I've been reading an English translation of the original edition of Grimm's fairy tales (first volume 1812, second volume 1815) and it's some great stuff. The text is really stark without all of the flowery description I usually associate with fairy tales, a lot of stuff that got bowdlerized in the better-known later editions is intact and there are a bunch of stories that later got cut that I've never heard of before.
So I'm going to go through it and mine it for D&D content and then maybe dig up some other collections of fairy tales from before the Romantics got their hands on the genre. Let's start.
Fairy Tale 1: The Frog King, or Iron HenryEveryone knows this story because it's the first one so everyone reads before getting bored. Girl loses golden ball down well, got gets it out, frog claims reward, girl gets grossed out but when she keeps her promise the frog changes back to a prince and:
QuoteWell, now indeed he did become her dear companion, and she cherished him as she had promised and in their delight they fell asleep together.
Stuff we can use:
OathsThe princess wants to weasel out of her promise to the frog and the king has to constantly remind her of the importance of keeping your promises. I think that having oath breaking bring down curses on you could be a fun rule to bolt onto D&D as it appears constantly in fiction.
One way of doing that would be to have someone who has broken their oath to you be constantly within range of any magical curses you want to call down on their head. Or just have the DM smack any oath breakers with a Bestow Curse spell.
Combine this with making outright lies be easy to detect and you'd have people avoiding outright lies and broken promises but engaging in a lot of trickery and word-twisting which would be fun. Also I tend to dislike how clearly magical and mundane things are separated in a lot of RPGs and having something as simple as "I promise" have magical force blurs those lines.
Poetic DurationsWhat's interesting is we're never told what exactly broke the Frog King's curse or who polymorphed him into a frog, but it's pretty clearly that the princess taking care of him (especially putting him on her bed?) does it.
Think a lot of D&D magic (especially buffs and curses) could use poetic durations, in which they last until a specified event breaks them. To keep casters from just constantly saying "until the end of time" have them not get their spell slot back until the spell is broken (or the target dies) which would encourage casters to be appropriately dickish but not put impossible conditions in place.
PolymorphPolymorph magic has long been a D&D staple but I don't think "guy who was polymorphed into an animal a few years before the PCs run into him" has been used anywhere near enough. Would be a good thing to add to wandering monster charts, as in "human polymorphed into another creature, roll again to see what the person has been polymorphed into."
TreasuryRemember reading that way way back a lot of royal treasuries were more like trophy cases than bank accounts. Sure you COULD sell them if you really needed cash but a lot of the stuff was mostly there for symbolic value to show what a badass you were. D&D could use more stuff like that and the princess's golden ball sort of fits here.
Perhaps there are a whole lot of magic items a bit like the Jewel of Judgement from Amber that are useful in and of themselves but are most useful because they can influence and empower the connection between a ruler and the land ("the king is the land and the land is the king"). If you have the golden ball it's just a shiny golden ball (like something you cast the Continuous Light spell on) but if you're a ruler it can do far far more than that, but only on the land of your own kingdom.
Iron HenryThe Frog King's servant had iron bands installed around his heart to keep it from bursting in grief after his master was turned into a frog. That's pretty damn hardcore, gotta think of a way to D&D-ize that but I'm drawing a blank. Any ideas people?
Up next: The Companionship of the Cat and Mouse
"The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage" -- and the noobs wonder why they had a T.P.K....
Quote from: Daztur;854176Everyone knows this story because it's the first one so everyone reads before getting bored. Girl loses golden ball down well, got gets it out, frog claims reward, girl gets grossed out but when she keeps her promise the frog changes back to a prince
I liked the Muppet version (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068613/).
What's the name of the book you're reading? I'd like to read something closer to the original oral tradition.
Is this the one? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691160597/laughing-squid-20
Quote from: Simlasa;854346What's the name of the book you're reading? I'd like to read something closer to the original oral tradition.
Is this the one? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691160597/laughing-squid-20
Yup that`s the one. Apparently from the comments it has some translation goofs that`d be annoying for academics but it`s great for this purpose. In the introduction the translators compare how the same story changed through various editions of the Grimm book and it`s amazing how much the Grimms larded up the straightforward oral stories with extra verbiage.
Quote from: Daztur;854176Iron Henry
The Frog King's servant had iron bands installed around his heart to keep it from bursting in grief after his master was turned into a frog. That's pretty damn hardcore, gotta think of a way to D&D-ize that but I'm drawing a blank. Any ideas people?
Not yet, but that is too good not to use. I'll have to ponder that one for a while.
QuoteThink a lot of D&D magic (especially buffs and curses) could use poetic durations, in which they last until a specified event breaks them. To keep casters from just constantly saying "until the end of time" have them not get their spell slot back until the spell is broken (or the target dies) which would encourage casters to be appropriately dickish but not put impossible conditions in place.
Neat idea!
Great thread, BTW! :)
Fairy Tale 2: The Companionship of Cat and Mouse
In this original edition of the Grimm stories the oral tradition is coming through really clearly. In this case we get a story that comes across exactly like one long dad-inflicted groaner joke.
In this story a cat and mouse are living together and decide to stash a jar of lard under a church altar for some reason so that they can eat it in the winter.
But the cat gets hungry and decides to start eating the fat and tells the mouse he has to go to the church for the baptism of "Skin-Off" and then "Half-Gone" and then "All-Gone." Eventually the mouse figures out that the cat is actually talking about how much of the lard he's eaten and then the cat eats the mouse.
Yeah, not the best story in the collection, but what can we do with it?
Having animals you can talk to be important is something D&D could really use more of, having the PCs stumble across random things because cats put them there would be interesting. On of my favorite D&D With Pornstars post is the one about goats: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.kr/2014/08/and-goat-had-notable-horn-between-his.html Will hit that theme later but what this story really made we think of was:
People in Fairy Tales Don't Lie
Or at least pretty damn rarely. Sure they trick and mislead people all the time but there are surprisingly few bald-faced lies. Why not? Well for people to use really obvious half-truths like the cat in this story, it must be that people are really good at spotting outright lies.
Let's make a NWP of the sort that you see in 2ed an ACKS:
Proficiency: Know Lies.
Effect: anytime someone speaks a lie to you, you know it. No roll or declaration required, this is completely automatic. However, even the most threadbare half-truth can defeat this proficiency.
And I always thought it was unfair that NWPs has just proficiencies while you could get speciaization and mastery with weapons. So let's fix that.
Specialization: Know Lies.
Effect: you can also detect written lies and anytime anyone says something that they believe to be true but is actually false.
Mastery: Know Lies
Effect: if someone lies to you, you instinctually know the truth behind the lie.
Or something along those lines.
To meander a bit more off-topic, for me what I dislike about a lot of skill systems is the same thing I dislike about free form magic systems. Give me
Affect Normal Fires over Fire Magic: Rank 1 any day of the week and similarly I'd much rather have Know Lies (effect: you can know lies, no roll required) than Empathy Rank: Fair (effect: anything that the player can justify falling under empathy vs. a difficulty that the GM will then pull out of his ass) and for a lot of the same reasons.
I'd like to see a thief class rebuild so that they'd get Proficiencies, Masteries and Specializations as they level up they let them simply and reliably do certain narrow things without having to worry about what DC the DM is going to choose.
Up next: The Virgin Mary's Child
Fairy Tale 3: The Virgin Mary's Child
Poor woodcutter has a hard time feeding his daughter so the Virgin Mary offers to take her off his hands and takes her off to heaven. Living in heaven is awesome but you get the standard "here's the keys to twelve doors, but don't open the thirteenth" spiel and then the dumbass has to go and open the 13th door of heaven. God's behind that door and touching the holy flames turns one finger gold which makes it easy for Mary to catch the girl gold-handed.
She won't admit her fault so she gets kicked out of heaven and has the power of speech taken away with her. She then has to live in the forest where Mary found her so she gets all hungry and dirty and whatnot so of course a king stops along and marries her.
Each time she has a kid she gets another chance to repent but she doesn't so the Virgin Mary kidnaps her children and takes them to heaven. People start thinking that she's eating her kids because she can't speak to defend herself so they decide to burn her. Then she repents and gets her kids back and everything's fine.
OK, what can we do with this?
Questions, Questions
Anyone want to give a hand with any of these questions?
-Why does the idiot keep on not admitting that she opened the door until the very last possible moment?
-The girl and her three kids spent a lot of time in heaven. What effect would that have on a person? Especially one who was old enough to talk a bit and walk around before he ever set foot on Earth. That'd be a great concept for a character. In D&D terms, what effect would having your home town be heaven have on a person?
-Why does the king decided that random dirty starving mutes that he just randomly happened on in the forest are good marriage material even if they're really beautiful dirty starving mutes. What is the king thinking? This isn't a one off thing, almost the same exact thing happens a few stories later. What's the story here?
Fairy Tale Magic
Most fantasy RPGs draw a sharp line between magic and the mundane. Everything that exists in our world works exactly the same as it does in our world and then there's a layer of magic added on top of that. Fairy tales very explicitly don't work like that. A lot of the stuff that we take for granted in our world has fabulous power in fairy tales and a lot of the magic is surprisingly mundane.
In fact, we're so used to magic being stuff that humans do (I cast a spell, I make the laws of physics sit up and shut down) that a lot of fairy tale magic isn't really recognizable as magic. But at its core, it's really a lot like Elric magic: Elric doesn't really cast spells he just knows how to call on supernatural entities that owe his family favors and get shit done. The end result is the same (Elric says some words and magical shit gets done) but the internal logic is very different.
Same deal with fairy tales. Magic is all about knowing how to ask for help, not knowing how to manipulate reality. In a lot of fairy tales people do critters favors and get favors in return or get all kind of help that looks like a big fat Deux Ex Machina. But if you look at it the right way, this translates pretty easily to D&D terms. Calling on animals or supernatural helpers is basically a summoning spell and costs a spell slot to cast. Some of these summoning spells might cost material components in the form of food or help but the basic logic is the same. Therefore in D&D terms the gormless prince who gets a lot of help from beasts and the supernatural isn't a 1st level doofus who's getting a lot of gimmies from the GM, he's got a couple magic-user levels under his belt, he's just not a hermetic magic user. Instead he's really good as asking for help and knows that when you see a flock of hungry crows it's a good idea to slaughter your horse and feed it to them.
For a very fairy tale style first level spell I'd having one called Appeal which is basically opening your heart if you're desperate and asking the world for help. The fairy tale world isn't an uncaring place, it deeply cares about people and what they do, often it fucks with you but it never ignores you. This can make anything from the Virgin Mary to talking frogs to hungry trolls to whispers on the wind show up, basically something that has the potential to solve the PC's problem, if they're smart enough to take advantage of it. Then you'd tie this spell to a long random chart and seed it with stuff that has the potential to TPK the party if not handled properly. This'd be fairy tale magic in its purest form, basically setting off a big flare into the air that screams "help me" and hoping something good comes of it.
For playing with kids I'd black box this. And simply have the classes be called strong (fighter), smart (thief) and lucky (magic-user) and not tell the person with the magic user PC about the existence of spells and spell slots but have them figure out stuff for themselves and any time they express frustration or verbally call out for help (as in "crap, the trolls have caught me and are going to eat me and there's nothing I can doooooooo!") have that count as their PC casting Appeal.
Up next: Good Bowling and Card Playing
Fairy Tale 4: Good Bowling and Card Playing
Here we have the guy who has to spend three nights in a haunted castle in order to marry a princess. In other versions of this story that I've read the castle is completely harmless and the man triumphs by simply not being afraid of any of the creepy stuff. Here's it's not quite like that.
The man decides to bowl with the legs and heads that fall down the chimney and then some cats show up that are cold and want to play cards and he puts them in a vise and beats them to death. Then a bunch more cats and dogs show up and he stabs them with knife then when he goes to bed his bed runs around and eventually turns upside down but he just rides it then throws the blanket out the window so he can get out.
What can we do with this one?
The Completely Harmless Dungeon
It'd be interesting to make a completely harmless one-page dungeon. It'd be an interesting way to screwing with players, especially back to back with a Raggi negadungeon.
I'd set it up so that if players just stay calm nothing bad happens but it has dangers if they don't. For example the long-clawed creepy cats that show up really just want to play cards but will attack if the players bother them and the chimney just spits out harmless dismembered arms and legs but is dangerous if the players try to climb up it.
This sort of dungeon could get old real fast but as something short and sweet I think it has potential.
To Marry the Princess You Must...
This is the first of the many many fairy tales that have "anyone, anyone at all, can marry the princess if they only..." Don't think I've ever seen this really common trope used in D&D but it'd be an interesting alternative to launching politics-level D&D instead of the old clearing the wilderness and building a keep. But why are all the kings doing this?
One idea I had a while back was for a D&D matrilineal society where rule is passed from mother to daughter. The women are the educated ones who run the legal system, civil administration, etc. For the husbands bloodlines doesn't matter so much (it's the female one that counts) so what's needed is either a cunning or powerful husband who can run the military and keep foreign threats at bay. This society could co-opt warlords and dangerous adventurers by simply marrying them and seems a good way of maintaining social stability in a world where any random pig herd can potentially get city-leveling power within a few years.
Of course this assumes that the bulk of adventurers are male so wouldn't work in some campaigns.
Another idea that's still just half-formed in my head is this ties in somehow with "the king is land and the land is the king" magic, which I'd really like to see more of in D&D. Perhaps there are certain disturbances in the land that can only be properly dealt with by the royal family (which is connected to the land by their rule) so if someone else deals with it you have to marry them to make them royal ex post facto? Or perhaps royals are simply driven to find a spouse who's a good fit for the land, which could perhaps explain all of the "hey beautiful woman who's been living along in the forest, you can't talk but I want to marry you can make you queen!" plots (like the last one).
Black Cats and Dogs
Haunted places always seem to be full of black cats and/or dogs which might make for a more interesting entry-level undead than mindless skeletons and zombies. Plenty of myth to grab onto that hasn't really been taken advantage enough in D&D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dog_(ghost)
Sure there's the hell hound but those are more demonic, fire breathing and not very creepy.
Up next: The Wolf and the Seven Kids
This is a great thread idea, I loved reading the OP. Keep it up!
Fairy Tale 5: The Wolf and the Seven Kids
A more famous one this time. Goat goes out, wolf disguises itself as said goat, gets let in by her idiot children and eat them all. While sleeping off the meal, the goat then cuts open the wolf, lets the kids out and puts in stones instead. The wolf then is too heavy and falls down a well and dies.
What can we get from this one?
Magic Scissors
I really like the idea of magical items that are intended for something peaceful and then weaponized by PCs. So take the scissors from this story which can somehow cut a wolf open without waking it up. Perhaps these are magical surgical scissors which cause no pain but have a "safety" feature preventing them from doing something like just sniping the wolf's head off. The incisions it makes also heal incredibly quickly, allowing the cut in the wolf's belly to heal by the time it wakes up.
Pointless Passions
The wolf is driven by hunger by doesn't actually digest or even chew anything it eats. Similarly a dragon is consumed by greed despite never being able to spend its money on anything. If you stretch it a bit, a vampire is driven by lust without pleasure or fertility.
It seems that a good template for a monster is taking a human desire or vice and then remove the actual point of that desire so that the monster is left as a mockery of human passions.
So, if...
Lust = vampires
Gluttony = wolves
Greed = dragons
Then what are sloth, wrath, envy and pride? What sort of monster would be utterly consumed by those vices but not gain any of the normal benefits that humans get by pursuing them?
For wrath I like the idea of wrathful elves. Dante said (according to Wikipedia): that wrath is "love of justice perverted to revenge and spite."
I like the idea of elves has half-fallen angels (angels stayed loyal to God and are in Heaven, demons revolted and are in Hell while elves were neutral and were exiled to Earth, add in some apocryphal stuff about the Grigori and you're good to go).
The elves are bound to only be able to hurt humans if the humans break certain (divine?) laws. But the elves are wrathful so they love punishment for its own sake and constantly try to trick people into breaking laws so that they can then punish them and generally being rules-lawyering dicks. They also like confusing people about what the content of the laws actually are but if you're smart and careful you can generally keep the elves off you back.
Any ideas for sloth, envy or pride-based monsters?
Up next: The Nightingale and the Blindworm
Quote from: Daztur;857104Any ideas for sloth, envy or pride-based monsters?
Sloth: "Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows." -from Antony and Cleopatra, by Shakespeare
A monster that embodies sloth could be a beast that chooses to remain idle out of fear of failure, even when the possibility of failure does not exist. It would be an absurdly powerful monster with a ridiculous number of hit points and abilities that decides to lay around in bed (even though it doesn't have to sleep.)
Envy: A monster that wants what others have, even though it already has everything.
Pride: A monster with an inflated sense of worth, even though the monster has nothing of worth, or an incredibly ugly monster that spends an inordinate amount of time primping and preening.
Quote from: Daztur;857104Any ideas for sloth, envy or pride-based monsters?
The Lich King, also known as the Rotten Pharaoh, who pursued eternal life but got the bad side of the deal, would naturally envy those still living.
Quote from: Cave Bear;857127Sloth: "Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows." -from Antony and Cleopatra, by Shakespeare
A monster that embodies sloth could be a beast that chooses to remain idle out of fear of failure, even when the possibility of failure does not exist. It would be an absurdly powerful monster with a ridiculous number of hit points and abilities that decides to lay around in bed (even though it doesn't have to sleep.)
Envy: A monster that wants what others have, even though it already has everything.
Pride: A monster with an inflated sense of worth, even though the monster has nothing of worth, or an incredibly ugly monster that spends an inordinate amount of time primping and preening.
Hmmmm, any folkloric creatures of anchor those ideas to?
It's hard to make sloth threatening. Perhaps a giant whose very vast bulk is threatening?
For envy that seems draconic again but I like simple greed better for dragons. Any other critters to fill that slot?
For pride that sounds like the standard idea of hags, want to crank it up a bit so it's more threatening and scary than pathetic. Hmmmm...
Quote from: SapaInca;857249The Lich King, also known as the Rotten Pharaoh, who pursued eternal life but got the bad side of the deal, would naturally envy those still living.
Yeah, envy's a hard one because there really isn't any up-side to envy. Gluttony gets you tasty food, sloth gets your relaxation, wrath gets rid of people who annoy you but what does envy get you? And then how can we take that away while still leaving the gnawing envy?
Fairy Tale 6: The Nightingale and the Blindworm
Pretty simple little animal fable. The nightingale and the blindworm have one eye each. The nightingale one from the worm to have a matching set for a wedding and then won't give it back so the blindworm gets eternal vengeance by eating nightingale eggs.
OK, what can we do with this one?
Fairy Tale Social Combat
During the first fairy tale I touched on the importance of oaths and how important it is to keep them while in the second instead of lying to the mouse the cat uses half truths to weasel out of its promise.
So, fairy tale people don't lie. Or if they do people see through their lies easily (unless they're written down, it seems much easier to lie in writing).
Fairy tale people don't break promises. Or if they do they suffer terrible consequences for breaking their promises (as in the thousand and one stories where someone promises to not open that one door or that one box etc.).
Hitting players with those (NPCs that almost always know when they're lying and curses for oathbreaking) and you get some interesting fairy tale behavior in response. Not honesty, fuck no, but instead technically true deception and weaseling out of promises with pedantic rules lawyering. Or cursed PCs. That's very in-genre too.
I'm going to do this in my next campaign. Sounds fun. What I like most about it is that the actual content of what people say matters, right down to the exact weasely phrasing. Too often the specific content of what people say in "social combat" gets glossed over, this brings it back into focus.
In Which I Ramble on About What's Wrong With RPG Social Mechanics
Social Combat is really a terrible term, isn't it? It frames social interaction in precisely the wrong way, as an attempt to force someone to do someone to do something they don't want by talking at them. Anyone who's been involved in an online debate knows how hard that is to do so it often feels artificial and then it leads to other problems. Either it's something that players can do to NPCs and the NPCs can't do back which just seems unfair or it's something NPCs can do to PCs which is just annoying ("nope, sorry you can't do that, the NPC convinced you not to!") and leads to annoying behavior on the part of PCs ("Oh no! Someone is TALKING TO ME! Quick! Help! Hit them with an ax before they hit me with a mind whammy!").
In response a lot of the OSR just says, "screw that" and runs things mostly freeform. Which is a good idea. No rules are better than bad rules. But often good rules are better than no rules. What would good rules for RPG social interaction be?
First reframe things. Don't think of things as a combat, think of them as haggling. It's not a "duel of wits" it's two used car salesman swapping cars and trying to get one over on the other. The PCs want an NPC to do something for them (join them, not eat them, give them information) and the NPCs want something in return (not getting killed, money, food). Most NPCs are dicks and want to drive really hard bargains. Maybe the right haggling rules could be framed around that?
I think making lying hard (NPCs are really good at detecting outright lies) and making oathbreaking risky (brings down curses on your head) would work well with social mechanics based on haggling since the PCs couldn't just promise a pack of lies each time, they'd have to be clever and you could have the same kind of cleverness on the part of the NPCs.
Then have social skills not be stuff like "diplomacy" or "bluff" but rather be things like:
-Know Lies.
-Smell Fear.
-Hear the Heart (corny name, will have to think of a better one, but the idea is that when someone talks about the one thing they desire most of all, you know that they're talking about the one thing that they desire most of all).
-Oath Pact (you're good at making two-way oaths that bring down especially nasty curses if someone breaks them outright).
Basically mostly stuff that gives you more information that helps you in social interaction rather than stuff that does your social interaction for you.
OK, then on the NPC side of things don't give them stats based on how easily they can be pushed around, give them stats based on what they want and on how badly they want it.
For example a goblin whose desires are:
-Not Being Killed.
-Being Treated With Kindness.
-Peanuts.
Is going to be a whole lot easier for PCs to manipulate than a giant king whose desires are:
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.
It also makes specifics matter. RPGs are always better when the specifics matter.
Perhaps as a general framework, the rules for deciding "does the NPC agree to what the PCs are telling them to do" is counting up how many of the things the NPC wants the PCs are offering them minus the number of desires the NPC would have to go against to provide what the PCs want and then as a general rule of thumb if the number is positive the NPC goes along with it. With perhaps modifiers for the PCs going really above and beyond to fulfill a desire (giving the goblin a literal building full of peanuts instead of a bag) or if what the PCs want in return is especially onerous even if it doesn't directly clash with one of the three desires.
So for example, if the PCs are dicks to the goblin it'll get its back up (conflicts with its "Being Treated With Kindness" desire) but the goblin is pretty easy to manipulate if the PCs are smart enough to pick up on clues like its stomach mumbling. With the giant PC, the PCs start in a hole because of his desire for "The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell" so they'll really have to tap dance just to get to zero and have the giant let them go in peace and simply offering the giant food or money won't cut it no matter how honey-tongued the PCs are since the giant doesn't especially want those things.
A bit skeletal now, but I think it could be pretty functional if fleshed out. Would perhaps be the sort of rule that'd work better if the PCs don't know it exists.
Up next: the Stolen Pennies.
Quote from: Daztur;857256For envy that seems draconic again but I like simple greed better for dragons. Any other critters to fill that slot?
Perhaps a doppelganger or similar creature who desperately wants to be what it mimics but can never have their life because it can only look like them but not be them.
Quote from: rawma;857394Perhaps a doppelganger or similar creature who desperately wants to be what it mimics but can never have their life because it can only look like them but not be them.
That could work. Dopplegangers are a fun monster.
Hits the right mix of threatening and pathetic.
Quote from: Daztur;857256It's hard to make sloth threatening. Perhaps a giant whose very vast bulk is threatening?
What's a good monster to represent depraved indifference?
...Cthulhu?
The great old ones could rise up and devour the entire human race! But the stars aren't right. The great old ones enjoy their sleepy-time.
Not exactly faerie tale creatures though...
You could say angels represent a sort of depraved indifference in that they allow evil to exist in the world even when they have the omniscience to detect it and the omnipotence to end it, but then you're getting into some "fedora" territory there.
*edit*
http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/depraved-indifference/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_(deadly_sin)
The embodiment of sloth doesn't necessarily need to be passive, or inactive. It could be a monster that harms people indirectly through its careless and apathetic refusal to perform whatever important duty has been assigned to it, or a monster that emerges as the result of carelessness.
Quote from: Cave Bear;857402What's a good monster to represent depraved indifference?
...Cthulhu?
The great old ones could rise up and devour the entire human race! But the stars aren't right. The great old ones enjoy their sleepy-time.
Not exactly faerie tale creatures though...
You could say angels represent a sort of depraved indifference in that they allow evil to exist in the world even when they have the omniscience to detect it and the omnipotence to end it, but then you're getting into some "fedora" territory there.
*edit*
http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/depraved-indifference/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_(deadly_sin)
The embodiment of sloth doesn't necessarily need to be passive, or inactive. It could be a monster that harms people indirectly through its careless and apathetic refusal to perform whatever important duty has been assigned to it, or a monster that emerges as the result of carelessness.
Well it's well known that Cthulhu makes everything better: http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html
Lovecraftian fairy tales work quite well, see The White People by Machen for example (pre-Lovecraft but hits the same spot) so maybe that's something to work on.
Don't really like the idea of jerkass angels, it's be done to death. If they're going to be jerkass let them be jerkass in an interesting an novel way. Kind of like if you're going to have jerkass elves please please please don't make them be ecoterrorist elves who kill people for chopping down trees.
Quote from: Daztur;857538Well it's well known that Cthulhu makes everything better: http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html
Lovecraftian fairy tales work quite well, see The White People by Machen for example (pre-Lovecraft but hits the same spot) so maybe that's something to work on.
Don't really like the idea of jerkass angels, it's be done to death. If they're going to be jerkass let them be jerkass in an interesting an novel way. Kind of like if you're going to have jerkass elves please please please don't make them be ecoterrorist elves who kill people for chopping down trees.
Wonderful!
So you're right now you've got
Lust = Vampires
Gluttony = Wolves
Greed = Dragons
Pride = Hags
Envy = Doppelgangers
Sloth = Great Old Ones
Wrath is going to be easy. I want to see that one attached to some weak, piddling monster though. Not like Khorne and his chaos guys, like some little petulant guy. Maybe kobolds are wrath? Or gnomes? Or worst of all... kender (kender embody anger not by being angry, but simply by being. Their existence is what drives men to wrath.)
Quote from: Cave Bear;857569Wonderful!
So you're right now you've got
Lust = Vampires
Gluttony = Wolves
Greed = Dragons
Pride = Hags
Envy = Doppelgangers
Sloth = Great Old Ones
Wrath is going to be easy. I want to see that one attached to some weak, piddling monster though. Not like Khorne and his chaos guys, like some little petulant guy. Maybe kobolds are wrath? Or gnomes? Or worst of all... kender (kender embody anger not by being angry, but simply by being. Their existence is what drives men to wrath.)
Reminds me if my old kobold concept: they are the forgotten memories of dragons made flesh. When drqgons sleep they forget things and those memories are too potent to dissipate so they become kobolds.
Life is hard when your soul is the memory of torching a city and you`re three feet tall. Enough to fill you with Wrath.
This is an ambitious, and excellent, project.
For Envy and Pride, we should look at what the actual bad results are. What happens to a person who has too much Pride? What happens to a person who has too much Envy? Then we can think of a monster who's natural state matches that condition.
Quote from: RPGPundit;858147This is an ambitious, and excellent, project.
