Elemental Reductions

This post is part of October's Blog Carnival theme of Horror and Fantasy , hosted Timothy S. Brannan's The Other Side Blog Trigger warning: this article talks about horror and how to evoke it.  It covers evoking horror through disasters, monsters, and psychological tension.  While it doesn't go into detail in any of them, they come up.     Along these lines, before using any of this at your table, make sure your group is accepting of content of this type by using safety tools like Lines and Veils and The X Card, especially if you don't know the players at your table really well .  Information for these and other social safety tools is available here .     Or don't use them, I'm not your father, and you presumably know your table. Das Geisterhaus by Harald Hoyer, under CC BY-SA 2.0     Old school Dungeons & Dragons and the games that sprung forth under its cultural umbrella generally assume your charac...

This post is part of October's Blog Carnival theme of Horror and Fantasy , hosted Timothy S. Brannan's The Other Side Blog "Another zombie.  Ho hum.  I'll kite it, you stick it with arrows."  Zombies by liftarn, under CC0 There is nothing horrific about zombies.  Here, look, courtesy of Basic Fantasy RPG: Zombie (undead) AC : 7[12] HD : 2 Attack : 2x +1/weapon or swipe (1d8) Mv : 20 ft.   No. Appearing : 2d4 (4d6 in the wild) Save : F2 Morale : 12 Treasure Type : none  XP : 75 It's basically a slightly worse gnoll that never retreats.  This has been a chip on my shoulder for a long time.  Here's what I propose:  First, every undead creature should be freaky: they utterly violate the natural order of the world.  They should be described with that in mind.  Play up the disturbing appearance of their decaying yet animate corpses and their putrefying stench. Mechanically, we might reflect this character reaction i...

A combination of another bout of Covid and elder family members getting hospitalized delayed this by a few weeks, but my hopes for a steady gaming group seem to finally culminate in an actual game last night.  Socrates was delayed by theatrical problems, but Gwenchant and I arrived at Soddentowel's place, and, after discussing parenting and schooling, snacks and drinks, we got around to talking about play experience and what we were going to play.  It probably helped a bit that we had hashed out lines and veils and a few other session 0 topics on our Discord. After determining that Gwenchant and Soddentowel's play experiences were more exclusive to latter day D&D , we decided to each make two characters to play the Shadowdark quickstart, using 3d6 down the line, with a house rule stolen from the *WN books of replacing one attribute with a 14.  Socrates got there shortly after they started making characters while I skimmed the GM's Guide.  I think it took us abo...

 This post is a response to Xaosseed's post Your great-grand-elf's elvish: long lives slowing language change (RPG Blog Carnival) .  I suggest reading that first in its entirety, before I dig into it.  My goal here is to have a deeper discussion, not just to rain Xaosseed's linguistic parade.  This lede hooked me: The RPG Blog Carnival prompt from Beneath Foreign Planets of WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics sparked some other thoughts for me - on the stability of language when there are very long-lived organisms around.   Xaosseed shared the hypothesis of the post: The core thought here is that you can find thousand year old elves, dragons and giants around - presumably still speaking the same language with the same accent as when they learned their languages in their your - so accents and languages would change much more slowly in such settings than in our own world.  Xaosseed then set up the setting's premise with respect to linguis...