Temple of the Android. Sleeping Beauty's Dungeon: 4th Level

Why a temple to her? Because there are only three rooms in the section and it sounds more grandiose and interesting than "1 Android hiding in room". Also there is only one of her. Perhaps her synthetic brain has gone a little off, and she now believes herself to be a goddess, using her laser pistol to fry unbelievers.

Section A: Temple of the Android

1. Treasure
2. Empty
3. Monster & Treasure: 1 Android

Section B: Hall of Statues

1. Treasure
2. Monster & Treasure: 13 Goblins
3. Empty
4. Monster & Treasure: 80 Goblins
5. Monster: 1 Lion
6. Empty
7. Empty
8. Monster: 2 Evil Thieves
9. Monster & Treasure: 1 Basilisk
10. Empty
11. Empty
12. Treasure
13. Monster: 2 Calots
14. Empty
15. Empty
16. Empty
17. Empty
18. Empty
19. Empty
20. Treasure
21. Empty
22. Empty
23. Treasure
24. Treasure
25. Monster: 14 Kobolds
26. Monster: 1 Basilisk

Hogs! Giant Insects! And Stuff Attacking from Underwater! Sleeping Beauty's Dungeon: 3rd Level

Author's Notes: Again, I reserve the right to change anything. The dungeon is meant to be fun, but not thoroughly comic. However, what's neat (to me) is the way at least apparently meaningful patterns can be generated completely randomly. Note the section exclusively inhabited by giant insects. Also, there's definitely a water theme going on here, both on this level and others. Can that be developed into something cool, even with the Sea Horses and all? I can't say for sure, but I think it's worth at least trying.

Despite their perhaps less than imposing name, Giant Hogs are some of the most fearsome creatures we have met so far, surpassed only by the Lesser Vampires on the 2nd level. One would think that 5 Giant Hogs with 6 hit dice, that each do 2-12 hits of damage would be more than a match for a group of 3rd level adventurers (just two hits would kill the average full-strength such character). Remember all hit dice are six-siders (3rd level Magic-Users only have 2) and most humanoid and non-humanoid creatures only do one six-sided die of damage.

Section A: Dungeon of Lights

1. Empty
2. Empty
3. Monster & Treasure: 2 Piercers
4. Monster & Treasure: 12 Mermen
5. Empty
6. Empty
7. Empty
8. Monster: 1 Duellist
9. Empty
10. Empty
11. Treasure
12. Empty
13. Empty
14. Monster & Treasure: 100 Fire Beetles
15. Empty

Section B: Hogs

1. Monster & Treasure: 5 Giant Hogs

Section C: The Drowned World 2 (Lair of the Rabid Sea Horses)

1. Monster: 2 Piercers
2. Empty
3. Empty
4. Monster & Treasure: 1 Giant Tick
5. Monster & Treasure: 1 Cave Creeper
6. Monster & Treasure: 5 Orcs
7. Monster & Treasure: 1 Cave Creeper
8. Monster & Treasure: 7 Giant Rats
9. Monster: 11 Orcs
10. Empty
11. Monster: 23 Fire Beetles
12. Empty
13. Monster: 18 Fire Beetles
14. Monster & Treasure: 6 Shriekers
15. Empty
16. Monster & Treasure: 1 Giant Hog
17. Empty
18. Empty
19. Empty
20. Monster & Treasure: 240 Sea Horses
21. Monster & Treasure: 2 Wererats

Section D: Order of the Screaming Skull vs. the Elfin Marines

1. Empty
2. Empty
3. Monster: 6 Diabolists
4. Monster & Treasure: 14 Elves

Section E: House of Insects

1. Empty
2. Monster: 3 Giant Moths
3. Empty
4. Monster: 3 Giant Moths
5. Empty
6. Treasure
7. Monster & Treasure: 1 Giant Bee
8. Empty
9. Empty
10. Empty
11. Empty
12. Empty
13. Empty
14. Monster & Treasure: 2 Huge Spiders
15. Monster: 110 Giant Bees
16. Empty
17. Treasure
18. Monster: 1 Large Spider
19. Empty
20. Empty
21. Monster: 5 Giant Flies
22. Empty
23. Treasure
24. Empty

Cantico Del Sole

For RPG Pundit.

