D&DG Worshippers 5: Chinese

Shang-Ti, crusher of tortoises

Chinese Worshippers

So we arrive at a mythos I knew nothing about when I got GD&H, but thanks to that and the later D&DG I have developed... well, no real knowledge of the gods involved since then.

I probably picked up more from watching Monkey - that the Eastern pantheon (as it was known in GD&H) is basically a bureaucracy mirroring that of the Imperial Chinese court in the days before the Mongols arrived to teach the emperor a few unpleasant lessons. I have at least read the Penguin Classics translation of The Journey West (which is truly terrible) and Cowboy Bebop sent me off on a bit of a dig into Feng-Shui (nuts but fun) and that's about the extent of it.

The introduction to the mythos lists a few magical items, including a reference to the I-Ching as a tool for controlling matter and motion, and what I think is supposed to be Monkey's staff (all 7t 16cwt 88lbs of it). It also introduces the idea that the head of a church might be simply "gifted" with the powers of a high priest, presumably in the case that the emperor is more of a military man than a holy one.

The method I'm using here to generate the tables based on the deity's own class abilities throws up something new as well: gods without either clerical or druidical worshippers. In all cases except one - Huan-Ti, god of war - the gods in question are in fact demi-gods and we can perhaps handwave this, especially if we assume "demigod" to have the literal Greek sense of having one mortal parent.

In the case of Huan-Ti, I guess we just have to assume that the god of war is not interested in spell-casting and simply does not take on clerics in the normal sense. It seems that the deity is based on the mythological emperor of the same name who supposedly became an immortal after death. If so, it is strange that he is said to wear red +3 platemail as Huan-Ti is the "Yellow Emperor" and strongly associated with the colour (according to Google).

One very notable omission is Monkey himself - Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, Great Sage Equal to All Heaven.

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Paladin	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Shang-ti	1-9				1-100	1-13	1-17				1-30
Chang Kung Ming				1-17					1-18	1-11
Chih-Chiang Fyu-Ya			1-21							12-28	31-50
Chih Sung-Tzu	10-22		22-36			14-26
Chung Kuel	23-36	1-21		18-36		27-36	18-30		19-45	29-44	51-70
Fei Lien				37-46				1-17		45-52
Feng Po				47-56				18-34		53-61
Huan-Ti				57-75					46-73	62-80
Kuan Yin	37-53	22-42				37-49					71-100
Lei Kung		43-58	37-52			50-58	31-42
Lu Yueh	54-66		53-69			59-70	43-59	35-66
No Cha		59-73	70-83				60-73	67-100
Shan Hai Ching	67-73		84-100			71-77	74-82
Tou Mu	74-86			76-90		78-81	83-87
Wen Chun				91-100		82-90	88-100
Yen-Wang-Yeh	87-100	74-100				91-100			74-100	81-100

D&DG Worshippers 4: Central Americans

Xochipilli (Lombard Museum)

Central American Worshippers

For the first time we come to a pantheon in D&DG in which every PHB class is represented amongst the gods. The idea of a paladin of Quetzalcoatl in authentic Aztec dress and arms certainly appeals, but it does bring up yet another problem with the book's coverage of "pagan" religion - aspects, or the lack thereof.

Quetzalcoatl is listed as lawful neutral, so why would any paladin hold him in high regard, let alone Camaxtli, the neutral god of fire. And as for Chalchiuhtkicue - she's chaotic, for Set's sake!

Many polytheistic deities represent or control an aspect of the world which has the potential for a wide range of effects on the human world. Loki and fire is the classic example, but Chalchiuhtkicue's element of water is another. Even more abstract ideas can have variable levels of desirability depending on how they are applied: law, passion, invention, love etc. can all be positive or negative depending on the degree or the type. Because of this, deities often has aspects which represented these facets of their sphere of control and different forms for each aspect.

