The Seven-Sided Die

I’ve seen a few hits in my logs from people looking to roleplay in Tamriel using Savage Worlds rules. The Elder Scrolls conversion I’m working on isn’t finished, but it’s finished-enough that I can use it to run games and I have other projects taking precedence. I figure even unfinished rules would be more useful than nothing to those people coming from Google, though.

So: Savage Elder Scrolls.

Note that my experience is mostly with Oblivion, so there’s not much in there that reflects Morrowind or earlier games in the series. However, since I’m not interested in just playing Oblivion with the CPU replaced with a human GM, I tried to avoid re-creating Oblivion’s game mechanics. That was my biggest objection to Advanced Dungeons & Savages, and I didn’t want to make that mistake myself.

Note that there’s a lot that’s just skeleton, especially around the Edges and Hindrances, the Bestiary, factions, and non-combat Gear. Alchemy is only half done, but an enterprising GM can fill in the blanks. Restoration spells are barely touched as well, but Savage Worlds provides Healing and Greater Healing for now. Also note that the contact form referred to at the end doesn’t yet exist here because I haven’t had the time to test out the various contact form plugins.

Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome. This is only around the level of an alpha, so major rewrites might happen.

Edit to add: Welcome, readers from the Paizo boards. Flame-free comments are welcome. Some important points to keep in mind to avoid saying clueless things: I understand that you’re protective of your iconics, but they’re fair game for social criticism. Please don’t confuse “exploitive” with “offensive”—they’re different words. Having a female friend/being a woman who doesn’t see any problem doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no problem, just that that woman doesn’t think there’s one. There’s a difference between criticising an example of a cultural phenomenon and “speaking for all women”—I’m doing the first, not the latter. A female CEO doesn’t give a free pass on exploitation or sexism: see Jenna Jameson or Sarah Palin. For context you might want to read my first post on this blog, White privilege in fantasy fiction and gaming, and consider whether the comment you have in mind will get any traction here.

I made an account at Paizo’s online store when I wanted to take a look at their Pathfinder RPG beta, so I’m on their mailing list. I got a promotional email from Paizo yesterday that I was compelled to answer.

Some of you might have gotten the email I’m talking about. It’s a “Season’s greetings, have a discount coupon” sort of promo email. It’s one of those emails that’s nearly all image. Since my mail reader doesn’t load external images until I say it should (for security reasons), it initially just looked like:

Dear D7: [have a big-ass image]

Minus the editorialised replacement text, of course.

The image is of a big-breasted, skimpily-dressed, White woman fondling an enormous candy-cane with a come-hither look, sitting inside a wreath against a snowy background. (She must be cold. Or maybe she just has DR/fire.) The wreath is topped by “Season’s Greetings”, and the words “from your friends at Paizo” sit just beneath her coyly-crossed feet and elaborately-impractical costume. Curiously, her ears are hidden so she’s of indeterminate species. Maybe they didn’t want to be on the wrong side of that all-important elf fetish divide.

Yes, I’m being slightly caustic. Here’s the non-caustic email I sent them in reply:

Thank you for the discount coupon and well-wishing. However, I have to take exception to the image. I imagine many of your customers appreciate being shown random cheesecake, but it’s not terribly professional or respectful to your female customers. I do hope you had something less exploitive of women for your female customers. Even if so (and especially if not!) this is a good time to stop and consider how this kind of careless skin-selling from a major publisher sets back gamers’ attempts to make roleplaying less of a horny-boys’ club. FYI, the group I run games for is more than half women.

If none of that made any sense, you’re welcome to ask what I’m on about. Part of the problem is that this kind of image is considered normal in the industry, so people don’t have much of a handle on what might be problematic about it.

Sincerely,
d7

I’m curious what their reply, if any, will be. Paizo is known for this kind of cheesecake and fanservice, and I can only imagine the company culture that must hold sway when that’s their public face. I’m not expecting much. If only they’d realise (and care) how hostile to women gamers this kind of thing is.

Despite being finished school, I’ve been busier than ever. My family is taking a lot of my attention, and getting the house into better order than we were tolerating while I was consumed with school is being alotted the remainder. Then, of course, there is the holidays. Failing a thoughtful post, I can give you some links that are thought-provoking.

I was looking for GM advice earlier today. (More on that below.) By some tangents I came across the site of Greg Stolze, who is the most interesting RPG designer who I’ve ever been only vaguely aware of. (He’s no longer in that category since I’ve absorbed his page and starting paying better attention to him.) If you enjoy reading industry-insider reminiscing and introspection about game design, you’ll enjoy reading Stolze’s pages devoted to talking about the games he’s worked on. As he notes, they’re marketing-pitch free unless you click the links to the products’ own pages. He writes about good design, bad editing, a young Jonathan Tweet, the companies that come and go, and what it’s like to write the RPG for a franchise he loved as a teenager. I usually balk at reading screens of non-blog home pages, but his are well worth it.

A later tangent found me reading Communicate: Understand the Lessons You Will Teach Each Other, an old guest article at Treasure Tables. Good advice there about considering what styles of play and group behaviour are rewarded by the choices and events the GM brings to the game. Along a similar theme I found Expectations, Conditioning and Your Game: Examples and its follow-up, Rules of Thumb, over at Errant Dreams. They address the broader but more practical techniques for setting the group’s expectations for a new game (or resetting them in an established one) through deliberate crafting of an introductory session and making a themes reference sheet to keep the game on-track thereafter. It’s one of those ideas that only seems obvious after it’s stated.

