Other Fictions: Weird Modes

My new year's resolution for 2021 is to stay adamantly positive about the world.  In that vein, I'd like to recommend a few fictional universes for you all to get lost in.  If escapism makes you feel guilty, don't worry -- that's not all this is about.  Let's call it 25% getaway, 75% inspiration for the now.  Refueling rest stops for the soul.

I've got two primary recommendations -- for which the "delivery modes" may be as unconventional as the content -- and two secondary ones, which many of you probably already know about.

First, I'd like to tell you about a science-fiction podcast called The Strange Case of Starship Iris.  Created by Jessica Best, the first season was released between 2017 and 2019, and the second season just started earlier this week.  

 

 

Okay, it's the year 2191, and humanity has spread to the stars.  A few years prior to the events of the show, there was a war with an enigmatic race of purple aliens known as Dwarnians.  During the war, there was a military coup that saw the human worlds taken over by a kind, benevolent Intergalactic Republic.  (Shh... they're listening.)  In the first episode, we check in on an IGR research ship exploring Planet 5925, and we begin to meet our characters.

The above summary doesn't do it much justice, because it's really about those characters.  The official podcast description says "It's a story of outer space, survival, espionage, resistance, identity, friendship, found family, romance, and secrets. (Also there's jokes.)"

To that I'll add: ramen noodles, linguistics, awkward crushes, and songs!  Also, the Dwarnians may be on their way to a place in my heart -- alongside the Bajorans, Minbari, and Time Lords -- as one of the few alien cultures in which I'd truly like to immerse myself.

The characters live in my heart, too.  I hope you get to know them.

* * *

Second, I'd like to recommend the world of Whisperwind, which is delivered in the form of ASMR videos on Youtube.  Yes, these kinds of videos are often the subject of giggles and disdain, but there are gems.  There are pearls.  Sometimes the talents of the artist are just perfectly matched with the medium, and the Story (capitalization intended) just breathes through the screen.

It's kind of a D&D world, with a mix of humans, elves, gnomes, goblins, werewolves, vampires, and such.  But there's amazing depth... multiple fleshed-out towns and cities, quite a few parallel plot lines, and occasional flashbacks to an adventuring party from hundreds of years ago whose actions continue to have an effect on the present.  Amazingly, it's also all told in the second person.  You are a character in this story, and over time we come to learn just as much about your backstory, motivations, and secrets, as we do about the other characters (nearly all of whom are played by Sage, the creator of this story).

And, it's all very relaxing.  :-)

* * *

Lastly, my other two recommendations.  I'll be quick:

• I think the recently concluded 3rd season of Star Trek: Discovery has been the best season of Star Trek in its entire history.  Controversial?  Maybe, but I stand by it.  Some individual episodes of the other shows have been better, but taking the season-long arc as a whole?  This jaunt into the 32nd century shines.
  
  
• Just last week my family and I started watching The Watch, based on the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett.  I haven't read them, but now I might.  So much fun.

Socially Distant Miscellany

Have I collected some new blogworthy topics in these days of viral isolation?  You bet.  Let's juxtapose them with the tried and true "five things make a post."

(1) C2TH << AF2K ?

My previous post, as well as my lengthier 2015 musings -- both about Rush's classic tune Closer to the Heart -- managed to neglect one important thing: it doesn't exist in isolation.  This song is the first track on side two of its album, and it rhapsodizes about possible solutions to personal and societal problems.  However, it's the first song on side one, A Farewell to Kings, that both lays out those problems...

When they turn the pages of history,
When these days have passed long ago,
Will they read of us with sadness
For the seeds that we let grow?
We turned our gaze
From the castles in the distance.
Eyes cast down
On the path of least resistance.

...and indicates, indirectly, at the end, that solutions may be forthcoming:

Can't we raise our eyes
And make a start?
Can't we find the minds
To lead us closer to the heart?

I have a feeling that these songs are best when played back-to-back, like Queen's inseparable pair of "We" songs.

(2) Grognardia is Back

On my "2020 weird events" bingo card, alongside the tiger kings, murder hornets, and babies named XÆA-12, I didn't think I'd be noting the return of one of the main D&D OSR (Old School Renaissance) bloggers after 8 years of silence. But a few weeks ago, we started seeing posts from James Maliszewski again -- sometimes 2 or 3 in a day now -- like nothing at all happened since that last post from 2012.  I haven't been reading so closely to know if he's talked about the gap, but it's good to see him back again.  I'm kind of surprised that YDIS hasn't mentioned it...

(3) Alpha-Bytes Redux

For a while, I posted a lot about my obsession with weird alphabets.  Recently, when re-watching the classic movie The Fifth Element, I rediscovered a bit of odd linguistics that doesn't get talked about a lot.  Usually, when commenting on this movie's creative use of language, one sees a lot of discussion of the (spoken-only) alien "Divine Language" that director Luc Besson had star Milla Jovovich try to commit to memory.  But there was something interesting happening back on Earth, too.  The police had the word "Police" written in two parallel scripts on their uniforms and equipment.  Some searching found a high-resolution version, and it's possible to search for some phonetic realism in those two sets of characters...

 
For example, are there only 5 letters on the right, thus dispensing with the English oddity of a silent E?  Or do the stacked dot and dash count as two?  Both P and L are backwards, but the order still seems to go from left to right.  I can find no explanation of how or why anyone associated with this movie came up with this alt-alphabet, or if any real-life script inspired it.  Does anyone know anything more about it?

(4) Sci-Fi Reading & Reviews

Last year, I really enjoyed reading through the 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology, and I've been pondering a bit about doing another one.  I've got a copy of 1972's Again Dangerous Visions, but I suspect my reviews wouldn't be very positive.  I recently dug out a set of Fantasy & Science Fiction pulp magazines from the 1980s, and I noted a few favorites in them that I could reread and review, too.  However, I'm not too excited about either of those options.  If I'm going to reread something, I think it will be Neal Stephenson's Anathem.  When it came out in 2008, I breezed through it quickly, mostly on planes... but I think it deserves another go.  We'll see.

(5) Sad News

A few days ago, I learned that one of my personal heroes and mentors, Charles Cameron, has passed away.  I blogged about him several times, and it made my year when I saw that he showed up in the comments!  God speed, Magister Ludi.

Star Trek, RPG Dice, and STEAM

A few weeks ago I saw an interesting Venn diagram posted on Twitter by someone named Christine Liu:

In hindsight, I guess it's not surprising to see so much overlap between science and art... after all, the education acronym STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) includes them all.  I just enjoy seeing these intersections, and I guess I've tried to make the central region of this diagram a focal point of this blog, too.

