Monstrous Monday: The Faceless

I had to decided to pitch in for Tim's Monstrous Monday event for the month of October.  October really is one of the best months, isn't it?  I need to start getting out some monsters that will work well in the Spirit Island campaign.  Plus, I need to carry through on my threat to make some monsters that would use Dreamblade figures!

First up is a creature based on a monster from folklore, the Mujina (or more properly, Noppera-bō).  I'm not a fan of the previous incarnations of the Mujina, so I'll refer to them as The Faceless, an alternate type of doppleganger.  Commoners often refer to them as 'Faceless Ghosts', but this is a misunderstanding of their true nature.

The Faceless delight in terrifying a victim unto death; they are skilled shape changers and often work as a pack, replacing people close to the intended target for building up to a final, horrible reveal.  A common scenario involves a victim encountering a stranger on the road, frequently a woman combing her hair, discovering in horror that she has no face, fleeing to a well-known person (like a wife), and then experiencing the ultimate horror as the wife too, wipes away her visage to reveal that she is also one of The Faceless.

The Faceless
AC as chain, HD 5, Attacks 1 weapon or monstrous claw, Damage by weapon or 1d12, Mv 9, Morale 8, AL Chaotic.

The Faceless can assume the identity of any human, drawing forth memories and thoughts in order to perfect the duplication.  They are unaffected by Sleep or Charm.  They save as 8th level fighters.  When The Faceless reveals its blank visage, anyone viewing it must Save vs Death or flee in fear.  If one of The Faceless has taken the role of a key loved one, or other person well known to the victim, the victim must Save vs Death or die.

Ramblings About Spirit Island

I'm traveling this upcoming week, but have some reading material with me and hope to get a few reviews posted.  A reader dropped a note asking about my process for gathering ideas for Spirit Island, and since I went a bit overboard in answering, the correspondence would work fine as a blog post, too.  I've been heartened by how many OSR folks are interested in seeing more D&D style of play in an Eastern setting, so here's where I'm at with the development and what you should see posted in the near future.

For starters, I've had a bunch of 'Arthurian Mythos' themed explorations going on at the house; I had just been reading 'The Once and Future King' with my oldest kid and we watched Excalibur (redacted) so he could see different interpretations on the cycle of stories.  The younger ones were just discovering Miyazaki ('Spirited Away', and 'Princess Mononoke') and the idea struck me - why not make my next project, after The Black City, a Japan-themed setting that combines the broad themes of Arthurian myth with a heavy dose of samurai and the spirit world?

I'm really early in the process and I have a ton of reading lined up.  Royall Tyler's 'Japanese Tales' has been very entertaining, and full of short, flavorful folk tales, many featuring monsters.  I've also been reading this guy's blog, it's translations of tons of short Japanese ghost stories:  Hyakumonogatari.

I finished Osprey Press's "Warriors of Medieval Japan" to get insight on equipment, organization, and tactics used by fighting men of the period (it covered samurai, ninja, ashigara, and warrior monks - sohei).

Other RPG writers have already done a good job of compiling cultural notes and daily life - thanks all for the many excellent recommendations - so I plan on getting ideas from games like Sengoku and Bushido on cultural ideas instead of focusing on primary sources, at least for now.   I recently became aware of a game called Blood & Honor, discussed over on the Age of Ravens blog, that looks like it provides lots of tools for building samurai clans and the political structures.

My goal for the main island is to briefly describe the high level political structure of the empire, clans, leaders, armies, etc.  The northern provinces, closer to the adventuring area, would be more detailed.  The remote island of Honshu will be created as a giant hex crawl, with scattered mini dungeons across it.  Most of the D&D style adventure will be on that island, renamed Spirit Island in the campaign world, but players can engage with politics and war on the mainland as they gain levels (assuming that's even interesting to them).

