D&D Portals at Your Table

If you have an ongoing paragon- or epic-level D&D game going, you're probably get a lot of mileage (both literal and figurative) out of the linked portal ritual and its higher-level alternatives. They're bread-and-butter transportation for any sort of world-spanning campaign.

Some tips to make your portal rituals work better at the D&D table:

Sigil Forensics

The rules are silent on this issue, but if you're the DM, you should decide for yourself what people who observe the linked portal ritual learn about the destination of the teleport. Whether it's PCs chasing the Big Bad Evil Guy who portals away or NPC bounty hunters trying to track down the PCs, your table will eventually confront the "Do we know where they went?" question. 

The rules specify that the sigils in the temporary circle at the origin point (or the modifications to the permanent circle at the origin) disappear at the end of the ritual. But that's usually a few rounds after the portal users step through, so anyone close enough (how close? I'd say six squares or cobble up a quick Perception-based answer) can see the sigils, and thus be able to duplicate the ritual and arrive at the same place.

More interestingly, I'd also rule that anyone who listens to the ritual being performed hears the sigil combination and thus can duplicate the destination. (But you have to know the linked portal ritual yourself, or all those words are just a bunch of gibberish to you.) Off the top of my head, I'd say that the sigil combination is repeated roughly every minute during the 10-minute ritual. If you make it fairly easy for people to follow each other with teleports, you open up more interesting plots than you close off. 

The rules are also silent on the reverse engineering point, but I'd rule that you can't learn where a destination is by merely knowing the sigil combination. In other words, you can't determine that the sigil combination "aluk-tam-yesh-quor-tahn-tahn-galli-prao" will send you to a jungle ziggurat in southern Qbarra. It's probably more fun and more adventure-enabling to make the PCs perform the ritual and check it out firsthand. At my table, you could probably talk me into an arbitarily high Arcana check, but unless you're scraping the top of the epic tier, your odds won't be good.

Use "Real" Sigils!

One way you can really make the portal rituals come to life at your D&D table is by making your players keep an "address book" of the sigil combinations they know. Rather than just saying, "you discover the sigil combination for Castle Scarypants," tell your players, "You discover that maur-yao-kuru-trehn-plau-ganou-rikh-shen is the sigil combination for Castle Scarypants." Keep a record for yourself, of course. You'll know the effort pays off when one player says to another, "What are the sigils for Castle Scarypants? We can go there!" and someone else says, "Just a sec...it's maur-yao-kuru-trehn-plau-panou-rikh-shen."

I used a variation of this myself in my epic-level post-apocalyptic Eberron game. I used the English alphabet for the sigils, though, which in retrospect didn't really seem fantasy enough. But my players dutifully kept track of where "M-Y-K-T-P-P-R-S" would take them, and whenever they found a bad-guy library, one of the first things they'd do is ransack the place looking for sigil combinations. 

So there's potential there. But to really come to life, the portal sigils deserve a fantasy alphabet of their very own--and it needs to be different from the existing D&D alphabets because presumably everyone uses the same sigil "language." Twenty or thirty characters is plenty, and each sigil combination should be six to eight letters long.

Wizards R&D is a busy place, but wouldn't it be great if they'd come up with a portal-sigil alphabet and release it as a font? Then we could all make cool handouts for our players.

Languages and Rituals

More broadly, the Player's Handbook is silent on what language a ritual is performed in. The language doesn't matter in most cases, although it would be a little weird if assistants to the ritual don't share a language with the lead ritualist. We imagine rituals are complicated things, and it probably bends suspension of disbelief to imagine that you can pantomime ritual instructions effectively. You ain't that good at charades, Baron E'Ville. And language matters also in the fairly common case when PCs come across an in-progress ritual and want to know what the ritual is before they (inevitably) interrupt it.

My answer is that rituals have no language per se--they use a specific vocabulary from the relevant skill (Arcana, Religion, etc.). You can't conjugate a sentence in Arcana-speak, but you can evoke a great deal of magical power if you say the right Arcana words and throw around the right alchemical reagents. That answer is a bit of a reach, but easy overhearing of rituals is probably more adventure-enabling than it is adventure-thwarting.

Things I'd Do Differently 

If I had another chance to make changes to the linked portal ritual, here's what I'd do:

• I'd make the default diameter of the portal circles 15 feet. That lets five PCs use it at the same time, and it's a lot friendlier to monsters. And I'd explicitly make it clear that big dudes can make even bigger portal circles so they don't have to squeeze through the little ones. (If the Huge titan arrives at a smaller portal circle in a constrained space, he takes his lumps, of course.)

• I'd have the portal sigils remain for, say, 1d6 x 5 minutes after the portal closes. (They'd be visible, but powerless at that point.) That makes it even easier for the pursuer to keep the chase alive. Keeping the chase alive good for business, most of the time.

Out of Context: The Ice Stone has melted!

Music: Radiohead, Kid A

Random Country Music Thoughts

I've been messing around with country music for a just-for-fun game project (long story). Two insights:

• The devil totally wins in "Devil Went Down To Georgia." His solo is waaaay better than Johnny's.

• The world needs more steel guitar. All genres, everywhere. Robert Randolph aside, we need more great musicians to take a Hendrix approach to this instrument. Country has had steel guitar all to themselves for too long.

• Special bonus insight: Imagine how cool the steel guitar controller would be on the (imaginary) Country Hero videogame. See what I mean

Out of Context: "It is a section of fencepost that is used as a poor man's plunger.

Music: The Word, The Word.

Monster Manual Comics

Just a quick one; feelin' the writing urge today.

Check out Lore's Monster Manual comics. Especially if you're of a certain age, you'll find them hilarious. But be warned: They might ruin your ability to take some classic D&D monsters seriously. Or take the Allman Brothers seriously, for that matter.

Just hit the back button to flip through all of the Monster Manual ones. (His other stuff is good, too. Lore is one-half of the Brunching Shuttlecocks team. Remember them?)

--Dave.

A Great Freakin' Book

If you like Conan...

If you like Elric...

If you like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser...

...get yourself a copy of Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. Pay off those library fines if you have to. Sell your plasma if you must.

This book is rollicking adventure in that classic style--and almost no one writes like that anymore. (Heck, not even Moorcock, and he's still around.) It's got a big guy and a little guy, so the obvious parallel is with Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. But Chabon is a better writer, and the fantasy dial is set very low--low like in Howard's later Conan work. I very much got a "People of the Black Circle" (my favorite Conan story) vibe from this.

Yes, it's that Michael Chabon: The Wonder Boys guy, the Kavalier and Klay guy, etc. Chabon is always quick to defend "genre" fiction, and I think given his druthers, he'd write a bunch of good, pulpy stuff. It's clear that he's using his Wonder Boys fame and the glow of that Pulitzer Prize to satisfy some of his creative urges. And what a happy day when his creative urges happen to match something I crave to read! 

Chabon is a wordsmith, and you'll savor the way he strings together a sentence. But all his fancy wordsmithin' doesn't get in the way of the rollicking. You will burn through this book and wish it was twice as long.

And that's my only regret. He's Michael Chabon, dammit. He's not chained to his typewriter cranking more Gentlemen of the Road stories to sell to Weird Tales for three cents a word. This is probably the only one we get.

But--bright side time--we do get this really, really excellent book.

P.S. Wikipedia informs me that Gentlemen of the Road was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine in 2007. See, serialized! It doesn't get any pulpier than that.

Out of Context: "Are you the angel of death?"

"Even worse, fatty," the pale stranger said. "I'm the angel of fools."

Music: CSS, Cansei De Ser Sexy

The Fantasy Language Barrier, Part II

World of Warcraft has languages, too. And if D&D’s languages sometimes impose unfortunate barriers to communication, WoW’s language system imposes exactly one barrier. Horde PCs and Alliance PCs can’t talk to each other. Period.

How It Works: Each faction has its own common tongue, and there’s no way (absolutely no way, period, end of discussion) for a Horde PC to learn Common or an Alliance PC to learn Orcish. That was a fantastic decision that I don’t think Blizzard gets enough credit for. That language barrier prevents the tidal wave of trash-talking that would drown out everything else whenever the Horde and Alliance are in proximity—including key places like battlegrounds and main cities like Dalaran and Shattrath.

Maybe I’m old, and maybe I have delicate sensibilities, but I shudder to think at what the shouting in Dalaran would sound like. Remember, WoW is a big place. The player population is almost six million strong (and another six million play Alliance characters!), and even spread across multiple servers, that's a lot of shouting.

When a Warcraft character of the opposite faction yells something, the game translates it into gibberish with a consistent letter- and syllable-replacement system. Back in 2005 or so, some enterprising WoW players made some rudimentary efforts at reverse-engineering that gibberish translation, enabling some awkward two-letter communication between Horde and Alliance. Predictably, it was used for trash talking, and Blizzard changed the translation algorithm to confound the effort.

If you aren’t a human or an orc, you get a racial language. But the vast majority of Warcraft players never, ever use Zandali, Taurahi, Gutterspeak, Thalassian, Darnassian, Dwarvish, Gnomish, or Draenei. The game has unlimited person-to-person whispering and unfettered ability to create chat channels (to say nothing of actual voice chatting), so there’s no need for a “secret language” to facilitate PC-to-PC communication. Those languages exist only because Blizzard was contemplating a broader language system fairly late in the design. For very good reasons (the trash-talking thing above), bilingual WoW PCs never happened, and they never will happen.

I Must Have Missed Looting That Babelfish: Just saying “no…period” to cross-faction communication was a gutsy call on Blizzard’s part. Beyond that, though, WoW seems content to blithely ignore language. When my Horde druid stealths his way through Stormwind and Ironforge, I can often overhear when the NPCs are saying—and I doubt they’re speaking Orcish or Taurahe. In quests and instances where I meet major NPCs like Thrall and Jaina Proudmoore, I can understand what everyone’s saying perfectly. If a monster speaks, I understand it. And when a demon or a dragon or another big, bad NPC addresses the Horde and the Alliance together (like in the cinematic you see after you get the “Veteran of the Wrathgate” achievement), everyone understands everyone else. My character has met Arthas maybe a half-dozen times so far. What language does he speak? And what language do all those death knights in the Ebon Hold speak, anyway?

So Who Does Languages Right? D&D strives for a realistic treatment of languages, but that realism often gets in the way of communication that everyone at the table wants to happen. Warcraft blows off realism almost completely, but it’s left one singular, key language barrier in place where it’s needed most.

I suppose maybe that leads to the following principle: only erect language barriers where you want there to be an actual barrier. Once you know the barriers you want, then let everyone else talk to each other—especially in a game like D&D which relies almost exclusively on the spoken word for communication among the players.

But justify your language setup! Don’t just blow it off like WoW did. Especially in a fantasy world, you have the ammunition to believably justify as many or as few languages as you want. And think big! Have a player-discoverable reason for your language setup. You won’t be the first to have an earth-shattering event that changes the nature of language. If you want more languages, pull off something at your campaign table like the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). And if you want everyone talking to everyone else, you could do a lot worse than cloven tongues of fire…like in Pentacost (Acts 2:1-12). Like I said, you won’t be the first.

Out of Context: “That one’s Snow White. That one’s Cinder-gorilla.”
Music: Blur, Think Tank

The Fantasy Language Barrier, Part I

Two of my favorite games handle the issue of language—what the heck it sounds like when the PCs and NPCs are talking—very differently. Today…Dungeons and Dragons!

More Barriers Than You Think: In 4th Edition D&D, there’s a lingua franca: a language called “Common.” But it’s not truly universal. In fact, it isn’t even particularly widespread. Sure, a lot of creatures—including all the PCs—speak Common. But many key creatures don’t, including entire categories like angels, archons, beholders, most demons, most devils, driders (curious given that they used to be Common-speaking drow, huh?), efreets, elementals, giants, lizardfolk, salamanders, slaads, treants, troglodytes, trolls…and those are just the heavy hitters.

Some of the above speak Supernal, of course, but Supernal doesn’t enable universal communication. If you speak Supernal, everyone understands you. You don’t necessarily understand their non-Supernal replies.

Why Do Languages At All? The conventional wisdom is that it’s sometimes fun to try to play through a language barrier, resorting to pantomime and gesture to communicate with a monster. And there’s a long D&D tradition of PCs collectively learning an obscure language and using it to talk among themselves when NPCs might overhear them.

I think the first part of that conventional wisdom is largely bogus; the pantomime encounter is fun once or twice, but it becomes tiresome after that. And you can still have the occasional pantomime encounter without hard-coding so many language barriers into the game. Make those language-barrier situations what they truly are: the exception, not the rule.

I’m more sympathetic to the second use of the language barrier: a PC-only language. It has a nice side effect: It provides a degree of story-legitimacy to the table-talk that happens among the PCs anyway. But again, the many language barriers seem to be forcing the issue a bit.

I guess there's a third reason for the existing system: The game designers' natural inclination to reward PCs who expended the effort to learn the languages in the first place. But in 4th edition, those language choices (if indeed your character gets any choices at all) are almost entirely made at character generation. And if you quiz the third floor at Wizards, I doubt you'll get many designers who say they want lots of players picking up the Linguist feat. That reason, though well-intentioned, is the most bogus of all. Rewarding someone for being an elf is the same as punishing someone for not being an elf. 

It's All About Monster Dialogue: The real point where the rubber meets the road is with NPCs talking to other NPCs, however. The D&D language system has created a world where monsters can’t talk to other monsters--not as easily as I'd like, anyway. And in a game that stresses heterogenous monster mixes in a given encounter—and monsters with identifiable roles in combat—that’s a problem. 

It’s better for the game if the leader monster can shout out to the skirmishers “Stop the one with the crystal!” or tell the artillery, “Cover me while I retreat to the Sanctum of Skulls!” As a DM, I usually want the PCs to overhear stuff like that. It adds some exposition, some verisimilitude, and a tactical hint—and it gives me a way to provide some color and characterization for the monsters. Even if the PCs don’t understand the language the monsters are using, they’ll get a different vibe from a harshly whispered “Ruthek kaura naaa…ruthek kaura naaa…” or a hysterical, screaming “Ruthek kaura naaa! Ruthek kaura naaa!”

But a lot of monsters can’t talk to each other. I once flipped through the Monster Manual and looked for language barriers in the sample encounters. I don’t remember the exact figure (and I’m not about to duplicate the effort), but somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 percent of the sample encounters include a language barrier. And that doesn’t count sample encounters where one of the monsters is a hyena or something that doesn’t speak at all. No one at the table is going to bat an eyelid at that. But the number of “intelligent speakers that can’t talk to the rest of the intelligent speakers the Monster Manual groups them with” is way too high.

And the language barriers strewn throughout the game can jump up and bite a DM when no one’s expecting it. All it takes is one curious player to say, “Hey, what language is the fire titan ordering the fire archon around in?” At the very least, that creates a needless “um…” moment for the DM.

Quit Throwing Bricks, Dude: So what should you do? Well, you can play it as it lies, of course. Embrace those language barriers. Show the fire titan gesturing wildly at the fire archon. Have the red dragon wing-slap the salamanders into position. There are too many language barriers for my table, but there might not be too many for your table. And that’s what really matters, huh?

Alternatively, you can make a really expansive interpretation of DMG 171: “intelligent creatures [the PCs] encounter speak at least a little Common.” You can decide for your table that “a little Common” is enough to engage in light conversation, give and receive tactical commands, taunt the PCs, beg for mercy, and deliver key clues. You’re pushing the envelope of that rule’s intent—heck, you’re probably outside the envelope. But I think the payoff at the table is pretty good. You don’t get stuck with monsters that can’t talk to each other. Their choice of language is the spice, not the stew. And that's the way I think it ought to be.

Out of Context: "It's an RP realm. You're supposed to say, 'Weep more, novice.'"

Music: Joe Satriani, Engines of Creation

How I spent my Christmas vacation

I took a nice vacation to visit family down in Southern California. Took the kids to the beach, Disneyland, that sort of thing.

And I happened across something from my adolescence: Megaforce! Check it out. It's the dune buggy! The dune buggy...that shoots LASERS!

Believe it or not, this thing--apparently a prop left over from the movie--is parked in front of an Army/Navy surplus store in Newport Beach, right on Pacific Coast Highway. And a close-up inspection revealed that it hasn't moved in years.

Now, the movie Megaforce...well, it hasn't exactly aged well. But man, when you're 13 years old, the notion of an elite team equipped with laser-shooting dune buggies and flying motorcycles that shoot missiles is completely awesome. 

You can see the last few minutes of the film--a pretty accurate sampling of the movie as a whole--here. And here's the opening few minutes. 

Yeah, it's terrible, Still, it would be difficult to exaggerate what a charge I got out of seeing the dune buggy on a parking lot on PCH. The actual quality of the movie in no way diminishes my fondness for it. I guess a lot of the things we're fond of are like that, huh?

Out of Context: "I was being the wild card!"

Music: Nouvelle Vague, Nouvelle Vague