Returning to industry reminiscing, I found an archive of John Wick’s entire series of “Play Dirty” articles for Steve Jackson Games’ Pyramid magazine. It’s badly formatted, alas, because it’s in the form of an email attachment that someone once sent to a fellow gamer, which itself has been archived on the web. It’s well worth reading, although I admit I only got through the first few (long!) articles while Mr Baby napped on my chest earlier today. It has a massive word count. Those of you who aren’t fans of Wick should probably take it in small doses, though, because he’s his usual unsettling self. People seem to either love him or hate him. He’s made some great games, though.

And that wraps— wait, what? Oh, right. That game on Wednesday I promised to report on. Um. Let’s just say that parts of our group—myself included, much to my chagrin—are entering the storming stage. There’s a reason I was looking for GM self-help and self-improvement articles… On the plus side, storming means that norming is on the way!

The RPG Blog Carnival topic for December is transformations and transitions, hosted by Critical Hits. That’s very pertinent to me right now since I’m transitioning from being a working student to being either a plain ol’ worker or a stay-at-home dad. (We’ll see in January which it will be.)

That partly explains the sudden quiet here at the Seven-Sided headquarters. The other part is that my Elder Scrolls conversion for Savage Worlds is coming along swimmingly. I should have Magicka (as magic is called in TES lore) and character mechanics in general done this weekend, and some templated NPCs and monsters done next week. Wednesday the group will hit it with sticks and put it through its paces for a one-shot session.

For Magicka I was tempted to model it after the mechanics in TES3: Morrowind and TES4: Oblivion, but while chatting with Fimmtiu I realised that that way lay madness and I should take my own advice to just trust Savage Worlds’ system to work well. I’m tweaking it a bit—the Power used determines which Skill test is needed and there is one Skill for each of the six Schools—but otherwise I’ve just been putting SW-style mechanics to classic TES spell effects. There are some easy equivalents like telekinesis and dispel which need no name change, and command humanoid which is just puppet renamed. Others are a bit tougher, but I have about 50% of the Powers worked out already.

This hasn’t really been a Carnival post so I’m not submitting it, but it did get me to update, so there’s that at least.

There is a tonne of setting conversions for Savage Worlds, but one in particular stands out for its absence: Bethesda Softwork’s venerable world of The Elder Scrolls. It’s been discussed, but I haven’t turned up anything substantial in my searches.

It’s the perfect sandbox setting¹, with deep background material, abundant maps, plot threads galore for players to chance upon, and a wide world to explore. It’s also nearly ideal for my current needs since I can wing it and still have a lot of setting information at my fingertips after many hours of playing TES 4: Oblivion. (I haven’t played the others in the series, yet.) As hack/ points out, there is a bounty of adventure ideas to be had from player-maintained sites documenting each game’s quests in good detail, including maps. As easy as it sounds to convert to d20, it will be even easier to convert such adventures to Savage Worlds.

There are a good number of people familiar with the setting through the video games, too. That lowers the player buy-in for those players, although it does mean I can’t steal quests whole-cloth for the campaign. That’s just as well though, since I want to avoid the temptation to just rehash Oblivion. The real strength of a pen-and-paper game is the ability to go anywhere and do anything. Although The Elder Scrolls series of games are delightfully accommodating of that desire, a tabletop game is just so much more flexible than anything that computers can produce so far.

The one challenge then, is not building the setting, but wrapping Savage Worlds mechanics around it. There’s a lot to work out, but fortunately the system is simple and flexible enough that what would be a monumental task in d20 should be something I can actually accomplish in SW. The biggest mechanical hurdle is how to handle magic, since everyone has a little bit of magic in The Elder Scrolls.

The other challenge (”Two! Two main challenges…”²) will be distilling the setting details that will get unfamiliar players engaged in the sandbox. An overview of the races and their relationships, the provinces of Tamriel and local geography, and recent history will be necessary, but have to be conveyed in few enough words that I can depend on my players reading it.

So! With all that in mind, I’m prodding a skeleton of a Google Doc into a useful conversion. I’m sure you’ll see pieces of it here at some point. Any fellow Savage Worlds and TES fans out there? Do you have any suggestions for how to tackle the various setting details?

The single most useful piece of GM advice I’ve yet read is Dr Rotwang’s Adventure Funnel.

The Adventure Funnel is a quick and satisfying technique for creating nuanced and memorable adventures. Start with a goal, throw in some obstacles, season with details (I think I’m getting my metaphors mixed…) and the result is a stew of ideas that hang together loosely enough to not be binding, but are well-interconnected enough to run an adventure that looks, at the table, like pages of carefully-written notes. The key is throwing things at the wall (or page, or pot—as the case may be) without worrying about vetting it or making sense of it first. Something nonsensical you put down might inspire an entire plot thread that turns out to be brilliant. Once inspiration strikes the connections just make themselves, and the Adventure Funnel is nothing if not good at generating inspiration.

