I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, I’ll never get it done in time…

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While most of Chapter 21 had been done when I started this series, Chapters 22 and 23 were at best partially finished, which means my easy ride is over. In the end, it proved easier to complete these partially-written chapters properly (it was simply topo jarring going from finished paragraphs to draft paragraphs and back again. But these are the last chapters for a while that will be written in final form.

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The Second Great Dwarfwar: Elvarheim Invasion

The Dwarves soon found trade to be a profitable exercise, especially the refined Adamant Ore. Mithral, they discovered, was a far more delicate material, too fragile to used for weapons or armor. It was pleasing to the eye, though, and light enough to be used for inlayed decorations; but even the most profligate such usage could not make a serious dent in the supply, as first hundreds and then thousands of ounces of the brittle metal accumulated. For close to 50 years, trade in foodstuffs, gems, and ore flourished, and was soon accompanied by the products of various crafts.

But eventually, and inevitably, the false peace was broken, as the Elves at last released their assault on the Dwarven caverns. Clouds of noxious fumes issued forth from the ventilation shafts; some of the Dwarven water-sources became blackened and foul-tasting, and soon proved toxic, while others simply dried completely; tree-roots the size of a Dwarf erupted from the walls, resistant to axe and flame, and knocked down supporting pillars, crushing whole communities in their cavernous homes; and rumors of strange creatures being encountered deep in the Dwarven tunnels were accompanied by the inexplicable disappearance of isolated Dwarves. While most of these can be accurately blamed on the creatures released by the Elvish Bladedancers, some were opportune kidnappings by the Drow, who were always eager to press others into their service. Even today, it is rumored that there are Drow Houses with Dwarven slaves hidden deep in the bowels of the earth, performing hard labors for the profit of their masters.

King Veldergrist was now elderly by Dwarvish Standards, but remained a vital and strong ruler; as a youth, he had ascended the throne, in his prime he had negotiated a friendship of sorts with the Drow, in his middle age he had managed trade between the two underground-dwelling races to the betterment of both, and now, as he approached his century of years, he faced the renewal of hostilities with a calm and grim determination to prevail.

He immediately sent word to the Drow Ambassador, and told him, “As your Mistress prophesied, so has it come to pass. Now is the time for plans long-held in abeyance to be realized. Long ago, She offered the aid of her Spellcrafters in a direct counterassault apon the surface; now we accept that offer, while they are distracted in the upper levels of our Mines. We ask also for increased shipments of food, that our remaining growers may be armed for war, and beg leave to repay this generosity in more sanguine times. And when we have prevailed, we should be most pleased to accept the offer of Spellcraft in undoing these unwarranted and unjustified assaults apon our realm.”

To which, the representative of the Spider-Queen replied, “We shall be most pleased to render unto you the aid that was promised so long ago by She Who Is Eternal. As I recall, there was also the offer of refuge from these travails for yourself, your immediate family, and a small cadre of Warriors, but you make no mention of this; I assure you, the offer remains open; will you accept our hospitality and shelter?”

And the Dwarf did reply with pride, “Eld may I be, but not yet in my dotage. My people will fight all the more stubbornly and proudly for the knowledge that we share in their discomforts. Not until the last possible moment will I abandon the protection of my people; they would accept nothing less of their King.”

“But surely,” said the Ambassador, “you would wish to see your wife and children escorted to a place of safety?”

“My wife refuses to leave my side, for which I am grateful, for she is the rock apon which I stand; and my children insist apon joining the ranks of those who will fight for our homes. I may be able to keep them from the front lines, where the dangers are greatest; beyond that, my authority seems to be somehow lacking.”

“Truly, a great Lord may master his people, but never his kin,” the Ambassador managed to announce, all the while contemplating how one of the House Mothers would react to such a statement. Were such a tragedy to befall him, the best for which he could hope was that his torment would be ended quickly lest others be exposed to such blasphemy! Truly, the Dwarves were ignorant savages to hold to such beliefs.

“Aye, in that you have the right of it,” replied the King.

“Very well, your Majesty. I shall depart at once to make the arrangements.”

And so it was that the Drow directed the Dwarves in how to tunnel beneath the roots of the forest of Elvarheim, and then nudged to one side those spellwoven defenses that lay between the bearded warriors and the heart of the Elven Realm. To those used to tunneling through hard stone and unyielding rock, the soft earth of the forest was the merest trifle, and progress was made at a prodigious rate. Even as the raiding party prepared to emerge, and the Drow spellweavers retreated down the tunnel, Deruan was leading the Bladedancers in renewed invasion of the Dwarven Mines, armed with a list of promises and guarantees to be demanded of the Dwarves before their surrender would be accepted.

The Spider-queen was at last on the verge of achieving Her initial purpose when She instructed Her people in how to instigate the conflict between the Elves and Dwarves, more than 70 years earlier.

The Dwarvish insurgency did not go undetected; even as they labored to complete their breach of the Elven forest, a youth serving the council as messenger felt what he regarded as a strange vibration in the earth, and an unsettling shudder of the leaves of the tree he was ascending. Being conscienscious, he dutifully reported his experience to the Council; but the Spellweavers employed their arts, and reported that the forest’s defenses were intact and undisturbed, and the warnings of the messenger were dismissed as youthful imagination and overexcitement. As a result, the Elves were totally unprepared when the Dwarves erupted from their tunnel.

It is ironic that of all the races, Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves are in many ways, the most alike. In all three of their cultures, everyone is expected to be able to defend themselves, and everyone acquires at least a minimal skill in some form of combat. For the Dwarves, hammers and axes are as natural as black leather is to a cutpurse; for the Orcs, it is broadblades, maces, or polearms; and for the Elves, longswords, bows, or the curved 14″ daggers known as Alkaith that the mages favor. Even the curved blades of the Bladedancers are reflections of this aspect of their fundamental natures. This is a truth that has been lost in the modern day. Curves are as natural to Elves as straight lines are to humans, and circles are to Halflings.

So it was that even with their official defenders engaged in the Mines by an ill-timed act of aggression – the product of decades of patience wearing increasingly thin, for it is a limited resource even in an Elf – the Dwarves encountered stiff opposition from the everyday Elves who happened to be passing that part of the forest at the time, and pitched battle erupted.

To understand why the Bladedancers had chosen this moment to renew their assault on the Dwarven mines, it is necessary to understand the strategy that had been conceived and executed by Deruan.

As is usually the case, battlefield reports – especially those of a dramatic nature – are frequently exaggerated. This truth was evident in hindsight to those who heard the reports of the Dwarves to their King, and in the King’s summation to the Drow Ambassador.

In reality, the Bladedancers were not indiscriminately targeting the Dwarven mineshafts and tunnels; rather, they were using their arsenal to restrict the tactical options of the Dwarves that they encountered, and restricting the battlefield to a direct – if convoluted – line to the chambers which contained the Dwarven Throne.

Elves are not pacificists, but do not engage in wholesale slaughter of bystanders; every death must be the only remaining alternative. This is one of the fundamental differences that separated them from the Drow; for their subterranean kin identified more with a racial collective or nationalist grouping of people instead of dealing with them as individuals; but this merely made them dangerous. It was for the love and adoration of their Dark Queen that they committed the most despicable, vile, heinous, and diabolical acts, because they did not perceive the targets as individuals in individual circumstances, but as members or representatives of an entire populace or population segment. (It is notable that when Drow behave thus, they always fail in the final analysis; only when engaging others as individuals, as their Ambassadors did with the Dwarven King, do they achieve success). The question of whether this failure of perception is due to Lolth, or inherent in those who follow the insect totems in general, or is a deficiency that drew them to others with the same flaw, is one that has endlessly been debated – without resolution).

Standing between the Bladedancers and their ultimate goal were four fortified salients, manned by grim and angry Dwarves who were predisposed to believe that they stood between arch-fiends bent on the slaughter of their entire race and their families and friends. They were prepared to fight to the last defender to protect their homes, just as the Elves of the central forest were fighting to protect their homes and families.

But the Bladedancers had planned, and practiced, and equipped themselves with specific weapons for the task that lay before them, while the Dwarvish incursion was assembled in haste, ill-prepared, and an act of desperation. No matter how analogous the two situations, they were predestined to have inevitably divergent outcomes. Even as the Bladedancers overran the first salient, penetrating the first line of Dwarvish defenses, and released their Spellwoven creatures into the side tunnels that did not lie apon their path to the Dwarvish King, the incursion that had transpired at the command of that ruler was itself being overcome and taken captive.

The Second Great Dwarfwar: Captive Revelations

The Elves, quite naturally, were in a state of acute shock and distress over this invasion, which smacked to them of everything that they had feared since long before the Verdonne had been created. Like any people who had been violated in the area of their greatest cultural insecurity, they considered the Dwarvish invaders to be guilty of one of the most unimaginably heinous outrages possible, a crime that was unforgiveable. Though most of the invading Dwarves had been killed during the incursion, many had been captured; and the Elvish Council regathered to consider how this should be punished. Their deliberations were brief, and the council were preparing to announce their judgment, when one aged tracker stepped forward from the gathered crowd and interrupted them, demanding to examine the boots worn by the invaders more closely, for something was greatly amiss. Thus did Therialas reenter this narrative.

At a nod from the head of the Council, the Elves who had captured the Dwarvish invaders rudely stripped their prisoners of their footwear and brought the apparel before the tracker for inspection. None of the elves had ever considered the unique needs of an underground culture in terms of their footwear, and they were amazed by the craftsmanship as feature after feature became evident. The boots had a steel-reinforced toe-cup and articulated steel strips with jagged teeth down each side. The heels were layers of rigid leather held together by four recessed bolts which also passed through eyelets on the side-assemblies. These enabled the Dwarves, when climbing unstable and narrow ledges, to support their entire weight on the edge of a boot, or by their toes, or their heels; while leaving the centre of the boot extremely thin, soft, supple leather so that the wearer could ‘read’ changes in the surface beneath their feet. “How long have Dwarven boots had these teeth along the sides?” demanded the aged Tracker.

“Two hundred years or more. My son has just started wearing the pair crafted for my father when he was a child, and he is that old. We replace the soft leather and heels when they wear out and reuse the steel bindings,” came the surprised reply from one of the Dwarves. Examination of the other pairs of boots bore out the statement, revealing different levels of wear consistent with decades or more of use. The Council, while this inspection was underway, were growing impatient, and now demanded, “And what is the significance?”

“The boot prints at the site of the original destruction matched this design. The boot prints at the second attack, when the fires were directed toward Elvarheim, did not; they matched the designs that I saw as a youth when we pursued the Prince Of Lies. I felt perhaps that they were a new innovation, not available to common warriors, and thought no more about it. But if that were the case, you would expect at least a few of these to be wearing the old-style of footwear. I can only conclude that someone has manipulated us into this war for their own ends.” The Council immediately went into whispered conference. After a few minutes of serious exchange while the Dwarves waited anxiously – was the judgment against them about to be suspended? Had they been made cats-paws – and if so, by who? – the head of the council turned once again to address the prisoners. “Tell me your story again, Dwarf. And leave nothing out.”

If they were not already inclined to suspicion, the Dwarves might not have mentioned the trade alliance with the Drow; but the conversation had primed them to mention any involvement of non-Dwarves in their society, and history had made them doubly-suspicious. Hence it was not long before the Dwarves first mentioned the Drow Trading alliance and its terms. These only reinforced the suspicions of the listening Elves. They were intrigued by the mention of a metal too delicate for the Dwarven artisans to work, and fascinated by mention of the Black Gems that the Drow had found so irresistible. Especially tantalizing was a comment made by the Drow Ambassador implying that the Gems were somehow connected to the ability of the Drow to guide the Dwarves past the defenses of Elvarheim. Without those defenses, Elvarheim was completely exposed to any enemy; learning how to prevent future such incursions would forgive any offense resulting from the Dwarvish incursion, no matter how unforgivable that incursion might have seemed at first glance. It did not take the Elves much thought to uncover the rather more sinister “alternative interpretations” of the largess of the Drow, and to point these out to the Dwarves, who were suitably enraged by the prospects. The inadvertent mention of the use of one of the Black Gems to penetrate the defenses of the Elven forest makes it clear that the Gems – mentioned almost as an afterthought in the negotiations – held much greater significance and value than they first appeared.

At the same time, while the Dwarvish tale had the ring of truth to it, there remained the possibility that it was all a very plausible fiction. The Elves were not willing to simply ignore what had transpired, and release the Dwarves. After several hours of debate, the Council decided on a course of action, resentful of the urgency which prohibited serious contemplation of alternative courses of action. One prisoner would be released to act as an escort to an Envoy back to his people. That Envoy would be the Youngest Son of the King – while a member of the Royal Family and hence a Prince, he did not expect to inherit the title and hence had received some practical education. This Envoy would carry an offer of a cease-fire to the King of the Dwarves.

The Elves, notably, did not make it clear to their Dwarven Prisoners how little value they placed on the titles of Prince – or King, for that matter. To the Dwarves, this offer amounted to an exchange of Hostages of high Rank – one Prince for another – a serious gesture towards reconciliation.

Even as these revelations were uncovered and analyzed, the Huyundaltha were penetrating the second tier of defenses surrounding the seat of Dwarvish Power, breaking through the fortifications erected by the Dwarves after driving the defenders away from their positions with their weapons of noxious fume and poisonous gas. Only one last barrier now stood between them and the Civilian Dwarven population, including the Royal Family. As every foot of descent brought them closer to this final barrier, so the pressure on the Dwarven King to accept the Drow offer of Sanctuary increased; already, many of his advisors and personal guard urged him to reconsider his refusal. Only the hope of a victorious conclusion to the bold raid into the Elven homeland stayed his decision.

The companions bearing the offer of an armistice were engaged in a desperate race. Could they reach the Dwarven King before Lolth succeeded in annexing the Dwarven Tunnels?

The Second Great Dwarfwar: War’s End

Even though the passage was relatively straight, without the maze of turnings and tunnels that marked most Dwarven tunnels, it was still a journey of over 60 leagues – more than 200 miles – to the heart of the Dwarven Kingdom. Even at a forced march, and resting for the minimum possible time, it was still going to be four long days journey, probably more.

The pair caused quite a sensation when they staggered, almost falling over themselves in exhaustion, into the court. Dirty, dusty, covered in blood, and bleeding from numerous wounds, they interrupted the King as he was desperately sending reinforcements to the front lines, now less than a mile from the civilian population. He immediately ordered the Elven messenger taken captive and summoned a healer to attend the Dwarven Warrior, who had passed out in mid-salute.

As the Elven messenger attempted to declare the purpose of his mission, one of the Dwarves covered his mouth and instructed him to speak only when spoken to. It was at this moment that the Drow Ambassador swept into the chamber, with his escort. As he observed the captive Elf, he froze, hissing in alarm. “Ah, Aberzherisharde, come in. Fear not, the Elf is restrained. His kind are another matter,” announced the King. “It may be that temporary refuge for our citizens will become necessary before we succeed in repelling their attack. Is your Queen’s offer of sanctuary still open?”

Recovering, the Drow Ambassador replied, “It is, your Majesty. Do you wish me to send runners to advise her of your acceptance?”

“To describe our condition as ‘Acceptance’ would be premature. But since we may need to move to such a position without further warning, I wish to make all the arrangements – should the need become pressing. My paramount duty must be to my honor, but my duty to my subjects is only barely the lesser.”

“As always, a wise decision, Your Majesty. I shall request that the appropriate preparations commence immediately.”

The Drow Ambassador bowed stiffly, and – after another glare at the helpless prisoner – withdrew from the royal chambers. As he exited, the Dwarven escort awoke with a groan. “Easy, warrior,” said the King gently. “What is your unit, and how came you to escort this prisoner from the front lines?”

“I am Kazeth, your Majesty, and I was part of the strike force into the forests of Elvarheim. My companion is Prince Elbareth, and he carries an offer of armistice. Our strike force has been captured with heavy casualties, My Liege.”

“What of my son?”

“The Prince survives and is being well-treated,” replied Kazeth.

The warrior then recounted the full tale of the incursion, its capture, interrogation, and his return in the company of Prince Elbareth. “As we left the passage dug specifically for the invasion and entered our familiar tunnels, we were unexpectedly attacked by a monstrosity the likes of which I ever imagined. It had two heads, and was lizard-like, but with great tusks projecting from a grotesque jaw. Razor-sharp spikes fanned out along the bestial spine, rippling with every movement of the beast. And it moved like lightning, bounding from wall to wall, clinging to ceilings, and twisting the path of its bounds in mid-air as though gravity were its personal servant.”

“No doubt one of the monstrous creatures that the Elves have released into the tunnels to bedevil us,” replied the King.

“Perhaps, your Majesty, though it seemed as surprising to Elbareth as to myself. In any event, it took the both of us striving to our utmost to drive the beast off.”

“Release the Elf,” directed the King. “Prince of the tree-lovers, I reject your offer of Armistice. Your offer smacks of desperation, and perhaps explains the intensity of your current incursion. I had, in my mind, explained that as simple fanaticism, but desperation seems a more likely fit. You will remain here, a hostage to the good treatment of my Son. If and when he is liberated or repatriated, so shall you be – I give you my word of honor.”

“Your Majesty, Mighty King of those who dwell beneath the mountain, you cannot reject an offer until it has been made. I beg your leave to formally present the proposal of the Elven Council before you issue your judgment in this matter, and permission to return to my people with your reply. Should you grant this, and should your son grant surety that he will not come against us in battle once more, I will insist apon his being released to you as a gesture of good faith.”

“I trust you not, tree-lover. Seek not to beguile me with your artfully-honeyed words.”

“I think you confuse me with some of my detested Kinfolk, your Majesty,” replied the Prince. “But is your honor so great that it can tolerate the confinement of an Envoy of peace? How many of your warriors, women, and children will perish while you delay – lives that could be spared, if my offer is genuine? For I swear apon the spirit of my Deity, the lordly Corellan, that this is no deception. May he strike me down if I speak falsely.”

The King stiffened, stung by the accusation of dishonor. “Very well, speak your piece. But I will hear of no insults to our loyal and valued allies, the Drow,” he warned.

“No insults, nor even accusations, your Majesty. Mere questions. Should you know the answers, you will be satisfied; but should you not, is not the possibility of deception worth considering? For both our peoples are children in comparison to the webs of deceit of which the Queen of the Spiders is capable. Her subjects worship her as a deity, and with some justification, for she is nearer to that state than you or I, or any that are mortal. Our most subtle planning may look forward a decade or two, a generation at the most; beyond that span of years, we seek simply to create an environment in which the lot of our subjects and families are better than those we have known, in the hopes that they will be able to take advantage of the opportunities we have procured for them by stint of our labors. Being immortal, her plans may encompass centuries. My questions are these: Of what value is a metal that is too delicate to be worked? Why are gemstones which enable the learned to penetrate defenses erected and reinforced over the passage of centuries but an afterthought, accorded little value in your negotiations? You are promised refuge in the tunnels of her Drow, but are you assured of your ability to come and go and rule amongst your people as you see fit? Will your people not be required to pay for such refuge with service and subservience to the laws of your hosts? What of the law that mandates the worship of Lolth, whose violation even in seeming, brings death? The creations with which our people now assault yours are fearsome and bestial, but still recognizably akin to their progenitors; whence, then, came the monstrosity which Kazeth described to you? For if we did not create and release it, who did, and for what purpose? The tunnel in which it was encountered does not connect with those apon which our forces proceed, save here, behind your lines, so how came it to be where–”

Abruptly, the Elven Prince fell to the floor, collapsing. His body shuddered and then was still.

“So he spoke false, and his God has punished him. Let that be an end to it,” muttered the King. “We will crush them, and liberate my son from his captivity. Have a company of warriors prepared,” he instructed a page.

“I heard no falsehood, your Majesty. If I may be permitted?” replied Kazeth, gesturing toward the body.

“Nor I, but falsehood there must have been. Go ahead,” answered the King.

Quickly examining the body, Kazeth gave a startled gasp. Rising, he held out something for the King’s inspection. “I think not, your Majesty. Unless the God Of The Elves employs poisoned darts of Drow manufacture to enforce his will.”

“Who would dare to besmirch my honor? I gave my word that he would be well-treated,” replied the King, his temper flaring.

“No-one who valued honor would do so, your Majesty. And if an Elf could reach us here, you would have been his target, not Prince Elbareth. That leaves only a third party. I must ask you to consider one final question in his name, as a bandage to your wounded honor – did you not find his questions troubling? For you answered none of them, and your son could not do so. Indeed he sent this to you,” replied Kazeth, retrieving a patch of parchment and a ring.

Gasping, the King inspected the items.

On the parchment were the words, ‘Father, I believe them.’ “He chose this ring to authenticate the message, knowing that you would know that had it been written under duress he would have included his seal of Rank and not his personal signet, as a signal to you. If the assassin was not one of us, and would not have been an Elf, it must have been a third party. And only one third party is involved here, and they only stood to gain if the charges were truthful. Prince Elbareth did not accuse them, nor – as per your instructions – did he insult them. I do both, my Liege. The Ambassador and his people are without honor, and have deceived us into fighting their war for them. I demand the right to confront the Ambassador with these questions.”

Wearing an expression that mirrored both troubled thoughts and a stern anger, the King instructed, “Summon the Ambassador Aberzherisharde. He is to come immediately. Do not accept a refusal,” he instructed two members of his personal guard.

A few minutes later, the pair returned, empty-handed. “The Drow delegation appears to have fled, Your Majesty,” explained the more senior of the two. “We found these in his quarters,” he added, holding up a pair of darts identical to that which had taken the life of the Elven Prince.

“I uphold your challenge to the honor of the Drow, Kazeth,” replied the King. “Give instructions to hunt them down. Let them never return to the Queen which sent them forth,” he instructed. “I will accept the offer of Armistice. Prepare a formal honor guard – we travel through the tunnel to Elvarheim. Have the body of the Prince interred amongst those of my ancestors, for no less than my family, he was under my protection when he died. Until my honor is washed clean of that stain, he will remain so.”

Not unexpectedly, there was an immediate outcry amongst the King’s advisors. “This might still be deception on the part of the Elves,” they argued. “Another may have followed Kazeth and the so-called Prince to assassinate him for the purpose of bringing about this accord,” said another. “We have them on their knees, your Majesty. Do not give away the victory now,” advised a third. “The Ambassador may merely have been fearful that the Elf would deceive you,” chorused a fourth.

“All true, replied the King. But they have earned the right to negotiations in good faith with blood, and seemingly at the hands of one who claimed to respect our ways. I do not say that I am convinced – merely that I will give them the opportunity to prove their claims.”

Three hours later, the King – with full honor guard – set out down the invasion route to the heart of the Elven Forest.

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The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

• Alkaith: Curved 14-inch dagger favored as a weapon and general cutting tool by Elvish Spellcasters and some High Elves.
• Arnost: Simple Speech (Modern “Common”, a human tongue)
• Arrunquessor: Plains Elves
• Ayer: Nuthanori word meaning “Squat”. Mont Ayer is the name of one of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands.
• Calquissir: High Elves
• Corellan: The First
• Drow: “Those Who Dwell Apart” (in Nuthanorl). Added to Ogre by the Drow with the meaning of “Smart”.
• Ellessarune: The “Shining City” of the Tarquessir, home of the Elvish King and capital of the Elven Lands to this day.
• Eltrhinast: “Guiding Spirit”
• Elvarheim: “Blessed Leafy Home”: The Elven Forest, homeland of the Tarquessir and the centre of Elven Power in modern times
• Gilandthor: “The Gathering”, the formal title of the Elvish Council.
• Hithainduil: High Elven Language
• Huyundaltha: “Masters Of The Ondaltha” (literal), “Bladedancers” (colloquial). Formerly Noletinechor, now Guardians Of Elvish Society.
• Ondaltha: A two-weapon combat style based apon Elvish Dance, practiced exclusively by Huyundaltha.
• Illvayssor: “The Other”, a mythical race
• Isallithin: “The Sundered”, a name applied to Aquatic Elves
• King: A human title interpreted by Elves as “speaker to others” and defined as such within their language.
• Magi: A corruption of the Zamiel word “Machus”, which means “of the wise.”
• Mithryl: the Elvish name of an extremely fragile metal given in trade by the Dwarves to the Elves. The word is imported from Dwarven, who in turn obtained it from the Zamiel Tongue name of the metal, “Mithral”. “Mithryl” means “Moonsilver” in Elven. The word also enjoys popular usage as a metaphor for a treasure found which appeared initially worthless.
• Mithral: the Drow name for Mithryl. A literal translation from Zamiel is “Shadowsilver”.
• Mont: Nuthanori word meaning “High Place”. Used human-style in the naming of Mountains.
• Noletinechor: “Lore Shields”, an elvish historical vocation
• Nuthanorl: Low Elven Language, Common Elven
• Sarner: A human abbreviation of the Hithainduil word “Saranariuthenal” which means, literally, “Swift and Wide”. The River Sarner runs through the central valley of Elvarheim.
• Tarquessir: Forest Elves
• Thuyon: Nuthanori word meaning “Tall Spires”. Mont Thuyon is the name of the taller of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands; Modern Elvarheim lies between the foothills of Mont Thuyon and the River Sarner.
• Verdonne: “Quickbranch”, an artificial race created by Elves to be “The Guardians Of The Forest”.
• Zamiel: Drow Language

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Next time: Now we’re into material that only exists in note form, so I’m not sure how far I’ll get. If all goes according to plan, next time will show how the aftermath of the War permanently reshaped Elven and Dwarven Societies in Chapters 24 through 26. Join me next week to see how much I actually get done….

One of the most contentious issues in modern times is set to escalate to a whole new level. That’s right, people, copyright law, trademark law, and its enforcement is about to get messy – well, messier than it already seems. At the same time, recent developments have given me a new perspective on past events as well, to share.

For a starter, let’s look at the more egregious outstanding issues that we’ve already got on our plate, and at least some of the story about how we got here. Some of these might not seem directly related to RPGs, but I’ll connect the dots at the end, so bear with me.

The Old Problems

There have been problems and minefields related to the protection of ideas for centuries. Some of these landmines have been defused, some have corroded with changing technology, and some have gone off.

Trademarking A Color

Let’s start with something that, so far, has been relatively benign.

It used to be that a unique design was needed to receive a trademark. I first became aware that the landscape had changed in 2007 when some promotional materials for one of the big four banks in Australia, the ANZ included, in the fine print, that the color of the logo was trademarked (as “ANZ Blue”, I think – from memory). I soon discovered that this was not the only corporation that had trademarked a color, as this discussion reveals. These days, the practice is increasingly widespread, as this article shows. I understand that some car makers have even trademarked particular paint colors.

I can see how specifying a particular color as one of the distinguishing features of a trademark would be legitimate. I can see how patenting a particular process of painting a vehicle to produce a unique shading scheme, as for the McLaren formula 1 team’s silver transition paint job, might be legitimate. Even trademarking the association between a particular type of product and a particular shade would be reasonable – and that is, reportedly, what the Bank were trying to achieve. But trademarking a particular color seems extraordinarily problematic to me. It’s all about restricting what we are allowed to do with color, a natural phenomenon.

Color is used as a focal point for corporate identity in the modern world. Specifying a particular color for a logo and then using that color for outlet paint, uniforms, etc, all creates a unifying association between those elements. It’s only right and fair that a company be able to protect that association, I don’t dispute that; but being actually able to trademark the color itself? No.

Just because a legal principle is used in a benign manner does not mean that it will only ever be used for that purpose. By accepting the principle of trademarking color, a can of worms has been opened that sooner or later will cause problems. This is one of those legal landmines that has not yet gone off. We can only hope that it’s a dud.

