Pelor’s Florist
The natural world is full of wonders. That’s why we eat everything in it, and sometimes it eats us. The gods, being gods, take it upon themselves to mess with it when they get bored. This can go really wrong and then you get things like banana fungus, leprosy, Nickelback, and the Twilight series of books. Other times, it’s simple and beautiful, and you never even know it’s there. This is how the donut was born, and also the sweet-smelling Pelorbell flower.
The first Pelorbell flowers came to the Forgotten Realms long before anyone can remember, and only appear often enough that their legend continues. It’s said the flowers weren’t discovered, but rather the answer to a prayer — specifically, one about not being consumed alive by the undead.
By day, Pelorbells appear to be large, bright, white sunflowers. Their smell is sweet, not unlike lilac, and is said to gently calm the hearts of those nearby. By night, the flowers wither noticeably, to the point where it is difficult to tell if they still live. That is, unless they are exposed to light. Then, they bloom even larger than before, and radiate waves of their own silvery light.
No ordinary light is this, for it seems crafted for the express purpose of eradicating the unnatural damned. Those pure of intention who bathe in this light find their wounds healed and steel in their spine. Undead creatures, on the other hand find their rotting flesh burning off into oily smoke and their spines lying on the ground.
It’s unknown if the flowers are the product of powerful magic or if they are the physical manifestation of a god’s will, but their effects are potent indeed. One or two of these flowers planted outside a house shine sufficient light to keep its occupants safe for what would otherwise be a long night of horrors. The thought of yards and fields planted with Pelorbells is enough to give pause to even the most bloodthirsty dead-army-wielding necromancer.
In my D&D game last week, our intrepid adventuring party encountered just such a field (and undead army). And if, like them, you didn’t realize until it was far too late the lengths I will go to to make a Plants vs. Zombies joke….. then Pelor protect you.
Photo Credit
30 Ranks In Use Trope
We’ve all been there. The campaign has slowed to a crawl, morale is low, and players are getting more and more physically violent with every session. Soon, the blood-harvest comes. As a DM, you already know none of this is your fault. However, as the sovereign of your gaming group it is your right, nay, holy duty to return the light of goodness, truth, and the Gygaxian Way to your table. Allow me to assist.
Spunky Sunshine Mephit
Some DM’s, myself included, find a familiar albatross around their neck in the form of the same tired old plots week after week. There’s nothing worse than having the D&D equivalent of Spaghetti Thursdays at your gaming table.
What your game needs is a little help… or should I say, a little helper?
One commonly used tactic in many popular TV shows over the years is to add a cute and sassy kid to the mix to freshen things up. Let’s call this kid Cousin Olefar.
Always brave and daring, but just too darn spunky to have any regard for the well-being of any creature, Cousin Olefar can brighten up even the dullest combats. Now every combat has an exciting secondary objective!
Just imagine how the players would feel if they let the cute little bugger die.
Jumping The Bulette
Your players are probably bored with the standard fare of mystery, exploration, exciting combat, and deep roleplay. They can get that anywhere. You should give them something cooler. Remember the early seasons of Happy Days when it was boring and about stupid stuff American life and emotions? Remember when all the girls got anachronistic perms and Fonzie started getting superpowers he could invoke with a simple “AYYYY?”
That’s what you can do for your campaign. It works, too. Historically, the best campaigns are the ones where about halfway through, you drop everything and decide that you already know what’s going to happen. You tease your players incessantly about it for about 2 weeks beforehand, even dropping little hints about “wormsign” and “the likes of which God has never seen.” Everything leads up to a super exciting moment that you’ve been dreaming of for so long, and it’s gonna be so cool, and you don’t even need game mechanics you just make it happen.
When everybody sees the mage (with a brand new perm) riding bareback atop a half-lich bulette tarrasqueomancer through no real conscious choice of his own after an unlikely but charming sequence of events, they’ll all understand it was worth it.
Then you blow up the PC’s lair and have a guy from Murphy Brown chase them through time. Aww yeah.
Fuggedaboutit
Another fantastic TV trope you can use in your campaign is the old “amnesia caused by a bonk on the head” trick. I recommend you invoke this every time a player takes damage or fails a DEX check.
No metagaming, players! You’ll need to take another bonk on the head to remember who you are. Also, if a monster uses Claw / Claw / Bite, you may think of it as Forget / Remember / Forget.
Freaky Friday Night Magic
How many times over the years in movies and TV has a magic spell been cast or a lever been pulled causing characters to swap bodies? Countless. And it’s a thing of beauty every single time. Every DM should do this to their players at least twice in a given campaign.
