Publish or Perish: d100 reasons your wizard had to drop out of academia and become an adventurer instead

My department has been interviewing for new academic posts this week - and as I contemplated the mountain of incoming job applications, the vast majority of them inevitably doomed to failure, I found myself thinking about D&D wizards. Becoming a D&D magic-user clearly requires a specialised education, and yet many of these highly-educated wizards end up as expendable dungeon-crawling adventurers. This suggests to me that D&D wizarding, like modern academia, is probably a profession in which supply and demand are badly out of balance, with many aspiring magi competing over every institutional post. 

In situations like these, gatekeepers proliferate like weeds. There are lots of qualified applicants for every position, so having long lists of arbitrary hoops to jump through helps to winnow them down to a manageable level. (If half of them don't even know about the hoops, so much the better!) A lucky few will master all the formal and informal rules of the profession well enough to get one of the coveted seats around the high table at Wizard College. The rest have to settle for a life spent casting Magic Missile spells on goblins, instead. 

So where did it all go wrong for your magic-user? Why are they shivering in a dungeon instead of dozing in a nice warm corner of the Senior Common Room? Why are they plotting how to sneak past a troll, when the only plotting they wanted to do was about how to get a seat on the college wine committee? Roll 1d100 to find out!

1. Your deep and subtle knowledge turned out to be no match for your terrible exam technique.
2. Disastrous relationship breakdown just before finals scuppered your chances of a top grade. At the time you thought love was more important. You were wrong.
3. You coasted through your education, getting by on natural talent, until you finally hit a subject you couldn't master at first glance and discovered you had never acquired any actual study skills. 
4. You joined a drinking society in your first week at college. You finally sobered up shortly after graduation, which in retrospect was probably a bit late.
5. You proudly declared your support for one faction in an ongoing intellectual controversy, only to discover that the people assessing your work all adhered to the other side.
6. You were too busy doing part-time work to pay your extortionate college fees to actually do any studying.
7. You foolishly prioritised mastering your subject over making the right connections while at college.
8. Hosting ever-more-legendary college parties seemed like a great idea until you got expelled for setting fire to the accommodation block.
9. A senior academic took against you and failed all your assignments out of spite.
10. Impenetrable university bureaucracy meant that a minor clerical error on your part somehow led to you failing on a technicality.
11. You unwisely took the advice of your tutors at face value and studied the subjects that you, personally, found most intellectually stimulating, not realising that you were rendering yourself unemployable until it was too late.
12.  You got really into student politics, and were too busy organising protests and having intense conversations with sexy young radicals to do any actual studying. 
13. You became fascinated by avant-garde theory, and denounced your tutors as a bunch of obscuratist authoritarians too old and scared to recognise the true brilliance of your ideas, which in retrospect may not have been the best way to open the first paragraph of your dissertation.
14. Discovered too late that you'd enrolled in a low-status college whose degrees no-one really took seriously. 
15. The one topic you'd revised for most carefully didn't come up in the paper.
16. You suffered a massive panic attack in mid-exam, destroying your prospects in a single horrible hour.
17. You devoted yourself to the fearless and objective pursuit of truth and enlightenment, regardless of where it might lead you. Turns out it led you to some very, very low grades.
18. The exciting new theory on which you wrote your thesis was discredited shortly after you submitted it. 
19. You staked everything on making a big breakthrough, but someone else got there first.
20. Your academic supervisor was exposed as a fraud and you were tainted by association. 
21. Your tutor stole all your ideas and took all the credit.
22. You unintentionally offended your tutors by turning down too many social invitations, and discovered too late that none of them would write you references.
23. Your hazy grasp of academic referencing conventions led to your whole dissertation being failed for plagiarism. 
24. Your breezy, irreverent, informal presentation style made you stand out in all the wrong ways.
25. You were written off as a hopeless case when you forgot to wear full academic dress to your first formal dinner.
26. You didn't find the real library until it was much too late.
27. You made the wrong friends at college, and subsequently discovered that all your applications for funding kept being mysteriously rejected.
28. It turned out that scholarship you were counting on was not, in fact, a sure thing.
29. How were you supposed to know that was a secret society handshake?
30. Invited to dinner with the professors, ordered the wrong wine, career dead in five minutes flat.
31. Fell asleep and started snoring loudly in the middle of a very boring lecture by a very famous visiting academic. 
32. Sent to a conference as a representative of your college, completely fucked up your paper, tutors loathed you for making them look bad and failed you in revenge. 
33. Tutored by an affable drunk who gave you brilliant grades for everything. You believed you were a genius until you met the real competition.
34. Just because the invitation to meet the Master says it's optional doesn't mean it's actually optional, idiot!
35. Went to the wrong lectures.
36. Used the wrong archives.
37. Cited the wrong sources.
38. Spoke at the wrong conferences.
39. Competed for the wrong prizes.
40. Sent manuscripts to the wrong publishers.
41. Collaborated with the wrong academics.
42. Applied for the wrong kinds of funding.
43. Held visiting fellowships at the wrong colleges.
44. Chose the wrong referees. 
45. Wore the wrong shoes to interview.
46. Used the wrong honorifics when greeting the Master. 
47. Said what you really thought about the Master's taste in painting while he still wasn't quite out of earshot.
48. Came from the wrong town.
49. Went to the wrong school.
50. Spoke with the wrong accent.
51. Worshipped at the wrong church.
52. Patronised the wrong tailor.
53. Had the wrong opinion about that new play everyone was talking about.
54. Spent too much time working.
55. Spent too little time working.
56. Didn't get the right permissions.
57. Mentioned the wrong people in your acknowledgements.
58. Took the same drugs as everyone else, but made the major faux pas of admitting that you took them.
59. Walked on the grass without permission.
60. Fought back when viciously attacked by the college cat.
61. Passed the port right at High Table.
62. Dared to complain about the food.
63. Using long strings of on-trend content-free buzzwords may have sufficed to get you shortlisted, but oh God it did not play well at interview.
64. Did so well as a poorly-paid teaching assistant with no job security that the faculty decided to just carry on exploiting you forever. 
65. Couldn't compete with the research resources available to much better-funded rivals.
66. Staked everything on a brilliant job opportunity without realising it was only ever meant to go to the inside candidate.
67. Loyally followed your boyfriend/girlfriend to a new city, without realising that everyone at college would forget all about you the instant you left town.
68. Turned down a safe job to follow up a tip about a more prestigious post elsewhere. You didn't realise that you'd only been invited to make up the numbers until you saw the rest of the shortlist, and by then it was too late.
69. Just because they say they want your 'honest feedback' doesn't mean you should actually tell them the truth!
70. All those 'unmissable research opportunities' turned out to be unpaid, and you eventually ran out of family money. 
71. Used as an expendable catspaw in some kind of esoteric power struggle between two senior academics.
72. Took a few years out and found that the field had moved on without you.
73. Framed for academic misconduct by an ambitious rival who wanted to remove you from the competition.
74. The professor you gave up your old post to work with was undoubtedly brilliant twenty years ago, but these days he's just senile.
75. Applying for high-status posts made you look over-ambitious.
76. Applying for low-status posts made you look desperate.
77. Application letter was much too long and nobody read it.
78. Your interviewer was your grandfather's college rival fifty years ago and still takes the feud extremely seriously.
79. Your work was too traditional and it made you look boring.
80. Your work was too non-traditional and it made you look unsafe.
81. Panicked in the interview and just started babbling.
82. Couldn't think of anything clever to say when the interviewer asked: 'And now, do you have any questions for us?'
83. I think you'll find that that term is now considered highly offensive.
84. No, of course we don't mean anything by it when we say it. Don't you have a sense of humour?
85. Insufficiently active in defending the college during the latest town vs. gown riots.
86. Failure to attend sporting fixtures shows unpardonable lack of college spirit.
87. Insufficiently aggressive salary negotiations meant that your 'dream job' left you a pauper.
88. 'Yes, I can see that your work is terribly clever. But has it had any public impact?'
89. 'Is it relevant to current government priorities?'
90. 'Does it have any commercial applications?'
91. 'How does it fit into our college strategy?'
92. Oh God you should have researched this place more thoroughly before you said that in your interview.
93. How were you supposed to know they hated each other?
94. Citing too little existing scholarship made you look ignorant.
95. Citing too much existing scholarship made you look derivative.
96. Your first book received a devastating review in the field's leading journal and your career never recovered.
97. It took you years to work out that the reader was rejecting all your articles because he wanted you to send them to his journal, instead!
98. Failed to keep pace with changing intellectual fashions.
99. You were stupid enough to believe them when they said that the dinner wasn't part of the interview.
100. Learned too late that the college tiddlywinks society was the real key to success all along. 

