A More Civilized Age

Art by Donato Giancola

I'm all for "lived-in futures" and dusty, grubby space Westerns, but I feel like there are some science fiction aesthetics that don't get their due. And I'm not talking gleaming, featureless rocket hulls and silver lamé outfits. I mean the more refined, swashbuckling, adventure film derived style.

Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon was probably the biggest feature in promoting this style, but it shows up in other places like Cody Starbuck by Howard Chaykin:

And in Milady 3000 and i Briganti by Magnus (Roberto Raviola):

It's not really absent from the Star Wars saga. It just shows up more in the prequels than in the original films. I think there's a hint of it in Lynch's Dune and the SyFy mini-series version--though it is sorely lacking from the drear Villeneuve version.

The Adventure-Point Crawl Campaign

My kid has been rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which means I have been rewatching it, and that gave me a roleplaying game related idea, not so much in regard to its content, but really its structure. 

The creation of the fantasy epic, such a staple of fantasy media, has always been hard in games because historically, attempts to do so have led to drastically limited options for player agency. At best, the Adventure Path that is the modern descendant of the Dragonlance modules tends to be really linear. At worst, it's an outright railroad.

I don't think it has to be that way, though, but it would require some discussion and buy-in from players and a good session zero. Here's how I think it could work:

1. The GM tells the players the campaign setting and situation and suggests (but not mandates) a Quest, perhaps. Or perhaps, the players and the GM sort of make that up together? The "Quest" is the desired outcome: defeat the Firelord in the case of The Last Airbender or defeat Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

2. The player's make up characters, finalize the Quest, and plan the steps they think they will need to achieve it. The Quest needn't be etched in stone. It's possible the campaign as it unfolds might lead to a different goal, e.g.: Babylon 5 was our last, best hope for peace. It failed. But in the year of the Shadow War, it became something greater: our last, best hope for victory. It's even conceivable PCs might switch sides. Anyway, there should also be more character specific goals woven in, not just big campaign ones.

3. The GM plots those steps both geographically on a pointcrawl map and node-wise for a campaign structure map and makes clocks of antagonist/rival actions and other events. It's important to note here that the steps which will become nodes aren't plotted scenes. They aren't linked to each other in a linearly (or strictly linear) fashion for the most part, and they aren't supposed to go any certain way. Nothing is "supposed" to happen. In Avatar, Aang has to master the 4 elements. That goal could have played out in a lot of different ways. In fact, it takes two potential teachers before he ultimately gets to learn firebending. Localizing potential places where the goals can be achieved is important, because fantasy epics tends to cover a lot of geography. They aren't just dramas or soap operas to be played out in a limited location.

4. The players choose where to go and have other adventures and encounters along the way due to those choices. This may call for a bit of separation of player and character knowledge, but even without that, I feel like it works if the players just know the likely location of achieving one of their goals. Circumstances may mean it doesn't work out. The world doesn't stay static. But any unsuccessful attempt to achieve a goal at a point should always yield clues to a goal--either another one or the one they failed to achieve. In this sense, it's like running a mystery; clues to the next goal location shouldn't be hard to find.

5. Players can alter goals in response to events or their desires.  New point crawl "maps" may need to be generated in response. When new goal nodes come online, new hooks and areas of interest need to be populated around them. It's the "story" goals embedded in sandboxy locations that makes this much less linear than an adventure path.

6. Repeat until the PCs achieve the goal or the clocks expire and a new status quo (and possibly campaign) is established. What if the hobbits fail to destroy the ring before Sauron's victory? Well, the story needn't be over.

This approach doesn't feature the degree of session to session freedom of the completely sandbox game, it's true. However, the player collaboration in the planning phase ensures it's not a GM enforced story. Indeed, both players and GM will be surprised by the final shape of the emergent story. 

While this may be a bit of a novel approach (at least I haven't seen anyone ever talk about it) ideas about "node-based scenario design" and "mission-based adventures" have existed for a long time. What this does to enhance those is get player input prior to the missions and link the nodes in a grander campaign.

