Winter is upon us here in the northern hemisphere. We’re settling in for cold days and long, dark nights. Here’s how the winter season was imagined in late Roman Britain.
This figure comes from a floor mosaic at Chedworth Villa in western Britain. Each corner of the mosaic had a little allegorical figure representing one of the seasons. Winter appears bundled up in warm layers with a hooded cloak, carrying a hare in one hand (the reward of a hunt), and a symbolic leafless branch in the other.
Wishing you a warm, cozy, and cheerful winter season!
Image: Winter from Chedworth dining room floor, photograph by Pasicles via Wikimedia (Chedworth Roman Villa; 4th c. CE; mosaic)
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Part of the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons as a tabletop role-playing game is that it provides a robust and detailed set of rules for paying out fantasy fights, from smashing your way through pesky goblins to assaulting the lair of an evil dragon. You can see the tabletop war games in D&D‘s roots when you have a table full of figurines maneuvering and trading blows. Unfortunately, that same detailed set of rules for combat also means that fights tend to drag. Everyone who’s played the game knows how one large combat can eat up an entire gaming session, leaving little room for character development or story progression. That’s where narrative combat comes in.
Narrative combat is an alternative to the full combat rules that lets you as a DM challenge your players and put them in danger while also speeding up the action so you can move on with the game and make room for other activities. You might not want to use it all the time, but it is a useful technique for getting your party through an encounter that is meant to build the story more than to present a tactical challenge.
Narrative combat is a battle-focused version of an old D&D standby: the skills challenge. Instead of making attacks or casting spells by the usual combat rules, players declare what their characters are attempting to do in order to win the fight. The DM (or the DM and players working together) decide on an appropriate skill check or other d20 roll for the action. When the players have scored enough victories on the skill checks, they win the battle. Failed skill checks bring consequences.
Preparing the encounter
As a DM, you need to prepare for a narrative combat, just like you need to prepare for a traditional combat, but in a different way.
First of all, make sure that the encounter you’re planning is appropriate for narrative combat. This method isn’t well suited to encounters that could potentially be deadly for the adventuring party. It serves to speed up combat, but that comes at the expense of characters not getting to use their full suite of abilities, and most gaming groups won’t be happy about seeing a character die just because they didn’t have the chance to use an ability that could have saved them. If an encounter is meant to push your players’ character to their limits, it’s better to opt for traditional combat.
Once you’ve decided to make a fight narrative rather than traditional, describe the encounter in narrative terms, laying out what role it plays in your story. How would you describe this event in a novel or a screenplay? Think about not just the monsters your characters will face but their motivations, goals, and personalities. Instead of “One Vampire Spawn (CR5) and five Skeletons (CR 1/4),” try describing your scene something like: “A recently-turned vampire spawn, drunk with her newfound powers, gathers her own minions from the ancient dead of a nearby graveyard, and ambushes the party as they journey toward their next destination, hoping for an easy kill to add to her subservient throng.”
Next, you need to make three mechanical decisions which will determine the difficulty of the encounter:
Number of successes needed to complete the encounter
DC for the encounter’s skill checks
Consequences of failure
The number of successes required to complete the encounter determines how long the encounter will take to play out. The more successes required, the more opportunities for failure and consequences. I recommend making the number of required successes a multiple of the number of player characters involved.
Encounter difficulty
Multiplier
Trivial
1x
Easy
2x
Average
3x
Challenging
4x
Hard
5x
I don’t recommend going above 5x; at that point, you may not be saving much time over just running a regular encounter. If you are planning for a longer encounter, it’s also a good idea to plan for a few changes in the fight after a certain number of successes to give your players new problems to think about—the monsters change tactics, reinforcements show up, a sudden snowstorm hits, parts of the floor give way, etc.
