeners, the constant impetus to work on my faith and think about it, the constant impetus to work on my gaming and think about it, and the opportunity to talk with our guest hosts (and become friends with some of them too!) has given me back far more than I could ever put into it. So my advice? When service comes knocking, and knock it will, it’s okay to think like Gideon, Moses, or Jonah. But don’t be afraid to answer like Isaiah. You will reap more than you could ever sow.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” -Isaiah 6:8 (ESV)

This week’s image is from James Sutton, shared on Unsplash.

Peter

Richard Beck actually covered the Sabbath on his blog the day before our episode on it dropped. So naturally, I have to include the link.

Let me say it a different way. We are missing the point of Sabbath because we are instrumentalizing Sabbath, turning Sabbath into a technique and a tool.

Notice how the call to Sabbath tends to work. We’re busy. That’s unsustainable. So we need to rest. Why? So that we can keep working.

Sabbath in this view is a technique to sustain work. Sabbath isn’t the end, it’s a means to an end, the sustaining of work.

In short, we’ve turned Sabbath into a self-help technique. Sabbath is a recommendation for busy people to keep them from getting stressed out.

Douglas Underhill recently wrote a great blog piece on the Wish spell in D&D that could very well go alongside some of the other “battered group syndrome” rants we’ve had on the podcast of late.

As written, wish spells, or wishes in general in TRPGs, are almost always explicitly ways to disrupt players’ expectations and, in a word, screw them. GMs and DMs are often encouraged to find any possible loophole, any interpretation in the player-character’s wish that might justify screwing with them.

I think roughly 100% of the people who read this are podcast listeners, so I can be pretty sure this Lifehacker article on speeding up podcasts (or maybe not) will at least be an interesting read to you.

There are so many good podcasts out there (including Lifehacker’s The Upgrade), but there’s only so much time in a day. The Wall Street Journal reported on “podcasts nuts” who make time for podcasts by speeding them up with apps like Overcast. Like, up to 5x speed. Sure, that saves time, but it also probably spikes your blood pressure and makes listening to podcasts super stressful. So what’s the best speed to listen to podcasts in without sacrificing your health or ruining the podcast?

Jenny

My weekend reading for today is brought to you by crime!

During a politically tense time in 19th Century Lithuania, Russia tried to ban Latin Lithuanian. The clergy were having none of that so what do they do? The only thing they can do to save their language and traditions: they smuggle books.

In 1899, a pair of smugglers were crossing the border between Lithuania and East Prussia. Clutching their packs, they lay on a bank along the Prussian part of the river Šešupe, and for hours they studied the movements of the guards on the other side. They could not afford to get caught.
When it was dark, they pushed across the Šešupe and ran 10 miles to a distribution center in the Lithuanian village of Pilviškiai. There they discovered that Russian authorities were searching for them.
Soon they would return to Prussia, where they would hide out for several weeks before deciding to abandon the region entirely. Within a year, they would be on a boat to Scotland.
But that first night, before they fled, they needed to drop off their smuggled goods—the very reason that authorities were after them. They opened their packs, and out poured books.

Waypoint recently put out an incredible 10 minute documentary on YouTube called Escaping Prison with Dungeons & Dragons. This isn’t exactly reading, but watching it was eye-opening and truly inspiring. (There is some coarse language and a mildly controversial statement regarding which edition of D&D is best, so watch with discretion.)

All across America, hardened criminals are donning the cloaks of elves and slaying dragons all in orange jumpsuits, under blazing fluorescent lights and behind bars.

We meet with two former cellmates in who played D&D together in maximum security prison and how they are now using the game to integrate back into civil society.

And for the last reading, the story of one of the most successful book thieves in the history of the United States.

James Richard Shinn was a master book thief. Using expert techniques and fraudulent documents, he would ultimately pillage world-class libraries to the tune of half a million dollars or more. A Philadelphia detective once called him “the most fascinating, best, smartest crook I ever encountered.” And yet, despite the audacity of his approach and the widespread effects of his crimes, Shinn has been relegated to a footnote in book history.

Grant

Sit tight, folks, because there’s a lot of reading coming your way.

Jenny mentioned Waypoint above, but that video isn’t the whole of the story. This past week, Waypoint has focused heavily on play in prisons—gaming of all types, in fact. They’re calling this series “At Play in the Carceral State“, and almost every article has been utterly fascinating. A couple of notable articles to mention: “Inside the Gaming Library at Gitmo, America’s Controversial Military Prison”; “The Benefits of Gaming Behind Bars”; and “How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband”. From that last article:

It may sound like a strange juxtaposition: hardened, tattooed offenders donning the cloaks of fantasy characters. Yet both former inmates and correctional officers agree: D&D is more common in prison than you might imagine. Most facilities have at least one game going. Some have a player in every cell block. According to Micah Davis, a former inmate and Dungeon Master imprisoned in Texas, “We had our own table in the dayroom. That’s saying something. Aryan brotherhood table, Mexican mafia table, black guy table, and D&D table.”

Luke Harrington’s “D-List Saints” series at Christ & Pop Culture is back, this time discussing St. Hippolytus, a.k.a. “The Guy Who Just Decided He Was Pope”. It’s an interesting look at a fascinating father of the early church only a few degrees removed from Christ himself:

But just like that one kid who thought he was shoo-in for class president because of his straight As, Hippolytus soon got a rude awakening about how politics work. The council elected St. Calixtus I instead, which Hippolytus didn’t like at all—so he more-or-less just declared himself pope. No, seriously—not only did the guy write large chunks of the Western liturgy, he also straight-up invented the concept of an “antipope.” What have you done with your life?

My final suggestion is, uh, big. Galaxy Science Fiction was an American sci-fi short story magazine with a thirty-year run, from 1950-1980. It was notable for quality stories with an emphasis on social science fiction from excellent, well-known authors of the era. It’s also now available in its entirety online from archive.org. It’s very hard to excerpt any reasonable piece of this, so just take my word for it and start browsing. I promise you’ll find something you’ll enjoy.

Grant

One of our listeners, John Henry, has been working to catch up on our episodes and responded very positively to STG 110, “Spiritual Warfare (with Rev. Derek White)”. He pointed us to a related blog post he’d written in 2015 that’s the perfect combination of enlightening, convicting, and fascinating titled “Peace Be With You”:

I lived for a couple of years with several insane roommates. Not leaves-dirty-dishes-in-the-sink-and-likes-lousy-music insane. On-medication-and-talking-to-themselves insane. I didn’t mind. I liked them. They were, in fact, very nice people. […]

I grumbled, got into my weekend lounging-around rags, and followed him out to the porch, where he proceeded to walk up and down on the lawn in front of me, and preach me a sermon. By the time he was done, I had forgotten my hangover, and sat openmouthed. I was, perhaps, not so surprised by what he had to say to me as by the fact that something so blindingly clear and obviously true had never been so much as whispered in my ear.

If you’re not especially engaged with Twitter, you might have missed that there’s an organized attempt to discuss RPG design and RPG theory there this month using the hashtag #rpgtheoryJuly. Led by indie luminaries like Emily Care Boss, Epidiah Ravachol, and others, there’s a lot of design tips and thoughts to pick through. Keep an eye on it this month, and don’t hesitate to look through the backlog of discussion under that hashtag—you’ll learn a lot.

Finally, The Getty Museum’s “The Iris” has a neat feature this week: “Thinking about Sisyphus (Or, the Afterlife with Some Rock ‘n Roll)”, on how that cautionary figure of Greek myth evolved into a modern-day reference. As you might expect from a museum blog, it’s full of artistic visual aids, making it a pleasant read as well as engaging.

As might be expected, though, what once served as propaganda could just as easily be turned into satire. Fast-forwarding a few more centuries, it’s clear that Sispyhus and his suffering offered a gold mine to political cartoonists. The rock and its pusher can be easily labeled, and doing so allows for pertinent comment on the political issues of the day. Browse online and you’ll find countless variations on the theme (a number are collected by Wolfgang Mieder in his book Neues von Sisyphus. Sprichwörtliche Mythen der Antike in moderner Literatur, Medien und Karikaturen (Vienna, 2013)). Thus far, the earliest example I’ve been able to find comes from British periodical Punch. One of its regular contributors was Richard Doyle (1824–1883, uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), and his first cartoon for the magazine was entitled “The Modern Sisyphus” (1844).

Peter

If you’re doing a historical campaign that includes espionage, don’t overlook the powerful covert tool of… …knitting?

In many cases, just being a knitter—even if you weren’t making coded fabric—was enough of a cover to gather information, and this tradition continued decades later during World War II. Again in Belgium, the resistance hired older women near train yards to add code into their knitting, to track the travel of enemy forces.

There’s an absolutely fascinating timeline of Christian denominational fragmentation over here. If you’ve ever thought that modern Christianity seems a little fragmented, well, first, you’re not wrong, but second, the fragmentation goes WAY back.

And finally from me, here’s a useful GMing tool from Gnome Stew that’s still in the prototype phase.

I’m trying something new. As a GM, I like it when players come up with small contributions to the game. Players like bennies. So I’ve designed and printed out a handful of 3×5 index cards that players can fill out to get bennies.

Jenny

Apparently, the seven deadly sins used to look quite different. In fact, there used to be an eighth sin called acedia, and it was vital to the way monks lived in the desert.

The seven deadly sins seem familiar and, with that familiarity, less a matter of life and death and damnation. Sure, greed and envy aren’t great, but who hasn’t overindulged in this or that without grievous consequences? But when the list of Christian cardinal sins was first created, they were a big deal: eight of the biggest threats to a devout life as a monk in the desert. Eight? One among those that isn’t included among the sins today, called acedia, was perhaps the greatest threat of all to those monks.

Shut Up and Sit Down do wonderful reviews. I’ve played many games because of their recommendations, and I like the way they write their reviews. They describe how a game plays, not just whether they liked it or not. So I am now very much looking forward to finding people to play Lady Blackbird with.

Lady Blackbird is an innocent-looking fifteen-page pdf created by John Harper, whose name you should learn and remember. It features five pre-generated characters, one ramshackle spaceship, several planets, simple rules, and one of the most charming opening crawls you’ll ever read aloud.

Take the blasters and camp of Star Wars: A New Hope. Then, add the romance and swashbuckling of The Princess Bride. Finish it off with a bit of steampunk style. Now you’ve got the world of Lady Blackbird: low-tech, light-hearted, full of sudden plot twists and star-crossed love.

