M is for-

Mongols. It would be remiss on my part to not mention the Mongols when we got to the letter M. The Mongols had the world's largest land empire. The Mongols invented the concept of diplomatic immunity. The Mongols practiced religious freedom and tolerance*. The Mongols had the world's largest free trade zone. The Mongols were great patrons of both the arts and science. Mongol women had rights and privileges that their settled sisters could not have even dreamed of. Not bad for a bunch of smelly horse-riding tent-dwelling nomads, eh? Seriously, Jack Weatherford wrote a couple of books on the subject that are pretty easily accessible for non-historians, find them on Amazon here and here.

M is for Morgana Le Fey, particularly the deliciously evil Morgana played by Helen Mirren in Excalibur. Smart, sexy and evil with an agenda all her own. She plays Merlin and steals all his secrets. Seriously, the women in that film totally set my taste in women going onward into adulthood.

M is for Manorialism the economic system associated with feudalism. A manor is held by a lord, of some rank or another, and it is his means of support. The, very much simplified, main idea is that a manor be essentially self sufficient in the production of food and necessary goods, or as close to it as possible. What they can't produce for themselves they can trade their surplus for. The system assumes that there will be a labor force tied to the land. In the end two things destroyed the manorial system. The first was the black death, which made labor scarce and valuable. The second was the rise of the money based economy, which caused often wide fluctuations in the value of tradable commodities and the general rise in the price of labor, which led subsequently to the raising of rents. Obviously, a system that reigned over western and central Europe from the Carolingian period until, in some places, the early modern period had a lot of variation over time and geographic area; but this is a pretty simple definition.

M is for Monelun, which is the online gaming persona of my lovely wife Mona. She is also a founding member of the Steppe Warriors gaming guild in AOL's Neverwinter Nights. Probably because the internet became omnipresent at the same time that we were using these names online a lot, she too has managed to keep using her old gaming persona name as her nom-de-net. She is a talented fantasy artist and has been moderately successful. She has an art blog here, that she rarely updates and a deviant art site here that receives only slightly more attention. There is a great corpus of work just waiting to be scanned and uploaded and I am sure that if there were enough of a clamor...

M is for Mind Flayers. Creepy, alien looking, brain-eating things. Psionic on top of that. Bastards. I hate them.

M is for Medieval, presumably the default setting for D&D and the SCA, but both of them have serious issues there. In D&D the problem is that they can't really decide where in the middle ages they want to be and seems that this ranges from late antiquity to the renaissance with fantasy added, usually all thrown in a blender. With the SCA it's pretty much the same minus the fantasy**.

M is for Magic. A long, long time ago I made a decision to keep magic rare and wonderful. Lately, I have been making more of an effort to randomize treasure items, including magic, and just let the dice fall where they may. I may have to alter this via DM fiat if it drops the Wand of Orcus into the hands of a lone gimpy kobold, but it seems to be working out OK so far.

M is for Magic-Users, but I covered them here not too long ago.

M is for Maps and Mapping, which fell into the same category of laxity on my part that lighting and food/water and encumbrance did. We're doing a megadungeon now and I am working harder on forcing them to map better, but a lot of the time the battle mat comes out and makes it easier on them and sometimes I feel the need to correct their map when they ask me if something is right. I know I need to start being a more of a hard-ass about this and I am working on it, but it is my wife and kids...

M is for Miniatures and boy do I have a complicated relationship with them. When I was a kid we played with them as often as not, just because they were cool, not because we thought we needed them. Then I got older and we used them less and less. My collection dwindled due to sales and never really replacing them thoroughly and most of the people I played with wanted to invest, at most, in a single mini for their own character. DM's burden then, eh? Some of my players had collections and some didn't over the years, but most of us didn't want to haul them around to wherever we were playing; so we mostly quit using them. Then I started playing in a 2nd edition game where the DM had a huge collection of his own, so we started just bringing our own to the game***. After several years of play that campaign ground to a halt due to personality clashes, and I went back to mostly not using miniatures for the rest of the 2nd edition era; then 3e came along. 3e made the damned things practically mandatory. I had a number of frustrating years as an old school style DM running 3.x D&D and ultimately gave it up for HackMaster. I bought the HackMaster PH and DMG and was quickly convinced you could play it as a straight game rather than a parody. I convinced some of my older gaming buddies to give it a try and we had a great time with it. Probably the greatest moment though was when we realized that we had played through a combat encounter with out the use of miniatures. The next combat was larger, so I offered to "battle-board" it up and everyone emphatically said NO! We felt freed from the shackles of 3.x D&D's bondage and we saw the miniatures as the manifestation of everything we had felt was wrong, what had gone wrong with D&D. I have miniatures today and I use them for combats more often than not. My kids have a hard time visualizing combat without the battle-board; I blame video games.

M is for Monks, seriously my least favorite class for standard D&D play. Clearly these guys are Shaolin Monks, not Benedictines. The best thing 2nd edition did was remove them from the game. Bards make more damned sense in an occidental setting, they're still useless wusses, but at least they make sense there. Monks on the other hand are pretty cool on Oriental Adventures, so I don't hate them completely.

M is for Monasteries, you know the places where all these Monks come from? Except in almost every case D&D monasteries are A: ruined and B:the kind where Benedictines would have lived. Maybe it's because the D&D setting logic gods have ruled that all player character Monks are travelers from distant lands AND that all of the occidental Monks are dead so there wont be any confusion.

M is for Morale. Here is my question why does B/X D&D have easy morale rules and AD&D have a quagmire of judgment calls and unrelated systems? In all my years of DMing I have always used simple morale rules and never really remembered where I got them. They certainly weren't from any AD&D book, but I always liked morale rules; probably the wargamer in me. Since I started playing AD&D and DMing I have apparently been using a modified version of the B/X morale rules for AD&D and I have to say I think it makes the game better. Morale isn't the only non-AD&D rule to filter into my AD&D game either. Holmes and B/X really have molded my AD&D quite significantly.

*Unless you were an Assassin, them they hunted down and destroyed. I wont argue that the world is a worse place because of the loss of the Assassin cult.


**The SCA of course has the suspension of disbelief required to have events where people from across over a millennium of time and all over the world, usually not including the Americas, can somehow get together and peacefully co-exist. Hell, my wife and I are neither from the same country nor the same century; and our oldest daughter has a persona that predates both of ours by centuries.

***Except Lance W., always a trooper willing to go the extra mile for a D&D game he hauled around those hard plastic army cases full of D&D miniatures to those games too, just in case Marty Van B., the DM, needed something he didn't have a miniature for.

L is for-

Lughnasa a Gaelic festival celebrated in modern times on the 1st of August. Lughnasa is an agrarian festival celebrating the early harvest. Lughnasa is celebrated with dancing, feats of prowess and sacrifices; it is sacred to the god Lugh, who is also known as Lleu or Lugos. A similar festival among the Gauls is known as Edrinios. Modern neo-pagans consider it to be a lucky time for hand-fasting. It is one of the four major annual festivals in my Garnia campaign setting.

L is for Liege Lords. I have wondered fairly often why so many D&D characters are free agents in a clearly feudal society. When I DM Oriental Adventures the PCs are usually all retainers of the same lord and undertake missions on his behalf. When we play "straight" D&D though, everyone is a cowboy; the character in the party most likely to have a tie of obligation to anyone else is actually the party Thief, with regard to the Thieves Guild. I really want to play a game of occidental styled D&D in an actual feudal setting some day. I fear that the best I'll ever get is to play Pendragon* or Chivalry and Sorcery**.

L is for Law. I know everyone reads into this the Moorcock version of Law vs Chaos. I never read it. I did read Zelazny's Amber Chronicles though and they have the Law vs. Chaos theme too.


