Hexmas: The Gingerbread Village

It's been a while since I posted anything on this blog. Part of that is because I haven't had the time or energy to write much, and part of it is that I've run through the material I had prepared for ongoing projects like The Saga of the Ortegids and don't have anything to fill the spots I would ordinarily be using for that content. Regrettably, this means that I've been behind the curve on the blogosphere, and that means it was only just now that I discovered Hexmas, Prismatic Wasteland's challenge to make a community-sourced Christmas-themed hexcrawl. That means that I'm jumping in far later than I would like to be doing so, and up against the deadline

But I like the idea, dammit, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let an opportunity like this pass me by. A couple years ago, I made a post about how there is a glaring lack of Christmas-themed adventures inspired by E.T.A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and this gives me the perfect excuse. I was going to do a different post today, but that can wait.

The Gingerbread Village

North: House of the Kringles

Northwest: The Grumpus

West: Candy Cane Forest

Nestled at the foot of a snow-crested mountain, amidst a grove of pines, there lies a village of gingerbread. The modest settlement is ringed by a fence of candy canes (harvested from the forest to the west), and the buildings are made from gingerbread, decorated in peppermints and frosting. The people of this village, too, belong to a race of gingerbread folk, small in stature and similar in form to the domiciles they inhabit. The gingerbread folk are usually quiet and content to bide their time peacefully, but recently, their tranquility has been threatened by the coming of a threat from the mountain - the man-eating giant Sweettooth.

The village is a simple and self-sufficient one. Most buildings are modest family homes, but there is an inn, the Royal Icing, that will shelter travelers and offer them a stiff pint of the local specialty, ginger ale. Besides the inn, the most conspicuous building in town is the house of the mayor, Mr. Adrak, a luxurious gingerbread mansion that sits amidst a garden of candy canes and gumdrops the size of trees and bushes.

Or, at least, it was, before Sweettooth last struck about two days ago, smashing the roof under a giant rock and carrying away a few of Adrak's servants. Now, the roof of the mansion is caved in, and gingerbread men are working around the clock to clear away debris and stick the roof back together using icing. The mansion has been vacated since the attack, and Adrak is now staying at the inn while he waits for his home to be repaired. His demeanor has grown bitter since the attack (even if his flavor hasn't), and he demands that something must be done about Sweettooth before any other gingerbread men are lost!

If the PCs enquire about Sweettooth, the townspeople will direct them toward the house of the town doctor, Dr. Kolobok. The doctor is currently tending to Adrak's butler, Sir Peppercake, a well-mannered gingerbread man with a handlebar mustache made of icing who was in the mansion when Sweettooth attacked but was lucky enough to escape with his life. Alas, Dr. Kolobok only knows how to treat gingerbread folk, and has no understanding of the physiology of flesh-and-blood people. He will not be able to heal or cure any ailments the PCs face, but will find them quite interesting.

If the party seeks an audience with Sir Peppercake, he will describe his terrifying encounter with the giant, who grabbed three gingerbread men and a gingerbread maid and mercilessly devoured them in front of him! Peppercake only managed to escape the attack because one of his legs broke off in Sweettooth's grasp. The doctor managed to bake him a new leg and attached it with icing, but he's been resting it before he returns to work. Despite his master's fiery temper, Peppercake doesn't have any ill will toward Sweettooth, and believes the giant is only motivated by hunger - he just wishes he would stay away from the town in his pursuit of satiating himself.

The gingerbread folk have the stats of halflings. However, since they're made of gingerbread, they're more fragile than if they were made of flesh. Attacks made against them score critical hits on a roll to hit of 15-20.

The gingerbread folk know that Sweettooth lives in a cave at the top of the mountain. If the PCs make the ascent, they will discover that a ravenous giant indeed lives there. Sweettooth has the stats of an hill giant, and has an insatiable hunger for candy and sweets. If the PCs are openly carrying any sweets, or have any gingerbread folk or similar creatures accompanying them, he will attack on sight, trying to grab the sweets and run off with his bounty. He will not attack any creatures who do not have sweets on their person, and finds them boring and uninteresting. If he is denied sweets, he cries and pounds the walls, demanding the party share their treats with him.

