Asking for Directions in an RPG

"Five Turns Sixwards of Five’ is a pretty simple instruction for someone around Saint Five; just turn ‘Sixwards’ (people nearby will probably have a good general idea of which direction ‘Five’ is), and then take five major turns in that direction." 

This from a post regarding Patrick Stuart's upcoming book, Queen Mab's Palace. I’m looking forward to reading it, as his Deep Carbon Observatory was one of the very first OSR products I ever read, and Patrick’s work continues to be appointment reading.

The above excerpt reminded me of an interesting question to consider when running RPG sessions; how do people give directions in the fictional world? This is worthwhile to think about both in the sense of NPCs giving PCs literal directions, and in the sense of how the DM describes imagined spaces to the PCs so they can visualize them accurately. So what are some options?

Locally relative. Until recently in human history, most people did not have GPS, compasses, or even detailed maps. Most directions would be given based on a simple view of the sun and some dead reckoning using local landmarks. This is a good baseline assumption for low-tech worlds like most fantasy milieus. Simple questions of elevation and sight lines would greatly affect how well the local area is "known" to inhabitants. 

Map-level view. The opposite is people who primarily have a “map-level” view, rather than an egocentric sense of direction. This is generally better for PCs trying to ask for directions, as the players themselves are to some degree viewing the action “top-down” (literally or figuratively) when trying to get from place to place. So an NPC who can tell them to go west is probably more helpful than one who gives locally relative directions. 

But it can get tricky for the PCs in other circumstances. If a PC deep in a dungeon asks an NPC “which door should I use, the one on the right or the one on the left?” and the answer they get is “the westernmost one,” that PC may wish they had those locally relative directions. 

Intuitive directions. The direction-giver knows how they would get there, using subtle clues from the weather, the disposition of local flora and fauna, or even something like the planet’s magnetic field. But that can’t be relayed in a way the PCs will realistically understand. This is a good way to prompt the PCs to hire a guide who can navigate for them. And to stress that they need to keep that guide alive. 

Different units of measurement. The locals know how far it is to where you want to go, but they don’t use the same units of measurement and don’t know how to convert to units the PCs understand. This can create a bit of a puzzle, where the PCs are rewarded for figuring out something that must have been a challenge for real-world explorers as well.

Different or differently emphasized sensory organs. What happens when a PC uses Speak with Animals to ask a bat about the interior of a cave? The bat knows the cave in great detail, but not in the way a person would know it. Imagine the poor bat trying to explain how echolocation feels to someone who cannot echolocate. 

Weird environment. If PCs are exploring a strange space like the astral sea, and they meet a resident of that place, how does that creature explain how to get where they want to go? Light? Gravity? Something else?

Be Kind to Your Players

It is fun to bake your crazy ideas into your game, but please keep in mind that TTRPGs are a matter of mediating a highly fluid and unstable imagined environment through mostly just... words. Be careful when throwing in advanced concepts like tricky or hard-to-understand directions. Err in favor of the players when they’re struggling with confusion that is more about the distance between player and character than any intentionally crafted game challenge.

The Rival Taxonomies of D&D Magic

D&D’s origins were full of contradictions. The game was defined by strict rules, but open to liberal interpretation. Top-down design versus a strong DIY ethos; high fantasy versus science fantasy; Appendix N versus Hammer horror. It shows up in so many aspects of the game. 

Consider for example how spells are named in D&D. They can be grouped into two broad categories. 

Detect Magic, Locate Object, Comprehend Languages, and similar spell names have a technical nomenclature. The spell names quite literally explain what the spells do, in plain language. This is magic as technology. This is one of the two taxonomies of the game that goes all the way back to the beginning, appearing in the context of magic items as well. 

Now consider names like Hellish Rebuke, Crown of Madness, Eyebite, and almost all of the spells that include proper names, like Tasha's Hideous Laughter. These have a mythic nomenclature. The name still relates to what the spell does, but in a much more evocative, figurative, or culturally mediated way.

Now imagine that these rival naming conventions aren’t just an oddity of the game’s development. What if we infer there is an in-universe reason behind this distinction? Perhaps the technical nomenclature came from magic-as-science aliens, while the mythic nomenclature descended from primordial progenitors at the dawn of the world.