As of right now, I'm planning on doing it with ACKS - ACKS is an OSR type D&D (based on the Mentzer edition of basic D&D) that adds 3E style proficiencies and good custom class building options, two things that will help players achieve a bit of mechanical differentiation between types of fighting men.  ACKS also has a domain system I'll use to define the different provinces and daimyos.  I tend to view an economic system in an RPG as useful primarily insomuch as it provides guidelines on how large should be the different armies of the various lords, as well as what the players can afford if they get their own domains.  It's only a worthwhile exercise if the DM also thinks it's fun to do a bit of bean counting!

My reading syllabus includes those other RPGs, lots of folktales and Japanese horror stories, and a more detailed exploration of the construction, layout, and defense of Japanese castles and forts.  Readers have suggested lots of good anime, so my netflix queue is full for the foreseeable future.

Next up for the blog is more character class mapping and designs, and then I'll start developing hex maps based on Japan and outlining those high level provinces for the empire.  I won't actually tackle Spirit Island and the dungeons for a while - right now, ideas are just getting dropped into a brainstorming notebook as I find them.  I tend to keep a couple of long term notebooks handy, one for each campaign concept, just for jotting ill-formed ideas.  I highly recommend keeping good old fashioned notebooks on hand.  I'm currently keeping one for The Black City, the Colonial Hex Crawl idea, and the last for the Spirit Island campaign.

The Black City is on the front burner, so my priority is spending a few hours each week preparing for the next session - I try to do some writing in the early mornings. Evenings allow a bit of reading and jotting ideas in the notebook after the kids are in bed.  The Black City percolated and simmered here on the blog for nearly a year before it became the main game, so I expect to take a similarly slow development period for Spirit Island.

Grinding the Axe

I mostly stopped paying attention to message boards when I began blogging, although perhaps that was a hasty choice - entertainment springs aplenty on them.  I was drawn into reading a laborious thread over on the RPG site when Tenkar posted a link to a rant (the Osric guy rails against ACKS).  After a few years away, the acerbic dialogue generated a bit of nostalgia for the good old days of boards.

Sprinkled liberally amongst the complaints about the Dwimmermount kickstarter were charges levied against the ACKS system by various folks, most of them fairly pedantic or priggish - like, was the right population density factor and historical sources used for determining the economic assumptions - or because the game included a chapter on campaign rules, doesn't that mean it's completely abandoned dungeons and wilderness for bookkeeping?  In the aftermath, a few bloggers took up the call to discuss "How much reality simulation do you want in a fantasy game, anyway?"  (I'm a little pressed for time, so I'll see if I can get some links - but I know Noisms had one of those posts:  Medieval England did not have dragons...).

One of the complaints that's actually kind of interesting is that ACKS borrows too much from modern versions of D&D, like 3rd edition, by implementing a proficiency system that's reminiscent of 3rd edition's feat system.  Although the authors all play or run old school campaigns as well, it's clear they've had their feet in the waters of 3E as designers, players, and writers.  A handful of bloggers are running ACKS campaigns, but board discussion for ACKS seems to center on the big purple and Enworld, sites with more resonance amongst new schoolers, rather than old school hubs like K&K or Dragonsfoot.

The last poll I conducted out here is still on the pane to the right - 88% of the folks visiting the blog identified themselves as DMs.  This corresponds to the prior poll, where the majority of folks indicated they didn't need mechanics to differentiate their characters.  I wondering how much correlation there was between mechanics-light as a DM value, vs mechanic-heavy as a player value.

So how about this for a Friday theses; Folks that hang out on old school message boards and blogs are heavily skewed towards DM's that want to run lighter versions of D&D, without a lot of mechanical bits for player characters, whereas players generally would prefer a system with more player-facing toys.  There's nothing too revelatory in that statement; in my own current campaign, The Black City, my players have been clamoring for us to switch to ACKS, whereas I've been fairly content running it using the stripped down and lower-powered LOTFP rules.  I just think it's interesting to consider how we , players and DMs, come to the table with different expectations and agendas that need to be balanced.  (I did tell my players we'd run an ACKs trial for The Black City in the near future and try it on for size - there's plenty I like about the system, and I certainly expect to feature it heavily in my Asian themed setting.)

