Musical Inspiration Challenge 2! Part 10 – The Second Encounter.

The Oracle by Van Canto

Van Canto’s an odd one. They’re a mostly acapella metal band. Mostly acapella because apparently they originally intended to have a guy beatboxing to provide the drumline, but the guys they kept auditioning kept on passing out because of that whole humans-need-to-breathe thing.

The Oracle is part of the Voices of Fire album, which is a kind of rock opera thing about bards and dragons. So its suitable for fantasy stuff, but can we take any use out of it? Well..

On to the lyrics (from genius.com).

[Choir:]
Once for all!
Hear your call!
Dragonfall!
Create an army, unite in harmony

No escape!
Face your fate!
Save the eight!
Fulfill your purpose, your voice is precious

Rise up and fight your misery
Step right into your destiny
Defend our holy legacy
Create an army, unite in harmony

Rise up and face your enemy
Invoke the bard's integrity
Unite your skills for victory
Fulfill your purpose, your voice is precious!

[Voice:]
We come in peace to seek your advice
Too blind to see we beg for your eyes
Is there a hidden prophecy
To figure out this mystery?
Is there a little chance to survive this war?

(a war)
Out of my mind
Left far behind

[Choir:]
The dragon is rising
The islands colliding
The savior in hiding
The empress not guiding
Ash to ash – dust to dust
Our star will combust
Not to fail is a must
Raise your voice to be free
Harmony is the key!

[Voice:]
I need a little faith in my voice (don't rail against your fate, young bard!)
I cannot seem to have any choice (defeat the coward you have empowered!)
I want to hide behind armour plates (you can't escape – accept your lot!)
My inner voice is conquered by hate (rise like a phoenix, out of the ashes!)

[Choir:]
Fight with a mighty heart
And we will sing aloud of dragons we fight

[Voice:]
This line of fate decides on my heart (don't lose heart!)
I'm cut into pieces, like the islands
I am drifting apart
No gallantry inside my soul (call the bards!)
All valour vanished in my memory
And a long long way from home

Out of my mind
Left far behind

Don't you fear your tryst with destiny
Put your faith in your own melody!
I will join up into harmony

[Choir:]
Raise you voice to be free
Harmony is the key!
The dragon is rising
The islands colliding
The savior in hiding
The empress not guiding
Ash to ash – dust to dust
Our star will combust
Not to fail is a must
Raise your voice – built on trust!

[Voice:]
I need a little faith in my voice (don't rail against your fate, young bard!)
I cannot seem to have any choice (defeat the coward you have empowered!)
I want to hide behind armour plates (you can't escape – accept your lot!)
My inner voice is conquered by hate (rise like a phoenix, out of the ashes!)

[Choir:]
Rise up and face your enemy
Invoke the bard's integrity
Unite your skills for victory
Fulfill your purpose, your voice is precious!

[Solo]

Fight with a mighty heart, and you will
Raise your voice to be free
Harmony is the key!

[Voice:]
I need a little faith in my voice (don't rail against your fate, young bard!)
I cannot seem to have any choice (defeat the coward you have empowered!)
I want to hide behind armour plates (you can't escape – accept your lot!)
My inner voice is conquered by hate (rise like a phoenix, out of the ashes!)

[Choir:]
Fight with a mighty heart
And you will find your own path
Look upon the start
Shining in the dark
And we will sing aloud of dragons we fight. [4x]

[Voices:]
Fighting my heart
Losing my path
A star in the dark
For thee
I learn to fight!
Fighting my heart
Losing my path
A star in the dark
For thee

And we’re back to the issue of rising up against an insurmountable foe. There is also the bard-angle where it speaks of songs and the strength of voices. Mighty hearts. That refusing to surrender is itself a victory.

In many ways this ties in with what we’ve been aiming for. So how do we make this an encounter? Also, how do we make it a non-consecutive encounter? Reminding ourselves that climactic encounters in an adventure don’t always flow A to B.

Let’s imagine now more about our bad guy. He’s doing terrible things to these people to attempt to prove to himself that there is no final judge or arbiter, while simultaneously wishing that there were. This is positively diabolical. Tie in with that though, he’s been running what’s essentially a death camp of the soul for old folks. Suicide, death, euthanasia and all of those terrible things.  

Pathfinder has an entity referred to as an allip, it’s a being of mindless madness and despair made from the insane who take their own lives, perhaps that’s our enemy. The asylum or old folks home is overwhelmed by entities and spirits of despair, so the heroes must defeat them with the desperate human power of hope. Re-enacting a story or singing a glorious song together, or working together and remembering where they came from and why they can’t stop.

Also, having to punch incorporeal monsters flooding on them. Let’s see how our final battle music pans out before we finalize though.

