Category: Original Content

More importantly, where are all the water mills? Water mills can be much larger than windmills, and are capable of doing more than just grinding wheat into flour.

Civilization’s first automation.

This is the second in a planned series of evocative names of magical items from any media. Names that spur one’s own imagination of what they could be outside of their source material.

The Diablo game series has hundreds of unique magical items. Below is a far-from-complete selection.

Diablo I:

• Arkaine’s Valor
• The Grandfather
• Veil of Steel

Diablo II:

• Azurewrath
• Corpsemourn
• The Eye of Etlich
• Gidbinn
• Stone of Jordan

Diablo III

• Bloodtide Blade
• Convention of Elements
• Reaper’s Wraps

I am intentionally omitting my imaginings for these items so you may do so for yourself.

The power of names.

A quarterstaff is a polearm. It is a two-handed weapon. RPG wizards should not be proficient with it.

A wizard’s staff is, mechanically, a club.

I, too, have spent countless hours on making D&D combat more to my liking. Like many I have come to appreciate simpler, more elegant mechanics.

While I have not yet found the right combination of attacks versus defense bonuses, I have “solved” the weapons list. Emphasizing the abstract design of D&D combat, I see only five weapon sizes—really just three:

Prompted by the excellent essay Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: What’s a Guild?

In addition to the real world guilds, having separate wizards guilds in every city would make things interesting. Thieves Guilds are already treated that way, in fact.

I have lately been pondering cavalry lances in D&D. I never see them used. (I never see mounted combat, either, but nevermind that now.) With a charge attack scoring double damage, a lance is the most powerful melee weapon. Yet no one uses them.

Although there has never been a rule for it, one reason I never used a lance was because they usually break—are supposed to break. A Player Character needs to carry more than one. (Missed opportunity to have a person-of-hench as a squire.)

A magical lance that does not break is a danger to its wielder. It should be impermanent in the same way magical arrows are. (You should find 1d4 lances +1 in a treasure trove. 😁)

My pondering led me to the conclusion that the best application of magic here is overcoming the need for spare lances; all my Player Character truly wants is another, unbroken lance. A lance that magically reassembles after breaking is too fanciful for my tastes. Conjuring a new lance is the simplest solution. Since the lances are not the permanent magical item, something else needs to perform the conjuring.

And so I give you: the Gauntlet of Lances!

Gauntlet of Lances

Wondrous Item, Rare

A gauntlet for the right hand that creates in its grip a nonmagical wooden lance (of appropriate size).

Letting go of the (presumed broken) lance causes all pieces of it to disappear.

Game Master’s discretion as to what level of action is required for a wearer to conjure a new lance.

I could not have said it better, myself.

Roleplaying games rarely address flaws like poor eyesight. Or hearing.

The only case I know of is the pre-generated magic-user character in the H1-H4 Bloodstone Pass series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons modules. He is near-sighted and has eyeglasses. His character description lists a die-roll penalty for vision-related actions performed when not wearing the eyeglasses.

“The first phase of a duel is the psychic dominance contest. A duel is often lost before the first physical pass at arms. I have seen a duelist back down and concede defeat, having recognized his opponent’s superiority; it saved his life, in fact.”

“My sorcery is a martial art. Psychically dominating all opponents is a core skill. The training to improve this skill is adversarial. Two sorcerers will intentionally prolong the dominance phase of a duel, pushing the limits of both mental strength and endurance.”

“A disciplined will is the hallmark of someone with significant martial, magical, psychic, or even spiritual training.”

“The exertion of will in this way has a drawing-in effect. Done with sufficient intensity, the local environs can experience a temperature drop and even frost.”

“A sorcerer will also channel power into his body. The most common effect is augmented strength. This energy flows mainly down the arms and out through the hands. This release manifests as heat; You have seen the burned-in handprints on my bokken’s hilt.”

— Xenograg

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, some early CRPGs (e.g. 1981’s "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord" and 1985’s "The Bard’s Tale: Tales of the Unknown") had a modular armor system. Helms and gauntlets provided a defensive bonus. Helms could also have a magical bonus. Items like shields and gauntlets had more than one type, each with a different defense value.

