Interview With A Man Who Is Angry About Hot Goth Porn Girls

Maybe the second in a series of interviews with people who are totally wrong?

Anyway, readers will be aware that a lot of people get mad that porn stars play D&D.

An adjacent issue is that people get mad when porn stars--or any sex workers really--do literally anything. 

There was a recent internet controversy where a video of a bunch of model-types did a sexy video and they were goths. The internet got very upset that goths were shown as being hot. There was also something about Drake? Idk. There was discourse.

Here at D&D With Porn Stars we know a thing or two about goth sex workers but this is the Internet, where actual knowledge is often a tremendous handicap in trying to figure out what people are talking about.

So I interviewed one of them.

I started talking to B00GIEpunk and asking why he cares about any of this, he eventually got real frustrated and stopped answering and said that he would only respond if I paid him or if it was a formal interview. I said Ok, its a formal interview.

He then put a bunch of perfectly reasonable conditions on the interview assuming I'd decline (he does not assume good faith--which is evil). I agreed to the conditions, he said:

Q:

Ok, you've said that these girls in this video represent a trend that you don't like, is that right?

A:

Yes, with one qualification: I'm not saying the women themselves are the problem, I'm saying the way they've been selected and presented appears to reflect a broader, commercially legible stereotype of goth femininity - the conventionally attractive, sexualised "goth girlfriend" archetype - and I find that flattening of a much broader subculture irritating.

Siouxsie Sioux

Q:

So, the idea of this as "flattening" would seem to suggest that this piece of media is part of a *more* significant trend than lots of *other* media which portrays goths in different ways. Why is it *more* significant than other kinds of media takes on goths?

A:

I don't think it has to be more significant than every other portrayal of goths for "flattening" to be an accurate description.

Different representations can coexist, including ones that pull goth aesthetics in very different directions. My point is that this video participates in one recurring shorthand - namely, goth femininity reduced to a narrow, conventionally attractive, sexually legible aesthetic.

"Flattening" describes what happens within that representational pattern - a broad music-based subculture with many aesthetics gets compressed into a smaller set of immediately recognisable visual cues. It doesn't mean that pattern has successfully erased every competing representation, nor that this particular video is culturally more powerful than all of them.

So I wouldn't claim this video is uniquely significant. I'd claim it's recognisable as one example of a broader stereotype that is significant enough to be culturally familiar in the first place.

Patricia Morrison (Sisters of Mercy)

Q:

If it's not more significant than say "the goths in South Park" or "goths represented as losers who watch too much anime and need to touch grass" or "Goths who will boil and eat your cat" then why are you steamed?

A:

Because "significant" and "annoying" aren't synonyms. I don't need to believe this is the single most culturally powerful depiction of goths in existence to dislike what it's doing.

What irritates me about this particular stereotype is that it takes a subculture with decades of music, fashion, DIY culture and internal diversity and filters goth women through a very familiar lens of sexual desirability - "goth" as an accessory to the fantasy of the hot, available goth girlfriend.

The South Park goths are a caricature too. So are the "anime loser" and "cat-boiling weirdo" stereotypes, and I can criticise those when they're in front of me as well. Other stereotypes existing doesn't make this one less worthy of comment - this happened to be the representation in the video I was looking at, so it's the one I commented on.

I don't rank every cultural irritation on a league table before I'm allowed to be annoyed by it.

Maitri and Valor (Christian Death)

Q:

So would you say "I'm being annoyed on the Internet about something that doesn't really matter"?

A:

I'd say I'm annoyed on the Internet about something that isn't especially high-stakes, which is different from saying it doesn't matter.

Most cultural criticism concerns things that aren't matters of life and death. Representation, stereotypes and commodification can still be worth noticing and discussing without pretending they're the gravest problems facing humanity.

So yes, it's a relatively minor irritation. No, I don't think "minor" means "meaningless."

