Killing Gently

Though my rate of posting has slowed significantly, the Dungeon Purgatory campaign is still going, and the party has come once again to one of my areas. I am playing my cards close to my chest at the moment, but I will share reflections on this level later.

Until then, I've been immersing myself in the Dune universe lately. Even going so far as to listen to the prequels co-authored by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson. They are not nearly as esoteric or perceptive as the writings of Frank Herbert, but are sufficiently interesting for describing the underpinnings of the universe.

 



Dune is one of those science-fantasy settings where it is the future, in space, but people are still fighting with swords for some reason, which is cool.
Dune's justification for swords-in-the-future is the Holtzmann-Effect shield. The Holtzmann shield is a energy barrier which deflects any object which enters the field at a certain velocity. A person with a shield equipped is invulnerable to any projectile or explosive force. A shield can be personal, or large enough to cover a city.
The only way to penetrate a shield is by moving into it at a sufficiently slow speed. This necessitates a particularly disciplined form of melee combat. And as shields are ubiquitous, military tactics are based around the necessity of close combat.


Shields- as depicted in the 1984 movie. When CG was new.

Holtzmann shields do have some serious limitations however: For one, they attract and enrage the giant worms of Arrakis. So using one in the open desert is practically suicide.
For another, if one is shot with a laser, the interaction creates a detonation equivalent to a nuclear blast. So beware of suicide troops with lasguns. Depending on who you are fighting, that could be a thing.

There have been several attempts to make a Dune rpg. The ones I've perused don't seem too promising. But the schools and disciplines of the Dune universe seem well suited to the Class and Level model.

Thank you, internet.

I got to wonder about Dune Larping. The action in a Dune novel is mostly talking, or intense chemical-aided introspection, punctuated by spying  and the occasional assassination attempt or duel. It seems like it would lend itself well to live-action gaming, so I did a quick search to see if anybody else has wondered about this.

 

who to credit on this one.

A few have, and fewer still have attempted it.  One of these bold souls wondered aloud how the particular character of holtzmann-shield fighting could be simulated.
I've done some fencing and boffer and SCA combat here and there, so I thought about it.

In shield-fighting, only an attack which enters slowly can penetrate the shield. This is the trick, because in conventional melee combat, the faster hand has the advantage. It seems that this sort of combat would emphasize subtlety, deception and precise control. And that is what we would need to simulate to get the "feel" of shield-fighting.

I noticed that impact or mass-weapons don't play into shield combat. It's all rapiers, bodkins, crysknives, poison needles and hidden blades. These weapons can be manipulated with special finesse, and don't need to be moving fast to deal their damage. Hacking and smashing weapons such as maces, axes and broadswords pretty much need to be moving fast for their mass to play into the damage, as such they don't get used in shield fighting. I don't know much interest Frank Herbert had in martial arts, but he seemed to have realized this distinction when he was building his world.

What occurred to me was a form of boffer-fighitng or fencing where the object is to touch the opponent so that they feel it, but in such a way that it doesn't hurt or even sting a little bit. Every other aspect of the sword-play would be full speed. But being required to pull one's blows would, I think, simulate the challenge of slow-blade shield fighting.

I am actually pretty tickled by this notion. It's a bizarre form of counting coup. Some time when it's not blazing hot out, I will have to get some people together so we can figure out how this works in practice. Things like what kind of weapons to use, what protective gear, if any. Is grappling allowed or not? how to properly gauge a "hit" and so on.
I think there could be a lot of appeal in a martial game where the object is to not hurt your opponent, just show that you could have if you'd wanted to.

anyone seen this episode? it seems relevant.

 

 

Hopefully I will have some results to report on this experiment sooner rather than later. I am pretty excited about it.

 

Something for Everybody

A friend in the Dungeon Purgatory campaign ran in one of his levels last friday.

I would call the session a success, and it had a very basic lesson to teach.

In the little scenario, there was something for everybody to do.
Or nearly so. The character-players had plenty of action. The rogue had a heist to perform in the background. Only the fighter, who suspected a trap was really left out in the cold.

This is a basic idea. Its so obvious, it is in certain editions of the DMG. I guess I am just getting back  to basic lessons after taking such a long break from game.

