More Monster Metamorphoses, Please

More monsters should undergo metamorphosis. Let’s consider some examples, ranging from the canonical, to the reinterpreted, to the brand new.

Piercer to Roper

Some mock the piercer, alleging that its behavior and life cycle is implausible. But I think it is a great monster and makes a lot more sense when you emphasize that piercers grow into ropers. Many animals reproduce by creating many spawn, expecting only a few to survive to adulthood, so a cavern full of piercers in roper territory fits. The piercers also complement the ropers’ tactics; a roper dragging an adventurer toward its maw provides an easy target for some piercers to dive bomb from above.

It always irks me that the 2014 Monster Manual puts the Roper and Piercer in separate entries, while the same book groups the following two creatures in one entry, despite similar immature/mature growth stages…

Fire Snake to Salamander 

Fire snakes have some good flavor (“When a salamander is ready to hatch, it melts its way through the egg’s thick shell and emerges as a fire snake” – that’s good!) But it doesn’t do much to explain how it turns into a salamander. It also is pretty unremarkable as an encounter, with “hot stove, do not touch” as its entire personality.

What if a fire snake consumes heat to turn into a salamander? No big deal on the elemental plane of fire, where heat is plentiful. But on the material plane, it gives them a much more compelling hook for conflict, as they gobble up fires of all shapes and sizes to fuel their transformation.

Gas Spore to Myconid 

The lowly gas spore is another target of mockery for its work-backward-from-dungeon-logic ecology. I don’t think that’s a problem per se, but we can fix it with a non-canonical hack. Instead of assuming that gas spores just produce more gas spores, why not make them the source of new myconid colonies? Either as an intended transition from one life stage to another, or perhaps as myconids hijacking the unintelligent gas spores to spread their colonies?    

One of my favorite takes on myconids, by Dungeons and Drawings

Lurker Above to Trapper

More gimmick monsters from the early days of D&D. These guys have gradually lost ground (or ceiling, respectively) in the game’s cultural consciousness to mimics, which have escaped the confines of D&D to become a fantasy staple (in Dark Souls, of course, but also prominently featured in manga and anime like Dungeon Meshi and Frieren). Thinking about such creatures makes me wonder – does the existence of the executioner’s hood, darkmantle, and cloaker imply that there is some evil pants-mimicking creature out there that can complete the aberrant wardrobe?

Regardless, I do like the implicit idea that camouflaged ceiling monster and camouflaged floor monster might be two parts of the same species' life cycle. Looking at the original AD&D Monster Manual, they’re awfully similar in most respects, but the text doesn’t make the connection explicit. I believe the lurker above is the juvenile form and the trapper is the mature specimen. 

Why? Because of my favorite detail distinguishing them – the lurker above is non-intelligent, but the trapper is “highly” (!) intelligent. 

You, a pleeb, clinging desperately to the ceiling. Me, an intellectual, resting comfortably on the floor. 

Caterkiller to Butcherfly

Here’s an original idea for you. The caterpillar and the butterfly are probably the most famous example of metamorphosis in nature, so let’s monstrify them. The caterkiller is a slow-moving meat shield that loves to consume paper and textiles of all kinds, whether that food is garbage, treasure, or adventurer apparel. 

Coming into conflict with adventurers actually helps trigger the metamorphosis. The “blood” it bleeds from its wounds hardens into a cocoon. Leave a “dead” caterkiller behind, and you will find a pupae when you return. Wait too long before you return, and that pupae will have already split open. A butcherfly now roams the local area, every bit as nimble and savage as the caterkiller was slow and methodical. Remember to tell the PCs the monsters' names. Both forms should behave like tokusatsu monsters and should probably do menacing poses when the PCs first encounter them.

Finishing the 0E D&D Jobs and Summing Up the Implied World

Last Week: More 0E D&D Job Tree Details -- Adding Cross-Class Connections

Bishop. We get back into a normal seniority progression after the exception for the curate. We’ll assume that characters in the clerical column can still opt out into the secular world, but curate was the last point at which they could join it; diagonal arrows only point away from the cleric column beginning at this point.

