A couple days ago, I talked about some of the oddities surrounding the ligth and darkness spells in the core rulebooks. The genesis of that post was a collection of light-and-darkness themed spells I was creating for an adventure. (I really like the idea of using rare knowledge — particularly spellbooks filled with non-core spells — as a type of treasure.)

As I tend to do, once I started exploring the concept of light and darkness spells I got a little carried away. When I stepped back and discovered that I had cranked out 20 pages worth of spells, I realized that what I really had on my hands here was a true mini-supplement.

So I spent a few more days laying out the book, developing artwork, creating the cover, and going through my proofreading cycles. The result is Spells of Light and Darkness: The Art of the Flame and the Void.

THE ART OF THE FLAME AND VOID…

Spells of Light and Dark: The Art of the Flame and Void contains 50+ spells themed around magical light and darkness. While many may merely dabble with the unrefracted glory of magical light and the stygian forces of magical darkness, there are great wonders and terrible powers to be harnessed by those willing to master their might…

Animate Shadow
Banefire
Blacksight
Blinding Burst
Blinding Light
Blindsight Cocoon
Control Shadows
Dark Shroud
Eclipse
Endless Daylight
Endless Night
Endless Twilight
Flare
Gloomsight
Hidden Shadow
Incandescent Burst
Midnight Shroud
Moonlight
Obfuscate the Hidden Eye
Orb of Darkness
Orb of Light
Radiant Infusion
Shadow Chains
Shadowsheen
Shadow Spy
Shroud of Brilliance
Starflame
Touch of Shadow
True Darkness
Unholy Darkness
Unholy Gloom
Utterdark Shroud
Wall of Brilliance
Wall of Shadows

… and many more!

RPGNow – Lulu PDF – Lulu Print
20 pages

These have been around for awhile, so it’s likely that some of you have already seen them. But Monty Oum is made of awesome, and therefore I must share him with all those who have not seen his work.

Each video is just a no-punches-pulled, wall-to-wall blitzkrieg showcasing of awesome fighting. It reminds me of XKCD’s lament of yet another summer passing without a tmindless big-budget action movie. In Random DM Tips: Running Combat, I talked about taking a really great fight film and narrating the action on screen as an exercise for developing a larger descriptive repertoire at the game table. If you’re looking for some truly epic gaming, Monty Oum’s stuff is a great place to start.

Since I’m a compulsive quibbler, I will point that:

(1) If you’re going to use the Burly Brawl music from The Matrix Reloaded (in Haloid), I probably would’ve steered clear of actually reusing some of the fight choreography from the same movie.

(2) The fights can get a little repetitive in places. The result can feel a little bloated, with bodies just flying around without much purpose or result. But this more than made up for in the major set-pieces, some of which are incredibly clever and very well done.

(3) In the Dead Fantasy videos, some of the choreography ends up feeling like screen-caps from a fighter game — repetitive combo moves and the likes. Obviously Dead or Alive is a fighter game, but it’s not like the Final Fantasy characters are lining up for turn-based combat.

So we’ve slapped an ill-conceived and pork-laden bailout bandage onto the current economic crisis.

But that’s all it is: A bandage. This bailout bandage contains no solutions for the fundamental problems that led to the current crisis. It’s the functional equivalent of pulling over a drunk driver, taking away the bottle of rum he’s clutching in his right hand, and then giving him back the car keys.

So the next step must be to address the fundamental failures that led to this crisis. It’s the only way to prevent another.

(1) The lack of regulation that allowed unfettered greed to flourish on Wall Street must be addressed. This means re-instituting the regulations that have been obliterated by the last thirty years of bankrupt Republican strategy — a strategy based entirely upon the facilitation of greed.

(2) The bad mortgages lying at the heart of the current crisis must be alleviated. Main Street has been guilty of making some bad decisions in its own right, but the middle class has also been victimized by predatory lending practices.

This means that bad mortgages held by homeowners (not speculators) need to be re-structured to ensure reasonable and consistent monthly payments. Barack Obama has proposed giving bankruptcy judges the power to restructure these bad mortages, but in my opinion that’s not good enough: If we see these people hurtling towards the cliff of financial ruination, we shouldn’t wait for them to go over it before trying to pull them back up.

And this also can’t be an effort limited to just bailing out those currently in trouble. It also means regulating the mortgage industry so that these types of bad mortgages can no longer be created. For example, adjustable rate mortgages were legalized in the same legislation that led to the Savings & Loan crisis.

(3) We can no longer slave our economy to the fate of a small handful of companies. Senator Bernie Sanders says that “if they’re too big to fail, then they’re too big to exist”.

Unfortunately, in the wake of the current crisis, we have actually exacerbated this problem instead of alleviating it. Mergers of the largest banks have resulted in even larger banks. This solves a short-term problem, but we’ve simply replaced it with a bigger problem down the road.

The current crisis clearly demonstrates the truism that, the larger they are, the harder they fall. These large institutions, on which our economy is apparently completely dependent, must be broken up into smaller entities. We shouldn’t be keeping all of our eggs in one basket.

(4) A happy balance must be found in regards to mark-to-market accounting rules. These rules (requiring that the value of assets be set to their current market value) were put in place as a direct result of Enron’s abuse and downfall. The problem is that they tend to exacerbate downward spirals, particularly when applied to long-term assets, by creating and then reinforcing destructive pricing volatility.