Our example encounter with a Vampire Spawn and Skeletons could be a significant challenge to a novice adventuring group, warranting a multiplier of 4x or 5x, but to an experienced group this encounter would be more of a speed bump, a way of alerting the players to the presence of a larger threat lurking in the shadows without putting their characters in much danger. For such an encounter, I would choose a multiplier of 1x or 2x.
The DC for the skill checks is the most direct way of setting the difficulty of the encounter. If you have a specific set of monsters for your encounter, you can use the average of their ACs. For our example above, Vampire Spawn has an AC of 16 and Skeleton has 14. Five Skeletons and one Vampire Spawn have an average AC of 14.3, which you can round down to 14. Feel free to tweak the DC if it doesn’t feel right for your encounter; you might decide that the Vampire Spawn’s control makes the Skeletons more coordinated than mindless undead usually are and bump the DC up to 15.
If you don’t have a specific set of monsters in mind to check the AC of, here’s a guide for choosing an appropriate DC.
Party level
Trivial
Easy
Average
Challenging
Hard
1 to 4
10
12
14
16
18
5 to 8
11
13
15
17
19
9 to 12
12
14
16
18
20
13 to 16
13
15
17
19
21
17 to 20
14
16
18
20
22
Finally, you need to decide the consequences of a failed roll. The easiest and most obvious one is to do damage to the character whose attempt failed, but the circumstances of your story might suggest other possibilities, such as losing vital resources or reputation with the local community.
To determine the amount of damage a failure should cost, if you have a specific set of monsters in mind, you can again use an average of one round’s damage from their standard attacks. A Vampire Spawn’s Claw attack does 8 damage on average (2d4+3), and it can use the attack twice, making a total of 16. A Skeleton’s Shortsword attack does 6 average damage (1d6+3). Our example monsters therefore have an overall average damage of 7.6, rounded up to 8. You can just use the average damage, or to keep some of the fun of rolling, you can make it 2d4+3, 1d6+4, 1d8+3, or something else that gives the same average.
Instead of doing damage as a consequence in the example encounter, you might instead decide that characters who fail fall victim to the Vampire Spawn’s bite and must make a Charisma save (same DC as the encounter overall) or temporarily fall under the villain’s sway, telepathically revealing information that the spawn’s Vampire Lord will later use against the party. Play into the story of the encounter; if a good alternative to damage for a consequence presents itself, use it!
If you don’t have a specific set of monsters in mind for your encounter, just look for one at the appropriate CR and use its basic attack damage. The whole point of narrative combat is to reduce the amount of time it takes to play out an encounter, so don’t make things more difficult for yourself than you need to.
Playing the encounter
As the encounter begins, give the players a narrative description of how the combat begins. Again, imagine you are narrating a novel or setting the scene in a screenplay.
“As you walk through the heavily-shadowed avenues of the decrepit graveyard, slow, shambling movements in the undergrowth on your left catch your eye. Everyone make a Perception check… Those of you who failed the check are distracted by the movements of five skeletons lumbering out of the thicket on the left, but those who succeeded realize that the skeletons are a diversion and prepare yourselves to face the sudden attack of a red-eyed, sharp-fanged shape that lunges out of the sepulcher on your right, reaching for you with her sharp, talon-like hands!”
Once you’ve given your players the set-up, it’s now time for them to act. Your players narrate how their characters engage with the challenge in front of them. There are no rounds or turns in narrative combat, just contributions to the story. If your players are good at making room for each other, you can just invite everyone to contribute a story moment whenever they feel moved to. If you think it’s better to impose some order on who talks when, you can go around the table one at a time, or have them roll for initiative. The monsters do not get a turn of their own; they only get a chance to hurt the player characters when characters fail a check.
