An Alternate Universe of Dwarvish Art & Architecture as Glimpsed in MERP's Mines of Moria

Or, a Manifestation of Furt's Guilt Over not Doing More with the Art History Courses He Took in College

I've tangled with Rolemaster's little sibling in the past and thought I was done with it for good, but a recent interest in megadungeons led me to crack open Middle-Earth Role Play's take on the Mines of Moria, particularly with an eye toward what the book does with the deepest depths of the dwarf hold and the Nameless Things known to lurk therein.

I was disappointed by a lack of support for the latter, outside of a handful of paragraphs gesturing at the dark mysteries and scary campaigns one could place down there. But I soon found myself thoroughly distracted by something else that I decided to spin into a whole blog post: the book's art direction, or rather, directions.

If you know MERP, you probably know the MERP art MO: slap an Angus McBride painting on the cover and then fill the pages with black-and-white illustrations by the omnipresent Liz Danforth. Danforth's style features both action scenes and still life portraiture, often very naturalistic with a bit of art nouveau throughout, but still possessing a clear place in the timeline of LotR art with inspirations going back decades, all the way back to the first doodles penned by jurt¹ himself. It is no different in Moria for MERP 2E, except there's far more art deco in keeping with how most Tolkien dwarves are presented.

As far as I'm concerned she is MERP's visual identity, with very few exceptions. But it just so happens that we're talking about one of those exceptions today, rather than Liz's work, except where comparing and contrasting feels appropriate. She will come back at the end though.

The second interior artist in Moria is one Kent Buries, a name I'm unfamiliar with but which is apparently closely tied to a whole lot of Palladium books. Right from his first piece on page 18, his take on dwarves is... different.

Initially I mistook the helmet for a bird face headdress or some kind of weirdly floppy hood, since they're out in some nasty weather. But then I saw how the ridges sit and I realized that they were actually rock, or something emulating it. That, plus the incredibly chunky-looking mace at the dwarf's side confused me.

I'd only been skimming the text up to this point and thought, maybe these aren't dwarves? Maybe they're hide-wearing Umli, the culture of half-dwarves invented for the game, who live in the wastes between Forodwaith and the northernmost mountains. But with my second look at these dwarves a few pages later, I quickly abandoned that theory.

Facing toward the viewer rather than away, we can see the unmitigated lumpy glory of this dwarf's weirdly organic and bulbous armor and weaponry. The knobs and protrusions aren't random despite how they first looked to me, and care was taken in making each piece symmetrical. His helmet reminds me of something a one-off villain from a sentai series would wear. I was confused and perplexed.

Yet another face-to-face with a dwarf in strange armor. This one lacks the winter weather furs the previous dwarves wore, and that causes an odd effect where it almost seems like there's no distinction between armor and exposed skin, like he grew this out of himself rather than putting it on. Combined with those thick cords like pieces of tubing that keep appearing as part of their gear, he almost looks sci-fi.

Here are some standard Danforth dwarves a few pages later for contrast:

Notice the radically different—by which I mean very traditional—armor and clothing they wear, obviously inspired by real life human material culture from various parts of medieval Europe. Notice also the noncanonical lack of facial hair on that one dwarf woman; at least get some sideburns going, girl!

By now the book had moved indoors from the historical timelines and overviews on the geography and climate of the Misty Mountains, to move toward the domestic. The books in this series love going over every facet of their subjects in grueling detail, to the point that we're treated to some Khuzdul vocabulary constructed specifically for the game. We're also treated to this... excitable fellow.

Five minutes into Smith, Flux & Chill
and he gives you this look.

By now the text had clearly established that this book is about the regular dwarves of Moria, from the time before Khazad-dûm was abandoned. These are just two artists' very different depictions of the same community, presented side-by-side without explanation or comment on the part of the book. But the textual descriptions of specific parts of Moria lean far closer to Liz Danforth's illustrations, so Kent's stuff is just kinda... there. The readers are left to deal with these incongruities by themselves, and at least for me, it bugged the hell out of me.

Then I got to the first Kent Buries depiction of Morian(?) architecture, and the wheels finally started to spin.

While there are some clear signs of artifice like the squared column bases and that carved archway in the back, the number of lumpy and organic features in this hall of lamps and light stones is unmissable. These dwarves deliberately sculpted the room with these rounded features in mind, a far cry from the clean lines and sharp angles of traditional dwarvish art deco.

An armory receives the same treatment later in the book, although I couldn't readily describe it as one if the marginalia didn't describe it as such:

Those might be shields hanging on more of those chunky cords they like so much, but the shapes along the wall and column more closely resemble teardrop-shaped eyes to me. The weapons held aloft by the procession of dwarves are fairly mundane-looking, though once again their helmets are very ridged and rocky-looking, as is the knife or short sword carried by the one in the foreground.

I can't quite tell if that axe up top is just an illustration separate from the scene or a gigantic capstone decoration, but it's possibly the most raw and nature brut thing (a term which I've made up unless it's actually a real thing) in this whole series of images in either case, with a head made of slapped-together rocks that feels like it belongs in the hands of a Gruul Clan barbarian from Magic: the Gathering or something.

This next image was seemingly drawn by Kent by himself, yet within it the Kentish and Danforthian dwarf styles clash almost comically:

This incredibly normal-looking Chamber of Mazarbul with recognizable furnishings and fixtures nonetheless hosts a group of very lumpy dwarves, whose material culture apparently didn't develop so far in that aesthetic direction as to create books made out of boulders, or lecterns shaped like an outcropping of flowstone. The pattern on the wall, though difficult to see through the shaft of sunlight, even resembles the Danforth image of "axehead" pattern stonework described elsewhere in the book.

I don't know how to address this clash, and it's kind of the exception that proves my hypothesis later, but it's weird and amusing all the same.

A "freestanding" Kentish dwarf building appears elsewhere, this one a rare glimpse at the dwarves' surface level architecture.

Unlike the armory, this building's function as a watchtower is very much evident, but it arrived at that functionality by being grown and carved out of an existing rock formation, rather than creating something with blocks and mortar. This is the closest dwarvish equivalent I can think of to the broader fantasy trope of elves or other woodland beings living inside still-living trees that have been nurtured and grown around their homes.

