Universe Building in MMII

   Monster Manual II was my least favourite AD&D book, and I’m going to tell you why. But first, let me say this: I read it all over again on May 8-9, from cover to cover, and I noticed things that the teenage me didn’t see at all. Monster Manual II could very well have been given a different title, like Monster Manual of the Planes. This volume is a bold attempt at “Universe Building”. Gygax endeavoured to tie up many loose ends in his AD&D multiverse, and paint a clearer picture of the Nine Hells, Gehenna, Tarterus, Nirvana, and a few other planes.

   When I was fifteen, one of my regular players contemplated DMing his first game, so he went and bought himself his own Dungeon Masters Guide. Having saved some more scratch he wanted to go and get monster manuals, and I remember telling him this word for word: “You still have access to my copies of Tsojcanth and Barrier Peaks so you don’t need Monster Manual II.” Passive aggressive, indeed; I guess I was a grognard already in ’85 and despised anything published after ’82 – hilarious! But there’s truth in there, isn’t it? MMII was nothing more than the S3 and S4 monsters bundled up alongside loads of crap like the Cat Lord, modrons, more useless dinosaurs, and almost 30 pages of lists and indexes. I myself rarely used this book and stuck to Monster Manual I and Fiend Folio and the S4 booklet.

   But let’s get back to that Monster Manual of the Planes. Amidst all of those para-elementals, quasi-elementals, grue elementals, time elementals, magmen, and azers, some planes still come out on top. Gehenna and Nirvana are the big winners here, with Hell a close third. All three receive lots of coverage and development both political and sociological. Getting to know the natives of more Outer Planes is very nice. Some of these planes are still unpopulated as of yet; people die and end up there, sure enough, but nobody is born there, like the modrons are born in Nirvana or the slaadi in Limbo. We kinda know Olympus because of Greek mythology, and we have a pretty good idea of Gladsheim because of Norse mythology. But what’s really going on in those Happy Hunting Grounds?

   Universe Building is a gigantic undertaking, it goes without saying.

   Gehenna is a slope. Pandemonium is a tube. I too took lots of acid in the late eighties, and I saw my fair share of slopes and tubes also.

   Slope or no slope, there are still thirteen habitable layers between Gehenna and Tarterus, and just two worthy rulers to fight over them. Anthraxus and Hades have lots of room to maneuver, if they ever decide to go at it.

   Even the Abyss doesn’t seem crowded at all: Demogorgon and Orcus both rule several layers. With 666 of ‘em and only two dozen major demons, there’s vacancy somewhere, without a doubt.

   But the Nine Hells are another story entirely: fifteen major gods or arch-devils crammed into just nine layers. These are the nine arch-devils plus the gods Set (Egypt), Druaga (Babylon), Hecate (Greece), Inanna (Sumer), Gruumsh (Orcs), and Maglubiyet (Goblins). In theory, each of these badasses command 60% of one layer. It’s packed all right, that’s for sure: Hell is literally hell – duh –, but it is hell figuratively also.

   Real estate ought to be a bitch. Imagine Hutijin putting his palace up for sale, and all the other dukes of Hell and Inquisitors and Provosts trying to outsmart each other and buy the place...

   Monster Manual II also introduces the “consorts”, the girlfriends of these squabbling arch-devils. Believe it or not, Asmodeus and Baalzebul are sharing a woman! I hope this Bensozia is twelve feet tall, but she certainly is one lucky she-devil, and I suppose she’s still trying to have a threesome – alas, Asmodeus is afraid to see Baalzebul’s junk.

   Mephistopheles is with the classy Baalphegor. Moloch is with Lilith. Geryon is with Cozbi. Belial is with the gorgeous Naome. Dispater is with Lilis. Mammon is with sweet Glasya, daughter of Asmodeus (and Bensozia?) – or maybe not the daughter of Asmodeus at all – but how a fatso like Mammon scores a beaut such as Glasya is beyond me.

   But what really broke my heart is this: Tiamat alone is without a consort! What the hell, Gary! She’s got the worst layer – the first layer, where all the damn interlopers and astral squatters come, and where most of the stench kows graze and poop, and she has to rule that dump without getting laid? Jeez, man, can’t you throw the lady a bone?

   And you, Bahamut – yes, you! Come on, big doofus! You’re single too, aren’t you? Tiamat is evil, and you’re good, but who cares? The two of you could be great friends with benefits – just don’t talk politics when you get together...

