Pantheon Prompts: Questions for Fantasy Deities

Deities are too dull in too many RPGs. We can do better by randomizing inputs, but sometimes we need to study use other solutions. 

Browse these two Wikipedia entries: Janus, the ancient Roman god and a typical RPG fantasy god, like Azuth from the Forgotten Realms. They are radically different. And I mean beyond the obvious difference, in the sense that one article is summarizing mythology while the other was created as gameable content. The differences prompt a number of questions that can make fantasy deities more interesting.

What are the deity’s spheres of influence, and which of those have nothing to do with dungeons? At least half of a deity’s spheres of influence or domains should have no direct connection to adventuring. A good worldbuilding tool is to consider how much the supernatural and divine is applied to mundane, real-world problems, as I discussed when writing about trade magic.

What is named in this deity’s honor? The real world is flush with honorary words. Months, days of the week, cities, and people are easy ones, but the influence can be less direct. Think about how morphine comes from Morpheus, or how the atlas is literally named after Atlas.

What rituals do their followers observe? This is a big one that TTRPGs tend to ignore. But rituals are central to religions both historical and contemporary, and it is a missed opportunity to leave them out of worldbuilding.

What are the aesthetics and purposes of their temples? Places of worship should not be abstracted or generic. Structures and civilizations are integral to the worship of the gods. The god of lightning’s shrine is atop the tallest tower in the city, covered in a tangle of conductive copper aerials. The god of disease’s temple is within a decommissioned sewage treatment plant. You get the idea.

In what secret places are they worshipped? Public worship and cult worship should tell us something about both the religion in question and the society surrounding it. Remember that cults are a function of how society understands that religion, not just an internal moral quality associated with the deity itself.

What are their relationships with other gods? I don’t mean the usual “the life god and the death god hate each other” RPG stuff. That’s fine, for what it is, but it is not going to make these deities seem alive. Classical pantheons often featured siblings, spouses, and children among the gods. The Greek and Norse pantheons keep reappearing in new fiction because those remain compelling relationships, even as more complex (but also abstracted) fantasy pantheons blur into the background. 

What is their priesthood like? Do they even have one? If yes, are the practitioners locals? Do they choose to become priests when they reach adulthood, or were they raised expecting this to be their purpose? Are they assigned by some distant authority, or elevated by the local community? You don’t have to answer every question, but answering at least a few will make them much more real.

Where does the deity reside? Again, think through this. “The fire god lives on the fire plane” is intuitive, and we don’t want to subvert expectations just for the sake of doing it. But “the fire god lives in the Slagmouth, the fourth incarnation in this world of the ever-erupting world-heart, born astride the corpse of the titan Jokulos, who legends say claimed the first burning fire from deep within the earth…” OK, that’s a little purple, but the players are probably awake and looking at you with curious/worried expressions, right?

What beliefs about this deity are contested? This is a big one. TTRPG rulebooks give players the impression that every god is a known quantity to everyone in that world, with their purpose and ethos conveniently compressed in table format. Even in a world where gods are demonstrably real, there would still be a great deal of ambiguity and disagreement about a particular god’s priorities, desires, and goals. Most fantasy worlds presume that deities still must communicate their liturgy through priests, and even spellcasting clerics only have the broadest and loosest ways to divine the divine’s will, at least at low levels. As I’ve said before, D&D’s cleric spell list actually does a great job of illustrating how cleric’s very gradually get more and more insight into their deity as they level up, from a crude thumbs up / thumbs down for Augury, all the way up through the ability to Gate to the deity’s plane of existence and ask them questions directly. This ambiguity about divine intent should be expressed in the books and come through in-session more often. 

What is the etymology of their name? Not every game needs this, but it can be fun. Consistent use of language is going to show that a lot of thought went into the worldbuilding. You don’t need to create an entire constructed language or etymological tree. Use shortcuts, like using Latin-derived words for all the lawful religions, and German-derived words for all the chaotic religions.  

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.

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.  

Polytheism, Belief, and Ritual in Fantasy RPGs

Consider the following scenario in a fantasy RPG. While traveling, the PCs arrive at a small village. The villagers tell them that for many generations, the people in the village have left offerings for local spirits. The spirits in turn protect the village. If the village ever fails to make the annual sacrifice, the spirits will be angry. Oral histories attest to this, but there's no other evidence. The offerings make up a significant chunk of the small village’s agricultural output and could otherwise be used to improve their practical welfare.

What will the PCs make of this? If your players are like most players I have met while gaming – basically modern material realists whose spiritual beliefs are centered on personal morality rather than community ritual – they will probably be skeptical of the villagers’ choices. Their first thought will be that this is a waste, or at best, something that preserves community cohesion at significant expense. Because players subconsciously have their ear out for an adventure hook, they may also suspect that some malevolent local creature is manipulating the villagers.

So that’s what the players probably think. But what do their characters think, in a purely in-world sense? They would have to take this situation pretty seriously! There would be room for doubt, but they couldn’t scoff at it out of hand.

Why? When thinking about fantasy worldbuilding, it is helpful to remember how ancient people interpreted gods, spirits, magic, and the unknown. They were not ignorant or backward or “superstitious” in an abstract sense. They were making sense of the world in a way that was pragmatic and sensible within the context of what they knew.

I was thinking about this question in part because of a series of posts on the excellent A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog on how ritual works in a polytheistic world. The author, Bret Devereaux, makes an important point that more games should factor into their worldbuilding:

"The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge."

Why does this matter for RPGs? Well, he begins the first post on ancient polytheistic beliefs with a few screenshots from the Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder video games. He points out how the fantasy RPG adoption of religion – for ethical or philosophical reasons – differs greatly from the real-world adoption of religion.

East God by Ching Yeh. The gods are not your friends! They do offer power tho...

Clerics, paladins, and other believers in modern D&D basically act like monotheistic thinkers in a polytheistic world. They choose one system, and the stronger their belief, the greater the power granted by that god. 

"Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods."

A cleric or paladin in a polytheistic world shouldn’t be a one-true-god diehard. Instead, they should have multiple, flexible arrangements with various gods, balancing the power they offer with their contrasting goals and powers. The fact that fantasy gods are proven to exist and not an article of faith actually makes this more true in a fantasy world than it already is in the real world. A cleric’s advancement should be a careful accumulation of bonds and credits with various relevant gods, uncovering the mysteries of their desires and actions, rather than a linear escalation in the ranks of a single institution of the true faithful.