Arena Assault

I completely forgot to write up our last session (two Sundays ago) in our Land of Azurth campaign. The party was still trying to figure out a way to free Bellona, War Lady of Sang, from the control of Loom. Their attempt at subterfuge hadn't played out the way they thought, so they shifted tactics and cased the place for an assault under cover of night.

The were pretty sure Bellona was being housed in the building behind the arena, but the means of spying (using Waylon's owl familiar) were insufficient to get a real sense of the inside of the place. Still, they are confident in their abilities.

The sneaking across the deserted arena is easy, but they must have tripped some alarm, because an image of a being called itself Loom appears before them when they reach the door and demands they bow down in reverence. Most of the part goes along, but Dagmar views it as sacrilege and won't do it. Loom allows his lackeys to attack first: Helmarg the troll woman and her ogre bruisers move in to attack--but Loom says this match won't be to the death.

These guys are tougher than the party anticipated, but after a battle that saw Waylon fall twice only to be revived by Dagmar healing magics, they finally prevail.

When they still won't bow to Loom he unleashes some sort of poison cloud on them. They still isn't enough to take them out, thanks to good saving throws all around. After looting their unconscious foes, they prepare to move into the complex. 

A Taxonomy of Fantastic Lands

Thinking about the phylogenetic connection between the Lost Worlds of Victorian adventure fiction and the planetary romances of last century led me to an overall classification scheme for all sorts of unusual/fantastic lands or country within large settings (whether that larger setting be an approximation of the real world or a secondary, fantasy world). This was quickly done, so it might bear further though. 

The Strange Country: The Strange Country probably is an outgrowth of The Odyssey and Medieval travelogues. It is a place definitely situated in the wider world and generally not differing in its physical laws but possessed of its least one unusual feature whether than be a geographic anomaly, cultural eccentricity, or weird animal. Most of the various city-states of Barsoom, and the countries of Vance's Tschai or Raymond's Mongo fall into this category. The "Planet of Hats" TV trope is the Strange Country on a planetary scale. The Strange Country differs from the more mundane foreign land by the degree of exaggeration in its unique thing and by the fact that beyond that thing, it isn't usual that foreign in terms of culture, language, etc.

The Lost World: The Lost World is more remote and more divergent from the outside world that the Strange Country. Most often it's an isolated pocket of one or more elements of the world's past, but it could be completely alien. Perhaps its most defining feature is that it is typically a hidden place and is much harder to reach than the strange country. Maple White Land of Doyle's The Lost World is the prototypical example, but Tarzan encounters a lot of these "lost valleys" from Crusader to remnants to lost Atlantean cities. The dividing line between the weirder Strange Countries and Lost Worlds isn't entirely clear, but if the place is widely known to scholars just seldom visited, it's a Strange Country. If no one knew it existed or it was believed to be mythical, it's a Lost World.

Fairyland: The Fairyland is a region defined by its fantasticalness. Physical laws may be very different from the surrounding world. If it has contact with the wider world if is limited and geographical conscribed. Often though, it will be as remote as the Lost World--even more so, perhaps, because it may not strictly be placeable on a map, existing in an extradimensional space. Literal Fairy lands are generally Fairylands, but so is the demonic subworlds of a number of Michael Shea's fantasy novels, Hades in Greek Myth, or Wackyland in Warner Bros. cartoons featuring the Dodo.

What I Like

In this DIY rpg world, there are a lot of factions, cliques, theorists, declarations of movements, manifestos, categorizations. I'm not really adherent to any of these except in the loosest since of being an rpg enthusiast of a certain vintage, preferring games of a more traditional tabletop lineage (in which I would include most rpgs) rather than strictly story games, and being a member of the Hydra Co-op and enjoying the gaming material written and run by my fellow Hydra heads. I do have things that I like in games and try to produce in the games I run.