Well hitting 1,001 is something to aspire to more than a realistic expectation. As I get a bigger number I want to start getting a catalog of stuff like:
-Magical stuff, abilities and critters.
-Trained skills that protagonists possess.
-Interesting locations.
To use for eventual RPG fodder, as in "sure your character can try to do that but since nobody in 1,001 fairy tails even attempts to do that I'm not going to be arsed to write up rules for it."
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;858152For Envy and Pride, we should look at what the actual bad results are. What happens to a person who has too much Pride? What happens to a person who has too much Envy? Then we can think of a monster who's natural state matches that condition.
Will have to think on that, brain isn't being responsive.
For
wrath I want to circle back to my idea of wrathful elves that I mentioned a while back in my first deadly sins post. Wikipedia mentions Dante saying that wrath is the desire for justice perverted which really struck a cord with me. When I think of perverted justice what comes to mind?
Ultima Online: way back when in the days of precasting (which must be brought back) the land was filled with battles between Player Killers (random murderers) and Anti-Player Killers (people who killed anyone tagged as a murderer). Interestingly people often hated the Anti-Player Killers more as in order to get more targets they used various tricks (jumping into people's spells etc. etc.) to get the game to tag various people as aggressors so that the APKs could then will them with impunity.
Elves are like that. They use misdirection, entrapment and extreme rules lawyering to trick people into breaking the Law, which then allows the elves to punish you, which is justice inverted.
There's also...
Freemen on the Land: conspiracy wackjobs who are convinced that the law doesn't apply to them because they wrote their names in call-caps or because they're a boat or something.
Except those kind of tactics work against elves. They try to trick people by convincing them that they've broken laws that don't actually exist but if you know the Law (especially all the technicalities) and stick to your guns the elves can't touch you since they're bound by the Law.
OK, on to the next story...
Fairy Tale 7: The Stolen Pennies
Parents give kid some pennies to give to the poor but the kid instead hides them in a crack in the floorboards so that he can use them to buy cookies later.
Then the kid dies (of course) and his ghost is constantly scratching away at the floorboards to get at the pennies. When the family figures out that happened they take out the pennies and give them to the poor and the ghost can rest in peace.
I like this one since it's small, simple and mundane but interesting. Adventures that are based on the PCs trying to lay ghosts to rest tend to be rather aggravating but if they're happening in the background in a low key way so that they don't DEMAND that the players fix them RIGHT now they'd be a cool little setting element.
Also this got me thinking about burials and how important they are for keeping undead away and the rest of the sacraments...
Sacraments
D&D religion is often annoying in that all of the ritual that's so important in real world religion is still just non-magical ritual and then a separate system of miracles get built up alongside that. To give real depth to a fairy tell setting you need to make the mundane magical, and a good way of doing that is injecting some magic into day to day rituals like the sacraments.
Let's hit them. There's seven of them so they're a good counter-part to the seven deadly sins monsters that we've been talking about.
Baptism: important to avoid dead babies turning into annoying ghosts. Also some monsters will treat the baptized differently (can smell them? won't want to touch them?).
Confirmation: I got nothing.
Eucharist: in Three Hearts and Three Lions the hero thinks about how it'd be a really good idea to receive communion before heading out into the chaos-haunted wilds without exactly spelling out how. Perhaps some time-limited 5ed-style Advantage against some magic?
Penance: some of the more goofball acts of penance demanded of people in Medieval history would be fun things to hit PCs with. "You can't wear shoes for a year! ESPECIALLY during winter!", stats for hair shirts, etc. etc.
Anointing of the Sick: wikipedia kind of merges this one with Extreme Unction and Last Rites. This sort of thing is VITAL for not being hit by angry undead. How often have you had PCs kill random mooks and just leave their bodies there and not even consider burying them let alone giving them burial rites? And you've never hit them with vengeful undead? Not once? Having a trade-off between spending time digging grades for dead bandits now vs. getting hit by annoying tunneling zombies later is exactly the kind of resource management trade-off that D&D needs as much of as it can get.
Holy Orders: basically turning people into priests. As I'm making even really basic rituals magical how I'd handle this on a class basis is dump all magic into the magic-user class and then have different ways of getting spells. Lawful: once you're ordained as a priest (or become a nun/monk/crazy dude in the forest) you can use Lawful magic. Lawful magic spells eat up a spell slot but can be used at-will as long as they're used in accordance with Law. For example you could have a first level spell called "Sacraments" that lets you perform the sacraments any time you want but eats up a first level spell slot permanently (or at least until defrocked). Think 3.5ed reserve feats. Lawful spells are gained by pilgrimages, relics, self-sacrifice, etc. Neutral: quid pro quo bargaining with the fae and talking animals. Think Elric magic but with more fish and fewer elementals. The spells use up a spell slot when you cast them but don't have to be "memorized" ahead of time (think 3.5ed sorcerers). Chaotic: binding asshole demons to your will. Basically you cast a spell ahead of time by binding the demons into an amulet, charm, gem, etc. and then let the spell take effect by letting the demon out of its prison. Slightly different fluff but mechanically the same as a standard D&D magic-user in that you prep spells ahead of time. Chaotic spells are powerful, but the demons like creatively interpreting your orders. You can dabble in different kinds of magic or focus on one but all of them basically come down to using your magic-user spell slots in different ways.
Marriage: this one is more badass than it sounds. I loved those old stories about the hero marrying the troll's daughter and the marriage making her cow tail fall off and become basically human. You get similar stories with selkies and other critters. It seems that marriage is Lawful enough to suppress the Chaotic nature of a lot of monsters, at least until you break your marriage vows and all hell breaks loose. Would be a lot of fun to have one of the best ways to deal with dangerous monsters be marrying them, which opens up all kinds of potential for fun drama.
Up next: The Hand with the Knife (the most D&Dish one yet!)
Fairy Tale 8: The Hand with the Knife
This is one of the tales that was cut from later editions of the Grimm fairy tales, which is a shame because it's one of the better ones.
Girl with three jerkass brothers has to go dig peat with a crappy shovel every day. Luckily an elf likes her and helps her by giving her a magic knife that can cut through anything, which she uses to cut peat really fast.
The brothers guess something is up and watch the girl and then imitate her knocking on the elf's hill to get the knife and then use it to cut off the elf's arm. The elf thinks the girl did it and is pissed off, The End.
Pretty simple story but the sad ending is pretty poignant. The one-armed elf who is angry at the girl who loves him would be an interesting NPC, as the story seems set-up to get even more tragic (perhaps the elf wants revenge on the girl and she's pregnant and the brothers are up to something with the knife...).
What else can we do with this one?
Vorpal Penknives
Interesting seeing something that's basically a D&D vorpal sword show up. Also interesting is that you mostly only think about vorpal swords being really good at lopping body parts off when really they're incredibly useful for all kinds of things (even cutting peat).
I guess vorpal swords are expensive enough that they don't show up to get used for all of the wonderful stunts things like bags of holding get used for so maybe have a vorpal penknife. Small enough that its combat use doesn't overshadow everything but so sharp that it can cut through anything and be used for all sorts of things by creative players.
Elves are Grigori
The Grigori ("Watchers") show up in a lot of Biblical apocrypha like the Book of Enoch and (in more detail) in the lesser-known Book of Giants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Giants. Although in the Bible (book of Daniel etc.) "Watchers" seems to just mean angels, in the apocrypha it gets used a lot to mention the more horny angels who father the Nephilim and teach man things things he Was Not Meant to Know. IIRC God gets pissed off at them and binds them under the Earth.
This lines up with some bits of folklore about elves:
-Some folklore (which I like) says that elves are the angels who stayed neutral when Satan revolted against God, which fits with the more dickish Grigori who aren't full-on demons.
-Falling in love with human women (like in this story) matches stuff about the Nephilim in the Genesis and elsewhere.
-The Grigori are bound under the ground and folkloric elves are often subterranean. In this story the elf seems stuck under the ground and can't get out but can only stick one arm out.
-Forbidden lore.
-For the half-human kids (Nephilim) you can draw on stuff like The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.
Also you can link in the more modern fundie concept of Territorial Spirit who are demons who each have influence over certain bits of territory and who can be fought with Spiritual Warfare. Elves seem like they're be a lot more locally-based and territorial then demons hanging out in Hell.
Up next: The Twelve Brothers
Quote from: Daztur;858320For wrath I want to circle back to my idea of wrathful elves that I mentioned a while back in my first deadly sins post. Wikipedia mentions Dante saying that wrath is the desire for justice perverted which really struck a cord with me. When I think of perverted justice what comes to mind?
Yeah the wrathful Elves are I think the best example out of this so far.
Fairy Tale 9: The Twelve Brothers
This is a weird one.
There are twelve princes and the queen is pregnant. The king says if a girl is born he`ll kill all of his sons. So the queen tells the boys to hide in the woods and that she`ll signal them when the baby is born.
It`s a girl so the princes decide to live in the woods and kill any girls they meet. The princess eventually finds out she has brothers and goes into woods and meets one.
She talks her way out of getting killed and agrees to do all the housework in their cave and proves to the brothers that she`s their sister.
Things go well until she picks twelve flowers which are really her brothers which makes them turn into birds. The only way out of this is to not talk for 12 years.
So she decides to stay in a tree. A king meets her and decides to marry her. Her mother in-law bad-mouths her and because she can`t speak to defend herself her husband plans to burn her at the stake.
Then at the last minute the 12 years run out and her brothers become human agan and everything gets explained and her mother in-law gets thrown into a barrel of boiling oil and poisonous snakes and everyone except her lives happily ever after.
OK, first of all WTF? there so much stuff that gets thrown in here without any explanation. Why is the king so randomly murderous? Why does picking flowers turn people into birds? Why do kings keep on marryng random mute girls they find in the forest (this happens again and again in fairy tales I haven`t got to yet)? Why is being mute important for breaking curses? Why put poisonous snakes and boiling oil in the same barrel? Wouldn`t that kill all the snakes?
Anyone have any explanation for any of this?
This got me thinking about the nature of fairy tale kingship and Korean geomancy. Bear with me here, I`m going somewhere with this.
Way down in the hyeol
If I understand pungsu jiri (Korean feng shui) correctly, the earth itself has chakra points from which gi (qi) flows. Building your house on these is generally a good idea (the first Korean geomancer directed a temple-building project to harness the gi of the entire nation, which is a lot more badass than finding the best place to put your sofa).
HOWEVER, if bad stuff goes down on top of a hyeol it gets corrupted and becomes a fountain of bad mojo until it gets cleansed.
OK, let`s translate this into fairy tale terms. The king is the land and the land is the king. This is central. A king`s castle is then a fountain of good mojo that sustains the land and keeps Chaos at bay. The king has an instinctual knowledge of what happens around his castle and limited power over his land (think the king and the jewel of Amber). By hunting and patrolling the borders of their land, the king can push his civilizing influence into the surrounding wilderness.
BUT if tragedy strikes the royal family or if the king loses his way this mojo becomes corrupted and the land becomes twisted and Chaotic.
This also works the other way, bad things happening in the land twist the king`s mind and pushes him into madness and evil. This is partly why so many fairy tale kings are such aasholes.
Also royal corruption can be cleansed but this is hard. It often requires bizarre conditions or strange quests, which explains by suitors have to do all kinds of crazy shit in fairy tales.
The role of the queen is important here too. The king`s rule is a marriage to the land so the queen is a stand-in for the land. Perhaps this is why what appears to be the main way that kings find brides it to stumble across random women while out hunting. Have to develop this more, but it`s a start. If the queen is the land at least as much as the king, you want a badass queen who can survive in the land.
But still, what the hell is up with the flowers and the barrel full of fried snakes?
My only idea is the sister passed to the other side of the mirror and on that side all people from the real world are represented by things like flowers so you can screw with them while on the far side of the looking glass.
Up next: Riffraff and an inventory
Fairy Tale 10: Rifftaff
The German title of this story is Das Lumpengesindel which is by far the best thing about it.
A bunch of talking animals stay at an inn and rip off the innkeeper and do stuff like fill his eyes with eggshells. Not really much for me to work with here.
So let's do an inventory:
Magical Acts
-Turning people into frogs.
-Turning frogs into people by keeping your promises to said frogs.
-Taking living people to heaven.
-Spending 12 years not talking in order to break a curse.
Magical Creatures
-Many, many kinds of talking animals.
-Subterranean elf.
-The Virgin Mary.
-God.
-Spectral(?) black cats and dogs.
-Guilty ghost.
Magical Items
-Vorpal knife.
-Key to the doors of heaven.
-Chimney that constantly drops skulls and other body parts.
-Annoying bed that runs around.
-Magical(?) scissors that let you cut things open without waking them up.
-Lilies that are actually your brothers so if you pick them your brothers turn to birds and stay that way unless you stop talking for 12 years.
Magical Locations
-Heaven and its many rooms.
-Harmless hats and dogs.
Trained Skills
-Iron heart-band installation and removal (necessary to prevent hearts from bursting with grief).
-Making your voice softer by eating chalk.
Misc Nifty Stuff
-Children being kidnapped at birth by the Virgin Mary and raised in Heaven.
-Kings constantly marrying mute girls they find in the forest.
-Serial disappearance of royal children at birth leading to accusations of cannibalism.
-Crazy kind saying that he'll kill his 12 sons if he has a daughter instead of a thirteenth son.
That's some weird shit there.
Up next: Little Brother and Little Sister.
Quote from: Daztur;857258Fairy Tale 6: The Nightingale and the Blindworm
Pretty simple little animal fable. The nightingale and the blindworm have one eye each. The nightingale one from the worm to have a matching set for a wedding and then won't give it back so the blindworm gets eternal vengeance by eating nightingale eggs.
OK, what can we do with this one?
Fairy Tale Social Combat
During the first fairy tale I touched on the importance of oaths and how important it is to keep them while in the second instead of lying to the mouse the cat uses half truths to weasel out of its promise.
So, fairy tale people don't lie. Or if they do people see through their lies easily (unless they're written down, it seems much easier to lie in writing).
Fairy tale people don't break promises. Or if they do they suffer terrible consequences for breaking their promises (as in the thousand and one stories where someone promises to not open that one door or that one box etc.).
Hitting players with those (NPCs that almost always know when they're lying and curses for oathbreaking) and you get some interesting fairy tale behavior in response. Not honesty, fuck no, but instead technically true deception and weaseling out of promises with pedantic rules lawyering. Or cursed PCs. That's very in-genre too.
I'm going to do this in my next campaign. Sounds fun. What I like most about it is that the actual content of what people say matters, right down to the exact weasely phrasing. Too often the specific content of what people say in "social combat" gets glossed over, this brings it back into focus.
In Which I Ramble on About What's Wrong With RPG Social Mechanics
Social Combat is really a terrible term, isn't it? It frames social interaction in precisely the wrong way, as an attempt to force someone to do someone to do something they don't want by talking at them. Anyone who's been involved in an online debate knows how hard that is to do so it often feels artificial and then it leads to other problems. Either it's something that players can do to NPCs and the NPCs can't do back which just seems unfair or it's something NPCs can do to PCs which is just annoying ("nope, sorry you can't do that, the NPC convinced you not to!") and leads to annoying behavior on the part of PCs ("Oh no! Someone is TALKING TO ME! Quick! Help! Hit them with an ax before they hit me with a mind whammy!").
In response a lot of the OSR just says, "screw that" and runs things mostly freeform. Which is a good idea. No rules are better than bad rules. But often good rules are better than no rules. What would good rules for RPG social interaction be?
First reframe things. Don't think of things as a combat, think of them as haggling. It's not a "duel of wits" it's two used car salesman swapping cars and trying to get one over on the other. The PCs want an NPC to do something for them (join them, not eat them, give them information) and the NPCs want something in return (not getting killed, money, food). Most NPCs are dicks and want to drive really hard bargains. Maybe the right haggling rules could be framed around that?
I think making lying hard (NPCs are really good at detecting outright lies) and making oathbreaking risky (brings down curses on your head) would work well with social mechanics based on haggling since the PCs couldn't just promise a pack of lies each time, they'd have to be clever and you could have the same kind of cleverness on the part of the NPCs.
Then have social skills not be stuff like "diplomacy" or "bluff" but rather be things like:
-Know Lies.
-Smell Fear.
-Hear the Heart (corny name, will have to think of a better one, but the idea is that when someone talks about the one thing they desire most of all, you know that they're talking about the one thing that they desire most of all).
-Oath Pact (you're good at making two-way oaths that bring down especially nasty curses if someone breaks them outright).
Basically mostly stuff that gives you more information that helps you in social interaction rather than stuff that does your social interaction for you.
OK, then on the NPC side of things don't give them stats based on how easily they can be pushed around, give them stats based on what they want and on how badly they want it.
For example a goblin whose desires are:
-Not Being Killed.
-Being Treated With Kindness.
-Peanuts.
Is going to be a whole lot easier for PCs to manipulate than a giant king whose desires are:
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.
It also makes specifics matter. RPGs are always better when the specifics matter.
Perhaps as a general framework, the rules for deciding "does the NPC agree to what the PCs are telling them to do" is counting up how many of the things the NPC wants the PCs are offering them minus the number of desires the NPC would have to go against to provide what the PCs want and then as a general rule of thumb if the number is positive the NPC goes along with it. With perhaps modifiers for the PCs going really above and beyond to fulfill a desire (giving the goblin a literal building full of peanuts instead of a bag) or if what the PCs want in return is especially onerous even if it doesn't directly clash with one of the three desires.
So for example, if the PCs are dicks to the goblin it'll get its back up (conflicts with its "Being Treated With Kindness" desire) but the goblin is pretty easy to manipulate if the PCs are smart enough to pick up on clues like its stomach mumbling. With the giant PC, the PCs start in a hole because of his desire for "The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell" so they'll really have to tap dance just to get to zero and have the giant let them go in peace and simply offering the giant food or money won't cut it no matter how honey-tongued the PCs are since the giant doesn't especially want those things.
A bit skeletal now, but I think it could be pretty functional if fleshed out. Would perhaps be the sort of rule that'd work better if the PCs don't know it exists.
Up next: the Stolen Pennies.
OK, that's the best one so far, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm going to need a couple days to mull over it.
The rest of them up until here? You can easily do it with other systems, in fact cursing the oathbreaker is an explicit rule in at least one system I can think of, LotW.
Quote from: AsenRG;859623OK, that's the best one so far, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm going to need a couple days to mull over it.
The rest of them up until here? You can easily do it with other systems, in fact cursing the oathbreaker is an explicit rule in at least one system I can think of, LotW.
Yeah, although in theory I'm going to build a fairy tale OSR hack from the ground up, realistically considering how much difficulty I'm having squeezing in enough time for doing this WIR that's a long long way away so having things that I can easily do with other systems is fine. Little stuff like a vorpal pen knife could be lots of fun to add.
But I agree with you, that bit's my favorite thing as well.
Basically I'm coming at social skills from the other side.
Most systems with social skills try to model how good PCs are at bullshitting people into doing what they want. Instead what I'm trying to do is build a very simple system for deciding "will this NPC take this course of action"? You can plug in courses of action that the PCs suggest but there's nothing special about the PCs suggesting them, you could plug in any sort of proposal into the system.
Think it works especially well in a fairy tale context since in fairy tales people's desires are so close to the surface and the characters seem to have such a thin filter of rationality and foresight that desires get pretty much instantly translated into action.
Moves the standard PC/NPC interaction away from PC bullshitting and towards negotiating agreements, which I think I like better in any case.
As far as the point of building what amounts to a simple AI sub-system, I really like the kind of OSR DMing in which the DM is a referee who steps back, shuts up and mostly lets the game run itself. Having a simple AI system to help me decide what NPCs do is good for the same reason that morale systems are good as they take some decisions out of my hands and let me referee instead of being a story teller. I think it's also cool to be able to put things like:
Desires
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.
On an NPC stat line.
Quote from: Daztur;858647Fairy Tale 9: The Twelve Brothers
This is a weird one.
There are twelve princes and the queen is pregnant. The king says if a girl is born he`ll kill all of his sons. So the queen tells the boys to hide in the woods and that she`ll signal them when the baby is born.
It`s a girl so the princes decide to live in the woods and kill any girls they meet. The princess eventually finds out she has brothers and goes into woods and meets one.
She talks her way out of getting killed and agrees to do all the housework in their cave and proves to the brothers that she`s their sister.
Things go well until she picks twelve flowers which are really her brothers which makes them turn into birds. The only way out of this is to not talk for 12 years.
So she decides to stay in a tree. A king meets her and decides to marry her. Her mother in-law bad-mouths her and because she can`t speak to defend herself her husband plans to burn her at the stake.
Then at the last minute the 12 years run out and her brothers become human agan and everything gets explained and her mother in-law gets thrown into a barrel of boiling oil and poisonous snakes and everyone except her lives happily ever after.
OK, first of all WTF? there so much stuff that gets thrown in here without any explanation. Why is the king so randomly murderous? Why does picking flowers turn people into birds? Why do kings keep on marryng random mute girls they find in the forest (this happens again and again in fairy tales I haven`t got to yet)? Why is being mute important for breaking curses? Why put poisonous snakes and boiling oil in the same barrel? Wouldn`t that kill all the snakes?
Not sure about why he decides to kill them. There's probably a detail missing. Even something like "they were all born after he came back from trips" would explain it.
Picking those specific flowers was likely a geasa. She might not have known about it, if it was part of a prediction/curse, but it was there.
Kings marry random mute girls because...pick one.
- They're mute and don't have apparent mothers, so calm is assured.
- They're weird and interesting, and finding them yourself in the forest makes them feel some kind of accomplishment.
- The princes themselves believe that nothing happens without a reason, and if the new one is nice enough, it's possible the gods have sent her to you for this very reason?
- This is a tale women have been telling to each other and their kids to pass the time during work and the prince marrying the random girl appeals to them?
- Some combination of the above?
Muteness is serious business. Such motives exist in our (well, mine) folkloric heritage, too, so these are probably better explanations.
- Muteness means contemplation, purifying your spirit to reject the curse.
- Muteness is denying yourself something important, putting yourself at the mercy and understanding of strangers, and thus is a kind of redemption (for transgression against the geasa).
- Muteness repulses evil spirits which are attracted to the sounds of talking and laughter, and vice versa.
They're not thrown in to kill her. In China, a Snake is one of the Five Odious (or repulsice) Creatures or the Five Poisons. So it's symbolic for "killing her poisonous words with her" and "you're dirty bitch and will rest with the fried dirty animals".
It's not enough to kill the body. You need to hurt the spirit beyond it, too. Be thourough.Let me see how you're going to do that in a game.
QuoteAnyone have any explanation for any of this?
Hope the above helped.
QuoteThis got me thinking about the nature of fairy tale kingship and Korean geomancy. Bear with me here, I`m going somewhere with this.
Way down in the hyeol
If I understand pungsu jiri (Korean feng shui) correctly, the earth itself has chakra points from which gi (qi) flows. Building your house on these is generally a good idea (the first Korean geomancer directed a temple-building project to harness the gi of the entire nation, which is a lot more badass than finding the best place to put your sofa).
HOWEVER, if bad stuff goes down on top of a hyeol it gets corrupted and becomes a fountain of bad mojo until it gets cleansed.
OK, let`s translate this into fairy tale terms. The king is the land and the land is the king. This is central. A king`s castle is then a fountain of good mojo that sustains the land and keeps Chaos at bay. The king has an instinctual knowledge of what happens around his castle and limited power over his land (think the king and the jewel of Amber). By hunting and patrolling the borders of their land, the king can push his civilizing influence into the surrounding wilderness.
BUT if tragedy strikes the royal family or if the king loses his way this mojo becomes corrupted and the land becomes twisted and Chaotic.
This also works the other way, bad things happening in the land twist the king`s mind and pushes him into madness and evil. This is partly why so many fairy tale kings are such aasholes.
Also royal corruption can be cleansed but this is hard. It often requires bizarre conditions or strange quests, which explains by suitors have to do all kinds of crazy shit in fairy tales.
The role of the queen is important here too. The king`s rule is a marriage to the land so the queen is a stand-in for the land. Perhaps this is why what appears to be the main way that kings find brides it to stumble across random women while out hunting. Have to develop this more, but it`s a start. If the queen is the land at least as much as the king, you want a badass queen who can survive in the land.
That's true.
And it's a possible angle. You should talk to a real scholar about it, though.
Quote from: Daztur;859663Yeah, although in theory I'm going to build a fairy tale OSR hack from the ground up, realistically considering how much difficulty I'm having squeezing in enough time for doing this WIR that's a long long way away so having things that I can easily do with other systems is fine. Little stuff like a vorpal pen knife could be lots of fun to add.
Check Sorcerer and its supplements, as well as Legends of the Wulin. Don't hate me for the latter:D! It's worth it when you manage to plow through the mechanics.
QuoteBut I agree with you, that bit's my favorite thing as well.
Basically I'm coming at social skills from the other side.
Most systems with social skills try to model how good PCs are at bullshitting people into doing what they want. Instead what I'm trying to do is build a very simple system for deciding "will this NPC take this course of action"? You can plug in courses of action that the PCs suggest but there's nothing special about the PCs suggesting them, you could plug in any sort of proposal into the system.
It was time someone did that. That's all I'm going to say.
(Now I just want someone to adapt a similar system for combat. But that can wait, really, focus on the social stuff now:)).
QuoteThink it works especially well in a fairy tale context since in fairy tales people's desires are so close to the surface and the characters seem to have such a thin filter of rationality and foresight that desires get pretty much instantly translated into action.
People in the Middle Ages had this trait more prominantly than we do today.
QuoteAs far as the point of building what amounts to a simple AI sub-system, I really like the kind of OSR DMing in which the DM is a referee who steps back, shuts up and mostly lets the game run itself. Having a simple AI system to help me decide what NPCs do is good for the same reason that morale systems are good as they take some decisions out of my hands and let me referee instead of being a story teller.
Agreed. I came up with this system of GMing when trying to run a White Wolf game. Actually I only got interested in the OSR when I heard it's the assumed default for GMing, up until then I was starting to think it's something I've discovered;).
QuoteI think it's also cool to be able to put things like:
Desires
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.
On an NPC stat line.
That helps, too:D!
Fairy Tale 11: Little Brother and Little Sister
Quite a bit of D&D-able magic to chew on with this one.
A brother and sister have a terrible step-mother so they run away. Unfortunately their step-mother is a witch so she uses magic to make a cursed stream come out of the ground.
The brother drinks it and gets turned into a deer. After crying for three days the sister makes a nice home for them in a cave and camps out there for several years with her brother the deer (who doesn't seem to age, strange that).
Later the king stumbles across the girl while hunting and decides to marry her and they soon have a son. The step-mom is shocked to find that her step-daughter hasn't been eaten by beasts after all and decides to go kill and replace her with her own daughter illusioned-up to look like the queen.
The works but the queen comes back as a ghost three times to check on her son and brother and on the third night the king finds out what's been going on and "embraces" her, which causes her to come back to life.
The witch gets burned of course which breaks the curse on the brother.
What can we get from this one?
Polymorphed people don't age.
They never get any older. That random ferret that's always hanging around the inn might have been a prince that was polymorphed CENTURIES ago.
Fairy tale magic-users
Well this has clearest example of a D&D-style magic user yet: the witchy step-mom. She can summon cursed streams and create illusions. But both of these come with a catch, the sort of catch that'd be interesting to insert into a lot of D&D spells without necessarily telling the players about them...