Cosey Fanni Tutti (Throbbing Gristle)

Q:

Well, I know you said you didn't have a problem with the women themselves--you do understand that they agreed to do this right? And it's basically part of their job?

A:

Yes, of course. I understand that they're consenting adults doing paid work, and I haven't suggested otherwise.

My criticism isn't that the women were somehow coerced into appearing, nor that they're personally responsible for every cultural meaning attached to the finished product. It's about the product itself - how it selects, frames and packages a particular version of "goth femininity" for an audience.

People can willingly participate in something and that thing can still reproduce a stereotype. Consent answers the question "did they agree to do it?" It doesn't answer the separate question "what cultural image is this piece of media constructing?"

Caroline Pierce (currently playing an elf ranger)

Q:

Ok. I'm asking a different thing. Knowing that these people worked on this project as their job, do you get that your nuance between "I don't like this video" & "you're not real goths" might not be real important to them--especially with thousands of others saying obnoxious things to them?

A:

Yes, I understand that. If someone is already receiving thousands of obnoxious comments, they may not care very much about the distinction between criticism of a piece of media and criticism directed at them personally.

But that doesn't make the distinction unreal or unimportant in what I'm actually saying here. I'm responsible for the claims I'm making in this interview, and I'm being explicit that my criticism is of the representation and packaging, not of the women as people or their legitimacy within the subculture.

I can understand why somebody on the receiving end of a pile-on might not stop to parse that distinction. That's a question of how criticism is experienced, though, not whether the distinction itself exists.

Vampira

Q:

The extent if your grievance is "this annoys me but I can't think of any way it really affects anything" correct?

A:

No, that isn't correct. I've said it's low-stakes, not that it has no effect. My criticism is that repeated commercial shorthand can narrow how a subculture is popularly understood, particularly when women within it are repeatedly filtered through a sexually marketable archetype.

I'm not claiming this video causes some large, independently measurable social harm by itself. Cultural representation generally works cumulatively, not because one video changes society overnight.

So if you want to characterise my position as 'this annoys me and it isn't terribly important,' that's fair. 'I can’t think of any way it affects anything' is using your own interpretative wording to misrepresent what I said.

Ms. Cassandra Peterson

Q:

Ok, so this "narrowing"--how could that affect anyone concretely?

A:

Concretely, repeated narrow representations can affect what audiences come to recognise as "authentically" goth, which in turn affects how people within the subculture are perceived and treated.

That can mean:

- women who don't fit the conventionally attractive, sexualised archetype being treated as less recognisably goth

- people assuming goth women are inherently sexually available or performing for male attention

- commercial spaces increasingly rewarding the most immediately marketable version of the aesthetic

- newcomers encountering the subculture primarily through that stereotype rather than through its music and broader history

None of those effects requires this one video to be uniquely powerful. They're cumulative effects of repetition. My claim is not (and has never been) that this video causes measurable harm by itself, but that it participates in a representational pattern which can shape expectations about what goth women are supposed to look like and what their participation in the subculture means.

Penny, who ordered this miniature

Q:

Let's start with the first one: if someone is not conventionally attractive and so they're not read as goth (by someone really stupid and impressionable who watched some videos) who cares? Why would even they care? How does this hurt anyone?

A:

Because being persistently misread or treated as inauthentic within a community you actually belong to can matter to the person experiencing it.

That doesn't require catastrophic harm. It can mean being dismissed as "not really goth," being excluded from spaces or conversations, having your taste and identity treated as illegitimate, or being expected to perform a narrower aesthetic to be recognised at all.

And I don't think you need to posit some uniquely stupid person who watched one video. Cultural stereotypes work through repetition: people absorb shorthand from lots of media and social encounters until it starts to feel like common sense.

You asked me for a concrete effect. That's one. If your next question is "but why should anyone care about that effect?", that's a different argument.

Chelsea Wolfe

Q:

Why should anyone care about that (entirely hypothetical) effect? Both the person causing it and the person feeling it would appear to have such a severe mental health problem to start with that the video wasn't the issue. The problem is untreated mental health problems.

