Mythic Monday: China Mieville's Slake Moth

At one point over at Cyclopeatron's place, I came across a link to an interesting China Mieville interview where he talked about a fascination with AD&D's bestiaries:

I use AD&D-type fascination with teratology in a lot of my books, and I have the original Monster Manual, and the Monster Manual 2, and the Fiend Folio. I still collect role-playing game bestiaries, because I find that kind of fascination with the creation of the monstrous tremendously inspiring, basically.

Typically the Mythic Monday columns focus on some aspect of myth or folklore, and how to adapt it for your D&D game; this week's column is interesting because it involves an item from D&D that apparently showed up in a literary work; let's bring something back.

One of Mieville's most fascinating creatures is the Slake Moth from Perdido Street Station; a horrifying predator, it unfolds hypnotic wings that transfix a victim in place, allowing the larger-than-man-sized moth to slip forward and feed on the victim's thoughts, draining the psyche through a long slobbering tongue until the victim is a mindless vegetable.  The Slake Moths in Perdido Street Station are terrifying, but the way the criminals of Bas-Lag attempt to exploit them is even more horrible; feeding on dreams and psyches, the milk of the moths can be used to create a powerful street drug.  The criminal underworld brought the moths in to breed them and generate the dream-drug.  The horror begins when the moths escape and terrorize the city by night.

The Gloomwing

I couldn't help but notice a more than passing semblance with the Gloomwing from 1983's Monster Manual 2; the Gloomwing is an aggressive predator moth that also uses hypnotic wings (the gloomwing's wings cause Confusion); meanwhile the moth slips forward, weakening the victim with pheromones and then using the corpse to gestate the moth's larvae (which eventually become the Tenebrous Worm, also in MM2).  You have to wonder how much the Slake Moth's mind draining was inspired by the Mind Flayer and this iconic image from the back of D1:

It's pretty cool to think an obscure monster (the Gloomwing) from an old bestiary inspired one of the modern day's rising authors in the realm of Weird Fiction; keep your eyes open, we may see even more monsters from AD&D find their way back into the realms of popular fiction.

Of course, we D&D players can borrow some of these ideas back.  Taking a page from Perdido Street Station, the Gloomwing can be used as bizarre urban predators that drop out of the night sky to carry off victims from the city's darkened streets.  The real terror is waiting back in the moth's lair, where any would-be exterminators would have to deal with the Tenebrous Worm back in the nest.

Incidentally, a Dragon Magazine (#352) had an article featuring the city of Bas-Lag and various monsters from Mieville's world, including the Slake Moth; the 3.x version bumped the hit dice to 13, and had abilities to represent the psychic draining (mind rot), the hypnotic wings, and the way the moths induced nightmares while flying high above the city (essentially "fattening the meals" before feeding).  One could easily beef up the Gloomwing by strengthening the hypnotic effect of the wings, bump up the HD a little, and give it the ability to drain psyche like a mind-flayer and you'd have your own slake moth.

Making a Deck of Many Things in 15 minutes

Deck of Many Things - fast and easy

Here's a quick and easy way to make your own Deck of Many Things in about 15-20 minutes.  (First off, thanks to Jim from the Carjacked Seraphim blog for pointing me to the WOTC site for an old PDF from 2006 - you can find it here:  WOTC DOMT link.  About halfway down is something called Deck of Many Things download with a pdf of cards from the original deck).  I printed the PDFs in a minute, borrowed a glue stick from the kiddos, smeared glue all over a couple pieces of chipboard, and was cutting cards within a few minutes after it dried - started it about twenty minutes before gamers would be showing up and got done with plenty of time.

You can get 8 x 11 chipboard at a paper-supply store - I happened to have some around because I used to make creature counters back when we messed around with 3.x, before I owned any miniatures (I'd print Fiery Dragon creature counters on whole sheet label paper, stick the sheets to the chipboard, and cut it up - instant cardboard counters).

The cards worked fine and look pretty good for free and fast.  While I was forwarding the cards picture from the iPad, I saw I had one for this year's jack-o-lantern.  Enjoy!