False Advertising And The Music Industry

The File Sharing / Music Copyright problems, for example, seem to have largely quietened down, at least for the moment. An overprotective music industry which sought to squeeze every last cent of profit, draconian protection mechanisms, lopsided legal influence. Or have they? The success of iTunes and similar legal avenues for the purchase of music in digitally-encoded formats has taken a lot of the steam out of the issue, but it simply puts a more legitimate frontman at the front of the parade – Apple have a far better case for attacking P2P file-sharing systems as they directly compete with the for-profit distribution channel that they have built and popularized. Heck, I buy some music through iTunes myself.

Really, when you get down to it, the heart of that problem is that the Music Industry was guilty of false advertising for decades. They advertised music as “for sale” – “buy the new album by X” – and focused on the medium, thinking that the two were one and the same. The first warning that this perception was flawed was the kerfuffle over piano player rolls but it went unheeded. A more serious wakeup call came with the advent of blank audio cassettes, but that warning was also unheeded. What they were actually selling – at least in their minds – was the limited right to use the music for one particular purpose, i.e. listening to by the person who bought it. You couldn’t use it for any other purpose without negotiating the right to do so with the “permanent owners” of those rights. What customers thought they were buying was far less than that – and so, when the recording industry moved to restrict public usage to what they saw as the valid purposes for which the purchaser had paid, excluding those purposes that the public and the industry disagreed on, people got angry.

Music used to be given away to the public for free, so far as the public was concerned. It came over the radio. But what was actually happening was that the radio station was paying the record companies for the right to broadcast the performance, then extracting payment from their listeners by broadcasting advertising. If you wanted to listen to the music, you had to listen to the advertising. When music videos became successful marketing tools, once again the music industry gave them away for free and recouped the cost of doing so through the increased sales that resulted. Then they got greedy and started to charge. Or perhaps it was simply that the sums being spent on the videos made no economic sense, and this was the only way to continue funding them. Either way, most of the music video shows died, or shifted to the more liberal independent sources.

From the public perspective, what was happening was that they heard the music for free, and if they liked it, they could buy a copy for their collections. There were some artists whose work they liked enough that they would buy it, unheard. Because this programming was cheap for the radio stations, and later, for the TV networks to produce, they proliferated.

When the music industry first demanded that the radio stations pay-to-play, the Radio Stations should have accepted on the proviso that they were advertising the product and would pay the fees if the record labels would pay the full commercial advertising rates for the duration of the song. This would have brought the whole mess into the open and enabled some reasonable compromise to be reached.

The upshot was that by discounting the benefits received in promotion of their products, the music industry killed the promotion and distribution channels that had grown up as secondary industries around their primary function. As these began to die, they looked for someone else to blame, found the file-sharing services that had stepped into the breach – nature abhors a vacuum, and that holds true for human nature as well as physical reality – and became draconic in enforcing their “rights”. Since they weren’t addressing the real problem, it didn’t have much effect. The promotional channels shut down, the hits stopped happening, and the retail stores that survived by selling the hits to the public collapsed and went away. And, to a large extent, the record labels collapsed in consequence.

No-one could argue that there have not been some benefits from the collapse of the old distribution channels. More people are able to make and distribute their music than ever, simply because they no longer have to jump through the hoops of attracting record label interest, getting a contract, getting their recordings through the A&R filter, then through the selectivity of the old promotional channels before the product became available to the general public. These days, you can do it yourself, and put it on YouTube. There is a greater freedom for artists to express themselves.

But Commercial Mass-market doesn’t mean bad. The old system pushed artists to find some common ground with a large audience segment, filtered out the extremes, and ensured that a product could be enjoyed by a large number of people. Their work was more accessible. One of the reasons I buy a LOT less music than I once did, even in proportion to my income, is that there is simply less out there that I like. (The last CD I bought was of the 2012 Eurovision Song Festival – one of the remaining global promotional vehicles. Which, I think, proves my point.)

While these problems may have receded from public awareness, defused by the advent of iTunes, by a less over-the-top aggressive stance on the part of the RIAA, and by the public backlash from the DRM/Rootkit Scandal, ongoing fallout constitutes the leading edge of new problems, and those directly affect the RPG industry.

Monopolism and the Channels Of Distribution

Comics
Newsstands used to be the primary outlet for Comics Publishers. When these became fewer in number, allegedly because of the Wal-Mart effect, primary distribution shifted to specialist stores. A combination of oversaturation with “collector’s editions” and marketing gimmicks, internal industrial disputes such as the breakaway formation of Image Comics, and escalating prices for deluxe formats brought about a collapse within the industry. Both Marvel Comics and DC Comics, the two largest producers and distributors, have had financial problems as a consequence. As the market shrunk, the prices needed to sustain profitability escalated to nonsensical levels, further shrinking the market. Comics used to be cheap – I can remember being able to buy five or ten each week with a reasonable amount of pocket money, as a kid. I stopped collecting them when they hit A$10 each. These days, I’m told the price is closer to $A20 an issue. I don’t consider $100-200 a week to be a reasonable amount of pocket money. The parallels with the collapse of the music industry are obvious – and it may be no coincidence that both are owned by media conglomerates.

Small businesses have it rough, and have always operated on a razor’s edge profit margin. One of the greatest criticisms of superstores like Wal-Mart are that they increase the pressure on small businesses beyond the breaking point, with the result that the small businesses fold. Consequently, the variety of products that were available in the specialist store is reduced to only the most popular commodities.

Wal-Mart
By centralizing purchasing power in this way, the superstores become subject to charges of monopolism. These can be easily countered provided that the superstores do not engage in monopolistic practices; unfortunately, most do. Control of the retail sector becomes more vertical, dominated by a relatively small number of corporate entities. That’s a recipe for corruption and excess, and most of the criticism of Wal-Mart comes to two factors: unfair market advantages and monopolistic behavior.

It was big news within the industry a few years back when Wal-Mart changed its policies with respect to RPGs. Hard-covered books that could be handled by the book sections were still fine, but soft-covered low-cost elements like game modules were considered magazines and to be pruned from Wal-Mart stores as unprofitable in comparison with other products.

Amazon
Similar criticisms have been leveled at Amazon.com by bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Again, many can be boiled down to an allegation of monopolistic practices.

And yet, the ability of many independents to compete for sales through Amazon’s new-and-used operations provide a new distribution channel for struggling small businesses, expanding their customer base from the strictly local to the global. So, as much as Amazon may be part of the problem, they are also part of the solution.

Online Home Shopping
Being physically disabled to some extent, I found it very difficult to shop at the local supermarkets. For a while, I managed by using home deliveries; but these days I do my grocery shopping over the internet at one of the leading supermarket chains. It’s cheaper than home delivery plus fares to the supermarket to do the shopping in person, and less physically strenuous. In effect, this is similar to buying books on Amazon, and amounts to the conversion of the supermarket chain into a virtual superstore with a multitude of suburban distribution centers that also have a direct-to-the-public retail capacity.

This can’t help but put more financial pressure on the neighborhood corner stores. The convenience of being able to just pop in when I need something is therefore under greater threat as a result. I therefore make it a point to use those local stores for the purchase of those products that both have in common. Even so, the majority of my purchases from the local stores tend to be products that the online supermarket simply doesn’t stock. Since they will stock what sells, the corner store is becoming a specialist store in “everything else”, and anything that needs physical inspection before I am sure it’s the type I want, like light bulbs.

Because that’s the pattern that I’ve been observing over the last 3 decades or so – superstores closing specialist stores with a resulting monopolistic trend, collapse of minority industries, and resulting absence of the products that I want to buy from the marketplace.

The New Problems

Which brings me to the new problems that are crawling out of the woodwork.

Copyrighting Genetics

For the last 30 years, genes have been patentable. 20% of the genes in the human body are now the “property” of someone as a result of such patents. Check out this article. Those patents are now being challenged. With biotechnology set to become a big-ticket industry over the course of the current decade, this one is going to get bigger and bigger.

Copyrighting Vocabulary

There are a number of trademarked words that have entered the general vocabulary. “Google” is recognized as a verb for carrying out an internet search on Google.com, and is included in many dictionaries. Wikipedia maintains a List of protected trademarks frequently used as generic terms that is surprisingly long. If you scroll up, you will find a much shorter list of terms that started as protected trademarks, became general vocabulary, and have remained in general use after the lapse of the original trademark, like “Zipper”. Perusing both lists shows that this is nothing new, and we’ve managed all right so far, so what’s the problem?

In 2010, Facebook trademarked the word “Book”. Facebook have also trademarked “wall,” “like,” and “face”, according to the article. Apple have trademarked the use of the letter “i” as in “iTunes” and “iPad”.

It’s one thing for a product to become so universally recognized that its name enters the general vocabulary. It’s quite another for an existing general term to become a protected trademark. This flew under the radar at the time, but sooner or later the dysfunction between popular usage and what usage is permitted under the law is going to explode in someone’s face. And, like the music industry example, there will be substantial public acrimony when it does.

Custom File Formats As A Protection Mechanism

It is becoming more common for DVD Recorders to use a proprietary file format to store its recordings so that they cannot be played through any other device. Is this the latest move to protect copyrights on the part of the media conglomerates? Or is it the choice of the device manufacturer, seeking to protect proprietary technology within the device?

By adding yet another layer of complexity, how long will it be before material is offered in a proprietary format that enforces DRM? Oh wait, some file formats already do that. How about a separate file format with it’s own user-agreement?

At some point, someone will sue a maker of file-format conversion software, for accessing the file format in a way or for a purpose forbidden by the terms of the usage agreement, and the whole copyright issue will explode again.

Trademarking Basic Concepts

The most recent development puts Facebook on the receiving end of its own aggressive protection practices. According to an article published on Mashable on Feb 12, just over a month ago, Facebook are being sued by Rembrandt Social Media LP, owners of a patent by Dutch programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer, who used a button for people to “like” other user’s content in Surfbook, a product that predates Facebook by 5 years. With the lawsuit only filed on February 5th, this has all the hallmarks of an opportunist grab for wealth, but at least superficially, it would seem that Facebook – who have a history of aggressive protection of their corporate identity (as described above) – have a case to answer.

But this irony is only a recent expression of a more troubling and much deeper issue – the same one that recently manifested in the Apple vs Samsung stoush, and before that in the legal battles between Apple and Microsoft. The whole question of whether “look and feel” – in other words the way we do things – should be or can be protected, as opposed to the behind-the-scenes mechanisms or code that translate that action into some action.

Can you trademark human behavior?

Social Networking And Responsibility

Still brewing up is another huge question – that of social networking and responsibility. If I say something on a business’s twitter account, how liable is that business for what I have said in their name? How about if someone else says it and I simply rebroadcast it or like it or whatever the correct usage is for a particular social network?

Are social media comments public or private communications? Especially if you have to specifically opt-in to receive those communications?

If I say something negative on twitter, is it libel? Is it slander?

Can Social Media comments be trademarked or copyrighted?

I am not a US Citizen – are my comments through a US-based system like Twitter, whose licenses and usage are handled under US Law, protected as free speech?

To what extent am I not entitled to state my opinion?

As usual, the law is a decade or more behind the wavefront of technology and social behavior, and most laws are applied through legal confrontations – so this is an issue that is only going to grow over the next decade.

The Regulation Of Human Behavior

Ultimately, all these problems can be summarized as attempts to regulate human behavior. The laws all spell out things that we are not allowed to do, for what at least seemed like good reasons at the time. Corporate entities are using those laws for other purposes, though. They are using trademark, copyright, and patent laws to protect things that should never be trademarked, copyrighted, or patented.

Of course, it’s always easier to extend an existing law to cover something similar. ePublishing is neatly covered by existing laws relating to publishing. This only really goes awry when the potentials of a new storage format or medium create additional capabilities for public usage that were not present at the time the laws were extended. Changing technology is a game-changer.

Treating digital formats as just another medium to present music which could be protected and controlled under existing laws governing usage is what led to the DRM / file-sharing legal wars. So long as you couldn’t do anything more with the digitally-encoded format than you could do with the old technology, those laws worked and were seen as satisfactory. But the new medium brought additional inherent potential usages that were not explicitly dealt with under those laws, and it was those usages that the Recording Industry sought to curtail.

There are analogous arguements to be made regarding all of the other situations cited above. Business laws framed at a time before technological change made the superstores – the Wal-Mart’s and the Amazons – feasible, are inadequate for dealing with the new social reality of their existence. For a time, when the new arrives, the old laws work; but eventually the opportunities provided by the new circumstance evolve beyond the scope of existing laws, at which point the laws become counterproductive to society.

The Purpose Of Copyright

Copyright law was originally intended to foster and encourage creativity, by ensuring that the creator received fair remuneration for their act of creation. It was limited in duration to what was deemed a reasonable period. Specifics vary from country to country, but they all have that common aim.

In effect, owning the copyright gave the creator:

• The Right to Control what was done with their work;
• The Right to Profit from their creation, enabling them to continue to create;
• The Right to develop Derivative Works from their creation, enabling an author to write sequels to his own works.

All these seem utterly reasonable, so where did it all go so wrong?

The Causes

I think there are three direct causes that have collectively led us to this mess over responsibility and control.

Restrictable Rights

In describing the purposes of copyright, I said that the right to control what was done with their work seemed completely reasonable. But I can trace a lot of the problems with copyright as it is compared to its original intention to this one element. Perhaps it would have been better to have stated (in legalese) that once a work existed, you could do anything you wanted with that work provided that you paid the author a reasonable return for the use of their work. Such usage would not constitute an endorsement of the second use by the creator.

Once the original Sherlock Holmes story gets published, anyone is free to write another, so long as they pay a legally-mandated sum to Arthur Conan Doyle. Of course, subsequent works by Doyle – suitably credited as “by the creator of” – would have greater cache and marketability.

If someone wanted to use a particular piece of music as part of the soundtrack to a movie, they can – they simply have to pay for it. If someone wants to make a movie based on a book, they can – under the same condition. If someone wants to write a new song based on an earlier one, they simply have to pay for the use of the old song.

Removing control from the equation ensures that copyright can no longer stifle creativity.

Transfers Of Ownership of intangibles

The second major plank in the current misery comes from the concept of transfer of ownership. If a publisher simply acts as an agent for the creator, acting as a collection point for the revenues owing to the creator of a work and taking their percentage accordingly, there is no difficulty; it is only when the publisher can claim ownership of some form (even if they paid the author a considerable sum for it) that real problems arise, because there arises a potential conflict of interest between the creator and the publisher.

Gene sequences cannot be subject to protection if the principle of transfer of ownership of intangibles is never established – only an original usage of a gene sequence. Look-and-feel issues go away. Ridiculous issues like the trademarking of “book” and the patent of a “like” button become non-starters – because the idea itself is free for anyone to use provided they pay the legally-mandated sum to the original creator, or his estate.

A corporation should never be able to “own” something; at best, they should be holding it in trust for, and administering it on behalf of, their shareholders and customers.

Money as free speech

If the laws are slipshod, or shortsighted, or inadequate, must we not look to the elected officials who created those laws when we assign responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in?

Donating money to a cause may support a cause, but it does not publicize that support, and hence should not be considered free speech. The contrary position permits those with the largest chequebooks to dictate policy, against the public interest, for their own benefit. Equating money to free speech may be viewed as putting your money where your mouth is, but if the mouth is absent, it’s simply a bribe to see things “the corporation’s way”.

The Dynamic Of Responsibility

To see how these causes have led, and are leading, the world into a tar pit, there are three additional factors to contemplate.

Unenforceable Rights Are Non-Existent Rights

If you can’t enforce a right, you may as well not have that right. Seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it? Your rights are not what the law says they are, they are what the interpreters of that law will enforce. Long court delays and appeals processes favor those with deep pockets, and lawyers are perfectly willing to use the size of their employer’s pockets to intimidate opponents.

Corporations As “People”

A corporation is a magical thing. In some ways it is considered to be a legal “person”, and in others it is not considered to be a person at all. The problem, of course, is drawing the line between these two conditions.

The general principle was established so that corporations could be sued in the same way as individuals, should a transgression be alleged, or vice-versa. Nothing wrong with that.

It’s in some of the other applications of the theory – that a corporation should be able to own things in the same way that a person would, that a corporation has rights in the same way that a person does, that a corporation can donate money to political campaigns as though they were an individual – that provokes greater contention.

We would all be far better off if a corporation was a separately-defined legal entity, with its rights and abilities enumerated completely separately from those of a citizen. Such an explicit statement would remove much of the fuzziness.

The Determinism Of Wealth

The combination of these factors is greater than the sum of their parts. Corporations have financial resources far beyond those of most individuals. They can employ the best lawyers. In theory, politicians are supposed to represent the people, giving them a collective voice and equal say in the way things are done. The real effect of the “Money is free speech” principle is to give corporations a greater voice in politics, in the framing of laws, than the ordinary citizen. With dominance in both politics and the courts, they have near-complete control over what rights can be enforced by the individual. Only when they do something so egregious that the courts cannot tolerate the transgression do they suffer a reversal.

The Brave New World

So, where does all this leave us?

The Lowest Common Denominator

It’s long been my contention that the internet erases much of the national boundaries that have shaped our world. If the US bans an activity, the service can be relocated to another country where it is not illegal. I’ve held this view since the very beginning of the Napster lawsuit. In effect, what is enforceable is the lowest common denominator amongst all the laws of all the countries that are connected through the web.

Technology has modified that position somewhat – China is notorious for filtering what its internet users can access – but only at prohibitive cost in terms of censorship and – according to studies proposing similar filtering software for Australia – in terms of connection speeds (a loss of up to 87%).

Nevertheless, in general terms, the principle holds.

Counterculture Inevitable

With the public at large feeling under assault by corporate interests with political connivance and support in the DRM mess, a counterculture movement was inevitable. Feeding into that counterculture are the availability of cheap second-hand and remaindered products through Amazon which devalue residual value of published material in the minds of customers, who will quite naturally gravitate toward the lowest price they can find – if they get what they are paying for.

Also contributing to that view are the relatively cheap prices of e-books – some available free on Amazon Kindle.

It used to be that all an e-publisher had to worry about were pirated copies showing up on P2P networks – sometimes with malware such as viruses added. The debate was about whether or not reducing prices would act as a disincentive to such activities. These days, the pressure is to maximize the short-term profitability of an e-book, and a little piracy after that period is more trouble to chase down than it is worth.

The Devaluation Of Intellectual Property

Worryingly, though, when you devalue residual worth, you devalue all intellectual property in the eyes of the culture, and especially the counter-culture. People expect books and eBooks to be cheaper, even without economies of scale and with increasing labor costs. It doesn’t take any less time (per page) to write a book, or produce an illustration, but in order to sell, the price has to be reduced. The consequence is that it gets harder for the author to make a living (even at a reduced living standard) from his writing – and that’s a disincentive to write. Authors feel undervalued by the public, and some are even resentful.

The Impact of RPGNow

I wrote a couple of well-received articles last year on the pricing of RPG materials (Part 1 and Part 2). What I didn’t predict in the course of those articles was a new phenomenon that I’m beginning to notice: content written to meet the price point. In part 2 of that series, I divided PDFs into sizes by page count for detailed analysis (and the analysis was a lot more detailed than what saw print, I assure you). Well, the tail is starting to wag the dog, in my opinion. Rather than writing a product and seeing how large it is, people are writing to achieve a given page count – and saving anything that doesn’t fit for a subsequent volume.

Why? Well, if you write a 25-page PDF and break it up into 4 page lots, you would expect to get eight PDFs out of your 20-page work. But, by the time you include front-page and contents and licensing pages, suddenly your four pages is down to a page-and-a-half of valuable content, 2-and-a-half if you’re feeling generous. And that means that you can serialize your 25 pages into 10-16 PDFs. Call it 13. That’s the equivalent of a 62.5% increase in profitability – at the cost of perceived value-for-money. Even if that perceived loss of value costs you 30% lower sales, profits are still up 32.5% – and you still have the option of compiling them into a bigger omnibus edition, and hopefully selling the same content to the same people multiple times.

Spreading the costs thinner and ramping up the effective price both plays into the mindset of reduced value and reinforces it. Will the trend last? Is it all in my head? Time will tell.

Pushbutton Comments

Comments are dying. No, that’s not true – comments to the source of content are dying. This is an unintended development of social media. It’s easier to tweet that you like something, or share it, or like it on facebook. No thought needed.

The pushbutton comment is far more transitory than a comment to the source. After a few days (or less), you have to actively search for it in order to find it. And it contributes less to the discussion, simply because there’s no content-add.

That contributes a lack of lasting feedback to the content provider, reducing their ability to target products to an existing audience. And that means that profitability of products is diminished.

Must Copyright Be Sacrificed?

There aren’t many ways out of the current problems, save struggling with them one at a time. Wholesale reform is not going to happen. Nothing will happen, in any event, until either a crisis flashpoint is achieved, legally or in public opinion, as it was with the Sony Rootkit scandal, or until the US political situation is resolved.

What are the alternatives in the meantime? The harder it gets for authors and publishers to make money writing and publishing, the more of them will stop doing it. Under these conditions, producers will either get aggressive and vitriolic about protecting their intellectual properties, or will simply give up on copyright enforcement beyond taking a few basic precautions, and live with erosion of profitability – or simply stop.

But there are larger legislative issues in the wings, with far-reaching consequences only dimly-observed at the moment.

RPGs and the copyright/publishing tangle

One of the proximate sources of inspiration for this article was a discussion on Linkedin concerning the value of using old works, whose residual value was now minimal, as bonuses and marketing materials. This is a trend that I’ve observed in kickstarter offerings. I offered my two cents worth in that discussion, but that started me thinking about the larger ramifications.

The impact on the RPG industry is this: it’s harder than ever to write RPGs full time and live on the proceeds. That points to an imminent market implosion, something that might only be prevented by am OGL-like explosion in DnDNext-related materials. If DnDNext is the hit that Wizards hope it will be, and if the third-party publisher terms are more reasonable, a new boom could manifest.

In the meantime, there will be a rise in the use of kickstarter as (effectively) a pre-ordering system. It’s not going to be about marketing and distributing a product, it’s going to be earning the money from a kickstarter project to justify putting the time into creating a product in the first place. And there will be a restructuring of products toward smaller items offered through RPGNow and subsequent omnibus collections of proven product who have already paid off most of the creation overheads that amounts to a reduction in the value-for-money quotient.

I still expect Print-on-demand to be the game-changer. With both Amazon and RPGNow getting into the PoD game, the incentive to produce direct-published paper-and-ink products can only diminish. So the future is digital, and will be subject to exactly the same pressures that the music industry has struggled with for the last 20+ years. Hopefully, we’ll learn from their mistakes and not get too heavily into DRM and aggressively strong-arm protection.

RPG production is going to become even more of a part-time hobbyist activity and less professional in standards. Prices will drop. Markets will become more insular, more closely-focused. Small businesses will stop, and will agglomerate. The honorable ones, like Purple Duck, will live up to the promises of the businesses that they absorb. And by virtue of being there, they will be in position to capitalize on the next boom, when it comes.

And we’ll continue to look over our shoulders. We live in paranoid times.

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, I’ll either never get it done in time…

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Chapters 18-20 are all in final form. I don’t change “speaker” in mid-paragraph, but the speaker does change from one paragraph to the next. So if it seems like the tone changes direction suddenly – sometimes it does.

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The Second Great Dwarfwar: Dwarven Incursion

The delegation returned to the King and his Council with word that the Dwarves were more arrogant and stiff-necked and unreasonable than ever, and claimed all the forest save that which had been transformed by the Elven Arts as their own, to do with what they willed; and that they were impolite and disrespectful to the person and Title of the Elvish King; and that not even the threat of hostilities had moved them to bargain in good faith.

“That was their final word?” asked the King.

“No, your majesty. Their last words were, ‘Kiss my Braided Beard, You poncy snob. We’ll give you more war than you can stomach if you set foot in our domain again.”

The council all agreed that this was unacceptable, a direct challenge to the stewardship of the forest by the Elves, which was a sacred trust with which they had been charged by Corellan himself. They had no choice but to accept that the Dwarves had given just cause for a declaration of War. “In any event,” argued some, “it would be well to learn how to fight in the tunnels and holes deep beneath the earth, for sooner or later we must confront the Drow once more.”

Only one major objection could be raised: the Elves had not yet formed a military force with which to respond to this threat. Even as the council retired to consider solutions to this conundrum, which now assumed an urgency that had not previously been felt necessary, word arrived that another Dwarven expedition had been sighted felling trees, and lighting fires which they were directing toward Elvarheim itself.

The inner forest would not burn easily, the Elves knew; but this latest assault on top of recent events made it clear that the Dwarves were being belligerent in the extreme, and escalated the Elvish need from ‘Urgent’ to ‘Dire’. Lacking any other solution, the Elvish Priests appealed to Corellan to solve this problem before Elvarheim itself came under direct threat.

And Lo, the most holy Corellan didst hear the anguished beseechments of his people, and he came to comfort and guide them, as he had promised; and he did say unto his people, bring before me the Noletinechor, and it was done, and Corellan in his wisdom and majesty didst say unto them, “Ye have been chosen by your kin to be the guardians of all that is Elvish. This is a high honor indeed, but the designs of those who ordained your order are incomplete, for to be a guardian is to do more than shelter and remember, it is to protect, nurture, cherish, and teach. This is a sacred trust, the stewardship of the spirit of the Elven peoples and all that makes them great and good in the eyes of Nature, and I charge you with the duty of forever being worthy of such trust. I shall call forth those Totems who are gifted in battle, and together we will teach you that which you will need to discharge this duty and trust, guardians worthy to succeed the Verdonne. And you shall issue forth with the most skilled hunters and warriors of the Elven people to repel this and any future invasion.

“And when this crisis doth abate, you shall establish, in some far distant place, a fortress, a bulwark, to be the home of your order, and the seed from which all may begin anew should the worst befall your people, for yours is a difficult and lonely task that shall persist until the last Elf is no more. You must keep alive the traditions and songs and cultures of your people, resisting those changes which are alien to its nature, and yet permitting the race and society of the beloved of nature to grow and evolve as its nature doth decree.”

And the then-beloved Spider-queen of the Drow, Lolth, scrying from afar, was infuriated, for Her plans to take advantage of the Elvish vulnerability had failed. It had seemed a simple proposition: a few Drow in stolen Dwarvish boots, a few carelessly-guarded trees, and one enemy would destroy another. But the plot had failed to allow for the interference of Corellan, and it never paid to ignore a God when devising your tactics – an error that she would not repeat on future occasions. And still worse, it might well result in teaching her enemies how to fight more effectively underground, in an environment all-too-similar to that of Her people, costing their own defenses a tactical advantage that might be irreplaceable.

It was all the fault of Her military advisors, of course, and several were promptly made the centre of attention at a public beheading at which their failures were publicly announced to all, object lessons in the consequences of failing their Queen.

The Second Great Dwarfwar: The Huyundaltha

It proved less easy than Corellan had made it seem. The Noletinechor were artists and musicians and dancers, and while they had received basic instruction in bow and sword, that instruction had been abandoned in favor of a more cultural education. When it came to martial matters, they were hesitant and clumsy. With the need pressing, Corellan and the totems he had summoned devised, in desperation, a martial style founded apon the delicate dance steps that the guardians of culture had mastered, using two equal weapons for balance; a style that combined grace and elegance, mobility and nimbleness of foot and hand, into a lethal art. And this art he did name Ondaltha, and to the Noletinechor he gave the title Huyundaltha,’Masters Of The Ondaltha’, or (literal translation), “Bladedancers”.

