6 magic inks

March 1st, 2013

The Lensman was rocked to the heels, but did not show it. Instead, he took the captain’s pen – his own, as far as Willoughby was concerned, could have been filled with vanishing ink – and wrote George Olmstead’s name in George Olmstead’s bold, flowing script.
-E. E. Smith, First Lensman

In 1950, when Doc Smith wrote the sci-fi novel First Lensman, disappearing ink was still reasonably hi-tech: it had been a major espionage tool as recently as World War II. Now it seems a little quaint and dated, which means it’s time for it to make the transition from SF to fantasy.

Not only is disappearing ink a good trick for a RPG character’s reportoire, ink itself seems like a fruitful avenue for new magic items, untapped by the standard D&D magic-item list.

Here are some ink bottles that might be available at the local apothecary. Each ink bottle can be used to write a dozen pages.

Disappearing ink: Twelve hours after you write with it, the writing disappears. Great for messages that must not fall into the wrong hands, and signing contracts that you don’t want to keep. It’s entirely alchemical so it doesn’t radiate magic.

Burning ink: Twelve hours after you write with it, the ink catches fire, burning the paper it’s on, along with anything flammable nearby, unless it’s caught. Even better for signing contracts you don’t want to keep. It radiates faint magic: a suspicious notary/wizard using Detect Magic will have to make an Intelligence Check to notice it.

Exploding ink: As soon as the ink is dry, any writing turns into Explosive Runes. Great for wizards on the go. The ink and the runes radiate strong magic.

Courtier’s ink: As you write, the words re-form behind your pen into elegant phrases and flowery compliments. Your handwriting is also slightly improved. Grants your letter a +3 to Charisma checks to anyone who is impressed by well-expressed sentiments. This is widely used at courts, and too expensive for the starving poets who covet it so very, very much.

Sewer Ink: The reverse of Courtier’s Ink turns any writing into a collection of shocking profanity, ill-turned phrases and deadly insults. It applies a -6 to Charisma checks. Unlike Courtier’s Ink, the writing does not re-form for twelve hours, and your handwriting is not altered. This ink is most often used for practical jokes and venomous plots.

Poison Ink: This oldie but goodie causes pages to slightly cling together so that readers must moisten their fingers to turn the pages. It’s also a deadly poison: twelve hours after a careless reader ingests the ink, he or she must make a saving throw or take 3d6 damage and be helpless for the next twelve hours. This saving throw is repeated every 12 hours until a successful save is made.

Characters may make a hard Wisdom or Intelligence check, or an easy History, Pulp Literature, Rare Poisons, Dastardly Plans, or other appropriate skill check to realize that the pages are poisoned.

Poison ink can also be used as a normal poison, on weapons or in food.

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healing poll

February 27th, 2013

Whenever HP or healing are brought up in D&D conversations, they tend to dominate the rest of the discussion, and no consensus is reached. I think the issue is confused because “healing” really means three different things:

  • per-round: How much healing should you get during a fight? Are you limited to a cure spell or two, or does everyone have second winds, potions, and wands of Cure Light Wounds?
  • per-hour: How much healing should you get between fights? Does the damage from the last fight significantly drain HP and healing resources, or is each battle a self-contained tactical challenge?
  • per-day: How much healing should you get overnight? If you’re really beat up, is it important to determine if you rest a day or rest a week to heal fully?

    I’ll misuse my Mearls software to make a quick poll:

    I’d love to know how you use each of these three elements in your game. Do you (or your DM) limit access to potions, or use easy fights to drain daily resources, or make the characters start a day of adventuring low on HP?

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    we can all use the same d&d history

    February 25th, 2013

    If you have players who memorize every D&D supplement but won’t read your ten pages of campaign background, try this: organize your game world’s history around D&D editions.

