I hope you’re having better nights than I am.
(A return of Tabula Candida, my old white board comics.)
Image by Erik Jensen
Some things are just too silly not to share!
Insomnia
Author: Erik
An Urban Orchard in Pompeii
We don’t usually think of cities as places where food is grown. Farmland is a rural thing, and the harvest must be brought to urban markets so that city-dwellers can eat. But urban agriculture is nothing new. The destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii by Vesuvius in 79 CE preserved the evidence of extensive food production inside the city walls. One place where ancient Pompeians could get fresh, super-local food was the house known today as the House of the Ship Europa. (The name comes from a detailed graffito on the house wall depicting a sailing ship with that name.)
This house sits among other houses on the southern side of the city. From the outside, it doesn’t look much different from the dwellings around it. On the inside, though, the house owners had made good use of the space they had for growing a variety of foods.
At the rear of the house, a large walled garden space stood open to the sky. Gardens were not uncommon in Pompeii, and many houses had open courtyards for leisure, but not all were as carefully planned as at this house. Archaeologists studied the layout of the garden, pollen deposits preserved under the volcanic ash, the types of planting pots and tools kept in the space, and even the shapes left in the ground by tree roots to determine how this garden was planted and what grew there.
The core of the garden was laid out in regular rectangular planting plots which match the ways Roman agricultural writers like Cato and Varro recommended planting grapevines. The roots of one large tree were identified as a filbert, a tree which is often planted at the edges of vineyards in modern Italy. The pollen samples from the site had an unusually high amount of grass pollen compared with other Pompeian gardens; while in other houses grasses were weeded out out flower beds or kitchen garden plots, at the House of the Ship Europa, grassy paths were allowed to grow between the grape vines.
Smaller tree roots were found in regular rows along the walls. Since young fruit and nut trees are typically grown by grafting branches from the desired species onto rootstock that may come from a different kind of tree, we cannot tell from the roots alone what smaller trees were planted in this garden. The rootstocks would have been suitable for plums, peaches, cherries, figs, olives, or almonds, and some or all of these foods may have been grown at the house. Elsewhere in the garden were a number of large perforated ceramic pots whose shape and size match the types of planting pots Roman writers recommended for growing citrons, a citrus fruit and ancestor of the lemon.
The burnt remains of filberts, grape seeds, figs, beans and dates were scattered in the layer of volcanic ash that covered the garden. Most of these plants could have been grown at the house, but date palms do not produce fruit in the climate of Italy, so the dates must have been imported. Perhaps the Europa celebrated on the wall of the house was a trading ship belonging to the family. The house may have functioned as a store selling both their own locally grown fruits and nuts and some imported produce from elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
The House of the Ship Europa gives us an idea of what kinds of foods were grown within the walls of Pompeii and were part of the diet of city’s residents. The city was not just a place of residence, but also an agricultural landscape, and we must imagine that other ancient cities were as well.
Image: Fresco of fruits, photograph by the Yorck Project via Wikimedia (House of Julia Felix, Pompeii; c. 70 CE; fresco)
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Quotes: Either to Be Bored or to Lie
Dr. Watson comments on the afternoon’s mail to his flatmate, Sherlock Holmes:
“Here is a very fashionable epistle,” I remarked as he entered. “Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a tide-waiter.”
“Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety,” he answered, smiling, “and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.”
As a fellow introvert, I share Holmes’s annoyance with unwelcome social summonses. I have more than once been bored at a social occasion I was expected to attend, and I have been known to lie to get out of events I don’t want to go to.
(For the curious: a fish-monger sells fish, and a tide-waiter was a customs official who historically went aboard ships to oversee the collection of import duties and check for contraband.)
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories. Vol. 1. New York: Bantam Books, 1986, 388-89.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
A Concordance of Polybius and What AI Can and Can’t Do for Historians
Boosters of large language models (LLMs) and other kinds of so-called artificial intelligence make big claims about what the technology can do for us, sometimes referencing the benefits brought by other inventions like the Internet or mass production. I rarely find such arguments convincing when applied to my field, history. An experience from my graduate student days may help illustrate why.
