FYI Inkwell sale

The full version of the Coat of Arms Design Studio from Inkwell Ideas is on sale right now for $15.95.  I just bought a copy and have been having quite a bit of fun with it.

Intoxicants of Wessex

Updated 5-18-11 & 7-1-11

Last week's discussion of beer got me thinking about what sort of things might be clouding the PCs' thoughts when they blow that carousing roll.  Here's what I've come up with.

Wine, French - Shipped in from across the channel in vast quantities, this is the drink of choice for many who can afford it (i.e. nobles and churchmen).

Wine, English - According to analysts, the Domesday Book seems to indicate the presence of about 40 to 50 vineyards in England circa 1080.  We'll assume that the snobbery about French wines surpassing the English is at least as strong then as it is now.  (Quick show of hands, is anybody hip to the fact that England has had hundreds of wineries in operation since the 1970's?  I did not know this until I started researching this topic.  And I don't recall ever seeing an English section in my local wine nerd shops.)

Wine, fruit - Non-grape alcoholic beverages featuring fermentation based upon cherries, currants, raspberries or strawberries.  Available mostly in the summer.

Wine, other -  Apparently you can also somehow make 'wine' out of hazelnuts or almond milk.

Ale - The daily drink of commoners but also imbibed by their superiors in great quantity.  The use of hops in ale has not yet reached England in the 12th century.  Instead Wessex alewives employ 'gruit', an herbal mix.  Since gruit recipes can vary based upon local plant distribution, the resultant ale may be an even wider flavor range than in modern ales. Medieval ales probably had about half as much alcohol in them as modern beers.  But ale bought from the right alewife may be the most potent intoxicant available, as some folks suspect that henbane, mandrake and belladonna were used in some gruits.  If the stuff didn't kill you, you'd be tripping balls.

Also, I've discovered since originally penning this that the Domesday Book mentions two different types of ale under production, cervisae (ordinary "ale") and plena cervisia ("full-bodied ale").  Plena cervisa may be thesame stuff called "godale" (literally "good ale") in a 14th century French cookbook, which refers to ale made with spelt in the malt in addition to the usual barley.


Anglo-Saxon law recognized three different types of ale. I have yet to be able to determine if the third type was the small ale mentioned below or if the Angles and the Saxons knew something about ale that the Normans didn't. It's a bit amusing to imagine the Normans as wine snobs and the Anglo-Saxons as ale aficionados.

Ale, small - Basically regular ale cut with porridge.  Served at breakfast and given to small children in lieu of the full strength stuff.

Scrumpy - Apple cider (hard cider, as it is called in the U.S.).  Appears to be one of the more potent drinks available to the common folk.  Seems to be less popular in Wales as compared to England and Cornwall.

Perry - Pear cider.  Imported from France and very expensive.  Effectively the champagne of the period, in terms of its use as a commodity of conspicuous consumption.

Jerkum - A cider type beverage using plums instead of apples.  Known only in the Cotswolds, on the Wessex map you can basically get it in the triangle described by Christminster, Glowan and Sulis.

Mead - Honey-based fermented beverage.  Pricey due to small supply and high demand.

Mead, small - The cheap version the peasants whip up after they make the proper stuff for their lord.  Normally ready to serve right as fall harvest gets under way, just in time to keep the scythers and sheafers properly refreshed.

Pyment - Medieval wine doesn't seem to keep as well as the more modern versions.  My sources conflict as to whether that's a problem with production, storage or simply a lack of appreciation for aged wine.  Either way, when wine starts to sour it is often turned into pyment by jazzing it up with fruits, spices and/or sugar and maybe a little heating.

Braggot - A Welsh mixed beverage, like pyment above, that involves combining wine and mead with additional spices.

Aqua Vita - Brandy.  Distillation is a brand new state-of-the-edge, cutting art technology, so unless you are pals with a wizard or an alchemist this stuff is nearly impossible to obtain.

Pipeweed - I won't lie to you.  Wizards and hobbits?  Straight up smoking Mary Jane.   Now you know why hobbits are always hungry.  I'm a tobacco man myself (though not as hardcore as that other pipesmoking blogger) but I'm just not down with using tobacco, a New World plant, in my decidedly old world setting.  Hit up Google with "shakespeare marijuana" if you need to see some evidence for earlier use of cannabis in England than maybe you previously suspected.

I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff

One Issue Campaign, part 4

Time to continue plundering Dragon #69 to build a campaign from whatever we find inside. Today we're looking at this totally awesome ad for an old Atari computer game. Speaking of Atari personal computers, have you seen this new Atari style USB keyboard? I never owned an Atari PC but that looks sweet as hell.

FACT #1: If your campaign does not already have a haunted cemetery full of draculas, wolfmen and other unsavories then you either need to add one ASAP or come up with a darn good explanation why your world does not include such things.

