The Narcissus-, or Undesirable-, Peacock

Narcissus Peacocks, also known as Undesirable Peacocks (a perhaps over-literal translation from the Tsolyáni) at first appear to be ordinary male birds of the species cristatus or muticus. Once the animal spreads its fan, however, a baleful disparity is revealed. Reports of precisely what a Narcissus Peacock's tailfeathers look like when flared differ wildly--of the few who have seen the sight and lived, none were talented wildife painters.

Popular superstition holds that the "eyes" of the terrible bird's feathers change and warp to resemble the victim's own eyes in some inscrutable way (thus the name) --while others say the "eyes" act as scrying devices for forces unknown. Some hold that the fan contains no "eyes" at all, but instead displays, in a perfect feather-mosaic--the portrait of a god.

What is certain is that when the animal opens its fan, creatures of weak will stand transfixed and fascinated by whatever it is they see there, and are willing to stare into the open fan for hours while the peacock devours them.

Luckily, the animals are extremely rare. They are occasionally bred as pets for rakshasas, Melnibonéans, and certain of the more decadent Elvish courts. Medusae--who are immune to the fans' enchantment--build on the birds' natural affinity for shining objects to train the beasts to attack mirrors on sight.

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Crunch:

Physically it's just a 1 hit-die bird, though the beak and claws should do d6 damage and anyone seeing the spread tail requires a saving throw to avoid being transfixed. If you're feeling generous or have a low-level party, allow any victim to re-save every time s/he takes damage. Killing the animal or just damaging the tail feathers removes the effect. The feathers are probably worth a lot of money to the right wizard and the low-level version of the beast itself is worth 75 xp in AD&D.
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Slight tangent about inventing this monster:

The peacocks came about just before a session where:
-The party already knew there was a medusa in the dungeon, and
-They knew where its lair was
I realized that the next session could very well turn out very boring, because although they make great villains (they are intelligent, luxury-loving, and have a ready-made reason to be isolated and hate the world) a medusa is kind of difficult to run as a "boss". While a medusa is a relatively high-level monster, as soon as a party knows it's going after a medusa, it becomes a low-level monster. A medusa out of nowhere is a challenge so huge it's almost cruel, a medusa you are actively hunting is just like any other monster, only you can kill it instantly with clever preparation and a mirror. Either way, the encounter would be short.

The other problem was that while knowing you are hunting a certain specific kind of dangerous monster definitely makes the session more ominous (which is good), it somewhat kills the mystery (which is bad). So I decided that the first thing they found in the medusa's hall of statues had to not be a medusa. As soon as that happens the players realize they're not out of the woods yet. Who knows what other pets she's got in there....

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In play:

Almost had a TPK when these showed up. Everybody but the paladin (8 PCs) failed to save. Then the paladin went to kill the peacock, rolled a one and hit a transfixed fighter. The fighter woke up, tried to kill the peacock, rolled a one and hit himself. Then they started hearing footsteps and hissing in the next room...

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ADDENDUM:

Ragnorakk, I accidentally deleted your comment while trying to fix the...long story, anyway, I read it.

What I Mean When I Say Dungeoncrawl

I can't imagine getting bored of dungeons.

Why is that?

The artificiality of dungeons is important, I think, the hand- (or claw-, or tentacle-) made -ness of them. The idea is: you are alone--but someone was here before you.

A key thing in making dungeons feel dungeony is inspiring the idea that anything could be down there. The ship in Alien and the Borg cube in Star Trek--these are not quite dungeonish to me, because you already know what's down there--dangerwise anyway--more Borg, some Alien. They lack that intimation of unknown potential.

The best story about dungeons is The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. It's about a library that...well I won't spoil it. But I'll quote it:

"Before, there was a man for every three hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary diseases have destroyed that proportion. A memory of unspeakable melancholy: at times I have traveled for many nights through corridors and along polished stairways without finding a single librarian."

Isn't that exactly what playing a dungeoncrawl videogame alone in front of your machine at 4 am is like?

Some other examples:

Bowser's castle in Super Mario feels even more dungeony than it should. Yes, Super Mario is a happy, friendly game with smiling clouds, but the first time you get to the Bowser level, the music changes and you realize, all of a sudden, that you kind of miss all the smiley mushroom men that were trying to kill you on all the other levels, and the music has changed, and now you are alone. (Which you were all along.) And it's creepy.

As many people have pointed out, Alice In Wonderland reads very dungeony--grow big so you can reach this keyhole, shrink down so you fit through that door--but it didn't look dungeony until American McGee put out that very gothy Alice video game and there was the chess level in there--it's all black and white with huge chess pieces that come at you bleeding red.