In my first attempt using the Adventure Funnel (and so far only, I should take my own advice and use it more), one of the silly things I wrote down when I couldn’t think of anything was “And then: DRAGON ATTACK”. It turned out to inspire one of two major villains that injected some delicious pathos into the adventure. Yes, a dragon attacked, no, the player didn’t fight it, and the fallout from the dragon’s actions (demanding a yearly ransom, killing the villiage elder, shaming the hubris-filled priest) is still being felt in my ongoing Edge of Empire campaign. In fact, the major reveal and cliffhanger from the last session is a direct result of the spiritual crisis of that shamed priest.

So, go read The Adventure Funnel and get cooking up something fast and tasty for your next game.

Our regular Tuesday game had two cancellations, so I ran a Savage Worlds one-shot instead for the two players who could make it. I decided to run the Tomb of Terrors one-sheet adventure that Pinnacle has available on their website. (Spoiler alert.) Overall the session was fun and I think a good demo of Savage Worlds’ strengths and weaknesses. In four hours we managed to make characters and play through that short adventure, which is impressive considering none of us had ever played SW before.

Here are some of the highlights and “low”-lights.

Character creation

We started with character creation, which went slower than I hoped but still quicker than I’m used to chargen taking. There was some confusion between points and die sizes for skills, especially since “15 points for skills” looks so much like the skill ranks system in d20. We ended up with Guz, a lead pipe–wielding autonomous flesh golem-thing, and Stillmoon, a shape-changing human shaman. We used Arcane Background (Magic) to substitute for Shamanism. For Guz we decided that he was of a race much like Eberron’s Warforged, created for some historical purpose and now free and commonplace.

In general I, and I think my players too, were pleased with how straightforward a Savage Worlds character was. More choices and flexibility in choosing Hindrances would be good, though, since there’s only so many character concepts that can fit into “One Legged” or “Blind”, effectively shrinking an already-short list.

Interpreting powers

We used the standard magic system since I don’t want to tinker until I get more hands-on experience with running the game. There was one point of contention around the Shape Change power: The player wanted to use it to sneak up and attack the necromancer, but I ruled that shifting out of crow form and attacking would be two actions and the Fight roll would suffer the standard -2 multi-action penalty. My reasoning was that drawing a weapon and attacking is considered two actions and the degree of readiness was comparable. I’m not sure that I handled that well at the time—really, I should have just given it to him and moved on—but in hindsight I think that would be the right way to handle it in the future.

Some guidance on this sort of thing might be useful as an aid for GMs who are trying to justify how magic works to players used to highly formal magic systems like d20 has. However, I do think that once everyone is invested in the philosophy of Savage Worlds, it’d be easier to get players to accept rulings like the one I made above. SW is a loose but consistent set of rules, and it’s easy to use the rules philosophy of one part of the rules to extend another part. More on that next.

Making sensible rulings

Another notable ruling that needed to be made was how to handle Swarms and the Defense manœuver. Swarms hit automatically, making a +2 to Parry irrelevant. In various places in the rules there are “common sense” substitutions. In particular under Areas Attacks, a target in cover would normally give the attacker a penalty to Shooting, but instead this is made a bonus to the target’s Toughness. The philosophy behind exceptions like this seems to be that the mechanics are meant to be flexible and not break in unexpected situations.

With this in mind, I ruled that the +2 from the Defense action applied to Toughness when resolving a Swarm’s automatic attack. This satisfied my players, although there was some grumbling that I think I can attribute to familiarity with more rigid. Savage Worlds doesn’t try to cover every eventuality, so it definitely falls into the old-school paradigm that makes good rulings more important than rigid adherence to a set of comprehensive rules.

The only disadvantage of this ruling is that it makes hits from a Swarm very unlikely for the average hero with even a Toughness of 5 or 6 since the Swarm only rolls 2d4 for damage. At first I thought this was a flaw, but I think that’s more sensible. I don’t expect a swarm of rats to do the major damage to a prepared hero that a Wound represents, but it would happen by rare bad luck, and the dice reflect that with this ruling.

Fighting

Our thoughts on the combat system were mixed. The bone golem was hard to take down. It kept being Shaken and then making its Spirit roll to recover. That made the combat seem interminable, and also effectively made it impossible for the golem counter-attack. (In hindsight I should have blew more bennies on instant recoveries, but at the time I didn’t want to be a dick GM and erred on the side of letting my baddy get smacked around.) Afterwards my players were a bit concerned that the Shaken status makes things very swingy, which prompted me to think about how I should have used my bennies. The Actual Play account in the RPGnet review of Savage Worlds made me focus on using bennies for Soak rolls, but I think unShaking will be as important a use for them.

That said, the golem took two wounds on Round 4 and failed its Shaken recovery roll, then went down in Round 5 to a solid hit. We kept forgetting about the +1 bonus the PCs should have been getting for Ganging Up on it. On the whole, though, the combat mechanics were well received. Using a deck of cards was really popular despite initial doubt, since it makes the flow of combat easy to see at a glance and never results in ties.

After breaking the bone golem, Guz took one swing at the angry necromancer and hit with two swings of his lead pipe (using Frenzy) and rolled a cumulative damage of 32 (on 1d10 Str + 1d6 lead pipe, once for each hit). That involved two Aces on the pipe die, if I recall correctly. Needless to say, the necromancer and his paltry 4 Toughness went down spectacularly. At this point I entirely failed to remember the Knockout Blow rules, but it was a good place to wrap up for the night.