House Beedo's 2011 Jack-O-Lantern

Sage Advice: Adventure Details

There's clear tension between the amount of adventure detail in a published work, utility at the table, and required preparation time.  The X factor is the DM's ability to think on his or her feet and improvise interesting details.  It could probably be represented as an equation:

X = Y:  Detail requires reading and preparation; walls of text are useless while running the game, so all the prep is necessary for memorization, creating notes, and highlights.  Meanwhile, sparse notes are easy to read and parse while running the game, but the important details need to be improvised.  There are correlations between detail and prep time, and improvisational ability and the degree of sparseness the DM can handle.

There was a post over at Telecanter's place that laid out the case against too much details; it went like this - detail is expensive (it takes up a lot of time), it demands mastery (you need to keep the details straight), and it's dominant - once something is tagged, it's hard to change the descriptors, the details stick.

One sheet of notes for a huge level

There's been a whole minimalist movement in the OSR, starting long before I was out here posting, to recapture that sense of 'creation at game time', where the adventure is laid out in the loosest level of detail imaginable, and the DM improvises on the fly.  The "one-page dungeon" movement and Sham's empty room principle captures this aesthetic well; sparse description and empty space transforms the effort of DMing a game from rote memorization and regurgitation into an effort of creation on the fly.  Remember those interesting Gygax pictures, like this one, of Gary running his famous Castle Greyhawk?  The map might be intricate, but  the prepared notes seem as brief as possible.

On the other hand, there are adventure writers like James Raggi that insist on extensive detail, and make impassioned defenses both of the published adventure and copious detail.  Consider this excerpt from the introduction to LOTFP's Hammers of the God:

It is the atmosphere and flavor which I feel is the most valuable in a commercial adventure. Anybody can make maps and stock them with monsters and treasure. You can even do it randomly. Off-the-cuff refereeing is a skill that indeed requires no outside support, be it commercial or free. But I know when I buy an adventure, I am seeking in-depth descriptions that make the map and the contents of the location come alive, and hopefully in a way that I would never have done on my own…

There are some valid points there; note that he doesn't denigrate off-the-cuff refereeing, he just opines that there's not much you'd need from a publisher.  We'll come back to that point later.  He goes on to make another interesting observation, one that I agree with; one way to learn how to run your own games better is observing how other DMs do things.  You can't always sit in when other DMs run their games (although Google+ games seem to be changing that!) but you can pick up staging tips if a module author makes it a tacit goal to impart that kind of help through the module presentation:

Becoming a good musician starts with having a good record collection. Being a top athlete means competing against the very best. I think a Referee can only benefit from taking another’s adventure and adapting their style to the author’s presentation, instead of doing the commonly-vaunted reverse method of always adapting published material to the Referee’s own campaign.

The "problems" of detail have different solutions for the home DM vs the RPG Publisher.  In the home game, we should strive to run wild with that minimalist style; write down just enough to keep the facts straight and jog your memory if you get fuzzy.  You are your campaign.  The reason there is no published Castle Greyhawk is because Gary was Castle Greyhawk; how do you catalog and document a life-time of running adventures in a location you mostly improvised?  You don't.  That's why we'll never have the real thing.  Go make your own.

For publishers, the answer is different.  When I look to buy a published module, it's for one of three reasons - either the author has established a specific theme or tone (using the authorial voice Mr Raggi discusses in his quote above), or the author is providing new tools for enabling the home DM, or the module covers a significant amount of scope.  I've done a fair amount of reviews the past year, with more on the way, and those adventures that score highest  in my personal ratings do something new and different in one of those three areas.  For everything else, you'd probably be better off just home brewing it yourself.

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Table Manners: A response to Noisms

Noisms pointed out some subjects D&D RPG bloggers tend to avoid, and I saw Simon is going to rise to the occasion as well.  Plus, there are many comments at Noisms's place - here are some more!  It's a perfect lazy Friday post.

