Back in the Day...

... after my mother got me into D&D (because she wanted an excuse to paint minis) in 1983, she found out about the controversy surrounding it, and so made me sit down and watch Mazes and Monsters as a serious cautionary tale.

... I bought a lot of games (or more accurately, had Mom and Grandma buy me a lot of games), and so I would tank the game we currently played in order to try out this new thing. Yes, I ended up playing a lot of games that way, but at the expense of a real lasting campaign for anything... ever.

... I feared that the fun and success of a campaign was determined by player success, so oh boy did I fudge and fudge and fudge and fudge rolls to make sure nobody ever died. Three first level PCs (with "gifted" magic items) taking out the moathouse from T1. A fourth level thief killing the green dragon from X1 single-handedly. ayyyy...

... I invented my own adventures and NPCs to inhabit Dungeonland and made them suitably bizarre, and ran that for people during lunch in elementary school. Other kids familiar with D&D immediate told me I was playing it wrong and was an idiot.

... I'd completely blocked these people from memory until just now... I have been saying my first encounters with people who had already been familiar with D&D before I met them didn't happen before high school. That's not true! I did have encounters with people already familiar with D&D early on. But because I was very unpopular in school for probably dozens of reasons, legitimate and not, my encounters with them were short and unpleasant. I thought the D&D commonality would help us become friends, but what happened was these more "experienced" DMs (remember we're talking about kids 10 and younger) just used the game to abuse me further, and I cut out trying to game with them almost immediately.

... I can't remember if this was elementary or middle school, but I had a player who didn't like a call I made, and he was in some sort of "tough guy" stage, so he actually stood up and slapped me. I took him down (in real life, not the game) and so we were "even" but that's the sort of thing I dealt with running games (and may have contributed to that second point above).

... while playing D&D with my best friend and his little brother one time, their older brother storms in, pissed as hell because my friend had left a save disc (a 5 1/4" floppy for Bard's Tale or Ultima or Wizard's Crown or a game like that) idle in the computer for hours, and "They melt when you do that!" and beat the hell out of him (or so it seemed at the time, I don't recall lasting bruises or anything) on the spot. Game over.

... one of the many games I tried to run was Runequest, that edition set in Europe with the huge box. I'd missed the whole "Runequest is the sophisticated fantasy RPG!" type of thing and had no idea. It was just a new game and I wanted to try it! Unfortunately the character sheets had naked character silhouettes so instead of playing the game, my players drew boobs and nipples and dicks on the character sheets and I got pissy and so much for this big expensive box my mother just bought me.

... in high school I tried recruiting a player once, but a couple of people from around the neighborhood that played in my games sometimes had a problem with him from previous interaction so they beat him up when he came to my house.

... also in high school, at a local convention this one guy who ran a D&D campaign I was in decided that he was going to kill off all the "newbies" (younger kids we didn't know) at the con game so he could run a "serious" adventure for his regular crew.

... in high school, when a few of us had hooked up with some older gamers who ran great and serious games (and introduced us to Justifiers and Bureau 13!), I ran a D&D game for that group. I was so nervous about running for gaming veterans twice my age that I completely screwed up and it was a shit game and I never got to try running a game again with that group.

...I spent most of the post-high school 90s not gaming because I wanted to play D&D, and that was passé. When I left home to go to college, Vampire was the hot new thing (and White Wolf was based in a suburb of Atlanta, where I just moved). Magic: The Gathering killed a lot of role-playing when it came out as well, but the Vampire thing was brutal. I had no clue about goth culture, never had so much as been on a date at that time, and hadn't ever been in a social situation where anyone besides my mother and her friends ever drank alcohol, so reading the Vampire rulebook was both socially threatening to me as well as conceptually foreign (I was thinking Van Helsing and monster hunting when this one guy was pitching it to me). I've still never played it (and would and have passed on offers to). And I still strive to this day to stay out of social situations where alcohol is involved, by the way, although concerts really ruin that, don't they? Anyway, I was a D&D pariah in the 90s.

... I was, however, involved with one D&D campaign in 94 or so. These two guys ran as co-DMs, and everything ran smoothly and I remember it as a pleasant game. However, this ended when two things happened - I discovered girls right around the time my character was magically changed to evil alignment. I don't remember what triggered that but it was definitely a curse or something else DM-initiated. So I ditched the MacGuffin of the campaign and screwed the party over because "It's what my character would do," and then miraculously had Saturdays (or was it Sundays?) free after that. I think the rest of the guys continued on as a group.