And finally, because I am a sucker for sarcasm, there are now, officially, only two kinds of librarian.

Since the beginning of time, there have been two kinds of librarians: those who divide librarians into two kinds and those who don’t. Librarians who divide librarians into two kinds have never met a false dichotomy we didn’t like. We have an easy, simple vision of the world that’s very attractive for us and others, because reducing the irreducible complexity of existence to a series of false dichotomies simultaneously reduces the effort required for serious thought, and some of us are too busy running libraries to have time for serious thought.

Tilt is a poker term for a state of mental or emotional confusion or frustration in which a player adopts a less than optimal strategy, usually resulting in the player becoming over-aggressive. This term is closely associated with “steam” and some consider the terms equivalent, although steam typically carries more anger and intensity.

Placing an opponent on tilt or dealing with being on tilt oneself is an important aspect of poker. It is a relatively frequent occurrence due to frustration, animosity against other players, or simply bad luck. Experienced players recommend learning to recognize that one is experiencing tilt and avoid allowing it to influence one’s play.

Normally, tilt is the sort of thing you experience in competitive games – there’s a reason I know the term from Magic: the Gathering. It certainly isn’t the sort of thing that I expected to experience in Pugmire, of all places. But during slot six of Fear the Con 10, I tiled so hard I almost walked away from the table. In fact, I actually tried to walk away from the table, but the GM talked me out of it. To understand why this happened, I need to back up to the beginning of the session.

First of all, it’s worth noting that Slot 6 is the last slot of Fear the Con. It started at 7:00pm on Saturday evening, so while I’d been having a blast for the last couple of days, playing games and catching up with old friends, I was on limited sleep and my social bank was starting to get a little overdrawn (I’m an introvert, as I’ve mentioned before). I came to the slot excited to try Pugmire after listening to Grant rave about it on the podcast, and at first, all seemed well. The character I wound up with was Leo Bulldog, a character with a strong moral compass that fits well into my limited dramatic range. (We got to keep the pregen character sheets at the and of the session, so you can actually see the relevant text that touched off the rest of the story in the picture below.

Tough and no-nonsense, but possessed of a good heart and less racist than than at least some in the setting. Definitely a “Peter” character. If I was designing from scratch, I’d have probably picked a herding breed rather than a bulldog, but whatever. I can work with this!

All was fine until we started out on a scouting mission, where I immediately started butting heads with the player to my right, who was playing a barbarian. We had a rather heated argument about how to deal with some porcupine folk that attacked us in the woods (I wanted to stay and face the opposing force, he wanted to run for it), but the real problems started when we found a bunch of anthropomorphic cats celebrating in a cave. There were a couple of dancers in the middle of a circle dancing in a festive way, and the circle of cats around them was laughing and clapping. Nothing sinister was going on – they were just enjoying life. And then the barbarian walked up to one of the two guards at the mouth of the cave and cut him down without so much as a word.

I lost it a little.

My immediate response was a very bleed-rich if mostly-internal “how dare you!?” I tried to stop the other PC from actually performing the attack and the dice weren’t with me. He casually struck the cat down with his weapon and that’s where things really went off the rails for me. Seeing red, I attacked the other PC (doing a significant amount of damage with the first attack), the PC group dog piled (ha! dog pile – Pugmire… …yeah, that’s not all that funny) my PC to keep Leo from killing the other PC, and things devolved from there. I tried to negotiate with the other player, asking if there was a “racism against cats” trait on his character sheet. He said there wasn’t and he was sticking to his plan. At that point, I stood up to walk away from the table. I really didn’t want to kill another PC, but I also didn’t want to stick around for the wholesale slaughter of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – in addition to that being as bad as it sounds just on face value, some of you probably know that my wife and I lost our cat earlier this year, and that probably played an additional subconscious role. I was also a bit embarrassed about making a scene (and to some extent, still am) and wanted to get out of there for that reason, too.

Ultimately, the GM asked me to sit back down, managed some fantastic story wizardry, introduced us to an awesome Scottish badger, and the rest of the slot was fun. The other PC and the cat he cut down both survived, due to the negotiating skills of our pug princess and the healing talents of our collie cleric. I’m pretty sure the cat was a retcon on the GM’s part, but I was well beyond caring at that point and just appreciated the concession.

As recently as the day before we recorded our episode with Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman, I think I’d have felt even worse, and I’d also have had a hard time articulating why. Talking with Sarah helped to both crystalize and validate some things that have been swimming around in my head for a while. With the benefit of both those insights and the amazing powers of 20/20 hindsight, here are what I think would be some good takeways from that incident. (In addition, I reached out to Sarah as part of writing this and have some great links about related topics for you to take a look at as a result of that conversation. Be sure to check out the hyperlinks in this post and the couple of extra ones at the end!)

My first and worst mistake, I think, was trying to resolve things in-game at all. I probably should have just asked for a time out and explained my reservations. That did not occur to me in game at all. I really should have hit the proverbial brakes and said “this is tilting me. Can we please go another direction with this?” I think at least part of the reason I didn’t is covered under the discussion of the “cult of the hardcore” in this article on consent-based play.

The second problem, which is less of something that was the fault of any one person and is more down to general media and gaming culture is that tables will tend to follow someone who does a “Leeroy Jenkins” and picks a fight, no matter how immoral or ill-advised, in part, I think, because they fear that the GM will kill the party off unless they commit to it. This was one of the things the GM did right in this scenario, by the way. After I explained that things had gotten to the point where I felt like I needed to leave, he had the NPCs stop the fight by restraining the other PC and (very angrily) asking us what was going on. I think the other player was operating under the same assumption that he could start a fight and nothing would stop it. This type of table dynamic is the reason things like Lines and Veils and consent-based play exist. It’s hard to level-set the comfort of the players in a con game without chewing up a lot of valuable game time, though, so sometimes things like the incident in this post happen.

And in the other player’s defense, I also got the impression he wasn’t viewing the game through the same set of lenses I tend to – he probably wanted some 5e tactical hack & slash (Pugmire is based on D&D 5e) which, devoid of the moral context I was supplying would have probably been fun. Fifth Edition D&D has a very nice set of combat rules and the battles play out pretty quickly and excitingly. Further, the other player may have been taken aback a bit by my bleed and the moral lenses I’ve started to use almost unconsciously.

Another take-away, not exactly a problem, is that instead of becoming de-sensitized to violence over time like I was warned about in my childhood, I have instead become more sensitized to it. I ran into that same phenomenon last weekend after the con when I watched John Wick: Chapter 2 on Monday and then went to see Wonder Woman on Tuesday. No spoilers for the plot of either movie, but John Wick is bloodthirsty and Wonder Woman is merciful in their respective fighting styles and I was keenly aware of that difference as I walked out of Wonder Woman and appreciated the latter movie for it. (Both are pretty solid films, for what it’s worth, and it’s worth the quick mention that both are also very gameable. WWI is a criminally under-utilized setting in genre fiction and the whole universe of the John Wick films with The Continental, The High Table, and other various stylish international crime-based stuff is all very cool and just begging to be lifted.)

The final take-away is that, especially in convention game scenarios where you may not know the other players’ sore spots, one should be gracious at the table. You never know what’s going to be just a little too much for someone else and sometimes what’s a little too much for you will come as a surprise. Be willing to dial it back, back up, and compromise if someone is getting worked up out of the game.

Two additional pieces of content Dr. Bowman was kind enough to share that deal with related topics:
1. Social Conflict in Role-Playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study (by Sarah Lynne Bowman)

2. Bodies and Time in Tabletop Role-Playing Game Combat Systems by Evan Torner (This link is the entire companion book for Wyrd Con 2015; the article the link refers to is the last one in the book)

This post’s featured image is from Tom Conger, used under Creative Commons.

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Peter

Richard Beck’s Experimental Theology blog makes the list again, this time with a post about martyrs.

You’re surrounded by martyrs when you tour through old churches in the UK, but the inclusion of modern martyrs at St Albans–like Oscar Romero and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, two heroes of mine–really brought home to me a point I’ve raised before on this blog. From my 2014 post entitled “Blood Trumps Everything”:

I’m not sure if this post about Red Dead Redemption and six years of vacillating about whether to get what’s necessary to play it or not is funny, tragic, or somewhere in between, but it’s worth a read. As a PC gamer, I can definitely empathize with this guy about console exclusives. (Some mild cursing in both parts of this story.)

“Gun-Horse? What is Penny Arcade making fun of this time?” I’m not as tapped into the gamingsphere as I used to be, so many PA jokes just go right over my head. This is one of those.

I do a quick Google search and it looks like they are referencing a game called Red Dead Redemption. Huh. The game looks REALLY interesting. It has everything I never knew I wanted in a Western game: Horses! Duels! An achievement for exterminating the buffalo!

If it were available on the PC, I’d buy it – but it’s not, so I give a mental shrug.

And since that one ends on a cliffhanger, here’s part two. ;)

But we are not the complete and utter masters of our souls. Every time future-me saw some mention of Red Dead Redemption in a web comic, article or VH1’s “I Love the 2010’s” special, future-me’s anger, regret and/or resentment would flow, whether future-me willed it or not. As real as any memory, I could see future-me sign as he (embarrassedly) mourned never finishing the game. He’d feel that twinge for years and years.

And finally, our good friend and 3-time guest host Derek White has a post over at Preach the Story called “the parable of the vlogger” that’s worth a read.

The Teacher said, “Once there was a Vlogger who scattered videos across the internet. One day he uploaded a few clever videos. Some of them were watched for a few minutes, and then people were distracted by other items in their news feed and all his hard work was lost amidst the chaos. So, the video blogger decided to specifically target his video to one or two specific social media sites and his friends shared them very quickly.

Jenny

This article on Faith & Leadership gives the rundown on a new-old kind of worship called Simple Church. This type of worship takes place in homes, where the small congregation shares a meal and begins what they describe as “the conversation as the sermon.” The church also bakes bread to sell at farmer’s markets, thus giving back to their surrounding communities.

When the five last members of North Grafton United Methodist Church in Massachusetts voted to close and sell their building four years ago, they had no idea what would happen.

Denominational officers told them, “We’re going to send you a planter,” said Sue Novia, 73, one of the last five at North Grafton UMC. “We thought, ‘What is a planter?’”

But Grafton-area residents are now embracing a fresh style of worship at the three-year-old church plant called Simple Church(link is external), a United Methodist congregation where 30 to 40 share the Lord’s Supper every Thursday over dinner. The church is also pioneering a revenue model that puts less strain on parishioners by generating income from a trade — in this case, bread baking.

