Nationalist Behavioral Norms

In a recent post, I talked about computing a value for nationalism using the trade system, getting a value for each city based upon its proximity to nationalistic sites (capitals, major battles, etc.), but I left myself room for some further disambiguation.

1). I'm using the word "nationalism" as a shorthand to talk about a larger group of things you might call "cultural myths". A cultural myth is a behavior or set of behaviors typically ascribed to some culture. The ideas that German people are efficient and Japanese folks are hardworking and scrupulously polite are both strategic essentialisms (to borrow from Spivak) that help define the "national character" of a place. While in real life these things can be terribly problematic (like the false impression that Christianity or Islam condone the violence done in their name), these kinds of ideas can be tremendously useful in an rpg scenario, where we don't have the ability to model a city full of real and different people. "Cultural myths" is a cleaner term for the intentional racism usually practiced in rpg worlds (goblins are dumb and violent, orcs are soulless killing machines, elves are haughty and/or hippy-dippy, dwarves are greedy, the list goes on and on). The use here is to create a list of expected behaviors against which an individual from a particular society can be measured against - i.e. how much does this person cleave to a particular cultural myth.

2). The system I outlined provides a number between 0 and whatever that measures the strength of a given cultural myth in a specific city (nationalism, again, being one cultural myth). I haven't adopted this yet (it's brand new), but my list of cultural myths might look like this:

Nationalism (Tarluskani Empire)

Nationalism (Southern Kingdoms)

Nationalism (Confederacy)

Nationalism (Nithya Bairnedred)

Nationalism (Arein)

Nationalism (Catacombs)

Nationalism (Ferocia)

Religious ID (OTG)

R. ID (The Order)

R. ID (Splendor of Sahargeen)

R. ID (Fiája)

R. ID (Ancestor Spirits)

R. ID (Twin Gods)

R. ID (Mystery Cults)

Ethnic ID (Southerner)

Ethnic ID (Ferocia)

Ethnic ID (Bairnedred)

Ethnic ID (Archivist)

Ethnic ID (Tarluskani)

Ethnic ID (Confederate)

And so on.

What I'm interested in is not the absolute values of any category. Instead, for each city, I want to know what these values are, relative to each other. For example, let's consider the nationalism of the made-up city of Gazildapop.

Gazildapop has:

Nat (TE): .8	0.8	0.04
Nat (SK): 2.65	2.65	0.14
Nat (Con): 3.9	3.9	0.21
Nat (Nith): 3.6	3.6	0.19
Nat (Are): 2.25	2.25	0.12
Nat (Cat): 4.8	4.8	0.25
Nat (Fer) .85	0.85	0.05

We can then take each number and divide it by the sum of all of the numbers to determine how important that myth is to the overall picture, which looks like the second column above.

The significance is that if I want to know how an NPC in that city might act, I can now roll on the table above to determine to which myth(s) that NPC subscribes. If Gazildapop resides in an area politically controlled by the Tarluskani Empire or Ferocia, it is likely a hotbed of resistance, given the antipathy the city feels for both nations - it's a fairly even mix of Confederates and Nithya and Southern Kingdoms and Areinians, which indicates a high degree of cosmopolitanism - there's likely a sizeable population of each within the city itself, and/or the city has regular and positive dealings with all 4 groups.

This, to me, is an excellent way to get a feel for a fictional city and how it relates to the larger geopolitical climate, as well as providing plenty of information to inspire specific choices made about each site. Determining where monuments to each of these ideologies will be a time-consuming process, but it will vastly enrich my world. One more thing to the to-do list!

Tabletop Soundscapes

The required materials for a tabletop roleplaying game are: paper, pencils, and dice. That's a common formulation. Except, of course, you need a surface upon which one can write. You also need a physical space (that will include that writing surface) in which the game's actors assemble and partake (I'm not going to address online games, like the one I'm in right now). Food is often a part of the rpg experience, as are character miniatures, battlemats, terrain things, beer, computers, books, outlets for those computers, etc.

Having access to a "good" space for tabletop rpgs is a question of privilege - a table in the cafeteria will suffice, but there are a number of factors that are desired, including physical isolation (allowing you to play without casual interruptions by passers-by) and sonic isolation (insulation from non-game-related sounds). The first is fairly straight-forward - everyone understands that playing a tabletop rpg does not work well in an environment full of distractions and interruptions, which leads to us playing in dorm rooms, basements, classrooms late at night, or (most desirably) within the comfort of our own home.

Sound is a fundamental part of the experience - having a sonically static environment facilitates communication as everyone is able to speak at the same volume and be equally heard. The shuffling of character sheets, scratching of graphite, clacking of keys, and clattering of dice underscore the conversational interaction that is the heart of the rpg experience.

This sonic underscore or soundscape interacts our behavior, as we associate specific habits with a specific sonic environment. Imagine the differences between the background sounds of an ER, coffee shop, and office - our impressions of that space, the feelings these spaces trigger in us can be summoned by listening to an audio recording of that place.

Some DMs like to use music's ability to evoke a sense of place consciously, by playing music appropriate to whatever game situation is at-hand. A cursory search for "rpg music" yields a number of sites offering themed tracks (medieval tavern, graveyard, battle music, and so on) to aid the musically-inclined DM in choosing appropriate music.