Myrmidon. It’s possible to see how the hero and swashbuckler jobs could depict someone moving up in the world, and the ranks that come after myrmidon in the fighter column continue that tradition. But myrmidon itself, to the degree it is a distinct idea from “soldier,” doesn’t suggest lordship, and clashes pretty sharply with the renaissance context of the swashbuckler. A curate-myrmidon might be a holy warrior, like a paladin. But a swashbuckler-myrmidon might require a more complicated explanation. Perhaps becoming a myrmidon is a matter of giving up the wealth and fame of the hero-swashbuckler life to challenge oneself with military life once again. Or it could in contrast represent a demotion forced by the factions that oppose whoever the character swore service to as a swashbuckler.

Sharper. Our interpretation of cutpurse finds full flower here, as this title implies fraud or financial manipulation rather than simple property theft. At this point the PC is senior in some kind of organization that either profits from or seeks to prevent such behavior. I’m interpreting the implied setting here as a place with a lot of gray area between legitimate mercantile business and actual crime.

Warlock. One way to interpret the order of the magic-user roles is that they start very passive (medium, seer) and gradually creep toward wizards who can more explicitly and unmistakably alter reality. A warlock has now made contact with an entity beyond the material world. Not just the whispering dead who can only remember the past, or the time-displaced spirits who can only see into the future; but a being with present-tense ego, goals, and power to grant to those who can hear its voice.

Lama. Even moreso than myrmidon, this is a strange word choice when divorced from its real-world cultural basis. I would have cut this one when I originally narrowed the list down to four by eight, but the multiple instances of patriarch were more urgent targets for their redundancy. Lama is in a very broad sense a comparable term to patriarch, but its presence here is harder to square in a chain of titles mostly drawn from European/Christian culture. At risk of engaging with Buddhism on a very superficial level, we could imagine that in between serving as a bishop and becoming a patriarch, an aspirant is expected to retire to a distant mountain monastery to master meditation and inward understanding. 

Champion. After our detour through myrmidon, the fighter column returns to a clear endgame of running a domain. We can imagine this as someone designated to serve as a field commander or take on a special fixed-term leadership responsibility as a stepping stone to becoming a lord. The three entry points (from bishop, myrmidon, and sharper) suggest that this probably covers a wide variety of areas of expertise.

Pilferer. Yes, our second-to-last thief job, strictly interpreted, means to steal small things of little value. My best guess is that this is winkingly ironic, that a merchant-thief at this level is beyond stealing or investing vast sums of wealth, and instead might have taken to thieving for its own sake, to prove that they can steal from the very best. Those who aren’t interested in such things can take the sharper-champion path instead of the straight line of sharper-pilferer. Warlock-pilferer is interesting. The voice on the other end of that warlock phone is insisting you steal something – what could it be?

Necromancer. The most forbidden school of magic. There is a nice idea that the magic-user at this point who comes full-circle from the medium (who can hear the dead, but has no control over them, and is probably in more danger than an ordinary person due to the contact with unlife) to the necromancer (who can channel and control death).

Patriarch. Apart from its previously discussed overlap with lama, this is a nice and simple capstone for the cleric path. As with most of the other high-level titles, this really has to be all about domain management.

Lord. Like the champion, but the PC now has full discretion and control over the organization, army, or government they are running. Since lama, champion, and pilferer all feed into this job, it serves a a nice catch-all for PCs who wish to "rule" in some sense, but aren't drawn to the other final titles.

Thief. In contrast to some of the middle-tier thief titles, I actually like that this one is simple and ambiguous. You could go with something like guild-master, and it would stand evenly with the other domain titles. But as with "swordsman" having a cultural implication that is more than "person carrying sword," it is interesting to think of capital-T thief as a forbidden word that is rarely uttered aloud.

Wizard. I’m sure there’s an answer somewhere as to why very early D&D went with “magic-user” rather than a natural-language term like wizard. But as with thief, "wizard" is a nice capstone title in its simplicity. I like the idea that a wizard is not just someone who can cast spells, but a title given only to someone who has mastered the various schools and specialties implied by the preceding titles.

