Here’s a random village-name generator. It’s tuned to generate English village-style names, with a touch of D&D. As with all generators, ignore or justify nonsensical results.
random village names
June 10th, 2013metallic dragons are from the planes
June 7th, 2013Here’s an essay from my Random Dungeons book, which you should buy! Lots of stuff there, by me and other authors, which doesn’t appear on anyone’s website.
metallic dragons are from the planes
Metallic dragons never seemed to me to occupy the D&D world as chromatic dragons did. While fighting evil dragons is a core D&D experience, interacting with friendly gold and silver dragons sometimes seems hokey.
For one thing, a D&D world doesn’t have room for a lot of super-powerful good creatures. You might as well have a race of Elminsters running around, solving problems before the PCs can get to them. Even if they’re more Switzerland than global policemen, they still add areas of stability and safety that don’t have a place in every campaign world.
Also, the metallic dragons, with their ability to disguise as humans, seem to be on a different level of reality than the straight-ahead evil lizard cousins. They remind me of the Golden Hart from the Blue Rose d20 system: more like magical guides from fairy tales or hero’s journeys than inhabitants of the natural world.
I think that the metallic dragons have a place in D&D: and that place is the planes.
Gold dragons belong in the realms of the gods: the Astral Sea or the good-aligned outer planes. These dragons, like their home planes, are almost too beautiful to view directly: the sight of half-a-dozen winging across the glowing astral clouds is one that will stay with viewers until the end of their days. Gods and their exarchs sometimes ride gold dragon allies into battle. A gold dragon in the natural world is, perhaps, on an errand, doing a favor for a god.
Silver dragons are native to the moonlit glades of the Feywild. They’re among the most powerful and unpredictable natives of that powerful and unpredictable place. I like them as the most powerful dragons of their plane: it seems like a more interesting niche than “the second-most powerful good dragon”.
The other three traditional metallic dragons are brass, bronze, and copper, which is a bizarre collection of metals. We have way too many indistinguishable copper alloys here. There are five metallic dragons to match the five evil dragons, but, to me, these three don’t seem to have distinct conceptual places. I’d get rid of brass and bronze, and just keep copper dragons.
As gold dragons reflect the radiant light of the sun and silver dragons the moon, copper dragons suggest to me firelight. I actually think that copper dragons might belong in the natural world: they’re less powerful than many of the evil dragons, they’re described as gregarious, and in some editions they have stone-related powers. They might need to hide from the evil dragons to survive, and they split their time between hiding among humans in cities and skulking in vast torch-lit caverns under the mountains.
Maybe every dungeon, or many of them, contains the hidden lair of a copper dragon. You’re not likely to find it without really thorough exploration and possibly a stroke of luck.
Forgotten doo-dads
June 3rd, 2013Here are some magic items that have no specific purpose. They’re ingredients that could be used by the DM as part of Rube Goldberg traps, or by the players in any number of DM-confounding plans.
The Incredible Changing Brick
This item appears as a colored stone cube, sized anywhere between a few inches to 15 feet across. It has five possible sizes. When it is exposed to fire (or any effect hot enough to do damage) it grows one size. When it is exposed to freezing temperatures (cold enough to do damage), it shrinks one size.
If someone is struck by a cold or heat attack while carrying the brick, the brick is likely to change size. When the Changing Brick grows, it is strong enough to burst any container except well-constructed stone or thick metal. In a confined space, it will crush any creature who cannot escape or make a DC 21 Strength check.
Size 1: The size of a half-brick, the Changing Brick is 6 inches long and 5 pounds.
Size 2: 2 feet long and 50 pounds, about the size of a stone in a typical dungeon wall. If it’s in a full backpack or bag when it grows to size 2, it’s likely to burst the container.
Size 3: 4 feet long and 400 pounds. It is difficult to drag, even by strong characters.
Size 4: 8 feet long and too heavy to lift. It’s big enough to almost completely block a typical dungeon corridor.
Size 5: 15 feet long.
Example uses: A Brick at the base of a loose wall could cause an avalanche if struck by a careless fireball. A character armed with an at-will Cold spell and a torch could use the Changing Brick as a portable defensive wall or battering ram.
Electrum Mirror
The ancients used solar and light power to fuel many of their lost technologies. If you find a cache of ancient electrum coins, look around carefully for an electrum mirror guarding it. Electrum mirrors were versatile parts of many of the traps and devices in ancient dungeons.
