Talislanta: Werewood

My work on a Talislanta adaptation for the Dying Earth rpg, made me think it was worth reviving my dormant series of posts from 2020 touring Talislanta through editions. Still, in the Western Lands, we come to Werewood. 

"Look yonder to Were Wood and its darkling oaks!"

- Jack Vance, Rhialto the Marvellous

The Chronicles tells us that Werewood is a "dark and tangled forest region" north of Zandu. It's described in forbidding terms. Enforcing this impression, Tamerlin tells us of its most baleful inhabitants: the Werebeast, which combine the "worst attributes of men, apes, and tundra beasts" (the Naturalists Guide says "Ur, beastman, and lycanthromorph") and the Banes. Banes are vampiric creatures with the power to mimic voices of any sort. They were inspired by Vance's deodands with their skin as "black as polished obsidian" and their large fangs and eyes that "glow like embers." Then there are the mandragores, plant things that stand immobile during the day, but move around at night to hunt prey.

Not everything in Werewood is deadly, however. There are the Weirdlings or Wish-Gnomes, who according to legend must give over their underground treasure if caught or grant their captor a wish. There are also the Dhuna, the human inhabitants of the forest. The Dhuna were persecuted for witchcraft in ages past and were forced to flee into the forest. They are still believed to have magical powers, particularly the women who can "capture a man's heart with but a single kiss." The Handbook adds, under the Dhuna Witchwoman/Warlock archetype listing, that they are "strange and mysterious by nature" and are "believed to engage in sacrificial rituals."

A Naturalist's Guide expands a little on the lore of the creatures. In fashion reminiscent of Dying Earth monsters, it says banes are thought to be a bizarre hybrid of "darkling, night demon, the extinct babbling howler, and perhaps even Ariane." Their fangs, claws, and ocular organs are sought by alchemists and thaumaturges. The mandragore are valuable because they speak the secret language of plants and trees.

The second edition expands a bit more upon the region. It adds locations with the forest, including the Valley of Forgetfulness, where a mist from the river steals memory, and the creatures known as gnorls, who get player character archetypes. The gnorls are an underground dwelling race, who practice a divination art called "rhabdomancy" (rhabdos rod, wand). They are speculated to be related to the Weirdlings.

This is pretty much the Werewood of later editions. The Dhuna get a bit more fleshed out: we are told they are persecuted for their "pagan beliefs" (presumably meaning non-Orthodoxist), and that they live in "close-knit clans or covens." They also have "liberal views toward matrimony," but the descriptions suggest more that they practice polygamy.

Werewood is the sort of dark, fairy wood of Talislanta. It has elements that recall Tolkien's Mirkwood, and Vance's Tantrevalles in his Lyonesse trilogy, but those resemblances may just be that they are drawing from the same inspirations. The Dhuna are sort of compositions of various witch tropes, including maybe some neo-pagan witches flavor. They're a good counterpoint to the Rennfaire types of Silvanus.

Given the potential fairytale scariness of Werewood, I feel like the Dhuna as insular, isolated people either fighting against (or sometimes embracing) that darkness ought to be played up. It seems like protecting their covens against banes, werebeasts, and mandragores ought to be a bigger concern than Orthodoxist oppression. The canon is somewhat inconsistent regarding the eldritch danger of the forest. The proliferation of inhabitants has added to that, but I'm in favor of gaining a bit of that back.

Jack Shear has some interesting thoughts on Talislanta and the Gothic that would be interesting here.

The Affairs of Wizards

What is a D&D character to do after they've surpassed all those domain building levels? Epic level campaigns where the monsters are just have more hit points? Walk a path of apotheosis like some out of Mentzer's Masters Rules set?

Both of those are good, but they could also hang out in luxury, go to parties on exotic demiplane, try to one-up their fellow epic levels at every turn. In other words, they could act like the Arch-Magicians in the Rhialto the Marvellous stories by Jack Vance.

I feel like the hero/quasi-deities of Greyhawk are ripe for this treatment (see Mordenkainen's magical prep of what must be an epic sandwich in the image above), but Elminster seems like this sort of guy as well. I don't mean to suggest they would never go on something resembling a traditional adventure (Vance's "Morreion" is good inspiration, here.), but the main challenge for these demigods is out doing other beings of power. Sure you could kill Asmodeus, but wouldn't it be more civilized and rewarding to humiliate him in front of his infernal peers?

