Some Odd Experiences

Although my current RPG campaign is on hiatus I got two chances recently to introduce novices to roleplaying using Chris McDowall's Into the Odd. This is not a review so much as a breakdown of what works and what doesn't work for me.

WHAT WORKS

Character generation is simple and yields perfect shabby-Victorian protagonists for this weird industrial setting, more punk than steam. Starting equipment is derived super quickly, balancing out poor stat rolls with better stuff. All magic resides in things (arcana) and nobody is extra at anything. You are only as good as your starting rolls, your stuff, and later your levels which let you survive better.

The Oddpendium is a fabulous gaggle of percentile tables that let you quickly generate info about characters, places, and things. It conveys and embroiders the setting.

New players love the quirky characters and the quick dive into action. There are real Every-beings without super-powers or fancy tricks. The system forces low cunning and inventiveness to get by.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

Behind the screen (well, the uptilted book) I was sweating a little. The system outright omits some features I am used to in judging adventurous events.

No skills, just saves vs. ability scores. I guess this makes a statement about the replaceability of characters and importance of possessions in an industrial world. I found it more fun and characterizing to roll a random former profession and give an extra roll, or "advantage" in 5e terms, on saves related to it. And "saves" can be proactive, covering any player action that is unsure to work. New players really need all the hooks for character they can grab.

Combat is simple and safe-till-it's-deadly; being in combat means you score a die roll's amount of damage which is taken first from hit points, which high level characters and monsters have more of, and then from Strength. Each wound to Strength requires a Strength save or you are incapacitated, and dead if not tended to. Advantage and disadvantage in combat means using a bigger or smaller die. Armor can only reduce 1 point of damage, or more for certain monsters.

I like the limited armor - that's in-setting - and randomly deadly wounds. But -- I find there's something you miss by not having a hit roll or the possibility of defense in melee. There's firearms, so taking a long shot seems particularly poor to model and not well covered by the disadvantage idea. You can try to flee when your hit points are zero, but they'll always be able to "hit" you as you run.

At a minimum I suggest: To get a shot in at long range with a ranged weapon, save Dex at disadvantage. Medium range, just save Dex. Automatic damage at close or point blank range.

In close melee, damage with fists (d4) or short bladed weapon (d6) or claws/teeth is automatic. With surprise, damage is also automatic. At swords' length, each attacker saves vs. Dex to hit, and each defender gets one Dex save against one attacker to parry or evade. To speed up a fight you can take Disadvantage on the attack to force the defender to do the same on the defense. If a successful hit is met with a successful parry, both sides roll damage and the difference is applied to the loser.

It's
Odd!

Failed Monster Designs

Although I have written about bad monsters in RPGs, you can identify another type I have sometimes written about: the failed monster, whose basic idea is OK but whose mechanics are off. Either it's too weak or too strong relative to expectations, or just not a good join-up between concept and implementation.

Some examples, from AD&D first edition, with my writings about the first three:

• Ghosts are super-powered, with “zap” effects like aging and possession, but aren’t really true to the variety of their source material. It's a similar failure to golems. There should be lower-level hostile living statues (as in Basic D&D) and lower-level hostile hauntings.
• The gelatinous cube as a 4 HD bag of hit points just doesn’t, er, gel.
• Piercers can be much improved. 
• The carrion crawler with eight attacks is an overpowered paralysation machine. It hits plate and shield on a 14. Good luck!
• The slithering tracker is an undescribed, underdeveloped monster – really, more of an effect -- of consummate unfairness.It tracks you invisibly, paralyzes you in your sleep, and kills in six turns. There is no way to set watch for it unless you're willing to prod sleeping comrades every hour for a reaction.
• AD&D dragons are borderline failed. Certainly their implementation in 70’s-80’s D&D, with fixed HP and breath weapon damage, substitutes “special” for “scary,” and has been repudiated by every edition since and even some retro-clones.
• Harpies are mixed-up with sirens. There should be just normal shitbird harpies. Charm-harpies should be more powerful than they’re given credit for, with squads of charmed minions.
• The oddly specific horror story of the night hag is hard to use in actual adventuring. Like the Fiend Folio’s penanggalan and revenant, the hag’s description is focused on her threat to a lone civilian. It's assumed the party is supposed to barge in upon and rectify the haunting and draining by the hag, even though the victim by definition has to be exceedingly evil.

