Nurture is the first area the character received training or which they put effort into improving. The adult (cuz it’s strength 5) black dragon here picks up the themes of the Spirit card ~ cunning, sneakiness, and lies. It appears that it was one of those random things which exert so much force on our lives that led this character to their class. They didn’t set out to become a vigilante; chance pushed them down this path. Nurture gives its token to Dexterity.
I think I’ll name the character Boanerges, or something like that; they remind me of those two somehow. They have all the force of a lightning bolt, funneled into a subtle fight for minds and souls in order to save their own infected one.
The Red Dragon 10 in Dexterity steals Strength’s two tokens, furthering the theme of constrained force, I suppose. I think Boanerges was raised to be a soldier, a vain and venereal bravo filled with a dark panache, but a chance encounter in a military raid brought them to the side of the angels. Literally. But one soldier against an army, let alone the nation that sent them, is a losing proposition. So Boanerges turned to shadier methods to spread the word.
Strength, in its turn, steals two tokens from Intelligence as it is also an adult Red Dragon. Panache was glorified and fostered in the army’s ranks, but questions weren’t. Venal tastes were catered to, pointless pleasures and decadent diversons employed to keep the bravos from rebelling. A third adult Red Dragon lurks in Intelligence’s land, stealing two tokens from Wisdom. Armies like this one present a paradox: it does everything it can to restrict the exercise of intelligence, which means that a piercing mind is the only thing that allows promotion.
An old bronze dragon in Wisdom gives its token to Dexterity. Constraining the thunderous force of Boanerges’s personality into clandestine activities breeds skill, but discernment has a tendency to disappear into discomfort. Planning is replaced by quick wits. As Boanerges’s angelic master pushed them away from their chaotic life into one of discipline and honor, their heuristic, social, and behavioral skills prove less and less useful, more and more foolish, even when drawn upon in the appropriate situations. But it also pushes them to become damn good at what they do.
The old Gold Dragon in Charisma passes two of its four tokens to Constitution. Recently, Boanerges had to take a severe beating in order to cover for a fellow bravo they had managed to convert to the way of good after months of work. This act of self-sacrificing nobility left them humbled but even more resilient than before. Significantly more resilient, as the Dracolich in Constitution (the last card in the reading) steals a token from all the evil dragons in the spread: Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence.
Constitution ends up with a freakin’ 14 tokens! That’s one more than the 13 needed for a 17 Constitution. According to the article, I take that token and apply it to the next highest score. But Dexterity would be in the situation, as it has exactly enough for a high Dex. I should skip the tie between Intelligence and Charisma and apply the token to Strength. However, it makes more sense for this character to give it to Charisma, I think, so I’ma do that. Boanerges’s ability scores come out to
Strength 11 [1 point]
Dexterity 15 [7 points]
Constitution 17 [13 points]
Intelligence 12 [2 points]
Wisdom 9 [-1 point]
Charisma 13 [3 points]
OK, I seem to have chosen a class and even an initial feat for Boanerges, so lemme backtack a bit and consider a class. The region of my campaign world in which celestials are the biggest deal religiously is roughly equivalent (in geographical and geohistorical relation to other regions, at least) to Eastern Africa. Ethiopia and the like. While I always try to do all the research and include actual elements from a variety of real-world and literary sources, I am by no means an Africa scholar, and this region is in no ways intended to actually represent East Africa. As a nod to the ancient, questionable European legends that inspired me to make this region the angelic one, I’ve named it Prester.
My world-creation has been focused on Aoqina (roughly, Europe) and Scarhas (roughly, the Middle East) so far, so I’m not yet certain what the racial makeup of the area is like. Elfs exist all across the surface of the world, and dwarfs can easily pop up anywhere. Halflings are an Aoqinan race, but they’ve been around a helluva long time, so they’ve spread. Gnomes came into existence on the border between Aoqina and Scarhas, as dwarfin sailors bred with merbunnies (descendants of outcast anthropomorphic rabbits from the moon) in the Hemaya Sea, but that was also a long time ago. Now, gnomes range far and wide. Gnomes gave rise to gnolls in Aoqina a decent time ago by breeding with trolls OD&D style, so they’ve had time to spread, but they’re prolly pretty exotic by the time you hit the equivalent of, say, western China or of the Congo Basin (though more headed south from Aoqina than any other direction). Humans are the leavings of a uselessly successful gnollish magickal experiment. They sought to remove all that was obedient from them to ensure their everlasting freedom, but that left only an unintelligent animal: the hyena. The intelligent humans were the obedient bits they discarded, and are pretty young as a race, so are unlikely to be found in significant numbers outside of the three regions bordering the Voda Sea (Aoqina, Scarhas, and my equivalent of the Maghreb/North Africa).