Fun fact: skills, spellcasting ability, and weapon/armor proficiencies don’t transfer along with a person’s consciousness. Just their voice, memories, and a schedule that really isn’t conducive to having another person at the wheel much less a dwarf NOW I’LL NEVER GET MARRIED.
It’s science.
Quest For The Closet Of Elemental Water
PC’s never fear death anymore. Not with healing surges and resurrection and rings of regeneration all ready and waiting to save their imaginary butts.
Solving this issue means gleaning dark knowledge from the vilest master of terror that ever whitened a hair or startled an innocent puppy — Wakko Warner. To know true fear, a PC needs to be faced with a fate worse than death. A potty emergency.
Everybody always wants to know the secret of making 4e combat run fast and exciting. If every PC has an overfull bladder and cursed pants they can’t remove until they find and defeat the end boss of the dungeon, this problem is now officially solved.
Be warned, there are some minor mechanical issues to work out if you decide to go this route. For instance, who can say if the PC’s should be making Fort checks, Will checks, or a combination of the two to avoid certain embarassment and chafing. Regardless, I recommend making this check every 5 minutes of actual time, starting the DC at 0 and raising it by 5 after each check.
Bonus Tip: in the original Oriental Adventures book from TSR, there is a Wu Jen spell called Urine to Acid. Use this in the event that your players still fail to become excited at these new developments.
Photo Credit
Special thanks to TvTropes.org (especially their “Random” button) for all the article ideas and for straight up murdering my productivity for many years.
And yes, you can probably blame Chatty for this too.
Divine Divinity: Dividends Of The Divination Divide
D&D’s been around so long that clerics and paladins are a normal part of most fantasy settings. Divine magic in any setting has a great many implications — most of which involve causing players to get into stupid arguments.
I Wish I Could Turn Stupid People
In the real world, people pray to their deity of choice all the time. Whether it has any effect is the subject of intense theological debate and many wars throughout the course of history. The presence of divine magic in a setting means that gods definitely exist and that they will answer prayers. If you ask a cleric how she knows her god is real, she can say “You remember how your bones magically unbroke themselves and you quit bleeding to death? THAT.” If you ask a paladin how he knows his god is real, he can say “You remember when that vampire burst into flames when I smote him righteously in his stupid fangs? THAT.”
A person who has seen the direct effects of a deity’s influence won’t be wondering if their god exists. They have proof. However, there is still the opportunity to wonder if one is playing for the right team. What if a person finds the things their god asks of them to be immoral? What if someone thinks another god will treat them better? A lot of fantasy settings go polytheistic (many gods), so there are a lot of higher powers to choose from. That being said, it may not easy for the average person trying to change faith or renounce the gods, especially if that person’s family or village all support that god.
It stands to reason then, that a crisis of faith of this nature is absolutely catastrophic to a divine-powered character. For starters, there’s not going to be any more divine juice coming. Magic notwithstanding, a character whose resolve used to be backed by the force of a god is suddenly going to find only the otherwise unsupported steel in their own spine, and their confidence and morale are likely to be shaken until they can learn to deal with that.
Oh yeah. There’s also the whole “making a god angry” thing, and I’d imagine there are a few gods out there that might take being abandoned by one of their elite devout as a bad thing. Gods like curses. Mythology is littered with poor souls that ran afoul of the gods. Littered, I say!
Prostrate yourselves! BZZZTALAALKS, the lord of Sperm and Hornets is come unto your world!
Alignment Is Evil
I’ve never been particularly fond of alignment (mostly due to the amount of heated arguments I’ve seen over its interpretation), and while I think it might be useful to a DM as guidance for how to play a monster or NPC, I think it has no place on a player character sheet. People aren’t computer programs with set responses. They’re flawed, nuanced individuals who change over time. Their idea of good and evil may well be different than another person’s, and very few people will define themselves as evil.
It’s for these reasons that I hope game mechanics that deal with alignment go the way of the THAC0 in D&D Next. If you have two people with opposing views that each would consider good and the other’s evil, what then would a Detect Evil spell do? Detect Opposing Viewpoints? Does your whole party glow subtly, the marbled nuance of their moral fibre visible in the darkness?
