Musings on a Dragonlance X Talislanta Magic System Crossover Nobody Asked For

Notice: What follows is a collection of ideas and guidelines rather than a fully realized homebrew system. It probably would have been faster and easier for me to just do that instead, but I just had to go and take a bird's eye view of the whole thing.

Dragonlance's Fifth Age, AKA the Age of Mortals, was a bit of a fanbase-breaker back when it was first introduced in the '90s. It was meant to usher in a new phase of the universe after the trilogy that was supposed to permanently cap the series off forever with no new additions instead got condensed into a single book (Dragons of Summer Flame) and hastily shoved out there. The backlash to the continuation and the direction of that continuation hit, and when they tried to roll those changes back to something closer to the status quo in order to appease the displeased part of the base, they ended up angering the other side of it. It was kind of messy.

One of the biggest changes to the universe (other than the gods "leaving") was the introduction of ambient magic in the forms of Wild/Primal Sorcery and its spiritual counterpart Mysticism, the latent magics of the planet itself that had been dormant ever since the days of the Greygem came and went. With the gods gone, it was allowed to resurface in the world and become usable by mortals who put their hearts and minds to it, without needing to rely upon faith in fickle gods or the practice of High Sorcery (which is just a different form of devotion to the moon gods at the end of the day). Why primal sorcery didn't return during the gods' long but voluntary absence after they dropped a meteor on Krynn, I'm not sure, but the end result is that a fundamentally different source of magic was introduced to the setting.

To put it simply, primal sorcery and mysticism act like arcane and divine magic in the loosest sense. Sorcery manipulates the physical forces and matter of the world and is divided up into disciplines that reflect that, like aeromancy and transmutation. Mysticism relies upon faith in oneself and sympathetically affects most things that are alive or possess some similar sort of essence, like through healing or necromancy.

Sorcery and mysticism effects don't behave like similar spells in normal systems of magic, though. There are no "spells" per se at all, save one's trademark effects and personal favorites. Each magic user spontaneously and creatively uses their magic in any way they can for the situation at hand, producing effects that are more narratively bounded than mechanically. It's kind of like how in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure everybody has one weird Stand ability that they use as creatively as possible in whatever situation they find themselves in, rather than just escalating in power level or picking up new tricks as the series goes along, like most shōnens do. On top of it all, when two or more sorcerers or mystics get together, they can freely blend and meld their magics together in order to make something new and even more powerful.

This is all pretty much anathema to a Vancian magic system based on spell slots, so despite my soft spot for it, the D&D 3E Age of Mortals campaign setting pretty uniformly fails to depict its ambient magic. The primal sorcerer was just a regular sorcerer, while the mystic was a stripped-down favored soul. Not bad classes by themselves, but big letdowns for the source material.

SAGA Magic

It wasn't always like that, though. Primal sorcery actually did get a lot of play in the Dragonlance: Fifth Age game for the SAGA System back in the day.

In contrast to the later d20 implementation, its lore and mechanics were integrated well and fleshed out, and coupled with the diceless card deck rules you played SAGA with, it was one of the more original magic systems ever printed by TSR. You come up with spells on the fly and determine how expensive they are to cast using an additive spell point system for stronger effects. Casting an instant healing spell for the maximum amount is going to be a lot more costly than casting a weak one that takes a half-hour, for example. There are sample spells provided in the books, but those are just to illustrate spell construction and provide players with models that they can then tweak to their specific needs.

But this was still the SAGA System, which means that all of 8 people ever played it, and the rest of the books in production got axed after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR out. So unless you want to painstakingly recreate a mechanic from a dead game that relies upon a peripheral card deck, ambient magic is just another one of those Dragonlance things you can't really do in-game that you can do in-story.

... Say, you know what else has a robust, freeform magic system where spell effects are determined by intent?

Talislanta Magic

Why hello there, new old friend!

I already went into it in my Talislanta retrospective of sorts, but depending on the edition you're looking at, magic works like this: there are a little more than a dozen magical disciplines called orders like shamanism, witchcraft, cartomancy, etc. Each order of magic is divided up into different "modes" that represent types of magical spells like attack, defend, heal, illusion, transform, etc. Each order has access to a few but usually not all modes, in keeping with the flavor of that order. Elemental magic, for example, doesn't have the heal mode because it's kind of difficult to treat wounds with a rock or a gust of air.

Magicians learn each order and mode combination individually, so they tend to have a limited repertoire that they must use creatively. Mechanically this is represented by the custom spell system where you can build your own effect by adding increasing difficulty modifiers to the spellcasting roll in exchange for better range, duration, numerical values, secondary effects, etc.

Aside from the mingling of two or more casters' abilities which is absent here, this is a pretty good approximation of how Dragonlance's ambient magic works. Wild sorcery and mysticism are already divided up into neat little schools and spheres respectively, so all one would need to do is assign a list of modes to each to start porting the system over to the d20 ruleset of one's choice. You could even use the 3E Gold Rush port of Talislanta for a few more ideas on how to implement it- just whatever you do, do not follow its example and tie spellcasting to a skill roll like in that edition. That way lies brokenness.

What follows are a few of my ideas on how to implement this mashup.

My Take on Schools/Spheres

The school and sphere lists can remain unchanged from SAGA, unless you feel that some of them are too narrow and would be best combined. Likewise, Modes from Talislanta can stay the same. They are as follows:

Wild Sorcery Schools: Aeromancy, Cryomancy, Divination, Electromancy, Enchantment, Geomancy, Hydromancy, Pyromancy, Spectramancy, Summoning, Transmutation.

Mysticism Spheres: Animism, Alteration, Channeling, Healing, Meditation, Necromancy, Sensitivity, Spiritualism.

Magic Modes: Alter, Attack, Conjure, Defend, Heal, Illusion, Influence, Move, Reveal, Summon, Transform, Ward.

Next, match the most appropriate Modes with each School and Sphere according to their flavor text blurbs. Some are more obvious fits than others.

