Investigations in DCC

I mentioned before that I'm going to be taking over as the head writer for Discerning Dhole's CRAWL-thulhu zine. I haven't made many decisions about the future direction of the zine yet, but I know I want it to be set in a fictionalized Gilded Age (encompassing roughly the period from 1880-1945) and I know I want it to focus on mystery investigations.

Which has got me thinking more generally about the question, how do you conduct investigations in DCC? How do you handle skills? How do you handle clues?

Zine by John Potts, cover and interior art by Todd McGowan

CRAWL-thulhu issue 1 has a mystery investigation adventure, but basically everyone is willing to talk to you, and all the clues are laying out in the open. The core mysteries arise from the fact that a key witness is dead and a key source of danger is invisible. Essentially any character should be equally likely to solve the mystery - deciding where to go, what to look at, who to talk to are all tests of player skill instead.

But often in mystery investigation games, there's an element of character skill involved instead. The basic idea being that not every character should be able to find every clue. Even in Trail of Cthulhu (and related games) where any character with the right skill can find a clue automatically just by asking for it, they still have to have the skill, and they still have to ask if there's a clue. In the original Call of Cthulhu, you not only need to have the skill and ask to use it, you also have to roll the dice to see if you succeed at finding it. This introduces an element of ambiguity - was there really no clue there? or was there a clue but you failed to find it? (I'll talk about some possible solutions to the "what if they don't find ANY of the clues?" problem at the end. Dungeon Crawl Classics HAS a skill system that involves rolling dice already - so I'm NOT going to propose adopting Trail of Cthulhu's diceless skills.)

CRAWL-thulhu issue 2 introduces skills, and the list would look pretty familiar to players of both D&D and Call of Cthulhu.

There are a few other people who've written rules for conducting investigations in DCC, so I'm going to look at Brent Ault's Cyber Sprawl Classics, Stephen Bean's Bloody Hound character class for Julian Bernick's Nowhere City Nights, and Paul Wolfe's Dark Seas. Luckily for us, these are all freely available online, so they're very easy to look at.

In DCC, there are two types of skills - the named, formal skills practiced by Thieves, and the unnamed, informal skills that every character learns from their zero-level occupation. A Thief's formal skills can usually be substituted by an ability score check - although the Thief might roll against a lower DC, and always benefits from a bonus determined by her alignment and level. The informal occupational skills are considered either "trained" or "untrained" - and about a dozen occupations are likely to be considered "trained" for any particular task. Untrained characters roll a d10 to attempt the skill, while trained characters roll a d20. So using a trained skill in DCC is basically the same as making an ability score check.

CRAWL-thulhu's skills build on this framework. All skills start out untrained, and you can roll a d10 to attempt them. You get one trained skill from your occupation, and you can roll a d20 for that. As you gain levels, you earn "skill points" that you can either use to train in untrained skills, or to improve your training in a trained skill - becoming an expert who rolls a d24 or a master who rolls a d30.

There are two really basic ways to find clues in a mystery investigation - talking to people, and finding / analyzing objects.

There are also two really basic dangers to designing skills for a mystery investigation. The first is having too few skills - most people would agree that a single "Clue" skill is too few, and likewise that a "People" skill and an "Objects" skill is still not enough. The second danger is having too many skills. Consider the question of talking to people - if each PC occupation could only talk to NPCs in the same occupation, then surely having 100 different "Talk to Person of the Same Occupation" skills is too many. (A third basic danger is making the skill tests too difficult, which is related to the "what if they don't find ANY of the clues?" problem I'll discuss at the end.)

Zine by Brent Ault, Cover art by Korotitskiy Igor

In Cyber Sprawl Classics (CSC), player characters know Etiquettes that help them talk to NPCs. CSC treats Etiquettes a bit like foreign languages - everyone knows the common tongue, but you need a positive Intelligence modifier, a Lucky Sign, or a class feature in order to learn an Etiquette. If you are smart or lucky enough to know an Etiquette, you get to roll a d24 when speaking to the relevant NPCs, instead of the standard d20. So in this game, everyone is "trained" to talk to everyone else, but if you know the relevant "foreign language," then you become a bit of an expert.

There are seven Etiquettes - Academic (for talking to scientists and doctors), Corporate (for talking to CEOs and white-collar workers), Gang (for talking to criminals), Security (for talking to police and military), Runner (for talking to hackers), Socialite (for talking to "industrialists" and "the elite"), and Street (for talking to blue-collar workers and people who provide services to criminals.)

If that list sounds familiar to you, it's probably because it's so similar to the list of backgrounds available in 5e and the GLOG. Before looking at what other DCC writers were doing, I made a list of the way I would divide up Gilded Age society, and CSC's list is very similar to what I came up with. It's probably very similar to the list you would come up with, if you were thinking about how to divide virtually any Western society.

If I were to alter CSC's list, I think I would combine the Corporate and Socialite Etiquettes. In the Gilded Age, "society" was basically synonymous with the corporate elite and their families. That might be different in a cyberpunk game - indeed, in such a game, it might even make sense to have two skills for talking to the same person in two different environments, at work and at leisure. I might also do away with the Runner Etiquette, or combine it with Gang, since there isn't really any group analogous to hackers in a Gilded Age setting, and since the motives of any analogous individuals would be essentially criminal.

I like "etiquette" as the name for this kind of skill though. I'd thought of calling them "interaction skills," but I think "etiquette skills" might sound better.

There's also a question of how common these skills should be among characters. In 5e and the GLOG, essentially every character starts with one Etiquette due to their background. In CSC, only a fraction of characters know any Etiquettes. In the heroic fantasy of 5e, character backgrounds are mostly relevant for receiving material support from NPCs, and the support most NPCs provide is food and shelter, and perhaps friendship with a specific faction. In CSC, Etiquettes might have many uses, but they're optional, a bonus. You get along fine without them, you just get along better if you have them. But "etiquette skills" could be treated as a skill like any other, a skill that you could either be "untrained" or "trained" in - but doing that changes something else fundamental about how social skills work though.

If everyone has an "etiquette skill" (or, what amounts to the same thing, if not everyone has one, but nobody needs one) then it's possible to have other social skills as well - separate skills for persuading people, for tricking them, or for intimidating them. Those are the kinds of social skills we're pretty used to seeing. But, if not everyone starts the game with an "etiquette skill" and every NPC needs you to have one, then I don't think you can have separate "traditional" social skills as well. If the party wants to blackmail a robber baron, I think it's too much to ask for them to have both a "corporate etiquette" and a "blackmail skill."

So the question becomes, which is more interesting for a mystery investigation game? Is it more interesting if you have a skill to interact with corporate types in whatever way you please? Or is it more interesting if you have a skill to blackmail any NPC you come across? Which leads to more interesting dilemmas if you don't have the skill? Is it more interesting if you have "academic etiquette" and you have to try to find a scientist who can talk to the robber baron for you? Or is it more interesting if you have "intimidation skill" and you have to find someone you can bully into setting up the blackmail?

Roleplaying games, including D&D, including Call of Cthulhu, have traditionally answered the latter - that it's more interesting to use character skills to define a particular approach and then let the PC use that approach on any kind of NPC they want. But part of me wonders if it might not be interesting to try the former. Perhaps it's more interesting to use skills to define a kind of NPC and then let the players use whatever approach is situationally appropriate - but only on the correct kind of NPC. At least for a mystery investigation game, where (paradoxically) the whole point of skills is to not let every character find every clue. To misquote Maslow, if all you have is a Seduction skill, every NPC looks like a nail. But if the only kind of NPCs you can talk to are workers, then perhaps it forces you to get creative to figure out what happened inside that share-holders meeting.

Nowhere City Nights by Julian Bernick, Bloody Hound by Steven Bean

The "Bloody Hound" character class (BH) is an investigator character that Steven Bean wrote for Nowhere City Nights and published in the 2017 Gongfarmer's Almanac, volume 7. BH includes six skills for mystery investigations. The Bloody Hound character class gets all six, every other character gets a single skill based on their background.

