Six Monsters Beginning With "I"

Playing today--I had a holiday-appropriate plot seed all ready, but unfortunately the PCs aren't really high-level enough yet to fight an ex-carpenter-turned-lich. One day.

Anyway, point is I've got things to do, luckily the I's are easy...

Excluding the "Ice ___(place base creature here)___", not a lot of monsters start with I. Most are stupid. I have a job to do, though...

Imp

The imp is one of the very few infernal creatures in D&D that has an effective mechanical method of portraying satanic evil as not just a brand of monster but as a force for manipulating people. Specifically:

"...an imp is able to contact a lower plane once a week in order to help its 'master' decide some course of action...6 questions are allowed".

I like that very much:

Send six questions down to Hell.
Wait.
Get six answers from Hell.

(Six Answers from Hell sounds like a Christopher Lee movie.)

That's a whole adventure right there--a siege is coming, a sorceror wants to ask six questions that will allow him to prevail, the PCs are hired to find out as much as possible (they're paid by the meme) about the battleground, the army, etc. and then to help the sorceror formulate six perfect questions.

If the six questions can only be asked once, or if they can only have yes or no answers or something, that's even better.

Or: the imp is about to return to the crooked tower with answers that--progressively--will annhilate all that the PCs hold dear. The imp brings back one answer a day, and each makes the enemy harder to defeat--can they defeat the sorceress before her imp returns with the fatal final answer?

Or: The situation is dire. The imps answers are known, yet it is also known that three are lies and three are true, and the PCs are hired or otherwise obliged to sort out which is which, sending them on a minmum of 3 far-flung (or strictly local) quests.

Oh my god I'm in love.


Intellect Devourer

Mandy does not fear PC death. She has, however, explicitly said she fears her PC being made stupid. How seriously she'll take it if it ever does happen is not yet known.

Here's a sub-question: if you knew you were going to end up stupid, would you feel better if it were done by the intellect devourer--a giant brain with claws--or the thought eater--a skeletal duck monster? Or is the point here that creatures that make you stupid are always, at least in the Rientsian sense, stupid.

You have to love the fact that the lion-legged giant brain will "stalk" its victims and hides in shadow as a level 10 thief. Like it's sneaking. Sorry Frankie, I know you like to sneak, but the overgrown mind with paws will have your 2nd-level rogue outclassed for at least another six months. I imagine it creeping around behind you with Elmer Fudd wabbit-hunting music cues matching every step.

Maybe it's just too stupid.

I've just decided it has a slightly less stupid subspecies that's more like a jellyfish--a brain with tentacles that floats on the water.


Invisible Stalker and Irish Deer

I really want to flip them around so it's invisible deer and irish stalker.

Or.... intellect stalker and irish devourer. (Gasp! The spiced stew and Guinness have all disappeared! 'Tis The Devourer!)

Stalker-devourer? That sounds like a prestige class. Or a Mastodon song.

Or deerstalker, deer devourer, invisible irish intellect...fuck i need a chart...

"Run, it's the invisible irish intellect!"
"Mary mother of Christ, have ye no backbone! Don't you know fear is merely an emotional response to a perceived threat characterized by overstimulation the amygdala?"
"Oh no! You can't see him and he's smart."

Anyway...


Ixitxachitl

"They are of evil disposition, and clerical in nature."

Oh jesus, what to do with this thing?
I don't know, but I think I know where it came from:
I refer again to Jeff, this time from a post about creating memorable villains:

It's a simple technique. Start with a basic type of critter that could be seen in your campaign, one of those archetypal encounters that people have been using since the stone age...[like, say, a Manta Ray]...Now modify these basic encounters with a word or phrase that is not normally associated with the basic encounter. Don't be afraid to go far afield in this step...[Religious Manta Ray]...Now do that again, making sure the new modification has nothing to do with the original word or the first modification...[Religious Vampire Manta Ray]

Jeff does not then add that you should then let your cat walk across your keyboard and then name the resulting creature after what comes up, but then, Steve Marsh* was way ahead of his time.


