G is for Gremorly

[This is the 7th of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

A short post today, in terms of words.  But I couldn't let a month of intricate symbols and glyphs go by without seeing the mystical etchings of Dave Trampier's evil wizard Gremorly, from the long-running Wormy comic strip in Dragon Magazine.

Scoff if you must, but a magic circle like the following would flummox John Dee himself:

You'll kick youself if you don't click for the bigger version

The above is just one of several of Tramp's intricately rendered examples of the "visual manifestations" of Gremorly's conjurings.  In a different strip, Gremorly's spell-casting speech was transcribed with a script (left panel below) that looks to me much like the Nuskhuri form of the Georgian alphabet (right panel below):

Yes, my thoughts exactly!  :-)

F is for the Ficus Gesture

[This is the 6th of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

Today's symbol isn't something written... it's a hand gesture that goes by many names around the world.  I first encountered it as the "fig" (Italian fico, Latin ficus) gesture, that came from ancient Greece as a sign of fertility, but has now bifurcated into either a sign of good luck and/or an obscene gesture.  (With the issue of fertility, one can easily see how that bifurcation happens...)  Towards Eastern Europe it's called Dulya and is used to ward off the evil eye.

In America, though, I've got your nose!

About 100 years ago, when occultist Aleister Crowley was rewriting the Christian Mass for his own newly-born religion of Thelema, he substituted this gesture for the traditional priestly sign of benediction.  Given the "naughty" symbolism of much of Crowley's material, this probably made a lot of sense!

In role-playing games, I think there are a few areas in which it would be interesting to include an arcane symbology of hand-gestures...

1. Thieves Cant:  Instead of having roguish scoundrels develop a spoken language of their own, it may make more sense for them to use a SILENT system of sign language.  Some players and GMs may feel the need to develop its basic details, but at minimum one can just keep track of proficiency using the thief's experience level.
2. Wizard/Cleric Spell Casting:  This is the infamous "somatic component" that never seems to get as much discussion as the verbal or material components.  There are all sorts of ways one can go with this...  Maybe great precision is needed, such that if the caster is distracted or fatigued, the wrong stroke of the finger could cause a disastrous mishap.  Maybe, like in the Harry Potter universe, a sufficiently advanced wizard or witch can learn to do away with one or more of the more distracting components and rely only on the somatic.
3. Not to leave out the fighters, there are also the tactical hand signals used by ground forces when trying to move quietly through dangerous areas.  Of the three types listed here, these are probably easiest for the actual players to learn to do, rather than leaving it to the in-game characters.

Finally, I can't let a discussion of "Ficus" and fertility gestures go by without a reference to a terrible old TV show from the 1970s: Quark, starring Richard Benjamin.  It was kind of a Star Trek knock-off, and the Spock-like science officer was a half-human, half-plant, named FICUS.  Probably the only time this show made me truly laugh out loud was a time when Ficus was forced to woo an alien princess, and he set about to show her his species' mating pollination rituals. After lying down on the ground and starting to make some high-pitched sounds, she asks him what that was all about...

The plant-man's monotone answer:  "We're waiting for the bee."

E is for Ecology

[This is the 5th of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

Usually when one sees the word "ecology" these days, it's meant to refer to the natural, biological environment of planet Earth.  But people have extended the concept in so many other interesting ways.  The familiar Theta-like symbol is artist Ron Cobb's superposition of a lower-case "e" (for environment) with a lower-case "o" (for organism).  The intersection of these two terms is certainly general enough to reach beyond thoughts of endangered species and air pollution....

Piled on top of the natural biosphere is the multi-layered noosphere of human society and knowledge, and on top of that is the recent dawning of a global infosphere.  What could be next?  Thinkers from Teilhard de Chardin to Frank Tipler saw it all collapsing eventually toward an infinite-density Omega Point.  On the other hand, David Zindell, in his Neverness books, envisioned it all continually expanding outwards...

There is an ecology of information. Stars will die; people and gods will die, but information is conserved. Macroscopic information decays to microscopic information. But microscopic information is eventually concentrated. Nothing is lost. Gods exist to devour information. The lower intelligences sort, filter, concentrate and organize information. And the gods feed.

Zindell's "gods" are complex fusions of biology and computer, in the end expanding into uncountable quantum multiverses.  The "happy ending" of the story (of all stories?) is essentially that once Life reaches a certain level of complexity, it fills all of existence with its diversity and can never be completely extinguished.

Heady stuff!  Coming back down to the ground -- and to my daily refrain of real-life applications to RPG la-la land -- I think back to the multiple layers of social activity that Zak Sabbath laid out here.  It turns out that a tabletop role-playing game can contain a quite complex "ecology" of psychological interactions:

You get both Lord of the Rings and the Mystery Science Theatering of the Lord of the Rings. In this way, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts -- it's not just hanging out with your friends plus an adventure story plus the challenge of a game -- it's also and largely that fourth thing that only happens when all of them happen together.

People often talk about cognitive dissonance, but here's a place where the layers can play together in "cognitive consonance."  (Is that a thing?)  In any case, I think those of us on the "inside" may sometimes let familiarity dull the wonder that rightly should be directed at this many-layered, many-splendoured pastime of ours!

D is for Double Dagger

[This is the 4th of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

Today's symbol is the double form of the typographical dagger.  We saw the single form two days ago, as the symbol for Death written on Ben Casey's chalkboard.  Why associate death with a dagger?  Apart from the obvious association that it's something that can kill you... I wonder if the medieval copyists were making a canny allusion to that Biblical verse about how the end will come "like a thief in the night"  (very cloak and dagger, hmm?).  The visual association of the dagger with the Christian cross probably has something to do with it, although the typography people are always quick to distinguish the dagger from the cross.

The DOUBLE dagger doesn't have much unique significance, other than being next in line after its single sibling when making footnotes.  But I think it's cool.  :-)

In RPGs, daggers are sometimes dismissed of as one of the least deadly weapons, fit only as a backup for weakling wizards once they run out of spells.  But to most "normal men" (with 1d4 hit points in many classic versions of D&D), a dagger is just as deadly as a two-handed sword!  Maybe it's time to make the simple dagger more interesting... and dangerous!  Taking a cue from today's symbol, I found the following super-cool "double dagger" in a Google image search:

(Click for link to original source)

Like a thief in the night, indeed, it's got you coming and going!  Here are a few other ideas, which I'm sure are not new, but they're what tumbled out of my addled brain...

1. Daggers are small, so they're perfect for hiding in everyday objects.  Particularly nasty was this wooden crucifix shiv that someone found in a real prison.
2. Sometimes daggers are thrown, but what if the thrower attached a light rope or chain to the end, so it can be pulled back and used repeatedly?  One would think the extra weight of the line would make it clumsier to use in battle, but there are styles of Eastern martial arts that make use of this kind of Rope Dart.
3. I'm sure that many RPGs have special rules for high-dexterity combatants who can fight with one dagger in each hand.  Putting some thought into which parts of clothing conceals such a dagger-pair can be fun... Boots?  Sleeves?  Sword scabbards or arrow quivers that conceal extra hidden pockets?  (i.e., weapons within weapons!)
4. Some monsters can be damaged only by bladed weapons made of a special metal (sometimes silver, sometimes iron).  Extending that, an interesting "magic item" would be a set of 7 daggers, each made of the one of the 7 classical/planetary metals. (The Mercurial one would have to be merely "infused" with quicksilver, of course...)  Each would have a special effect related to the symbolism of its metal.

One last fun association, fit for this symbol-themed set of posts:  The symbol to the right, used by chemists to denote an equilibrium between competing processes, is often called a "double harpoon!"

C is for Chiron

[This is the 3rd of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

In 1977, astronomer Charles Kowal discovered a new asteroid that eventually came to be called Chiron.  Even though thousands of asteroids had already been discovered, this one made the news because of its strange orbit -- not between Mars and Jupiter like most of the others, but between Saturn and Uranus.  Some news reports (even the one I remember from sci-fi magazine Starlog) called it the 10th planet.  Later it was also discovered that Chiron sometimes develops a fuzzy tail, and thus is a strange asteroid/comet hybrid.

It wasn't too long before astrologers began thinking about what effect Chiron may have on human birth-charts... and they assigned it a key-shaped symbol to indicate its arcane properties.  Some talk about it as a key to unlocking changes in one's life, or a key to healing inner wounds.  They also emphasized the in-betweenness of its being wedged between stability (Saturn) and upheaval (Uranus).  Sometimes the key points to one extreme, and sometimes it "turns" to point to the other.  [Note that this symbolism is no less fascinating if you, like me, don't ascribe to literal interpretations of the influences of the planets on one's personality.]

Of course, the "healing inner wounds" bit is reminiscent of Chiron the Greek mythological centaur, who was a healer and teacher that had his own unique wounds to deal with.  The Greeks liked that kind of irony (see also the blind seer Tiresias), but what fascinates me most is the in-betweenness, or liminality.  Not quite safe and normal, and not quite wild and crazy like his centaur cousins.  Not quite a man, not quite a horse.  Not quite an asteroid, not quite a comet.

Are there ways to make practical use of these ideas in role-playing games?  Well, D&D has had centaurs as monsters to fight since the beginning.  In The Dragon #103 there was an extensive article on centaur society, which led some to implement them as playable races and/or classes.  See also Mazes & Minotaurs for another cool approach, or also see my own take on Gulliver's Houyhnhnms in an RPG setting.  (They flip the man/horse dichotomy on its head in a different fun way...)

But is this really about centaurs?  Fantasy adventures embody many other kinds of in-betweenness.  The world, in many RPG settings, is often divided into "cleared hexes" (i.e., safe zones of civilization) versus uncharted wilderness zones full of all manner of vile beasts.  Also, the overall flavor of fantasy tropes also must tiptoe a fine line between being too historically pedantic and being too weird and "gonzo."  A little of both extremes is lots of fun, but stray too far away from balance and it becomes a noticeably different experience....

B is for Ben Casey

[This is the 2nd of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

"Man... Woman... Birth... Death... Infinity..."

I'm curious how many readers remember this opening sequence from the old TV series Ben Casey.  (Here it is on youtube.)  A hand draws these symbols on a chalkboard and an off-camera voice slowly intones their one-word meanings. As a kid enthralled by signs and symbols, I've never forgotten it.

The unseen speaker was Sam Jaffe, who played Dr. Zorba on the show.  (I've wondered if Zorba's portrayal of the kindly, but also slightly crotchety, older doctor was the inspiration for Star Trek's early progression of old mentor-doctor figures [in the pilots] that evolved into Leonard McCoy...)

Ben Casey was kind of a spiritual ancestor to shows like St. Elsewhere that tried to go beyond the "doctor soap opera" format that medical shows often rely on.  The symbols may have been a slightly heavy-handed way of saying: "Herein lie the Big Questions of Life."  Still, even ambitious shows like this are often locked into a kind of episodic straightjacket, since the writers are usually constrained to make sure the shows can be viewed in random order and still understood!

My purpose in recalling this old TV drama is to remind RPG game masters about the huge treasure trove of material available on the small screen for creating memorable characters, plots, and settings. A lot of it is formulaic and over-used, but there's just SO MUCH that the small fraction of good stuff still amounts to a lot.  Even the episodic nature of TV shows is often a good fit to the picaresque nature of fantasy RPG adventures.

This is far from new advice, of course... I constantly see references to TV Tropes in the RPG blogosphere, and there's also a game devoted to this very idea, too!

I've always wanted to systematize the process of "pulling out the interesting bits" from TV land.  For just about any TV show or genre, it's possible to create tables that allow one to generate random scenarios in that particular style.  Examples...

1. The Star Trek inspired game Where No Man Has Gone Before does a particularly nice job of this.
2. A newspaper reporter tossed off a list of five basic plots that pretty much cover all 400+ episodes of the western show Bonanza.
3. Drama is never far away with a list of tried-and-true soap opera cliche plots.

There are dozens of generic random plot generators out there, too; this blog post lists some of them.  See also Plotto, or Plots Unlimited, or the Plot Genie, and so on...

I've wanted to delve deeper into the theory of narratives for Glass Bead Game reasons, too.  See my older posts about Tension and other musical analogies for some initial thoughts.  I suppose there's no universal formula that will auto-magically do what human minds have labored over for millennia, but that won't stop us from trying!  :-)

A is for Antimony

[This is the 1st of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

The metallic element antimony has been known since ancient times. The Egyptians ground it up for their kohl eye cosmetics, but it's often best known for its highly poisonous nature. The derivation of it's name in English (the "Anti-Monk") brings to mind Eco's Name of the Rose, since it's reputed to have been especially deadly to monastic alchemists of the middle ages.

The classical alchemical symbol of a cross atop a circle (the inverse of the traditional sign of Venus) is the same as the medieval symbol of the Globus Cruciger, a Christian symbol often held by kings to show their God-sanctioned dominance over their little slice of the world.  So we've got the heights of power, and the dangers of the chymist's art...

Antimony also shows up in the notes of Isaac Newton, who experimented for many years in making all kinds of interesting forms, including the Star Regulus of Antimony, a beautiful crystalline version that occurs after repeated meltings and coolings of the raw ore turn it into a purified, crackly wonder:

My original idea for this post was to stat up the brittle Star Regulus as a "broken" magic item that must be assembled from its shards back into its pristine whole.  (There's a cliched adventure seed for you...)

However, the sheer difficulty in just making this thing made me think of the whole process of how player characters can create magic items and artifacts.  Most versions of fantasy RPGs have rules for this, and I always remember Len Lakofka's alchemical expansions on this process in The Dragon #49, too.  But readers of this blog will know that I often like to play with "mini-games" within the larger game (see Contests of Skill and Training for XP).  Magic item creation is another fun place for a mini-game, I think!

There should be multiple steps in creating any magic item, with opportunities for mishaps spread out all along the way.  An example list of processes for a magic ring, say, could be:

1. Find the ore for the ring, and the gemstone for the main ornamentation.
2. Alchemically prepare the ore into pure metal.
3. Infuse some special potion or other compound into the metal and/or the gemstone.
4. Forge the ring into its proper shape (with help of a blacksmith??).
5. Insert the gemstone into its setting (with gaudy ritual to finalize the process!).

Each step need not be tediously role-played, as long as in-game time is set aside for these things to be done. The key is that the PC is given the chance to make key choices, at each step, that affects the chances of success, failure, or catastrophic failure (boom!).  Spending more money on quality equipment improves the chance of success.  So does taking additional time to do everything properly.

Usually an RPG will give a single probability of failure for the whole process, and this can be divided up into all of the stages to up the tension. (Just don't use the by-the-book probability in EACH stage; probabilities multiply!)  If any given roll comes up as a failure, the GM can give a context-appropriate explanation of what happens in that stage.  In the event of running out of specific ideas, one can always rely on external circumstances such as someone entering the room and distracting the PC... hearing a rooster crow outside just as the PC is set to pour from one beaker into another... and so on.  :-)