But why is this graveyard haunted?  Is every cemetery in the campaign world a hang-out spot for the undead?  That's my assumption in the World of Cinder.  Graveyards there are basically segregated housing for the living impaired.  Or is there something particular jacked up about this one bone zone?  Maybe some sort of evil artifact or lingering curse powers the undead-ification and the PCs can do something about all these spooky monsters. 

I remember reading somewhere (an old MERP module or maybe right there in Tolkien) that the whole problem with the Barrow Wights was that the Necromancer was waking them up.  Perhaps an agent of the the Iron Wind (as mentioned in part 2) who was a student of Circe Doombringer (part 1) is running around stirring up the dead as a sort of macabre fifth column.

FACT #2: Starting a game by waking up in a coffin is totally rad.

Seriously, can you think of a better way to deliver an in media res upside the players' heads than "SUDDENLY you awaken in a coffin surrounded by a vast graveyard"?  Forget scoring goldpieces, just get me the crap outta here!

Perhaps all the PCs in the campaign are folks from the Real World who wake up in coffins!  It would be the fantasy equivalent of starting the campaign by getting out of cryofreeze like in The Morrow Project or "An Alternate Beginning Sequence for Metamorphosis Alpha" (Guy W. McLimore, Jr., Dragon #6).  Players could even run D&D-ified versions of themselves in the vein of the D&D cartoon or Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series.  The latter, incidentally, is one of the few fantasy novel franchises of which I was ever able to get through more than one book.  The rape sequence in book 2 or 3 put me off the whole thing, though.

Getting killed by a kobold while playing yourself would be a bummer.  But you'd also get the opportunity to try to figure out what character class best suits you.  Unless like Mark Barrowcliffe, the author of The Elfish Gene, you figured that out when you were a kid.  Mr. Barrowcliffe decided as a lad that he was obviously a druid.  I never went to the Mazes & Monsters-esque level of actually acting out some of these fantasies the way he did, but I was convinced at one point that I would be a kickass wizard if only magic was real.  By the way The Elfish Gene has some pretty neat stuff about the early British D&D scene, if you can get over the fact that the author seems to despise anyone who might be reading this post.

So this post is getting rambly.  To get back on track, let's run with the idea that every PC in the campaign is from Earth Prime (or whatever) and enters play by waking up in a coffin, tomb, open grave, etc.  That establishes a nice little overarching mystery: What the crap is going on?  Were those wacky medieval theologians right about the existence of Purgatory and that realm just happens to look like a cheesy 80's fantasy movie?  Are the jerks behind Riverworld also at work here?  Did all the PCs go into some sort of capsule-less cryofreeze only to wake up in the distant and weird future?  Obviously the whole campaign doesn't have to center around this mystery, but it certainly adds a little flavor.

So next installment of this series we will finally get to the first article in the mag: "Runes".

wisdom from the This American Life guy

The advice Mr. Glass offers here applies just as much to gamemastering as it does to any other creative endeavor.  You are going to suck the first time you do it.  You'll probably suck the fiftieth time you do it.  I put on the bravest face possible in my after action reports, but most of the time I still feel like I suck and I've been doing this since my age in years was a single digit.  Honestly, starting young and stupid was a tremendous advantage.  A poet or novelist can toil for years without having to share their earliest efforts, but a DM has to perform for other players right from the get-go.  That any adult actually tries to do this, with a lifetime of social pressures and fear of embarrassment weighing them down, is pretty much a miracle to me.  And then the poor newbie ends up sucking, because we all suck at everything we do the first time.

(Thanks to my buddy Pat for sharing this little item.)

twenty quick questions for your campaign setting

You can run D&D with just some PCs and a dungeon. I think that's totally legit. But if you have a campaign setting, here are some things for you to think about.  Better to muse on these before your players ask you, rather than finding yourself on the spot.

1. What is the deal with my cleric's religion?
2. Where can we go to buy standard equipment?
3. Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?
4. Who is the mightiest wizard in the land?
5. Who is the greatest warrior in the land?
6. Who is the richest person in the land?
7. Where can we go to get some magical healing?
8. Where can we go to get cures for the following conditions: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath?
9. Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells?
10. Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC?
11. Where can I hire mercenaries?
12. Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law?
13. Which way to the nearest tavern?
14. What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I will become famous?
15. Are there any wars brewing I could go fight?
16. How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes?
17. Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight?
18. What is there to eat around here?
19. Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for?
20. Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure?

Campaign worlds, whether published or just notes scrawled in some DM's binder, contain a lot of material that most players honestly just don't give a crap about.  That's entirely okay.  Answer some of these questions or others like them and you'll have yourself a campaign regular players can relate to.

Mr. T will destroy us all

This was the first result for a Google image search of "Mr. T robot".

(That looks kinda like the old Activision game Atlantis, but the graphics look too good for the Atari 2600 version.)