A:

If you continue framing ordinary social behaviour, identity, or (illegal claim deleted) as evidence of "severe mental health problems," or otherwise introduce (illegal claim deleted) premises into the questioning, the interview is over. You're free to challenge my argument as aggressively as you like, but I'm not obliged to participate in (illegal claim deleted) or pathologising framing.

I don't accept the premise that caring how you're perceived within a community, or being influenced by cultural stereotypes, constitutes a "severe mental health problem." Those are ordinary features of human social behaviour.

People care about belonging, recognition and how others perceive them. People also absorb stereotypes. Neither of these require a mental health diagnosis.

And even if someone involved did have a mental health condition, "therefore the surrounding social influences don't matter" wouldn't follow anyway. Individual psychology and social environment aren't mutually exclusive explanations.

You asked for a concrete way narrowing representation could affect someone. I gave you one. Declaring everyone involved "mentally ill" doesn't actually rebut the mechanism. It just changes the subject in a deeply offensive way.

Morticia

Q:

Offended or not, do you dispute either of the following:

1. Someone who decides someone isn't a goth because they're not attractive has a mental health problem

2. Someone who decides they care significantly whether that person thinks they’re a goth has a mental 

health problem 

?

A:

I dispute both. Neither of those facts, by itself, is sufficient to diagnose someone with a mental health problem.

More importantly, I explicitly told you that continuing to frame ordinary social behaviour as evidence of mental illness would terminate the interview. Your very next question did exactly that.

So the interview is over. You may publish the answers given during the agreed interview period under the terms we established. I won't be answering further questions.

Astarte

Q:

Yeah you have been perfectly clear: you think things that are absolutely bananas aren't and that pretty much explains your whole deal. No need to ask any more.

Brides of Dracula

You Got To Appreciate What An Explosive Element This Bonnie Situation Is

On Quentin Tarantino, GMing And The Art of Anti-Mystery

0. This will all have to do with games, trust me.

1. Pulp Fiction was in a small class of films that changed movies forever. Directors like it, arty people like it and audiences liked it--which is rare enough by itself--but also it changed what Hollywood thought regular people could put up with in a movie. Only a few other movies did that and most were genre movies with special effects showing you something only movies could show you (realistic moving space ships, dinosaurs, demonic possession, etc). Pulp created a director-centric frenzy not seen in a decade that lasted basically until the Marvel movies--which Pulp strongly-influenced.

2. There's no one simple explanation because, as so many people-- including QT--have pointed out, all the cool things in it have roots somewhere else. The lurid subjects appear in all kinds of old B movies, Shane Black and Howard Hawks did good dialogue in crime films before Pulp did it, Scorsese did those needle drops and cool characters, Godard and the French New Wave did a lot of the experimental film techniques, the plots were standard potboiler fare (thus the title), etc.

3. A common thesis might be that he did them all at once, but then you've got things like The Long Goodbye which arguably did as well, and a million movies since (including ones with Samuel Jackson, Uma or Travolta), which don't hit as hard.

4. I think I have a piece of the puzzle:

5. For all his interest in genre films Quentin Tarantino has never done a spooky or mysterious movie. Death Proof is mayyyybe a horror movie but it definitely is not spooky.

6. One thing Tarantino does not do is mystery. And not just spooky horror mystery but also another kind of mystery.

7. You've seen the other kind of mystery in a lot of the foreign films that Tarantino loves: a character appears and is doing something and you don't know what. It may turn out to be something banal, like shopping while waiting to hear back from her doctor about a life-threatening illness, or something crazy, like running from the mob or stepping through a time warp to talk to a machine consciousness from the future.