• Aeromancy: Can manipulate air to create anything from a breeze to a gale. Example spells include conjuring concealing fog, clouds of choking vapor, bubbles of air for underwater travel, or flying through the air. Very powerful aeromancers can even influence the weather.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Cryomancy: Considered by some to be a hybrid of aeromancy and hydromancy. Can manifest great cold and conjure large quantities of ice. Examples include creating walls of ice, freezing rivers solid, and freezing enemies in place with frostbite.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Divination: One of the most common schools of sorcery on Krynn, used to gain information about the world. Examples include detecting traps, seeing magical auras on objects, and divining the past or a potential future. Cannot be used to read the minds of others, because only mysticism directly affects living matter.
• Modes: Reveal (inanimate)
• Electromancy: The rather basic domain of good old fashioned lightning bolts, with a few extra ideas thrown in to make it less of a one-trick pony. Examples include producing static electricity to sting and annoy people, or using electricity to generate an aura of light for visibility.
• Modes: Attack, Illusion (light)
• Enchantment: A deceptively simple-sounding school that lets you do a wide range of beneficial things to objects. Examples include giving enhancement bonuses to weapons and armor, or enchanting a crystal on the end of one's staff to shed light, etc. Permanent enchantments are not possible with normal sorcery.
• Modes: Transform (inanimate, but you also gotta bend the rules a bunch for this one)
• Geomancy: Manipulation of the earth and everything that can be found within it. Examples include conjuring stone walls, creating quicksand, or controlling gems, crystals, and even alloys that have been worked by mortal hands like steel.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Hydromancy: Power over water, although presumably not the water that makes up over 60% of most humanoid bodies by weight. Examples include pulling up drinkable water in a desert, creating favorable currents during a sea voyage, and otherwise manipulating water in its liquid state; ice and steam are more the purview of cryomancers and aeromancers, respectively.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Pyromancy: Flame, dear flame. It's unclear if this controls only the chemical reaction of fire, or other forms of heat transfer as well. Examples include heating homes, damaging enemies, scaring away beasts, and creating elaborate fireworks shows.
• Modes: Attack, Move, Illusion (light)
• Spectramancy: The magic of light and how it can be perceived. Examples include making a basic light to see with as in electromancy and pyromancy, extinguishing light sources, changing the color of lights, as well as the more interesting implication of creating illusions of light and shadow. Tucked away in this school is the implied subschool of umbramancy, if you ask me.
• Modes: Illusion (light & shadow)
• Summoning: The art of folding space like a Dune navigator, used in such a way that it appears the sorcerer is teleporting people or objects from place to place or creating them from thin air. Can be combined with other schools to summon monsters from other planes, such as a summoner/pyromancer pulling fire elementals from the elemental plane of fire.
• Modes: Conjure (just pretend you're teleporting items from elsewhere), Move, Summon
• Transmutation: Alchemy in the classical sense of transmuting one form of matter into another. Examples include turning one type of metal into another (a la the classic lead to gold trick), or more radically turning one form of matter into a completely different state if the sorcerer has access to multiple schools. A transmuter/geomancer/aeromancer can turn that stone wall into a puff of fog, for example.
• Modes: Transform (inanimate)
• Animism: The sphere concerned with living things in the natural world. Examples include communicating with plants and animals, although not natural creatures with "magical powers"- the kinds of things later editions of D&D would term magical beasts, probably. It also doesn't affect creatures with a Reason score of 2 or more in SAGA, which I think you could map to the 3 or more Intelligence threshold for sapience in D&D.
• Modes: Influence (unintelligent creatures), Reveal (unintelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
• Alteration: Shapeshifting, plain and simple. Examples include transforming oneself into an animal or monster like a wyvern, or disguising oneself as a different person. Particularly powerful alterers (alterationists?) can shapechange other people, whether willing or as a baleful polymorph kind of effect, and they can even assume the exact appearance of a specific individual.
• Modes: Transform (animate)
• Channeling: An incredibly specific sphere of personal physical ability score buffs. Examples include making oneself very strong, or as nimble as a cat, even beyond one's normal limits (if those rules are in use). Cannot be used to affect another person's physical abilities.
• Modes: Alter (physical)
• Healing: Another very simple sphere focused on curative arts. Examples include healing wounds and curing disease, though there is no mention of reattaching limbs or raising the dead because like in Talislanta, some things are explicitly beyond the abilities of ambient magic. Somewhat uniquely, the only sphere to have a mishap mechanic whereby the caster loses extra spell points or even suffer damage if a damage-healing spell goes awry. This doesn't affect curing diseases, poisons, etc. however.
• Modes: Heal (can't reverse)
• Meditation: The mental counterpart to channeling's physical buffs, allowing one to increase one's mental abilities. Notably, improving one's casting stat does not grant bonus spell points, similar to how temporary spellcasting stat increases don't affect bonus spells per day in 3E and later editions of D&D.
• Modes: Alter (mental)
• Mentalism: Telepathy by another name, and the "intelligent creature" counterpart to animism's connection to plants and animals. Examples include projecting one's thoughts into another person's mind, reading another's thoughts or memories, changing or erasing memories, inducing hallucinations, or controlling another's mind outright if the mentalist is extremely powerful (and unscrupulous).
• Modes: Influence (intelligent creatures), Reveal (intelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
• Necromancy: The opposite to healing. Examples include wounding or outright killing enemies, draining their life, or reanimating corpses to become temporary undead. Mostly forbidden on Krynn, although ironically it's less capital-e Evil than most forms of necromancy in D&D because there's no involvement with evil deities or torturing a being's soul.
• Modes: Attack, Heal (only to reverse into Harm), Summon (corporeal undead)
• Sensitivity: Like the divination school of sorcery, but again focused on living things. Examples include sensing magical auras around creatures, determining if someone is under the influence of magic, reading their nature and demeanor, and feeling echoes of emotions well after the fact. Can't read thoughts like in mentalism, however.
• Modes: Reveal (emotions, character)
• Spiritualism: The spiritual counterpart to necromancy's physical death and decay, appropriately enough. Examples include communing with the dead, or calling spirits back from the dead to create temporary incorporeal undead like ghosts. Less scorned than necromancy, but arguably has the potential to be more harmful because of how it influences souls?
• Modes: Influence (spirits), Reveal, Summon (incorporeal undead)

Unlike in Talislanta where each discipline/mode combination has to be learned separately, here I've decided an ambient caster learns all spell modes when they acquire a school or sphere. They are not limited in the breadth of their magical ability, only the power of it. I think this is a fair change because unlike the disciplines of Talislanta, you just don't have that many modes per school here.

As I alluded to earlier, you can even mash a few of the more niche schools or spheres together if they feel too slight for someone to have to specialize in. For example, combine Channeling and Meditation into a single self-buffing 'Empowerment' sphere, or Animism and Mentalism into one 'Telepathy'. Likewise, maybe Electromancy could be folded into greater Aeromancy, or alternatively Pyromancy, since what is lightning but really fast sky fire?

From here you "only" have to figure out how the rest of spellcasting works, in the sense of how spell cost and spell difficulty are calculated. Just use Talislantan values if you're basing the system on that, or tweak them to be better suited to the math of your preferred D&D system. Caster level checks are a good starting point for that, if they exist. And speaking of spell cost...

My Take on Spell Power

One snag in this hackjob is that SAGA uses a spell point system, Talislanta lets you spam until you roll a bad mishap, D&D at large uses Vancian spell slots, and the Dragonlance books themselves do something completely different with regards to how much magic their casters can fire off in an arbitrary period of time. The first three are pretty self-explanatory, but the fourth might need some elaboration.

Keeping in mind that things and characters in Dragonlance are highly dependent upon the specific writer, what is often the case in the novels is that there is a physical component to spellcasters running low on magic juice. From clerics sweating and panting from the fervor of their prayers, to Raistlin up and keeling over like Elric before he got his clammy hands on Stormbringer, magic is a physically as well as metaphysically demanding practice in much of Dragonlance. From what I've read of the 5th Age (mostly Jean Rabe's goblin trilogy), that is true of primal sorcery and mysticism too.

That leads me to recommend a really weird thing as food for thought on the subject: this 3E rules variant of a rules variant that replaces spell slots with spell points, and then adds a spellcasting fatigue system on top of that.

Using the Vitalizing system, any caster who falls below 1/2 of their maximum spell points becomes Fatigued, and any who falls below 1/4th becomes Exhausted until they can rest to recover spell points as one would spell slots. But the reverse is also true; if a caster becomes Fatigued while at full spell points, they immediately drop to 1/2 until the Fatigued condition is removed. Likewise, someone who gets hit by Exhaustion plummets all the way down to 1/4th spell points until it's lifted.

You can probably add something similar to the spell point system found in the Player's Option: Spells & Magic supplement without too much fuss, if an AD&D version of the Age of the Mortals that never was is your goal.

If you go down some kind of spell points route (which I recommend for variable strength spells), this might be a cool thing to implement both for setting fidelity and to work (probably in vain) toward balancing casters somewhat. And speaking of casters as a discrete type of player character...

My Take on Classes

Talislanta and SAGA are classless, so in theory anybody can eventually pick up some magic if they have the ability for it. And I personally like that kind of system; it makes certain flexible characters in the stories far easier to realize than through most multiclassing (or gods forbid, dual classing) systems. Of course, classless is not a perfect fit if you're wanting to play an otherwise ordinary edition of D&D with more ambient magic-friendly rules plugged into it.

One way to go about this is to build full, homebrewed sorcerer and mystic classes. Which sounds a lot worse than it might be. Depending on the edition of D&D you're trying to use, that might be somewhat easy, or very convoluted.

Simplest might be to take the standard wizard and cleric chasses from AD&D or 3E, remove their default spellcasting, familiars, and/or domains and undead turning, and replace them with scaling school or sphere access as they level. Each might begin with 1 school/sphere plus extra for high casting stats, which would also influence bonus spell points. These would be Intelligence for sorcerers and Wisdom for mystics. I briefly considered Charisma for sorcerers like their 3E counterparts since there is some aspect of intuition or force of will that comes into play from my reading of things, but wild sorcery is also the kind of thing you can apparently teach in a traditional academic setting, if Palin Majere's Academy of Sorcery in Solace is anything to go by.