I had been sharing these pictures with a Discord server, and one person pointed out how similar the hall of lamps and armory look to those old "Net of Being" paintings by Alex Grey, which you might know better as the thing where they got the face for that one TOOL album cover.

It would actually be pretty easy to explain all of this as dwarves listening to TOOL and taking a bunch of shrooms and call it a day, and I'm only half-joking. I think dwarves would be fairly likely to cultivate weird forms of mushrooms given their limited forays into agriculture seem to focus on underground-friendly crops and root vegetables like earth-bread.

But instead I choose to ascribe a deeper, albeit probably accidental meaning to this art style.

Do you all remember the Glittering Caves, where Éowyn and the civilians at Helm's Deep took refuge? 

Like a handful of other locations in Middle-Earth, they were directly inspired by a real-life place jurt had visited in his life, in this case the caves of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. Both Cheddar Gorge and the Glittering Caves' depiction in the live-action Two Towers film (which I think was just a set constructed for the scene rather than any existing cave where it'd be a nightmare to safely navigate dozens of extras and equipment around?) are dissolved limestone caverns struck through with stalactites, stalagmites, bands of minerals, columnar rock formations, etc. and as a result have an overall extremely lumpy character.

Early in the Fourth Age it was the site of one of the last new dwarf colonies, where Legolas' and Gimli's bromance really started burning after the former listened to the latter's breathless adoration for the natural beauty of the caves and how his people would work to emphasize it rather than just use it to extract precious minerals. To quote Gimli's reply to Legolas warning him not to tell all dwarves about that pretty little place:

‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by

such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore,

not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of

blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of

flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of

rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as

the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that

are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights,

Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-dûm; and

when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills

were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.’ ²

Gimli's fantasy, which eventually becomes policy enacted by him as lord of the Glittering Caves, is one of gentle stewardship of nature and its beauty. It fits comfortably within jurt's quasi-nationalistic, anthropocentric (or in this case, Khazâdocentric?) style of environmentalism in which conservation of nature's utility and beauty by and for the benefit of people is emphasized higher than raw as-is preservation. And in the distant future of the Fourth Age, I could easily see parts of the caves resembling that hall of lamps, or that craggy tower.

It's never emphasized nearly as much as with those caves, but dwarvish appreciation of their rocky homes is present throughout the universe. So I think it's reasonable to believe many more examples of naturalistic architecture could be found throughout the many dwarf-holds of the world, their history stretching as far back as the days when Aulë was finally permitted to wake his children up.

And if that style of building, mimicking the lumpiness and organic shapes of natural caverns, has been present for so long, isn't it also reasonable to think it would go on to influence other areas of dwarvish art, artifice, and aesthetics? Wouldn't those motifs and stylized landforms eventually find their way into smaller creations, weapons, armor, and even clothing? It's a little like how many real-life settled, agricultural societies adopt vegetal motifs which get so widely used and abstracted that eventually they cease to clearly resemble plants.

The Kent Buries illustrations, then, can be read almost like glimpses into an alternate universe where dwarf art and architecture was informed from the ground up (heheh) by that adherence to the forms of nature, rather than by the mastery of intricate stonework and yawning volumes shown in most dwarf depictions.

The images don't culminate in anything, and as I said before it's likely they aren't really "saying" anything at all, it was just one artist's personal style placed in an unusual context. In all likelihood I bet the reason for the two illustrators being present side-by-side at all was because of some long-ago contract, schedule, or budgeting reasons. But all meaning is fabricated out of nerve impulses and the consequences of random chance, so I guess why not read a little extra into it?

I consider the Buries illustrations the star of this book for that reason, as well as the reason that later in the book Liz Danforth sins against the entirety of Eä and all its creatures with this absolute nightmare of a Frodo face:

Delayed Happy Halloween, here's your dose of horror for the year.

At least we got that Absolute Twunk of a Samwise coming to the rescue like a snack back there.

¹ Jurt being my way of verbalizing the letters J.R.R.T., in typical Furtive fashion. Similar to how in the rare circumstances where I have to talk about him, George R. R. Martin is rendered down to gurm. I like how simultaneously "cute" and diminishing it sounds.

²  The Two Towers, "The Road to Isengard".

Crypt: A Found Fiction FKR MicroRPG

Recently I've been editing a TTRPG book with a found fiction element to it. By found fiction, I mean to say that the game book also functions as a book in-universe, a part of the fiction that has been annotated by other characters prior to falling into the player's hands. And unlike something like the Book of Gaub which is supplemental in nature (and which you should buy if you haven't!), this one contains its own stand-alone ruleset. I'm not sure if found fiction is the right name to give this, or even if there is a proper term for it. It's a little like the found footage trope in cinema, or an epistolary novel without the back-and-forth.

Whatever it is, it's extremely novel to me, and the first of such a game I've ever encountered, let alone had the privilege to work on.

So it's weird that just the other day I ran into another one. Two nickels and all that.

"Are you seein' this!?"

Trollish Delver, patron saint of this blog's pseudo-reviews and main character of my Itch.io collection, recently released Crypt, an addition to a growing collection of Free Kriegsspiel-style games in what was once a catalogue dominated by ultralight d20 and d6 OSR rulesets. Mechanically, it's Yet Another FKR Thing with one or two tweaks. But the mechanics are not the only reason why I'm writing this post.

Crypt bills itself as a recently discovered piece of TTRPG history, a long-lost game written by an anonymous British wargamer sometime in 1970, years before Arneson and Gygax ever got to work on the zero'ith edition of their critically acclaimed friendship-ruiner. The manuscript was lost for years amid the aroma of stale rhubarb pie and nerd musk in some West Yorkshire wargaming club, only to be rediscovered by one Thomas Culottes. Culottes did his best to compile the manuscript into a coherent whole and track down the creator, but he never succeeded in the latter, and once he passed away in 2021 a family friend handed the manuscript over to Scott Malthouse, the Trollish Delver himself.