BH's skills are Search Scene (for finding clues within a crime scene), Analyze Physical Evidence (for learning information from objects), Analyze Medical Evidence (for learning information from dead bodies, primarily), Interrogate - Charm (for making people want to talk to you), Interrogate - Intimidate (for making people talk to you even though they don't want to), and Conduct Surveillance (for staking out a person or location to see what happens.)

In terms of the effects of skills, BH distinguishes between finding a clue (with a "clue" here meaning an fact from an interrogation or an object discovered at a crime scene), making a deduction (which means analyzing the fact/object to learn what it tells you), and discovering an answer (which refers to piecing together several deductions to solve the mystery, or at least an important part of it.) So for example, finding a shell casing next to a murder victim would be "finding a clue," figuring out what kind of gun fired that bullet would be "making a deduction," and realizing who the shooter is would be "discovering an answer." Note that to discover the answer, you would need another strand of the investigation that tells you what type of gun a specific person has, so that you could later discover that that person is the shooter. BH also awards XP for each of these activities.

So BH makes a few key distinctions. First, it distinguishes between finding a clue and learning something from the clue. Those are two separate steps, and it's important for anyone adopting this approach to keep in mind that adding a step increases the chance of failure, especially if adding a step means adding a dice roll. Difficulty Classes that look intuitively too low individually can easily become too high collectively if you make ultimate success contingent on succeeding each roll in sequence.

Second, BH distinguishes between clues from objects and clues from talking to people. It does this in two ways. First the obvious - you use one set of skills to find and analyze objects, and a second set to learn information from NPCs. But second, and less obviously, you only have deductive skills related to objects. You make one roll to find an object at a crime scene, and a second roll to learn something from it. But when conducting an interrogation, you make one roll to learn a fact, and then ... It's possible that you make a second roll on the same interrogation skill to get the person to tell you what you deduce from the clue. It's also possible that making deductions from verbal clues is a player skill, and not a character skill.

I agree that "discovering an answer" - that is, finally solving the mystery - should be a player skill that doesn't rely on rolling the dice. I'm not sure if I agree that "making a deduction" should be a player skill, or at least, not always. Some information NPCs give you is going to be clearly useful. It will either already be a deduction, or it will clearly point to a deduction that the players can make. But if an NPC tells the players something, and they just have no idea what to do with that information, it seems like it might be nice to have some mechanism in place to let them ask the judge for help. The danger of that is players relying on that mechanism instead of their own thinking, or judges insisting on that mechanism even when the players are able to deduce on their own. If you don't create such a mechanism, then no one can abuse it. But also, no one can use it in a real emergency. I guess it's the same problem you run into with traps in D&D, where it's inherently ambiguous whether you should find them with player skill or character skill, and where any GM hoping to rely on player skill is at the mercy of the adventure writer to provide enough detail to make that possible. (Although we're veering into "what happens if they don't find ANY of the clues?" territory here, so let's come back to this.)

What I find especially useful in the "Bloody Hound" class description is the idea that learning from clues in a mystery investigation is a two-step process, and that it might be profitable to separate those steps.

Dark Seas by Paul Wolfe

Dark Seas (DS) is a mini-setting with it's own fairly complete set of rules modifications that Paul Wolfe wrote and published in the 2017 Gongfarmer's Almanac, volume 4. 2017 was a good year for DCC mysteries! DS doesn't have any specialized skills for investigation, but what it does have is a really excellent interpretation of clues and how to use them.

Let me start with what I consider to be the key takeaway, and then back up. Every clue is an object. You might find some clues by talking to people and other clues by looking around the environment, but what you GET when you find a clue, what you KEEP once you have it, is a physical object. Like any other object, it goes in your character inventory.

But what that means for a mystery game, is that when you want to take stock of your investigation so far, you don't have to wrack your brain trying to remember every detail, you just look through your inventory and see which clue-objects are there. If you need help remembering what a particular clue told you, you just ask the GM to describe the object again. All this is probably easier than tracking ephemeral bits of information that are untethered from any specific reminder. I think this is brilliant, and I definitely plan to take Paul's advice.

So technically, in DS, Paul doesn't talk about "clues" but rather about Secrets. As mentioned, each secret takes the form of a physical object. Players collect Fragments like treasures as they explore - and 10 fragments combine to form one secret. In the example adventure, characters can collect fragments by doing things like searching a dead body, gathering rumors in a bar, inspecting magic items, questioning NPCs, they can be acquired like treasure from defeated monsters, and they're a reward for finding islands. The number of fragments acquired at one time is generally random, and is usually somewhere on the order of 1d10 fragments per investigative activity (although sometimes you get a full secret at one go).

I don't know if I would use this approach, but it encourages players to search as many places as possible, and it means that you don't need to know the meaning of every fragment, only the meaning of the final secret (clue) once it's assembled. And, you get to pick which secret you give them, which could maybe avoid the problem of finding a lot of clues hinting at one thing, while missing all the clues hinting at something else. Some examples of secrets in DS are port reports and charts of the sea, but also ghost stories and chess moves. Each character begins the game with a "starting secret" that grants them one boon, so for example you can have a political pamphlet that gives you an NPC contact, a last will and testament that gives you money, or a racy novel that gives you a bonus on certain saving throws.

I'm not completely convinced the experience system in DS would really work in practice the way Paul seems to want it to. When characters find fragments, they divvy them up, each character gets their own secret at 10 fragments. Characters earn XP for secrets - although not for finding them, but rather for divulging them to an NPC confessor. I think you're supposed to need a new NPC for each secret, although that could add up quickly. Raising 4 PCs from 0th level to 1st level would take 40 secrets and 40 NPCs ... which feels like kind of a lot. Starting secrets also need to be divulged in order to earn their benefit, which seems more appropriate. I'm quibbling over details at this point though - the big takeaway that every clue is an object is still absolutely brill.
 

Zine by John Potts, cover and interior art by Todd McGowan

 
Finally, as promised, let's address the question "what happens if they don't find ANY of the clues?" How are you supposed to run a mystery if there's a chance that the players won't find, or won't be able to interpret, ANY of the clues that are left for them?

1) First, and most obvious, give lots of of clues. The Alexandrian famously recommends including a minimum of 3 clues for any conclusion you want your players to draw.

The point is that in order for there to be ENOUGH clues for the players, there need to be what feels like TOO MANY clues from the perspective of the judge. The judge can see everything, the players will only ever experience a fraction of it. The judge also knows all the answers from the outset, and so can instantly see how each clue points to each conclusion. The players are assembling a mental image piece-by-piece, and it's not always immediately clear where each piece goes.

2) Second, provide multiple sites of investigation. Give the players several distinct places to go look for clues. Following the Alexandrian's advice again, at every site, leave clues pointing to the final solution AND clues pointing to the other investigative sites.

Realizing that there's another place to go look can feel like a discovery in itself, and leaving one site to go to another can feel like forward progress is being accomplished. Movement between sites also passes some time that gives the players a chance to think, and creates opportunities for new information to become available.

3) Third, use the random encounter table to provide breaks in the case. Mysteries don't necessarily need wandering monsters the way other D&D adventures do, but random encounters are still useful for pacing and for marking the passage of in-game time.

Each day that passes with no solution to the mystery, allow events to be in motion. Maybe the criminal keeps committing similar crimes. Maybe the criminal gets spooked and engages in some kind of cover-up. Maybe new witnesses come forward. Maybe new sites for investigation are revealed. Maybe an NPC investigator got killed but left a diary behind. These random events provide verisimilitude, they can be a way to just GIVE the players a clue they might need, and they should almost always open up some new avenue for investigation that wasn't available before.

4) Fourth, speaking of just giving the players clues, sometimes just GIVE the players clues. Sometimes don't require a skill check. Sometimes just let the clue be sitting right out in the open, so all the players have to do is say they want to look at it. Sometimes let the witness be perfectly willing to talk, so all the players have to do is say they want to talk to them. Sometimes, the barrier of the players having to notice that they want to look at something or talk to someone is going to be enough without getting the dice involved at all.

Alternatively, if you're going to require a skill check to find the clue, then consider just TELLING the players what it means. You want to be a little careful with this, because you don't want to rob your players of the chance to exercise their player skill at solving mysteries, BUT if you're going to require a skill check to FIND the clue in the first place, then maybe don't require a second check to discover the meaning of the clue.