There will need to be other options made available in their place, though. Detect Danger gets into Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses territory. Detect Malice might work but you’d have to make something angry at you and then it usually becomes evident. Detect Enemies is what this spell is usually after. It’s X-ray specs combined with a lie detector made out of a sledgehammer. Of course, since you’re receiving a power from a god, the god could let you detect whatever the hell they felt like. I personally like the idea of a Detect Nonbelievers variant of the spell. Or they could just mess with you. Detect Pollen? Detect Sharp Cheeses?
An interesting sidebar: the average joe in a fantasy realm probably won’t know the difference between arcane and divine magic (especially in a setting where magic is really rare to begin with). Mages could trick people into thinking their deeds were backed by the force of a god. And what if a divine character suddenly found out the powers they’d received from their god ever since childhood were actually psionic or a natural talent for sorcery?
Let Your Conscience Be Your Spirit Guide
At this point even I am starting to think I’ve loaded a shotgun with Divine Character Thought Pellets and fired it skyward, so here’s my (somewhat dubious) point:
Divine characters are fueled by pure belief. It’s interesting sometimes to think how much a character truly believes in their god’s ideals and how deeply this would affect this kind of character. Their belief in their god, their ideals, their confidence in what their doing would shape their very identity because to waver means to fall. But that doesn’t mean they’re all the same.
As usual, I have roleplaying-shaped ulterior motives behind my article. With all the recent discussion on Mike Mearls’ latest L&L column about clerics (and by “discussion”, I mean people angrily yelling “HEALBOT” into the heavens), it’s clear that people have a few defined ideas about what clerics and paladins should and should not be. One of the things that has me very excited about D&D Next is that the design team seems committed to making a system that allows you play whatever you want, whether it’s a traditional “mace & shield” cleric or “I get a horse and +5 holy avenger” paladin, or something new.
People are complex. Religion is complex. People’s feelings about religion are crazy complex. There’s conflict and drama all over the place. That means there is a wide variety of things you can create a character from, and million more things you could try when roleplaying that character. There is room in the imagination for infinite gods, and those gods can each grant different powers or demand something different from their followers. Even then, it’s up to the player to determine how his or her PC chooses to worship. Of course, in D&D, it helps the DM’s sanity if you have specific powers backed by game mechanics, but for several editions now clerics could choose spells or domains or feats or skills that made them different from any other Generic Cleric™. Paladins can still believe very strongly in gods and causes that are not Lawful Good, and I see no reason why a character’s personal code of ethics couldn’t be peppered with some nice habañero chaos.
For my part, I will be petitioning the team at WotC to make sure the default setting for D&D Next includes gods in charge of:
- Habanero
- Bacon
- Pigtails
- Marching Order
- Eczema
- Rock
Wish me luck. Or pray to whatever gods govern tabletop roleplaying games. Doesn’t matter to me. Crom gives a man but two things at birth: a blog and the courage to post in it. And if he won’t help me, then to hell with him!
Photo Credit
Golden Oldie – A Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Preview
ID: May Parker (secret)
Affiliations
Solo d8, Buddy d10, Team d6
Distinctions
Herald Of Galactus, Little Old Lady, Always Worrying About Poor Peter
Power Sets
The Power Cosmic
Cosmic Blast d12, Godlike Strength d12, Godlike Durability d12, Godlike Speed d12, Superluminal Flight d12, Telepathy d10, Telekinesis d10, Intangibility d10, Transmutation d10, Godlike Durability d12, Godlike Senses d12, Time Travel d10
SFX: Multipower. Use two or more The Power Cosmic powers in a single dice pool at -1 step for each additional power
Limit: Galactus’s Whim. Shutdown The Power Cosmic if Galactus wills it.
Limit: He’s A Menace. Gain a PP to step up Emotional Stress inflicted by Spider-Man doing something misunderstood.
Specialties
Cosmic Master, Baking Master, Knitting Master
Milestones
You Get A Big Delight In Every Bite
1 XP when you bake something.
3 XP when you convince Peter or Galactus that he really should eat something.
10 XP when you discover a golden food source tasty and plentiful enough to sate even the dread and mighty Eater of Worlds or discover that your darling Peter is that awful Spider-Man.
History
May Parker was a sweet old lady who lived a very happy life with her husband Ben. The couple cared for their nephew Peter after his parents died. Then Peter had an origin story that resulted in Ben’s death and his becoming Spider-Man. For years, it was thought that Aunt May’s heart would explode if she ever found out about her nephew’s second job.
