Weird Revisited: Mondegreen's Mixed-Up Magics

In the Land of Azurth, the wizard Mondegreen is infamous among magical practitioners, not because he was powerful (though he was) nor for his output of arcane scrolls (though it was prodigious) but because of his habit of misprinting magical sigils and formulae. He seems to have suffered some sort of malady in this regard, perhaps a curse.

A Mondegreen scroll will not contain the traditional version of the spell it appears to catalog at cursory examination. The subtle errors will either effect some aspect of the spell 50% of the time, giving:

1 Advantage to the spell save
2 An increased duration
3 Increased damage (if applicable)
4 Decreased damage (if applicable)
5 A decreased duration
6 Disadvantage to the spell save

The other 50% of the time, it will not work as it should, but rather produce a magical effect from a roll on the Wild Magic Table.

The original version of this post appeared in 2018.

The Collected Planes

One of these days, I'm going to completely finish (and maybe publish) this series on the Great Wheel, but until then, here's everything I've done.

The Planes of Pure Law
The Planes of Chaos
Hell
Carceri

Hades

Arborea

Elysium

Beastlands

Gehenna

Twin Paradises

The Layers of Heaven (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)

Arcadia

Limbo

Ysgard

Where'd the Grot Go?

Watching Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (which are both great, so watch them), I've noted that both display very D&Dish world, but ones completely without even token gestures toward the gritty and grime of Medievalism. They are grot free, nothing like this to be seen:

This could be put off to the style of anime or cultural differences between U.S. and Japan, but I noted this same thing back in my review of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Compared the production design and costuming of that film to something like Excalibur (which is pretty gritty despite all that gleaming plate) or even Jackson's Lord of the Rings. 

I think it's even in the art of a number of 5e products, too, and in The Legend of Vox Machina animated series (at least the parts of it I've seen).

I'm sure there are counter examples, but these are fairly high profile works in the D&D world, some of them official, so I think we're in a moment where D&Dish fantasy worlds partake of more of a fairytale feel, perhaps, in regard to depict of their environments. Nothing wrong with that, really, just an observation.

The Elements of Generic D&D

Over the years since its creation, the standard mode of D&D has become a subgenre of fantasy unto itself, codified now in the other rpgs that followed on its coattails and the other media they've inspired. GURPS terms it "Dungeon Fantasy," though I don't think it required dungeons--though obviously they play a big part.

The essential element as I see it are:

• The primary characters are a loose group of companions.
• Well-defined character roles/types and capabilities, very often recognized within the fictional world.
• Characters engaged in quests or missions in dangerous locales, mostly commonly underground. 

Other elements that are common are:

• A setting with pre-modern technology.
• Adventurers as a recognized role in society.
• A large variety of monsters, categorized and taxonomized. 
• Hierarchies of capability within character types.
• The development of character abilities and capabilities over time through dangerous trials. Sometimes there are in-setting codified tiers or levels.

There are, of course, others but these are things I feel like are less common in fantasy works that aren't in the subgenre than those that are. There may even be some work that if you play loose enough with definitions that would fit all of the above that we wouldn't consider "D&D fantasy," but genre boundaries have never been impermeable and precise things.

Got to Catch Them All

Inspired by Vance mostly, people have considered spells as living entities. It was discussed in the Gplus days, and it shows up in Eric Diaz's Dark Fantasy Magic. Back in 2011, before I had really read a whole lot of Vance, the Vancian magic of D&D and the film Pontypool got me imagining spells as a neurolinguistic virus or memetic entity.

Anyway, all that as preamble to a related idea which I'm sure someone has had before but came to me seeing my daughter play Pokemon Go. If spells are living things in some fashion and wizards are forced to adventure to find them and master them, aren't they kind of like Pokemon? Eldritch viruses or self-assembling arcane subroutines. Free-living (at least currently) cheat codes to the universe. Things to be captured and tamed and bent to will of the mage.

I think this sort of framing could make the finding and learning of spells on scrolls more interesting (or at least more challenging), and I think it would definitely suggest interesting things that could be used to develop the background the campaign world.