It is interesting that the original cleric of D&D in 1974 was closer to this ideal than later iterations. They were defined more by their alignment than commitments to particular gods. In contrast, modern D&D presupposes that a single god grants all of a cleric’s spells. Some editions played around with spheres, allowing clerics to tailor their focus, but modern D&D mostly gives some bonuses for the spells closest to the deity’s heart, and then calls it a day. 

In the second post in the series, Devereaux notes that the “core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.”  

Imagine being a cleric in a world that works like this. What if you want to cast Spiritual Weapon? If you are lucky, perhaps you have a choice to pray to Athena or Ares. Perhaps praying to one will make it harder to seek the aid of the other in the future. Perhaps only Hades can grant the spell Raise Dead, and that’s a big commitment. In such a system, the variety of spells available is constrained not so much by spheres and lists as it is constrained by how many deals the cleric can balance without fatally angering any particular god.

In this way I am a fan of how relics in Knave 2 are so clearly framed as exchanges with particular gods. Compared to modern D&D, this magic is very distinct from arcane spells. It's a form of extrinsic advancement. And it really delivers on the idea of a world with living, active gods, rather than remote, abstract philosophical concepts.

Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World

Last Week: Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

So if these wizards are not concerned with what the common people think, whose values and opinions would they care about? The Discord conversation concerned, in part, how humans naturally seek the attention and approval of their fellow people. Certainly this motivates real-world humans, and plays into many of the things they seek to accomplish in the real world. But I don’t think high-level characters necessarily see the broad population of other humans (or other sapient humanoids, more generally) as their peers. I believe wizards would care about status as measured by beings whose power equals or exceeds theirs; gods, extraplanar immortals, and, of course, other high-level wizards.

Following the logic of these ideas can take us back to the basic concept of domain play in classic and old-school D&D. Fighters rule land, clerics gather followers, wizards research knowledge. There is some overlap between those ideas, and exceptions, to be sure; a world should have an occasional witch-king or Merlin-style advisor. But in my conception, those are rare exceptions even among the already very small population of high-level adventurers.

So that’s my take – but I concede it is limited to certain assumptions about the metaphysical workings of a D&D world, how rare NPCs with class levels are, and the prevalence of magic. The approach of many high fantasy worlds – where NPC wizards and clerics in the double-digit level range seem happy to serve as government administrators, small business owners, and local troubleshooters – is not my approach. But it’s not a wrong approach, and it may suit certain styles of play. “It depends” wins another argument.

But it’s also interesting to turn this question around, and try to draw a more universal conclusion about the real world. Why do people seek status and power within nations and other organizations in the real world? Precisely because they cannot “level up” and access magic and supernatural power. Real-world historical rulers surely aspired to be like the 20th-level PC of their mythologies – Hercules or Gilgamesh or Merlin. But they were ultimately just mundane, mortal humans. They could not harness magical power or superhuman mastery of weapons. They had no choice but to build powerful societies because there was no other way to extend their influence and power far beyond themselves. 

In a fantasy world where magic and supernatural power exists, people would have that choice. That’s why I believe governments in medium- or high-magic worlds would be weaker, smaller, shorter-lived, and with less state capacity, simply because some percentage of the most talented potential rulers would instead be gaining power through magical means instead of building social and political power. 

We seek status because we lack the power to act so unilaterally as individuals in the way that the fantasy of fantasy RPGs allow us to do.

Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

Would high-level wizards in a fantasy TTRPG setting – say tier three and tier four, in modern D&D parlance – rule kingdoms and nations, whether directly or indirectly? Would they concern themselves with affairs of state?

These and related questions came up in a recent discussion on the Alexandrian Discord. They got stuck in my brain, and a blog post is the only reliable way to pry them out.

The discussion concerned the degree to which powerful D&D characters – particularly wizards – either would or would not seek real-world status and power in a manner that would be familiar to us from historical examples in the pre-modern real world. Would developing infrastructure, taxing the populace, raising armies, and otherwise participating in statecraft matter to them? Or would such worldly concerns be irrelevant to their goals and interests? 

I am firmly in the latter camp; in my own games, a character wielding such powerful magic simply has better ways to achieve their goals. Some other high-level characters – fighters or paladins, for example – might (might…) choose this route. But not a wizard.

It was clear from the Discord discussion that worldbuilding assumptions underpinning this question varied greatly. For example, the more the material plane is the metaphysical “center of the universe,” the more plausible it is that a wizard would invest resources in controlling mundane elements of it. In a cosmology where only mortal souls on the material plane can worship gods, perhaps the conventional control exerted by temporal nations would matter to a wizard.

But in my own conception of how wizards work, they would have better ways to achieve their goals. They would isolate themselves in their wizard towers (or better yet, off-plane domiciles) and focus their work on research and exploration. They would have little time for the values and priorities of the humans of their world. And doing so would make them a target of rivals and enemies more than it would help them. 

I believe that governments in medium- and high-magic fantasy worlds would be even more susceptible to decapitation strikes than their real-world equivalents, so high-level characters would have a strong incentive to decrease their visibility, exposure, and entanglement with organizations and governing structures. Some of my earliest posts on this blog were an attempt to reason out how societies in this kind of world would differ from equivalent historical societies in the real world.

Next Week: Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World

Even More Weird Second Lives of Useful Exotic Creatures

Last Week: The Weird Second Lives of Useful Exotic Creatures

The Lingual Loon

The Immutable Imperium developed the loon as a tool of spycraft. This waterborne bird could instinctively understand and speak the predominant language of the closest large concentration of intelligent creatures. Its purpose was to fly into lakes and pleasure gardens in enemy lands, attune to the local tongue, and eavesdrop on the conversations of the wealthy and powerful.

Long after the internal collapse of the Imperium rendered its external intelligence operations obsolete, the remaining loons were captured by the Imperium’s former enemies. The loons were offered gainful employment to offset their former service to the oppressive Imperium. They accepted the offer gladly (the alternative was… unpleasant).

