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.

*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.

More Monster Metamorphoses, Please

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

Piercer to Roper

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

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

Fire Snake to Salamander 

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

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

Gas Spore to Myconid 

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

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

Lurker Above to Trapper

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

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

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

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

Caterkiller to Butcherfly

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

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

Treat Lists of Deities Like Roll Tables to Create a Scrambled Pantheon

Mythological pantheons in the real world are fascinating. They raise all kinds of fascinating questions about how the people who worshipped those gods thought about the world and understood their place in it. Pantheons in fantasy worlds are often a lot less interesting. 

Look at those tables in Appendix B of the 2014 5E players handbook. We have gods like “Leira, goddess of illusion; CN; Trickery; Point-down triangle containing a swirl of mist” or “Rao, god of peace and reason; LG; Knowledge; White heart.” These are… easy to remember, I guess? They are tropey and linear. Not very evocative, though. Most of these gods lack implicit internal tension. Some of them have obvious roles vis-a-vis their believers, but others only make sense as a flavor hook for a possible cleric character’s desired domain selection.

What if we treat these tables as roll tables? If you count from the first entry in Appendix B, on the Forgotten Realms table, and then number it up through 100, you get most of the way through Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Eberron. Roll five d100 – once for each column, plus twice on the first column, splitting the name and honorific. I re-rolled entries that came up more than once. Here’s what I got.

Name: Gond
Honorific: Goddess of the Moon
Alignment: LG
Domain: Death, Knowledge
Symbol: Oak Leaf

I just rolled this up outta nowhere. A few details jump out right away. Note that in Appendix B, all the gods with the death domain are either neutral or evil. What does it mean to have a lawful good death goddess? How important is death to the order and well-being of the world? And what’s with the moon and the oak leaf? Are these pure symbology? Or do they mean something more? Is the moon the world of the dead? Are oak trees mystical gates to the moon?

Name: Mystra
Honorific: Goddess of Wrath and Madness
Alignment: N
Domain: Knowledge
Symbol: Feather

I love the idea that the goddess of madness also has the knowledge domain. Very evocative to think of madness as a contingent risk to seeking more knowledge.

Name: Hiddukel
Honorific: God of Meditation and Order
Alignment: NE
Domain: Knowledge
Symbol: Flame drawn on silver or molded from silver

This is what I love. Why is the god of order NE? There’s a story there. My first thought is that he is an usurper. But it could be even weirder. What if the former god of meditation and order trapped him in this role, forcing a NE deity to rule over an order-inducing pantheon? Is he meditating to gather knowledge? Perhaps his parishioners are split between those who venerate him in his captivity, versus those who want to set it free. That’s an interesting deity.

Real-world mythologies are more interesting. In fantasy creators' defense, ancient Egypt has a 5000-year head start. Colossal figures in front of the Great temple of Abu Simbel, via Old Book Illustrations

Name: Milil
Honorific: God of Fire and Change
Alignment: LN
Domain: no clerics
Symbol: Upright flaming sword

Right away we have a “god of change” who is LN. How do we even square that? Some kind of dynamic change that is part of a larger rebalancing of the world? The domain is “no clerics,” an entry specific to Dragonlance, which raises further questions. Perhaps this god considers divine magic to be an impermissible exception to the LN “change” they allow? Perhaps in this god’s view, it is clerics themselves who unbalance the world, and they seek to apply their power in ways that punish or curtail divine casters.

Name: Kelemvor
Honorific: God of Storms
Alignment: LG
Domain: Life, Light
Symbol: Blank Scroll

Again, we get more interesting results from random rolls. Storms are typically chaotic, but what if we associate them with law instead? And the domain of life? And the symbol of a blank scroll? Perhaps a world where lighting strikes spawn new demigods and monsters who serve to maintain the divine order? 

Name: Lunitari
Honorific: God of Thieves
Alignment: NG
Domain: Death, Life
Symbol: Bundle of five sharpened bones

What do you even make of a NG death/life god of thieves? I’m thinking of a mythology where Lunitari steals souls from competing law and chaos factions to balance the scales.

The basic idea of all these ordinary-pantheons-turned-weird-by-roll-tables is this – the incongruities and contradictions that the rolls produce are features, not bugs. The world does not need more chaotic-weather-god-versus-good-light-god-versus-evil-death-god pantheons. Rolling forces the DM/worldbuilder to grapple with weird contradictions. That’s what produces strange, distinct, actionable worlds. Go for that energy when worldbuilding. 

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.

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.

Ecology of a Dragon’s Demise

A “whale fall” is an oceanographic phenomena in which whales die and sink into deep, nutrient-poor parts of the ocean.

A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones.[1] On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.

D&D isn’t required to follow real-world ecologies. But they are amazing sources of inspiration because their complexity and natural logic creates verisimilitude without requiring that we build complex working systems from scratch. How could we use this shortcut for a D&D game?

Dragons are among the largest creatures in a typical fantasy world, and already have the most cultural cachet; it makes sense to make them similarly central to the life of the fantasy world in question. The dragon is more than just a monster to be fought. It can be set dressing, a hazard, and even an adventuring site.

