New System, New Face: Hastily Reviving a Dead Series with Janky Optional Rules for BFRPG

Been a while since I made a character hereabouts, huh? Figured I'd fix that and shoehorn yet more BFRPG into my blog while I'm at it.

As I've mentioned in the past, the open-source game system BFRPG has tons of fan-made content hosted on its site, from new species and classes, to new subsystems, and in at least one case that I know of, a pretty significant rules conversion mod.

Basic Fantasy Questing by Joe Carruthers changes the game from a mixed OSR title into a hybrid between The RPG Not To Be Named and the "Classic d100 Game" that the supplement references obliquely throughout. For those who don't know what that's referring to, like myself when I started this post, it's the original Basic Role-Playing system by Chaosium released in 1980. It's a generic system similar to GURPS or Savage Worlds in that it supports a wide range of genre fiction that you can flesh out using books in their niche. You might have heard of a few of BRP's little genre splats; they include Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and RuneQuest, among others.*

BFQ works like this: you roll your ability scores and pick a species and class like normal, then convert every ±1 of ability modifier into a ±5% to applicable roll-under d100 rolls, like adding Strength percentage to Melee Attack rolls or Wisdom percentage to Divine Casting. Each class has a main skill that determines their HD, like a fighter's highest weapon skill or a thief's highest thief skill. Class skills start at a 55% base chance to succeed, not including modifiers.

For everything outside of the class's niche, you have a new set of Ability Skills to roll. These skills combine saving throws from the core game with the ability checks for all 6 ability scores that you commonly see elsewhere, and their base % is equal to a character's ability score x2. You roll these to push heavy stuff, shrug off the effects of poison, remember lore, etc.

You might notice there's not really anything to build here, though. What would I be doing other than rolling dice and seeing what I end up with?

Well, fortunately Joe included some optional rules for his already optional ruleset: classless characters.

The classless characters rule nudges BFQ much closer to BRP than to D&D by removing classes and opening all skills up to all characters, albeit at much lower starting values than their specialized fellows enjoy. Which comes up as a bit of an issue later on, but for now let's just figuratively and literally roll with it.

Ability score generation is identical to the base game, which means I spent literally hours rolling arrays in a generator until I got one that felt not too crippled by negative modifiers but also not too good that it seemed like I was blatantly fishing for a strong character. Ultimately I found one that's just average enough to help illustrate a few parts of the system.

With this conveniently middling array, we can calculate our classless adventurer's base skills using the following:

You still select species as part of this system, for which I decided to pull in yet another fan supplement; Monsters as Player Characters by Sidney Parham, Omer Golan-Joel, R. Kevin Smoot, and steveman. I decided to go with hobgoblin, since they're kind of like the humans of the humanoid world in a lot of ways, and a generalist character feels appropriate here. They also have a pretty nice Alertness ability that reduces the chance of being surprised, and +5% bonuses to Listen and Finding/Removing Traps, which is great for someone with free access to thief skills.

Maybe they've actually drifted away from their highly regimented community after failing to find a rank and niche to specialize into? A rather uninspired implementation of the societal misfit trope, I know, but one that at least weds plot and mechanics.

We distribute another 50 points on top of the above base values to finish, so that we have at least 1 skill above 55% and none higher than 70%. After some final bookkeeping we've got our hob:

Art stolen from the hedgewitch chapter of Land of Mist.

As you can see, average base values for classless characters start very low to make up for their much greater versatility. This PC's highest ability score, Strength, only amounts to a base of 26% in melee attack and force, although it's actually slightly higher than this thanks to the +5% from the +1 modifier to Strength which still gets applied to all applicable rolls, for a total of 31%. On the flip side, our friend here ain't gonna be doing much wheeling and dealing with an Influence of 11% (16% base -5% from -1 modifier). At early levels they will probably flail and flounder a lot before they eventually slide into a semi-randomly determined niche of whatever they happen to succeed at by sheer dumb luck.

This is where I come to the biggest houserule I would use for a game of BFQ: reverse the progression system.

Under standard BFQ rules, you mark a skill for improvement once during an adventure when you succeed with it. At the end of the adventure you then roll vs your skill to see if you improve it by 1d3+1 points by succeeding at the roll, or just 1 by failing at it. This is fine for use with the class system because it means each class will naturally excel in the area of their expertise from the base game, such as fighters leveling their attack skill much faster than magic-users from having more and higher chances to succeed at a roll, which compounds after a certain point and makes you all but guaranteed to mark a skill for advancement within the first roll or two of a session, while your less relevant skills fall far behind.

But with the base skill calculations of classless BFQ, most of your skills are going to start off well below 50%. This means improving almost anything other than your 1 or 2 favored skills will be a long slog. And if you're going to specialize like that, why not just stick with classes?

So I propose houseruling it so that you mark for advancement every time you fail a roll instead of succeed. Likewise, when rolling to advance, a failure adds the full 1d3+1 points and success adds only 1.

This way, characters are encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zones, and it's easier to build a generalist if one wants. At the same time, the jacks of all trades will be discouraged from becoming masters of anything by the fact that it's harder to fail rolls at higher levels. Quick, early skill advancement naturally trends downward and slows to a crawl as it nears 100%. This is also closer to the the leveling curve of many OSR games, if that's a plus for you. And depending on the players at your table, it might also just feel better to always be getting something out of an action? Losing that Agility check and faceplanting in the mud's no fun, but now you've learned from that mistake, as that old saying goes.

* Okay, technically RuneQuest came first and then had a genericized version of its ruleset spun off into BRP, but I think it's still accurate to say that RuneQuest is "powered by" BRP so to speak.

Spirits & Spookiness: Gazetteer 10: The Orcs of Thar (1988)

Preface

Ugh. Alright, let’s get this over with.

The Orcs of Thar, written by Bruce Heard for BECMI D&D, is the 10th entry in the Mystara Gazetteer series detailing different areas of the campaign setting and how to play a game there. Orcs of Thar is a boxed set about the desolate and inhospitable Broken Lands, which are divided up between ten nations of humanoids barely united under the rule of the orcish war chief King Thar.¹

The set contains several booklets that detail the lore and history of the region, how to run a campaign in the Broken Lands, and how to play a simple grand strategy-style wargame using the armies of Thar. The players' guide and dungeon master's booklet also contains options for playing monstrous characters who hail from the Broken Lands, including the first playable shamans we've seen in BECMI so far.