Additional schools/spheres may be acquired through leveling, perhaps with the aid of someone who already possesses that type of magic. How many schools/spheres should be attainable by max level depends on the kind of game you want to run, and the levels PCs are likely to reach; something tapping out at the midlevel range might best be suited for 3 or 4 schools/spheres max, but climbing up into the epic levels might justify near or total mastery of one's respective field of ambient magic.

... At this point out of a mix of brevity and spite I'm just going to call schools/spheres "scheres".

If you do create ambient spellcaster classes, might I recommend keeping the game limited to the decades when the gods were gone. Not because I like denying people the ability to play as the other classes, but because the added headache of managing all 4 types of spellcaster plus their various subclasses in a single shared setting feels like a little much to inflict on a DM.

If you're playing 3E or later editions, feats are another avenue for rewarding scheres. Maybe high-level knights, rangers, and other classes with partial spellcasting receive a free schere feat when they'd otherwise gain their first caster level. Or maybe it's keyed off of character level with certain other requirements so anybody can dabble in magic if they build toward it, preserving character class but divesting spellcasting from it.

I say 3E or later, but I'll be honest I don't know how to fit any of this into 4E, considering how different so many of its moving parts and powers in particular are. I'd love to see someone try and succeed, though.

Speaking of 4E, it might hold the secret to the other big, finnicky part of ambient magic...

The Question of Group Casting

Like most things, ambient magic is stronger when it's done cooperatively rather than alone. In SAGA this is presented through combined castings in which multiple practitioners of the same type of magic (i.e., no mixed parties of wild sorcerers and mystics) can pool their powers together to make a stronger effect that would normally be out of reach of any one of them. There are also coordinated castings, which are a bit more like a ritual involving non-casters who essentially use Aid Another on the main caster in order to assist them with their spell, which is generally easier and less ambitious than what you'd start a combined casting for.

The latter can be done fairly easily by just giving the caster a small bonus to their spellcasting check depending on the number of assistants, perhaps with a limit that scales with level. A novice sorcerer could only wrangle 1 or 2 ritual assistants at 1st level, but know how to effectively manage perhaps a dozen or more at high levels. Each participant offers them a +1 or some other small bonus to the roll.

The former has more possibilities. Maybe each additional caster involved in a combined casting increases the maximum level spell effect that one of them can cast, or everyone rolls a spellcasting check and the highest result is used, or they can divide an enormous spell point cost up amongst themselves evenly.

Or, you can take a page out of 4E's book and implement a system of elaborate Ritual magic that may or may not require appropriate schere access of all its participants. Unlike magic which is freeform, you might want to keep rituals limited to a specific list so the party can't absolutely rip the campaign in two- unless you want to make sure they have the tools to do just that.

In any of the above cases, I'd say required casting time is automatically longer or even the max time possible, to reflect the amount of time it takes to coordinate with others and set up a group casting/ritual. Unless you want a game in which spellcasters can completely break power scaling and use the rest of the party as nothing more than ambulatory batteries and buff bots, of course. Which, to be fair, is nothing foreign to D&D.

The Question of Armor

An incredibly specific thing I fixated on for about half the time I spent working on this post was the question of whether or not primal sorcerers should be allowed to wear armor. They're technically arcane spellcasters, but they have many differences from the robed wizard orders of the moons, not to mention the magic-users in many other D&D worlds. So it's not unreasonable that they might be able to wear armor, too. And this is true, to some extent, depending on which source you're reading.

Dragonlance 3E makes it clear that primal sorcerers are just regular old sorcerers, subject to all the same limitations. That means no armor proficiency to start, and Arcane Spell Failure % for any armor they do wear anyway. The SAGA system, meanwhile, is classless and ties many proficiencies to different ability codes. So as long as your sorcerer draws cards for a high enough Coordination and Physique, they can wear or wield pretty much anything in the game while casting magic (assuming they also got a high enough Intellect of course). Just to make sure that wasn't an oversight and there should be some kind of armor limitation, I trawled through dozens of sample NPCs until I found the Plainsman named Ironhawk, who is not only an accomplished ranger-type clad in leather armor, but also proficient in a school of sorcery (pyromancy) and a sphere of mysticism (animism).

Thank you, weirdly Rambo-looking indigenous dude.

The books, meanwhile...

Well, I haven't really read many of them, as my series on the Stone-Teller trilogy explains. But from a cursory glance over the (admittedly sparse) Dragonlance wiki, it feels to me like most wild sorcerers conform to the unarmored stereotype, but it isn't necessarily enforced in-universe. One big exception is the formerly Takhisian Knights of the Thorn, who often wear the same plate armor as their nonmagical knightly fellows. Ultimately it's up to you whether your game's sorcerers should be wearing more than a tunic or not, but I think they could get by with at least light/leather armor, or at least not suffer any outsized penalties for wearing it if they acquired proficiency through multiclassing or the like.

Mystics, on the other hand, are depicted as being able to wear many kinds of armor like their clerical counterparts across much Dragonlance media, though sometimes it stops at medium armor before they break out the full plate, as in 3E.

At least one question in all of this has a simple answer!

The One Where Furt Reads a Second Dragonlance Novel in as Many Years to Quell the Gnashing Anxiety in the Back of His Head and Then Ends up Summarizing it Again

Late last year I wrote at length about my experiences trying to read a book for the first time in ages. In typical Furtive fashion I laid bare all my worries and neuroses and then just did a bunch of word-vomit about a thing that interests me.

This time, I've decided there's going to be a 'this time', and it's going to have less of the former but just as much of the latter. Because I'm invested in Jean Rabe's Stonetellers trilogy now, and I feel compelled to see it through to the end. Plus this year has been unnerving in the extreme, and I could use another distraction from my slowly growing age and shrinking bank balance.

At the time of publication we've just finished our two weeks of real autumn before all the leaves die and a long, damp pre-winter settles in. Something about the wind and the leaves reminds me of the schoolyear, which invariably leads to a series of panic attacks as I think back to that period of my life.

Can homework legitimately trigger PTSD? Asking for a me.

Another thing that this time of year fills me with is brief moments of swelling inspiration to do... something? Anything? Oftentimes the urge takes the form of something vaguely scholastic, like reading or writing or discussing a topic with passionate others. It echoes back to the feeling of walking my high school or college campuses in the rare moments when I wasn't quite so rushed or scared and I could imagine what a better being in my shoes would have accomplished by now. 

I don't know why I get these moments, but I've experienced them for a long time. I think it comes down to some deep subconscious association from my youth. When the light hits the trees just right and I look out over the admittedly beautiful land that the Hudson River School romanticized and propagandized so effectively from a place just across the creek from me, I feel it. I get it. I am consumed by that licentious poison of the soul that we call the sublime, and I am moved to propagate or harness the feeling in some way. It's like somebody's beaming one of those silly academia aesthetic playlists directly into my lizard brain.

Invariably, the feeling deflates a second later as I remember why I can't do anything smart or academic or vaguely gesturing toward the notion of personal growth or learning because of reasons X, Y, and Z.

But this time I remembered my incredibly low-stakes struggle with these books, and where I left off.

... I said there would be less neurosis this time, didn't I?

-

To simplify greatly, the first book in the series, The Rebellion, is about a group of enslaved goblin miners on the Dragonlance world of Krynn who rise up against their Dark Knight masters during a massive earthquake. They then endure the volcanic brutality of the Khalkist Mountains of Neraka, the world capital of Evil. They are led through much fiery death and bloody dismemberment by the begrudging hobgoblin foreman Direfang and the auguries of the self-interested geomantic shaman Mudwort. Along the way they team up with (and enslave) some of the knights who enslaved them, most notably the half-elf wizard Grallik N'sera.