Nirvana

   What sort of adventures or quests happen in Nirvana? What secret dungeons or plots can there be? If you sneeze somewhere, Primus knows it instantly... If you’re lucky enough to locate even one monster hidden in a very remote hole far away in a sector of Nirvana governed by the laziest octon, as soon as it (the monster) awakens, Primus will know about it and send in an elite unit of pentadrones.

   Three Indian deities also live in Nirvana: Varuna, Yama, and Rudra. They probably make fun of the monodrones in secret – but still, if they fart, Primus knows it...

   The Chinese god Shang-Ti is head of the Celestial Bureaucracy; Nirvana is a perfect home for him, too.

   But Horus, son of Osiris? What’s he doing over there?

Gehenna

   The oinodaemon rules all of the Middle Lower Planes – so Tarterus, Hades, and Gehenna? Do Hades himself bow to Anthraxus the Decayed? And what about the shator nobility of Tarterus, are they plotting with this Bubonis guy to overthrow Anthraxus? I can picture a sick campaign there, easy!

Last Words on Universe Building

   This is a short dialogue between Gary Gygax and Jeff Grubb. The exchange could have happened when Monster Manual II was almost finished and ready to go to print:

   Jeff Grubb: “What’s next? Time Plane?”

   Gary Gygax: “No way! After Nirvana, I’m drained. The Time Plane will be one vague paragraph and that’s it. I’ll mention that there are some ‘royal’ time elementals and also ‘other creatures’... Fuck me, why didn’t I stick to just Greyhawk?”

  

Logical Illogical

   When I first started AD&D, all players went back and forth between Dungeon Masters, depending on what adventure was available, but keeping the same character. Now, this whole situation is reversed – and when you come to think about it, it’s a difference almost as significant as last century’s migration from theater to the big screen.

   In those pre-1985 role-playing games, the individual PC was the hero – and the world just “happened” all around him or her. In post-1985 games with their crazy deluge of supplements and clanbooks and whatnot, the world is the hero – and the PCs just “happen” in it.

   When the world becomes the hero, things have to get logical. You cannot put fifty crashed spacecrafts on one medieval fantasy continent, unless it’s Medieval Nevada or something.

   In those early days, this is the average conversation players used to have when they first met:

   “Hello, I’m David, and this is my friend JS.”

   “Hi. You guys joining in for this one?”

   “Yes. We’re both level 9. JS is a magic-user. I have a ranger, with blaster rifle.”

   “Barrier Peaks?”

   “Loved it.”

   “Us too. Just finished it last week.”

   “And before?”

   “Defeated Drelnza.”

   “Us too!”

   “What about The Village of Hommlet?”

   “Not yet.”

   “I recommend it. Lots of fun. But your characters may be overqualified now...”

   There was no logic at all in there. How many adventuring groups entered that crashed spacecraft anyway – and every artefact is always lying around? And Drelnza got killed how many times exactly?

   This is how role-playing games started out. It’s almost like a boardgame: everything is reshuffled right into the box, ready for the next group of players. Me and my friends explore the Village of Hommlet. Another group of players explore the Village of Hommlet, uncovering the same pernicious secrets. Then two guys from my group meet with three guys from the second group, and together they tackle some other adventure. But who went to that damned village first? There’s no need (and no point) in settling that.

   But then, something happened.

   Role-playing games became logical.

   A rather large proportion of Dungeon Masters got infected with a nasty streak of WBV, the “World Builder Virus”. We’ve all forgotten what it was like and how it used to work in the very beginning.

   Don’t get me wrong: World Building is cool, and I did my fair share of it, trust me, but I think in some cases it’s unnecessary. In fact, I really do believe it depends on how long your game sessions actually are, and how often you play. Here’s my personal little chart for that purpose.

	Game Sessions of less than 3 hours	Game Sessions of 3 to 6 hours	Game Sessions of more than 6 hours
1-3 Games / Year	No World Building	No World Building	Optional
4-6 Games / Year	Optional	Optional	World Building OK
7 + Games / Year	Optional	World Building OK	World Building OK

   Nowadays, there are two ways a game session can begin.

   TYPE 1 START: “You guys found a forgotten cave with a big bronze door at the bottom of it. What do you do?”

