Spirits & Spookiness: Gazetteer 10: The Orcs of Thar (1988)

Preface

Ugh. Alright, let’s get this over with.

The Orcs of Thar, written by Bruce Heard for BECMI D&D, is the 10th entry in the Mystara Gazetteer series detailing different areas of the campaign setting and how to play a game there. Orcs of Thar is a boxed set about the desolate and inhospitable Broken Lands, which are divided up between ten nations of humanoids barely united under the rule of the orcish war chief King Thar.¹

The set contains several booklets that detail the lore and history of the region, how to run a campaign in the Broken Lands, and how to play a simple grand strategy-style wargame using the armies of Thar. The players' guide and dungeon master's booklet also contains options for playing monstrous characters who hail from the Broken Lands, including the first playable shamans we've seen in BECMI so far.

It’s also my least favorite book in the entire Gazetteer series (that I’ve read, at least). Partly because I initially had unreasonably high hopes for it. That part is my fault. The book is entirely functional, and has more details on humanoids and shamans than most other BECMI books, making it a handy resource to adapt for one's game. But the style of writing throughout also seems to want to make it a tongue-in-cheek joke book.

The book's humor derives from how stupid, stinky, and goofy the orcs and their neighbors are. Slapstick and gross-out humor abound as the endless hordes churn against one another, driven by bits of narrative microfiction that read like a bad rendering of a Warhammer orc warboss’ speech. The book also has an art direction that looks halfway between “unhinged vaudeville show” and “racist World War II war bond poster”.

Less yikes but just a confusing, there's also this piece of some orc "punks" from the hard streets of the volcanic capital city of Oenkmar where everything has a vaguely Mesoamerican or Incan name for Reasons, seen here breakdancing with a boombox and massive traumatic head piercings, also for Reasons.² This doesn't really fit into my broader point, but I can't not share it.

Now we share a trauma bond.

Much digital ink has already been spilled over the years by other people about the weird borrowing of both racial stereotypes and scientific racism tropes for the book’s species breakdown section, which precedes the chapter on shamans. I don’t have anything new to add to that discussion or a creative way to express how nakedly yikes the beads-and-buckskin-wearing “red orcs” or the goblinus oriensis who parrot the Mongol-coded Ethengarian peoples are, other than reiterating that they very much are yikes.³ But I’d feel derelict in my duties as a responsible wannabe historian if I didn’t bring it up briefly. Of all the legacy content on DriveThruRPG that Wizards of the Coast has slapped a content disclaimer onto, The Orcs of Thar decidedly earns it in my opinion.

But I digress.

I don’t apologize for digressing, because it’s my show and I do what I want, but I do digress.

I came here to talk about shamans. For all its 1980s cringe, Orcs of Thar gives the first bit of concrete depth and texture to humanoid shamans in this edition, where previously it was all a matter of reading in between the lines or just outright imagining that the monstrous spellcaster sections in the core rules boxed sets are more meaningful than they might actually be- I know I'm prone to hyper-fixating and reading depth into things.

And, excluding the technicality of that one OD&D clerical title, this is the first ever book where shamans became fully playable in D&D!

Shamans & Wiccas

Thar shamans and wiccas (this book was published before the Hollow World campaign set changed them to wokani) both consort with dark powers, either by worshiping them or trying to control them. Anyone looking to become a shaman or wicca must apprentice to a master, and this apprenticeship lasts for at least 1 full level of play after character creation. After this point the spellcaster’s training is complete, and they are kicked out to continue practicing on their own.⁴

I find this rule really interesting. So many other character classes throughout D&D assume that the character’s days of apprenticeship are behind them and that 1st level is the era of messing around and finding out on one’s own. Sure, a cleric or wizard PC might have an old mentor in their backstory, or a druid might occasionally have to deal with other druids in their order because of the weird cage match rules that define grove politics. But a prospective humanoid shaman or wicca explicitly has to play through an apprenticeship and engage with a master NPC in real time to gain their most basic abilities. I think that’s neat, and it adds to roleplay opportunities.