It’s also my least favorite book in the entire Gazetteer series (that I’ve read, at least). Partly because I initially had unreasonably high hopes for it. That part is my fault. The book is entirely functional, and has more details on humanoids and shamans than most other BECMI books, making it a handy resource to adapt for one's game. But the style of writing throughout also seems to want to make it a tongue-in-cheek joke book.

The book's humor derives from how stupid, stinky, and goofy the orcs and their neighbors are. Slapstick and gross-out humor abound as the endless hordes churn against one another, driven by bits of narrative microfiction that read like a bad rendering of a Warhammer orc warboss’ speech. The book also has an art direction that looks halfway between “unhinged vaudeville show” and “racist World War II war bond poster”.

Less yikes but just a confusing, there's also this piece of some orc "punks" from the hard streets of the volcanic capital city of Oenkmar where everything has a vaguely Mesoamerican or Incan name for Reasons, seen here breakdancing with a boombox and massive traumatic head piercings, also for Reasons.² This doesn't really fit into my broader point, but I can't not share it.

Now we share a trauma bond.

Much digital ink has already been spilled over the years by other people about the weird borrowing of both racial stereotypes and scientific racism tropes for the book’s species breakdown section, which precedes the chapter on shamans. I don’t have anything new to add to that discussion or a creative way to express how nakedly yikes the beads-and-buckskin-wearing “red orcs” or the goblinus oriensis who parrot the Mongol-coded Ethengarian peoples are, other than reiterating that they very much are yikes.³ But I’d feel derelict in my duties as a responsible wannabe historian if I didn’t bring it up briefly. Of all the legacy content on DriveThruRPG that Wizards of the Coast has slapped a content disclaimer onto, The Orcs of Thar decidedly earns it in my opinion.

But I digress.

I don’t apologize for digressing, because it’s my show and I do what I want, but I do digress.

I came here to talk about shamans. For all its 1980s cringe, Orcs of Thar gives the first bit of concrete depth and texture to humanoid shamans in this edition, where previously it was all a matter of reading in between the lines or just outright imagining that the monstrous spellcaster sections in the core rules boxed sets are more meaningful than they might actually be- I know I'm prone to hyper-fixating and reading depth into things.

And, excluding the technicality of that one OD&D clerical title, this is the first ever book where shamans became fully playable in D&D!

Shamans & Wiccas

Thar shamans and wiccas (this book was published before the Hollow World campaign set changed them to wokani) both consort with dark powers, either by worshiping them or trying to control them. Anyone looking to become a shaman or wicca must apprentice to a master, and this apprenticeship lasts for at least 1 full level of play after character creation. After this point the spellcaster’s training is complete, and they are kicked out to continue practicing on their own.⁴

I find this rule really interesting. So many other character classes throughout D&D assume that the character’s days of apprenticeship are behind them and that 1st level is the era of messing around and finding out on one’s own. Sure, a cleric or wizard PC might have an old mentor in their backstory, or a druid might occasionally have to deal with other druids in their order because of the weird cage match rules that define grove politics. But a prospective humanoid shaman or wicca explicitly has to play through an apprenticeship and engage with a master NPC in real time to gain their most basic abilities. I think that’s neat, and it adds to roleplay opportunities.

This rule also gives way to another rule that I find to be quintessentially BECMI. Because this was the edition of race-as-class much like in the first three books of OD&D, every humanoid can only ever advance as their species. A kobold is a level 3 kobold, a troll is a level 8 troll, etc. And nothing can change that. But you also can’t just slap a second class on, because multiclassing is a distinctly AD&D system (ignoring the OD&D supplements that introduced multiclassing in all but name) and doing that would probably hurt brand identity or some other "board of directors" type worry like that.

To get out of this mechanical corner that the designers wrote themselves into, optional rules such as humanoid shamans followed an additive XP track rule: every “level” in your character’s side gig is an extra couple of abilities layered on top of their base class chassis, plus a debt of several thousand extra experience points needed to advance to your next real level in whatever racial class that is. It’s harder to explain than it is to just use (much like AD&D’s THAC0), but still kind of a funny relic of the time that we’ll see pop up elsewhere.

Anyway, once an apprentice has concluded their apprenticeship they undergo a ritual that leaves them a full-fledged shaman or wicca. The exact details of this ritual of passage are not spelled out in the book; only that it is probably one of the most grueling and frightening experiences of their life. The rest is left up to “you, the DM, and to your players’ tastes”, to quote the book.

That’s a moment of surprisingly thoughtful game design from an era before lines, veils, and other “Session Zero” style content discussions were common. I know it was probably written with the thought of “ooh, what kind of gross and screwed up do you fellas wanna make it?” in mind, but still, credit where credit is due.

The book does provide a table of ‘typical’ ritual effects to use, if you want. It’s a single d12 roll that explains how physically harrowing the experience was for your shaman, and how much of themselves they sacrificed or allowed to be eaten up by hungry entities beyond the veil. The damage can range from 1 or more points of permanent HP loss, to losing points of Constitution directly. Benefits include a small experience point boost, a permanent bonus to Wisdom, or just nothing at all; the powers that shamans treat with can be fickle pricks.

This ritual is undergone at the end of apprenticeship, as well as every time a shaman or wicca wants to learn a new spell from outside of their class list, replace a lost gri-gri (a tribal holy symbol that both classes require to cast magic, derived from the gris-gris of West African Vodun and its diasporic descendants like Voodoo), craft a talisman (a minor magical item unique to them), or exceed their racial spellcaster level limits (which are often quite low in comparison to their normal level limits). Over a decently long career, a Thar spell-caster will end up truly grizzled and wizened by their craft. They might even die outright from a ritual if not careful.⁵

I believe this was done in order to cement how nasty the shaman’s objects of worship are (and we will be getting to them shortly). But it does something else as well, perhaps unintentionally.

It invokes (please bear with me for a moment) the Jungian archetype of the Wounded Healer.