Players describe their character’s acts not in terms of game mechanics but as if narrating a story. Their options are limited only by their imagination and the constraints of what you as DM are willing to accept. Instead of “I use my bonus action to rage and my action to attack with my axe,” a player might say, “I yell my warcry and charge into the thick of the enemy, hacking furiously away,” or “I slip into the shadows waiting for a chance to strike at an enemy when their back is turned,” or “I open my senses to the currents of magic in this area and try to disrupt the monsters’ sources of power.” A character’s act might be something closely tied to their abilities, but they can also be more creative, such as “I create a distraction on one edge of the fight to set up my allies for a better shot,” or “I help the innocent townsfolk caught in the middle of the fight get to safety.”
Players have a lot of leeway in describing how their characters engage in the battle, as long as they play fair. No one gets to just say “I kill all the monsters and save the day single-handedly.” As DM you can always say no to a poorly-thought-out or bad-faith act, but it’s also good to let the players have agency to shape the story of the fight themselves. If someone wants to push the monsters onto uneven ground, impersonate an enemy leader and confuse them with conflicting orders, or start an avalanche, as long as it’s something their character could reasonably pull off in the circumstances, go with it and let the fight evolve accordingly.
Once a player has described their character’s contribution to the story, pick an appropriate skill for them to roll. You can do this yourself as DM, or collaborate with the player on picking something that plays to their strengths. In place of a skill roll, you might also use an attack roll, or even a saving throw if it seems appropriate (“I raise my shield hurl myself into the line of fire to take the brunt of the attack so it doesn’t hit any innocent bystanders” could merit a Constitution save, for example).
For a character fighting in the front lines, a weapon attack may be the best roll, but look for opportunities to call for other skills like Athletics (like tackling and grappling with an opponent), Acrobatics (nimbly jumping from tree branch to tree branch to stay ahead of a pursuing enemy), Perception (watching enemy movements and calling out their maneuvers to one’s allies), or Insight (analyzing the enemy’s tactical plan and devising an effective counter-strategy). Characters relying on magic can always roll a skill relevant to their particular variety of magic such as Arcana (wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks), Religion (paladins, and clerics), Nature (druids), or Performance (bards), but consider also using magic as a bluff to distract the enemy (Deception or Intimidation) or to create hazards in the field of battle (Survival). If a player uses a spell or other special ability of their character’s, or if they come up with a particularly original or interesting twist in the story, let them roll with advantage.
If the roll succeeds, mark down a success for the party; if it fails, the character in question suffers the consequences. A player who takes damage has the opportunity to mitigate that damage in any way they could in regular combat, like the resistance granted by a barbarian’s Rage or a ranger casting Absorb Elements.
When the party has scored enough successes to complete the encounter, narrate how the remaining monsters flee or are destroyed. Then the characters can lick their wounds, and the adventuring day continues.
Employing narrative combat effectively
There are advantages to using narrative combat in place of full combat. There are also times when it’s not a good choice.
Pros of narrative combat
It’s quicker than traditional combat. It can be a good way of dealing with encounters that are of little mechanical threat to the party but contribute to the ongoing story.
It makes much less work for the DM—no tracking monster abilities or hit points, just the party’s successes.
It keeps the action with the players. There are no separate monster turns.
It encourages creativity and storytelling, which can be rewarding for a group that likes those aspects of play more than the hard tactical thinking of traditional combat.
Cons of narrative combat
It takes time to explain to a group of players who haven’t tried it before, and may be confusing to players used to the routines of regular combat.
It sacrifices detail for speed, sometimes leading to results that could feel unsatisfying—will a wizard player casting Fireball feel good about having the same effect on the outcome of the battle that a fighter using Action Surge does?
When confronting a particularly dangerous or important enemy, players may be unhappy about not having their full range of combat options open. Narrative combat is not a good choice for such fights.
Narrative combat is a useful tool to have at your disposal as a DM, but make sure your players understand how it works, and know when to use it and when not to. It’s a good thing to introduce to new players in a short, trivial encounter that poses no real risk so that they can learn how to play it without the pressure of a dangerous fight. Once your players know how to do it, though, it can save time for more exploration, role-playing, social encounters, plot advancement, and other fun things.