Whale falls happen because of the particular environmental conditions in very deep parts of the ocean. When whales die in shallow water, they decompose normally. But in the ocean depths, their death radically changes the local environment.

So how is a dragon dying different from any other large animal dying? Dragons are unusual creatures. They are inherently magical. They change the land around their lairs during their life, reshaping it to more closely match their chromatic type. Why not also in death?

Green dragon by Better Legends (betterlegends.com)

When a dragon dies outside its lair*, it changes the land around the site of its death for a period of time equal to the dragon’s lifespan. The change corresponds to the type of dragon.

Black Dragons: It gets into the air first, like a crummy gray haze that the wind can't disperse. It’s really noticeable when the first storm hits, and acid rain falls; it will be the only kind of rain in the region for years, maybe decades. Plants turn into monstrous, sickly mockeries of themselves. The water table’s PH level gradually sinks below 7.0. Most creatures shelter bitterly or flee, but purple worms burrow unerringly toward the site, and oozes and other toxic things follow. These conditions do eventually fade, but even centuries later, it’s still possible to identify the site of a black dragon’s death by the pitted patterns on even the toughest exposed rock.

Green Dragons: The location of a green dragon’s death is a superfund site that will someday grow into a horrible, mutant forest. A miasma of toxins fill the water, the air, the very earth. Creatures adapted to such environments are like clownfish hiding in a stinging anemone.

White Dragons: A frozen bomb goes off, like a snowglobe dropped from a great height. An already-cold region turns into a desolate wasteland. A temperate or warm locale gains a localized forever-winter, spinning off tornados and other weather phenomena due to the drastic temperature differences along its borders. Cold-loving creatures sojourn to this place to bask in its frostiness.

Blue Dragons: Perhaps the least obvious of the draconic death-sites, at least at first glance. The effects are subtler, but just as pronounced in their own way. Animals that use magnetic fields for navigation and migration are lost. Metal objects are constantly conveying electric charges, sometimes dangerously powerful. Water tastes metallic. The air is perpetually dry, and people in the area experience frequent static shocks and nosebleeds. Lightning mephits and conduit demons spawn with every thunderstorm.

Red Dragons: Bro, have you ever even been to the elemental plane of fire? You think it is just a hot place? Wait until you see fire so hot that it can burn rock. Fire that flows like water. Fire that sets other fires on fire. This environment is obviously dangerous and deadly to creatures not native to the elemental plane of fire, but the hardiest and greediest dwarven smiths will seek out these locations, because a red dragon’s grave is also a furnace capable of forging the most epic creations.

*A dragon’s lair is not just its home. It also serves as an environmental safety measure to minimize the blast radius of the dragon’s detrimental death. Woe to the creatures of the land when a dragon dies outside its lair!

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.  

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.

Stranger Than Fiction: Ascetics

It’s taken as a platitude that truth is stranger than fiction, but we have to remind ourselves constantly, lest our games be more ordinary than everyday life.

Consider the historical example of Simeon Stylites. Was the strangest holy man in your game as strange as this real-world one? Certainly players would not soon forget such an NPC encounter. I would guess that most games have too few strange religious outcasts, and very few have too many.

In the interest of moving money to the mouth zone, a random table.

Why is the fervent ascetic you encounter on your journey locally famous?

1. A repentant former soldier. They have worked thousands of swords and other weapons into a massive modern art sculpture. Will evangelically attempt to convince armed PCs to donate their weapons to the project. A little too interested in swords for it to be healthy (possibly a Gladio worshiper?) 
2. A wizened pilgrim from a far-off land. They attribute their longevity to fasting, prayer, rigorous calisthenics, and a diet of salt scorpions (only available locally!) Searching their modest yurt will reveal pigments, dyes, and tinctures they use to fake this elderly appearance; in reality they’re not a day over 30.
3. A hairless farmer who has forsaken the plow. They now dwell inside a huge, hollow brass statue near the forgotten lord’s road. The statue amplifies their voice, and they can often be heard singing, crying, or proselytizing in the early morning hours. Local tax sheriffs pay them a grudging tithe to keep them from quiet during winter’s thaws, when their vocalizations could trigger dangerous avalanches. 
4. An impoverished fisherman who has found their true calling. Their shrine holds thousands of small clay statues, which they lovingly care for, cleaning them and making tiny sacrifices to “feed” them. For a modest donation, they can dedicate one such statue to you, as a temporary receptacle for your soul, in case of your untimely death. It will be safe in their care until such time as your relatives can retrieve it and return you to your homeland for burial.
5. A flockless sheep herder who was just sick of “the politics.” They can read the future in sacrificial entrails, but their prognostications are uniformly negative. The superstitious local towns pay them to not use this reputed ability, in a kind of backwards protection racket. The local hetmen would like nothing more than to get rid of this annoyance, but they’re worried the seer will see it coming.
6. A fearless young runaway, ready to usher in a new age. By some combination of dumb luck and divine providence, they single-handedly killed six soldiers from the King-in-Repose’s Army, and now a dangerously hangry mob of pitchfork-shaperners has gathered around their hilltop altar, ready to march on the capital at their divine leader’s sign.