To paraphrase greatly, the wounded healer is someone who was drawn to their profession by the fact that they themselves have suffered similar traumas in life as their patients. The wounding is what opens up one’s empathy, and unlocks their healing powers- speaking figuratively, of course. In real life this deals with people in the professions of therapy, medicine, nursing, etc. But in the context of fantasy it is also quite literal.

Many modern writers and philosophers–mostly Westerners–connect the idea of the wounded healer with countless real life religious and mythological phenomena, including many shamanic traditions, where it is often the case that a person is considered ‘marked’ or otherwise destined to become a shaman by some ominous ordeal early in life, such as suffering from disease, injury, or mental illness.⁶

I am not going to dig deep into that theory because I don’t know the first thing about Jungian psychology and boy do I not have the patience to learn. However I will say that I'm leery of the theory and anything else that tries to orient diverse shamanic traditions around a single universality. Still, it does relate back to the real-life diversity of conceptions of shamans that I mentioned back in the etymologies and definitions post. Bit by bit, more of them are being borne out in the fiction of D&D as it grows and expands.

Religion in the Broken Lands

I’ve alluded to the dark powers treated with by Thar shamans twice now, and it’s our first taste of actual specifics for a shamanic religion, so let’s dig into that next.

The spirits and other forces shamans get their power from are very ill-defined in the text, and stand curiously separate and divorced from popular religion. This encourages you to come up with your own answers as to what they are, or leave them wholly opaque. Are they the spirits of the dead? Demons? Some other completely different entities? I don't know. All I know is that they are not Immortals.

Religion in the Broken Lands operates much as it does elsewhere in Mystara: instead of “gods” in the traditional sense, intelligent beings worship so-called Immortals. Immortals were once regular people who became powerful and badass enough in life that they ascended to immortality and carved out a sphere of deific influence for themselves. They are the “I” in BECMI, and therefore they serve not only as objects of worship for the world, but also objects of emulation for the player characters, whose long adventuring careers might just allow them to do the same.

The Immortals worshiped by humanoids tend to be former conquerors and warlords who paid for their divinity in foes slain and cities razed. The book says there are far too many to list, which encourages groups to come up with their own religions. The Immortals who are listed tend to be 1 per species, and they usually have portfolios centered on warfare, consumption, and destruction. It makes sense that a bunch of militaristic societies trapped in permanent endemic warfare would emphasize gods like that, although I think it's also a bit of a metaphorical chicken-or-the-egg situation as to whether they started to war first and picked up relevant gods second, or got pushed into forever war by their gods.

Something funny I noticed is that most of the Thar Immortals have alternate names in their entries. The bugbear Immortal Bartziluth is also known as as Hruggek, the orc warrior god Karaash is AKA Ilneval, The Shining One of the kobolds was once named Kurtulmak, etc. These are all names taken from the ethnic pantheons found in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign setting for AD&D, a decade and a half before they were turned into generic deities for 3rd edition. Another rare bit of cross-pollination between the otherwise separate branches of D&D.

Also I can’t believe that I’ve been playing or at least reading about Dungeons & Dragons for over 20 years and it took me this long to realize that the god of the gnoll hyena people is named Yeenoghu. Did anybody else miss that one? Maybe I shouldn’t be the one writing about media.

Shamans are described in this section as effectively being clerics of the Immortals, minus the ability to turn undead. Instead, they gain a unique ability that emulates a feat or quality their Immortal is known for, as well as a more general benefit enjoyed by all followers of that Immortal regardless of class. 

Karaash/Ilneval for example grants his shamans better authority checks against his faithful, as well as the ability to use a pretty nasty karaash sword, which deals 1d10 damage and causes wounds that can only be healed with magic.⁷ Shamans are often quite limited in the weapons they can wield, either by sharing the cleric weapon restriction or by a requirement to only wield “tribal” weapons, so seeing a shaman with access to such a big, martial weapon is rather novel at this time. Spirits or no, they are soldiers just like everyone else in the Broken lands.

While shamans and most wiccas worship one or more gods of their respective racial pantheons in the henotheistic fashion that was already standard for D&D religions, they explicitly are not obliged to pray to them for their spells. Instead, they get their powers from those capricious spirits that accept their sacrifices and nibble away at their bodies and souls level after level. It is remarkably similar to the patron/supplicant relationship that would grow out of the many iterations of the warlock class decades later. Alas, we won’t see many other examples of this ephemeral shaman-as-warlock archetype in our survey.

Shamilitarism

Because of how militaristic humanoid societies of the Broken Lands are, shamans and wiccas serve dual roles as mystical and martial figures. They are forced into the hierarchy wherever they will fit, and often rise to positions of authority beneath the various chiefs and kings of the land. Here they serve in some capacity as an advisor, a force multiplier during wartime (which is all of the time), and a sort of combination chaplain/doctor.

This role is borne out in the mechanics of the Orcwars! pullout wargame, tucked away inside the dungeon master's booklet. In Orcwars! a chief in control of a shaman gains +1 to their combat, authority, and servility dice rolls from utilizing the shaman's mix of potent magic and politico-religious legitimacy. They also seem to be regarded as very valuable to keep alive by all sides, because shamans are not killed during battles, and they always move over to the winning side, or else flee to another territory until a chief worthy of serving comes along.

One of the last parts of the boxed set we're treated to is Thar's Manual of Good Conduct, a primer on how to give and follow orders, obey hierarchy, win fights, and generally keep the military running as close to smooth as possible. In the section on "Orcish Sanitation" the two classes (shamans more than wiccas) minister to the troops in their tribe by inspecting them during ztan-HU'T (a pun on ten-hut) to make sure they're reasonably healthy and fit.⁸

Much space is afforded to extended jokes like making sure each soldier's feet smell an appropriate level of stinky or explaining why it's bad to eat rotten meat, but shamans also do more serious work like treating wounds and diseases through mundane, medicinal, and magical means. This marks shamans and wiccas out as the specialized repositories of vital, nonmagical day-to-day knowledge in humanoid societies, just as they often are in real life human societies where the shaman is an active participant in life in the community beyond just performing rituals in a hut kept separate from the rest of the village, as the tropes so often depict. Admittedly their Broken Lands counterparts do a whole lot more heavy lifting by comparison, because of how stupid most humanoids are typed as being.