I like Legend of Korra. I like it a lot. So it’s no surprise that I am super pumped for the board game that will be coming out later this year. Hopefully, if it’s wildly successful, it could lead to something related to Avatar: The Last Airbender, too.

According to IDW Games, The Legend of Korra: Pro-bending Arena will evoke the first season of Korra’s adventures in Republic City when she was part of the pro-bending sports team known as the Future Industries Fire Ferrets.  The focus of the game will be on the Fire Ferrets and their hated rivals, the White Falls Wolfbats. Within the game, two players will assume control over their respective teams as they draft benders by building a deck of cards and deploy elemental tokens on the game board. The game will also maintain the rules of pro-bending that were established in the show.

Thieves’ Cant has been talked about a fair amount in D&D’s many settings. I’d been vaguely aware that it was a real language or pidgin that was actually spoken in real life, but apparently there were dictionaries for it?! Now I have to see if I can get my hands on one.

Thieves’ Cant, also known as Flash or Peddler’s French, existed in many forms across Europe. The cant flourished in England during a 16th-century population boom, when less work was available amid greater competition and crime appeared to be on the rise, according to Maurizio Gotti in his 1999 book The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds. Many early cant speakers, who often were peasants or newly jobless soldiers, were considered “particularly numerous and dangerous” by more well-off groups.

Grant

It’s the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—go ahead and start feeling old. E. Stephen Burnett at Speculative Faith studies the lack of noise about this from certain Christian circles in his article “So Are Christians Now Okay with Harry Potter?”, and makes a number of important points in the process of theorizing about the matter:

As I get older, I find I’m blessed with far more mature and delightful Christian friends.

They care about biblical truth, including the truth of what God’s hated “witchcraft” actually is and why He hates it). They also care about biblical imagination, following Jesus and pursuing His holiness, which drives their secondary pursuits of fantastical storytelling.

As we move deeper into these kinds of real-life Christian circles and social media circles, we’ll be more “sheltered” from other Christians. We’ll no longer hear those beliefs shared.

Gnome Stew offers a very helpful guest article from Jerry Weis, “From the Horse’s Mouth“, on digesting player feedback:

While you should never attack a player’s criticism or suggestions, you definitely do want to get as much clarification as possible. Finding out what your players liked or disliked about an adventure is useful, but understanding why is invaluable.  A marketing expert for a prominent food label once pointed out to me that when it comes to getting feedback, it is important to understand not only what people want, but why they want it:   “Knowing the ‘why’ is when you can gain control/power because you better meet people’s needs.”   When getting feedback, try to learn the reasons behind why something worked for them or not; knowing the “why” gives you true insight into what makes for a fun challenge or adventure for your group.

Every modern espionage game these days will likely involve interacting with airport security at some point and getting really weird stuff through it. To wit: “That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis” from The Atlantic. (Warning: Occasional language and topics that might not be 100% SFW.)

Scientists, as it happens, are full of tales like this because as a group, they’re likely to (a) travel frequently, and (b) carry really weird shit in their bags.

In previous years, Cohn has flown with the shin bone of a giant ground sloth and a cooler full of turtle embryos. Just last month, Diane Kelly from the University of Massachusetts, who studies the evolution of animal genitals, was stopped by the TSA because she was carrying what is roughly the opposite of Cohn’s item: a 3-D-printed mold of a dolphin vagina. “Technically it’s not even my dolphin vagina mold,” she says. “I was carrying it for someone.”

Peter

There’s a cool article on the origins of the Paladin class in D&D over on Geek and Sundry.

Throughout the novel, Carlsen performed actions in the name of Law and Good. They are the driving forces behind everything the man does. So, when Gygax was creating D&D he drew inspiration from Carlsen’s character and combined it with other legendary figures who fought against evil in a medieval setting, such as King Arthur and real-life Palatine Guards.

With the con season starting (and just in general) I think this interview with Will Willimon is timely. The audio isn’t the greatest and it’s a year old, but listen to it anyway.

Shane Raynor of Ministy Matters recently interviewed me about my book, Fear of the Other. We spoke together about welcoming the stranger and this call that we receive from Jesus, to love others as he has loved us. I hope you enjoy!

And finally just for sheer silliness value: Man Comes to Haunting Realization that he is NPC.

Darian Rumfield, a 25-year old man living in New York City, realized today that he is, at best, the side-character of someone else’s adventure as opposed to the hero of his own, according to close sources.

Jenny

As I am writing this, I have literally just finished listening to a lecture from Dr. Chris Barrigar, an Anglican priest and doctor of philosophy. He was giving a talk titled “God, Materialism, & Ultimate Meaning,” and I was absolutely blown away by the way he was able to explain how meaning comes from God, and the randomness of creation, and the relationship between atheism and split-brain studies. He explains a lot more in his book Freedom All The Way Up: God and the Meaning of Life in a Scientific Age, which I greatly look forward to purchasing and reading through.

Freedom All The Way Up proposes four intertwined elements that make up the meaning of life — self-worth, purpose, identity, and hope. Materialism (atheism) claim the universe has no meaning, so there is no larger purposeful story into which we can place ourselves—we are left on our own to construct meaning for our lives. Barrigar argues, though, that the universe possess God’s meaning and purpose—to provide the space and conditions by which to bring about the existence of agape-capable beings in agape-loving relationships with God and with others. In effect, the universe is a great ‘freedom system’ designed by God with freedom built in ‘all the way up’, from the Big Bang to the emergence of big brains and free will.

Related to our recent episode with Sarah Lynne Bowman about LARP, apparently The Mind’s Eye Society (a White Wolf LARP group) is getting a universe reset. But this isn’t any small, local LARP. Your actions in this LARP can have consequences across the country.

Every four years, this organization with membership in the thousands, all agree to reset the chronicle and start anew. Allowing the organization to evolve and adapt based on the merits and flaws of the past chronicle. In addition to finally retiring those long-beloved experience hog characters. It has now grown to an organization that helps put both large-scale events (like this year’s Tampa by Night (in Florida) and smaller local games right in your backyard. But no matter which you attend, your characters exist in the larger world. An action you take in Chicago, could very well impact people in Texas—for better or worse.

And here, once again, are a bunch of board games that I am looking forward to, this time compiled on Board Game Geek. These are the games that will be previewed at GenCon this year. I am especially interested in #20 on the list, Photosynthesis.

Gen Con Indy 2017 takes place August 17-20, 2017, and as the largest and longest-running game convention in the U.S. – fifty years! – it’s no surprise that U.S. publishers will demo or sell many new games at the show in order to introduce fresh releases, build buzz, and (of course) make sales.

This Geeklist highlights titles that, to the best of my knowledge, will (1) debut at Gen Con 2017, (2) be released shortly before the convention, or (3) be available in demo/preview form.

Grant

Relevant to our own spiritual growth and adventure gaming: Cristina Craig’s C&PC article “Adventure Is Good. But Planting Roots Is Essential”.

Though there is merit to building fresh relationships in a new place, Weil’s quote also alludes to an inherent value in being rooted in relationships that remain constant throughout one’s life. Take stock of your relationships. Do you have people in your life–living near or far–who know you deeply and have seen you through seasons of your life? These people will serve as anchors for your life and you for theirs.

Eric Weiss over at Polygon points out a serious issue facing DC and its movies: Altruism. “The DCEU has a problem — everybody likes Wonder Woman”.

Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman, and Suicide Squad all espouse a fundamentally selfish worldview — where heroism is a test of self, not a service performed for other people. Batman views it a somber responsibility, forcing himself into action because he believes he’s the only individual with the ability to stand against Superman. Meanwhile, the protagonists in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad are incarcerated supervillains, mercenaries who will save the world because they expect to be compensated and/or they’ll be punished if they don’t. Amanda Waller runs the show as a government operative (and ostensible good guy) who argues that coercion is more reliable than doomed altruism before murdering her fellow agents to cover her own tracks.

Finally—look, this isn’t a helpful article or anything. It’s just delightful. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid… as run through Google Translate.

Enjoy.

The reasons for this overwhelmingly positive sentiment are many – because it’s a smaller, more intimate con, there’s a strong element of community – family, even at the con, especially among those who have been multiple times. Fear the Con was where I met Grant in person for the first time. And Jenny. And guest hosts Dan Repperger, Shannon Dickson, Derek White, and a significant number of friends who went from “people I knew on the forums,” to real, true, genuine friends. Far from being cliquish, though, that tight-knit community is exceptionally welcoming, a trait which the community self-awarely embraces with pride. In fact, I would say that if this is your first time coming to the con, you should be prepared for people to randomly walk up to you, introduce themselves, ask if you’re enjoying yourself, and see if they can help you out or bring you into something. The Fear the Boot community is very welcoming and friendly, though not in a pushy way.

And then there’s the gaming. Because it’s a smaller con, there isn’t an expansive dealer’s hall to distract you – what there is instead is a 6-slot schedule full of games an activities. This close to the con, most things are full, but if you’re planning for next year, be sure to check Conplanner early and often so you can get into games that sound interesting to you.

Finally, it’s relatively cheap. Admission to the con itself is free, for starters. Because of the fact that it’s a small event (and because the community is so friendly), finding roommates is pretty easy, either via the Fear the Boot forums or via their Facebook group. The first three years I went, I roomed with people I barely knew and counted them as friends by the end of the con. The last time I went, I roomed with Grant and this year I’m rooming with my friend Christian who was one of the many, many folks that latched onto me and made me feel welcome my first year at the con. And because it’s small, it’s not like all the restaurants and hotels are going to jack up their prices for a couple hundred people.

Also: stay at the Drury. That’s where the whole con is this year, but that’s also where everybody stays, so you’ll get some wonderful interactions over breakfast, which is amazing. Drury hotels serve very nice breakfast buffets full of bacon, eggs, sausage, fresh fruit, and other “real” food in addition to the bagels and pastries you’ll get at a lot of other hotels.

And of course, if you do make it this year, you can meet Jenny and me in person, if that’s a draw for you (it’s certainly a draw for us – I’ve always really enjoyed meeting StG listeners). We won’t be hard to spot on account of our MASSIVE and ABSURD fake beards. For charity.

Hope to see you there!

This week’s image is by Admerial Crunch, used under Creative Commons.

