Five Minute Friday Map

This is my first Five Minute Friday Map, inspired by this meme on Google+.

It is a cross section of a spherical mini-dungeon.  The PCs start in the center, teleporting or gating or dimensional shifting or somesuch to arrive there in the first place.  There is a large window that looks out over a gap to a much larger window opening into a lush garden chamber lit from above.  The light that comes out the window of the garden room is the only illumination inside the structure, providing indirect lighting all around the central opening.  The only door out of the start room opens onto a log bridge over a gap.  A demon beast of some variety is lurking below out of sight.  Roll 1d6 1: Giant Demon Porcupine 2: Two Headed Demon Wolf with Human Hands 3: Demon Bear 4: Giant Demon Spider 5: Giant Demon Toad with Toothed Tongue 6: Demon Minotaur with Battle Axe from Hell

The light source is a miniature sun that hangs in the air in the middle of the room above the Garden Room.  It does not produce heat but inflicts 2d6 damage per round to anything inserted into it, melting metal in 2d6 rounds.  

All of the plants, bushes and trees in the Garden are contained in large ceramic pots glazed with magical symbols.  They are a rare mixture of medicinal and poisonous herbs, trees bearing magical fruit and bushes with shadow berries useful for summoning dark creatures.  Both the pots and the plants radiate magic.

Defeating the Demon Beast causes a portal to open up in the Start chamber that leads back to wherever the PCs came from.  This portal will remain open for 2d20+4 rounds.  It will begin flickering with blue light when 5 rounds remain.

The chambers directly above the start chamber are a wizard's comfortably furnished living room appointed with indestructible lounge couches and low tables (lower chamber with two doors and a ladder to a trapdoor above)

and a wizard's mostly looted and totally ransacked laboratory/library with a secret door to the wizard's back door, a teleportation chamber.

The secret chamber below the demon beast contains the magical machinery that generates the light source, controls the humidity of the garden chamber and links with the magical pots to keep the plants in perfect health, and summons a new beast automatically 1d4 days after the death of the last

Dwimmermount Doesn't Suck

Dwimmermount doesn't suck from my perspective as a player.  I played in a play by post Dwimmermount game run by James M. a while back at http://odd74.proboards.com.   I responded to an open invite James made on his blog.  This was before Google+ existed in all its free multi-person video chat glory.

I played Kersa Duer, female goblin thief and shit stirrer (we were Group 2 if you actually check out the posts on the odd74.proboards).  I had a lot of fun and I think the group as a whole was having fun before James completely dissapeared without even a goodbye post.  Just like Joe the Lawyer  et al we were exploring the 1st level of Dwimmermount coming in the main entrance.  We found a secret door and an alchemist's workship and before that we tangled with metal infused skeletons that were guarding a door, and we found a metal disk that was a key in the secret room, and it fit in the door...

jamesm Level 8 Warlock member is offline Whipping Boy Joined: Dec 2007 Gender: Male  Posts: 812 Location: The Echo Chamber Karma: 25

Re: [GROUP 2] Beyond the Door « Reply #78 on Sept 29, 2009, 10:29am » Sept 28, 2009, 12:00pm, carlnash wrote: "Pull boys! Pull! Lets see them ignore this!" Whether for good or ill, the lead skeletal warrior springs to life as the noose lands around his neck and you pull on it. His companions then do the same, all twelve of them rushing forward in battle formation, clanking of they go. Clanking -- that's the odd thing about the skeletons before you: they make too much noise for the armor they are wearing, especially as their feet are not shod with sabatons. Looking more carefully at the skeleton you have ensnared and pulled closer into the light of your torches and lanterns, you see that its bones are shot through with a silvery-black metal -- metal you assume it to be, because it reflects the light. All the skeletons have the same appearance to them, with veins of this strange metallic substance covering their bones and, judging from the clamor they make as they advance, weighing them down somewhat. Link to Post - Back to Top   Logged James Maliszewski, Writer and Sleep-Deprived Dad Grognardia

The Purpose of D&D

I really enjoy reading the Tao of D&D blog.  I fully recognize that Alexis comes across as an asshole and may in fact be exactly that, although I would certainly not presume to judge a man's character by the content he posts on a blog.  I enjoy the blog because it makes me think; I enjoy thinking.  The vast majority of the posts on D&D blogs that I read do not make me think.  It is an almost vanishingly small minority of Alexis' posts that do not make me think.  I could care less if the man is an asshole - mine is a utilitarian liking, a purely selfish acknowledgement of the pleasure it gives me to read someone's point of view which is simultaneously utterly alien to me, very intelligent, and quite thought provoking.