Black City Game 8 - A Careless Transfixion

After what seemed like a month away from the role-playing table, we were able to get in another session this past weekend.  In fact, the weekend was a gaming bonanza - we also had a nice 4-player game of Dungeon Command on Sunday night, too.  But first, let's talk about how poor Arthur the Fair was transfixed by a giant lance and drawn into the mouth of a stone head and ground into a formless mass.

Breaking from the many delves in the giant tunnels beneath the city, the group finally started exploring the topside ruins.  Our last session ended with them finding a belt of levitation, which Arthur now used to float near the ceiling, clearing ice and debris and pulling open a pair of clamshell doors that led from their part of the dungeon level into the cool, crisp air of the surface.

Arthur floated higher into the air, so he could crane his neck around and get a nice 360 view of the surrounding ruined city hexes.  They now have the start of a surface map for hex crawling.  Not far to the north of their position was the edge of the great glacier that splits the northern and southern halves of the city, and the heavy mist and clouds that obscures the north half.  Immediately to the north of the dungeon entrance was a fascinating domed building, fully intact when everything around it was tumbled, cracked, and fallen.  Most interesting!

But as Arthur looked to the south, he saw a troop of Vikings a few streets over, pointing up into the sky at him, and clambering up rubble piles to get a better look.  Arthur quickly dropped down out of view with the levitation belt.

"Did they see you?  Are they coming this way?"  Those were the types of questions peppering Arthur when he got back below ground.  Since the 'voice of reason' in the group had to miss Saturday's game, the callous remnants decided that "dead men tell no tales"; the best way to keep their new entrance to the dungeon secret was to ensure the guys that spotted them never left the ruins... alive.  Climbing ropes were made to get everyone topside; the group scouted a good vantage for an ambush; a trap was laid for the other party.  Despite a careful approach, the Hersir and his guardsmen didn't stand a chance against the player's hail of arrows and brutal charge on foot.  The bodies were dropped down the long shaft after the useful gear and money was stripped off the corpses.

"Those guys were just in the wrong place at the wrong time", remarked Shamus.  "Under other circumstances, we might have tried to talk to them.  But we can't have word about our special dungeon entrance getting back to the camps."

While everyone was together on the surface, the party went to investigate the large domed building.  It appeared to be made out of a dull brown metal, apparently impervious; they could see where ancient obelisks and columns fell onto the building, shattering themselves, but doing aught to the structure.  Arthur was invoked to go scout the entrance.

As the thief approached the entrance, a pair of large ball-like structures, flanking the entrance area, rotated in their sockets and revealed (previously hidden) stone faces with large gem-like eyes. Each stone ball was around 10' diameter.  The eyes glinted with a faint orange gleam.

The group was cognizant that certain structures in the city would open to someone bearing the right color gemstone passkey, and they were fortunate to have an orange gemstone; Arthur held it out in front of himself, and approached the two round heads.  He was able to get to the door, which also had an orange flicker on a nearby panel, and his gemstone opened the door to the domed building.  Beyond, he saw a large circular place, dimly illuminated by occasional purple strobes of light.  They had discovered an untouched structure that had escaped pillage and ruin!

Greed got the better part of prudence, and Arthur stowed the orange stone to retrieve a chisel and hammer - he had every intent of looting those gemstone eyes from the rotating balls that flanked the doorway.  The rest of the party, a safe distance across the square, watched in horror as the stone ball behind Arthur opened a mouth, lanced him with a long, spear-like tongue, and drew the wriggling thief back to it's mouth, where he was crushed and mangled.  It looked kind of like the set of "watchers" in the middle row of this picture:

They spent some time with a grappling hook and rope, trying to snag Arthur's crushed remains and drag them back to a safe distance, in the vain hope that the orange passkey gem was still in serviceable condition.  No such luck.  They had no way to get into the metal dome or safely approach the watchers.  A cairn was built for Arthur, and the group returned to the dungeon below.

