Dungeon Inscription Resources & a Weird Text

For the curious, educated lot you all are, none of these are probably new.  But I thought I'd share anyway.  Some resources for dungeon inscriptions:

My first plan was to extract some of these symbols, and then make a single sheet that you could use as an index to record your own sounds or meanings for them, but there are just too many.  So I decided to just point you to the resources themselves.  The first book is Early Chinese Writing.

There's a cool example of how a Read Languages type of spell doesn't necessarily let you know what an inscription means in the page above.  The sign that looks a bit like a dollar sign to me is for "steadfast."  Imagine it inscribed on a tomb passage.  Perhaps it means "be steadfast and you will prevail", perhaps it means "this passage is a steadfast defense and you are likely to die." *(whoops, it was "unyielding").

Also an example of how symbols change through time.  You could pick some of these oldest symbols to use and I doubt anyone would even associate them with Chinese, they look so different.

This book, Central American Hieroglyphic Writing, has fewer symbols.  It does have the Mayan symbols for months and days though, which could be interesting if different tombs can only be accessed at certain time of year.  Or that's when a ritual needs to be performed to be successful.

The meanings of the symbols in Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script are largely unknown, or were at the time of this book.  So if you are the type to get hung up on accuracy just grab some of these and feel free to make them mean what you want. Another example from the same book:

A post like this wouldn't be complete without some Egyptian hieroglyphs.  The page above is from The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous. 

Now for the serendipity.  Apparently that last book was supposedly written by an Egyptian priest to catalogue the meaning of some 189 hieroglyphs before they were lost to the ages.  This text was translated into Greek by someone named Philippus much later.  The book was then found on an island in the middle ages and became very popular.  Except the whole thing is, not a hoax, but a misunderstanding of what hieroglyphs were, and feeding into what folks wanted them to be, mystical, religious symbols.  So by 1543 you end up with this edition of the book, Orvs Apollo de Ægypte, with woodcuts for all the symbols that don't even depict the Egyptian hieroglyphs any more!

 

 

What better weird text to find in a dungeon library?

I'd like to do more with dungeon inscriptions, maybe a chart of who inscribed this kind of like the Why is the secret door secret one.  But we'll see.  My boss is on leave and so my work has been extra hard lately.  I haven't even gamed in weeks.  Feels good to just find and share those last weird pics for now.

The Maximalist Dungeon

A few posts back a commenter was not too happy with the push toward minimalism in some parts of our hobby.   Since then I've been thinking of what the opposite would look like.  And, while it would be easy to be snarky, I want to do this seriously: what would a maximalist dungeon look like?  And by that I mean a maximalist dungeon that I, the lover of small and streamlined, would really want to see and use?

I think if you're getting a dungeon from someone else it should be giving you something you can't do yourself, either because you are unable to do it or you don't have the time.  This could be several things including ideas you might never have had or DM experience you don't yet have cooked into the design of the place.  But I think the two most obvious are drudge work and art work.  I'm not an artist so that's something I could get from someone else.  And there are plenty of things that might be worth trying at the table but which take so much prep time you never get around to them.  Let's think along those lines a bit.

The Maximalist Dungeon could have:

1. Illustrations of every room.  There's precedent with the image booklets in some of the TSR modules like Tomb of Horrors.  I think a lot of those were produced because a trap needed visualization, but even just an illustration to show you the decay and layout of the rooms would be cool.  As a kid I loved David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries and the detailed images of those rooms, in what was essentially a dungeon, unearthed.
2. Illustrations of cluttered crime scenes.  This is related to the above, because once you have high enough level of detail and once you have illustrations of every room, so that showing an illustration isn't a tip off of importance, you can hide clues in plain sight.  Keys, notes, scraps of cloth.  I have always been interested in solo play and I remember reading about (but never seeing) a solo gamebeook that had some full page illustrations for this kind of close examination/exploration. If you know what it was called let me know.  Of course traps can become more brutal too, if the trip wires or pressure plates are right there in the picture.
3. Illustrations of every monster, or at least every new monster.  We are limited in our ability to imagine based on things we've seen before.  But if you show us a picture your new monster can look like whatever you can draw.  If you've followed my blog you know that I've tried to come up with new monsters through lots of different angles.  This would be one I haven't tried: something hard to explain or describe but that you can easily understand by looking at a drawing.  There could be all kinds of dreamlike, nightmarish, warped possibilities waiting for the right artist to unleash them on us.
4. Portraits of every NPC.  Without a face players don't have much to remember NPCs by, an accent, a cliched personality.  Portraits could help with that.  With portraits you could get a sense of class, wealth, general demeanor, scars, familial resemblance etc.
5. Illustrations of treasure items.  This is pretty simple, one way to make the +1 magic swords unique is to make them look different.
6. So these have been about art so far how about the drudge work?  Well, related to the NPC portraits above would be NPC personalities fleshed out for all the folks in the adventure/dungeon.  I don't think I would personally need a whole backstory, because after a certain length I'm probably not going to read it.  But if the background could inform how they act and make choices that would be cool to know.  If the person was orphaned and has had to struggle alone they might not like the idea of accepting help, for example, and will become irritated if they can't pay for services.
7. Along those lines, if we are dealing with factions, or politics, or romance, illustrated and annotated relationship webs of NPCs would be cool.  What is the chain of command?  Who will rumors spread to first?  Who owes favors to whom?  Who do you need to talk to find out intimate details about a particular NPC?
8. And of course, going right along with the illustrations of treasure items would be unique treasure items with back stories.
9. This is related to having detailed pictures of rooms but takes it one step farther.  I've posted before about the idea of a grab bag store room, where everything in a room is on cards, so imagine if you combine a room's illustration, with small illustrated cards that you could hand players when they ask about particular objects or details.  There comes a point where this would almost be better suited as a video game with items you can pick up and examine, a whole immersive digital world, but even in those, details are sparse or duplicated because of the work it takes to make things.
10. Unique spellbooks is a subset of unique treasure items.  And it doesn't have to be a cheesy facsimile, but having some illustration or physical card with the contents for each spell book found would be cool.  And, of course, each would have unique spell variations.
11. Give me a constructed language and a script or system of runes.  I love this stuff, and I think it adds to the atmosphere in a game, but it takes so much time it falls by the way side in my games.  But having even something that is little more that pig-latin for goblin inscriptions peppered around the dungeon that players can try and decipher would be fun.  Or different aged scripts denoting excursions into a megadungeon at different times, that would be sweet.  You want to talk about something that would be cool but I don't do just because of the amount of work, there it is.
12. Along the lines of musing I did about sandboxes, it would be interesting to have the locations affected by different times of visit.  So, maybe in the wet season this cave is half full of water and there are different creatures here, maybe during festivals this cult encampment has an entirely different population and feel to it.  That is in essence asking for multiple modules.  Yes.  And players are likely to only ever encounter one of these states.  Yes.  But if you want maximal, that's maximal to me.
13. Designer notes is something I don't think I've ever seen.  Presumably, if you are selling a dungeon you have run multiple parties through it, multiple times.  So, what did those folks do?  What choices did they tend to make?  I can see not wanting to read this stuff and experiencing my party's choices with them, but I can also see wanting to go back and read how that compares to the other folks that visited here.  Designer notes would also be cool just to get a sense of what the maker was trying for and how this module/adventure fits in with their experience and other creations.
14. DM notes would be slightly different.  I'm thinking tips and advice gained through experience.  So, this section of the dungeon is invisible, here's some ideas on how to run that at the table.  This monster causes fear, here's a way you might handle what players under the fear power will do.  Etc.  Obviously this stuff isn't necessary to run a night of D&D, but if you are good enough and experienced enough at designing dungeons to sell me one, one of the assets you have is that experience.  So why not share it with me?

What else?  That's all I've got right now.  And I suppose it might seem a little absurd to put so much effort into a single module.  A module you might use with your friends once.  A module that would probably be crazy expensive with all the art and labor involved.  But maybe that's the difference between products and art.  The difference between processed food and a nicely cooked meal.  Anyone can generate random contents for a set of megadungeon rooms, but how are yours notable?