Iron Cobra

I have no idea how legit this is, but whatever obsessive soul did the Wikipedia entry for Iron Cobra wrote:

"The iron cobra is typically built and animated (they require more magic than machinery) by neutral or evil aligned mages in the above mentioned settings to act as a sentry, interrogator, assassin, or servant."

Interrogator?

Man, do I like that.

The drug wears off, you wake up, you're tied to a chair and there's this metal snake sitting there. You begin to sweat in the merciless glare of its ruby eyes.

Six Questions From The Iron Cobra is the sequel to Six Answers from Hell. Peter Cushing is in it.

___________
*seee comments

What's THIS For...? (Lankhmar, City of Adventure)

If you read this blog, you know I'm always looking for stuff to use in city adventures. So the kind people at Troll & Toad sent me a copy of an AD&D supplement I've always wanted to get a look at--Lankhmar, City of Adventure.

If you don't know, Lankhmar is the city where Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories are usually based. Also, if you don't know, some of them are fantastic. They have a sort of pulp medieval/noir aesthetic. So anyway...

Whenever I hear someone wax rhapsodic about some old (or new) supplement, I always want a chance to get a good look at it before I go to the effort and expense of actually getting it--which is hard, so I almost never buy anything.

So anyway, I'm going to tell you what I would want to know if I was considering getting this. Here's exactly what's in it:

Chapter 1 consists of synopses of published Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories followed by suggestions for how to use the ideas in the stories for your campaign.

I figure if you read this blog, you probably have good enough taste to have read every Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story you can get your hands on already and smart enough that you could figure out how to use the ideas in D&D on your own--still, it's nice to see a D&D product so forthrightly acknowledging its literary roots.

Chapter 2 is the best and most generally useful part--maps and maps and maps.

The first one is the one illustrating this blog entry--in real life it is much clearer (click on it, then click on it again to get an idea). It is followed by several pages of blow-up maps of each of the eleven districts. They are mostly just hollow shapes of anonymous buildings, but all are large and clear enough to completely label on your own and put in your own buildings. Major landmarks from the stories are labelled, but not in such a way as to interfere with repurposing them. Some of the buildings have decent adventure-seeds attached, some are just functional.

Also: all of these maps are reprinted in a special supplement in the back along with twelve nifty extra city geomorphs (about 3 square blocks each) you can slot in anywhere.

Also: there's a poster-sized full-color version of the map that you can use to explain to your players where stuff is--though since it's in color it's a little harder to re-purpose if you're not actually adventuring in Lankhmar.

These maps are a perfect place to start for any urban location--and probably big enough to keep the PCs busy forever, though you're going to have to decide what all the buildings are by yourself.

Chapter 3 is short descriptions of other places in Leiber's world--Newhon--outside Lankhmar. It's sketchy, but it's a conscientious round-up of Leiber's locales. The only map in this section shows where everything is in relationship to everything else.

Chapter 4 contains stats and descriptions of characters from the books, including stats for Fafhrd and the Mouser at three different ages.

Chapter 5 is a list of a few dozen factions, from the Assassin's Guild to the Astrologers' Consortium, along with short descriptions and the relative social status of each. It isn't quite set up so you can use these interfactional rivalries as a game in itself (or an independent sytem motoring the rest of the game), but if you're modelling a very political campaign, you might find these a helpful springboard for thinking about factionf.

Chapter 6 is about Lankhmar's gods--Glaggerk, Hate, the Red God, the Rat God and about a dozen others. Again, this is (mostly, presumably) all in the books, but having all of the gods and their details collected together is interesting and useful.

Chapter 7 has 20 monsters with stats. The Marsh Leopard is typical--statwise it's a lot like something already in the Monster Manual but the fact that it can be detected because of its "glowing blue eyes" is a nice touch. There aren't enough pictures to make the monster section indispensable.

Chapter 8 has special rules and systems for urban adventures, and other Lankhmar-specific details like what festival happens during what month. These range from the lite-but-possibly-useful (social status rules with 5 different ways your status can go up or down) to the lite-and-destined-to-be-hacked-immediately (the sketchy legal system rules) to the heavy-but-useless (a random building scheme that requires you to roll on at minimum three tables--with a list of modifiers for each--if the PCs dash into a random building in the middle of a game. Why not one long table?).

