Captain America Never Fought This

Read the full page here.

I love the hydra, but it has been one of those monsters that seems like it's tough and scary, when in fact it has all the danger offered by a bunch of orcs.  And so, all the venom (which was a part of the original myth) and the immortal head (also sourced mythologically).  I've adjusted the experience so that if players do nothing more than nick and lightly damage the hydra's heads, they're effectively unhindered.  It isn't mentioned in the post above, but this also means the heads cannot be, in my system, "stunned" -- unless the body is.  Yum.

Hm.  I see I've misspelled Lernaean on the table.  I'll have to fix that.

Refreshing Comments

I don't want this comment buried back in 2017.

Jim Davis has left a new comment on your post "A Rundown on What Advice Exists":

Alexis,

I appreciate the feedback, even though I'm only just now reading it. I've been an intermittent reader of your blog for a few years now and think How to Run is superb DM advice, so I take "not too bad" and "wouldn't be the worst DM I've had" as compliments. I'm genuinely curious about the times I've gone up my own asshole (you're not the first to observe that) but I understand if I'm a little late in soliciting that level of feedback.

Thank you for your honesty; it's refreshing to get anything resembling a genuine critique.

And yes, I was looking through your backlog to see if you'd watched any Web DM. I wanted to know what you thought of our videos. I'm very glad you didn't think they were terrible.

-Jim "punchable demeanor" Davis

Jim,

Your comment was refreshing also.

I kicked a lot of people that day.  I've reread my post; I confess the knife was just as sharp as I could grind it.  I don't take it back.  I will, however, be positive.  You've been either genuine or sarcastic.  Either would be understandable and I deserve the response you've given.  In return, I'm anxious to be genuine, and write in a manner that won't be understood as sarcasm.

By my count and the internet's, you and Pruitt are significantly popular.  You're long lived; your last video was yesterday.  You receive 100,000 or more views per video; I receive nothing like that kind of traffic.  You have 24,000 followers on twitter and by the looks of their comments, they genuinely love you.  You're interviewing Luke Gygax, you're in the heart of the community, your words are listened to and treasured.  That's not sarcasm.  That's what I see as an honest evaluation of how others feel towards you.

Which leaves me puzzled as to why you would comment on a blog post I wrote three years ago.  I am just as puzzled as to why you would be an intermittent reader of my blog at all.  I don't write the sort of content you produce, at all.  There isn't a glimmer in anything I've seen in any video you've produced -- though I admit, it's been a couple of years since I watched anything -- of the least influence I've had on your material.  You say that my How to Run is superb DM advice; but there's no evidence that you've taken it, and as far as I know, you've never told any of your viewers this.  If you had, no evidence of it has ever materialized as visitors to my site from yours.

My content is ... critical.  Sometimes viciously, sometimes academic ... but always deconstructive and always critical.  I was taught to be so and I embraced it with both arms.   The content of your programming is motivational.  Your method is to inspire your audience; to encourage them to believe in themselves.  You present the game as something that's fun, and you try to helpfully simplify the game processes, so that your listeners will feel confident.  Your advice devotes itself to reminding the players to "don't stress" and play the game however they want to play it.  That sentiment is uplifting, cheerful and fortifying.

If you do read me, and this spirit of incentivising promise is indeed your genuine feeling, then I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to see the brutal, negative hatchet job I commit against the game you support and believe in, day in and day out, mercilessly.  I should think it would be the kind of thing that would make you sigh, shake your head slowly, and mutter to yourself, "That poor guy.  He just doesn't get it.  He doesn't see how simple and how much fun this game could be.  He's so smart; he's so comprehensive about the game; but he just can't seem to take his hand off the downer stick.  Hopefully, someday, he'll see the light and come out of this dark place he's stuck in."

If I believed in what you say on your videos; if I wrote the kind of things you say; and if I stood by them as right and legitimate ... then that is what I would think about me.  I would feel sorry for me.

On the other hand, if you were to read this blog, and really believe that How to Run was a bit of superb DM advice, given how it guts the sentimentality of role-playing with a fish knife ... then, I don't know.  That book argues that good game play can't be brought into being through motivation and simplification.  It can't be brought into being by believing in yourself.  If that's what you think is "superb" ...

