Dungeons Dragons and More Dungeons

so the metaphysics/cosmology of the greater world of araman are something i find really interesting, i've explained it a couple times in text already, but i had the thought it might be easier with visuals, so have some diagrams!

(to the best of my lore knowledge, with the understanding that these things do not exist solely in 2d space, so the places i've put them are where was convenient for the connections, not necessarily what actually neighbors what)

so this is what the world looked like for the past few millenia of shaper rule. dead souls end up in the tenebral reaches (the deep dark woods), to be guided on to their respective afterlife from there. some gods had celestial psychopomps, like olbalad, to guide the souls they deemed as theirs. house tachonis did that job for tansul, because their sorcery draws power specifically from that shadow realm, they know it intimately. azgra had a crueler method, and cursed the souls of all dead orcs to follow a river of his own blood directly from araman, through the underworld, and into the dying fields

and lurking underneath it all, the oldest path, the first one ever made. the druids can guide souls themselves, back to this plane in a new form, but they were almost wiped out during the shapers' time, forced to continue their work in secret if they did so at all

sylandri wasn't allowed to keep the elves as immortal as she wanted them, but she wanted them always in the light, to never know the world of shadow. so the stone of nightsong was eventually created, to open a bridge between araman and faerie, such that any mortal injury they did befall, it would carry their souls to faerie directly

with the shapers gone after the war, their psychopomps mostly went with them. the afterlives are theorised to still exist, but with the paths closed, no one could prove it. gavzidra's drying up with no recourse for the souls trapped in it. and with nowhere to go, the dead just pour into that shadow space that can't hope to contain them, swelling precariously as it tries. the old path is more vital than ever now, but it's like trying to drain a bucket of water through a pinhole, there just isn't enough time or druids to make a real dent

and then 8 years ago. the chaotic expanse of necromantic energy bursts directly into faerie and almost kills everyone in it. faerie has no choice but to seal themselves off or die, leaving the golden orchard behind as the last bit of true faerie left in this world

and to the dire state of the present day, prior to opening night at the theatre. the underworld has gotten so big it's started creating only theorised geography, like the sea of lachris. elf souls and orc souls and everyone else who died after the shapers war are lost here somewhere. tachonis are doing whatever the fuck they like with an ever expanding portion of the universe/its people that they see as rightfully theirs

but then thjazi's ritual. blood from gavzidra, made into paint. painted on the walls of an old temple to azgra, reforged into a place of joy and hope for all orc people. hal and shadia and the rest of the ko'therai cast telling a story that reaches across planes, touching the actual souls who lived the story, souls trapped in the dying fields, freed through the repurposing of the same river that brought them there. anchored to this theatre, to the pariah blades in shadia's hands, unaware she holds the legacy of her entire people now. the bridge is open, for thaisha, who's spent her life training to guide lost souls, to show them where to go

the problem: one bridge alone can't keep its form, there's pressure acting on it from all sides, it's shaking and swelling like the underworld has been for 70 years. it needed stability. needed something whose purpose has always been to open a bridge

a triangle can withstand a lot more force than a single line. and with the hope and blessing of vaelus and hannan and every faerie in that theatre, two more bridges were created, anchoring the three planes together and giving the lost souls somewhere else to go. it's still not an open bridge for mortals, and the elf souls who died without a path to faerie are still lost out in the shadow somewhere. but if the stone is still doing its job, the shadow can't interfere with this one. and maybe one day at the end of all this, when hannan and vaelus have found all the elves out there in the dark, they can all return to faerie together

danskjavlarna

Source details and larger version.

Dragon chairs, ghost chairs, chair gods, trick chairs, giant chairs: all sorts of vintage chairs.

randomitemdrop

Item: trick throne that bonks anyone that sits in it with a concerningly pointy weighted devil head

also i'll grant the cr fandom this they are generally better (ie it's less widespread) on this note than some fandoms i've been in

but always wild whenever i see art of the entire c4 cast and the artist has given occtis the lightest skin tone

like i understand he's everyone's favourite dead goth boy so apparently that equals practically paper white in some people's heads but. from the official art occtis has the second darkest human skin tone after kattigan (and they're pretty close) and the third darkest overall (thaisha)

the resident pasty white boy of the campaign could not more clearly be julien

to add references in case anyone hasn't looked at the official art in a bit, i went through and colour picked directly from it (doing my best to be objective as an artist myself and grab the most neutral lighting colour from everyone's skin tone - what i would use as the base colour before adding highlights and shadows) - and the skin tone scale goes approximately like this

(no teor bc he has fur of multiple colours, no bolaire bc all of his skin is borrowed)

you can quibble about the exact tones of the bottom half bc they're all roughly the same colour, but the rest of the spectrum speaks for itself!