Caves--organic, natural caves, do nothing for me. I like a manufactured dungeon. On some level, the decayed geometry--right angles, perfect circles, pointed arches (all crumbling)--communicates to your DNA. It says: something has been here before--something intelligent. It was probably smarter than you or at least managed to move and shape more earth around than you could--and it died anyway.



I tend to think of a dungeon as somehow metaphorically like the inside of your brain. Running a party through a dungeon is kind of like running them through the DM's head. If there's a shard of black glass in someone's pack is that automatically a clue or is it possibly just for atmosphere? Can the traps be turned against the monsters in the dungeon? Can the monsters be turned against each other? Is there a "right way" and a "wrong way" or are there many right ways? Depends on what's in the DM's head.




"Crawling" is an important part of dungeons. If you can fly, or are so big you can knock down any wall, or you can turn into living liquid, then you might not notice one of the major features of dungeon aesthetics, which is the architecture itself is out to get you. I don't mind people playing monsters in a game--as long as they don't play a monster so enormous or versatile that the architecture ceases to scare them.



A palace can feel dungeony, as long as you make it feel like it's so big that even whoever owns it doesn't know what's going on in there. And it's hard to get out. And you can't see anyone out the window.

I never liked the idea--strongly implied in the early rules--that the standard drill was to go into the dungeon, then leave whenever you needed to rest in order to heal or recharge spells. The idea that you could leave whenever you want seemed to domesticate the dungeon too much. Plus it meant you had to go to a town which...well towns are all well and good but they're not dungeons. At least not usually.

So, the way I set it up, the players generally end up sleeping in the dungeon. The downside is someone or something will probably try to kill them in their sleep, but the upside is, in order for them to have fun, I jiggered the rules a little:

_If a wizard sleeps a few hours, wakes up, kills something, then goes back to sleep, I say that still counts as full rest.

_In AD&D, once you're at 0 hp, you can recover but it takes at least a week. Leaving in the middle of the dungeon to go back to an inn for a week and re-tool kills the dungeon-as-mythic-underworld mood. So,if you survive the night, and get bandaged up, you get a hit point back.

(images, top to bottom & left to right: Ian Miller, Dave Trampier, 2 more Ian Millers, HR Giger, 60s edition of Borges, some temple in SE Asia, the city of Valetta--world's dungeonest city--on Malta, Giacometti, a bunker from Paul virilio's new book on bunkers, Marble Madness, 4 drawings by some guy,2 comic pgs by P. Craig Russel, painting by Bihzad)

Wargames For Anarchists

This is how I play Warhammer 40k with my girlfriend*:

-Go to the store and buy whatever minis you like, ignoring what faction, system, or even game they belong to. Cool-looking-if-slightly-out-of-scale plastic dinosaurs count as "minis".

-Organize the minis into "units". A "unit" is defined as: "any group of soldiers that always fights together"--a unit can have from 1-5 members. That is: one big demon can be a unit, three witches can be a unit, five space marines, whatever.

-Stat up each unit. Use any system you want. (We use modified 1st E. Warhammer 40k stats--ballistic skill, toughness, wounds, etc.--but without the morale rules) Here's the trick: each unit must be, theoretically, exactly as useful as each other unit. That is: the five space marines, as a group, must be worth as much as the one demon by itself, or the three witches. Weak units can be easily made more useful by giving them a good movement stat, good weapon range, or some sort of magic weapon or spell. Each mini should do roughly what it looks like it does, but it doesn't have to do exactly what the manufacturer intended it to do. If a scatter laser looks like a gatling gun, well, there you go. Put each unit's stats on a different piece of paper.

(-If you've never played a wargame, write your own rules or modify the stats from an RPG--just remember:

+Minis should have a "movement" stat, in inches, so you can move them around.

+Weapons need ranges--in inches.

+An average mini getting (succesfully) hit with an average weapon should die instantly rather than lose a certain number of hit points or wounds--otherwise you'll be there all day. Only an extra powerful mini should be able to survive more than one hit and only an extra powerful weapon should be able to cause more than one "hit" worth of damage. In academic terms, it's like this: in an RPG, weapons are things which wear away your hit points at a given rate--big weapons do it fast, small weapons do it slow--whereas in a wargame, weapons are things which have a given chance to kill an ordinary mini outright--big weapons have a big chance, small ones have a small chance.

+When in doubt: rulings, not rules. Play with someone who is not a dick.)

-Lay out terrain. Complicated terrain with lots of cover is best--books and cooking utensils work well.

