Names resources for your games

Great names are critical for immersion. Name an NPC Bob and you set a bad tone for any serious campaign. However, even the best GMs get stumped occasionally on generating great names. Following are links to several online names resources, lists and generators.

Before diving into the links though, I have a naming tip for you. We’ll use my Pathfinder campaign as an example. Make a list of all the cultures and races you will want names for. Next, make a list of Earth languages, past and present. Match one Earth language to each culture and race.

That’s it. It sounds simple, and it is. But it makes planning and running games so much easier! It is fast to prepare because so many Earth name lists are available online. Once you have this all set up, you are ready for the whole campaign.

In my Riddleport campaign, I have built a names spreadsheet. Across the top are races and cultures. I give each two columns. In the first column I place male names for the group. In the second, female. When I need a Taldan male name, for example, I just go to my spreadsheet and pick the first name from the list. The list is randomized so NPCs do not appear in alphabetical order in my campaign. :) If the name sucks, I delete it and select the next.

To populate the spreadsheet, I did the following:

1. Made the list of cultures and races I needed names for
2. Assigned each an Earth language
3. Googled for the Earth language + name, or I went to one of several sites I have bookmarked
4. Copied and pasted into spreadsheet

Location names are a bit more tricky. My first tactic is to name a place after an NPC. That works like a charm, adds an instant hook to the location, and gives the PCs something tangible to research if they ever choose to investigate the location’s history.

My second tactic is to use my names spreadsheet and mash two names together. I’ll take the first half of one name (or the whole name if it’s one syllable) and jam it together with the second half of another name.

My third tactic is to use Google’s language tools. I’ll type a location name in English, using nouns and descriptors, and generate the translated version. For example, “Big Rock” in Czech is Velky Kamen, a great settlement name.

List of Great Names Links

Online Generators

Behind The Name. Lots of cultures. Includes fist and last names, male and female.

Squid.org. Includes fantasy and Earth names.

Rinkworks’ oldie but a goodie fantasy name generator.

Chris Pound’s language machines. Click trhe “sample output” links.

Yet Another Fantasy Name Generator. A tossed salad of results but offers interesting filter function.

The Random Name Generator. Generates names from US Census data, so best for use in modern and future settings.

Seventh Sanctum. The holy of holies in random generation.

The Pagan Name Generator. Fun times!

Manbon’s generators. Scroll down to see lots of random goodness.

The Forge. Strange GUI, but interesting results. Enable pop-ups, then click Enter then click TheForge.

donjon’s Fantasy Name Generator. Lots of generation options.

Generatorland. You will not find exactly what you’re looking for here, but it is worth a visit to just see what you stumble on.

Totro, the Fantasy Random Name Generator.

James’s Random Generators. The NPC generator offers random names in its cool results.

Abulafia. A wiki-based generator with lots of name choices.

Schub’s Online Fantasy Name Generator.

Randomly Generated Identity. Best for modern and future games.

Baby Zone’s Baby Names Inventor.

Software Generators

Everchanging Book of Names. Shareware. License purchase opens more data sets.

Tablesmith. Awesome shareware app. Be sure to grab name sets from the Yahoo! Group.

Excel generators for download.

Lists of Names

(Dictionary of Names).

Phone book. Just google “phone book” + city or country. For example, here’s one for Singapore.

Atlas. Just google atlas + city or country and use image results for faster reference. For example, here are search results for “atlas china”.

Behind The Name. Includes etymology for further inspiration.

Baby Names. First names galore.

Babyhold. Offers several cultures.

Name Meanings. Several culture lists.

Medieval Names Archive. Ye olde feast of names. Scroll down for the lists.

803,423 Names by Category.

The Canonical List of Evil Baby Names.

A Collation Of Viking Names.

Resources

For synonyms, Old English and general inpsiration use a dictionary or thesaurus: http://thesaurus.reference.com/ and http://dictionary.reference.com/

A list of colours.

Subscribe to word of the day lists. Each day you receive a word and its definition. Many words will make interesting NPC names. Use the definitions as a hook for the NPC’s personality. http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday, http://wordsmith.org/awad/, http://www.wordthink.com/.

Anagram names. Great for plot twists!

Getty Vocabularies. Great for obscure or exotic words you can turn into names.

Language Encyclopedia. Use the sample lists to generate names or to help you find good matches for Earth culture names to in-game cultures.

Anagram generator. Great for names as clues and twists.

Great names make games more fun. Take a bit of time to create themetic names lists for your cultures and races. Offer these to your players when they make PCs to help them fit into the game world better and immerse themselves into the game.

The Premise

Archetypes for RPGs are usually defined either by the psychology of the character or the abilities of the character, but other classifications systems are possible. These can yield a different perspective, which can be invaluable.

This series’ approach is based not so much on what the characters could do as a team, but of how the characters fit into a team. I have defined 27 archetypes (and counting!) based on this concept.

A single character may fit into just one niche within the party or may fill multiple roles, either willingly or reluctantly. An entire group of characters may have an archetype in common, but it is my contention that each character should have at least one role from this list that is unique to them alone. The archetypes are as much a function of the personality of the player as they are the abilities and personality of the character in conjunction and in comparison with the rest of the party.

The purpose of this series is to enable the tailoring of scenes and adventures in a game based on those roles – either highlighting the role, using the role to complicate the parties’ lives, or simply as another avenue for making sure that everyone at the table has something to do in each adventure.

A note about general comments regarding this series

While comment is welcome on the subject in general, especially the suggestion of any archetypes that I haven’t thought of yet – if I agree, I will add it to the pile – I want to avoid making future instalments anticlimactic. As a result, although I will read any general comments and suggestions you may have, any comments aimed at the rest of the list may be edited or even removed. I promise that if we don’t publish your comment, I will have paid close attention, and will give credit where it is due when the time comes!

In the meantime, discussion of the archetypes that are the focus of attention in the current article is welcome!

To Recap

Parts one and two of this series have examined six archetypes:

1. The Heart Of The Team
2. The Tactician
3. The Moral Guardian
4. The Rock
5. The Mother Hen
6. The Intellectual

The series picks up from there, as I look at

7. The Faithful
8. The Air-head, and
9. The Flashing Genius

7. The Faithful

A character of this archetype believes in something or someone to the point of total confidence that a successful outcome will be achieved, no matter how difficult circumstances may seem. The ‘someone or something’ might be a deity (religious faith) or a principle (‘love conquers all’, ‘might makes right’, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, ‘the good guys always win’, ‘if we stick together we are stronger than the sum of our parts’, or even ‘math is everywhere’) or a person (‘X is always right’) or a political alliance or other organisation, or even themselves or their training. Taken to extremes, this leads to jingoism and would-be world conquerors and religious fanatics and martyrs.

This archetype clearly takes in a lot of territory, and many quite distinctive characters. The common characteristic is that by placing doubt at arms length, they are able to act decisively, with minimum hesitation, sure that everything will work out in the end if they are only true to what they believe in.

This in turn draws them to careers where a lack of hesitation is an asset. The church, the military, the police force, emergency services of all kinds, acting, stunt work, competitive sports, test pilots… the list gets ever-longer. It has often been said that every racing car driver thinks that he is potnetially the equal of everyone else in the world, and that the key to success is unlocking that potential and getting the maximum that the car can deliver. That doesn’t mean that they do not acknowledge fallability; it simply means that they have confidence that if they overstep ‘the limit’ they will either recover from it, or learn from it.

The funny thing is that the mere act of committing themselves 100% to a task – whether it be taking a corner in a racing car as fast as possible, or putting themselves completely in a role, or standing staunchly against seemingly overwhelmning odds, they will often achieve more than those who lack that faith would have thought possible. That’s why one of the priority tasks for all sporting coaches is to get a team’s confidence up, especially if they have lost a match!

Does everyone need something to believe in? The question requires deep philosophical reflection to answer, and that answer is usually contentious. There was a time when I thought so – that people either believed in God, for example, or subsituted belief in something else for that faith, and that those who had nothing to believe in were mentally or emotionally ill or injured in some way. In more modern times, I’m not so sure; whether that is a sign of growing maturity, cynicysm, or confusion is another question! But I do believe that faith in something is a trait that comes naturally to people, and that the strength of that faith can vary from one individual to another, and that the absence of that faith makes someone entirely reliant on their own emotional and psychological resiliance, and hence more prone to suffer as a result of any shortcomings in those areas.

To qualify as a member of this archetype, this beleif has to be very strong, central to the character’s or the person’s attitudes and actions and choices, for good or ill.

Examples of The Faithful

Almost every one of the subjects of faith listed above brought one or more characters firmly to mind as an example. Quite often, it was the thought of that example character that provided the entry onto the list, and not the other way around. Ned Flanders, Magneto, Dr Doom, Charles Eppes from Numb3rs, Gibbs & Abby from NCIS, Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, Judge Dredd, even William Stannix (Tommy Lee Jones) in Under Siege (even if the only thing he believes in now is Revenge, or himself)… the list just goes on and on and on.

Numb3rs Complete Pack

NCIS Season 1-7 Pack

Oceans 11-12-13 Trilogy Pack

Under Seige

Plotlines for The Faithful to avoid

All too often, plotlines for this archetype fall into two categories: The Contradiction and The Affirmation.

In The Contradiction, the plotline exists to cast doubt on the validity of the faith. This usually takes the form of an encounter with a character who succeeds in overcoming or threatening The Faithful despite having views or philosophy or even Faith in something that is diametrically opposed to the beliefs of The Faithful. Many GMs employ this plot as a homily to the power of Faith itself, implying that this is superior to any specific subject of belief, faith in which might be erroneous.

This is usually a reflection of either the personal beliefs of the GM, or a philosophy that permits Beleiveers and Non-believers to work together instead of being at odds – a somewhat-tolerable sort of politic awareness, a statement that “I may not believe in what you believe in, but I can respect that you do believe in it.”

This type of plotline can very easily overstep the mark, treading on a player’s personal beliefs. It can very easily degenerate into a statement that is percieved to be critical of a personal belief of the player. Some people can keep this sort of interaction at arm’s length – “it’s just a game” – while others can’t, or don’t want to. The plots can also very easily become preachy, and there is little that is more boring in a game than preaching to the players about the philosophic nature of reality. They are also fairly dull and predictable, simply because they are so obvious, and that alone is good reason to avoid such plots.

The Affirmation is the exact opposite, a scenario designed to show that the character’s belief is right. This not only suffers from almost all the problems of The Contradiction (it’s less common and hence less predictable, but that’s the only difference), it adds a near-certainty of plot railroading to the compound of woes. Again, this type of scenario should be avoided.

Which brings me to two less common types of plotline for The Faithful that are often overlooked: Ramifications and Expansions.

Ramification Plotlines

A plotline which gives a Faithful the opportunity to explore some of the ramifications and consequences of their faith always works well. It avoids all the problems listed in the previous section by presenting a character with circumstances that are interesting, and in which their belief will prompt them to act in a certain way, without making judgements of the character’s beleifs, one way or another. This is often presented as a plot subtype, The Test Of Faith, but that is not the only such plotline that is possible.

The key to these other subtypes of plot is generally to put the character into a position where their belief is working against them as much as it is working for them. If, for example, a character believes that his team will always win because their hearts are pure, a scenario in which one of their team becomes tainted with some scandal while at more or less the same time, they confront another team whose hearts are even more pure – but who oppose the characters’ team – and who make an offer for the Faithful to change sides, will result in divided loyalties and lots of scope for interesting development. Perhaps the road to success will lie in The Faithful helping the character of Tarnished reputation to redeem himself, or perhaps the character will choose to switch sides (in line with the Faith), only to discover that everything is not as it seemed, or perhaps the character will be confronted with a crisis of confidence in his or her team. The GM can pull as many strings as he has to in order to create the circumstances; getting out the other side is up to the player, and it is the tension and interplay between the two that creates the in-between.

Another example: A scenario exploring the question, “Does having faith in a deity mean agreeing with and supporting everything that Deity does?” Perhaps the question is “Can a deity make a mistake?” or “Can a deity be irrational?”. Or even, “How will The Faithful feel about unsavoury acts committed in the Deity’s name?”

And one more: Sometimes, Love is described as a form of mild insanity, in that it can drive people to perform acts that they would never normally dream of. In the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Cardboard Box”, Love for her sister’s husband drives a woman to disrupt their marraige in hopes that he will turn to her; she reinstates a condition of alcoholism in him and beings about an affair between her sister and a third party. The victim of this love triangle is so wounded that his love drives him to kill both his wife and her lover and to send their ears to the manipulative sister, a way of suggesting “It’s all your fault,” or “Look what you made me do?” In all of this, the love of one sister for another also plays a part. So where would someone who believes that “Love Conquers All” land if they found themselves in the middle of this mess? Would they support the unfaithful sister, the faithful husband, the manipulative but love-struck sister, or the unfaithful sister’s lover?

Expansion Plotlines

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5. When it comes to theology-based characters, like Clerics, or characters with a central philosophy in which they believe, no plotline is better than a confrontation between them and something that is completely alien to that faith, and which drives them to widen their beliefs.

I don’t really need to go any deeper into the subject in this post, as I have already written a post specifically addressing this point, one of the most frequently-referanced articles on the site: A Quality Of Spirit. That’s right, I consider this type of plotline to be that important.

Without The Faithful

In terms of team psychology, The Faithful is a very interesting character archetype. Confidence can be contagious, just as doubt and uncertainty can be catching. While having a confident character pushing the party to ‘go for it’ can get the team in over their heads from time to time, it also keeps them from endless procrastinating and excessive caution.

While groups who have never adventured with a Faithful may have a balanced perspective, those who are accustomed to striking a balance with a Faithful in their midst should find themselves overplanning and becoming overcautious. And if they attempt to compensate for this tendancy, they should start swing too far in the opposite direction, and find themselves underplanning and being overconfident. Over time, this oscillation should dampen down.

Problem: Players have different personalities to those of the character archetype. That means that the unexpected absence of the archetype won’t have the same effect; instead it will simply lead the other players to step a little out of character and pick up the slack.

It’s not that they are suddenly worse roleplayers, it’s just human nature – the players are drawing apon their own mental and emotional resources, even if those are not the same as those of their characters.

That means that it is up to the GM to make the players ‘feel’ the absence. Unless he is totally convinced that the players are not subconsciously compensating for the absence and are playing their characters in a manner that is consistant with the way they were playing them previously, he has to bring the absence of the Faithful to life for the players.

That means that no matter how little planning they undertake in the first adventure – or the first part of the first adventure – without The Faithful, it should turn out to be too much. They should discover that their opponant has used the time to his advantage, and all their planning is worthless. And then, in the second, he should ensure that they are continually taken by surprise by things that should have occurred to them.

This requires the GM to perform a very delicate balancing act. He should not alter or force the outcome on the players in any way, shape, or form – so any difficulties that he imposes as the adventure proceeds have to be carefully counterbalanced as the scenario reaches its climax. That, in turn, is tricky to achieve without the whole thing feeling contrived and artificial and melodramatic.