A brief history of British literature in Warhammer armies

This is all Solomon VK's fault. In a comment on my previous post he challenged me to imagine Warhammer armies for three British authors - Belloc, Waugh, and Greene - and now I can't stop doing it. So now you all get to suffer the consequences.

The Medievals: Geoffrey Chaucer plays a Bretonnian army heavy on peasants. Thomas Mallory also plays Bretonnians, but his army is mostly knights, and he spends a lot of time trying to reconcile different versions of the game's lore. The Gawain poet plays a weird Bretonnian - Wood Elf allied army which he insists is rules-legal in some edition or other. William Langland plays dwarves, who he says are much better than humans because they're harder workers. The Beowulf poet plays Space Wolves, but it's OK because he only plays 40K first edition, and back then the rules and armies were Warhammer compatible. The whole group sometimes organises tournaments with their rivals, the Welsh Bards, who mostly play armies of Wood Elves and Beastmen and place a premium on freakish and spectacular conversions.

The Renaissance: Phillip Sidney plays Empire. Edmund Spenser plays Empire too, but squanders all his points on knightly orders and High Elf allies, and had to be banned from trying to include a 40K Necron in his Warhammer army list. Shakespeare prefers historical wargaming, with Imperial Rome and the War of the Roses as his favourite periods, but he's got a pretty good Dogs of War army going on the side. Thomas Middleton plays ludicrously murder-happy Dark Elves. John Webster plays Undead.

The Seventeenth Century: Rochester plays Slaanesh. John Donne used to play Slaanesh as well, but then got really serious and switched to Dark Angels. George Herbert has an Ecclesiarchy army. George Etherege has an army of beautifully-dressed High Elves. Herrick collects Halflings. John Aubrey mostly just writes anecdote-heavy blog posts about the good old days of first edition.

John Milton has two collections - Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines. He claims that the Space Marines are his 'real' army and the Chaos Marines are just there to give them someone to fight against, but it's obvious that the Chaos Marines have been painted with vastly greater skill and care than their loyalist counterparts.

The Augustans: Jonathan Swift plays Orcs, carefully converted to look like caricatures of various political figures. John Gay plays Skaven with a heavy emphasis on gutter runners. John Dryden and Alexander Pope only play historical games set during the Classical era: Pope used to play fantasy as well, but ragequit after one too many dwarf jokes. Henry Fielding plays Empire. Thomas Grey plays Halflings. Horace Walpole plays Undead.

The Romantics: Jane Austen has a custom Imperial Guard army, with dashing red uniforms and far too many officers. Mary Wollstonecraft plays Sisters of Battle. William Wordsworth used to play Wood Elves but switched to Imperial Guard after the war started. William Blake plays Chaos Daemons, and sculpts all his own miniatures. Walter Scott used to play Undead, but then switched to historicals, and now spends most of his time obsessively refighting the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge keeps buying new armies and then changing his mind about who he wants to play, leaving behind a couple of half-painted figures and a stack of unassembled models. Percy Shelley plays Slaanesh, and keeps writing interminable blog posts about why they're actually the real good guys. John Keats plays Eldar aspect warriors. Lord Byron plays Vampire Counts. Thomas De Quincey plays Chaos Undivided.

The Early Victorians: Elizabeth Barrett Browning plays Sisters of Silence. Robert Browning plays Dogs of War. Christina Rossetti plays Sisters of Battle, but maintains a secret collection of painstakingly converted goblins and beastmen. Charles Dickens plays Goblins and Skaven, because he can paint twice as fast as anyone else and thus has time to maintain two collections. Alfred Tennyson plays Stormcast Eternals. Lewis Carroll plays Tzeench.

Ann Brontë plays High Elves. Emily Brontë plays Dark Elves. Charlotte Brontë plays Wood Elves. Bramwell Brontë used to play Vampire Counts, but sold all his models on ebay to buy more gin.

The Late Victorians: Thomas Hardy plays Imperial Guard. Algernon Swinburne plays a Dark Eldar army heavy on sexy dominatrices with whips, and makes everyone a bit uncomfortable with just how into it he is. Bram Stoker plays Vampire Counts. M.R. James plays Nighthaunts. Lionel Johnson plays Dark Angels (obviously). Oscar Wilde plays Eldar Harlequins.

The Modernists: Virginia Woolf plays Tzeench. W.B. Yeats plays Wood Elves. Henry James plays High Elves. D.H. Lawrence plays Beastmen.

Ezra Pound plays Space Marines, and obviously loves the Imperium for all the wrong reasons. T.S. Eliot also plays Space Marines, but he always loses on purpose in order to make some kind of obscure moral point.

New B/X Class: The Gothic Villain

My reading has taken me, once again, back to the Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where the villains have dark eyes, the heroines have white dresses, the castles have secret passages in every room, and the plots make no damn sense whatsoever.

This class is my tribute to the absurdist horror fiction of yesteryear. It should bring a touch of melodramatic lunacy into any campaign.

[Edit: Dandibuja has now drawn an illustration to accompany this class! You can view it here.]

Gothic Villain

To-Hit and Hit Dice: As Fighter.

Saves: As Thief.

Weapons and Armour: Gothic Villains can use any weapon, but cannot use shields or any kind of heavy armour, as these would get in the way of their dramatic gesticulation.

XP per level: As Magic-User.

Dark Secret: All Gothic Villains harbour Dark Secrets, although at the beginning of their career they only know a fragment of the terrible truth. At level 1, roll 1d10 on each of the following tables to generate a secret, as follows:

1. I...
2. My husband / wife...
3. My mother...
4. My father...
5. My brother...
6. My sister...
7. My son...
8. My daughter...
9. My whole family...
10. My one true love...

1. ...murdered...
2. ...stole the inheritance of...
3. ...committed adultery and/or incest with...
4. ...was deliberately driven mad by...
5. ...usurped the rightful title of...
6. ...imprisoned and faked the death of...
7. ...was ruined and degraded by...
8. ...was tricked into committing treason by...
9. ...was lured into heresy and blasphemy by...
10. ...was seduced into a life of shameful vice and crime by...

1. ...me.
2. ...my husband / wife.
3. ...my mother.
4. ...my father.
5. ...my brother.
6. ...my sister.
7. ...my son.
8. ...my daughter.
9. ...my whole family.
10. ...my one true love.

(If this results in something totally bizarre, like someone usurping their own title, then just roll with it. Maybe everyone involved was drunk and/or mad at the time.)

Every time the Gothic Villain goes up a level, they will discover another fragment of the horrible truth. Roll again on all three tables. If this results in something they should really have known already, like the fact that their own daughter murdered them years ago, then feel free to include however much amnesia and mistaken identity is required to make the whole thing work.

Example: Eduardo rolls 1, 7, 5, so his initial Dark Secret is that he was ruined and degraded by his own brother. When he reaches level 2 he rolls 6, 4, 9, and discovers that his whole family also conspired to drive his sister mad. On reaching level 3 he rolls 4, 1, 9, and learns that whole family - who he's been regularly interacting with since the campaign began - were actually murdered by his father. Maybe all these people are ghosts? Or impostors? Maybe they faked their own deaths? Or maybe he's just going mad? Just another day in the life of a Gothic Villain...

The Home of My Ancestors: The Gothic Villain starts play as the owner of a decayed castle, abbey, or manor house, located somewhere horribly inconvenient, such as the top of a mountain, the depths of a forest, or the middle of a swamp. Bits of it keep falling down, and its once-fine furnishings are warped and worthless, but its staff of servants (all of whom are too old, inbred, sycophantic, and/or insane to leave) maintain it well enough to prevent it from actually collapsing. Although it is instantly obvious to everyone else that this building is a total liability, the Villain will be insanely proud of it, and must always devote at least 50% of all treasure earned to restoring their family home. No matter how much money is spent on it, however, the house will remain the same rickety deathtrap it has always been.

While on the grounds of their estate, the Villain may mobilise a number of family retainers equal to their Charisma multiplied by their level. These retainers are normal 0-level humans, but they are extremely devoted to the Villain (morale 10) and obey the Villain without question. They cannot be brought more than a day's journey from the estate, as the outside world bewilders and terrifies them.

If the Villain dies without naming an heir, the House will be abandoned by its servants and sink into utter ruin within 1d6 months.