This rule also gives way to another rule that I find to be quintessentially BECMI. Because this was the edition of race-as-class much like in the first three books of OD&D, every humanoid can only ever advance as their species. A kobold is a level 3 kobold, a troll is a level 8 troll, etc. And nothing can change that. But you also can’t just slap a second class on, because multiclassing is a distinctly AD&D system (ignoring the OD&D supplements that introduced multiclassing in all but name) and doing that would probably hurt brand identity or some other "board of directors" type worry like that.

To get out of this mechanical corner that the designers wrote themselves into, optional rules such as humanoid shamans followed an additive XP track rule: every “level” in your character’s side gig is an extra couple of abilities layered on top of their base class chassis, plus a debt of several thousand extra experience points needed to advance to your next real level in whatever racial class that is. It’s harder to explain than it is to just use (much like AD&D’s THAC0), but still kind of a funny relic of the time that we’ll see pop up elsewhere.

Anyway, once an apprentice has concluded their apprenticeship they undergo a ritual that leaves them a full-fledged shaman or wicca. The exact details of this ritual of passage are not spelled out in the book; only that it is probably one of the most grueling and frightening experiences of their life. The rest is left up to “you, the DM, and to your players’ tastes”, to quote the book.

That’s a moment of surprisingly thoughtful game design from an era before lines, veils, and other “Session Zero” style content discussions were common. I know it was probably written with the thought of “ooh, what kind of gross and screwed up do you fellas wanna make it?” in mind, but still, credit where credit is due.

The book does provide a table of ‘typical’ ritual effects to use, if you want. It’s a single d12 roll that explains how physically harrowing the experience was for your shaman, and how much of themselves they sacrificed or allowed to be eaten up by hungry entities beyond the veil. The damage can range from 1 or more points of permanent HP loss, to losing points of Constitution directly. Benefits include a small experience point boost, a permanent bonus to Wisdom, or just nothing at all; the powers that shamans treat with can be fickle pricks.

This ritual is undergone at the end of apprenticeship, as well as every time a shaman or wicca wants to learn a new spell from outside of their class list, replace a lost gri-gri (a tribal holy symbol that both classes require to cast magic, derived from the gris-gris of West African Vodun and its diasporic descendants like Voodoo), craft a talisman (a minor magical item unique to them), or exceed their racial spellcaster level limits (which are often quite low in comparison to their normal level limits). Over a decently long career, a Thar spell-caster will end up truly grizzled and wizened by their craft. They might even die outright from a ritual if not careful.⁵

I believe this was done in order to cement how nasty the shaman’s objects of worship are (and we will be getting to them shortly). But it does something else as well, perhaps unintentionally.

It invokes (please bear with me for a moment) the Jungian archetype of the Wounded Healer.

To paraphrase greatly, the wounded healer is someone who was drawn to their profession by the fact that they themselves have suffered similar traumas in life as their patients. The wounding is what opens up one’s empathy, and unlocks their healing powers- speaking figuratively, of course. In real life this deals with people in the professions of therapy, medicine, nursing, etc. But in the context of fantasy it is also quite literal.

Many modern writers and philosophers–mostly Westerners–connect the idea of the wounded healer with countless real life religious and mythological phenomena, including many shamanic traditions, where it is often the case that a person is considered ‘marked’ or otherwise destined to become a shaman by some ominous ordeal early in life, such as suffering from disease, injury, or mental illness.⁶

I am not going to dig deep into that theory because I don’t know the first thing about Jungian psychology and boy do I not have the patience to learn. However I will say that I'm leery of the theory and anything else that tries to orient diverse shamanic traditions around a single universality. Still, it does relate back to the real-life diversity of conceptions of shamans that I mentioned back in the etymologies and definitions post. Bit by bit, more of them are being borne out in the fiction of D&D as it grows and expands.

Religion in the Broken Lands

I’ve alluded to the dark powers treated with by Thar shamans twice now, and it’s our first taste of actual specifics for a shamanic religion, so let’s dig into that next.

The spirits and other forces shamans get their power from are very ill-defined in the text, and stand curiously separate and divorced from popular religion. This encourages you to come up with your own answers as to what they are, or leave them wholly opaque. Are they the spirits of the dead? Demons? Some other completely different entities? I don't know. All I know is that they are not Immortals.