Today Alexis tossed out a line while responding to a comment on his blog that I think is worthy of taking out of context and presenting here on my blog for my own readers, many of whom might not have the required temperament to navigate the treacherous shoals of Alexis' blog.  Alexis succinctly states the Purpose of D&D, and I think he nailed it:

"My perception of the purpose of D&D is that is should be so interesting you perceive it as one of the three fundamental activities of your life. "

How frickin' awesome is that?  Say what you will about the man, that is a powerful summation of what keeps people addicted to this hobby.  It made me think, as usual, and while eating and fucking would definitely top D&D for me, right after those two D&D joins making music as one of the most fundamental activities of my life.  I am constantly whistling or singing, melodies erupting unprompted from unknown quarters, and likewise I am constantly viewing the world with the eyes of a DM, appropriating cool bits of real life, imagining cool bits of unreal life, rehashing the events of the last game, imagining the actions of all the NPC players in the game, frantically scribbling down the places and people and events that burst forth unbeckoned from the burbling morass of my subconscious brain.  Despite working full time and having a wife who demands and deserves attention and time and an under-the-table second job, I consistently make time in my life for D&D. I make a lot of time for it.  It is clearly one of the fundamental activities of my life.  And I think that is awesome, and I thank Alexis for making me realize it more clearly.

Thanks Alexis!

DM's Trick: Name Lists

Name Lists

Name lists always turn out to be one of the most useful things I can do for a campaign in play.  For every language group in my campaign world I have a list of names, at least a full page in 12 point font, of male and female names.  I use common names in different real word languages; I prefer lists that have a quick description of name meaning when I compile these "DM's Cheat Sheats".  A little bit of time spent Googling and Copy Pasting into notepad and printing out a few pages of names for all the language groups in the campaign is incredibly useful at the table.

No matter what the situation, when your players run into an NPC, you can pull a name out that not only is consistent with the background of the NPC but also suggests a personality trait.  I just circle the name on the sheet and draw a line to the margins and note what the encounter is.  Once a campaign has been going for a while, just referring to the sheets for each different language group is a succinct reminder of every randomly encountered NPC in play.

This trick is one of those DM's sleight-of-hands that makes it seem like you are never unprepared.  Of course you had some planned out material if you could rattle off the names of the seven sleeping liches and what their demi-Godhood was focused on...

Tour of the Universe - Pan-Galactic Luxury Liner "Starfriend"

I really like this cutaway view of the pan-galactic gargleblaster, er, the pan-galactic "Starfriend" luxury liner.  Like many of the awesome illustrations in "Tour of the Universe", it is a two-page spread which sucks for scanning but it does make for an impressive experience leafing through the book (which is printed on a ridiculously heavy stock of paper).  The tickets and clearances needed to board the starliner are also presented, wonderfully anachronistic forms that appear to be filled out in the future by hand or typewriter.  If you were running any kind of game set in the future, there would be a lot of very useful handouts in this book.

Most of the keyed locations on the map are self-explanatory, but I am very curious about the "witchhold" located to the aft below the main thrusters.  I have not read the book word for word despite looking at every page for a while, so I could have missed something about the witchhold.

Our couple of inter-galactic tourists visit Orionis Delta III, or Behemoth's World, home to the universe's largest life forms.  Dig the scale on this pic - that is a spacecraft of some sort cruising by in the foreground, dwarfed by the behemoth it is flying past.  The behemoths strain "flying plankton" out of the atmosphere with their massive heads, which float along with the help of a series of helium sacks in the head and neck.  Another great picture shows the tour ship flying out the mouth of a behemoth skull and kneck preserved in upright position for tourism (steel trusses just barely visible in the skeletal remnants - I should probably scan that picture in too if I get a chance).

Tour of the Universe - Tombworld

A friend of mine just lent me a book called "Tour of the Universe" by Robert Holdstock and Malcolm Edwards.  It is presented as the scrapbook of a lucky human couple in the future who win a lottery and receive tickets to a tour of the universe.  The book is lavishly illustrated and includes ticket stubs, hotel brochures, starliner publications and all the ephemera collected on your average tour of the universe.