    I’ve mentioned that you can use the game year to denote what edition you’re running. Thus, if you’re playing 4e, your game is set in the Fourth Age, and the year is, say, 413. If you decide you’d like to try a first-edition campaign, you could play in the year 113, in the First Age of the same campaign world. Here’s a sample D&D history that would work in a lot of campaigns. You can weave your own campaign events around this chassis.

    PRIMORDIAL AGES:
    This is the realm of prehistory, before adventurers delved, and before humans were the dominant species on the earth. Here you can slot in millennia of rule by gods, demons, aboleth, god-emperors, chainmail-clad armies of giants, elves who ruled from Avalon Hill, and what have you.

    During this time is the fabled Golden Age – a time of great wealth and civilization, when platinum coins were minted and when all those +1 swords were forged. The people of the Golden Age guarded their treasures with the technological mechanisms so often found in dungeons: gas traps, teleporters, elevator rooms, etc.

    ORIGINAL AGES: Also called The Old Age or the Zeroeth Age. If you play OD&D, you’re adventuring in this time setting. In this era, swamps are filled with dinosaurs, and deserts are filled with Mars creatures like tharks. The Original Age can be further subdivided into ten epochs, based on the OD&D and Basic supplements: the Age of Origins, Age of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Demigods, Basics, Experts, Companions, Masters, and Immortals, each with its own historical events based on the new rules introduced in that supplement. For instance:

  • The Age of Men and Magic was the time of great heroes like Mordenkainen and Robilar. Adventurers first delved in dungeons, and few survived.

    In my campaign: In the Age of Eldritch Wizardry, elven experimentation with psionics triggered a disaster that turned their home into a ruin-covered desert. Many elves still live in the ruins, where they fight a constant battle with ghouls (thus, elven immunity to ghoul paralysis and secret-door abilities).

  • In the Age of Greyhawk, the first thieves guilds flourished, and many new magic items came to light. High-level spells were first researched.
  • In the Age of Blackmoor, the forces of good fought the Egg of Coot. The first monasteries and assassins guilds appeared.
  • In the Age of Eldritch Wizardry, psionics were discovered, and many artifacts were created.
  • So it goes, through OD&D and BECMI, until the Age of Immortals, when lich-kings ascended to godhood, leaving a ruined world in their wake.

    FIRST AGE: You adventure in this age if you’re playing 1e AD&D.
    In the First Age, orc tribes established their own lands, and half-orcs became more common. Bardic colleges were established. Gnomes immigrated, bringing illusion magic with them. Humans first explored the underdark and met the drow, planar travel was perfected, and the Tomb of Horrors was built.

    SECOND AGE: The epoch of second-edition rules.
    City-states became great empires. New lands were discovered and carved up into nations. By the end of the age, many of the empires had become decadent, and were plagued with financial problems.

    In the Age of the Masters, badass dudes flew dragons!

    THIRD AGE: 3e, and, midway through the age, 3.5.
    In the third age, wizards took control of the crumbling empires. Prestigious warrior, religious, and wizard organizations became more important than nations. There was a proliferation of martial skill training traditions. Magic item shops were first established. In this age, the first warlock pacts were made.

    FOURTH AGE: 4e and Pathfinder.
    The great nations of the Second Age finally fell. Nothing was left but small communities, points of light against the darkness. Many ancient traditions were lost, including the old ways of magic first taught by Vecna. New traditions arose. Magical paths were discovered to the Feywild and the Shadowfell. In the chaos, there were many emigrations: tieflings and dragonborn arrived from faraway islands and deserts, and many civilized folk, seeking to preserve their old traditions, set sail on ships to a new continent. They called themselves the Pathfinder Society.

    FIFTH AGE: It’s currently the beginning of the fifth age and we don’t know how it will turn out. So far, it seems to be a time where democracies flourish: for the first time, city-states are beginning to determine their laws by vote. Like all ages, it will probably be a time that mixes great advances with tragic errors.

    And that’s as far as you can play, unless you get these RPGs:

    DRAGON AGE: Some future century will be called Dragon Age, and, according to the game’s subtitle, it will be a time of Dark Fantasy.

