Encounter-a-Day

In today’s installment of Dynamic Domains, it’s time for some spelunking as I brainstorm features to make your subterranean combats more interesting.

Stalactites & Stalagmites: If you ever forget which is which, a good mnemonic (in English, at least) is the ‘c’ or ‘g’ in the middle of the two structures’ names. Stalactites hang from the ceiling, while stalagmites protrude from the ground.

Stalagmites are useful for cover, but could also be ripped out of the ground by larger monsters and used as weapons. Stalactites, being heavily-weighted, sharp spears hanging above the heads of the combatants, just beg to be dropped on them.

Water: Underground rivers are a staple of any genre which ventures beneath the ground, and can be used in the same way as above-ground rivers. In addition, there can be pools of standing water which might be natural hazards which spread disease. Another fun thing is that you can get a new angle on rivers when you’re underground… Imagine a large explosion busting a hole in a thin cave wall which has a river on the other side. Suddenly the combat has changed into a fleeing scene where all the characters madly try to escape the rushing waters flooding in.

Difficult Terrain: One of the downsides of caves is that they can be very small and cramped. However, by adding in lots of difficult terrain you virtually expand the size of the area, since you’re reducing how quickly all of the combatants can move.

Flora: Caves are damp and dark and the perfect breeding ground for various molds, slimes and spore-laden mushrooms. A sticky mold might immobilize foes, or beds of mushrooms release noxious spores when disturbed.

Darkness: PCs love to forget about light sources… Sometimes, it can be fun to make sure they don’t.

Unstable footing: Carpets of slippery mold; damp, slick rocks; and slopes of loose gravel are all opportunities for skill checks to avoid falling down.

Poor structural integrity: Falling rocks are always a hazard, but cave-ins and weak floors can separate and isolate people.

Lava: ‘Nuff said

Elevation: Caves give you an almost free playground for making weird elevations and ideal perches for snipers and other ranged attackers.

Oxygen: Most caves don’t come with built-in air purifiers. Without some good knowledge checks, a party might wander deep into a system of caves and have no idea how much danger they’re in until they start feeling short of breath…

The feywild, mortal plane and shadowfell form a path which every mortal soul travels. New souls enter the world through the ley nexus in the feywild and, when they shuffle off their mortal coil, exit through the ley nexus of the shadowfell.

Long ago, a fearsome dragon named Monatiss tried to take the power of the shadowfell’s ley nexus for himself. He succeeded, and for a short time death was no longer a threat, until the gods imbued a great hero with the strength to stop Monatiss.

Monatiss couldn’t be killed, for it was linked with the ley nexus and doing so would shatter it. Instead, Monatiss was returned to the location of the ley nexus at the foot of the Penumbra Cliffs, along the shores Sea of Despair in a massive cavern barely able to contain the ancient dragon.

There, for countless millenia he has remained, bound by enchanted iron chains forged by Moradin himself. Each link of the chains is as wide as a human is tall and weighs more than the greatest tree in the feywild. The dragon physically reunited with the ley nexus, its function was restored.

And so now, when a mortal dies, its soul passed through to the shadowfell, flies across the Sea of Despair, and enters the astral sea through Monatiss.

There was a time when the world of Rith teetered on the verge of annihilation. The mortal races had grown powerful and foolhardy, the humans in particular, and threatened to destroy creation itself with their powerful magics.

The dragons of Rith set aside their territorial disputes to save the world. Dragons have three qualities in abundance; patience, intelligence, and wrath. Their plan was made in secret and one day every major mortal city found the skies darkened by the beat of wings.

No one was spared. Not the dwarves in their mountains, nor the eladrin in the Feywild, nor the Shadar-kai in the Shadowfell. Most of the cities fell within three days. Only Amanellis, crown jewel of the human empire, withstood the siege much longer, but within a month its walls too crumbled. The death toll was catastrophic among all sides.

Afterwards, the few remaining dragons retreated and banded together, forming the Rithian Stewards. They would monitor the mortal races carefully, preventing any civilizations larger than a small town from flourishing.

The culling was a success. Rith was saved, and over time the world healed. All the ancient magics were lost to time. It was not without a price, however. Without their large cities, the mortals have become acutely vulnerable to the predations of the wild and of other mortals as well.

It seems there’s always a pack of wolves or tribe of orcs making life difficult for the poor people just trying to eke out an existence. As a result, mortal towns have become insular and xenophobic. Strangers are mistrusted and hurried out of town; there is little hospitality to be found anywhere.

Some have tried to recapture the glory of old, but there is little they can do. Though the dragons no longer make their presence known, the Rithian Stewards are ever vigilant. Whenever any mortal city begins to reach the point of old excesses, it is quickly razed.

Something very strange has happened. One day everyone wakes up and finds the world as they knew it to be completely different.

In fact, the world almost seems to be a patchwork of other worlds. Villages, cities, even entire kingdoms have mysteriously appeared, all from different worlds and all completely oblivious as to what has happened. Forests, mountains and other geographical features have been transplanted wholesale as well.

The range of reactions is quite varied. Some continue living their lives as ever, some try to carve out power in this new dynamic, and some try to figure out what happened and how to undo it and be returned to their home world.

An interesting exercise in worldbuilding is trying to figure out how the different classes fit into your world. This serves a couple purposes; it gives you a framework to explore and expand your world and it gives you some direction for your players. If a new player is curious about, say, invokers you could tell him about the Bretani Academy where priests of varied faiths train in secret for the day when the primordials will try to retake the world.

So the next time you’re just sitting around or bored, try this. Pick a class. Now come up with three different backgrounds for or examples of that class. You don’t need to restrict yourself to the exotic classes either; as generic as a fighter is, it can serve as a great jumping off point for defining a mercenary troupe, a military, or a nomadic desert tribe known for wielding their signature khopeshes.

Earlier this evening, RPGNow pulled all of their Wizards of the Coast product, at WotC’s request. This includes the ability for people who had already purchased PDFs to download them. Paizo will be removing them tonight at midnight.

Their stated reason is an attempt to fight piracy. This is at best misguided.

Piracy is. It will always be. Every form of media can be pirated, and anything which can be pirated will be pirated. It’s not really even a matter of when; for the most part, pirated versions of movies, books, songs and games will be available as soon if not sooner than their legitimate commercial counterparts.

There is nothing you can do to stop piracy. There is nothing anyone can do to stop piracy. Many have tried, all have failed. Many will still try, and they, too, will fail. The problem is, people expect to be able to consume their media. If media can be consumed, the consumer must be able to access it. If the consumer can access it, then it can be copied. Maybe not easily, maybe only by people with specialized skills and software, but it only takes one. Once one unencumbered copy has been made, it can and will be quickly propagated throughout the internet.

Removing your PDFs from RPGNow and other retailers will have one effect, and only one effect: it will now be impossible for people to legally acquire PDFs of your material. Anyone who would have purchased your PDFs will now have two options: pirate them (in which case you get no money) or don’t get them at all (in which case you get no money and the “user base” for your game suffers as well). Neither of those help WotC at all.

As for the pirates? They’ll just go and download the PDFs, same as always.

Wizards of the Coast, please take back this terrible decision. You are hurting yourselves and you are hurting your customers, but you are not even providing so much as a minor inconvenience to pirates. This policy will be completely invisible for them, except perhaps their PDFs will be a few megabytes larger because they’re scanned and OCRed.

Well, some good news and some bad news.

The good news, I’ve had a few requests for a standalone version of Monster Maker and it’s now available. I’ve also posted a zip file with the font in it for people who use the installer version.

The bad news, I’ve decided to officially cease updating the monster and treasure databases used by the various scripts on my website, at least with respect to Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Sorry for the inconvenience

The concept of a lingua franca is very important. In the real world, if you take two people completely at random, the chances of them sharing the same language– never mind a mother tongue or another language they’re both completely fluent in– is damn near zero. A Swiss pilot landing in Cairo, Egypt has to be able to communicate effectively with the tower, and both of them will speak English because it’s the lingua franca of the air industry. It’s not either one’s mother tongue, but particularly with respect to aeronautics both of them are expected to know how to communicate effectively in English.

German used to be the lingua franca of science and mathematics because so many of the best journals in the field were published in German. French was the lingua franca of Diplomacy until World War II. In modern days, English is the lingua franca of programming, diplomacy and business. Latin used to be the lingua franca of academia.

This concept can be extended to your fantasy games and add a bit of flavor. Rather than having one common tongue, have several for different purposes. Mionese, the language of the mighty Mion empire, might be the lingua franca of politics and diplomacy. Any character expecting to interact with nobility had best know how to speak Mionese or he’ll look terribly uncouth, if he’s not dismissed outright. Similarly, there could be a different language which is commonly used in arcane writings and a third used most often by merchants.

The important thing to note here is that these languages weren’t invented to be international languages in their fields; this phenomenon arises naturally because one particular country or region will frequently dominate a particular field. It’s only natural that their language becomes the de facto standard in that field. Depending on how deeply ingrained it is, a character might have a hard time dealing in that field without it or the character might even be actively ostracized.

It was over three hundred years ago that the war against God began. It was just over sixty years ago that the war was finished. In the end, the arcane magics the mortals had cultivated proved triumphant, and God was slain.

At last, the plagues and foul beasts God had sent against the mortals were no more. For the first time in history, the world was united in peace, in jubilation, in celebration.

It was short-lived. There was a problem no one had accounted for. With God dead, there were no new souls. Every new baby died as soon as it was born. Human, elf, dwarf, orc, even livestock.

At first, they all banded together, trying to find a solution. Nothing worked. Food supplies were suddenly very scarce; even crops could no longer be cultivated. The only renewable source of food were from magic, and mages were rare.

The warforged, originally created to aid in the battle against God, were now turned against former allies. Wars were fought over storehouses and mages. The mortal races had accrued terrible weapons in their centuries-long war, and now entire kingdoms were reduced to smoking craters in the blink of an eye.

But that was then. Things have calmed down quite a bit now. Most of the mortals are dead. Orcs are completely extinct, and the youngest humans– those born just before God was slain– are into their sixties. Only the dwarves and elves really remain. Few of them are left, though, and even their time is dwindling.

The age of the mortals is over. This is the age of the warforged, of the kiln-born, of the liches and undead.

I’m very proud to announce Monster Maker 3.5! There are a lot of great new features like auto-update, file association, an XML file type, and the ability to import monsters from the D&D Insider Compendium!

3.5 3/28/08

• Now using ClickOnce to install Monster Maker. This will automatically set up file associations, add start menu entry, and add uninstallation entry to the control panel

  Important! If you’re using Firefox and have the .Net Framework 3.5, this should work fine. If you have problems, however, you have two options. 1: Get the FFClickOnce addon to add support to FireFox or 2: Use Internet Explorer. Once the program is installed, it can be updated in the future without a browser. Sorry for the inconvenience.

• The program will now check for updates when it is started.
• Added support for saving as XML

• Added support for importing monsters from the D&D Insider Compendium.

  To do this, view the monster’s stat block on a new page (shortcut: middle click or control+click), and then save that page. Make sure you save as HTML only, not as “webpage complete” or something like that.

  Once you’ve saved the html file, click File -> Load in Monster Maker and in the file type box choose D&D Insider Compendium files. Then select the file you wish to load.

  This functionality is experimental! Please let me know if you encounter any problems with it!

• Added file association support. By default, .mon and .xmon files are associated with it.
• Most new windows (e.g. add power window) will now be centered on the main program’s window when they’re opened.
• It is now possible to explicitly order auras and powers.
• Powers and auras have been moved to separate tabs, and now show a larger preview of each in the list.
• Selects all text when you tab to new fields, easing data entry.
• Wiki output finally includes elite/solo status