Religion in the Broken Lands operates much as it does elsewhere in Mystara: instead of “gods” in the traditional sense, intelligent beings worship so-called Immortals. Immortals were once regular people who became powerful and badass enough in life that they ascended to immortality and carved out a sphere of deific influence for themselves. They are the “I” in BECMI, and therefore they serve not only as objects of worship for the world, but also objects of emulation for the player characters, whose long adventuring careers might just allow them to do the same.

The Immortals worshiped by humanoids tend to be former conquerors and warlords who paid for their divinity in foes slain and cities razed. The book says there are far too many to list, which encourages groups to come up with their own religions. The Immortals who are listed tend to be 1 per species, and they usually have portfolios centered on warfare, consumption, and destruction. It makes sense that a bunch of militaristic societies trapped in permanent endemic warfare would emphasize gods like that, although I think it's also a bit of a metaphorical chicken-or-the-egg situation as to whether they started to war first and picked up relevant gods second, or got pushed into forever war by their gods.

Something funny I noticed is that most of the Thar Immortals have alternate names in their entries. The bugbear Immortal Bartziluth is also known as as Hruggek, the orc warrior god Karaash is AKA Ilneval, The Shining One of the kobolds was once named Kurtulmak, etc. These are all names taken from the ethnic pantheons found in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign setting for AD&D, a decade and a half before they were turned into generic deities for 3rd edition. Another rare bit of cross-pollination between the otherwise separate branches of D&D.

Also I can’t believe that I’ve been playing or at least reading about Dungeons & Dragons for over 20 years and it took me this long to realize that the god of the gnoll hyena people is named Yeenoghu. Did anybody else miss that one? Maybe I shouldn’t be the one writing about media.

Shamans are described in this section as effectively being clerics of the Immortals, minus the ability to turn undead. Instead, they gain a unique ability that emulates a feat or quality their Immortal is known for, as well as a more general benefit enjoyed by all followers of that Immortal regardless of class. 

Karaash/Ilneval for example grants his shamans better authority checks against his faithful, as well as the ability to use a pretty nasty karaash sword, which deals 1d10 damage and causes wounds that can only be healed with magic.⁷ Shamans are often quite limited in the weapons they can wield, either by sharing the cleric weapon restriction or by a requirement to only wield “tribal” weapons, so seeing a shaman with access to such a big, martial weapon is rather novel at this time. Spirits or no, they are soldiers just like everyone else in the Broken lands.

While shamans and most wiccas worship one or more gods of their respective racial pantheons in the henotheistic fashion that was already standard for D&D religions, they explicitly are not obliged to pray to them for their spells. Instead, they get their powers from those capricious spirits that accept their sacrifices and nibble away at their bodies and souls level after level. It is remarkably similar to the patron/supplicant relationship that would grow out of the many iterations of the warlock class decades later. Alas, we won’t see many other examples of this ephemeral shaman-as-warlock archetype in our survey.

Shamilitarism

Because of how militaristic humanoid societies of the Broken Lands are, shamans and wiccas serve dual roles as mystical and martial figures. They are forced into the hierarchy wherever they will fit, and often rise to positions of authority beneath the various chiefs and kings of the land. Here they serve in some capacity as an advisor, a force multiplier during wartime (which is all of the time), and a sort of combination chaplain/doctor.

This role is borne out in the mechanics of the Orcwars! pullout wargame, tucked away inside the dungeon master's booklet. In Orcwars! a chief in control of a shaman gains +1 to their combat, authority, and servility dice rolls from utilizing the shaman's mix of potent magic and politico-religious legitimacy. They also seem to be regarded as very valuable to keep alive by all sides, because shamans are not killed during battles, and they always move over to the winning side, or else flee to another territory until a chief worthy of serving comes along.