The chapter ends with a set of generic maps which are ok but some of which are so larded with weird symbols (why not the traditional dollar-sign-wall for secret doors?) that the small benefit you get from using a pregen building could be outweighed by the pain of interpreting it.

Chapter 9 has rules for converting an AD&D campaign to a match a more Newhonian style, mostly concerning lowering the magic level. Only useful if you're not pretty much DIYing it already, which, if you're buying a 25-year-old supplement for an out-of-print game, you probably are.

Chapter 10 has suggestions on dialing back the body-count to match a more noirish mood as well as a short adventure (a heist) and 18 paragraph-long subgenre-appropriate adventure seeds. They're decent.

So, overall, how good is it? Well, it doesn't exactly make it so you'll never have to do any work ever again, but since you can still pick it up for less than 20 bucks, it might be worth it if you're building your own city. If you've read but don't own the Leiber books, it nicely extracts a good deal of the adventure fuel from them.

Let me know if this was useful, I may do it again.

Panic In The Hands Of An Indifferent God

A horror movie:

You are going down a hall.

The music begins to swell...a pair of minor chords oscillate ominously.

You know what's down this hallway: The Plot.

You don't always want to do that.
__________

We evolve--sometimes unconsciously--different ways of DMing different groups.

The most effective demeanor for dealing with my current group is: act like Bill Murray drinking coffee while trying to get his cigarette lighter to work.

Act light, act negligent, act like you can barely remember, act as if telling them what's going on is the last of several things on your mind. No lush word pictures, no candles, no mood music.

This instills a gratifying panic in the players.

Conventional wisdom is: the DM acts engaged and fired up and epic and grand, and then the players get engaged and fired up and epic and grand. Maybe this is true with some groups, not mine. They start out engaged--they want their characters to do things, and they want to make sure things don't get done to them. They have shit ready to do before I even tell them where they are. They have armor classes and memorized spells and they dream big dreams.

So they are waiting waiting waiting to see what will happen.

So you tell them...almost nothing.

"You see, like...y'know" (sip your drink,) "...like, a room. There's..."

Inevitably I get interrupted at this point. A room? The players have a whole lists of things they want need must absolutely do to this room right now.

"Hold on, hold on. There's something there..."

"What is it? How big is it? Does it have claws? Oh MY GOD WILL IT MURDER US ALL?"

"...Huh..mayyyybe...lemme roll on this chart...talk amongst yourselves for a second..."

They are wild now, asking questions, on top of each other, over each other. And they are paying waaaaaaay more attention than they would if I'd just bathed them in purple prose describing all they see in minute and mood-setting detail.

Because when faced with this, they need to ask questions, they need to observe, their characters' very survival depends on it and--this is important--even though I appear to be more concerned about getting another Oreo or cleaning a spec of something off my fingernail than I am about telling them what's in front of them, they know that I know everything they need to know.

They know I know how big it is, I know how many hit points and tentacles it has, I know whether there's a pit trap next to it, and I know whether the door opens in or opens out and I know which side the knob is on, and I know how many feet they just fell down the stairwell.

And the fact that I don't seem to care that much either way about all these things that affect their fate terrifies them.

Or at least it serves as a heads up that they'll have to be very careful. Like when you play hide-and-seek and the kid who's "it" counts but doesn't count out loud.

In the most desperate situations, they hang on my every mumbled, like, uh...Southern Californian word. They mentally translate from contemporary american english into what this means in the fantasy world that they occupy. I don't have to do it for them. Since their characters' lives are at stake, they extract special meaning from a phrase like: "It's got three eyes and the third one lights up with, like, this sort of greenish, like..."

"Oh FUCK!"