(and yeah it's kinda hilarious just how pale julien compared to everyone else 😂)

#like i know brennan keeps describing all the other tachonises as pale but occtis canonically has olive skin (via @minathevampireslayer)

he's barely even done that, is the thing!

like okay he described petra and ryah as pallid, which is i think the closest we got to pale (which, pallid can mean pale for sure, it can also just mean a death/illness-like lack of colour)

he gave no descriptions on skin tone for univere (just that she was gaunt and white haired), doset (no description at all), tertia (we only saw her as a skeleton or a ghost), ethrand (no description), or frons (we only saw him in armor)

primus was described as sallow (which as a skin tone descriptor means unhealthily yellow)

all of which can fit with tachonis as a family having occtis' same medium skin tone with yellow undertones, the sorcerers by nature of being sorcerers just also all look half dead

princeoffife07

more maps, from the giant gothic manor i made :)

all maps by princeoffife07 on Inkarnate. feel free to use for rpgs or inspiration, but please do not claim as your own

J.W. Buel’s Sea and Land (1887) is a gloriously bizarre book. I love and adore it. It purports to be a natural history of all the plants and animals on Earth, from both before and after the Great Flood. What it turns out to be is more of a chronicle of every possible way to be killed by animals in the wilderness. I know that the law of the jungle is to eat and be eaten, but Buel takes this to a comical extreme. He claims he’s compiled the most exhaustive scientific data and first-hand accounts but, I dunno, just open to a random page and read a bit and see if he doesn’t strike you as either gullible or a sensationalist, or both (he is, at least, not so bad as Edward Topsell).

The real draw is the 300 or so engravings. The vast majority of these, like the Monster Manual, depict animals and monsters fighting or devouring people. Elephants, tigers, saw fish, you name it, it’s in here, killing some poor fool. My very favorite is the entirely made up Yah-te-veo, a man-eating tentacle plant that I have definitely turned into a monster for my D&D campaign and yes, it nearly ate someone. When people aren’t available, the pictured animals are happy to eat each other. One gruesome melee has a collection of animals of the African Savannah literally at each others throats. Another favorite depicts some sort of giant tree crab killing a goat and hauling into the boughs for a meal. There’s also an illustration of a caveman fighting a plesiosaur, because of course there is. One violent tableau after another. It’s amazing.

I’ve found very little biographical information on Buel, though I’ve admittedly not tried very hard. He was an Illinois-born journalist and a world traveler (he definitely visited Siberia, among other far-flung locales) though I can't help but wonder if he actually saw any animals while abroad. His accounts and the book's illustrations seem like a fever dream of the sort that might be cooked up by a person who has never left his house.

A word of thanks to Zac Bir. Not content to enjoy the digital version on Archive.org, I bought a tattered copy of Sea and Land which he painstakingly and beautifully rebound. Now at least this copy with be around to stupefy future generations. He's compiled an amazing, detailed post about the process that you should check out! This thing has staples in it?!

inbabylontheywept

In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

haveyouplayedthisttrpg

Have you played You Will Die In This Place ?

By Elizabeth Little

You Will Die In This Place is a nihilistic survival-horror tabletop dungeon crawl RPG about exile, decay, and the inevitable failure of the self. Set in the crumbling Vaulted Kingdom and the endless Abyssal Labyrinth beyond, players take on the role of exiles struggling to survive. The goal is not to save the world or vanquish some great evil, but instead to find some kind of purpose, meaning or peace of mind before death arrives.

The game is framed as the reconstruction of a lost and unfinished indie game, pieced together from fragments of notes, design documents, and personal reflections. It is a story about creativity, communication, identity and coming to terms with loss.

Each class uses radically different game mechanics to interact with the world around them and has a unique character sheet to support this. These include worker placement on an anatomy chart, scoring poker hands and more esoteric systems such as the Corpse Engineer's monster programming.

Have you played ?

Yes I have played it

no but i've read it

no but I've heard of it

Never heard of it

Voting ended onMay 3

Sometimes instead of fixing ill-considered OSR mechanics I like to imagine what kind of setting would operate by them as written. It's a worthy challenge to envision the world where missing breakfast has a non-zero likelihood to make your head pop off.

morkazstuff

briefly misunderstood this as 'if you fail you attack roll against your breakfast it kills you'

While fumbling your "eat breakfast" roll would in fact be hilarious, what I'm talking about is legitimately a frequent unintended interaction in a certain stripe of OSR games. It goes something like this:

All privations (e.g., like starvation) deal HP damage.

If you take damage while at 0 HP, you roll on a table to see what happens.

There is only one such table.

One possible result is "decapitation".

Hence, by the strict letter of the rules as written, it is possible for missing breakfast to make your head pop off.

haveyouplayedthisttrpg

Have you played Downfall ?

By Caroline Hobbs

A table-top role-playing game for 3 people. No GM, no dice, no prep.

In Downfall, you choose a Flaw you want to explore and build a unique and irredeemably broken world around it. See how Greed destroys a city, how Loyalty corrupts a kingdom, or how Curiosity betrays a galactic empire. You’ll craft traditions that bring your society to life, then see how it all comes tumbling down.

The game works in any kind of setting, from mythical fantasy to the real world to high-flying science fiction. It’s made to tell a whole story in a single 2-4 hour session and doesn’t require preparation, dice, or a GM.

You take turns as each character in the game, so everyone is at the center of the fiction. The decisions you make throughout the game lead to a unique and memorable collapse of a civilization.

Even though you fail to save your world, the story you tell of its destruction will remain forever.

Have you played ?

Yes I have played it

No but i've read it

no but I've heard of it

never heard of it

Voting ended onApr 29

elbiotipo

There's a whole book or even multiple sagas to be written around the question of "why do adventurers exist in this world at all". I hate the term "murderhobo" with a passion but there is a lot, a lot to talk about what kind of society hires wandering questing warriors to solve problems and where do those "adventurers" come from and what role do they have in society.

elbiotipo

Lots of people have talked about this but I would like to point out this essay on ACOUP that starts with seemingly a semi-related matter (why gold coins in fantasy don't make sense in historical societies) and ends with a very revealing insight... gold isn't the reward that "fantasy adventurers" should seek. It should be power and influence, noble titles, a comission in the local army, land.

This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and ro

As usual and expected from a blog titled A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, it does take a long (but very interesting and worth reading) read to get to that point, but I'll point out the interesting thing in this context:

Here, "Big Man" is a stand in for the nobles and rulers and landowners of agricultural societies. While more urbanized and industrial societies may have a use for coinage, what do these societies based in interpersonal relationships can give you as a reward for a quest, as a reward for solving a problem? Social power; a title, a relationship, a promise of support. And not only that, but this isn't often a reward but a necessity in the first place. To have a horse, to have armor and weapons and the means to wage war (go adventuring) in the first place, you don't go to the medieval store and buy them with 20gp, you often have people supporting you and even , you are a man-at-arms, part of a noble retinue a noble yourself, maybe part of a holy order, or in more early-modern scenario, part of a mercenary group.

However, this doesn't happen often in fantasy because of these reasons reasons:

The idea of the selfless hero who doesn't choose glory or fame but instead continues questing endlessly to do good or defeat an ultimate evil. Making a hero have a patron feels like selling out (but I will address that)

Even with those characters who aren't selfless and would probably take the power and titles, it seems to tie them down to a place or obligation and this makes adventures boring (but I will address that!)

Dungeons & Dragons

People say that every generic fantasy world is inspired by Tolkien but I will argue that he's the grandfather of modern fantasy, the father is Gary Gyax. The ideas baked in D&D have been present in ALL over popular fantasy for decades now, even more prominently than Tolkien (and of course D&D 'borrowed' a lot from Tolkien). Now what this means in this particular case is the idea of wandering "adventurers" solving problems for "gold" in "dungeons", often with the undertone of a frontier or decaying civilization full of monsters and bandits to be killed and tamed into civilization (some other people have written about this better than me)

Nevertheless, even beyond the setting implications, there are deep gameplay implications that have filtered down popular fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons is a survival/combat game. It's a survival game because you have to rely in your abilities and limited equipment (which you buy with gold) to survive in a dungeon, through combat. Of course you can do a lot more than that, but this is the core of the game, what it was designed for: buy equipment, go into a dungeon, survive, get treasure, use it to buy equipment, go into another dungeon. Here "dungeon" can mean many things... combat, travel, puzzles, but the loop is clear.

There is no "gain a patron and get social capital" loop in the game, though it might be simulated, it isn't fun. So there is a lack of interest on exploring this, or really, anything beyond the "quest". And since again, it's D&D, not Tolkien, that shapes most popular fantasy, we see popular fantasy repeating this deeply baked in idea of fantasy once and again and again and again. Sometimes even making them into actual, literal points inside the world: making literal worlds with Adventurer Guilds and Dungeons and Quests and sometimes even Levels and XP as part of society (they're only lacking the dice... and that's because D&D is also the main influence behind videogames).

Is EVERY SINGLE FANTASY WORLD like this? No, not at all. But I want to talk about where does this idea of "gold" and "adventures" comes from, and it's NOT medieval or historical inspiration, and it's NOT even Tolkien. It's D&D.

elbiotipo

I told you I would address the idea that having a patron or a story based on one's social standing could be boring or at least incompatible with "adventure", and there are many cases that I could point out, but I want to point to a very interesting one: Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid Campeador.

El Cid is both a real person who lived a very interesting life and a folklore figure, and both are very interesting as inspirations for fantasy "adventurers". El Cid was considered (by the social standards of the time) as an ideal knight and a tragic figure. But his whole life is defined by the society he lived in and, as any knight (or noble warrior in general), how he walked the interrelationships of his society; his back and forth of loyalty and betrayal with King Alfonso, his loss and recovery of honor, his service to the Muslims rulers of Zaragoza which indeed gave him his title (these constant intercultural interactions were very common in medieval Iberia, which makes it a very unique and underused setting inspiration), his rulership over Valencia. Over time, El Cid changes and seeks patrons and his changes in his social status (and his dependence on them) are a major part of the story both in real life and fictionalizations.

But this doesn't mean that the life of El Cid is boring or lacking in combat and travels. He gets "adventures" all over the place, he travels and fights over the whole breadth of Iberia, he has countless legends to his name. He wasn't a "murderhobo" that got gold from each adventure and then went to the store to buy a new sword, he took command of armies and he even took power and governed his own realm, but his life wasn't lacking from excitement, he didn't just sit and became a paper-pusher. I need to be very clear I'm not saying El Cid was a hero, I'm saying he led an exciting, interesting life, worthy of most fictional adventurers, but he wasn't just going from place to place asking for gold... well, technically yes, but this involved his status, his honor and his place in society. Which makes for a rich story.

And he's not the only one, Medieval Iberia is full of stories of these characters that navigated the social networks of their time, a place where cultures interacted with each other in multiple complex ways and kingdoms and taifas often employed these wandering "adventurers". Maybe if you want to get inspired to write about adventurers, don't look to D&D for inspiration. Read about Al Andalus sometime.

So what do we think about the Geekify email announcing the death of the Neopets ttrpg

I'm genuinely surprised that Neopia gave sufficient fucks to pull the plug. There are a lot of officially licensed tabletop RPGs that make an absolute shitshow of the properties they're ostensibly based on and make it to print without a peep of protest from the licensor, some of them involving franchises with much bigger bottom lines than this one, and fucking Neopets is the one that does their due diligence? Really? Really?

commodore-jeep-eep-blog

I am legit afraid to ask what happened.

TL/DR; version: an outfit called Geekify had been contracted to produce a licensed tabletop RPG based on Neopets. Some weeks ago, they released a public preview of the forthcoming game which featured:

a strange preoccupation with sword-and-sorcery violence that looked a lot like someone had simply slapped the Neopets license on top of their homebrew Dungeons & Dragons clone rather than building something to suit the subject matter;

a discussion of player safety tools which seemed to have been copied and pasted from a totally unrelated game, and which (among other things) advised GMs to discuss with their group exactly how much explicit sexual violence was acceptable at their table; and

several sections which appeared to have been deleted entirely and replaced with written allegations that the contracted author(s) had not been paid for their work, and the project's alleged editor didn't notice before putting the preview up, I guess?

And to top it all off, it's now sounding like Neopia might not have authorised a public preview in the first place, so not a great showing all around.

#i just noticed i can have a queue tag with xkit

Exploring a country still all mystery. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we venture to Mythic Britain & Ireland, a Vaesen sourcebook by Graeme Davis. A labor of love, the book presents all you need to run a game of Vaesen in the British Isles, including scenarios, monsters and mystery seeds. But in addition to being an RPG book, it also works as an introduction to the landscape of folklore that's so unique to Britain and Ireland. Fantastic stuff, and gorgeous illustrations to boot.

#i just noticed i can have a queue tag with xkit

When I was reading Colin Wilson’s The Occult (1971) way back when, I found that he referred so much to Richard Cavendish’s The Black Arts (1967) that I put The Occult aside halfway through, read all of Cavendish’s book, then returned to Wilson more prepared for the challenges ahead.

This is a history, but also an explanation of practice. Cavendish covers numerology, Tarot, Cabala, alchemy, astrology, necromancy, Satanism, witchcraft and more, always with an eye toward conveying comprehension. I would call Cavendish an energetic writer and he has a knack for putting plainly what the occultist would obfuscate. Even non-believers have a tendency to make the topic overly complicated or dreadfully boring, hewing to dry academic standards in order, presumably, to make up for the fact that they they’re writing about unseemly or unserious topics like ghosts and demons and spells. Not so Cavendish. He loves this stuff and has a wicked, infectious enthusiasm. Reading The Black Arts will give a person a solid grounding in esoterica up to the point it was written (admittedly, nearly 60 years ago, so keep that in mind). Cavendish ably prepares you for the bores and the bafflers who await you should you decided to continue your exploration.

If there is one clear takeaway from The Black Arts, it’s that magick isn’t just making stuff up. There’s a system of magickal thinking that, while it seems bizarre in the sunlit world, is internally consistent and often seems more correct than conclusions we draw from rational thinking. Similar to the way The Golden Bough or The Witch-Cult in Eastern Europe are exciting and intriguing and make a certain sense, but are also pretty much incorrect in their larger theses. But it also doesn’t matter if they are correct if they still give us the inspiration we’re seeking.

Love the dust jacket of the first edition. I originally read the 2000ish edition, which has a sort of swirl of ink-blot like monsters and is actually quite good and trippy despite being black and white. When I saw the 1967 cover, though, I had to snag it, the color scheme, that green and blue, layered over the old engravings with obscure symbols seems so perfectly of the period. And the distorted title, the letters twisted by invisible currents. It’s a beaut.

fanonical

i am looking at you, new ttrpg players. i am looking you in the eyes. you do not need to be like the professional players. it's okay if you can't do voices or stutter or need to pause to think about what you're going to say or how your character would act. we are doing this for fun. gaming should never stop being fun

tadfools

Grabbing you by the shoulders so hard that my knuckles crack. Matthew Mercer has been a GM for the world of Critical Role since 2012 but he had been playing and running games for 20 years before beforehand. And when the core team started, it was graph paper and pencil and the theater of the mind guiding their battles not the fancy map pieces the team had now. And Brennan Lee Mulligan came about the same way, his mother is a well published author and playwright who encouraged his creativity, the man used to be a larp summer camp counselor

You don’t start off day one being a smaller sideburns version of Matt, you’re not supposed to be a smaller sideburns version of Matt

CR as of now and anything on D20 is recorded ahead of time, a lot of laughing parts and breaks of immersion are cut for time the GM rifling through paper for fives minutes is cut for time, the players looking for the right spell description is often cut for time. Brennan hosing down his weight in almonds is happening in the background while the cameras focus on the players

Both of these GMS have lamented on how sad they are that countless people are afraid to start their own campaigns because they’re not like them, you’re not supposed to be!

The first step to being sort of good at something is sucking at it, and more times than not the definition of good in this regard isn’t matching the place style of another gm/player