The ragtag bunch survives long enough to stumble into the ruins of Godshome, where most of the gods of Krynn once schmoozed together with their followers before they punished the many for the sins of the few and nuked the planet from orbit. Here, Mudwort and the other Stonetellers of the goblin refugee army scried the entirety of the continent of Ansalon and glimpsed a prospective home for a new goblin nation far away in the forests of Qualinesti. They then set off on the long road south, unwittingly leaving behind them the still-warm corpse of Moon-eye, the first of many goblins about to get shanked in the back as power-hungry clan leaders throughout the army plot Direfang's overthrow.

Simple, right?

The sequel, Death March, focuses on that grueling journey southwest to Qualinesti, and all the challenges and intrigues the goblins are sure to face along the way.

It's also pretty metal as far as DL covers go.

Speaking of Qualinesti, I want to touch on something that I don't think I gave enough attention to at the end of my first post.

The Rebellion began somewhere in Neraka, close to the city of Jelek that actually gets placed on maps on occasion. The exact location of Godshome changes from map to map over the years, but we can confidently say it's within the same neck of the woods. So let's say they ended the book somewhere within this area, using an excerpt from the map that appears in the 1992 Tales of the Lance boxed set that happens to be pretty detailed and accessible.

At the beginning of the book the goblin refugee column is over 1,000 strong. By the end, through a combination of attrition and smaller bands splitting off from the main body, that number is reduced to less than 500. Let's zoom out a little, and see how much farther they have to go with those numbers.

As you can see here, the refugees have quite a ways to go before they reach the-

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't zoom out far enough. Silly me.

There we go.

They've lost over half their number traveling less than 50 miles of what is conservatively a 400+ mile journey, and that's if you measure in a straight line as the crow flies, through some of the most hostile territories on the planet. If things keep going at this rate, these folks are screwed!

I mean, obviously not entirely screwed since there is a third book in the series and I'm pretty sure I saw trees on the cover when I downloaded an image of it. But I still don't have high hopes for anyone besides the named protagonists reaching their destination- heck, not even that will save them, considering how quickly the list of named goblins got chewed through in the first book.

I guess we shall see. Let's get this show on the road.

Let's Dig Into: ArcticMUD

Since my late teens or early twenties, I've looked at text-based video games with a curiosity born of novelty. I was too young to play text-based adventure games during their heyday, so the idea of manually typing out your character's actions was always a strange one to me. It was like some lost artifact of a bygone era, so obscured by layers of electronic sediment that it wasn't even preserved in pop-culture's folk memory of what old school video games were like, what with all the beeps, chirps, joysticks, high scores and such.

Some of the first text-based games were mixes of exploration, puzzle-solving, wry humor, and occasionally bizarre logic, like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure from the 1970s. They helped birth the adventure game and RPG genres, and their influence continues to be felt to this day, both in the inherited tropes and language of gameplay and in the continuous reference to old early memes like the Grue that have never fully died out in nerd culture.

Multi-User Dungeons/Dimensions/Domains/Detcetera (MUDs for short) are a multiplayer genre of text-based games that branched off from their single-player ancestors in the 1980s when enough nerds who weren't busy playing chess or Roguelikes got together and figured out how to use their college campuses' computer networks for video games. A MUD is basically a series of self-contained rooms that players can guide their avatars through independently of one another, each populated with its own NPCs, tasks, interactive objects, or flavor text. Under the hood, the game world is just a disjointed series of flowcharts, but with care and craft it can be presented as an engrossing, living world that knows how to get your imagination going.

MUDs started off limited to whoever was on a given internal network at an institution, but with the emergence of the Internet they began to catch on wherever someone could afford both a connection and a personal computer. MUDs were, in essence, the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, depending on how strictly you define the word "massively"; dozens, even hundreds of users could be logged onto a MUD at a time, depending on how popular and stable the server was.

MUDs exploded in scope as their popularity grew. The first few were Tolkienesque fantasy or science-fiction in theme, but others soon came along that delved into horror, Westerns, film noir, post-apocalypse, erotica, and just about any other genre people experiment with when a new medium of artistic expression comes along. Many MUDs hosted user-generated content as well, which gave a game's fanbase real influence over the thing they shared an interest in. That bit might be the sharpest differentiation between old MUDs and modern MMOs, because rather than being a customer or consumer of the game, you were often a collaborator with it.

Countless ephemeral clones and spin-offs were born and died according to the whims of fate, community fracture, and occasional license disputes. The '80s and early '90s were a crucible of MUD creativity that is in many ways forever lost to those of us who didn't live to experience it firsthand: like pieces of tectonic plate subducted into the mantle and melted down to their base elements, most of these early games are for all intents and purposes gone forever, but little pieces of them exist everywhere in the bedrock and bones of online communities and gaming culture.

I've dabbled in a handful of MUDs over the years. Most of them were LotR- or D&D-inspired, as well as one Discworld-themed game I could never figure out how to finish character creation in. What they all have in common is that they stood the test of time long enough to appear on my radar, which means 20 or even 30 years in operation. Usually I'd either fail to get very far, or get into the groove until I ran out of easily accessible content to experience before one of the semi-regular server wipes hit, at which point I'd move on. Many of the MUDs I've played owe their existence and rhythms of gameplay to one particular MUD that had an outsized influence among its contemporaries: DikuMUD.

Diku, named for the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen where it was created in 1991, is in many ways the archetypal hack-and-slash MUD. You crawl through dungeons fighting monsters and collecting loot, with or without a party of friends, and it have stats, mechanics, and combat inspired by D&D, although technically the game uses a d100 behind the scenes. Diku was a massive inspiration for 1999's EverQuest, which some of the designers including Brad McQuaid played. It was so inspiring in fact, that there was a brief legal kerfuffle where the folks at Verant/Sony had to swear they didn't outright steal some of Diku's code.

The DikuMUD spinoff I'll be writing about today is ArcticMUD, a 1992 community project based on AD&D and in the Dragonlance setting. I played it fairly regularly between Summer 2022 and Winter 2023 the same way I play most MMOs: solo, and very poorly.

ArcticMUD starts with character creation, which is heavily but not completely based on character creation in AD&D tabletop. You choose from a surprisingly robust roster of species and classes, from kender and minotaurs to dark knights and scouts. Naturally, I rolled a goblin shaman self-insert named Furt.

You also pick your character's alignment, which is slightly different from the classic 9-point spectrum from tabletop. The game accounts for some amount of nuance and variance within the classic alignments, so Lawful Neutral and Neutral Lawful are separate options you can select, for example. I thought I was going cross-eyed the first time I read that. Alignment is limited by class and species, although not to the same extent as some other MUDs, so I considered myself lucky to get away with a Neutral alignment as a goblin. Better off grillpilled than chugging the Takhisis Kool-Aid, I suppose.

Unlike in AD&D, you don't roll your ability scores at character generation. Sure, the game rolls them behind the scenes, but the results are hidden from you at creation in order to discourage people from spending hours rolling and rerolling for the optimal stat array like some of us have done with the first few Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale games. You have to spend a bit of time playing and getting invested in the character before you can drink a potion that gives you full knowledge of yourself and all your stats.

I was a weirdly slim-buff gobbo.

Arctic actually hides a lot of the inner workings of the game from you. You rarely see a die rolled or referenced in-game, unless you do something like successfully identify a magical weapon at the shop, in which case you'll see the damage range but that's it. You aren't given a clear idea of your AC, saves, or really any statistic beyond the HP and Vitality points displayed down in the corner at all times. You are given even less information for NPCs and monsters, forcing you to approach potential challenges cautiously and with /consideration like in old school EverQuest. You don't even know for sure what your own variable spell effects are, which makes prepping them Fun™.

This constant, deliberate obfuscation of mechanics is part of the game's design philosophy, believe it or not. The designers don't want you to attain full knowledge and mastery of the game or its systems. They want you to always be in a state of guessing, whether those guesses are educated or truly blind. They want players new and old alike to have to feel their way through everything organically and authentically, like the entire game is under an aggressively enforced spoiler warning. They go so far as to delete posts on the forums that reveal too much about the game or one of its secrets- or at least, they did before they deleted the forums entirely a little while ago, apparently because the mods couldn't keep up with the number of spam bots flooding the place. The wiki and other officially-sanctioned gameplay guides are similarly sparse on details.