Wizards Are Weird: The Wizard Is An Asshole

Last time, we took a look at some pulpy based wizards from the two Conan movies. I wanted to use this as an introduction to how wizards are, well, weirdoes.

I mentioned that wizardry in a lot of the older books had this element of trickery, misdirection and illusion to it. I even used the word 'cheating,' when I did it. That's because the wizard in quite a few tales, occupies the spot of being well.. The bad guy.

One of the concepts of dark sorcery, whether its called thaumaturgy, necromancy or what not, is the idea of trifling with things you don't understand and doing things you shouldn't but that you arrogantly think you can get away with. Wizards frequently are portrayed as gaining their powers by making fell bargains with unholy powers.

One of the ideas here is that the unholy powers know tricks and traps about how to make things happen, and that's what those rituals are for. Kind of like bribing the computer server guy to let you set up a Counterstrike server on the hospital's secure records server, except you bribe him with blood and souls.  Wizards also have a strong tie to gnosticism, and if you've ever looked into gnosticism, you understand why they're viewed as jerks.

Gnostics, to summarize, are a particular group of philosophical weirdoes who believe that only by gaining 'the secret knowledge' which of course only they are smart enough to figure out, can one achieve salvation/greatness/merge with the celestial atman, etc. Gnostics also frequently show up in what I like to call 'Supermarket Checkout Line' material, where we hear about how 'We've Discovered!' a book that got refuted in the second century, or 'New Unheard of Secrets Come to Light' which once again some dowdy guy in robes blew apart philosophically several hundred if not a thousand, years ago.

Wizards and gnostics have the general idea that again, they're the smart ones, privileged by their superior brains and 'daring spirits' to do and believe in crap that sane and normal people wouldn't go near with a ten foot clown pole. And both wizards and gnostics are frequently portrayed as speaking in high minded gobbledygook. Pleromas, princes of hell, CHIM, aphelions, etc. Big fancy words that generally end up being things ridiculously and needlessly complex, blasphemous and/or dangerous.

Even if we go to Jack Vance, wizards are portrayed as a collection of backbiters, perverts, sneaks and assholes constantly jockeying for position. Or who treat people's lives as an afternoon entertainment. The routine thing that comes up with wizards is the idea that they think they are better then you because of their powers, and end up causing no end of misery to others and themselves because of it.

There's a joking term used in some tables I've run called 'wizard hubris,' which gets trotted out whenever the PC Wizard decides to do something dodgy, or when they run into something like an owlbear that fires laser beams. I imagine they view it more as the 'wizard as mad scientist' mindset we have more of these days, but I think its a good representation of the 'wizard as asshole,' angle that magic users never seem to really escape.

Wizards are Weird: Introduction Via Conan

Wizards are weird. We hear about that frequently.

In the modern RPG mindset though, wizards are treated kind of like kindly old college professors, or only-vaguely mad scientists. Or more recently, and more annoyingly, like over dramatic chess masters.

I don't have much of a problem with these, what I do have a problem with, is that we seem to have lost a lot of the reasons why barbarians (justly) dislike wizards and normal folks want to keep them at arm's reach.

Since pop culture makes for easy examples, I turn your head towards Conan. The one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hell. I'm going to include the not-as-great Conan the Destroyer movie as well. This gives us four examples of "wizards."

In the first Conan film, we have two wizards.
The Wizard of the Mounds played by Mako and Thulsa Doom played by James Earl Jones.

In the second Conan film, we have a wizard and sorceress And Mako's character, who gets the name of Akiro.  Also we have some other minor wizard. You know what? We had four wizards, you happy? They were our evil Queen Taramis, Mako's character, a random scrub wizard and a guy called Toth-Amon.

Now, let's examine our wizards here.
The Wizard of the Mounds, Akiro, lives in a ramshackle hut, runs around like a tiny weirdo, wears odd clothes, apparently spends his time talking to dead people and communing with gods, and threatens people with his outrageous powers. He's friendly, but he's still a weirdo. I mean he set his house in freaking burial mounds to gain necromantic power.

Thulsa Doom, who might be a snake man, is a cult leader. he leads an army of hippies and barbarians, and barbarian hippies, for the purposes of spreading a world philosophy of utter nihilism to gain power. He also has orgies, feasts on human flesh, shoots snakes out of bows and turns into a giant python FOR NO REASON.

Moving on to the second film, we have..

The guy who tried to open a door but got stopped by Akiro. He's not too strange, except its also implied he's some sort of cthulhic giant being who are worried about Conan and crew awakening an elder god.

Taramis claims to have necromantic power to reunite Conan with his lost love, but her real objective is to resurrect the elder god Dagoth, which will reign destruction on mankind. Why does she want to resurrect it? She wants to bang him before he erradicates all reality. So, she's such a ridiculous hedonist and so jaded she wants to literally cross 'booty called cthulhu' off her bucket list.