... I got into a huge fight with my girlfriend. In the mid/late-90s, I was going to start a 2e campaign. I was ready to get back into gaming by running a serious game now that I was a grown-up! My group was going to consist of my girlfriend, my roommate, and his girlfriend. My girlfriend was the first to roll up a character. She wanted to be a ranger! I don't remember which character generation method I decided on, but her rolls were not good enough to be a ranger. And I would not budge. I was going to be serious this time and finally game as an adult with adults, I wasn't going for this kiddie 'gimme' crap! I think I even pulled out the "maybe the character is allergic to trees?" suggestion from the DMG. That's where it turned from a disagreement to a fight. The campaign didn't even get to its first session.

So as you can see, I obviously play older versions of D&D just because I'm nostalgic and my current gaming and this blog and all my efforts are all entirely efforts to reclaim the glorious gaming of my youth. The fact that I've been running traditional games continuously now for three and a half years (OK, about six months of that using HERO, admittedly) is just my way of showing I'm afraid of getting old.

More on Religions in Game Worlds - Religious Classes and Demonic Monsters

Continuing the series... it's fun (!) that a lot of people have been talking about this sort of thing around the blogs.

People have mentioned the idea of gods being something that are combatable and that take a direct role in human affairs (like the Greek gods). These aren't the sort of gods I'm talking about. If you kill Demeter, do no more crops grow? If you kill Apollo, is there no more music? If you kill Zeus, does the sky disappear (instant and total dissolution of the atmosphere and the exposure of the entire world to sudden depressurization and hard vaccuum would be one hell of a way to end a campaign...) If the answer to this sort of thing is "no," then we're not talking about the same thing.

Powerful entities calling themselves gods because they can aren't the sort of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about entities that define the universe. Entities that actually regulate and define things and are the conscious embodiments or maybe creators of concepts like "the Sun," "Death," "War," "Fertility." Or maybe incorporeal consciousness that is on a greater level of existence, if not necessarily tied to a certain domain or portfolio. That's the lens through which to view my earlier posts on the subject.

I've already talked about not using "Good" and "Evil" in this setup. Priests may be specialized but they (and the people!) would worship the entire pantheon, and the gods themselves would be both good and evil (just as the rain can be both life-giving and terribly destructive).

But that's all good and well until you factor in clerical magic and paladins, as well as angels and demons and other religiously-inspired creatures.

Games with clerical magic by definition have changed the definition of faith. Belief is not something to be debated - the gods exist in some form. It's not an issue to allow clerics of various alignments under the same religious umbrella. Just take the mental and personality part out of the priestly requirements and separate what makes a character divinely favored from what the human religion requires.

In campaigns, being a spellcasting cleric should be different than being a priest anyway (and yeah, I'll state that as a universal truth), but if one's alignment (or whatever way you define morality in your game) is irrelevant to being a priest (or cleric), then each religion (or defined however you like, either involving one god or a pantheon) would have specific sets of rites and requirements for the granting of both a priestly station and the granting of clerical powers. Funny would be a situation where the human religion is clueless and is very far off from accepting the true divine will that creates spell-casting clerics.

Because clerical spells are granted by divine favor (and if they're not, you really need a good campaign explanation of why clerics and magic-users are different), it is conceivable that some recipients of clerical ability aren't even intentionally receiving them... or particularly cooperative with the idea! I'd stay away from that sort of thing with PC clerics though, because you're always one poisoned trap away from the possibility of somebody rolling up a new cleric for the group, and a succession of unwilling godly tools would just be silly.

Remember that religion, especially for those specially anointed, isn't just belief or devotion, but service, and if getting these powers were easy, everyone would do it. Who wouldn't want to cure diseases? Or curse an enemy... (say goodbye to restricting the reversed spells to only one alignment type under this way of things!)

Defining what a person needs to do to be a priest, and what they need to do to be a spell-casting cleric, can make for interesting campaign situations. What if the priestly orders of a certain god required vows of poverty and chastity, while the deity itself didn't care about such things, for one example? Religion doesn't always follow the will of the gods, even if it thinks it does. And as long as certain things are done correctly, the deity might not much care about the extra things the human worshippers invent in its name.

So OK, campaign religion can be as confused and vague as real-life religion, even when spells are on the line.

What about paladins? Or druids?

Druids only make sense in this setup if we're talking 2e clerics, with their specialized spell lists. (and good luck getting a player in the typical adventuring campaign to choose a God of Peace and Prosperity and its pile of not so immediately useful spells... :P :P :P) Otherwise, why the different powers? Certainly there can be verisimilitudinous (I love that word) explanations, but if normal clerics already have a pantheon to draw powers from, a reason why the druid would be different would have to be pretty darn good.