L is for Lighting and Light sources. I have to say that as a DM I used to be a lot more of a bastard to my players about resource management particularly with regard to food and light. Over the years my game became much more wilderness oriented and the emphasis on managing party resources kind of fell by the wayside. I am trying to bring myself back up to speed on these things (and encumbrance) but I very often forget. I guess I should write myself a note and tape it to the inside of my DM screen "Remember to keep track of time, mark off food and light resources and make the party tally up encumbrance at least once every session". For what it's worth, I don't think my players have noticed and have been keeping track of these things pretty well themselves.

L is for LARP. I never played in a "real" LARP, but when I was a teen-ager we used to play "Live D&D" a lot. Mostly it was a chance for us to swing sticks at each other, but sometimes we would have a "DM" that set a scenario and we'd divide into teams. We were perhaps a little crazy as kids.

Today's been a pretty hectic day too, so sorry about the short post again. I will try to get some extra stuff up on Sunday.

*Pendragon is one of those games that everyone seems interested in, but then never wants to commit to, even just for a one-shot to learn the system. A shame really, I think it's an elegant system and I have liked it since it's first edition; but it isn't really the game I am talking about wanting to DM anyway.

**Chivalry and Sorcery I don't even have, that's almost a joke; the mere mention of the system sends some people running in fear. I'd like to take a look at it sometime, if only from an archaeological view.

K is for-

Kings. Back in the day the dream was that our characters would one day be kings, real movers and shakers in society. Certainly heroic poetry offers that as a model for a successful adventurer through Beowulf. Becoming a king in our games meant that we'd be crossing the threshold between RPGs and wargames too, and back then we pretty much all loved our wargames. Many of us still do. I remember an epic battle that took place back in the Dempster Mk. II days where the party attempted to overthrow an evil duke, and of course replace him with one of their own. This duke had a castle that sat on an ancient site of evil power and a host of evil minions at his disposal. The party raised an army and laid siege in an epic miniature battle*. I am pretty sure this all took place after Battle System came out, but before any of us had it and none of us kids had ever owned Chainmail. We used miniature mass combat rules for AD&D that I had devised**, along with my friends, over the course of several years leading up to then. They lost that one, but it was hard fought and pretty cool.

The SCA has kings too. I have attempted, unsuccessfully, on several occasions to become King of Aethelmearc. Choosing our royalty by combat is a little strange I guess, but not really the most anachronistic thing about the society. Honestly, I think that kind of gives it a bit of a D&D feel, which I am sure my fellow SCAdians will take issue with. The idea was originally that the winner of the tourney got to crown his lady as "The Queen of Love and Beauty" ostensibly until the next tourney; so I guess that's where the SCA got the idea of crown tourney from.

K is for Knights and knighthood. Often a knighthood is the reward for an adventurer, often in the mid level range where they have started to make a name for themselves and attract the attention of the nobility. Knighthood is kind of their first step up into the ranks of nobility that they will, if they live long enough and are successful enough, join. This of course assumes that your average D&D fighter is NOT of noble birth to begin with, which is easy enough to assume considering they are adventuring to make their way in the world to start with and EGG gave us the secondary skills list in the DMG that doesn't include a lot of noble skills, but rather assumes a lower to middle class upbringing. Pendragon aimed you towards knighthood right out of the gate assuming that all the characters were the sons of minor nobles or knights on their way up; we always started as squires. Later AD&D 1st edition's Cavalier class did pretty much the same thing, but threw them in with the rest of the low born rabble adventuring.

The SCA makes knighthood a lifetime achievement award for fighting. It is the peerage you receive for fighting and that makes it the opposite of historical precedent. Historically knighthoods were granted to young men when they were fully trained fighters. There was a certain amount of variety in who would get knighted based on wealth or social status or time or place, but knighthood itself was the START of a fighter's career. There historically were higher statuses of knighthood you could achieve, such as Banneret, or entry into exclusive orders of knighthood like the Order of the Garter.

K is for Kilts. Strangely, I don't have a lot of kilted people in my D&D games. I have one specific area where the kilt is the primary male garb, but mostly the PCs never wind up going there. That said, as a man of Scottish Highland descent I can tell you that the kilt is an excellent garment to wear. I wore my first kilt to high school for St. Andrew's day my senior year, so that would have been November of '86. I was totally bad-ass and rocked it. Chicks were totally into it and the guys were envious. Word of warning though, if you wear a kilt it is traditional to go "regimental" or without underpants, for some reason wearing a kilt means that people will feel free to check. Often. Make sure you are comfortable with your junk going randomly on display or wear underpants.


My apologies, I had intended a longer K section today but I have simply run out of time. I've had quite a full day, so perhaps on Sunday I will revisit K and finish it properly.


*So epic that we didn't have enough miniatures between everyone in the group combined to represent all of the forces present and we were forced to make counters for many of the forces. The party Barbarian Osric had called his horde which led to a great many Barbarian counters needing to be created. Darryl C. and I spent 2 days making counters for this battle and he wasn't even a regular player in that campaign.

**Those rules started out as a simple way of just fighting battles on a table-top with pretty much every miniature we owned. Different races had different abilities, like Dwarves were slower but tougher and had better resistance to magical attacks. Mostly it was a dumbed down fast paced D&D combat that would be fun for both me and my wargamer/role-player buddies and my little brother and his friends who were about a decade younger than us. Clearly, I had some simple core rules and added more complex optional rules based on who was playing.

J is for-

Jagatai my online Mongol persona. Considering I am an American of Scottish Highland, English and French descent some people find it a little strange that I have a Mongol Warrior persona on the internet. Jagatai came about through a strange conjunction of circumstances. When the Steppe Warriors were forming in the original Neverwinter Nights on AOL, Darryl C. and I were looking for a hook to make our new guild different from every other guild. I had been playing a lot of Civilization at the time and the Mongols were one of my favorite civs to play. I had been one of, apparently, relatively few fans of the Hordelands Campaign setting from TSR*. I had read and enjoyed the Horde trilogy, although everyone I know who has read it agrees that it is total BS that King Azoun of Cormyr beats Yamun Khan; simply unrealistic and unsupported by the history on which so much of the Tuigan/Mongol thing is based. They would have been better off having Yamun die some other way and force the horde to return to Qaraband for a new couralitai, that's how Europe was saved from the Mongols historically. Twice.

Anyway, we decided that the culturally distinct warrior Mongols made a fine addition to AOL's Neverwinter Nights and we ran with it. We created our own back story in keeping with Forgotten Realms canon, we were Tuigan survivors of the Battle of the Golden Way. Cut off from retreating to the east towards home we crossed all of Faerun and ended up settling outside of Neverwinter, where we were largely welcomed as an organized force of warriors that helped to protect the land. Essentially we became Cossacks in the service of Lord Nasher, but not really. Our ultimate goal was to set up an independent horde, like the Golden Horde, and conquer everything. It says so in our group charter, which is known as "The Revered Yassa of Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors"**.

That Jagatai and the Steppe Warriors would bleed over into almost every aspect of my life is kind of amusing to me, considering the whole thing started as an online AD&D character. Obviously it has though, look at the title of the blog! I have made friends over the years that only know me as Jagatai. The Steppe Warriors and Jagatai have been present in a plethora of online games since their inception in 1996, with greater and lesser presences depending on the game; ranging from MMORPG to FPS to RTS to chat room D&D. We have held a number of gatherings, where people come from all over the US to camp in my yard for a long weekend and get to know in person the people they spend so much time online with. It's not really too much like "The Guild". We have featured a number of medieval and Mongol style sporting events, including boffer fighting tourneys, archery, thrown weapons, races and feats of strength. We also play D&D, face to face, on the table top then too, it's pretty cool.

J is for Japan, the source of so much of my inspiration, particularly feudal Japan. I blame the TV mini-series Shogun airing when I was at an age to be particularly susceptible to cool exotic stuff. I am from rural upstate NY, dairy country, and while I can't say I had never seen an Asian face before, I can say I had never seen an Asian culture before and it was presented so as to make it easy for us westerners to get. Some people say that James Clavell played a little too free and easy with Japanese history, I think he set a good balance. He made learning about feudal Japan palatable and digestible to the average American. In order to get the same kind of easy to understand story going we would have to wait another 20 years for "The Last Samurai", and that seemed to me to just be a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves".