The problem isn’t that Auntie Bloat is too sympathetic – far from it. She showed up and taunted and threatened us, and then tried to goad us into betraying and attacking the Kenku on the flimsiest of grounds last session. In the process of doing so, she bragged about doing some truly awful stuff to the Kenku on the island over the years. She is, without a doubt, a horrible, nasty, evil character. Lambert is livid with her for all of the things she’s done in the past and the things she’s trying to do to the colony. Just her latest action is cursing the sea to cut off a food source for the colony, a gambit which has been largely thwarted by the presence of lots of fruit and those massive, slow-moving beetles I’ve mentioned before. It’s not at all an exaggeration to say Lambert would like Auntie Bloat dead, and there have been a few times where he has definitely wanted to kill her himself.

Likewise, the problem isn’t the combat potential of the party. The party has fought off Sahuagin attacks, vicious wildlife, skeletons, and managed to rescue all of the slaves from a village of nasty frog people who didn’t just say “okay, go on and free them.” Lambert himself is good with both his hammer and an assortment of combat-related spells, but he’s got nothing on the lightning-slinging beast that is Garm (the fighter) or the lethality of Aster (the rogue) and her sneak attacks and pinpoint archery. And while Garm favors the straightforward approach you might expect from an axe-swinging, lightning-slinging armored freight train of a man that he is, Aster and Lambert are both very tactically-minded. Aster is also played by Grant’s wife Krissi, who is (as you probably gathered while listening to Episode 109) very smart. So tactical imbalance isn’t the issue either.

The problem I’m having is that there just isn’t enough of Ehud in Lambert for him to be comfortable with just going and killing someone, even someone very, very bad, no matter how much he wants to. I originally reached out to Grant via email with the idea that he would want a trial for Auntie Bloat (probably in absentia, given just how dangerous she is) and some sort of official sanction in the form of a sentence before hunting her down. Later in a subsequent email, I mentioned that a declaration of war might also work.

But Lambert isn’t an assassin, an executioner, or a soldier. He’s a priest in a religion that is deliberately highly reminiscent of Christianity, with (at least in my mind – we haven’t fleshed out specific doctrine in much detail yet) similar exhortations about violence, especially murder. And because he’s the leader of the party (a position that started out as de facto and seems to have become explicit over time) he feels like he’s ultimately responsible for the actions they take, especially big ones like this.

And even as awful as she is, with as much violence as she’s done, and as inhuman as she is, Auntie Bloat is still a person. A profoundly, unrepentantly and dangerously evil person, but a person. And hunting a person down and killing them is murder.

It’s also obvious that there really isn’t any other solution to the problem she poses. Exiling her or driving her away is unlikely to be permanent, and even if it is, it makes her some other innocent party’s sadistic, manipulative, murderous problem. If the party were back in the Old World, imprisonment might work, but she’s strong enough to crush the skull of a Sahuagin priestess one-handed and throw her body with one arm. And that’s not even accounting for her manipulative abilities, say nothing of her magical talent. A prison that can actually hold her is technologically beyond the reach of the party, the colony, and the Kenku. She absolutely cannot be talked out of being evil – by her own admission, she’s sown chaos and suffering for centuries for its own sake. So she really does need to be hunted down and removed.

It’s further worth noting that most, if not all, of my previous player characters would not have been wrestling with this. For a long time, I played people who would definitely be classified as “sheepdogs” by Grossman, but were also fairly hardened, ruthless people who were very comfortable with violence. Those types of people tend to make excellent player characters, because while they won’t do anything awful to random people in the setting, they require very little in the way of justifying the action of hunting down and snuffing some bad guy. In this manner, Lambert is actually a somewhat defective player character. I’ve mentioned on multiple occasions (and spoilers, I’m going to mention again in episode 111) that I don’t have very much “range” with my PCs – they tend to represent an idealized, usually somewhat aspirational version of me. They even tend to physically resemble me. That thin line between player and character does mean that my PCs are good for testing my own moral compass in difficult situations.

And right now, I am leaning very strongly toward Auntie Bloat neeeding to go, but also toward not feeling particularly smug or righteous about it. There are times when someone is so awful, and so determined to continue being awful that violence probably is the only solution. Hunting down Auntie Bloat can be justified as “defense of others” in a big way. If she isn’t stopped, she’ll starve the colony, steal a baby and start a war between the colonists and Kenku. That’s just what she’s up to in the game world right now. That we know of. But even with defense of others, Just War Theory and all of the other justifications out there, the ultimate decision to snuff out her evil at the point of a sword, axe, arrow, hammer, or spell still isn’t going to be one that Lambert will feel good about.

Nor should he.

This week’s image is from Porsche Brosseau used under Creative Commons.

While I really enjoy traditional medieval/renaissance fantasy as a player, a reader, and even as a writer, when I GM, I prefer to throw a significant amount of extra technological “stuff” in. My most successful fantasy game drew heavily on material from the DragonMech and Iron Kingdoms line – there was a lot of fantastical steam technology, including mechs, trains, firearms, and so on. This type of campaign setting seems to run counter so some fantasy “conventional wisdom” – a lot of people say they don’t want gunpowder in their fantasy, despite the co-existence of primitive firearms and armored knights on the same battlefields for a significant chunk of history. But it’s not even really guns that make the mix interesting to me.

While a lot of folks enjoy the absence of things like rapid transportation and rapid communication in their fantasy settings, and again, as a player, I tend to like that, too, as a GM, I find the absence of those things to be somewhat irksome. I have really come to appreciate the modern world and its conveniences, and that has bled into my GMing. So for the next few hundred words, I’m going to make my case for this niche style of fantasy.

One thing the “everything but the kitchen sink” style lends itself to particularly well is some interesting set pieces. For example: the train fight. Everybody knows that fighting on top of a moving train is a pulpy classic, but it gets a lot more interesting with magic involved. In most versions, getting knocked or thrown off the train may not be a death sentence (depending on the height and speed of the train and what’s next to the tracks) but it does take someone out of the fight, left behind by the moving train. In a fantasy game, that’s not necessarily the case – there are any number of flight powers, items, or spells available, to say nothing of teleportation magic, and that guy who got knocked off the train might be back a few rounds later. Speaking of things that fly, the presence of flying mounts also opens up new avenues of attack and can make the flight much more three-dimensional. Magic also means the train itself can get affected in various ways – suppressing the fire in the engine with magic will stop it in a hurry, and conjuring things like boulders onto the tracks can cause a derailment.

The more industrialized world also opens up new types of locations. Factories and the machinery and chemicals that come with them are the obvious pull, and even though things like dockyards exist long before anything resembling an engine is invented, once you get up to a steampunk level of tech, you’ve got big ol’ cranes to run along, truly massive ships, submarines, rail cars, and other cool stuff to hide in or behind, get on top of, swoop down from, collapse, or animate. However, think broader than that. Industrialization means paved roads, dams, taller buildings, and more dense and diverse market places, all of which can be interesting to fight through or visit in social and/or investigative scenes.

But more than the new weapons and set pieces, I think the thing that really pushes me toward at least a Victorian level of tech in my games is the way that level of advancement shapes the societies that achieve it. Soldiers on patrol for threats turn into legitimate, professional police forces, complete with detectives. Medicine goes to real, true hospitals potentially with anesthesia and definitely with sanitation, but country doctors making house calls still exist. Printing presses mean that journalism becomes a viable career path for both adventuring PCs and interesting NPCs that can support or annoy them. Or even both, for that matter. Mass printed news can also convey world events and adventure hooks in ways that feel believable. And interesting news stories can be a fantastic source of revenue for a freelance journalist PC, as one of my former PCs would no doubt attest to – selling news stories makes the adventure itself into treasure, in a sense. For example: the party got a significant amount of cash for publishing the story of how they found a lost civilization and reunited them with the rest of the world that they’d been cut off from for so long.

Non-fighting locations like telegraph offices also become important – and it bears mentioning that while the telegraph system may seem redundant with things like the sending spell, anyone can use a telegraph, not just a magic user of some kind. On the other hand, if you have a magic user, you can still get word out from the middle of nowhere.

All of this gives the GM additional narrative levers to pull on, and in my case, I enjoy them a great deal. The nice thing about stopping some time before automatic weapons and electronics

None of this, of course, is to say that traditional fantasy is bad or doesn’t work. As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoy those settings as a player. But if you’ve been leery of trying a more modern and technological fantasy campaign, it can work, and furthermore, it can be a lot of fun.

This week’s image is from Jane, used under Creative Commons.

We’re going to be participating in a convention-wide charity fundraiser for Pat Roper. Pat’s a great guy, and a long-time host of Fear the Boot. The money will be going towards defraying the cost of his cancer treatment, which, even with very good insurance, is SHOCKINGLY expensive. A number of Booters are busy fundraising for Pat—in fact, if you’re interested, there’s a set of competing fundraisers. In particular, Mikey Mason (geek comedian) and Daniel Krenzke offered to dye their beards if the collective total for Pat’s GoFundMe fundraiser hit $10,000 by the time Fear the Con X rolled around. The word used to describe the style was ‘manicorn’. Naturally, we couldn’t pass this up.

So here’s the deal. None of us can actually dye our beards—employment standards, lack of facial hair, and so on all prevent us from doing so. But it turns out the Internet sells some amazing fake beards, and we can certainly make those even more ridiculous than they already are. So we’re doing that: If Pat’s GoFundMe fundraiser hits $8,000 by the time Fear the Con X rolls around, Jenny and I will craft utterly nonsensical fake beards and wear them to the con. Grant can’t attend this year, but he’s promised to make one as well and share pictures.

I don’t know Pat directly very much at all – I think I may have said “hi” to him in passing at a FTC years ago and he’s not as active on social media as some of the other Booters I communicate with regularly. I think the same is also true for Jenny and Grant.

So why are we we willing to look ridiculous as part of a fundraiser?

Well, first and foremost, Pat is sick, and as Christians, that really should be enough – but it goes further than that. By every account I’ve ever heard, Pat is a loving and devoted husband and father, and I know all too well how awful it is to have cancer take a loving and devoted husband and father away FAR before his time. We lost my father-in-law, Tony, to lung cancer at the age of 59 back in 2014. Pat is even younger than Tony was, which means not only is it worse for him to be in this position, but it also means he has a younger man’s constitution so there’s a better chance he can beat this than if he was my father-in-law’s age.

Listeners of Saving the Game may or may not know this, but the podcast also owes its existence in part to Pat – just like it does with Chad Wattler, Chris Hussey, and the countless other hosts that have helped Dan Repperger keep the lights on over at Fear the Boot for so many years. Grant and I know each other in the first place because of the Fear the Boot forums, we met each other in person for the first time at a previous Fear the Con, and Fear the Boot has been supportive of us from the moment we floated the idea of doing the podcast years ago. There is a very clear familial link between Fear the Boot and Saving the Game.