Obey Me, Miscreant!: The Gothic Villain begins play with a single cringing minion, who obeys them out of greed and fear. Each time they go up a level, they gain an additional minion. If a minion dies, then the Villain will automatically obtain a replacement after spending 1d6 days in any inhabited area, as malcontent weirdos with strange deformities are attracted to them like moths to a flame.

Generate each minion by rolling 2d12 on the following tables.

1. A fighter (half your level, round up) who...
2. A thief (half your level, round up) who...
3. A cleric (half your level, round up) who...
4. A magic-user (half your level, round up) who...
5. A slow-witted brute (STR 15+1d3, INT 2+1d3, HD equal to half your level, round up) who...
6. A well-trained ape (HD equal to half your level, round up) who...
7. A seductive harlot (equal chance male or female, CHA 15+1d3) who...
8. A disgraced scholar (INT 12+1d6, has mastered a number of fields of knowledge equal to half your level, rounded up) who...
9. A master infiltrator (capable of disguise, ventriloquism, imitating voices), who...
10. A Scooby-Doo villain (dab hand at faking apparitions with aid of wires, phosphorous, and magic lanterns), who...
11. A corrupt detective (capable of spotting clues and following trails, can try to frame people for crimes with a success rate of 10% per level), who...
12. A band of ruffians (a number of 0-level thugs equal to your level+1) who...

1. ...has hideous facial deformities.
2. ...is covered in distinctive scars.
3. ...is missing a body part (roll 1d4: 1 = eye, 2 = arm, 3 = leg, 4 = ear). 
4. ...is a dwarf, giant, or hunchback (equal chance of each).
5. ...is always drunk.
6. ...is addicted to horrible narcotics.
7. ...has some kind of weird psycho-sexual obsession with you. 
8. ...is a kleptomaniac.
9. ...is a pyromaniac.
10. ...is a compulsive liar.
11. ...is a slave to their bizarre sexual fetishes.
12. ...experiences irrational bursts of rage at inconvenient moments.

Minions will put up with most forms of ill-treatment, but will not obey orders that are obviously suicidal. Their base morale is 8, adjusted for Charisma as usual. 

Dread Gaze: At level 2, the gaze of the Villain grows so powerful that it can leave people transfixed with fear. If the Villain catches the eye of an intelligent target (including animals), the target must save or be effectively paralysed for as long as the villain carries on staring at them. During this time the Villain cannot take any action other than walking, talking, and staring, and the effect ends at once if either the Villain or the target takes any damage. Once someone has successfully saved against this ability, it cannot be used on them again for the next 24 hours. 

Full of Scorpions is my Mind: By level 4, the Villain has uncovered so many Dark Secrets about themselves and their family that by brooding on them for 1d6 minutes they can throw themselves into a frothing rage, during which they gain a +2 bonus to-hit, damage, and saves vs. mind-affecting powers. This rage lasts for a number of minutes equal to the Villain's level. During this time the Villain will rant, rage, and literally chew the scenery, making any kind of stealth impossible until they have calmed down. 

Everything I Own Is Poisoned: At level 6, once per day, the Villain may retroactively declare that any object within their power or possession that someone has just interacted with - the dagger they just stabbed someone with, the glove they were wearing while shaking hands with someone, the doorknob someone just turned, whatever - was actually covered in poison. The person who touched it must save or take 1d6 damage per level of the Villain. If the poison was on something they ate or drank, then the damage rises to 1d10 per level. 

Into the Oubliette! At level 8, once per month, the Villain may send a lettre de cachet to mysterious allies of his family. The next time the person named in the letter leaves their home, a band of mysterious masked men will attempt to abduct them. They must make a saving throw: if they pass, the attempt fails, and the lettre is wasted. If they fail, however, they will be dragged off with a bag over their head and thrown in a secret dungeon somewhere, where they will be kept for 1d6 days per level of the Villain before being pulled out and released without explanation at a random location 1d100 miles from their home. (Roll 1d8 for direction: 1 = 1d100 miles north, 2 = 1d100 miles north-east, and so on.) The location of their prison is so secret that even the Villain will not be able to locate them during their imprisonment. 

Ruin Has Come: At level 10, the Villain may enter some kind of institution (a castle, a temple, a university, etc) accompanied by his full retinue of minions, and simply... self-destruct. Unless the leader of the institution is higher level than the Villain, then over the next 1d6 days the institution disintegrates into crime, madness, factional warfare, corruption, and vice, before collapsing into spectacular ruin in a final institutional flame-out that consumes the lives of the Villain, his minions, and (1d6 x 10)% of the institution's members, including its entire senior leadership. All sane and decent people will abandon the institution immediately thereafter. 1d6 weeks later, one scion of this fallen institution will return home, seize control of whatever remains of it, and begin their career as a new level 1 Gothic Villain. 

Here Be Cannibals: Mapping Generic OSR-Land

You've probably all seen those maps of Generic Fantasy Land. This one was made years ago;  more recently James Hutchings posted two similar ones over on his Teleleli blog. You might also have seen this post over on Throne of Salt,  which took a whole bunch of OSR settings (including mine!) and squished them all together into a single hexmap - which is also, incidentally, pretty much how I built the game setting for my current Team Tsathogga campaign.

Reading these two posts in close succession made me think about what the OSR-fantasy version of those maps would look like. The OSR, after all, has its distinctive preoccupations and areas of focus: a lot less Generic Fantasy Kingdoms, and a lot more crashed spaceships and mutant snakemen. We have our own fads and fashions - islands and whaling seems to be in this season - and one doesn't need to read very widely in the OSR blogosphere to start seeing the same motifs surfacing over and over again. (There seems to be no limit to our collective fixation with cults and cannibals, for a start.) So I idly opened Hexographer, and an hour later, I came up with this...

What's happening at the wizard's conference?

If I have to keep going to these things, I might as well turn them into gaming materials, right?

Most of these are based on things that have happened at academic conferences I've been to, but with added wizards. Many are rather anachronistic for medieval settings, although in some cases probably less so than you might expect. Some aspects of academic life have changed surprisingly little in the last eight hundred years.

In the main hall (roll 1d8):

1. Keynote address on the state of modern magical theory. The guest speaker was allocated forty minutes: he's now been talking for two and a half hours and shows no sign of slowing down, but his seniority is such that no-one dares ask him to stop. Many of the more elderly listeners have fallen asleep.
2. Immediate aftermath of a contentious lecture by a rising academic star, provocatively entitled 'Everything You Thought You Knew Is Wrong'. The post-lecture 'debate' has devolved into a screaming match, with supporters and opponents of the speaker on their feet and hurling abuse at each other while the chair desperately tries to restore order. The speaker herself watches serenely from her podium, unpeturbed by the chaos she has unleashed.
3. Annual general meeting of the magical order, at which it elects its officials. Rival cliques within the order have been planning for this for months, and are determined to get their chosen candidates into the most influential positions. People keep yelling things like 'Point of order!' and 'I propose the Archmagister Esmerelda!' and 'I second the Necrolord Abraxus!' 
4. Extremely abstruse dissertation on an obscure area of magical philosophy, delivered by a noted expert in her small and rarefied academic field. No-one in the audience can understand a word of it, but they don't want to risk looking stupid by admitting it, so they're all nodding sagely instead. The more cynical members of the audience are privately wondering if she's just senile, but how could you be sure?
5. Award ceremony. Relays of indefatigable speakers are listing every quality of every work which was considered for the award, and every reason why the winner was chosen, and every detail of the career of the person to whom it has been awarded, and it just goes on and on and on. The winner is standing at the front in full academical dress, obviously desperate for all this to be over so that she can launch into her acceptance speech and start making not-so-subtle digs at her academic rivals.
6. Memorial service. One of the senior wizards has died between this conference and the last one, and now the stage is full of lachrymose magicians delivering anecdotes about their long-gone student days together, and how the field will never see her like again. An official with a big bag moves threateningly through the audience, extorting money from the delegates to fund the new magical laboratory which is supposed to be built in her honour. 
7. A junior wizard has been granted a chance to address the conference, and is making a misguided attempt to appear excitingly transgressive by delivering a presentation full of graphically weird sex stuff. No-one is shocked, and no-one is impressed.
8. Technical problems. There was supposed to be a big, complex display of spectacularly advanced sorcery, but there's been a problem with the reagents and now the conference organiser is stalling frantically while his minions run desperately from lab to lab, trying to locate an alternative stash of purple lotus flowers. Seven very powerful wizards have travelled a very long way to make this demonstration, and now stand muttering in a semi-circle at the back of the stage. If no-one manages to appease them soon then they are going to start turning people into toads.