The illusion spell wraps the witch's daughter with the appearance of the dead queen. The down side of this is that it appears to anchor the queen's ghost to the location and allow for the possibility that the queen can be resurrected.
The catch of the cursed stream is that the curse is broken by the witch's death. Interestingly the number of days (3) that the girl weeps for her brother is the same as the number of days (3) that she comes back as a ghost. If the king hadn't revived her on the third day she would've faded away entirely. Human emotion is vital here.
But how to D&Dify this? This most obvious way is to have the magical effects of casters die with them. A simple way of doing this is tying lasting effects to spell slots: you don't get the spell slot back until the lasting effect is gone. And if you're dead you don't have any spell slots left and the effect goes *poof.* That gives casters the power to do all kinds of cool stuff without having them let loose all kinds of crazy fire works every single day: most of their spell slots are tied up maintaining the duration of various spells.
But what about the interaction of human emotion and magic?
Still have to work out the details but maybe give PCs and NPCs the ability to invest very powerful emotional bonds with magic power by dedicating a spell slot to it that can then be used to do powerful things (like resurrect yourself) if that relationship is attacked (for example you being forcibly separated from your loved one).
This could work in an interesting way if run as a complete black box (especially with an adult DM and child players). Have classes labelled strong (fighter), smart (thief) and lucky (magic-user) and don't tell the player with the "lucky" player a thing about how the magical system works but count any emotional outbursts on the part of the player as the character casting a spell and put in place some guidelines about how to do that.
For example: a third level Lucky character has two first level and one second level spell slot. The player really loves their character's pet dog so the DM decides this counts as casting a second level Emotional Bond spell. This spell is always on (which means the second level spell slot is filled in and out of commission as long as the player still loves that dog) which provides benefits like the dog being really smart, absolutely loyal, really easy to find if lost or kidnapped, etc. etc. The death of the dog would provide a powerful one-time magical effect of some sort (powerful angry dog ghost?). The character is also an ordained priest which allows them to cast the Sacrament spell at-will (see post 25 of this thread). The character then has one free first level spell slot that can be used daily to do things like Appeal and call in favors from talking animals (see post 8 of this thread).
All of these mechanics whir away in the background without the player knowing all of the details: they just know that they have an awesome dog, if they bury people they won't come back as ghosts (usually) and often lucky stuff happens when they get upset.
I'm inching towards a spell slot economy in which spell slots can power a lot of fairy tale-isms, including stuff that people don't usually think of as magical. I like where this is going, I just need to nail down the specifics eventually.
Marriage to the Land
One thing I touched on in post 28 of this thread is how I want to emphasize Fisher King mechanics ("the king is the land and the land is the king"). A part of this would be a symbolic marriage to the land and in these fairy tales we see kings marrying random beautiful girls they meet in the woods again and again and again and again. And always while hunting. We also see people being shocked (like the evil step-mom) in this story be shocked the said girls don't get eaten by wild beasts.
From that we can tell:
-The woods are a dangerous place full of dangerous beasts.
-Kings go hunting there all the time. Part of the job description.
-Some girls can spend YEARS there without being harmed. They must be really badass.
-Kings really really like to marry said girls.
On the flip side when random nobodies marry princesses then always:
-The king has no sons (conversely some kings have only sons and flip out murderously when a daughter is born to them).
-The random nobody generally comes from far away.
-The random nobody has to do some crazy-ass task to win the princess's hand. The princesses mostly seem to prove they're worthy by being able to survive unscathed for years in scary places.
I feel like I'm this close to coming up with a royal marriage/fisher king sub-system for fairy tale D&D but I can't quite make it all come together. There's obviously some gender essentialism baked deep into the metaphysics here, just need to tease how how it's operating here and D&D-ify it.
Think brain, think. Will sleep on this and try to take another wack at it tomorrow. Interesting that most all royals either have only sons or only daughters and the only exception to this results in murderous madness. That's got to be the seed here. Think, think, think.
Up next: Rapunzel
Posted at the same time. Let me delay sleep a bit longer and respond to you as we seem to be working in parallel.
Quote from: AsenRG;859682Not sure about why he decides to kill them. There's probably a detail missing. Even something like "they were all born after he came back from trips" would explain it.
Picking those specific flowers was likely a geasa. She might not have known about it, if it was part of a prediction/curse, but it was there.
For the king who wants to kill all of his sons if a daughter is born, it's interesting that he says he has no interest in killing them if a thirteenth son is born. There seems to be some crazy need for gender-matched royal offspring.
For the flowers, in the story it seems a bit deeper than just a curse as the girl is told that those flowers
ARE her brothers.
I love all the things in fairy tales that don't make any sense. Some of my best world building has come from screwing up and contradicting myself in front of players and then, instead of backtracking, making up some crazy explanation that explains away the contraction. Fairy tale dream logic taps into the same part of my brain.
Quote from: AsenRG;859682Kings marry random mute girls because...pick one.- They're mute and don't have apparent mothers, so calm is assured.
- They're weird and interesting, and finding them yourself in the forest makes them feel some kind of accomplishment.
- The princes themselves believe that nothing happens without a reason, and if the new one is nice enough, it's possible the gods have sent her to you for this very reason?
- This is a tale women have been telling to each other and their kids to pass the time during work and the prince marrying the random girl appeals to them?
- Some combination of the above?
Muteness is serious business. Such motives exist in our (well, mine) folkloric heritage, too, so these are probably better explanations.
- Muteness means contemplation, purifying your spirit to reject the curse.
- Muteness is denying yourself something important, putting yourself at the mercy and understanding of strangers, and thus is a kind of redemption (for transgression against the geasa).
- Muteness repulses evil spirits which are attracted to the sounds of talking and laughter, and vice versa.
For the first list I'm inching towards third. Marrying random girls you find in the woods because god(s) sent them matches in with the "marriage to the land" stuff I'm trying to puzzle though better than marrying some girl because she has great tracts of land.
Love the second list. For fairy tale-ify D&D you really need to muddy the water between magical and mundane stuff, a line that's often much to clear in D&D. You can do that by making mundane stuff (like not talking) have magical power and have magic that's subtle and not obvious (like making love magical).
Quote from: AsenRG;859682They're not thrown in to kill her. In China, a Snake is one of the Five Odious (or repulsice) Creatures or the Five Poisons. So it's symbolic for "killing her poisonous words with her" and "you're dirty bitch and will rest with the fried dirty animals".
It's not enough to kill the body. You need to hurt the spirit beyond it, too. Be thourough.
Oooh, I like that. My idea of breaking a curse by just killing the witch is not fairy tale enough, you have to kill her spirit. Exactly! The explains all of the insane deaths of witches in fairy tales (like the dancing in white-hot metal shoes until you die). Many thanks, that goes into the pile.
Quote from: AsenRG;859682And it's a possible angle. You should talk to a real scholar about it, though.
I have some books on Korean shamanism sitting around, will have to hit them next. Mixing them and the Brother Grimm at random would be a lot of fun.
QuoteCheck Sorcerer and its supplements, as well as Legends of the Wulin. Don't hate me for the latter! It's worth it when you manage to plow through the mechanics.
From what I know about Sorcerer it has a lot of the kind of abstraction that gets under my skin in a lot of games. Maybe I should take another look at it, one of the reasons I like OSR stuff so much is it makes the specifics matter so much more than in a lot of other RPGs but there's a lot of things to learn elsewhere.
Don't know LofW. *Google searches* Aaaaah, its basically Weapons of the Gods II, have heard a lot of interesting things about that game but have never read it. The TvTropes page about it has some interesting tidbits and a lot of overlap with Korean metaphysics (of course massive influence here from China) so useful if I make a weird German/Korean/Russian(?) fairy tale melange.
Quote(Now I just want someone to adapt a similar system for combat. But that can wait, really, focus on the social stuff now:)).
Hmmmmmmm, build off morale mechanics and make a simple AI system for helping GMs determine NPC combat actions? Or are you thinking along a different track?
QuoteAgreed. I came up with this system of GMing when trying to run a White Wolf game. Actually I only got interested in the OSR when I heard it's the assumed default for GMing, up until then I was starting to think it's something I've discovered;).
What I've noticed is, as a general rule, OSR games are a lot more about the world than about characters. In a lot of OSR games its perfectly OK for characters to be complete cyphers or even not have names while that would completely hamstring a lot of indie-type games. You can just see it looking through the page count of, say, OSRIC vs. FATE. The bulk of OSRIC is about what the world does to your characters while the bulk of FATE is about what your characters do to the world.
If you look at old school social mechanics (reaction rolls, morale rules, even goofy little rules like the (in)famous Random Harlot table say things like prostitutes have a 15% of making up random BS in an attempt to get a reward. None of these rules are really about what PCs can do, they're all about what the world is doing to them.
Now look at indie social mechanics, they're ALL about what the PCs can do. They generally focus on giving mechanics for the ability of PCs to influence people.
This is really out of step with OSR-style play so a lot of people are really leery about social mechanics, period. But that doesn't mean that you can't make OSR social mechanics that fit an OSR game, you just have to make them all about what the NPCs decide to do to the PCs and not about all the cool stuff PCs can do.
In fairy tale terms you can't really
influence NPCs in the first place. They all have really strong desires and no real barrier between desire and action. Getting a fairy tale NPC to ignore the things is wants most because the PC is really good at BSing, is like derailing a train with a toothpick, it's just not going to work.
So you can't influence them, not really, but you can cut deals with them, mislead them with half-truths (but not outright lies, unless they're in writing of course...) and screw them over with technicalities.
Before 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.
Royal Marriage
Royal marriage is really central in fairy tales and I really want that to matter with ""the king is the land and the land is the king" mechanics a la the Fisher King.
To merge D&D and fairy tale ideas, each King and his castle is a font of Lawfulness that spreads like light into the world. Around each King's castle things are more stable as the mad dream logic of fair tales abates. Think of each king's castle as a miniature Amber. Just like in the Amber books, each king has a sense of what's happening within their kingdom and some degree of control over it (like weather control).
In order to expand the kingdom's island of Lawful sanity, a king must hunt in the wilds at the borders of his kindgom, drive out threats (good old-fashioned D&D hex clearing), be healthy and go on bizarre quests (have to figure out some logic to those quests). When choosing a prince to marry his daughter, a king wants someone who can do that sort of stuff and do it well, hence all of the "if you want to marry the princess you must..." plotlines.
Now where does the queen come in?
Well let's look at what kind of person the kings in fairy tales want to marry again and again and again: random girls (often mute) who live in the wilds. Kings hunt in the forest but queens can LIVE there for years on end without injury. Considering how scary fairy tale wilds are, that's as badass as the bizarre quests that would-be kings have go on.
By why would fairy tale kings want that specific flavor of badass in their queens? Well if the kings maintain the kingdom and basically ARE the kingdom then the queens represent the surrounding land and by marrying the queen they make a pact with the land. A good queen gets knows the wilds and can maintain good relations with it as sort of a Foreign Minister to the wilds of fairy.
OK, if kingdoms are Lawful and the wilds are Neutral then what is Chaos? Chaos comes from royal families fucking up and corrupting their kingdom. As the royal family sustains the kingdom then the most damaging evil is family evils: eating your kids, incest, that sort of thing.
That explains some things in fairy tales: mute queens constantly getting slandered with accusations that they're eating their kids, the stories about kings getting tricked into eating their children, etc. Maybe that's why the king with the twelve sons didn't want a daughter: incest poses a very potent threat to the whole kingdom. Can recall some fairy tales where the threat of incest is explicit (Mordred and one fairy tale whose name I forget in which the queen dies and king wants to bang daughter because she looks like her mom).
OK, that's a good outline, will have to fill in specific mechanics later.
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.
This requires more thought than I have time to spare right now. Suffice it to say, there's stuff I like a lot, and stuff I think is generalising too much.
More later, as I said.
Quote from: AsenRG;860761This requires more thought than I have time to spare right now. Suffice it to say, there's stuff I like a lot, and stuff I think is generalising too much.
More later, as I said.
Would appreciate feedback whenever you can get around to it. As you can probably tell I'm doing a lot of rambling thinking out loud and when I eventually bring this stuff together into something playable it'll be a hell of a lot more focused.
In no real hurry though, I'll be playing in a CoC campaign that's starting up soon and won't be DMing any D&D for a good while. Might have to use my son and his friend as guinea pigs for some of this stuff when I can get his reading level up to second grade or so.
Fairy Tale 12: Rapunzel
I don't think I have to rehash the plot of this one in too much detail as it's such a famous fairy tale. However, it's interesting to note that in this early version Mother Gothel is a fairy rather than a witch (the first fairy we've hit so far!), that the fairy figures out that Rapunzel has been meeting the prince because her pregnancy is making the clothes too tight and that Rapunzel is able to restore her lover's lost eyes (injured by falling out of the tower somehow) with her tears.
We see here the continued theme of kings/princes wanting to marry random girls they meet in the wilderness, but what else can we do with this one?
Fairies
The fairy is able to convince Rapunzel's father to trade away his daughter for some lettuce. She's obviously got some good bargaining skills there. How I'm imagining fairies is that they're not very good at straight-up violence but very good at threatening or tricking people into horrible bargains or arrangements. If the father hadn't agreed to give up his daughter for the lettuce what would the fairy have been able to do? Perhaps surprisingly little.
Fairies are very good at making threats but unless you enter into a bargain with them they have very little power to do anything to you, but they're quite adept in convincing you otherwise.
Also, unlike in the Disney movie there's no real motive given for why the fairy wants Rapunzel or why she shuts Rapunzel up into the tower in the first place. In the story she only shuts Rapunzel up in the tower when she turns twelve (puberty, obviously) but what was she doing with Rapunzel before that and why does the fairy seem to care a great deal about her captive's virginity? Something to think about. When I think up some answers to those questions I'll have a some good ideas about what makes fairy tale fairies tick.
Any ideas on for this one?
Magical Healing
Unless I'm missing something, Rapunzel's tears healing the eyes of the prince is the first instance of magical healing we've come across so far.
Like a lot of things in fairy tales, this healing seems to be directly powered by human passions. Going along with the mechanics I've been talking about before, the prince is certainly something that Rapunzel has a Desire for.
Looking back at Post 33 in this thread I proposed that Magic-Users be able to imbue their relationships with magic (by sacrificing a spell slot) so that they'd be able to use the power of their relationships to achieve magical ends. Being able to heal people you love of afflictions that are (at least partly) you own fault would fall into this. Rapunzel can heal the prince because she loves him, with some other random dude her tears would do nothing.
Thinking on the power of love in these fairy tales, having something that you Desire being completely negated has a very negative effect on fairy tale characters. For example the servant in the very first fairy tale (the frog prince) had a desire to protect his prince and that desire got turned to ash when the prince got turned into a frog and was lost. When that desire was negated the servant was so distraught that he needed iron bands installed around his heart to keep it from bursting with sorrow. So if you want to kill a fairy tale character a good way of doing it is striking at what they Desire as that could result in a useful saving throw vs. broken heart, unless of course they have a something with a heart-band installation NWP on hand...
Up next: The Three Little Men in the Forest
Fairy Tale 13: The Three Little Men in the Forest
A girl's mom dies so her father pours water into his boot. Because his boot is able to hold the water he decides to marry a widow with a daughter of her own.
The girl's step-mother and sister are, of course, evil so they send her out into the forest in the middle of winter in a dress made out of paper to gather strawberries.
She stumbles across a house where the three little men live (elves?) and because she's nice they give her berries, beauty, the ability to spit gold coins and a king to marry her.
When the step-mother finds out what happened she sends her own daughter to cash in as well. But because she's bad the little men instead give her increased ugliness, the chills and a miserable death.
This pisses the step-mom off so she goes to visit her step-daughter in her castle and, after girl gives birth and is weak the step-mom chucks her into a river. The girl comes back as a ghost duck to check on her baby and later her husband resurrects her by waving a sword over her head.
The step-mother is sent into the forest to get eaten by wild animals.
Never seen ghost ducks before. What can we do with this one?
More Magic
We've got a couple different magical effects here:
-What basically boils down to the D&D augury spell despite the weird format of putting water into your boot.
-Strawberries out of season.
-Beauty.
-Gold coin spitting.
-Making someone cold no matter how warm clothes they wear.
-Death curse.
-Possessing(?) a duck after you die.
-Resurrecting yourself.
I'm also going to count the girl being able to stumble across exactly the people she needs as magical. The mundane and the magical aren't neatly separated in fairy tales so the ability to randomly wander and hit exactly where you need to go is as much of a magical effect as any.
It's interesting here that the format of the resurrection (king resurrecting his queen) is exactly the same as we saw a few stories ago (see post 33 in this thread). In both the queen comes back as a ghost and her husband's love is able to bring her back. This ties into our discussion earlier about the crazy ways fairy tale people kill each other, those are needed to kill the spirit otherwise the spirit comes back to haunt you or even to life.
A lot of these magical abilities seem fairy permanent. To keep people from spamming them, I like my old solution: you don't get your spent spell slot back during the duration of any magical effect that you cast. So if you want to use magic to make coins fall out of your mouth all the time you can do that but you won't get your spent spell slot back until the effect ends (which might not be easy).
Fairy Tale Queens
Here we have a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier about what makes someone a good fairy tale queen. They're able to easily survive in the wilderness (while the unfit get snacked on), have magical beauty, and are able to secure help when they need it.
Being nice enough so that people help you willingly seems kind of boring but think of Elric of Melnibone. Pretty much all the magic he does is ask various supernatural critters for help because they owe his family favors, here it's basically the same deal: the main character is really really good at asking for and getting help which in fairy tales is probably the single most powerful ability you can have.
Also she's able to do something that's more powerful than most any fantasy protagonist I can think of: manifest as such a potent ghost that her husband can easily resurrect her. That's a damn good trick if you can do it.
Up next: Nasty Flax Spinning
Fairy Tale 14: Nasty Flax Spinning
This is a strange little story. For some reason a king is obsessed with flax spinning so he commands the queen and his two daughters to spin an incredible amount of flax while he's away on a trip. To get out of this annoying work, the queen and princesses get three ugly spinsters to stand in for them and tell the king that their deformities (big lower lip, one giant finger, giant foot) were caused by spinning to much flax.
The plan works. The end.
The Palace-Industrial Complex
Pretty strange to have the royal family engaged in drudgery. Maybe the king is just crazy but maybe the kingdom is so tiny that it's more of an overgrown farm than a country and the farmer's wife and daughters have to pitch in like everyone else.
Having fairy tale kingdoms be pocket sized makes a lot of fairy tales make more sense and fits in well with D&D-style points of light. But what would a culture with a slew of tiny independent kingdoms look like?
A good source of ideas is Viking Age Iceland. While there was the Althing and various "chieftains" who could provide protection for a price each farmer was incredibility independent and was able to run his own affairs much like the king of a tiny kingdom. The Icelandic Sagas are an incredibly rich source of D&D fodder so being able to use them for ideas is great.
Of course fairy tale kingdoms wouldn't be quite as small as Icelandic farms but they'd tend to look like large manors more than historical kingdoms so you'd get a lot of Saga-like features like incredibly personal politics in which the scale is small enough for a couple of regular dudes with swords to make a difference.
The Icelandic farms were also too small to be self-sufficient so they loved it when foreign merchants stopped by and competed to host them (so that they'd get dibs on the best merchandise). Fair tale kings would be similarly dependent on foreign trade.
However, unlike Icelandic farmers who had no problem with mercantile endeavors fairy tale kings would look down their nose at business. So what do you get when you have a bunch of people who need trade but don't want to get their hands dirty with it?
Simple. Gift giving. These micro-kings would give each other gifts (of roughly equal value) so that kings would be able to barter for the goods they needed to keep their manors running without officially being engaged in trade. That's why kings like the one in this story "had to take a trip."
But it's a hell of a lot easier if your fellow kings to visit you and exchange gifts in your parlor than if you have to travel about and schlep your gifts across scary fairy tale wilderness. Even if you have something that everyone needs that's really annoying since it's hard to drive a hard bargain when the person you're bargaining with isn't officially buying anything.
How do you do that? Well, that's where all of the fancy fairy tale castles, the dresses and the balls and all the rest come in. One big part of their purpose is to make the people who have the stuff you want have a good reason to come by your place and trade gifts with you so you don't have to go there. If you have a beautiful princess who attracts loads of suitors so much the better. It might even be worth it to string those suitors along as long as possible by demanding crazy tasks so you continue to get guests showing up with useful gifts.
Up next: Hansel and Gretel
Fairy Tale 15: Hansel and GretelThis story is pretty much the same as your standard adaptation for kids. What's interesting is that later editions by the Grimms added a whole bunch of filler about how Hansel and Gretel get home that everyone then cuts out or ignores. The only real difference is that the step-mom who wants to leave the kids in the woods is the children's real mom in this earlier version. Annoyingly the book just cops out and said she died by the time the kids came back home again without any details. Oh, also the kids only take two trips into the woods rather than three.
What can we get from this one?
A few small things first:
-Magic can preserve cookies from the elements.
-The witch seems to have a kind of Cause Fear spell that she uses on the kids if you stretch things a bit:
Quote...they heard a shrill voice cry from inside:
"Nibble, nibble, I hear a louse!
Who's that nibbling on my house?"
Hansel and Gretel were so tremendously frightened that they dropped
what they had in their hands, and immediately thereafter a small, ancient
woman crept out of the door....
-Female characters are far more active and enterprising than in stuff like the Icelandic Sagas or the Arthurian Romances. Gretel is the one that kills the witch after all.
-Hansel tries to lie and fails every time. Lies don't work in fairy tales (unless you write them down).
-The dangers of the wild beasts of the forest get mentioned again. Of course they never bother Gretel. She's awesome like that.
-The witch's house is stuffed with gold and jewels. That reminds me of a Dunsany story in which monsters intentionally leave gems around to ensure a constant stream of edible treasure hunters. That's as good of a reason for dungeons to have treasure in them as any.
-The witch is burned to death in her own oven, that's the kind of symbolic death that's necessary to destroy a magic-user's spirit and ensure that she doesn't come back after death (like in the last story) or have magic that survives her.
For stuff I want to go into more detail about:
HungerPeople have gotten so used to cutesy illustrations of Hansel and Gretel eating a cookie house, that it's easy to forget just how dark this story is. All of the action is driven by starvation and hunger with a mother so far gone to starvation that she'll abandon her kids in order to make the last loaf of bread go a little bit farther.
Because of this modern retellings of fairy tales that are self-consciously trying to be more "dark" or "mature" than classic fairy tales get under my skin, the old school ones are plenty dark and it makes the authors sound like they only know the modern bowdlerized versions.
But if you're kicking off a sandbox campaign "you have no food" makes for a great way to get the ball rolling as it's concrete, open-ended and doesn't allow for the PCs to turtle up or be indecisive. It also helps fix in the players' minds just how vulnerable first level PCs are and allows gameplay to change once being able to buy food becomes trivial.
CannibalismCannibalism comes up a lot in fairy tales and even in stories where it doesn't happen you have heroes accused of it (usually when supernatural forces are taking their kids).
We've touched on gluttony before with the wolf and the witch seems to be driven by much the same forces. She doesn't NEED to eat people. She lives in a house made out of freaking food. So why is she eating people? Again she seems to be driven by a vice that doesn't give her any of the usual pleasures associated with it.
The wolf cannot digest the kids it swallows and the witch is starving in a house made out of food. Evil makes a mockery of human pleasures.
Another way of looking at cannibalism is by comparing it to the nine-tailed fox creatures from Asia. In order to take on human form they need to eat 100 human livers. Perhaps to maintain their human form inhuman creatures of Chaos need to eat people and the longer they go without eating people the more inhuman they appear.
This ties into the old idea that Satan cannot create ANYTHING but can only corrupt (for example by itself an incubus could not impregnate a woman as creating life is impossible for a devil so it would have to take on succubus form and have sex with a man, get sperm from that, corrupt the semen, change into incubus form, have sex with a woman and impregnate her with the corrupted semen). This works right on down to the cellular level. Human bodies can turn milk and bread into human cells but creatures of Chaos can't create anything so they need to get their hands on human cells directly if they want a human appearance.
You Can't Map FairieHansel leaves a trail of stones to mark his way through the forest and later a trail of bread crumbs. When the bread comes are eaten he and his sister become hopelessly lost despite it not being far from their home and a place he'd just been to.
This sort of thing happens over and over again in fairy tales and you get things like king's going hunting and running across strange castles they'd never seen before. How they hell are there castles they'd never heard of within hunting distance of their home?
Well obviously you can't map fairie and distances are deceiving. You can't make a hex map and track where the players are. You need something more sneaky.
I'll be stealing some ideas from there: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?620342-D-amp-D-Cosmology-My-extensive-rework-of-the-Planes
But I think that what's really important is to have a path or a guide. If those fail when you're out in the wilderness it's virtually impossible not to become immediately lost. But in fairy tales you don't need to go through a mirror or through the back of the wardrobe to get into fairie, you just need to take a walk in the woods. It's right there. All the time. Right outside your house (the fairy in Rapunzel lives right next door to Rapunzel's parents after all).
Will be returning to this topic more in future posts.
Taking ThreeOne change between this version and one's I've read before is here Hansel and Gretel only get taken into the woods two times while in other versions they get taken three times. Three's obviously an important number in fairy tales (three brothers, three tasks, three doors, three little pigs). So what I'd do is use 5ed advantage/disadvantage rules like so:
-If someone has done something successfully twice in a row they get hit by disadvantage on the third time.
-If someone has failed at something twice in a row they get disadvantage the third time.
This also gives you advantage if your two older brothers have failed at something, etc. etc.
Would be more fun if you don't tell the players about this rule, just roll the advantage/disadvantage dice behind the screen and tell them that the 19 they rolled failed or the 2 they rolled succeeded. Good to keep the players on their toes.
Up next: Herr Fix-it-up
Into the Woods
Have been letting the issue of how to map faerie turning over in my head and I think I've hit on an idea. In RPGs when things are too complicated to model with rules or catalog by writing down setting information it's time to break out the random tables. Here's what you do.
First you draw a hex map and label each hex Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic.
Lawful hexes are the points of light in a mad world, where things make sense and where (at least somewhat) benevolent kings and queens reign.
Neutral hexes are faerie where things are dangerous is not really malevolent and things follow a surreal dream logic. Don't worry too much about spending a long time seeding weird shit across the neutral hexes, the random tables will do that for you when you need it.
Chaotic hexes are lawful hexes that have been corrupted. They're perverse slices of hell on Earth, although not always obviously so. The wilderness is dotted with these festering corpses of dead kingdoms.
There's an ebb and flow of these affiliations. Lawful hexes can be corrupted (usually by striking at the royal family, although in some cases the land can be corrupted directly which poisons the mind of the king) or redeemed to lawfulness by an act of cleansing heroism.
Meanwhile neutral hexes tend to gnaw away at Lawful (and weakly Chaotic) hexes unless kept at bay by vigilance and hunting while strong kings can push the alignment of the kingdom into the Neutral hinterland through questing, diplomacy with faerie and killing shit.
On the ground level what this means is that when you go into the woods you step into Neutral territory and its mad dreamworld logic starts to take hold.