They are terrified because it appears I don't care. I am just relating the horrible things that will happen and making the world react the way the dice tell it to and I have zero interest in letting them know whether this is the right hallway or the wrong hallway or the horrific danger hallway or if this is "meant to be" a horrific scene or a heroic scene or what. They have to figure it out all on their own. This is far scarier and far more fun than making them sit through my HP Lovecraft impression every time they get into a new room. (And that would bore them and seem cheesey to them anyway--they are imagining the stairwell in all necessary detail already because they know they need to in order to survive.)

The terror and the engagement don't come from me being Vincent Pricey or Peter Jacksony and hoping they get into it, the terror and the engagement come from the players realizing in their own minds that this or that casually dropped word might just be the thing that kills the character they have so lovingly levelled up. And they like it, because now instead of tourists, watching amazing things, they are wrestling with the things, trying to extract meaning from a barely-landmarked world.

David Foster Wallace on a similar phenomenon:

Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication -theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed-from-but-evoked-by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve...Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called "compression" -- for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.

Further, this technique makes the game more about them than me, which is always good. I want to be like Nanny in Muppet Babies--show up, give them a new toy or rule or plot, then let them go nuts trying to figure it out.

Like I say, this works on them and they like it. Different players, you might roll with them in different ways.

The Rorschach Fight

Here's one I like to use--you can do it over and over without anyone realizing you're doing it if you just change the details:

The PCs come upon two parties (entities, monsters, groups, group v. monster, etc.) fighting. The PCs are either hidden from the combatants or else the belligerents are so busy that they don't notice the PCs.

The Players' three most obvious choices are: join Party A, join Party B, or just ignore the whole fight and continue on their way.

The funny thing is, the party often acts---or at least my players often act--as if they have no choice at all.

They instinctively join in the fight on the side of whichever combatant looks more human. I think part of the reason might be because most of them are semi-new and don't realize that there's D&D in every direction, no matter what they decide to do.

The situation is like a Rorschach test in a very literal sense--sometimes you'll see an ink blot and it's not just like it looks kinda like something it's like you don't immediately realize that anyone else could see it any other way.

The players, in this way, create both the plot and the morality. Occasionally without knowing it.
________

Mandy's commentary on one such encounter:

Mandy: "After we fought the guy with the weird brain coming out of his head I was like that was the wrong thing to do."

Zak: "Why was that the wrong thing to do Mandy?"

Mandy: "Well he was outnumbered already even before we got there and then we found out later that the dark elves were performing experiments on everybody. But they were dark elves and Frankie is a dark elf, plus there was the language thing like the brain guy was only making weird bug noises we couldn't understand, but the dark elves could ask for help so we're instinctively like oh, lets help them!"

The H Monsters

Continuing the Alphabetical Monster Thing. Monsters that start with "H"...

Halfling

A big philosophical difference between the epic special-effects bonanza movie trilogy that informed my childhood and the one that informed the youths of children who first started watching movies during the Zeroes is that Star Wars was about a kid who couldn't wait to get the hell out of his tedious rural backwater and out into trouble, whereas the Rings movies are about a bunch of guys who are like "Oh, it looks like we're on an adventure, I don't know about this shit...I sure wish we could've just stayed in our tedious rural backwater..."

I used to have a roommate that was basically a hobbit. When the LotR movies came out we talked about Tolkien. I said how I didn't get why somebody with all that imagination would make hobbits--the most boring thing in Middle Earth--the center of the story. He felt exactly the opposite. His favorite part in all Tolkieana is when Gandalf encourages Bilbo to ignore his fear by "thinking of pleasant things".

Bilbo then lists off the pleasant things:
"A warm fire...my library at twilight...cakes."
Can't relate.

The bold and pugnacious urban halfling is by now, of course, a well-established D&D anti-stereotype and also begins with ideas in Tolkien. It works fairly well.

The outright evil halfling has two main possibilites: bad-halfling-as-icy-Machiavelli and bad-halfling-as-creepy-child. The second is automatically intriguing, and the first has possibilites--especially if you can manage to make the scheming overhalfling so austere, commanding, and vicious that it never seems funny. Tall order, as Rorshach would say.

Harpy

You can call it The Demilich Rule: the less capable of causing harm something appears to be, the more disturbing it is when it starts being evil. For this reason, I've always thought harpies worked much better without arms.