-Place the units on the terrain, anybody can put any unit wherever they want, but units with more than one member have to stick together. (We are not dickish about unit coherency, but 4-5" from each other is best).

-Randomly distribute the unit stat sheets between all the players--whichever stat sheets you get are the units on your team, and wherever they are on the terrain is where that unit starts. (Alternately, you could use the schoolyard-draft sytem where you take turns picking which units you want.)

-If you get a unit you don't like and another player thinks that unit is viable, you can trade units with that player.

-Once trading--if any--is done, start playing.

-After the game, talk about if any minis conspicuously underperformed and decide whether it was the minis' fault or the player's fault--if it was the minis' fault, stat that unit up with slightly more power for next time.


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(*Just googled the phrase "warhammer 40k with my girlfriend"--one result.

The Binding Painting

This appears to be an ordinary oil painting. Upon entering a room in which the painting is hung, the DM should show the players an image of the artwork. If any player should point at- or to- any figure in the painting, that player's PC and the living, three-dimensional equivalent of the figure s/he was pointing to will exchange places. The PC will appear in the painting, and the figure will appear in front of the PC's fellow adventurers.

Inside the artwork, the situation is as follows--the demon Thrigulas (a kind of Babau demon--though much depleted from lack of fresh souls), has, for the last 4000 years, been pleading with the cleric (Saint Wolfgang) to read, from the large book he holds, a divine incantation which will release them all from the artwork--offfering him any pleasure his heart can imagine. The very upright St. Wolfgang, who has sacrificed his life to help bind the demon safely in the painting and away from the Prime Material Plane, has been refusing for 4000 years. The four courtiers in the background, are, as one might expect after four miliennia, simply incredibly bored.

The painting must always contain 6 souls. A being may escape by being replaced (in the manner described above) by a living being outside the artwork. All six will be freed if a high-level cleric reads aloud the incantation in the book (though Wolfgang will go to any lengths to prevent this).

A being not part of the original 6 may be returned to ordinary life if the being s/he replaced in the painting is slain or if a living being is summoned, via spell, to replace him or her. Wolfgang, if inside the painting, will try to prevent such summonings, however, not wishing to extend the trauma of entrapment to any more souls than necessary.

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The summoning method hadn't occurred to me before I put this in a dungeon, but it occurred to Caroline Pierce. She had first level monster summoning (we were running 3e) and I, thinking the 3e rules for monster summoning were pretty dull, decided she would summon a random first level creature. So, in my campaign, Thrigulas runs free, and a painted badger stands forever in his place.

The Explosions In Space Rule: or How To Decide Who To Play RPG's With

Sometimes, I'm told, people play games and don't like them. At least half the time, if you listen to what people say, the problems they have are not really the fault of the game, but of the people they play the game with.

So, how do you figure out who to play a game with?

The general rule is: play with people who aren't dickheads. I don't know whether Wil Wheaton or Noisms said it first.

However, the only time the Dick Head Theory may be inadequate is when dealing with teenagers. These are people who may be actually good and interesting people who would enjoy playing but may yet simultaneously not have the perspicacity to remember to deal with the rules in such a way as to always be attempting to distribute maximum fun.

To teenagers and other immature people, I propose the "Explosions in Space Rule" which goes like this, and which should be printed at the beginning of every game, under the heading "The Explosion In Space Rule":

"Are there explosions in space in this game--like in Star Wars? Or not--like in real life? We, the game designers have left this entirely up to you.

"Before each gaming session, you must get together with your players and decide, as a group, whether--should such a contingency come up--there will or will not be explosions in space.

"We do not care what you decide, or how you decide--by silent ballot, by GM fiat, by best-of-3-Super-Mario-Kart Tournament, whatever. What's important is that you decide and decide conclusively.

"If you cannot all agree, or if this conversation goes on for longer than 20 minutes, DO NOT GAME WITH THOSE PEOPLE."

Death Frost Doom Review/Play Report

This is from a few weeks ago. It was originally posted on Mandy Morbid's blog, but I wrote it, so I figured I'd post it here, too, so that all my D&D stuff would be in one place:

If any of you are following or involved in the Old School Dungeons & Dragons revival, then you've probably heard of Death Frost Doom, the new adventure written by Old School D&D Blog Overlord James Edward Raggi IV.

It has gotten rave reviews around the Old School D&D blogworld for its creepy and fatalistic atmosphere, as well as its horror-movie-like cruelty. Most people run through it die or go insane or both. Plus you can download it for 5 bucks off the web.

Anyway, Mandy was bored today and her eye was infected so she couldn't play video games, so we downloaded Death Doom Frost and ran it as a solo adventure.