When I was a graduate student in the early 2000s, I wanted to write about the Greek historian Polybius and his idea of what constituted Italy. Polybius lived and wrote in a time when the Roman state had fought a century of wars to conquer and defend the Italian peninsula. The idea of Italy as a single thing that could be defined and found on a map was still somewhat new and up for debate. I was interested in seeing where the boundaries of what Polybius called Italy lay, as a reflection of how the Roman elite whose society he moved among thought about their empire and its place in the world.
The obvious place to start was to search the text of Polybius’ Histories for references to Italy, but remember that this was the early 2000s. Search engines for the internet were still in their adolescence, and while there were some projects under way to digitize Classical texts and make them searchable, they still had their limitations. To get the information I needed, I went to the library and found a concordance of Polybius.
A concordance is a type of scholarly reference work that was common in the days before texts became searchable. It is a list of every word used in a particular text (such as Polybius’ Histories) and the context in which it is used. To find every instance when Polybius used the word Italy (or Ἰταλία in Greek), I just had to open the volume to the letter iota, scan down to Ἰταλία, and start going through the references to find which ones were worth looking up in my copy of Polybius and which ones were not useful for my research.
The work that went into creating such a concordance was enormous. The surviving text of Polybius’ Histories runs into the hundreds of pages in a modern printing. Someone had to go through the Greek text and catalog every single word (not to mention dealing with the issues of differing texts in different manuscript traditions, scribal errors, and emendations), then compile all those references into one enormous volume. All of this work was done by hand in the days before computers. The book that I laid out on the table in front of me when I was writing that paper represented thousands of work-hours, a significant chunk of some previous scholar’s working life. (I was lucky to have chosen a research question about a well-known author whose work had been concordanced by scholars of past generations. If I had wanted to check the work of some more obscure author or uncatalogued fragments, I would have had to sit down and scan every page myself.)
If I wanted to research the same question today, I could simply load a copy of the Greek text, type the word into a search box, and have the results in seconds.
Technologies like searchable electronic text have not only changed what questions scholars are able to ask, they have changed the meaning of scholarly work altogether. The kind of rote mechanical labor that went into creating something like a concordance of Polybius used to be a staple of an academic historian’s life. While scholars have always aimed to make new discoveries and present new interpretations of the evidence, up to the late twentieth century it was understood that as a working historian, you would spend a significant amount of your productive life just reading through texts and assembling data a piece at a time, either for your own research or to make a tool for others to use.
These days, although there are still times when searching doesn’t help and you still need to just go through the text line by line, a significant amount of what historians used to do is now automated. Indexed, searchable texts with good metadata have taken the place of a lot of the more cumbersome old scholarly tools in much the same way that electronic databases have replaced the old card catalog system.
This is a change I fully approve of. I have no nostalgia for the old days. I am not shaking my cane at the clouds complaining about kids these days who don’t have to use a concordance in the snow uphill both ways. Making basic information more readily available and easier to probe in new and unexpected ways leads to better questions and more interesting arguments about history, and both scholarly and non-specialist audiences benefit from the wealth of new research that modern tools have made possible.
Now, some have tried to present artificial intelligence as a new revolution in scholarship parallel to the development of searchable catalogs and texts. Just as searchable texts allow us to skip the tedious and unrewarding work of slogging through sources word by word gathering references by hand, so an LLM can save us the tedious work of reading through the existing literature finding the answers to questions so we can spend more time focusing on our own research interest. I find this argument unpersuasive for two reasons.
First, the LLM services which currently exist and promise to perform this kind of operation are not up to the task. They may have scanned all the relevant literature that I would want to consult in my research (and there is a good chance that they have not, but let us suppose for a moment that they have), but they have no understanding of it. They do not know how to separate different threads of argument, how to weigh different theoretical approaches or contrast older and newer scholarship, or how to critically assess evidence. They do not actually know anything, they just slap together text in a way that fits the models they’ve been fed. A search engine may produce wrong results, depending on how well the text it’s searching has been coded or how accurate a search term one uses, but these errors at least point to specific data points that can be checked. An LLM produces authoritative-sounding nonsense with as much facility as truth. It saves no time or effort to use an LLM for research, since everything it produces is suspect, and it does not present its sources for checking.
Second, the tedious work of reading through existing literature is a vital part of scholarship. We have to understand the arguments made by scholars in the past and the bases on which they made them if we are going to do any better at tackling the same questions ourselves. Historical research depends on extensive reading of sources and prior scholarship, not just as a way of assembling data but in order to actually understand our subjects. It is not the same as the rote work of compiling all the words used in a text. There is no royal road to historical understanding, and this part of the research process cannot be automated away.