Anyway, like most nerds from the 80's, I grew up loving Samurai and Ninja. I learned as much as I could about the exotic Japanese culture, from martial arts and Bushido to the tea ceremony and Zen. Then, of course, I ran D&D games there.

I eventually graduated to watching Japanese Samurai movies, the Seven Samurai is still my favorite, but I recently watched 13 Assassins and that was a lot of fun too.

J is for Jarl, according to Norse mythology, one of the three social classes of men along with Karls and Thralls. Jarl is at the top of the social heap and kings are descended from them. Curiously, they were all fathered by Rig, who scholars believe to be Heimdall. Why then are the first born (thralls) at the bottom of the social ladder?

*OK, I am not going to lie here, the setting itself wasn't that great, it kind of read like a boring history and travelogue of central Asia with random fantasy thrown in; but I did like it as an expansion for Kara-Tur, which it worked as quite well.

**Before I sound like too much of an ego maniac here, we stole the style from Genghis Khan and I was not the first Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors, Darryl C. was. He got the job because he could afford to be online more often than me playing NWN back then (hourly rates, he had a real job, I was in college) and he had been playing longer than me and knew more people in the NWN community; which should have made things easier for us to transition our new guild into place. As the Khakhan Ogotai, Darryl has a number of credits to his name, he was a good recruiter and a decent diplomat with other guild leaders. He led us to victory in the flurry of wars that we were forced into when we arrived on the scene. He wrote the first Yassa and a bunch of it's early revisions, the format of which is still used and the bulk of the text is the same; when the Yassa is revised it is usually clarified by addition not modified by subtraction. In the end, his real life issues made him a poor leader for us and he stepped down as Khakhan, then ultimately, left the Steppe Warriors all together. He and I parted ways somewhat acrimoniously as well, and despite both of us reaching out and trying to rebuild our old friendship on several occasions, we really still aren't speaking. I try and concentrate on the good times when I write about him, he was my best friend for something like 20 years, so I have a lot of those.

Mail Call 04-11-11

First off, I got a pretty good deal on this lot of Warhammer Ancients books. Almost all photos are from EBay, where I couldn't find them there because they weren't pictured I did a Google image search.



A buddy of mine has been trying to get me to do WH Ancients for like a decade now. He does it on the cheap using plastic 1/72 scale historical minis I think. We'll see.



Same thing, different scale?



Who doesn't love the Spartacus rebellion? Aside from Romans I guess.



Maybe we can get a little Hittite on Egyptian action here?



Bringing us up into the middle ages!




Some Victorian gentlemen adventurers in 25mm scale.



Some Clan War guys I found pretty cheap on EBay.

I is for-

Infravision, which I never really liked. I was OK with it when people just assumed that it was like normal vision, only in the dark; but then Predator came out and ruined it for everyone. I like the 3e way of splitting it into low-light vision and dark-vision better, but they still both kind of suck. They only exist so all these dungeon dwelling creatures won't need a light source and to give people an advantage to playing a non-human race. I see the logic to the first point, but not really the second; I mean if EGG really wanted lots of people playing demi-humans why the level limits? And why do Halflings get infravision? They are, for all intents and purposes, just tiny humans. Often chubby and with hairy feet, but pretty much human other than that. Why do Elves need infravision? They live above ground too. I can kind of understand the Dwarves and Gnomes because of their preference for deep subterranean living. But Elves live in the sunlit forests.

I is for Initiative. Why is initiative reworked for every version of the game? Why is it still inadequate regardless? The best initiative system I have ever seen was one my 2nd edition era Oswego group invented with phased movement based on your rolled individual initiative (with dexterity modifier), movement speed (size, strength and armor type were considerations here) and weapon speed. It was needlessly complex and still didn't manage to adequately solve the problem of reach weapons, but we all understood it at the time and it kept everyone focused on combat because everyone was pretty much always moving. If I could remember exactly how that system worked I would probably add 3e attacks of opportunity and call it perfect.

I is for Imbolc on of the four major festivals of the Celtic year. Traditionally celebrated in the beginning of February, it is the Celtic spring festival*. Sacred to Brighid and associated with birth. It falls 9 months after the fertility festival of Beltaine.

I is for Ixitxachitl. Ixitxachitl isn't the only I monster, but it is one** of the most confusing. What the hell is it supposed to be? An Aztec stingray? They get a vampiric variant too? I guess I understand the need to scramble for undersea encounter type monsters, but this one makes EGG seem like he was smoking crack.

*The British Isles and western Europe have a gentler climate than the US and Canada, so the beginning of Spring is earlier.

**Irish Deer being the other one. I mean, is Ireland also in the World of Greyhawk? Every other fantasy world? Wasn't there a less obvious scientific name he could have used?

