Any Sufficiently Advanced Chemistry

.... is indistinguishable from alchemy. I've taken the six miracle substances from this recent Cracked magazine article and found a couple of fantasy-world uses for each one.

Gallium, the Metal That Melts in Your Hand

1. Obviously, heat-sensitive tripwires.
2. Cool way to seal a flask.
3. Reptiles or golems or undead are blocked by this wall, warm-blooded creatures can melt their way through it.
4. Stand here for too long and the heat from your boots will trap your feet in the cube of metal underfoot.
5. Gallium also reacts with aluminum to make it brittle. Imagine that a similar reagent exists for each metal - who needs lockpicking skills? Imagine a self-destroying golden treasure.
6. A metal bridge that you can blow with a tea kettle at each end.

Sulphur Hexafluoride, The Gas Heavy Enough to Float Solid Objects

1. It's what's under your floating disk.
2. Take the 100' leap of faith down; the heavy air will cushion your fall, but then breathing becomes a problem as you climb the 10' ladder to the passage onward.
3. It makes your voice deeper, kind of an anti-helium. Kobolds huff this stuff and hide to make people run from the "loud, singing giant around the corner." 
4. Floating skull! Run!

Hydrophobic (Water-Repelling) Surfaces

1. A necessary coating for underwater adventurers' spellbooks, bows, etc.
2. A corridor floor coated with this, then a trap dumps a blob of water, which races towards you like an Indiana Jones boulder. When blood spills on the floor, it beads and skitters like water on a hot griddle.
3. Invisible fishtank: foot-deep water on the floor surrounded by a hydrophobic zone. Will they figure out that this is the safe place to be when pursued by that water elemental?

Spontaneously Exploding Powders and Crystals

1. What's this smoky gray gem ... BAM
2. What's all this funny colored sand ... BAM
3. Bad guy to captive in10x10 room: Hold this. Don't move.
4. Explodes with shock wave from loud noise... best door opening deterrent.

Hot Ice (clear liquid that turns solid and white when disturbed)

1. Let me just stick my foot into this pool of clear water ... Oh.
2. If you can find a way to carry it around in a flask without bumping it, you have an instant door sealant, hole plugger, etc.
3. Sprayed from the ceiling, is an encasement trap.

Memory Metal


1. Clue, command word, true name, etc. written in cursive script as a twisted piece of wire that only needs an application of heat to snap back into the real letters
2. The same, but forms a key to a mechanical lock.
3. A strip of metal formed into an innocuous looking wristband expands and sharpens into an assassin's blade when placed in warm water.
4. A tangled wire ball placed in a piece of cold meat and fed to a mighty beast will, in its warm stomach, resume its former shape of a jagged, four-pointed cross.

One Page Obstacles & Breaking

It's time to get back to the old-school old school with Breakage II: Electric Boogaloo.

This page combines one of my earliest blog posts with my earliest One Page. Strength is not like the other abilities: it can easily be measured in terms of force, and has a straightforward application. When you roll to open a door, you shouldn't be rolling for how much force you put out but how tough the door is to open.

Breaking stuff is fun. Or not fun if your weapon gets broken during a critical hit on your arm in combat. In the latest 52 Pages, items are either carried on the chest or by the waist, so a crit on body or legs would respectively threaten items in each of those areas with breakage.

Lilliviathan

I've got some fantastic ideas cooking. Just a small peek behind the veil ... I'd be lying if I said that Talysman's mite swarms didn't have something to do with this, although the roots of the idea are firmly planted in 17th century England.

LILLIVIATHAN

HD: 3, with CON bonus/penalty to each hit die

AC: base 6 [13], 3 to 9 [10 to 16] depending on DEX

Attacks 2 arm bites for d4 each, swarm over for 2d4, or 2 weapon attacks; bonus to hit depending on STR 

Special defense: Swarm weapon immunity

Size: Small to human

MV: 15 

Mind: Low to genius depending on INT

Reaction/Morale modifier: +0/+1

A human-shaped swarm of one-inch-high human-like infinitesimals numbering from 300 (gnome size) to 1800 (majestic human sized). The individual creatures are too small to have much of a functioning brain, but a telepathic link gives them a collective consciousness that lets them perform the incredible acrobatic feat, linked limb to limb, of perambulating and acting en masse in a mockery of humankind.

Its ability scores are each the same and number from 3 to 18, that is, 1 point per 100 individuals, giving the appropriate modifiers as to a character. Its Wisdom bonus determines the keenness of its collective senses, while its Charisma determines its ability to communicate in the common tongue through a kind of shrill, choral piping, using the first person plural.  