The best solution to this problem is to up the hyperbole and melodrama prior to the climax, and progressively understate the melodrama as the climax approaches. Instead of exaggerated drama, baroque – even lyrical – language should be substituted – a symphony instead of a rock show. Express the feelings and emotions of the NPCs and not how big and mean they look, and watch for an opportunity to play up a turning point at which the outcome becomes inevitable.

The situation itself will infuse the climax with melodrama; by reducing the thickness with which you are laying more on top of that level inherant in a climax and focussing elsewhere, you can nuance the emotional overtones and avoid the feeling of inevitability that can leave players feeling like they are on a plot train when they are not. This is a lesson I’ve learnt the hard way!

8. The Air-head

This archetype also acts without thinking, but not because they have faith in something that will ensure a successful outcome!

While it may be surprising to many, this archetype contains more variety than is initially aparrant, and may even have profound depths. This result is best explained by considering an alternative definition: an “Air-head” applies their intelligence to matters other than those of everyday action and concomitant interaction with the people around them. Einstein, under this definition, was an air-head, just as much as Cordelia in season 1 of Buffy The Vampire-Slayer.

Einstein notoriously concentrated so deeply on abstruse philosophical and physical questions that he became the prototype for Hollywood’s cliche, the absent-minded professor.

Cordelia was obsessed with image and popularity and other things that were trivial in comparison to the problems of Buffy and Co – and that was her role, as a foil.

Many Forms Of Intelligence

In fact, there is the concept that there are many more varieties of intelligence than the logic-oriented measure of performance with which game mechanics usually associates the term. Anyone who is strong in such an area of development, who could be said to have a ‘natural instinct’ for certain problems, and who is also less developed in the usual application of intelligence to everyday life can be said to be an “Air-head”.

For example, contemplate a person who always knows the right thing to say or do to make the people he or she cares about feel better, regardless of the circumstances – a form of “emotional intelligence”. Such a character could easily be an air-head in every other way.

There is a long-running and still popular Australian sitcom, Mother And Son, which revolves around a woman, Maggie Bear, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but who is often posessed of a cunning that permits her to exaggerate and take advantage of her infirmity to manipulate those around her, especially her son, Arthur. Six seasons over a 10-year production run testify as to the popularity of the series, together with the fact that it is still being shown in repeats; the wit and intelligence with which it approached an otherwise sensitive subject are shown by the many awards that it won. (The first two seasons are now available through Amazon for our non-australian readers: Season 1, Season 2).

Illness may have taken much of Maggie Bear’s intelligence when it came to ordinary life, but there was more going on behind her state of confusion than most people can muster on their best days. This role is the perfect proof that an air-head can have depth and even be capable of profound contributions to the plots around her.

Other Examples

I am deliberately ignoring more obvious examples, like Rain Man! British Comedies often touch on this concept as well – The Young Ones, for example – but so have American Comedies like Night Court and Welcome Back, Kotter.

Two other sets of examples come to mind, which – since they derive from successful Hollywood movies – are more likely to be accessable to the majority of our readers.

The first are the misfit patients in The Dream Team, who are able to work together and use their infirmity to save their Doctor and catch a pair of crooked cops.

The second are also patients in an asylum, in a comedy, in which they become ad-writers: Crazy People. I can’t go any further into the plot without ruining it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but once again, the impairment of the characters is what enables them to succeed.

Plotlines for the Air-head

The ideal plotline for an Air-head uses their incapacity to get them into trouble, and their natural genius – whatever form it might take – to get them back out again. Equally ideal is the opposite, where a character’s gifts lead them into trouble but they eventually stumble back out again to a succesful resolution after a comedy of errors.

Often, these are not sufficient to be the central focus of a plot, because only the one character generally fits the description, and that character generally takes over the spotlight in all such plots. It’s often a better choice to give this character central billing in a subplot, and to occasionally use them to get the other characters into trouble; otherwise, the players will tend to (a)feel short-changed in terms of screen time; and (b) find the air-head to be more trouble than the character is worth.

The big advantage of this aproach is that the “air-headedness” can occur more frequently, but a lot of the time, the other players are reaping the benefits of having such a character around while only indirectly catching the downside; this will make them far more tolerant of the character being around.

It’s also important to play up the comedic potential, if that is appropriate (it usually will be, but there are some cases where it would not fit). Players won’t tend to laugh when their characters are the butt of the jokes, but do exactly the same things to an NPC and it’s a whole different story!

Without the Air-head

Another characteristic of the air-head is that they are often emotional catalists, drawing out emotions in others, one way or another. We all tend to root for the underdog, and the air-head is so out-of-depth in most situations, so much a fish out of water, that they naturally become likeable to the audiance (the players) and to those around the character. Those who meet the PCs are going to tend to be a little more sympathetic, and tolerant, and even forgiving, if they have an air-head in their midst.

Take that away, and the atmosphere around the PCs should change noticeably. The PCs will have to work much harder than they have been used to if they want to win friends, make allies, or influance people. Those around them will cut them a lot less slack.

In part, this is simply due to the absence of a factor that has been making life easier for them; in part, it will be the result of those “muscles” having atrophied on the part of the other characters because they are used to having that factor in their favour.

The air-head could also be counted on to defuse tension and lighten grim moments; these should affect the other characters more strongly. Tension will often escelate into harsh words or physical conflicts; and the tone of the campaign should become darker and more oppressive, at least for a while.

9. The Flashing Genius

The last archetype to be examined this time around also does things without always understanding the reasons why, or the implications. This is the flashing genius, the character who every now and then has a brilliant insight, but is far from brilliant the rest of the time.

In early drafts of this series, this archetype was actually considered a subtype of the Air-head, above. It was only when I realised that a Flashing Genius did not have to be impaired the rest of the time, but could simply be average, that the elements that make this archetype distinctive began to manifest.

Distributed Skill Ranges

More exotic personality constructions are also possible; proficiency in any given field is usually considered a constant, set skill value, but any variation should be possible provided that the average value over time or skill usage attempts matches that constant.

Let’s say that a character has a skill of 10 in something. Don’t worry about the game mechanics, or what that 10 actually means in terms of the character’s capabilities – it’s just a numeric measure.

If, 1/3 of the time, the character had a skill of 2, and 1/3 of the time, he had a skill of 7, and 1/3 of the time, he had a skill of 21 – the average is 10. By having the character choose his skill value with a die roll, 1/3 of the time he will be incompetant (in comparison to his usual state), 1/3 of the time he will be at his usual average, and 1/3 of the time, he would be brilliant.

But brilliance is only noticeable relative to the difficulty of the problems being faced. Some of the time, the extraordinary comptetance would make no difference, and would not be noticeable. Only when the character faced a seemingly near-imposssible problem and was able to solve it almost immediately would the high value be noticeable. This describes a brilliant, almost instinctive, insight.

Of course, attempting to explain the reasons for the solution being correct requires a fresh roll – 1/3 of the time, the character will be reduced to “it just felt right”, and 1/3 of the time he would be able to explain it in general terms – but only 1/3 of the time would he be able to convince another expert in the field. Proof of a solution, acceptance of a solution, would happen a little over 10% of the time.

This character’s abilties would be a dangerous guide to choices of action. One third of the time, his findings would be so far wrong that serious problems would result. And one-third of the time, his findings would be sheer genius. Most of the time, he could not convincingly prove his findings correct, one way or the other, even when he was right. He would lead his allies into trouble, or make the problem worse, as often as he would fast-track a solution.

I am not recommending this as a game-mechanics approach to simulating the flashing genius; this proposal is simply being offered as a means of unlocking some of the ramifications of having a Flashing Genius on your side.

This is a character capable of the most bone-headed blunders imaginable. It is also a character capable of the most astonishing insights. I can’t help but relate this particular variety of flashing genius to Venkman (Bill Murray) from Ghostbusters, and Doc Brown from Back To The Future… (the link points to the special collectors edtion of the trilogy).

More Examples

Many other scientists, both fictional and real, fit this profile. One of the most obvious, at least anecdotally, is Archimedes, whose discovery of the principle of the displacement of water occurred in his bathtub, leading to the famous shout of “Eureka!” (and him running naked down the street), which is still associated with this type of sudden insight. But Archimedes was pretty smart most of the time, so I consider him to be a poor example.

The character I consider to be one of the best examples is that of Dick Seaton from EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Skylark series. Although he was smart, he really only had one or two singular insights – the rest of the advanced technology he used came from other planets that he contacted and learnt from. He is even described (several times) as the Flashing Genius (as compared to his partner, the deep thinker).

And one more scientific example: Rick Moranis’s character in “Honey, I shrunk the kids” is an obvious choice.

Types Of Genius

Obviously, we have the scientific genius, whose insights deepen our understanding of the world around us. But that is not the only type of genius that fits this profile; artists who are suddenly inspired to create a new art style, cooks who come up with an original recipe that becomes a culinary staple, musicians, inventors of all types; battlefield geniuses, driving and riding geniuses, and so on and on. In fact, in any field in which originality is possible, or any skill is utilised, can have a genius. And if that person is not brilliant all the time, he may be a flashing genius, gifted with one singular flash of inspiration.

Plotting for the Flashing Genius

This is actually nuch harder than it might first appear. Most people would think that the wayto do so is to target the flashing genius’ area of expertise, but (by definition) this is an unreliable gift; adopting this course means that the satisfactory resolution of the scenari ocomes down to a die roll – hardly optimum.

A better approach is to build a plotline around infomation that the character would have because of his occasional flash of expertise – for example waiting for the character’s next moment of brilliance and then introducing an NPC who is attracted in some way by the result, and who then becomes the pivot around which the adventure will revolve. Or building an adventure in such a way that the character’s exercising of his expertise is not time-critical.

It’s generally a good idea to look at all your adventures with a view to identifying shortcuts or other benefits that the Flashing Genius can contribute to the team IF their genius sparks, but which are not critical to the outcome.

The other type of scenario that can be crafted is a scenario that focusses on the character’s inability to use their genius all the time, ie where failed rolls will give inaccurate information to the team that gets them into even deeper trouble. Agin, the key to making these plotlines work is to ensure that you aren’t relying on the genius to fail, but are instead using a failure of the genius as a triggering event of some kind.

Adventuring without the Flashing Genius

The time to run a scenario which relies apon the area of expertise of the flashing genius is when that character is no longer around, for whatever reason. This emphasises the qualities that the character brings to the party, forcing them to rely on second-best sources of information – from potentially biased or unreliable sources.

After such a plotline, the characters will be left acutely aware of the little side-benefits and shortcuts that the flashing genius can sometimes provide.

Naturally, such plotlines can’t occur contiuously thereafter; over time, the team will get used to their new configuration, and adventures should return to a normal balance.

Still to come

The series has barely begun! Future instalments of this series will study still more archetypes. Here’s what I’ve still got in store for you:

10. The Wild Card / Rebel / Scoundrel
11. The Strange Uncle
12. The Romantic
13. The Comedian
14. The Egotist
15. The Drama Queen
16. The Panicker
17. The Messy One
18. The Clean / Neat Freak
19. The Hot-Head
20. The Wannabe
21. The Father-Figure
22. The Greedy / Power-hungry
23. The Troublemaker
24. The Jealous One
25. The Comic Relief
26. The Sidekick
27. The Bystander

The Premise

Everything that I’ve ever read on the subject has defined archetypes for RPGs either in terms of the psychology of the character or the abilities of the character, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are other classifications that are possible, and these yield a different perspective that can be invaluable. This approach is based not so much on what the characters could do as a team, but of how the characters fit into a team.

I have defined 27 archetypes based on the concept – undoubtedly not the full gamut of possibilities, but enough, and three more than were on the list last time out of the gate! A single character may fill just one of these roles within the party or may fill multiple roles, either willingly or reluctantly. In some teams, all characters will all have one of these roles in common, but this is unusual; regardless of any commonality, everyone needs to have at least one role from this list that is unique to them alone.

The archetypes are as much a function of the personality of the player as they are the abilities and personality of the character in conjunction and in comparison with the rest of the party.

The purpose of these archetypes is to enable the GM to tailor scenes in a game based on those roles – either showing off the role, or using the role to complicate the parties’ lives, or simply as another avenue for making sure that everyone at the table has something to do in each adventure.

A note about general comments regarding this series

While comment is welcome on the subject in general, especially the suggestion of any archetypes that I haven’t thought of yet – if I agree, I will add it to the pile (as I have done with a suggestion from ppinkosh from part 1 of the series). I want to avoid making future instalments anticlimactic, so although I will read any general comments and suggestions you may have, I may edit or even remove any comments aimed at the rest of the list. I promise that if we don’t publish your comment, I will have paid close attention, and will give credit where it’s due when the time comes!

In the meantime, everyone is welcome to discuss the archetypes that are the focus of attention in this part of the series.

Expanding The Series

The “real world” time pressures that I wrote of a month or so ago (“Jolting The Status Quo“) are really starting to bite as I knuckle down to write this post.

To accommodate those external needs, I have decided to break this series up into a larger series of smaller posts than I had originally intended. The original intent was to break the series into 6 parts, each examining 4 archetypes. The new plan is to detail only 2-3 archetypes to a part. Don’t worry, we’ll still get there in the end!

In addition, some of the write-ups are proving to be larger than I had originally expected; under normal circumstances, that would not be an issue and I would make the post as long as necessary (or at least as long as I could make it in the time available). The change in plan permits a little more attention to be paid to those larger archetypes instead of forcing me to compress them for lack of time.

To Recap

In part one of this series, I looked at four roles that I consider vital to any team:

1. The Heart Of The Team
2. The Tactician
3. The Moral Guardian
4. The Rock

The series picks up from there, as I look at

5. The Mother Hen, and
6. The Intellectual

5. The Mother Hen

The Mother Hen is a worrier, the person who always wants to prepare for the worst. Not necessarily a pessimist, this archetype is nevertheless the type who thinks that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, unless someone makes it their business to do something about it – and they have appointed themselves. Often in teams, this role is taken by the youngest member, because experience builds a track record of success which in turn gives a character confidence.

These characters rarely refer to themselves as “Mother Hens” – more frequently they are “the voice of reason” or “the voice of experience”. While their warnings and suggestions of imminent calamity are rarely necessary, they nevertheless sensitise the other characters to the potential for things to go pear-shaped at any moment. Inevitably, when the characters encounter a setback in the course of a scenario, even though the nature of the difficulty is rarely what was forecast, the mother hen will seize apon the trouble as proof that they were right, and simply lacked the strength of imagination to forecast all the possibilities.

Many GMs would prefer to live without a Mother Hen amongst the characters at the table; by insisting that the characters plan for all conceivable contingencies, they can slow play down to a crawl. The only compensation for this is that the presence of a Mother Hen is invariably a backhanded compliment to the GMs regarding their ability to make life interesting for the characters.

There is also an element of Don Quixote in such forecasts of doom and gloom; if the PCs plan for all the things that can go obviously wrong in their schemes, but know that the GMs will seek to put reversals, trials, and tribulations in the PCs way anyhow, all they are really achieving is making sure that the GMs are forced to become evil geniuses in formulating unexpected and unlikely plot twists. And that’s the real value to the campaign of this archetype: the stop the GMs from taking the lazy way out. In the long run, the campaign benefits.