Then again, on that last note, maybe knowledge like maintaining proper hygiene might actually be viewed as overtly magical by most of the tribes of the Broken Lands...

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the longer wait between last entry and this one. Next time we'll be looking at another entry in the Gazetteer, of which I believe we'll cover 4 in total.

Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D Archive.

¹ Not to be confused with the Great Gray Land of Thar, a desolate northern region of the Forgotten Realms that also happens to play host to large warring armies of orcs and other humanoids. D&D is nothing if not willing to borrow from/cannibalize itself.

² Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Dungeon Master's Booklet. 1988. P. 30.

³ Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Player's Guide. 1988. P. 18, 40-42.

⁴ Dungeon Master's Booklet. P. 5.

⁵ Ibid. P. 6.

⁶ Jackson, Stanley W. "Presidential Address: The Wounded Healer". Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 75. No. 1. 2001. P. 1-6.

⁷ Dungeon Master's Booklet. P. 8-10.

⁸ Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Thar's Manual of Good Conduct. P. 24-29.

Renegade Thoul Class for OSE Classic

Freak. Mutant. Abomination. Thoul.

You've heard it all by now. It doesn't phase you anymore. You don't even bother snarkily correcting their pronunciation nowadays.* It's not like they'd listen, anyway. You just ignore them, or show them what those claws of yours can do if they really push you.

You were born into the ranks a normal hobgoblin, or so everybody thought. The mutation was so vanishingly rare in your stronghold that they stopped bothering to test newborns for it generations ago. But then you came along, and before the end of your first year you accidentally paralyzed three wet nurses in a row. Then the commander slashed the sole of your foot open with a knife, and watched the cut knit itself shut even as you kicked and wailed.

So you were labeled thoul, and cast down into the proverbial dung heap of hobgoblin society. Only menial labor and the worst, most dangerous postings in the stronghold were open to you. As you languished in squalor, those of your birth-group slowly but steadily climbed the ranks, leaving you behind. You keep mostly to yourself now. Others only stop to bark orders at you, or to stare at you and try to pick out the one feature that marks you out as thoul. Sometimes it's your nose, or your teeth, or something absurd like the sound of your breath or the shape of your shadow.

At least your hardships has given you the opportunity to gain a perspective on life denied to most hobgoblins; that the promise of meritocracy and advancement through the ranks according to ability and duty is a load of festering stirge guano, meant only to keep society's subalterns obediently following the orders of their "betters". Otherwise, you'd have earned at least a captaincy by now.

But what are you going to do about it? Abandon your post and desert?

... You should probably see if that norker and the varag runt want to tag along. They aren't terrible company, and their prospects aren't much better than yours.

Hobgoblin by Tony DiTerlizzi

Renegade Thoul

Requirements: Minimum STR 9, minimum CON 9
Prime Requisite: CON and STR
Hit Dice: 1d8
Maximum level: 8
Armour: Any, including shields
Weapons: Any
Languages: Alignment, Common, Elvish, Hobgoblin

Thouls (contraction of hobgoblin tah'oul, lit. 'death hands') are strange unfortunates of hobgoblin society. They are the rare few who express a highly recessive mutation unknowingly carried by most hobgoblin populations from a long-forgotten magical experiment in which some bored god or wizard merged bits and pieces of hobgoblin, troll, and even ghoul biology. They are outwardly indistinguishable from other hobgoblins except upon close inspection.

Thouls often live in blissful ignorance among their kin until traumatic childhood events reveal their unique abilities. Almost invariably this revelation leads to the thoul getting kicked down to the bottom rung of hobgoblin society, where they are treated as mutants and aberrations lacking in honor. Some still rise through the ranks by proving themselves as bodyguards to more important individuals, while others take steps to conceal their nature. A few even strike out on their own, or with other outcasts and castoffs.

Claws

Thouls are forced to defend themselves at an early age using the long, sharp claws they sport on each hand. They gain 2 unarmed attacks for 1d3 damage each.

Infravision

Thouls have infravision to 60’ (see Darkness under Hazards and Challenges in Old-School Essentials).

Paralysis

Thouls, though not undead in any way, possess a distant echo of the ghoul's paralyzing touch. From 4th level, if a thoul hits their target with both claw attacks in a round, the target must save vs paralysis or be paralyzed for 1d4 turns. As usual, elves and creatures larger than ogres are unaffected.

Regeneration

From 7th level, a thoul regenerates 1hp per round after being damaged. Severed limbs do not reattach. Fire and acid damage cannot regenerate as normal. Either the wizard got lazy, or they couldn't cram a whole troll's worth of regeneration into a thoul-sized body.

After Reaching 8th Level

A renegade thoul has the option of creating an underground stronghold that will attract other outcast members of goblin societies from far and wide, including 1d6 other thouls of levels 1-3. Neighboring goblins will generally be unfriendly and suspicious of any community led by a known thoul, and will rarely collaborate in times of trouble at first.

Thoul Level Progression
Level	XP	HD	THAC0	Saving Throws
				D	W	P	B	S
1	0	1d8	19 [0]	12	13	14	15	16
2	4,000	2d8	19 [0]	12	13	14	15	16
3	8,000	3d8	19 [0]	12	13	14	15	16
4	16,000	4d8	17 [+2]	10	11	12	13	14
5	32,000	5d8	17 [+2]	10	11	12	13	14
6	64,000	6d8	17 [+2]	10	11	12	13	14
7	120,000	7d8	14 [+5]	8	9	10	10	12
8	250,000	8d8	14 [+5]	8	9	10	10	12

D: Death / poison; W: Wands; P: Paralysis / petrify; B: Breath attacks; S: Spells / rods / staves.

* It's pronounced like tool rather than thool. The 'h' indicates an aspirated consonant similar to that used in the word 'ghoul', and it would perhaps be better rendered as tʰoul in Common. But when do they ever care about accuracy?

The One Where Furt Reads a Second Dragonlance Novel in as Many Years to Quell the Gnashing Anxiety in the Back of His Head and Then Ends up Summarizing it Again

Late last year I wrote at length about my experiences trying to read a book for the first time in ages. In typical Furtive fashion I laid bare all my worries and neuroses and then just did a bunch of word-vomit about a thing that interests me.