(Sometime, ask me about a talk I heard at a conference a while ago about how astronomer Johannes Kepler got the idea for one of his eponymous "laws" of planetary motion.  The answer, I say in Buzzfeed listicle mode, will surprise you!)

Today, though, my thoughts about this STEAMy synergy turn to the world of dice.  If you're coming here from the RPG world, you know all about them.  You may know that a two-handed sword does 3d6 damage against large opponents, and no speed factors will tell you otherwise.  You may have been inducted into the illustrious Order of the d30.  You may have scratched your head about the fairness of some very non-Platonic Zocchi dice.

But did you know about how Vulcans use them?

Almost 30 years ago, Star Trek: The Next Generation brought back Leonard Nimoy as Spock.  That episode may have been a bit underwhelming in some ways, but it showed some interesting aspects of alien cultures that fans had been hungering to see for years (well... this fan, anyway, he said pointing two thumbs inward).

In the episode, a Romulan kid shows Spock a set of little dice-like blocks that supposedly convey "the syllabic nucleus of the Vulcan language."  In an episode of Star Trek: Picard from just a few weeks ago, those dice showed up on the desk of a Vulcan admiral.  Since we never got a good look at them, I always just assumed they were either cubes or four-sided dreidels (since Nimoy had a history of using elements of his Orthodox Jewish heritage in creating bits of Vulcan culture).

But no!  An enterprising (heh? heh?) fan found pictures of the actual props from 1991 and posted some detailed shots...

Click to enlarge... it's only logical

There are some shapes here that RPG veterans have probably not seen:

1. Okay, we do have one bog-standard D&D die, an 8-sided octahedron (d8) on the left of the image above, with slightly sawed-off corners.
2. There's also a square pyramid (5 sides), at the top, which I don't think is useful for dice-rolling at any aspect ratio.
3. But then we come to the truncated octahedron (14 sides), on the bottom.  Essentially keep sawing off those corners of the d8 until the triangular faces erode into hexagons.  A Google image search for "d14" seems to bring up a few manufacturers that use this shape, but it's not employed by many games.
4. Lastly, the one that surprised me the most: the rhombicuboctahedron (26 sides) on the right!  There's kind of an architectural mini-majesty to that shape, which I don't think I'd ever taken notice of before.  No less than Johannes Kepler himself gave it that Greek-derived monster of a name, but if you were around in the 1980s you may remember it as Rubik's Snake.

However, if you were around during the ancient Han dynasty, you may remember either the 14-sided one or the 26-sided one (with 8 of its corners minimized to give it 18 rounder sides) as dice for the Chinese board game Liubo.  Some random examples from Google image search...

Anyway, 8 + 5 + 14 + 26... I guess there must be 53 unique syllables in the Vulcan language.

Where was I going with this?  Oh, the ART of it all.  It's kind of amazing how these uniquely deterministic 3D geometries can be used (hacked?!) to give our brains randomized input that assists in our creative endeavors, be they games or divination or actual art pieces.  They all have the capacity to instill wonder, push boundaries, and do the other stuff in the middle of that STEAM diagram at the top of this post.  Occasionally one also finds designers of Glass Bead Games employing randomness as a spur to creativity, too!  I keep ruminating on becoming one of those designers someday, so these posts are a set of running notes that may someday be assembled into something bigger....

Atlas of Oddities, Part Deux

Here's the sequel to the blockbuster prequel...  3 maps down, 3 to go.

In my 2013 April A-Z post on author Somtow Sucharitkul, I mentioned his alternate take on a Roman empire that conquered (or tried to conquer) the New World.  His original "Aquila" short stories were published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in the 1980s, then later packaged into novels.  However, the novels didn't contain this gem of a map from the April 1982 issue of Asimov's!

Click to Maximus... er, maximize

I had to dig through a few boxes to find this one, but once I realized it wasn't online anywhere (at least anywhere easily searchable), I was determined to rescue and digitize it.  The map credit at lower left reads "J. R. Odbert."  I think most of the Latin puns are taken right out of Somtow's story, but I wouldn't put it past a crafty cartographer to insert more.  As I remember, a lot of the story takes place in and around the city of Caesarea, which I think is sitting where Omaha, Nebraska ought to be.  This is not your paterfamilias' Terra Nova!

The last two maps are things I've drawn.

Several times on this blog I've waxed on about my love of David Zindell's awesome first novel Neverness and its sequels.  I even wrote a fannish Travel Guide to his intricate and uplifting constructed universe -- which I heartily recommend to anyone about to read the books for the first time.  No spoilers in there!  Much of the action takes place on the largest island on a chilly planet named Icefall.  Zindell didn't include a map of the place, but I did my best to piece together something that could help readers navigate around...

I think my MS Office art skillz have matured a bit since first making this in 2011, but it does the job.  I do need to note that the TV show Family Matters didn't exist when Zindell came up with the name of that southern-most mountain, but I wonder if he found it a minor source of embarrassment when writing the sequels...

Okay (gulp), the final map today is something I drew back in the 1980s.  When my friends and I played D&D, we took turns running the game, and we each took control of a continent on a larger world.  We blithely ignored the realities of such a setup, and each new adventure usually started with something like "As you're disembarking from the ship from Brian's continent, you see...."

Anyway, here's mine.  I did my best to enhance the image, but the original is very lightly-drawn pencil on notebook paper...

I suppose there's a symmetry between my "Ponténar" with the mythical "Poseidonis" that I talked about in the previous post.  I originally designed the coastlines by tracing over a map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and imagined a whole Greek-themed Atlantis-ish empire in the southern part.  I eventually added some extra land up in the north, because my actual contour of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge just didn't have enough surface area for everything I wanted to squeeze in.

Unfortunately, I never got to tell the stories of many of the places on this map.  Invorum up north was a hidden stronghold of powerful wizards.  The unfortunate dwarfs of Felak-Gizan were enslaved by the Tachyran empire, and were soon going to get their revenge.  See that island in the bay between Tachyra and Yaxaan?  The volcano on that sucker was going to cause trouble for hundreds of miles around.

As I look at the place names in my map, I also see a litany of morphed names of people that meant a lot to me back then.  I'm not going to tell you who Meaghra, Rendin, Gyule, and Kalapis are named after, but each one gives me a lump in the throat.

Ah, well.  I think counter-factual maps like these are tempting vessels for us to pour in our weird, wild thoughts & dreams... and mix them up in ways that sometimes surprise even the mapmaker.

Cthulhu fhtagn!?

I've recently had a chance to fill in a huge, yawning gap in my geek cred.  Up until this past month, I'd never actually read any H. P. Lovecraft.

I've always known the tropes... In the 1980s, I practically memorized the "Cthulhu Mythos" section of the original D&D Deities & Demigods book.  I got the joke about "Uhluhtc" (oo-loo-tec) in the original Heavy Metal movie.  Heck, I own the game Call of Cthulhu, and I even consulted on a supplement for CoC back in the 1990s!

