Labyrinth Lord Cover to Cover: Part 5, page 10, The Dwarf

For this series of posts I will be using the free PDF of the 

Labyrinth Lord rules that can be found Here at Goblinoid Games

This is the fifth part of a series, here are the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th parts

The Dwarf

   My favorite fantasy race barring dragons. It also has the honor though of being the first of the races as a class that a number of people don't like about the older D&D editions. Lets get that out of the way right now. It is the generic dwarf and not every single dwarf out there. The included classes are just your starting point and if you want a dwarf who is a cleric talk it over with your DM, its his world and he can put whatever he wants in it. Ok, now onto whats actually in the book.
   To play a dwarf you need at least a constitution of 9. Dwarves are tough and if you want to be one then you better be tough as well. Of course since it is like a fighter the prime requisite is for strength. Yeah nothing has really changed with melee fighters at all since the beginning if you discount the book of weeaboo fightan magic nine swords.
   The dwarf being a race other then human of course has another controversial thing going for it.They have a level limit. If you are a dwarf you will never ever (barring act of DM) be a single level higher then 12. Some people don't like this as it limits them. I personally have no problem with it as it is generally agreed that the levels from ~3 to ~9 are the funnest to play. I would personally rather just settle my dwarf in his shiny new underground stronghold and start a new dwarf at level 1 who comes from there. Then again I also like consistent worlds that grow with play and that my characters can truly affect so the founding of that stronghold would actually mean something.

   Umm, yeah I like dwarves and think they rock and this post turned into more of a rant then I was planning but at the least I got all those thing out of the way.

This is the fifth part of a series, here are the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th parts

Labyrinth Lord rules that can be found Here at Goblinoid Games

Comics to Movies = Books to Movies

   Its true, when they take a comic book and make a movie out of it they tend to do the same thing they do when they turn a book into a movie. The story gets changed and warped. Its generally better to just hope they do something good with it instead of hoping for a movie that is true to the book/comic.
   This is partly because of how they have to do it. Sometimes they don't have the freedom to do a true conversion from one format to another but there is a bigger problem. When ever you read in a book that someone thought something or felt something, that will not transfer to a movie correctly unless exaggerated.
   A book, even if its a comic book can easily tell you what the characters feel and think. This is quite the boon for the format as it lets you have incredibly deep characters that you can get across to the reader without to much effort. On the other hand books have a hard time with action scenes. Even comics which have a more visual format can not truly impart actions with out exaggeration. Movies though are the exact opposite of this as they can easily with no effort at all show motion and action, even the small things like having a character quirk his eyebrow at something someone said.
   Basically what this means is that the two formats are dynamically opposed in what they can tell the viewer. If you want a person shown who is deep in thought a book would be better for this because in a movie unless they do the cheesy inner monologue thing you basically just have a guy sitting quietly by himself. Now an action packed fight is the movies forte. While a book could take pages and pages trying to describe a short fight the movie just shows you it.
   Comic books are more of a middle ground as you can show and tell but overall they are closer to books then movies. This means that they should technically transfer over to movies easier then just a book but there is one thing that stops the smooth transition.
   Comic book fans are into canon. Now you may wounder about this as comic books get quite a number of rewrites and such. Trying to find out what is truly canon in a popular comic book series is quite hard. This is doubly true if the story is written by several people over its years. My personal opinion is that this is why the fans care so much. They love the story but the authors keep trying to change it on them. If you say love the story to Lord of the Rings and some author came along and completely rewrote it and said his story was now the real story and the old one never happened you would definitely care. This is something comic book fans have to actually deal with.
   From what I have seen of the movies done from comics they tend to get a number of things right, more so then a good number of movies based off books ever did. The problem is that the fans of comic books have been sensitized to this kind of thing over the years and are quite willing to complain about it. Even worse because the comics actually showed you what the people looked like anything that's changed at all about the character will easily be noted and despised. In a book you say a person has blond hair and so long as the movie uses someone with blondish hair your fine, in a comic if the character is drawn with blindingly blond hair if you even just have a regular blond play the role people will notice.
   Overall the movies tend to be okay but because of the general inability of Hollywood to make something into a movie without perverting it and the semi visual format of comic books combines with a fan's love of their personal view of how canon should go to cause quite a bit of complaining and arguing to go on. I will admit though as the Spider-man's movies have shown, the more sequels they do the worse it gets or as emo-spidey would say, "why wont the pain stop".

