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.

More Catholic Aspirations

Grad school has me busy, far busier than I expected, which has dramatically cut down on the work I am able to do on my world.  However, one of my classes focuses upon medieval liturgical life, with an emphasis on monasteries - it's where I found the source for my previous post.  I have no idea how much work I'll be able to get done, but as I come across these kinds of gems, I'll post them - when I have more time, I'll collate them into a different idea of the 'cleric,' perhaps called the 'cantor' or something similar.

Today's insights come from Susan Boynton's article, "Orality, Literacy, and the Early Notation of the Office Hymns."  It's a fascinating text on the relationship between oral and written traditions in the 11th c.  While rather technical and detail-oriented, the scholarship is phenomenal.

The monks of Cluny, a Burgundian abbey, attracted widespread renown for their wholesomeness and purity, inspiring many other monasteries to follow their customs (at least, in theory).  Consequently, the Clunaic monks produced dozens of texts called 'customaries' which listed the ways they practiced their faith, "including its liturgy, the duties of monastic officials, and the routine of daily life in the community" (135).

The reason for this admiration, and the purpose of this post, is that the purity of these monks was believed to grant divine power: "the abbey's fabled way of life... in addition to its salvific power through intercessory prayer for the dead, was thought by some to transform monks into angels.  The training of oblates at Cluny... aimed to instill in them the purity that would enable them to lead a celestial life on [sic] earth..." (136).

The parallel between this and becoming a Buddha by reaching Enlightenment are striking.

I guess the takeaway is that the reward for a character who's powers come from a divine authority (at least within some sort of Christian-ish tradition) is becoming an angel and still dwelling on Earth.  Do with that what you will.

Trade Equations

I have, potentially, my first game on Monday.  It's at a local gaming store, but since it's during the weekday, it should be relatively quiet.  Because of this, I have been frantically working at the trade tables to get them into a useable state - it also keeps me distracted from the schoolwork that needs to be done this weekend as well.

I was completing the second step in the process, aggregating all of my world's references into thematic groups with some rudimentary determination of goods that require no processing, when I ran into two problems.

Before I get into this, if you are not familiar with Alexis' trade tables, I suggest you fix that - the following discussion will make no sense if you don't.

The first problem was with the valuation of gold.  This is the first calculation on the sheet, and it's important because it determines the price, in copper pieces, of 1 reference's worth of goods.  For the sake of simplicity, I am calling that quantity a crop.  Right now, a resource's crop size is determined by dividing the global production of that resource by all of the references for it (on a global scale).

It struck me as a little odd that the gold crop had no direct bearing on the local value of gold.  Then I started digging a little further and it appeared that the price of gold would only fluctuate based upon .002*local/global, where local is the number of local references of gold and global is the total number of gold references.  This seemed strange to me, but I continued forward.

What convinced me that this was a problem, though, was the double-conversion to coinage seen whenever the price of a good was to be generated.  The formula for an arbitrary good looked something like this,

Where refVal is the value in copper pieces of 1 reference, calculated as above and production is the global quantity of a good produced.

This simplifies to

Which means that the local amount of a reference has no significant bearing upon its price.  Additionally, since refVal has already converted from oz. gold to copper coins, the additional coin conversion at the end of the equation is extraneous.

Which means that I needed a new way to value gold and a new way to assign a coin value to 1 unit of a resource.  I called in my roommate and we spent half the night yesterday/this morning fighting through this to find a solution.  And find one we did.

The challenge of this problem is that there are so few actual variables that depend upon location - every meaningful combination of them resulted in their cancellation, which defeated the purpose of the proposed improvement.  We eventually hit upon the idea of incorporating a new variable: the power of the market in question, determined by the sum of all the local references (i.e. all the references in the world altered by their distance from the market in question).  With this in hand, we returned to the problem.

For gold, we have

I'll walk you through this equation.  The product/global term gives us the crop size - how many units of a good are worth 1 reference.  We then multiply our crop size by the power of our market which tells us how many oz. of gold our economy is worth (since 1 reference is equal in value to any other reference, we have product/global*power value in our system as a whole).  We divide this number by how many references of gold we actually possess, local, and this gives us a ratio of the total value of our system in gold by how many references for gold we actually have.  We convert this to copper coins and are done.

Now to tackle valuing goods.  Working this morning, I constructed the following expression:

The first term calculates the value of the goods on hand in copper pieces.  The second term scales that price by how powerful our market is and how abundant the resource is - a resource with fewer references will have a higher price than one with many, and a more powerful market (drawing more things from more places) will command lower prices overall.

Alexis' explanations of his own steps are as good, if not better than mine.  But the units of all of these expressions work out, and now each good's price is influenced by the market's power and the global and local reference values, increasing site-specific prices.

Of course, due to the probabilistic process through which I generated my references, I may have some correcting to do (I needed to add a bunch of iron references, for example), and that may necessitate either adding more references or modifying the production totals in order for the economy to work in the way that I need, but I am much happier with these expressions.

Also, as a side note, VLOOKUP is a godsend in this work.  No more hunting for appropriate references!

Speaking of Sacred (Catholic) Music...

Reading for a class and I come across a section from Chris Page's book, The Christian West:

"Some time before 1123, Peter the abbot of Cava in Campania found that the local seigneur was sporadically emerging from his castrum of San Severino and harassing the workers on the rural estates of the monastery.  He even drove them from one of the fields as they were in the midst of sowing.  The lord's motives are unlikely to have been very complex; the archives of the abbey of Cava are extensive and they leave no doubt that the monastery owned a considerable amount of land.  Lord Roger of San Severino had every reason to enlarge the scope of his tenantry by threatening its rural serfs as a prelude to appropriating its good arable land, and it would not have taken much for his group of armed and mounted men, the garrison of the castellum, to see off the abbey's peasants in the field.  Instead of raising a militia or appealing to a diocesan, however, Abbot Peter decided to defend the furrows with plainsong.  He went out to the field with the serfs and a few monks and 'instantly began to sing chant'.  Lord Roger appeared with his men, but at the sound of the plainsong his mood was softened to the point where he became penitent, even lacrimose, and prostrated himself at the abbot's feet. 'Thus', says Peter's biographer, 'we know that psalmody softens the ferocity of evil spirits and puts them to flight.' (394)

Furthermore, we also get these gems:

"plainsong was a means of healing... it was also, as the miraculous appearance of saints during worship occasionally revealed, a form of conjuration." (394).

Some things to think about when considering how music might play a role in your worlds, especially your sacred music.