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.

Creatures for The Dig

I said I'd write a dungeon, didn't I?  Maybe this one?  i should probably get started.

Morlock Squealer

These are morlock children.  They are used in wartime as scouts and lookouts.  Despite their youth, they disciplined fighters.  They do not run away out of cowardice; it just makes better tactical sense to run for reinforcements than to tackle a difficult enemy head-on.

SQUEALER
HD 0
AC 12
Shiv +0 (1d6)
Move 12
Save 16+
Morale 5
Special: Morlock, Run Away.

Morlock: Darkvision.  Immune to pain and charm.

Run Away: Squealers make a morale check at the start of a battle.  Whenever a group of squealers fail their morale check, they run for reinforcements.  And since you'll never find squealers without larger morlocks nearby, squealers will almost always find some.

Morlock (Killian)

These are just normal, humanoid morlocks.  They're the result of a few hundred years of selectively breeding humans to serve their centipede overlords.  They are pale, thin, intelligent, and fanatically loyal to their masters.  They wear loinclothes and a lot of elaborate piercings.

MORLOCK
HD 1
AC 12
Spear or Pickaxe +1 (1d8)
Move 12
Save 15+
Morale 9
Special: Morlock, Subtle.

Morlock: Darkvision.  Immune to pain and charm.

Subtle: 3-in-6 chance to surprise.  Can run away without provoking attacks.  Cannot be tracked in caves.

Anomalocaris

An 8' long beast that was the apex predator of its time.  Looks a bit like a killer shrimp.

ANOMALOCARIS
HD 3
AC 17
Bite +3 (1d8 + Grab)
Swim 10 or Fly 10
Save 13+
Morale 10

Anomalocaris will usually attempt to swim away after it has grabbed a target.  Then it just find a secluded part of the cave where it can grind it's prey to death with its circular mouth.  They have an intense love for trilobites and will attack them preferentially, without fail.

Wiwaxia

About 18” in diameter, these spiny animals are just a symmetrical shell atop a slug-like foot.  It's shell is covered with spines, each 9” long and as sharp as a knife.

WIWAXIA
HD 1
AC 16
Throw Spine +1 (1d6, 30' range)
Move 3
Save 18+
Morale 7
Special: Flurry, Blind

Flurry: Wiwaxia can throw 1d4 spines as a single action.  If someone has a shield readied against a particlar wiwaxia, it blocks half of the spines automatically.

Blind: Wiwaxia listens for nearby threats, and then throws spines reflexively.  Their sense of hearing is about as good as a human's, and a character can sneak past by rolling under their Dexterity.

Opabinia

About 2' long, with undulating side paddles, five eyes, and a prehensile jaw (sort of like an elephant trunk with a lobster claw at the end of it).

OPABINIA
HD 1
AC 14
Bite +3 (1d6)
Swim 12 or Fly 12
Save 15+
Morale 8

After an opabinia succeeds on a hit, it will retreat to chew its food.  After 1d6 minutes, the surviving opabinia will regroup and attack again.  However, this requires a morale check, if they've lost a significant chunk of their hunting group.

Hallucigenia

Hallucigenia is small, but aggressive.  It will mince over to other creatures and strive to attack them with its needle-like legs.  It's face is a featureless bulb, with a sphincter-like mouth at the tip.  It is about 6 inches tall.

HALLUCIGENIA
HD 1
AC 11
Spines +1 (1d4)
Move 6
Save 12+
Morale 10
Special: Guilt

Guilt: After killing a hallucigenia, a character is compelled to feel guilty.  If they fail a save, they will avoid all violence for 1d3 turns.  These feelings of guilt will persist until they do something noble (save an innocent, buy their mom some flowers) or wake up after a night of sleeping.  The guilt will return when the character is laying down to fall asleep.  Once asleep, they will dream of a vast plain of stinking mud, like a primordial sea floor exposed to a large, pale sun.  Here, they will do battle with another hallucigenia, using whatever equipment and spells they had available when they fell asleep.

The nightmare hallucigenia is about 15' tall.  It strides atop 8' tall needles in a convulsive undulation.  It's dorsal tubules whip their air.  But worst of all is the head, which has gone from being a featureless white bulb to a crudely human face, with blue eyes and cruel lips.

NIGHTMARE HALLUCIGENIA
HD 3
AC 13
Spines +3 (1d8)
Move 12
Save 12+
Morale 12

The nightmare hallucigenia will pursue the player relentlessly across the mud until it can kill them.  It can be fought, or it can be escaped (requires outrunning it for 8 hours), but it can never be appeased.  If a PC is killed in the dream, they will die in real life.  Their companions will discover their mangled body in the morning, trampled and pierced as if by a dozen spears, their corpse stinking of the sea floor.

Nascent Primordium

A huge mass of flesh and slime, gently sussurating as internal reactions gas off noxious by-products.  It looks threatening, but if it is never attacked, it will never move nor attack.  Unless the PCs go right up to it and jump in, or something.