There are some structural problems with the repertoire given - each track, rather than being the soundscape of whatever environment is referenced, gives a musical representation of that soundscape. If you listen to the "Lost Mine" track, you'll see what I mean. There's very little that's 'mine'-specific, and a whole lot of chromatic brass descents - it sounds like a film score, not the sounds of an actual place. Now, film music is awesome, but it necessarily works to drive tension in the foregrounded activity, building towards a particular moment. In a movie, you can tailor the music to work alongside the events displayed. In a live rpg, though, that kind of synchronization is impossible, and what we're left is an awkward tension build-up communicated by the music that is totally separate from the actual game-playing itself. At best, the players don't notice it. But what usually happens is the music distracts from the experience of playing - it pulls focus from the character's actions (out of the game world) into the real one, a concrete [albeit sonic] reminder that we are engaged in the act of playing the game. This decreases immersion, breaks dramatic tension, and so on. And then, of course, there is the question of what to do when the track ends. Does it loop? Is there a playlist that seamlessly plays a bunch of 'similar' music in a row, at least until the scene changes and we need a new playlist for the new game environment?

The reason for these problems is how the DM conceives of music in their game. While music can evoke a time and place, the players are already doing that in their heads. Those of them who can see mental images have built some visual representation of the described space, those of us who can't have figured something else out. The music does not need to do this work for us. Instead, the function of music during a running is to discipline the rpg soundscape - to maintain a constant sonic environment (changing enough that the static-ness is not a noticeable feature), a series of sounds that underscores every game interaction. Having music (quietly) playing in the background, covering the silences, helps keep players focused because there is now no silence to fill with awkward jokes or tangents that pull players out of the game world.

If the bulk of the music touted as being "for rpgs" is schlock for this kind of work, what can we use? I like to use music that falls into the "ambient" genre - Alva Noto and Brian Eno right now, and more as I acquire it. The tracks are usually sonically-similar (facilitating a more seamless ending of one track and beginning of the next) and don't often feature the kind of volume or rhythm intensification found in most of rpg tracks (which reduces the music/tension conflicts). The downside is that they are entirely electronic music, which can unnerve some people (it can have a strong association with horror films) and can trouble people with expectations that "music" should mirror or reflect the game environment rather than reflect the fact that the game is playing.

But, music can be a valuable DM tool, just as battlemats, custom miniatures, and game props  (they can also be terrible - it depends upon the quality of the product). It's important to know that we have more choices than Yes music and No music.

Subhuman Mental Capacities and Behavior

One of my chief challenges as an actor was attempting to play characters less intelligent than myself. The possibilities that I see, the connections that I make are so instantaneous, so "obvious" that I can't imagine why someone doesn't see them as well. Graduate school has been good for me in that I've come face-to-face with people who are smart in very different ways, and I've been in the position of trying to see what they see so clearly.

The application to tabletop rpgs, as you might have guessed, is in trying to play "stupid" creatures. Playing creatures of average or above average intelligence is not particularly challenging, but trying to think as these creatures requires curtailing one's own cognitive abilities, trying to "unsee" options and connections.

I don't think that's the right way to go about it. Rather, I think a behavioral breakdown is in order, listing the kinds of behavior one might expect to see from creatures of a given intelligence.

The trick to this (and why these breakdowns usually fail to function) is that Intelligence is not the only attribute that needs to factor into this approach. Mindfulness (Wisdom) is also crucial. In my game, Mindfulness represents the character's ability to know themselves and others in a wordless way. This also corresponds to the character's situational awareness, but that's a fringe benefit of this self-attunement. High Mindfulness characters are more quickly aware of when their needs are unmet - they feel a muscle getting tired before it gets pulled, they are aware that they feel some degree of antipathy towards another before they act out, etc. Consequently, Mindfulness informs social interactions, which has a huge impact on behavior (since most critters are not encountered solo).

My scale for attributes works like this: nil, 0, 1, 2, 3,… Nil indicates an absence of that aptitude, an inability on the part of the creature to use the skills associated with it (programmed robots lack Cognition because they do not possess the ability to "think"). 0 indicates a subhuman (at least, below an adult human) level of functionality, and 3 is the human average. I don't really care about transhuman capacities - like I said, that's easier to manage than subhuman abilities, which produces the following matrix, with C for Cognition and M for Mindfulness:

Score	C: Nil	0	1	2	3
M: Nil	No behavior possible	Single-minded pursuit of food. If threatened will attack without hesitation. Can die from overeating, if enough food is available.	Same as left	Same as left	Same as left
0	Takes predetermined when appropriate stimuli occurs (think Venus flytrap, robot).	Fight-or-Flight response: able to perceive obvious threats and react to them. No group interaction.	Fight-or-Flight, minimal predictive powers (if-then, no nested clauses)	Fight-or-Flight, moderate predictive powers (1 nested clause)	Fight or Flight, full predictive powers
1	Same as above	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction: group decides upon actions/goals communally (think school of fish).	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction, social hierarchy: alpha and betas.	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction, social hierachy: alpha, betas, omegas	As left and above
2	Same as above	Same as above	Same as above	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction, social hierarchy, territory ownership, as above	As left and above
3	Same as above	Same as above	Same as above	As above	Human average

I am not fully happy with this list - I need to go through all of my animals and see where they fit on this matrix and if I am satisfied with this representation of their behavior. I like how this scales from the bottom up, but the top down might seem problematic. This is resolved when we add in considerations of language production. Language allows characters of lesser cognition/mindfulness understand ideas beyond their capability to generate - the 2 cognition bruiser does not understand the intricacies of court politics, but they do understand hierarchies of power and territory interactions, so as long as whoever is explaining stuff to the bruiser is able to translate it into terms the 2/2 bruiser understands, the bruiser can follow what's going on.