Screw "Appendix C"!

Er, okay.

What is Appendix C?

Appendix C is the list of 'classic' great books that are allegedly light years above, in terms of profundity and intellectual heft, what most people usually read. Here is a partial enumeration:

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Shakespeare, anything he wrote
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Leo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Hesiod, The Theogony
I Ching
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Plato, anything he wrote
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

This is taken from suggestions made by RPGPundit in his recent blog post "Screw 'Appendix N'!" (I stole my title from him.)

Well screw that. (As the Pundit might say. The 'screw' thing is of course taken from the Pundit. But no, I won't lower myself even further by repeating his use of the 'p' word.)

Whoa! Before this gets too heated, let's step back a bit. Am I suggesting that all of the above works are not worth reading (in some sense of the phrase)? No. Am I suggesting that, all things being equal, they're not all on average more worth reading than, say, a random selection from the shelves of Barnes & Noble? No (though, since they're on average longer, and life is finite, all things may not be equal).

I am suggesting that putting them on a pedestal and implying that all (without exception) are just so much better for you to ingest than any of the books on that other Appendix, is just so much bilge.

According to the Pundit, the works on Appendix N are only 1% better than the most hack-like romance novels or TV show tie-ins. Hemingway is 99% better. Hemingway? Seriously? That's bilge.

We all know what other books are on Appendix C. We read (or at least we were assigned) many of them in high-school and college. The list features mostly dead white males, of course. But recently more and more dead white females and dead 'people of color' have been appended to it. A few of them may not even be dead, but if not, they're probably pretty elderly and aren't writing anything, or at least not writing anything worthwhile anymore. Occasionally they make speeches at book festivals.

Who created the list? No one in particular or exclusively. But many participated. That hippy high-school teacher with the 'Speak Truth to Power' stickers on his office door, and who thinks Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 election helped to perpetuate the list, though he added Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker to it. So did the grey-haired college professor with the pipe, the one that none of his colleagues speak to because he didn't think Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 election, though he threw in a few more Romans and Greeks to it. Mortimer Adler, one of the greatest intellectual hacks of the 20th century, also stands accused. So does William Bennett. Alexander Macris, whose 'Ted-Talk' the Pundit cites approvingly, is also part of the problem.

Ted-Talks are the Star Trek novels of the half-educated.

So why am I against Appendix C? Well, to be frank, many of these works (to again, speak like the Pundit) sort of suck. Gibbon's opus is a misleading and often inaccurate anti-Christian screed. Nietzsche was insane. Virtually all of his 'arguments' are either tautological and thus trivial, obviously invalid, or feature conclusions (deduced from false premises) that are morally repellent. Plato is the most overrated philosopher in history (which obviously says a lot). John Stuart Mill isn't on the above list, but he's on the larger list. Don't even get me started with him.

But don't you need to know who these people are and what their arguments are (such as they are) in order to get along at certain types of cocktail parties? Well, yes. Or at least, yes, if you're not good-looking or charming enough to succeed without answering Great Books trivia questions. But I didn't know we were talking about cocktail parties.

Look, the above are just my opinions. I completely and utterly concede that. But that's precisely the point. Don't blindly take my word for any of it. But by the same token, don't take anyone else's word that all of these books are a hundred times better for you than reading another Conan novel. They might be. But then again, they might not.

By all means, read. Read a lot. Read outside of your ideological boundaries and preconceptions. No one I know treats Appendix N as gospel (despite the claims of the Pundit). But many many people (including the Pundit?) treat Appendix C as gospel. That's silly. Don't be silly.

Think for yourself.

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen Contest Announcement

A Magic-User Serving the Cause of Chaos

Well, there are two.

