Aside: in Praise of the Mundane

Cave Bear recommended that I read Kill Six Billion Demons which is a great web comic that I'll add to Girl Genius and Stand Still Stay Silent in my "archive binge on every couple months" list.

It's also really fucking weird and reminded me of how important the mundane is in fairy tales and D&D (but not in crazy over the top web comics).

Fairy tales are basically one-offs that people have to be able to sit down and understand without any real context so there's never anything that has to be EXPLAINED. All kinds of weird stuff happens but they happen in a mundane context that makes them stand out better and they're easier to grasp because they're based on mundane things doing weird shit instead of weird shit doing weird shit. After all, it's a lot easier to get across an eerie feeling to the PCs if they stumble across a red-mouthed stag chewing away at the carcass of a doe than if they stumble across a red-mouth "traylek" doing the same thing.

Also too many DMs try to hard to include cool stuff in their campaigns, the best cool stuff by far is the things that PCs do not the things they find: http://awizardskiss.blogspot.com/2012/04/where-does-cool-shit-come-from.html

To make cool stuff happen the best thing a DM can do is put in stuff that the PCs can USE to do cool unexpected stuff with not so much things that they find. Having a lot of mundane things is important for this as players understand what you can do with a cow, it's hard to have such an intuitive sense of what you can do with a mutant hell-crab.

The very best things you can give the PCs are abilities, possessions and things in the environment that are obviously useful but not in any one obvious way plus enough desperation that players can't just do things the simple and easy way.

Stuff like "possession: cow" is one of the best things you can put on a pregen character sheet ("how am I going to use a cow in a dungeon" oh they'll find ways, believe me they'll find ways) and I really miss the more off the wall 2ed proficiencies like mimicry. Open ended stuff that's easy to grasp works wonders.

Fairy Tale 22: How Some Children Played at Slaughtering

Once upon some time some children were playing. One was the cook, one was the butcher and one was the pig. So the butcher took a knife and slit the pig's throat while the cook held a bowl to catch the blood to make sausages out of.

After killing his friend the boy who was playing butcher got summoned to the town council and told to choose between an apple and a gold coin. He chose the apple so was set free.

There is another version as well, in this one the "pig" boy's mother is giving her baby a bath when she hears horrible screams downstairs. She leaves her baby in the bath and goes downstairs and sees her son with a knife in her neck. She takes it out and plunges it into the heart of the "butcher" kid then goes back upstairs to check on her baby who has, in the meantime, died in the bath. In guilt she hangs herself and when her husband gets home he dies as well.

The fuck? I can see why this one was taken out after the first edition. It's also the perfect reason why if you want fucked up fairy tales you don't need to deal with modern "adult" and "dark" "reimaginings," just go back to the oral tradition and you'll get all of the fuckedupedness you could ever want.

What can we get out of this one?

Morality

A lot of RPGs try to get players to care about the morality of their actions and they generally fail, which is why Sword & Sorcery (and Icelandic Sagas) are often great fits for RPGs, in those the PCs being greedy bastards is perfectly in-genre so the DM doesn't need to whine "come on guys, you're supposed to be the HEROES!" when the PCs act like PCs.

But fairy tales aren't Sword & Sorcery stories, morality really matters in those stories. How to get players to think about that without being obnoxious? One of the best methods I've ever seen is by having a bunch of wide-eyed kids idolize the PCs and try to emulate them. Don't try to be mean or sneaky, have the kids mob the PCs at the edge of town and beg to hear about their adventures while acting as innocent and adorable as possible. Then have them take the PCs as their role models and emulate the behavior of the PCs in the most straightforward way possible. Then sit back and enjoy the show.

If your PCs are anything like mine there's no better way to make them think "oh god, what have I done?" It's important to not make it seem forced or a trap for the PCs. Make it really obvious that the kids want to be just like the PCs and are taking all kinds of life lessons from stories of their adventures well BEFORE the kids do anything fucked up.

Judgment

Really like the judge here. The kid choosing the apple over the gold coin shows that he's still a little kid and doesn't get what he's done because he can't understand that a gold coin can buy a whole lot of apples.

Think putting in something similar (but more confusing) in a trial of the PCs would be fun.

Saving throw vs. anguish

Yup, definitely going to have a saving throw vs. anguish. Any other good fairy tale saving throw categories?

Quote from: Daztur;860582Before hitting the next fairy tale, I want to flesh out some of my previous ideas.

NPC Desires

This is what I posted about before as a replacement for social mechanics.

In fairy tales characters have strong desires and few breaks on them. In game terms, each NPC has three desires representing the things they're most obsessed with, with especially single-minded NPCs having fewer.

Examples of a Desire could be anything from "peanuts" to "the whole world and everything in it" depending on an NPC. A random desire table would be a useful tool here.

Generally if an NPC sees a way to obtain something they desire they'll grab ahold of it almost immediately. The only thing that gives NPCs pause is if their desires conflict.

How the PCs come in contact with NPC Desires is when they want NPCs to do something. Look at what the PCs are proposing and add up the following modifiers:
+1 Fulfilling a desire (for example giving a goblin who has a Desire for peanuts a bag of peanuts).
+2 Satiating a desire (for example giving a goblin a peanut farm).
+1 Friendly reaction
-1 Hostile reaction
-1 Resisting a desire (for example if the PCs ask for the goblin's bag of peanuts).
-2 Eliminating a desire (for example if the PCs ask the goblin to join a religion with an anti-peanut taboo).
-1 to -3 Ordeal (the PCs asking the NPC to do something that doesn't conflict with their Desires but which is difficult, dangerous, time-consuming or just annoying, -1 is something bothersome while something bordering on suicidal would be -3).

