Episode 8: You say you want a revolution

With the Inquisition at the door, the party is heading for the roof of their guesthouse when they receive an animal messenger from Caleb, one of the PCs who had missed the previous run and had as a result been left in the village harbor to mind the Fortuna while the rest of the group ventured into the Tendyran port city of Nemala. When the party failed to return by sunset Caleb- a voodoo priest- decided to consult the spirits and cast Augury to see if he should find and help his friends. I had given the player the option simply to have been with the party all along (a simple retcon aided by the fact that Caleb has a Ring of Invisibility), but he decided it would be more fun to play out his reunion.

So Caleb arrives in the city just in time to catch the tail end of the torch-wielding mob of Imperials and town guardsmen heading for the party's guesthouse. He sends a message detailing the situation outside, which prompts the group to split up when they take to the roof- two players will try and create a diversion, while the rest will head uphill towards the Temple of the Oracle, which will grant them sanctuary even from the local authorities. Nemala is a city of terraces and closely-packed rowhouses, so moving from rooftop to rooftop is relatively easy, save for the occasional gaps which must be jumped or otherwise negotiated.

The only hazard is that they are attempting to do this at night, and as quickly as possible, so for each terrace I roll 2d6, compare it to 7, and ask the players to make a DEX check at whatever my roll was over or under. Simple failure means tripping and taking 1d4 damage; failure by 4 or more on the ability check means falling through the roof itself into the top floor of the building below, taking 1d6 falling damage plus an additional 1d4 damage from crashing through the roof; a critical failure results in falling off the building entirely and landing on the street for 20' or more of falling damage. Moving from terrace level to terrace level presents a different challenge each time (they will need to make 3 level changes in order to reach the temple): the first change is an actual arch, the second has one 15' jump, and the third has two jumps, of 6' and 9' respectively.

The results are amusing, but not deadly enough to deter the party from sticking to the rooftops. Meanwhile, the diversionary party gets to witness first-hand what happens when you violate the laws of hospitality on the island of Tendyra, where the ancient gods known as the Nameless Ones are venerated at every hearth. For no sooner do the Imperial soldiers break down the front door of the guesthouse than they are assaulted by Evard's Black Tentacles, which cause most of them to run screaming in every which direction until they are able to regroup. So the diversionary party, no longer needed to create a diversion, decide to make their way down to the waterfront to meet up with Caleb when they are hailed by the bookseller- a Varonian merchant named Ovidio who has been laying low in a tavern basement ever since the Inquisition came looking for him.

Back to the main party, who gets as far as the third terrace before one of the players botches a jump and ends up on the pavement, alerting a couple of Inquisitors and several Imperial auxiliaries. A pitched battle ensues and the PCs narrowly avoid having their asses handed to them by two knights of the Inquisition, both of them fourth-level fighters clad in plate mail (right now the average party level is between 2 and 3)- since they are both wielding two-handed weapons I refer to them as Rexor and Thorgrim, after the big lugs in Conan the Barbarian. Fortunately however the party prevails, and are rejoined with their comrades, who show them a secret route back down to the safety of the waterfront. Had the party decided to follow through with its plan to go to the Temple the result would have been a standoff, and probably would have required another clever plan to escape, so this has likely turned out for the better.

The reunited party then deliberates as to how to proceed. Captain Kiin feels strongly about delivering his books, which are revealed to be political propaganda printed in Varo and destined for the rebellious city of Vrolens, where Imperial authorities have shut down bookstores and confiscated all printing facilities. Is Kiin some kind of anti-Imperial, Vrolentine sympathizer? Not in the least, but it sticks in his craw that the Empire with its blockade has managed to stifle trade in this region, making Heijin Kiin a Canalsider in the truest sense of the term. So a plan is concocted to rid the port city of its Imperial presence- Kiin and his first mate Mr. Hu will sneak over to the galley and attempt to free the two hundred-odd rowing slaves, while the rest of the group will divert as much Imperial attention as possible away from the waterfront with a coordinated series of diversions.

