Don't start me talking. I can talk all night.

And when he was come to the other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way.

And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city, and told every thing, and what was befallen to the possessed of the devils.And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.

When The Face can beat the encounter by just talking at the monsters - that's compelling stuff.  It's not what you want for every encounter though - and before you think about it too much just put it in the perspective of the other people at the table.  It's easy to fall into a conversation between the Referee & some star-player.  It's easy to leave everyone out of it all & just let the PC eat up scenery.  It's quite a bit harder & quite a bit rarer in the literary canon to see a group of people involved in a social discussion (or at least in one that actually progresses matters).  

But This Thing We Do - is something that We Do Together.  It just won't do for the better part of the party to sit on their hands while the single face character talks their way out of an encounter.  Well, not all the time anyway.  When We Do This Thing Together it has the virtue of allowing everyone to have the spotlight sometimes, to shine out best & greatest among their peers at the table.  Everyone gets their moment.  But not every moment is one for the spotlight.  Sometimes the whole group needs to have a say, have something to do in a scene, even if the scene is just a conversation.

Locus & Platea are theatrical concepts that fit nicely here - an idea of people being at the center of the discussion while others act out their own roles at the edge of that focus.  At the table the concept tends to prevail, in the systems of initiative where people take turns consciously, and in the typical flow of interactive narration, where someone is always the focus of the Referee's attention.  You see this dynamic over and  over again & while I think it's useful to consider, it's also something I think worth avoiding when possible.  Everyone should be cued to know their time & turn.  Everyone should have a voice in a scene, if they can.    

Again, I'm coming up short on scenes in which the ensemble speaks in turn to get across a point or to make a specific bargain.  The best iterations you might commonly encounter are variants of Good Cop / Bad Cop - where two people on the same side try to persuade a third who is not.  So what about a scene where there are between 5-9 cops are they all different shades of good or bad?  Well...

So sometimes people can be part of the scene & be a presence without saying anything.  In the case of Good & Bad cop there's naturally the entire apparatus of the criminal justice system that is effectively a character, judges & lawyers & jailers are all in the minds of the person being interrogated as are their opposite numbers in the criminal underworld.  So - these can exist in the scene and still not speak.  How much more persuasive is the bad cop if there are heavily armed men standing at his back?  Or a torturer or executioner?  These don't need to say anything to make the bad cop's speech more terrifying - but they do have a presence.  

So let's take Jesus as the face - defeating the diabolical forces of perdition through bargaining.  This has a backdrop but let's consider it as an encounter typical of a fantasy game.  The PCs are traversing the wild roads of the frontier and they're warned away by the presence of monsters.  This is a party of 13 or so & it's no doubt difficult for the Ref to adjudicate it all.  When they decide to continue despite warnings the Face/Leader takes charge of the ensuing encounter.  Here,  making a bold demand that the devils acquiesce to.  

But the exchange isn't just between Jesus & the Devils.  There's JHVH - who's presence is on the minds of everyone in the encounter.  But as well there's Jesus' gang of 12 guys.  So we can imagine, if we are players - that this encounter is occurring with the unstated statistical advantage of having 12 guys on hand who may or may not be up to the challenge of beating up a pair of possessed guys.  But, if you're a demon - hey why take the chance?  It's easy to think of this encounter falling out a whole other way - in which Matthew relates the story of Jesus & his disciples kicking a pair of lunatics into submission...

Which is to say: "We could make this encounter go as easy or as hard as you want it to go.  You can just go over there and be in those pigs, or you can test your luck against 13 guys."  During which time of course all 13 guys are making Strength checks to flex on the demons.  That's one way of making the conversation an ensemble conversation.  

Se we can, if we want, build a mechanic around a scene where players can choose to make it a social interaction - one where they're effectively turning the tables on the Referee to talk their way out of danger or past an obstacle.  There's, again, too few examples of this outside of The Hobby for me to really grab on to any given example.  But there are counter examples - a whole counter-game in fact.  What about a combative conversation between many and one?  What about the villain trying to talk their way out of being captured?

This is difficult, to say the least.  One thing that's inevitable at the table is a bit of mega-game sensibility.  Players, no matter how good they are, hate to be told what their characters believe.  No matter how they love to use the dice to test their own believably - no amount of failed saving throws will let a player really believe that their character believes something they don't want them to.  Or - to put it more succinctly you can't rely on tricking Characters - you have to trick Players.  This line of thinking is more of an aside though - more of strategy for Running the Game than it is a system that can be used in Designing the Game.  So I'll leave it be & consider it another time.  

Really though - this whole direction lends itself beautifully to asides & discursions.  Thinking now about the example of Jesus vs. the Devils & you know - I don't know of many religionists, let alone any players playing a religionist (clerics & paladins oh my) who go into a fight with the dark forces of perdition with anything like the confidence that Jesus has.  That's a fairly intimidating display right out of the gate - just immediate certainty that Yahweh's got your back.  

So thinking of that - this construction:  There are devils who are threatening you and you threaten them back & they ask for something & you negotiate.  It's a zero sum game - someone wins & someone loses.  Zero Sum Game is the essence here - you wouldn't roll dice or make the interaction into a game if it didn't already require that there be a winner and a loser.  So let's take that as the basic framework - fundamental to our structuring of the game.  