How this is modeled in the game is that whenever the PC step into a new Neutral hex the DM counts how the PCs are from the nearest Lawful hex and then rolls a d8 (or maybe a d6 or d10, have to think). If the result is the distance to the nearest Lawful hex or lower then something strange happens (so the deeper you get into the woods the more weird shit happens). If the PCs spend a night within a Neutral hex then the DM should similarly roll a check for one of these strange Hex Events (have to think up a more creative name).
These Hex Events cover all kinds of weird shit that happen in fairy tale woods from running into buildings/terrain/features/roads/etc. that weren't there the last time you walked through that hex, to unique creatures, to strange weather to being transported to a hex a thousand miles away or one that isn't even on the map at all. Many would be specifically geared to getting the PCs horrifically lost.
Of course players following a set path or a supernatural/animal guide would be generally immune to those teleportation events, (but if you leave the path for just a minute...) but those paths or guides wouldn't necessarily be following the hex map in the first place. With the right guide you can skip across a continent-spanning wilderness in a day's march.
But what's important to keep in mind is that fairy tales aren't Lovecraft. In fairy tales humans wants and desires matter and the universe orders itself around them. So instead of one Hex Event chart there'd be several corresponding to various human feelings and drives. The DM would roll on whichever one they judge the characters are exhibiting most strongly (another rule that'd be especially fun if the players don't know it exists).
For example Hansel and Gretel are hungry, very very hungry so they'd be rolling on the Hunger Hex Event random table which is full of trees bearing strange fruit, elf feasts, creatures even more hungry than they are and, yes, cookie houses. You'd get a different set of events for fear, greed, sadness and right on down the line. There'd be enough vagueness to the random events so that the DM could tailor them to what's been going on but they'd also respond directly to player desires in a way that fits fairy tales better than a "weird shit completely out of the blue" Weird Tales vibe.
Of course the best Hex Event random table to roll on would be the Noble Quest one. Lots of good stuff there to help the players along, unless they're jerks to random dwarves asking for help or are open to temptation of course...
Back to fairy tales next time.
I really like that random encounter mechanic you have there! Flavorful, simple, gets the job done.
Maybe the roll also determines the 'severity' of the Hex event; 'chaos' wants to roll as high as it can under the PC's distance from a lawful hex. This way moving farther from a lawful hex doesn't just make events more frequent, but also more dangerous!
You were trying to decide if the die should be d8, d6, d10, etc. If you don't mind an extra bit of mechanical fiddliness, maybe it starts out at d4 but steps up to d6, d8, etc. depending on factors like time of day, or ... I dunno, how long it's been since a party member has been to confession or received communion or something?
I like your idea but I`m going to tweak it a bit:
For hex events in Neutral hexes there is always SOME kind of event but sometimes so subtle that players might not even notice it. The DM would always roll the same dice to determine what the hex event is (d20 probably) but the list of hex events would be about 40 items long with mild stuff being low and the highest numbers being really weird shit. Being farther away from Lawful land would provide a bonus to the roll with maybe some other modifiers as well (like recent Communion) or maybe not. Want to keep this simple.
Different random hex event tables depending on the emotional state of the PCs, not really on the terrain. So a "hungry" event table, not a "mountain" one. Hex events would be different from random encounters and would include things like "mist rises and when is burns off you find yourself in a hex on the other side of the map" or "you notice a mountain in the distance that wasn`t there last time, there`s a giant figure of someone you know carved into it." Or just simple stuff like plunking a cookie house down in a hex that doesn`t normally have one.
Like before you get a hex event when crossing into a nuetral hex or having dawn break while inside one. Chaos would work differently, Chaos is more specific...
Also my approach towards alignment is a bit different than in Elric or Three Hearts and Three Lions:
-Lawful: human civilization. Much nicer than lawfulness in Elric (but still not really GOOD) a lot like Three Hearts and Three Lions.
-Neutral: fairy and the primal worls in general. In Three Hearts and Three Lions and standard D&D the PCs stand on the frontier facing off againt chaos. Here rhe dangerous wilds are basically Neutral. As PCs are often bearers of civilization they`ll probably tangle horns with primal untamed Neutrality. Not as evil as Choas in Three Hearts and Three Lions but a good bit more dickish than standard D&D or Elric neutrality.
-Chaos: Chaos isn`t the scary stuff in the forest, it`s the scary stuff in the human heart. While Neutrality is primal and basically inhuman, Chaos is just as human as Law, just twisted and perverted. Human civilization gone wrong. In many ways it`s more familiar than Neutrality, after all the cancer that`s killing you has the same DNA as you while the bear that`s chasing you doesn`t. Chaotic hexes are all there because of tragedy, each one was created by a monumental human fuck-up and there`s a lot of them out there. Chaos is usually evil and always bad news.
TL: DR
Law: Arthur
Neutral: Green Knight
Chaos: Mordred
I don't have anything to contribute, I just want to point out that I'm really liking the series. It's quite evocative spin of both fairy tales and hexcrawl, and it's actually quite uncanny how well they mix and complement each other. Looking forward for more.
Quote from: Dr. Ink'n'stain;862418I don't have anything to contribute, I just want to point out that I'm really liking the series. It's quite evocative spin of both fairy tales and hexcrawl, and it's actually quite uncanny how well they mix and complement each other. Looking forward for more.
Thanks, will tey to keep up the good work.
Fairy Tale 16: Herr Fix-It-Up
Cute little story. Discharged soldier gets a job as a servant for a king who sends him off to win a princess for him. On the way to the princess he helps songbirds, fish and crows (the crows by feeding them his horse which really made me think of Odin symbolism).
When he gets there the king gives him tasks to win the princess. The songbirds help him gather every poppy seeds in a field, the fish help him retrieve a ring from the ocean and the crows blind a rampaging unicorn so that when it attacks him he can let it charge and get its horn stuck in a tree.
Then the princess gets delivered and the ex-soldier delivers her to his boss and gets made prime minister as a reward.
Pretty predictable except I though the guy would marry the princess himself.
What can we get from this one? Well "kill the rampaging unicorn" that is "causing a lot of damage" seems to be right at home in D&D hex-clearng domain play. To maintain and spread Lawful hexes into Neutral land kings would have to do that sort of thing.
But let`s look at the animals...
Elric Writ Small
I`ve touched on this topic before but let`s try to develop it fully here.
People being nice to animals and getting favors in return happens all the time in fairy tales. The first instinct would be to handle this the same as any other act of negotiation but the sort of relationship that gets described here seems like much more of a magical pact.
As I`ve said before, it`s Elric writ small. Elric does magic by summoning extra-planar beings of great power who owe him favors and this guy does magic by summoning fish who owe him favors. Same difference.
To make this work rules-wise you need to account for players summoning fish a dozen times over a campaign not once in a single story tale so setting up a complete favor accounting system with every damn species of animal would be a huge pain in the ass. Here`s how I`d do it:
Animal summoning is Neutral magic just like the sacraments are Lawful magic and demon-binding (which`d work just like spell memorization in game terms) is Chaos magic. To get access to one kind of magic you need to spend a Proficiency. You can still be nice to animals without magic but calling on them at will to help you needs magic.
Once you have that Proficiency if you fulfill a certain animal's Desire while standing in a Neutral hex you have a Pact with that species that you can record on your character sheet. Desires can be quite specific. Crows want your horse not some fucking bread. Having been a dick to that species in the past or having a Pact with a species that animal hates keeps you from forming a Pact (goats aren`t going to help any wolf-friend).
Once the Pact is established to can call on that animal. The simplest way to do that is use a material component that is a token of what the animal wants and spend a free spell slot (used on the fly like a 3ed sorcerer not memorized ahead of time, to clarify a caster could sink some slots into stuff like demon binding and then leave some free for Pact magic). This would summon that animal and get them to help. Higher level characters could get animals to show up in weirder places or have more of them show up.
If you have no material component (maybe some meat for the crows not a horse every time you summon them) the animals will help you one last time but that dissolves the Pact. Some animals will agree to defered payment but will drive a hard bargain.
Summonng an animal for help is the most common use of Pact magic but it can do other things too. Soon we`ll see that summoning a fish lets you cast freaking Wish and animals could help you in less direct ways. Maybe your wolf friend will have you a spare wolf skin that lets you go were one time, maybe birds talk to the wind for you and let you float down from the tower, maybe the deer can tap its hooves and bring forth water from a rock. Get creative. Would have to make a list of sample effects but also be creative, if the players are willing to send the spell slots run with the crazy ideas they have...
Pact magic would also work for Neutral supernatural creatures but getting a Pact with them would be a lot harder than feeding them your horse.
Finally, throwing the animals you summon into fights as cannon fodder is possible but usually dumb as that`s a good way to get your Pact dissolved (and re-establishing them is HARD) umless of course you summon them to fight something that those animals really hate. Summoned cats have no problem laying down their lives to help you fight were-rats, but if you the hundred cats you summoned on the bandits that are chasing you and get half of them killed then catkind will be pissed at you.
Again this would be interesting to use without teaching players any of the rules, especially with kids. Have a common encounter be an animal in need of help (to establish Pacts) and then have animals lurking about when the PCs are in a bind to plant the idea of summoning them.
For just talking to animals that`s pretty easy in Neutral hexes. Might cost a proficiency in Lawful ones. Animals n Chaotic hexes might be too fucked up to communicate with.
Up next: The White Snake
I really like the Hex Event idea you have. Would the players actually be looking at a hexcrawl map and seeing where they are?
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;862511I really like the Hex Event idea you have. Would the players actually be looking at a hexcrawl map and seeing where they are?
Nope. One of the main points of the system would be to make fairie hexes very hard to map as the landmarks don`t stay put and distances change. Trying to model dream logic with rules is hard so random events work as a substitute.
This would make following paths and having guides very important as if you stick to them you`ll always get where you`re going.
Some hexes people coukd stumble into wouldn`t even be on the map, places like east of the east wind.
Fairy 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?
Fairy Tale 17: the White Snake(https://a4-images.myspacecdn.com/images03/30/7bdf1e178a124de0933ee3e0378307a9/600x600.jpg)
This seems to be a variant of the last one.
A king gets served from a covered platter every day and nobody knows what he's eating. So a servant takes a peek and sees that the king is being served a white snake so he eats some and gets the ability to understand animals.
Meanwhile the queen is pissed because she lost her ring but the servant hears a duck complaining about the ring it ate so he has that one killed and retrieves the ring.
After being rewarded he sets off into the world. Along the road he helps ants, fish and crows (again, crows love eating horse) before finding a princess who he can marry if he performs some strange tasks but he'll die like all the other suitors if he fails.
He uses the animals he helps to perform these tasks (ants retrieve seeds, fish retrieve ring and crows get an apple from the tree of life) so he gets married and lives happily every after.
Shorts comments:
-Lot of the same stuff as last time, which kind of reinforces their importance. Especially that crows love eating horses.
-Again with tasks that need to be accomplished to wed a princess. In order to run a fairy tale kingdom you can't be a level 0 mook and this accomplishes that. In order to marry the heir you need to be formidable and even the heir gets tested (see various stories in which the king gives his three sons a task like The Water of Life and Prince Ivan and the Firebird).
-Why do all of the failed suitors get killed? Seems kind of pointless bloodthirst. Is there any logic here? Some kind of human sacrifice?
-What's the deal with the apples of the Tree of Life. Yggdrasil? I'm remembering magic apples in Norse myth that restored youth. Then maybe the apples are from Avalon/Fortunatae Insulae:
QuoteThe island of apples which men call “The Fortunate Isle” (Insula Pomorum quae Fortunata uocatur) gets its name from the fact that it produces all things of itself; the fields there have no need of the ploughs of the farmers and all cultivation is lacking except what nature provides. Of its own accord it produces grain and grapes, and apple trees grow in its woods from the close-clipped grass. The ground of its own accord produces everything instead of merely grass, and people live there a hundred years or more. There nine sisters rule by a pleasing set of laws those who come to them from our country.
Any ideas?
Talking to AnimalsThere are lots of examples in fairy tales of animals talking to people but IIRC there aren't any of people eavesdropping on animals without some sort of magical help.
So animals in a Neutral hex can talk to people but usually don't want to. They will refuse to do so unless one of their Desires is on the line. Animals in Lawful hexes can't speak Common.
Also animals don't speak to each other in Common so if you want to eavesdrop on them you need to spend some proficiencies on animal languages or use magic. The magic spell used in this story seems to last for only a day (which is why the king has to eat snake every day) and allows someone to understand all animals even in Lawful hexes. A bit of an annoying spell to cast in the field unless you're carrying a bag of white snakes about.
Rings in the waterWe're having female royals either losing (last story) or deliberately throwing (this one) rings into the sea very often. That must mean something. It reminds me of the old Venetian ritual of the Doge throwing a gold ring into the water to symbolically marry the sea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_of_the_Sea_ceremony Could we imagine something like that going on here? Most Lawful kingdoms would share borders with a whole lot of Neutral hexes that'd be the source of dangerous incursions unless propriated in some manner by gifts or marriage, quested in or beaten into submission. Fairy Tales meets Birthright would be a lot of fun.
Up next: The Journey of the Straw, the Coal, and the Bean
Fairy Tale 18: The Journey of the Straw, the Coal, and the Bean
This is a dumb little story about straw, coal and a bean trying to cross a river. In one version the bean falls in the water and drinks so much that he bursts and has to be sewn up which is why beans have a seam. In the other version the coal burns through the straw and then fizzles out in the water, which causes the bean to burst and be sewn up in a get a seam.
Nope, no idea whatsoever about what to do with this one.
So instead let's take what we talked about last time with Rings in the Water and make it a bit more concrete.
In fairy tales kingdoms are small collections of Lawful hexes and generally border at least a few Neutral faerie/wilderness hexes, when it comes to dealing with Neutral hexes on his borders a king must either:
-Ignore them: this causes the frontier to weaken and strange things come over from neighboring Neutral hexes. This is a bad idea as it result in bordering Lawful hexes returning to Neutrality and leaving the kingdom.
-Pacify them: go on hunting expeditions into neighboring Neutral hexes, explode and bash some heads. This secures the border but has to be done at least once a month to keep the border quiet.
-Annex them: this is a more extended affair and requires symbolically conquering a neighboring Neutral hex. This can be very direct (go there, kill dragon) or more round-about (marrying the swanmay that lives there, planting an apple of the seed of life within the sacred grove). Too much annexing can be a bad idea as that just extends your borders and gives you more headaches. It is often a good idea to try to get other people to form Lawful kingdoms around your borders and reduce your borders with faerie that way, you might even get to be High King.
-Form a pact with them: negotiate some sort of peace with neighboring bits of faerie. This can be done by throwing rings in the water each year, agreeing to give up your firstborn child, marriage alliance, or agreeing to strange and inconvenient taboos. Often pacts with powerful creatures of faerie will cover multiple hexes.
One of the benefits of being a king and queen of a hex (aside from general instinctual knowledge of what's in that hex and limited weather control ala the Jewel of Amber) is that each hex you rule gives you some sort of concrete bonus if you're the king or queen of it. For example a hex of fertile farmland might give doubled natural healing while a great mountain might give an AC bonus of one, with many stranger and esoteric examples out there as well as well as ones that change with the season, etc.
High Kings get no benefits for hexes held by subject kings.
However, if disasters befall a hex or if a hex descends into Chaos then the bonus becomes twisted. For example if the farmland becomes blighted than the quickened natural healing becomes a wasting disease and if the mountain-becomes demon haunted then the king's skin might slowly turn to stone or worse...
Because of this it is generally a good idea of for a fairy tale king to keep their kingdom relatively small. It's much easier to keep 6 hexes from getting fucked up than sixty.
In this version of D&D the more mundane aspects of running a kingdom would be mostly abstracted away pretty heavily. What would be focused on is keeping the kingdom free of supernatural corruption. Part of this would be being morally upstanding, as evil on the part of the king can corrupt the land directly.
Confucius said: “To have taken no action and yet have the empire well governed. Shun was the man! What did he do? All he did was to make himself reverent and correctly face south."
It's the same with fairy tale kings, being good in your private morals matters more than competent administration.
Up next: The Fisherman and His Wife
We've got a good run of stories coming up, four really interesting ones in a row.
Fairy Tale 19: The Fisherman and His Wife
A fisherman who lives in a piss pot (bwah?) goes fishing and catches a flounder who begs to be spared because he's a prince who has been transformed into a fish for some reason.
Wife is pissed (heh, heh) that her husband hasn't caught anything and that she has to life in a piss pot so she asks the husband to ask the fish for help.
He says a rhyme (i.e. in game terms casts a magical summoning spell) and says:
“Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
if you’re a man, then speak to me.
Though I don’t agree with my wife’s request,
I’ve come to ask it nonetheless.”
And gets the flounder to upgrade their piss pot to a hut, the wife is satisfied and later asks for a castle then a kingdom (complete with a throne of gold and diamonds), then an empire (with a three-yard diamond crown), then to be pope (with a two-mile high throne and three crowns) then to be like God. That last wish returns the husband and wife to their original piss pot.
As this progresses the water slowly turns black and then curdles then the horizon turns red then a storm starts raging.
What can we do with this one?
-Emphasizes how pacts with animals can do bigger stuff than summon cannon fodder, they can even be used to cast Wish.
-Makes me think about the sea getting progressively more fucked up as the man asks for more and more wishes? What's going on there? Anyone have an idea to interpret this one?
-Random encounter tables REALLY need to be seeded with a lot of people who have been transformed into animals.
But mostly what I makes me think about is how everyone would react to the sudden appearance of castles, palaces and two mile high papal thrones. That's some weird shit going on in the background of everyone else's life. To make a fairy tale setting seem alive it needs all kinds of weird shit happening to everyone not just the PCs. Have a castle suddenly appear in the PC's home base, and then be replaced by a palace by the end of their next adventure and have the PCs scratch their heads wondering what the hell is going on.
In fact, a good fairy tale setting needs a random event generator. Just roll for a random hex and then hit it with a random event...
Let's Make a Random Fairy Tale Event Generator
Actually, we don't have to. A bunch of Norwegians already did it for us with the updated Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale classification system. Took all of my google-fu to find a COMPLETE listing of the classifications but I finally tracked it down here: http://www.mftd.org/
If you look at the classification there's a 2,000 tale listing (with a few missing spaces, I guess spaces for future tales Dewey Decimal System-style). Most of the listing have a short summary of the tale. Just roll against the table any time you need a random hex-level event and have it going on in the background. If one tale seems boring then roll twice and mash the tales together.
For example:
I roll 1380 and 1602. That is:
(1380) The faithless wife: Asks God how she can fool her husband. The husband from the tree (or rafters) tells her that she can make him blind by feeding him milk-toast. The husband feigns blindness and slays the lover. The body is thrown into the river.
(1602, no story there, rounding down to 1600) The fool as murderer: The brothers put a he-goat in place of the body and thus save their brother.
OK, mashing those two together we get: there is an incredibly stupid couple and the wife wants to cheat on her husband. She asks God how to do it but the husband answers from the rafters of the house telling her to make the husband blind by feeding him milk-toast.
She does this and invites her lover over. However the lover's brothers figure out what is going on and swap him with a goat at the last minute and the husband kills the goat and thinks he has killed his wife's lover.
Then the PCs show up the next day. Yep, that works.
Up next: A Story about a Brave Tailor (the most OSR fairy tale I've ever read)
Fairy Tale 20: A Story about a Brave Tailor
I love this story, it's so damn awesome.
There was a tailor who got annoyed at all the flies that were buzzing around his apple so he smacked the with a cloth and killed seven in one blow.
Then to commemorate his glorious fly-swatting he got a suit of armor made inscribed with the words "Seven with One Stroke."
Since the armor looks badass and makes everyone think he killed seven MEN with one stroke so he gets hired on by a king which pisses off the king's other knights so they quit. This annoys the king so he wants to fire the tailor but is afraid that the tailor will kill him if he does that so he sends the tailor on a suicide mission against two invulnerable giants (with the hand of his daughter as the reward for success).
He finds the giants sleeping and throws stones and one giant when it's asleep and then at the one other one. They get in a fight and kill each other and the tailor claims all the credit.
Then the king decides to weasel out of the engagement by sending the tailor on another suicide mission: this time against a unicorn that is out damaging fish and people (fish?).
He waits until the last minute and jumps aside so the unicorn gets its horn stuck in a tree so is able to capture it. Later he captures a giant boar by letting it chase him into a forest chapel and then closing all of the doors and windows so its trapped inside.
So the tailor marries the princess and talks in his sleep about tailory things which annoys the princess so the king plans to have him kill him in his sleep but the tailor manages to bluff his way through that as well.
Then the Grimms give a second version of the same story.
This time the tailor kills twenty nine flies with one swat so he gets "twenty-nine with one stroke!" embroidered into his vest.
This time he gets in a contest of strength with a giant. The giant squeezes a rock until water comes out so the tailor disguises some cheese as a rock and squeezes that. Then they throw stones and the tailor wins by throwing a bird.
Then the giant bends down a fruit tree to get some fruit from the upper branches and invites the tailor to do the same. The taior's gets catapulted by the tree... And the story ends with the tailor trying to BS the giant because this second version is just a fragment.
What I like about this story is how much a nobody can accomplish with bluffing, blustering and trickery. The perfect inspiration for OSR characters and DMs. Players tend to enjoy wins they get by cheating far more than those they eke out from a hard fair fight.
What can we learn from this story?
-Misleading claims that are only technically true are a great way of tricking fairy tale characters.
-Fairy tale characters always massively over-react to everything. That's what makes them fun NPCs. Make this a guiding principle when running them.
-The only specific physical skill the tailor possesses is being nimble and good at dodging stuff.
-Unicorns must be gotten rid of because of the danger they pose to the kingdom's fish stocks.
-If a PC marries a princess, having his in-laws be shocked at his humble origins and decide to murder his in his sleep over it is a fun twist.
Goals
This post has got me thinking about XP rewards and advancement as this is the fairy tale in which the character is doing stuff that should most clearly provide XP. Standard D&D characters are greedy bastards who'll do anything for a bit of money. Let's see what fairy tale protagonists are after in these first twenty stories:
1. Return of golden ball.
2. Lard.
3. Survival (also royal marriage as a side reward).
4. Princess.
5. Survival.
6. Eyes.
7. Exorcism.
8. Peat.
9. Brothers (also royal marriage as a side reward).
10. Stay at an inn.
11. Escape from step-mother (also royal marriage as a side reward).
12. Royal marriage? (hard to parse this one since Rapunzel is so passive).
13. Survival (also royal marriage as a side reward).
14. Not having to spin flax.
15. Survival (with wealth as a side reward).
16. Princess (which is handed over to his master).
17. Princess.
18. Crossing a river.
19. EVERYTHING.
20. Princess.
So far and away the most common motivations for fair tale characters are simple survival and royal marriage (with the male characters actively pursuing it and the female characters getting offered it after doing other stuff).
That suggests that a standard fairy tale campaign should start with the characters being motivated by survival (due to starvation, evil step-mother, etc.). I'd probably make the starting PCs a batch of siblings since the closest thing we have to adventuring parties in this stories is siblings teaming up, with at least one of them getting a royal marriage being a good goal.
But how to make XP and advancement work in the meantime? Fairy tale protagonists are generally not that powerful so they don't need that much XP and it also doesn't really fit for them to be as focused on every bit of gold they can get their hands on as standard D&D characters. The closest thing we have to characters after money are the princess wanting her golden ball back and Hansel and Gretel looting the witch's house.
But on the other hand having an XP system based on royal marriage doesn't really work because you can usually only marry one royal. What would work instead?
For a start, saving others is important in several fairy tales so maybe an XP reward for that (with higher values for princesses etc.). Perhaps even survival XP in which PCs get XP for saving THEMSELVES from what seems to be certain death.
Not sure what else. What sort of XP system would best motivate PCs to act like fairy tale characters without being annoying or bogging the game down. Any ideas?
Up next: Cinderella
Maybe you get XP for establishing and maintaining relationships?
Marriage to a prince/princess would be one example of a relationship.
"Marriage to the sea" via throwing a ring of sufficient value into a lake would be another example of a relationship.
Making long term pacts with animals could be yet another example.
But the catch is that you lose XP if you betray your relationships.
Quote from: Cave Bear;863498Maybe you get XP for establishing and maintaining relationships?
Marriage to a prince/princess would be one example of a relationship.
"Marriage to the sea" via throwing a ring of sufficient value into a lake would be another example of a relationship.
Making long term pacts with animals could be yet another example.
But the catch is that you lose XP if you betray your relationships.
Been 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.
Here's the stuff we've come across in the first 20 stories.
Fairy Tale Inventory
Magical Acts
-Turning people into frogs.
-Turning frogs into people by keeping your promises to said frogs.
-Taking living people to heaven.
-Spending 12 years not talking in order to break a curse.
-Making a cursed stream come out of the ground that causes people who drink it to turn into deer.
-Illusions that make someone look like someone else.
-Hugging a ghost to return it to life. Waving a sword over a ghost also seems to work.
-Crying healing blindness.
-Stoking people’s temptations/making lettuce addictive?
-Getting strawberries in winter.
-Spitting gold coins whenever you talk.
-Making someone more beautiful/ugly.
-Blessing someone with marriage to a king.
-Cursing someone by making it so clothes don’t warm them in winter.
-Cursing someone with a miserable death.
-Human ghosts possessing ducks.
-Preserving food etc. from the elements.
-Cause fear.
-Summoning birds, fish, etc. to help you and forming pacts with various species.
-Boot-based divination.
Magical Creatures
-Many, many kinds of talking animals.
-Subterranean elf.
-Gardening elf in tower.
-Three little elves in a house in a forest who have winter strawberries.
-The Virgin Mary.
-God.
-Spectral(?) black cats and dogs.
-Guilty ghost.
-Cannibalistic witches.
-Animals possessed by human ghosts.
-Wish-granting flounder.
-Unicorns that “damage fish.”
-Stupid giant brothers.
-Giants that challenge people to contests of strength.
-Scary giant boars.
Magical Items
-Vorpal knife.
-Key to the doors of heaven.
-Chimney that constantly drops skulls and other body parts.
-Annoying bed that runs around.
-Magical(?) scissors that let you cut things open without waking them up.
-Lilies that are actually your brothers so if you pick them your brothers turn to birds and stay that way unless you stop talking for 12 years.
-A white snake that if you eat it grants you the temporary ability to talk with animals.
Magical Locations
-Heaven and its many rooms.
-Harmless hats and dogs.
-Fairy’s lettuce garden.
-Cookie house.
-The Tree of Life (which has apples).
Trained Skills
-Iron heart-band installation and removal (necessary to prevent hearts from bursting with grief).
-Making your voice softer by eating chalk.
-Animal languages.
-Being nimble.
Misc Nifty Stuff
-Children being kidnapped at birth by the Virgin Mary and raised in Heaven.
-Kings constantly marrying mute girls they find in the forest.
-Serial disappearance of royal children at birth leading to accusations of cannibalism.
-Crazy kind saying that he'll kill his 12 sons if he has a daughter instead of a thirteenth son.
-Polymorphed creatures do not age.
-To break a spell you don’t need to just kill someone, you need to kill them in a way that destroys their spirit.
-The palace-industrial complex.
-Lots of inhuman monsters want to eat people, perhaps to help give them the semblance of humanity.
-The threat of starvation as a way to kick off a sandbox campaign.
-Taking three (the third time you try something you get advantage if you failed the first two times and disadvantage if you succeeded the first two times). Also applies to stuff like three brothers trying the same thing.