You could even group the spells accordingly and associate them with a new alignment axis, to replace the good-evil axis. Is your character lawful-technical, neutral-technical, chaotic technical, lawful-neutral, true neutral, chaotic neutral, lawful-mythic, neutral-mythic, or chaotic-mythic? Replacing good-evil with a different alignment axis to complement law-chaos can make for a much interesting milieu. 

Want to go even further? You live in a world of rationalist wizards and faithful priests. Wizards get all the technical language spells. Priests get all the mythic ones. That’s right, Regenerate and Remove Curse are technical names. Those are wizard spells now. Burning Hands and Cloudkill go in the other direction. These more embellished or ornate names are now cleric spells.

An Even Closer Look at the Medusa: Seven More Variant Gorgons

Several years ago I wrote a post with variant versions of the classic gorgon. As noted in that post, we’re talking gorgons as in "people who have serpentine features and can turn things to stone by looking at them," not gorgons as in "big metal bulls that fart petrifying gas." 

Calling gorgons “medusas” is like if aliens made first contact with a human named Glen, then insisted on calling all other humans “glens.”

Although... now the idea of aliens who call humans "glens" is growing on me.

Anyway, gorgon variants. Here we go.

The Deep Time Enthusiast

Medusa was not a vain fool. She was not jealous of her immortal sisters because they would be forever young and beautiful. She was jealous of them because they would live long enough to see the world transformed in ways that even the gods couldn’t predict. Medusa was a deep time enthusiast, and immortality was a path to seeing the future.

Immortality allowed Medusa to study changes in the world, from the rise and fall of kingdoms to the evolution of species to the geologic development of the world itself. The petrifying gaze, nominally a “curse” associated with the condition, also proved useful in her studies. Petrifying a living thing ensured a level of preservation that archeologists can only dream of. 

Building wealth is trivially easy for the immortal, who can rely on compounding passive gains over long periods. Medusa invested her wealth broadly, and used the proceeds to build the world’s greatest museum and biological storehouse. Because petrification can be (relatively) easily reversed, it is an ideal way of preserving organic life.

Random table: What long-gone creatures has Medusa stored in stone in her archive of deep time?

1. Ravenous meglopedes. Nearly wiped out by humans because of their ruinous consumption of crops. A petrified weapon of mass destruction that fits in your hand.
2. Party of neanderthal adventurers. Recognizably a fighter, wizard, cleric, and thief, but with exaggerated caveman aesthetics. 
3. Polonium elemental. Inert in stone form, but highly radioactive if de-petrified. 
4. Corewurm. Massive interstellar wurm that seeks volcanically active planets, burrows to their core, and consumes them, destroying the planet in the process. Sticky note reading “do NOT reanimate” attached to its stone snout.
5. Genesis Seed. A single seed, turned to stone. If revitalized and planted, it will produce a rampant explosion of new life, evolving at a greatly intensified speed; and likely displacing existing life.
6. Doppleooze. Protoplasmic ooze that takes on the form of what it touches. Petrified before its kind drove themselves to extinction via excessively successful doppling. If de-stoned, will turn into the first living thing it can touch.

Credit to Epochrypha by Skerples for inspiration.

The Graft Surgeon

There are various options available to adventurers who have lost limbs, ranging from simple prosthetics up through the powerful Regenerate spell. Somewhere in between those extremes is the exotic procedure known as petrigrafting.

The gorgon known as the graft surgeon practices a craft somewhere between doctor and sculptor (the distinction is… not fixed among gorgonkind). After carefully examining a patient who has lost a limb and taking various measurements, they will search through their storehouse of statuary, looking for a limb that is as close as possible to the missing one. They’ll then petrify the (willing) patient.

The next step is most critical. They must carefully chisel both the patient’s stump and the donor limb so they fit together as exactly as possible. The stump and then limb must then be bonded with adhesive made entirely from organic components. The closer the ingredients are to human physiology, the better.

Finally, the surgeon applies restorative magic to reverse the petrification. As with any graft, there is no guarantee that the body will accept the new addition. Sometimes, the graft fails, and the surgeon will need to re-petrfiy and remove the failed graft. 

But in many cases, the process is a success, and the patient walks out of the operating theater with a newly functional limb. The arm is always conspicuously different; the surgeon cares little for aesthetics, and skin color, musculature, and even biological origin may vary.

The surgeon is always seeking donations for their statuary collection. A common way of defraying the surgeon's bill is for a patient to agree to donate their body after death, so that their limbs may one day be donated to others. For patients fortunate enough to die of natural causes, the graft surgeon is often the last to visit them at their bedside, to call in that debt from years before. 