Closing Thoughts 

So we have a a church that is highly integrated in affairs of state, but also relatively permeable in membership, allowing practitioners to enter at different points from the laity. 

We have an army that regulates what weapons a warrior is allowed to carry, providing a path into the nobility for the very best of the soldiers who started out as ordinary grunts.

We have a quasi-legal professional organization that blurs the lines between thieves guild and conventional craft guild. 

And we have a wizarding order that provides practical trade magic through its first few iterations, but also offers the ambitious an illicit higher path into the forbidden arts.  

Sounds like an interesting situation, where character classes and choices made when leveling up have major factional and social implications. I could run that today. 

Like 0E D&D itself, this structure strongly implies domain play, and assumes that the PCs will enmesh themselves in a social milieu. Players not interested in domain play could mitigate it somewhat by steering toward the right-hand side of the table. 

I stuck to three diagonal arrows between each row to keep it simple, but you could absolutely add more to create some additional connections. You’ll note that in the upper reaches of both the cleric and magic user columns, you can leave at any time for the neighboring columns, but there’s no getting back in afterward. I like that this implies the highest forms of magic require specialization. 

I also intentionally put the cleric and the magic user at opposite ends of the table. While this system isn’t really concerned with balance, this does give thieves and fighters some more options to dip into different roles, by virtue of their place in the middle columns. Hats off to the enterprising player who goes seer-robber-hero-curate to hit all four columns. That sounds like a memorable character.

Finally, I acknowledge it is possible I have reinvented a wheel here. Well, not this exact wheel, but I’m sure some other TTRPGs have done job trees. I’m not really aware of any except for D&D 3.5 and 4E’s respective prestige classes and paragon paths. I haven't played Burning Wheel, but its lifepath system sounds like it could be in this space.  

More 0E D&D Job Tree Details -- Adding Cross-Class Connections

Last Week: Turning the 0E D&D Level Titles Into a Job Tree and Inferring a Setting Through Backward Induction

Adept. Here we can start adding diagonal lines that break from linear leveling. Obviously an acolyte can become an adept, but what does it look like if a veteran can also become an adept? Perhaps that implies a state religion where a possible reward for military service is entry into the priesthood. An adept gains basic clerical spellcasting. This function of the job tree would already create some contrasting characters. An acolyte-adept would be very similar to a B/X cleric, while a veteran-adept would be a little tougher and have access to magic, but would be unable to turn undead.

Warrior. The natural progression from veteran to warrior would produce a familiar fighter character; but what about an apprentice-warrior? This character would have some skills and some martial talent. Advancement through the fighter column will probably just add more HD, but a more feature-rich system could add martial abilities closer to modern D&D.

Footpad. You’ll notice that while the cleric and fighter columns have some clear indications of seniority as they advance, the thief column is more of a festival of synonyms. Let’s say that a footpad leaves behind the ambiguity of the apprentice and is now actively committing crimes. Advancement through this column probably entails gradual increases to the traditional thief skills.

Seer. Seers could gain access to magic from the divination school. Leaning into the schools of magic would give some real oomph to leveling up. For a medium-seer, this is a matter of applying discipline and rigor to not just understand the voices of the dead, but also interpret their prophetic utterances. On the other hand, an apprentice-seer could explore the practical applications of trade magic. 

Village Priest. The implicit institutional hierarchy in these jobs comes across most strongly in the cleric column. The acolyte joins the monastery or temple. The adept further hones that skill, with the ranks of the sheltered acolyte-adepts strengthened by the integration of more worldly veteran-adepts. Once they have mastered the adept job, they are experienced enough to run their own parishes.

Swordsman. This is another odd title that provides an interesting worldbuilding opportunity. What does it mean for someone to be a veteran and a warrior before they become a "swordsman"? I read this order to imply that training, ownership, and usage of swords is strictly controlled by the state. A veteran-warrior may fight with a spear or an axe, but only after they become a swordsman are they allowed to carry a sword. 

