Monsters of the Great Rot

Yesterday I wrote about the Great Rot.  I've already written about the ubiquity of oozes there, so this is where I'll detail some of the other unique fauna.

The Smell

The Great Rot stinks more than you can believe.  This is because it's literally 24,000 square miles of constantly decaying biomass.

First time visitors usually spend their first couple of days throwing up.  Use Con checks to see how fast the PCs acclimate, and how fast their penalties recede.  Eventually they'll get used to it, but if they've got two weeks to cross the Great Rot, how many days do they really want to spend in the fort, nursing their stomachs?

Yeasts and other fungi cause a lot of respiratory and skin diseases, but they'll be fine as long as they don't remove their mouth protectors, expose any skin, or submerge themselves in water.

hahaha I could have posted much grosser pictures

Catapult Slime

Instead of dividing when hit by a slashing weapon, this slime is instead capable of throwing half of itself up to 50'.  Since it's aiming by scent and vibrations, it gets -4 to this attack roll.  On a miss, it lands near its target.  On a hit, the target is engulfed.

Faffernacky Pudding

This sedentary slime preys on animals.  It smells supernaturally delicious.  It tastes supernaturally delicious.  And eating it is invariably fatal, much like swallowing green slime.  It looks like molten caramel, and anyone who smells it must make a save to avoid walking over to it and eating it (with some hesitation).  Anyone who is hungry (hasn't eaten today) automatically fails this save.  This is why Rotsmen never skip meals.

It's also an intermittent-but-significant source of income for the Rotsmen, since it is also a delicacy that often graces the tables of the rich.  The trick is to gently boil it, which gently disintegrates the slime but preserves the aroma and flavor.  It tastes fucking delicious.  Anyone who has eaten faffernacky pudding and survived must make a save or become obsessed with tasting it again.  They'll do whatever it takes to get more faffernacky pudding in their lives, and only get another save after a week has passed or they've eaten more faffernacky.

And of course, people have died by eating what they thought was boiled faffernacky pudding, either through incompetence or assassination.  But that's only served to make the stuff more popular.

It is rumored that the mischief people, the babarukhs, are immune to acid and slimes, and so serve live faffernacky pudding at their clandestine parties to ensure that everyone present is one of them.  (As a race of shapeshifters, they are understandably paranoid at times.)

this is slime mold
it can solve mazes
sorta

Fyrinxes

Everyone hates a fyrinx.

They look like small lobsters, except that they have long legs that allow them to scuttle and jump and climb and latch onto faces.  They have scorpion tails that contain a poison (save vs. paralysis for 2d6 rounds).  Both genders are bone white.  They are omnivores, but prefer rotted meat.  They usually avoid hunting live game unless they are starving, or they stumble across easy prey.

They're about as intelligent as nine-year-old children, except without any of the playfulness.  They can speak to each other in a language of chitters, but cannot make themselves understood to humans.  Combined with a penchant for eavesdropping, their linguistic abilities allow them to understand--but not speak--the common human tongue.  No mere vermin, this one!

Fyrinxes are always found in mated pairs.  They form these pairs even before they are sexually mature, so the lovebirds usually grow up together.  They are loyal, and would each sacrifice itself for the sake of the other.  Poets would compare their love to the love of fyrinxes, if the latter weren't abominable little spider-lobster-scorpion monsters.

So unless adventurers mess with their cozy, mailbox-sized lairs, fyrinxes are content to avoid adventurers altogether.  This changes when the loving couple decides to have babies.

The male fyrinx will sting a large animal (halfling-sized or larger), and while it is paralyzed, the female will crawl down its throat.  The pregnant mother will settle down in the stomach, and begin the feng shui required to turn it into a nursery.  She will birth one baby a day for the next 2d20 days.  Each live-born baby will exit via the anus and scuttle to safety, all while making "safety peeps" to let mama know that everything is alright.

Because here is the trick of the fyrinx mother: she puts her ear right up to the bellybutton, so that she can hear everything that is going on outside (and remember that she can understand words just fine).  Then she wraps her barbed tail around a tender organ (liver, heart).  Whenever something happens that she doesn't like, she stabs the offender's organ.  Organ stabbing deals between 1 and 3d6 Con damage (the lady picks) and she is fast enough to do it as a reaction (since she is just sitting there with her hand on the trigger).  The pain is enough to incapacitate a grown barbarian, although they can do simple things (pull a lever, drink a potion) if they make a Cha check.

Things mother fyrinxes hate:

• Sounds of her mate or children being killed.
• Attempts to remove her from her stomach nursury.
• Insufficient flow of food into the stomach nursury.
• Other stuff, like off-key singing and bad puns.

Food is an important one.  The babies that the mother births are huge, ideally about 1/3 of the mother's full length.  This requires a constant and intense flow of food.  She usually lets her displeasure be known after a meal.  A person eats a dinner (which she then eats) and afterwards she throttles their liver to let them know HEY that wasn't enough.  Keep feeding me.  She's only satisfied once the person has eaten 5x the normal amount of rations.  (In case you haven't noticed, the proper food management and preparation is one of themes of this place.)  In the middle of this shared pregnancy, the landlord can have a distended belly, which looks almost exactly like a normal pregnancy.  

She can express her displeasure via pain, which can range anywhere from a -1 penalty to all actions, to a -4 penalty, to a -whatever because she can just squeeze as hard as she wants, even enough to shred a grown man's heart.

At the end of the pregnancy, she'll paralyze her host with a sting, crawl out of the mouth, and rejoin her husband, who has missed her very much. 

The male usually follows his wife around, just to make sure that she's okay.  He'll stay out of sight for the most part, trying to be stealthy (and they are quite stealthy).  His job is to collect the babies and keep them somewhere safe.  

Could a resourceful party capture the father and use him to hostage his wife out of her cozy home?  Yeah, probably.  Can a baby survive on its own if the father isn't there to gather them?  Yeah, probably.  Could fyrinxes form a society where they enslave humans?  Not normally, since mated pairs don't get along very well with other mated pairs.  Could the PCs befriend a mated pair and have some sweet monster hirelings?  Yeah, probably.