What the gingerbread folk do not realize is that Sweettooth is not a full-grown giant! He is, in fact, the bratty son of a family of frost giants who dwell atop the mountain. His parents, Longtooth and Sharptooth, are disinterested in disciplining the boy and pay him no heed, focused only on decorating their cave for the coming winter festivities. They will, however, come to Sweettooth's aid if the child is harmed, throwing rocks at any intruders to try and drive them away from the cave.

If Sweettooth is dealt with, the gingerbread folk will be grateful and offer the PCs a free stay at the Royal Icing whenever they are in town, with plenty of ginger ale on the house. They will also offer the forge the PCs weapons of their choice made of candy glass - on a critical hit, the weapons explode and deal an additional die of damage to all creatures in 15 feet of the target due to the showering of candy shrapnel. If this happens, the weapons are destroyed, but the gingerbread folk will be happy to make replacements. It takes 1d4 days for a candy glass weapon to be completed.

Merry Hexmas!

Lunar Lands Appendix N

Whether you want to call it "6e" or "5.5e" or "One D&D" or "D&D 2024" or "the spawn of Satan," the core books for the most recent iteration of D&D's ruleset have hit shelves. I've had a chance to look at them (and what people online are saying about them), and while I would overall call it a mixed bag I don't have much in the way of strong feelings on, there is one decision I find truly concerning. The venerable Appendix N, of inspirational reading and influences on the game, is gone from the Dungeon Masters' Guide, replaced by a "lore glossary" of terms and characters from existing D&D fiction.

I'm sure you already knew I was going to hate this. It's just another nail in the coffin of what I've been arguing since the very beginning of this blog - that in becoming a brand, D&D has become a corporatized, proprietary Human Centipede constantly consuming, excreting, and regurgitating its own lore, and that the rejection of outside influences will just lead to more homogenized cinematic-universe-friendly slop targeted more at investors than gamers.

But rather than focus on how the sky is falling, I would like to use this as an opportunity to do something positive - to discuss the sources that influenced my approach to DMing and worldbuilding, both in content and in philosophy. I've seen other blogs do something similar, and I suppose that with the death of the official Appendix N, it's time to keep that spirit alive through exploring what an Appendix N for the Lunar Lands might look like. So, in no particular order, here are ten things that shaped both myself as a DM and the Lunar Lands as a setting. I might return to these with more detail at a later date, but for now, here's what I have.

National Geographic

1. World culture and history

Ever since I was young, I've had a fascination with how people live and lived their lives, both around the world and in different eras. I'm of the opinion that no fictional universe can ever be quite as deep or as interesting as the real world - even today, there are thousands of societies with their own practices and cultural norms all around the globe, and I find delving into the subject to be just as rich and compelling as any fictional universe bible. I love learning about how people live or lived on the other side of the world, or in a different age. My approaches to worldbuilding take after that interest, both from a superficial perspective and a more in-depth one.

Obviously, the Lunar Lands is very much a History's Greatest Hits setting, with various regions based heavily on different cultures and eras. Even with the Year of the Gazetteer, I've drawn from subjects as diverse as colonial Mexico, the Saami people of Scandinavia, the Holy Roman Empire, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In rejecting Flintstonism, I make an effort to portray these cultures as people raised in them would have thought and felt, rather than to use them as dressing for contemporary stories - I enjoy doing the research, and I strive to give the worlds I portray a greater level of immersion and verisimilitude through referencing real-world practices, social norms, systems of governance, and other phenomena.

But on a broader scale, I also take inspiration from the diversity of real-world society to make every part of my setting feel distinct from one another, with all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of real cultures. The Lunar Lands has ethnic minorities, diasporas, and stateless peoples - real life isn't so clean that you'll get a society where everyone wears hats, and that's it. That's one thing I like so much about this planet, and I want the same for my setting.

2. Mythology and Folklore

Long before I was into anything we'd call "fantasy literature," I was enamored by the various myths and legends of the world from throughout history. As a child, my image of stories of magic, monsters, and the supernatural was more colored by fairy tales and ancient myths than pulp speculative fiction. The iconic fantasy heroes, to me, were Odysseus and Beowulf, not Gandalf and Conan. Of particular interest were the Usborne and Kingfisher books that presented a glossary of gods, heroes, and stories from around the world, with beautiful illustrations that brought these tales to life. When I began running campaigns, I didn't have ready access to modules or setting guides, so these were the sourcebooks I used instead to get inspiration for my next game.