Thus it was that the Noletinechor were transformed into a martial order, their mandate extended to the protection of the Elven homeland and way of life, and the replacement for the Verdonne. Satisfied, Corellan departed, having faith in his people’s ability to chart their own course, make their own mistakes, and live their own lives.

The Bladedancers were amateurs at this ‘war’ business, and they started by making a lot of amateur mistakes. The exterior of the Dwarven Mines were undefended, and rather than giving them pause, this encouraged the Bladedancers to take advantage of this overt defensive weakness. They had not realized that the entrances were unguarded purely to lure would-be attackers into a realm shaped by the Dwarves in a manner not dissimilar to that of Elvarheim; a giant trap in which the architecture itself was a weapon. In their preferred habitat, the Dwarves were just as at home, and just as deadly, as the Elves were within their forest.

Gathering a band of twenty aggressive young warriors, the Bladedancer Hoddell penetrated the mineshaft, ignoring the gong at the entrance, and descended into the depths, and promptly become lost in the twisting, turning maze of tunnels. Four days later, they found themselves at the entrance once again, having never seen a Dwarf, returning to Elvarheim tired, thirsty and covered in dust. Undeterred, they tried again, and this time never returned.

Expedition after expedition followed, and slowly the Elves learned many of the secrets of navigation below ground – systematic exploration, mapping, always following one wall, dropping markers at key intersections. Eventually, some reached the second layer of underground defenses, only to be lured into deadfalls, or pits, or pockets of foul air, or chambers that were then flooded by Dwarves, or galleries with many narrow slots in the walls for weapons to penetrate while the wielders remained safely behind solid rock.

After 24 years of sporadic and wholly-unsuccessful expeditions and adventures below the ground, Deruan, leader of the Bladedancers, reached the inevitable conclusion that if the Elves continued to conduct their war on Dwarven terms, they would lose it. Their foes were the masters of their domain, and inherently superior in skill over the Elves while within it. In order to emerge victorious, they would need to change strategies, and to make the Dwarven environment work against the residents and not in their favor. While all conceded the need to change tack, the strategies that Deruan proposed were extreme, radical, and ruthless, and caused many to have misgivings. Those in opposition described them as too similar to what might have been expected of their estranged cousins, the Drow, and questioned once again whether the Elves had been right to start this war in the first place.

Many on the council considered this a healthy debate for the society. A proper understanding of the question, and of why the Elves had made the decision to go to war, could only yield a greater insight into the natures of the Elvish people themselves, to the unending benefit of their society. But to the Bladedancers, this was cowardice akin to high treason against the Elvish race, and they denounced those who opposed and undermined their efforts towards Victory. THEY were the nominated guardians of society, who had sacrificed their personal liberties to this sacred cause, and as such, their decrees should supersede those of the Council in matters of the defense of the realm and the prosecution of war. So aroused and inflamed were passions over the issue that the Council had no choice but to bar Deruan from their deliberations, lest tempers lead to a impasse that could only result in violence, one Elf against another, an act so heinous that it had led to the ostracizing of the Drow.

For the moment, Deruan was able to invoke the blessing and authority of Corellan, and override the concerns of the Council, and press forward with his plans. His strategy was four-fold. The Totem Spirits were beseeched for their aid, causing Rabbits and other burrowing creatures to search out the source of the waters that fed into the Dwarven realm; these would be acidified. In the process, the entrances which funneled clean, fresh, air to the depths would be found; they would be poisoned with noxious fumes. Trees would be planted in every crack and crevice, and spellwoven to grow their roots faster and more deeply, widening the cracks and destabilizing the walls and ceilings of the Dwarven halls. And many forest creatures, and other creatures who preferred an underground existence, would have their natures altered through Spellweaving to make them larger, more aggressive, and more fitted to living deep beneath the surface, then released into the tunnels to make their homes; deadly foes with which to vex the subterranean Dwarves and compete with them for food and water and living space.

Fifty-three years of superficial peace passed before all was prepared, with the Bladedancers suppressing all expressions of doubt or concerns over morality, as they single-mindedly pursued what they regarded as their sacred trust.

The Second Great Dwarfwar: A Dwarven Perspective

Lolth had not repeated Her error in ignoring those who shared Her preference for living within a completely controlled underground environment. She had sought to use the Dwarves as pawns, weapons against Her true enemies, the followers of Corellan, he who would unmake Her, in a rare moment of their vulnerability. Although superficially successful, this plan had backfired tremendously. But Lolth was a realist, despite all Her grand schemings, and possessed of a rare instinct for survival; no matter what the situation She was presented with, She would always seek (and usually find) a way to turn events to Her advantage. Even as a long twenty-four years of defensive engagements between the Dwarves and the surface Elves began, She undertook the difficult and dangerous task of establishing diplomatic relations with the Dwarves.

The initial approach was fraught with danger, and several diplomatic missions were slain by the Dwarves before the envoys they carried could be conveyed to the Dwarvish Court. But these were expendable lackeys, unimportant in overall life, and easily replaced. Approach after approach was attempted, until random chance found a successful formula: one of the envoys on this occasion was a Drow of great size and strength, a Giant amongst his people. and it so happened that he challenged the leader of the Dwarven Patrol that he encountered to a wrestling match for the honor of being escorted to the King.

Aberzherisharde was the name given to this walking mountain, and when his challenge was curtly rejected, he mocked the Dwarven Patrol as cowards. A known hot-head, who had been sentenced to this duty for brawling in defiance of Lolth’s Laws, there were several amongst the Spider-Queen’s advisors who thought his selection to be most unwise; but Lolth’s instruction overrode any debate, and so he found himself bandying insults with the leader of the Patrol.

Knowing the Dwarven nature now, as they did not know it then, it is clear that this was in fact the perfect response to the situation. He Challenged the Dwarven Arrogance, stung the Dwarven Pride, and then engaged in a game of friendly insults in which he took as good as he gave, all in tones that showed that he did not take the insults directed toward him personally. As the game wore on, and minutes became hours, the nature of the insults being exchanged gradually evolved into a series of backhanded compliments; insults of which the target could take pride at being accused. In due course, the Patrol Leader, Khalzesh, agreed to convey the deputation to the Dwarvish Crown under his personal protection, and at last Lolth’s message could be conveyed to the King.

These deputations had been comprised of carefully selected malcontents, given personal and private instruction by the Queen Herself in their deportment, and had their families held hostage to ensure their full cooperation. Not even the Priestesses and House Matrons were permitted to know of the instructions they carried; were these to become public knowledge, they could have undermined the very foundations of Drow Society. No members of a delegation would ever be permitted to interact with ordinary members of their society again, something of which they had not been informed prior to the undertaking of their missions. Only when the Drow peoples lost our [their] Dark Queen was the truth revealed, as the surviving members of the diplomatic corps were discovered living in hidden harems of untold luxury and zero liberty. (The Matrons who discovered them heard their words, but (under the-then-operative circumstances) could not permit themselves to accept such blasphemy, and executed them all immediately). Only when Lolth was restored, and abandoned Her people, were their words remembered, reconsidered, and found trustworthy, even insightful:

The diplomats began with a humble apology from the Spider Queen for the mistakes of the past, while deflecting most of the blame onto the House Matrons of the time, and especially the Princess whose ambitions had enmeshed all three participant races in the Prince Of Lies affair. They filled the Dwarven Hall with tales of the torture and retribution exacted apon those deemed by Her to be principally responsible for dishonoring their people. Nevertheless, Lolth Herself admitted that She had erred in Her handling of the matter, and was just as fallable as any ruler. In recognition of what this had cost the Dwarven peoples, She offered recompense in the form of rare gems and minerals that had been wrested from deep beneath the earth, deeper even than the Dwarven Tunnels could reach; Rubies and Sapphires and Adamant Ore, which (when refined by those with sufficient skill and expertise, which Her people lacked) would yield a metal named Adamantium.

This blend of humility, nobility, and pride – backed up by wergild – appealed to the Dwarven King, as every word reinforced his innate senses of pride and moral superiority. From that point, steady progress was made, despite the occasional diplomatic stumble.

After some years of periodic hostility between Dwarves and Elves, the Drow came to the Dwarves, and said, “It seems that we now find ourselves with enemy common, and that our expertise and experience might benefit you in your current hostilities should matters develop in an unseemly manner.”

To which the Dwarves replied, “Our homes are our weapons. Those who trespass are little more than an annoyance, a rabble who we need no aid to overcome.”

And the Drow Envoy replied, “And we hope that this remains the case. We have no desire to disparage your capabilities; but if it should come to pass that the pattern of this conflict should change unexpectedly, we wish your Royal Highness to know that we are at your disposal for advice and assistance.”

Once again, life in the tunnels returned to a routine, and the Drow bided their time, until the day arrived when the Dwarves looked back apon the year past and realized that the Elves had discontinued their futile assaults. And the Dwarves were greatly puzzled, for this sudden absence was not expected of the Elvish Character; even the Dwarves acknowledged that. Next to them, the Elves were the most tenacious race in existence.

So it was that the King, who had been but a young Prince when the offer had been extended, summoned the Drow diplomatic representatives and asked for their interpretation of the change. And the Drow Ambassador said, “You are correct, as always, your Majesty. Our surface brethren would not simply stop; they would either concede and negotiate a peaceful settlement of your differences, or they would withdraw to change tactics, conceding your people’s mastery of the battlefield. Any other enemy would accept that they have been beaten, but our surface brethren have no honor, and will stoop to any depths to achieve a victory they do not deserve.

“Since there have been no peace envoys, the war between you continues unabated. We see but two possible courses for their conduct of this war: either they will seek to create some great provocation to lure you out into an environment where they hold the advantage, and will do so soon, or they will seek to turn your advantage against you by arcane means, which will take much longer. The solution to the first we leave to your own tactical acumen; but should battle not resume in a handspan of years, we shall return to discuss how best we might contribute to the countering of these underhanded tactics.”

Five years later, they returned, and said to the King, “Greetings, your Highness, from your sister Monarch, Queen Of Spiders. In the name of our close bonds of friendship have we come to discuss the tactical support that our people can provide you in your quest for justice from our common enemy, the Elves of the surface. Our Queen bids you to understand Her position on these matters from the outset, lest false expectation should undermine the friendship that has been forged between us; this is your war, not ours, and while we wish to you every success in this matter, we cannot fight your battles for you. Nor do we expect that such a brave and noble people as yourselves would expect anything less of those who respect your most sterling qualities.”

To which the Dwarf-king replied, “We would never ask another to fight our battles for us, you have the right of that; yet, this then begs the question: if you so not offer the strength of force of arms, what value do you then attach to this friendship that you will not fight for it? What assistance will you render, in the name of the friendship your Queen professes, that the cynical amongst us should not dismiss them as merely an empty platitude?”

This was troublesome for the diplomats, revealing as it did a measure of wit that they had not previously attributed amongst the King’s gifts. The King had matured greatly since their previous visit, it was true; perhaps in the case of Dwarves, wisdom came apon them suddenly, when the weight of accumulated experiences suddenly forged associations of understanding, where for other races this developed more gradually over the course of time. Choosing his words with care, the Envoy answered, “Your words, in effect, do say unto us: ‘Friendship is easily professed, but true friendship requires deeds of fidelity’. We accept that burden in the name of our Queen, may She be ever-blessed, and convey from Her many promises of aid of practical value unto you.

“Firstly, we bring word of what She and Her advisors have Divined of the underhanded and unworthy stratagem to be employed by the surface dwellers; it is our Queen’s belief that they will turn the waters you drink, the rock you tunnel, and yea, even the very air that you breathe against you, in a bid to drive you from your homes forever, into the ambush that they will have prepared; and that should this be insufficient, they will release horrors and fell beasts unimaginable to plague your daily lives, for they are corrupting the very creatures that they profess to guard and protect into abominations most horrifying and perverse to do battle in their stead. And should this come to pass, our Queen offers refuge for you and your Court and a small army of stalwart Dwarven defenders within our tunnels, and the aid of OUR spinners of spells to the end of undoing this harm to your homes.

“Second, we offer to trade with you food, that you may increase the number of warriors that fight to protect your lands; and shipments of Adamant Ore and unprocessed Mithral, that you may better arm your warriors; and that we will sell these things to your people for gold, and silver, and platinum, and for the black gems that rumor states that you have found in the wash of the underground river that runs through your domain.

“And thirdly, and most greatly, should all come to pass as our Queen has foretold, She bids us to offer unto you this aid: we shall draw aside the curtains of sorcery that protect the surface dwellers and give you the opportunity to strike directly back at the heartland of our mutual foe from beneath their very feet. Should you capture the heart of Elvarheim, you will force our brethren to bargain for peace on your terms, and achieve a total and lasting victory in the war against our mutual foe.”

The King, his countenance unyielding, replied “Those are great gifts of friendship, it must be said; and we are honored to be numbered amongst the friends of the Drow and their Queen, and we are very happy to accept Her offer of trade with our people. In honor of that accord, I shall have the most brilliant of the dark gems of which you speak polished and mounted apon a circlet of purest platinum as a gift to Her, in recognition of Her enlightened rule. Many details remain to be settled, of course, and I in turn would charge unto you this task: to relate unto your Queen that we do not fear the surface Elves, and do not think them capable of inflicting the travails your relate apon us; always, it doth seem to me, those of the surface world wish to hold themselves blameless for the ill that befalls another at their hands, a smugness and self-important superiority that is unmerited, and such deeds would bind their hands to the axe-handle while blood still drips from its blade. Yet, it might be that in this, we are the ones who are mistaken, and should that be the case, only then would we countenance such a dangerous tactic as an invasion of the Elven homeland. In our tunnels, we have the advantage, as they have learned to their great cost; should we have the foolish audacity to brave the leaves of their twisted and defiled forests, it is they who would have that advantage, and we who would do the dying. A foolish bravado is not bravery, just stupidity.”

This set the Ambassador back on his heels; his Queen’s expectation had been that Dwarvish Bravery extended far beyond the point of folly, and that they would leap at the chance of engaging the surface Elves in direct combat; indeed, Her instructions had been for him to permit himself to be reluctantly persuaded to aid in mounting the direct attack as soon as possible, and not as a far-off contingency plan. He was also more than a little concerned that it was he who would have to inform Her that She had underestimated Her people’s Dwarven neighbors – an unenviable position, and one that might prove painfully fatal; few survived the voicing of such criticism.

Fortunately for the Ambassador, the Queen was entirely satisfied with the outcome. She had no doubts of what the followers of Corellan had planned, for She had emplaced spies in their midst; and it would have taken a very blind, deaf, and inept spy indeed for him to have remained unaware of the debate and controversy over the plans of Deruan The Bladedancer. As a result, She was of no doubt that the royal family of the Dwarves would deliver themselves to be hostages of Her good will, subjugating Her Dwarvish neighbors; that the offer of trade for food would see the Dwarves becoming economically dependant apon Her people, and providing them with the resources and ready capital to funnel into the vast espionage apparatus that She envisioned for the future, while refining ore and crafting weaponry that would ultimately be turned to Her ends; and that in the final course of events, the Dwarves would succeed in obliterating the Followers Of Corellan for Her, in response to the war that She had started between them. She was eternal, and could wait.

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The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

• Arnost: Simple Speech (Modern “Common”, a human tongue)
• Arrunquessor: Plains Elves
• Ayer: Nuthanori word meaning “Squat”. Mont Ayer is the name of one of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands.
• Calquissir: High Elves
• Corellan: The First
• Drow: “Those Who Dwell Apart” (in Nuthanorl). Added to Ogre by the Drow with the meaning of “Smart”.
• Ellessarune: The “Shining City” of the Tarquessir, home of the Elvish King and capital of the Elven Lands to this day.
• Eltrhinast: “Guiding Spirit”
• Elvarheim: “Blessed Leafy Home”: The Elven Forest, homeland of the Tarquessir and the centre of Elven Power in modern times
• Gilandthor: “The Gathering”, the formal title of the Elvish Council.
• Hithainduil: High Elven Language
• Huyundaltha: “Masters Of The Ondaltha” (literal), “Bladedancers” (colloquial). Formerly Noletinechor, now Guardians Of Elvish Society.
• Ondaltha: A two-weapon combat style based apon Elvish Dance, practiced exclusively by Huyundaltha.
• Illvayssor: “The Other”, a mythical race
• Isallithin: “The Sundered”, a name applied to Aquatic Elves
• King: A human title interpreted by Elves as “speaker to others” and defined as such within their language.
• Magi: A corruption of the Zamiel word “Machus”, which means “of the wise.”
• Mont: Nuthanori word meaning “High Place”. Used human-style in the naming of Mountains.
• Noletinechor: “Lore Shields”, an elvish historical vocation
• Nuthanorl: Low Elven Language, Common Elven
• Sarner: A human abbreviation of the Hithainduil word “Saranariuthenal” which means, literally, “Swift and Wide”. The River Sarner runs through the central valley of Elvarheim.
• Tarquessir: Forest Elves
• Thuyon: Nuthanori word meaning “Tall Spires”. Mont Thuyon is the name of the taller of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands; Modern Elvarheim lies between the foothills of Mont Thuyon and the River Sarner.
• Verdonne: “Quickbranch”, an artificial race created by Elves to be “The Guardians Of The Forest”.
• Zamiel: Drow Language

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Next time: Violence and Mayhem as the Second Great Dwarfwar climaxes in Chapters 21 to 23!

For a recent superhero adventure, I went looking for a map, preferably a 5′ scale map that I could use with miniatures. I couldn’t find what I needed, and that surprised me greatly. After all, there are so many maps and map tiles on offer through RPGNow – there are umpteen castles, marshlands, swamps, forests, forest clearings, villages, and so on. Heck, you can buy entire cities. So I felt sure that anything you could think of would be catered for by someone.

The more I looked into it, the more maps I was able to place on my wishlist of maps that were simply not available. So this post is for all you mapmakers out there. I don’t know how big a market there would be for any of these specific items – but there is going to be some market, and – the last time I checked – it was a market that no-one was catering for.

Circus Tent, Arena, and/or Amphitheatre

The specific map that I was looking for was a circus tent, complete with audience seating, central rings, acrobat platforms, high-wires, etc. But I was prepared to compromise – I could have worked with almost any arena or amphitheatre map and dressed it to my needs.

I couldn’t find any of them (heck, I couldn’t even find any maps or blueprints on Google). And the surprises, well, the heck out of me.

Arenas and the like have been part of the landscape from just about as long as we’ve been building cities. The Ancient Greeks used amphitheatres for debates. The Romans had their coliseums. In medieval times, tournaments were regular events. Modern times have the circus, plus rock concerts, and plays, and heaven knows what. Scientific Conferences, perhaps. University lecture halls. And in the future, any of the above might come back into vogue.

Solving the immediate problem

In order to solve my immediate needs, I had to get creative. I used wall panels as rows of bleachers, stone floors as a set of elevated stages (I thought about putting dice under them to raise them, but it proved enough to use some unwanted tiles as a layer underneath the “stage” to raise it just a little). I used portals to represent major supports for the tents, pits for recessed areas (like an orchestra pit and a hidden passage beneath the stage where the dressing rooms were located). Burning torches represented the position of spotlights. Pieces showing something else – spiderweb, I think, but I’m no longer sure – became the anchors and platforms which were connected by high wires.

A really important factor was the size of the end-product. I had assembled stacks of the different component elements before I started laying the ‘map’ out on the playing surface and roughly added up the amount of space that I could fill using those tiles.

While it took an extra half-hour of game time to lay out the map, it worked reasonably well. While there were undoubtedly holes and flaws within the resulting map, neither the players nor I could spot them in the course of play. So it was good enough, in the end.

Labs

Getting back to the main point of this article, we come to Labs.

Frankensteinian Labs. Gothic Labs. Futuristic Labs. Chem Labs. Electrical Labs. Robotics Workshops. Leonardo’s Workshop. Labs, Labs, Labs. You can never have enough diversity in Lab Spaces.

And of course, most of these have fantasy analogues. The Chem Labs work for alchemist’s labs. Leonardo’s workshop could definitely be useful in a steampunk setting. Frankenstein’s Workshop works for all sorts of Necromancer’s workshops, not to mention golem construction workshops. Astronomical observatories and astrological workshops can be interchanged – at least well enough for one map to be used for another.

Some of these maps are available, most don’t. But its the futuristic labs that are really hard to find.

Special Rooms

There are a number of special rooms that recur in various game genres time after time. The throne room. The conference room – one with round or elliptical tables and one with rectangular tables. Armories – which will be different in different time periods. Mobile armories, like those that might be used by a Swat team. Armored Cars. Ambulance interiors. Operating theatres. Caves with entrances that look like giant skulls.

Most of these just aren’t around. Some of them can be replicated using standard map tiles and appropriate dressings – but having a baseline to work from would make things so much easier.

Special Locations

Finally, there are a few “special” locations that keep coming up, and that are very hard to fake with something else. Cemeteries, Casinos, Las Vegas showrooms, Medieval Japanese Castles, and a period-correct Egyptian Palace. Oh yes, and the TARDIS, or some other sci-fi starship bridge.

So, there you go

These are all examples of locations that I’ve needed to use in adventures in the past – and couldn’t find. And if I needed them, so could others. So it’s over you, mapmakers. Who will take up the gauntlet?

Only a short article this week, for a change. Don’t expect it to last…

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it in public, I’ll either never get it done in time…

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Chapters 15-17 are all in reasonably final form. I try not to change “speaker” in mid-paragraph, but the speaker does sometimes change from one paragraph to the next. So if it seems like the tone changes direction suddenly – sometimes it does.

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The Verdonne Insurrection: Elves in the Age Of Heresies

Throughout their history, the Elves had largely been preoccupied with social and interracial problems. They had given little thought to the larger theological reality that surrounded them, and had no true conception of the vast powers against which Corellan struggled to protect his people. Elvish theological thought was focused on the Totem Spirits of Nature that guided them; their scholars debated whether the belligerency and inconstancy of other races could be attributed to their seeming inability to perceive the wisdom of their spirit-totems, and Elvish philosophy was turned continually inward, focused on defining exactly what it meant to be an Elf, and how best to have that quintessential Elvishness express itself throughout their society. Even the rearing and education of the Verdonne had been left to the Verdonne themselves, so preoccupied were the Elves in their soul-searching and expression of the results through Spellweaving to more closely conform the environment to their natures and perceptions.

The crushing disappointment of the truth of The Other, who they had romanticized into idealized and nobly tragic figures, had soured any interest in the outside world and the beliefs and knowledge of outsiders. The world hurt so much that they turned their backs toward it and became an insular and self-preoccupied society.

This was a state of acute vulnerability to the forces which had corrupted the Spider-totems with Ambitions, and when what became known as The Age Of Heresies began, that vulnerability would exact a heavy toll on Elvish society.

The weapons employed by the Chaos Powers against the Elves were curiosity, insecurity, and ego, and they would prove devastatingly effective.

The Elves of the time had accepted the presence and role of the Verdonne within their realm as a part of everyday life. The subject was no more to be given special consideration than were the presence of the Bluebird and the role of its song as an inspiration to poets and artists. The Verdonne, who were long-lived even as were their Elvish creators, slowly began to perceive that the forest they protected with life, leaf, and limb was altering in its nature, little by little. From one day to the next, the changes were so insignificant as to go unnoticed, but over a span of centuries, they added up into an increasingly alien world. After discussing it amongst themselves at length, they resolved to ask the Elves, and here the Spellweavers proved that history was doomed to repeat itself apon the preoccupied.

After the episode with the Dwarves, the Elves had created the Council Of Elves to ‘guide’ the King toward his decisions in all matters relating to other species; but they failed to apply their hard-learned principles to their own creation, treating them as part of their domain, and not as a separate species with whom they had a relationship based apon common interest. Instead of referring the Verdonne’s gentle questions to the council, they answered in simple terms and without thought, being distracted by whatever they were concentrating apon at that particular moment, replying that they were changing the forest to make it a better home for the Elves, closer to their nature.

The Verdonne questioner accepted this, and left; and he and his kind thought long and hard apon the over-simple truth of the reply. Almost thirty years passed before the Verdonne came to the realization that the more perfectly the Forest suited the Elves, the less perfect an abode for their kind it became. Increasingly, they would come to exist only at the Sufferance of their elvish masters, slaves to their whims and fancies; and yet it was by their efforts, and deaths, that the Forest remained unmolested.

The question of what should be done about this was another to be given slow and careful consideration, but in time – another 22 years to be precise – they reached the conclusion that their role was to protect the Forest as Nature had intended it to be. The Elvish manipulations were as unnatural as the destructive instincts of the Fallen Races against which the Verdonne struggled regularly. The Elves had to be treated as an enemy by the Verdonne.

The result was a Slave Revolt (from the perspective of the Verdonne) and an act of Heresy (from the perspective of the Elves). The first strike was against the Spellweavers, and those of martial prowess, and it was swift and brutal. A few at a time, the Verdonne infiltrated the heart of the Forest, where they were welcomed by the Elves. Few realized how many had gathered until their appointed leader, Silverleaf, gave a great booming cry and signaled the attack.

If the Forest Elves had been spared the worst of the Orc-wars, they bore the brunt of this unexpected assault. Their most powerful and learned were felled in the first stroke. To fully appreciate the magnitude of the calamity, it must be recognized that the Verdonne had been entrusted with the keys to all the defenses of the Forest, were trusted completely, were able to proceed unmolested to the most sensitive of locations throughout the Elvish Kingdom in preparation for the assault, were as able to instantly relay messages from one to another by means of the trees of the forest as were the Elves (in fact, messages between the Verdonne were presumed to pertain to the defense of the realm and were given priority at the instruction of the Elves themselves), and the greatest vulnerability of the Verdonne – fire – could not be exploited without irreparably harming the forest itself. The result was a slaughter.

Some Elves were desperate enough to resort to weapons of flame regardless of the risks, and in the struggle, control over the fires was soon lost. The resulting conflagration swept through the forest as an even more unstoppable and implacable foe than ever the Verdonne would have been. And yet, the desperate measure achieved its objectives, as the Verdonne fell back before the flames and fled, all coordination amongst themselves lost to the panicked cries of the Forest, retreating instinctively to the banks of the Sarner. The Elves had beaten back the Verdonne Insurrection in but a week, but within the course of that week the heart of the Elvish Realm became a smoking ruin. More than half of the population of Elvarheim were lost in insurrection.

When at last the fires abated, the survivors began to reconstruct their society in imitation of its former glory; but much context and understanding had been lost, and often the forms were preserved and mimicked without an understanding of the reasons those customs had evolved, or their purpose. Elvish society began to stagnate from that moment, and its eventual collapse became inevitable.

Though it took weeks of patient discussion and debate, the survivors formed a new Council, and confirmed the ascendancy of the sole survivor of the Royal Family. The council then directed the formation of a delegation to approach the Verdonne Enclave that had gathered by the banks of the Sarner, to learn the cause of the conflict and what might be done to resolve the Verdonne’s grievances. By the time the delegation warily approached, almost three long months had passed, and to their surprise, the Enclave had been all but abandoned. Only Silverleaf remained, mortally wounded and badly burned in the fires. He informed the delegation that his brethren had all departed, to take up the burden of the protection of forests and glades wherever they might be found; and that so far as he and his kind were concerned, Elvarheim was a true forest in seeming only, perverted and twisted as it had been by Elvish Spellweaving, and unworthy of the protection of the Verdonne, who would henceforth hold themselves fully independent of the Elvish Kingdom.