Toth-Amon? Aside from inspiring dozens of D&D Dungeons in the 80s, this guy lives in a giant crystal castle in the middle of a lake. He uses weird mirrors, wanders around half naked most of the time, and his immediate reaction to being attacked by heroes is to transmogrify himself into a green ape man wearing a red cape to try to beat Conan by going WWF on his ass.

What do these guys tell us? They tell us that wizards are weird. When Conan makes friends with Akiro, its a big deal to Akiro. Why? He's a freaking weirdo. Nobody wants to be around a guy who claims he hears spirits and lives in a graveyard so he can have conversations with them.

Toth-Amon and Thulsa Doom may or may not even be human anymore, if they even were to begin with. Taramis' motivations are perverse, creepy and insane.

The reason for this is because wizardry in pulp, carries with it an intrinsic idea of 'wrongness,' or 'cheating.' Its an art based on illusion and misdirection, and sneaking around, and accomplishing things by treating with stuff better left untouched. Its the marketplace for people with sick ideals (Toth-Amon, Thulsa Doom and Taramis all have a pseudo-sexual perversity to them), and each wizard is monstrously and bizarrely unique. Taramis the evil seducer queen. Toth-Amon the twisted mirror-mage. Thulsa Doom the Serpent.

Akiro, being a good guy, avoids this by mostly being a shaman. Most of his supernatural power seems to rely on calling on ancestors, or just knowing the right way to deal with bad crap. He doesn't seem to call up vile shades, or reanimate the dead. He seems strangely content to just sit on top of dead men's bones and listen to them sing about better days. He's a weirdo, but he's a nice one.

When Wizards became PCs, they started being less weird. We started having more wizards academies, and good wizards became the norm instead of the exception. I think this has been a step away from really having wizards, and thus magic, feel well.. Magical.

Magical in the bad way. Magical in the dangerous way. Magical in the weird way.

 

The Problem of Loot

Treasure used to be why adventurers did their thing. OSR games like ACKs try to reclaim this. See, back in 1e, your xp was linked almost directly to how much gold you were able to drag out of the specific necrotic hellhole you and your compatriots decided to go to. That's why you were adventurers. You dealt with kobolds, goblins and type VI demons because they had shiny gold, that you wanted to procure and spend on wenches, ale and strongholds.

This mercenary aspect faded away as time went on.

Folks like the RPG Pundit over at this link think that this is partially because of a change over to a more story or 'novel' approach to RPGs.

I kind of agree. I mean, 1e D&D gave the referee the express title of 'Dungeon Master' whereas modern games use a softer Games Master, or even Storyteller. A series of adventures in D&D was referred to as a "Campaign," Pathfinder RPG seems to prefer 'Chronicle.' However, the change from mercenary adventurers to story heroes, resulted in a problem.

That problem was loot.

See. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. When you want to procure it to spend on fortresses, nights with friendly company, buying off your father's house's mortgage or paying off gambling debts, that money is a pretty good motivator. The money is the end. Its what you're doing the stuff for.

In a story based campaign though, and most modern systems, money is a means. The hero in 1e who found 10,000gp in a chest had 'won' his adventure and would fill his pockets and run back home to spend it. The hero in pathfinder who finds 10,000gp likely spends it immediately on some item to use against the big bad, or to craft. These sound similar, but there's a major difference.

In 1e and OSR, you couldn't spend money on magic items, or stat boosters, or the like. Once you graduated past a certain point, money became something you horded up, or something you turned into businesses or castles, or the like. When you have 85k in the kitty, and a few beers and a night's company cost 100gp, you start thinking bigger and start buying land and saying 'to hell with spinning wheels.' ACKs actually made pissing your money away on stuff like lavish parties or fun trips a game mechanic for building up the xp of successor characters, making the point that gold is either used for something useful, or for xp even clearer.

Meanwhile, modern Pathfinder and D&D are mired by wealth by level. The idea that you should only be so rich at a certain level, because being able to buy magic items, devices, and the like results in you having a gear advantage over others. This causes problems because now things like truly impressive treasure hordes risk severely imbalacing the game.

In OSR if your party of adventurers took down a dragon and came to town with 250k each to their name, they'd either be parted with it by a collection of conmen, fritter it away, or discover that they had to find a good place to hide it. Or they'd retire.

So, our problem these days boils down to the fact that players want money, cool treasure and they want it in sufficient piles to justify their effforts, with the unfortunate irony that people don't seem to appreciate the glittering gold and precious baubles for what they are unless they can spend them to buy an upgrade to their magic armor.

We've got 17th level adventurers with zero liquidity these days. Its kind of weird. The OSR valued money above all else, modern adventuring seems to have no value for it at all unless its buying new weapons/armor/spells. On one hand, we have heroes who are only interested in the mercenary, and on the other we have ones who are walking poor except for having pants on that could bankrupt a small country.