Malthouse (the character) then annotated and published this manuscript alongside Culottes' story in order to share this artifact of gaming history with the world, while also helping to make it comprehendible for modern audiences. Malthouse (the real person) then uploaded it to his Itch.io, where I found it while I was five-and-a-half hours deep into listening to a new song on repeat until I had wrung every last mote of dopamine out of it (this one was country rock sung by Nurgle for some reason).

With character!Malthouse as our guide, the rest of the book is dedicated to the quirky and weirdly charming rules of the game itself, plus marginalia offering context, speculation, and occasional quips on the sides.

You learn that the creator was probably a theater kid because of their reliance upon Shakespearean archetypes and some of the language of theater that they use as a way to explain what the heck a fantasy imagination game inspired by Middle-Earth and Zothique is supposed to be like. Players are cast members treading upon the boards of the theater of the mind for example, and the list of character attributes (Courage, Humour, Romanticism, Status, and Friendship) is far more tied to interpersonal drama than to combat, which barely gets two paragraphs in the whole book.

They also came up with some mechanics that I find very believable as novel ideas cooked up by some wargamer who didn't know what they were doing as they branched out into a whole new genre in the '70s. Instead of rolling d20s to resolve chance, players flip one or more coins (ideally penny farthings) like a sort of proto-dicepool system. Yet it's still grounded in what the writer was familiar with in little ways, like the game master being called an umpire, as in actual Kriegsspiel.

The book is short and sweet with some stylistic jank, both a game and a piece of self-referential short storytelling. And for the price of PWYW, I thought that was worth a shoutout.

I feel a sudden and mighty need to "run" Lucian's A True Story or one of the lesser-known Arthurian poems with this system to see what sort of shenanigans can be gotten up to.

I Did a Thing for a Heartseeker Game Jam (And Also Am Still Alive)!

Oh, hey.

I kind of vanished for a few months there, didn't I?

I didn't plan on that, and had a few things lined up, but I guess somewhere between the new medications, crushing ennui, and the occasional terrifying explosion of real paying work, posting fell between the gaps.

But I'm back with something to show for it, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about other people's work too.

There are only about 5 days left on it as of writing, but an open-ended game jam for Heartseeker is going on right now!

I've written about my fondness for the cozy old school microRPG in previous years, and I was stoked to learn the creator had put out an open invitation for people to make stuff for or with the game's newest edition. I submitted my own single-page supplement to the jam a little while ago, filled with a few old ideas and a whole bunch of whatever struck my random fancy in the moment.

Unfortunately my fancy involved pretty gross mythical creatures this time around.

Anyway. Check the jam out, maybe contribute your own mini bits to it, or join the Heartseeker community. They've got a Discord server too, though I haven't gathered the willpower to enter a people place and check it out yet.

Lamplighter Class for Shadowdark

LAMPLIGHTER CLASS

Owl-eyed watchers, jumpy tomb-skulkers, or selfless defenders of the light who use burning oil and grim hope to keep the literal and metaphorical dark at bay.

Weapons: Club, dagger, javelin, mace, shortsword, spear, torch

Armor: Leather armor, chainmail

Hit Points: 1d6 per level

Controlled Burn: You specially treat your torches, lanterns, and oil flasks to burn 2 times as long. Additionally, you have advantage on Light Mishaps and other checks to keep a light from going out.

Blinding Burst: You can cause a torch or lantern in hand to flare up brilliantly, blinding Close creatures for 1 round. This reduces the light source's timer by 1 hour.

Brilliant Soul: When you give your luck token to a companion, roll d6. On a 1 you keep your own token as well.

LAMPLIGHTER TALENTS
2d6	Effect (2 duplicate = reroll, 3-5 if already taken twice = reroll)
2	Your Blinding Burst talent lasts for 1 additional round
3-5	+1 to the duration of Controlled Burn, or +1 to the d6 range of Brilliant Soul
6-8	+1 to melee and ranged attacks, or +1 to fire damage
9-11	+2 to Dexterity, Constitution, or Wisdom
12	Choose a talent or +2 points to distribute to stats

LAMPLIGHTER TITLES
Level	Lawful	Chaotic	Neutral
1-2	Spark	Flicker	Lit-Wick
3-4	Glowing	Guttering	Night Owl
5-6	Way-Lighter	Pitch-Burner	Watcher
7-8	Illuminator	Immolator	Firekeeper
9-10	Bright One	Lurid One	Watchmaster

Lantern Keeper from the What Lies Below art pack
Artwork used with permission by Charles Ferguson-Avery of Feral Indie Studio

NEW WEAPON
Weapon	Cost	Type	Range	Damage	Properties
Torch	5sp	M	C	1d6	Fl

Flaming (Fl): This weapon deals fire damage, and can only be used while it is lit. Each successful attack reduces the torch’s timer by 10 minutes.

"Steady on, crawlers! We'll make them blink first..."
- Arodin Hesk, human lamplighter

Earning XP Through Community Investment

(Misleading Clickbait Title: Elevate Your D&D Campaign With Orgies, Inc.™!)

A few times on this blog I've fiddled with alternate XP systems for OSR-type games, usually in a very surface-level and indirect way that does little more than gesture at other people who already explored the concepts much more fully years before.

This time, I plan to do better with the idea.

What orgies have to do with my aspirations of doing better, I'll explain in a moment. But rest assured it's nowhere near as interesting or even eyebrow-raising as you're thinking.

Today's post concerns the 10th issue of Dragon magazine, from all the way back when they still spelled its name with a "The". Content Notice for people reading along with the archive.org copy above in SFW environments: there are elf-presenting nipples visible on page 5. I suggest covering the art with a nice, beige window or piece of construction paper depending on reading device, if necessary.

In this issue Jon Pickens debuted one of two alternate experience systems for D&D which would release that year, the other being Dave Arneson's in The First Fantasy Campaign. Unlike Arneson's rather dry title for a gameplay aid, Jon's article goes under a title that would not be out of place in today's world of clickbait, which is an impressive feat for 1977. Though, I guess advertising has always been preying on the same parts of the human psyche, just using different tools throughout the ages.

Orgies, Inc.