No one makes concordances any more, and hardly anyone uses them. Search technology saves us labor and frees up scholars’ time to do the more interesting and more important work of engaging with evidence and contemplating new questions. The human work that searches replaced was work that we could well do without. The work that LLMs promise to replace is essential, and they can’t do it for us effectively anyway.
Here there be opinions!
Textile Work on a Greek Vase
In ancient Greece, as in many pre-industrial societies, textile work was primarily the domain of women, and since ordinary women and their lives rarely appealed to ancient Greek artists as a subject, we have few artistic depictions of women doing the work that filled much of their lives. That fact is one of the things that makes this vase so interesting. The decoration on the main body of this vase depicts many different stages of textile work, including spinning thread, weaving, folding the finished cloth, as well as weighing and perhaps dyeing it. All of these activities were part of the daily life of most women in ancient Athens, where this vase was painted.
As we discussed in our series about textile production, making cloth and making clothes took up an enormous amount of time. It’s interesting to speculate on why someone might have chosen such a theme for a piece of tableware in their home. Was this a commission for a family who was in the textile business, not just producing for home use? Was it meant to celebrate the unsung daily labor of Athenian women by putting it in the same artistic frame as the deeds of gods and heroes? Was it a marketing ploy to try to appeal to a feminine audience?
Whatever the artist’s intent may have been, this is a wonderful piece to have surviving from antiquity.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Temple Services Homebrew for Dungeons & Dragons
When you’re designing a settlement for your player characters to visit, one thing you might want to include is local religious establishments like temples and shrines. In a world where divine beings actively grant powers to their followers, adventurers can visit these establishments looking for magical services, just like they might head to a tavern to listen for rumors or go to the local blacksmith to get their armor repaired. Here’s a homebrewed guide to temple services, suitable for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (2024), that you can use or adapt for your own games.
Temples in town
The first step is to determine what kind of holy places exist in the town you’re creating. Not all gods are worshiped everywhere, and not every settlement can support a large religious sector.
Holy places come in three sizes: shrine, temple, and grand temple.
A shrine is a small, humble place where the faithful can make offerings and present prayers to the gods that matter in their daily lives. A shrine typically does not have a full-time staff performing rituals, but one or two dedicated caretakers who make sure that it stays tidy and welcoming. Local people will know who to go to if some special services are needed. A shrine and its custodians can offer only services of rank 1.
A temple is a larger structure with a dedicated full-time staff of priests and acolytes. Regular religious rituals are carried out here, and there is usually someone on hand who can see to the needs of worshipers and visitors in between their duties to the god. A temple can offer services up to rank 2.
A grand temple is a community unto itself, containing a sanctuary for the god, treasuries for storing valuable offerings, and residences for a full-time staff of priests, along with the kitchens, workshops, storage sheds, and other mundane necessities for keeping the community going. A full hierarchy attends the grand temple, from the high priest and hierophants down to the acolytes learning their first prayers and the workers supplying the priests’ daily needs. Receiving visitors and attending to their religious needs is part of the routine work of the grand temple, and some of its staff are dedicated to doling out the god’s favors to adventurers and other folk in need. A grand temple offers all services.
Each religious institution in a town also serves one particular god and belongs to that god’s divine domain. This homebrew system includes options for gods in the domains of Death, Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Tempest, Trickery, and War, but you can use these examples as a basis for adding other domains as your setting requires.
When you are designing a settlement, it shouldn’t be too hard to decide what sort of holy places can be found there: a small village in the woods may not have much more than shrines for Life and Nature deities, while a huge port city probably has temples for every domain and a grand temple for a Tempest god.
If you want to randomly generate your settlement’s places of worship (either to save yourself a little thinking effort, or just because math rocks going clicky-clack is fun) here’s a couple of tables you can use.