Random table: What ingredient does the surgeon need you to find in order to create a stone-to-flesh graft adhesive?

1. Basilisk tears.
2. The heart of a galeb-duhr.
3. Saliva from a mimic that has feasted on human flesh.
4. A branch from a tree in a petrified forest. 
5. A flagstone from the hall of the king of Urgos, located deep within the elemental plane of earth.
6. A fang from the snake-hair of a gorgon (no, the surgeon is not interested in donating one of his).

The Stonework Stablemaster

Nomenclature mixups aside, gorgons (the petrifying people) are sometimes found in the company of “gorgons” (the metal bulls). The bull-like creature that many humans call a “gorgon” is actually a close cousin of the catoblepas; a more correct taxonomic name would be petroblepas. Both the former’s stench and the latter’s petrifying gas comes from their specialized stomachs; like cows, they are ruminants.

In isolated areas, gorgons are known to raise basilisks and petroblepases. While gorgons are not immune to their petrifaction, they do understand its dangers better than most creatures, and have some inherent resistance to it. 

Gorgon stablemasters can provide a stable supply of food in the form of petrified stone, which allows them to domesticate both of these petrified flesh-eating creatures. Basilisks are useful because gorgons know how to use the oil from their digestive system to create the alchemical combination that cures petrification, which is very helpful for any gorgon that wishes to maintain peaceful relations with their neighbors.

Random table: What useful things are available for sale or trade at the gorgon’s farm?

1. Cockatrice egg-grenade. Reproduces the effect of the cockatrice’s bite, in grenade form. Fragile.
2. Cockatrice-feather cloak. AC as scale, at half the weight. Stylish. 
3. Basilisk oil. A single vial can restore one petrified creature.
4. Basilisk kidney. Filters out trace rare metals in stone that the basilisk can’t digest. Highly sought after by alchemists.
5. Basilisk cornea. Expertly removed intact and preserved in oil. Can be placed over the wearer’s eye like a contact lens. Allows a one-time use of the basilisk's petrification gaze.
6. Petroblepas oil. The oil that naturally lubricates their armored plating. Functions as oil of slipperiness. Can also be used to restore even seriously rusted metal.
7. Petroblepas haggis. Pudding made from the organs. Eating it causes petrification, but only gradually over a period of about 48 hours, as most creatures can only digest it very slowly.
8. Petroblepas armor. AC as full plate, but half again heavier. Advantage on saves versus petrification.

The Surveillance Assassin

The idea of meeting a gorgon’s gaze is terrifying, but most people can take comfort in the knowledge that gorgons usually dwell in remote ruins and dungeons. Surely, here in the world’s greatest city, there is no reason to fear that a gorgon's glance could turn one into stone.

Don’t be so sure. With the proper application of spells like Scrying and Project Image, a gorgon with magical powers can instantiate its petrifying visage far from its own lair. This method of remote petrification is particularly useful for targeting wizards, as their crystal balls and scrying pools can be magically hacked by the gorgon. 

Adventure hook: Just one more thing… The PCs are investigating the mysterious fate of an aristocratic leader who was turned to stone. No one is fessing up to hiring the gorgon who conducted the remote-stoning, but someone certainly bought up all the basilisk oil in the region over the past few years to prevent an easy cure. If the PCs can figure out who, they will have a strong lead on the responsible party. 

The Mirror-Maze Prisoner

Gorgons are famously vulnerable to their own gaze. Many gorgons end their immortal lives amidst their own statue gardens, after letting their guard down for just a moment. And for some, the double-edged danger of that gaze becomes a prison.

King Calviano's pursuit of immortality may have driven him half-mad, but he found it. The forbidden magics that transformed him into a gorgon ensured he would live forever. Queen Calviano recognized the danger he presented to the people of the land, but could not bring herself to kill him. Instead, she trapped him in a prison of unbreakable mirrors.

The maze is not so difficult to navigate for someone with normal vision. Ordinary techniques for escaping a mirrored carnival funhouse will work, including looking at the ceiling and floor, or finding smudges and marks that give away the glass. 