The nomadic peoples outside the empire had no interest in spycraft. They instead found a future for the loons in the Imperium’s underground tramway, repurposed from military supply to civilian transportation. The drawback that the tiny, numerous polities faced after the death of the empire was the difficulty of determining which mobile micronation the train was passing beneath at any given time. The tramway was deep underground, and it was slow to accelerate and decelerate, so it wasn’t practical to stop and peek at random to see who was living up above the current station.

But because the loons could always speak the language of the nearest large concentration of people, they could serve as indirect indicators of who resided up above at any given time. Periodically prodding a loon would reveal if the train was close to a group of Nethian-speaking Kalians, or already nearer to the Zeelian peoples who (as readers obviously already know) speak the Classical Ramajavian tongue. The loons' linguistic contortions, once the pride of Imperium spymaster arcanologists, was reduced to a mere signpost of localized humanity. Well, it’s a living.

The Psychopomps

At the beginning of time, the Omnimother created the boatmen and charged them with ferrying the souls of the deceased across the chthonic waters. For millennia, they executed their duties faithfully, as unchanging as the sun and the stars. But even stars eventually burn out, and the psychopomps’ duties came to an end when humanity won the War on Death. The psychopomps had a challenging career transition to navigate.

Their human conquerors were nothing if not helpful in their reinvention. The psychopomps were immune to the waters of the Lethe. They had perfect, incorruptible, limitless memories.

Some adjudicated contract disputes. Perfectly able to recall every detail of an agreement without prevaricating or dissembling, they were natural arbiters. They were particularly known for settling wills and estates, given their former occupation. 

Some dove into history. They had no interest in chronicling past events for their own sake, but their retention was limitless and their recall perfect. And had they not been the final witnesses for some of the great figures of history? Did Tamsen the Vitiator die laughing, or with tears streaming from her eyes? The history books disagree. But the psychopomp who guided them to the afterlife could say for sure.

Finally, some were entrusted with the greatest dark secrets of mortality. There is magic and technology so terrible and powerful that no one should have access to it; but erasing it completely from the world risks its accidental rediscovery in the far future. Someone needs to remember it perfectly, to be able to name it and recognize it for what it is, if humankind ever lays hands on it again. And who better than the psychopomps? They had become guardians of death once again, but in a very different way.

The Weird Second Lives of Useful Exotic Creatures

They tampered with the natural order of the world. “They” could be a wizard, a gene cult, the greys, the transhumanists, the Umbrella Corporation. It doesn’t matter anymore who it was. The important thing is that they created something unnatural, for a particular purpose. And their creation eventually outlived that purpose. But the world has found a new purpose for that creation.

Keybees

The Prince Palisperous of the Court of Infinite Flowers bragged that no thief would ever pierce his floriferous vault and breathe in the scent of the Barbarous Orchid, most beautiful of all flowers. He offered vast riches for any who could prove him wrong. Again and again, the greedy, the foolish, and the brave tried their luck, with nothing to show for their efforts but a trail of adventurer corpses sprouting beautiful bouquets.

Uno the Humble Beekeeper was not an adventurer. He did not know how to fight monsters or disarm traps. But he did know everything there was to know about bees. And the bees knew everything there was to know about flowers.

Through selective breeding over seven decades, he cultivated the keybees, hives of bees each devoted to locating a particular kind of flower. A keybee could hone in on the faintest floral scent. No obstacle could stop a keybee for long, and if a keybee drone was killed, others would finish its work.

Keybee hives dedicated to finding the Barbarous Orchid sent waves of bees after the closely guarded flowers. Iterative testing of its defenses and accelerated breeding overseen by Uno led to a dexterous proboscis for picking locks and a sixth sense for avoiding monsters and traps. It took a long time, but the keybees were patient. The bees eventually pierced the vault, drank the nectar within, and returned to Uno, the first and only person to smell the nectar's scent. He died three days later, at the age of 99. He had never expressed any interest in the prince’s reward, and died content, with his life's work complete.

But Uno’s perfected keybees lived beyond their prescribed purpose. Hives propagated naturally, and the keybees retained their flower-seeking behavior. Feeding nectar from a particular flower (combined with the proper reagent) to a queen keybee from a new hive would produce the same flower-seeking effect. Uno’s successors found more pragmatic uses for the keybees.

Naturally, some applications were modeled closely on Uno’s original feat. Sneak a flower into the kingdom treasury and a keybee will guide you all the way in; that sort of thing. But there were other possibilities. Use a keybee to stress-test the security system. Sew a rare flower into your child’s cloak, and never worry about losing track of them again. Bury a cache of documents with a flowering plant that goes dormant in darkness; only those who know the flower type can locate it later with a keybee.

The Guardian Viper of Fearsome Banishment

The Plane of Endless Snakes was never a particularly popular destination for planar travelers. But apparently someone or something that once resided there was particularly interested in discouraging unwelcome visitors from trespassing in its sibilant halls. 

So they created a special kind of guardian, the Greater Viper of Fearsome Banishment (or GVFB, as brevity is important when identifying and fleeing from venomous snakes). This creature not only delivered the deadly venom typical of many mundane snakes, but also the Banishment spell. Imagine the sight of an unfortunate interloper not only appearing back on their home plane, but writhing in pain from the snake's venom, as well; much more effective than the old “beware of snakes” signs.

These snakes outlived whatever entity created them, and in the snakely paradise of the Plane of Endless Snakes, they speciated into various forms, some less fearsome. Enterprising ophidiologists eventually discovered a strain of GVFBs that retained only a lesser strain of poison, but the full effect of the banishment spell (Guardian Vipers of Tolerable Banishment, or GVTBs, for short). While banishment is typically deployed coercively to, well, banish an interloper, nothing stops a planar traveler on a budget from directing the spell at themself for a quick emergency escape back to home turf. Uncorking an angry snake and intentionally inflicting a (nonlethal) bite on oneself is no one’s idea of a good time, but as an alterative to the cosmic terrors of the more hostile planes, it has much to recommend it.

Next Week: Even More Weird Second Lives of Useful Exotic Creatures

How to Make Your Game In Tense

I’ve written before about how language is a powerful tool in RPGs. Here’s another great language tool for our games. Let’s talk about prophetic perfect tense. Per Wikipedia:

“The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique commonly used in religious texts that describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened.”