A common theme in these and other failures: indecision about combat encounters. There's a desire to make monsters about more than a line of stats, to make fighting them a matter of strategy and decisions as well as lining up and whaling on them. But these work better as rules than as haphazard monster effects. That way the strategy can generalize, and be inverted, working for both sides. Just some examples, some of which I've written on:

• Monsters can be scarier, and true to life, by coming into close combat where your weapons are less effective.
• Little monsters can, and must, climb you. You can also, and must also, climb big monsters.
• Flying monsters should be annoying as hell.
• Immunity/resistance to weapon effects. No flesh, can't slash. Nothing hard, can't bash. No vital points, can't pierce.
• Monsters with that one weakness. Puzzle monsters, in a word; murderous locks with murdering keys.

Gloriously Water-Logged Mines

In writing adventure material, nothing pays off like primary research. Look into the lives of rats, and you find that they are purblind and communicate subvocally. Pay attention to stone, and you find that at the juncture of limestone and granite sometimes grows a layer called skarn, laced with gold, copper, and gems. Architecture, chemistry, botany: as much as they constrain design with realism, they also open up intriguing possibilities with the ring of reality to them.

Lack of research also shows. How many lost mines, dwarven or not, have been written up for adventures? How many of them have been glommed together from the residue of Moria-sublime (halls, chasms, demons) and Wild-West-banal (railcarts, lifts, ingots)? The one thing that's certain is that horrible things from the deep have been unleashed and are now running around in the place. But can we do better in setting the scene?

Waterwheel-driven pump

Even cursory research turns up one detail of deep metal mining, in medieval Europe or any other civilization, that presents enormous challenges. Below the water table, mines tend to flood. The simplest solution: dig a drainage channel, or adit, to lower ground. But this presumes your mine sits on higher ground from somewhere. Deep mines don't have this luxury.

So, pump the water out. At first people pass buckets hand to hand, then as craft deepens, machines use hand power, mule power, water power to lift out the groundwater using buckets, screws, suction pipes and tubes. All these latter solutions need keeping up, and once the mine is abandoned, the lower levels partly or fully fill with water.

Flooded floors, concealing pits and swimming monsters; flooded tunnels, requiring magic light and water breathing to have any chance of mere survival. Or, another way: get the old pumping machinery working again and see how much you can clear out, and what treasures lie in the murk.

All this assumes a pre-industrial European level of technology. But a fantasy world also has dwarves, that people of notably precocious craft. Indeed, one solution only they might reach comes from the computer construction game Dwarf Fortress, whose worldbuilding is as complex as its graphics are crude. The game simulates groundwater by having some settlements sit over an aquifer level, whose water floods and ruins all construction beneath it. The way past the aquifer requires one of many complicated engineering solutions, including rapid pumping, opening a shaft to cold air that will freeze the water, or dropping a "plug" of dry stone into the wet level and boring through it.

Dropping the "plug"

Although Dwarf Fortress simplifies the geological reality of seepage, the plug idea suggests that dwarves might have the skill to locate the source of groundwater and simply wall it off with non-porous stone. Maybe the water is controlled and channeled into a reservoir, for drinking and industrial use.

Allow a certain amount of magic in mining, and the pumping operation can be helped in a dozen ways. Maybe the dwarven priests have deals with elementals, or maybe these solutions are found among other underground peoples, like the dark elves. Golems can be set the task of working the pumps. The miners themselves breathe water in flooded galleries. Magic freezes flooded caverns so that ice tunnels can be dug through. A portable hole, or elemental portal, does the work of an adit in draining off water. And what might come through the portal the wrong way?

Another difference: human metal production historically had to be distributed over several sites, because the material for processing ore -- water, wood, and aboveground oxygen -- was not present within a mine, and not necessarily plentiful close to it. Dwarves, though, live entirely underground. Their mine dungeons necessarily include areas for crushing ore, then sorting and filtering the metal-bearing compounds through the action of water. They need to smelt ore in the heat of a furnace, creating liquid metal. If steel is being made, the fuel needs to infuse the raw iron with carbon. Most likely for dwarves this will be mineral coal rather than the medieval-era charcoal. Why not have the facilities for shaping and working metal objects right there to hand as well? A whole complex suggests itself. The only limit is availability of fresh air and water, which architecture or elementals need to supply. And Dwarf Fortress gives another idea: using the earth's own magma to power fierce furnaces.