The maze is more difficult for someone who cannot risk looking at their reflection. The glass is unusually tough so that the king cannot easily break it. And the maze includes loops and gaps that make it difficult to navigate by touch alone. Doors include strange handles and locks that are relatively easy to open when looking at them, but impossible to manage blind. While the king has tried to escape by blindly wandering the halls, the maze’s construction has been enough to keep him trapped at the heart of the maze. 

Adventure hook: Not a place of honor. That all happened over a thousand years ago, and despite the queen’s best efforts to ward intruders away from the mirror maze, people have forgotten the place’s purpose. Adventurers have recently begun to enter it in search of treasure. The king stirs, sensing an opportunity to escape and return to the outside world.

Stone-Cold Counsel 

It’s a quandary that many mortal rulers face. They’ve accomplished great things in their life. But time comes for everyone, and the leader of a hereditary monarchy must ask: can the next generation be relied on to rule effectively? Well, maybe. If only there was a better way.

There is! In stately palanquin, surrounded by lead-lined screens, the gorgon Gravieska travels from court to court, offering aged rulers a tempting bargain; meet her gaze and become a statue. Their heir will receive a dose of petrification-reversing basilisk oil as part of the deal. The statue and oil are passed down from generation to generation. At times of great danger or opportunity, when the wise ancestor's counsel would be most valuable, the current ruler can de-petrify them to seek their aid.

Adventure hook: Succession crisis. The emperor, diagnosed with an incurable disease, was thought to only have a few weeks of life left to them. They underwent the petrification process so that they could save those precious weeks to provide advice to future generations. Several decades later, a cure has been found for the disease. The new emperor’s reign has been controversial, reversing many of the previous emperor’s signature accomplishments. Amidst the old guard in the imperial court, there is more and more talk of bringing back the old emperor; not to provide counsel to the current emperor, but to overthrow their own heir and rule once again.

The Mother of Flesh and Stone

In the beginning, the world was nothing but a writhing mass of organic matter. 

Life, microscopic and thoughtless, was caught in a constant cycle of mad consumption and thoughtless reproduction. This went on for a really long time. 

Into this primordial chaos came the first gorgon. Was it an alien? A monster? A god? There was no observer there to make such distinctions. But it was able to transform the other denizens of this world into non-organic material. For the first time, there was stone. The core of a world. 

Gorgons gradually transformed more and more life into stone, and that stone provided a stable core for the life of this world. For the first time, living things were not in constant contact with other living things. There was room for water to settle, habitats to form, and creatures to specialize. 

Random table: What weird creatures flourished in this gorgon-influenced world? 

1. Giant shipworms. Kinda like nautical purple worms. Harbormasters will lay stone pilings well outside the harbor, laced with tasty minerals, to keep these creatures away from the piers.
2. Mage-bane lichen. Lichen colonies that specifically grow on sapient creatures that have been petrified. Acidically eroding this particular type of stone seems to supercharge their growth. The lichen is a serious threat to any gorgons (like the Deep Time Enthusiast) who use petrification to preserve samples of living things. 
3. Piddock-folk. These molluskular creatures bore into soft rock in search of locations to form new colonies. They appear to be intelligent, but are incapable of verbal communication, or just very rude (scholars disagree).
4. Dire parrotfish. Particularly common around colonies of coral gorgons. As they scrape statues, they can sometimes ingest intelligence or magic from petrified persons. 

Dungeon Rooms are Nouns, Dungeon Corridors are Verbs

I sometimes think about dungeon design like this: Rooms are for nouns, corridors are for verbs. 

Explaining what is going on there requires some background.

Why are corridors important at all? Many modern dungeons eschew them. I think part of the challenge is that writers publishing dungeons often want to fit an entire map floor on a single page of a book or PDF. Many otherwise very good dungeons feature cramped, close-together rooms because of product design, not dungeon design. 

But those corridors serve important purposes, many of which are covered well here. So dungeons should have more corridors. How should we design them differently from rooms? 

Dungeon Rooms Are Nouns

The room is defined first and foremost by its contents. The classic dungeon stocking options of “empty/monster/treasure/trap/special” are essentially noun-focused. Something may be happening in the room, but any action is derived from the contents. If you are GMing a minimally keyed dungeon, and the PCs approach a room that simply says “guard post: barricade, 3 goblins” you are going to intuit the action downstream of those nouns. Are the goblins alertly watching out for intruders? Or arguing with each other? Asleep? You may infer the answer, you may roll for it, but it is downstream of the contents. Rooms are noun-forward.