The Cleric and the Rituals of Faith

Over the weekend, I read this interesting blog series about how polytheism worked in the real world. Check it out. 

Anyway, it got me thinking about how D&D/rpg polytheism might be made more realistic without changing it much. Granted, it's a bit of an uphill battle since rpg polytheism of the D&D variety is very unrealistic in a lot of ways, but I'm going to focus here on one thing and that's Devereaux's central point in the early articles: religion is mainly about ritual not metaphysics.

This is actually pretty good for the D&D cleric, because they are largely soft on metaphysics and philosophy (short a lot of worldbuilding) but out-of-the-box do a lot of things like spells and special abilities that could be glossed (and roleplayed) as rituals. It's sort of transactional, even mechanistic from a modern lens, which is good for D&D because that's what clerical magic is. 

So, clerics are the most religious (in what Devereaux relates is the Roman sense) because they have the most effective deity-related rituals (spells) and they are the most diligent in their performance (it's their job). The use of the cleric to the adventuring party is this very religiousness: their ritual performances always get results. 

I think it would take relatively little roleplaying in this direction and reframing of these abilities in a more religious ritual context to make it feel a lot less merely mechanistic and a lot more flavorfully mechanistic.

Weird Revisited: Combat as Bloodsport

The original version of this post appeared in 2018.

 

A common reframe in the old school landscape is "Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport," often used to negatively contrast elements of 5e and particularly 4e concerned with encounter balance and "the encounter" as a fundamental unit of game action in general with the old school. Without getting into the merits of how this argument is typically framed, I think that even if we accept this as true, there is a way to lean into those elements of modern D&D and come out with something cool. Instead dungeoncrawling for treasure (mainly), maybe the dungeon environment could be the battleground of a big tournament.

X-Crawl deals with some of this territory, I guess, but from what I read of it, it is set in the modern day, and seems very much concerned with the celebrity aspect of things, bringing in a lot of professional athlete cliches. All well and good, but I'm more interested in something more like Dragonball Z. The fighters are in it often for the personal betterment--a personal betterment that is practically apotheosis, which dovetails nicely with D&D advancement. What if the gods or immortals or whatever design the dungeons as tournament grounds, and foundries to forge new exalted beings to join their ranks?

In this context, the lack of XP for gold makes perfect sense. Also, "levels" of dungeons are like brackets of a tournament. In order to give a good spectacle, you don't want scrubs advancing to take on the contenders too soon. Mainly playing this sort of setting would just mean thinking about the game differently. The only change might be that there wouldn't be any nameless rabble or humanoid tribes with kids and the like. Everybody in the dungeon is playing the game!

Planes of Law--Complete!

Everything Lawful, in one post!

The Twin Paradises

The Layers of Heaven (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)

Arcadia

The Planes of Pure Law

Acheron

Hell

Gehenna

Et in Arcadia Formicae Sunt

Arcadia was born from the schism between Absolute Order and the Archons which believed in transcendence, those who raised up the Heavenly Mountain. The Archons of what would become Arcadia, were in awe of the Mountain, but worried its rigors would not create the optimal balance of Order and Good for the most souls. The Mountain, they felt, risked unacceptable numbers of souls potentially falling to Chaos and error in the name of a goal that might never be attainable. Only through Mechanus could the Cosmos be salvaged, but the algorithms must be modified to reflect the needs of the willful souls of the Primes. Arcadia would be that benevolent Order. 

Long ago, the greatest of Arcadia's builders distributed their being among a crafted species. The ant-like formians carry out and carry forward the great working through that divine spark within.  For the souls which come to reside in the ordered collectives of Arcadia, the formians are both humble servants and strict correctors of infractions. They model for the other inhabitants self-less service of the community.

Visitors to Arcadia find it a place of great serenity and happiness. Its souls live in ziggurat arcologies with terraced gardens and precise, geometric parks. They are amiable, though highly conformist and given to speaking in aphorisms regarding the virtues of their lifestyle.

It could be said that Arcadia is a benevolent dictatorship. While the souls have a great deal of freedom, there is little tolerance of behaviors which are detrimental to the community. Friendly warnings and lectures are the first response, then tasks meant to create awareness. If those interventions are ineffective or resisted, the community practices ostracism and a truly rebel soul will find the plane itself rejecting them.