There is an entire social side of the hobby that doesn't get touched on much in the blogs or the published game books.  I haven't had the chance to get onto any of the Google+ games, but this would be the best reason for me to be a player out there; one of the surest ways to improve as a DM is to play with some great DMs and see how they handle their tables.

Here are some practices from Table Beedo:

Roleplaying, Voices, and Roll-playing
I don't mind hamming up characters, taking on some physical characteristics of an NPC from time to time, and I have a long history in the 90's doing all those character-driven White Wolf games.  That stuff is GREAT when it comes from the DM.  But whenever a player disagrees with the group and starts in with "My character would/would not choose X for role playing reasons…", it's going to lead to tears and breaking glass.

D&D is a cooperative game of problem solving and adventure, and there's no place for role playing choices that inhibit group play; the needs of the many outweigh the few. Player-versus-Player conflict is not accepted or wanted.  I don't mind players discussing role playing choices out-of-character and coming to a consensus, but any time we've had players that have stolen the spotlight and warped the game around their in-character dramatic role playing choices, they haven't lasted long in my group.

For that reason, I'm really dubious about alignment, and many of the sub-classes in AD&D, because they come with built-in agendas that can warp group play - Paladins, Rangers, Assassins, Druids - bah.  They're all banned unless the group clamors for one.  Our current group does indeed have a Paladin, but that's because they have a powerful Cleric that was already guiding party activities towards "good" versus the roguish pillaging they were engaging in earlier in the campaign.  As a group, they cheerfully agreed that a Paladin was a good idea when one of the kids suggested making one.  At that point, I concede; it's their group.

I've had plenty of "evil" characters in my games in the past, and they bring a lot of drama and interest, as long as the evil acts happen off screen or back in town, and involve NPCs.  When it's adventure time, it's team time.  For instance, one campaign had a callous and slimy Magic User that tended to overuse Charm Person whenever he was passing through a place, leaving behind a slew of cheated merchants and pregnant farm girls.  He was shockingly despicable, but during adventures, he was all business; no PvP action in sight.

So that's my line - role playing enhances the game and makes the experience fun, but the moment it crosses over into a distraction from group goals and makes the game less fun for everyone else, you need to take that person aside and have The Talk.  This happens all the time with the kids, and once you explain to them that D&D is a team sport, the kids usually get it.  It's the immature adults who respond with, "F-U, Beedo, I'm taking my Half-Orc Cleric/Assassin and going to play World of Warcraft on a PvP Server."

Snacks, Breaks, and Booze
I host like 90% of the time, and players bring snacks; each week the snack duty rotates, and the snack person brings a few bags of chips and pretzels.  During important sessions and boss showdowns, some wise guy might bring chocolate covered donuts or Pop'Ems in an effort to cloud my judgment; curse them for knowing the DM's weaknesses.

We only play three or so hours, so we don't take breaks - folks just wander out as necessary.  These days we go with water only; there are kids at the game and a few of the guys have to drive, but we've had beer at game night in the past.  For that matter, every game night starts with The Song:  the theme for Monday Night Football.  The only thing better each week than the kick off for Monday Night Football is kicking off game night.

Other curious table habits:  the bringer of snacks is also the party "Caller" for the night; this ensures the duty rotates around the table and every body gets a chance to be the table boss.  Weekly snack duty comes along with an honorary title, such as Ceasar Octavius Snackius, Thurston J Snackwell the 3rd, or Spongebob Snackpants.  This week, snacks will be brought in by JR, in the role of alien snackoid from the planet Snack.  (It's true, I can be amused by really dumb things like making up a weekly snack title.)

The Absent Player
You cede control over your character's life when you miss a game, and the other players run the guy like a henchman.  Pretty much everyone is a friend or acquaintance of each other, so they don't go out of there way to abuse the characters of missing players, but it's also true that those guys tend to be the ones that open doors and test potions.  Just saying.

Talking About the Hobby
The first rule of Fight Club….

