Room Sizes

A little idea as I get back into things -- In some adventure products you get boxed-text room descriptions like, "The double doors open into a courtyard that is 80 feet deep and 90 feet wide. Once well cared for, the dirt floor is now choked with weeds. In the center of the yard sits a large pool, etc., etc." [D&D Module B7 Rahasia, Tracy & Laura Hickman, area #2]

There's a debate to be had about whether giving the room dimensions (80×90 feet) at this point is justified. Cognitively, you'd think that (a) the PC's attention would be first attracted to the stuff in front of them (especially any hostile monsters!) before dimensional details, and also (b) to get exact footage you'd probably have to get in, explore, and pace it off. The counter-argument, I suppose, might be that letting the players draw the area on the party map allows them to mentally situate themselves there. Sometimes I go back-and-forth about whether the dimensions should be the first thing described, or the last.

Here's a synthesis: Give the players some notion of room size first, quickly, by just using the terms "small, medium, or large". Only give exact dimensions after a fight has been resolved, and exploration/ searching/ pacing/ mapping is possible. Of course, this requires some kind of consistency in your "size" descriptions, such that you're playing fair with the players. Here goes after a bit of research:

• Small -- Up to 200 square feet (10×10 or 10×20). Small living quarters or chapel.
• Medium -- Up to 2,000 square feet (from 20×20, 30' diameter around, to 30×60 or 40×50, etc.). Tower central room, guard hall, castle kitchen, big living quarters.
• Large -- Up to 20,000 square feet (from 50×50, up to 50×100, max 100×200). Keep great hall, largest DMG Appendix A room/ chamber/ cave size.
• Huge -- Up to 200,000 square feet (from 100×200, 150×350m, max 400×500). Major cathedral, largest DMG Appendix A cavern size.

Back To Posting

I've had to take off most of June & July in order to deal with some band stuff, and also to teach a pair of accelerated summer math classes. Hopefully I'll be back to some D&D writing, blog posts, and replies to email & comments that have been sitting here for a while.

And if I don't, I'll come back and erase this so I don't look like a big doofus. :-)

Gygax on Conan

Gygax devoted the entirety of his "Sorcerer's Scroll" column in Dragon Magazine #36 (April 1980) to a dossier on Robert E. Howard's Conan character. He says in the first paragraph that this was inspired by the Schick-Moldvay "Giants in the Earth" series that had recently garnered some attention. I think it's interesting in a number of ways. Without reproducing the entire article, I'll present the summary table and briefly outline the rest of the article afterward.


Looking at this table, we see a number of interesting design decisions. As Gygax writes, "All ability statistics are based on the assumption that Conan was a prime example of the physically and mentally superior individual...". All of his ability scores vary up and/or down over the course of Conan's life, not wholly unlike the rules in the DMG. (Intelligence in parentheses was "potential"; Charisma after a slash was with regard to females.) More interestingly, his class levels in Fighter and Thief also go up, peak, and then degenerate later on in life. (While this was never codified in any ruleset, I think it's an excellent idea.)

The rest of the article presents details on Conan's various skills, proficiencies, and special abilities, which take up most of two magazine pages (an immense length, considering standards of the time). These include -- Weapon proficiencies (14 types by age 40), thieving abilities (various bonuses), armor class (usually light armor), number of attacks (specially increased, up to 3 per round), damage per attack (normal weapons act magical, up to +3), special attacks (modified hit roll of 21+ does double damage), special defenses (surprised 1-in-20, saves get +4 bonus, can't die from poison, heals 10 hp/day), magic resistance (25% if aware), psionics (latent, stress situations only, see table above), special abilities (parry with 2nd weapon, run for a day without fatigue, 75% to hide his trail), secondary skills (6 types by age 25), nonlethal combat (special bonuses to pummeling, grappling, overbearing), and weaponless combat (attack with bare hands as a club). Phew!

Another interesting thing is that if you take this list of special abilities, and compare it to the later Barbarian class writeup for AD&D, you'll see that more things overlap than don't. Conan, appearing first in this "Sorcerer's Scroll" article, clearly served as the template for AD&D Barbarians as they would be constructed later.

Final note: You might also compare this to the much shorter writeup that came earlier in OD&D Sup-IV (Gods, Demigods, and Heroes) by Kuntz & Ward. There he's presented as a Neutral Ftr15/Thf9 with hp 117 (S18/00, I16, W10, C17, D18, X15; surprised only 1-in-12), this being somewhat similar to Gygax's writeup between the ages of 25 and 30. Of course, that work has the further advantage of detailing all the other interesting figures in REH's Hyborea, such as Crom, Set, Thoth Amon, several pages of special magic items, and so forth.

Giant's Armor

When I recently ran Module G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, there were some adjudications I had to make about giant armor. One issue is that although in AD&D giants are given increasingly effective armor per giant type, in OD&D they all have the same fixed value: AC4. A second issue is that while the Steading has an Arsenal/Weapons complex with giant-sized shields, helmets, and spears (Greek style?), there are no rules given as to how this helps the giants if they get in and arm themselves appropriately.

