The Perfect Languages of Elves

Elven Language

Elves are immortal, genius bourgeoisie with access to staggering amounts of linguistic and historical education.

They also get bored easily.

Because of these two things, True Elves do not bother establishing a fixed language.   Most of the time, when an elf writes something down, he's going to do circuitously.  The actual message will be obscured in substitutions and metaphor.

Why write something simply when you could obscure it?  Everyone you care about (i.e. other elves) are all clever enough to read it.

And so most elven languages aren't languages.  The elf will write their message in whatever language they prefer: dwarvish, orcish, celestial, French.  And then they will encode it with as many references, metaphors, and sly nods as they can.

This makes things fun to read.

Of course, for other species, it makes things nearly impossible to read.  It's a bit like trying to read Shakespeare without a guide, or to understand all the subtleties of Nabokov or Milton without a full education in the literature that those authors reference.

Elves are fond of saying that a human must read a hundred books before they can fully understand a sentence in Elvish.  This is crass arrogance, of course, but it is also true, sadly.  And attempting to learn a highly self-referential language when all the explanations are similarly recursive is a goddamn daunting task.  Without an elf to teach you, it is nearly impossible to learn to read Elvish.  It defies naive translation.

When a human says that they read Elvish, they usually mean "I've spent my entire life reading summaries of famous Elven literature (a corpus of several thousand books, at a minimum) and can translate a page of Elven writing per day as long as the elf that wrote it wasn't too familiar with pre-Hadean poetry."

It's difficult to explain how brilliant elves are compared to us.  They can translate through several levels of languages and metaphor with nauseating ease.  And they can do it while playing an instrument and drinking wine.

Does this (by itself) make them any harder to kill?  Perhaps not, but for many, it is sufficient reason to want to kill them in the first place.

Elven Cipher

Of course, sometimes an elf just needs to write down a message quickly and efficiently.  For this purpose, there are a number of related ciphers that elves use to accomplish this, all of which revolve around the game goal: making the encoded message (and all language is a code) as dense as possible.

Shit, this digression is large enough that it probably deserves it's own heading.

Digression: Information Density of Language

How short can we make a book before we lose any of the meaning?  If we removed the 'e' at the end of every instance of 'language', there wouldn't be any ambiguity.  (Just an annoying misspelling.)  Likewise, we don't lose any meaning to compression if we change all instances of 'you' into 'u'.

What if we replaced each word with a number?  We could have a master dictionary that correlates each word with a number.

Surely that would compress the book even further.  We could use hexidecimal or Base32 for each character, in order to fit the most information into each space.  If we limited ourselves to numbers only, we'd be wasting perfectly good space.

What if we ordered the number-dictionary so that the most common words were given shorter numbers.  Surely, we would save more space if the words 'a' and 'the' were numbers '1' and '2', rather than '382' and '28190'.

We could even have an appendix at the end for common phrases.  After all, 'I think that' is a lot longer than '69402'.

Elven Cipher, Again

And so that's the problem that elven ciphers were created to solve.  Their goal was perfect information density.

It should surprise no one that the elves believe in linguistic superiority.  If there are shitty languages, (and people should have no trouble thinking of things that fail at being effective languages) then it obviously follows that there must be better languages, and even a best language (if not eternally, then at least for a given place and time).  It falls to the elves, then, to develop this piece of perfection in language (as in all things).

And sometimes, you'll find examples of the perfect language: the elven prime cipher.  You may see this language amid the micro-engravings on the diamonds in your staff of the magi, or perhaps visible on the surface of the sun (when viewed through an appropriate telescope).

The prime cipher is a hell of a thing to see.  It's dense the way that a bar code is dense.  Swarms of dots and halfmoons and violin scrolls, all tangled in a thicket of lines of varying thicknesses.

(Digression for the pedants: yes, while something resembling a QR code might be technically more information dense, the human (and elven) brain has an easier time recognizing lines, edges, and simple shapes.  By leveraging the preexisting heuristics of the brain, elven language-architects were able to cram more shapes and lines into smaller spaces without losing any legibility--something that matrix-clouds of binary code cannot do.)

The density possible with the perfect cipher is absolutely incredible.  A cuboid ink-net the size of your thumbnail could hold a sonnet, a trade agreement, or a record of past sexual encounters.

