(un)reason
Legend
Dragon Magazine Issue 210: October 1994
part 2/6
Who's afraid of the big bad ghost: From a fairly new idea to one that's somewhat less so. How exactly do you make horror roleplaying genuinely scary? In this case, less is very definitely more. The greater the degree of uncertainty, the more players will genuinely worry about the fate of their characters. Fake dice rolls, jump scares, sensory weirdness, monsters with uncertain stats, extended periods with no combat, and the prospect of permanent loss of stats when it does occur. It's all about being mean, but in moderation, and making their imaginations do the real work. Which will only work with some players, no matter how good you are. I liked this quite a bit on first read, but there is quite a bit of stuff that's been discredited here, or at least has been made unfashionable by the many people who complain strongly whenever they feel deprotagonised. So it's not as compelling as the last article, but is more universal. Horror techniques are a lot easier to apply to games other than D&D without breaking things than easy resurrection.
Too evil to die: Tom Moldvay finally finishes his series putting new spins on all the standard D&D undead, 7 years and 5 articles later. It's always worrying to see something done sporadically, because you're never sure they'll finish it. So much can go wrong in a life, and people can change unexpectedly in ways that ruin the project, or cause it to end up substantially different to when it started. It's a nagging concern of mine as regards this thread, and why I've set it up so posts continue on a daily basis even when I'm taking a break from writing. So anyway, this is now complete, which feels pretty damn satisfying. So we now have a full 32 variant types of undead from him, more than enough to populate an Ravenloft style domain of distinctive horrors, capable of challenging people from low to high level. I think I'll call it Moldvania.
It has a nice ring to it.
Ekimmu are the restless spirits of people who never got properly buried. They possess you and then attack your buds, forcing you to do the subdual and exorcism thing. You'd better hope there's enough players free to grapple them, for they also come in groups, and you don't want to be reduced to observers to the carnage.
Casurua are ghostly horrors created by mass slaughter. They're exceedingly tough, but fortunately are not intelligent or mobile. They may well make a place pretty uninhabitable though, which won't be good for real estate prices. And just inflicting damage won't finish them off for good, either. Stuff like this is why undead make good long-term challenges.
Keres are one of the monsters that originally escaped from Pandora's box. They inflict ageing, disease and bad luck with their attacks, which means you'll probably need some serious clerical assistance after fighting one. They can transform into gnats, which makes them quite effective spies or able to pop up while you're in bed to scare you and then disappear. As with the random undead from last issue, they'd make excellent horror movie stars, especially in a threesome as they like to gather.
Charuntes are an interesting clerical variant upon liches. Vulture-headed, hammer wielding high-up servants of gods of death, they sound like they could become iconic if given a good promotional push. And if not, they can still scare the crap out of your players, especially if used in groups.
Dark Lords aren't based upon real world mythology, but a purely AD&D conceit. What happens if someone is sucked into a sphere of annihilation, but badass enough to survive and escape? A near indestructible creature of pure blackness, able to warp time and space in quite a number of versatile and scary ways, and both age you and drain levels with every hit. The only saving grace is that subtlety isn't their strong point, but these buggers could take on armies and tear down cities and are likely to be pissed off enough to try it. They very much earn the special appellation. So as expected, this final instalment is very much aimed at the high level player. Very nice to see longtime readers getting some love.
A monster in the classical traditions: Call of Cthuhu is our non D&D coverage this month. This means one of those amusing little bits of IC fiction where some poor schmuck stumbles across things that are bad for the SAN score and barely escapes with their life. Degenerate worm-things that worship Nyarlathotep? Well, if you do close-ups of real little worm things, they look pretty creepy. This definitely qualifies as an easy target. Still, it's fun, and manages to meld Cthulhu mythos bits with real world mythology bits in a manner that seems pretty seamless. Like the ecology articles, which it has a lot in common with, this both makes for a cool read and adds plenty of adventure ideas independent of system. I approve.
Geas: Oooh. This is an interesting tie-in. The Tarroka cards for Ravenloft were one of the cooler little bits and pieces included in their boxed sets. It's pretty obvious what their inspiration was, but they put a D&D spin on the tarot symbolism. With suits based on the 4 main class groups and a major arcana filled with other monsters and strangeness, it can be used for both IC fortunetelling and games. And that's exactly what they do here, with an amusing little card game they cut from the actual set for space. Assemble an adventuring party and complete quests to win the game? Sounds very similar to the premise of actual D&D. This does seem like a very niche article, as it's use is completely contingent upon having one particular supplement, and it can't be easily converted the way many of their specific world and non D&D articles can. I guess this falls into the same category as their Audio CD's, an expensive to produce and obscure frippery that helped to split the player base to a ridiculous degree, thus causing them to lose money in the long run. The kind of thing that would be given away for free on the web these days. I'm rather uncomfortable about this.
Campaign Journal: Athas is an interesting world. It's easily been the one in which they twist around the core rules of AD&D the most. (at least successfully) Which means unlike the similar Al-Qadim article this time last year, they do genuinely have some new adventure ideas. Very rarely is keeping track of water supplies crucial in other games, except for short periods in desert adventures. There would be vast amounts of bitching if you were this stingy with weapons and other resources in any other world. And while intrigue and exploration can be applied to virtually any setting, they have a very different feel here, largely because basic resources are so scarce. It's all a lot more desperate and cutthroat. It's weird how in some ways, Athasian characters are more powerful than regular ones, while in others, they're rather less, and of course they have challenges more than sufficient for them. Of course, if you put them in a crossover game, all these problems disappear rapidly once they've encountered another adventuring party, killed them, and taken their stuff. So cool ideas, including a bit of badwrongfun here. Greg Detwiler has examined the source material and put plenty of thought into this one.