Of course, applying this to another game system will be a pain in the butt, as game designers really haven't considered this idea at all. The conventional wisdom is that animals tend to have subhuman Intelligence but human or transhuman Wisdom, which only makes sense when Wisdom is a mystical attribute covering all of the holes presented by the mental attributes themselves (as it governs faith, perception, lie-detection, and saving throws, among other things). My formulation, with Mindfulness, lacks this hodgepodge nature and also requires us as designers and DMs to question the "naturalness" of giving animals average or good Wisdom scores. Something to consider, as I work on the Bestiary.

Nationalism

What does it mean to model nationalism in an RPG context? Certainly this idea goes far beyond anything Gygax or Wizards considered, and a search for D&D and nationalism does not bring you anywhere you want to go.

If I am considering modeling a new concept in my game (i.e. not an extension of something already present but a wholly new idea), if needs to fulfill a couple of basic criteria.

1). It makes the game more engrossing/enriches my world.

2). It does not infringe on anything I already have in place

3). I can expand upon it later.

2 and 3 are solved by default here. 1 is the tricky one. This thought process stems from a comment I left on Alexis' blog about the bard. In it, I commented that rather than create a bunch of bard-specific rules, the bard's abilities let them affect culture and politics, so we need rules about culture and politics (in this case, nationalism is the starting example).

Now, I will be the first to admit that nationalism is a problematic word to apply to the middle ages, really to any European-based civilization until the 19th century. However, the same kinds of identification that occurs in nationalism does appear in different time periods - it'd be religious fervor, devotion to the feudal lord, commitment to the city-state, etc. So, really what this rule needs to represent is the degree to which the populace is strongly attached to whatever thing they hold onto.

Necessarily, this comes in two forms: cultural and personal. Personal is easy - an individual's feelings about the subject of devotion. Cultural represents the degree to which "nationalism" is baked into the customs and behaviors constructed by that culture - it sets the baseline for all of the culture's members, from which their personal values will deviate.

OK, great. But how do we apply that in practice?

Nationalism extends through its display of power - a force that can visibly accomplish things is more valuable/believable than one that can't (or is not seen as effective). So, our model of nationalism is also a model of state power distributed geographically. State power will be concentrated in capitals and around national symbols (sites that display the power of the state or commemorate previous actions (successfully) taken by the state). [I think we can already see the role of a bard in this construct] and radiate outward, losing strength with each iteration (and losing additional strength when applying to a population somehow removed from that of the governing body, racially, religiously, or so on).

Of course, state power is opposed by other cultural myths, concretized in resistance symbols - sites where other narratives hold sway and act against the state narrative.

The next question is to determine how distance affects nationalism. Each site (whether pro-state or anti-state) has a fairly limited geographic spread - affecting only the community that interacts with it on a fairly regular basis. In my 20-mi map, that means a site directly influences its hex and the neighboring ones.

Ideas of nationalism are most important in urban and suburban populations - rural folks are unlikely to harbor strong opinions on the issue because it simply doesn't affect them (they'll be farming no matter who's in charge) - and it makes some sense that nationalism and similar ideas travel along economic routes (as the symbols of nationalism will travel along these pathways as well).

So, we could think of nationalism as an economic good (governed by the trade system) but produced at a variety of locations (not just markets). A reference of nationalism exists wherever:

1): some monument to the state exists (palaces, fortresses, etc.)

2): the state triumphed in a (major) conflict (The Alamo)

a) either within the past 100 years or

b) one of those wars that will go down in the history books (War of the Ring, 30 Years Wars, etc.)

A reference of counternationalism exists wherever:

1): a monument to state excess, corruption, or violence exists (The Alamo)

2): the resistance thwarted outright or delayed state victory, subject to the same constraints as before

Now, 1) and 2) could be conflated into the same place. Each such location contributes either 1 nationalism or 1 counternationalism.

However, the ethnicity and faith of the dominant population affects the value of this reference. If ideology in question does not directly affect the ethnic/religious majority, the reference's value is 1. If it interacts in a positive way, the value increases by 1/3 per relevant factor. If it interacts negatively, the value is halved for each relevant factor. So, the Tarluskani Empire invaded the Southern Kingdoms and outlawed their religion. A site supporting the Tarluskani Empire in the Southern Kingdoms would only provide a nationalism reference of 1/2/2=.25. A resistance site, however, would have a nationalism reference of 1*4/3*4/3=16/9=1.7778.