An electrum mirror is a smooth silver-gold sheet marked with a single rune. It’s frequently mounted, out of reach, on a dungeon wall or ceiling.
Electrum mirrors can have a single wizard spell stored on them. They’re sensitive to light: when a certain light level is reached, their stored spell is triggered. Electrum mirrors can cast their stored spell once per day.
Electrum mirrors can distinguish between firelight, sunlight, moonlight, and colored light, and may be programmed to react to any or all of these. Characters with dungeon experience might be able to spot the devices from a distance, noticing the glint of electrum before their torches trigger any spells.
If the rune is physically wiped off the mirror, the stored spell is erased and a new one may be cast into it. The caster presets variables like spell range and direction.
Example uses: An electrum mirror might be programmed to shoot a fireball down a corridor when exposed to torchlight. Another one might cast the illusion of a ghost when moonlight shines on it through a window. A third might react to any light by casting Mage Hand, pulling a nearby lever and opening a pit trap.
the ha ha
May 31st, 2013The ha-ha is a bizarre architectural feature common in ornamental gardens: it’s a ditch that’s designed to be nearly invisible from one side. Presumably it gets its name from the garden-owner’s reaction when visitors stumble into the ditch.
In real life, ha-has are used to enclose livestock without breaking sight lines. In D&D, I presume that they’re a goblin invention. They’re named so because goblins find it so funny when human invaders fall into hidden pits.
In one game I ran, I gave the PCs a goblin-drawn map of a dungeon. The hidden pits were all marked as “ha-ha.” However, goblins find so many other things funny: sharpened pendulums, poisoned meat, patches of green slime on a green carpet: and they note them all with various onomatopoeia for laughter. On a goblin map, treat “ha-ha,” “har-har”, “hee-hee”, or “lol” as “find an alternate route.”
our ghouls and ghasts are not as good as the originals
May 28th, 2013On a Wikipedia binge, I learned the origin of the D&D ghast: Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. (I’ve read it before, but this detail never made an impression on me.)
The ghasts are a race of fearsome humanoids. They are much larger than a man and have a vaguely human face, albeit missing a nose. Their skin is rough and knotty. Their senses are unusually acute; they can see in the dark and have a strong sense of smell. They hop about on a pair of hooved, kangaroo-like legs, and are swift, strong, and agile. They have also been described as lacking a forehead. Ghasts prefer to dwell in complete darkness and have no tolerance for natural light — sunlight will kill them instantly.
That grotesque kangaroo-hopping detail is what gets me. Make these guys pack hunters who travel, say, twice as fast as the PCs, and, whether they’re chasing you across midnight plains or down pitch-black dungeon corridors, you’ve got a really creepy monster.
D&D ghasts, on the other hand, are like ghouls but they smell bad. As far as I’m concerned, D&D ghasts now hop like kangaroos.
Score: D&D 0, Lovecraft 1
Ghouls, of course, are from Arabian folklore (the earliest mention is in the Arabian Nights). Arabian Nights ghuls act a lot like D&D ghouls: they hang out in graveyards, eat human flesh, etc. “The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently eaten.”
Ghouls were already one of my favorite D&D encounters, but this is the detail they’ve been missing. A shuffling pack of ghouls, each with the familiar face of their victims, partakes somewhat of the horror of doppelgangers and somewhat of zombie-movie zombies, but it has its own special something. This isn’t a “this zombie was once my buddy” pathos moment, or a “my buddy was a doppelganger all along” chills moment; this is a “this ghoul ate my buddy’s face, and now he’s wearing it” rage moment.
In the past, I’ve had my ghoul-eaten PCs return as ghouls, but I think that from now on I’ll have the original ghouls take on the PCs’ appearances.
Score: D&D 0, Arabian Nights 1
en garde!
May 23rd, 2013
If I had been reading Strategic Review 1.4 in winter 1975, this ad would have caught my eye:
EN GARDE! is Game Designers’ Workshop’s newest, and most unusual game. The 17th Century, with musketeers, and swordfights in the streets, comes alive as the 40 pages of rules, charts, and tables unfold. In EN GARDE! each player finds himself a person, born and bred for the swashbuckling life of a gentleman adventurer. Status is pursued above all else, even above money. Social climbing is a way of life. The world is inhabited by the likes of Scaramouche, Cyrano and Roxanne, Errol Flynn, Porthos, Athos, Aramis, Rhonda Fleming, Franco is Villon, and, of course, D’Artagnan. There are people to be used, lackies to be abused, the Cardinal’s Guard to be trounced, friends to be cultivated, enemies to be humiliated, the hearts of fair ladies to be won, the ear of the King to be gained!
