Like the Spider

Taking my morning walk, I could feel myself break a spider's web that had been strung from the tree on my left to the car on my right. Given that people must walk there every day, and given that the car must move off from the curb also, I found myself wondering about the spider that releases a light silk line into the air to let the wind carry it until it catches another surface. Once it catches, the spider tightens and reinforces it, then uses it as a first bridge line for the rest of the web. Course, that never happens, because human activity produces a routine environment destruction of the spider's efforts. Yet, "orb-weavers" who do this rebuild often, sometimes daily, even eating their webs so they can be reused, because if it catches just one decent sized insect (and for some of the smallest types, that can be very small from our perspective), then the effort hasn't been wasted.

My first thought was to connect this effort to prepping games for Dungeons and Dragons. Weird, huh?

It's a matter of apparent wasted effort when it seems to provide no real value or consequence. Obviously, the spider is functioning from instinct. It lets its web to the wind because it has adapted that way to its environment. Humans are harder. We do things by instinct, but because we have the capacity to think we find ourselves endlessly forced to justify that instinct in a concrete, identifiable way... even if that way becomes story-making we tell ourselves. We convince ourselves that this jam is better than that because this is "sweeter" or "less chewy" or "thicker"... when in fact, we're just reaching for things to call the jelly we like versus how to describe the jelly we don't. All jellies are sweet, chewy or thick; they're jelly. We only care which is which when we're forced to rate them. Human instinct says, eat the one that's closest when your hungry. Human thought tells us, we can choose which one to eat because we can prepare for when we are hungry. And... for the most part, that choice is simpler if we need only go to the shelf, look for the cherry and buy it. Cognisance, explaining the reason we do things, only gets hard when we have to explain to someone else "why cherry."

In turn, D&D preparation gets easier when we turn off the signal that keeps asking "what are we doing this preparation for?"  There are a great many DMs who simply enjoy making megadungeons. They don't need a reason. The dungeons don't ever actually have to be used in a game. Yet the act is just pleasant, and because it is, the act can consume hundreds of hours in the space of a season. It doesn't need to be justified. Like the spider, it's just what we do.

The leap comes when we realise that non-intentional preparation actually IS preparation, just in another form. Because it's more enjoyable than the forced stuff we have to do for a specific game, we do more of it. And it changes what we know, and how good we get at it, and how rational we become doing it and... ultimately, it gives us a group of skills we can apply to other things. Steady work enlarges our stock of patterns, instincts, procedures and solutions. We learn scale, we learn how rooms connect and how big they ought to be... and most of all, how repetition, drawing the same thing over and over again, pushes us to invent new things to draw, new ideas, new possibilities.

Anyone who's decided they're going to make a world because it has to be done, not out of love for world making, soon discovers how dreadful the experience is. As soon as you have to use your head to convince your body to go through the motions of dungeon design, you've already lost the battle. There's no way, when you're thinking about it all the time, and wondering if this is going to do any good, or if it has value, to just keep at it. You're like the spider would be if it fretted all the time about whether or not it would catch food today. The spider doesn't think about that because it can't. It just does. If it doesn't catch food, it dies. And it doesn't think about that either. Which might be a blessing... except the spider can't recognise a blessing.

This is why "shortcuts" appear so desirable. We don't want to make a world, but we want to have one. We get bored trying to make a module, so we buy one. We don't want to learn for ourselves how to DM through practice and effort and pattern recognition — we just want someone to tell us how to be one, in such a way that it happens easily. Like a fingersnap. Poof, you can DM now. That's much better than having to slog our way through endless room drawing and tedious research about things we don't in fact care about.

The spider is born to do what it does. People want to be born with the knowledge of how to DM. That would be perfect.

This is why the theory that some DMs are just "naturally" good at this is so popular. It lends credence to the belief that knowledge is a lock that all we need do is find a key for, and again, just like that, we can do it. And if we can't, well... there's no point trying. "I wasn't born a DM, so realistically, there's no point in my trying to be one."

I'll be conceited and arrogant and say that I've never met one of these "natural" DMs who especially impressed me, as the all seem to be a lot of show and performance and not much on flexibility and design. Mercer, for example, is all show; as a DM, he runs a pre-made story that's fleshed out with glitz and glamour... but it only works if the players don't have there own agenda. This is fine for what he was doing: "acting" like a good DM. I didn't see a thing in any episode I watched that suggested he had any skillset except that.

Dungeon Mastering as a skill we "inhabit" like the spider comes down to two things: the ability to assume authority that, right or wrong, causes the players to give way when we speak. The other is managing player independence. If you take that independence and cram it into a set of "if-then" options, as modules do, as Gygax told us to do, as the company continues to argue we ought to do, that solves the second problem. This argues that players, in essence, are leashed. They have only the independence we allow them to have. Which isn't really "independence," but hey, what'ya want for a game where the rules ain't really the rules anyway?

All the DMs I've met that were worth their salt had a "second game" going on the side. Not running other people, not creating their own characters to run in a dungeon like playing chess against ourselves (but a lot of us have tried it). No, just making. Like the whittler who makes squirrel after squirrel with a pen-knife until the squirrels look really, really good, and there are hundreds of them on every shelf in the basement, with a pile of them in the corner over there. Because the squirrel's end is not the object. Making is the object.

For the DM, the whittled squirrel is a laptop or a file book full of unused dungeons, failed attempts to create an economy, maps for other planets and planes the players will never see, scale drawings of towns that have no application, price lists, geneologies, histories... the list goes on and on. It does not matter that these things are not "useful." At some point, when the DM needs something, the thing may be remembered and sought after — either without success, or only to discover that the thing was made so long ago that it pales compared to how the DM would draw that map now, or design that dungeon now, or make up that geneology now. Which is fine, because the DM learned how and can churn out a better, needed product in a matter of hours. You want a squirrel? No, don't take that one off the shelf. Listen, give me two hours, I'll make you a better one right now.

That brings us back to the spider. I break the spider's web and think, what a pity, the spider spent that effort for nothing. But the spider's "effort" is irrelevant. The spider's nature makes the effort fluidly, unconsciously, and when it's gone, it's not wasted because it's not thought about. Thinking is the stumbling block, not doing.

The common DM thinks about objects. They want a dungeon, a world, an "adventure," an end result that they think they need to make their world happen. They are utterly trapped in the materialism of DMing because its the only part of their gaming that they can remotely understand. Thus, if a module sits on the shelf and is never used, it IS a waste... of money, of expectation, of space on the shelf. And because they need the object to run the game, they're dependent on others who can make it for them, They're dependent on the object arriving in time, or they need to make sure they have enough of every kind of object so that if something unexpected comes up, they'll be ready. They run their game worlds like an inventory.

