12 January 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

ROGUE FEED
Cheap Death
JAN 11, 2010 09:04A.M.
When I began my Dwimmermount campaign, I did so with the expressed
intention of starting with the OD&D rules as presented in the LBBs and
expanding from there, (generally) allowing house rules to evolve
naturally through play. This is part of my “D&D is always right”
philosophy, which is simply my belief that it’s foolish to assume that,
even in OD&D, the rules were not written as they were for a very good
reason. Naturally, this philosophy doesn’t preclude the possibility of
changing rules, either by modification or outright removal. Rather, it’s
meant to apply a break to the commonplace notion that the LBBs are a
haphazard concatenation of half-baked ideas without any guiding
principles behind them. Having refereed an OD&D campaign for over a
year now, I’m fairly confident in saying that’s very much not the case and
that most, if not all, of the seeming haphazardness of the game comes
from context lost or obscure to us thirty-five years on.
meeting their demises. What’s interesting is that Brakk’s death is still
keenly felt, months after the fact. The players — and not just Brother
Candor’s player — frequently remark on how they “miss Brakk” and
express remorse about the way they left his acid-splashed body behind so
as to cover their own escape.
No such feelings are attached to Vladimir or Henga’s deaths, because
they weren’t permanent. They were just bumps in the road and, if
they’re mentioned at all, they’re treated more as sources of comedy than
drama. Now, let me be clear: I’m not looking to inject “drama” into the
campaign. I remain more firmly committed than ever that all campaigns,
even ones mired in purely venal dungeon delving will, given enough
time, develop the depth from which good roleplaying is born. There’s no
need for the referee to insert his own prepackaged drama to achieve this
and indeed doing so may well have the opposite effect. Yet, here I was,
faced with the deaths of a PC and a longstanding NPC, and I punted. I
passed up the opportunity to see some campaign development — and in
the case of Henga, development of Dordagdonar’s feelings toward
ephemerals — because raise dead made it easy to do so. What a waste.

That said, I wish I had established early on that the raise dead spell
(never mind raise dead fully from Greyhawk) did not exist in my
campaign. As I said, I am philosophically predisposed to let D&D be
D&D and build my world around its assumptions rather than try to
conform the game rules to my world. Down that path lies the madness of
2e. That’s why I convinced myself that retaining raise dead as a clerical
spell and a reasonably easy to obtain one at that was a good idea. And, on
some level, I still do think I was right to hew closely to the LBBs.
Otherwise, I doubt I’d have come to the realization that the presence of
raise dead has a profound effect on the complexion of any campaign.
I don’t believe in changing horses midstream, so I won’t be eliminating a
spell I’ve already clearly established exists and to which the PCs have
access. However, I do regret my early decision to allow the existence of
raise dead and wish I’d disallowed it. Brakk’s accidental death remains
one of the more tragic, even poignant, episodes of the entire
Dwimmermount campaign, whereas the deaths of Vladimir and Henga
mean nothing. That’s a pity and I know that, in my next campaign, I
won’t make the same mistake I did this time.

One of the “themes” — and I hate to use that word but I can think of no
better — of the Dwimmermount campaign is uncertainty about the
existence of the gods and, more personally, a hereafter. Though the cult
of Turms Termax is supposedly predicated on self-willed deification, the
characters have seen evidence that suggests it’s not as straightforward as
that, with at least two presumed former members of the cult denying the
existence of anything beyond death but oblivion. Likewise, the
Termaxians’ obsession with the undead would seem to suggest at least
seem doubts about a more spiritual understanding of life after death.
And then of course, those avatars of Chaos, the demons, outright deny
the existence of both gods and an afterlife, but then it serves their
purposes to say so, doesn’t it?

Brother Candor’s goblin henchmen, Brakk, died in the first third of the
campaign and circumstances prevented his being raised from the dead.
That was not the case for either Vladimir the dwarf or Henga,
Dordagdonar’s henchman, both of whom were returned to life after