A tattooed Thrall warrior from the Seven Kingdoms.
A Gnomekin from the Seven Kingdoms.
An Oceanian ship’s boy from the pirate crew of the Skull-Bearer, a three-masted schooner with lateen sails.
A Gryph scout from the Seven Kingdoms.
A Tanasian wizard from Cymril in the Seven Kingdoms.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons
In Dungeons and Dragons games you are trying to bring characters to imaginary life by getting into their deformed, powerful, or magic-filled heads and walking around in a very dangerous imaginary world. You have to be them. You have to think like them and talk like them. You have to love what they love, decide what they do, and live and die for them. They become real people to you. Well… as real as imaginary people can ever become.
But there are actually two distinct types of characters.
These, remember, are the Player Characters. My two sons and my daughter provide them with their persona, personality, and personhood. They are the primary actors in the stage play in the theater of the mind which is D & D.
But there are other characters too. In fact, a whole complex magical world full of other characters. And as the Dungeon Master, I am the one who steps into their weird and wacky imaginary skins to walk around and be them at least until the Player Characters decide to fireball them, abandon them to hungry trolls, or bonk them on the top of their little horned heads. I get to inhabit an entire zoo of strange and wonderful creatures and people.
Besides the fact that these Non-Player Characters can easily lead you to develop multiple personality disorder, they are useful in telling the story in many different ways. Some are friendly characters that may even become trusted travel companions for the Player Characters.
D & D has a battle system based on controlling the outcomes of the roll of the dice with complex math and gained experience. In simpler terms, there is a lot of bloody whacking with swords and axes that has to take place. You need characters like that both to help you whack your enemies and to be the enemies you get to whack. There is a certain joy to solving your problems with mindless whacking with a sword. And yet, the story is helped when the sword-whackers begin to develop personalities.
Crazy Mervin, for example, began life as a whackable monster that could easily have been murdered by the Player Characters in passing while they were battling the evil shape-changing Emerald Claw leader, Brother Garrow.
But Gandy befriended him and turned him from the evil side by feeding him and sparing him when it really counted. He became a massively powerful ax-whacker for good because Gandy got on his good side. And stupid creatures like Mervin possess simple loyalties. He helped the players escape the Dark Continent of Xendrick with their lives and is now relied upon heavily to help with combat. He was one of the leaders of the charge on the gate when the Players conquered the enthralled Castle Evernight.
Not every NPC is a whackable monster, however. In the early stages of the campaign the Players needed a magic-user who could read magic writing, use detection spells and shielding spells and magic missiles, and eventually lob fireballs on the bigger problems… like dragons.
Druaelia was the wizard I chose to give the group of heroes to fulfill these magical tasks. Every D & D campaign requires wizarding somewhere along the way. And Dru was a complex character from the start. Her fire spells often went awry. When Fate used a magic flaming crossbow bolt to sink a ship he was defending, killing the good guys right along with the bad guys, it was with a magic crossbow bolt crafted by Druaelia. Her fire spells went nuclear-bad more than once. She had to learn along the way that her magical abilities tended more towards ice and snow than fire. She learned to become a powerful wielder of cold powers. And while she was comfortable in a bikini-like dress that drove the boys wild because she grew to love the cold, she didn’t particularly like the attentions of men and male creatures that went along with that. More than one random bandit or bad guy learned the hard way not leer at Dru. There are just certain parts of the anatomy you really don’t want frozen.
The Player Characters will need all sorts of help along the way, through travels and adventures and dangerous situations. They will meet and need to make use of many different people and creatures. And as Dungeon Master I try hard to make the stories lean more towards solving the problems of the story with means other than mere whacking with swords. Sometimes that need for help from others can even lead you into more trouble.
But as I am now nearing the 800 word mark on a 500 word essay, I will have to draw it all to a close. There is a lot more to say about NPC’s from our game. They are all me and probably are proof of impending insanity. But maybe I will tell you about that the next time we sit down together at the D & D table.
Every good Dungeons & Dragons game needs a quaint little magic shop to provide the appropriate magical boom-boom solution that isn’t obviously needed, but will prove essential to the adventure later.
