Between Gygax and Greenwood

Here is a representative treasure description written by Gary Gygax. It's from Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.

The jade coffer is worth 5,000 g.p. and contains 6 healing potions. The crown is begemmed and worth 25,000 g.p. The small sack holds 276 p.p., 29 base 10 g.p. gems, a scroll of 7 magicuser spells (pretend to roll, but they are all 1st and 2nd level), and a map showing a location several hundred miles away which supposedly has a rich treasure (it is a fake, naturally).

(I love that "naturally". Whaddya expect? A treasure map for free? This is the guy who invented the ear seeker! Suck it up!)

Now here is part of a vampire's hoard, published by Ed Greenwood about 13 years later, from Ruins of Undermountain.

Also in the sack is a small (5"” × 5"” × 2”" high), flat, plain ivory box (value: 7 gp). Its lid slides off in grooves to reveal the contents: a black silk garter and a coin-sized plate of human bone, carved and polished into the semblance of a staring eye. These items are actually a band of denial and an eye of aiming, respectively; both items are detailed in the Magical Items chapter. 

There is also a stout book, of parchment pages locked with iron hasps between two pieces of black, smooth-polished slate. It is a spell book, the spells recorded one to a page; the book has six blank pages at the end. Thearyn'’s spell book details the following spells: [long list] 

There is finally a leather drawstring bag, heavy with coins (43 cp, 21 sp, 36 gp, and 18 pp), and a small copper coffer (worth 5 gp) which contains satin wrappings. Within the satin folds are a tiny ivory statuette of a mermaid (worth 4 gp) and gems: six 5000 gp rubies (deep crimson red, crown cut); and four unusually large sapphires, each worth 4,000 gp (clear blue, cabochon cut). DMs are urged to modify this hoard to fit the individual campaign.

Of course, the differences between writers may be exaggerated - there are Gygax treasures that are more unique and Greenwood treasures that are more bare-bones. But it's no exaggeration  that Greenwood got his start in the hobby by elaborating on what had before been left generic, through his eye-opening treasure and ecology descriptions in the Dragon magazine.

"The skull belonged to a jester, Yorick..."

Still, looking back, the descriptions seem less magical and more self-indulgent. Can't the DM just determine how small a small box is, or that a spellbook has parchment pages? Are we required to study the terms of the jeweller's art? Old School writers today have to navigate between these two poles. Some are kinder to the Greenwood way, some less so, but the general agreement is: you need to make descriptions interesting, but do it efficiently. Here are some guidelines for doing that.

Information has to ultimately be of use to the players. It has to give them information useful in problem solving, evocative descriptions that create an atmosphere, details that add to the sense of discovery and piecing things together.

• Don't write about what the characters can't actually discover. The classic example is the room in an early draft of Dwimmermount where "There were plaques, statues, and other similar ornaments all long since looted and removed to other parts of the fortress." There's a tiny example in the vampire's hoard, too: the disk of "human bone." Boy, that's going to put a chill down the players' backs when they get the DNA results back from the lab.
• Detail for the sake of detail may give short-term interest, but detail that supports top-down discovery pays off better in the long term. In the page or so that the vampire's hoard takes up, there's no hook to larger discoveries. You'd never know that "He is searching for a way to augment his magical powers so he can master the creation and control of gates," his main motivation from earlier in the description.
  Does he deal and trade with other powers in the dungeon? Why the hell is this vampire living in a dungeon, anyway?  That last unanswered question makes clear that beneath all the clever traps, combat situations, and treasures, Undermountain is still at heart a monster zoo.

At the same time, it's also a mistake to think of the DM as an invisible conduit through which information should flow from writer to players. The DM is a person who wants to be entertained by creating entertainment. A lot of advice on adventure writing focuses on making the descriptions easy to read in play, on describing things in a logical order. That's good, but not enough.

• A description should involve the DM actively, while saving space, by leaving to the DM things that can be easily imagined. The dimensions of the box, how its lid opens, the ordinary material the bag is made of: none of that is necessary to describe unless it challenges the players or contributes to a larger meaning.
• This means that description should be reserved for things that can't be improvised: details of startling originality, or clues that support a larger process of discovery. I like how the nested containers and wrappings of the treasures give drama to the unpacking of the vampire's trove, and the basic descriptions of the items are certainly original. So, the first paragraph can boil down to: "Also in the sack is a small flat ivory box worth 7 gp. It holds a black silk garter (a magical band of denial, p. **) and a carved bone eye (an eye of aiming, p. **)."
• Writers should keep in mind that a good DM will want to fit the adventure into their own world. That's another difference between Gygax's wide-open Greyhawk world and Greenwood's detailed Forgotten Realms. Let's suppose that the vampire's hoard gave some clues to his former life as "an 18th level adventurer-wizard, once of Lantan." Perhaps the box has a Lantanian design, or the gems are an unusual type known to come from there. That description would still only be good in a world containing Lantan. A better way to go is to make Lantan generic, describe it as "a far-off land of scholars to the south" and give appropriate descriptions to some of the goods and treasure. 
• Too much time describing the history and set-up of the adventure in loving, campaign-specific detail is also useless to a DM with their own agenda. "A baroness wants evidence of her past crimes erased. She has tracked down all copies of an executed historian's book, except one, traced to a wizard's tower in the wilderness which swears fealty to a different law. She needs deniable agents to go get that last book by force." That is all the DM needs to fit the adventure into their own campaign.