So, Prester’s population of standard races, to summarize:
Dwarfs: Possible, but somewhat unlikely
Elfs: As common as elfs ever get
Gnomes: Uncommon
Halflings: Common, but a minority
Humans: Rare
Orcs: Absent
I also note that a full quarter of the Three-Dragon Ante spread is red dragons ~ this suggests maybe a direction to start looking beyond the standard seven races. Red dragons live in warm mountains, I wonder what comes up on www.pfsrd.com with that ecology . . . . Naw, nothing useful comes from that search. I consider ifrit (I don’t think I want an elemental theme to races in Presterjho), kobold (possible, draconic, but a little small for the sheer force of personality I’m imagining), tiefling (currently the front-runner, but a little on-the-nose), kuru (tied with tiefling, currently), I keep coming back to the goblinoids but their homes are on an entirely different continent. The charau-ka are interesting, with tactics based on intimidation and exuberance which could blend in the swashbuckly elements I’m imagining.
Friday, June 29, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Well, let's start where everyone starts (Traveller Tuesday #1)
By creating a world, with an eye toward it being part of a whole subsector!
Well, first we start with a name. I know, I know ~ it seems like I'm putting the warp nacelles ahead of the cargo bay, but I think figuring out a name first off gives you something you might work off, to establish themes, original colonizing culture, et cetera. And if you don't? Logically speaking, most stars won't be named by colonists anyway.
I like to keep as much randomness as possible, so I went to Wikipedia, hit “Random Article”, and got sent to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Sheumack. At the moment, we know nothing about the structure of the system, so I'll apply the name to the star itself ~ we're writing about the Bishop Sheumack system. I kinda like including the title in the sun's name; it gives a different feel than other settings.
Thinking about it, I can totally name the mainworld of the Bishop Sheumack system. Rolling the dWikipedia, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ishee. Ishee will be the name of the mainworld, and we'll place it in a random hex in the subsector. Oooh, but first, let's name that subsector, sector, and quadrant: Eau Pleine subsector (Alpha-3D or Greve-D) in Greve sector (Alpha-3) in Alpha Quadrant. Lets roll for the hex: 0704.
Anyway, Ishee needs some definition. I'm more of a social scifi/anthropological scifi kind of qween, so I like to start with the second half of the bUWP (Basic Universal World Profile). So, rolling 2d6-2, I find that Ishee has more people than the average planet: tens of millions of people live there (Pop digit 7: bUWP α-3D-0704-? (α Greve-Eau Pleine-Bishop Scheumack-Ishee)/????7??-?/?/??/Em).
But how many tens of millions? Using random.org to generate a random 8-digit number, I discover that 16,021,313 live on Ishee. That's about the size of Lagos, Nigeria (city proper) or the Moscow metropolitan area or the entire country of Cambodia!
Next, I roll 3d6 and get a 9, which is greater than the world's Pop digit of 7, so there are no cities of tens of millions on this planet. How about millions? Are there cities of that size? A 10 on 2d6 tells me that no, there are not (again, it's larger than 7). I don't have to roll for cities with hundreds of thousands of people ~ 1d6 will always roll less than 7! Another 1d6 roll gives me a 1, which will result in a very decentralized planet, as that means that there are only (16,021,313/107)*(1+9) cities of this size (the largest). That comes out to 16 of them. Assuming they have an average population of 500,000 for ease, that takes up 8,000,000 of our 16,021,313, leaving us with 8,021,313 people unaccounted for.
Rolling 1d6 again tells us that there are (8,021,313/107)*(4+9)*10 cities with tens of thousands of people. That works out to 104 of them. Of these 3d6-3% ( I rolled a 15, so 12%) will have populations of 90,000 or more. The math says that's 12.513 cities, so I will just barely round up ~ 13 cities of such size exist on Ishee. Overall, however, we again assume these cities average out to about 50,000 people each, accounting for another 5,200,000 of our people. We still need to account for the remaining 2,821,313.