Garnian Social Classes

Garnian Social Classes
Garnian Character Background
Roll to determine the starting social class of a character.
1d10
1: Bondmen
2-7: Freeborn
9-10: Nobleborn
Bondmen-
The practice of being bound to service is falling by the wayside but still exists. There are 3 types of bondsmen. Hereditary bondsmen are born into servitude. Several orders of priesthood are opposed to the practice and it exists mainly in older more established lands. The frontiers of society being a great equalizer of humankind.
Bondmen are protected against abuse by law and custom and there are many ways to achieve free status.
The first type of bondmen are hereditary. They are born to a life of servitude to whomever owns the land they work.
The second type is criminal bound. The criminal bound have committed some minor crime and have been bound as a punishment to repay society. The criminal bound are fairly rare and it is usually for a set time.
The third type is debt bondage. Debt bondage is more common than crime bondage but still uncommon. Debt bondage occurs when a person is substantially in debt and is reduced to bondage to pay the debts. Ordinarily a persons family will pay the debts to avoid the dishonor of having bondmen as kin but occasionally a person has no family in a position to help. Children are sometimes sold to bondage for repayment of their parents debts.
Characters from a bondman background are assumed to have been freed before the beginning of play, technically being freedmen; however, if a player wishes they can roleplay a runaway bondman. All bondmen characters receive skills from the farmer skill set. All bondmen characters are penalized 50% of their starting money by character class.
Roll to determine the type of bond background.
1d6
1: Criminal
2-3: Debt
4-6: Hereditary
Hereditary bondmen can roll to determine to whom they were bound.
1d10
1-6: Temple bound
7-9 Royal bound
10 Noble bound
It is a great irony that most folk are bound to temples despite many orders being opposed to the practice; clearly not all are. Older, more conservative temples are much more likely to keep bondmen, as they are opposed to the breaking of the orders of men laid down in ancient times. Those born to bondman status in a royal domain are also fairly common. Royal bondmen are usually quite well treated, but find it harder to become free simply because ultimately they are only freed by royal decree, and it can be difficult to attract the notice of royal officials. Those born bound to the nobility are quite rare and their treatment varies as much as the attitudes of their masters, though generally within the bounds of the law and accepted custom. Bondmen are known by several distinguishing features shorn hair being most common, followed by cropped ears and/or iron collars in more conservative regions.
Freeborn-
The bulk of the population is freeborn, also known as commoners. They may be farmers that work land owned by the lord, but merely pay rents on it or they may own the land in freehold. They may be craftsmen, or merchants or any of a myriad of occupations. Most characters will come from the freeborn class of society.
First roll to determine Freeborn origin.
1d10
1: Freeholder
2-8: Farmer
9-10: Townsman
Freeholders own their land, generally it is enough land to support one family, but occasionally they may have tenants. Since freeholds are granted by the crown they are fairly rare, but they are hereditary. A freeborn character of freeholder origin will have the farmer skill set plus perhaps one or more others from the townsman-villager skills list, they tend to be jacks-of-all-trades.
Freeborn farmers are the most common commoners. They receive the farmer skill set, on a roll of 1 on 1d10 they may also receive the townsman-villager skill set.
Townsmen are where the middle class comes from. From among their numbers come respected craftsmen, rich traders and other specialists like millers, bakers and brewers. There are also a variety of unskilled laborers and fairly destitute types among them, as well as the less savory prostitutes, actors and thieves. Towns offer the freeborn a chance at success, not a guarantee. Towns can be a small as an outlying village or as large as a bustling metropolis, the larger the town of origin, the greater variety in skill set.
Roll for town of origin size.
1d20
1-12: Village
13-17: Town
18-19: City
20: Metropolis
Village- the village is the standard proto-town. Most village inhabitants are actually farmers that live in the village and work fields around the village. There are, however, in villages skilled craftsmen that supply the villagers and the outlying farms with both necessary and luxury goods. Villagers receive the townsman-villager skill set. A village will usually have a population of at least 100.
Town- Towns are, in many ways, like big villages. However fewer townsmen are farmers and more are specialists. Towns will have a population of 1000 or more. Towns will nearly always have a standing militia that doubles as a police force. Towns thrive on trade and are often based on a single trade that supports the bulk of their residents. Mining towns, market towns and fishing towns are quite common. Towns often have a charter that gives their citizens rights and exemptions that vex local nobles because the town falls officially outside of their domain. Townsmen receive the townsman-townsman skill set.
City- Cities are what happens when a town hits it big. They may have been lucky enough to be on a major trade route or have an excellent natural harbor, perhaps they have a major temple or college; as often as not more than one of these things in combination with what would have made a successful town. They have hordes of specialists usually organized into guilds for quality control and price-setting. They have wealth and and a free population that makes your average noble look askance at them. Often they are ruled by a council of guilds, or an appointed lord-mayor. They nearly always have a royal charter. A city will have a population of 10,000 or more. A city will always have a militia, usually doubling as a police force. Characters from cities receive the townsman-urban skill set.
Metropolis- A metropolis is like a city with a glandular condition, huge, sprawling and densely populated. A metropolis is likely to be an old, wildly successful city; a massive trading port, a national capitol, or a very sacred site. They are likely to have a multitude of temples, centers of learning, and centers of culture. A metropolis will have a population not less than 50,000 people, and nearly always have foreign ghettos. Dwellers of a metropolis receive the townsman-metropolitan skill set. There are very few metropolises in the world. Oddly enough, though metropolises are really just huge cities, they are usually directly in fealty to either a king, a major temple, or a great noble; they do enjoy both great status and great privilege, usually the day to day governance of the metropolis is handled by appointed noble and commonborn officials in conjunction with elected magistrates and guild councils. A metropolis will often have a militia, always have a professional police force and quite regularly have actual full-time military units stationed there.
Nobleborn-
The Nobleborn are a hereditary warrior aristocracy. Most live on fortified estates in the country called duns. Many are land rich and cash poor, but the vast bulk of society is still rural and feudal so they get by. Most of the Nobleborn men are trained to be warriors from an early age. There is still enough chaos, especially in frontier regions, to warrant this. However, in the interior nobles that can’t find an external threat often engage in petty wars with each other. Border disputes, slights to their honor (real or imagined), water rights, grazing rights, cattle raids or a multitude of other reasons can be the cause of these small wars. Sometimes the wars can escalate, the death of a noble may start a blood feud, or a noble may call in allies and family members to help if they are likely to be overwhelmed; which, in turn, causes his enemy to do so as well. If both nobles are vassals of the same lord their lord may step in to dispute the grievance or may be called in by one or the other of the warring parties. In short, most nobles live for war. The flip-side of this are the Nobleborn courtiers. Courtiers live and serve in the courts of high nobles or royal courts. Courtiers are less inclined to warfare and more inclined to cultural and educational pursuits. Courtiers are more likely to be land poor and cash rich. Courtiers are more likely to be involved in trade (at least peripherally). Many never see their country estates, instead living in cities or the duns of high ranking nobles. Their country kin consider them to be weak, effeminate and backstabbing, they consider their country kin to be rough, uneducated barbarians. However, they are all kin, and there is no outright hostility (usually), it is usually just mild condescension from the courtiers towards the country nobles and bemused derision towards the courtiers from the country nobles. They still freely and happily intermarry and often exchange fosterlings.
Roll to determine noble status
1d10
1-7: Simple Lord
8-9: Low ranking Noble
10: High ranking Noble
Roll a second d10. On a 10 you are a Courtier.
A simple lord is known as an Arcloedd, Argwydd, Tiarna, Tighearna , Cingeto, Cingedd, Boneddig, Bonheddwr all of which mean roughly lord.
Low ranking noble titles include Toaiseach (chief), Tieryn, Righ-Tuatha, Brehyr (roughly baron) and sometimes Rix, Rig or Righ which mean king but often a very petty king.
High Ranking noble titles include Vergobrete, Gwerbret, Gwledig, Righ-Cuicidh (roughly Count or Duke), Flaith, Tywysog, Edling, Gwrthrychiad (Princes of various houses), Righ, Rig, Rix, Brenin (Kings of various lineages and territories), Ard-Righ (High King of Garnia, assumed titles of the ruling houses of Torakor and various other pretenders).
Simple lords may or may not be from landed families. Roll 1d10, on a 1 your family is landless, you receive 50% starting money by class, mostly paid out by concerned kin. Simple Lords receive the Noble Skill set and the farmer skill set.
Low ranking Nobles receive the Noble Skill set and 1d10 roll
1: Farmer Skill Set
2-9: No additional skill set
10: Courtier Skill set
Also 1d4 multiplier to their starting money by class.
High Ranking Nobles receive the Noble skill set and 1d10 roll
1-5: No additional skill set
6-10: Courtier skill set
Courtiers all receive the Courtier skill set and 1d10 roll
1-7: No additional skill set
8-10: Noble skill set

Sadly, no game today.

We didn't have a D&D game today because my wife and oldest daughter were both sick with a cold and Lee Ann had to work a double yesterday. However, I did get some pretty cool mail.

Once again, the pictures are from Ebay.
The Dungeoneer's Survival Guide is another of the late 1st edition AD&D books I never owned. I may have flipped through this one before though. Anyway, I am going to read through it and give a retroreview like I did for it's sister tome the WSG. God I hope it's better than that one.


I never owned this book in the 2nd edition era, but I remember it fondly regardless. I look forward to reading it through again too.



This one is the crown jewel. I haven't owned a Holmes Basic book in decades. Despite the discoloration on the cover the interior is good and it came from the "Jail-House" edition with the chits. How do I know? They are still intact. Just like my original boxed set!

H is for- Part 2

H2- The Mines of Bloodstone. For a late 1st edition module, I thought it was pretty darned good. I have run it twice. The first time I ran it was with Darryl C. right after the module was published. We wanted to play and there weren't a lot of other D&D players around at the time, so he soloed it with his character Borg and a party of his Henchmen that included Elisha the Magic-User, Khan the Fighter, Napoleon the Thief and Glendan the Cleric. Also present was my character Lodor, an Elven Fighter/Magic-User running as an NPC because he owed Borg and Elisha a favor for restoring him to life. The adventure went along with few hitches* until Borg touched the wall of annihilation and ceased to exist. Darryl kind of lost heart then and retreated from the last part of the adventure while he schemed ways to restore Borg.

The second time was with younger players and I converted the module to 3e. They fled the area after the encounter with the Iron Golems on the 1st level of the mines absolutely creamed their party Rogue in one round. Wrong place, wrong time kind of a deal; but they were done with that adventure after that. I guess they were unaccustomed to bad things happening to their party.

H is for Harmony; my giant, slobbery and quite elderly English Mastiff. I figured since Grendl got an entry on G I should give Harmony some tribute time too. We bought her from a breeder a few years back. She had been returned there when the guy who had her before got married and his new wife's toddler was kind of abusive. The kid used to jump onto her back all the time and it messed up her back legs over time, so the guy brought her back to where he got her. She was too old then for most people to want so nobody would buy her, except my wife. Harmony is a good girl. She spends most of her time sleeping now, but sh is quite affectionate, loyal and well behaved otherwise.