For our game, where we had a choice of a number of screwy little magic shops that didn’t manage to blow themselves up, the main place of choice was Failin’s Arcanum Magickum Shoppe in Sharn.  (Why “shop” has to be spelled “shoppe”, I’m really not certain. You have to spell things wrong to cast spells apparently.)
The shoppe is located in the Precarious District of Sharn, City of Towers. Visitors have been known to be crushed by falling parapet stones from above that may or may not have been wedged loose by a hobgoblin street gang. Failin himself is a rather morose individual with red hair and a connection to the Dragonmarked House Orien, the house whose magical dragonmarks allow the members of the house to do transportation magic. Failin was himself a talented geomancer, able to create items with bound earth elementals used for power and propulsion. He also collects items of great value from adventurers and commands impossibly high prices for them.
So, if you want to buy a Wand of Blinding Colors, a Bag of Holding, a Flaming Elf Skull of Timely Warnings, or a Deadly Drum of Druid Doom, he’s definitely your man and will only take twice the amount of everything you own in payment. If you want something more powerful or more arcane, you better be ready to slay a dragon for it and bring back the entire hoard as payment. Failin is rich in several different ways.
Working for Failin is his one and only servant, Gobbie. Gobbie is also a rare thing, a goblin you can trust. He was raised by dragonmarked humans and treated slightly better than the average goblin (who tend to be killed on sight by heroes).
Gobbie is also trained as a shield bearer, and carries a shield that is immune to dragon fire and most magical fire and ice. Failin rents Gobbie to adventurers for a high price, and Gobbie usually serves them just as faithfully as he serves his red-haired master.
And Failin’s shoppe is a place where you can find any number of magic users, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, illusionists, thaumaturges, and other magicians. If you don’t mind risking a meeting with horrifying necromancers, you can find and talk to some of the most powerful people in all Eberron.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, humor, magic, Paffooney
Traditionally, D&D-type role playing games are played with miniature figures to represent characters and npc’s on the battlefield. But when the kids were small and we started playing Star Wars RPG I didn’t have the proper figures. So. to visualize characters, we used what I did have plenty of, dolls… err, action figures.
I told you who the player characters were a couple of Saturdays ago, but let me remind you.
Princess Moreno, represented by the Barbie dressed in Emperor Palpatine’s robe was the leader of the adventuring group, and the player character of my niece, who was available back then because they lived in the Dallas area too.
Juba Jubajai, Jedi Guardian, was the muscle-brained power of the group. He was my oldest son’s player character.
The sidekicks and NPC’s that rounded out the group were Hrowwuhrr, the Princess’s loyal Wookie companion, and Keebo Kloohorn, the Rodian minstrel, quick of wit and poor at shooting.
Of course, there were numerous other people you run into in an adventure, like Jedi-trainer Master Link Conn (played by an Abraham Lincoln Presidential action figure) and Barrabas the space pirate. I customized some. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo played a lot of them. And others were only present in our imaginations. For a brief little while, it was a quaint and happy gaming experience to play Star Wars with dolls and dice.
One of the things I discovered by relentlessly playing outer-space D & D is the unique setting for fiction presented by the basic interstellar starship. Here you have a cookie-cutter setting with a basic set of requirements that can’t really change. It takes the crew as the primary cast from one possible site of adventure to the next, offering a complete barrier to carry-over conflicts and interactions, and also providing a setting for forced internal conflicts that can have profound story consequences.
Starships are an enclosed environment where you cannot simply run away from your troubles. Especially when you are alone aboard with a hungry flesh-eating alien and surrounded by empty, airless, interstellar space. You have to confront both inner and outer demons face to face. There is no mileage available to put between you.
It has a certain set of requirements for who is on board and available to be hero friends or friends turned adversary. There must be a pilot. Somebody has to know how to drive the thing. There must be an engineer. Somebody needs to be able to fix things and keep things running. Somebody needs to know how to manage food and drinking water and the general odor of this enclosed place. That last is a position that is too often overlooked in movies and science fiction novels. Scotty cannot be expected to clean the toilets on the Enterprise. And somebody needs to be in charge.