    THIRTEENTH AGE: Prophecy has it that the last age before the end of the world will be the Thirteenth Age. In that time, the Thirteen Icons will wage a final war for the fate of the world. (I hope that official D&D won’t get to 13th Edition for quite some time, so I’ll give this one to Tweet, Heinsoo, and company.)

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    D&D names from the 17th century

    February 22nd, 2013

    Here are some 17th century historical figures with D&D names:

    From Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver:

    On 16 August 1688, I met Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orleans, who is known to the French Court as Madame or La Palatine, and to her loved ones in Germany as the Knight of the Rustling Leaves, at the gate of a stable on her estate at St. Cloud on the Seine, just downstream of Paris.

    This is a pretty awesome name for a semi-exiled, itinerant princess. It seems to have been the real nickname of Liselotte von der Pfalz. From her letters, it seems that she was a tomboy princess who preferred hunting to fancy-dress balls, and, as she says elsewhere, swords to dolls. It would be pretty easy to fit Lisolette, the Knight of Rustling Leaves, into any D&D campaign.

    And how about this name? In a 1660 passage from his diary, Samuel Pepys mentions “Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Speaker for the House of Commons.” How about that name? It sounds almost aggressively, implausibly D&D, and I had to double-check that it was a real guy.

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    D&D Next healing idea: the “Soldier On” rule

    February 20th, 2013

    Mike Mearls recently confessed that the 5e design team is out of ideas for healing.

    Here’s my proposal for 5e healing. I’ll call it the “Soldier On” rule.

    In a short rest, you can bring your HP up to 2/3 of your max HP. Beyond that, your HP can only be raised through magic or through overnight healing. Overnight healing is old-school slow – say 1 or 2 HP per day.

    Basically, the top 1/3 of your HP is physical injuries. The bottom 2/3 is energy, luck, and will. Your last 1 HP is a mortal wound. This is not too far from a wounds/vitality system except that it doesn’t require you to maintain two different HP tracks: the only rule change from First Edition is that you heal up a little after a battle.

    This rule allows injured characters to soldier on indefinitely, at slightly-reduced efficiency. You can swig the warm Gatorade of partial healing anytime, but the ice-cold spring water of overnight or clerical healing are luxuries not to be squandered.

    The numbers could be tweaked depending on how serious you want injury to be. You could change the Soldier On threshold to be 50% or 75%. Ask this question: “At what stage of Hit Points depletion should we stop adventuring and go home?” and set the Soldier On threshold to a tiny bit above that.

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    hobbits are monsters of the week

    February 18th, 2013

    Sci-fi and fantasy serials are full of monsters of the week: introduced in one episode, forgotten the next. These creatures are, almost by their nature, unknown to most of the fictional society. No one has mentioned them before because the writers just thought of them! Just because Flash Gordon meets a tribe of rock-people in a cave doesn’t mean that the rock-people need to be fully integrated into galactic civilization.

    Hobbits fit perfectly into the monster-of-the-week pattern. They live in an isolated area, and, outside the local area, no one has ever heard of them. It’s clear that, during the course of Gandalf’s episodic travels, he had a fun interlude in the Shire. In most high fantasy, it would have gotten a chapter at most. But here is Gandalf’s (and Tolkien’s) brilliance: Gandalf thought, “I think these guys have surprisingly good stats. I want to start making a big deal out of them.” And so he started sending them on missions of greater and greater importance. The Lord of the Rings saga is like a crazy version of Flash Gordon where the rock-people tribe take over the narrative for the rest of the series.

    "Fool of a flint! Throw yourself in the well next time and rid of us your stupidity!"

    But every D&D campaign doesn’t have to be Lord of the Rings.