H is for Head-hunting, the one Celtic pass-time that is most misunderstood by non-Celts. Celts considered taking the head of an enemy to be an honor. The killer and the killed were honored this way. Heads aren't taken from unworthy foes. A fallen foe is honored by being considered worthy enough to have his head taken, and the reputation of the victor is enhanced by the status of his fallen foes. There is also a religious significance to the act. The cult of the head is not well understood by scholars, but they have some ideas. The head, for instance, they know was considered the seat of the soul. The entire concept, however, horrified the Romans.

Among the Samurai the practice started for more practical reasons. Samurai started taking heads just so they could prove that they were going to battle, basically the job for which they were paid. This led to some strange rituals among the Samurai, like burning incense under your helmet so your head would smell nice for the guy that took it; or head viewings, which began as a way of proving how recently deceased the head was to prevent cheating by some Samurai. Some Samurai would steal the heads from other people's kills too, often showing up to a battle just long enough to grab an enemy head, then leaving.

H is for Honor. Warrior societies the world over have various concepts of honor, the principles are nearly universal. Whether the warriors are Celts or Samurai the universal concept of honor is something that they would kill or die for. We modern folk often have as much difficulty with the concept of honor being important as we do with religion being important. While we mostly would like to have an honorable reputation, it really isn't something most of us would really much go out of our way for; much less kill or die for. That's probably why we need to have the "rules" of honorable behavior codified for us in RPGs and need to be given some sort of mechanical advantages for honorable behavior or disadvantages for dishonor. 1st edition Oriental Adventures addressed the issue, as did 2nd edition's Celts campaign book and both editions of Hackmaster. Those are the only examples I can think of, but there may be more.

H is for Hospitality, everyone pretty much knows what hospitality means; what they don't know is the great significance placed on it by early northern and western Europeans (Celts and Germans). They considered hospitality to be a sacred obligation. They competed to be considered the most hospitable.

There is a story from about the year 1600 about a MacGregor clan chief that granted hospitality to the son of the chief of the neighboring Lamont clan. That lad and the MacGregor's son went out hunting together and an argument broke out and in a fit of anger, the Lamont stabbed the MacGregor to death. The Lamont fled back to the MacGregor chief's house and was given hospitality. The others from the hunting party arrived shortly afterwards and wanted to kill the Lamont. The MacGregor chief said no, and gave the Lamont lad an armed escort back home the next day.

Yeah, it was that serious.

H is for Harald Hardrada, King of Norway and attempted conqueror of England. Everyone know that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and made their Duke, William the Bastard, into King William I of England. What most people don't know is that he wasn't the only foreigner to invade England that year. Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, also had a claim to the English throne and attempted to take it by force. He was one of the greatest generals of his time. He had a large and experienced viking army. He even had a turn-coat Englishman that was the brother of the new English king Harold Godwinson. If contrary winds had not kept the Norman fleet stuck in France, the Normans would have landed first and, since Hastings was a near thing for them in our time line, they might have lost to fresh English troops. But, as luck would have it, the Norwegians were better sailors and had better weather for the crossing; so they got there first. Harald stomped the English army at Fulford and received the submission of York. Sadly for Harald, he thought he was safe for the time being and divided his army, a fairly standard practice at the time; and a fresh English army from the south appeared in record time to catch them off guard. The Norwegians were defeated in a hotly contested battle at Stamford Bridge and Harald was given his promised "Six feet of ground or as much more as he needs, as he is taller than most men"; thus ended the story of Harald Hardrada, last of the bad-ass viking kings.

The epilogue of course is that Harold Godwinson was killed a few weeks later at Hastings and England passed to the foreigner with the least legitimate claim to the throne.

H is for Heraldry and Heralds. Heraldry was developed in Europe as a means of battlefield identification. Heraldry began to appear in rudimentary form around the turn of the first millennium and over the next couple of centuries became very widespread and codified. Heralds, an the other hand, have a number of functions not necessarily associated with heraldry, like announcing at tourneys and acting as ambassadors between belligerent parties in war. In the SCA I have my own heraldry and I am a warranted herald. I have served in various courts for both my barony and my kingdom. What I am really good at though is name stuff, if you need a legitimately medieval name I can help.



My arms in the SCA.

H is for Holy Grail. The quest for the Holy Grail actually. The Grail quest is an iconic story that we can use to create our own heroic quests in RPGs. Read about it, or watch the Monty Python movie even, just avoid "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The DaVinci Code". Stick to the original sources.

H is for Hatamoto. In Japanese Hatamoto literally means "under the banners", it refers, starting during the Sengoku period, to direct retainers of a lord. During the Tokugawa period it came to refer to the highest ranking retainers of the Shogun.

H is for Holmgang. A holmgang, which literally means "island going" in Old Norse, is a specific type of duel fought between two participants in a small area. Originally the participants would row out to a tiny island, but eventually they just started doing it in a small area. There is a certain ritual to it and I was pleased to see they fought according to custom in the movie the 13th Warrior. For my part, I authorized as an SCA heavy weapons fighter and fought in a holmgang tourney that day, so they'll always be special to me.

*Lodor, lower level than everyone else, was separated from the rest of the party for a while. He spent a lot of time hiding and waiting for his buddies to find him, which they eventually did.

H is for-

Henry II. Great-Grandson of William the Conqueror, Grandson of Henry I, Son of the Empress Mathilda, Husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Father of Richard the Lion-Heart and John Lack-Land. King of England, Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Count of Anjou, Maine and Nantes, Lord of Ireland. The first Plantagenet King of England, the period of his reign is referred to by historians as the Angevin empire*. He was descended also from the royal house of Scotland and the Anglo-Saxon royal line of England through his maternal grandmother. He was born on his father's estates in France and died in France too; which was not uncommon for English kings of the era.

In appearance he was large and strong, tall and broadly built, stocky. He had gray eyes, red hair and a freckled face. He excelled at athletics and could usually out ride, fight or march any of his nobles. He was also sharp-witted with a mind for law and languages. He was renowned for his generosity, his excellent memory, his sense of humor and his furious temper, exemplified in the Thomas Becket incident.

Most people would concentrate their appreciation of Henry II on his military career, which was extensive and glorious, but I would rather concentrate on what made him a good king. He reformed the law in England and invented the concept of grand juries and trial by jury. He created Royal Magistrate courts with traveling judges to increase justice throughout his realms.

He centralized power over the nobles by destroying illegal fortifications and forced the nobles to pay scutage. Scutage is a tax noble had to pay to avoid military service, essentially giving the king money to hire guys to meet their military obligations. Previously to the reign of Henry II nobles just routinely failed to meet their commitments and suffered not penalty for it. The institution of scutage had the dual effect of making the king's forces loyal to the king, their pay-master, rather than the lord they came with; and after paying the scutage the nobles couldn't afford to support as many of their own troops, so the low-grade endemic warfare common to the feudal system largely ground to a halt.

Henry II also increased royal control over the church in England, but it was at great cost and of relatively short duration. The sticking point between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King of England was that the king wanted clergy to be subject to English laws and courts where previously they had held the right to be tried in ecclesiastical courts.


H is for Halflings. Halflings have an interesting lack of history in Garnia. In all of the history I wrote as a kid, Halflings only get mentioned once; and now that early stuff is apocryphal. Only rarely has anyone ever played a Halfling in my Garnia campaign; notably, back in the 80's my neighbor Scott W. played the Halfling thief Thorik for several years of regular play, and now Ashli is playing the Halfling Thief Ruby. Ashli insists that they be called Hobbits, so maybe they migrated here from Middle Earth.

H is for Half-Elves and Half-Orcs and any other half breeds that might exist in the D&D universe. They happen in my Garnia campaign, but only rarely. Most recently Lee's character Eemah the Half-Orc Fighter, who died last session. My take on the genetic viability of these creatures breeding is that the Elves, Humans and Orcs are all genetically the same and their parent races are influenced by the ambient alignment of the planes on which they originated. Good Elves or Evil Orcs can breed with unaligned Humans, but not with each other.