So, yeah, I can envision a module that is a piece of art because of its elegance, how it gives you just what you need to run it and then gets out of your way.  But I can also imagine a module that is a piece of art because of its ridiculous abundance, its richness that spills out at you like coins from a coffer. 

Thoughts on a Design Example

Jez Gordon recently started up a discussion about design in rpgs by posting this image to G+ as an example of a game doing it right:

It's from the Pathfinder Beginner Box sample adventure.   I love this kind of stuff and wanted to share some thoughts.  I don't own any Pathfinder products and haven't seen this image before so I'm a good proxy for an experienced gamer trying to digest the info here.

I was going to put notes on the image, but thought better of it because I want you to see the original uncluttered.  So, I'll just walk through as my eye travels or paragraph by paragraph.

My Thoughts

The first things I notice are the big black border, the red bar with big number and title, and the two column layout with map inset and text.   I follow what these divisions mean.  I'm hoping the black border denotes a section of a rulebook and isn't just the border all game books seem to include.  I don't know what those standard borders are for but to say "this isn't a readin' book, this is a gamin' book" or something.  I'll give this page the benefit of the doubt and imagine this will help me quickly navigate to the sample dungeon section of a bigger book.  I can easily tell that each dungeon room/section will be getting its own write up with a smaller map.  I imagine that somewhere else there is a larger map that shows the spatial relationship between all these rooms.

This is the fifth room and a spider nest.  This room is worth 400xp, though that seems like information I don't need here, not yet.  The red text is apparently meant to be meta text, aimed directly to the DM reader.  It tells me there is a spider in the room, which I knew from the room name, although new information is that there is only 1 and its size is about that of a human.  Then a direction to read a quote to players.  Okay, that tells this is not meant to just prep me for a game, but to be used while DMing the game.  That's cool.  I like that I can see ahead that the stats for the monster in the room are on this page because I know I'll need that.  But if I'm using this in play I'm wishing I had a map of the entire dungeon visible.  I mean there appear to be two exits from here.  Do they lead to room 4 and room 6?  I suppose that works if the dungeon is linear.  But this set up wouldn't work well if there were stairs or the nearby rooms were not adjacent physical pages in the book (like if the right passage goes to room #12, left passage room #1).

The quote feels odd to me.  I play with lots of non-gamers, brand new to our game and everyone knows webs mean spiders.  And they all know webs probably mean big spiders.  It feels like this is aimed toward standardization more than helping a new DM, that it is important all parties entering hear the same info.  But this reminds me of discussion about room descriptions that happened a while back I know Courtney of Hack n Slash was involved.  When I describe a room to players there are certain things I let them know: Room size, exits, things that stand out.  So if this quote is meant to teach a new DM what players will notice first in a room, it isn't doing a great job.  Looking ahead I see there is a dead goblin which is cool because corpses are signs of immediate danger even to new players.  But why isn't that sooner?  Will they only find the corpse by digging in the webs?  But then wanting to check the corpse is a great bit of bait to draw them in and have them distracted when the spider pops out.  Why not mention it sooner?  If the quote is meant to help the new DM convey information I would suggest something more like this:

"This is a large rectangular room filled with webs.  You see a little body laying on the floor near the center and what looks like a passage leading out the other side."

I would also say, if the quote is meant to help a new DM know what information is important to give to players then, explicitly point that out to them.  Something like "Make sure to let players know the general dimensions, exits, and focal details of a room first.  Then you can always add more details as they ask questions."  But, this book might do that on an earlier room since we are seeing the 5th.

Next we see some sections with headers.  The webs, the creature, the dead goblin.  There is a lot of information in here that I think anyone would know: "webs are sticky" or don't need to know "the spider killed the goblin a few days ago."  I mean I suppose the latter could be important in signifying there is still an active threat here, this isn't an ancient skeleton.  But players will know that from the description of the corpse.  You could amend my quote above to say "a bloated little body."  And again, if this is meant not just to smoothly run a dungeon but to teach about running a dungeon why not point out why the corpse is even here?  It could be a single sentence about corpses as a good way to signpost hidden dangers.