In the seminar rooms (roll 1d10):

1. A panel of low-status junior wizards dutifully delivering papers on their research to an audience of two, one of whom is the boyfriend of one of the speakers. Everyone else is either too hungover to have got up yet, or attending a talk being given by someone much more important in the next room. 
2. An anxious junior wizard is delivering an academic paper as though his whole future depended on it, which it probably does. He's pulled out all the stops - mobile illusions as visual aids, daring arguments, incredible displays of scholarship - but he's getting more and more nervous, speaking faster and faster as he goes on. An audience of senior magicians watch coolly and critically from the back.
3. The favoured apprentice of a leading archmage - charismatic, good-looking, well-dressed, horribly slick - is delivering a paper heavy on confidence and rhetorical fireworks but light on actual scholarship, while his tutor smiles and nods indulgently. All the other apprentices stare daggers at him and secretly long for him to humiliate himself as spectacularly as possible.
4. A gladiatorial display. Audience members fire questions at a brilliant young speaker regarding the paper she's just delivered; she answers each one with grace and flair, but the queries just keep coming and she's obviously beginning to tire. The most senior wizards lurk at the back, sharpening the wording of their questions like an assassin's daggers, waiting to move in for the kill. 
5. Three junior wizards are delivering a 'joint panel' - except as it goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that one of the three has actually reached completely different conclusions to the other two, who make increasingly desperate attempts to qualify his assertions while signalling ever-more unsubtly for him to just shut up already. The audience is loving it.
6. Hilarious paper being delivered by a junior wizard, who has managed to make magical theory not just interesting but funny, at least if you get all the in-jokes. The audience are in stitches, howling with laughter and clapping wildly every time he delivers such showstopper punchlines as: '...because it was actually abjuration magic all along!' A couple of non-wizard attendants are watching in total bemusement. 
7. Fashion competition death match. Three senior wizards with reputations as academic style icons, all dressed in their most extravagant hats and robes, are posing and preening at the front of the room. Supposedly they're delivering academic papers, but no-one is even pretending to listen as they stalk and strut, competing to display their profiles to best advantage and to ensure that they are standing in the most flattering light.
8. Some buffoon is delivering an 'avant-garde art performance' in place of his paper, as a 'meta-commentary on the repressive nature of academic institutions' - presumably including the one which paid for him to attend this conference in the first place. He's currently capering around in a fake horse's head while the audience watches aghast.
9. Roundtable discussion on 'how to build a career in the magical professions' has degenerated into all-in bitching sessions by apprentices about the many and varied failings of their tutors, none of whom could be bothered to attend.
10. An execution by firing squad. A luckless apprentice has antagonised the wrong people, and the senior magicians have turned up to his paper en masse in order to make an example of him. Now a cabal of wizards are mercilessly shredding his argument right in front of him under the cover of 'offering constructive criticism', while he dutifully records his many and varied academic failings in note form and tries very, very hard not to cry.

Outside (roll 1d8):

1. 'Informal' social event with drinks. The conference attendees have swiftly sorted themselves into cliques based on academic status, and refuse to socialise with anyone except their peers. Occasionally a naive young wizard attempts to approach a senior clique to 'network' with his betters and gets ruthlessly slapped down.
2. Guided tour snaking its way through the grounds of the host institution, its route carefully planned to take in all the most impressive parts and avoid all the embarrassing bits. The guide is a rather panicky apprentice who is having great difficulty keeping his charges from wandering off.
3. Ceremonial unveiling of a sycophantic mural in honour of the single most important wizard attending the conference. She is depicted as a wise, regal, sternly beautiful figure, surrounded by quotations from her most famous works. The rather less impressive-looking original preens herself nearby, surrounded by fawning admirers.
4. Servants setting up tables with tea, coffee, and pastries. A particularly overweight senior wizard has arrived early, and is eating the pastries almost as fast as the servants can put them out. 
5. Junior wizard running sprinting from building to building, obviously totally lost, yelling 'FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!' at the top of his voice. He's ten minutes late for his extremely important twenty-minute paper and he just cannot find the right room. 
6. Small group of junior wizards talking excitedly about what a great opportunity it is to be here. Nearby a small group of senior wizards stand grumbling about how boring the conference is, and how the food was better last year.
7. Junior wizard having a panic attack in the shrubbery. She's due on stage in five minutes and she cannot do this. What if they laugh at her? What if they laugh?
8. An excursion! A cavalcade of wizards are setting off, by carriage, to visit some famous location in the nearby region: a temple, palace, stone circle, or similar. Sitting next to a senior wizard means having almost uninterrupted access to them for the whole of the two-hour journey, and competition for the best seats is complex and murderous, with ambitious young magicians trying to work out the exact moment at which they need to make their move in order to end up sitting in the right coach.

In the evening (roll 1d10):

1. Lavish conference dinner. Tables groaning under the weight of food and drink. Senior wizards gorging themselves silly. Junior wizards nervously sipping wine and wondering how on earth they're going to afford their share of the bill.
2. Interminable formal dance recital held in honour of one of the conference organisers. Everyone is bored stiff but too polite to leave. Mutinous band of apprentices at the back is seriously considering trying to sneak out under the cover of invisibility spells. 
3. Band of apprentices and junior wizards sitting by a lake in the moonlight, settling in for a bout of serious drinking. Lots of rambling conversations about magic, sentimental declarations of friendship, and surreptitious vomiting in the bushes.
4. Group of drunken senior wizards singing, dancing, and making fools of themselves, while their appalled apprentices watch from the sidelines. Both the songs and the dances were fashionable about fifty years ago. Neither they nor their performers have aged well.
5. Roaming bands of junior wizards 'sampling the local nightlife', barging into bars, drinking stupid cocktails, and generally being obnoxious. Locals stare at them balefully wherever they go.
6. A pair of senior wizards slip away together into the night, giggling like schoolchildren, their arms around each other's waists. They are both definitely married, and not to each other - but what happens at the conference stays at the conference, right?
7. In the corner of an old pub, a gaggle of junior wizards surround a senior magician, vying for her attention. They compete frantically to impress her with the best jokes, the most colourful anecdotes, and the most dazzling displays of academic knowledge, while she sips sherry and listens to them with benign indifference.
8. A cabal of apprentices sit muttering in a public square, pooling their meagre supplies of knowledge and gossip to try to work out what's really going on within their order and how best to advance themselves within it. All their conclusions produced by their increasingly conspiratorial logic are utterly incorrect, but they have no way of knowing this.
9. Under the influence of one too many drinks, an extremely senior wizard has just revealed that he loves to sing the old traditional folk songs of his homeland. Who wants to join him in a few rousing old ballads? All around him, his colleagues are steeling themselves for what they know is likely to be a very long night...
10. The real event: at a table in a private room at the best restaurant in town, the four or five most important (not necessarily the most senior) people at the conference are having a serious conversation about what their magical order is going to do over the next few years. This meeting is the real reason the conference takes place: everything else is just camouflage. No-one else has been informed that this meeting is taking place.

New B/X Class: The Tinker (AKA 'MacGyver in D&D')

So, um, this is going to be one of my sillier classes. Derek Holland asked me to write a B/X MacGyver class. I've never seen any MacGyver, but I knew the general idea, and Derek gave me a brief: an engineer class which tinkered its way out of situations using devices cobbled together on the spot, rather than relying on a portfolio of prior inventions. So here it is.

Note that, by its very nature, this class requires the GM to be very lenient when it comes to accepting what can be built out of what. The question of exactly how the PC turns a heap of bones and leaves into a fully functional hot air balloon simply by hammering at them for a few minutes is really best not looked into too closely...

Also note that, with the exception of their stronghold (see below), all the devices built by the Tinker have a strictly limited lifespan. When it comes to building things that actually last for more than a few hours, their ability is no greater than that of any other talented engineer of the appropriate tech level.

The Tinker

To-hit, saves, hit dice: As per thief.

Weapons and armour: As per thief, but you are also proficient with any improvised weapons or armour you create yourself (see below).

XP per level: As magic-user.

Mechanical Aptitude: You have the same ability to pick locks and find or remove traps as a thief of equal level.

Inspiration Pool: You have a number of inspiration points equal to your Intelligence score plus five times your level. (So a level 3 tinker with Intelligence 12 would have 27 inspiration points.) Your inspiration pool refills every time you get a good night's sleep.