And last but not least: you REALLY want to see what we’re going to do. I have PLANS for these beards, folks. And if we hit that funding tier, there will be at the very least some entertaining photos. We’re obligated at the $8,000 mark. If you want to nudge the needle in that direction, here’s the link.

This post’s image is from Ayleen Gaspar used under Creative Commons.

As someone who made the (in retrospect, unwise) choice to enter the workforce after high school instead of going off to a four-year college, I’ve ironically been in school for most of my adult life, albeit part-time. I have an AAS in criminal justice that’s never been used and I’m getting close to being done with an AAS in network security that, fortunately, tends to teach me things that are useful within a week of me learning them thanks to my new-ish job in IT. So my classes are handy, but I still have to prepare for finals twice a year.

That ritual, repeated as many times as it has been throughout my life, has some interesting gaming potential.

Most player characters, whether they’re in a traditional fantasy setting or a modern, sci-fi, or superhero one, are fairly well-trained individuals. Whether they’re combat, spellcasting, personal, or technical skills (like the ones I use in my job) made more awesome, a lot of adventurers have spent a significant amount of time and resources acquiring those skills.

But here’s the thing – skills, even commonly-used ones, need to be maintained. With some skills where there’s not much of a change in the state of the art, simply using them regularly is enough. The skills needed to operate a passenger car have been pretty static since automatic transmissions and anti-lock brakes became standard on all new vehicles, for example. Other skills, however, are constantly changing. The knowledge necessary to maintain cars changes a lot faster than the knowledge needed to operate them, because while the user interface (steering wheel, turn signals, gas and brake pedals, shifter) has remained relatively unchanged, all of the stuff those controls link to continues to evolve and be engineered upon.

And so it’s not much of a stretch for a wizard player character to have occasional contact with his mentor, or the magic school he learned at, for example. Obviously, especially with younger characters, the educational process can be the focus of an entire campaign. Harry Potter and The Magicians are popular at least in part because a school for exotic skills (magic) is fascinating. Some educational elements can, and probably should, creep into other more traditional campaigns. The continuing education environment that a spellcaster, hacker, or other highly-skilled PC stays enrolled in to keep herself sharp is an excellent source of potential contacts, adventure hooks, and interesting adventure complications. If you need to finish this mission up right now so you can dash over to the college and take your final exam, that adds an extra layer of tension that doesn’t involve life-or-death stakes. Conversely, much like I mentioned earlier, a PC enrolled in classes somehow related to what they do as an adventurer may occasionally pick up new and interesting things. Ways of using their existing capabilities, perhaps, or even minor but entirely new capabilities (at the GM’s discretion, of course.) People go back to school as adults for a reason.

School also teaches things that aren’t part of the curriculum itself. Students learn discipline, study habits, patience, stress management, and (often) how to navigate an academic bureaucracy. These can lead to subtle shifts in a character’s personality as they get more invested in, frustrated with, or burnt out by the academic process and lifestyle.

Finally, the differences in the life experiences between formally-educated academic folks, those who apprenticed in a trade, and those who had to learn through trial and error can make for differences in the various people that make up a PC group that can be fun to explore. In a cyberpunk game, the guy educated as a white hat penetration tester may have more-or-less the same skills as a self-taught street hacker, but the two characters will have different contacts, philosophies and styles depending on how they picked up their skills. They may also have intriguing gaps in their knowledge or areas of expertise with respect to one another as well.

So the next time you make a PC, take some time to consider exactly how they got so awesome, and also how they stay so awesome. Then, compare notes with the rest of the party. You may just find that there’s a whole other layer of roleplaying to be had out of that relatively simple exercise.

This week’s image is from Gareth Simpson, used under Creative Commons.

Grant

Before I get to my recommendations proper, I want to re-up an article we shared out earlier this week from Kotaku: “Therapists Are Using Dungeons & Dragons To Get Kids To Open Up”. Friends of ours from both Wheelhouse Workshop and The Bodhana Group were interviewed for this article. It got a lot of attention early this week, but if you missed it, don’t hesitate to share it out. Every bit of exposure helps these awesome groups.

Okay, moving on.

Alice Daniels’s review of Life, Animated over at Christ & Pop Culture hit me right in the feels, as it were. “A Land of Lost Sidekicks in ‘Life, Animated'” sounds incredibly powerful, and I’d love to watch it soon. (And I never say that about films—I’m really not a movie guy.) I’ve had it in the back of my mind that we should talk about autism on STG sometime; this article made that conviction much more urgent.

Throughout the film, the question “who decides what a meaningful life is?” hangs in the air, and viewers are led to ask it of themselves. Does it consist of the traditional paradigms we have—financial gain, public recognition, and above all, a universally accepted idea of “normal” that allows us to smoothly transition from success to success? Life, Animated allows the viewer into that world we see in 1 Corinthians 1:27, that place where God chooses what the world thinks is foolish to shame the wise and what the world thinks is weak to shame the strong. Really, how God determines what the meaningful life is—and it may not be what we think.

‘Karloff‘ put out a very solid blog post about running noir-slash-police-procedural games: “Top Cop (Mutant City Blues)”. Honestly, he barely touches on MCB in this article—it’s all about capturing the tone of this sort of game. Well worth a read.

In this kind of campaign, the city is just as important a character as any of the players. More so, because the city was there before them and will be there long after they are dead and dust. In The Wire we see small parts of that bigger picture, when McNulty and Bubbles school Shakima Greggs about Omar’s cousin No Heart Anthony, or Prop Joe talks about how the house he lives in is one of the first available to black families in that neighborhood. These stories go straight to the long term history of the setting, hinting at a bigger universe that the individual characters are often blind to, so focused are they on their own problems.

Nikita Stewart at The New York Times wrote a very powerful article a couple of weeks ago about Girl Scout troops for homeless NYC girls: “Living by the Girl Scout Law, Even Without a Home”. It’s powerful, and hopefully inspirational.

Troops for homeless girls are rare, but not without precedent. Girl Scouts of the USA does not track such troops nationally, but in the past 30 years, troops have formed in shelters in Atlanta; Broward County, Fla.; and San Pedro, Calif. At one point during the 1990s, a number of untraditional troops were created to reach girls in shelters, migrant worker camps and public housing.

And finally, perfect for any Unknown Armies game: “Fatal Victorian Fashion and the Allure of the Poison Garment”. Over ninety different pieces of Victorian fashion, collected in 2016 at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and described by Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier—all of which were lethal to their wearers or manufacturers. Entirely appropriate given our contemporary conversation about character appearance and clothing!

Fashion Victims is presided over by one of these arsenic dresses, its color still vivid, and beguiling. And even as Emerald Green’s hazards were exposed in the 19th century, people still wanted it, and in a way, that hasn’t changed. “Emerald Green was the Pantone Color of the Year for 2013, which suggests that we still love it,” Matthews David said.

Jenny

For my spiritual piece of media this week, I’d actually like to give a bit of a shout-out to a church I used to attend, St. Michael’s & All Angels in St. John’s, Newfoundland. They’re trying something a little new where every Monday at 1 p.m Newfoundland Time (11:30 a.m EST) Father Jonathan Rowe does a Facebook livestream talking about the gospel reading for the season of Easter. Father Jonathan is an excellent speaker, and an all around cool guy. You can find the archived livestreams here on their Facebook page.

For gaming, I would like to happily (but quietly) tell you about Sign by Thorny Games. It’s a silent role-playing game about the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which is a fascinating story all on its own. I encourage you to read the Wikipedia article about it. I actually first learned about the story in one of my favourite linguistics classes in university, so when I heard about this game I had to pre-order it.

In 1977, something happened. Fifty deaf children from across the country were brought together to an experimental school in Managua. Without a shared language to express themselves, the children did the only thing they could — they created one. In Sign, we follow a small piece of their journey.

How I Learned to Love the Weird, from Octavia Butler to Kelly Link, a piece by Brian Francis Slattery on strange, outlandish fiction, added a large number of authors and books for me to check out.

For the reader in me, it was as though someone had given me a bigger, more detailed map of the book world than I already had. There were towns I’d just passed through that now demanded return visits, longer stays. There were entire continents of books I’d somehow missed. Possibly the best thing about publishing a book was discovering so many more books to read.

Peter

I could apologize for the number pun in the title, but the apology just wouldn’t be genuine. ;)

This article on the Bazooka Vespa seems like it’d be great inspiration for pulpy adventure games set in the 50s or 60s.

Vespa has had many models through the years, used for many purposes. However, there is one model which will remain known as the most dangerous scooter ever made: the Vespa TAP 150. Ordered by the French military in 1950’s, Vespa TAP 150 was produced by ACMA, the licensed French manufacturer of Vespa models. The model was first introduced in 1956 and enhanced in 1959. The TAP 150 was planned to be used in the Indochine and Algerian conflicts by the Troupes Aéro Portées (TAP), hence the name of the model.

On a considerably more serious and thoughtful note, this sermon by bishop Will Willimon isn’t from this week, month, or even year, but it’s a favorite of mine and it has stuck with me since I heard it when it was new. Willimon has an interesting perspective on faith, community, and God’s rather active role in our decisions. It’s particularly hopeful if you have folks in your life that have lost their faith.

Finally, apparently pacifist speed runs in Diablo II are a thing? If that’s making you scratch you head, like it made me scratch mine, take a look at the article.

There’s a catch, of course, as DrCliche explains in a detailed guide to the pacifist run. He equipped his character with thorn-covered armor, so that any time an enemy hit him, his gear would just hit them right back. Based on DrCliche’s defined set of rules, that didn’t count as a kill; as long as he never took any intentional aggressive actions, he was in the clear.

However, because I’m a bit of a navel gazer to begin with and am always on the lookout for good material for this blog, you probably already know I can’t just leave it there. That service, like so many things, got me pondering, which then got me writing. There is nothing inherently blasphemous, sacrilegious, heretical, sinful, irreverent, or inappropriate about humor. In fact, the only negative reference I can find to it in humor is Proverbs 26:18-19, which is more a passage that calls out that it’s not cool to be a jerk and then pretend it was all for laughs.  So there’s nothing wrong with humor, at least from a Christian perspective, but it seems like Christians often forget that.