One day, Peter took May and his girlfriend Mary Jane to a theatre and promptly ditched them to go do superhero stuff. As it happened, the Fantastic Four was sitting nearby and were having trouble figuring out how to simultaneously go save the world and find childcare for young Benjamin RIchards. May overheard their problem and kindly offered to watch the child. The Invisible Woman was justifiably creeped out, but Peter (as Spider-Man) showed up to give his official endorsement (which May didn’t like).
All the superhero-types went off to do some stuff, and May is walking around with Benjamin in a parking lot, and Galactus randomly shows up. He says he is weak, and Benjamin is powerful and he will help him reach his full potential. So he blasts some Power Cosmic on him, and apparently May is having none of this so she jumps out in front. Instead of being reduced to crispy old lady bits, she becomes Golden Oldie, Herald of Galactus.
May then uses the Power Cosmic to break into a snack shop so Benjamin can give Galactus some Twinkies. Then apparently she’s just not interested in the whole childcare bit anymore and she takes off into space to go find Galactus some more grub. Then she almost gets into a fight with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man over a planet-sized Twinkie. But he’s cool with it, and Galactus gets his nom on.
Then May wakes up, and it was all a dream. Except it totally wasn’t.
Art by Brian Patterson of d20Monkey. All characters © & ™ 2012 Marvel & Subs. Heroic Roleplaying and Cortex Plus ™ 2012 Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd.
The Agony & The Ecstasy of D&D Next
Following the “Retraction” episode of This Greyhawk Life, I feel I must explain myself. As you may have heard on the episode, I now admit that my account of visiting the Wizards of the Coast offices in Seattle and playing D&D Next has had elements that were not entirely truthful.
You see, as a Dungeon Master, I often incorporate elements of the dramatic into my storytelling, even while using some of the trappings of journalism. I embellished in the pursuit of the sharing a story that I felt was important. I am sorry for misleading my audience when I claimed this to be the entire truth.
Thus, in the interest of clearing the air, I would like to clarify the following points:
- I claimed to have interviewed a former worker of Wizards of the Coast who said that he and his coworkers were paid entirely in copper pieces, which do not add up nearly enough to a living wage in Seattle. The truth is that they are paid entirely in coffee.
- My story about the giant mutant chickens being used as playtesters for the Gamma World game was slightly exaggerated. The mutant chickens were merely human-sized.
- My translator says she has no recollection about my meeting with a dice tester required to make sure d4s gave “the full experience” by being forced to walk across them barefoot.
- When I wrote that an iPad would be required to play D&D Next, I actually meant that the New iPad purchased using our Amazon affiliate code would be required to play D&D Next.
- My claim that there were entire rooms, running 16 hour shifts, devoted to playtesting every possible class from Archer to Runepriest was false. No one has every played a Runepriest.
- When I described the D&D Next modular system as being able to “effortlessly combine all aspects of every RPG you’ve ever loved in a seamless way that produces an RPG superior to anything you could ever do with your life in a million years and will make you wish that you could spend your entire life within the fully realized fantasy world that you create using the multitude of advanced tools guaranteed to produce the greatest story ever told,” I was engaging in a slight bit of hyperbole.
- When I said that you could get access to the D&D open playtest early by purchasing a copy of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying... well, wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?
So as you can see, my dramatic retelling of my trip was all in the purpose of serving a greater story, one that I felt was not being told properly in the greater media. I apologize to anyone I mislead in previous posts, in my speaking tour, or my various podcast experiences. Clearly, we will redouble our efforts to tell nothing but the truth, especially on April 1st of all days.
The Swag of Yore
These people understand.
I was born in 1975, so I got to spend the entire 80′s fully cognizant of the gigantic vortex of awesome I was daily marinating in. Once the entire Star Wars trilogy, He-Man, the Thundercats, and Ghostbusters came into play, my imagination was pretty much stocked. There are certain part of my childhood that, after knowing some history, I can’t believe existed. For instance, we had a D&D Saturday morning cartoon and we could walk into most toy stores and pick up official AD&D action figures and monsters. In the 80′s. During all the Satanism scare WTF.
Today, we have D&D merchandise, but it’s much more limited in scope. What happened?
Called Shot: Gamers?
Either my parents didn’t know about all the D&D/Satanism hullabaloo in the 80′s, or they rightly dismissed it as stupidity. Either way, my brother and I had lots and lots of D&D stuff to play with. Oddly, though we did have a Red Box set, I don’t think I ever actually played the actual D&D roleplaying game with my brother until my late teens. Had lots of adventures in the Forgotten Realms? Battled evil monsters from the Monster Manual (though we didn’t know it)? Yes, both of those, and lots.
