Things Cybermen Hate #3: Overheating Groin Units

"Do you think anyone will notice?"
"It kind of draws the eye, to be honest."

AD&D Combat Rules Guide

By far the biggest section of AD&D's actual rules is the combat section. I'm not going to discuss the rules themselves here, just one aspect of the actual text which is very easy to miss: the logical layout. Yes, I said "logical".

Combat runs from page 61 to 84 of the DMG — 24 pages of fun and/or charts. Page 61 is the core and key to the whole system and after a half page of rationale we are presented with a list of steps or actions which can occur in combat. There are 6 steps and steps 4 and 5 are broken down into sub-sections labelled A to H. Since step 5 is simply "do step 4 but for the side without initiative", we can ignore it, and similarly step 6 ("continue from step 2") doesn't need any more discussion.

The point that is overlooked by most people is that the text that follows this initiative procedure is laid out in the same order.

Here's the system, but with cross-references added:

1. Determine if either or both parties are SURPRISED — p61
2. Determine distance, if unknown, between the parties — p62
3. If both parties are unsurprised or equally surprised, determine INITIATIVE for the round — p62
4. Determine the results of whatever actions are decided upon by the party with initiative:
1. Avoid engagement — p63
2. Attempt to parley — p63
3. Await action by other party — p63
4. Discharge missiles (p63); cast spells, magical devices , spell-like powers, turn undead — p65
5. Close to striking range, or charge — p66
6. Set weapons to receive a charge — p66
7. Strike blows with weapons to kill or subdue — ­p66 (subdual on p67)
8. Grapple or Hold — p72

Within these sections there is a certain amount of leeway for bringing in other concerns, so the "strike blows" section from page 66 to 72 includes the rules for morale (p67) which in turn bring in the rules for fleeing combat which run to page 69 where the actual discussion of melee starts.

The end of the combat section includes psionic combat and that means that insanity has to be dealt with in there too, which is why insanity is in the combat section, something that previously seemed strange to me.

Looked at this way, there is a much clearer system to how the rules are presented, although sadly it does not explain the reference to "see Combat Procedure, below" on page 65. Oh, well.

The Missing Pantheon

Kirby's "God"

Jehovah (God of the High Places and Wilderness)

Greater God

Armour Class: -6
Move: Infinite
Hit Points: 400
No of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 2-200 (2d10 x 10)
Special Attacks: Disease, Curse, Destruction
Special Defenses: +4 or better, or cold iron to hit
Magical Resistance: 130%
Size: M (5" 6") to L (300')
Alignment: LN
Worshipper's Alignment: Any
Symbol: 6-pointed Star
Plane: Arcadia
Cleric/Druid: 30th level cleric
Fighter: nil
Magic User/Illusionist: 20th level Illusionist
Thief/Assassin: nil
Monk/Bard: 23rd lv Bard
Psionic Ability: I

S: 20 I: 23 W: 24 D: 20 C: 25 Ch: 25

This deity can appear in any form but, although he has been known to take the appearance of a normal man in a market place, he is more routinely encountered in some abstract form, often with a firey aspect such as a burning bush or a pillar of flame.

At will, he can strike a land (up to 40,000 sq miles) with a disease, individuals with a curse, or destroy by fire an area up to two miles across, doing 2-200 damage to each living thing in that area (roll separately for important individuals). All these effects are at the 30th level of ability. Since he can be anywhere instantly, there is no practical need for a range on these effects; Jehovah simply moves there and causes the effect.

Jehovah is served by seven solars (Michael, Gabriel, Rapheal, Uriel, Raguel, Saraqael, and Remiel) and a host of planetars and devas. An eighth solar (Satan) quit Jehovah's service after losing faith in the latter's sense of justice but freedom has since gone to his head and he has become a terrible being (see below).

Jehovah's greatest enemies are the Babylonian and Egyptian pantheons, both of whom claim that Jehovah is a renegade from their own domains.

Unusually for a deity, Jehovah is vulnerable to cold iron and is said to be powerless against those using it.

