Gods and Religions, Part 3: Domains and Pantheons

If you read my previous article advocating for creating multiple co-existing pantheons in a single campaign setting, you may have thought to yourself, "Wait, you want me to make multiple pantheons?  Won't that get boring?  How many different fricking thunder gods does one setting need?  Damn you, d20 Despot, you ask too much of me!"  Okay, first of all, please let go of my shirt collar.  Secondly, I think you might want to read this very article.  That's right, it's time for another installment of Gods & Religions, and this time we'll be talking about different structures that a pantheon can take, and how to spread domains around creatively so that you don't get stuck with nine nearly identical gods of war.  And, as is so often the case, we can find the inspiration for such diverse domains and pantheons in our own history.

Pantheon Structure
In the first article on the subject, I touched on the idea that there were more options for a religion than your typical eight-to-twenty-member pantheon: many polytheistic religions are centered around a few core deities but include hundreds of gods and god-like beings among their pantheon; others (like Zoroastrianism) acknowledge only two gods, often representing opposing worldviews and locked in eternal struggle with each other.  So when making your pantheons, don't feel obligated to fulfill a certain minimum (or maximum) number of gods.

Aside from numbers, another way to differentiate your pantheons is by structuring them differently.  What do I mean by structure?  Well, your typical D&D pantheon (think the gods of Golarion detailed in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook or the Greyhawk deities found in D&D 3.5) is fairly level, with all the gods on relatively equal footing, ruling independently over their own sections of the outer planes.  Other pantheons have more of a hierarchy.  Take the Classical Greek pantheon as a familiar example: Zeus rules over the Olympian gods as king, with his wife Hera.  They, along with the rest of the twelve Olympian gods in turn are superior to the remaining gods and demigods, like Herakles and Asclepius and the Muses.  Hades, meanwhile, reigns over the realm of the dead, and the overthrown Titans are condemned to Tartarus.

The Ancient Egyptian religion provides an example of an alternative structure.  Depending on what time you are looking at in Ancient Egypt's 3000 year history (and who you are asking), the chief god might be the sun god Ra, or the falcon god Horus (who merged with Ra), or the dead god Osiris, or the sun disk Aten (if you ask Akhenaten), or even the dreaded Set (if you ask the Hyksos).  The primacy of the gods depended on the whims of the ruling pharaoh and the power of the various cult centers (like Heliopolis, the House of Ra, or Thebes, where the Theban Triad of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu held sway).  Where the Greek gods were like a kingdom, the Ancient Egyptian gods were more like Hollywood, with different actors rising and falling in popularity over time and being called upon to fulfill different roles depending on the needs of the director.

There are many possible structures a pantheon could take.  Maybe the eight major gods each govern a strictly defined domain, and turn either to the god of balance or the god of treachery when conflicts arise between them.  Or maybe three major gods hold primacy over a cavalcade of lesser gods with more focused domains, like the god of the sea or the god of disease.  Perhaps the pantheon is divided into competing halves, with each god and goddess facing off against their polar opposite on the other side.  Mix things up and throw together a wide variety of ideas to make your pantheon as simple or complex as you want.  As cliché as it may sound, the only limit is your imagination.

Immigration and Absorption
One thing that really shakes up real-world pantheons is the addition of other gods from other religious/mythological traditions.  The Greeks were always receiving popular gods and goddesses from the East and adding them to their theology.  The Romans did their fair share of that (as attested by the popularity of Isis, Sol Invictus, Jesus Christ, and Mithras in the Late Roman Empire), but they also tended to absorb the gods of their conquered subjects into their own gods - a process called syncretism.  The ancient Egyptians, meanwhile, were constantly syncretising their own gods together - combining Ra and Horus into Horus-re, for instance.