Always be careful not to set your skill check DCs too high, and be DOUBLY careful not to make the checks too difficult by requiring multiple rolls to succeed. What sounds like "this is an appropriate test of skill" to a person just READING the adventure will often turn out to be too difficult to people actually playing through it. What sounds like "this is way too easy" to someone who's just reading will often turn out to be appropriately difficult for actual players. Set your DCs for players, not for readers. And wherever you set your DCs, make the reward proportionate to the difficulty. If you need one check to find the clue and another to research it, then the reward for those paired successes had better be a REALLY GOOD CLUE so that the players' efforts are worthwhile.

5) Fifth, give the players multiple opportunities to find and interpret each clue. If they fail once, give them a second try. If one approach comes up short, let them attempt another.

Use these multiple attempts to create the narrative of the adventure. Maybe the first time the PCs search a room, they try just looking around very carefully during a house party. If that fails, they can try searching a second time, but they have to try a different approach. Perhaps they try breaking in and tearing the room apart looking for secrets. Perhaps they hire a professional burglar to search the room for them. Make sure there are narrative consequences for whatever approach they choose. The first attempt requires getting invited to the house party and roleplaying interactions with the other guests. The second attempt is sure to tip off the house owner that somebody's on to them. Hiring a burglar is going to require using criminal etiquette to make contact with the local underworld.

If a character can't interpret the meaning of a clue, let them try again if they can get access to a library or a lab. Or let them find an NPC who can interpret it for them. NPCs don't need to make skill checks. Picking the right NPC to ask, and using your etiquette skill to ask them, is difficult enough. There's no reason to add another chance of failure by making the NPC roll the dice as well.

The point is, failing once shouldn't mean failing forever. Players should have multiple clues they could find, multiple ways to get information out of each clue, and multiple ways to "get help" if they find they can't do it alone.

6) And finally, what happens if they can't find any of the clues? Let them fail. Give the whole mystery some kind of time limit. Create consequences for failing to solve it. And if the players fail, let them fail. The killer keeps on killing. The burglar pulls of their heist. The sorcerer summons the monster. The monster destroys the city and slinks back into the ocean.

If you've provided lots of clues, made them easy to find and easy to interpret, allowed second chances for anything the players want to try again at? Then let them fail. Just make sure their failure is legible. At least let them understand the solution to the mystery when they see what happens as a result of them not stopping it. Nothing's going to be less satisfying than having the mystery end and STILL not understanding what happened. If the players don't stop the villain, then at least let them watch the villain take their mask off, or gloat in triumph, or commit one final crime right before their eyes.

At that point, you've created a recurring villain, and a chance for your players to shout "I'll get you next time, my pretty!" When the villain DOES recur, the players have a much better shot at stopping them the second time around. Or, if they're very proactive, they can start planning to bring the pain directly to the villain's doorstep. Either way, failure in one case can be made to simply raise the stakes and make another case more interesting.

Overland Maps - Gridcrawl, Chromatic, Mars

Lately I find myself wishing my campaigns were set someplace a little better defined. For awhile now I've been running a very episodic campaign that started in one town, then relocated to another, and then another. I have no idea where those town are in relation to each other, no idea what other towns might be nearby, no idea what terrain lies between or around them.

And this has sort of worked okay so far, but lately it's also got me feeling like I want more definition from my setting. I want the "sense of place" that comes from knowing where you are and knowing what's around you. I want the opportunities that come from having a sandbox for my players to traverse and explore. I want an overland map.

Let's look at a few examples of overland maps I've seen recently that I've liked.

First, and most recent is the unnamed map Edward Kann posted to the Forbidden Lair of the OSR MeWe group. He calls it "wilderness map done in gridcrawl style". I like it. It's simple, hand-drawn, unconventional for being on a grid instead of a hexmap, and something about it captures my imagination. It pleasantly reminds me of the maps from the old Legend of Zelda games, and other 8-bit overworlds.
 

Wilderness Gridmap by Edward Kahn

 

Legend of Zelda map from NES Maps

Next are a couple maps by Evlyn Moreau of Le Chaudron Chromatique. Evlyn has a couple maps I want to show off. Her most recent is a keyed map of a lake and its surrounding environs. I particularly love the way the black-circle numbers break through the edge lines as they lead you on a meandering tour around the lake. It reminds me, for some reason, of Tom Gauld's map of his home.
 

Lacustres Map by Evlyn Moreau

 

Map of the Area Surrounding Our Holiday Home by Tom Gauld

 
The other map of Evlyn's that I find really inspiring right now is her Doodle Map. This one is more colorful and more whimsical, with more obvious landmarks. Again, it's a pointcrawl, rather than being tied to a grid or a hexmap. This one feels more like something that might accompany a Mario game from the 16-bit, SNES era. It's full of skulls and snails and mushroom houses, and other interesting details. I should point out that if you go to the sidebar of Evyln's blog, she's got a link to free PDFs of Lacustres and Doodle Map as well as her other books, as well as a link to her Lulu storefront.
 

Doodle Map by Evlyn Moreau

Super Mario World Map from Mario Universe

 
Finally, I like Aos from Metal Earth's map of the Bad Canyon region from his forthcoming B/X Mars book. Compared to the Wilderness Gridmap and the Doodle Map, this is much smaller in scale, much closer to the Lacustres Map in terms of the geography covered. Like Evyln's second map though, Aos has included a number of interesting landmarks to draw the players' attention. The canyon setting is also a neat way to put literal walls around the sandbox setting, rather than making it an island, or requiring informal agreement to stay within the bounds of the map.
 

Bad Canyon Map by Aos

 

Should we Start Numbering Hallways on our Maps?

I was thinking about Diogo Noguiera's now-famous post "How to Never Describe a Dungeon!"

If you haven't read it, you might like to. He makes a persuasive argument. I'll summarize.

There are two ways to describe a dungeon hallway. One way is bad and, you should never do it. The other way is good, and you should try to do it every time.

The bad way is like this: "You get to a intersection and there is a door to the north and two passages, one going east and one going west."

The good way is like this: "If the corridor in the east leads to a natural cavern covered with mushrooms and myconids, maybe when the PCs look down that passage they will see a dim fluorescent light that emanates from the weird moss that lives there, and feel a light cool breeze flowing from that direction. Some moss may be growing in that corridor also. If to the west there is a nest of giant spiders, that corridor will certainly have more cobwebs covering it than the other passages they have been through, and some of them are still vibrating, as if something alive is touching the web."

The bad way is bad because it prevents the players from making an informed decision. With no information to base their decision on, they might as well roll the dice to decide which way to go. They might as well be in a straight railroad.

The good way is good because it supplies information that lets players make meaningful, informed decisions. Rather than a simple toss-up between "left or right" or "heads or tails" they have a real choice between moss and cobwebs, and whatever each implies about what's at the end of each hallway. (I would add, this approach also encourages players to use the information available to them to try to draw conclusions, and it rewards them for thinking ahead, by hopefully supplying them with a safer or more favorable path through the dungeon.)

I feel like Diogo has persuaded me, but what I'm thinking about is how to make it easier to put his idea into practice. (I say "his idea" even though I know Diogo's not the only one who's ever made this point - he IS the one whose essay on this point I'm quoting here.)

Because good intentions are fine, but I think there's a reason so many game-masters probably default to the bad way of doing things. The reason is, it's easier.

Pick any dungeon you like. Open the map, find a hallway. Imagine your players entering the hallway. Now, prepare to describe it to them. What will you do?

The first thing you'll do, of course, is look at the drawing of the hall on the map. How long is it? How many doors open off of it? Where are those doors? Are there any special features you need to mention?

All of that is important information, but if that's all you describe (and I'll be honest, it's probably all I usually ever describe) then you're doing things the bad way that we just agreed doesn't allow for meaningful player decision-making.

What more do you need to do, in order to describe this hall the good way? Well, you need to take note of the room numbers. You need to go check the key to the map for each of those rooms. For each room, you need to read the description, come up with a general impression of what's the most important thing in the room, decide what a good clue about that thing would be, and then move on to the next room, which is probably on another page. Also, you need to hurry, because your players are waiting, and what's taking so long describing a simple hallway?