Artist: Erol Otus.  I'm trying to illustrate this post without any tentacles.

So shame on me for taking this long, for sure.  What spurred me to start reading wasn't Lovecraft himself, but rather a short story from 2014 by Ruthanna Emrys called "The Litany of Earth."  (Online in full here.)  It's powerful and very well-written.  I resist saying too much more about it because I'd like people to read it without preconceptions, as I did.  Suffice to say that it provides a new perspective on the Lovecraftian world that genuinely surprised and charmed me.

This story also got me to seek out more information about cosmicism, a (sorta kinda) real-world attempt to broaden Lovecraft's ideas into a coherent and satisfying belief system.  Despite its stereotypical veneer of bleakness and existential nihilism, there seems to be some raw material for a more positive and optimistic path; see here, for example.  I was already familiar with Kenneth Grant's mind-bending attempts to do something vaguely similar, but it was nice to see a few more modern, less occultish, perspectives on it all.

Virgil Finlay

However, the rub:

Nearly all of the ideas that fascinated me -- both from Emrys' story and from the cosmicistical writings I found on the web -- were extrapolations from Lovecraft... not really taken directly from what he says on the page.  His stories are powerful and interesting -- and I do intend on reading more of them to complete my education.  But after reading a handful, I'm learning that Lovecraft's well-known reputation for bleakness and terror is well justified.

I'm hoping to find some small kernels of hope in the remaining HPL stories in my queue.  I might give Derleth a try, too.  But I'm starting to suspect that Lovecraft may be a bit like another early 20th century thinker who ushered in some scary new ideas: Aleister Crowley.  Both kind of serve as anti-prophets -- i.e., conveyers of wild thoughts that spurred on others in unique ways, but who ought not to be "followed" too slavishly or literally.  That way lies, well, the mountains of madness.

Back to Erol Otus

Won't you please?

Won't you please?
Please won't you roll... for initiative?

Hat tip to the Old School Roleplaying FB page

In a way, it was the perfect gateway drug for RPGs and other imaginatory pursuits.  A trip to the Neighborhood of Make Believe every day?  Who could ask for more?  And given that land was filled with kings, trolls, witches, talking animals, and aliens from the Planet Purple (I'm lookin' at you, Arneson's Blackmoor) I see no incongruity here.

- - -

More content soon, folks.  This blog ain't dead yet!

Gen Con 2015

I usually don't talk much about games to colleagues in my professional life, but I do happen to be mentoring a grad student who is very much into board & card games.  I knew she was taking a trip to Indianapolis last month, but it took longer than it should have to figure out where she was really going.  Here's a snippet from the email I sent her a few weeks ago:

I just put two and two together.  You said "a game convention in Indianapolis."  Understatement of the year!  I didn't realize until now that I should have translated that as "the legendary game convention started by Gary Gygax in the 60s, which I read about all the time in Dragon magazine as a kid, and dreamed about attending all through the late 70s and most of the 80s."  :-)  :-)

That's probably more than I've talked about games to colleagues in the last 25 years!  But what did my student hand me when I saw her this week?

Am I going to have to actually start playing again so I can use these?  We'll see!  :-)

Church of the Big Gamble

Apologies for not a lot going on here lately.  I'll know the new direction I'm looking for when I see it.  :-)

The other day I came across a really thought-provoking blog post by Joey Vigour in defense of randomness in games.  It helped to explain some of my own (unformed) thoughts and predilections.

The basic idea is that there's a sweet spot between the two extremes of order and chaos.  Staying balanced on that knife-edge is difficult, but well worth it.  The more I thought about it, the more I'm sure this general idea applies to lots of things.  Let me just list a few of them...

Games:  Joey Vigour explained that including the "dark forces" of randomness (dice, cards, etc) in a game gives us a glimpse of the craziness of life.  I'll just let him tell you:

"So why do most game designers introduce an element of randomness to their games? I would argue that dark mystical (or at least unknown) forces are a game designer's ally because the introduction of chaos to a game causes our subconscious to be reminded of real life. Games are a simulacrum of life, but all the beautiful photo-realistic art and all the flavor text is still just fluff on top of the Spark that moves us emotionally. Understanding the Spark is the struggle of all artists: to know that there is unknowable, and to grasp at it in a comprehensive presentation."

Vigour also considers human strategizing as being in the same category with the dark forces of randomness -- after all, other people can sometimes be as inscrutable and hard to predict as a roll of the dice! -- so games like Chess can also invoke these feelings.  Still, too much of the human/random element in a game can be pointless and dreary (like never-ending games of Chutes and Ladders).  Too little of it gives you something easily solved, like Tic-Tac-Toe.

Stories:  The knife-edge between order and chaos is apparent in narratives, too.  Too much order gives us the logical tying and untying of plot-driven "knots."  I'm thinking of the inevitability of events in things like Greek and Shakespearean tragedies.  Fatalism can sometimes be interesting, but not in isolation.  Too much chaos is just surrealistic dada.  :-)

Life:  Too much order leads you right into a rut.  (Think of Mr. Incredible stuffed into his tiny car on a traffic-filled freeway... that had to be inspired by this song.)  Too much chaos means adrenalin and stress all the time, which is just plain not good for you, whether you're a superhero or not.

Music:  Goes without saying, I think.  Our ears and brains have evolved to respect the knife-edge between monotonous order and dissonant chaos.

There are probably so many other examples... enough to build a Glass Bead Game worthy of the ages, I'm sure.  By the way, the title of this post comes from old-school D&D; see here for more about my own history with it.

Back to Joey:

"So let’s embrace dice rolling, deck shuffling, hidden information, and mystery in games. It’s what our subconscious relates to anyway. It’s how we lose our forgetfulness and reconnect with hidden truths. It’s how we find ourselves. Anything less than that is just Tic-Tac-Toe."

Time... to play

As I've been planning out the posts for my April A-Z adventures in the realm of fiery manifestos, I realized that I hadn't found any that are specifically about role-playing games.  There's no shortage of passionate commentary about them -- see, for example, Alexis and JB and Cyclopeatron.  But I've been looking for something that mixes the passion, the old-school spirit, and some decidedly new-school futurism into something that might catch fire as a 21st century gaming manifesto.

I haven't found that yet, but I did just find the seeds of all of those things in a recent, excellent post by Noisms, titled Storytelling and Immersion, or We Are Ahead of the Curve.  Go ahead and read it; it's not long.