But the more capable DM thinks of skills. Making the dungeon, making the world, making the adventure. The skill means I don't need to have one ready made, it will pop into my mind because I've made so many of this thing, out of nothing really, that I can do it for myself, any time, on demand, for free. And if I make it and it's not used? No matter, I didn't pay for it, I made it... and whatever the end object that is now, the process of making it remains eternally a part of me, forever. Without my needing to think about it.

It is impossible for something unexpected to come up that I can't deal with in the next five minutes. I've been doing this too long.

Obviously, I don't expect any reader to suddenly stop being an object-dependent DM, if that's what you are. I only want to make it clear that your manner of thinking about what "prep" means for you defines whether or not you are dependent or independent... and for you to think about what's a better strategy for you in the long run.

And They Tell this Stuff to Children

Here is a subject that is never spoken of enough.

When the makers of RPGs, regardless of the given company — and of course there are many now — seek to sell their game, the marketing that's pursued promotes the product to a young, new, accessible, family-friendly, easy-to-onboard culture... something that, in particular, a kid can enter. The wording is always carefully balanced to include short words, to suggest emotional ideals such as "imagination," "adventure" and "fun," because the goal is to make something that absolutely encourages young people to play. Most of us here began playing D&D, as the front-leading example, when we were quite young. Therefore it seems perfectly natural to us, having been introduced to the game in school and early in life, that the company should go on promoting the game to the next generation.

However, when any part of the company's position is challenged on the ethics of its practices — fudging, for example; or story-manipulating the player's experience with railroading, illusionism, concealed forced outcomes; or questions of consent, the politicisation of the game with "safety tools" and "consent checklists"; corporate control over community labour; digital ownership and platform control; and monetisation of the product, building brands, the endless stream of book selling, the normalising of performance-centered versions of play, the mechanics of audience retention — then suddenly the imagined game table is composed of consenting adults who have negotiated every premise. Children are useful as customers; but magically, when discussing their customers, the manner in which the product's pitch affects children is never a part of the discourse.

Yes, I began playing D&D at 15, but the company did not at the time tell me what to think about D&D, what to believe about the game's purpose, what it was supposed to mean to me or any other form of propaganda, such that pours like heaven's flood, drenching the landscape now. I was given the rules and allowed to play. What I did with the game, how I spoke to my players, how they spoke to each other, that was NOT discussed by the game's seller. Now, if one wants to buy the product, the pitch that you should like the game you just purchased is there on the front page. Because the last thing we can allow is to let children think for themselves, when the opportunity exists to tell them how to think, fast and early, before they develop any opinions of their own.

We don't think about it because nowadays, the lawnmower we buy includes text before the instructions that tells us how much we're going to love our lawnmower... or the microwave, or even Christmas lights, if some justification can be made to provide printed material with the product. Sometimes, I believe the safety pamphlet is really only there as a performative way of the company telling us that they "care." As if to say, "See, we don't want you to hurt yourself by plugging in these five-watt fairy lights in some imagined manner that might cause the tiniest of shocks — if that doesn't tell you how much we LOVE you as a customer, we don't know what will."

It might be nice to buy a blender and not be told the lifestyle feeling I'm supposed to derive from owning my very own way to make pulverised carrots, but, c'est la vie. It's the world we live in now.

The difference is that my blender is not giving instructions in order to mind-fuck my players according to a supposed understood emotional contract that allows me as a DM to run a game in which the dice, or any other aspect, in an "advisory" way, for the player's larger benefit (as defined by me), to help them avoid an unwanted consequence (as defined by me), so that I can "save them" (a necessity that is, again, defined by me) from an unsatisfying game experience (as I define it). All, I might add, without admitting that I'm doing any of this.

Moreover, if a nine-year-old walks into an appliance store to buy a blender by himself, the store won't sell it to him. Guess why.

We supposedly live in a culture that views marketing and selling products as a rule-governed social practice. From the law's point of view, marketing and selling are regulated forms of public conduct. A thing may be offered to the public because it is presumed to be intelligible. The buyer is not merely handed an object; he is given a public account of what the object is, what it is for, how it is meant to be used, what sort of experience it promises and what kind of relation he is entering by purchasing it. The product’s description, packaging, instructions and surrounding language are not incidental. They form the buyer’s understanding of the thing.

At present, the role-playing game is not being sold as a product. It is being sold as a social practice. It tells persons, including children, how to exercise authority (as the company defines it), presenting it in scope as a "rule-governed game" while then immediately undermining the so-called rules by flat-out stating that the rules do not need to be followed. The DM does not need to follow them, the game is better served by not doing so, the DM should instead concentrate on the "vibe of the table," while the company argues loudly that those running the game — and again, this can be read by children able to read just as well as by adults — are empowered to subordinate the rules to flow, story, fun, pacing, and emotional management of, yes, other children.

But don't talk about that. The WOTC never does.

A company should not be legitimately permitted to give public advice, market a game as accessible and family-friendly, while at the same time pretending that it's messaging is begin received only by mature adult tables who have negotiated all ethical premises in advance. A company cannot pretend to sell this form of propaganda about how to play a game in a manner that imposes lies, manipulation and brand-serving product language and then pretend it is not responsible if children do not understand the message.

Obviously, I have no problem with a game being sold. My problem is with people being told, screamed at really, through multiple mediums, supported by a cadre of fairly ignorant lock-steppers who ALSO do not discuss children when giving advice on their youtube channels, the principles by which the game should be played.

It is the word should that really gets under my skin, to be honest. Which might sound strange to some, since I've spent a lot of time on this blog doing my own shouting about how the game "should" be played. The difference, I think — and some might disagree — is that I'm not spending my time telling people how to feel about the game, or how to ensure others feel about the game as you should. A subtle difference, to be sure. Certainly one I don't expect the majority to grasp. But there is an enormous difference between my teaching a little leaguer how to hold a bat in order to achieve the best possible swing with the best possible leverage, to permit a better physical contact with the ball, and badgering that same little leaguer into liking the game more, because he should, because it's a great game, and everyone should love it, period, no questions asked. I think there's a difference.

Feel free to disagree.

The World is Too Big a Place

My recent post about the D&D-branded play community addressed the issue that I have long had with the proffered "game" proposed by the company. While sold as "wonderful, communal and magical," in reality I believe the latest version of the game is in fact not a very good product... but that it is made tolerable by a community that has embraced ideals of individualism, "me"-ism and a strong compulsion to feel recognised and not excluded... this last having a lot to do with general social feelings just now that the world has become too big for those who cannot place themselves rationally within the world's present-day internet-driven massiveness.