It should go without saying, but to make it clear, I don't necessarily think these things are better (though sometimes maybe I do!), they just happen to be my preference. Starting loosely with a list that gets quoted a lot in Old School and related circles that I believe was created by Scrap Princess allow, here's what I like:

1. Interact with the world. I want players to approach the world as if their characters are inhabiting it, not as a gloss over a rules set or just flavor. The world, however, isn't merely composed of (imaginary) physical objects and locations but of (imaginary) social relationships, and conventions of genre or setting.

2. There is nothing that is supposed to happen, but some outcomes are more likely given (1). The story is in the hands of the players, but the world is going to dictate some more likely outcomes of actions. To give absolute, unfettered agency is to violate the first principle, but there is always a high degree of variation within a broad outcome, and the player actions and preferences are going to determine how it all turns out.

3. The player is an actor but also a participant in a social activity. I don't mean actor in the arch sense of the stereotyped thespian behavior, but I mean that the player has the roll of portraying a character, but also in considering (in a somewhat metagame fashion) what makes sense for that character within the larger context of the "story" unfolding. (And by invoking "story" here, I don't mean in a preconceived way. I mean: given the inputs of character, setting, situation, and genre, what seems cool to the player to have happen?)   This differs from the stance of strictly playing the character, wherein the player gives no consideration to the big picture, which can lead (in my view) to a player becoming too involved in the character and viewing the character's losses or setbacks as a loss or setback for themselves. Also, "it's what my character would do" can lead to disruptive behavior at the table.

4. It's the player's job to make your character interesting and to make the game interesting for yourself and others. This follows logically, I think, from (3) and (1) and leads directly to (7) below. The GM is also a player in this regard.

5. The character sheet is the mediator between theory and result. Plans and actions should be conceived in line with (1) and a lesser extend (3), but the mechanics of the game should support the actions players are likely to engage in. The character sheet as the rules-based abstraction of the character's capabilities ought to have some role in that, otherwise why not just play pretend and dispense with it?

6. Player skill/talent is important. The way I see rpgs as "winnable" is not primarily in character survival or successfully achieving goals (though those things are far from insignificant) but rather in making the experience more fun or cooler. I like skills and related systems some old schoolers dislike, but I think good, clever roleplay and tactics--defined as ideas that are not merely sensible or logical in the abstract but are also entertaining, spur/inspire players, and show clear consideration and interaction with the sustained, consistent, imaginary world we are involved with--are crucial.

7. Sometimes your character will die, but it's seldom interesting to die pointlessly. Death can be an important possible outcome in rpgs and I don't generally favor removing it as an option (though perhaps some games make a case for this), but I don't find pointless death as a result of computer game style "gotchas" or super-swingy rolls fulfilling. It's more gamey perhaps than I typically want. Often, another sort of setback other than "start over" is a better option to me.

8. It's fun to try new things. New settings, new mechanics--all worth a go. I don't think there is a particular formula of the type of game I want to spend all my time with. To me, it would be akin to eating the same thing every day for lunch. It gets old. Sometimes that even means sampling something you already know you aren't going to like most of the time to see if you enjoy partaking of it rarely.

Witchmire Rumors

 A few rumors regarding the Witchmire on Gnydrion:

• “Does the Witchmire seem forlorn in aspect? Well, so it is. But it is also locale of historic importance as the site of the Landfall, which is to say, the place of humankin’s advent on Gnydrion.” 
• “I take you for experienced travelers, inured to the variegated configurations human appetite and proclivity may take, so I will speak with candor unadorned by circumlocution: The prominent families of Gamory are perverse. Their cult seeks congress of a carnal nature with ieldra.”
• “The witch Heth has come to live on an island surrounded by treacherous quag. She wears the semblance of a crone, but in her true form she is youthful and very beautiful. She holds a treasure of jewels and fine trinkets lavished upon her by wealthy suitors in her homeland.”
• “Last winter, a mushroom-hunter of Draum made it known he had happened by a Black Obelisk with an aperture where before there had been scatheless stone. Word perhaps traveled as far south as Ascolanth, for scant months ago a party led by a trio of sorcerers arrived. They hired a guide and undertook to find the Obelisk. None of that expedition returned.”
• “Are you familiar with the ditty? It speaks of the disappearance and looked-for triumphant return of  Prince Wanaxandor. He found it expedient to flee more civilized regions after his ill-planned efforts to overthrow the rule of his uncle, the Panarch. He is popularly supposed by rustics and simpletons to be in hiding, gathering a force armed with dire alien armaments, plundered from the Black Obelisks for a repeated attempt.”
• “Wollusk is no more in the grip of rogues meager of scruple than most habitations similarly situated far from civilization, but Zeniba and her Devils have a zeal in the application of violence that borders on obsessive. My admonition: watch yourselves and do not attract undue notice!”
• “A famed medium from the South has recently arrived. She offers intercession for the folk of the region with the wrathful presences of the Mire. She asks no compensation at present for her services. Popular opinion is divided between those that regard her as a fool and those that judge her insane. I am broader of imagination than most and accord both concepts a measure of validity. Be that as it may, I suppose she will need escorts in her endeavors.”

Beetles & Birds

Beetle Milk Mead 

A beverage favored in the west of Gnydrion, beetle milk mead is made from the fermentation of a sugary liquid ("the milk") produced by a species of beetle native to the titanic trees of the coastal forests. These colonials insects have members of their community who function as living casks for their hive. They gorge themselves on food and store the liquid they produce in their abdomens so they distend to an incredible degree, having the appearance when full of plump fruit with a diameter as wide as the length of the first digit of a man's thumb. The milk is harvested from the engorged beetles and fermented. The resulting liquid is sometimes added to beer to sweeten it but can also be mixed with the local liquor to render that more enjoyable, as well.

The beetles are farmed by placing thick slices of the bark of their favored trees into beetlehouses. This practiced has allowed the production and enjoyment of beetle milk mead to spread to places where the trees do not grow.

Quaklu

Quaklus are the ubiquitous saddle birds of the Northwest region. It is assumed by most learned folk of the modern age, that the birds are a result of the puissant science of the ancients, though the pedants of the hwaopt have alleged that the quaklus are a distinct lineage from the creatures of humankin's homeworld and so must have been taken from some other world in the past.

Whatever their origins some quaklu, considered atavistic in the modern parlance, are more than just cunning animals and are capable of speech.  The accidental acquisition of such a gifted fowl is considered an unlucky turn due to their willingness to make their thoughts and wishes known--and unwelcome trait in a riding beast.

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.

Into the Arena

 Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last Sunday with the party still trying to find the power core within the crashed spacecraft. It turns out there weren't any more major threats after the undead spacemen--just a will o' wisp and some poltergeist, so it's mostly down to doing a thorough search. The party finds the core, but they are (quite reasonably) afraid of some sort of malign energy or radiation off it, so they choose to handle it with mage hands. They carry it back to the Church of Clockwork without (apparent) incident. 

Viola thanks them for their help, but now she has another mission for them. She needs them to Bellona, the Battle Princess of Sang, out of the arena of Junk City. She's fallen under the control of the Loom--the mad and bad duplicate of the mind of Mirabilis Lum. She leaves it to the party to determine how they do it, but she assures them it's necessary.

The next day, the party disguises themselves and heads over to the arena to check things out. Waylon disguises himself as a theatrical gladiatorial combat promoter from Yanth Country and Erekose pretends to be a fighter. They talked to the trollish emcee of the arena, but things go badly when Dagmar gets insulted and snaps back at the caustic creature. 

They do get to check out the games, though, and they see the fierce, silver-masked, woman warrior, who they are sure is Bellona.

Sail the Microversal Seas!