Let us not forget that elves also possess (a) incredible manual precision, and (b) stupendous eyesight.  This is how they manage to make their books so small.  An entire spellbook could be encoded on the surface of an acorn, a haze of lines as fine and as ordered as a fingerprint.  What looks like a single, extremely complex Chinese ideogram could contain detailed invasion plans, something that would take a full page of English to accomplish.

Redundant Calligraphy

But the most perfectly dense language is also going to be the most vulnerable to error and decay.  If you go into the bathroom and see a message on the wall with part of it scribbled out (such as 'FO* * **OD TIME CALL'), you can probably puzzle out what the original message was thanks to context and redundancy.

But in a language optimized for perfect information density, there is no context or redundancy.  It'll all been reduced down to its most minimal form.  Ideally, just a number that references something else.  And if that number is changed by a single digit, then it's entire meaning changes.

And so the elves had to introduce some redundancy into their ciphers, because the most perfect language is not the most robust language.

This took the form of calligraphy.  Lines were extended and merged.  They served the same function as a checksum--the little artistic flourishes that confirmed the reader's interpretation without necessarily yielding any new information themselves.

The rules governing the extension, fusion, and splitting of the calligraphic flourishes are also well-established.  It is possible to extend them indefinitely according to certain rules.

One of the games that Elven children play, when they are first learning to write, is to extend the flourishes beyond a word as far as possible.  Some mixtures of flourishes decay, some stabilize, and some blossom into networks of repeated motives.  And it's tough to tell from the starting conditions what a particular collection of flourishes will do.

For example, if the cipher-word word for "greed" is extended indefinitely, it creates an ever-expanding, non-repeating tree of calligraphic limbs.  (Elf kids think this is poetic.  It becomes eye-rollingly trite by the time they've reached adulthood.)

d14 Trapped Chests

Trapped chests.  A classic feature of the dungeon, and yet one that is often as much fun as spilling a box of cereal.

I'm writing this post under the assumption that you're running an OSR game, and that there is no Perception or Disable Device skill or whatever.  All traps and shit like that is done with the old-fashioned "I like under the rug." "You find a trap door." method.

(Digression: Finding and disabling traps is a goddamn dungeon staple.  It's bread and butter.  And yet Perception + Disable Device is the shittiest fun way to handle it, because you're just throwing those skills at problems like a robot.  It becomes a test of the character sheet, rather than the player.)

First warning: before you start throwing trapped chests at your players, make sure that they know that trapped chests are a possibility in this place.  You can warn implicitly, by throwing some gently-trapped doors at them early on, or showing the corpses of people killed by trapped chests, or explicitly, just by telling them "You heard that dwarves often trapped their funereal chests."

Second warning: no pixel-bitching.  Having players exhaustively search every chest they find is exhausting.  No surprise there.  Make the clues obvious.  Make the solution obvious.  And by obvious clues I mean "give them the information they need easily".  And by obvious solutions I mean "solutions should be apparent that they are solutions."  (Especially with traps, which sometimes carry big costs for failure.)

Shark Fact: traps don't have to be hard.  They don't have to kill players.  They can (and should) but a trapped chest can be an enjoyable experience even if it doesn't fuck people up.  It's okay for a trap to simply be an interesting feature, or an interesting decision.  

1. Skeleton slumped out in the hallway.  Needle sticking out of the keyhole.  Covered with some blackish grease.  (This is poison.)  Chest cannot be opened until the needle is pushed back into the keyhole and the trap reset.  A player with a shield or gauntlet could easily push it back into the keyhole.  The poison needle could also be broken off; this yields a useful poison needle, but makes it awfully hard to unlock the chest (since you have to push the mechanism back into place).

Shark Fact: This first trapped chest is pretty harmless, but it's interesting.  An accurate investigation of it (or a successful Disable Device check) will yield the information about how it works, but the players still have to decide for themselves if they want to break off the needle or push it back in.

2. In a room with a metal floor, a stone plinth holds a copper chest.  The chest is electified, of course.  Just knock it off the plinth with a quarterstaff.  (Live wires run up through the center of the plinth.)

Shark Fact: Chests often contain fragile things like potions, scrolls, and art objects!  Each of these has a 50% chance of breaking if the chest is smashed open or dropped!  Yay!

3. There is a chest on a plinth.  A pressure plate beneath the chest is triggered when the chest is picked up, or if it is lightened.  The trap can be thwarted by putting items in the chest of an equal weight.  Anyone who starts picking up the chest or emptying out its contents will hear the mechanism start to click beneath the chest, and will have a chance to put the put it back down.