"Orgies, Inc." inverts the OD&D standard of experience points being awarded equal to the number of gold pieces in treasure looted from the dungeon and brought back to civilization. Instead, XP is awarded only when gold pieces are spent in a way that effectively removes them from the game without direct benefit to the players. So, coming home and blowing all that gold on a new stronghold or obtaining magic items wouldn't count toward leveling up. The article provides a list of possible income-burners, ranging from religious sacrifices whose entry ends midsentence, to philanthropy, to spell research- the last of which is cheating a little, since you actually can get material (magical) benefit out of that option.

The orgies do eventually appear, at the bottom of the list. The actual description is simultaneously tame and outlandish, glossing over the activity as "lusty indulgence in wine, women, and song" at a tavern which can somehow last as many days in a row as the participants have points of Constitution, costing up to 500gp per day. I know the PCs are meant to be larger-than-life pulp action figures in this kind of game, but when the system gives normal human beings a Con of 9-12 by default, it suddenly makes the world look way more like Oglaf than Conan.

There's also the issue of level scaling that butts up against that 500gp/day limit real quick. At low levels a weekend or a week of wild partying at most will be enough to level everyone up, but as the required XP amounts climb into the tens and hundreds of thousands of experience points per level, you're suddenly looking at weeks or months spent doing nothing but orgying or recuperating from said orgies. Which sounds exhausting at best and downright hellish at worst, if the DM doesn't provide multiple gold burners for the PCs to switch it up with.

If you'd like to know more about other attempts at "carousing" XP systems over the years that we won't be looking at, I recommend this post from Yore. Another Content Notice here, some of these early systems had gross and coercive implications about whom a PC could "wench" with.

Clan Hoards

I'm more interested in the 4th item on this list of gold sinks, however. The so-called Clan Hoard option allows characters who are dwarves or "other clannish folk" to gain XP by donating treasure to the heavily guarded public hoard owned and operated by their clan. No private individuals may make withdrawals from the hoard, and as the article puts it, the money is effectively taken out of the campaign.

This system interests me for a few reasons, not least of which being the implied lore of a public hoard operated by each dwarf clan. That terminology suggests a form of public ownership and public funding that the clan as a whole may dip into and benefit from, distinct from the private estates of wealthy clan members or a treasury owned by whatever hereditary ruler one might expect to be in a dwarf-hold in 1970s D&D.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it because I've been doing a lot of writing about working class dwarves over the past few months, but with that one line this option implies a very different society and political system than what was common in fantasy fiction at the time. And I think that's neat.

I also just like the mechanics of the system for the way they could transform a campaign and reorient it around a community. It isn't the only sort of donation a person can make under these rules- I did mention philanthropy earlier on. But philanthropy conjures a very specific mental image (for me at least) of detachment, both from the needy and from the underlying causes of need: rich folks getting a park named after them or preventing a bad harvest from getting worse, but stopping short of systemic change, and junk like that.

The clan hoard, meanwhile, keeps the PC(s) connected to their community. They have to return home (or at least meet representatives abroad) in order to turn their wealth over, which encourages them to establish their base of operations at home rather than off in some chunk of wilderness recently scoured of all inconvenient life and deeded in the fighter's name.

That creates opportunities and complications you might not get from a traditional dungeon or hex crawl. For one, you have a whole lot more NPCs you're likely to run into regularly, none of whom are necessarily beholden to the players as hirelings or serfs. Different families, groups, or factions within the community can bring different flavors and friction to social interaction. Events beyond the party's control can pop up at unexpected times. If they return from a long adventure only to find a natural disaster has struck or there's a dispute going on, more than just a monetary donation will be needed to resolve the community's problems (and unlock that sweet XP). Even the least personally-engaged PC has a stake in all of it to some degree, which keeps gameplay varied and fresh.

What to Throw Out

There are a few minor parts of Pickens' take on the system that I don't like. For one, the clan hoard necessarily being limited to clan-based societies limits its applicability in a (to me) unrealistic way. Lots of societies in real life can form intricate systems of social cohesion, cooperation, and resource management beginning from radically different starting points, that would nonetheless let them arrive at the same place for this kind of mechanic. It should be even more so for fantasy, I think.

Second and less nitpicky is the idea that the money is effectively removed from the campaign once it's donated. I think that's a lazy way to handle it, akin to the religious sacrifice mechanic where all the wealth basically goes up in a puff of smoke on the altar. It doesn't feel meaningful or impactful to the fiction.

What to Add Instead

I think even if the money is permanently taken out of the hands of the PC—which is totally fine—its impact should still be felt. The PCs should see evidence of what it's being used for and what goes on in the community as a consequence.

The most obvious way to do this to me is by reflecting each character in the way the community grows, since it's the mechanism by which those same characters grow more powerful. Take each PC's character class, background, or other defining features into account and consider how that might affect the place as they grow more prominent.

For example, the fighters might grow stronger because the money has been invested in community defense with a training ground, armory, and maybe some kind of citizen militia is set up. At low levels the fighters would be training alongside the other newbies, but at higher levels of experience—literal and narrative—they might be the ones doing the organizing instead. Similarly, a magic-user's need for specialized tools and a place for magical research might spur the creation of a larger archive or public library in town.

With this little change, the PCs are no longer leveling up and growing stronger through their mix of dumb luck and Main Character power, but through the opportunities provided for them by their community. It makes the game a more social RPG with a greater emphasis on reciprocal relationships, although the potential for exploitation in the form of dungeon delving in order to acquire the wealth in the first place does still exist.

Community XP

The simplest way to implement this system is by doing as Jon Pickens did, and have each character level up independently according to their own XP track once they've contributed enough of their personal wealth to the community. One might reasonably assume wealth and therefore XP is divided up evenly and/or equitably between PCs in the spirit of cooperation this whole thing is meant to foster, but there's always room for character competition or friction in a story about people like this.

If the table doesn't enjoy lopsided leveling tracks common to OSR games and the minimal impact it can have on moment-to-moment play, you can remove everyone's leveling track and instead give one big XP bar to the community as a whole. This can represent the amount of gold stored in/being utilized by its version of the public funds hoard from earlier on, standard of living for the average person, urban or economic development, or some other nebulous indicator of growth. Remember, money locked up in the personal fortunes or private properties of rich jackasses contributes nothing.