I intend to scan in several of the illustrations, but let me start off with a cross-sectional map of one small part of Tombworld, a tourist destination planet that was used for millions of years in the past by spacefaring species from many different planets to inter the remains of powerful individuals.  The surface of the planet is hidden beneath kilometers of ruins, but recent award winning work by a corporation holding tourism rights showed that sunshafts designed to bring sunlight down onto the masks of the sleeping kings from the earliest levels were incorporated into the designs of later tomb builders and provide uninterrupted vertical access; hundreds of sunshafts have been identified granting access to all layers of the mausoleums.

I am totally stealing this map:

Books vs. RPG Products

I won a Barnes & Nobles gift card at the white elephant gift exchange last Christmas at my grandparents-in-law's.  Rediscovering it recently, I have been poking around on B&N trying to figure out how to best spend my $20.

I long since discovered the wonders of buying books for $.01 + S/H from Amazon, using this amazing resource to fill in many a hole in my sci-fi / fantasy library.  When my friend lent me Halbritter's Armory recently and proudly told me I "wouldn't find another copy" of this "rare" and out-of-print book I didn't say anything, but sure enough, I found it for one penny on Amazon.

My current working list of B&N titles that I am trying to choose from (after a very brief session of poking around in the B&N search engine):

"Weapons - an International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to 2000 A.D." for $.09 + S/H;

"Encyclopedia of the World's Special Forces" for $.21 + S/H;
 
"The Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders and Birth Defects" for $.12 + S/H;

"Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects" for $.01 + S/H;

"A Dictionary of the Martial Arts" for $.01 + S/H

"The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom: A Celtic Shamans Sourcebook" for $.01 + S/H

"The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft" for $.85 + S/H

"The Ultimate Dinosaur Book" $.34 + S/H

"A Bestiary" $.01 +S/H

The question begging to be asked is why in the world anyone would spend money on buying products created for RPGs when products created for other markets with much higher production values are available for pennies and are infinitely more useful than all the RPG crap ever put up for sale.

I have a large collection of RPG books that I never use.  I compulsively buy cool RPG books when I encounter them in the wild, sometimes irrespective of the fact that I own the exact same edition of that particular book.  The desire that I have to buy cool looking RPG books when I encounter them in used bookstores and comic shops has nothing to do with their utility in my games.  I will not use them.  Most of the material sprung upon my players in any campaign I run is original Carl madness.  I do use some published resources, however, and they are hardly ever "RPG Products".

 I do use my ethnographies from my days as a cultural anthropology major at the University of Oregon quite often in my campaigns, and academic texts on subjects as disparate as the city states and orthography of ancient Sumeria and quantum mechanics.

Imagine a subject that is of paramount importance in the RPG you are currently playing in.  Google that subject with possible book titles in mind and figure out what kind of books are out there on that subject.  Search for those books on Amazon or B&N or just freakin' Google it again or something.  If you do a rational analysis of the bang for the buck it makes no sense to buy an RPG product in physical form for $10-15 + S/H when you can get multiple books of source material on the same subject for less money.

I'm not sayin' I'm just saying.

:)

Dream Physics and the Bizarre in Gaming

I have run PCs through dream sequences in almost every campaign I have ever DMed.  In my early days as DM (we ran 2e and loved it) I used dreams as plot hooks and a way to introduce demonic and magical influences in ways that made the players think beyond the dungeon.  I started exploring gaming in active dream state with an adventure I wrote involving four pocket dimensions contained within the rubies on a ring the players found in a treasure trove.  Powerful entities in these dimensions reached out to the PCs in their dreams and planted the seeds which would ultimately result in discovery and exploration of the pocket dimensions in the ring.  This was an example of my "gaming" in college, when I was not actually playing but still compulsively wrote D&D material.

  My games tend toward the extremely bizarre by almost any standards, so perhaps the dream state is the platonic ideal that my games strive toward.  Long before the recent dream adventures of Tilia, I introduced many other situations in my 4e game that are analogous to the lucid dreamstate; I have always liked the results when I give the reins to the players and let them come up with the limits of their actions.