H is for Henchmen and Hirelings. Back in the day we used to bring veritable armies of these guys with us into dungeons. That doesn't happen so much anymore, because player characters have gotten tougher over succeeding iterations of the game and players themselves began to see the hired help as experience point leeches. To my mind Henchmen are like back up characters that you already have ready to roll out if anything bad happens to your main PC. Hirelings are just 0-level NPCs, usually, but they have their uses too for sure. The experience point leeching issue is one I have considered a lot recently as I try to encourage my players to go more old school and bring some help with them. First, I don't pull any punches, I let the dice fall where they may and I roll in the open. That means that the players want to see more targets on their own team, which encourages hiring help. Second, normal hirelings don't get experience points, they are stuck at 0-level forever.

Now that the PCs are leveling up some Henchmen have become an option, and despite losing a 1/2 share of xp to the Henchmen the players seem to be enthusiastic about finding some. We're playing later today and they are headed back to the city, so I guess we'll see.

H is for Huscarls. Huscarls, under various similar names and spellings, are the Germanic precursor to knights. They are oath-bound warriors that serve a warlord as a full time military, they are usually fed and housed by their lord and spend their days training for war or at war. They usually won't bother to survive a battle where their lord dies. There is actually a pretty moving, tragic Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Wanderer", about a guy that did live through a battle that killed his lord and fellow Huscarls.

H is for Heroes, that's what player characters are. They may be flawed heroes, but they are still heroes, at least in my games. I don't tolerate any of this burn the orphanage and rape the nuns nonsense of evil campaigns. Evil is the enemy, there to be destroyed; if you can profit from that, so much the better, but that's what you are there to do. I also don't like angsty BS or "situational" ethics, I am a black and white good versus evil kind of a guy. My wife calls me a Paladin**.


*Technically, the Angevin Empire period also encompasses the reigns of his sons Richard I "The Lion-Heart", who slightly increased it's territory; and John I "Lack-Land" or "Soft-Sword", under whom it collapsed.

**Unless she's mad at me for being inflexible, then I am just being a dick.

G is for-

Gaming. Gaming is the main reason I started this blog. Gaming has been a huge part of my life since I was about ten years old. I spent pretty much all of my spare money as a teen-ager on wargames and RPG stuff. Pretty much all of my oldest friends are gamers of one sort or another. My wife is a gamer. So are our kids.

G is for Guilds. Medieval guilds were the trade unions of their day and modern trade unions take a lot of their terminology from guilds. Every RPG setting pretty much has guilds in some form or another that provide a variety of services. The most common and notorious manifestation of this is in the Thieves Guild. Other likely guilds in RPGs include Wizard's guilds and Adventurer's guilds, and those are just for the players to join. Assassin's guilds serve as adventure hooks and nemeses for PCs, although some games have PC assassins too. Merchant's guilds are pretty commonplace, they must be, because they set the prices for goods pretty much throughout the game world right in the Players Handbook :)

I feel like I should give a shout out to gaming guilds too. I don't play any MMOs now, but I did play a lot of the old AOL NWN back in the day. Over the course of my time there I was a member of two different guilds. The first was the extremely newbie friendly "Explorers of the Rising Sun" or ERS. They were pretty much a starter guild in the game, most ERS members left and joined more prestigious guilds of greater antiquity eventually. I left ERS to found the "Steppe Warriors" or SW with my buddy Darryl C. and my girlfriend (now wife) Mona. The Steppe Warriors had a brief but glorious history in NWN, about 18 months after their founding the game was shut down. We stuck together as a group for a long time after, trying out different online games as the MMO market emerged. We have also had several "Steppe Warrior Gatherings" over the years, with varying degrees of participation from the membership as a whole.

G is for Gauls. Historical bad-asses from whom I am descended, they are also the first group of men to migrate to Garnia. In our world they did all manner of awesome stuff, from insulting Alexander the Great to his face, to sacking Rome and Delphi, to planting a long lasting colony in central Turkey. They loved wine and battle and feared nothing.

G is for Garnia. Garnia is both the name of the campaign setting and a nation within the setting, much like Greyhawk is both the setting name and a major city within the world. The Garnia campaign setting is named after my first truly successful D&D character Garn. Garn was a victim of a crazy Monty-Haul/Killer DM campaign run by my buddy that introduced me to both wargaming and D&D Chris G. Chris and I played D&D together with a small group of like minded nerds* for maybe six or seven months the year that I turned eleven. The setting started as a vanity world when Garn achieved godhood in Chris's campaign.

Modern Garnia has been tempered by my higher education and my experience in gaming and bears little resemblance to it's earliest progenitor, except the map, which has stayed largely the same since Darryl remade my earliest maps when we were in 7th or 8th grade. He also worked on some campaign history, which has been largely discarded since**, and drew some maps for various historical periods on graph paper.

In the canonical version of Garnia, the county is a Celtic "kingdom" that keeps recurring. I based this off of Chinese history, where dynasties can lose the "mandate of heaven" and be replaced, either by another native dynasty or by foreigners through invasion. Because they are Celts at their core I have given them a relatively weak central power in their High-Kings. Culture and tradition are the core of their society, not a strong central government. There are various tribes and clans that rule different parts of the country more or less independently and often make war on each other on a small scale. Because the Celts of the world come from all over the real world's Celtic areas and from roughly a millennium of transference to Garnia, and a millennium of cultural development in Garnia, there are various forms of government that have been tried at different times and places in Garnia. Some areas have traditional Gaulish oppida ruled by a council of aristocratic senators, others have petty kings. There are clan chiefs that have more wealth and power than some kings in Garnia. Invasions of barbarian Celts from the north have toppled more than one dynasty and imposed yet another Celtic system of government and aristocratic culture. Essentially, take all that we know about the Celts. All of the Celts from the Iron age Gauls to the Potato Famine Irish from the Gaeltacht and throw them in a blender. Not like a new age Wiccan blender, but a tribal head-hunting, cattle raiding, heroic epic, druid human sacrificing, did you see the movie Wicker Man blender. All the "bad" barbaric pagan stuff along with all the good, fun stuff like art and music.



Garnia map not to scale.

G is for Gambling. Gambling has been a favorite way for PCs to blow off steam and carouse during their off time. It also provides a pretty fun mini-game inside the RPG you are playing. This can be as detailed or as vague as you want, but I am pretty sure that EGG put "Zowie-Slot Variant" in the DMG for a reason.

G is for Good, as the counterpoint for Evil from the other day; Good is also a palpable and real force in my campaign universe. The higher planes are all imbued with "Good"-ness. Creatures from those planes are inherently Good.

G is for Gods. I know most people like to use sanitized RPG gods for their campaigns. I even designed a really crappy pantheon for my Garnia campaign when I was a kid. I stopped doing that and started using real mythology for my campaign, including Christianity. The Christianity in Garnia is the old Celtic variant that was ultimately suppressed by Rome, and is not the primary religion. The primary religion is based around the worship of the old Celtic gods and Jesus is often just added to their number. I don't spend a lot of time going into religion in my campaign, although I easily could, because most people just aren't that interested. Jesus made the cut, because I had a pretty serious Christian player once that wasn't comfortable pretending to be a pagan. I gave it some thought and it made sense for my campaign's continuity, so I went with it.

G is for Gnomes. For the record, I am not a fan of Gnomes. They didn't even exist as a playable race when I started playing. The first I saw of them was in AD&D. I have had exactly one person in all my years of playing D&D make a Gnome character, and then she never played her. I often go back and forth over whether or not I should even include them as a race in Garnia, but have never been forced to make the final decision. I was amused at the minor uproar when I heard they weren't included as a player race in 4th edition.

G is for Grappling. Why can't any edition make a grappling system that simply uses the regular combat rules? Why must they be complex to the point where it's easier to kill a guy than to wrestle him to the ground and pin him?

How about this-

Player-I want to grapple with him!
DM- OK, roll to hit.
Player- 17!
DM- That's a hit, cool. You've got hold of his arm and start pushing him to the ground. He's going to try to break your hold for his turn, roll a 20 sider and add your strength bonus.
Player-12?
DM- He got a 7, he's down.