Then I am sorry for you, that you've chosen to spew pretentious bullshit for years on the internet in order to make a buck.

Understand.  I'm not saying this last is what you're doing.  But I am saying that if this last isn't what you're doing, then your praise of my book was a lie; and that probably, you've never read my book.

As a bit of genuine criticism.  It's the way you lift your chin as you're getting into character, knowing that you're about to speak.  In film making, it's a self-conscious tic that a good director would point out, and that an acting coach would address, spending a couple of afternoons to get you past the habit of doing that.  People in film-making, particularly in video journalism, take is as evidence of an amateur; which you're not, obviously, having done this for so long.  But it is, nevertheless, amateurish, at least in the eyes of anyone who's spent any time doing this sort of thing for a living.  The good news is that it's fixable.  Find a good acting coach; they're pretty much everywhere; if you talk to some community documentary filmmakers, you can fix that habit right up in no time.  Think of it like not quite having a good poker face.  Once you sort that out, your face will be far less punchable, and in general people with more money will find you more reassuring and fundable.  Good luck.

Where, Jackal, where?

I don't know if I can take another humanoid race that's belligerent, that constantly fights among themselves, that has a god that urges them to fight, that acts with cruelty or any other thing that focuses the creature's entire mental capacity on war or battle or vicious backstabbing.  They're evil, they're evil, they're evil.

It is in just about every humanoid monster description.  It's meant to sound all demented and nifty, all this evil, this service of evil creatures, their associations wtih evil creatures, their making humanoins suffer "a lifetime of slavery" and "agonizing death," blah blah blah ... but it is repeated so ungodly often, it borders on a fetish.

The reason is quite clear: the worse the creature is, the less guilty we should be about killing them ... so we heap on the gore and hideousness and what not.  It's precisely the same tactic used in hateful propaganda, familiar as Donald Duck fighting the Nazis and the Japs.  Make the enemy look stupid, make them look like cowards, preach about how they stab babies and drink blood, anything that alleviates any possible guilt that anyone can ever have about killing these creatures.  Keeping in mind that this isn't propaganda from world war II, this is published in 2014.  When the anti-racists online carp about the questionable nature of slaughtering orcs and black elves in D&D, they can pick up a book published in the last year (every splat book from the company indulges in this) and see it right on the page.  Where you see Jackalwere, think Jap.  Think Jew.

These murderous sadists are not my jackalwere.  Admittedly, I have a race or two like this; the players just finished helping wipe out a frogling lair, and they were pretty bad.  But the average orc in my game is a farmer; the average kobald builds a village where they can raise meat for food; the average bugbear is a hunter gatherer.  True enough, some of them raid, and some of them kill.  But that's true of humans.  We humans invented this grilling-babies-on-pitchforks shit.  Not all of us, obviously.  Just enough of us who happened to be in charge of the war effort, who thought this was a good idea, and just enough people working for the company, who no doubt literally get off on the ooey-gooey magnificence of their writing prowess.  "Kewl, Mike!  But wait -- when I'm done writing the gnolls, the readers will barf!"

But of course, all the people in charge at the WOTC are adults.  They're not infantilized man-boys.  The repeated theme of the passage written above throughout all their splat books proves that!

I prefer humanoids that can change sides in a fight.   Humanoids who appear to have learned something through their mastery of large political sub-divisions.  Humanoids who love their children and their partners.  Humanoids that are, at least in some ways, like us ... in a way different from sociopaths.  With D&D, you're either all bad, incredibly so, or you're so squeaky clean you shit soap.  This polarization is boring.  Being good or evil is okay; but I'd prefer if we could stop being so two-dimensionally evil.  Or good.

I had more trouble with the Jackalwere than usual.  But there is no mythological "jackalwere;" and the Anubis warrior thing appears to have been an invention for the Scorpion King.  It doesn't fit Anubis, at all.  A little looking turned up cynocephaly, but the content here and elsewhere on the net is, well, meh.  I kept on looking and turned up this god, Wepwawet.  But yeah, no jackalwere here either.  At some point you just have to make things up.