Alternatively, if you like the milestone leveling that seemed to get popular with the advent of D&D 5E (or at least I was ignorant of it up until then), throw out all the bars and XP and tie the milestones to various public works initiated by the community. This could take the form of funding building projects or the acquisition of certain skills or resources and the like.

More hands-on involvement from the PCs like labor hours or direct participation in planning/advising on the project could also count toward the goal, making it better for games with less of an emphasis on dungeon crawling. You could also probably assign a GP value to characters' workhours if you want to use that in combination with XP tracks; after all, is adventuring not already a form of wage labor?

Once a goal has been reached by whatever means with the indispensable aid of the PCs (not because they're better than everybody else but because the story kind of hinges on them), a level-up may be had.

Leveling Tables

Each level-up, a PC gains all the generic benefits: increased HP, attack ability, etc. This represents a mix of their own personal growth from adventuring, and what their community helped foster in them during downtime.

The player also rolls on the [Great Big Table of Community Upgrades]. This is a general table that everyone has access to regardless of class, background, etc. An upgrade is checked off after being rolled, and repeats are rerolled unless specifically noted in its entry. If XP curves are flattened so every character levels up at the same rate, or the table uses milestone leveling like the above, the whole party rolls at once.

The table can just be a regular old d100 or similarly large roll. Example:

Nergui advances to 2nd level and rolls on the table. They roll a 46, which means that greater investment in local food resources has given the community a Food Surplus. Rations and meals are always available for purchase in town, the population is healthier and well-fed, and rolls on the Complications table (more on that below) that result in famine might be cancelled out/ignored.

Later, Nergui advances to 4th level and rolls 46 again. This upgrades Food Surplus into Improved Nutrition, which improves the general quality of life for the people, gives the community as a whole a bonus on rolls to avoid plagues spread by malnutrition, and also gives the PCs a +1 to their next Hit Point roll.

Alternatively, the table could be much more narrow and use a smaller die such as d10 or d20, with higher results being better, but also gated in tiers by being far higher than the die size naturally allows one to roll. Only one roll is made per level for the whole party, but the party's total level is added to the roll. Example:

The party reaches 3rd level. Because there are 4 of them in the party, they add a +12 modifier to the community roll. This increases their roll of 10 to 22, kicking it up to the 20-25 tier. They roll 1d6 for the tier and get a 2, netting their community the Minor Magic Shop upgrade. This makes minor magical trinkets available for purchase in town. Or, if the table refuses to break the 'no buying magic items' taboo, each PC is gifted 1 (and only 1) minor magic item for all their help around town lately.

In addition to the Great Big Table, each character has their own Class/Background table that represents how their own personal contributions have affected the community. These should be smaller than the general table, but they can be full d20 or even d100 tables if you're feeling motivated/masochistic enough. Example:

Nemo the cleric advances to 5th level. They roll on the cleric table and get Local Devotees a second time. This represents the growing community of their coreligionists in the area, and allows Nemo to upgrade the little roadside shrine they had previously constructed into a modest temple/sanctuary/sacred grove/etc.

Opposite the table of Upgrades is the table of Community Complications. This table is rolled on whenever upgrades are rolled for, representing the unexpected incidents or setbacks that go hand-in-hand with the community growing and changing over time. They don't have to be straight-up penalties; the complication can instead be an encounter the party/PC is forced into, with consequences resulting from how well they handle it. Example:

The party advances in level and rolls 14 for complications. A climate-appropriate natural disaster strikes the community, forcing it and the party to devote considerable time to cleanup and repairs. This might strengthen bonds between survivors, or cleanup might uncover a hidden secret somewhere.

Characters could have their own personal complication tables, again dependent upon class, background, or anything else relevant to the campaign. Depressing!Example:

Outis the tiefling advances to 6th level and rolls the Not Welcome Here complication. Their growing fame and apparent acceptance within the community has drawn other tieflings to live in the area recently. Their more visible presence has riled up the local bigots, who only tolerated Outis as "one of the good ones" up to that point. Now an incident is about to occur, and needs intervention.

You could also put together some kind of cumulative group level complication table in the interest of maintaining pointless symmetry with the group upgrade table mentioned above- I know I'm certainly tempted to do that. But I'm unsure how high the stakes should be for something like that. Where does it top out? Plague? Invasion? A wizard tripping and spilling the entire contents of their forbidden tome collection out on the sidewalk? I'll leave you to decide that one.

I realize this still isn't an actual system, but I do hope that this offering of bigger- and crunchier-than-usual breadcrumbs might be useful in designing a community-oriented progression system of your own.

Adapting Moorcockian Cosmology to D&D

Years ago now I tried writing a post about alignment in D&D, Elden Ring, and Michael Moorcock. It quickly bloated into a messy constellation of ideas that only got even worse when I realized I didn't know who the hell Poul Anderson is, nor how much more important to the development of old D&D alignment (and the entirety of the paladin class) his book Three Hearts and Three Lions was.* So, I gave up on it.

More recently I found myself poring over Dragon Lords of Melniboné, the 3E Goldrush-era d20 port of the Stormbringer RPG by Chaosium. It's an odd duck that combines a few secondary systems from the original d100 game with the core d20 mechanic in a way that isn't terribly strange or broken, and from what little I know of the universe (being as poorly read as I am) it seems to strive to maintain lore-accuracy as well. Overall functional, I'd say.

It also inspired me to take another shot at the main point I'd wanted to make in that old draft:

I think using alignment inspired by the metaphysics from Moorcock's Eternal Champion series could make D&D more interesting- when one is forced into the unenviable position of having to use alignment at all, that is.

Why Do I Keep Saying "Moorcockian" Anyway?

To start, I should explain what I even mean by Moorcockian cosmology and metaphysics.

In the Eternal Champion series, the universe is a perpetual battleground between the metaphysical forces of Chaos and Law. Chaos is change, entropy, and random chance. Law is stability, stasis, and predictability. These are not personal beliefs or inclinations, but the rules that undergird the laws of physics such as they exist in this universe. Both are necessary for the multiverse as we know it to exist, but neither side cares about that; each force wants to defeat the other and reshape the cosmos in its own image. Chaos would render everything down into a roiling soup of ephemera constantly changing too quickly to really make anything, while Law would fix everything in perfect, crystalline singularity and stasis where nothing can grow or live.