(My campaign world is more or less monotheistic and thus dodges this issue. I can say that clerics are worshippers of "All," while any druids are worshippers of the old pagan ways. Funny since the rules I've been running with this past year and a half don't have druids as part of the core rules!)

Paladins are difficult for me, since the idea of the class just seems to be a duplicate of the cleric concept (religious warrior) to begin with. But assuming you want to keep paladins in the mix as a concept - and I mean a real paladin, the "must be Lawful Good" shining beacon of everything noble and honorable, not the 'every god gets one' and 'nidalap' inversions (as we called them when I was a pre-teen... Gary would have been so proud!) - you need further explanations.

On one hand, all these explanations could tend to get really tedious, especially if none of this is any more than background flavor in your campaign. On the other hand, if you're going for a more involved world and not just dungeon-of-the-week, just the most basic beginnings of answers to all these questions will bring your world to life very quickly. In the real world, religious attitudes in many ways defines what a society looks like, so asking these questions first when starting a campaign may be a great method for world-building.

Again, my current game (BFRPG) doesn't have the paladin class, and with my campaign world being monotheistic, the context of the paladin's influences (King Arthur, Three Hearts and Three Lions, Charlemagne, and what have you) would cause no difficulty anyway. But in a polytheistic setting? I have no idea. Good grief, this whole thing about religion and gods is starting to sound like a campaign to stay the hell away from AD&D with its weird religious classes and too-fine alignment scheme. Keep it Basic and Law/Chaos, haha!

When it comes to demons and angels and all that... well, it's difficult to discuss them without resorting to cop-out non-answers. Clerical powers don't seem to work so much on good/evil as they do on extra-planar forces. Protection from Evil works just as well against an angel as a demon as an earth elemental.

So what's the definition of an angel or demon in a universe where the gods are themselves both good and evil? I'd say it's simply any extra-planar being. If it's helping you, it's an angel. If it's hurting you, it's a demon. Seriously, the only reason we think of demons and solars and modrons and xorns in such different manners is because the Monster Manual tells us to and the Players Handbook told us that demons come from the Abyss, elementals from their own set of planes, etc.

If you throw out standard AD&D cosmology (and why shouldn't you?), there's just "here" and "not here." Your average inhabitant of your game world isn't going to bother to differentiate a Type VI demon from a fire elemental from an efreet from a salamander. They're all demons, as would be any extra-planar creature, except those specific extra-planar creatures that an individual culture would be taught are "angels." If you're not Asian (or your campaign equivalent), then you're not likely to be too happy or calm about it when a Ki-Rin shows up, if you think angels look like handsome men with wings.

If we throw away the cosmology and just have an "other" place (or an infinite number of "other" places), then we can play thought games. Think of the variety of life on Earth. Then factor in that a normal campaign world probably assumes all of that... and more. Nothing has gone extinct (cavemen and dinosaurs show up in many campaign worlds, so what else didn't die out?). Plus there are all the additional sapient humanoids that aren't in the real world (elves, orcs, dwarves, etc etc), not to mention fantastic creatures like dragons and unicorns, all native to the campaign world. Add in the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life.

Now we can play with the idea that the infinite "other" realm, whether broken up into individual "planes" or "dimensions" or not, can be easily assumed to be as diverse as our own world. They don't have to be - an incredibly simple dimension works just as well for an alien environment - but it does create a stunningly simple explanation of why there would be so many weird things in so many forms. The possibilities are endless and they will each have their own tribes and characteristics.

An intruiging possibility is that there actually isn't anywhere else but our own dimension, and all the different forms of these extra-planar creatures are created entirely from the imaginations of the summoner. Forman the Summoner thinks he's summoning a flame-spewing demon, so that's what arrives. Herbert the Druid thinks he's summoning an earth spirit, so that's what pops up. Legends and folklore and ignorance that created fairytales in our world actually make the fictional creatures real in the campaign world.

Where do souls go after death? If gods exist, and if undead exist, and if there is reincarnation and resurrection and all that as the spell lists show, then there is definitely an in-game spirit and consciousness distinct from the biological life of a body. You don't have to define this, and to recreate a trip to Hades or recreating the plot from Erik the Viking doesn't mean that where you see the dead is actually where the dead go (a mortal going to "Valhalla" just might be questing to find one hell of a seance parlor), but to definitively answer this is to make players think they can get around using magic to raise the dead... but it's common in fiction and folklore for souls to go to the places assigned by certain rituals, so being sacrificed becomes much more horrible than the physical atrocity and proper last rites become crucial...