Scavenger: You can't build your devices without a suitable heap of bits and pieces - fragments of metal, scraps of cloth, bits of wood and bone, whatever - to build them out of. Luckily, you have an uncanny knack for finding random bits of junk wherever you go. By searching for 10 minutes and spending 1 point of inspiration, you can always find enough stuff to build the thing you want, unless it would be obviously and entirely impossible for you to do so.

Improvise Weapons: By spending 1 point of inspiration, you can turn any random bit of junk into an effective improvised weapon by working on it for one minute. In your hands, the resulting weapon will deal 1d8 damage if it's a ranged or one-handed melee weapon, or 1d10 damage if it's a two-handed melee weapon. It will fall apart after being used in one fight.

Improvise Armour: You can cobble together any old random junk into weirdly effective improvised armour. 1 inspiration and 1 minute's work grants a +1 AC bonus to you or one other person; this may be increased to any extent, but the cost in time and inspiration doubles for each extra point of AC. (So granting someone +3 AC would cost 4 inspiration and take 4 minutes.) The resulting armour will fall apart after a number of hours equal to your level.

Improvise Tools: You may spend 1 inspiration and 5 minutes to cobble together nearby junk into a crude but effective version of any normal tool: a lockpick, a snorkel, a water clock, and so on. (At the GM's option, this may also allow you to cobble together things like magnets and small electrical generators.) If your toolkit is taken away from you, you can use this ability to tinker up replacement tools out of sticks and stones. The resulting tools will function for 10 minutes of use per level before falling apart.

Improvise Chemicals: You may spend 10 minutes to convert some totally innocuous-looking nearby substances into either slippery stuff, a phosphorescent fluid, a powerful explosive, a powerful corrosive, or a poisonous gas. You also create a fragile container to store it, which will break if thrown, trodden on, etc. Effects are as follows:

• Phosphorescence: When container is broken, whoever or whatever is splashed with it will glow brightly until it is washed off. Costs 2 inspiration to make.
• Slippery Stuff: When broken on the floor, creates a 10' puddle so slippery that anyone who walks on it must save or fall over. If broken over a person instead, they become effectively impossible to grapple. Lasts for 1 minute for every 2 inspiration spent making it. 
• Corrosive: When container is broken, whoever or whatever is splashed with it takes 1d6 damage for every 2 inspiration spent making it. (Save for half damage.) Maximum damage is 1d6 per level. Can also be used to melt holes through metal barriers and destroy small metal objects
• Poison gas: When container is broken, everyone within 10' must save or suffer either incapacitating sickness or confusion (your choice) for 1 round per 3 inspiration spent making it.
• Explosive: When container is broken, explodes in a 10' blast radius, inflicting 1d6 damage for every 5 inspiration spent making it. (Save for half damage.) Maximum damage is 1d6 per level.

The chemicals you create will decay and become inert after 1 hour per level.

Build Artillery: You may spend 5 inspiration and 10 minutes to turn a random heap of junk into a crude but effective man-portable catapault, ballista, cannon, mortar, or similar device. Its target must save or take 2d6 damage: you may increase its damage by spending 5 inspiration for each additional 1d6, so a cannon which inflicts 4d6 damage costs 15 inspiration, and so on. You can also upgrade it to an area effect by spending additional inspiration equal to the desired blast radius in feet. The resulting weapon can be fired once per level before it breaks; it will also fall apart after a maximum of 1 hour per level if it has not already done so. If your artillery is used by anyone other than you, each shot taken counts as two shots towards its maximum limit.

By spending an extra 5 inspiration, you may give your artillery an automated firing mechanism, which will trigger either after a certain length of time (e.g. 'ten minutes after I set the timer') or when a connected tripwire or pressure plate is triggered. Once the automated artillery is triggered, it will fire once per round at whatever it's currently pointing at until it falls apart.

Note that artillery may also be used for non-combat purposes, such as launching grappling hooks across chasms, throwing halflings over walls, breaking down doors, and so on. Just ask your GM how many 'damage dice' worth of artillery power the effect you want would require!

Build Decoy: You may build wheeled decoys (normally human-sized, although you can choose to make them smaller), which you can use as trap-springers, distractions, or even improvised cover. An unpowered decoy which has to be physically pushed from place to place costs 2 inspiration; a wind-up decoy (can run for up to 1 minute per level) costs 4 inspiration, and a motorised decoy (can run for 10 minutes per level) costs 8 inspiration. The decoy has AC 5 and 2 HP per level. Note that you may use decoys as delivery systems for chemicals or automated artillery (see above). If not otherwise destroyed, decoys fall apart after 1 hour per level.

Build Transportation: You may turn a random heap of junk into a crude but effective vehicle. Different vehicles cost different amounts of inspiration, as follows:

• 1 inspiration: Sled, snowboard, skateboard, surfboard.
• 2 inspiration: Rowboat, cart, bicycle, hang-glider.
• 4 inspiration: Chariot, carriage, sailboat.
• 8 inspiration: Hot air balloon, diving bell. 
• 16 inspiration: Pedal-powered gyrocopter or submarine.
• 24 inspiration: Motorised cart, speedboat, or snowmobile. (Don't ask what's powering them. Probably a spring or something.)
• 32 inspiration: Motorised crane, bulldozer, steamroller, jet ski, or biplane.
• 48 inspiration: Motorised hovercraft, helicopter or submarine. 
• 64 inspiration: Mole machine (can dig through earth, sand, or rubble, although not through solid stone), jetpack. 
• 80 inspiration: Space capsule (complete with steering thrusters and heat shielding capable of surviving re-entry.) 

The vehicles you build will function for 1 hour per level before they fall apart, although you may double their effective lifespan by increasing their inspiration cost by 50%. By default, they are one-person vehicles, but you may add space for additional passengers by increasing the vehicle's inspiration cost by 2 per extra person. (So a five-person speedboat would cost 32 inspiration.) Building time is 5 minutes per point of inspiration cost. 

Emergency Construction: If you're in a real hurry, you can scavenge for parts or build devices at double normal speed by increasing their inspiration cost by 50%. Round up any fractions.

Scrapheap Stronghold: Upon reaching 10th level, you may build a stronghold. Doing this requires 1d6 months work, at the end of which you will, by mysterious means, have built yourself a castle-sized stronghold guarded by a number of 0-level men-at-arms equal to your total inspiration pool. Upon close inspection, both the castle and the guards will turn out to be built out of sticks, duct tape, bits of corrugated iron, and similar unlikely objects, but they function just like a normal fort guarded by normal men. If your men-at-arms are killed, they can be replaced at a rate of 1 per day of work spent rebuilding them. If a year ever goes by in which you do not devote at least one full week to maintaining and repairing your stronghold, both fort and men collapse into heaps of scrap. 

Summon Evil Hedgehog: A spell from 1854

My trawl-through of mid-nineteenth-century literature is getting weird, yo.

Nicodemus: The Black Art? Here is your very good health! - I wish you could see my master's room, after he has been trying to call up the devil! Lord, sir! there's no end of skulls, and chalk marks on the floor, and stench of sulphur, and what not - but I don't believe that, with all his pains, he ever brought the devil up.

Second Familiar of the Inquisition: Take another cup. - But he tries it sometimes!

Nicodemus: Punctually upon Wednesdays - about midnight, when the whole household have gone to sleep. But he's not up to the trick: he never could raise anything larger than a hedge-hog.

Second Familiar: But he has done that, has he?

Nicodemus: Of course! Anyone can raise a hedge-hog. But I'm not going to sit here all night seeing you drinking. I must go home to translate Plotinus, who was a respectable father of the Latin Church. Take my advice and go home too - you are both drunk. Where's my beaver? Don't attempt to offer me two, in case I put the phantom one on my head. I say - if there is a drop remaining in the bottle, you might offer it by way of courtesy. Thanks, and take care of yourselves. [Exit]

First Familiar: What say you to this story? A clearer proof
Of arrant sorcery was never given
Unto the holy office.

Second Familiar: It is complete.
He raises hedge-hogs! That's enough for me.

- William Aytoun, Firmillian (1854), scene 5

New level 1 Magic-User spell: Raise Evil Hedgehog.

Summoning an evil hedgehog requires chalk, sulphur, and the skulls of at least six humans or large animals, and can only be attempted at midnight on a Wednesday. The spell is most commonly cast by novice magic-users, usually while drunk. Casting the spell requires a 30 minute ritual and the burning of lots of sulphur, at the end of which one of the skulls tips over and an evil hedgehog crawls out from underneath it. If cast by a magic-user of level 5 or higher, there is a 1% chance per level that something really dangerous shows up instead, so the spell is usually avoided by more competent magicians.