-Ravens really really love horse meat.
-Saving throws vs. anguish.
-Failed suitors get executed.
-Lots of rings getting thrown into the ocean for some reason.
-Incredibly ornate crowns/thrones. For example a three-yard diamond crown or a two mile high throne.
-If you hide your humble origins from your wife she’s try to get your in-laws to murder you in your sleep.
Next I'll finally hit Cinderella. I really like this version of the story, it has no fairy godmother...
Fantastically good job.
Fairy Tale 21: CinderellaEverybody knows the story of Cinderella and a lot people know that in the "original" (not really the original, the oldest version we have has hippos and pirates in it) version the evil step-sisters get their eyes pecked out by birds.
That's why I was surprised when I came across:
Quote"Dear child, I must leave you, but when I am up in heaven, I shall look after you. Plant a little tree on my grave, and whenever you wish for something, shake it, and you'll have what you wish. And whenever you are otherwise in a predicament, then I'll send you help. Just stay good and pure."
That works so much better than the fairy godmother. I wonder why the Grimms changed it in later editions?
The tree is, of course, watered only by Cinderella's tears.
In this story the ball last for three days, so to keep Cinderella occupied on the first night her step-sisters make her sort lentils. When she cries "if only my mother knew about this!" speaking pigeons show up to help her sort them. They then invite her into their pigeon coop and she can see the ball from up there. When she tells her sisters about that they tear down the pigeon coop.
The next night she has to sort peas. The pigeons (who don't seem upset at all about their home) help her again. Then they tell her to get a dress by shaking the tree on her mother's grave. Servants and a carriage also show up (but they're not mice).
Cinderella returns the clothes when the night is done with a spell:
Quote"Shake and wobble, little tree!
Take these clothes back from me."
The third night she summons the pigeons again and gets her clothes back from the tree. On this night (not the second one for some reason) she gets told to get out by midnight.
This time the tree summons different clothes, carriage and servants (so it's golden slippers, not glass ones).
The prince is prepared. He has people stationed to watch the way out so see where Cinderella goes and paints the stairs with pitch to slow down her exit.
The ending is the standard foot-slicing bit but with the pigeons helping out saying:
Quote"Looky, look, look
at the shoe that she took.
There's blood all over, the shoe's too small.
She's not the bride that you met at the ball."
Interestingly, no eyes get pecked at the ending. So when the Grimms edited this story for later editions to make it more family friendly they ADDED that.
What can we do with this one?
Magical EffectsPretty simple to plug in the magical effects to what I've talked about with previous stories. Cinderella can summon pigeons, clothes, carriages and servants thanks to a Pact with her mother's spirit.
As in other stories, summoning mundane animals turns out to be incredibly useful, especially when they can bad-mouth your competition. In D&D terms each act of summoning would cost a spell slot and she's restricted to only being able to cast these spells right by the tree. Being able to anchor magical effects to people you care about gives a fairy tale feeling to the magic.
Tedious TasksWe've seen these before, tasks so tedious that the protagonists need magical help (generally animal summoning) to complete them. They seem boring but I think they're a good thing to hit PCs with as they take some cleverness to deal with. Like a lot of things in fairy tales they mingle the magical and the completely mundane.
Birds are ghostsThe pigeons in this story seem to represent Cinderella's mother's spirit and in a previous story a murdered queen came back in the form of a duck. So, birds are obviously ghosts. Keep that in mind the next time a large flock of crows settles around your characters...
Up next: How Some Children Played at Slaughtering
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.
(http://swtor.gamingfeeds.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files/HLIC/0ae172c4e5584507b72c3553af0340b7.jpg)
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.
Quote from: Daztur;879560Also the seeming lack of digestion seems rather undead...
This reminds me of Attack on Titan. The giants in that series crave human flesh even though their digestive systems are incomplete; they have stomachs, but no intestines or anuses. They just chew people up so they can regurgitate them later.
*edit*
Also, what did you make of the wolf disguising itself as grandma? Illustrations always show the silly image of a rather obvious wolf simply dressed up like a grandma. Did you get that impression from reading the story?
Quote from: Cave Bear;879563This reminds me of Attack on Titan. The giants in that series crave human flesh even though their digestive systems are incomplete; they have stomachs, but no intestines or anuses. They just chew people up so they can regurgitate them later.
*edit*
Also, what did you make of the wolf disguising itself as grandma? Illustrations always show the silly image of a rather obvious wolf simply dressed up like a grandma. Did you get that impression from reading the story?
The relevant bit of the story goes like this:
Quote"Oh, my God, how frightened I feel today, and usually I like to be at grandmother's." Then she went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grandmother with her cap pulled down over her face, giving her a strange appearance.
Then it goes into the standard question and answer about the wolf's appearance.
So she can FEEL the presence of the wolf before even seeing it. Interesting.
Also if we assume that these wolves can regenerate like a lot of werewolves and vampires then the "cut the belly open and fill it with stones" gambit starts to make more sense. Having a belly full of stones is not the sort of thing that regeneration can heal.
Fairy Tale 27: Death and the Goose Boy
This one is a strange little riff on Charon the boatman. A goose boy is herding cheese by a river and sees death come across, the talks to Death about what he's doing and asks if Death can take him across the river. Death says he has some things to do first and goes and pushes a rich man into the river so he drowns. The rich man's cats and dogs follow him in and also drown.
Then Death takes the goose boy willingly across the river and his geese turn into sheep. He's happy because he heard that in this country shepherds can become kings, so he's obviously in heaven and talking about Jesus.
Not a lot to chew on here. While we do have people travelling to other planes through portals (namely a well in fairy tale 24) in most cases people can just go to supernatural places by taking a hike. I think it's important, though, in making a fairy tale setting to not map out where stuff is, at least not precisely. You get to the right place by following the road or a guide, not by following a map. Fairy tale navigation is HARD and an RPG should reflect that.
My question for you is what's the deal with the cats and dogs that got drowned following their rich master into River non-Styx?
Up next: The Singing Bone
Quote from: Daztur;879650The relevant bit of the story goes like this:
Then it goes into the standard question and answer about the wolf's appearance.
So she can FEEL the presence of the wolf before even seeing it. Interesting.
Also if we assume that these wolves can regenerate like a lot of werewolves and vampires then the "cut the belly open and fill it with stones" gambit starts to make more sense. Having a belly full of stones is not the sort of thing that regeneration can heal.
More importantly, it's been pushed in running water. It's a purifying ritual, and both vampires and werewolves are
unclean, despite their current status as sex symbols (propagated by the ignorant:)).
And regeneration doesn't help with drowning, either.
Quote from: Daztur;879654Fairy Tale 27: Death and the Goose Boy
This one is a strange little riff on Charon the boatman. A goose boy is herding cheese by a river and sees death come across, the talks to Death about what he's doing and asks if Death can take him across the river. Death says he has some things to do first and goes and pushes a rich man into the river so he drowns. The rich man's cats and dogs follow him in and also drown.
Then Death takes the goose boy willingly across the river and his geese turn into sheep. He's happy because he heard that in this country shepherds can become kings, so he's obviously in heaven and talking about Jesus.
Not a lot to chew on here. While we do have people travelling to other planes through portals (namely a well in fairy tale 24) in most cases people can just go to supernatural places by taking a hike. I think it's important, though, in making a fairy tale setting to not map out where stuff is, at least not precisely. You get to the right place by following the road or a guide, not by following a map. Fairy tale navigation is HARD and an RPG should reflect that.
My question for you is what's the deal with the cats and dogs that got drowned following their rich master into River non-Styx?
Up next: The Singing Bone
You know what they say about the camel and the rich guy? Well, that's Heavens.
And whoever follows the rich one, shall perish as well.
I'm sure there is another explanation, too. But that one also conforms to fairy tale logic, where being the mother of a murderer also makes you a target, just ask Beowulf about Grendel;).
Quote from: Daztur;879650Also if we assume that these wolves can regenerate like a lot of werewolves and vampires then the "cut the belly open and fill it with stones" gambit starts to make more sense. Having a belly full of stones is not the sort of thing that regeneration can heal.
If the wolf is a sort of undead with regeneration then perhaps it doesn't even feel pain; hence how they are able to cut the wolf open without it noticing.
Quote from: AsenRG;879672More importantly, it's been pushed in running water. It's a purifying ritual, and both vampires and werewolves are unclean, despite their current status as sex symbols (propagated by the ignorant:)).
And regeneration doesn't help with drowning, either.
Yup, that's what happens in the Seven Kids story but in the Little Red Riding Hood addendum the wolf falls down due to all the rocks and smashes his head. Still, interesting. I like these ideas about the ways to get rid of evil critters in which just chopping them to bits with a sword isn't enough.
I'm also edging more towards explicit Christianity. I was thinking of having a fairy tale trinity of deities but will probably repurpose them:
1. The Lady in Green: influenced by the Lady of the Lake and Artemis. The goddess of prophesy, animals, ponds and springs and all green things. Famous for favoring certain mortals while screwing other ones over with terrible curses.
2. The Man in the Moon: influenced by Odin, Herne the Hunter, the Wild Hunt and fairy tale Satan. The lord of hunter and darkness with a surprisingly strong sense of fair play. Famous for testing and striking deal with mortals, usually to their detriment.
3. The Queen in Splendour: sun goddess influenced by Hera at her worst and the Queen of Hearts. The goddess of light, fertility, motherhood. Incredibly domineering and famous for making mad demands of mortals.
Fairy Tale 28: The Singing Bone
A wild boar is causing "great damage" and kills anyone who goes in the forest so the king offers his daughter to anyone who can kill it.
Three brothers decide to go hunt it and the third is an idiot so he's the hero of course. Then the youngest son enters the forest a "little man" gives him a lance to kill the boar with.
He kills the boar and is carrying it home and on the way back sees his older brothers drinking and they invite him to join them. On the way back they beat him to death, bury him under a bridge and the eldest brother marries the princess.
Later a shepherd makes a flute out of one of the youngest son's bones and when he plays it the flute tells the story of what happened.
The shepherd takes the bone to the king and when he finds out what happened he throws the has the older brothers killed and thrown in a river while the younger brother gets reburied in a fancy grave.
What can we get from this one?
Pigs > Kings
Some initial thoughts are that damn is this kingdom weak if it needs to beg for help to deal with a pig. This fits with my older ideas about these kingdoms being pocket sized. They're almost more like overgrown independent farm steddings (Icelandic-style) than proper countries so marrying a princess and becoming a king is an important milestone for a PC but not really something that'd give him armies at his disposal and completely upend the campaign.
Also note how the magical is mundane (the supernatural threat is just a pig) and the mundane (a random guy's bone) is magical. For fairy tales it's vital to blur the line between what's magical and what isn't. In most version of D&D this line is far too clear.
Will have to think more about these "little men" of the woods and what sort of elves they represent.
On Death and Burial
The way I'm imagining the mechanics of magic in a fairy tale world, all long-term magic is powered by spell slots. So if you want to enchant your house so that all of the cookies stay fresh for ever that'll cost a first level spell slot and you can never get that spell slot back as long as the effect remains in place.
This applies to magical items as well which is why so many are made with a certain specific purpose in mind: so that the caster can get their damn spell slot back after its used.
Now the interesting thing here is that the death of the caster does not necessarily end these magical effects. Just killing the witch who cursed you isn't necessarily going to break the curse. You have to either extinguish the witch's soul entirely or sever its connection to the mortal realm.
Sometimes a Christian burial will do the trick but for really nasty people you need a proper symbolic death that will be so shocking that it drives off their soul and dispels their magic. Hence rolling witches around in barrels of snakes and making them dance in red hot iron shoes (thanks for the great idea upthread!) or dumping the brothers into the same spot where they killed their brother.
I also like the idea of players wondering if they should give a Christian burial to the bandits they just killed (reduces the chance of ghosts) or just leave them there and press on ahead (saves time).
Also is people are killed in a way that keeps their soul in the mortal realm the power of their ghost or of the magical effect that happens after their death (such as making their bone sing) is determined by how many spell slots they have free at the time of their death.
Whenever I hear the fairy tales tell me that a character is an idiot, the first thing I think is magic-user. Their good fortune (like meeting the helpful elf) fits right in with the kind of mundane magic that these fairy tales seem to focus on, the kind of magic where a powerful and useful spell is "summon normal fish." That's why the third brother's bone sang.
Up next: The Devil and the Three Golden Hairs
Quote from: Daztur;882357I'm also edging more towards explicit Christianity. I was thinking of having a fairy tale trinity of deities but will probably repurpose them:
1. The Lady in Green: influenced by the Lady of the Lake and Artemis. The goddess of prophesy, animals, ponds and springs and all green things. Famous for favoring certain mortals while screwing other ones over with terrible curses.
2. The Man in the Moon: influenced by Odin, Herne the Hunter, the Wild Hunt and fairy tale Satan. The lord of hunter and darkness with a surprisingly strong sense of fair play. Famous for testing and striking deal with mortals, usually to their detriment.
3. The Queen in Splendour: sun goddess influenced by Hera at her worst and the Queen of Hearts. The goddess of light, fertility, motherhood. Incredibly domineering and famous for making mad demands of mortals.
You could take a syncretic approach where your heathen trinity exists as relict pagan holdovers alongside explicit Christianity.
Christianity is practiced among civilized people, and pagan idolatry becomes more prevalent as you get farther from civilization. That seems like it fit in with some of the themes you are working with.
QuoteWhenever I hear the fairy tales tell me that a character is an idiot, the first thing I think is magic-user. Their good fortune (like meeting the helpful elf) fits right in with the kind of mundane magic that these fairy tales seem to focus on, the kind of magic where a powerful and useful spell is "summon normal fish." That's why the third brother's bone sang.
Maybe magic is more closely associated with the Charisma ability than Intelligence?
Quote from: Daztur;882357Yup, that's what happens in the Seven Kids story but in the Little Red Riding Hood addendum the wolf falls down due to all the rocks and smashes his head. Still, interesting. I like these ideas about the ways to get rid of evil critters in which just chopping them to bits with a sword isn't enough.
I'm also edging more towards explicit Christianity. I was thinking of having a fairy tale trinity of deities but will probably repurpose them:
1. The Lady in Green: influenced by the Lady of the Lake and Artemis. The goddess of prophesy, animals, ponds and springs and all green things. Famous for favoring certain mortals while screwing other ones over with terrible curses.
2. The Man in the Moon: influenced by Odin, Herne the Hunter, the Wild Hunt and fairy tale Satan. The lord of hunter and darkness with a surprisingly strong sense of fair play. Famous for testing and striking deal with mortals, usually to their detriment.
3. The Queen in Splendour: sun goddess influenced by Hera at her worst and the Queen of Hearts. The goddess of light, fertility, motherhood. Incredibly domineering and famous for making mad demands of mortals.
I like them:).
Quote from: Daztur;882365Some initial thoughts are that damn is this kingdom weak if it needs to beg for help to deal with a pig.
Also note how the magical is mundane (the supernatural threat is just a pig) and the mundane (a random guy's bone) is magical. For fairy tales it's vital to blur the line between what's magical and what isn't. In most version of D&D this line is far too clear.
Keep in mind, various epics from today's UK mention boars attacking a kingdom, too, and knights being sought after to fight them, and not managing to stop them outright;). A huge boar is a murder machine.
Also, those boar talked, and didn't want to give a haircomb.
I get the impression that in the older myths,which this is based on, the boar has the place of the Grandfather Bear in what is known as Slavic myth.
Totally agree that the mundane should have repercussions in the invisible world. It's hard to overemphasize this.
Also, you really want to read Artesia for an example of a game that does that:D!
Quote from: Cave Bear;882441You could take a syncretic approach where your heathen trinity exists as relict pagan holdovers alongside explicit Christianity.
Christianity is practiced among civilized people, and pagan idolatry becomes more prevalent as you get farther from civilization. That seems like it fit in with some of the themes you are working with.
Maybe magic is more closely associated with the Charisma ability than Intelligence?
Yes, but that's actually not enough. Make people believe the heathen trinity is equal to, or actually the same as the Christian trinity (different people would believe differently, and this might be grounds for arguments and murder).
And yet others would recognise they are not related, but still would pay "protection racket". Leaving a cup of milk for the Domovoy was done until the 20th century in, say, Belarus;).
And magic is definitely Charisma-based.
Quote from: Cave Bear;882441You could take a syncretic approach where your heathen trinity exists as relict pagan holdovers alongside explicit Christianity.
Christianity is practiced among civilized people, and pagan idolatry becomes more prevalent as you get farther from civilization. That seems like it fit in with some of the themes you are working with.
That's sort of what you get in the Pendragon games, but I'm not sure that's what I want here. Seems anachronistic. I like the approach to Grandmother Frost a few fairy tales ago in which she's pretty obviously a pagan goddess but nobody would think to call her that or worship her.
So sort of I Can't Believe They're Not Deities. Plenty of people going to church on Sunday after asking for the Man in the Moon's protection on Saturday night. They wouldn't grant spells but they would certainly be able to teach a witch some. No temples, no priests, but everyone respects them.
For the fairy lord trinity the seed of the idea was that while in English the sun is male and the moon is female in German it's the other way round.
I think I've got a good handle on the Man in the Moon and the Lady in Green but am still struggling a bit to get the Queen in Splendour how I want her.
The Man in the Moon shows up in disguise to test people like Odin, cuts bargains like Satan and leads the Wild Hunt. That's easy to inject into a campaign.
The Lady in Green is enigmatic, makes pets of various beasts and monsters (think Artemis), provides prophesies, blessings and curses and lies in ponds distributing swords. Again, easy.
The Queen in Splendour is easy in the abstract. Terrifying avatar of sunshine, the hearth, motherhood and fluffy bunnies. Combine Hera's jealous rages and the Queen of Heart's arbitrary demands. But having a harder time thinking of how to have her interact with PCs that would give the right tone. Any ideas?
And yes, bowls of milk for the Domovoy are in. Will hit Russian and Korean fairy tales after the Grimms (will take a long time but am in no hurry). Am damn glad my great-grandfather got the hell out of Belarus in 1905 though...
For cha-based casting that's for certain. Fairy tale magic is mostly getting a good reaction roll with the universe. Might have int (learning spells) and wis (more spell slots?) matter a bit too, but cha will be the core magic stat just like str is the core combat stat.
OK, let's procrastinate my report cards a bit more and write another entry.
Fairy Tale 29: The Devil and the Three Golden Hairs
A princess and a woodcutter fall in love so the king tells his daughter "don't you know you can only marry the guy who brings me three golden hairs from the devil?" So off the woodcutter goes to collect them.
On the way to hell the woodcutter claims to random people that he knows everything (why?) so they ask him to solve problems and he tells them "when I return."
The last of these people is not-Charon who asks when he'll be relieved of his ferrying duty. When he gets across into hell (both heaven and hell are reached by crossing rivers, interesting) the devil isn't home so the woodcutter talks to the devil's wife who agrees to help him.
When the devil gets home he does the fe fi fo fum routine but his wife distracts him and puts him to bed. While the devil sleeps his wife pulls his golden hairs out and each time claims it was a nightmare about the various problems that the woodcutter got asked about on his way to hell and when he wakes up the devil grumbles and talks about how they don't know the solution to those problems.
Then woodcutter then goes to get ferried out of hell. On his way back home armed with the devil's knowledge he tells not-Charon that he can leave people stranded in hell until they agree to take over his work, he tells people that a wilted fig tree can be restored by killing the mouse gnawing at its roots, he tells people that a well can be restored by taking out a white stone, and a princess can be healed by killing the white toad that's sleeping under her bed.
For this he gets various rewards (gold, soldiers, etc.) so he looks pretty good when he goes home to claim the princess as his wife. At this point he king gets cold feet and tries to back out of the marriage pact but the woodcutter threatens him with the soldiers he got as a reward and the wedding is back on and that's it.
A lot to chew on here. Let's hit it.
We're Not in Kansas Anymore
Noisms recent blog post gave me something to chew on here: http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/02/things-in-spaces-where-adventure-happens.html which is very much what I want to do with this fairy tale hack as well, magical places where adventures happen are fundamentally different from the farm where the PCs grew up. In some setting the difference is pretty clear like in Narnia or catching the train to Hogwarts while in others the threshold between the magical and the mundane realms are foggier. In some fairy tales the difference is fairy sharp (go down the well and you're in a magical land) but in others you just hit the road and end up in fairy. To make the line a bit more sharp I'm going to import something from Korean folklore, these babies:
(http://cfile233.uf.daum.net/image/202C5D4E4F225F7015551D)
These are 장승 (jangseung), basically Korean gargoyles that were places around villages and other spots to keep the evil spirits out or to keep demons from moving through realities. Have these things placed as a threshold around the lands of man in order to clearly show the line between the mundane and fairy. River crossings also generally take you to a new reality, same with wells, water is the best conductor.
It's Not That Easy to Marry the Princess
One common trend I've noticed is that often when a commoner performs a task to marry a princess then either the princess herself or the king try to weasel out of it by demanding more tasks, playing for time or outright murder attempts. Just winning the princess's hand often isn't enough, you generally need military power, wealth and/or social standing to make the marriage stick. This makes it a bit harder for players to get to the victory condition of a royal marriage.
This isn't only for males, in a lot of the stories about common women marrying princes they immediately have to deal with slander and machinations, often from evil mother in-laws.
More Thoughts on 혈 (hyeol)
As I've touched on before 혈 (hyeol) means "chakra point" of which I think there are many many more than the classic five. People have hyeol but so does the land.
(http://www.san-shin.net/images/Dict_Pungsu.jpg)
Generally you can get good luck by building a house or tomb on top of one of these sites or channel its power by building a temple on it. In fact a whole line of temples were built alongside Korea's eastern mountain range in order to create a whole conduit of gi (qi/chi) from these sites.
(http://www.baekdu-daegan.com/images/BDDG-plum-tree-painting-2.jpg)
OK, what does this have to do with the devil's hair? Western folklore isn't as mountain obsessed as Korea but the land often has focal points in certain holy sites. In Korea those are mountains but in German folklore those are holy groves and springs. And in this story we have the woodcutter proving his worthiness to be king by claiming the land by restoring the damaged well and tree (which are the hyeol of that land).
So in game terms what this means is that each hex has a holy (hyeoly?) site that serves as the focal point of that hex, generally trees or springs but they can be anything. If a king claims them and protects them then the hex becomes Lawful and part of his realm, but if these holy sites are corrupted or go feral then the surrounding hex slowly becomes Neutral (wild) or Chaotic (corrupted). Often the weird-ass royal requests for various items (like golden hairs) are the raw materials for rituals to claim these sites. Have to think more on the mechanics for this.
This is also why royal marriage is important. Patronage of these holy sites can be passed by blood or sex (am thinking of that scene in the Rome TV show where the protagonist symbolically claims his farm by having sex with his wife in the dirt of its fields). If a king dies then his son inherits his pact with the land and his son in-law can claim them through marriage with his daughter but if the king's line fails then the pact is broken and the kingdom begins to turn feral.
Basically good old-fashioned hex clearing but with more mystical blather. This could also explain why whole kingdoms get enchanted if the royal line gets screwed up (think Sleeping Beauty). The king is the land and the land is the king.
Up Next: Little Louse and Little Flea
Quote from: Daztur;882934That's sort of what you get in the Pendragon games, but I'm not sure that's what I want here. Seems anachronistic.
Why? It was being done in the early 20th century, when are you putting it:)?
QuoteAnd yes, bowls of milk for the Domovoy are in. Will hit Russian and Korean fairy tales after the Grimms (will take a long time but am in no hurry). Am damn glad my great-grandfather got the hell out of Belarus in 1905 though...
Sadly, this only reminds me that I'm in front of the same dilemma as your great-grandfather;).
Quote from: AsenRG;883028Why? It was being done in the early 20th century, when are you putting it:)?
Sadly, this only reminds me that I'm in front of the same dilemma as your great-grandfather;).
I mean IIRC in Pendragon Christianity and paganism are separate faiths much like modern day religions in which paganism and Christianity are clearly separate while the fairy tales are full of stuff that are pretty clearly pagan survivals but the people didn't really think of them as anything that was in any way contradictory with Christianity, any more than we moderns think that the periodic table goes against Jesus.
And I hope you're not going to get sent to get shot at by the Japanese and end up dying of black lung in the Pennslyvania coal mines, that would be rough O.o
Fairy Tale 30: Little Louse and Little Flea
A short animal fable, a louse got scalded while brewing beer in an egg shell (strange, when you brew the beer it isn't that hot otherwise you'll denature the enzymes maybe they're talking about the post-mash boil) and it sets off a chain reaction that results in the flea weeping, a door creaking, a broom sweeping, a cart racing, a dung heap burning, a maiden breaking a jug of water and EVERYONE DYING HORRIBLY!
The way it's set up it's more of a nursery rhyme than a fairy tale, not much here to chew on so what can we do?
Unleash Mothra
It's easy for players to get the feeling that their actions don't matter. This can not only happen in rail road adventures in which the future is mapped out by in badly-DMed sandbox campaigns as well.
The way a lot of sandboxes are set up in many hexes there's a certain event going on when the players show up and that event is going on no matter when the players show up or what they did before they showed up.
Of course having a world in motion is important but I think an especially important part of this is to have player actions unleash as many butterflies as possible, as in a homebrewing mishap resulting in everyone dying rather than having to mop the ceiling like usual.
(http://www.drewsbrews.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/blowoff.jpg)
This is harder the more detailed the setting is, as updating the world as the players smash their way through it can be pretty intense but there are shortcuts through this especially if the setting information is written with broad brush. The easiest way to do this is to have the first thing you think about when the players hit a new area be "how has what the players have been doing affected this area" or by using a wonderful little rule that I'm going to steal that says that each time the PCs start interacting with some random guy who you haven't even bothered to stat out roll a d6 and if it's a six it's someone they've met before.
I also like having the family of random NPCs that the PCs screw over show up a dozen sessions later all Inigo Montoya. Always great fun when the PCs don't even remember their victims from that long ago.
Up next: Maiden without Hands
Quote from: Daztur;883029I mean IIRC in Pendragon Christianity and paganism are separate faiths much like modern day religions in which paganism and Christianity are clearly separate while the fairy tales are full of stuff that are pretty clearly pagan survivals but the people didn't really think of them as anything that was in any way contradictory with Christianity, any more than we moderns think that the periodic table goes against Jesus.
Oh, that, gotcha. Well, I'm talking about only some people, probably a minority, considering it a separate way.
The rest of them would be just "paying spirit protection racket", or simply doing as people have always done. It's quite likely the village priest does that as well:).
QuoteAnd I hope you're not going to get sent to get shot at by the Japanese and end up dying of black lung in the Pennslyvania coal mines, that would be rough O.o
Definitely not, I already have a better life than that here! The idea of migration wouldn't be to
worsen it all;).
Though I'm glad it worked out for your family!
Quote from: Daztur;883417This is harder the more detailed the setting is, as updating the world as the players smash their way through it can be pretty intense but there are shortcuts through this especially if the setting information is written with broad brush. The easiest way to do this is to have the first thing you think about when the players hit a new area be "how has what the players have been doing affected this area" or by using a wonderful little rule that I'm going to steal that says that each time the PCs start interacting with some random guy who you haven't even bothered to stat out roll a d6 and if it's a six it's someone they've met before.