Silverleaf had been waiting patiently to deliver his message of Verdonne Independence, sustaining himself only through sheer force of will bolstered by his healing arts; this last task achieved, the Liberator Of The Verdonne permitted himself to succumb to his wounds.

The Elvish delegation were greatly puzzled by this statement. Only when information was forthcoming from their Human neighbors about the religious strife that they had been experiencing, the acts of heresy and betrayal and compounded confusion that had been experienced, did they begin to grasp the root cause of the disagreement, even though the specific misunderstanding that had been central to the Verdonne Insurrection remained unknown. By this time, almost a century had passed, and it was too late to repair relations with their creations.

So it was that the delegation returned to their devastated forest home to begin the long process of mourning, and the slow process of rebuilding, still in a state of confusion over what had transpired and why.

Noletinechor: Guardians Of The Elvish Legacy

Elvish society is organic in nature, slowly growing and evolving to accommodate sustained changes in circumstance, much as does a tree. Change occurs in miniscule increments, and traditions and forms remain unchanged for centuries, until the old ways are proven inadequate to the burdens of a catastrophic and usually unexpected disaster.

The loss during the Verdonne Insurrection of their most learned, and wise, and their most adroit Spellweavers, and most subtle (and incomplete) Spellweavings, was just such a calamity, and as was their way, the elves reacted to it by debating for years what should be done to prevent a recurrence. Indeed, it was only the imminent demise of the most senior of the survivors and awareness of the loss of the unique perspectives and understandings that would result, that cut short the debate.

The elvish solution was a planned society as rigidly defined as any promulgated by Lolth; the Royal Council instituted a completely regimented career path for all the young elves approaching maturity designed to protect and preserve as much of the elvish culture as had survived.

Any who had shown the slightest potential for Spellweaving was apprenticed to the aging masters of that craft. Of the remainder, any with any talent for any of a dozen arts or crafts or disciplines that had been identified as ‘uniquely’ or ‘characteristically’ Elvish by the committees formed to debate the subject were recruited into a new vocation, the Noletinechor, or “Lore Shields”. Each was then trained intensively in each of these definitive social attributes, and those who did not achieve a satisfactory standard of accomplishment were released back into the general population to contribute to society as they wished.

From their beginnings, the Noletinechor were subjects of considerable controversy amongst the elves. Never had the free-spirited woodland dwellers been subject to such harsh regimentation, and the prospect of being forced into the Noletinechor was hugely unpopular, though the elite few who succeeded in the disciplines were greatly respected – and the subjects of considerable sympathy. They were also the butts of much Elvish humor, which did little to brighten their dispositions; that, when combined with the general hot-headedness of youth, quickly gave the members of the group a reputation for being grim of demeanor and irritable by nature. ‘Prickly… almost Dwarven,’ was the frequent comment, accompanied by a wry smile.

The Noletinechor were artisans, poets, and musicians, craftsmen of the highest caliber. They memorized the 1145 songs that had been identified as ‘Fundamental expressions of Elvishness’, they learned the 7 musical modes and 173 forms of dance that were ‘definitively’ Elvish, and were educated, in as much detail as possible, in the history of the Elven peoples. His role in that history made Corellan himself another vital field of knowledge that the Noletinechor had to master. They became, almost by definition, the experts on elvish rituals and social customs, the keepers and protectors of the legacy of an entire cultural development.

They were not warriors.

The Second Great Dwarfwar: Beginnings, Boundaries and Confrontations

Having safeguarded the things that made them Elvish, the learned bodies that had created the Noletinechor had turned to the pressing question of protecting their borders. While it was recovering, the forests held little of interest to outsiders, and as yet the Fallen races did not realize that the Elven lands were now unprotected; neither situation could last. The forest had bloomed with new foliage years earlier, but the trees were just trees; they had not yet been awakened and assimilated into Elvarheim. An invisible line within the Forest demarked the territory of the Elves. Nevertheless, since the new growth formed a connecting corridor between Elvarheim and the huts of the Amrunquessor, which lay between the forests and the mountaintop dwellings of the Calquessir, there was periodic travel through the new growth.

The first indication that their grace period had expired was when one such pair of travelers, named Arudrial and Denowyn, found that many of the trees in the vicinity of Mount Elrozi had been cut down and the timber removed.

The travelers first blamed Ogres, seeking timber for their seige apparatus, or other members of the Fallen Races, seeking lumber for construction, woodworking, or bonfires. But when the scene was surveyed by the experienced Pathfinder Therialas, the true culprits were identified.

Therialas had been a tenderfoot warrior, barely adult, during the confrontation over the Prince Of Lies affair. Now a very respectable 549 years of age, he was the greatest tracker in all Elvarheim; but even with all his experience, it was no easy task to cross the five-hundred-and-ten year gulf since the last time he had seen the imprint of a Dwarven Boot. Nevertheless, he achieved the task and duly reported to the Council that undoubtedly, the footprints he had seen were those of Dwarvenkind.

This posed a new challenge for the Council to debate; the Elven lands had never had any formalized borders, and while the Living Forest of Elvarheim was clearly their domain, protected and nurtured and shaped by Spellweaving, the trees that had been felled were… just trees. Could they truly claim this as part of the Elven realm? Should they? Was this really a cause, a justification, for war?

Ultimately, the decision rested on a very human perspective, viewed through a very Elvish perspective. Instead of their normal pragmatism, the decision was founded on sentiment and emotion; many Elves had died protecting the trees that had previously occupied that region, and with their long lives, that was an even more poignant sacrifice. Further, it was a connecting corridor between the habitats of the differing branches of the Elven people. Finally, there remained the suspicion that there might be another force behind the Dwarven Incursion; Calquessir divinations had long ago revealed the connection between the Drow and the assaults by the Fallen Races, and there was the potential that this was simply more of the same.

And so it was resolved that the Elves would seek reparations for the damages, and for the incursion, and would offer to negotiate forest management for the Dwarves. A trade agreement would benefit both – in comparison to the alternative. A delegation was assembled for the purpose and given careful instruction by the ‘Dwarven Expert’ from the Council.

The Elvish delegation approached the entrance to the Dwarven mines with caution; they were used to the forests of Elvarheim, which were ringed with layer apon layer of defenses. What they were seeing as they approached was nothing but unspoiled wilderness, save for a large spoil heap – a small mountain, if truth were told – filling a valley next to the entrance with rubble. The closer they came to the unsealed, unguarded entrance, completely out in the open, the more nervous they became.

Their caution approached paranoia as they examined the silver-plated steel girders that framed the entrance, and the delicately-carved runes inset across the entrance. “Ring The Gong,” pronounced an Elf who was learned in the Dwarven script, “and wait.” A scout warily approached the entrance, and found a large bronze gong mounted to the ceiling on one side, just beyond the portal, with a hammer on the ground next to it. Warily, the scout picked up the hammer and struck the gong gingerly.

He was completely unprepared for the massive swell of ringing bells that sounded from the enchanted device, and fled back to the remainder of the party. It was clear that the Elvish hearing was more sensitive – it could almost be said, more delicate – than that of the Dwarves. In the distance, even removed some small way from the entrance, the party could clearly hear other bells relaying the summons into the shafts of shaped stone.

While they waited, the Elves examined the workmanship of the portal more thoroughly, and were increasingly impressed. The lines might be rigid and straight, and broadened to resist weathering from the elements, but the edges were crisp and sharp, and the decorative shapes were subtle and not without their artistic merit. They might have their own style and a different set of chosen materials, but the Dwarvish artisans were clearly as proficient as any Elven craftsman.

For three days, the delegation waited, while nervousness turned to anxiety, and anxiety to boredom, and boredom to irritation, and all the guidance of the council became a distant memory.

If you climb too quickly from deep under the ground to the surface, you forget how to breathe right. Weaklings die from it. You have to be slow, and patient, and take time for your body to remember how to breathe thin air. Even more if the surface is high in the mountains. Elves don’t dig deep, not like Drow, so they don’t know this. Stupid of them.

But eventually, the patience of the delegation was rewarded. A small group of Dwarves exited the tunnels and took up a defensive posture, weapons drawn and at the ready, lips curled in thinly-disguised contempt. They were followed by a Dwarf dressed in somewhat better fashion, with gems and gold practically dripping from his clothing and personal effects.

“We have come to discuss the unlawful destruction of Elvish trees by your kind without our leave. The forest is ours, and you have harmed it, cutting down that which belonged to the Elvish nation and carting it away. We demand the oath of you and all your kind that this will not happen again, and we demand wergild for those trees whose voices you have stilled,” began the leader of the Elvish delegation.

“Hear me, Elf: we want none of your sickly and twisted forest. That which we cut down and removed belonged to none, the trees were good and healthy and unprotected, and we will take as much of the lumber as we want or need. Go back and tell your scrawny little King that neighbors are polite to each other, and if he wants to discuss things in a civil manner, he must kiss my boot in apology. We have learned our lessons from your kind, and will never be as helpless again as we were when they drove us from our homes. Who do you think you are, to make demands of The Clans?”

“We are those who were injured, whose lands were violated, the party wronged – that is who we are, and the source of our demands. You are the one who will apologize, for your actions, for the actions of your kind, and for your disrespect toward the King of Elves. Withdraw your ridiculous request and apologize, and we will discuss fair recompense for the slaughter of the outlying forest; refuse and a state of war will exist between our nations!”

“Kiss my Braided Beard, you poncy snob. We’ll give you more war than you can stomach if you set foot in our domain again.”

Thus it was that the Elvish people and the Dwarvish people found themselves at odds once again.

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The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

• Arnost: Simple Speech (Modern “Common”, a human tongue)
• Arrunquessor: Plains Elves
• Ayer: Nuthanori word meaning “Squat”. Mont Ayer is the name of one of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands.
• Calquissir: High Elves
• Corellan: The First
• Drow: “Those Who Dwell Apart” (in Nuthanorl). Added to Ogre by the Drow with the meaning of “Smart”.
• Ellessarune: The “Shining City” of the Tarquessir, home of the Elvish King and capital of the Elven Lands to this day.
• Eltrhinast: “Guiding Spirit”
• Elvarheim: “Blessed Leafy Home”: The Elven Forest, homeland of the Tarquessir and the centre of Elven Power in modern times
• Gilandthor: “The Gathering”, the formal title of the Elvish Council.
• Hithainduil: High Elven Language
• Illvayssor: “The Other”, a mythical race
• Isallithin: “The Sundered”, a name applied to Aquatic Elves
• King: A human title interpreted by Elves as “speaker to others” and defined as such within their language.
• Magi: A corruption of the Zamiel word “Machus”, which means “of the wise.”
• Mont: Nuthanori word meaning “High Place”. Used human-style in the naming of Mountains.
• Noletinechor: “Lore Shields”, an elvish historical vocation
• Nuthanorl: Low Elven Language, Common Elven
• Sarner: A human abbreviation of the Hithainduil word “Saranariuthenal” which means, literally, “Swift and Wide”. The River Sarner runs through the central valley of Elvarheim.
• Tarquessir: Forest Elves
• Thuyon: Nuthanori word meaning “Tall Spires”. Mont Thuyon is the name of the taller of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands; Modern Elvarheim lies between the foothills of Mont Thuyon and the River Sarner.
• Verdonne: “Quickbranch”, an artificial race created by Elves to be “The Guardians Of The Forest”.
• Zamiel: Drow Language

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Next time: War, subterfuge, hidden agendas, festering resentments, and the origins of the Huyondaltha as the Second Great Dwarfwar continues in Chapters 18 through 20!

Last night, I caught up with a documentary that I’ve been waiting to view (lack of time) since early February. The subject, and title, of the documentary was the question, ‘Are We Still Evolving?’. And, as with many subjects that I digest, it sparked a number of thoughts, all of which are relevant to the shape of humanity in the distant future – which is directly relevant to any science-fiction setting. Because of this relevance, I thought I would take a few minutes to expound my thoughts on the subject.

Let’s start by revisiting the fundamental assumptions.

What is evolution?

Evolution is the process by which traits emerge, are conserved from one generation to another, and accumulate until the species is so transformed that it is no longer compatible with the previous form of the species (if any representatives survive). Where these traits are only preserved in a limited subpopulation of a species, it eventually gives rise to a new species.

Survival is not sufficient

The driving force behind evolution is Natural Selection. It used to be thought that the driving force behind Natural selection was the capacity to survive, and this remains a key factor during times of extreme environmental distress – if you don’t survive, you don’t pass on your genes and any mutations that they may contain – but these days we know better. It’s not enough merely for an organism to be better adapted for survival than another member of the same species, it also has to be able to reproduce. The capacity for survival is simply one of a number of criteria that, in combination, determine whether or not an individual will successfully reproduce.

Consider that if a mutation renders a species incapable of reproduction, there will be no new generation competing for food supplies and other resources, and hence more to go around for the existing members of the species, who are more likely to survive as a result. This shows that a pro-survival evolutionary trait can actually be counterproductive in terms of the survival of the species.

The distinction lies in the false assumption that what is good for the individual is also good for the species. It ain’t necessarily so, and neither is the converse: that what is bad for the individual is also bad for the species. In both cases, the statement can be sometimes true and sometimes false, depending on which specific benefit to the individual we’re talking about.

It’s the journey that matters, not the destination

It also used to be thought that once humans had achieved intelligence and began manipulating its environment to enhance its capacity to survive and prosper in relative comfort, that evolution stopped, because there was no environmental stimulus to select one characteristic over another. The human form was therefore described as the pinnacle of evolution, perhaps in need of a few tweaks here and there, but overall perfection and inherent superiority to every other life-form on the planet. These days, we know better concerning this misapprehension as well.

There are still factors that can wipe out large segments of a population. 400 years ago, one in three children survived to reach adulthood. 200 years ago, that had gone up to two in three. The ability to resist those diseases was clearly an evolutionary factor – and if the diseases remained unchanged, we would have evolved a resistance to them long ago. Influenza used to be a killer, and I don’t just mean the rare ultra-virulent strains, I mean the everyday ordinary household variety. These days, most children survive the flu with nothing more than bed rest – and even that treatment is more concerned with comfort, effectiveness, and restraining the spread of the disease than actually curing it. So long as our environment poses a threat to our health and hence our ability to reproduce to our maximum biological capacity, evolution is at work. The journey never ends, and hence the destination – perfection – is a chimera, and has no significance. What matters is accumulated generations of adaptability to whatever the environmental conditions happen to be – the ongoing process of evolution.

But isn’t evolution just a theory?

I don’t intend to get into a big arguement about science vs. religion at this point. What any individual believes and how they reconcile those beliefs with the accumulated understanding of the way the world works is none of my business, and I’m happy to keep it that way. This “counterargument” is a different kettle of fish entirely, and comes from fundamentally misunderstanding science or willfully distorting what Science is.

At its heart, Science is simply a process for proposing and validating theories about the nature of reality. No scientific principle is ever etched in stone, immutable and eternal; it’s a best approximation of our current understanding. All scientific theories must continually face attack from people looking for flaws, for holes in the logic, for exceptions that disprove the universality or accuracy of a theory. Science, in other words, gives the term “Theory” a slightly different meaning to that of colloquial English, and employing the term in its colloquial sense misrepresents the meaning.

The colloquial meaning of ‘theory’ (note the lowercase) is more akin to the scientific usage of the term ‘hypothesis’ – an untested, unproven explanation for an observed event or condition that may or may not be accurate. Only once a hypothesis has undergone rigorous testing and verification by independent scientists can it advance to the point of being called a Theory. Becoming a theory means that the hypothesis has been analyzed and codified mathematically to the point where precise predications can be made, and that those predictions are testable by controlled and repeatable experiments and have been so tested, and the results verified. In general, it is also true that no new hypothesis will be accepted until there is some observed condition or phenomena that the existing theory does not adequately explain. That doesn’t eliminate its viability as a good approximation in most cases.

Einstein’s was not the only Theory Of Relativity. There were half-a-dozen or more of them. But its predictions were closer to the observed reality than that of the others, and so it is the one that’s accepted – and remembered – these days.

That, by the way, is where the arguement for creationism being taught in the classroom falls down. Creationism, or Intelligent Design as it is now named, is a hypothesis, but it has not been subjected to the rigorous development and testing of evolutionary theory, and it cannot point at an event or phenomenon that it explains but existing theory does not. To its adherents I say: find those exceptions and do that research, and then make your case. You might even be right, but propounding dogma and rhetoric as logical arguement will never prove it, and until you do, its about as scientific as fairies at the bottom of the garden.

We used to think there were natural laws that, once stated, would stand inviolate as the last word on a fundamental principle of the universe. As our understanding of what Science is has grown, we have become less arrogant. It was not uncommon for scientists in the 19th century to believe that a complete understanding of physics was possible within their lifetimes, and several lamented that soon we would know all that there was to know, and speculated on what we would do once that had been achieved. We now double the sum of human knowledge every X years (it used to be 10, I think it’s now approaching 1 – but it may even be beyond that numeric threshold) – and there is no end in sight. But it’s not the broad principles that elude us – its the details, and the extrapolations of those broad principles beyond the limits of our understanding, and the causes and relationships between them.

The principles of Evolutionary Theory are just as solidly verified and as widely accepted as the Theory Of Gravity.

Evolution in the lab

In fact, you can watch evolution take place in the lab. Time-lapse photography of the growth of antibiotic-resistant E. Coli showed evolution in action as part of the BBC documentary “Defeating the superbug”. While this documentary is not apparently available on official DVD (it’s an episode of the BBC2 “Horizon” Science series), a reveals a number of sources which claim to permit one to watch it online (well worth the effort). The images were of an experiment in which panels of successively stronger doses of an antibiotic were incorporated into a growth medium for the bacteria, until the final panel which had an antibiotic dosage as high as a human could medically tolerate and survive – any stronger and it would kill the patient outright. In the course of a week or two, bacteria which were just a little more resistant to the antibiotic successfully colonized one panel after another, growing more resistant at each step, until finally they invaded and conquered the strongest panel.

Of course, this produced only a new strain, like a new breed of dog. To actually change the bacteria so much that they became a new species, much more time would be required.

By way of comparison, how long would it take for an equivalent amount of change in humans? Well, typical bacteria double in population (assuming adequate food supplies, etc) every 20 minutes. Two weeks is therefore equivalent to 1008 generations. The human equivalent is roughly 20 years – so about 20,000 years could produce a similar amount of change – at least in theory. There’s a secondary consideration: persistence of environmental influences. In the lab experiment, there was no significant change in the environment in the course of those 1000+ generations; the same can’t be said of a time-span of 20,000 years. For one thing, there is a complete seasonal cycle in each one of those years. So, rather than constantly selecting for the one criterion, we would be diluting the evolutionary trend – the question is, by How Much? To one-fifth? That’s 100,000 years. One-tenth? That’s 200,000 years. One-twenty-fifth? That’s half a million years. Anatomically modern humans first emerged about 200,000 years ago, according to the fossil evidence, while our immediate forerunners evolved between 250,000 and 400,000 years ago. That’s the sort of timescale we’re talking about. Evolution is SLOW.

Explosive Evolution

At least, most of the time. The theory of Punctuated Equilibrium suggests that evolution occurs more rapidly in small populations or geographically restricted habitats – that there are long periods of stability and then some environmental catastrophe or cataclysm that triggers a period of rapid change. This theory is not universally accepted, as a quick scan of the “criticism” section of the Wikipedia Page linked to above, shows.

I find it quite credible that following a mass-extinction event, or some more local equivalent, there might well be a drastic increase in population amongst the survivors and occupation of multiple ecological niches which would lead to rapid differentiation. In the short-term during the recovery from such an event there would be decreased competition for food, permitting rapid expansion of population levels. The natural behavior of population growth is for numbers to increase unchecked to the point at which the food supply is barely adequate for survival plus one generation of expansion that crosses the line from sufficient food to drastic competition. Those subspecies that have diverged sufficiently to have occupied an ecological niche outside of the primary niche formerly learned have a clear advantage in this climate of drastic competition, and so begin the transition from one species to another.

But that doesn’t mean that evolution would stop at other times. It just means that the rapid increase in numbers and the availability of empty ecological niches promotes an acceleration in the rate of evolution.

Actually, evolution would still be slow – but the rapid increase in numbers would compensate. The overall rate of evolution is dictated by the base rate multiplied by the total population, multiplied by environmental/competition distress, multiplied by the number of opportunities for sustainable differentiation of sub-populations. At least, that’s my hypothesis. On certain occasions, all these factors line up and the result is rapid evolution when viewed as a species; the rest of the time, most of these factors are muted, and serve to inhibit differentiation from the norm, because each such differentiation exposes the species to a new source of competition from the current occupant of the ecological niche in question.

Evolution in the modern world

Another segment of the documentary revealed that the Sherpas of the Himalayas actually have a slightly different anatomy to the rest of us, and that this is the reason they can breathe the rarified air without the problems that plague the rest of us in that environment due to the relative atmospheric density and resulting shortage of oxygen. Less convincing was a study of the residents of a small town over a period of more than 60 years by a single scientist. This study suggested that evolution was continuing in that town, favoring a slight decrease in average height and a slight increase in average weight. While interesting, I have reservations about this research. The sample size seems too small, as does the time span; the social factors (such as the general rise in obesity in the western world) have been discounted, but the results would seem to be well within the consequent margin of error.

But that actually leads me to the key topic within this subject that this article is intended to address.

There was an elephant-in-the-room that the documentary completely failed to address. In fact, there was a whole herd of them.

Social Stratification and evolution

Selection of preferred mates continues throughout the human population. Over time, this can’t help – if sustained – but differentiate the population. But the criteria used to assess the suitability of a mate are different at different social strata; just as there are ecological niches, modern society has defined social niches. The key here is sustainability of this evolutionary pressure – for it to have any long-term impact, it will have to be sustained for millennia.

Economic flows and evolution

In pre-modern societies, and even into the early industrial age, wealth was a dominant factor, because the wealthy had better health care. Wealthy individuals could support larger families, and hence as a proportion of the population, the descendants of wealthy individuals would make up a larger segment of society. Once the feudal model of the “eldest son inherits all” was abandoned, this had the effect of dispersing that wealth more evenly amongst this segment of the population – a general migration of the wealthy into a new middle class.

At the same time, modern technology brought new means of creating wealth and new paths for the flow of money through an economy. This elevated whole segments of what were once considered ‘the lower classes’ into that middle class, eventually forming a continuum.

In modern society, the economic capability of an individual to provide for children is one of several social factors that dictate the size of a family. The gradual elimination of any social stigma attached to women in the workplace over the last century has produced a social evolution in which two-income families have become the norm of that middle-class, and in fact a way for those who are slightly lower on the economic scale to take a step up into that middle-class.

There are still a few families in which being a member of the aristocracy or the gentry – coming from ‘the right family’ – are dominant criteria for the selection of marriage partners, but these days they are viewed as being out of step with society, anachronisms and dinosaurs. They are lampooned, ridiculed and pitied in various measure by modern media; witness the character of Charles Emerson Winchester III in MASH. Increasingly, they comprise a shrinking pool of genetic diversity which is slowly being eroded by exogamy.

The overall result over the last century has been a more even distribution of wealth, position, and authority, and hence a reduction in the traditional criteria which had previously been used to determine the desirability of potential partners.

Society and evolution

You only need to examine a few “dating” websites to realize that the number of possible factors unwed individuals look for in a partner has diversified tremendously over the last century or so. A search for “What men look for in a partner” reveals no fewer than 262,000,000 results on the subject; the distaff equivalent search yields 307 million results. In combination, that’s a total of 569 million sites on the subject!

This is natural selection of the most ruthless variety: individuals excluding potential mates from consideration based on socio-economic and personality criteria. It seems logical to me that these same criteria are extant within society in general, though the choice of a partner from a more diverse community would blur the selectivity. I don’t think it is going to far to suggest that the dominant driver of human evolution is now social in nature and not biological.

This is so radical a change in behavior that it is as though the evolutionary landscape had been completely flattened; the old criteria are just one factor in many. In the short-term, this cannot help but reinforce those elements of the social and personality traits deemed desirable that derive from the genetic makeup of the individual. It is as though the entire human population suddenly exists within an environment that had been subjected to a mass-extinction event; the old criteria for opportunity to secure potential mates no longer apply.

Consequently, it can be argued that human evolution is about to kick into high gear, especially if any of the other driving factors in evolutionary explosion apply.

Diffusion

It has been suggested that this multitude of criteria has the effect of diffusing the evolutionary impact. In one generation, an individual seeks intellectual stimulation as their dominant criteria; a child of that generation might seek emotional sensitivity; the child of that generation might seek artistic capacity, or generosity of spirit, or adventurousness, or physical attractiveness, and so on.

This suggestion relies on the assumption that advancing in a different direction negates whatever evolutionary trend occurred as a result of previous generation’s choices, that each generation is resetting the evolutionary clock to zero and setting off in a different direction. This is an oversimplification that cannot be supported on closer inspection.

Each generation, statistically, the species overall within an isolated social or geographic confine would be selecting for those criteria, in the overall priority assigned by surveys of what people are predominantly seeking in potential partners. An individual from the next generation doesn’t have a completely uniform field to draw from, they have the results of the union subpopulation who selected for that individual’s desirable criteria. “Progress” may be slowed, but overall, the race is still selecting for the same capabilities in order of statistical superiority.

Unless one criterion is directly opposed by another – and there are some which are, such as security vs. willingness to risk security for advancement – the evolutionary steps will accumulate, generation after generation.

Fake it ’till you make it

There have been two developments over the last half-century or so that will act as an accelerant to these evolutionary imperatives. The first is the increase in accessibility and desirability of plastic surgery, and the quest for perfection. The dark side of that quest is the rise of new psychological disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa. In evolutionary terms, this is as much about concealing imperfection as it is achieving some personal view of perfection; it amounts to an elimination of physical characteristics as a reliable determinant of suitability as a mate, and hence elevates other characteristics to primacy.

One of those secondary characteristics is the capacity to afford such artificial “perfection”. Economic prosperity has found a new means of expression. At the same time, there is a natural reaction against such social imperatives for whom they are not available, and I suspect that the current trend toward tattoos and piercings is as much related to distancing oneself from false “perfection” and being perceived as a real person (i.e. ‘genuine’ and ‘honest’) as it is about personal expression. This is a new cultural divide and a collective identity for a counterculture, and as such it will probably have a limited lifespan, just as the members of past countercultures have been reabsorbed into the mainstream of society.

The second development is genetic screening and gene therapy. It is becoming entirely possible for an individual who has achieved an artificial “perfection” via plastic surgery to perpetuate that idealized self-image to the next generation by manipulation of the genetic inheritance of their unborn offspring prior to conception. As with all such technological developments, there are deep and complex ethical issues to be resolved, but the technology already exists and is already being used in a limited way.

The immediate consequences will be apparently beneficial, as IVF clinics routinely screen for genetic diseases and defects; given enough time, these will be eliminated or reduced in impact on society. The longer-term impacts and potential psychological and social consequences will take longer to emerge, let alone be recognized. It’s easy to envisage a teen in arguement with his or her parents exclaiming, angrily, “I’m exactly what you wanted me to be, so let me be me!”

In evolutionary terms, this represents the collapsing of many generations of development into a single child, a tremendous acceleration of the evolutionary trend of potentials towards those deemed desirable by parents.