This time, I've decided there's going to be a 'this time', and it's going to have less of the former but just as much of the latter. Because I'm invested in Jean Rabe's Stonetellers trilogy now, and I feel compelled to see it through to the end. Plus this year has been unnerving in the extreme, and I could use another distraction from my slowly growing age and shrinking bank balance.

At the time of publication we've just finished our two weeks of real autumn before all the leaves die and a long, damp pre-winter settles in. Something about the wind and the leaves reminds me of the schoolyear, which invariably leads to a series of panic attacks as I think back to that period of my life.

Can homework legitimately trigger PTSD? Asking for a me.

Another thing that this time of year fills me with is brief moments of swelling inspiration to do... something? Anything? Oftentimes the urge takes the form of something vaguely scholastic, like reading or writing or discussing a topic with passionate others. It echoes back to the feeling of walking my high school or college campuses in the rare moments when I wasn't quite so rushed or scared and I could imagine what a better being in my shoes would have accomplished by now. 

I don't know why I get these moments, but I've experienced them for a long time. I think it comes down to some deep subconscious association from my youth. When the light hits the trees just right and I look out over the admittedly beautiful land that the Hudson River School romanticized and propagandized so effectively from a place just across the creek from me, I feel it. I get it. I am consumed by that licentious poison of the soul that we call the sublime, and I am moved to propagate or harness the feeling in some way. It's like somebody's beaming one of those silly academia aesthetic playlists directly into my lizard brain.

Invariably, the feeling deflates a second later as I remember why I can't do anything smart or academic or vaguely gesturing toward the notion of personal growth or learning because of reasons X, Y, and Z.

But this time I remembered my incredibly low-stakes struggle with these books, and where I left off.

... I said there would be less neurosis this time, didn't I?

-

To simplify greatly, the first book in the series, The Rebellion, is about a group of enslaved goblin miners on the Dragonlance world of Krynn who rise up against their Dark Knight masters during a massive earthquake. They then endure the volcanic brutality of the Khalkist Mountains of Neraka, the world capital of Evil. They are led through much fiery death and bloody dismemberment by the begrudging hobgoblin foreman Direfang and the auguries of the self-interested geomantic shaman Mudwort. Along the way they team up with (and enslave) some of the knights who enslaved them, most notably the half-elf wizard Grallik N'sera.

The ragtag bunch survives long enough to stumble into the ruins of Godshome, where most of the gods of Krynn once schmoozed together with their followers before they punished the many for the sins of the few and nuked the planet from orbit. Here, Mudwort and the other Stonetellers of the goblin refugee army scried the entirety of the continent of Ansalon and glimpsed a prospective home for a new goblin nation far away in the forests of Qualinesti. They then set off on the long road south, unwittingly leaving behind them the still-warm corpse of Moon-eye, the first of many goblins about to get shanked in the back as power-hungry clan leaders throughout the army plot Direfang's overthrow.

Simple, right?

The sequel, Death March, focuses on that grueling journey southwest to Qualinesti, and all the challenges and intrigues the goblins are sure to face along the way.

It's also pretty metal as far as DL covers go.

Speaking of Qualinesti, I want to touch on something that I don't think I gave enough attention to at the end of my first post.

The Rebellion began somewhere in Neraka, close to the city of Jelek that actually gets placed on maps on occasion. The exact location of Godshome changes from map to map over the years, but we can confidently say it's within the same neck of the woods. So let's say they ended the book somewhere within this area, using an excerpt from the map that appears in the 1992 Tales of the Lance boxed set that happens to be pretty detailed and accessible.

At the beginning of the book the goblin refugee column is over 1,000 strong. By the end, through a combination of attrition and smaller bands splitting off from the main body, that number is reduced to less than 500. Let's zoom out a little, and see how much farther they have to go with those numbers.

As you can see here, the refugees have quite a ways to go before they reach the-

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't zoom out far enough. Silly me.

There we go.

They've lost over half their number traveling less than 50 miles of what is conservatively a 400+ mile journey, and that's if you measure in a straight line as the crow flies, through some of the most hostile territories on the planet. If things keep going at this rate, these folks are screwed!

I mean, obviously not entirely screwed since there is a third book in the series and I'm pretty sure I saw trees on the cover when I downloaded an image of it. But I still don't have high hopes for anyone besides the named protagonists reaching their destination- heck, not even that will save them, considering how quickly the list of named goblins got chewed through in the first book.

I guess we shall see. Let's get this show on the road.

The One Where Furt Tries to Overcome His Crippling Fear of Reading With the Help of a C-Tier Dragonlance Novel and Then Just Ends up Summarizing the Whole Thing

Longtime readers might know that I'm a bundle of anxieties masquerading as a sapient being. Somewhat counterproductively, these anxieties dominate a major facet of my chosen hobby and (if I'm being extremely generous to myself) career path:

I get so upset and agitated sitting and reading long-form text that I would almost call it a phobia.

The feelings that gradually run through me when I try to read something longer than a Wikipedia article in one sitting are a pretty weird mix of issues, most of them probably unrelated in origin, but I can't say that confidently.

The oldest feeling I've always had, ever since I was little, is an excruciating awareness that I am reading something. Within a few minutes of sitting down and trying to focus, I begin to grow restless. My arms get tired from holding up their own weight (and the added weight of the book), or my neck aches from looking down at my desk or lap. My eyes jump and reread the same lines over and over, but even so, my reading comprehension plummets and I find myself forgetting what I read just a few pages or paragraphs ago. This, coupled with the fact that I read as fast or slightly slower than my speaking voice, means I slow to a crawl.

Next I begin to hear the creaking of my joints, and feel the churning of my organs. My breathing is never automatic while I'm awake; I don't know if it's some kind of daytime apnea or what. But here it's soon joined by the sensation that I need to remind myself to blink or swallow, or an awareness of the feeling of my tongue in my mouth and the smell of the inside of my own nose.

Next, as the minutes tick past, comes the guilt. Despite my lack of social media presence I am one of those "terminally online" people. I have far more important personal connections over the internet than face-to-face, and I want to be clear that that part is okay. That's a reality that a lot of people live with this weird, disconnected society that we have in this technologically fortunate corner of the globe that me and statistically most of my audience occupy.