The Structure of the Inner Planes Revealed

Back in Dragon Magazine #8 when Gygax presents the first diagram of the standard planes of D&D (which wasn't yet a "Great Wheel") he assures us the image is "a 2-dimensional diagram of a 4-dimensional concept." Gygax doesn't explain what he means (is the entire conception 4D or only some part>), and so far as I know, no one else seems to have picked up this thread. 

In Dragon #42, for example, Lafoka makes the both suggestive and hard to parse statement about travel to the Elemental Planes from the Prime: 

A figure with ethereal access can freely travel on the Prime Material, go “up” into the Elemental Plane of Air, “down” into the volcanic Elemental Plane of Fire, can go into the Elemental Plane of Water (if a large body of water is nearby), or can go “down” into the Elemental Plane of Earth. 

I think this is mainly saying that areas of the element on the Prime Material are effectively portals in the Ethereal, but it could be more clearly worded if so, and why are up and down in quotes as if they are only so-called? Anyway, unless that scare-quoted up and down are referencing directions other than the usual, this doesn't offer anything.

Next, in Dragon #73, Gygax (inspired likely by Swycaffe's article in Dragon #27, though he doesn't credit it here) proposes a cubic model of the Inner Planes to accommodate the Positive and Negative Material Planes and the various para- and quasi-elemental stuff. Still no indication of dimensions beyond three, though.

I've written posts about the much-maligned inner planes before, I've never addressed this aspect either, so now, in full recognition of what has been written about them by above, I'm going to suggest that the inner planes exist in a 4-dimensional space. So, a better model for them and their relationships would be a hypercube or tesseract (to use the word coined by Charles Hinton to refer to such). Here's a 2D representation of the spatial relationship of the 3D "faces" of the 4D structure:

So this means the elemental planes (with the Prime Material unpictured in the center) are all 3D cells accessible by travel along the 4th axis. Hinton calls these directions kata and ana, and they stand with left and right, forward and backward, and up and down, to define location in a 4D space. This video shows how the above projection is arrived at by "unfolding" the 4D shape in 3 dimensions.

Of course, the Inner Planes don't really form a 4D hypercube any more than they were a cube. It's a model to show their spatial relationships. 

Godless in the Outer Planes

The Archons of the Cosmos and their lesser progeny have the comfort (or curse) of an unshakable belief that there was something different before. Their separation and conflict is based on different ideas about how to regain what once was and what precisely the characteristics of that thing was but they know it existed.

Mortal souls, even planar dwelling ones, don't share that faith or knowledge.

Mortals on the Material Planes are generally unaware of the wider conflicts in the Cosmos, but Planar ones, particularly those dwelling in the Concordant Opposition cannot help but be aware. In the city of Sigil, very mortal philosophies have emerge or at least congregated to explain the clash of realities around them.

The Athar deny or at least doubt that the gods and Archons have any privileged knowledge of the multiverse compared to mortals. An elephant might seem godlike to an ant, they say, but it has no greater insight into how or why the sun rises. In fact, some Atharan thinkers have argued that the certainty experienced by the Powers (as they call them) is a barrier to their rational examination of the Cosmos, suggesting that, whatever their puissance, they may be less capable of reason than mortals. Athar sages see the simplistic duality of Law and Chaos with their ill-defined and contingent categories, for explain, as proof for this line of thinking.

In general, Athar adherents seek to free mortal minds from the tyranny of the Powers, for only then can anyone ever hope to understand the Cosmos. Some Atharans believe that a Godhead does exist that undergirds or perhaps created reality, but the nature of such a conceptual being is only conjectural, while others feel such assertions are at best premature.

The Plane of Whatever It is, I'm Against It

No one is quite certain how the Concordant Opposition came to be. It is quite possible that some soldiers of Law and some warriors of Chaos tired of the endless battle of natures and paradigms and came together in that consensus to make another alternative. Others believe (or hope) that it is the place where the last fragment of the Godhead exists. a strange loop of dreaming God unconsciousness, a bulwark against a schizoid multiverse. People in the City of the Sigil, in particular, like this idea.