I mean, I wouldn't  make Something for Everybody the primary principle of my process. But for set-piece encounters or important areas, I will try to keep it in mind.

One thing I noticed about the recent session, was that we split the party without fretting about it. Keeping the party together is like the first rule of dungeon survival.
But somehow, in this scenario, we sensed that we had license to do so. I think it was when the party had found an are which was not technically a "dungeon," And he took a moment to describe several objects, people and simultaneous events at the same time, which was likely to pique and divide our interests at the same time.

Simple stuff.

The Underloft-grid-map lessons learned

After a hiatus out of respect for Med-faire season, we resumed the Dungeon Purgatory campaign.

Over the last two sessions, we returned to and completed one of my levels.

The Underloft.
The Underloft may be thought of as the flooded-basement of the castle complex. A vast, subterranean space, wet, cold, dark and dripping.
Something like this image of Dwarrowdelf from LotR, except flooded.



I liked the idea of the Underloft. it was very archetypal. I thought the atmosphere would translate easily, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to use the Zelda-Grid style map.

The players recently made their second expedition to the Underloft, in search of a key which would grant access to new areas.
And I swear, it was the most boring couple of sessions I have run in recent memory.

One of the problems was misuse of a random encounter table. As the party progressed from gridsquare to gridsquare, I would roll away on a d20 encounter table to see what appeared in adjacent grids.
This gave me a lot of nonsense and things that Either I didn't feel like running, or else some nonsense encounter.
Fortunately, the table producd a merchant with a boat for sale. So the PCs could traverse the waters without suffering hypothermia.
Then it so happened to yield the Boss with the McGuffin they were looking for.

I went in thinking that adherence to a random table would produce an organic experience that would surprise everybody. What I got was either nonsense, or unappealing. Really, it would have been better if I had simply plotted to a certain extent.

We are using a spell failure table for this campaign. Spells require a spellcraft check with a difficulty based on the spell level. This makes it possible to fumble spells. Fumbled spells call for a roll on a  d100 table listing various effect, some benign, some terrible.
Somebody failed a spell, and as a result evaporated all water in a 1 mile radius.
This Dried up the whole level. The party was able to walk to the exit.
Near the exit, they stumbled upon the same merchant. How the merchant got there before them was not explored. But the only reason for it was my use of the random encounter table.

I think it would have been better to track the significant objects over time according to the reasonable natures of the object, rather than relying on the random encounter table. It would have created a greater sense of depth to the level. Even if this would have been imperceptible to the players, I would have felt better about it. Adherence to a random table for generating encounters off-the cuff was a bad idea. I use random tables when populating areas beforehand, but I don't obey them if I don't feel like the result is appropriate. Why did I have this temporary lapse? Must have been too long since I last DMed.

Next time will be better.

They're finally remaking FFVII

myth building- apocalypses.

And I pray, oh my god do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution
                     - 4 non blondes

This post is an observation about mythologies, which I expect to be useful for contriving mythologies for a gameworld.

I've already written some about apocalypses, especially concerning millenarianism in American culture.
But millenarianism isn't restricted to one time or place, or even one form of ideology. Belief in the "end times" is generally associated with religious outlooks. But it seems that even political or ethnic ideologies have some notion of this. That would account for pretty much all ideologies.

Ideologies form their own views on history, that is, they customize a mythology. This mythological history would naturally interpret past events. And it would also develop conjectures about the future and the direction history is going in.

Basically, no matter what your outlook, whether you are Jew, Gentile, Hopi, Sioux, Republican, Anarchist, Burner, Evangelist, Progressive, Positivist, Luddite or Flower-Child, you probably have some notion that something is going to happen. And probably soon.

People imagine this thing differently. They have different words for it: apocalypse, rapture, the technological singularity, when the Shit Hits the Fan, The Transcendental Object at the End of Time, The Age of Aquarius, The Revolution. Ragnarok.
And then there's the one where the internet stops working and we all don football pads and grab our ARs and kill eachother for the last bottle of coke. Plot twist: the last coke will be warm and taste awful.