The whole web section seems weird to me.  No one is going to walk into webs on purpose.  The webs don't cover the room.  So, why spend so much priority space describing what happens to players in the webs?  Perhaps pathfinder combat rules, similar to 4e, include sliding and pushing and players will inevitably end up in the webs once combat starts?  What would be cool is if the spider lays down webs to catch players, but I looked ahead and that doesn't seem to be the case.  If this were a room I was running with my simple rules getting caught in a web would merit a footnote, something at the bottom of the page.  Unless I put the little bloated corpse within webs.  That would be an interesting choice for players: "if you want to investigate the corpse you'll have to wade into the webs a few feet.  It does look like it has jewelry."  And again, if that is the case, point it out to the new DM, "this is meant to be a choice for players, dungeon set ups that present tough choices are always interesting."

Next comes the Spider Section.  This all seems well enough, but more important than the webs.  Skipping ahead I see the combat subsection though and I get a bit confused why in the world you would separate that with the dead goblin!?  The spider section tells you how to check if players are surprised, the combat section tells you what it means if they are surprised.  I feel like these bits are much more closely related to each other than the layout portrays.

I see now that this whole room might be meant to teach how to handle surprise.  So my bit up above about teaching how to describe a room, signpost danger, or offer choices could be considered distractions.  Even so, if this spider is the stealthy monster in the dungeon meant to teach how to handle that kind of creature, why not say so?  It could be a single sentence "When players see the webs they will expect a spider and be looking for it.  How do we determine if they see it or not?  That's where stealth rolls come into play . . ."  Some of this explanation might have been done in the rules section on perception checks or stealth.  But if you are using this as the first actual in-game use it would probably be good to tie back to that.  Something like "this room is a perfect spot to see how stealthy creatures that attack from hiding work (see page 12)."  Maybe not.  You might want to just get the new DM playing and then have an afterward that touches on some of these things.  But the way the combat section is set off and focuses on surprise it seems like the authors wanted it to be a teaching moment.

This is running long and I need to get to work but I don't want to split this into two parts, let me try to speed up a bit.

The blown up image of a door(?) on the map is odd.  Why isn't it clear from the map itself that it is a door?  Is there no master key somewhere?  It seems silly to have so much color and digital texture to the map inset and not be able to convey a door.  Also, I'm biased here, but I could not recognize the spider on the map as a spider I think an image that showed more legs would work better, though using the same image on map and next to the creature's stats is a good and necessary design choice.

Treasure is given before the monster.  Again, seems like that along with the xp given earlier should be the last thing on the page.

That statblock is overly messy though.  Two units are given for distance!  If you are going to have a game that uses squares in combat, why not embrace the advantage of using squares as a simple unit?  which of these data points are most important?  Hit points are a different color but sort of shuffled off to the side, I didn't notice them at first.  It seems like from the rest of the page, the first thing we are going to need is the stealth score.  So why is that given the same prominence as the climb skill?  I know the stealth skill was given back in the creature section, but it is harder to find within all the text.  Also there is new info here in the statblock: that score is only when it's in webs.  That makes me wonder, does this mindless creature have some strategy?  Will it always try to stay in webs once combat begins?  I don't want a whole page on spider strategies, but it might be good to have something.  I'm imagining the first thing my players do would be to light the webs on fire, and if it's strategy is to fight from webs this might be a very brief combat.

There is a whole section on poison here and my mind puts on the brakes.  Wait a minute, is this the first creature that uses poison in the dungeon?  If this room is meant to teach how to handle stealthy creatures is dealing with poison going to complicate things?  If the dungeon were more old school with save or die poison I think some discussion of that would be warranted.  Though looking at the fiddly way poison is handled here it might warrant some discussion of how to keep track of it all anyway.

Finally, a picture of two skulls.  Are those kobolds?  I don't see why this is here.  I'd probably cut it, move the treasure section down here and make the map image bigger.