Just add up the modifiers and if the result is positive the NPC goes along with what the PCs want them to do. If the result is 0 it's a toss-up and which way the NPC goes is determined by PC demeanor/persuasiveness or by the PCs offering to give the NPC something that is nice but not really one of their Desires.

NPCs will generally trust the PCs to live up to their side of the bargain because NPCs are EXTREMELY good at spotting lies (unless they're in writing) and breaking a sworn promise brings down curses on your head. NPCs will generally do their best to weasel out of their side of the bargain without technically breaking it.

One up-shot of this is that there's little need to apply modifiers to reaction rolls. A friendly dragon is still terrifying. For example if a dragon's desires are:
-Gold.
-Delicious human flesh.
-Princesses.

Then if the dragon meets the PCs it will desire their gold and tasty flesh. Even if the PCs roll a friendly reaction from the dragon and try to negotiate "please don't eat us" with the dragon it'll be tough going. They'll have to give the dragon gold or a princess to get the dragon to resist its desire for their delicious human flesh and even that's a bit of a toss-up.

Because of this generally the best way of getting an NPC to do something isn't to go against their desires directly but to redirect it. For example the younger two Billy Goats Gruff don't try to get the troll to resist its desire to "eat goats" but give that desire a different target. You see a lot of fairy tale protagonists doing this, often by trying to redirect the antagonist's desires into the future (by offering first born children etc.).

Navigating this system takes a good bit of player skill since the players don't know what the NPC's desire are or (how I'm going to run it) even know that this whole Desires mechanic even EXISTS.

As for as what the point of having a system like this instead of the DM just making shit up, it's for the same reasons that D&D has morale rules, reaction rolls or the hundred and one little rules scattered around the 1ed core books about NPCs have such and such a percentage chance of doing such and such a thing. It's to help the DM take a step back and be a referee rather than a hands on story-teller.

This system pretty much completely runs on player skill rather than character skill but it's pretty easy to add in elements of of player skill in the form of proficiencies like "know lies" or "blood pact" (raises the stakes of breaking a promise) or "smell fear." This wouldn't replace the ability of a player to talk and be social but would give them more information to go on when figuring out what to say.

What I like about this system is that it emphasizes the specific over the general. Players can't break out any one hammer to knock down every nail, they really have to focus on what makes each NPC tick when trying to manipulating.

Think that's a fairly functional system, maybe add some more of an element of chance to the whole thing.

Fun fact: the Desires system is more or less the core of Exalted 3e's social system. They're just Intimacies, but you need to manipulate their intimacies if you're to persuade them about anything.
I think you should add some more mechanics for "cold reading" and for misdirection, though. Well, you could leave the misdirection out, I guess, but unless you're exceptional in portraying NPCs, the "cold reading" and finding out what the NPCs want is still necessary.

Quote from: Daztur;862607Fairy Tale Limit Breaks

In honor of the release of Exalted 3, let's convert Exalted-style limit breaks to fairy tale characters.

Fairy tale characters are driven by their Desires, which always bubble close to the surface. But what happens when a Desire dies? What if your greatest Desire is to protect someone who has just died or to claim an apple from a tree that has just been chopped down?

When faced with a Desire that has become impossible to fulfill, characters must make a Saving Throw vs. Anguish or suffer one of a variety of afflictions:
-Burst heart.
-Murderous rampage.
-Cry until you have no more tears. Such tears may consist of gemstones.
etc.

Having something with the useful Iron heart band installation proficiency may be useful in such situations in order to keep your heart from bursting.

Aside from Anguish what else would be appropriate D&D saving throws?

I like that.
Also, Save Vs Sorrow. A critically failed save might actually be useful, though. You can water a tree with your tears, and the last of your tears can be a peerless diamond, as you mention.
More importantly, to go together with this, you need a Defining Quality. A Sorrowful Musucian would start singing and playing. Such abilities just tend to burst forth when people are sorrowful!
Your sorrow might move the heart of local spirits, too. And they might decide to help you.
Of course there shall be a catch, why are you even asking:D? Read Radko from Novgorod, if you can find it.

Also: Pendragon Passions rule here.

Quote from: Daztur;865164Been mulling over this since my last post. Fairy tales kind of stand be between King Arthur and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. In Le Mort de Arthur the social hierarchy is tight, nobody really moves up and down too much. The only badass peasants are really nobles in disguise. Nobody cares too much about simple money they're more in it for reputation. They don't try to get a new position, they just try to do a really good job of the position that they're in.

In Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser they really don't pay too much attention to the social hierarchy at all. They're able to basically live outside any organized system by their own wits and are mostly after money that they then piss away. They get more powerful (a bit) but they don't really change their social position at all as the series goes on, unless I'm forgetting something.

In fairy tales, on the other hand, the social hierarchy matters. The way to win is to become royal, generally through marriage not by force like with Conan. Protagonists try really hard to better their social position (generally by PC-style cunning and trickery), they don't just ignore it like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or smash it under sandaled foot like Conan. Money matters a lot to fairy tale characters, but being a king is far far far better than being rich.

Also, like Cave Bear points out, relationships matter more to them than complete footloose wanderers like a lot of Appendix N characters.

So how to bake this into the reward system?

First off, remove XP for killing monsters. Combat doesn't play as much of a role in fairy tales.

Keep GP = XP. Fairy tale characters are motivated by more than just gold, but they are definitely greedy.

Put in a table of "ransom values" of how much various characters are worth if ransomed. If the PCs save people (including party members and even themselves) from capture or certain death you get XP equal to the ransom value of the people you saved. By making people "treasure" this way then GP = XP applies to them as well, so kidnapping people gives you XP but just murdering them doesn't. This is why princesses get kidnapped, not killed.

This also allows PCs to get some experience in adventures where they don't bag any treasure, this means that PCs can get to a decent level while still being poor enough for the price of, say, a horse to matter to them. I think that level not automatically conferring wealth fits with fairy tales.

