Vanceburgs, for Jack

News of Jack Vance's passing, a few days delayed, is now hitting the old-school gaming sphere. Although I could wax in already-waxed ways about his fantasy, his science fiction, or for the n-teenth time about the vision of magic in his Dying Earth novels, there's a less obvious way his fiction has influenced the world of my campaign games.

In whatever genre, Vance's fantastic fiction excelled in the creation of a specific kind of society which I'll call the Vanceburg. Assembling some elements from Robin Laws' analysis of Vance's fictional elements in the Dying Earth roleplaying game, the Vanceburg merges "Strange Customs" with a "Crafty Swindle." Specifically:

1. The community projects a fraudulent myth to outsiders and visitors.
2. The myth is shrouded in some obscure custom or activity.
3. The custom or activity is presented as advantageous to outsiders.
4. This is not the case; a situation of exploitation obtains, in which outsiders are easily ensnared.

Vanceburgs from the Dying Earth novels are legion, but include the gruesome ponzi scheme of the rat-men; the town of Vull, where Cugel is set on watch for Magnatz; and Master Twango's scale mining operation. The Planet of Adventure series arguably describes a series of Vanceburgs, from society-scale to the intimate scam of the eel-race at the end of Chasch. In Lyonesse, one is reminded of fish dishes sold at a "seasonal price."

In my own game, the memorable Vanceburg was the far northern town of Parmentell, peopled by bluff merchant factors  and evasive townsfolk, and dominated by a secretive citadel. The authorities' constant fees, levies, regulations and imprecations lent a Vancian air to the proceedings. The town billed itself as a prime base for adventuring parties to hunt the secret stores of purple worm ivory and even the Purple Worm Graveyard itself, scattering maps throughout the realms.

In reality, few adventuring parties found any ivory, but their activities concealed the actual source of the town's wealth, for the Graveyard itself lay underneath the citadel. The mysterious ceremonies were actually farewells to desperate citizens daring to descend to this vast cavern, which promised unimaginable wealth but also speedy death at the hands of lesser worm guardians and worse. Thus, a double-tiered Burg, with the townsfolk persuaded that their knowledge of the truth and chance at upward mobility gave them an advantage over the visiting rubes.

While the Vanceburg is at high risk of being overturned in one way or another by its perceptive visitors - and my campaign was no exception - I should also mention an inversion-variation on the theme that sometimes pops up in the Vance corpus. In this concept, the inhabitants of a place have themselves become deluded by their own myth, and so ripe for upending, exploitation, or outright robbery by the canny interloper. Shining examples are the villagers of Smolod who lived in the paradise granted them by the cusps of the Overlord, or the pilgrims of Gilfig on whom Cugel practiced a memorable deception. The Burgvance, perhaps?

Although I've shied away from this kind of adventure plot because it seems too easy, I'm sure it could be put to work, with the primary risk being the awakening of the inhabitants themselves ... Perhaps this is a good way to tone down the threat of monsters stronger than the party can defeat toe to toe. Imagine a society of hallucinating minotaurs, or a revival tent meeting of altruistically deluded mind flayers?

At Last, Savage Encounters

Recently, a comment from Jack Headland reminded me that I hadn't ever posted the table for "savage" encounters from my encounter series, though I did show the silhouettes and make some kind of rambling nostalgic semi-related post about dinosaurs. This table is just for every kind of prehistoric beast and other outlandish creature you might find in a lost world or very hairy wilderness. Others in series can be found in this tag.

I've gone to percentiles along the top because they're more accessible and also fit well with the percentile system I've adopted to tell you which chart and row to use in the first place. Maybe I'll share that one later this week.

Lodge Initiations and Dungeon Tricks

Two separate sources this weekend led me to the amazing and disturbing Demoulin Brothers catalog of initiatory prank equipment  for North American fraternal lodges, published in 1930.

These lodges - the likes of the Elks, Moose, Woodmen, Odd Fellows, Red Men, and avowedly unserious outfits like the Hoo Hoo and E Clampus Vitus - outdid each other in prankish initiation rites, aided and abetted by the electric shock gadgetry and "burlesque costumes" of the Demoulin Brothers.

