The Tao of D&D

 "Story, at least in the European tradition, requires conflict.  Characters must be flawed, they must make mistakes, their opponents must get the better of them.  Things in some way, shape or form need to get bad, need to entertain uncertainty.   In Return of the King, a conventional story, Denethor's actions must bring Pippin and Gandalf and Faramir low, in order to create the tension that will be relieved later in the story when the conflict is resolved.

"However, these basic mechanisms of narrative tension are at odds with the needs of propaganda ... the subject of propaganda has no arc but upward.  They begin strong and stronger, they crush all that oppose them, their opposition is flimsy and victory is trivial."

Dan Olson, Trimph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire, published in 1883 and written by Howard Pyle, is an awful book.  Interest in the character of Robin Hood had grown all through the 19th century, starting with his appearance in Walter Scott's 1819 book Ivanhoe, and Pyle — an American — was significant in cementing the version of Robin that dominates the 20th century and the present.  All the jargon about robbing from the rich and giving to the poor was central to The Merry Adventures, which pulled together multiple myths about the band of outlaws in Sherwood Forest that firmly established that list of familiar names.  Pyle invented none of the characters, so far as I know ... but he expanded them, give them additional parts to play in other stories while rounding out the merry band.

However, the stories are simply ... bad.  Every fight goes on and on for an hour without either contestant succeeding in striking the other; Robin is forever blowing three blasts on his horn to "summon five or seven score men" to overwhelm his enemies; there's never any doubt that Robin's going to succeed at some effort — and worst, in nearly ever story there's hardly a conflict at all.  By pretending to be someone other than himself, largely playing the part badly, Robin merely catches people unaware and then robs from them.  It's so obvious where the story's going that it's painful to sit and wait for the resolution to arrive.

Yet every adventure is describes as great and greater still, with none of the Merry Men ever being in real danger, not for a second.  It is as described above:  a really awful sort of propaganda for an England that's as interesting as a pasteboard sign outside a failed restaurant.  It's been something of a trial to bear up, to reach the end.  And that says nothing of the terrible, terrible verse that every character sings at every opportunity throughout.

There is nothing so boring as winning.  If anyone doubts me, get yourself on audible and have a listen.  If you're paying your monthly fee, the book is free; it costs no credits.  The audio version is not quite 11 hours.  I'll bet most couldn't get through two.

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

On each of the inhabited continents, the same four elements were distinguished as building-blocks for all the substances that could be observed: earth, air, fire and water. Within the game world, it is accepted that these four elements exist, and that they represent the Four Elemental planes. However, science indicates clearly, even in the Dungeons and Dragons world, that science dictates the existence of many more elements than four, and that tradition practices as followed in Earth's history were a load of rubbish.

To be sure, to retain the effects of magic and the presence of elemental beings, both science and elemental theory must be true ~ with the latter explaining many of the magical effects that science cannot explain. Examples of elemental influence on reality would include ...

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Also called the Tree of Life, that grew from the womb of the center of all creation. Among the Norse, the tree is called Yggdrasil. The tree exist outside the Prime Material Plane, and in fact enfolds all planes of existence: the outer planes, the astral and ethereal planes, the elemental planes and the negative and positive planes. Crann Bethadh exists as the axis mundi that supports all the planes and whose branches interweave between the planes and create passages from one plane to another.

Though there are hundreds of planes of existence, conceived of by every culture, both in the Prime Material and elsewhere, Crann Bethadh encapsulates them all. Most cultures vastly underestimate the ...

Having completed the work I mean to do on the background of demons, I am still cleaning up the background of devils.  This has been a long, hard fight but I am getting it under control.  Thankfully, I don't have to do any background like this again until I get to giants.  And I will probably put monster making on a shelf long before then.  If nothing else, some readers are learning some interesting things about the profound depths of human mythology.

So, the culture of devils.

Devils are beings from the Lower Planes of Existence, dwelling almost exclusively in the planes of Hades and Hell, who serve the purpose of torturing the malevolent dead as a means of cleansing the soul. This has gained them the reputation for being disturbingly malevolent themselves, and this is quite a common description for most of the individuals, particularly among ...

What follows is a meaningful description of the causes and effects related to the war between angels led by the Archangel Micheal against those led by Satan, that ended in Satan's defeat and casting down into Hell and the Abyss. This is viewed within the game world as a real event that happened according to the manner in which divinity is created and made real.

Upon the subject of demons, I have been putting together some content on the wiki outlining my structure of these monsters.

Starting with the creature itself, there is the Demon page.  This concentrates on what a demon can do, with a quick introduction and then a discussion of their abilities.  Wanting to give them powers closer to those I have read about in many an ancient text, I made their most important power the ability to possess others ~ and not once a day and not by the use of a magic jar spell.  Certainly, very unpleasant, but I insist that monsters should not be weakened just because it will make players uncomfortable.

And this is why I've gotten rid of several things that the books tried to sell as "fun" but are, in fact, imposed handicaps on what should be a terrifying monster.  I just don't understand.  If the beholder does not have a special "amulet" that enables the beholder to be controlled just because the players have gotten a hold of it, why should a particular demon?  If mind flayers and sphinxes don't have to worry about people knowing their names, why should a demon.

I understand that these things are supposed to be clever and adventure making, but it is really crappy, trope-driven adventure making, the sort of awful cliche that we're always seeing in TV supernatural series so bad writers can explain how a bunch of "good ol' boy" humans can get an edge on something that ought to be able to kill them outright.  They're cheap, cheesy off-switches for monsters and they are inexcusably stupid.

I just don't see that characters should be able to kill demons at all; but I don't have an experience system that is based on killing anything, so it works out for me.  At best, I expect a party to fight one off long enough to get it to teleport somewhere else ... which, let's admit it, is good enough.

Oh, and I also made a page on Demonic culture.

I have been playing with this concept that's based on arguments I've made in the past that the Gods are only as powerful as the belief that people have in them.  I'm making up my mind to go one step beyond this ~ that the gods don't exist at all until they are invented by creatures on the prime material plane.  This is what I was getting at with the Gehenna story.

It is always presumed that the gods must be much, much older than we are ~ but why?  We invented the gods, didn't we?  How does that necessarily change the freedom with which the gods act, why does it matter when they came into existence?

We conceive of things all the time that then get way out of our control.  It's easy to imagine that if our thoughts were able to create a real god Zeus, that's going to get out of hand very quickly ~ particularly if we don't know our thoughts created him.  We're just going to assume that he's been there all along and that we've "discovered" him.

There is a story that Zeus created the goddess of wisdom, Athena, directly from his head; "born from the head" will turn up the story if you search it on google.  I've decided to call the process of giving birth to gods (and therefore to places within the outer planes) as "Thoughts Made Manifest." This is, without a doubt, the scariest idea that can be imagined, if we apply it to the actual creation of things simply because we invent them.  But some readers will remember the old Star Trek episode that played havoc with the party on account of that.

I'm not saying that one character's thoughts will suddenly produce a god.  That is not enough belief.  But a thousand characters?  Ten thousand characters?  At some point, there is a tipping point reached and the belief becomes real.  And this is the premise I intend to build my entire god-based universe upon.

Anyway, I hope the demon content is fun.

Okay, this was sort of fun.  I thought I'd take a shot at making a few pages for the wiki about "Mythology" ~ get a feel for what those pages would look like or how the content would be designed.  It needs a map, but there aren't any ready at hand that would fit the content I'm designing.  The reader may note, however, that I am trying to keep with the spirit of the actual mythological context, just sprinkled throughout with transitional stuff designed to make it work together and within my D&D game.

This should be somewhat chilling.


Gehenna

A part of the Lower Planes of Existence, a place of punishment, created by the sacrifice of thousands of children in the Valley of Gehinnom outside of Jerusalem, beginning some ten thousand years ago. As the children died upon burning pyres and began to enter the underworld, then no more than a place of dust, a shelf of icy rock was made manifest against the side of a mountain, amidst a great ocean, under an open sky, and there the dead children were left to wait, their feet frozen into a cake of ice that stretched out into the water. But this place had no name, not as yet.

Within the second millenia BC, the mountain above Gehenna began to ...