The Orc Problem, redux

I wrote about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little over a year ago, and like most of the things I write, you probably shouldn't read it.

However, vagabundork wrote a post on the same subject about seven months ago, and he said it far more eloquently than I. (To the point that it should probably be the last word on the subject, at least until the situation radically changes.)

Go read it:

Can racism be fixed? on Chaos Magick-User

Anniversary

I provide occasional updates for my long-running D&D game on the blog, so here's this one:

Crux of Eternity turns ten-years-old today. (The blog itself doesn't turn ten until August 9.)

What started because one of Nicole's co-workers asked if she played Dungeons & Dragons (neither of us did at the time, but we were very aware of it) has since sprawled into something both wonderful and strange. The request hit at the perfect time: I had just picked up the fourth edition books and I had just discovered the OSR blogging scene. The game has since spiraled out into at least eight other games (across at least five separate rule systems!) with the eternal possibility of more in the future.

The game started with just a handful of prompts, including:

• Could I run a D&D 4e game from levels 1-30?
• Could I include classic content and an OSR feel for new players so that they would get a reasonable facsimile of a classic dungeon-y, dragon-y experience?
• For those of you following along at home, I included adaptations of Bleak House, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and Queen of the Spiders.
• I also included a handful of references to The Gates of Firestorm Peak, the Slave Lords series, and the Tomb of Horrors.
• Could I include Seekers of the Ashen Crown, which one of my players bought and wanted me to run?
• Could I include a wicked, decadent, pulp fantasy city?
• Could I use this sweet ultimate tyrant mini Nicole bought me?

I think the experiment has been successful, although only the players can say for certain. We switched to fifth edition partway through the campaign, which helped streamline some things while making other things more complicated. (Most notably, 4e games are very linear, but 5e is a little more forgiving of sandboxes, so we've had more improvised and sandbox-y game stuff since the switch. Honestly, it's my preferred mode.)

Back on May 1, the players finally faced the ultimate evil of the campaign after almost a decade of play: the Esteemed and Omniscient Peacock Lord, the aforementioned beholder ultimate tyrant and mastermind of many of the miseries that have infected this particular campaign. (Ironically, due to COVID and social distancing, I never got to use the actual ultimate tyrant miniature; we ran the battle using digital tokens over Roll20. So it goes.)

(The campaign isn't quite over yet, though; I introduced content from Coliseum Morpheuon several sessions ago, and the PCs decided that they hate the Khan of Nightmares and want to kill him as a coda.)

As always, if you're into Actual Play and session writeups, you can read the whole shebang at Obsidian Portal.

While I expect I'll be dealing with this setting and the fallout from its many campaigns for years to come, I'm sure I'll move onto some other long-form obsessive campaign for the 2020s. If the 2000s were dominated by World of Darkness and the 2010s were dominated by D&D and OSR stuff, what do the 2020s hold? (Potential predictions: my long-running Unknown Armies game, Tip the World Over on Its Side, turned five-years-old on May 2, so the idea of running a sprawling, inter-connected series of Unknown Armies games is very much on the table. Additionally, I'm leaning towards using Forged in the Dark stuff for the official follow-up to Crux of Eternity.)

If you want to see what happens next, watch this space...

Review: Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft

Lost Prototypes

After many years of waiting, I finally had a chance to play Grim Fandango and subsequently played Broken Age. These, in turn, reminded me of playing adventure games when I was much younger, which subsequently reminded me of something I hadn't thought about in years.

Starting in third grade, we used to play pretend at recess. That's not especially noteworthy on its own — lots of kids did that — but I made elaborate scenarios with continuity from one recess session to the next, and the plots ran for years. Individual sessions usually included puzzles to solve, enemies to battle, and friendly characters with whom to interact. (If I had known about randomizers like dice or any of the abstract LARP-style combat forms, this no doubt would have become even more elaborate.) By sixth grade, the damn things even had character sheets. (Just equipment lists, but still.) I think I even developed paper props once or twice.