I give the players a good ten or fifteen minutes to come up with some ideas for their "Project Mayhem," which each decent idea decreasing the contingent of troops on board the galley when the Captain goes all Spartacus on the Korumani. To my surprise they come up with three solid ideas: 1. Float a rumor that the contraband books are arriving after sunset via the city gate, 2. Stage a commando raid on the Inquisition's headquarters in the city, and 3. Have Caleb run around the city invisible shouting anti-Imperial slogans to appeal to the locals in the street, as regardless of whatever deals their leaders have struck with the Inquisitors Tendyrans are proudly of their neutrality and clearly resent having Raynar boots on their soil. This is good enough that I rule the ship will have but a minimal contingent of auxiliaries and its captain when Kiin and Mr. Hu come to free the galley slaves.

The rest, as they say, is history. The plan goes spectacularly for the PCs and much fun is had by all, and by the end of the session the Imperial galley has been sunk, the slaves freed, and the remaining Korumani put to flight, making the port of Nemala safe for Varonian commerce once more. The players are particularly pleased with themselves for coming up with and executing their strategy, and although at times the resistance I offered them as DM threatened to upset their hopes and fears I made sure to tread that fine line between antagonism and action. The real crux of this balance came down to the final combat of the evening, which took place between Mr. Hu and the captain of the galley, who was a Raynar knight like the other Inquisitors, and a real badass to boot. I made a point of introducing him into the fray, a big red-bearded brute who started his round of combat by running through one of his own mean for attempting to flee the burning ship. This was meant to be a real Boss Battle, pure and simple, and I was looking forward to thrashing Mr. Hu to within a hit point of his life when he announced his player's intentions:

"This guy's in plate mail, right?"

"That's right," I tell him. "Bronze plate, because that would look even cooler by firelight."

"OK," the player says. "I'm going to use my Tumbling skill to put myself in the best position to trip the Captain and push him overboard."

"Wait. What?"

Mr. Hu rolls a 1 on his Tumbling check- a critical success. Although I've decided that the Raynar Captain is by no means a fool, I have to acknowledge the player's lucky dice here, and rule that an opposed Strength check will decide whether my level Boss will quite literally sink or swim.

Full disclosure: I really wanted this fight to happen, so I could have fudged my roll and ensured that the Captain remained on his feet. But I didn't. One of the hardest lessons to learn as a Dungeon Master is that despite the fact that you are the creator of your world and its final authority on all matters earthly and cosmic, the story you're helping tell is not yours and yours alone. Epic battles are always fun, but what I allowed to transpire instead was arguably even better, because I allowed player ingenuity and lucky dice carry the day...

...as every DM worth his salt should.

"So what happens?" the player asks, fully expecting Mr. Hu to fail, especially after he saw the look on my face when he first announced his intentions.

I look up from my dice and sigh. "You send the Captain flying headlong into the harbor, where he lands with an undignified 'ploop' and sinks like a stone."

"Really?" The table has fallen silent. Perhaps this is my idea of a joke?

"You did it. He's gone. Still sinking as we speak."

"Really?"

"Look, dude, are you searching for loot or what?"

There was more to the run- much more, but some of that will no doubt come into play during the next episode, when the players finally get to the Isle of Dread... I mean Ryzien. Seriously, though, the island only looks like the Isle of Dread- okay, exactly like the Isle of Dread, but I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about.

Wyrmholes!

I decided to take a stab at contributing some material to Zak S's crowdsourced Gigacrawler RPG. Here it is...

Wyrmholes- In ancient times it is said that the Great Wyrms coiled themselves around the geological faultlines of the heavenly spheres, burrowed deep beneath the tectonics plates. When the Gigastructure filled the spaces between celestial bodies the wyrms were free to roam, their tunnels trailing for millions of miles in seemingly random directions. Wyrmholes are perfectly smooth, their tunnel walls perfectly frictionless- enterprising Crawlers can ride these tubes from region to region at maximum falling speed, although such a means of travel is not without its hazards. Upon encountering an unfamiliar wyrmhole, roll 2d6:

2. Dead End- Aeons ago a Great Wyrm perished here in the midst of the Gigastructure. Unless they have some means to brake themselves suddenly, Crawlers will take maximum possible falling damage when they reach the end.