The strange thing about the cartoon, the toys, and a lot of the other random D&D stuff we had was that it really didn’t feel like it pushed you toward playing the tabletop RPG at all. I remember seeing the occasional ad for the games, and the toys shared the same art style and graphic design as the later AD&D books, but they weren’t marketed as supplements or anything directly game-related at all. They were toys, and games, and books with an awesome fantasy flavor.
Sometimes, liberties got taken from the original source material. For instance, Lolth appears in the D&D cartoon as less of a dark goddess and more of an evil lady who tricks people and turns into a gross spider with the face of an angry Winona Ryder.
Sometimes the material was true to the books but only those familiar with the books knew it. I always thought the Acrobat and Cavalier were strange class choices until I read Unearthed Arcana a few years later. The really bizarre thing is that the D&D cartoon was cancelled the year UA came out — previously, those classes had only appeared in Dragon Magazine and the D&D cartoon. Today, we have D&D Insider for these things. Back then, all we had was a magical teenage pole-vaulter with a fur bikini and an awesome perm. And Ralph Malph.
Marketing Tie-Ins
It seems to me like D&D was being marketed to a much broader audience than gamers back then. Though I’m absolutely certain someone will prove me wrong within nanoseconds of writing this, it doesn’t seem like D&D gets a lot of spotlight time outside of gamer circles. Which, on the surface, is double extra weird because, back then, D&D was owned by TSR (a game company) and now WotC is owned by Hasbro (a much larger toy and game company).
These days, we have tabletop games, board games, and videogames. And belt buckles. Now, don’t get me wrong. I want a D&D belt buckle. But I long for my favorite game not to occupy a niche I have to explain to people. (At least, in the 80′s, all you had to explain was how you weren’t casting real spells using your immortal soul as the currency of the damned. I don’t like explaining things, OK?)
I do not have a marketing degree, nor do I have any idea what WotC could do to put a Dire Chicken In Every Pot™. (P.S. I get royalties if that gets used.) What I do have are desires and silly ideas.
Let me get this out of the way first: I cannot believe that we’ve had 4 blockbuster movies about sparkly vampires and werewolf emotions and the best Dragonlance movie I can get appears to be the product of a compromise between two warring animation houses that couldn’t decide on 2d or 3d. We can shrink Sean Astin to hobbit-size, we for damn sure can shrink Ryan Gosling to kender-size or just hire Snooki or something. (Maybe Gosling’s body but Snooki’s voice? Gotta get the kender-taunt just right.) Technology has finally invented Benedict Cumberbatch, so he can voice Lord Soth too when he’s done with Smaug.
Obviously, I’d grant my son all the D&D swag I had as a child and more. I want my son to be able to buy a Sword +5, Holy Avenger in a toy store, and have it glow unless he steals something or lies to me. I want to buy big, cool plastic monsters right out of the Monster Vault. I want a plush owlbear. I want good quality D&D cartoons (rendered in either 2d or 3d but not both!) and I want him to be able to tell tales of the Forgotten Realms and Eberron and Dark Sun like I tell about Eternia and Thundera and Cybertron. I also hope their plots hold up better than the cartoons of my youth but that is beside the point.
Those of you who’ve attended Gen Con probably know how fun this is: I want D&D themed food, especially at fast food places. I want to eat the McIllithid and drink Sahaugin Shakes. I want Beholder Bites. I want Fries +2. I want themed cups, and I for damned sure want cool Happy Meals with neat monsters and treasure. C’mon, I still have fond memories of the Astrosniks. Give me an Elemental Princes of Evil Happy Meal. I wanna see all the crazed soccer moms who used to hoard Beanie Babies lining up for days trying to get the elusive Cryonax figure.
Tears Shed For Decades Of Swag That Never Were
Eh, who am I kidding? I would have hoarded it just like the other stuff I actually did hoard and the majority would likely have the same honored place in my closet and crawlspace. But it really would have been cool and I do hope we see a few tendrils of our favorite game snake out into the mainstream.
Thinking about how vastly different D&D’s marketing approach has become over the last 30 years has really intrigued me (and may warrant a future article in which I am not full of crap). If you are chock full of this info, please let me know so that I may mine the contents of your brain.
Until then, I will wait for the day I can buy an Otiluke brand refrigerator.