Talislanta in the Dying Earth RPG

Still cogitating on Talislanta in Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth rpg, I tried out character creation of a character from the Chronicles of Talislanta: Crystabal, the Cymrillian/Saristan self-styled "rogue magician." Here's what I came up with:

Abilities:

Persuade (Charming) 10

Rebuff (Wary) 8

Attack (Finesse) 9

Defense (Parry) 9

Health 8

Magic (Curious) 9

Appraisal 2, Athletics 3, Etiquette 2, Gambling 3, Perception 4, Pedantry 2, Riding 2, Seduction 2, Stealth 3, Wherewithal 2 

Wealth 2

Resistances: Avarice 2, Indolence 5, Gourmandism 4, Pettifoggery *[infinite]

Possessions: High-collared cloak, breeches and tunic; dyed leather boots; leather-bound spell book; rapier; pouch; shoulder bag; 2 magical trinkets; equs steed; 50 gold lumens worth in assorted coinage.

I had had the thought of just using the archetypes from 4e as the scale of abilities is pretty close to that of Dying Earth. Unfortunately, it isn't close enough--and Dying Earth's scale doesn't seem to be consistent across abilities, at least as far as I can determine looking at NPCs. This means a lot more just re-creating the archetypes, which isn't hard given the relative simplicity of the systems, but more work than I was hoping for. Of course, one could just ditch adaptation and interpret the Talislanta setting alone in the Dying Earth game, but I worry that would lose much of the flavor the archetypes provide (and make chargen take longer).

Another issue is spells. In Talislanta 1st-3rd editions, basic spells are rare broad and generically named, but advanced spells are more specific and have Vancian names. In DE, all spells are specific and have Vancian names. I'm inclined to just use DE spells, renaming some of them eponyms with the names of famous Talislantan mages, using the Tal advanced spells as a model.

Vancian Talislanta

I've again been pondering running Talislanta in Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth rpg. Why this particular ruleset, which just happens to be based on the work of an author who was a big influence on Talislanta (particularly when there's another Dying Earth game on the way, after all)? Well, attempting to emulate its source material, it discourages combat and killing and encourages social interaction and trickery. While this isn't the only way to approach Talislanta, it is certainly a reasonable way to do it, and one supported by the example of the picaresque travels of Tamerlin through the land in The Chronicles of Talislanta.

Also, take a look at the key ingredients of a Dying Earth adventure the GM advice identifies:

• Odd Customs
• Crafty Swindles
• Heated Protests and Presumptuous Claims
• Casual Cruelty
• Weird Magic
• Strange Vistas
• Ruined Wonders
• Exotic Food
• Foppish Apparel

I don't think all of those are essential for a good Talislanta adventure but Odd Customs, Weird Magic, Strange Vistas, and Ruined Wonders seem to me to be--and none of the others seems at all out of place.

The base level of the Dying Earth rpg is the "Cugel level" which seems to recreate the adventures of the knavish Cugel (hence the Crafty Swindles and Presumptuous Claims). The next level is that of Turjun (of Miir) and the earliest Dying Earth tales, which are a bit more standard Sword & Sorcery.  Turjun level protagonists are more competent and at least sometimes more moral, so the key adventure elements change somewhat:

Talislanta certainly leans "Turjun level" (with many an archetype based around combat), but I don't think it needs to abandon the swindles and verbal interplay of the Cugel level. My personal conception of Talislanta is that it would be best served by analogy to a Vance work that was written between the time of the early Dying Earth stories and the later ones (though Cugel's first appearance does predate it) and that's the planetary romance of the Planet of Adventure series. Tschai presents a sort of Turjun-level-esque hero, Adam Reith, in terms of competence--but he's less bloodthirsty than some other Turjun-level types--who is forced to deal with with verbose grifters at every turn and maneuver through oddball cultures.

Conceptual grounding aside, the ease of adaptation is always an issue with something like this. Completely remaking Talislanta in the Dying Earth system would daunting, even though Dying Earth is not terribly crunchy. I think though a complete adaptation might not be necessary; there may be a way to meld the sort of traditional Talislanta system with the DE mechanics, but I have only started thinking on this. Perhaps more on that in a later post.

The Small Setting

For some reason, the idea of a small setting has long had some appeal for me. Something like the British Isles or any other single country, sure, but also even smaller, like an single province of a country (Averoigne, Poictesme)--or smaller still, like an immense Gormenghast-esque castle and its environs.

Obviously, hexcrawling has limited to no utility in a setting like this, and it's probably not grist for a long term campaign, if you do the usual D&D activities. But you know, most campaigns I play in or run don't seem to be long term enough that that would create into a problem. My Land of Azurth campaign will be 7 years old this month, and while the players have now ventured beyond Yanth Country, I feel like we could easily still be in that terrain (roughly the size of the state of Georgia), allowing for the brief planar, time travel, and underground other-realm excursions they've done.