   TYPE 2 START: “You guys can’t return to Stiflebury as planned because of Goblin troops on the border with the Duchy of Brulhg – there’s a war brewing, even if you haven’t played into that arc yet (but you heard the rumours). Today, instead of returning directly to your mage contact in Stiflebury to finally complete the ritual and save Vince’s wise old master from his curse, you’ll have to detour through Qerryn Forest, and risk a new encounter with Constable Phemk, whom you insulted last time around (or maybe the King’s other Constable is patrolling Qerryn Forest with his men these days, because you know the King has two Constables, and Phemk’s wife is about to give birth. So, what do you do?”

   Logical worlds are for players who can play often, and for long game sessions. Illogical is for casual, occasional play. Ashardalon and Drizzt are quick, efficient, and they cut to the chase: we’ve come full circle now, we’re almost back to Castle Greyhawk – the original megadungeon.

   The Flanaess was an awesome place, and the very first “world setting” many of us ever played into, but that big illogical-to-logical switch I talk about wasn’t yet complete nor absolute, and weird stuff happened. For example, I remember this crazed three-day weekend at a friend’s house, during which we played Dwellers of the Forbidden City and then White Plume Mountain. Now, in retrospect, I look at the distances and think “Wait – what?”

   My ranger didn’t own a horse, and neither did those other PCs... so, did we actually walk from Hepmonaland all the way to the Rift Canyon and cross the Tilva Strait and the Vast Swamp – more than twenty-five hundred miles?

   What about those DMs who became world builders in their twenties when they had lots of free time, but now they reach forty and don’t have as much time – and neither do their players? What then? Is it possible to downgrade the whole thing, to scale down a huge world carefully crafted over ten or fifteen years or more?

   One of my friends is a fantastic world builder. The complexity of his world is almost impossible to fathom: he created his own personal computer database and has twelve fat 6-inch folders full of printout charts and maps and NPCs and backgrounds developed since ’95. He even integrated all of his Photoshop maps into one enormous thing, kinda like Google Earth: you can see his entire fantasy continent and then zoom in to a small kingdom, and to a city, and even to some main streets... He’d probably tell me to go fuck myself. “You want me to take my life’s work and downgrade it? Take a magnificent three-hour movie and turn it into an MTV clip?”

   On the other hand, we only play twice a year. We used to play much more often, but it gets harder and harder to find a convenient time slot – so we only play twice a year and the sessions only last about five hours. On my little chart, that’s labeled No World Building.

   I offered five of my friends to try out Ashardalon, but there was really no enthusiasm at all on their part. “We are used to drinking a unique bold eighty-year-old scotch – and now Dave wants us to switch to a six pack of wine cooler?” Yes, I understand what they mean by that; but then again, we only get a taste of that eighty-year-old scotch twice a year! We could be chugging those California Coolers once a month! And why can’t we have both, by the way?

   I wonder if there’s ever gonna be a clear solution to that dilemma; and I’m quite certain we are not the only ones facing it. The hobby we love has officially become too complex for our own good and busy schedules.

Vecna

   There is nothing cooler than a mysterious name thrown in somewhere – and then never referred to again. I mean, really, Gardens of the Moon was first published in ’99, and to this day, I still wonder about the Spar of Andii. What is it? What was it used for?

   Let’s hope we never actually get an explanation. I don’t want to find out. It’s just a strange name thrown in once – only once – and then never mentioned again, ever, not in nine thousand pages anyway – I’m not kidding. As I said, cool.

   That’s what Brian Blume did back in ’76 when he first created the infamous “Hand” and “Eye” of Vecna. But the mystery was much too enticing to resist, I suppose. The arch-lich Vecna (anagram of Vance) eventually got a whole lot of media coverage, so much so that it completely spoiled the mystery and ruined the character itself. Vecna is now the “hero” of a graphic novel, he’s a major villain in the Ravenloft campaign, and his talking skull even makes a cameo appearance in the video game Planescape: Torment. Who paid what kind of money to whom, for all that? Don’t ask me!

   Other relics were regularly introduced here and there: the Scalp of Vecna, the Foot of Vecna, the Molar, the Heart... even though it was written that the arch-lich “imbued both his hand and his eye with wondrous and horrible powers enabling them to persist long after his other remains mouldered away into dust.”

   Nope, they didn’t moulder away.