What about ruling territory and relationships?

Well I thought long and hard about xp rules for those and came up with some ideas that'd work well for a Dark Ages campaign but not really for a fairy tale one. In any case I think we've already got the fairy tale value of territory and relationships covered:
-You can spend a spell slot to imbue a relationship with magical power. For example you could always know where your daughter is or make your favorite dog smarter and more loyal. That makes those relationships potentially matter a lot.
-Being a king/queen of land gives you a small boost per hex ruled (on the order of one of the weaker 3.5ed feats, but generally more interesting). Ruling a good bit of territory gives you a nice selection of bonuses along with a lot of duties. People wouldn't get to choose these boosts, each hex would provide a bonus that makes sense thematically. As noted in a previous post, if the hex that provides these bonuses becomes corrupted then so does the bonus.

Well, this would have the bad consequence of players saving people only to ransom them themselves, I suspect, because then they double on the XP gain.
Maybe twice the GP XP of a ransom if you save someone? Then you don't get money, but might get opportunities for social promotion, or at least favours.

Quote from: Daztur;866264Fairy Tale 22: How Some Children Played at Slaughtering

Once upon some time some children were playing. One was the cook, one was the butcher and one was the pig. So the butcher took a knife and slit the pig's throat while the cook held a bowl to catch the blood to make sausages out of.

After killing his friend the boy who was playing butcher got summoned to the town council and told to choose between an apple and a gold coin. He chose the apple so was set free.

There is another version as well, in this one the "pig" boy's mother is giving her baby a bath when she hears horrible screams downstairs. She leaves her baby in the bath and goes downstairs and sees her son with a knife in her neck. She takes it out and plunges it into the heart of the "butcher" kid then goes back upstairs to check on her baby who has, in the meantime, died in the bath. In guilt she hangs herself and when her husband gets home he dies as well.

The fuck? I can see why this one was taken out after the first edition. It's also the perfect reason why if you want fucked up fairy tales you don't need to deal with modern "adult" and "dark" "reimaginings," just go back to the oral tradition and you'll get all of the fuckedupedness you could ever want.

What can we get out of this one?

Morality

A lot of RPGs try to get players to care about the morality of their actions and they generally fail, which is why Sword & Sorcery (and Icelandic Sagas) are often great fits for RPGs, in those the PCs being greedy bastards is perfectly in-genre so the DM doesn't need to whine "come on guys, you're supposed to be the HEROES!" when the PCs act like PCs.

But fairy tales aren't Sword & Sorcery stories, morality really matters in those stories. How to get players to think about that without being obnoxious? One of the best methods I've ever seen is by having a bunch of wide-eyed kids idolize the PCs and try to emulate them. Don't try to be mean or sneaky, have the kids mob the PCs at the edge of town and beg to hear about their adventures while acting as innocent and adorable as possible. Then have them take the PCs as their role models and emulate the behavior of the PCs in the most straightforward way possible. Then sit back and enjoy the show.

If your PCs are anything like mine there's no better way to make them think "oh god, what have I done?" It's important to not make it seem forced or a trap for the PCs. Make it really obvious that the kids want to be just like the PCs and are taking all kinds of life lessons from stories of their adventures well BEFORE the kids do anything fucked up.

Judgment

Really like the judge here. The kid choosing the apple over the gold coin shows that he's still a little kid and doesn't get what he's done because he can't understand that a gold coin can buy a whole lot of apples.

Think putting in something similar (but more confusing) in a trial of the PCs would be fun.

The judge was just ascertaining whether the kid was fit to be judged as an adult, that's all.
The other variant of the story, though? It's classical, in the sense "people may lose what they cherish most due to someone's whim...even a kid can be dangerous". Notice that the woman also stabbed the butcher kid without hesitation.
Also, deciding to play a butcher is deciding to play a gangster. Because people were generally allowed to carry the tools of their trade in a German city, guess which profession's representatives were known to be dangerous in a fight;)?
Right, that's probably "playing at being the local tough", so the kid was transgressing from the get-go.

AsenRG:

Been mulling over your post for a while. As for Exalted and Pendragon I'll have to look that stuff up as my only experiences with them is making a character for an abortive Exalted 2ed game and leafing through Pendragon. I think what I'm trying to do is slightly different as these social mechanics are focused mostly on the NPCs. I'm not sure how to apply them to PCs without it seeming a bit ham handed. Will think on it.

For cold reading and misdirection I'm going to have some mechanics for that but I want to really clearly delineate the line between character and player skill. Specifically:
-Knowing if someone's lying will be character skill but really easy to do. As in take an NWP at first level and succeed automatically easy. This ISN'T to prevent misdirection, just the opposite. It's to make the players sneakier bastards who can't lie outright without people knowing so they tie the truth in knots instead.
-Keeping people from breaking promises will be tied into character skill. In Mongoose Conan (the best d20 game) a lot of spells could be cast at the range of "magic link" which meant that if you had someone's hair clippings you could hit them with a curse from the other side of the country. The same thing would work for fairy tales but having "they broke a promise to me" would a standard "magic link" rather than hair clippings so if you break a promise to a witch she can smack you around with curses at infinite range. Will probably add some more stuff to make breaking promises a very bad idea. Weaseling out of promises on technicalities, on the other hand, is very much encouraged.
-Player charisma will be tied into reaction rolls but in a lot of fairy tales how friendly someone isn't tightly connected to how helpful characters are. For example dragons will chat pleasantly with you and trade stories and then apologize for having to eat you (friendly reaction, unpleasant desires) and wolves will jump out of the bushes and eat your horse and then say sorry and offer you a ride (hostile reaction, pleasant desires).
-For cold reading there would be proficiencies that give hints but trying to tease out specifically what NPCs want would be mostly player skill.
-Same with getting NPCs to actually agree to stuff, that'd mostly be player skill of trying to get as much stuff as they can out of the NPCs without giving up anything that they can live without while telling if the NPCs are using weasel words and trying to be as weasely as possible themselves.