Well, let's run through that formula again, rolling a 2, which gives us (2,821,313/107)*(2+9)*100. That's 310 cities averaging 5000 people each. Rolling 3d6 tlls us that (12-3)% of them have 9000 or more people ~ that's 28 such cities. That's another 1,550,000 people placed in cities, leaving 1,271,313. Let's do another quick run through for the small towns of hundreds of people, rolling a 3 on 1d6. (1,271,313/107)*(3+9)*1000 equals 1526 cities, of which (15-3)%, or 183, have populations of 900 or more. Averaging all those cities out to 500 people each, we realize that they hold a total of 763,000 people. Only 508,313 people remain homeless. Or, rather, they tend to live alone in isolated settlements of no more than maybe a few dozen people (2-4 families), or roam across the surface as traveling folk with no permanent residence.
For future consideration, we designate the ten largest of the cities as primary cities, the remaining 6 cities with hundreds of thousands of people as secondary cities, and all the rest as tertiary.
Now, let's define the planet's major cultural elements. Rolling 1d3, we discover that there are two big Cultural Differences. Rolling 2d66, we get 12 and 61. Let's see . . . looking at the chart . . . the planet is (or hosts) a Tourist Attraction of some sort which attracts Travellers from at least the subsector if not further afield and is Progressive, with an expanding and vibrant culture full of optimism and hope. I'm kind of taken with the idea, at first blush, that this tourist attraction isn't a thing or a place, but a seasonal or annual festival that people come to the planet to see ~ maybe like a futuristic Burning man or a Cherry Blossom Festival or election hoopla . . . .
In addition, there is but a single local custom of note (I rolled a 1 on 1d6). Another 1d6 roll gives me a 5, which tells me that is single local custom of note is something from the “Miscellaneous Customs 1” table . . . That's a 1d66 roll, which gives me a 56, so high tech is allowed for . . . some group of people. Let's head on over to that table, which is another 1d66. But first! I roll a 1d6 and get a 2, s I don't have to roll on the bigger table. A roll of 1-3 tells me that the entire culture practices this custom. Hmmmm, “High tech allowed for everyone”. That sounds to me like a culture that is fiercely protective of access to high technology and deeply distrustful of any attempt to limit it. Think of, say, the NRA's take on the 2nd Amendment, or even more extreme. Maybe mixed in with what are currently more leftist ideals (or non-political and seen as a charity) of removing societal and economic barriers to access.
Maybe that festival I mentioned above, the tourist attraction, is a high tech playground/conference/chance to show off? Depending on how capitalist (ugh!) this world or this subsector turn out, it can be something like a Maker Fair mixed with Burning Man kind of thing or a massive corporate marketing scheme (like, say, E3 or Comic-Con) . . .
Well, first we start with a name. I know, I know ~ it seems like I'm putting the warp nacelles ahead of the cargo bay, but I think figuring out a name first off gives you something you might work off, to establish themes, original colonizing culture, et cetera. And if you don't? Logically speaking, most stars won't be named by colonists anyway.
I like to keep as much randomness as possible, so I went to Wikipedia, hit “Random Article”, and got sent to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Sheumack. At the moment, we know nothing about the structure of the system, so I'll apply the name to the star itself ~ we're writing about the Bishop Sheumack system. I kinda like including the title in the sun's name; it gives a different feel than other settings.
Thinking about it, I can totally name the mainworld of the Bishop Sheumack system. Rolling the dWikipedia, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ishee. Ishee will be the name of the mainworld, and we'll place it in a random hex in the subsector. Oooh, but first, let's name that subsector, sector, and quadrant: Eau Pleine subsector (Alpha-3D or Greve-D) in Greve sector (Alpha-3) in Alpha Quadrant. Lets roll for the hex: 0704.
Anyway, Ishee needs some definition. I'm more of a social scifi/anthropological scifi kind of qween, so I like to start with the second half of the bUWP (Basic Universal World Profile). So, rolling 2d6-2, I find that Ishee has more people than the average planet: tens of millions of people live there (Pop digit 7: bUWP α-3D-0704-? (α Greve-Eau Pleine-Bishop Scheumack-Ishee)/????7??-?/?/??/Em).
But how many tens of millions? Using random.org to generate a random 8-digit number, I discover that 16,021,313 live on Ishee. That's about the size of Lagos, Nigeria (city proper) or the Moscow metropolitan area or the entire country of Cambodia!