Assuming something does leak out and become common knowledge, even just through in-game player word-of-mouth, that thing won't stay the same for very long. Arctic does a yearly server wipe in which all characters are deleted, like many MUDs do to prevent too many characters accumulating at the very top of the game's content and ruining the ecosystem. Years before Diablo II was doing seasonal ladders, MUDs were coming up with their own multiplayer refresh mechanics.

But Arctic takes it a step farther by remixing pieces of itself with every wipe, changing small aspects like how a quest works or where to find a particular item. When I started playing for example, one wing of a low-level dungeon commonly recommended to newbies was completely sealed off and inaccessible, meaning I had to go elsewhere while it was under construction. This significantly altered the roadmap of my early playing experience, and pushed me into different areas at weird times.

I've never seen anything quite like this before or since playing Arctic. The game is in a state of perpetual New Game Plus, by and for the small handful of regular users who still play the game after 32 years in operation. The tiny trickle of tourists and new players like myself are expected to just kind of go along with it, or perhaps we're not really considered at all. It's a certain kind of charming to me, I suppose.

Gameplay begins with your newly-created character zipping down from the heavens into a city of your choosing, which for newbies is usually the town of Solace, forever frozen in time immediately before the events of Dragons of Autumn Twilight. The game has a day/night cycle, but technically it's always the morning before the imperfect reunion of the Companions. You can even find Tanis Half-Elven moping around in the Inn of the Last Home, while Tika serves up some drinks and Otik's spiced potatoes nearby.

You're walked through a brief tutorial by an NPC who teaches you the basics of the game and guides you through Solace. Solace is a city that really needs a guide, even after the first few levels, because it is a very vertical and sometimes disorienting starting city, replete with multi-level vallenwood tree buildings and aerial walkways between them. I almost always had a .png of the official site's map up in the background while I was playing. After you've gotten your bearings as well as you can, you're encouraged to head down to the dump where you can muck about in the sewers for your first few levels killing vermin, but otherwise the game takes its hands off and leaves you to get lost in the world.

And it is a dang big world to get lost in. Huge areas of the continent of Ansalon have been rendered in-game, and I can only say that they didn't recreate the entire world because I couldn't personally reach every area during my relatively brief time with the game. You can spend hours wandering in any direction, and you're bound to run into towns and dungeons (as well as a few maddening dead ends or loops) along the way. You don't have to hoof it everywhere, though: an all-terrain caravan added in one of the content updates in 2004 regularly makes the rounds through every major city in the world for a reasonable fare. There are many ferries connecting the coastal and riverine areas of the world, too. It's faster than walking, and safer. As long as you don't say anything about the upholstery.

I read this just as we hit some rapids and I thought I was
being transported straight into "The Most Dangerous Game".

My personal journey saw me wandering around in the forest beyond Solace once I outgrew the sewers a few levels in. Mostly animals and a few of my larger cousins turned to banditry could be found out there, as well as some very random touches of personality that the game threw in. For example, every sign that isn't a big official road sign between cities tries to simulate the scrawl of an inexpert hand by using mixed caps, which leads to warnings like this:

I can't not read this in the mocking Spongebob meme voice.

Other times, looking more closely at a bit of wildlife will reward you with a surprisingly competent bit of ASCII artwork in a game that is otherwise completely devoid of visuals.

After I wandered too far out and got overwhelmed a few times, I made my way back to Solace and ground the sewers again until I made up my loss of XP and gear, which gets left behind on your corpse when you die, also very EQ-style. It was around this time that I actually met another living soul.

Sure, I'd seen a handful of other players in town or in the /who list, but up to this point I'd never interacted with any of them. They were all seasoned veterans doing their own circles and their own things by my guess, and even though there's a chat channel specifically designed for them to help newbies out, I felt too intimidated to approach.

But eventually at the surprisingly easy-to-reach level of 16, someone named Hippy reached out to me in PMs. They asked me what I was up to and inadvertently offered some good advice when they found out I was new. Turns out I was playing my class all wrong. Shocking, I know!

Or maybe you could be generous and say I was playing hardmode. To start off, my alignment put me at a disadvantage. You get more XP for killing creatures of your opposite alignment, because character alignment is mostly expressed through violence and magic in this game. Being neutral, my goblin was essentially running around with a permanent XP gain penalty compared to everybody else... also a lot like EQ. Wow, learning that tidbit really opened my eyes to a lot of things here.

I don't really begrudge that part, though. I couldn't start off good as a goblin, but I wouldn't have wanted to go evil either. Especially once I learned that a lot of what constitutes evil character XP grinding is just slaughtering townsfolk wholesale.

Butchering them into meat was just for fun, apparently.

The other major inefficiency was in my loadout.

Up to this point I had been spending all of my steel coins on whatever weapons and armor I could afford off of either basic vendors or the shared market auction house style thing which I currently forget the name of. Sometimes I'd live long enough to turn a profit on those pieces and sell them in favor of upgrades, but usually I'd lose them from death or forgetting to repair.

Shamans don't need weapons, though. They can make their own, as the other player explained. I was aware of the Bone Shape spell they were talking about, which creates a club, staff, bow, or arrows out of the bones of a slain creature (even if the creature doesn't have bones, amusingly). But because of the paucity of details given by spell descriptions and the very low level I had tried the spell at, I assumed that the weapons created by the spell were low-damage and completely nonmagical; weapons of last resort to be quickly replaced by 'real' weapons.

I was very wrong. The weapons made from Bone Shape scale with caster level, and actually outclassed anything I could buy with my half-empty wallet. What's more, the weapons' power stacks with the Ancestral Blessing spell that buffs a weapon with scaling hit rate, saving throw and healing bonuses, and a chance to make extra attacks every swing. In essence I had an uber-Shillelagh sitting in my back pocket at all times, and all I needed to cast it was to have a dead centipede handy. This was on top of a plethora of other self-buff spells I hadn't been taking full advantage of, because I was spending most of my memorization slots on healing and status effect cure spells for when my weakness inevitably caused a fight to drag on too long.

This was that moment of mechanical satisfaction that I was waiting for. The synergy hit, and what followed was one heck of a dopamine rush. Which is ironic, because I can't write any accurate description of my next few levels of gameplay in a way that doesn't come off as incredibly boring and grindy.

What I did was make my way into the higher-level dungeon located in Solace; a burned-down school filled with the restless ghosts of the students and teachers who died there, only visible and hittable with the aid of magic items or spell effects- spells my shaman just so happened to have, but which I couldn't really do much with before I had the DPS for the task.

So I started clearing out the rooms of the school again, and again, and again, wielding nothing but a centipede bone staff and presumably wearing only a loincloth, because I began selling every single piece of armor that I could. Once I was finished whacking ghosts and nuking the area's unique enemies (a renegade mage, a pit fiend, and the wraith of the man who caused the whole mess) with a health-leeching spirit blast, I went back to central Solace to deposit all my earnings and occasionally check in with the eccentric shaman class teacher Foghorn for a shot at spell and skill upgrades.

You don't lose money that you have set aside in the bank, and so that's what I began to judge my true success by: an ever-growing bank account that I could eventually invest into something meaningful and more permanent once I reached a high-enough level.

Once I had outleveled the school I struck out west into the wilderness, skirting a lake until I reached an old copper mine filled with kobolds, myconids, rats, giant crawdads, a giant snake, an owlbear, and a very deadly giant spider at the bottom of a hundreds-of-feet-deep pit of no return that is frustratingly easy to accidentally walk off when your mental map of the area is just 1 room off. There I got used to the new rhythms and finally started to use scrolls of recall to cut down on travel, before settling into the grind all over again and soon surpassing 20th level, at which point I began acquiring a secondary advancement resource called Rank Points, used to purchase small permanent boosts separate from character level, yet again like in later expansions of EQ.

In essence I turned a party-centered game about socialization and exploration into the least compelling elements of a roguelite mixed with a dash of sigma grindset.