First, the results of the name shortening poll. As might have been expected, there was no winner of a majority of votes. Here is the final tally of the votes contained in the seventy-four comments that made it in before the end of the week-long deadline:

                       

Name	Votes	Vote%
Zylarthen	18.83	25%
7VoZ	17.25	23%
Seven Voyages	11.50	16%
SVoZ	9.58	13%
7VZ	5.00	7%
7v	4.50	6%
SVZ	2.33	3%
7Z	2.00	3%
Seven	1.00	1%
Seven Voyages of Zylarthen	1.00	1%
Voyages	1.00	1%

The above looks like the sort of results you get in those European parliamentary votes with all of those fringe parties and people who want to sell things. In the United States, we never have close or ambiguous elections.*

Notes on my counting methodology:

1. Some submitted suggestions for a spoken shortening versus a written shortening. In those cases the written shortening was counted.
2. Some submitted two or more suggestions. In cases where the commenter said something like, 'A or better B', I counted B. In cases where the commenter said something like, 'A or B', I gave A and B a fractional vote.
3. Gorgonmilk was allowed to change his vote. Luckily, this didn't change the results (although it almost did!).
4. Porphyre77 compared a particular selection to a place referred to in a Queen song. This was interpreted as a positive vote.
5. Obviously, the glaring thing here is that if certain tendencies had been combined, the winner might have been different. For example, the 39% of 7VoZ plus SVoZ would have swamped the 25% of Zylarthen. But then again, the 41% of Zylarthen plus Seven Voyages would have narrowly beaten that. I think there's probably at least a small majority feeling for some sort of 'cool' abbreviated answer--the sum of 7VoZ, SVoZ, 7VZ, 7V and 7Z totals 54%. I only mentioned one such abbreviation in my initial list of possibilities, but five emerged. That says something.

But in my own writing, I'm going to stick with 'Zylarthen', emboldened in a small way, by its admittedly narrow 'win'. To be honest, I didn't expect it to get so many votes, since up until the contest I hadn't really seen very many people use it. Perhaps I prejudiced the vote. I don't know. But I am also even more persuaded by those who referred to the uniqueness of the Googling results, as well as the strangeness or possible evocative nature of it. Of course, I'm still totally in favor of others using a different shortening. Perhaps in time Zylarthen (or or 7VoZ/SVoZ) will emerge as a clearer favorite. So, to paraphrase E.M. Forster, two cheers for diversity!

Second, who won the contest for the hard-copy version of the game (or one of the Lulu alternatives)? I know, but I'm not telling, quite yet. The winner will be revealed within the next few hours or perhaps even minutes. Jason McCartan, otherwise known as 'The Badger' or 'Teh Bagder' agreed to post a roll on on one of those public random generator sites.

Jason runs the uniquely informative OSR Today site as well as co-anchoring the new Tenkar and the Badger podcast. If you haven't checked those out, I urge you to. Among other things, the first episode of the Podcast has a great interview with Matt Finch of Frog God games. 

I goofed on relating to Jason the precise number of qualified entries--it was 74 not 76--but luckily 75 or 76 did not come up. The number was pegged to a chronological listing of comments. The winner will have one week to come foreword. Email me at ospalding@saveversusallwands.com with your address and prize preference--Zylarthen or the three other products.

Thank you for your comments. I really appreciate your input and support. And I apologize for being a bit tardy on wrapping things up. 

Next, a Jack Vance dialogue contest?...

*This lying thing just has to stop.

OSR Art Friday: Cover of The Dragon #37

The piece is by Darlene Pekul and appeared in the May 1980 issue.

I am fond of it partly because it graced the cover of one of the first issues of The Dragon that I purchased, and thus it helped to define the look of the game for me. Its pastel colors and serenity provided a neat contrast with the usual fare.

Oddly, I never noticed the skulls until now.

Pekul (who legally changed her name to the one-word and capitalized 'DARLENE' in 1984) was one of the most prolific of the early TSR artists. Indeed, that same issue of The Dragon seemed to feature her work on almost every page, from city and wilderness illustrations—'From the City of Brass to Dead Orc Pass'—to calligraphy and background design—Out on a Limb, Leomund's Tiny Hut—to the comic strip, Jasmine, which would run for twelve issues.

She also was responsible for the 'fat unicorn' on the title page of the Dungeon Master's Guide, the cover and interior art for a number of TSR adventure modules and perhaps most famously, the full-color map of the Flanaess for the 1980 World of Greyhawk release.

The neat illustration below (also in the DMG), probably contributed to good old-fashioned mutual suspicion among players as much as any other single thing:

Curiously, Image Googling 'Darlene Pekul' or even 'Darlene Pekul The Dragon' or 'Darlene Pekul Dragon Magazine' does not yield this OSR Art Friday's featured piece. Doing a reverse search seems to imply that it has rarely, if ever, been previously discussed or featured. I hope this post, in its small way, helps to redress that.