But where it turns into a problem is the way I respond to that reality. By divorcing myself from a screen for so long, or even just looking at a different screen in the case of using an e-reader, I feel as though I'm selfishly disconnecting and shutting myself off from other people who might want or need me- and considering how agitated I get trying to read, I begin to ask myself "for what possible benefit?"

Finally, way back somewhere in my reptile brain, there's always that tickle of existential pain.

Language is two or more unique meat-computers cobbling together a facsimile of mutual understanding through the use of noises that carry with them multiple layers of abstracted meaning. The speaker's brain thinks a thing, then tries to break those thoughts down into constituent parts, then tries to match those parts to words that they then speak to the listener's brain. The listener's brain then receives those words and—shared vocabulary willing—tries to reconstruct the first brain's meaning using its own separate set of building-block connotations between those same noises and the meaning attached to each, which are created through that second brain's fundamentally different lived experience from the first.

If two people are talking about a tree, then there are actually three entirely different trees present: the tree in the speaker's imagination, the tree as it is capable of being rendered in human speech, and the tree in the listener's imagination. And that's the way it has to be. Barring the invention of technology that allows people to accurately and directly beam their thoughts to one another, no one will ever know exactly what another person means. The same goes for art, music, and every other form of expression that tries to communicate the concept of a tree, or infinitely more complex ideas like emotions.

Most people who learn about this concept will make peace with the fact that it's weird, but it is what it is. Or maybe they'll exult in the miracle of language and the amazing humanoid achievements suggested by the fact that we are able to cooperate and communicate at all like this. I was first introduced to the idea by Innuendo Studio's examination of Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide, which takes it in stride while diving into semiotics, death of the author, and other stuff like that.

I do not take it in stride. I find the idea painful to deal with. I hate knowing that my interpretation of a story is 'wrong'. It reminds me of how flimsy and subjective our ideas of meaning are, and from there I typically spiral into obsessing over how by extension we are as unreal and invalid as the contents of a book. Then I usually settle into desperately willing the universe to conjure up a bubble of false vacuum decay and please just end it all already.

Keep in mind, this is all happening while I'm trying to read through a breakfast scene in a fricking Redwall book.

So yeah. I have some hang-ups about reading books, and my resulting avoidance of the medium has shaped my life enormously, in ways that I know and probably don't know. As a kid I always felt like I was nerding "wrong" by not being the bookworm or comic book geek. As I've grown older I've started to lament the hypothetical worthwhile experiences I could have had but never did. I'd say the last time I read an entire book purely for my own enjoyment separate from schoolwork was sometime during senior year in high school.

Visual media like shows and video games played a far bigger role in my development, and online gaming had a direct hand in making the creature that I am today. I opt for adaptations of books because even when they flop or grossly conflict with how most people interpret the text, they at least give me someone else's interpretation of the world to replace my own with, and that feels somehow more legitimate and permissible than my own. More official.

This doesn't sit well with me. I know I'm missing out, and it diminishes my enjoyment of other media by proxy. But usually I just avoid the issue entirely. Very rarely, I'll make a half-measure like listening to audiobooks. Sometimes I'll even finish them, but more often than not the extra voices become too distracting for someone who basically lives inside of a Skype call.

Every few years I do take a crack at "real" reading, but it usually only lasts a few pages before I fall off again. I never found a way to incentivize myself to finish a book.

Until now.

Because now, I've had an idea. If I can make myself accountable to an external party, such as you fine Burrowers (and the bots that inflate my site traffic), then I am that much more likely to follow through with the task. Because otherwise, I don't even have a finished story to relay here, and the post will remain an unfinished draft mocking me from my dashboard each and every day.

I realize that trying to outweigh the pressure of reading by using the pressure of not reading and therefore squandering a blog post I've already started writing is maybe not the healthiest technique. But it's the best plan I've had in a while, so I'm going to give it a shot.

Of course the plan isn't perfect. I can't just start reading anything under artificial duress. I still need it to be something that I have an interest in. Preferably, it's something that I also already have some familiarity with, so that I have an experiential base for my imagination to draw upon. Finally, it should be something bland, low-stakes, and utterly inconsequential to the real world and humanity's place within it.

I know just the thing!

I tease, I tease.

While I've gone on record as saying that Dragonlance is kind of past its prime as an IP (and especially as a moneymaker for its owners), I don't actually dislike it all that much. Like many kids, the original Dragonlance trilogy was one of my first experiences reading through a huge, high fantasy setting- I didn't get around to the LotR books until after high school, and when I did they were in the form of the admittedly wonderful audiobooks by Phil Dragash.

The series' central themes of faith and the balance between good and evil feel increasingly stupid to me the older I get, but the world of Krynn still holds a quaint charm for me, the way you might like certain parts of a mostly cringey '80s cartoon. The huge history always meant that there was something of passing interest to me somewhere, somewhen. It was also the closest thing to a culturally diverse fantasy series that I experienced for a long time, what with its prominent protagonists of vaguely Native American and Black inspiration- although you wouldn't know that from looking at the cover art that makes most of them white.

I really should read Earthsea someday.

Also for some reason I still think it's so cool that Krynn's major continent is in its southern hemisphere, with all the changes to geography and climate that entails? I'm sure fiction writers have been using that trope for a hundred years or more, but these books were what opened my tiny whelpling mind to the fact that you could do something like that and I just think that's neat.

Anyway, yes. I have chosen to read a Dragonlance novel for this little project of mine.

Next, I have to choose which one. Which you might think would be the bigger challenge, given that there are over 200 books in the series, spread across dozens of trilogies, anthologies, sagas, etc., all written by different authors with different abilities and areas of focus. And it's not like my past reading narrows the list down much- I read the original trilogy, the finale/reboot Dragons of Summer Flame, and one book in the Ergoth series. I've never even read the Twins series that is, as I've learned during research for this post, one half of the "Holy Six" that everyone recommends starting their Dragonlance journey with.

But this is one area where my brand of one-trick-ponyism comes in mighty handy.

I'm not even sure which of the 200+ Dragonlance novels this entry is, because every publication list I looked at online gave different numbers depending on which modules or anthologies they included or excluded from the lineup. The Rebellion could be the 140th in the series, or the 152nd, or the 182nd. Suffice it to say it's pretty high up there.