What's the appeal to me of the small setting? I'm not exactly sure. Perhaps it's the thought of accreting a lot of granular detail in one part of a setting in a way players will actually find interesting versus that detailed city supplement approach where most of it never gets used. There's also the possibility of developing more of a robust "supporting cast" and layering in mysteries big and small. It also makes adventure locales less likely to be one-offs, encouraging the portrayal of them as living, changing places.

In short, maybe, it's bringing some of the aspects of the megadungeon to a setting that isn't centered around a megadungeon.

New Flesh On Old Bones

Staying busy with other stuff (including gaming sessions), the blog has suffered from me having a lack of time to cogitate sufficiently for many posts on new ideas. I thought it might help to go back to the old standby of riffing off an existing setting. I find constraint sometimes stimulants creativity and placing boundaries on things limits the number of tangents that can distract you.

So, I thought it might be interesting to take some older setting that was perhaps open-ended in its approach or sparse in its presentation and see how I would develop that. At least, it's an idea to consider; whether I get around to it or not is another matter.

But what setting? The perennial favorite to "make one's own" is the Wilderlands. But there are two published, individual visions of that, and blogs with other good versions (and some good versions on blogs that are now lost as Atlantis). I don't know that I have anything to add there without getting really variant, and I've never really got the Wilderlands in the way these folks seem to, so I would really be riffing off them to some degree.

Another setting similarly sparse in its original presentation is the Greyhawk folio. The later box set, for that matter, is only a little more detailed. While not as popular as the Wilderlands for this sort of thing, certainly folks have offered there own take on it to--here's Evan again.

Beyond those, what else? The Known World (pre-Gazetteers) is terse in its original presentation in The Isle of Dread, though the helpful (for the neophyte GM) cultural references might hem it in more than the ones mentioned previously, despite it's shorter length. Is there anything else? Powers & Perils' Perilous Lands, or does in that way lie madness? (It's not really terse at all, but curious unspecified in some ways.)

Savage Swords of Middle-earth: Magic

Re-reading those old posts got me thinking about the "Middle-earth in the style of Robert E. Howard" idea, and with some time to read in travel, I was thinking about the similarities and differences in Tolkien's and Howard's approaches to magic.  The comparisons are interesting, and I don't think they would be difficult to fuse to a degree.

Compared to modern fantasy literature or rpg fantasy, both the Hyborian Age and Middle-earth are decidedly what we might term "low magic," which is not to say there is little magic in them. In fact, both worlds are full of things we would consider magical in the real world sense. There are any number of specially wrought items and substances that in D&D would be "magic items." Magic-users are not necessarily less powerful either, but they tend to use magic less and in less flashy--and certainly less "zappy" ways--than the D&D standard.

In Howard, you could say spellcasters are thinner on the ground. In Tolkien, that's true to an even greater degree; there are only like 6 wizards! But that's ignoring the special (magical) abilities so many people seem to evidence: the abilities of elves and dwarves to craft magical items, Bard and other Men of Dale having the ability to speak with thrushes, etc.

In an unsent letter, Tolkien addressed magic in LotR, drawing a distinction between magia (physical magic) and goeteia (charms, enchantments). For elves and spirits both of these are entirely naturally parts of the world, it's only the mortal races that view them as magic. Tolkien notes there do not rely on spells or "lore," and that humans can't perform them. This letter was unsent, though, and this last part contradicts elements of published works. The Hobbit speaks of dwarves casting spells (though maybe this is just superstition on their part and doesn't work), and even in the margins of the letter Tolkien reminds himself about Numenoreans using spells in making swords.

While Howard has the trappings of classic Sword & Sorcery spellcraft with summoned demons and dark, magical tomes, there is also an element of the psychic to his portrayal. In "People of the Black Circle" it's implied that belief plays a role in susceptibility to magic, even when it seems to be manifesting as physical phenomena, and that a lot of it's effect is hypnotism. Both Thoth-Amon and Xaltotun seem to accomplish a lot merely by directing mental energy without spell or obvious ritual.

For a more Sword & Sorcery Middle-earth, it goes without saying that Morgoth and Sauron, at least, taught sorcery to mankind. Sorcery that arises from evil and risks corruptions fits in well with a Howardian vibe (though, as I've mentioned before, not all spellcasters in Howard are evil. Just most of them!) Also, I would also have evil magic-users (Sauron, Saruman, etc.) perform more magic and more visual magic than in LOTR as written, more along the lines of things we see in Hour of the Dragon--where interestingly, keeping a magic item of power out of the hands of an ancient, awakened evil out to conquer the world is the key to that evil's defeat.

