The description of the original helm of teleportation from OD&D recently struck me as particularly interesting:

Helm of Teleportation: The Magic-User employing this helm must have a Teleportation spell in order to take advantage of the device. Having but one such spell the Magic-User can Teleport himself endlessly about the universe, but if he teleports some other person or object the helm does not function and the spell proper is used. Thus the helm is good only to transport the Magic-User himself. Treat as a non-protective helm if worn into combat.

(A passage which also indicates that “protective helms” should have some beneficial effect in combat, but if there’s any explanation for what the benefit would be the rules are rather silent on the matter. I’ve been thinking about applying a -1 AC penalty for missing helmets. But I digress.)

What I was particularly struck by in this passage was the similarity between its mechanical construction and the construction of reserve feats from Complete Mage for 3rd Edition. Conceptually I always liked the idea of reserve feats (allowing spellcasters to make minor magic-based contributions on a regular basis), but found the actual execution to be rather broken. (Allowing wizards to do 6d6 points of area effect damage per round with no saving throw, for example, no longer qualifies as a minor contribution.)

But it might be interesting to take properly balanced reserve-type abilities and have them accessible via magical equipment (like the original helm of teleportation). I’m particularly drawn to the image of magic wands that don’t have charges, but instead allow you to use specific spells you currently have memorized in a powered-down form.

On the other hand, maybe chewing up an equipment slot would be necessary to keep this sort of thing balanced. Or what if there was a percentage chance that you’d lose your reserve spell whenever you triggered the reserve item? In a semi-similar fashion, AD&D’s helm of teleportation limited the number of uses per day based on the number of teleport spells you had prepared. (So that the item extends your magical endurance, but not necessarily limitlessly so.)

Cyclopeatron wrote an interesting post t’other day regarding the fact that blog posts which are the equivalent of op-ed commentary tend to attract more comments than blog posts containing creative content.

To a large extent this makes sense: Commentary posts inherently serve as the opening salvo in a potential conversation, inviting responses which either disagree with that commentary or extrapolate upon it. Creative content, on the other hand, doesn’t have an easy response: If you liked it, there’s not much to be said beyond “nice” (and that seems pointless enough you’ll probably skip it). If you didn’t like it, you’ll probably feel no particular compulsion to be a jerk by saying “you suck”. (A critique might be useful, but if it wasn’t invited you’re probably wasting your time and likely coming across as a jerk again.)

But the point Cyclopeatron makes is that this has a real effect on what bloggers write: The only real payment we get is the social validation from seeing people talk about what we wrote. When commentary posts see so much more activity than creative posts, we’re being strongly encouraged to write commentary posts instead of creative posts.

Despite this predilection, I agree with Cyclopeatron that the RPG blogosphere is a happier and healthier place when it’s filled up with awesome creative ideas. Towards that end, I propose Alexander’s Rule:

If you use something awesome from a blog in your game, go back and tell the creator about it.

That might mean taking fifteen seconds to write a comment. (“Hey. I ran the Dungeon Crawl of Ultimate Doom last night and it killed three PCs. Nice work.”) It might mean writing up a full session report, posting it to your own blog, and sending the original creator a trackback or link. Or anything inbetween.

Lemme take a second to practice what I’m preaching. Let me just stick a little spoiler protection for my players (who should read no further here)…

(more…)

The casting of magical rituals was once a lengthy and time-consuming process; one which often required the combined efforts of entire covens or wizard circles to complete. All of that changed, however, when wizards first discovered spells.

The earliest spells were dangerous and unstable — parasitic horrors from a primordial proto-plane of raw magical essence which feasted memetically upon the sanity of those they infected. But whether by accident or design, a small band of wizards managed to tame the spells to their own purposes. With proper training, they learned that these living parasites could hold complex rituals in a state of pressurized memetic potential. And then, by infecting themselves, they discovered that they could release the entrapped rituals upon command.

Magical rites that had once taken hours, days, or even months to cast could now be unleashed in minutes. (And later, as their arts improved, in mere moments.) The world was transformed.

The parasites, of course, were consumed in their casting. And so, every morning, wizards find themselves preparing fresh spells and then infecting their minds with them. It takes years of practice to perfect the finely honed balance required to sustain even a single spell-parasite in your mind without being driven mad by its thought-consuming proclivity. The ability to sustain multiple spells in that state of mind-rending follows more quickly, but it is always a delicate balance between power and madness for those who would follow such a path.

Generations passed before the spell parasites mutated again: Those possessed of rich, magical bloodlines began to be born infested with the parasites. Women died in horrific, unspeakable childbirths… the nature and fate of their spawn better left unspoken. Fears of plague and mass extinction followed.

But then a state of symbiosis was once again found with the new form of the parasites: Some children were born infested with parasites, but appeared otherwise normal. Some felt that the parasites had mutated into a more benign form. Others whispered worries, hurled epithets, and named them plaguebearers.