Fyrinxes are 2 HD monsters with a very good AC (tough shell + small size+ agility).  They have 4 special abilities.  Leap!  Paralyzing Sting!  Acid immunity!  And the whole crawl-down-the-throat-business!

Sludge Vampires

Here.

Fungal Giants and Moss Men

Here.

Tubular Peacocks

Here.

Fungal Demons (Fungal Angels)

These are weird motherfuckers that are, blessedly rare.  No one is sure which part of the ecology they fit into, since they don't behave like either wild animals or civilized ones.  Most people assume that they're demons or angels or nature spirits, or at least servants of those things.  

Digression about the setting: Demons, angels, and spirits only differ in their role, not in their essence.  Like a murderer, a policeman, and a baker, respectively.  Once you strip away their costume and motivations, they're all the same underneath.

Fungal angels tend to be humanoid-sized and humanoid-shaped, but it's a pretty broad bell curve.  Roll 2d6-3 to see how many limbs they have, and roll something similar to figure out their size.  They fly magically, without wings.  They are mottled, bulbous, suppurating masses, topped with a fungal bloom that doesn't even approximate a head.

They despise symmetry, and seek to destroy it whenever they find it.  They leave vast swathes of destruction through the Rot, where they have been "sculpting" giant mushrooms into more pleasing examples of asymmetry.  This appears to be their only motivation.  

They attack with 20' whip tendrils that can disembowel a man with a single stroke, but have a hell of a time getting through armor.  (Two attacks per round for 1d8 damage each.  They get +4 to hit with each because they are like ninjas trained by a ninjas trained by a cat.  However, the damage is reduced by an amount equal to the armor bonus, so if a paladin is wearing plate that gives +6 AC, the lash damage is 1d8-6.)

They can also breathe out clouds of decay that rot any flesh that they come into contact with.  (Treat this as cloudkill, but only if it is inhaled.  People who hold their breath will do fine.  Rotsmen helmets give a bonus to this.  It also does some passive rot damage each turn, as the PC's skin will turn wet, black, and begin to slough off.)

They can cast a few druid spells, too, but really they prefer lashing the limbs off unarmored foes, and rotting their face into something less symmetric.

The Dweller-in-Soil

This is an enormous network of mushrooms, connected by a vast network of underground mycelium.  It covers the entire central area of the Great Rot.  Ten thousand miles of creeping tendrils below and above ground (where they look like black shoestrings, rooted to the mulch).  He hear out of little clusters of pale mushrooms, which look quite innocent at first glance.  If he wants a better look, he'll grow an eyeball on a stalk, and use that to get a better look.

While the Rotsmen act in the interest of civilization and the October King acts against them, the Dweller-in-Soil is a third, more neutral party.  The Dweller-in-Soil is intelligent and has goals of his own.  The Rotsmen suspect this, but so far the Dwell-in-Soil has been content to let them remain ignorant of his presence.

It takes a full day for a thought to get from one side of the Dweller to the other.  He doesn't have myelinated neurons, after all.  His thoughts are conducted along chemical gradients.  And so his "mind" is a slurred, fractured thing.  Memories come slow and irregularly.  Motivations are sometimes obscure, even to the Dweller.  The larger he gets, the stronger the tides of dementia are.  But it is a peaceful and slow madness.  The dweller hesitates when he recognizes irregularities; he doesn't act on them.

The myconoids serve him, although he did not create them.  They came to him from underground.  With their spore-based method of communication, the Dweller struggles to understand his servants.  He has come to the conclusion that they are a divine being, and suspects that they are a hive mind like himself.  He has begun to worship the myconoids, and sees secret intentions in all that they do.  For their part, his myconoid benefactors work in his interests.

The Dweller believes that humans are a hive mind, too.  (And in a way, he's right.)  So, he doesn't feel bad when a single human dies.  Extinction is the only real death, and death is his only real fear.

And it is a logical fear.  Each year the Great Rot shrinks.  The frothy pulse of loam slows, and each generation of spores finds live more difficult than their ancestors.  In decades or in centuries, the Great Rot will have rotted away.

I'm not even going to give stats for the Dweller-in-Soil, because fighting him would be more like fighting a kudzu infection.

Goals

The Rotsmen want to do their job.  This means keeping the roads open and the Great Rot contained.  Although, in their own way, they'd be sad if the Great Rot disappeared, since this is the first place where most of them have found noble careers, recognition, and a institution where they felt they belonged.  However, there are elements within the Rotsmen that hate the Rot, and want to see the whole damn thing burned to the ground.  This is certainly the opinion of their patron state, Asria, who has to pay for all this shit.

The Dweller-in-Soil wants life.  It wants to continue living.  It wants to see the Great Rot continue, or expend, or at least not wither away to nothing.  It wants its god, the Myconoids, to be pleased with its service, and thinks that this is what is desired.  It is afraid of death, even though it feeds on it.

The October King and the Druids of Decay are the last remnants of Roa Junyo, the gang of druids (and dragons) who tried to destroy all civilization.  And although most of these druids aren't even human any more (reincarnation gets messy, sometimes), they haven't given up on their original goal.  Their intermediate plan is to reincarnate Aglabendis, probably as a giant mushroom this time.  (See also, +Matt Finch's excellent Demonspore).  This would have the effect of sucking the magic back out of the surrounding countryside, and destroying the wilderness of the Great Rot.

these are polypores

The October King and the Druids of Decay

Y'know, there's already enough stuff swirling around in my head for these guys that I should probably give them their own post.  If this ever becomes a hex crawl, they'll be the obvious probably-bad-guys faction.

Notes:

Scarecrows.  Scythes.

Every druid is different.

What would a human spore do?

+Scrap Princess's symbiotic, fungal armor.

Crown of Rot.

Swarms of dead leaves, hungry and grasping.

Rib cages filled with rot and dead leaves.

Weevils.  Borers.  Fattened on divinity.

A vast black ocean of ooze, transport.