Next, I roll 3d6 and get a 9, which is greater than the world's Pop digit of 7, so there are no cities of tens of millions on this planet. How about millions? Are there cities of that size? A 10 on 2d6 tells me that no, there are not (again, it's larger than 7). I don't have to roll for cities with hundreds of thousands of people ~ 1d6 will always roll less than 7! Another 1d6 roll gives me a 1, which will result in a very decentralized planet, as that means that there are only (16,021,313/107)*(1+9) cities of this size (the largest). That comes out to 16 of them. Assuming they have an average population of 500,000 for ease, that takes up 8,000,000 of our 16,021,313, leaving us with 8,021,313 people unaccounted for.
Rolling 1d6 again tells us that there are (8,021,313/107)*(4+9)*10 cities with tens of thousands of people. That works out to 104 of them. Of these 3d6-3% ( I rolled a 15, so 12%) will have populations of 90,000 or more. The math says that's 12.513 cities, so I will just barely round up ~ 13 cities of such size exist on Ishee. Overall, however, we again assume these cities average out to about 50,000 people each, accounting for another 5,200,000 of our people. We still need to account for the remaining 2,821,313.
Well, let's run through that formula again, rolling a 2, which gives us (2,821,313/107)*(2+9)*100. That's 310 cities averaging 5000 people each. Rolling 3d6 tlls us that (12-3)% of them have 9000 or more people ~ that's 28 such cities. That's another 1,550,000 people placed in cities, leaving 1,271,313. Let's do another quick run through for the small towns of hundreds of people, rolling a 3 on 1d6. (1,271,313/107)*(3+9)*1000 equals 1526 cities, of which (15-3)%, or 183, have populations of 900 or more. Averaging all those cities out to 500 people each, we realize that they hold a total of 763,000 people. Only 508,313 people remain homeless. Or, rather, they tend to live alone in isolated settlements of no more than maybe a few dozen people (2-4 families), or roam across the surface as traveling folk with no permanent residence.
For future consideration, we designate the ten largest of the cities as primary cities, the remaining 6 cities with hundreds of thousands of people as secondary cities, and all the rest as tertiary.
Now, let's define the planet's major cultural elements. Rolling 1d3, we discover that there are two big Cultural Differences. Rolling 2d66, we get 12 and 61. Let's see . . . looking at the chart . . . the planet is (or hosts) a Tourist Attraction of some sort which attracts Travellers from at least the subsector if not further afield and is Progressive, with an expanding and vibrant culture full of optimism and hope. I'm kind of taken with the idea, at first blush, that this tourist attraction isn't a thing or a place, but a seasonal or annual festival that people come to the planet to see ~ maybe like a futuristic Burning man or a Cherry Blossom Festival or election hoopla . . . .
In addition, there is but a single local custom of note (I rolled a 1 on 1d6). Another 1d6 roll gives me a 5, which tells me that is single local custom of note is something from the “Miscellaneous Customs 1” table . . . That's a 1d66 roll, which gives me a 56, so high tech is allowed for . . . some group of people. Let's head on over to that table, which is another 1d66. But first! I roll a 1d6 and get a 2, s I don't have to roll on the bigger table. A roll of 1-3 tells me that the entire culture practices this custom. Hmmmm, “High tech allowed for everyone”. That sounds to me like a culture that is fiercely protective of access to high technology and deeply distrustful of any attempt to limit it. Think of, say, the NRA's take on the 2nd Amendment, or even more extreme. Maybe mixed in with what are currently more leftist ideals (or non-political and seen as a charity) of removing societal and economic barriers to access.
Maybe that festival I mentioned above, the tourist attraction, is a high tech playground/conference/chance to show off? Depending on how capitalist (ugh!) this world or this subsector turn out, it can be something like a Maker Fair mixed with Burning Man kind of thing or a massive corporate marketing scheme (like, say, E3 or Comic-Con) . . .
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Introducing Middens & Morals {Design Domingo #1}
“I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.”
--William Blake, Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, chapter 1, plate 10, lines 20-21, The Words of Los
Welcome to Design Domingo!
Yeah, I know, but I couldn't think of a good word to describe creating my own game system that alliterated without using the Spanish word for Sunday. And I, like Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon skalds he flattered with imitation, enjoy alliteration. *shrug* It's a thing.