The fine line between the two extremes is the only situation in which the wonders of existence can, well, exist. That is where the third metaphysical force, the Cosmic Balance, comes into play. Balance exists to keep the other two forces in check before they destroy everything with their perpetual clashing. Balance works to equalize Chaos and Law, and whenever there is a severe unbalance, it sends a new incarnation of the series' tragic protagonist, the Eternal Champion, to go sort it out.

If you've ever read the AD&D 2E writeup on alignments where a True Neutral druid is shown to help a local barony against some marauding gnolls, only to then side with the gnolls once they're on the backfoot, the Cosmic Balance is the initial idea that I believe Zeb Cook or someone on his development team took and then royally butchered and contorted into the above scenario.

I must stress that Balance is not neutrality in the interest of some unchanging status quo, nor is the Eternal Champion like the aforementioned pendulum druid, but that is a common way things are interpreted. I think that's due in part to how Elric's story, the most famous in the Eternal Champion series, depicts a world where Chaos is ascendant and thus it, the Chaos gods, and their servants are depicted in an almost comically super-villainous light, which makes the stodgy defenders of Law far more sympathetic, and Elric's eventual alliance with them can come across as vetting them as the official "good" side.

But as I've been rambling, neither Chaos nor Law are good or evil, and Balance is not morally neutral for being between the two. In fact, because Balance is so inextricably linked to life and all its boundless wonder and potential, it often comes across as both morally good and prosocial in Moorcock's writing; he's a lifelong anarchist after all. My favorite example of this is how Tanelorn, the city of Balance located simultaneously outside of and at the very center of the universe, sometimes reads less like a Sigil-esque no man's land and more like a chill commune where you can sort out your mental health, and true love can flourish outside the toxifying confines of violent society- unless of course you're Elric.

I say all of that to get to this next and most important part about using Moorcockian alignment in D&D: it's no longer about morality.

While the servants of some sides exhibit more behaviors of a certain morality than others at various points in the series, the cosmic forces themselves really don't care that much about an individual's personal ethics or lack thereof, so long as they further the cosmological goals of that force. As an example, Elric starts off as an absolute bastard despite being the incarnate champion of Balance, and only gradually turns into something more hero-adjacent as a side effect of fulfilling his role. Another dissonance is the weirdly bureaucratic and hierarchical Theocracy of Pan Tang, which operates an orderly and authoritarian war machine that efficiently mobilizes and depopulates entire continents... but it's all in service to Chaos, so Arioch & Chaos Co. don't mind one bit.

You can of course still present a side as better than the other for the purposes of a campaign, though. Throughout the Eternal Champion series both the subjectively positive and negative aspects of Chaos and Law are showcased as the wind switches direction. It can be a very 'one's terrorists are another's freedom fighters' sorta deal depending on POV. But there are no longer any morally objective tags of [Good] and [Evil] to consider.

This recontextualization of alignment around big, cosmic acts rather than the personal and individual is, I think, somewhat freeing for many types of characters and stories. Sincerely kind people and royal pricks can find themselves working toward the exact same metaphysical goals, a slight shift in morality doesn't put champions like paladins in danger of Falling, and the overwhelming majority of creatures in your D&D world would be (or at least start off being) neutral and uninvolved in the cosmic conflict, so you're free to have the same interpersonal moral complexity as in an alignment-free game.

Remember, minor acts shouldn't budge the PCs' place in the conflict much, so the low levels might also be heavily unaligned until the PCs grow powerful enough or (un)lucky enough to meaningfully tip the scales in some way with a regional shift in power or so. That leads to the cosmic forces taking an interest, which in turn leads to a gradual teasing-out of the universe war.

It also makes the OD&D convention of alignment languages make so much more sense in-universe. Moral outlook as the determining factor in whether or not you know a club's secret passwords is kind of silly; it being something taught to you after you consciously buy into the cosmic conflict as a way to communicate in code with other members of your metaphysical army is cool.

Reusing the 3-Point Alignment Axis

Speaking of OD&D, that would be the easiest edition in which to implement this alignment system, partly because it was only just recently divorced from something quite like it back when D&D released in the '70s. Keep the 3-point axis of Chaos and Law with Neutral in the middle, rename Neutral to Balance, and instead make "Neutral" the default alignment outside of the spectrum for beings totally uninvolved in the conflict, like Unaligned animals in 4E, or certain outsiders.

Speaking of 4E, the odd job they did flattening alignment into a linear track from LG down through Neutral straight to CE in that edition actually fits this whole scheme just as well; it's basically a 5-point axis.

PCs begin dead-center and then hold steady or drift one way or the other depending on their acts in the world. Anyone can choose to have a disposition one way or the other as backstory demands however, and certain classes like pact warlocks, clerics, and paladins should automatically begin a couple steps to one side as appropriate. Druids and their kind start and probably stay in the center, right where their normal counterparts do.

Just slap a meter on this bad boy and you're good to go.

How long to make the axis depends on how much you want to do with it and how granular things get. You could make it as simple as just 5 or so steps from Balance to one of the extremes, with 1 step representing the minimum level of devotion to a force that an underling can demonstrate, and 5 being a creature who has practically ascended to become one with the force so to speak.

One downside of this approach is that it kind of diminishes Balance and makes it seem more like Neutrality, since one cannot become anymore aligned with Balance through deeds than an ordinary creature starts off as when they're born. One solution to that is...

    Alternative Approach: Scoreboard

Ill-fittingly crisp numbers added for illustrative purposes.

Taking another cue from the Stormbringer books, instead of using an axis that you shimmy back and forth along, keep a scoreboard of how much stuff you've done aligned with each cosmic force.

These Allegiance Points or Elan as they're called in the d100 games are on a 0 to 100 scale. All three forces have an Elan scale, and a player keeps a running tally of all three on their character sheet. Everyone starts at 0 in all three unless a starting class or other factor changes that. Major acts like slaying demons or casting magic add or subtract from a PC's allegiance points in the appropriate power, but it's possible to accrue points in all three at once due to the complexities and inconsistencies of being people.