One of my players has described the tone of the Lunar Lands as "more fairy tale than fantasy novel," and that's a description that's stuck with me. I draw inspiration from real-life folklore whenever possible. If a creature in the Monster Manual has abilities that are at odds with what ancient people believed about its namesake, nine times out of ten, the ancient people are going to win out. My gods take human form, meddle in mortal affairs, and are fond of cursing people for arbitrary reasons, rather than passively sitting around rewarding prayer with spells. Add in my Catholic upbringing introducing me to the various saints, miracles, and folk rituals of Europe and beyond, and you have a setting where the fantastic has a more grounded, mythical feel - even if there's room for beholders and displacer beasts too.

I'm pretty sure either
I had this cover,
or my teacher did.

3. The Hobbit

That isn't to say that modern fantasy literature hasn't influenced my setting. Far from it. When I was raised on a diet of myths and legends, it was only natural that I would move on to the works of Tolkien when I was older, and that I would be enamored with it from the beginning. My first exposure to Tolkien's work was The Hobbit, a book that one of my teachers decided to read to us over lunch period, and it didn't take long for me to be hooked.

I've always preferred The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings - the first of the movie adaptations of which came out just after we had finished The Hobbit, in a stroke of good timing - and while I suspect nostalgia plays a part here, I also find the tone, scale, and scope of the story resonates more with me. The world of The Hobbit has a more folkloric character than what would come later. A big part of it, I feel, is that Tolkien is content to just let things happen, without needing to justify it through worldbuilding. Animals talk. Bags talk. People just have magic items lying around. Elves are bothersome tricksters, not wise mentors. There are encounters with strange creatures that Tolkien never attempts to fit into a greater and more cohesive world. I always hate when fans try to explain away the giants playing catch in the mountains as a metaphor, citing that giants aren't mentioned in any other Middle-Earth stories - maybe there are just giants in this world, and that's okay. My setting strives to work in much the same way.

The Hobbit, compared to its sequel, is more concerned with a singular adventure, making it feel more intimate and relatable than a grand sweeping epic where the fate of the world lies in the balance. That's a tone I try to capture with my setting, but I'm also influenced by the structure of The Hobbit. The story is an episodic one, told through a number of incidents along the journey that are largely self-contained. When my players are seeking out a destination, I always make sure to have plenty of interesting locations along the way - whether they be dangers or potential allies and resources. And, just as Bilbo and the dwarves rarely overcome their obstacles through force of arms, I like to encourage players to use clever tricks and exploit their environments to get out of a bind.

4. Swashbucklers and Historical Adventure Fiction

Think Ivanhoe, the various Robin Hood stories, The Three Musketeers, Prince Valiant and similar comics, and their legions of adaptations and derivative works on the big screen. This genre is a bit of a lost art - the latest example I can think of is 1991's Prince of Thieves, unless Pirates of the Caribbean counts - and that's really a shame, because they provide a great font of material for interesting plot points and adventure sites.

The Lunar Lands is a low-magic setting, and I think that a big part of that comes from how stories like these have shown me that you can have compelling and dramatic stories in a pre-industrial setting without needing to throw a wizard in there. My games are full of corrupt nobles, daring escapes, and honorable duels; while there are plenty of conventional D&D dungeons, just as many are literal dungeons, where one will have to fight their way out of a scheming baron's castle, braving guards and traps and navigating passages hidden by clever stonework. Of course, doing all of that and throwing a wizard in anyway is fun too!

A lot of swashbucklers are comparable in tone and character to old-school sword and sorcery tales - something I think a lot of people don't realize, especially given Robert E. Howard considered himself a writer of historical fiction - but without the influence of turn-of-the-century weird fiction, they mesh more easily with a setting that's more grounded in myths than Lovecraftian themes. I suspect my lifelong interest in history made these historical adventures more appealing to me, but there's plenty of material there to be mined by any DM.

5. Wilderlands of High Fantasy

Is this one cheating? In the interests of slaying the self-referential ouroboros of modern-day pop culture, I've tried to avoid sources that came from D&D itself. But I'm going to list Wilderlands here. Not only is it a third-party product so I think I can get away with it, it was a profound influence on my approach to worldbuilding and running games. One of the most important moments of my development as a young DM was when I received the 3.5e Wilderlands boxed set as a birthday present. At the time, I had no idea it was a setting that was almost as old as D&D itself. What I was fascinated by was the nature of the product.