The one thing we didn’t like about combat was that it was easy to devolve into a toe-to-toe fight. The AP report I linked above had the same problem. Partly this was our inexperience—trying to use Tricks didn’t go well since we couldn’t think of an appropriate trick, and I didn’t make the golem do anything more than swing. Partly too this was an uninspiring combat environment (two enemies in a bare dungeon room) and there were few things that could conceivably be turned to one side’s advantage. Another part of this was deciding to use a Trick first and then trying to decide on what the fluff was after, which puts the horse before the cart in a fiction-first system like Savage Worlds. In future games I will try to introduce the convention that players first describe what their characters are doing and afterwards decide what kind of combat manœuver it is.

The literal low point

Another gripe was the do-or-die nature of the 13-foot jump at the beginning of the adventure. A Seasoned Wild Card character had a so-so chance of jumping it, but Extras had almost no chance. I had a hard time justifying the rats managing to cross this chasm, since the scenario has them fleeing out of the Tomb and into the sewers but failed to explain how they could cross a 13-foot wide, 30-foot deep trench.

It also slowed down the session considerably as they tried to get across. I had sent two town guards with them in order to try out the Allies rules, but one fell in and nearly died and they had the other take him back to town. The silver lining is I got to try the Aftermath rules for Extras.

In hindsight I think this wasn’t so much a flaw in the adventure design as a feature made into a flaw by a lack of other dungeon dressing. Had there been some planking or something in the Excavation Room, the fleet-footed Stillmoon could have gone and grabbed it for a makeshift bridge, and I didn’t think to add anything like that on the fly.

Take-home impressions

The initiative system was a hit. Everyone was leery of using cards before we tried it, and now we’re converts. Tracking initiative was never a problem and not having to write each number down let combat flow without interruption. The die system of d20 introduced cyclic initiative to get the same advantage, but this has all the advantages of round-by-round initiative without the disadvantage of slowing things down. I would even consider using a deck of cards (pared down to Aces through 10s to maintain scale) for AD&D initiative because it worked so well.

Combats didn’t take exceedingly long, especially considering that it was a first time for all of us, including me as the GM. Swarms are interesting, but I’ll have to try them in a different environment. We didn’t get to try out the much-vaunted ability of the system to handle large numbers of combatants since the guards left at the beginning and the players opted to ignore the zombies unless they attacked first. Although I’m leery of the stupidly-high Toughness on the BFM at the end of The Red Swamp, I’m now leaning more toward running it next time we take SW for a test drive in order to try out its early multi-combatant battle.

Character creation is a bit mixed. It’s fast and relatively intuitive. A fairly interesting and varied range of characters is possible with a minimum of fiddly character-sheet things to work out. On the down side there just isn’t enough variety in the available Edges and Hindrances to satisfy a heroic or gritty fantasy game, which means that as the I am GM looking at a pile of writing to develop genre- and setting-specific lists of Edges, Hindrances, and Powers. Normally that’d be pleasant work that would just take some time, but with my schedule constraints it presents a daunting obstacle to starting a real campaign. (On the plus side, I hope to have a copy of Shaintar: Immortal Legends in the new year.)

Savage Worlds really, really, needs more Hindrances. There just aren’t enough that can be applied to a broad set of character concepts. The result was that Guz had the Enemy Hindrance in a one-shot game where it didn’t matter (I decided the necromancer was his enemy, but that didn’t make it meaningful). Similarly, Stillmoon had a Vow to take vengeance on someone (which I also made the necromancer). These ended up being just filler on the sheet rather than having an impact on the game, and were picked because there just wasn’t anything else that worked.

In the end these two players were pleased with the system and at least one of them has been looking around online for more stuff to make Shamanism work well. I enjoyed running it and my qualms so far were all with the adventure, the limitations of the lists for Eges, Hindrances, and Powers, and the need to get me and my players to think fiction-first before trying to invoke the mechanics.

Next time I’ll talk about the astoundingly awesome support I got from Pinnacle when I discovered issues with my copy of the rulebook.

November’s topic for the RPG Blog Carnival is religion.

In The B.A.D.D. Files, part1 I posted the first of a set of text files shared in the 80s and 90s among Christians alarmed about the nature of Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games in general. Today’s text file is about the sad story of Darren Molitor. The History of Role-Playing, Part IV from issue 4 of Places to Go, People to Be has the story in brief:

In 1984, Pulling involved BADD in the trial of Darren Molitor. Darren was being tried for the murder of a young girl which allegedly occurred while he was acting out a Halloween joke. Pulling convinced the defence to argue on Molitor’s lack of culpability due to the influence of D&D, presenting many so-called “D&D-experts” as witnesses. This evidence was dismissed as irrelevant, but this did not deter BADD from intervening in other trials.

What was most frightening about this incident was that BADD was also able to convince Molitor of the game’s control over his actions. Under this belief, Molitor penned a damning essay blaming D&D for his crime, which was then widely disseminated by BADD. Later, Molitor stated that he was under a lot of stress and “completely in confusion” when he wrote the essay, and hence “may have gone overboard”. He added “I no longer feel the game is dangerous for everyone”.