Examples of the Mother Hen

Strangely, I’m actually hard-put to discern any examples from the media. Perhaps that’s because this type of character – and the bogging down that comes with them – are death to the momentum of stories. Movies, TV shows, and Comics all read better if the lead characters wade in, boots and all, and win through on their wits and skills. But there are a couple: Han Solo has a touch of the Mother Hen about him, especially in the original Star Wars, leavened by his tremendous ego; C3PO has even more about it, but plays it for laughs. Crease in Sneakers, and – in an odd sort of way – Mother’s paranoid conspiracy theories from the same movie – also qualify. Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series is another example – where, again, it’s played for laughs, and to sharpen the contrast with Riggs. And the best example of them all is Marion Cunningham from Happy Days – for those who are old enough to remember it!

Star Wars Trilogy Pack with bonus disk

Sneakers (Special Edition)

Lethal Weapon Box Set

Happy Days Seasons 1-4 Pack

Curiously, almost all these examples are males – perhaps because a female role of this nature would be too stereotypical.

Plotlines for the Mother Hen

This archetype rarely needs to be made the central focus of a plot, and it’s rare for it to be the only archetype posessed by a character. GMs are usually better rewarded by focussing on other aspects of the personality of the Mother Hen. Nevertheless, it can occasionally be humorous for all the dire portents and grim warnings to manifest; just because the PCs are prepared for them, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen, at least some of the time. The smarter the villain, the less likely this should be – if you’re smart enough, you should also be able to anticipate what might go wrong, and how would-be interventionists might seek to take advantage of those problems – and will have plans in place to overcome their problems.

In fact, that’s a fairly reliable gauge of am enemy’s intelligence in my campaigns – the dumber the villain, the more likely the plotline is to follow the PCs script, at least up to a point.

Without The Mother Hen

What would life be like if the team lost their Mother Hen? For a while, they wouldn’t notice much difference, except that they wouldn’t spend as much time in endless discussion before going into action. They might even regard it as a positive development.

Sooner or later, however, they would find themselves over-committing, getting in too deep, getting caught by some embarrassingly obvious complication. At the same time, life would be getting endlessly more complicated by loose ends, as little things that they have overlooked start coming back to bite them. Slowly, the campaign should naturally become a bit more soap-opera in tone, because of the entanglements of these loose plot-threads.

When this happens, the team’s batting average should start to slip, and their escapes become even more hairs-breadth. Eventually, one or more of the characters, weighed down by the potential for things to go badly wrong, will step up and start to fill the shoes of the Mother Hen.

If the GM does his job right, they will ultimately come to look apon the ‘old days’ (with the original Mother Hen in tow) as ‘the good old days’, and regret the loss of the word of warning. The other members of the team might even go so far as to try and get the original Mother Hen back!

6. The Intellectual

Not every team includes an intellectual, but they are commonplace. Also known as an Anorak, the Intellectual is a character who glories in understanding what is taking place and (usually) explaining it to everyone within earshot. I should also make special point of noting that I have distinguished this archetype from a related one, the Flashing Genius.

The Intellectual doesn’t have to be a genius – he’s not necessarily a Reed Richards or Tony Stark. He certainly doesn’t have to be an inventor or gadgeteer. There are many more variations on this archetype than these options, but they all have certain traits in common.

The intellectual values intelligence above all other characteristics, and relishes the application of intelligence to problems. There is also an element of snobbishness about them, in that they find it difficult not to show off their intellect or knowledge. They will tend to build up knowledge-type skills, and (to a lesser extent), analytic and deductive skills.

Those traits are the defining characteristics of the Intellectual. Outside of them, everything is up for grabs, and that is why there are so many variations on this theme. Subtypes include the Detective, the Technician, the Analyst, the Engineer, the Scientist, the Reporter, the Lawyer, the Historian, and the Trivia King or Queen.

Many characters might be considered “Intellectuals” within a limited sphere of speciality, but that alone is not enough to qualify for this archetype. It is also important to distinguish between the Intellectual and a character who is a mouthpiece for exposition – it must come naturally to the character in order for them to qualify as a genuine Intellectual.

Examples Of The Intellectual

Finding examples of this archetype is made more difficult by the way that this role is often “contaminated” by the Flashing Genius archetype – which excludes many of the more obvious choices, because they would confuse the issue. So much so that the combination is almost a cliché. For this reason I have excluded Spock from Star Trek, Reed Richards (both Comics and Movie versions), Dr Doom (Comics Version), Tony Stark/Iron Man, Emmett “Doc” Brown from Back To the Future, Charlie Eppes from Numb3rs, and even Professor X from the X-men.

More pure examples include Hank McCoy (aka The Beast) from the X-men (especially the early appearances of the character in the comics), O’Brian and Bashir from Deep Space Nine, and even Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager. I would also throw in Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code, the members of the Black Widower’s mens’ club (from the short stories of Isaac Asimov), Lisa Simpson, almost every regular cast member of the CSI franchise (Original, Miami, New York), and just about every TV detective you can point to.

X-men Omnibus (issues 1-31)	Deep Space 9 Complete Series	Star Trek Voyager Complete Series	The Da Vinci Code Giftset	Tales Of The Black Widowers
The Simpsons Season 9	CSI Seasons 1-10 Pack	CSI Miami Seasons 1-8 Pack	CSI New York Seasons 1-5 Pack	Columbo Seasons 1-7 Bundle

A few of the latter are illuminating, but none more so than Homicide Detective Columbo. This character’s persona plays completely against type until he has the proof he needs, and the explanatory exposition at the end of each show, where he confronts the culprit, is a return to archetypical behaviour, almost as though he can only hold it in for so long before he bursts. If you watch many episodes, you will also find controlled “mini-releases” of archetypical behaviour along the way.

I would also characterise Dr Watson as an Intellectual, but NOT Sherlock Holmes himself – one always gets the impression that Holmes finds the need to explain his conclusions an irritation, one that he tolerates as necessary to convince the people to whom he is explaining to take action in response to his deductions, and out of friendship for the Doctor.

Plotlines for the Intellectual

Mysteries and puzzles are obvious, even to the point of cliché. But more interesting plots are possible; for example, you could play on the arrogance of the archetype by introducing a rival – either an up-and-comer (“fastest gun” syndrome) or a challenger who claims the character’s past work has been flawed on occasion (a staple of the mystery genre, and one of my favourite subtypes within that type of plot). Or you could play on the arrogance in a different way by having someone attempt to deceive the Intellectual.

But as a general rule, building strong plots around the Intellectual generally requires a completely different approach; you can’t simply take the archetype at face value.

Often, the most interesting aspects of an Intellectual are not archetypical in nature, but centre on how those archetypical traits are shaped and influenced by other aspects of the character and his or her personality. The personality, skills, and expertise of the player is also a vital consideration (I have one player who is a great friend and excellent player and GM, and a big Sherlock Holmes fan – but he can’t stand mysteries in RPGs and makes a lousy detective even if the skills of the charecter say otherwise). In other words, play the man (or woman), not the ball (or, in this case, the archetype).

Nor is it generally necessary to integrate scope for the intellectual into every plot (though the GM should always remember their presence), except in cases where the player needs extra support from the GM to make up for their deficiencies (but not for their character’s). This type of character can generally make their presence felt within the team even without an explicit contribution to make.

Intellectuals and the non-intellectual player

Some players feel that unless they are already inclined in the direction of the Intellectual, they cannot adequately play this archetype. This is not the case, though in the bad old days it did require extra prep on the part of the GM; in modern times, technology has come to the GM’s assistance in this respect.

The Old-School Approach
The keys to the old-school method for a non-intellectual player to act in the capacity of an Intellectual are Key Words and Index Cards.

The GM should extract from his planned adventure for the day a list of key words and create an index card for each with a couple of pieces of trivia related to the subject. Each time that keyword comes up, add a couple more.

When the key word comes up in play, the GM simply hands the index card to the player of the Intellectual, providing him with a source of relevant trivia – and the occasional useful factoid. The Intellectual then roleplays the delivery of that trivia.

The GM can even make his task easier by creating the index cards from books of trivia and integrating the results into his scenarios instead of going the other way around. This might be putting the cart before the horse, but it is – at least in this case – a valid technique.

Another old-school approach is to buy an almanac (preferably from the era of the campaign if you can find one) and just hand it to the player as his “repository of knowledge”. And it’s this last old-school approach that has been modernised in the 21st century to give:

A New-School Approach
The best modern technique that I know of requires the use of a laptop or similar device. The GM cherry picks a couple of useful reference websites, and the player simply does his research on the fly after a successful knowledge roll. To maintain some limits, the GM should not permit the player to click on an external link, no matter how relevant, unless the player achieves a spectacular success of some sort, and neither should he permit the use of a search engine.

This takes virtually all the prep out of the equation for the GM, except for campaign-specific items. Using an appropriate website, like Google Docs or Google Site, the GM can even modernise the creation of “index cards” on those subjects as part of his regular campaign creation, and create a reference for his own use at the same time. The result is that these additional references can be accessed in exactly the same way as the other websites.

The Loss Of The Intellectual

It’s when a team loses their intellectual after becoming used to the presence of the archetype that the GM’s work really begins. The reason for this is that what is often perceived as annoying, even distracting, chatter from the Intellectual often provides a context to the events that surround the party, a connection into the perception of a bigger picture.

The problem is that the remaining players will tend to step into the breach, even if their characters had previously shown no propensity for the role of The Intellectual of the party. As a result, they will generally not feel the absence in the way that they should, and may even find the change to be beneficial in that they get more ‘screen time’ as a result.

In order to properly emphasise the absence of this archetype, the GM should carefully scrutinise the skill lists of the remaining characters, searching for those skills in which none of the remaining members of the party are especially knowledgeable, the GM should deliberately craft a short series of scenarios or subplots revolving around these skills, purely to emphasise the party’s loss.

In particular, if the player is still at the table and has simply retired his previous character, special care should be taken by the GM to balance his natural tendency to focus on the new character (because it’s new and everyone is still getting used to what it brings to the table) with plots emphasising the absence of the old character. At least for a while.

If one can be contrived, a small plot arc in which seemingly-separate and unrelated plotlines suddenly dovetail into a larger picture, revealed to the PCs at the last possible minute, is an excellent approach to this circumstance.

The plots should emphasise the need to locate and interact with substitute sources of information – and the risks of deception and incompetence that come with this change. In addition, the party should find themselves more vulnerable to certain kinds of manipulation – hoaxes, scams, con games, and deceptions of all sorts, without the “walking encyclopaedia” at their fingertips to ferret these out and spot the warning signs.

During this period, the GM should be unusually strict when making rulings about the other characters attempting to ‘fill in’ for the intellectual, especially in distinguishing between player knowledge and abilities, and those of the characters. Gradually, the GM can relax this stance to his normal standards and permit the other characters to step up to the plate, once the objective has been achieved.

And who knows? One or more of the new NPCs brought in as replacements for the Intellectual might become another of those fantastic, memorable characters that give each campaign their own unique cast.

Still to come

Future instalments of this series will study the following archetypes:

7. The Faithful
8. The Air-head
9. The Wild Card / Rebel / Scoundrel
10. The Flashing Genius
11. The Strange Uncle
12. The Romantic
13. The Comedian
14. The Egotist
15. The Drama Queen
16. The Panicker
17. The Messy One
18. The Clean / Neat Freak
19. The Hot-Head
20. The Wannabe
21. The Father-Figure
22. The Greedy / Power-hungry
23. The Troublemaker
24. The Jealous One
25. The Comic Relief
26. The Sidekick
27. The Bystander

We’re just getting warmed up!

Enter to win these

Win sets of new Dungeons & Dragons minis over at RoleplayingTips.com. 12 sets total are up for grabs!

Just send in your minis and battlemats tips and advice by email or by leaving a comment in the contest blog post.

Multiple entries are allowed, so enter often for a better chance to win. Enter now.

Be sure to read the entries already submitted while you are there. Some great ideas!

iAnnotate is fast becoming my most-used in-game iPad RPG app. It not only reads PDFs, but it lets you edit them too. And this is where it becomes a killer GMing app for me, which I will soon explain.

Thanks to Tom Ganz for pointing this app out in his comment on good gaming apps for the iPad.

Features

iAnnotate is available on the iTunes App Store for $10 at the time of writing. Here is a rough feature list:

• Make annotations: Text Notes, Highlight, Underline, Free-Form Drawing, Stamps, Bookmarks. You can edit and move annotations around.
• Full-featured PDF reader: supports standard scroll and zoom gestures, supports portrait and landscape modes, also offers full screen mode.
• Easy transfer of files: I use Dropbox, which is free. You can also use email, iTunes sync, file URL or Aji’s free desktop transfer software.
• Tabbed PDF Reading: This was a big factor for me. I want rules, adventures, notes and other files open, all at the same time. There is a 6 file open limit, which I hope they increase.
• Customizable Toolbars: Reposition, resize and customize all the toolbars.
• PDF support: Copy and paste text, view existing PDF annotations, support for internal and URL links, and PDF outline/bookmarks support. Fully integrates annotations directly into the PDF, which means if you send files to other people, they will see the annotations you’ve made via iAnnotate. Those other people can use the PDF reader of their choice. I have only tested this with PDF reader on a different machine, but it worked well.
• Document and library search: Search the files you have imported into the app. You can also filter by new, recent, unread, and annotated documents, or browse using folders. I find the GUI a bit confusing. I wish there was just a button that says Open File. Most other functions are intuitive, though.
• VGA output: Another potentially awesome feature. I’m hoping I see a VGA adapter under the Christmas tree this year to test this out. :) According to the Aji site: “Use the iPad VGA dock connector to display your documents onto an external projector or monitor. Your document view, along with all annotations and popup displays, is mirrored as you navigate and annotate the document. You can also reference documents in other tabs on your iPad, without affecting the presented display.” Sounds like a win to me.

For RPG use

Those are the app’s features, so how can we take advantage of them in-game? I would love to hear your ideas and experiences. Here are mine.

Mapping nirvana

I created an abstract map of Riddleport for my campaign because I wanted to change some buildings on Paizo’s map. I traced their map in Illustrator and PDF’d it. However, you can use any map embedded in a PDF for glorious mapping.

I use my city map to record building identities. While every building is sketched out on the map, I have not figured out what every building is being used for, who owns it, who lives there and other details. To make things tricky, in my version of Riddleport the average building height is three storeys, thanks to magically aided stone construction over the years. So I have potentially three storeys-worth of notes to make on each building!

In-game mapping and notes are simple

Zoom into files for easier mapping

Bookmarks make navigation fast

I find it easier to just make up locations as I plan specific encounters or play the game. That means I can use iAnnotate to label buildings and make notes as I go. This has solved a huge problem for me. Where have the PCs visited? What was at the location they visited? Who was at each visited location? I just note these on the PDF as I GM now.

As a bonus, I can search my annotations, so finding buildings previously visited is a snap.

