What is the Moon Good For?

So, I recently discovered that the world upon which The City State of the Invincible Overlord (CSIO) is situated has two moons, according to the Necromancer edition of the setting. There’s nothing I know of in the original release to say that this is the case, but it’s not unlikely enough for me to reject it.

Partly this is because it never mattered.

Never mattered that there was a second moon in the sky? In decades (on and off) of play? If that’s the case, then does it matter if there’s even a single moon? What, in short, is the moon doing for us?

The reason is that at least one moon has an important game purpose - modulating lycanthropy. This is, of course, vitally important if any PC is afflicted with this curse, but also if the PCs know of an NPC with it.

Simulation Vs Gamism in Lunar Orbits

I looked up the information and found that the “main” moon, Howla, had a period of 27 days and that the small one, Vannis, just 13.

Clearly exactly 27 days and exactly 13 days would be improbable to say the least. Since I was working on a calendar program (more of this in a later post) my first instinct was to add a small fraction of a day to each number. But on reflection I stuck with the unrealistic round numbers.

Adding fractions of a day to the lunar cycle may add realism but any such addition is subject to the hassle/reward ratio — is the hassle of adding some feature to the game world outweighed by the reward of how that feature improves the experience of playing the game. A hassle/reward ratio greater than one means you shouldn’t do it. Remember that the reward part includes both the players and the DM. Just because you personally love complicated calendars or weird languages doesn’t mean your players do too.

So, unless your group of players has more than a couple of astronomers in it, making lunar orbital periods non-integer is a bad idea. Leaving the numbers as exact values means that predicting the lunar phase is easy - easy on you, easy on the players. That makes it easy for you all to think about the implications of the passage of time. And in the case of a werewolf scenario, for example, the focus should be on the adventure and the werewolf, not working out how many hours 0.13 of a day is and trying to calculate backwards to previous reports of attacks over the last year. To hell with that!

Werewolves aside, there are plenty of functions related to the moon. Illumination is a big one - whether trying to travel into the night or trying to get into places unseen. Another one is religious, with many of the deities in D&DG having holy days linked to the phase of the moon. Which leads to quasi-religious things like demonic rituals which must be performed on a night with no or a full moon.

Ambiguous Druids, Batman!

The “official” relationship between druids and moons is a bit unclear. They are stated as worshipping the sun and moon - the combination of which creates the lunar phases, of course - and the sickles they use represent the moon. However, there is no reference to moons in the definitions of their material components. I would suggest that there should be some requirement in connection to lesser mistletoe.

Sailor Moon

A lesser usage for the moon is the fact that it controls the tides. This assumes, as I do, that at least one moon is as large as our own moon and has a similar effective gravitational field down on the surface of the parent planet.

Stable Diffusion displaying a weak grasp
 of lunar phases

Luney Tunes

If one moon is good, useful, and pretty easy to use, then two is probably better, yes?

Well, yes! The two moons given for CSIO are pretty easy to track even with two of them and with two moons you can easily plan for special but rare effects like two full moons or nights with no moons at all. In the case of CSIO these two events happen once every 350 days (each) and so are likely to be once-in-a-year possibilities for all sorts of rituals and shenanigans. Again, the simple nature of integer lunar periods makes it fairly easy to predict these events and the DM can plan NPC actions ahead of time and players can attempt to predict them too.

With an annual event like this, there is potentially a lot at stake for PCs and NPCs alike - if the deadline is missed or a ritual interrupted there is a long time to wait for another chance.

I would suggest that in a world with two moons that druids’ Greater Mistletoe be linked to the night of the double full moon instead of the night of Midsummer.

Priest of the Rising Moon

With two moons you could have a priesthood of clerics who’s spells are modified by the combined value of the moons. For example, as I write this the two moons of CSIO are at 77% and 35%, for a total of 112%. Spells could have their various parameters modified to reflect this (probably in bands - hassle/reward again), so that when the two moons are full their spells are twice as effective but when both are new they are powerless.

While this might be too much variation for a single-classed PC, it could be fun for an NPC cult or for multi-classed characters who are not completely dependant on their clerical abilities.

The Dark Side of the Moon

A final thing about multiple moons is that they can eclipse each other and the sun. This is much harder to model than just the phases but with events this rare the DM could just handwave it by introducing an upcoming, or unanticpated, event as desired.