First, roll 1d6 and adjust the roll depending on the size of the settlement, from -4 for a tiny village to +4 for a huge metropolis.
| Adjusted roll | Religious institutions in town |
| -3 | None |
| -2 | 1 shrine |
| -1 | 1 shrine |
| 0 | 2 shrines |
| 1 | 3 shrines |
| 2 | 4 shrines |
| 3 | 4 shrines, 1 temple |
| 4 | 3 shrines, 2 temples |
| 5 | 2 shrines, 3 temples |
| 6 | 1 shrine, 4 temples |
| 7 | 5 temples |
| 8 | 5 temples, 1 grand temple |
| 9 | 6 temples, 1 grand temple |
| 10 | 6 temples, 2 grand temples |
For each religious institution in your settlement, roll 1d8 to determine which domain it belongs to, rerolling any rolls that give the same result as one already rolled.
| 1d8 | Domain |
| 1 | Death |
| 2 | Knowledge |
| 3 | Life |
| 4 | Light |
| 5 | Nature |
| 6 | Tempest |
| 7 | Trickery |
| 8 | War |
Services available
The tables below list the services available in each domain, the rank of each service, and its cost. A description of all services is given after the tables.
The cost given in the tables below is for characters who wish to pay for services in cash, and includes the cost of any necessary material components, which the priest performing the service provides. As an alternative, some other means of payment are suggested in the next section.
Services are granted to the character requesting and paying for them, or to another creature or object that character designates. The recipient of a service knows what effect they are receiving, and a service fails if the recipient is unwilling to receive it. Only one service can be active on a given creature or object at a time, but one creature can carry multiple objects with different services active on them.
Services marked with an asterisk (*) are spells found in the Player’s Handbook or the System Reference Document 5.2.1. A brief description is given below for convenience, but see one of those sources for fuller information if needed. If a character receives one of these spells as a service, apply the following conditions:
- The spell is cast at its lowest level.
- The spellcaster’s ability is Wisdom, and their ability modifier is +4.
- A spell provided as a service does not require concentration from either the priest providing it or the creature receiving it.
- A spell cast as a service can only affect the creature who received the service or an object they carry, even if the spell normally allows its caster to choose another or multiple targets.
- Any spell whose duration is either Instantaneous or 12 hours or longer takes effect exactly as listed in the spell description as soon as the service is provided.
- Any spell that has a duration more than Instantaneous but less than 12 hours does not take effect immediately. The service instead creates an aura of magical potential around the receiving creature which lasts for 24 hours. At any time during that 24 hours, the creature may take a Magic action to activate the spell. The spell immediately becomes active and lasts for its full duration.
Death
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Death.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Detect Poison and Disease* | 50 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of the Grave | 5 GP |
| 2 | Gentle Repose* | 50 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Departed | 125 GP |
| 3 | Raise Dead* | 700 GP |
| 3 | Speak with Dead* | 100 GP |
Knowledge
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Knowledge.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Detect Magic* | 50 GP |
| 1 | Detect Poison and Disease* | 50 GP |
| 1 | Identify* | 60 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of Sagacity | 10 GP |
| 2 | Augury* | 80 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Wise | 50 GP |
| 3 | Sending* | 100 GP |
| 3 | Speak with Dead* | 200 GP |
| 3 | Tongues* | 200 GP |
Life
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Life.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Bless* | 25 GP |
| 1 | Cure Wounds* | 1 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of Healing | 5 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Protector | 50 GP |
| 2 | Lesser Restoration* | 75 GP |
| 2 | Protection from Poison* | 125 GP |
| 3 | Protection from Energy* | 200 GP |
| 3 | Raise Dead* | 700 GP |
| 3 | Remove Curse* | 100 GP |
Light
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Light.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Bless* | 25 GP |
| 1 | Cure Wounds* | 1 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of Flame | 5 GP |
| 1 | Shield of Faith* | 50 GP |
| 2 | Augury* | 80 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Illuminated | 50 GP |
| 2 | Magic Weapon* | 125 GP |
| 3 | Dispel Magic* | 100 GP |
Nature
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Nature.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Cure Wounds* | 1 GP |
| 1 | Detect Poison and Disease* | 50 GP |
| 1 | Goodberry* | 25 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of the Serpent | 5 GP |
| 1 | Longstrider* | 50 GP |
| 2 | Gentle Repose* | 50 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Wild | 50 GP |
| 2 | Protection from Poison* | 125 GP |
| 3 | Water Breathing* | 100 GP |
Tempest
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Tempest.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Cure Wounds* | 1 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of the Storm | 5 GP |
| 1 | Longstrider* | 50 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Winds | 25 GP |
| 2 | Magic Weapon* | 125 GP |
| 3 | Water Breathing* | 100 GP |
Trickery
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of Trickery.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Detect Poison and Disease* | 50 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of Cunning | 10 GP |
| 1 | Protection from Evil and Good* | 75 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Dissembler | 50 GP |
| 2 | Lesser Restoration* | 75 GP |
| 3 | Dispel Magic* | 100 GP |
| 3 | Remove Curse* | 100 GP |
| 3 | Tongues* | 200 GP |
War
The following services are available from a shrine, temple, or grand temple of a deity of War.