Tolkien in Blacklight

It's well known that hippies were into Tolkien's work. Some of it's themes appealed to them, certainly, but like with Ditko's Dr. Strange comics, there was also the idea that the works might somehow be drug-influenced. That the author might be taking the same trip as them. This was, of course, a false belief, but it was one that existed.

I feel like this appreciation of Tolkien filtered through 60s countercultural and mixed with the prevalent cultural representations of fairytale fantasy led to a a subgenre or movement within fantasy, most prevalent in the late 70s and early 80s, before D&D derived fantasy came to ascendancy. While this subgenre likely finds expression in literature and music to a degree, I think it's most obvious and definable in visual media. It's evident in works like the Bakshi's film Wizards and the comic Weirdworld ( both in 1977), and in the Wizard World sequences (starting in 1979) of Mike Grell's Warlord. Elfquest (1978) shows the influence to a degree. Bodē's Cheech Wizard (1966) and Wally Wood's Wizard King (introduced 1968 but significantly presented in 1978) are either the oldest examples or it's direct progenitors.

Essentially, the subgenre eschews the serious world-building of LotR for a more drug-influenced riff on The Hobbit, often with greater use of anachronism, camp, and sexiness, and often with a degree of psychedelia. Beyond the Tolkien influence, these works tend to share a number of common features:  a "traditional" visualization of elves and dwarfs as "little people," arising in folklore and classic illustration, but coming more directly from Disney animation and the fairytale comics of Walt Kelly; the influence of Denslow's Oz illustrations or design aesthetic of The Wizard of Oz (1939); more unreal and visually alien settings informed by Sword & Sorcery comics rather than the historical or mythic sources of Tolkien.

Given they were contemporaries, why didn't D&D borrow more from this? I think in some of the less than serious aspects of classic D&D, it did. It may have influences some of the visuals as well. But as a game that arose from wargaming there was always a thread of verisimilitude or equipment fixation that runs counter to this freewheeling psychedelic adventure vibe.

On Fantasy Naming

Since I read Lin Carter's worldbuilding advice in Imaginary Worlds, at least, I've had an interest in names and neologisms in settings. I certainly have an interest in the "conlang" end of things--the world of Professors Barker and Tolkien appeal to me--but I don't think it's necessary to invent a language or even partial devise one to have character and place names that seem plausibly like they might arise from a an actual language.

Carter points out in his essay, names need to have an appropriateness to them. He uses the example of Stonehenge (the location), and asks the reader to imagine it was named Piccadilly. Stonehenge seems a much more appropriate name for the place, not the least because it has "stone" as a component. Obviously, the "fit" of a name depends on preconceptions arising from one's native language, but also one's personal preferences. There are people that feel Clark Ashton Smith was horrible at invented names, and plenty (Carter included) who think he was a master of them.

In coming up with names I try to first consider this aspect of appropriateness: What vibe do I want the name or names to convey? The second thing I try to do is give them a sense of linguistic cohesiveness, as if they might come from the same language. 

For the imperial Vokun in Strange Stars, I wanted them to have names that suggested a tradition-bound, decadent, warrior culture. I thought longer names with some "heavier" (to the English speaker) sounds would fit the bill. I wound up using a list of Old Avestan names as my base, adding in some names from other sources, mixing and matching syllables and selecting mostly longer ones that I further tweaked to taste. Online name generators that accept a list of words as an input are good for inspiration, but they seldom provide a lot of "keepers" without tweaking. I wound up with names like this: Artazosthra, Ishramis, Jannaxa, Valakasta, Vahupareshta, Zrayangashamesh.

For my as yet unnamed science fantasy setting, I wanted most of the human names to have an easy and obvious rhythm and length for English speakers, but not generally be actual (or at least common) English names. the naming styles of Edmond Hamilton and Jack Vance were particular influences here, leading to names like: Glattis Malva, Godo Shrune, Yreul Dahut, and Festeu Harfo. The place names similarly were devised to be like English place names, but not actually be English place names.

The names of the nonhumans in this setting (like the various clades in the Strange Stars) had names suggesting they came from different languages:  hohmmkudhuk, ythlaxu, and hwaopt are "weird" in some way for English speakers, but trell and ieldra are much easier. Not every alien should have a name like something out of Marc Okrand's Klingon!

Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider. Carter's essay suggests things like trying to spread them out over the alphabet to make them distinct. 