Anyway, those are some of my raw thoughts as I looked through this page.  Thanks to Jez for sharing it as an example that the community can discuss.  I like a lot of what it is trying to do with the single creature, simple map inset, and single room focus.  I think it could be revised to do that even better.  But I'd be interested to hear from all of you.

Serendipity XXIV - Blueprints & Letterhead

Usually I have many pictures for a serendipity post but this find was so cool I thought it was enough on its own.  It's a book from 1903 called Artistic Homes.  It has images of homes with their blueprints right under them.  It seems like it was made for player's handouts for your mystery, Cthulhu, or time travel games:

 

This is one of the few that could be a shop too.  There is also a city apartment I saw in there.  So, you need house blueprints from ~1900 you got 'em.  Wait . . . there's more.

The book has a testimonial section in the back with a bunch of letter facsimiles you might be able to use as well.  Granted, they are all saying pretty much the same thing "blah blah blah the house you built us is wonderful" which is hardly a clue to a nefarious plot, but for some of them they have interesting letterhead and signatures you could use if you replace the text with something of your own.  Like this one:

And, heck, since I like you so much, have these groups of photos from a different publication, absolutely free:

Obviously conspirators of some sort, or perhaps a time travel hit list.

These images are all in the public domain and you can use them however you wish.  I hope you find them useful.

1000 Posts

For my 1000th post I thought you might find it interesting to see some statistics.  I've never used anything but blogger itself, so the data I have is pretty crude, but here, after a bit over four years of OSR blogging, are my stats :

Traffic Sources

First, I have no idea what the difference is between the two categories "Referring URLs" and "Referring Sites."  Is one coming from a blogroll and one from a link in a post?  No clue.  With my many image posts and silhouettes I get a lot of general Google traffic.  From within our community I get the most from Jeff's Gameblog and D&D with Pornstars.  Underdark Gazette changed names to Dreams of Mythic Fantasy.  Eternal Keep was a blog aggregator that seems to have gone dark.  The Nowhere Collective link is a list of random tables and has a couple entries from my blog.

I used to get a lot of traffic from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess blog, but Mr. Raggi did a blogroll cleanup a while back and I was one of the blogs he removed.  I was never linked at Grognardia.  And finally, there is starting to be more and more traffic, the majority outside of Google actually, from . . . me.  I'm guessing that means people following links from my index.

As for the Search Keywords, not too much exciting there.  The many searches for my name could be an argument for having a unique name, or it could just be me checking my blog for comments from my friends and family's houses.  Turner's Cubes are a practice work for machinists that I did a casual post about.   It shows up again as one of my most viewed posts and I suppose shows that something mildly interesting to our community might be fantastically more interesting to some other community.

# Of Pageviews
Pageviews all time history = 488,448
Top Ten: 

This section is almost worthless to me.  The all time most page views are from old posts that get a lot of hits from outside of our community or at least a steady amount of hit for a long time.  Monthly traffic is more meaningful as a measure of what my audience inside the community finds interesting, but blogger doesn't archive that (as far as I know).

So, for example, #2 is a picture that gets tons of hits around Valentine's Day, and #5 shot up in the ranking I think only because it has the word "hobbit" in it right around when the Hobbit movie came out (that was not intended).

Another reason that these are less interesting to me is because my most popular stuff is not things I made.  The slave angel is a picture from Deviant Art, #3 is a picture of a braided tree that I did not take, etc.  I suppose there is a case to be made for curating content, that folks would find value in seeing links through the lens of my expertise and personality, but those links took little effort and were just something I thought were fairly interesting at the time.

I would be more interested in knowing what people within the gaming community, especially the OSR and DIYers think of my ideas and resources I've made.  The next two categories get a lot closer to that I think.