Assumptions made so far:
1  - There's an interaction where we want to resolve matters as a conversation.  This is a Social Encounter.
2 - Someone will win the encounter & someone will lose.  
3 - Everyone who's playing needs to be able to participate.

So here I think it's worth looking at negotiating postures.  What are the tools you can bring to a negotiation.  I'm thinking, broad strokes, about the kinds of demeanor you can use & what are the end-game goals of this discussion?

Off the top of my head I'm seeing a few broad-strokes options.  Bargaining - that is pleading & requesting & offering.  



Then there's Coercion - that's straight up intimidation, arm-twisting insistence. 

After that straight up Lying - Deception.

And at last there's flattery, seduction maybe.

Are there more ways to talk to people?  Probably.  I'm going with these four using a bit of essentialism here - saying that you can have a demeanor that asks for something in 4 distinct ways.  By force, by conniving, by seduction & by obsequiousness.  So there.  Let's settle on these together shall we?  Say that they're the 4 temperaments - Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric & Melancholic.  It'll be an exercise for the reader to settle on which is which.

So given these approaches - we're down to working out what the PCs can do in a scene.  I'm thinking that the Players can have their characters approach one or another of these methods as a preference.  One of the Doormen always lies, one always flatters, one always commands & one always begs.  It's a harder logic puzzle, for sure, but it's...

Well it's an environment.  In the end the game is that - a place where there are systems that can work to create story.  I'm interested in a story where the players harangue the hobgoblin with pleading & lies & bluster into giving up their wicked ways.  At least once in a while.

So as an environment for a quasi-staged conversation I think these bases are good.  They each suggest an action.  Recall the basis of the game-within-the-game -
1 - Induction
2 - Sequence
3 - Objective
4 - Options

This foundation is holding up so far, so I'm sticking with it.  I'm not sure, but I think I can bear a few more social methodologies - or maybe fewer.  It's getting to be a matter requiring rules testing more than rules speculation.

The Thing as a Fight: Crafts as a Party

Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
"No, no – no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. 

As a kid this scene from Moby Dick always spoke to me.  The blood, the curses - the hate.  In magical traditions & tango there's a concept of intention a sensibility that guides you from the essential core of the self.  It's not something you can fake or pretend to have - it's something that projects from out of your self.  Ahab's got all kinds of intention, and he binds the rest of the crew to his mad purpose.

There's another influence from my youth that speaks in the same tone of voice.




The team gathering together to create something as a solution to the immanent crisis is an interesting trope to work with.  Building it into the system to create a Game-Within-The Game then becomes an interesting challenge.

Based upon my deconstruction of the basic Game-Within-The Game  I'd like to create a mechanical system that allows everyone to participate in a kind of building-montage.  In order to create a bounded scene with full-participation we need to look at the requisite features of a proper encounter.

It must have a clear boundary - something analogous to Initiative.

It must have an implicit objective - something similar to the win & loss conditions of a melee

It must have opportunities - a chance for each player to participate using their distinct abilities

It must have a time frame - a sequence of phases in which each player can interact with the task.

In the Moby Dick passage Perth is creating the harpoon's head but Ahab filibusters & insists on making it participatory for more of the crew.  In the A-Team example everyone is busy constructing a different component of the battle-jitney and even those bringing little to the task at hand are able to contribute in some way.

So we want to establish a system that is recognizable from its inception as a Crafting-Game with its own internal framework & opportunities for player agency to be respected.

Initiative is highly focused & a crafting game needs for a similar mechanic.  In the Game of the North we can consider Initiative not merely as the order of combat - but use the first definition of initiative & reflect the individual's desire to initiate action.  Do the PCs spontaneously begin creating something?  Does one lead the project?  There's no reason we can't repurpose the initiative score encompass the larger meaning - saying that the character's innate drive & alacrity sets the terms of their participation.  So one system for creating a Game that encompasses the crafting montage would be to simply call an initiative roll - giving everyone participating a place in the order of things, allowing them to put the thing together.

If we use the Moby Dick passage as a template - Perth has taken the initiative while Ahab follows & is in turn followed by Queequeg et.al.  Then Perth finishes & then Ahab offers his diabolical benediction.  There's no necessary order to the creation - rather its designed after the initiation.

So let's consider the path here - One person is committing the muscle & the skill - creating the object itself.  Another person is affecting this initial plan by devising a complicated ritual surrounding it.  The three pagan participants are offering their blood to the project & the mastermind of the enterprise consecrates (or desecrates) the whole project. This is interesting in relation to basic framework which demands the inclusion of an objective - but I'm not exactly certain what to make of it mechanically. 

Compare to action economy in The Game of the North & in other games. 

In Game of the North – players have a movement capacity – they can move a number of spaces or meters equal to their Movement statistic.  All players can move – so we want to carry over this mechanic – say that players can range as far as they need to to make the thing.  The distance they travel then sets the timetable for the rounds & turns structure that the system prefers.  If they must travel around the world to get the things - the project may be a months or years long process.  This in turn sets the parameters of what can be used to make the object.  Say that the PCs have an afternoon to rig their van into an ersatz tank.  This limits the scope & means the PCs may only be able to deal with the materials they have on hand.  