Photo Credit
O The Tangled Webs We Weep, When Breathe We Don’t When Go To Sleep
Ever since I was a wee lad, I’ve always had really vivid dreams. On occasion, this translates into really vivid nightmares, which sucks mightily. Usually, though, it just means I’m going to have a good story to tell come the dawn. Well, that is, until I found out I had sleep apnea. Turns out, one of the side effects of stopping to take a break during sleep to not breathe every few minutes is that you never really leave REM sleep — causing incredibly vivid dreams. Getting a machine to help with that provides me with a lot more energy during the day, but I only get a tiny fraction of the WTF I used to reap each night. This week, however, my sinuses have decided to clog up everything, making it really hard for my machine to blow air down my throat to keep me breathing normally. And that meant it was SHOWTIME.
It all started off fairly innocuously. I was at my parents’ house, waiting to go to a weekly board game night at the local community college with my dad. I really wish this existed. It was like a little mini-convention, but everyone there was really laid back and the lights were low and it was really mellow and it made me feel like how adults looked to me when I was a kid. I say this never having gone there in the dream, just remembering it, because my dad was taking forever. I was getting impatient enough to wander around the house, which apparently had become the Christmas village in a department store since I’d moved out. After pacing a few times around a few snowy gumdrops, my dad decided it was finally time to go.
When I was very young, probably 5 or 6, I read an article in Parade magazine called “You Can Control Your Dreams”. I didn’t really understand what it was trying to tell me to do at the time, but the concept that I could take a bad dream and decide to take it in a much better direction was extremely appealing to a little boy who would sometimes wake up terrified in his parents’ bed not knowing how he got there. I tried to control the nightmare I had that very night — Darth Vader had taken over the playground at my school, and several Imperial Stormtroopers had their blaster rifles pointed at me. I made it so their blasters could only fire Finger Pops. I was ecstatic. However, that was about as far as I could take it, and I soon woke up all freaked out as Vader and his men were about to get me.
So it was from then on. I’d get a little nudge, but not full control. I’ve managed to erase tornadoes from nightmares, only to have the storm continue or find another threat emerging. I’ve managed to summon the Sword of Omens to smite my nemesis, only to find it’s made of plastic. Having a useless power is almost worse than being completely helpless.
So it was that my dad was finally ready to go, but instead of going to the Community College Weekly Mellow Game Con, we went to K-Mart. I think we were going to go buy a swingset, and we were in a really bizarre truck that had the engine in the back, no windshield or doors, and pretty much exposed you to all the elements. I think it had seatbelts. I remember being very keen on making sure of that. It was wintertime in the dream, so I wasn’t real happy about riding in this truck to begin with. Fortunately, we somehow found ourselves having the argument about riding to K-Mart in front of said K-Mart, so we just sort of went in. (Arguments as an alternative source of clean transportation energy?)
I can’t tell you what shifted in the dream just then, but I noticed something odd in the dream. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whatever it was, it shifted everything toward the worse. I became aware of the fact that the FBI was coming for me, because I’d mistakenly hacked into a server somehow and looked at a secret file that I didn’t understand. I remember my conscience being clean, it all being just a big misunderstanding, but knew they wouldn’t see it that way. They were coming for me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw my son happily running around the lumber section of the K-Mart, and I cried knowing I wouldn’t get to see him grow up.
I heard someone pull up outside. For a moment, my heart rose, thinking it was my mom come to pick me up and whisk me away. It was the police, and they had replaced my dad with an agent meant to act in his stead wearing a weird leisure suit. Weird Leisure-Dad explained what was about to happen to me, disingenuously pausing to call me “son” every few seconds, and then a Clearly Evil person in charge showed up. I apologized and cried. He laughed and had me stand on a large couch cushion. “For science”, he said. I didn’t understand. Shaking his head, he declared the experiment a failure, and told me to go sit on a nearby porch swing. I noticed it was rusting and ready to fall apart. ”For science,” he gestured toward the contraption, leering cruelly.
I’ve seldom been happier to wake up.
Even today, I haven’t mastered lucid dreaming. On the rare occasion that I realize I’m dreaming, I’ve usually got about 15 seconds before I wake. I’ve had people suggest looking upward and spinning, scrambling the dream somehow and putting you in control. That makes me dizzy and in a dark, dangerous place. I used to try pushing my temples in to wake up. That was a nice thought, and it got me dream-killed a couple times.
The other fun part of sleep apnea? Sometimes it comes with sleep paralysis. That’s when you wake up (or think you do), and you can’t move, and you can’t breathe. Sometimes, your brain is still in dream-mode, and the stuff my subconscious makes when I’m scared ain’t nice. I’ve dreamt or hallucinated so many ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and packs of ravenous wolves coming to claim my paralyzed body that I feel like I’ve really stimulated the supernatural economy over the years.