The ratio of nationalism to counternationalism determines the general attitude of people in the city of interest towards the idea of nationalism/counternationalism. Clearly, if the ratio is some number greater than 1, nationalism rules and if it is close to 0, counternationalism rules (and a value of roughly 1 indicates ambivalence). Pulling some numbers out of a hat:

Nationalistic	Ambivalent	Counternationalistic
Ratio>1.5	1.49>ratio>.51	.5>ratio

Bards, interacting with this system, can increase the references produced by a location by calling popular attention to the site and the nationalist (or counternationalist) monuments/victories there. They could decrease the references produced by spreading a counternarrative discrediting the official (or resistance) story surrounding the site.

Thoughts?

On Experience

When everything your character does improves on level-up, earning experience gets a little funky. Because experience is a single pool which drives leveling up, the question of what activities provide experience becomes crucially important.

The general desire is to restrict experience-gaining activities to ones that are related to the bulk of what improves. This is how we get OD&D's gp=xp system (but only coin gained from "adventuring" activities) or Alexis' ruling that only combat provides experience. The squiggly bit enters as soon as characters are able to perform actions that do not directly contribute towards experience acquisition, like fishing or cobbling, or whatever. How are these skills improved? If tied to level, as most games do, then it seems a little strange (although explainable) that one's battle prowess (or personal wealth) directly improves one's ability to fish or make shoes, but it also would be strange for making shoes to improve either one's fishing abilities or one's combat prowess. On the other hand, if fishing is not tied to level, we've added in a secondary progression mechanic orthogonal to everything else in the game, and now a lot of the skills previously lumped into the old xp framework might better fit into the secondary one, which certainly makes the previously elegant level system much clunkier. Some people like clunk, others don't: YMMV.

One of the goals of my discipline system was to try and clean this up, providing a single mechanic that can reasonably account for both types of experience. As I've now personally seen in Alexis' games, having recourse to Sage Abilities (and the huge implications of choosing one's initial specialization on overall character development) is a huge part of having a fully-fleshed-out character.

I've discussed this before, but I'll summarize. Each discipline (skill) has its own xp track, measured in notches. Certain amounts of notches correlate to significant leaps in ability (rolling 1d4+1d6 instead of 1d6, for example). Notches are gained in one of two ways.

The simplest way is through training: characters pay some amount of money and spend 6 months to gain a notch, with the idea being that after a successful adventure characters will spend their winnings on training and equipment, taking on another adventure in a year's time.

The second way comes from using the discipline in-game: whenever the player rolls a critical result (critical success or critical failure), the player marks it on their sheet.  When the number of these marks equals the number of notches possessed in that discipline, the character gains a notch. There is one problem with this rule: currently, characters require 1 notch to progress from Novice (untrained) to Apprentice (a little trained). Consequently, a player has a 2/6 chance (rolling a 1 or 6 on a d6) to jump a tier and significantly improve the character. I don't like this for two reasons: the first is that this negates much of the advantage of skill-heavy classes - since most characters enter play with perhaps one or two Journeyman disciplines (the tier above Apprentice), some Apprentice, and mostly Novice, the general expertise that I want these skill-heavy trades to have is quickly (and easily) matched by everyone else at the table. The second reason is that the in-world logic doesn't make a ton of sense - it’s the same as saying that someone can, after playing a single game of soccer,  be on equal footing with someone of equal physical ability who has been playing for 6 months - while also removing the usefulness of training.

Because of this, I have ruled that gaining notches in this way cannot allow the character to increase that discipline's tier - criticals still tally, so that after the final notch is gained and the tier is improved the character might gain an additional notch or two, but the actual mechanical benefits do not manifest until the character has trained. While I don't think my players (when I get some…) will like this very much, I do think that they will understand it and not whine too terribly much.

The Bronze

It's out of order, but I wanted to post this after I finished. It's a rough draft (as all the work presented here is in draft format), and I'd love to hear what you think.

In the actual book I have a statblock for each monster, but that's not really the focal point of these posts.

Bronze

            One of the surviving creations of the Azintheen is the race of golden-skinned automatons known as the Bronze. They dwell in the ruins of the Azintheen Empire, protecting them from treasure hunters and lore-seekers alike.

            They do not appear to be alive, and their behavior is often simplistic. As far as I can tell, most simply guard a specific location, driving away or destroy intruders. But withdraw from the protected area and they cease to pursue. Some, like the Maintenance Arachnids, seem to behave in a more complex fashion, and it is possible that even two members of the same species might exhibit different behaviors.

            As constructs, I do not believe that the Bronze require sustenance or rest. While their metal bodies are hard to damage, bludgeoning attacks can decouple their clockwork mechanisms and disrupt their internal circuitry.

Given the heavy Archivist presence in Sha’aryam, the lack of accessible Archivist research on these constructs seems suspect. Regardless, what follows are my own research notes, gleaned from first-hand experience and consulting with so-called “adventurers.”

Chrysoprase Scarab

Scarabs are usually encountered in groups of two to four. While fragile, scarabs are scrappier than one might expect: the central gem[1] in their carapace somehow acts as a ritualist’s wand. Most have lower-level magics, but I’ve seen one single-handedly wipe out a squad of mercenaries. Cheap mercenaries, but the point stands.