Serious question, you mean people aren't doing that already? I just call them ripples on the water. Or sand ripples would do, I guess, since it's a sandbox:D!
Quote from: AsenRG;883583Serious question, you mean people aren't doing that already? I just call them ripples on the water. Or sand ripples would do, I guess, since it's a sandbox:D!
Oh people do that already, just I'd be in favor of really exaggerating that past the point of realism.
Interlude: How'd You Become King Then?
This is bringing together, expanding, and polishing up my previous ideas on fairy tale royalty.
Each hex of the world has a Keystone that is the wellspring of life and magic for that portion of land. If a hex has a royal palace, a dragon's lair or a witch's hut they'll all be located right on top of the Keystone every time.
In Germanic fairy tales these Keystones are generally going to be springs or groves (perhaps domesticated as wells, fountains, and wooden buildings) while in Korea you'll going to get mountains, mountains and more mountains.
In order to become a king or queen you have to lay claim to one of these Keystones. How to do this various from hex to hex (and would be a good subject for a random table) but generally involves marrying some avatar of the hex's Keystone, defeating some beast that lairs there, building a palace, or by gaining knowledge of that keystone (for example by hanging by your neck from one of the tree's branches for a while or chucking your eyeball into a certain well).
Once a person has claimed a Keystone they establish a kingdom and become linked to the land in a powerful covenant that makes the land of the kingdom Lawful. This grants Amber-style general knowledge, weather control, etc. over of the land of the hex and a small bonus (perhaps +1 AC or the ability to see like a cat) or perhaps a larger one that's only applicable within the hex. What this bonus is would be symbolically representative of the land of the hex and would be another good subject for a random table.
However becoming king or queen has its dangers as well. The forces of Neutrality and Chaos constantly war against the powers of Law. The fae powers of Neutrality can be bargained with, threatened and bought off but the infernal powers of Chaos are more insidious. These attacks often come in the form of dominating or corrupting the Keystone and a damaged or corrupted Keystone brings a curse upon the king or queen that holds it. Another good random table would be the threats that are spawned by hostile neighboring hexes.
Once a kingdom is established it can be expanded by laying claim to the Keystones of surrounding hexes. This again generally involves sex, blood, knowledge or engineering. After these Keystones are claimed they are still potent magical sites and are the obvious places to have health-restoring water, magical fruit, princes in the space of frogs, etc.
When a king or queen dies the kingdom is passed on to their heir and their heir's spouse. Simply slaughtering a royal family and grabbing the crown for yourself isn't enough to make yourself royal, you need a blood connection FIRST. Simple usurpation will make a hex stop being Lawful so that it has no king or queen. This explains why so many kings are so unwilling to let people marry their daughters, after all the only would-be usurpers you have to worry about are your son in-laws.
Also commoners who try to marry into royal families are generally greeted with suspicion, slander, rules-twisting and outright murder attempts so it is often important to bring a bunch of gold and soldiers to your wedding.
A kingdom can also be split among multiple heirs and often half of a kingdom is given to the royal son in-law to rule before inheriting the other half. This can be useful for placating people and a cluster of allied kingdoms is often easier to defend than one large kingdom, far fewer hostile hexes over the border per royal that way.
This still doesn't explain why the king with 12 sons threatened to kill all of them if a daughter was born. These mechanics should explain all the kings of seeming madness that fairy tale royals go in for.
Been mulling over the nature of chaos and the devil in fairy tales and it got me thinking. Now if you take the fairy tale devil, add in Cthulhu (who works with everything: monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html), The War Hound and the World's Pain by Moorcock and The Ceremonies by T. E. D. Klein (the last of two I've only read summaries of, which I'll have to remedy) and I may have hit on something.
Hell is a Cancer
After Lucifer's rebellion the defeated rebels were cast into Hell while those who remained neutral were exiled to the Earth to become Grigori/Fae. While the Neutral lands of Faerie are without God's Law and unpredictable at best the Chaos of Hell is far worse.
Without even the mad dream logic that faerie possesses, hell has become the world's cancer and ever day it bloats greater from the damned souls that it feasts upon. As Hell fattened itself it has become conscious, a blind idiot consciousness that knows little but hunger but a dangerous one nonetheless.
This worries the devils of Hell so they endeavor to keep it fed on the souls of the damned while lulling it with the monotonous pipings of demon flutes. But with every passing year Hell grows more ravenous and the devils of Hell have become divided about what is to be done.
One are in denial and just want to keep Hell asleep and well fed, others want to wake it and bring on the end times with the great beast arising from the depths to shake off lands of men and assault Heaven itself while others are searching for the Holy Grain in a desperate attempt to use its waters to wash away their sin and allow them to escape into Heaven.
The Angels and the Fae are equally divided. With the Host of the Lord exhausted with the attempt to hold the line against hell some wonder if it is better to just get things over with and destroy the world in order to save it and the peace feelers sent out by the devil have aroused massive suspicion.
This would set up an apocalyptic campaign in which the machinations of the various factions of Devils being the main driver of actions. The main attraction of this for me is that it is gets some nuance without the tired old trope of making Angels a bunch of assholes.
Quote from: Daztur;885040Been mulling over the nature of chaos and the devil in fairy tales and it got me thinking. Now if you take the fairy tale devil, add in Cthulhu (who works with everything: monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html), The War Hound and the World's Pain by Moorcock and The Ceremonies by T. E. D. Klein (the last of two I've only read summaries of, which I'll have to remedy) and I may have hit on something.
Hell is a Cancer
After Lucifer's rebellion the defeated rebels were cast into Hell while those who remained neutral were exiled to the Earth to become Grigori/Fae. While the Neutral lands of Faerie are without God's Law and unpredictable at best the Chaos of Hell is far worse.
Without even the mad dream logic that faerie possesses, hell has become the world's cancer and ever day it bloats greater from the damned souls that it feasts upon. As Hell fattened itself it has become conscious, a blind idiot consciousness that knows little but hunger but a dangerous one nonetheless.
This worries the devils of Hell so they endeavor to keep it fed on the souls of the damned while lulling it with the monotonous pipings of demon flutes. But with every passing year Hell grows more ravenous and the devils of Hell have become divided about what is to be done.
One are in denial and just want to keep Hell asleep and well fed, others want to wake it and bring on the end times with the great beast arising from the depths to shake off lands of men and assault Heaven itself while others are searching for the Holy Grain in a desperate attempt to use its waters to wash away their sin and allow them to escape into Heaven.
The Angels and the Fae are equally divided. With the Host of the Lord exhausted with the attempt to hold the line against hell some wonder if it is better to just get things over with and destroy the world in order to save it and the peace feelers sent out by the devil have aroused massive suspicion.
This would set up an apocalyptic campaign in which the machinations of the various factions of Devils being the main driver of actions. The main attraction of this for me is that it is gets some nuance without the tired old trope of making Angels a bunch of assholes.
There's a lot of potential to use devils as quest-givers.
I could actually see the old man in the dark corner of the tavern being an imp in disguise seeking mortal heroes to aid his grotto* in their fight against a rival grotto*.
*I do not know the proper term for a social grouping of devils. A court of devils? A revelry of devils? I'm not sure if Anton LaVey went into that in his Satanic Bible, I haven't read that since high school. I'm going to go with 'grotto'. As in the The Supernal Grotto of the Serpent, The Pale Grotto of the Cacoethe, The Gilded Grotto of the Diptera, etc. But that's just my head canon.
*edit*
Ah.
http://electricliterature.com/supernatural-collective-nouns/
A legion of demons
A bombast of devils
A party of incubi
An opulence of succubi
Quote from: Cave Bear;885041There's a lot of potential to use devils as quest-givers.
I could actually see the old man in the dark corner of the tavern being an imp in disguise seeking mortal heroes to aid his grotto* in their fight against a rival grotto*.
*I do not know the proper term for a social grouping of devils. A court of devils? A revelry of devils? I'm not sure if Anton LaVey went into that in his Satanic Bible, I haven't read that since high school. I'm going to go with 'grotto'. As in the The Supernal Grotto of the Serpent, The Pale Grotto of the Cacoethe, The Gilded Grotto of the Diptera, etc. But that's just my head canon.
*edit*
Ah.
http://electricliterature.com/supernatural-collective-nouns/
A legion of demons
A bombast of devils
A party of incubi
An opulence of succubi
Actually there's a story that's just like that later on in the Grimm collection. The Devil hires some guys to (indirectly) make sure some evil merchant dies and pays them well. He doesn't even try to screw them over he just wants that evil merchant's soul.
Which means that if the PCs want to kill some evil people then (looking at the extreme short term) the Devil is on their side (dead evil people means souls for him) while Heaven is against them (killing evil people precludes any chance they have for redemption). Giving supernatural powers comprehensible motives that just don't fit with mortal ones does a good job of allowing you to include angels and devils without going in for a simple white hat vs. black hat narrative or the tiresome "the angels are the real bad guys maaaaaaan" dime store Gnosticism that I'm so sick of.
Basically if you look at things from Hell's point of view there's plenty of reasons from infernal ideological splits, for example:
-Got to save the world, it's where I keep all my stuff!
-Kill evil people, more souls NOW.
-Foster evil people and let their evil spread, more souls LATER.
-Charge the gates of heaven! Sound the last trumpet!
Plenty of reasons for them to work cross purposes and sponsor PCs (possibly without even trying to screw them over) while still basically being dicks.
Same with heaven, if you want to avoid asshole angels you still have a bunch of disagreements in heaven. If the world has a cancer that is hell there's a lot of ways for well-intentioned and non-asshole angels to want to go about treating the patient:
-Cut it out. Yeah the patient might die but it's out best chance. It's only going to get worse later.
-Chemo. Yeah their hair's going to fall out and they're going to puke a lot and a few kingdoms will burn but what are you going to do?
-Try to keep the patient comfy for as long as possible.
-Well-intentioned but misguided denial and ignorance.
Also you can have the answer to "why don't the angels do more to help us?" be "they're really really busy keeping hell from bursting through the surface and tearing the world to pieces" if they take their finger out of the dike to come help you then you won't like the results.
Same with fae you get plenty of options for opportunistic alliances with factions from Hell or Heaven or "get off my lawn" xenophobia. With fae being neutral you actually have a reason for the old stupid D&D trope of neutrality wanting to balance good and evil, the fae have a reason to avoid too much Law and Heaven because that results in humans bulldozing them and making the whole world subject to Lawful human kings.
The way I'd approach this is by having Lucifer (the leader of the "Got to save the world, it's where I keep all my stuff!" faction) kick things off by trying to get his hands on the Holy Grail and have the supernatural faction warfare get more and more important as the game progresses with Lucifer offering them a job at one point and taking things from there. Put together a "what happens if the PCs do nothing" timeline and then make it very very easy for the PCs to derail that in unexpected ways.
I've just read through the whole thread and it's absolutely excellent. I particularly like your insights and commentary on social combat/interaction. Many thanks, Daztur (incidentally, I'm fairly sure that I once read an essay that you wrote on 'Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War', which was also excellent. Thanks for that one too! If you're ever in Hong Kong, I owe you a beer.)
Quote from: Daztur;884942Interlude: How'd You Become King Then?
This is bringing together, expanding, and polishing up my previous ideas on fairy tale royalty.
Each hex of the world has a Keystone that is the wellspring of life and magic for that portion of land. If a hex has a royal palace, a dragon's lair or a witch's hut they'll all be located right on top of the Keystone every time.
In Germanic fairy tales these Keystones are generally going to be springs or groves (perhaps domesticated as wells, fountains, and wooden buildings) while in Korea you'll going to get mountains, mountains and more mountains.
In order to become a king or queen you have to lay claim to one of these Keystones. How to do this various from hex to hex (and would be a good subject for a random table) but generally involves marrying some avatar of the hex's Keystone, defeating some beast that lairs there, building a palace, or by gaining knowledge of that keystone (for example by hanging by your neck from one of the tree's branches for a while or chucking your eyeball into a certain well).
Once a person has claimed a Keystone they establish a kingdom and become linked to the land in a powerful covenant that makes the land of the kingdom Lawful. This grants Amber-style general knowledge, weather control, etc. over of the land of the hex and a small bonus (perhaps +1 AC or the ability to see like a cat) or perhaps a larger one that's only applicable within the hex. What this bonus is would be symbolically representative of the land of the hex and would be another good subject for a random table.
However becoming king or queen has its dangers as well. The forces of Neutrality and Chaos constantly war against the powers of Law. The fae powers of Neutrality can be bargained with, threatened and bought off but the infernal powers of Chaos are more insidious. These attacks often come in the form of dominating or corrupting the Keystone and a damaged or corrupted Keystone brings a curse upon the king or queen that holds it. Another good random table would be the threats that are spawned by hostile neighboring hexes.
Once a kingdom is established it can be expanded by laying claim to the Keystones of surrounding hexes. This again generally involves sex, blood, knowledge or engineering. After these Keystones are claimed they are still potent magical sites and are the obvious places to have health-restoring water, magical fruit, princes in the space of frogs, etc.
When a king or queen dies the kingdom is passed on to their heir and their heir's spouse. Simply slaughtering a royal family and grabbing the crown for yourself isn't enough to make yourself royal, you need a blood connection FIRST. Simple usurpation will make a hex stop being Lawful so that it has no king or queen. This explains why so many kings are so unwilling to let people marry their daughters, after all the only would-be usurpers you have to worry about are your son in-laws.
Also commoners who try to marry into royal families are generally greeted with suspicion, slander, rules-twisting and outright murder attempts so it is often important to bring a bunch of gold and soldiers to your wedding.
A kingdom can also be split among multiple heirs and often half of a kingdom is given to the royal son in-law to rule before inheriting the other half. This can be useful for placating people and a cluster of allied kingdoms is often easier to defend than one large kingdom, far fewer hostile hexes over the border per royal that way.
This still doesn't explain why the king with 12 sons threatened to kill all of them if a daughter was born. These mechanics should explain all the kings of seeming madness that fairy tale royals go in for.
How would you handle this in a party-based game, where rewards need to be split among the players?
(I guess if you split up a kingship, that could explain oligarchies, and the subsequent tendency for one oligarch to try to become a lone tyrant.)
The king killing all his sons sounds like Heracles. Maybe Hera is out there waiting in the wings, eager to screw up kings' lives for no particular reason. She is associated with women and childbirth, too, so the birth of a daughter could be an omen.
Quote from: Majus;885259I've just read through the whole thread and it's absolutely excellent. I particularly like your insights and commentary on social combat/interaction. Many thanks, Daztur (incidentally, I'm fairly sure that I once read an essay that you wrote on 'Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War', which was also excellent. Thanks for that one too! If you're ever in Hong Kong, I owe you a beer.)
Yup that's me. The only thing I've ever written that anyone's read. Usually I ramble too much and get people going TL: DR.
My current thinking on CaS vs. CaW is to divide up GMing styles like so:
-Environment focused: sandbox in which the players paying attention to and manipulating the environment is vital to success.
-Tactics focused: choosing between the options the game gives you is the focus of the game.
-Plot focused: adventure paths, 90's-style, etc.
-Character focused: story games and other play styles that really drill down to what's going on in the character's head, but in which the world often feels like a sound stage.
Am in Korea so will probably end up in Hong Kong one of these days since now that the kids are older I'm able to travel more and will no longer be the only lifer in Korea who has never set foot in Thailand etc.
Quote from: Dumpire;885273How would you handle this in a party-based game, where rewards need to be split among the players?
(I guess if you split up a kingship, that could explain oligarchies, and the subsequent tendency for one oligarch to try to become a lone tyrant.)
The king killing all his sons sounds like Heracles. Maybe Hera is out there waiting in the wings, eager to screw up kings' lives for no particular reason. She is associated with women and childbirth, too, so the birth of a daughter could be an omen.
For a party-based game I'm assuming that not all characters WANT to be kings, a lot would want to be a prime minister, the court wizard, the local bishop or just the king's drinking buddy. However I'm setting the game up to intentionally support/reward clusters of allied kingdoms as having a kingdom that borders a lot of neutral/chaotic hexes is a big pain so having some smaller lawful kingdoms on your borders makes maintaining your kingdom a lot easier. A lot of NPC kingdoms would also be tiny and clustered together.
For the second point, I love it. That reminds me of my previous discussion about my can't-believe-they're-not-gods fae trinity (the Lady in Green, the Man in the Moon and the Queen in Splendour).
Making kings do crazy shit would right up the Hera-inspired Queen in Splendour's alley. She's be in charge of madness, arbitrary rule, the hearth, sunshine and kittens.
Just have to figure out some pattern behind her actions as I don't want to go the jealous wife Hera route. Why would a fae power drive some kings insane but not others and drive them insane in different ways? The Man in the Moon likes testing people and making bargains, the Lady in Green likes prophesies and curses/blessings that reek with poetic justice, what is the Queen in Splendour's schtick?
Going to actually run this thing September of next year with my son's friends and adults as well, gotta stop navel gazing and start hacking some stuff together.
Perhaps the Queen bestows her favor on an honestly worthy mortal, they become king, and then she variably becomes disappointed with them. They never measure up to her impossibly high, if not outright ideal, standards.
Then she throws that one away, and looks for another mortal. It's not that she is capricious or cruel, mortals just can't never fail or always succeed in some task that is trivial to fae demigods.
Sorry, only just noticed your reply.
Quote from: Daztur;885495Yup that's me. The only thing I've ever written that anyone's read. Usually I ramble too much and get people going TL: DR.
I don't know, mate, I've read two articles that you've written and found both of them interesting and insightful. That's a pretty good average.
Quote from: Daztur;885495Am in Korea so will probably end up in Hong Kong one of these days since now that the kids are older I'm able to travel more and will no longer be the only lifer in Korea who has never set foot in Thailand etc.
You definitely should. That said, I've been in Hong Kong for a couple of years now and have seen precious little of Asia either, so I'm a fine one to talk!
Was just listening to an audiobook of Russian fairy tales. There seems to be constant theme of people marrying bits of nature which at times seems to dance on the line of human sacrifice.
Quote from: Baron Opal;885667Perhaps the Queen bestows her favor on an honestly worthy mortal, they become king, and then she variably becomes disappointed with them. They never measure up to her impossibly high, if not outright ideal, standards.
Then she throws that one away, and looks for another mortal. It's not that she is capricious or cruel, mortals just can't never fail or always succeed in some task that is trivial to fae demigods.
This I like. This I like a lot. Humans being given gifts and then screwing up (either from ingratitude, simple greed or having a gift with strings attached) is a constant theme in fairy tales and having a character to help push that works perfectly. Seems like a perfect thing to hit PCs with.
Quote from: Majus;886270Sorry, only just noticed your reply.
I don't know, mate, I've read two articles that you've written and found both of them interesting and insightful. That's a pretty good average.
You definitely should. That said, I've been in Hong Kong for a couple of years now and have seen precious little of Asia either, so I'm a fine one to talk!
Well here's a third. Hope you like it: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=28659
Here's the stuff we've come across in the first 30 stories.
Fairy Tale Inventory
Magical Acts
-Turning people into frogs.
-Turning frogs into people by keeping your promises to said frogs.
-Taking living people to heaven.
-Spending 12 years not talking in order to break a curse.
-Making a cursed stream come out of the ground that causes people who drink it to turn into deer.
-Illusions that make someone look like someone else.
-Hugging a ghost to return it to life. Waving a sword over a ghost also seems to work.
-Crying healing blindness.
-Stoking people's temptations/making lettuce addictive?
-Getting strawberries in winter.
-Spitting gold coins whenever you talk.
-Making someone more beautiful/ugly.
-Blessing someone with marriage to a king.
-Cursing someone by making it so clothes don't warm them in winter.
-Cursing someone with a miserable death.
-Human ghosts possessing ducks.
-Preserving food etc. from the elements.
-Cause fear.
-Summoning birds, fish, etc. to help you and forming pacts with various species.
-Boot-based divination.
-Possessing a clothes-producing tree upon your death.
-Cursing your children so they turn into ravens.
-Using a person's ring to return them to their true shape.
-Eating someone's food to gain power over them.
-Using your finger bone to open doors.
-Establishing a threshold keeps out uninvited guests such as wolves.
Magical Creatures
-Many, many kinds of talking animals.
-Subterranean elf.
-Gardening elf in tower.
-Three little elves in a house in a forest who have winter strawberries.
-The Virgin Mary.
-God.
-Spectral(?) black cats and dogs.
-Guilty ghost.
-Cannibalistic witches.
-Animals possessed by human ghosts (usually birds).
-Wish-granting flounder.
-Unicorns that "damage fish."
-Stupid giant brothers.
-Giants that challenge people to contests of strength.
-Scary giant boars.
-Mother Holle, the avatar of frost and winter whose feather bed creatures snow when shaken out.
-Cannibalistic sun and moon.
-Glass mountain that is home to a dwarf and "lord ravens."
-Death the boatman to heaven and/or hell.
-Monstrous pigs.
-Little men of the forest.
-The Devil and his mom.
Magical Items
-Vorpal knife.
-Key to the doors of heaven.
-Chimney that constantly drops skulls and other body parts.
-Annoying bed that runs around.
-Magical(?) scissors that let you cut things open without waking them up.
-Lilies that are actually your brothers so if you pick them your brothers turn to birds and stay that way unless you stop talking for 12 years.
-A white snake that if you eat it grants you the temporary ability to talk with animals.
-A singing bone that tells of its owner's murder when played.
Magical Locations
-Heaven and its many rooms.
-Harmless hats and dogs.
-Fairy's lettuce garden.
-Cookie house.
-The Tree of Life (which has apples).
-A well that takes you to a microcosm of the world were even tiny acts can have a big impact on the moral realm.
-Roads through the forest that protect you from wolves.
-River that divides the mortal realm from heaven/hell.
Trained Skills
-Iron heart-band installation and removal (necessary to prevent hearts from bursting with grief).
-Making your voice softer by eating chalk.
-Animal languages.
-Being nimble.
Misc Nifty Stuff
-Children being kidnapped at birth by the Virgin Mary and raised in Heaven.
-Kings constantly marrying mute girls they find in the forest.
-Serial disappearance of royal children at birth leading to accusations of cannibalism.
-Crazy kind saying that he'll kill his 12 sons if he has a daughter instead of a thirteenth son.
-Polymorphed creatures do not age.
-To break a spell you don't need to just kill someone, you need to kill them in a way that destroys their spirit.
-The palace-industrial complex.
-Lots of inhuman monsters want to eat people, perhaps to help give them the semblance of humanity.
-The threat of starvation as a way to kick off a sandbox campaign.
-Taking three (the third time you try something you get advantage if you failed the first two times and disadvantage if you succeeded the first two times). Also applies to stuff like three brothers trying the same thing.
-Ravens really really love horse meat.
-Saving throws vs. anguish.
-Failed suitors get executed.
-Lots of rings getting thrown into the ocean for some reason.
-Incredibly ornate crowns/thrones. For example a three-yard diamond crown or a two mile high throne.
-If you hide your humble origins from your wife she's try to get your in-laws to murder you in your sleep.
-Terrifyingly impressionable children.
-Judges using clever tests.
-Butchers being scary dudes.
Fairy Tale 31: Maiden without Hands
A miller meets the devil who offers the miller riches in exchange for whatever it behind his mill. The miller thinks its his apple tree but it's actually his daughter.
When the devil comes to collect the maiden draws a circle of protection vs. evil (really!) on the ground and purifies herself with water so the devil can't grab her. The devil demands that the miller take the water away the next day but she purifies herself with tears. On the third day the devil threatens to take the miller to hell instead if he doesn't hack the girl's hands off so she can't wash herself at all. Of course the girl then cries so much that even the stumps of the arms are clean.
By resisting the devil for three days the maiden breaks his claim on her and instead of staying with her dad who was really sorry about the whole dismemberment thing she sets off into the world with her hands slung across her back. And comes to an apple tree. She feeds herself by slamming into the tree so that apples fall down.
But it's the king's apple tree so some guards come to haul her away but the prince intercedes and gets her to care for the castle's chickens instead and later marries here.
Later he's off to war when their son is born and the devil switches the letters that they send to each other so that the king appears to command that his wife be exiled. She sets off into a forest with her baby and her hands (STILL!) slung across her back she meets an old man and asks him to hold her baby to her breast. Instead he tells her to hug a random tree, which gives her her hands back.
Later her husband searches the woods and finds her.
IIRC in later editions the maiden gets dragged down into hell to serve the devil but this is how this one goes in this first edition.
What can we get from this one:
If You Deny the Devil for Three Days He'll Go Away
Very important thing to keep in mind, especially if the devil is your Mr. Johnson.
Written Words are Lies
In fairy tales spoken lies never seem to work and but written lies always succeed. Will have it be stupidly easy to detect spoken lies (as in a NWP that you can take at first level that lets you unerringly detect lies) but there will be no character ability to discerning written lies.
She Kept her Hands Around for HOW Long
Seriously, she kept the damn things around for at least a few years it seems and carried them on her back right next to her baby! Having the PCs meet random people carrying around random body parts because reasons would be a good thing to seed random encounter tables with, much like I really want to make a PC one day who's carrying around one finger bone of their dead beloved so that they can get resurrection cast on it once they have enough money saved up.
Everywhere With the Trees
Trees appear three times in this story, always having pivotal roles. If mountains were the real lynch pin of Korean shamanism, trees (and springs a bit as well) seem to be massively important in Germanic paganism and it survives into fairy tales. The importance of holy and magical trees really can't be overstated and they'd be the real key stones of the land that represent the whole surrounding hex, like a Yggdrasil writ small.
Divine Magic
Here we have a straight-up bit of D&D clerical magic: circle of protection vs. evil. Note that it only works if the girl is pure physically and spiritually. As having to track a certain PC's state of grace seems annoying a simpler way is to just have divine magic work if the intentions behind that specific bit of magic are pure and sacramental magic always works (because otherwise is Donatism and BURN HERETIC!).
Up next: Clever Hans
East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, is a collection of Norwegian fairy tales you might be interested in.
I've noticed that too; trees are significant in the North, even to the point that the gods made the first people from trees. I've heard that clay or earth is the desirable raw materials for people from Egypt to India. I vaguely remember a story somewhere that people are made from the clotted blood of the gods; Navaho, maybe?
Quote from: Baron Opal;886691East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, is a collection of Norwegian fairy tales you might be interested in.
I've noticed that too; trees are significant in the North, even to the point that the gods made the first people from trees. I've heard that clay or earth is the desirable raw materials for people from Egypt to India. I vaguely remember a story somewhere that people are made from the clotted blood of the gods; Navaho, maybe?
Oooh it's the one with the Kay Nielsen illustrations those are almost as good as the Harry Clarke ones.
Also Korean stuff (which I'll be hitting eventually) mixes in interesting ways with Scandinavian stuff since Korean shamanism fits in well (once you strip out all the Buddhist stuff) with the same circumpolar tradition as Siberian and Saami stuff so I can cheat by using Korean stuff to fill in any gaps in my knowledge of Nordic witches from the woods.
Meanwhile in Korea you have humans being birthed by a bear stuck in a cave munching on garlic. And the cave is in a big mountain because everything magical in Korea happens on mountains.
Fairy Tale 32: Clever Hans
Int must be the main dump stat for fairy tales. Just look at this story...
The style here is interesting with even more repeated language than normal, seems like it's meant to be a call and response between the storyteller and the audience.