   To honor what seems to have become a tradition, I give you a new mysterious relic of that poor old chopped-off undead superstar:

The Foreskin of Vecna

   The Foreskin of Vecna looks like any other dried-up piece of human prepuce, but more disgusting. When pulled over a circumcised penis, the Foreskin will instantly graft itself to the member, and it cannot be removed without slaying the host – who is now able to use the following magic-user spells, at the 18th level:

   Enlarge

   Preserve

   Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter

   Extension I, II, and III

   Childish, I know... And I am sorry, dear arch-lich. I liked you a lot, back in the day, before your mortal remains got turned into IKEA furniture.

   P.S. Here I am talking about the Hand and the Eye, but the truth is, I never actually encountered either one of those evil relics in a real campaign – so feel free to let me know about any crazy Eye- or Hand-related tales you can remember. I recall one guy I met in ’83 or ’84, and his fighter had the Sword of Kas; we talked for a long time, but I never saw him again, and our characters never played together. I also remember throwing the Eye of Vecna into my own campaign, and it was my brother’s favorite character, a thief named Nightshadow, who eventually found and kept the nasty thing. But we stopped playing two weeks later and switched to Gamma World, so there was no time for any chaotic event / reckoning / downfall or whatever.

   Again, to anyone with such stories of doom to tell – involving the Hand especially – I’d be more than glad to hear about them. The crazier the better!

Golden vs Silver

   Here’s my humble take on that Gygax Magazine “dice collection” series. Golden Age and Silver Age dice arrayed for some sort of epic clash. The Golden Age guys are clearly outnumbered here, but don’t worry: one Noldor is still worth at least two Númenóreans, right? And look at those three pale blue ones standing on the front line there – recognize them? That’s like having a trio of Valar on your side...

The Wish List

   For ten years, starting in the summer of 1995, I ran a “Medieval Vampire” game, one very detailed and somewhat exhausting campaign à la Anne Rice, with two unrelated groups of players, and constant references to the books. This is when I first came up with the concept of the player’s wish list, around 97 or 98. At first, I expected to find the same idea somewhere else, already invented and exploited in some supplement. Over the years, I kept looking, but didn’t find anything like it anywhere. So, maybe I really invented this, after all. Hard to believe... but there it is.

   Whenever I was out of breath or inspiration, or both, I created a few of these Lists and passed them along to my players, to keep them happy – and it worked extremely well, mainly because, as you are about to see, this thing allows players to (temporarily) become their own Dungeon Master.

   Basically, it is just like the spending of good old experience points, except that these “wish lists” can impact both the storyline and campaign setting directly, whereas ordinary XP only impact the player characters themselves. Some of the stuff you put on a List will have implications well outside the scope of mere character sheets, and when the player’s choices are finally turned in, as a Dungeon Master, your hands are tied, and you have to implement whichever and whatever option you hinted at on paper.

   Here’s how it works.

   Let’s say you have four players in a classic medieval fantasy campaign. There is one Half-elf mage, one thief, one Human fighter, and one Dwarf fighter. Presently, they have just concluded a lengthy adventure module, and all return together to the human fighter’s modest estate. That’s when you hand out your Lists. Each player gets his or her own.

   This is the Half-elf’s List:

   30 POINTS TO SPEND

   10 POINTS

   Identification of the gelatinous contents of the two mysterious urns found in the priest’s subterranean temple (end of last adventure).

   5 POINTS

   Increased control over that tiny Ghost Bird that’s been following you since your Astral Travel of two adventures ago (one precise task, weekly).

   10 POINTS

   Have your Master remove the curse on your newfound magical weapon, thus making it an ordinary +3 dagger.

   5 POINTS

   Receive a letter from your friend Lord Ochtar, with fresh news about Sorcerer Island, and the pact you made over there in your very first adventure.

   5 POINTS

   Near the river, find a beryl wand that could very well belong to one of Prince Bresh’s apprentices, providing a permanent +1 bonus in casting any Illusion spells.

   15 POINTS

   An old travelling witch sells you her eerie Vellum Tablet, on which you can write any magic-related question you want – and an answer to that question will appear on the same page, three minutes later. Who (or what) is the author of those “answers”? The witch doesn’t know. (12 pages / charges left in the Tablet).

   Now, the Human fighter’s List may look like this:

   30 POINTS TO SPEND

   10 POINTS

   Focusing every last moment of your free time on the study of royal proclamations and various Court documents, you learn the crests of every Lord and Knight in a fifty miles radius. You acquire the Heraldry skill, first level.