Sludge dragon.

Wet bark, teeming with insect life, like a subway station.

They live inside the Stump, which is all that remains of the great tree.  It's about a quarter mile in height (400 M) and the same in diameter.  Water constantly flows from cracks in its wet, black bark, and the surface is studded with gargantuan polypores.  Clouds of flies surround it, and you'll hear it before you see it.

these are also polypores

New Biome: The Great Rot

Not just a giant mushroom forest but possibly just a giant mushroom forest.

So this one time, a bunch of druids decided to save the world by destroying it, and so they grew a giant tree that would pulverize all the cities of the world between its roots.  It would take a hundred years--it almost lasted a hundred years--but in the end, even the god-tree, Aglabendis, fell.

Aglabendis was over a mile tall.  It's bark was thicker than city blocks.  It's leaves never turned brown or fell.  Instead, a constant rain of petals fell, tumbling from the billions of flowers that covered it.  Each flower was unique, like a snowflake.  Aglabendis produced all possible flowers because it was all possible trees.

It was not a tree of wood and sap.  While your axe could bite into its grain, and your fingers become sticky from its sap, the deity was not composed of these things, in the same way that a human is not composed of their clothing.  The poet Uman ko Ayam claimed that "all we perceive is paint upon the veil, when the Immortal is merely air and scent".

It was a god.  Not because it was worshiped (it wasn't) or that it granted prayers (it didn't).  It lacked an agenda.  It even lacked anything we'd recognize as a mind.  It was a god because it was a piece of a higher reality.  It was a thousand times more real than the world around it.  If the world was a book printed on rice paper, Aglabendis was an iron spike that nailed it to the table.

So it was all the more surprising when the tree was killed.  Poisoned.  By forces of Civilization.

But the tree couldn't die.  It was, almost literally, a Platonic ideal of Life.  But it couldn't live, either, not with poison filling its phloem.

Removing a god of Life by killing it is a bit like removing a water fountain by drinking from it.  It's possible, but you need to empty the reservoir that the fountain is connected to.  This isn't to say that there are any parts of Aglabendis that are extra-dimensional (none are), simply that its definition was too big for our world.  That's sort of what transcendent means.

When it was alive-alive, it grew constantly and impossibly.  Now that it is dead-alive, things grow upon it, constantly and impossibly.  And this will continue for as long as it takes for the reservoir to run out--sometime between 50 and 500 years, according to scholars.

And so now, the great trunk of Aglabendis rots, but does not vanish.  It is eaten, but it is not consumed.  This is the Great Rot, 24,000 square miles of mildewed hills.

this is pretty close to what I imagine
except this picture doesn't look cramped enough
or smelly enough
or like EVERYTHING YOU WALK ON IS ROTTING

The Road

This is not some untamed wilderness.  55 miles of the Rumhoney Road passes through it, itself part of a major trade route.  Asria maintains a fort on the northern boundary, and claims the whole Rot as part of its domain (a completely pointless and untested claim).  And the client-state of Truaga maintains a much smaller fort at the southern boundary.  The Rumhoney Road runs along the eastern boundary, along the shores of the Saltsea, while squinty-eyed mountains mark the western boundary.

The road has wardens who maintain it, drawn from Asria's exiles, criminals, and lepers.  The Rotsmen, as the wardens have come to be called, are a severe, penitent group.  The work is dangerous and brutal, and any recruit who does not adopt a strict code of honor and brotherhood is quickly swallowed up by the hills.  As a result, the leprous Rotsmen behave with nobility, professionalism, and loyalty.  (Except for the newest class.  But they'll be dead soon.)

The Rotsmen wear leather armor and blue-painted horsehide capes.  Their headpieces look like the plague doctor masks, except that their masks are actually quite functional: the nose of the bird mask is filled with rose petals and other sweet stuff.  In addition to smelling super bad all of the time, the Great Rot will also give you lots of skin and respiratory diseases.

Also, a few of the Rotsmen elite wear metal armor, so I suppose their bird masks would be shiny bird helmets, yeah?

The Rotsmen work to keep the road open.  The obvious problem is that the Great Rot grows too damn fast.  10' tall mushrooms sprout, grow, and die all in the space of a month.  Any path that is cleared is overgrown in less than a day.

So the road is not a road.  It's a series of (12' tall) posts that run along the hilltops and ridges.  They have long top-beams pointing to the next post in the series.  Usually the next hilltop post is visible enough to keep navigation simple, but if posts all eventually become overgrown and must be replaced.  And of course, when the fungi are sporulating, you might as well be in a thick fog.

The posts nearer to the border forts have been replaced with metal, which is much more durable.  But iron is extremely expensive, while labor is cheap.  So not may posts, not many at all.

The pointing top-beams of the posts so long that they resemble gallows.  (They were made this long so that they would remain recognizable, even when they were covered with fungi 2' thick.)  And that's what the Rotsmen call them.  "There are 122 gallows along the road," a Rotsman might say, "and I love each one more than the last."

yeah!

The Root Tunnels

There is an alternative to Rumhoney Road.  You could always go underground.

When Aglabendis was trying to turn the cities into gravel, it sent out its roots throughout the world.  Each root was wide enough for a grizzly bear to travel through it.  (This is how a stationary tree conducts ambushes.)  Those root tunnels persist, and the Rotsmen sometimes travel through them.

Compared to the above-ground, the root tunnels are somewhat safer.  Or at least, they are more consistent, compared to the strange seasons of the mushrooms, or the pulses of rot that sweep the bacterial prairies.

It is sometimes difficult to find the entrance to the root tunnels, even for experienced Rotsmen.  And it is easy to get lost once you are within them.  There's a lot of terrible things down there--the ruins of the druids' machinations, unquiet hives, jelly nests, rooms that are filled with 4' of maggots, and all sorts of restless spirits.

Oozes

From border to border, the Great Rot is filled with oozes.  There are far too many to kill.  Rotsmen often joke that as soon as you leave one behind you'll come across another.  It is absolutely true.  Oozes, jellies, and slimes of all kind thrive within the Great Rot.  On days when the visibility is good, a traveler can stand on a hilltop and see dozens or hundreds of glistening gobs of color, squirming down below them, like watching traffic lights change from your hotel room balcony.