The evil hedgehog looks like a regular hedgehog, but more sinister. It can roll itself into a ball and bounce along the ground at a brisk walking pace, and will use this mode of transportation to follow its summoner around until the following Wednesday at midnight, at which point it returns to wherever evil hedgehogs go. During this time it will obey any non-suicidal instructions given to it, and can be used as a messenger, watch-hedgehog, carrier of very small objects, and so on. It cannot speak, but will communicate via biting - one bite for yes, two bites for no. Its teeth are very sharp.

The evil hedgehog can be ordered to attack someone, which it will do by running up their legs (inside their trousers or under their skirts if possible) and proceeding to maul their most tender regions with its spikes, teeth, and claws.This doesn't do any damage, but it's very painful and distracting, and its victim must make a save vs. paralysis each round to be able to do anything except shriek and try to knock it off them. Once the save is passed, the hedgehog is dislodged, causing it to bounce away and lie stunned and useless for the next 1d6 rounds: during this time, it can be killed by anyone willing to spend an action stomping on it. At any other time, killing the evil hedgehog requires a successful attack against AC 0 (AC 20 if you use ascending AC) due to its extreme bounciness. If killed, its explodes into a ball of sulpherous soot and its soul is banished back to Hedgehog Hell, there to await its next summoner. Targets who have very thick skin or proper armour are normally immune to the evil hedgehog's attacks.

Normal hedgehogs hate evil hedgehogs, and will shun them whenever possible.

Just a wandering gill-man, in search of love and adventure...

The other day, I saw some toys for sale in a local shop at a knock-down price; I thought my son might like them, so I bought him some. They turn out to be part of some complicated multi-platform media franchise called 'Skylanders', which I've never heard of until now. My son (who is two years old) eagerly grabbed the first two toys, which he promptly christened 'Cake Belly' and 'Robot Guy'.

This is Cake Belly.

This is Robot Guy.

I, however, was much more interested in the third of them, a buff, bicep-flexing fish-man dude with a big, happy smile. I told my son that the thing he was holding was an anchor, so he was swiftly named 'Anka', which isn't nearly as good a name as Cake Belly or Robot Guy. But he's still my favourite of the three.

This is Anka.

According to the packaging, his real name is 'Gill Grunt'. I looked him up online, and discovered that he actually has a surprisingly tragic backstory:

Gill Grunt was a brave soul who joined the Gillmen military in search of adventure. While journeying through a misty lagoon in the clouds, he met an enchanting mermaid. He vowed to return to her after his tour. Keeping his promise, he came back to the lagoon years later, only to learn a nasty band of pirates had kidnapped the mermaid. Heartbroken, Gill Grunt began searching all over Skylands. Though he had yet to find her, he joined the Skylanders to help protect others from such evil, while still keeping an ever-watchful eye for the beautiful mermaid and the pirates who took her.

So at this point I was pretty much in love. A happy fish-man who wanders the world looking for his kidnapped mermaid girlfriend (whom he met in a cloud OMG WTF) and whacking people with an anchor. And his battle-cry is 'Fear the Fish!'

But wait. It gets better!

Gill Grunt grew up in a typical Gillmen city on the ocean bottom. From his glass bedroom bubble window, he would gaze out at circling cyber squid and menacing mega sharks. He couldn't have been more bored. 

Cyber-squid? Mega-sharks? Boring! I'm gonna join the army and work out and date mermaids and maybe shoot some guy with a fucking anchor. Fear the Fish! FEAR THE FISH!

I feel a very real connection to Gill Grunt. I identify with him on a very deep level. I can think of very few better ways to live than as a happy, romantic, easily-bored fishman with an anchor gun.

In fact, if and when I get a chance to actually play in a game instead of running one, this might just be my next character...

Halloween zombie-movie rambling: the Resident Evil films and the struggle to escape Saṃsāra

[Fair warning: insofar as they have plots to spoil, this post contains spoilers for all five Resident Evil films. And, no, I don't really think the Resident Evil films are metaphors for Buddhist theology...]

Let me start by stating the obvious: the five Resident Evil movies are not good films. The first one was a serviceable Aliens pastiche. The second one was a rubbish zombie movie. The third one was a rubbish post-apocalyptic action movie. The fourth one was just rubbish. The fifth one was totally incoherent. I tremble to think what the sixth one is going to be like when it comes out in January.

And just how much sillier are Jovovich's increasingly-ridiculous costumes going to get?

They're not good films. But they are increasingly strange films. Driven by their own near-total lack of new ideas, they fill their run-time by endlessly repeating themselves, like a rambling drunk launching into the same anecdote for the third time in two hours. As their plots become ever more nonsensical - why is Red Queen now trying to kill the world, exactly? - they increasingly dissolve into a kind of impressionistic collage, in which the same handful of scenes are endlessly repeated. Alice wakes up naked in a strange place. A team of friends delve into a labyrinthine underground facility. A band of survivors is whittled down, one by one. A grid of lasers hurtles down a corridor. Alice befriends a little girl. Alice gains new powers. Alice loses new powers. The Red Queen threatens people over a speaker system. Alice loses her memories. Alice battles a near-unkillable monster. Alice is carried off by masked men, unconscious. And then, at the start of the next film, Alice wakes up naked, in a strange place...

These films make aggressively clear that the viewer isn't supposed to be looking for a deeper meaning in all this. These are exactly what they appear to be: big, stupid action movies whose appeal depends almost entirely on the opportunities they offer to watch Milla Jovovich put on fetish outfits and shoot zombies in the head. But as their internal logic disintegrates under the force of too many plot twists and too much repetition, I find it increasingly appealing to try to make sense of them in other ways, especially as their actual plot - if they can even be said to have a plot at this stage - is so clearly no longer up to the job!

So let's ignore the increasingly unconvincing attempts of the films to pretend that the scenes they show us can be connected together into a single coherent narrative, and look at the scenes themselves. One very strong repeating pattern in the films is death and rebirth. It's not just that people constantly die and then come back as zombies, or that Alice experiences a long sequence of symbolic deaths and rebirths as she endlessly whacks her head on things and wakes up in new places, sometimes in womb-like fluid bubbles, usually in white, hospital-like environments, and usually naked. It's also that Alice, and later other people, keep getting cloned and killed, only to be cloned again.

Alice discovers hundreds of her own clones waiting to be sent to their deaths in Resident Evil 3.

Alice sends her own clones to their deaths in Resident Evil 4. 

Resident Evil 5: Alice discovers everyone else is being mass-produced and repeatedly sent to their own deaths, as well.

The villain of the third film, Dr Isaacs, repeatedly runs clones of Alice through a kind of 'greatest hits' version of the first film; each time a clone dies, he reloads the set-up with a new one and starts again. (Just like a Resident Evil video game, geddit?) In the fourth film, Alice sacrifices a whole army of her own clones to take out an enemy stronghold. (This is probably a joke about the ease of using CGI graphics to copy-paste duplicates of the same figure onscreen.) In the fifth film, it turns out that virtually the whole cast of the first film (including Alice) were almost certainly clones right from the beginning: the Red Queen has been mass-producing copies of all of them in an underwater base, in order to run staged 'zombie outbreak' scenarios over and over again, in giant bio-domes that look like cities but are actually just Truman Show-style stage sets. (Just like the Resident Evil film series, geddit?) The more of them I watched, the more I started to feel that under the surface of these loud, dumb action movies there was some kind of almost Buddhistic meditation on life, death, and rebirth - entirely unintended by their creators, no doubt, but reaching out from between all the zombies and explosions, none the less...

Bear with me, here.

Alice's interminable travails, I would suggest, reflect what it is like to be stuck in what the Indian religions call saṃsāra: a cyclical world of life, death, and rebirth, characterised by continual change and pain. At the micro-level (of any one incarnation, or of any one film) her actions seem to have meaning, value, purpose: there is an evil to be fought, a person to be saved, an obstacle to be overcome, a clear and determinate goal towards which she can and must advance. The further one zooms out, however, the clearer it becomes that all this sound and fury doesn't really add up to anything, and that instead of advancing towards something, she's just wandering around in circles - which, Wikipedia tells me, is more-or-less what the word saṃsāra literally means. Her world never changes: there's always another underground labyrinth, another wave of zombies, another sneering villain, another mega-monster. She is born and reborn many times, in many places, sometimes more powerful and sometimes less, but it never makes any fundamental difference. She always just ends up in some damn corridor kicking zombies in the head. 