Time, however, would eventually name them sorcerers: Unlike their wizardly brethren who were forced to carefully prepare each spell before infecting themselves with it, the roiling mass of parasitic entities running rampant through their bloodstreams allowed these sorcerers to unleash extemporaneous magical assaults. Some found that they could literally “burn out” their infections by simply expending their parasites in overwhelming magical onslaughts. (Unfortunately, not all of these outbursts were controlled ones.) But other sorcerers discovered that as long as they were careful not to burn out all of the potential of the parasites they hosted, a symbiosis of sorts could be maintained as the parasites regained their strength each day.

Some name the world a better place for the perfection of these magical arts. Others still watch the plaguebearers warily, worried that some greater horror may emerge from the thought-eating worms which roam unchecked through the minds of all magicians.

And then there are others who whisper that spells may be but a lesser order of beings from that distant proto-plane of magic. If so, what greater terrors might be unleashed from such a place?

While bantering with Zak at Playing D&D With Porn Stars (NSFW; EDIT: Zak turned out to be a missing stair and then a very well known serial abuser years after this was posted), I came up with a quick-and-dirty system for handling 3rd Edition NPCs:

(1) Give them an arbitrary number of HD. (Let’s say in d8s.)

(2) Assign them an array of ability scores.

(3) Figure out their AC. (Assign a number or do armor + Dex.)

(4) Figure out how much damage their attacks do. (Assign a number or do weapon + Strength.)

(5) Done.

In play, pertinent stats can be easily calculated off HD:

Melee Attack: HD + Strength modifier
Ranged Attack: HD + Dexterity modifier
Saving Throws: 1/2 HD + ability modifier
Skills: HD + ability mod

You could also, obviously, precalculate these values if you were feeling fancy. But where this is really useful is when you’re trying to keep up with your PCs on-the-fly. If you can quickly jot down:

HD 7; Str 16, Dex 12, Con 14, Int 11, Wis 10, Cha 8; plate, longsword

Then you’ve got enough information to run the NPC.

If you want to class up the joint a little bit, it’s pretty easy to slap a few class abilities on there. And here’s how you do spellcasters:

(1) Look up how many spell slots they have.

(2) Write those numbers down.

(3) Open your PHB to the spell lists and pick spells as they cast ’em.

So you might jot down:

Wizard 8; Str 8, Dex 14, Con 10, Int 18, Wis 14, Cha 11; 4/4/3/3/2

And that’s enough to run the encounter.

It’s a pity that old school monsters didn’t include ability scores, because otherwise this system would allow you to instantly convert them on-the-fly.

“Dice of Destiny” was one of my earliest professional sales. Written in late 1999, it was published in Pyramid on June 16th, 2000. It proved remarkably popular and, until I wrote “D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations” and “The Three Clue Rule“, was the single piece of writing for which I received the most feedback from readers. In fact, enough people told me that they specifically re-upped their subscription to Pyramid on the basis of that article that I am absolutely positive that the $170 Steve Jackson Games paid me for it was money well-spent.

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Qualities
Part 3 – Examples of Application
Part 4 – Adaptation

Reading the article from a distance of eleven years, I am forced to occasionally twinge at particularly awkward bits of writing. I have, however, resisted the urge to rewrite it. With the exception of noting that Feng Shui is now available from Atlas Games (when the article was written, Feng Shui was a recent smash success that had driven its original publisher out of business because they were reportedly losing money on every copy sold), the article remains unchanged.

I’m also struck, however, by how misleading the published works of an author can be. “Dice of Destiny”, for example, clearly demonstrates my early appreciation of the fact that roleplaying games are improv structures (among other things). It would seem to be totally of a piece with my recent musings on wandering monsters as a mode of procedural content generation.

But if you had actually asked Justin the Younger about wandering monsters, he would have scoffed at the crudities of a primitive and bygone age. Wandering monsters made their way back into my game when I started using them to model “living complexes” that were too large for me to track every individual NPC group in real time, and it was only from there that I eventually realized that a properly constructed wandering monster table is a great improv structure.

In a further bout of irony, it was only a few months after this article was published that the 3rd Edition of D&D was published. Dice pool systems had dominated my gaming during the late ’90s, but for the past decade D&D has taken their place. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve actually GMed even so much as a single session of a dice pool system since this article was published. (Although I’m sure something will probably occur to me as soon as I hit the “publish” button.)

Perhaps because of that, one of the things that particularly caught my eye on this read-thru was the idea of using die qualities while generating ability scores to give you some idea of what a score really means. It really is incredibly easy to just pluck out keywords from the description of ability scores and assign them as qualities. To that end, here’s a quick table you can use when generating D&D characters.