| Rank | Service | Cost |
| 1 | Bless* | 25 GP |
| 1 | Cure Wounds* | 1 GP |
| 1 | Lesser Blessing of Wrath | 5 GP |
| 1 | Shield of Faith* | 50 GP |
| 2 | Grace of the Marauder | 100 GP |
| 2 | Magic Weapon* | 125 GP |
| 3 | Protection from Energy* | 200 GP |
Descriptions of Services
The ranks of services and the domains which can offer them are given in parentheses after the name for reference. Services marked with an asterisk (*) are spells found in the Player’s Handbook or the System Reference Document 5.2.1. A brief description is given below for convenience, but see one of those sources for fuller information if needed.
Augury* (2 – Knowledge, Light)
- School: Divination
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Consult a divine force about a specific course of action and receive a positive or negative omen.
Bless* (1 – Life, Light, War)
- School: Enchantment
- Duration: 1 minute
- Add 1d4 whenever you make an attack or save roll. (Note: when received as a service, this spell targets only the creature that received the service.)
Cure Wounds* (1 – Life, Light, Nature, Tempest, War)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Heal 2d8+4 Hit Points.
Detect Magic* (1 – Knowledge)
- School: Divination
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Become aware of magical effects within 30 feet.
Detect Poison and Disease* (1 – Death, Knowledge, Nature, Trickery)
- School: Divination
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Become aware of any source of poison or disease within 30 feet.
Dispel Magic* (3 – Light, Trickery)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Ends one magical effect of level 3 or lower.
Gentle Repose* (2 – Death, Nature)
- School: Necromancy
- Duration: 10 days
- A recently deceased creature is protected from decay and becoming Undead.
Goodberry* (1 – Nature)
- School: Conjuration
- Duration: 24 hours
- Create 10 berries, each of which heals 1 Hit Point and provides nourishment for one day.
Grace of the Departed (2 – Death)
- School: Necromancy
- Duration: 24 hours
- Whenever a spell you cast causes a creature to make a Constitution saving throw, it does so at Disadvantage.
Grace of the Dissembler (2 – Trickery)
- School: Enchantment
- Duration: 24 hours
- You have Advantage on Charisma (Deception) and Dexterity (Stealth) checks.
Grace of the Illuminated (2 – Light)
- School: Evocation
- Duration: 24 hours
- You may use a Magic action to cast the spell Light, requiring no material components. You may cast this spell any number of times while this service lasts. When you cast Light using this service, Wisdom is your spellcasting attribute, and if your Wisdom modifier is less than +4, it is considered +4 for purposes of this spell.
Grace of the Marauder (2 – War)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- You gain a +1 bonus to your attack rolls and AC.
Grace of the Protector (2 – Life)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: 24 hours
- Whenever you roll dice to restore Hit Points to any creature, that creature also receives Temporary Hit Points equal to the highest number on any one of the dice you rolled.
Grace of the Wild (2 – Nature)
- School: Enchantment
- Duration: 24 hours
- You have Advantage on Intelligence (Nature) and Wisdom (Survival) checks.
Grace of the Winds (2 – Tempest)
- School: Evocation
- Duration: 24 hours
- Once per turn, when you deal damage to another creature, you may move your target up to 10 feet away from you or move yourself up to 10 feet away from your target. (This movement does not provoke opportunity attacks.)
Grace of the Wise (2 – Knowledge)
- School: Enchantment
- Duration: 24 hours
- You have advantage on Intelligence (Arcana) and Intelligence (History) checks.
Identify* (1 – Knowledge)
- School: Divination
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Learn the properties of one magical object.
Lesser Blessing of Flame (1 – Light)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- An enchantment is placed on one weapon of your choice. That weapon deals either Fire or Radiant damage in addition to any other types of damage it deals (you choose the type of damage when receiving the service).