Did I say the bad way was easier? I misspoke. The bad way is MUCH easier.

So if all you have is good intentions and a regular map, it's going to be much harder to describe each hallway the good way. And that's because RPG maps don't number hallways.

Which is one of those things that I noticed, and thought was odd, when I first started reading RPG books. But there are all kinds of conventions and practices that go into making RPG books. Pretty quickly you get used to them, and basically forget that you ever thought they were strange. But reading Diogo's essay made me remember the way I felt when I first looked at an RPG map and wondered why the hallways didn't have numbers like the other rooms.

Which is fine, I guess, if you're treating hallways as non-spaces, like we've probably all been doing all along. But treating them that way basically forces you into the bad way of describing halls, because it forces you, the GM, to come up with a description right there on the spot.

If we want to describe hallways well, we need to number them on our maps.

Every hallway is an empty room, except we usually don't think of them that way. They have all the promise, and all the problems, that we associate with empty rooms. Think of every blog post, every essay, you ever read about what to do with empty rooms - we should apply all those ideas to hallways. And we should number them.

Getting good hall descriptions during play shouldn't be a matter of exception skill, fast reading, and quick thinking. It should be a matter of looking at the hallway's number on the map key, and communicating the information there to your players.

CRAWL-thulhu

My friends John Potts and Todd McGowan have just published the second issue of their DCC zine - CRAWL-thulhu!

Zine by John Potts, Art by Todd McGowan

I was a playtester and a volunteer proofreader for issue 1, and I wrote a couple sections of issue 2. John and Todd worked as partners with John doing almost all the writing, editing, and layout, and Todd providing all the art. Because John has decided to retire following the release of issue 2, I'm going to be the lead author of all future issues.

CRAWL-thulhu issue 1 introduces advice for running a Lovecraftian campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics. It replaces the Luck score with a Sanity score, has rules for Sanity loss due to encountering elements of the Lovecraft Mythos, has a list of 1920s occupations for zero-level characters, and has a complete adventure "A Horrible Day at the Dunwich Fair", which I've played through twice.

CRAWL-thulhu issue 2 introduces a skill system for mystery investigations in DCC, has six 1920s character classes, rules for spellcasting and magic, some death & dismemberment style tables I wrote for recovering from insanity and near-death, and offers more advice for running Lovecraftian campaigns using DCC.  

(And I should note, the tables here are different from the death & dismemberment table I wrote for DCC earlier. They're tailored to the horror genre and the modern setting in the same way that my original table is tailored to DCC's regular setting.)

Zine by John Potts, Art by Todd McGowan

 
So if you like DCC or Cthulhu or both, you might like to take a look at what my friends made!

My agreement to take over writing in the future was very recent, so at the moment, I don't have any answers about what will happen to the Discerning Dhole Productions imprint, or what will be in the contents of future issues. I'm sure I will shamelessly advertise here when issue 3 is ready to be released. In the mean time, CRAWL-thulhu issue 1 and issue 2 are available for you to enjoy!

Quotes from Empire in Black and Gold - part 2

I wanted to share some quotes from Empire in Black and Gold, both to show a little what Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing looks like, and to illustrate a few ideas from the text. This is a follow-up to my earlier post about the book.
 

 
Factions of the Lowlands

The first quote comes from chapter 5, and shows the opening ceremony for an annual Olympic-style game. I like it because it's the first really good introduction we get to all the species/factions of the Lowlands, and it's also the first time we see the Wasps.

"There was a crowd the length of the Pathian Way. The wealthy and more prosperous artisans rubbed shoulders unselfconsciously, sitting on the great tiered stone steps that lined the route. The ritual of the Games and the procession of the athletes were older than the College itself. These steps had been thronged like this when the city had been still called Pathis and the Beetle-kinden were second-class citizens and slaves, back in the Bad Old Days."

"Before those comfortable steps thronged the poor, but they made up for it with noise and cheer. Being poor in Collegium was only a relative thing, for the poor of Collegium enjoyed ample work, and sewers and clean wells with pumps, and there was food to be had from the civic stores when times were lean. Governance by academics, philanthropists and the wealthy was hit or miss, but it had always been fashionable to be seen doing charitable work for the lower orders. Even the greediest magnate wanted to be seen to be generous, and even false generosity could fill bellies."

"There was a roar among the crowd. People began craning forward, even pushing out into the Pathian Way, though there was a scattered line of the city guard to keep them in check, mostly middle-aged men in ill-fitting chain mail. Their presence was enough, though, and every tenth man was a Sentinel wearing the massively bulky plate armor that only Beetle-kinden possessed the sheer stamina to wear. The cheering grew louder and louder, for Collegium's own athletic best were the first band of heroes to enter the city by the Pathian Way."

"Helleron's team came close behind. The Helleron team were fed a little less approval than the city's home-grown heroes, but they received cheers nonetheless. They were mostly Beetle-kinden, and they and Collegium took the honour of that race with them to the field."

"Traditionally, the Ant cities came next in the procession. The first platoon of neatly marching Ants hailed from Sarn, which in the last few decades of political reform had become Collegium's nearest ally. They were a uniform breed, tan of skin, regular of feature. The Kes team followed next, looking much like their predecessors save for the coppery tone of their skins, and then the pale Ants of Tark following on their heels."

"A showing from Seldis and Everis came next, a score of Spider-kinden, both men and women, and each of them as beautiful as heredity and cosmetics could conjure up for them. Behind them was the combined Egel-Merro team of Fly-kinden, a jostling pack of little people casting looks at the crowd that were full of bravado and sly humour."

"And last, of course, straggled whatever of the other two kinden of the Lowlands had managed to put together for a team this year. There were just eleven of them, far short of any of their competition, and nine of them were Mantids. They looked down their noses at the patronizing crowd, stalked with a killer's grace between the great packed masses of Collegium like hostage princes entering into captivity."

"Amidst the Mantids were a couple of others, grey-skinned and grey-robed, shorn of any ornament, staring fixedly at the ground. These two were not official delegates from Mount Hain in the north. They were radicals, renegades. Like the few Moth teachers employed at the College, they were the exceptions to their race who had come to see the world beyond their insular home. The Beetle spectators looked on them with amusement nowadays. There was no ire left, among the people of Collegium, for a race whose reach had once shadowed all of the Lowlands."

"There was now a murmur running through the crowd. For there was, this year, another team. They brought up the rear, consigned there because the organizers had not known what to do with them. Their banner, their colours, repeated in their clothes, their armor, even the hilts of their weapons. Black and gold. All of it black and gold. They were men, every one of them. Some were pale and some were darker, and most were fair-haired, and handsome when they smiled. Some of them wore banded armour and some simply cut clothes, and all of them had short swords in their belts. They were not the rigid lattice of the Ants, but their step was close in time. Seeing them, all of them together, the people of Collegium understood that a new race, a new power, had fully entered into the Lowlands."
 
 
Apt-ness and Crossbows

The next quote from chapter 7 is one of the first times Tchaikovsky really lays out how the different relationships-to-technology work within the setting. We learn what it means to be "Apt" and see just how unable to use machines the in-Apt species are.

"Tynisa shook her head. 'Sorry, Totho. All machinery is bibble-babble to me.' "

" 'But you were brought up here in Collegium!' he protested."

" 'Sorry. You ever see a Spider-kinden crossbow-woman? Being Apt to machines isn't something you can just pick up. You're born to it or you're not.' "

"Che had seen Tynisa with a crossbow, once. It had been when they were both around twelve, and Tynisa had been determined to become good with it, as she had been with everything else she put her hand to. That day lingered in the memory because it was the first time Che had found something she herself could do, that her foster sister could not."

"But it's not hard, she remembered saying patiently. You just point it at the target and pull the lever. And the staggering weight of her understanding that Tynisa just could not grasp the notion, could not understand that the action led to the result. She almost shot Stenwold when she finally clutched the weapon so hard she mistakenly triggered it, and she could not even begin to reload or recock it. It was not just that she had never been trained, or taught. It had all been there for her, if only she could adapt her mind to take it in."