The lilliviathan attacks by swinging its arms, sometimes leveraging human-sized weapons into its hands whose fingers are the deftest members of the swarm. But when it can, it prefers to leap into close brawling range and swarm over its victim with hundred of tiny cuts and bites, hitting automatically each round (each infinitesimal bearing a pin, shard, or nail as a side arm).

Taking normal damage from fire and other area effect weapons, the lilliviathan is nearly immune to weapon attacks, taking only 1 hp per hit from an edged or piercing weapon, or 1 hp per four points done with a crushing weapon. Each hit point it takes reduces its ability scores by one. If danger looms, the swarm is capable of collapsing, dispersing and oozing through small cracks or tiny passages, though it will thereafter need a few minutes to get back into human shape. 

Apparently, individual infinitesimals have gender and sex, pregnant females and rapidly growing infants safeguarded within the "torso." Lilliviathan swarms, if they reproduce at all, do so by mitosis. Food is passed in through the "mouth" and distributed hand-to-hand throughout the corpus.

Stonehell: Dungeon Poetics Improved

As promised in the last critique, let's take a look at how Michael Curtis' Stonehell megadungeon works with creativity, meaning and description.

Turning to a random page of descriptive text, we get a nice coincidence: the picked-over starting area of the box canyon makes a good comparison against the picked-over starting area of room 1 of Undermountain. Let me reformat here for purposes of criticism, starting at a random place ...

This monument is a minor climax to a thematic series of rooms that started with a feeling of evil and then presented the classic skeletons rising from the bones to attack. This is how you do a picked-over secret compartment! The description wastes almost no words. Not so much an anticlimax as an antEclimax ... a minor mystery appropriate for an underwhelming area, hinting at undeveloped vistas.

The friendly bear is a good hook, especially as developed elsewhere in the book as a kind of dungeon legend/good luck sign. The only false note: 64 cp, that doesn't sit well with the bear's habit of bringing up things to gnaw on. (Question that low-level penny jar every time!) Better cheap treasure: leather strap with silver buckles. The empty cave is less empty than it seems, a pretty obvious temptation to camp in case the town is too far or too "hot."

"I've got some outdoor caves and I'm going to put outdoor critters in them" part 2. Here, too, there is meaning soft-pedaled below the surface, a story that's almost told. What happened to the hermit? The brigand? Does knowing about the mad hermit and his pet puma in Keep of the Borderland help clarify things? That's a nice touch, if intentional. The scarf is maybe one detail too many - everything else invites use.

Compared with the last examples, it's clear that Stonehell aims for less but delivers more. There's no need to spell everything out, and themes are possible but subtle, rewarding exploration in nice ways.

My Eight Favorite Petty Gods

Miraculously yanked back to life from the Plane of Vaporware due to the efforts of Gorgonmilk's Greg and a cast of dozens, the Petty Gods volume is now available for download. My own homage to Children of the Corn and The Wicker Man is by no means the principal reason to get it. Here is an Ogdoad of the most excellent, from which I had to leave aside many worthies, and some ideas for their use.

Best Dungeon Trope God: Jhillenneth, Mother of Horrors (Matt Fischer). She can provide for a whole magical-naturalist monster zoo, and stand as the end boss, to boot.

Best God for a Campaign: Azwa, God of Stone Heads (Garrett Weinstein). The perfect ominous artifacts to scatter around your hexcrawl.

Most Oddly Compelling Worshippers: Lord Downall, God of Drains (Joel Sparks). Just the cultists to fund an expedition down ... down ...

Best Comedic God: Manidono, the petty god of slackers, half-assed effort, and loose change (Erin Palette). Put him in a medallion and pop him out when some party member or another proves worthy of his tutelage.

Best Idea: The Man in the Moon, a petty god who manifests via pareidolia - the perception of faces in random objects (Barry Blatt). Best introduced through a found manuscript proclaiming his existence and usefulness.

Most Astoundingly Obscure God: Mespilus, god of the Medlar Fruit (Chris Wellings). The what? Yes, the medlar fruit. Narrowly beat out Qurgan Quagnar, god of Three-Legged Toads. The punchline to "I believe this artifact has the power ... to summon the very gods!"

Creepiest God: Nazarash the Shatterer (Blair Fitzpatrick). A human skin stretched around a rough assemblage of broken glass. Creepier still: his one and only known mortal worshipper.

Best God Mechanics: Ochlos Volgos, the god of angry mobs (Eric Jones), whose powers snowball as a result of their increasing size and more desperate actions. Surely he has a human believer and instigator, a good catch for investigators or bounty hunters.

Best Folklore God: Whisper Will, Lord of the Crossroads (Dale Cameron). Who knows that crucial piece of information? Only this guy. Now,how to coax it out of him ..

