The World is a Haunted House

 

Some time ago I was in a conversation with Cole about Nightwick in the very pretentious way I sometimes do and the topic veered into the definition of "Dark Fantasy." It's a genre which I think there is no question that the World of Nightwick occupies, even if it's not always serious. It's also a genre which, 13 years after I first started running Nightwick still has a lot of cultural cachet. If anything it's gotten bigger in this post-Dark Souls/post-Elden Ring world, and I think for someone who works in that medium, even if it's all hack work, it's worth thinking about what it is. 

Normally it is defined as "fantasy with horror elements," but very commonly Moorcock's Elric saga is included in Dark Fantasy and I wouldn't say it has horror elements. Cole provided a definition that I think does the wonderful job of including the things people would want to include and excluding what they wouldn't while also being very evocative: Dark Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a world that is haunted.

What does it mean to be haunted? Probably at least in part because of my history background, I am going to be using "haunted" here to mean that it bears the scars of the past - a psychic shock that causes the memories of the dead to cluster there like bats in a cavern and for them to weigh as a nightmare upon the brains of the living. In thinking about this topic outside the realm of games, I have come to see history writing as a sort of ghost story. The crimes of the past have a long reach and haunt us today as much as any specter from the mind of MR James.

In our fantasy game worlds, or fantasy worlds in general, we can achieve this sense of being haunted through the numinous. The psychic scars of the past have physical and spiritual manifestations on the world. In the world of Nightwick, immediately to the northwest of Nightwick Village, is the Mire of Princes - created when the blood of an army facing the Sword Brothers so suffused the ground that it became a marsh ever after. More distantly there is the Blood Red Sea - stained that color after the demon Moloch pitched the men of ancient Acheron into it. And of course there is Nightwick Abbey itself.

Within Nightwick Abbey's hall, the sins of the Sword Brothers live on in twisted and exaggerated form. Tortures carry on forever, heedless of the death of both torturer and tortured. Hochmeisters of the past walk evermore beneath its ruins, returning again if slain for they are trapped forever. Even what was once a lavatory has taken ghastly shape in hideous memory of the room's previous purpose. Nightwick is, after all, a mythical underworld. 

If you want to run something that's Dark Fantasy, as seems to still be in vogue, that's how you do it. Think about the history of the setting and how its crimes gnaw away through time into the present. It is a mode of thinking that should be easy to all of us now.

There are times when I desire to run something where the world is less numinous - a lower fantasy where heroes of maybe a Howardian stripe come to grips with monsters of super science - but then I have to write dungeon rooms. It seems my brain is either too choked by the weeds of time and the study of past wrongs or too enamored with the gothic I engaged with in entertainment and saw in the woods where I grew up. But my dungeons are always haunted. Maybe I am too.

An OD&D Thief Rewrite

A bit ago I saw a discussion on twitter where Idle Cartulary and Marcia B were discussing the design differences between the original thief class - which anyone familiar with OSR discourse knows creates limits on other characters that didn't previously exist - and the paladin which largely creates new abilities only that class has. Marcie later posted her own thoughts on the original version of the thief, but I thought I'd weigh in not with thoughts on the thief but my third(!) attempt at a rewrite of it.

Note: unlike the version on my patreon, this is written with OD&D - or FMC or DD or whatever very close retroclone you want to use - in mind.  I wanted to make sure the mechanics either added things a thief could do better than another character and that tied into existing mechanics where possible.

Thieves

A player in the Nightwick campaign may wish to play a thief. This character type is open to  all races and any race may advance to any level as a thief. 

The prime requisite for the thief is DEX. If a character has a 16 DEX or higher they may opt to level as a thief for a given dungeon expedition in the same manner as an elf may switch between fighting man and magic user. Characters who do so retain their abilities from their original class but may not wear armor heavier than leather and still utilize their thief abilities.

Thieves may use any weapon and shield, but may only wear leather armor and no magic sword will ever deign to be used by you unless you also have attained at least the 4th level of fighting man.

Thieves possess a number of special abilities described below.

Hear Noise: Unlike other human characters, or even demihumans, thieves advance in their ability to hear noises as they level.

Hide in Shadows: While the thief will always be surprised if the party is, the referee must check separately to see if monsters are surprised by the presence of the thief even if they are not surprised for the party, for a thief may hide in the shadows cast even by a torch. At level four a thief gains a 3 in 6 chance of surprise and at level 9 they may attempt to slink back into the shadows even if they reveal themselves during combat.

Open Locks: If the referee determines a lock on a chest or door may be picked, a thief may attempt to pick a lock during a combat round by rolling the number indicated on the table below. They may also spend 1d6 exploration turns to automatically open a  lock given.*

Move Silently: Thieves whose party would not otherwise be given away by torch light or the clink of armor, may surprise opponents or otherwise move without being detected based on a roll described on the table below. This ability increases as they level.

Sense Traps: Thieves may intuit the existence of traps on a 1-2 on 1d6, much as elves do with secret doors.

Remove Traps: A thief has the same chance to disarm a trap per turn as they do Open Locks per round. No attempt to automatically disarm a trap may be attempted in a time segment shorter than an exploration turn. The referee may determine that a failure to disarm a trap automatically sets it off.

Sneak Attack: A thief attacking an opponent who is unaware of their presence gains a +4 to hit and does additional damage based on the table below.