Shark Fact: Give your players the benefit of the doubt.  Unless they tell you otherwise, always assume that they are doing it carefully, slowly, and observantly.  (If you are using the old rules where it takes a 10-minute adventuring turn to do anything at all--this is why.)

4. After opening the chest an inch, a tripwire is visible on the inside.  If the chest is opened more than an inch, the wire is tripped and the vial of flesh-eating gas inside the chest is broken.  (This isn't really a trap, it's more like a second treasure.  What's the chest going to contain that's cooler than a pre-made flesh-eating gas bomb?)

Shark Fact: Even though you are giving your players the benefit of the doubt, there's still going to be some idiot who announces "I'm going to open the chest as fast as I can while standing behind it!" or "I'm going to throw it down the stairs!" so don't be too sad; your flesh-eating gas will probably still get to kill someone, even though that isn't its primary purpose.

5. Chest is full of bee golems.  Or just one big bee golem.  It buzzes angrily when you shake the box.  And if you open the chest, you can shut the door in time if you win initiative.

6. Chest is part of a support pillar.  Smashing the chest will collapse the pillar, and bring down the whole ceiling.  Attempting to pick the lock and failing will have the same result.  There's a key later in the dungeon, but players are pretty much guaranteed to be hasty and fuck it up anyway.

7.  Chest is covered in green slime.  Chest is made out of a highly explosive ceramic.  (You might want to preface this one with evidence of exploded chests, or even better small containers made of explosive ceramic.)

8. Chest stinks of chemicals.  It is full of acid.  All of the treasure is metal.

9. Chest is a chest of non-detection.  Always appears empty.  Actually contains gems and shit.  (Alternatively, contains a ghoul assassin taking advantage of the chests effects.)

10. Chest of contrariness.  Chest has a tinted glass window that allows you to see it's contents.  When the chest is open, the contents become locked in a force field.  The chest is solved by just leaving it closed and then reaching through the (now intangible) window.

11. Chest is only visible in a mirror.  To open it, you must insert the key into the keyhole (by watching yourself in the mirror).  The chest is silver and awesome looking.  There is also a fake chest in the room, covered in blood and spikes.  Inserting the key into the false chest causes it to shooting out ninja stars.

12.  Chest is chained to the wall.  Beside the chest is a bloodstained butcher board, complete with a cleaver.  (The chest is actually a mimic.  If you feed it some tasty meat before you approach it, it will let you take items out of it.  It'll probably purr while you do it, too.

13. Wall of gripping metal hands.  Hands will only allow you to take an item if you give them an item of the same time.  For example, they won't release the magic sword until you give them a different sword (of any time).  There is at least one item that is difficult to replace (like what do you have to give them in order for them to release the creepy doll)?

14. Chests with particular opening conditions.  The blue chest covered in painted fish can only be opened underwater.  The chest depicting witches flying over a clock can only be opened at the witching hour (between 3 and 4 am).  The chest covered in painted birds only opens at the touch of a bird.  (You can invent a million of these, I bet.)

Manticores

The Mantigon

The Mantigon was created by Yalys the Enchanter, and it is said that it only became cruel after watching her many deaths.  It is said that the Mantigon was one of her favorite sons.

(Yalys was a sorceress who created a bunch of powerful, unique monsters.  Each one has a different impression of her--one describes her as stern, another as mischievous.  The idea being that a group of determined adventurers can discover the location of Yalys' tomb only by talking to all of her monster-children and figuring out where she went to die her final death.  While this concept is cool, the implementation has, so far, eluded me.)

The Mantigon resembles an enormous old man stretched until he was 30' tall.  His grimacing face sags atop hunched shoulders, and it drags its boneless tail wherever it goes.

For the last few centuries, it has been offering a bounty for the other children of Yalys.  His belly bulges with the weight of its devoured siblings: strong enough to contain them, but not to digest them, as Yalys mastered the creation of immortal beasts early in her career.

The Mantigon lives with his wife, the Dragon Hen, in a stinking cave made all the more wretched by the Mantigon's constant digestive complaints.

Unlike his children, the Mantigon does not eat people.  His guts are full enough.  However, people who annoy him are hurled from the adjacent cliff.  Most people annoy him.

The only conversation he enjoys is slander.  He enjoys hearing horrible gossip.  Betrayals, catifights, scandals.  He cares nothing for truth, only extravagant descriptions of all the goats the the king secretly enjoys fucking.

(Stats as HD 8 giant that can breath stinking cloud every 1d4 rounds.  Non-magical weapons deal half-damage against him and cannot reduce him below 1 HP.  Nothing he eats can harm him.)

He welcomes two types of visitors.  Guests are often invited into his filthy cave to share one of his wife's enormous eggs, cooked over a low fire.

The first type are those who bring him works of art, the more ancient and irreplaceable the better.  He pays for these with gold from dead kingdoms.  Then he smashes the works of art and eats them.  His gums bleed from pottery shards, and leaded paints give him shooting pains behind the eyes, but still he gorges himself on these.

The second type are the bitter old men who wish to become manticores.

trampier, of course

Manticores

A person who wishes to become a manticore must fulfill three criteria.  They must be:

• old
• male
• spiteful

More specifically, the horrible old man must also have a grudge that they want to settle. 

The Mantigon sometimes accepts those who match only two of these criteria, but never less than that.

Perhaps the orphaned Mantigon feels kinship with these fellow embittered souls.  Or it seeks to emulate his departed creatrix.  Or perhaps it's just a colossal dick that likes sowing discord.

The Mantigon will interview potential candidates to ensure that they are indeed old, hateful men, and that their grudge is indeed genuine.  There may be tests of spitefulness involved.  

The grudge must be one that a manticore, but not an old man, could achieve.  Usually this involves killing someone or ruining something.

Once accepted, the Mantigon cleans out one of his wife's eggs (they are always born empty--she is infertile) and stuffs the old man inside it.  He uses his saliva to seal up the egg, and it is given back to the Dragon Hen to incubate.  Nine days later, a small manticore hatches out of it.

It is unknown if the Mantigon can make other types of manticores, but regardless, all of the manticores that you will encounter will be flying lions with the heads of bitter old men.

The first thing they do is fulfill their original grudge.  This usually involves killing a local authority, destroying the farm they were forced out of, or eating some teenagers who made too much noise.

Then the manticore disperses.  (They do not return to the Mantigon, who has no more wish to hang out with a bitter old asshole than anyone else.)  However, from time to the Mantigon calls his manticores back and holds court.  It is unknown what, if anything, is discussed at these meetings. 

Manticores have unique psychologies.  While their initial moods are as varied as any humans, they invariably turn towards resentment.  

Roll reaction rolls normally.  On a neutral or better result, the manticore is talkative and possibly even friendly.  But as the encounter continues, the manticore will begin to grow resentful (over things that the party has and it lacks, such as youth, love, or thumbs) or insulted (as it begins to imagine veiled insults at every opportunity).  The only thing that keeps them calm is a steady supply of slanderous gossip accompanied by (at a minimum) the minor acts of casual cruelty.  

(Manticores don't actually enjoy widespread killing and cruelty.  Auschwitz, for example, would horrify one, and it would probably seek to avenge itself on the perpetrators.  Manticores prefer smaller actions, like breaking a kitten's tail and laughing at its pain, then spiking it to the ground when its mewling became aggravating.)

Everything that a manticore interacts with eventually becomes an object of resentment.  Opponents, their weapons, their clothes, et cetera.

A manticore will always devour a slain foe, their clothing, their weapons, their belongings.

Unlike their father, the Mantigon, they have no special ability to consume objects.  Bones will be splinted and wood will be chewed.  It is not uncommon to come across a manticore gnawing on a half-eated sword, cursing a dead knight with bleeding gums and broken teeth (which constantly regrow, like a shark's).

But they cannot digest the metallic chunks that they gag down, and such indigestible items are usually vomited back out.

That's the daily routine for many manticores.  Gnaw, bleed, gag, swallow, vomit, curse, and repeat.  

Indigestible items are concentrated in the tail, where the strongest elements become tail spikes.  

Such consumption is a difficult task, and the area around a manticore's lair are often littered with half-eaten objects, many having been swallowed and vomited up several times.  The manticore will always return to these objects once its mouth and throat have had a chance to heal.

In combat, they prefer to make strafing runs while riddling their target with spikes (which are later recovered and painfully re-swallowed).  