If we're rethinking D&D cosmology, what of planar travel? Making these changes will alter how many spells work. Contact Other Plane certainly needs reworking. What of the nature of the ethereal and astral planes? The whole assumption of inner and outer planes would need to change. My thoughts?

For Contact Other Plane, change the percentages to be based on a magic-user's combined level and intelligence, rather than "planes removed." Make the ethereal and astral planes one and the same, or maybe the astral plane becomes a dream-realm, or something, but either way, they do not become gateways to further planes and should be connected to our world. Since these methods won't be "connecting flights" to further planes, you just need to add a planar travel spell to the spell lists, perhaps making each individual destination dimension its own spell if you don't want things to get too far-fetched.

And none of this has to eliminate any previous adventure possibilities. You want to play Q1? Instead of Lolth living on whatever plane of the abyss, she's just got her own subdimension, not intrinsically connected to any others except for the types of gates shown in the adventure itself. The drow clerics may worship Lolth and think they're getting clerical spells from her, but Lolth being a crafty demon has simply made the divine rites of some other truly divine power part of her own worship, so the drow clerics gain their spells and worship Lolth and never realize their power is actually coming from elsewhere. (Or they might realize, and that's why certain houses are now worshipping something else...)

So there it is. I hope this long post is a bit more coherent than the last one, but aside from any discussion stemming from the posts themselves, I think I'm done with the subject for a good long while. Maybe. :D

Let the Function Define the Form - Notes on Death Frost Doom

I'm terrified.

You see, I sent out the review copies of Death Frost Doom today.

(They're going to Grognardia, Goblinoid Games, Mythmere Games, Brave Halfling Publishing, Troll Lord Games, Elf Lair Games, Fight On!, Goodman Games, Kenzer & Co, Black Blade Publishing, Paizo, and Adventure Game News... as I figure out better who ignores my mailings and who people trust, this list will mutate, contract, or expand)

While I know the adventure works for my style of running games, and the last people to play the full version of the adventure enjoyed it (see here, here, and here), it is not the typical D&D style adventure. I have no idea how it will translate to other people reading the text, gathering the atmosphere and deciding that indeed this is something that should be publicly talked about (and in positive terms!), or maybe even run as part of their own campaigns (which is its entire purpose).

It would be just typical to spend a few hundred euros updating my hardware and going through this business registration rigamarole just to see reviews along the lines of, "Raggi can't write to save his balls. This sucks."

My immediate concern is the layout of the dungeon. Gabor Lux's definitive essay on dungeon mapping and good dungeon design (here) presents an intimidating standard. And I've intentionally ignored and in many ways defied that standard in Death Frost Doom (and in the upcoming No Dignity in Death as well, but that dungeon is considerably smaller and not the main environment for that adventure so it's not as major of an issue).

I'm just not into big dungeons for the sake of them, and I feel Lux's analysis works better for large dungeons. For all the traditional gaming elements I enjoy and fill adventures with, I don't much use large dungeons in my games. I like to ask, "Who built this? And Why?" to satisfy in-game explanations, and then a heaping dose of, "What situations do I want to see the players react to?" The answers to those questions will determine what the place looks like, and in my mind it very rarely looks like that ideal dungeon layout linked above.

In fact, a lot of the dungeons I make for my weekly games are of a limited selection: Evil cults could build dungeons. Natural caverns with their own little ecosystem, yeah, and dwarves build great big underground cities/labyrinths. The more ideal "game dungeon" designs are usually done with a bit of eye-winking, as with the dungeon that was made to guard a shrine (face it, who else besides a bunch of really out-there religious lunatics are going to build an inefficiently planned labyrinthine complex?), with the human guardians there not to stop the PCs, but to be monster-wranglers, stocking the dungeon to prevent the unworthy from finding the oracle.

Most "dungeons" I present are a bit mundane in layout, because I can't satisfy myself as to their internal logic any other way. To me, playing Dungeons and Dragons should be more involved than a "live-action" version of the Dungeon boardgame, so to speak. The "dungeon as mythic underworld" approach is certainly valid, but I use that for certain things and not a universal rule of dungeons in my game. And if it's not in my game, why would it be in the things I publish?

Not that I think Death Frost Doom is a shitty dungeon by any means; just that it has a different feel to its exploration and a specific focus. It's about presenting an atmosphere and encouraging players to open Pandora's Box, and in a lot of ways the adventure is about what happens when they do so.

To me the question of "What will the PCs do when X happens?" is a legitimate adventure format, especially when X has to be triggered by direct player action. By reading the blogs one starts to feel that this sort of thing is considered "un-old school," and I at once don't care (I run my game as I like, not according to what other people say the game is or should be) and worry about perceptions of my work (this being a commercial release for general use, after all). The way I reconcile this supposed contradiction is to just sit back and let the players trigger X on their own, or trick them into doing it, but absolutely not forcing them to do so.

Death Frost Doom gives you a great big X to play with, and it is from the point of X, and not the entry point of the dungeon, that "which way do we go?" becomes truly relevant - and there is no one correct route from there, but of course some are better than others.

In fact, my last playtest session went in a direction I didn't even think possible, because of PC actions within the rather linear prelim area of the dungeon that worried me enough to write this post. I didn't expect their actions, and it's certainly not written there in any form of the text (in fact by reading the text you'd get the impression that what they did after X is simply impossible!), but their decisions and choices earlier on saved them from the lion's share of grief and danger after the fact.

ahhh, hell with it. I've just got "Opening Night" jitters. The adventure rocks.

*shakes with anticipation... damn you, slow paperwork, damn you!*

I just got an email from Joseph Browning.

James,

I'm pleased to say that the voting members of Your Games Now have decided that they would like to have your products sold next to theirs and your company in our cooperative venture!

So LotFP: RPG pdfs will be available at Your Games Now.


To the question of "When?" I have my next appointment with a caseworker on Wednesday to decide if I'm to get that business start-up grant. I'm certainly more well-armed with both information on the market as well as details of how I'll operate and publicize between the Noble Knight and Your Games Now deals, as well as the upcoming Roolipelaaja interview.

But after that recommendation is made, I'm told it will be a week or so before I receive a final decision, and then it's literally a matter of going to an office and registering, and then LotFP: RPG will be Open For Business and have stuff On Sale. The LotFP: RPG website is being revamped to look more professional.

And I'm rather excited right now. And nervous. I tell you, if this whole venture fails, it's not like I'm going to have any excuses. :D

Right now I'm going to have dinner, then I'm going to sign my contract and send it back to Mr. Browning, and then I'm going to ready the promotional copies of Death Frost Doom now that I know what the sales outlets are going to be. Then prepare the promo blurbs to use for DFD... and then get back to work on the unfinished projects so I can prove that I can put something out more frequently than once every eight to twelve months!

See you in Helsinki at the end of the month, Joe. :)

My Tentative Ropecon Game Schedule

Ropecon is July 31 - August 2, and I'm planning to run games on the first two days. Here is what I submitted to the organizers:

July 31st 4pm
Original D&D (1974)/Swords & Wizardry - The Spire of Iron and Crystal
4 - 10 players
4 Hours

July 31st 8pm
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition - Cairn of the Skeleton King
4 - 10 players
4 Hours

August 1st 12:01am
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition - Tomb of Horrors
4 - 10 players
Until Death, Victory, or Everyone Quits! ... or 6am

August 1st 12pm
"Basic/Expert" Dungeons and Dragons/Labyrinth Lord - Castle Amber
4 - 8 players
4 Hours

August 1st 4pm
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition - The Fane of the Poisoned Prophecies
4 - 6 players
4 Hours

August 1st 8pm
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition - Sanctum of the Stone Giant Lord
4 - 9 players
4 Hours

August 2nd 12:01am
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition - Slave Pits of the Undercity
4 - 9 players
Until Death, Victory, or Everyone Quits!

I'm run the Tomb before, and I ran Slave Pits way back when, but otherwise, these will all be first-time runs for me.

One thing I was thinking of doing was saving myself the rules confusion and running everything under Labyrinth Lord rules, but I'm worried because AD&D assumes a bit more powerful characters pound-for-pound so I'm worried about inviting an even worse bloodbath than some of these are going to be.

Old Geezer Brings Down the Hammer...

... he's good at that. Remind me to stay out of his reach. :D

The quote from here about this.

Okay, so Skip Williams finally admits he was one of the 13 year old kids who kept getting his character killed by Gary and Rob because he had his head up his ass.

Note the comment about "aribitrary and capricious GMs." Good GMs aren't, and neither Gary nor Rob ever were.

About 1974 there was a sudden influx of younger high school age kids into Gary's mostly-adult game. We are still seeing the aftereffects.

Also, I was Skip Williams' patrol leader in Boy Scouts too.

The Face of Old School in Finland

Nothing is definite in publishing, and this might all be cut down to a sidebar, small column, or be left on the cutting room floor completely... but...

Today I was interviewed by Jukka Särkijärvi for Roolipelaaja magazine. The interview lasted just about two and a half hours, and I'm told the plan is for it to be a three or four page article. We discussed the Old School Renaissance, my personal history with RPGs and being in Finland, and my upcoming publishing activities (I sent him advance copies of Death Frost Doom and No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides).

He said (not unprompted, I must admit) that I could end up being the face of Old School in Finland.

If he doesn't decide to focus on my weird stories and crucify me in the article, anyway. :D

He's also asked for a picture of me to run with the article. What do you guys think... would the one at the end of this post be good? Or the year-and-a-half old pic I use as my avatar here and on the forums? Or what?

Hanging in the Balance (Abridged)

Yesterday's post was one of those that I knew was out of control, but I posted it anyway because, well, I'd spent the time writing all that stuff, what did it matter that I couldn't tie it all together coherently.

Here is the short version, including the thought inspired by a comment:

Good and Evil as Cosmic Powers are useless concepts. Don't use them.

Good vs Evil Cosmic Conflicts are bad because PCs really don't have much choice as to what to do (what, turn down the mission to save the world from Great Evil?) and failure really isn't an option if the campaign is to continue afterwards anyway. That's awful gaming right there.

Divine beings are going to be portrayed through our human perspective anyway, and even the weirdest creature or purest concept is going to be anthropomorphisized so using Gods as actors within your campaign just cheapens human-based plots by dialing up the WOW factor to 11 for no reason.

A religion doesn't have any bearing on the character or disposition of its believers or its priests. A good god (as opposed to a Really Powerful Monster) will still have evil priests and worshippers, and an evil god will still have good priests and worshippers.

In a polytheistic setting, priests and worshippers won't be "dedicated" to one god, and will instead worship all of them.

Jokes about gods made of poo are hilarious.

How this relates to clerics, paladins, druids, demons, devils, and angels... that post is to come.

Hanging in the Balance

The past couple of days I've been talking about Good and Evil, and how the supernatural extremes of the two sides might be completely indistinguishable from a mortal on the ground. So how would one differentiate between the two on a conceptual level, and how to apply that to a game if the mortals don't understand the greater cosmic forces to begin with?

How do characters relate to all this? All this conjecture and theory about the Nature of Things is interesting and all, but without actual playable advice, it's really irrelevant.

First, perhaps some definitions.

Good doesn't mean perfect. Even a Greater Power of Good is going to be imperfect in ways and rub certain people the wrong way and even cause harm on the way to being Good. But for me, a working definition of a Greater Power of Good is one that, if it had its way, everything in existence would be measurably better off. Not to say existence would be a paradise or that certain types wouldn't be perhaps even fundamentally unhappy, but everything would work and people and things would be closer to kum-ba-ya than not. Grampa might still die at some point and you'd be sad, but it would be part of a natural order and it wouldn't be because he was murdered or disease shut down his body prematurely. Maybe you couldn't ever have your favorite food anymore but the abundant sustenance would keep your belly full and your body healthy. (just a couple of human-term examples)

Evil is a damn sight more difficult to define. You can't just reverse Good's definition. "Everything in existence would be measurably worse off"? What, ultimate destruction? Isn't the universe supposed to contract at some point in the future to where existence is wiped out? What, is the universe evil? phaugh! Are we talking a great cosmic sludge of everything/nothing like the Warhammer concept of Chaos? Isn't that just rather like some transcendental philosophy on LSD, with Chaos being really the natural way of things, and it's just the process of becoming one that's rather unpleasant to us Earthly fleshy types?

But Evil generally doesn't work like that. Usually, Things That Work Evil are doing it for their own benefit. The success of Great Evil would mean a great consolidation of power, where all but a very select few are worse off. It sounds like the beginnings of a political screed, but one could say that Evil is a giant Ponzi Scheme of Weal. Malicious (or even Indifferent) Overlords stepping on Great Masses of Suffering.

Or maybe all of the above.

However, one of the failings of Dungeons and Dragons when it comes to deities and in-game religion is assigning alignments to gods and assuming their worshippers should follow suit. Anything that humans would worship is going to be anthropomorphisized. Even if the object of their worship is an oozing ball of shit (literally), worshippers will apply human motivations and emotions to it, and relate them to their own activities. "Faeces the Mighty is angry at the infidels wincing at his Magnificent Odor! Kill them!" "Faeces the Mighty is pleased that his faithful feast on Super Hot Texas Chili on the eve of seeding the fields!"

But most deities, from classical mythology anyway, are not just Great Big Powerful Beings, but are powers representing aspects of the universe. You know, the Sun God, the God of the Water, the Thunder God, that sort of thing. If the deity in question actually does regulate an aspect, and isn't just taking it as a symbol, then that has consequences on a campaign.

First off, the Great Wheel cosmology goes out the window. How many Gods of Death will we need? Sun Gods? If there is going to be a variety of Powers and a polytheistic setup in a game's cosmology, a pecking order has to be established. Maybe different cultures will have their own pantheons in your game, but at the end of the day you need to decide who is In Charge of certain things. Are all of these cultures worshipping the same Sun God under a variety of local names? Or are they all actually different entities? If so... who is In Charge of the sun and who are just the lesser hangers-on?

If there is one God of the Sun (or The Sea, or Death, or Rain, etc), then even though the deity might be of a certain alignment, their worshippers and more importantly priests will not be.

Take Tlaloc (or maybe I should link to Tlālōc). Let's say that the requirement of sacrificing children is actually a requirement of the god and not just some insanity his worshippers came up with. I'd say that was evil, wouldn't you? But only if the god was perfectly capable of delivering things within his domain to worshippers without this sacrifice.

Divine certainly doesn't need to mean omniscient or omnipotent or even effective.

What if the god wasn't even aware of the mortal realm without this sacrifice? Or hated that children had to die but was unable to deliver rain without the portal to the mortal realm being opened by the sacrifice?

Or what if the god was a finkish piece of crap that wallowed in the suffering he demanded in exchange for his gifts? You think in a universe where you don't get rain and all that comes from it (crops! drinking water!) without killing kids, that doing so would be considered evil? Even if Tlaloc was seen as a cruel, oppressive force that needed to be sated in order to deliver what is necessary to life, you don't think that kind, good men would be involved in this situation which, to them, is a natural way of being?

But this is taking real-world mythology and twisting it around for the sake of argument and variety. (Not offending any of you real-world Tlaloc-worshippers, am I?) Let's go real-world modern-day religion. Jesus Christ. I've never met anyone, atheist, Satanist, anybody, who thought that Jesus Christ was anything but a good man (the greater power he represents, and the significance of his death, are different issues for purposes of this argument). Supposedly the Christian religion is based on the teachings of Christ. Yet I'm sure nobody here need take any time to think of awful, horrible people that are ordained Christian priests. I'm sure everyone can thing of events that can't be described as anything other than atrocities committed at various times during history in the name of Christ. But at the same time, I'm sure every single one of us knows decent men and/or women of the cloth.

A religion doesn't have any bearing on the character or disposition of its believers or its priests.

Also keep in mind that the very existence of a pantheon means that people in general are not going to worship just one god, and priests will generally be priests of the pantheon more than any one entity within it. Perhaps priests will specialize (actually, they definitely would), but a priest of the God of Justice is certainly going to also worship and participate in rituals to the God of Death and the God of Disease, if even just to appease them so they don't strike. They won't blaspheme or fight other priests or gods as a matter of course.

(In such a setup, would druids really exist as a separate class than a cleric? What's the difference in a polytheistic society between worshipping the God of Thunder or a God of Nature or nature itself?)

But the key to the discussion at hand is that once you're thinking in terms of religion and how people relate to these powers, rather than just the nature of the power itself, then the power itself is almost irrelevant. How Good or Evil it is doesn't make a whit of difference on a human level, because humans are both good and evil and neither Good nor Evil.

At this point, the gods become just another rung on the hierarchical ladder, just a more flashy title than "King" or "Emperor." Deities and Demigods does indeed become just a Monster Manual for higher levels. So why use them? What value does the Cosmic and the gods and their religions have beyond local cultural significance (in which case the things about the Gods are really about the priests and kings)?

None.

One of the points of the previous posts on Good and Evil is that We Don't Get It, So Stop It! Why use these alien agents of good and evil in substantive ways if in the end it's just a monster with more hit dice and an array of innate magical powers with the same motivations and schemes that a wizard or minor baron might have?

In the real world, religion matters. Whether there is an All-Powerful Being out there at all, whether it's benevolent or not, and whether or not it gives a crap about us or not is fundamental to the nature of our universe and our understanding of it. Getting it Right and The Search For Truth are absolutely important elements of our spiritual existence.