[Threat 1]

Cyborg Duke

I did not have the misfortune of seeing this type of construct myself. From horror stories told by my adventuring compatriots, the so-called Cyborg Dukes stand seven feet tall and look like humans encased in a heavy suit of armor, with one notable exception. A shard lies embedded in their chest, and the Cyborg Dukes are able to use its powers freely, without the restraints normally suffered by mortal users.

            They also appear to be fully self-aware and have no sense of mercy.

[Threat 6]

Golem

Alternate names: Bronze Gorilla, Buzzblade

            At first glance, the golem resembles one of the large Sahargeen gorillas made of bronze. The second reveals the gear-like saw where one of its hands should be, whirring so fast as to make a high-pitched whine. The third, provided you have sufficient mercenaries to give you enough time to take a third look, shows the small circular opening in the golem’s chest carapace, presumably the ‘golem heart’ described in some of the surviving literature on Azintheen technology. I decided to not take a fourth look.

[Threat 5]

Maintenance Arachnid

Alternate name: Scuttler

Patrick MacAlan

The best counterexample to the hypothesis that the Bronze simply follow pre-programmed “instructions” is the Maintenance Arachnid. No larger than the palm of one’s hand, these tiny metal spiders travel in large groups through the metal pipes and ventilation shafts in Sha’aryam.

A cursory examination of smashed Maintenance Arachnids revealed tiny diamond blades at the end of each leg.

            Their behavior is quite unpredictable; they are not tied to a fixed geographic location, nor topological feature. Loud noises and disturbances to the pipes or ventilation system seem to attract their interest, but not always.

[Threat 3]

Melech Hakosemim

            The very existence of the Melech Hakosemim is suspect, but I deemed it necessary to include its description on the off chance that it does.

            The Melech Hakosemim appears to be a more powerful version of the Cyborg Duke. While approximately the same size, the Melech Hakosemim’s armor is far thicker and more ornate, and the breastplate bears both shards.

            If the Melech Hakosemim exists, it can be found in Sha’aryam’s lowest levels, although I cannot understand why someone would seek it.

[This is unecessary]

Sentinel

Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia

            These Bronze are the most human-shaped, appearing as a bronze person standing approximately 2 yards tall and wearing plate made out of Azintheen Bronze.

The specimen I witnessed bore a strange cylinder on its right arm, where its hand ought to be. Reports from trusted sources[2] indicate that the creature can fire small iron balls out of the cylinder, like some kind of personal cannon, and it can fire multiple balls without obviously reloading. It is possible that ritual magic of some kind is used to automagically reload the cannon – more study is required.

Lastly, Sentinels appear to be some of the more intelligent Bronze, anticipating ambushes and the like.

[Threat 4]

Sphere-Mounted Arbalest

Alternate name: Bolter

These constructs appear to come in two parts: a 2’ diameter metal sphere atop of which rests a metal crossbow. While an investigation of decommissioned specimens revealed no adhesive or obvious attachment between the two, while active, the arbalest maintains connected.

            When encountered, Sphere-Mounted Arbalests typically patrol access points, firing metal bolts from their auto-loading crossbows. Curiously, while they avoid stairs, I have seen them somehow roll along the metal walls and ceilings.

[Threat 3]

---

[1] Usually chrysoprase, although I believe that I have seen others with other stones.

[2] One of them, named Jack, wore a suit of armor harvested from the body of one of these creatures.

Playing Again

Well, Alexis is running a new set of online campaigns, and I was fortunate enough to get a slot. This is exciting on a number of different fronts: not only am I playing again for the first time in years, but I'm playing with a DM I greatly respect and a respectable group of players. I am also quite excited to see how a lot of the rules Alexis' has mentioned actually work in practice.

This comes at a particularly welcome time as I've stalled a bit on developing things for both this blog and my world - without a game to drive me, my output has slowed to fits and spurts.

One of the things I've been working through is the bestiary project I outlined a while ago.  I was rather unhappy with what I churned out initially and decided to take a somewhat different tact (especially with regard to the voice of Patrick MacAlan. I'm sorry about that.). Because the ultimate goal of the project is to sell it, spacing is an ever-present concern. I've decided on page sizes (6x9, which makes for a very handy book), but this makes space an ever-present concern. Fitting at least two paragraphs from different authors simply requires too much space, so my current mindset is to write out each author's descriptions in full and then quote them to communicate their voice and information without losing all of that space.

Additionally, I've significantly reworked the shard magic spells to incorporate a more science-fantasy vibe, the results of which I'll post later this month.

Lastly, I'm still tinkering with the bardic artwork tables I outlined a while back. What I presented was an excellent first draft, but it fails in two counts. Some of the abilities are not presented within the psycho-magical framework that underpins the whole endeavor, and much of the abilities require a fundamentally Judeo-Christian worldview, something that does not jive with my aggressively multicultural setting. I've finished editing a couple of them, but I want to get the whole series done before posting it.

Conventional Wisdom

Susan McClary is one of the most prominent musicologists alive today, at the forefront of the turn of the discipline towards the postmodern. She has published on a variety of musicological topics, but one of her books strikes me as particularly D&D-relevant. Her book, Conventional Wisdom (from which I stole my title), chooses to study the conventions of musical practice, instead of the typical mode of inquiry which focuses upon the strange and inexplicable. Her argument for doing so is that the foundation of expectations from which scholarly inquiry proceeds requires discussion and analysis - if we are to judge something as "different", we need to have a very good and clear idea of what constitutes "normal".