In short, thinking about realistic logistics can take you places in design your unconstrained imagination never would. It can insert unforeseen challenges into mundane mines, or underwrite the need for a thematically varied industrial site in the more fantastic variety.

(Rise and Decline of) The Third Reich

The full title of this post belongs to a legendary board wargame of World War 2 in Europe, published by Avalon Hill in 1974. I owned it, and played it solo obsessively, as a teenager. Some of the finer points I only picked up following forum posts on BoardGameGeek last decade.

The partial title belongs to a novel by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, one of many works published only after his untimely death in 2003. The protagonist is a champion player of the boardgame, among other titles. Impressively, the game's play is described in accurate detail throughout the novel, and plays a major part in the plot. To my knowledge, this is the only literary work to treat a hobby game in this way; I'm not talking about the haze through which a number of mainstream writers have rediscovered their teenage Dungeons and Dragons days recently.

A combination of an intensely familiar game, and an intensely recognizable setting for me (a seaside tourist town in northeastern Spain, similar to the one half my family is from). You would think it irresistible. But, probably as intended, the short novel left me ambivalent as it ended.

THE GAME

At one level, Rise and Decline of the Third Reich is a slogging game of economic warfare waged on the basis of the all-important Basic Resource Points (BRPs). These are gained from territory conquered and held, and spent on waging offensives and replacing units lost to the game's bloodthirsty combat tables. Abstract submarine war and strategic bombing rules allow direct attacks on enemy BRPs. Diplomatic events offer minor yet consequential variants on the strategy of the game, which usually follows the ebb and flow of actual events.

But the stolid economic game fuels a demanding, knife-edged combat. Disaster always looms through encirclement and the catastrophic capture of a major capital. Armor, airborne, and sea invaders can ruthlessly exploit inor mistakes in placement. Further enablers of catastrophe: a low-probability combat outcome that spells disaster for an attacker who hasn't piled advantage thick enough, and the feared moment when a change of initiative based on underlying economy gives one player two turns in a row.

These strategic features come through blurrily in the novel, but the details of the game are all described extremely correctly, suggesting that Bolaño is either a fan of the game or consulted one extensively. The only few mistakes are probably errors in translation from Spanish to English. An uninitiated reader would still get the idea: this is an astoundingly complex game of skill and chance for nerds, played on the stage of world history. What's brought across most visibly is the Axis player's chance to overcome the weighty accumulation of economic destiny against them -- first Soviet, then American BRPs -- through lightning conquest and skilled tactical play.

THE NOVEL (revealing plot points)

The Third Reich is one of those novels (like Iris Murdoch's The Bell) where the author builds suspense along several lines of menace and desire, only to shrink away from fulfilling the crude expectations of the genre, delivering an anticlimax that is so very literary.

Our German narrator, Udo, is taking his weeks-long holiday in a Catalan seaside town. An emotional cipher, he never shows the passion for his girlfriend Ingeborg that he does for the solo Third Reich game he has set up in their room to plan out a strategy article. They socialize with another German couple, Charlie and Hanna, without much enthusiasm, and rub elbows with local lowlifes who are less sinister than they appear.

While the supposed driver of the plot is the mystery of Charlie's disappearance in the sea one day, there is more underlying drama in the way Udo's solo game gets replaced with a head-to-head contest. The live opponent turns out to be the local character El Quemado, a mysterious South American man with ugly burn scars who works and lives on the beach. He learns the game with surprising speed, taking the Allied side. As in history, Udo starts out in a winning position, but El Q turns things around surprisingly and drives back the Reich. As it's later revealed, he has some help, being coached by the hotel's reclusive German owner who has been sneaking into Udo's room to study the game.

I wish the ending was something worth spoiling. But as I've said, there is no real climax on any "front". The game ends peacefully, a corpse doubtfully similar to Charlie's washes up, a romantic intrigue never goes past first base. Having overstayed well into September, Udo returns to Germany (Ingeborg, and hs job, both long gone) to resume his hobby.