Advancing to our third row begins to provide more disparate combinations of jobs. A veteran-warrior-swordsman could be a martial master who earned their place despite their family’s low standing. An acolyte-adept-swordsman could be someone of noble birth who was trained in the church, but always expected to return to the nobility and take up their familial sword. A veteran-adept-swordsman is a soldier who was singled out for their tactical abilities. An apprentice-warrior-swordsman is an irregular, non-military warrior who by luck, daring, or sheer skill rose to the envied rank of swordsman.

Robber. The thief column, with its profusion of synonyms, will provide more of a challenge than the other three columns. But the different branching options that could bring a PC to the robber job provide some ideas. A warrior-robber is someone who forewent the option to become a warrior-swordsman. Were they driven by money? Or dislike of the noble class that dominates the upper ranks of the fighter column? A seer-robber is using their prescient magical abilities to steal – perhaps to in turn acquire better magiks? Is it possible that taking a level of robber is a faster route to magical power than sticking to the linear magic-user column?

Conjurer. It’s worth noting that the first two levels of magic-user are essentially non-material. Someone who can speak with the dead or predict the future is powerful in a sense, but they’re not altering reality. Conjurers change things – the conjurer PC is now able to create something from nothing. Note how apprentice-seer-conjurer continues to support the idea of trade magic; predicting the future and conjuring objects are two of the most practical applications of magic.

"These tricks were expensive!"

Vicar. What a vicar is and what responsibilities they have can vary considerably depending on what real-world religious denomination one uses as a reference point, but the seniority escalation continues in a grokkable fashion. No special notes here. Someone taking the vicar job is probably just getting more cleric powers, but they’re also likely deputized or assigned some important role in the church-state apparatus. Anyone wanting to avoid such an assignment would choose not to become a vicar and instead would be a…

Hero. This is one of the most general “titles” on the entire list, so naturally we can have three different row-three jobs fed into it. What it means to be a “hero” is implied by both the path a character took to get here, and the paths they didn’t take. A village priest who forgoes the opportunity to become a vicar and instead becomes a hero perhaps saved the village at the expense of their standing in the church. The warrior-swordsman-hero could suggest a paragon of the form, someone who has defeated every other swordsman in the city; while an adept-swordsman-hero could tap into the etymological origins of the word hero, and be part divine; a demigod like Hercules. Warrior-robber-hero continues the fiction implied in the robber description above. I’m not even sure what to make of an apprentice-seer-robber-hero progression, but it sounds exciting.

Burglar. As with robber, we are challenged with a non-evocative title (by virtue of synonymity), so let’s once again look at what the burglar isn’t. Choosing not to become a hero suggests the character is not driven by justice. Not becoming a theurgist (see below) suggests they are not motivated by subversion of divine power. Burglar would be a middle path between the factions. This column has a mercantile feel to it, so we could even treat burglar as a close cousin to burgher.

Theurgist. This is one of the most curious choices on the list. Theurgy implies specifically divine magic, but it appears in the magic-user column, rather than the cleric path. D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder would square this circle with the mystic theurge, a spellcaster who could use both divine and arcane magics; but we’re not interested in the prestige class approach, which is (as discussed in the Dice Exploder podcast linked at the beginning of this series) clearly mechanics-first, flavor-and-story-second. Instead, presume that divine and arcane magic are not so neatly separated in this world (that the first-row medium job communing with the souls of the dead supports that idea). Keep in mind that the cleric column is expressly hierarchical. The theurgist could be someone tapping into divine power without participating in the state religion’s rituals. I see this as a banned profession. Trade magicians are expected to stop at the conjurer level, while someone coming to theurgist from the robber job is already outside the law. 

Curate. I thought the veteran entry was puzzling, but curate’s position on the OD&D table is doubly so. What a curate is can vary depending on which religious tradition one references, but a curate is typically engaged as assistant to a priest or vicar. Why would it appear here, rather than a step or two lower on the table? Again, it can vary depending on the path the PC took to get there.

Let’s say that a village priest-vicar-curate has undergone a kind of ritualized demotion, a way of expressing their humility. A village priest-hero-curate is probably still on a normal advancement track, since they “skipped” the vicar job. Someone who becomes a curate with no prior clerical levels is probably the beneficiary of some kind of worldly leader’s investiture discretion.