All you need to play EN GARDE! is a pencil, paper, a six-sided die, the EN GARDE! rule booklet, an adventurous imagination, and some friends. . . Rules cover a complete 17th Century society in some hypothetical country, (oh, call it France, if you like). Specific rules include a complete fencing system (to settle those disputes you may have), character generation, social climbing, money, carousing, mistresses, gambling, influence, the military, advancement, everything you need to live a full life, and enjoy every minute of it.
Come with us to those bawdy, rowdy days of yore. . . Sharpen your blade. . . Sharpen your wits. . . Take care not to insult a small man with a large nose. . . All for one and one for all. . . Good luck, friend, and may your swash never buckle!
EN GARDE! $4.00 ppd.
I like the Three Musketeers milieu, and Scaramouche, Flynn, and the rest of them. (I had to look up Rhonda Fleming, and I’m still not sure why she was on the list.)
The promise of rigorous rules for “social climbing, money, carousing, mistresses, gambling, influence, the military, advancement,” and “everything else” would have been enough to part me from my $4.00 ppd. It’s a lot to jam into 40 pages, though; my guess is that the En Garde rules are about as sketchy as the OD&D rules, or more so.
Also of note: “40 pages of rules, charts, and tables.” This was a time when people made a selling point of the quantity of their charts and tables. RPG design has sure changed over 35 years.
According to En Garde’s own wikipedia page, En Garde was mostly a play by mail game. I also noticed that Loren Wiseman was listed as one of the designers. That name was familiar to me, since I had just read it in the same 1975 issue of Strategic Review containing the En Garde ad, in this hilarious cartoon:
Apparently En Garde is still around and in its fourth edition. It seems to be mostly a play by email/messageboard game. It’s fun to see this list of all the currently-running En Garde games, so similar to the Players Wanted sections in the 70’s game zines or the Strategic Review list of all the DMs looking for players. I’m kind of tempted to try one of the En Garde games out.
unnamed Gygax and Grubb campaign setting
May 20th, 2013This week, two exciting, unpublished TSR settings collided in my head to form a third setting.
setting 1: Jeff Grubb project
On the latest WOTC D&D podcast, Steve Winter talked about the great campaign-world books that came out of Second Edition D&D. He said that, for every kick-ass setting like Planescape or Al’Quadim, they had a bunch of ideas just as good – they just didn’t have time to print them all. Prompted, he described one of the settings that he’d never forgotten:
There’s one that always comes to mind: it was proposed by Jeff Grubb, and I forget what the name of it was, but the idea was, it was a world where there were all these mountain ranges, and all of civilization – the good part of civilization – has been driven up to the tops of these mountains, and then there’s a tremendously thick cloud layer, so wherever the sun shines is where good exists. Everything beneath the cloud layer has been overrun by evil. There are cloud ships that sail out from these mountain-top cities across the clouds, and the adventurers rappel down to the world where they go raiding the ruined cities that used to be down there, looking for gold, metal, and all the kinds of things that they don’t have in these mountaintop cities.
As Steve Winter says, that idea isn’t quite as fresh as it was in the late 80s (he’s seen elements in anime, and it reminds me of Final Fantasy) but I think it’s still an evocative and inspiring world. I’m ready to play it! But, since all we have is a podcast sound bite and not a campaign book, I’m left with a lot of questions: exactly what kind of evil lurks in the cloudy lowlands? What does the wilderness look like?
setting 2: “The Original D&D Setting”
Here’s the other great setting I read this week: The Original D&D Setting, a series of blog posts by Wayne Rossi. This teases out the weirdness that you get if you take the original OD&D books and play its assumptions to the hilt. Griffin-riding Arthurian knights wait inside sinister castles, swamps crawl with dinosaurs, there are Martian creatures in the desert, and undead shamble through cities.