   15 POINTS

   Add fortifications and a watch tower to your estate, with no extra costs in gold.

   10 POINTS

   The antique tapestry you just brought back from the subterranean temple of Enhuyr, slowly turns into a bizarre map over the course of the next ten days! It appears to show the path towards another temple of the same evil cult, with two marked secret doors.

   5 POINTS

   A village boy brings you back four of the precious +1 arrows you lost six months ago in Krick’s Wood, during that midnight ambush by the Goblins.

   5 POINTS

   Your dog is gnawing on a human femur. Following it the next day, you discover the overgrown forest barrow of a monk. Collect 19 copper pieces, 3 silver pieces, and a mysterious clay amulet (possibly magic).

   5 POINTS

   Blacksmith Oswen helps you increase your crossbow’s maximum range by 12 feet.

   Of course, the thief and the Dwarf would also get very different Lists. You really share your Dungeon Master job with them individually: open a few doors here and there, make these suggestions, and let your players mull them over and come up with a choice.

   Expect the players to be quite excited, and maybe ask each other: “What do you have?” Secretive players won’t tell. Collaborative players will put everything out in the open, every option, and try to make strategic decisions for the common good. Secretive or not – it’s all fine. This is their moment. Give them time to scratch their heads and ponder.

   You can set a timer on the table, if you prefer to add urgency to this process. If you find a vintage alarm clock, even better: that ticking will drive them crazy.

   I have never seen a player turn in his or her List within the first five minutes; they are always torn, unable to pick and choose. Even if you go into the next room for coffee, you’ll hear various groans and hisses, fumbling with the pencils and the eraser, nervous scribbling sounds, and then more fumbling with the eraser...

Group Lists

   Another type of List is the Group List. The Dungeon Master comes up with but one set of options, and the players all get the same sheet of paper. So, the secretive aspect is not applicable in this case; the group has to come to an agreement, and spend their points together. It’s a different experience, but very interesting.

   Imagine this next List being presented to a space opera group of three: Humanoid female pilot, Alien gunner, and Hologram scientist (why not).

   20 POINTS TO SPEND

   10 POINTS

   A chance encounter with a crippled android soldier provides you with a critical piece of information: the exact coordinates of Warlord Huwyd’s invisible asteroid. For the first time ever, you could have the upper hand in an ongoing conflict with this nasty arch-enemy of yours...

   5 POINTS

   Skirting the Qëlyth Nebula, you came across the remains of a blown-up shuttle, and found a small container floating about in the void, with a +2 plasma cannon clip inside, compatible with your own ship’s armament.

   15 POINTS

   Midway between Tolstar VI and the Herring System, you receive a distress signal from the Zip-N-Orbit spaceclub. Being so close, you decide to respond, only to find the club’s staff shot, and nineteen patrons dead or dying in the main room. “Umokh Raiders,” they say. One dying explorer gives you the access code to his base on a remote moon – a rather large compound with comfortable living quarters for six, plus a landing bay!

   10 POINTS

   You get a rare audience with the Ozone Mutants headquartered on the Flat Moon, and they expertly upgrade every single one of your weapons (add +1 to any and all existing bonuses).

   5 POINTS

   Brand new RHP (Remote Holographic Probe) allowing Xynt the Hologram to operate in outer space up to 500 yards away from the ship.

   Needless to say, a big powerful item alongside crappy ones, with nothing else in between, doesn’t make for a very challenging List. Always aim towards those painstaking dilemmas. You put at least two major prizes on any given List, but you also want minor items. These things have to be flexible. Granted, the +1 arrows lost in Krick’s Wood are not that important – but you still have to include “small” stuff, in order for the players to adequately complete and adjust their spending. (If you get 30 points, you sure don’t want to spend only 25.)

   For example, on a 30-points List, you should have one big 20-points item, one 15-points item, two 10-points items, and two or maybe even three little 5-points items. Your goal is for players to shop around and be conflicted: that is where the fun begins. With 30 points to spend, they could either go 20 + 5 + 5 or 15 + 10 + 5 or 10 + 10 + 5 + 5 or any other permutation.

   So, our Alien gunner will love that plasma clip; Xynt the Hologram will want the RHP; both pilot and gunner would appreciate that upgraded weaponry (but not the Hologram – he is unarmed); all three would love a home base to stay at... What will the group decide?

