Dungeon of Signs' Characters I Want to Play (part 1)

The Dungeon of Signs blog has officially stopped updating. Which makes this a good time to revisit some of the author's, Gus L's, best ideas, or at least the ideas I liked best. This is something I could, perhaps should, have done sooner. This first post will be about character creation ideas from the Dungeon of Signs.

Most of these ideas come from Gus L's HMS Apollyon campaign, which was probably his longest-running series of posts. He also wrote ideas for the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, an Underdark exploration campaign, and his take on OD&D, the Fallen Empire - all of which I'll talk about later - but most of what he wrote was for campaigns set in a megadungeon-sized ship, lost in some extradimensional sea (including a high-class fop-slaughter campaign that I'm especially fond of). HMS Appollyon is one of the OSR settings that's inspired me most, and it's one of the closest matches to my own aesthetic, alongside the original out-of-print Engines & Empires, Heriticwerk's Wermspittle, Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque's now-deleted pre-2013 gothic campaign ideas, and Into the Odd's Electric Bastionland, all set in a kind of fantastical, urban, long-19th-century rather than the Dark-Age-Medieval-Renaissance pastiche that forms the default D&D setting. It occurs to me as I write this that I haven't done much in this aesthetic in some time. (It's also not lost on me that two of my inspirations no longer exist on the internet, and exist for me at all anymore as a handful of downloads and memories.) The endings of things always feel melancholy.

Let's start with fighter skills. In this system, fighters can only use weapons they're skilled with, and as they improve their skills, they both fight better and learn new kinds of attacks. Later, I believe Gus L switched to a system that combines X-in-6 skills with X-out-of-6 tiered abilities, so some or all of what he wrote here may have been reincorporated into the tier system, but this is a starting point.

For me, when I first saw this, there was something revelatory about the idea that a character improving their skill in something didn't just become more likely to succeed, they also gained new abilities related to that thing. At that point, the only other model I'd seen was D&D 3.0/3.5, where characters could take feats that lets them use their skills to do new things, such as tacking the Tracking feat to use the Wilderness Survival skill to follow tracks. In retrospect, Gus L's approach reminds me a little of Tekumel, where a warrior starts out knowing how to use spears, maces. and axes, and learns to use swords, slings, bolas, etc by gaining levels. But at the time, this was my first exposure to the idea, and it expanded my ideas about what was possible in this game.

Ship's steward by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

 
Thieves on the HMS Apollyon follow a code like the Vory, living by stealing, refusing to do honest work or cooperate with law-enforcement, and they all have tattoos documenting their careers. Alongside thieves are assassins, dirty fighters, "murderous thieves,pretty much the most antisocial character class one can play." Specialist characters can become engineers, who learn to use grenades, fix machines, and pilot "boiler plate", which is robotic/cybernetic armor somewhere between the original Iron Man suit and steampunk mecha. Gus L's original version of thief skills include weapons and armor like the fighter, but instead of tactics, fortitude, and agility, they have the option to learn the full array of typical thieving skills, alongside business skills like appraisal, wilderness skills like animal training, and magic skills like hedge magic and huckster faith. His revised version of thief skills is intended to work alongside the tiered-ability system I mentioned earlier.

The idea that D&D thieves could be modeled on specific, historical real-world criminals was a new idea when I first read this, and alongside Land of Nod pointing out that D&D's magic-user spells are based on real world occult beliefs, and that D&D's cleric spells are based on miracles described in the Bible, it opened up my own ideas about how to use real-world ideas to inspire gaming material. Thieves as Vory is still my favorite version of the classic "thieves guild" idea, too.

Clerics in Gus L's games don't just have a few spells determined by their deity or domain, they have all their spells determined that way. Much like wizards in the GLOG, each deity's clerics gets their own spell list. Actually, if I understand correctly, they each get three spell lists, since each deity gets three avatars, and each avatar offers a list of spells. Gus L's first take on this was for clerics who worship animal-gods or primal-gods. These spells were mostly reskins of existing spells, a spell to detect secret doors becomes "Sight into the Hidden World," and a spell to summon a familiar becomes "Avatar of the Great Ones." His next spell list was for clerics who worship rats, and this was the first time he wrote using the three-avatar approach. These are also mostly new spells, mostly based on rat-like abilities. "Speak with Rats" is basically a more limited version of a spell to talk to animals, but something like "Insignificance Charm," is more unique to rat priests. He wrote three posts with spells for clerics in his HMS Apollyon setting who worship the leviathan, clerics who worship a force of primal chaos that threatens to sink their city and drown the residents. The first post was about the whirlpool as an avatar for the leviathan, the second was about the brine witch avatar, and the third about the leviathan's devouring maw as a kind of synecdochal avatar for the whole beast.