On a more serious note, I'm long past caring what people think about gaming.  I've got a successful career, awesome family; I'm very open about my enjoyment of history, fantasy, horror and sci-fi literature, and running a weekly D&D game.  You get used to reactions that run the gamut from embarrassed chuckles ("You still play that game from the 80's?"), shocked incredulity ("That game's not evil?") and the occasional approval ("Very cool, I wish I had a group near me").  My neighborhood has a few dads who play, and a few who nod politely and don't let their kids over because they're close-minded.  C'est la vie.

The funny thing about explaining gaming to interested newbies is that it's become easier to discuss video games like Zelda or WOW, and then just say this is like playing those games from the time before computers.  Ouch.

Narrative Style
I believe in progressive elaboration, start bland and high level, and reveal more details as the group asks questions and investigates.  I'm not shy of big words, but I understand that long descriptions put people to sleep, and folks can't parse too many things at one time in short term memory.

Gothic Greyhawk Game 45 - Firebombed Again

Cast of Characters:
Mordecai, a Cleric-6: Adam
Forlorn, an Elf-5 (1): Bo
Mister Moore, Magic User-6: Mike
Shy, a Fighter-6 (3):  JR
Leonidas the Paladin-5:  Nogal
Digit, the Elf Thief-6:  Z

Henchmen:
Phat Kobra, a Dwarf-5
Grumble the Smug, Halfling-5 (3)
Donavich, Cleric-4
=========================================
AD&D 1E, I6 Ravenloft
=========================================

Life expectancy of henchmen in the group has continued to decline.  The group rode back to town, disheartened by the recent death of Serge, who was smashed by an Iron Golem's fist.  These days, they use a pair of horses and a wagon to haul stuff around, like corpses, and the paladin rides a war horse (though not his special paladin-friend horse).  It beats walking.

Zeke, a henchman who had died in the cave-in by the creek-side a few days ago, was excavated by some peasants, and they returned his body and belongings to the players, including Zeke's Deck of Many Things.  (The peasants might have pocketed quite a bit of electrum, but who's counting?)  The temptation of using the Deck of Many Things, now that it's back in the limelight, was a bit high; I might have had something to do with it.  "I wonder if one of the cards would lead to something like Wishes.  You guys sure could use some wishes to get some of these dead henchmen back to life."

Note:  There's a poll on the right if you have any experience with the Deck of Many Things in your own campaigns.

Other than that, the rest of the game session was taken up by a massive vampire ambush in town that night.  You'd think after being attacked while sleeping last week, the group would take some counter measures; sleep in a guarded place, post some watches, something.  They sprawled across 3 nearby abandoned cottages in the north part of town, not far from the church, and sacked out.  Mordecai was awakened by a heavy knocking on the door to his home; looking out of the 2nd floor window, he saw a vampire chick on the cobble stone street looking up at him.  "C'mon out, we want to have a talk with you!"  He pulled the shutter closed and started waking the others.

A second later, the roof was doused by a Molotov cocktail from atop a nearby cottage, and Mordecai's companions (Grumble, Leonidas, and Donavich) were running down the stairs to the back exit, dragging armor and backpacks.  They ran smack into a pair of dire wolves in the alley, and had to drop gear and start defending themselves sans armor.

Mister Moore heard the ruckus from across the street, woke up, and looked out the window himself; he saw the house on fire, vampires fluttering in the air (there were three of them), huge night wolves loping into the alley behind the burning house, and the din of combat.

Mordecai turned the first vampire into the alley, a new female vampire they hadn't seen before (Helga).  A few rounds later, Top-Hat Man and Gertrude dropped into the alley as well.  Questionable Ruling:  I gave Mordecai a second turn attempt when the other vampires arrived, since his first was successful and these vampires weren't present when the combat started; I see now it was too generous. As it happened, he turned Gertrude with his second attempt, and they were able to fend off Top-Hat Man with magic weapons and the Sunsword; unfortunately, all three vampires escaped safely into the darkness for the next skirmish.  They'll be back.  The other two contingents of player characters slowly joined the fray, blasting dire wolves with spells and quickly reinforcing the guys pinned down in the alley.

The next morning, they learned there was a massacre at the tavern earlier the night before; the vampires had killed the bar keep and some villagers, perhaps to find where the characters were staying.  After a quick meal of grubby peasants, the three vamps went and firebombed Mordecai's house.