There's not much more to say; they explored a handful of new rooms in the Mist Dungeon, getting into a few simple combats, and not discovering too much of great interest.  We ended after the party chiseled their way into a frozen vault, and braved the chill mist in the frigid room to behold a number of 'specimens' in large upright tanks; there was a long-haired human, a muscular Neanderthal, a white-haired man-monkey, and a thing that was built like the Neanderthal, but had ashen skin, vicious looking sharp teeth, and appeared blind or eyeless.  They grabbed some electrum plates off the wall, covered in alien dot matrix script writing, and retreated to a camp site in the dungeon.

Abducted by Fairies

So - what happened to your character while he or she was abducted by the faeries?

Fairy abduction is a common enough literary theme, but we don't use it very often in games - mainly because players hate losing control of their characters!  It's a fantastic plot device in a horror game because it underlines themes of helplessness and impotence against otherworldly powers.  In a fantasy or adventure game, time spent in the otherworld should give the character some kind of benefit to offset the inconvenience of having to play a backup character for a time.

Here's a small table of "benefits" that might happen to a character who has been spirited away to the otherworld.  There are cross-cultural similarities between fairy abduction, alien abduction, carried off by spirits (kami), or snatched by one of the gods, so replace the word "fey" with the other dimensional being of your choice.  Some modern UFOlogists even use the term "ultraterrestrial" to marry these phenomena into a singular theory.

In my current campaign, one of the comely male characters was whisked off by a group of Norse dark elves a few weeks ago, after the rest of the party was put to sleep.  Assuming he's returned to the world in the near future, here are the kinds of things that could happen to him after he's spent time with their dread queen:

1 Time Loss
2 Fairy Marked
3 Abused
4 Future Sight
5 Psychic Empowerment
6 Favored
7 Altered State
8 Scarred

Time Loss
The character might have been gone for only a few hours in our world, but years or decades had passed amongst the immortals of the fairy world.  Advance the category on the age track (if using an aging table), or increase intelligence or wisdom by 1 point and reduce constitution.

Fairy Marked
The character returns with a distinctive birthmark that improves reaction rolls with fey creatures by +1, and takes a similar penalty with inquisitors or enemies of the fey.  (We also see these called devil's marks or witch marks).

Abused
Many abduction stories have a sexual component.  The fey took something personal from the character - in time, a half-human offspring returns to the world, fully grown because of the time differences between the otherworld and the mortal world.  The offspring is a wicked changeling who will challenge the character's place in the world!  (Literary examples of this type of character include Valgard (The Broken Sword) or  even Mordred (Le Morte d'Arthur).

Future Sight
The character was offered a disturbing vision of an unavoidable tragedy that will befall the mortal world in the near future.

Psychic Empowerment
Time spent among the faeries unlocks a latent psychic talent, such as ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, or postcognition.  This new ability can be used once per day.

Favored
The character won the favor of a fey noble while in the otherworld; they return with a whimsical title and a magic item appropriate to the role.  Unfortunately, they don't fully remember all that was required of them.  Future comedic interludes are assured.

Altered State
The character has been enhanced or altered in a bestial way through exposure or experimentation - increase 2 physical attributes by a point but reduce their charisma.  (If it happens in the Black City, the character is now partially troll-blooded).

Scarred
The character returns with hidden scars, chunks of missing time, and a bad attitude.  Their hatred grants them a +1 when fighting fey creatures.

Magic and the Spirit World

Spirit Island is an Asian themed setting for old school D&D I'm working on, based on folklore and traditions of feudal Japan.

Shamans describe the spirit world as consisting of a number of interconnected realms - the Summerlands and Nightlands,  Natsunokuni and Yorutochi; the Celestial Court, where the greatest of the kami dwell; the Pure Land, a place of great beauty and enlightenment; Yomi, realm of the dead; the Hells, the place where devils and Oni originate.  These distinct places are considered smaller realms within the larger spirit world, because it's understood by the wise that spirits, and the rare mortal visitor to the spirit world, can cross from one realm to another while on a spirit walk.

The Nature of Spirits
There are a near infinite variety of spirits, ranging from simple spirits personifying a particularly distinct tree or landmark, to the majestic spirits that rule the Celestial Court, like the Sun and her brother, the Moon.  Spirits range in appearance from horrible aberrations, such as giant clawed centipedes with human faces or the terrible 8' tall Oni, with their green skin and glaring red eye, to the glorious divine presences of the gods, who sometimes appear as men or women of great beauty.