Surviving in this land of oozes depends on (a) not attracting their attention, and (b) not lingering in one place once you have it.  Since oozes are attracted by smells and vibrations, travelers are advised to carry as few rations as possible and walk lightly.  Rotsmen are experienced with oozes, and can confidently walk past them, just outside of pseudopod range.  Or at least they can when an ooze is busy eating a mushroom instead of just drying itself out atop of one (and it takes years of practice to tell the difference).

Mechanically: the more food you're carrying, the more random ooze encounters you're going to have.  The faster you travel, the more random ooze encounters you're going to have.  Horses are fast, but risky--the hooves will attract all the nearby oozes, but the horse goes much too fast for them to catch.  Of course, the horse will tire eventually, and that's the tricky part.

Resting within the Great Rot is usually accomplished by either (a) finding a safe spot in one of the root tunnels, or (b) camping out atop a large, gilled mushroom.  It is important that the mushroom is sporulating, since if the gills are closed, oozes will be able to access the top of the mushroom.  And since sporulation is sporadic, there are times when it is near impossible to find a suitable giant mushroom.  Ziplines are sometimes sacrificed to make a quick exit from a mushroom cap, since slimes sometimes gather beneath the mushroom at night.  (It's also a good idea to hang your rations from a separate mushroom.)

Although the Great Rot is immune to forest fires, it is vulnerable to slime waves.

Things That Aren't Oozes

Well, there's at least one ghost of a dragon somewhere around here.  There's also poison dryads (victims of the same poison that killed Aglabendis) and the Suppurations, which are pits in the ground where oozes behave weirdly under the influence of red gems.

There's the obvious stuff like giant rats, otyughs, and persuadable maggots (see: Book of Mice, pg 16).

Unquiet hives build themselves up, like vast termite mounds.  Hundreds of insect-sized holes are visible on them, and they are filled with buzzing--but there are no insects.  Looking directly at a hive gives people a sensation that ants are crawling on their skin, even though no ants are there.

Fungal angels wander the land, to whom symmetry is abhorrent.  They will undo symmetry wherever they find it.

Shaggy mycotheriums plod across the landscape like rhinoceruses.  They know no fear and will examine travelers by smell and by using their mouth-tentacles to palpate them.  Although they will eat rations, they have no interest in eating live creatures.  However, corporeal undead will be quickly pursued and snapped up, like a candy.

Lastly, there is the October King.  This is either a popular boogieman among the Rotsman, or some great opponent buried deep in the wilder parts of the Great Rot.  Rotsmen who have travelled into the foothills of the mountains, where the actual stump of Aglabendis still stands report seeing extremely strange things.

Most feared among the Rotsmen are the dead hands of the October King, which are vast swarms of dead leaves that move as fast as wind, slip under door cracks, and kill their prey through suffocation or millions of small scratches.

this is fungus
specifically, rotting wood
perfect

Definition of RPG, Mechanically Encouraging Roleplaying, and Types of Player Skill

A bunch of people are talking about a thing that +John Wick wrote called Chess is not an RPG.  People have been talking about it.

So here's my thoughts on the matter, specifically on the part of what makes and doesn't make an RPG.

Then I ramble.

In Which I Quibble About a Definition

Roleplaying is when actors in a game assume roles (knight) and motivations (protect the king) within a certain context (a battlefield).  (The stuff in parenthesis can, so far, be applied to both chess and a story game.)  The moment when a game becomes a roleplaying game is when choices (and player fun) starts to come from the established motivations (or story) of the game's actors, instead of from mechanical considerations.

You'll notice that this is a definition based on player motivations, and not on the game's rules.  I am going to argue that what definese a "roleplaying game" is a result of gameplay, not of game design.

Chess can be a roleplaying game.  If both players consent to play chess as a role-playing game, they can damn well play it as a roleplaying game.  The black rook could court the white bishop, a pawn could agree to allow a knight past his defenses in exchange for surviving the war, etc.  None of this requires any changes to the rules, it just requires the two players to agree that the fun comes from roleplaying, not from strictly pursuing a mechanical victory condition, then they are now playing the game as a roleplaying game.

Storygames can also be stripped, and can be played as if they weren't roleplaying games.  Take a group of the most cliched, powergaming munchkins you can imagine and drop them into a storygame.  They are only here to kill the evil wizard and rescue the princess.  Everything else is just symbols for them to manipulate.  A munchkin might (briefly) talk to the NPC king about nobility and romantic love, but only if they think that'll give them access to their next goal.  Concepts like "nobility" and "romantic love" are just symbols that interact in a certain way, like choosing cards in Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity.

Another way to think about How to Take Roleplaying Out of a Roleplaying Game: Could a computer be taught to play it?  If we built a AI ("Deep Blue Book") to play a roleplaying game, could it take part of some activities that look like roleplaying, while strictly maneuvering for a campaign's final victory condition?  If it was 5e, the AI's character could have the flaw "rude to servants", and so whenever the DM mentions that there is a butler, maid, or linkboy nearby, the AI's character will say something rude to the servant.  It looks like roleplaying, but it's a mechanical calculated action.  There is no "role" there--it's just an internally meaningless manipulation of a symbol.  The AI's flaw could be "spouts prime numbers when HP = a member of the Fibonacci series" and the AI wouldn't care.  And if the goal-focused AI was playing with other goal-focused AIs, then the other players wouldn't care either.

Roleplaying among players comes about by agreement, moreso than rule design.

Yes, yes, of course some games are much better for roleplaying that others, according to how they are designed.  But if you can roleplay chess and powergame through Lady Blackbird, it's clear that we're talking about a gradient that depends on how much the players want to roleplay.  Actually, it's more complex than a simple gradient, since different players will react differently to different incentives to roleplaying.