Express boats in Traveller are one-man-crew affairs, basically in the service of carrying information between the stars, an interstellar postal truck of sorts. These can be the setting of man-versus-himself sorts of conflicts. If starships are in our future, and it is obvious with global warming we don’t have a future without them, then we are going to have to confront the concept of living with boredom. Boredom can become mindless or it can become raving insanity. This is why, in my Traveller games the X-boats all carried the current favorites among episodes of I Love Lucy reruns. Aliens have been watching that stuff for years now in real life. It will one day be a galaxy favorite.
Starships are also filled with a fascinating complexity. There will be times when there is no gravity so up and down can become irrelevant. If the heat goes out, deep space can freeze you solid. If you go outside, you need a space suit so you don’t blow up from your own internal pressure suddenly released in a pressure-free environment. And you have no air outside the spaceship. James Holden’s favorite coffee maker could malfunction and foul the air with poisons from burned plastic, causing a serious problem-solving situation that could result in you needing to get really, really, a thousand times really good at holding your breath.
And, of course, there is the obvious conflict of meeting another starship with lasers and meson cannons and nuclear missiles all controlled by a captain who is a homicidal maniac and knows your sister and really, really wants to get revenge on her whole family for what she said about his zilfinbarger back on Metebelius III.
So, as a role-playing gamer, and as a creator of science fiction, I really, really love starships. I will probably talk about them a time or too more until it gets really, really annoying… almost as annoying as the whole “really, really” thing.
Part of the joy I find in the family Dungeons and Dragons game is in making Paffoonies, the story-based pictures that illustrate and elucidate the characters and other things that enter spontaneously into the game.
I don’t invent every part of the image and concept myself. Â Some inspiration comes from the game books and published adventures, while others come directly from the players and the way their imaginations shape characters and events.
Many of the Dungeons and Dragons Paffoonies began life as character sheets. Â That’s why there are numbers, strength numbers, intelligence numbers, character levels, dexterity, skill sets, and magic items listed all around the character image. They more or less morphed over time into illustrations done in colored pencil on colored paper.
I enjoy drawing wizards and apprentices, warriors in action, castles, and dragons. Â I have used the game as an extended excuse to draw vast quantities of them. Â And now I have a resource to mine for Paffoonies to lace my blog with. Â They provide a sort of sugary spice that I love the taste of, and I will continue to share them until the end, even if they disagree with you and give you reading indigestion.
I am working on a new piece that is D & D Paffooney- related. I will keep you apprised of the the progress here until it is finished or until you get fed up with it. Â Whichever comes first.
Paffoonies are my own thing… pictures and stories melted together… loony, cartoony, balloony, pink baboon buffoons brewed together in a big pot. Â And I will continue to use them for acts of Dungeons and Dragons nonsense.
Filed under artwork, Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney
As a family, we play Dungeons and Dragons. Well, all of us, that is, except Mom. It’s basically against her religion and means the Jehovah’s Witness version of Hell for us. (Which is a spiritual condition where God refuses to talk to you, and play checkers with you, and then you die.) But let’s not discuss that here. I don’t need her to start thinking about reasons to divorce me. She accepts that it is a thing we do and like and keep mostly to ourselves. (I just rolled a 15 on a twenty-sided dice to succeed in that charm-enemy spell and avert disaster.)
As a family we have chosen to use the Eberron campaign available from Wizards of the Coast, the company that now publishes all official D&D stuff. It is a medieval/Renaissance sort of setting where magic is every-day common and takes the place of science in the real world.
I get to be game master and creator of the basic plots and stories. My three kids, Dorin, Henry, and the Princess are the player characters who interact with the world and determine the outcomes of the adventures through the rolling of Dungeon Dice.
I want to assure you at this point that my eldest son does not actually have a watermelon for a head. Maybe metaphorically, but he is easily the smartest and most likely to be a leader of my three kids. His character routinely pursues ideas like replacing his arms with magical metal arms, or grafting additional arms on his body. He has chosen the phoenix to be the symbol on his personal flag and coat of arms, but his artifice roll to create the magical ship’s flag turned out to make it look more like a pigeon that someone set on fire. (You have to watch out for those rolls of “1” on a 20-sided dice.)
Henry, my middle child, likes to play a halfling. The little hobbit-like character is the one called upon to disarm all the tiger traps and poison-arrow traps that line the dungeon tunnels ahead. He is a problem-solver in real life. And he wants to be an architect. In D&D games, he is often the first one to run up to danger and look it in the blood-shot eye.
Every D&D group needs a wizard or some other magic-user. Ours has Mira, the Kalashtar mind- wizard. My daughter’s character can use mind powers to float in the air, pick up and throw things with her mind alone, and figure out ways to do things using as little physical effort as possible. Oh, and she loves to eat chocolate. (The character, I mean… or is it actually the daughter? I don’t know. It is sometimes hard to tell them apart.)
In our last adventure, we went to investigate the evil doings going in Evernight Keep, a castle in the country of Aundair. We were able to not only defeat the evil mind-flayer, Dr. Zorgo, who had turned everyone into golems in the castle, but also to win the castle and the title of the Duke of Passage. Now that they own a castle, my little band of adventurers will have to defend it, and I know of one old game master who will definitely throw all kinds of evil challenges at them.
Yesterday I forgot that it was Saturday. But that doesn’t matter much in a D & D campaign. You may not play at regular times… or at all, like this week. But you do what you can when you can. Just like in real life. So let me share a character gallery, in order to give me my weekly dose of fantasy sword and sorcery nonsense.
These illustrations all come out of my D & D notebook. They are done in colored pencil on colored paper. Many are copied from models in catalogs, action movie stills, comic books, and illustrated Dungeons and Dragons products, but always interpreted in my own style and costumes.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, foolishness, Paffooney
Dragons in the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games are the central monsters of the story.  In our Eberron campaign they not only rule an entire mysterious continent, but they are credited with the very creation of the world and everything.  Not only monsters, but also gods, is a pretty big order for a  character to fill.
Skye, the Blue Dragon to the left above is a dragon who believes that human people are the most important part of fulfilling the Dragon Prophecy. Â Therefore the characters can rely on him as an ally, and sometimes even a patron. Â He is a blue chromatic dragon with lightning breath, and the Blue Dragon Aureon, his great great grandfather, Â is an important leader of the god-dragons worshiped as the Sovereign Host.
Phaeros, the great crested red dragon, is a servant of chaos who actively opposes all that is good. Â He works with orcish dictators and priests of the Dark Six to accomplish vast swaths of damage, destruction, and war.
He is a big bad villain that has to come at the end of a campaign, because dragons are not only powerful fire-breathers with monstrous monster-damage capability, they also know far more magic than even the wisest of wizards. Â My players have not crossed him yet, but if they start finding the missing dragon eggs, that will happen soon.
You may notice that my dragon pictures are mostly coloring-book pictures repeated with different colors, but in many ways dragons are like that. Â They all have the cookie-cutter qualities of a dragon, but with different-colored personalities and powers and ideas of good and evil.
Pennie is a copper dragon with divided loyalties and the soul of a clown. Â She never takes the adventure at hand too seriously. Â But if she decides to help the player characters find the missing dragon eggs, no ally will prove stronger and more helpful than her. Â And she knows things that the players need to learn from her to find the missing eggs.
So dragons come in many forms and personalities.
In fact, the search for the missing dragon eggs will be critically affected by the fact that the eggs have all five hatched and dragons instinctively protect themselves when young by using their polymorph self magic to become some other creature. Â And someone has implanted the idea of using human form as the default even though the wormlings have never actually seen a human being in real life.
This is a double portrait of Calcryx, both as a white dragon wormling and a young girl.
So, playing games with dragons is fun and archetypal story-telling, and I will continue to do it, even if it means getting burned now and again.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney
Again I go back to artwork done for Saturday role-playing games, a thing which I started doing in 1981. It filled my life for a time. And it also taught me to be a teacher. After all, the DM (Dungeon Master, or Game Master) has to be a story-teller and a master explainer… just like a school teacher.
Filed under artwork, characters, Dungeons and Dragons, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 