(Is it too fanciful to suggest a resemblance between the omnipresent logo of the Umbrella Corporation and the Buddhist Wheel of Life, which rolls our souls from one incarnation to the next? They certainly keep reincarnating Alice...)

Umbrella Corporation logo.

Wheel of Life.

This cyclical world is characterised by duhkha, suffering. Everywhere she goes, Alice sees a world dominated by violence, death, hunger, and pain. With each incarnation, more and more of the world is taken over by zombies, animalistic beings driven purely by their own insatiable desires. (Or is it just that people increasingly look like zombies to her increasingly rebirth-weary eyes?) But it is also a world of māyā, illusion, in which virtually nothing is 'really' real. Alice begins to realise this as early as the first film, when she takes off her wedding ring and sees that it has 'property of the Umbrella Corporation' engraved inside it; by the fifth film she has come to realise that the world she inhabits is literally a series of stage-sets. After waking up naked and amnesiac for the first time (or is it the first time?) at the start of the first film, she finds a handwritten note on her dresser: on this day all your dreams come true. (Perhaps the films are her trauma-dreams: Freud noted a hundred years ago that people who had suffered traumas tended to experience recurring nightmares in which those traumas were repeatedly replayed, albeit often in coded or symbolic forms, and he would have had a field day with all the weird injections that Alice keeps being subjected to.) Is any of this more than a dream, or an illusion, or a pantomime? Is anything?

Stuck in this illusion-world of pointless suffering, Alice's lives start to look increasingly meaningless. Dr Isaacs runs eighty-seven successive incarnations of her through a deathtrapped murder-maze, each of them waking, struggling, and dying without ever having any idea what their lives are supposed to be about or why nothing that is happening to them makes any sense. (Just like you and me, right?) Not that Alice herself proves to be a better task-master: under her leadership her clones die in droves, using the deaths of their 'sisters' as excuses for cheap quips, not even pretending to care whether they live or die. The Red Queen repeatedly manufactures whole communities of born-to-die victims, each provided with only the most basic memories and personality (just like minor characters in films, geddit?) - just enough to equip them to play their part in staged zombie-outbeak scenarios that last for no more than a few hours at most (which is roughly the length of a zombie movie, geddit?). Adopting a child refugee from one of these fake, doomed worlds, Alice insists that the girl's false memories matter because 'they're real to her': implicitly she's also talking about why her own memories matter, given that by this point she must have worked out that the chances of her not being a clone as well are slim-to-nil. But her actions belie her words: Alice and her comrades go on to blow up the whole clone storage facility, with countless thousands of clones inside it, demonstrating very clearly that they actually don't consider their fake lives and fake memories to have any real value. It that because they have, nihilistically, come to much the same conclusion about their own lives, as well?

Mass grave of dead Alice-clones from Resident Evil 3.

This being an action movie franchise, Alice responds to all this death and pointlessness by fighting. Punch the monsters, shoot the zombies, blow up the underground bases... as though victory was simply a matter of racking up a sufficient kill-count. The films tell us that this is the right and heroic thing to do, but what they actually show us is that it's almost totally counter-productive: the only thing her violence ever grants her access to is yet more violence. She gets an army of her own clones, hundreds of new incarnations which she could devote to any end she chooses, and what does she do? Throws their lives away in yet more warfare. She discovers the means to repopulate the zombie-ravaged world with effectively-real people, and she blows it up in the hope of taking the Red Queen down with it. Her reincarnations are locked into a degenerating downward spiral which any Buddhist could have seen coming from the start, a cycle which threatens to drag her down below the level of the human and into the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. (Maybe she's there already. Maybe that's why she's always surrounded by ravenous zombies.) You can't shoot your way out of saṃsāra. 

So what should she have done? Well, one possible answer is that she could have taken the hint from her name. (Her name is also obviously fake, by the way: other people keep referring to her, not as Alice, but as 'Project Alice', though she never seems to grasp what this implies.) There was another Alice who went down a rabbit-hole and met a Red Queen. (Every single Resident Evil film includes a sequence in which the characters go down a long, long shaft into the depths of the earth... and, yes, I know the Red Queen isn't the same person as the Queen of Hearts) That Alice also found herself in a world that made no sense, ruled over by tyranny and death ('Off with their heads!'); but instead of just fighting it, she tried to understand it, pursuing the nonsense-logic of its inhabitants to its logically illogical conclusions. As a result, she was able to attain a kind of transcendence, seeing through its basically illusionary nature ('You're nothing but a pack of cards!') and ascending (literally - she grows two miles high) into a higher level of reality. Her Resident Evil namesake does not seem to be on track for any similar kind of spiritual progress.

Another Alice, attaining something resembling enlightenment.

The start of the first film isn't really the start of the story. Before Alice wakes up, amnesiac, naked, and alone, she's already lived at least one previous existence as Umbrella's head of security; very possibly she has lived many, many more times before that one. The slate is never wiped clean, even though her memory often is: she's always neck-deep in karma, enduring the consequences of her previous actions, even when she has no idea what those actions might have been. Almost no-one in these films really stays dead: they come back as zombies, or as clones, or they just straight-up regenerate and pick themselves back up off the floor, confirming yet again that the present can never truly rid itself of the weight of the past. The sixth film is supposed to be the last one, and so I guess it'll have to offer some kind of attempt at narrative resolution. But the franchise being what it is, that resolution is probably just going to be an even bigger explosion, probably with Alice waking up in yet another symbolic rebirth on the other side of it; and unless she can change her ways, I fear that, on some level, she really is going to be stuck with her hordes of hungry ghosts forever.

B/X Class: The Extras

I was reading through issue three of Brave the Labyrinth (get it! It's free!) when I came across the Grimp character class. The idea behind the class is that, rather than playing one character, you play a whole group of tiny imps (grimp, geddit?), all standing on one another's shoulders, using limited telepathy and acrobatic skills to coordinate their actions as though they were one creature. The number of imps in your 'body' is equal to your hit points: so if you have ten HP, you're a pile of ten little imps, and so on.

Now, I really liked this idea, but it made me think: could the idea of one player playing a group of characters, all of whom collectively act as one character, be taken further? And then my eye fell upon my Pirates of the Carribean DVDs, and I came up with this:

B/X Class: The Extras

You aren't one person at all: instead, you are playing an indeterminate mob of nameless minor characters who follow the other PCs around. You might be a pirate crew, a band of Merry Men, a bunch of faceless stormtroopers, or anything else, but two facts remain constant: there are a lot of you (although exactly how many seems to vary from scene to scene) and, despite your numbers, collectively you only manage to achieve about as much as each of the main characters does individually. At best. 

You're not playing Barbosa. You're playing the other guys.

The essence of playing as The Extras is that you aren't playing as a specific group with clearly-defined numbers and capabilities (e.g. 'the six archers Alice hired in the city'): use the regular henchmen and followers rules for those. Instead, you're playing as that bunch of guys who are milling around in the background in every scene. Every time you get in a dangerous situation, one or more of you probably dies just in order to show that things are serious; but, mysteriously, these deaths never seem to affect your overall numbers. If, for any reason, it ever becomes necessary to determine exactly how many of you there at a given moment, then roll 1d12+6; but the number rolled has no effect on how many of you there are in the next scene, or indeed in the next combat round. 

Game rules for playing The Extras are as follows:

Hit Dice: 1d12. The Extras aren't individually very tough, but there are a lot of them. 

To-hit, Hit Dice, Weapons and Armour, Saves: As per Fighter.

Experience Per Level: As per Magic-User.

Safety In Numbers: Apart from named characters (see below), The Extras always go around in a single big mob. If you use a battle grid or similar, assume that this mob of extras takes up an area 20' square whenever possible. (In a 5' wide tunnel, they'd form a single line 5' wide and 80' long.) They always move as a single mass, and can attack or be attacked by anything within 5' of the mob.

Inverse Ninja Rule: Even though there are so many of them, The Extras only get a single action per round: so a whole mob of Extras attacking a monster is resolved with a single attack roll, and so on. (The exception is Named Characters - see below.)

Many Hands Make Light Work: Whenever they're performing some kind of unskilled labour - e.g. standing watches, digging ditches, carrying treasure, rowing oars, etc - The Extras can accomplish the work of ten men. Even though there are more of them than that. Probably. Most of the time. 

'Who are you people? Why do you keep following me around?'

