He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows if you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So you’d better be good for goodness’ sake…
– Haven Gillespie, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”

This lyric is deliberately ironic wordplay and incredibly clever.

First, you have to understand that “for goodness’ sake!” is a euphemistic replacement for the curse “for God’s sake!”. (Similar to the also common “for Pete’s sake!”)

The immediate syntax of the line itself, as you note, carries the meaning that you should be good for the sake of doing good (“do good for goodness’ sake”).

The juxtaposition of the line with “he knows if you’ve been bad or good”, however, calls that interpretation into question and reveals the ironic nature of the line: It’s not “do good for the sake of goodness”, it’s “for God’s sake, do good because the fatman knows what you’re doing!”.

The ironic use of the phrase “for goodness’ sake”, however, also calls attention to the fact that the euphemism is replacing the identity of God. We note, therefore, that this conception of Santa Claus as an omniscient arbiter of morality to whom we perform certain rites and rituals (writing of letters, leaving out a sacrifice of milk and cookies, etc.) raises him to a sort of primitive godhood. As the lyric replaces the identity of God, so does Santa Claus replace the identity of God. Our “worship” of Santa Claus is, in fact, a form of idolatry.

And the prohibition against idolatry is, in fact, why we use euphemisms like “for goodness’ sake” instead of God’s name.

Seeing that God is hidden in the lyric, however, reveals another layer of meaning: The ironic construction of the line is designed to highlight an ideological conflict between “you should do good because it’s good” and “you should do good because otherwise you will be punished by an omniscient power”. And that’s a philosophical criticism which applies whether you’re talking about “coal in a stocking” or “being sent to Hell”.

It’s not just a playful jab at the panopticon mythology of Santa Claus. It fundamentally questions the dichotomy of religious belief in beneficent higher powers that will ruthlessly punish you if your cross them.

Most people, of course, won’t consciously plumb the rhetorical depths of the song like this. But what makes it an effective and memorable lyric is that pretty much everybody can sense the strong ironic tension in it. It may do nothing more than amuse you; but in that amusement the song has caused you to smirk at one of the major underpinnings of most religious faith.

1. Species that simply prefer living underground (either because they fear the sun like the drow or because they love the dark like the dwarves).

2. Magical construction techniques that make huge, underground constructions more plausible.

3. Magical creatures that either have an instinctual need to create underground complexes or which create them as an unintentional byproduct. (Where did all these twisting tunnels come from? Well, they started as purple worm trails. Then the goblins moved in.)

4. Catastrophes on the surface world that prompt people to flee underground are also a great explanation for underground complexes. (See Earthdawn. Or just an Age of Dragons.) Mix-and-match with the techniques above to explain how the huge cataclysm refuges were built. Then simply remove the danger and/or (better yet) introduce some new danger that came up from below and drove all the vault dwellers back onto the surface.

It’s also useful to establish a method for underground species to generate food. In my campaign world there’s fey moss, which serves as the basis for fungal gardens. Huge, artificial suns left behind in underdark chasms by the vault builders or the under-dwarves also work.

I don’t find it valuable to do full-scale urban planning or figure out exactly how many toilets the goblins need, but I do find that at least some degree verisimilitude makes for better games: If the goblins get their food from fungal gardens, then their food supply can be jeopardized by destroying those gardens. And that’s either the basis for an interesting scenario hook or it’s a strategic master-stroke from the players or it’s some other surprise that I hadn’t even thought of before the campaign started.

Fey moss itself is useless. It’s a black, scummy substance. If left unchecked it will cover almost any surface with a thick, tar-like substance.

Sunlight almost instantly destroys fey moss, causing it to burst into flame. Unadulterated fey moss is also extremely flammable.

But, like the plankton of the ocean, fey moss is the bedrock of the underdark’s ecosystem.  Ecosystems on the surface all ultimately draw their energy from the powerful rays of the sun – plants capture that energy; herbivores eat the plants; and carnivores eat the herbivores. But in the underdark the ecosystem ultimately derives its energy from fey moss (which, in turn, draws it directly from the magical ley lines).

Animals in the underdark either eat the fey moss directly or they eat the wide variety of fungal species which have adapted themselves to parasitically grow upon the fey moss. Civilized species establish vast fungal gardens to feed their populace.

Vornheim includes a set of stripped down guidelines for giving PCs a set of contacts in an urban setting: The PCs can hit up their contacts for information about a particular topic and there’s a table for randomly determining what their reaction to the question is. (Here’s an example of the system in practice.)