   Assuredly, you will hear many speculations. “Can we attain the very same result through normal gaming?” Players are ever so practical, and they will think of grabbing the useful / powerful items first... and then, maybe, try to learn about that major villain’s abode through ordinary in-game investigation. Question is: will it work? Really, it’s your call. You allow it, or you don’t. Not allowing it is an interesting move; when the next Group List comes, they sure will think twice about just collecting the cool stuff. (“Yes, maybe that lucky break, on the previous List, was indeed our only chance to ever locate Warlord Huwyd’s invisible asteroid!”)

Campaign Lists

   The most daring and complicated type of List is the Campaign List. This is where you truly relinquish your DM powers and let the players steer the game in a direction of their own choosing. You simply put forward a diverse array of compatible scenarios and NPC elements, and let your DM-players shape the future for themselves.

   Let’s go back to our first example: Half-elf mage, the two fighters, and the thief. The Campaign List they’d get could look like this:

   5 POINTS TO SPEND

   3 POINTS

   An earthquake strikes the kingdom, opening a gigantic fifty-mile-long rift and revealing numerous long-lost subterranean settlements. Adventurers quickly go down into that crevasse, enter some ancient ruins, and return with gold – thus ushering in a new era of “rift explorations” and (of course) rivalries amongst professional treasure seekers and ruthless looters.

   2 POINTS

   A bizarre vagrant tribe of jesters, riddlers and puppeteers settle down along the river, offering perfunctory gifts to every Knight and Lord in the vicinity. People soon find out strange things about these “riddlers” and “jugglers”. They are, in fact, powerful priests of an unknown religion, said to hunt down demons and evil spirits. Is that true? Are they good guys, or bad guys?

   2 POINTS

   A dimensional altar materializes on top of Aker Hill, with seven irregular holes in it. One big asymmetrical gem pulses in the first socket, but the six others are still empty. According to scholars, the locations of the six other gems are hinted at in ancestral scrolls scattered in libraries, monasteries, and private collections across the kingdom. But what exactly will that altar do if and when all seven gems are gathered?

   1 POINT

   Deep underground, some sort of Elemental War ended up with the banishment and random binding of the leaders: five Earth elementals, eight Water elementals, and two Fire elementals. If a Human was to find the exact binding place of any banished Elemental, that Elemental would have to do his finder’s bidding for up to a week!

   1 POINT

   Count Enràug, a very rich old man, hired an architect to build him a huge tomb on his own land, but inexplicable things keep happening on that site: workers feel stronger, younger, and the sick ones even got healthy again. From as far as two cities over, more and more workers come to the site, wanting to get hired, while the architect keeps re-drawing that mausoleum, making it ever bigger and bigger...

   1 POINT

   Ten years ago an abandoned child was found on the steps of a temple. Raised by clerics and priests, that child now begins to display some amazing abilities: he says he can “feel” the magical things and places – and find them right away. He once walked straight into the wilderness, and dug up an enchanted ground stone maul nobody knew about. Alas, being close to that child also seems to trigger all sorts of eldritch nightmares...

   The List above is an example of variety. That “rift” arc involves survival skills and lots of exploration in deep inhospitable tunnels. The “vagrant tribe” arc involves social skills and old-school techniques of investigation. The “altar” arc will test knowledge skills, library use, and maybe demand some puzzle solving. So, the players really make an important decision here – one that is going to impact their adventures for quite a while – and they indeed become their own Dungeon Master, objectively, if not subjectively.

   Could an Elemental War cause an earthquake? If the group end up selecting those items together... possibly! Exploring that “rift” with the help of a bound Earth elemental would be nice. But having both “vagrant tribe” and “altar” could also prove very interesting... Or maybe an ominous “rift” plus “tribe” combo? And this gifted child, was he abandoned by that same vagrant tribe, ten years ago, and if so, why?

   Once the players have chosen the parts, you take over and put them together as you see fit. If they picked “altar” and “mausoleum”, then maybe that mysterious architect is in fact the dimensional guardian of the altar... Feel free to mix it up. Lists are not mini CYOA books in that the details are still up to a real-life DM. You get the onions, beef, and celery – but will you serve a stew, or a meatloaf?

   It’s fun to know what your players crave – so that you can go and write it for them, but still surprise them. Custom-made campaigns are the best.

