Getting Hyperborean: the Voormis

They stood only half erect, and their shaggy heads were about his thighs and hips, snarling and snapping like dogs; and they clawed him with hook-shaped nails that caught and held in the links of his armor.
- Clark Ashton Smith, "The Seven Geases"

I've been under the influence for a while now of Clark Ashton Smith's writing, and have grown particularly fond of his material on Hyperborea. I want to mine some of his work for D&D purposes, and there hardly seems any candidate more suitable than the Voormis, featured in "The Seven Geases." (Indeed, the story features a plethora of weird creatures, some of which make their way into the venerable Cthulhu Mythos.)

Voormis are slavering, shaggy-furred humanoids, who the arrogant Ralibar Vooz hunts for pelts. Smith describes them as "possessed of quasi-human cunning," using stones as missile weapons, but heavily implies that their "vile feeding-habits" include anthropophagy. Once Ralibar Vooz closes on them and starts pummeling them to death with his fists, they attack with tooth and claw rather than having weapons of their own. Perhaps most important to their use in D&D, the Voormis are frequently a subterranean race.

Smith has Ralibar Vooz take on a skeptical cast to the heritage of the Voormis, who are supposed to have been descended from the toad-like god Tsathoggua (who we see as a recurring theme in Smith's Hyperborean work). It is the kind of irony that CAS used heavily that this skeptic will soon be under the compulsion of several magic Geases and encounter all variety of gods and monsters in the underworld of Voormithadreth.

The most terrible Voormis in CAS's stories is Knygathin Zhaum, the antagonist of "The Testament of Athammaus," who causes the abandonment of Commoriom (and may well be the anthropophagic creature encountered in "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"). In "Athammaus," the Voormis are described closer to degenerate humans than pure beasts, and Knygathin Zhaum is an almost invulnerable creature descended from Tsathoggua with the uncanny ability to reform after his head is repeatedly chopped off.

"Athammaus" also tells us that the Voormis did speak, using the "Eiglophian dialect" for which translators are needed in Commoriom. It also gives us a pattern of raiding, and the knowledge that it was relatively uncommon for them to be too aggressive with it. They are further anthropomorphized by Lin Carter in a short story called "The Scroll of Morloc," a tale assembled posthumously from CAS's notes and found in an old DAW paperback called Lost Worlds or in Chaosium's The Book of Eibon. (The current Wikipedia entry for Voormis focuses heavily on this story.)

The Voormis are an excellent "weird" answer to D&D's standard humanoids, both in role and flavor. I think their savagery but slightly more human edge gives them a weight where fighting them feels significantly different from the classic human / orc antagonism. I also think the ambiguity can be very useful to a referee; they can be as human-like as in "Athammaus" and "Morloc" or as bestial as the specimens in "Geases."

As far as stats, I would say they could safely vary from those usually given for orcs to gnolls; i.e., from 1 to 2 hit dice, and with an armor class between 5 and 7. Damage will differ based on specific system, but I would think either one attack of 1d6 or two of 1d3 each is appropriate. Morale would get a bonus when defending their homes.

So that is the Voormis; I think they're excellent adversaries, and can fill a classic D&D niche while helping to set a weird fantasy tone. I'm going to spend a few more posts on the creatures of "The Seven Geases," which is richest in terrors and wonders.

Sighting Robots in 1976

Jon Petersen, in his Playing at the World, spends a bit of time with Alarums & Excursions. The zine's early years focused heavily on actual play reports. Because Lee Gold sent me the copies that I have with the understanding that they were still copyright their original authors, I am generally loath to do too much in terms of extensive quoting from them. But I want to give a paragraph from issue #9 (March 1976), which fit in nicely with some points I've made recently about robots. Note that this isn't the 6th issue pictured, but I needed a pic of a contemporary issue of A&E.

The below is from the section "Fornholt's Mockturtle Quest" by Hilda C. Hannifen.

It's important to know that the characters at this point were circumventing a "hot" room which had some "Godholm" material (and radiation), and one of the PCs, Tedron, had turned into Efreet form temporarily to withstand the heat. They have just walked into a room with a cabinet that has 6 doors, and a door that should see them clear of the radiation area.