The whole article has even more context, such as the thinness of the credentials of the “experts” and Pulling’s own sad story. This file is B.A.D.D.’s own account of Molitor’s story followed by the infamous essay itself:

Introduction

The following is an essay written by Darren Molitor, a former D&D player. Darren was a very devout D&D player who sometimes played marathon games that lasted for days.

The friends with whom this young man often played D&D, began “horsing around” in a game of their own while preparing for a “Friday the 13th party” on March 13, 1984. The “horsing around” went too far, and a young girl named Mary Towey (18 yrs old) became the victim of a “mind game.” She was strangled to death by Darren Molitor.

Darren stated repeatedly in his trial that when he and another boy tied Mary up, they were just “messing with her mind.” By the physical evidence in the case, a coroner testified that the death did appear accidental; however, a jury found Darren guilty of murder in the first degree.

The prosecution sought the death penalty, but Darren received a life sentence instead. D&D was a major influence in Darren’s behavior at the time of the incident, but because of a lack of knowledge on the part of the police regarding D&D, this area of influence was not explored until it was too late to be considered “relevant.”

Darren, in his own defense, never tried to excuse his actions. The essay that he has written on D&D was done after his trial, and he initially sent this essay to an elementary school in the hopes of helping young children.

Prior to his involvement with D&D, this young man had never been in any trouble.

Dungeons and Dragons - March 22, 1985 by Darren Molitor

I’m sure many, if not all, of you have heard about or played the very popular game of “Dungeons and Dragons”. Now I’m not speaking of the board game of which there is one, I’m speaking of the game that is played in your minds.

To give some backround of the game for those of you that heven’t had the so-called priviledgd of experiencing the game let me tell you about it.

The game is called “Dungeons and Dragons” and it is a fantasy role- playing game. As you can probably assume from the title it is set in the medieval era of our time of history. Because it is a game of “fantasy” anything is possible and being a “role-playing” game means you act as a character of that time as if you were on stage. But there is no physical action on the players part. Everything is played or imagined in the mind. And you as a player, are the sole person responsible for the actions of your character or characters. You control him totally. His/her actions, words, feelings, thoughts.  Everything about this character you control.

To obtain a “character”, a player must first roll three six-sided dice. Add up the numbers rolled and write it down. A player does this six times and then he must organize the numbers he has rolled to the six characteristics of his character. The six characteristics are strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity and charisma.  These six characteristics are the “heart” of your character. After which the player may roll to obtain the height and weight or he/she may choose it. The player assigns a race to the character, a class, which is his/her occupation and the alignment. An alignment is the character’s attitude or outlook on life. The different classes are many and each class has a sub-class. They are the following: cleric, (druid); fighter, (paladin, ranger); magic-user, (illusionist); thief, (assassin); monk and bard. The different alignments are: lawful good, lawful neutral, lawful evil, netural, chaotic good, chaotic neutral and chaotic evil. Now the player rolls a particular die or dice, of which are many to obtain a character’s hit points. The “hit points” are the ammount of stamina or damage the character can sustain before going into a coma or even dying. You then give him/her some money, by rolling the dice, and equiping him with supplies, weapons and armor.  From here there is only two more steps. The first is to roll and obtain the spells a character has if he/she is able to use them. Some classes use spells and others don’t. The final stage is picking a name for your newborn character. He/she is now a true and real person in the player’s mind.

There is also a player called the dungeon master or DM, for short.  This player is usually more familiar and experienced in the game. The DM is a VERY important part of the game. Also a very powerful part.  He/she plays the sole role of being “god” of the game. The DM controls everything that happens within the game. The only part of the game he does not control entirely is the actions of your character. But he/she may constrict them if he/she chooses. He/she is also in control of that player’s character’s life. The DM may decide to destroy the character for some reason, but it should not be for any personal reason and the DM should refrain from doing such actions unless the player of that character has become uncontrollable and has changed the fun of the game.

The DM has a lot of responsibility, as you can imagine. For example, the DM must create an adventure or dungeon. There are many books called modules with “dungeons” already prepared, but for the most part the DM creates them himself/herself. He/she must create the scenery (indoor, outdoor, underground, the various and numerable characters a player may encounter, the temperature, the smell, the monsters and the treasure. It is a very long and tedious process and the average dungeon takes anywhere from 36-48 hours of work. There is one case of the game being followed, that the DM, a lady, has quit her job and does nothing except create and prepare a dungeon for her players. She has created an entire country. The players of the group support her living necessities. They pay for her home, her groceries, her bills, etc.

The game is played with two or more people with the average group consisting of 5, including the DM. The DM, as I have explained, runs the show. He/she will describe, in detail, what is around you. What action is taking place, what sounds you may hear, what smells you may notice, etc., etc. From here it is the player’s option of what to do.  The player must decide what his/her character is going to do. In responce the DM tells the players of the result of their actions. As I’ve said before, a character may do anything, I emphasize anything, that a player wants him/her to do. For example; the DM has just told you that you have come up a cave entrance. It is midday, warm, you hear what appears as water running from inside, but you can’t see anything. The players now decide if they wish to enter the cave, throw a stone in to try and locate the water, yell something in to try and get a response or just ignore it completely.