3. Non-Euclidean Wyrmhole- the Great Wyrm which carved this tunnel blundered across an interdimensional faultline, causing the Crawlers to teleport to a random location in the Gigastructure (with a possibility of reappearing in solid matter).

4. Relativistic Wyrmhole- the track of the Great Wyrm transits the gravity well of a supermassive object, such as a neutron star or a black hole. Crawlers will suffer the effects of time dilation, arriving d100 years later than they had started

5. Quantum Wyrmhole. A tunnel which forks 1d4 times, each branch representing a different quantum state. At each juncture there is a 50% chance of taking the wrong path.

6. Unstable Wyrmhole- Due to the nature of the local Gigastructure matrix, the tunnel bored by the Great Wyrm is not entirely smooth. Unless the Crawlers take special precautions they will take 1d6 points of damage per round due to friction and minor abrasions.

7. Stable Wyrmhole- A perfectly traversable tunnel from start to finish, though be sure to check for wandering monsters and other Crawlers .

8. Unstable Wyrmhole (II)- The Great Wyrm's tunnel traverses a pocket of inherently unstable matrix in the Gigastructure (d6): 1. Mud, 2. Silt, 3. Water, 4. Air, 5. Steam, 6. Magma. Crawlers must find means to traverse the hazard or become stranded.

9. False Wyrmhole- This tunnel, despite its appearances, was not carved by a Great Wyrm but something else entirely of the DM's devising. Roleplay accordingly.

10. Möbius' Wyrmhole- Somehow the Great Wyrm who carved this tunnel bent back upon itself in an infinitely recursive track. Crawlers must find an ingenious way to break the cycle or ride this loop forever.

11. Wyrmhole to Nowhere- This tunnel empties out into the Void itself, the space between spaces in which the Gigastructure itself is situated.

12. Live End- Crawlers have stumbled upon a wyrmhole that is still in the process of being carved... by a live Great Wyrm!

The trouble with Tlaloc

Thanks to Jeff Rients' excellent Gameblog I stumbled across the current brouhaha surrounding Carcosa, an "old skool" D&D variant created by Geoffrey McKinney featuring graphic depictions of child sacrifice. While such things are by no means unheard of in the pulp fantasy genre, McKinney has ignited the firestorm here by requiring such gruesome acts as the material components necessary for player character spellcasters, who are sorcerors in a creepy Lovecraftian mode. Suffice it to say that I'm not terribly interested in the controversy itself as I am the larger question of heroism versus Heroism in roleplaying games that the Carcosa flap has inspired.

Rients hits the nail squarely on the head with the problem of Tlaloc, the Mesoamerican rain god (a.k.a Chaac or Chaac-Mool). Featured along with the other Precolumbian Mexican gods in the 1st edition supplement Deities and Demigods, Tlaloc's demands for innocent blood presented an interesting challenge for players and DMs alike -- how do you square the otherwise civilized behavior of a people such as the Aztecs or Mayans with the mass human sacrifice practiced by both cultures as a matter of course?

The Hero with a capital H says that, put simply, you can't. According to big-H Heroism, when faced with an example such as this...

At each full moon, a priest of Tlaloc sacrifices a child or baby to Tlaloc. Once a year, there is a great festival held in his honor. Numerous babies are bought or taken from the populace. These babies are sacrificed to Tlaloc, after which the priests cook and eat them. If the babies cry during the sacrifice, this is taken as a good sign that rain will be abundant during the coming year.

...the only proper reaction is revulsion and disgust. What's more, even if you are born and raised as a member of this culture, as a Hero you must be aware on some fundamental level that these practices are shameful and wrong and not just the way things are done. If you've ever read Gary Jenning's Aztec, you get a great illustration of the big-H principle at work, as the protagonist -- a Mexica artisan -- quietly revolts against the injustice of giving Tlaloc his due. To suggest that acts such as this could be "normal" features of the hero's world marks you as some kind of Godless cultural relativist.