Having already remarked the similarities between the levels and titles of Dungeons and Dragons, and those of a fraternal order, I can't help but wonder if the spirit of the basement initiation rite also lives on in the tricks and traps of the "gotcha!" dungeon. In the DeMoulin catalogue, as with the Dungeon Master's catalogue, nothing is certain, safe things are dangerous and dangerous things safe. Even the famous imperceptibly sloping corridor of Greyhawk Castle has its precedent in the "balloon ride" gag shown below, visibly hoisted and imperceptibly let down.

Treasure-Centered Adventure Design

In most adventure design methods I have seen, treasure placement is kind of an afterthought. The perils and creatures come first, and then the treasure is placed more or less methodically according to what is guarding it. Or, you place your dangers and then you ration out how much treasure the level will contain, in dribs and drabs here and there, with an all-important number in mind ... let's say, 5 party members at 2000 xp each to get to second level ... yup, clearing this dungeon level should get them there.

Now, if the party never catch on to the idea that their treasure is being handed out like a paycheck, that's fine. But as a DM I like to be surprised by my own creations. Rolling things randomly while stocking an adventure site is a big part of that. The random comes first, the sense comes after, and more often than not the gain to be had in creativity is immense.

I wanted to break out of this thinking with the treasure table I posted last week. Here is a revised version, with hopefully greater clarity, as some people had trouble understanding it at the first sight:

click it to enlarge

The idea with this treasure table is: each trove is its own thing. It could be a pittance, or a bank-breaking amount. There is an upper limit on each trove, because you want some control over huge hauls, but in my system it's a pretty big upper limit (characters need only 1000 xp to make 2nd level, so two maximum level hauls - you stop rolling once you hit or exceed 2000 x current "depth," or dungeon level - will get them most or all of the way there. However, the average value of hauls at depth 1 is about 500, so the average party will level from about 10 of them, or if there are other ways to get experience that are roughly balanced with treasure, about 5.

And not all treasure will leave the dungeon. Some of it will be unwieldy, requiring a laborious extraction. The matrix of value vs. weight pretty much sees to that (200 weight of fine quality wood anyone?)  Some of it will be hidden or just never found. Coins, in this table, are not all that common, so transporting and selling the treasure will be the norm. The more variables there are, the more adventure feels like adventure, and less like drawing a paycheck.

Let me break out the Lovecraftian italics for this manifesto:

If you are trying to create a sense of wonder, danger and adventure in your players, while you yourself know that you have scripted out the adventures with carefully level-balanced encounters and rewards ... while you may entertain the players, something will be lacking for yourself. 

Having rolled, and possibly surprised yourself, why not then build the adventure around the treasure, instead of the treasure around the adventure? Create the hazards and monsters more or less proportional to each trove, with some having no treasure at all but guarding key points - in effect, giving access to later treasures. I'll give an example, next post.

Reign of Wizardry: Unacknowledged Gygax Source?

The first AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, as grognards well know, contains the touchstone Appendix N, in

Frazetta cover, 1964

which Gary Gygax lists literary influences on the game. One of the writers who appears without any specific works listed is Jack Williamson. I don't think anyone yet has realized that Williamson may well be the direct source for a few aspects of magic, monsters and adventures in AD&D.

Williamson is one of those science fiction writers I read as an adolescent without really absorbing his name. His career started in the 1920's and his last novel, a year before he died at age 98, was published in 2005. Along the way, he is credited for inventing such terms as "terraforming," "genetic engineering," and "Prime Directive" - the latter from his classic 1947 story "With Folded Hands," a wry subversion of the ideals in Asimov's contemporaneous Robot stories.

It's been assumed that Gygax's reference to Williamson's influence is indirect, and based on those science fiction works. Having just read Williamson's 1940 novel Reign of Wizardry, I'm not so sure of that. There are a number of telling resonances with the very specific elements of early D&D in this "sword, sandal and sorcery" novel of the ancient Greek world. The version that Gygax probably read was the 1964 Lancer paperback reissue.