Yet I was having fun, and every level where I didn't fail my rolls to learn new spells, I gained new tricks that made my cup runeth over with options from moment-to-moment in combat. On top of all of my self-buffs and curses, my shaman could also hex a target, cause fear, enter a berserk rage like a miniature barbarian (pun intended), and bind the spirits of slain foes to myself or my weapon as combat minions/buffs. The only thing that stopped me in combat was my ability to type fast enough.

Which did become a legitimate issue for me, later on.

After a certain point, combat on a caster has so many moving parts, and can involve as many as a dozen participants at once, depending on the dungeon. When this happens the text scrolls very, very quickly and it was easy for me to miss important details like what had died, when a buff ran out, or what special attack an enemy just used. I would often try to cast a healing spell only to realize I had been sitting on my butt for the past few rounds after someone roundhouse kicked me off my feet. And then when I did stand upright again, I'd lose another precious few seconds misspelling the spell shortcut.

The game does have an answer for this, but it's not something I ever brought myself to use.

In most modern programs that run MUDs, there are options to create aliases, highlights, substitutes, and triggers. These are tools to allow you to navigate and respond to the game easier and faster, such as by condensing long typed lines of text into very short macro commands, highlighting or changing the language of important notifications, or just outright automating certain parts of the game by setting the program to run background commands that activate when X event happens.

It's enormously useful for standing up when you're knocked down, resting and preparing spells, and doing busywork like looting corpses after battle. And as long as you're not completely automating your character or turning them into something like a healbot, you don't run afoul of any of Arctic's policies. But it's a hell of a lot of coding for a tourist like me, so I never committed to it, and eventually that led to me hitting a skill ceiling of sorts, where if a battle was too hectic I just couldn't keep up and only pulled through thanks to lucky crits.

I wonder if combat was easier back in the '90s when everyone had dialup and you had more time to think in between ticks?

I also had a few unpleasant run-ins with people who did use all those commands, or at least that's what it looked like to me. Arctic is a server with PvP enabled, although you're discouraged from using it to grief specific players. But out in the world you're always vulnerable to attack from other players, and I was PK'd a few times during a run. Invariably, what would happen was I'd be engaged with a monster when the other person or party entered the room, evaporated me and everything else in the room into a red mist with AoE spells and crushing melee attacks, rapidly looted anything of value, and then moved to the next room like a tornado of death and avarice. Within 10 seconds I'd go from having a handle on a slow, tedious fight to sitting on the menu screen wondering how I'll pay off the new XP debt.

That would usually kill my motivation to pick back up where I'd been, and revenge was as impossible as it was undesirable, so I took frequent breaks and then went off in some other direction instead. I took advantage of the transportation system to find some of the more far-flung areas where I would be the only player-controlled soul for miles. I wandered the Plains of Dust in the shadow of Icewall Glacier, got extremely lost in some mountains, ran from trolls in Thorbardin, visited Pax Therax and other locations from the trilogy, undertook a vision quest with a Qué-Shu shaman, discovered tiny out-of-the-way hamlets that probably exist in one of the other hundreds of Dragonlance novels, and even stumbled upon a war crime or two.

I no longer feel so bad about the kender-skin sofas.

Eventually my wandering in search of secrets stranded me far from home with little to show for it, though I probably could have paid my way back to someplace more familiar thanks to the weirdly globally-connected banking system Krynn has in this game. But by that time it was getting late in the year, and the server wipe was on the way.

Nothing, not your bank account, character, or rank abilities, survive the great reset, so I was faced with the prospect of restarting from scratch, or not at all. I took a lengthy break and picked back up early in 2023, at which point I was able to smooth out my early leveling experience considerably using all that I had learned the first time around- and I finally got to access that part of the sewers that I'd been barred from entering. But I was still enough of a noob to forget that part of the Inn of the Last Home is an anti-magic safe area, so I spent a good fifteen minutes fizzling my hunger spell while angrily shouting "SATIATE!" at the wall- which is weirdly true to life when lunch rolls around and I don't want to spend so much time and effort feeding this carcass of mine.

I ended up focusing on Bridgetown for much of that year though, so I played little beyond that, and in time another wipe came. I've yet to partake in 2024.

I don't know if I'd recommend ArcticMUD to anyone who isn't already pretty into MUDs in general, which I imagine is a pretty small segment of people who read these posts. But my time with it has been entertaining so far, and if you are interested I'd recommend jumping in during one of the occasional special events that they host throughout the year, which often involves unique quests or bonuses to XP and other stuff. Sometimes they're purely focused on in-game lore, other times they commemorate real life events in some way.

Hey, maybe monarchs are good for something!

The One Where Furt Tries to Overcome His Crippling Fear of Reading With the Help of a C-Tier Dragonlance Novel and Then Just Ends up Summarizing the Whole Thing

Longtime readers might know that I'm a bundle of anxieties masquerading as a sapient being. Somewhat counterproductively, these anxieties dominate a major facet of my chosen hobby and (if I'm being extremely generous to myself) career path:

I get so upset and agitated sitting and reading long-form text that I would almost call it a phobia.

The feelings that gradually run through me when I try to read something longer than a Wikipedia article in one sitting are a pretty weird mix of issues, most of them probably unrelated in origin, but I can't say that confidently.

The oldest feeling I've always had, ever since I was little, is an excruciating awareness that I am reading something. Within a few minutes of sitting down and trying to focus, I begin to grow restless. My arms get tired from holding up their own weight (and the added weight of the book), or my neck aches from looking down at my desk or lap. My eyes jump and reread the same lines over and over, but even so, my reading comprehension plummets and I find myself forgetting what I read just a few pages or paragraphs ago. This, coupled with the fact that I read as fast or slightly slower than my speaking voice, means I slow to a crawl.

Next I begin to hear the creaking of my joints, and feel the churning of my organs. My breathing is never automatic while I'm awake; I don't know if it's some kind of daytime apnea or what. But here it's soon joined by the sensation that I need to remind myself to blink or swallow, or an awareness of the feeling of my tongue in my mouth and the smell of the inside of my own nose.

Next, as the minutes tick past, comes the guilt. Despite my lack of social media presence I am one of those "terminally online" people. I have far more important personal connections over the internet than face-to-face, and I want to be clear that that part is okay. That's a reality that a lot of people live with this weird, disconnected society that we have in this technologically fortunate corner of the globe that me and statistically most of my audience occupy.

But where it turns into a problem is the way I respond to that reality. By divorcing myself from a screen for so long, or even just looking at a different screen in the case of using an e-reader, I feel as though I'm selfishly disconnecting and shutting myself off from other people who might want or need me- and considering how agitated I get trying to read, I begin to ask myself "for what possible benefit?"

Finally, way back somewhere in my reptile brain, there's always that tickle of existential pain.

Language is two or more unique meat-computers cobbling together a facsimile of mutual understanding through the use of noises that carry with them multiple layers of abstracted meaning. The speaker's brain thinks a thing, then tries to break those thoughts down into constituent parts, then tries to match those parts to words that they then speak to the listener's brain. The listener's brain then receives those words and—shared vocabulary willing—tries to reconstruct the first brain's meaning using its own separate set of building-block connotations between those same noises and the meaning attached to each, which are created through that second brain's fundamentally different lived experience from the first.

If two people are talking about a tree, then there are actually three entirely different trees present: the tree in the speaker's imagination, the tree as it is capable of being rendered in human speech, and the tree in the listener's imagination. And that's the way it has to be. Barring the invention of technology that allows people to accurately and directly beam their thoughts to one another, no one will ever know exactly what another person means. The same goes for art, music, and every other form of expression that tries to communicate the concept of a tree, or infinitely more complex ideas like emotions.

Most people who learn about this concept will make peace with the fact that it's weird, but it is what it is. Or maybe they'll exult in the miracle of language and the amazing humanoid achievements suggested by the fact that we are able to cooperate and communicate at all like this. I was first introduced to the idea by Innuendo Studio's examination of Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide, which takes it in stride while diving into semiotics, death of the author, and other stuff like that.