I've been thinking of late about the world I grew up in — but before I get into that, let me stress, as I have many times on this blog, that I am not a nostalgic person. I do not think the game that I ran in 1984 is better than the game I'm running now. I do not think that the world was a better place in 1976; I do not think that there were more opportunities for individuals to express themselves in the 1970s and 80s. I do not think the culture was "better"... though I will admit that it was more focused and less owned by a corporate elite. I am not interested in writing a post about the "good old days," because in fact I don't think those days were actually very "good." I believe that people say that because they don't adapt well, because they don't know how to make use of new things, because they taught themselves to be confused more easily than younger folks and because, let's face it, things were simpler. I just refuse to consider "simpler" to mean the same thing as "better."

Importantly, what matters here is that that other world was smaller. The number of those who might know of our existence was minimal, limited for the most part to first hand or second-hand sources. Others at school or in my work place might know me, or they might have heard of me, directly, as told by others... but that was all. Very, very few had any experience with actual "fame," either small or large. Politicians did not need to perform in a mass-media fashion because it was sufficient to go to one's riding or district, meet people on a street, shake their hands, talk with them, and feel personally connected. Some one might develop a "reputation," but this was largely only with people already known. When I played D&D, what happened at my table might to told directly to others by my players, or myself, but that was as far as it could conceivably go. Even attending a game con, the larger audience was fleeting, hardly impressive and no means existed by which a person could go to a third source to look me up, to see what others thought of me.

This is all obvious. I only feel the need to say it because no one ever does now.

Another writer might now decide this is the opportunity to talk about how this unlimited visibility is bad for us and soul-crushing, and the reason why everything sucks now, while decrying the loss of the personal or some other such rot. I'm not going to do that.

What's materially relevant is that the world I grew up in had two or three centuries to develop a structure that included a school, a shared workplace, a university-directed path towards careerism, meeting spaces, expectations about politicians, celebrities and the media... all of which, while reaching fruition at different times and with different impulses, did create a sort of structured, predictable world that enabled people to tell us, "you will get an education at school" or "if you improve yourself, you will get a good job." These were myths to some degree, but the result came up often enough that there remained a sentiment that it could be trusted.

Thus the individual growing up in that world could perceive the world, correct or not, as a navigable space; as a finite space. If I did not enjoy my time at one restaurant, I could leave the job and cross the street to be hired there, without someone having the power to look my name up on an internet and learn what my life had been before entering that new space. That limitation matters, not because it was better, but because it was, for the average human, comprehensible.

A finite world can be harsh, stupid, toxic, have its head up its ass... but it exists in a "bubble."  The concept of a bubble became the rage in the 2000s not because it accurately described the average person's behaviour toward the internet — picking and choosing what they desired to believe or hear — but because it connected to the world that the pundits of that time understood best. We have ALWAYS lived in a bubble... but once upon a time, the bubble was something one had to earn. If you worked for the New York Times as a writer, you had to prove yourself to be there... and you had to prove yourself able to stay there. Now a promising youtuber can outproduce the best writer of the New York Times easily, not only in views, attention and popularity, but in volume and legitimacy. That is terrifying for those people who remember when there were kept gates. It is normal for those who do not care about such things.

But... there is a price to be paid to the "popularity" model... and it is the price that vast numbers of persons are paying now. In my younrger life, there was a thing called a "plugger." This was a person who did not have any special skills, any special value to a company, was not inventive or innovative... but they showed up for work day in and day out, they got along with everyone, they had nothing else particularly special in their lives but they did have the resolve to just keep plugging at a job. This often produced its own form of respect. Jimmy has been with this company for 42 years; no, he's not invented anything new, he's not all that clever, we could replace him with someone cheaper... but really, he's still here. Wow. That counts for something.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Jimmy was replaced with someone cheaper. And Jimmy doesn't have the capacity to do all that well in the present climate, where "plugging" will not get you attention on the internet, it will not increase your youtube views, it will not guarantee you a space with the company and, really, we don't care if you plug. What can you do? Hm? Anything?

Pluggers can exist in a finite world. But that world is gone. And unfortunately, there have always been more pluggers than stars. Thus we have the people who have followed the strategy recommended by the internet: post regularly, post often, just keep posting, just keep at it, just count on the future, just plug. But it isn't enough to plug. The 147th boring post is still just boring, it is still just getting 11 views. There isn't a future. The world is too big a place and Jimmy isn't competing with Hal and Mary and Tom for employee of the month. Jimmy is competing with every living soul with access to the internet.

The larger picture here is a conscious understanding that nearly everyone has now that we're very, very small in an amazingly vast and incomprehensibly sized universe. A very large slice of people cope with that by just not getting on the internet at all. Or limiting their contact with the internet to an anti-boredom machine. They don't have delusions of mattering. They don't imagine that something special is going to happen to them one day. They'd like to not be alone. They'd like to be among friends that make them feel important. Friends who want to give them something around a D&D table that it would be impossible to have online. Friends who will let them be a "star" for a few hours on a Saturday night, because the company tells them, "Forget the internet: your place to shine is which you cool new zumbla-raced character with its bahzit character class! You'll be special, you'll be unique, you'll have what the internet and the world cannot give you: relevance."

The corporation, even the pundits on youtube, are selling a very distinct image: that the D&D table can be a finite room where the players can matter because everyone present agrees that they do. All that's needed is to remove every obstacle to this goal: thus, rules can't exist, because that's a hump the players would have to climb over; limitations on action can't exist, because we're here to have fun, not prove anything; every imaginable form of character and self-definition has to be possible because THIS is the goal: to self-define to make oneself important. This is what D&D is selling, in the most analog way possible, because "collaborative" game table is becoming one of the last places where live human beings of the "loser" variety can gather together physically, in the flesh, to "become" more than they are.

It's all kind of... well, I'm sorry to say it, because it's mean and cruel, but it's kind of pathetic.

If, to feel self-important, to feel part of activity you're willing to partake in, you're prepared to give up everything except self-gratification, then you're... well... a child. You're a child who has felt so overwhelmed by the world you've been thrust into that your sole means of ego is to return to the sort of play-pretend games that children play, because they don't actually understand what they're pretending to be. They're thinking that being a doctor means dressing like one and having a stethescope. They're thinking that being a firefighter means having the right hat. They're doing the equivalent of pinning their brand new police officer's badge to their t-shirt and then wearing it proudly in front of their friends, as though this means anything except a piece of tin.

They're not actually perceiving themselves as real life adventurers, who have to overcome impossible odds to achieve unimaginable things, through courage, difficulty, dangers, possible loss of life... they don't want to experience anything even remotely close to those things. They can't even gather the courage to face those things imaginatively. No. What they want is the free badge, pinned to a shirt, so they can strut and pretend they've earned it.

While the company recognises that this impulse is an easier way to make money than to make a difficult-to-understand, but engaging product. The role-player in the present day doesn't want to be "engaged." They want to be empowered, and they want that empowerment to take a shape that the world cannot offer them: with an iron-clad guarantee that they matter.