Like a maniac shooting
    flaming arrows of death
   is one who deceives their neighbor
    and says, “I was only joking!”
-Proverbs 26:18-19

That thread of somber, anti-humor thinking has a couple of effects: first, it tends to take the joy out of faith, which is a tragedy all on its own. As I mentioned in Episode 108 during the Patreon question, my favorite memory from a gaming table was a riotous, silly good time that I had with at least two other practicing Christians, one of whom was running the game. I could barely talk for say two of the con from all the shouting, laughing, and funny voices and my sides hurt from all the laughing by the end of the night, and I really enjoyed myself. That experience formed good memories and bonded us at the table, if only for a few hours.

Rabbit: “He’s got a flush…he threw away three cards!”
<pause>
Rabbit: “He drew a better flush?!”
Mouse: “They’re stupid AND lucky! Interrupting this game will be a mercy!”

-Two talking animal PCs watching some talking dog NPCs play poker…badly.

I’ve come to feel the same way about jokes and snark around the table as long as it doesn’t completely derail the game. And it’s interesting that in the D&D game Grant runs that I play in, a lot of that humor has slipped into character. My neutral good cleric spends some time playing shoulder angel to the chaotic neutral fighter and rogue, but he’s also become their friend and that means that some joking around happens. Okay, it means that nearly-constant joking around happens. (The humor moves in and out of character pretty fluidly as you can see from the use of the #DND hashtag among our group members with public Twitter accounts.) And Lambert (my PC; a neutral good human cleric), though I think he’s probably one of my top three favorite PCs of all time, is the kind of person for whom it’s fortunate that he can take a joke, because he makes a very easy target. Exceeded only by the actual governor of the colony in the level of responsibility he feels for the well-being of the colonists and prone to adding any other non-hostile parties he encounters to the list of people he feels responsible for at the drop of a hat, it’s not hard to pick on his sense of propriety, his desire to help, his unwillingness to let the party be too self-serving, and the stress all of these concerns give him, and he himself realizes it.

Toucan: “I’m going to tell your boss, and then you will be in BIG. TROUBLE.”
Dog: “I dunno, man. He seems pretty reasonable.”
Dog’s player casually eats a nacho

-Another moment from the funny con game

And here’s the interesting thing: because Lambert has actually become friends with the other PCs instead of just angrily shoving them back into line whenever they do something he doesn’t like, they have actually started to act like his moral compass is in play even when they aren’t around him. Not completely, but more than they would have at the beginning of the game. The most dramatic example of this shift occurring was the “arrow incident” that I’ve written about before. However, because Grant is a considerate GM and not, for example Frank Miller, good actions may be difficult, but they aren’t foolish or a lie in his world.  And that in turn means the snowball effect of consistently doing the right thing (or at least trying to) is starting to roll. The party has begun to be trusted with a significant amount of resources – specifically a boat and the personnel to crew it.

This lines up well with Lambert’s faith, which is just Christianity with not even all of the serial numbers filed off after the monotheistic retcon we did a while back. He’s in the colony in the first place to help make the world better, to keep peace between the colonists and the natives, to heal the injured and sick, and generally help bring about the Kingdom of God in the new world. The fact that he can give and take humor is actually helping with that. It’s not the main thing, and it’s certainly not the only thing (his utter stubbornness is helping him at least as much) but it is helping.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Humor, while certainly not inherently holy is definitely not inherently unholy either, and can serve a holy purpose, especially when things are hard. It’s a simple way to provide some relief from stress, anxiety, and sometimes even real suffering and it’s a bonding agent for relationships. There’s some real worth in letting the joy out, don’t you think?

This week’s image is from Umair Mohsin, used under Creative Commons.

So, without further adieu: The first StG Weekend Reading post!

Peter

An interesting ministry idea: A church-run laundromat.

The inventor of the Lithium-Ion battery has a new high-capacity battery design using glass, of all things.

This MASSIVE article on play styles and personality over on Gamasutra is a fascinating read. I’m not sure how much I buy it, but it’s sure interesting.

Jenny

I am currently in the middle of reading a book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins. I like it a lot so far!

It was published a couple months ago, but this article about using board games to connect with refugees is something I can’t stop thinking about.

Old Japanese animated films available to watch online for free. Here‘s where to watch them (all Japanese, navigable with Google auto-translate,) and here‘s an English article about them.

Grant

It’s got a very explicitly Evangelical bent, but if you like learning about historical figures and events in the church, Stephen Nichols’ 5 Minutes in Church History podcast is a great way to get that in bite-size chunks!

Friend of the show and previous guest Josh Jordan is part of a neat anthology of small conspiracy-themed RPGs called “The Imposters”, now on Kickstarter. Several of these games have won awards in the past, so check it out if indie RPGs are your thing!

Green’s Dictionary of Slang—in and of itself a wonderful resource—has an excellent blog about the sources of English vernacular throughout the ages. The most recent article on Mary ‘Moll’ Frith, an English “Napoleon of crime” hearkening all the way back to the late 1500’s, is delightful reading for both historical slang and a remarkable personality.

He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. -Matthew 28:6

One of the interesting peculiarities of the United Methodist denomination that I belong to is that we rotate our clergy periodically. United Methodist pastors will serve with a local church for a period of several years and then will eventually be reassigned. There are a few exceptions (I don’t think Adam Hamilton is going anywhere, for example) but in most of the denomination, you can look forward to bidding a fond farewell to your old pastor and meeting a new one on a fairly regular basis. It’s been an interesting adjustment for me, because I grew up in various non-denominational Evangelical churches where the pastor would often stay for a very long time indeed, and when one left, it was a job opening that was interviewed for rather than an appointment that was filled.

I don’t like everything about the process, but I can see the value in a number of contexts – theoretically, moving pastors around should expose the problem ones, share around the best qualities of the good ones and – as I’ve come to appreciate – it exposes the local congregation to a variety of different teaching styles and perspectives from the pulpit, and I’ve been fortunate to have three good ones in a row at my church.

My new (or new-ish; he’s been at my church for about a year now) pastor is a friendly, enthusiastic sort and does the kind of participatory worship you’ll often see when you get an extrovert in the pulpit. More than once, he’s divided the congregation up into groups, had those groups discuss something and then share their findings with the congregation. It’s not the most comfortable sort of worship for a solitary introvert like me, and to his credit, he doesn’t do it every week, but that practice, combined with his Lenten sermon series has gotten me thinking.

The theme for that series is “what needs resurrecting in your life,” and clearly one of the things that needed a jolt from the old defibrillator for me was my sense of communal worship. For a lot of my life, my faith has been a more or less solitary practice, and I still enjoy having it that way a lot of the time. However, it took a new pastor to remind me that religion isn’t just a solitary effort. Especially as I’ve come to view my faith as being less about a code of rules that need to be adhered to and more about looking to see what can be done to serve others, the idea of worship as a group activity has slowly gained the purchase it probably should have had all along, gradually and persistently prying its roots into my stubborn heart and mind.

Another thing that should probably come out of the tomb for me is what could be called “casual religious practice” or perhaps “routine religious practice.” I have basically stopped doing simple things like praying over meals, and while I don’t think this is a horrible atrocity, those practices became tradition for a reason. It’s good to acknowledge one’s faith regularly and to thank God for continued life and sustenance. And while I’m not Catholic and never have been, I do derive a certain amount of meaning and purpose from small faith rituals, which is one of the reasons we have them.

There are other things, too. I really should read more, from actual books, than I currently do. I should structure my week better so I can “honor the Sabbath” and take Sundays off from obligations like schoolwork. But endless self-recrimination isn’t very fitting for the season.

This is the time when we celebrate renewal, new life, forgiveness, the ultimate victory over sin and death. Two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth, made thoroughly and painfully dead three days prior, walked out of his tomb and split history in two. Even the dead can live again.

Happy Easter.

This week’s image is from Sean MacEntee used under Creative Commons.

Yeeeeaaaah. Good times. Oh wait, the exact opposite of that.

In case it wasn’t obvious, Grant, his wife, and their kids have been sick for the last couple of weeks, which quite understandably has meant we haven’t been gaming. We did, however, do something last Saturday night. This is going to be another one of those practical posts about gaming as an adult which those of you who are in high school or college probably won’t get a whole lot of mileage out of – yet – but it will be good to store away for future usage.

The first week of the illness, we just straight-up canceled. Everyone was completely wiped out, and the Woodwards just needed to rest. Last Saturday, though, despite the persisting illness, Grant reached out to the rest of us and we had a short call at the same time our game normally would have been, it was just over much faster. We did this partly just to say hello and to allow the other player and me to hear that the Woodwards were still alive, but we also wanted to maintain our momentum as much as we could without actually doing a full session, and we also wanted to set ourselves up for success as much as possible next week. It worth mentioning beforehand that this sort of thing is often seen as the death knell of a game and it really needn’t be. Illness is going to happen, particularly if anyone in the families of your gaming group is under 16 or over 60, and just like work or school, you’ll occasionally need to take a sick day, but also like work or school, it should be somewhat expected and there should be plans in place, though you’ll obviously never be thrilled to implement them.

Here’s how the specifics of that broke down:

First of all, we did give ourselves a few minutes to just let the sick people get some sympathy and catch up a little as friends. There is definitely at least a minor thread of thinking in the gaming community that all gaming time must be about the game. I don’t subscribe to that thinking and furthermore, I don’t even try to. You obviously want to get to the game in relatively short order, but if you’re fortunate enough to be gaming with friends, go ahead and catch up a bit before gaming or in a meeting like this one. It’ll help you focus better later, and you’ll deepen your friendships too.

Once we finished with that (which only took about 10 minutes because, hey, sick people) we came to a consensus as to what we wanted to do next week when the session starts back up. Grant left us with one minor and two major adventure hooks hanging out there:

We’d just arrived on an island populated by cautious, but not hostile, lizard people. They have a couple of wounded (the minor hook) that aren’t healing properly because…
The island has ancient, mysterious ruins on it that apparently have things that make sure you STAY hurt when they hurt you but there’s also…
A couple of Kenku (a group we’re already sympathetic to) that have been captured by nasty frog people slavers the next island over.

We put our heads together as a group and determined that my cleric, Lambert (who is the informal leader of the group as far as the group is concerned and the formal, established leader of the group as far as the colonial leadership is concerned) would want to heal the wounded and then save the enslaved Kenku before checking out the ruins. The other PCs might want to do things in a different order if it was up to them, but they tend to follow Lambert’s lead when it comes to these sorts of things. When then determined that we had our plan and would stick to it next week, thereby cutting down substantially on the list of things Grant has to prepare for.