Guns of Middle-earth

The Shire, particularly in the first published version of The Hobbit, has a number of (at the earliest) Victorianisms. I don't see why you couldn't run a sort of 19th Century version of Middle-earth that would make those not be anachronisms, or at least not as much of an anachronism, as we might want to not tie ourselves down to the feel of a specific part of the 19th Century.

The rangers of the North would be like Mountain men or frontier scouts.

Gondor might have the architecture and general vibe of Old Mexico or Spanish California.

And Mordor perhaps becomes some sort of Steampunk industrial nightmare.

Cinematic Superhero Rpg Universes

While we may be past the era of "peak television," we seem to be entering the era of peak superhero TV. The CW and HBOMax have got new DC shows, and Disney+ has the latest Marvel offerings. Then there's a few other things on Amazon Prime like The Boys and Invincible. The superhero dominance of the box office got put on hiatus by the pandemic, but it has gone on long enough now to get backlash.

All of this makes me wonder when we'll get a superhero rpg with more of a cinematic vibe, much in the the same way we got a number of rpgs with a "animated series" aesthetic (some of that could be pragmatic, though. There may be more artists able to do a cartoony style willing to work at rpg rates). Of course, you don't have to want for a new game to run a cinematic style campaign. You could even reboot an old campaign in a cinematic version.

What would "cinematic superhero universe" mean in a rpg context? I haven't really fully formulated an answer to that but their are some traits I can think of:

• Fewer superhumans (though they are getting more all the time!), particularly villains
• Lower power levels (in general), but...
• Fewer "skilled normal" masked heroes. (Captain America seems super-strong in the CMU; Falcon as more gadgets)
• Fewer secret identities, fewer masks
• Less colorful costumes
• A smaller array of possible origins
• Heroes more likely to engage in potentially lethal action

In general, cinematic universe changes seem similar to "ultimate universe" changes. They are more "realistic" versions of the characters.

What I Want in A Superhero Rpg

When it comes to superhero rpgs, I've played and enjoyed a few of them over the years starting with Villains & Vigilantes and going through the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game, DC Heroes rpg, Champions, GURPS Supers, and Mutants & Masterminds. I've owned and read numerous others, including Heroes Unlimited, Wild Talents, Silver Age Sentinels and ICONS. I'm about to give the Sentinel Comics rpg a whirl.

I don't think I've ever found the perfect supers game for me, though. At least, not perfect for what the 2021 version of me wants out of one. These are the things I think I'm looking for:

Low to Medium crunch. I'm not interested in rules heavier games like Champions or GURPS currently. I would suspect medium crunch games would probably give the best balance between covering what needs to be covered, but not doing too much.

Emulates comics. I'm interested in something that supports creating the sort of thing we see in comic books (or superhero film) not "a world with superheroes." Some of my following points sort of flow from this one.

"Every member of the Justice League gets to do something important." Older superhero games, to me, make the mistake of wanting to tailor attributes/power levels to benchmarks, winding up with disparate power levels. Sure, things like Karma/Hero Points address some of this, but in comics it mostly seems that power levels wind up being more about how characters tackle problems than whether they can tackle them. The Fantastic Four beats Dr. Doom, but so does the Punisher (or close enough). They just do it in different ways.

Heroic Normals are viable. Because of the ability score benchmarks, guys like Nick Fury or the Challengers of the Unknown tend to come out pretty samey in abilities because the normal end of the scale gets shortened. A system that gave them more variation would be nice. Of course, if you wanted a campaign of these folks, one could just play a nonsuperhero game, so this perhaps isn't as important to me as other points.

Variable Villains. Ever noticed how villains tend to be tougher or weaker depending on the hero or heroes their dealing with? I suppose it could be argued the heroes change and the villains stay the same, but anyway it might be nice if supers rpgs had mechanics for this difference.

Powers not overly detailed, but not quite freeform. Honestly, I lean toward more of a "just tell me what is does take", but you need to certain mechanics attached to powers to use them in the game, and you also need suggestions for people modeling powers, so for that it seems like completely freeform isn't the way to go. 

Supreme effort. This is one supers games seem to consistently pick up, but it bears repeating. There should be a means of a hero giving it that extra oomph in a dramatic moment.

There's probably something else I'm not thinking of, but that's all I've got now.

Bob Haney's Marvel Universe, A Comics Counterfactual

I've previously speculated in a couple of different ways about DC done in a Marvel manner, but it seemed like a good time to think about things in the other direction: what if somehow DC had managed to take over Marvel just as the Marvel Age was getting off the ground?