Hell Hound, Hound of Ill Omen, et al.

Much as I am dubious of monsters that exist merely because of synonym-sprawl (or Gegenstandsverdoppelnde Gesinnungsdifferentiation, as they call it in Germany) I feel that there are two different and honest niches for the hell hound and the hound of ill omen/bargehest/black dog/whatever other spooky northern European dog legend you subscribe to.

The hell hound is like this horrible persuing monster that chases you like Rick Moranis got chased out of his Upper East side apartment and chews you up with it's "great black teeth" right there on camera whereas the more low key and spectral hounds appear and then howl and then go away and you're doomed.

Herd Animal

Hit dice: 1-5
Damage/attack: variable
Cop out meets Gygaxian Naturalism. It's kinda like Gygax wanted to say "look every single thing is in the monster manual" but couldn't be bothered to actually do it. Conflicting urges. Technically, you could say that all herd animals ever are in the monster manual as long as you accept the fact that that doesn't mean you don't have to make up the stats for them yourself anyway.

And who are these Whole-Earth-Catalog hippies running from the giraffe?

Hippocampus

The part of your brain called the hippocampus is called that because somebody thought it looked like a seahorse. Which is a little confusing.

Imagine how much more confusing it would be if the science of anatomy had taken a little bit longer to develop and that part of your brain had ended up being called "that thing that pops out of Kane's chest".

It occurs to me that this blog's audience is the type where somebody is bound to point out that chest burster was actually made from hog guts so I'll just go ahead and say that for you.


Hippogriff

Ingres does a pretty good job of making the hippogriff look not stupid in this picture. (Though you kinda have to wonder whether the damsel is just pretending to be in distress since Roger showed up--the dragon has a kind of "I thought you said he was on a business trip in New Mexico" look on his face.) However, he does it by having the knight's armoured leg sharply divide the horse parts from the eagle parts. If he didn't, the thing might look pretty awkward trying to walk around with those little talons in front and horse legs in the back--like a wheelbarrow with wings.



Hippopotamus

How's this for lame-on-paper: Last year I played in a one-shot game that was pretty much a one-way only, heavily "storied" adventure (with a moral dilemma thrown in the middle that backfired and didn't take) which turned out to be just a staged set of encounters moving toward what at first seemd like it was going to be a demon gnoll-god boss monster but was actually a giant hippo.

I had a lot of fun anyway.

Moral of the story: play with your friends. It's fun pretty much no matter what.

As for the whole hippos-being-the-most dangerous-megafauna-in-Africa thing: apparently, the deal is we don't have reliable statistics for all the animals in Africa, but that observers all agree the hippo is indeed an irritable and deadly beast and definitely kills more people than lions do.

However, an RPG is not the same medium as rowing down the Okavongo River in a straw canoe, so--in a game--I'm still way more scared of this unicorn-head guy (ice-cream cone notwithstanding) than a hippopotamus.

Hobgoblin

The militarized hobgoblin--as opposed to the hobgoblin-as-weird-little-magic-sprite-thing is entirely a legacy of J.R.R Tolkien.

You could say the same thing to some degree about other races--elves, goblins--but there are premodern stories in which these creatures had something approaching societies. What gets lost to some degree in the translation from the old ideas of fairy courts and fairy worlds to what you can usually fit in a game without trying is the idea that although they were as sophisticated or perhaps more sophisticated than human socities, they had what we would call these days a completely different technology: They value gold we value gold but one always got the sense that it was for completely different reasons.

The hobgoblin probably moved the farthest post-Tolkien--starting out as an often benevolent (a "hob" is a actually a friendly spirit) magical creature and through Gygax's translation of Tolkien's translation (Uruk'hai or however it's spelled) turned them into goblins on steroids.

Normally, at this point I would decry such grotesque simplification. However, sometime in the last few years Jeff of Jeffs Gameblog posted the really cool Hayami Rasenjin picture of a hobgoblin in full armor which graces the top of this page (thank you Blizack for the image and image credit) which made me decide DnD hobgoblins were fine by me.

