I believe that dungeons should always be heavily xandered.

…

Okay, it’s true. I’m just making up words now. Recently, though, I’ve been doing some deep dives into the earliest days of D&D. I’ve been reading and running the rules and adventures of those bygone days and discovering — or rediscovering — the amazing work of Arneson, Gygax, and the many, many others who were exploring the brave new world of roleplaying games. When it comes to xandering the dungeon, what I wanted was a word that capture the pioneering dungeon design of Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and, above all, Jennell Jaquays, who designed Caverns of Thracia, Dark Tower, Griffin Mountain, and a half dozen other old school classics for Judges Guild, Chaosium, Flying Buffalo, and TSR. Because a word for that didn’t exist yet, I felt compelled to create one.

This article originally coined a different term. Click here for an explanation.

I first started running Jaquays’ Caverns of Thracia last year. It inspired an entire campaign, and while exploring its depths with my players over the past several months I’ve often found myself ruminating on the mysteries of its labyrinths and trying to unravel why it’s such an utterly compelling and unforgettable adventure. Along the way, I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone should be more familiar with Jaquays’ amazing work, so let’s take a moment to dive deeper into her legendary career and also consider what makes a dungeon adventure like Caverns of Thracia different from many modern dungeon adventures.

After amazing work in tabletop RPGs, Jaquays transitioned into video game design, and in that latter capacity she recently wrote some essays on maps she designed for Halo Wars:

Memorable game maps spring from a melding of design intent and fortunate accidents.
Jennell Jaquays – Crevice Design Notes

That’s timeless advice, and a design ethos which extends beyond the RTS levels she helped design for Halo Wars and reaches back to her earliest work at Judges Guild.

And what Jaquays particularly excelled at in those early Judges Guild modules was non-linear dungeon design.

For example, in Caverns of Thracia Jaquays includes three separate entrances to the first level of the dungeon. And from Level 1 of the dungeon you will find two conventional paths and no less than eight unconventional or secret paths leading down to the lower levels. (And Level 2 is where things start getting really interesting.)

The result is a fantastically complex and dynamic environment: You can literally run dozens of groups through this module and every one of them will have a fresh and unique experience.

But there’s more value here than just recycling an old module: That same dynamic flexibility which allows multiple groups to have unique experiences also allows each individual group to chart their own course. In other words, it’s not just random chance that’s resulting in different groups having different experiences: Each group is actively making the dungeon their own. They can retreat, circle around, rush ahead, go back over old ground, poke around, sneak through, interrogate the locals for secret routes… The possibilities are endless because the environment isn’t forcing them along a pre-designed path. And throughout it all, the players are experiencing the thrill of truly exploring the dungeon complex.

By way of comparison, Keep on the Shadowfell, the introductory adventure for D&D 4th Edition, is an extremely linear dungeon:

(This diagram uses a method laid out by Melan in this post at ENWorld. You can also find a detailed explanation in How to Use a Melan Diagram.)

Some would argue that this sort of linear design is “easier to run”. But I don’t think that’s actually true to any appreciable degree. In practice, the complexity of a xandered dungeon emerges from the same simple structures that make up a linear dungeon: The room the PCs are currently in has one or more exits. What are they going to do in this room? Which exit are they going to take?

In a linear dungeon, the pseudo-choices the PCs make will lead them along a pre-designed, railroad-like route. In a xandered dungeon, on the other hand, the choices the PCs make will have a meaningful impact on how the adventure plays out, but the actual running of the adventure isn’t more complex as a result.

On the other hand, the railroad-like quality of the linear dungeon is not its only flaw. It eliminates true exploration (for the same reason that Lewis and Clark were explorers; whereas when I head down I-94 I am merely a driver). It can significantly inhibit the players’ ability to make meaningful strategic choices. It is, frankly speaking, less interesting and less fun.

So I’m going to use the Keep on the Shadowfell to show you how easy it is to xander your dungeons by making just a few simple, easy tweaks.

Go to Part 2

XANDERING THE DUNGEON
Part 2: Xandering Techniques
Part 3: The Philosophy of Xandering
Part 4: Xandering the Keep on the Shadowfell
Part 5: Xandering for Fun and Profit

Addendum: Dungeon Level Connections
Addendum: Xandering on the Small Scale
Addendum: How to Use a Melan Diagram
Dark Tower: Level Connections

I’m fairly certain that All-Star Superman is far too awesome to exist within the constraints of the universe as we know it.