The biblical examples in the Wikipedia link are instructive, but I don’t think they would jump out at a contemporary bible reader, because most translations have various archaic and indirect wordings that just sound strange to modern readers. But excerpted and emphasized, they become more interesting. Something foretold by the divine is so certain that one can talk about it in the past tense even when it’s in the future. Ponder that for a moment.

In fantasy media, prophecies are a cliche. NPC statements like “the dark lord is prophesied to rise again” or “the prophesied heroes will come at the fated hour” are not going to put players on the edge of their seats. In a world of magic and monsters, prophecies are just Another Weird Thing That Happens.

So try this instead: Have prophets speak in the prophetic perfect tense. If the prophet says “the dark lord arose in spring of the year 416” and the players know it is autumn in the year 415, they’ll wonder what is up. They’ll ask the GM if they made a mistake, and when the GM says no, and reiterates what the prophet said, the players will have to engage a little more seriously with the statement. 

There's no need to hide the ball – unless it seems like an opportunity for a little diegetic puzzle. Once the players catch on to the incongruity of what the prophet is saying, you as GM can just explicitly flag that the statement is in prophetic perfect tense, and explain what that means. By that point, the importance of the prophecy has already been flagged and certified as special and truly out of the ordinary. If there is an entire lingual structure that is only used for prophecies, players are much more likely to remember it as something unusual and important, not just lore wallpaper.

Underland: A Deep Dungeon Delve

I’m partway through "Underland: A Deep Time Journey," a 2019 book by Robert Macfarlane. The book is broadly about underground spaces, and the fascination they engender in us. The book’s potential application to fantasy TTRPGs and dungeons is so obvious that I have to imagine someone has written about Underland in the context of RPGs. But googling “RPG Underland” and similar terms didn’t produce any results, so on the off chance that I’m the first to notice this, I will share some interesting quotes from the book that are readily applicable to D&D-style RPG games.

On Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project:

It is clear that [Walter] Benjamin’s imagination was strongly drawn to enclosed and underground spaces: the warren of the covered ‘arcades’ themselves, as well as the caverns, crypts, wells and cells that existed beneath Paris. Taken together, these sunken spaces comprise what Benjamin called a ‘subterranean city’, shadow twin to the ‘upper world’, and dream-zone to its conscious mind. ‘Our waking existence is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld,’ he wrote, memorably: the realm from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass by these inconspicuous places, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors.

This is right down the middle of the lane for classic dungeon construction. The shadow twin? The dream-zone? Sounds like the mythic underworld to me. I’ve added the Arcades Project to my reading list to see how much more the source text supports classic RPG exploration.

On the quarries underneath Paris:

For centuries, quarrying was ill-regulated and largely unmapped. Then in the mid eighteenth century, the extensive undermining began to have consequences for the upper city, causing subsidence sinkholes known as fontis that were reputed to be of diabolic origin. The quarry voids had begun to migrate to the surface; the under-city had begun to consume its twin. In 1774 a fonti engulfed, in a matter of seconds, pavements, houses, horses, carts and people. The site of the sinkhole was, of all places, the Rue d’Enfer – the Street of Hell. Several minor cave-ins followed, and panic spread in the city at the unknown extent of the invisible danger. Louis XVI responded shortly after his accession by creating an inspection unit for the ‘Quarries Below Paris and Surrounding Plains’, headed by a general inspector called Charles-Axel Guillaumot, and tasked with regulating the quarries for the purposes of public safety. It was Guillaumot who initiated the first mapping of the void network, with a view to consolidating existing spaces and regulating further quarrying activities.

If you showed me this excerpt without context, I would assume it was fictional content for a novel, RPG, or video game. It already sounds like a scenario that might show up in, say, Miseries & Misfortunes. Just consider how many gameable elements we can draw from the above paragraph alone: 

• Sinkholes, a fascinating, scary, and under-utilized phenomena.
• The sudden immersion of the surface/normal/waking world into the subsurface/abnormal/dreaming world (“a city block has sunk, can you lead people to safety?”)
• “Reputed to be of diabolic origin.” Great ambiguity. We can either treat this literally (malevolent intervention in the surface city) or figuratively (peoples’ misunderstanding of what causes the sinkholes leads them to attribute it to the supernatural).
• “The Street of Hell” and “the invisible danger.” No elaboration needed.
• An inspection unit. This is another great hook to adventure. The PCs are explicitly assigned the duty of mapping the “void network.”
• Yes, it is that Louis XVI, so on top of everything else, this is an urban scenario percolating within the prelude to the most famous revolution in world history. 

The book goes on to detail the various uses of the catacombs over time:

The deposition of bones into the catacombs continued over the course of the nineteenth century, but quarrying dwindled away as the best limestone deposits became worked out. From the 1820s the quarry voids were put to a new use as mushroom fields: damp and dark, they provided the perfect growing spaces for fungi, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. Adaptable quarrymen made a career move into mushroom farming, and a subterranean Horticultural Society of Paris was founded, its first president being a former general inspector of the mines. By 1940 there were some 2,000 mushroom farmers working underneath Paris. During the Second World War the French Resistance retreated into sections of the tunnels in the months following occupation. So did civilians during air raids – and so, too, did Vichy and Wehrmacht officers, who constructed bombproof bunkers in the maze under the sixth arrondissement.

The abundance of gameable options here is comical:

• “The deposition of bones.” Yes. Catacombs and necropolises are obviously fruitful places for RPGs for any number of reasons, including the undead. All the more when they have multiple overlapping/conflicting uses.
• Mushroom fields. Again, this creates room for both classic monsters and unconventional “treasure” (be sure to have a “so you ate a random mushroom” table to roll on).
• “...its first president being a former general inspector of the mines.” Sounds like an adventurer who graduated to domain play.
• Factions in the dungeon. The resistance, civilians, Vichy, and Wehrmacht officers all going underground. If I had read this in the pages of a WW2 RPG, I would have thought it was cool, but a little unrealistic. Knowing that it is real provides some great fuel for games of all kind (and this wasn’t even the only urban space where this kind of thing happened during World War 2).

I’ve been reading bits of Underland between time with other books, so I haven’t finished it yet. I’ll follow up this post with another one if I find other interesting excerpts.