I do not take it in stride. I find the idea painful to deal with. I hate knowing that my interpretation of a story is 'wrong'. It reminds me of how flimsy and subjective our ideas of meaning are, and from there I typically spiral into obsessing over how by extension we are as unreal and invalid as the contents of a book. Then I usually settle into desperately willing the universe to conjure up a bubble of false vacuum decay and please just end it all already.

Keep in mind, this is all happening while I'm trying to read through a breakfast scene in a fricking Redwall book.

So yeah. I have some hang-ups about reading books, and my resulting avoidance of the medium has shaped my life enormously, in ways that I know and probably don't know. As a kid I always felt like I was nerding "wrong" by not being the bookworm or comic book geek. As I've grown older I've started to lament the hypothetical worthwhile experiences I could have had but never did. I'd say the last time I read an entire book purely for my own enjoyment separate from schoolwork was sometime during senior year in high school.

Visual media like shows and video games played a far bigger role in my development, and online gaming had a direct hand in making the creature that I am today. I opt for adaptations of books because even when they flop or grossly conflict with how most people interpret the text, they at least give me someone else's interpretation of the world to replace my own with, and that feels somehow more legitimate and permissible than my own. More official.

This doesn't sit well with me. I know I'm missing out, and it diminishes my enjoyment of other media by proxy. But usually I just avoid the issue entirely. Very rarely, I'll make a half-measure like listening to audiobooks. Sometimes I'll even finish them, but more often than not the extra voices become too distracting for someone who basically lives inside of a Skype call.

Every few years I do take a crack at "real" reading, but it usually only lasts a few pages before I fall off again. I never found a way to incentivize myself to finish a book.

Until now.

Because now, I've had an idea. If I can make myself accountable to an external party, such as you fine Burrowers (and the bots that inflate my site traffic), then I am that much more likely to follow through with the task. Because otherwise, I don't even have a finished story to relay here, and the post will remain an unfinished draft mocking me from my dashboard each and every day.

I realize that trying to outweigh the pressure of reading by using the pressure of not reading and therefore squandering a blog post I've already started writing is maybe not the healthiest technique. But it's the best plan I've had in a while, so I'm going to give it a shot.

Of course the plan isn't perfect. I can't just start reading anything under artificial duress. I still need it to be something that I have an interest in. Preferably, it's something that I also already have some familiarity with, so that I have an experiential base for my imagination to draw upon. Finally, it should be something bland, low-stakes, and utterly inconsequential to the real world and humanity's place within it.

I know just the thing!

I tease, I tease.

While I've gone on record as saying that Dragonlance is kind of past its prime as an IP (and especially as a moneymaker for its owners), I don't actually dislike it all that much. Like many kids, the original Dragonlance trilogy was one of my first experiences reading through a huge, high fantasy setting- I didn't get around to the LotR books until after high school, and when I did they were in the form of the admittedly wonderful audiobooks by Phil Dragash.

The series' central themes of faith and the balance between good and evil feel increasingly stupid to me the older I get, but the world of Krynn still holds a quaint charm for me, the way you might like certain parts of a mostly cringey '80s cartoon. The huge history always meant that there was something of passing interest to me somewhere, somewhen. It was also the closest thing to a culturally diverse fantasy series that I experienced for a long time, what with its prominent protagonists of vaguely Native American and Black inspiration- although you wouldn't know that from looking at the cover art that makes most of them white.

I really should read Earthsea someday.

Also for some reason I still think it's so cool that Krynn's major continent is in its southern hemisphere, with all the changes to geography and climate that entails? I'm sure fiction writers have been using that trope for a hundred years or more, but these books were what opened my tiny whelpling mind to the fact that you could do something like that and I just think that's neat.

Anyway, yes. I have chosen to read a Dragonlance novel for this little project of mine.

Next, I have to choose which one. Which you might think would be the bigger challenge, given that there are over 200 books in the series, spread across dozens of trilogies, anthologies, sagas, etc., all written by different authors with different abilities and areas of focus. And it's not like my past reading narrows the list down much- I read the original trilogy, the finale/reboot Dragons of Summer Flame, and one book in the Ergoth series. I've never even read the Twins series that is, as I've learned during research for this post, one half of the "Holy Six" that everyone recommends starting their Dragonlance journey with.

But this is one area where my brand of one-trick-ponyism comes in mighty handy.

I'm not even sure which of the 200+ Dragonlance novels this entry is, because every publication list I looked at online gave different numbers depending on which modules or anthologies they included or excluded from the lineup. The Rebellion could be the 140th in the series, or the 152nd, or the 182nd. Suffice it to say it's pretty high up there.

The Stonetellers series is a trilogy set during the latest era of the Dragonlance timeline, the Age of Mortals that started in the wake of the gods' war against their dad (or maybe uncle?) Chaos. Chaos was trapped inside a rock for eons and then decided to erase the gods and their entire world as payback. Obviously he failed, but the whole ordeal combined with the goddess Takhisis' unceasing machinations led to a pretty serious shakeup of the status quo. I talked more about the magical consequences of this in my recent 3E OdditE post about Ambient Tempests.

In hindsight this move was pretty clearly meant by TSR to set Dragonlance up for a new series of books with new protagonists and new challenges (as well as to market the new spin-off RPG using the SAGA system) that ended up not performing so well. The huge changes to the setting split the fanbase, and after a few years the entire story arc was revealed to have been a deception by Takhisis, with the world returning to something closer to what it was beforehand. I see it as a hasty rewrite from corporate to try and course-correct, but I have no evidence for that.

In the aftermath of all that mess, a plethora of Age of Mortals books has released that explore the less well-known parts of the world, far and away from the entrenched protagonist families that became central in the Summer Flame era. You can probably make a comparison here to how liberating or refreshing it is to read a Star Wars Expanded Universe novel that isn't about a Skywalker or a Solo, but of course I've never read any of those either.

The first installment in the Stonetellers series is, as the image above suggests, The Rebellion. In it, a group of goblin slaves find an opportunity to cast off their chains and seize some measure of justice and self-determination after their people have been unrelentingly shat upon for the better part of thousands of years. That is the extent of my knowledge of the book so far, but it's enough to entice me.

Goblins occupy an interesting position in Dragonlance, if you'll allow me to use 'interesting' as a synonym for 'pathetic' for a moment. They typically exist as another species of mooks to be bossed around by bigger and meaner villains, and hobgoblins essentially replace orcs, who are not native to the planet Krynn. But draconians do much of the same- and corrupted dragon people raised from eggs to be Spartanesque soldiers and perfect minions of evil are a touch more compelling and visually exciting than "D&D goblins, again". So goblins have almost always been backup minion fodder on Krynn when the Dragonlords and evil clerics don't have better folks under their employ- a pretty ignominious position to be in.

There are exceptions here and there, like the peaceful and "civilized" Ergothian goblin province of Sikk'et Hul, or the weirdly Blackadder-esque story dedicated to the grotesque but comically lucky little hobgoblin despot, Lord Toede. But those instances are rare and often unserious, so I was surprised to find that someone wrote an entire and sincere trilogy about them. Or at least I'm assuming it's serious- I haven't started reading yet.

Jean Rabe, the author, has a somewhat soured reputation among at least one vocal part of the Dragonlance fanbase. Her Dragons of the New Age trilogy was the one that carried the Age of Mortals forward with all its radical alterations, and some of the onus of things being too different and bad is placed upon her writing, or even her personally. In her defense I will say that the changes technically began with Summer Flame, even if it was originally intended by Weis and Hickman to be the Dragonlance finale. Other than that I don't know a thing about her, but she's the first Dragonlance author I've seen write about goblins this way, so I'm going to give her the benefit of a doubt.

It occurs to me that I've been infodumping a lot here to put off actually reading. That stops now.

I am going to make use of my first-ever jump break to mark my first-ever intrapostal time skip for whatever this nightmare is turning into, because I know it will be longwinded. What follows will be my "live" commentary as I work through the book in chunks.

3E OdditE: Ambient Tempest (Bestiary of Krynn, 2004)

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Dragonlance has a weird relationship with the larger body of 3E material, as well as the audience who engages with it. WotC owned the license throughout the entirety of the edition, but after one of many legal back-and-forths they handed the actual work of writing and publishing Dragonlance books off to Sovereign Press, the printing company owned by Dragonlance cocreator Margaret Weis.