It seems to me that all these various apocalypses hold Anxiety as their common origin.
It is uncertainty or a perceived threat which causes people to make these guesses that something serious is going to happen.
The nature of the anxiety reflects on the principle concerns of the rest of the mythology.
For instance:
Who will be saved, who will be damned.
Environmental concerns or concerns over limited resources.
Concerns about group-identity or social position.
Civil liberties or political power.

The term "Apocalypse" has come to mean the end of the world as we know it. But in the original sense, it meant a revelation. Apocalyptic literature was a genre of religious writing in which people wrote about the bizarre visions they had while fasting or in trance. In this state, they believed that God was revealing things to them. So in a more basic sense, an apocalypse is how-things-are-going-to-turn-out.

In this view, when the apocalypse happens, questions are answered, things turn out, and the anxiety is resolved. That is why people are fascinated by the idea. It is appealing in a sense.

People take for granted that a mythology will have a creation story. But don't forget that they almost always have some future which they expect as well.

Priest-Craft

There's hardly anything actually useful in this post. Just musing on worldbuilding for general purposes.

I left the last post on a bit of a question mark.

In short, I made distinction between the domains of craft, science and technology on one hand, and ineffable magic on the other. In game terms, One field is more or less understood and under the control of the character. The powers of the other field are unpredictable, and they strike like the inspiration of a muse.


This left me in a bit of a muddle as a Game Master, since it is difficult to create a system to regulate divine inspiration or a character's affinity for the eternal tao.
The other field is easy to regulate: a character knows this much science and has such and such resources. A character has the mental endurance to memorize and cast so many spells a day. It's straightforward and rational.

The first thing that occurred was simple DM fiat. But nobody wants the unbridled whim of the DM as their character's main source of power.

Also, I was writing like I was imagining the source of magic-magic as the one ultimate reality of the universe. God in short. The sort of polytheistic set up common in science-fantasy settings were not really being considered.

In standard D&D, clerical magic is channeled to Clerics from their deity as sheer spells per day.
I figured his could be interpreted either as technology- where the deities are super-powerful wizards who distribute their extra-planar energies to their acolytes. Or it could function as magic-magic, where the deities embody more abstract principles which a devotee "tunes in" to. So I left it undefined.
One of these models could suit your campaign world better than the other, depending on the statement you are trying to make.
Heck, you could have both; creating a distinction between "true" and "false" gods of which the players may not even be aware.

Then my buddy came over, the same one who go me thinking about the proper distinction between technology-magic and magic-magic.
Somehow, we got to talking about ritual magic, basically that practiced by priests and magicians in our own history. Imagine a pagan priest attempting to invoke the power of Athena or Mars or somebody like that. They invent a ritual which involves the trappings associated with the given deity in an attempt to attract their power. This is something like sympathetic magic, which operates on the theory that like is affected by like.
Thing is, even with such a ritual, the practitioners are never really sure whether it worked or not.
If the desired result appears, then maybe it is due to the god's intervention or maybe not. It is with this uncertainty, that priest-craft becomes a mystical , mysterious, ineffable process; the success of which possibly attributable to the skill of the priest or the whim of the god or both.

At this point, I noticed that Priestcraft is like hunting or fishing in this regard; you could be doing everything right, but still not get what you want. Possibly simply because of forces beyond your understanding or control.
It doesn't necessarily have to be understood by the players, so long as the DM understand the whys and wherefores.

I argued that the theory of the existence of gods and the ritual associations used to influence them were a sort of cultural technology- a sort of rational formula based on a given understanding of the cosmos. But I also agreed that because the "science" of it was so vague, that this was kind of a moot point and the whole pursuit is in the realm of the mystical.
If there is am unproven hypothesis with only limited evidence to support it, acting on that hypothesis would be rather like relying on magic, wouldn't it?

I realize, I already proposed a reasonably good system for distribution of clerical magic where anybody can do cleric stuff regardless of class. Mechanically, it's built on the framework of standard D&D. Needs Playtesting.

Science-Fantasy

After you read enough weird shit, The fantasy and science fiction genres begin to lose their distinction and merge into a unified field. This is what I was trying to get at with the Fukkin' Fairies post.