Lesser Blessing of Cunning (1 – Trickery)
- School: Enchantment
- Duration: 24 hours
- Choose 1 skill based on Dexterity or Charisma. An enchantment is placed on an item you carry. Any creature carrying that item gains a bonus equal to their proficiency bonus to d20 checks made with that skill.
Lesser Blessing of Healing (1 – Life)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- An enchantment is placed on an item you carry. Whenever a creature carrying that item casts a spell with a spell slot that restores Hit Points to any creature, that spell restores a number of additional Hit Points equal to the caster’s proficiency bonus.
Lesser Blessing of Sagacity (1 – Knowledge)
- School: Enchantment
- Duration: 24 hours
- Choose 1 skill based on Intelligence or Wisdom. An enchantment is placed on an item you carry. Any creature carrying that item gains a bonus equal to their proficiency bonus to d20 checks made with that skill.
Lesser Blessing of the Grave (1 – Death)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- An enchantment is placed on one weapon of your choice. That weapon deals either Necrotic or Psychic damage in addition to any other types of damage it deals (you choose the type of damage when receiving the service).
Lesser Blessing of the Serpent (1 – Nature)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- An enchantment is placed on one weapon of your choice. That weapon deals either Acid or Poison damage in addition to any other types of damage it deals (you choose the type of damage when receiving the service).
Lesser Blessing of the Storm (1 – Tempest)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- An enchantment is placed on one weapon of your choice. That weapon deals either Lightning or Thunder damage in addition to any other types of damage it deals (you choose the type of damage when receiving the service).
Lesser Blessing of Wrath (1 – War)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- An enchantment is placed on one weapon of your choice. That weapon deals either Force or Radiant damage in addition to any other types of damage it deals (you choose the type of damage when receiving the service).
Lesser Restoration* (2 – Life, Trickery)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Remove Blinded, Deafened, Paralyzed, or Poisoned conditions.
Longstrider* (1 – Nature, Tempest)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 1 hour
- Your Speed increases by 10 feet.
Magic Weapon* (2 – Light, Tempest, War)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 1 hour
- A weapon you touch becomes a magic weapon with +1 to attack and damage rolls.
Protection from Energy* (3 – Life, War)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: 1 hour
- Gain Resistance to one damage type: Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder.
Protection from Evil and Good* (1 – Trickery)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: 10 minutes
- You are protected against Aberrations, Celestials, Elementals, Fey, Fiends, and Undead. ( Note: when received as a service, this spell targets only the creature that received the service.)
Protection from Poison* (2 – Life, Nature)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: 1 hour
- Gain Resistance to Poison damage and Advantage on saving throws against the Poisoned condition. ( Note: when received as a service, this spell targets only the creature that received the service.)
Raise Dead* (3 – Death, Life)
- School: Necromancy
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Revive a creature that has been dead less than 10 days.
Remove Curse* (3 – Life, Trickery)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Remove all curses affecting an object or creature.
Sending* (3 – Knowledge)
- School: Divination
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Send a message of 25 words or less to another creature.
Shield of Faith* (1 – Light, War)
- School: Abjuration
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Gain +2 AC. (Note: when received as a service, this spell targets only the creature that received the service.)
Speak with Dead* (3 – Death, Knowledge)
- School: Necromancy
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Ask 5 questions of a corpse.
Tongues* (3 – Knowledge, Trickery)
- School: Divination
- Duration: 1 hour
- Understand any spoken or signed language. ( Note: when received as a service, this spell targets only the creature that received the service.)
Water Breathing* (3 – Nature, Tempest)
- School: Transmutation
- Duration: 24 hours
- Gain the ability to breathe under water. (Note: when received as a service, this spell targets only the creature that received the service.)