Class or Skill

   I like class based roleplaying games. I also like skill based roleplaying games. What I don't like is when you try to mix them. Take your pick but choose only one when creating a system please. Why do I say something like this? In D&D if I play a thief and someone else plays a fighter and we are the same level I should be able to hide better, end of story. The thief class is sneaky but in a system that has both classes and skills such as D&D 3.5 you could end up with a fighter out hiding your guy if you did not put any point into hide.  This is not how the system should work. Closer to home my cleric had no points in knowledge[religion] till 3rd level while the sorcerer maxed it. This meant that my character, a person who literally talks to his god on a daily basis could not even by the rules attempt a roll to identify a holy symbol of his own religion!
  This frankenstein of a circumstance came from trying to bolt on a skill system to a class system. What a class system is good at is quick and broad characterization, the Magic User knows arcane secrets, the Fighter is a master of battle, and the Cleric is a religious type. These are very broad stokes in which to make your character yours. This type of system defines what you can do, not what you can't and in doing so even though the options are few the possibilities are great.
   A skill system is the exact opposite of this. By choosing your skills you define what you can't do. If you don't have the ride skill you can't ride a horse while the class system doesn't tell you one way or the other. Some people over time have suggested that you could combine class and skill by doing stuff like changing skills to mean your extra good at it instead of just being a binary where not having it means not doing it. This Wont Work. Or more specifically you could make the system but the players will still play it as if not having the skill meant not being able to do it. With all this though a skill system is not bad. Because of how you create such a system its not just having 3 skills and putting points into a single one every time which would be like a class system but instead you have many options all of which do things worth having. A skill system does not restrict creativeness by restricting options, it creates opportunities for it. A party comes to a deep underground chasm that is not all that wide. In a class system your players just jump over it, this is very straight forward but what about in a skill based system where no one in the group has the jump skill? Well what about using a rope to bridge the gap, after all that one guy took the rope use skill.

   Wrapping up I will say once again both systems are quite all right on their own. Combining them though is futility if you are trying to keep both systems intact. They are opposites and they do not attract people. A cleric of Pelor who can't even recognize his own religions symbol when played by the book is a broken mess. Both systems define who the character is but by using opposing systems. Skill systems let you create your character after play, a class system lets you create your character before play. The 3rd/3.5 Edition of D&D is the closest to combining the two systems out there and no I don't mean the actual skill system, I mean the basically free multiclassing options which is taking classes and making them the skills in a skill system. There may be a perfect combination out there but unless you already saw the fact that multiclassing was a skill system I highly doubt you will find the balance point.

Front end, Back end, No end

   No matter where I go in the world of roleplaying games there is always the debate of how to do the backstory. Do you front load it all, make it up as you go along, or what? I can respect a person who can make a giant backstory for every character they make but if it takes up game time its unnecessary and in the way. Along with that in more classic forms of D&D you character life span is, well, quite small and you chance to die is enormous until you reach higher levels and even then your always just a step away from deaths doorstep. Five pages of backstory don't mean squat if you die to the first trap, dead is dead.
   On the other hand no backstory is not the answer. Without some form of a grounding in the world your character might as well have popped into existence out of nowhere. If you only want to play in a hack and slash game this may be alright but even then what about when you go to town? Without a backstory you don't have any friends, you don't have any connections, you don't even have a family!
   My answer to how much is good enough is in two parts. First a paragraph describing the character, where they grew up, what their job was, and why they decided to start adventuring. Nothing much, just enough to have an idea of what they did before in their life and why they decided to go adventuring.
   The other thing I require is a list of close family member such as the parents and any brothers or sisters. The list will have for each person their relation followed by name and finally occupations. As an example:

Relation	Name	Occupation
Father	Dave Johnson	Farmer
Mother	Marry Johnson	Farmer
Older Sister	Jessica Smith	School Teacher
Younger Brother	James Johnson	Guard

In this case I would probably also make them note who the older sister was married to. I also will not allow more then half the family to be dead without an amazing reason why.
   With just those two things all kinds of ideas of what your character may be like can spring up. Both parents are farmers so you probably know how to handle farm animals and what the weather is like from your area. If you lived by a lake or some other big water feature you probably know how to fish and maybe swim. Your sister is a school teacher and because the parents are farmers that probably means one of those small schools for the local farm children, you may even have had her for a teacher depending on the age difference. If your a fighter type then the Younger brother being a guard probably means he looks up to you but if your a thief then he may actually dislike or even hate you and chose to be a guard to try to catch you. It is amazing what you can extrapolate form just a paragraph of info and a list of names.

U is for Unspeakable Horrors

   Has it ever struck you as weird that the best know Horror not only has a agreed upon pronunciation for his name but also seems to care in some form about humanity? Nothing against Cthulhu but for an Unspeakable Horror he seems a little to easy to speak of. Also when I think of things beyond the ken of man I don't imagine it chowing down on humans like its a delicacy. Why? Because that would be a point of connection between it and us. It becomes not a horror but a predator, yes quite a scary one but still only a hunter. I think the concept needs a makeover and a quick reversion back to its roots.

   First up is the name. Cthulhu is nice and all but its a name and for something unspeakable that is a little weird. So what should we call our creation of horror? Nothing, it should not be named by such as us. A true Horror should be so beyond our knowledge that trying to fit it into our knowledge should be beyond us. Thus mechanically this would be some form of XP, stat, or level drain. When someone tries to refer to it by a name or form and say they can no longer remember such a thing and tell them what they lost. Either they learn or they die from the drain. Enforce this with not only in-character communication but also out of character communication. As long as they are at the table they are drain-able. This will definitely put the fear in them.

   Next up is form. With a defined shape comes familiarity. Giving something a shape is a way to gain power over it. There are two ways to get around this. First is to never define it the same way twice. If the players look at it and you said it was a mass of purple tentacles the next time they look at have it be an orange blob of pulsating pseudo-flesh. This will take the most work because you will have to be constantly be re-explaining what they see and your choices are limited because you can't just say it looks like something. To say it looks like something is to much familiarity.
   The second way is both harder and easier. It is easier because of consistency, just never say what they see. Tell them what it does and where but never how. You could do this by leaving spaces where a description would be such as "The --------- attacks Derick with its ------- and hits". If done right it can work quite well as it will freak the players out. Also when they ask things like is it invisible never give a straight answer. Its form should be in flux as a true horror should never be fully there in that dimension.

   Finally is how it interacts with the prime material plane. Or as players look at it, how they fight it. They should not be able to ever beat it. Even if you let the gods be killed a true Unspeakable Horror should never be killed. It should not even technically be fighting them. To fight is to take notice and something so much greater then the players should not even be able to notice them let alone actively do something to them. Players will meet one as it is passing through or just happening to be intersecting whatever plane of existence the player happens to be on. When the players try to attack it they have a 50% chance of missing no matter what, even if they have all kinds of super gear and artifacts to help them. When they hit damage is cut in half and done to whatever part they attacked. If they manage to "kill" part of the horror then roll a d20 and on any result other then a 20 make something bad happen. Whether its just a the part heals fully or it does the hydra head thing make it bad for the players. The pieces that the players can see are just a miniscule part of the Horror and overall like having bacteria attacking your toenail. If any of the parts are next to a player roll d% and deal damage equal to that % of their maximum health rounded down. Unless being called in someway to stay in that area most horrors may leave the current area if on a d% you roll equal to or under the number of rounds it has been there.

   To round this off I will say that in normal play players should never have to face a true Unspeakable Horror unless it is their own fault. Even creatures of the lower planes do not deal with them and gods will not speak of them even. Only the truly incurably insane can even conceive of calling such to themselves and even then they will not be able to truly know the scope of which they are dabbling in. If all you want is something for a cult to worship just use some weird demon or devil. These are only for the end of all.

S is for Star Wars

   I decided on Star Wars because I have a slight rant against the newer trilogy. I have nothing against the movie quality and believe that on their own they are quite good. My problem is with the fact that they occur at the wrong time in the Star Wars history.

   My favorite stories in the Star Wars universe are the books during and after the original trilogy up until just before the Yuuzhan Vong show up. I like the that occur during that period of time more then anything and the newer trilogy totally throws a lot of it to the wayside by accident really. The New Republic is always having trouble with deep set prejudice and clashes with the remnants of the Empire. That kind of stuff doesn't just happen in the amount of time that occurs between the supposed start of the Empire and the original movies.

   How many years are there between episode 3 and 4 you ask? Well episode 3 occurs at 19BBY and episode 4 occurs at 0BBY so that would mean 19 years. That would mean that the supposed "Evil Empire" was nothing. How did this blip on the radar manage to develop so many secret super weapons and create such a hateful environment as seen in the books? Better yet how did the Empire manage to wipe out almost every Jedi barring a few in such a short amount of time! That is not even enough time to build all the neat ships from the original trilogy let alone all the massive numbers of wayward fleets from the books. Entire races are enslaved and people are made to accept this without a word and yet by the time scale there should be people who still lived when everything was peaceful.

   Also even if Palpatine did manage to get the senate how in the world did he manage to crush everyone so well that a rebellion needed to be made from rag-tag team of people? The rebellion should have been able to go to an unnumbered-able amount of worlds and hang up a recruitment sign and have half the world sign up by noon. The Empires biggest thing is that its anti non-humans. That is it is against most of the people that it controls. It would be impossible for that even just on earth let alone a whole galaxy. Even with all those clones running around its only an army.

    That is how I feel the new movies are wrong. They should have been farther in the past. If someone took over the world for 19 years and then was overthrown that would not be an Empire that would be a foot note in history. In a universe like Star Wars 19 years is a drop in the bucket especially when you consider that most races besides humans seem to live longer then us by default. The Old Republic lasted over 20 Million years. To finish this, the movies where good but they are not a part of my Star Wars timeline.

Flesh Golem != Frankenstein Monster

   A flesh golem is like the Frankenstein monster. A flesh golem is based on the monster. In the end though it is not the monster. There are two distinct reasons for this.

   The first reason is that the Frankenstein monster is not taking commands. It has free will and enough intelligences to use said free will. A golem in D&D terms is a construct. It even lacks an intelligences score so is incapable of  the thought needed for self awareness. If a flesh golem goes on a rampage it is either because it was told to do so or its programming got messed up. It kills a little girl and does not care. The Frankenstein monster sure cared and emoted about it. The monster can even speak if you go by the actually story and not the lame movie. That's right, the monster can speak and in fact was eloquent, educated, and well-mannered. Now all people think of the monster is that he grunts,  a serious loss of ability compared to being able to fluently speak french.

  The second reason is that a flesh golem is not alive. It is a shell for magical energy to move like a puppet. The Frankenstein monster is alive, not a construct, and definitely not undead. Sure he was made up of a number of different peoples part's but that changes nothing. If it did that would mean someone who had a heart transplant is in fact a flesh golem. After all by definition not having a heart would mean death and the transplant heart was definitely dead so putting the two together and making a living being would be about the same. Even if you argue the percentage of the original person still there what happens if the same person also had to get a number of other transplants? Is there a point when you become a flesh golem or something, maybe it's at 51% no longer being original that it happens. "Opps sorry miss, that kidney transplant pushed you over the limit, your a golem now." and then the audience laughs.

   The Frankenstein monster is a thousand times better then a flesh golem. Seriously, who would make flesh golem anyway? Silly necromancer wannabee, your undead minion is in another castle but here have a free golem.