Ultimately, this tool finally marries content with function. I have my map and I can make make notes on it, but with all the benefits of computing: infinite note space, editing, searching and easy filing. Woohoo!

In my screenshot you can see the annotations I have made on my Riddleport map so far. Those black dots are from Illustrator, so ignore those. When I first made the map I was going to update it in Illustrator and re-export each session. Then Tom told me about iAnnotate and I immediately switched, but forgot to remove the black dot labels in Illustrator.

For any map that needs annotation now, I am using this app on my iPad. My next dungeon map? Yup, I am making all my notes on locations and encounters on the map itself after I put it into PDF format. My next pre-designed building layout? Yup. The world map? Yup.

House rules

Make comments in your rules

I GM Pathfinder and the Sord product is an awesome rule summary reference. You can get it at RPGNow for $5.

However, when I use it with iAnnotate, all kinds of possibilities open up.

I bookmark frequently used rules. This reduces searching during encounters and speeds up combat, not only because I have an awesome rules summary in Sord, but because I can get around the PDF fast with bookmarks.

You can create bookmarks quick. So do not skimp on temporary ones. If you plan an encounter where monsters have certain abilities or certain tricky rules will come up, bookmark those rules in Sord and delete them after.

Further, you can pass your iPad around. Let a player figure it out while you do something else.

You can see in the screenshot how I have also made a note about house rules. It is the electronic equivalent of using Post-It Notes in your rulebooks. Have a comment, note or house rule? Put it right there in the exact place you need in the PDF version of your rulebook. Links, too.

NPCs

Now it's a killer NPC organizer

I recently received a reviewer copy of the Rite NPC Deck. Now I am trying something new: using NPC images plus iAnnotate.

The product comes in a series of JPG files, which I imported into a single PDF. Then I opened the PDF in iAnnotate and used the bookmark feature to note what NPC pictures I am using for my campaign. I named the bookmark by the NPC name for fast reference.

Next, on the NPC’s page in the PDF, I started making notes about the NPC. Like maps, this now gives me the best of both worlds. Image + data, all-in-one. A single tap on the screen puts the PDF in full-screen mode, which hides the menus and all my annotations for a player-friendly show-and-tell of the NPC when they meet!

Next up, I will experiment with Hero Lab, as I make Pathfinder NPCs using that softwar and it supports PDF export.

Just for reading

I also use the app just to read PDFs. The tabs let me flip between files quick when researching and preparing for a session. I keep an annotation open to record ideas as they hit me, and drag the annotation around so it follows me as I go.

What would you do?

If you could add notes, bookmarks, highlights and lines to a PDF for RPG use, what would you do with those features? Got any ideas how we can take iAnnotate further to help us GM better?

Last time, I continued examining the concept of The Internet as an analogy or metaphor for Psionics, especially telepathy. The examination of web phenomena is now in the home stretch – here are the final seven, and a few closing thoughts.

15. Cookies

A cookie is a small file placed on a computer by a website which facilitates a more interactive experience with that website. That’s pretty much part of Internet 101. Sometimes, these do nothing more than record the last time you were at that particular website, or even just that you’ve been there before; sometimes, they are the key to unlocking a far more immersive internet experience.

The psionic equivalent of the simple cookie seems fairly obvious – some sort of implanted subconscious memory that simply tells the telepath that he’s been here before. Perhaps the thought could include the date of the previous visit.

But go beyond that simple concept and we start running into more interesting – and difficult – possibilities. What if the psionic left behind a catalogue – the equivalent of a saved Google search – of everything in the mind, neatly tabbed into some sort of organisational system? When he returned, he could easily discover what’s changed since the last time he had probed that particular mind, enabling him to quickly keep tabs on key individuals.

The central questions that this raises are three-fold: How much information can be “implanted” in this way? What will the side-effects be on the target? and How much effort is involved?

Before permitting anything on this scale, the GM should carefully consider his answers to those three questions.

There will be more to be said on this subject in the next section.

16. Fisching

Fisching is an internet nasty that is (unfortunately) on the rise. It’s essentially a scam in which an email or website misrepresents themselves in order to gain access to secure information, like bank account passwords. Everyone should know about Fisching and how to spot it – know their bank’s policies on what they will and won’t include in an email, know how to check the destination of a hyperlink before they click on it, and so on. Not enough people do, unfortunately.

The telepathic equivalent brings us to a new concept: Psi-bots.

A Psi-bot is a programmed set of thoughts and reactions, essentially a ‘virtual machine’ constructed within a target mind entirely out of thought. A poorly constructed Psi-bot would manifest as an obviously rogue thought that leaves the subject wondering “Where did THAT come from?” after the fact. A well-constructed Psi-bot would seem to be a natural thought to the owner of the mind in question, leaving them completely unaware that anything out of the ordinary has taken place.

I’ve commented before on some of the unwritten assumptions that have been in place within my campaign’s treatment of Psionics, and this brings us to another one: the more sensitive a piece of information is, the more aware of it the target is. So a telepathic probe to determine what the target had for breakfast is a lot easier than a telepathic probe to determine the target’s bank account number and password. Especially in a world where Psionics are known to be real, anyone who – completely out of the blue – thought about the latter would become immediately suspicious.

To access that information, there are really only three choices: (1) risk detection; (2) wait until the subject accesses the information for their own use – which might take a very long time – or (3) try and probe for the information while they sleep. This is only marginally better, as it would probably mean interrupting whatever the target was dreaming about for a visit to the bank – the sort of weird dream that people tend to remember. Only by creating a far more plausible and seamless dream transition can the telepath hope to avoid detection – and that takes time and extra effort. You might be able to construct a nightmare about not being able to remember your PIN, but most people rarely think about their bank account numbers – and that’s the big tip-off.

If Psi-bots are permitted to exist by the referee, it opens the door to the telepathic equivalent of Fisching as a fourth solution to the problem. Instead of the telepath having to spend hours, days, weeks, or even months, keeping close watch on the target until the secret is revealed, he just launches the Psi-bot and lets it do the waiting for him. The next time the target accesses his PIN number, the machine momentarily blocks the recall and shunts the memory of the number into a “file” where it is stalled, then suggests to the target that he has pulled out an old card by mistake – better double-check it – which gives the Psi-bot access to the account number and name. Or any one of a dozen similar scams, depending on what the ‘secure’ information that the telepath wants to obtain happens to be.

17. Viruses

Of course, if a Psi-bot can ‘derail’ someone’s thinking, then it can be designed to do other things as well. It might be designed to act as a ‘suicide pill’, killing the target when a particular thought or memory gets accessed. It could be linked to brainwashing or other mental controls – people will do things in their sleep, or in a video game, that they would never do in real life; so if the target thinks they are dreaming, or playing a game, when they aren’t, normal behaviour can be completely overridden, turning ordinary people into assassins or fifth columns. (More good ideas for scenarios!)

And perhaps the nastiest trick of the lot is to leave a doomsday weapon in someone’s mind designed to go off if it’s ever accessed by another telepath.

Depending on how the referee wanted to restrict this concept, the side-effects on the host’s mind might be anything from a headache to a catastrophic failure, total collapse. The more devastating the side effects, the more this capability becomes reserved for the bad guys – at least in a superhero campaign, YMMV!

Which leads in rather nicely to another subject for contemplation, a stroke of genius from Babylon 5:

Traitor To The Living

The Experience Of Death

What happens when you’re in someone’s mind as they die? It wasn’t something that occurred to me until I came across a novel by Phillip Jose Farmer – “Traitor To The Living” – but while that raised unsettling questions about mortality that were somewhat inspirational at the time, it fell short of giving me enough inspiration to answer this particular question, just enough to inspire me to ask it. Lacking a satisfactory resolution, I set the issue aside and let it gather mental cobwebs for a couple of decades.

“Flatliners” raised the question again, and raised the prospect of an answer, but it was Babylon-5 that really brought the subject into prominence for me, as part of the fifth-season episode, “The Paragon Of Animals”.

Telepathy offers a means to manifest theological experiences as subjective reality. The ability to be present in someone’s mind at death, or prior to birth, means that the theological foundations of your campaign can be directly scrutinised – so you had better have your answers ready, or – at the very least – some prepared obfuscation.

This seems a really good point at which to point you at another article on the subject here at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit: Big Questions In RPGs, and move on before the discussion gets sidetracked.

18. Social Networking

Social Networking sites are an evolutionary outgrowth of the internet dating site. The concept is to enable the site’s members to find and communicate with people of similar interests, forming a distributed community of friends who (by definition) are more likely to be interested in what an individual is doing and thinking.

The psionic analogue is a variation on the “Cookies” discussed at the beginning of this post. If a telepath left the equivalent of a telepathic “signature” in the mind of ‘interesting people’, it would facilitate the recruiting of new members into a psionic community. This is a slightly darker application of the cookies concept; it still revolves around using people for your own purposes, presumably without permission, but the usage in question is relatively innocuous. Call it morally gray; some telepaths might consider the development of such a community to be worth the price paid. I can’t help thinking of Anne McCaffrey’s “To Ride Pegasus” when I consider this possibility, and contrasting the impact of precognition to that of this telepathic approach to the same basic problem.

19. Twitter

Twitter’s psionic analogue harkens back to the old “broadcast” metaphor. Essentially, it’s broadcasting a thought describing in a short burst something that you are doing or thinking, that is worth telling anyone who’s interested, about.

I have always ruled that “Telepathic broadcasting” necessarily opens the mind, leaving one telepath exposed to another; the more limited the broadcast, the smaller the window of vulnerability. In effect, I was forecasting this analogy before there even was a Twitter!

20. Website Hacking

Now we’re getting into the really nasty stuff. If a non-telepathic mind is the equivalent of a third-party website, a clear implication of the “world wide web” analogy from part 4 of this series, then hacking a website so that it says what you want it to say instead of what it should, is a form of psychic mutilation. And, unless the owner has his mind conveniently backed up somewhere – something that’s actually possible in my campaign, though the technology is not trusted by the players – the “defacement” will be permanent.

Psychic Surgery might be able to remove the damage, but could never completely restore what was there before; there would be noticeable psychic scarring, which is to say that there would be emotional and psychological impacts. The cure could well be worse than the disease!

What’s more, it has recently been shown that neurological connections continue to be formed throughout our lives in response to learning new things and acquiring new skills and habits. That would imply that the physical infrastructure of the brain would alter as a consequence of the “hacking” – effects that not even a “full restore” from a “backup” would undo. The target – assuming he was unaware of what had happened to him – would find himself occasionally thinking and doing things instinctively that he might not want to do. This would be not all that dissimilar to Gulf War Syndrome or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or even Shell Shock. Recent studies have even shown a similar effect in soldiers following the US Civil War (refer to the Gulf War Syndrome page cited above).

Given all of the above, the justification would need to be compelling before any such “website hacking” or Psychic Surgery could be perceived as anything other than a villainous act.

21. Spyware / Hijack exploits

That brings us to a rather Matrix-like concept, that of using the minds of ordinary people as nodes in a distributed-processing system – something that makes vastly more sense than the “power generation” concept of the Matrix films. Where the analogue of Website Hacking affected the conscious mind of the target, this sort of malicious activity usurps the subconscious mind. In fact, I remember once reading a short story in which all of perceived reality was a side-effect of software running in a computer system of super-biological complexity, i.e. the dreams of the computer. Sorry, I can’t provide any specific references, I no longer remember the name of this story (I’m not even sure of the details).

Hijacking people’s minds and putting them to work for you as elements of a gigantic supercomputer is the psionic equivalent of spyware. Like the computer virus analogy discussed earlier, this is dependant on the creation of Psi-Bots. It would also require a ‘bank’ of telepaths to act as servers, connecting the distributed computing ‘nodes’ with the central processor, where the results are compiled.

One extremely high-level telepath might be able to do it, but it is more likely that a psionic community is responsible – which ties in with the telepathic equivalent of “social networking” as a means of recruiting members into the community.

The whole thing sounds like yet another telepathy-oriented scenario to me…

The Internet as a metaphor for Psionics

I’m sure there are internet phenomena that I haven’t thought of. But by this time, it should be clear that the Internet makes a very useful tool for thinking about Psionics and the way that such abilities could be employed.

This is a framework that takes the ideas on the subject that I’ve had kicking around for many years and reframes them for a modern age. The rewards are an enhanced accessibility to the concepts of Psionics and its limitations on the part of both GM and players; and that can only be a good thing, making psionic characters easier to play.

The value of analogy

On a larger scale, this example also illustrates the value of using analogy as a vehicle for examining a concept. Some of the ideas – the scenarios, for example – that have been described in the course of this article simply didn’t exist in my mind prior to writing this series. That’s both an immediate payoff for the time and effort involved and a demonstration of that greater understanding that I referred to a moment ago.

The same approach can be used to simplify any other complex phenomena in your games. Pick an analogy and see where it takes you. If it illuminates some new aspect of the concept, or helps to define and refine the concept in any way, then it is a useful metaphor for the phenomenon.

Einstein was once said to be able to think in purely mathematical terms; but his writings suggest that he did so by means of analogy. If it’s good enough for a genius, then it’s good enough for me!

New player surveys are a worthwhile time investment

Roleplaying Tips reader Zerfinity sent me a campaign survey he used to build his new group. A friend once told me the best finishes have great starts. So it is with great campaigns, and one key is getting a group of like-minded, enthusiastic people around you each game night. Zerfinity’s survey offers a great tool to help you make this happen.

As a double-win, a reviewer of Filling the Empty Chair was looking for advice on campaign surveys, and this post is in answer to him. To paraphrase Lowell, how do you select a new player if you get multiple responses to your gamer wanted ads? A campaign survey like Zerfinity’s could be your answer.

Zerfinity’s Campaign Survey For Prospective Players

Thank you for your interest in my campaign. I want to create a group where players needs and interests match my interests and GMing strengths. To do that I’ve created this survey. There aren’t any wrong answers to these questions. I’ll be evaluating responses to these questions according to the degree to which your answers suggest you will have fun in a game that I run.

Hopefully, even if my campaign isn’t a good fit for you, you’ll learn a little about your gaming interests and needs as a player.

Please only take this survey if you are interested in my campaign, willing to travel to the [city or area code] for games, and can commit to attend sessions [required frequency] [required percentage]% of the time. There are a limited number of free spots here, so it is important that only potential players take this survey.

These first questions are necessary to find out if the most basic elements of match to a campaign I run are present.

1. Can you commit to only playing good characters?
Y/N

2. Can you commit to gaming every other Saturday most of the time?
Y/N

3. If you marked yes, what percentage do you expect to be able to attend?
80%
90%
95%
100%

4. Please indicate if there are any types of people that you aren’t willing to game with:

The next questions are about roleplaying styles. Often a mix of fairly closely related styles help but so does some degree of diversity. Just be honest and know that I don’t have one of these but rather several that I think can work in a campaign I run.