For saving throws vs. sorrow etc. I like the idea of interesting and useful critical failures. For anguish vs. sorrow maybe:
-Anguish: having something that you Desire being permanently put out of your reach. For example if you Desire to see the most beautiful woman in the world and you're blinded then that's Anguish.
-Sorrow: having something that you already have and value greatly taken away from you.

Having anguish and sorrow baked into the rules reminds me of a setting I built before which I thought of as "Shiny Dark" (in contrast to grimdark) in that there's wonder and beauty everywhere (rather than grit and guts and grime) but the dominant mood is melancholy and tragedy and enough tears to turn the oceans to brine.

For rescuing people and then ransoming them, that'd be fine but I don't think it'd get double XP. What I mean is if in D&D you go and take a statue worth 1,000 GP. By doing that you get 1,000 XP. If you then sell the statue you get gold for that (but no more XP) and if you give it back to its previous owner you get no gold (but gratitude and possible favors) and no XP. The same goes for people, if you rescue someone worth a 1,000 GP ransom you get 1,000 XP no matter what you do after rescuing them. TAKING something (like prisoners) gets you XP, not selling/ransoming/returning/eating/whatever them.

I like the aside about butchers being dangerous guys, that kind of rules lawyering is perfect. I could see a lot of PCs joining butcher guilds just to be able to carry around cleavers.

Yup, the judge is just using a clever way to tell if the kid is an adult morally but I like the idea of using choices as tests to other things as well.

Incestuous Fiction

A lot of good fantastic fiction comes about from taking things that affect you in real life and then creating something in fiction that has a the same effect on a deeper and more universal level. For example weird foreigners in New York freaked Lovecraft out so he made things that tapped into that fear of the unknown and did it on a level that really transcended his own rather pedestrian xenophobia.

A lot of shitty fantasy fiction comes about from drawing the bulk of your inspiration from the genre than you're writing in. For example writing horror fiction and throwing a lot of tentacles in there because Cthulhu is cool.

After a while you get fantasy (or horror, or sci-fi or whatever) that's inspired by other fantasy that's inspired by other fantasy and the whole thing becomes an incestuous mess. The trappings are maintained but all of the stuff that's being poured out into the story doesn't have any real connection to human wants, desires and fears. You get symbols shorn clear of anything to symbolize and the whole thing feels hollow.

This happens with fairy tales (which is why I'm going back to the first edition of Grimm here), this happens with RPGs, this happens with everything.

The thing is writing really good fantastic fiction is hard so most people don't do it. There is however a shortcut: stealing from other genres.

When you import stuff from other genres into your fiction then you have to throw out a lot of the trappings and it really makes you think about what's behind them. Just look at all of the most popular fantasy, none of it is primarily influenced by other fantasy. Tolkien is all about myth, GRRM is far more influenced by historical fiction than fantasy and with Rowlings there's a hell of a lot more influence coming in from old British boarding school fiction (and Roald Dahl?) than from fantasy.

Gygax and Lucas were freaking masters at doing this. Look at Star Wars it's a fairy tale western about samurais in hot rods fighting Roman Nazis in space. The idea of "Jedi" stole all the bits about samurai in Kurosawa stories that were attractive to Americans without getting bogged down by specific trappings except for really basic stuff like "has sword" and even that was adapted well to the setting it got placed in.

Then look at the prequels. They kept all the Star Wars trappings but they were primarily influenced by, well, Star Wars and not by all of the cool stuff that inspired the original trilogy. Hence fucking midichlorians. Textbook incest.

You get a lot of the same problems with a lot of D&D settings, people constantly rehashing the same "D&D stuff" and tweaking stuff to make it "fresh" while loosing sight of what made it interesting in the first place. It's all GOOD stuff, but the umpteenth different rehash of D&D dwarves gets pretty damn boring after a while, especially when so many D&Disms get carried over without thinking because they're so much the default that people don't even think about them any more before including them.

That's a big part of what I'm looking at fairy tales for. Adapting them to D&D makes me think more about what makes D&D awesome and what makes fairy tales awesome better than either do alone. After I finish the Grimm stories I'll probably hit a collection of Korean shamanist stories I have and see how well they'd work in the same setting.

I'm not creative enough to make cool shit up whole cloth but the next best thing is to steal from different places and to steal widely.

Fairy Tale 23: The Little Mouse, the Little Bird, and the Sausage

Another one of these stupid animal tables. They're starting to get on my nerves.

A mouse, bird and sausage live together. They divide up the labor so that the bird fetches wood, the mouse fetches water and the sausage cooks. The bird decides this is unfair and the jobs get reassigned by lot.

So the sausage fetches wood (and gets eaten by a dog), the bird fetches water (and falls down a well and dies) and the mouse does the cooking (and falls in the pot and gets cooked).

Lesson: shut up and do your own damn job.

Not really much to do with this one so short aside...

Sufficiently Advanced Ignorance is Makes Everything Indistinguishable from Magic

It's really hard to make a clear dividing line between science and magic. You can say that magic is more unpredictable and it cares about humans in a way that science doesn't, but that doesn't really make it unscientific per se just driven by scientific principles that are wrong. That's why wrong scientific principles (alchemy etc.) often show up as magic and magic is easy to dress up as sufficiently advanced technology.

The real dividing line is that magic is science that we're deeply ignorant of.

So that means that the easiest way to make magical in an RPG seem magical is to not tell the players any of the magic rules.