The Wilderlands boxed set - apparently something of a collector's item today - is essentially a big collection of hex maps, altogether covering an area about the size of the Mediterranean Sea, with two books detailing every region described therein, and the various points of interest contained within each hex. There's plot hooks, but no overarching narrative. It's meant to be a sandbox you can drop a party into and have them make their own fun. This was a game-changer, for me. It made me realize the virtues of sandbox campaigns, and how you could seed an area with enough interesting encounters to let a party explore it as they pleased. They might save the world. They might become wanted criminals. They might even carve out kingdoms - all of this was anticipated and expected.

That was the kind of campaign I decided I wanted to run. It also got me thinking of how I could design a setting that was just as open-ended, detailed, and diverse. The Wilderlands has a reputation as somewhat of a gonzo setting, with lost technology and alien races, but I never got that impression from the boxed set, and none of that really found its way into my work. What I saw was that I could do something similar in terms of presentation and game philosophy, and I've never looked back.

6. British old school gaming

I've spoken on this subject in the past. As far as I'm aware, I was one of the first people to posit the existence of a distinct tradition of British old school fantasy gaming on the OSR subreddit, and it got some discussion going in its day. I need to revisit that at some point. But I'm of the opinion that there is a distinct pantheon of British RPGs and related material - the tentpoles of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and Dragon Warriors, plus related works and also-rans like Blood Sword, Maelstrom, and the material in old White Dwarf articles and TSR UK's books (yes, that includes the Fiend Folio, so the Flumph and the Space Marine are cladistical cousins!). These works have a distinct feel and their own tropes and conventions, and while I am both American and a 90s kid, they've always appealed to me in a way that American games of the era never did quite as well.

While American games took inspiration from pulp fiction, British games had more of a grounding in history and folklore. Flintstonism was downplayed in favor of accurately depicting medieval culture and society, and often there was a greater influence from fairy tales, Arthurian romance, and other more traditional sources. Things were more grounded in mundanity, providing a contrast to the overtly fantastic, and there was a slant toward low fantasy rather than high fantasy, with PCs being desperate rat-catchers and adventures entailing bogus haunted houses set up to scare locals away from smuggling operations. A lot of this paralleled and overlapped with other areas of interest to me, so I consider the Lunar Lands a British old school fantasy setting, in spirit if not by birth. Since discovering Fighting Fantasy, I've also incorporated much of the series' philosophy into my approach to game design. In those books, a clever player can get out of danger or evade a tough fight by taking an alternate route around or using the right item, and I strive to do the same with my campaigns.

7. Dragon Quest

I've spoken on the subject before, but as a child, I played the Game Boy port of Dragon Quest III extensively, and read the strategy guide even more extensively. The game dates back to an era where Japanese RPGs were only starting to meaningfully diverge from their western counterparts, and III wears its D&D influence on its sleeve, with a party of customizable characters, thieves with utility abilities to be used outside of battle, clerics who can wear armor and use weapons (have you ever seen a white mage do that?), and cursed items that can only be removed by seeking a blessing at a temple. Discovering the game at the same time I was discovering D&D was well-timed. Even if I did recognize the box art was done by the guy I knew from watching Dragon Ball Z on Toonami, I could also recognize the two games as being part of the same canon, and they seemed to complement each other. I always just assumed DQ3 was of the same genre as Might and Magic VII on my family's computer, just designed differently due to technical limitations. In my early days of gaming, I tried to remake my D&D characters in DQ3 (poorly), and I ran several dungeons out of the DQ3 Prima strategy guide at the table.

While the Lunar Lands doesn't have cutesy ooze mascots, I do draw inspiration from how DQ3 - and the greater series, now that I've gotten back into it - presents its world. A big aspect of the games that I think gets left out of the conversation is how open-ended they are. While there are some entries that are more story-driven, the stories tend to be simpler and the worlds more open to exploration than a typical Final Fantasy title. Often times, story arcs are self-contained to a single town or dungeon, hitting on the same episodic nature of a hexcrawl, of Bilbo's journey to the Lonely Mountain, or indeed, of the campaigns I run. Furthermore, the settings tend to play things more traditionally than most JRPGs, and despite Toriyama's art, they feel closer to classic fantasy or folklore than to modern-day anime.