Regular roll to hit, opposed strength check to maintain. That was simple and off the top of my head.

G is for Grendl. Grendl was mine and Mona's first pet together. I guess it's about time she got a tribute somewhere. She was a black and white house cat. She kind of looked like a dairy cow with a slightly off kilter Charlie Chaplin mustache. I named her Grendel, the spelling was changed by the vet's assistant on her paperwork, because she looked like a monster when my wife found her. We thought she was going to die, but Mona nursed her through the night until we could take her to the vet. She survived and we brought her home where she lived with us and taught me to love cats like I never thought I would. I grew up a dog person, we had cats but I never liked them particularly. My dad had had a cat that he loved, Macho; but I never had loved cats before. Grendl lived a pretty full life with us for about a decade before she suffered a stroke and died shortly afterwards. She is buried under the big maple tree in my back yard now. She has been gone for seven years now and I still miss her.

*Which included a girl. Most of my D&D experiences, from the early days on,have had at least one female gamer at the table, so I never really got that it was a sausage-fest in RPG gaming until I started reading Dragon magazine and listening to other D&D players talking about the lack of women in gaming. Wargames have pretty much always been a boys club, but RPGs haven't in my experience.

**He was constantly having Frodia, his pet country, kick Garnia's ass in major world wars, then resetting the boundaries for the next bout. He wrote maybe a thousand years worth of apocryphal history for the campaign, because I said it would be OK if he filled in some of the more recent back-story events for the setting if he wanted to while I worked on other aspects.

Mail Call 04-02-11

A couple of rather odd-ball things for me today.

I found this pretty darned cheap, now I can see what all the fuss is about. Yeah, I know it's an older edition and I probably could have found a .pdf online somewhere for free, but I like real books; despite being marked as used it's in brand new condition too.


This, I just wanted a new battle mat; my old one is getting old and has ink stains on it that won't come out and this new one has hexes on one side too. The only downside is the slightly larger 1 1/2" squares, but I am going back to using true 25mm scale miniatures anyway, so they can just be 10' squares.

F is for-

Feudalism, which is the assumed default governmental form in most D&D settings. We usually add in it's associated economic system of Manorialism, if we give any thought to economics at all. The problem is most people get Feudalism dead wrong. They think the king is some Louis XIV type and everyone is running around doing his bidding. That's called absolute monarchy. Feudal monarchies are about decentralization of power. In a feudal system the king is likely to be, at best, first among equals. Sure, every now and again a strong king comes along and makes the nobles toe the line, but under a feudal system only those nobles directly in fealty to the king have ANY ties to him. For example a duke may be in fealty to the king, but the duke's men aren't; they owe their allegiance to the duke alone, if the duke decides to rebel against the king they are obliged to follow the duke; they don't owe the king anything. Follow this down the line of the duke's vassals who have vassals of their own. Now there are significant legal and moral obligations to those above you and below you, which is why feudalism works, but you can see how easy it might be to gum up the works.

I suppose I should point out that I am using the western European/English model for feudalism here. Feudalism works much the same way elsewhere, but some cultures have more or less rules for their particular versions. The Japanese system, for instance, only allows a vassal to have one lord; in England or France you could have as many as you could handle- often with quite humorous results*.

F is for Frodia, the "other" nation in my Garnia campaign. Frodia has an interesting history with regard to it's existence. I originally designed it to make use of EGG's other governmental types from the DMG. I wanted a magocracy in my fantasy world because it sounded cool and couldn't exist in the real world. My initial Garnian pantheon of gods included "Frodal- God of Magic" and the Oligarchic Theocratic Magocracy of Frodia was born. I initially envisioned Frodia as a very much "other" kind of a place and they were the counterpoint and rival of the standard warrior culture of the Garnians. Kind of like REH's Stygia, a small but extremely powerful group of wizard priests holding dominion. The people of Frodia were of the same ethnic stock as the Garnians, ie. Celts, but the area where they settled after the conquest of the Elven empire was where the Elves had their centers of sorcery and they had fallen into worship of Frodal, a god of indeterminate origin; and split off from the kingdom of Garnia fairly early in history.

Then I handed it over to Darryl C. for fleshing out while I worked on Garnia, the primary campaign setting area. To say Darryl took it in a different direction would be a vast understatement. He made Frodal a much nicer god than I had originally designed him to be by changing his alignment to NG; the idea being that wizardry should be used for the betterment of the nation. He used magic as a replacement for technology and made mages commonplace. There were wizards in charge of a variety of public works. There were wizards as the officer corps of the Frodian military (and most of the NCOs) and entire commando units of wizards. He pretty much brought Frodia up to a mid-1980's level of development using magic as a direct replacement for technology.

Obviously the bulk of that had to be scrapped. We fought for a bit over the details, but I got him to bring Frodia back to the early medieval tech level I had in mind, he got to keep the benevolent wizard god and a nation ruled by a cabal of arch-mages and high priests of that god. Garnia and Frodia became locked into a struggle for supremacy. Both have vast swathes of fertile land and navigable rivers for ease of transport. Frodia concentrates on trade and being magically powerful and hires a lot of mercenaries** .

F is for Fighters. Just read this.

F is for Feuds. Feuds and feuding are pretty important cultural things to the Celts and thus part of the background of the culture in my Garnia campaign. Feuds have started wars in Garnia, which has a VERY decentralized proto-feudal government. Celtic anarchy FTW.

F is for France. That's right, France. France gets a bad rap here in the US, particularly over the last couple of decades, as weak and cowardly. That is an exact quote from my mother-in-law. The French are weak and cowardly, and that's why she doesn't like them. Here in the US the French have become so despised that in politics being compared to the French in anyway is damaging to your career or policy position. We were so furious over the fact that the French did not give full throated support to our invasion of Iraq that there was a concerted effort to rename French Fries "Freedom Fries". Failing to support the US in it's decision to invade another country is just more proof of their inherent cowardice right?

Wrong. Not just wrong but WAY wrong. First the French are descended from the ancient Gauls, a people so incredibly scary and warlike they made the Romans wet their togas and spend centuries of concerted (although sporadic) effort to ultimately defeat***. The Gauls who loved war and collected heads. Cowards? I don't think so.

OK, you say they were defeated by the Romans. That is true, indisputably. They became largely Romanized and were absorbed into their empire, fine. The world's first western super-power? That Roman empire? What makes them weak and cowardly, the fact that they were defeated and absorbed into the toughest empire on earth? Or the fact that they went on to be a significant asset militarily to that empire? I guess we'd all like to think that if our native land was defeated we would fight on forever to the death to regain our freedom, but world history would seem to indicate otherwise.

OK, the Romans ultimately lost too, and those Gauls got yet another master****- the Franks. The Franks were so bad-ass and warlike that the Romans used to hire them as mercenaries to keep the other Germans in line. The Franks, who under the leadership of Charles Martel, ultimately saved Europe from becoming another part of the Muslim world*****. The Franks, who gave their name to France. The Franks that spawned Charlemagne, who was THE model of Christian kingship throughout the middle ages and became emperor of a resurrected Roman empire. Charlemagne who was probably the greatest European conqueror since, maybe, Julius Caesar.

OK, everyone gets lucky once in a while, maybe Charlemagne broke a national stereotype, or it developed after his death. No. Through good dynasties and bad the French set the standard for being warlike super bad-asses. From the age of Charlemagne through the age of Napoleon they were pretty much the tough country that all the other European countries wished they could be. That's over a 1000 year run, how many other nations can say they have a millennium of ass kicking under their belt? The French had a world spanning empire, just like the British, and they mostly did it first. The word for bad-ass white man (or white devil) in pretty much every non-European language is usually some derivation of the word Frenchman. Rudyard Kipling, once said about the French: "Their business is war, and they do their business.".