Because of that technically-officially-licensed-yet-also-3rd-party status, all of the 3E Dragonlance books are in a weird limbo when it comes to whether people consider them "core" or not. You rarely ever see material from them referenced alongside other splatbooks on forums and in character build handbooks. Even other settings like Eberron were talked about far more often in similar contexts, although part of that was probably thanks to differences in sales and plain old popularity. This was the early-to-mid 2000s, and Dragonlance was no longer the same hot young IP it was in the 1980s.

As a result, I regularly learn about whole new classes, spells, and feats that I've never even heard of before cracking open one of the old Dragonlance campaign setting books for the first time. It's always a fun discovery, no matter how bland or broken or just plain weird the thing in question happens to be.

Today, I'll be sharing one such find.

The Bestiary of Krynn was originally released in 2004, but owing to the hefty amount of errata and cut content that it shipped without, a Revised edition was released in November of 2006. 3E Dragonlance books were somewhat notorious for their seeming lack of close proofreading and editing, which probably contributed to their lack of popularity online. At least the Bestiary got a second shot, unlike most others.

(And it really needed the second shot, because one of the class abilities we'll be looking at today was completely nonfunctional due to an omitted word!)

In the Bestiary we are treated to all manner of nasties and weirdos. This includes an unsurprisingly large proportion of dragon subtypes, but also some beasts, outsiders, undead, and a caste of goblins mutated by chaotic magic called the Gurik Cha'ahl. It also has a suite of monster-oriented Prestige Classes, as well as rules for handling a monster PC's initial rejection and possible acceptance by any humanoid communities they adventure in, which I wasn't expecting at all. Savage Species should have done something similar, in my opinion.

One monster PrC in particular grabbed my attention, because more than being for monsters, it's for anyone with enough primal magical power.

3E Dragonlance books were mostly set during the Age of Mortals after the Chaos War, where through multiple novels worth of machinations the dark goddess Takhisis used the cosmic battle with the gods' deadbeat dad Chaos to steal the entire planet of Krynn away from her siblings. All divine and arcane magic ceased to function for that approximately 50 year period, because even wizards are dependent upon the three magical moon gods for their spells on Krynn.

During this magical dark age, mortals rediscovered the ancient "wild" sorcery that comes from the land itself, rather than from the moons. Simultaneously, they drew upon the latent power of mortal souls to develop the more internal and spiritualistic form of divine magic called mysticism. In thematic terms they're remarkably similar to different aspects of Primal magic that we would later see in D&D 4E. In mechanical terms, the sorcerer is unchanged while the mystic is a new base class presented in the Dragonlance Campaign Setting that acts like a spontaneous cleric minus the heavy armor, undead turning, and 1 domain. Kind of sparse, but still a solid Tier 2.

Even after Takhy's plot was foiled in part by a time-traveling kender and most of the gods returned to the world, these new/old forms of magic continue to exist alongside their traditional cousins. The future is uncertain and bound to be rocky, but mortals are in a better position to steer their own destinies than they have been in ages- so long as those pendulum-obsessed rich kids they call gods can stop meddling in their plaything so much.

Delving deeper into either of these ambient forms of magic to unlock their hitherto-untapped potential is the specialty of the aptly-named Ambient Tempest.

Ambient Tempest

Unquenchable, unstoppable, and, er, unclothable.

The Ambient Tempest (AT) is a 5-level PrC with 1d4 HD, 2 + Int skill ranks in a modest list, 1/2 BAB, poor Fort and Reflex Saves, and 4/5 spontaneous spellcasting advancement. Between the sorcerer and the mystic, its basic chassis is closer to sorcerer. A melee mystic would get set back quite a bit by levels in this class, though its unique abilities might make up for it to some extent. Dedicated casters who are already trying to stay out of harm's way are mostly only looking at a downside of 1 lost CL.

Qualifying for AT requires 9 ranks in Knowledge (Arcana) and Spellcraft, two out of a selection of magical and metamagic feats, 3rd-level spontaneous spells from either of the above classes (or a weirder pick), and either a supernatural or spell-like ability or two more of the above feats. Mystics can qualify depending on their chosen domain's granted power, while sorcerers might need a bit more work depending on if the Familiar class ability counts as (Su) or not. Something like a dragon with innate magical abilities has the easiest time qualifying for this PrC, but PC species can potentially qualify by 6th level.

Unsurprisingly there are no online reprints of this or most other Dragonlance material.
So here's a screen grab of the table from the revised PDF. Shh, don't tell Hasbro.

The three big class features of the AT are Shifting Knowledge (Ex), Ambient Secret, and Spellshaping (Ex). Their theme is tweaking or breaking many of the usual rules for spontaneous casting, which fits well with the flavor of the PrC.

Shifting Knowledge allows the spontaneous caster to dispense with the once-at-4th-level-and-every-2nd-level-after-that rule for changing out their known spells for others, and instead change 1 spell/week with an hour of meditation as long as it's 2 spell levels below your max. While it isn't as freeing as other classes like say, the Spirit Shaman (Complete Divine) that can change their spontaneous list daily, it's a big step toward making sorcerers and mystics more versatile. With enough downtime you could redo most of your spell library, and I think that's an uncommon and neat ability.

Ambient Secret comes up 3 times during AT progression. It allows you to select 1 ability from a short list, most of which can't be selected multiple times as is standard for that sort of thing. The choices are:

• Improved Metamagic, which allows you to ignore the normal rule that metamagic on a spontaneous spell costs a full-round action. I always wondered why that rule only existed for the less overpowered of all the full-casters, but wonky balance is part of why I love/hate 3E.
• (This is the ability that I mentioned was unusable prior to errata, because instead of "a spell" it just said "a". Big improvement.)
• Improved Shifting, which allows you to ignore the spell level limit on swapping spells in and out with Shifting Knowledge. Simple but good. Now your entire repertoire is mutable.
• Metamagic Feat, which is exactly what it sounds like. You may learn any metamagic feat you qualify for, and you can take this more than once if you really want.
• I'd personally avoid taking this more than once because you only have 3 secrets total.
• Shifting Knowledge, which is named exactly like the other class feature for some reason. I would've gone with Expanded Knowledge or something like that but hey, I'm not the editor. It lets you swap 1 extra spell per week and can be taken more than once. This could be really good, or just kind of nice, depending on how varied the challenges you tend to face are.
• My personal ranking puts this at the bottom—maybe tied with the bonus metamagic feat—below the other two near-mandatory secrets.

Spellshaping lets you just walk all over the normal rules of metamagic. With this ability, you can reverse your Enlarge, Extend, or Widen metamagic feats so that they reduce the spell's effect for a spell slot 1 level lower than normal. This is the first instance of reverse metamagic I've ever seen in 3rd Edition, and I love the concept. It gives so many situationally useful spells that much more utility, especially at higher levels when your lower-level spell slots start to pile up and feel less impactful. 

Imagine Narrowing a Fireball so that you don't clip your friends who are hanging around too close to the target, or Shortening all those combat buffs and debuffs that have durations measuring in the minutes/level, which rarely ever matters in a system where combat lasts less than a minute on average. It barely even feels like a cost, and that's before you get to the gravy of saving your bigger spell slots, or the hidden tech of adding one of these on top of a regular metamagic feat in order to modify its increased cost.

I've never wanted to play a sorcerer before (except for an attempt at a Greater Mighty Wallop build one time), but this PrC kinda gives me the itch to try. I'd probably opt for mystic if I was in a Dragonlance game, though. Playing a Stone-Teller of the Godless Folk would be too nifty to pass up.

You could bring in any other spontaneous caster for shenanigans, though. Imagine a spirit shaman combining daily list tweaks with the metamagic metagame, or using the Unearthed Arcana option for spontaneous clerics and druids.

Or don't, because that might be too much cheese. It won't be mozzarella nightstick levels of cheese, but at least a solid, rindy gouda.