Talking about this with my friend and occasionally fellow blogger, Jim Shelley, we came up with several ideas, but since several came down to "Bob Haney," I figured that was worth a post in and of itself. This, of course, is just idle speculation, but I could see it informing a very interesting supers rpg campaign. Maybe it will look that way to you, too.

The Hulk

In this timeline, the "hero and villain in one man!" dynamic that Haney brought to Eclipso (first appearing in May of 1963) will instead get applied to Marvel's Jekyll and Hyde character, the Hulk. The Hulk would retain his more villainous "gray hulk" persona through the entirety of his short run, and Banner would be his antagonist. Just like in the real world, this series doesn't last long, so in Tales to Astonish in 1964, Haney and artist Ramona Fradon bring the camp and whimsy they would have brought to Metamorpho to the Hulk. Bruce Banner becomes stuck in Hulk form, but still tries to woo Betty Ross, while being under the thumb of her father who ostensibly has Banner on a short lease "for his own good," but doesn't hesitate to exploit his abilities.

The X-Men

"Dig this crazy teen scene!" The X-men had a rocky start, so Haney was given title, along with a new artist, Nick Cardy--the original Teen Titans team in our history. Haney made the X-Men "hip" teens and gave them new foes like the Mad Mod, and more than one motorcycle gang. The male X-Men often refer to Marvel Girl as "Marvel-chick" as a term of endearment.

The Haney/Cardy team kept the X-Men from going all reprints, though the title wouldn't really catch on until the arrival of the New X-Men, same as in the history we know.

Knacks or Gifts

I haven't done the work, but it seems like to me that it would be fairly easy, using one or another of the available 5e "race creation" rules sets to essentially make super-powered humans. I don't mean in the costumed adventure sense necessarily but it terms of that branch of fantasy where a lot of people are born with some sort of singular, inherent gift or power.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon in fantasy literature, but is less common, I think, in rpgs. In fantasy novels that utilize this trope (much like in superhero or psychic hero media) gifts didn't to get categorized, and maybe these types of gifts would run in families, creating lineages or ancestries. 

This sort of setup would allow you to get rid of the standard D&D idea of "race" with all its baggage and potentially suggest a bit of a weirder world where magic caused mutations or individuals with these magical gifts became sort of a society set apart (not unlike mutants in marvel, but also not unlike adventurers in D&D).

Tenet and Further Meditations on a 4-D War

I saw Tenet last night, and I thought it was good, but I am typically a fan of Nolan's work. If you aren't I can't say you would like this one more than the others. It most resembles Inception with a plot involving a degree of spy fiction doings, overlaid with a science fictional conceit that is a strong, visual representation.

The film underscores nicely--and it's something I've talked about here before (this post is really just a reinforcement of those ideas, so check it out)--is how time travel/manipulation is how a temporal cold war provides a great set up for espionage paranoia. Shifts in allegiance and betrayal can have retrospective as well as prospective effects, and individuals changing over time can bring them in direct conflict with themselves in a very literal way. Your worst enemy could indeed be yourself.

Futility and fatalism, sometimes and aspect of spy stories, are played up in this sort of setting. If the best case scenario is that the world doesn't change drastically, then the protagonists are always stuck fighting for the status quo, no matter what the personal cost.

Exploration and Science Fiction Settings

 On a pulp science fiction reading kick lately (mostly stuff out of Planet Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories), I've come to conclusions about something in the structure of these stories that has previously bothered me. It's not uncommon for these stories to take place on a "Io no one has ever explored" or "a seldom visited Ceres" or the like, despite the fact the story suggests fairly developed civilization or at least trade lanes around these bodies. Why is (for instance) Ganymede a thriving colony world and Callisto unexplored?

The problem is not so much with the stories as with my expectations of them. I'm used to thinking space as divided into explored and explored territory, something like Star Trek or the like: here is civilized space, there's a border, there's the hinterlands. Sure, you might have outposts in the "wilderness" or "uncharted worlds" in otherwise fairly civilized areas, but mostly the unexplored is demarcated from the known. It's model inherited, perhaps, from simplified views of the Age of Exploration and the discovery of the New World.

These pulp studies model themselves on somewhat more modern conceptions. I think we can loosely place in them in three categories:

• The Jim Bridger Model: I'm wandering around areas others have passed through, seeing things they missed.

• The Amundsen/Hillary Model: Let us prepare to go to this place no one has yet been able to reach.

• The Shipwreck/Crashed Bush Pilot Model: People avoid this place because there isn't much to recommend it. I'm hear and I don't want to be, and I've found something weird.

Model Three and One mostly differ by intention, and can overlap.