However it came to be, it stays because he serves a purpose. It's the phase boundary between not only Law and Chaos but the other syxygies which emerged from their conflict come together. It is the place of concordant. Of course, it actively resists being incorporated into any camp (though they all try). It is a place of opposition.

Across it's expanse none the Powers hold sway, yet no where are their philosophies more discussed and debated. There are groups of evangelists and missionaries from other Planes working to convert travelers, though these all die out eventually, either in conflict or by loss of faith. The plane does not mock, but it is actively indifferent.

At the edge of these Outlands are the Border Towns. Their appearance vary from town to town, but they control the flow of traffic from whatever plane is on the other side. All are fortified, no matter how benign the appearance of the Plane on the other side. Indeed, from the perspective of the Opposition, the most benign are often the most dangerous.

The Grind of Acheron

There is a realm where the obdurate, crystalline structure of a Mechanus shatters and fragments, floating free into the void of half-formed concept. This is a border, though not any physical border because the clockwork nirvana is infinite and redundant in its mechanism, but a conceptual border where the Prime Mover's certainty no longer holds, where the grand program fails. This was the place where, after the fall from Unity (as Law sees it), rebellious Archons sundered themselves from Mechanus. This is the ideaspace separating Pure Law from Hell. This is Acheron.

It's a hell of sorts in its own right. Its acolytes know it as the Crucible. Here, they contend, new truths of Law are formed. Perhaps one day there will be one stronger and surer than either Hell or Mechanus? Adepts of Pure Law view it as gall on the purity of Order, the place where Hell's error abrades it. The Lords of Hell see it as an opportunity.

Pieces of supernal machinery break off at the edges of Mechanus, twisting and reforming, to store failing Order within, into planet-size Platonic solids which continue to degrade, erode and crumble. These have been colonized by numerous beings: malcontents from Hell, reformed things of Chaos, and authoritarian souls with iron dreams of their own version of Order. All the would-be dictators and tyrants begin to gather their followers among the lost and the beaten and forge their own armies of conquest. And then they go to war.

The struggle is as senseless as it is endless. None of the despots or authorities are ever able to overwhelm the others and seldom do they convert them. The strength of Law is shattered, after all. Also, none of them have clear vision of Unity, for they were only born after it. They merely ape what they know of Hell, crudely. 

One might be tempted to view Acheron as a place of Chaos, but philosophers point out that when taken as a whole, the plane is as predictable as Mechanus. Its war machines grind forever on at the behest of devils who will never achieve the godhood they crave.

Sword & Sandals Mystara

The Known World of Mystara is a Hyborian Age-esque fantasyland of often thinly disguised real world cultures from a variety of historical eras, but the general vibe seems Medieval to early modern. I think it would be interesting reimagine Mystara as a more ancient world inspired, Sword & Sorcery setting, though will not greater adherence to a single era. Here's how it could breakdown:

Emirate of Ylaruam: This desert region has always been oddly placed, but depending on what latitude you think it's at, it might be weird for it to be a hot desert. Maybe it's a cold desert like the Tarim Basin or the Taklamakan. You could ditch the faux Arab culture for something more Central Asian, and give it's central religion a more Eastern flavor.

Empire of Thyatis: Less Byzantium and more Rome, though I would probably move it more in a Hellenistic direction. What the Empire of Alexander might have been like if it had been able to hang together better after his death.

Grand Duchy of Karameikos: This would stll be a breakaway, former province (though not a "Grand Duchy"). There wouldn't be true, Medieval feudalism here, but something more like the Roman latifundia.

Kingdom of Ierendi: This kingdom ruled by adventurers is kind of a pure fantasy trope, but I would give its material culture a Minoan spin.

Minrothad Guilds: A plutocratic thalassocracy more like Phoenicia or Carthage. The Guilds would be collegia.

Principality of Glantri: Well, still a magocracy, but maybe more like the Estruscans?

Republic of Darokin: Keep the plutocratic republic, but cast it less as Venice and more as Republican Rome with a of the "center of caravan routes" feel like Samarkand or Palmyra. A bit of Persian influence wouldn't be misplaced as Darokin does border Sind, which is sort of Mystara's India.