    Halflings are in a weird position in D&D: they’re one of the original four races (although Gygax didn’t like them very much). Therefore, they’re much more common in most D&D worlds than hobbits are in Middle Earth. They’ve grown in importance the same way Tatooine has in the Star Wars universe: instead of a backwater planet, it’s a ubiquitous stop on every video-game, novel, and prequel version of the galactic tour.

    There’s a lot of D&D history behind us, so it’s probably fine at this point to accept halflings as one of the defining elements of the game. But it might be worth remembering that halflings don’t NEED to be one of the Big Four races in your world. Maybe there’s a middle ground between “50% of all thieves are halflings” and “halflings are banned from my game world.” On this middle ground (or middle earth, if you will) the big players would be humans, dwarves, and elves. If someone wants to be a halfling, or a dragonborn, or a drow, the DM will probably allow it, but they are all what 5e is calling “rare races.” They’re monsters of the week, allowed as occasional PCs, but not necessarily important to the setting. It’s OK if they’re there in the world somewhere… but they’re generally overlooked. I don’t know about halflings, but that’s how hobbits would prefer it.

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    magic from the time of Newton

    February 15th, 2013

    Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is about the era of Newton, Samuel Pepys and the foundation of the Royal Society: it’s the transition period where you’d stop using D&D to model contemporary scientific belief and start using d20 Modern. From the point of view of fantasy fans, periods like this are productive. As magic goes under the microscope, its formulae are recorded in lab notes.

    Take this passage from Quicksilver, inspired by a real experiment conducted by the Royal Society:

    Sir Robert Moray came to visit, and ground up a bit of the unicorn’s horn to make a powder, which he sprinkled in a ring, and placed a spider in the center of the ring. But the spider kept escaping. Moray pronounced the horn to be a fraud.

    The description of this experiment, by which they prove that unicorn’s horn does not kill venomous beasts, raises some questions: where did they get the unicorn horn? Let’s put that aside. The D&D takeaway here is that, if magic does work, unicorn horns (and unicorns) should be very dangerous to venomous creatures. Let’s say that a touch from a unicorn horn forces a creature to make a save vs. its own poison or suffer its effects. A creature’s immunity to poison does not protect it against this effect. This is the sort of using-its-own-power-against-it magical judo you’d expect from a good-aligned creature like a unicorn.

    Daniel… read the graffiti cut in the stone by prisoners of centuries past. Not your vulgar Newgate Prison graffiti–most of it was in Latin, big and solemn as gravestones, and there were astrological diagrams and runic incantations graven by imprisoned sorcerers.

    One thing we know about the incantations of imprisoned sorcerers: none of them are Knock or Teleport. Here is one of the real Tower of London carvings, etched the sorcerer Hugh Draper in 1561:

    It looks just like the kind of thing I doodle in meetings. In D&D terms, it actually looks less like a spell and more like a spellbook: something you’d carve once, and then consult while doing innumerable astrological readings.

    The D&D inspiration I get from this carving: a spellbook is a collection of shortcuts and pre-computed values. A wizard can’t be permanently separated from his or her spellbook. Given enough time, the wizard can re-compute and re-draw the various calculations and diagrams necessary to cast spells, even with nothing to write with but a stone wall and a tiny piece of metal. I like to think that in 1562, after a year or so of turning his dungeon cell wall into a spellbook, Hugh Draper was able to memorize Teleport and get the hell out of the Tower.

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    why you don’t want to learn 10th level spells

    February 11th, 2013

    One of the coolest spells implemented in a video game was Armageddon, in Ultima 6. The description: “Once it is cast, it destroys all life on the world, with exception of the spellcaster, leaving only a barren wasteland behind, devoid of any life.” If you cast it, every creature in the world would, indeed, die. You could wander around and pick up all the treasure you wanted. Obviously, at this point, the game was unwinnable and, indeed, pointless.*

    I suspect that the spell was in there as a sort of nuclear-holocaust cautionary fable. But such fables have a place in post-apocalyptic games like D&D. Something happened to all those dungeon-building civilizations. Maybe they cast Armageddon.

