The Duty of Good

This excerpt from the Demon Slayer movie “Mugen Train” is a discussion between a demon-slayer in training and his mother. Mostly it is the mother talking except for the part in italics. Her explanation of her son’s duty is a neat encapsulation of what Good in AD&D is about:

Do you know why it is you were born with greater strength than so many others?

Uh… no, ma’am, I don’t.

It is so that you can protect the weak.

Those who are born blessed with more bountiful gifts than others are obligated to use those gifts for the sake of the world, for all of our fellow brothers and sisters.

You must never use that God-given strength to bring harm to mankind or for your own selfish desires.

It is the duty of those born strong to help those who may be less fortunate, a responsibility you must carry onward with due purpose.

Be sure you never forget that.

Good and Evil in AD&D is framed in the context of the strong and the weak. This can be missed but references to strength and weakness appear in the summaries for Chaotic Evil, Neutral Evil, and Lawful Evil. The Good alignments are not described in these terms but more by what the outcomes should be - “bringing life, happiness, and prosperity to all deserving creature” and similar. But the implications inherent in being the opposite of Evil are clear enough.

We could perhaps imagine a demon mother advising her child:

Do you know why it is you were born with greater strength than so many others?

Uh… no, ma’am, I don’t.

It is so that you can prevent the weak and undeserving from usurping what is rightfully yours.

Those who are born with fewer gifts than others are obligated to use what little they have for the sake of their betters, for the strong.

You must never believe that there is anything wrong with using your God-given strength to bring "harm" to weaklings or for your own desires.

It is the duty of those born strong to keep those who may be less fortunate in their places, a responsibility you must carry onward with due purpose.

Be sure you never forget that.

I think when looked at in these terms, the question of whether Lawful Good is “more Good” than Chaotic Good is shown to be the non-sequeter that it is. The paladin and the CG thief are clear on what Good is trying to do. They differ, essentially, on political grounds about how to achieve that goal.

Monster: The Firebird 鳳凰

Frequency: Unique/V. Rare/special
No appearing: 1
Armour Class: 3 (AT 3)
Move: 24"/36" (Class C)
HD: 12
% In Lair: 90%
Treasure Type: Qx10, S, T, X
# Attacks: 3
Damage/attack: 1d8, 1d8, 2d8 (claw/claw/beak)
Special attacks: Fireball
Special defenses: Fire Resistance+non-magical weapon damage
Magic Resistance: 30%
Intelligence: Genius
Alignment: LN
Size: L
Psionic Ability: 240, C, D, I, J
Level/xp: X / 12850 +16/hp

The firebird comes from heaven on the ascension of a new eastern emperor, to inspect the state of mortal affairs, returning to report to the Celestial Emperor. Thus it will only be encountered in eastern nations within five years of a new emperor coming to the throne  (roll 1d6 when encountered to see which year of its stay it is in, then a d12 for the month. On an initial roll of 6 roll 1d8 for the number of days remaining in its current visit).

It makes its nest deep in a forest, mountain range or desert where it carries out interviews with spirits and fantastical creatures such as foo-dogs and lions, dragons, ogre magi, sylphs, and so forth to gather information for its report. There is a 10% chance that any encounter in lair will coincide with an audience of some such creatures (roll an additional encounter appropriate to the location ignoring inappropriate results). If encountered with a non-chaotic oriental dragon there is a 30% chance that the Firebird is in a relationship with the dragon.

If attacked, the Firebird can produce a 12 dice fireball-like effect centred on itself instead of attacking with its claws. It may do this once per turn. Additionally, it may perform any of the following once per round (as if at the 12th level of ability) instead of beak attacks: affect normal fires, cause blindness, continual light, dancing lights, detect evil/good, detect magic, fire charm, fire shield, fools gold, legend lore, mirror image, protection from evil/good 10' radius, and pyrotechnics.

And the following effects once per day in lieu of any physical attacks in the current round: ESP, command, detect lie, hallucinatory terrain, plane shift, polymorph self, protection from normal missiles, resist cold, teleport no error, wall of fire, water breathing.

The Firebird has the major science of Energy Control.

Elemental attacks against the Firebird are modified as per the entry for dragons in MM, but fire-based attacks do no damage and in fact heal one point of damage per die (or 5pts for fixed-damage attacks).

In combat (or any high passion) the Firebird's body glows with heat and although its metallic-seeming body can be struck with non-magical weapons, any such must save versus magical fire (use the worst score if there is a choice) for each successful to-hit roll or be destroyed. Successful open hand attacks cause one point of heat damage to the attacker.

The Firebird is a heavenly creature and as such needs no material sustenance and can understand and telepathically speak any language.

The Firebird's treasure will consist of gems and jewels it brings with it to pay for information which it deems useful, and magic items given to it in tribute by rulers hoping for a good report (i.e., items given to the Firebird effectively leave the campaign when it returns home, so this can be a good way to get rid of artefacts). If the Firebird polymorphs into an appropriate form, it will certainly use these items in defense. It will trade magical items on occasion, but will only give an item in exchange for one with at least 10% higher gp value, and even then it will haggle from a starting point of 100% higher. Easily offended by mortals, it will break off discussions at the slightest provocation. Initial reaction rolls for the Firebird are at -10% as it is a grumpy old bird, but it will never instantly attack any creature unless it is obviously a thief or of a race which is normally chaotic.

Description: because the Firebird can polymorph, reports of its appearance, and even sex, are jumbled but it seems that its natural form is that of a huge red, black, copper, gold, and yellow peacock some 20' long.

The Firebird is generally officious and uninterested in mortal concerns except where they impact the continuation or support of the harmonious rulership of the rightful claimant to a throne. In such cases, it will side with the claimant and aid them unless they are aligned with chaos, in which case it will oppose them; Good and Evil do not interest it. In other matters, it will stick strictly to the business of information gathering and in no case will it remain on the PMP for a day over five years.

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.

Turning Japanese

Nagora is a samurai of great honour

Blog's quiet at the moment as I'm spending a lot of time learning Japanese using Heisig's system and the Obenkyo application on my phone, which is working very well. However, if anyone else is interested in trying this be warned that Obenkyo is based on the 5th edition of Heisig's Remebering the Kanji and the cross-referencing will not work with either the new 6th edition or the older ones.

With 70 minutes to spend on the Tube each day, I've been able to get up to 508 Kanji memorized pretty quickly, which only leaves another 1600 to go!

I have also learned the Hiragana (using Heisig's method as well), but of course that gets you nothing other than the ability to read out some Japanese without any comprehension. Learning 500 Kanji means I've learnt 500 actual words/concepts which I can use to read and comprehend text. This is a lot more satisfying, especially now I work beside SOAS and have access to huge amounts of Japanese books, magazines, and newspapers. As fragments become lines and lines become paragraphs of understandable text it is a great boost to morale and I'd heartily recommend learning Kanji before tackling phonetic Japanese, especially as there are many Japanese books which are almost totally written in Kanji. If you can get a Japanese text about something or somewhere you know about it's useful too; I'm using a Japanese guidebook to London.

The ultimate goal is to be able to visit Japan and be able to get about without help - reading signs, maps and so forth - so verbal communication to others is definitely a secondary requirement for me and I'm happy to leave it until I can read and write useful amounts. The downside is that, as Heisig says, knowing 50% of the 2000 common Kanji isn't really enough - they're genuinely "common" and normal text has a wide variety of them, just as written English casually draws on thousands of words without seeming flowery or overblown. So Heisig presents the Kanji in an order that suits his memorisation method rather than the more normal presentation in frequency order. This means that the symbol for person (人) is #951 in his system, whereas it usually turns up in the first ten or so Kanji in flashcards and dictionaries.

The major downside of not learning the sounds of the Kanji is that it makes it impossible to take advantage of Emac's very impressive Japanese support which depends on the user being able to type the phonetics and then choose from a menu of Kanji.

Heisig's method for the Hiragana leaves something to be desired, by the way, if one is a native English speaker rather than an American. He suggests mnemonics for the sound of each symbol and links that back to a word which has a similar sound in American and if you aren't American it can be rather weird. The worst example is the mnemonic for あ (an "a" sound) which Heisig links to "otter"! Try saying it with a broad American accent and it's a bit clearer: "ay is fer ahtter, y'know?" sort of thing. So, you have to patch the method up a bit if you're not from the right part of the world but other than that it works well and of course the Kanji are not affected by this as he's not trying to teach you the pronunciation of those.

So, that's what I'm doing at the moment.