The Northern Reaches would probably still just be sort of Vikings, I guess, maybe more proto-Vikings like the horned helmet wearing raiders of the Nordic Bronze Age. Ethengar might be more Scythians than Mongols. Haven't given much thought to the demihuman lands or Atraughin. 

Dungeon & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

I went with most of my gaming group to see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves this past weekend. The short review is: we all enjoyed it and thought it was a lot of fun.

That out of the way, I think the way that is good--and the ways that it isn't--are kind of interesting. Fantasy films, like fantasy lit, generally seem at least in part about transporting us to a different world. The best fantasy films attempt to evoke wonder or horror, the lesser offerings at least seem to want to evoke another place or time. 

The Dungeons and Dragons movie doesn't seem much interested in those things. In fact, it doesn't really act like the typical fantasy movie much at all. It has the tropes, to be sure, but it doesn't try to wring a reaction from the audience with them, nor is it concerned with the typical stylistic elements of fantasy storytelling. There are no grubby streets, or seedy, dimly lit taverns. Monsters aren't really scary. Underground passages in the deadly Underdark seem spacious, clean, and relatively well lit. At best it's a dark ride at a theme park, and the magnificent CGI cityscapes could well be some sort of new addition to the Magic Kingdom. 

Honor Among Thieves is a fantasy movie set in the Forgotten Realms, sure, but in a real sense, it isn't a fantasy movie of the usual sort at all. What it is a evocation of what it's like to play a D&D game. The characters (within the bounds of not breaking the fourth wall) get to be as snarky, bumbling, and at times blasé as players at the table. It's like a memorable game session dramatized before you, allowing the D&D-versed viewer to imagine what's going on at the table to create what you see on the screen.

I'd say it's very clever, if I thought that were intentional. Rather, I think it's just the fortuitous consequence of post-Guardians of the Galaxy, action-adventure filmmaking and a script sharp in the sense that it keeps things moving and is filled with as many "easter eggs" as possible. Just lucky, perhaps. Still, no gamer looks askance at a lucky roll.

Other brief thoughts:

• Elves, dwarves, and halflings take a backseat to WOTC IP "ancestries." It wasn't a choice I was expecting.
• To maintain a PG-13 rating, no doubt, things must remain bloodless, which means combat relies a lot on fisticuffs and grappling. I've seen a lot of twitter jokes (well, the same joke multiple times) about "what system would be good for that D&D movie?" but I remarked to my players after the show that Broken Compass might be better at replicating what we saw on screen than D&D.
• There wasn't really a hint of a possible sequel, but that surely won't stop them if it does well enough.

A Tale of Two Paradises

 

It is possible for the determined traveler who has been shown the hidden paths to walk from the Elysian Fields to another planar realm. The primaeval forests and unworked fields of wildflowers give way to pastures, farmland, and finally, quaint villages. There, they will be greeted by the local inhabitants and perhaps invited in for a meal. The traveler has come to the Twin Paradises.

The Paradises represent the rejection of the universal contentment of Elysium as unearned. Also, not for its souls is the selfless dedication required to scale the Heavenly Mountain. Those who come to stay in the Twin Paradises find contentment in industriousness and a life well-lived--or afterlife well lived. 

The denizens of the Paradise reachable from Elysium are small folk like gnomes. They live in villages governed by democratic councils and send representatives to the over-councils that govern the smaller the interactions of the smaller ones. All the citizens work for the common good, and all who contribute partake of the communities' supplies according to their need. The Paradises are not Elysium; the land, though pleasant, is not free from the caprice of nature. The people, though similar in outlook, are individuals and not immune to petty disagreements and misunderstandings. It is overcoming these obstacles that make the pleasantness of life in the Twin Paradises deserved.

At the far edge of the first Paradise, there is a great, mist-filled chasm. One sturdy bridge spans it. On the far side, the land begins to become more rugged and more thickly wooded, though it is still beautiful and bountiful. Here the habitations are more isolated, and the people place a greater value on self-sufficiency. They are more willing to teach a newcomer than to provide what they view as charity. The people still work together on tasks of common need, but they do so as individuals and of their own volition. 

