KhorasForum

I can imagine a culture, let's say Myrians or Borrellians, eating the hearts of things they hunt. Maybe a polar worm or... I can't think off the top of my head what might be a good candidate for Myria. ^^;

I do think their point about it being an interesting way to flesh out the culture of a setting is apt, though; these people are surrounded, sometimes even besieged, but fantastical things every moment of every day of their lives. There's real-world precedent for this sort of behavior, and I think that some things, like torgat hunts for instance, are already present in Khoras, so it seems like it's an interesting thing to think about, even if the specific ideas they provided aren't to taste. Why wouldn't people try eating at least some monsters. People eat all sorts of weird things, ya know?

But yeah, mostly I just enjoyed the exercise in thinking about ways that culinary culture and alchemy might intersect, and more broadly, the implications that a campaign setting's monsters and fantastical creatures might have for what people eat, and how they relate to the world. And further, how thinking about that might lead to better gaming and better world-building.

No I have not. I have a pretty full plate when it comes to reading, but I may have to check those out. Thanks for the recommendation.

I was watching this episode of Web DM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXNOvuBLTO8, and felt really inspired, and it made me curious to hear your thoughts on the matter, guys.

Have any of you ever thought about eating monsters? What would it mean to eat the heart of a Krallinar? Is there a Teddy Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway of Normidia? What DOES Emerald Prattle Fish sashimi taste like? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

The world may never know.

I agree that D&D has always had a very black and white conception of things, largely, I suspect because of the Satanic Panic forcing Gygax to attempt to clearly delineate player roles from villain roles, provide ways to deal more effectively with murder hobos, and give players guilt-free targets (they're orcs, don't feel bad for slaughtering their whole village; they're all evil).

And I agree that morally sophisticated characters are typically more interesting in storytelling.

I would say, though, that the former is mostly an issue with TSR's and Wizards of the Coast's campaign settings and worldbuilding, and not with the alignment system in general. I tend to dissociate the setting's flaws from those of the system, in cases like this. You can "fix" how alignment works without changing any of the core mechanics and thereby creating an altogether different game, and that's what I'm mostly interested in pointing out.

As far as storytelling games, I don't really think of them as all that closely related to RPGs, even though they're descended from them, because they do things very differently, and don't share the same focus or intended player outcomes. That said, I've watched a lot of Wil Wheaton's series TableTop on Geek & Sundry's YouTube channel, and they've played a number of storytelling and indie roleplaying games.

From what I've seen, many storytelling games that don't have a GM have in-built structures that constrain storytelling within traditional narrative structures like acts, scenes, or chapters, and their mechanics tend to provide means of developing narrative arcs, rather than handling detailed physical simulations or similar things. Quite a few of them still have dice, or some other mechanic to introduce chance and variety into the game, but some of the more experimental do really weird things.

There's even one indie horror RPG called Dread where players play Jenga to tie the building story tension to something in the actual playspace.

Most of the storytelling games that I've seen tend not to be focused on long-term campaign-length storytelling, though. They're more like short story- or screenplay-length stories, meant to fill a single night's gaming session, rather than a decade of play. So, while a lot of them look pretty fun, they're not really intended to compete directly with more traditional RPGs, from what I've seen.

That's actually a really cool idea. Certainly it would have more implications on how you roleplay than on mechanics, but I think that's fine, and potentially a source of really interesting experiences and adventures.

Also, I'll be looking for your further response, as well as Dave's, with great interest!

I know I'm resurrecting an old topic, and I apologize, but I've been thinking a lot about game mechanics lately and I've been rereading some of these old posts to remind myself of things we've discussed on the forum over time. When I reread this thread, I realized I had things to say that I hadn't had the language, knowledge base, or wherewithal to add some seven years ago.

I think one of the main things I was trying to get at when I pushed back against both of your thoughts on alignment was in the different orientations we had towards how to interpret alignment. In linguistics, and numerous other disciplines, we talk about prescriptivism versus descriptivism. For instance, saying that some groups of people, or some individuals, "don't speak properly" is prescriptivist. It assumes that there is a "right" way to use language, and prescribes rules to be followed, typically justifying the privileged position of social elites by defining their language as "proper". In contrast, descriptivism assumes that all language that achieves the goals of communication is, by definition, correct, and seeks to understand and describe how it achieves those goals.

Similarly, I think your interpretation is that alignment is a prescription for how your character must behave, and I think that's got a lot to do with the way AD&D 2.0 handled class restrictions and other related mechanics by walling them off to anyone who didn't have the right alignment and, in some cases, the right rolled stats (I'm looking at you, Paladin). However, I, having had less contact with those rules (the closest I've ever come to playing AD&D is playing Baldur's Gate repeatedly, because it's great -- speaking of which, Baldur's Gate 3 is on the way, and looks like it'll be awesome, if you haven't heard or seen the trailer that was released last month), have always been predisposed to interpret alignment as a description of how your character thinks and behaves, rather than rules to follow.

Your character isn't sadistic because they're evil, they're evil because they're sadistic and cruel. Your character isn't lawful because they lack the ability to break the law, they're lawful because they value a stable society with defined standards, and are predisposed to try to act in accordance with those values.

None of what I've said is new, of course. Lots of YouTube DMs offering advice to other gamers, new and old, have said as much (among many others), and I get the sense that consensus in the hobby is beginning to shift that way already. Plus, this is the perspective that people like Jeremy Crawford and Mike Mearles openly support, so anyone paying attention to 5e's designers will probably be familiar with the ideas.