Share the Pain: The Extras have a single HP total. Any healing or damage done to any of them affects them all. Weirdly, area-of-effect damage only damages them once rather than many times, almost as if they really were just a single creature...

Arm the Troops: For The Extras to gain mechanical benefits from new equipment, they must obtain at least ten copies of the equipment in question: so once they have ten swords they can make sword attacks, and so on. If they have less than ten, then some of them can be described as carrying the equipment in question, but they gain no mechanical benefit from it. (Oddly enough, this does not extend to consumables like rations and ammunition, which The Extras consume as though there was only one of them present.)

Too bad these Extras only have five sets of legionnaire gear! No bonuses for them!

Magic For the Masses: The Extras can collectively have any number of magic items 'equipped' at once, but they can only gain the mechanical benefit from each item once per scene. (The guy with the magic sword steps up to take a swing, or the guy with a magic shield steps up to block a blow, and then they just fade back into the mob.) If the item in question is assigned to a Named Character (see below), then its benefits also apply to any independent actions they may take.

Named Characters: At level 1, give one of the Extras a name and a personality, just as you would for a normal PC. This character (whom the other Extras will usually call 'Sarge') acts as the 'face' of the mob, and is the character who you will play during social interactions and similar roleplay-focussed scenes. (Naturally, the rest of the Extras never get any lines.) 

Once per scene, you may have this character take an action independently of The Extras: so The Extras could attack an orc while Sarge ran off to warn the other PCs, or whatever. This is the only exception to the rule that The Extras must always act as a single unit, and it effectively gives you two actions for that round only. Next round, Sarge is assumed to have been absorbed back into the general group, and will spend the rest of the scene acting as part of the mob.

Each time you level up, you may create one more Named Character, by giving one of The Extras a name and a single distinguishing characteristic. (E.g. 'Private Wilkins, always drunk'.) Just like Sarge, each of these named characters may also take one independent action per scene, but only one named character may take such an action per round. 

• Example: Kat's Cutthroats (level 3) have three named members: Kat herself (their Sarge), No-Ears Jake (their musician), and Silver Fork Sarah (who claims, and may actually believe, that she is secretly a princess). When they get into a fight with some goblins, the Cutthroats may act twice on up to three rounds of the ensuing combat: the Cutthroats take one collective action per round, in one round Kat can take an action, in one round Jake can take one, and in round Sarah can take one. Once all three Named Characters have taken one action each, the Cutthroats revert to their normal single collective action per round. 

Die All, Die Merrily: If The Extras are ever reduced to 0 HP, describe them all dying in some suitably tragi-comic fashion. The only survivors of this massacre will be the Named Characters. The person playing The Extras can immediately continue play as Sarge, who can be assumed to be a Fighter of one level lower than The Extras; the other Named Characters will be fighters of half the level of The Extras, rounded down, who will instantly become Sarge's henchmen (or someone else's, if this would take Sarge above their limit.) Each of these characters emerges from the general massacre with only (1d6x10)% of their maximum HP.

• Example: Kat's Cutthroats (in the example above) are reduced to 0 HP by the goblins. The only survivors are Kat (who becomes a level 2 fighter, and a new PC), and Jake and Sarah (who become level 1 fighters, and Kat's henchmen). 

If all the named characters survive the adventure and make it back to town, they may recruit a new band of faceless followers and regain their status as The Extras. If this happens, then the Named Characters merge happily back into the new mob. If, on the other hand, Sarge or any of the other Named Character goes on to die before a new band of Extras can be recruited, then the remaining ones decide sorrowfully that It Would Never Be The Same Without Them and remain as ordinary PCs and henchmen forever.

Horrible Mysteries!!!

So - the reason for the ghoul-blooded class write-up in my last post is that I have been reading Gothic novels. The original ones. From the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

They are super-weird.

If your players ever tell you they want more 'gothic horror' in your D&D game, roll on these tables and inflict the resulting plot on them in your next session. If they complain that it makes no fucking sense then smile and nod and explain that you are being authentic.

WHO IS THE VILLAIN? (roll 1d10)

1. An evil priest.
2. An evil aristocrat.
3. A secret society.
4. A ruthless outlaw chief.
5. An evil aristocrat disguised as an evil priest.
6. An evil aristocrat disguised as a ruthless outlaw.
7. An evil priest disguised as a ruthless outlaw.
8. An evil aristocrat disguised as an evil priest disguised as a ruthless outlaw.
9. An evil aristocrat disguised as an evil priest disguised as a ruthless outlaw who also runs his own secret society in his spare time because why the fuck not.
10. The Spanish Inquisition.

NO, SERIOUSLY, WHO IS THE VILLAIN? (roll 1d10)

1. A demon.
2. A demon disguised as a boy.
3. A demon disguised as a girl disguised as a boy.
4. A lustful monk.
5. A lustful nun.
6. A demon disguised as a girl disguised as a boy disguised as a lustful monk.
7. A ghost.
8. A lunatic.
9. Some guy who sold his soul to the Devil.
10. The Spanish Inquisition.

WHO IS THE HERO? (roll 1d6)

1. A well-meaning but basically useless young Italian nobleman.
2. A well-meaning but basically useless young Spanish nobleman.
3. A well-meaning but basically useless young British nobleman.
4. A well-meaning but basically useless young French nobleman.
5. A well-meaning but basically useless young German nobleman.
6. Victor Frankenstein.

WHO IS THE HEROINE? (roll 1d6)

1. A beautiful, virtuous, and talented young Italian noblewoman.
2. A beautiful, virtuous, and talented young Spanish noblewoman.
3. A beautiful, virtuous, and talented young British noblewoman.
4. A beautiful, virtuous, and talented young French noblewoman.
5. A beautiful, virtuous, and talented young German noblewoman.
6. Roll again, but they're disguised as a boy and carry a locket containing a MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT with them at all time. (If you keep rolling 6s, just keep adding more MYSTERIOUS ITEMS until you roll something else.)

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? (roll 1d10)

1. There's a beautiful girl in town and the villain wants to rape her.
2. There's a holy man in town and the Devil wants to test his faith.
3. There's a rich man in town and the villain wants to kill him and steal his estate. 
4. There's proof of the villain's crimes in town and the villain wants to destroy it.
5. There's a rich man in town whose only relative is his beautiful daughter and the villain wants to murder him and rape her and steal the estate while he's at it.
6. There's a beautiful girl in town and the villain wants to kill her because she is the LIVING PROOF OF HIS CRIMES!!!!
7. A secret society is trying to start a revolution. Their plan for doing this involves tricking everyone into thinking they have magical powers but actually they don't but maybe they actually do. 
8. There's a castle which seems to be haunted but it isn't really haunted because the villain is just tricking everyone into thinking that in order to keep them away from his hidden secrets.
9. There's a castle which seems to be haunted but then seems not to be haunted but then it turns out it actually is haunted HA HA GOTCHA SUCKERS and then a ghost pulls out everyone's eyeballs.
10. NO-ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!

OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP (roll 1d10, or 2d10 if you want a twist ending)

1. ...and then a giant ghost appears and kicks the castle over.
2. ...and then the Devil drops the villain off a mountain and insects eat his brains and it takes him five days to die.
3. ...and then it turns out that the villain's victim was ACTUALLY HIS SECRET DAUGHTER and he's so overwhelmed with grief and shame that he kills himself.
4. ...and then it turns out that it was actually all just a trick with magic lanterns.
5. ...and then an angry mob turn up and try to lynch everyone.
6. ...and then this crazy noblewoman starts pushing people off cliffs.
7. ...and then proof appears that ALL THIS WAS ARRANGED IN ADVANCE BY THE ILLUMINATI.
8. ...and then it turns out that actually the villain was just crazy.
9. ...and then everyone is OVERCOME WITH REMORSE and lives out the remainder of their days in penance and weeping.
10. ...and then everyone is burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition, except the hero and heroine, who live happily ever after. 

(Reading list: The Castle of Otranto, The Hermitage, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, The Monk, Gondez the Monk, The Monk of Udolpho, Horrid Mysteries, Vathek, The Castle Spectre, Melmoth the Wanderer, The Abbess, Frankenstein, The Vampyre, St Leon, St Irvyne, Zanoni, Zastrozzi, Zofloya, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Cenci, Manfred, Marmion, Tales of Wonder, The Monastery, The Bride of Lammermore, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Ghost-Seer, The Robbers, Klosterheim, Caleb Williams, The Inquisitor, The Three Spaniards, The Horrors of the Priory, The Abbess 2: Roman Catholic Boogaloo, Northanger Abbey.)