Another example is; you are in a room or chamber underground that you have discovered. There is a table, some chairs, a desk with numerous jars on it. There is a lot of dust covering everything. And in the corner a chest sits. As a player your first instinct is to search the chest for some treasure. During the process of checking for any traps and trying to unlock it a few orcs (a type of human-like monster, resembling a pig) sneak up from behind. They are very angry and have their weapons drawn and are about to attack. What do you do now? If you are a spell user you attempt to cast a spell. You may try and bargain with them. Or, amd most likely, you may fight them. You draw your weapon and charge. Now the dice come in. The DM rolls a six-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided or twelve-sided, depending on the weapon and the result is the amount of damage to the orc. Now the orc or orcs swing. The same process is used. And this continues until you or they are dead.

Remember now, all of this is imagined in the mind. You can actually see this. What they look like, how you’re swinging, the damage given and obtained. It all appears in the mind.

The reason for explaining so much is so you may understand how the game is played. It may seem to be harmless and very entertaining and it is entertaining, but far from harmless. I have had the experience of the game for more than 3 years now and I know the effects of the game. For the majority of those that play it becomes a way to escape reality. It is a way of letting tension and anxieties loose. And that is good. But subjecting the mind to the amounts of violence involved isn’t. It is far more bad than it is good. Especially to a young mind.  And an 18 or 20 year old still has a young mind. Its effects are both mental and physical. It is in comparison to drugs, alcohol or tobacco.  It is very possessive, addictive and evil. Evil may sound wrong or peculiar to explain a game, but there is no other way to describe it.  It is a device of Satan to lure us away from God. It is an occult.

An occult you say? What is an occult? Defined in American Family and School Dictionary, a publication based on the American College Dictionary, prepared by Random House, Inc., it is: beyond the bounds of ordinary knowledge; magical; supernatural; mystical. Staying on the same subject let’s define occultism: the doctrine or study of the supernatural, magical, imaginary, etc. Stated concisely it is the participation or involvement in ANYWAY with fortune telling, magic practices, spiritism, or false religions cults and teachings. Within that category is using a ouija board, ESP, telepathy, horoscope, a seance, yoga, remote influence of the subconscious mind of others, self-hypnosis, following astrology and Dungeons and Dragons(R). They are all connected with an occult or are considered occultism practice.  All such occults are condemned by God in the Scriptures, being an abomination unto Him and are under His curse. To quote a passage from an article written by Dr. Hobart E. Freeman, I write the following:

“The Scriptures condemn all forms of occultism as sorcery and warn that…. they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:19-21), but

“…..are an abomination unto the Lord” (Deut. 18:12),

and “…. shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone” (Rev. 21:8).

From earliest times God forbade occultism as spiritually defiling (Lev. 19:31), and made participation in it punishable by death (Ex.  22:18; Lev. 20:27), and cause for rejection of that soul by God (Lev.  20:6).

Dungeons and Dragons(R) is based on magic and the supernatural.  There is, in fact, a hard bound book entitled “Deities and DemiGods” for the sole purpose of informing you of the “gods” that are involved in the game. It gives complete details of the “gods” and it expects you as a player character to pick a “god” to worship him/her. To pray to, to sacrifice to, to obey. And to die for if necessary.

Not only is the game based on the supernatural and magic it involves violence. Serious violence! The type of violence not allowed on TV. There is hack and slash murder, rape, theivery, pillaging and terrorism. And in the game it is natural and expected for a character to do those things. A character must, at least, murder and rob in order to survive. And it is the object of the game to survive. To do whatever you must, to anybody or anything, in order to survive and become more powerful and wealthy. The more you do those things the longer you live. The longer you live the more powerful you become and usually with power comes wealth.

You may be saying, “All of that may be true, but what does that have to do with me (or my children)? It has everything to do with you (or your children) if you (or they) are involved in the game. As I have repeated several times the game is played or imagined entirely in the mind. Totally and only in the mind. The conscious mind experiences these visions as reality while playing. And if it is played, let’s say, 3-5 times a week, 4-8 hours each time, the conscious mind becomes accustomed to such acts of violence. Then when the person is finished playing for that day, it is all pushed back to the subconscious supposedly. But it is known that the mind is very powerful and unexplainable. It is very possible for the sub-conscious mind to “overpower” the conscious mind. Suddenly you are no longer in total control of your mind. The “fantasy game” becomes a “reality game”. You begin to live it for real. Everything you do, or say, involves or associates to the game itself. You no longer play the game for enjoyment, you play it because you feel you have to. You must have it (play it) just like a person on drugs, achohol or tobacco must have them. It is an addiction. And your mind is under the control of the game. It is possessed by the game.

Now, you’re probably saying that won’t happen to me (or my children) because I won’t let it happen or I’m too smart for that to happen. Believe me, it happens! And it happens to anyone. It has happened to me. It has happened to many college students that have committed suicide or have done some serious bodily harm to themselves and or others. It has happened to many younger teenagers, 13 and 14.  The destruction it can cause to the mind and soul is incredible. It’s rather unexplainable. I and many others have had some very bad experiences because of the game and I am writing too, on their behalf to warn or make you aware of the game. It is dangerous and against God’s command.