The world has just become too big a place now for them to be adults inside it.

For Nigel Robinson

 
Way back in 2022, I had this exchange with Nigel Robinson, who wrote,

"Alexis, I usually comment as Nigli, but I'm on a shared tablet so I have a different handle. I'm from New Zealand originally but have spent most of my adult life in Europe, mostly in the Czech Republic and more recently in Hamburg, Germany.In passing, I am interested to note you used Gottwaldov for what's now Zlin."

He added when I asked,

"Duchy of Vlachia sounds like a reasonable name. I know it as Valašsko, which is the current Czech name. The people there speak with a really sing-song dialect."

Well, Nigel, here's Zlin at last.

Unfuckingbelievable

I'm in a terrible mood today. I'm writing this in what is probably the mistaken belief that the mainstream media does not actually represent the mainstream of human culture right now; and that the United States press, both sides of it, also do not represent the mainstream. This is not going to be a blog post about D&D, or anything that most of my American readers are going to want to read about. I'll keep this as polite as I can and try not to sink the popularity of this blog.

First of all, I do not care about the World Cup. I think many others right now are doing what I'm doing... tolerating the nonsense sham of encouraged enthusiasm, just as the Knicks were shoved down our throats when, likewise, I did not care. I do not care who wins the basketball final because I'm not invested in something I can't do, can't enjoy, can't feel emotions about and which, in essence, assumes that because I happen to live in a given city, I give a rat's ass about how the sports team of that city performs, or what other sports teams from other cities that it beats. I feel the same way about the World Cup. I have played soccer, but I have zero investment in other people playing soccer and I do not care what country they come from. No matter who wins, no matter what arbitrary country boundaries they happen to live in or be from, I'm sure they'll be very good at "football."  That is as far as my concern about the matter lies. I'd be able to forget about it entirely, except that Google has a series of extremely annoying short videos that I'm forced to see every day reminding me about something I'd rather not be reminded about.

As far as Iran goes... and I really shouldn't say this, but... for the sake of my soul. The United States people in the majority elected a bloated, arrogant, ignorant rapist and pedophile, with delusions of role-playing as the world's hockey goon... twice. They had all the opportunities in the world to see to it that this goon could not be elected again, that this goon should have seen the inside of a prison, that this goon should have faced some kind of justice, and instead they all thought about their own careers and their own needs and did fuck-all nothing about Jan 6... so this goon went ahead and attacked a foreign country without provocation, like a tin pot dictator, without any real consequence to himself and his cronies, like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia, except that he got his nose broken and his knees broken and was forced to accept that it was an incredibly stupid, impractical thing to do... not to mention a very BAD thing to do, except that because he's American, the American press won't just repeat that over and over again. The country attacked another country — never mind which one, because the rules are that no one does this, ever, under any auspices, period, done deal. Except that he did, and oh poor, poor, poor, poor, poor America, they lost a fucking war because they got their ass beat by the nominal Czechs in this situation, and now have to eat crow or dirt or whatever they have to shove down their poor sick throats now because it turns out that being the "greatest country in the world" doesn't seem to matter fuck all where the end results occur. And now the big bad other country is going to get a bunch of things that even liberals in America are unhappy about... and seriously... seriously... to everyone taking America's side here, fuck you. Them's the breaks. You let this moron goon off the chain, he did something very stupid, YOU LET HIM, and now here you are. Suck it up, all of you.

Congratulations. I didn't think it was possible, but the long and the short of it is that IRAN are the good guys in this scenario.

Unfuckingbelievable.

There.

My conscience is clear. Hate me as you will.

Back House Garbage

This is something of an ungenerous image to post, but I feel it says in a screenshot something very important about the pattern of streaming D&D that continues to proliferate, in search of the money Critical Role made.

The moment is from the WOTC's Dungeon Masters, episode 8, campaign 1 Finale. I'm not going to give the time stamp, you'll just have to watch this to find the moment. Yes, the fellow on the left is definitely picking his nose. The fellow on the right is not smelling his armpit, though the freeze suggests that; he is, rather, apparently checking out some growth or something to do with the skin behind his elbow... apparently because he's so bored with the ongoing campaign that he's forgotten that a camera is running.

This is a problem I have with the "actors" from all such things that are being presented by some sort of "official" organisation or corporation: while they may be actors or even have experience with improv, they aren't "professional."  The lack of immediate attention from moment to moment allows them to slip into a habit that all unprofessional actors do... get bored, start looking around, allow their faces to express momentary contempt at what the dungeon master says, or another actor... all of which produces an effect more like a reality show full of bored jerks (in other words, normal) and not a D&D session.

The assumption that professional discipline isn't necessary comes from the belief — again, in from a very unprofessional point-of-view — that improv doesn't need to be professional. This is an amateur's assumption that because something is improv'd, it doesn't require pacing, timing, care, attention, mindfulness and respect for other performers. In the scene above, the fellow on the left is talking to the DM while performing the act, while the fellow on the right is ignoring that the fellow next to him is talking. Professional actors know to turn and look at whomever is talking, because it draws the audience's focus to that person. NOT doing this isn't just poor acting, it's flat out disrespectful. I shouldn't be able to capture one second of two actors in the same shot, with one talking, and the other doing anything.

True enough, at an ordinary table, people scratch themselves, they check their phones, they make side jokes, they get up for snacks and ignore the other players, or roll their eyes and so on. They naturally behave much of the time that it's their turn that counts, that when others are playing its fine to look over one's character, look off blankly, yawn, stretch, whatever... because it makes little difference to the game: but the WOTC isn't presenting "a game"... not really. The WOTC is presenting something it hopes will encourage sales, interest, attention, a willingness to follow... and, one hopes, the fostering of a positive attitude towards the game itself.

This video fails utterly to accomplish this. One doesn't need to take my word it. This is the "big finale," presumably the most important episode... and yet, after 13 days live, 52K page views. In the scene of the screen capture, we're talking about the Alchemist's character's abilities and spell slots, as though that ought, on camera, to be something we need to highlight in a 1 hour, 35 minute episode. In D&D terms, that's not very long. If I were to run a session that short, it would be over in a finger snap, so far as the participants and myself were concerned. Instead, this hour and a half drags... nothing really happens. There's no build of tension, just display. The DM is making a lot of show, but there's next to no actual game play. The players are told things that happen (with the DM's voice literally enhanced technologically to sell the scene). This is a terrible representation of what the game of D&D offers.

On some level, this is what hurts D&D, and always has. Going back to the Dragon Magazine, there's always been this sort of... let's call it a "lets-go-camper vibe" with respect to the game that's always been very successful at undermining the game's credibility.