part 2/6
Who's afraid of the big bad ghost: From a fairly new idea to one that's somewhat less so. How exactly do you make horror roleplaying genuinely scary? In this case, less is very definitely more. The greater the degree of uncertainty, the more players will genuinely worry about the fate of their characters. Fake dice rolls, jump scares, sensory weirdness, monsters with uncertain stats, extended periods with no combat, and the prospect of permanent loss of stats when it does occur. It's all about being mean, but in moderation, and making their imaginations do the real work. Which will only work with some players, no matter how good you are. I liked this quite a bit on first read, but there is quite a bit of stuff that's been discredited here, or at least has been made unfashionable by the many people who complain strongly whenever they feel deprotagonised. So it's not as compelling as the last article, but is more universal. Horror techniques are a lot easier to apply to games other than D&D without breaking things than easy resurrection.
Too evil to die: Tom Moldvay finally finishes his series putting new spins on all the standard D&D undead, 7 years and 5 articles later. It's always worrying to see something done sporadically, because you're never sure they'll finish it. So much can go wrong in a life, and people can change unexpectedly in ways that ruin the project, or cause it to end up substantially different to when it started. It's a nagging concern of mine as regards this thread, and why I've set it up so posts continue on a daily basis even when I'm taking a break from writing. So anyway, this is now complete, which feels pretty damn satisfying. So we now have a full 32 variant types of undead from him, more than enough to populate an Ravenloft style domain of distinctive horrors, capable of challenging people from low to high level. I think I'll call it Moldvania.
It has a nice ring to it. Ekimmu are the restless spirits of people who never got properly buried. They possess you and then attack your buds, forcing you to do the subdual and exorcism thing. You'd better hope there's enough players free to grapple them, for they also come in groups, and you don't want to be reduced to observers to the carnage.
Casurua are ghostly horrors created by mass slaughter. They're exceedingly tough, but fortunately are not intelligent or mobile. They may well make a place pretty uninhabitable though, which won't be good for real estate prices. And just inflicting damage won't finish them off for good, either. Stuff like this is why undead make good long-term challenges.
Keres are one of the monsters that originally escaped from Pandora's box. They inflict ageing, disease and bad luck with their attacks, which means you'll probably need some serious clerical assistance after fighting one. They can transform into gnats, which makes them quite effective spies or able to pop up while you're in bed to scare you and then disappear. As with the random undead from last issue, they'd make excellent horror movie stars, especially in a threesome as they like to gather.
Charuntes are an interesting clerical variant upon liches. Vulture-headed, hammer wielding high-up servants of gods of death, they sound like they could become iconic if given a good promotional push. And if not, they can still scare the crap out of your players, especially if used in groups.
Dark Lords aren't based upon real world mythology, but a purely AD&D conceit. What happens if someone is sucked into a sphere of annihilation, but badass enough to survive and escape? A near indestructible creature of pure blackness, able to warp time and space in quite a number of versatile and scary ways, and both age you and drain levels with every hit. The only saving grace is that subtlety isn't their strong point, but these buggers could take on armies and tear down cities and are likely to be pissed off enough to try it. They very much earn the special appellation. So as expected, this final instalment is very much aimed at the high level player. Very nice to see longtime readers getting some love.
A monster in the classical traditions: Call of Cthuhu is our non D&D coverage this month. This means one of those amusing little bits of IC fiction where some poor schmuck stumbles across things that are bad for the SAN score and barely escapes with their life. Degenerate worm-things that worship Nyarlathotep? Well, if you do close-ups of real little worm things, they look pretty creepy. This definitely qualifies as an easy target. Still, it's fun, and manages to meld Cthulhu mythos bits with real world mythology bits in a manner that seems pretty seamless. Like the ecology articles, which it has a lot in common with, this both makes for a cool read and adds plenty of adventure ideas independent of system. I approve.
Geas: Oooh. This is an interesting tie-in. The Tarroka cards for Ravenloft were one of the cooler little bits and pieces included in their boxed sets. It's pretty obvious what their inspiration was, but they put a D&D spin on the tarot symbolism. With suits based on the 4 main class groups and a major arcana filled with other monsters and strangeness, it can be used for both IC fortunetelling and games. And that's exactly what they do here, with an amusing little card game they cut from the actual set for space. Assemble an adventuring party and complete quests to win the game? Sounds very similar to the premise of actual D&D.
This does seem like a very niche article, as it's use is completely contingent upon having one particular supplement, and it can't be easily converted the way many of their specific world and non D&D articles can. I guess this falls into the same category as their Audio CD's, an expensive to produce and obscure frippery that helped to split the player base to a ridiculous degree, thus causing them to lose money in the long run. The kind of thing that would be given away for free on the web these days. I'm rather uncomfortable about this. Campaign Journal: Athas is an interesting world. It's easily been the one in which they twist around the core rules of AD&D the most. (at least successfully) Which means unlike the similar Al-Qadim article this time last year, they do genuinely have some new adventure ideas. Very rarely is keeping track of water supplies crucial in other games, except for short periods in desert adventures. There would be vast amounts of bitching if you were this stingy with weapons and other resources in any other world. And while intrigue and exploration can be applied to virtually any setting, they have a very different feel here, largely because basic resources are so scarce. It's all a lot more desperate and cutthroat. It's weird how in some ways, Athasian characters are more powerful than regular ones, while in others, they're rather less, and of course they have challenges more than sufficient for them. Of course, if you put them in a crossover game, all these problems disappear rapidly once they've encountered another adventuring party, killed them, and taken their stuff. So cool ideas, including a bit of badwrongfun here. Greg Detwiler has examined the source material and put plenty of thought into this one.