It was only years later that I realized these were some manner of proto-LARP.

(Most of the characters were ripped from popular culture, but at some point, I should probably bring The King of All Trees into a game. Why I had some Green Man-style nature deity in my elementary school pretend games is probably a conversation for another time, although it probably has the same psychological root as my deep and abiding love of folk horror.)

The weird recess proto-LARP stuff I remember, and Nicole and I occasionally discuss it. (Lamentably, she always figured we were never interested in having additional players, and so never participated.) That's old news. The more recent memory from playing adventure games is this:

No doubt spurred both by this and by a diet of computer adventure games, at some point in sixth grade, I started writing analogue adventure games that we would run through at lunch. If you've played any of the command prompt or point-and-click adventure games popular in the eighties and nineties, you'll recognize the format: a map with a series of rooms, each of which usually features an NPC that requires some object or interaction (often from a previous room) to progress. These were all hand-drawn maps and characters, and while very linear (in the style of adventure games at the time), are recognizable as weird puzzle dungeons. I only remember one or two puzzles from them, but I now idly wonder if I could track any of those down...

(If I do happen to find any of them, and they're still legible, I'll no doubt have to scan them and upload them for general perusal. I wonder if I'll recall any of the puzzles from the time...)

I know at some point in seventh or eighth grade, I started developing a scenario with percentages, but never sorted out the math and always assumed it would have to be some manner of video game. Again, had I known about d100s or random number generators, I would have been running and designing RPGs years before I "officially" started.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I suppose no one (least of all me) should be surprised that I started running role-playing games or messing with game design. The obsession started early, before I had the language or tools for it.

The Migration of the Oni-Wives

The oni-wives migrate on schedules unknown to mortal scholars.

"Migration" probably isn't even the right word, as it implies something regular, instinctual, inevitable, and purposeful. But the coming of the oni-wives is none of those things, save perhaps "inevitable."

The migration will happen, and the oni-wives will come. Will you be ready when they do?

They emerge from their mountain caves and redoubts and fastnesses, gripped by wanderlust. And where they wander, things change.

The changes are small at first. One of the witch-ogres arrives in a village and saves a child. Another finds a wolf whose leg is stuck in a trap and she sets it free.

But soon they grow large. An oni-wife destroys a slaving ring. An oni-wife faces down an army. An oni-wife destroys a city.

And before anyone can fully adapt, they disappear, returning to their mountain holds (or sometimes slain by angry mobs) and waiting for the next cycle.

Why do they do this? The few scholars who know of them have many theories but few answers. Some say they are emissaries of the numinous, go-betweens and messengers among the gods, the primordials, the folk of the world, and the forces of magic. Others say they are entropy incarnate, yet another mechanism by which civilization is doomed to fall. Still others claim they are the immune system of a healthy cosmos, a process by which the world keeps its systems vital and keeps its ages turning.

(Sages also wonder at their names. Are they truly kin to ogres or oni, or are these just poetic epithets? What do they do when they are not in the world? What drives them to come and bring change with them? Do they hear the songs of the gods and the music of the spheres keening constantly in their minds?)

It ultimately does not matter from whence they come or why they come or even when they come. What matters is that they will come, and you (or your children, or your children's children) will have to adapt to the change they bring with them.

When they come, will you be ready to greet the world they bring with them?

New Classes

While cleaning out the old corners of my Google Drive, I found the custom classes I made for Arctic Death, Infinite Night back when it was a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game.

You could probably also use them in a B/X game or other such derivative, were you so inclined. (Which is probably where they're best suited. Otherwise, good luck playing a half-ogre in 1630s Germany.)

As usual, if you use them, let me know how it goes.

The Half-Ogre

Similar to the dwarf, but strong instead of tough. (And now available in the psychedelic colors of classic AD&D ogres!)

I developed this class because my players encountered a half-ogre NPC named Chunk the Twunk and one of my players wanted to play him when her original character died.

The Froska Fairy

A pixie that can summon and speak with frogs. Based on the halfling, but way more agile and maneuverable. (And much harder to hit.) The trade-off is low hit points and an inability to carry much of anything. (If you want to fight, you're probably wielding a knife as a zweihander.)

I developed this class because one of my players wanted to play Saffron the frog fairy from Clint Krause's The Stygian Garden of Abelia Prem after his original character died.

Click the link for the Half-Ogre and Froska Fairy classes!

The Old Horror Discourse

Because everything old is new again when it comes to RPG discourse, I recently saw The Dreaded Discourse™ around horror raise its head. This usually comes in two flavors:

1) Adventure games (especially D&D, but a wide net that potentially describes any game the commenter does not like) are bad at horror.

2) Modern horror is hard to do effectively.

The former argument is predicated on the fact that one needs specialized systems to invoke feelings of horror, while the latter argument is predicated on the fact that modern technology is too much of an equalizer in the struggle of humans vs. the unknown.

Both reflect exceedingly narrow viewpoints.

Issue #1: Adventure Games are Bad at Horror

I will freely admit: adventure games typically aren't built for horror, and aren't often my go-to horror games, but sometimes the lack of tools is liberating. Indie games tend to have very specialized procedures as to how characters interact with horror, and even Call of Cthulhu has a typical encounter loop (see the horror, roll SAN against the horror, fail and freak out or succeed and fight or retreat). But all you really need for horror is a sense of powerlessness, and it takes very little to reinforce that — a single powerful attack from the monster, or a single player attack that the monster no-sells, or even just something the players have never before seen, and suddenly everyone is scattering to regroup and figure out what the hell just happened. Ignore the advice on balanced encounters, and suddenly everything is survival horror.

But you don't even need to go that far. Just start describing a creepy environment, and most players get into the zone. I have absolutely made players fear something far weaker than they just by describing it in a frightening enough manner.

It's a sometimes food, and you don't want to just spring it on a group without some warning, but it's still worth trying at least once.

Issue #2: Modern Horror is Hard to do Effectively

I take much greater offense at this one. Sure, it can be hard to do horror when you're running a spreadsheet of ever-ascending numbers and magical powers, but the modern era is almost uniquely suited for horror tales.

As noted above, horror relies on a sense of powerlessness, even if that sense is transient or only arises from encountering something one has never seen before. (Even in the case of something like Unknown Armies, where the horror comes from responsibility, the "powerlessness" arises from unintended consequences and the sense of spiraling out of control. Powerlessness takes many forms.) The alienation of modern, Westernized society gives us this in spades.

I've heard the argument before that people avoid eras past 1980 because of ubiquitous computers and cell phones and automatic weapons, and I've heard the (admittedly rarer) argument that some avoid the last 100 years or even the 20th century altogether.

You have to watch The Thing, or more importantly, Aliens. Technology is your friend as a horror GM, because it offers a false sense of security. Players always like to assume that they can handle problems because of the tools at their disposal: they have guns, cars, and cell phones. Help is just a phone call away, and they can always get into a car and leave the scene if things get bad.

But remember what happens in Aliens. The marines assume their heavy ordinance will nullify the threat while the tactical sorts coordinate the offensive over cams and comms. But their guns do very little to chew through endless waves of xenomorphs, and all the cameras and communication systems do is let the others watch them die.

Modern horror parties spend most of their time apart, embroiled in research, or working dayjobs, or splitting up to divide tasks more effectively. They rarely sleep in the same building, let alone the same room. And they sometimes encounter things that guns cannot put down.

Use this to your advantage.

If your buddies are halfway across the city when you get attacked by the rampaging monster, all your panicked cell phone call will do is let them hear your last, desperate moments. If you manage to get cell phone video of it, amateur digital analysts on Reddit will pick it apart and tell the survivors how fake it looks. Even with the fruits of 10,000 years of human civilization, your toys will not save you.

Everyone dies alone.