I honestly have no idea how to 'fix' this though.

Musical Inspiration Challenge 2! Part 9: The First Encounter

Wake the White Wolf by Miracle of Sound

This one is going to be a bit odd. Wake the White Wolf is a fantasy song. Maybe too much of one. I think one of the major strengths of Miracle of Sound is that he makes songs based on video games, or science fiction or fantasy shows, and their source material is usually immediately identifiable, but its not so obvious that they can only be appreciated that way.

Wake the White Wolf is supposedly inspired by the Witcher series. The white wolf in question being the protagonist of the Witcher, who during the video game series, is dealing with increasing age and weariness, but who still rouses himself again and again to do what he has to.

Anyway, our lyrics.

Torches of war under hatred's sails
A whisper of doom on a wary breeze
Scorching the shores in a blazing trail
Cinder and fume foul the air we breathe

Blood of fallen kings
Blades of chaos ring
Steel and silver sing
For justice

Keen to the scent, the hunt is my muse
A means to an end this path that I choose
Lost and aloof are the loves of my past
Wake the White Wolf!
Remembrance at last

Wake the White Wolf at the dawn of war
The end of the age is-a coming now

Sign of flame will sting
Punishment I bring
Steel and silver sing
For justice

Keen to the scent, the hunt is my muse
A means to an end this path that I choose
Lost and aloof are the loves of my past
Wake the White Wolf!
Remembrance at last

Wake the White Wolf at the dawn of war
The end of the age is-a coming now
Ravaging the rivers scorching the shores
Fires in the night the torches of war

WAKE THE WOLF
WAKE THE WHITE WOLF

Wake the White Wolf at the dawn of war
The end of the age is-a coming now

I’ve said before that encounters aren’t necessarily punchy-fighty stuff. Not every encounter involves beating on a given target. Climactic Encounters are moments when the heroes have to contend against something, and when that contention has an important outcome. As before I’m not going into the details of the players having to do stuff like deal with angry orderlies in the old folk home or sneaking past doorways. That stuff isn’t stuff that really needs to be plotted.

In this case, our first major encounter is one that’s massively important.

They have to convince the guy they need to get the information from, to not give up or give in.

In a way this can be social. It might end up a combat encounter though. Rousing a man from his old dreams and getting him to lift his creaky bones free of the madness and despair that surrounds.

This might require us to examine some of our earlier plans though. After all, if our first real climactic encounter has them find the guy, well, then they could just take him back, have him open the vault, point out the princeling, etc.

Alternatively, they could have to rescue him from the vile euthanasia of this hellish crapshack that he’s found himself in, and he might not be in the best place mentally or physically after wards, but that seems like a cheat to me.

So, hmm, how do we get the players to get the guy they need to rescue early developmentally, but still have an adventure?

Musical Inspiration Challenge 2! Part 8: The Complication

Another Record by Genesis

The complication is meant to be the aspect that provides a bit more meat to the mill. Its intended to add complexity and maybe switch things up a little bit from the straight forward. Last time we had walruses, this time.. It’s “Another Record” by Genesis.

Anyway, the lyrics..

It's funny you know,
'Cos there's an old rock 'n' roller
He's got nowhere to go.
Did you ever think of taking him in?
Somebody help him, somebody please.

Put another record on
'Cos he likes that song.

It's funny you know,
Ooh he never done nothing, done nobody wrong,
Did he think about changing his name,
But I'm gonna tell him it's the same old game.

Put another record on
Round and round and round and around - oh
Ah - see him smile.

Well lately I've seen him
Walking down the street, kinda moving his feet,
Everyone I know looks the other way
Somebody help him, somebody say -

Put another record on
Round and round and round and around - oh
Ah - see him smile.

It's funny you know,
'Cos there's an old rock 'n' roller
He's got nowhere to go.
Did you ever think of taking him in?
Somebody help him, somebody please.

Just put another record on

Alright. This cements the ‘old adventurer’ thing I was growing into earlier. Another sensation of a guy past his prime ‘old rock and roller, he’s got nowhere to go’ who is trying to get by. The burnt out wrecks of past heroism and adventure, left to molder.

Since I’m a pedant and a weirdo though.. Records can also represent histories and documents. What if our hero past his prime, who is moldering in this crappy place knows something important? Something vital. Like what the combination is to a vault, or who the remaining illegitimate heir to a kingdom is?

He’s the only one who knows. And he’s practically insensate. Maybe senile. Or maybe he’s lost in his past, trapped in nostalgia and forced to reminisce himself to death?

Maybe that’s what our villain is up to. Making the cast off elder heroes of other ages waste away in his lotus eater machine of their past glories until they die.

Put another record on, indeed.