Start with the basic elements -

Move- everyone can do it if not prevented & they have unlimited choices.  Giving everyone a universal capacity for movement makes time the abstraction & the amount of movement required sets the abstracted time.  I need to run all over the city to make this = hours or days of construction. I need to run all over the territory = days or weeks & etc… We look at the distances traveled to gather materials to set the time frame.

Turns – establishing a series of turns that don’t coincide with the time-scale of the combat – everyone has a chance to participate in the making.  Actions on your turn:

-          Make a Stat check

-          Supply materials

-          Use a piece of equipment

We want for players to have options here & for each player to be able to participate - even in a small way.  So bloodletting by making a CON check or carrying the ammo crate by making a STR check.  This type of action can be easily included but not intensely planned out.   

Rounds – The whole project can be considered as a Round

-          Use a skill check to plan the construction

-          Use an ability like magic or tinkering

In a combat encounter the round encompasses everyone's turns - so the round here must be all the turns of the characters involved - certain actions should require the complete round - these are the main activities in the creation-game, the guiding activities.  

Objectives – So there's a basic objective-  build something.  But in a fight there's an opposing side with an opposing objective.  Here the Players are just rolling dice & narrating - which is amusing, sure, but it falls short of being a Game.  This is another area where I've got competing notions of how to execute this.  First, I'm thinking of Hit Points - HP is best when used abstractly - in my opinion to indicate the vitality & willingness to fight of an opponent - rather than the actual integrity of their corporeal form.  So it's an abstract quantity that sets a goal that the team of players must whittle down to zero in order to win.  It's almost dirty, when you put it that way, but it's also true.  It seems that this is a portable mechanic - something that could be used in this crafting game.  Perhaps there's a secret value - held by the Referee who considers the item's ultimate value in say - Silver Pieces.  Each action could add to this value & when the value is reached the thing is created. 

That's not a terrible way to go - it has the virtue of including the unfortunate anti-climax all players know about.  How many times have you stood, poised to unleash your best & most useful move only to have the player whose turn strikes before yours end the battle.  You're left with nothing to do as the game crosses out of initiative.  So Imagine the harpoon being made before Ahab even speaks up, in the example from Moby Dick.  I like the potential for this in any given system - surprises & disorientation focus attention.  

But what about opposition.  In the Combat Game the players can be hurt, can be killed themselves by an opposing side.  What about here - what's the opposition?  So here, maybe the Referee can oppose with a series of approximate NPCs.  Have you ever heard of the Person From Porlock?  Having your efforts to create things spoiled by random intrusions is something every creator knows about - why should PCs be denied the pleasure of thwarted dreams?  

So - If we consider the crafting game as a series of activities aiming at completing a task - we can look at the things that oppose or hinder that as effective counterattacks.  In the combat-parodying system above the idea then is to include these on separate turns.  This would mean that hindering events would need to be treated as NPCs or environmental effects.  This is...  Actually Fine.  Perfect in fact - but an idea that needs more development prior to presenting (I work through ideas here, I work through concepts with the intention of figuring out how I'd like to create a game - so this is me having an epiphany).  

Simplified:  

On initiative turn 20 - The environment intervenes.  Rain?  Hurricane?  Power outages?  Earthquakes?  These are things that should be randomly decided & then resisted through Saving Throws.  Failures increase the final cost of the thing.

On initiative turn 10 - NPC interventions.  People come around to pester you about your insurance situation, neighborhood kids come to watch & ask too many questions.  A wandering monster appears on site & attacks...  This is something that needs to be beaten through a Social test or a combat encounter (although - probably you shouldn't beat up some neighborhood kids for being curious).  Failing means that the thing is set back - maybe considerably.  Maybe the NPC intervention is a robber who steals what's already been made, for example.

On initiative turn 5 - Moment of Truth - Here's where the project enters its proving phase.  It's all well and good to bolt armor to your custom van - but what if it's too heavy & it pops all the tires?  What if your blood-soaked harpoon deforms under stress?   This should be worked out as a single check made by the initiating player.  Let them devise their response to the proving of the work & then have them make the check - aided or assisted by the other players as they're able, of course.  A failure here sets the project back considerably - but doesn't thwart it utterly - work can resume, but it's almost a back-to-the-drawing-board scenario.  

What's left then is to quantify the respective values.  How much does a skill check remove from the target value?  How much does a failed NPC interaction deduct from the Player's accumulated points?  How many of these abstract points need to be accumulated in order to create the object in question?  

Finally - how does creating the object affect play going forward?  What good does making the battle-jitney do you?  Does it allow you to defeat a specific encounter without a combat?  That's not a terrible conclusion to come to.  Does it allow for a single, ruthless, magical attack upon a single, ruthless, magical enemy?  From here - at the end of this effort to work through the ideas - I think that the effectiveness of the thing being made should be built into the initiative declared when creating the thing.  So - when Ahab plans that the harpoon be a cursed weapon of Moby Dick slaying - that is where the desired effect is being declared & the value of the object must be adjudicated by the Ref.  When B.A. starts customizing the van to allow a bloodless defeat of the impending mook-wave - that sets the target.  