One of the last parts of the boxed set we're treated to is Thar's Manual of Good Conduct, a primer on how to give and follow orders, obey hierarchy, win fights, and generally keep the military running as close to smooth as possible. In the section on "Orcish Sanitation" the two classes (shamans more than wiccas) minister to the troops in their tribe by inspecting them during ztan-HU'T (a pun on ten-hut) to make sure they're reasonably healthy and fit.⁸

Much space is afforded to extended jokes like making sure each soldier's feet smell an appropriate level of stinky or explaining why it's bad to eat rotten meat, but shamans also do more serious work like treating wounds and diseases through mundane, medicinal, and magical means. This marks shamans and wiccas out as the specialized repositories of vital, nonmagical day-to-day knowledge in humanoid societies, just as they often are in real life human societies where the shaman is an active participant in life in the community beyond just performing rituals in a hut kept separate from the rest of the village, as the tropes so often depict. Admittedly their Broken Lands counterparts do a whole lot more heavy lifting by comparison, because of how stupid most humanoids are typed as being.

Then again, on that last note, maybe knowledge like maintaining proper hygiene might actually be viewed as overtly magical by most of the tribes of the Broken Lands...

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the longer wait between last entry and this one. Next time we'll be looking at another entry in the Gazetteer, of which I believe we'll cover 4 in total.

Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D Archive.

¹ Not to be confused with the Great Gray Land of Thar, a desolate northern region of the Forgotten Realms that also happens to play host to large warring armies of orcs and other humanoids. D&D is nothing if not willing to borrow from/cannibalize itself.

² Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Dungeon Master's Booklet. 1988. P. 30.

³ Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Player's Guide. 1988. P. 18, 40-42.

⁴ Dungeon Master's Booklet. P. 5.

⁵ Ibid. P. 6.

⁶ Jackson, Stanley W. "Presidential Address: The Wounded Healer". Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 75. No. 1. 2001. P. 1-6.

⁷ Dungeon Master's Booklet. P. 8-10.

⁸ Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Thar's Manual of Good Conduct. P. 24-29.

Hob-Goblin (TROIKA! Background)

Hob

Noun

(archaic) The flat projection or iron shelf at the side of a fire grate, where things are put to be kept warm.

Hob-goblin

Noun

The goblin who sits upon a hob. Duh.

Most folk claim that hob-goblins are named for the hob upon which they sit, but if that was true then what was the hob named for? You know the truth of the matter; hobs are so-named for the hob-goblins who deign to alight upon them in secret, always just out of sight of a home's occupants, even when sitting right beside them at the hearth.

You should know, since you are one after all.

It is your calling to find a spot by a nice, warm hearth where you can rest, and watch, and ensure that the household around it doesn't descend into utter ruin in the indelicate hands of the big folk who own it. To some, you are a small-god of raked ashes, of docile mice and spilled milk unwasted. But it isn't an easy job, and you aren't always thanked for it either; some big folk don't even know you're there, and blame the disappeared leftovers and scraps of cloth on rats or elves, which you are perfectly fine with.

But it satisfies something deep in your liver to preside over a well-kept hearth and home, and to see your chosen wards prosper in at least some small ways. You watch them grow and cycle through the home generation after generation, some far too soon and others lingering on well past the point you expected. Perhaps this is what it's like to be a schoolteacher.

When a home finally dwindles and empties with no one left to tend the hearth and leave you little offerings (knowingly or otherwise), you die down with the embers, awaiting the next big folk who will assuredly need your help, but might not ever know where to look.

That is why, on rare occasions, a hob-goblin will separate themself from their hearth. It's an uncomfortable process that leaves a groove in the hob forever unoccupied by their behind, but it frees the goblin to follow after a departing family, or even strike out on their own.

Your head is full of knowledge and memories from across the hump-backed sky now, but your feet are beginning to ache. Perhaps you'll find a new hob to sit upon soon.

Brownie by a Fireplace, John Bauer

Possessions

• A Tatty Old Cap
• Walking Stick (actually a Fireplace Poker)
• D6 Mementos of families you've sat beside

Advanced Skills

4 Sneak
3 Homemaking
2 Sleight of Hand
1 Language - Mice

Special

At any time you may designate a hearth, firepit, or similar fixture as your chosen hob. You can become perfectly silent and invisible so long as you are within range of your chosen hob. What constitutes "in range" depends on the size and nature of the household in which your hearth is located; you might stay invisible all throughout a farmhouse and surrounding yard, but you can't haunt an entire castle this way. Severing yourself from your chosen hob requires that you Test your Luck, usable once per week.

Additionally, you can produce a flame like a match by snapping your fingers.

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.