Chess is tough to roleplay.  All chess brings to the table is a bunch of agents (the nouns that verb with intention) with evocative labels like "knight" and "queen", but everything else needs to be supplied by the players.  Checkers would be even harder to roleplay.

DnD is easier to roleplay because it gives you more context for the game's agents, so the players have to supply less.  Not only do they have an evocative label like "wizard", but they presumably have a comprehensible context, like "defending a village from miniature dingos" or "shipwrecked on an island".  Best of all, the humans playing the game have an understanding of all the symbols in the game, because the game's symbols mirror our own.  You don't have to explain how the symbol for "fire" interacts with the symbol for "unlit torch" interacts with the symbol for "darkness".

So with a stronger context for the actors and their motivations, you can quickly move onto the fun stuff like moving, talking, discovering, and learning.  Cool.

Encouraging Roleplaying

You can encourage roleplaying by a lack of tactical options, or by mechanically rewarding roleplaying.

Games like FATE or ICONS lack an abundance of crunchy tactical options.  Everything is more free form, so there is less calculation involved when a player decides what to do.  This leaves more room for the player's choices to be based on intuition, theme, or roleplaying concerns.

The opposite of FATE would be a game where each situation, after careful analysis, has one choice that is mechanically superior to all others, e.g. a situation where you'd always want to roll Intimidate instead of Diplomacy, which leaves less room in the decision making process for things like theme and character background.

There has been a trend in games to reward roleplaying with mechanical benefits, like XP, inspiration, hero points, etc.  This is popular because it helps bridge the gap between powergamers (who are here to fuckin' win) and roleplayers (who are here to explore character and story and stuff).  And it helps us, too, the people in the middle who want to both save the princess AND act as in-character as possible while doing it.  It helps pad out the difference between choosing the most mechanically useful option and the most in-character option, by making the most in-character option more mechanically appealing.  (Sometimes, anyway.)  I've seen some GMs only award Inspiration when they chose something that wasn't tactically ideal, and that seems like an appropriate way to use it.

+Jack Mack wrote a pretty good essay about this same thing over here, with a somewhat different conclusion.

But on the other hand, it's possible to extend these rewards to make roleplaying (and by extension, social skills) all about the numbers on your character sheet.  This leads to the rollplaying vs. roleplaying scab that people pick at every once in a while.

If people are only roleplaying because there are mechanical benefits to it, is it still roleplaying?  Well, sometimes.  Some players are doing what they think their character would do, and are enjoying mechanical benefits to that process.  Other players see roleplaying just as another system to be engineered, and so will munchkin their way through every social encounter.

One of the reason that munchkins get so much hate is because they're interested in victory.  It's like a chess game, where Black is interested in roleplaying and White is interested in victory.  White will win every time, and be confused/angry as to why Black played so poorly.  Black will be confused/angry as to why White kept shitting all over the story, because chess isn't about winning--it's about telling a story.

I'm not going to anything beyond that, but I just want to say that roleplaying tends to come out in social interaction, not during combat.  A prince and a dirty bandit might both fight with the same type of swords in the same type of way, and no one cares about that.  But we expect them to behave very differently in social situations, which is why any social mechanics need to be considered very carefully.

"Martial Artists Shouldn't Get a Bonus to Combat, so Why Should Articulate Players Get a Bonus to Roleplaying?"

Here's what I tell new players before I DM for them.

I don't care if you do funny voices.  I don't care if you went to acting school.  I don't care if you give hilarious speeches.  Those things are all awesome and make the game more fun, but they won't help you when you're trying to seduce a dragon.

All I care about is (a) what your character is saying, and (b) how they are saying it.  You can say: "I flatter the dragon and then ask the dragon if has a mate" OR you can say "Glorious exemplar of dragon-kind, your cavern is truly magnificent and more splendid than any mortal king's throne room, and yet your greatness exceeds even it!  This humble human cannot help but wonder if this is the chamber of you and your mate, or yourself alone?"

To me as the GM, both of these approaches will be handled identically.  I figure out if the dragon responds well to flattery and how it feels about being asked about its romantic situation.  Usually I have notes that make this less of a "DM whimsy" and more of a "deterministic result of a previously-established facts".  Then, based on that result, I will decide if the question automatically succeeds, automatically fails, or requires a Charisma roll (with or without a modifier).

I run social encounters this way because I believe that social skills are one of the things that DnD should test (which are distinct from acting ability).  Empathy; recognizing pride, fear, and love in other creatures; learning how to exploit those emotions; figuring out when to be humble and when to be ostentatious; etc.

I also think DnD should test creativity by challenging players to solve problems with no obvious solution (i.e. good ol'-fashioned combat).  I also think that DnD should challenge people's knowledge of the real world, but only a little bit.  Like knowing that lamp oil floats and is flammable.  I also think that DnD should challenge mechanical analysis of the situation; this involves math and tactics, and includes (but is not limited to) good ol'-fashioned combat.  There's lots of ways that player skills can be expressed in a game.

Player Skills

Where does player skill come from in a roleplaying game? (Skill as that stuff that leads to victory/goals, as opposed to the stuff that leads to fun.  Sometimes throwing a pie at the king is hella fun, but it rarely leads to victory.)

• Book knowledge of the rules? (e.g. knowing that flesh golems aren't undead, or that you get -4 to hit if prone)
• Real world knowledge? (e.g. lamp oil floats and is flammable)
• Mechanical analysis of the situation (i.e. stuff a chess computer could do)?
• Creativity? (i.e. thinking outside of character sheets and explicit mechanics?)
• Social skills (e.g. learning motives, interpreting social cues)?

You'll notice that roleplaying isn't on the list.  This is because it's usually something that a player does for fun (not related to victory) or it's mechanically rewarded, and therefore part of the mechanical analysis bit.  (Social skills are only part of roleplaying.  A paladin choosing to abandon his god can be done for roleplaying reasons, but doesn't involve any talking.)

I'll be the first to admit that there is some overlap here between the last three things.  Calculating the damage that burning oil would do to friends/foes and the subsequent chance of death is mechanical analysis.  Thinking to go back for a barrel of oil is creativity, since the player is thinking outside of the character sheet.  And getting the oil imp to give you his barrel quickly is roleplaying, since it depends on talking and understanding the imp's motivations and fears.