If one of the civilizations in your campaign world has close contact with another, through trade, war, or conquest, consider adding one or more gods from one of the pantheons into the other.  Consider what gods fill a 'gap' in the theology of those peoples.  Consider also how the god might change as it is absorbed into a new culture.  For instance, imagine a desert people who are conquered by a seagoing foreign race.  The seagoing race's primary deity is Sha, the god of the sea, storms, and physical might.  As the desert people begin to worship Sha, they focus more on the storms and might than the sea.  Perhaps the desert people already had a minor deity of storms and lightning named Surru.  As Sha takes a leading place in the desert peoples' pantheon, Sha absorbs the less-important Surru and becomes Shasurru, mighty god of storms and floods.

Real history is full of political changes resulting in theological changes.  Gods gain power in the heavens as their supporters gain power on earth - though in a fantasy world, which causes which is a matter up for debate.  Perhaps the earliest example is the Enuma Elish, a piece of Babylonian literature describing how Marduk, the patron god of the city of Babylon, came to overthrow the pre-existing hierarchy and dominate all the other Mesopotamian gods.  Real history is also full of examples of gods being absorbed into other pantheons from outside, adding variety and exotic flavor to an established pantheon.  Incorporating such things into your own world makes the pantheons feel more real.

Leaving Things Out
One great way to make all your pantheons seem very boring and cookie-cutter is to always have every domain represented by a major deity.  Not every religion has to have a god of animals and a god of war and a god of fire and a god of weather and so on ad infinitum.  In fact, not every domain needs to be represented in each pantheon at all.  Some societies might not even have a god of, say, evil.

Think about what sort of gods the civilization would worship.  Take the aforementioned hypothetical desert civilization.  They might have a sun god, since the sun is so omnipresent in the desert, and they might have a water god because water is the source of all life.  They probably would not have a god of the sea (although you might be surprised - Tiamat, who plays such an important role in Mesopotamian mythology, was the goddess of the ocean).

Sometimes domain gaps are filled by the inclusion of foreign gods in the pantheon, as mentioned above.  Other times, other god-like but non-divine forces can fill that role.  It is quite easy to imagine, for instance, a pantheon which has no evil deities; worshipers of evil in such a society might be forced to throw in their lot with demon lords or Old Ones or other such malign forces.

The God of What and What?
This may seem counterintuitive, but don't think too logically about which domains you assign to what gods.  When creating a goddess of the sea, you might give her the water domain of course, plus the weather domain because weather is so closely associated with the sea, the travel domain because ships travel on the sea.  Maybe add in the chaos domain, because the sea is ever-changing, and the destruction domain because of the great destruction the sea can wreak, but also the animal domain because the sea supports so much life.  Sounds pretty good, right?  Okay, now create a sea god for the next pantheon who feels like a completely different god.  If you go about each god logically, you will end up with a bunch of sea gods that seem pretty much the same.  Real deities have so much more variety.  Mesopotamian sea goddess Tiamat is associated with creation and dragons, while the Greek sea god Poseidon is also the god of earthquakes and horses.  The Irish sea god Manannán mac Lir is associated with the afterlife, necromancy, and trickery, the Norse sea god Njörðr is associated with wealth and good cropland, and Ōyamazumi - one of several Japanese sea deities - is also a god of mountains and war.  And those are just sea gods!

In practice, gods tend to accumulate odd associations that we probably wouldn't think of if we set out to create them logically from scratch.  Sometimes this is just due to the unique nature and character of the god - The Norse thunder god Thor is also a war god and a fertility god, because that's just what Thor is.  Sometimes it is because the god absorbed the role of an earlier god who fell out of favor (or a vaguely similar foreign god) picking up strange traits in the process - when Marduk defeated the sea goddess Tiamat, he usurped her role as creator by paradoxically (re-)creating the earth out of her mangled body, and in the process he also seems to have gained an association with the sea.  Sometimes the domain of one god rubs off on their parent, child, or spouse - Apollo, for instance, is associated with healing because of his son Asclepius, god of medicine.  Whatever the reason, gods often come with a plethora of seemingly odd domains which make them unique an interesting.

One easy way to simulate this in your fantasy pantheon is, once you have established your main deities and assigned them a few basic domains, randomly assign the remaining domains to those deities.  Then you can work backwards to create myths that explain why that deity is associated with those domains.  Let's say you have a triad of gods - the god of the sky, the god of death, and the goddess of the sea.  You randomly assign some spare domains to them, and the goddess of the sea gets stuck with love and knowledge.  You decide that her association with love is because the gods of death and the sky are constantly competing for her affection.  Maybe her relation to knowledge comes from the loss of a great library when a once mighty city sank beneath the waves - now all that knowledge lies on the sea floor, where she jealously guards it.

Shake your pantheons up!  Make them feel different from each other.  Above all, make them seem interesting enough that your players will engage with them rather than just ignore them as part of the backdrop.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi all you loyal readers!  You may have noticed that there was no post last week.  I'm sorry about that - this month has been very busy, partly because I am on vacation and partly because when I was not on vacation I was working very hard on non-d20 despot related stuff.  So I have decided that this month I will only be posting every other week.  My $5+ patrons on Patreon can still expect all the promised Monster Mondays, but they will be arriving in a lump at the end of the month rather than weekly (except for the awesome leather golem which I posted in the first week of May).  Check back on Monday the 30th for the next post!

-your syncretic d20 despot

Gods and Religions, Part 2: Death, Undeath, and the Afterlife

Death - it comes for us all, eventually.  Sorry, that's not how I usually start my articles.  Welcome to part II of Gods and Religions!  Usually, an adventurer's main interaction with death is in the dealing thereof, but sometimes - hopefully not too often - the characters get to meet death face-to-face.  If they are lucky enough and rich enough (or know a druid and aren't afraid to come back as a different species) they might even get to come back from the dead.  This can make death seem like just another game mechanic, but it is so much more important than that.

A religion's attitude towards death can have a profound effect on the beliefs and attitudes of the individual and on society as a whole.  And that's just in our world!  Imagine how much more important religious ideas about death become when the afterlife is not just a matter of belief but of verifiable fact (heck, you can just plane shift there!), when there are a number of spells that can bring the dead back to life, and when dead bodies returning as undead monstrosities is a very real danger.

With that in mind, there are some questions you need to ask yourself about death when you are creating the gods and religions of your world.  Questions like:

Can dying in a certain way have consequences for a soul?

Einherjar - brave souls who died in battle - are fêted by Valkyries in Valhalla. Walhall by Emil Doepler, via Wikimedia

Most belief systems have the concept of a 'good death' vs a 'bad death'.  Suicide, for instance, is often considered a bad death, but dying for your faith is a good death (see for example the many hundreds of early Christians who were martyred by pagans and became saints as a result).  For the ancient Greeks, drowning in the sea was a particularly bad death because your body often could not be recovered.  In most cases a good death means a fast track to the nice afterlife, but a bad death means a longer waiting period, or even being condemned to the shitty afterlife that no one wants to go to, even for a quick visit.  In pagan Norse belief, for instance, a brave death in battle might see you whisked by Valkyries up to the halls of Valhalla for an afterlife of feasting and drinking, or to the field of Fólkvangr where Freyja's hall of Sessrúmnir stands (and where women who die a noble death also go), but dying of disease or old age gets you sent to the dark halls of Hel.

Consider having the idea of a 'bad death' manifest mechanically in-game with tougher resurrection costs.  Maybe a character who dies in a way that their god considers 'bad' cannot be raised by the raise dead spell and require the more expensive resurrection or even true resurrection.  

At the very least, having a concept of a 'good death' vs a 'bad death' can affect the risks a believer might be willing to take.  With the promise of divine reward, maybe a character will be more willing to fight to the death in battle.  With the threat of a tougher afterlife, maybe that same character will be a little more cautious fighting at sea, where the risk of drowning and having their soul sucked into a black abyss is very real.  Or maybe a character dying of disease will throw themselves recklessly into battle in hopes of reaching a better afterlife.