I remember my creative writing instructor telling me in university, way back 30 years ago, not to make things up.  It's much better to write about what you "know," because then you will always write from the heart.  If you write about things you just make up, readers will be able to tell and it won't sound genuine and authentic.

One has to admire the obtuseness of this point of view, given the mountains of literature and religious influence on society that were clearly "made up" on truly gargantuan levels; and the purebred evidence of how many people cheerfully and violently believe it, to frightening degrees.  There's something so utterly navel-gazing about post modernistic writing, which yet finds a way to exist in a universe that has Poe, Scott and Shakespeare books aplenty.  I wonder; did my instructor suppose that Lew Wallace learned to drive a chariot before writing Ben Hur, or that Jules Verne actually built a submarine?  More likely, she just didn't "believe" it.  A rather idiotic standard to hold fiction to, if you ask me.

Anyway, you can read the whole wiki page for my Jackalwere here.  I made it all up.

Class-Backward

As I work my way through the wiki, with some of my focus on shifting over old content and some on making what's needed, I can't help noticing how many things in old D&D are never properly explained in the original books.

Things come up because I am following the guidelines of the image on the right.  These show pages that don't exist, that are yet wanted by pages that do.  Right at the top, "cantrip" is mentioned on at least 8 pages in the wiki (and probably more often, where it isn't linked), yet there's no page for it yet.  Logically, this makes it more important that all the other 1600+ pages that are also linked but less often.  "Clan," "natural abilities" and "progenitor" are just as important, but we're going through this process alphabetically, also.  Basically, I want to concentrate on "what's next."  I like that something mechanical is telling me what that is.

This makes it easier to get things done.

As far as I know, none of the original books explains what a "natural ability" is.  It isn't even called that.  Generally it is used on monster pages to describe powers the monster can perform "at will" ... but there are no strict guidelines established for that, either.  How long does this take?  How often can it be done?  If a demon can gate in other demons at will, does this always mean it will do so?  What if the other demons don't want to be disturbed?  Demons are "chaotic," after all ... and if we don't use alignment at all, where is the acceptable limit for the number of associates a demon can pester?  If we're talking devils, who can also do this, surely there must be rules in hell about it.  There are rules in hell about everything.

Most important of all, how many powers can be performed at will per combat round?  One?  Two?  Ten?  No definite idea.  It suggests a limitation on some monsters in the old Monster Manual, but there is no reference anywhere else about this ability, and certainly no standardization.  As DMs, apparently, we were expected to have gotten this information from our mothers while we were in the womb.

This post isn't about natural abilities, however.  I haven't gotten to those yet.  Instead, I completed something today that there is an explanation for -- which, I have to say, I very much do not like.

The damned idiot notion that a character class is a "profession" and not an education comes straight out of the prevailing 1950s university dictum that people go to school to learn how to do a job.  Different job, different schooling.  This has been proved wrong only about a billion times, more or less literally, but it helps sell overpriced university degrees so here it is, still with us.

A fighter's training ought to be sufficient to perform any of the hundreds of character classes that have been invented in the last forty-plus years that stand side-by-side with the original fighter.  As if learning how to fight with weapons and organize oneself in the military can't be applied to hundreds of professions.  No!  We must have a perfectly individual specificity to every operation that humans can perform!  We can't have all this fluidity!  Stamp that person a teacher when they get out of school and DON'T let them use that degree for anything else!

Exactly why do clerics principally function as "supportive"?  True, priests support people, but they LEAD their churches, they don't stand behind the throne.  This is military speak for doctors, not religious leaders ... which is why we had to eventually gut the class and rename them after doctors.  We never gave the religious profession a chance, because it was too "squicky" for atheists.  And I know of no druids whom the players run as support-staff.  Just because a druid has 2 less hit points than a fighter and less armour, doesn't exactly kick them to the curb.  The description might as well say, "Fighters don't think."  It's all hideously two-dimensional and purposefully propagandistic ... and because no effort to do better was ever really made, the subject of what a character class is or what it stands for became hopelessly and appallingly polluted.

This shit is no better than the kobald crap I railed about yesterday.  It just takes less space and, because it is really, really old, it is venerated more.