5. My favorite ways to rock on my air guitar in game have been:

• To acquire, use, and optimize new spells/powers, abilities, and other resources to make me and the party successful.
• To think cleverly, strategically, or creatively to overcome obstacles or make obstacles easier to defeat.
• Me bash!
• To play the same kind of character I usually play in most campaigns.
• To have a character participate in a fun story and hopefully to be successful.
• To stay in character even when it might hurt me. To get and revel in the spot light.
• Hey, I’m just here for friends and snacks. So if I laugh hard and make others laugh, that is a good session.

6. Please name some of the systems that you are most interested in playing:

7. Tell me at least three campaign events or situations you have enjoyed in previous gaming:

8. Please tell me a little bit about two campaign events that you did not enjoy from a previous campaign and help me understand why you didn’t like them:

9. Please tell me about a conflict you have had with a player or GM and how that was resolved. Please share especially your role in the conflict, what did you to create it, and what did you do to resolve it.

10. If you can’t attend a session, please indicate what you like to have happen to your character:

• My character’s abilities may being used.
• My character may be roleplayed by a player I trust.
• A GM I trust may roleplay my character.
• It’s okay if my character dies while I’m gone.
• It’s okay if my character dies while I’m gone but only in near TPK or TPK situation (so we’re all in the same boat).
• My character may pop out of the action when I’m gone and back in when I return the next session.

11. Please indicate which of the following responses best matches your expectation for missions:

• I’m okay with failing a tangential mission.
• I’m okay with failing a mission related to the overall campaign goals.
• I’m okay with failing a mission related to the overall campaign goals, but only if it isn’t too hard to fix the failure.
• I’m okay with failing an overall campaign mission thus far (e.g., prevent a gate from forming to an evil plane) as long as we get new related goals (e.g., fight what comes through the gate and then close the gate).
• I’m okay with failing a mission related to the overall campaign goals as long as we get new goals and those goals may be unrelated (e.g., survive the demon horde pouring through the gate; save/protect the McGuffin from the demon horde).
• I’m only okay with failing side missions that are tangentially or only loosely related to main goals. Beyond that, I like a GM to keep us moving closer to a successful completion of the over all goal.
• I’m okay with failing. Period. Even the whole campaign.
• Though I know the party won’t be perfect, I really need every mission to end with at least a modicum of success.
• I prefer the party to set its own goals and don’t want a given goal in the GM’s mind before we create characters or before we start a mission.

12. I like roleplaying where:

• Everyone focuses on the group goals
• There are group goals, individual goals, and those goals may be different.
• I like individual goals to converge with group goals.

13. When has it been okay or even fun for your character to die in a game? (Check all that apply.)

• Never. How could that even be fun?
• When the character can be resurrected and eventually catch up to other characters in power level.
• When it forwarded a plot overall or made a very dramatic enjoyable scene.
• When the GM thought we made serious mistakes and the dice dictating it.
• When I got an awesome death monologue.
• When I had something else to do at the table afterward.
• The acceptability of character death is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes to create a new character.
• Character death is more acceptable the longer and more successful my character has been.
• Character death is less acceptable the longer and more successful my character has been.
• Character death appropriateness is based on my character. If I play a cautious, careful, combat avoid, and combat savvy character, I expect those traits to help the character live longer. If I play a reckless foolish character, I expect death to catch up to the character eventually.
• It is okay to me if other characters die for character/story reasons but not if it affects my character too much.

14. When we start the campaign, I want my character to be able to:

• Influence a small group of people known to him or her
• Influence events in a small group
• Influence events on a local level (neighborhood or small town)
• Influence a large city
• Influence a state or region
• Influence a country
• Influence a world
• Influence a plane
• Influence the fabric of reality

15. By the time we finish a campaign, I want my character to be able to:

• Influence a small group of people known to him or her
• Influence events in a small group
• Influence events on a local level (neighborhood or small town)
• Influence a large city
• Influence a state or region
• Influence a country
• Influence a world
• Influence a plane
• Influence the fabric of reality

16. How fast do you like your character’s power level to develop?

• I like to see power development every session.
• I like to see power development every few sessions.
• I like to see power development a couple of times a year.
• Power development is not as important to me as character development.

17. How realistic do you like character mortality to be?

• Realistic: A point blank shot to the head should be fatal almost every time even for PCs.
• Heroic: For most people in the world a point blank shot to the head would be fatal but not for my character.
• Realistic or Heroic as above but with faster healing to keep the game moving and my character in the story.
• Cinematic: A point blank shot should kill, but the bad guy flinched and grazed me instead. Then I knocked him out and grabbed the gun out of the air and turned it on him before he even hit the ground.
• Superhero: My skull flattens bullets.
• Godlike: “How will you shoot me in the head with that fish?”. . . .”Bwa?!”

18. What kind of overarching campaign goals interest you:

• Halt a danger to a home town
• Fight a war of defense
• Be loyal to an organization (get orders, fulfill missions)
• Stop an evil organization/evil overlord
• Save the world/universe
• Stop the internal power grab within my organization/country
• Build up the power/wealth/status of my loyal patron
• See the world
• Explore different cultures
• Get the McGuffin
• Build a menagerie
• Avenge the wronged
• Protect the weak
• Build my power and the power of my friends

19. How do you feel about dice:

• The dice rule the game
• Die rolls are suggestions
• I want a GM to ignore the dice when it favors me
• I want a GM to ignore the dice when the story would be furthered (even if that sometimes hurts my character)
• Do we really need dice?

20. Desired length of campaign:

• 6 months
• 1 year
• 1.5 years
• 2 years
• An epic campaign of epic longness
• As long as we can keep it going and fun

21. I like playing in a game where:

• Scene A leads to Scene B leads to Scene C, and our success or failure in each leads to how difficult the next scene will be but not whether the next scene will be.
• Where the adventure starts with Scene A and leads to Scene D, but where, when, how and whether B and C come about is up to the players.
• Where the adventure starts with Scene A and leads to goal D, but the path between those points is up to the players.
• Where the adventure starts with Scene A, and from there the players are free to set, change and accomplish their own goals.

22. How do you feel about GM improvisation:

• I like a GM to improvise so I can be free to decide what I want to do. I’m willing to accept some gaffes from the GM as sometimes happens when improvising.
• I like a well planned, well balanced adventure and am willing to accept some railroading so the GM can meet that need.
• I like a well balanced seamless but improvised adventure and get frustrated by GM mistakes or railroading.

The next questions are asking about engagement and participation in a campaign.

23. In previous campaigns, I have enjoyed (please check all that apply):

• Writing character background
• Writing character journals
• Writing session notes
• Finding/making/painting markers for my and other characters
• Helping others and the GM remember the rules
• Tracking NPC contacts
• Helping players/the GM in other ways. Describe:

24. In this campaign, I would be willing to and would enjoy (please check all that apply; don’t worry though, I’m not asking for a commitment, and I’m not expecting you will do all of the ones you check or that you will do any of them all of the time):

• Writing character background
• Writing character journals
• Writing session notes
• Finding/making/painting markers for my and other characters
• Helping others and the GM remember the rules
• Tracking NPC contacts
• Helping players/the GM in other ways. Describe:

Roleplaying encompasses a huge range of or lack of violence. Not everyone is comfortable with every style. I’ve seen players be quite disturbed by the scenes/acts described by the GM or other players. So, the next few questions are an attempt to find out a little bit about what you might be comfortable with in game.

25. Please let me know what kinds of dramatic events can escalate tension or enjoyment and motivate your character(s) to fight against:

• Descriptions of graphic violence/gore
• Violence against
  • innocents
  • women
  • children
  • animals
  • men

• Torture/Sacrifice
• Dismemberment

• Insults
• Kidnapping
• Threats
• Death
• Other

26. Please let me know what kinds of dramatic events you don’t feel have a place in a game that would be fun for you:

• Descriptions of graphic violence/gore
• Violence against
  • innocents
  • women
  • children
  • animals
  • men

• Torture
• Dismemberment

• Insults
• Kidnapping
• Threats
• Other

27. Please let me know if there are any types of violence that would not be okay to happen to your character:

• Descriptions of graphic violence/gore
• Violence against
  • innocents
  • women
  • children
  • animals
  • men

• Torture
• Dismemberment
• Insults
• Kidnapping
• Threats
• Other

28. Please let me know if there are types of violence that would not be okay to happen to your character’s loved ones or family:

• Descriptions of graphic violence/gore
• Violence against
  • innocents
  • women
  • children
  • animals
  • men

• Torture
• Dismemberment
• Insults

• Kidnapping
• Threats

• Other

The next questions are about your experience GMing. Don’t worry if you don’t have any GMing experience, these questions are near the end because they are much less important to me.

29. I might be interested in GMing this group if it is also a good fit for my style:
Y/N

30. I have GMed before?
Y/N

31. I am GMing now?
Y/N

32. I read:

• Gnome Stew
• GameGrene
• GM blogs
• roleplayingtips.com
• RPG magazines
• GMing related Yahoo Groups
• Other. Describe:

Okay now, for the big reveal. Here are some of my preferences and what I’m hoping to build in a group. Let me know what you think below.

33. I’m interested in running a group and campaign that has high player investment (e.g., journals, notes or backstories), where we co-create a story in a world, where the characters are low powered but with occasional cinematic flair, with slow skill/power development.

A group that can last years, where players are nice to one another, where characters are good or at least benign (though not necessarily moral paragons), where characters may die but not often and where self sacrifice would be rewarded.

I’ve also recently discovered something about myself: I tend toward the cinematic. I’m inclined to ham it up for the fun of everyone. As I GM I’m going to be exploring what it means to keep things low powered (no fireball) but still larger than life and cinematic (more swinging from chandeliers). This means more flaboyant NPCs, more crazy leaps from the tops of stairs, and more tentacles that grab you around the neck when you stick your head over the edge of a well.

1. That’s not for me
2. This could be okay but what exactly do you mean by…
3. Meh, its better than no group.
4. Sounds good.
5. Sounds great.
6. Awesome.

All of the questions that I’ve asked are an attempt to help me identify people who would have fun playing in a game like that. I’m not especially fixated on a number of people, though I think the smaller end from 2-5 seems best. If you’re familiar with Robin’s Laws of GMing, you may be interested to know that I’m a Storyteller first, Method actor second, and Butt kicker a distant third.

To satisfy those needs, I intend for the game to be comprised of a mix of approximately 75% roleplaying and 25% combat. Where that spread would be true across sessions is some sessions might not have any combat. I’m open to casual players, especially if she or he is attached to a more invested player.

I like running a campaign where it is possible for players to experience setbacks, but where they ultimately triumph even if ultimately is some time away. I’m not that invested in what happens to a character while a player is gone with the exception that popping out of existence suddenly can cause an encounter to become unbalanced, so that doesn’t work well often.

Comments:

34. Which of the following campaign ideas sounds like the most fun to you? (Please rank them 1-7, with 1 being the least fun and 7 being most fun; I may try to blend the highest vote getters together if possible.)

• A *role* playing heavy low magic fantasy campaign where the players and their characters don’t really know how magic works but get to discover it throughout the course of the game. All or most characters magical.
• A *role* playing heavy low magic fantasy campaign where magic is well established and the characters are working with a magical college as ambassadors, investigators, magical security, and maybe supplemental military forces. All or most characters magical.
• A *role* playing heavy low magic fantasy campaign where your goal is to increase the prosperity of a magic shop that you are affiliated with.
• A *role* playing heavy low magic fantasy campaign where your home city is in danger and the purpose of the campaign is to find the way to rescue it.
• A *role* playing heavy mostly city based low magic fantasy campaign where the short term plot lines are diverse but there is one over arching, save the world plot.
• A *role* playing heavy, low power, psionic, non-military campaign set in a relatively low tech sci-fi future.
• A *role* playing heavy, low power, psionic, military campaign set in a relatively low tech sci-fi future.
• None of these really interest me below this point what are the other options?

Thanks for the survey, Zerfinity! Campaign Mastery readers, what do you think? Any questions missing for you?

My group plays about 20 times a year, 5 hours each time, and we’re going on 5 years now. That’s a 500 hour investment – and counting. While the survey initially seemed a bit long to me, I realized the total time I’ll be spending with the person means a little time spent up front to find the right player is worth it.

I can also see many GMs doing this interview in person, verbally. That would make it social, faster and easier. It would certainly be less intimidating for the player.

Last time out, I started examining the concept of The Internet as an analogy or metaphor for Psionics, especially telepathy – but ran out of time after looking at only 7 web phenomena of a planned 21. So here we go, with the next seven:

8. The World Wide Web

Everyone knows someone else who knows something useful. This information is the telepathic equivalent of a hyperlink, a connection leading from one mind to another. And, like the internet – especially in the 90s – these links are eclectic and diverse, often having nothing to do with the primary subject of the ‘website’ in question.

Accessing that information is a little trickier for the telepath – it’s one thing to know that “Harry knows rockets”, and quite another to locate the mind of this “Harry”. Even the identity might require additional psionic probing to discern, as people rare think of their friends and acquaintances by their full names without making a deliberate effort to do so.

Browser Redirects

Complicating the picture are the equivalent of browser redirects, where the link appears to point to one thing but actually connects to something else entirely: “Werner Von Braun knows rockets” but the individual in question doesn’t know Von Braun personally, just of him. Instead, the link probably leads to a high school science teacher, or something like that.

Dead Links

And finally, even if the link is “Harry knows rockets”, that doesn’t help very much if Harry’s dead (though in that case, the thought would probably be in the past tense) or if Harry’s information is out of date. Maybe Harry did know rockets – fourteen years ago, or fourty.

Nevertheless, a lot of time could be spent “Mind Browsing” for no particularly good reason.

9. Misinformation

Of course, you can’t always trust the information that you find on the internet (we’ll try to always be honest with you here at Campaign Mastery, I promise!).

Whether for reasons of mischief, malice, propaganda, zealotry, ignorance, or error, a substantial component of the information that is presented as fact on the internet is simply wrong or is opinion disguised as fact.

Most of these will also hold true for telepathic communications. If the subject believes something, no matter how erroneously, their belief will be picked up as fact by the telepath who probes their mind. Campaigns of misinformation and propaganda will still be effective, even in a psionic world – unless the telepath just happens to probe one of the few minds “in the know”.

Self-deception, external deception, brainwashing, paranoia, zealotry, ignorance, and error will all result in incorrect information being fed to the telepath. That’s almost identical to the earlier list.

Telepathy will be no more reliable than internet as a source of information – if you stick to the “reputable sites”, you will get reputable (but possibly biased) information; if you wander the backwaters, you will be inundated with disreputable information which might just contain a nugget or two of truth here and there.

As always, the real trick will be separating the wheat from the chaff. The telepath should not get a free ride – even if they can somehow sense the “truth” in the mind of the person being scanned.

10. Spoofs

Some people – usually very creative people – have created some amazing fake videos for the internet. To everyone else, these are the same thing as propaganda – with or without an underlying message. Some will believe what they have seen, some will be sure that the videos have been faked, and some will just be uncertain. Check out five tell-tale signs of a fake viral video for some examples and some tips on spotting the fakes.

The telepathic equivalent adds mental disturbances and mind-altering substances to the list of reasons why a “fact” received telepathically might be faked.