GLOG Class: Goblin Auntie

A typical auntie, silently judging you.
The loud judging comes later.

Not every goblin is lucky enough to have a mom. But whether they like it or not, they've all got an Auntie. Part parent, supervisor, and tribal elder, Aunties know it's pointless to try and enforce a semblance of orderliness upon their niblings. Instead, they help guide and redirect them, like one might the flow of a mighty river. A green, gibbering river full of teeth and shiny rocks and- hey, was that a goat?

Note that you don't need to be an actual goblin or auntie in order to be a Goblin Auntie. It's all about having the right state of mind.

Goblin Auntie

Starting Equipment: stained apron, sewing kit, dagger, bag of acorns

Starting Skills: Childrearing. Also, roll on adjacent table.

A: Adopt Niblings, Auntie Knows Best

B: Just The Thing, Slap Some Sense Into

C: Family That Stays Together

D: An Auntie's Love

You gain +1 to Save vs mind-altering effects for each Goblin Auntie template you possess.

A: Adopt Niblings

Being a Goblin Auntie means you know true family is found. Found, nicknamed, badgered, and possibly wiped 'clean' with a spitty handkerchief when you want to make sure they're extra handsome. You may designate a number of nearby friendly creatures equal to 1/2 your Wisdom score (rounded down) as your adoptive niblings. Several of your class abilities affect your current niblings.

A: Auntie Knows Best

When one of your niblings rolls under a stat or tries to use a skill you may offer unsolicited advice and admonishments to help them out, even (and especially) if you have no experience with what they're doing. Roll to Save; if you succeed the nibling gains +1 to their roll, but if you fail they suffer -1. You can do this once per round.

B: Just The Thing

Extra snacks, bits of thread, herbs for that one asthmatic kid; your career has prepared you to always have just the thing you need for a random situation. You've gotten so good at it in fact, that the depths of your backpack have become a zone of Schrödingerian potentiality.

You can designate 1 Inventory Slot (other than a Quick-Draw Slot) as a Just The Thing slot that is always filled. You can spend 2 rounds rummaging around in that slot to produce any item that is worth 1 gp or less, even if you never put one in your inventory to begin with. You may do this once per day, after which your compulsive saving and pocketing naturally refill the slot.

B: Slap Some Sense Into

When 1 or more of your niblings are affected by fear or another mind-altering effect, you can attempt to slap some sense into one of them to set them all straight. You deal 1 damage to the target nibling, and they and every other nibling within 30' are allowed to reroll their Save against that chosen effect. You may do this once per day per point of Strength bonus (minimum 1) before your slapping hand gets tired.

C: Family That Slays Together

Even if they never asked for an Auntie, your protective clannishness has begun to rub off on your adoptees. When 2 or more of your niblings are next to each other in combat, they unwittingly start to fight together as a swarming, gobliny unit. Each gains their choice of +1 to Initiative, Defense, or Attack. This effect ends if they split up.

D: An Auntie's Love

You always knew what you were signing up for. What this job is really about. If ever one of your niblings is in imminent mortal danger—about to take lethal damage in combat, suffer a fall, trip a trap, etc.—you may intercede on their behalf through some dramatic contrivance and suffer all harm in their stead. You may do this once per day, assuming you survive.

1d6	Goblin Auntie Skills
1	They have a habit of getting sick, don't they? Gain the "Medicine" skill and 3 doses of your homemade decongestant (extra chunky).
2	You are a 1st generation gentle Auntie. In your case, "gentle" means you reserve the rod for your enemies. Gain a proper nasty switch (light weapon).
3	Insomnia is part of the job, but you've elevated it to an artform. Gain the "Stay Awake" skill and a trashy, dogeared novel.
4	A well-fed nibling is a less troublesome nibling. Gain the "Baking" skill and 2d6 muffins (about to go stale).
5	Why, it looks like you've already attracted a few hangers-on without even trying! Gain 2 random camp followers, each with an embarrassing nickname.
6	These fricking kids. Gain a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of spirits.

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.

Goats & Gobs

Take a second to forget about all the animals you've seen domesticated (or not-so-domesticated) and ridden by goblins in the past. Forget about wargs. Forget ponies, or bats, or rat-dogs, or squigs, or llamas.