Artist Jeff Nelson has imagined Marvel's Microverse from the Micronauts comic as islands in a sea. Only tangentially related, but this reminds me how the Microverse would be a good Spelljammer setting.

Dead Spacemen and the Clockwork Princess

Last week, I forgot the session report on our last Land of Azurth 5e game, so here it is. The party was still in the labyrinthine, ramshackle of Junk City. The former Mayor of Rivertown, Gladhand, though ailing from a mysterious attack was able to lead them to where Viola, the Clockwork Princess of Yanth Country (who has been absent for quite some time) was hiding out. Turns out it's in a shabby temple to Clockwork--but that's really just a front for her operation to build--well, some sort of weapon, she didn't elaborate to fight the Wizard and his shadowy allies.

The party is a bit nervous about this as last time they saw her (in the future) she was crazy and on a rampage. They ask a lot of questions to probe for signs. She seems her same old self though, and she has a mission for them. She needs them to still a power source from a crashed spaceship to power her weapon.

The party agrees, but later maybe they wish they hadn't as the remnant of the ship's crew are undead. At least one of them a fairly powerful undead with the power to drain life. It's a close call for Erekose, but the group wears the creature down. 

They still haven't found the power core, though.

The Mixed Up Setting

 

Sometimes, always with an eye toward being able to use the published material for some well-supported game or another, I get (possibly mad) idea to take parts of one setting and combine with another so that the result wouldn't immediately be recognizable.

Ideas I've had in the past playing a wuxia game using the map of Middle-Earth (and MERP materials), The Known World replaced with Talislanta equivalents, or Creation from Exalted, but built as a D&D setting (using published 5e material).

I've never done any of these as at the end of the day the work required wouldn't be that much less than making up my own stuff in some instances, but it's still an idea that pops up from time to time.

Swords Against Sorcery: Archetypes

 In the game I'm working on, all PCs are defined in part by two Archetypes. These represent types of characters found in comic book Sword & Sorcery. In game terms, they provide bonuses to Attributes and Domains and also special abilities. 

Each archetype has a primary and secondary Attribute and Domain. Should a player pick two Archetypes with the same primary Attributes/Domains they can use that one and their choice of the two Archetypes secondary Attributes/Domains. The character also gains the Expertises and Talents of each Archetype.

While the Archetypes remain a work in progress, below is a sampling of the ones I've come up with. At this point, the plan is not to give any description of them beyond the abilities they provide, letting players interpret them as they will.

ACOLYTE

Attributes: Presence (Intellect)
Domains: Words (Sorcery)
Expertise: Religion
Talent: Divine Favor. Make a successful roll to call upon the aid of your gods or guiding spirit. Any successes can be used like Momentum to aid you or another hero for one scene. It does not add to your Momentum pool. 

BARBARIAN

Attributes: Daring (Instinct)

Domains: Wilds (Deeds)

Expertise: Survival or Hunting

Talent: Like A Jungle Cat. Gain an additional die when detecting dangers in the wilderness or when trying to sneak up on a foe.

COURTIER

Attributes: Instinct (Presence)

Domains: City (Words)

Expertise: Persuasion

Talent: We Were Close Once. Once per session, succeed at a Persuasion Challenge to create an NPC and/or declare a recently introduced one a former intimate acquaintance. A failed roll means they now harbor some ill-will against you.

DABBLER

Attributes: Intellect (Instinct)

Domains: City (Sorcery)

Expertise: Occult Lore

Talent: Just What I was Looking For. Add an extra die to any roll related to quickly finding a particular magical formula, ritual, or piece of information in a tome or even library.

GALLANT

Attributes: Presence (Daring)

Domains: City (Swords)

Expertise: Persuasion

Talent: Flashy. Use Presence instead of Might as an attribute for melee fighting when you have an audience but deal one less Blow.  

REAVER

Attributes: Daring (Cunning)

Domains: Deeds (Swords)

Expertise: Seamanship

Talent: Bloody-Handed Buccaneer. Apply your Seamanship Expertise to shipboard combats and to attempts to intimidate foes or lead pirate crews on the high seas.