Superficially, the setting resembles previous examples of the ancient-world pulp story such as Talbot Mundy's "Tros of Samothrace" series: a fantasy Theseus pursues a grudge against the sorcerous rulers of Minoan Crete. The writing is zesty, evocative and gritty. Williamson uses the well-known Greek myth as a springboard rather than crutch for the plot, which delivers more dizzying twists than Christopher Nolan or M. Night Shyamalan would dare try.

What about the D&D influence? I'll go from most obvious to most doubtful.

AD&D spellcasting: As Gygax's Advanced game increased the power of spellcasters with a plethora of new spells, it also limited them with increasingly specific rules on how spells were cast. One of the key elements: the detailing of verbal, somatic and material components, with terminology taken straight from Pratt and de Camp's Compleat Enchanter series. But in that series, all three were described as necessary components of spellcasting; while in the Player's Handbook, many spells lack one or more of the elements, complicating the question of whether a spell can be cast while bound or gagged. Where did Gygax get the idea to make the components optional for different spells?

At one point in Reign of Wizardry, Theseus is captured by the bad guys and tempts a greedy admiral with a story of buried treasure, which allegedly can only be retrieved by the magic of Theseus' ally, the craven minor wizard Snish. This gives a pretext to bring Snish to Theseus:

"He is the wizard," said Theseus. "But let the gag stay. He can use his spell without words -- if he wants to avoid being tortured" [...]

As it turns out, Snish can indeed cast his spells without verbal component, although this fact turns out very much to the admiral's disadvantage. I can't help but infer that the question came to Gygax's mind as a result of this scenario, or similar other ones in fantasy literature.

Iron golem: The iron golem in the Greyhawk supplement and AD&D has a number of abilities - slowing spell, poison gas cloud - without obvious precedent in fiction or legend. In Deities and Demigods, the Cretan construct Talos is described as a "triple iron golem." Reign of Wizardry has a memorable version of Talos as a giant, moving brass statue who is animated by an internal magical fire and causes steam when he wades in the sea. This aspect is probably inspired by the legend, in the classical Argonautica, that Talos would heat himself in a fire to give intruders a lethal embrace. But the internal sorcerous fire of Williamson's Talos seems to have inspired at least one trait of that D&D golem - being regenerated instead of harmed by fire damage. Perhaps the other abilities have an equally obscure fictional origin?

Specific spells: The sorcerers of Crete, including King Minos himself, hurl lightning bolts, while a very crucial spell known to the wizard Snish (and, it turns out, others) bears a distinct resemblance to the AD&D illusionist spell, change self, although the version in the novel lasts until you make close contact with another person and can be conferred on others.

Killer dungeon: The Labyrinth of Knossos appears near the end of the novel, as Theseus is once again captured and thrust into it without a light, there to be devoured by the Dark One, the Minotaur. The description as Theseus explores the depths may not have been directly influential. But it certainly resonates with what we know of Gygax's ideas about how the game should be played:

He went slowly, counting the steps and testing each carefully before he set his full weight on it. After sixty steps there was a small square landing and a turning in the passage; after sixty more, another. Upon the third landing his foot crushed something brittle, and his exploring hand found two skeletons [...]
Theseus left the remains and went on down, wondering what might be on the fourth landing. Again, he counted fifty-eight steps. But, where the fifty-ninth had been, there was -- nothing. Almost, moving with too great confidence, he had lost his balance.

Theseus proceeds to use logic and the skeletons' bones to find a way through the abyss in the darkness, and then reflects:

The way through the dwelling of the Dark One was clearly thick-set with peril. The most of those thrust into the labyrinth, he thought, must perish in this chasm he has passed. 

I'm reminded of this anecdote from Mike Mornard of a convention scenario run by Gygax, in which eight out of nine incautious would-be adventuring parties fell victim to a similar death pit in a stairway, concealed by a wall of darkness. While the direct connection can't be proved, the indirect one is evident. The kind of fiction Gygax read and enjoyed was directly reflected in the challenges he set for his players and the style of play that ended up being rewarded.

St. Amaro's Western Adventure

While researching my folk saints I came across a most intriguing real-world figure, the legendary, uncanonized Santo Amaro.

This blessed wanderer set sail from the land of Alia, "whose cities now lie in ruins," searching for the terrestrial Paradise, convinced it lay across the oceans - he is assumed to have sailed west, although the direction of travel is not always clear from the manuscripts. He gathered a crew (could YOUR PARTY be that crew?) and set forth into uncharted waters, guided only by faith.

The Spanish texts of his adventures (available here, at the end of the monograph) bear a certain resemblance to themes in pagan Celtic literature of the journey across the western ocean to the Otherworld (imramm) and to the similar legend of St. Brendan the Navigator from Irish Christendom. C.S. Lewis (who was Northern Irish) may indeed have drawn on these tales of curious islands, moral lessons and marine perils for his Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Amaro's encounters, to the gaming mind, look like the kernel of a saltcrawl map.

1. Tierra Desierta, island of five cities and many castles, where the men are ugly and the women beautiful. Abundant animal encounters. Provisioning and trade available. Handsome male party members are at risk of entanglements, jealousy.

2. The Ruddy, or Vermilion Sea.

3.  Fuente Clara, island of many sins and vices, but where everyone is beautiful and courteous, disease is unknown and the lifespan is 300 years. Henchmen and hirelings must make a loyalty check or remain in this false paradise.

4.  The Coagulated Sea traps the ship among seven other abandoned ships, where fierce sea monsters the size of horses and larger fight over the corpses of the ships' crew. (Inspired by prayer, Amaro escaped this deathtrap by inflating waterskins with air and tying them to the ship, whereupon the beasts attacked the waterskins, believing them to be corpses, and pulled the ship out of the clotted waters.)

5. Ysla Desierta, bare of growth, overrun by fierce lions and populated by hermits, a fortified abbey with basic supplies. Each Saint John's Day the lions and other fierce beasts fight and the stench of the resulting corpses is such that anyone staying on the island for up to a month afterward is sickened.

6. Further on the monastery Val de Flores, in an abundant land with rich supplies. The leader of Val de Flores is a friar, Leonatis, whom the local savage lions respect.

7. The Port of Three Houses, a rich and beautiful land but without inhabitants and the port with no more than three houses.

8. The two hermits in the valley beyond do not know where the Earthly Paradise is, nor do the high-born women of the convent Flor de Dueñas.  but the wandering holy woman Baralides does, who only appears to the virtuous. She can give directions to the gem-encrusted castle gates of Paradise.

9. Paradise: whose porter allows a timeless glimpse of that land (Amaro spent 277 years gazing without realizing it) and gives as a gift the fruit (complete healing) or the earth (a tree planted in it will give fruit as healing potions) from the trees of paradise. You want to pry some of the gems loose? I double dare you to try...

Amaro's voyage is short, however, compared to the wilder adventures of St. Brendan, which curiously manage to cover some of the same ground. Maybe a Greater Neo-Imramm Western Sea map is in the offing?

Graphic Treasure Table, Take 1

Well, finally I have completed the treasure table for the One Page Rules. This is actually more like Take 3, as I went through several less worthy and less graphically intensive alternatives that just didn't look right. And it took a long time to grab up all these public domain images.

Click for larger version.

I'm just going to leave this out there and see what people think.  I should explain that previously in the rules, item weights are represented by weight icons (approximately 5 lb though adjusted by unwieldiness); armor types by the schematic shield icons; low-level partial +1 weapons and armor are made of various kinds of steel; and "depth" is my term that approximates "dungeon level/challenge level." Anything you don't understand? Could be better?

I will say that, played by my rules, it does a pretty good job at generating varied amounts and contents of treasure hoards, with a decided bias away from coins and the occasional hard-to-transport white elephant.