The Holy Mountain is visible from this land on clear days. Even these hardworking folk occasionally take a moment to stare at it from time to time. They are perhaps comforted to know it exists, but they have little desire to see its heights.

The Delver Underworld

In wuxia fiction, the characters are members of the Wulin, the World of the Martial Arts or community of martial arts practitioners. This term has overlap with, but is not identical to Jianghu, which is the sort of demimonde/underworld that includes the Wulin practitioners and associated people and locations.

While D&D and D&Dish settings sometimes feature guilds adventures are members of, I don't think I've ever seen this developed into a full-fledged community analogous to the Jianghu or Wulin. As I've briefly suggested before, there are a number of interesting developments taking this sort of approach would allow, though. Just off the top of my head:

• Schools of magic using types would be given an in-setting function.
• It would provide an in-setting rationale for the separation between adventuring clerics and stay in the temple priests
• The "keeping the Martial (or in this case Adventuring) World" separate from "civilians" aspect of wuxia would explain why adventurers are running every kingdom in the land.
• It would seem to naturally lead to more rivalry between adventuring groups, potentially meaning more faction play within dungeons.
• Guilds/sects/collegia are an easy source of adventure hooks.

D&D Icons

Thinking about the 13th Age Icons this weekend, I think it would be fun to replace them with these guys. Really, it wouldn't take much modification of the official 13th Age crew. 

Caruso the Bard probably wouldn't make the cut, though.

Weird Revisited: The Dungeon Mad God Machine

This post originally appeared in 2017...

 

Seeing Alien: Covenant yesterday, which (no real spoilers) carries a theme from Prometheus (and from Frankenstein, ultimately) of lesser beings meddling in creation of life, gave me an idea. I've written before (and it's sort of baked into the rules in any case, most explicitly in BECMI) about dungeons in D&D being an engine of apotheosis.

What if dungeons didn't just create gods or god-like being? What if they tended to create mad ones? All those weird D&D monsters are waved off as the products of crazy wizards, but maybe they're more specifically the product of crazy, god-level wizards?

In fact, it's possible dungeons weren't originally a tool of apotheosis at all. One mad race, the Engineers (or Dungeoneers) did came upon that accidentally. The first dungeons were their laboratories, their three dimensional journals of magical experimentation. A delve into one charts (and recapitulates) their ascension to post-mortaldom--and their descent in madness. A dungeon then, is a living blasphemous tome, recording secrets man was not meant to know.

It goes without saying that probably all life in the campaign world began their. Everything crawled up from the depths, evolving away from its original purpose to its current form. Unless of course, that evolution was the point. The Dungeoneers might have felt they would only have arrived at godhood when they could create beings that could follow in their footsteps--or maybe even challenge their supremacy. Perhaps there's another, higher level game and they need soldiers, or experimental subjects, to win it?

Weird Revisited: In the Blood

This post originally appeared almost 10 years ago to the day...

 

The element iron has a special status: it carries oxygen on our blood; it’s the most abundant element in the earth’s crust; and it has the most stable atomic nuclei. More to the point for fantasy gaming: "cold iron" is said to ward off or harm fairies, ghosts, and/or witches.

In the novel Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington, magical attitude is inversely related to iron in the blood. A necromancer explains it this way:

“Iron, as I’ve told you, is one of the only symbols that represents what it truly is, here and on the so-called Platonic level of reality...Because it is true material and not just a symbol of something else, iron restricts our ability to alter the world, be it talking to spirits or commanding symbols or however you put it.”

Not only does this nicely tie some of the real properties of iron with its folklore properties, but it would have some interesting implications in fantasy games. Prohibitions against metal armor and the working of magic make sense in this light. Even more interestingly, it might it explain why D&D mages tend to be physically sort of weak--they need to be somewhat less robust in order to work magic well. Maybe higher Constitution scores actually impairs magic, or impairs the “level” a mage can advance too? That might also example the traditional dwarven poor magic aptitude: they’re hardy, creatures of the earth (where iron’s abundant).