Spirits do share some basic characteristics.  In the spirit world, they are physical and tangible, but in the mortal world, they are invisible and immaterial.  Many spirits have the ability to become visible, and some are powerful enough to manifest physically  in the mortal world.  Most spirits that can assume a physical form can only do so near an anchor in the physical world, such as a landmark or gate to the spirit world.  Immaterial spirits can only be affected by magic or their spirit bans.

The life force of lesser spirits is usually tied to a physical anchor.  A mountain spirit would be tied to its mountain; a tree spirit is anchored to a special tree or grove.  Destroying the physical anchor destroys the lesser spirit.  Greater spirits are not tied to a location in this way.

Spirits are usually affected by one or more bans that limit and control their interactions with the world.  Many spirits can only manifest at night; some can't cross running water; most can't travel far from their physical anchor.  There's no limit to how strange or weird are the possible bans; a spirit might be forced to appear when its true name is said a certain number of times in a row; some can't cross the threshold of house; a river spirit may never be able to walk backwards; a spirit may be forbidden from speaking certain words; another spirit is obliged to eat anyone appearing before it and not carrying a juniper sprig, while the next can't attack anyone holding a turnip.

Learning a spirit's ban is a difficult but important step to safely interacting with the greater spirits.  It's common for spirits to become fascinated with mortals, and folklore is full of spirits that have physically manifested and become the lovers and spouses of humans.  In most cases, the human is placed under a ban that will dissolve the union and send the spirit back to the spirit world if the ban is broken; common bans for these marriages include things such as never revealing the true nature of the spirit spouse, or remaining faithful.  The offspring of these marriages are the spirit folk.

Magic and Spirits
Detect Invisible is invaluable for dealing with spirits, as it reveals the presence of lurking spirits, and also reveals spirit gates - doorways to the spirit world.  (True Seeing also works).  In the mortal world, spirits are otherworldly creatures and can't affect someone with Protection from Evil.  They can't cross an Anti Magic Shell.  Dispel Evil can destroy a spirit or sever its connection to an anchor.  Gate can be used to open a direct path to one of the spirit realms.

Immaterial spirits can only be damaged by magic or magic weapons, assuming the spirit can be detected while it is invisible.  Physical spirits can be damaged by normal weapons, although the more powerful spirits are still immune to normal weapons, even in physical form.

Alignment
Spirits are creatures of order.  Their actions and goals are governed by rules that are nonsensical or inscrutable to humans, but are binding to the spirits.  The greatest of the kami shaped the spirit realms and brought order to the primordial chaos.  Spirits are Lawful, and spell casters that draw on divine power are similarly Lawful.

Law is a cosmic alignment and an indicator of divine power; it does not reference good versus evil.  The majority of humans are plain old Neutral.  A human gains the Lawful alignment by drawing on spirit power, such as the various clerical spell casting classes, or otherwise gains a supernatural allegiance to a powerful kami.

Chaos is the echoes of the primordial void, the roiling elements before the creation of the mortal world and the spirit realms.  Monsters seek to subvert the natural order, destroy civilization, and return the world to the primordial chaos; they have the Chaotic alignment.  Magic Users and elementalists gain the Chaotic alignment by drawing on these powers of the void for their spells.

Note:  Although spirits have the Lawful alignment, many of their actions are evil when viewed through the lens of human morality.  Furthermore, most spirits have dual natures and aspects, one benign and helpful to humans, the other destructive and terrible from a human perspective.  Priests and shamans are often invoked to appease wrathful spirits and help them transition back to their benign nature, calming the angry spirit.

What's Next
I need to go back to working through character classes and class options; I did a bit on samurai as fighters a few weeks ago, and will continue with korobokuru, hengeyokai, spirit folk, and the other options for humans.  I'm using ACKS and the ACKS players guide, so it opens up some neat class options like the shaman, witch, and warlock.