Without a sliding scale, your highest value represents the force you are most aligned with (and that's only if you accept it), but having a close second can indicate all manner of plot-driving possibilities like inner turmoil, deliberate playing-off of several factions, suspicion among the gods of 'your' side as to your true loyalties, or even that another faction is interested in poaching you.

In this system rather than beginning one or more steps toward one extreme, clerics and their ilk instead start with X amount of points in their chosen power, whereas everyone else starts with all 0s.

Whether or not your game uses allegiance points to fuel certain powerful effects or events like divine intervention or ultimate apotheosis in the Stormbringer books is your call, but it is an easy and fun way to transform D&D alignment into a gameplay resource rather than a potentially limiting guideline.

Salvaging the Holmes' Basic Alignment X

Has anyone ever read an explanation for this one?

Holmes' Basic with its weird 5-point alignment system of Lawful Good <=> Chaotic Evil and Chaotic Good <=> Lawful Evil with Neutral slapped in the middle of the two kinda-sorta-overlapping axes is harder to adapt to nonmoral concepts, but then again it was always kind of incongruous with the rest of D&D at the time. The axes don't exist independent of one another, so you can't have a creature dedicated to just Chaos or just Good; only Chaotic Good. I've found the matrix odd ever since I first learned about it through Blueholme; it lacks the simplicity of the 3-point linear axis and the depth of the 9-point graph without really adding anything of its own, unless I'm just completely missing the point.

Regardless of my feelings on it, you don't have to ditch the Holmes X. In fact it's very useful for illustrating my next big point: don't limit yourself to Moorcockian Chaos vs Law.

You can and should think up different sets of powers to align in an X or + shape, but maybe with the extremities corresponding to each power directly rather than to a corner between two of them. These could be two sets of opposing forces that are then neutral to each other, to explain the shape.

An example of this would be using the classic elements as the cosmic forces. Earth stands opposed to Air and Fire to Water (or Earth to Water and Fire to Air as the Elric book I was reading earlier did it). Actions in favor of one element necessarily pull you away from its opposite, but the other two don't particularly care (unless you're mucking about at such a high level you might upend the entire planet).

A character also has the option of gaining favor with one side of the remaining pair in such a system as well, or remaining neutral in that particular conflict. Thus a PC could wind up wholly dedicated to one force, or they could wind up in a corner between non-opposing sides like the original Holmes X.

9-Point Alignment Chart

The format that launched a million memes when I was in high school.

Now it's time for the big one. The 9-point box that most people imagine when they think of alignment in D&D. Obviously a single-axis cosmic battle won't do here, but you can easily use the default system's double axes replaced with two opposed pairs, similar to how we did the Holmes X a minute ago.

But I think there's a cooler way to implement this chart than that. And it only involves throwing it in the trash a little bit.

Most D&D CRPGs over the years have given the alignment axes numerical values, whether they're hidden or visible. I want to say the old Neverwinter Nights games use a -100 to 100 scale? This turns a character's alignment into a dot on a graph plot shaped like the above that moves around according to the morality of actions taken during play.

I want to take that concept, but round the edges off the box a little. In fact, make it a circle.

AD&D also brought us what would come to be known as the Great Wheel cosmology, in which a huge number of intersecting cosmic planes lead to the existence of the Prime Material where most of the living and adventuring and dying takes place in a given game. Of interest to me are the Outer Planes, which are the manifestations of different moral and ethical outlooks, home to gods, archdemons, angels, fiends, and all that sort of thing.

I like me some Planescape, and I know what I'm about to suggest sounds like a derangement of the basic conceit of the setting. But consider giving the Outer Planes the same treatment as Law vs Chaos and strip the objective morality dimension from them.

Every god and outsider can remain exactly as pleasant, nasty, or indifferent as they are in canon, and each plane can pursue the same interests abroad, so no need to cancel the Blood War or other turf wars and Prime Material influence/absorption plots. In-universe, people can still conceive of them and speak of them in the same language of moral extremes. But none of them are literal manifestations of good, evil, law, chaos, or neutrality anymore.

To reflect this change, mortals don't have any of the old 9 alignments. Like in the 3-point system the overwhelming majority of living creatures are or start off with a planar alignment of Neutral in the dead center of the alignment chart. Radiating out from that center is a map of all 16 Outer Planes with a circular grid of planar alignment steps between them and the center, which you could represent with your pick of the Prime Material, Outlands, the Spire & Sigil, or The Lady. Just be careful of that last one.

A major step toward aligning with one plane, its agents, and its motives moves you one box closer to that plane. A step toward one of its polar opposites (any of the 3 planes directly across the middle from it and its edges on the wheel) brings you back toward the center. A step toward a non-opposed plane rotates you one box over, while staying in your row. As in previous charts clerics, warlocks, paladins, and other people with overt connections to extraplanar forces begin play a few alignment steps closer to the plane to which they are connected.

Basically just slap a polar grid on top of this badder boy and you're even gooder to go.

Max steps toward a plane may represent a character becoming such a living embodiment of that plane that they transform in some way, like Stormbringer's apotheosis mechanic but far less powerful. Consider something along the lines of giving the character free [Outsider] traits, free teleportation to and from their chosen plane and the Prime Material, or other goodies. Also consider drawbacks, such as creatures, weapons, or magic aligned with an opposing plane being able to harm them more than usual. That allows you to continue to implement things like Protection from X spells, weapons that bypass certain Damage Reduction, and so on.

Other Ideas

There are plenty of other ways to implement a more Moorcockian style of alignment in a d20 game if the above seem a little too awkwardly-fitted or uninspired for you. There're 13th Age's Icons, Dungeon World's Bonds, and various similar boon/relationship type mechanics from other games. Knowing my luck, there's probably a game directly inspired by the concept that delivers on it perfectly, but I somehow overlooked it.