The level of detail is incredible. There are both 2D and 3D versions of the map that you can zoom in on and fly around like a modern digital map. Here’s a view of Rivendell and the nearby Misty Mountains from the 3D version.
The Middle-Earth Map is a project Micah Vander Lugt, a geographic information sciences analyst. It’s great to see people put their professional skills to work on hobbies that they’re passionate about!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Some modern holidays, including Halloween and Dia de los Muertos, are rooted in the idea that on certain special occasions the spirits of the dead can return and walk among the living. The living can join the celebrations by disguising themselves to mingle with the spirits.
The ancient Romans did not celebrate a holiday quite like our modern ones, but the idea that the dead could still be present in the living world, and that living people can use masks and costumes to blur the line between living and dead, is one that they would have recognized. Here is a detail of Roman funeral customs reported by the Greek historian Polybius:
After burying the body with the customary rites, they place an image of the deceased in the most prominent part of the house with a wooden shrine around it. This image is a mask of the deceased’s face, shaped and painted to be an extraordinary likeness of the dead person. They display these masks with great reverence on public occasions, and whenever some prominent member of the household dies, they are worn by participants in the funeral procession, whoever seems to best match the original’s appearance in shape and size. They also don appropriate clothing: if the ancestor was a consul or praetor, a toga with purple edges; if a censor, a wholly purple toga; if he had celebrated a triumph, a toga worked through with gold.
Polybius, History of Rome 6.53
(My own translation)
Our modern traditions are different (these Roman worthies weren’t going trick-or-treating), but there is something ancient about the feeling that, on certain special occasions, the line between living and dead may not be quite as clear as we think.
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the old chestnuts of writing advice. Like most such nuggets of wisdom, it has value, but there are also good cases for ignoring it, even sometimes doing the exact opposite.
Telling, as a writer, means giving the reader a direct and straightforward description of a character’s thoughts, emotions, or personality. Showing means providing the reader with tangible evidence of the same things without stating them outright. “She was nervous” is telling. “She fidgeted and took hesitant, aimless steps while her eyes darted about, refusing to focus on anything in the room” is showing.
Showing is valuable in writing because it engages the reader’s imagination. It makes the characters’ experiences more relatable, but also requires the reader to pay attention and figure things out for themselves. When we read about a character fidgeting and taking hesitant steps, we discover her nervousness for ourselves rather than have it served to us. Making little discoveries like this is part of the joy of reading, and that joy is diminished if we have nothing to figure out.
While it’s useful to show your readers things, there is also a good case for telling things sometimes. You don’t want your readers to have to figure out everything for themselves. For one thing, that’s exhausting. For another, it divides your readers’ attention and keeps them from focusing on the elements of the story that you want them to pay attention to. It’s perfectly fine to write “She was nervous,” if the character’s nervousness isn’t the point of the scene.
Jane Austen uses telling rather than showing to excellent effect in her novel Emma. The very first line of the novel tells us exactly who Emma is:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
As the novel goes on, we get plenty of chances to observe these qualities in Emma for ourselves, but Austen starts by telling us straight out who her heroine is. By giving us this portrait of Emma up front, Austen frees us from having to figure her out for ourselves and allows us to focus our attention on the world around her, discovering the characters who make up her life bit by bit through their own interactions with handsome, clever, rich Emma.
At the same time, the straightforward way Austen introduces Emma may trip us up. As the novel unfolds, Emma discovers that she has misunderstood who her friends and neighbors in Highbury really are. By telling us about Emma instead of showing her to us, Austen lulls us as readers into expecting similarly straightforward introductions to the other characters, and so we get to go along with Emma’s own discoveries rather than getting ahead of her.
Showing is a skill you need as a fiction writer, but knowing when to tell is a valuable skill, too.
How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.
A lot of international foods are available now in Finland that may have been hard to find decades ago, but one food that is still elusive is bagels. While there are some bakeries making good bagels here, they are few and far between, and certainly not as convenient as our neighborhood bagel shop was back when we lived in Massachusetts. So I have decided to try my hand at making bagels myself.