Which is why it was necessary for the unspeakably dreadful All-Star “Goddamn” Batman to exist in order to balance the cosmic scales.

To read a spoiler-free review of Pushing Ice, click here.

For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the very end of the book, go ahead and read more…

(more…)

Pushing Ice is basically Alastair Reynolds’ attempt to take the sequels to Rendezvous with Rama, scratch off the serial numbers, and rewrite them so that they don’t suck as much.

In this, he succeeds. Although, honestly, that’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Warning: The spoilers in this reaction will contain deeper spoilers than most of my reactions. In general, I follow a policy of not spoiling content beyond the first 50 pages of the book. That will not be the case with Pushing Ice.

Isolating the strengths and weaknesses of the book is actually rather challenging. Reynolds lacks consistency throughout his narrative, often soaring to compelling heights only to crash back to mediocre depths.

For example, as a re-imagining of the Rama milieu, the first challenge for Pushing Ice is the creation of the Big Dumb Object (BDO). The initial conceptual strokes of the BDO are absolutely riveting: Without any warning, Janus — one of the icy moons of Saturn — suddenly starts accelerating out of the solar system. Unbeknownst to any of us, an alien spaceship had been masquerading as the entire moon for countless eons.

But when the main characters actually reach the BDO, the details are shoddy and underdeveloped. Reynolds paints with a broad and unfocused brush: We’re told repeatedly how “strange” and “enigmatical” Janus is, but we’re never shown any of the details necessary to really bring the place to life.

But then Reynolds turns it around again: The first BDO leads them to an even bigger BDO, and that BDO — and the larger mechanism it’s part of — is really fascinating. And the revelations of its true nature are not only continued until the end of the book, but beyond it (as I believe Reynolds is subtly hinting at something that even his own characters don’t realize).

One of the areas where Pushing Ice dramatically improves on the Rama sequels are the interpersonal dramas of the main characters. To put it succinctly: Instead of being derived from cheesy soap operas, they’re truthful and meaningful.

Even here, however, Reynolds has consistency problems. For example, the central drama of the novel revolves around the schisming friendship of Bella and Svetlana. Reynolds is attempting to create a dynamic in which two people can both vehemently disagree with each other and both be right from their own point of view.

And if he had actually pulled it off (as he comes tantalizingly close to doing), the result would be absolutely breathtaking.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Largely because he resorts to both protagonists being inexplicably idiotic.

Sittuation #1:

SVETLANA: I think the company is hacking into our computer systems and altering the data. But I found a backup that they forgot to change. Here it is.

BELLA: Okay, I have my doubts. So what I’m going to do is tell the corporation exactly where the backup data is that you’re claiming they forgot to change is. Then I’ll wait awhile. Then I’ll go and check it to see if it says what you claim it says.

SVETLANA: Wait… what?

BELLA: My god! It no longer says what you claim it said! You’re lying to me!

Okay. That’s pretty bad. But it gets worse.

Situation #2:

BELLA: I’ve decided that you were right all along. Now that I believe you, I’m using the true version of the data that you brought to me to conclude that our only possible course of action is X.

SVETLANA: Well, I hate you. And so I think we should do not-X!

BELLA: You mean the course of action which, if you weren’t lying to me before, would mean our inevitable death?

SVETLANA: Yup.

And silliness ensues.

I mean, I’m obviously supposed to take it all seriously. But when you set up this Titanic Clash of Wills(TM) in which both characters are mentally deficient… well, it’s a little hard to take them seriously.

The end result of all this is a book which I found both compelling and frustrating in almost equal measures. It was a book that could both keep me up into the wee hours of the morning frantically turning pages, and simultaneously a book that would leave me slamming the covers shut in disgust.

In the final analysis, Pushing Ice is a thoroughly mediocre book that could have been (and should have been) great. This puts it one step up the rung from the dreadful Rama sequels (which are thoroughly awful books that could have been great), but there’s still too much dross to dig through to find the good bits (which are, at times, very, very good).

GRADE: C-

Alastair Reynolds
Published: 2006
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $8.99
ISBN: 0441015026
Buy Now!

