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.

The RPG Revelation: GM as Interpreter and Medium

I can’t turn off my GM brain when listening to an actual play podcast. As entertaining as the content may be, and as much as I can appreciate different styles of GMing, it is hard for me not to listen to an RPG session unfolding and say “I would handle that situation so differently.”

With that in mind, listening to 3d6 DtL’s recently concluded Arden Vul campaign has been an interesting experience. About 90% of the time, I'm on the same page as Jon, the podcast's GM. He prioritizes player choice, adjudicates fairly, and isn’t afraid to present consequences when the PCs get in over their head. 

But the 10% where we do things differently is the interesting part. One example is that Jon is quite transparent when the text of the Arden Vul campaign doesn’t provide the answer to a question the players have proposed. At times he even says something like “Richard doesn’t say,” referring to Richard Barton, the module’s writer.

Early in listening to the show, this made me wince. While I try not to be too precious with verisimilitude, I do make an effort to preserve it. Why remind the players of the layers of artifice at work between the creation of the game and their experience with it? Not just that they are playing a game, but that the game is being mediated from the author through the GM, and that there is no easy, in-session way for the latter to seek clarity from the former.

But the more I heard of this approach, the more I warmed up to it. Because it is entirely viable to cast the GM less as the storyteller and master of all knowledge, and more as an interpreter and medium of exogenous content. 

The GM is an interpreter in that they are taking an inherently incomplete text and attempting to translate it for the benefit of the players. Except perhaps for read-aloud text, everything in a published RPG product needs to be translated. Descriptive notes need to be translated into what the players can perceive. Tables need to be translated into actual events. A monster stat block must be translated into an in-fiction diegetic entity. And the text is partial, inevitably missing information that will come up in the game. The GM must emendate the text for the players, making reasonable decisions to fill in the blanks that the players will inevitably find. 

The GM is also a medium, in that they must intuit the will of the creator, going beyond what is on the page. Even a writer creating the most painstakingly thorough RPG product in the world is only going to anticipate a tiny fraction of the things PCs will do with that product. This is a feature, not a bug. The magic of roleplaying is that no matter how many times a new group runs Lost Mines of Phandelver or Keep on the Borderlands or any of the other most popular modules in the history of RPGs, the output is going to be different. The GM can act as medium, and allow the spirit of the creator to act through them. In a good RPG session, the writer is like a ghost that is dimly perceived, as the GM intuits their will beyond what was explicitly written on the page.

We can and should have strong opinions about the role of the GM. But we should also keep an open mind when observing how others run games. You never know what strange truths they may reveal. 

Frieren and What It Means to Play a Truly Ancient PC

Frieren, the manga and anime about the titular elf, is in many ways classic fantasy, using a lot of common fantasy vernacular to tell its story. A dragon is a dragon, a wizard is a wizard, and even a mimic can be used as a sight gag without explaining what a mimic is, and why it resembles a treasure chest. 

But Frieren also does several things that most classic fantasy does not, including taking seriously the idea that elves with extremely long lifespans would live fundamentally different lives than humans.

Of course, the concept of elves as long-lived beings is itself part of that common fantasy vernacular, and is drawn from Tolkien, who originated the idea of an "elf" as something distinct from the way the term was used in fairy tales, interchangeably with “gnome” or "fairy" and other depictions of magical fey folk. 

In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the members of the fellowship are talking about what is (to them) ancient history, Elrond can weigh in and say he was actually there. He witnessed those events firsthand.  This is a powerful way of illustrating the difference in how these people live. Frieren does the same thing, to great effect. 

But a lot of other fantasy derived from Tolkien tends to copy the aesthetics without incorporating the underlying worldbuilding. D&D rarely presents its elves as truly long-lived creatures, because elves are first and foremost PCs, and it is difficult to embed a PC in ancient lore, or think about what they might have been doing 300 years prior to the game's start.

But is there a way we could we create a more Tolkien/Frieren treatment for elvish PCs? I do not mean the “penalty to strength, bonus to charisma" kind of mechanics that D&D has sometimes applied to its ancestries. Instead, a simple layer of situational advantages and disadvantages could provide characters with hooks for understanding how their character’s age affects their place in the story. These could be literal advantages and disadvantages (applied to d20 rolls) or more abstracted tools for resolving situations.