Here's what I decided to do for my OD&D game: Say that all giant types are AC5 naturally without any protection. Then say that the more sophisticated giant types customarily wear better armor, with the same number of steps protection that PCs get from them (or equivalently, normal book armor AC +4 steps). For example:

• Hill giants, AC5 base. Normally wear no armor (primitive skins) for AC5. If giants in the Steading get to the Armory for shield & helmet, they become AC3 (+1 each).
• Frost giants, AC5 base. Normally wear leather armor (berserker/barbarian-style) for AC3 (+2 steps improvement).
• Fire giants, AC5 base. Normally wear giant chain mail (dwarf/heavy foot style) for AC1 (+4 steps improvement).
  

So you can see it becomes easy to adjudicate if a giant picks up a shield, or gets caught sleeping unarmored, etc. On the one hand, the G1 giants become easier by one step when feasting/unarmored, but are more challenging by one step if they get to their shield/helmet gear. The "normal" protection here results in being within 1 or 2 points of the revised AD&D statistics, frost giants being +1 improved, and fire giants toughened by +2 steps. If you want to make some special giant King that had full plate mail ("black iron armor"?), then he'd weigh in at AC -1, but I wouldn't anticipate using that very frequently.

Finally, if you compute the average AC among all these types in their standard armor, weighting by frequency of occurrence (6:1:1, per Vol-2, p. 9), then you get a mean value of AC 4, exactly as shown in the OD&D monster reference table for all giants.

GridMapper v1.0

In the continuing list of things I was wishing for 20 years ago, and am getting a chance to check off now, here's GridMapper: an application for Windows that lets you create old-school dungeon complexes in the quickest possible fashion. Start with a filled-in underground map, and from the first mouse-click you're clearing spaces for dungeon rooms, corridors, etc. Additional options under "Tools" allow you to place doors, stairs, and walls. Save, open, print, resize, and copy your map to other image-manipulation software.

I've been using it for a few weeks now to make my own dungeon maps, and I'm finding that it greatly speeds up my ability to jot down ideas, experiment, erase, and play around with the layout. (Also thanks to Al-Krelaan's excellent HexMapper for some inspiration.)

Now, this is Version 1.0, and frankly it's doing everything I need it to at the moment to increase my productivity (and generally make the job more fun), but conceivably it could take some feature expansions in the future. Here's some initial ideas, and I'll let you tell me which ones sound most appealing:

1. A free-floating toolbar in its own, separate window.
2. Objects such as statues, trapdoors, water, etc.
3. Loading custom icons for the various features.
4. Automated random generation of corridors, rooms, etc.
5. Possibly better error-handling code throughout.

A few things that I would not ever expect to add to this application are: (a) irregular, diagonal, circular, or cavernous rooms and corridors (the program is simply not set up to deal with anything other than single-square elements), nor (b) annotations like text, room key numbers, etc. I think any of those items are best produced by standard image-editing software, and when I want fine-grained details like those I just copy my base map into Photoshop and go at it from there.

Have at it and tell me what you think!

Moorcock and Music

One final thing in what's turned out to be "things related to Michael Moorcock" week". Did you know that he played blues and toured all over Europe as a solo act and with bands? That he corresponded with (and covered) Guthrie and Pete Seeger back in the 50's? That he wrote the novelization to the Sex Pistols' movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle? From an interview at the Zone-sf.com in 2002:

Q: Do you think there was a connection between the social revolution of the 1960s and science fiction and fantasy? Your fiction reflects knowledge of the drugs and party scene at the time - how involved did you get in all that?

Party scene? Sounds strange to me. Didn't do much of that. There were some clubs, but they were mainly full of record business wankers, so I left those for the uni-dropouts like Rosie Boycott who seemed more interested in meeting the stars than working for the revolution.

People of my generation were attracted to SF and rock 'n' roll because they had no standing with any kind of authority - they were well in the margins and so well out of sight. Which meant you could make them your own. Drugs, I suppose, were also a natural part of that from the 1950s onwards. They were simply part of the culture I grew up in. Drugs didn't just suddenly appear in 1965, as it sometimes seems from histories of the times... Ask Charlie Parker.

What happened to rock 'n' roll in Britain also happened to SF. We turned it into something that suited our own voices and concerns. Popular arts had never seemed so good.

Q: Music and SF seem to have changed in similar ways. Do we just look back at the 1960s and 1970s with rose-tinted spectacles, or were those really more exciting times?

We had no borders. We didn't know how far we could go with something until it snapped. We were willing to try new ideas and there was money around to back them. This was before the big companies started applying the lowest common denominator technique to everything, when they didn't know what sold, so they'd back a lot of different kinds of bands. These bands came up on a flood of rage, too - young men who were not being taken on their own terms, at the simplest level, but there was politics and stuff in there, too. Whatever band nowadays admires The Who, they can never capture what The Who had - and that's anger. Anger (frustration, disappointment) also drove the kind of SF that Wells, Huxley, Orwell, Pohl and Kornbluth wrote - anger at social injustice.

In the case of the blues this was exemplified in black musicians, in the case of folk music it was originally inspired by Fenian songs and the like and later what came to be called 'protest'. A few years ago a nice young man came up to me at a funeral. He said he enjoyed my books and it seemed to him the 1960s had been really glamorous. "But my dad says they weren't really like that, they were just the same as any other time."

"That means your dad wasn't there," I said.

Also: If you haven't read James Mal's epitaph for Ronnie James Dio, do so now. And if you're into it, perhaps consider the Facebook group "I Refuse to Admit Dio Died of Cancer, I Believe a Dragon Ate Him."

The Once and Future King

The book that I've read more times than any other in my life is T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's a modernist take on the King Arthur legend (dovetailing from Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur), written 1939-1958. It's drop-dead brilliant.

I first read it, I think, when I was about 8 years old, as my mother had it for a college class she was taking. Later it just happened to be assigned reading in high school when I was around 18 or so. I continued the pattern after that, reading it at least once every 10 years or so. I'm on my 5th reading right now, maybe?

It's not part of the pulp-fantasy canon, and I can't remember it coming up with any of my other gaming buddies in conversation. It's not part of Gygax's Appendix N. Maybe it's not really applicable to D&D much at all (the tragic structure, and the sense of pre-ordained fate playing out, doesn't synch up very well with a tabletop game). Nonetheless, it's shaped a lot of my background expectations for fantasy and mythic imagery.

One of the great things about my relationship with The Once and Future King is that every time I read it, I discover new meaning -- details, references, allusions, themes -- and new depth. Each time I return, there's a new understanding that I simply wasn't ready for at a younger age.

This sort of matches the structure of the book itself, written over a period of about 20 years. The first part, "The Sword in the Stone", telling the story of King Arthur's childhood, is light and airy and frequently comical (to the extent that Disney was comfortable making an animated movie based on it); this part caught most of my attention when I was a child myself. The rest of the book, with Arthur in adulthood, was written after White had seen the effects of World War II on the U.K., and it's darker and more brooding and troubled. There's a lot to the portrayal of Lancelot in "The Ill-Made Knight" that my 18-year-old self was suddenly shocked to recognize very deeply, waiting for me like a secret map in a book that I'd already read.

Some of the wonder of White's work comes from his intimate familiarity with archaic pastimes such as falconry, hunting, and fishing. (Apparently he lived by those means in a cottage for a year or so in the mid-1930's.) Later on, he took up flying, and that experience clearly fertilized some lengthy and beautiful scenes of families of birds flying together across the North Sea. He also spent time translating a medieval bestiary (which I would recommend for some great ideas in spicing up otherwise mundane animals in a D&D game -- available online here), which itself makes an appearance in The Once and Future King, Book 2, as the Sons of Lot prepare to go unicorn-hunting.

The Once and Future King may possibly be the single best book I've ever read. Is it absolutely perfect? No, it's not.

Pre-World War II, White wrote and published "The Sword in the Stone", and I think most critics categorize the work as a comedy, even though there are some heartbreaking scenes contained within it; Arthur receives a magical education from Merlin as best he can manage. After World War II, White started writing and publishing the darker sequels, including a concluding work called "The Book of Merlin", set at the end of Arthur's reign, with one final lesson that had been, perhaps, tragically overlooked.

Now, when the whole work was put together into one book called The Once and Future King, guess what White was unable to resist doing? You guessed it: He went back and rewrote parts of the original book from 20 years earlier. He snipped out a section of a more comical adventure with Merlin's Owl, and dropped in the extended scene intended for "The Book of Merlin" in its place (leaving out the rest of that last book, but including the 4 others that came before it).

Without giving spoilers on it, this cut-and-paste scene is the single awkward blemish on an otherwise ideal piece of literature. When you're reading Part 1, this scene very abruptly interrupts other action, and it has a tone and sensibility clearly different from what's around it. White is even forced to create a Merlin-time-dilation-magic rationalization for this part, because it actually doesn't fit into the story-time allotted to it. Then when you're reading Part 4, it ends on a slightly weird note that feels something else should be coming, but it is indeed the end of the collection. And it's a little hard to see how this all-important, extra-long lesson was rather blithely forgotten by Arthur afterward, in the mid-part of the book. If you get a standalone copy of "The Sword in the Stone", apparently that still gets published in the original format.

You might see the connection with what I wrote on Monday: Things like "Artists' best stuff tends to be their early stuff" (White's most renowned and best-loved work is the lighthearted first part), and "You should read/watch stuff in order of publication" (what I'll call the long-lesson works best at the end of the overall story), and "Business corrupts art" (or whatever reason caused White to not include "The Book of Merlin" in the overall collection). Most importantly in this case: Artists going back and altering old works usually ends in tears. But at least he didn't write a prequel (well... unless you count "The Sword in the Stone" itself as being a prequel to Le Morte d'Arthur).

Oh, and one final thing: Michael Moorcock was deeply influenced by T.H. White and his most famous work, apparently having an ongoing correspondence with him for some time. According to Moorcock:

T.H. White's series had also been very enjoyable and equally tragic. White had given me some very good advice on how to write, as had Peake. White was very kind and, looking back, tolerant with me. [Interview with Zone-sf.com, 2002]