Today You Need A Maltese Name Generator

As the action in my Band of Iron campaign promises to shift to the fake-Mediterranean island of fake-Malta

if Malta were brachiated instead of compact and huge instead of tiny and populated by dragons instead of rabbits and the battlefield between three faiths some of which have cannons and some of which have dinosaurs

here is an edited-down version of a list of Maltese surnames I found online. It is perfect for generating slightly off-Mediterranean nomenclature for memorable characters and gadabouts.

Click to generate in a pop-up. Copy and paste the link location for a peek at the table.

Thusly, your next five henchmen can be Medati, Cauchi, Segond, Ciarlo and Xuereb. Fiorentino is already spoken for; taken on for great toughness and a willingness to reconcile his own belief in the Platinum Dragon with his orthodox Militant boss' devotion to St. Gonsalvo.

One Page Dungeon Contest Entries!

Once again ... wow.

Some evaluations from a superficial run-through.

Joe Bloch gives us the Black Reservoir, I mean Black Lake, from Castle Greyhawk, I mean, Castle of the Mad Archmage. Yes!

Some great presentation/mechanics combinations. Outlaw Shrine in the Prehistoric Camp of the Mermen Maiden (whew); Amid the Reaper's Scattered Bones; The Shattered Temple; Bloodberries; The War of the Wolf; Island of the Lizard God; Ballad of the Bonny Bard's Booty; Castile Zela; Dire Briars; A Deadly Catch.

Some great gimmick ideas: The Crucible; The Great Stag; Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Tower of the Fox, Devil's Teapot; The Astral Prison of Urash Myrr; Bioprospecting Report 976 (not a new idea per se but a very good implementation); Follow the Gold.

Some great artistic presentations: Tower of Nicanor; Well of Souls; Stellarium of the Vinteralf; The Long Fall.

And many, many that are solid and good. I don't think I'll be wanting for one-shot adventures in the coming year.

(oh yes, there's my entry, and my article about it in case you were wondering about some of the oddly specific references)

From Dungeon Kitsch to Dungeon Camp

I was going to do some writing -- about some people's resistance to my identification of gaming aesthetics as kitsch, about how it might be more productive to think of it in terms of the warmer category of "camp." With a huge warning sign that here, we are not talking about an aesthetic mode meant to bridge the gap between masculine and feminine, but rather, between the wonder of the child and the consciousness of the adult.

Then I went to re-read Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp" and discovered that most of the things I wanted to say, she had said, and all I had to do was change "Camp" to "Gaming" and a few other words (in blue). These aphorisms out of her list of 58 are perfect. The others are too tied to specific examples, to a view of camp based in gender and sexuality, or to camp as aesthetics rather than gaming as experience, to make them work.

1. To start very generally: Gaming is a certain mode of simulation. It is one way of imagining adventure within the world. That way, the way of Gaming, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of adversity, of stylization of "awesomeness".

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Gaming sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

3. Not only is there a Gaming vision, a Gaming way of looking at things. Gaming is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "gamerly" movies, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Gaming eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Gaming. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Gaming:

MacGyver
Aurora monster models

The Transformers
Conan the Barbarian (stories, comics, film)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Kurosawa's films

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Gaming." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Iain M. Banks are Gamerly, but not those of Margaret Atwood. Many examples of Gaming are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Gaming not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Gaming (example: the major films of Guillermo Del Toro) merits the most serious admiration and study.

8. Gaming is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in dungeons, the most typical and fully developed Gaming style. Dungeons, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of skulls, the living room which is really a habitation of disguised monsters.

10. Gaming sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp" (worth 500 gp); not a woman, but a "woman" (2nd Level, Thief). To perceive Gaming in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

16. Thus, the Gaming sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Gaming. Pure Gaming is always naive. Gaming which knows itself to be Gaming is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Gaming are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Dungeon designer who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine gaming -- for instance, the encounters devised for the TSR modules of the late seventies -- does not mean to be funny. Gaming "humor"-- say, the Order of the Stick -- does.

23. In naïve, or pure, Gaming, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Gaming. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Awesome), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Gaming enthusiasm.)

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Gaming in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Gaming taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Gaming sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

41. The whole point of Gaming is to dethrone the serious. Gaming is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Gaming involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

44. Gaming proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Gamer taste cannot be overestimated. Gamer taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

53. Nevertheless, even though adolescents have been its vanguard, Gamer taste is much more than adolescent taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of adolescents. (The Gamer insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the adolescent's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if adolescents hadn't more or less invented Gaming, someone else would. (To be precise, middle-aged men did.)

55. Gaming taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Gaming is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Gaming taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Gaming taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "player character." . . . Gaming taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a game," they're enjoying it. Gaming is a tender feeling.

57. Gaming taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Dark Dungeons (the tract) and The Big Bang Theory aren't Gaming.

58. The ultimate Gaming statement: it's good because it's awesome. . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

Next 52 Introduction

I have been letting out a few of the new pages from the "Next 52"-a rules expansion for my 52 Pages system covering new classes and options. As may be apparent, the structure of the two documents mirrors the Basic and Expert sets of TSR D&D. Just as the first 52 gave a simple structure and goal for adventuring, so do the next 52 structure the next set of challenges - from a town to a realm.

Essentially, each adventure completed from player levels 4-6 should usually be set up to have consequences for the party's reputation in the eyes of one or more leaders (from 3-7 individuals who influence a realm). Have more of the leaders on your side than against you, and you can be named agents of the realm, setting you up for the level 7-9 adventures that will end with your own rulership. It's a slightly different twist on the ACKS middle and end game - you're not sent on missions per se, but you are aware - usually - of what your activities mean for those in power.

In a fit of disclosure, I'll say that neither of my ongoing campaigns are based on this template. The more story-intense one has the players bouncing long distances across the world with the vague structure of a couple of mysterious prophecies and conspiratorial organizations, while the looser one is based around the tentpole of the Castle of the Mad Archmage. So certainly 52 Pages "as written" would be a viable idea for the next campaign ...

Meanwhile, I've set myself the fun challenge of coming up with mechanics for politics, trade and domains that are as modular and simple as the 52 Pages aim to be.

Awesomeness Overload

Danger is part of the kitsch and mystique of the adventure game, as I explained previously. So is antiquity. But one thing that's medieval and dangerous but doesn't make people think "WHOA ADVENTURE" is ...dying of disease from a rat bite or plate of bad beans in a pest-hive medieval city.

Not the DMG's finest moment.

That's because disease is low, squalid, and lacks awesomeness. It's not a soul-drinking sword, a city full of dark elves, a beholder or a Tyrannosaurus or a laser gun or a rocket ship. All these awesome elements make the final piece of dungeon kitsch, of fantastic adventure overload.

It's important here to trace the slang term "awesome" back to its literal roots in the feeling of awe. There has been a lot of hand-waving and grasping at straws in psychology to explain this feeling, but its meaning and function are fairly clear. You look up, gape, eyes wide open, taking in all possible information about something that is more vast, more powerful, than you can comprehend. It is the ancient attitude of the mouse beneath the tread of the elephant: rooted to the spot, look up very carefully for the descending, unthinking foot.

Seeking out the awesome - the gigantic, the overpowered - leads in pyramidal fashion to the apex of every design hierarchy. The most powerful monsters? Beholders, dragons, liches, archdevils. The most powerful melee weapons? Vampiric, vorpal. Missile weapon? Death rays. Character class? Paladins, I guess, but they're not dangerous enough. Make them anti-paladins. Race? The drow: mysterious Monster Manual secret turned penultimate boss of the most epic dungeon adventure ever printed, with more special abilities and lost-race tech than they can really use. Animal? Dinosaur. Terrain? Mountain, or abyss, either way. Spell? Prismatic sphere - not wish; to be awesome, power has to show itself off.

Awesomeness can get mined out, though. Look what happened to that poor non-SRD apex creature, the beholder. Already given a bargain-basement undersea knockoff in the Monster Manual, things got worse over the editions as the stock got diluted so mid-level characters could have their own brush with awesomeness. Eventually things got really tragic ... yes, posting this image is hard. I'm not sure why giving the Drow a city makes them more awesome, yet giving beholders a society with all kinds of variants makes them less awesome, but the effect to me is undeniable.

Pac-Man never had this kind of identity crisis.

To avoid this dead end, there's another maneuver. The equivalent of the kitsch corner that maximizes sentimentality by combining sad clowns, big-eyed puppies, noble Natives and velvet Jesuses: the gonzo adventure.

Gonzo mines each of many different genres for its most awesome content and throws it all together. It's sometimes defined plainly as genre clash. But you won't see "gonzo" applied to something that combines Old West land rights issues, Japanese tea ceremony, prehistoric giant ferns, and science fiction moral dilemmas. You will see it applied to something that has ninjas rappelling down the Grand Canyon to fight laser-packing dinosaurs.

All this gives the adventure designer a recipe for awesomeness. Or should I say preposterawesome?

In a ...
1. gigantic mountain 2. plunging chasm 3. lava hellscape 4. humongous iceberg 5. petrified giant creature's body 6. crashed spaceship

With architecture inspired by ...
1. skulls 2. swords 3.serpents 4. spiders 5. demons 6. dragons

You fight a bunch of thematic vermin and goons, and then you come face-to-face with ...
1. a dark elf 2. a storm giant 3. a cyborg 4. a millennia-old undead 5. a dinosaur-riding 6. a death ray shooting

1. anti-paladin 2. super-sorcerer 3. arch-psionicist 4. half-demon 5. immortal leaping kung fu master 6. shadow magic ninja

Whose treasure is ...
1. a cache of ray guns 2. a life-drinking sword 3. a prosthetic hand of doom 4. a world-annihilating spell 5. a skull caked with platinum and gems 6. a cyclops idol with a single ruby eye the size of your head

Whew. To conclude the series I'll answer the questions posed by some readers, about whether the term "kitsch" does justice to this kind of game experience as lived from the inside.

Next 52: Psionicist

OK, short break from heavy aesthetic slogging. I made a psionicist class for Next 52 Pages and the rules can with little effort be ported to any other system. The spell schools are Enchantment, Divination, Alteration and Destruction (fire, force).

While making it a balanced option I have also tried to preserve the rarity and elitism of the class ("Wow, Skip! You tested psionic!") and the possibility that they open the party up to a whole new kind of attention and danger from big-brained mutations. It's not quite the long-range sensing and communication of the Hiero novels but maybe some more Divination spells in that vein could be added.

Adversity Overload

Put together unicorns, rainbow colors, pixies, moonlight and mountains and sparkles and mystery.

Art by PristineDream on Deviantart.com

Does this fit the description of dungeon adventure kitsch? Not really. This picture may be fantasy overload but it's not dungeon overload because it lacks the element of adversity - or mortal menace and danger. Adversity is what you overload to stress the element of fantasy adventure.

There's a paradox in the ways adversity can be overloaded: either by leaning on obvious signifiers of danger, or by creating an environment where danger is concealed everywhere so that the lack of danger also signifies danger. Let's consider the obvious first.

Skulls on mountains (more the merrier...)

From the D&D cartoon

Snakes and daggers on skulls (tattoo flash by Hamera@deviantart):

Swords on seats ...

Spikes, spiders, sharks, crags, blades, fangs, claws, boulders, chasms, chains, bones, wolves, dragons, fire, lava, ice, lightning, lasers ... Adversity!

Now, the other way to overload adversity has something to do with this meme going around (first spotted in the hands of Jack Holt):

Why is Westeros not somewhere you'd want to go? Because unlike the other two worlds, there is no safe and cozy space there. Adversity is part of adventure, of course, but things become overloaded when it starts to appear everywhere, when players start to take it in and see it everywhere.

Adversity kitsch fuels the killer DM legends, the elaborate traps, the "Gotcha" monsters built to subvert and punish rational player behavior. Most of all it overloads deception to create omnipresent threat in adventure design, endlessly repeated in the kind of adventure-hook cheap heat where the inn is really run by werewolves, the farmhouse is really the head of a demon, the friendly talking badger is the charmed sock puppet of the arch-lich conspiracy, and the treasure, folks, is cursed.

So adversity overload taken to the extreme would present you with this ...

Which is just an illusion, luring you in to this:

And the change in character art after 2000 or so? From facing adversity, character designs now project adversity. Today they bristle with spikes and flanged armor-blades and energy auras, whereas before they were just poor working stiff adventurers plunged into Lava Skull Mountain. But this is all by way of getting at the next and final building block of dungeon kitsch: Awesomeness ...