Wayne Rossi provides a “campaign map” of this strange wild land: James Mishler’s version of the Outdoor Survival map that Gygax used for his wilderness adventures. When I took a close look at it, I noticed that three areas had little snow-capped peaks – presumably impassable. That’s when the Steve Winter idea crash-landed into the setting. What if those white-capped peaks aren’t covered with snow, but shining with sunlight? What if they’re the only safe places in the setting, and the PCs descend from the mountains to explore the misty lands of Wilderness Survival?
A couple of nice things happen when we combine these settings:
getting lost
Getting lost is a big deal in Wilderness Survival, and in the OD&D exploration rules. If you roll badly, you can end up wandering north when you think you’re going south. I’ve always wondered how getting lost by 180 degrees can happen on a sunny day, when you always know which ways East and West are. But suddenly, in this setting, it’s possible! Beneath the cloud cover, you can’t see the sun or the stars, and navigation is much harder than it is in a traditional outdoor adventure.
cities
Even if you’ve played a campaign on the classic Wilderness Survival map before, this setting inverts it. Usually, peaks are impassable and towns are your home base. Now, peaks are safe in a way that no valley village is. Cities will be places of horror: mockeries of safety.
In OD&D, in a city encounter, 50% of the time you roll on the “men” subtable and 50% of the time you roll on the “undead” subtable. Even in straight OD&D, there are way more undead in cities than we’re used to from later adventure settings. It really makes sense in this below-the-clouds horror setting, where, as Steve Winter says, the ruined cities are the primary dungeons. Since it’s always cloudy, you’re never safe from sun-fearing undead like vampires. Maybe the cities are filled with vampire lords who keep humans (the “men” encounters) as their cattle; maybe anyone who dies down here becomes undead, so cities are amoung the most dangerous places in the world; maybe the cities are straight-up dungeons ruled by necromancers and evil high priests (who together form 1/6 of the encounters on the “men” subtable).
Wayne points out that the arrangement of the cities is odd: there are five in a cross in the middle of the map, and the central one is in the forest. If we’re saying that ruined cities are the main dungeons of the settings, the central one, overgrown by eerie forest, is probably the scariest and most dangerous dungeon.
castles
Most OD&D castle encounters, with wizards and clerics who enslave you and high-level fighters who challenge you, fit squarely into Steve Winter’s description of the wilderness as “overrun by evil.” While cities are the megadungeons of the settings, castles might be the bite-sized minidungeons that the players can try to clear in a single adventure.
Wayne Rossi makes the point that, according to the number of castles on the Wilderness Survival map and the castle-inhabitant charts, you’d expect three of the castles to be controlled by good clerics. I have my eye on the three castles in the mountain pass near the largest mountain peak area.
Wayne suggests that these good clerics are all part of one holy order dedicated to recapturing the land from evil. This makes sense to me. We can say that, while the surface of the world is nearly overrun with evil, there is one little area where a holy order has a foothold. This is the likely starting point of the PCs’ adventures: these castles control the only safe way to ascend to the mountain peaks. From the southernmost castle, it’s only 4 hexes to the closest city. That will undoubtedly be the first dungeon that the PCs tackle.
rivers
OK, there’s something I haven’t figured out. According to OD&D, rivers are just swarming with buccaneers and pirates. Who are they preying on? Each other?
Steve Winter said that cloud ships travel from mountain peak to mountain peak. Maybe the buccaneers and pirates are based on the river, but their ships can ascend to the clouds to attack cloud shipping. Maybe the pirates even have flying submarines.
That said, if pirates can fly, why do they spend so much time on the river? Maybe someone can solve this for me.
Another thing: there are a lot of flying monsters in the original OD&D encounter tables – dragons, griffins, chimerae. Can they threaten the mountain settlements and cloud ships, or are they confined to the lowlands?
This week I’ll try to delve more into the implications of this setting.
why you want Domains at War
May 17th, 2013
There’s about a day left in Autarch’s Adventurer Conqueror King: Domains at War kickstarter. I was lucky enough to get a Domains at War war-game playtest with Tavis Allison. It’s very impressive for the same reason Adventurer Conqueror King is impressive: it marries simple D&D mechanics with rock-solid behind-the-scenes mathematical rigor. That may not sound like much, but that combination is a rock on which many RPG-design ships have foundered. I still can’t believe that ACKS has pulled it off, and I keep peeking behind the curtain, only to find that the system is even more solid than I expect.