I do, alas, regret to inform anyone who's interested in seeking Dragon Quest out nowadays that the series' English releases changed translators partway through its run, and more modern games have rejected faithful translations in favor of just adding in whatever dumb jokes the translators wanted to tell, regardless of if they fit the intended tone. If you want something with the tone my games aim for, avoid anything with Dragon Quest on the cover and look for Dragon Warrior instead. While I use the official title for clarity's sake, earlier English releases, including those of my youth, were released under Dragon Warrior because TSR owned the trademark to Dragon Quest at the time. Which is ironic, because...

8. Dragon Warriors

Yep, there actually was a TRPG out there called Dragon Warriors, and no one bothered to care. This one falls under the umbrella of British old-school gaming I talked about earlier, but I wanted to devote its own section because its influence is just that strong.

Dragon Warriors takes place in Dave Morris's Land of Legend, a setting based heavily on medieval folklore and culture. It's a setting where people invoke the names of saints so that the fair folk won't cause their milk to curdle and their grain to spoil so they'll be able to pay their tithes to the local lord. When I discovered Dragon Warriors for the first time, my immediate thought was somewhere between "Yes! This is exactly what I've always wanted!" and "Oh no, someone beat me to it." It hits the nail on the head perfectly for what I want out of fantasy grounded in history, myths, and legends, and a lot of Legend content would fit into the Lunar Lands with minimal changes. In fact, I've done exactly that.

Dave Morris is still putting out content today - he's working on a new edition of the rules, titled Jewelspider, and his blog Fabled Lands still releases material for the setting in the form of semi-regular zines and adventures, all of which have that deeply folkloric feel that I can't get enough of, and many of which have made it into the Lunar Lands practically unchanged. I'm only somewhat joking when I call the guy my spiritual liege.

9. The Elder Scrolls

You may have noticed that one of the bigger recurring themes in this list is that I like open-world games that encourage and reward player-driven exploration. It shouldn't come as any surprise that I'm a big fan of The Elder Scrolls, a series that makes this sort of thing its wheelhouse. In turn, it's influenced how I think about campaign design. Most of my campaigns have been set up similarly to a typical Elder Scrolls game, where I might have an overarching plotline, but also seed the world with plenty of locations, sidequests, factions, and NPCs that the players are free to explore as they wish, pursuing different leads and affiliating themselves with different parties. If they want to ignore the main quest entirely and just focus on doing missions for the local guild, or clearing out dungeons, or collecting roots, that's perfectly fine, and they can do that as long as I have interesting material to throw at them.

But more importantly, Elder Scrolls was a heavy influence on me for how it approached its world. Before I played Oblivion, my introduction to the series, I had never seen a video game that felt like a living, breathing world - one that I could see people actually living in, with lives and stories that unfold beyond what's necessary for gameplay. A big part of this is how Elder Scrolls handles its lore. There's much more canon information about the setting than is ever encountered in any of the games, with the world possessing hundreds of books you can read - everything from novels to encyclopedias to biographies, and all expanding on the world of Nirn and making it feel like something greater. That was a big inspiration for me to develop the world of my setting to match. The Lunar Lands doesn't have the weirder metaphysical qualities of Mundus - there's no room for a magical space station (yes, that's canon!) in a world of myths and legends - but the philosophy of creating a setting for a game that's rich and detailed enough to stand on its own drove me to the sorts of thinking that led me to make this blog. Even if some of this stuff never comes up in gameplay, I know it's there, and that's enough for me.

10. Touhou Project

Come on, it wouldn't be a Lunar Lands article without something completely out of left field. Out of all the things I've listed today, this is probably the one most unfamiliar to much of my readerbase, so allow me to explain.

Touhou Project is a long-running series of independently published video games, produced almost entirely by a single Japanese man who goes by the online handle of ZUN. They're arcade-style shooters about poorly-drawn anime girls in funny hats firing excessive amounts of lasers at each other. I haven't played a single one of them. My exposure to Touhou instead comes from its large and devoted fanbase. ZUN has encouraged players to produce fanart and fanfiction of his characters - there are over 100 poorly-drawn anime girls in funny hats that have appeared over the course of the series, each of whom has their own distinct personality and unique quirks, and the fans have been so compelled by them that the majority of Touhou-related content on the internet comes from fans. These range from memes to music videos to professionally-produced manga to an entire animated film. There are entire characters who have no dialogue at all, but the personalities and traits fan works have given them have been so influential they've set the model for how they're portrayed in other productions.

