Month: September 2020

Gold Sickness

Let’s talk about Dwarves. 

Dwarves are vectors of gold: they can smell gold, they desire gold above all things, they go mad without gold, they are afflicted by the Gold Sickness. And it’s not even like they want gold because it’s valuable (even though it is), it’s like they need it to live (maybe they eat gold? Like Gorons eating rocks from the Legend of Zelda?). It’s a psychological thing, it’s Greed with a capital G, it’s a Big Boy Sin. And there’s never enough gold to satisfy a dwarf. Adding a dwarf to the party is a mixed bag because dwarves are like labrador retrievers: they can smell gold out, but if you don’t keep them on a leash, they’re going to steal it all and shove it in their dirty little mouth and chop off your legs with a handaxe. Exactly like labrador retrievers. 

Dwarves come to human lands because there’s not a lot of real estate left for them where they come from in the Underdark. They join adventuring groups because while they can smell gold out they’re not invulnerable to a crossbow bolt through the head.  

There are a couple of different game mechanics you can cobble together: there’s Dungeon Crawl Classic’s Underground Skills (Smaller concentrations, down to a single coin, can still be smelled but require concentration and have scent ranges as low as 40’ for a single coin or gem), there’s Dwarven Greed from the always impressive Torchbearer, and I feel confident that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had special dwarven madness as a mechanic for their Dwarfs (following the old ways of grammar laid out by Tolkien himself). You might even find references in the GLOG and in some old level tables for Flail Snails content to dwarves and gold. 

The Gold Sickness is an actual sickness: as dwarves collect more, gold they get more sick. It makes you ill and it breaks out in scaly rashes all over your body and eventually it breaks all your bones and makes you breathe fire. Dwarves are dragons; dragons are just dwarves at the end of the Gold Sickness. That’s also why dwarves hate dragons, it’s like you going to a nursing home and hanging out with extremely old people: there’s a touch of revulsion and fear because there’s nothing that makes you feel your own mortality than hanging around those who are so close to death. Likewise, there’s nothing more revolting to a dwarf than seeing where his gold lust leads him. He can escape the Gold Sickness just as well as you can escape death.

In fact, it’s so off-putting that dwarves that shut down their Greed usually give in to Wrath, starting for themselves their own little black book full of Grudges. Grudges are a way to hold on to yourself: if you remember why you hate a person, that’s tied to a personal offense, an emotional reaction. And that emotional response keeps you from stripping naked and rolling in a pile of coins and becoming gigantic and scaly. Grudges are the way a dwarf remembers who he or she is. That and fire engine red mohawks.

You either die a banker or live to see yourself become a punk rocker. As all things should be. 

Found and Earned

I’m not sure how focused or detailed I want to be with these blog posts, if they should flow from my head or if I should write them beforehand and post them later. But yeah, here goes this: from the ever deceitful heart.

There are two kinds of knowledge (just like they’re a binary amount of binaries, like two kinds of people, I guess), found knowledge and earned knowledge.

Found knowledge comes from the act of research, of reading books and watching videos and drinking coffee with old men, discovering more and more about the world around you through the knowledge that’s lying around. You can find out a lot about the Mongol Empire or the political situation of Shanghai in the 1930s or Japanese Christian persecution from reading books and drinking coffee. It’s a relatively painless way of understanding more of the world.

And then there’s earned knowledge, the knowledge you gain from putting your hand on the stove and burning your palms, or telling a girlfriend you love her too soon. It’s something that is earned; as Mark Twain said, “Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience the result of bad judgment.” And I think if you want to make something, you need a little of both. You need the knowledge of what already exists, and you need the experience of trying to create something that doesn’t.

I’m trying to write a game system, my very own fantasy heartbreaker. I see a place in the OSR community (not that I am a part of the OSR community) for a particular kind of game, like a hole missing in a puzzle. I’m killing my literary father, as Harold Bloom might put it, carving out what I see as a place my own DMing style might live. And the first step of that is recognizing what needs to be stolen and what needs to be built.

There’s something off-putting about the way B/X and old OSR retroclones use miles and feet and yards for travel, especially after reading Slumbering Ursine Dunes and getting my first taste of a proper point crawl. There’s a majesty to the Six Mile Hex, and simply allowing an adventuring party to cut their way across jungles and mountains, but there’s also a clumsiness to it as well.

The Ultra Violet Grasslands continued this fascination for me (and it’s where the blog title was inspired from) and I think it is an amazing book everyone interested in gonzo tabletop gaming should read. But I still feel there’s something missing. There’s a gap between the focus of travel days and the way rations work in UVG and the more modular use of quarter days and individual actions used in a game like Forbidden Lands. There’s a place for more refinement there, and a chance to tie it into more of the game.

Returning to knowledge, a lot of DMs (especially me) read our gamebooks and think that we have an understanding of the way the game is supposed to work. We forget that games are meant to be played, and we forgo the actual earned experience of playing the game. I’ve played UVG, but there are so many more games I need to play before I would feel comfortable leaving the world of found knowledge to enter the world of earned knowledge. However, as the good hymn says, “If you tarry ’til you’re better, you will never come at all.”

Go read Superhorse’s Superblog, he’s actually got rules and things you can bring to a game table, instead of pontificating about how before one can roll a die, one must first create the universe.