Well, okay, just put a pin in llamas for now- those are worth coming back to later.

But forget all of that, and for a moment consider instead: goats.

MTG Goblin Cavaliers by DiTerlizzi

The combination might not be obvious, but there are some strong reasons why goblins and goats should have a high affinity for one another.

For starters, they can both live off of almost unthinkable diets. While the belief that goats will gladly munch down on cardboard or tin cans is a myth propagated by their curious foraging nature, goats still eat a wide range of plant matter. Some of what they like to eat the most is actually toxic to most other living things- goblins included. 

Goblins, meanwhile, can and will devour that old leather belt or that dead sparrow if they aren't confident that another, better food source will be readily available in the near future. And even if there is, the goblin will probably take the bird or belt along anyway so that it can be pickled or fermented for later. Don't mistake that for simplemindedness or gluttony, however- it's thanks to a digestive tract evolved for a nutrient-scarce environment, coupled with an instinctive sensitivity to the risk of famine. They never did learn to stomach most leaves or grass, though.

Because of these broad diets, goblins and goats can coexist and eat what the other won't eat without having to compete for the same food sources. This efficiency is a double-edged sword in large numbers. While the jury is still out on whether goats are scientifically proven to cause habitat collapse via soil erosion or they actually help revitalize certain ecosystems, the sheer number of empty stomachs that a mass of goblins and goats brings with it is a problem alone.

For that reason, the hybrid herds are hyper-nomadic, moving almost daily within the environments allowed by their particular species of goat rather than settling in an area for weeks or months at a time like normal. To linger on any longer would strip the land bare and leave nothing to return to in their nebulous conception of the far future known as the Next Time. It must be acknowledged that, in emergency circumstances, a group of goblins can probably just eat the goats- assuming the goats' hooves and/or horns don't have anything to say on the matter. But more often than not they stick to their itinerancy, seeing little reason to try and kill their neighbors.

And it is that distinction—that they are neighbors—which defines the rest of the coexistence between these species. The goats are not so much domesticated as they are accustomed to bearing the gangling little green things that help them fend off their predators. The goblins are not so much herding the goats as they are fitting themselves into a larger herd and finding their niche- something they are apt to do everywhere else, so why not here?

Another cause for their uncommon kinship is how the rest of the world views them. Big folk tend to treat goblins and goats as inherently silly and bizarre creatures, and make them the butt of jokes and folklore when they aren't making them out to be the embodiments of pure evil. It's a wonder there aren't a bunch of them leaping across the pages of illuminated medieval manuscripts together, right in between the monopods and the killer snails. Commonality of adversity can go a long way.

Goblins and goats are also just generally fond of one another. They don't mind the other's odd smells or habits. Kids and whelps get along surprisingly well around nannies or aunties. And unlike most other humanoid species, the majority of goblins find the rectangular-pupiled eyes of a goat incredibly comforting and relaxing to gaze into. Goat eyes have taken on an apotropaic quality among some tribes, acting like an inverse of the more well-known Evil Eye. They appear often in decorative motifs and protective amulets, sometimes made using actual preserved eyes from the herd's most respected old goats.

Some of these goat-eye talismans even find their way into outsiders' hands through trade, alongside dung (sold either as fuel or fertilizer), homespun goat wool articles, and the (in)famous cheeses and beverages that goblins make from goat milk. There are more points of contact between the herds and other groups than being shooed off of someone's property, after all. Gob-goat herds will even hire themselves out to big folk as professional lawnmowers and conservation grazers on occasion.

And lest we forget, goat riders can be some of the most deadly annoying riders in the world, considering most defenses against cavalry don't take into account the ability to climb 95° inclines or leap 3 meters across from a standstill.

D&D 5E Character Background: Gob-Goat Herder

You are a child of the gob-goat herds, forever wandering the margins of the world in all their bleating majesty. Your scruffy ways belie a globetrotter's wisdom and a cosmopolitan outlook. You've seen trackless wilderness, distant bazaars, and a dozen terrors that would have devoured you if not for your goat's quick hooves. With naught but a good saddle and better cheese, you are eager to face anything and bring back stories Next Time you're passing through.