Gus L imagined lawful clerics too. He thought clerics on the Apollyon might worship the ship itself. Likewise, in this Fallen Empire setting, he imagined clerics who worshiped the empire, which is really very similar to real-world kingdoms where the king is worshiped as a god. He also had a larger vision for the religious landscape in his HMS Apollyon setting, and house rules for clerical turning power.

Imperial cultist by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

Illusionists in Gus L's games are halfway between wizards and thieves. He also allowed magic-users to specialize as necromancers (not surprising, given his interest in the undead), and as alchemists. As he did for fighters and thieves, he wrote a list of skills for magic-users. He thought it was important to reskin the "magic missile" spell so that each caster manifested their power in a different way, and he wrote a similar reskin list for the "lightning bolt" spell.

He also wrote a more detailed reskin for the "floating disc" spell, wherein an earth elemental takes the form of a bronze frog, swallows up your treasure, hops along beside you for the spell's duration, and then vomits it back out onto the floor. It's an evocative image for a spell that otherwise bores me, and it raises an important idea. If your spellcasters are using Vancian magic and can only memorize one copy of each spell, then a variant version of an existing spell becomes a valuable treasure, because it becomes a way to cast the same spell twice. Even a relatively mundane spell can become somewhat interesting when you describe it well and when scarcity lends it value. (Needless to say, "floating disc" also becomes more valuable if you track encumbrance in some way, or if you find treasures too big to carry by human hands, both of which were features of Gus L's campaigns, at least according to his play reports.)

The HMS Apollyon setting includes a handful of monstrous character classes. The first is the merrowman, a kind of catfish-like humanoid. Merrowmen started out as a monstrous NPC faction, but Gus L later decided to make them playable characters. The notable thing about merrowmen is that they're biomancers. They grow weapons and armor out of dead bodies, rather than manufacturing them by conventional means, and while these are usually of standard quality, he hints that they might occasionally grow powerful magical items this way. The other cold-blooded, magic-using, anthropomorphic animal class on the Apollyon is the frogling. Instead of grotesque body horror magic, though, froglings are elementalists.

I love the idea that while there are both fish-people and frog-people, they are totally different from one another, almost seeming to come out of two different sf/f genres. Merrowmen embody some kind of New Weird, biopunk, body-horror aesthetic, while froglings are more like young-adult, high-fantasy Pokemon catchers. The minigame of raising the rank of your pet elemental by having it defeat and eat wild elementals feels very videogamey, but in a good way. Gus L's descriptions of the wild elementals aboard the HMS Apollyon is also one of my favorite things he's written. Consider just this sample description of two variant types of water elementals:

"Abyss - Strange and powerful elementals formed from the highly compressed waters of the deep sea. Considerably denser and stronger than normal water elementals, any creature captured within them will be crushed by the terrible pressure that their waters contain. Weed - Elementals that have taken in enough earth essence to spawn life within themselves and are full of algae and weeds. The plant life perhaps links these creatures more closely to the material plane, but as a practical matter it allows them to choke and entangle in addition to the normal pummeling and drowning attacks of a water elemental."

Reading this makes me feel like there should be some classes that act like Pokemon hunters. Those games are popular for a reason, and having a character who catches and raises pet monsters creates a source of motivation that's necessary if you want to have player-driven sandbox play. Having a minigame to increase the ranks, or tiers, of some ability that's separate from level progression seems to be very typical of Gus L's vision for D&D. Also typical is the way that merrowmen have three subclasses, one warrior-like, one thief-like, and one mage-like. This is something that shows up again and again in his writing, including the last character class he posted, for playing vikings. Another innovation, and one I also like, is Gus L's way of handling ability score modifiers. Starting from AD&D forward, D&D games have included paired +2/-2 modifiers for non-human ability scores. Instead, Gus L recommends that for abilities where the non-human is likely worse than humans, they roll 2d6+1 instead of 3d6, for abilities where they are very average roll 2d6+3, and for abilities where they are likely to excel compared to humans, they roll 2d6+6. It's a different way of handling the same idea, but one I rather like, especially because it keeps all scores within the 3-18 range.