And, crucially, even when you do know what's going on, you aren't told what the interesting part of it is supposed to be. The point is: you don't immediately know what's going on and part of what the film is saying is: I know you're confused, we have to watch other peoples' lives carefully to see what's going on. The mystery around simple plot points is part of the aesthetic. The poetry is in the difficulty of extracting any meaning from anything in this crazy world. David Lynch was an American director who definitely did take on this kind of Euromystery. He could make a diner or a police station as strange and new as a black dimension of evil spirits. 

8. Basically these kinds of films trust the audience to eventually notice there is some kind of beauty in what's going on. But it is also possible that the audience won't "get it" because the movie never signals "Alright, here's where it's supposed to be awesome". You either notice The Week-End is beautiful and surreal and as absurd as life or you scratch your head wondering where those sheep came from. 

9. Often this is when a film critic is brought in to explain the art movie to the audience.

10. So here's my thesis about Quentin, with Pulp as the prime example:

Quentin managed to use all the techniques of arty filmmaking to make a blockbuster by chucking out the mystery and instead making the explaining-what's-going-on part of the movie. The film critic has been entertainingly imported into the movie.

He shows instead of telling---but then he also tells.

But he doesn't do it in a Deadpool way, as a winking meta-comment, he does it by making the explaining part of the movie--sometimes the best part.

Quentin Tarantino made an arty, creative movie that does not trust the audience at all. He tells everyone everything multiple times, but somehow manages to not make it condescending either.

11. The stakes, context and meaning of basically every single big plot event in Pulp Fiction are hyperexplained by characters in the movie--in ways that don't suck:

-A European director would've just let that diner get robbed in the middle of Jules and Vincent's conversation about walking the Earth. This would disorient the audience, making us feel like we were getting robbed of the one thing we now know Jules and Vince reliably supply (great dialogue)--which is fun! But QT is making a blockbuster. 

Tarantino doesn't want audiences confused by where this new two-person gun crime is coming from and what it might have to do with the previous two-person gun crime (nothing, but Godard would want that confusion--America is just full of guns and violence and so its absurdly funny for two violent criminals to get robbed at gunpoint just after a violent crime of their own). 

So what does Tarantino do? QT gives us a prologue at the beginning of the movie where the two diner robbers extensively discuss why anyone would rob a diner (Denver omelette, anyone?). We don't know why they're doing it when we see it, but when it pays off, our confusion evaporates.

-J &V discuss Tony Rocky Horror and the foot massage. Why? It sets up the stakes of the Mia Wallace date. Tony stepped out of line and got thrown four stories. Almost every other director would've let us realize for ourselves that touching the boss gangster's wife is a high-risk activity (Hell even I know that), QT makes sure we know, but does it fun, and with swearing.

-At the end of the execution scene, Jules recites a Bible verse and we're left hanging with that--shots fire and the scene ends. Why did he do that? Again, an art movie director would've just let us live with the weirdness of it (David Lynch would've), but no, QT then has Jules explain, scenes later “I just thought it was some coldblooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass.” Then his spiritual awakening is because he is thinking about what it means and he explains that.

-Christopher Walken's cameo. What's he explaining? How important the gold watch is. Again: many other directors would've made a scene where the boxer, trying to survive in a world of murder-capitalism, is fixated on a gold watch he used to own for reasons of symbolism alone. Not QT. You're gonna be told and you're gonna be told by the greatest weird-exposition scene guy in film history.

-Butch kills a guy in the ring. Do we see boxing? No. Do we see a scene where the boxer explains to a driver how he feels about killing a man in the ring? Yes we do.

-Willis blows up at Fabiana for forgetting the watch. He then, in the car, explains it all to himself (and us) again. "I didn't explain to her how important the watch was..."

-Now we have the one thing that's not glossed by anyone in the movie: the pawn shop basement grotesquerie. Why is this happening? Well, its in the title at least: Pulp Fiction. This is a lurid story and you came here for violence and cheap thrills. No explanation needed.

-The Bonnie Situation starts with the unlikely end of the execution previously seen and then Jules and Vince discussing the meaning of the previous scene--was it a miracle?

