The Dreaming is a realm which lies “beneath” or “alongside” the world as the mortal races know it. It is a wild and dangerous place, an ever-shifting forest whose shadows and glades hold the greatest of wonders. Mortals sometimes reach it, unwittingly, in their hours of deepest dreaming, and it is said to be the place where all dreams are born. In the Dreaming, one may leave a city forged with towering spires of the finest crystal and lose sight of it within three paces, never to see it again. Or one may be tempted by strange, dancing lights, and never wake from their dreams.

This is what the Dreaming is in words. But what it is in truth is not so easily expressed. To understand the Dreaming, one must learn to feel the Dreaming. To trust the Dreamsong.

THE NATURE OF TIME IN THE DREAMING

The elven scholar Falnafeshnae described three orders within the Dreaming: The Dream That Was, the Dreaming Moment, and the Undreamt (or the Dream That Will Be).

THE DREAMING MOMENT: The Dreaming Moment is now. It is the moment of existence. It is the present tense. It is fleeting. It is ever-changing – it is always present, but it is always passing and it is always going.

In life we rarely live within the moment. Our thoughts dwell in the past or wish upon the future. But in the Dreaming, such wandering ways are dangerous. In the Dreaming it is the Moment that is the touchstone of your experience. It is the bedrock upon which you stand.

It requires absolute mental precision to maintain it. But without it you will be lost.

THE DREAM THAT WAS: Within the Dreaming all things that ever were exist… but also many things that never were or merely might have been. It is uncertain to us whether all of thought originates within the Dreaming and passes through our hands to become reality, or if thought comes from us and then passes through the Dreaming and thus into the waking world. But that is how it is.

THE DREAM THAT WILL BE: Just as all that was lies within the Dreaming, so too is there everything that might be. But such realms are dangerous and uncertain. We will return to them later.

But the secret of the Dreaming is that there is no true distinction between past, present, and future. All are as one in the Dreaming, even if we are not capable of understanding it in totality. That is why we must be careful. That is why we must stand upon our bedrock in the Dreaming Moment that is.

Meditate upon these things. Seek the truth of them within yourself.

THE LORDS AND LADIES

MINOR SPIRITS, LORDS, AND LADIES: House spirits are the most common of the “minor spirits” which you can see manifestly in the world, but they are far from the only ones. These minor spirits, also known as rivera, can be found almost anywhere. The world around you is filled with a spiritual life. Those who smile upon the spirits are blessed by good fortune, while those who do not will find their lives cursed by them.

Above the minor spirits of the world there are the Spirit Lords, who each possess dominion over a common family of minor spirits. For example, Pegana, the Lady of the River, rules over the spirits of stream and brook. They were first worshipped by the trading clans. Their ancient representations can also be found on the charm tokens of the northern barbarians.

LORDS OF THE DREAMING: What the common man does not understand is that the Spirit Lords are, in truth, powerful lords of the Dreaming. It is through the Dreaming that these Lords have power, for they are of the Dreaming.

It is overly simplistic, however, to consider them as individuals. They are not gods. They are more fundamental than that – they arise of the Dreaming, and the Dreaming arises from them. The Pegana one meets in the deltas of Duvei is not the same Lady of the Rivers one might meet in the spring thaws of the Great Glacier or the mountain streams of Hyrtan. She might not even be the same Pegana you’d meet in the next river valley to the west. She might not even be the same Pegana you met last night in the very same place. Or, on the other hand, she might be.

SHAPING THE SPIRITS: Few take these beliefs literally any more, but they remain a part of their philosophical outlook. For example, many believe that a person’s outlook on life “shapes the spirits” around them and has an effect on the fate that life brings them.

In this there is truth.

GUIDES: The Spirit Lords serve as guides and signs. We have learned to trust them, although not completely. Some are more trustworthy than others.

When a Spirit Lord seeks out a Dreamwalker, however, it is always a matter of great import – an event which will change the Dreaming and thus the world in ways unforeseen and unknowable.