Welcome to my long-running Fantasy Heartbreaker project, currently named Middens and Morals. I seem to mean something slightly different than Ron Edwards and many people by the term “Fantasy Heartbreaker”. I tend to mean by it a homebrew RPG system that someone tinkers with on and off for years or decades, trying to get it just right. Fantasy Heartbreakers are generally attempts to do “D&D but better” or (more rarely) “Exalted but better”; there are also a number of Sci-Fi Heartbreakers (“Traveller but better”), Cyberpunk Heartbreakers (“Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun but better”), Gothic Heartbreakers (“World of Darkness but better”), and arguably every superhero game is some level of Supers Heartbreaker (sometimes they’re trying to improve on a better game, but just as often they’re starting from scratch). They don't break hearts cuz of an old nickname of the Christian God or a much-newer Pat Benatar song (*sigh* Oh, Pat ~ I will always love you); they break hearts because they never quite capture what their creators are trying to capture with the elegance of design that is required of RPG mechanic design. But, of course, that's not really the point, is it? We ask ourselves questions that have no elegant answers in order to whet the blade of our thoughts, to shape the cup of our mind, so that when we do ask questions that have elegant answers we can speedily reach those heights that are higher than they could be if such was our first attempt at elegance. They are sandboxes, where we can play and put things together and not have to worry whether the sand coheres into adobe that will last the centuries.
It's also, well, like that Japanese company that figured out that everyone's shit has tiny, tiny, miniscule amounts of gold in it (we already know what Freud would say, by the way) and that building a factory to separate out this gold from the stinky remains of Tokyo living which hid it from prying eyes would not only be economically feasible, but quite profitable. This series of posts is the shit that has come about from all the RPGs I've consumed over the last two and a half decades or so of my life (since I was about 10 or 11) ~ I can only hope the gold is relatively easy to see among it. And that the smell is the rich, earthy, fertile smell of a truly satisfying shit, and not the putrescence that flows from the SAD (Standard American Diet ~ no, literally, this is an acronym used by actual scientists and policymakers).
“Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.”
--William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
There’s a tension inherent in what we call the European Dark Ages or the (different) period we call Middle that fascinates me. {I’m talking here about the general mishmash of memes in all of our heads, not the actual thousand years or so between the Fall of Rome and the onset of Early Modernity.} It's a world beyond alien to us modern folk. Basically none of the things we consider vital for mental health were present and available to the large mass of people. Work was often constant and backbreaking and, although alienation of labor hadn't yet set in, taxes were high enough in crops, money, and men that we might consider a similar fruitlessness of one's labors to have pertained. Nutrition was poor, flavors bland, and diet unvaried. Feudalism is a system of rests on everyone in the social hierarchy lacking control of their destiny, and, in any view of the time period with even the slightest pinch of grimdark added, being subject to constant tests of loyalty and abusive manipulations by what we would now call warlords or gang leaders. Disease was a constant companion, even without the Armageddon of plague. You know how toothaches carry with them just the most intensely depressing emotional load in addition to their owie factor? Not only would toothaches (and other such pains) be more common thanks to the undeveloped state of medicine, painkillers would have been unavailable or much weaker than we have today. Transportation being much slower and recreational time being more limited (vacation? What’s that?), seeing someone who lived even two miles away could happen but a few times a week, and long stretches of time were spent alone or in small groupings. And therapy? What’s that?
And yet, despite all of this ~ or maybe because of it ~ the cultures of the time were fascinated with rising up out of the muck, ascending into a Heavenly bliss. Stories filled the pages and the ears with the quests of shining paragons of virtue and their striving to achieve and (harder still) maintain that exalted state. Priests preached an honor that was an exacting discipline, and every effort was taken to maintain the image of the ruling classes fulfilling them. Popular entertainment ~ books, poems, street entertainment, and theatrical plays ~ centered on questions of virtue in deed and in attitude, inventing the genres of the “morality play” and the “passion play”. Characters in these plays often lacked identity beyond their role and/or moral status, with names like “Everyman”, “Pilgrim”, “Temptation”, and “Prudence”. Religion was much more suffused into everyday life than it is now, a constant gaze above the clouds and past the Pearly Gates. Careful attention was paid to one’s behaviors, thoughts, and ways of being to refine them in an alchemy whose methods ranged from the explicit and arcane (that is to say, alchemy itself) to the mundane and banal, but always to the goal of forging your soul into gold worthy of keeping company with angels. Chivalry grew, ensconcing further the reign of the feudal warlords but attempting to bend it towards a Godly purpose to match its divine right of kings; Romance developed, in part, as what we might call Zeroth Wave feminism, lending a measure of agency to women in the grinding processes of what would eventually become heterosexuality. Even (many of the) countercultures of the time approached things from this yearning for an angelic life ~ utopian movements even back then were explicitly attempting to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Diggers, for example, (ancestors of us anarchists, socialists, and communists) explicitly based their belief in economic equality in a passage from the Bible. The same effect carries over to the self-consciously antinomian movements of the day ~ those Gnostic sects in this category were striving to achieve the glory of the Pleroma by breaking the rules of this earthly prison; even Sin could be found to be Virtue! This is the time the Grail chose to be findable.
