Author: Erik

The “Sheer Dumb Luck” Table

Erik

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Sometimes the tools you use the most are the simplest ones. This is one of the simplest things in my arsenal when I run a role-playing game, but I use it all the time.

Your players will often ask you questions that you didn’t think of ahead of time. Is the guard wearing gloves? Are there any pine cones lying around? Does this planet have any beryllium deposits near the surface?

Of course, if it matters to the adventure whether or not the guard is wearing gloves, then you have your answer and you go with it, but often either yes or no will do, you just have to pick one. It can be exhausting to always be having to decide, so you can just flip a coin, but not everything in the world is a fifty-fifty chance. If you’ve already established that it’s a cold night, the chances that the guard is wearing gloves are pretty high.

That’s where the table comes in, which, in honor of my favorite Harry Potter character, I have dubbed: The “Sheer Dumb Luck” table.

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Simply pick the descriptor on the list that sounds right for whatever your players asked and roll 3d6. Is the guard wearing gloves? Very likely. Are there any pine cones? Somewhat likely. Any beryllium? Virtually impossible. If you roll equal to or under the number given, the answer is yes. If higher, no.

  • 4–Virtually impossible
  • 6–Very unlikely
  • 8–Unlikely
  • 10–Fifty/fifty
  • 11–Somewhat likely
  • 12–Likely
  • 14–Very likely
  • 15–Virtually certain

And the best thing about this table: sometimes, once you’ve rolled, you realize that the opposite answer is actually better. One way or another, you’ve answered the question and the adventure can keep rolling.

Like everything, it’s a tool, not a rule. Not everyone likes to leave as much up to chance in an adventure as I do. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t.

Images: Books and dice by Erik Jensen; “Five points…” via rosereturns.tumblr.com

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.

Travel: Some Basics

Erik

151116caravanWhether it’s carrying the One Ring to Mount Doom or sailing the Azure Sea, travel is an important part of a lot of fantasy stories and games. For those of us more accustomed to traveling by car, train, bus, and plane than by foot, horse, oxcart, or galleon, this poses a lot of practical problems. How far can your characters travel in a day? How long will it take them to get from point A to point B? And what do they need in order to make the journey successfully?

This is the introduction to a History for Writers series that looks at the evidence of history to help provide practical answers to your questions about travel in the pre-modern world. We’ll look at a few basic issues today. In future installments we’ll examine specific modes of travel, terrains, and problems.

Note that what we’re discussing here is based on real-world history, so it applies only to the extent that your world resembles historical conditions. If your characters travel by foot, horse, and sail, much of the information here will be directly applicable. If they have teleportation and magic carpets, adjust accordingly.

Here are a few basic issues that apply to just about any kind of travel in a pre-industrial world:

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The Phantom Mousse

Erik

To accompany the first of our Star Wars rewatches, I made a dark chocolate mousse. As rich as Queen Amidala’s wardrobe and as dark as Senator Palpatine’s heart, this mousse kept us happy through the podrace and droid battles.

The Phantom Mousse

Ingredients

  • 7 oz dark chocolate
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 4 tablespoons dark rum
  • 3 eggs

Melt the chocolate, butter, and rum together in a double boiler over barely simmering water

Separate the eggs

Remove the melted chocolate from the heat and whisk in the egg yolks

Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks

Whisk the egg whites into the chocolate mixture

Spoon into dishes and chill for an hour

 

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

Dynastic Race Theory and Why Revision Is Essential

Erik5 Comments

151109steleThe words revision and revisionism, when it comes to history, have a bad smell. They are lobbed as insults against people who propose new ways of understanding things that already have a conventional explanation. “We had it right the first time, stop monkeying with it” is the implied retort. Revision, however, is essential to the study of history. No matter how well we think we understand something, our grasp of history is always partial and conditional. New evidence, new ideas, and new questions applied to the known sources frequently yield new results and we often discover that our conventional explanations, while not wrong, are incomplete. And sometimes they are just wrong.