It's because of the need to involve the DM that I have a certain tolerance for bare-bones descriptions like Castle of the Mad Archmage's. Yes, there certainly could be more, but what I have to fill in during the course of play takes on a life of its own - almost like writing my own adventure, with very little preparation needed.

The Orange-Painted Corner of Naturalism

Is "whale on 2nd Edition AD&D" week over yet? No? All right. I'm here to pay homage to the first Undermountain boxed set, from 1991.


[Spoilers follow]


Let me start with the positive. Ed Greenwood stands tall as a pioneer of fantasy naturalism in role-playing games. I devoured his Dragon magazine articles in the 80's, so rich with invention and detail. They worked up the plain and sometimes weird building blocks of the game into something more like a fantastic museum.

This is about 10% of Level 1.

In re-treading the orange and yellow floors of Undermountain last week I noticed no shortage of this imagination. It's a great resource from which to learn and steal set-pieces: ingenious traps and tricks, disguised monsters, classic fake-outs, detailed combats where the enemy uses every tactic available.

The core area of these Saturday Night Special encounters, justified by "hey, mad 29th level sado-wizard," is fringed by more naturalistic environments: the tavern where adventurers' descents make up a kind of medieval reality show, the slaver town of Skullport, or Waterdeep's monster-infested garbage dump. And even the smallest treasures drip with detail. Why loot "some jugs of wine" when you can have "14 wicker-jacketed, 5-gallon green glass carboys of dry white wine (1 gp)"?

At his best, Greenwood doesn't just create naturalism with physical and economic details. He takes the official monsters, spells and magic items to the limit. Ropers and mimics take on a dizzying variety of guises. Wands are disguised, put into the hands of enemies, worked into traps. Why make a trap rely on magical tentacles when you can use an imprisoned mutant carrion crawler instead? Sure, there are occasional "inexplicable" magical effects, but you get the sense he had more fun working with the standard toolbox.

But here's the catch - players can use their resources to be naturalists too. Faced with a script that says "Endure your heroic, character-defining quest up through seven chromatic levels of the Rainbow Tower to reach the solid gold pineapple on the platform at the top," the prosaically-minded player rebels and says "Er ... what does this fly spell do, exactly?" This is why medieval knights were afraid of crossbows. History is written by innovators who at one point said, "Screw the rules of engagement. This works." Player naturalism finds short cuts around fantasy railroads using the rules and resources built into the game itself.

Ah-ah-ah, but ol' Halaster is not letting you off so easily in Undermountain. Inexplicable, massive "magical fields" stop all teleporting, ESP and other game-breaking spells. We see not just a naturalistic designer, but one who expects players to use naturalism too - and prepares for it! Just about every dead body you find in the maze has a name and a history in case the players try Speak With Dead. That's cool, but at the same time there are places where the player runs up against "because I say so."

• What you can do in Undermountain: Fry a whole room of orcs with a level 3 fireball spell.
• What you can't do in Undermountain: Use your 5th level rock to mud spell to deal with that trick where the stone hands take one magic item and give you another. The hands are just impervious to any magic short of  a limited wish.

• What is detailed in Undermountain: Exact procedures for lifting, smashing, and being crushed by the doors in the Bonecrusher trap.
• What isn't detailed in Undermountain: How exactly those necrophidii, the ones that jump out of the pillar you have been prying gems from, steal your magic items. They just do! It's part of the trick! What do you mean, you want a DEX check?

"Look sharp, the floor here is orange."

So, it's not the designer's naturalism, but a particular response to anticipating the players' naturalism, that paints the encounter into a corner. I'm not picking on Ed Greenwood. This is a common problem in 2nd Edition-era adventure design,  lampooned pitch-perfectly over many issues of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic.

1. The designer wants the characters and setting to read from the mythic script. Characters should succeed through force of arms where appropriate, and through clever wits in designated clever wits areas. The setting must be allowed to enforce the moral lessons of its tricks and surprises.

2. The players want themselves, not necessarily the characters, to be heroes. Their funniest and most awesome stories are of outwitting the DM, not the dungeon. The more the rules describe a prosaic, lawful system of cause and effect, the more they can leverage this against the mythic story to gain advantage.

3. This is where things go awry. The designer refuses to allow player creativity to work and imposes more rules, by decree. When the players burn down the Hollywood saloon facade they find, not a way out, but walls behind made of solid steel and three feet thick.

Now, how can a designer do naturalism and not end up like this? I have a few tentative solutions, coming up next.