I started by looking through my cookbooks. Astonishingly, there’s not a single bagel recipe in any of the cookbooks on my shelf. Even my trusty old Joy of Cooking let me down here, so to the Internet it was! Fortunately, there’s no end of bagel recipes online. After looking at a number of recipes, I settled on one that seemed straightforward and clear, this New York-style bagel recipe from the Sophisticated Gourmet. (One thing I particularly appreciated about this recipe is that it gives both American and metric units. I’ve gotten used to doing conversions, but it’s nice when you don’t have to.) With that recipe as a base and a few tweaks to suit my own kitchen, I made my first test batch of bagels.
And they were good!
So, here’s my process, in case you want to try the same. This recipe is for a plain white wheat bagel without inclusions or toppings. Adjust as you like to make your own preferred type of bagel.
The Roman writer Vitruvius had some opinions about public art, expressed here in a critique of the city of Alabanda in western Anatolia, modern-day Turkey:
The people of Alabanda are sharp enough when it comes to affairs of state, but they have been found foolish for their mistakes in lesser matters, since the statues in their gymnasium are all arguing lawsuits, but the ones in their forum are holding the discus, running, or playing ball.
Vitruvius, On Architecture 7.5.6
(My own translation)
Vitruvius’ gripe about the statues in Alabanda may seem odd at first. Why is it foolish to have statues of people playing ball in the forum? Why shouldn’t there be statues of people pleading cases in the gymnasium? Vitruvius’ point is that the statues the Alabandans chose for their important public spaces didn’t match the functions of those spaces.
The gymnasium was a place for the men of the city to socialize and spend their leisure time, but above all to exercise and improve their bodies. The forum was a public space that served many functions, but importantly among them it served as a courtroom for trying legal cases. Vitruvius was clearly of the opinion that art in public spaces should mirror the functions of those spaces: statues of lawyers belong in the forum, and statues of people playing sports go in the gymnasium. In his opinion, the Alabandans made the foolish mistake of setting up the right statues in the wrong places.
Vitruvius’ text is a useful indicator that people in antiquity thought about the visual culture around them and had opinions about the appropriateness of particular subjects, themes, or styles for particular spaces. You couldn’t just slap any old statue anywhere you liked; there were rules to be followed, and the Alabandans had failed to follow them.
At the same time, Vitruvius’ remark is also useful evidence that not everyone shared the same opinions. Vitruvius may not have appreciated the Alabandans’ choices for public statuary, but the Alabandans clearly saw no problem with them. Maybe they thought that lawyers arguing in court should be inspired by the vigor of athletes or that people exercising in the gymnasium should be reminded to also improve their minds like the great orators of the past. We don’t know for sure, but it’s good to be reminded not only that people in the past had opinions about the world they lived in, but that those opinions could and did differ. What one person considered an artistic mistake was for someone else a sensible decorating plan.
When we read ancient sources, it is important to remember that they represent one person’s perspective, not necessarily a universal ideal.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
The Villa Farnese is a gorgeous Renaissance palace in central Italy, built in the early 1500s and richly elaborated with sculptures and frescoes. One of the rooms in the villa features a map of the world filling the wall at one end, with detailed maps of the continents on the other walls, under a ceiling decorated with constellations. Standing in this room, the magnates of the villa could see the whole world, as it was known to scientists and cartographers of the day.
The map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Etienne (Li) via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)
Looking at this space, it occurs to me that a room like this would make an excellent setting for a scene in a fantasy or historical story. Many such stories play out over long distances, and knowing how one territory or city relates to the others around it as well as to the shapes of the land can make a huge difference in understanding the stakes and possibilities in play.