Anyway, different games and different DMs will reward/test different skills differently.  I don't actually want to analyse this stuff (I want to go eat lunch), so I'll just leave it at that.

A FUN Question For DMs

If you think about DMing as giving a test, what skills would you be grading your players on?

Here's my answer.

Book Knowledge: 0% of the test.
Real World: 10%
Mechanical Analysis: 30%
Creativity: 30%
Social Skills: 30%

The 0% book knowledge is probably the iffiest one.  Can I really say that the PCs who've read the book ten times have no advantage over the ones who have never read it?  Maybe.  Maaaybe.  It's a goal of mine, anyway.

Mismera Monsters

False Stars (a.k.a. Dire Wisps) are extensions of the aurora, possibly animated by spirits/demons/angels.  They range in appearance from glowing balls to pulsing columns, like a mile-long esophagus built from atmospheric incandescence.  They haunt the tops of polar mountains, appearing when the aurora is especially active.

FALSE STAR
HD 3
AC 0
Attacks: Pulse, Abduct
Move * (they're in the sky and a mile in diameter)
Save 14+
Morale 10
Special: Immune to pretty much everything except for lightning/light/magnetic damage and effects.

Pulse: Treat this is a gaze attack (and remember that a hungry star is a mile in diameter).  Targets looking at the hungry star take 2d6 damage (save for half).  If a creature is brought to 0 HP by this attack, they are turned into tightly-packed white ash.  Despite being boiling hot and fragile enough to scrape away with a fingernail, this condition is otherwise exactly like petrification.  The hungry star uses this attack to pacify large groups, or in self-defense.

Abduct: A target who fails their save is lifted off the ground, like antigravity or a tractor beam.  They rise 1d6x10' per round.  A target who is lifted ~350' or more is entirely consumed by light.  Hungry stars use this ability to feed.  They are capable of lifting a target halfway, using the Pulse attack a few times, and then resuming the Abduction.  Target's who are killed by abduction will appear in other people's dreams 1d3-1 times after their deaths, often imparting some wisdom.  (In metagame terms, take the dead player aside, let them ask the DM 1d3-1 questions about the campaign, and then let them relate that over the next couple of in-game nights via dreams.)

A target who is lifted but not devoured will return to earth with vast insight concerning the local geography and electromagnetic fields of the planet.  This latter effect has no major effect except allowing them to predict the weather perfectly for the next week or so.  Local shaman use a system of cables and unpaid interns to survive "half-abductions"

Polar Nightingales are a species of large, predatory parrots.  They fill the same ecological niche as eagles and falcons.  Their elaborate calls function as both a courtship call, but also also help a mated pair of nightingales coordinate their hunting, which they do in tandem.  Langan warriors often whistle songs when charging into battle, in imitation of the ferocity and musicality of the nightingale.  An adult bird is worth 100 silver, while eggs are worth about 10 silver.

Stats as eagles.

Siege Monkeys can be found in the lowlands of Langa.  Picture a shaggy stegosaurus that has been cleverly disguised to look like a monkey.  They have a gripping "hand" at the end of their tails instead of a quartet of spikes.  Famously, they can use their tails to throw stones, as well as to bash things.  On their backs is a high hump of fat, sort of like a camel.  They can be tamed, and are frequently driven up into mismeras where they are used to safely harvest lightning stones.  These brutish animals require lots of attention, and unless they are socialized everyday (either by other siege lizards or by extensive grooming and talking), they are prone to dying of loneliness.

SIEGE MONKEY
HD 6
AC 14 (16, if covered in barding)
Attacks: Bite, tail club, or throw rock
  Bite +6 (1d8+2)
  Tail Club +4 (2d8)
  Throw Rock +4 (2d8, 200' range)
Move 9
Morale 8
Save 11+

Love Ghouls (a.k.a. Grateful Undead) are formed by the intersection of charm of necromantic magics, when an obsession persists into undeath.  It is a jealous love, and love ghouls will sacrifice everything for the object of their affection, while never permitting any other person to enjoy it.

Stats as ghouls, with the following exceptions.  Love ghouls can be brought to 1 HP, but cannot be killed, except by either (a) magic, or (b) the destruction of whatever it is that they care about.  Love ghouls are cunning and their undead nature is not always obvious.  They may try to warn or trick people away from their precious, while keeping at a distance so their rot cannot be scented.

They may be in love with a person.  If that person is killed (or at least, seemingly killed) they will lose the will to live (?) and can be killed.  If they are in love with an area (e.g. a mismera), they you may need to topple a tafulum in order to finish them for good.  Or at least trap them under an ice fall or something.

Hum-Sloths also frequent the mismeras, where they eat the crystalline saprophytes from the sides of tafula.  They are territorial and travel in families of 1d6+2.

HUM-SLOTH
HD 2
AC 13
Claws +0/+0 (1d6/1d6)
Move 9, Climb 6
Save 15+
Morale 7
Special: Hum

Hum: In combat, about half of the sloths will just sit down, close their eyes, and hum.  This humming has one effect.  Every moving creature in 100' takes 1 damage for every 10' that it travels.  This stacks, so 3 humming sloths deal 3 damage per 10' traveled.  Sloths are immune to this effect, and enjoy outrunning their normally quicker opponents.

The effect actually immobilizes small chunks of creatures, as if on a tiny, psychic fish hook suspended in the air.  If a person insisted on running through a group of hum-sloths, they could look backwards and see little bits of themselves suspended in the air like popcorn on a string.

Crystal Treants are a bit like normal treants, except that their crystalline surface lets them beams of light.  These beams have a range of 200', deal 8d6 fire damage during the day.  At night they deal 1d6 fire damage +1d6 for each nearby light source.  They move slower than normal treants, and locals have all sorts of methods of eluding or neutralizing them, usually involving darkness or smoke.

