EricNoah

Ok, this blog stuff is a little more rambly than I intended, but when I see a good idea I just have to jot it down...

Paizo's recent module release, LB1: Tower of the Last Baron, features an openly known temple to Asmodeus in a small frontier town. "That's not a cult!" I hear you say -- well, stick with me a second.

The nifty bit I picked up here is the idea of "pacts." Basically, the leader (or "High Mediator") of the church makes deals with townspeople. In exchange for various favors (not really specified), townsfolk enter into agreements with the church. A suggestion spell is sort of "hung" over them, and then the High Mediator can later call on that suggestion spell as needed.

The seed of this idea works really well for a secret, lawful evil cult. There are a few different angles such a scheme could work from:

1) Enticing neutrals. Sure, most Good people would never knowingly enter into a pact with a devilish cult. But there are pleny of neutral (though possibly foolish) folk who might be willing to make such a deal.

2) Sleeper cells. Certain individuals under such a pact might be compeled to forget that they ever made the deal in the first place, or only have a vague, fuzzy notion of what it entails. If the suggestion can be triggered at a distance -- or by a set of specific circumstances -- cult leaders might very well end up with a little cell of adherents who don't even know they are ticking time bombs. Imagine some of the circumstances: "If anyone besides me asks about the cult, kill them." Or "On April 15th at midnight, put on this mask and kill so-and-so." (Oblivion players: you know those Mythic Dawn sleeper agents who live as normal folk in various towns and then suddenly morph and attack you once you've reached a certain stage of the main quest? I have that in my brain -- so maybe pacts involve not only a suggestion, but additional magical effects that could potentially disguise the cultist and maybe grant additional firepower?)

3) The source of this power could take the form of a magical book (the names and details of the pacts would be recorded here and make them magically binding), or maybe a font where the pact is spoken and the blood of those making the agreement is mingled. Perhaps the font or book also allows cult leaders to scry on their victims.

More later as I continue to muse...

As I mentioned in my intro article, I find cults to be a fascinating way to introduce a sinister element to urban D&D games. Cults make great evil organizations and their schemes are great plot devices. Their minor members are excellent minions and their major adherents make wonderful spell-casting bad guys.

I guess I need to start with a definition. For my purposes, a cult (in D&D) is a secret organization composed of seemingly normal people who have pledged their allegiance to an evil power or philosophy, and is led by a charismatic "master cultist" who has formed the cult for reasons that may be beyond what the typical cult member is aware of.

I'm sure I'll need to come back and change this definition as I learn more.

I thought I would make a list of some questions I need to answer for myself over the next few blog entries, and then link to one or two real-world resources about cults.

Questions:

1) What kind of person starts a cult? What does the cult leader get out of it? What classes, races, and/or monsters make interesting cult leaders?

2) What kind of person is drawn to joining an existing cult? What are their personality traits, flaws, typical alignments, social standings, income levels, etc.?

3) How do cult leaders and cult members keep their membership a secret?

4) How do cult leaders recruit new members?

5) What organizational structures do cults use (cells, hierarchies, etc.)? What effects do different structures have on the cult's activities?

6) Where do cults get ther financial and other resources? If the cult is hidden behind a legitimate facade, what kinds of facades work well in D&D?

7) Given that magic is real and works in D&D, what is the role of magic in a "religious" cult? What kinds of spellcasting classes work out best to represent cult underlings and cult leaders? With magic and monsters both "real" in D&D, how does a D&D cult differ from a real-world cult?

8) What are some interesting cult "themes" in D&D?

9) What are some of the basic plots or storylines that can be centered around a cult?

10) What published RPG resources are useful with regards to running cults or creating cultists with interesting powers?

Resources: The following websites make for some interesting reads. I will highlight what I learned from them (as they pertain to D&D cults) in a future entry.

• The BITE [Behavioral, Information, Thought and Emotion control] Model for understanding "destructive mind control"
  
• The Wikipedia article on cults - if nothing else, it has links to other sites and at least summarizes certain issues

Resource: Blood of Dragons: Houses

If you have the urge to run a campaign that features (or even mentions) a network of nobles entangled in vast family trees, the task of coming up with that web of relationships (and names) can be daunting. When I wanted to do so for my Western Shore campaign, I turned to Blood of Dragons: Houses, a resource found on the A Song of Ice and Fire MUSH.

Fans of George R.R. Martin will no doubt recognize many of the family names and heraldric symbols, but this MUSH is set a few generations before the timeline of the novels, and thus the individuals named are new/different as are some of the relationships between families.

Using the vast lists of houses and who belongs to them, I was able to pick out a handfull of them, alter some names and some relationships, and voila, I had the tangled feel I wanted and a big list of names as well.

Figuring out the ages of the named nobles was a bit of a challenge, since you are given their birth year and not an age. What I did was subtract their birth year from 160 to get their "current" age. (For characters who died, you can figure out how old they would have been had they lived, and you can use their death date to figure out how long ago they died).

I'm no fan of spell resistance -- I think it gets used too often, and introduces an unnecessarily complicated step in combat. Blanket magic immunity and/or resistance should be a fairly rare thing among D&D monsters -- I reserve it for creatures that really have a special "schtick" for resisting magic. For everything else, its purpose seems to be simply to toughen up the opposition, and there are other ways to do that during the game prep stage that (to me) make things work better (and create the flavor or intent I really want) during game play.

Here's the house rule I use when prepping for my 3.x game as it pertiains to creatures with SR...

1) Determine if the creature really deserves SR as part of its schtick. If not, just ignore it. Some creatures deserve immunities to certain damage types or conditions and those should be applied as warranted, instead of blanket SR.

2) If it does indeed need some heightened general magic resistance, eyeball the creature's CR and its SR. If the creature has typical SR for its challenge rating, I apply a +2 to +4 bonus to the creature's saves vs. magical effects. If the creature has a trivial SR compared to its CR, don't grant a bonus. [I worked out the math on my own some time ago and for creatures with a typical SR, a +2 to +4 simulates that extra roll, without the extra roll.]

3) For extra protection, grant the creature "Magic Evasion" -- the creature suffers no partial damage/no effect on a successful save vs. magical effects. Again, apply this sparingly.

To make this fair and workable for the PCs, I made sure to share this with them at the start of the campaign:

"For the Player: don’t take feats that improve your ability to overcome SR. It might make sense to instead focus on increasing the save DCs of your spells. If you have a class ability, spell, magic item, etc. that grants SR, go for it – as long as you are the one doing the math, I don’t care."

Welcome to Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D Blah Blah Blog.

A little background: I've played and DMed D&D in various incarnations since the late 70s. From 1999-2001 I ran Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D Third Edition News, the predecessor to EN World. I am a D&D 3.x/d20/OGL fan who is not yet ready to move on to 4E for a variety of reasons. I currently DM a 3.5 campaign and play in two others. You can see my campaign website here: [Link]

What's coming up? I'll be using this space to gather my thoughts on a few D&D 3.x related topics/projects, such as...

• All about cults -- the social and mechanical aspects of cults and cultists in a D&D 3.x game. How and why does a cult form? What kinds of personalities are drawn to a cult? What hierarchies and structures do cults use to give orders, accomplish goals, yet maintain secrecy? What RPG stories can be centered around infiltrating or destroying evil cults? I have a cultist NPC class I use to add some appropriate spellcasting to NPCs that I'll share as I tweak it.
  
• House Rules -- I'm just getting to the point where I feel I know 3.x well enough to start tweaking it, and I'll share some successes I've had in that area.
  
• Resources for Gaming -- there are lots of great free and pay resources that can help with a 3.x (or any) game, so I'll try to point folks to a few of them.

Thank you for reading and I hope to post more soon. -- Eric