Swashbuckler. D&D was always a historical mashup, and the presence of swashbuckler in the same list is a reminder that it was never a purely medieval game. A logical extension of the preceding hero category would be that swashbucklers would be like musketeers, members of an elite military company entangled with affairs of church and state. This is also a convenient point for the thief column to cross back over into the fighter column, with a robber-swashbuckler fulfilling a Robin Hood type of role.

Cutpurse. Yet another implicit seniority disconnect here. The footpad-robber-burglar path at least vaguely implies crimes of escalating complexity. What sense does cutpurse make in the upper half of the thief column? Perhaps we take it euphemistically. The powerful banking guilds that control trade magic and keep the national purse full form a counterweight to the state religion favor thieves among their merchant-leaders because they are well-suited to becoming white hats who can stop thefts. 

Enchanter. The magic user column continues to raise interesting questions. If we proceed from our idea with the theurgist that we’re entering the world of outlawed magics, enchantment makes sense, given how it lends itself to deceit and fraud. Where a burglar-cutpurse has perhaps “gone straight,” a burglar-enchanter is doubling down on illegal activity.

Next Week: Finishing the 0E D&D Jobs and Summing Up the Implied World

Turning the 0E D&D Level Titles Into a Job Tree and Inferring a Setting Through Backward Induction

Some combination of watching Final Fantasy V challenge runs, listening to the Dice Exploder episode on prestige classes (recommended by Idle Cartulary), and reading this old post from The Manse about the 100-class pyramid has melted my brain. This post is the meltwater that resulted.

One of the characteristic Gygaxisms of early D&D were titles by level. They looked like this (fighter, magic-user, and cleric from the original brown books, with thief following soon after in Supplement I: Greyhawk): 

Fighter Magic-User Cleric     Thief

1 Veteran         Medium         Acolyte             Apprentice

2 Warrior Seer         Adept     Footpad

3 Swordsman Conjurer         Village Priest     Robber

4 Hero Theurgist         Vicar     Burglar

5 Swashbuckler Magician         Curate     Cutpurse

6 Myrmidon Enchanter Bishop     Sharper

7 Champion Warlock         Lama     Pilferer

8 Superhero Sorcerer         Patriarch             Master Pilferer

9 Lord Necromancer Patriarch, 9th     Thief

10 Lord, 10th Wizard Patriarch, 10th    Master Thief

These titles are just for flavor. There is no mechanical significance to them. A magic-user moving from level 8 to level 9 does not gain specific necromancy powers; they just become a more powerful magic-user. Some old-school games (e.g., Knave) have copied titles-per-level, again as flavor rather than mechanic. But most games gave them up long ago.

Can we create something interesting if we try to use them more literally? What does a job tree with these entries look like? We’re mostly going to try to roll with these as-is, but let's start by cutting out a few of the synonymous, duplicative, or uninteresting titles to get this down to a tight eight by four grid. 

Fighter Magic-User Cleric     Thief

1 Veteran         Medium         Acolyte         Apprentice

2 Warrior Seer         Adept Footpad

3 Swordsman Conjurer         Village Priest Robber

4 Hero Theurgist         Vicar Burglar

5 Swashbuckler Enchanter Curate Cutpurse

6 Myrmidon Warlock         Bishop Sharper

7 Champion Necromancer Lama Pilferer

8 Lord Wizard Patriarch         Thief

It could look like this:

I’ll provide a few ideas for mechanics, but where not otherwise stated, moving between job columns should blend abilities in a fashion similar to multiclassing. I'm not making any real attempt to balance these against each other. As in the linked Manse post, every class needs to be distilled down to just one or two abilities. There is no in-class leveling up. You are either a swordsman or you are not; you’re not going to get incrementally better at it.

Commoner. All PCs start as Commoners. These are level 0 characters with no abilities or training. This is what a PC is at the start of a funnel adventure (this idea doesn’t require a funnel, but it would be a good fit for it). A commoner who finishes a funnel (or a single session, in a non-funnel game) can choose any of the four first-level-equivalent jobs.

Acolyte. Makes sense as a starting point. An acolyte can turn low-level undead but can’t cast spells, just like first-level clerics in many old-school games.