As we advanced into the room which had the cabinet, the last in line noticed a sign on the outside of the door light up: "Game in Progress." The door swung to of itself and refused to open. 3 Doors n the cabinet opened and out of the cubbyholes came 3 robots with weapons and a target-painted shield. Each had 24 lights: none glowing. We found no matter what the weapon +s or strength, the "damage" was only the weapon's basic damage as if non-magical; damage was reflected by the number of lights lit on the robot. Certain hits lit double the ordinary number of lights. Owen rolling hot (a 17 was needed to hit) was able to get Turan's robot out of the way quickly (Turan had only 18 HP so he had to be quick) and Bruciver finished his shortly thereafter. Tedron didn't do so well with his since it did not want to get too close to his "hot" armor. Instead he maneuvered it towards the corner which was slagged where its positronic brain malfunctioned. Each of the 3 fighters had to fight a robot and got a 5000 GP piece of jewelry as a result. These were dueling dummies they had fought.

This immediately precedes a troll encounter. I get the feeling that it wouldn't have been out of place in the parts of Greyhawk that inspired the Machine Level and so on: an encounter that is quite serious, but at the same time is whimsical enough to have a "Game in Progress" sign light up. The California dungeons were different but the spirit is less far off than people think.

A few fun things come out of this. First, an idea that robots are somehow immune to the bonuses for magical weapons and the effects of high Strength. It's a neat twist in the rules, and the kind of thing that can freak out players who are quite confident in their high-level PCs. Second, the way Tedron beats his dueling robot. Maneuver like this is something that's natural in old school D&D, or at least should be; the combat system is simple but it's really meant to be run with positioning as a "natural" part of it.

Of course the robots had positronic brains; that simply seems natural for a '70s robot. (One suspects that, being in a dungeon, these "dueling dummies" may not have obeyed the Three Laws of Robotics.) But those 5000 GP pieces of jewelry - I wonder where they came from? Maybe out of a compartment in the robot, or out of the cabinet. It puts me in mind of a dungeon version of a boardwalk arcade game.

This is all very "funhouse," but to me it's a wonderful example of the kind of weirdness that permeated the early years of D&D.

Weird Encounters from the Dawn of D&D

I have started going through some of my old Alarums & Excursions zines again (I have a collection of issues 1-20 courtesy of Lee Gold herself). In issue #2, Lee had her own encounter table. I can't reproduce it here, sadly, due to copyright; but I do want to give an idea of what was in her dungeons, just for flavor.

Early levels are pretty normal, save that they have "Hawkmen, etc. 30-120" and "Miscellaneous" as entries. I'll get back to Miscellaneous in a minute. At 5th level we see Melniboneans added to the list. 6th level has the Yeti, which may or may not have already appeared in The Strategic Review #3 (dated August 1975 while A&E #2 is dated July 1975). 8th level adds Huorns to the listing for Ents, a logical extrapolation. And 13th lists Frankenstein Monster, which Gold identifies as being a D&D Golem.

But the real charm is that Miscellaneous entry, which reads as follows:

Miscellaneous = conmen, pollsters, petition passers, peddlers. stores, minstrels, revival meetings, beggars, Punch & Judy shows, etc.

It's a fun bit of '70s California anachronism in the midst of a dungeon; it also emphasizes the fact that early dungeons weren't always dead serious, and a lot of the time the players were taking the piss. In Playing at the World, we find that the Golds would later do another dungeon with less anachronism than Neocarn, but it's useful to remember that the dungeons were frequently taking the piss and throwing in-jokes and modern references at the players.

One of Lee Gold's encounter descriptions involves short black-skinned humanoids that say "GNAP!" and bite at people; they bite one of the party fighters in the process, and he turns black-skinned and begins saying "GNAP!" and biting as well, until a blue-skinned humanoid decked out in red comes in and sprays tuberose on the others, and they all turn blue and regain their senses. He introduces himself as the Grand Schtroumpf (spelled schtroumph by Gold), but any child of the '80s would recognize him as Papa Smurf. This encounter is taken directly from the Belgian bande desinée Les Schtroumpfs Noirs – the first story of what would later be adapted as the Smurfs.

I don't want to recite the whole recap, just to give a flavor; there were other weirdnesses, such as a young woman who pretended to be charmed only to make off with the mule, or the mule itself which was temporarily turned into a giant spider, or the fact that the party was accompanied by a proper Rabbi's golem. I think you get the gist.

The unashamed oddness of it all, willing to have puppet shows or then-obscure references to Belgian comics, is one of the things that decades of self-serious fantasy have drilled out of most of the game. I don't think D&D should be goofy all the time, but neither should it be so dour and serious that all sense of fun is lost.

It was ALL weird!

In Michael Mornard's discussion thread over on the OD&D forum, I asked this question:

OD&D lists a bunch of increasingly weird options at the end of the monster types - dinosaurs, living statues, robots, androids, etc. Do you remember any encounters with that kind of creature?