Normal Lifespan

These creatures rarely live far beyond 100 years. The category includes humans, halflings, dragonborn, tieflings, and many other sapient creatures not otherwise known for long lifespans.

Disadvantage: Ignorant of history. You aren’t familiar with much of the world beyond your own experience. Unless you are a scholar or other specialist who has had a specific reason to learn something about the history of a person, place, or thing, you just don’t know it. You may know the history of your family over the past several generations, or the last century or so of events in the community where you grew up, but that’s about it.

Advantage: Unencumbered by the past. Longer-lived creatures do not expect you to know or adhere to customs, traditions, or obligations not expressly presented to you in any kind of formal social situation. A human among dwarves or elves can get away with a lot of behavior that those peoples would consider rude or even offensive in a venerable peer who should “know better.” A human or other normal-lifespan person can always throw off the obligations of country and clan if they choose to do so, and longer-lived peoples will simply view that as being the natural way of such short-lived people.

Extended Lifespan

These creatures can live to be several hundred years old. Dwarves and gnomes are the most well-known members of this category. Creatures of the land, of rock and stone, often belong to this category.

Disadvantage: Unforgotten Feuds. These people have long memories. Their lives are too long to allow for the quick passage of time from generation to generation to wash away disputes; but they are not so long-lived that such disputes will ever seem inherently trivial. A creature with an extended lifespan likely has at least one unsettled feud with a member of any large community they visit.

Advantage: Appeal to the Old Ways. In their dealings with other creatures as old or older than them, people with extended lifespans can always appeal to an alternate system of resolution to resolve a problem. Depending on the culture or polity where the dispute takes place, it could be trial by combat, an appeal to the gods, or something more esoteric. The important thing is that the alternative definitively predates whatever the normal, contemporary resolution would be to a dispute. 

Long Lifespan

These creatures can live hundreds of years, approaching 1000. Elves, of course, fit into this category. Other people who are not immortal, but whose infusion of magic lends them to greatly expanded lifespans, can fit in this category (for example, the druid’s high-level Timeless Body ability in D&D 5E fits this fiction well). 

Disadvantage: People are like leaves in the wind. Like Frieren herself, people with long lifespans struggle to form lasting relationships with others. When they travel to a place they haven’t been recently, at least one person, organization, or institution has changed since they were last here. Someone has died. The government has changed. The customs and culture are radically different. This will always take the long-lived person by surprise, no matter how many times it happens. 

Advantage: I was there. There is always a chance that something that seems ancient, secret, and powerful to the younger peoples is recent, obvious, and mundane to a long-lived person. Even if they didn’t personally witness an event or know a historical figure, they always have a chance of knowing things that no one else remembers.  

The RPG Prestige: GM as Stage Magician

Is the GM a referee? Or are they a performer? Are they adjudicating a game? Or curating an experience?

I strongly dislike the RPG habit of fudging. A GM fudges when they alter die rolls or other randomized elements of the game to steer a session toward a favored outcome. I have previously written about my issues with it. But I also believe it is worth seriously thinking about why fudging is so compelling for many GMs out there.

And one possible reason is that some GMs think of themselves less like impartial adjudicators and more like stage magicians. The verisimilitude is not some external thing that all the people at the table can independently verify, but rather an illusion or trick that the GM is performing for the players. 

And the players, like an audience at a stage magic show, have agreed to be deceived. Most people in audience at a magic show are not there to "see through" or "figure out" the trick. They are there to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the performance. A GM who is working with a stage magician mindset will be much more likely to fudge than a GM who is thinking like a referee.

Magician gif by Jude Coram

Lie to Me 

There isn’t a hard line between these styles. Most DMs are concealing at least some part of their process from the players. Sometimes when a particularly exciting and strange thing happens in a session, a player will ask me, “did you plan that!?” I’m reluctant to explain specifically which aspects of a session's events were firmly rooted in prep contingencies, and which emerged almost completely from the session itself. 

That said, I’m generally not a fan of the stage magic approach to GMing, for several reasons.

The exclusive society. GMing with this idea of "the prestige" in mind reinforces the idea that running games is an exclusive skill available only to the select few who, like magicians, have been inducted into the society of GMs. There is a bright line between the magician and the audience at a magic show. Applying the same idea to GMing discourages players from running their own games.

No room for error. When the illusion of stage magic fails, there’s no easy way to get it back. If a magician blows a trick, the audience is not going to believe anything that follows in the performance. The spell has been broken. Likewise, once a player realizes that the verisimilitude of the game is an illusion maintained by the GM's fudge, they're never going to buy into the magic spell again.