These three models suggest a setting that is mostly explored, or at least explored around the edges and the primary exploration of the current age is "filling in the blank spots" to varying degrees.

Their are obvious parallels to traditional D&D style fantasy settings. The classic "wilderness exploration" game looks more like Star Trek, but the dungeoncrawl sort of game is more filling in the gaps exploration.

In making a sci-fi setting it seems to me you'd want to think about what sort of exploration you want to have (if that's going to be a focus) and the implications of the size and layout of setting "space."

The Metaphysics of D&D

"The wearer of the amulet is filled with Chaotic Evil, which is how I grew up so…"
    - Hunson Abedeer, Adventure Time!

In L. Sprague de Camp's 1942 novella The Undesired Princess the protagonist is transported to a world that follows Aristotlean logic, where everything is either one color or another with no mixing and shapes, besides the animals are all simple: The princess has hair that is primary color red; tree leaves are regular polgons of blue or yellow.

D&D as written often describes a world just as foreign as that. Even ignoring things that you could argue are merely abstractions for the sake of the game (like movement), you still have things like alignment (and in some editions alignment language), leveling, people with classes vs. nonclassed NPCs, clerical healing and the like.

I've read things in the past that posited a world where D&Disms got rationalized a bit (I've maybe written one), but discussion yesterday with a reference to the perennial "baby orc" argument made we think it would be interesting to throw rationalization somewhat out the window and play in a setting where the world just sort of runs on D&D (meta)physics.

We're talking about a world where some people start to develop superhuman resistance to injury and various abilities--and these keep increasing so long as they acquire treasure from underground hordes. Where there's some sort of metaphysical orientation to the universe that leads people to automatically acquire a language recognized by every member of the club when they join up. A world where sentients with lifetimes much longer that humans just can never learn to be better than humans in arms or magic. Stuff like that.

"But no!" You'll protest. "That would be really silly!" 

Sure, but isn't that often the case with D&D?

See?

And this would actually elevate the silliness by making it a thought experiment.

All kidding aside, it perhaps wouldn't be the stuff of a long campaign, but I don't think the implications of that sort of thing would be interesting to think about.

Some Thoughts on Science Fiction Settings

Thinking about science fiction settings in rpgs (and in film and television which I think is the biggest influence on rpg sci-fi settings) I think that two important factors are scale and frame. Scale is the size of the setting, not necessarily in absolute terms (though maybe), in narrative terms. Frame is a descriptor or genre of the typical types of stories the setting supports. The two factors are not independent or exclusive.

Here are the frames I have thought of with a media representative. There are likely more that slipped my mind:

• Crime/Hard-boiled Mystery (Outland) - Hard people doing hard things...in space
• Exploration, Pulp (John Carter) - A stranger meets a strange land or lands
• Exploration, Mystery/Horror (Alien) - we've found something anomalous and now it might kill us.
• Exploration, Realistic  - (can't think of film here) - Alien planets are mostly inhospitable, talking to other species is hard!
• Exotic Ports of Call (Star Trek) - every week another world, another adventure
• Outpost (Babylon 5) - Everybody comes to Rick's
• Pioneers (Earth 2) - A little bit of exploration, but mostly we're putting down roots
• World-trotting (Star Wars) - Constant motion; as many exotic backdrops as possible
• Galaxy Wrecking (Guardians of the Galaxy) - the universe is vast and wild

I am probably missing some very realistic genres or some "ten minutes into the future stuff"/mild cyberpunk stuff, but I'm thinking mainly here of science fiction settings that include space travel. Some of the categories are also broader than others, too. 

Why isn't Star Trek (for instance) Exploration, Pulp? Despite it's mission statement, the Enterprise mostly seems to go to places people have gone before. They do very little first contact. Their activities harken back to pulp stories about places that are known, but perhaps little understood. Exploration, Pulp in my formulation is really the descendant of the Lost World novel. 

Here are the Scales in order of increasing size:

• Ship/Station
• Planet/Megastructure
• Orbital System (this could be either a group of moons or artificial satellites)
• Solar System
• Near/Few Star Systems
• Several Star Systems
• Many Star Systems/Galaxy
• Galaxies+

There is sometimes the issue of "visible scale." A setting may technically have a large scale than what the characters typically interact with. In general, I think the commonly visible scale is most important for fit with frames.

The following frames seem to go best with smaller scales: Crime/Hard-boiled Mystery, Exploration Pulp, Exploration Mystery/Horror, Exploration Realistic, Outpost, and Pioneers.

These frames seem to me to go best with large scales: Exotic Ports of Call, World-trotting, and Galaxy Wrecking.