Dungeon Corridors Are Verbs

Corridors are typically not defined by their contents. I’m excluding a “great hall” or “foyer” here. We are talking about corridors that are exclusively transitional spaces between rooms. They are not defined by their contents but instead by action, by what is going on within them.

Wandering monster or random event tables are the classic way of adding verbs to corridors. I strongly agree with Fae Errant's linked post above that there’s typically no need to roll for wandering monsters in rooms; those rolls are doing the most work in corridors. Corridors ensure that there is always a cost to exploring. 

Corridors ask: 

• What are the players doing? Searching, sneaking, pursuing, fleeing? Consider the party's pace.
• What are the monsters doing? Consider using the nested table style of Hot Springs Island, or the supplemental tables in The Monster Overhaul.
• What is the dungeon doing? Depending on the degree of motive agency we assign to the space itself, hazards and obstacles can be thought of as verbs the dungeon itself apples to corridors.
• Has time passed? Have torches guttered out? Spells expired? Corridors ask these questions.
• What has already happened during the delve? Is anything recurring? Is it time for any consequences of prior action to make themselves known?
• What has changed since the PCs last traversed a corridor? What is changing right now?

Touch Grass

The same ideas can apply outside the dungeon. For example, I usually use pointcrawls for outdoor exploration. Each location is very noun-heavy, but the paths between points are the places for verbs. 

Dungeon Thresholds Are Adjectives

This is less essential than the noun/verb distinction, but if you want to take it a step further, consider adjectives as thresholds. Adjectives are relayed to the PCs when they first enter a room, then give way to the nouns as the room is explored in earnest. The adjectives serve to mark the transitional space. How is this room distinct from the corridor you are exiting? The adjectives are often most prominent when the PCs are still deciding whether or not to enter a space.

Adjectives can answer questions like the following: 

• What hidden thing in the room should the PCs be looking for?
• What was the room recently used for? 
• What was the room’s original purpose? 
• What is most immediately noticeable sight, sound, and scent?

Imagining the Far-Future Year of 2025

It’s always an event when the real world catches up to the putative timeframe of a famous science fiction work. If you’re on any form of social media, you have probably seen this in action. Blade Runner, released in 1982, was set in 2019, and when the real 2019 arrived, people had a fun time posting about it. Soylent Green, released in 1973, is presented as taking place in 2022, so in real-life 2022, the Soylent Green posts duly appeared. It’s easy to pick some tentpole speculative fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety, and joke on social media about how the fiction does or does not reflect the real world.

But whatever you thought of the state of society in 2019, it bore only a faint resemblance to the rain-soaked, neon-drenched vision of Blade Runner. And while I saw posts comparing the pandemic-stricken world of 2022 to Soylent Green, I think that’s even more of a stretch. Soylent Green was primarily concerned with overpopulation, a pertinent topic in the 1970s that didn’t figure in real-world 2022’s problems. Different dystopia.

But I want to credit two* works of fiction that correctly predicted some interesting things about our real-life present year of 2025: the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, and the 2006 Vernor Vinge** novel Rainbow’s End. I have endeavored to keep this post spoiler-free, but feel free to check out one or both works and come back afterward, if you are conservative on hearing plot details.

Her

Her is the story of a lonely man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence on his computer. It is hardly the first piece of science fiction to explore the idea of a person falling in love with a robot or other artificially created person. But most other works were about robots, and were set further in the distant future. The titular character in Her is decidedly non-physical, and much of the story involves the two main characters navigating what that means for their developing relationship.

Life imitates art, and in real-life 2025, there are now many stories of people interacting with AIs as if they were real people. The movie was so influential on artificial intelligence that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, tried to get Scarlett Johansson (who portrayed the AI in Her) to lend her voice to their products. After she refused, they went with an allegedly similar voice, which got them into legal trouble.

Her is not a precise picture of 2025. The setting almost feels like a utopia, apart from what seems like a widespread epidemic of loneliness. The technology around AI is decidedly well ahead of our real-world tech. But its vision of how AI would affect relationships, and how people would try to find genuine connections with AIs – is seriously prescient.

Rainbows End 

Rainbows End, like Her, is set in the California of 2025. The primary point-of-view character is an elderly man who has been cured of dementia and had his health so thoroughly restored that he looks like a 20-something. But he doesn’t fit in at all in this new world, and his struggles to grapple with change inadvertently embroil him and his family in a conspiracy that threatens world stability.

