For a possible TARDIS-based kitchen sink campaign, I've been adapting setting stuff for several periods of Terran spacetime that interest me.
Approx. 800,000 BP - 130,000 BP
After the reign of Homo erectus, a species of man called today Homo heidelbergensis, known to the cultures of the Hyberorean Era (Sangamonian/Eemian Interglacial) as Antehumans, and calling themselves (placeholder), evolved in the icebox Europe of the Wolstonian. They achieved a sophisticated social culture and mastered the sciences known to Homo sapiens as magic, but did not achieve a material culture that would be recognizable to the archaeologists of the Arbitrary Present as anything more than middle stone age technology.
The population quickly dispersed around the globe. In the glaciated north, they grew compact and hairy, while in the baking south, they grew tall and smooth. There was frequent movement between the populations, so that it was not uncommon for the upstart H. sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis who arose in the Antehuman's twilight to see a blocky, rude northerner in the Sahara or a towering southerner on the ice. Memories of the senescent Antehuman species have morphed 200,000 years later into the dwarfs and elves of folk memory. The antehumans of Asia settled in Mu (known to the Elder races as R'lyeh) and in Lemuria, driving the more primitive H. erectus into the hinterlands of mainland Asia. The rotation of the Terran hypersphere led to the catastrophic destruction of Mu in 165,000 BP.
For our purposes, we are concerned only with the Antehumans of Thule and Hyperborea. Thule is the translation of the name the Hyperboreans gave to Scandinavia, while Hyperborea was their name for Greenland. The Antehumans shared their subarctic lands with the diverged hominids known as the Voormis, the inhuman Jeelo, and the degenerate Voors. It was from the Voormis that the Antehumans, and subsequently the Hyperboreans, learned the worship of Tsathoggua. The Jeelo are ill-attested by Eibon, and thus little known in the Arbitrary Present. The Voor predate even the Antehumans in Thule. Voor delving uncovered much from the pre-hominid cultures, becoming a species corrupted by too much knowledge too soon. Their wars with the northward immigrating Antehumans drove the isolated "low" Voor tribes into the uttermost, desolate north, where they would evolve into the cannibal Gnoph-Keh, and the "civilized" Voors underground into "Deep Dendo". Over the millennia, these have become squirming albino burrowers, barely sapient, and reminiscent of the Crawlers from 21st century horror film The Descent. Their Voorish Domes still stand, tantalizing adventurers into the deep caverns and an inevitably horrific death.
28 May 2013
10 July 2012
Ivory Goat
yeah, okay. Miniatures reviews never happened. Whatever. I still like the blog name.
I love fantasy settings. But what I love about them is the thing least supported both by the games themselves and gaming culture in general. I love investigating the... well, the science of them. Biology, Anthropology, History, Physics. The whole shebang; heck, in most fantasy settings, Theology becomes a falsifiable field of inquiry. I want to know if evolution exists, or if it's all a static intelligent design, and if it was intelligently designed, by whom? Is that designer still around? If not, what happened to it, and its creations? What happens when a manifest and immanent deity is no longer worshiped? If an elven god became worshiped by humans, is it possible that the elves adopted that god from an older race? Can an alchemist's concoctions be mass-produced? If not, WHY not? How are there still precious metals and gems in the earth if dwarves, humans, and countless monstrous and bizarre species have been mining nearly non-stop for thousands of years?
Questions like that are what I want to delve deeply into. And the answers to those are either not addressed, and sometimes even mentioning that they're not addressed can cause one to catch hell within the fan community, or are left entirely up to the GM, which, given that I end up the GM more often than not, is unsatisfying. If I wanted to CREATE a world, I wouldn't have paid money for your setting, game-designers. When GMing, thinking about these questions is often dismissed as building castles in the sky, and GMs are admonished to focus on the gameable stuff, and if they want to world build, write a book. In a lot of ways, I agree - because if it's not going to hit the table, it really is wasting the other players' time. When playing, you're told not to worry about it, and focus on the four-armed ape that's trying to kill you.
An older game called Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth is about the only RPG I know of that focuses on world building as the game itself, and although I've never seen the book, I'm told it's nearly unreadable for its pretensions and unplayable in its mechanics. That's a damned shame. And from what I've heard about Aria, it's very much about top-down world building. The players make their decisions and apply them directly to the world. That's fun, but again, I can world-build in that fashion alone, and without scouring e-bay or game stores with a used book section. As player, I want to formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and collect data. As a GM, I want a working mechanism for players to uncover this information, apply it to change the world, and sometimes come to incorrect conclusions.