Group / Campaign mixes

   After playing for a few years, you come to a point where the characters are intricately linked to the world they live in. This is when the Lists you create can contain both Group and Campaign elements. An example:

   Reports of Umokh raids have more than doubled in the last eighteen months, and there are not nearly enough military ships to patrol every route. On the Flat Moon, government officials have come to a decision: they selected a hundred independent starships, and “deputized” them for two years. Your own ship is among the chosen! But who are the other ninety-nine – and what if some of these crews abuse their new powers and try to make a profit while “enforcing the law”?

   Finally, never be afraid to change the delivery system. Individual Lists can be handed over at the beginning of a game session instead of at the end. Or you can wait until the day after a game, and send each player his or her List via email.

   For a Group or Campaign List, you can print the options separately on a series of cards, and give each one a title. The “rift” arc could then be called “What Lies Below”, and the “vagrant tribe” arc could be called “Unexpected Guests”.

   I’m sure imaginative Dungeon Masters out there will find new twists and alternative ways to use this tool and have fun with it.

   This is a small contribution to the RPG universe, but writing it and putting it out there was actually an item on my bucket list!

   Second post, and the visuals are still byakhee poop forgotten on a steel plaque under a halogen lamp in Florida for a week. Blogger is quite a formidable foe, but I vow to keep coming at it until this looks at least half decent.

   In early March there was still no sign of winter subsiding. Some very simple tweets helped me through those next few weeks. Brianna is a gamer living in Tennessee, and she just says the funniest things. Like she wants to play a bard sometime, to sit down at the table with a ukulele. Or she and a few friends dress up as pirates and go out on a Pirate Pub Crawl – and she even posts a map of their (intended) route!

   It got me thinking: why is it that I’m no longer enjoying myself like that? When I do something silly, I feel like I’m just being stupid; but when I see someone else doing something silly, I think it’s the greatest damn thing in the world...

   My friends and I could dress up as Tom Tew and Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny and go on our own Pirate Pub Crawl, and I’d probably secretly think: “Seriously... pirates?”, but since someone else is doing it, I’m really thinking: “Pirates! Wow!”

   The goofy stuff I do isn’t inspiring. The goofy stuff other people do is inspiring. What’s up with that? Is it the psychological scars of the most brutal fucking winter I’ve ever seen?

   This post is not really RPG-related, I know.

   With this new blog I’m gonna try and do something both silly and RPG-related, with some serious stuff – and hope to enjoy myself while writing it! Indeed, a tall order.

Shocking Grasp

   At one point in January, it was colder here than on the Forbidden Plateau of Antarctica. That polar vortex rolled a crit and I found myself at death’s door: -9 Hit Points! There is no way to express how much I hate freezing. Cold on my neck and shoulders especially – sometimes I even have nightmares about it (not unlike HPL).

   So I just browsed and drank hot tea. Nothing else.

   I first discovered Greyhawk Online, and then Greyhawk Grognard, and then a bunch of links catapulted me towards numerous other blogs and – literally – a week of reading round-the-clock Sword+1 / The Retired Adventurer / Hack & Slash / Roles, Rules & Rolls / Grognardia / Hamsterish Hoard... and many more.

   Bless you all, guys!

   Not only did it help me through that damn deep freeze, but it also came as some sort of revelation. Role-playing games were still alive and well, after all. Lots of people were still passionate about them, playing them, enjoying them, even writing about them. So, it was not just me and my friends putting together one meagre three-hour game session every five months or so, and not remembering a single thing about it five months later. We were not the only few survivors slowly dying out in our forgotten hole!

   That was a wonderful and amazing realization.

   I made the decision to partake in this exhilarating online scene, and write a blog of my own, even though I’m as good with computers as Boromir is with Tamagotchis. My previous blog is about Steven Erikson, but it is quite ugly, visually speaking. Let’s try to do just a tiny bit better this time around, shall we? But don’t expect me to successfully slap a money-making ad here, or even create functioning downloads or links. As for those “donate” gizmos, they’re sci-fi to me, and I honestly can’t understand how money from online could ever reach some dude in meatspace. If you’d like to give me five bucks, just go out and give it to the Korean guy at your local drugstore; eventually, it’ll get to me. It’s called the Economy. (Goldman Sachs, I hope you’re not lying about that.)

   Of course, I’m probably gonna run out of (interesting) stuff to say in a short while, but let’s do it regardless – this thing happens to be the only RPG project that truly motivates me in at least four years!