    D&D’s 9 spell levels have always called out to be rounded up to an even 10. The problem is, with wish a 9th-level spell, what is there left to wish for? Let’s slot Armageddon, and other big, dangerous, world-altering spells in here: spells that fuse the Prime Material with another plane of your choice, spells that sink continents, spells of apotheosis, spells that scry on Cthulhu, scrolls of genocide.

    Extrapolating from the wizard spell chart, you’d get access to 10th level spells at level 19 (pretty close to the level cap in some editions). In D&D campaign worlds, there are no existing 10th level spells to learn: they’ve been expunged from every ancient library. (If any hints of their existence exist, they are in incomplete and obscure form, like the scientific learning in A Canticle for Leibowitz.) Generally, a civilization can’t research such powerful spells until they have a greater academic understanding of magic than exists in standard D&D campaigns. Peaceful golden ages lead to such academic advancements. Academic advancements lead to 10th level spells. 10th level spells lead to Armageddon.

    Given that this cycle has probably happened multiple times in the campaign world’s history, there’s probably a conservative, anti-intellectual secret cult that seeks to save the world by spreading chaos, toppling golden ages, and assassinating saints and sages, and they’re right about everything.

    * Ultima 6 also has a big in-game library, in the Lycaeum. If someone develops an eyeglasses mod, we can re-create episode 8 of the Twilight Zone.

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    more magic and monsters from Quag Keep

    February 8th, 2013

    From Andre Norton’s silly D&D novel, Quag Keep:

    Memory once more moved in Milo’s mind, opening grudgingly another door. It was a gar-eagle-the greatest of all winged creatures (save, of course, a dragon) that his world knew. The very beating of those wings churned up snow as the bird descended. And when it came to perch at last on a rock a little farther ahead, closed its fifteen-foot wings, and twisted its head downward toward the elf-over whom it would have towered another head’s length had they been meeting on level ground-even Naile pushed back a fraction.

    Many fantasy worlds provide their own version of a roc, from Tolkien’s giant eagle to John Norman’s tarn from the Gor series which Arneson used in his own campaign. I’m not sure where the gar-eagle came from: was it a reference, conscious or otherwise, to John Norman’s Gor? or just a nonsense fantasy world?

    Odd note: in looking for prior references to “gar”, I found this veteran’s organization, whose symbol is an eagle.

    Milo did not need the faint, musty smell of corruption that wafted toward them from that crew to know that these were liches, the Undead. Their body armor was the same color as the dust that had been their outward tomb for so long. They even wore masks of metal, having but holes for eyes and nostrils, which hung from their helmets, covering their faces. The masks had been wrought in the form of fierce scowls, and tufts of metal, spun as fine as hairs, bearded their chins to fan outward over their mail corselets. They poured up from the hold, swords in hand-strange swords curved as to blade-which they swung with a will. And the Undead could not die. Milo, as he reached the surface of the deck, saw Naileboar savage one of the Undead with his tusks, breaking armor as brittle as the shell of a long-dead beetle, in fact breaking the liche almost in two. But its feet continued to stand and the torso, as it fell, still aimed a blow at its attacker. “ALL-LL-VAR!”

    In this passage, “lich” is used as a general term for undead. In fact, these liches sound more like skeletons or zombies – undead fighters, not undead wizards.

    If Andre Norton encountered, or heard of, a spell-casting lich in her dungeon crawl, there’s actually no reason that she would have believed that the creature’s spells were an integral part of its lichiness. After all, before D&D, “lich” just means “corpse”. But for me, decades of D&D tradition and fantasy imitation have made “lich” synonymous with “skeleton spellcaster”, so this passage just seems weird.