Hans is courting Gretel but instead of giving gifts he asks for them. He gets a needle but brings it back in the hay wagon and looses it. His mom tells him he should've put it up his sleeve.
Next time he gets a knife and puts it up his sleeve. His mom tells him to put it in his pocket.
It goes on like this with Hans suffocating a goat in his pocket, dragging bacon across the ground with a rope, carrying a calf on his head and taking his beloved home by leading her with a rope, putting her in the stable and feeding her hay.
His mom tells him that was dumb and he should've cast friendly eyes upon her so he cuts out the eyes of the farm animals and throws them at her which results in him finally getting dumped.
There's a second version of this story written out in a more normal narrative style.
Here "Clever" Hans demands that his mom set up a marriage from him or he'll smash the stove, windows and staircase.
Here Hans messes up nice gloves by getting them wet, puts a hawk in his shirt, etc. etc.
The mom gets frustrated and goes off the set up the marriage herself leaving her son in charge of the house. While she's gone the idiot makes a terrible mess of the house (the floor is covered with wine-soaked flour etc. etc.). This freaks out the goose so he decides to get naked and stick a bunch of goose feathers to himself with honey and sit on the eggs himself.
The story ends like the first version with Hans chucking eyes at the girl.
What can we get from this one?
Some NPCs should take everything literally
Not only "clever" humans but a lot of fae NPCs should take everything the PCs say literally which can lead to a lot of comedy. It's a well-worn trope but it still works.
Encumbrance
Usually in D&D people just write down shit in their inventory and then pretend to add up the weight for encumbrance but we see here that where you put you stuff actually matters.
So Clever Hans definitely needs to use this: http://rottenpulp.blogspot.com/2012/06/matt-rundles-anti-hammerspace-item.html kind of encumbrance system, maybe with some tweaks to have a image of a character and equipment slots with arrows pointing to where in the body they are.
Also I like the idea (what I read in a blog somewhere that I forget) of having material components often be reusable but very bulky so that a wizard's gear is as bulky as a fighter's armor. This can shift some magic items into material components and add some interesting flavor to the magical system. "Suuuuuure you can cast the divination spell when you want, it'll make the answers come out of the nearest severed pig's head, you did bring one didn't you?" It also makes it important for the wizard to actually have a home base and workshop as a place to keep all of the bulky material components that they can't take on every single adventure.
Screw You Harvest Moon
Marriage matters a lot in fairy tales with marriage to someone of high status often being the main goal of the protagonist in a story. In many cases it's basically impossible to make a rise in status "stick" without marrying into the rank. Nobody's going to take the PC's efforts to build a castle very seriously unless they've married a princess and no princess wants to marry some grubby adventurers.
Think this would be a good use of the Desires system I posted about a long while back. To make a marriage really work you have to tick the boxes of what the spouse and their parents desire (royals don't like peasants eloping with their kids) and those can be most anything. Simple gift giving isn't going to cut it, nor will simple flirting in most cases.
Up next: Puss in Boots
Heretical Interlude
Took a long hike this morning at the break of dawn up a mountain past a hundred piles of meditative stones to a wizened five hundred year old tree outside an iron-shod gatehouse topped with winged tiger banners while listening to an audiobook of Russian fairy tales.
Got me thinking about things like the guy who can drink a lake or run to the end of a world in a day and how the border between the mundane and the fantastic is a moth-eaten rag in fairy tales, with the feats of sorcerers often seem more mundane than a random peasant's special skill. In a later Grimm fairy tale there's a guy who can shoe a galloping horse while his brother can swing a sword so well that he can keep his head dry in a downpour.
How to model all of these fantastic feats in an RPG?
Previously I was thinking of having spell slots for the magical stuff (often nerfed in power down to the "summon mice" level) while also having NWPs (and non-weapon specialization and non-weapon masteries, often powered up to the "can run across a lake you're so damn fast") level. These would be able to be used whenever.
The more I think about it the more I think that this distinction might be artificial. There just doesn't seem to be a clear line between "sorcery" and "really good at something" in fairy tales so I'm not sure that it makes sense to have them in the rules.
So let the players learn different kinds of skills (summon ants, turn into a mouse, eat a dozen cows) and then have them all feed off of the same pool of bennies. If your pool of bennies has run dry then you can't do any magic or any amazing feats because you're too tired.
I'm wondering if this is elegant or a simplistic cop-out that makes everything too samey.
Also I'm thinking of having these bennies work like 4ed healing surges because I'm feeling heretical like that.
Will think about this and see if I want something along these lines or a more traditional OSR set-up with fairy tale-flavored spells and strong-ass NWPs.
Quote from: Daztur;887254Heretical Interlude
Took a long hike this morning at the break of dawn up a mountain past a hundred piles of meditative stones to a wizened five hundred year old tree outside an iron-shod gatehouse topped with winged tiger banners while listening to an audiobook of Russian fairy tales.
Got me thinking about things like the guy who can drink a lake or run to the end of a world in a day and how the border between the mundane and the fantastic is a moth-eaten rag in fairy tales, with the feats of sorcerers often seem more mundane than a random peasant's special skill. In a later Grimm fairy tale there's a guy who can shoe a galloping horse while his brother can swing a sword so well that he can keep his head dry in a downpour.
How to model all of these fantastic feats in an RPG?
Previously I was thinking of having spell slots for the magical stuff (often nerfed in power down to the "summon mice" level) while also having NWPs (and non-weapon specialization and non-weapon masteries, often powered up to the "can run across a lake you're so damn fast") level. These would be able to be used whenever.
The more I think about it the more I think that this distinction might be artificial. There just doesn't seem to be a clear line between "sorcery" and "really good at something" in fairy tales so I'm not sure that it makes sense to have them in the rules.
So let the players learn different kinds of skills (summon ants, turn into a mouse, eat a dozen cows) and then have them all feed off of the same pool of bennies. If your pool of bennies has run dry then you can't do any magic or any amazing feats because you're too tired.
I'm wondering if this is elegant or a simplistic cop-out that makes everything too samey.
Also I'm thinking of having these bennies work like 4ed healing surges because I'm feeling heretical like that.
Will think about this and see if I want something along these lines or a more traditional OSR set-up with fairy tale-flavored spells and strong-ass NWPs.
I agree completely with that logic, but you risk to end up labelled as a storygamer;).
Quote from: AsenRG;887714I agree completely with that logic, but you risk to end up labelled as a storygamer;).
When Wishing Still HelpedIt's not storygaming when Amber characters can create entire worlds, a good Neverending Story RPG would hand huge amounts of authorial fiat over to the players without being a storygame (http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-neverending-campaign-and-problem-of.html) and it's not a storygame if it helps for the characters in a fairy tale game to wish for things.
Also breaking with D&D has the advantage of letting me put in some stuff from my son's favorite board games so they'd be instantly recognizable for him in much the same way that OSR stuff is instantly recognizable for most gamers.
To dig into the details, one big organizing thought here is that you've got to write a rules for stuff you don't want the players to do. 0ed has a lot of combat rules but if the players rely on their combat prowess (rather than administering beat downs after cheating first) they're going to end up very dead. That applies to fairy tales as well but so does standard RPG skill rules. Except for maybe some VERY narrow specialties fairy tale characters never ever win because they're good at anything but rather because of cunning, luck, aid and their enemies being really stupid. In a fairy tale RPG, characters should win in the same sort of ways and a good way of doing that is making them pretty much suck at combat and most skill use. Let's hit it.
Players have three stats which start at 1d4:
-Strong: gives you your HPs (one for one) and is the basic physical stat.
-Smart: gives you your Proficiencies (one for one) and is the basic mental/fine motor control stat.
-Luck: gives you your Luck Points (one for one) and is your basic magical/charisma/willpower stat.
Combat would work pretty much like in D&D with armor being DR. So with starting characters having 1d4 HPs and 10 AC, swords that do 1d8 damage are terrifying. To hit people with the sword you'd add how Strong you are to a d20 roll and try to hit 10. Blunt weapons would still do 1 HP damage if you hit no matter how high the DR is.
For out of combat stuff, doing easy stuff would be automatic. Doing hard stuff you don't have a Proficiency in requires you add your stat to a d20 roll and try to hit 20 (or roll under your stat on a d20, same difference). As these stats start out at 1d4 this is intentionally punitive to keep people from relying on their stats to do stuff and forcing them to use cunning instead.
However, PCs would also have Proficiencies and Luck, those help out a lot.
Proficiencies would be very very narrow and would cover the weird niche abilities that seem to crop up in fairy tales such as being able to eat a dozen oxen or shoe a horse that's galloping or know whenever someone is lying to you, knowledge of magic (being able to make pacts with animals or being an ordained priest who can perform sacraments would both cost a proficiency). Each proficiency would have rules for how to use it, many would be automatic, some would require an easy roll and others would cost Luck, which leads us to...
Luck Points. These are basically MPs by another name but they'd be a bit broader than that since characters without any obviously magical Proficiencies would still be able to spend them, for example all of the fairy tale characters that we're told are "pious" have mountains of Luck but aren't sorcerers. What you could do with them would be include:
-Power those Proficiencies that use Luck Points as fuel. For example summoning an animal who owes you a favor would cost one Luck Point.
-Giving yourself 5ed-style Advantage for a roll, additional Luck Points would give you more d20s to roll and choose the highest of. This could be used when characters are choosing high door to open/which road to follow blindly.
-To wish/pray for things, which would be blind unfocused and unpredictable magic that the DM would be encouraged to twist.
-Claiming a hex as its King/Queen.
-To cement a relationship with someone, giving that relationship magical force.
-To use a magical thingie that someone else has given you (you can still use it without spending Luck but using magic without having Luck on your side is dangerous).
-To give people a chance (still unsure about how much of a chance) to weasel out of otherwise certain death and have something very bad happen instead.
-To recover HPs a bit like 4ed healing surges, but with much longer time intervals (in 4ed terms a "short rest" would be a night's sleep).
-Simply having a stack of unused luck points would reduce the frequency of hostile wilderness encounters (which is why all of those pure-hearted kids never get eaten by wild beasts).
-If you turn into a ghost, how powerful a ghost you turn into is determined by how many points of unused Luck you had when you died.
Stuff like starvation, exhaustion, sorrow and anguish would do Luck Point damage so having a lot of them represents determination.
Luck is powerful but it can be used in so many different ways that it'd be easy to exhaust so players would have to husband it carefully.
Luck Points and Hit Points wouldn't refresh with a simple night's rest, they'd require an extended period of time spend at home or in what Tolkien calls a "Homely House."
Luck Points lost of anguish and sorrow (often due to horrible things happening to people/critters that PCs have a Relationship with) wouldn't refresh with simple rest and neither would Luck Points used to maintain an ongoing effect.
Since Luck Points can be used in so many ways you'd have different characters using them differently and feeling quite distinct despite some pretty simple base mechanics. Pretty easy to have different stats translate into different fairy tale archetypes. Sorcerers would be mostly Smart with a bit of Lucky to fuel their power, your standard "fool of the world" fairy tale protagonist would dump everything into Lucky while a huntsman would be mostly Strong with some Smart and Lucky to back it up.
For advancement you'd need a number of XP equal to the next level of your stat to bump it up one. XP would be hard to come by.
Fairy Tale 33: Puss in Boots
Interestingly, this fairy tale doesn't appear in later editions of the Grimm collection because it (and a few other stories) are cribbed from Perrault (who got them from an Italian writer) rather than it coming from the German oral tradition.
I don't think I have to give much of a summary of the story here as it's pretty well known and this version doesn't cover much new ground. Just a few things I noticed:
-Originally the miller's son wants to make gloves out of his cat.
-The cat's first task is catching partridges by putting wheat in a sack so that they rush into a sack to eat it.
-The cat says that the partridges are a gift from his master the Count.
-Why does the cat go through the facade at the lake to get clothes for the miller's son when he already got enough money to buy clothes for the king by bringing him partridges?
-He makes the sorcerer's servants say that their master is the Count before he even bothers killing the sorcerer.
-The cat becomes the kingdom's prime minister.
What can we get from this one?
Polymorph self is good fairy tale magic
Especially with people swapping between multiple forms. Keeping it to animal forms helps limit its power but I guess PCs turning into rampaging elephants is a nice power boost.
Partible Inheritance
In fairy tales, property is split between the children and in old Germanic kingdoms when the king died his kingdom was split between them. This lead to constant civil wars with the kids trying to reunite the kingdom of course and is a good source of drama. Perhaps this is why kings send their sons of ridiculous quests, to thin the ranks a bit?
Passing for Noble
In a lot of these stories marrying a royal is the win condition for both male and female protagonists. Some characters do it honestly by performing amazing feats, in which case they meet massive resistance and are usually pressured into doing more feats and their future in-laws (and even spouses!) often attempt to murder them.
As in puss in boots, it's often a lot easier to simply fake nobility/royalty. This gives PCs a good incentive to burn through some gold to keep up appearances as appearing to be of a high social class is as helpful as it is expensive and it opens up a lot of chances for drama and comedy as some NPCs will want to test the PC's high status as in the princess and the pea. It isn't often that knowledge of etiquette can be the difference between life and death so take advantage of it.
Up next: Han's Trina
Quote from: Daztur;886313Well here's a third. Hope you like it: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=28659
Very much! Interestingly, my girlfriend teaches here in HK and has also started using RP techniques. She also agreed with a lot of what you had to say.
Fairy Tale 34: Han's Trina
Trina is really lazy and eats and sleeps all the time and doesn't work. So Han cuts her dress short while she is sleeping and when she goes outside she's surprised that her dress is so short so she wonders if she is herself. So she goes home and asks "is Trina there" and people reply "yup, she's here sleeping" because they assume that she's always sleeping so she decides that she isn't herself and leaves.
That's pretty damn stupid, even by fairy tale standards.
What can we do with this one?
Well in fairy tales identity is very important especially with people who get transformed into animals holding on to their identities and people (as in Puss in Boots) faking their way into a better position. I could see PCs pulling a con along these lines with them convincing an ogre that he's really a human who has been transformed or something along these lines. That fits with what I think would be a good dynamic in fairy tale games: very powerful NPCs who are dumb as bricks. That makes trickery a lot more appealing than combat which fits with how fairy tales operate.
The other point is the importance of marriage in fairy tales. In so many of them the main is securing a good marriage but here we have Hans weaseling out of a bad one. In traditional D&D the most important goal for characters is cold hard cash but in fairy tales a lot more focus is on people with a lot of stories having the goal be saving family members of marrying up rather than gold, although gold does figure as well.
That got me thinking about how you could work people into D&D's GP = XP system. I really like the GP = XP system because of the sort of behavior it encourages and how objective it is. The problem is people are a lot harder to pin down than gold coins. I poked around that before with treating humans as treasure according to their ransom value but let's expand that a bit.
All humans have a GP value. That GP value is how much you can ransom them for if you kidnap them. This number is a bit harder to pin down than counting up coins but not any more so than valuable artwork and similar treasure in traditional D&D. Because you can pin a GP value on people and GP = XP then it follows that you can gain XP in the following ways:
-Kidnapping people: people are worth GP so stealing them gets you XP. This gives both PCs and NPCs a reason to take prisoners rather than murdering everyone.
-Rescuing people: stealing a ruby worth 5,000 gp from an ogre's castle and rescuing a princess worth a ransom of 5,000 gp amount to the same thing: you're taking things of value so you should get the same XP for both.
-Marrying people: if you marry someone then they're "yours" so why not get XP from them? If you get married you get XP equal to the ransom value of your spouse. If your spouse's ransom value increases then you gain XP (if it decreases you don't lose anything but you don't gain anything either until it increases above the previous baseline). This does mean that marrying people, murdering them and then marrying more people is a great method of XP farming, hence Bluebeard.
-Increasing your status: you obviously own your own body so if you increase your own XP value then you get experience from that. Just getting a lot of gold doesn't really increase your ransom value (anyone kidnapping you can take your gold) but increasing your social status does, therefore if you find a way to worm yourself into a kingdom that'll give you a massive XP boost right there.
-Getting pets: players, especially kids, always love pets. The horse you own is as much treasure as the sword you own so make sure that players get XP according to the value of the pets that they get their hand on if they acquire them in interesting ways instead of just buying them.
Am thinking about working having children into this as well as that opens up some interesting adventures (the king I married is impotent, but screw that I need to get pregnant anyway, kids are great for XP!). Am thinking about how to include the strange desire of kings of have children all of one gender and if there can be any rules basis of this.
Now I just need a few tables for determining how much of a ransom people are worth and I'm good to go.
Up next: The Sparrow and His Four Children
Fairy Tale 35: The Sparrow and His Four Children
Let's make up for lost time!
Some asshole kids try to kill some baby sparrows for fun but a sudden windstorm blows them away. Their father isn't able to find his kids until quite a bit later in the year when he finally finds them and talks about how they've been surviving since then. Their father talks with them about the best way to survive and get food in various places.
Then the smallest and weakest sparrow speaks up and says that he's been hanging out in a church and that he doesn't need to be careful to avoid being eaten because God will watch out for him and that he doesn't need to worry about finding food because God will provide.
It's interesting how much religion gets stripped away in modern adaptions of fairy tales. It's so thorough that you don't even realize that it's gone until you run into a fairy tale like this that's basically about nothing but God and in a lot of stories simple piety matters more than the cunning we normally think of in fairy tales.
In fact if you really think of it, it's startling how little religion comes up in pop culture. In the young adult novels I teach my students I can't even remember the last time religion came up in any of them except for a short Easter service in The Bridge to Terabithia. It makes stuff like the Simpsons with the kids bored out of their skulls in church seem almost out of place in its uniqueness despite that being a pretty common part of childhood.
Don't think this is really an Evil Atheist Conspiracy so much as religion being a touchy enough subject that people just avoid it entirely and instead we get Hollywood Spirituality: "it doesn't matter what you have faith in or even if what you have faith in is true, just having faith is awesome, because all religions are based on entirely on faith, right?" which is just idiotic.
Interestingly, despite a lot of fairy tales assuming their modern forms in the wake of the Thirty Years War, denominations never seem to matter in fairy tales but simple faith and piety very much do. The problem with that is that succeeding at an adventure because your character was a good little boy and always listened to his parents is boring as fuck. But if the way of succeed at adventures is to always be a cunning ratbastard and never by being nice then that doesn't really fit with how fairy tales are presented.
Think the best way to make being pious actually be helpful is to look at NPCs. Often in D&D people with Good alignment are nice guys who won't try to kill you even if you act like a dick to them while people with Evil alignment will try to fuck you over no matter what, while Neutral PCs are rare and mostly just regular dudes. While in fairy tales it seems like a massive chunk of NPCs are Neutral and their modus operandi is to be incredibly helpful if they receive just a little kindness but they light you on fire and then piss on the ashes if you're just a tiny bit rude to them.
In general make how the NPCs treat the PCs be determined by PC behavior rather than NPC alignment.
In generally NPCs that are both incredibly grateful and touchy does a better job of rewarding in-genre good behavior than any kind of meta system. Just seed the random encounters with stuff like hideous beggars who are really sorcerers in disguise.
Up Next: The Little Magic Table, the Golden Donkey, and the Club in the Sack
Aside: the Fundamental Attribution Error
The Fundamental Attribution Error is a psychological term that means that people are stupid because when they think about their OWN behavior they think about the circumstances but when they think about other people's behavior they think about innate character traits. For example, "I shouted because I had a really bad day but HE shouted because he's an asshole."
In a lot of fiction the Fundamental Attribution Error seems to be baked in. The hero sometimes has misunderstandings or makes mistakes but the antagonist does bad things because they're evil. I can see this with the cartoons my son watches, "the bad guy is fighting the good guy because he's a bad guy." This gets baked into a lot of RPGs as well with things liked alignment systems.
The reason this way of thinking is such an error is that is discourages moral behavior. If good people are always going to be good it doesn't matter if you're a bit dickish to them, they're fundamentally good so you can still patch things over and if bad people are always going to be bad then being nice to them is for suckers.
What's interesting is that fairy tales do a really good job of avoiding this pervasive error. Again and again and again in fairy tales characters act in certain ways because of how they're treated, not because of any set characteristics. Think of all of the stories in which the hero is trapped in a cannibal's (or giant's or sorcerer's or whatever) house and then gets help from the cannibal's wife or mother or other character who's been there cooking the long pork for years. These aren't nice people, but they still respond well to kindness and help the people who are kind to them. Or the dwarf/beggar/old woman by the side of the road who responds to mild rudeness with lethal curses but showers magic items on people who give them a heel of bread.
Of course there pure heroes and thoroughly vile step-sisters but the characters that people meet on the road, the characters who really drive the story forward have their behavior determined by circumstances: namely if people treat them with kindness or not.
This works in RPGs as well, the more the behavior of NPCs is driven by circumstances rather than hard coded then the more player behavior matters, which is what these games are all about.
Good observation.
Quote from: Daztur;903489This works in RPGs as well, the more the behavior of NPCs is driven by circumstances rather than hard coded then the more player behavior matters, which is what these games are all about.
Side note: there's this weird, hard to describe in real world thing, working on some deeper level of reality, that makes people act in specific way towards each other. Call it "charisma", "presence", "attraction", "animal magnetism" and such, but it's there. We kind of know that, hence proverbial "beautiful people have it easier" and "sexy blondes don't need no brain". Pretty much everyone knows people they can't stomach for no apparent reason, and the other way around - assholes, whom you seem to always forgive and give 25th "2nd chance", just because.
RPG addresses this thing too. Plenty of mechanisms feature "how much I influence other people's hearts, minds and behavior" attribute or set of skills, not to mention mind-influencing magic and powers.
Unless properly dealt with they might act like "morality killers", a workaround of your idea, because
heck, with my CHA:20 I'm simply gonna say "sorry" if caught red-handed, and then everyone's gonna forgive me anyway.
Quote from: JesterRaiin;903508Good observation.
Side note: there's this weird, hard to describe in real world thing, working on some deeper level of reality, that makes people act in specific way towards each other. Call it "charisma", "presence", "attraction", "animal magnetism" and such, but it's there. We kind of know that, hence proverbial "beautiful people have it easier" and "sexy blondes don't need no brain". Pretty much everyone knows people they can't stomach for no apparent reason, and the other way around - assholes, whom you seem to always forgive and give 25th "2nd chance", just because.
RPG addresses this thing too. Plenty of mechanisms feature "how much I influence other people's hearts, minds and behavior" attribute or set of skills, not to mention mind-influencing magic and powers. Unless properly dealt with they might act like "morality killers", a workaround of your idea, because heck, with my CHA:20 I'm simply gonna say "sorry" if caught red-handed, and then everyone's gonna forgive me anyway.
Right the way charisma works in a lot of games can short circuit that, which isn't necessarily unrealistic.
What I was thinking about is that in a lot of modules there are all kind of encounters with critters who are hostile pretty much no matter what and often try to pretend to need help in order to get you to leave your guard down. But the thing is not even the biggest assholes in the world are so universally hostile. Not even Manson is knifing everyone he meets there should be ways to get positive interactions with all but the most diabolical NPCs even if doing so isn't easy.
For Charisma my idea was that the old D&D model works well, charisma helps determine NPCs' initial attitude but not much beyond that. So maybe the sorcerer who looks like a beggar tells the guy with 20 cha "for a few crumbs I will give you the benefit of the wisdom I learned at the feet of Severard of the Seven Circles" and tells the guy with 4 cha "gimmie eats, ya ugly bastard, I'm hungry and it looks like you've had plenty to eat!" but in both cases he curses you if you don't give him food and gives you help if you do, it's just a lot easier for the 20 cha guy to get a handle on what's going on.
Upthread I go on about having social mechanics be based on haggling. NPCs have Desires that describe the things they want. In order to get the NPCs to do stuff the PCs have to give them things that they Desire and avoiding going against those Desires. Desires could be anything from "true love" to "human flesh" to "the moon" depending on the NPC.
Quote from: Daztur;903511What I was thinking about is that in a lot of modules there are all kind of encounters with critters who are hostile pretty much no matter what and often try to pretend to need help in order to get you to leave your guard down. But the thing is not even the biggest assholes in the world are so universally hostile. Not even Manson is knifing everyone he meets there should be ways to get positive interactions with all but the most diabolical NPCs even if doing so isn't easy.
I agree with you when RPG application of the concept is discussed. 100% support, thumbs up & stuff.
However (ah yes, the inevitable), I'd like to say I think you're damn optimistic man, who has a lot of faith in the mankind. ;)
During my voyages I've met people, who were pretty much hostile and angry all the time, no matter what. Sure, they had their own private safe space where they suspended their violent behavior, or reacted positively towards certain people, but aside of that - pure anger, hate, often rage. Most interesting thing, while some had some sort of "explanation" as to why they acted like they did, others were just angry for no apparent reason.
Quote from: JesterRaiin;903516I agree with you when RPG application of the concept is discussed. 100% support, thumbs up & stuff.
However (ah yes, the inevitable), I'd like to say I think you're damn optimistic man, who has a lot of faith in the mankind. ;)
During my voyages I've met people, who were pretty much hostile and angry all the time, no matter what. Sure, they had their own private safe space where they suspended their violent behavior, or reacted positively towards certain people, but aside of that - pure anger, hate, often rage. Most interesting thing, while some had some sort of "explanation" as to why they acted like they did, others were just angry for no apparent reason.
Certainly. But still there's a wide range of ways in which their dickishness can manifest. They're not going to automatically be taking a swing at everyone they meet. In RPG terms there's a big difference between someone who shouts at the PCs and someone who takes out a knife and tries to stab them.
Fairy Tale 36: The Little Magic Table, the Golden Donkey, and the Club in the Sack
There are two versions of this story included. In the first one a son feeds his father's goat but the goat tells the father he didn't get fed (stupid goats) so the father beats the son and drives him off. The same thing happens to the other two sons. Then the father feeds the goat and the goat lies to HIM about being fed so he realizes he's been an idiot so he shaves the goat's head for some reason. The shaven donkey looks so weird that it scares off bears until a bee stings it.
Meanwhile the three sons have worked hard and gotten some magic items: a table that produces food (which an innkeeper steals), a donkey that shits gold (which an innkeeper steals), and a club that smashes you in the face (which an innkeeper steals and gets smashed in the face). The third son then recovers the table and donkey.
The second version of mostly the same with no donkey (father sends his kids into the world with a penny and a pancake) and a moral about how going to parties is bad is tacked on.
What can we get from this one?
Goats are Assholes
Stupid lying goats. http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-goat-had-notable-horn-between-his.html
In general the importance of talking animals to give a story a fairy tale vibe can't be overstated, just look at the Hobbit compared to the Lord of the Rings. In general starting with the familiar ("it's a goat!") and then adding on the weird works a lot better than just going straight to gibbering tentacles as it gives something for the weirdness to be hung onto.
Magic Items
So we've got three magic items here:
-Table that produces food.
-Donkey that shits gold.
-Club that smashes you in the face.
So cursed items are yet another D&Dism that has a lot of precedent in folklore. The other two are great treasure as well, especially considering how useful an infinite supply of food and drink is if you're tracking encumbrance.
PCs and the Status Quo
The gold shitting donkey raises a very important point about campaign structure. If the PCs get their hands on a donkey that shits gold then why bother to go on any more adventures? You've got everything you need right up your donkey's butt. And this doesn't just apply to donkey poo, it applies to any other situation in which the PCs can get their hands on a passive income stream, especially if the money in that income stream gives them XP under GP = XP rules.