These sorts of events fit nicely with “The Stars are Right” scenarios where the stakes are even higher than they are for annual events. If someone stops the ritual tonight it might be centuries before it can be tried again!

That’s some thoughts on moons for now. Next time, or the time after, I’ll look at how this fits in with Gygax’s notion of why time is so important and how I know what phases the moons are over the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

Yes - I’ll be looking at 1:1 time.

A Hex Map of Ancient Greece

This is Sparta!

I was tinkering and put together this hex map of the area we usually call Ancient Greece (download it; it's a lot better than the preview makes it look). Not everything - Crete is probably the biggest missing part, but also the northern area, including Thessalonika. And of course there's nothing of the Italian/Sicilian colonies to the west which everyone always forgets about.

The big hexes are 36miles and inside them are 6 mile hexes (don't forget: a 6 mile hex is still 20,000 acres).

The map itself is the size of a single index mapsheet in my Campaign Map Book by sheer luck rather than intent. But the 6:1 ratio is ideal for that if you fancy splashing some cash my way.

Here's a little index for the map which I'll try to update from time to time:

Place	Type	Hex
Argos	City	0607
Athens	City	0807
Corinth	City	0607
Delos	Island	1108
Delphi	Temple	0506
Elis	City	0307
Elusis	Temple	0806
Ephesus	City/Wonder	1606
Halicarnassus	City/Wonder	1609
Lindos	City	1811
Marathon	City	0806
Megalopolis	City	0408
Messene	City	0408
Mt Olympus	Mountain	0502
Mycenae	City	0607
Olympia	Temple/Wonder	0308
Plataea	Site	0706
Pylos	City	0409
Rhodes	City/Wonder	1810
Sparta	City	0509
Tegea	City	0508
Thebes	City	0706
Therea	Volcano	1210
Troy	City	1302

It's sometimes hard to decide when something is a city or a temple complex so take the "Type" column with a pinch of salt. Also, Corinth is very near the place where three hexes join so I might be wrong there.

Finally, the background map is of course a modern map from OpenStreetMap and while at this scale changes in coastlines are mostly invisible, I would point out that there was historically no bridge between the western Peloponnese and the mainland and it certainly would not have been called  the A5.

I say "mostly" invisible because there is some controversy over the location of Ithica - Odysseus' home. The modern island of Kephalonia has two clear regions - an east and western "lobe". It has been suggested that the western of these was the original Ithica and the channel between the islands was filled in by a combination of uplift and huge landslides caused by earthquakes. 

I actually went to the bother of going there and having a look myself and, especially from the air, it is clear that there has been very significant landslipping and there is plenty of evidence - and indeed modern records of - land uplift by really strong earthquakes. There is a major fault complex where three tectonic plates meet just to the west/southwest of the island.

So I'd say it's likely that these were two islands in the past, possibly even the historical past if Scrabo's text about a shallow channel is definitely referring to this location. But that of course does not mean that the western area (now called Paliki) was then called Ithica. However, the modern Ithica bears no resemblance to the low-lying island good for horses which Homer describes. Unless "good for horses" means that it's ideal for watching them fall over cliffs or roll down precipitous slopes into the sea.

Anyway, I mention all this mainly because it illustrates that the area is active enough that a detailed modern map can in fact be an inaccurate guide to the ancient landscape described in stories. We're sort of used to the idea that rivers move about over time. Not so much islands.

D&DG Worshippers 7: Egyptians

Art: Inonibird@tumblr

Egyptian Worshippers

The first of three biggies this week: The Egyptian pantheon, which will be followed by Finnish and then Greek. Between them they probably cover about two thirds of non-homespun pantheons in use by AD&D DMs, with Norse covering most of the remainder.

The table has some interesting aspects. If you meet an Egyptian paladin there is a surprising number of possible patron deities s/he may be following, but a ranger on the other hand is always a follower of Osiris. Thieves are all devoted to Bes. There's also a wide range of options for illusionists, although dominated by Set and Thoth, which is a very Conanesque rivalry.

The lack of clerics for certain deities is a little surprising too - Horus in particular. This is something we've seen before in other pantheons using this method, but in the case of Horus we can at least imagine that the paladins of Horus serve that purpose and perhaps the DM could make a slightly expanded paladin variant which has more extensive clerical spell casting abilities. Alternatively, multi-classing could be allowed even for humans providing one class is cleric for a deity not listed.

Encounter	Cleric	Druid	Fighter	Ranger	Paladin	Magic-user	Illusionist	Thief	Assassin	Monk	Bard
Ra	1-10		1-11			1-8
Anhur			12-24			9-11	1-6		1-40	1-100
Anubis	11-21				1-21	12-20
Apshai			25-34
Bast	22-29		35-41			21-26	7-18
Bes			42-47			27-32	19-29	1-100			1-35
Geb			48-59			33-38
Horus					22-53	39-45
Isis	30-39	1-43	60-65			46-53	30-45
Nephthys	40-47		66-71			54-60
Osiris	48-58	44-72		1-100							36-100
Ptah	59-68		72-80			61-71
Seker	69-75	73-100			54-79	72-76	46-54
Set	76-83		81-91				55-77		41-100
Shu	84-91				80-100	77-82
Tefnut	92-100		92-97			83-88
Thoth			98-100			89-100	78-100

A Lorry-Load of Sand

Filling the Sandbox

Hex-shaped sandbox:
the gag writes itself

Whether starting a new campaign or simply needing to expand the "known world" to reflect the players' expanding range of operations, or because you dropped them through a hatch to China, a decent wilderness map is a necessity which is sometimes needed quickly.

By "decent" I mean: gives the DM ideas and information which can be fed to the players as scenarios, plots, and NPC motivations, and is able to support play when the players decide to ignore everything and wander off into the wilds to see what they find.

Arneson recommended setting four "adventures" per 100 square miles (i.e., 10 x 10 miles; Arneson seems to have been a bit reluctant to use hexes in the early days, perhaps because of a lack of suppliers of hexpaper). Gygax, in the DMG (p47) modulates encounter frequency by population density and terrain. This post combines these two facets of wilderness into an interactive cavalcade of numbers to get your map off the ground quickly. The calculation assumes that Arneson's number is based on forest (6 checks per day in Gygax's table) and wilderness (1 in 10 chance in DMG). It also allows for 25% of encounters in non-wild areas being patrols, which are not lairs. The chance of a lair being a fortress is left to the encounter tables proper.

The function below takes various parameters which you can manipulate to suit. The output is a long list of hexes and the number of lairs in each hex generated with a random poisson distribution based on the average number of encounters based on the above factors. I've amalgamated Gygax's population levels so that each hex shows the number of lairs if it is wilderness, sparsely populated, or densely populated. Similarly, each hex is listed for each terrain type since clearly I don't know what the terrain is on your individual map.

You can also choose between a simple list of "give me 100 hexes" or an area coverage with hexes numbered in the classic Judges Guild method of 3212 being the 32nd column of the map, and hex 12 of that column. The defaults for the area option are set to match the Judges Guild Wilderness maps's layout of 52 columns and 34 hexes per column (you need to set 5-mile hex size manually if actually using the JG mapping system). If you are a freak that has hexes oriented with the points up the page, you'll have to adjust to fit.

So, as an example, if I'm looking at CISO Map 1 at the Plain of Cairns, I could generate 15 hexes, selecting only "plain" and "hills" but, since the village of Dorn in in there, keeping all three levels of civilisation active. If, for example, I get this result:

	# Encounters by Terrain
Hex	Plain	Hills
1	0/1/0	2/1/1
2		0/3/0
3	0/1/0	0/0/1
4	2/0/1
5	0/1/0	2/0/0
6	0/1/1
7	2/0/0
8	1/0/1
9
10	1/1/0
11
12		1/0/0
13		1/0/1
14	2/0/0
15		1/0/1

Starting in hex 3629 (wild, hills) I have two lairs (I rolled hobgoblins and werewolves on DMG tables). South one hex (wild and split between hills and plain, so I would usually take the higher number), we have nothing rolled for wild. Since each civilisation level is diced for independently it is possible for a hex to be, like this, free of monsters on wilderness but populated on sparse or dense. Beware of fudging the result to be "more interesting" as the tendency is to over-egg the pudding.

Then, going now to the hex southwest of Dorn (plain, patrolled) I have a lair (merchants are rolled but they don't lair, so a re-roll gives wild boar). The hex south of that (plain, wild), is clear, and the final hex in that column (3730 on the map) is again empty (the 1 indicated being for patrolled, not wilderness). 

Hex #6 equates to Dorn itself and we have a lair in the same hex - a halfling village.

And so on. Alternatively, I could have generated the lairs for the entire map and walked down the columns in a similar way, making notes as I go.

Here's the tool:

[Update: I've added a seed option. Basically, if you supply the same (numerical) seed the results will be the same for the same other options (number and size of hexes), so you can effectively bookmark a result and come back to it later].

Hex width (miles):
Base rate (encounters per 100sqm):
Output:	LinearArea
Population levels:	Wild Sparse/patrolled Dense
Terrains:
# Hexes:
Seed:
Columns:	Height:

Levels Distribution

Simulating, but simulating what?

I’ve mentioned before that D&D has a problem in deciding what it is simulating, but that happens at the table too. Many DMs have a simulationist streak but it is sometimes hard to decide whether we’re simulating some sort of extrapolated reality based on the world as experienced personally by the PCs, or something more literary.

One topic where this plays out is in the realm of classed NPCs. When making broad-brush strokes about a campaign, for example, the numbers of high-level NPCs in the countries around the starting location, it’s handy to have a quick way of generating those numbers. But what method to use?

Basic Assumptions: Demographics

Two basic assumptions carry through both methods: firstly that classed characters are 1% of the human population. Secondly, that the age demographics are something like the Coale-Demeny West table at level 4. This basically means that half the population is old enough to have or have started training in a class, and that 60 is a reasonable expectation for characters.

A. Simulating PCs

One approach I have used is a complete simulation based on entrance requirements for the classes, age demographics, and an assumed rate of experience point accumulation.

Without going into too much detail, what you find with this approach is that there are relatively few 1st level characters, especially thieves, because it takes so little experience to pass through the low levels, resulting in a sort of bulge at mid-levels. Exactly where depends on how much xp per month you figure in, how many active months in a year you assume etc.

For fighters this gives an output something like this for 1000 fighters:

Level	#Fighters
1	33
2	42
3	59
4	107
5	205
6	209
7	273
8	70
9	2

The shape of the bulge varies depending on how exactly you see the rate of xp gain working over time, but you get the idea. Mid- to high-levels dominate over the lower levels.

B. Simulating Fiction & The Implied Reality

The above doesn’t fit most people’s expectations of the world which are taken from fiction and/or the Monster Manual’s listings for “Men”. The implied world is one where low-level characters are outnumbered by 0-level normal people, and low level characters greatly outnumber name-level characters.

As a simple example, an encounter with 200 bandits will consist of 200 0-level bandits, 6 second-level fighters, 10 third-level fighters, 7 fourth-level fighters, 5 fifth-level fighters, 4 sixth-level fighters, one seventh-level fighter, and a tenth-level fighter. The MM seldom places first-level characters, although Berserkers do have them at a ratio of 1:10 compared to 0-level types.

Another area where the game departs from the “simulated PCs” method is in the incidence of the individual classes. Rather than depending on the odds of qualifying for each class, and some factor for how desirable the classes are, we can just use the numbers from DMG p35 (which assumes that the distribution of prospective henchmen in a town or city is the same as the general distribution of classes everywhere).

For the purposes of quickly determining what’s happening in a specific country, or in a town, we quickly boil the assumptions down to this:

Class	Divisor
Cleric	1200
Druid	6000
Fighter	561
Paladin	4545
Ranger	4545
Magic-user	1200
Illusionist	6000
Thief	1600
Assassin	8000
Monk	200000

So, a location with a population of 300,000 will have on average 535 fighters, 2 monks (I’m rounding up at .5), and 38 assassins (300000 divided by 561, 200000, and 8000 respectively). Here’s the full table:

Class	Divisor	#
Cleric	1200	250
Druid	6000	50
Fighter	561	535
Paladin	4545	66
Ranger	4545	66
Magic-user	1200	250
Illusionist	6000	50
Thief	1600	188
Assassin	8000	38
Monk	200000	2

But what levels are these guys?

Last week's post was really just a bit of Javascript which tries to generate higher levels based on how hard they are to reach as an absolute number.

What the method boils down to is that the ratio of 1st level clerics to 2nd level clerics is the ratio 1500:3000 (the maximum number of xp in first and second level), so basically 2:1. This is a fairly complicated calculation so I’ve done tables up to high levels below.

Aside: An obvious alternative is to take the ratio of the mid-points of the various levels rather than the maximum values. This leads to a normal ratio of 1:3 at lower levels, and since this is compounded the numbers appearing of even 4th level and upward are insignificant. So, if this method gives too many mid-level characters, you could try adjusting that.

How it works is to set a maximum possible level, then assume that all the NPCs are distributed across those levels in inverse proportion to the amount of xp needed to reach each level. The tables are normalised so the values add up to one.

Here’s the tables.

Level	Bard	Cleric	Druid	Monk
1	4.706451e-01	5.045307e-01	4.587672e-01	5.254946e-01
2	2.353225e-01	2.522653e-01	2.293836e-01	2.489185e-01
3	1.176613e-01	1.261327e-01	1.223379e-01	1.182363e-01
4	5.883064e-02	5.821508e-02	7.340276e-02	5.254946e-02
5	3.765161e-02	2.751985e-02	4.587672e-02	2.489185e-02
6	2.353225e-02	1.375993e-02	2.621527e-02	1.206493e-02
7	1.568817e-02	6.879964e-03	1.529224e-02	5.911814e-03
8	1.107400e-02	3.363538e-03	1.019483e-02	3.378179e-03
9	8.557183e-03	1.681769e-03	7.340276e-03	2.364725e-03
10	6.275268e-03	1.121179e-03	4.587672e-03	1.689090e-03
11	4.706451e-03	8.408845e-04	3.058448e-03	1.244592e-03
12	2.353225e-03	6.727076e-04	1.223379e-03	9.458902e-04
13	1.568817e-03	5.605896e-04	6.116896e-04	6.756359e-04
14	1.176613e-03	4.805054e-04	2.621527e-04	5.254946e-04
15	9.412902e-04	4.204422e-04	2.293836e-04	4.299501e-04
16	7.844085e-04	3.737264e-04	2.038965e-04	3.638039e-04
17	6.723501e-04	3.363538e-04	1.835069e-04	3.152967e-04
18	5.883064e-04	3.057762e-04	1.668244e-04
19	5.229390e-04	2.802948e-04	1.529224e-04
20	4.706451e-04	2.587337e-04	1.411591e-04
21	4.278592e-04	2.400907e-04	1.310764e-04
22	3.137634e-04	2.240847e-04	1.223379e-04
23	2.353225e-04	2.100794e-04	1.146918e-04

Level	Fighter	Paladin	Ranger
1	5.029507e-01	5.064549e-01	4.894399e-01
2	2.514753e-01	2.532274e-01	2.447199e-01
3	1.257377e-01	1.160626e-01	1.223600e-01
4	5.588341e-02	5.803129e-02	5.438221e-02
5	2.874004e-02	3.095002e-02	3.058999e-02
6	1.437002e-02	1.466054e-02	2.039333e-02
7	8.047211e-03	7.958577e-03	1.359555e-02
8	4.023606e-03	3.979288e-03	9.063702e-03
9	2.011803e-03	1.989644e-03	4.894399e-03
10	1.341202e-03	1.326429e-03	3.262933e-03
11	1.005901e-03	9.948221e-04	1.748000e-03
12	8.047211e-04	7.958577e-04	1.193756e-03
13	6.706009e-04	6.632147e-04	9.063702e-04
14	5.748008e-04	5.684698e-04	7.305073e-04
15	5.029507e-04	4.974110e-04	6.117999e-04
16	4.470673e-04	4.421432e-04	5.262795e-04
17	4.023606e-04	3.979288e-04	4.617357e-04
18	3.657823e-04	3.617535e-04	4.112940e-04
19	3.353005e-04	3.316074e-04	3.707878e-04
20	3.095081e-04	3.060991e-04	3.375448e-04

Level	Magic-user	Illusionist
1	4.897863e-01	4.883469e-01
2	2.448932e-01	2.441735e-01
3	1.224466e-01	1.220867e-01
4	5.442070e-02	6.104337e-02
5	3.061165e-02	3.139373e-02
6	2.040776e-02	1.831301e-02
7	1.360518e-02	1.156611e-02
8	9.070117e-03	7.577797e-03
9	4.897863e-03	4.994457e-03
10	3.265242e-03	2.497229e-03
11	1.632621e-03	1.664819e-03
12	1.088414e-03	1.248614e-03
13	8.163106e-04	9.988915e-04
14	6.530485e-04	8.324095e-04
15	5.442070e-04	7.134939e-04
16	4.664632e-04	6.243072e-04
17	4.081553e-04	5.549397e-04
18	3.628047e-04	4.994457e-04
19	3.265242e-04	4.540416e-04
20	2.968402e-04	4.162048e-04

Lv	Thief	Assassin
1	4.947792e-01	4.984702e-01
2	2.473896e-01	2.492351e-01
3	1.236948e-01	1.246175e-01
4	6.184740e-02	6.230877e-02
5	3.092370e-02	2.990821e-02
6	1.455233e-02	1.495411e-02
7	8.835343e-03	7.477053e-03
8	5.622491e-03	3.738526e-03
9	3.865463e-03	2.492351e-03
10	2.811246e-03	1.759306e-03
11	1.405623e-03	1.300357e-03
12	9.370819e-04	9.969403e-04
13	7.028114e-04	7.477053e-04
14	5.622491e-04	4.984702e-04
15	4.685409e-04	3.742724e-04
16	4.016065e-04
17	3.514057e-04
18	3.123606e-04
19	2.811246e-04
20	2.555678e-04

One way to use these tables is just to find the number of clerics, say, in a town using table 1, then you can multiply that number by the value given for 1st level clerics on the table below to find how many Acolytes there are; then multiply the total number of clerics again by the value given for second level clerics to find the number of Adepts, and so on.

For example, Say you have a large town with 12,000 inhabitants. Table 1 tells you that there will be 12,000 divided by 1200 = 10 clerics in the town. Multiplying by 10 all the way down the cleric table gives this:

Level	# Clerics
1	5.041905
2	2.520952
3	1.260476
4	0.581758
5	0.275013
6	0.137506
7	0.068753
8	0.033613
9	0.016806
10	0.011204
11	0.008403
12	0.006723
13	0.005602
14	0.004802
15	0.004202
16	0.003735
17	0.003361
18	0.003056
19	0.002801
20	0.002586
21	0.002401
22	0.002241
23	0.002101

What I normally do is actually feed the values into a poisson-distribution random number generator so that I get a spread of values who’s mean is the number given, which is what last week's program does (I've added the source code at the end here).

This final result is much more like a literary setting where the central characters (the PCs) are much less likely to encounter high level NPCs than low level ones. However, there is an issue with high levels.

Once the xp totals reach name level (for most classes) the amount of xp needed increases at a constant rate. This means that the ratio from, say, 12th level to 13th level, to 14th is gradually falling rather than increasing. The practical result is that the representation of very high level characters in the population reaches a plateau and 22nd level clerics are not really any rarer than 21st level ones, as you can see in the above table.

You might want to tinker with this for your campaign.

I've stuck the code up onto GitHub but I would warn you that I'm not a Javascript programmer and this is the first real program I've written in the language so the code is not great (I've done lots of glue-code in it of course, AJAX and stuff, but that's mostly calling other programs and just updating displays rather than being a complete application). The program was originally in Perl but I wanted to post it on the blog so I converted it. Consequently, the JS is currently the more up-to-date version but if I make further change it's more likely to be to the Perl version since that version's output is suitable for reading into Emacs' org-mode where I can further format and manipulate it.

Anyway, with the code on your local machine you can fiddle with assumptions such as half the population being too young to be classed, or perhaps add features such as generating ages for the npcs. Or whatever!

What's the highest level cleric in this town?

Or: D&D meets Javascript

Without any further explanation (which will come in the next post), here's a bit of javascript which generates NPC levels based on an input (total) population:

Population:
Max level:

Click "Go"

Although I said that the explanation will come next time, here's a little bit of info. The numbers of characters are based on the NPC henchman class frequency (although I took ½% off fighter and thief to give to bards), with a poisson distribution around that mean, and the levels are based on the relative amount of xp needed to attain the given level, and also randomised using a poisson distribution.

Also note that population is expected to be the full population including the aged and children amounting to 50% of the total and who are assumed to not be of interest.

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.