“I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”
--Dylan Thomas
I am fascinated by this contradiction. All that is best in life and all that is worst in life all mixed up and blended together in Dung Ages stage strewn with the midden trash of what passed for civilization at the time. This is humanity in its most distilled essence, the truest nature of what it is to be us. So, I thought, why don't I try to recreate D&D in its image, mixing in all the lovely off-the-wall fantastic elements I can?
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.”
--William Blake, Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, chapter 1, plate 10, lines 20-21, The Words of Los
Welcome to Design Domingo!
Yeah, I know, but I couldn't think of a good word to describe creating my own game system that alliterated without using the Spanish word for Sunday. And I, like Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon skalds he flattered with imitation, enjoy alliteration. *shrug* It's a thing.
Welcome to my long-running Fantasy Heartbreaker project, currently named Middens and Morals. I seem to mean something slightly different than Ron Edwards and many people by the term “Fantasy Heartbreaker”. I tend to mean by it a homebrew RPG system that someone tinkers with on and off for years or decades, trying to get it just right. Fantasy Heartbreakers are generally attempts to do “D&D but better” or (more rarely) “Exalted but better”; there are also a number of Sci-Fi Heartbreakers (“Traveller but better”), Cyberpunk Heartbreakers (“Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun but better”), Gothic Heartbreakers (“World of Darkness but better”), and arguably every superhero game is some level of Supers Heartbreaker (sometimes they’re trying to improve on a better game, but just as often they’re starting from scratch). They don't break hearts cuz of an old nickname of the Christian God or a much-newer Pat Benatar song (*sigh* Oh, Pat ~ I will always love you); they break hearts because they never quite capture what their creators are trying to capture with the elegance of design that is required of RPG mechanic design. But, of course, that's not really the point, is it? We ask ourselves questions that have no elegant answers in order to whet the blade of our thoughts, to shape the cup of our mind, so that when we do ask questions that have elegant answers we can speedily reach those heights that are higher than they could be if such was our first attempt at elegance. They are sandboxes, where we can play and put things together and not have to worry whether the sand coheres into adobe that will last the centuries.
It's also, well, like that Japanese company that figured out that everyone's shit has tiny, tiny, miniscule amounts of gold in it (we already know what Freud would say, by the way) and that building a factory to separate out this gold from the stinky remains of Tokyo living which hid it from prying eyes would not only be economically feasible, but quite profitable. This series of posts is the shit that has come about from all the RPGs I've consumed over the last two and a half decades or so of my life (since I was about 10 or 11) ~ I can only hope the gold is relatively easy to see among it. And that the smell is the rich, earthy, fertile smell of a truly satisfying shit, and not the putrescence that flows from the SAD (Standard American Diet ~ no, literally, this is an acronym used by actual scientists and policymakers).
“Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.”
--William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
There’s a tension inherent in what we call the European Dark Ages or the (different) period we call Middle that fascinates me. {I’m talking here about the general mishmash of memes in all of our heads, not the actual thousand years or so between the Fall of Rome and the onset of Early Modernity.} It's a world beyond alien to us modern folk. Basically none of the things we consider vital for mental health were present and available to the large mass of people. Work was often constant and backbreaking and, although alienation of labor hadn't yet set in, taxes were high enough in crops, money, and men that we might consider a similar fruitlessness of one's labors to have pertained. Nutrition was poor, flavors bland, and diet unvaried. Feudalism is a system of rests on everyone in the social hierarchy lacking control of their destiny, and, in any view of the time period with even the slightest pinch of grimdark added, being subject to constant tests of loyalty and abusive manipulations by what we would now call warlords or gang leaders. Disease was a constant companion, even without the Armageddon of plague. You know how toothaches carry with them just the most intensely depressing emotional load in addition to their owie factor? Not only would toothaches (and other such pains) be more common thanks to the undeveloped state of medicine, painkillers would have been unavailable or much weaker than we have today. Transportation being much slower and recreational time being more limited (vacation? What’s that?), seeing someone who lived even two miles away could happen but a few times a week, and long stretches of time were spent alone or in small groupings. And therapy? What’s that?
And yet, despite all of this ~ or maybe because of it ~ the cultures of the time were fascinated with rising up out of the muck, ascending into a Heavenly bliss. Stories filled the pages and the ears with the quests of shining paragons of virtue and their striving to achieve and (harder still) maintain that exalted state. Priests preached an honor that was an exacting discipline, and every effort was taken to maintain the image of the ruling classes fulfilling them. Popular entertainment ~ books, poems, street entertainment, and theatrical plays ~ centered on questions of virtue in deed and in attitude, inventing the genres of the “morality play” and the “passion play”. Characters in these plays often lacked identity beyond their role and/or moral status, with names like “Everyman”, “Pilgrim”, “Temptation”, and “Prudence”. Religion was much more suffused into everyday life than it is now, a constant gaze above the clouds and past the Pearly Gates. Careful attention was paid to one’s behaviors, thoughts, and ways of being to refine them in an alchemy whose methods ranged from the explicit and arcane (that is to say, alchemy itself) to the mundane and banal, but always to the goal of forging your soul into gold worthy of keeping company with angels. Chivalry grew, ensconcing further the reign of the feudal warlords but attempting to bend it towards a Godly purpose to match its divine right of kings; Romance developed, in part, as what we might call Zeroth Wave feminism, lending a measure of agency to women in the grinding processes of what would eventually become heterosexuality. Even (many of the) countercultures of the time approached things from this yearning for an angelic life ~ utopian movements even back then were explicitly attempting to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Diggers, for example, (ancestors of us anarchists, socialists, and communists) explicitly based their belief in economic equality in a passage from the Bible. The same effect carries over to the self-consciously antinomian movements of the day ~ those Gnostic sects in this category were striving to achieve the glory of the Pleroma by breaking the rules of this earthly prison; even Sin could be found to be Virtue! This is the time the Grail chose to be findable.
“I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”
--Dylan Thomas
I am fascinated by this contradiction. All that is best in life and all that is worst in life all mixed up and blended together in Dung Ages stage strewn with the midden trash of what passed for civilization at the time. This is humanity in its most distilled essence, the truest nature of what it is to be us. So, I thought, why don't I try to recreate D&D in its image, mixing in all the lovely off-the-wall fantastic elements I can?
Friday, June 22, 2018
Dragon Magazine's Cartomantic Character Creation (Fantasy Friday #1)
Way long ago in an earlier age, an eighth of a century ago, in the inexplicably ancient time of 2005, Wizards of the Coast released a card game that could function as a game prop, much like White Wolf’s series of vampiric, werewolf (including the bad ones), hunter, demon, and mage scriptures (published long before Zak's name was associated with the company ~ like at least two decades before), or Pathfinder’s Harrow Deck. The game was called Three-Dragon Ante; I own it but I’ve never played it.
It’s a betting game designed by Rob Heinsoo in which you compile flights of cards of various strengths, many of which have various triggered abilities whose activation is dependent on its strength compared to those played previously. After each “gambit” (kinda like a trick, I guess), the stakes go to the player with the most strength and a new gambit begins. Collecting matching sets of same-color or same-strength dragons triggers extra gold-earning effects. The idea is that this is a game that exists within Greyhawk (the default setting for D&D 3.x) so you can play while your characters play.
I’m most interested in it not for this, however. No, far more interesting is that the August ‘06 issue of Dragon included a Tarot-like character generation method using the deck. The only thing better than a cartomantic spread for 2nd-generation RPG character creation is a good lifepath system. I’m a sucker for those, as Traveller Tuesdays will no doubt eventually show. I thought I’d create an adventuring party by this method (using Pathfinder rules, however, cuz duh) and see how it does at providing me with story seeds and interesting character details. Join me in this adventure?