Asherah (Goddess of Nature)

Lesser Goddess

Armour Class: 0
Move: 48"/48"//48"
Hit Points: 100
No. of Attacks: 2
Damage/attack: 1-10
Special Attacks: energy drain

Special Defenses: Unharmed by natural materials
Magical Resistance: 80%
Size: M (5'1")
Alignment: N
Worshipper's Alignment: Any woman, any neutral man
Symbol: Walnut Tree
Plane: Astral
Cleric/Druid: 24th level druid
Fighter: nil
Magic User/Illusionist: 12th level Magic User / 14th level Illusionist
Thief/Assassin: nil
Monk/Bard: Nil
Psionic Ability: II

S: 18/00 I: 20 W: 24 D: 25 C: 25 Ch: 22

Asherah was once Jehovah's wife but they grew apart and eventually she was cast out of his temples and celestial realm as he demanded more and more of his worshipper's attention (he is a jealous god) until there was no space for his wife.

Some say she instigated the rebellion of Satan but withdrew her support when she saw the effect it had on the Fallen One; others that she is still in league with him, working to undermine Jehovah in revenge for spurning her. In either case, what she desires most of all is to be taken back and restored to her position as Queen of Heaven. She wanders the Astral plane looking for some way to advance this cause and will generally be uninterested in other issues, although she will usually aid women who call on her, especially in the fields of fertility and childbirth. Such aid (whether to women or otherwise) will come with strings attached and in particular she will demand payment in worship. If this is freely given, she will be an enthusiastic patron within the bounds of her alignment.

No attack based on natural materials will harm her - wood, flint, iron, silver, fire, most animal and monster acids, water, lightning etc. Many compounds, however, will and even a normal steel or bronze sword will harm her physical form (assuming steel and bronze do not occur naturally in whichever world she is manifesting in at the time).

A touch/blow from Asherah's hand will either drain a level or restore one lost one.

Satan (God of Unrestrained Power)

Demi-god

Armour Class: -6
Move: 18"/40"//18"
Hit Points: 216
No. of Attacks: 3
Damage/attack: By weapon (+12)
Special Attacks: Suggestion

Special Defenses: +3 or better to hit
Magical Resistance: 95%
Size: L (60')
Alignment: LE
Worshipper's Alignment: LN, LE, NE
Symbol: 5-pointed star
Plane: Hell
Cleric/Druid: 16th level cleric
Fighter: Attacks as 20th level fighter
Magic User/Illusionist: 20th level Magic User / 20th level Illusionist
Thief/Assassin: 25th level thief/18th level assassin
Monk/Bard: Nil
Psionic Ability: I

S: 24 I: 20 W: 21 D: 23 C: 22 Ch: 22/-3

Satan is the nominal ruler of the Nine Hells but is currently unable to act physically. Long ago, those devas and planetars who joined his rebellion realised that the power to act independently had gone to his head and they faced the choice of serving in Heaven or serving in Hell. So rebellion begat rebellion and a plot was formed to trap Satan in the lowest level of Hell where his triple-faced form is encased in ice.

He is still able to receive worship, and to roam the astral plane and even manifest on the prime material plane, Satan is incapable of acting at all on his ostensible home plane and Asmodeus and the other Arch Dukes make sure that this remains the case.

Every word Satan utters is a suggestion spell and only careful magical warding will allow anyone to deal with him honestly or see his true form (in which case CHA is -3).

Despite everything else, he is proud of what Hell hath wrought and is more interested in spreading his vision of rule by the powerful and deserving than in breaking free of his prison - at least for now. If he does break free, he will be armed with three two-handed swords of the type used by Solars.

Satan can create any non-unique item desired, and any amount of gold, silver etc. Such things never last more than a month (and often a lot less, at his option) before dissolving into ash. Likewise, he can grant any wish but no matter what the wording it will eventually bite the wisher, perhaps decades later.

All Satan's actions will work towards elevating the strong and cruel and crushing the weak or kind (not that he sees any difference in these last two).

"Campaign" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means

Oh, I see.

Still smarting from the loss of last week's monster post, I thought I'd get back in with a short observation on a trend in "new school" thinking while has been niggling at me for a while.