WARRIOR

Attributes: Might (Daring)

Domains: Swords (Wilds)

Expertise: choice of a weapon

Talent: Valor. Spend 1 Momentum to shake off any Fear condition in a combat situation.

Lord of the Rings and the Beginning of "Serious" Fantasy

Hear me out!

I'm aware, course, that there are many works that we would now call fantasy that predate Lord of the Rings, but the conception of fantasy as a specific genre post-dates those works. The conception of fantasy as a genre grew out of fairy stories, and so what I mean here is a work distinct from fairy tale that nevertheless contains the elements of fairy tales: elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. The works of Howard, Smith, and others would be been thought of as adventure stories, weird tales, and the like when first published.

Even still, there are older works that that meet that criteria: MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, some of Baum's works, and Dunsany's. But all the works I can think of that do they aren't obviously children's works have strong elements of whimsy, irony, and often outright humor. Even Tolkien's own The Hobbit could be so characterized. Lord of the Rings, while not humorless, is much more serious business, though perhaps not as much as Anderson's The Broken Sword, which closely follows it.

Did this seriousness play a role in it's centrality to the emerging genre? I think a bit, though it might be easy to overstate the importance of that one factor. I do think that with Howard and Tolkien sort of being the prevailing template for fantasy has served to influence the tone of a lot of works that followed and the games that inspired them.

Things to Read If the Spirit Moves You

 I've gotten into 2 good fantasy novels with connections to British esoteric spiritual belief at the turn of the 20th Century which are both good reads and good gaming inspiration.

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

I've praised Rajaniemi's science fiction work before. Here he goes for an alt-history and alternate physics in a spy-fi story set in 1938 were Summerland (the 4-dimensional space where the dead go) s being exploited with etheric technology and Britain and the Soviet Union are involved in an escalating proxy war in the Spanish Revolution. Behind all that are mysteries regarding the afterlife: where do souls come from? And why isn't Summerland full of ghostly civilizations? (Not all these questions are answered!) The spy stuff reminds me of a couple of novels by Tim Powers (particularly Declare) but the very science fictional rigor applied to the mechanics of afterlife physics is all Rajaniemi's own.

The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

Gilman is another author I've praised previously. In this one, a young couple in Victorian London gets involved in an attempt by a occult cabal's ambitious attempt to visit Mars by means of astral projection, but in doing so they make themselves targets in a magical war being waged between occult societies. One of the highlights here for me is how magic is portrayed in a way that is powerful, but somewhat subtle. A duel between magicians involves bystanders controlled or charmed into hurling insults or punches rather than mages hurling bolts of glowing energy.

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!

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.

Swords Against Sorcery: Showdown in The Tower of Eyes!

Last weekend, we continued the playtest of Swords Against Sorcery, the Bronze Age comic book Swords & Sorcery system I have been working on. Here are the characters in the session:

• Zanjar, Gallant Thief (Tug)
• Thunda, Barbarian Acolyte (Andrea)
• Korag, Primitive Warrior (Jason)
• Kharron, Cursed Warrior (Paul

When last we left our heroes they were facing the mind-boggling inner dimension of the Tower of Eyes. They had to travel through this space presumably to reach the sanctum of the wizard Narznn Gath who had tried to kill them. Everyone had to succeed at a Tough (2 successes) Instinct+Sorcery roll to be able to navigate the space without error. Several didn't succeed and so received a "Confused" penalty condition when trying to navigate. Luckily, they have Thunda's instincts, honed to the Shaman's Realm, which allowed her to be their guide.

They had barely began their descent when a strangely doubled bellow assailed them from all directions. They hastened on, only to have a hulking monster appear some distance below them--they materialize on the catwalk in front of them! 