What if the altered state of mind that comes with being high on cocaine, or LSD, or any of the other illegal drugs, or any invented for the campaign, was picked up telepathically? Could you get lost in that alternative mental space and not be able to find your way back out until the subject came down? Could you have your own mental processes so affected (without losing yourself completely) that you were effectively out of your head for a period of time afterwards – or immediately went into withdrawal symptoms?

Telepathy could be very dangerous – to the possessor and those around them, not just to the world at large.

11. Spam

I have always had the notion that thoughts come in different strengths – that something a person was concentrating hard on would be more easily read than something they were focussing no attention on, and that was in the background. The problem with that theory is that you then need some sort of ranking system.

I’ve never constructed one, and there is no clear reference to this concept that I can recall putting into the game architecture that was the subject of the previous posts – though there are some implications here and there that might suggest it. Nevertheless, the analogy of someone shouting with excitement producing a message that is more clearly received by telepathy is one that I expect to continue to use, because it makes the whole process seem a little more tangible during play.

Another phenomenon that has also never been explicitly described within the rules is the presence of – as they put it in Babylon-5 – a kind of “background hum” that you can never really shut out unless you enter a shielded space.

I would liken Spam to the occasional excited mental shout that rises above this mental noise to be heard in isolation. Someone is excited about buying a new car? You get an unsolicited mental image of that new car, and the notion of buying it, that is full of pleasure and excitement. Someone is looking through a list of restaurants, picking those they might like and those quisines they absolutely hate? You get a series of “Spam” telepathic shouts reviewing those restaurants and/or that style of cooking. Someone is wandering around a shopping mall, window shopping? Or thinking about how much they are looking forward to intimacy now that they have medical reinforcement (trying hard to avoid internet spam filters myself, here!)? Or enjoying a beer in the pub? Or craving a hit of chocolate? Or (shudder) a kid in a candy store – or Imelda Marcos in a shoe shop!?

Ian (the player bringing the telepath into the campaign) won’t know what’s hit him… (unless, of course, he reads this article!)

12. Instant News

Another internet phenomenon with an obvious analogue in the psionic sphere is the arrival of instant news. In modern times, immediately something happens, the news starts hitting the web. To find out what’s happening, all you need to do is go to a suitable website, and you will be as well-informed as a newspaper editor would have been in preceding decades.

Ironically, the psionic equivalent is to scan the recent memories of a news editor or television equivalent. These positions require the editor to be continually aware of the latest news and assess which stories should have prominence. Every time a new event or announcement comes over the wire, he has to compare its importance with the items already present – and the result to a telepath would be like an announcer reading the news headlines of the day.

13. Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing is the process of using ‘word of mouth’ to spread the word of some cool new discovery; marketers are now creating cheap version of proposed real ads and placing them on YouTube to gauge reactions and decide which of the ideas should be up-scaled for “the real world”.

It started off when one person would spot something cool on the net and send links to it to their friends; if enough of those friends did likewise, it could galvanise a massive wave of the online community coming to check out the something cool.

As technology made it easier to share the latest ‘cool discovery’, the concept evolved into the marketing tool that it is today. In fact, the term internet phenomenon, which inspired this entire article, was originally coined to describe the subject matter of successful viral marketing.

So what is the psionic equivalent of Viral Marketing? The best answer I can offer is – drum roll, please: – viral marketing.

But rather than the shotgun approach of existing services, and rather than using the internet as a form of cheap market research, Psionics permits targeting and stepwise refinement. Instead of placing the consumer in command of the process, the telepath can ‘play’ the advert in people’s heads as though it were something that they were imagining, can manipulate it and tweak it to resonate with the mindset and personality of the target, and can (effectively) Convert the consumer to whatever message the “advert” is supposed to be selling. Because people think of this “telepathic marketing” as their own idea, they will be committed to it in a way that is rarely achieved using traditional marketing.

The use of a religious term to describe the effect is a deliberate one. This seems to be the ultimate celebrity endorsement – you, yourself – and it’s totally free. ‘Influence’ a dozen or so of the most influential people on the planet and convert them to your cause and they become zealots in pursuit of the agenda you have implanted. The capacity to shape society to your specifications using Psionics is clearly tremendous.

In any world where telepathy is a proven phenomenon, it would undoubtedly be used as a marketing tool by someone.

Only a telepath would be aware of what was really going on – and so the scene is set for the brainwashing of the masses, while only a few isolated individuals have the capacity to even be aware of the manipulation, let alone fight it. This is the ultimate big brother… and something that I will have to use for a scenario!

14. File Sharing

This is a phenomenon for which there is no initially obvious outright psionic equivalent that I can think of. And yet, there are parts of the file sharing phenomenon that translate directly into the psionic sphere.

Copyright becomes meaningless when all you have to do is locate the mind of a legitimate consumer of whatever you are looking for and enjoy it along with them. Pirating the latest release for your own enjoyment becomes trivial when you can ‘ride along’ with the producer or director seeing a finished product for the first time.

It was only when I started contemplating the technology that is used in file sharing, and in particular Bittorrent, where you download parts of a file from everyone else who has that file on their system, that I started to see an analogous capability within Psionics.

Instead of keeping your information all locked away in your own head, why not use other people as offsite storage – without their permission? By including directions on where to find the next piece, and the preceding piece, of the overall package of information, you end up with telepathy being used as a ‘file sharing’ product – any telepath can get whatever you have ‘uploaded’, they just need to come across one piece of it.

Naturally, there are some disturbing civil rights issues raised by this concept. It inherently elevates the telepath to a position of social superiority over the rest of the species. The mindset needed to use people as a personal convenience without their permission would show in other antisocial tendencies; the individual capable of such acts would be convinced that the psionic were a higher form of life, with a manifest destiny to rule the lesser – a Magneto/Doctor Doom level of arrogance.

This is another idea that I’ll have to use as a plotline in the new campaign!

To Be Continued…

Almost there – only seven more to go….

Make your next black dragon unforgettable

Dragon encounters are supposed to be special. Black dragons are supposed to be nasty. Put them together and you get….crickets. It is tricky pulling off a great dragon encounter, especially when player expectations run high from watching movies and imagining Smaug and looking at gorgeous art in monster books.

The good news is you just need to be memorable. You do not need to be better than Tolkein. Just make dragon encounters fun and entertaining. Be larger than life when you game master dragons. Stand up on your chair and flap your arms. Raise your voice. Put on some heavy metal.

You can also make your next black dragon encounter unforgettable with this month’s Q-Workshop generator: roleplaying and black dragon, inspired by black and yellow dragon dice.

Create an unforgettable black dragon for your campaign by rolling for:

• Mannerism
• Goals and Dreams
• Motive
• Weakness
• Voice
• Smell

	Mannerisms
1	Gets loud and preachy about listening to and obeying them
2	Cracks knuckles continuously and cannot stay still
3	Laughs at terror and misfortune, weeps at others’ good luck, angers when people make jokes (about anything)
4	Gets angry and defensive whenever family is brought up (theirs or even others’)
5	Bad breath to the extreme, is a close-talker and laughs often
6	Self-centered, takes everything personally, needs constant reaffirmation
7	Blows breath out through the mouth in exasperation
8	Has a hacking cough and bemoans the constant ache in their scales
9	Constantly repeats what others say, but sarcastically
10	Has frequent and strong facial, tail and wing tics
11	Suffers an existential crisis and demands others tell them the meaning of existence; when stressed they repeat all the gods’ names in alphabetical order over and over
12	Has taken a vow of silence and mimes everything
13	They have alzheimer’s disease but get very mad when reminded or corrected about things
14	Gloomy, pessimistic and quick to criticize or point out fault
15	Thinks they are mighty and ought to be worshipped; demands sacrifices
16	Always apologizing, cannot make decisions, but angers quickly if they think they are being taken advantage ok
17	Greedy, grumpy and gaudy; prefers treasure they can wear and show off
18	Loves torture and violence and to see others suffer
19	Thinks they are charming when they are actually stuffy, arrogant and self-absorbed;
20	Has multiple-personalities – roll d4 more times

	Goals and Dreams
1	Enslave a kingdom of humans and become ruler of this land
2	Become powerful enough to kill their father or mother in combat
3	Gather enough treasure to fill an entire cavern and swim in
4	Become a god, gain immortality, be served by worshipers
5	Slay every unicorn
6	Establish a home base and grow it into an empire
7	Slay all other dragons of its type
8	Move to the city…and level it
9	Gather a set of relics and harness incredible magic power with which to destroy their foes
10	Recover the bones of their great great great grandfather and turn them into a magical throne
11	Make the twelve kings bow to them and serve their every whim
12	Become King of the Dragons

	Secrets
1	Is actually of the opposite gender
2	Fears mice and other small creatures
3	Is deaf but good at reading lips
4	Accidentally killed their mate and still grieves
5	Is in love with a human (or other race)
6	Allies with a devil to achieve its goal
7	Cannot say no to their children
8	Finds gold poisonous, even contact causes pain
9	Breath weapon does not work
10	Is hunted by several other black dragons

	Weaknesses
1	Chocolate and wine
2	Singing
3	Orc beer
4	Poetry
5	Goblin jokes
6	Pirates
7	Flowers
8	Fresh bread

	Voices
1	Sssibiliant, almossst a whisssper
2	Foghorn Leghorn, I say Foghorn J. Leghorn, son
3	SHOUTS ALL THE TIME
4	Backwards talks, he does
5	Deep…slow…and…menacing (speak from your diaphragm)
6	highpitchedandfast likeanimp

	What do they smell like?
1	Ozone
2	Sulphur
3	Burnt hair
4	Vinegar

If you are a fan of the fantastic Q-Workshop dice that inpsire these generators, you might have seen the Q-workshop STRIKE dice movie. Well, Q-Workshop has released a Making Of sequel movie with behind-the-scenes looks into the rolls roles they all played.

This, and the two parts that preceded it, were all originally intended to be one post, and a relatively smallish article at that. The decision to incorporate material from the game rules that I had written relating to the subject put paid to that concept, but I felt it was a necessary preamble.

Finally, though, we have all caught up with each other on the subject, and are ready to forge new paths.

But before we do: something that I meant to offer in one of the earlier parts (and which was mentioned in the text, as I recall) was the Psionics Questionnaire that I came up with for the Champions Campaign.

Zenith 7.0 Psionics Reactions Questionairre

Getting each player to fill it out “in character” should make the impact of a psionic character immediately obvious, and it should be appropriate to just about every campaign with telepathic characters. So, here it is, in convenient PDF format.

A New Metaphor

Regular readers of these blogs will know that I am a big fan of analogies and metaphors as tools for the examination of a phenomenon or concept from a different direction. Past paradigms that I have employed when thinking about telepathy and other psionic powers have been simplistic, rooted in metaphors of books, speech, and broadcast media like television and radio; they always seemed a trifle Victorian to me. If “television” is replaced with “film”, everything about those analogues derives from the first decade or so of the 20th century! Don’t look now, but it’s 2010 – these ideas are a century old! The problem was that I had nothing better with which to replace those analogies – until now.

What if the internet was a metaphor for Psionics? What might the telepathic equivalent of various ‘net phenomena be, and what could they symbolise? That’s what this article is going to consider. I’ve come up with a list of 21 facets of the internet that just about everyone will recognize, and found that I can relate just about all of them to telepathy and related Psionics – and gained some fresh ideas and insight along the way.

1. Privacy

This is the most obvious issue in a world with Psionics. How do you protect your privacy from a telepath? The moment telepathy becomes a proven physical phenomena, that race to develop a cheap and effective countermeasure would be on. Early versions would be “secure rooms” – useless because you can’t help but take your information out of the room with you when you leave, but still useful for shielding people in critical decision-making capacities in a crisis.

In modern times, it has become recognised that if the footsoldiers know the plan and the objective, they are more likely to succeed in their missions because they can make intelligent choices and capitalise on opportunities as they arise. In a world with telepaths, the need for security would demand that everyone outside the shielded command bunker be told only what they absolutely needed to know and no more.

The next stage in the development of psionic defences would be some form of personal shielding; again, large and bulky at first, this would still be of limited utility because it could not be worn 24 hours a day. It might not even be functional unless powered by a rather bulky power pack.

Does anyone remember briefcase-sized mobile phones of the 70’s? Or the phones the size and shape of house bricks in the early 80’s? It wasn’t until the 90’s that they became truly portable, and the mid-to-late 90’s before they became pocket-sized. In the 21st century, mobiles have shrunk to the point where the limiting factor is the need for a human-controllable interface – the keypads can’t get much smaller – and so designers have begun packing more and more features into the devices.

Despite the inconvenience, those early mobile phones were very much a status symbol, and possessing one marked the individual as someone of significant wealth or influence. A similar situation would result with these early semi-portable Psi-shields; possession would mark an individual as having secrets that others with resources might wish to steal.

Eventually, the devices would become small enough and cheap enough to be commonplace.

An entirely different path of development is also possible: if Telepathy is integrated into the law-enforcement profession and telepathic evidence legislated into acceptability by the courts, psi-shields might well be banned (with exceptions for the military and various intelligence agencies). Possession of one would be enough to mark the individual as suspicious, if not criminal in nature.

All this parallels the ongoing debate over privacy when it comes to information on the internet. This is the central legal issue of the early 21st century – who knows what about you and who can get access to it? The default position is ‘anyone’ – only legislation to reinforce the rights to privacy and against self-incrimination will protect ordinary people from the excessive zeal of either cybercops or psionicists.

It is possibly not going too far to suggest that one set of legislation might be used as a template for the other – and, at the same time, that those groups who opposed the earlier legislation would be even more vigorous in their opposition of the second.

2. The Wild Wild West

Every culture that recognises telepathy would have to deal with the regulation of the ability. The ‘net is akin to the US wild west, in which it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t get caught, and everything is legal until it’s not. People have to protect themselves and be self-reliant, as the law can only act after the fact.

What’s more, telepathic abilities, like the internet, crosses boundaries, effectively reducing the law to the lowest common denominator. If something is legal somewhere, you can find it on the net – and it it’s not legal, it’s probably still available, just better hidden.

The same principle would apply to telepaths. If one nation bans certain mental activities – a law that would be difficult if not impossible to enforce – and its neighbour permits it, the people of country A are sure to experience that which is forbidden, even if those who want to commit the illegal act have to move to country B in order to do so. In practice, most wouldn’t bother.

3. The Thought Police

Eventually, just like the West, the telepathic territory would be tamed, or at the very least, the possibility of doing so will become apparent. This would require a new, more active form of policing, the sort of thing that is reserved for hunting down serial killers and mob bosses – telepaths who are trusted to search out other telepaths breaking the law – PsiCops.

Would people really be comfortable with someone else monitoring what people think? And would people ever really be confident that this authority was never abused? I don’t think they would, but I’ve never denied being a moderate liberalist.

Much of the plotline in Babylon 5 revolved around the Psi Corps, doing a fair job of presenting both sides of the arguement even though the proponent of one was (at best) an anti-hero (Alfred Bester, played by Walter Koenig). Who watches the watchers – and who watches them?

