I have been making monsters for
so long that many of you may have forgotten why I am making them.
Perhaps I have as well. I shall speak until I have reminded both of
us what I am doing and why.
This is long And rambles, and is long.
I am making a book called 'Veins
of the Earth' which is meant to be like Vornheim but for the
Underdark.
It is taking a LOT longer than I
thought. My capacity for work and amount of self-will is lower than I
thought. It takes me longer that I hoped to come up with good, or at
least semi-original ideas.
My principals for this blog are
generally about when not to blog something.
If someone has already done it.
Don't blog.
If its about RPG's and it's not
adding something to what is already there. Don't blog.
If its an opinion. Probably don't
blog.
If its an opinion about someone
else's opinion. DON'T BLOG.
Arguments are for understanding
things.
Don't get involved in an argument
unless you 1. are sure you know a lot about it and can add something
useful. 2. Are prepared to have your mind changed. And 3. Are
prepared to muster your energies and persist in the narrow gap
between almost-aggressive hyper-certainty and flaccid abandonment.
This means I rarely argue on the
internet.
One of the good, and shit, things
about the internet is that it is full of interesting and intelligent
people who have probably had most of your good idea's before you
have. The number of times I have had a powerful but half-formed idea
about something and then seen someone else make a well constructed
blog-post about it that makes the same point better than I would have
made it, (like here)
is beyond count. The number of times I have had an interesting
counter-argument to something and then seen someone else make the
same argument, better, and faster, is also large.
So what does this have to do with
monsters?
Nothing so far, why am I writing
it? I will go on.
The
Encounter Table
The central table is meant to be
an equivalent to the big city encounter table in Vornheim. The most
necessary part of the book. The part that if you were editing the
whole thing and doing sophie's choice with every page and you cut
everything away until there was only one thing left, then this would
be that thing.
The brief plan was this. Three
columns, fifty rows.
Column one is topographic cave
types. In Vornheim each of the encounters is carefully made. They are
almost like mini-plot hooks. In a city you can (usually) go around
anything you don't want to meet, so city encounters can't just be a
dangerous thing in the road, they need hooks. The Vornheim encounters
'stick' onto the PC's like velcro. If they engage, fine. If they
don't, there are usually consequences to not engaging. The plot will
come looking for you. In some the history of the game reforms so you
are already involved. That's 'your' friend in the cage, or 'your'
stuff the thieves stole.
But in caves this is quite
different. As opposed to freedom of movement they are defined by
dramatic loss of that freedom. In real caving almost all of the
effort is moving places the geography doesn't want you to go. The
deepest cave expeditions are generational. You cannot explore them in
one lifetime. If I made a cave adventure book like this it would be
sort-of-interesting an a very particular way and not at all what I
wanted.
So column one is to present the
kind of movement-challenges that might be encountered in caves but in
a toy-box way. That is, in a real cave journey it is much more likely
that the route you are following will end at a blank impassible wall.
Only very occasionally will you actually get somewhere. In the book,
it's meant to be the other way round. Each challenge is designed to
restrict or shape the movements of the group in some way. Its also
assumed that they can overcome this challenge. (Though it makes no
assumption as to how) It is not a true random geography generator in
which sometimes you are just fucked.
So Column one is cave types. This
will be the next thing I am doing on the blog. You can expect things
to be a lot less interesting around here as describing topographical
challenges in clear, short, game-applicable English is much less
charismatic than crazy monsters.
Column two is beauty, poetry and
strangeness. Reading a lot of books about cave exploration it seemed
evident to me that one of the most powerful things drawing explorers
was a kind of formless wonder that no-one involved ever clearly
describes. But it fills them up and animated them. (There is a part
in Ten Years Under The Earth where Nobert Casternet comes to the edge
of a waterfall no-one has seen before. He stares into the darkness
and cannot reall for how long, or in Fortnoys hisotry of the earth
where, descending the grand canyon he sees that a yellow sandstone
strata has billows of dunes and the footprints of ancient insects
written in the rock) Like sex in Dracula (the book) it's everywhere
but no-one talks about it. It was important to me that underground
spaces be beautiful in unexpected and powerful ways. This imaginative
energy also helps an old-school dm as it provides the unrefined fuel
for improvisation.
Column three is the living things
you encounter when you are in the cave with your movement restricted,
hopefully being deranged by the alien beauty.
My intention was originally that
you could open the book to this page and roll and encounter and just
start a game straight away, filling in the rest of the information
you need with the rest of the book as it came up.
I have failed in this intention.
The thing with Vornheim is that
if you open to the encounter table and roll an encounter, you don't
have to tit around with the rest of the book very much to work out
what happens. Its all right there on the page.
But my encounter table won't be
like that. Because I was obsessed with creating new monsters. Ones
no-one had done before, I had to describe them, to myself mainly, so
I understood them. People seemed to like that and I got a bit carried
away. Also, if you are making a new thing it takes a lot of words to
cart the fragile new ideas into someone else's head. Description.
So you won't be able to read my
encounter table and use it straight away because each of the living
things described in it is somewhat unlike any other monster you know
of. That means you either need to pause to look it up, or pre-read
the book. So I have kind-of fucked myself. I can live with it as the
new monsters are generally interesting enough to me to justify the
failure.
So how did I do? And what must
I do?
By my own standards.
If I have failed the test of
brevity, I think I have generally passed the test of originality.
A good monster has this-
It is an unexpected and powerful
idea which can be communicated in a few words. Geltatinous Cube is
the perfect example of this. Describes in two words. Impossible to
forget once you have heard it. Name forms a poetic paradox in your
head that locks it in place. Geltinous. Cube.
How many of these ideas have
this? Some. I think. Many do not.
Another problem with originality
is that the intention is not to describe things directly but to put
them inside the head of the DM who will then describe them to other
people. You are not making a normal form of art, you are making a
virus. It is not to be looked at, it is to infect people, go inside
them and then they do actions round a game table with other people.
These actions cannot be predicted but they are the real monster, not
the description in the book.
This happens in three stages.
Firstly you fill the head of the
DM with imaginative energy. This makes them want to run the monsters
and to be in that world.
Secondly, you give them simple
direct things the monsters can actually do when they interact with
the players, this means when the DM is frantic, distracted and
dealing with a lot of shit they have a simple behavioural/aesthetic
'handle' on the beast so they can have it do things in the game
straight away. (You could write for careful DM's who account for
everything in advance and o not franticly need stuff during the game
but that's not the kind of person I am so not really who I am
imagining. It suggests the DM was in too much control of events, that
what they expected to happen is what actually did happen, which is a
kind of silent failure)
Thirdly, these interactions are
carefully modulated and planned ahead so they don't fuck each other
up and send the game spinning.
Obviously the third concern is
almost irrelevant for Old school DM's, it's a kind of 4th
Ed worry (which they dealt with quite well). But most of my creations
need work on one or both of the first and second things. Eventually
the third column should have a name, a brief sensory description to
tell the DM how the PC's sense and encounter the living thing it
describes, and a brief behavioural note so they know what it is
likely to do in the first seconds. Check the beastiary for full
description.
So. Some are underwritten, but
the idea is there. Will have to go back and punch them up a bit
later.
Many are vaguely powerful ideas
but with little to connect them to the playing experience. Or are
overwritten.
Also
Zack
Smith asked if I was doing dungeons for any of these. I intend to.
The idea is a kind of one-page dungeon equivalent for each of the
intelligent races. They are going to be based on a kind of
underground silk-road (so the players have a good economic reason to
go long distances) Each dungeon would actually be a kind of trading
post/dungeon/mystery/fight. Like an American TV show where every week
holy shit a new mystery to solve oh crap the rocks are alive oh god a
a bear crushed chad to death after it set him on fire run oh shit but
they left diamonds in this obsidian crypt sweet. And DM's can string
them together as they wish.
Magic
items and trade goods with Archean and deep-earth silicon chemistry
will be really hard. I may need to get a new stack of books just for
that.
Statistics.
Humanoid things you can have a
conversation with – Seven?
Fungal or symbiotically fungal –
Five.
Small things but big – Ten.
Predators from outside space and
time – Three.
Ancient culture gone horribly
wrong – Eight.
Made from rock (sort of) –
Seven.
Draws creative energy from the
depth of geological time – eight.
Lessons
learnt.
I peaked around Christmas with
the AntiPhoenix and the Archeans. Maybe it was the solitude and the
time off work that did it.
If you write an entry in poetry
it will be massively unpopular and actually reduce hits around it
like a crack house bringing down prices. I REGRET NOTHING.
Naming things after German forms
of light makes them hard to invent and paradoxically unpopular.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is an
excellent poet. For some reason I like the religious parts at the end
less than the rest, this seems somehow unfair to Hopkins. Like I'm
robbing him.
It's hard to concentrate on one
thing for an hour.
I need to manage my time better.
I need more focus and
self-control.
It takes a LOT of books to fuel a
good idea.
(maybe I like reading too much
and have let it become a form of prevarication)
If you want cave explorations
that read like thrillers or military expeditions, go to the
Americans, if you want poetry and wonder you need the Europeans.
Duregar should be like evil
Swiss. Are they neutral evil? Lawful?