Good.  Good...  Work cut out for me, objectives defined, I must begin making all of my rolls to accomplish the crafting of a rulebook.  

... the underside of the door's lever has a cleverly concealed pin - easy to avoid if you know to look - and you know to look. You've spared yourself an ugly death here but more danger lies forward...

A rose by any other name wouldn’t be a rose though would it, it’d be whatever that other name is.  I dunno about sweet smells – I live in Cleveland. 

The name of the thing – the thing in itself.  I gotta tell you – writing up spellbooks?  It makes you kind of philosophical.  What does it mean to be well? What does it mean that there are other dimensions?  You read up on some things you might not otherwise have glanced at.  The unity of ideas – synthesis of them – they come together and mix creating a kind of thing – an idea – the existence of which isn’t directly predicated upon perception – how weird.  A thing that is that can’t be touched or seen.  This we regard as the Unreal – and I have to tell you – the different names you give to your Unreality have a whole bearing on what’ll become of them.  At the very least they’ll set an expectation.

Star Wars – I’ve been running Star Wars – a neat game – and it’s been cool.  Everything you need to know is right in the name though – Stars?  Yep, in the stars?  Yes.  And War?  Not just war – but WARS – there’s lots of them.  Short, sweet symmetrical & kind of rhymes.

Middle Earth – As a kid I never got this.  I took it, as a child, to mean that there were supposed to be layers – worlds within worlds and the middle one was in the middle shell of the concentrically hollow earths.  Which – Maybe that’s what old JRR was going for?  Probably not, but not something I’d just put past him.  Anyhow – It’s the kind of name that raises questions – and that’s what you like because it engages. 

What I thought Middle Earth might refer to before I read the Hobbit

I’m not the worst at names.  Not even. 

The Fabulous Unknown City is still just fun to say – and it was a great campaign – maybe my best ever.

The First Campaign Guide is Intended for Fall of 2017

The Hundred Worlds?  I kept thinking – this could be better – and then kept thinking – this could be worse.  It’s the perfect middle ground for a setting with professional adventurers & jaded interdimensional travelers – it’s Fine.  Not great and that kind of fit the bill.

In the Ruins?  Whenever this gets its proper launch I think it’ll land with some poise & have a lot to say for itself.  I think the name really emphasizes broken dreams & landscapes & the instincts of people in the ruins to rise.

Expect the Campaign Guide in late summer 2017

The War of the Kliali Succession?  Still love it, still maybe just for me and no-one else.  Who knows?

So when I started down the OSR path the game I ran wasn’t of my own design – it was someone else’s with the hard parts provided by me -  I ended up calling it The Game of the North – and the whole matter seems to have taken off from there.  I liked it so much in fact that when I put all the customized modified rules all together I decided to name them collectively The Game of the North.

So now that I’m putting together guides & appendices for that campaign – to share it with everyone instead of the (really devoted) audience of 10-12 people who played it with me for a few years.  I, anyway, think it’s got value – value & heart & a good deal to offer the community of gamers OSR or otherwise.  So now that I’m writing it all down & making it into a nice book?  Well Game of the North is already taken – it’d be confusing to call that campaign the same thing as the rules no?  Probably I should name the campaign setting.

Sometimes I think a campaign is named really well, evocatively.  Sometimes I think the name that’s on the package isn’t really explanatory or it’s somehow contradictory of the whole premise.  Sometimes it’s a neat name that just lingers in the consciousness. 

But I like a good name for a campaign – something that will make it memorable, tangible – something you can hang your hat on and say – “I did that adventure”. 

I’ve come to see some of the shared experiences that a canon provides as being really valuable in making This Thing We Do Together into a community – and it’s the community aspect of our Hobby that’s got the most to recommend it (I mean, otherwise – we’d all just be novelists right?  Not that we can’t be that too).  Anyhow – shared experiences that disparate people can all point to and recognize – That’s a Big Thing – to me.  So I don’t do this just to do something – I do this to try and do something Great.  May as well be ambitious no?

But let me talk about that first Game of the North campaign.  I’d drifted out of running and playing in some big campaigns that had all contained a real abundance of cosmic power & eternal struggle – that worked on a scale & in a direction that I just couldn’t really buy anymore.   I was tired of playing characters that most certainly must have been tired – who rose levels encounter after encounter without barely pausing to rest.  I was tired of running PCs through these ordeals & being run through them myself.  “Just to say this – my fighter has not slept in a bed in almost two months, has not showered – ever – has killed, personally something like a hundred guys – all of whom wanted to fight to death rather than surrender all so I can get this one McGuffin upon which the whole universe spins?”  I’d really, factually, burned out of the epic scale.  Everything was so urgent, everything was so demanding – and in the end not fun.  Fun for me – Sure!  But I thought about my character, my PC’s and I just felt bad for them.  Absurd magic power and enough gold coins to build a house out of – but who could even imagine being bathed in so much blood and so little soap.  So I thought about that – what if I was my PC – not what I would do if I were a player – but what I would want if I were the player’s character – in the setting.  What would I want.

I settled on Adventure.  And after that I resolved that the stakes for the PC in this campaign would only be as high as they set them.  The rewards would be numinous & physical and Every Waterfall Would Have A Secret Cave Behind It.  Adventure, thrills.  No cosmic struggles, no Forces of Good & Evil.  Adventure.  Only.

And that was fun.  I had the right players – for sure – and they were game for an adventure where they got to drive the story forward with their character’s own ambitions – to conquer the wilderness, to defy convention, to name & to defeat enemies

.

The game itself became a game within the game – the meta-game of party vs. party and stronghold vs. stronghold – the things that I think somewhat distinguish The Game of the North from other OSR systems. 

And it was good.  It was so good I write books all about it now.  For fun. 

The trouble – again – is now what do I call these books. 

Thematically the game – this campaign, that is near completion in terms of publishing and accessibility – final forms and all that – thematically that game is about the wilderness, about conquest & colonization.  It’s about intense competition between factions to accomplish all of those things & it’s about trying to knock over the petty fiefdoms of your adversaries. 

So I got philosophical about that.  I end up on Hobbes – the Leviathan – Bellum Omnia Contra Omnes – the war of all against all. I mean –that’s not an inaccurate assessment of how the various playtests & playthroughs of that campaign have gone – they’ve gotten to be brutal. 

But it’s a little on the nose – a little too…  Latin. 

Eh, not quite.  Pass.

(now, bear in mind that I came up in gaming while gaming was coming up – and back when, back in the 80’s – they’d advertise these books & say that they were the Hardest or the most complicated – like that would win over players – and knowing the old school of players – it probably did.  And I came up in gaming so I… respond to that kind of pretension.  To the point that I don’t mind including common latin phrases in my own stuff – sure!  Why not?  Why not?) 

So I looked a little deeper and ended up following the trail – Homo Homini Lupus – Man is a wolf to other men – that’s yet more latin and with a better vintage – not English but Roman.  Still a bit on the nose – and really I’ve got to give some consideration to the material in question – Man is  a wolf to other men sounds a lot like this is a game about Werewolfs. 

Instead of being a game that Might be about Werewolfs.

So Durkheim. 

Insatiable Will.  I liked that – I liked that plenty – it encapsulates what the Ref needs the PC to portray – to have in the game – ambition, drive & desire.  To get rich & to dominate.  Things, again, that I felt were woefully missing from my years-long sessions about saving the world.  I thought- to hell with the world – what about mine?  And while that’s probably not a great attitude as a citizen – it’s exactly what I thought of when I thought of adventurers.  Not heroes, not villains, not saviors at all.  Adventurers – out for their own – Wolves to each other, At war with the world & driven in the end by their own implacable desires. 

Too similar to something else - something I can't quite recall the name of...

What name goes here?  Huh?  I mean - it's ALWAYS going to be The Battle of Lepanto because of course The Battle of Lepanto.  

So I got Unquenchable Will of Wolves.  It anagrams nicely – UWoW – as well.  A fair title for a fun campaign.

It’s pending – this month the first installment – the Arrival, as well as the first guide to NPCs & Monsters and procedurally generating encounters – all of that is upcoming. 

In the meantime – the first appendix is up – in case you want to have some OSR style naval conflicts – you can help yourself.

...Some brave soul has done you the favor of prying out the idol's jeweled eyes & they seem to have perished for their trouble. Your trained senses detect the faintest presence of poison but what inflicted this venom? ...

Life & Death.  So this is my third installment of discussing the confluence of these two ideas intersections In Our Hobby.  First – thePhysical with motive force but lacking any anima, and then the Elan-Vital withoutany form.  Zombies & Ghosts. 

I think that there’s a middle ground between the two and that’s where most thoughts of the Undead come from & where it’s easiest to settle into a comfortable groove of ideas relating to stories.  Some of the best stories about living dead people are in this vein – they have the same quality of blood & death & sleep & feeding that people do, just perverted & made macabre.  Naturally we’re talking about Vampires today.

I really like the idea of inherited vampirism, of transmission by biting & generational dilution – all of that.  I really like that but I feel like, also, I don’t have anything to add to that lore beyond approval.  And also – I prefer a different version of the Vampire.  Not the afflicted, not the vaguely biological, and not the hungry dead – rather I like thinking about the Curse. 

There’s the tried & true vampire story – the Mark of Caine & the relevant exposition in Genesis – you’ll be marked & no-one will be able to harm you & so on for being the first murderer.  That’s a solid reason for being a vampire –for The Vampire to come about.

Now, from that you can postulate a fantasyland where sometimes there’s a vampire.  But that’s really in opposition to what I’m interested in considering & talking about.  No Vampire tribes & teams, nosir.  No.  Sometimes there’s not a vampire.  Nope.  Because of That One Catastrophe Now There’s That Vampire.  This is the saga that interests me most. 

(Not to speak against other types of stories, you can have a preference without denigrating the other options – that’s what I’ve got going here.  Communicable vampirism just clings too closely to the physical, and too closely to the prevalent zombie mythos – I don’t need those, not today anyhow.  Today is for cursed people becoming singular & terrible monsters.)