Cyclopean Masonry and Making Civilizations Feel Forgotten and Ancient

Last week: The Strata of Civilizations

Many fantasy games do a poor job of suggesting the passage of time. They merely assert it, or give it the thinnest coat of narrative veneer. The “present” of the fantasy world already feels “old” to the modern-day player; how can we better communicate that the “present” of the game world sits on top of a much older past?

Think about cyclopean masonry. To a modern observer, without some specific training, these ancient walls do not look much different from other ancient walls. But to the classical Greeks, they were so strange and different that they were attributed to mythological forces, rather than the humans who built them. What can we add to games to inspire similar wonder?

The Walled City of Rosargy

No one who lives in Rosargy today knows who built its incredible walls. No other city has walls like them. They show no sign of wear from the elements and require no maintenance. Powerful monsters and terrible magics have left them unscathed. 

The city’s four perfect, imposing gates stand at the points of the compass rose. There are no handles, knobs, or keyholes. Bas reliefs on the doors plainly show supplicants speaking before the doors, and the doors opening in response. But no one today speaks the language they spoke, or knows the words they said.

So getting into and out of Rosargy is difficult. Massive dirt ramps allow carts to trundle up and over, while pulleys and lifts and ladders of all shapes and sizes allow access for individual travelers. In peaceful times, the walls are more of a nuisance than a benefit. But the occupants are reminded of their value when peaceful times end.

Torsten the Thresher

It’s still possible to find remnants of the ancient war golems who served Archmage Aristaios in the Patient War. Buried underneath layers of undergrowth or sunken into the seabed, huge ancient granite monstrosities, still as any other stone. But once upon a time they walked the earth and fought great battles. We know this is true because we can observe Torsten the Thresher.

Torsten can be found near the village of Ukaleq, in a secluded river valley full of stitch-weed and gabble groves. Scholars theorize that a great fortress must have once been here. There are no ruins of this fortress. There is quite the opposite, no trace of civilization. For Torsten is still here, smashing his enormous stone club into a huge crater in the ground. Scholars believe that Torsten was ordered to attack a structure at this location, but never ordered to stand down. The scholars speculate that Archmage Aristaios died while Torsten carried out his assault, and with no command to cease, Torsten simply continued to follow through on this final orders into perpetuity.

Visitors are understandably terrified of Torsten, but the people of Ukaleq village love him. For countless generations, they have dragged the tough stalks of the gabble trees to “Torsten the Thresher,” as they call him. The slow and methodical rise and fall of his club, powered by magic, is far more productive than any conventional threshing method. The villages do not fear this weapon of war, for his presence has been as consistent and indifferent as anything in the world, since long before their ancestors came to this place. If the villagers have any concern at all when it comes to Torsten, it is the worry that the hole he has dug with his massive blows will eventually destabilize the ground on which he stands, and tip him over. They seek the help of dwarven architects to reinforce Torsten’s footing and ensure he can continue his vital work for generations to come.

The Pleasure Palace of Queen Léontine

There were elves once, in this land. Perhaps there still are, but no person who walks these roads has met them in person. Their ancient works remain, although time and circumstance have changed them to such a degree that the humans here scarcely recognize the purposes they once served.

Take, for example, the Pleasure Palace of Queen Léontine. What no person today knows or understands is that this elven queen once called this place her home, many centuries before men set foot here. Her magic was great, and the barriers between worlds were thinner and more porous in that age. She traveled back and forth between this world and the fey realm of the fairie courts, which in that long-ago time were friendly to the elves.

To ensure she could readily attend the social season of the fey lands and rulership of her domain in this world, she worked powerful magicks on her pleasure palace, allowing it to phase between worlds on a timely schedule, without the need to cast the spells each time herself. Would-be suitors – whether magically compelled or completely willing – guarded the palace from intrusion in both realms. For many human generations, she reigned and reveled in this way, living in both worlds.

Exactly when and how is lost to history, but at some point Queen Léontine died, or disappeared, and her palace fell into disuse. The guardian suitors left or died, and the first humans to wander this land attempted to settle in the disused palace. But its strange travel between worlds made it dangerous to these intruders, who unexpectedly disappeared with the palace's transition. Folklore stories sprung up about the cursed place and the people who disappeared after lingering too long in its glamoured halls. Over time, without servants to maintain its beautiful gardens, it fell to ruin; the delicate glasswork structures collapsed; and eventually everything was so overgrown that the structure of the palace itself was no longer  even visible.

But the magic remained, and the palace and the land it resided on continued to shift between worlds, albeit more slowly with each passing millennia. The palace phases into the real world approximately once each century. In three out of four of its appearances, the ruin’s arrival is barely noticeable; a heavily overgrown mound that appears in the wilderness, swapping places with largely similar terrain, then disappears again months later. But in one out four appearances, it phases back to our world from a fey court with a dangerously severe difference in air pressure, relative to the modern world. In these instances, the arrival produces a tremendous booming noise, audible for miles around, followed by terrible storms and tornadoes. The guardians are gone, the splendor faded and overgrown, and Queen Léontine no longer walks those fabled halls; but its magic still dominates the lands she once ruled.

The Strata of Civilizations

Dungeons in general – and megadungeons in particular – are excellent at conveying the strata of civilization. Adventurers, like archeologists, find layers of progressively older civilizations as they dig deeper. Even the more archetypical (or stereotypical) D&D adventures – orcs in an abandoned dwarven mine, or bandits camping in the first level of an ancient tomb – fit this pattern, in a very simple way. But megadungeons have the scope to do it especially well.

Caverns of Thracia is an excellent model. Its factions tell the story of four civilizations, each different from the societies that came before them. And these civilizations are not merely window dressing; the PCs’ understanding of each group should change as they unravel the history of the dungeon (a history that no single faction understands completely). The beastmen will most likely be hostile to the PCs, and have many antagonistic individuals in their ranks; but the players may be more sympathetic to them after learning about their history of rebellion against death-worshiping slavers. Many modern dungeons trace influence directly from Thracia (the creator of Ardun Vul, for example, calls Caverns of Thracia “the greatest early (published) mega-dungeon”). Listening to the 3d6 Down the Line podcast's playthrough of Ardun Vul, it sounds like it learned those lessons well.

When a game fails to present coherent strata of civilization, it kills verisimilitude. I was immediately annoyed when I played last year's Zelda game (TotK) and it premised its action and exploration in the land of Hyrule on the discovery of an ancient lost civilization that once wielded great power (the Zonai). The previous Zelda game (BotW) had also been about a different ancient lost civilization that once wielded great power (the Sheikah).

There is no trace of the Zonai in BotW. Practically speaking, I understand that the game’s designers only created the Zonai during TotK’s development, well after BotW was complete. That’s why there’s no in-game logic to the relative ages of these civilizations, or a sense of how they might have influenced each other, or represented different eras in the world’s history. But no one forced the game’s designers to make that choice. They chose this incongruity. My immersion was broken. I didn’t believe that both of these societies had existed in the world of Hyrule, except as gamified plot devices.

It is worth noting that most previous Zelda games rebooted the world entirely with each new release, avoiding such continuity problems. The iterations of Hyrule in each game have connections and callbacks and overlapping ideas, but they avoid defining their cosmological and mythological relationships too clearly. With a few exceptions – including BotW and TotK – Zelda is a good example of loose canon. 

The Rise and Fall

When a dungeon (or other kind of adventuring site) tells the story of the strata of civilization, it is telling the story of the rise and fall of those civilizations. It is intimidating for a DM or game designer to try to communicate thousands of years of overlapping history through in-game action. I have found it helpful to avoid names and dates, and instead focus on culture, beliefs, traditions, and customs. The Fall of Civilizations podcast is an excellent source of these ideas. I get a half-dozen or more ideas for games from each episode.

There are many reasons for societal collapse, including but not limited to:

• Changing climate 
• Changes in water or soil quality or availability
• Exhaustion of finite resources
• Breakdown in internal or external commerce
• The retreat or fall of the society’s parent civilization or allied civilization
• The rise of an antagonistic civilization or civilizations

In a fantasy world, we can add others:

• The actions of gods or other supernatural entities
• The ravages of monsters, from lowly monstrous hordes to mighty dragons
• Epic magic, whether hostile action by an archwizard or misguided hubris by the society’s own high magus

These two lists can be merged quite easily. Ancient peoples often did attribute the natural to divine or supernatural boons or banes. We can simply make those connections explicit when crafting strata of civilization in a fantasy setting.

Irregular Layers

A new DM’s first go at a dungeon can be pretty simple. Their first floor is goblins, second floor is ghouls, third floor is gargoyles… and so on. Fine for a first effort, but experienced DMs and PCs will quickly begin to question why these creatures adhere to such artificial constraints. Iterating on this basic idea, the DM might spread goblins out into the surrounding countryside. Perhaps they were displaced from the second level of the dungeon when the ghouls were awakened from their tombs (with a handful of ghoul-goblins to show for it). The gargoyles, immune to the ghouls’ paralytic touch, have been herding them deeper into the dungeon to harass their enemies, the giants… and so on.

The dungeon levels, the factions that occupy them, and the strata of civilization don’t exist independently. They are spread over each other and interact.

Consider Thracia once again. While the first and second floors are dominated by its two “present day” factions, the older factions can be found quite early. Inquisitive players on the first level of the dungeon can find a hidden room – not far from the main entrance! – occupied by an ancient death priest, locked in stasis. A secret door on the second level can quickly take PCs to the abandoned temple where the Immortal King – one of the most dangerous creatures in the campaign – lies slumbering. When I ran Thracia, my players nearly stumbled right into the Immortal King’s tomb, but (wisely) retreated.

They Don’t Make Them Like This Anymore

The ruins of these civilizations are not interesting only for their archeological or anthropological value. Understanding who these people were could be one motivation for dungeon exploration, but it usually won’t be the primary one. 

Instead, it is the temptation of treasure and magic that brings adventurers to the dungeons of those ancient societies. Key to this idea is that there are things down beneath the ground that the modern world outside the dungeon no longer knows how to create. Magic and technology that has been lost or forgotten.

I have never enjoyed the style of D&D that developed in 2nd edition and hit its stride in 3rd edition, where magic items were neatly quantified tools that PCs could churn out during downtime (or, more likely, purchase from well-stocked shops). The very idea of a “magic shop” is anathema to me, except in specifically high fantasy settings. And high fantasy games have a proportionately weaker connection to the dungeon anyway; why go to the trouble of delving deep into a pit full of monsters when you can buy what you need from fantasy Walmart?

Standing in a store aisle, counting coins, and weighing the benefits of a Belt of Battle versus an Ioun Stone is not an interesting fictional scenario to me. The foolish and brave venturing deep into the depths to recover the lost arts of a forgotten age is more interesting.

Next Week: Cyclopean Masonry and Making Civilizations Feel Forgotten and Ancient

Random Ideas from the Real World

The real world provides more inspiration than we could ever hope to use, and in complex and unpredictable forms that can break us out of the ruts of genre fiction and vanilla fantasy.

So let’s spin the virtual globe and pick a place at random. Presume we are populating a hex, or planning for an overland trek in our favorite TTRPG.

This is merely an inspirational exercise. It is not informed by any deep study of the randomly chosen real-world location. Indeed, we are intentionally keeping our view “fuzzy” to make it that much easier to create something fictional for game purposes. 

Latitude: 18.46154

Longitude: 104.94312

Real-world location: Bolikhamsai Province, Laos

Immediate visual keywords: Bridges, Boulders, Flowers. The GM should aspire to include one or more of these keywords in every major feature they describe. 

Criss-crossed with mountain ranges, our province is a land of bridges of all shapes and sizes, traversing either deep forested valleys or rocky rapid rivers. Many of those bridges are characterized by winding, flowering vines, growing along every available surface.

What else can we learn about this place? Again, this is an intentionally superficial skim. While a deeper study would likely be interesting and rewarding, it’s beyond the scope of ordinary session prep.

1. Waterfalls and hydroelectric power
2. Quasi-military refugee gangs
3. Religious tension
4. Karst limestone “stone forest”
5. Sun bears, elephants, clouded leopards, and hornbills
6. Tobacco production 
7. A temple with a “very large footprint” of a famous ascetic 

Already, with just a few pieces of information, we have an intriguing setting. We can adapt, abstract, remix, and refocus in various ways. For example:

1. Water power. In addition to the bridges, huge water wheels turn constantly on the fast-moving rivers. This is a natural place, but also one heavily leveraged for energy. 
2. Foreign gangs. Gangs from the north are constantly troubling the local populace. They may try to rob the PCs, but would be just as likely to recruit them, perhaps downplaying their predatory nature. The PCs are soon drawn into a story of foreign invasion and secret societies.
3. The religious overlay. More than one faith is observed here. Religion forms another “overlay” on the region, perhaps creating conflicts within communities and among otherwise sympathetic NPCs.
4. A petrified forest. The karst limestone “trees” of the real world can become actual trees transformed by magic. Perhaps by gorgons? 
5. Fantastic animals. Some of these animals may be fantastic enough in their ordinary form. But we can also derive fantastic equivalents just from literal interpretations of their names. Perhaps the sun bear can emit a blinding flash to stun its prey. The clouded leopard is invisible unless in direct sunlight. The hornbill makes a distinctive trumpeting call when disturbed, something that can work for or against the PCs.
6. Tobacco as treasure. What do PCs do when they capture the bandits' treasure… and realize it is 100 massive bales of stolen, unprocessed tobacco? Can they transport it somewhere and trade it in? 
7. The ascetic’s temple. This could be a flashpoint for religious tension, a bandit hideout, or the entrance to our obligatory dungeon.  

Why Roleplaying Games?

Double warning: This is a galaxy brain post; and I claim no special expertise. If this question has been formally interrogated through one or more disciplines (arts education, art therapy, anthropology, neurology?) I appreciate referrals.

Why weren’t tabletop roleplaying games invented much sooner? Various commentators have pointed out that all the tools were available from ancient times, and widely available from the time literacy was common. But they didn’t arrive in a recognizable form until the 1970s.

So here is my theory. Imagine an ancient hunter-gatherer society. They’ve mastered fire. Control of fire means, for the first time, a (relatively) safe area where they can focus their considerable brainpower on something beyond just survival. So they tell stories.

And while some societies had dedicated storytellers and lore-keepers, presumably many cultures told shared stories, where anyone around the fire could contribute. Changing or adding to old stories. Creating something new. Taking on different roles within the fictional narrative. Similar to roleplaying, right? Add some formalized prompts and a bit of randomness and you have a storytelling game like For the Queen or Fall of Magic.

For thousands of years, this local, collective expression of the performing arts doesn’t change that much. It may be farmers around a hearth instead of hunters around a campfire, but the basic logic is the same. Up until the end of the 19th century, if you were an ordinary person outside a major urban area who wanted to experience live storytelling, theater, music, dance, and the performing arts generally, your community’s most consistent option was to do it itself. You would be a performer and a creator, not just an audience member.

Community members learned to play instruments because that was the only way their families and neighbors were going to hear music regularly. Churches and schools held pageants and plays because that was the only regular source of dramatic performance available. If those prehistoric people gathered around the fire could see these performances, up through the 19th century, they would still recognize it, on some level, as the same tradition they engaged in thousands of years prior.

Then – within a generation in the early 20th century – that all changes. The phonograph, radio, and film are not only available, but available cheaply to a mass audience. Television follows soon after. Average people have easy, affordable access to entertainment and culture they and their community took no part in producing.

For the first time, that ancient desire to be an audience for art is easily satisfied without the work of participating in the creation of art.

But the ancient drive to create is still there, unfulfilled. Certainly many people still choose to become creators. But I think there is some rather large percentage of people on the margin who would have gotten involved in the pre-media era of art creation if they had lived before mass media, but do not get involved in the mass media age. They remain consumers only. 

And that’s why the invention of TTRPGs makes sense in a mid-20th century world saturated with passive media. They are a hack to bring the passive consumers on the margin back into the act of creation. I don’t think TTRPGs are unique in this role; many functions of the internet have allowed ordinary people to find that creative margin too. But TTRPGs do have an interesting, pathbreaking role in the return to community creation.

Alignment Languages Were Good, Actually

Previously: Putting the “Align” Back in Alignment 

AD&D 1E DMG, page 24:

“Each alignment language is constructed to allow recognition of like-aligned creatures and to discuss the precepts of the alignment in detail. Otherwise, the tongue will permit only the most rudimentary communication with a vocabulary limited to a few score words. The speaker could inquire of the listener's state of health, ask about hunger, thirst, or degree of tiredness. A few other basic conditions and opinions could be expressed, but no more. The specialty tongues of Druidic and the Thieves' Cant are designed to handle conversations pertaining to things druidical on the one hand and thievery, robbery and the disposal of stolen goods on the other. Druids could discuss at length and in detail the state of the crops, weather, animal husbandry and foresting; but warfare, politics, adventuring, and like matter would be impossible to detail with the language.”

Yeah, it raises a lot of questions. How early in life does one gain an alignment language? Is this learned by imitation or taught formally? Does it vary regionally like most languages do, or is it moral Esperanto?

Druidic and thieves’ cant are easier to place in the world. We can intuitively put together how characters in these classes would have learned these languages. They’re both evocative ideas that don’t require such mental gymnastics.

So why don't we just do that for all the alignment languages? Once the focus on profession and practical faction is clear, it’s a lot easier for players to grok. But the above paragraph only identifies two languages. How would we fill out the rest of the nine-grid chart?

• Lawful Good. The pure language from before The Fall. 
• Lawful Neutral. Mathematical speech, the aspiration of Babel.
• Lawful Evil. The language of command, ala They Live or the Manchurian Candidate. The language of the tyrant.
• Neutral Good. A polyglot creole of languages old and new, spread through trade, treaty, and camaraderie around a shared fire. 
• Neutral. Druidic. The secret tongue of plants and beasts.
• Neutral Evil. A base tongue of unrestrained id and unfettered ambition. A grim handshake between two sociopaths, a gesture worth a thousand words.
• Chaotic Good. The language of revolution and rebellion. Graffiti and samizdat. 
• Chaotic Neutral. Thieves cant, the language of rogues, spies, smugglers, and anarchists. 
• Chaotic Evil. The whispers of the Beast. The voice speaking directly from the dark place of the soul.

Sure, some of these are closer to the grounded fiction of the game than others. Some would require a bit more work to place in the world. But it’s not so hard to imagine tying them to factions and tangible hooks in the game world, in the same way druidic and thieves cant already work.

Putting the “Align” Back in Alignment

In the past year, I’ve enjoyed listening to several efforts to read the AD&D 1E DMG aloud and untangle its famously opaque contents. Listening raises a number of interesting questions and writing ideas. One that struck me was how nine-grid alignment was born, and then how it has deviated from its intended use.

Alignment, as Gary Gygax presented it in the 1E DMG, was both a guide to behavior (a roleplaying tool) and a chess board for faction play. The former application led to countless arguments and fruitless battles, and D&D-derived games have either mostly dropped alignment (as in D&D 5E, where it is mechanically almost vestigial) or have altered it significantly (for example, Dungeon World).

The latter use – for driving faction conflict – is as useful as ever, and probably underappreciated.

Law and chaos have as much oomph as they ever did, whether used in the style of the Elric books that inspired them, or simply to distinguish  group (lawful) and individual (chaotic) priorities. The latter tension still drives loads of modern media; it’s the crux of most of the conflict in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So law and chaos can stay.

But how about replacing good and evil? The concepts of good and evil may exist in the world, but they’re abstract and philosophical, as they are in the real world. They’re not part of our new grid that we invite players to opt into when they create characters. What should we use instead to create a nine-grid alignment chart? 

We could certainly simply rename the good-evil axis. Celestial and terrestrial? Earthly? Telluric? Rational? Pragmatic? Different adjectives put different spins on the spectrum we will cross with law-chaos.

What if we move further afield? I’ve long been a fan of the Jungian treatment at From the Sorcerers’ Skull. You could build an entire RPG around the adventuring implications of this chart.

What about using social status as an axis? For a dungeon project I’ve been working on, I created the following nine-grid “alignment” chart for character background plus starting "special" equipment.

	Noble (1-2)	Servant (3-4)	Imposter (5-6)
Lawful (1-2)	Vicar (Holy Water)	Hunter (Bear Trap)	Spy (Forgery Kit)
Neutral (3-4)	Scholar (Tome of Lore)	Bricklayer (Trowel and Fast-Dry Mortar)	Thief (Lockpicks)
Chaotic (5-6)	Black Sheep (Gunpowder Bomb)	Fired Yesterday (Hidden Knives)	Goblin (Human Disguise)

Think about all the implicit world building work done by presenting a law-chaos/noble-imposter grid. 

For the same project, I used Patrician, Proletarian, Pastoral as categories. Again, these adjectives can be crossed with the law-chaos spectrum to create very interesting combinations. Just the intersection of those two ideas is enough to spark interesting characters and situations.

Next: Alignment Languages Were Good, Actually

Stranger Than Fiction: Historical Instability and Dynamic Society

Think of your typical fantasy kingdom in the common fantasy vernacular. There is a king or queen who dwells in a palace or castle in the capital city. They have soldiers who act both as military and police force. If there is intrigue and conflict, it typically comes from monstrous infiltration; perhaps a shapeshifter stirring up trouble within the royal court. 

There’s nothing wrong with this approach. Like many motifs in the vanilla fantasy vernacular, this allows viewers (or players) to quickly engage with a familiar setting, with minimal load time.

But it’s still a great point of departure for adding complexity and drama to a game. And real world history provides plenty of fuel to do so. I was inspired, for example, by overlapping stories that emerged while listening to history podcasts covering the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the history of the Catholic popes. 

The Mediterranean world – and Italy in particular – in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire provides a situation ripe for dynamic gameplay. Imagine PCs beginning their adventures in a kingdom with factions modeled on some or all of the following:

The Ostrogothic Kingdom

They speak a different language and practice a different form of Christianity than the Romans they rule over. Militarily triumphant, they lack the legitimacy needed to establish stable diplomatic relations and trade connections with other powers, and need to act as nominal “vassals” of the Eastern Roman Empire. A recently ascendant foreign ruler is a great prompt for game action.

The Pope and the Church

The pope is not just a spiritual leader, but also has growing secular power. The pope must both compete and cooperate with the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the Eastern Roman Empire to maintain independence, while also making concessions to protect the citizens of Rome and negotiate thorny theological problems for the still-young religion. A young religion is another way to reinforce a dynamic scenario.

The Senate

Far from the republican body it was at its height, the Senate would still represent the interests of a powerful landed aristocracy. The Ostrogoths rely on them for the civil and administrative tools of the former Western Empire. They would have the strongest attachment to Rome’s imperial past.

The Eastern Emperor

The emperor has unparalleled legitimacy, vast funds, a defensible capital, and relatives for marriage alliances. But they lack the manpower to take and defend the former imperial lands of the Western Empire. Their use of mercenaries to and proxy interests adds dynamism to the situation. 

The Exarch

A local extension of the Emperor’s rule, they are expected to do the impossible: take back an Italian peninsula swarming with barbarians. They can take cities, but not hold them; make deals, but not enforce them, if the emperor overruled them. There are many ways they could become enemies or patrons of adventuring PCs.

Anti-Popes and Schismatics

Many Christians oppose the pope's authority, or differ on religious teachings. Other cities vie for doctrinal preeminence. And the formal succession of the pope itself is by no means a settled matter. These religious disputes intermingle with political disputes, fueling even greater conflicts.

The Lombards

The Ostrogothic Kingdom is young, and other barbarians from the north are eyeing the depopulated peninsula, planning to sweep in and take the kingdom from its new rulers.

Consider the implications of these overlapping, contrasting power structures. No one living at this time could be sure if some form of empire would return, or if gothic rule would persist. Those in power would speak a variety of languages, from Germanic tongues, to vulgar Latin, to proper Latin, to Greek. Christianity was still a young religion, with core principles in flux. Merchants, mercenaries, and missionaries could introduce people and cultures from all over the early medieval world.

Many games adopt such trappings for setting. The key when doing so is to find the conflict inherent in these stories, and remember that while they read as ancient, settled, historical fact to modern eyes, they were as chaotic and unpredictable in their time as at any other point in history.