The samurai-style hobgoblin in the monster manual is clumsy but I think the idea isn't so bad--a hobgoblin is a thing that actually looks like those crazy demon masks that samurai used to wear. (Putting them in somewhat the same category as gargoyles--a creature inspired by art imitating some other creature.)

Homonculous

The wikipedia entry for Homonculous is one of the coolest things I've read in months. So rather than plagiarize it here I will just suggest you go read it.

I think an interesting idea would be to fuse the old alchemical concept of a homonculous as a sort of reduced magical counterpart to a person with the modern scientific concept of a homonculous as an image of a person distorted to reflect the importance of certain parts of the body from a given point of view.

For example: you could have a homonculous spell which distorts your enemies bodies according to the sins they are guilty of. A greedy person might grow huge eyes an fingers, a gluttonous person might grow a gigantic mouth, etc. Alternately you could have some sort of device which copies you, only smaller, exaggerating the body parts you use most or something like that. The possible combinations seem endless.

Hordlings

Hordlings are to the lower planes what "herd animal" is to this one. A way for Gygax to point to anything in a Heironymous Bosch painting and say "that's in the game."

Horse

This message is for any members of my gaming group that may be reading this blog: there are no Warponies available for any price in this campaign.

Hydra

Since everyone knows already that hydrae are super cool and you should use them at every available opportunity I will instead to address a specific issue concerning the hydra. That is: what does the non-snakey head part of the hydra look like? The DnD hydra has a big quadrupedal lizard body but there are also versions that have a snake body and some that have a big fat fish tail. All are acceptable. However: a hydra with four legs and a tail strikes me as unimaginably tasteless.

Hyena

A note to any of my players who might be reading this: Trained hyenas are available in most towns in my campaign at reasonable prices.

Nephilidian Vampire

So decadent are these creatures that they fear equally the sun, the sea, dry land, and, indeed any surface not hewn by an intelligent hand.

Most prefer never to leave their half-drowned empire of Nephilidia. Inside its tarnished palaces and rotting halls they sit--forever knee-deep in black and stagnant water, with strange algaes stretched like
cobwebs from the surface to the once-ornate walls and crumbling statuary--endlessly elaborating cruel and languid intrigues, attended by salamander men and eyeless fish.

This amphibious species can change into a small, mobile pool of black blood, or take the form of a strange, darting, long-tendrilled aquatic animal resembling a hybrid of a lionfish and a manta ray. If reduced to zero hit points on land, the creature will revert to the former form. Consequently, if sufficiently injured, the Nephilidian vampire often sinks into the soil and becomes hopelessly trapped and intermingled with the earth. If grievously wounded in the water, this bizarre creature will turn into sixteen black stones and sink to the bottom. In either form, a drop of blood from another vampire is sufficient to revive the creature. Due to these vulnerabilites, the Nephilidian vampire prefers to travel via subterranian aquaducts, sewers, or other shallow, watertight, artificial constructions. They despise, but can--with an effort of will--tolerate clean running water.

In their humanoid form, they are distinguishable from ordinary vampires by the gills on their necks and their glassy blue eyes.

Evaluating Your City

What do I want when I buy a city off somebody? I want them to do work for me. Not necessarily work I couldn't have done myself, I just want them to have put in the hours to put a little love into things I myself was too busy with other things to do.

So, scoring your city supplement:

Size

-You get one point for each thing described. An NPC, a building, an item, a unique local custom, a bar game, a legal system, etc. For example: you can say "there's a church" and you get a point.

Clarity at High Speed

-You lose that point if you tell me anything about it that could just as well have been randomized or made up on the spot by anybody with a brain, like: "the church doors are eleven feet high and made of oak."

I can make up generic details myself, I don't need professional game designers for that. More importantly, doing that clutters up the graphic design on the page when I'm in the middle of the game trying to figure out what's going on with your church. This may seem harsh, but the whole point of using someone else's setting is that you have to do less work and if I have to prep and highlight all over the page or rewrite it then it suddenly becomes more trouble than just writing my own thing.