Let me tell you two stories: the first is why you should have ACKS on your bookshelf, and the second is why you should back Domains at War right now.
Ask Adventurer Conqueror King: How many knights per square mile?
Right now I’m reading Charles Oman’s A History of the Art of War, a giant volume that, according to Jon Peterson, was a primary text for Gary Gygax’s Chainmail. I’m reading a chapter chock full of the meaty medieval economic information I love:
We have seen that “knight-service” and “castle-ward” were ideas not altogether unfamiliar before the Conquest, and that the obligation of every five hides of land to send a mailed warrior to the host was generally acknowledged […] A landholder, knowing his servitium according to the assessment of the vetus feoffamentum of the Conqueror, had to provide the due amount of knights. This he could do, in two ways: he might distribute the bulk of his estate in lots roughly averaging five hides to sub-tenants, who would discharge the knight-service for him, or he might keep about him a household of domestic knights, like the housecarles of old, and maintain them without giving them land. Some landholders preferred the former plan, but some adhered, at least for a time, to the latter. But generally an intermediate arrangement prevailed: the tenant-in-chief gave out most of his soil to knights whom he enfeoffed on five-hide patches, but kept the balance in dominio as his private demesne, contributing to the king for the ground so retained the personal service of himself, his sons, and his immediate domestic retainers.
OK, this seems pretty clear: each knight needs five hides of land to support him. Problem is, what’s a hide? Apparently, it’s an extremely variable amount: the land needed to support one farming family. Its area is most often given in old texts as 120 acres.
Given this information, I extrapolated two useful pieces of information: how many families can be supported by a square mile of farmland, and how many knights defend it? (Stuff like this can be very useful for D&D worldbuilding, whether you need to know, for instance, the size of a country’s army or, conversely, the size of the country needed to support the army you want to use.) According to my initial calculations, a square mile of farmland, 640 acres, contained about 5 hides: about 5 farming families and one knight.
I thought I’d compare this to ACKS. I discovered that each hex of civilized land contains, according to ACKS, about 4x as many peasant families as I expected. I had a feeling that Autarch hadn’t missed a trick here. I emailed Tavis and Alex to see if they could unravel this riddle for me. Alex responded:
It’s quite confusing because a hide is not a fixed area of land. It’s 60-120 acres, but the acres in question are “old acres”. ACKS uses “modern acres”. A hide is about 30 modern acres. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_land_terms. […] Now, 1 6-mile hex is about 32 square miles, which is 20,480 acres, which translates into 682 peasant families. At sufficient densities I assume a surplus that includes non-farming craftsmen, so we end up with the cap of 750 families per 6-mile hex in ACKS.
In any event, 5 hides supports 5 families in ACKS. Each peasant family generates on average 12gp per month in revenue for their lord. 5 x 12 gp = 60gp. The monthly cost for a knight is 60gp (see Mercenary Wages, Heavy Cavalry). So each 5 hides can support 1 knight, as per The Art of War in the Middle Ages.
Mystery solved! My estimate for peasants per mile was off by a factor of 4 because the area of an acre had increased 4x! Furthermore, I was delighted to see that five families exactly supported one knight, as Oman suggested.
That’s one of the big selling points of ACKS for me. I like to do historical research and tweak my game accordingly, but if I want to double-check my answers, having ACKS on my shelf makes things easier. And if I consistently fall back on its prices, domain rules, end economic model, I’ll end up with something more plausible than what I could cobble together on my own.
Domains at War: Richard and Saladin
A few nights ago I went over to Tavis’s house for a playtest of the Domains at War system. I hadn’t read the rules, but I was deep in Oman’s descriptions of the major battles of the Crusades, and I’ve read a lot about medieval tactics. I figured that my ignorance of the Domains at War rules was actually a boon for the playtest. If I could command an army using only the tactics described in historical battles, and get plausible results, without knowing rules, that would be a win for the system.
On the train ride over, I’d been reading about the battle of Arsouf between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. I think Tavis had some other playtest planned, but after I enthusiastically recounted the battle, he said, “That sounds fun: let’s play that.” Oman gives a rather detailed troop breakdown of both sides, including the generals in charge of various divisions of the Crusaders. D@W includes rules for subcommanders, each with their own initiative and attributes, so the wings of my army were led by their historical commanders: King Richard at the center, King Guy of Jerusalem in the rear, and the Duke of Burgundy in the van. I put the Bishop of Bauvais, a cleric, at the head of the small band of heavily-armed Templars at the fore. Although D@W includes rules for battlefield heroics by PCs, King Richard and Saladin never met for a decisive D&D-encounter showdown.