At least, that's my own experience as a player. Once I’m aware of how and why the GM is fudging, the nearly limitless scope of potential that makes RPGs shine shrinks down. The game goes from limitless possibilities to only those possibilities that fit with what the GM has predetermined as acceptable outcomes. 

In contrast, GMing primarily as a referee or adjudicator gives the GM much more flexibility. They are conversing and negotiating with the players, not performing for them.

Buy-in is difficult. Getting players to consent to this deception without conceding it completely is difficult. For stage magic, it is baked into the very experience that the audience is signing up to be fooled. But the same is not true of RPGs, because of course many games do not feature the prestige at all. Some players may want to be fooled, while others (like me) view it as a dealbreaker. 

For My Next Trick

As strongly as I feel about this, I am not a one-true-way GM. As I discussed in the steelmanning post linked above, I can see various reasons why a GM might still choose to fudge.

Ultimately, if the players keep coming back to the stage magician GM’s game, and keep saying they’re having a great time… it is pretty hard for me to argue that the GM is doing something “wrong.” My one request for stage magician GMs is that they ask players to buy in to this arrangement at session zero. Simply advertising the GM's style at the outset solves many of the problems of unaligned expectations.

In Defense of Rats in the Basement

In parallel with my Strangers on a Train game, I’ve also been running Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow by Joseph R. Lewis. It has been refreshing to run Nightmare, as a change of pace from the relatively high-concept Strangers premise, because the idea is straightforward: The local temple is mysteriously surrounded by a golden dome, trapping people inside. The PCs are locals who need to figure the problem out. A small adventuring region around the town provides different opportunities to tackle the problem. Classic fantasy adventure stuff.

In the first session of the game, the PCs decided to make some money by clearing vermin out of the local tailor’s basement. If you’re already groaning, you’re familiar with the rats-in-the-basement cliche; an RPG trope in which novice PCs are given a trivial, one-dimensional fight against low-HD monsters to kick off the game.

Tropes have their place, though. “You meet in a tavern” is another cliche, but it is a cliche because it gets the PCs together and into the action quickly. “Rats in the basement” provides an immediate problem with a straightforward solution that PCs can solve quickly without taking up much session time.

But there are both good and bad ways to run a rats-in-the-basement scenario. A few details can make all the difference. Here’s how I ran this scenario.

There’s a reason for the reward. One of the players quite reasonably asked why a tailor was willing to pay 100 GP for someone to clear vermin out of his basement. I decided that he had an order from the nearby kingdom for some elaborate finery (something like the “London Season” in England in the 19th century, which fueled much of the textile industry at that time). He needed to retrieve the raw materials from his basement in time to complete the work. That was reason enough to justify the reward, and also did a bit of background worldbuilding.

The situation is at least somewhat unknown. The vermin in the basement are not ordinary rats, but spider-rats, and they have some great art (below, by artist Li-An). Always show the players the art! Mechanically, the spider-rats are not too different from mundane rats. But they feel different. Just like the rattagator and the doom cow, the spider-rodents are mechanically ordinary, but the players don't know that, and they are flavorfully evocative enemies. 

Something is at stake beyond HP. After the lead PC failed a roll to start the encounter, I ruled that a spider-rat would drop from the ceiling and crawl into his clothes. So when the resulting fight broke out, there was also a non-combat situation (spider-rat in clothes) with a non-combat goal (eating the PC’s rations). This was simple and low-stakes, but it made the situation feel three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional.

There is an x-factor. The encounter describes the webbed nest of the spider-rats, which serves as a visual reminder that these aren’t ordinary rats (even if they are ordinary rats in terms of mechanics). The web is ultimately harmless, but the PCs don’t know that, and not knowing makes the fight more interesting.

Tactics are weighed against risks. The PCs decided that igniting the nest would be the fastest way to deal with the spider-rats… which might be true… but it would also be the fastest way to destroy the fabrics that were the reason for the job in the first place. A terrible roll nearly lit the tailor’s precious fabrics on fire, and only some quick thinking on the PCs’ part saved them.

There is a choice. The spider-rat that started out in the PCs clothes was the last one left at the end of the fight. The PCs decided to spare it and gave it a nickname. The spared spider-rat goes in the bag of threads, where it can get tangled up with other threads, and potentially reappear later in the game. Players love callbacks like this for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that it shows that choices they made changed the world, are remembered, and come back in unexpected ways.