One Page Weapon Vs. Armor Chart

This year being the 35th anniversary of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player Handbook, I thought it only fitting to remedy some of the realism gaps in mine own 52 Pages ruleset, taking a leaf (no. 38, to be precise!) from the Dean of Dungeons himself - possibly the most beloved page of all in that estimable tome.

After extensive research in musty fechtbueche, after in-depth consultations with American ninjas and dead-serious dudes who will cut you if you call them "reenacters," I decided to ignore everything they told me. D&D was never supposed to simulate the literal medieval era, but rather, a mythopoetic simulacrum-dimension called "Dungeon Game Reality." Hence, D&D is always correct - and thus, inevitably, AD&D just advances the correctness to a near-unbearable level, in a brief golden decade before the "Et tu, Brute?" of 2nd Edition.

Of course, because the attention spans of today's gamers are beset with daily rat-race and squalling offspring - or else, were strangled at birth in a world of point-and-click instant gratification - the chart had to be cut down from its original 57 x 9 to a mere 4 x 4.

Combat now presents a terrain of real strategic choice! Do you drop your enchanted flatchet and choke-up on your retainer's mundane awl-pike, the better to penetrate the crevices of the giant serpent's scales? From the rack of pole arms, do you grab the sword-like glaive-guisarme as the tool wherewith to Julienne that room of giant mushrooms, or trust in the axe-like power of the bardiche to dismember the killer ants foretold in yon scrawled graffito? And at last, the traditional poisson d'Avril shines forth in the arsenal of adventure, delivering a most efficacious slap to unjacketed varlets.

Future Advanced 52 Pages updates include psionic combat, aerial jousting rules, that hardscrabble hero class the Monk, and Boot Hill character conversion guidelines.

Dungeon Poetics

When I used to write poetry (that other, extinct hobby of mine that hewed closer to my twentysomething New York idea of adulthood) I ended up setting two rules for myself: Write concisely; avoid cliches. In hindsight I would have done well to add a third: The damn thing must still mean something.

These laws work equally well for adventure writing. This genre, too, requires striking imagery to succeed; rewards going behind the scenes to find new connections and insights. And yes, the damn thing must still mean something - how you get there is your own concern, but imaginative fiction does not simply mean pulling six-legged animals named smeerps out of a hat and making them whistle Dixie. There has to be some evocative link to a consistent and rooted world, no matter how strange or oblique, to make it work.

I realized this connection after Zak S recently dicussed the legendary megadungeon disappointments, 3rd edition Castle Greyhawk and 2nd edition Undermountain. The former was shown up to be full of cliches and meaningless misses, the latter full of padding.

But besides mining the "gem" ideas from those clunkers, what would it take to make them more meaningful? Let's take a closer look at Old-School whipping boy Undermountain - specifically, the first room of the first level - then Old School Revival whipping boy Dwimmermount - three rooms from a page chosen at random. I can't get the image to size just right, so you're probably going to have to click to read it.

Even leaving out the boxed text, Ed Greenwood's Undermountain room 1 presents a no-fun-house of random features that lead nowhere and contribute nothing to the sense of gradual discovery through exploration. When the off-message and filler material is removed, we're left with a sly,mocking marker that this is the starting room of the weakest level: 1 rat, 1 gold piece, enjoy. The hidden compartment is actually a much better anticlimax if it's empty. A smart party will find ways to use it as a cache. Using this logic the DM can do a better job of figuring out what might actually, reasonably be cached there.

Speaking of rats and small change, let's give James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount more of a chance by looking at its deeper levels. For purpose of criticism, here are three rooms from the top of a randomly chosen page of the backer draft, which happens to be on level 5. Comments on the right.

With Dwimmermount, there's better style but similar problems in substance: the prose is lots more economical, but meaning and unique twists still prove elusive, although they are there.

I think the main problem of both these and similar efforts is, well, that they're megadungeons. The amount of time required to put poetic craft into each and every one of a thousand or more rooms is practically impossible. Some corners inevitably have to be cut.

Greenwood did it by actually presenting only about 30 super-prolix rooms per level, filling the rest of the map with "do it yourself" maze wallpaper. Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage is honest about having lots of super-short room descriptions but thrives on the set-pieces and the grand plan; it helps that he's intentionally recreating the gonzo-ish Greyhawk legend, which sets low expectations for coherence and dungeon cliche avoidance to begin with. Somehow we expect more of Dwimmermount, with its much-trumpeted world, story and secrets. I haven't gotten Barrowmaze yet, but have a thumbs up for Patrick Wetmore's Anomalous Subsurface Environment, which achieves its goals by using smaller (yet still expansive) megadungeon levels and a number of creative back-stories to sow meaning. Even that one, though, isn't complete yet.

Stonehell by Michael Curtis is another interesting case. I think that deserves a post all of its own.