In the UK I think we generally associate this with the Hindu pantheon, if we associate it with anything, but it manifests all over the place. If you go to Nashville, Tennessee and look at the statue of Athena you will see a giant snake beside her on the dais. That snake is none other than Athena's father, the great god Zeus from whom we get the words "Deus" and "Deity" itself, in his chthonic (underworld) form*.

*Edit: I may be misremembering this (see comments) but Zeus Ktesios was a widely worshipped form of Zeus as a snake protecting a family or household, which is what I thought he was representing on the Parthenon.

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Paladin	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Quetzalcoatl	1-13	1-17			1-29	1-10	1-17	1-63			1-29
Camaxtli	14-23				30-46	11-19
Camazotz	24-30		1-20			20-30	18-34		1-17
Chalchiuhtkicue	31-40				47-64	31-40					30-51
Huhueteotl	41-48	18-30	21-40			41-47	35-47		18-33	1-31
Huitzilopochtli	49-54	31-47		1-57		48-52	48-53		34-50	32-63
Itzamna	55-65				65-83	53-59
Mictlantecuhtli	66-72	48-66		58-100		60-68	54-69		51-67
Tezcatlipoca	73-77		41-80			69-76			68-83		52-60
Tlaloc	78-87		81-100			77-86
Tlazolteotl	88-94	67-84				87-94	70-90		84-100		61-82
Xochipilli	95-100	85-100			84-100	95-100	91-100	64-100		64-100	83-100

So, if we say that a paladin follows or venerates a deity who is not lawful good we need to ask - is there an aspect of this god which fits. In the case of Quetzalcoatl it's a pretty small step from a god of "law giving" to an aspect which uses the law to help the weak. Water, likewise, can be harnessed for such socially positive things as irrigation, turning water-wheels, or even fishing. Xochipilli is a bit more of a challenge as the god of gambling (in D&DG; in real life that was his brother Macuilxóchitl, apparently).

Well, gambling is generally part of a game and games have rules (even "I bet that snail crosses the path faster than that snail" generally includes rules like "you can't pick your snail up and just throw it across the path"), so that's lawful. The Good part is a bit trickier but perhaps we can imagine a paladin of a god which encourages us to enjoy life and be more flexible in the face of changing fortunes. An up-beat paladin would be quite a change, wouldn't?

Anyhow, aspects were a common part of polytheistic religions (and, if you scrape the surface, you can find traces in most monotheistic ones), and are glossed over in D&DG. RuneQuest generally didn't do a great job here, although some of Stafford's writing did include them. But mostly they are an uncharacteristic weakness in RQ's religiousity. Petal Throne, especially with Bob Alberti's wonderful Mitlanyal guide to the gods of Tekumel, did do it a bit better.

D&DG Worshippers 3: Celts

Celtic Worshippers

This week we have the Celtic pantheon from D&DG and, like the Babylonian one, there is a distinct lack of thieves in the results (and paladins, but you  have to get used to that). There are a couple of assassins and of course lots of options for bards, both of which could subsume thievery functions.

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Arawn	1-16	1-9		1-30	1-15					1-9
Brigit		10-18	1-8		16-42					10-19
Dagda	17-27	19-27	9-20		43-54	1-24				20-31
Diancecht	28-47	28-36	21-30		55-63					32-37
Dunatis	48-58		31-42							38-48
Goibhnie		37-45	43-54							49-57
Lugh		46-65	55-67							58-68
Manannan Mac Lir	59-78		68-78
Math		66-68	79-81		64-86	25-40
Morrigan		69-75		31-65				1-56		69-74
Nuada		76-81		66-100				57-100		75-80
Ogham	79-89	82-91	82-91		87-100	41-69				81-91
Silvanus	90-100	92-100	92-100			70-100				92-100

However, the solution I used with the Babylonians of going with a general alignment table doesn't work as most of the deities are neutral and for "worshippers' alignment" they generally have something of the style "all beings interested in <deity's sphere of control>". So Brigit is worshipped by "Beings worshipping fire and poetry", for example. Once could almost say that the Celtic deities are rather catholic in their acceptance :)

Anyway, there's no easy conversion to alignment for quickly generating NPCs.

As an alternative, I thought I'd look at the probabilities from Zac's original method and here is what we get:

Encounter	Cleric
Dagda	1-40
Arawn	41-45
Brigit	46-50
Diancecht	51-55
Dunatis	56-60
Goibhnie	61-65
Lugh	66-71
Manannan Mac Lir	72-77
Math	78
Morrigan	79-84
Nuada	85-90
Ogham	91-95
Silvanus	96-100

Just liked the image, TBH

Although I was initially enthusiastic about the system Zac presented - who would turn down the chance to get something useful from Deities and Demigods, after all? - his approach did not in fact give much nuance. The head of the pantheon gets a base 40% of results and all the rest are weighted according to their hit points. Hit points are taken as a proxy for the amount of worship the deity enjoys which, ignoring the issue of it being a dubious theological concept, seems reasonable for game purposes.

The problem is that most pantheons don't have that much of a range, with 2:1 between top and bottom being rare.

Part of the problem is that D&DG doesn't contain that much information on each pantheon. The Greek pantheon has 19 deities listed out of hundreds - the Norse one is a similarly small selection. Another part is that the cap of 400hp isn't that much higher than the top levels for PCs and dipping much below 200hp makes a deity vulnerable to a high-level party which could possibly muster more hp between them. So the design is constrained and consequently there's not really room for obscure deities with small cults.

But, still, the idea of getting some value out of D&DG is very appealing. It is, after all, nearly a dead loss. The research is patchy, for a start, and it has basically no grasp or representation of religion at all. Compared to Cults of Prax for RuneQuest it's something of a joke in roleplaying terms.

Even today, most people who play D&D have relatively little grasp of polytheism (apologies to Hindu and Japanese readers) and D&DG doesn't really illuminate the subject much. It certainly doesn't get into the differences between types of polytheism.

"The DM must also make sure that the cleric is aware of his or her place in the community and the church hierarchy." (D&DG p9).

The church what, now?

Greek worship seems to have had no such thing. Each city seems to have had a particular favourite deity, and almost everyone agreed that Zeus was usually in charge of everyone, but there was no "church" in which to have a place. Individual clerics would "work" - usually part-time, often voluntarily - at a temple or shrine and the more important the temple the more important the post was, politically. But the priests worshipping the same deity in a temple three miles up the road had no need to obey or even much care about any statements made by the high priest of a city even as regards the proper worship of the god in question. And since every city was fiercely independent, there was even less power for the would-be church leader once s/he got to the neighbouring city limits.

The Sumerian experience seems to have been very similar, and even in Egypt there was real power vested in the priests near to the throne, but that power was not especially doctrinal in form and had no reach up- or down-stream unless the current pharaoh put his or (occasionally) her weight behind it.

With the Celts, and many others, the picture is very similar but with "tribe" swapped in for "city". Indeed, this tribal favouritism for one god is probably the seed from which city cults grew.

Old Time Religion

With no church to issue edicts, personal worship was very much an individual's choice. Relatively little writing has survived which expresses the feelings of normal people, or even members of the elite classes. But what does survive is often reminiscent, I find, of the sort of stuff one might find on a Reddit forum devoted to a boy-band. Passionate, but often rather arbitrary. Outside of special occasions like childbirth or illness, people generally worshipped the deities that they just liked.

Things do often change, however, as states become more intrusive (read: more militaristic) and we start to see State Religions.

To my eye, D&DG was written with Empire of the Petal Throne in mind. The strict hierarchies, nation-wide temples, and relatively small numbers of adventuring clerics who are semi-detached from the main clerical body fits with EPT's half-way house between the Christian Churches which clearly underpinned the original game, and the reality of most polytheistic "religions". Individuals, especially clerics, are expected to follow a specific deity through most of their lives - in EPT this is generally a Clan thing, or sometimes an occupational requirement.

What's odd about the D&D version of this is that it throws out the main functions of the Church: the determination of what is appropriate behaviour for the deity and punishments for transgressing the rules (unwritten or otherwise). In the Church's place the deity itself makes these calls, and tells the clerics either via dreams, messengers, or literally to their face.

In AD&D there are no doctrinal disagreements - a cleric who is transgressive has no spells and if they're high enough level to cast 6th or 7th level spells they will be told by GOD that they are wrong!

So we have this weird mix of an assumed Church within the cleric must "be aware of their place", and at the same time no temporal authority for any officials in that Church especially if they are not spellcasters.

D&DG tells us that 'Cleric "adventurers"...rarely have any important place in their religion's hierarchy'. This only makes sense if all the important clerics are spellcasters, otherwise we get scenarios like this:

Pope (0-level political genius): It is wrong to eat fish on the first Tuesday of the month.

Fred Bangashagga (cleric, 5th level): Actually, an angel told me that's not true. It came up when I was asking for create food and water.

Pope: Arse.

Now, it's possible to invent reasons for deities to subvert some of these observations, but the deity in question would need to be really into secrets and concealment (and of course there are always mystery cults in any pantheon) but even that is a level of sophistication which one will not find in D&DG.

So, really, all D&DG is, is a list of gods divided into cultures and with a bunch of very variable quality notes attached. The reference chart is at once very handy and at the same time complete baloney in terms of accurate historical observations.

But. It is lovely. 

It has that great Erol Ottis cover, lots of good illustrations inside, and lots of numbers which gamers usually like to see. I'm talking nostalgia here: the desire to see something the way you saw it when you were younger. And when I was younger I thought D&DG would be really great and really useful.

Which brings us back to the current series of posts as an attempt to at least get a bunch of tables that answer some useful question about the game world. Specifically, the question "this bloke the players have just walked up to in the street - what deity does he worship?"

It's not much but it's about the most a 57 year-old can get out of a book that his 15 year-old-self really loved.

D&DG Worshippers 2: Babylonians

Babylonian Worshippers

So, following on from the previous post, here's the table for Babylonian worshippers:

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Anu	1-25		1-16
Anshar	26-50		17-31
Druaga			32-44		1-11			1-100
Girru			45-58		12-42
Istar	51-69			1-100	43-61
Marduk			59-75		62-73					1-100
Nergal	70-100		76-85		74-89
Ramman			86-100		90-100	1-100

This brings a problem with the system to the fore: there are no Babylonian deities listed with thieving skills (other than Druaga who presumably inherits the thieving abilities based on his assassin level).

In fact, this problem was there last week because none of the listed American deities have levels in the Paladin class and, in fact, neither do the Babylonian ones. That's not such a big deal - most campaigns can trundle along without paladin NPCs - but no thieves seems an unlikely social setup.

Looking at this I tried doing the table based on alignment, with the weights being the deity's hit points - a direct link back to Zak's original idea, albeit with a different methology. Here's the result:

Encounter	LG	NG	CG	LN	N	CN	LE	NE	CE
Anu	1-43	1-32	1-62	1-30	1-41	1-41	1-34	1-25	1-32
Anshar								26-44	33-56
Druaga							35-53
Girru	44-73	33-54
Istar	74-100	55-74	63-100	31-49	42-67	42-67	54-75	45-60	57-76
Marduk				50-75
Nergal							76-100	61-79	77-100
Ramman		75-100		76-100	68-100	68-100		80-100

It's okay and is another way to slice the data but in this case I'm using the "worshippers' alignment" entry for each deity and, looking ahead at the Celts, that might pose a problem too. Looking slightly further ahead to the Cthulhu Mythos, it isn't going to make for a particularly interesting  range of options (spoiler: Chaotic Evil is what I'm talking about).

But for now it's okay.

D&DG Worshippers 1: North Americans

American Worshippers

Wider blog for better tables!

I decided to try to get some use out of D&DG and following an idea from Zak I used the relative levels in each class listed for the deities to come up with tables showing which one an NPC of a given class followed as their favourite. Zak originally suggested running down each deity until you hit a success but I felt a single table would be more useful.

Here's the first one for the American Pantheon as listed in D&DG.

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Raven	1-12	1-17		1-11	1-11	1-16	1-35
Cyote	13-27	18-37	1-60		12-21	17-33	36-80
Hastseltsi	28-37			12-29	22-29	34-45		1-55
Hastsezini	38-49	38-54		30-43	30-50
Heng	50-59			44-54	51-59	46-56
Hotoru			61-100		60-66	57-66
Shakak				55-68	67-76
Snake-Man	60-69	55-68			77-87	67-81	81-100		1-38	1-100
Tobadzistsini	70-80	69-82		69-89	88-94	82-91		56-100	39-100
Yanauluha	81-100	83-100		90-100	95-100	92-100

More soon.

Fred T. Jane and The Deep Roots of D&D

There comes a point in any genealogical backtrace when you realise that everyone in the world is now an ancestor of whoever you are studying. Generally, the researcher, politician, or random nutjob on YouTube then slides the window forward a few generations so that they can continue to make arbitrary claims like being of African descent (like everyone else), from native-born English stock (except for all those Anglo-Saxon immigrants that were born in Denmark and Germany), or that their opponent is from genetic background that prevents them from being president of the United States of America (unlike, for example, all those people who actually lived there before the speaker’s closer ancestors arrived on boats to steal it).

So it is with games. By the time we get back to the 1800’s, it’s almost tautological that any given game can be found to have some influence on D&D, perhaps because it used dice, perhaps because it required players to speak, and possibly because it had a referee. And the latter is the link I’m looking at here, combined with the implied corollary that the rules are known to be, perhaps intentionally, incomplete.

Fred Thomas Jane was a geek (or nerd, if you prefer). He was just a typical example of the type: into science-fiction, fascinated by modern technology, and with a mathematical mind that appreciated applied physics and engineering, who read a lot. He also was a talented artist and a game designer.

Here’s one of his more expressionistic, even slightly futurist, images of the London Underground in 1893.

And another of an imagined Moonbase (in the year 2000) from 1894.

He also wrote a few science-fiction novels, including an alien abduction yarn where the spaceship is disguised as a “summer house” - could this have been a gazebo?! - and the excellently-titled The Incubated Girl.

He even illustrated some Sherlock Holmes stories.

But, of course, Jane’s claim to fame was built on his fascination with warships, in particular battleships and then dreadnoughts. Like many of us, he found himself pondering how to simulate the operation of these floating fortresses for the same reason that so many games continue to be designed on any number of real-world topics: to see which ships were best, all else being equal.

He first released his classic work Fighting Ships to the public in 1898 when he was 33 years old, and were an immediate hit in an imperial age where battleships were the pinups favoured by boys and young men. The ships’ vital statistics were included in a new and compact form, rating armour and arms with a letter code.

To modern eyes Jane picked the wrong method for these and in a foreshadowing of Arneson’s choice of Armour Class decades later, set the best armour as class “A” instead of that being the worst armour and E the best. As the imperial arms race continued, Jane was forced to add AA, then AAA, and so on until resorting to notation of the form A5 as shorthand for AAAAA and even higher. Clearly, ascending armour classes would have suited his purpose better.

At this distance in history it’s been hard to precisely order events but it seems that the rules needed to turn Fighting Ships into a game - the simply-titled “The Jane Naval War Game” - were released either at the same time or immediately afterwards and these sparked interest in Official Circles™.

These were quite wide circles - the rules were apparently playtested, or at least carefully-enough read for corrections to be suggested by Grand Duke Alexander Mihailovitch Of Russia, Prince (later Lord) Louis Mountbatten (the one murdered by the IRA), Captain H. J. May of the Royal Navy, and Lieutenant R. Kawashima of the Imperial Japanese Navy. There was some input from Australia too.

The rules went through a familiar pattern of a simple initial edition, a series of releases with more complexity, and then a “reset” in 1905 with an edition which threw much of this extra complexity back overboard and put the emphasis on the game referee to decide using their presumed knowledge of real-life naval combat; by now the game was solidly established as a teaching/training tool for the navies of the world.

I’m not suggesting that The Naval Wargame was a direct ancestor of D&D. When Jane died in 1916 at the age of just 50 and the game almost immediately went out of print, never to return. With the first world war in almost full swing (America would not join for another year and a half), the ability for tourists to wander around the naval dockyards of the world, even onto the docked warships, became a quaint notion never to be seriously entertained again. With the characteristics of the ships now much more secret than before it was hard to update the rules accurately, not to mention the rate at which ships were being deployed and, in some cases, sunk.

So the chances that Gygax had even heard of it in 1973 are slim. Arneson, with his life-long interest in sea-battles probably had heard of it but I doubt that he had seen a copy; I think the nearest publicly available copy was in Michigan, and no complete set (with all the markers, ship “character sheets”, and strikers used for the combat system intact) survives today.

Take 3000d6 damage

But the game’s heavy reliance on a referee is another example of the type of game that was common for many decades, and everyone involved with CHAINMAIL and hence D&D would have taken the idea of loosely-defined rules which are interpreted by a trusted game-master not just in their stride but as the normal format of a game which was simulating some reality.

Hex and counter games which did away with the referee were certainly around but they paid for that freedom with deeply detailed rules. CHAINMAIL was by no means unusual in being what appears, to an Advance Squad Leader player, to be a pamphlet which might be advertising a game rather than the thing itself. Such games had no influence of any note on D&D and, like Jane’s game, this would lead to problems when a wider audience held the rules in their hands, an increase in complexity followed by something of an Old School Reformation.

Jane was, to a large degree, a typical gamer who one could encounter at a convention today. Interested in science-fiction, even writing some of his own, and wanting to try recreating old battle or imagine “what-if’s” and “maybe one day” scenarios with a set of rules he’s put together under one arm and a source-book of stats he’s illustrated himself under the other. Rather like a certain Mister Arneson, in fact.

Jane’s ships floated on the primordial soup from whence D&D emerged.

A Bit More Traveller

The Old School of Marc Miller

As a minor follow-up to the previous post, I’ve been meaning to post this definition of what is generally thought of as “Old School play” from Marc Miller. You can read the full text of the original post on James the Geek’s blog. That is a recounting of a chat James had with the man in 2018, following a game Miller ran for James and some others, but the following sections were particularly interesting:

While playing Traveller, Marc role-plays. Very little rules. Traveller is truly a rules-light game system once you start playing. For our scenario, we generated characters by only rolling up stats. No skills. Just stats and pick your service. All rolls were made against those stats, but you couldn’t roll against the same stat again, until you had used them all. Oh, and you had to support your decision on which stat to use. After that, it was all role playing. Creating a communal story. He made it up as he went along, allowed us to build the story, and acted as “referee” just as intended. After we were through, he said “There. Now you know how I play Traveller.”

The following very much reminded me of how random generation of monsters and treasures work for me:

“Think of a world. Now think of another one. And another. After a while you run out of imagination or things get a little boring.” That’s where the world generation system steps in and helps you by creating worlds that you now have to creatively explain. Why would millions of people choose to live on a desert world with a tainted atmosphere, for example? The more I learned about his play style, and his original ideas for the game, the more it became apparent that the systems, while there to aid us, could be completely ignored (and should be) in order to simply play the game

Miller was in, if not on the ground floor then at least on the mezzanine level in the lobby and had a background in wargaming so it’s no coincidence that he shares many of the same perceptions as Gary, Dave, and various early stars of the D&D world.

Next time, I’m going to look back a bit further at another gaming referee who started a global phenomenon which is still with us: Fred T. Jane, of “Jane’s Defence Weekly” fame.