The SEC has now been given the power to suspend the mark-to-market accounting rules. But if they exercise that power to simply remove yet another layer of protective regulation from the system, we’re simply switching one form of economic catastrophe for another.

Newt Gingrich has proposed what appears to be a logical compromise between these two extremes: “Perhaps a three year rolling average to determine mark-to-market prices would be a workable permanent system.”

And now I’ll say something I rarely expect to say: I think Newt Gingrich is right. A three year rolling average for long-term assets evens short-term volatility in the pricing of those assets, without completely disconnecting corporate accounting from any kind of objective reality. (The rest of his proposals, on the other hand, are just the standard Republican refrain of “cut taxes and deregulate”… which shows a rather stubborn inability to learn from past mistakes.)

Now What?

That’s the real question. I’ll admit that I’m not an economic specialist. I don’t know the best way to accomplish these things. (Although you probably couldn’t go too far wrong if you started by rolling back most or all of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.) But it’s clear that these are things that must be done.

Because simply slapping a bandage on an infected wound won’t solve the problem.

And, really, this is just the beginning — a first step. Because the current and most immediate crisis we’re facing is merely the tip of the iceberg. Years of mismanagement under Republican economic theories have left our economy fundamentally dysfunctional. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. But I think this is a decent outline for the first step in the right direction.

There are six ability scores in D&D. And there are six spells for buffing those ability scores:

bear’s endurance – Clr 2, Drd 2, Rgr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
bull’s strength – Clr 2, Drd 2, Pal 2, Sor/Wiz 2
cat’s grace – Brd 2, Drd 2, Rgr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
eagle’s splendor – Brd 2, Clr 2, Pal 2, Sor/Wiz 2
fox’s cunning – Brd 2, Sor/Wiz 2
owl’s wisdom – Clr 2, Drd 2, Pal 2, Rgr 2, Sor/Wiz 2

Okay, I can kinda see the archetypal reasons for the bard, druid, paladin, and ranger getting access to different subsets of these spells.

But given the fact that the cleric’s key role in the party is healer and buffer, why are they missing cat’s grace and fox’s cunning?

It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Never has. In my house rules, the cleric gets access to all six buffs, just like the arcanists do.

Random thought: Given the predilection for PCs to get pumped up on stat boosters, is anyone else struck by the similarity to performance enhancement drugs? This doesn’t have much (if anything) to do with game mechanics, but it can be an interesting insight into the relationship between wandering heroes and the world around them. I think the idea that PCs are, in some sense, doped up further alienates them from the common society. Not only do they wield amazing powers, but their very bodies and minds are being constantly hyped up on mystical enhancements.

One of the things I talked about in D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations is the fact that the game covers a range from sub-normal to super-human powers. I think there’s something particularly interesting about a world where the guy sitting next to you may be able to unleash incredible destructive forces with the flick of a thought. What does it really mean for a common man to live in that kind of world? Even if there’s only one such person in a hundred thousand?

Here are the tent-pole Evocation [light] spells from the core rulebooks:

light – Brd 0, Clr 0, Drd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
darkness – Brd 2, Clr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
daylight – Brd 3, Clr 3, Drd 3, Pal 3, Sor/Wiz 3
deeper darkness – Clr 3

I feel as if one might go mad trying to understand this progression of spells. The druid’s affinity for light spells makes perfect sense, and even the fact that the paladin has access to daylight and not the lesser light spell has some logic to it (since daylight has some martial application).

But what doesn’t make much sense to me is that the arcanists get access to the more powerful daylight, but not the more powerful deeper darkness.

The other odd thing is that the 3.5 darkness and deeper darkness spells actually creates illumination and can be used to light an unlit area: “This spell causes an object to radiate shadowy illumination out to a 20-foot radius.” This is weird enough in its own right, but it gets even weirder when deeper darkness and daylight interact with each other and cancel each other out.

In other words, if you’re in a cave and you cast deeper darkness, you can see. If you’re in a cave and you cast daylight, you can see. But if you cast both deeper darkness and daylight, you can’t see.

These oddities were the result of attempting to re-balance the darkness spells. In all previous editions of the game, darkness had actually created an area of impenetrable darkness (as the name might suggest). But this was considerd too powerful for a 2nd-level spell, and so the “shadowy illumination” formulation was applied as a patch of sorts.

While I tend to agree that darkness was very powerful, the loss of any way to create true magical darkness was an unfortunate loss. Apparently, someone at WotC felt the same way. But their solution was somewhat perverse: In the Spell Compendium there is a spell named blacklight, which creates a true magical darkness which the caster can see through.

Oddly, however, this is a 3rd-level spell which is, in virtually every way, superior to deeper darkness. It can also be cast by arcanists.

I’m not sure what the best solution for the darkness/light spells would be. But I would certainly look at normalizing the level progressions, add more powerful versions of the darkness spells (with matching light spells to provide the natural antithesis of the two sub-types), and smooth out some of the discrepancies in how the various spells interact with each other. I’d probably also look at creating a more powerful version of the light spell to add back in the combat utiltiy of the spell that was stripped out in 3rd Edition.