Speaking of the afterlife...

Gods and Religions, Part 1: Worldbuilding Options

Some of my players may find it funny that I am starting up a series of articles on gods and religions.  It seems like whenever they roll up new characters for one of my work-in-progress campaign settings, one of them asks, "So what gods do we have to choose from?" and my response is always a sheepish, "I, uh, haven't gotten around to making the gods yet."  In my defense, even if it rarely comes to fruition, I devote a fairly large portion of my thought processes to the gods of a setting.  Gods and religions are important, and if executed properly, their influence on the campaign setting can be profound.  

The fantasy worlds of D&D and Pathfinder have an advantage over our world in that the gods have an empirically verifiable effect on those worlds.  Our world has a variety of competing religions and faiths and an increasing number of people who doubt the veracity of any of them.  If army chaplains could heal the wounds of their companions with a touch of their glowing hand, like D&D clerics and paladins can, our world would likely have a very different outlook on religion.  As it is, we as worldbuilders have to deal with this difference as best we can.  

There are two main approaches that a typical campaign setting takes to religions: universal gods, or local pantheons.  

Universal Gods

In this approach, the same gods hold sway over the entire campaign setting.  This is what most campaign settings (eg. Faerûn, Greyhawk, Golarion) tend to use.  It is the easier approach for the creator of the world, because they only have to think up one batch of gods (usually adding in some new ones in later supplements), and it is easier for the players because they don't need to navigate a treacherous web of home-brewed theology.  

Where Are All the Halfling Kingdoms? A Call for Demihuman Diversity

Think of the main races in your basic campaign setting.  Humans always dominate the world with a wide variety of kingdoms and cultures and ethnicities.  Then you've got your dwarves in their mountain holds: a proud, Scottish-accented race of perpetually bearded miners who write in runes and love axes almost as much as they love grudges.  Of course you have your elven kingdom too, often tucked away on an island to the west where they are free to be mysterious and haughty.  Don't get them started on their evil cousins, the drow, who worship demons and spiders deep in their subterranean kingdoms conveniently located wherever the plot needs them to be.  The orcs live in barbarian tribes just on the other side of those mountains at the edge of the map, but they're always coming over to raid the civilized lands.  Halflings and gnomes?  Oh, they are around somewhere too.  I guess they live in little villages inside human kingdoms, where they just sort of hang out, practicing with their slings and talking to badgers.  Maybe the gnomes are, like, steampunk inventors or whatever.  And the halflings are... well, you read The Hobbit, right?

RPGs these days are getting better at representing real-life human diversity, which is great.  Astute worldbuilders make sure to fill their campaign maps with a wide variety of human kingdoms representing any number of ethnicities, cultures, and government types.  But what about diversity for the other races?  Are there any feudal halfling kingdoms?  How about dark-skinned elves?  (And I don't mean drow).  Are there dwarven merchant republics?  Oriental gnomish dynasties?

Sometimes you'll get a bit of an explanation.  'The special thing about humans is how diverse they are!  All those other races are just too set in their ways to have a wide range of languages, cultures, and ethnicities.'  I call that BS.  It's just a way to excuse lazy worldbuilding.  I know why it happens: humans are real.  We can look to our own history for inspiration when creating the human kingdoms and cultures of our fantasy settings.  But elves and dwarves don't exist.  Most of the fantasy races are only around because of Tolkien.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with halflings, who owe their entire existence to Tolkien.  In fact, the basic D&D halfling, with its love of adventure and skill at thievery, is based not so much on the pastoral hobbits of the Shire, but on one hobbit in particular: Bilbo Baggins.  When humans can draw on 10,000 years of real history but all the other races are tethered - directly or indirectly - to a handful of books or even a few beloved characters, it's easy to see why the fantasy races get such short shrift.

How do we fix it?  To start, throw Tolkien out the window.  The man is the father of modern worldbuilding; let's honor him by making our own worlds, not copying his.  Start with all of the base races on equal footing.  Think about what defining characteristics they would have in your setting.  If you just can't find a place for one of the races, toss it out and consider replacing it with an alternate race.  When you start filling in your map with cool country ideas, think to yourself, "Does this country need to be human-dominated?  Is there another race that fits it better?"  Draw on human history and diversity for inspiration not just for your human cultures, but for your dwarves and elves and halflings and gnomes as well.

In the 'India and Southeast-Asia' region of my campaign setting, Chattara is an empire ruled over by a warrior caste of dwarves (an amalgam of the Mughals, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs).  Chattar dwarves descended from a race of surface-dwelling dwarves in the hill country to the north.  They have bronze skin and black hair, which they keep wrapped in a turban in public.  They have an abiding love of wine and poetry.  They are skilled with the falchion and the chakram, and they ride into battle on the backs of woolly rhinoceroses.

Chattar dwarves bear little resemblance to Gimli, son of Glóin, but they are distinctive and interesting nonetheless.

For your inspiration, here are a few more ideas for non-human-centric kingdoms and civilizations:

The halfling kingdom of Amall has a reputation for chivalry.  They have fought long and hard to keep from being overrun by the 'big folk' and have adapted well to their style of warfare.  Amallish castles are built with high walls to repel human attackers.  Amallish knights on purebred war-ponies train constantly at tournaments.  The elite knights of the Order of the Giant's Skull only earn their spurs when they have fought a giant and lived to tell the tale.  Aside from their knights, Amall is renowned for the quality of their gourds and squashes - every Amallish housewife has a well-guarded recipe for pumpkin pie.

The wood elves of Cythnemoria hold insanity to be a gift from the gods.  Before making any important decision, they consume a potent hallucinogenic drink to 'bring them closer to the wisdom of the mad ones'.  In battle, they paint their bodies with natural dyes and strike with poisoned weapons.  Cythnemoria is divided into a dozen chaotic elvish clans.  Alliances shift rapidly at the whims of the clan elders who, if not actually insane, manage a fair impression of it.

In the swampy islands of Pindalang, human and gnomish slaves work under the rule of the lizardfolk warrior class known as the Chonggai.  Katana-armed Chonggai maintain a tightly structured society that ensures that their slaves can never hope to rise up.  The lizardfolk, in turn, carry out the orders of a shadowy cabal of serpentfolk working toward inscrutable goals.  The slaves, meanwhile, live lives of toil in rice paddies and copper mines, more afraid of the terrifying monsters that haunt the night than of their scaly overlords.

The Falan are a race of black-skinned gnomes from the coast of Tong.  They live most of their lives on their boats, fishing or carrying trade goods down rivers and up coasts to port cities.  It is taboo in Falan culture to speak while on land, for fear that evil land spirits will fly into your open mouth and turn your heart away from the water.  As such, the Falan have devised a sign language that they use to trade in human markets, and many humans believe the Falan to be mute.  The most honored gnomes in Falan culture are believed to be able to call fish to the surface with their songs.  These Sea-Callers are forbidden from ever setting foot on land, lest they inadvertently open their mouth and lose their precious gift.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Just as a reminder, my patreon has switched to a monthly schedule, and there is a whole new set of rewards tiers to choose from.  $5+ patrons get a new monster every Monday, $8+ patrons get to vote on the final monster of the month, and $12+ patrons get access to a monthly playtest document full of all the open game content I worked on that month.  In January, as a special preview, I made all reward tiers available to every patron.  January's monsters were the rustbound skeleton, funayurei, valraven, and the patron-voted strix harpy.  January's playtest document added three new monsters (goo bat swarm, ikuchi, and pit mimic), a giant-blooded playable race (the Grenn), and a new spell worthy of a Disney princess (animal servants).  Check out my patreon if you like what you see here!  I don't mean to beg, but please give me all of your money!

-your perpetually bearded d20 despot

Worldbuilding - How to Steal from History

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good GM has to know how to steal.  This is never more true than when you are creating your campaign setting.  Even Tolkien, the father of fantasy worldbuilding, stole the language and culture of the Rohirrim from the historical Anglo-Saxons, with the twist that they are horse people of the plains rather than an infantry-heavy insular people.

It may be satisfying to create a whole continent of kingdoms and city-states and emirates from scratch, but it is even more time consuming and difficult.  Plus, you'll have to spend just as much time explaining your world to your players as you did creating it.  Worse still, you run the risk of creating a bland and unengaging world full of shallow, interchangeable kingdoms.  Pilfering ingredients from history makes your world easier to create and more accessible for players.  Once you've decided, for instance, than Kingdom X is going to be based on Charlemagne's empire, you can use pseudo-French and pseudo-German names to lend your kingdom a consistent overall character.

Immersion requires a sense of verisimilitude, which is just a big word that means realism.  Verisimilitude helps players become invested in your world, lose themselves in it, and have great roleplaying experiences.  For that, you need a world that seems real, that makes sense on a human level, and that is readily accessible.  There is no better source for realism than the pages of history itself.  You have ten thousand years of human history at your disposal, displaying a bewildering variety of societies, governments, religions, warriors, and architectural styles.  Steal something from here, something from there, mix and match them, add a twist of your own, and you've got something.  Even the more obscure historical civilizations will add that verisimilitudinous flavor to your campaign setting because they are inherently human, and on some level we understand them.

So go get an entry-level history book from your local library or used book store, read about history on wikipedia, watch some documentaries on Netflix (or the History Channel, if you can find anything that's not about aliens or Templar conspiracies or pawn brokers).  Even just dipping your toes in the waters of history will improve your worldbuilding.

Now, let's take a look at how we can apply what we've stolen to our campaign setting.

Speaking in Tongues: Using Languages in Your Campaign

The monk halts mid-step and tilts her head.  Yes, those are voices!  She silently drops down next to the sarcophagus and presses her ear to the granite floor.  There must be some sort of chamber below!

"Everything is falling into place," a sinister voice echoes from below.  "That earthquake will have awakened the Unconquered Bull."

"The people will also take it as a sign of divine disfavour.  Their faith in the Emperor will be shaken.  We need only push, and he will fall," a deeper voice responded.  

"Yes, soon the People of the Bull will topple this decadent society and usher in a reign of blood and fire!  We must return to the capital and complete the rituals."

"Indeed.  It is best we move as far from the coast as possible; the tidal wave will come shortly."

The monk sits up, puzzled.  She pulls out her Hyksaean-Zhengi phrasebook and flips through the pages with a practiced hand.  "I wish I knew what they were saying."

Language is key to how we interact with and interpret the world.  As such, it naturally comes up a lot while roleplaying as well.  The character from a distant land.  The ancient inscription above the doorway.  The conversation overheard between hobgoblin guards.  Yet the rules for learning, speaking, and reading languages are surprisingly slim in the d20 and PFRPG systems.

This sort of thing bugs me, so I came up with a new set of rules that govern how a character learns and uses languages.  It works fine if your approach to languages is as simple as "Common, Dwarven, Elvish, Orcish, etc." but it also includes optional rules for those GMs who want to lend some realism to their campaign settings by including regional languages and language families (Try going to Latvia and see how far speaking "Common" gets you).  So if you are looking for a more comprehensive rule set for languages in your campaign, look no further.  Actually, look a little further; the rules are below.

The following gold text and its associated tables are available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is (C)2014 Jonah Bomgaars.

It's My Party: Adventurers Don't Operate in a Vacuum

Bernard grabbed another glass from the bar, dipped his rag into a bucket of beer-colored water, and polished the glass to no obvious effect.  He looked out at his patrons.  It was the usual lot: crusty old farmers, local ruffians, gangly stable boys...  He saw a couple of farmers drain their glasses and push them away.  Bernard was about to draw it to the attention of one of his barmaids when the door burst open.  Sunlight briefly streamed into the bar before being blocked out by the newcomers.  First came an ugly brute of a half-orc with a glowing greatsword strapped to his back, followed shortly by a hooded figure with a black cloak and brandishing a wicked staff topped with a gruesomely realistic human skull.  Next through the door was an anthropomorphic raven in spiked red armour with a mandolin in one hand and a flaming katana in the other.  Last but not least was a black-skinned elf with piercing red eyes, dressed only in woven ivy and riding a monstrous tiger.  

"The conquering heroes return!" Bernard called out from the bar.  "What'll it be, fellas?  The usual?"

~~~~~

Adventuring parties are a strange thing.  Oftentimes, they are actually comprised of many strange things.  It's not much of a problem when you have a group of humans with the occasional elf, dwarf, or halfling.  But there are a huge variety of strange playable races available to your players, some of which are quite literally monsters - in a game where fighting monsters is not an uncommon occurrence.  Some would say it is a defining characteristic.

So if your party includes crow-men, fox people, frog-folk, horned hellspawn, winged monsters, talking monkeys, the bad guys from Lord of the Rings, or magical robots, you should probably give some thought to how they are going to be seen by the people they are trying to save.  This applies equally whether you are GMing a game or writing a fantasy story.

Happy Halloween! Murder Mystery D&D Session

Happy Halloween, everybody!  If you're like me, you really want to play in a Halloween D&D game where all the players are classic monsters: a mummy, a flesh golem, a vampire, a ghost...  Man, that would be fun.  Anyways, this post isn't about that.  I was thinking about what to post for Halloween when I remembered a murder mystery session of D&D that I once ran.

I had never run a murder mystery before, but I knew that I wanted to do one.  It required a lot of preparation, and more improvisation than I had done up to that point, but it really helped me learn how to run a roleplay-based town adventure that wasn't 'on rails'.  Essentially, I created a small village and everyone who inhabited it.  I gave them names and personalities, suspicions and secrets.  I made up rumors about them and gave some of them motives for the murder.  I made sure to throw in plenty of false leads, red herrings, and unrelated secrets.  I tried to make the village feel alive, and part of that was making sure there was plenty of small-town drama.

The adventurers were told by the authorities of a nearby city that they were needed to investigate some killings performed by an unknown monster in the small village of Moulle.  When they arrived at Moulle's only tavern and inn (The Giant's Bag), they were to learn that, although belief in the 'Monster in the Woods' was widespread, there was rumor going around that these killings were being performed by a townsperson.

Book Review: Brokedown Palace

As this blog is the primary authority on matters relating to fantasy role-playing games for literally tens of people, I thought I might branch out to touch on the literary world - inextricably linked as it is to the world of fantasy RPGs.  After all, D&D was fundamentally shaped by the novels and stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, and Fritz Leiber - among many others - and modern RPGs continue to draw heavily on contemporary and classic fantasy works.

It may come as no surprise to you that I have been known, on occasion, to read fantasy novels and stories.  As such, I am taking it upon myself to post reviews of some of these here on this blog.  And with this blog being what it is, my reviews will be made with an eye toward fantasy RPG gaming.

Brokedown Palace

The first work up for review is Brokedown Palace by Steven Brust, originally published in 1986 by Ace Books.  Some minor spoilers may follow, but I shall endeavor to restrict them, for I am vehemently anti-spoiler.

Fleshing Out The Campaign World

As a GM, you always have to keep in mind that your players won't necessarily do what you plan on them doing - especially in a city, which lacks the GM-friendly constraints of your average dungeon.  In such cases, you will have to improvise.  It can be tricky to come up with something at the spur of the moment, but having a fully-realized and fleshed-out game world really helps out with that sort of thing.  If you have established the history and culture of your city, not only will it feel very real for your players, but it will be so real for you that you will have very little trouble improvising within it.

For example: