Designing monster books

One of the reasons I was asking about the article "How Dungeons & Dragons Changed my Life" yesterday was because I wanted to find this quote from Tavis Allison: "The art in the oldest books is weird and crude and like a medieval manuscript; even when it was new it reeked of some strange past..."

...and the reason I was looking for Tavis's quote is because I'm starting to work on a revised Monster Book for Swords & Wizardry with a lot of new monsters and illustrations. This project is barely on the drawing board, so we're talking serious vaporware at this point in time; this blog post isn't an announcement to drum up interest, it's about some of the first principles involved in writing a monster book.

It's that "reeked of some strange past" which I wanted to think about. There are two ways in which a monster book is read. On one hand, it's a tool for the DM to use in constructing adventures and campaigns. But on the other hand, it has to inspire the DM to do so. These two functions have different, and somewhat contradictory, forms, if we're going to stick with the principle that "form follows function."

For a monster book to be best usable by the DM, it should be flexible in terms of how it says the monsters are used. After all, if a DM wants to have ghouls that are transformed humans rather than actual undead, that's creative stuff, and the monster books shouldn't get in the way of that. A monster book written purely with the goal of being a flexible tool for the DM might offer lots of different alternative descriptions for the monsters, or perhaps alternate stats. Alternatives, alternatives, alternatives.

But there's a problem with alternatives. At a certain point, a raft of alternative options causes the book to become boring to actually read. At every turn, the DM-reader is being reminded that he's reading a game "manual." At no point does he really get that sense that he's got a "medieval manuscript reeking of a strange past" before him. Presenting a monster purely as a manipulable tool for use in a game loses the descriptive magic which makes you want to play the game, or use the monster, in the first place.

This raises two questions in my mind. First is the question of just how "authoritative" to be in the description of a monster. Should one say things like "Super-ghouls are never, ever found except in dungeons?" "Super-ghouls are almost never found except in dungeons?" "Super-ghouls are never found in dungeons unless the DM decides otherwise?" "You, as the DM, may decide where super-ghouls might be found in your campaign?" Obviously these are some very different approaches.

The second question is about theme. Monsters can "feel" like they come from several different genres of literature, and lumping some together doesn't work particularly well if you are aiming for that "strange past" feeling. A "Lasagna Monster" fits well in a sort of gonzo-original-D&D book like Chaosium's "All the World's Monsters," but doesn't particularly evoke a strange past. The TSR books, although they contained some weird monsters, stuck to their guns and avoided letting the books reflect the humor of the actual gaming table too much. It could also mean making some decisions between alternative genre-versions of some monsters. As one example, the OD&D shadow was not clearly described as an undead monster (as I recall). It could have been a Lovecraftian dimension thing just as easily, from the description. On the other hand, AD&D decided to remove it from that ambiguous state, drop the Lovecraft feel, and make the shadow an undead critter. No corresponding monster replaced the lost half of that ambiguity.

I haven't started to make any judgment calls based on these thoughts; but I wanted to assemble the thoughts so I know the shape of the challenge. When you compare a book like "All the World's Monsters" to the "Monster Manual," you see two very different types of books.

Question - where can I find ...

A while ago, several bloggers linked to an article written about D&D, and it had to do with how the D&D generation now controls everything, or something like that. The only thing I really remember about it, and the quote I'm looking for, had something to do with D&D feeling like it was the description of a world that existed. I know that's incredibly vague, which is why I can't find it through Google and need to draw on you guys to figure out what article I must be talking about.

I seem to recall that some people didn't like the fact that it was written for a publication which has political leanings -- liberal leanings, I think.

Also, it's not this article: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/15/dungeons_and_dragons_we_love_you/

The article I'm thinking of was similar, but a lot longer.

Help .....

Design Deskbook 2: Monsters

Several people have been asking me about getting copies of the second adventure design deskbook, which focuses on monsters. Remember, there is going to be a compiled copy of these available relatively soon from Frog God Games, but in the interim I've put up a pdf at lulu. It has a black and white cover, not the original maroon-backed one, and, again, there will eventually be a complete version of all four deskbooks available.

However, if you really want a copy of the pdf right now, and many people have written to me about this, you can get a copy from HERE.

Monsters as Inspiration

Recently, I've been reading through the Fiend Folio because it ended up on my desk. Sometimes the D&D books just seem to float around, ending up places in a sort of Brownian motion. It's an interesting phenomenon I can't entirely explain. That aside, however, as I said, I've been browsing the Fiend Folio. In general, it's not my favorite of the monster books, although I like most of the art quite a bit. It has a gritty, dark feel to it that's not so much the folkloric feel of the Monster Manual or the somewhat clinical Monster Manual II. Nevertheless, many of the monsters are a bit silly or a bit contrived. Reading through them, though, I realized that several little adventures or encounters kept popping into my head. And I stopped and thought about this for a second.

I've said several times that my adventures tend to begin with a visual image, and that's true. Yet there might be a bit more to it. It may be that reading monster descriptions has a tendency to create those visual images as they derive from a monster description. When I visualize a monster based on its description, I often get a glimpse of the background behind it, summoned forth from my subconscious ... and since I wasn't thinking about the background when the monster picture got created, the backgrounds can sometimes be quite unusual, the same way that dreams create unusual settings out of nowhere.

It might be that the best adventures don't necessarily come purely from a visual image, but from the combination of a visual image plus some less-clear addition to the visual image that crops up somewhere in the mentally-supplied background. A picture of Angkor Wat might have the subsidiary, dreamlike impression that "something ripples that water," or "something moves in the shadow of that doorway." And then the interpretive part of the brain starts to fill that in, working its way from the vague into the specific.

The mind works in bizarre ways, sometimes. I've never been able to really pin down the mental process of coming up with ideas, and heck, maybe it happens in several different ways at different times. But perusing a monster book seems to be a really good way of letting background visual images crop up out of nowhere.

Let's not go there

Normally I'd put this into the comments on a blog rather than jumping to my own blog, but I think it's worth saying in a full-scale blog post. It is a very, very bad idea to speculate in any sort of public forum about the identity of the YDIS guy, or, really, anyone who stays anonymous on the net. I don't mean to sound like I'm scolding Austrodavicus, although I guess I am, but mainly I want to point out something that he may have missed in making a public guess about who the YDIS guy might be.

The problem is this: whoever gets accused of "being" someone else has no way to refute that accusation. The accuser has basically thrown mud on someone who cannot provide any proof that the accusation is invalid. You can't prove the negative. In fact, even if the YDIS guy got on his blog and "admitted" to being someone, could you necessarily believe that statement? Of course not. Most likely the YDIS guy would think it was totally hilarious to see someone else being vilified in a case of mistaken identity.

Austrodavicus doesn't make a completely blind accusation, since he provides links to a couple of places where his accused person makes message board posts that are reminiscent of the writing style of YDIS. But I can think of at least a couple of people who can and do occasionally write that way when they are pissed off. Taking a couple of quotes in isolation, cobbling it together with someone's known opinions (the guy accused by Austrodavicus doesn't, for example, think highly of the blogging scene) might be fine for private speculations between buddies in a context like private messages or emails, but it creates a possible public slander of someone who is innocent and can't prove it. That mud sticks; it creates suspicions in peoples' minds; it is not fair.

I think that post is something where Austrodavicus didn't really think through the possible consequences if he's wrong about his guess. Not that I personally think Bill would care one way or the other, but what if he does? Part of the accusations that have been leveled at YDIS is that he targets people without knowing them personally, creating a lot of pain for someone out of the blue if they happen to be sensitive about it. Austrodavicus has done just that, even if Bill didn't care. Who can say if he cares or not? Who can clear his name of that kind of accusation? Making a public speculation about the identity of a very-disliked person like YDIS shouldn't be done unless there's a lot more proof than a few posts where the tenor or the content is similar. There is no way to disprove it, and thus no way to repair a reputation.

I've had this sort of thing, in a much less problematic form, leveled at me before, the most upsetting one being when someone claimed I had written something on the net that I'd never written. Try to disprove that accusation when it's possible for someone to delete posts, and where the assumption would simply be that I'd deleted the never-existing post.

If bloggers were to get into a public speculation and counter-speculation, naming names, there will be lots of people who get their reputations attacked -- and only one of those accusations would (or might) be correct -- every single other accusation would have been leveled at an innocent person. And it could never end, since even an "admission" by YDIS would be utterly suspect.

Although it will never happen

... since I like compiled books, and don't like pdfs at all, it would be cool if somehow all the various blogs out there were compiled and organized into a single, huge book. You'd have a massive, rambling tome of advice, musings, and resources. It wouldn't be all that usable unless someone were to organize it, which would really and truly be the problem. A bunch of people could conceivably create such a thing by contacting lots of bloggers, but it would be that organizational component that I think would bust the likelihood of such a project. Somebody would have to edit it, or it wouldn't be anything more than a collection of topics thrown willy-nilly into a giant pile of text. The other problem is that everyone has an off day now and then, and it would be a bit touchy for that editor to be put into the position of telling someone that there are posts that really don't meet the standards of the rest of the book. And without that, there would be weak points -- I don't think any blogger out there would really claim that all his posts are of the highest possible quality. Certainly mine aren't.

Nevertheless, all the writing that has been done over the years makes for a formidable body of work -- probably, indeed, the availability of the internet has created more polished material than was available in the seventies and eighties, where people simply knew that no one other than a few friends would ever read it. When that's the case, why bother to turn scribbled notes into anything more readable? Now, if you're looking at some scribbled notes, it's not a big leap to decide to finish it out a bit and post it where quite a few people will read it and benefit from it.

It's just a thought experiment, since really I don't think it would be possible to organize a project like that -- I certainly wouldn't want to go to all that grief. But it would be really cool if it somehow materialized. While I'm at it, though, I'd like a million dollars and my youth back, too.

Most awesome megadungeon

I have seen some awesome megadungeons from various people in the old school community over the years -- bits of Allan Grohe's Castle Greyhawk, Stefan Poag's Mines of Khunmar, some unpublished parts of Bill Webb's Rappan Athuk, and even those couple of photos of the real Castle Greyhawk that were visible from behind Gary at some convention or other.

However, when I was DMing at NTRPGCon, someone showed me the map of one that just blew me away with its ... I don't know ... epic quality is I guess the best description of it. If you happen to run into Austinjimm at a convention, ask for a glimpse of his dungeon, because it will take your breath away.

His blog is here, although I don't think there are any pictures of the actual dungeon in there.