Michael's response, which I am enthusiastic enough about to get on a t-shirt:

Greyhawk was FULL of weird sh*t. Once you got below the fifth or sixth level the odds of encountering anything "usual" except as a wandering monster was virtually nil. Go look at Rob Kuntz' "Bottle City" for an example. It was ALL weird!

Somehow, the idea that Greyhawk was vanilla crept down into the gaming world, and it has sort of lodged there as one of the great falsehoods of our hobby. It leads to the perception of the megadungeon as nothing more than a reverse mountain of stock fantasy, and of the Greyhawk setting as a big boring realm, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In The Dragon #17, Jim Ward wrote the following in an article called "Boredom and the Average D&D Dungeon":

The Future or Machine Age: While some steady readers might think that I harp on this topic too much, the first time I came in contact with a level of this type was in the “mighty” castle of Greyhawk; run by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. Imagine conveyor belts that force players to travel in one direction or another, a cellophane machine that wraps you up no matter how big or small you are and puts you in a holding area for as long as it takes to rip yourself out, how about a die press that shapes anything in its path into a bottle top (Boy, can that hurt!), or a row of blades that cut in a pattern on the belt with a 25% chance that any given blade will cut you? Try a slot machine that takes only large sums of gold and with the flip of the handle takes a random magic item from the party, and how about a lever that turns on something way off in another part of the level (like a robot or level clean up machine) that you can’t know about until you travel to that part of the level? The treasures of this level could easily be more fun than the level: imagine bottle tops made out of mithril on wine bottles; how about guns and pistols that work; a set of chain mail made out of a super hard and light alloy that acts like plus 5 armor and shows no magical traits; how about a huge pile of gold dust in a large plastic bubble that isn’t small enough to get out the door and can’t be cut by anything less than a plus 5 sword?

Archivists of the magazine will recall that this was the very same issue in which Gygax writes up a foray from Greyhawk Castle inhabitants onto the Starship Warden of Metamorphosis Alpha fame. A story, which is too long for me to quote here, by Gygax talks about the Black Reservoir, a massive body of water in Castle Greyhawk. (Allan Grohe, who created that Greyhawk site, ran a group I was in through some of that Reservoir using the AD&D rules.) And of course several oddities from Greyhawk have seen print: Gygax's EX1 Dungeonland, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, WG6 Isle of the Ape; and Kuntz's The Original Bottle City, The Original Living Room, and Garden of the Plantmaster.

What this adds up to is the opposite of a big vanilla madhouse. The point of this classic megadungeon was to get down, survive the weirdness, get the treasure, and get the hell out. Perhaps most impressive is that Gygax and Kuntz were so good at making these environments into really challenging game areas, as we see in Ward's summary: the things that are trying to kill the PCs are themselves objects of intense curiosity.

Forays into science fantasy are expected; there is a way to get to Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure and face the birdlike Dirdir (documented in the DMG) as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom. One of the remarkable things about Greyhawk is how literary it was; everyone talks about Appendix N as inspiration, but Gygax was using various novels straight-up as material for his dungeon. This of course allowed Gygax to use puzzles, riddles and puns that relied on real-world references and wouldn't make sense in a totally fleshed out fantasy-land like, say, Tolkien's. Compared to this, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks seems almost par for the course of what you'd expect in a Gygax dungeon.

Gygax advocated using the weirdness as a contrast to the "standard" grind:

That is, moments of silliness and humor help to contrast with the grinding seriousness of a titantic struggle and relieve participants at the same time.

In the ponderous high fantasy seriousness of the '80s, the railroady plots of the '90s, the over-the-top '00s and the grimdark teens, it's way too easy to lose sight of this simple advice. Gygax was on the ball, but more importantly he managed to shift tone without losing playability. That's really the most important takeaway from all this: everything described above was seamlessly part of the game. It didn't stop to look at something cool, there was something interesting just around the next corner and an encounter in Wonderland was just as threatening as anything in the grim "area of evil."

Arneson had a reputation for being the weird one, but in the most productive era that he had, Gygax really laid this on thick. It's not a coincidence that large chunks of Appendix N are either planetary romance, post-apocalyptic or straight-up science fiction. So the next time you're wondering how to make your dungeon a bit of a stranger place, try to make it a little more like Greyhawk. You won't go wrong.

Clark Ashton Smith and Unbalanced Encounters

If you haven't yet, you should definitely pick up The Dark Eidolon and Other Stories, a new anthology of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories, prose poems and poetry. It's edited by S.T. Joshi, a Lovecraft scholar who has managed to convince Penguin to put out all kinds of weird fiction lately. Joshi's Amazon page is like a wish-list of weird fantasy tales.