"No place in town is safe for us until those guys are all staked", was the popular opinion amongst the players.  "They level drain us, then they head off to regenerate and attack again; we don't regenerate.  They're just going to keep up the hit and run."  The group made plans for an extended stay at the castle - here on out, they would camp right in the dungeon.  "Either we walk out of there alive, with three more dead vampires to our names, or we don't come back at all".

It'll be like Thunderdome.

The Deck of Many Things , Beneficial and Baneful

My players have been hauling around a Deck of Many Things for months and months now; long ago, they wrapped it in a cloth, tied it up with string, and threw it in the bottom of Zeke's  backpack, promptly forgetting about it.  Zeke got killed in a cave-in a few weeks ago, and just last game the peasant workers that have been toiling for days to clear the rubble, returned to the village with his corpse.  Amongst the belongings were Zeke's Deck of Many Things.

The reemergence of the Deck into the forefront of people's minds has them reconsidering the temptation.  The character Mordecai is 59 years old after being on the wrong end of a ghost attack, and is considering retirement.  He's thinking about going out with a blaze of glory and pulling a few cards.  One of the fighters sees the other 4 fighters in the group and wonders if he'd be missed.  "Weren't you saying we could use another magic user, or perhaps a druid?"  And then there's the guy in the corner, "Don't do it; the DM is using the jedi mind trick on you by reminding us about the Deck."

I have to give my players some credit; they don't go snooping in the Dungeon Master's Guide.  That one guy remembered something about "picking a card and getting trapped forever by a demon" from an AD&D game 20 years ago, and that was enough for him.  "I will never draw a card from one of those things, ever."

If the players peeked, they'd know the 12 or so awesome things are ridiculously good, most of the bad things are manageable, but the 2 or 3 really bad things means it's time to roll up a new character.  For a single pull the odds are like 54% for something great, 33% for something bad but manageable, and 13% for a fate worse than death.

How many of you have drawn from the Deck of Many Things?  It seems like a device that is tailor made for memorable events, malevolent and benign - earn a castle, get all buffed out, pick up some wishes, gain an enemy for life.  I've posted a new poll to get a sense on how risk averse is the community of players out there.

Mosaics and Impressionist Paintings: An Alternate Setting Metaphor

Middle Earth vs Newhon

The post on white space the other day highlighted some differences between bottom-up and top-down setting design, and how bottom-up allows room for more dramatic changes as you go along;  by starting small and developing the micro-setting, the DM can plug in emergent ideas without violating the big-picture aesthetic, because there is no big picture aesthetic. Bottom up is a way to mitigate the gamer ADD.

Anyway, I struck on a different metaphor - top-down is like an impressionist painting, and bottom-up is a mosaic.  The picture caption refers to the different setting approaches taking by Professor Tolkien for Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, and Fritz Leiber's approach to Newhon in the stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Folks that sketch out the world, provide the history, and define an aesthetic that unifies the setting are painters - they cover the available canvass when creating that overarching picture.  It looks great when you squint or view it from a distance, but when you get close you realize it's just broad brush strokes without a lot of detail.

The bottom-up approach is like building a mosaic out of tiles.  Each tile is highly detailed and colorful, and you can zoom in real close to see the details.  One tile doesn't define the color, size or style of the next.  A similar metaphor for creation could be a quilt; everyone has seen those quilts with highly detailed squares, each with a unique pattern; the pattern on one square exerts no influence on the next square over, and the end result might be fairly discordant, but it was fun to put together along the way.

Many of the high concept worlds that TSR and WOTC created are clearly top-down, and it's not hard to think of something an old school gamer might want to put in one of those worlds that would be fairly discordant.  The one TSR setting I can think of that's clearly a bottom-up mosaic is Mystara - the Known World from BX and then the BECMI era.  Each new Gazetteer extended the setting in a modular and unusual new way; I could probably write an "ode to gonzo" just based on the Mystara sprawl.  It's the ultimate D&D kitchen sink setting.