4. A more efficient porn delivery system

It often doesn’t seem to matter what you look for on the internet, porn is just a few clicks away. Although it’s not quite literally true, especially these days when some aspects of the ‘net are better regulated, the same would not be true in telepathic circles.

Every salacious thought (no matter how fleeting), every desire, every passing fantasy – all would be on public display for any telepath who wished to look.

• How easily manipulated would people be if their innermost desires could be played apon?
• How easily could someone be blackmailed if their darkest secrets were an open book?

Just as internet porn became a fertile ground for organised crime, so would telepathy.

5. The Value Of Information

In the 21st century, information has been described as the most valuable commodity. (Here’s an interesting article on the subject, which contains an awful lot of what I was going to say).

Information is bought and sold, and is sometimes considered a company’s most valuable asset.

Put that together with a psionic reality in which information is there for the taking.

Fortunes will be won and stolen and lost.

Data And Information

One of the reasons Information will be so highly valued in a telepathic age is the difference between data and information – context and interpretation. The telepath doesn’t have to supply their own, they can get it direct from the source. As a source of personal power, this is poor, as the telepath may not be able to do anything with the information they glean; but as a source of leverage, and intelligence, it is unsurpassed.

Wall Street

I was reminded of the ultimate reference source – Wall Street – for this aspect of Psionics. While the movie is all about greed, and money, it is information that enables everything else to happen.

Trading Places (Looking Good, Feeling Good Edition)

A close second, and just as entertaining (in a completely different way) is Trading Places. Superficially, this is a comedy about stock market manipulation, but look just a little deeper and this is a movie that revolves around information acquisition, counterfeighting, and manipulation.

Both of these are directly relevant to the potential usage of information by telepaths. And that’s food for thought.

6. Data Piracy

A direct implication of the value of information is that people who aren’t supposed to have it will try to steal it. Most of the information I’ve focussed on so far has taken the form of secrets and decisions, and those are important; but there is a third type of information: proprietary information and trade secrets. And this information is just as valuable as the other types.

Every organisation has its own unique advantages, the things that make them successful against their rivals. It might be a cost-cutting measure, or a training methodology, or a proprietary technology, or any of half-a-dozen other advantages. And all of these are vulnerable to the telepathic thief.

Even the vandalism of using mental control to change the minds of potential customers to persuade a rival that a successful strategy is no longer working, and should be abandoned, can have a major impact. Anyone remember the Cola Wars of the 1970s?

7. Search Engines

Everyone knows something, some people know more than others. And then there are the people who know people, who seem to have the world at their fingertips, and others who know where to find information. Librarians and political numbers men and media executives – these are the telepathic equivalent of a search engine. And if they don’t have the answer, they will know who they would ask – the equivalent of redirecting an enquiry to a specialist web page which has it’s own search engine.

To Be Continued…

It looks like I’m out of time, with many more internet analogies still to draw – so keep your seats, this article is going into a fourth innings!

1. Give them personal names

A simple but effective method. Even minor items get a personality boost when named.

Tip: A name could imply special powers if you are not in the habit of naming most magic items, so you might need to explain the first time that Felix the Cape is what the previous owner called it, and it truly is just a +1 Cloak of Resistance. However, that little bit of disappointment will soon fade as the player starts having fun calling his cape by name. You should not have future problems after this expectation-setting moment, but the benefits will last the whole campaign.

2. Give them a flaw

The best flaws spawn from an item’s powers. Before you tack on a flaw, look first to see if the item’s ability has a story-based downside or can be turned against the PC in a narrative way. This approach generates more choices and consequences for PCs and better integrates the item into your campaign.

Fables are a neat source of inspiration for this kind of puzzle. Read their moral tales, study the mishaps of the characters and look at reactions for ideas on how to turn magic items into trouble and conflict for the PCs.

Fame is a good one. The Slippers of Spider Climbing sure are useful, but when people see the PC walking on walls and ceilings everyone will want him to do that trick. It is hard to be stealthy when you get recognized and asked to perform tricks.

Another example is the lowly +1 dagger. What commoner would not want an ever-sharp, easy to clean, sleek knife? Perhaps the PC is constantly asked to wager away his dagger. Perhaps a killer uses a +1 dagger, so when the authorities see the especially clean and lethal cuts they will suspect the adventurer known to wield that special knife. Providing an alibi might be easy but also inconvenient if the character has something to hide, as they always seem to do.

3. Give them a quirk

Make the item fun to play. A quirk is not a flaw or boon, but an interesting trait. It encourages roleplaying, offers choices and affects character tactics, though not in combat encounters so much. It may have a positive or negative effect, but on a smaller scale than flaws and boons.

A quirk often introduces new gameplay when the item is used or present. Another word for quirk could be side effect. For example, a wand might turn your hands blue for half a minute after each use. No big deal, right? No effect on combat, and just a silly thing. However, in the city of Carnus in a previous campaign, arcane casting was illegal and captured wizards were prosecuted. Blue hands would tip off foes who could summon authorities.

That example might be a bit severe. I might consider it a flaw in that campaign, but a quirk in another. Perhaps using the wand makes flowers bloom instead. Alternatively, the wand might have a clue scratched into it by a former owner and if the PCs realize the clue exists and can decode it, you have a surprise adventure hook waiting.

4. Give them a background

Stories about magic items breathe depth, detail and optional hooks into your games.

Even if a background is so independent it is completely detached from any adventure or encounter hooks, the player will still instantly form a bigger bond with that item and feel your campaign is awesome. Such is the power of little touches like adding backstories to magic items.

If backgrounds are tough for you, try this short outline:

Three owners, two events, one conflict

• Have the item trade hands at least three times.
• Give at least two owners notable uses of the item in some kind of event.
• Give each transfer of ownership a reason, with at least one involving an unwilling transfer.
• Provide the reason or circumstances for how the PC managed to get the item. If the item was in a treasure pile, describe how it got there if that event was not one of the three transfers you have already described. Likewise, if an NPC had the item last, ensure you know how they got it.

Tip #1: Make at least one part of the background relate to the new PC owner. A previous owner might have had the same race, class, goals or struggles as the PC. This will add personal significance for the player.

Tip #2: Make the item’s original purpose incomplete. Tie this into the current adventure, or let it kick off a new adventure for your group. Either way, you just added mystery, a quest or a tragedy depending on how the PCs react.

Tip #3: Use names. Get your name generator out, because you want to include names of previous locations, owners and other NPCs in your backstory. These details will flesh out the story nicely. Plus, players need names to retell their items’ stories.

“Yeah, some guy made this in a nearby forest to kill another dude, but that dude escaped, came back and stole it. Years later his oldest son took it with him when a country invaded another, and the item saved his life three times. The dude’s son came back from the land alive, and that is when they started calling the item Lucky.”

Now go back and add proper names to the people, places and events in that background to see just how dramatic a difference these little details make.

5. Give them a dilemma

Create magic items that require give and take. They offer a benefit compelling enough that the curse or downside is worth it.

For example, infuse your campaign with enemies who take advantage of the flaw. They trigger encounters setup to take advantage of the flaw. They bring the kryptonite, or tuned energy resistance or protection. They hire a disarm specialist, lay a trap or plan a diversion.

If the PC has come to depend on the magic, that is a weakness right there. Enemies just need to nullify the item’s benefits, perhaps even for just a short time, and the PC is made vulnerable.

First though, enemies must learn about the item’s existence, then learn a PC has it, and then learn its properties and flaws. If you game this out, you add great depth and realism to campaigns. How exactly do NPCs gain this knowledge? Spies, divination and direct encounters offer possible answers. So now you need to arrange some encounters.

For example, in my current campaign the villain sends minions to fight the PCs on a regular basis. He then sets spies nearby to observe the combat and report back on the PCs’ capabilities, special equipment and tactics.

Should the PCs figure this out, it becomes a new concern for them each encounter. Is this just a setup by the villain to gather more intel? What should be done to prevent this? It is not enough to beat the guys in front of you anymore; you have to spot the spies or keep your special powers a secret lest you reveal them too soon. Great games within the game!

Another dilemma could be one stat goes up and another goes down while the item is in use. Another might be chances of a critical hit goes up but so do chances of fumbles, or everybody’s chances of a critical goes up in a 10′ radius – including foes. A funny one might be an item grants invisibility but makes the wearer incredibly noisy and smelly.

6. Give them attention

Keep good notes handy about how the characters appear to NPCs. Roleplay NPCs based on how they perceive the PCs. This perception should especially include magic items.

Unless magic is commonplace, others will take notice and talk about it. Take this a step further by producing a range of reactions on a regular basis. If every NPC reacts the same, the effect of attention wears off, so mix it up.

Example reactions:

• Amazement: characters love this kind of attention because it makes them feel important.
• Fear: NPCs run way, cower or freeze up. In each situation, ask what they fear and why. Explore this to add more depth to NPCs. For example, the NPC fears for the PC’s well-being. But why? Perhaps in this region only certain people may own and use magic items, such as nobles and military officers. If a character is caught with a magic item, he’ll be thrown in prison. Suddenly you have a great region and culture hook, plus good gameplay tension.Another option is to create phobias regarding magic items, types of magic and types of magic effects.

• Greed: the NPC wants this item for its potential use, to sell it or to curry favor by gifting it. Imagine the value in a magically sharp item that never loses it’s edge, doesn’t rust, and weighs little. If it glows it will further blow their mind!
• Anger: this is a great surprise reaction. Why is the NPC angry? And what will the anger make the non-player character do? Anger is such a string emotion, even an ally could do something unexpected, such as attack to subdue the PC for his own safety.
• Pleasure: similar to amazement, the NPC is delighted when the magic item is around, on display or in use. They want to see it, touch it, use it.
• Confusion: one option here is the NPC just does not know what to make of the thing. Another is to use the effects from the Confusion spell, perhaps because the idea of magic is overwhelming, or the magic emanates some confusion property at close range for those unused to its presence.

No matter what, have NPCs react when the magic item is around.

What about you? How do you make magic items more interesting in your campaigns?

I’m interrupting my series on Psionics to bring you this timely post on sports and nation-building…

As I write this, the local TV host is replaying highlights from the opening ceremony of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Since Johnn is Canadian and I am Australian, both Commonwealth countries, we find our respective nationalities on opposing sides.

It’s a somewhat interesting event, this time around – the Australian team is hoping to beat its medal tally from the 2006 games, when Melbourne were the hosts. Last time around, we came home with 222 medals, more than double the next best Commonwealth nation, the mother country, England, who scored 110. Canada was third with 86 medals.

This year, the host city is Delhi, India, giving that nation the home team advantage; they hope to ride that advantage into second position overall. England, meanwhile, is suffering under the mixed blessing of preparing to host the next Olympics in London – so their team funding may well have been affected, and they have plenty of distractions, but they also have the benefits of increased sports funding in general over the last four or more years. At the same time, there are a number of English athletes who are hanging onto the tail end of their careers to try and make their home Olympics – so very much a bag of mixed riches. According to reports, the Canadians are entertaining hopes of overhauling them in the overall medal tally – and that might be doable, depending on who steals medals from who, India vs. Canada vs. England vs. Australia.

That’s all background to this article, as is the Distilled Cultural Essence series of articles I wrote in February 2009.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a nation’s reputation on the sporting field, and how that derives from and reflects apon the nation’s reputation in other areas.

Limited Reference

I have to admit that I have limited sporting reference apon which to draw. I have plenty of knowledge about Australian sports and our attitude toward them; I have more limited expertise about the nations against whom we regularly compete; and I have a media-tainted perception of US sports which is not always reliable, and which can be considered biased, at best.

So I should apologise in advance to any who is offended by the opinions expressed in this post. I hope that the reader can see past any offence enough to absorb the light sprinkling of perception and wisdom (I can’t lay claim to anything more substantial) that might benefit their campaigns.

The Plan

So, what’s the plan of action? Well, to start with, I want to analyse Australian participation in various sports and competitions, examining our international reputation as we / I perceive it to be. At the same time, I’ll touch on a number of our/my perceptions of other nations in those contests, not to disparage our rivals, but to highlight and contrast the Australian performance. The ultimate goal will be to distil out a few key characteristics of the Australian reputation and performance.

Along the way, I will attempt to provide historical or social context for the origins of a particular attitude or perception. These are all my own personal theories, and the reader is warned that they might not hold water – and might be biased!

The ultimate purpose of the discussion is not to big-note my nation’s sporting achievements, but to provide an example of how a GM can take a society from one of his games and develop a series of ways to express that history and society through sporting achievement, style, and tactics – and how to work it in reverse, as well, reasoning from a competitive style and reputation to a source culture and history. That’s the goal – we’ll have to wait and see if I can get there! As with sports, you can never be quite sure what will happen until the flag falls…

Aussies in Elite Motorsport

Australia continues to be extremely well represented in most categories of Elite Motorsport. Not just as competitors, but as mechanics and engineers. And the reason for that is a blend of practical bush-mechanic “we can fix anything with some wire and a hammer” attitude and precision engineering. Virtually every team who has competed in the Formula 1 world championship over the last 20 years, or in the CART/Indycar, or Rallying championships, have had an Australian somewhere in the back rooms. That’s reputation number one: a plain-spoken, blunt, practicality.

The Origins Of This Reputation

This reputation really began with the success of Sir Jack Brabham in formula one, when he became the first (and so far the only) driver to win the championship in a car of his own construction.

The “tyranny of distance” meant that until the late 70s and even the early 80s, it was impractical to transport technology to Australia. If we couldn’t build it, or rebuild it, ourselves, we didn’t have it. Australia’s remoteness is the source of this characteristic. I am quite sure that in Roman times, the English would have had a similar reputation, when they were the outer fringe of civilization.

Elite drivers

But our drivers have a reputation for being tough competitors, as well, and at first glance, isolation can’t explain that – or can it?

The fact is that the elite series are in the US and continental Europe. It might be hard for a local to succeed in breaking through into those series, but it’s one hundred times harder for an Australian, simply because Aussie competitors don’t have the financial and material support that a local can acquire. Sponsorship Dollars (or Pounds or Euros) are harder to find; in order to succeed, they have to push harder.

It comes as something of a shock to overseas drivers the first time they make a guest appearance in our local racing series; the standard of competition is as high, if not higher, than anywhere else in the world. We’ve had BTCC champions like Jason Plato come down under and struggle – even when in one of the best cars in the field.

Never Say Die: Stephen Bradbury, Ice Skater

The story of Stephen Bradbury’s Gold Medal in the 2002 Winter Olympics illuminates another characteristic widely associated with Australian sportsmen – we never give up. It’s this characteristic that has enabled so many of us to succeed in elite motorsport despite the obstacle of distance. Bradley was coming last and out of all medal contention when the four skaters in front of him were involved in a pile-up at the very last corner. Bradbury skated past to take the win.

The Origins Of This Reputation

It is my opinion that the seeds of this particular attribute lie in the country’s origins as a Penal Colony. Unwilling immigrants, forced to forge a nation whether they wanted to or not, determination was necessary in order to survive and prosper.

