Cricket = PC.

After viewing the photo above, I had a sudden compulsion to map out the demesnes and citadels of the ice dwarves.

Let us take Gimli’s speech regarding the Glittering Caves and reshape it to our purposes:

“Strange are the ways of men! Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Ice, they say! Ice! Glaciers to take water from in time of need! My good elf, do you know that the glaciers of the Frozen Sea are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known! Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!

“Do think those halls are fair where your King dwells in his castle of ice mounded up from the snows? It is but a hovel compared with the wonders I have seen here: Immeasurable halls, filled with everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools as fair as the mirrored sea in moonlight!

“And when the torches are kindled and men walk upon the snowy floors, ah! Then the walls cast shadows that dance with all the puppeteer’s skill among rivulets and eddies of twisted frost! There are columns of hard white holding up roofs of endless, perfect blue — waves of an ocean which laps but once in a millennium! It is a glimmering world viewed through cerulean glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! A silver drop falls, and round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea.”

Thus did the first dwarf fall in love with realms of ice and turn his purposes towards them.

But that was long ago, and the halls which those elder races wrought have been compressed and changed and turned by the tides of time. They are now perilous with the weight of the ice above them, but the slow, grinding pressures of those places have not wholly deformed the wonders which have been left behind.

In addition to whatever other treasures may lurk down there, there’s a fair market for the snow suns which once lit those halls. The art of their craft has been lost, but they burn with a cold light which can nonetheless light fires to keep the limbs of the living warm while leaving untouched the ice about them.

(You should also click thru; the original photographer has a lot of really great inspirational photos.)

Deer in Scotland have begun biting off the heads of baby birds, sucking out their bones, and leaving behind deformed carcasses of deflated meat. Apparently they’re seeking to supplement the limited calcium in their diet (which they need in order to support the growth of their mating antlers)

But slap on a ritualistic patterning to the bird murders, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a pretty decent horror scenario. (Or are the birds the real problem with the deer being enchanted by a local druid circle to stop whatever cuckoo terror is nesting on the island?)

Alternatively, crank up the stakes in a fantasy horror game: Replace “baby birds” with “actual babies”. Replace “deer” with “dire deer”. (Possibly deer who have become dire due to their blood-drinking rites. And what happens when the bloodcraze begins to spread?)

I’m not sure why I’ve never noticed it before, but Asimov’s “Nightfall” short story is totally a tale of the Lovecraftian Mythos.

Think about it: You’ve got a strange cult whose primordial origins predate the rise of civilization which predicts the end of the world. Forward thinking men of the modern age learn of the cult’s beliefs, scoff at first, but then begin discovering strange and disturbing correlations with their own researches.

And then the Stars Are Right and everyone is driven mad in a cataclysm of truth.

The 20′ By 20′ Room blog has apparently disappeared, but here’s something from Neel Krishnaswami that I think is too useful to let slide into the digital vortex:

In our last Nine Worlds session, I introduced Perseus, a captain of the Lunar space fleet, who was married to Nick’s PC’s wife. In the session before that, the players had been boarded by a Lunar ship which had confiscated our engineer’s robot as technological contraband. That ship had a captain, who went unnamed. So when I first mentioned Perseus, the players’ first response was “Hey, is he the same guy?” and my answer was, “Of course — the law of conservation of NPCs demands it!” The players chuckled, and we went on playing.

The principle of conservation of NPCs actually is one of my GMing strategies. Whenever I introduce a new conflict into the game, I try to see if existing NPCs can be integrated into this role before I consider introducing a new NPC. I find two big benefits from doing this.

The first is simply that the size of the cast stays under control — I’ve run plenty of games where NPCs multiplied without limit, and that meant that months of real time could pass before we saw an NPC reappear. This limits the amount of shared history the players can develop with a character, and is often a little unsatisfying as a result. So reusing NPCs helps prevent the narrative from fizzling out.

Secondly, re-using NPCs means they will have multiple facets relevant to the players. In our 9W game, Perseus’s family became a center of the narrative — each of the players was off doing something else, but they affected each other because their actions influenced Perseus and his family. So despite the characters being separated the players were still interacting with each other.

This is great advice, and it can actually be generalized beyond NPCs.

For example, when I was first designing the Western Lands (the campaign setting I typically use for my D&D campaigns), I decided that there would only be a single, limited pantheon of true gods. The pay-off has been that whenever I design a new adventure, I’m forced to figure out how to make my ideas fit within the context of that existing pantheon. This has yielded particularly rich results when I’m using published adventure modules that call for various gods, forcing me to figure out how radically different concepts can be rationalized within a limited framework.

As a result, my campaign’s religions are now rich with saint cults, historical holy symbols, disparate practices of worship, and a rich panoply of relics. Instead of spreading all of that work on fantasy theology out thinly over a multitude of gods, the effort has instead steadily deepened and enriched the Pantheon.

Similarly, the conservation of NPCs will cause drama to accumulate instead of dissipating: Current events will be more deeply informed by past events, and you’ll find all kinds of unexpected synergies and memorable recurring themes cropping up spontaneously.