-Marvin gets shot. Grieving Marvin--Jules! friend!--takes a back seat to Jules (to Vincent), then Quentin (to Jules and Vincent), then Jules again (on the phone to boss Wallace), then the Wolf (to Jules, Vincent and QT) all explaining how dangerous it is to be roaming around The Valley in the middle of the day with a dead body.

This sequence contains almost nothing but people explaining to each other how serious the situation is and other people trying to crack jokes while they do it. And did they have to? No. Like 90% of crime directors before 1980 would've maybe spent one line reminding the audience that cops tend to notice shit like you're driving a car drenched in fucking blood, then gone about the business of having these cold-hearted gangsters get to work doing their mysterious, underground business with hatchets and garbage bags and whatever. Watch, say, Sexy Beast or Gangster Number One for great examples.

-The whole film basically ends with an exegesis--Jules explaining the Bible verse. 

12. So what's all this have to do with games? 

13. Remember: while immersion (mystery! confusion! where are we?) is fun. But the other thing can be, too: just explaining what is going down and why you should care. And in RPGs, with all the numbers, and the players who missed sessions or forgot the rules, or were in bathroom, often requires a lot of explaining--about the story or the stakes or the backstory or the math. But explaining can be fun. Explaining can be the difference between a fun afternoon at the movies and a full-on blockbuster.

Sanctum of the Heresiarch (a one-shot dungeon)

So in the Lands of the Heresiarch, the Xenomorph-worshipping cult (think Alien: Resurrection but in the  middle-ages) has built its shrine around the crashed ship where the alien was first discovered.

This is where the cult performs its creepy rituals and the cult's alchemist performs his creepy experiments.

click to enlarge

We Won The 3 Castles Award (Again)

 Like Red & Pleasant Land before it, Nebulith, our Japanese-themed LOTFP book, just won the prestigious (and very heavy) Three Castles Award.

This award is extra cool because the award jury tends to be composed entirely of game designers from the early days of the hobby, the Red & Pleasant Land jury was David "Zeb" Cook (of the original Oriental Adventures), Steve Perrin (Runequest), Dr Dennis Sustare (as in Chariot of Sustarre), James M Ward (Metamorphosis Alpha), and Steve Winter (Nightmares of Future Past, etc). 

Winter, Sustare, and Grubb, were on the jury this year, along with Allen Hammack (of TSR's Slave Lords series), and Ben Burns (Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds)

Grubb, who wrote a lot of classic stuff including the Marvel Super-Heroes (FASERIP) RPG and Al-Qadim and Spelljammer, had this to say about Nebulith:

The Nebulith is a volcano magically halted mid-eruption, so it is a huge frozen stone cloud hanging over the island of Awa Nikko, and serves as the "dungeon" for this setting. The setting is rich in lore, changing the euro-centric LotFP rules to adapt to samurai, ninja, and martial arts. This is the first Asian-themed product I've read that beats out the venerable Oriental Adventures from TSR. I love the art, I love the lore, I love the game design.

So, that's very cool!

If you haven't got it, its available here and here.

If you ask about it and anyone gives you static, it's because of this and this.

John Blanche Is Dead

 John Blanche is dead.

Probably no artist in the gaming hobby was as simultaneously influential and original at the same time as he was. As artist and art director at Games Workshop, he was the key figure in creating and perpetuating the Warhammer Look that still sells gobs of miniatures to this day, and basically invented modern grimdark.

That kinda sells it short because he was also a huge part of what kept Warhammer weird--he had a creaky, eccentrically filligreed sensibility and a wonderful color sense that combined an electric modern intensity with a feeling for the weight of the past in a way nobody has ever managed to copy--war-banner red and the gold-yellow of bad teeth and age.

John Blanche pictures look like ancient records from an alternate universe where it all played out in a series of enigmatic and brutal cartoons. Like history paintings by a post doom-metal Terry Gilliam, everything is alarmingly vivid and yet completely inevitable. Prog rock in Hell.