Veteran. Like some other aspects of 1974 D&D, this feels like a first draft that needed another pass. Why is the junior-most fighter a “veteran”? But rather than reordering this to “make sense,” let’s challenge ourselves to interpret what the campaign might look like to make sense of "veteran" as the junior-most fighter. Perhaps becoming a veteran is about toughening you up. The average grunt in a fantasy army is probably distinguished by their ability to complete long marches and survive on limited food and sleep rather than their offensive expertise. A veteran is proficient in most weapons and armor. 

Apprentice. Another self-explanatory category. An apprentice gets the basic first-level thief skills. I like the idea that PCs gain these skills whether they're an apprentice of a thieves guild or in some more quotidian line of work. Hearing noises and climbing walls comes in handy in a lot of trades.

Medium. Isn’t it interesting that medium is the first level title? Not “apprentice mage” or “arcane student” or “hedge wizard” or something else, but medium, in the “in contact with the spirits of the dead” sense. I like the idea that the path to wizardly magic begins with opening oneself up to the voices from beyond the grave. A medium gets a spell just like a first level magic-user. Roll randomly to reflect the idea that they are more of a conduit for magic than a master of it.

Next Week: More 0E D&D Job Tree Details -- Adding Cross-Class Connections

You Fell for the Great Drow Psyop

You’ve heard stories about the drow. The evil, dark-skinned, matriarchal elves living under the ground. You were meant to hear those stories. The drow are masters of psychology. They studied the surface world before they made contact with it. And they orchestrated the very stories that portray them so harshly.

The First Lie: The Drow Are Matriarchal

The drow saw that those who ruled the surface were mostly men, and that in the rare instance when someone who wasn’t a man gained power, many of those ruling men were at their most irrational, driven by a mix of suspicious sexism and eroticized fascination. This was the state in which these rulers were least prudent and most vulnerable. So the drow planted the idea that theirs was a matriarchal society; not just a regent empress or other temporary form of non-male rule, but a continuous matriarchal line where men were subservient.

The truth: Drow do not typically express a particular gender. Reproductively, they are crepuscular hermaphrodites; female in darkness, but male when exposed to moonlight. Their primary reason to interact with the surface at all is to find liminal-luminal locations where they can procreate.

The Second Lie: They Are Dark-Skinned

The drow sought more weaknesses among the surface men, and they found the second in their reliance on sight. Touched by the sun in varying degrees, the surface men used skin tone as a shorthand for distinguishing between nearby kin and far-flung strangers. It was very different from the brutal but egalitarian darkness that the drow knew from the underground, where sight was not privileged as first among the senses. The drow saw another exploitable weakness, and planted the lie that (despite their deprivation from the sun) they were darker than the darkest-skinned human, the sort of total darkness that surface-dwellers feared above all.

The truth: The drow are translucent. When still and unclothed, they are very difficult to see at all, even in moderate illumination, although light will cause their silhouette to quiver in a manner similar to the way shadows seem to move at the edge of the candlelight in a child’s bedroom. A clothed drow is either a pool of inky blankness or a blinding flash of silvery strands (their clothes are reversible). They are fully visible and conventionally opaque in moonlight, in some forms of magical light, and during coronal mass ejections and other rare, disruptive stellar events.

The Third Lie: They Are Elves 

The final weakness that the drow identified in the surface men was their love-hate relationship with elves. The elves were everything the men wished they could be. Longer-lived, more beautiful, more skilled with magic. The mightiest human leader would be dust within the natural lifespan of the lowliest elf, and humans were both awed and enraged by this fact.

The truth: No elf, good or evil, would ever live underground. The surface is fundamental to what makes elves elves. The drow are best understood as fey, as they once lived in the shadowy glades of the unseelie court. Insofar as elves also have fey blood, they’re related to the drow; but no moreso than they’re related to satyrs or pixies.

Spiders are real. That part was the truth. Gif by macdoom

Three Truths About the Drow

The drow spread these lies to ensure that their potential foes on the surface would not understand them well enough to defeat them, if they were to come into conflict. But the drow did not completely fabricate the stories that spread on the surface. The best lies mix in enough truth to fool even those who investigate.