"Persistent myth related that the crossbow was the first tool of the revolution. Almost certainly there had been something else, something less warlike and more practical. The crossbow was what won the battles, though. Any fool could pick up a crossbow and kill a man with it, any Beetle-kinden, or Ant, or anyone Apt. Bows were an art form, crossbows but a moment in the learning, in the making. The world had been turned upside down within a generation by men and women armed with the crossbow and the pulley, the hand pump and the watermill. All the old masters of the Lowlands had been unthroned, their slaves prising mastery of the world from their impotent hands. The old races of the superstitious night were waning. Only the Spider-kinden held on to their power, and that was because they could play the younger races like a musical instrument. The world belonged to the Apt: Beetles, Ants, and most Fly-kinden these days, the races of the bright sun that drove out the shadows."

"And also the Wasps: an entire Empire of the Apt."


Locks are Technology Too

So this quote, from chapter 8, kind of repeats some of the ideas from the previous post, but I like it also lays out what the Spider worldview is like. We know that they can't really use technology already, but it's nice to get a glimpse of what they CAN DO instead.

"Tynisa discovered that the cabin door was her only way out, and the door was locked."

"Now if she had been a Beetle, that would have been different. She was quite sure that if she had been a Beetle-maid then a few quick jabs with a piece of wire would see her out the door and away as fast as her stubby legs would carry her. She even began to try that, kneeling before the lock and peering into the narrow keyhole, trying to imagine the pieces of metal inside that, in some way beyond her imagining, controlled whether the door would open or not."

"She simply could not do it: there was no place in her mind to conceive of the lock, the link between the turn of the key, the immobility of the door. Of all the old Inapt races, the Spider-kinden still prospered as before, but that was only because they found other people to make and operate machines for them. Spider doorways were hung with curtains, and they had guards, not locks, to keep out strangers."


The Motley Mafia

We don't see very much of the demimonde or criminal underworld, but we do get a glimpse. In chapter 12, we're introduced to one of several colorful gangs within Helleron. There are quite a lot of "half-breed" characters in the Lowlands (including the apprentice Totho), and we see very early on that there's quite a bit of prejudice against them ... so it makes a certain kind of sense that many of them who are denied other opportunities might end up as criminals. I actually find Tchaikovsky's portrayal of this gang to be reasonably sympathetic, especially compared to "Mister Motley" from Perdido Street Station. Honestly this crew would be pretty at home in Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque's city of Umberwell.

"There was a Fly-run eatery where Sinon Halfway, leader of the Halfway House cartel, held court. Some half-dozen Fly-kinden staff were serving three dozen men and women, and it was evident to Tynisa at first glance that there was a right end and a wrong end of the table to be kneeling at. The right end was closest to the enthroned figure of Sinon Halfway himself."

"He was a lean man just turning to fat around the middle, due to the few years now when he had not personally taken up the sword to defend his empire. He was dressed like a man about to flee the city with all his wealth upon him, but she saw that all of them were, more or less, the gangsters sported chains and rings, amulets and jeweled gorgets, even in one case a mail shirt made from coins, good silver Standards of Helleron mint. Sinon would have been worth, in gold and gems alone, a much as half the table, and she understood that it was a status thing. A wealthy man who hid his light under a bushel would gain no respect for that here."

"The name told true. Sinon was a half-breed, and she guessed that he was Moth-kinden interbred with the pale-skinned Ants of Tark. What should have been an unpleasant mottling had instead left him with milky skin traced with veins and twists of grey, like marble. It was an exotic, oddly attractive sight. His hair was dark, worn long over his shoulders in a Spider style. His eyes were just dark pupils circled in white, without irises. The melange of his ancestry had conspired to make a man at once unnerving and compelling."

"The gangstesr were a motley lot: Beetles, Ants, Flies, Spiders, plenty of half-breeds, and a few she could not name. They had scars, most of them, amidst the jewelry, so it had been a fight for them to get where they were."


The Origins of the Empire

We've been kind of following Tynisa, but here in chapter 19, we pick up with her sister Cheerwell learning about the origins of the Wasp Empire. It sounds vaguely similar to the origin of the Mongol Empire, and reminds me of Coins and Scrolls' vision of foreign invaders as a source of threat in the medieval world of his game.

" 'You must have a very skewed picture of the Wasp-kinden,' he told her. 'If you think of us at all, you must think we're savages.' "

" 'Not so far from the truth,' he admitted, and she raised surprised eyebrows. 'The Empire is young. Three generations, three Emperors.' "

" 'No, we don't live for hundreds of years. Nothing like that. Our Most Revered Majesty Alvdan the Second is not thirty years of age. His grandfather was one tribal chieftain in a steppeland full of feuding tribes, but he had, as the story goes, a dream. He took war to the other tribes, and he subjugated them. He brought all the Wasp-kinden together under his banner. It took a lifetime of bitter fighting and worse diplomacy. His son, Alvdan the First, built the Empire: city after city brought into the fold, the borders pushed ever outward. Each people we made our own, we learned the lessons they taught us. We honed the tool of war until it was keen as a razor."

"Our Emperor now, Alvdan Two, was sixteen when he came to the throne, and since then has not rested in furthering the dream of his father and grandfather. We have fought more peoples than the Lowlands even knows exist. We have defended ourselves against enemies who were stronger than us, or wiser than us, or steeped in lore we could not guess at. We have conquered internal strife and we have done what no other has ever done before us. The Empire is physically near the size of the entire Lowlands, but all under one flag and marching all to one beat. The Empire represents progress, Miss Maker. The Empire is the future. Look at my people. They have a foot in the barbaric still. They must be forced into discipline, into control, into civilization! But we have come so very far in such a short time. I am proud of my people, Miss Maker. I am proud of what they have brought about.' "
 
 
Maps of the World

In chapter 20, Cheerwell and her friend Salma discuss their peoples' visions of the larger world. Salma tells the fable that I relate below, and Cheerwell follows up by explaining that the only famous Beetle explorer ended up having all his accounts sold as children's fiction, because Beetle-kinded society could neither believe what he found nor take it seriously. You get the sense though that this world might contain nearly every possible type of insect-kinden if you travel far enough to find them. Here we see Locusts, Slugs, Woodlice, a pretty good description of how "foreigners" become "barbarians", and an outsider's perspective on the Lowlands.

" 'Where is there, out here?' Che wondered. The Lowlander cartographers had never been much for going beyond the borders of the lands they knew. It was part of the inward-looking mindset that was now giving the Wasps such free reign."

" 'Commonweal maps don't go into much detail here. Just "wildlands," that kind of thing,' said Salma. 'Mind you, they're mostly about a hundred years out of date at the least. It's been a while since the Monarch's Nine Exploratory Heroes were sent to the four corners of the world looking for the secrets of eternal life.' "

" 'The who sent for what?' she asked incredulously. He grinned at her."

" 'Three centuries ago the Monarch was very old, and he sent the nine greatest heroes of the Commonweal out into the unexplored parts of the world, because his advisors and wizards had told him that the secret of life eternal was out there to be found. Some went north across the great steppe, through the Locust tribes and the distant countries of fire and ice, and the ancient, deserted mountain kingdoms of the Slugs. Some went east where the barbarians life, and where the broken land is studded with cities like jewels, or to where the great forests of the Woodlouse-kinden grow and rot all at the same time. Some went west, and sailed across the sea to distant lands where wonders were commonplace and the most usual things were decried as horrors not to be tolerated. And some,' and here his smile grew mocking, 'went south across the Barrier Ridge, and found a land where no two people can agree on anything, and the civilized comforts of a properly measured life were almost completely unknown. And five of the Exploratory Heroes returned, with empty hands, but with tales enough to keep the Regent's wise men debating for centuries.' "

"She was agog, just for a moment, waiting. 'And? What about the others? Did they find it?' "

"He laughed at her. 'No one knows. They never came back. Some people still say, though, that the last of the Heroes still wanders distant lands, living eternally, eternally young, trying only to get his prize back to a Monarch who died just two years after the Heroes set out.' "


The REALLY FAR Far Away Lands

Finally, from chapter 40, another glimpse of the much larger world, in which certain peoples are so distant that, like in Charles Saunders' Imaro stories, they are believed to mythical. In this case it's the Centipede-kinden and Mosquito-kinden who are thought just be legends. I somewhat wonder if either species ever shows up in Tchaikovsky's series, and if they do, whether his Mosquitoes are at all like the Anophelii from China Mieville's The Scar.