I had a really mild bout of sleep paralysis that night, as well:
I felt like the bed was at a 45 degree angle, and I was slowly sliding off, only it never stopped. I figured out I was dreaming and calmed down a little when the aliens from They Live were holding a potpourri party.
Shortly thereafter, I drifted back to sleep to find myself in a world under attack by aliens. Or tornadoes. Or energy trees. This part was extremely chaotic. It was like watching a sci-fi movie where I really had no control over what was going on, and I wasn’t entirely sure if I was there or watching it. What I do remember is a bunch of guys dressed like the Ghostbusters giving each other high fives like they’d saved everyone and a bunch of government types sneering at them and calling them losers.
Then, I felt it again. The same shift I’d felt before, only less subtle. More deliberate. I saw something gold skitter past the corner of my vision, but then it was gone.
The shift wasn’t quite as traumatic this time out. Well, for me anyway. Suddenly the tone of the dream is pretty mellow and most everything is rebuilt. I’m driving around my small town making sure every building and structure has a colorful kite or enormous hair tie stuck to it. Apparently, this was how the aliens were defeated. The scene cuts to a ruined house, where one of the Ghostbuster-type guys is milling about when he finds one of the female scientists featured prominently in the earlier movie-action part. Then he says “so when did you find out you were pregnant?” and then her belly suddenly goes from zero to “we better go shopping at Target right now“. This didn’t seem particularly unusual to either of them, but as a father I wondered where they would find a duffel bag to hurriedly pack with a bunch of things they will be completely wrong about needing at the hospital later.
Then, I feel that weird shift again. Then, I see a gnome in full plate mail, gold and glittering, drop from the sky to land right in front of me. He hands me something purple. Then I wake up.
I woke up knowing full well what the gnome had given me.
He was an agent of the GM running my dream. He gave me a plot point. Apparently, my subconscious runs Cortex+.
I’d like to think this was all an elaborate night-long multi-dream joke my subconscious played on me, but more likely it just sort of progressively interpreted some earlier stuff into the golden plot-gnome. Either way, my son looked very strangely at me when I woke up laughing.
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10 Epic-Level Problems Nobody Thinks About
Everybody thinks being powerful enough to slap-fight the gods themselves would be completely awesome. There’s a reason epic-level D&D breaks down. Actually, there are ten. And NONE OF YOU have thought of ANY of them. Unless you’re future epic-level me. In which case, you probably have.
1. Hygiene
I don’t care if you can move mountains with your epic elbows or travel effortlessly through time and space with your god-butt. You need to wash both, or you’re going to be epic-level disgusting. Since opponents typically scale with the PCs, these will be no ordinary corynebacterium or staphylococcus epidermidis. Epic-level heroes have to face down bacteria that resist all mortal soaps and could eat a Shetland pony within seconds. Most epic heroes have a special combat waterfall for these purposes, and have to quest monthly to find cleaning agents mighty enough to remove the beastly micro-organisms but gentle enough on skin to leave that epic glow.
Clipping epic nails is also a problem, and any instruments used to do so must be +3 or greater. There are epic emery boards available, but, as they are made of the hide of the World Serpent, Jörmungandr, they are in somewhat short supply. Especially on planes of existence without Norse gods.
2. Awkward Thanksgivings
Woe betide the fool who ascends to godhood at a family reunion. Does your family worship you now?
“Please pass the green beans, Sun Lord.”
Awkwarrrd.
Plus, your uncle Jorgen, half-blind with mead and the other half with politics, is inevitably going to try to push your buttons like he always does. Is it OK to smite him? What about your filthy heretic cousins?
What do you do if your mom worships you but still kicks you out of the house for smiting people? [Read the rest of this article]
The Statistical Truth* About Gender And Racial Stat Modifiers
There has been a lot of controversy on these here Internets as of late about a Legends & Lore article that talked about things people wanted included in D&D Next. Specifically, a significant ruckus occurred in the direction of stat modifiers for gender and race. Wizards quickly quelled the hellstorm, and wisely revising their poll so as not to include silly things like THAC0 and sexism. Though the results of that first poll are now gone due to “technical issues”, there were still 330 or so people recorded as of yesterday afternoon that wanted gender and race stat modifiers included in D&D Next.
I’ve seen plenty of arguments as to why these rules are included.
