Underground

Much of our hobby is spent creating or exploring and defiling dank,dark, dangerous places that have never and will never see the light of day. The player characters go there because that's where the treasure is. The creatures they take the treasure from live there because that's where the DM said they do, generally because a book told him/her so.

But why do these places exist in the first place, especially in such huge freaking numbers? Creating underground spaces is hard, dirty dangerous work. Excavation is no joke, requiring skills and experience, a massive expenditure of time and effort (and probably lives). Building above ground is quicker, cheaper, and easier.

It's easy enough to explain why one microdungeon exists in the world (tomb, modified natural cavern, etc.) but most adventurers will delve into dozens of downbelows if their careers are even middling long. so without further ado, here are a few global and regional reasons why your campaign has so many holes in the ground stuffed with monsters and treasure:



1. Sunspots Every few centuries/millenia, the sun has a massive case of heartburn, bad enough to lightly toast the surface of the world.

2. Plague of Locusts But these locusts are the size of elephants and number in the millions. Nobody knows where they come from, or when they'll be back.

3. Geomantic Empire In ages past, an empire arose with stunningly powerful earth magic. Excavation was child's play to them. Also the pinnacle of beauty for them was fishbelly white skin (hey, if bound feet was a real thing...).

4. Because the Night.... Belonged to the Hunters. Extra-dimensional beasts of godlike powers, they harvested sentient species in the millions- but only above ground, and only at night. Nobody knows why, they're all just glad they've been gone for generations and hope like hell they never come back.

5. And the Gods Said "For each House ye place Above, so must ye build Below; for ye were raised from the Dust, and to Dust ye must go."

6. The All-Seeing Eye should really be renamed, because people figured out pretty quickly that it couldn't see through more than about six feet of dirt.

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

This Sunday I get to put my DM spurs aside and just be a player, as Anthony will be running a D&D session.

I've rolled up a character I rather like in preparation, a Fighter named Hau the Unstable. His alignment is Chaotic, but that's just because they don't list psychotic as a choice. Hau hears voices -- well, just one voice, emanating from a burlap rag doll named Pookie. He carries Pookie around in a sack. Pookie is wise. If Pookie says you are good, then you are good. If Pookie says you are bad, then BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. Pookie doesn't like bad people.

Wherein I Blow your Mind

Or not, you know, because this is actually something that grabbed the part of my brain that likes Warhammer 40k.

from this article

My son is more metal than your son

So he's had a 'wiggly tooth' for a couple of weeks now (his first baby tooth going bye-bye), and finaly just got fed up with it and Pulled it. Out. Himself.

How metal is *that* at five years old?

You know how when the dark lord is just laying there, all ass-kicked and broken-boned and the heroes turn away and walk off, confident in their victory, and then the dark lord's corpse kinda twitches and the evil hellfire flickers back up in his open, sightless eyes?

Yeah, I like that, too.

Things that keep me awake at night*

One thing that has always bothered me about D&D (in all its incarnations, but it seems to get worse with every edition) is the basic rationalization of combat damage. i know, i know, it's not supposed to reflect reality, it's supposed to approximate it in such a way that combat doesn't bog the game down unnecessarily. but the thing is when players only look at the amount of damage a weapon does and not how it does that damage, two thing stend to happen: they don't pick a weapon that suits their character, or they pick some outlandish weapon that 'looks cool' but in reality wouldn't actually be very useful in a fight.

Case in point: The short sword vs the katana vs the greatsword.

• The short sword is an infantry tool, designed to to be used in close formation and with shields. It is a thrusting weapon.
• The katana is primarily a two handed weapon, and it is for slashing and chopping. the physical movement necessary to weild a katana effectively requires some room, some space to swing it.
• The greatsword requires even more space to use than the katana and is actually a crushing weapon designed to beat the hell out of an opponent in plate armor, to break his bones and pulp his flesh.

Now tell me, in a crowded underground setting, which of these three swords is more likely to be effective? Either the short sword should (generally) do more damage in this situation, or the katana and greatsword should have penalties to hit and/or damage. If we wanted to be even more nit-picky, we should take into account  the type of armor the opponent is wearing (greatswords should get bonuses to damage vs plate armor wearing foes, etc.)

So my question is, is this too much versimilitude? Would it bog down your game if you factored in the weapons function, the melee location and matched armor vs weapon type?

*yes, really. Sad, I know.

This is not Tarqis

There is a City.


Before the City, you remember stumbling through fog-shrouded moorland, wet and cold, the occasional skeletal tree appearing out of the mist as you made your way... to where? from where? You can't quite recall. Just as you can't seem to recall your name, or much of anything else. As far as you can remember, you might as well have come into existence that very day. Perhaps you were sprung forth, fully formed from the mists themselves, some necessary counterpoint to the endless mist, the heather and the bogs and the black-barked, denuded trees. Perhaps this should bother you, but you can't seem to make yourself care all that much at the moment. Before you lies the City.

At the edge of the moorland you've come to a wide valley. The swirling, enveloping mists do not stray here, though the sky is overcast; a slick, uniform gray. It is as if there is some boundary that the mists cannot, dare not cross. And below the flat and featureless sky, below your vantage on the terminus of the moorland, like a nest of jeweled spikes and broken blocks, is the City.

It draws you to it, it calls, and though you feel a note of disquiet, even perhaps dread, it is all but drowned out by the compulsion to descend and walk the streets you see down there, narrow and twisting, appearing and disappearing in between buildings that seem to stand askew, their geometry subtly out of true.
 
***
 
I'd like to start a campaign this way, the player characters essentially amnesiacs, encouraging the players to discover the 'character' of their and the other characters through roleplay. I'd like to do it as a way to waive preconceptions of what an adventure should be (expect the unexpected!), to encourage the players and their characters to interact with every element of their environment (who knows who and what is important here? not the players, and certainly not the characters), and I'd like to start a campaign this way to set the mood right up front: You are not in control here, you don't know what is going on. You aren't powerless, but you are definitely in danger of blundering into danger without even knowing it... until it's too late (I scare because I care).
 
Yeah, I'd like to do that.

Ass-deep in (metaphorical) alligators

...but still alive. Still kicking. Have decided that the only person who can really screw me over is, well, me, so I'm trying very hard not to do that.

On the gaming front, not very much, actually, at least not on the surface. Been a couple of months since our last session, and things are in stasis. But I've had lots of time to ruminate, and I believe that when we do dust off the dice, Tarqis will be better and more fully realized. It may well be a more grim place (and really, with all that's happened in the last six months...) but it will be more interesting.

I got an email the other day invitng me to the local hobby shop's Red Box Day. I was, to say the least, excited. Until I found out they meant the other Red Box. the new one from TS... er, WOTC. There must be a better way to differentiate, something like 'Old School Motherhumping Red Box Day'.

And now for something completely different:

Female warriors in chainmail bikinis? Pffft. Milla Jovovich in 'The Messenger' Check.

The Necromancers have arrived

Pill Hill Press's anthology Flesh and Bone: Rise of the Necromancers is now available. I have a story in it, but that shouldn't stop you from picking up a copy.

a halting return

Sometimes everything goes wrong at once. A friend dies, a marriage dies. here on this blog about benign pastimes, I don't feel it's particularly approriate to go into detail. For those interested, you can visit joo chiat diaries. But I am back, sort of, quietly, unobtrusively.