So now I want to think about the terrible things that might occur that could cause there to be something like a Vampire.  I’m working on a list here so maybe I’ll update this as time goes by.

·       

•   The priests of a god all become some-kind-of-cursed-monster when that god is killed off by an adversarial god following some type of protracted war in heaven.  Let’s say that these Vampires, Undead-Horror-Priests linger in their places of worship & that they are compelled to hunger for the music & praise offered other, still living gods – they must consume the faith & love & hope of the practitioners of other religions.  Let’s say that they do this by stealing & eating children.  That’d just about do it no?  A sect of monstrous clergy all venerating a corpse-god.  So – you see – evocative.  Monstrous. 

•          How about the more solitary individual, a mystic, a wizard.  This person has taken to powering her magic with the vitality of the living - sacrificing animals & sometimes people to a point beyond explicable reason.  Even the simplest of her magics begins to demand the shedding of blood – a crushed frog here, an opened mouse there.  Soon she is just the conduit of blood, a crucible in which is alchemically formed not by her wizardly intention – but by its own magnetic attachment to itself.  So instead of being alive with a mentality & ego, this wizard has become purely instinctual, elemental – in helping blood to seek other blood.  She hungers and seeks & still utilizes her magical practices – but lacks for any autonomy & even the rudiments of life & comfort.  Monstrous.

      Or consider the Lothario – a lustful figure of intrigues & base drives, a man of romance in constant search for more & greater passions.  This man who abides, perpetually in love, in a state of constant youth – fueled by the passions & lusts that he inspires in those he seduces – incubus like.  This predator is blameless, though, and at heart remains innocent, uncorrupted by his antics – he nevertheless visits corruption (maybe like diseases?) to those whom he has preyed upon.  Never aging but leaving a string of wrecked homes, dashed hopes & broken hearts.  Perhaps he sustains himself on the forlorn suicides and relishes the perfume on all the fateful tearsoaked farewell notes that mention him by name.  Monstrous.

• ·        Maybe there’s that one.  That’s never grown up, that is or has always been the devourer, born hungry to a withered mother, it, itself withered beyond recognition, it lived though – a sprite of famine, a token of a pestilent year.  This infant grows & prospers without ever being nurtured.  It begins to steal breath & thus vitality – draining the air of its next parent and then its siblings and eventually the whole village.  The starving waif at the side of the road, permanently shivering, eternally famished.  Taken in, it eats up the smoke in the fireplace, the heat from the flame, the savor of the food and yet never does open its mouth – except at the fatal moment in the night when it drinks the breath of its doomed benefactor.  Monstrous.

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•             Possibly the dancer.  The model of grace & poise, silent in this world, expressing all through movement.  Drifting, confidently, between life & death as another might stride in and out of a room.  The dancer is too fleet, too evasive to ever succumb to death itself, but is too unreal & ethereal to be properly alive either.  This grace is not without its own demands though, and the Dancer Macabre must afflict others with agues & catarrhs – ailments of the joints & breath as they shrug off age they shed infirmity into the prematurely aged.  Disease & misfortune is the coin with which the dancer buys an immortal fame.  Monstrous.

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•            The Warrior.  Essential in this milieu is the one who fights.  This one fights death itself, a knight, killed at war but unwilling to cease the battle, who rises again & again to launch arrows & fire cannon, to cut down the rabble of the opposition.  The blood-covered-warlord whose unlife is made of endless war.  Perhaps guarding eternally against an invader – the city’s last wall & hidden tower, a fortress of a warrior slaked only on repelling the living & destroying them likewise.  Monstrous.

So in my examples I’ve just matched the sorts of monster-vampires to one of the six traditional statistics each.  Just as a guide – a common sensibility that’s reasonably shared among Our Community.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to match each of the examples to the CHA – WIS stats. 

Let’s very briefly hold that the six examples above are sufficient explanation for the why of Vampires.  And Vampire here – well, maybe it’s a loose term bandied with some negligence – but we’ll accept it as the placeholder to encompass – dead things that also have dead souls – that’s the bulls-eye for our discussion and now we’ll look at how distantly we can track from that and still have the thing be the thing.  So that answers the what. 

I think that the how is the best area to focus on now.  How do you persist in living when your body & soul are dead?  Traditionally it’s been the eating of blood & sometimes breath that keep the Vampire going - let’s extend & elaborate on that.  Life, other life.  That’s what you’ve got to live on.  Which is strange because – well, that’s everything alive, except I guess plants – and even plants, well.  They’re pretty mercenary in their own ways too.  Life eats life – so why is the Vampire unwholesome?  Maybe we’ll linger on the stalking & hunting of people (ALWAYS unsavory) and bring that up for closer inspection.  Maybe the Vampire needs to eat something more essential than the life of the people it feeds on.  More than the blood or the breath – let’s use those as markers shall we?  Let’s.  Let’s think that blood & breath represent vitality.

Now – in This Thing We Do – we’ve always or frequently had recourse to the draining & removal of Levels.  People don’t so much have levels in real life, but the system of levels really shines in the RPG as a functional mechanic only when levels are things that can be won & also lost.  Just knowing that around the bend there’s that one creature – you know the one –the WORST ONE –that steals your hard won levels, that bites of your HD and chews up your attack bonuses.  That One’s The Worst. 