# Of +1s

1. My OSR
83
2. Fear What You See
20
3. Misc VII 
17
4. Map Insets
14
5. Achievement-Based Level Progression
13
6. Trackless Wastes
11
7. Vancian Spell Ideas
11
8. A PocketMod Portfolio
10
9. Complex Monsters II
9
10. PlayerHUD
9

This category is more recent.  If I remember correctly G+ was open to the public in the Fall of 2011.  Before that there was some way for people in Google Reader to "like" a post (like or +1?).  And if you subscribed to your own feed you could see those (that reminds me, before it was killed, Reader showed ~537 people following my blog's feed.  I don't know what people are using now or how I would know).  But for Blogger, +1s are relatively new.

It feels good that the top entry is what it is because it was something I put a lot of time into, concerns the community directly, and that I feel strongly about.  Maybe it's also an example of a blog at its best, meaning a kind of essay incorporating personal history with a viewpoint. 

#2 is curation again so it is hard not to feel a little cheaty about it.  I'm probably most proud of 6, 7 and 9 as examples of me contributing ideas to the community that you turned out liking.  If I were to criticize my own blog it would be for the way I tend to just throw out ideas, ideas I haven't tried, ideas that I won't return to.  But it's hard to separate that from posts that function as drafts, that help me progress my ideas.  #8 is an example of something impractical that I don't use, but that I posted about before Jensan made Telemonster, which I do use all the time.  It was one of several posts that helped lead to Telemonster and so were important for that.

#3 is an example of why +1s as a gauge of audience are problematic.  That post has four ideas in it and I have no idea which people were reacting to or why.  For that reason, comments might be the best indicator of what you think of what I write.

# Of Comments
Total number of comments = 4901
Top Ten: 

1. Rules That Make You Go Huh?
33
2. West Coast Bloggers
31
3. Procedural Lockpicking
25
4. The Problem with Psionics
23
5. Easy D&D Village Maps
22
6. My OSR
22
7. Fairy Tale Spell Names
20
8. Slaves?
20
9. Medieval America, Punters, and the D&D Endgame
20
10. Creepy Combat Commentary
19

It takes more effort to post a comment than to press the +1 button, so you could say it means more when people leave a comment.  But people usually only leave comments when they have something more to say than "I like it."  As a blog that posts a lot of images, I probably see fewer comments than I might otherwise because what else can you say about an image you like.  Also, I try to respond to every comment, so you can subtract a lot of these comments as they are not reactions to my post but me.

So what do people have things to say about?  The top entry is a post allowing people to rant about rules they don't like.  #2 is just people saying they are on the West cost of North America and took no creativity on my part. There is a subset of posts that involve community creativity where you ask folks to contribute an idea or table entry (7,10 and several that didn't make the top 10).  Sometimes people get excited about them, sometimes not.  I feel less responsible for those as well, it seems another kind of curating.  #8 and 9 are examples of contentious issues that get people talking.  I think forums are traditionally the venue for these kinds of discussions.  If a person has a lot to say, rather than comment they might go back to their own blog to respond, which can fragment the conversation but also spread it.

Being timely with a post can lead to more comments.  #3 came when people seemed to be interested in talking about the subject.  In fact my post was a response to another and it in turn generated its own responses.  Taking part in those kind conversations is what I love most about this blog and the community.  It is also the hardest to track and record.  Often folks have made response posts that I found only much later.  Even if it's a blog you read, if you get busy with work you might miss someone's response.  And if you stumble upon a cool old post you might miss out on much of the atmosphere and context it was developed in.

As an example of a post on the identical subject of #3 that happened outside of a big community conversation, my post Procedural Lockpicking Revisited only has 188 pageviews and 1 comment.

One other thing that I can say about conversations is that they are the primary fertilizer of new ideas for me, not my own mental capacities.  #10 is an example of a popular table of mine.  It has been linked several times and adapted into a booklet, but if you go back and look, it sprung from someone else's comment to a previous post.  I did not have some Eureka moment in the bathtub.  I saw what someone said that was interesting and then tried to push its implications, develop it into a whole chart.

Well, that's it.  If you have questions feel free to ask, but this is most of what I know about my blog's statistics.  I intend to keep on trucking but have no control over how many other folks are still interested in conversing about Adventure Gaming, D&D, and DIY.  Here's to another 1000 posts.