Here’s an example. As the European study of ancient Egyptian history developed in the 1800s, European colonialism was also spreading across Africa. For scholars who supported the imperialist agenda, or at least accepted its intellectual framework (and there were those who didn’t, but they were a minority), ancient Egypt presented a problem. Imperialist thinking declared that Africans were incapable of reaching a high level of culture without the help of superior white men, and therefore European colonization of Africa was not just a profitable venture but a moral imperative. Yet there could be no denying that ancient Egypt had been a high culture. How could both things be true?

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Garrisons: Solving the Wrong Problem

Erik

Sometimes you put a lot of time and effort into solving a problem, only to realize that you were coming at the problem from the wrong angle and your solution doesn’t actually fix anything, or even just makes things worse. (Or at least I do. I do this all the time.) It’s what I think of as “solving the wrong problem.” Blizzard Entertainment, creators of World of Warcraft, has been solving the wrong problem in the latest expansion, and garrisons are the manifestation of that mistake.

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The Aliance garrison, where I’ve spent entirely too much of my gaming time.

It’s not that there aren’t problems to be solved. WoW‘s player base is getting older and a lot of us have less time to play, can’t sit down and play in long sessions like we used to, and aren’t as interested in investing lots of time and effort into chasing big goals, but we still want to play and enjoy the game. Garrisons were, in my opinion, a good-faith effort at solving this problem, but they came at it from the wrong direction.

This weekend is Blizzcon, Blizzard’s big event when they talk about what’s coming for their games and we’re going to hear all about the next expansion for WoW. I hope we hear something that addresses what garrisons got wrong.

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Superfluous Ghosts

Erik

It is odd to find oneself arguing that a ghost story would be better without the ghosts, but that’s how I felt coming away from Crimson Peak.

Crimson Peak, as others have noted, is a Gothic romance. Ghosts are de rigeur for the genre. They give form to emotional traumas and compel the hero or heroine to uncover the horrible secrets behind them. The ghosts of Crimson Peak fulfill this role and prod the film’s heroine to expose the dark past in the house. Eventually. She takes an awful lot of prodding. In the meantime, the ghosts just take up screen time being ghostly and doing ghost stuff, none of it terribly interesting.

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“The ghosts are a metaphor,” we are told early in the film, except they aren’t. A metaphor is when one thing stands for or represents another, but there is nothing metaphorical about the ghosts of Crimson Peak. The ghost of the old woman in the bathtub with a meat cleaver in her head does not represent the lingering traumas of the past or the madness of the characters. It represents the fact that an old woman was killed in that bathtub with a meat cleaver to the head. The crumbling, bleeding house is a metaphor for the unraveling of the family that dwells there, but the ghosts are the most literal ghosts you have ever met.

The only purpose the ghosts serve in the narrative is to nudge our heroine Edith into uncovering the truth. They might as well just be standing in the hallway holding signs that say “PLOT-RELEVANT INFORMATION IN THIS CLOSET” or “ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS BATHROOM.” They are narrative shortcuts that save the heroine the bother of actually having to do much thinking. The most interesting part of the story is when Edith finally does a little investigating, but the ghosts do most of the uncovering for her and rob the story of complexity. I would rather have watched Edith do the work of piecing together what was going on at Allerdale Hall without the ghosts standing around holding their “THIS WAY TO THE PLOT” signs.

“It’s not a ghost story,” we are also told early in the film. “It’s a story with ghosts.” I give the movie enormous credit for its gorgeous visual design and for showing how well a period piece can incorporate active and effective female characters. But maybe it should have been a story without ghosts.

Image: Crimson Peak, (c) Universal Pictures 2015 via imdb

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Feasts and Fools

Erik1 Comment

151026jackHalloween will soon be upon us. The origins of this holiday are obscure. It is often connected with the Gaelic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, but Halloween, at least as popularly celebrated today in the US and some other countries, has wider connections. It is an example of a type of holiday found in many cultures: the “feast of fools.”

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The Myth Is Strong With This One

Erik1 Comment

It’s well known that George Lucas drew inspiration from mythology when writing Star Wars. Luke Skywalker, the young hero from the planet farthest from the bright center of the universe, gets the call to adventure delivered by droid and goes off on a Campbellian journey to rescue a princess, seek out an ancient mentor, and finally confront his fallen father. The prequel trilogy gave us the tragic version in which Anakin, the great warrior, was driven to madness and destroyed the things he loved the most.