The trouble is, Deities and Demigods was inviting no such summary judgment on the player's part. The whole point of the supplement was to give campaigns some mytho-historic flavor, not to present players with the evils and injustices of alien cultures as wrongs to be righted. Not surprisingly, back in the 70's and 80's the Moral Majority types seized upon the descriptions of Tlaloc and other similarly cruel and/or bloodthirsty gods as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of D&D. Never mind that back then most of us (those of us just hitting puberty, at least!) were more interested in the naked pictures of Aphrodite and Ishtar than we were learning about how human sacrifice was A-O.K..

But D&D has always had these issues -- should fantasy roleplaying implicitly judge its setting, or merely describe it and let the players figure out what's wrong and what's right? As time has gone by, Dungeons and Dragons has drifted ever more solidly into Hero territory, reflecting both political correctness and corporate risk aversion as the RPG has evolved from a countercultural pastime to a mainstream gaming product. One of my favorite examples of this in D&D is its treatment of the use of poison by player characters. While the 1st edition does not shy away from providing a virtual apothecary of poisonous substances available to players, already by 2nd Ed. poison use has been marked as "evil" behavior -- never mind that Herakles, one of the greatest heroes of Greek mythology, used poisoned arrows to defeat several enemies during his celebrated Twelve Labors! 3rd Edition further circumscribed player use of poisons by making them available only to certain evil prestige classes, and while I'm not sure what 4E's take is on the topic it doesn't seem to be the kind of game that would favor such non-Heroic tactics.

While I've always enjoyed trying on another culture for size and questioning my own assumptions about what makes a hero, I know that even among gamers there's quite a spectrum of comfort in this regard. One of my best friends from childhood was squarely in the big-H camp, and refused even to entertain the possibility of a hero who was first and foremost a product of his times -- we would have the most epic arguments on this point, with him championing Joseph Campbell and me full of my recent studies in (of all things) Mesoamerican culture. The Aztecs are one of history's greatest character studies, and I daresay that they will always be.

In the case of Carcosa, I think McKinney is offering up something up something similar: a kind of Rorschach test for latter-day gamers. Do you play it at face value, or with a sense of irony? Do you accept the culture of the campaign world, or rail against it? The beauty of roleplaying is not just that you get to decide, but that there's plenty of room at the table for different answers.

UPDATE: The web is a beautiful thing. No sooner did I sit down to work this morning than I noticed that Geoffrey McKinney himself stopped by to see what I had to say! For the record, he offered the following clarification to my admittedly hasty summary of Carcosa's setting--

"Not all PCs on Carcosa are sorcerers. Some are fighting-men. Also, about one-sixth of the sorcerous rituals in the book do not require human sacrifice. It is entirely possible to be a Carcosan sorcerer who never sacrifices a human. In fact, since the rituals that require human sacrifice are more dangerous to the sorcerer than are rituals that do not, a sorcerer who does not sacrifice humans will probably live longer than the sorcerers who do."

Why alignment in 4E sucks

It's not exactly a state secret that I'm lukewarm on 4th Edition D&D. I played it at Gen Con and my team even placed at the Open (though we got boned in the semifinals), and I think it's a perfectly harmless set of miniatures rules, but not really something I'd like to campaign in long-term. But something in the new edition really does irk me, and that's the change to alignment rules. Since 1st Edition D&D characters have chosen their alignment on two intermeshed axes: Lawful to Chaotic, and Good to Evil, with Neutral as a uncommitted option for both. Law and Chaos were not cast as necessarily good or bad things, but one's response to authority and the dictates of society; similarly, Good and Evil denoted a person's inherent selflessness or selfishness. The result is a system with nine permutations: Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Evil, Neutral Good, Neutral Evil, True Neutral.