I'll be starting to post spirit creatures here and there as I build out a bestiary.  I've tried to keep the cosmology loose and ambiguous, so interactions with spirits remain a bit vague, mysterious, and unsettling.  One thing I need to work into the mix is the nature of the undead, Japanese ghosts, and spirits of vengeance, and how they differ from ancestor spirits or the enlightened souls that reside in the Pure Lands.


*The image is Nayug, the spirit realm from Moribito: Guardian of the Sacred Spirit.

The Aristotelian Traps of Game Creation

I've been mulling the nature of the Spirit World as part of the development for the future "Spirit Island" campaign.  It's a setting I hope to use next year by repurposing some OSR rules to cover ground similar to AD&D's Oriental Adventures.

Ideas are whirling around my brain - inspirations culled from anime like Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Spirited Away; concepts drawn from J-horror properties like Silent Hill, Ringu, Ju-On, or Dark Water; it's even territory that has been trod by roleplaying games, like Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

It's hard to break out of the western, Aristotelian, impulse to explain how everything fits together.  As a game master and world-builder, you're expected to have answers, statistics, and mechanics, to reduce the great mysteries to a mere set of numbers for game purposes.  A glance at the appendix in the Player's Handbook, the original Deities and Demigods, or Manual of the Planes, with those baroque drawings of the relationships of the planes, reveals an orderly pantry where everything is set neatly on its own shelf.  A careful model with turf set aside for every conceivable alignment or relationship to elemental matter is depicted in the classic view of the multiverse.  Were I a learned occultist, I could probably trace the inspirations for that model of the planes, perhaps to the Theosophists or the Medieval hermeticists.  That Gygax fellow was well read and had a mind for harmonization and syncretism.

Much of what makes movies like Spirited Away or the various incarnations of Japanese horror so compelling is the ambiguity, the not knowing precisely how things hang together.  It represents a loss of control - a realization that our narrow slice of being exists in a much larger universe where we don't understand the rules.  In The Ring, for instance, we almost start to get a sense on what motivates Sadako (or Samara, in the Americanized version), but just as we get close to comprehension, the rules apparently change.  It's quite different than most American horror movies, where there's usually some kind of silver bullet, some rational explanation that provides a solution, if the protagonists can only persist long enough to see it through.

So the challenge in developing an alternate cosmology for use in the Asian setting is this problem of creating a set of rules that govern how things work, but placing the comprehension of the rules beyond the purview of any of the characters (and maybe even the mundane inhabitants of the setting).

But certainly, some things are known about the functioning of the spirit world?

As the name implies, it is the source of spirits, both light and dark.  Powerful spirits of light might have been worshipped as gods in the past, and humans have sought to please them, whereas the powerful dark spirits can only be appeased.  It is said the spirit world is a reflection of the waking world, and prominent landmarks have their own analog on the other side, altered to exaggerate characteristics that resonate the emotion of the place.  Depending on how and where one crosses over, the spirit world can be bright and sunny, and is referred to as the Summerlands, or it is dark and forsaken, when one crosses into the Nightlands (the realms of Samārando and Yorutochi, respectively, although they could be one and the same).

There are rare places where the veil between the worlds is thinner, and mortal magic can create a bridge to walk physically into the spirit world - others can only project their consciousness, leaving their mortal form behind.  It's also easier to enter the spirit world during the times of the solstice, when the walls are thinner, or when using certain drugs, or eating special plants.  These are all closely guarded secrets.  Of course, at these hallowed locations or celestial phases, the spirits can more easily enter the mortal plane, too.

Water and mirrors act as conduits, and there are rumored to be deep pools lost in the wild through which a swimmer can surface on the other side.  Ponds, lakes and certain springs are all associated with spirit creatures, the most  dangerous of which are the dragons.  Other spirits range from small scuttling things, to powerful incarnates representing early gods.  Stories also persist of people encountering spirits of their own family ancestors.  But many spirits are abstract concepts, personifying such varied elements as mountains, trees, and landmarks, to emotional properties like spirits of madness, fear, and rage.  Have we created them through our dreams, or is it the other way around?


*The picture is a still from the movie Avatar, depicting the wilds of Pandora.