THE NOVEL AND THE GAME (more plot reveals)

For non-gamers, the game is still an effective literary device, an arena of alternative history. Through it, Udo gets to dream of winning the war, playing his own country, pursuing a strategy in which he invades Spain to get to Gibraltar. There's an obvious irony in the parallel reality of the German vacationers "occupying" Spain though peaceful means.

Udo tries to square his national self-esteem with the moral abyss, disconnecting bravery and technical skill from the aims of the Nazi Party. Udo knows each German corps counter by its general's name, a list he recites for us at one point in a narcotic litany.  Near the end he has visions of the brave, great generals looking down from the heavens and approving his efforts, doomed as they all may be in this instance.

El Quemado is not having it, and through Udo's unreliable narration we see glimpses of what the game must mean to someone who, it's implied, has survived a South American authoritarian regime. As the cardboard war's tide turns, Udo's opponent hangs photocopies of Nazi documents on the wall, a reminder of the moral facts that Udo would rather forget. As Udo's defeat becomes certain, El Quemado begins to mutter about war crimes trials, preparing us for a violent dénouement that never happens. Instead, Udo resigns himself to technical and moral defeat, the opponents hug it out late at night, and he has to return to his boring job and content himself simply with Germany being the peaceful, economic master of Europe.


IN CONCLUSION

As I said, there isn't another novel out there that uses gaming in this way, as a living, adult hobby that becomes a vehicle for deeper meaning. It's worth reading, and probably a better introduction to Bolaño than his mega-novel 2666 which I started but had to put down at the point where the exposure of misogyny via the murders of women in Mexico became a relentless, voyeuristic supercut. No matter what you think of it as a novel, The Third Reich is a rare treat for the literary-minded gamer.

Post-OSR Adventure Gaming with the Interactionist Set

So Zak fell, and G+ died, and people seem to have scattered and sorted. It's time to reflect on the adventure gaming movement known as "OSR" now that at least one heir contender to the title has popped up (see also this).

I have been following this movement for 9 years, both in the sense of interest and in the sense of dedication. But it took the splitup to see the fault lines that had always been there. Here's my analysis.

In the first place, the OSR was a reaction against 30 years of D&D development. Technically you could care about other games and be OSR, but in practice D&D was the big kahuna, the starting point for so many people's experiences, the touchstone often returned to, the market-share leader to watch.

Starting in 2008 or so with the release of 4th edition, people started to chafe at it it. And then in a kind of dance of the veils, they stripped away the previous layers of development, questioning each edition back to the Original books.

Fourth Edition: Away with the carefully balanced tactical game with roleplaying cut scenes, the blurring of class abilities.

Third Edition:  Away with the unified mechanic, the scaling treadmill, the bewildering character options and optimization, the rules that cover every circumstance in talmudic detail.

Second Edition: Away with even the tamest instances of all-class skill rolls, the slight tweaks to character kits and class specialization. (This was an easy veil to strip off, very lightweight.)

AD&D: Away with the late-era developments of plotlined modules, the crufty mechanics that nobody used anyway, the fancy spells and character classes.

Not everybody took that last step, but most of the "old school" took as role models either Original D&D or the Basic offshoot. But why? If game design is progress, why go backwards?

The different answers to this question, in hindsight, can reveal the eventual fractures in the movement.

• Because nostalgia. Some people (concentrated in places like Dragonsfoot, Grognardia, and Knights & Knaves) just wanted to experience, or re-experience, the old rules, the old adventure tropes and clichés. Where they had an intellectual position, it was cultural conservatism -- the wisdom of the ages may seem irrational, but there is probably a good reason for it, and we should really strive hard to find the hidden brightside of things like descending AC or racial level limits. That position always struck me as silly. We are talking about game rules that aren't even 50 years old and have never gone a single human generation without substantial and multiple revisions. It's like going all-out G. K. Chesterton in defense of the original box design for Corn Flakes.

• Because idiosyncrasy. Some people (most egregiously, Alexis of the Tao of D&D) wanted to strip the old mechanics back down to their roots in order to build their own layer of heartbreaker complication from the ground up. That impulse itself is very old-school, rooted in the hoary traditions of Arduin, Arms Law, and dozens of other bolt-ons. Implicitly, this: "Increasing simulationist complication and character options isn't a bad thing, but I'd rather just have them my way, thank you."

• Because edginess. Some people (for example Raggi, McKinney) realized that stripping away the history of D&D also meant rolling back the layers of accommodation to prevailing social tastes: squeamishness over Satanism in the 80's and 90's, egalitarianism in gender and otherwise, but most importantly the "nice" style of gaming in which characters started with a lot already invested and it was hard to get killed for good. This left room to embrace all kinds of pulp-magazine nastiness: rape, slaves, body horror, morally blurred characters, meaningless character death, "nega-dungeon" effects that wreck the whole campaign world.

• Because interaction. The most esoteric development, but also the one I find most appealing, was to realize that after stripping away all the conventions of play, you are left with a space beyond rules, traditions, and railroads. You are free to emphasize creative improvisation, interaction between GM and players, and to design situations and systems that make the most of this. Philotomy's Musings and Finch's Primer, for example, put this forth as a play aesthetic, but there are also those who have made it into a design aesthetic -- often known as the "artpunk" or "DIY" movement.  

I don't think too many people saw this at the time, but this Interactionist school was actually a fourth goal, not covered by Ron Edwards' Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist scheme that dominated discussion about RPGs in the 2000 decade. Significantly, it is the Interactionist perspective that has made it into the DNA of D&D's fifth edition, rather than anything else that Zak or Pundit could have given it as consultants. The game now realizes that exploration and social interaction are co-equal pillars with combat; that the rules should be loose enough for GMs to improvise mechanics; that players have a hand in building the setting.

But while today's D&D has Interactionist DNA, it is not a fully interactionist game, and certainly the official adventure material looks staidly conventional when compared to artpunk's open play and creative flourishes. At its best the DIY movement has given us: Borgesian monsters posing problems that go beyond combat; weird magic systems with flavor and creative effects; adventures that map out strange societies and oddball challenges.

Can we really still call it "Old School" or is it more like a "Never-Was" school? Certainly if anyone back in the 80's was playing or writing like this, I never heard about them. As the antithesis of nostalgia, Interactionist gaming uses the blank space around the stripping-down of the World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game to fill with its own peculiar objectives and ideas. That's what I like the best; that's my banner, right there.

Enemies of Vegankind

For gaming campaigns that aim for weirdness, whimsy ...

or simply things that kids can hack and slash at without too much moral injury ...

let's imagine some of the standard humanoids as semi-sentient plant creatures.


TOMATO GOBLINS

Unclothed, they appear as limbs and torso of tightly coiled, hairy green vines, surrounding fruity inner organs and supporting a bulbous head with pointy ears and an evil little face that -- according to the goblin's age -- is green, yellow, orange, or lighter and deeper shades of red. They give off a characteristic sharp green smell.

They are usually wrapped in cast-off pieces of clothing and armor, armed with sharp spear-sticks for poking and throwing.

When one is fatally squashed, pulp and seeds spatter everywhere, and if allowed to grow, one seed equals one future goblin.

The existence of these creatures is one reason tomatoes are feared. Adding to this reputation, a tomato goblin will on rare occasions become infected with green, horned, noxious worms (treat as the worms of a Son of Kyuss).

EGGPLANT HOBGOBLINS (Aubgoblins)

These larger creatures are built and scented similarly to tomato goblins, but their vines are more yellow, their heads and organs various hues, some a very deep purple, some mottled with ivory white, some fully albino. Their age can be seen from the head and jaw, the young rounded and egg-shaped, the older more elongated.

These "aubgoblins" are less impulsive and more strategic than their tomato cousins, but speak the same Nightshade language. Their heads are packed densely with spongy, pale matter, within which a few dozen seeds can spawn new aubgoblins if the old one falls. Human-sized, they take care to select the best martial equipment from battlefields they loot, and usually have at least medium armor and 1-3 weapons including a shield.

PUMPKIN BUGBEARS

Their tall, rangy bodies covered in dark green leafy hair, vegetable bugbears sport a broad, squat, orange gourd on their shoulders. Born blind and faceless on the vine, their rite of maturity has them carve their own features into the pumpkin, letting out the inner, flickering glow of a corrupted soul. They move in absolute silence, and can dim their jack o'lantern light to firefly brightness when they don't wish to shine in the dark.

Stealing material from farms to clothe and arm themselves, they wear burlap sacking, tarpaulin canvas, pot-helm and pan-lid armor, all tied on with frayed rope. Their preferred weapon is a heavy piece of log with pounded spikes, bolts, or an embedded plowshare at the business end.

Having no seeds with which to reproduce, bugbears clip and plant grafted vine segments from their bodies that new ones may grow. Their penchant for stealing and frightening human children may stem from the inadequacy of their family life.

One-Page Dungeon Entry: Yesterday's Dungeon ... Tomorrow

After rejecting a number of time travel gimmicks for this year's One-Page Dungeon Contest entry, I stuck with the best kind of time travel ... the kind we are all doing, all the time. So, this dungeon has notes for a first play at beginner level, then for a second play at later levels when things have changed. It's also interactive, so that decisions players make -- to smash down a door, open sealed tombs, kill or leave an NPC -- have an impact on the higher-level profile of the dungeon.

I mainly wanted to make this adventure useful in a campaign, the kind that gets up to fifth level or so. Or, you can play it in a convention session, devoting 2-3 hours to each "half" and switching to higher level pre-generated characters midway through.

Click to enlarge.

Finally, here are some rough, old-school generic stats for the monsters I have jankily doodled herein.

"NOW"
Grimalkins: HD 1-1, AC 11 [8] +2 against 1 attack/round, MV 12, AT spear d6+1
Grimalkin Shaman: HD 2-1, AC 11 [8] +2 against 1 attack/round, MV 12, AT holy stick d6, spells: cure/cause light wounds, command, spiritual hammer
Beak Dog: HD 2, AC 12 [7]. MV 15, AT beak d6
Satyr: HD 4, AC 12 [7], MV 12, AT weapon
Psqualladir: HD 8+8, AC 18 [1], MV 15, AT bite d8+poison, DF +1 weapon to hit, immune to fire and lightning, half damage from cold and acid, 50% magic resistance, powers as described

"LATER"
Ogre: HD 4+1, AC 14 [5], MV 12, AT weapon +3
Half-Demon Ogre Fire Wizard: HD 6+3, AC 16 [3], MV 12, AT weapon +3, spells: burning hands (x2), magic missile, affect normal fires, flaming sphere (x3), fireball, protection from fire, DF half damage from fire and non-magic weapons, magic resistance 20%
Leucrotta: HD 6+1, AC 15 [4], MV 18, AT bite 3d6, back kick d6, voice imitation
Cray-leeches: HD 1+2, AC 14 [5], MV 12, AT 2 pincers (d4, fall on a 4) and mouth (d4, stays attached doing d4 blood drain/round, open wound still bleeds for 1 hp/round)
Wraith: HD 5+3, AC 15 [4], MV 24, AT hug d6 and 1 level energy drain (permanent or not), DF undead immunities, immune to cold, +1 weapon to hit
Evil Satyr Priest: HD 6, AC 12 [7], MV 12, AT spear d6+ d6 fire + 1, spells: cause light wounds (x2) (fingers become centipede pincers), sanctuary, cause fear, hold person, know alignment, feign death, cause blindness.
Flaming Skeleton: HD 3, AC 13 [6], MV 12, AT 2x flaming punches d6 +1, wrestle for d6 fire damage/round, DF mindless, immune to fire and piercing weapons, half damage from slashing weapons and lightning

Harry Clarke Project: The Hellrake

=

I feel impelled to contribute to Cavegirl's Harry Clarke Project using this fabulous fellow (Bluebeard?) who has sat on my hard drive many a year awaiting his introduction to polite society.