If a manticore is angry at you (and this is the default result) and is denied the reasonable catharsis of killing you, it will follow you, circling high above you, seeking to spite you in any way that it can.  It will try to kill people that look like they might know you.  It will yell down obscene things about your parentage.  It will scare away game and trample helpful herbs.  It will seek out water sources so that it can piss on you (but from a few hundred feet up, this is nothing more than the occasional droplet).

Manticore

HD 5  AC chain  Claw/Claw/Bite 1d8/1d8/1d4  Tail Spikes 1d10 + poison

Fly 18  Int 10  Morale 6

*Tail Spikes -- A manticore can make up to three separate tail spike attacks, but they must be at three separate targets, and no two targets can be more than 10' apart.  A manticore will be encountered with 1d10+10 spikes (track them).  These spikes are functionally identical to the iron spikes you can buy in town.

*Poison -- 1d4 per minute for 3 minutes.  Targets under the effects of a manticore's poison become bitter and resentful, and cannot aid their allies (unless their life depends on it).  Instead, they laugh at their friends' suffering, and will mock them even as they die.

The iron in a manticore's diet supplies the iron in their tail spikes.  If they are unable to achieve sufficient metal in their diet, the spikes will be stone (from eating dust) or bone (usually from suckling at cows' teats, after laming them), and will deal less damage (1d8 rather than 1d10).

There are rumors of more exotic types of manticore spikes.  Cursed spikes from a manticore that ate a cursed sword.  Golden spikes from a manticore that gained a dragon's hoard.  Metaphysical spikes from a dragon who ate too many philosophers.

The GLOG: Wizards

I'm not happy with it, but I'm getting real fucking tired of rewriting it.

My OSR-compatible rules for wizards can be found right. . .

HERE

They include the Illusionist, Necromancer, and Orthodox Wizard (the most traditional one).

I think these wizard rules are cooler than a witch's tit and hotter than a witch's other tit, but if you aren't interested is wading through another homebrew in search of bits to steal, here are the parts that I think are the most hackable:

• I think the whole spell slots + casting dice is pretty elegant.  It removes the whole quadratic wizard thing and gives players a clear idea of how much spellpower they have and are bringing to bear.  (I actually give them aluminum casting dice at the start of each in-game day.  It's very tangible.)
• Book Casting is a great ability.  It actually makes wizards feel more like wizards, since they're wading into combat with their big dorky spellbooks out, chanting stuff.
• Vancian Preparation would be good to port into a 5e game, except maybe give a different benefit.  Maybe +1 to the spell slot, can only be used 1/day.
• Giving mono-class bonuses is a great fucking idea and I'm sad I didn't hit on it sooner.  Just: I think it's a good idea to incentivize the all-wizard party or the all-thief party.  It makes the game experience more diverse, gives us more ways to play the game.
• You'll notice that a lot of the old-school spells are a lot more powerful, and a lot more hackable.  A lot of them have multiple uses.  I tried to make spells like feather(fall), floating disk, lock, and levitate more comparable to sleep on the scale of usefulness.
• Also check out the Illusionist's Final Doom where they turn into an illusion and get stuck there.  There's enough there for a blog post on its own.
• I tried to give a lot of diversity in the undead that low-level necromancers can raise.  They all have different functions, and the necromancer's corpse economy means that they'll have to pick their favorite.

Starfighter Samwise

I normally spend my lunch breaks writing down D&D ideas on the backs of receipts and then losing them in my car, but today I spent my time thinking about an idea for a video game.

I'm a fan of bullet hell games.  (If you haven't played them, they're similar to shoot-em-ups like Gradius, except cramped and tactical, in the sense that you learn to anticipate bullet patterns rather than respond to random enemy behavior).  It's a pretty well-developed genre, and once you dig into it, there's a hell of a lot of variety, both in interesting boss mechanics and in tactics.

But bullet hell games never have a good story </opinion>.  Like, some games have such good stories that I have fun just talking about the story (Shadow of the Colossus, Portal, Half-Life 2) completely independent of the gameplay.

This is perhaps tough to do for a bullet hell game, because you're basically just a floating dot that spews out a wall of bullets at other floating dots that are also spewing out walls of bullets in an otherwise featureless landscape.  

It's not a genre that lends itself to usual story touchstones (doors, people, a sense of place).

ikaruga

Anyway, here's my script for a bullet hell / shoot-em-up game that will probably never get made.