Which I think is just right.  It sets the monster up as being truly fearful, menacing.  It’s dangerous in a novel way & a somehow more serious one.  It’ll do things to you that aren’t easily undone.  That’s the most monstrous thing. 

Of course this tracks as a meta-game concept but it’s hard to translate into story – one of those instances where game concepts can fill in blanks that we lack precise language for in storytelling.  There, in that world, you’ve got to use metaphor – The skulking creature fell upon her neck, a broad crimson stripe at its mouth as it eased away from her throat, having slaked its thirst and left her hollow and yet, still alive.  Well, she’s hollow & he’s less hungry?  I mean, there’s so, so many ways to look at this that all refer back to biology – eating, sex, life & death, disease – it’s fine – all of those are fine.  But none of them are metaphysical enough to really rub me as I wish to be rubbed. 

So I think you have to go to sins.  Wickedness – bad-deed-doing.  Let’s make the feeding a component of this – that there has to be a sinister act affiliated – now you’re into sneaking, and eating up innocent people, children if you want, or virgins, or maybe one’s own family members?  Make the killing & eating really Terrible and then you make your monster a Monster and not just a kind of person you might end up being.

Which is the line, in the end, that we’re drawing here – in the sand – between people and Monsters.  We’re making a circle around us and then describing everything on the outside of it as a monster.  In this instance we’ve gone and made concentric rings – In the middle – Us.  People.  So you take something away and end up with a monster – I think, curiously, that the first step of removal is to take away the physicality.  That the ghosts & spirits are closes to people and least monstrous.  Next are the zombies & skeletons, the dead bodies without souls – they’re horrible, sure, but not abstractly alien so much as displeasing, depressing.  Furthest away is the thing with a dead-soul & a dead-body – the predatory monster-person who looks at you not as another & not as a peer – not even as prey.  It looks at you as something to brutalize & defile – and that doing so will grant it some furtherance of its brutal, defiled existence.

A Kind of Vampire.  A Mean One.

This…  To me this story, of the addict, sick with despair & hungry for help – who sees people as mere instruments to aid & feed the addiction – that’s the demeanor of the Vampire, properly expressed.  Who else is so desperate and in turns pitiable & terrifying?  So that’s my who of this monster – the person made monstrous, stripped of persona & agency – left only with unrelatable drives & hopeless wants. 

So that – Is That.  On the three genera of undead monsters this is my assessment.

...You falter & stumble, the cave's entry is muddy, slick, it slopes downward through a mass of flowing mud, crawling things & darkness but you don't fall far, your descent is broken by...

Here’s something we’ve been arguing about forever and ever.  Race in the game.  I said a small piece of my piece on Goblins the other day but I don’t get tired of thinking about these sorts of things so I thought I’d write on this a little more but with some clarification as it pertains to the subject at hand today – which is Monsters. 

It’s always monsters.

You put together your character sheet and right at the top it always has that little piece of persistent Victoriana – Race – It’s not the most appealing thing to consider in real-life actuality because of its lack of actuality and its prevalent role in the complexities of our various societies.  Victorian – and it’s worth seeing the 19^th century as the source for this, our hobby.  Fantasy fiction erupting from out of a fascination with gothic eras, orientalist interest in the further parts of the world coupled with adventurism, confiscation – a lot of complex, difficult – fairly difficult to justify things all wrapped up what’s nowadays called white supremacy. 

Fun stuff right? 

Probably not – I’ll skate through that as it’s much more academically interesting than it is useful as part of a discussion of How To Do All Of This.  Short & sweet – the races as presented in gaming are broad strokes caricatures that make for easy shorthand in terms of motivations, identities, expectations & behaviors and that is Useful at the table because time at the table is brief and quick & dirty portrayals make points.  There’s a reason Sitcom characters are so cartoonish – it’s how you tell a story quickly & well. 

So let’s allow that in our settings there are races and these represent kinds of people who are distinct, one from another.  That’s something. 

Now we’ll take that internal logic and progress it along time & space – as that Is What We Do.

In real life humans out-competed & intermingled with a bunch of hominid species and now we’re the only ones – it seems reasonable that that would happen in a fantasy setting too right?  One of the races over time would overwhelm the others.  Well, only if they actually compete for the same resources and have similar ranges & starting points.  So you can knock off a few of the races from this discussion right there – Goblins & Elves – let’s say – they live in remote, unwelcoming places where the others don’t care to tread – the Elves in the deepest wilderness the Goblins in the deepest Wastelands.  Okay – Halflings?  Maybe they’re like… rats.  Let’s say rats but not with malice – the Halflings just join up and follow the others, they’re a shadow-people, perpetual outsiders living in the margins.  That works for them, maybe they even like it.

And we don’t have to worry about things like evolutionary competition over time because – hey, fantasy.  Let’s put Goblins, Elves and Dwarves into the realm of Fairies.  They’re extra-dimensional or some-such – from the land of dreams & nightmares and they are migrants, only lately come to this world. 