    There were women secrets that even the wizards could not fathom. Milo had heard tell of them. He shook his head as if to loosen a pall of dust from his mind, as he had in part from his body. Women magic-cold. Moon magic. . . . All men knew that women had a tie with the moon which was knit into their bodies. What she wrought here might be as alien to him as the thoughts and desires of a dragon — or a liche — if the dead-alive had thoughts and not just hungers and the will of Chaos to animate them. Yet Milo could not turn away — for still that trilling enticed, drew him. Then she spoke, though she did not turn her head.

    This “moon magic” stuff reminds me of the back of Sign of the Labrys, another book by a female Appendix N author:

    There was life also, for he started once and nearly spun off into the dust, as the sound of shrill and loud croaking made him think, with a shiver he could not entirely subdue, of that horror tale told about the Temple of the Frog and the unnatural creatures bred and nurtured therein to deliver the death stroke against any who invaded that hidden land. That, too, occupied the heart of a swamp, holding secrets no man of the outer world could more than guess.

    Temple of the Frog! That’s from the 1975 Blackmoor supplement. Just how much did Andre Norton know about D&D? Did she have the rulebook and all the supplements? Are her lore changes made in ignorance, or was her novel set in a consciously house-ruled version of D&D? So confusing.

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    D&D Greyhawk magic items

    February 6th, 2013

    Continuing my readthrough of TSR books in publication order, I’m up to the magic items of the Greyhawk supplement:

    sword of cold: In addition to the bonus shown vs. creatures of fiery origin, the weapon scores triple damage whenever a 20 is rolled. It is able to dispell a Wall of Fire and gives its user the same protection as a Ring of Fire Resistance.

    This is an example of what I’d be glad to see in a 4e or 5e magic item. It’s a reasonably powerful weapon, but not overpowered compared to other magical weapons; it has a lot of thematically-related abilities; and it reminds the owner of its presence (its acting as the ring of fire resistance, for instance, makes you glad you have it in several non-hewing situations). It also has a very satisfying crit power.

    shield of missile attraction: This item will appear to be a perfectly genuine +1 to +5 shield until missiles from true enemies are shot at its user in anger. It will attract such missiles and reduce the person’s armor class by 5% (-1).

    Depending on how you read it, this might just be another “bummer” cursed item, or a quite interesting one.

    It might be a shield that seems to be a magic shield, but when used turns out to be a -1 shield against all attacks, and it also “attracts missiles” in some undefined way. Or, it could be read as an ordinary magic shield against melee attacks, +1 to +5, but -1 against all missile attacks. This makes the shield a situationally valuable, but very dangerous, item that might cause some angst to the player! “Do I keep this shield? It might get me killed! But it might save my life!” Seems like a nice model for cursed items, but D&D didn’t go in that direction.

    vorpal sword: The Vorpal Blade differs from a Sword of Sharpness in several ways:
    1) its bonus hit probability is +2;
    2) it needs only 10% over the required score to hit, or an 18 through 20 in any event to sever, and it will always sever the neck; and
    3) it will perform in the hands of any Lawful fighter, although it requires a Paladin in order to act in its anti-magic capacity.

    Wow, this weapon is crazy. It kind of makes a mockery of the D&D combat system.

    It’s +2, and if you get 10% more on the attack roll you need, you sever the target’s head. Note that that +2 and 10% cancel each other out on the attack die. That’s roughly equivalent to (but better than) a sword with no pluses to hit, that does A MILLION DAMAGE on a hit. Combats are going to be a lot shorter with this weapon. I don’t know how the DM could continue to challenge a party with this sword, except send them a constant stream of gelatinous cubes and other headless creatures.

    Arrows of Slaying: Special magical arrows which are specifically enchanted to slay Monsters with a single hit. The referee may distinguish them by basic types if he wishes, or they may each slay any monster. Basic types would be: Giant Class, Undead Class, Flying Monsters, Other Monsters, Enchanted Monsters (Invisible Stalkers, Elementals, Golems, Aerial Servants, and so on).

    I want an “Arrow of Slaying Other Monsters”. It’s an arrow that’s defined only in relationship with other arrows! It’s a meta arrow!

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