There's plenty of precedence for this kind of black box gaming. In Gygax's original campaign the players didn't know pretty much any of the rules and got told to roll different dice in different situations without knowing anything. I've used purely black box DMing in my games with students (to save time more than anything) and it works fairly well, it especially improves thief skills as the thief skill rules are basically fine they're just very easy to misinterpret and nobody can misinterpret them if they don't know anything about how they work.

As a rough outline of how I'd do that with my son and his friends (once he's a bit older):
-Have a "lucky" class and don't tell the kids anything about what the lucky class is capable of besides "being lucky."
-Keep track of what spell slots the PC has available.
-If they're nice to a species of animal and the player expresses a wish that an animal of that species show up it does so (summon animal).
-If they're very emotionally attached to something (a weapon, a pet, another person, etc.) then have that as casting a spell that gives that bond magical power (kind of like find familiar)
-Let players come across more D&D-ish magic (i.e. demon binding) but withold a lot of information about how the magic works or mention it only in vague terms.
-Put in things that modify how magic words (time of day, where you are, etc.) that players don't know about until they figure it out.
-When players have interesting wrong ideas consider stealing them.

Up next: Mother Holle

Quote from: Daztur;866750Incestuous Fiction

A lot of good fantastic fiction comes about from taking things that affect you in real life and then creating something in fiction that has a the same effect on a deeper and more universal level. For example weird foreigners in New York freaked Lovecraft out so he made things that tapped into that fear of the unknown and did it on a level that really transcended his own rather pedestrian xenophobia.

A lot of shitty fantasy fiction comes about from drawing the bulk of your inspiration from the genre than you're writing in. For example writing horror fiction and throwing a lot of tentacles in there because Cthulhu is cool.

After a while you get fantasy (or horror, or sci-fi or whatever) that's inspired by other fantasy that's inspired by other fantasy and the whole thing becomes an incestuous mess. The trappings are maintained but all of the stuff that's being poured out into the story doesn't have any real connection to human wants, desires and fears. You get symbols shorn clear of anything to symbolize and the whole thing feels hollow.

This happens with fairy tales (which is why I'm going back to the first edition of Grimm here), this happens with RPGs, this happens with everything.

The thing is writing really good fantastic fiction is hard so most people don't do it. There is however a shortcut: stealing from other genres.

When you import stuff from other genres into your fiction then you have to throw out a lot of the trappings and it really makes you think about what's behind them. Just look at all of the most popular fantasy, none of it is primarily influenced by other fantasy. Tolkien is all about myth, GRRM is far more influenced by historical fiction than fantasy and with Rowlings there's a hell of a lot more influence coming in from old British boarding school fiction (and Roald Dahl?) than from fantasy.

Gygax and Lucas were freaking masters at doing this. Look at Star Wars it's a fairy tale western about samurais in hot rods fighting Roman Nazis in space. The idea of "Jedi" stole all the bits about samurai in Kurosawa stories that were attractive to Americans without getting bogged down by specific trappings except for really basic stuff like "has sword" and even that was adapted well to the setting it got placed in.

Then look at the prequels. They kept all the Star Wars trappings but they were primarily influenced by, well, Star Wars and not by all of the cool stuff that inspired the original trilogy. Hence fucking midichlorians. Textbook incest.

You get a lot of the same problems with a lot of D&D settings, people constantly rehashing the same "D&D stuff" and tweaking stuff to make it "fresh" while loosing sight of what made it interesting in the first place. It's all GOOD stuff, but the umpteenth different rehash of D&D dwarves gets pretty damn boring after a while, especially when so many D&Disms get carried over without thinking because they're so much the default that people don't even think about them any more before including them.

That's a big part of what I'm looking at fairy tales for. Adapting them to D&D makes me think more about what makes D&D awesome and what makes fairy tales awesome better than either do alone. After I finish the Grimm stories I'll probably hit a collection of Korean shamanist stories I have and see how well they'd work in the same setting.

I'm not creative enough to make cool shit up whole cloth but the next best thing is to steal from different places and to steal widely.

And it's posts like this that give me hope that D&D wouldn't self-cannibalize itself to death. But man, are some people trying...

Quote from: Daztur;867414Fairy Tale 23: The Little Mouse, the Little Bird, and the Sausage

Another one of these stupid animal tables. They're starting to get on my nerves.

A mouse, bird and sausage live together. They divide up the labor so that the bird fetches wood, the mouse fetches water and the sausage cooks. The bird decides this is unfair and the jobs get reassigned by lot.

So the sausage fetches wood (and gets eaten by a dog), the bird fetches water (and falls down a well and dies) and the mouse does the cooking (and falls in the pot and gets cooked).

Lesson: shut up and do your own damn job.

I think you're underestimating this one.
For one thing, people in fairy tales should be good at what is expected of them, but might or might not be abysmal failures or natural talents at other stuff.
Still, one modifier for the social system: if it's clear who you are and what you do, people would consult you on that account. Even if it's a disguise.
Failure at your professed role in society, however, would be met with derision or worse.

Quote from: Daztur;866583AsenRG:

Been mulling over your post for a while. As for Exalted and Pendragon I'll have to look that stuff up as my only experiences with them is making a character for an abortive Exalted 2ed game and leafing through Pendragon. I think what I'm trying to do is slightly different as these social mechanics are focused mostly on the NPCs. I'm not sure how to apply them to PCs without it seeming a bit ham handed. Will think on it.

One warning, Ex2 has a social system that's...well, not really like that. And Ex3 is only out for backers, yet.
Focus on Pendragon, for now.

QuoteFor cold reading and misdirection I'm going to have some mechanics for that but I want to really clearly delineate the line between character and player skill. Specifically:
-Knowing if someone's lying will be character skill but really easy to do. As in take an NWP at first level and succeed automatically easy. This ISN'T to prevent misdirection, just the opposite. It's to make the players sneakier bastards who can't lie outright without people knowing so they tie the truth in knots instead.

I approve of that;).