The Battle of Arsouf is exceptional because the Crusaders, for once, held their ground and stuck to their game plan instead of charging disastrously into traps set by Saladin’s more mobile cavalry. I set myself the same challenge: could I maintain discipline and resist the temptation to charge Tavis’s skirmishers?
NO!
After a few turns of being peppered by arrows, I deviated from King Richard’s strategy. I saw an opportunity to send my cavalry into the flank of Saladin’s wheeling cavalry. It was worth it to see how beautifully my rolling cavalry charge checked Tavis’s advance and sent a few of his units fleeing for the woods.
After a few turns of opposed cavalry charges and countercharges, I was rolling up Tavis’s left wing while my own left wing was close to routing. We’d each taken a lot of casualties. Tavis needed to kill only one more of my units to force a potentially game-ending morale check; I needed two. And in real life, it was well after midnight. We played one more turn. On my left wing, Saladin concentrated his forces on one of King Guy’s cavalry units, trying to force it to flee, but it held. Meanwhile, on my right wing, I chased down and defeated one of Saladin’s light cavalry units, and sent a thundering charge into a second, but, bad luck for me, it made its morale check. Night fell on the battlefield, ending the battle inconclusively after a tense final turn. I got home around 3 AM on a work night – the sign of a good game.
As the game went on, I found myself trusting the rules more and more. If I had just role-played the part of King Richard, I think the game system would have given me the victory. In fact, I role-played the part of an undisciplined, impetuous Crusader cavalier, and, as they so frequently did, I nearly turned victory into defeat. Maybe Tavis will give me a rematch sometime. This time I’ll stick to the plan.
a moment of dread on the Isle of Dread
May 14th, 2013The 5e playtest version of Isle of Dread encourages the DM to spindle, fold, and mutilate the original adventure. The module suggests (spoilers ahead) having NPCs who visit the jungle center of the island return as undead, possessed, or otherwise corrupted versions of their former selves.
I went with this idea: the natives of the friendly village warned that explorers often come back “wrong:” not undead, but with an imperfect memory of their former lives and with a cunning tendency to act normal until they found a way to kill as many of their fellow villagers as possible. Therefore, the villagers had instituted a password and security-question system for letting explorers back in the village.
When the PCs met some native villagers walking around in the jungle interior, they somehow forgot about these hints. They trustingly hired the natives as guides: furthermore, they insisted that the villagers keep watch at camp so that all the PCs could go to sleep at once (including the high elf, who insisted that “I don’t NEED to sleep, but I LIKE to sleep.”)
That night, the corrupted villagers tried to creep up to the sleeping PCs and slit their throats. Only a series of improbably high PC Listen checks prevented a sleeping TPK. The PCs killed the corrupted villagers and then finished their rest.
The next day, surveying the carnage, the PC druid had a horrifying thought. “What if the villagers were sneaking up to put mints on our pillow or something? What if we’re the ones that are “wrong”? They went through the checklist: do we leave piles of their bodies in their wake? check. Are we remorseless? Check: this was the second night in a row the PCs had gone blissfully to sleep among corpses of their own making. Do we have poor memories? Sure, they’d forgotten that natives in the jungle might be dangerous. Besides, PCs never remember any plot points from week to week.
For a while, the players seriously entertained the notion that I was acting as an unreliable DM narrator, and the players had “gone wrong” and were killing innocents. And I? I cursed myself for not thinking of it. If I’d planned it, and managed to pull it off, this could have been The Creepiest D&D Game Ever.
OK, I don’t 100% encourage you to try this trick in your own Isle of Dread run. It could go horribly wrong and really alienate all your players. But on the other hand, it could go horribly right. Either way, it’d be a memorable campaign, and I’d like to hear about it.
de vetula, the 13th century d&d poem
May 10th, 2013I was amazed when I read in Playing At the World about De Vetula, the 13th-century poem that addressed the most important problem of science: how likely are you to roll an 18 STR?