" 'There is no hand from which I would not take help at this point. I would write to the underground halls of the Centipede kingdom or the Mosquito Lords if they were anything more than a myth. Perhaps, if matters grow much worse, I will do so anyway.' "

Empire in Black and Gold - part 1

If Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold isn't the GLOGosphere's favorite novel, it probably should be. In the first place, all the characters are technically human, but they're also all "insect-kinden", members of fantasy races and societies who liken themselves to different insect species, bear some physical resemblance to their namesakes and bear some supernatural powers that resemble them too. In the second place, the setting is an industrial, pre-apocalyptic world where the various societies of the Lowlands are on the cusp of a catastrophic invasion by an unstoppable army from just outside their borders.
 

 
All the different insect-kinden have access to what are essentially psychic powers called "The Art." A person can learn to access their Art by meditation, and it manifests in different ways in the different human races, and apparently there's some variation among individuals of the same race. (Only some Beetle-kinden can fly, for example, and those who can are much slower and clumsier than any other flying race.) When someone summons their "Art-wings", they appear like they're made of light, and the same is true for some other physical manifestations, like the Wasp-kindens' "Art sting." Art also lets Ant-kinden communicate telepathically and Spider-kinden manipulate people's emotions, but it ALSO also lets the Mantis-kinden grow bone-blades from their forearms, and it supposedly accounts for the Beetle-kinden's superior durability.

Tchaikovsky refers to the human races using capital letters, and actual insects using lowercase. So "Beetle-kinden" and "Beetle" refer interchangeably to humans, while "beetle" refers to the insects. There's not much animal life of any kind in the novel, but aside from humans, I think that horses are the only mammals we see. Meanwhile insects are sometimes as large as horses or elephants, and fulfill similar domesticated roles.

The Lowlands are a relatively self-contained region, protected from their neighbors by ocean on two sides, desert on a third, and a "The Great Barrier Ridge", a very Grand-seeming canyon that led me to spend a little time pondering if Tchaikovsky had set his novel in the far future of the real world. I think actually the geography here is supposed to kind of resemble Central and South Asia, but also maybe Southern and Eastern Europe, and the invading Wasp Empire seems like both the Mongol Horde in some ways, and like the Roman Empire in others.

The most industrious people are the Beetle-kinden, who control the liberal, cosmopolitan college city of Collegium and the sprawling, industrial-capitalist city of Helleron. Beetles are shorter than the other races and fatter. They're also the most mechanically adept - or "Apt" - and are the most similar to any readers who hail from liberal democracies in the contemporary West. Three of our viewpoint characters, Stenwold, Che, and Totho, are all Beetle-kinden.

Stenwold Maker reminds me a little of Isaac dan der Grimnebulin from China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. He's a middle-aged man of science, confronted with problems whose origins lay outside his worldview. I think the two are cut from the same cloth, and Isaac's life might be a bit like what Stenwold's life would have been like, if he hadn't adopted an infant daughter and raised her, hadn't adopted his niece as a ward to give his daughter a sister, if he had the opportunity to devote himself to his machines, instead of being forced by circumstance to become a spymaster and a statesman, so that he could learn about the Wasp Empire's activities, and try to influence Collegium's policy against them. (I guess he's also a little like Benjamin Franklin, now that I write this out.)

Cheerwell Maker, "Che", is Stenwold's niece and ward. When I think of her I usually just see Glimmer from the new She-Ra series. Totho is Stenwold's apprentice. The other two viewpoint characters are Tynisa, a Spider-kinden woman who Stenwold raised as his daughter, and Salma, a visiting prince from the Dragonfly Commonweal who understands the importance of opposing the Wasps. Spiders are incredibly adept at emotional manipulation, and Dragonflies just seem to be generally very graceful. We also see a Mantis Weaponmaster, Tisamon, in action, and he's the sort of fighter who can mow through an unlimited number of enemy combatants like an out-of-control grain threshing machine, the kind of fighter who basically can't be defeated in normal combat, because there simply isn't room to surround them with enough opponents to actually defeat them. (If Dragonflies remind me a bit of D&D's monks, Mantis-kinden are like barbarians with unlimited rage. If you used this as a setting for a game, you might want race-as-class character classes, or you might want to give each race 2-3 classes that are tied to it.)

The other place the Lowlands reminds me of is the fantasy East Africa of the Charles Saunders' Imaro stories. Saunders' Nyumbani is filled with a variety of societies and ethnicities, but his heroes are from beyond the boundaries of the lands any of the other characters are familiar with. They have "powers" that are common among their peoples, and those peoples are themselves repeatedly described as "semi-mythical" when Saunders explains how they seem to the majority of Nyumbanians. Imaro himself is a raging warrior whose upbringing resembles a fictionalized version of the Maasai peoples' traditional lifestyle. Pomphis is a pygmy sage who seems to have read and to know everything (a bit like the "lore" ability of D&D's original bards, hmm...), and Tanisha comes from a society that I think is supposed to seem a little like the Nubians after the end of their rule of Ancient Egypt. The point is, in both Saunders' world and Tchaikovsky's we have several heroes from distant lands, whose appearances and abilities seem almost supernatural to local observers.

As I mentioned, the Lowlands are in the midst of an ongoing, Beetle-led industrial revolution. The other "Apt" peoples are the Ant-kinden, whose skin-color derives from their city, and whose cities war endlessly with each other, and the Fly-kinden. (Incidentally, Ants from the city of Tark, and later, desert-dwelling Scorpion-kinden, are the only peoples described as having "pale" or "white" skin, although the Wasps are all blonde, I believe. Everyone else has a skin-tone that would make them a person of color in contemporary America, except the moths who are grey, and the people of Mynes, who have blueish skin.) Spiders have their own kingdom to the south of the Lowlands, and Dragonflies live further north. The Lowlands used to be dominated by the Moths, who enslaved most of the other races, but by the time the book opens, Moths mostly live in caves beyond the outskirts of their old cities.

The Wasps are also Apt, and they're organized as a conquering army. Literally every Wasp male is a soldier, and all their other work is performed by slaves taken from their conquered peoples. From the beginning of the novel, their Empire is large, unified, organized, and preparing to pour into the Lowlands and conquer everyone. The Beetles have been selling them weapons for decades, every Ant city expects that the Wasps will conquer the other Ants and leave them alone, so Stenwold Maker is nearly alone as a voice of reason. Slavery is a common enough practice in the Lowlands (and some characters even observe that Helleron's factories practice a kind of wage-slavery) but if Lowlands' slavery is like the kind practiced throughout the Ancient World, then the Wasps' slavery is more like the chattel slavery that Europe and America perfected between the Age of Exploration and the Civil War. That is to say, all slavery is bad, but some kinds are indeed worse than others, more dangerous, more dehumanizing, less escapable - and the Wasps plan to convert all the peoples of the Lowlands into property.

We get introduced to the Beetles and their scientific world-view first, and only later learn that the "in-Apt" races - the Old races who ruled during the Age of Lore before the Beetles' and Ants' revolution overthrew them - that they believe in magic. "Magic" is separate from Art, which is part of why I think of Art as being more akin to psionic power, and for most of the book, it's not clear whether the Beetles' or Moths' worldview is more accurate. Certainly within the industrial society the Beetles, Ants, and even Wasps live in, there is no room for or appearance of magic. It's only what happens outside those societies that makes magic's existence seem possible.

I should mention, the in-Apt peoples literally can't use technology. They can't pick locks or even fire crossbows. Individually, their citizens fly better, fight better, and are just generally more cultured and skilled than the masses of the Apt, but Beetles can make machines, and use them, and overwhelm the others with their sheer numbers. Beetle equality is the key here, because of course the "citizens" of Spider or Dragonfly society doesn't really include their lower classes, who are unlikely to receive such extensive education or training to develop their abilities. And there just aren't enough aristocrats to defeat entire armies of the middle class. (If you were modeling this in a game, you might assign Technology Levels to different species, and use those to restrict their ability to use various equipment. In a kind of balance, the Old races get more innate powers, while the Apt races get better tools.)

