Is My Power Level Showing ?

There's a recurring problem in certain kinds of ttrpg, in particular in Dungeons & Dragons. The question of How powerful is this guy ?

Imagine I'm talking to some lady in a tavern, she's strapping a longsword, her clothes are clean and relatively up market, she has a minor scar on her cheek. How dangerous is she ? Does she have five hit dice or fifteen ? If things turn sour and we get into a tavern brawl together is this going to be a fair match-up or is she going to absolutely trounce us with one hand behind her back ?

I have been on the weird end of this as a player. Fighting some city guards, just some guys with shield and spear and, as it turned out over the fight, thirty hit points. Thirty! Really ? These shmucks ? Was the extent of my thoughts. It was not a particularly big problem but it did harm my sense of place within the narrative a little and sometimes those little road bumps add up.

The issue is one of expectation. I thought these were just guys, not level five veterans of several campaigns. I hadn't been given the information with which to make an informed decision and so when I was surprised, when my expectations were broken, it felt off.

Do you think we can take him ?

There are two things that I think my DM could've done in that scenario. Hi Mark, by the way, if you happen to be reading. Don't worry, it really was a very tiny moment, I am hyper focusing. You were a great DM. That time in the tower with the mirror-men and the psychic hamster is to this day one of the most entertaining sessions of D&D I've played. I'm still not sure to this day if my guy came out of that or the doppelganger did.

When running games myself I've hit upon two thinking-on-my-feet 'solutions' to this 'problem'. They are both different ways of handing more information to the players. One in narrative terms, and one in game mechanical terms. 

Navel Gazing on Goblins & Their Narrative Purpose

In my opinion goblins currently occupy a strange place in the fantasyland milieu. They've been increasingly treated as people-like. Goblin is a playable race in several D&D settings, Eberron and Ravnica come to mind as well as their core ancestry status in Pathfinder 2E. In these settings goblins are people with all the implications that brings. They have varied emotions and outlooks. Goblins can be smart, clean, dirty, angry, pacifistic, inventive, industrious, cruel, and any number of other things. Goblins have societies, friends, and children whom they love.

I feel like this is something of a misstep. Goblins which have been granted narrative personhood seem to me to be nothing more than slightly grotty gnomes, and often they're actually not even that grotty. They're small, they make things, they play tricks, but also they're dirty. It's like taking the strong stereotyped characteristics of the various dragons and throwing them all away. I understand (and enjoy) the depiction of slightly grotty gnomes as PCs in those settings, but I don't think it's the right fit for my fantasyland. 

My conclusion is that my goblins are wolves with opposable thumbs. Sure they sometimes have good humour, sometimes can be convinced and bartered with, but at the end of the day they're there to provide a low-level foe who nonetheless acts with near-human levels of wit and tactics.

But, you say, can't regular full-personhood humans fill this role just as well ? To which my answer is, yes you're right, but generally (and in my mind healthily) people balk at declaring a group of persons killable with impunity. That's exactly why I think it's a mistake to give a real proper personhood to the goblin. The way in which I deploy goblins, I don't want the PCs - or indeed the players - to worry about what to do with the goblin children, there are other species with full personhood to foist that dilemma upon the them if that's what we want.

I am acutely aware of the problem that exists in labelling near human intelligences as non-persons and giving narrative permission to kill them with impunity. So instead I say they occupy a category of thing more like an elemental, ghost, or vampire. All of these things are generally presented as being intelligent and person-like to lesser or greater extents but they all have something about them which makes them not-people. They're not made of flesh and blood, they aren't assumed to reproduce in a 'natural' fashion and they don't generally have a culture or a society in the way we imagine such things.

So I'm removing certain things from goblins so that they are as far away from being people as possible whilst still keeping their cunning. They don't have genders or sexes, they don't need to eat, they don't reproduce and have little goblin children, they don't have little goblins hopes and dreams, they barely have a long-term memory at all and they aren't made of flesh and blood, if you cut them you find dirt and sticks.

WotW Part 1: The Secret Ingredient Is Fire

Alternate titles: We Better Take Her Eyes, Escape By Arson's Light

The Way of the Wicked is an adventure path made for Pathfinder. In it the player characters begin as prisoners condemned to some grizzly fate for an equally grizzly crime. They are as a rule horrible people, and in the course of this adventure are expected to perform many fantasy villain clichés. I am adapting it as I go to DnD 5th Edition.

For this unwholesome adventure has been assembled a dastardly duo.

John Lucidum - Disappointing second son of a petit bourgeoisie human family, wizard, and pyromaniac. Attributes sorted by ascending importance. Burned down his family farm and home when it became clear it would fall to him after his older brother went away to join the Knights of Alerion. He hates farming.

John Lucidum as portrayed by
Mackenzie Crook. Imagine he 
has both of his eyes.

Timmy the Goblin Boy - Is a fungus ridden goblin druid and most definitely not a boy. Forsaken twice over. First exiled from Faerie for the crime of eating one of the most delicious beautiful flowers in the House of Beauty. Then caught passing around pamphlets advocating for various radical freedoms and shouting about how 'the man' (presumably they mean the King but who knows with such people ?) keeps everyone down. They were tried for sedition in the mortal realm.