Compound Complexities

Of course, Genetics is not that simple. The potential for intelligence is not controlled by a single gene, but by a number of them, and a complex relationship amongst them. For anything more complex than Blue Eyes or Blonde Hair, this is true. A single gene may affect more than one attribute, and while it may be possible to select for potential, there is no way to guarantee that this potential will be realized in any specific case. The individual is a complex blend of many different genetic, social, and environmental factors.

It’s even going too far to label some genetic attributes as desirable or unwanted. Doctors learned that lesson from Sickle-cell Anaemia (drepanocytosis), where it was discovered that having a single sickle-cell gene conferred a resistance to Malaria. At the price of having 1-in-4 children suffer from the Anaemia, 2-in-4 children gain resistance to a more serious medical problem – an evolutionary ‘win’ for the overall population at the price of individual heartbreak.

I was once involved in the creation of a Traveller campaign in which genetic engineering was combined with medical teleportation technology (something akin to Star Trek’s transporters, incapable of beaming anyone or anything anywhere due to the data storage, transmission, and energy requirements) to permit anagathic restoration of individuals through a very expensive process. Only the ruling class of Nobles could afford this treatment – and only years later was it discovered that there were all sorts of side effects, including a high incidence of birth defects, a compromised immune system, a tendency to develop aggressive forms of cancer, and an ongoing dependency on the treatment. The Nobles of the Imperium were all hundreds of years old, (some pushing four figures), sustained artificially, and hopelessly out of touch with the normal population as a consequence. With one stroke, they had transformed themselves (unwittingly) into an entirely separate species of human. The overall plot of the campaign was going to centre on the nobility’s search for a “cure” to these side-effects, employing ruthless medical experimentation on commoners, producing an extremely dystopian society, which in turn would result in a rebellion to be (eventually) led by the PCs in a very Star-Wars-esque narrative. (This was all worked out one New Year’s Afternoon over a decade ago by myself and my friend Stephen. We never got to run it.)

When selection takes place naturally, the effects are relatively gradual, giving the species the opportunity to weed out undesirable reinforcements and complications – even to abandon the selection if the genetic cost is too high. When selection is taking place in the test-tube, we will have to live with the consequences with no editing. This will cause an escalation of natural selection in at least some cases.

Equating genetic screening for social, intellectual, and secondary characteristics with Thalidomide is probably going too far, but at least some varieties of genetic manipulation of the species will undoubtedly result in similar problems. (I am not unsympathetic to those affected by the Thalidomide crisis; my cousin, the same age as me, was one of them, missing one forearm and hand and needing to wear a leg brace. I was always aware that ‘that could have been me’). We may yet be thankful, as a society, that not everyone will be able to afford such genetic treatments.

Environmental Distress

I made the point earlier that human evolution could be about to kick into high gear, especially if any of the other causes of Evolutionary Explosion applied. One of the causes I identified earlier is environmental distress.

Pollutants and Evolution

Modern urban populations are facing threats and environmental factors that the species has never had to deal with before. Every possible form of pollution is a consideration and present to some extent – even deliberately induced, in terms of the fluoridation of our water supplies. This environmental stress has been blamed for the sharp rise in incidence of allergies and dietary intolerances, though specifics of the logical relationship have been short. While it is possible to demonstrate the existence of a connection statistically, the causative connection has not been identified (to the best of my knowledge). The best explanation I am aware of rests on the stimulation of the immune system by pollutants to become hypersensitive to compounds found within some foodstuffs, which sounds plausible, but only talks about the how and not the why.

I propose the possibility that the environmental distress on the population caused by pollution is causing rapid (if slight) evolutionary changes in our immune systems as a species, and that while some of those changes may yield a dividend in tolerance for contamination of our environment by pollutants while others are dead ends in that respect, some of them have also resulted in alterations to the biochemistry of individuals that has conferred allergies and dietary intolerances.

I include in the category of pollutants another possible vector for the association, the manipulation of feed provided to our food supply, including the practice of lacing feed with antibiotics.

In the long run, if this theory is correct, a new evolutionary equilibrium will be attained. At the moment, we are seeing an overreaction to the modern environmental distress, one with undesirable side effects. While we have been able to mitigate those side effects through adjustments to individual diets, every such adjustment carries an economic pricetag that will slowly impact the relative proportions of afflicted sufferers in the population. Assuming that one exists, chance will evolve a tolerance for atmospheric pollution that doesn’t have any unwanted side effects, and that will spread through the urban population. It will only take 100,000 years or so – at most. But the genetic butcher’s bill will still have to be paid at some point.

The revenge of biology

Did I really write that human evolution is now more socially-driven than biologically-driven? In terms of selection of mates, perhaps it is so, but biology won’t be ignored that readily.

I’ve already touched on the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases. Add to that the resurgence of viral diseases such as Ebola and HIV – there is evidence that both have been around for hundreds of years, periodically exploding into brushfire epidemics – and mad cow and bird flu and… new and potentially deadly diseases have been coming out of the woodwork in droves over the last couple of decades, or so it seems.

So far, the race as a whole seems to have dodged these bullets. But it’s fair to suggest that the modern environment is stimulating the evolution of our microbiological ‘natural enemies’ at a ferocious pace, and that the result is not only eventually going to be another pandemic like the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed between 50 and 100 million people, up to three percent of the world’s population, but is an ongoing assault on our viability as a species. An additional evolutionary pressure stemming from our environment, in other words.

Health authorities have long warned that dissemination through modern transportation systems will eventually result in a pandemic that is far worse than the Spanish Flu. The problem with such prophecies is that they only have to come true once to be catastrophic. If it’s three times worse, that’s about 10% of the population – dead. Five times: 15%. Then factor in the economic cost in terms of lost productivity alone, never mind the costs of producing and distributing vaccines that may or may not be effective, at least at first.

Some areas will undoubtedly be harder-hit than others, depending on the epidemiology and local conditions. The inevitable result will be yet another evolutionary spur as those most susceptible are eliminated from the population.

Not only does this point to an eventual catastrophe-induced evolutionary spurt, but there is also the slow, ongoing, impact of this continual assault. Make no mistake: as more diseases become drug-resistant superbugs, resistance to those diseases will play an increasing role in the capacity to contribute to future generations. History is replete with waves of virulent diseases being followed by periods of relative freedom from that disease. Then the virus or bacteria evolve into something against which that acquired resistance is less effective, and a new epidemic spreads.

Global Warming

I’ve written about my reservations concerning the “Menace” of “Human-caused” Global Warming (refer to The Frozen Lands: A Science-Fiction Campaign Premise). I’m not going to go into that again, here.

Global Warming, as a trend, is relatively indisputable. And that’s yet another source of environmental pressure on the human race to evolve.

It’s also potentially catastrophic in another sense: we are, if the trends are to be believed, approaching a time when weapons will be cheaper than food. In other words, under this doomsday scenario, it will be cheaper to buy weapons and take someone else’s food. As if the global warming and potential drowning of the majority of humanity (80% of the population live on a coast) weren’t enough.

With three (or more, depending on how you count them) sources contributing, that’s a second causative factor to rapid evolution that’s conclusively in place, in my opinion. And the third?

Population Pressure

According to Wikipedia, there are currently 7.07 Billion people on the earth. If that’s not population pressure, I don’t know what is. It’s also fair to state that we have, as a species, already occupied all the ecological, social, and economic niches available to us as a species. How many more people can the world sustain? Well, that depends on a great many factors. Western agriculture is currently retreating (slowly) from the agricultural practices that supported the booms of the mid-20th century – herbicides, pesticides, and so on. Free Range is the buzzword.

The capacity of the food supply will further shrink if (as I fervently hope) the practice of lacing animal feed with antibiotics is banned world-wide – it’s already happened in some places, while others are holding out.

In other words, we are reducing our food production to the point where it will be insufficient – if we haven’t done so already. And yet, there are other developments that have increased food production, such as the development of Norin 10 Wheat, sometimes referred to as Dwarf Wheat. Judicious genetic engineering of crops promises further increases in agricultural capacity.

Couple that with uncertainty as to how the world population will change in the future, as shown in the graph above, and there is great uncertainty as to whether or not capacities will be sufficient. There are social and economic factors at work that are not applicable to other species, and which make prediction especially difficult. That’s ignoring any reduction in arable land as a result of Global Warming, of course.

All of that adds up to: there is existing population pressure contributing to the evolutionary rate of humankind. This pressure may increase or may decrease in the future, possibly drastically – but for right now, it’s definitely present.

Crystal Ball Gazing

With all three of the primary requirements for an evolutionary explosion within the Human species demonstrably present (the extent may be subject to debate), if the hypothesis proposed holds any validity, we’re in for a period of dramatic change in the very definition of what it means to be human.

But what does that actually mean? What are the changes that can be anticipated in our biology, and how quickly might they occur? How might the implications manifest in a sci-fi game? This final section of the article will attempt to do a bit of crystal-ball gazing.

Physical Changes

We’re not talking about everyone suddenly sprouting little green tendrils, here. I would expect little-or-no gross anatomical changes. What we might get is a trend towards the ideal man and woman as described by the dating sites as what the other gender are looking for. More muscular, prettier, higher potential for intelligence and desirable personality traits, etc. Most people won’t exhibit all of these, many will exhibit none at all. The potential might be there but social and environmental factors will determine who taps into that potential and what they can do with it.

Allergies will continue to rise for quite a while, then slowly decline – unless humanity drastically cleans up its environment. However, these will become more general throughout the population and less specific to individuals. Regional trends will appear in response to variations in evolutionary stimuli. Depending on what these are and where, these could have anything from minimal impact (an allergy to goat’s milk wouldn’t bother most Australians) to socially catastrophic (an Italian allergy to tomatoes).

There might be some minor changes to jaw lines, cranial shapes, nose sizes, etc. Most of these will be cosmetic and within the range of normal appearance we are used to; it will simply be that more people will have a given characteristic.

Digestive Changes

As food supplies are stretched ever thinner, the ability to survive on fewer calories will emerge somewhere (probably Africa). This would be coupled with adaptions increasing the tolerance to Heat described below (presupposing the accuracy of Global Warming trends).

Different foodstuffs will become dominant in various regions of the world based on the allergy/intolerance factor mentioned above. This will subtly alter national cuisines.

Some of these changes will be the result of faster evolution of the digestive bacteria that we keep in our gut, a symbiosis that permits a more rapid evolutionary response than we, as a species, are capable of achieving.

Diseases

The more people there are, the more attractive a target we make to emerging diseases. The virulence of some dangerous diseases will moderate even as we struggle to develop new treatments for them. Consequently, many of these will become survivable with only palliative care and support, just as the common flu is now.

Tolerance to Heat

If the world is really growing slowly hotter, we will begin to adapt to the climatic changes. This will take the form of a darkening of skin tones, and perhaps a greater systolic pressure in some cells facilitating improved retention of water. As the area most strongly affected by thermal climatic conditions and heavily populated without external technological support, it is most likely that this change would emerge in the Middle East.

The Rate of evolution

If explosive evolution is not a reality, these changes would take place over a period of about 100,000 years. If explosive evolution, as I have described it, is a reality, then it might take as little as 10,000 years. Which means that from one generation to the next there would be about 0.2% change – spread over the entire human population. That’s 1% change a century. Even explosive evolution is SLOW.

Have you ever seen pictures of Neanderthal Man dressed in a business suit? I don’t have one handy, but the fact is that you would be hard-pressed to see anything abnormal about them. Neanderthal Man still fits generally within the range of appearance variations of humans.

Diaspora

If the race comes up with any sort of workable FTL drive, or decides to launch generation ships, all bets are off. Not only will increased mutation rates be probable due to radiation exposure, but what we will end up with is a bunch of isolated communities pre-primed for rapid adaption. The one thing that’s for certain: within 1,000 years of settling an alien world, differences in physiology would be noticeable; within 10,000 years, citizens of different worlds would show as much variation as we have on earth – everything from Pigmies to Eskimos, and all points in between, plus variations we’ve never seen before.

Impact On Society

These changes should have a marked impact on Society. Note that ideals of beauty have changed over the centuries in some details but there are many aspects that have remained consistent. That means that even if exhibiting pronounced diversification as a result of a diaspora, the general trend will be for changes to be internal and not external.

Beyond This Horizon by Robert A Heinlein

Heinlein’s second-published novel, Beyond This Horizon, is not his best work, by any measure. I have a vague memory of reading that he himself disliked it immensely, especially the John W. Campbell-esque focus on telepathy and psionics in the latter half. And yet, even without accepting the materialistic utopia that he proposed, the genetics and their impact on society seem increasingly on the mark to me, combining scientific progress both responsible and irresponsible with very human fallibilities and good intentions.

In conclusion

If evolution is being driven by society while spurred on by external pressures – and that is the thesis of the day – then the results of that evolution will reflect the society from which it emerged. What’s more, since this is a characteristic of any sufficiently intelligent organism to be readily simulated in a human RPG, it should also be true of any alien species populating that RPG. That’s something to bear in mind as you develop settings and encounters, personalities and cultures. You can either work backwards from some physical development you want to the culture necessary to spawn it, or integrate the consequences of a historical outline into the modern-day biology of your creations. Either way, evolution serves as a signpost on the road connecting what was with what will be.

Food for thought.

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, in public, I’ll never get it done in time…

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Chapters 10-13 are all in final form. I don’t change “speaker” in mid-paragraph, but the speaker does change from one paragraph to the next. So if it seems like the tone changes direction suddenly – sometimes it does.

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The Power Of Ideas

From Lolth’s perspective, the only benefit from the (premature) commitment of her people to a path overtly opposed to, and by, the other Totem Spirits was that her people no longer needed to operate beneath a veil of subterfuge. Their secret was now revealed, permitting them to operate more openly, and thereby to pursue their current agenda – whatever it happened to be – with greater speed and vigor. Having forcibly stabilized her power base, Lolth began by addressing a personal vulnerability: so long as her followers were all Drow, She was as much a hostage to their fate as they were to Hers. If, for any reason, they were to fall from grace or, despite her best efforts at ensuring their safety, be slaughtered in sufficient quantities, She would be unmade. It was essential that She develop a second tier of worshippers.

For practical reasons, these should have Strengths that her beloved Drow lacked, so that the one threat was less likely to overcome both. Any shortcomings could be overcome through Spellweaving, but Her primary criteria must be size, strength, and an innate bond with the Surface World. While She, and Her people, had spent many long years in isolation, She had not permitted herself to become ignorant of the world above the surface; just the opposite. She would spend long hours scrying through her Spiderweb Mirror, searching not only the now but the possible nows of tomorrow. It is not unfair to say that She knew more of the surface world than did the Elves or even their beloved, simpleminded, earnest, Corellan.

After contemplating the possibilities, She gathered the most powerful and subtle Spellweavers from amongst her subjects, and together they did labor for decades to produce – two berries. When ready, these berries were planted most carefully in selected places by stealth. With the passing of a handful of seasons, the vines of these berries flourished and prospered. With these preparations complete, a small company of hand-picked Drow followers were sent forth in the guise of Elves to befriend the leader of the Ogre Clan of Ketchzagrat.

The ogres were a simple people, Hunters and Fishermen and Gatherers of leaves, and were all one people, one tribe. Then came the Elves, who liked the way they lived with the land, and took the smartest thinkers to teach them religion and other mighty tricks. And when these returned, they were strong, and clever, and called themselves Magi, as had the Elves, and they warned that some of the Elves were jealous, and were arousing Humans to attack the Ogres. But the Ogre Magi had learned of a miraculous plant that would make the Ogres bigger and stronger and thicker of skin, a plant which they called Bluevein. The ogres knew of Bluevein only that it killed any who ate the leaves, but the Ogre Magi had been taught the secret of squeezing out the oil from the berries of the Bluevein. And they taught that there were two types of Bluevein plant, one with thin leaves and one with broad leaves, and that the thin-leaved variety was good for Ogre Magi only, and that the broad-leafed variety was just for Ogres who were not Magi.

To the Ogres, it seemed right that the earth to which they belonged should protect them, and so they eagerly swallowed the brew of the Ogre Magi, and they grew strong and tough and beat the humans who dared to attack them until they went away. And the Humans went to the leaders of the Elves and complained, and the Bad Elves chased away those Elves who had befriended the Ogres, telling them never to come back. And so the Ogres knew that the Humans and Elves were bad, and they named the once-Elves who were their friends Drow, which means “smart”.

Then Humans and Elves came, and tried to trick the Ogre Magi into taking away the Bluevein because they were scared of the Ogres, but the Ogre Magi told the ordinary Ogres and we hit the Humans and Elves until they went away, too. And the chief gave his cub to the smartest of the Ogre Magi and went away, and the Magi Azh-krupt became the chief of all the Ogres.

Azh-krupt told the Ogres that the Humans and Elves would come back in greater numbers, too many for them to fight even with the help of the Bluevein, because the humans would cheat. It would take a long time before the Ogres were strong enough to hurt all the Humans and Elves, but if they did what the Magi told them, they would be safe. He made it a rule that Ogres drink Bluevein every week, and the Ogres liked feeling big and strong and the Magi was the leader, so they did it. And he broke the Ogres into tribes, and each Ogre Magi took one of the tribes away to keep them safe.

The Ogre Magi did not like to be in charge, so they made it a rule that there was a Chief of each tribe, and they made it a rule that the Chief was in charge unless the Magi said different, and the Ogres liked easy rules so they did it that way. And the Ogres grew big and strong and did well.

The Power Of Blood

Lolth had observed the tactics and techniques that had evolved between the Elves and Dwarves in the First Drow War, and had deliberately built an army that would enable her to utilize the most effective of them, while maintaining what she perceived as her people’s advantage. Given that She assumed that her Drow were, by definition, inherently superior to the Elves of the Surface world, she had only to choose a martial ally capable of overpowering the Dwarves. The Ogres fitted this bill perfectly – bigger, stronger, and almost as hardy, even before the Drow provided them with Bluevein. Eventually it came time to put the new alliance to the test.

There was also a security vulnerability that could be tolerated no longer: the Aquatic Elves. While the Drow had been merely estranged from their Surface kindred, and the Aquatic Elves knew not where to search for them, the Underdark Tunnels had been secure. The comfort of this veil of secrecy was now gone; the Surface Elves were now Her people’s implacable foes, and moreover knew where they resided. It might take the Isallithin a while to find the underground rivers apon which Her Drow were dependant, but eventually they would succeed. The only choice was to obliterate the water-dwellers while the opportunity presented itself.

The Drow contacted one of the newly-scattered tribes of Ogres, who happened to have settled on a riverbank, and taught them to make nets and boats and spears with barbed heads. They then told the Ogres that they had learned that the Elves were trying to sneak up on them by breathing the water in the river. The Ogres thought this was cheating, and decided to hurt the River Elves until they went away. And the Drow friends of the Ogres said that they would help.

Elsewhere, other agents of the Spider Queen were rousing other Ogre Tribes with the same story. Thus the Drow led an army of Archers and Ogres, and a small corps of Magi, in an unprovoked assault on the Aquatic Elves from multiple sides. Villages were razed and whole populations slaughtered. Fleeing in terror, the Riverdwellers were driven upriver toward the very underground channels that Lolth had feared they would one day discover and exploit, and which she had carefully mapped and charted in preparation. When they were trapped, Lolth turned the waters into flame. Hotter and hotter, she exhorted the flames, reveling in the destruction of those who were, in her eyes, an abomination. For millennia it was believed that the Isallithin had perished utterly on that terrible day (though it was rumored that, in desperation, Aquatic Spellweavers had transformed the last survivors into a new variety of Isallithin that could survive the deeper oceans, and that interference in the weaving perpetrated by the Dark Elves and haste-induced errors caused this change to go awry).

With the success of these tactics, she directed her Ambassadors to the Ogre Magi to educate their pupils in the principles of indirect warfare, and called apon the Ogres to harass the Elves of the Surface World by proxy. The objectives of these raids was many-fold. Firstly, to keep the Surface Elves off balance, never knowing if this strike was the beginning of a major confrontation or just another feint. Secondly, to enable her allies to slake their need for constant conflict without risking major confrontation. Thirdly, to probe the defenses of the Elves and locate any vulnerabilities for eventual exploitation. And finally, to erode the knowledge and resources of the Surface Elves. For there was always the chance that a raid would kill someone of high skill or power through mischance before they were able to pass on that skill – and every such setback would be twice as hard to overcome, thanks to the draining of resources that the raids would cause. A people under perpetual siege tend to lose the little things that give them an edge in more significant confrontations.

Lolth had no fear of Elvish warriors, no matter how skilled they were; she was apprehensive about what such warriors could do if backed by Spellweaving. And so, at Lolth’s behest, the Ogres exerted themselves against less-dangerous opponents – Orcs, Goblins, Bugbears, and the like – driving them by conquest, or by the simple occupation of key territories, toward the Elven lands, and confrontation.

The Guardians Of The Forest

The Elvish Spellweavers had not wasted their time, either. Long before the act of genocide that would cement an implacable barrier between Elf and Drow, they had known that their Kin would be coming, in person or in proxy. The first act of the newly-formed Elven Council was to look to the defenses, especially those of the “capital” of Elvarheim, which had been named Ellessarunne. With this complete, they turned their attention to their first duty and the impact that these developments would have apon it; the Elves had been created by Corellan to be the Stewards of Nature, the guides and masters of life. That task now forced apon them the creation of Guardians to protect the forests themselves.

Long ago, the Elves had awakened trees.

The Sharing of Elven Blood with the awakened trees had created Treants – half-Elven trees.

Now the Elvish Spellweavers began to craft a still more aware form of tree-life, which they named Verdonne, which means “Quickbranch”.

The timing was more critical than they knew: even as the first Verdonne saplings were being planted, Lolth was committing her act of unforgivable hatred against her subjects’ kin. When the first bodies of the Isallithin washed up apon the riverbanks of the Sarner, the elves were stricken with grief, and for days wandered their homes of verdant green in confusion and shock, unable to comprehend what had taken place. But the spirit of Corellan moved amongst them and comforted them, and slowly they began to ask who had done this. And the Forest Elves consulted the trees, and the High Elves consulted the auguries, and the Plains Elves did beseech all the creatures of the world to search for the answers, and in time, the truth was revealed, and the Elves knew that their kindred were truly beyond redemption. Corellan was inconsolable, and in his grief and rage, he proclaimed the Drow to be a Fallen Race, and declared eternal enmity between the surviving branches of Elvenkind and the subjects of the Spider-Queen, Lolth.

And even as the first Verdonne branch sprouted and budded and began to grow, Lolth’s allies’ cat’s-paws were preparing their first assaults against the greenest of Forests.

Orc-Wars and Fallen Races

By this time, the Elves numbered almost 40,000, the highest population level that they would ever record. Five thousand of these were High Elves, and twelve thousands called the forests home, but most numerous were the Plains Elves. The assault masterminded by the Drow was a masterpiece of tactical savagery.

It began with a feint by small bands of Orcs, raiding into the forests down the mountain slopes of Mont Ayer and Mont Thuyon, the twin peaks that straddle the valley of the Elves, while thousands of Goblins mounted on wolves drove across the valley homes of the Plains Elves, driving all before them toward the Sarner. At the same time, Ogres dragged steel mangonels from hidden tunnels and commenced bombarding the towers of the High Elves. The ammunition fired by these siege weapons consisted of heavy, spiked balls of steel, augmented magically to inflict greater damage on their targets by fragmenting apon impact. The Towers, which consisted of fitted stone blocks held together by the weight of the blocks without mortar, were unable to resist, and great rents quickly appeared, into which hordes of Orcs wielding short spears and bronze swords swarmed. Although individually these foes were no match for the High Elves’ arcane abilities, force of numbers took its toll and thousands were killed, especially the young and the infirm. Most significantly, these attacks prevented the High Elves from coming to the aid of their kin in the valley. In effect, they were reduced to the choice of a sure and prolonged defense, or an uncertain counteroffensive which would certainly cost the lives of their families.

Without the protection of the High elves, the Forest Elves were forced to respond to the marauding bands of Orcish raiders, and they did so with seemingly great effect; the invaders turned and fled from the forests, dashing at full speed through lines of wolf-mounted Goblins, who made short work of the Forest defenders who eagerly pursued them. With this sudden reversal of battlefield fortune, it was the Forest Elves’ turn to flee from the field of battle, hotly pursued by the faster and more mobile Wolf Riders, while the Orcish attackers reformed into a picket line and showered the plains elves with arrows from their short bows.

Even as the Forest Elves made their desperate dash toward Elvarheim, the outlying tracts of forest before them erupted into flames, put to the torch by a more substantial army of 3,000 Orcs and 500 Ogres armed with oil and torches. This force had made their way along the Sarner by stealth and remained hidden while their kin lured the defenders of the forest into the open fields. Had the High elves not been engaged in their own desperate struggle, their elevated vantage points would have permitted them to warn their Forest Kin of the danger; Lolth’s initial strike was intended not only to prevent the High Elves from assisting the others, but to prevent discovery of this intrusion until it was too late. The defenders of the forest were killed quickly where they stood and fought, or incinerated ruthlessly if they braved the inferno before them, or slaughtered, helpless, by the stealthy force if they managed to force passage through the wall of flames.

With the outer battalions of Forest Elves dead, the Wolf Riders resumed sweeping the Plains Elves toward the river, to which the force that had put the torch to the forest now retreated, reforming their ranks on the riverbanks, and trapping the Plains Elves between two armies. All told, 7,000 attackers slaughtered more than 36,000 elves in one grim day of battle. The surviving High Elves numbered but a few hundreds, the survivors of the Plains numbered barely a thousand more than this; only the Forest Elves survived in numbers. Almost 1/3rd of the forest of Elvarheim had been blackened and burnt.

But now those Forest survivors counterattacked; even as the invading hordes advanced warily into the tree line of the forest, the Spellweavers and inner battalions (originally intended to be nothing more than reinforcements, to be deployed where needed), turned on the attackers, and by sacrificing much of their power and lives, devastated the invading force. Routed, the invaders began to flee, and the bugbear infantry and their goblin cavalry support quailed, giving the surviving High Elves the chance to rally.

This was the tale of the day the Elves met the Other. It was not the joyful reunion that had been wished for. For the next 110 years, all of Elvarheim would bend itself to the protection, rearing, and education of the saplings which were intended to be the Elvish masterstroke, while those to whom the Elves owed their very existence, the Other, layed siege apon the Forest’s defenses. The bitter irony of the situation was not lost apon the Elves. While any besieging Orc who dared brave passage beneath the forest canopy was quickly killed, the same fate awaited any Elf foolish enough to seek passage beyond the protection of the Spellweavers of the Forest.

After decades of patience, success came to the Elvish Spellweavers, as the newly-matured Verdonne drove back the Orcs; but they would come again, and frequently. The Elvish sacrifices had not been in vain, and the siege was broken. For the 270 years that followed, the Forests of Elvarheim would remain inviolate and under the protection of the Guardians Of The Forest.

A pattern soon developed, a rhythm of life: this race or that would invade or assault the Elven borders, sometimes in strength and sometimes in isolation, sometimes openly and at other times from concealment or through cunning. The Verdonne, guided by the Elves, would block the incursion, and turn it back, before returning to their dwelling places to await the next assault. It even came to be perceived as ‘normal’ by both sets of combatants.