There are as I’ve said numerous recorded accounts of teenagers 13 to 19 and some older persons that have had some troublesome experiences. Many have commited suicide due to the game. Another good many have either caused serious harm to themselves or other individuals. And some have coused the death of a friend or family member by accident, but because of the “game”, they took the “game” one step too far. “Playing” it for real one time too many. For some it was the last time they played it or any other game. Many were lucky, but you may not be.

And the fact is, that you don’t even have to be playing the game at the time. The mind is continuously “playing” the game. You could have played it 2 or 3 days prior, but your mind is still playing.

So, please for your own safety and salvation and the safety of others don’t play the game anymore. If you don’t play it now, don’t even start. It is more dangerous than I can fully explain. Don’t play with your physical life that way and don’t condemn your soul to hell by participating in the game.

A very concerned ex-player, Darren Molitor

If you would like to write to Darren Molitor or his parents the mailing address is:

Darren Molitor
C/O Mr. & Mrs. Louis Molitor
2303 Sublette
St. Louis, MO 63110

Or you may decide to send a word of encouragement to Darren’s parents.

There is another young man who is in a similiar situation and he is 16 years old. He is guilty of murder in the first degree. He never had a trial (plea bargaining was involved). His parents feel that D & D was responsible for his bizarre behavior in the murder of a next door neighbor.

Paul Sargent
C/O Mr. & Mrs. Robert Sargent
6545 Tauronee
Kansas City, Kansas 66102

His parents certainly need a word of encouragement.

Reprinted with permission from:

B.A.D.D. Inc.
P.O. Box 5513
Richmond, VA 23220

(B.A.D.D. stands for Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons - a national organization concerned about the widespread playing of D & D and its effects.)

This file has been brought to you by:

Southern Maryland Christian Information Service BBS
(301) 862-3160 HST
P.O. Box 463
California, MD 20619
Sysop:  Buggs Buggs

The ironically-extensive space in the essay given to how the game is played and the awkward misuse of the word “occult” make this one particularly awful.

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is religion.

Most fantasy settings have particular domains of interest and influence assigned to each god, but very few actually bother to say what the followers of the gods actually believe. It’s a strange omission when designing a faith.

I was thinking about this when I was putting together the gods for the Iron Valley region for the Edge of Empire campaign. I decided that each god would not only have the traditional set of domains, but also some basic tenets that define how followers are expected to behave and what the church believes. Here are three ways you can add depth to gods and their followers’ faiths in your setting by thinking about the nuts and bolts of belief.

1. Five tenets of the faith

Write down five things for each god that their followers believe or do. These can be prohibitions, duties, articles of faith, details of devotions, or principles of living.

Prohibitions are easy: things like wielding edged weapons, touching dead meat with bare hands, or speaking during the dawn are the sorts of things a god or its church might forbid.

Duties are the flip side of prohibitions. Always making an offering of food before eating, tithing 10% of your earnings to the local church, community service in the name of the god (imagine a weekly stint in the mortuary for a god of death!), never sleeping above the ground floor, and taking a vow of chastity are possible duties.

Articles of faith are what the followers of a faith hold to be true. They might believe that running water is the incarnate body of their god, that they are manifestations of a part of their god’s soul, that ritual combat is the only proper way to resolve disputes, or that the world must be prepared for some future event.

Details of devotion are more fine-grained. A church might require its faithful to pray in a particular language. Perhaps holy water of a fire god can only be blessed while boiling. A god might require that a cleric confront incarnate evil by singing.

Principles of living is a catch-all category for anything that doesn’t fall into the first four. A principle might be that followers should live in the moment because all things die and are forgotten, that giving to chartiy is for chumps, that followers should dedicate their every action to the greaty glory of their god, or that being soft-spoken is virtuous.

Focus on tying together the tenets with a theme in order to get across what a god is “about”, and you might not even need to rely on the domain-of-power trope. Consider throwing in one seeming contradiction to imply greater depth without having to do too much more work. (For instance, followers of the god of death might be cheerful and flighty: they know all things end, so they are instructed to enjoy life before their master claims them.)

Also don’t strain to hit each these categories—consider how a faith that has only duties gives it a distinctive flavour compared to a faith that has only prohibitions. The categories really aren’t important and are just there to inspire a variety of tenets.

2. Devotion time

The god that has no holy days or times of particular importance is a rare god indeed. Holy days and other times of prescribed honouring add interest to the setting’s culture and give priests of a god rites they have to perform. You can roll this into the list of tenets if you think it fits.

Times of significance to the god in particular or to the culture their church is a part of are good choices for holy days. Changes of season, the migratory patterns of herd animals, or the first rain of the year might be marked with feast or fasting days. The anniversary of a god’s ascent, the longest night of the year, or the renewal of a pact would require certain rituals. A particular time of day might require meditation.

Events might call for particular devotions. The first birth in a new settlement might be marked with rituals, the coming of the spring floods, the first thawing of the sea ice, or the appearance of a dragon in the sky might call for certain rites.

3. Where is that written?

Gods in fantasy games have a habit of just coming right out and telling their followers what they should do and believe. Most gods are more circumspect, though, or maybe they just have better things to do than to constantly micromanage their followers. In that case, all this stuff needs to be remembered and passed on somehow.

Some cultures and faiths will pass it on from person to person, initiating new members into the rites and tenets of the faith as they prove themselves. These churches keep the details alive in an oral tradition. Others will write it down somewhere. Perhaps there was a prophet who spoke the god’s will. Maybe there are oracles wired into their god who do nothing but write into the great libraries of the church.