We should be clear about D&D design always being absolute shit.  I didn't know that when I was 15; but I know it now.  I may run a game "based" on old AD&D, but I am so far from the original philosophy and approach I can't begin to find any relationship between me and the dreck written by Gygax.

The wiki is forcing me to address these things for the first time in writing.  "Character Class" comes up a bunch of times as I'm writing some other page, and I duly make a link to it, thinking, "One day, I'll have to write a definition of that."

Then, it's today.

The idea is to build a functional concept that expands character understanding and conjecture, not one that narrows it.  Don't tell me how a cleric principally functions.  Tell me how a cleric gets made.

With some game play and experience, I'll probably expand this page over time.  It deserves to be.  Given good reason, it would be worth the effort to delve into the exact procedure of education for every class.  But I don't need that just now, and I have a lot of other topics to write on.

There is More 5e Content on Kobalds

First, a note.  5th edition's Volo's Guide to Monsters has more information about the kobald.  You can read the whole entry through this site.  Here's a screen shot of the first two pages; there are 8 pages in all:

I have to tell you, I'm still not very impressed.  The exhausting and annoying issue with all this content is the lack of details that would be of tremendous use.  Telling us that kobalds are skilled at tunnelling, and that they make small-diameter tunnels (I thought of that too) does not describe the exact size of tunnel or how much they can tunnel in the space of a day.  We're told it's "respectable." What the hell use is that?

There is this endless litany of where kobalds are and what little skills they have, but none of these produce a "feel" for a kobald's mentality.  Wikipedia does better!  Though, the wikipedia entry will disappoint, if D&D kobald is what you're looking for.  A problem I have with all of the 5e monsters is "splatter design."  We're told a dozen things in a short 260 word passage; and when we have eight pages, do we carefully investigate and expand those things?  No, we add a hundred other things: they're cowards, they loot, they're good with tools, they don't shun arcane magic, they're clever as crafters and strategists, they understand their actions contribute to the group, their plans always include an escape route, they are rarely affectionate, they don't have funerals, they're cautious, they get angry, they fear, they're this, they're that ... and this just goes on and on for eight pages.  Imagine reading a sociology textbook that just gives a long list of what humans sometimes do, believe or think.  It's tremendously boring, it keeps returning to the same theme over and over and when you're done reading it all, you know about as much about using kobalds in a game setting as when you started.

I mean seriously, take the bit about them being good with tools.  When are we going to use that, exactly, as a DM?  Have the party come along to find the kobalds fixing a cart, so we can say, "As you watch the kobalds, you're really amazed at how good they are with those tools."  Or maybe the party has caught some kobald prisoners, and now the wagon is broken, so we can tell the party, "You know what?  Get the kobald to fix it.  They're really good with tools."

You know who else is good with tools?  Humans who are trained to use tools.  Thank heaven that because those are so rare, we have murderous kobalds to help us.

Of course, more of this is to help out a player who is running a kobald, than it is a book about monsters.  The passages are really more to help the player know what to say, cookie-cutter like, when it comes time to "role-play" a kobald.  Make sure that you acknowledge that you're weak, that you're not that clever, and to get personally affronted easily ... and oh, don't forget about that ever-critical tool ability, plus a willingness to loot and find escape routes.  There, fleshing out the character, done.

It's like explaining the character of Willie Loman from Death of a Salesman thusly: you're a man, you're married, you've got a suit and tie, you carry a briefcase, you're a salesman, you have two sons, you talk out loud to people you used to know, that aren't there now.  Got it?  Great.  Start talking.

This is my favorite bit:

There are 20 names here.  20.  Arranged as an alphabetical list in two columns, with plenty of white space and numbered to save us the trouble of having to pick.  I've played this game a long time, I've never needed a name for a kobald; though I think, if I really needed one, I could randomly pick a consonant in my mind, randomly pick a vowel to follow it, then randomly pick another consonant.  Something like, I don't know, "Bob."  Bob the Kobald.  Fits fine.

Later on in the description, we find out that kobalds have cellars and sleeping areas, and mines, and mushroom farms.  Under "mushroom farms," we're told kobalds aren't good at agriculture.  It might interest people to know that underground mushroom farming is "simple" if you don't need to make money and you absolutely do not depend on them for food.  Otherwise, it is labour intensive and frustrating, since one small contamination can spread like wildfire and destroy the whole crop.  Ah, but maybe kobalds can eat anything.  We'll never know, because we spent at least a full page describing how kobalds make and use the same traps that every other humanoid in D&D uses.

I don't want to be petty, but eight pages of this content and there isn't one piece of information that isn't rehashed from books 35 years old, that I can use.  Back in the 90s, I could open a splat-book and at least steal some bits and pieces here and there, to fit into some table or redesign into a concept that would expand my system.  But with this 5e stuff, it's just old stuff rewritten, telling me that deadfalls are common traps, that kobalds attack light sources in combat, that they use poison, that tactics include ambushes ... it is just cliche after cliche for eight goddamned pages.  It's a little annoying.

Don't Send Any More Men! It's a TRICK! There are TWO of them!

Shown here is the 5e version of the kobald, evidence that writing out rules in books, even books with 406 pages, can only bring disappointment.  As usual, 40 years of D&D design, and what we get is that kobalds dig tunnels, make traps, worship gods and ... omg, some of them can fly.

This is pretty sad.  But most of it, no doubt, is a lack of space on top of a lack of imagination.  And we should admit it ... kobalds are kind of a lacklustre monster.  They're not very strong, they look a little silly, they're even shorter now than they were in 1978 and they're not even able to come out in the daylight.

I've never liked that -1 penalty in the daylight, frankly.  Kick a weak monster in the gronknuts, why don't you?  And for the most part I don't care what gods the kobalds worship, if it doesn't directly affect how they act or organize themselves in the game world.  It's not much of a story and it takes up 12 lines in a 47-line descriptive text.  Flying kobalds takes up another 11 lines, leaving us with all of 24 lines.  Of these, 4 are used to tell us how a trip wire works; 1 is used to say they inhabit dragon lairs (no idea if the dragon is still there); and 2 are used to tell us that kobalds are weak.  No shit, Sherlock.

It is bad enough that the book format doesn't give much room to talk about any creature in it, or that we've used half the bottom of the page to basically repeat the exact same stats for the winged kobald that a kobald has.  It's the bloody crime of not using the actual space to tell us anything we didn't already know about kobalds.  Hey, guys ... you heard of the Internet?  It's this thing that your entire market of 9-year-olds use every single waking minute of every single day.  Here's a surprise: it was actually around in 2014!  Something you should look into.

I have no great genius to add.  I don't have space limitations, so it isn't really fair.  Additionally, I have a game world about which I can make references that my readers will get -- so again, not fair.  Still, I don't feel that 5th edition is much of a "competitor."  DMs need ... specifics.  Details.  Grit.

As ever, I do what I can.  Read the whole wiki entry here.

Follow Her? I Don't even Know Her.

Running an NPC is a DM's best means of fucking with a party's head, pushing a party this way or that, and indoctrinating players to believe what we want them to think.  An NPC by definition knows everything the DM knows, so unless the DM wishes it, there need be no restraint on the NPC's ability to fortell the future, solve problems, know what other NPCs know and say it all to the players in a careful, dissembling tone that suggests the NPC is as innocent as a little girl fetching a unicorn.  In fact, the most evil NPC may look just like that.

If the players are wary of this, and most of the time they are, we can count on having anything the NPC says be completely ignored or deliberately tested.  Players will do this so openly and candidly that we don't have to guess that they don't trust our NPC.  There are two ways to play this.  The first is to have the NPC tell the party everything, so that when -- ironically -- the NPC proves to be 100% accurate, the DM can smugly say, "The NPC told you so."

The other is to gently poke and prod and wind the players up by having the NPC tell the party to do everything we don't want them to do.  Done in small bits, the party will never guess that it's a case of almost pathetically juvenile reverse-psychology, so ham-handed at times that although any of our players would roll their eyes if they saw it on television, they'll walk right into the trap we set.  Honestly, some times I wonder just where it is that players come from.  Aren't these the trust lessons we learned in junior high school, when we were all still dumb enough to trust our parents?

In any case, because NPCs can be dangerous weapons in the hands of the wrong DMs, there need to be rules that master them.

The standard tactic (5th edition included) is to create a set of tables that tell you the NPC's personality, usually revolving around the NPC's alignment.  Of course, a character with a good alignment can be every bit as manipulative, insistent and threatening as a bad character (since the first thing a "good" character is always ready to do is judge everyone else's "goodness"), but this is never discussed.  The subject material almost always discusses a willingness of the NPC to help the players ... which is exactly the argument I started this post with.  NPCs help players do what what they're supposed to.

5th edition hardly addresses the player's responsibility or respect for the NPC at all.  Certainly, we don't expect the players to respect them.  And yet, as a DM for 40+ years, if there is one thing I can count on, it's players getting attached to NPCs that they like.  If an NPC is good to them, backs them up, acts bravely, makes sacrifices ... then I've always found that players were ready to make sacrifices for them.

In my mind, I began to separate the difference between a "retainer" -- an NPC who appears because a player has reached Name Level -- and a "follower," being someone who wants to join the party because they like the party.  Of course, this depends on the party being likeable.  I challenge anyone to find any word in the 5e DMG that suggests the party be "likeable" with NPCs.  I couldn't find it.

I wrote these rules on followers today, this being the first time I put these rules into words.  The rest of the page can be read here.

That is So Lamia

Have you seen the wikipedia page on the lamia?  Going back to the source material for this monster, it is a kitchen sink of conflicting explanations for what the beast was, with sources weighing in for centuries to describe what it is.  And none of them are anything like the lamia as it's described in the 5e Monster Manual or Dragonix.  Viewing the source, "lamia nobles" and a "lamia queens" are obviously ridiculous, while the 5e lamia is no closer to the real thing than is the old lamia from the old 1979 Monster Manual.

The 5e version is a true punch-and-play monster, as shown.  Blah blah, desert cities, jackalwere guards, caravan plundering, tons of treasure, scrying, seeks out adventurers with "pure hearts" (I just threw up in my mouth).  Jeebus, we could pretty much scratch out "lamia" and insert half a dozen other monster names, or simply a 14th level mage, in its place.  There's not a shred of originality in this.

Notice in particular what's missing: Kills Children.  Parents using the name "lamia" for centuries to scare little children half to death to make them be good little boys and girls.  Not just another desert queen with a few powers, grotesque disney supervillain, but a voracious, sexualized monster that removes it's own eyes because it can't sleep at night.  But hey, D&D is a childrens' game, right?  We can't possibly include a monster in it that was used deliberately to scare children, can we?

Having run the lamia in the old manual a few times, I never liked it.  The wisdom drain wasn't particularly scary and apart from that the monster does not even do much damage.  The 5e lamia looks like a hodge-podge of desperate.  The source material is a scattered mess, engendering pictures of lamia online that are indistinguishable from medusae.  The lamia is a queen, a lover, a snake thing, a child killer, a succubus, even a dragon and a mother of dragons.  Shee-it.  I had to roll this around for awhile.  Whatever I came up with couldn't possibly be worse that what I've seen and frankly, the only thing that really interested me was the snatch-children-and-kill-them thing.  I've already got monsters that do all the other things.

So this is mostly independent of any other source, except for one artist who offered me a respite from a thousand pictures of women with breasts and snake bodies (sexually ambiguous, anyone?), identifying the image below as a "lamia."  Take this monster or leave it.  I tried to be dark.  D&D is a game for adults.

Baby, I Can Warm You Up, 'Cause I'm Your Weatherman

Today's most excellent wiki page, which I've effectively rebuilt. It looks so much better.

In AD&D, Control weather is a 7th level cleric spell and a 6th level mage spell that provides a loose organization of weather types with very little exact detail about what any of these conditions will produce.  It was difficult running the spell back in the 1980s, without the sort of gritty information that is presently available on the internet.

It is particularly annoying in phrases when we're told, "obviously," that the spell must meet appropriate climatic conditions, as though we are either supposed to believe the only sort of conditions the players will every meet will be those that occur in Wisconsin, or that we are blessed with perfect knowledge of what storm conditions are possible in conditions like the African Sahel, the Brazilian Caatinga or the Yunnan Rainforest.  In 1978, when the Players Handbook was published.  It's surprising there isn't a note beneath that reading,

* Watch National Geographic, stupid.