This brings me to Joseph Manola's post from earlier today. Manola argues that RPG material with a price tag needs to be more creative material than a DM might produce on their own. He uses the term "conceptual density", by which he means how many "good" (i.e. useful and nonobvious) ideas exist per page. I can't imagine someone sanely opposing Manola's point, and that's not what I want to do today.

Instead, I want to talk about his criteria for "good" ideas - their utility and nonobviousness. Both depend quite strongly upon ideas of normality - i.e. convention. "Good" ideas challenge the expectations held by DM, who judges the information, and then player, to whom it is presented in play.

But if every event is unconventional, is the power of these ideas blunted? Or is it cyclical, that after a while a dwarf who enjoys mining is itself strange and exotic? Can we meaningfully differentiate between "good" ideas and novel ones?

Just as DMs induce the play they are willing to facilitate, so too do worlds (as presented by the DM) construct a horizon of expectations for the player. In a "vanilla" setting, one presumes that these expectations are pre-built. In a snowflake setting like Manola's or mine, part of the game experience lies in constructing that horizon of expectations, against which ideas are judged "odd" or "normal".

We find an interesting liminal space where the snowflake setting butts against the "vanilla" one - most commonly when a snowflake world uses "vanilla" concepts (like the word troll or dwarf) or a "vanilla" setting has thematically separate areas (the Frozen North functions very differently from Waterdeep). In these borderlands, expectations are all over the map, attempting to map the evidence presented into one or the other horizons of expectations.

What's important, ultimately, is that one of a DM's conscious responsibilities lies in constructing their players' horizons of expectations, whatever they are. Without a horizon of expectations, the odd seems banal and the commonplace, mysterious.

I'll finish this up with a short story about a game I ran a while ago. As part of Alexis' world-generation exercise, detailed in How to Run, I had prepared three different worlds and run my players through a one-shot in each. One of them was a version of my Prodigy setting, fast-forwarded several hundred years into a cyberpunk dystopia. I made many mistakes in that running, and the biggest of these was failing to construct a horizon of expectations. To get the game started with a bang, the session opened with my players at a rally run by one of the minor political parties. After a particularly anti-government speech, the government security drones (who had been monitoring the protest) attempted to kill everyone present. I had wanted the deaths of so many civilians after little perceived provocation to shock my players, to galvanize them against the government forces, but they just looked at me and asked, "is this normal?"

One of my strategies for first sessions is to jump into some kind of action as quickly as possible - to put my players into a situation where they have to start making choices, quickly (beginning the session usually immediately follows a great deal of exposition on my part to get everyone through the character creation process, so I want them to talk instead of me for a while). It usually works quite well, getting my players used to the idea of being in the driver's seat in the world. But trying to have this intrusive event shock my players, right off the bat, is an ineffective strategy - they have no conventions against which to measure the events transpiring.

In short, boring, conventional ideas do serve a purpose. They are crucially important in creating a world and running a game. Once everyone knows what's expected, you can start throwing the curveballs.

The Chupacabra

Well, I''m not really a radical, I guess, so there's that.

Anyway, here's the first draft of a monster entry - the Chupacabra.  In an ideal world, each creature gets its own page, including art, statblock, and description.  We'll see - I may need to give each creature two pages to fit in all of the content that I want.

I'd appreciate input on this - for obvious reasons, I keep the bestiary a secret from my players, which means that I'm the only person who's seen this, until now.

Chupacabra

“We were probin Sahargeen’s edge, tryin to see how far round she went.  One a the erlier xpaditions.  Sommat spooked the pack donkeys and they near draged the handler off wiff em.

“Jus then a big critter, wiff long spines on s back, came chargin out a the trees.  We gave chase n folowd it.  We ran and ran.  Fainly we caw up tu it in a clearin.  It had long fangs covered in donkey blood and a cupl a our donkeys lay bleedin’ on the dirt.  Must a bin scared by all of us shoutin’, cuz right then it ran out on us.” – PM

“The species colloquially called chupacabra are primarily found in flatland and hill environments, where their dun-colored skin patterns allow them to blend in with the shrub vegetation.  They stand approximately 2 yards tall and weigh somewhat more than a human male, resembling them in gross anatomical features.

“Dissection revealed both the fangs and claws of this creature are capable of wicking blood out of scratched or bitten creatures, potentially causing fatigue from blood loss.  Overall muscle density is quite high.  Presumably, the back spines are vestigial – they appear to be a hardened cartilage substance, not bone, and therefore do not serve any real offensive or defensive purposes.

“Behavioral studies are few and far between – most creature research teams are forced to put the beasts down before bringing them back to the Catacombs for full experimentation.  It would appear, though, that their pain tolerance is fairly normative, despite their fierce appearance.

"More research is also required to fully investigate the reproductive cycles and mating behaviors of this species." - TAS

Ongoing Projects

With all of my medieval music research right now, I've been rolling the idea of the cantor class around for a while now.  It'll be done when it's done - as I commented earlier, classes/trades strongly contribute to player engagement with the world because it is a momentous choice made at character creation that directly draws upon the world's lore.  While I restrict first-time players in my world to a small subset (Researcher, Soldier, and Thief) of all of my trades, my experience has been that players will draw almost exclusively from the more specific trades for subsequent characters.  Changing that pool is a huge step - even Alexis, with an entire wiki of house-rules, has not really changed the class distribution (he's rewritten and revamped most of their abilities, but all of the AD&D classes are present in his world).  So I want to make sure that the cantor provides a meaningful, new way for players to engage with my world.