Rainbows End heavily emphasizes augmented reality, where virtual worlds and interfaces overlay the real one. This technology does exist in real-world 2025, and is getting more widespread by the day, but it is not integral to the fabric of everyday life as it is in Rainbows End, where many people have multiple overlays of projected reality on top of the “real” world. The real world may look a lot more like Rainbows End by the 2040s or 2050s, but it isn’t there yet in 2025.

That said, the Rainbows End is prescient on several other topics. A big chunk of the story hinges on a battle around a university library and the digitization (and subsequent destruction) of its book collection. It also thinks deeply about how education and careers would change in a world so completely saturated with data. The book understands how children become intuitively fluent in new technologies, often in ways that they can’t even explain, and how quickly they lose their connection to cultural experiences that aren’t represented in the virtual worlds and communities they inhabit. Finally, it groks how online fandoms become powerful forces on their own. The height of the Pokemon Go craze, with fandom filtered through augmented reality, would have fit neatly in the world of Rainbows End. 

If the worst thing you can say about a work of speculative fiction is that it predicted changes accurately, but a bit more quickly than they actually happened, that’s a good sign that the work did its job.

Sir, This is a Wendy’s

So what’s the relevance to roleplaying games?

You can create verisimilitude in a game world by thinking deeply about how ordinary people use technology (or magic, or whatever is the "disruptive tech" of your fictional setting). It’s easy to think about high tech or high magic in the ways our PCs will interact with it, especially in a heroic fantasy game or a cyberpunk thriller. But we should also think about how ordinary people use it, and how that would show up in the quotidian fabric of the world.

What is world-changing one day is completely ordinary the next. And the time it takes an idea to go from world-changing to taken for granted is surprisingly short. There’s no shortage of examples in real-world 2025; technology that would baffle the previous generation is completely natural to modern-day young people.

And it is better to take some big swings and big misses than to conservatively aim for what seems most plausible. The example of a conservative approach that always comes to mind for me is the driverless car aesthetic you see in a lot of TV sci-fi, like the third season of Westworld or the futuristic parts of Netflix’s Bodies. The car design there is very believable… a little too believable. I don’t see a vision, a speculative gamble that really makes me curious about this future. Don't play it to safe with speculative fiction; better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.

*Honorable mention to Futuresport, the 1998 made-for-TV movie starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes. It isn't saying anything that Rollerball or the Running Man or other movies hadn't already said better. But to its credit, Dean Cain’s voice-activated smart home is pretty close to what an Alexa-plus-AI home would provide to a real rich person in 2025.

**Another of Vinge’s novels has one of my favorite examples of a science fiction author predicting the future and getting it almost (but not quite) right. Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime was published in 1986. The story makes passing reference to a big-budget film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, released around the turn of the century. Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, so Vinge nailed this prediction. 

But Vinge, presumably working on the novel in the early 1980s, guessed that it would be none other than George Lucas helming that LOTR adaptation. In real-life 2001, Lucas was of course doing his own big-budget trilogy; but he was halfway between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, not working on LOTR.  

It is hard to fault Vinge for this guess, as he was writing when Lucas was at the height of his creative powers, fresh off Star Wars and his Indiana Jones script. And obviously Vinge couldn't predict the strange career path of actual LOTR director Peter Jackson, whose first feature film hadn't even come out yet when Marooned in Realtime was published. But I love these little moments in speculative genre fiction, and the subtle details that separate what is shockingly correct from what is so far off the mark.

The World's Largest Rewrite: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans

Last time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Floating Heads, Mother Fungus, Cellipedes

#60: Horse. OK, yes, I jumped into this exercise without really thinking about how to handle the various mundane “monsters” in the OSE bestiary. I don’t want to overlap with mules and camels, so I’m going to dive deeper into the Monster Overhaul, my manual of choice, to populate this one.

The book includes an entry for a “grey horse,” a strange constructed thing in the shape of a horse that challenges travelers to make clever rhymes, eating their rations as punishment if they fail. The grey horse seems too benign to be a prisoner, and too capricious to be one of the jailers. I’ll treat it as an invasive species, but without explaining how it got here (the grey horse just shows up in places where it is not wanted).