But what on earth, you might ask, does this have anything to do with the Lunar Lands? Well, Touhou is heavily inspired by Japanese folklore. The characters and their abilities are all based on mythical beings, Shinto and Buddhist traditions, and urban legends, and much of the series's appeal comes from seeing how these entities are reimagined and how they interact with one another. Very rarely is something created completely out of whole cloth. Though the cultural backgrounds I draw from are different, it's a philosophy I apply in my worldbuilding as well, creating cosmologies and magic systems out of real folkloric traditions and basing characters on precedents found in myths. Another one of my players compared my setting to a European Touhou, and while the anime influences are not nearly as overt, it is something I've leaned into.

Also, tying back to my first point, I do have to credit Touhou with introducing me to the principles of Shinto, and I find the religion's animist traditions fascinating. The concept of regional shrines, local deities, and items that can gain sentience with time have found them into my setting, and I don't think I would've used the term "shrine maiden" in my setting if not for Touhou. Plus, I almost called this blog "Lunar Land Story," so that should count for something.

With that retrospective on the material behind my setting, I would like to open the floor. Let's not mourn Appendix N. Let's celebrate the rich tapestries of influences behind our games and our settings! If you haven't written anything on the Appendices N for your games, I encourage you to do so. I'm not the first DM to blog about this subject, and I'm sure I won't be the last. I'm interested in hearing from you!

Legojam: Cedric the Bull and the Canton of Ochsebad

As a certified Lego Enjoyer who was still collecting sets long after it was socially acceptable for me to do so, it shoudn't be a surprise that when Anne of DIY & Dragons announced her challenge to create a mini-setting based on a Lego set or sets, I was all over it. The only question was, what to do?

Rise Up Comus - one of my personal favorite blogs and one I've been following for a long while - put out an excellent hexcrawl based on classic Castle sets, one that somehow manages to marry the themes of Arthurian romance and the Fisher King cycle with Lego lore and the meta-narrative of how we as children play with toys, and does so fantastically. I didn't want my work to retread the same ideas. I thought about doing something with Rock Raiders - a personal childhood favorite of mine - but this blog is pretty strongly fantasy-focused at the moment, and even if I have taken jaunts into other genres, I felt that doing a full sci-fi hexcrawl would be harder to place in context with the rest of my work here on the blog, and would have less opportunity for interaction with the rest of my content.

And then it hit me.

When I was a kid in the early 2000s - around that same crucial point in my development where I was reading The Hobbit and The Odyssey and playing Dragon Quest III on the Game Boy - one of my favorite Lego themes was the then-current attempt to reboot Castle with Knights' Kingdom (not to be confused with the identically-named but otherwise unrelated later theme from 2004, which left me with many questions when one of my classmates was telling me about this cool new line called Knights' Kingdom on the playground one day). Among the cast of characters introduced was the central villain, Cedric the Bull.

Looking at the schedule for my ongoing Year of the Gazetteer series, I knew that my next spotlight would be on the Freikantons, a region inspired by Switzerland. Switzerland, famous for the Canton of Uri, of which the coat of arms looks like this.

Yep, it's time to play Historical Trivia or Pop Culture In-Joke again. And, as usual with me, the answer is both.

I realized I could kill two birds with one stone - participating in the game jam, and providing more detail to the Lunar Lands and the Freikantons in the process. Join me under the cut for a tour of the Canton of Ochsebad!

Random Encounters From Your Miniature Drawer

I've always had somewhat of an off-and-on passion when it comes to miniatures. I've never really used them for my games - collecting and painting miniatures is an awful lot of setup, especially when you factor terrain and scenery into the equation, and (to riff on my last post) I fear that visual representations on the gaming table can influence the imaginations of my players more than I would like. Couple that with the fact that my regular gaming group is spread over multiple states and I handle everything over Skype chats anyway, I find it easier and more streamlined to just go with the theater of the mind.

At the same time, I've always liked the little bastards. Just to have them, and paint them, and to look at them for their own sake. Maybe even play a skirmish wargame once in a while. They aren't (or at least shouldn't be) necessary, but minis are fun.

