(click for legible size)

I still can’t decide if it bugs me or not that alignment takes up something like 1/5th of the chapter on character creation (simply due to the bulk of information being conveyed). It was originally meant to be relegated to a sidebar, but it actually proved too large for that and ended up getting all of page 11 to itself.

Of course, that’s partly because the information on alignment needs to be entirely contained in Chapter 1, whereas the rest of Chapter 1 references players out to the more detailed descriptions of ability scores, classes, races, and the like found elsewhere in the rulebook.

A couple of other options I entertained:

(1) Removing alignment entirely. I would have left “good” and “evil” descriptors in for spells and extraplanar creatures, but the basic concept of PCs having an “alignment” would have been gone. Ultimately, I decided this was too radical a departure.

(2) Just describing the two axes of alignment — good vs. evil; law vs. chaos — in general terms and not discussing each combination in detail. (This might have included an old school, x-y axis chart of alignments.) A remnant of this remains in the sidebar on page 11, but what I discovered was that new players weren’t grokking the system. They were asking a lot of clarifying questions, and that’s usually an indication that the rulebook isn’t doing its job.

What do you think?

Check out this page purporting to be a list of Words That Don’t Exist in the English Language. It’s been making the rounds for awhile, so you may have seen it. And at least portions of it have possibly been debunked. But here are a couple of examples:

Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods.

Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.

Gheegle (Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.

What concepts would be so unique to a fantasy world that they might give rise to words which are, more-or-less, untranslatable to English?

Here’s a few thoughts:

The feeling of slight nausea and dizziness that happens when you teleport somewhere.

A color that can only be created by magic.

The soul-searing, howling noise created by adamantine when it’s shattered.

The sick giddiness left in the wake of a charm or domination effect.

What would be some good words for that? What other concepts would be evocative?

You may have heard that if you cut an earthworm in half, both halves will grow back into a full worm. That’s an urban legend. (They have amazing regenerative powers, but a severed back end will never be able to grow a new head.) But if you’re wondering how you could bring this into an RPG session, the answer is self-evident: Toss in a couple trolls.

More intriguing is the case of the bulldog ant:

“But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of its kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: The battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation)

I think the behavior after severing would be easy enough to model as a confusion effect on both halves of the creature. But the real question would be determining when and how the creature would get severed in the first place. A few thoughts:

(1) Some sort of modification on the mechanic used for severing a hydra’s head. The question, however, is how you can motivate a PC to actually make the sunder attempt. (This problem also exists with hydras.)

(2) Treat all weapons as effectively vorpal against the creature. When somebody confirms a crit off of a natural 20, the creature is effectively severed.

(3) Treat it as an effect of bloodying the creature (reducing it to half hit points).

(4) Treat it as an effect of killing the base creature (which is effectively transformed into two new creatures). Maybe there’s only a percentage chance that this happens.

(5) Set a “Break Threshold” for creature: If somebody deals more damage than the break threshold in a single attack, the creature is severed.

I recently became aware of the Sarajevo Roses: Deep scars in the concrete of Sarajevo created by the thousands of mortar rounds fired there during the intense urban warfare of the Bosnian War. Where these explosions resulted in casualties, the scars have been filled with a red resin.

I was touched by the sad, serene beauty of these enduring monuments.

But since I’m the creator of fantasy worlds, my mind was also inspired. Taking the familiar and twisting it to the fantastic is nice. Taking something culturally unfamiliar and then, on top of that, giving it an extra twist of fantasy can often result in some really memorable touchstones.

The Sarajevo Roses exist as both an artifact and a memorial of a specific, historic event. More importantly they’re an unintended side effect that, to my American eyes, testifies that something outside of my normal experience happened in this place. What sort of fantastical equivalents could we hypothesize?

Direct fantasy parallels, for example, aren’t too hard to conjure up: The long, blackened scars in the fields around a village where the blight-breath of an elder dragon prevent anything from growing. The effervescent green sands driven into the eastern walls of an adobe village by the sandstorm thrust up by the execution of the Seven Gods. And so forth.

Going a bit further afield, what examples of fantastical side-effects could we postulate from non-destructive events? Are there oil slicks in the street from the fad for armor golems among the city’s mages? Are the skies above the city filled with long twists of multi-colored thread because magic carpets have a tendency to unravel? (And once a year is there a Skein Day when the magical thread is gathered for some purpose either practical or festive?) Does the casting of a time stop spell leave little temporal schisms?

I saw Conan the Barbarian a couple nights ago. Quick thoughts:

1. It’s a much better movie than its box office.
2. In fact, I’m comfortable saying that I think it’s a better movie than the Schwarznegger version from ’82.
3. It is not, however, a great movie. It may not even be a good one. But it’s not a bad one, either. It’s a fun flick: It doesn’t insult your intelligence. The plot makes sense. The action sequences are dynamic. The script doesn’t carry much of the load, but it gets out of the way and lets the actors carry the load for making us care about the characters and the SFX guys carry the load for getting us immersed into the world.
4. The biggest failing of the movie is the conclusion. It falls very flat and concentrates a lot of problems that were scattered throughout the rest of the film.
5. It’s literally wall-to-wall action. It’s pretty much ACTION-breath-ACTION-breath-ACTION-breath-ACTION for the duration. I’d like to say that the movie would be better if it was 10 minutes longer and took a minute or two to catch its breath, but that would really only be true if they brought somebody in to punch up the dialogue.
6. Momoa is a fantastic Conan.

The film has also forced me to revise my understanding of effective fight choreography. I used to break it down into basically two parts:

First, the choreography itself. Is it exciting? Clever? Compelling? Well-paced? The whole nine yards. Plenty of films, of course, don’t clear this basic hurdle.

Second, how the choreography is filmed. Effective cinematography will focus your attention, showcasing and even improving the choreography. But this is where a lot of films have recently been falling down: They get too tight on the action. They cut too rapidly between shots. And the result is that, regardless of how effective the choreography is, you cant see it. It’s as if someone filmed a drama by pumping up the soundtrack so that you can’t hear large chunks of the dialogue while panning away from the actor’s faces. Or like watching ballet in a strobe light performed behind a wall with some random holes punched in it.

Conan the Barbarian, however, manages to achieve both of these elements and yet still frequently fail. It’s forced me to add:

Three, conveying the geography of the scene.

This may really be just a subset of how the choreography is filmed. But I was really struck in Conan by how often I was completely enthralled by the actual, specific choreography of a given fight… only to be confused by how two simultaneous fights were relating to each other; or where the fight was in relationship to the person Conan was trying to save; and so forth.