After being captured and sentenced for their crimes our intrepid villains were taken to Brandescar prison, a fort on the southeast coast turned secure holding pen for the wretched. The castle sits on a small rocky island, connected to the land by bridge. Frigid sea below slowly saws through sharp cliff faces. 

There in the courtyard, hemmed in by high stone walls and lungs full of salty air they were each branded with a runic F for forsaken, a tradition going back hundreds of years. They knew that for three days they would wait before being led to their final fates.

Notes on Terminan Dwarves

The dwarves of Termina are not born, they are made. More specifically they are fired in a kiln. 

The secrets of this process are known only to dwarves and usually entrusted only to the eldest among them. It is however known that all dwarves of a clan are produced from the same kiln and that all kiln mates bear some mark that clearly identifies them as such. As they do not reproduce in the common fashion dwarves do not carry a reproductive instinct and whether or not to fire new dwarves into existence is a simple matter of management for Wisedwarves.

• Do we have enough workers to exploit our current resources ?
• What population can our current resources sustain ?
• Is there a conflict foreseen in our future ?

Exactly how complete a dwarf is at its creation is unknown, however there does not seem to be any reference to an infant like stage of dwarvern development in any of their broader mythology and they hide their children from outsiders.

So far as can be seen dwarves come out the kiln comparable to human young adults and accordingly they seem to be able to walk, as well as speak, read, and write in dwarvern. There are even some stories of desperate clans in sieges taking newly fired dwarves directly from the kiln dressing them in armour, thrusting a battle-axe and shield into their arms and sending them directly off to the frontlines. They supposedly possess innate knowledge of some tools in the same fashion as a foal that knows how to walk upon birth.

Mytho-History

Dwarves are from a different world. Or so they say. The tale they tell is that they were created as tools of a being they call Mostal to aid him in maintenance of the World Machine. Some kind of great mechanism they liken to a windmill or a winch, but vast and extending throughout the world unseen. It is perhaps their description of the Spirit World or the Formal plane.

The Nature of Goblinhood

What Dogs Smell

The little wild people smell of dirt, sticks, and poison fruit. Two-legs are very worried about them so they must be dangerous, we will bark and chase them. It's fun to chase them but they taste awful (which is saying a lot for a dog, they'll eat nearly anything.)

What Common People Know

Goblins are hideous little thugs. They spring from the ground covered in filth and full of hate. They cannot create things for themselves, but they enjoy things made by others. They are angry magpies and cattle rustlers. Anyone who knows of an infestation of them would do best to kill the pests now before they gain the confidence to come and take your children and make them into Hobgoblins. They are the most common and pernicious demons left behind in the Time of Fire and Madness.

What The Spirits Know

Goblinhood is a punishment for those who commit the most horrible crimes. It is the final punishment for those too abhorrent to be allowed the final release of death and too dangerous to be exiled. Goblination is for enemies for which you have only disrespect.

How To Write A Backstory When I DM

Don't.

The Common Language

What The Common Man Knows

Onisol is the trade-talk, merchants all seem to know it. I suppose they need it to talk to foreigners with their silly babbles. I don't see why the whole world doesn't just speak our tongue,  it would be so much easier.

What Wealthy Merchants And Nobility Know

Onisol is a remarkably simple language when compared to others. A fluent speaker can teach it to someone completely virgin with only a few weeks of dedicated study. Everyone who needs to talk to foreigners learns it by default; sailors, traders who visit foreign ports, mid-to-high ranking nobility, and so on.

Florian Herold

Occasionally you hear stories of novices who dream on some restless night of falling out of their beds and up into the sky, landing on some distant star. There they find a tower of slick black stone. Inside they go through many constricting passages with walls detailed by intricate golden filigree. They lead deep underground and finally come to a chamber greater than the greatest cathedral hall and twice as opulent. At the center, on a plinth, they find, well that's where they can't recall, nobody can. Then they wake up in a cold sweat and suddenly they're speaking Onisol fluently like their father had been whispering it to them through the wall of the womb.

Map of Termina

I quite like maps, I'm not much of an artist though. So here's a map of my default, standard issue, campaign setting known as Termina, that I made in hexographer. One of these days I'll likely make something less rudimentary and slightly more functional with names and icons and everything else in an actual image editor but for now this is the what I've got.

Fig. 1 The Continent of Termina. Scale is 24 miles per hex

There are currently no places marked and I think that technically this is a map from before the massive deforestation that comes with tool using, tree chopping intelligent mortal life anyway. There are however places on the actual real and present day Termina, the one that exists in my head and not this feeble representation. Places like the Rot, the Rainbow Forest, and the Broken Tusk Mesa. Most of these places are a few paragraphs scattered in text documents on hard drives, the rest are less concretely free floating in my head.

The eagle-eyed of you may recognise the contours of this land from a certain place on Earth. It is in fact based on a map of Antarctica 'cept no ice. The original inspiration and map I drew over came from here or one of the other alternate Earths on that site, though Termina is not in the tropics. Those vestigial white lines on the edges at 1/3rd and 2/3rds the y-axis mark latitudes of 30 and 60 degrees north, putting her firmly in the temperate regions.