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.

While poking around caving websites doing research for the Better Dungeon Maps series, I stumbled across a thread at CaveChat.org of “caving lies”, many of which seemed to have a great deal of pertinence to fantasy dungeoncrawling:

• “You pretty much can’t get lost.”
• “The trip can’t take more than 4 hours.”
• “I’m just going to poke my head in and see where it goes.”
• “It’s dry.”
• “We’ve got plenty of rope.”
• “You can fit through there. No problem.”
• “Trust me.”
• “Leave your pack behind, you won’t be needing it.”
• “I know exactly where I’m at!”
• “The cave map is accurate.”
• “I don’t know how those rocks got in your pack.”
• “I only scooped a hundred feet.”

Tangentially, the idea of “scooping” an area (i.e., being the first to explore it) has recently come up quite a bit in my hexcrawl campaign. Should have more on that later this week or next.

A couple days ago I followed a trackback from here to a Danish gaming blog called “The Voice from the River Valley”. Curious, I used Google Translate to take a peek around. The blog line, which in Danish reads:

En blog om rollespil af Morten Greis. Fra Tryggevælde ådal en dyb klang. Elverpigernes dans. Røre i det hvide slør. Disen hyller landskabet. De gamle stammer krogede trolde.

Is currently rendered by Google Translate as:

A blog about RPG by Morten Greis. From Tryggevælde creek in a deep tone. Elfin girls dancing. Stir in the white veil. Haze clothed the landscape. The ancient tribes hull trolls.

I don’t know anything about Danish, but I’m guessing something has gone slightly awry with that last sentence. The poetic imagery got me thinking about it, though… what if the ancient tribes actually were hulling trolls?

Trolls are regenerative, right? So imagine that a tribe of (let’s say) Vikings learned how to use certain alchemical compounds and rites to warp the bones and flesh of captured troll-spawn, twisting and stretching them until they formed the endurant, regenerating hulls of their longboats. Vulnerable to fire, of course, but so is wood.

Of course, for this technique to be worthwhile the trolls would still need to be alive. And the pain must be unimaginable.

Beware the Raiders of the Screaming Ships.

Yesterday’s post about hovering at death’s door got me thinking about AD&D’s system shock rules. In the 1st Edition Player’s Handbook, these rules read:

System Shock Survival states the percentage chance the character has of surviving the following forms of magical attacks (or simple application of the magic): aging, petrification (including flesh to stone spell!), polymorph any object, polymorph others. Example: The wicked necromancer polymorphs (others) his hireling into a giant roc, with the rather foolish agreement of the changee; the hireling must make a saving throw based on his constitution score using the table above. Assuming he survives, a further saving throw would have to be made if he was again polymorphed or dispelled back to original form. The saving throw must be equal to or less than the percentage shown.

Resurrection survival shows the percentage chance the character has of being successfully raised from the dead or resurrected by a cleric. The score of the percentile dice must be equal to or less than the number shown on the table, or the character fails to be revivified and is completely and totally dead forever. Remember that a character can never be raised from the dead/resurrected a total number of times in excess of the character’s initial constitution score.

Reading through these rules again prompted a couple of thoughts.

First, wouldn’t re-introducing some sort of save-or-die effect for polymorph spells pretty much instantly solve the balance problems those spells have in 3rd Edition? This is a pretty good example of how the long, slow retreat from lethal consequences in D&D can have some really bad tack-on effects when those lethal consequences were serving as an important balancing mechanism.

Second, the degree to which order has been imposed onto the Gygaxian chaos of the early rulebooks. It’s easy to look at big examples (like getting all the numbers pointed in the same direction) and ignore the multitude of smaller adjustments made over the years: For example, 2nd Edition just quietly smoothed away the fact that you have one set of saving throws resolved using a d20-roll-under mechanic determined primarily by class (but adjusted by race and ability score) and a completely different set of saving throws resolved using percentile dice determined by ability score. And even retro-clones like OSRIC follow suit.

Nor, in my opinion, is this something that’s limited to published rulebooks. Gygax was an effusively creative fellow, but his rulebooks are dizzying affairs of the contradictory and the imparsable. I’ve talked before about the fact that the ur-game of D&D basically requires you to impose your will upon the rulebooks in order to play, and I think, when confronted with AD&D, we all tend to quietly gloss over the grosser oddities while sorting everything into a more comprehensible order. And I think that’s true even when we don’t really think about the fact that we’re doing it.

As a final thought, here’s the same set of rules in AD&D2:

System Shock states the percentage chance a character has to survive magical effects that reshape or age his body: petrification (and reversing petrification), polymorph, magical aging, etc. It can also be used to see if the character regains consciousness in particularly difficult situations. For example, an evil mage polymorphs his dim-witted hireling into a crow. The hireling, whose Constitution score is 13, has an 85 percent chance to survive the change. Assuming he survives, he must successfully roll for system shock again when he is changed back to his original form or else he will die.

This may be the perfect example of the shift from AD&D1 to AD&D2: Like most of the rules, this one is essentially unchanged. But in changing a roc into a crow one gets an immediate sense of how AD&D2 rulebooks were turned into vanilla.