I think it's possible that we Americans picked up our dislike of the French from our immediate progenitors, the British, who had legitimate grievances towards the French. The English were conquered by the French in 1066 and had their culture largely destroyed as a result. English readers might feel like pointing out here that it was the Normans******, not the French that defeated the English, I will point out that Normandy is in France, get over it. 30 percent of the English language comes from French. Then they tried to out French the French through their use of feudal laws and inheritance which led to the Hundred Years War, and that didn't turn out so good for the English either. They had a pretty big victory in snatching French north America in Canada, but that still hasn't absorbed into the Anglo-sphere. We Americans just bought the rest of French north America, back when we were friends and it has absorbed into our culture a lot better as a result.

Honestly, I think the American dislike of France stems from our shame at not being able to achieve our independence from Great Britain without their help. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown roughly half of the army opposing him was French, and a French naval blockade kept the British forces from receiving resupply or reinforcements.

We Americans always bring up two things about the French. First that we saved their asses during WW1, which isn't true, but we like to say it anyway. We were Johnny-come-lately's to that war, it was pretty much all over but the crying when US forces entered battle. The second is that they got their asses handed to the by the Germans in WW2; all I have to say about that is that the German's pretty much kicked everyone's asses in the early days of WW2, their opponents were ready for a WW1 rematch, not all new WW2 stuff. The British are damned lucky there was a channel in the way and they had the world's greatest navy, otherwise they'd have suffered the same fate as the French. I mean, the British army had already been pretty soundly defeated in the field too. The French for their part, after the surrender by their government, continued to fight on as the Resistance, the Maquis and the Free French Forces.

Some might mention that the French suffered more defeats during the decolonization period following WW2, particularly their humiliating defeat in Viet Nam; but most won't go there because we Americans suffer the same stigma of defeat at the hands of the same enemy. I figure nations are like people, every tough guy gets beat sometimes, you can't win every fight. Sometimes they are just legitimately tougher than you, sometimes circumstances just work against you; it doesn't make you a pansy if you lose a fight.

Now I am going to ruin all this history by revealing that I may have an ulterior motive in defending the French martial reputation, I am half French by ancestry on my mother's side. On my father's side I am of Scottish Highland and English descent. I bring this up to point out that my mother's people are much more likely to beat your ass if you piss them off. That's right, they are 100% French and bellicose as all get out. They tolerate no insult. I guess it's possible that all the hardcore bad-ass Frenchmen moved to north America, but it doesn't seem likely.

This concludes my rant about France.

*This would be from my medieval historian's perspective, I am pretty sure people involved at the time didn't find these legal and ethical quandaries to be particularly amusing. I am thinking of several examples from the Hundred Years War, where various lords were enfeoffed by both the English and the French and had to decide which obligation took precedence and whether or not to meet their obligations to one side or both in the conflict. I like it when the do both. Hilarity ensues.

**Notably they have the Wodanish kingdom to the south, a very Saxon kingdom of horse lords. Believe it or not, I only realized that they were a carbon copy of the Rohirrim when I saw the Peter Jackson movies. I will cover them in greater detail when we get to the letter W.

***How effective this extermination of Gaulish culture really was is still debated by scholars, but I feel I should note here that one of the successor states to the western Roman empire was the Gaulish empire, albeit briefly.

****Actually they got several new masters from a variety of Germanic tribes, but to save time and space all of those Germanic conquerors get consolidated under the rulership of the Franks.

*****There is a lot of debate about how concerted the Muslim attack into France was, and the fact that they were at the end of a very long supply line; but ultimately it was like Ayn Jalut was for the Mongols, it shattered the myth of Muslim invincibility.

******The Normans of 1066 were certainly descended, fairly recently, from the Vikings, sure; but the Normans that conquered England were a damned sight more French after a century plus in Normandy than the Normans in England would ever become English. Anglo-Saxon English culture adapted to it's Frenchifying and became the English culture of today. Embrace your hybrid vigor, it built the British empire, something the Anglo-Saxons never would have gotten around to doing.

E is for-

Elves. Elves are the only sentient race that is native to my Garnia campaign world. Elves invented the magic gates by which they visited other worlds and other races migrated to theirs. The Elves are naturally Good in the same way that, say, Orcs are inherently Evil. The Elves used to have a continent spanning culture and lived in peace with the various immigrant races and each other. Unfortunately for the Elven race, and every other race present on their world, the greater forces of Evil also invented magical gate technology and used it to invade the Good world of the Elves. They sent in their specially bred troops, the Goblinoid races, the Trolls, and especially the Orcs. They weathered all of these threats with various degrees of success. The threat they couldn't handle was the arrival of Man. When Humans originally arrived on the Elven world, the Elves did not notice. When the Elves finally did notice the Humans, who had arrived in a barren steppe, they were cautious and observed them for over a century before arriving at a decision as to their nature and what to do. Unfortunately for the Elves, the Humans were not alignment bound and came from a warrior culture. The magic imbued world made the Humans mighty sorcerers as well. Humans bred quickly and kept bringing in more of their kind through the gate they controlled. The forces of Evil also brought more Humans to the world. Border clashes with the Humans, whom the Elves were attempting to keep bottled up in the northern steppes, eventually sparked off a full scale nearly genocidal war in which the Elven race was soundly defeated. The Elves lost for a multitude of reasons, the hardiness and adaptability of Human kind* and the fact that they were fighting off major offensives by the forces of Evil on other fronts simultaneously being prime among them. The Elves of the Garnia campaign setting are a largely defeated people, ruling themselves only in places where refugees fled during the great invasion of the people of Ailill**.

E is also for EBay. Ebay is the beast that eats my money and feeds my OSR habit. Over the last four months or so, I have bought rules sets that I either lost long ago or never had; I have quadrupled (at least) the number of miniatures I have, both old school and newish, even WotC plastics. My natural desire to hoard cool stuff is defeating my aesthetic desire to have a less cluttered house. I am not a nomad anymore, so I don't really need to keep my stuff to a minimum, but still.

E is for Eirik the red. Not only is Eirik the red a viking, which totally kicks ass, but he is probably the last real, old school viking. He got banned from Norway for being a viking bad-ass, so he moved to Iceland, where the old school vikings went to escape Norway's suppression of their bad-assery, and then got kicked out of there for being too hardcore too. Did he let getting kicked out of everywhere stop him? Hel no! He discovered a new land and set himself up as chief of state, then advertised for more settlers. His son Leif gets more attention for sailing a little further west and discovering north America, but he was more of the new breed of Northman; a Christian and a trader. Eirik held on to his heathenry.

E is for Evil. Evil is a real invasive force in my world of Garnia, not just a moral decision. My cosmology is based on Good planes and Evil planes with one balanced neutral plane between them. Evil wages ceaseless war to exterminate Good and vice versa. Evil is winning.

E is for Epic. Epic poems in particular. Epic poetry forms the heroic basis that I use as a framework for building off of. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf, the Tain. These are our roots, they tell us what a hero is and what adventures are.

That's all for today, sorry to cut it short but I have work to do today and my eldest daughter is being inducted into French Honor Society tonight, so I need to have everything done and be ready to go before the induction ceremony and dinner.

*Rules-wise this world was built using AD&D 1st edition rules, pre UA; therefore Humans get all the real advantages level and class wise.

**Ailill being the name of the first High-King of the pan-Celtic peoples of the northern steppes. From him was descended the first Garnian royal dynasty.

Mail Yesterday and Today

Most of these came yesterday and I was too lazy to post the pictures, sorry. As always the pictures are from EBay until I get a better digital camera.

These guys are Lion Clan Samurai for Clan War. I got kind of addicted to Clan War minis when I started buying them for use in my Oriental Adventures/Ruins and Ronin mash-up campaign.


This book I have been meaning to buy for quite some time, like dating back into the 2nd edition AD&D era. I like the way the seller posed it with a wee dragon too.


Finding a complete box set of 1st edition Twilight:2000 for $.99 was awesome. It almost makes up for the fact that my original is still MIA.


This is the one that came today. I don't play GURPS. I just really like their setting books.