Quote-Keeping people from breaking promises will be tied into character skill. In Mongoose Conan (the best d20 game) a lot of spells could be cast at the range of "magic link" which meant that if you had someone's hair clippings you could hit them with a curse from the other side of the country. The same thing would work for fairy tales but having "they broke a promise to me" would a standard "magic link" rather than hair clippings so if you break a promise to a witch she can smack you around with curses at infinite range. Will probably add some more stuff to make breaking promises a very bad idea. Weaseling out of promises on technicalities, on the other hand, is very much encouraged.

Just make it clear that it's encouraged...D&D has a record with rules being misunderstood.

Quote-Player charisma will be tied into reaction rolls but in a lot of fairy tales how friendly someone isn't tightly connected to how helpful characters are. For example dragons will chat pleasantly with you and trade stories and then apologize for having to eat you (friendly reaction, unpleasant desires) and wolves will jump out of the bushes and eat your horse and then say sorry and offer you a ride (hostile reaction, pleasant desires).

That will get you some perplexed looks.
I approve.

Quote-For cold reading there would be proficiencies that give hints but trying to tease out specifically what NPCs want would be mostly player skill.
-Same with getting NPCs to actually agree to stuff, that'd mostly be player skill of trying to get as much stuff as they can out of the NPCs without giving up anything that they can live without while telling if the NPCs are using weasel words and trying to be as weasely as possible themselves.

Well, just give an example on procedures. Seriously, it's for the GMs as much as the players. You don't want a GM that's less than clear on how this works to be disappointed because he or she was unable to even understand what the player was doing:p.
Yes, I've seen that, why are you asking:D?

QuoteFor saving throws vs. sorrow etc. I like the idea of interesting and useful critical failures. For anguish vs. sorrow maybe:
-Anguish: having something that you Desire being permanently put out of your reach. For example if you Desire to see the most beautiful woman in the world and you're blinded then that's Anguish.
-Sorrow: having something that you already have and value greatly taken away from you.

Sounds good to me. And failing forward is very fairytale-like in my book.

QuoteHaving anguish and sorrow baked into the rules reminds me of a setting I built before which I thought of as "Shiny Dark" (in contrast to grimdark) in that there's wonder and beauty everywhere (rather than grit and guts and grime) but the dominant mood is melancholy and tragedy and enough tears to turn the oceans to brine.

Hey, no reason you shouldn't have joy, too. Tears of joy healing blind eyes is, like, fairy tale 101, right?

QuoteFor rescuing people and then ransoming them, that'd be fine but I don't think it'd get double XP. What I mean is if in D&D you go and take a statue worth 1,000 GP. By doing that you get 1,000 XP. If you then sell the statue you get gold for that (but no more XP) and if you give it back to its previous owner you get no gold (but gratitude and possible favors) and no XP. The same goes for people, if you rescue someone worth a 1,000 GP ransom you get 1,000 XP no matter what you do after rescuing them. TAKING something (like prisoners) gets you XP, not selling/ransoming/returning/eating/whatever them.

Again, make it clear.

QuoteI like the aside about butchers being dangerous guys, that kind of rules lawyering is perfect. I could see a lot of PCs joining butcher guilds just to be able to carry around cleavers.

No reason it should be just butchers, you know. Guardsmen, if the city has a guard. Shepherds might be well-armed, too.

QuoteYup, the judge is just using a clever way to tell if the kid is an adult morally but I like the idea of using choices as tests to other things as well.

It's a consistent idea in the setting, as the logic of the people of the time was very much that your qualities would show in your daily life. Check the father who wanted to marry his son and gave the three possible brides the same items to see how they would dispose of them...
(Said logic is still valid, though these days  we assume people might be, say, dishonest, without cheating you in a deal. Sometimes we're right).
Of course, the modern-day variant is the father just giving each would-be bride $5000 or something. But let's not go into jokes territory;)!

Quote from: AsenRG;867571And it's posts like this that give me hope that D&D wouldn't self-cannibalize itself to death. But man, are some people trying...

Yup.

Nothing wrong with D&D stuff, it's certainly as good as fairy tale stuff. It's just that when your main source of inspiration is D&D stuff that has mostly been inspired by D&D stuff that has mostly been inspired by D&D stuff it's really easy to lose the beating heart of D&D while keeping the form.

QuoteOne warning, Ex2 has a social system that's...well, not really like that. And Ex3 is only out for backers, yet.
Focus on Pendragon, for now.

Will take a look at both when I can.

QuoteJust make it clear that it's encouraged...D&D has a record with rules being misunderstood.

Right, just don't think players need much encouragement to rules lawyer and weasel. Both fairy tale characters and D&D players are very good at being the best kind of correct.

QuoteThat will get you some perplexed looks.

Well the wolf eating your horse and then apologizing is straight out of the most famous Russian fairy tale. And the dragon chatting pleasantly before trying to eat everyone was from Piestro running the B5 module. Was a great scene as we all tried to keep the polite conservation going long enough while on knife's edge as we slowly tried to fan out around the dragon so that it couldn't hit more than one of us at a time with its breath when the inevitable fighting started.

QuoteIt's a consistent idea in the setting, as the logic of the people of the time was very much that your qualities would show in your daily life. Check the father who wanted to marry his son and gave the three possible brides the same items to see how they would dispose of them...
(Said logic is still valid, though these days we assume people might be, say, dishonest, without cheating you in a deal. Sometimes we're right).
Of course, the modern-day variant is the father just giving each would-be bride $5000 or something. But let's not go into jokes territory!

Right, although I think these fairy tale stories are often mostly jokes themselves.

The previous example we've seen like this is the guy who filled his boot up with water and used whether it could hold the water or not to decide if he should marry again or not.

Fairy Tale 24: Mother Holle

This is one of the good ones.