The Stonetellers series is a trilogy set during the latest era of the Dragonlance timeline, the Age of Mortals that started in the wake of the gods' war against their dad (or maybe uncle?) Chaos. Chaos was trapped inside a rock for eons and then decided to erase the gods and their entire world as payback. Obviously he failed, but the whole ordeal combined with the goddess Takhisis' unceasing machinations led to a pretty serious shakeup of the status quo. I talked more about the magical consequences of this in my recent 3E OdditE post about Ambient Tempests.

In hindsight this move was pretty clearly meant by TSR to set Dragonlance up for a new series of books with new protagonists and new challenges (as well as to market the new spin-off RPG using the SAGA system) that ended up not performing so well. The huge changes to the setting split the fanbase, and after a few years the entire story arc was revealed to have been a deception by Takhisis, with the world returning to something closer to what it was beforehand. I see it as a hasty rewrite from corporate to try and course-correct, but I have no evidence for that.

In the aftermath of all that mess, a plethora of Age of Mortals books has released that explore the less well-known parts of the world, far and away from the entrenched protagonist families that became central in the Summer Flame era. You can probably make a comparison here to how liberating or refreshing it is to read a Star Wars Expanded Universe novel that isn't about a Skywalker or a Solo, but of course I've never read any of those either.

The first installment in the Stonetellers series is, as the image above suggests, The Rebellion. In it, a group of goblin slaves find an opportunity to cast off their chains and seize some measure of justice and self-determination after their people have been unrelentingly shat upon for the better part of thousands of years. That is the extent of my knowledge of the book so far, but it's enough to entice me.

Goblins occupy an interesting position in Dragonlance, if you'll allow me to use 'interesting' as a synonym for 'pathetic' for a moment. They typically exist as another species of mooks to be bossed around by bigger and meaner villains, and hobgoblins essentially replace orcs, who are not native to the planet Krynn. But draconians do much of the same- and corrupted dragon people raised from eggs to be Spartanesque soldiers and perfect minions of evil are a touch more compelling and visually exciting than "D&D goblins, again". So goblins have almost always been backup minion fodder on Krynn when the Dragonlords and evil clerics don't have better folks under their employ- a pretty ignominious position to be in.

There are exceptions here and there, like the peaceful and "civilized" Ergothian goblin province of Sikk'et Hul, or the weirdly Blackadder-esque story dedicated to the grotesque but comically lucky little hobgoblin despot, Lord Toede. But those instances are rare and often unserious, so I was surprised to find that someone wrote an entire and sincere trilogy about them. Or at least I'm assuming it's serious- I haven't started reading yet.

Jean Rabe, the author, has a somewhat soured reputation among at least one vocal part of the Dragonlance fanbase. Her Dragons of the New Age trilogy was the one that carried the Age of Mortals forward with all its radical alterations, and some of the onus of things being too different and bad is placed upon her writing, or even her personally. In her defense I will say that the changes technically began with Summer Flame, even if it was originally intended by Weis and Hickman to be the Dragonlance finale. Other than that I don't know a thing about her, but she's the first Dragonlance author I've seen write about goblins this way, so I'm going to give her the benefit of a doubt.

It occurs to me that I've been infodumping a lot here to put off actually reading. That stops now.

I am going to make use of my first-ever jump break to mark my first-ever intrapostal time skip for whatever this nightmare is turning into, because I know it will be longwinded. What follows will be my "live" commentary as I work through the book in chunks.

Courtship in the Fokari Tribes.

((Happy Inverted Silphium Seedpod Day, Burrowers! I hope that each of you and your significant other (or others) have had a tolerable middle of the week together. And if you haven't, or you don't have an other, well, screw it! The holiday's a soulless commercial juggernaut anyway, and indulgence chocolate will be half-off tomorrow.

Seriously though, be good to yourselves out there.

As for myself, I've decided to stop with the crippling fear of exposure and launch a donations page! A few of your fellow Burrowers have already contributed, and I am humbled by the quick responses and willingness to support me.

This doesn't mean I'm retiring my plans for a Patreon, however. Things are progressing in that respect, albeit slowly. I just gotta make sure the banner art and video voice-over are good...

For now, I thought I'd write something appropriate for the occasion, as well as revisit our perpetually present yet narratively separated wasteland friends to the east.))





"Here are all of the things you will need to furnish your tent, Aymajah."
"Incense, perfumes, a brazier for the fire, a new dress with a cut that would make father's heart seize up from horror... a dagger, mother?"
"Even the finest pashdehm cloth should be hiding steel, child."
- Bisnaj, educating her daughter on the finer points of keeping a suitor tent.

"I heard that Ghaanbold offered up three carved wooden staves to that girl from the Zirkh family."
"Hah! Poor, love-struck fool. Doesn't he know how she looks at the Speaker's nephew?"
"By the end of the month, he'll find his staves propping up the flap of some stranger's marriage tent!"
- Banter filtering out of the Sheyhan tribal elders' tent.



Marriage and procreation is a public matter of some consequence in many Fokari tribes, often involving the input of family members and several key authorities within the camp. But that does not mean that the Fokari abstain from love or romance otherwise. Quite the opposite, in fact.

After a Fokar has graduated into adulthood through various deeds or consensus, but before they branch off from their family unit with a spouse, they are considered to be bachelors and bachelorettes. Though they are limited to the family tent and are expected to contribute to family affairs as full-fledged adults, single young Fokari are expected and sometimes encouraged to spend less time at home. The friendships they cultivated in earlier years are expected to develop into practical connections which will support them throughout life. Additionally, a certain degree of field-playing is considered to be the makings for an ideal partner. Inexperience breeds weakness and leads to death out on the wastes, and it could be said that this outlook has to some degree influenced Fokari perceptions of intimacy.

Of course it would be indecent, or at least awkward, for young Fokari to progress their flirting and courtship rituals within or around a family's tent. The solution to this is, somewhat surprisingly, simply to make an entirely new one.

These tents are made by the family of a young woman, and situated several meters away from the primary family dwelling. Normally, they are made of plain felt and are left completely unadorned. They do not incorporate any of the imagery of motifs of the family's patchwork ceiling program into their roofs, and when they are eventually deconstructed for the last time, nothing from them is added back to the family tent either. Instead the finer, more usable material from the tent is recycled into articles, garments, rugs, rags, or anything of the sort, which the woman would bring with her into her new married life. Thus her time spent in this tent is almost akin to living within one's own hope chest.