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The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

• Arnost: Simple Speech (Modern “Common”, a human tongue)
• Arrunquessor: Plains Elves
• Ayer: Nuthanori word meaning “Squat”. Mont Ayer is the name of one of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands.
• Calquissir: High Elves
• Corellan: The First
• Drow: “Those Who Dwell Apart” (in Nuthanorl). Added to Ogre by the Drow with the meaning of “Smart”.
• Ellessarune: The “Shining City” of the Tarquessir, home of the Elvish King and capital of the Elven Lands to this day.
• Eltrhinast: “Guiding Spirit”
• Elvarheim: “Blessed Leafy Home”: The Elven Forest, homeland of the Tarquessir and the centre of Elven Power in modern times
• Gilandthor: “The Gathering”, the formal title of the Elvish Council.
• Hithainduil: High Elven Language
• Illvayssor: “The Other”, a mythical race
• Isallithin: “The Sundered”, a name applied to Aquatic Elves
• King: A human title interpreted by Elves as “speaker to others” and defined as such within their language.
• Magi: A corruption of the Zamiel word “Machus”, which means “of the wise.”
• Mont: Nuthanori word meaning “High Place”. Used human-style in the naming of Mountains.
• Nuthanorl: Low Elven Language, Common Elven
• Sarner: A human abbreviation of the Hithainduil word “Saranariuthenal” which means, literally, “Swift and Wide”. The River Sarner runs through the central valley of Elvarheim.
• Tarquessir: Forest Elves
• Thuyon: Nuthanori word meaning “Tall Spires”. Mont Thuyon is the name of the taller of the two peaks that define the traditional elvish lands; Modern Elvarheim lies between the foothills of Mont Thuyon and the River Sarner.
• Verdonne: “Quickbranch”, an artificial race created by Elves to be “The Guardians Of The Forest”.
• Zamiel: Drow Language

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Next time: Insurrection, Aftermath, and the Beginning of the Second Great Dwarfwar – All to come in Chapters 15 through 17!

In the course of the last week, two different emails have been sent to Campaign Mastery that are going to form the core of today’s article. Since they are about as different as chalk and squid ink, the results might be more than usually schizophrenic, but I think it will all come together in the end.

Email the First: From Joey

The first email reads:

I have been interested in D&D for a long time and have tried running a game with my brothers and my mother, but I haven’t been able to get a game going for the longest time, not once! Could I get some advice on increasing their interest in the game? Thank-you for your consideration.

I have to admit that I initially misread this (despite its brevity) and thought that Joey was asking for help in increasing the involvement of players in a campaign that was dying. Rejuvenating ailing campaigns is not a subject I’ve talked about yet, so I was all set to dive in, head-first, despite not being an expert in that part of the hobby. In fact, I had a good portion of my response quick-drafted in my head within minutes of first (mis-)reading the email. Fortunately, when I went to outline the actual response, I reread the email and got it right this time.

A call for collective wisdom

Joey has managed to get his family to play at least once, but they seem less than interested in continuing. I’ve offered my response below, but this is a very different subject to the one I was going to write about in reply, and one on which the ground underfoot seems far shakier. So I’m throwing the floor – well, the comments section – open to suggestions from the audience. Can you think of anything I haven’t suggested below?

Mike’s Answer:

I’m afraid that there is not a lot of good news, Joey. Once someone has tried a game and decided that it’s not for them, it’s usually better to accept that and find someone else with whom to play. Heck, for all I know, they weren’t actually interested to begin with and gave it a try purely out of family loyalty. The first game that I ran was for my two brothers, David and Paul; both had fun, but for the older of the two, the hobby was a diversion and nothing special; he dropped RPGs from his list of activities when I left home. A couple of his kids are far more into the hobby than he ever was. My younger brother, Paul, enjoyed it far more (even though he was considerably younger than the recommended age) and five years or so later found his own group to play in; but he too has since dropped the hobby for other pursuits.

Look Elsewhere

But that actually offers a potential solution to the initial problem. People hate to be left out, especially when it comes to fun. Look beyond your family circle for players, using the techniques offered in (US$7 from DriveThru RPG), or the latest addition to the options available, EnWorld’s Gamers Seeking Gamers Service.

If you generate enough fun at the gaming table, your family might be persuaded to join in simply because they don’t want to be left out. Of course, if everyone is having fun already, it probably won’t matter too much if your family don’t come around; we’re all different in tastes and hobbies, and yours simply might not appeal to them.

I know for a fact that I would never be able to get my parents or sister to join in a game. It’s just not their thing. Though my sister came close, running a couple of “How to host a murder” games in which all the participants went all-out with period costumes – which goes further than I ever went at the gaming table!

Make their interests relevant to the game

Once you have a gaming group set up outside the family circle, involve interests that your family actually do have. If one of your brothers is seriously into sports, get his help in coming up with games for an Orcish Arena (shades of Blood Bowl!) – key players, team rankings and histories, the “sports”, the championship, and how the players might get mixed up in all of this.

If they are into wood- or metal-work, get their help in making some props. If into sewing, involve them in designing clothing for important NPCs. If into art, get them working on illustrations for forthcoming scenes. It especially helps if they are strong in an area you are not – consulting their expertise makes perfect sense under those circumstances.

Involve them on your side of the table, and if everyone has enough fun, they may decide to make the leap to the other side of it – or simply stay put as assistant GM. Either is a win, in terms of your stated goals.

Engage their mercenary instincts

If you still can’t get a gaming group together, start writing adventure modules for sale through RPGNow or DriveThru RPG, and get them to assist (as above) for a share in the proceeds. Of course, any module has to be playtested before you actually sell it…

Ummmmm…

…but that’s where my list of ideas for possible solutions runs out, beyond some extremely generic advice – try to find out what they didn’t like about the game(s) they did play, and see if you can improve it in that respect. So at this point in this discussion, I have to throw the floor open to suggestions from the audience, and move on.

Email the second: From Tabz

The second email doesn’t require anywhere near as much effort on my part as the first did!

Tabz writes:

Geek & Sundry’s TableTop (hosted by Wil Wheaton) has made a huge impact on the gaming community. After every show stores run out of the game that was featured and millions of people have watched the episodes.

More than that though, we’ve been getting email after email about how TableTop has helped people through difficult times by introducing them or reintroducing them to gaming. It’s blown us away and, as a response, we’re organizing the first International TableTop Day to celebrate this hobby that has meant so much to us and fans of TableTop. (Feel free to embed the video on your own site). We’ve partnered with game publishers, local stores, and more to put on one event in many cities across the world. Everyone is encouraged to go play more games (as Wil always says) on March 30th.

We’d love for you to share this news with your readers and encourage them to go to tabletopday.com to sign up for an event OR create their own event! If you can’t write about it right now and still want to support this community event, we’d love for you to use the hashtag #TableTopDay and let your social media folks know about the event.

Ironically, Saturday the 30th is one of the few dates this year on which it’s less likely that my friends and I will be gaming than usual, but even if I can’t participate in person, I’m behind the concept in principle.

Connecting the dots

Of course, the whole concept of an international Tabletop Gaming Day is, ultimately, about the benefits of the hobby, about spreading the word about it, and about bringing lapsed players back into the fold. It’s about reminding people of the importance of having fun – and that makes it directly relevant to the question posed by Joey. It’s a day that’s all about the solution to his problem. (For those that want them, you can download more logos and banners at to use on your website.

You can kick-start your participation in both the event and the cause it celebrates by offering any further advice you might have on Joey’s problem. So, I’m officially turning the floor over to you, the readers…

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, in public, I’ll either never get it done in time…

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A shout-out to the sources

There aren’t many sources of non-original material that I have used in my Campaigns, but sometimes something is just too useful. These chapters reference two such sources.

Click to get the free download from DriveThru RPG

The Grave Of The Prince Of Lies from 0one Games

free mini-module, all about Dwarves and Drow and Betrayal and Obsession published by 0one Games (“Zero-One Games”, I think) and available at DriveThruRPG – , and tell ’em Mike sent you!

I freely acknowledge the copyright of 0one Games and the author, Mario Barbati. Any content below that references the original sources is intended as homage and acknowledgement. It might also be useful as an example of how to adapt such third-party material into an existing campaign.

Click to buy as a PDF from DriveThru RPG

Relics & Rituals

The material on Spellweaving was extracted and adapted from the descriptive passages of a Prestige Class under development, though the concepts been part of the Fumanor campaigns from the very beginning. This prestige class is an effort to formalize the concepts into game mechanics, which in turn have been based on material within Relics & Rituals by Swords & Sorcery Studios and published by White Wolf.

This game supplement is available from RPGNow (reduced to under US$11 as I write this). Some sellers still have copies of the hardcover version for sale through Amazon for about half that price – plus postage and handling – less if you buy one of the second-hand copies.

While the concepts for the prestige class were my own, elements of the game mechanics derived from this source have undoubtedly shaped and influenced the descriptive content, so I feel it only proper to acknowledge the source.

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Chapters 6-10 are all in final form. I don’t change “speaker” in mid-paragraph, but the speaker does change from one paragraph to the next. So if it seems like the tone changes direction suddenly – sometimes it does.
Chapter 5 is first draft, extracted and modified from a Prestige Class under parallel development with this history – finishing that is part of the camnpaign prep that needs to be done. But one thing at a time!

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The Art Of Spellweaving

As they grew learned and wise, the Elves began to master the natural world, developing the art of Spellweaving. Unlike the gross magics of other species, Spellweaving is a slow and delicate shaping of patterns of nature; a single Spell might take years or even decades to weave. This is an art that only Elves, with their long lifespans and persistence of worldview and Elven Sight, could master. While some rare Humans might live long enough to learn the basics of Spellweaving, their attitudes are too inconstant, their attention spans too brief, and their faculties too limited, to permit true understanding or the delicacy of touch and deftness of control that is necessary. Elvish Spellweaving controls and shapes the most powerful of forces over vast areas. Elves view the energies of the universe as a tapestry woven from “threads” of energy, and possess the ability to feel the shape of the weave of the resulting tapestry.

It is normal for elves to grow in their abilities to work with this weave over time, eventually entering into “The Song Of Life” more directly than other species can. Most elves retire from adventuring eventually purely because they become overwhelmed with the “other world”. Eventually, some learn to reshape the patterns they perceive, becoming what the elves term a “Spellweaver”. These are both more powerful and more subtle than most human magics, and quite literally enable the elves to shape their preferred environment, manipulating it in many ways. Spellweavers form the innermost layers of Elvish society.

High Elven spellweavers use their powers to construct towers otherwise impossible, influencing the natures of the herds and farms, and shaping the raw beauty of the mountain wilderness. Beyond these simple purposes, they tend toward more esoteric and theoretical studies of the weave and less toward practical applications. Indeed, many of the greatest craftings are centuries old, and require only a little maintenance, further reducing the scope for practical applications of their knowledge. A High Elf might not be able to persuade a tree to grow into a shape suitable for a dwelling, but he could outline the peaks with eldritch fires, craft elaborate illusions to lead unwelcome strangers away from their homes and herds, and create subtle and sophisticated magic devices. Many High Elves specialize in air, earth, divinatory, and weather magics of great power, frequently cast only at need. More than any other elves, High Elves are interested more in what the weave and its properties are, and less with exploiting this knowledge in their everyday lives. Paradoxically, this makes their lifestyles the most akin to humans.

Forest Elves abide in forests which teem with life, much of it modified through Spellweaving. They utilize spellweaving routinely in their daily lives, and are the best-versed in using it for practical ends. They tend to have little interest in the theoretical extremes of the High Elves and are far more skilled than the Plains Elves. Trees grow in ways that suit the Elves, forming an impenetrable barrier about their forests, dwellings for elvish families that are green and grow with the family, community and common buildings, etc.

Forest elvish craft their dwellings by growing and shaping trees into the forms required; creating large hollows within the tree trunks, frequently 50 feet or more above the forest floor. Elvish trees can be anything up to 60′ in diameter, so these “rooms” can be quite substantial in size. A single dwelling for a moderate-to-large family might well consist of ten or twenty such trees, each containing five to ten “rooms”, which may be individually subdivided into smaller compartments. Such a dwelling “cluster” could be home to up to 150 Elves. These trees are connected by branches which form ramps and “broad” avenues (perhaps 2 inches across), which elves use to travel from tree to tree and room to room. Humans consider it possible for an Elf to go anywhere within an Elven Forest while never touching the ground – though that is something of an exaggeration, as humans are want to do.

Much of the plant and animal life within the forests have been modified through spellweaving to serve the purposes of the elves. Certain trees grow with their roots rising completely above the surface of the ground, forming shaded hollows beneath the trees that are large enough to walk through. In these places, a particular lichen grows which, when mature, glows in the dark, producing sufficient light to read by. There is a particular moss which grows along the tops of the avenues and ramps of the forest dwellings which provides a more certain footing when wet by rain. These are but two examples among many.

In modern times, the forests below the lowest levels of the Elven “buildings” there are other trees, whose tops form a thick carpet that rises no higher than the lowest avenues. These form mazes which do not bar forest wildlife below 3′ in height, with many hidden passageways through which the elves themselves can pass. These mazes are sure death for any invader, however, leading through many traps and dangers crafted through Spellweaving. Vines that grow at ground level across deep pits, naturally disguised by leaves and virtually undetectable, trees bearing seemingly-edible fruits of extreme toxicity, and many other such dangers await any who force their way through the protected outer barriers. Regularly-spaced glades are used as the locations where spellweavers work their arts, where weddings and other ceremonies are conducted, where large social gatherings take place, and so on. These glades are strong in the weave and are amongst those parts of the forest most manipulated by the Elves. Those uninvited to enter will frequently not even perceive the glades, or will be attacked by the trees themselves apon entry, or will find that anything of once-living matter about the invaders’ person – wood, leather, etc. – immediately beginning to decay and rot, or will turn on the wearer. Each such glade is different in nature, but all are natural defensive formations and strongholds within the forests. Whole armies can now be destroyed apon entry to the forests without an Elf coming into sight.

The greatest dangers to the Elven buildings from an enemy who has penetrated the forest are the ramps that lead from ground levels up to the heights, and the Forest Elves realized this long ago, and crafted traps accordingly. Perhaps 1 in 20 such is genuine; the others are vines with burning sap, weakened (hollow) limbs which are home to stinging insects – wasps, scorpions, and other such – or snakes which kill by constriction.

Perhaps the greatest enemy to these Elves and their Forests is Fire. The Elves have strenuously sought to craft alternatives which make torches unnecessary. Fires naturally occur within forests as a means of clearing undergrowth, permitting other species of plant to mature. Some plants require fires to become fertile. None of these holds true in an Elven Forest, where the spellweavers perform these tasks; and hence at best, small campfires are cautiously tolerated. Standing guard against larger conflagrations are other plants which grow, vine-like, amongst the branches of every tree. These store vast quantities of a watery liquid which is released when a fire beneath grows too hot, inundating and extinguishing any blaze.

All this makes Elven Forests a haven for wildlife, especially smaller creatures. Squirrels, Birds, and many more species abide there, as do some more substantial creatures of diminished stature – boars, grenedraken, bears, and the like. All have been modified somewhat through Elven spellweaving, to the point where none will attack a Forest Elf, and many will obey the commands of senior elves. They remain wild creatures, however, and will rarely leave their sheltered forest dens.

While High Elves study the weave itself and manipulate the unliving environment, and Forest Elves weave patterns in the nature around them, Wood Elves (also known as Plains Elves) weave subtleties into their own natures; through the exchanges of children, traits thus developed slowly spread through the general elvish population. Most of the physical characteristics associated with Elves originated with the Wood Elves.

Plains elves are in fact in many ways cleverer and more advanced than the members of the other subcultures. It is the province of villager diplomats to settle disputes between the differing socially-acceptable subcultures, and they are more adept artificers than either of the other groups. “Elvish Mail” is always of Plains Elf construction, being crafted of equal parts metal and spellweaving. Weapons from the Plains Elves are more commonly enchanted or of superior workmanship. In watercraft, since the Fall of the Aquatic Elves, none can match them. Where other subcultures either manipulate their environment or the animals themselves to their ends, Plains elves tend to take both as they are found in nature.

Aquatic Elves were closely related in many ways to the Plains Elves, and used their powers of spellweaving in similar ways. They preferred to live on coasts and in shallow waters, and modified themselves accordingly. They were sailors and shipwrights of uncanny ability.

The spider-clan of the Plains Elves long ago settled into a new environment and are now known as Dark Elves or Drow. They believed that the surface world, with its myriad distractions for the senses, interfered with the development of the abilities to sense the weave, and that by living an ascetic existence within caverns deep underground, these distractions could be avoided, producing a manyfold increase in the powers of elvish perception and spellweaving. Those elves who accepted this concept were then joined by members of the other subcastes, and in particular by large numbers of High Elves (one reason why they are so much less prevalent today). The spider-clan thus began to utilize their spellweaving abilities in all the diverse manners of all the other subcultures, from the environmental manipulations of the Forest Elves to the raw Spellcraft of the High Elves.

At this point in our narrative, these arts are still in their relative infancy, and many of these changes have not yet been achieved, or are present only in rudimentary form. Each is the result of hard lessons learned.

Man

It was while searching for The Other that Elves first made themselves known to Humans, seeking leave to explore through, in, and beyond the Kingdoms of Man. Although there had been sporadic and individual contacts in the past, this was an altogether more organized approach, and exposed the Elves for the first time to the full political machinery beloved by Humans – laws, treaties, “Diplomacy”, and deception, the full range of human social relations. And it exposed the humans of the era to many facets of a perspective alien to their perceptions – for while Man accepted and tolerated the vagarities of nature, he perceived it as something to be controlled (not gently shaped); as something to be sheltered from, if it could not be controlled (not lovingly appreciated); and as something to be endured and escaped, if it could not be sheltered from, not something to be revered. “A human,” it was said, “would take the world apart to see how the mechanisms worked, and more importantly, whether or not they could put it back together in a manner more to their liking.”

The formal contact changed both societies dramatically. Humans rediscovered the potential for a more harmonious relationship with the natural world around them, which ultimately manifested in the resurgence of Druidic orders. The Elves, for their part, were forced to structure their society somewhat, formalizing relationships and obligations that had simply been there through the long centuries previous. They also chose a King to represent them to humanity; this role was not taken very seriously by Elves, being adopted for the sole purpose of making Humans more comfortable. The Elves recognized that Humans had an innate preference for centralizing authority and dealing with other centralized authorities, and while their race had no such drive, they were willing to accommodate the human need.

And so they chose the most vain amongst their people, the Elf with the greatest love of luxury and its trappings, provided him and his family with a throne, crown, clothes, and the finest furniture and food, and entrusted to him the responsibilities of greeting and entertaining visitors from other races, and of formalizing any agreements with non-Elven Authorities with seal and signature.

Since this was a purely ceremonial role, there was no need at this time for a Council of Advisors; nor did the King hold any authority over the Elves as a people. His sole function was to formalize decisions once they were taken; Elves persisted in deciding matters amongst themselves as they always had, through the binding consensus of interested parties.

Dwarves!

It was through their association with Humans that the Elves first learned of Dwarves, a discovery that set in motion a chain of events that would forever alter Elvish society. Some years earlier, some thousands of the bearded folk had crossed the borders into human-controlled lands, wounded, despondent, and despairing. They had been exiled from their homes by the betrayal of one of their own, seduced by a Princess from another race called Drow. Details were sketchy, but the Dwarves had been permitted to travel to the lands to the far Sunset, where they had settled into a vast tent city. Some hired themselves out to raise the money for food, but most had given themselves over to abject despair, spending their days drinking themselves into insensibility and bitterness, or crafting improbable schemes for the reclaiming of their homes. A proud and noble people, skilled smiths and wrights, now broken and humiliated. Could these “Dwarves” be the “Other” that the Elves were seeking, inquired the Humans?

The Elves who heard this tale knew immediately that the Dwarves were not who they had been seeking, but the involvement of the Drow nevertheless made this a matter of vital interest to the Elven peoples. Unwilling to reveal to humans matters that were none of their concern, the Elves answered “Perhaps,” and urgently sent a deputation to learn the truth of the reported event from these refugees.

When these investigators returned, they bore grim tidings. The Drow had formed a matriarchal society, based on cruelty and the enslavement of others, within tunnels deep under the mountains. Family groups called Houses competed with each other for the favors of their Spider Goddess; when their population had grown to the point where these tunnels became crowded, they chose to annex those carved by another race, the Dwarves, rather than extending their own domains. The Daughter of one of these matriarchs, seeking to elevate herself and her House, had seduced the youngest Prince of the Dwarves, inveigling him through romance and sorcery until he was utterly enthralled.

At her instigation, he had raised a band of personal followers who had slaughtered those ahead of her in the line of succession to rulership of her House, a deed met with considerable approval by the Queen Of Webs. The Princess had then prevailed apon him to spy out the defenses of his people, and apon ascending to the rule of her House, a combined assault by her forces and those of his personal entourage penetrated those defenses and routed the Dwarves completely. So profound was the anger of the Dwarves that the offender’s name had been expunged from all records; they renamed him “The Prince Of Lies”.

This forced the Elves into an unhappy position. While angry at the disrespect paid to Corellan by the Drow, these were still their brothers, sisters, parents, nieces, nephews, husbands, and wives. They had come to understand why Corellan had prevented them from starting what could only be a Civil War which would entangle the entire Elven Race.

And yet, Corellan’s instructions had been not to interfere with the Drow “so long as they impose their will apon no others”; clearly, they had overstepped that boundary, and the Elves were forced to interpret Corellan’s instructions as a Divine Commandment to oppose the Drow and their dark Queen. The search for the Other was, of necessity, abandoned until the Drow problem had been dealt with.

An army of Elves was gathered at the instruction of the Elven King, and travelled to the tent cities of the Dwarves, where they announced that they were the Kin of those responsible for the Dwarvish Exile, come to aid the Dwarves in reclaiming their homeland. Alas, the Elves (for all their wisdom and learning) had little experience in dealing with other races. The Elvish attitude – “We are going to do this, we have been commanded to do so by our God. You can help if you want to” – was guaranteed to irritate and further humiliate the Dwarves, whose natural pride was already sensitive because of their situation.

Despite the growing irritation of the Dwarves, the combination was extremely effective, and succeeded in overcoming the Prince Of Lies and his Drow paramour, and reclaiming sufficient of the Dwarven tunnels for the Dwarves to return to their homes. Lolth, never one to forgive incompetence or presumption, closed the links between the Drow tunnels and the Dwarven mineshafts, trapping both the young House Mother and Dwarven Prince between the Drow and the invading armies.

Even so, it should not be presumed that the pair were without resource and skill of their own; they successfully evaded the conquering allies and fled, pursued by a mixed force of Elves and Dwarves. Ultimately they were cornered in some remote corner of the world; when they were finally trapped, the Drow Matron turned on her Dwarven lover, seeing no further use for him, and killed him and his surviving personal guard with a Curse, only to be slain herself by those who had pursued the couple so remorselessly.

Legacies of The Prince Of Lies: Dwarves

All three groups had been marked by the events surrounding the Prince Of Lies episode. Despite the success of their collaboration, relations between the Dwarves and Elves had been forever poisoned by the Elvish attitude. It was natural, for an Elf, whenever engaged in, or proposing, some joint activity with a Dwarf, to remind that Dwarf of how successfully they had united in the past. They could never quite grasp the fact that Dwarves resented the humiliation of the need for the aid of outsiders. The Dwarves had not asked for any of it – the manipulations of the Drow, the exile, or the aid of the Elves. They further resented being made secondary participants in the war to reclaim their homeland. And they absolutely and definitively resented the perception that Elves expected them to be grateful for their unwanted and multiply-humiliating interference!

To be fair, relations with Dwarves were always going to be difficult; there were too many personality traits in opposition. Everything from sense of humor to stiff-necked pride would have gotten in the way. Nevertheless, events conspired to do irreparable harm to relations between the races. It must be remembered that from the Dwarvish perspective, Elves and Drow were one people. They were all Elves. They perceived irrefutable similarities between the attitudes of the Elves and the Drow – both had treated the Dwarves without respect. Coupled with the Elvish sense of humor and ability to find the sunny side of just about anything, and their never-ending ability to “babble”, the Dwarves were left with the overall impression that Elves were an untrustworthy, arrogant, and deceitful race, who delighted in belittling and humiliating Dwarves and in regurgitating past humiliations.

As a people, their racial pride had been publicly humiliated by the events; and while they did everything in their power to erase all memory of that humiliation, that pride aroused a feirce determination never to be so humiliated again. Their culture was forced down an increasingly martial path in consequence. Where once they had prized skills in finding, mining, and working the treasures of the earth, military prowess now became the dominant desirable trait.

This cultural transformation was as much a reaction to the Elvish behavior as to the Drow manipulation of events. Had the Elves approached the exiled Dwarves in a manner that did not offend the always-prickly Dwarven Pride, commonality of purpose could have produced an alliance that would have held steadfast for all time. It was the difference between “We have come to aid you in reclaiming your homes” and “We are here to lead your people back to their homes.”

Legacies of The Prince Of Lies: Elves

The Dwarven reaction to the events of the first Drow War greatly puzzled the Elves of the time, and they spent long years analyzing the events and how they had led to the bitterness expressed by the Dwarvish King at the War’s end. When they reached the conclusions set forth above, they were able for the first time to see themselves through an outsiders eyes, however dimly. Humbled by their unrecognized and unremarked mistakes, the Elves decided never to speak of the Prince Of Lies or the circumstances of the first Drow War again. As the generations passed, the matter was lost to memory, and the status quo came to be accepted by the Elves as simply “the way things are”. Only humans, who were only peripherally involved in events, retained any record of the tale, and at the time they had insufficient experience with any of the races involved to understand the all-important subtexts that had dictated the consequences, so their records were woefully incomplete.

That said, the Elves were determined not to make the same mistakes in future. It had become clear to them that the authority granted, and the responsibilities delegated, to the role of King were more important than they had appreciated. This time, they had resulted in a Civil War, and perhaps perpetual mistrust with another Race; what effect might they have next time? And yet, the Elf chosen for the role had been selected not for his relevant abilities, but for his love of pomp and ceremony. While he had managed – just barely – the Prince Of Lies crisis, it was not unfair to lay the blame for many of the mistakes during those events at his feet. While the chosen King was more than sufficient under normal circumstances, events could transform into the extraordinary in a heartbeat. At such times, the King needed Advisors to guide him – although he would remain the public spokesman, the Council would make the decisions.

Years were spent considering and debating the structure of the council, and who should be eligible for inclusion, and the issues of mandatory vs. voluntary participation. Ultimately, a ruling body evolved that was uniquely Elven in character. Actually, years were spent considering and debating each of these issues.

At the heart of the Council (known formally as The Gilandthor (The Gathering) were five Elves: a representative of each of the four branches of the Elves: Mountain, Forest, Planes, and Aquatic. Of course, the Aquatic representative was unable to participate directly, but worked closely with a volunteer Elf from one of the other groups who conveyed the position of the Aquatic elves on any matter to the Council.

Supplementing these four were specialist members who were dedicated to each of the major races, and whose primary responsibility was to consider that race’s reactions to any action proposed by the Council. If this council of advisors had been in place prior to the crisis, the theory went, the Dwarven Specialist would have been able to point out the consequences of the approach adopted by the King, and a more amenable tone adopted. It might not have prevented the subsequent estrangement of the allies, but it would at least not have exacerbated the problems.

Legacies of The Prince Of Lies: Drow

The impact of these events apon the Drow were no less profound. Through the presumptiveness and independent scheming of one Princess, centuries of planning had been torn apart. While the damage was not irreparable, the confrontation with the Elves had been instigated precipitously, before She had completed preparations for a decisive blow. As a result, although Shehad approved of the ambition and cleverness of the House Princess, the results were completely unsatisfactory.