A mother has two daughters: one pretty and diligent and the other one ugly and lazy. For some reason the mom prefers the ugly and lazy one and makes the other one work "like Cinderella" (first time I've seen a fairy tale reference another one, interesting).

While getting water the good girl falls down a well and wakes up in another land. There she hears bread calling out to her so she takes it out of an oven before it burns and when apples call out to her that they're right she shakes them off the tree.

Soon she runs into a scary old woman with big teeth. She's scared but Mother Holle calms here down and takes her on as a servant. Her most important duty is to shake out the woman's blanket so hard that feathers fly, as that's what makes it snow.

She eventually misses her horrible family and is sent back home through a gate and is rewarded with a rain of gold.

Wanting more money the bad daughter is send down the well as well but she slacks off and is sent home through the magical gate and is rewarded with a rain of pitch that will never completely wash off.

Pretty straight-forward moral but the world building is really interesting here. We get to see Narnia-style doorways in fairy for the first time and I really like the idea of cursing someone with sticky stuff that never comes off but my favorite part is:

Plato's Cave

In most D&D cosmology the Prime Material Plane is, well, prime and all other planes of existence are twisted reflections of that or represent some element of that. This is probably clearest in 4ed in which the Feywild and the Shadowfell are A Link to the Past-style reflections of the moral world.

But here it's very clearly the other way round. Fairy here is primal. It is the true objects that throw shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, it is the microcosm, it is the primal pattern upon which the universe is inscribed.

Shake out feathers form a blanket here and it snows in the mortal world. Pick twelve white flowers here (see Fairy Tale 9) and doom your twelve bothers.

Everything in the mortal world is mirrored by something smaller in fairy. That means that relatively small actions in fairy can have massive consequences back home. Some possible ideas:
-PCs walk on some grass, the forest back home has been reduced to kindling.
-PCs save a wounded dove from a hawk and return home to find a princess recuperating in their guest room.
-PCs pour out a water skin on the ground and return home to find a new river watering their thirsty kingdom.

Especially fun to massively magnify the strangest or most fucked up things the players do while in fairy.

What I like about this is how fairy tales muddle the line between the magical and the mundane. Even the most mundane things have magic and some of the greatest sorcery is accomplished by shaking out a blanket.

Up next: The Three Ravens

Fairy Tale 25: The Three Ravens

While their mom is at church three brothers sneak off to play cards. This pisees their mom off so she curses them and they change into ravens.

Not taking this sitting down their kid sister sets off to rescue them. While tracking them she finds a ring that one of her brothers dropped.

She asks for help from the sun and the moon but they like to eat kids and were too hot/cold so she asks the stars for help instead and got a chicken leg.

She found the glass mountain where her brothers were and there was a gate that needes a chicken bone to unlock it. She`d lost the bone so she chopped off her finger and used that instead.

Inside a dwarf told her to wait for the return of the "lord ravens" and while waiting she took a bite of all of their food and dropped the ring in a cup.

While eating the ravens were annoyed Goldilocks-style at the missing food but when they found the ring they were transformed back to humans and everything ended happily.

Lots of good D&D fodder here.

Fairy Tale Girls are Hardcore

A common stereotype is that fairytales are full of heroes rescuing princesses but so far we`ve had zero women being rescued by anyone and several stories in which girls save boys (often their brothers). Sure we have a lot of stories about guys doing strange tasks to win princesses but those princesses hardly needed rescuing from anything except their virginity. The closest we come is to a king resurrecting his wife, but the queen is the hero of that story not the king.

So if you need to be saved, call a little girl. She`ll hack off her finger for you if that`s what it takes. Once you wash off the Romantic crud that`s adhered to a lot of fairy tales there`s very little need for "dark" or "modern" reimaginings.

Lord Ravens

The dwarf calls the raven beothers "lords" and serves them. Why would they be lords? Perhaps humans that have been polymorphed into animals are the aristocracy of the animal world thanks to them being smarter and having a good understanding of humans.

We`ve already established that humans in animal form don`t age which opens up a lot of ways in which an ancient animal lord could be used. Maybe the white stag is the king`s great-great grandfather?

Who`s Been Eating My Porrdige?

We know that eating a magical creature`s food puts you in their power (stupid Persephone) but it seems to work the other way 'round as well.

By eating the ravens` food a magical bond is created between the girl and the ravens as soon as the ravens eat the food as well. Their conduit helps the girl to return her brothers to human form with the ring helping as well.

Maybe that`s why in the first story, the princess is able to rwturn the frog prince to humanity by treating him as a human: treating someone as human can make them human, sharing food with someone makes them your brothers (agan).

This same logic appears in things like Christian Communion and way way way back to various ancient sacrificial feasts. It`s tied into the rules of hospitality that they Freys broke iat the Wed Redding and cursed themselves.

This is why fairy tail spells often have ranges of "magical link" things like broken promises and shared food can create a link that can be used to cast spells along so thst pesky things like line of sight aren`t necessary.

Fingers Are Great Material Components

A lot of fairy tale magic requires that you give in order to get. Ravens want horse meat etc. etc.

But the most potwnt thing thst you can give is yourself, which is useful if you`ve run out of bat guano.

The Sun and the Moon

The sun and the moon are pretty creepy here with their desire to eat kids. They`d make interesting NPCS. In German "sun" is feminine and "moon" is masculine.

So I`m imagining the Old Man in the Moon as something akin to Odin or Herne the Hunter or the Leader of the Wild Hunt. Nocturnal, wise, cold, and voracious with sunken cheeks, a long white beard and stag horns.

What would a good female solar avatar look like. It has to be one that`s "too hot" and likes to eat kids.

What`s up with the dwarf in the glass mountain?

What`s up with the dwarf playing butler for some ravens in a glass mountain? Any ideas here? Could use some help.