Merrowman by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

Frogling by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

The other non-human character classes Gus L makes available are the passenger, a kind of nobility that inherits its status and right to receive service from its ancestors first-class tickets back when the Apollyon was an earth-bound vessel. Since then, they've intermarried with demons and other supernatural entities to maintain their stature and their wealth, making them a bit like elves or tieflings. If there's going to be a noble character class, it seems like there should be a servant class as well, and there is: flying monkeys. I don't quite know why or how Gus L chose flying monkeys to be livery-wearing bellhops aboard his ship, but they're a perfect fit, although I suspect they make better hirelings than player characters. The final option is the draugr, an undead class.

Flying monkey by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

In addition to his character classes, Gus L also wrote a random starting appearance table for characters on the Apollyon (who might be drawn from seafarers from many eras, on many worlds) and rules for gaining and using reputation (see what I mean about minigames to increase tiers/ranks being typical in his work?) Driving home the diverse origins of Apollyon residents is a d100 table for hirelings and their personality quirks, as well as another one especially for passenger-class characters, and rules for buying a dog.

While Gus L's own non-human character classes help to define their setting, he also wrote interpretations of horrible halflings, horrible dwarves, and horrible elves - all ostensibly for the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, but they're so evocative they're likely to color your view of the awful demihumans in any game you play. I especially like his take on dwarves as a society of debt-prisoners, ruled over by the few, rich, debt-holder dwarves. Why are dwarves gruff, surly workaholics who're obsessed with gold and jewels? According to Gus L, it's because they're desperate to pay off their hereditary debt. I even like his account of why dwarves have beards. The few debt-holder dwarves are all clean-shaven, but if any debtor dwarf so much as trims his own beard, it's likely to get a kind of "if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean," reaction from his debt-holder, including some kind of bump of interest rate, balloon payment, or other reprisal.

The final character contributions I want to talk about from the Dungeon of Signs are Gus L's meditations on character competence and character death. The two are related. Old versions of D&D are highly lethal - hit points are few, combat is deadly, skills are unlikely to succeed, hazards are save or die, and in an open world, there's nothing but good information gathering preventing players from wandering into a situation far beyond their ability to handle. Characters will die, often. How should the players, and the judge, understand the meaning of that situation? My preferred answer is slapstick black comedy, but Gus L offers a different answer:

"The idea that dying to everyday horrible like banditry, bar fights, ergot madness, food poisoning and disease is commonplace suggests that dying to poisoned spikes and the rusty weapons of the unquiet dead is at least somewhat glamorous and perhaps a better fate then what awaits characters who decide to stay at home. ... The first level fighter is a 'veteran' - a warrior and slayer of men on distant dusty battlefields, hard to frighten, adept with tactical stratagem, knowledgeable about ambush and survival. The first level thief knows every dire mechanism that the merchant houses use to protect their wealth, has a fair grasp of standard poisons with the danger sense and ferocity of a startled alley cat. Magic-users are learned, filled with powerful secrets and observant and clerics blessed and protected by divine favor.  Yet the hazards of the underworld are far more dangerous then back alley brawls with hardened toughs, and the depths monstrous strangeness far more terrifying then breaking the final desperate shield wall of a band of sea raiders pursued back to their longship. The alternative is to view the characters as complete incompetents, weak willed, unskilled at the arts they profess and incapable of basic survival without specific player input. ... One must take the player's word that their characters are not incompetent wastrels and act accordingly."

Of course, all of this isn't advice for avoiding character death, not really. It's advice for avoiding capricious character death as a result of "killer GM-ing," but the in old-style D&D character deaths will happen. A lot. What Gus L has is not advice for avoiding character death, it's advice for making sense of it, making it fair, accepting it. He has three good articles about it. In one sense, they're just articles about what to do when your pawn gets captured in fantasy chess. But in another sense, they're articles about how to deal with loss, about what to do when some part of your shared imaginary world, something that exists only so long as you keep talking about it together, what to do when that comes to an end.