And then the Wasps, like something from Max Weber's nightmares, represent a kind of rationality run amok, able to outnumber and out-compete literally every society they encounter. While the Beetles' universal citizenship and compulsory education give them their military and economic edge over traditional societies like the Moths, it also makes them vulnerable to the authoritarianism and universal conscription of the Wasps.

(After writing this, I checked to see if there was a sequel, and learned that Empire is the first in a series of 10 books. I'm not especially interested in watching the kind of thumb-twiddling you have to do to keep mostly the same set of characters in the same unresolved narrative arc over the course of like 3-4 thousand pages, but if you enjoy reading fantasy series, I suspect you could do worse.)

Your Life is Forfeit

In my recent post about types of resources, I had an especial bone to pick with light sources and darkness. Even more recently, Rise Up Comus followed up on my complaint.

The two main points of my complaint were that (a) I don't know how to run a game session where the characters are truly trapped in the dark, and that as a consequence (b) it seems like if you run out of torches, you should just die.

Here's what I actually said:

"Darkness, like death, is narratively interesting as a looming threat, as something the judge can get all poetic while describing, as something that players take pains to avoid. As a thing that actually happens, it's boring, and I'll say it, darkness is worse than death, because if you get trapped in darkness, you still have to keep playing a game that can no longer possibly be fun for anyone involved, whereas at least when you die you get to start over."

"If torches are supposed to be a resource where if you run out of them, the game's over, well we already have hit points for that. Do we really need a second terminal resource? Do we really want a second terminal resource, especially one where you can buy and carry an unlimited number, unless your asshole GM and their asshole encumbrance rules force you to carry too few just so they can laugh at you when you get stuck in the dark?"

Yeah, take that, vision, first of the five senses! In your eye! I'll have more to say about my various feuds and grudges against the concepts of light and darkness in another post, but what I actually want to talk about today are terminal resources.

I defined terminal resources when I was talking about hit points. I said a terminal resource is one "where, if your character runs out of them, you stop having that character anymore."

If I may though, I think I might like to define that a bit differently now. I think I might like to say that a terminal resource is one where, if you run out of it, your life is forfeit. You might not die, but you have given up your right to remain alive.

I also think there are 3 terminal resources that we encounter routinely. Hit points, of course, are one. Player time is a second. And I think there might be some movement toward making torches, and light sources more generally, the third.

If you run out of hit points, or run out of time to play the game while your character is still in the dungeon, or you run out of light, your life is forfeit, and you have given up your right to remain alive.

Thinking about it this way points to a possible solution to the darkness problem. It's a solution that's already pretty popular for hit points, and that at least one blogger pretty famously applied to player time. It's a solution I considered, but didn't write, at the time of my earlier post, and that a couple of others have now proposed in response to my complaint.

I don't mean to sound mysterious, or to sacrifice clarity for the sake of suspense. I'm talking about death & dismemberment style tables, but reimagined to apply to running out of time, or running out of light.
 

Time's up, Mario! Your life is forfeit!
Also, it's true, everything really does sound scarier in German.

 
So I was talking on Discord with the author of All Dead Generations, and he helped me feel a bit vindicated on point (a) that I made at the very beginning, that I don't know how to run a game where the characters really can't see anything because they're in total darkness. He said: "One of the interesting things that I noted is that while I assumed OD&D and AD&D 1E had fairly serious rules for light sources and their lack/exhaustion ... they don't. Even by AD&D and 1981 B/X infravision, glowing magic weapons and continual light is assumed to be on hand for every party, and both simplify equipment encumbrance. Strangely even as no mechanics for being lost in the dark without a light exist, light sources are touted as central to play - a necessity to the party.  5E has fairly extensive rules for various types of darkvision and the combat effects of light conditions - but like most of its rules they're tailored to encounter design, not exploration.  Still I don't actually think 'classic' games had much of a way of handling a loss of light sources either. The rules are sort of there - but from OD&D - 5E the rules for blindness are used. In B/X this means 'a blinded creature cannot attack' and in AD&D etc it's a -4 to all rolls. Not great rules really."

Rise Up Comus recently said something similar on his blog: "In the games that I run, light sources are really important. In the last few sessions, the players decided to haul back to the surface because they were running low on light. But if they had actually run out of torches in the Underworld, I wouldn't have known how to handle it. It would be tedious ad nauseum to narrate an experience without light."

Like I said, I find it vindicating to see others echoing my experiences. (Nothing fights Impostor Syndrome like people you respect agreeing with you.) So there's a consensus, kind of, among people who want darkness to be an important factor in their games, on two points. First, that in darkness, the traditional rules of D&D fail us, and second, that traditional narrative techniques fail us too. I've noted before that many of the original versions D&D rules only work if you have the patience of a saint and the inexhaustible pedantry of a wargamer living in the pre-digital age, back when no one could ever ask "why have we written rules that force us to play an inferior version of a dungeoncrawler video game?" 

But even if the rules were on our side, language itself is not. Because of the prominence of vision in our sensorial experience of the world, we simply have a much better vocabulary for describing how things look, rather than how they feel. It's one thing to read The Pit and the Pendulum, it's quite another to try to ad-lib it in real time. No one wants to play "Ouch I Stepped On A Lego Brick In The Living Room Because Its Dark At Night: The Game." (OISOALBITLRBIDAN:TG is not affiliated with WOTC or any of its subsidiaries.)

If the rules fail you, then you need a new rule. But if language itself fails you, then either you need a new language, or you need a way out of the situation without having to describe it. And it's that latter solution that a new consensus is emerging around: write a new rule that lets you end the scene and skip ahead to something new. If you can't describe it, then don't. Just stop, use some method other than narrative description to decide what happens next, and then start again after "what's next" happens.

And as I said earlier, that new rule that lets us skip ahead is death & dismemberment, repurposed. This is where the consensus is at right now. It's not necessarily the only way or even the right way to handle the situation, but it is a way, and I can't think an other way, let alone a better way. I actually like this solution, it's what I think I would like to use myself. But if you don't like it, you're going to have to think of the alternative yourself, because I don't see many others kicking around. (Of course, the ultimate alternative is always available to you - just ignore it. Stipulate that there's always enough light available that the characters are never blinded by the darkness, and get on with your game using existing rules and existing language that will continue to work just fine.)
 

This image will make sense in a minute, I promise.

 
So what happens when your character runs out of terminal resources? What happens when they run out of the resources that prevent bad things from happening to them? The answer is obvious. Bad things happen.

So as their name implies, death & dismemberment tables are lists of bad things that might happen. They're also the au currant way of dealing with terminal resources. Despite their name though, they're not really about killing your character; they're about allowing your character to live.

No More Hit Points

The original death & dismemberment tables were a way to let your character survive falling to 0 hit points. The earliest, easiest mechanic for reaching 0 hp is to just die immediately. So the point of death & dismemberment is, maybe you don't die, even though your life is forfeit. Maybe bad things happen, maybe it gets worse, but you stay alive. And that's the point of these tables, to maybe stay alive.

In that regard, they're actually pretty forgiving. Consider 5e's "death saves" or DCC's "rolling over the body" mechanic for seeing if a character who falls to 0 hit points lives or dies. Unless you have access to clerical healing or some other kind of aid, 5e gives you a 50% chance to survive. It's a coin toss in slow motion. DCC uses a "Luck check" where you try to roll under your current Luck score. Considering that your starting Luck is determined by a 3d6 roll that averages 10-11, that you can earn more Luck by doing cool things, but that you also routinely spend Luck to improve other rolls ... I'm inclined to say that your chances of survival in DCC are probably usually less than half.