She resolved never again to be caught unprepared, without a ready-to-implement backup plan for any action contemplated. In the meantime, it was clearly long past time to bring the House Matrons firmly into line, and to bind them more closely to herself; She ordered that the Priesthood of Lolth be elevated to dominance over all other elements of Drow society. To celebrate this ascension, the existing House Mothers were martyred in Her name – a rather pointed reminder to their successors of the consequences of exceeding their authority.

The sacrifices struck Drow society like a thunderclap, and a superficial peace enveloped Drow society as a whole. While the newly-elevated House Matrons would never cease their attempts to climb above those around them in power and authority, the conflicts between them became the stuff of plots, intrigues, and shadows. While each priestess was loyal to their House, they were first and foremost the Children of Lolth; should any House conflict even threaten to endanger the most trivial whim of the Spider-Goddess, betrayal from within was certain, and the punishment swift.

This change completely transformed the balance of power between the Drow Houses. Previously, there had been six arenas of primacy, all of roughly equal value: Wealth, Political Connections, Spycraft, Secular Authority, The art of Spellweaving, and Martial power. The change to a Theocracy elevated the Secular arena to dominance over all others. The ranking of the House Priestess relative to that of other Houses became the sole measure of success, and all else was merely a tool to be exploited in this pursuit.

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The Ongoing Elvish Glossary

• Arnost: Simple Speech (Modern “Common”, a human tongue)
• Arrunquessor: Plains Elves
• Calquissir: High Elves
• Corellan: The First
• Drow: “Those Who Dwell Apart” (in Nuthanorl)
• Eltrhinast: “Guiding Spirit”
• Gilandthor: “The Gathering”, the formal title of the Elvish Council.
• Hithainduil: High Elven Language
• Illvayssor: “The Other”, a mythical race
• Isallithin: “The Sundered”, a name applied to Aquatic Elves
• King: A human title interpreted by Elves as “speaker to others” and defined as such within their language.
• Nuthanorl: Low Elven Language, Common Elven
• Tarquessir: Forest Elves
• Zamiel: Drow Language

*************************************************************************************************

Next time: Lolth schemes, the Verdonne are revealed, and at last the Elves find “The Other” – but it’s not the glorious occasion they hoped for. All in Chapters 11 through 14!

   “It has to be an effective deterrent, Prime Minister.”
   “But it’s a bluff. I probably wouldn’t use it.”
   “They don’t know that you probably wouldn’t use it.”
   “They probably do.”
   “Yes… they probably know that you probably wouldn’t use it. But they can’t certainly know.”
   “They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn’t.”
   “Yes, but even though they probably know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would.”
      – Sir Humphrey Appleby, Cabinet Secretary, in conversation with James Hacker, Prime Minister, Yes, Prime Minister

While there are a lot of things the Hero System does well, there are a few things that it does exceedingly poorly, and one of those is the Bluff.

There are two skills that seem to cover Bluffing in the game: Persuasion and Acting. Neither is adequate to all the applications that Bluff may be put to in actual play. Blair and I recently reached the point in planning a future adventure in which it seemed inevitable that the PCs would need to Bluff their way into a situation and back out of it, and a quick review of those existing solutions showed that they were completely insufficient. So we set aside working on the adventure and spent the afternoon crafting a solution to the problem – a new subsystem for handling Bluffs within the Hero System. I am so happy with the results that it is also being integrated into my superhero campaign.

But I don’t expect our readers to simply take my word for it. Before I detail our solution (which I am also making available as a standalone free download), it’s only fair that I review those solutions already present and discuss the shortcomings that drove us to create a new game subsystem. Of course, never one to leave well enough alone, I have also had a number of thoughts about taking the system further; our goal when crafting this subsystem was to make it as similar in operation to existing subsystems within the Hero System as we could, so we were deliberately conservative. I’ll conclude this article by discussing the most promising of those further expansions that seemed to me to be a step too far for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, so that if other GMs want to tinker with the ideas, they can do so.

The Existing Rules

The two areas of the existing rules that might be considered to cover bluffing are Persuasion and Acting. The other interpersonal/interaction skills (Seduction, Bribery, Conversation, Interrogation, and so on) and Concealment are obviously not applicable to the problem (concealment is about hiding things on your person or elsewhere).

Persuasion

Champions 5th Ed: “Characters with this interaction skill can convince, persuade, or influence individuals, or tell believable lies.”
Pocket Oxford Dictionary: [Persuade:] Convince (person, oneself) of fact; impel by arguement.

To both Blair and I, that last part of the dictionary definition is the all-important hallmark of what Persuasion, as a Hero Systems skill, is all about. It covers making a thin arguement sound reasonable, or a good line of arguement seem inescapable. A poor Persuasion result can make a reasonable arguement sound ridiculous, and a good one sound “not quite right”. Persuasion is what an Army Recruiter might use to get an enlistment; what a Politician might use to get a vote or to lobby for support for or against a measure; what a used-car salesman might use to get you to buy.

Yes, this includes the art of lying convincingly. But that is not a bluff, though it may add to the apparent veracity of a bluff.

Further, toward the end of the description of Persuasion, the rules state,

“Persuasion is normally only used on NPCs. PCs are usually allowed more latitude with their decisions. However, a successful Persuasion roll should make a PC much more inclined to believe the speaker or do as he requests.”

Bluffing is emphatically not something that can be constrained in this matter.

Acting

Champions 5th Ed: “This interaction skill enables a character to alter his physical mannerisms and speech patterns to seem to be another person, to fool someone, or to fake moods and emotions. Characters can use it to hide their true identity or to impersonate another individual.”

In other words, it’s about adopting a specific identity or role and being convincing, about conveying the impression of a specific personality, or about falsely manifesting opinions, moods, or emotions. But that’s not quite a bluff, either – though it, too, may add to the evident plausibility of a bluff.

Some Bluffing examples

The Cambridge English Dictionary: Bluff: “To impose on by a show of boldness or strength” (ignoring the meanings related to personality or geography).

Bluffing is all about bravura, bravado, and chutzpah.

Bluffing is:

• James Bond wandering around the Villain’s Lab with nothing but a lab coat and clipboard to support his attitude of having every right to be there.
• At the core of the villainous plots of, well, just about all the Die Hard movies.
• James T. Kirk trying to convince a seemingly hostile and far stronger opponent that the enterprise has a mutually-annihilative substance built into its hull that will destroy any vessel that destroys it in The Corbomite Maneuver.
• “Don’t come any closer or I kill a hostage” – when you have no intention of doing so.
• Using non-verbal arguement and misdirection and maybe even a convincing line of patter to convince a third party of your intentions.
• “I’ve got a bomb” when all you have is some painted pieces of dowel and some wires.
• “I know what you’re thinking – did he fire six shots or only five? Do I feel lucky? Well, do you feel lucky, punk?” – when you know full well that you’ve emptied your magazine.

And yes, it’s seeming to have a better hand in poker than you really do. (The opposite situation, pretending to have a worse hand than you really do, or simply being unreadable, is acting).

The whole arena of projecting a false impression can be divided into three overlapping areas: a convincing lie, a good acting job, and bluffing. Acting can suggest that you have the personality or the emotional capacity to do something; a convincing lie can persuade that you think you have good reason to do something; a bluff convinces that you intend to do something (or perhaps, not do something, or that you belong where you are).

The shortcomings

It’s clear that some bluffs can be covered by stretching “Acting” a little further, while others can perhaps be covered by considering “Persuasion” a little more broadly, and some can be covered by a combination of the two. If you stretch them far enough, perhaps these will meet in the middle and obviate the need for a new subsystem dealing specifically with Bluffs. And perhaps a Presence Attack can be used to cover whatever is left over.

That’s what we have been doing for several years. I’m sure it’s what the designers of Hero Games thought – that there is no need for “Bluff” because it’s already covered. Unfortunately, on any number of occasions when we have stretched the rules to cover bluffs in this way, it has felt like we were stretching. You never want the game mechanics to so completely intrude into your awareness that it takes you out of character, and the suspension of disbelief was strained to the breaking point by that awareness of stretching the rules.

The interaction factor

A further problem is that there is not a lot of interactivity to the approach. Skill checks are excellent for moment-by-moment resolutions, they don’t work so well over a sustained period – the best you can do is have the results of the last roll stand or persist until the situation changes and a new roll is required. Things get even worse when you’re talking about opposed die rolls and more than a few individuals, all of whom can be dealt with at once.

The obvious approach to a bluff is some sort of skill roll – acting or persuasion – with the other person making some sort of die roll – probably perception – to penetrate the bluff. So how do you handle it when there are ten or twenty people to be bluffed at the same time? Do you have the character doing the bluffing make a separate opposed check for each – so that sometimes he gets a good result (a success) and sometimes a bad one, for exactly the same words and actions? That hardly seems fair. Or do you have them make a single roll that is opposed, one by one, by the targets of the bluff – so that the results tend to be all-or-nothing? That hardly seems fair, either. Or all that realistic. Or very much fun. Or do you assume that their rolls will average out and not have them roll at all, assuming an overall average result? While the most consistent approach, and perhaps the most realistic one, taking all the randomness out of the system denies a fundamental aspect of the fun of the game, the vicarious thrill of rolling the dice, never knowing if the results will be good, great, or disastrous. It drains the game of all tension and excitement. Not to mention all these solutions being incredibly, undeniably, cumbersome and tedious.

And if the bluffing character moves from one room to another, to another, to another, do you really want to repeat all of this multiple times, reducing the game to nothing but a series of interactions not with the characters, events, and circumstances present, but to a never-ending set of game mechanics?

The Shades of Gray factor

Finally, the results of such checks are all black-and-white yes-or-no outcomes. There’s no scope for someone gradually becoming suspicious, or having their doubts allayed, or for degrees of suspicion. It’s too absolute.

There can be no doubt: the existing mechanics can be stretched all out of shape to cover bluffing – and doing so is not a satisfactory answer to the problem.

Design Constraints for the new solution

One of my core philosophies (these days) is that you should always identify and review the shortcomings of the existing solution before devising any new House Rules. This analysis not only serves to provide design constraints for the new rules, and to enable a comparison to ensure that the new proposals are actually an improvement over the current state of affairs, they ensure that there really is a problem that needs addressing by a change to the rules. Never include House Rules for their own sake – a house rule always has to be able to justify its existence by doing something that the existing rules don’t, or don’t do well enough. That ‘something’ might be in the way characters interact with the game mechanics, or the way the rules reflect the campaign, but that justification always needs to be there. And if a house rule is needed but the proposed solution is not an improvement, you need to junk it and start again – or find a way to live without it.

House rules can look great on paper, but they need to function in the real world, as I explained in My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes of Piety & Magic (in particular, the discussion of the Piety system). Over time, I’ve learned the hard way that this approach can save you from at least some of the headaches.

So, what are the results if we apply this principle to determine what is needed from a Bluff system that does not have the shortcomings of the built-in solution?

1. One set of Rolls

The new rules absolutely have to do away with the multitude of die rolls. It has to be persistent in some way without making the game all about the interaction between player and game mechanics.

2. Flexibility of results

The outcome of the rules has to be more varied than a black-and-white yes-or-no.

3. Simplicity of result

At the same time, the results need to quick and easy to interpret.

4. True to the system core

It’s always preferable for a house rule to recognizably resemble other rules within the game, ensuring a consistency of game interface. This is best achieved by ensuring that the new rules are “true to the core of the system” and to the general principles and philosophies that underpin the game mechanics. This can be tricky because they are often not written down anywhere, and need to be derived by backwards-engineering the existing rules – but there is a shortcut that can sometimes be used: modifying the details but not the fundamental mechanics of an existing rules substructure.

5. Flexibility of application

In discussing Persuasion, the 5th Ed Hero System rules have this to say:

“Modifiers are very important for Persuasion.” – and then some vague and (quite honestly) inadequate guidelines are provided as to what modifiers are appropriate and how large an impact they should have.

Flexibility and adjustability are going to be even more important in Bluffing. What’s more, since bluffs usually take place in dangerous situations, while Persuasion attempts only occasionally occur in such situations, the consequences are going to be far more profound to the narrative of the game. It follows that, like combat, there should be less scope for GM interpretation and more precise guidelines provided – in other words, more reliability and definition.

6. Learning to bluff

Characters can learn to bluff. It’s not a stat that all characters have equal access to, it’s more like a skill that can be learned – and improved.

7. The impact of roleplay

Ideally, far from disrupting roleplay, the bluff mechanism should compliment it, contributing to and shaping the narrative events, enhancing the gameplay.

The model of the solution

The key to the solution was suggested by another passage within the description of Persuasion:

“…Use the modifiers listed under Presence Attacks as a modifier to the Persuasion roll (for example, a +2d6 modifier would equal a +2 skill roll modifier).”

A presence attack is very close to what we want the new system to be, provided we add the principles of persistence and depletion to it, and somehow integrate it to operate off a bluff skill check instead of a character’s Presence stat.

The features of this subsystem are a base number of d6, with more dice being added or subtracted according to circumstances and roleplay; these dice are then rolled and compared to the target’s Presence or Ego (whichever is lower). There is no effect if the total is below this target, and several escalating degrees of success for achieving 10, 20, or 30 more than the minimum target. So, right away, we can tick off items 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 from the list of criterion, and have identified the changes that are needed to add items 1 and 6 to that list.

From that point, it’s all a question of details, and a bit of tweaking to how the system integrates with the existing system and gameplay.

Persistence

We want the one roll to persist throughout the bluff. That eliminates that ever-repeating cycle of rolling dice, moving on, rolling dice again, etc. The randomness is preserved, but the more dice you roll, the greater the probability of a result approaching the average – so all the problems that came with earlier attempts to employ persistent results (described in “The interaction factor” above) go away, leaving only the benefits.

Depletion

Having the results deplete or wear off or erode with each encounter adds the drama and tension that should be present during a bluff. Will it last long enough? When will the bluff be exposed?

Skill integration

A character succeeds in using a skill by rolling their skill total, as modified by the GM, or less, on 3d6. Increasing the skill total represents learning how to be better at using that skill. Presence attack works on the principle of 1d6 to the base number of dice for every 5 points of Presence. Success magnitudes in skills are smaller, but they exist – so simply adding dice to the Bluff based on how well the character rolls his bluff skill is enough to integrate the two systems.

Skill modifier

Circumstantial modifiers to the initial bluff roll have a twin effect: they adjust the average point of the roll relative to success or failure, and the increase or decrease the potential magnitude of a success or failure.

The average of 3d6 is 10.5, so rolls of 10 and 11 are equally the most probable results (13% each), and that 10/- is exactly a 50% chance. A skill level of 11/- means that either of these, or anything less, succeeds, so it is better than a 50% chance of success (it’s actually 62.5%). If there’s a modifier of -2 applied by the GMs, then the roll required for success shifts to 9/- from 11/-, and the two most probable results become failures. Understanding what modifiers do to the chance of success is fundamental to successfully GMing the Hero System.

If the most probable result is 10 or 11, and the mark of success is 11 or less, then the most probable outcome of the roll is a success by 0 or 1. In practice, the probability curve is relatively flat at the peak, so there is only a slightly reduced chance of getting a success by 2 – or a failure by 1.

The greater the distance from the average result, the less probable – and more significant – the margin of success becomes. A modifier of +2, for example, would mean that on a base roll of 11/-, success is achieved by rolling anything below 14 – better than 83% chance. The most probable rolls are still 10 and 11, so the most probable result is a success by 2 or 3. And the maximum margin of success (resulting from rolling a 3) shifts from 9 to 11.

All that means that modifiers of +1 or +2 (or -1 or -2) are far more significant to the outcome than adding an extra +1d6 or +2d6 to the pool of dice to be rolled for the bluff because they can not only increase the chance of success, they increase the chance of a good success, which adds those +1 or +2 dice on top of the increased chance of success. These must be carefully controlled by the GM. But what should they signify?

The significance of skill modifiers

The things that add or subtract dice to the target pool, in addition to the degree of success in the skill roll, are all external factors to the character, or consequences of roleplayed behavior and actions – the environment, the target(s), supporting actions or statements by the character, and so on. It follows that the basis of skill roll modifiers should be only that which is internal to the character – the skill at bluffing, any overall competencies they might have, and the magnitude of the bluff they are trying to pull off.

Target Roll

Presence attacks are measured against the lower of a target’s Ego (representing their stubbornness) or Presence. They are an attempt to awe or intimidate the target into doing what the character wants the target to do – which must be explicitly or implicitly stated as part of the presence attack. Bluff should not be measured against either of these – well, maybe stubbornness – they should be measured against the target’s credulity, i.e. their Intelligence. Or possibly their Perception.

Click to download the Bluff Rules 1.0

The Bluff Subsystem 1.1

(The following is also available as a standalone download. Just click on the icon to the right)

Bluff: Interaction Skill, 11/- for 2 pts, 8/- for 1 pt; BASE VALUE 9+(PRE/5) for 3 pts, +1 for +2 pts.

Bluff is a presence attack which is intended to give a false impression to the target. It is based on the Presence stat. It is distinct from persuasion which is about convincing a target to act in a certain specific way and distinct from acting which is designed to convince the target of a character’s identity and may last a period of time. Bluff is immediate is aims to convince the target that the character is about to do something or is capable of doing something without any regard to specifying how that target should react to that potential action. Bluff is all about chutzpah and brazening your way out of or through a situation.

To Bluff a target, roll against your skill at a modifier assigned by the referees according to the difficulty and plausibility of the bluff. If you succeed, you then make a presence-style attack with a base of 1d6 for every point of success. Additional dice may be added or subtracted by the referees as follows:

General Modifiers

• -1d6 character is in combat
• -1d6 character is at at a disadvantage
• -3d6 character is covered
• +1d6 target is surprised to encounter the character (lasts for 1-2 rounds only)
• +1d6 target is at a disadvantage
• +3d6 target is covered
• +1d6 Target is surprised
• +1d6 Character appears to have a power or technology that increases the bluff’s plausibility
• +2d6 Character is exhibiting or has just demonstrated that technology
• -1d6 Target has a power or technology that might protect them against the threat
• ±1d6 Target is idealistic (+1 if bluff appeals to idealism, -1 if contrary)
• +1d6 Target is naive or inexperienced
• +1d6 Target is in an unfamiliar environment and character looks like they belong in that environment
• -2d6 Target is a zealot or fanatic

Target has a disadvantage (usually a psych lim, berserk or enraged if active) that conflicts with acceptance of the bluff

• -1d6 Moderate
• -2d6 Strong or enraged
• -3d6 Total or Berserk

Target has a disadvantage (usually a psych lim, berserk or enraged if active) that accords with acceptance of the bluff

• +1d6 Moderate
• +2d6 Strong
• +3d6 Total

Character has a disadvantage (known psych lim, berserk or enraged) that accords with the bluff

• +1d6 psych lim
• +2d6 enraged
• +3d6 berserk

Target has a responsibility or duty that conflicts with acceptance of the bluff

• -1d6 slight conflict
• -2d6 strong conflict
• -3d6 extreme conflict
• +3d6 slight commitment to duty
• +2d6 strong commitment to duty
• +1d6 extreme commitment to duty

Character’s Reputation is contrary to attempted bluff*

• -1d6 8/-
• -2d6 11/-
• -3d6 14/-
• -4d6 extreme

      * if acting/disguise is in use, reputation is that of the character being impersonated

Character’s Reputation is in accord with attempted bluff*

• +1d6 8/-
• +2d6 11/-
• +3d6 14/-
• +4d6 extreme

      * if acting/disguise is in use, reputation is that of the character being impersonated

If the bluff is a threat and the character has just performed

• +1d6 violent action (includes shoving, shots in the air)
• +2d6 extremely violent action (includes physical attack, shooting weapon from target’s hand but not shooting at the target themselves)
• +3d6 incredibly violent action (includes determined physical attack, wounding the target)
• -1d6 has just hesitated
• -2d6 has just exhibited fear or tenderness
• -3d6 has just attempted to hide or flee
• -2d6 if bluff repeated against this target without further demonstration of intent

Character’s demands of target are

• +1d6 reasonable
• +1d6 sensible
• -1d6 unreasonable
• -2d6 ridiculous
• -3d6 dangerous to the target of the bluff

Target is:

• +1d6 already nervous
• +2d6 fearful
• +3d6 backing away
• +4d6 in retreat

Character is:

• -1d6 obviously nervous
• -2d6 fearful
• -3d6 backing away
• -4d6 in retreat

Roll these dice and compare the total with the Presence attack table on page 288 of the Champions 5th Edition rules.

Attempting to bluff a crowd:
Attempting to bluff 2 people at once:

• Divide the number of dice as evenly as possible between the two.

Attempting to bluff more than 2 people at once:

• for every doubling of the crowd after the first two people subtract 2 dice i.e. 4 people = -2 dice, 8=-4 dice, 16=-6 dice, 32=-8 dice, 64=-10 dice, 128=-12 dice, 250=-14 dice, 500=-16 dice, 1000=-18 dice, 2000=-20 dice, 4000=-22 dice, 8000=-24 dice, 16000=-26 dice, 32000=-28 dice, 64000=-30 dice, 125000=-32 dice, 250000=-34 dice, 500K=-36dice, 1M=-38dice, 2M=-40dice, 4M=-42dice, 8M=-44 dice, 16M=-46dice, 32M+=-48dice (ie zero or fewer d6 of bluff). This assumes that in any crowd, leaders will naturally emerge and that the character is actually only attempting to bluff those leaders. Mass communications are required to reach more than 250 people at one time.
• If the results are <1d6 per person, there is a minimum result on a successful bluff of 2d6 per person.

The Depletion Options

As you can see, we chose to take a mixed option of splitting the bluff between two targets and then eroding the number of dice to be rolled. We very deliberately wanted to be able to accommodate a politician attempting to bluff an entire population.

What happens with the version of the system described above, and in the PDF, is this: Let’s say that the character is attempting to bluff two people. He gets 17d6 when all the modifiers and adjustments are taken into account. These are split as evenly as possible between the two, giving 9 dice for one target and 8 dice for the other. The player rolls the 8 dice to get a total against the first target and then one extra die to add for the second, getting 33 and 5, respectively, or 33 and 38. These totals are compared with the lower of the target’s INT or Perception Skill (9+INT/5). The targets are both above-average individuals with an INT of say, 12, which also gives them a perception of 12.

33-12=21; 38-12=26. So both are affected in the “target number +20” bracket, which reads,

“Target is awed. He will not act for 1 full Phase, is at 1/2 DCV, and possibly will do as the attacker commands. If he is friendly, he is inspired and may follow the character into danger; he will comply with most requests and obey most orders. He receives +10 PRE only for the purpose of resisting contrary Presence Attacks made that Turn.”

I would translate that, under these circumstances, as: “Target is convinced by the bluff and will react accordingly. He will obey most orders and comply with most requests and is convinced that the character is supposed to be where he is and doing what he is doing. He will resist attempts by others to convince him otherwise with +10 INT for the purpose. He will almost completely lower his guard (1/2 DCV) and will not question or act to investigate the bluff for a full Phase.”

If, in that time, the bluffing character has moved away from the target (say into another room), the target’s convictions will not be changed.

And what if there are two more people in the next room, to be taken in by the same bluff? Then the character loses two dice of bluff. There are four ways this can be done: removing the two highest-value dice from the roll already made; removing the two lowest-value dice from the roll already made; a proportionate reduction; or rolling two dice and subtracting them from the existing totals. We have not specified a method because (a) we didn’t think of the question, and (b) it permits us to choose which method seems most appropriate to the situation.

In this case, the two were fairly thoroughly convinced, so I would choose the two lowest dice, probably both showing 1’s.

The pool of dice in front of the player thus becomes a visual aide to the erosion of his bluff. With each new person encountered, it shrinks. If the character does something to reinforce the bluff, and we decide that it works, we can add a couple of dice to the total. If the character does something inappropriate to the bluff, like getting a name wrong, or poking around at controls that should not be altered in a manner that suggests he doesn’t know what he’s doing, we can subtract a couple of extra dice. We just have to let the character roll additional dice or remove existing dice as necessary. As the dice pool shrinks, the player should feel the rising tension in the air as his bluff begins to wear thin.

Eventually, if the character keeps encountering new people, the total on the dice will drop the 8-dice target to below the target-plus-twenty range. At that point, the target who was in that range begins to question himself about what he saw, but he’s still in the target-plus-ten range so he will be only very slightly suspicious. When the results range drop to less than target-plus-ten, the character will become even more suspicious, perhaps even enough to ask his colleague – but the colleague was even more convinced and is probably still in that target-plus-ten range. Eventually, the character that was more weakly affected will become suspicious enough (ie the total will drop below a success) that he may report his suspicions to his superiors; the bluff has worn off, but the character is presumably long-gone from the vicinity.

Depletion option #1: High to Low

Take away the highest die results first, and the Bluff will wear thin and fail far more quickly. This approach is most appropriate if the character does something suspicious – asking questions, claiming to be from personnel and then examining the reactor settings, monkeying with the controls, whatever.

Depletion option #2: Low to High

Take away the low numbers first, and the Bluff will persist for a lot longer. This approach is most appropriate when the character committing the bluff does something to allay suspicions, or simply does nothing suspicious.

Depletion option #3: Middle-ground first, rising; and option #4, proportionate reduction

Both of these remove an intermediate amount from the total. The first removes threes and fours as matched pairs; when you run out of one of these, start removing fives, when you run out of the other, start removing sixes. The second is useful if you have recorded the total but not the actual rolls that comprised it, simply dividing by the number of dice that there were and multiplying by the number of dice that there are now. This is appropriate for low-suspicion activities if those being bluffed are already suspicious (a warning sounds over the intercom about an intruder somewhere in the facility, for example) or for asking low-suspicion questions.

Depletion option #5: Roll two dice and subtract the result

This is my favorite option because it is unpredictable compared to the other two. Will the character roll a 12 and lose a lot of their bluff’s effectiveness? or a two, and lose very little? The law of averages still gives a rough idea of how long the bluff will last (without reinforcement), but when you get down to only a few dice in hand over the target, individual results and the vagarity of actual rolls begins to outweigh that law of averages. This can be the appropriate option any time, under any circumstances. And you don’t need to keep the pool of dice in front of the PC, just have a record of the total. The GMs can even roll secretly for the amount of depletion so that the player doesn’t know how weak or how strong his bluff still is – just that the GM keeps rolling dice and doing sums on his scratch pad.

A Direct-Depletion Alternative

That’s the way the present version of the system works. But I’ve been thinking about it subsequently, and have realized that there are a couple of alternatives.

How about if, instead of reducing by a fixed two dice for each doubling of targets, we simply subtracted 1 point from the total for crowds of more than 1 at the time of the initial bluff, and instead depleted the dice pool based on the perceptiveness/INT of each target? 1 dice for every 5 points of whichever one was used as the basis of the comparison for that target?

Erosion by numbers alone would eventually expose the deception, but this means that it’s harder to bluff smarter characters for long periods of time. And easier to bluff characters who aren’t so smart for long periods of time.

The Erosion variant

A further approach might be to erode the totals by 1 per minute, or 1 per hour, or even one per day, depending on the nature of the bluff and how often the bluffer and the bluffed interact. If the daily newspaper is the only source of interaction, one per day would be appropriate. In a real high-security setup, you might even go with 1 per turn.

The Slow-depletion variant

You could also state that the character committing the bluff gets his first turn in someone’s presence free, but that they suffer depletion/erosion for every turn thereafter. That means that asking detailed questions, or inspecting something closely, or being interrogated by a couple of self-important guards, can bring the bluff undone, or at least burn through it more quickly, but if the character simply keeps moving without interacting with anyone or anything, they can last for quite a long time.