Here's how it went:

(WARNING: SPOILERS! IF YOU PLAN TO PLAY THIS MODULE, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER)

(HOWEVER, MANDY IS CONSIDERING MAYBE GOING BACK TO THIS PLACE LATER, SO THERE ARE NO SPOILERS FOR THINGS IN THE ADVENTURE THAT MANDY
DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT YET)

So in addition to her old stand-by, Tizani Ildiko, 3rd Level Cleric of Vorn, Mandy rolled up a Dwarf Fighter (Gowron) and an Elf Sorceress (Ilona)--both first level.

(Gamers may want to know at this point what system we used--we used a mongrel of 1st edition AD&D (because that's what we'd been playing with our friends up until now and because we like it) and edition 3.5 (because that's all Mandy has the books for at the moment because someone gave them to her)(However, edition ended up not mattering at all much because see below).

So I tell Mandy that the Sister Superior of Vorn has told her to fetch a certain book that is rumored to be on a mountiantop, in a place of great evil. Then I put on "Ceremony of Opposites" by Samael. ( I would've put on colder, doomier things like Wolves In The Throne Room and Amebix's "Winter" but I played them to death during our last session which was heavy on wolf demons, witches, hunters and other wintry paganisms.)

Mandy laughs because "There is a place of great evil in the wilderness" is exactly what a priestess says at the beginning of Diablo and you hear it a million times if you play Diablo.

So anyway, these three trudge up the frozen mountain and encounter the weird old backwoods disturbing hick who warns you not to go up to the cabin on top of the mountain.

Now, there is a thing that will happen if you fuck with this guy, and a thing that will happen if you try to walk past him when he warns you not to head up the mountain.

But Mandy did not do these things. She pretended to be going around the mountain, walked off into the woods, then continued the path up to the cabin, so neither of these things happened.

Mandy heard The Disturbing Sounds and did not follow them to their source.

Then Mandy saw The Nightmarish Tree. She gave The Nightmarish Tree a wide berth.

Nor did she investigate The Stone Well. Likewise she saw The Frozen Corpse and fucked not with it. Nor did she do any of the things you're not supposed to do in The Graveyard.

Not having much else to do, she went into The Cabin.

She looked at The Clock, The Bizarre Painting, The Harpsichord, The Chairs That Are Facing You When You Come Through The Door and The Deer Head and none of these did she fuck with.

She took the Purple Powder and because she had a Dwarf and a Sorceress with her, knew that it could Drive You Mad Or Turn You Into A God and put it in her pack. She saw the Dead Guy's Stuff and took it.

She used a spell to decrypt the writing on the walls, then took this note--"Runic writing says bad things".

Then she went down into the Trap Door.

She fucked not with the Screaming Faces On The Wall, went through the Demon Head Carved Door and into the Room With The Skeleton Hands. She did not fuck with the hands.

I told her "You see a sigil on the door, it looks like This" (and showed her a picture).

I said "It fills you with unease and nausea" she said "I knew you'd say that."

The CD ended and I put on Cradle of Filth, which was perfect for a second because at the beginning of the album there's creepy choral music and just as the voices began to spiral up, she entered...

The Demonic Chapel--
wherein Mandy fucked not with the Pews, nor the Organ of Bone, nor the Skulls on Hooks, nor the basins with teeth (except reaching into one to pull out the treasure and taking some unholy water), nor the Jewelled Dagger and Necklace, ("I'm not a thief, so I left them--I figured the altar was carved like a skull mouth so it might clamp shut or something"), nor the Demonic Murals, Nor The Door That Leads East.

I got sick of Cradle of Filth and put on Sleep.

Mandy then investigated The Crypts of the Priests, Warriors, and Commoners respectively and got all the gold out of the crypts. She did not go down the spiral staircases.

She investigated The Embalming Room and took the Book that was there, but did not read it.

She went into the room with the eyepiece and the books on pedestals, she took the eyepiece and put it in a sack.

She went into The Bloodstained Prayer Room and did not translate any of the writing.

She went right past the Room With The Black Fountains.

Then she got to The Plant Monster.

Now, you'll notice absolutely nothing has happened so far. If you know the module, you'll also know that killing the plant monster--for complex reasons--causes the dead to rise from their graves. And there's no way the players can know this.

So here, as the referee, I am getting excited, finally, somethings going to happen: Mandy can't get the book she's been sent here to get without getting past this plant.
She can see it there on the other side of this plant.

Also over there is a Gold Altar, an Inscription, A Pit, And Two Gold Cups.

So, she starts killing this plant. Acid, axe, axe, axe. Now it's dead. It almost kills her dwarf but she heals the dwarf. So she's past the plant.