For additional comments on Pushing Ice, which include SPOILERS, click here.

Photo by Mark Vancleave

Back in 2009 I posted a series of essays on my work translating The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. This essay was written, but apparently I forgot to actually post it to the website. Whoops.

In Act III of The Seagull, Trigorin threatens to leave Arkadina for Nina. Arkadina, driven to desperation, succeeds in seducing Trigorin and convinces him to stay with her. (“He’s mine now,” she says to herself. And she’s right.) Trigorin then opens the small notebook that he keeps in his pocket and jots something down.

Аркадина. Как хочешь. Вместе, так вместе…

Пауза.

Тригорин записывает в книжку.

Что ты?

Тригорин. Утром слышал хорошее выражение: «Девичий бор»… Пригодится. (Потягивается.) Значит, ехать? Опять вагоны, станции, буфеты, отбивные котлеты, разговоры…

Which can be literally translated as:

Arkadina: As you wish. However, both together …

Pause.

Trigorin writes in the book.

What?

Trigorin: This morning heard the expression: “Virgin forest” … Handy. (Stretches.) So, go? Again, cars, stations, buffets, chops, talking …

The key phrase here is “Девичий бор” — “virgin forest”. It’s pretty easy to look at the juxtaposition of “I heard an expression” and “virgin forest” and leap straight to the common English phrase: “virgin wood”. And, indeed, a casual survey of translations of The Seagull reveals that virtually everyone goes for the easy solution.

But there is a problem here: Trigorin jots it down as something worth remembering; an oddity that must be recorded. Generations of English-speaking actors and their audiences have struggled with making sense out of Trigorin’s seeming unfamiliarity with a common phrase.

A quick search of Russian sources, on the other hand, reveals what I suspected: Unlike “virgin wood”, the phrase “Девичий бор” is virtually unknown outside of The Seagull. So one can immediately intuit that there is an important context for “Девичий бор” which is being lost when we translate it simply as “virgin wood”.

My next step was to pull open a Russian-to-English dictionary.

Девичий — maiden (girl’s, maidenly, virgin, maidenish, maiden-like)

бор — boron, chemical element; forest, thicket

I think we can safely discard the “boron” definition. But this may suggest that we should be wary of putting too much weight into the word “virgin” here. “Maiden” has a very different connotation to it.

Poking around the Russian Google for awhile, I dig into a few of the obscure non-Chekhovian uses of the phrase. One is a 1939 book called Montenegrin’s Tales (Черногорские сказки), which appears to be a collection of folklore by P. Stiyensky (Стийенский Р.). One of the stories has this phrase as the title, but I’ve been unable to find out any details about it.

Another reads: “Их было четверо, девичий бор, кружок, тайное общество, можно сказать. Учились в одной школе.” In English: “There were four in theдевичий бор; a circle, a secret society you might say. They studied together at school.” And the phrase is used again in the same work, once again to describe this small group of girls.

This is intriguing to me because it suggests that the use of the word “forest” or “grove” or “thicket” might be the metaphor in this phrase (rather than “maiden” or “virgin”). In other words, it is not the wood which is being described as virginal, but rather the maidens who are being described as like a forest — like a thicket of trees grouped together.

And, looking at the context of the scene, it begins to make sense why Trigorin would suddenly be struck by such a phrase: He has been beset in rapid succession by Nina and then Arkadina. He feels pulled this way and that by the women around him. They are a thicket penning him in.

I have now defined the parameters of the problem: I need a catchy turn of phrase which is (a) original rather than proverbial and (b) invokes the imagery of a covey of women.

What I eventually came up with was “girlish gaggle”. I was unhappy to lose the sense of “forest” or “trees” from the phrase, but I think it nevertheless strikes closer to home than “virgin wood”.

(EDIT: Intriguingly, a reference that has cropped up on Russian Google since I originally translated the script seems to suggest that Девичий бор might be a “paraphrasing” (typo?) of девичий вор — which can be translated as “maiden’s burr” or “girl thief”. I wish I had a better understanding of Russian to fully appreciate the argument being made, but if I accept it at face value then it raises the interesting possibility that I had it backwards: Is Trigorin actually referring to himself as a burr which catches upon women? There is invocation of both injury and clinging which I find intriguing.)