NASCENT PRIMORDIUM
HD 5
AC 10
Engulf +5 (1d6 acid damage on subsequent turns)
Move 0
Save 11+
Morale 9
Special: Evolve, Regenerate 1 HP/rnd

Evolve: The primordium is always evolving.  Keep track of the last three things that damaged it.  It gains immunity to those damage types (piercing, bludgeoning, slashing, fire, acid, lightning, etc) and gains the ability to duplicate those attacks.  If you shoot it with an arrow it will grow armored plates and shoot spines (mechanically identical to the arrow).  If you slash it with a sword it will grow immensely thick hair and slashing claws.  If you pound it with a hammer it will become obese and grow huge, pounding paws.

Each time it wants to go somewhere but can't get there in one turn, it will gain +3 Movement, Fly, Swim, or Burrow, up to a maximum of 18 Movement. If it is spoken to, it will attempt to respond by growing a face and imitating the sounds.  Talk to it for a few days and  you may even begin to see it develop a simple intelligence.

Basically, it evolves (Lamarckian style) whenever it senses a need, or to imitate something else.  Determine it's behavior according to those two criteria.

It's a bit out of the scope of the average dungeon encounter, but the primordium could honestly go on to become anything.  It's a blank slate.  It could turn into a Tarrasque and the PCs could teach it morality.  It could turn into a super-doppleganger determined to resurrect all extinct species.  (But most likely the PCs will murder it in some fucking cave.)

Trilobite

TRILOBITE
HD 1
AC 17
Bite +1 (1d6 + Disease)
Move 6
Save 15+
Morale 8
Special: Slashing and piercing damage is halved.

Disease: 1d4 Dex.  For every 3 points of Dex you lose, you gain +1 AC.  Unlike other diseases, the damage from this disease is permanent (if untreated).


Rules for Diseases
Once you're infected:

1. Make a Constitution check at the start of every day.
• If you fail it, you take the stat damage indicated.
• If you pass it, you get +1 to all subsequent Con checks against this disease.
• If you pass 2x in a row, you're cured.
• Rest and medical care can give you a bonus on this check.
2. You automatically fail the first day's constitution check--this is sort of represented by the save you made when you first risked contracting the disease.
3. Stat damage recovers at 1 point/day, but only after you're cured.

The Perils of Synergy

This post is about game design.

When you are designing a ruleset, or some homebrew stuff for an established ruleset, you should consider how much synergy you want in your game.

Let's define synergy.

Let's say that we are designing 3rd edition DnD.  Everyone knows that elves are smart, and orcs are dumb.  So we give them some racial modifiers like this:

Elf: +2 Int (plus other stuff)

Orc: -2 Int (plus other stuff)

That's a kind of simulationism.  We want to simulate a world where elves are smart by giving them a +2 bonus to Int whenever they're rolled up.

So we've just made a strong piece of synergy between elves and wizards.  And you may be nodding, because your world is full of elvish wizards (and no orc wizards) and that Feels Right to you.  It matches your internal expectations of what a fantasy world is like.

But by promoting synergy, you've actually stomped down on player choices by making players choose between Character Concept and Combat Efficiency.

No one wants to suck at their job.  So when a player thinks, "I want to play a wizard, I wonder what race I should be?", they'll be attracted to elves.  And if they've decided to be an elf, they'll be attracted to being a wizard.  So there is a high correlation between elves wizards and elves, because you (the game designer) have chosen to reward it.  Via synergy.

And so there are lots of elven wizards and half-orc barbarians.  And while this is great for conforming to tropes, it's not great for diversity.  7 races x 11 classes could be 77 combinations, all equally likely.  But instead we get a level of diversity that's more like 20 combinations plus outliers.  

Consider instead, a system with 0 synergy.  That is to say, that no part of the character sheet touches any other.  Strength doesn't influence your Climbing skill, race doesn't influence your stats.  In this case, you really would get a greater diversity in your characters.

Simulationism

The big reason to give elves +2 Int is in the interests of simulationism.  We want the rules to reflect the expectations of a world where elves are smart.

But here's my food for thought.  Simulationism doesn't have to extend to character creation.  You can have a world where elves are smarter than humans, and all NPC elves have 15-18 Intelligence.  That doesn't ruin the fiction of your game world.

You can remove synergy from your character creation if you want.  Players will still be attracted to elvish wizards and orcish barbarians (because they're awesome), but they are not restricted to them when designing a character.

This degree of simulationism extends throughout all elements of character design.  Sometimes this is good and necessary.  Like, do you want wizards to be as capable as fighters?  People have expectations.  Perhaps they expect orcs to make superior barbarians than elves.

But on the other hand, the 0 synergy system gives the maximum amount of player freedom when they are designing their character.  I'm sure there are some characters that would love to be an elvish barbarian, all blood painted and killing wolves with a broken rapier.

Anyway, just a thought.