His sense of anatomy and composition resisted the emphasis on optically plausible movement and scale that was so enthusiastically embraced not only in the fine art in the 400 years after the Renaissance, but by so many fantasy illustrators influenced by photography, comic books and guys like Frank Frazetta. Blanche figures don't move through space--they have always been there. He and a few like-minded neo-primitive geniuses like Ian Miller turned Warhammer and 40k's "backstory" and "fluff" into lore.

He could summon all the connotations of that word using an alchemy that made everything new old again. Anybody can make a picture and say it's something that happened a thousand years ago--with Blanche you felt it, even when they had space armor and bolt guns.

RPG artists can all depict war, these Blanche visuals were key to Warhammer's very cynical, British, and wargame-friendly sense of eternal war. Think Iron Maiden, Mötorhead, Garth Ennis, once more into the breach (and Bolt Thrower, of course). There's no fucking timeline in Warhammer, no progress, no revolution, no good guys, no solutions, no change in the setting, no leader you can trust, no reasons for any of it--you and another unworthy god met in school and now you will be moving miniature men back and forth on a hilltop you made forever.

His art and that of the colleagues he hired on and managed is the main reason that the British D&D crew at White Dwarf that turned into Games Workshop stood apart from all the other D&D competitors long enough to create a distinct identity.

And as far as I can tell, he was also really cool.

Rest quietly in the void, big guy. You've done enough.

Caroline Pierce Ate A Cat

 

If you know Caroline Pierce--outside of her, ahh, work--pretty much the first thing you know is she's a cat lady. Epic scale cat lady.

But last night she ate a cat.

Ok, technically her character ate a cat, Elaria, the half-elf ranger.

In her defense, it was because she refused to eat a person, so that's a good(?) sign.

I blame Session 2 of Maze of the Blue Medusa.

It went like this:

After last session our heroines wake up in the first room there at the bottom, barricade themselves inside and hope to regain spells etc and heal up for their next sojourn into the Maze.

They are interrupted after an hour by a polite knock on the door from 6 Bondye Reparatè (humans who believe the Maze is heaven and their job is to perform maintenance on it). They would never be so impolite as to bash down the door so they slide a polite offering of two hand-rolled cigarettes beneath the door and move on.

Despite Elaria, being a ranger and all, being able to identify these as ordinary hand-rolled cigarettes, a weirdly lot of time is spent trying to figure out what the cigarettes do (nothing except give you cancer 40 years after making you look cool).

The next hour a Chronomancer (lizard wizard) and a pair of his thrall mammals (ape-morons) show up. They kill one moron and steal the pearl that allows the Chronomancer to control the other and shoot him fulla holes before he can use his time-magic to reverse the damage. The newly-cnotrolled moron thus played an important meatshield/scouting role in the rest of the session.

Also note the girls made extensive use of the wardogs in this fight as they pounced on and murdered one of the morons, though out of deference to a recently deceased real pet Kimberly Kane's was turned into a war-cat.

You might see where this is going.

So anyway after defeating the Chronomancer, the girls went past the living chess pieces (basically a wise decision), used a mirror to investigate the Jade Tiles That Freeze You and inadvertently made them freeze themselves.

(Dialogue in this room:

Michelle: "Uh, I have Trap Sense?"

Zak: "You sense this is a trap.")

 ...and then cast Dispel Magic to make thetiles mundane enough to cross. Halfway through another Lizard Wizard attacks and gets beat up.

All this time Caroline Pierce is taking notes. 

Zak: "You take a lot of notes, CP."

Caroline: "Well the thing is your dungeons are always like a puzzle, none of my other games are like that."

Zak: "I don't know whether that's a compliment or not, but you're still around after 15 years so I'll assume its a compliment."

They investigate some more rooms and pronounce them weird. They are: the room with the snail golem, the room with the light-eating roses, the room with the grape juice.

Then they go into the Gallery section.

Those of you who have played Maze of the Blue Medusa know that in the Gallery section there's a mechanic that speeds up time and spoils food. So the PCs get hungry fast and will start to lose hp if they don't eat.

There are lots of solutions to this--the Create Food and Water spell, moving in and out of the gallery from the peripheral areas around it, stashing food in other places, etc., but a common one among the adventuring classes is cannibalism.

The PCs poke around at the magical artworks, including the paintings that show all the wounds you have, then encounter some cannibal critics! They hate art and want to eat the moron! (Contary to popular belief, Patrick Stuart made these monsters up. They are jussssst this side of too whimsical for me.) The PCs make quick work of them and Michelle's halfling Jinx wastes no time slicing off one's cheek and eating it. Kimberly Kane's cleric of the Great Maggot eats the other. I remind her the Great Maggot has no compunctions about eating flesh.

Elaria, a noble half- elf, abstains.

Soon they find the pit in the middle of the reptile-eye floor mosaic and head inside, down into the Reptile Archive. After accidentally annihilating the Nyctocaust Memorial (a touch-sculpture that is destroyed by light, oops) Elaria takes the multi-lingual warning sign ("please do not use light in this room") to see if she can start to puzzle out other languages from it. Clever.

Soon they wind up in the room with the clockwork needlebirds that tattoo you. They send the moron in first. He gets tattooed to death. Then they send in the pets. The cat gets tattooed to death. Only the terrier escapes.

Elaria helicopters in with her magic morningstar (the Steel Cyclone) and kills the remainder of the birds but it's too late. And she's hungry, losing hit points. She barbecues the cat.

Jinx attached the cat's tail to her hat. "Well we are using every part of the animal".

The rest is conscientiously sliced up into pieces and packaged for later. After a short fight with a chameleon women waiting to ambush them and passing some strips of tattooed flesh and undead bees, the crew winds up in the lair of the Lampen Proletariat, a wax golem who urges revolution against the masters of the Archive.

What will they do???? Find out next time!!!!

-

-

The Testing Chamber

This can be used in any appropriate dungeon or just as its own dungeon. It should keep players busy for an hour or two.

• PCs appear in the chamber colored green. 
• Each of the four doors out of the green room has one symbol: sword, coin, cup, wand.
• Behind each of these doors is a sleeping ogre with a sack of coins worth 100gp. Each ogre is identical to the other three.
• Opening the red doors leads to a magic portal--the portal leads back to the green room.
• To end this loop, each ogre must be overcome by the proper means, which won't be told explicitly to the PCs:
• --The ogre behind the sword door must be defeated (at least partially) by physical attacks
• --The ogre behind the wand door must be defeated (at least partially) by magic
• --The ogre behind the coin door must have his coins taken by the PCs in a nonviolent way
• --The ogre behind the cup door must not be harmed (or robbed) at all--just get to the door
• If an ogre is overcome in the way appropriate to their door, then they will remain in the state they were left (dead, sleeping, etc) any time that door's checked until all 4 of these identical ogres have been properly overcome.
• If an ogre is overcome in an "inappropriate" way, they will reappear in their original state (unharmed and asleep with all their coins) next time their door's opened and any coins taken from that ogre will evaporate.
• Once all four sleeping ogres are overcome in the way appropriate to their door, the PCs still reappear in the green room, but this time each door leads to an ogre that's awake. This is a different ogre (technically a mountain ogre rather than forest ogre) and he has a sack of coins worth 400gp. He must be overcome 4 times in the same ways as above.
• After the mountain ogre, the 4 rooms contain coffins, inside each of which contains 800gp and an (identical) sleeping vampire. She must be overcome 4 times in the same ways as above.
• After the coffin is overcome, the 4 rooms each contain a different vampire (awake) wearing 1200gp worth of jewelry. She must be overcome 4 times in the same ways as above.
• After all that, the test is over and the new, richer PCs can go back to whatever and wherever they were.