Here is a summary of the system from Wizardry I, which is closer to D&D regarding character classes:

Starting Armor Class is 10. The lowest (descending system) AC possible is -10.

Priests in Wizardry cannot wear helms thus enabling the combat primacy of the martial classes. This inspired the blogpost, Armor Class Penalty For Not Wearing a Helmet, and the taboo that a Demodarid sorcerer’s head must be bare to perform magic.

I already asked about horse farms.

There should also be ranches for food animals such as cows, chickens, and/or pigs.

Addendum: oxen.

“What do you know of hobgoblins?” asks Wyheree.

“Only the well-known axiom, ‘there never is just one hobgoblin.'” is Xenograg’s reply.

• burial grounds
• holy mountains
• blessed springs
• holy rivers
• sacred groves
• faery rings
• henges
• holy cities

Kingdoms/states/realms that field armies need hundreds if not thousands of horses. Not just mounts for cavalry troops but draft horses for wagon teams.

“How many moons does Rhydin VIII have?”

“Six.”

“No, it has seven. There is one your instruments cannot detect.”

I have a soft spot for fantasy political structures that are pre-Medieval. Every city should be a city-state with its own king. Its own polity, I should say. Theocracies, magocracies, et. al.

Celtic Britain had the office of High King because there were so many petty kings—many of them ruling over nothing larger than their tribe/clan.

The 5e class description of Monks says

“Small walled cloisters dot the landscapes of the worlds of D&D, tiny refuges from the flow of ordinary life, where time seems to stand still. The monks who live there seek personal perfection through contemplation and rigorous training. Many entered the monastery as children, sent to live there when their parents died, when food couldn’t be found to support them, or in return for some kindness that the monks had performed for their families….”

When you actually look at official D&D settings, this very clearly seems not to be true for most of them. Classes like wizards, clerics and druids tend to be incorporated directly into the fabric of their settings. Magic schools and organizations, churches and temples of various gods, and druidic circles are all present and accounted for, providing easy hooks for players of those classes to directly attach their characters to core elements of the setting.

But monasteries that produce D&D style monks? They’re basically nonexistent. If a setting has some ersatz-[East Asia] equivalent, there might be some suggestion that many monks hail from there, but this notion of monasteries that “dot the landscapes of the worlds of D&D” is plainly not true. If there is a monastery, it is far more likely to be a western-style religious institution that produces clerics than a shaolin-style haven for martial arts mastery….

It all seems like a pretty major disconnect to me between the supposed official lore on monks that they come from these monasteries dotting the landscape, and the reality that basically no creators of official D&D content for most settings has bothered to incorporate them in any way.

— RPG.net Forums

Author’s emphasis. I could not have said it better, myself.

Cannot have wine without vineyards. And wineries.

As mentioned in Part 2 of this series, my knowledge of the D&D editions I grew up on is not actually complete. This is especially true of Advanced D&D 2nd Edition (2e).

There is a now-old jibe about how no one has read the 5th Edition Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) because most DMs (at that time) were older players who had played prior editions. The idea of “rereading a book you already know” caused issues because of rule changes. This is old news to me as I never read the 2nd Edition DMG when it came out.

As orisons were introduced in 2e Players Handbook—which I did read at the time—I decided to check the 2e DMG to see if it covered zero-level characters. Indeed, it did: more than half a page! Here is the introduction:

It goes on to cover Ability Scores and Proficiencies (weapon and non-weapon) which I am skipping here. It is worth reviewing the section on Hit Points:

Quite a range depending upon vocation. Basic D&D only had two categories: Normal Man (1d4) and Man-at-arms (1d4+3).

One important thing (almost) always missing from RPG outdoor maps are mines. Gold doesn’t grow on trees!

• gold
• silver
• copper
• tin
• iron
• diamond, ruby, bloodstone, et. al.
• coal
• salt
• lead
• mithril, voidstone, and other fantastical ores
• stone (quarries)