Of course, it's also enlightening to know, for instance, that alignment started out as just Lawful versus Chaotic, and was intended as a way for Gary Gygax to rein in his murder hobo players, with players being tied to the civilized forces of Law, as opposed to the despoiling forces of Chaos. Good and Evil were added during the Satanic Panic days to help defend against misguided accusations that players were modelling evil behavior. Though, the game definitely retains an underlying tendency to treat alignments as reflective of objective reality, especially in its relation to Great Wheel cosmology, I'll grant you that.

Beyond that, I guess I'd add that I've never been fond of hedonist ethical standards (i.e. pleasure-seeking/pain-avoidance), whether we're talking Epicureanism or Utilitarianism, so I'm inclined to think very differently than you on that point, Dave. If I were going to tie ethics to a game mechanic, and by so doing hardwire an ethical framework in, I'd probably be going into things with more of an Aristotelian sort of perspective (Aretaic or Virtue Ethics), or even a Kantian one, though I'd probably be prone to eliding a lot of the details of those ethical systems. What would matter in that sort of situation would be the framing of certain acts as good or evil.

But having said that, I think I'm still much more inclined to take a very loose, descriptivist approach, and just say something along the lines of, "Altruism is good, egoism is evil, and most people are somewhere in the middle. As far as law and chaos go, lawful people tend to follow laws irrespective of the justness or aptness of the laws; chaotic people tend to disregard any laws that they find distasteful, inconvenient, or unjust, for whatever reason, and follow their own whims and standards without concern for others' opinions; and those who are neutrally aligned tend to follow the law, but aren't devoted to it."

Oh, one last point. Since legend and myth, as well as Victorian and 20th Century fantasy literature, play such a large role in influencing D&D, and by extension roleplaying games in general, let me bring up a good example of a magical weapon with an alignment restriction: Excalibur. The sword Excalibur couldn't be wielded by evil people, or in service of evil actions. How did Excalibur know who was evil and who wasn't? Magic. Explain it however you like: the sword looks into your soul, or asks you to respond to philosophical thought experiments, or their exists some objective measure of good and evil (potentially related to a divine source). At the end of the day, the mechanism isn't as important to the myth as the result -- a sword that resists what it considers misuse on the part of its wielder.

1) "Braya", huh? I know a Callister story when I see one.

2) Holy shit, those were all excellent, especially the most recent one. I especially loved the implication for all those poor henchmen and hirelings getting drug hither and yon on adventurers' business.

Congratulations, that's really cool!

Lol, I concur. That's fairly impressive.

Oh, yeah. I've been loosely following the Pathfinder 2.0 playtest, and I've heard good things about Numenera and a few other systems, but I've been toying with the idea of making my own system for a while now, as well. Something with a bit more verisimilitude in combat, and with a bit more rational magic system, among other things.

And if any of the players in this campaign want to add anything, I'd enjoy reading it!

Happy Thanksgiving, btw.

*1812 Overture blaring, cannons firing, drunken singing, and Cossack dancing; over the din...*

Well! that was a hell of a conclusion! This has been an enjoyable read, and I'm a little sad it's over, but I definitely enjoyed following your players' quest to free Anquar and end Dalmoran!

Champagne, anyone?

I concur, this does sound like a cool setting for a game or three. I also like the sort of Song-of-Ice-and-Fire-esque "Great Man" setup with certain pillars of the setting being the principle movers of the wheel of history.

Yeah, go me! Lol. Morlokk was obvious, so I just had to guess which other wizard was comparable to him in power, and Tolkarus seemed the most likely candidate.

When I was double-checking my assumption, I noticed that Tolkarus doesn't have his own page, which I did find a bit odd, especially given how powerful he obviously is. I'd be very interested to see more information on him in future.

As for the History section in general, and the section on the Alliance specifically, it seems like there would always be more to know, but, while I would certainly always like to see more information added to the site, along with greater explication and clarification of what's already present, it does seem to me that it would be entirely likely that information on that period of history, and the Alliance itself, would be quite spotty anyway. For one thing, there was an enormous cataclysm which killed most of the Alliance's members, and presumably destroyed most of the contemporary written sources, followed by an equally destructive period of total war between three states and multiple non-state factions, for another, the Alliance itself was a secretive organization, which means that much of the relevant information would have either been intentionally obscured, perhaps through Huridian, or simply died with the Mage Lords in whose minds it solely resided, and finally, it's nearly three thousand years later in Khoras's timeline that most play is occurring, which means that it's not dissimilar from the difficulty we have studying the period around the Bronze Age Collapse in our own world (which, sans magic/magic-related solar catastrophes, is actually quite parallel to the events, despite the Thullian empire clearly being more closely modeled on Rome), and that with our vastly more advanced academic infrastructure and highly developed disciplines of study compared to a medieval society.

So, in a sense, it's almost a bit apropos that the details of that period are a bit fuzzy.

Given that defeating Dalmoran and restoring just and benevolent rule to Anquar has always been, to me, one of the most compelling campaign hooks in the whole of Khoras, I'm really looking forward to seeing what you and your players come up with in tackling it yourselves.

Plus, anything involving immensely powerful Alliance magic is always cool, right?

I'm looking forward to it!