In a lot of ways, adventure gaming can handle part of that. In an adventure role-playing game, you're always going to be more Indiana Jones and Lara Croft than George Bass and Augustus Rivers. So I can rappel down caves into ancient pre-human ruins and dodge the murder traps ("Why did they have so many murderous traps in their own city," the part of me that prompted this post asks). That's fine. Other people at the table want to swing swords and/or bed harlots, and y'know, that's fun too. I don't necessarily want to role-play out sitting around for 72 hours while the computing elemental crunches my data on the air-speed velocity of an unladen white dragon. But wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mechanic for obtaining and understanding that data?
Whenever I complain about non-combat mechanics in a fantasy adventure game, my request is always "I want the mechanics for doing activity X to be at least as complex and robust as the mechanics for murdering things!" The usual response is that combat can be broken down into discrete steps with easily identifiable actions that have obvious cause-and-effect relationships to mechanical elements. Social interaction, to me, does seem to lack that sort of modularity - and yet, pick-up artists, social psychologists, and behavioral anthropologists all seem to be able to break down these interactions into steps that seem a lot like combat examples in your usual RPG. Research and investigation certainly lend themselves to a logical breakdown even more than chatting up a hot young thing in a nightclub.
I should make these rules myself, then, since no one else seems to be jumping at the opportunity. But if I make the rules, I'll almost certainly have to run them, and again, nobody else seems interested in this mode of play. Which is almost certainly why they're not included in rules sets - if you can sell one copy of the book to me by including rules for collecting data and interpreting experimental results (and for the GM, embedding those facts into the world to be uncovered), or you can sell 100 copies by including more rules for murdering people more spectacularly, the economics are clear. I'm facing a similar roadblock in my ideas for Spell-Component Tycoon, which would focus on mercantile and economic endeavors rather than the research-based ones I'm rambling about here. Both could be attempts to graft rules onto systems that already have an embarrassment of rules, or they could be game unto themselves, requiring me to build a system from the ground up, which lacks a great deal of appeal to me.
So, that's almost 1,000 words of complaining. Let's see if I can write another few thousand words on solving the problem, and see if we can write the next thousand in less than a year?
I love fantasy settings. But what I love about them is the thing least supported both by the games themselves and gaming culture in general. I love investigating the... well, the science of them. Biology, Anthropology, History, Physics. The whole shebang; heck, in most fantasy settings, Theology becomes a falsifiable field of inquiry. I want to know if evolution exists, or if it's all a static intelligent design, and if it was intelligently designed, by whom? Is that designer still around? If not, what happened to it, and its creations? What happens when a manifest and immanent deity is no longer worshiped? If an elven god became worshiped by humans, is it possible that the elves adopted that god from an older race? Can an alchemist's concoctions be mass-produced? If not, WHY not? How are there still precious metals and gems in the earth if dwarves, humans, and countless monstrous and bizarre species have been mining nearly non-stop for thousands of years?
Questions like that are what I want to delve deeply into. And the answers to those are either not addressed, and sometimes even mentioning that they're not addressed can cause one to catch hell within the fan community, or are left entirely up to the GM, which, given that I end up the GM more often than not, is unsatisfying. If I wanted to CREATE a world, I wouldn't have paid money for your setting, game-designers. When GMing, thinking about these questions is often dismissed as building castles in the sky, and GMs are admonished to focus on the gameable stuff, and if they want to world build, write a book. In a lot of ways, I agree - because if it's not going to hit the table, it really is wasting the other players' time. When playing, you're told not to worry about it, and focus on the four-armed ape that's trying to kill you.
An older game called Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth is about the only RPG I know of that focuses on world building as the game itself, and although I've never seen the book, I'm told it's nearly unreadable for its pretensions and unplayable in its mechanics. That's a damned shame. And from what I've heard about Aria, it's very much about top-down world building. The players make their decisions and apply them directly to the world. That's fun, but again, I can world-build in that fashion alone, and without scouring e-bay or game stores with a used book section. As player, I want to formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and collect data. As a GM, I want a working mechanism for players to uncover this information, apply it to change the world, and sometimes come to incorrect conclusions.
In a lot of ways, adventure gaming can handle part of that. In an adventure role-playing game, you're always going to be more Indiana Jones and Lara Croft than George Bass and Augustus Rivers. So I can rappel down caves into ancient pre-human ruins and dodge the murder traps ("Why did they have so many murderous traps in their own city," the part of me that prompted this post asks). That's fine. Other people at the table want to swing swords and/or bed harlots, and y'know, that's fun too. I don't necessarily want to role-play out sitting around for 72 hours while the computing elemental crunches my data on the air-speed velocity of an unladen white dragon. But wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mechanic for obtaining and understanding that data?
Whenever I complain about non-combat mechanics in a fantasy adventure game, my request is always "I want the mechanics for doing activity X to be at least as complex and robust as the mechanics for murdering things!" The usual response is that combat can be broken down into discrete steps with easily identifiable actions that have obvious cause-and-effect relationships to mechanical elements. Social interaction, to me, does seem to lack that sort of modularity - and yet, pick-up artists, social psychologists, and behavioral anthropologists all seem to be able to break down these interactions into steps that seem a lot like combat examples in your usual RPG. Research and investigation certainly lend themselves to a logical breakdown even more than chatting up a hot young thing in a nightclub.
I should make these rules myself, then, since no one else seems to be jumping at the opportunity. But if I make the rules, I'll almost certainly have to run them, and again, nobody else seems interested in this mode of play. Which is almost certainly why they're not included in rules sets - if you can sell one copy of the book to me by including rules for collecting data and interpreting experimental results (and for the GM, embedding those facts into the world to be uncovered), or you can sell 100 copies by including more rules for murdering people more spectacularly, the economics are clear. I'm facing a similar roadblock in my ideas for Spell-Component Tycoon, which would focus on mercantile and economic endeavors rather than the research-based ones I'm rambling about here. Both could be attempts to graft rules onto systems that already have an embarrassment of rules, or they could be game unto themselves, requiring me to build a system from the ground up, which lacks a great deal of appeal to me.
So, that's almost 1,000 words of complaining. Let's see if I can write another few thousand words on solving the problem, and see if we can write the next thousand in less than a year?
05 June 2011
Welcome
This is a blog about the most important part of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing: the little tiny mens we push around on the battlemat. But I won't be talking about just D&D minis - I'll look at any little dude that can be thrown down for the Fighter to try and power attack. Horrorclix, Heroclix, Reaper metals, Games Workshop metals, paper minis, whatever strikes my fancy.
Modern D&D has one size constant: in 4e (D&D 'proper') and Pathfinder (Paizo's adaptation of OGL-era D&D) one side of a one-inch square on the battlemat is five scale feet. That's 25.4mm - which means 5.08mm is one scale foot. I will be applying this 'unspoken' scale to all the miniatures I look at, although I will mention the figure's official scale when I know it. Base size is important in D&D, so I will provide its actual base size, and its D&D-intended base size. Clix humanoid minis, for instance, have a 1.5" base instead of the 1" base uses for medium-sized creatures in D&D.
I will also be measuring these miniatures as if they were living creatures. This means the following:
We'll start by looking at the summon monster suite of spells. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than trying to collect all the miniatures needed for these nine spells.
Modern D&D has one size constant: in 4e (D&D 'proper') and Pathfinder (Paizo's adaptation of OGL-era D&D) one side of a one-inch square on the battlemat is five scale feet. That's 25.4mm - which means 5.08mm is one scale foot. I will be applying this 'unspoken' scale to all the miniatures I look at, although I will mention the figure's official scale when I know it. Base size is important in D&D, so I will provide its actual base size, and its D&D-intended base size. Clix humanoid minis, for instance, have a 1.5" base instead of the 1" base uses for medium-sized creatures in D&D.
I will also be measuring these miniatures as if they were living creatures. This means the following:
- Vertically-oriented bipeds (e.g., humanoids) are measured from bottom of feet to top of head
- Horizontally-oriented bipeds (e.g., birds, theropod dinosaurs) are measured for height from bottom of feet to hips. For length, it is tip of snout to vent/cloaca for currently extant animals, but total length (snout to tail tip) for extinct animals. Yes, this will cause confusion in the monster manuals.
- All quadrupeds and hexapeds are measured from snout to vent or anus, except again, for those creatures who are only known from fossil remains. Tails are often damaged or missing, or at the other extreme, are as long as the rest of the body. Thus tails can give a much misleading idea of the animal's size, and are excluded as part of the "size determination". These horizontally-oriented animals have their height measured from bottom of the foot to their shoulders.
- Winged creatures will have a wingspan listed whenever possible. This is measured from wingtip to wingtip when the wings are fully extended.
- Centauroids have their height measured as if they were humanoid, and their length measured as if they were quadrupeds.
- Diameters are used for creatures like cephalopods and oozes.
- Everything else will have this measurement information made explicit in the entry.
We'll start by looking at the summon monster suite of spells. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than trying to collect all the miniatures needed for these nine spells.
01 February 2002
Okay. Last post of the night. I'm going to go w...
Okay. Last post of the night. I'm going to go watch Conan in a few minutes, and then go to bed waaaaay too late for getting up at 7:30 AM for work tomorrow. Been chatting in my IRC channel with some friends from the UK, discussing Geordie accents and road trips. I hope that in the future I'll be spending less time cluttering up people's friends lists with trivia like this....
And more time filling it up with random, screaming gibberish.
And more time filling it up with random, screaming gibberish.
Well, this is another nonsense post to see how my...
Well, this is another nonsense post to see how my other LJ Icon looks. Suck Gibberish, Internet!
Well, looks like I've finally succumbed to the pe...
Well, looks like I've finally succumbed to the peer pressure.
We'll see how this works out, won't we?
We'll see how this works out, won't we?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)