The drow do live underground, although not exclusively. Only by living under the earth and severing themselves from the seasons can the drow resist the instinctive pull to return to the fey realm, which eventually calls even the most willful and mischievous of its children back from seasonal dalliances on the material plane. 

The drow do love spiders, although not as a form of demon worship. Spiders were one of the few familiar things the drow knew from the fey realm and recognized when they arrived in the underground world, and they serve as mounts, livestock, and guardians for the drow. 

Like other members of the unseelie court, the drow are morally inscrutable to most humans, which can be difficult to distinguish from evil. Their society has been shaped by the low-resource, high-competition environment of the underground. They can be cruel (they would say pragmatic), extreme (they would say uncompromising), and quick to judgment (they would say decisive) in their dealings with other peoples. But the few surface-dwellers who have untangled the lies from the truth in the webs the drow spin have dealt with them and lived to… well, probably not "lived to tell the tale," because the drow would not appreciate that. But they have lived.

Halflings Are Only Half the Story

Most humans assume that halflings are called “halflings” because they are about half the height of a human. Naturally this is wrong, or at best, misleading.

But don’t expect a halfling to tell you the truth. Ask them about it and they will agree with the commonly accepted definition. Or pretend to get angry, and then laugh it off. Or just change the subject and call for another round of drinks and a fine song.

What they won’t do is tell the truth about halflings and their all-too-apt name.

Long ago, in times lost to memory, there were humans, but no halflings. And then, as now, some humans worshipped gods. One of those gods was Magara the Mistreated, a god of luck – both for good and ill. Followers of Magara would experience great fortune one moment, and equally great calamity the next.

Magara's followers were taught to embrace the highs and lows of Magara’s fickle luck in equal measure. But humans being humans, they could not resist the temptation to tamper with Magara’s blessings, and they used forbidden magiks to twist the god’s influence toward the “great fortune” end of the luck spectrum.

When Magara found out – of course they found out – they were displeased. Magara unleashed a powerful curse on those who broke the compact. Each disobedient soul was split in half. Their good fortune was given over to newly forged souls; these became the halflings. Those who betrayed Magara were trapped in the other half of the soul, experiencing only bad luck in all of its forms. These souls became the goblins.

Half Full or Half Empty?

Goblin by Jessica Andrade

For every halfling that walks the earth, there is a goblin.

The name “goblin,” of course, has been linguistically scrambled. It began as “obling” – “ob-” (as in opposition, like in the word obstacle) “-ling”. Opposed to halflings. The other half of the halfling. That’s what a goblin is. The word’s etymological journey includes a sort of reverse pig latin, where the "g" from the end of “obling” moved to the front of the word to create the modern “goblin.”

A goblin is the halfling’s dark mirror. A halfling’s barrow is cozy and tidy; a goblin’s warren is chaotically jumbled. Halflings are most active from late morning to early evening, while goblins thrive from nightfall to dawn. Halflings love to barter and trade; goblins prefer to bicker and steal.

Halflings are not ashamed of this, per se; it's not really their fault. But every halfling is aware of how lucky they were to be spared from Magara's fickle judgment. And every goblin is understandably resentful of their situation. Consider that this curse was placed on them by a cruel deity as punishment for something their distant ancestors did. Magara is long-dead or lost and raving mad (scholars disagree), but is certainly no longer able to lift the curse. Goblins didn’t ask to be the despised shadow of amiable burrow-dwellers. Is it so strange that they view the surface world with a mixture of envy and disgust?

And on rare occasions, they have an opportunity to defy their fate. When a goblin meets a halfling who is the direct descendent of their mirrored original ancestor, they know. And they believe there is a way to put together what once was sundered. To join halfling and obling, and emerge as something new, reunited, whole and strange.

Finding Your Own Meaning in the Dungeon

Why do the adventurers care? Why are they here? Why are they in the dungeon at all?