#84: Normal Human. Ah yes, the most dangerous monster of all; the Normal Human. OSE defines them as “Non-adventuring humans without a character class. Artists, beggars, children, craftspeople, farmers, fishermen, housewives, scholars, slaves.” But they are also implicitly not bandits, or pirates, or nobles, or any of the other “monster” types in the OSE bestiary that are obviously humans, but have their own entry. Essentially this is what the modern game would call a commoner.

I think we have some Normal Humans here who are guilty of Abnormal Crimes. They’re probably not individually dangerous to adventurers; even the typical serial killer is more of an opportunistic-but-ordinary person, rather than someone with high levels as an assassin or something. These Normal Humans are like the prisoners in Con Air or the mooks in the Batman Arkham games. They are weak, but numerous. And they likely have some powerful leaders among them as prison bosses; maybe NPCs with classes, maybe actual monsters.

#106: Shark. Shark!! The shark brings us back to the submerged section of our dungeon. We want to distinguish a bit from the other monsters that have flooded (literally and figuratively) into the prison. Picking randomly among OSE’s three sharks, we get the bull shark, which can ram and stun prey for three rounds. This is a nice twist that you don’t really see from beasts in modern D&D. I like the idea of the bull sharks ramming prey as they pass through a transitory space like a submerged hallway. The hallways are navigable for the sharks but too narrow for the sea serpent, who is the alpha predator in the seawater sector. Stunned swimmers sink deeper into the depths, so attempting to rescue them presents further risk for their allies. The crabs clean up what the bull sharks don't eat, at the bottom of the halls, amongst the bones of failed prison escapees.

#70: Lycanthrope. I usually choose a subtype randomly, but in this case I am going to simply pick the devil swine, because (a. they’re much more evocative than the other, more standard lycanthropes, and (b. they’re evil, so they’re the easiest to explain as prisoners of celestials. OSE describes them as follows: “Corpulent humans who can change into huge swine. Love to eat human flesh. Lurk in isolated human settlements close to forests or marshes.”

A devil swine has 9 HD (!) and a charm ability. So these guys are not minor brutes, but instead dangerous bosses, and with their charm ability, probably a powerful faction in their own right. I imagine they’ve been strategically charming other prisoners to take over the prison and eventually try to escape. Relative to some of the other very archetypal monsters we have featured so far, “shapeshifting mind-control pigs” could really surprise players.

Another nice detail on lycanthropes is as follows: “Horses and some other animals can smell lycanthropes and will become afraid.” The grey horse and the mules are both aware of the devil swine and could help the players avoid them, or at least anticipate their presence.

#22: Chimera. Another folklore classic. OSE doesn’t provide any suggestions beyond a visual description. The Overhaul gives us more to work with, including a roll table that produces a chimera with a goat for the left head and hindquarters, a leopard for the center head and forequarters, and a newt for the right head and tail. It breathes poison gas and has no wings. Created by a wizard who is also probably interred here.

#26: Cyclops. It’s interesting to compare the OSE cyclops to one from a more modern-style monster manual. The OSE version hews close to the Odyssey; it raises sheep, is slow-witted, and possesses the ability to curse people. All straight out of the Greek lore.

The 2014 5E monster manual, by comparison, shunts this information into the flavor text, abstracting it away from the source myths. Consequently, aside from its poor depth perception, the 5E cyclops has almost nothing to distinguish it from the statistically similar hill giant, which is a shame, particularly because 5E has an abundance of interchangeable brutes like this taking up space in the book.

The Overhaul parsimoniously groups the cyclops with the giants, so we’ll roll there to get some more of an idea of what to do with this dude. The “Why fight these giants?” table produces “They keep growing larger. Soon it won’t be possible to harm them.” So this cyclops was getting bigger and bigger with no end in sight, and the magic of the prison keeps that magical growth in check. The cyclops may even be a willing prisoner here, worried that the prison’s weakening structural integrity will reboot their uncontrollable embiggening.

#7: Beetle, Giant. The fire beetle (a fantasy firefly) and the oil beetle (a fantasy bombardier beetle) are the famous ones here, but rolling randomly tilts me toward the Tiger Beetle (a fantasy… uh, tiger beetle). OSE tiger beetles “hunt robber flies, but sometimes eat humans.” The bit about robber flies is useful, as we haven’t placed those guys yet.

The real-life tiger beetle has a number of gameable features we can steal, including antlion-like larvae that burrow into the sand to trap prey; an ability to charge very quickly toward prey, but with the need to stop and visually reorient; and the ability to mimic the sounds of toxic moths so that bats won’t eat them. We can tie these guys to both the robber flies and the bats when we get those results. 