As far as personality systems go, this ain't bad for a game played with funny dice -- Myers-Briggs, for example, has 16 personality types. And the best part of D&D alignment is that it could be applied not just to people but to societies as well, or even entire planes of existence. I've always found alignment to be both a clever and a useful mechanic, but this hallmark of classic D&D has had its enemies since Day One. From players who found the restrictions of playing their alignment too onerous to would-be game designers who found the Gygaxian ethical system lacking as an adequate description of RPG reality, there has always been a contingent of naysayers whose first question upon hearing about a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been: "Did they finally get rid of alignment?"

Well, the haters finally got thrown a bone this time around with 4E's simplification of alignment rules. Forget the interlocking wheels of Law and Chaos, Good and Evil - in Fourth Edition the grid of alignments has been pared down to a line. Now you progress from Chaotic Evil to Evil, then to Unaligned, and on to Good, then Lawful Good, creating a continuum whereby "Chaotic" and "Lawful" in this contest mean little more than "very". So who cares, right? Doesn't this make D&D simpler, more heroic? Doesn't it harken back to the old school days before AD&D muddled the issues or right and wrong with its relativistic wheel of cosmology where devils could be law-abiding and heroes could be antisocial?

On a fundamental level edition wars are a religious argument, and if it's already a given that I'm not too fond of the rest of 4E can I really be trusted to evaluate how well the new alignment system works or doesn't work? Well, the truth of the matter is that I can't. But that's okay: despite my animus towards the new product, my critique hinges less on my own loyalties to previous editions of D&D than it does upon my own experience in the real world. Just today I was reading the opinion section in my local newspaper -- a dangerous prospect, to be sure, as our community is a notorious collection of cranks who seem to have little else to do than compose their next angry tirade for the paper -- when I came upon a regular contributor who equated secularists with Marxist collectivism and God-fearing Christians such as himself with rugged American-style individualism.

Say what? Since when did secular humanism automatically make one a socialist? And how could anyone argue with a straight face that devotion to religion directly correlated to being an individual (in fact, isn't it the other way around? But I digress). This is when I realized that the problem was that the letter-writer was trying to use 4E alignment rules to understand his world, as so many people frequently do. Never mind that Religion-Secularism and Collectivism-Individualism are operate in most people on independent axes, whereby it's just as easy to find Religious Collectivists and Secular Individualists as it is vice versa -- this guy had created a continuum where those who agree with him are by their very nature Lawful Good and those opposed can only be Chaotic Evil. For you see, in this oversimplified conception Lawfulness is a manifestation of Good, and Chaos is what proceeds from Evil.

And this is why 4E alignment sucks-- not because it's new or different, but because it inflicts a false and quasi-moralistic duality onto the game world. Although alignment had previously suffused Dungeons and Dragons from the micro to the macro level, it aspired to be an objective determination of a character's/polity's/plane's ethical orientation. Alignment in the Fourth Edition on the other hand forces you to subscribe to the morality of this oversimplified universe in which good is Good (insert angelic choirs here) and evil is EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL! Gone is the legalistic menace of Lawful Evil, the Robin Hood-like healthy disregard for authority in Chaotic Good, the absolute madness of Chaotic Neutral, and the cold, sharklike self-interest that embodies Neutral Evil. It was always this last alignment combination that frightened me much, much more than Lawful or Chaotic Evil. Give me a mafia don or a serial killer any day over someone who is so dedicated to himself that nothing else matters.

Alas, these alignments no longer exist. I've always said that every generation gets the D&D that it deserves, and maybe this is more true than I had originally thought. As a child of the Cold War my childhood was a Manichean nightmare of light versus darkness, so the shades of gray suggested by the fantasy worlds to which I escaped seemed like nothing less than a revelation. These days however we are sufficiently through the looking glass where the kids of today only wish for a world as simple as the defining conflicts of the 20th century seemed to them. After 9/11, we wanted so much to identify civilization as a manifestation of the Good and barbarism the consequence of Evil such that even when we knew deep down that the pieces really didn't fit together that way it only hardened our resolve to make it so. Moral simplicity is the escapist fantasy of the 21st century, so I suppose it only makes sense that 4E should embrace this Zeitgeist with its take on alignment.

But I still don't like it.