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

Last time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Dungeon Is Wet, Tortoise Foreshadowing, and 30-50 Feral Hogs

 #51: Green Slime. This could again be interpreted as a connection to the dragon, but I don’t want to make an entire section of the dungeon oops-all-slimes. I’m instead going to put the green slime(s) below the pixies – in both senses of the word. We haven’t been very specific about verticality yet, besides some broad strokes, but I’m thinking that the upper left corner (where the fresh water comes in from the "roof") is near the top of the dungeon, while the lower right corner (where seawater comes in from the ocean) is near the bottom. I like the idea that the green slimes are forming on the ceiling on the level below where the dragon is, as runoff from its breath attack, and moving laterally through some point of connectivity that could potentially be exploited by explorers. 

#116: Stirge. I’ve got a bit of an order of operations going for responding to these random rolls. Some of these immediately suggest a fit based on what we’ve already established about the dungeon. Others become clear once I check the OSE entry and notice some evocative bit of flavor, or an ability I didn't know about.

If I need more beyond those two steps, I’m going back to the Monster Overhaul once again. The stirge (“skeeter” in Overhaul terminology) has a table for reskins that are mechanically identical, but very different in aesthetics. I rolled and got “Rotting floating head. Lank hair, no eyes.” This immediately sparked some ideas. Perhaps some number of the prisoners in this prison were executed by beheading, and now those severed heads are mindless blood drinkers, wandering the halls. I’m going to place them near the wights, on the assumption that the execution chamber would be near those undead wardens.

#137 Yellow Mould. No entry in the Overhaul, possibly because yellow mould is more of a dungeon hazard than a “creature” per se. It is also possible that its functionality is captured by the lavish two-page spread for myconids. OSE doesn’t appear to have myconids, so we can liberally use the Overhaul tables to figure out what is up with this yellow mould.

Rolling on the “spore attack” table, we get “fungal curse,” which means that a creature failing the save will eventually sprout a “mother fungus,” forming a new colony. I like the idea that this fate befell a prisoner who was interred here, and a new colony formed in the dungeon.

Riffing off this idea further, I imagine these fungi are somewhat like the mycorrhizal fungi that allow trees to communicate in some forests. Rather than a purely parasitic dungeon hazard, I like the idea that the fungi are symbiotic, and are probably a major source of food, exchanging (non-toxic) edible mushroom growth with other dungeon denizens for things they want (especially water and fertilizer). Because tiny fungal filaments connect many parts of the dungeon, they can provide information or facilitate communication. We’ll place the mother fungus near the fresh water, but assume that their filaments have spread to many parts of the dungeon where there is at least some moisture and not too much heat.

#21: Centipede, Giant. A classic, flexible dungeon monster that can go anywhere. OSE notes they favor damp areas, but we need to narrow it down further than that (remember, dungeon is wet). The Monster Overhaul includes both a monstrous vermin category, and another section for ancient anthropods. Going with the latter because it has an intriguing “why fight these ancient anthropods” table, we roll a prompt that “one of them ate the key to this chest.”

I’m going to tweak that and combine it with the other tables in the entry that generate weird head-shapes for these bugs. These “cellipedes,” known colloquially as the prisoner’s best friend, have evolved key-like protuberances on their heads. They are drawn to places like prisons; the more locked doors, the better it is as a breeding habitat for these sickos. They can be used to open some doors, and particularly rare specimens have a skeleton key ability, and are able to open many locked doors. 

#99: Roc. I love that OSE has giant roc, large roc, and small roc. Given that the roc’s brand is “very large bird,” I'm kinda skeptical that three categories were required. We don’t have manual entries for “tall halfling” or “non-animated skeleton.” 

OSE notes that rocs are lawful creatures who react negatively to non-lawful creatures, and can also be trained as mounts. So let’s associate them with the prison builders. We haven’t yet decided pinned down the builders’ whole deal, but for the prison to make sense as an adventuring site, it helps to presume that their authority and control has partially or completely lapsed. 

To put a twist on the roc here, let’s make it a big egg. Not every monster has to appear in its fully grown adult form. And finding an egg is a classic sort of unusual “treasure” for PCs; a player in one game I ran took a deep interest in the unhatched egg of a giant carnivorous parrot, which became a focus of downtime work for many sessions afterward. We’ll drop it near the wights, on the assumption it has or had something to do with the builders/jailers.