And for a Spirit Lord to seek out one who is not yet trained in the Dreaming Arts, as the Lady Pegana did with you, is something rarely if ever seen.

DREAMING ARTS

Dreaming Arts is a new Wisdom-based, trained-only skill. Dreaming Arts checks are made in conjunction with the three different paths of the Dreaming Arts.

DREAMSIGHT: The Dreaming is the wellspring from which all of reality is born and the grave to which all of living memory returns. As such, those who can see the Dreaming with unclouded eyes can perceive deep truths of the world around them.

Game Mechanics: Without any training, you’ll be able to use Dreaming Arts checks to duplicate the effects of an augury spell. With a feat you’ll be able to unlock more powerful divination abilities (that you’ll use with your Dreaming Arts check).

DREAM PACTS: The Lords of the Dreaming are powerful and fey. Those skilled enough in the dreaming arts can turn their own souls into conduits through which the Spirit Lords can be made manifest in the world around us. But following such a path requires supreme self-control, for the Lords of the Dreaming will reshape your soul.

Game Mechanics: There is a class dedicated to forming dream pacts. In order to form dream pacts, you would need to multiclass. By channeling different Dreaming Lords, you will gain a variety of powers.

DREAMSPEAKING: Those practiced in the dreaming arts can reshape the Dreaming around them. Those who are masters of the Dreaming, however, can reshape the world around them by reshaping the dreams from which the world is born. These arts have been perfected into the dreaming tongue – a primal language which not only describes the most fundamental aspects of reality, but can be used to transform it.

Game Mechanics: These are a suite of feats you can take, giving you mastery over various parts of dreamspeak. Dreamspeaking essentially allows you to reshape reality or yourself – essentially minor spellcasting.

Dreamsight – Dream Pacts

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 14A: MANY UNHAPPY RETURNS

January 5th, 2008
The 3rd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They returned to the surface just as the sun was slipping behind the Spire. They walked home in the Spire’s shadow, arriving as true evening fell and Ptolus’ second dusk began.

They weren’t sure when they had begun to think of the Ghostly Minstrel as home, but as they washed their bloody clothes and bodies in the stables, that’s how they thought of it. And all of them were looking forward to a long and well-deserved sleep in their own beds.

But before they could get there, Tee voiced a thought that was on many of their minds: “We need to talk.”

“Can it wait until morning?” Elestra asked. “Breakfast?”

Tee shook her head. “No. We need to talk now.”

They retired to Elestra’s room – the room that had once been Agnarr’s. Once the door was shut behind them, Tee turned to face Elestra: “What happened down there… That can’t happen again. You nearly got us all killed.”

“It’s not that simple,” Elestra protested. “My snake—“

“It is that simple. That door had to be closed. Agnarr knew it. And you kept opening it.”

Agnarr nodded, and then Tor joined in: “And this isn’t the first time. This is life and death. You have to be focused. If you ever put us in that situation again, I’ll kill you myself.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tee said.

“Better one of us than all of us,” Tor said bluntly. “Dominic can always heal her wounds if we survive.”

Tee didn’t have a response for that. She turned back to Elestra. “Look, you say you care about your snake, but you keep sending it into dangerous situations. And its gets us all in trouble.”

“I understand that,” Elestra said. “But what am I supposed to do?” (more…)

(click for PDF)

This PDF collects the mission types listed for each crew type in Blades in the Dark on to a random table that can be used as a procedural content generator. As detailed below, it’s particularly effective when used in conjunction with the more specific procedural content generators already found in the core rulebook.

USING THE TABLE

FIRST: Roll 1d6 + 1d4 to generate a mission type. Option: Roll 1d8 + 1d4, with results of 7 or 8 on the d8 defaulting to the crew’s type. (This creates a result that will be biased towards the crew’s type, while also leaving open a sizable opportunity for other mission types.)

OPTION #1 – USE OPPORTUNITY TABLES: Roll 1d3 + 1d6 on the appropriate crew’s opportunity table and combine with the mission type.

• Assassins, p. 103
• Bravos, p. 107
• Cults, p. 111
• Hawkers, p. 115
• Shadows, p. 119
• Smugglers, p. 123

Example: “Smuggle Arcane/Weird” + “Union organizers want to arm factory workers in advance of a strike” tells you what kind of weapons the union organizers are looking for.

Example: “Sabotage” + “A master assassin has come out of retirement for one more job; many would pay well to know who their target is” means your mission isn’t just to figure out who the target is, but to prevent the master assassin from carrying it out.

OPTION #2 – USE WORK TABLE: Rolling 1d4 + 1d6 on the WORK table may seem superfluous, but can also combine with the mission type in unexpected ways (e.g., “Disappearance” + “Hollow or Revivify” resulting in a job where you need to kidnap a corpse in order to revive it).

• Blades in the Dark, p. 306

Example: “Accident” + “Burglary or Heist”. It’s that much harder to kill someone and make it look like an accident when you ALSO need to purloin something from their person/house.

Example: “Augury” + “Poison or Arrange Accident”. Cult mission types can be difficult to interpret for other crews. In some cases, the crew may just be engaging in cult-like activity (attempting to gain a powerful augury by giving a noblewoman a very powerful poison that causes prophecies regarding their blood relations to appear as blood welts on their skin). You might also invert the scenario so that the crew is seeking to prevent a cult from carrying out the mission. Or the crew might be hired by the cult to do the mission.

FINALLY: Flesh things out with the other SCORES tables.

• Client/Target, p. 306
• Connected to Person/Faction, p. 307
• Twist or Complication, p. 307

Play Blades in the Dark!

Newer readers may not be familiar with my old Reactions to OD&D series. If you haven’t read them, you may want to check them out first. It’s been more than half a decade since I last visited the series, but a recent discussion prompted me to track down and dust off some old notes.

Dave Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign was published by Judges Guild in 1977. It “attempted to show the development and growth of his campaign as it was originally conceived.” (For those unfamiliar with the early history of D&D, the campaign in question is Blackmoor: The original dungeon, city, and wilderness setting in which Arneson created modern roleplaying games, and which would eventually become Dungeons & Dragons.) In practice, sadly, it is a deeply flawed book. It’s a haphazard concordance of lightly edited campaign notes, and Arneson, unfortunately, is not particularly effective in explaining what many of these notes mean or how they were supposed to be used in actual play. The confusing nature of the book is heightened because its contents span both the original Blackmoor material (starting in 1970), revisions made to his home campaign after D&D was published in 1974, and further revisions made to the material in order to run it at conventions from 1975-77… and Arneson is rarely clear about exactly which material is which.

To take one small example, let’s consider the BLACKMOOR DUNGEONS section of the book. The material described here is literally Ground Zero for every single roleplaying game ever published (and, by extension, a huge percentage of pop culture, literature, and gaming over the past 50 years). Being able to get a glimpse into how Arneson actually ran those games would be an incredibly cool insight into a cultural watershed.

It’s frustrating, therefore, to discover that the First Fantasy Campaign makes it basically impossible to puzzle out what Arneson’s actual procedures were. I’ve spent an incredible amount of time pouring over this section of the book, and it remains a tantalizing enigma. I have, however, managed to work out a few details which I think others might find interesting.

Before we begin taking a close look at the text, however, it’s important to note a key point of context:

The Castle itself is still blank since it has been destroyed twice and rebuilt twice and then taken over by non-player Elves when the local adventurers were exiled. Thus, there are no sheets or goodies for it and only a sketch of its appearance. The Cavern sheet of Encounters is also lost (at least the first ones and the new one is in use). For these deletions I apologize.

The first six levels of encounters were prepared in the last two years for convention games, and set up along “Official” D&D lines. The last (7th – 9th and Tunnel Cavern System) are the originals used in our game. Additional crazy characters that got into the game over the years have been the Orcian Way and Sir Fang the Vampire.

(…)

Details on room, Cavern shapes for the Tunnel/Cave system have been lost or misplaced.

The first thing is that, as noted before, sections of Arneson’s notes as presented in the First Fantasy Campaign had been revised for convention play. This has, for better or worse, eradicated some amount of crucial information. The second is that the notes have also been partially (but not wholly) revised through actual play.  And the third is that Arneson has deliberately not included some of his notes because he’s still using them in actual play. So you can already see that there are multiple layers of obfuscation here, made worse by the fact that some material has simply been lost due to the passage of time.

With that being said, let’s take a look at what Arneson is able to give us:

(click for larger version)

The other obstacle we almost immediately encounter here is poor proofreading.

For example, Arneson lists Group I, Group II, and Group III for monsters. Later he says: “The Grouping of the Monsters were Level I for 1st and 2nd levels; Level III Creatures for 3rd and 4th levels, etc . . .” It seems fairly certain that “Level III” here should be read as “Level II”. One might initially conclude, both due to similarity of usage and the use of the capitalized term “Grouping”, that “Group I” and “Level I” are meant to be the same thing, but they are clearly not. (Balrogs on the 1st level of the dungeon would be an unusual design choice.)

Level I most likely refers to something equivalent to OD&D’s Monster Level Tables, so Arneson is saying to use the “Level I” (sic) tables for the 1st and 2nd level maps of Blackmoor. But if “Level I” and “Group I” aren’t the same thing, what are the Group listings used for? Ultimately, after going over the text several times, I’m forced to conclude that there simply isn’t any explanation given for why he created the Groups or what purpose they served. (Perhaps the order of the Groups was inverted and they ARE the same thing as the Levels, with Balrogs being Group III creatures instead of Group I?)

THE ARNESONIAN DUNGEON

Here’s what I think can be worked out with a fair degree of certainty. If you want to run Blackmoor in a style similar to how Arneson originally ran it:

1. You’ll need Level I, Level II, Level III, Level IV, and Level V monster tables.

• 1st / 2nd level: Level I
• 3rd / 4th level: Level II
• 5th / 6th level: Level III
• 7th / 8th level: Level IV
• 9th / 10th level: Level V

These tables are not provided in the First Fantasy Campaign, but it’s likely that these were D10-based tables. (He writes “all dice throws were with 10-sided dice.” Although this appears as almost a non sequitur in the text, the only logical use of the D10s here would be on the monster tables.) To stock the tables, I would probably try to pull a full list of monsters appearing on the Blackmoor key and the anomalous “Group” listings and then distribute them appropriately. (You might also consider stocking all of the creatures found in Chainmail.)

2. You’ll need to pull the point values for creatures from Chainmail. (And “due to the addition of new Creatures beyond those given in Chainmail” create point values where necessary. Additional values might also be gleaned from other sections of the First Fantasy Campaign.)

3. There is a “magic protection point” encounter budget that is determined by the dungeon level:

• 1st level: 5 points
• 2nd level: 15 points
• 3rd level: 15 points
• 4th level: 25 points
• 5th level: 35 points
• 6th level: 40 points
• 7th level: 50 points

(It feels extremely likely that the value listed for either the 2nd or 3rd level is a typo. I’m guessing the values should either be 10 & 15 or 15 & 20.)

4. For each room, roll an encounter chance:

• 1st level: 1 in 6
• 2nd level: 2 in 6
• 3rd+ level: 3 in 6

5. If an encounter is rolled, roll 1d6 for a 1 in 6 chance that the room includes “a higher (stronger) creature”.

(By default, I would assume “stronger” just means “use the next Level monster table,”  but you might have some chance of using encounters from even stronger Level tables. There’s also “a chance that weaker creatures would be present”, but it’s not spelled out. It’s possible Arneson just winged that. You might also consider rolling 1d6 and using a weaker encounter on 1 and a stronger encounter on 6.)

6. Roll on the appropriate Level table, then purchase creatures of that type using the “magic protection point” budget. If you don’t have enough points, then either “reroll or place a weaker version of the creature within the room (extremely old or young).

(Arneson gives no indication for mixed encounter types. You might wish to do so: Perhaps generate No. Appearing using OD&D methods and then, if you have points left over, check for additional encounters in the same room. OTOH, Arneson’s keys and wandering encounters give no indication that he ever used encounters with mixed creature types.)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

It remains unclear whether this was a “restocking” procedure that Arneson used between sessions or if he randomly determined results during play as rooms were being explored. It has the feel of a during-play system, but look at the key for the 7th to 10th levels (the ones set up according to the original schema and not revised for post-D&D convention play):

Note that the “Protection in Points” entry doesn’t consistently list points; it also lists specific creatures which have been generated with those points. If these are the notes Arneson was running the adventure from, then he was using the Protection Point system to restock. (For more on re-stocking dungeons, see (Re-)Running the Megadungeon.)

On the other hand, look at the similar key given for the Glendower Dungeons:

Those entries would appear to be the “Protection Point” or “Magic Point” values for those rooms, without the nature of that protection being predetermined. In the description of Loch Gloomen, Arneson also writes:

Defense of Area

30 – 180 Magic Points Creatures (two six-sided dice): 2) Giant; 3) True Trolls; 4) Roc; 5) Air Elemental; 6) Ogre; 7) Basilisk; 8) Goblins; 9) Ghouls; 10) Lycanthrope; 11) Balrog; 12) Dragon

The fairly clear intention here is to roll 3d6 x 10 to determine the number of Magic Points, and then roll 2d6 to determine the creature type.

So it seems quite likely that the Protection Point system was a flexible one. Arneson could:

• Stock the dungeon with specific creatures (using the Protection Point system as a procedural content generator).
• Quickly note “there should be X amount of protection in this room” (and then either specify it later or generate it during play).
• Randomly stock the dungeon room by room during play.

However, there are still several points which I find confusing. You might notice the “(Magic)” values given in the key for the 7th level of the Blackmoor dungeons, for example. It’s unclear what this entry is supposed to be: In any single entry it might be interpreted as an empty room’s encounter budget, the total cost of the listed “protectors”, or an unspent number of “magic protection points” that is meant to be spent in addition to the listed protectors. But no explanation seems to satisfactorily explain all instances (and any given explanation I’ve ventured is frequently contradicted by one of the usages). My suspicion is that he actually had a point system for determining how many magic items were located in each room (similar to the point budget for monsters in each room), but if so there’s no surviving evidence of how it would have worked.

Based on the key, it’s also likely that Arneson had some method for generating “Wealth” values independently from the Protection Points, but it’s not detailed here. (I’m guessing it was not dissimilar from that described in OD&D: 1 in 3 chance for treasure in occupied room; 1 in 6 chance in unoccupied room. And then rolls on some associated treasure table based on the dungeon level.)

It’s also unclear whether Arneson used wandering monster checks in addition to these room stocking procedures. It seems likely, but whatever method he may have used isn’t detailed. (Note that the poorly described “Wandering Monster Area” quadrant system described in the First Fantasy Campaign is part of the revision done to the material for convention play.)

Arneson also mentions that he would intermittently create “Home Bases for the Orc Tribes” and “special treasure troves”. These appear to have been completely arbitrary in their creation, but he would randomly roll to determine which level of the dungeon they would be added to. (“Thus the upper levels would occasionally have quite powerful encounters.”) The special distinction of the “Home Bases for the Orc Tribes” (as opposed to lairs for other creatures) seems significant, but I’ve been unable to tease it out. (And it may be entirely illusory.) There were four orc tribes in the campaign: Red Eye Orcs, Orcs of the White Hand, Isengarders, and Orcs of the Mountains, but the only information given relates to outdoor adventures, and it’s unclear what their agenda/function within the Blackmoor dungeon would have been.

I’ll also admit that I stopped trying to make sense of Arneson’s key for Blackmoor when I realized that he had 32 dwarves keyed to a room that’s 20′ x 10′. In the lower levels, there’s a point where he keys “250 Dwarves (living quarters)” into a room 10′ x 40′ long. There’s clearly some method to the madness here, but it’s beyond my ability to figure it out.

Go to Arneson’s Machines

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