-You lose a point if you explain the function of a thing when I already know what it does. Like if you say "the Cathedral of Chuckles is the center of the worship of the Great God Chuckles" you're wasting your space and my time.

Notice that from these rules the effect is: if you include a church and do nothing but give me generic details about it and describe what a church is, then you've actually lost a point and so you are better off leaving the church out entirely if that's all you're going to do.

Map

-You gain 0 points for putting the thing on a map or otherwise locating it, unless where it's located has some especially distinctive effect on the game or setting, in which case it gets you one point. Telling me the crypt is in the northeast quadrant of the city doesn't get you a point unless that means the graveyard is built on top of the all-girl juggling school. Again, if you're giving me a detail it needs to be a detail that couldn't just as well have been randomized.

-0 points if there's a map that's keyed with only numbers or letters referring to paragraphs spread out across the supplement. Five points if it's keyed with the names of places and/or some sort of distinctive shape telling you what something is just by looking at it. Twenty points if the spread with the map manages to both locate a place and encapsulate most of the important things I need to know about each location.

Character

-You gain a point for adding a descriptive detail that affects the style of the thing. That is: creates some sort of shift in the idea of the thing by its mere presence. For example: telling me the church is shaped like perfect sphere, or an antler, or is made entirely of leather, or is a monolithic grey streaked with long dark stains from centuries of rust and rain. Ideally, You get this point even if it I don't like it--like you say the church is made of burlap and magic lutes.

Adventure Fuel And Completeness

-You gain points for adding distinctive features to things that create playable depth --information, "adventure seeds", mini-challenges--to a thing you've created, according to the following scheme:

-One point for a detail that basically says "There's an adventure you could go on outside the setting" (no matter how lame). i.e. "It is rumored that the priest has a map to the location of a sunken wreck full of treasure." (Assuming the description of the actual wreck and map are not provided in your setting.)

-One point if the adventure being pointed to isn't lame.

-Two points for a detail that points the PCs towards an adventure outside the setting and implies that some person or institution in the setting will be pleased, displeased or in some way affected by completion of the task, and if that person or institution has any identifiable and persisitent personality or role in the setting. i.e. "It is rumored that the priest carries the map because he hopes, one day, to recover the dog collar belonging to his dead puppy, Randolph, who died on that voyage."

-Three points for a detail that could send the PCs out of the setting but which will, if they succeed or fail, create a substantial change in the setting. i.e. "Legend has it that returning the collar to Charneldyne will cause all the madmen in the city to become sane."

-Four points if it sends the PCs out of the setting but also requires or implies that in order to complete the task they must do something substantive within the setting. "The ruined galleon is a mile beneath the waves. It is said there are only a handful of devices and substances that allow one to reach such depths, and a scant few in the city who know how to use them--and they all have been imprisoned by the Baron for either necromancy, lechery, or fraud."

-Five points if the task can be performed entirely within the setting. "The wreck is actually located deep beneath the surface of the Baron's moat."

(Or, to put it another way, the easier you make it for me to run the city just like a dungeon, the happier I am.)

(I'm all for "leavng space for the DM to invent things" but I don't need you to provide that--I know I can create space wherever I want. I'm subcontracting you.)

-Six points if a detail could be of general use to many, most, or all of the PCs activities within the setting. "The priest, like all the clergy in the city, is unknowingly subject to a ancient curse from the Sea Gog, Nykkto, whereby his intimates are doomed to die by drowning."

Style

Five points for each part of the basic premise of the city that is actually interesting. i.e. "The City of Charneldyne is a bustling metropolis at the heart of the orcish empire" would get 0 points, whereas ""The City of Charneldyne is a bustling metropolis at the heart of the orcish empire and is built entirely from the bones of slain foes" will get 5 points.

Subjectivity

Twenty points if the setting as a whole is actually interesting. Like Viriconium.

Neither gain nor lose points either way if it's just basically a medieval place.

You lose twenty points if it goes out of its way to be uninteresting, like Stamford, Connecticut.

Value

Divide the number of points by the cost in U.S dollars of the setting.