“Weak hooks” are a common point of criticism in adventure reviews. The reviews are not wrong, but I’m sympathetic to the adventure writers here. It is difficult for a standalone adventure to hook players. The product is implicitly available to drop into an existing game. The writer is trying to come up with something that will be specific enough to foreshadow the adventure and motivate the players toward it, but at the same time general enough that it can be dropped into any game with minimal modification. That’s a narrow target to hit. Good hooks are hard!

Good games are powered by motivation. Even in the grottiest old-school game, where the PCs aspire to little more than shivving goblins for copper coins in a dank hole in the ground… play that game long enough, and those PCs are going to develop some kind of purpose or goal. They may not set out to save the world, but they’re going to organically come up with some kind of goal, whether it is stick it to their rivals, get rich, build something cool, make history, or simply find out just how deep this dungeon goes.

So here’s another idea. This has big story game energy, so it’s not going to be for everyone. But… I would be curious to try it. 

Write five hooks (rumors, leads, whatever) for your adventuring scenario. One for each of the following categories:

• Wealth: The accumulation of resources, from common coins to unique works of art.
• Status: Importance in the eyes of other creatures, whether mundane societies or mystical peers. 
• Knowledge: Secrets, lore, or new discoveries about the world and its wonders.
• Purpose: A belief, cause, or principle that gives meaning to life and justifies risking danger.
• Change: Altering the world in some way, whether to effect a very particular change or simply to leave one’s mark. 

Gif by jonreytrevino

When the PCs decide to take up the scenario, each player chooses one of the five hook types. The hook that the most players pick is the party’s shared motivation to pursue the adventure. If a player is indifferent or otherwise doesn’t want to choose, their vote defaults to Wealth. Wealth also always wins ties. Ties between non-Wealth categories are settled by a roll of the dice.

 Even those who voted for something else share in this motivation as long as they are a member of the party and the group pursues the hook. One or more characters might vocally dissent, but if they’re not quitting the group over it, they're implicitly going along with the shared motiviation.

Here’s the twist. Each PC has a one-time ability they can choose to use at any point during the scenario associated with the hook the GM provided. When they use it, they change their motivation from the party’s shared motivation to a different motivation. If they are switching to Status, Knowledge, Purpose, or Change, they have to be able to explain what that looks like in-world – status in the eyes of whom? What kind of knowledge? Which purpose, and why does it matter to them? What specific change? (If they switch to Wealth, they don’t have to provide any elaboration).

When they do this, they can reroll a failed roll. Or get some equivalent bennie, depending on the system. The mechanical payoff should be something big enough that it might turn the tide in a specific dangerous situation, but not so great that it overshadows the characters’ conventional abilities. This idea is more about the implications of the process and less about the award itself.

For example, a party made up of five PCs votes on the five motivations. Two players choose Status twice, one chooses Wealth, and two choose Purpose. The GM says that odds means Status and evens means Purpose, then rolls and gets an even number, so Purpose wins. The DM gives the PCs a Purpose hook, explaining that wyverns have migrated out of the mountains for unknown reasons and are terrorizing the populace. The PCs agree to help, with the two PCs who chose Purpose perhaps leading the interaction, describing how the situation applies to their characters’ values.

While scaling the wyvern’s spire, the party thief is in danger of being grabbed and carried away by a wyvern. They use their one-time power to reroll a failed result, avoiding capture. The thief changes their motivation to Wealth, deciding that they’re only sticking with this boondoggle if there is some treasure involved. 

Why do this? Two reasons. 

First, there’s a very rich vein of media where characters set off with goals that seem clear and straightforward, but change as they learn new information or endure challenging circumstances. In narrative media like movies and books, this is pretty conspicuous, and part of enough stories to be a widely recognized trope. TTRPGs cannot and should not try to force “beats” taken from narrative media, but plenty of story games have proven that it can be done organically. 

Second, it can create some interesting friction between the mechanical payoff and party unity, because the party starts off with the same motivation, but their motivation splits once someone uses this power. The GM should use split motivations to inform challenges and choices for the players. What happens when the thief chooses Wealth instead of Purpose? What happens if the spire lacks treasure? Or if there’s an opportunity to grab the treasure without dealing with the wyverns? What if another PC changes motivations? What happens when the Purpose group loses its plurality? Answer those questions, and you've found your own meaning.