Skill Proficiencies: Animal Handling, Survival
Tool Proficiencies: One type of artisan's tools or musical instrument, either particular to your herd or something completely incongruous that you picked up on a whim at a market somewhere
Languages: One of your choice from the myriad of cultures you've encountered 
Equipment: Shepherd's utility crook, your favorite old saddle (goat-sized), a rectangular eye amulet, a set of traveler's clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 "squeaky stones" (extra-preserved goat cheese curds usable as 10 rations or 10 pieces of sling ammunition)

Features

Herd Role

Most goblins in a gob-goat herd can do most things, but every once in a while someone takes an extra bright shine to one profession or the other. Consider the ways you perform your role different from anyone else, or how you've picked up new tricks during your travels. You may roll on the following table to determine your profession during your time with the herd, or choose one that best fits your character.

d10	Herd Role
1	Cheese-maker
2	Dung-shoveler
3	Scout
4	Wrangler
5	Eyesmith
6	Milkgob
7	Kid-minder
8	Shearer
9	Storyteller
10	Peddler

Hard Living

Your knowledge of ancient goat-lore ensures that you are never without a caprine companion. In the woeful event that you are without a goat, you can spend 1 hour scouring the wilds for a feral goat, even in places where goats are not native. You still have to befriend the goat yourself.

In addition, you can find food and fresh water for yourself and your goat each day, even in places where the land shouldn't be able to provide that much sustenance.

Suggested Characteristics

It's a rough, wild life out on the edges. But you learned more than just wiliness or plucky determination from it. The herd is shaped by the peoples and places it interacts with, and you are no different.

Personality Traits

d6	Personality Trait
1	I normally speak in an idiosyncratic pidgin of a dozen different languages plus goat noises that I've developed over the years.
2	I have a soft spot for herd and draft animals of all sorts, and I usually carry a bag of treats for whenever I come across them.
3	Working hard so you can play hard later is for fools- just do both at the same time!
4	Big folk have done terrible things to goblins and unspeakable things to goats. I am always on guard around them.
5	Even if I don't believe in them, I collect symbols of lots of different gods, spirits, and faiths as good luck charms on my travels.
6	I always try to relate the ways of the world and the behaviors of outsiders to the internal dynamics of a goat herd as a way to understand them.

Ideals

d6	Ideal
1	Coexistence. Let us share the lessons we’ve learned out on the margins, to help build a more accepting future. (Good)
2	Herd Mentality. We stay out of trouble by sticking together and keeping our heads down. (Lawful)
3	Whimsy. I bet this would go great with some fermented nanny’s milk…! (Chaotic)
4	Despoliation. Why shouldn’t we smash and reave and go as we please? Let them try to catch us. (Evil)
5	Survival. I’m hungry, and I don’t know how to eat philosophy- yet. (Neutral)
6	Curiosity. Ooh, I wonder what’s over that hill? (Any)

Bonds

d6	Bond
1	My mount is my best friend and my living, breathing, bleating connection to my herd even when we are far apart.
2	Strangers are just friends I haven’t met yet, and hospitality is sacred to my people.
3	The herd once passed through a special, transformative place that I have held as sacred ever since, and I will return to it someday.
4	Despite probably being younger than all of them, I view the outsiders I travel with as bounding baby goats in need of a nanny to guide them.
5	I carry a precious keepsake I accidentally "borrowed" long ago, and have vowed to give it back Next Time.
6	I draw a goat eye on everything for protection, and to keep my herd's tradition alive.

Flaws

d6	Flaw
1	I get anxious and stir-crazy if I stay in one place for too long. “Too long” can be several days, or it can be several seconds.
2	I balk at concepts like borders or private land ownership- the world is free for all to graze in common! … Landlords and town guards don’t ever seem to agree, though.
3	I spent too much time watching the billies butt heads growing up, and I can come across as rough and aggressive when I don’t mean to be.
4	I often forget that other people didn’t grow up in a herd, and this usually ends in embarrassing situations- for everyone else.
5	I am curious about the places I visit- incessantly, vocally curious, much to the dismay of whomever I choose to ask questions of.
6	I consider bathing to be a silly affectation, and a senseless waste of precious drinking water besides. No one will convince me otherwise.