Unbeknownst to her, the dead begin to rise from their graves.

I tell Mandy "There's a book--it matches the description of the book you've been sent to get, along with two cups, and..."

"We grab the book and the cups and run back the way we came."

"So you're just..."

"Yeah."

So then the players run, full speed, out of the dungeon, they run into some of the living dead, who scrape up the sorceress and kill the dwarf, but the party just keeps running, past the skeletons underground, past the ghouls above ground, and down the mountain.

And that's that and the adventure is over and now an army of undead walks the earth. "That's not my problem," says Mandy.

"Mandy," I say "everybody who runs this module has everybody die or goes insane or at least they find it really creepy, but you just ran in, got the stuff and left, scott free. How the hell did you do that?"

(Mandy is not a terribly experienced RPGer, this is her seventh night out.)

"I've played video games, I've played Zelda and Diablo--I know when you go around in a crypt the dead are going to come back. I know you just run in and get the stuff and leave. I mean, they sent me to get the book, I got it. It sucks that the dwarf had the purple powder--but I can go back for that later."

"So, um, did you like the adventure?"

"It was fun, I mean, it wasn't as creepy as Wolves In The Throne Room, but y'know, it was good despite being a bit predictable."

That's Mandy's review.

My personal dungeon master review--

It says right in the introduction:

"Careful and methodical adventurers will be able to find a great deal of treasure with absolutely no personal risk, but a number of adventurers may feel that this is not an
exciting adventuring location...if they are clever enough to never meet any opposition, they will likely be unsatisfied with the adventure as a whole without realizing how lucky they were."

Now, Mandy got the best of both worlds--it was easy and she got a lot of treasure, plus she did think it was fun. I, on the other hand, had a good enough time but just kept thinking what it would've been like if the group had included some of my other, less clearheaded, players.

I may have fucked this module up by running it right after an adventure that was already culty and creepy and full of demon terror (and using up all my best doom metal in the background). When I read Death Frost Doom, I thought the whole nothing-happens-in-the-whole-first-half-of-the-adventure-but-it's-all-creepy-and-that-builds-tension-thing was excellent, and a nice play on player expectations, but Mandy seemed to take it all in stride. Maybe it's just really hard to make a one-on-one adventure scary. Maybe you can't get the proper claustrophobia when you don't have several personalities all bickering about which door to take. Maybe none of that matters because Mandy had fun anyway. Maybe I'm just being the crazy dungeon master who imagines all the lunacy that could have been rather than the cut-and-dry cut-and-run scenario that Mandy pulled off. Maybe the most promising thing is that Mandy wants to go back later to get that purple powder.

(Also here is a link to the guy who created "Death Frost Doom"'s site http://lotfp.blogspot.com/)

Why I Love Simple Initiative

The players come around a corner and there's a bunch of goblins about to eat a baby. It's time to fight. Who goes first?

The most realistic way to do it is, of course, everybody rolls individually to see who goes when, or friend and foe both go in dexterity order, or something like that. In the old D&D rules, however, the players roll a die, the dungeon master rolls a die, and the highest side goes first--the whole side.

Obviously this makes things simpler--the DM doesn't have to keep track of the initiative rolls for eight different goblins interleaved with however many players, but I like the one-roll-per-side thing for another reason:

When you play a game, it's chaos. This dwarf guy is fiddling with his miniature, the wizard is checking through her spells, the barbarian is answering a text from her boyfriend, the cleric is worried about being down to one hit point, and the elf is thinking about whether to order pizza--if you've ever DMed you know how it is. You can be describing the most bizarre, epic vista or the goriest critical hit and there's still a chance everybody's off in their own little world.

But then you say "Ok, initiative--the dragon rolled a 4, what about you guys?". Then suddenly everyone at the table looks up, they hand the d6 to somebody--"Ok, you roll it"--and they all gather around this person and get absorbed in that one bouncing die--because if it's a 6 they get to do stuff, and if it's a 3, they get to get eaten by a dragon. And they all would rather do stuff then get eaten.

And in that moment of shared anticipation, they are all a team. The players maybe drove here separately in separate cars, they may drive home separately, they probably made their characters separately and their characters may die separately and from separate causes and they all have separate distractions or worries, and the players may not even know each other, but in that little moment they are all together, and they all realize they are playing a game about teamwork and all relying on each other. And suddenly the wizard cares if the thief can backstab because that'll save him from having to run away and the dwarf cares that the cleric has a healing spell because if he does then he can use it right now and it's all happening at once and they're all paying attention to the same thing at the same time because they are all unified in their fear of impending death.

Which is fun.