* Full Spoilers for those who don't care: 3H&3L is a 1961 novel about a Danish Resistance engineer in WW2 getting shot by Nazis while protecting Niels Bohr. At that point he's isekai'd into a medieval French parallel universe where folklore and Arthurian legend are real and a war between Law and Chaos is raging. He finds some knightly gear including a shield emblazoned with the titular heraldry, falls in love with a swan elf, befriends a funky little dwarf who's actually the earliest confirmed instance of a dwarf with a Scottish accent before the fantasy media of the '90s and 2000s, becomes the champion of Law, and eventually discovers he's an incarnation of one of Charlemagne's paladins. Also Morgan le Fay shows up to be villainously sultry a couple times. It's a trip.

New System, New Face: Hastily Reviving a Dead Series with Janky Optional Rules for BFRPG

Been a while since I made a character hereabouts, huh? Figured I'd fix that and shoehorn yet more BFRPG into my blog while I'm at it.

As I've mentioned in the past, the open-source game system BFRPG has tons of fan-made content hosted on its site, from new species and classes, to new subsystems, and in at least one case that I know of, a pretty significant rules conversion mod.

Basic Fantasy Questing by Joe Carruthers changes the game from a mixed OSR title into a hybrid between The RPG Not To Be Named and the "Classic d100 Game" that the supplement references obliquely throughout. For those who don't know what that's referring to, like myself when I started this post, it's the original Basic Role-Playing system by Chaosium released in 1980. It's a generic system similar to GURPS or Savage Worlds in that it supports a wide range of genre fiction that you can flesh out using books in their niche. You might have heard of a few of BRP's little genre splats; they include Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and RuneQuest, among others.*

BFQ works like this: you roll your ability scores and pick a species and class like normal, then convert every ±1 of ability modifier into a ±5% to applicable roll-under d100 rolls, like adding Strength percentage to Melee Attack rolls or Wisdom percentage to Divine Casting. Each class has a main skill that determines their HD, like a fighter's highest weapon skill or a thief's highest thief skill. Class skills start at a 55% base chance to succeed, not including modifiers.

For everything outside of the class's niche, you have a new set of Ability Skills to roll. These skills combine saving throws from the core game with the ability checks for all 6 ability scores that you commonly see elsewhere, and their base % is equal to a character's ability score x2. You roll these to push heavy stuff, shrug off the effects of poison, remember lore, etc.

You might notice there's not really anything to build here, though. What would I be doing other than rolling dice and seeing what I end up with?

Well, fortunately Joe included some optional rules for his already optional ruleset: classless characters.

The classless characters rule nudges BFQ much closer to BRP than to D&D by removing classes and opening all skills up to all characters, albeit at much lower starting values than their specialized fellows enjoy. Which comes up as a bit of an issue later on, but for now let's just figuratively and literally roll with it.

Ability score generation is identical to the base game, which means I spent literally hours rolling arrays in a generator until I got one that felt not too crippled by negative modifiers but also not too good that it seemed like I was blatantly fishing for a strong character. Ultimately I found one that's just average enough to help illustrate a few parts of the system.

With this conveniently middling array, we can calculate our classless adventurer's base skills using the following:

You still select species as part of this system, for which I decided to pull in yet another fan supplement; Monsters as Player Characters by Sidney Parham, Omer Golan-Joel, R. Kevin Smoot, and steveman. I decided to go with hobgoblin, since they're kind of like the humans of the humanoid world in a lot of ways, and a generalist character feels appropriate here. They also have a pretty nice Alertness ability that reduces the chance of being surprised, and +5% bonuses to Listen and Finding/Removing Traps, which is great for someone with free access to thief skills.

Maybe they've actually drifted away from their highly regimented community after failing to find a rank and niche to specialize into? A rather uninspired implementation of the societal misfit trope, I know, but one that at least weds plot and mechanics.

We distribute another 50 points on top of the above base values to finish, so that we have at least 1 skill above 55% and none higher than 70%. After some final bookkeeping we've got our hob:

Art stolen from the hedgewitch chapter of Land of Mist.

As you can see, average base values for classless characters start very low to make up for their much greater versatility. This PC's highest ability score, Strength, only amounts to a base of 26% in melee attack and force, although it's actually slightly higher than this thanks to the +5% from the +1 modifier to Strength which still gets applied to all applicable rolls, for a total of 31%. On the flip side, our friend here ain't gonna be doing much wheeling and dealing with an Influence of 11% (16% base -5% from -1 modifier). At early levels they will probably flail and flounder a lot before they eventually slide into a semi-randomly determined niche of whatever they happen to succeed at by sheer dumb luck.

This is where I come to the biggest houserule I would use for a game of BFQ: reverse the progression system.

Under standard BFQ rules, you mark a skill for improvement once during an adventure when you succeed with it. At the end of the adventure you then roll vs your skill to see if you improve it by 1d3+1 points by succeeding at the roll, or just 1 by failing at it. This is fine for use with the class system because it means each class will naturally excel in the area of their expertise from the base game, such as fighters leveling their attack skill much faster than magic-users from having more and higher chances to succeed at a roll, which compounds after a certain point and makes you all but guaranteed to mark a skill for advancement within the first roll or two of a session, while your less relevant skills fall far behind.

But with the base skill calculations of classless BFQ, most of your skills are going to start off well below 50%. This means improving almost anything other than your 1 or 2 favored skills will be a long slog. And if you're going to specialize like that, why not just stick with classes?

So I propose houseruling it so that you mark for advancement every time you fail a roll instead of succeed. Likewise, when rolling to advance, a failure adds the full 1d3+1 points and success adds only 1.

This way, characters are encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zones, and it's easier to build a generalist if one wants. At the same time, the jacks of all trades will be discouraged from becoming masters of anything by the fact that it's harder to fail rolls at higher levels. Quick, early skill advancement naturally trends downward and slows to a crawl as it nears 100%. This is also closer to the the leveling curve of many OSR games, if that's a plus for you. And depending on the players at your table, it might also just feel better to always be getting something out of an action? Losing that Agility check and faceplanting in the mud's no fun, but now you've learned from that mistake, as that old saying goes.

* Okay, technically RuneQuest came first and then had a genericized version of its ruleset spun off into BRP, but I think it's still accurate to say that RuneQuest is "powered by" BRP so to speak.