Notes on Creating a Zylarthen Dungeon: Part I

1. Embrace the Random: I propose that creating a dungeon is a bit like writing a novel. For many people, starting one is intimidating because they assume that you have to have all of this stuff in your head beforehand. Most people are incapable of having all of that stuff in their head beforehand, so they get scared off. What they don’t understand is that much of the ‘stuff’ will emerge organically—later. You don’t create by setting down what you’re already thinking, but to discover what’s, so to speak, already there. Random generation is the engine that allows you to discover things. In Vol. 4: The Campaign, I cite the comments of C.S. Lewis on this. The other stumbling block is feeling responsible for every decision. Should I put this monster or that monster in that particular room? What is the right thing? What if I do the wrong thing? That feeling of responsibility can be daunting. But random generation takes it off of your shoulders. Or so it seems. It’s all sort of irrational. But it’s how many of us think. Or at least it’s how I think.
2. What Initially Reminded me to Embrace the Random: In his introduction to the seminal contemporary megadungeon Barrowmaze, the author, Greg Gillespie claimed that much of the dungeon was generated randomly. I thought, wait, that’s legal? You can create a dungeon randomly and then sell it for money? Count me in, man!
3. Level Variance: On P. 9 of Vol. 4 I laid out tables of monsters for each dungeon level. Each table spanned six or more monster levels, such that you could, say, get 4-24 of the weakest vs. 1 of the most powerful. I then wrote: ‘For greater variation, consider a wider possible spread of monster levels: die 1 = one (table) level lower, die 2-5 = specified (table) level, die 6 = one (table) level higher.' For this dungeon I increased the extremes such that die 1 = two levels lower, die 2 = one level lower, die 3-4 = the same, die 5 = one table level higher, die 6 = two table levels higher. Thus, on say the 3rd level one might encounter anything from 3 Giant Rats (at the absolute lowest possible end) to 1 Basilisk (at the absolute highest end). Is this variation good or bad? I have no idea. Keep in mind, though that ideally the players will often not be able (at least at first) to easily identify the level of difficulty of the monsters. How powerful are those frothing mammals swimming through the water at us? Who knows?
4. Non-Random Patterns: For new monsters, I decided that there would be a 1 in 3 chance that they would be the same as previously encountered ones. Die 1-2 = a random roll of all monsters previously encountered in the entire dungeon in numbers appropriate to the level, die 3-4 = a random determination of previously encountered monsters on that level, die 5-6 = a random determination of previously encountered monsters in that section. This creates meaningful patterns that make sense. Hopefully the repeating ones will be interesting and not boring. If they seem boring, perhaps there’s a way of making them more interesting.
5. A Mistake: I screwed up slightly on the algorithm for treasure not guarded by monsters. It’s supposed to be 1 in 6 of all unoccupied rooms. But my Excel randomizer algorithm only did 1 in 8. I will reroll unguarded treasure for the first two levels.
6. Just So You Know: That said, obviously much of the flavor, tone and mechanical interest will come from traps and features added later. But the monster distribution helps to trigger ideas for this.
7. Why are there so many Martians? Is this a good thing? Out of the 99 monster assignments in the first two levels, 6 are Martians. This is very close to precisely what the tables would predict, as Martians make up 1/18th or 1/19th of each table. The Zylarthen dungeon monster encounter tables are not naturalistic. That is, I didn’t set out to have them track some previously decided scheme of proportions. Rather (with only a few exceptions—dragons, most obviously) each monster is represented precisely once in the tables (and I decided that the different ‘colors’ of Martians would each be a separate monster). Each table for each level generally includes one monster from each of 15 or so categories—getting 'weirder' the higher the die roll. Thus, there is generally 1 mundane mammal, 1 giant insect, 1 prehistoric, 1 undead, 1 Martian and so on in each table. Since the humanoid Martian species are clustered in the lower tables (as opposed to the Orluks, White Apes and so forth in the higher ones), there’s roughly a 1 in 20 chance on these tables that a new monster will be a Martian. I guess I think this is fun. But other dungeon creators are of course free to reroll if they find this bothersome.

More notes in a subsequent post…