#78: Mule. Another mundane animal. My first thought was to make them a population descended from working animals when the prison was built, like the wild burros of the southwestern United States, who descended from domesticated donkeys brought to the area by prospectors. Then I remembered that mules are, uh, by definition not the type of animals you’re going to find breeding in the wild.

So we’ll go with a more ordinary explanation, and say that mules are survivors of adventuring parties that have entered the dungeon. Some of them have gathered here to dwell among their own kind. I like the idea that mules regularly appear on the dungeon's random encounter table as well, with each mule encountered giving hints as to the status (or final fate) of the adventurers who brought that mule into the dungeon. Mules also have a few useful sundry items on them ("found a mule" is local dungeon slang for a stroke of good fortune; more dungeons should have custom slang). An amusing recurring motif is mule-as-evidence of a TPK. Somehow the lowly pack animal always survives.

#65: Kobold. Our first humanoid! OSE uses the old-school characterization of kobolds, noting they are “canine,” while the Monster Overhaul goes with a modern take, describing them as "reptilian" and dropping them in the “dragon” section of the book. I’m sympathetic to Skerples on this taxonomic decision, given how much more prevalent that portrayal is these days, and I'll go the same route since I'm sticking to OSE where I can. But I cannot continue without mentioning that the very good boy Kuro makes a strong case for the canine kobold. I love the Dungeon Meshi portrayal, especially because “dogfolk” never really clicked in D&D the way tabaxi did. It’s a minor gripe, but I always thought the dogfolk in Thracia were the least interesting of the beastmen faction members.

…What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the World’s Largest Dungeon. Kobolds, regardless of aesthetics, are known for being numerous and individually weak, so I don’t think they make much sense as prisoners. Instead, let’s imagine they have entered the dungeon while delving underground. Did they get here intentionally or accidentally? Rolling on the Overhaul tables for prompts, we get “geckotian” kobolds (“sticky pads, marbled eyes”) with a current activity of “prodding a corpse” and “bucolic mushroom farms” as a current scheme. I think this is already more interesting than just making them dragon servants and calling it a day. 

Let’s say they entered the dungeon seeking the yellow mould mother fungus. Prodding a corpse suggests they are corpse retrievers (and possibly even grave robbers) because they’re gathering fertilizer to bring to the fungus. There may be some tension with the mother fungus; the kobolds ideally would like to domesticate it, while the mother fungus wants to infect them. So they want different things and are in tension, which is a good scenario for the PCs to crash into.

#59: Hobgoblin. The humanoid hits continue. Modern D&D treats hobgoblins as martial warriors, something like how orcs were originally portrayed. OSE reverts hobgoblins back to their earlier presentation, but that doesn’t give us much to work with, as they are just “bigger goblins,” a trait they share with bugbears. At least bugbears have the element of surprise. The Monster Overhaul (correctly) just folds hobgoblins into the orc category, which we’ll save for when orcs come up in this dungeon. So that’s no help. Hobgoblins, hobgoblins, what do you do with those hobgoblins?

It’s a thin sliver of lore, but the OSE hobgoblin entry does note that thouls sometimes serve as bodyguards to hobgoblin kings. If you’re not familiar, thouls are an infamous monster from early D&D that combines aspects of hobgoblin, ghoul, and troll, and probably originated as a typesetting mistake.

Perhaps we can make our hobgoblins more interesting by playing up the connection to goblins, ghouls, and trolls. Let’s say that hobgoblins are themselves goblins who are particularly susceptible to mutation, something already implied in other treatments of goblins. Mutation has made them bigger, for starters, but some of them have also been able to mutate into traits from other creatures. We’ll hold further specifics of their mutative powers for a future monster that hasn’t been placed yet. I’m also not sure whether they are prisoners, tresspassers, or something else. We’ll revisit that later.

#32: Driver Ant. Part of the fun of this exercise is looking at the stripped-down presentation of creatures in OSE. There’s a less-is-more vibe to these monsters. At first glance, driver ants are giant bugs with a standard bite attack and not much else to distinguish them. But on second glance…

• Omnivorous and rapacious: “Consume everything in their path, when hungry” – I feel seen.
• Morale: “Attack relentlessly, once they are engaged in melee (morale 12). Will even pursue through flames.”
• Gold: “30% chance of 1d10 × 1,000gp worth of gold nuggets, mined by the ants.”

So there are a couple of adventure vectors here. The ants are driven by hunger and can eat a lot of different things. We can imagine them chewing through barriers made from organic material, invading and connecting different regions of the dungeon.

The morale aspect is compelling for games that use morale rigorously. One of my biggest complaints with modern-style play is the strong presumption that every fight only ends when all the monsters are dead. When I run games, I stress how advantageous it is to compel monsters to flee or surrender, rather than slaughtering all of them because of video game logic.

Contrasted with our expectation of how morale may quickly end a fight against hobgoblins or kobolds or mules (please, do not fight the mules), a monster that goes into a 12-morale frenzy when you melee with it is a big problem. PCs who study their behavior could distract them with food, pelt them with arrows from a distance, or trick other monsters into fighting them. But also… the ants may have gold in their lairs. So there’s also a strong incentive to risk engaging with them further.

#135: Wraith. This is our first incorporeal undead. OSE notes that they “Dwell in deserted regions or in the homes of former victims.” I think this suggests that they are prisoners, perhaps murders or other capital criminals who persist after death, but are trapped in the "deserted region" of the prison. 

We had previously decided that our wights could be guards. Perhaps part of their role is to guard the wraith prisoners? The OSE SRD description of energy drain doesn’t specifically state that it wouldn’t work on undead, but it follows logically from the flavor of the power to say that wights would be immune. 

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

*Slaps Roof of Wikipedia Article* This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Monsters In It

Wikipedia is the DM’s friend. Even just hitting the random article button a few times – or spinning a virtual globe and looking up a real-world place – can produce ample gameable content. So let’s see how many ideas we can spin out of a real-world monster: The helmeted hornbill.

The casque (helmetlike structure on the head) accounts for some 11% of its 3 kg weight.

We don’t usually need to think much about the weight distribution of our monsters, but it can be an interesting way to flavor them. How is a giant flying creature's body built to accommodate that activity? Many of the prompts in my flavorful dragon post concerned that question.   

Here I’m picturing a huge flightless bird with a heavy casque on its bill. It basks in the sun on ridges and mountain crests until it sees interlopers on its territory. It then curls into a ball and tips forward to roll down inclines to smash into its prey.  

Unlike any other hornbill, the casque is almost solid, and is used in head-to-head combat among males.

This kind of behavior is pretty common in the real-life animal kingdom, but it rarely comes up in monster ecologies. This is a great way to present dangerous monsters that don’t care about the PCs; monsters fighting in this way are more like a hazard than a combat encounter. 

It is a belief among the Punan Bah that a large helmeted hornbill guards the river between life and death.

There’s nothing wrong with Cerberus, but mixing in mythology from other parts of the world is refreshing.

[The casque] and the bill are yellow; the red secretion of the preen gland covers the sides and top of the casque and the base of the bill, but often leaves the front end of the casque and the distal half of the bill yellow.

OK you don’t need to worry about preen glands for most of your monsters, but the secretions imply things about the monster. Does it protect them from some form of moisture endemic in the dungeon? Is it a unique and valuable resource that adventurers would want to harvest?

Their call is two parts, the first consisting of a series of loud, intermittent barbet-like hoots, sometimes double-toned and over two dozen in number, which sound like the "toop" or "took" noise of an axe. These hoots gradually accelerates to climax in a cackle reminiscent of laughter; this is thought to advertise information about the caller, such as age, size, and fitness, to listening conspecifics.

Conveying the idea of sounds to players is challenging. How many distinct ways can you describe bird calls? Unless you are a birdwatcher yourself, probably not too many. Copying a description like this can add a lot of flavor over a generic “you hear birds.” All the better if a player hears the hoots and uses magic that allows them to understand animals… and gets the hornbill’s dating profile for their trouble.

Because of this call, the Helmeted Hornbill is also known in Malay as the "Kill your mother in law" bird (Tebang Mentua). It is said that there once was a man who disliked his mother in law so much that he chopped down the stilts that supported her house while she was still inside of it to get rid of her. As punishment, the gods transformed him into the Helmeted Hornbill and so he was condemned to relive his crime forever by mimicking the sound of an axe striking foundation posts, followed with cackling glee at the house crashing down.

This could work with little or no change in a folkloric campaign. More generally, this is a much more compelling and specific idea for a monster than a lot of the standard book creatures. Many of modern D&D’s monsters have cursed origins, but they tend to be abstracted or attributed to broad cosmological forces. The genius loci flavor here is much stronger and more actionable.

Helmeted hornbills mostly eat the fruit of strangler figs.

One easy way to populate a wilderness hex or fill out a random encounter table is just to take real-world terms literally. Strangler figs become literal constricting plants that kill unwary adventurers. Studying the hornbill’s behavior (and how it feeds without being caught) is a useful survival strategy for an adventurer. 

I’ll leave it there, but there’s more we could harvest just from Wikipedia’s high-level view. But one last note. The real-world helmeted hornbill is critically endangered. I just donated to a group that supports conservation efforts for helmeted hornbills and other animals in Borneo. Go ahead and throw them a few bills, and enjoy the look on your players faces when you tell them how much damage they’re taking on a critical hit from a giant bird’s casque.

Ends, Themes, Scenes, and Cuts

Last week: SOMETHING Happens on Every Watch

 Tie Up Loose Ends

RPGs produce a lot of loose ends. Some of them will never be tied up, and that’s fine. Real life is the same way. 

But sometimes a rest watch can provide an easy opportunity grab those loose ends. An example I always remember is from the first season of Critical Role. A party member on watch sees a roc flying by at a great distance, and from context, they infer that it is a roc they previously encountered, and decided to spare. That’s a nice little way of calling back to previous events, without making it a capital-E encounter, or really anything that the party has to “do” anything with.

This can take other forms beyond just seeing something. PCs might have a prophetic dream, or receive a Sending or similar communication from an NPC, or simply stumble upon something static (like a crumpled up newspaper or broadsheet) that alludes to the conclusion of offscreen events.

Restate Fundamental Themes

This will sound weird, but… how often is the fundamental premise of your campaign restated? How often do the central conceits of the fictional world assert themselves in a form that isn’t a distinctive monster, special location, or important NPC?

It can help to have them appear a few times a session. Three is a good number. These don’t have to be important. It actually helps if they aren’t important, because it makes them feel less like hooks that the players are intended to act upon, and more like passive aspects of the world that would be present whether or not the adventurers noticed.

Dungeon dressing. Minor NPC behavior. Weather. And of course, random encounter results.

Say the campaign premise is that magic is returning to the world after a thousand-year absence. Yes, you will have upstart wizards upending society, and magical monsters overrunning the countryside. But there should also be lots of quiet, small, non-adventure-adjacent instances of resurgent magic affecting the game world. Are ordinary plants growing differently along the path? Has the weather or climate been altered in some small but noticeable way? How has life changed for a normal person in a small town? Big themes can’t be limited only to big representation. They need small representation too.

Do a One-on-One Scene 

“Stonks is on watch. Melvin wakes up to go to the bathroom, or maybe just can’t sleep. They have a brief conversation around the fire. What do they talk about?”

One-on-one scenes give characters a chance to bounce off each other. This could be two characters with tangled relationship or a beef; or it could be two characters who have little to do with each other, but find they share some perspective 

Yes, this is very much a story game idea. And I would use it pretty lightly in most games that aren't explicitly about interpersonal roleplay. But this can really flesh out a lot of detail that isn't going to come up in the ordinary course of exploration and adventure.

Cut Away to a Counterpoint Scene

This is another one I don’t do very often because it is very “filmic,” and that is not really my style of running games. But I think excluding it entirely would be a mistake, as it can be very powerful when used effectively. Players are steeped in books, TV shows, and other media that do this all the time. Cutting away from the main characters serves multiple purposes, including:

• Conveying the passage of in-game time without using a lot of real-life time
• Giving the PCs a break from being “on screen”
• Providing some urgency and highlighting “fronts” and other antagonist action

A friendly NPC or a character controlled by a player not present for that session can be a good viewpoint perspective to “explain” why the players can “see” the cutaway, even if their characters cannot; but it’s not strictly necessary to explain at all.

This is definitely to taste. Going into “director” mode can be too much for games that intentionally eschew those techniques. I don’t do this often, as it can put the players in audience mode, and I don’t like to run many scenes that are, effectively, me talking to myself.

But cutting away can be very compelling, and it can telegraph danger or urgency or change without dropping a tense situation or a long-ass combat encounter into every campfire rest.