In contrast, look at the original d&d table. Look at Trollsmyth's really famous one. Hell, look at the one I wrote. There are lots and lots of these - they're a very popular houserule for handling what happens at 0 hp, they've even been baked directly into the rules of several retroclones. What they all have in common is that they put your chances of survival much higher than the base 50% of a death save. Every one of those tables gives you a 80-95% survival rate as a starting point. Of cooourse ... at the same time that you're trying to roll high, you're also supposed to subtract the damage from the killing blow from your roll, which worsens the odds somewhat. It's hard to say what "typical" lethal damage is going to be, but my guess is that most of the time, these hardcore, hardass, tear-your-arm-off-and-beat-you-with-it death & dismemberment tables are actually going to be slightly more forgiving than 5e or DCC.

No More Time

In a certain kind of game, running out of player time isn't really a problem per say. If the same, or mostly the same, group of players is meeting on a routine schedule, then when you run out of time, you can just ... stop playing. Wherever your characters are, whatever they're doing, you can just hit the pause button and pick up exactly where you left off next session.

But there's another kind of campaign. Call it "open table," call it West Marches style, if you like. In this style of campaign, there's no set group of players, they vary from game to game. There might not even be a set schedule, although that part's not, in my opinion, definitive of the style. If the players change from game to game, then each game session has to be self-contained, episodic. And that means that running out of time at the end of the episode IS a problem in an open-table game. Leaving off mid-adventure isn't really an option, or at least, not a good one, because you WON'T be able to pick up where you left off. So in a game like this, player time becomes a terminal resource, not just because the session ends when you run out of time, but because when you run out of time, you run out of your right to keep your character alive. You either end the session at a good stopping point, or bad things happen. Your life is forfeit.

It was Jeff of Jeff's Gameblog who had the really brilliant idea to apply the death & dismemberment table as a model to solve the running out of time in the dungeon problem. He came up with a relatively simple table called The Triple Secret Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom. The idea here is that you actually start by making a kind of death save, with a flat 50% chance to make it out alive and unscathed. If your character level is higher than the dungeon level, you get a bonus; if you went in too deep, you take a penalty. If you fail that death save, your life is forfeit, and you roll on the Fate Chart, to find out which of 20 possible bad things happen to you. Mostly you just die, but there are a few options where your treasure and equipment can be recovered, and a few options where you're captured and could be rescued.

Like I said out running out of light above, running out of player time is a situation where narrative description fails as a resolution mechanic. In this case, it fails because you run out of time to say the words, rather than because you run out knowledge about how to speak correctly about the situation, but the solution is the same one I proposed above. If you can't narrate, then don't. Use a different resolution mechanic - rolling dice on a special table - and then later, start narrating again at a point where you're able to do so.

The uncharitable interpretation of this is that your characters are like Sims. Without the benevolent hand of a loving player to guide them, their default behavior is to walk around in circles, drenched in their own urine, until they starve to death - unless they have the misfortune to encounter a swimming pool or water fountain, which, they're SO stupid, they'll probably manage to set on fire, like in that picture I promised would make sense soon. I believe that Sim stepped on a pumpkin, which then caught on fire, and set her on fire. Left on NPC autopilot, your characters are idiots, and will probably die.

The charitable interpretation is that when you run out of player time, your characters run out of the will to adventure and just go into survival mode. All they want to do is get out of the dungeon, as quickly as possible, whatever may happen to them along the way. But the dungeon is dangerous, and so bad things happen.

D&D doesn't have any formal rules for PC morale. Monsters can roll morale and lose their will to fight, NPCs can roll morale and tear off in a blind panic, but aside from a few magical / supernatural fear effects, the players generally get to decide when to fight and when to run away. I've seen hit points described as being analogous to player morale - your character's hit point total is a measure of how willing you, the player, are going to be to continue putting them in harm's way. In the same way, player time might represent character morale. Your character only has the will to adventure when you're there to guide them. The rest of the time on the surface, they're content to live whatever hardscrabble lifestyle your downtime rules have in store for them. When you're not there in the dungeon, all they want to do is get back to the surface.

The alternatives to a table like this - in a West Marches style game, anyway - are either to just assume all the characters make it back to the surface safely, or assume that their lives are forfeit, and they all die in the dungeon automatically. The purpose of the table is to avoid making either of those assumptions, just as the purpose of the classic death & dismemberment tables is to avoid making the assumption of automatic death at 0 hp. Which brings us, finally, to the topic I started with, what to do about darkness.

No More Light

To be clear, when I say "no more light," I'm talking about total darkness, the kind you really do get inside caves, and that really is possible inside large buildings that don't have electricity. If you can still kind of see, then there's not really a problem. If you're in total darkness though, if you can't see at all, then I contend that is a problem for a game that consists, in large part, of the GM telling the players what they see. If the naive or default alternative is to switch over to telling the players what they feel, I also contend that won't really work.

GM: You feel rough cobblestones under your feet.
PC: I extend my hands and inch forward. What do I feel?
GM: Nothing.
PC: I inch forward again.
GM: Nothing.
PC: I inch forward again.
GM: Still nothing.
...
12 INCHES LATER
...
PC: I inch forward again.
GM: Nothi- no, wait! How long are your arms?
PC: I dunno, I'm like 6 feet tall, so maybe 2 ½ feet long?
GM: No, still nothing.

In a video game, this isn't a problem, because in a video game, you can move your character even if you don't know where they are, and the computer running the game knows when you bump into something. But in a tabletop game, I think it is a problem. It's not just that the GM has few good ways to communicate what the PCs experience to the players, it's also that there are few or no good ways for the players to communicate their characters' locations to the GM. Usually it doesn't matter exactly where you are within the fictional space of the game. If you're in a room for example, you can see the whole room no matter where you are within it. Further, if the GM asks you where you are, you can tell them your location by referencing other objects in the room that you can see. Perhaps you can tell where this is going ...

If you switch the game over to operating by feel, then suddenly it does really matter where you are, because you can only feel what you can touch, and you can only touch what's immediately next to you. Since you don't know what's next to you unless the GM tells you, and the GM only knows where you are by you telling them what you're next to ... the whole system breaks down. As I said, we don't really have the language for it. It's not just the judges who need a special language to talk about darkness, it's the players too. And even if the referee feels competent to extemporaneously describe the feel and texture of every space in the dungeon, the players still have no good way to communicate their movements within the fictional space.

So I don't really know what people do with darkness. You can ignore the possibility by making all dungeons at least dimly lit. You can ensure that the characters always have at least one magical or mundane light source, or that every party has a character with some kind of darkvision. You can try playing "Oops I Tripped Over The Ottoman And Landed Face First In The Dog's Water Dish Because I Can't See Where I'm Going: The Game", but I bet you'd only be willing to play it once. (OIOTOALF2ITDWDBICSWIG:TG is not affiliated with WOTC or any of its subsidiaries.) 

The options at your disposal are some kind of restriction on the information available to the players, or some kind of restriction or penalty to the abilities of the characters, or a death & dismemberment style table, or some combination of the above. I think I personally favor the table option, because as I think I've made it pretty clear, this is a situation I want a way out of as quickly as possible.

In our personal communication, All Dead Generations offered up his solution to exploring in total darkness: "My own current take is that when PCs are without light resources (and I limit continual light) they can continue exploring mapless. Movement takes twice as long (e.g. two turns to move through a keyed location) and if the exploration die comes up with torch exhaustion they become lost. Once lost the party members individually roll a D10 on a 2 - 20 table with a +1 for every room distant from the entrance. Things get worse the higher up the table you go. At 10 + there's death involved."

This approach actually combines all three methods. The players aren't allowed to map, so there's some restriction on the information available to them. The characters' movement rate is cut in half, so there's a penalty to their abilities. And then, once some other conditions are met, there's a d&d-style table. At a minimum, this table offers a 10% chance of death, but depending on how far you are from the entrance, it could be much higher, even automatic if you're more than 10 rooms deep.

Rise Up Comus proposes a d&d-style table gives a a 50% chance of death or forced retirement, a 25% chance of escape to the surface, and a 25% chance of capture, allowing for the possibility that a future character can recover the captured one.

And like I said, I agree that this is the right approach. If you want light and darkness to be important, make them important. Make running out of light as deadly as running out of hit points. Treat torches as a terminal resource, and after letting the players sweat while watching their last few matches burn out and go black, tell them their lives are forfeit, end the scene, roll on a table to find out which bad things happen to them, and resume the game with the survivors already back on the surface.