These rules are more realistic, some would say. Women aren’t as strong as men. EVER. The prospect of a woman having 18 — much less 18(00)! — strength is just patently absurd. Plus, it’s a proven fact that women burst into flames when they don Gauntlets of Ogre Power. They’re not called Gauntlets of Woman Power, obviously. Dwarves never get sick. Elves are clearly more dextrous, because TREES. (Except for those new elves that jump in and out of the prime material plane when they’re not dreaming. They just get like, extra rewards points on their Visa cards.)
I hate to break it to these 330 people, but they are all wrong. Every last one of them. Not for some tree-hugging moral reason. Oh, no.
Because it’s simply not true.
Public Records Don’t Lie
There’s a factor in play here unknown to most: the Forgotten Realms keeps detailed census data on all humanoid creatures (and several adjacent planes of existence, otherwise the Visa Elves wouldn’t get counted).
To be completely fair, the stat-modifier apologists are right — if this was 1972. This data was accurate at the time of the first publication of Dungeons & Dragons. However, this was forty years ago — which, as any scientist will tell you, is long enough for evolution to muck about with pretty much everything. Just look at the ancient peoples of our own 1970′s. Primitives.
Humans are now the least populous race in the Forgotten Realms, comprising only 6% of the population. However, their curious nature combined with their propensity to attempt to mate with anything that appears to be alive, has caused a massive upsurge in the number of Half-Orcs and Half-Halflings in the Realms, clocking in at 14% and 18% respectively. Census data shows that the average STR score for Half-Orcs is 17, and their CHA has raised significantly due to better government-funded access to charm school education.
Half-Halflings, sometimes known as Tall Short Hairy-Men, have an enormous average INT score of 31 and are known for their use of powerful magics. However, they are also known for making their homes in large barrels filled with brine and pickles, leaving their bodies as they astrally project for their entire lifespan. To date, nobody has figured out how they mate, but both the barrel and pickle industries in the Realms have enjoyed constant growth for the last several decades.
Pure-blooded Elves and Dwarves in the Realms are much more scarce than they used to be. This is primarily because, in 1987, a genetic predisposition toward epic-level hay fever spread through the elven populations of the world. The elves fled en masse underground, where there was war until the mid 90′s with the dwarves. Nobody knows for sure what happened, but in 2001, colonies of lanky, bulbous, aloof, cantankerous, rebellious teenage Elf-Dwarves started to emerge from the Underdark. Census data at the time reported an average CHA score of 5. It was thought that this number might rise as the teens grew out of their awkward phase, but the most current census data reports that sadly, CHA seems to be the dump-stat of the Elf-Dwarf.
On the topic of gender, The census data on males is largely unchanged. The average male STR score is still 18, as it has been for decades, but 60% of the male population now has a seduce ability. However, the average modern woman in the Forgotten Realms, according to current census data, has a 24 STR score, 4.8 children, and can breathe acid.
* It’s an election year.
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Dwarven SEAL Team Neutralizes Terrorist DM Threat: Film At 11
Yesterday, I returned from four days worth of DDXP 2012. As always, I return with many treasured memories. I got to rub elbows with lots of game designers, bloggers, and other cool people. I got to play some great games and playtest the new D&D. I even had the honor of being Patient Zero for the official con crud of DDXP 2012. The thing I’ll remember most, though, was running a table for the Battle Interactive on Saturday night.
Behind The Screen For Perfect Strangers
As some of you who read my column already know, I’m not big on 4e combat. The decision to run some games at DDXP was born from a strange mixture of wanting to help out and curiosity about what it would be like to run a table full of strangers who weren’t used to my crap. The idea didn’t scare me too bad at first. I couldn’t be worse than some of the judges I’d had at these things, I rationalized. I didn’t realize the idea made me anxious until it was far too late. I was to run my first game on Friday morning, and I was nervous enough about it by that point that I wanted out. I wasn’t about to shirk my duties, though. I familiarized myself with the module I was supposed to run the night before, and I reported to the marshaling area at 8am sharp as ordered.
It was about then one of the staff came around and said they needed another warm body for another table. I quickly volunteered, thinking this meant the table needed another player, and I would be able to get out of running the game. On the way to the table, I asked if I needed to go roll up a character. “No,” the staffer said. “You’re running.” No worse off than before, I smiled and reported to my table. They provided me with a printed copy of the module, but I brought the module up on my laptop anyway so I could see the monster stat blocks. I started to get confused, as the pages weren’t matching up between the paper and digital versions. Suddenly, it hit me.
This was a different module. I’d just volunteered to run a game completely cold.