HELLRAKE

Armour class: as leather with +4 magical protection
Hit dice: 6+9 hp
Move: slightly more than human
Attacks: weapon, as 6th or 9th level; spells
No. Appearing: 1, plus entourage
Morale: 4, or 9 in polite society
Treasure:  Fabulous weapons and clothing, worn jewellery, magic; nothing he cannot carry and show off
Alignment: Chaos

The parentage of this sterile nonesuch is cruel and improbable: a male-aspected devil of Hell's nobility and an elf-maid of the fey planes. Invariably male, but questionably masculine, hellrakes flaunt the improbable, reedy physique of a clotheshorse, with one or two coy devilish marks such as hooves, horns, wings, tail, talking moles, goatish features, or ruddy skin. Their anatomy only partly explains the bizarre, stiff- or bent-legged gaits they affect when making a grand entrance, for they can run fast enough if they need to.

Hellrakes are notorious, thanks to the legendary Barbramel, as fashion-breakers and fashion-setters. Other of their recorded professions include gambler, verbal duellist, procurer of succubi and incubi, black-market sommelier of potions and philtres, hired mourner, slander poet, and erotic ballet impresario. Each one will usually have the abilities of two character classes at 6th level or one at 9th: fighter, thief and wizard are the favored ones, but they are drawn to more exotic choices if available, such as assassin, illusionist, or bard. They take half damage from spells, no damage from normal weapons of iron or steel, and double damage from silver.

The nature of the breed is whimsical, ostentatious, and vain, their quirks but a masquerade upon a thoroughly rotten core. In front of those who matter, they make a great show of bravery, but when fending for themselves, they are craven. Despite or because of these flaws, they are usually attended by an entourage of 1d4 sycophants, grifters, opportunists, and pleasure-seekers from this list (d12):

1. lascivious succubus
2. coy incubus
3. fawning imp
4. hustling leprechaun
5. abrasive quickling twins
6. perspicacious drow rogue
7. ranting human devil-cult preacher
8. stolid minotaur bodyguard
9. paranoid smoke mephit bagman
10. frantic satyr hypeman
11. sarcastic talking wonder-goat
12. agile troupe of 5 homunculi

The hellrake ilk is inveighed against in a famous theatrical soliloquy of the Autumn Court literata Glingeroyce, thusly: "thou Limbeaux, thou Cocytuscombs, thou Hellsapopinjays, thou Macaro-Nicks; toffs of Tophet, preening pimps of perdition, flouncing fribble-fiends, sad cads of dire sire and glam dam."

Steal the Eyes ... Scratch That

That feeling when you're playtesting your long-delayed megadungeon and there's a 20' high bird god idol with glowing orange eyes and one of your players -- who has in fact probably never seen this picture:

follows her rogue's instinct to climb up and see if those eyes are a) gems and b) pry-able ...

but no, they are just magic light cast on stone eyes.

In what is not really a fit of pique and more like dogged mission completion mode, she then takes hammer and chisel and chips off all the light-bearing stone, raining a shower of little half-glowing, candle-strength chips on the floor ...

which turn out to be a useful small treasure in their own right.

Confirming that it's much more fun to redraw the path of ages, then follow it.

The Umpleby's Net

A 2nd Edition Umpleby.

Among the curious, little-used, and often-derided B-list of the AD&D Fiend Folio, there is a monster called the Umpleby that is tall, hairy, friendly up to a point, and can put a real hurting on you with ... static electricity from its shaggy pelt. It appeared in somewhat rough form in the source material, White Dwarf magazine's Fiend Factory (exhibit A below) and got a clearer set of rules and rulings in the Fiend Folio itself, including more detail given to its hair net weapon (exhibit B).

No relation.

The Umpleby is one of the lesser known Fiend Folio contributions that poses a weird, specific challenge, like the Aleax, Meenlocks, and so forth. It has a little bit of the mess-with-you factor from grudge monsters like the Zorbo or Disenchanter. In the editions since then, it has sometimes gotten dragged out of the attic for sheer obscurity cachet, like the Flumph but more underground. A long time ago here, I dragged it out as an example of a bad monster.

And where on earth does that name come from? Is it just a coincidence that one Stuart Umpleby was the co-founder of an early communication network -- NET-work -- in the 1970's, that used an instructional computer system called PLATO? A network that eventually failed to join up with the Internet like like ARPANET did, and almost got canned by Nixon for hosting calls for his impeachment? Is it coincidence that PLATO's terminals glowed orange? If true, this has to be one of the most obscure current events references in all of D&D. If Stephen Wood's not around to comment, perhaps a mystery forevermore.


Exhibit A:

Exhibit B: