The Wandering Crystal Sphere [Dark Sun]

Ok, I've talked about this before, but I have this idea that the Athasian Crystal Sphere travels through the Prime Material Plane on an inclined orbit; at times it is close to Water and the Positive plane, descending close to Earth and relatively equidistant between Positive and Negative, then down to Fire and Negative, before heading up through Air.

The Blue Age ended in the 8th Worlds (King's) Age; the Red Age began when Rajaat used the Dark Lens in the 144th King's Age. At 77 years per age, that means that each Age is roughly 10,500 years long (I'm fudging a bit for roundness sake).

That means that (In KA 191) FY 1 is about 3,600 years into the Red Age. This means there's about 7000 more years of the Red Age, followed by what I will declare the Yellow Age, just because it is an easy color to use. The Yellow Age will see a reduction of undead (as we move away from the Negative Material Plane), but other than that? Who knows? A resurgence of life shaping? In its 42,000 year cycle (assuming their hypothesis is true), do things repeat? Does the next Blue Age see halfling life-shapers? Maybe humans rise to the top? Might thri-kreen be survivors of a previous Green or Red Age, who suffered through the Blue Age?

This is all speculative, of course. Just a neat cosmological idea.

The D&D Genre, Racism, and Westerns

(This is from a message board post, in response to Wizards of the Coast announcing that they were going to be taking a look at diversity and how some of the negative stereotypes applied to fictional races could be harmful to real people in the real world; that explains a bit why I am talking to someone who is not there. I have edited it slightly to provide some more context, and may edit it more in the future to more clearly express the ideas).

Orcs were not created in a game. They were created by an author who described them as "...squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

He literally described them as the worst stereotypes available of Asian people. It is, in fact, a stereotype that tends to change slightly in the details to describe everyone not of the dominant culture and ethnicity. So, descriptions of those fictional races which match up to real-life prejudices pose a problem of representation... who are these people, and are we perpetuating stereotypes by saying that they are, uniformly, rape-happy barbarians who couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel?

Secondly, in the game, they exist. I realize that the game is not real, but the game has a fictional reality in which the characters exist, and in which creatures like half-orcs, half-hobgoblins, and half-elves are also real. And, if you go with "Orcs are not people [in the fictional world]", you then have to ask "At what point are those who are of orcish descent" (q.v. half-orcs) "people?"

While people like to point to the swords and armor and knights and call D&D and its descendants "medieval", I see them as having a lot more in common with Westerns.* The class of free wanderers, righting wrongs and wronging rights, be they adventurers or cowboys. The social mobility, where a simple warrior could become king (or a poor cowpoke could become a rich landowner). And the broad assertion that race (or nationality) is personality. The only ones with significant variation are "regular Americans" (humans, in D&D-likes), while everyone else broadly adheres to their stereotypes... the Englishman, the Swede, the Indian. "You're not playing an elf; you're just playing a human with pointy ears" is a common charge leveled against people who go against type, because only humans are supposed to be varied in personality.

This gets more severe when you look at "Indians", which D&D-likes tend to cast as humanoids. Tonto, in the Lone Ranger, was cast as the "one good Indian"... every other Indian in contemporary Westerns (the Classical Western) was a ravening savage, there to kill the Good White Folks out to Tame the West. But, as the genre continued, you saw more nuanced portrayals of Indians... Charles Bronson as the noble savage half-breed of the revisionist Western, Indian-friendly protagonists (q.v. Dances with Wolves), and even crept into more classical comedy westerns (q.v. McClintock, where the Indians are honored enemies of the title character).

In a lot of ways, these "revisionist Westerns" are what you are seeing now, and a lot of other people started seeing in 1983... drow, orcs, minotaurs, and the like as people within the fictional world, with their own reasons for doing things; reasons that make sense to them, within their culture. In short, they're being viewed as people, not just creatures up from the deep to destroy good and beauty, without reason. If they're evil, it's not solely because they "deriv[e] joy from violent acts", but because that's who their culture turns them in to. The gods they worship push them in that direction... and those gods are individuals, who might be good or evil (which somewhat differentiates them from modern religions which are more social phenomenon).

Of course, there's still room for the truly alien. Hackmaster's Morlocks, for example, infect everyone with a fungus that makes them want to infect MORE people with the fungus. You can have the supernatural creature that's more or less made of evil. But if you're taking a humanoid creature and applying to it the stereotypes that are used to demonize real people? You're treading on very thin ice, and folks are going to call you on it... and the fact that YOU don't see a problem with it does not mean that no one else does.

*Fantasy, as a genre, tends to have a lot in common with Westerns; both tend to focus on the setting as a place and character of the story, as opposed to mysteries or science fiction, which tend to focus on ideas that are being explored.

Argue Alignment With Me

An alignment thread on another website had me sitting down and carefully lay out my personal definitions of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil, and how they look. I'd like y'all's input on my definitions:

Good v. Evil (the moral axis) is concerned with life; primarily sophonts, but extending to other life, to a lesser degree, including artificial life (robots and warforged and such). Good people seek to support life; that is a goal in and of itself. Good is not necessarily completely self-effacing nor above being paid for their work... a good person can still want glory for their deeds and accept rewards for them; folks still have to eat, after all. But they won't want a reward that the person can't afford. Nor does Good always mean non-violent... Good can fight evil, even in a proactive fashion, if they are working to reduce the potential pain others will cause (i.e. "We went out and killed orcs because, unchecked, they would kill many people.")
Evil people are not necessarily malevolent, but they are self-centered, seeking to advance themselves, often at the expense of others. An evil person might heal people, or give to charity, but they don't do that because they want to help people, but because it serves their ends... it is useful for this person to be healthy (or they have a personal investment in that person; an emotional connection, for example), or to appear to be charitable.
Neutrality, on this axis, is self-centered, but not quite as willing to sacrifice others for their goals. For an evil person, a random stranger's death is almost always an acceptable price; for a neutral person, it has to be really worth it.

Law v. Chaos (the ethical axis) is concerned with property, including ideas and institutions. Lawful people hold that property, including the ethical mores of others, are important, so in the pursuit of their goals, they try not to violate them. They maintain their own oaths, don't put people into positions where they have to violate their ethical precepts if they can avoid it... they may not agree with them, they may try to change them, but they respect that other people HAVE those precepts and that they are important to them. A lawful person has a personal code, even if it's not fully articulated, and though they might violate it, it will not be without careful thought.
Chaotic people don't care a fig for other folks property and mores... they don't necessarily steal willy-nilly, but that's less out of respect for property as respect for consequences. A Chaotic person may have a personal code, but that code is almost always flexible and, even then, they'll discard that code if it gets in the way of their goals.
Neutrality on the ethical axis, again, is a balance between these two... their personal code may be important to them, but they don't care about the mores of others, for example. Conversely, they might respect the mores of others, but find themselves unable to really commit to an ethical standard.

So, the traditional Robin Hood is Chaotic Good. While he had personal loyalty to Richard the Lionheart, he had no such loyalty to John, and was happy to violate the laws of the land (external code) to achieve his personal goals... not just opposition to John, but also improving the lives of the poor. If he'd primarily kept the money, he'd slip to Chaotic Neutral. If he'd been a bit more about killing (rather than humiliating) tax collectors, then he'd be moving towards Chaotic Evil. The Errol Flynn/Disney Animated version of Robin Hood didn't want to KILL John or the Sheriff, he wanted to humiliate them.

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Update: Slight rewording of the first substantive paragraph.

Corpses and Caches [D&D, Castles and Crusades]

Another reblog from my old Cranky Gamer

Corpses and Caches:

The Afterlife and Burial Traditions in Dungeons and Dragons

One thing that has recently annoyed me about D&D cosmology is “Why on Faerun would you bury whole corpses?” That only the spirit survives into the afterworld is a provable fact, provided you have a high enough level wizard or cleric. Upper level clerics can even directly question their deities about life after death, to say nothing of visiting the souls of the dead in the Outer Planes, or interrogating them via Speak with Dead. The advantages to keeping bodies around is small; burials take up space, and, more importantly in D&D, corpses attract and become undead with disturbing frequency. A graveyard is likely to attract ghouls. Necromancers can use the various bodies for anything from simple skeletons and zombies to horrific flesh-born nightmares. This says nothing of the vast wealth that is regularly entombed with the dead... magic items, piles of gold, and tomes of eldritch spells are all regular found even in non-undead haunted graves. So why throw away useful magic items, usually only for the use of undead, necromancers, adventurers and similar reprobates?

To examine this, some assumptions remain the same from the D&D Standard Cosmology. Most notably, when someone dies, their soul travels through the Astral Plane to the home of their deity, or to the plane of their appropriate alignment (frequently, but not always, the same). Raise Dead and Resurrection call the soul back from this journey (or the destination), into a body repaired to receive it; reincarnate creates a body to receive them. I work from the assumption that preserving a corpse and grave goods of value serve some function; that leaving a body mostly intact and burying it with such riches as can be afforded is, in some way, useful to a person in their afterlife, and that purposefully eschewed the preservation of the corpse (such as through cremation) serves a purpose in the afterlife, as well.