In a game... what? "You have achieved singularity and absolutely wisdom to the nature of all things" really doesn't mean anything. "You are having a crisis of faith!" is a role-playing hook no more serious than "You seek your long-lost brother." Each is exactly as intense and lasts exactly as long as the players involved choose them to. Adventurers adventure and take risks and go out there and do things. That's what the game's about, and a character's philosophies and assigned spiritual qualities are only relevant to the point where they emerge in play through their character's actions. Kwai Chang Caine just ended up kicking people a lot, you know?

Using these outer powers as actors in your games will only cheapen the actual setting. It's one thing if you're starting out with a cosmic game and planehopping is the whole deal. Fine. But if your game has any sort of verisimilitudinous grounding that you wish to be familiar to players, going for the extradimensional pizazz will kill it dead. What, are you going to cross the Five Dimensions and combat the Void Which Contains All Pain... and come home and help that cattle farmer deal with the trolls that's thinning his herd? If you've stared at a Greater Power of the Multiverse, is a political struggle on Earth going to seem like a big deal anymore? *yawn*

Any evil you can think of can be assigned to a human. Any good you can think of can be assigned to a human. Philosophical differences need only be so deep to assign motivations and actions to NPCs and hopefully PCs. Otherwise... it's a complete waste of time. Are you writing a novel? Your little home version of the Silmarillion? Or are you going to get on playing a role-playing game?

Invent your gods and your pantheons. Give them brief personalities and domains, and dress up their priests in appropriate garb and come up with a few holidays and unique rituals if it's important for your game. Then forget about them. Really. Any plot or scenario that involves a god acting, just assign it to a priest instead and move forward. D3 becomes a lot more interesting if there is no Q1 to move on to.

Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out. But between Good and Evil is the life we actually know, and by sticking to that, as strictly or as loosely as you prefer in your games, you can prevent your campaign from jumping that last threshold of illogic and absurdity and unreality that ever gamer has that will cause him to just not take the proceedings all that seriously anymore.

And now that I've just jumped the shark in my little series, there is still more to come in the coming days. Clerics (and paladins and druids!) and what this sort of game philosophy means for divinely powered characters, and the question of demons and devils and all the little planar beasties that would make a game world duller for their absence... along with the angelic deva/solar counterparts, and how to actually use them in a manner consistent with what I've been saying.

Pondering the Greater Good

Yesterday I talked about how if the cruelty of man is in many ways inconceivably evil to the average person, how could we understand supernatural evil?

Today I wonder the same thing... about the forces of good.

I'm not interested in goodness in terms of calm and peaceful times. In the context of a role-playing game, such times might as well not exist. If things are calm and happy and that situation is not at all threatened, chances are your game's focus will quickly move elsewhere. Content characters make for bad adventurers.

Good under stress, now that's interesting. Good that's threatened, good that has lost the ability to deal with the world on its own terms... that's what this post is about. Anyone can go berserk when threatened and tear their enemy to teeny tiny bits when threatened, and not be blamed for it. But acting justifiably is not the same as being good in my eyes. Adversity introduces a man to himself, as the saying goes.

It's difficult to think of goodness under pressure in the real world, as life is almost never about good guys and bad guys. That's one reason why it's fun to play around in imaginary worlds where good and evil are more concrete entities. Even in games with a bit of moral complexity, figuring out the right thing to do may be difficult, but making the good choice is often pretty easy.

I've thought of an unquestionably good thing.

D-Day. The assault on Normandy Beach has to be considered a turning point of World War II, correct? And stopping the Nazis can't in any way be considered a bad thing, right? Taking up the fight against evil is a good thing to do, right? But for the soldiers on the ground, that was an absolute killing field. A slaughter. The Allied Command knew they were sending countless young men to die, ripped apart by bullet, bomb, and mine. But wasn't that the right thing for them to do in the situation they were in?

Real-world religion probably has the examples most applicable to the point of conceptualizing supernatural good. Look to the Old Testament. There is some righteous destruction (in more than one sense of the term) happening there, and things which seem inexcusably cruel to me. But certainly Jews and Christians do not think that the actions of God in the Old Testament are evil. Quite the opposite.

I would think that if the PCs in a role-playing game were to become agents of a Good power, or at least become involved in the schemes of the same, they wouldn't feel very good about the situation at all. I daresay from the perspective of mortals (who would absolutely not be informed of the Grand Plan, and probably be unable to ever comprehend it anyway), there would be no observable difference between the forces of Good and Evil.

In a multiverse where Absolute Good and Absolute Evil are in conflict, who's to say that the utter destruction of the PCs' entire plane of existence isn't just a tragic necessity, a smaller loss for infinitely greater gain elsewhere, in Good's efforts to fight Evil?

"Would you ever really want to see an angel?"