Dvanga Biters are foot-long insects that hunt in packs of 2d4, like a wolf pack that has been reincarnated into grasshoppers.  They live in the nooks and crannies of a mismera.  The most interesting thing about them in their behavior.  When they encounter prey larger than them, they do not attack immediately.  Instead, they hide, and stalk the prey, preferring to attack as soon as the prey is disadvantaged or alone.

Metagaming: when you roll an encounter with dvanga biters, the insects will hide.  They'll follow the PCs (you should probably give them a chance to notice that a bunch of giant, albino grasshoppers are stalking them).  Then, as soon as the PCs enter into combat with other opponents, or if a PC is ever alone, the biters will attack.  Either way, they are quick to flee, but might (50% chance) resume stalking their prey even after suffering losses.

A tremendous amount of local mythology surrounds dvanga biters.  Most people claim that they have the faces and beards of old men, will refuse to bite a righteous person, and other such nonsense.

DVANGA BITER
HD 1
AC 13
Bite +1 (1d6)
Move 9, Fly 15
Save 19+
Morale 4

Rival Adventuring Parties are not uncommon.

Environmental details (hot mismera):

• Gurgle of running water.
• Songs of hunting nightingales.
• Chirps of insects, clouds of gnats.
• Thermal dissonance when stepping off the frigid ice into the sweltering mismera.
• Crash of lightning.
• Rain-slicked crystals, planar, edged, hexagonal, cuboidal.
• Fast growing epiphytes brushing your face.

Environmental details (cold mismera):

• Crackle of shifting ice, deep underfoot.
• Electric hum above you.
• Soft, pink glow of the crystals.
• Stink of ozone.
• The constant ice- and snow-storms, ice layered upon ice.
• Labyrinthine spirals of darkened crystals, faint lines of metal visible inside.

New Biome: Mismera

So, way down south, in the antarctic extremity of the Centerran continent, you'll find a land called Langa.  Most maps will only list a single city for this place: Ba Dwai La.  (baw dwight-minus-the-t law, accent on all  syllables).  Ba Dwai La is bilocational, since the same city also exists on the moon, and is one of two places on Centerra that have any interaction with lunar cultures, languages, and ethnicities.  

Centerra has invasive species, too, and the Langan peninsula (about 2/3 the area of the Iberian peninsula) is a classic example of what happens when a lunar biome invades a terrerestrial one, and how the two ecosystems have adapted to each other.  This resultant biome is called a mismera.

on this map, mismeras are pink

Biology

At the bottom of a terrestrial food chain are plants, which get their energy from the sun via photosynthesis, and get most of their dry mass from the air via carbon fixation.

At the bottom of a lunar food chain are tafula, which get their energy from atmospheric discharges (lightning) and the ionosphere (the aurora australis).  They get most of their dry mass from the air via carbon fixation, but many tafula also grow silicate exoskeletons.

Consider how a tree is "designed" according to it's needs.  Trees need sunlight, so they grow taller than their competitors.  They need surface area for photosynthesis and gas exchange, so they grow broad leaves.  But they don't want to be blown over by wind, so they grow many small leaves instead of a few big ones, and they keep their smaller limbs springy and flexible.

except crystal

If mismera are analogous to forests, then tafula are the trees.

Tafula need lightning strikes, so they grow on mountaintops.  They remain flexible, since many of them endure high winds, but they build silicate struts at their bases (a bit like flying buttresses) that perform some gas exchange, close to the ground.  Many of them are communal, and will support each other with interlocking branches 20'-50' off the ground.  Although they have branching roots, most of the body is built into a single spire, which reaches as high as it possibly can.

A single lightning strike contains more energy than a single tafulum can collect, so excess energy is shared with friendly neighbors.  Roots are also heavily entangled, as each tafula tries to collect energy from the others.

Tafula have "veins" of superconductive crystals which rapidly become insulators as they heat up, as part of the process that allows them to store electricity.  Alchemists harvest these diamond-shaped collectors to make bottled lightning.  (Harvesting bottling lightning is dangerous, due to the high chance of electrocution.  The usual method involves throwing trunks off cliffs, dropping rocks onto clusters of branches, or bringing a catapult to the mountain top.  The loose shards are then collected.)

this is actually pretty close to what I envision

Tafula forests (mismera) do most of their growing in the summer, when they heat themselves up enough to melt the ice that coats them.  So, mountaintop mismera really have two seasons, hot and cold.

In the cold season, a mismera is a frozen labyrinth of milky, pink, and pale blue crystals filled with buttresses and joints, all nestled under the waving black antenna of the lightning spires.

In the hot season, all of the tafula in a mismera heat up simultaneously, in order to melt the ice that encrusts them and accelerate certain metabolic processes (since tafula do nearly all of their growing during the summer).  The mismera can sometimes get uncomfortably warm, and many of the tafula use different tricks to trap heat, like growing furry "thickets" around their clusters.

A lot of species are communal, like ants or coral.  Different tafula will take up different roles, whether that is storage, support, or lightning collection.  Some species build huge cathedrals around a few spires, built up over hundreds of years.

did I mention that they light up?
they totally light up

Ecology

Because of their slow growth rate and fragility, mismeras are very fragile ecosystems.  Lightning collectors are despised in Ba Dwai La, because of the frequency and severity of their damage.

Different species use different strategies.  Kite-flyers literally fly kites to collect lightning.  Capacitors build up a massive, opposite electrical charge to attract lightning.  Some use multiple flimsy lightning-rods that break often and regrow quickly.  Others build permanent, iron-tipped spears of carbon fiber, which are often made into ceremonial spears.

The animals that live in mismeras aren't lunar--they're terrestrial.  (The air is too thick in Langa for lunar fauna.)  Mostly insects, small mammals, and a bewildering variety of birds.  Nearly all of which spend most of the year hibernating, sleeping through the lighting storms.

And there are plants, too.  Parasitic creepers, insectivores, saprophytes, water-lillies.  (Yes, there are sometimes water-lilies on antarctic mountaintops, but only because a mismera is like a rain forest.)

tangles of roots, buttresses, and connecting branches

There are a lot of storms in Langa.  A huge air current--the strongest in the world--blows hot air in directly from the tropics.  When this hits the Langan mountain ranges, it mixes with the cold air and creates massive storm.  Langa gets as much rain as a tropical rain forest, and for this reason the landscape away from the mismeras is dominated by ice.  Seasonal rivers, glaciers filled with frozen water-lilies, and especially frozen waterfalls.

It's a common joke that no one ever reaches a mismera without climbing up at least one frozen waterfall.

ah, ice-climbing
very safe
so safe
(not safe)

It's another common joke that anyone who wants to explore a mismera is going to spend a lot of time hacking lilies out of glaciers, since that is the most reliable source of food up there.  While there is certainly a lot of life in a mismera, humans cannot digest cellulose nor silicates, which requires bringing plenty of food on your expedition.

Another popular option: dwarves, which can both pull your sled across the tundra and later excavate a lily-mine from the glacier, while the rest of the adventuring party explores the mountaintop.

pictured: frozen waterfall

Lastly, it's a common opinion that mismeras are stunningly beautiful places.  The pastel rock candy of the crystals, the delicate lacework of the silvery veins, the gracile spires of ferruginous lignin, the songs of the antarctic nightingale. . . all combine to create an unrealistic depiction of natural beauty.  A mismera is the crown of a mountain or, some say, all of Centerra.

Lightning storms are frequent and stunning.  And when the auroras themselves reach down and run their fingers through the branches of tafula, grown men have been known to break down and cry tears of joy.  (Treat this as a charm spell.)

behind a frozen waterfall

Culture

It sometimes happens that a visitor to the mismeras become obsessed with the alien beauty of mismeras.  This is common enough in Ba Dwai La that they have a name for it: "lightning-kissed".  These people are despised by the locals, but luckily, the problem usually resolves itself, when the adoring tourist spends too long on the mountain and freezes to death.

Frozen corpses are common enough on the mountain that many of them are known by name.  Every mountain trail has a few frozen corpses, each one a well-known landmark, who has a name and a (probably apocryphal) story about them known to the locals, usually a parable, tragedy, or ghost story.  These corpses are filled with poisonous needles, to prevent cannibalism (and wendigos).

So don't eat any frozen trail-corpses.  Not only will it kill you, but it's also very rude.

The people of Langa and Ba Dwai La are diverse.  When the lunar city of Vah Shembool decided to mirror itself on Langa, they displaced the sparse, nomadic tribes of Nikal people (like Hyperboreans, but black-skinned and who can sometimes recover after freezing to death).  So, people you'll meet in Ba Dwai La:

- Nomadic Nikal, riding mammoths and herding shaggy goats.  Their shaman drink strange liquors and sleep for days, entering through the Dream That Moves Through All Things.  If you piss them off, it's probably never safe to sleep again.

- Urban Nikal from the cities of the Revanwall kings.  They all have blood oaths (each and every one of them has a specific person they're supposed to assassinate, at all times) and mostly hang around Ba Dwai La, drinking too much kelpwine, stealing scrimshaw, and plotting against the gaseous cloud-kings that oppress their people.

- Lunar people (technically, they're Sindrians, but they're different enough that no one associates them with the deviants in Yog nor the weird forest-people in Icewatch, but I've never mentioned any of this on my blog before, so this sentence is really only for my own benefit, I guess).  They sort of look like hermaphroditic humans who continually grow taller throughout their lives (adults range from 4' to 10').  Also, they have shape-shifting hands, like a miniature blob wrapped in skin.  Not that appearances matter, since they almost never leave their houses.  When they travel around town, it's inside hermetically sealed carriages.  When dealing with them, there are two big things that you must know: (1) discussion of money or food is considered obscene, (2) any sort of deal-making or negotiation is probably going to involve sex.  Sindrians are all about sex.  They're like bonobos.

Sidenote: Lunar culture is really weird.  Adventuring on the moon is less about getting eaten by a moon-beast (although that's a risk, too) and more about learning the Byzantine culture before you offend someone powerful enough to have you distilled into your essential oils.

Other sidenote: So all of the default races in Centerra are color-coded mutant humans, because true humans are extinct.  However, you can still find true humans on the moon, where they are kept in ones and twos as celebrated pets, deep in the lunar enclaves.  Humans are like the mascots of the moon.

- Foreigners also come to Ba Dwai La in appreciable numbers.  Easterners come to learn spirituality, others come for the seal trade, others come to plunder the natural resources of the mismeras (which is a source of tension/violence in the community).

holy shit
someone has already drawn an iceberg ship
and it's awesome

Frost giants also used to visit Langa in their enormous iceberg ships.  Then they would sail their iceberg ships up the mountains (long story), harvest a bunch of lightning crystals, and leave.  However, while all the frost giants are dead now (long story), some of their iceberg ships still remain, parks on the mountainside, frozen sails blocking the sun, filled with undead frost giants and plunder from a previous age.

Elves also visit Langa, but they rarely stop in the city of Ba Dwai La.  Instead, they go straight for the mismeras, where they build beautiful towns among the crystals and forbid anyone else from entering the mismera.  They do this because elves love beauty more than anything.  Also they are assholes.

In Ba Dwai La, there is an informal bounty on elf ears.  Each ear is usually enough to buy a few rounds of drinks for you and all of your friends.  However, the elves have a bad habit of bringing multiple high level wizards with them, which makes them difficult to dislodge.  They say it takes a village to kill a wizard.

Langan priests frequently visit the mismeras in order to commune with the sky.  (It is said that the sky lives in Langa--the rest of the world, it merely visits.)  They compete with botanists, wizards from Meltheria, and all the sundry looters who wouldn't hesitate to strip the copper wiring out of a crystal forest.

Valuable things found in mismeras.

- Lightning stones.
- Carbon fiber-stuff.
- Iron and copper.  (Langans don't even mine the stuff--they just cut down a tafulum and smelt it.)
- Mirrors.  (The best mirrors come from Langa.)
- Antarctic nightingales.