Technoir is built around a plot-mapping mechanic in which PCs are created with a set of contacts: When the PCs hit up one of their contacts, there’s a system for randomly determining what they know. (And here’s an example of that system in play.)

The Technoir approach is built around the assumption that the GM — taking into account the subject indicated, that subject’s position on the plot map, the contact’s relationship to the plot map, and the specific question that was asked of the contact — will provide an act of creative closure and figure out what the contact says. And, in general, that works just fine.

But I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be useful and nifty if I had a Vornheim-style contacts table for Technoir? So that the rules of Technoir would produce the lead the contact was pointing them towards and then the Vornheim-like table would give some guidance on how they ended up pointing them at it?

The Vornheim contacts table includes some null value (“I don’t know anything about”) values, which don’t work well in Technoir. So I tweaked the table a bit and ended up with this:

Sometimes it takes years for your brain to puzzle things out.

For example, I wrote Revisiting Encounter Design way back in 2008. The basic thesis was that you should generally abandon the new wave fetish for My Perfect Encounters(TM) and embrace a more flexible method of encounter design that would emphasize faster-paced, strategic-based play.

The four major tenets I argued for looked like this:

(1) Design most 3E encounters around an EL 2 to 4 lower than the party’s level.

(2) Don’t be afraid of large mobs (10+ creatures) with a total EL equal to the PCs’ level. The common design wisdom is that these creatures are “too easy” for the PCs. This is true if you’re thinking in terms of the “common wisdom” that sprang up around misreading the DMG, but in practice these types of encounters work just fine if you’re looking for fast encounters and lots of them.

(3) Encounters with an EL equal to the PCs’ level should be used sparingly. They should be thought of as “major encounters” — the memorable set pieces of the adventure. It actually won’t take very long before the expectations of your players’ have been re-aligned and these encounters leave them thinking, “Wow! That was a tough encounter!”

(4) And that means you get even more bang for your buck when you roll out the very rare EL+2 or EL+4 encounter.

(The general philosophy of this advice, it should be noted, is widely applicable beyond D&D. In Feng Shui, for example, it means “keep a healthy supply of mooks flowing through your scenario.” In Shadowrun it means not letting a ‘run bog down into a single giant melee; keep the action on the hoof by making it possible for the PCs to cut their way rapidly through waves of security. And so forth.)

Most people seem to have grokked what I was selling. But there was a smaller group of people who insisted that I was wrong: That if they built an encounter with sixteen CR 2 creatures that the PCs would take a lot more damage than if they used a single CR 10 opponent. In fact, I still get fairly regular e-mails to this effect six years later. And I could never figure it out: Running the math on hypothetical scenarios regularly confirmed what years of play and hundreds of game sessions had taught me. It certainly wasn’t impossible for the mob of CR 2 creatures to out-perform the CR 10 creature, but in general the fighter was going to rapidly cleave through the mooks or the wizard’s fireball was going to rip them apart.

Were the people e-mailing me fudging dice rolls to toughen up the weaklings? Did their players just have no idea how to use mass damage or area control spells?

Nah.

It took six years, but then I was driving down a highway in Wisconsin the other day when epiphany finally hit me: These are reports of anecdote. And the problem with anecdote is that it selects for the exceptional and the unusual.

You don’t remember the 19 times that you used a CR 10 monster against a 10th level party and it took a few rounds to take it down while tearing out a few large chunks of hit points from the group. Instead, you remember the time that the party faced a single tough opponent and miraculously chopped his head off in the first round of combat.

Similarly, you don’t remember the umpteen times that your wizard casually fireballed a group of mook orcs and cleared ’em out without any hassle. What you’ll remember is that one time that a horde of kobolds left the PCs screaming and fleeing in terror.

It’s also likely that the actual numbers aren’t actually being looked at in these anecdotes: “Remember that time that the six orcs in area 4 were a lot tougher for the party to take out than the demon in area 10?” Sure. But were those actually EL equivalent encounters? Or were the orcs all CR 8 (for an EL 13 encounter) while the demon was CR 10?

None of this is a problem, of course, unless you start using the exceptionalism of your anecdotes as a guiding principle of scenario design. You want your scenario to be exceptional, of course, but you won’t achieve that if you’re expecting the statistically exceptional in every encounter.

(Of course this is another advantage of the encounter design method I advocate for: By increasing the number of encounters experienced, I increase the number of opportunities for the memorably exceptional moments to happen. Sometimes that will be the result of improbable math; sometimes it will be the result of clever and unexpected play. That’s the beauty of a non-deterministic medium.)