We Have Always Lived in the Megadungeon

 I have on occasion riffed settings which were small or at least smaller than the typical D&Dish setting. This goes against the grain of published settings which tend to want to give you big, as in a world big, and perhaps classic play which starts circumscribed, but is about expanding the frontier.

There is one archetypal D&Dish experience that doesn't quite work this way and that's the megadungeon. Certainly exploring the megadungeon means opening up more area, but the scale is so much smaller generally than the hexcrawl. Distance is not a primary factor.

It strikes me that the dungeoncrawl could easily combined with the player's living space. Megadungeons under towns are pretty common, but then the town becomes a place of relative safety and refuge that may or may not enter into actual play as anything more than "base camp." What if the megadungeon space and the living space bled into each other? Like say the PCs lived in a place like Gormenghast or Xuchotl from "Red Nails," or the starship Warden, and the exploration was progressively moving into rooms, levels, sections or whatever that were unknown? (You could perhaps include small settings with actually dungeons/underground spaces in this. See MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblins.)

This could be combined quite easily with the mystery sandbox. Indeed, the incremental accumulation of vast wealth is probably a bad goal for a smaller setting of this sort. Not that money might not be a motivator, but the real big payoffs should only come at the end.

Obviously, this sort of setting would differ from the standard D&D approach even without the downplaying of vast wealth. Parties would likely be less eclectic. The length of the campaign is probably somewhat limited without a change in approach unless the structure they reside in is really weird, but I think it would make for interesting low level play.

Weird Revisited: The Weird and The Unusual

This post first appeared in May of 2017...

 

The difficulty with dealing with the fantastic is too-often repeated tropes/ideas become cliches, and kind of unfantastic. The D&D (read: prevailing) view of elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. has thoroughly mundanified and Gygaxian-realismed these things into yawns for a lot of people. Now, it's resonable to ask just how fantastic an element needs to be in a game about killing stuff and taking its treasure, but feeling burned out on the standard tropes has led to a lot of folks reaching for the Weird. It's funny that almost 100 year-old tropes can seem fresh and untrod territory, but fantasy is nothing if not a conservative genre, I guess.

The trouble is, those elements might get a little stale for some people, too, with repetition. So there's the New Weird or gonzo, of course, but I'd also like to suggest that maybe things don't have to be wholly "new." They just have to be a bit surprising, and those surprises can each be employed a small number of times so they stay fresh.

I think looking back to mythology and folklore helps a lot, because there are a lot of forgotten elements in those that make no sense from the modern perspective, and so have tended to be dropped from retellings. Medieval bestiaries are good, too.

Here's an interesting thing I came across a couple of years ago: "mundane" animals as treasure guardians:

Washington Irving notes the folk-belief that the spiritual guardians of buried treasure could take on the form of animals, such as toads. “Wild vines entangled the trees, and flaunted in their faces; brambles and briers caught their clothes as they passes; the garter snake glided across their path; the spotted toad hopped and waddled before them; and the restless cat-bird mewed at them from every thicket. Had Wolfert Webber [a man in search of treasure, but who was unschooled in folk-magic] been deeply read in romantic legend, he might have fancied himself entering upon forbidden enchanted ground; or that these were some of the guardians set to keep watch upon buried treasure.” Diedrich Knickerbocker (pseud.), “The Adventures of the Black Fisherman,” Tales of a Traveller (1825), 2: 356.

So replace a dragon or some other "fantastic" creature with just an animal, acting kind of strange and maybe able to talk. Adventure Time! sort of (I'm sure unknowingly) uses this trope with a frog that serves as a portal to lumpy space:

Monsters that want to chat, instead of kill the party immediately, are also a mythological staple that is not as often done in rpgs (though I try to do a bit of this in Mortzengersturm). This one can hard because PCs are a stabby lot, but it can help put them in the old school mindset of the goal being to get treasure, not necessarily kill things. A loquacious monster is a challenge, not an encounter.

Finally I would suggest the behavioral reskin (this is sort of a broader application of the talking monster principle). We're all familiar with putting new flesh on a set of stats, but a more subtler reskin will sometimes surprise players more. If goblins aren't following their Gygaxian role, but instead all consumed with building/repairing some ancient machine, maybe that hooks the PCs interest? Maybe it's only me, but I think backwards talking derro that can only be understood if you look in a mirror as they speak, move a known monster away from an evil dwarf back to the Shaverian paranoid weirdness.

Those are just some examples, which may or may not work for you, but I'm sure you can think of your own. Instead of trying hard to make things fresh and new, just make them a little odd.