Wrapping up

While there are a couple of decisions that have not been made regarding these rules, and a few variations on them to consider, the overall system is sound, definitely Hero System in style, and very definitely needed.

A Guest Article by Dave Viars, line developer for Interface Zero

I’m so pleased with the way this graphic came out that I couldn’t resist uploading the full-sized image for everyone to drool over. Click this thumbnail to see it in all its glory :)

These week I’m interrupting the Orcs & Elves series to give readers wgho aren’t into it a break, and to bring you a guest article advance sneak-peek at a new Game Setting that’s on the way, in a genre that hasn’t yet received a lot of love here at Campaign Mastery…

Introduction

What’s up, amigo? How’s things going for you and yours? Not that I really wanna know, but it pays to play along with social niceties in this business, ya dig me? So you’ve come here to learn the straight skinny on how the Mediaweb works, what the hell a TAP is, how a Hyper-glove functions, and just how you can go swimming through the Deep and hack everything you come across…

Hi there! Forgive the hammy dramatics at the top! I’m Dave Viars, line developer for Interface Zero and the head rules guy for the game. Today I’m going to talk about how the internet functions of our game setting and how you, the potential player, can go about hacking it! I’m going to mostly do this In Character, so forgive me for hamming it up again, it’s all in good fun!

The Hacking Environment

Before I can really get you educated on how to Hack, we need to talk about fundamentals. I’m going to walk you through this as if you were a n00b, no offense omae, but we gotta take this one step at a time. You gotta learn to doggy paddle, before you can swim like a fish through the Deep, my friend.

The old world internet was only the start of the information revolution, here in 2090, it’s matured and reached its pinnacle. Well the pinnacle for all of us still walkin’ around in meat bodies, the Church Of The Upload would have you believe we should all be dubbing ourselves into data beings, but I’m rather attached to my own flesh, you hear me? Sure I could eat a virtual nutra-dog, but you don’t get the same real satisfaction of being full, or the heartburn later. Anyway I’m gettin’ off topic.

The Mediaweb & The TAP

The Mediaweb, as we call it today, connects everything and everyone in away you wouldn’t even believe. Ya see, the way everyone is connected to one another? It’s an implant 95% of the human, and post-human races have within their grey matter called the Tendril Access Processer, or TAP for short. The TAP was the biggest revolution to hit humanity since, well damn near electricity, ya feel me? The TAP gives us constant connection to the Mediaweb 24/7, you don’t have to worry about your service provider crapping out on you, because your head is the service provider. It doesn’t disconnect you unless you willing decide to turn it off. Whenever we want, we can look up websites, open em up in Hyper Reality (don’t worry I’ll get to HR in a moment), project our consciousness into completely Virtual Realms, keep our personal information stored away, and pretty much do more than any smart phone back at the turn of the Millennium was capable of. All of this and it’s in your head so you won’t lose it!

Most importantly, the TAP let’s you interact with Hyper Reality, the old world’s Augmented Reality, only taken to 11. Hyper Reality is friggan everywhere in 2090! Virtual Icons and control panels, objects and entertainment, directions and advertisements all just floating there, over laying the real world. Thanks to your TAP you can touch, taste, feel, see, and hear HR all around you. Now of course we got spam filters to take care of most of the garbage and viruses out there you can’t be too careful in avoiding, but the benefits seem to outweigh the drawbacks. Also while capable of transmitting “feeling” of a sort HR isn’t a replacement for the real deal, so that HR girlfriend or boyfriend program is only going to assuage you for so long. The majority of objects out there have HR controls, it’s how you’ll open most doors, tell most machinery what to do, and of course order things online by looking through HR menus.

The Hyperglove

But let’s get to what you’re really interested in now, how the hell do you make this Hyper reality filled playground do what you want? Let’s talk about Hacking. The first thing you’re gonna need, is a hyper-glove. Thanks to having what is pretty much a computer already implanted in your head, you don’t need to carry around a laptop like the real old days, but you’re also gonna need something with more power to it than a smart phone, too. That’s where the hyper glove comes in. The hyper glove is a tool used by programmers and engineers through out the world, and of course, information pirates like us. The Hyper glove is a symbol that says you’re someone who knows what the hell their doing when it comes to the Deep (which if you haven’t figured it out yet, is the mediaweb’s nickname!).

The Hyper glove works with your TAP, boosting it’s processing power and giving you the ability to access the underlying code of every hyper object and computer controlled object you run across… if you can break past its firewall of course. That’s another thing the Hyperglove lets you do. Think of it as a sort of big ass digital crowbar that lets you rip open the casing of these objects and play around with the guts, or code inside. If you can hack past the Firewall, you’re free to make some quick alterations to the code of the object on the fly.

Hyperglove Mode

Course, what you want to do to the object you’re hacking largely depends on what mode you have the Hyper-glove in. Standard hypergloves used by engineers have control and edit mode… Hackers, Law enforcement, and soldiers have the third mode, Destruction, added to their Hyper glove as well.

What do those modes do? Well, let’s say you’re breaking into some place you’re not supposed to be, and you spy a security camera down the hall. Point your Hyper glove at it, hack past the camera’s firewall, and the mode you’re currently selected in will determine what you can do! Control will let you turn the damn thing on and off or even make it point in the opposite direction for a short time while you hustle past. Edit will let you feed it new information, wiping you and your friends out from what it’s currently seeing, or make it look like a whole gang is running down the halls! Destruction? Well, that bad boy causes each system it hacks to fall into an electric feedback cycle which can cause some damage, do it well enough and the camera will end up crispy.

Defenses

Of course I’m making it sound much easier than it really is. Each item you run across either has its own internal firewall, or is hooked up as part of a larger network. Hacking the vending machine you run across outside isn’t going to cause you too much trouble usually, but the same vending machine inside of a corporate, government, or military facility is going to be hooked into that facility’s network, and have some nasty surprises for you! Fail your hack and you might get lucky, nothing might happen. Or you might just trigger an alarm. But if your luck is sour, you might trigger an Intrusion counter measure which sends a nasty bio-feedback signal up through your Hyper glove and into your brain! The Deep is full of nasty surprises in the end amigo, so watch yourself out there!

The mechanics beneath the surface

Hi again! Dave V here, stepping out from behind the curtain once more to talk system and mechanics with you. I hope you enjoyed the In character discussion of how things in our setting work, but let’s talk nuts and bolts about how that system actually runs while you’re playing the game!

Design Objectives

Savage Worlds is known to be a wonderful system which allows for excellent levels of detail and intricacy, all without giving the GM and the players a headache being bogged down by unnecessary rules. The standard philosophy of “Fast, Furious, Fun!” which is in all Savage worlds products is the same thing that we followed creating the rules for Interface Zero.

Too often in most other cyberpunk offerings the Hacker is removed from the action. They’re outside, not involved, and typically waiting on the rest of the party to do the “real” work. Other times the hacker engages in an entire mini-game involving the GM and player looking up rules just to figure out how things work while the rest of the group goes about twiddling their thumbs.

In interface Zero, we did our best to minimize that when it came to our hacking. The process is simply the player pointing their Hyper glove at the object they want to hack, deciding what mode their hyper glove is in, and then making a hacking roll to bypass the system’s firewall. Success grants one turn of effect, a raise usually grants a bigger effect. The Firewall of an object is determined by the network the player is hacking. The core book provides a range of Firewall difficulty suggestions depending on what type of network your players are running up against. It also provides a list of suggested consequences, depending on the type of network as well. In practice it means you only have to write down a single number for any building or area the players are running around in, and create or consult a simple chart when the player fails a hack! It’s fast, it’s easy, and it keeps the Hacker running right along side the rest of the group as well!

Deeper Hacking

Of course we also give more than just this quick and easy type of Hacking for those who want to get more complex in their games! You want the Hacker to go completely virtual, scout out the place ahead of time and leave in some backdoors for the group? We have a system for that built on the Savage world’s deluxe rulebook’s “Dramatic Task” rules, you can get it done quick and easy and get on with the campaign! You want to Hack someone’s brain, and turn them into your puppet? We got you covered there too. Along with a system for going completely virtual for those who want to really play in the Deep!

The TAP opens up a world of possibilities in game play, from fully uploaded digital consciousnesses called “Dubs” which can offer a form of “eternal life” to those with the cash, to viruses which turn people into stark raving lunatics with Hyper Reality inlaid red eyes that want to kill everyone around them!

Cyber-enhancement

Cool hacking rules aren’t the only thing we have going for us in Interface Zero 2.0 though, we also have a deep and varied “Enhancement” system covering a large breadth of cyberware and bioware to kit out your character’s. We also have an engaging system for what happens when you change to much of your meat. Go too far and maybe it’ll be something biological, your health will be affected… You might have to end up having to take a weekly immuno booster to keep yourself from getting sick too often, or the presence of so much ware in your body is limiting your control of it… your systems end up firing when you least expect it. You might end up going the mental route though, and find yourself with Pinocchio Syndrome; you’ll end up engaging in destructive behavior just to prove you’re a real boy (or girl) underneath all that chrome!

Beyond that, we have Drone rules made easy following the savage worlds rules for minions, Golem-mech creation rules, Solar colonies, vat grown simulacrum, android characters, brain bending psychics, and lots of other cool stuff in our setting. Interface Zero is the cyberpunk setting that will let you play and tell any kind of cyberpunk story you want too, psychics on the run from the North American Coalition’s “Psi group”, Investigative reporters digging into the heart of a mega corporations illegal experiments, mercenaries trying to earn a buck playing all sides against one another, or Corporate moguls aggressively taking out their rivals!

We really hope our setting sounds interesting to you, and welcome you to come take a look. This project is a labor of love, and is about giving everyone the best cyberpunk setting and set of rules we can give you! Thanks for taking the time to read this, and we hope you’ll check us out!

Okay, this is Mike, your regularly-scheduled author, here to wrap up this guest post.

As you can see to the left, Interface Zero 2.0 is going to be a cyberpunk tabletop RPG using the Savage Worlds Deluxe system. It is being crowdfunded through Kickstarter. At the time of this writing, it had 11 days to go and had attracted $51.231 of it’s $10,000 goal – those numbers will be updated automatically in the box to the left, so don’t be surprised if they are out of date as you read this. The funding project closes on March 2 of 2013. That means its fully-funded (several times over) and in the process of reaching for stretch goals. 797 Backers (at the time of writing) have found something of interest in the proposal – which has to increase the chances that you will, too.

I love this phase of a kickstarter project because it means that the risks are almost completely gone – the project is funded, and the only question is how much bang you are going to get for your bucks by climbing onto the bandwagon. Hopefully, the organizers have their sums right and the additional products they have included are also properly funded by the Kickstarter.

There are some really nice and potentially useful add-ons included in the stretch goals, products that would seriously increase the overall value of the package to GMs who invest in the kickstarter fundraising. The closer they get to achieving those stretch goals, the more value the total bundle represents – successful funding makes it easier to attract more funding. Tell ’em that Campaign Mastery sent you, and let’s see if we can get this project all the way to the $85K stretch for the biggest bang of all!

NB: Clicking on the link in the box will take you away from this site. If you don’t want to leave us (bless you!), you can use the text link above, which will open the kickstarter page in a new tab/window.

PS: I should probably add that I have no vested interest in this product, I’m not secretly one of the authors or anything like that. I’m not even a backer yet – though I hope to be by the time the funding window closes. I’m promoting this because it looks like an interesting project and a potentially valuable resource.

I’ve received a lot of compliments for the titles and logos that I’ve done over the years. You can see several of them in the illustrations for this article about my gaming schedule and the need to juggle campaigns to match player commitments when you have half-a-dozen GMs and a pool of perhaps a dozen players, including those GMs.

I’ve just been generating chapter headings for the Orcs and Elves series and thought that the readers might be interested in seeing exactly what’s involved – and who knows, there might even be a technique or two that you can pick up along the way.

The Tools

I use CorelDRAW and CorelPAINT (aka Corel Photo-Paint), both version 7, because I bought both the software and the license second-hand from a friend who was moving to a non-windows environment. I know there are more recent tools out there that may be more powerful – I even have a few of them – but these suit me. So Photoshop and GIMP users will have to adapt the techniques that I use to their own software environments.

Phase I: The Text

1. Start CorelDRAW. Open one of the previously-completed results. It will consist of text and a ballooned form of the text, overlapping in transparent and semi-transparent layers, looking something like this:

2. Save the file as the new document name. This prevents accidental overwriting of the source.

3. Ungroup and separate the layers into their constituent parts.

4. Put temporary outlines around the components without them. I use a dark orange because it’s handy to me in the RHS color swatch selector.

As you can see, there are 6 layers. They are shown in order from uppermost to the eye in the finished graphic to lowermost. I’m going to create a new one from these elements.

5. Remove all but one of the original letters.

6. Select Each of the layered elements and break them apart into separate curves, then weld these into one big curve. Move them to one side as they are done, until only the text remains in the “page”.

This shows the structure of each element more clearly, so I’ll run through them. Next to each are a pair of swatches: the first shows the fill with transparency turned off, the second shows a monochrome blue fill with the transparency still on.

• The uppermost layer is individual letters of the text, rendered as curves, with a variation on a shiny gold fill that I created many years ago and still use regularly. No transparency.
• The text shadow layer is the word in the actual font that I am using – in this case, Bradley Gratis, 294.188 pts (I work big because flaws become invisible when you shrink the image to usable proportions – if you work at a reasonable size, you’re stuck with any problems). Because I have used a hairline around the individual letters (a slightly golden yellow) I also have a hairline in black around these to make the text exactly the same size; normally, when rendering a font, it has no outline, just a fill. The effect makes the shadows look slightly rough around the edges, but it’s less fuss than the alternatives.
• Shadow Layer 2 is a subtle yellow-grey-to-golden-yellow fill, rendered almost completely transparent but with a slight conical transparency oriented vertically.
• Shadow Layer 1 is a solid yellow-brown fill, with a more acute conical transparency angled toward the top left at about 45 degrees.
• Gold Layer 2 is a yellow-to-orange conical custom fill, brightest in the top left, with a conical transparency that is most transparent at the bottom right. Note that the transparencies all have approximately the same centre while the conical fill of this layer is offset slightly down and right.
• Gold Layer 1 is another variation on the same Gold fill used for the text. The darkest tones have been muted to a paler yellow. There is no transparency.

These layers all have different purposes. The uppermost text layer is the communications. The text shadow is there to make it stand out. The two shadow layers give the ballooned text a sense of solidity, of being a 3D object. The Upper Gold Layer tweaks the colors of the primary layer to match this, while the bottom-most layer imparts a subtle metallic nuance to the ballooned text while connecting the whole thing visually with the uppermost layer, making it all feel like one object. It might seem almost invisible at the bottom of all the other layers, but its absence is very obvious.

7. Change the text layer to whatever I need the new layer to be. Create a duplicate and place it next to the rendered topmost layer. Create a second duplicate and place it next to the first ballooned layer, as shown.

8. Combine the first duplicate with the rendered letter, then break it apart into individual curves. The “D”, “e”, and “o” all contain hollows within, so recombine these to get the original letter-shapes back. Get rid of the original rendered letter (the leftover “C” of Chapter), it’s no longer needed. Group the rendered text.

It already looks good, doesn’t it?

9. Align the rendered text with the original shadow text, then manually move it up and left until it looks right, and then group them together so that they will stay put:

Phase 2: The Ballooning

10. Now it’s time to work on the ballooning. Take the copy of the shadow text and give it a white fill.

11. Generate a contour around the outside of the text at a radius of 30 pixels. CorelDRAW automatically fills this with black so that it’s hard to see (unless you tell it otherwise). Here I have replaced the black fill with white:

Notice how all the letters except the “o” join together? Sometimes that means that letters need a little bit of manual kerning adjustment instead of the default positioning, but the original “o” looked right. So I’m going to need to manually edit the shape slightly.

12. Extract the original text, leaving only the contoured shape.

13. construct a “patch” over the top of the offending area. Weld the patch to the original. Here’s a pic before and after the weld. The patch is shaded blue:

Although it might not be obvious, I carefully gave the patch curved edges that matched the shape of the letters, as you can see in this close-up:

Sometimes, other edits are needed. j, i, t, and g give me trouble regularly, and I don’t like the regulation capital-I that comes with the font, so I often have other editing to perform at this stage.

14. Make three duplicates of the resulting shape. Note that CorelDRAW positions duplicates on top of the original – being able to see which one is naturally on top is very helpful at this point and is the real reason for the white fill.

15. Just as the original “Chapter” layers are in order, top to bottom, so I want one of these to be placed alongside each of those layers in order from top to bottom. Once they get separated, there’s no visual way to tell which one’s on top, so I make sure I get this right.

16. Combine each with the layered, transparent object beside it.

17. Break each object apart.

18. Get rid of the original “Chapter” text, it’s no longer needed.

19. Recombine curves as necessary to create the layers needed for the new title text.

Here’s the result:

These all look fine except for the bottom one. The original fill has darkened corners, which are sometimes useful and sometimes a problem – this occasion definitely falls into the latter category. So I select the object and open up the fill dialogue box, and edit the fill. Here’s a before-and-after, note the top-left corners:

If the bottom-right had projected down – if the word ended in a backslash ( \ ) for example – that side would have needed a quick tweak as well.

20. Now it’s time to put the whole thing together. I line up each layer roughly correctly with the layer above it, then align the two.

Gold layer 2 plus Gold layer 1:

Plus Shadow layer 1:

Plus Shadow layer 2:

Group them all together and send them to the back – just in case the relative layer order has been sustained but the overall order relative to the parts that are to go on top has gotten mucked up. It happens :(

21. The final step in this phase of the operation is to align the two objects to their respective centers, then tweak as needed until it looks right:

22. Save the file, then export it as a bitmap, 1:1, ready for use by CorelPAINT.

Variations

The chapter numbers that I use are actually modifications of the numbers designed to go on the shield graphics at the start of each article. What’s the difference? And how do I convert them?

The differences are four-fold: the uppermost transparency layer is missing, and the fills and transparencies have been slightly tweaked (actually, since I did these first, it’s the other way around); there is no shadow text layer (and that causes more trouble than you might think, as you will see), the colors are much stronger and more vibrant, and they are of a different size. The difference is really stark when you put one of them next to our “Demo”:

Phase 3: Working The Numbers

So far, I have been working in CorelDRAW, but now it’s time to shift gears. CorelDRAW is a vector-based drawing program, meaning that it understands lines defined by complex formulas (that you never see or directly interact with) and fills within those lines. Everything is calculated mathematically. CorelPAINT is a bitmap editing program; it assigns color values to individual pixels, and a “line” is an optical illusion.

The next phase starts by extracting the numbers. Because I created these in batches in CorelDRAW and exported the result to jpgs, they are all lumped together in a single document:

So the first step is to extract the numbers we want.

23. Use a rectangular mask to select an area containing one pair of numbers. On the Edit menu, copy the masked area to a file, named for the number, and saved in the native .cpt format. So what you see to the left would be “30.cpt”.

I will normally process the entire set at once, so I would end up with 30.cpt, 31.cpt, 32.cpt, and so on, all the way through to 39.cpt.

24. When you open that document, the entire masked area is an object*, floating above the document. So merge it with the background with control-down arrow.

Dispelling the confusion
The things that you work with in CorelDRAW are called “CorelDRAW objects”, which are abbreviated to “objects” on the menus and dialogues. The pixels that you work with in CorelPAINT can either be part of the background or can be turned into a “CorelPAINT” object, enabling it to be moved independently around the page, rotated, distorted, resized, etc. These are also abbreviated simply as “objects” in the menus and dialogues – which is understandable because as an discrete ‘object’ you can do more or less the same things to both. Plus some specialized extras in specific programs, like playing around with the transparency of the object and the way it gets “merged” with the background, both of which I’ll be using later. CorelPAINT lets you alter the whole image at once, just an area that has been masked off (like covering the rest with tape when painting part of a car), or one individual “object” at a time. So they aren’t the same, but they are called the same thing – and can have similar things done with them. The big advantage of the native CorelPAINT file format is that it preserves the layers and individual objects as separately-manipulable items. Only when you save as a jpg, bitmap, gif, or png do some or all of these items get lost – producing a smaller image that can be seen in a web browser, but having few other advantages. All clear? I hope so!

25. This next part is a bit tricky: I want to select, with a mask, the inner part of the gold number so that I can turn it into an object, which I can then use to create the missing drop shadow. The key is the black rendered number at the top. I select a rectangular mask that completely covers the black number, then use the magic wand at a setting of 48% to de-select the white areas. I then move that mask over the top of the relevant part of the gold image, using zoom to position it precisely where I need it to be.

26. Object > Create Object from Mask turns the central portion of the rendered image into a separate image, floating on top of the rest. After carefully noting the precise position, I’ll move it out of the way, leaving a hole in the rendered image where it was located. In this case, a “virtual” rectangular coordinate of 51 across and 595 down permits me to position it precisely where it was. So, what I have now is what you can see to the right:

27. Next, I want to deal with the color-correction of the outside layer of the numbers so that they will more-or-less match the text of the word “Demo”. So, rectangular mask around what’s left of the gold number, then magic wand to deselect the parts I don’t care about. I can ignore the part in the middle, where the newly-created object used to be.

28. Image > Adjust > Color Tone to bring up my tone controls. Desaturate 25 to 30%, increase contrast 10%, desaturate 10%, increase contrast 10%, lighter 10%. The result is still brighter than the “Demo” text, but the demo text was getting brighter in that direction, so – allowing for a space between “Demo” and the number – it looks about right. Compare the result to the left with the uncorrected image I showed you earlier.

29. Next, I need to convert this masked area into another object, then move the first object back to where it was. Of course, since the larger object was created first, I will also need to bring it to the front. I then group the two together so that I can work with them as a unit and crop the image to get rid of the black version of the number, as I don’t need it any more. That leaves me with the image shown to the right:

Phase 4: Document Merge

30. I still can’t put the black shadow in – because I know the precise size and position that it needs to be, relative to the FULL size of the number, not this rough approximation. Before I can do that, I need to transform my rendered “Demo” text into an object, and enlarge the paper space enough for the steps to come. Too much white space is a temporary problem, too little can be a nightmare. I’ve put a black border around this one to show how much space I leave:

31. Next, I copy and paste the number object group from its original file into the working file. As you can see, it’s still nowhere near the right size.

If I had created the shadow in the previous stage, It would get resized when I enlarged the object and would have looked horrendous:

Phase 5: Resizing & Positioning

32. So the next step is to get the size right. Where the number has a flat element, like the bottom of the two, I’ll get the bottom of that in line with a flat element from the text – the r in “Chapter” or the m in “Demo”, in this case. Bear in mind that I’m talking about the brighter, inner part of the number. Where it has an angled part, such as the three, i’ll use that relative to the o of “Demo”. If there is a descender – and there are some – I will use the bottom of the “p” in chapter – and if there is no descender in the word (there’s none in “Demo” then I will deliberately include one for this purpose, with the intention of slicing it off afterwards – “p Demo” – if I expect to need it.

33. Once I have thr bottom of the number lined up more or less correctly, I’ll slide it across to the capital letter of the word, holding the CTRL key to constrain the movement:

34. …and then enlarge it. I want the top to be the same height as the capitol or just a little larger:

35. But that moves the bottom of the interior, which is why it wasn’t necessary to be super-accurate in step 32. So I move the numbers back and fine-tune. Then I’ll move the numbers into the final position, estimating the spacing by eye to roughly the same as an ‘e’. I may find that I need even more space beside the “Demo”.

36. Before I go any further, I need to convert the word “Demo” into an object if I haven’t already.

37. I’m finally ready to create the inner shadow. I start by ungrouping the numbers and selecting the top layer. I then create a drop shadow (Object > Drop Shadow) oriented bottom right with the following parameters: 100% Black,0 feather, offset 20 horizontally and 10 vertically, Direction: outside, curved edges. Drop shadows are automatically grouped with their parent object, so I then ungroup the two and combine them into a single object (Object > Combine > Objects Together), or Control-Shift-L.

38. One final tweak of the position, and I’m ready to move on to the next phase.

Phase 6: Final 3-D rendering

39. I combine all the objects into one. It makes following steps easier.

40. We start with another drop shadow: 100% black, offset 20 and 20 to bottom left, feather 50%, outside, curved edges:

41. Ungroup those and select only the text, not the shadow. Now, a third drop shadow: RGB 6,27,111, 75% opacity, 0, 0 offsets, pointed top right, and feather 30.

42. But if you look closely, it doesn’t quite look right. The blue over the top of the black just looks odd. Consider this close-up:

To fix this, I need to ungroup the blue drop shadow, deselect the main lettering. I can tell I’ve done this because of the 75% opacity, which is reflected in the object opacity slider. The pair of objects when both are selected have a total transparency of 100% opaque; only when only the blue shadow is selected will the slider show 75%, and that only because that was the opacity value that I selected in the drop-shadow dialogue that created it.

The key control to fix the problem is the merge-mode drop-down next to the opacity slider. All I have to do is change the blue drop shadow merge mode to “if darker”. Here’s a similar close-up afterwards:

And here’s how the whole image now looks:

Final Processing

The final steps are fairly straightforward.

43. Select all the objects and combine them together into one.

44. Mask > Create Mask from object.

45. Image > Crop > To Mask. This gets rid of any excess white space.

46. If necessary, invert the mask.

47. SAVE THE FILE. That’s the final step at full size – in the case of “Demo 30”, 3549 pixels wide and 1202 tall.

48. Resample the file to the “correct” size for use on the website – 7% of the original. Specifying the same % value instead of a numeric value means that all the results will be at the correct size relative to each other. If I wanted to use this graphic in a work designed for printing, I would keep it at 300dpi and only reduce it to 29% of its original size – that would give the correct image dimensions at full resolution. If I wanted to use it in a high-resolution display, like a map for download, I would only reduce it to 58% of its current size (600dpi) or even enlarge and sharpen it slightly (116% for 1200dpi). But, for use on the web, 72dpi does the job, and that means 7%.

Where did these numbers come from?
The largest single word to be rendered in this way was “Introduction”. I decided what size, in pixels, I wanted it to be, and noted the percentage value that resulted from the resampling.

49. Save the file as either a .jpg or a .png. The first can be reduced in file size by manipulating the quality, the second has a higher inherent quality.

Here’s the finished product:

Economies

It sounds like a lot of work – and it is. But by processing the numbers 10 at a time, I can get a batch done to completion in 2 or 3 hours. How many will I need? I’m not entirely sure. The original outline of Orcs & Elves called for about 35 chapters. The current outline requires 72 chapters – but “Dwarfwar III” was just one chapter and now it’s eight. That doesn’t happen often, but even one chapter in ten exploding like that amongst the 52 that aren’t completely finished could potentially run the total up to 107 chapters. Well, I’m both an optimist and a realist – speaking optimistically, I don’t see that happening that often, and speaking realistically, it will happen but I’ll be trying hard to minimize it because it means more work.

I’ve generated chapter numbers through to chapter 89, and can use them to make more if I have to – but I’m hopeful that it will be enough. With Chapter Titles for chapters 1-29 already done, that leaves 50 to go or about 10 hours work. That sounds reasonable to me, given the value that the chapter titles brings to the finished product. And, since there will be at least 20 articles before the Orcs & Elves series is done, the investment – when spread amongst them all – is small.

And, of course, if I’m ever minded to publish the whole thing as an eBook, I still have all those finished titles ready to be resized and dropped into place, so the work is an investment in future productivity. And, as a bonus, I got this article out of it! I hope it helps others.