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There are smaller touches of myth throughout the Star Wars hexalogy. Luke receives his father’s lightsaber like King Arthur drawing his father’s sword from the stone. The escape from the imperial garbage masher has hints of Jonah and the whale. Luke in the Wampa’s cave has shades of Beowulf.

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Like most of the rest of geeky internet, I’ve been watching the trailers for The Force Awakens with excitement. I’ve been struck by something, especially in the latest trailer. The mythology that this latest iteration of Star Wars is working hardest to evoke is… Star Wars.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer (Official) via Star Wars

Star Wars has transcended being a movie franchise or even an expanded universe. It has reached the point where we can speak of it in terms of mythology.

One of the definitions of myth is that it is a story you know even if you can’t recall ever being told it. Star Wars has that. It is part of our cultural consciousness to the point that even people who haven’t seen the movies (yes, they exist) recognize the sound of a lightsaber and the cadences of the imperial march. Star Wars was all over my childhood, and even though I didn’t get around to seeing the movies until I was a teen (I was a Star Trek fan and young and dumb enough to think that I had to pick one over the other), I recognized Darth Vader, Princess Leia and Yoda on my friends’ lunchboxes.

Another characteristic of myth is that all myths are versions. There is no original, no canon. Though some may disagree on whether this is a good thing, Star Wars has always been an evolving story, getting new versions from small tweaks to big changes. (Yes, I see you in the back in the “Han Shot First” shirt, you can put your hand down.) The new wave of Star Wars movies leaves the old hexalogy alone but reboots the post-Return-of-the-Jedi expanded universe.

For those of us who grew up in the world of Star Wars, it is hard to imagine a time when these stories were not a part of the popular culture, yet there was a time when no one had heard Darth Vader’s breathing or Yoda’s grammar, when no one knew what a lightsaber or a Death Star was. By connecting to the ancient stories we already knew, Star Wars made itself feel timeless. Now it has become a part of that universal memory to be played upon and invoked in its own right.

Images: “This is the weapon of a Jedi knight” via The Film Fatale; wampa via giphy.com

Post edited for style.

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

In a World Without Alfalfa…

Erik4 Comments

151019Shapur… Marcus Licinius Crassus would have been the first emperor of Rome instead of Julius Caesar.

Stick with me here.

Alfalfa is a plant in the pea family that resembles clover. It originally comes from south central Asia and was cultivated in the northern parts of the Iranian plateau as animal fodder. Compared with other fodder plants, alfalfa is very high in protein, so it is mostly fed to cattle. It can be given in small amounts to most horse breeds, but in large amounts it causes bloating as horses cannot use the excess protein.

The exception is Nisaean horses, a breed of horse that was developed in northern Persia and bred to feed on alfalfa. These horses were able to absorb the extra protein of alfalfa into their bones, giving them denser, stronger bones than other horses. These dense bones enabled the Nisaean horses to make sudden turns while galloping at high speed that would have broken other horses’ legs and to carry heavier weights than other horses of the ancient world could manage.

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Fantasy Religions: The Divine Presence

Erik1 Comment

151012DionysusDown the crimson marble steps of the temple of Zurukh, god of blood, came a bald priest in the red robes of the Order.

“Heathens!” he cried, pointing with his holy whip at Our Heroes. “Heretics! Blasphemers! You shall bow down and worship Zurukh or burn in the fires of the Scarlet Inquisition!”

“Silence!” answered Inessa, stepping forward from the party and raising aloft her crosier. “Repent of your wickedness! The power of Adnea, Lady of the Pure Light, compels you!”

Religions are tricky to write. If you’ve delved into much fantasy, you’ve probably seen a lot of faiths that seem oddly familiar. In fact, the religions of some fantasy worlds can be charitably described as “Catholicism with the serial numbers filed off.” Even given a profusion of gods with their own temples and cults and spheres of influence, fantasy religions tend to work more like the modern monotheisms than like the actual ancient “pagan” traditions they are outwardly imitating.

How can you make your fantasy religion feel more authentically ancient? There’s no rules to it, but in this and some future History for Writers posts, I’ll share some of what we know about historical beliefs from around the world that may help you imagine a religious worldview that feels less modern.

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