Up next: Little Red Riding Hood

Haven't updated this thread in far too long, will get back on track shortly but in the meantime I've almost finished reading the translations of the original Grimm stories. Some very interesting fragmentary tales and some cliches that get repeated over and over that I've never even heard about before. But for now I'll leave you with this from the intro to the vol II:

Quote from: Wilhelm and Jacob GrimmOur collection was not merely intended to serve the history of poetry but also to bring out the poetry itself that lives in it and make it effective: enabling it to bring pleasure wherever it can and also therefore, enabling it to become an actual educational primer. Objections have been raised against this last point because this or that might be embarrassing and would be unsuitable for children or offensive (when the tales might touch on certain situations and relations—even the mentioning of the bad things that the devil does) and that parents might not want to put the book into the hands of children. That concern might be legitimate in certain cases, and then one can easily make selections. On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nature itself provides our best evidence, for it has allowed these and those flowers and leaves to grow in their own colors and shapes. If they are not beneficial for any person or personal needs, something that the flowers and leaves are unaware of, then that person can walk right by them, but the individual cannot demand that they be colored and cut according to his or her needs.

Or, in other words, rain and dew provide a benefit for everything on earth. Whoever is afraid to put plants outside because they might be too delicate and could be harmed and would rather water them inside cannot demand to put an end to the rain and the dew. Everything that is natural can also become beneficial. And that is what our aim should be. Incidentally, we are not aware of a single salutary and powerful book that has edified the people in which such dubious matters don't appear to a great extent, even if we place the Bible at the top of the list. Making the right use of a book doesn't result in finding evil, but rather, as an appealing saying puts it, evidence of our hearts. Children read the stars without fear, while others, according to folk belief, insult angels by doing this. Once again we have published diverse versions of the tales along with all kinds of relevant notes in the appendix.

Those readers who feel indifferent about such things will find it easier to skip over them than we would have found to omit them. They belong to the book insofar as it is a contribution to the history of German folk literature.

This more things change...

Fairy Tale 26: Little Red Riding Hood

I always thought that Little Red Riding Hood being rescued from the wolf after being eaten always sounded like it'd be tacked on to make the ending happier but it's here in the first edition. So this is the second story in which wolves swallow things without digesting or killing them and in both cases they're rescued by having the wolf's belly cut open by scissors.

The story's the same one that everyone knows so no need to go over it, except in the ending (just like in the goat story) they load down the wolf's belly with stones after opening it to let Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother out so he falls down from the weight and dies.

More interestingly there's a postscript about the NEXT time Little Red Riding Hood meats a wolf on the road to grandma's house. This time she stays on the damn road (and says that the wolf would've eaten her if she'd stepped off).

Here grandmother locks her door and the wolf tries to get in, so they put a big trough of water in the fireplace, grill sausages to tempt the wolf with their smell and drown him when he comes down the chimney.

Other stuff:

Stay on the Path

In wild or fairy lands it is vital to stay on the damn path, here Little Red Riding hood is distracted from the path by flowers and shows up to her grandmother's house too late but learns her lesson later. A path doesn't have to by physical, it can be the course a guide or an animal has set you on but going off it can spell doom.

This makes wilderness adventures easier to plan out as you can focus on prepping out obstacles on the path, temptations to leave the path and the negative consequences of doing so.

Threshold

Interestingly, just like with vampires, the wolf seems to need to be invited to enter grandmother's house. Sneaking down the chimney doesn't cut it. This fits in which what I talked about before about separating the map into lawful, neutral and chaotic land and having that really make a difference.

Up next: Death and the Goose Boy

Quote from: Daztur;879445Fairy Tale 26: Little Red Riding Hood

I always thought that Little Red Riding Hood being rescued from the wolf after being eaten always sounded like it'd be tacked on to make the ending happier but it's here in the first edition. So this is the second story in which wolves swallow things without digesting or killing them and in both cases they're rescued by having the wolf's belly cut open by scissors.

The story's the same one that everyone knows so no need to go over it, except in the ending (just like in the goat story) they load down the wolf's belly with stones after opening it to let Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother out so he falls down from the weight and dies.

More interestingly there's a postscript about the NEXT time Little Red Riding Hood meats a wolf on the road to grandma's house. This time she stays on the damn road (and says that the wolf would've eaten her if she'd stepped off).

Here grandmother locks her door and the wolf tries to get in, so they put a big trough of water in the fireplace, grill sausages to tempt the wolf with their smell and drown him when he comes down the chimney.

Other stuff:

Stay on the Path

In wild or fairy lands it is vital to stay on the damn path, here Little Red Riding hood is distracted from the path by flowers and shows up to her grandmother's house too late but learns her lesson later. A path doesn't have to by physical, it can be the course a guide or an animal has set you on but going off it can spell doom.

This makes wilderness adventures easier to plan out as you can focus on prepping out obstacles on the path, temptations to leave the path and the negative consequences of doing so.

Threshold

Interestingly, just like with vampires, the wolf seems to need to be invited to enter grandmother's house. Sneaking down the chimney doesn't cut it. This fits in which what I talked about before about separating the map into lawful, neutral and chaotic land and having that really make a difference.

Up next: Death and the Goose Boy

Vampires are frequently conflated with werewolves in older folklore, so it makes sense that the wolf would have vampire-like elements..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrykolakas#Etymology

Quote from: Cave Bear;879459Vampires are frequently conflated with werewolves in older folklore, so it makes sense that the wolf would have vampire-like elements..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrykolakas#Etymology

Actually, they're pretty much the same thing:). Vampires can turn in wolves, bats and mist and they eat people, not just sucking blood. Werewolves are often people that didn't get proper burial;).

Also the seeming lack of digestion seems rather undead...

What was interesting is that in the addendum the second wolf says he WOULD eat Little Red Riding Hood but he can`t because she`s on a road.