By having that conversation in advance, we also skipped the entire first part of the session that often happens in games where the players, about half in-character and half out-of-character, sit around and deliberate for roughly eighteen times longer than the decision merits about which way to go while the GM, vibrating with frustrated anticipation, looks at their notes full of awesome stuff for the party to encounter once they JUST PICK SOMETHING ALREADY.

So while we didn’t get a full gaming session in, taking a few minutes to meet anyway and plan where it’ll go will allow us to hit the ground at a full sprint next week, and that should serve us well in making up lost time.

This week’s featured image is from Yuki Shimazu, used under Creative Commons.

After over two years as a two-person show, Saving the Game is proud to announce our new permanent host Jenny Dickson! This is her first episode, and she’ll be joining us going forward.

The episode starts off with an introduction of Jenny and then moves into our Patreon question about hacks and drifts, and then the three of us dig into our main topic: limiting the evil of villains in games. We cover why to do it, how to do it, and what effects it has on the story you’re telling.

Scripture: Exodus 5:6-8, Judges 3:13-14, Revelation 3:14-19

Links:
High-Heel-Face Turn on tvtropes.org
Star Wars in Traveller
The Fugitive
Episode 17: Lines and Veils

Undertale

Sometimes conflict happens because one side is evil, or both of them are. The classic examples of fighting Nazis, hunting serial killers, and tracking down thieves and crooked businessmen or politicians all apply, as do the ones of war in the underworld, either figuratively (as you’d see in a campaign with rival gangs fighting) or, heck, even literally in some games. But oftentimes, it’s not because one party or the other is monstrous. Some of the most awful and brutal conflicts in all of history were fought, not because of cruelty or wanton malice, but because of obligations, bad information, and poor communications. World War One, arguably the most horrific and brutal conflict in all of human history, was fought not over clear-cut moral grounds, but because of obligations, strategic calculations, poor communication technology, and a host of other factors that had nothing to do with evil at the start. There would be plenty of evil after it started, but aside from a single assassination that started the dominoes falling, there’s not a lot one can look at in the lead-up to the war with a terribly condemning eye if one is at all interested in being fair, especially with the distance that history provides. (Hardcore History and Extra History each did their own excellent muti-part series on WWI. I recommend consuming both.)

A bit closer to home, the Church in the US in particular is divided on a number of contentious issues, which has left sincere people of faith on both sides struggling to reconcile some of the differences that have come to the fore, and in fact if you look at Church history, this is nothing new. Religious schisms and conflicts are littered throughout the history of the church. We touched on one of the more dramatic events stemming from this in out Historical Heresies series when we talked about the First Council of Nicaea.

This is a contentious topic and one that gets people angry in a hurry. It can be difficult just to talk about in a civil way. Why would anyone want to game about this?

*ahem*

The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity. -C.S. Lewis

Okay, so C.S. Lewis has provided the “why” but what about the “how?”

It isn’t hard to imagine how evil winds up in fights. Caring either only for itself or for some sinister goal, evil has nothing to lose from conflict and is perfectly happy to escalate matters as far as is necessary for it to triumph, consequences be hanged. Good, on the other hand, usually only gets mixed up in fights when something important is threatened, but that’s not usually the entirety of it. If you want to bring two good people or groups into conflict, here’s at least one way it can start.

1. Good, as previously-mentioned, only tends to get involved in conflicts to protect or preserve something important. For example: in our D&D game, the party is planning to confront a hag who has struck a bargain that will cost a young couple their firstborn. This is a major threat to innocent life, something that’s definitely worth preserving. So to have a seed of conflict at all, you need to create a situation that threatens something one of your good sides cares about.
2. Once you’ve accomplished that, you’re going to need to set it up so the only solution that the side feeling threatened can see to their problem will imperil something important to another good group. Side note: using Moral Foundations Theory can help keep this from feeling too forced or cheesy. If one side’s Care actions threaten another side’s Purity ones or vice versa… …you’ll have a conflict that will feel very familiar to anyone who pays attention to politics.
3. At some point, someone is going to have to assume the worst in someone on the other side, and then they’re going to have to do something that makes the other side assume the worst too.
4. Someone needs to escalate.
5. Congratulations, you have a conflict.

And this is about the point at which the player characters should probably come in. To use this type of conflict to its fullest potential, it’s probably best to make the sides roughly equal in how sympathetic they are. The conflict will probably be thorny, resistant to easy solutions, and exhausting to resolve if the GM has done their homework, but if the PC group manages to pull it off, the resolution will be extremely satisfying. It is worth noting that all of these same traits mean this is probably best as a sometimes thing rather than a constant theme in your games, but if what we’ve said for four-plus years about games being good moral practice is at all something you agree with, this seems like a particularly good type of practice to be getting these days.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. – Matthew 5:9

This week’s featured image is from Agelshaxe and is used under Creative Commons.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. -Romans 12:15

Grief and sadness are exhausting, and I’ve had a lot more rough, half-asleep mornings in the last couple of weeks that I’ve had in the last couple of year. And yet even when the loss is crushing, such as in the case of the loss of a parent or, worse, a child, society doesn’t long excuse the grief-stricken from their daily duties. Work must be done, obligations must be attended to.

And that goes triple for those who, paradoxically, are going to experience grief-triggering events the most often – soldiers, law enforcement, emergency medical personnel, firefighters, and so on.

You know: player characters.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. -Matthew 5:4

Your average PC probably sees a lot of death, destruction, chaos, and carnage just in their first adventure, to say nothing of their entire career. And they generally press on through it with nary a complaint. This is a genre trope in a lot of cases; superheroes, pulp adventurers, crack special forces troops and so on are often portrayed as “psychologically indestructible” or at least sufficiently hardened, trained, and/or outfitted with coping mechanisms to handle the stress and tragedy of what they deal with. That can be great for lighter, more cinematic, and/or high-adventure campaigns and is certainly a valid way of playing. It’s not the only valid way, though. Some games choose to tackle the stressful, painful, exhausting side of adventuring and the emergent content from those systems is fascinating. (Two properties that explore these themes that probably don’t need any more plugging from me, but are going to get it anyway are This War of Mine and Unknown Armies.)

I’ll admit to a certain level of bias; as a gamer, I’ve begun to feel a bit of what I could term “violence fatigue” in relation to my entertainment. So much of the gaming experience seems to revolve around killing things, and after a while (perhaps as a function of getting older) one starts to tire of all the cleaving and smashing and shooting. In fact, I’d say that exposure to so much violent entertainment over the course of my adolescence and adult life has actually sensitized be to it rather than de-sensitizing like concerned folks often worry will. I’ve allowed some of this to consciously bleed into Lambert in the D&D game. He’s still perfectly capable of fighting and killing if need be (ask the phase spider that scared the living daylights out of us a few sessions back) but he’d really rather not; Lambert knows that violence and death (especially with sapient beings) often leads to grief and suffering. He also recognizes that sometimes, it’s necessary. Lambert lives in a fantasy world with evil things that exist pretty much solely to cause the misery he wants to prevent. That dichotomy (and the high quality of the rest of the gaming group) has allowed for some very interesting character interactions.

A reluctance to wade into battle isn’t the only application for more emotionally vulnerable (or even just emotionally complex) PCs, though. Allowing PCs to feel things and react appropriately is an underutilized trick in a lot of mainstream gaming. One needn’t be all melodramatic and angsty about it. Lambert certainly isn’t an “emo” character, but he’s very much a “Protestant work ethic” kind of guy who pushes himself very hard. In his particular case, he tends to cope with that stress by bantering with the other two PCs, whom he trusts even if not everyone else in the colony does. It takes the edge off and lets him keep going without getting overwhelmed. It’s not a front-and-center part of his character on every adventure, but it does add a bit of texture. And that texture helps keep the game fun, at least for me.

Which can be good when the game is one of the ways I, as a player, manage some small measure of the stress in the real world. Sometimes, knowing how my PC keeps putting one foot in front of the other can help me do the same.

This week’s featured image is from Brent Newhall used under Creative Commons.

One of the things that has stuck with me is the character of “Subject Zero,” better known as Jack. When you pick Jack up in Mass Effect 2, she’s a very troubled and violent person with an extremely traumatic past. As the subject of a bunch of brutal experiments designed to enhance both her biotic (essentially telekinetic) potential and simultaneous conditioning to fight as a child, she’s pretty darn messed up when you pull her out of a maximum-security prison station in game 2. If you play the game as a “Paragon” like I did, Shepard (the player character) works with her enough that she starts overcoming a few of her issues as the game goes on, but it isn’t until game 3 when you come across her as a teacher of other biotic students at a private school, and a good one at that, where you truly see the level of redemption she’s achieved. A woman who was once a vicious, lawless killer carving a path of rage and destruction across the nastier parts of the galaxy is now a devoted and fiercely protective teacher. She’s still got a sharp tongue, but there is genuine compassion in the way she treats her students and genuine gratitude toward the people, from Shepard to the Alliance personnel who gave her the job, that provided her with a fresh start.

Which brings up an interesting point about redemption: it’s seldom something a person can achieve on their own. People may break bad habits and establish good ones, but in order to truly complete the process, someone has to actually let them have a shot at being restored to some kind of community with other people. This has a lot of interesting story implications in game. How much do you trust the villain that’s reformed? What do you do with bad guys who are suddenly trying to do something good? How do you tell sincere willingness to change from a ploy? Let’s assume you’ve decided to give someone a second chance. What does that look like in this story? In this setting?

The second one that sticks with me and the thing that actually made me cry a little bit the first time I played the game was what happened on Rannoch, the homeworld of the Quarians and Geth. The backstory of those two races seems like a twisted and partially-inverted version of Paradise Lost. The Quarians built the Geth, a sapient race of what boils down to laborer robots, to assist them on their homeworld of Rannoch. The design was a little too good, and one day a Geth gained both sufficient self-awareness and boldness to ask its Quarian supervisor if it had a soul. The Quarians, fearing the response from the galactic community, attempted to wipe out the Geth, which resulted in a war they lost, badly. Driven from their homeworld and wandering throughout space on fleet of ships, and also stuck in environment suits from infancy due to immune systems that function poorly away from a homeworld they no longer have access to, the Geth are God, Lucifer, and Cain all rolled into one. The Geth even refer to them as “creators” rather than their racial name. And the Geth, paradoxically, are willing to forgive the Quarians and welcome them back as long as price isn’t their survival. In a series of events that plays out over an hour or two of gameplay, Shepard is able to learn both sides of the story and broker a peace between the formerly-hostile races. Interesting, the Geth, not being biological, have perfect memory and absolutely zero interest in holding a grudge. The level of forgiveness and sacrifice that goes into the reunification of those two disparate factions was the thing that actually opened the tear ducts up on me. One of the Geth, called Legion (a direct reference to the bunch of demons in Mark 5:9!) because of the way Geth operate (as a host of networked virtual machines, essentially) uploads itself and “dies” in the process. The sequence ends with a hulking Geth combat platform gently offering to let the Quarians come home. It’s also noted that the ecosystem of the homeworld the Quarians need so badly has been carefully preserved for over 300 years by machines that can survive in vacuum. The Geth were looking for an opportunity to reconcile with their creators.