The first story in The Dark Eidolon is "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", a short romp in the Hyperborean cycle where two disreputable types go to the ruins of Commoriom in search of treasure. It seems pretty undeniable to me that this is the kind of story that D&D is made of, even if CAS didn't make Appendix N.

Anyway, if you haven't, you should read the Satampra story. Mostly because it's a damn good yarn, but also because it's essential to my point here.

The thing in the basin is a great example of how an encounter should be able to go in a D&D game. PCs need to be able to run like hell, which seems to be missing from a lot of players' mindsets and editions of D&D. If you're going to have bona fide monsters in the game, it stands to reason that they should be able to have the kind of response that the thing coming out of the basin has on Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Ompallios.

It's a terribly unbalanced encounter, but clever player characters could have handled it otherwise. Not being drunk would be a start, as would a better plan of retreat. Some kind of alternative plan for the creature – fire, oil, throwing food or a corpse at it, pretty much any desperate move, or retreat and research as to its capabilities – could prevent a TPK, but if they stood and fought they'd both be dead.

To me, that's why save-or-die mechanics are a good thing in old school RPGs. Without them, you can't create that sense of visceral terror that we see in Satampra's tale. A careful referee could manage, although not with CAS's unique style, to create something quite parallel in the players as they face an unknown horror.

Of course, not every encounter should be like this one. CAS is unforgivably stingy with the treasure, for one thing. And there should be a time when it's appropriate to the PCs to stand and fight. But combat should generally be at the PCs' choosing, not in carefully arranged set-pieces. You fight when you think you can win, and you shouldn't always think that.

For me, it's very important that the dungeon is dangerous. If it weren't, someone would have already looted it and there'd be nothing left for the PCs to get. Encounters like the one faced by Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Ompallios are one of the ways to make sure of that.

NPC Wizards - Powers versus Spells

The whole Internet Drama over Isle of the Unknown (the source of the gorgeous picture to the right) reminded me of something Geoffrey McKinney did in that book that I've given serious thought to at times. Namely, instead of giving the magic-users a repertoire of spells from the list in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, he chose to give each one a unique and non-repeatable power, frequently tied to some piece of equipment or to animal companions (part of a Zodiac theme that is shot through that work).

Another LotFP product, The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions (which I feel that I should like in principle but find myself tepid on in execution) assumes that proper wizards aren't limited to spell lists and straight-up have powers and "often they are other things entirely, and have other origins, natures, and lifecycles."

I've considered using a similar for NPC wizards, giving them powers that don't neatly slot into the standard D&D spell system. Partly I think this is really juicy and mythic; it isn't like Circe or Merlin runs around casting Fireball or Detect Magic. They have powers, properly, and those aren't constrained by the limits of a spell list. I find the idea that NPC wizards and witches might have straight-up powers that aren't on the spell list to be an easy way to inject a bit of mythic wonder into a game.

A second reason I've considered it is the relative power of certain spells. It's long been noted in old school circles that an enemy magic-user can TPK a low level party pretty trivially by casting a single Sleep spell. There are ways to "go easy" on a party once Sleep is cast, but a lot of them are sort of lame. Giving the enemy wizards some totally unrelated powers seems to be an easier way to resolve this.

There are further benefits to this approach. One is cross-compatibility. Probably the biggest fiddly issue with modules and supplements is when a magic-user's spell list is enumerated and it contains a spell that's not in the specific game you're using. This is an annoying problem with clones. A unique powers cuts this out, since the power is listed directly. The other is simplifying high-level magic-user encounters for the referee. Instead of juggling a dozen or more spell options, the referee just has to pick from, say, one to three powers.

Of course there is a downside. Specifically, it's something of a tease to give enemy wizards a power that PC magic-users can basically never get. That's not to say that PCs normally get other magic powers, like a dragon's breath or a basilisk's gaze, but using the same spell list for PCs and NPCs does give PCs the aspiration of being able to turn the tables on foes. This can be remedied by making a way to get these powers, but making it very difficult to do so. If you run a game where finding spellbooks is difficult, not having NPC casters use spells is an obvious issue. And it does cross a certain "feel" boundary, since NPC magic-users casting spells is a pretty ingrained part of the game from its earliest days.

Still, I think it's an idea worth doing some experimentation with. An NPC wizard able, say, to shape and control certain plants might be a really interesting wilderness encounter, or a witch whose hexes go outside the "normal" boundaries of the spell system. I'm going to give this one a bit more thought on ways to go forward, but I like the basic concept.

