Several Bricks Short of a Load

I have posted descriptions of nalfeshnee, marilith and balrog on my wiki.  And again, this was work commissioned through my donate button, which can be found on the sidebar of this blog.  This content was made possible by JB of B/X Blackrazor.  Ask me about commissioning work at alexiss1@telus.net.  I'm open to ideas.

Regarding the post I wrote yesterday about the lack of details after decades of supposed game design.  I should like to make it clear that when I say "detail," I don't mean a story arc, such as the Blood War.  Story arcs are not details, they're examples of someone slapping an overused B-movie plot line on top of D&D monsters, which happens all the time.  Basically, take a WW2 film, scratch out "allies" and "fascists" and write in the monster you want.  It's exhaustively tiresome, boring and definitely not what I was talking about.

J'ohn left a comment about how "Pandemonium" is even "more chaotic" than the Abyss.  Let's examine that a moment.  The image shown is the original outer planes chart, that was purposefully used to explain how alignment ~ that which players were supposed to play their characters by ~ was fundamental to the universe.  Evil on the bottom, good on the top, law on the left and chaos on the right.  Pandemonium is also chaotic, yes.  But that only stipulates that they don't like "law" there anymore than the Abyss does.  The separation between the Abyss and Pandemonium isn't how chaotic they are, but where they are on the good-evil scale.  Pandemonium is less evil.  But there's no reason to think anyone in Pandemonium feels any different about a military culture than the Abyss does.  Why would either of these planes have any interest in fighting each other.

I also find it a bit galling to be advised that there a "many planes" and that Pandemonium is one of them.  I believe the phrase suitable to my generation is, don't tell your grandmother how to suck eggs.  I don't expect the young'uns will get that.

The chart above is, by the way, execrable.  A quick reading will tell you there are not four locations in Elysium, there's no logic whatsoever to the three planes of the "Happy Hunting Grounds," which is a racist thing by the way, nor is Nirvana remotely lawful.  Nirvana is not anything.  The "666 layers" of the Abyss is pure Gygaxian bullshit.  The meaning of the word "abyss" is the description of something that is bottomless, infinitely so.  The Greeks called it abyssos, which they used to translate the Septuagint Bible from the Hebrew tehom, "original chaos."  It is, linguistically, the chaos from which all others chaoses come.  So whatever a dumbfuck writer working for the WOTC thought once while casting about for something cool to write in his game module, the abyss was chaos before the word pandemonium was coined.

Pandemonium, incidentally, was a word invented by John Milton in the 17th century.  He needed a name for Satan's Palace in the middle of Hell, so technically it isn't a plane at all, and if "Hell" in D&D is lawful evil, Pandemonium is technically as lawful evil as it gets.  Pandemonium is lawful evil's comfort cushion.  It is lawful evil central.  When you punch "lawful evil" (10-digit number) into your cell phone, the Pandemonium front office picks up.

The "place of uproar" meaning came in 1770.  "Lawless confusion," not until 1865.  The end of the Civil War.  You know, the holiday being celebrated today.

Honestly, people.  The internet and google exists.  It wouldn't hurt to type some of these words into these search engines and LOOK SHIT UP.  In the very least, please do it before teaching me how to suck eggs.

I'm going to long way around the barn to point out that on many, many things, research exists and it will yield some tremendous content.  If the game company were run by just one scholar, just one, who was able to look at a piece of description and throw it back in the writer's face, we'd be farther along than we are now.

Dave Arneson rushes to share his genius
with the world.

A tiny bit of scholarship reveals in a twink how truly unlettered and dense, and unwilling to crack the spine of a book or two, were the inventors and "geniuses" behind the golden age of D&D.  Time and time again I am both stunned and bemused at the sheer numbskullery of these dorks, who got away with it because they didn't have to deal with real editors, experts or indeed adults where it came to slapping their works together.  The adults came later, out of the 6 and 7 year olds who learned to play the game and grew up as stone ignorant as Gygax and others ... who in the intervening years between then and now have continued to perpetrate the chowderheaded dumbfuck unschooled game culture, and to do so from a dim belief that they are upholding some "real" standard of some kind, as they puff themselves up to speak academic gospels like, "Well, Pandemonium is actually more chaotic than the Abyss."  Oh, really.  How interesting.

I suppose, in truth, D&D never had a chance of being anything but a child's game, given the grounding it had from the founding deadbeat fathers who birthed this thing.  There's so much contrary, discordant, willful, deliberately clueless and proud-of-being-unworldly sentiment in the community, misinformation that the pundits preen themselves on using to inform others, there's not much chance of improvement.  The community prefers to tout the benefits of "making shit up," rather than paying any attention to anything that anyone has ever written about the thing being discussed.  And yet, with all this talk about the constant and endless importance of making shit up, whenever I'm driven to look around to see what might have been "made up" about the Glabrezu in the last 40 years, I never seem to find anything.

I guess we make shit up, but we don't write it down.  Hmf.  Most of these dumb bastards probably don't know how.