Bell Jar Hive

Which bell is sweetest, tho it dost not ring?
Which town busiest tho it hast no king?


Stumbled onto this while researching Wardian Cases. More pictures here. As for campaign uses, how about a small receptacle at the bottom of this that releases healing honey periodically, or perhaps the buzzing of the hive is soothing and functions as a sleep spell on large monsters.

Wardian Cases

When I was poking around looking for steampunk animals I stumbled upon a post at the Brass Goggles blog about Wardian Cases. Oh, how I love learning, that Wikipedia article led me to terrariums and then paludariums, of which I had never before heard.

But enough of that, picture your intrepid players conquering the strange blue glob guarding a dungeon room to find a bell shaped glass housing something wondrous. What you ask? How about:

1. A tiny community of thumb-sized villagers.
2. A collection of rare herbs of every color (you needed a blue plant for that freeze spell, right?).
   
3. A collection of ordinary looking herbs, which when the glass is lifted smell of maple syrup and cause mammals to feel amorous.
4. A single plant of the most deadly Dart Poison Flower.
5. A sample of rare underdark flora that die if the glass is lifted.
6. A putrescent looking mess of fungus which, after exposure to light for a short time, emit lantern-bright light for hours.
   
7. A living ecosystem containing beetles that taste like chocolate.
8. A pair of lizards that produce a cry of a perfectly pitched note, useful for court bards.
9. Peppers so hot they will cause damage to anything foolish enough to eat them.
   
10. A single mundane plant which has a human shaped root that cries for milk or blood.
11. Twelve delicate flowers that will let those that smell them forsee the future but forever become addicted to the scent of the flower and search for it ruthlessly.
12. Plants enveloping a small replica of your local megadungeon's surface features.
13. The last breath of a dead demigod.
14. A foul tasting tuber needed by Dwarves to breed.
15. A seedling of a rare giant plant species (see Sequoiah Gigantea).
16. Grey-Black lichen growing on rocks that emits heat equivalent to a small fire.
17. A talkative toadstool.
18. A thought-to-be-extinct hops plant required for a legendary hobbit brew.
19. Flowers that only bloom on the holy days of a particular saint.
20. A tiny shrub which exudes mithril sap.

What I Want

I posted before about a kind of roleplaying product I'd love to have: maps of locations-- especially villages and towns-- rendered in isometric (or axonometric, something I learned from blogging!) projection.

Well, I have the perfect example, and you are probably familiar with it. When I was a child I was fascinated by the books of David Macaulay. I was probably more fascinated by these books because I never owned any of them; I either encountered them at the library or school.

His book Castle, published in 1977, tells the story of an imaginary but realistic castle being built from scratch. Paying attention to details and research, but not getting hung up with a specific historical site, this book really strikes a chord with me and probably holds a lesson for world/setting design.

I tried merging two halves of the castle picture itself, but it didn't come out well because of the binding. So here is one half of the two page spread showing the finished castle in all its glory:
I love that. This is what I want. I'd like a book with 10, or 20 of these. I suppose I'll have to try and create them myself, but I'm not an artist so it will be hard work.

I'm not sure why this is what I want, something about these images evokes a place in a way a map never does for me. A map is an abstraction that lends itself to tactics, which is fine, but an illustration like this can do that and breathe a little life into a fantasy setting.

If you find this interesting at all, you should check out Macaulay's other books. He had several in this style: Cathedral, Pyramid, Mosque, Mill, Underground, and City, which I have big plans for.

Thoughts on DMing

How many regularly practicing gamemasters are there in the world? One hundred thousand? More, Less?

I use metaphor a lot to understand and learn. I keep trying to find a metaphor for what a DM does, is it like being a chef? Like being a DJ in a club? Sort of for both, but not quite either. Seems a rare hobby indeed, we have here.

One last thought. I keep hearing this idea that rules complexity is added to roleplaying games to help counteract "bad" DMs. I'm not sure if anyone believes that, but I think it is fallacious. Say for example that a "bad" DM (whether that means new, unskilled, or just a jackass, I'm not sure) needs help describing and bringing combats to life. So, someone adds more rules to combat: hit location charts, critical charts, action points, etc. And combat becomes bogged down as the poor "bad" DM needs to keep checking all these charts. Rules complexity and explicitness do not make for a better game experience by simulating an expert DM; they change the gaming experience completely.

AD&D Coloring Album

Grognardia had a post on this a while ago and there is a link in that post to most of the pages from this album, but the two most important are missing-- the start of the adventure in the tavern and the final treasure room.

I remember being in a little craft store as a kid, being bored, and then finding the art instruction books (learn how to draw a tiger!) on a rack along with this. I don't know why my mother was even in there, maybe buying sewing patterns, she sewed for a while, but I do remember asking if I could have that book and being ecstatic that the answer was yes (she was always leery of the demonic nature of our beloved game, though I always reiterated "The ugly things are in the book because that's what we have to fight!")

The coloring pages were nice, with some wonderful representations of classic monsters. And I mentioned in a comment, hell, I'll quote myself:

This is no Sinbad voyage, the party meets at a tavern and plans their assault on the dungeon. Party members are lost to beholders and ettins. The dungeon is a weird underworldish place, with elemental beings. I remember one room shows a never ending battle between an army of gnolls and and one of hobgoblins (?). And in the end the remnants of the party stumble upon a door leading to a room full of treasure. The echoes of the dungeon as an abstract set of challenges drawn on graph paper is in each drawing and my ~10 year old self could sense it and was intrigued. In essence it was a new genre. I realize that, just now, in writing this, neither S&S, nor high fantasy had anything like this gang of armed men exploring hazardous, semi-random rooms.

Yeah, so the old school genre of play captured in a coloring book from 1979. And after checking, the battle in the book is between hyena-like gnolls, and baboon-like hobgoblins. The fact that the artist had to choose a "style" to render hobgoblins, I think is more evidence that humanoids in the classic game are generic baddies that scale in power to give players something to whack at. Not that that is necessarily bad or good, but I think I crave a little more from my monsters.

I particularly love the album's picture of the treasure room. In writing this I'm realizing these two images would make for a perfect, iconic DM's screen. I'd probably pick the fight with the beholder as the centerpiece and then you'd have a triptych, with the call to adventure, strife, and glory of success.