There’s more beautiful symbolism and mythic resonance in that story than I can unpack in ten of these blog posts, but it does serve as an excellent example of the C.S. Lewis quote we used to say all the time on the podcast:

“The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”

Interestingly, that phenomenon even works when you’ve previously had some familiarity with the myth – a little time away from a story brings back a lot of its significance. And the significance of forgiveness, freely, even eagerly offered is something we can all stand to remember a bit more these days.

This weeks featured image is from Tony Alter, used under a Creative Commons license.

However, unlike a lot of scenarios like this, Grant has left us with a somewhat longer window before we have to act, which does several interesting things.

First, it creates a sense of looming dread that we’re going to have to live with for a while. Incidentally, Grant seems fond of this – we agreed to an unspecified favor for a water fey earlier in the game and that won’t be coming due any time soon; we’re about two months in the world’s time into the game, which means we have about 10 more months until that favor comes due. The saving of the newborn is going to have to happen at least 2-3 months before that, however, which gives us both time to prepare and time for the situation to get more complicated. There’s also the near certainty that the party is currently no match for Auntie Bloat. Which means we need to gain some levels. Plural. Fast.

Second, speaking of getting more complicated, it’s pushing us to solidify alliances we’ve started forming. The party has sought the aid of Rishi, a Kenku sorcerer and the first friendly NPC we met on the island that didn’t also arrive on our ship. But in order to get that aid, we have to help him secure another teacher for his apprentice should he die in the effort, which means we’re going to be traveling to another nearby island (or perhaps several) in the archipelago on a just-salvaged boat we recovered from some gnolls that had been eaten by giant spiders.

Finally, it’s acting as a mechanism to tie several plot threads together. As mentioned in previous blog posts, the party has been building relationships and a reputation as folks useful to the colony (and to a lesser extent, the Kenku), and as such has been able to call in some favors. The boat itself is a massive favor that Governor Hester Warwick has granted us because while the party is so often the bearer of news of new complications that she gets a headache every time we report in, we’ve also gotten results every time she’s sent us to do something. Rishi is willing to help us because we’ve helped him and the Kenku in a big way once already (in fact, he was the one who sent us to steal the item from Auntie Bloat in the first place). And the colony is starting to expand to the point where the target painted on us for various threats to zero in on is getting bigger and more brightly-colored.

This long-term approach does have a single significant drawback, however: it’s far enough out, there’s a certain risk of losing the sense of dread, and on the other side of the coin there’s also a chance (as killed the Shadowrun game) that the players will become paralyzed with second-guessing and not go anywhere. Do that long enough and even a very good campaign can die.

Still, I think there’s a lot of value in taking this longer view. In a previous campaign of mine, a generally very successful one, we sat down at the end and realized that the player characters had started at level 5 and had wound up at level 21 less than six months of game time later. Their journey had been a constant charge through an unending chain of immediate threats and un-ignorable emergencies. They’d had no time to breathe at all; in the real world, even hardened combat verterans couldn’t keep up the pace they’d kept up, and in retrospect, that had been poor storytelling on my part.

So I think there’s some real value in placing a problem that’s certain and scary on the horizon and letting the players get to it over a longer period of time rather than dropping it on top of them and forcing them to react NOW like so many GMs, including me, have done.

As usual, I’d love to hear your comments on this topic. How have you and your gaming group paced your threats, and how did it work out?

This week’s image is used, unaltered, under creative commons and comes from Schizoform.

The party is a fairly low-level one, and the giant spiders they were fighting could do a decent amount of damage. Lambert was rolling poorly, and the spiders were not – despite his high armor class, they were landing a lot of hits on him and the situation was starting to look a bit dire before the faerie dragon NPC we had with us intervened and gave me some breathing room. Lambert quickly drank a healing potion and he was back in the fight.

That time when things got dicey got me thinking about what kind of impact Lambert’s death would have on the colony, and what kind of impact his life had produced up until that point. Without going into too much detail and boring you all with a gaming story, the effects would have been pretty substantial. Lambert had both a leadership position and a useful set of skills he was neither shy nor reluctant to use on the colony’s behalf, and had he been eaten by a giant spider, there would have been a substantial hole there to fill.

Which leads me to a short, if critical point: if you’re aiming to play heroic characters, what kind of legacy are they creating? A lot of the time, the more heroic PCs in fantasy games especially are defined primarily by what they’re willing to stick the business end of some weapon into, and, it follows, how many of those things they’ve vanquished. Certainly, a lot of fantasy settings are dangerous, monster-infested places and the dragonslayer’s role is a critical one, but oftentimes the things that really make PCs important in the world are the ones that happen when they’re not fighting, or at least after they’re done fighting.

The PCs in the colony game cleared out, but also thoroughly scouted, an ancient, abandoned monastery that’s currently the seat of colonial government. While in that same monastery, they worked out a deal with a freshwater faerie to secure a supply of clean water for the colony. They made peaceful contact with the Kenku village, they made peaceful (if somewhat exasperated) contact with a faerie dragon. They’ve identified the territory of a dangerous predator (a wyvern). They’ve found fertile land, helped find mineral deposits, located a wrecked gnoll ship, and rescued a bunch of lost colonists from an interdimensional “pocket plane.” Lambert has also done a lot of work on finding out which plants on the island are edible and/or medicinal.

They’ve also become known as the bearers of stressful news to at least the governor, who has come to realize that they get things done, but also often bring news that complicates matters every time they come back from some errand.

In short, they’ve made a difference. The people in the colony are safer (much, much safer) better-fed, and better-sheltered than they’d be without the help of the PCs or some other characters like them. In addition to problem solvers and threat-eliminators, they’re scouts, pathfinders, and trailblazers, and that has made them heroic without there needing to be a constant stream of monsters or even a known “big bad.” And like most of these revelations, it’s been equal parts serendipity, improvisation, good GMing, and a complete surprise.

I guess the take-away here is that if you’re looking to make heroes, especially ones tied to a place, look specifically for opportunities to do things that benefit that place in ways that aren’t just taking threats out. Try and find a way for them to leave a legacy. You’ll probably find yourself having even more fun than normal.

This week’s image is from Pedro Ribeiro Simões, used under Creative Commons.

On this New Year’s Day, hear the good news that God allows do-overs. God created do-overs. We get a second chance…or a third, or fourth, or fifth…or seventy times seven. -From the January 1 church bulletin of the Marengo United Methodist Church.

A lot of us make resolutions around this time of year – things we want to do better or stop doing, and therefore be better. This has proven difficult throughout human history – in fact, the Bible itself can be boiled down into “stop doing the things!” It doesn’t typically prove to be any better on an individual level. We start the new year full of life and excitement, determined to take on the world and our own bad habits and then life eventually grinds us down until sometime around August, we either have completely forgotten what our resolutions were, or we’re so dispirited that we have trouble seeing the point.

Some of this is just human nature and even human physiology. There’s some pretty compelling science that habits – never mind actual addictions – are so heard to break because the more we repeat something, the more it physically affects our brains. Common behaviors form what are essentially hard-wired neural pathways. This isn’t always a bad thing, mind you. This is also the reason why things like tying your shoes no longer require conscious thought by the time you’ve reached adulthood. But that also means that bad habits get hard-wired in as well. (So in Psalm 139:14 when the word “fearfully” comes up, it’s not hard to see this powerful double-edged psychological sword as part of the fear.)

So what does that mean for someone trying to change as a Christian? Probably lots and lots of things, but several big ones I want to focus on.

The first is that, as you may suspect, games are actually your friend in this!  One of the ways that works well for some people (me very much included) to form better habits is to game-ify the process. (If you doubt this, you really should take the time to watch Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on the subject.) As some of our listeners may already suspect, this is where I bring up Habitica. If you’ve never looked at it, look at it. If nothing else, it’s a fantastic to-do list app, and the RPG elements are obviously a bonus. The free version is more than adequate, though it’s helped me enough that I decided to subscribe at a small monthly amount ($5). That gets you access to… …snazzy-looking cosmetic stuff, mostly. There are other tools out there as well. This Lifehacker Article covers some of them, including Habitica (called Habit RPG back then).

The second is accountability. I’ve had some fairly poor results sticking with an exercise regimen in the past, and since I’m now no longer getting much exercise at work, this is getting more and more important with every passing day. I asked some members of a small, private Facebook group I’m in to periodically check in with me about how it’s going, and Grant’s wife (who is a member of that group) has been pretty diligent about not letting me forget this is a thing I’m supposed to do. The trick, for me at least, is to not have be a beatdown, just a check-in.

The third is that it can be good to keep your ears open. I had a horrible time keeping up any sort of regular prayer schedule until I heard about this prayer that can be said quickly as I step into my morning shower and learned this method of praying through my day that I can do at night. I tried them and they stuck. Don’t be afraid to grab tools where you can find them.

Finally and most important is grace. God is far, far more patient with us than we are with ourselves. The Bible is a continuous loop of screwing up and being forgiven from Genesis all the way to Revelation. (See the link under “stop doing the things!”) God has forgiven, does forgive, and will continue to forgive, and while none of us will ever reach Christ-like perfection this side of eternity, we can get better. There’s also a nugget of wisdom I’d like to share from a close friend of mine. I came to him feeling guilty about how hard it had been for me to resist a habitual sin. I’d managed not to do it this time, but the amount of effort it had required from me had me down. His response was “Just because there was a struggle doesn’t mean you lost, dude.” Now to some folks, that may seem obvious, but to me, that was profound.

I still have a lot to work on this year, but there is something wonderful and enticing about a clean slate, isn’t there?

This week’s image used under Creative Commons comes from Travis Isaacs.