What about Orcs?  Orcs and Humans and Halflings?  Are they all evolved?  Let’s say Orcs and Halflings are – Orcs to be nomads, let’s talk physiology – like the Elves and Dwarfs they’re distinct.  Maybe they can’t physically digest anything but meat – maybe they’re like cats and are obligatory carnivores?  Maybe they have language but their vision makes writing or reading impossible for them? 

And where do humans fit?  They’re the baseline if only because most of the people playing these games are nominally human.  Where’s their niche?  Let’s say that they’re created by the gods.  Let’s put religion & deity into this – because those seem like pretty human characteristics – maybe ones that aren’t shared by the others?  That’d be okay – Humans are created by the gods – the Fairy races came from fairyland – visitors/aliens & Halflings & Orcs were made by nature-  evolved. 

Now they don’t compete exactly, they’ve got room, each of them, so they can flourish.  And naturally have conflicts – there’s not much story without conflict – but we’ve at least tried to set up those conflicts in line with our setting’s internal logic.

So hey!  Good Job. 

Now it’s time for a dungeon and you want to fill it with monsters – maybe a bunch of monsters that can talk & think, that have a kind of civilization.  At least some kind of monster-made ecology that you can populate with tiers of a social order & most importantly their related accoutrements – since what is adventure without reward in the form of loot?

Let’s say these monsters can talk – this is, to me – the best & most useful designation.  If it can talk is it really a monster?  It’s a kind of person if it can talk and then the game isn’t about adventure so much as it is some kind of ethnic cleansing.  Well – that’s crassly put & certainly not the intention but it is the seeming result.  And that’s hard to love.  We all tell stories about our favorite old adventures – the ones that involved massacring countless kobolds to steal from them… well maybe not the best.  Probably not a high point. 

Now let’s say that they can talk, just not to PCs.  Maybe they can’t talk exactly but they can make & build?  Let’s say any number of things that will differentiate these things from people.  They’re not even a kind of people – not the way that the Dwarfs and Halflings are right?  They’re ALIEN and they’re MONSTROUS.  Here, I find it best to work from physiology & intent. 

Physiology means you make them really different from most living things – maybe they have mouths, heck, maybe they’re covered in them – but maybe too – they don’t eat.  They have hundreds of puppet-mouths that just crunch things up and mash their enemies into crumbs.  That’s MONSTROUS – it’s unrelatable on a physiological level.  It’s clearly outside of our milieu and thus ALIEN.  To me this makes for a solid monster-race.  A group of beings that may be otherwise comprehensible but with extreme differences rendering them unknowable.

Intent means that they don’t want anything that makes obvious sense to PCs, that’s unrelatable on a mental rather than physical axis.  Perhaps these things build massive complexes like huge termite mounds and then use them to pierce the bodies of giants, sacrificing them so that the giant’s blood mingles with the earth creating a slurry of blood which these creatures need to form their offspring from.  Perhaps they gain uncanny sustenance from stealing people’s words, maybe they render their prey mute or incapable of saying specific names.  That’s peculiar enough to make the monsters – MONSTROUS – it makes them something other than a different kind of person. 

So this is part of the rationale in creating the monsters from the last two weeks.  The Masheddenna & the Bawamb. 

The Mashaddenna are made of old panther-skins with ashes sewn up in them.  They extrude flint-like feathers and they hunt smaller folk for the materials to make their own kindred.  They can catch souls in their nets & fling their feathery flints to draw blood.  Now let’s say that they’re new in the world – an emerging next phase of mytho-evolutionary development that stands to gain if any of the other’s lose. 

Here we have Unrelatable Physiology – they’re panther-skins full of ashes.

And we have Unrelatable Intentions – they hate & fear agriculture & water.  They’re anti-life living beings of rock & wind. 

'Art' by Me!  Kind of.

If you were to pepper these through your campaign – you’d earn every bit of fear your players have for you, sure, but you’d also be able to evoke a certain element of wonder & exploration.  “How is this possible?  Why do they hate farms?”  Now there are questions with obscure answers.  Creatures with unknown origins who demand an origin.  This is a superior result to staged colonial expansion. 

The Bawamb are possibly components of a single extradimensional being- a god, perhaps, who casts a minor shadow over this world – and whose shadow is comprised of the Bawamb.  The unthinkable functioning of a god coincides mystically with the growth & movement of the world – so that these massive, horned bats seem to be purely a type of animal, a huge, strange predator.  And yet, they are not, they are shadow-stuff that eat scents & shadows & which communicate with mists.  They are slinking hidden beings and they may exist in many places, many times even all at once.  And is their presence linked to a weakness in the God, can this being of another reality be engaged if one pushes through and past the Bawamb?  Will they allow such a communion or do they seek to enable it?  Questions.

I mean, I mostly made this - but mostly from the works of the generous dead.

There's that Unrelatable Physiology - they eat shadows & scents & they are maybe the atoms of a god.  

An that old Unrelatable Intent - They're just suddenly here for no obvious reason.  

In the end the worst thing that can be said of a monster is that the PCs knew what it would do, and why it would do it.  Surprise is in the end the thing that startles us most, that shocks us into attentiveness, inquisitiveness & action.  Knowledge is the reward for experience – but it shouldn’t be fatal to that learning.