A lot of DMs wouldn't include magic items like this donkey, the goose that lays golden eggs and draupnir (Odin's gold-dripping arm ring) despite them having a lot of folkloric basis since they really shift the relationship of the PCs with the setting away from them being lean gold-hungry adventurers. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I like game design that organically changes how the game is played as it progresses rather than the late game being the same as the early game with bigger numbers so how do gold-shitting donkeys fit in with that?
Since I already linked to one D&D With Pornstars post I might as well do it again: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/01/sandboxes-and-roguish-work-ethic.html and http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/01/rogues-and-sandboxes-basic-edition.html
Although it's not how Zak phrases it my main take-away from those articles is you have some PCs that are fundamentally at odds with the status quo of the setting and that those PCs are proactive and good for sandboxes because they'll initiate conflict with the setting. These PCs are often rogues in the Sword & Sorcery vein whose main problem with the status quo is that there is so much gold in the world that is not in their pockets but they can be freedom fighters in a totalitarian nightmare or survivors in a Post-Apocalyptic setting just as well. However if PCs are basically OK with the status quo of the setting then these characters will be reactive as the GM has to feed them threats to the status quo in order to get them to do stuff rather then them initiating conflict by themselves.
How does this apply to fairy tale characters? Well starting characters are very much NOT OK with the status quo, they're poor smucks in a nasty world (the aftermath of the 30 Years War in Germany seems a good approximation of the setting of these stories and that was not a good time to be a poor nobody) who want to be rich, famous, comfortable and, if possible, royal. They're not going out defending the kingdom from threats or helping strangers in need, they're trying to worm their way into royalty and riches.
However after a PC becomes king or gets a gold-shitting donkey then things change. It's good to be king (or to have a gold-shitting donkey) so at that point the PCs is fine with the status quo and starts to defend it. Rather than wandering around poking holes in the setting the PC is tied down defending what they have and spends more and more of their time playing wack-a-mole against an array of threats. The PC has becomes more and more reactive as they gain status and the nature of the game changes accordingly which gives things a good "heavy is the head that wears the crown" vibe. So why not have a few adventures about the PCs defending their gold-shitting donkey against various thieves while they try to stockpile as much gold as possible and feed it as much as they can before it dies or gets lost. Sounds like a good chance of pace. Would love to see what kind of creativity PCs could unleash when given the task of "defend the donkey at all costs."
Up next: The Tablecloth, the Knapsack, the Cannon Hat, and the Horn
Fairy Tale 37: The Tablecloth, the Knapsack, the Cannon Hat, and the Horn
This one features some incredibly PC behavior. Three brothers are poor so they go to Spain for some reason. First they find a silver mountain so the first brother takes a bag of silver and goes home. Then they find a gold mountain and the second brother fills his bag with gold and goes home. The third brother keeps on going and gets lost in a forest where he finds a food-summoning tablecloth.
He trades the food-summoning tablecloth for a soldier-summoning bag. Then he summons some soldiers and has them bring back his tablecloth. He does the same thing and gets a cannonball-shooting hat and a horn of blasting.
When he returns home his (now) rich brothers don't want to hang out with him anymore so he summons some soldiers to beat them. This annoys the king but the third brother just stages a coup d'etat and claims the princess by force. This annoys the princess so she plots against him and tricks him out of one and then two of his magic items but he's still able to kick butt with his horn of blasting.
What can we get from this one? The princess being dissatisfied with her protagonist husband and plotting against him isn't new but it's good to remember as this comes up a lot in these older fairy tales but I don't remember it appearing in any modern adaptations and it's good to remember that it's an established fairy tale trope as it's great adventure fodder: "you've slain the dragon and married the princess and boy is she PISSED." In a lot of ways some of these first edition fairy tales read as better deconstructions of the genre than some of those painfully clever modern "re-imaginings."
PCs Being Rat Bastards is In-Genre
Pretty dickish behavior for the hero to barter his magic items and then take them back by force but we can see here that that sort of PC behavior is perfectly in keeping with old school fairy tales before they were sanitized (and this story was indeed removed from later editions of the Grimm fairy tales).
Magic Items
Well the food-summoning tablecloth is basically the same as the food-summoning table in the last story but the cannonball-summoning hat (you turn it and a whole battery-worth of cannonballs just shot), the soldier-summoning bag (which seems ridiculously overpowered since there's no limit on how many you can summon) and the horn of blasting are new.
Magic Item Shops
No magic item shops in the fairy tales but as we can see here you can definitely barter your magic items for other ones. Having NPCs then immediately attack you to get their magic items back makes perfect sense as we can see here.
Encumbrance Matters
The first two brothers find entire mountains of gold and silver but can only bring one backpack-load back. Why? Well gold and silver are freaking heavy. Encumbrance is a great way to lay out massive treasure troves without having the party get infinite gold. Makes for good gameplay too as in "How much gold are you willing to carry? Enough to not slow you down at all? Enough to slow you down to a painful stagger? How much food are you going to throw out to make more room for gold? All of it? Really?"
For kids playing I think a CRPG-style slot based system works best as it's very visual and intuitive.
Up next: Mrs. Fox
Fairy Tale 38: Mrs. Fox
There's two different versions of this story.
In the first a nine-tailed fox pretends to be dead in order to test his wife. While the cat maid cooks warm beer (beer-based soup or mashing grains?) his wife cries her eyes out. Foxes come to court her and she sends them all away until one comes with nine tails who she accepts and has her husband's body chucked out the window. Then the fox wakes up and attacks the wedding feast and chases everyone away.
In the second story the fox really is dead but his wife will accept only someone who has a pointed nose and a red coat like him.
What really surprised me here was to see a nine-tailed fox in such an old European story. They're famous here in Asia but I had no idea they also appeared in Europe so long ago. Anyone know the story behind this?
What can we get from this one?
The Suspicious Husband
It really seems quite unfair of Mr. Fox to be angry at his wife for not remaining faithful to him after faking his own death. Putting in some similarly irrationally jealous characters into a setting could make for interesting plot hooks. Perhaps ghosts could be jealous as well?
Just like the last story we have a complication to hit PCs with after they think they've sealed an advantageous marriage.
The Picky Widow
Similarly having a widow who will only marry someone who reminds her of her deceased husband in a very specific manner could make for an interesting plot hook, especially if the widow is rich or otherwise a good catch. Could call for some interesting investigation.
Up next: The Elves
This one has two sub-stories, the famous one about the shoemaker and a more obscure one about a servant girl.
Fairy Tale 39: The Elves
This fairy tale includes a few stories about elves.
The first one is the story of the shoemaker. Elves make shoes for him at night and he sells them to buy ever more leather and becomes rich. One night he stays up to see who is making the shoes and sees naked little men. His wife says they should make clothes for them, which they do. They set out the tiny clothes and spy on the elves again the next night and the elves are happy to have the new clothes and leave and never come back.
In the second story a girl is called on to be a godmother for an elf child and sees all of the luxury in the hollow hills. After spending three days there she finds that a year has passed.
In the third a woman gets a changeling who is annoying. She makes it laugh by boiling water in eggshells (why is that funny?) because that breaks a changeling’s power and so the elves give her real child back.
Short little snippets rather than fully formed stories, what can we get from these ones?
The Passage of Time
One of noism’s blog posts at monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com provides rules for time passing at different speeds in different places. It’s determined randomly so three days in the elf king’s hall could be a month outside or a year or a century. That’s well worth stealing. The opposite happens in Narnia style overworld dimensions so that a lifetime in there could be a moment in the real world. Often in 3.5ed the characters would go from level 1 to 9 in just a few weeks of real time which we never really thought about, would be interesting to have NPCs react to PCs returning a few days later as grizzled veterans of world-shattering power when everyone remembers them as kids.
Neutrality Shouldn’t Be Boring
Neutrality shouldn’t be the most boring alignment but it often is in D&D. Here in fairy tales we often see neutrality as extreme reciprocity (give me a crust of bread and I’ll make you a king, be mildly rude and I’ll make you wish you were dead) which makes for interesting stories without having any real benevolent or malevolence to it. Here we see a different kind of neutrality: operating according to rules that have nothing to do with human morality. The shoemaker doesn’t do anything good to deserve elf helpers and he doesn’t do anything bad to the elves to make them desert him (he just makes them clothes), they just operate according to rules he doesn’t understand.
Good fairy tale-style elves should be bound by a thick weave of laws that players can use to their advantage if they figure them out. In fact, that really reminds me of something.
Free Men on the Elf King’s Land
Sovereign citizens and their fellow travellers are a fascinating bunch of nut bars who hold that the laws that everyone follows are invalid because of humans are technically boats, or capital letters don’t count, or tassels on flags make everything nautical or other crazy reasons. They believe that if you know how the law really works then you can legally not pay any money you don’t feel like. The really crazy part about all of this is their theory of how the government operates: the state is an evil illegitimate conspiracy that is deceiving the people but at the same time if you say the magic legalese words it’ll leave you alone and let you not pay taxes and drive without a license. That combination of malevolence and strict adherence to the letter of the law just doesn’t sound human. But you know what it does sound like? It sounds like elves.
Elves are governed by a long series of laws that they are incapable of breaking. They have no authority over roads. They are allowed to punish poachers. They must say “mayhaps” whenever attempting to deceive. They must ask permission to enter a dwelling. They cannot hard anyone whose food they have eaten. And on and on and on. Elves, no matter how malevolent they are and how much they hate you, must follow these rules. But they can twist them. They can send deer into your path in the hopes that you “poach” them, they can tempt you from the safe path and they can palm the food you offer them. But if you keep your wits about you and you know elven laws you will not be harmed.
What are some other good elven laws?
Up next: The Robber Bridegroom
Fairy Tale 40: The Robber Bridegroom
A princess is engaged to marry a prince and he keeps on bugging her to visit him in the forest and she keeps on making excuses. Eventually he ties ribbons to all of the trees along the way so she has no excuse about not being able to find her way.
When she gets there she finds an old woman who tells her that her fiance is a cannibal and that she should hide. She does and her fiance comes back with her grandmother who he butchers to each. While trying to get one of her rings off he ends up chopping off her finger which flies across the room to where the princess is hiding.
Later the princess sneaks home (following the ribbons on the trees again) and when her marriage comes around she tells the story of what happened to her as if it was a dream and then whips out the finger as proof. When that happens her fiance makes a break for it and gets arrested and executed.
Overall a good story, if a bit bare bones. IIRC this story gets fleshed out a bit in later editions so that the souls of the robber bridegroom's previous victims take the form of caged birds. This is another story with a very active princess as a protagonist which makes whining about how fairy tale princesses are too passive seem that much more annoying.
What can we get from this one?
The importance of paths
We've talked about this before but it bears repeating: unless you have a marked path or a supernatural guide you WILL get lost in a supernatural forest, no matter how good you are at woodcraft. The wild wood defies mapping.
Cannibalism again
Just what is the attraction of cannibalism in setting terms? If you're willing to go through all of the bother of setting up an engagement with a princess it seems rather inefficient to throw that away for a few pounds of meat. What kind of benefit of cannibalism could explain this in game terms.
Allies in the camp of the enemy
This reminds me a bit of the story of Baba Yaga in which the protagonist befriends EVERYTHING in Baga Yaga's house. There are a lot of similar stories in which the protagonist is saved due to the villain's mother or wife or what have you taking pity on them. Something important to mention in adventure design: just because someone lives with a villain doesn't mean they're automatically evil. Even in the home of the most vicious villain a clever PC has a chance to cultivate alliances.
Up next: Herr Korbes
Quote from: Daztur;908338Free Men on the Elf King's Land
Sovereign citizens and their fellow travellers are a fascinating bunch of nut bars who hold that the laws that everyone follows are invalid because of humans are technically boats, or capital letters don't count, or tassels on flags make everything nautical or other crazy reasons. They believe that if you know how the law really works then you can legally not pay any money you don't feel like. The really crazy part about all of this is their theory of how the government operates: the state is an evil illegitimate conspiracy that is deceiving the people but at the same time if you say the magic legalese words it'll leave you alone and let you not pay taxes and drive without a license. That combination of malevolence and strict adherence to the letter of the law just doesn't sound human. But you know what it does sound like? It sounds like elves.
Elves are governed by a long series of laws that they are incapable of breaking. They have no authority over roads. They are allowed to punish poachers. They must say "mayhaps" whenever attempting to deceive. They must ask permission to enter a dwelling. They cannot hard anyone whose food they have eaten. And on and on and on. Elves, no matter how malevolent they are and how much they hate you, must follow these rules. But they can twist them. They can send deer into your path in the hopes that you "poach" them, they can tempt you from the safe path and they can palm the food you offer them. But if you keep your wits about you and you know elven laws you will not be harmed.
What are some other good elven laws?
I like the sovereign citizen analogy for elflaw. I remember reading somewhere - I can't find it now - that seeing totalitarian regimes as rule-bound is incorrect, and their defining feature is actually their arbitrariness, not their strictness. By contrast, the reason that the sovereign citizen movement has some appeal is that our constitutional democracies frequently do look like they obey incoherent and irrational laws.
But just like sovereign citizens are far more interesting than governments, I find the humans who have to wrangle with elflaw far more interesting than the elves themselves. Perhaps a more fruitful question than "what are some elven laws?" is "how do humans live under elven law?"
Quote from: Sanglorian;908576I like the sovereign citizen analogy for elflaw. I remember reading somewhere - I can't find it now - that seeing totalitarian regimes as rule-bound is incorrect, and their defining feature is actually their arbitrariness, not their strictness. By contrast, the reason that the sovereign citizen movement has some appeal is that our constitutional democracies frequently do look like they obey incoherent and irrational laws.
But just like sovereign citizens are far more interesting than governments, I find the humans who have to wrangle with elflaw far more interesting than the elves themselves. Perhaps a more fruitful question than "what are some elven laws?" is "how do humans live under elven law?"
You're right about the behavior the laws inspire being more important than the laws themselves. Let me tell you about cows.
I run D&D with my students every so often and because I only have so much time I give them pregens. I've stocked these pregens with all kinds of equipment over the years but the most memorable item, above and beyond weird magic items, as been "a cow."
Have had them drive cows down hallways to check for traps, push them off ledges at ghouls, use them for cover while reloading crossbows and feed them to monsters to buy them time to escape. A cow itself isn't interesting but it can inspire interesting behavior.
Setting elements are like that too. It's more important for a setting to provide tools for the players to do interesting things with than for it to be interesting by itself.
For the Shrouded Land setting that we worked on a huge part of the setting was institutionalized rules lawyering around magical laws and curses which gave it a mad Alice in Wunderland feeling I like a lot. For this I'm not so sure that fits, would rather have a setting in which the players can figure out ways to rules lawyer rather than have a culture in which that's already baked in.
So I need laws that are like cows.
That means "big" enough to obviously impact people and with obvious uses and ways for both PCs and asshole elves to rules lawyer them without any one obvious course of action.
Looking at it this way "stay on the path" is a bad law since it doesn't give many ways for PCs to twist it you've just gotta stay on the path, no real room for creativity.
How about "those who steal the Elf King's water shall forfeit their soul." Elves can try to trick PCs into getting their pants wet in the Elf King's river and PCs can feed magic spring water to their dog (and recover it later) without having to worry because dogs don't have souls. Having organized dog caravans and businesses in place to get the dogs puke the water out and then strain it out from half-digested kibbles would be plenty weird (and perfect for The Shrouded Lands) but I would rather leave it open for the PCs to be the first to figure that out.
Let's see what else works like that:
-"They who rest their heads on the Elf King's land shall not awake for a thousand days and one." (PCs had better bring hammocks)
-"Elves may not bring the King's beasts to harm without his leave." (live rabbit shields?)
-"Elves may not refuse any request of one who bests them in battle." (rules lawyering about what constitutes a battleand standard genie wish trickery along with elves doing things like offering something minor in hopes that the human asks for not not knowing they can ask for anything)
As far as totalitarian states being more arbitrary and LESS strict about rules is really true. I can see that even in South Korea. I remember my wife telling me that of course the TSA would make an exception to the rule about bringing iquids through airport security because they were kiddie juice boxes and kids need to drink. She was really confused she couldn't talk her way out of it.
The weird mix of malevolence, dishonesty and law abiding that the Soveriegn Citizens seem to believe that the government engages in isn't human. It's not even Jean Valjean. He never tried to entrap people by decieving people about laws or tried to hide the real nature of the law.
Kind of reminds me of Anti-PKs in really old MMORPGs (bring back precasting!). They didn't want to be aggressors since the game would punish them for that so they'd do things like jump into other people's AoE spells so that the game would treat them as the victim. That kind of malevolence mixed with exploiting technicalities seems positively elvin.
Quote from: Daztur;908505Fairy Tale 40: The Robber Bridegroom
Love that one. :D My mom used to tell me one of its variants as a spooky story when I was a kid. One Halloween she came to my first-grade class and told it, creepy voices included, and all the other kids shit their pants. It was the best.
Elflaw taboos might mesh well with having jerky sorcerers in your setting. Magical rituals could involve breaking taboos, like gathering flowers on an elf-mound. Breaking a taboo is dangerous, but sorcerers need those flowers, so they kidnap innocent young folk to do the gathering for them.
Quote from: Dumpire;908669Love that one. :D My mom used to tell me one of its variants as a spooky story when I was a kid. One Halloween she came to my first-grade class and told it, creepy voices included, and all the other kids shit their pants. It was the best.
Elflaw taboos might mesh well with having jerky sorcerers in your setting. Magical rituals could involve breaking taboos, like gathering flowers on an elf-mound. Breaking a taboo is dangerous, but sorcerers need those flowers, so they kidnap innocent young folk to do the gathering for them.
Yeah, it's a good one. One thing that's not coming through in my summaries is just show bare bones the narration is in this first edition of the Grimm stories. The stereotypical fairy tale wordiness is completely absent.
Unlike in later editions in this version she doesn't mark her path by scattering seed that grow (which is a nice image), there are no bird cages and for some reason the girl is a princess rather than a commoner. The "it's only a dream" gambit with the finger is the real centerpiece though and that stays throughout.
For the taboos one idea I had was that elves were the angels that stayed neutral when Satan revolted against God and were exiled to the Earth. They are bound to obey divine law but seek to weasel out of it to screw with people but divine law doesn't seem twisty enough for fairy tale elves.
Here's the stuff we've come across in the first 40 stories.
Fairy Tale Inventory
Magical Acts
-Turning people into frogs.
-Turning frogs into people by keeping your promises to said frogs.
-Taking living people to heaven.
-Spending 12 years not talking in order to break a curse.
-Making a cursed stream come out of the ground that causes people who drink it to turn into deer.
-Illusions that make someone look like someone else.
-Hugging a ghost to return it to life. Waving a sword over a ghost also seems to work.
-Crying healing blindness.
-Stoking people's temptations/making lettuce addictive?
-Getting strawberries in winter.
-Spitting gold coins whenever you talk.
-Making someone more beautiful/ugly.
-Blessing someone with marriage to a king.
-Cursing someone by making it so clothes don't warm them in winter.
-Cursing someone with a miserable death.
-Human ghosts possessing ducks.
-Preserving food etc. from the elements.
-Cause fear.
-Summoning birds, fish, etc. to help you and forming pacts with various species.
-Boot-based divination.
-Possessing a clothes-producing tree upon your death.
-Cursing your children so they turn into ravens.
-Using a person's ring to return them to their true shape.
-Eating someone's food to gain power over them.
-Using your finger bone to open doors.
-Establishing a threshold keeps out uninvited guests such as wolves.
-Making a circle of protection against evil vs. the devil and purifying self with tears.
-Successfully denying a bargain three times renders it null and void.
-Polymorph self.
Magical Creatures
-Many, many kinds of talking animals.
-Subterranean elf.
-Gardening elf in tower.
-Three little elves in a house in a forest who have winter strawberries.
-The Virgin Mary.
-God.
-Spectral(?) black cats and dogs.
-Guilty ghost.
-Cannibalistic witches.
-Animals possessed by human ghosts (usually birds).
-Wish-granting flounder.
-Unicorns that "damage fish."
-Stupid giant brothers.
-Giants that challenge people to contests of strength.
-Scary giant boars.
-Mother Holle, the avatar of frost and winter whose feather bed creatures snow when shaken out.
-Cannibalistic sun and moon.
-Glass mountain that is home to a dwarf and "lord ravens."
-Death the boatman to heaven and/or hell.
-Monstrous pigs.
-Little men of the forest.
-The Devil and his mom.
-Clever talking cats.
-Asshole lying goats.
-Shoemaking elves.
-Annoying changeling kids whose power can only be broken if you make them laugh.
Magical Items
-Vorpal knife.
-Key to the doors of heaven.
-Chimney that constantly drops skulls and other body parts.
-Annoying bed that runs around.
-Magical(?) scissors that let you cut things open without waking them up.
-Lilies that are actually your brothers so if you pick them your brothers turn to birds and stay that way unless you stop talking for 12 years.
-A white snake that if you eat it grants you the temporary ability to talk with animals.
-A singing bone that tells of its owner's murder when played.
-Food-producing table/tablecloth.
-Gold-shitting donkey.
-Club that hits you in the face.
-Bag of infinite soldiers.
-Cannonball-shooting hat.
-Horn of blasting.
Magical Locations
-Heaven and its many rooms.
-Harmless hats and dogs.
-Fairy's lettuce garden.
-Cookie house.
-The Tree of Life (which has apples).
-A well that takes you to a microcosm of the world were even tiny acts can have a big impact on the moral realm.
-Roads through the forest that protect you from wolves.
-River that divides the mortal realm from heaven/hell.
-Magic trees that heal you if you hug them.
-Mountains of gold and silver.
-Elven halls where time passes differently.
Trained Skills
-Iron heart-band installation and removal (necessary to prevent hearts from bursting with grief).
-Making your voice softer by eating chalk.
-Animal languages.
-Being nimble.
Misc Nifty Stuff
-Children being kidnapped at birth by the Virgin Mary and raised in Heaven.
-Kings constantly marrying mute girls they find in the forest.
-Serial disappearance of royal children at birth leading to accusations of cannibalism.
-Crazy kind saying that he'll kill his 12 sons if he has a daughter instead of a thirteenth son.
-Polymorphed creatures do not age.
-To break a spell you don't need to just kill someone, you need to kill them in a way that destroys their spirit.
-The palace-industrial complex.
-Lots of inhuman monsters want to eat people, perhaps to help give them the semblance of humanity.
-The threat of starvation as a way to kick off a sandbox campaign.
-Taking three (the third time you try something you get advantage if you failed the first two times and disadvantage if you succeeded the first two times). Also applies to stuff like three brothers trying the same thing.
-Ravens really really love horse meat.
-Saving throws vs. anguish.
-Failed suitors get executed.
-Lots of rings getting thrown into the ocean for some reason.
-Incredibly ornate crowns/thrones. For example a three-yard diamond crown or a two mile high throne.
-If you hide your humble origins from your wife she's try to get your in-laws to murder you in your sleep.
-Terrifyingly impressionable children.
-Judges using clever tests.
-Butchers being scary dudes.
-Deals with the Devil (he often tricks you into selling your kids).
-Girl walking around with her cut off hands slung over her back.
-Idiot NPCs who take everything literally and NPCs so stupid that they can be tricked into believing that they're not themselves.
-Passing as noble is difficult as you will be tested.
-Widow who only wants to marry someone who is similar to her husband in seemingly arbitrary ways.
-Cannibal robbers.
-There is always someone kindhearted in the camp of even the greatest villain. Always.
Fairy Tale 41: Herr Korbes
A rooster makes a wagon that's pulled by mice and gives a cat a lift. Same goes for a millstone, egg, duck, pin and needle.
They go to Herr Korbes house where the cat throws ashes in his face, the duck splashes water in his face, the egg breaks itself in his eyes, the pin and needle prick him and the millstone crushes his head.
Seems like a rather pointless little story, more of a convoluted "...walk into the bar" joke more than anything.
The only thing I can really get out of this one is that a lot of the small scale fairy tale magic of the "I summon a fish!" variety can be really useful if applied correctly. Summoning spells often get used as more disposable cannon fodder than anything (perhaps because of the short duration?) but they can be incredibly useful if applied correctly.
Up next: the Godfather
Quote from: Daztur;908805For the taboos one idea I had was that elves were the angels that stayed neutral when Satan revolted against God and were exiled to the Earth. They are bound to obey divine law but seek to weasel out of it to screw with people but divine law doesn't seem twisty enough for fairy tale elves.
Divine law could be pretty twisty! When you think of how weird some depictions of angels are, and how arbitrary parts of angelic and godlike behaviour are ...
Alternatively, the elves could be enforcing their memory of divine law, which over all these thousands of years could be looking pretty sketchy - full of mondegreens and anachronisms and mispellings. See for example the (unlikely) theory that the Qur'an is not written in Arabic at all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syro-Aramaic_Reading_of_the_Koran), but in Syro-Aramaic, and people coming across it then tried to read it as if it were Arabic, and that explains its confusing elements. Perhaps the elves' records of divine law are written in a language related to, but not, Elfish, and it's one that elves don't speak.
Especially twisty if you don't have an elf-calendar handy. No eating unleavened bread during elf-Passover, no working during the elf-Sabbath, etc.
Now you guys are making me want to break out Leviticus and write up all of the more obscure laws for the elves to enforce. That would fit with these fairy tales being far more explicitly Christian than modern versions but then they never do give a crap about the ins and outs of theology (for example, IIRC there is never any mention of Protestants vs. Catholics).
This would net us weirdly Jewish elves, which I can never recall seeing before. Hell, even dwarves are very rarely Jewish these days, Tolkien's were very obviously based on Jewish stereotypes with a Norse coat of paint but that almost never comes through in modern versions of dwarves, not even vaguely.
Of course these elves would be very very different from actual Jewish people in that they don't care about or respect divine law at all, they're just bound by it and looking for ways to weasel out of it to screw over people.
Simplest way would be to break out the Ten Commandments and have them mess with people who take the lord's name in vain as people tend to actually know what those are.
Quote from: Daztur;908338Fairy Tale 39: The Elves
This fairy tale includes a few stories about elves.
The first one is the story of the shoemaker. Elves make shoes for him at night and he sells them to buy ever more leather and becomes rich. One night he stays up to see who is making the shoes and sees naked little men. His wife says they should make clothes for them, which they do. They set out the tiny clothes and spy on the elves again the next night and the elves are happy to have the new clothes and leave and never come back.
The shoemaker doesn't do anything good to deserve elf helpers and he doesn't do anything bad to the elves to make them desert him (he just makes them clothes), they just operate according to rules he doesn't understand.
While your conclusions are interesting and worth exploring, I'm afraid the reason isn't hidden in obscure sets of laws.
It's in all likelihood just a precaution not to treat your hired help too nicely, lest they leave when they get everything they wanted in the first place;).
Quote from: Daztur;909467Now you guys are making me want to break out Leviticus and write up all of the more obscure laws for the elves to enforce. That would fit with these fairy tales being far more explicitly Christian than modern versions but then they never do give a crap about the ins and outs of theology (for example, IIRC there is never any mention of Protestants vs. Catholics).
Not a bad idea at all:D!
Wow! Just finished reading through the thread, there's some really great stuff in here!
Quote from: VommoV;992961Wow! Just finished reading through the thread, there's some really great stuff in here!
Welcome to theRPGsite!