The first time this happened in my 4e campaign was toward the end of the players' exploration of the Temple of Tamoachan.  Naturally I had placed the temple above a long-since-covered-in-solid-rock-by-tectonic-processes alien spacecraft, which radiated the energy used to power many of the crazy magical networks the party had discovered throughout the temple (I have to crazy up even a crazy tournament killer death trap 1e module, of course).  A near climactic battle in a sub-level I created featuring a massive worship hall with "benches" that animated into minions and huge statues that animated into huge demons that kicked major ass was close enough to the energy-emitting alien vessel that I allowed the PCs to take a full rest and refresh all their powers as a minor action by focusing on allowing the alien energy into themselves. Once the PCs got into the swing of things it was a spectacularly fun combat, with me hurling far greater numbers and more dangerous opponents against the PCs than they could have ever expected to survive, and them blowing daily power after daily power and refreshing all damage each round in a whirlwind of death and destruction.

 This was just a primer for when the party managed to teleport inside the spacecraft.  Finding themselves floating in a sphere of white energy that responded and conformed to their expectations, the players soon figured out they could "operate" the spaceship using whatever method they were best at. Hammer the barbarian fired lasers from the energy sphere at far away targets by visualizing his target getting blown the fuck up and using special 4e style attack powers with his ax to cleave the space where he was visualizing the target; meanwhile Beautiful Bob talked the white energy into doing what he wanted and soon gained access to the "ships logs", the total input the energy field had ever received from its former alien users as well as the myriad of sensors scattered throughout the solar system the ship was connected to.  Beautiful Bob soon absorbed the entire history of the world from birds eye view, seeing the continents split and join and the oceans rise and fall and the eventual beginnings of plant and animal life.  This is when the party learned that all intelligent humanoids were the failed byproducts of alien snake man experiments to produce a superior race of bipedal snake warrior servitors, cast off from the golden city on the meteorite into the swamps and forgotten about by the snake men.

Unlike bending reality in the alien spacecraft, I usually make limits to dream physics beyond simply what the player thinks to accomplish.  When I ran Tilia through her dream recently, I made a few notes about the physics of each stage of the dream journey and also improvised details on the fly.  Once Tilia became lucid, I allowed her more control over the dream but I did not give her 100% freedom.  Early on, she mostly walked because that was what her player expected her to do.  I had made a note that she could fly by walking or running on air in most of the dreamscapes, but Mike never thought to try that.  Floating in the mist and the great fall were examples of dreamscapes that started out with the presupposition of not standing on solid ground as part of the beginning dream description, but in all of the other scenes that unfolded in two long dream sessions, Mike assumed that Tilia was standing on the "ground" the whole time.

I assign a sort of elasticity to dream physics; they mostly resemble normal physics at first glance, but prolonged prodding and investigation will soon push them far past the normal state.  More accurately, the act of prodding and investigating shapes the direction in which the dream is pushed past normal expectations; the elasticity is a way to describe the resistance when approaching the limits of human comprehension (which a dream cannot stray beyond), and the resulting snap back into a more normal state of affairs.

There are limits to the bizarre in Dream Physics which do not exist in my alien and trans-dimensional gaming explorations (both are also strong recurring themes in my gaming).  A dream is after all a product of the mind, which experiences and processes reality while awake, and then deals with it while asleep.  Even though the sleeping conscious is not constrained by physical laws, physical reality forms much of the basis of dreams and provides a general framework past which a dream cannot be stretched too far.

Halbritter's Armory

Halbritter's Armory 

by Kurt Halbritter

First published in Germany 1977

English Translation 1978 - Jamie Muir 

A friend lent me this curious volume and I have derived a fair amount of amusement from its pages.  It purports to be an "Introduction to the Secret Weapons of History".  It is a farce, poking fun at war and instruments of war with one ridiculous, improbable and often immoral "weapon" after another.  My friend told me an amusing anecdote about lending this book to a fencing student of his, whose strict fundamentalist Christian parents were horrified at many of the illustrations.  First, a more typical example of the tone of this book:

Breastworks

And now a couple of illustrations that I think could be horked for your fantasy RPG setting:

Rad Maze to the Citadel

Cool Crescent Clifftop Castle 

Three Illustrations pertaining to the land of Bolt

Dreamscape

I still intend to write another post about the conclusion of Tilia's journey through a constructed dreamland to wake up six slumbering liches, but for now I am just going to post a page out of my session notes.  This is the "wicked awesome drawing" Tilia's player Mike referred to in his guest post about the first dream session.  It gave me a loose structure for my prep work for the dream and helped set the mood nicely at the table.  I intend to post more of my session notes because a lot of them are crazy artifacts in their own rights.