Since moving into my new house, I've been getting everything unpacked and reassessing what I have. That includes going through my old, mostly unpainted collection of minis I've had for years, always hoping to do something with but never really getting there. I've been looking more into games like Planet 28 lately, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to sort through my collection and see what I could make of them.

What immediately struck me was that, when I was at my peak of miniature collecting, I was very much the kind of person who collected things I thought were cool, rather than trying to build a certain army.

There's a lot of Reaper fantasy monsters, mixed in with some Warhammer Fantasy monstrous types, and even a few packs of the old Chainmail range from when Wizards of the Coast briefly wanted to get into the metal miniature business. An ogre, a dire boar, plenty of lizardmen (of various sizes), a bunch of orcs, quite a few skeletons and ghosts, a handful of Skaven, some barbarians...

Wait a minute. I'm sensing a pattern here. Maybe I can't make a cohesive army, but I do have a pretty decent random encounter table. Let's throw some of those things together, and see if I can write a dungeon around it.

1d20:

1. Dire boar

2. 1d8 orcs 

3. 1d8 kobolds

4. Ogre

5. 1d2 myconids

6. 1d2 Rat Men 

7. 1d8 goblins

8. 1d6 mummies

9. 2d8 spiders

10. 1d4-1 (minimum 1) lizardmen

11. 1d8 skeletons

12. 1d4 specters

13. Vampire

14. 1d4 wolves

15. Werewolf

16. 1d4 berserkers

17. Dragon (I haven't painted it yet. Let's say a red one)

18. 1d2 trolls

19. Death knight

20. Earth elemental 

I also think the reason I like the myconids in Dark Souls so much
is because they remind me of these old Reaper ones.

Yeah, it probably looks pretty funhouse-ish right now, doesn't it? And quite unbalanced, but remember: not all random encounters need to lead to immediate combat. But that's where we start thinking about how we could make everything fit. And as we do, the seed of an entire dungeon starts to emerge.

Right now, there's two big themes I'm starting to realize with the monsters we're using. There's a lot of undead, and a lot of reptilian creatures (with the dragon, lizardmen, and kobolds). These could easily be grouped into their own factions. The vampire and the dragon sound like natural leaders for the two groups (the death knight could be a second in command to the vampire, or vice versa), and that raises the question of what they're doing in the same dungeon.

Maybe the vampire has set up a lair for his necromantic experiments, and it just so happened to be in a cavern already inhabited by the dragon. Perhaps he's trying to manipulate the dragon and his lizardman servants to his own ends, and to serve as extra muscle to keep out those pesky intruders who are getting suspicious as to who's taking all the dead bodies. Maybe he has some magic artifact or other precious treasure that he's bribing the dragon with, knowing the creature's greed. This way, smart players could exploit the factions by pitting them against each other - maybe they'll need to steal the treasure from the vampire to sway the dragon to their side! After all, those lizardmen could be useful allies, to say nothing of the dragon himself!

There's some other entries we could group into smaller factions too. The orcs, goblins, and maybe the ogre all seem like they could be allies. Maybe it's an independent tribe of Trollkin, or maybe it's more hired muscle being used by the vampire (which could make them jealous of the lizardmen if they feel they're being replaced - something that the players could win their allegiance over if they don't side with the dragon, since they probably will have a harder time doing that with skeletons). The dire boar could be a pet of the orcs, or just an independent monster. The myconids, spiders, Rat Men, trolls, and earth elemental would all most likely be random denizens of the dungeon. As for the berserkers, wolves, and werewolf, they could be independent too - but what sounds more fun to me is the thought that maybe this is a clan of wolf-worshiping barbarians, led by a werewolf! Maybe they're visiting a shrine somewhere in the dungeon, or raiding it for its riches or as a sort of initation ritual!

As you can see, there's a ton of ways that this seemingly random collection of creatures and characters can be made into something more cohesive. And like many instances of working within constraints, it can get the creative juices flowing to be given a set of incoherent, mismatched elements and to be forced to make them work. Already, I have the start of a dungeon that could last me plenty of sessions to come. And if I was the kind of person to use minis, I wouldn't even need to buy anything new for it!

I'd love to see other people try this exercise out. It's a great way to come up with dungeons and other scenarios that you might never have considered otherwise. Do you have a bunch of random miniatures laying around? Try making a random encounter table out of them, and let me know what you come up with!