This post is not about the cantor.

I have mentioned several times that I am not really playing D&D anymore - it's a new RPG that I call Prodigy.  The first ongoing project (4 years and going strong) is the creation of a book that details all of my rules.  There are hundreds of RPG books on the market already, and I am aware of the perils of being a small RPG publisher trying to push a brand-new game into an already well-saturated market.  While I will sell it, the book's purpose right now is to give me a central rules Bible that I can give to players - my version of Alexis' wiki.

The second project is one that I have not mentioned before on the blog, but has been growing in importance over the past year.  To complement my source book, I am writing a Bestiary.  Sadly, good books of monsters are almost impossible to find, and most of them focus upon truly aberrant and weird creatures that are "original."  We are living in a postmodern age and valuing "originality" is quite the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm.  While I absolutely applaud "brand new" ideas, I don't think that they are necessarily better than "old" ones.

Part of the appeal, I think, is that there are perhaps a dozen monsters that are tragically over-used by most DMs, like goblins and orcs and vampires.  They have become troped to death, reinvigorated only by new paradigms (Paizo's depiction of goblins [initially expressed in Rise of the Runelords] is quite different from Wizard's 3rd edition view of them, and it has radically changed how goblins are perceived - they've appropriated a lot of traits historically associated with D&D kobolds).  Zak S. wrote about what he calls 'countertexts,' ways to take an existing idea and subvert it, producing a completely new way of experiencing that idea, and that is exactly what these paradigm shifts are with regard to hackneyed creature concepts.

Adventures require monsters that fit into a variety of types.  This is the root of the problem, I think - there will almost always be some sort of mook enemy, whether goblins or reskinned kobolds, or whatever.  There will always be a need for some kind of trick enemy, that requires special preparation and tactics to fight it effectively.  There are only so many entries in a given book of monsters, and the reuse of these creatures leads to monster apathy.

One of the solutions is to completely abandon these older creatures and use "original" monsters.  Of course, such an approach constantly needs new monsters coming down the pipeline, and while that works for some DMs, it doesn't work for all of them.

The other solution, the one I favor, is the reinvention of these creatures by paradigm shifts.  This builds upon the cultural capital of [goblins] and [orcs] but changes how players interact with them - Joseph Manola has done this by incentivizing his players to talk with "enemies," finding social solutions to conflict.

My goal is to do that for the entire monster hierarchy.  One of the more straight-forward ways to do this is by looking at the mythic history of creatures normally found in monster manuals - defining a kobold as not an artifice-driven dragonkin creature but as an earth elemental, or a ghoul as a shapeshifting creature that devours the recently-dead.  This led me to incorporate many creatures from folklore traditions all over the world - kappa, maenads, psychopomps, tanrrilla, chupacabras, and so on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Prodigy is the absence of active Heaven-like and Hell-like constructs.  The driving narrative of most planar arrangements (the use of alternate topologies populated by creatures drawn from a common theme) tends to be that of alignment conflict, either Good vs. Evil or Law vs. Chaos or whatever.  Arnold K. does a fantastic job problematizing and destabilizing this construct, but I wanted theistic culture clash as a central theme of my world and could not easily include such a place.  Instead of angels and demons/devils, I have Sidh and Yokai.  Sidh are fundamentally magical, sapient creatures that feed off of specific psychic emanations from other (non-Sidh) sapient life.  Nymphs consume love, Black Marauders despair, and so on.  Yokai physically consume a specific body part of sapient creatures.  Chullachaqui eat femurs, redcaps drink fresh blood, shabiri steal eyes, etc.

Another method is taking traits normally assigned to a specific creature (like a goblin's madcap glee, penchant for profanity, and inefficiency) and assigning it to another creature, creating a cognitive dissonance for players familiar with the original presentation of the creature.  I'll usually take this pair and give them a strong relationship so that both sets of traits are displayed in tandem, but separated.

Obviously, creating new paradigms does not 'solve' monster apathy as a problem.  No solution that focuses upon changing the monsters will fix it, because the problem does not stem from the actual monsters themselves - it stems from how the monsters are used.  By giving each creature a more detailed rundown of goals as well as talking about their interactions with other creatures, I hope to give DMs incentive to use their monsters better.

The other major goal of the Bestiary project is in changing how people perceive them.  Every monster manual I've seen presents its information as infallible, an ideal text from which DMs derive TRUTH.  As a musicologist, the idea of any text as an authoritative document, especially one professing no bias with regard to the information it purports to share, is laughable.  Bestiaries should include wrong information.  They should be incomplete or misleading, requiring DMs to fill in the gaps.  Just as we do not accept our rulebooks as written, we should not accept our bestiaries as written.  We do this already in adding new monsters or tweaking monsters here and there, but we treat this as exceptions to the text instead of a 'proper' way to interact with it.