De Vetula is a real poem, and amidst the gambling adventures of its protagonist, it really has probability calculations for 3d6. I love that the world’s first accurate discussion of probability is so directly applicable to D&D. This plus the Roman d20 almost makes you think that there’s been a secret society of D&D players throughout history (the Brontes were probably members).
I decided I’d track down the relevant section of the poem. Here’s a page of the manuscript:
That’s a bell curve there, and along the right side, you see the familiar 3-18 range familiar to D&D players. This doesn’t look much like a medieval poem. What it looks a lot like is the beginning of the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide:
In case it’s of interest to D&D players or people interested in probability, here’s Nancy Prior’s translation of the relevant section of the poem:
Perhaps, however, you will say that certain numbers are better
Than others which players use, for the reason that,
Since a die has six sides and six single numbers,
On three dice there are eighteen,
Of which only three can be on top of the dice.
These vary in different ways and from them,
Sixteen compound numbers are produced. They are not, however,
Of equal value, since the larger and the smaller of them
Come rarely and the middle ones frequently,
And the rest, the closer they are to the middle ones,
The better they are and more frequently they come.
These, when they occur, have only one configuration of pips on the dice,
Those have six, and the remaining ones have configurations midway between the two,
Such that there are two larger numbers and just as many smaller ones,
And these have one configuration. The two which follow,
The one larger, the other smaller, have two configurations of pips on the dice apiece.
Again, after them they have three apiece, then four apiece.
And five apiece, as they follow them in succession approaching
The four middle numbers which have six configurations of pips on the dice apiece.
The small table set out below will make these things easier for you:18 666
17 665
16 664 655
15 663 654 555
14 662 653 644 554
13 661 652 643 553 445
12 651 642 633 552 543 444
11 641 632 551 542 533 443
10 631 622 541 532 442 433
9 621 531 522 441 432 333
8 611 521 431 422 332
7 511 421 331 223
6 411 322 222
5 311 221
4 211
3 111These are the fifty-six ways for the numbers to fall,
And the number of them can neither be smaller nor larger.
For when the three numbers which make up the throw are alike,
Since six numbers can be matched up with one another,
There are also six configurations of pips on the dice, one for any number.
But, when one of them is not like the others,
And two are the same, the configurations of pips on the dice can vary in thirty ways,
Because, if you duplicate any of the six numbers,
After you have added any of the numbers which remain, then
You will come up with thirty, as if you multiply six five-fold.
But, if all three numbers are different,
Then you will count twenty configurations of pips on the dice
For this reason: Three numbers can be successive
In four ways and non-successive in just as many, but
If two are successive and a third non-successive,
The figure set out below for your perusal makes this clear:
You will discover from the one side twice three ways and from the other thrice two ways.666 555 444 333 222 111 665
664 663 662 661 556 554 553
552 551 446 445 443 442 441
336 335 334 332 331 226 225
224 223 221 116 115 114 113
112 654 543 432 321 642 641
631 531 653 652 651 621 521
421 542 541 643 431 632 532Again, if one looks more closely into the configurations of pips on the dice,
There are some which have only one way of falling,
And there are others which have three or six, since the ways of falling
Cannot be different when the three numbers in question
Are the same. But, if one of them should be unlike,
And two the same, three ways of falling emerge
After a different number turns up on top of any of the dice.
But if they are all unlike, you will discover
That they can vary in six ways, since,
When you give any position to one of the three, the remaining two change places,
Just as an alternation of the configuration of pips shows. And so
They vary in fifty-six ways in the configurations of pips on the dice,
And the configurations in two hundred and sixteen ways of falling.
When these have been divided among the compound numbers which players use,
Just as they must be distributed among them,
You will learn full well how great a gain or a loss
Any one of them is able to be.
The table written out below can make this clear to you:How many configurations of pips on the dice and ways of falling any compound number would have
3 18 configurations of pips on the dice 1 way of falling 1 4 17 configurations of pips on the dice 1 way of falling 3 5 16 configurations of pips on the dice 2 way of falling 6 6 15 configurations of pips on the dice 3 way of falling 10 7 14 configurations of pips on the dice 4 way of falling 15 8 13 configurations of pips on the dice 5 way of falling 21 9 12 configurations of pips on the dice 6 way of falling 25 10 11 configurations of pips on the dice 6 way of falling 27
Thanks to Jon Peterson for letting me know that this poem existed!