Some World-Building

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In addition to my B/X campaign, I've been working on some concepts for a combination of a world setting and a megadungeon. But it's a bit different from what I've been doing previously. I want to talk a bit about where I'm thinking of going in terms of world creation, theme and influences.

A big thing thematically that I want to achieve with this setting is to do a world that is, at the same time, both recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons, and isn't at all a generic fantasy setting. Hence the deinonychus above.

What I'd really like to get down is a science fantasy world that doesn't have a gonzo, crazy-go-nuts feel. I know that's an odd balance to hit when your goal is wizards and laser rifles, but I feel that it's a time-honored part of Dungeons & Dragons that should still be able to take itself with a modicum of seriousness. Part of that is doing things like dinosaurs but having them be scary rather than wacky. Again, hence deinonychus.

The basic assumption of the Dungeons & Dragons setting is that it's a pseudo-medieval world. I'm not going with that, although the PCs still look and act basically the same. The underlying idea is that the main human civilization are themselves literally aliens. The world that the PCs (well, their ancestors) come from is a high-magic world with all of the standard fantasy trimmings. They no longer live there. During the magical equivalent of a global thermonuclear war, the Second Empire opened a gate to another world. The first brave and hardy settlers had wizards helping them; much of their resources and knowledge were lost, but fragments remain. Now it is two centuries later, and the human realm (name TBD) has gone into a semblance of normal life.

So there are several sources of monsters. One is the other civilizations of the world that the humans came into; at this point the one they have the most contact with are lizardmen, who live in a vast swampy kingdom to the south of the human settlement. They have some weird technology, mostly a mix of found tech from previous civilizations – nothing orderly and modern, but enough that humans pose no fundamental threat to them.

As to the megadungeon itself, it's a multi-level dungeon that happens to be built near the ruined and long-since buried capital of an Atlantis style civilization, a mix of high technology and high magic. There are tribes of primitive blue-skinned humans living underground, the descendants of the last survivors of this world; they are savage and have no memory of their lost homeland, only a sort of religious worship of some of its artifacts.

I want to play a lot with megafauna in this setting, both dinosaurs and giant creatures. I'm particularly inspired by this description from Holmes's manuscript (reproduced on the Zenopus Archives):

Giant rats, spiders, scorpions and other horrors are naturals for dungeons. The Dungeon Master should adjust the monster's hit dice to the depth below the surface and assign a suitable armor class. These creatures fight ferociously, have special abilities, and there are many interesting possibilities.

I really love that bit about "have special abilities." Yes, you know what a fire beetle is in a standard D&D world, but the beetles in this world might be based on the bombardier beetle.

Future posts will talk more about this as I flesh out the world and solidify more of its aspects. But I'd be interested in reading what thoughts and ideas folks have for developing this kind of setting while keeping it feeling like a more or less logical world, not a zany mish-mash.

Lovecraft, Science Fantasy and Medieval Monstrosities

I recently read H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" (which HPL regarded as his best story, and was certainly the best pure alien story I've ever read) for the first time since high school, and what's been percolating about in my head ever since was the way the eponymous Colour in the story physically taints the things around it. And it happened yesterday that Rafael Chandler posted on his G+ stream yesterday a selection of rainbow-coloured beasts from a medieval monk's book of hours.

Naturally, things began to coalesce. These rainbow monstrosities are the result of contact with an otherworldly ooze, which is normally semi-invisible (its actual coloration is not visible to the naked eye) but when a light source such as a lantern or object with light cast on it is shined directly at it, generates a sickly, unnatural rainbow of colors. Any living creature coming into contact with this ooze must save versus poison or become one step tainted.

Each level of taint brings with it some deformation, whether it be horns, growth of abnormal hair, mismatched limbs, or taking on the eerie rainbow colors of the ooze. The changes also grant some ability, roll 1d8 to determine:

1. Unarmored AC improves by 1
2. Hit dice improves by 1
3. Gain an additional attack or +2 to existing attack
4. Regenerate 1 HP / turn
5. Immunity to fire / cold / acid based attacks (choose one)
6. Touch causes paralysis (save to avoid)
7. Can become invisible for 1 turn/day
8. Successful attack causes taint (save vs. poison to avoid)

Note that these abilities may be accrued multiple times. Each level of taint causes the subject to move one step toward Chaotic / Chaotic Neutral alignment, and requires a saving throw versus spells once per week or the subject goes irrevocably insane. One Cure Disease spell is required to remove an individual taint.