#100: Rock Baboon. Once again I’m charmed by old-school D&D’s “animal, but slightly weird” approach, contra modern D&D’s harder division between mundane animals (lumped together in the back of the manual) and fantastic monsters. The rock baboon is a pretty straightforward monster per the OSE entry, but I do enjoy that they “communicate with screams.” Same, rock baboon, same. How far can we take that? 

Perhaps relative to other creatures in the dungeon, the rock baboons are particularly good at communicating important information over relatively far distances. The primary danger when encountering a single baboon or a small group is that they will alert the rest of their troop, even if they are far away. The baboons could even be useful allies if befriended, facilitating long-distance communication (filtered through baboon-speak, of course).

#134: Wolf. The most interesting bit about wolves in the OSE entry is that they can be trained, and that goblins ride dire wolves. So we have two possible routes here; wolves trained by the wardens to police the prison, and wolves ridden by the goblins we haven’t seen yet. The next entry better serves the prior option, so I’m going to go with the latter and assume these are goblin-affiliated wolves. We’ll put the wolves near the hobgoblins and leave the door open for a greater goblin zone in the prison.

#10: Blink Dog. Apparently we’re in the dog block. In addition to their signature teleport ability, blink dogs are lawful and hate warp beasts. I think it makes sense to consider them servants of the jailers. Their blink ability would make them well-suited to capture, corral, or pursue prisoners without the prison’s physical barriers limiting their movement. Perhaps they’ve been left to their own devices since the prison has gone to rot. A first encounter with the blink dogs will probably involve them shadowing PCs or observing them from afar to take their measure. They could be powerful allies for PCs who earn their trust by containing monsters or stopping escapes.

The Tombs of Atuan and What Belief Means for Clerics

“There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking’s temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They’re all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won’t take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it’s like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There’s a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It’s like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”

-The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

I had read Ursula Le Guin before (The Left Hand of Darkness and Lathe of Heaven), but not the Earthsea books. I recently began to rectify that, and some elements of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series, made it in to several blog posts. Tombs of Atuan is the second book in the series.

Belief Is Not Either/Or 

In the background of the first third or so of Tombs of Atuan is a society where a (relatively) young theocracy built around a putative godking is co-opting and gradually replacing the old religion. But this is all understood and filtered through the perspective of a child who has basically never left the ritual shrine. The story does an excellent job of establishing this information organically; there are no lore dumps. Tenar, the protagonist, is instructed in part by servants of the godking who have their own motives. The godking doesn’t take an active role in the plot and isn’t an antagonist per se, but the worldbuilding really makes Tenar’s precarious position much more compelling. 

RPG settings sometimes explore this space, but usually with a more direct, head-on confrontation, like organized Christianity-style religion versus folkloric paganism. Or a pantheon of clear and unambiguous domains, where the life god is opposed to the death god, and it has always been thus. Tombs of Atuan is a reminder that it can be useful to focus more on the role of religion in people’s lives, how they navigate change, and what rituals are important to them.

Belief Is Ritual 

The wizard Ged, the protagonist of the first Earthsea book, appears in Tombs of Atuan as well. Ged’s magic (producing light, changing form, altering the weather) is recognizable as D&D magic, but Tenar doesn’t cast any spells. Her entire power is the ability to enact rituals, to interpret the will of suprahuman entities, to be protected from them, and to petition them. 

This makes them "feel" a lot different than wizards and clerics in modern-style RPGs, who have different spell lists but otherwise "work" largely the same. Whereas Ged's magic is proactive and transformative, Tenar's magic is reactive and divinatory. 

Belief Is the Attention of Ancient Things

For good or for ill, Tenar has the ear of… something that lives in the titular tombs. Whether these are gods or ghosts or genius loci or something else is not conclusively stated, and doesn’t need to be. Modern D&D draws a hard line between clerics and warlocks, but its easy to imagine that as a matter of public image. Ultimately, everyone who entreats the aid of the supernatural and the supernormal is taking chances with beings who are not and cannot be understood, and that should suggest a gravity and seriousness to the relationship that RPGs don't always deliver on. Belief is less about faith versus atheism, as in the modern world. Belief is more a matter of being willing to expose oneself to the dangerous and largely unknowable attentions of entities beyond mortal ken.