Africa, from the map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Jean-Pierre Dalbèra via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)
In a visual medium like tv or movies, it could be very helpful to have a visual in the background while characters are discussing important movements or plans, but even in text, putting your characters in such a place could give you an opportunity to describe them looking at the map, tracing routes of travel or the borders between nations, and arguing for their plans.
Europe, from the map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Ulrich Mayring via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)
Maps make everything better!
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
The Greek historian Herodotus provides some interesting information about a people living in the mountains beyond the eastern steppes whom he calls the Argippaioi:
They are said to be bald from birth, men and women alike, and they have flat noses and large chins. They speak their own language, but wear Scythian clothes, and depend on trees for their food. The tree they live off of is called “pontic.” It is about as big as a fig tree and bears stone fruits the size of beans. When the fruit is ripe, they strain it through cloth, and it yields a thick black juice, which they call “askhy.” They lick this juice up or mix it with milk and drink it; they make cakes out of the thickest of the leavings and eat them. They do not keep large flocks, for their pastures are not suited to it. Each of them lives under a tree, which they cover with white wool felt in the winter, but not in the summer. No person harms them, for they are said to be sacred, and they carry no weapons. Their neighbors refer conflicts to them for judgment, and anyone who flees to them for refuge is safe from harm. They are called Argippaioi.
– Herodotus, Histories 4.23 (my translation)
This is an interesting passage both from a historical perspective and as storytelling inspiration.
Historically speaking, many of the details Herodotus presents seem to indicate some actual knowledge of a central Asian culture. The geographic description could apply to the Altai Mountains, which lie east of the broad Eurasian steppes. The physical description of the people might be a garbled attempt to describe Asian features. The description of the tree fruit and its use matches fairly well with traditional ways of using the fruit of the bird cherry. The tree covered in white cloth could be a Greek’s misunderstanding of a chum or other type of tent. In contrast to some of Herodotus’ wilder accounts of the distant regions of the world, it sounds like he may have gathered some fairly accurate information about peoples in central Asia, which he put together as best he could given the limits of his own knowledge. The trade routes that we know as the silk road were already active carrying people and goods across Eurasia in his time, so it is not implausible that during his research among the Scythians he might have learned about peoples at the farther end of the route.
On the other hand, the idea of a sacred people who live without weapons and are left unharmed by their neighbors is an interesting concept to think about as a writer. Herodotus perhaps mistakenly associated privileges that belonged to a priestly or shamanic class with a whole people, but what if there actually were a sacred people living in peace in the mountains, acting as wise advisers to others and providing refuge to the desperate? What would it be like to live in such a culture, and what kind of conflicts could arise among a people who don’t fight? What worldbuilding could you do around such an idea? In one kind of story, the sacred people could be a refuge for the hero on their journey and a source of wise counsel, like the Elves are to Tolkien’s Hobbit heroes. In a different kind of story, imagine how power struggles would play among a people who do not fight, who even must not fight in order to preserve the awe that their neighbors feel for them. Replace the battles and murders of Game of Thrones with competitions over personal purity or devious advice given to neighboring peoples, and you could have a story that is dramatically different but with just as many opportunities for vicious betrayals and sudden reversals.
History can be a great source of writing inspiration when we get it right, but it can spark good narrative ideas even when it’s wrong.
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
I have these white cotton home trousers that Eppu made for me years ago. They are very comfortable, and I wear them all the time when just hanging out at home. I wear them so much, in fact, that they are starting to get worn through in places and need repair. I got a rip at the corner of one pocket opening, and here’s how she fixed it.
Eppu is good at making invisible repairs to our clothes, but she decided to try something different this time. Instead of hiding the patching, she made it a feature. There’s a recent trend for visible mending, including use of the Japanese stitching technique called sashiko, and this was one of Eppu’s test pieces to try out the approach. Just a little experiment to see how it would come out and how it would wear on a piece of clothing that gets used so much.
I think the results are great. Now I’ve got the sun in my pocket, all day long!
Image by Eppu Jensen
How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.
Co-Geeking 
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