Read Languages: If a thief is literate as determined by the referee based on their intelligence score, they may read treasure maps and other mysterious scripts without the use of a spell starting at the third level of experience. Once they reach level 9 they may then cast spells from magic user scrolls.

Thief Advancement

Level	Experience Required	Hit Dice	HN	OL/ RT	MS	SA	D	W	P	B	S
1	0	1	1-2	1	1	2d	11	12	14	16	15
2	1,200	1+1	1-2	1	1-2	2d	11	12	14	16	15
3	2,400	2	1-3	1-2	1-2	2d	11	12	14	16	15
4	4,800	2+2	1-3	1-2	1-2	2d	11	12	14	16	15
5	9,600	3	1-3	1-2	1-3	3d	9	10	12	14	12
6	20,000	3+1	1-3	1-3	1-3	3d	9	10	12	14	12
7	40,000	4	1-4	1-3	1-3	3d	9	10	12	14	12
8	60,000	4+1	1-4	1-3	1-4	3d	9	10	12	14	12
9	90,000	5	1-4	1-4	1-4	4d	6	7	9	11	9
10	125,000	5+1	1-4	1-4	1-4	4d	6	7	9	11	9

*Non-thieves have a 1 in 6 per exploration turn of opening a lock, provided they have the proper tools, but cannot make an attempt to do so within a combat round.

An Announcement

 

I've been meaning to say this for a bit now, but today being Transgender Day of Visibility provides me a convenient excuse and gives me a way to be in solidarity with the rest of the community.

I'm trans. Name's Miranda. Nice to meet you. She/her.

Obviously nothing about the blog or the patreon is really going to change. We're in TTRPGs so your probably used to this kind of thing.

Hope everybody has a good day.

The Adventures of Otzi the Ice Jerk

A Player Character

I'm not sure how common it is in the OSR/Post-OSR/NSR/[whatever you want to call the remnants of the blogosphere that exists] spaces, but a common refrain I have seen in more WFRP/BRP leaning rpg communities is that the idea of the "adventurer" is a purely pop cultural phenomenon without a basis in reality, with a usual corollary that as such it should not be simulated in our games. I want to deal not with the corollary, which I think the bulk of my readers will find stupid on its face, but rather the initial sentiment: that people of violent means who were largely unmoored from social structures and walked the world doing violent things for wealth and survival, largely did not exist. I want to argue that the historical record is replete with such people and provide a rather unorthodox example to help us better contextualize PC types in our games. 

In case you cannot tell from the title of my post, I have picked for my example Otzi* the Iceman.** If you did not have a father who was as interested in the archaeology of pre-literate peoples as mine was, or if you just lack similar interests to me, Otzi is the name given to a natural mummy discovered in the Otzal Alps at the Austro-Italian border in 1991. His actual name is unknown, as is any biographical details that cannot be gleaned from his corpse. In the broadest strokes he was a man in early middle age who lived sometime during the Copper Age, most likely sometime between 3200 and 3100 BCE. Some of the details of his corpse are interesting if we think of him as a PC.

First, Otzi seems to have traveled quite a bit, and done so largely by foot. The bones in his pelvis and legs show that he did a great deal more walking than is probably typical of other copper age people. While this has lead some to say he may have been a pastoralist of some kind, it is worth noting that materials in his copper axe (more on that later) probably came from Southern Italy and he had arsenic in his hair and nails consistent with being a metal worker. Perhaps he was playing AD&D and had it for a secondary skill?

Nice axe!

Otzi also seems to have had a fair amount of wealth for a copper age "pastoralist." Most notably is the copper axe mentioned earlier, which is made of over 99% pure copper and would've been incredibly rare at the time. Obviously this axe could be a simple tool, but given evidence later it also could've been involved in acts of violence. He also seems to have eaten extremely well - his digestive track contained the contents of two meals, both of which involved a significant amount of meat (chamois and red dear) as well as nuts, fruits, herbs, and einkorn wheat bread. This means he either had significant enough wealth to buy meat or, more probably but no less-PC like, he hunted in a period that was becoming more and more agrarian. Therefore we can conclude (at least for my stupid thought experiment) he subsisted at the edge of society.

The eyes of a killer

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our man Otzi was a man of violent means. DNA analysis of his gear showed that he had the blood of at  least three other people on him when he died - one on a knife, two on a single arrow head (meaning that they were killed before the incident that caused his death) and one on his coat. The arrow head is further interesting because it implies two separate fights before his final one, as I think it unlikely he would retrieve and fire the same arrow again in rapid enough succession for it to be considered a single fight. He also, of course, has an arrow wound himself that is almost assuredly the cause of his demise. Notably here too, the arrow has been removed and Otzi's somewhat characteristic arm folding in death may have been due to someone turning him over to get their arrow back. Why they didn't take his fine axe, I don't know.

It's a kind of magic

Ok I lied. That wasn't the final one. Let's do the most preposterous one: he was a regular recipient of healing magic. Otzi possessed a number of tattoos made by rubbing charcoal into an incision in specific points. This seems to have been done on more than one occasion, as is shown by the pigmentation in and repeated nature of the incisions. Some have said these incisions match up to acupunctural points designed to help with stomach pain, and indeed it seems that Otzi had whip worm. I guess it was AD&D after all. Sorry about that disease roll.

You poor dumb dead bastard

*I know there should be an umlaut. I didn't want to have to copy and paste it or do an alt code every time the name came up.

**Am I saying Otzi explored dungeons? Of course not. Who would've built them?