To this end, I present the Bestiary as Finnola Finnsdotter's doctoral thesis for the University of Reyjadin, a document compiled from the work of three other authors with emendations and author notes.  I'm appending the Bestiary's Forward, which situates the book into its fictive context, as well as the table of contents to give a sense of the project's scope.

This text is a compilation of key works detailing the creatures inhabiting the areas adjacent to the Sea of Shadows, including the Dunes, the Sahargeen jungle, Greatpines forest, the expansive Wildlands, and the Azintheen ruin of Sha’aryam. This is an attempt to synthesize prior research into a single reference document, distilled to an easily referenced size for future researchers and explorers. Primarily, this text uses Baraka al Tarluskani’s Collected Stories, Patrick MacAlan’s [sic] Jurnl Of A Jungl Explrer, and Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia’s A Concise Guide to the Flora and Fauna Surrounding the Sea of Shadows in 53 Volumes as sources.

The creatures within this text are grouped via apparent similarities in taxonomy and behavior, drawing from Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia’s extensive categorical system. While her methodology may seem pedantic, it is the organizational schema adopted by this text in lieu of any other categorical structures.

While the forwards to each section are my own insights into each category, the texts accompanying each entry are quotes from the authors indicated. In a very few instances, I found it necessary to emend their texts; such corrections are included in [brackets].  I also have appended a threat assessment, also in brackets, to the end of most species’ descriptions.  These values range from 1, least threatening, to 6, most threatening.

After the Bestiary, I have compiled a number of additional sections that are my own, independent research, including both a list of mythic figures discussed as well as some metadata analysis regarding the species of the Bestiary.

– Finnola Finnsdotter

This document has been submitted in partial completion of the requirements for a doctorate from the University of Reyjadin.

The Book of Hours

It's time for a brief history lesson.

Monasteries and cathedrals, i.e. large religious centers, celebrated a series of prayers every day in a sequence called the Divine Office.  The Mass (which I'm sure you've heard of) was the highlight of the day's worship, but the Office exists as a companion, with events throughout the day.  The highlights of the Office include Vespers, just before dark, Matins, in the dark of night, and Lauds at dawn.  Life in these places was centered around practicing the Divine Office.

Now, they did not use the same texts or music day-to-day, year-to-year.  Some texts were constant, but most was recited only once each year.  A number of different kinds of books facilitated remembering these rare events, but that's not the focus of what I want to talk about.

As you might know, Catholicism has a number of saints and has assigned a calendar day to each of them.  While every religious location honored these saints on their day, most areas had regional or local saints that they held especially dear (for example, Saint Martin was revered by all of France).  To especially celebrate these people, monks wrote Offices specifically for them - a collection of unique texts and music sung only for that saint.  Some of these Offices were quite elaborate and long, and (at least before the Council of Trent) multiplied until each location had their own, unique tradition and way of practicing Catholicism (and often did not follow the Pope's commands on that subject).  In fact, nearby liturgical communities would compete over who's Offices were better, and better celebrated a saint both places held in high esteem.  There's an adventure in there.  Or three.

Some really special Offices were added onto the end of every part of the Office - Notre Dame was significant in that it had at least two smaller Hours (each segment of the Office was called an Hour) following each regular one - the Hours of the Virgin and the Hours of the Dead.

What I wanted to talk about specifically, though, is the book of hours, the most important book of the late Middle Ages (15th-16th c.).  The book was a contained the Hours of the Virgin and the Hours of the Dead with a whole bunch of personalized stuff thrown in the mix.  Everyone who could read had a book of hours by the 16th c., as the printing press dramatically reduced the cost of these books.  Wealthy aristocrats commissioned beautiful books with unique illuminations on nearly every page, while poorer craftsmen made do with stock images.

The basic idea was that a person at home could read along with each of these so-called Little Hours while the monks or priests or whatever were doing them in the actual religious center, bringing sanctity into the home. Those who couldn't read Latin could meditate upon the images and get the same result.

Here's where they get really cool.  People customized these things like crazy, adding in prayers they'd heard once or twice, using special family prayers, venerating saints particular to their family, and all of these required distinct, unique texts designed by the individual or the individual's family (if it was an inherited book of hours).  By that, I mean that a book of hours functions like a religious spellbook.  The texts are completely mundane, but they have a special relationship with their rightful owner and serve as a channel for that person's faith to manifest.

Especially when you start thinking about those monk-scholars I mentioned a little while ago,journeying for new chants and new prayers, this gets very exciting very quickly.

Each (Catholic) cleric begins play with their book of hours.  The book contains a bunch of stock prayers in it, standard in all books - these would be used for all of the common clerical abilities, like healing, blessing, and so on.  Then we'd have a range of unique spells/chants/prayers, from which the character would have a couple (through some sort of random table) and the rest obtainable not through level advancement but through exploration, asking people about their faith and transcribing their prayers into your book.  Looting a book of hours wouldn't work - learning the story behind why this saint was important to this family or what makes this chant special is what gives the magic its power.

This is a very different take on the cleric.  Rather than trying to shoehorn the cleric into this, or make this some sort of weird optional subclass thing, this seems like a core mechanic for the cantor.  As I procrastinate and stay up late working on my world instead of sleeping or doing 'real' work, I'll keep developing this idea.