In 5th Edition, the spell is described as an 8th-level transmutation.  The duration of the spell is drastically curtailed (from an average of 26 hours to 8), the range is much expanded and the casting time remains unchanged.  Note, please, that I charge the caster only three rounds; I don't see how more makes the spell more powerful, except that it is clearly designed not to be used in a battle.  In other words, the very powerful spell should not help 3rd level druids from casting call lightning or enabling any other caster to produce a spell based on the weather conditions.  Gah.

If at all possible, I want to produce rules related to things like spells that precisely detail what the spell will do.  Control weather has been one of the hardest spells I've had to rewrite.  I'm tremendously pleased that I'm beginning to master mediawiki's layout sufficiently that this spell can look a lot better than it did, when I edited the page six months ago.

Battle at the Snow Gate

If you wish, you can see the new progress on the Juvenis campaign taking place, in a wiki format.  The players are in a locked battle with an Ice Toad that has just exhaled its breath weapon, while a demon fashioned of red mud is forcing saving throw after saving throw.  Already, the combat is strained, with Embla having fallen into negative hit points, while the party has issues fighting a demon that can only be hit by magical weapons, when only two of the party have them.

Doppelgangers

Frankly, there's never enough description of monsters.  When I see something like this for a doppelganger, it's no surprise that the flavour has gone out of role-playing and that so much energy has to be spent crying out for more of it in the game.  There's simply nothing on the page linked to help a DM effectively run the monster or get into the monster's head.

The original description from the 1979 monster manual was not much better.

As such, we have to turn to other sources to gain insight into the creature.  I can think of two in-depth examples right off, though of course there are hundreds, since making one character that looks like an existing character is an old Hollywood trope.  It is effective, creepy and -- in terms of production costs -- cheap.  But while the T-1000 turning into John Connor's foster parents is a familiar enough motif, there are only two examples I can think of that attempted to dig deeper into a doppelganger's motives and mental state -- and both were "heroes," not villains, while neither ever used the term "doppelganger."

Some argument can be made that Mystique wasn't exactly heroic.  Her character was waltzed back and forth across the line of pragmatism so much that it eventually suffered from the necessity to satisfy the plot rather than maintaining a strict and acceptable character.  Even Jennifer Lawrence got to the point where she didn't want to play the character any more, a fact that was obvious from the way she walked through the part in the last two movies (and the reduction of her make-up quality because either the actress didn't have time to sit in a chair for six hours or agreed to sign on again only if she didn't have to).

But, the question of whether a doppelganger actually likes looking like someone else, or many someone else's, is a good dramatic question.  In D&D, the matter is settled because adopting another persona gets the doppelganger what it wants: power.  Asking a natural shapeshifter if it gets tired of reshaping itself is something like asking me if I get tired of eating, sleeping, writing or going for a walk.  Of course, yes, sometimes I do get tired of these things.  I don't know what to eat, I have things to do and I don't want to go to bed yet, I don't know what to write, I don't feel like a walk today.  But these things are actually so natural, and often filled with such moments of joy and satisfaction, that nothing about them are enough to make me stop.  Logically, a doppelganger could no more seriously want to stop changing shape than one of us would want to stop showering to get clean.

Then again, D&D has lots of doppelgangers, who have a culture and can share thoughts with each other.  There's only one Mystique.  That would have to really screw up a person.  How exactly it would screw up a person is hard to judge, however, which I would count as the principle reason why the character was never really pursued.  We could afford to give her a few minutes of angst in every film, but then the actual plot has to get resolved, so Mystique, if you wouldn't mind transforming yourself into an army colonel now, we could maintain the film's momentum.

A better investigation took place with Odo in Deep Space Nine, though of course now we're talking about someone who was distinctly an anti-doppelganger.  Much of his unwillingness to change shape resulted from the budget of a television show, especially given how much CGI costed in the 1990s to do relatively simple things believably.  His character had to be designed around that reality, so that most of the time Odo did entire episodes where this didn't take place at all.  It was an extreme case of informed ability -- though an understandable one (not like Riker).  We had to be told that Odo didn't like to change publicly, treating his shapeshifting ability as something dirty, like masturbation, that needed to be hidden in his room because it embarrassed him ... and the show established the reason for that by adding backstory that he was treated like a dancing monkey in his early experiences with humans.  We can relate to this and understand it, so it worked.  Saved the makers of the show lots of money.

[I'm sorry that I tend to see films and television -- particularly the latter -- in terms of how much a particular sequence, set or bit of CGI costed.  One of the reasons I enjoy excessive blockbusters is that the expenditure is so obscene that I stop worrying about how much a particular effect cost, because so much of the film obviously involved thousands of people spending a year of their lives nitpicking over pixels.  I can just forget about budget details.  On the other hand, if I watch something like the Umbrella Academy and some vortex opens after we've just spent 35 minutes watching actors shout and mumble at each other, I am immediately struck by how much that little feature must have cost someone; and when the super-intelligent ape character appears on the scene, I feel a little sad knowing that I'm not going to see that character very much because wow, that would be expensive to have Pogo on screen constantly]

Odo worked as a character because he wasn't especially educated, and his back story did suggest someone without much imagination ... which also subverts every argument that Odo could have saved Deep Space Nine single-handedly.  It is one thing to have enormous power -- it is another to have it without possessing much insight on how to solve problems.  This is something every DM recognizes in the 17th level characters drenched with magic items who find themselves stymied by three levers sticking out of a wall, that must be pulled in some sort of order.

It would be hard for a DM to concoct a character as dense and three-dimensional as Odo ... and certainly impossible to do it from the paltry sum of material that we find written under a monster with Odo's powers.  This is true across the monster spectrum.  The books can give us details on how a monster functions, but that is really just the machinery.  The actual motivation underlying the monster is hard to convey, and frankly most "monster books" don't even try.  The pleasant benefit of working online, in a blog or on a wiki, is that space is not relevant; nor is a "final version," which is what the WOTC adopts anyway because surely no one has looked at their monster compendium pages since they were first put in place, probably five or six years ago.  A creative soul can, like a television show that allows a character to be explored episode to episode, return to the original material and keep adding more.  Details that were lacking, an explanation of motivation, a hint as to how a particular power could be used or how to subvert it, can be thrown in as it occurs to the creator and, ultimately, the user as well.

So, today's monster is the doppelganger.  I had fun working it up this morning, using notes from other sources in order to build a better picture.  Found a good picture for it, too.

Go Towards the Lich

Spent a goodly part of today working on this page:

... and I am glad to have it largely behind me.   I need to address the list of a spells that a lich has, picking out from the spell list the "best" choices, those that are most lich-friendly, but as I haven't properly working out the magic spells themselves above 4th level, I think I'll leave off doing this until another time.  I'm not likely to throw a lich in anyone's path soon.

I have no idea if this is anyone else's idea of a lich or not.  Surely there must be one such creature written about in some truly awful and popular game module with which I have zero familiarity, which every D&D player in the universe bases their lich upon, being so very very fond of that module.  Occasionally, I've tried to dig up such references, to use them, only to find them unspeakably tenth-rate in their quality or attention to detail ... and yet everyone LOVES them to death, because that's the lich they fought in their utterly overpowered game show contestant campaign that they played at the age of 7.

So.  This lich isn't like that lich.

I've dispensed with the word "phylactery," which is a Jewish holy article, and which I do not think is the appropriate article to be used in describing perhaps the most evil creature in the D&D lexicon.  People who want to carp about the abuse of orcs for their ugliness and drow elves for their blackness ought to add this particular abuse to their social justice cause list.  The 5th level spell, magic jar, seems perfectly appropriate.

I play it that the soul never leaves the jar, and that in fact the body doesn't have to be the original lich's body.  But it is all explained on the post.

Key to this is that it remains within the realm of a player character choosing to take their sufficiently high level mage and become a lich of their own free will.  Essentially, there's nothing to stop the mage ... most definitely not alignment, because I don't use it.  If a player character wants to go that route, I have absolutely no problems with it.  Of course, they have to get there first.  Starting at 1st level, as everyone must in my game, means it will take a little time.