The details aren’t so much important as just figuring out the form these teachings take and how they’re taught. A church might keep everything secret, divulging only what is necessary to tend the lay followers. The holy words might be inscribed in foot-high letters on a five-sided obelisk in the centre of the capitol. Maybe it’s all written in one magnificent book, or stored in hundreds of yards of scrolls kept safe underground.

Putting it together

I’ve already mentioned bits of my setting’s death god in the examples above. I’m going to give you a look at the Iron Valley’s version of Isis though, since she and her church are of particular relevance to the characters at this point in that campaign.

The tenets of the Istan Church are:

1. Nourish and nurture wherever you go.
2. Preserve mysteries, and seek them in your travels.
3. Revenge the destruction of natural beauty.
4. Things magical are the domain of Isis, who knows best how they are kept.
5. Honour Isis with a daily libation.

This isn’t a cut-and-dry goddess or church. It’s mostly a “nice” church, doing charity work and preserving knowledge. It’s also a selfish church, loath to share that knowledge and aggressively seeking out and seizing—by force if necessary—artefacts and items of power. It can unleash a terrible wrath when beauty is destroyed, which is all the more terrible for the gentle face that the church habitually presents.

The written expression of the core tenets of the Church of Isis are recorded and kept by monks in libraries constructed within the sacred grottos inside the Spire of Cantos. The libraries are constantly being expanded as priests seek the depths of the mysteries of their Lady.

The seekers attempt to commune directly with Isis. Devoted for life, these oracles are semi-amphibious and spend their waking hours in trance, floating in the currents of the crystal pools that well up in the sacred grottos. Alien and cryptic in their pronouncements, monks carefully record every word a particular oracle has ever said, and many a monk devotes their entire life to deciphering the larger truths their words reveal.

I will probably give Isis a holy day apart from the daily libations, but I’m leaving that open for now. Likely it will be something to do with the spring planting, as fertility is one of her portfolios.

We finally kicked off our Planescape game on Tuesday. We’re using AD&D 2nd edition rules and, wonderfully, for once I am a player rather than the GM. I’m pleased with the character I came up with. Clearly, being on the other side of the screen is good for my creativity.

Marius Solain

The third son of a landed family, Marius spent most of his time playing and composing music, carousing in the taverns of Luskan, and hunting in the forests surrounding the Solain estate. He kept it to himself when he began seeing visions, and for the most part his family missed the growing madness in their dilettante son. He spent more time in seclusion, as troubled when lucid as when hallucinating. Thus it was that, the night the Solains were targeted for death and the manor house torched, he was returning late from the hunt only to see the flames. In despair he flung himself from the cliff overlooking the river that marked the edge of the Solain lands.

Of course he’s not dead now. He just thinks he’s dead, or at least about to be. The visions he’d been having had been starting to make sense, and to be controllable to a degree, before that fateful night. In truth his untutored psionic potential was giving him glimpses of his future, and the frightful panopoly of beings and places of the Planes that he’d seen now surrounded him. He’d fallen through a gate keyed to madness, or perhaps despair, and was now in the Outlands. He believes that all this is merely a hallucination, the culmination of his visions, that he is suffering in the bare moments before his body is dashed on the rocks at the bottom of that cliff. Bashers look at him funny when he says that they’re just in his imagination, but they’ve heard and seen stranger things.

So, Marius is a psionicist. In the year or so he’s been on the Planes he’s learned to focus his mental potential into clairsentient abilities, although he just thinks this is evidence that the reality he perceives is just a hallucination that he can alter with an exertion of will.

He’s a natural fit for the Sign of One, whose members each already believe that they’re the only mind and that the whole multiverse is in their head. To make him a playable personality, though, I’m making him greedy for every moment of this “hallucination” that he can enjoy, considering that he thinks it will all end with his shattering death at any moment. In that direction he could become a Sensate, just looking to experience all and everything he can, with the license that nothing he does is of real consequence anyway.

I’m not sure if he’s actually mad, or whether he just thinks he is. If he goes Signer he’ll be maintaining and strengthening his belief, but if he doesn’t there’s the potential to bend his character arc toward discovering that, no, he’s not mad, no, this isn’t just a hallucination, and yes, he is really in the Outer Planes and his family is dead or scattered.

We managed to play a few hours in the first session, and it went well. The only rolls involved a composition that Marius wrote for the monks of the Three Waters monastery of Chantea on the spireward road from Faunel, and for a check to activate his Know Location power to discover those details of geography. There was plenty of interesting stuff to do, a two-year-gap in all the characters’ memories to account for, a mysterious, bearded, one-eyed man who brought them to the monastery, and residents of a small village on the way to Faunel that are nearly all suffering from some kind of mind-dulling enchantment.

The other members of the party include a (Primer) depressed blacksmith whose wife left him for a beefier blacksmith, and a rogue modron wizard who is trying to be inconspicuous and who had some of the best lines of the night.

Marius asks, “You’re a modron, aren’t you? I’ve heard of your kind.”

Ficus Softball Palin XMCVIII¹ is visibly deflated and laments, “Discovered!”

This game is going to be a lot of fun.