It was during World War I that this expression of the British Bulldog was forged into something new, known in Australia and New Zealand as the ANZAC spirit, winning the respect of military forces throughout the allied command. This was the first time that the country began to perceive itself as a nation, rather than as a colonial offshoot of England.

Unfortunately, the combination led to something called the Cultural Cringe in which the nation developed a cultural and social inferiority complex. This manifested as the belief that as a nation we were second-class except where we had proven otherwise. Our military courage and doggedness had been proven; the next field of battle was the sporting arena. Eventually, as local born artists and businesses became internationally successful, we outgrew the cultural cringe (well, mostly), proceeding in sputters and small steps through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; but the drive to succeed on our own terms against any odds that it engendered remains. INXS, AC/DC, The Bee Gees, Air Supply, The Little River Band, Savage Garden, Kylie Minogue, our Wine labels, and even Rupert Murdoch – they all exemplify the legacy of the Cultural Cringe. These days, we tend to see ourselves as taking the best on offer from the rest of the world and making it our own.

Lessons for RPG Nations – The Colonial Identity

Colonies almost inevitably develop some form of inferiority complex, and some means of denying or overcoming it. Australia’s response is not the only one; the US found its path to overcoming their own inferiority complex through a boisterous arrogance that is sometimes justified and sometimes makes other nations cringe. This tendency began in the War Of Independence and was worsened when the US became the keys to victory in both World Wars. Korea and Vietnam restored a little humility to both ourselves and the US, but the lessons faded from memory, something that goes a long way to explaining the current mess in Iraq. Not all Americans are from Texas, but as a nation, they seem to have that “You paid for lunch, I’ll pay for the Cadillacs” Texan exuberance and flash. Ultimately, both nations are more similar than either would like to admit, and it is this that makes us such fierce rivals and staunch allies.

The question that GMs engaging in world building must ask themselves are what events were pivotal in each nation’s perception of themselves as independent, especially the case when describing former colonies; how those events influence the nation in the campaign’s contemporary era; how the citizens of that nation see themselves, and how they perceive the rest of the known world, and how the citizens of that known world perceive them.

The Bigger They Are: The Americas Cup

In the preceding section, I talked about the friendly rivalry and competitiveness that Australia feels toward the US, and it’s something that I’ll address again in a later section.

Aussies tend to see themselves as the Underdogs, and will barrack (support) other underdogs in any contest even while respecting the abilities of the stronger opponents. This is a result of another legacy of the cultural cringe, in which we tend to perceive ourselves as underdogs, which leads us to identify with others in the same boat – though that tends to go out the window when it’s US competing against THEM.

Again, we are more similar to the US in this regard than we would probably like to admit; but this rankles us a little more because we are more often the underdogs against the US than anyone else. It’s a double standard that we shouldn’t be proud of.

At the heart of this support for the underdog are two core beliefs of Australian society: a stubborn repudiation of the cultural cringe that bellows “we’re as good as anyone else”, and the belief that anyone can beat anyone else on their day.

All of these elements came to the fore in Australia’s victory over the New York Yacht Club in the 1983 America’s Cup, when we broke a 132-year winning streak. Although there were innumerable challengers before, I think it fair to say that few of these competitors really believed that they could win; the Americans were the next-best thing to invincible.

Until Australia II proved that it could be done, that is. This opened the floodgates for other challengers, and since then the US record is exactly 50/50 against the rest of the world – which is a creditable success rate, but a fair cry from 132 years of undefeated success.

The victory sparked a night of national celebration (the contest took place late at night, Australian time), with then Prime Minister Bob Hawke moved to say on National Television, “Any boss who sacks a worker for not turning up tomorrow is a bum!” (I’ve never seen any reports of how many people took up this unofficial invitation to an extra public holiday, or of how many people actually lost their jobs as a result).

Lessons For RPG Nations – National Achievements are recognised in context

It wasn’t that Yacht racing was an especially popular sport in Australia either before or after the victory that sparked such recognition of achievement and the subsequent celebrations, and it wasn’t simply because we had beaten the Americans nor was it because Australians love to party; the public response was a combination of the “support the underdog” attitude and the scale of the record that had been broken.

In other words, this was celebrated as a nationally-significant achievement because Australian Society was “pre-programmed” to respond to such an achievement by an underdog – and because it was achieved by one of “our underdogs”. Never mind that Alan Bond (a Rupert Murdoch wannabe) spent a huge sum of money and that the design was a significant step forward in Yachting Engineering and that no-one really gave two hoots about the challenge until it came down to a sudden-death shootout, winner take all, in the final race. These pesky little factual details didn’t stand a chance of dampening the emotion-based response, because that response stemmed fundamentally from who we Australians were/are as a society.

And the same will be true for an society created for an RPG – the achievements that are taken to heart and celebrated will be those that reflect some underlying attitude or philosophy of the society, regardless of any pesky little nits that might be picked.

Deciding what those attitudes or philosophies are, then creating achievements to be publicly celebrated, is an excellent means of communicating those values to players – without spending lots of game time on a dreary social commentary.

The Great Rivalries

I could have stuck this section pretty much anywhere, but having carried the analysis of the Australian sporting rivalry with the US almost to its conclusion, this is as good a place as any to finish that discussion and move on.

The USA: The Big Brother

A lot of Australians wouldn’t agree with me, but I see so many similarities between Down Under and the USA in terms of our histories and shared experiences and resulting societal patterns that the US – at least in a sporting sense – is a lot like a big brother. They will often put us down in a sort of friendly way – anyone remember Gray Hall, Jnr. saying the US swim team would “Smash them [the Australian team] like Guitars” in the lead up to the Sydney Olympics? But when you hear or read the full comment, instead of taking it out of context the way the media – both Australian and US – did, you find that this was his hope, not his expectation; he was actually rather more respectful of the challenge posed by Ian Thorpe and was downright gracious after being defeated for the Gold Medal.

And, whenever brothers compete for “family bragging rights”, there’s frequently a small dig at the other from one of the two – and a lot of veiled respect.

Lessons for RPG Nations – similarity breeds relationships

This familial relationship illustrates another key point for GMs engaged in world creation – “similarity breeds relationships”. Each nation will tend to develop “personal” relationships with nations that are similar in history and outlook and origins; if the nation is older, the relationship will be that of an older relative or sibling, and vice-versa.

New Zealand: The Little Brother

The Kiwis are our closest neighbours, and European settlement by the English began at a similar time to Australia (the early 19th century). For obvious reasons, the two countries are very similar socially, culturally, and politically; most of the differences stemming from the influence of the native Maoris on our Pacific next-door-neighbour, in my opinion – in many ways, their society was ahead of ours for most of the 20th century, I have to admit (but we’re bigger!)

Think of us as neighbouring ranches in the Arizona West, whose owners have built the houses almost side-by-side, hundreds of miles from any other human habitation.

There has been an active sporting and cultural exchange and intense-but-friendly rivalry between Australia and New Zealand for as long as I can remember, starting with a shared experience – guess what the “NZ” in “ANZAC” stands for? This is true to such an extent that most New Zealand performers (and even sportsmen in some cases) come to Australia to make their living – and most of the time, we Aussies are happy to claim them as our own if they then go on to international success!

Again, the national relationship is very much that of a bigger brother and a very-slightly younger brother – we played together as kids, had the same problems with neighbourhood bullies, and in general shared innumerable experiences growing up. And, like brothers, while Aussies love to pay out on the Kiwis, we have a grudging respect when they do well, and are the first to help out when they’re in trouble.

Lessons for RPG Nations – proximity amplifies similarities and contrasts

The geographic proximity that we have with New Zealand means that they also share the isolation that was so crucial in forming our national character. But where we were self-reliant, and less respectful of the indigenous population, New Zealand turned to the existing inhabitants, whose culture immediately began to influence and shape their national character. So, while there are numerous similarities, there are also some sharp contrasts.

Each nation that you create in your games will share a similar relationship with any neighbours; similarities will resonate more strongly, and differences will seem bigger and more significant than they really are.

England: The Old Country

Everyone wants to do better than their parents, to establish their credentials and independence. The same is true of nations; Australia’s sporting rivalry with England has a passion and intensity that is unrivalled, and it all stems from a child’s need to earn a parent’s respect.

Of course, the difficulty in establishing an independent position relative to your parents is that you share most of your cultural values with them; there is less scope to actually be different. Many of the differences that can be achieved are superficial, the equivalent of a naval piercing or a tattoo. But where there is a genuine disagreement, it tends to be taken to extremes, even to melodrama and histrionics.

The easiest route to demonstrated capability is to best the mother country in some activity which they consider their own – and that usually means sports. The absence of any achievement damages national pride and unity, leaving former colonies politically and socially unstable.

Of course, sporting prowess or its absence is not the cause of this instability – but it is symptomatic of a nations abilities in other arenas. A country that has no unifying national force, that is politically and socially unstable, is unlikely to be able to mount an effective sporting campaign!

Lessons for RPG Nations – colonial instability

When newly established and not self-reliant, colonies will tend to see themselves as an adjunct to the mother country. With the achievement of self-reliance, colonial attitudes will change.

Most self-reliant colonial settlements are either rigidly controlled from the parent nation, or agitate for independence – whether they have the political maturity to handle it or not.

If the parent nation does not accede, pressures for a war of independence will begin to mount. If the strings of authority are loosened and a measure of self-determination permitted, the new nation will (generally) remain loyal to the mother nation, though they will increasingly go their own way in lesser matters.

These attitudes will propagate into other areas of social and political policy. Rogue nations will frequently seek to ally themselves with political enemies of the mother state and to model themselves apon those nations with whom they wish to curry favour.

There are salutary lessons for the would-be world-builder in comparing the attitudes toward England of the USA, Australia, and the various African colonies. While each nation’s circumstances will be slightly different, and those differences will also play a role, the preceding paragraphs remain a good general guide.

When creating a nation, the GM should consider carefully the location and circumstances of any colonial offshoots from that country, and how relations between those countries will have evolved by the contemporary era.

Per Capita: Relative Populations

An ongoing source of national pride to Australians is that per capita we outperform just about every sporting nation on the planet – at least in summer games! We don’t have anything close to the same level of competitiveness when it comes to skiing and other winter sports.

I often wonder whether or not this is a consequence of the climate (hot and dry), which in turn leads to investment in those sporting endeavours to which the geography is naturally suited.

Consider the record of Australian success in swimming, surfing, and cricket, and the theory seems quite viable. We would probably also be successful at Soccer (“Football” in the mother country) if we had not developed our own games based around Rugby, the popularity of which absorbs most of the available funding and support.

Lessons For RPG Nations – Each nation is #1 in their own minds

Every nation will find some way of looking at their achievements that elevates them to a position of superiority, however limited. And they will cling to it as a validation of their own national priorities, which means that future resources will be dedicated to improving and reinforcing it, further cementing it as part of the unique cultural identity of that nation.

Canada has tall mountains and lots of snow – they are the Australia of Winter Sports. New Zealand has similar advantages, and can also lay claim to that characterisation. South Africa loves to beat Australia at cricket, because (excluding the native African population), they were slightly smaller than us in size, and spent comparatively little on the sport. Until the 1980s-90s era of Australian domination of the game, their win-loss record was about 50/50 – they could lay justified claim to punching above their weight.

In the 1970s, when they were the dominant power in world cricket, the West Indies (with a population of about 4 million) had less than a tenth that of Australia – they were a small group of nations which had collectively risen to world domination in this very specific sphere of activity.

Do It Right

Another Australian attitude is, “if you’re going to do something, do it right”. When, as a nation, we set ourselves a task, we go into it “the whole hog” (i.e. all the way, boots and all). The Australian track record when it comes to big events is pretty enviable.

The Formula One Grand Prix

Australia became a regular host of a round of the Formula One Grand Prix Championship in 1985 on a temporary circuit in the heart of the city of Adelaide. In terms of organisation and facilities, it immediately astonished the participating teams, setting a standard that few if any of the permanent European racing circuits could match. Shamed, the overseas circuits began to upgrade their facilities (at the insistence of the Championship’s management) – but Australia kept lifting their game as well, determined to make each year better than the last.

In more recent years, the excellence of the Australian volunteer track stewards has resulted in the nation being asked to train track officials from other countries hosting Grands Prix throughout the Middle East and Asia.

The Gold Coast Indycars

A similar outcome occurred when the tourist area south of Brisbane began to host a round of the American Indycars championship. So successful was this event that it even outlasted (by a year) the demise of the championship itself (due to internal politics).

The Olympic Games

And there are those – and not just locals – who wonder whether or not the Sydney Olympic Games of 2000 will ever be surpassed. Memorable not just for elevating the party atmosphere of the opening and closing ceremonies to a new high, but for the friendliness and warmth of the volunteer officials, and the standard of organisation. The entire nation got behind the event, and that is the reason it was so successful.

The Country On Display

In a broader sense, it is the same sort of collective effort that is responsible for all of these achievements. Unlike many nations, we see the whole country as being on display when hosting events like this. You could say that when visitors drop in, we tend to get out the best china and hide any dirty linen.

Every nation has some event which creates this sort of unity to at least some extent. In the US, it is arguably the 4th Of July (though some would argue in favour of Thanksgiving Day), but my choice would be the Superbowl. That’s the American event that sets the standard for all similar events around the world, the one that they all try and emulate.

The same is true of every nation – there is always some arena in which they take pride in being the best in the world, the nation that others try to copy. Since international sports bring outside observers, it is often in the sporting arena that these positions of excellence are achieved (but not always – consider the Swiss, whose neutrality is their position of excellence).

Lessons For RPG Nations – The Focus Of National Pride

And the same will be true of every nation created for an RPG, as well. The selection of some achievement to be the ‘national focus’ of their pride is something that will arise from a limited range of options based on their circumstances, culture, and national identity. The origins of dominance might well be accidental; cricket in Australia was largely a pastime or hobby, and not a profession, until Australia first defeated England in 1882. Even then, it took half a century and the infamous Bodyline series before the transition of cricket to a professional sport seriously began, and it was the advent of one-day cricket and the World Series in 1977 that participants were able to earn enough to become full-time professionals.

So the choices are fairly wide open – but will reflect something unique about the nation and its culture. There will be a resonance between the achievement and the values of the nation, and that resonance can provide a path for the PCs to tread into an awareness of a distinct identity for each nation.

Meanwhile, at The Commonwealth Games

Australia is doing better in some areas than expected, and worse in others, and is likely to fall a little short of the overall ambition of bettering the total medal tally from 4 years ago (currently 137 medals, 61 Gold). England and Canada have both stolen victories that Australia expected to be ours, but have lost out elsewhere. It must be a bittersweet experience for the English, because as of this writing, India were number two in the gold medal count, with 29 gold and 74 overall, though the English are number two in total medals (105, with 26 gold). Canada are “languishing” in 4th place with 59 medals, 22 of them gold.

Any one of the three non-Australian countries at the top of the table could emerge on top – with only 7 golds separating the three, second place overall is certainly up for grabs. One thing’s for sure: someone’s ambitions are going to be disappointed.

It is the unpredictability of sport that makes it so popular in Australia – and the belief that anyone can beat anyone else on their day. That belief is equally true in an RPG…