But the more important use of the tent is unrelated to recycling. It serves as a place to which a young Fokar woman may bring any prospective suitors of her choice. In the case of particularly sought-after women, it becomes a gathering place for suitors either vying for her attentions, or supporting one of their friends in the endeavor. Likewise, a woman's female friends might congregate just within her threshold, competing or cooperating in their own way with regards to the preferable men outside. Physical beauty is unsurprisingly of great significance for both sexes, but other qualities are taken into consideration as well. A man's looks or material gifts will only get him so far, if he cannot also sing or speak poetry, while a woman excelling as hostess but lacking in brusque charm or a biting wit may come across as dull.

Often these gatherings will end with everyone dispersing come sunset, but periodically a match will indeed be made, at least in the short term. The other players depart, the flap to the suitor tent is shut, and private, nightly business is attended to. Several such nights may pass without any explicit conduct between the two, according to the preferences of the pair and the intricate, often reversing games of cat and mouse played through conversations, music, and a surprisingly convoluted ritual of sharing and drinking butter-tea. (A tea which often has contraceptive additives, harvested from the hardy and exotic plants of the wastes or the unspeakable glands and organs of badlands creatures.)

A woman may invite several suitors into her tent over the span of several months or years, and a man may visit several different tents before an agreement it made between a pair (and their families). A Fokar man must be careful not to force a matter, carnal or marital, with a woman however. No matter how ephemeral the tent is, its mistress is considered to be sovereign within it, and there are more than a few stories in Fokari mythology and living memory of presumptive boys being slashed across the face by his date's ranqanj (lit. "thigh-dagger"). Facial scars are considered to be especially unbecoming among the Fokari, due to their close association with the punishments meted out to gravely offending criminals.

Thankfully however, these incidents are quite rare, and the game goes on as normal.

Gender & Family in the Fokari Tribes.

"What should we name her, when the day comes? She needs a beautiful name to grow into."
"How about Alyah?"
"After your aunt? She had a nose like a falcon's beak! Better to choose Golnaj, in honor of my mother..."
"You mean the one whose face is like a salt flat?"
- Fokari parents bantering over the cradle of their newborn.


Generally speaking, there are two genders among the Fokari. These are male and female, and again generally speaking, each of these genders encompasses a broad range of roles, customs, and expectations for those included within it. The most visible example of the sexual division of roles in a Fokari tribe is the existence of the Speaker and Seer. The former, a tribal archivist and overseer of youths within various age groups, is always male, while the latter, the preeminent or sole shaman of the community, is always female. This lines up somewhat appropriately with the general Fokari worldview of dualism and differing halves. But there are more divisions of labor less ritualized than either Speaker or Seer, and there are many more scenarios where these spheres may overlap in daily life.

Women are the commodity powerhouses of sorts in each family, weaving, felting, doing needle-work, and more rarely woodworking or clay-making, when available plant matter and water permits. Men will scrimshaw, tan hides or process meat, or work metal in exceedingly rare cases, but they more often attend to hunting and the maintenance of the tools relevant to it. War is ideally a male affair, but then again war is ideally avoided whenever possible, and pragmatism often calls on all to defend kith, kin, and yuum herds. Both men and women may tend to the tribe's herds, often in larger numbers of shepherds per animal head than in cultures where the use of domesticated horses is common. These house industries are overseen by the elder married couple of each family, with active parents generally exempt from the most rigorous and time-consuming projects unless a grandparent can manage their children for them.

Fertility and the bearing of children is not a private matter for families in a Fokari tribe. Because of the fluctuating access to resources common on the wasteland fringes, the family heads and other elders try to maintain a certain population range from generation to generation, encouraging marriage and reproduction here or discouraging it there. The range has initially soft limits at either end, but the sudden and severe under-or-overpopulation of a tribe's territory can lead to either voluntary assimilation into another band, or the cleaving-off of groups into new tribes. Allegations of adultery arising from unexpected children are dealt with in the same discreet manner as other disputes, with a mish'khiltah rarely ever being needed. Couples who plan for a single child and receive twins or triplets are celebrated as being gifted by the spirits despite the extra burden, but couples who do not limit themselves after multiple instances of childbearing face social stigma of varying severity, mother and father alike. The exposure of newborns is rare due to an association with blood-guilt, but it is not an unheard-of practice. Children who are both needed and desired must still survive the challenging first two years of life before having a celebrated and official name-day.

Being one of the few hereditary roles in Fokari life, chieftainship is passed down from parent to selected heir. As a general rule, the chieftain selects their youngest adult child of the opposite sex who is unmarried, in the belief that this will ensure the new chief's full dedication to their duties, as well as prevent a dynasty of personality from forming through successive generations of fathers and sons or mothers and daughters. Of course succession does not always come to pass in this way, either because of fate, or by personal choice of the chieftain.

Marriage may still occur when children are unneeded, and there is nothing to stop a married couple from constructing their own tent and living together within it. But a low fertility does not mean that infertile or discouraged couples are forever without children. Attrition and challenges to life expectancy are found at all age ranges, and in the event that a youth is orphaned of both parents, or a nuclear family unit is overwhelmed with needs, a foster pair may take them in. These foster parents are typically of the same extended family through one side or the other, so it is not uncommon for these children to be raised by aunts, uncles, or cousins. Often, these foster parents are couples which include one nyaak partner.

Literally meaning "mirrored", a nyaak Fokar is one who identifies and behaves as the gender opposite of the one they were born into. In mythic traditions held by many tribes, they are the result of a spirit being incorrectly clothed in flesh during the movement from the spirit realm to the physical world. A Fokar cannot identify as nyaak until they are of the age to be able to complete the adulthood rituals typical for all members of the tribe. But after that point and upon completion of these events, they are treated in accordance with their truer, unfleshed self. A male is for all intents and purposes a woman, and vice versa. From a certain sociological perspective, couples including one nyaak serve to limit population growth somewhat, and so they are valued as naturally-occurring moderators despite their rarity in the tribes overall. In this way a dualistic binary is maintained, but a mode of transportation between the two points is made available.