Alternative payment
Instead of a donation in coin, you might offer your player characters a chance to pay for their services with services of their own. This can be a good option for a cash-strapped party, and can also provide opportunities for side quests or for downtime activities to let your players practice some of their lesser-used skills. Here are some suggestions to consider:
Rank 1 services
- Entertain the children at the local orphanage for an afternoon (Life, Trickery)
- Fix a leaky roof, patch gaps in the walls, replace some broken floor tiles, or perform other simple maintenance in the temple (Nature, Tempest)
- Gather firewood for the temple from nearby woods (Light, Nature)
- Gather wild plants to restock the temple’s store of spell reagents (Knowledge, Life, Nature, Tempest)
- Participate in a solemn funeral procession for a recently deceased local hero (Death, Light)
- Play a small, harmless prank on the priests of a rival temple (Trickery)
- Recount tales of your party’s adventures to be recorded for posterity (Knowledge, Light, Trickery, War)
- Spar with some paladin trainees (Light, War)
- Tidy up the local graveyard (Death, Nature)
Rank 2 services
- Clean out a local village’s irrigation channels (Life, Tempest)
- Convince some mischievous wood sprites to move out of a sacred grove (Light, Nature, Trickery)
- Deliver needed medicines and potions to an outlying village (Life, Nature)
- Fight a demonstration duel against a band of chosen champions for paladin initiates to observe and learn from (Light, War)
- Find a ghost that has been haunting a local crypt and find out what it needs to be able to move on into the afterlife (Death, Knowledge, Light)
- Fish, hunt, and gather foods from the local wilderness for a communal feast (Life, Nature, Tempest)
- Join in the funeral games for a fallen local hero and win at least one victory in the god’s name (Death, Life, War)
- Spy on a local criminal syndicate to find out where their meeting spot is so the authorities can deal with them (Knowledge, Light, Trickery)
Rank 3 services
- Compose and stage a play about the party’s adventures for the entertainment and education of local townsfolk (Knowledge, Life, War)
- Hunt a wild beast that has been terrorizing villages the hinterlands (Light, Nature, Tempest)
- Investigate the local noble houses to determine which of them has been skimming off the temple tithes (Knowledge, Light, Trickery)
- Keep an overnight vigil in a local graveyard on a night when minor evil spirits are known to wander. Keep the spirits distracted to stop them from causing trouble. (Death, Trickery)
- Recover a lost relic last known to have been in the possession of a fallen hero, who may have since become undead (Death, Light, War)
- Seek out and defeat a minor local bandit or other troublemaker (Life, War)
- Spend a stormy night standing watch at a dangerous headland and rescue the survivors from ships that founder in the waves (Life, Light, Tempest)
- Track a noble beast that was gravely wounded but not killed in an upstart noble’s botched hunt and put the creature out of its pain (Death, Nature)
This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 (“SRD 5.2.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Images: Algorithmically generated images made with Night Cafe: Shrine, Temple, and Grand Temple
Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.
Nan Madol: A Megalithic Palace in the Pacific
On the eastern coast of the island of Pohnpei, part of the Federated States of Micronesia, are the remains of a gigantic complex of megalithic structures. These structures stand along the coast of the island and on nearly a hundred artificial islands just offshore. This site is called Nan Madol.
The structures of Nan Madol were first built in the 1100s CE and served as an administrative and ceremonial center for the Saudeleur ruling dynasty that held power over Pohnpei from approximately 1100 CE to the early 1600s. They were constructed using columns of volcanic rock that formed natural geometric shapes. By carefully jointing these stones together, the people of Pohnpei created large structures stable enough that many walls still stand today.
Nan Madol is one of many sites around the world that remind us that cultures capable of coordinated labor, careful planning, and social complexity are not the product of only one environment or part of the world.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Swimmers of the Sahara
Thousands of years ago, the Sahara desert was not the dry, sandy place it is now. There was a time when northern Africa was wet and green. Most of what we know about climate changes in the past comes from the study of geology and paleontology, but one small indicator of a wetter ancient Sahara comes from the people of the time themselves.
There are numerous rock paintings and carvings in the Sahara, showing that people once lived in places that are now inhospitable desert. Several pieces of rock art show animals that could not survive in the Sahara in its modern desert state. One interesting painting, from a cave in southwestern Egypt, shows people floating or swimming in water.
Anthropologists have speculated that the swimmers represent souls of the dead floating in the primordial waters of the afterlife, in an early version of what would become the mythology of ancient Egypt. Whether this speculation is true or not, however, it must be the case that floating in water was something the people of the ancient Sahara could imagine, an experience that is hardly possible in the region today.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Winter is Coming, and He’s Got a Hare to Share
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.
Narrative Combat for Dungeons & Dragons
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.
Images: Algorithmically generated images made with Night Cafe: A winter battle, Temple ambush, The untouched armory
Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.
Co-Geeking 
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