First thing I do, obvi, is shuffle the deck. Fun fact: I always shuffle decks 7 times because I picked up somewhere that a standard 52-card playing deck achieves pure, unpredictable randomness at seven riffle shuffles, combinatorily speaking. So I do that. The spread involves three cards (Body, Spirit, and Mind) surrounded by 4 others, laid horizontally, in the cardinal directions (Nature, Nurture, Dexterity, and Wisdom) and four more bursting diagonal at the corners (Strength, Constitution, Intelligence, and Charisma). The orientation of the cards plays a role in the reading, so you should know that Strength is in the upper left, followed in clockwise order by Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, Constitution, and Dexterity. Thus, there’s a physical side (the left) and a mental (the right).
I draw the following cards for my first character:
Nature: Blue Dragon 4
Spirit: Black Dragon 1
Body: Green Dragon 6
Mind: Silver Dragon 8
{Oooh! An evil body, with evil instincts and urges, but a good mind stronger than it. It’s Driz’zt, sure, but the idea that I’m not even done drawing and already seeing interpretations suggests that this will be a useful creation method!}
Nurture: Black Dragon 5
Strength: Red Dragon 12
Dexterity: Red Dragon 10
Constitution: Dracolich 10
Intelligence: Red Dragon 8
Wisdom: Bronze Dragon 11
Charisma: Gold Dragon 11
Hmmm, there’s just so much evil in this spread ~ maybe the good mind, despite its being stronger than the evil body, is losing the battle, just outnumbered by instincts and culture. I have to be careful, though, cuz while I like the idea of deconstructing Driz’zt, these themes edge a little closer than I’d like to some truly disgusting ideas.
Let’s see, we then put 9 tokens on Nature, 3 on Spirit, 1 on Nurture, and 2 on each ability card. These will eventually become points in standard point buy that will determine the character’s actual ability scores.
The character’s nature, represented by a blue dragon, is resilient, vain, and forceful. I give six tokens to Body and three to Mind off the Nurture card as a result. Spirit, perhaps oddly-named, represents chance. We all have things that are central to who we are that just kind of bumbled their way into our path, whether it’s the career we discovered after a friend forwarded us a funny job posting or our love of Fleetwood Mac because the diner we ate lunch at everyday while homeless played a lot of it over the stereo. In this character’s case, these things involve the stealth, cunning, and deceit of the Black Dragon. Dexterity, Constitution, and Intelligence each receive a token as a result.
More doubling themes! I’m seeing a character inclined toward vanity and forcefulness, but pushed by circumstance into acting secretly, maybe even from the shadows. Perhaps I’ll make them a vigilante . . . . I think it might be fun to play up the discomfort of the character, the strain of trying to stifle their usual habits and bearing in order to be most effective. These are much safer themes than the ones I mentioned earlier, thankfully, though they could be combined by creating a sneaky character from a member of a typically brutish race like ogres. Side note: Golarion’s ogres might exist as part of a long line of classist depictions of rural folk (as ogres usually are), but damn if their sheer, utter, going-for-it monstrosity is much more fun than standard D&D uses of the ogre!
The Green Dragon in the Body position tells us that the character can handle most anything, accepting what would be maiming blows with nothing but a snarling belligerence. I kind of envision this more as the really annoying kind of person who is never down for very long, no matter what’s thrown at them, but always brings things to account. Many have tried to take them down, only to fall to the character’s retaliations. All six of these tokens go to Constitution.
We finally get a glint of something pleasant and hopeful in this character ~ who seems very much like a Mean Girl, to be honest, vain, cunning, tricksy, and vengeful ~ as their Mind is filled with the judgment and justice of the Silver Dragon. I kind of want to make them a paladin, but it seems like that would fail to capture the duality of the character, the tidal wave forced into the trickle that rots your walls. Maybe there’s an archetype of vigilante that would be appropriate . . . not really (at least not one listed on www.pfsrd.com), though I did briefly consider a zealot. It didn’t quite fit what I wanted, however. I think I could model what I want with the Celestial Obedience feat, perhaps, as I’m getting an image of a character in an evil society who has turned to devious methods to promote a good religion. Sort of a Frank Miller villain by day, sneaky Superman by night kind of situation. More on that later. For now, that Silver Dragon gives two tokens to Charisma and one to Wisdom.
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