It seems that for a lot of newer players a "campaign" is basically a process whereby a group plays through a pre-set list of modules and then calls it a day.

This is like saying that to really enjoy Art you must visit a pre-set list of the world's great museums - it confuses cause and effect. An art lover will probably visit as many of the world's great museums as they can, but they usually do it because they are art lovers already.

Similarly, many old duffers will tell you tales of how much fun they had playing through G1-3, D1-3, and (sometimes) Q1 (more rarely, A1-4). But there's no way in which that list constitutes a campaign in the sense used in the DMG. At most, it's part of a campaign. A small part at that, in my experience.

While our old group did indeed play through these modules (except the A-series which had real problems), they constituted only an incidental part of the campaign. The vast majority of the campaign revolved around the characters' actions in a sandboxed Greyhawk setting where events evolved out of the character's previous actions. Modules were hauled out only when things were quiet.

And "campaign" originally meant a little bit more than the idea that a party's adventures were linked; it meant a setting where more than one party of characters (and players) was active, allowing for one to affect the other. Personally, I only ever managed this with my CSIO campaign and it was a lot of fun seeing the players try to make sense of the other group's trail of destruction (and occasional shrine building).

But the idea that a simple list of maybe 11 modules might constitute a campaign has puzzled me for a while and I only recently, while scanning the bizarre world of rpg.stackexchange, realised what the root of this attitude might be. It seems that a lot of players are approaching the game (or at least the so-called fifth edition of the game) from the perspective of it being like a board game with an end goal and, therefore, a pre-defined win condition. The condition in this case being an arbitrary character level.

Under this model, the point of the game is to find the route to that level which is most efficient, i.e., quickest, and to traverse that route with the least fuss or, indeed, effort.

Realising this suddenly made sense of a lot of comments I had read over the years about the various copies of the game, not only the non-TSR versions either - this dates back to late 2e games I remember people talking about.

Basically, these players have mis-understood the whole concept of the role-playing game, and D&D in particular. They have swapped the side effect (high-level) for the goal (playing fantasy characters having adventures in a fantasy world).

The result is a massive drop in potential fun. Having "wrapped up" one of these severely curtailed "campaigns" many groups, it seems to me, move on to the next game system. Whereas many Old School games continued for years and decades, these shadow campaigns are over and done with sometimes in months, and almost always in a couple of years of not particularly intense play. And although they're presumably fun for the players while they last, they're very much at the "wham-bang, thank you, ma'am" end of the satisfaction range.

Well, this wonderful observation may not be news to anyone else, but I certainly feel like I at least understand the mistake that's being made a little better and while phrases like "we're playing a campaign to 20th level" have always irked me and probably always will, I can see where they're coming from now.

So, in summary: high-level isn't important, the story you tell while getting there is.

History is 3D; Real Life is 2D

History as it happens

Imagine that each day is represented by an old-fashioned photographic slide for a projector. As time passes, these slides go missing and the historian's job is mostly in trying to find these metaphorical slides and reconstruct the 3D story showing the progressive changes. The thing is that after, say, 800 years, the number of missing slides can be very substantial.

Now, look at a person living 500 years ago. That person doesn't view the world by flicking through all these slides and amassing a historical perspective. Their view is constructed as if ALL the previous slides were projected onto a wall at the same time, forming one jumbled 2D image. Almost everything they understand about the world is held in the most recent slides, but there are parts of the slides at the back which show through the layers in front, albeit dimmed.

The person-on-the-spot's view of their cultural/historical context does not suffer from missing slides, because everything that has gone before has some influence on the compound image, but it totally destroys perspective.

There are lots of examples of this in art but I've picked one of my favourites for the top image of this post: Brueghel's Massacre of the Innocents, a depiction of the Bible story about Herod's command that all male babies should be killed because of the Magi's prediction that one of them would become King of the Jews (a position currently filled by Herod). Brueghel depicts the scene exactly in the way of this metaphor: it is a two-dimensional image of an event in which several "understandings" are overlaid to create something that looks strange to us: a snow-covered Flemish town in which soldiers from the 1560's slaughter the inhabitants of a Middle-Eastern village in the year A.D. 1 or so. There is no attempt to depict history as a time-line along which things like dress and technology change, nor to show anything of the differences in location which Brueghel surely would have been aware of.

But the painting is not for the painter, and the intended audience probably did not even really grasp that history existed beyond a fairly simple division of "in my lifetime" and "long ago". We see here a snapshot of how normal people viewed something which was utterly central to their culture: the birth of Christ, and our attempts to reconstruct "true history" without Spanish soldiers or snow or pitched rooves render the image historically ridiculous which in turn hides the fact that this masterpiece is a very precious thing - a view into the historical mindset.

The historian's 3D view smears things out that were never blurred for the people who were there. The fact that Apollo was probably once two deities which became culturally merged is interesting but totally without use when answering "What did followers of Apollo believe in?" Because about all we can be fairly sure of is that they didn't believe that he was two gods.

People can even manipulate these compound views, and Jesus is a good example of this. We know what Christians were told to believe, and almost universally came to believe, after 325's Council of Nicea, but what about in A.D. 225? Well, in 225 plenty of Christians believed that, as a child, Jesus physically abused and tortured the teachers he didn't like at school and was told off by his dad for creating life from the mud around puddles. Historians still know these stories but they have very little impact on the content of Jehovah's Witness leaflets, or any other sect. The Orthodox view stamped out bits that it didn't like; removing them from the projected image that non-historians see.

The dropping of the Atom Bombs on Japan was the final action in a 90-year war for survival which Japan lost, but in that frantic 90 years the Japanese government invented an entire religion (complete with lists of "official" and "obsolete" deities drawn up by the relevant ministry) and a completely new historical context for the nation which the vast majority of Japanese people today take as being truly ancient.

In AD&D we have the price list in the PHB which is great if your campaign is simulating a fairly European 14th century, but there is about as much information about how to modify the list for the Dark Ages or the Roman period as there is in Brueghel's painting, and the same goes double for D&DG.

As DMs we often come to draw up setting based on some real place and/or time and history is one tool we reach for, but it's worth remembering that history is not something that happens to real people, it is just a tool for historians, and real-life culture has no requirement to stick to the truth or even to make sense when dissected from an outside point of view.

What Dave Did Next: Dungeons

Continuing on from the last post's look at how Dave Arneson handled wilderness setup, I'm going to look at his method for dungeon generation.

I'm again working from his First Fantasy Campaign book which is really a collection of notes arranged in what can only really be called "page order" and the Blackmoor Dungeon notes are a lot less extensive than the wilderness notes, at least in the sense of telling you anything about methods used.

Levels 1-6 of the Blackmoor Dungeon are distinguished as being developed for convention games along the lines of official D&D whereas 7 downwards are "original". The first group is also called the "Wandering Monster Areas" and I presume this all means that these levels were filled by use of the guidelines in D&D Vol 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures pages 6-12.

As a side note, these original D&D rules explicitly suggest that numbers of monsters encountered should be scaled to the size and ability of the party, but are non-specific about how. One third of rooms are occupied by monsters, only half of whom have any treasure; one sixth of empty rooms have treasure.

As with the wilderness, Arneson pre-prepares generating wandering monsters before play rather than at the table, and apparently divides the levels into four quadrants each with its own wandering monster encounter. These are noted for the first six levels.

The legitimacy of these first six levels as examples of Arneson's method is questionable given his note about preparing them for convention play; on the other hand, the "official D&D" method is co-credited to him.

In any case, from levels 7 down, Arneson puts forward a very rough sketch of his "magic protection points" system. "Magic" here appears to be unrelated to any part of the system; perhaps it never did, did once, or maybe it just described how good Dave thought the system was.

The method is basically to determine the level of the monster in a room (⅚ of rooms are empty on levels 1 to 2, ⅔ on levels 3 to 5, and 50% from there down—note that we've suddenly stopped talking about levels 7 to 10 only). The mapping of the monster level to the dungeon level is a little unclear—Arneson says that Lv 1 monsters appear on dungeon levels 1 and 2; Lv 3 monsters on level 3 and 4 "etc." What the hell happened to level 2 monsters? It's hard to guess, but there was a 1 in 6 chance of a "stronger" monster being allowed and maybe perhaps (I doubt it) this represented a boost to the next even level? There was also an unspecified chance of lower level monsters, which may explain the 10 goblins on the 9th level who one imagines are living on their nerves .

In theory, the DM then rolled 1d10 and multiplied it by a factor (1st level of dungeon: 5; 2nd and 3rd: 15; 4th 25; 5th 35; 6th 40; 7th(onwards?) 50) and used this final value to "buy" monsters of the given level from the table using a price list which is not given but we're told it was based on that in Chainmail where a balrog costs 75 points and an orc 2. So, on level 7 a die roll of 6 can buy 150 orcs or 4 balrogs (or 3 wizards @ 100pts each).

There is an ambiguity in the description in that it's not actually clear if the intent was to pick the monster type or roll for them too on some table (or maybe equal chances for each possible type).

Beyond this protection points system, Arneson says that various special treasures and "home bases" for monsters were drawn up and then placed within the dungeon levels at random, and within the specific level they were placed by hand based on what was already on the level, so suggesting that this was a final step.

It has to be said that the resulting deep dungeons are pretty crazy with 12 rocs in a room too small for even a single one. Even here, though, a DM can fly with the dice and maybe a bit of Time Lord technology—"You force open the door and nearly fall into the 250' drop on the other side. You stand blinking in the light of an alien sun until the hunting cry of a flock of rocs breaks the spell. Roll for surprise."

So the basic idea is intriguing from a point of view of "RRTEI" (see previous post) and I've looked at updating it for AD&D and the greatly expanded list of monsters.

I calculated challenge ratings for each monster (basically, a hit-dice equivalent that uses the count of special and extraordinary abilities—orcs are worth 1; gnolls 1¾; solars 89) and tried this procedure:

1. Roll for occupied or not (13+ on d20)
2. Roll for level of monster as per DMG
3. Roll for monster from that level using MM weightings, not DMG tables
4. Roll 2d6xDungeon Lv
5. Take that many monster CR points for the room
6. If more than 25% of points left, roll an additional monster of any level.

Each dungeon level can be a lair (and pretty well every dungeon should have at least one lair within it), so each monster that's generated above has a % lair rolled for it and the first one that turns up positive gets its full MM "number appearing" value, spread, if necessary, throughout the level (and maybe the next level if there's a lot of them).

Monsters who turn up in-lair naturally get their treasure type (not necessarily all in a big heap, of course) and as a final top-up, the dungeon as a whole gets a roll on the Map table on DMG p120. If the result is "false map" then there is no top-up treasure; otherwise the indicated hoard is generated and distributed around the inhabitants of the dungeon as seems reasonable, with some special items hidden within secret or trapped areas.

So far the method works okay but I've not found a way to drop classed humans into it. NPCs with character classes have quite low CRs on paper because what really makes a high level character a dangerous opponent is their magic, by and large.

Here's a quick set of ten example monster encounters generated at random this way, from dungeon level one down to ten:

Only with 6 more heads, and generally better

1. (d20: 17) level 2 monster, (random selection of 2nd level monsters) 3HD piercer (CR 4), (2d6: 9) # appearing: 2.
2. (d20: 6) Level 1 monster, wild dogs (CR 1¼), (2d6x2: 14) # appearing 11
3. (d20: 10) Level 1 monster, shriekers (CR 3), (2d6x3: 21) # appearing 7 (this is nearly the maximum given in MM, which I would normally use as a limit regardless of dice unless I had an idea how to use them interestingly).
4. (d20: 7) Level 2 monster, orc chieftan, (d100 for % in lair: 27) so there's an orc lair on level 4 with (3d10x10) 150 warrior orcs, plus females and young. This lot is probably spread over this level and the level above, so a d6 roll says that 60% (90) are away from the immediate lair area, probably on patrols here and the levels above or below, so that'll be reflected on wandering monster tables. A quick roll of their treasure shows nothing more than some gems. A check for ogres in the lair shows none.
5. (d20: 7) Level 3 monster, dire wolves (CR 3¾), not in lair, (2d6x5: 35) # appearing 9. It's a bit odd these being down here on their own, so I'd either add some narrow way out to the surface or perhaps a party of orcs from the level above on some sort of patrol or hunt for something or someone.
6. (d20: 14) Level 5 monster, 6HD Anhkeg (CR 7¾), (2d6x6: 30) # appearing 3.
7. (d20: 5) Level 3 monster, Mongrelmen armed with darts (CR 5½), not in lair, (2d6x7: 28) #appearing 5
8. (d20: 19) Level 9 monster, 11 headed Lernaen Pyrohydra (CR 22¾), not in lair. (2d6x8: 40) These are listed as solitary creatures so I would only ever place one (and that's all we have points for). With the 17¼ points left I roll for a level 8 monster and get a ghost (CR 17) which is in lair with a reasonable treasure (~32,000gp of jewels, a few potions and a scroll of spells). So what I'm getting from all that is a tomb area with a depiction of a fighter slaying a hydra and his/her body seemingly preserved in its finery on a dias or maybe altar. If the party enter then the hydra comes to life and the ghost attempts to magic jar (Int+Wis: 23) into a fighter, or the best combat option at any rate and fight the ancient fight over again. If it succeeds with the MJ spell, it will remain in the body for as long as possible. If it can not possess anyone, it will await the result of the fight and if they win, command them to leave. If they show any sign of disobeying then it will emerge and engage them to the fullest extent of its powers and attempt to kill the whole party. If they die, it will add their gold, gems, jewels, and non-military magic to the treasure heaped around the walls of the room. The hydra can only be killed once, but if a party escapes it will not pursue and each turn without combat gives a 10% chance that it will fade away again. Next time, it will be "reset" to 11 HD/heads.
9. (d20: 14) Level 7 monster, 8HD slime creature (CR 12),  (2d6x9: 36). # appearing 3.
10. (d20: 19) Level 9 monster, Movanic Deva (CR 33), (2d6x10: 60). # appearing 1. with 27 points left, I re-roll on level 8 again and get a pair of 8HD giant tropical dragonflies. So: an impassive and taciturn Lawful Good deva bars entry to a huge cavern where two polymorphed lovers pass their ten centuries of punishment for crimes of passion, endlessly being born and reborn in a the life cycle of the dragonflies in the Sun's garden where they met. Only force or a writ from Heaven or the Sun herself will secure passage. A fair chunk of the dungeon's specific treasure should probably lie within the magically lit gardens here.

Of course, each of the rooms above are just individual examples on one level; there would be many rooms on a level and the relationships between their inhabitants much closer and more dynamic than those between different levels, on average. There is scope for rivalry between inhabitants at both ends of a stairway, of course, and there's always scope for a Yojimbo-style divide-and-conquer game for a clever party.

You may have inferred one important thing about this method: do the map last. This allows you to tailor the levels to the monsters and the relationships and back-stories that you create while explaining them, as well as providing pyrohydras with enough room to fight. You can decide on the number of levels and the number of rooms, and of course "seed" it with particular locations you have ideas for, but by and large it's easier with this sort of approach to do the map afterwards. That allows you to place connections and passages that make sense in relation to the inhabitants, as well as tricks and traps which actually protect specific areas rather than just being completely random obstacles.

It also doesn't work well if you want a strong theme to a dungeon, say all giants, for a example, and it may be hard to maintain a strong plot thread, although it can be done.

If you're using my monster xp spreadsheet then you can add a CR column the same as the one I'm currently experimenting with by using the formula CR=round((HTK+SA*4+EA*8)/4.5/.25)*.25 (basically, count each special ability as a hit die, each extraordinary ability as two and round to the nearest ¼; use average hit points as the base so that daemons etc. get the high value they deserve).

Je Suis Charlie

Vive la France