When I was 14, I worked one summer as a camp counsellor at a camp that was just a half-mile from my parents' cabin in Sylvan Lake. Junior counsellors ranged in age from 14 to 17, and seniors 18 to 19... presumably, in retrospect, because we could all be counted on to work for the experience for free. I certainly was willing.  Each cabin of eight boys had a senior and a junior counsellor. My senior liked to use the evenings to get together with the other seniors and drink (legally, in Canada, this was always possible at 18), leaving me to look after the eight boys, aged 8 and 9,  between eight and ten at night. Bedtime was eight, but it was always at least an hour of sitting in the cabin getting them all to sack out, boys being boys. Mostly, I let them talk, because I get along with kids. I could easily remember, then, being 8, and I liked being looked up to.

One of the things the boys like about me was that I wasn't rah-rah-rah all the time. I'd just talk to them like people. This was 1979, the same year Meatballs came out, meaning I hadn't seen it, but I would talk to the boys like Tripper talked to Rudy. You know, normal. Turns out, kids like that. Makes them feel like they matter, like they're mature... like they're respected.

But that was not the other camp counsellors. With them, it was all Morning Has Broken every morning and Kumbayah every night, like some hellscape of virtue signalling that went on relentlessly for hour after hour, day in and day out. Because, by gawd, these kids were going to "enjoy" their camp experience, no matter how hard it had to be shoved down their throat.

From the beginning of the Dragon Magazine, I've felt as a participant in this game that the game itself was assumed never to be enough for me. I had to find dragon cover art to be "cool," I had to swoon over critical rolls, I had to be fascinated with beholders and I had to stop dead in my tracks at the very idea that Gary Gygax, the Gary Gygax, had deigned to write an article for the magazine that was, after all, selling his shit. And that has more or less been the official position for the last 40 years. I'm not supposed to just watch this latest manifestation of Critical Role. I'm supposed to wet my pants because the DM's voice has been deepened with an echo effect when she speaks as "Lord Soth."

I'm frankly just sick to fucking death of it.

Let me repeat: I was fourteen when I noticed that the counsellors standing around the camp's flag pole at the abusive hour of seven A.M. in the summertime, their hands on their hearts as they sang a 1931 Christian hymn made popular in 1971 by Cat Stevens, having rousted the kids out of bed at 6:30 — who were still waiting to be fed, remember — were also hung over from drinking hard the night before. This kind of fucks with your head when you're young and your eyes are open. I was between grades 9 and 10 and was already beginning to see that a lot of life was a sort of ridiculous performance art, where adults pretend that we're all wonderful good people for the sake of children only to become, well, themselves when the kids are all in bed. It wakes one up to things... like, politicians on camera and off, teachers in a classroom and not, front house and back house in a restaurant.

My game sessions are like a bunch of cooks occasionally burning the food, dropping a chicken breast and then throwing it on the grill anyway, grazing at the fries while waiting, getting the line swept enough to keep from slipping, but not so that it's really clean... that only happens after close. Whereas the WOTC is like the front house, pretending our eggs only come from hens that have never had sex or that yes, absolutely, the fish is fresh, even though this is Sunday and the order was delivered Thursday. And I can't unsee the reality of this just because the WOTC wants me to wet myself with glee every time it churns out another product like this video. Which is full of stuff that reveals this was made in the back house, not the front.

It is full of shabby reality, made worse by the truth that whoever edited this video ought to be fired. Today. Without a good reference. The failings on camera here are accidental, amateurish, incompetent. Garbage. And there's no value to branding garbage like this while selling me on it being an immaculate chicken.

Session 10: Bugs and Slugs, Oh My!

The above is the "troglodyte lair" that the party investigated last Friday, with dotted line beginning at the mid-left and moving around through numbers 1 through 7. White indicates traversable space, grey the walls that were identified and black equals unknown. Thus in the bottom right corner, where black cuts across the white space, that isn't a wall, that's just as far as the party's torches was able to reveal. The gray smattering about the area is "rubble." The party's last position is shown on the map; an enlarged version of that is given below.

The constructing occupants, orcs, abandoned this catacomb 400 years ago, due to dwindling population and, likely, genetic issues, not that a 13th century orc could have understood the latter as anything except a lot of stillbirths and monsters from inbred parents who can't seem to produce healthy children. Even orcs must obey the laws of DNA.

The party fought (1) two giant ticks [AC 4,1 HD,#AT 1,D 1-4] and [AC 3,2 HD,#AT 1,D 1-4, blood drain]; (2) three giant centipedes [AC 8,1/4 HD,#AT 1,D 1, poison]; (3) two giant cockroaches [AC 5,1 HD,#AT 1,D 1-6]; (4) two more centipedes; (5) eleven giant cockroaches; (6) one carrion crawler [AC 5,4+1 HD,#AT 8,D 1-3]; and then (7) two more carrion crawlers. I took a screenshot of that last before the combat started.

The party had been game to fight everything up to this point, but their hit points were being winnowed down and at the sight of the two crawlers, they decided, after a lot of resistance, to give it up and withdraw. Pandred did not withdraw far enough, however, and got caught in an attack; worse, he was paralysed by that attack. So the party changed their minds and rushed forward to save him.

Before the battle was over, Pandred had been dragged by Edvard down from 1417, where he was stunned, to his position after. Zoltan had been paralysed also. Arduin the druid had succeeded in lighting up the two crawlers with faerie fire and Ti had drunk a super-heroism potion that elevated him to 8th level. He was able to clock the one crawler but he has been repeatedly dropping and breaking weapons since they left Budapest, so that he was fighting hand to hand with a javelin at the end here (rolling to see if it would break after every attack). It did break before the other crawler was killed, but Arduin and Lexent, with help from Mikael's good dart throwing, were able to succeed in ridding the world of that one also.

The words "3 load" refers to three rounds loading a heavy crossbow, which Oddsdrakken could do but he could not fire it; Edvard took a shot but missed with it. A hit might have done the crawler in, as heavy crossbows in my game do 2d6+1 damage (3-13).

Earlier, when fighting the 11 cockroaches, five of them had swarmed onto Pandred (I allow up to eight attacks on a hex by small swarming creatures, and giant cockroaches are just 40 lbs.), causing 26 damage including one crit that did 12. This was enough to cause even the rollicking 5th level to slow down... but I think the two carrion crawlers at last taught the party a little humility. Either run away clean or get on with it. They dithered trying to decide and it almost got Pandred killed.

I think, except for that one cockroach hit, that it was one of my worst nights for die rolling, ever. I rolled only one critical the whole night, through all the fights, while with the first carrion crawler I managed to hit only twice in 13 rolls. Egregious!

Zoltan, after all the experience from the different creatures — there was no treasure for the night — went up a level to fourth. He'd missed a running so it took him, again, eight runnings to climb from 1st to 4th. That even though he needed less than Ti the running before (Ti is a fighter), the experience system awards fighting... so fighters usually just make more experience during combats. 

Lexent went up to fifth level and got the henchman that he had rolled initially when he joined the game in the 1st session, back in February. That was from the player not realizing that he could import his character from the old Juvenis campaign where he had run Lexent in Norway. I had not realising the two were the same player... the internet, nyet? 

Anyway, I let the player put Matyas down until Lexent got to 5th, and then he could have Matyas as his henchfolk. The rest of the party all got a lot closer to their next level, doing pretty well. And even though it was just little fights, they declared the game to be very successful because it just felt like the fights folded one onto the other in a rational, reasonable way, so that it wasn't, "Oh my God, we have to fight another group of bugs!" It was more along the lines of searching the well and finding that it had centipedes in it, and searching the bench and finding there were cockroaches under it, in the manner of one long fight. The party was also impressed at the size of the dungeon as they roamed through it; they have not explored it all, as the map above shows.

The game is supposed to end at 11 p.m. Eastern. We ran 40 minutes overtime to finish off the two carrion crawler attack.

Such Fun

Haven't put this up for awhile. This is my whole 6.67-mile scale world, up to date for today.

Blogger would not accept it at it's accurate size... but apparently it is possible for it to be viewed on Patreon, on this post. The above is 2500 pixels wide. The original is 13,050.

So yes, large. I like that it gives in this scale an interesting pattern of the highest civilised island (tan with red lines), relatively civilised places (orangish) and various shades of green for the rest of the world. The whitish areas, on the other hand, lack lines and represent non-arable lands of the Russian Steppe or the Adriatic-facing karst. That white is going to increase as I get further east, as large tracts of land become too dry to farm. Looking forward to it, since mapping those areas should be rapidly done, much expanding the designed size.

For those not following my map blog, I'm working on the upper right corner presently. More notes about my mapmaking plans and efforts can be read there.

Effing RSS

It turns out I'm on this list, at number 89. It's a dubious honour. There is no benefit to me whatsoever from this. Essentially, feedspot is a third-party service that uses the justification of RSS to strip, repackage, rank, monetise and control the presentation of my work, while calling it "curation." This is essentially syndication without my permission, without any compensation, without recognition beyond my name — while sapping direct traffic to my sight of people who might want to support my patreon, make a comment here or otherwise interact with the actual author.

My only alternative is to turn off my RSS feed, which I have done before; effectively, by leaving it on, so that those who wish to follow me and come to my site to access my work, I "give my permission" to companies that effectively plagiarise my work for their benefit. And there's nothing I can do about this.

If I were to cut and paste the work of another blogger and post it on this site, without using an RSS feed, I would be rightly identified as a plagiarist. But so long as the feed copies me and repastes me on Feedspot's site, and other sites that also rip me off, it's not.

Just now, there are thousands of artists screaming blue murder because A.I. is reproducing like work to theirs, a practice that began about 40 months ago. But this RSS thing has been going on since 2004, going by Wired reportage of that at the time. Total amount of pushback? Virtually nil. Plagiarism isn't against the law. Doing it manually is.

My question for the company ripping off my work is this: what is the company doing to identify the source of the material for the reader, so that they may use a link to go to my site instead of their feed? What is the company offering in the way of supporting my patreon, or helping others support my patreon? What is the company offering in terms of advertising my work for my benefit, since I'm writing my work for theirs, without pay, without so much as a how-do-you-do? What is the company doing to allow me to strip my work from their site? Is the company copying the links from my blogposts, so that if those url links go to actual pages of my actual blog, that's even possible?

Feedspot inserts itself between the reader and the publisher, then pretends that because the reader can see my name somewhere in the wrapper, nothing has been stolen. But things have: access to me, access to my work, access to my support network, access to comments that might be made, access to ME, as there is no email appearing on the link above that lists me as a contributor to their business model.

This is the internet's oldest protection racket and no one seems to give a fuck.

Pretensions of Grief

Maybe I should get off Chris Perkins' back. These last few years he's transformed himself from insufferable asshole to insufferable suck-up. It's an improvement. We should always reward improvement. The link provides an interview between Perkins and the creator of a channel I don't care about; I was able to listen to all of it without damaging either my laptop nor my computer tower. I count that a win.

For those who don't know, Christopher Perkins (wikipedia page) used to run public games for the WOTC, while also acting as a "game designer" and so-so editor. I say "so-so" because I've seen his work. It's about the same as mine, which I do for free and without hundreds of thousands of dollars of staff support. Like he had. In 2025, he "retired" from the WOTC... at approximately the same time the WOTC was letting everyone go that was costing money and not making it with splatbooks. He's now the creative director of the company for tabletop gaming launched by Critical Role, Darrington Press.

Throughout the interview, Perkins uses multiple choice questions as a rhetorical device which does nothing to educate the listener about D&D, since for the most part the answers are either intentionally insipid, or "all" the answers are acceptable. One such question is shown here on the right. A. and C. are clearly meant to convey the usual tropes associated with dungeon masters, which of course are expected to be funny... except that for me, having played since 1979, I find the humour a little dusty. That doesn't mean it won't be used for another 47 years.

Please either indulge me or forgive me as I provide a transcript of the above's deconstruction:

Host: {chuckling} Can it be option A and D at the same time? Definitely not B.

Perkins: I'm going to suggest that the correct answer is "have snakes erupt from the dead character's corpse." {general laughter}

Host: Okay.

Perkins: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. The real answer is "discuss options with the dead character's player."

Host: Right.

Perkins: Often when death occurs, it's unexpected and it might be the result of bad dice rolls or just a bad decision... and in that case, it's basically spelling the end of a character's journey or a character's arc. 

Host: {nodding sagely} Yeah.

Perkins: And some players are prepared for that; some players actually greet their character's death with a fair measure of enthusiasm. 

Host: Yeah.

Perkins: Particularly if they're a type of player who's got like a line-up of other characters that they've built and they're just aching to play something else. 

Host: Yes.

Perkins: You know the type.

Host: Yes.

Perkins: And so death is not that— doesn't come with any trauma or or any, um, um, you know, resentment—

Host: Yeah.

Perkins: Or anything like that. But... you never know... and so as a DM, it's always good to say, okay, this happened. Take the player aside or just have a conversation and say, "Do you think your character's journey is over at this point? Are you happy with this situation, or at least are you ready to move on from that character? Or would you like to discuss other possibilities? In D&D, there's plenty of ways for characters to come back from the dead, and working with your player, you might be able to contrive something fun — not only the player coming back from the dead, but maybe with a vision that they had while they were dead. Maybe while they were dead they actually has some sort of weird extra-planar interaction, that might propel the character's story even further along. It might be divine intervention or some other encounter, but there are all kinds of ways to skin it. But I think that it's smart for the DM and the player to both agree on the course of action with regards to that character and their journey. Just so it doesn't feel like it's incomplete.

Host: Right.

Perkins: ... and unsatisfying.

In answer, I'd like to link this youtube video of players and coaches being thrown out of baseball games for unsportsmanlike conduct, because they can't suck it up, despite being paid literally millions of dollars to do so. My question, then, is what produces the most trauma? Being struck out, so that you're so mad you argue with the umpire or throw your bat at the ground, or being thrown out of the game. Write your answer in the comments below.

The difference between the D&D example and baseball is that the company perceives "character death" as an inherited flaw of D&D, that it has to mitigate by turning every DM into a psychologist to manage player trauma... or or any, um, um, you know, resentment. Whereas Major League Baseball know the fans are going to fucking watch anyway, and they don't give a shit if the player is unhappy.

Chris Perkins is not selling table courtesy, he's performing brand protection. His answer treats player death as a customer-retention hazard. The dead character is not allowed to remain simply dead, because the company-facing version of D&D has become anxious about the player leaving the table with a negative feeling attached to the brand. So the DM is repositioned as the person responsible for converting loss into satisfaction.

And you, gentle reader, as the DM, have been co-opted into this, as the person who should, without being paid, protect the company.

All D&D game deaths are unexpected, unless the player suicides. All deaths occur because of a "bad" die roll OR a bad decision. NO game deaths result because of a good die roll or a good decision. Unless, again, suicide was the plan.

Oh, and hey, while we're here, let's point out that if we're going to roll dice to check success, there's not very much point in rolling the die at all unless we're going to accept the failure. If failure isn't an option, put the dice away and just say the players always succeed.

If a "bad" die roll (that is, one that fails to succeed, rather than one that is being framed as though the gods picked the number showing) does kill a character, and that causes or or any, um, um, you know, resentment, then maybe that player isn't old enough to play. Maybe that player needs to check themselves against a plywood knight with hand raised up and a motto next to it, "Your ego has to be this secure to play this game." Maybe, just maybe, just possibly, even if the company makes a buck from it, there are some people who just shouldn't be playing D&D. Because the mettle required to pretend things just isn't there.

Die rolls are only "bad" from the standpoint of the desired outcome. They are not moral events, they are not an injustice, they are not an attack against the player's emotional state... and their consequences should not need me to approach the player gently, possibly while to other players hold a fucking straightjacket, so I can talk an adult down, when as a kid we used to die all the time in this game and we were goddamned fine. What in the hell?

If a player needs the game to go well because they had a bad week at work, or they're so fragile that I need to sit down with them and use words like "journey" while measuring the player's degree of "happy," then that player needs to not be at my game table. They should be elsewhere doing something more constructive and helpful for their fragile ego. Learning to make pottery is good for that; it teaches how effort and failure can be met with resilience to make things that turn out to be excitingly beautiful, all while the skill learned is useful and the process beneficial for other activities. D&D is just way too, um, traumatic for these people. Honest. They're not up to it.

Whew.

All right, let's talk about death.

Death in the game sucks. No question about it. I don't like to kill a lot of characters; I've found in general I do it less than most people, not because I fudge, not because I deny players a chance to restore their dead characters — usually, I make raise dead and resurrection fairly easy to obtain, if at a price. I tend to view it in the way that some board games do, "Lose all your cash on hand, return to Start."

Some DMs seem to view the murder of vast numbers of player characters as a badge of honour. "See, I believe that player characters should die as part of the game. In fact, last week I ran a game and everyone died. That's how much I believe in that rule." Which is, I guess, okay. I'm not an advocate for game balance, so that's fair. Not how I run, nor a game I'd play in I think, but whatever works for whoever is running their table.

I said a few posts back (which you read, Gentle Reader, because you read everything I write) that I seem to have a gift for picking just enough monsters to seriously threaten death, without that actually resulting in death. A "bad" roll, or a "bad strategical decision" could tip that balance, which is why the players in my game tend to compensate thoughtfully for the former while respecting the latter. Most of my present players remember a session against fire beetles in which three of five members of the party died, mostly because they did engage in a bad strategical mindset, and that memory comes up in nearly every running. So the players know I can kill them. I just don't feel the need to prove it all the time, so they know that's still possible. Being mature adults, they seem capable of having memories longer than mayflies, apparently unlike every player Perkins has ever run.

IF a DM is there with the crash-cart, the EMT, the psychologist couch and smelling salts every time a player fails, for whatever reason, then of course the players aren't going to take the game very seriously. The reason that umpires in baseball were finally given the power to eject players for so much as a word was because the old way, in the old days when I was, what, a younger adult, it was really getting out of hand. Looking into it, it appears that with the 1999 umpire labour crisis, when twenty-two umpires quit, the old union was replaced, umpire staffs were merged into one... and that brought about the modern administration model. The overall effect was to give umpires more power to manage the game, not less... while the Perkins/WOTC/corporate model is there to effectively emasculate the DM's power by making this about therapy, not player management.

What's funny is that I have given players other options than resurrection for bringing back dead characters. Not the cheesy plot devices suggested, of course... but D&D does owe at least some fealty to Heracles rescuing Theseus from the underworld, or Dante spending at least some of his vacation there. The "outer planes" are comprehensible real places that have existed as part of the setting's structure since the 1970s, so sure, there ought to be some way to identify which plane of existence the soul of a dead character ending up at, and therefore some way of getting them back, even if a monkey's paw is needed. It's not that I necessarily encourage this kind of thinking; logically, if it were to be attempted, it would have to be the kind of adventure that required a year of game play, at least 20 or 30 sessions... but truthfully, it ought to be possible... just not in the way Perkins is suggesting. I'm not going to restore your character because you have the sads. That's just not good enough.

Trust me, if a party does decide to go through all that for someone's 8th level ranger, they're not going to do it all again for someone else's a 7th level fighter. It's funny how suddenly a party is ready to draw a hard line about such things.

Truthfully, it's taken the 1st level fighter in my present campaign nine sessions to reach 4th.  That is, the accumulation of 8,000 x.p. Logically, to reach 5th, 18,000 x.p. it ought to take ten or eleven more, but it won't, because the fighter is tougher, can take more damage, can kill more, hits better and so on. As the needed experience doubles, thereabouts, the actual time per x.p. shortens, just enough to make each level feel like an effort without there being a cut-and-dry certainty about when the next threshold comes. This is good for the game. A player who loses their 4th level, or 7th level, or whatever, should just count the time needed as game play and just that. Yes, okay, we all loved Rodrick. And it's a pity.

But not to sour the party or anything, I used to have another wife, who died for real. I have had two parents, who died for real. Which I had to get over, just as everyone has to when something like it happens to them. Look, just bear with this a moment, as hard as it is, as out of place as you may feel it is inside a post about D&D. Life isn't just living with the knowledge that we ourselves are going to die. It is also that along the way, we're going to find ourselves having to cope with others that we love passing away on us, and there's nothing, nothing at all, that we can do about that except to keep moving forward. Cruel, brutal, undeniable truth. Earlier, I said, "death in the game sucks." And so it does. But let's have a little perspective here, okay?

If my 8th level ranger dies, then really, how long does it take to replace that character in my heart? As Rodrick's memory fades, then Desdemona's memory, though she may now only be a 3rd level mage, grows. By the time D reaches 6th, R was a year ago. It's just not that hard to get over.

Gawddammit. If you've ever had a pet that lived for ten years, you know you'll never replace that pet in your heart, no matter how much you love your new pet Jupiter now. I guess maybe its because of how long I've been here... but fragility is a terrible way to manage what life is going to hand over. Yes, right, your D&D character dies, okay. Look on the bright side. There are no funeral arrangements to make. There's no lawyer's office you're ever going to have to sit in. There's no household of possessions you're ever going to have to divide up between your siblings and yourself, and you're not going to have the experience of watching your parents most treasured things being thrown into the trash, because they're old, they've been polluted with mice feces because the house wasn't looked after toward the end and worse, there's just no room in your house, or that of your siblings, for everything. That's how it goes.

I promise. If your D&D character dies, there are going to be worse things coming for you to get over.

Session 9: The Slaughter Room

I find these posts hard to write, which is why it's five days since our last running and I'm only detailing it now.

Our previous session left the party in the wilderness, running short on food, puzzling out how to cross the border into Hungary, having learned they'd been betrayed by someone, not knowing who. This session began with the party being caught off guard by a group of centaur archers, partisans protecting the local Hungarian peasantry from the Ottomans, acting as nomads throughout the Balaton Hills. After learning of the party's wishes to escape, the centaurs agreed to help feed and get them out of Bakony... but the centaurs could not help noticing the armoured members of the party and the presence of their gnome cleric Lexent.

They asked if the party wouldn't mind dealing with a nuisance that has plagued them for some time. A group of troglodytes, operating from an underground lair, inaccessible to their hoofed bodies. This "lair" was once built by orcish Huns who found themselves dwelling in the wilderness after the retreat of Attila (also an orc in my campaign). Thus, the orcs tunnelled, fashioning an underground dungeon that they occupied for 800 years... until 400 years ago, after some left to join the Mongols in the 1240s (again, an orcish people, though larger than orcs), the overall social system collapsed. It had been abandoned, until troglodytes either came up from below or entered from above. Either way, the trogs have been raiding and when the centaurs have tracked them back to their origin, they've found the trogs delving down into a place they can't follow.

The party agreed. I'd set up the first encounter expecting only three players, as Mikael the mage and Zoltan the cleric had both excused themselves from the session. Yet then Mikael showed up for the first two hours of the session, so we had a good number of combatants at the ready. This was the basic scene of the first occupied room the party entered:

This, once upon a time a place where the orc hunting parties would bring in scores of deer and other beasts for slaughter, consisted of drains, tubs, rings for hanging the animals up and so on. Obviously, the blood stains had long turned to dust in 400 years but the players figured out the purpose.

As they entered, they found one huge spider in the large centre room. This they killed in short order. Examining the room on the upper right, they found eight giant bats asleep. They moved down through the other rooms toward the exit at the bottom of the map, where they found a shrieker... which promptly began to scream, waking up the bats. A round later, three more spiders entered the room. One landed a solid bite upon Ti, the fighter, who began to suffer poison damage to the tune of 16 points, 2 per round over the next eight rounds. While fighting the bats and spiders (the former were not very dangerous), a carrion crawler entered from the bottom, passing the shrieker... and caught the Lexent's non-levelled soldier at arms as the first victim inside the door. The crawler attacked eight times... and missed every time. I mean, damn. If you can't kill a non-level, why even play?

Fenwick failed his morale check and fled. Outside, he failed his rally check and decided to stay outside. He'd managed to get 160 experience, however, putting him halfway to being able to start his 1st level fighter training, if the party should so desire.

Well, Ti came up, waded in, took two hits, did a little damage (I think, not sure if I remember that rightly) failed his save and was paralysed. But then Mikael unloaded Melf's acid arrow and the carrion crawler died. I should have made it two, but meh, it was what it was. I didn't know Mikael was going to play.

The spiders, bats and shrieker was mopped up and the party given experience. Arduin the first level druid, henchfolk of Pandred the 5th level fighter, finally reached second level. Mikael excused himself and the party was down to three players.

I should have had more prepared but, well, I let myself indulge in too many of my own projects, so I didn't. I had the party descend twenty feet of stair (finding a dead centaur's body along the way), to find more stairs, some going left, some going right. The cleric smelled both and declared that the left hand side smelled worse than the right, so expecting to find the troglodytes, they descended another 20 feet of stairs to find themselves at an unimaginably large underground temple, too large to reveal with their torchlight. Following the right hand wall, they found one shrine in the room's corner, then followed the wall to the left to find another shrine. They were attacked by three ghasts (which some of the party had fought before in Norway) and dispatched them easily. The next four were a little harder... Ti was paralysed again, Arduin was very lucky, but this second fight was a harder deal. Finally, the ghasts were overcome, experience rewarded, Ti went up to 4th level and the party gave ground. We ended the game with them stumbling outside.

I'll need to better prep my dungeon for the next session.

Skipping over the first session, in which the two did not take part, Pandred at 5th and Lexent at 4th have failed to level... though they're both much closer. Ti began at 1st nine sessions ago and has gone up 3 levels in nine runnings. If Zoltan had come, no doubt he'd have gotten to 4th as well. Mikael, who isn't getting hit very much (because although he's killing key monsters with his magic, if he doesn't actually engage in melee, he hasn't much chance of learning anything), is still 3rd, though he started at 2nd. Arduin has waded into many combats, but strangely, has usually avoided getting hit. Nice to see him finally climb from 1st to 2nd.

The benefit of Fenwick getting to be a 1st level fighter (though it will take plenty of training time) is that, if the party subsidises his training, he'll progress from "hireling" to "follower." Not a henchfolk, so not a fanatic member of the party that the players run, but someone who will come along, receive half as share of the bonus, ask for a share of the treasure and eventually rise, most likely, to act as a steward or someone the party can trust with their property someday, without worrying about being betrayed. He might even one day be counted as one of the party's "retainers," at which point he would become a fanatic joiner of the party, to be run by whomever his liege came to be, either Lexent or perhaps Pandred, as the party decides someday.

Well, that seems to be it. Glad to have this done.