My DM cheats for me

   Its all there in the title. Today was the first real session of my D&D 3.5 game and we would have TPKed twice. First we where clearing out a crypt of undead, specifically the church of PELOR's crypt...   Yah okay, whatever just remember to stay to the side and avoid the plot hole. Anyway moving on first we face some skeletal rats which would have been easy if the thief type hadn't decide he needed to go into the room first and promptly got 9 attacks before anyone did anything. Luckily he was some incarnium thing and had some ability that whenever something hits him it takes 2d6 fire damage so the rest of us where able to sweep up the skelerats. I popped a lesser vigor on the dude and we went to the next room. Zombie rats, but luckily we decided to do some spot checks so no one went and rushed in. They where big buckets of hitpoints and I had to use the rest of my healing here but we finally managed to beat them despite most of us not having any slashing weapons for some reason. We promptly retreated, rested, got healed up, and bought some weapons. In we go again only to face 3 ghouls which where actually pretty easy because of my +6 fortitude save though I had to use all my 0lv spells and a lesser vigor. The next room had the final boss and some nasty skeletons. This was a complete wash. We ended up with only our psionic warrior being conscious and only half of the time at that because of my vigor spell. We would have died here if the DM had not been ignoring the fact that a third of the attacks the skeletons where doing where hitting. The warrior managed to kill all the skeletons and the enemy caster paralyzed him and just walked out. We got to level 2 for this. Not a satisfying level gain at all.
   After the big fight we rested and healed up and where told that no we don't get any treasure but the happen to "know" where a shipwreck had washed up on the coast. We of course being players went to there at the speed of plot. We managed to notice the wire with bells and step over it. After a little searching we open a door and find 10 orcs sitting around a table. four of them where spear throwers. The fight was really not that much of a problem seeing as I rolled max hitpoints for level 2 and the other tank rolled quite well too so. This used up 2 of my 3 lessor vigor's, a cure light wounds, and 3 of my 4 zero level heals. We went into the next room that contained 24ish goblins. We did quite well for the shape we where in. It really helped that the gobo javelins only did 1d4 and the psionic warrior had a power that gave him DR 2/- so a lot of the attacks against him did nothing. Our Sorc was doing well with the orcs javelins taking down a number of enemy's and me and my crossbow did good though I quickly had to use my last lesser vigor when our rogueish character basically one again charged into the middle of the room to fight someone. This moved me out into the line of fire and only have 17 AC I quickly fell to a barrage of javelins despite my new shiny 24 hitpoints. The rogueish character kept falling unconscious then waking up on his turn because of the fast heal. In the end though we where all knocked out at negative hitpoints, and should have been killed. Of course what really happened is that we are going to start next week being goblin prisoners. I still have a zero level heal left so who knows.
   Once I hit 3rd level I will be getting the fiery blast feat and using my sun domains 2nd level spell which I will never actually use always be able to toss mini fireballs. Also because I will not have to actually hit things at that point bye bye large shield, hello tower shield. I can live with a burst 5' range 30' attack that deals 1d6/(level of highest fire spell memorized) fire damage every round. Maybe then the DM won't have to cheat for me.

Alignment and how I think about it

   A tricky subject in D&D. What does being evil mean? Or better yet what does being good mean, after all the players are generally that one. All kinds of trouble comes from these two so lets go even farther back. Originally there where only 3 alignments; Lawfull, Neutral, and Chaotic. These three actually make sense without all the moral confusion. At the least it is if you understand that Lawfull means order and not something to do with actual laws so lets start with defining that one.

   To be Lawful is to live for order. Any civilization not ruled by strength of the ruler alone is at least partly lawful or the civilization would quickly fall. Order is not all good though. Complete order would be an empty universe where nothing happens. In moderation though its what lets peace happen, of course on the flip-side of that is it is what lets large scale wars happen as well. Without order people would not be able to get along but they would also be unable to organize themselves enough to support large armies. To bundle this all Lawful is what lets a true civilization work in all its functions, whether peace or war.
   In a single person Lawfulness is harder to define. Only beings from the plane of Order would be fully Lawful. Paladins are the extreme end of Lawful and yet they are not fully so because for a mortal creature it would be impossible. Some quality can be extracted to define order in a single person though. First of all a stable set of habits and traits. A person that wakes up and goes to sleep at basically the same time everyday would an example of this. Secondly a want for civilization as they understand it. This means that the person wants the world around them to be stable. Those two things are the important things, various other such requirements could be argued for but if you don't have these they are not lawful. This might seem very restrictive on who can be lawful but if you look closely at the two its good enough.
   An important fact to know though is that while a civilization may be Lawful but this does not mean that everyone or even a majority of the people in it are lawful. It means that there are more lawful people then chaotic people. Most of the people will be Neutral because they will fail one of my requirements, generally the second one. A majority of the people will have an ordered life but want a better lot in life even if they are resigned to the life they have. A peasant farmer who has a set schedule everyday depending on the season that likes his life but would prefer less taxes or a nicer local lord would be an example of the majority of people in a civilization.  A smaller number of people will not have that much of a stable life but like their lot in life. A painter who's income is by the piece and doesn't have any set schedule but likes his country because it allows him to live like he does would be such a person. An example of someone that is lawful would be the sheriff who gets up everyday and goes on his round, he is quite content with his civilization as is and lives a stable life.

   Now I have already said a bit on being Neutral in the last bit but there is more to it then just not being Lawful. Being Neutral is the hardest to define for both a civilization and a person. The best way to describe it is the state of compromise. Maybe life is to chaotic for the person despite their want for order or maybe all of the order around them is stifling to the persons freedom but they compromise on it. Yes everything is constantly falling apart but, eh what can "I" do about it? Oh sure I don't have any freedom of the soul here but actually trying to change it is to much work. Basically if a person seems like they are chaotic but lives with order or a person "should" be lawful but is fine with the chaos around them they will fit in Neutral. The biggest problem is that the 3 alignments are not distinct set of points but a giant sliding bar with two sides and neutral being the gray area between the two. After all where does white stops being mostly white and becomes gray yet not somewhat black? Technically the color black is only 0,0,0 and white is only 255,255,255 but no one human is fully lawful or fully chaotic so the description needs to be extend to the in-between and when you do that it can get hard to define when it stops being one and yet is not the other.

   Chaotic is easy on a personal level. If you don't have a personal schedule and want the rules of civilization to not apply to you then Chaos is your thing. Like lawful has few people who actually are it, chaotic is the same way in a civilization. Ironically a true civilization that has more chaotic people then lawful will actually tend to be neutral because a chaotic civilization will not last long enough to to support a "true" civilization. The best example of this would be the Old Republic in Star Wars. It last for millennium as a lawful civilization. Then lasted for quite a while as neutral when it had a corrupt government. Finally in the end when it finally falls to chaos and Palpatine has taken over it quickly falls and the Empire takes it spot and while the Empire would be evil it is also quite Lawful. On the fact it only last a short time, well I will talk about that in a later post about how I think Star Wars should really go but that is not important here. What is important is that this finishes up with the original 3 alignments so moving on.

   Good is relative and so is Evil. Even some things that we consider universal are not so in other cultures. Murder is evil but there are religions that say its fine as long as you don't worship your god. The Mayan civilizations religion was one where they had to remove the still beating hearts from people as a sacrifices. Now this would be considered evil but to them that was just something you did because otherwise would be to chance gods wrath. No matter how much America tries to remove religion from government its basic laws are based on the christian religion. Now of course in D&D good and evil is based on a moral system similar to medieval Christianity mixed up with modern values because of its origin from the Wargame, Chainmail.
   The biggest problem I have with good and evil is what do you do if you detect evil on a peasant and they are? At that point just being evil means nothing! So what if they are, they did nothing to deserve it. Good people can do bad things and Bad people can do good. I have gone over that already in a past post "B is for Bad Guys". At least with order and chaos you get a feel for what the person is like. After all what is the difference between a person that doesn't steal because they don't want to get caught and a person who doesn't steal because they think it is wrong? Good and Evil only matter in the big movers and shakers. If the king is evil now THAT means something! the cobbler? Not so much.

   To wrap this all up what I plan to do is one of two things. First I will probably just not use Good and Evil for alignments but that doesn't work for all people and really all the people that I might get to play in my game around here are used to Good and Evil. So the Second option is to only give the two to important characters. This would mean that peasant working his field will only be neutral not neutral good/evil or true neutral. Some exceptions would be a NPC that actively does something considered evil like a thief. With this you won't get the Paladin jumping out of his skin in any big city with all the randomly evil people around and when he actually detects evil, it will actually mean something. It may only be the pickpocket in the crowd but it would mean something.