The references to Willy Wonka and Blade Runner were fun, but the eye-opening idea for me was that the key to a decades-old goal of web enthusiasts -- i.e., the promised land of hypertext and social 2.0ness and interactivity of every kind -- may have been already been invented back in the 1970s by some wargamers in a basement in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.  Dungeons & Dragons, and all its descendants, found an engaging, fulfilling way to combine "...the very participatory aspect of games with the narrative absorption of storytelling" (to quote the Frank Rose interview that Noisms came across).

I won't get into the details of precisely how D&D-type games "generate" engaging and immersive stories.  Suffice to say that not everyone agrees about how to best accomplish this!  Often times the best stories emerge in ways that the players never imagined they would.  Many game masters attempt to manage the narrative beats of rising and falling tension, only to have their players come away with a wildly different take on the emotional roller-coaster that was played out in real time.

All this makes me also want to think about the possible intersection of RPGs (role playing games) with GBGs (glass bead games); the twin celestial luminaries that I aim to follow with this blog.  I've done much less cross-comparison than I've wanted to... this post is only the 3rd in the history of this blog to use both the RPG & GBG topic labels!  But I'll definitely be thinking more about this in the weeks and months ahead.

Project Rockfish

Much of the history of this blog has been about my getting re-acquainted with old-school role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.  I still haven't gotten back into the groove with an in-person group, but I haven't ruled it out.  If I do decide to take the reigns and perform as the world-building "Dungeon Master," there's one aspect of it in which I've decided to go decidedly new-school...

I'll need a computer at the table.

This may be sacrilegious to some, for whom anything beyond "paper, pencils, dice, and the imagination" is no-go territory.  I'm happy to stick with low-tech for a lot of it, but in order to weave a world worthy of capturing the attention of players, I'll need to have a spare brain on call.

So with apologies to the non-D&D-types out there, I'd like to use this post to archive my current ideas for what I'd consider the ideal set of software tools to have at the gaming table.

The name for this project, up in the title to this post, came to me upon hearing of the sad passing of actor James Garner, who played a character that inhabited the kind of world -- i.e., never boring, always on the cusp of adventure, yet grounded in flavorful verisimilitude -- that I'm trying to help build with these tools.  (If you don't know the appellation "Rockfish," go find some episodes guest-starring Isaac Hayes as Jim's old pal Gandy...)

Jim was using a new-school answering machine in 1974!

RPG insiders will quickly see that the following outline contains tools for building a "sandbox" type world.  This probably all could be done with dice and lookup tables, but the sheer number of random numbers needed makes it ideal for a computer.

- - - - - - -

(1) Weather

For each new day in the campaign world, I'll click a button and it will tell me the following day's

• high & low temperature
• times of sunrise & sunset (for me only); approximate durations of light & dark times (for the characters, who don't have wristwatches) 
• moon phase, & times of moonrise & moonset

There will be a pulldown menu for me to choose the current terrain type (forest, mountain, desert, etc.), which will influence the

• precipitation amount & type
• clouds (probably only 4 discrete types: clear / partly / overcast / fog)
• wind (4 types, too?  calm / light breeze / brisk wind / gale-force)

The program should be smart enough to rule out crazy combinations (snow in the desert) but still contain small chances for weird & interesting phenomena (thundersnow, will o' the wisps).  From all of the above, the program will also display customized charts for

• character movement rates,
• visibility distances, and
• chances of getting lost while exploring outdoors.

- - - - - - - 

(2) Random generation of micro-locale details

This is only for when the players are entering a "new" (previously unexplored) region that I hadn't yet mapped out in detail.  If they've been here before, it will still be the same.

For a new wilderness hex, I'll have a handful of input options that specify its overall terrain type, and whether there are any major features (like coastlines or big rivers) in it.  Then it will generate a set of random landmarks, small waterways, paths, hills, animal dens, and so on.  (Definitely will be inspired by Alexis' work, here.)  These are keyed to the terrain type (e.g., a desert hex may have an oasis; a mountain hex may have a bubbling geothermal vent).  Some weird things -- graveyards? kooky hermits in huts? -- may crop up nearly anywhere.

For a new village, town, or city, it will generate some rough guidelines about the

• population
• overall spatial layout
• main products produced by them
• quirks about their traditions (governmental? religious? other?)
• notable NPC resident(s)
• yes/no answers to common player questions about specific types of shops or industry that are there or not (e.g., blacksmiths)

- - - - - - -

(3) NPC generation mini-module

If a new NPC (non-player character) is called for, there will be a screen that I can refresh to get a description of a random person's

• basics: gender, age, name
• place of origin
• profession, station in society, and/or experience level
• 1 or 2 distinguishing physical features (height, hair color, weight, clothing)
• notable personality traits
• major items they're carrying (money, food)
• rumors they may convey to PCs

- - - - - - - 

(4) Random Events


This is the heart & soul of the program... but I've blogged before about what I'd want this to look like.  In short, it kind of unifies several other existing ideas in role-playing games, including

• wandering monsters
• random NPC encounters
• location-based "shenanigans" (thinkin' of you, Jeff)
• town/city rumors
• adventure hooks/quests
• things that seem like adventure hooks/quests, but aren't  :-)

- - - - - - -

Notes:

• I know I'm reinventing the wheel, but I've got to do it my own weird way.  I've already been scouring the internet for random tables that can be used to feed this behemoth.  As I build it, I'll keep a good honest log about where the ideas came from, in case I ever decide to make the code public.
• In practice, I plan to override these random results from time to time, because there are some specific events and NPCs that I want to make sure the players encounter, at specific times.  I'll try my best not to turn these into opportunities for excessive railroading, or quantum-ogre-ism, or Mary-Sue-ism.  :-)

Unexpected (Cartographic) Gift

A few posts ago, I brought up the fictional "Avalon Lost" setting that I've been pondering for the Homebrew '82 role-playing game rules variant.  I've been rolling that little pocket universe around in my head lately (for more, see posts numbered 13-18 in the long list here).  Being a very visual thinker, I've been wanting to be able to set down more about where things are happening, so of course that brings us back into the world of maps!  :-)

Also being probably too anal retentive about details, I realized that I wanted a way to plot out a map at an arbitrary zoom level.  Kind of like if I had Google Maps of Camelot and environs for my alternate-history year 560 AD.

As I was searching for the data that might let me do this, and starting to get depressed about how much work it would be, I discovered something exceedingly cool.  The program that I use pretty much every day for making scientific graphs and plots also happens to be used by a lot of geologists and geographers.  Turns out, they bundled some accurate world coastline and river data into the standard-issue version of the code.  Every day for the last 20 years, I've been logging into a system that can do what I wanted!

So... after writing about a page of code... I got this...

Clicketh if thou likest spam a lot

...which has a few problems, but overall ain't too shabby.  The PDF I made this from can be zoomed-in to something like 1-mile resolution.

So, if I ever finish volume 1 of Homebrew '82 (the generic rules for players), and also manage to churn out volume 2 (tips & tools for GMs), I now have something that would serve as the backbone of a super-duper set of maps for volume 3 (the setting guide for the "Avalon Lost" world).

Easy peasy!

(Above: sarcasm alert... there's soooo much going on in life right now, so I'll probably mark the time in decades before getting all that stuff done.  Still, I'm grateful to have an outlet to think & post about stuff like this that's disconnected from the "real world.")

Six Cartographic Detours

In looking through the last few topics on the D&D 30-day challenge, I find myself either shrugging my shoulders at things that don't apply to the version I grew up with, or scratching my head wondering how my answers would differ from what I already said in some of the earlier questions.  Thus, I've made the executive decision to declare the challenge over and done with, and replace it with something that I always found much more inspiring for my RPG adventures...

Maps!

Click (any of them) for bigger versions

I suppose one can't get around the need to start with Tolkien.  A lot of people talk about how he supposedly wrote The Lord of the Rings in order to weave a story around the fictional languages that he spent decades crafting.  But he also created a visual world, filled with forbidding mountains, murky forests, and eerie swamps.  He also envisioned how that world changed -- sometimes violently -- over thousands of years.

The map above (found on a forum thread) shows a spooky before-and-after overlay of what happened to the elven lands of Beleriand when it became collateral damage in an epic war between good and evil spirits.  Still, who knows what the future will hold?  The elf queen Galadriel once talked about what may happen when "...the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again."

Closer to the modern age -- but still existing sideways in the land of imagination -- are the fictional cities of DC comics...

Don't worry about the thought balloon above; just have a squint at the details on that map.  Unlike the heroes of Marvel Comics, who tended to hang out in New York City -- where the writers lived -- the DC heroes often inhabited fictional cities of their own.  Everyone knows that Superman lives in Metropolis and Batman lives in Gotham City.  There were dozens of others, too.  To their credit, DC has artfully maintained the fiction that these places are not just silly pseudonyms for the Big Apple for many decades.

(Some writers took inspiration from other places... Superman's creators Siegel and Shuster modeled the Daily Planet building after a real newspaper tower in their home city of Toronto.)

The map above, from a 1978 newspaper strip, shows that shiny Metropolis is "really" just east of Dover, Delaware, and grim Gotham is just across the river near Fairfield Township, New Jersey.  Who knew?  :-)

Maybe we should move closer to "reality?"

Check out those purple and green regions.  I remember first seeing the above map in a historical atlas in my elementary school's library.  The idea that there once was a proposal to craft mid-western states called "Transylvania" and "Vandalia" blew my little mind.  Can you imagine TFC (Transylvanian Fried Chicken)?

Hmm, maybe that's all a bit too close to reality for fantastical role-playing.  How about if we zoom out by a few dozen orders of magnitude...

Cue the Alexander Courage theme song!  Above is a page from Franz Joseph's 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual, which because of some strange licensing agreements didn't appear able to directly reference names like "Kirk" or "Spock" -- though "Enterprise" was snuck in there.  Subsequent generations of fandom and TV shows may have changed the details, but the above is how I always think about that universe.  That page also introduced me to some real history, too!  :-)

Another way to be blinded by science (fiction) is to sit too close to the Sun...

For a long time, astronomers believed Mercury was "tidally locked" like the Moon is in its orbit around the Earth.  They thought that there was a molten side that always faced the Sun, and a side that sat in eternal night.  In between the two was a region that you can see gave Rod Serling some great inspiration.  The above image is from the 1940s pulp adventures of Captain Future... I first saw it in an awesome book from the 1970s called An Atlas of Fantasy.

(FYI, Mercury isn't really tidally locked, but there are hundreds of planets around other stars that are!)

Lastly is probably one of the very first fantasy worlds I experienced through the magic of television...

I couldn't find an actual map of the Neighborhood of Make Believe, so I had to make do with this wide-angle photo of the original set.  You may not know a lot of things as a toddler growing up in the early 70s, but you know that the castle is on the left, the tree housing the owl and cat is in the middle, and the clock without hands is on the right.  Oh, and you also know that any museum that isn't also a giant merry-go-round is totally lame!  :-)

Fighting On through the D&D 30 Day Challenge

More fun with the month-long blog party!

(14) Favorite NPC

The Non-Player Character (NPC) is often the Dungeon Master's trusty outlet for misdirection, MacGuffin plot development, and overall hamming it up.  However, I don't know if I can recall any of my own NPCs by name -- other than a few famous denizens of Middle Earth who appeared that time I popped everyone through a dimensional rift.

What I can remember is my most embarrassing bit of NPC acting as a DM.  It was definitely during high school... probably age 16 for me.  The NPC was a minor bad-guy, sort of comic relief prior to the players encountering the real villain.  Earlier that day, I remember clearly that a TV show I usually watched was pre-empted for something else... something that skewed distinctly, um, younger in its intended demographic than what was usually on at that time.

Yes, it was Strawberry Shortcake.  To my later regret, I was too lazy to get up and change the channel (no remote control!), and I watched it.  The bad guy on that show was the Purple Pie-Man, and he did a little ha-cha-cha sort of short song when announcing his presence.  That song stuck in my brain like super glue, and I ended up using it for the comic-relief NPC.

Being an only child, it kind of slipped my mind that several of my friends at the table had younger siblings who would be watching a show like this on the big family TV, and that the older sib might have absorbed it by osmosis.  I was caught!  The ribbing was fierce, but short-lived.  :-)

(15) Favorite Monster (Undead)

Got to be all of the bat-poop crazy variants on the undead from the Fiend Folio.  Artist Russ Nicholson gave vibrant life to those wild British imports.

(16) Favorite Monster (Aberration)

Aren't they all horrific aberrations of nature?  Still, the morkoth might take the cake for having the most chilling and creepy image in the 1st edition Monster Manual.

(17) Favorite Montster (Animal/Vermin)

Gotta be wolves.  Not only does the howling foreshadow all kinds of primal terror, but if the sound comes from multiple directions, then the players may just be outnumbered... and surrounded!

(18) Favorite Monster (Immortal/Outsider)

I think the Rakshasa falls in this category.  Nowhere else in the original Monster Manual is there a sentence filled with such foreboding as the first line of their entry:

"Known first in India, these evil spirits encased in flesh are spreading."

Some treat them as crafty, but still beast-like at heart.  I'd tend to treat them with more subtlety... maybe using their ESP and illusion powers to go undercover in human society... having patience for a big payoff down the road.  I used them in this way in this short adventure concept as proprietors of a gambling den.

(19) Favorite Monster (Elemental/Plant)

You know, I think these questions might just be a tad padded with fluff to get up to the magic number of 30.

(20) Favorite Monster (Humanoid/Natural/Fey)

The biggest guys... giants, titans, ettins... fascinated me quite a bit.  Probably because they came in a colorful palette of types (like the dragons and demons) but still had more-or-less human societies and foibles -- kind of like mortal versions of the gods.  At the risk of plugging another old post, I suggested a random giant generation system for people who wanted to spring something new on players.

(21) Favorite Dragon

A giant, ancient red dragon always seemed to be most appropriate for being a party's classic, eternal, elusive foe.  One of my friends from high school was a master storyteller of a DM who, over the course of years, caused us to just seethe with hate when we encountered the dreaded Ignis Unus.  (I have a feeling that's not perfect Latin for "The Fiery One," but we didn't care!)  :-)

But my own favorite type of dragon goes off that beaten path.  I always loved the idea of the tiny little pseudo-dragon most of all.

It's approximately the same size and disposition as a house-cat, and can communicate with its master via telepathy.  It can also blend into its surroundings like a chameleon and sting its enemies with its lightning-sharp tail.  Okay, it may be a bit of nerdish wish fulfillment, but you can't deny the coolness of the concept!  :-)

Adventuring with the D&D 30 Day Challenge

I'm going to continue bundling my answers to the ongoing September RPG house party.  The full list of questions is here, and below is this week's crop of answers...

(7) Favorite Edition

1st edition AD&D.  I liked the Holmes basic box, but never looked back after getting those three original hardcovers.

I'm sure someone else has made the following analogy between the timing of D&D editions...

• 1977: First basic boxed set 
• 1980: 1st edition AD&D books hitting the market 
• Early 80s: Newer AD&D products (UA, OA, Dragonlance) start to go downhill; seeds sown for 2nd edition. 
• Late 90s: After some dormancy and changing of the guard, 3rd edition is a very different kettle of fish (a stinky one, if you ask me) 
• Early-mid 2000s:  3.5 edition, 4th edition.  Not my bag, baby.

...and the timing of something else:

• 1977: Star Wars 
• 1980: Empire Strikes Back  (peak of quality, many say) 
• Early 80s: Return of the Jedi.  Still okay, but Ewoks, really?
• Late 90s: After some dormancy, Phantom Menace.
• Early-mid 2000s:  The rest of the prequels.  "Noooooo!"

The analogy isn't perfect, of course.  (I'm not going to look for parallels between 1974's OD&D and American Graffiti!)  Looking forward, I suppose one can add to both lists:

• 2014-2015: Yet another reboot.

I'm interested in seeing what both of those are all about, but I'm not holding my breath.  :-)

(8) Favorite Character You Have Played

There were two:  a human fighter named Arwold Archmalios, and a human cleric named Ingomer Lakhshmin.  The hodge-podge of names from different cultural backgrounds made (somewhat) more sense in the context of the Atlantis-like continent of their birth.

Arwold didn't have too many distinguishing personality traits, and was probably more a throwback to the featureless player stand-in PCs of late 70s OD&D.  He did carry around a sawed-off bardiche (which was usually a long pole topped by a curvy metal axe) that I managed to convince everyone did just as much damage as a full bardiche but could be wielded as easily as a sword.  My mental image of red-bearded Arwold was staring back at me from my AD&D Dungeon Master's Screen...

Ingomer's first adventure was L1: The Secret of Bone Hill, which contained the "Church of the Big Gamble."  The priests there were into randomness and worshiping the gods of chance and fortune.  I got the idea that Ingomer would be enthralled by this concept, and I searched through the Deities & Demigods book until I found Xochipilli, the Aztec god of gambling and chance, to be his patron deity.  That also was a decent fit for my crazy Atlantis-like continent!  :-)

They both made it up to something around 15th level before retiring and passing on the baton to the next generation.

(9) Favorite Character You Haven't Played

Ummm... not sure I understand this one.  Unless the questioner is talking about licensed properties (like playing Harry Potter or Gandalf), the characters don't exist until you create them.  Even at that point, they're just a few numbers on a page.  You've got to run them around for a while, and let them grow into themselves.

Now, as a DM, I might look forward to "playing" the roles of a few unused NPCs that I've come up with over the years.  Gotta have good villains!  I've got a great voice picked out for Manannan of Montfort, for example.

(10) Craziest Thing That Happened [in an RPG adventure]

The square brackets above clarify my interpretation of this question.  I might get people in trouble if I were to answer that more broadly!

Thing is, this all was 30 years ago.  I remember some crazy-fun D&D sessions.  There was a time when some really innovative thinking and teamwork got the party across a deadly chasm.  The success bred a kind of natural high that lasted for a couple of days (in real time, not game time!) afterward.  But I couldn't even begin to remember enough detail to bring that to life again.  :-(

(11) Favorite Adventure You Ran

At the time, the favorite adventure that I created from scratch was a high-level extra-planar extravaganza, capped by a confrontation with Orcus.  I called it "War in Heaven," and might have even had The Battle of Evermore playing in the background or something.  Too bad it was a massive railroad from start to finish.

(12) Favorite Dungeon Type / Location

My friends and I started out with many a bog-standard "dungeon crawl," so when I got into DMing, I always tried to stretch beyond that.  The few times I started new first-level groups from scratch, I led off with B3: Palace of the Silver Princess.  I suppose it's an above-ground dungeon crawl, but there's less of a problem in trying to justify the existence of a large semi-abandoned mansion than there is explaining why there's a multi-level underground ecosystem filled with monsters and treasure.  :-)

Thinking back, I guess I did tend to prefer adventures with some component set in houses or castles.  That part felt like an open-ended game of Clue!  The Clockwork Mage was kind of like that, too.

(13) Favorite Trap / Puzzle

I don't think I excelled at crafting these kind of mind-frack exercises.  I do remember once inflicting this quite sadistic, but ultimately harmless "trap" (from Dragon magazine #35) on my friends:

Should be readable if you right-click it into a new window

They forgave me.  :-)

D&D 30 Day Challenge: First Faves

I'm going to do the rest of the week's answers to the D&D 30-day challenge in this post.  We'll see if I can catch up to the rest of you in real time on the weekend...  :-)

(2) Favorite playable race

This probably sounds like a very strange query to those who don't know D&D.  But remember your Tolkien!  Fantasy worlds need not be so human-o-centric as our own.  But it's kind of strange that the word "race" is used for this... it really should be "species."

I once would have said that my favorite race was the dwarves.  For some reason, in the 80s the whole "Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu!" thing was flowing in my blood.  (That was the chilling battle cry of the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings.)  I devoured every page of MERP's Moria expansion book, even though I never played or owned MERP. One of my go-to PCs back then was a dwarven fighter named Ulman Burinnil, who was obsessed with finding the legendary Battle-Axes of Clanggedin.

Dragon magazine #58:  required reading!

If I were to start playing again these days, I'd be in favor of forgetting about all those demi-, hemi-, and semi- human races.  It's probably more fun to explore the depth and breadth that can be found with "mere" humans as the only playable characters.

(3) Favorite playable class

For all my fascination with magic, gods, and outer planes, I think the class I played the most often was the simple fighter.  Maybe my mind was too focused on the times when I would run a game as Dungeon Master to want to worry too much about being the "cerebral one" when I was on the other side of the screen playing a character.

(4) Favorite game world

I've really only played in one:  a shared world in which each of my high-school friends had responsibility for one "continent."  When the DM duties shifted from one of us to the other, we hand-waved that the characters decided to take a long sea journey.  :-)

My own continent was always in a state of rebuilding and repair, since I was constantly trying to stuff in new ideas.  The shape of that continent didn't change over the years, though... it was based on the northern part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- i.e., a huge "what-if" Atlantis scenario.

(5) Favorite set of dice or individual die

I had a pair of d12's that never got much use.  One was black with white numbers; the other white with black numbers.  Very yin/yang.  I ought to stroll through the archives of The Dungeon Dozen blog to find some good d12 random tables for use and/or adaptation in Homebrew '82.

(6) Favorite deity

Oh, I couldn't choose just one.  I jonesed on the D&D books that listed all the gods, demi-gods, and legendary heroes, but that was a bleed-through of my overall love of mythology and polytheism that still continues now.  I did play one cleric for many years that was devoted to a particular Mesoamerican god, but I'll talk about him later.

By far, my favorite PICTURES of deities in D&D were Jeff Dee's illustrations in the 1st edition Deities & Demigods book.  He recently used Kickstarter to fund re-creating his original art (which the company owned, and eventually tossed into a dumpster).  Here's a link to the Kickstarter campaign for the Egyptian god section -- there are several others.  I think my favorite of the Egyptians was Ptah... also known as the One You Never Want to Have a Staring Contest With...

For those unfamiliar with these books... I invite you to wonder at the fact that they listed such precise numerical details about the properties of supposedly infinite and immortal beings!  :-)

September D&D Deja Vu Challenge

Okay... Back from hiatus.  Those sluggish bow-wow days of summer can really sap one's motivation to get much done.  Nice, then, for the online old-school role playing community to start the fall by throwing a party...

I first learned about this challenge on Tim Brannan's blog, and I'm not sure where it originated.  I'm kind of keen on doing this because right now is the 2nd anniversary of my very first month-long blog challenge:  2011's September of Short Adventures!  (My entries are archived here.)  Is it too "meta" to be nostalgic for a relatively recent indulgence in nostalgia?  :-)

I wish that I had the time to do daily posts, but I'm afraid I'll have to collect several days' worth of responses into chunks, and micro-style them up for y'all.  We'll see how it goes.  For now, here's today's question:

(1) How you got started.

It had to have been 1979 when I first laid eyes on the AD&D Monster Manual.  That sucker fueled my dreams for at least 6 months before I got the urge to actually play this strange game.  I remember wanting to create larger-format copies of many of the evocative illustrations in that book, and I experimented with the grid method with some success.  Thankfully, I knew enough not to mark up my book!  :-)

Soon, though, I got my hands on a Holmes Basic blue box and realized what it was all about.  It took me a while, and several clumsy attempts to run a dungeon for friends (and one girl I was seriously crushing on) before I really figured out that an explicit "game board" (i.e., a dungeon map on which the metal figurines were placed) wasn't needed at all.

Also, my love of all the strange creatures from the Monster Manual impelled me to stock my first dungeons with far too many deadly foes than my friends' newly rolled-up characters could handle.  I don't think it helped my chances with my 8th grade crush that I killed off her character (along with all the others in that party)!

It wasn't until 1982 that my friends and I started up the long-term AD&D campaign that got us through high school, and was periodically refueled during college breaks until about 1989 or 1990.  We stuck with 1st edition AD&D through it all, though near the end I bought the 2nd edition core books with the idea of converting and writing up some of my adventures for submission to the new "Dungeon" magazine.  Grad school (1990-1996) put a damper on those ideas for a long while... but thanks be to the Old School Renaissance, which I discovered (via Jeff) around 2007!  :-)

Okay, that was a bit longer than "micro-style," so maybe I'll just end it here for now.  Stay tuned!

A trip to Old Number Six

I spent a rare day off today making a pilgrimage to a favorite used bookstore...

With more than 100,000 musty treasures available for browsing, how can you go wrong?  I picked up a book of poetry to better acquaint myself with one of my April A-Z post subjects, and I also found a long-sought occult tome for under $10 that I've only seen for over $50 on the webernets.

I also happened to see a rare (?) role-playing game book that was recently on a list posted by Catacomb Librarian, here, as one of several that deserve more attention in the blogging world.  (Don't worry about it being lost to history, though... the good Librarian has already started to dig into its quirky details, here.)  Unfortunately, the proprietors must have known its worth, too... $45 was too steep for me, for something I'd most likely never play.

Anyway, it was a fine day.

Also, a few other random bits that don't quite deserve their own posts...

(1) As a follow-up to my previous review, I eventually realized that Austin Grossman's characters Simon and Darren were probably not based on Jay and Silent Bob (duh), but more likely on two, you know, actual pioneers of the home computer age...

I'm pedantic and geeky, but I never claimed to be quick on the uptake!  :-)

I'd have used pictures of the real guys, but these actors give off vibes that are much more reminiscent of my conception of Simon and Darren.  (In Grossman's book, for example, Darren was a lot slicker and smarmier, and Simon was a lot more psychologically damaged, than the real Jobs and Woz probably were back in the day!)  This movie comes out in a few weeks... if any of you see it, I'd be curious to hear your opinions in the comments.

(2) A couple of days ago, I spent far more time than I'd care to admit scrolling through a web page called Awesome People Hanging Out Together.  Come on, they found this picture:

That's Count Dooku on the left, Grand Moff Tarkin on the right, and in the middle... the Candyman!  cha ch'kan... cha cha ch'kan...   Not a Star Wars or Rat Pack fan?  Okay, how about:

Look closely... "Daydream believer, and a homecoming..."  "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

(3) Blah blah blah third thing.  I just realized that this one probably could and should be expanded to a full post.  I'll hold off on it for now, in order to learn a bit more about this topic before proceeding.

Can we call you Al, or maybe just Din?

This post is a (slightly early) contribution to Catacomb Librarian's Obscure RPG Appreciation Day. This entry may not be about a full-on Role Playing Game, but it's definitely an old-school game of collaborative fantasy adventuring and storytelling.  The version that I own was published in 1985, so it falls within the years of the challenge (even if it may be too late to be some peoples' idea of the "Golden Age" of tabletop gaming).  :-)

Tales of the Arabian Nights was written by Eric Goldberg, and is described on the back of the box as "A game of fateful voyages and fabulous stories."  On the surface, it's a hybrid of a board game (with players moving their counters around a fantasy map of Europe, Asia, and North Africa) and a choose-your-own-adventure book.  The latter comes into play with "The Book of Tales," a collection of 1400 snippets of text that one turns to as directed by the events on the board.

There are quite a few good, detailed reviews of Arabian Nights on the web --see here and here and here, for example -- so I won't go into too much detail about how it's played.  Suffice to say that the Book of Tales makes it just as easy to play the game solitaire as it does to have fun with two to six friends.  It also generates an absurdly large number of possible situations.  The goal is to explore the world, build up a store of wealth and life experience, and return to the home city of Baghdad in triumph.  Anyone who's seen a Sinbad or Aladdin movie, or read about the 1001 tales told by Sheherezad, knows what kind of adventures await the traveler.

The original 1985 version of the game is quite modular:  there is a basic game, with the simplest rules, and there are several add-ons that make it more interesting.  You can set up trade routes, accept the Sultan's challenge of a great Quest, or use your skills against the other players in new and sneaky ways.  However, the most interesting variant is the Storytelling Game, in which you get extra points for narrating the events that happen to your character in the most evocative and moving way.  I love the preface to the description of these rules:

"Warning: Don't be surprised if you feel a little awkward the first time you play this version of the game. YOU HAVE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE! There aren't any other games like this. However, if you are the adventuresome type of person that will buy this game, you are the kind of person who likes innovation and new experiences."

Now, since the goal of Obscure RPG Appreciation Day isn't just to dust off old games, but to revive, rethink, and remix the heck out of them, I wanted to do something more than just review.  I got an idea from the extensive lists of possibilities in Arabian Nights for some random tables that may help Game Masters in other games generate interesting situations.  So, break out your big purple d30 and start rolling...

Source:  Studio Arkhein

Your player characters are coming across some random person.  Who is it?  What's their backstory?  How can a simple random encounter propel along the fun in new and interesting ways?  In other words,

What's up with this random NPC?

RECENT HISTORY:  They have recently --

(1) escaped from being kidnapped or held as a slave,
(2) attacked some other party and now are bloodied,
(3) hidden from a pursuer,
(4) made the bargain of the century,
(5) bartered away something precious, and realized they were cheated,
(6) beaten their servant,
(7) conversed with someone else known to the PCs,
(8) courted their true love,
(9) drank their fill and are barely able to walk,
(10) entered a secret chamber and emerged with a treasure,
(11) examined a clue in the area that the PCs may have missed,
(12) been following someone,
(13) groveled for their lives, and escaped to tell the tale,
(14) helped out a beggar,
(15) hired a new servant, and are regretting it,
(16) honored a new ruler, and are in that ruler's good graces,
(17) opened a secret tomb that has been locked for decades,
(18) prayed for their heart's desire, and got it,
(19) punished someone, unfairly,
(20) asked a question, and learned more than they bargained for,
(21) robbed a merchant,
(22) sought aid from nearby townspeople,
(23) snuck out of a place they shouldn't have been,
(24) studied an ancient tome and learned about a hidden treasure,
(25) traveled back from a far land,
(26) tricked another group of adventurers with a clever lie,
(27) used a powerful magic item, which backfired,
(28) waited a dozen years for a loved one, and was spurned,
(29) was offered a gift by a powerful person, turned it down, and was banished,
(30) saw a strange creature that nobody believes exists.

BASIC CHARACTER TRAITS:  The NPC is a ___ type of person:

(1) beautiful
(2) foolish
(3) crafty
(4) hypnotic
(5) wise
(6) practical joker
(7) needy
(8) bumbling
(9) kindly
(10) bloodthirsty
(11) wealthy
(12) playful
(13) fearful
(14) sad
(15) strange
(16) mysterious
(17) talkative
(18) destitute
(19) lovesick
(20) wicked
(21) puissant
(22) greedy
(23) repentant
(24) skillful
(25) possessed
(26) dangerous
(27) noble
(28) mad
(29) lonely
(30) happy

CURRENT STATUS:  The NPC is now --

(1) Accursed  (bad luck always happens to him/her)
(2) in Beast Form  (transformed into an ape-like creature)
(3) Beloved  (someone out there is obsessed with the NPC)
(4) Blessed  (fantastic luck; opposite of "Accursed")
(5) Crippled  (moves at one-third normal rate)
(6) Determined  (nothing will change his/her course of action)
(7) Diseased  (and possibly contagious; don't get too close!)
(8) Enslaved  (by a cruel master)
(9) Ensorcelled  (doing some wizard's bidding; unable to break free)
(10) Envious  (NPC is hotly jealous of a rival)
(11) Fated  (NPC knows a grim prophecy involving his/her own future)
(12) Grief Stricken  (broken hearted and unable to eat/sleep well)
(13) Imprisoned  (or just released/escaped, depending on where PCs find the NPC)
(14) Insane  (at times, he/she seems normal, but just wait!)
(15) Lost  (on his/her way home, the NPC has gone way off course)
(16) Love Struck  (NPC is enthralled and will do anything to win the beloved)
(17) Married  (roll for whether happily or unhappily)
(18) Newly Rich  (and ready to spend it all)
(19) On Pilgrimage  (in the midst of a voyage to a holy site)
(20) Outlaw  (on the lam from the law... choose nearby town where crime took place)
(21) Pursued  (by a jealous rival)
(22) Respected  (what? you don't know this NPC?  he/she is a local hero!)
(23) wearing a Robe of Honor  (which gains him/her entrance to the best places)
(24) Scorned  (very publicly humiliated for doing something foolish)
(25) Sex-Changed  (victim of bad magic... but who will believe him/her?)
(26) Sultan  (or other kind of king, in disguise)
(27) Ugly  (hideous visage, but quick-witted and kindly)
(28) Under Geas  (NPC must fulfill a task: part oath, part curse)
(29) Vizier  (or other right-hand man to king, on a secret mission)
(30) Wounded  (you don't want to see what's up his sleeve)

Note:  The "recent history" entries come from the actions that you can choose in response to an encounter, listed at the top of the Arabian Nights Reaction Matrices.  The descriptive adjectives also come from those matrices.  The "current status" entries are from, well, the list of possible Statuses (Stati?) that an Arabian Nights character can have at any one time.

Have fun with these!  And check out the game if you get a chance.  There's also a newer version from 2009, which I haven't seen up close.  It's said they added hundreds of new options to the Book of Tales, but also streamlined the game and removed some of the optional add-on rules.