The creature named himself in both his voices at once: Y'gnathra! And he announced his intention to kill them! Y'gnathra's stats in the system were:

This made him a formidable opponent! The player's were going to have to be smart and luck. They had get Momentum (often by taking risky rerolls by "Tempting the Gods") and by spending that Momentum.

Kharron, unafraid of any demon, strode forward, slashing his blade. Against the odds, he scored a blow. Thunda followed that up by calling upon ancestral spirits to bedevil the creature, hampering its attacks, but it still sent Kharron sprawling with a backhand blow, and a combined attack by Zanjar and Korag to blind it and push it from the walkway failed.

Y'gnathra proved able to transport quickly from one place to another too. Frantically seeking a means of escape as they fought to hold the creature at bay, Korag's keen hunter's vision noted an ornate doorway out of this central space a couple of levels beneath them. They all made daring escapes to the crosswalk below and ran for the door, but again Y'gnathra teleported in a way to bar their path. Thunda and Kharron made it past, but Y'gnathra caught Zanjar and Korag and tossed them like missiles, causing our heroes to fall into the room beyond the doors in a jumbled heap. By now, Zanjar had exhausted his Luck. Further "damage" would place him in The Hand of Doom!

Y'gnathra withdraws. In a round ceremonial chamber, the wizard Narznn Gath stood before a floating mirror in the shape of a stylized eye. He turns and removes the dome he wore over his head, revealing...

Narznn Gath welcomes the group. He had always intended they should be present for his ultimate triumph. He is drawing forth Occuloth the All Seeing from the Outer Dark, so he can merge with that being and attain his power. While he gloats, Korag tries an attack, but the many eyes of Narznn Gath give him an advantage, and he avoids it. 

The wizard waves a hand and casts a spell to bind them all. Kharron and Korag resist binding, but they pretend to be caught by the energy bands. They ask while Gath tried to kill them, he reveals he didn't--it was an a strategem to bring them here, as his auguries had said they would be present when he merged with Occuloth.

When he turns back to his mirror through which a swirling cloud of eyes and tentacles can be seen approaching through space, the free heroes make their attacks. They are unable to seriously harm Narznn but they keep him off balance and distracted until the others free themselves. Korag makes a rushing attack against him, slamming the wizard against the mirror, then he's grabbed by tentacles from beyond.

An inhuman voice booms: NARZNN GATH....YOU HAVE SUMMONED ME AND I HAVE COME...YOUR INITIATIVE AND RESOURCEFULNESS HAS EARNED YOU MY FAVOR...I SHALL MAKE YOU PART OF MYSELF...AND SET YOU TO EXPLORING DISTANT CORNERS OF THE COSMOS I HAVE NOT BEHELD IN EONS FOR THE NEXT FEW MILLENNIA AS REWARD!

The wizard screams as he is drawn into the mirror.

The heroes now find the interior of the tower much more mundane than before. The magic has fled. They quickly find the exit and depart for more civilized realms.

All Your Hydra Favorites

 

A new Bundle of Holding launched yesterday featuring all the Hydra hits including a few cuts from yours truly. Here's the list:

• Chris Kutalik's sourcebooks and modules set in his Weird-infested Marlinko Canton, a Slavic myth-inspired, acid fantasy world of Moorcockian extradimensional incursions, Vancian swindlers, and petty bureaucrats: Slumbering Ursine Dunes; Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, plus its free Map Pack; Misty Isles of the Eld; the hexcrawl What Ho, Frog Demons; and the collection that started it all, the Hill Cantons Compendium II.
• From another Hydra stalwart, Trey Causey, the Strange Stars; the pulp-era rulebook Weird Adventures and Strange Trails; and a deceptively whimsical foray into a wild wizard's mad magic mansion, Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak.
• Zedeck Siew's Malay-themed sandbox module about river exploration, horrific eternal bargains, and a very hungry crocodile, Lorn Song of the Bachelor.

You might expect to pay as much as $74.50, but for a short time you can get all these books for the low, low price $14.95!

Don't wait! Order today!

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.