What brings this to mind?
I randomly read The Magician's Nephew last weekend. The last time I read it, I was in the single-digits of age. Even then I knew that Narnia was about allegory, but I still missed a lot.

Incidentally, I find myself being much more sympathetic to Lewis's heavy-handed allegory than I used to be. It's really not as toxic as I have believed it to be. The thing about allegory is that is only works if the reader already knows the subject which is being referenced. On the other hand, a reader who is unaware will be largely unharmed by the author's agenda. So I suppose Narnia is safe to give your children after all. Besides, Lewis' blockheaded Toryism is way more offensive than any of his religious notions. 

What impressed me with this re-reading was the origin of Jadis, more commonly called The White Witch.

when a seven foot tall woman invites you to get in her sleigh and eat her Turkish Delight, I think it would just be rude to refuse.

 

I don't feel like giving a synopsis of Magician's Nephew. Suffice to say that the story offers us concepts including: travel between "worlds", god-queens, super-weapons, bio-stasis, the creation and destruction of whole universes. Stuff like that.

 

In the book, this is described as "magic." But it sounds to me like Clive Staples was writing sci-fi all along. 

 

Sci-Fi is just Fantasy with a better vocabulary for describing the weird shit going on. This is the conclusion I was lead to.

 

But I got to talking with a friend and he reminded me that it is not quite that simple.

It's not fair to lump Magic and Science into a unified field.

True, both are methods for getting us otherworldly connections, terrible-weapons, super-natural beings and life-warping plot devices.

But authors (or game masters) will choose to frame their scenarios with one or the other, and the choice has deep ramifications on the story.

 

Technology and science are understandable and controllable. They represent a measure of confidence in the people who use and develop it. Hard science fiction is frequently concerned with the effects which technology can have on a society, or the consequences of its use. Some point of morality may even be involved. But ultimately, technology is the mode authors use when they are making humanist or rational statements

 

Magic, on the other hand, works even if nobody understands how. It is a matter of the unknowable or of the mysterious.  Is ineffable. In fantasy fiction, it can become a metaphor for spirituality or the characters relationship to the immanent Tao or something like.

 

 

Ineffable.

 

Since D&D tends to treat most all magic as some form of technology or craft, it has not helped in maintaining this distinction. Even the Angels and Demons of standard D&D have hit points and habitats.

 

In cases of magic as magic, not as technology, magic comes across as a sort of ephemeral inspiration, or something like a poetry of the soul. 

Magic comes across this way in a certain vein of fantasy story. The Shapechanger's Wife comes to mind.

Also, the magician Schmendrick in the Last Unicorn; who relates to magic like Moses relates to Jehovah- sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.

 

Heck, even in Lord of the Rings, all the "magic" is a reflection of spiritual reality of the setting. Like Lewis, Tolkien's religiosity played deeply into his worldbuilding. But Tolkien is far more graceful about it IMHO.

If you want to know what I mean, find a copy of The Silmarillion and read the first chapter. Aloud. Bonus points for reading it to people who are high.

 

Oddly, Magic or technology can both be plot devices for making moral points. Sorcerous power or dangerous technology serve equally well for making moral lessons about Faustian Bargaining or whatever.

 

Back to the case of CS Lewis and Narnia, he chooses to describe all the fantastic elements of the Chronicles in terms of Magic. By doing so, he is directing the reader to consider the ineffable, the divine.

If the powers of Aslan or the Witch were framed in terms of technology or some attainable knowledge, our relationship to these characters would be very different: They would not be Gods, but rather wizards. If they were simple wizards, the characters and readers would view their powers as something attainable or imitable. As is, they represent opposite ends of a moral spectrum- objects of devotion, rather than emulation.

 

What's the point of this distinction as related to gaming?

 

I wanted to pursue the notion of magic and technology as a unified field, because in this wise, I can create a game mechanic whereby the power-levels of a technologist or a sorcerer could be compared or balanced as needed.

Basically, because I'd want a 5th level electrician to be even with the 5th level theosophist.

 

On the other hand, understanding the distinction between technology and magic is important for designing setting. So if a wizard gets his power from craft, where does the cleric get his power?

From the DM, I suppose.