The Alternate Bulette Challenge

Among those versed in the history of roleplaying games, it's well-known that several perennial mainstays of the Monster Manual - the Bulette, Rust Monster, and Owlbear - were inspired by monsters included in a set of cheap plastic dinosaur toys owned by Gary Gygax. Sometimes the Umber Hulk gets lumped in with them, but it's these three that seem the most definitive.

From Tony DiTerlizzi's article on the subject

What's less well-known is that these strange creatures were most likely bootleg toys of kaiju (giant monsters) from the popular Japanese tokusatsu (live-action with heavy use of special effects - the same genre as the Godzilla movies, or other superhero series like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, which you may know for its American remake, Power Rangers) television series Ultraman. The bulette has been variously identified as either of two monsters from the original 1966 Ultraman series - Gabora, from episode 9, or Skydon, from episode 34.

While Gabora does more closely resemble the modern Bulette, both the monster's classic depiction and the toy it's based on seem more likely to be based on Skydon to me.

Also, this is a clip from the Skydon episode.
No, you do NOT get context.

The Rust Monster is a bit harder to place, but the leading theory is that it's based on another monster from the original Ultraman - Kemular, from episode 21. Although the head is more reptilian than insectoid (as seen in the toy, either through poor sculpting, the need to dodge rights-holders, or both), the tail and the posture are a close match.

The Owlbear is a little bit different - while it's also based on a kaiju from a tokusatsu TV series, it seems to be Totsaurus from a different, non-Ultraman series, 1972's Go!! Godman. The smash hit success of Ultraman spawned a boom of kyodai hero shows (those featuring giant-sized superheroes fighting kaiju), which would give our friend the Owlbear the dubious distinction of being a bootleg of a bootleg of a bootleg.

An aside: Knowing that Gygax and his associates had access to (at least bootleg merchandise of) various works of Japanese popular culture, I'm also convinced that the Beholder was inspired by the character Backbeard from the 1960 manga GeGeGe no Kitaro, but as far as I know, this has never been confirmed.

So at long last, we have the answer to a mystery that has confounded gamers for generations. But there's something else here. What fascinates me the most about this story is how D&D as we know it could have been very different - and now, it's time for me to reveal I'm a nerd about more things than just TRPGs, history, and mythology.

See, Ultraman and its various spinoffs have been running, with the exception of a short break between 1981 and 1996, for the better part of six decades. As with many long-running tokusatsu franchises, every year, the series introduces a new hero, a new supporting cast, and of course, new enemies. Couple that with the need to bring in a different monster each week, the franchise has developed a deep rogues' gallery of kaiju and aliens over the years.

What if whichever manufacturers made the infamous dinosaurs set had chosen other Ultraman kaiju? Would the Monster Manual include menacing lobster-men? Eel-dragons? Whatever the hell this thing is?

Fellow minds of the TRPG blogosphere, I propose what I'm calling the Alternate Bulette Challenge. The concept behind it is simple. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a new monster based on a different Ultraman kaiju.

Here's how you can get started:

• Go to the Ultraman Wiki's Kaiju category.
• Pick an entry at random. Yes, I know there's no random page function, but use whatever method you like. If you want to go for full authenticity, you may want to only use kaiju from series that aired before when D&D debuted in 1974, but that isn't a requirement.
• Look only at the monster's visual design. Don't look into anything about its powers or backstory. Pretend you're a geeky Midwesterner in the 1970s who has never heard of Ultraman or tokusatsu, and whose only experience with kaiju is maybe watching reruns of old Godzilla movies on public television channels. You only have the design to work with.
• Stat up a monster for your favorite TRPG system based on that design. Anything beyond visual appearance is up to you; after all, Bulettes don't breath fire, and Rust Monsters don't feed on uranium (although a Rust Monster variant that only eats radioactive metals is a tempting thought for a killer DM). They don't have to be kaiju-sized - in fact, it's better if they aren't, since then they would of course be out of scale next to your medieval soldier miniatures.
• When you're satisfied with your creation, post it for the world to see!

Hopefully, we can create a fascinating look into the D&D that could have been, were it only for a few different decisions made along the way. Either way, we'll get those creative juices flowing and come up with some fodder for games. That can never be a bad thing!