Backgrounds for Early Modern Cairn

Despite being an inveterate collector of TTRPG books, I'm not much of a Kickstarter guy. I've gotten some reprints and second editions and that sort of thing via crowdfunding campaigns, but I've only ever backed one TTRPG book sight unseen: Beyond the Pale. In that case, I had a lot of confidence in Yochai Gal, whose work I greatly admire, but I also just couldn't resist the premise. As a history nerd, and as somebody with a personal connection to the place and people represented, if a somewhat tenuous one—one Ashkenazi grandfather, one Polish Catholic grandmother—it was so right up my alley I had to jump on it immediately. And I'm glad I did! The book is beautiful, it's full of clever and thought-provoking material, and I'm looking forward to running it…one of these days.

Yeah, I still haven't actually played it. And although that's mostly just because of the vicissitudes of game nights (my older group has been big on long-running campaigns; my newer group, turning away from fantasy, has been doing FIST and Mothership one-shots), but it's also because, almost as soon as I had the book, I got attached to the idea of writing my own backgrounds, more suitable to the quasi-historical setting than the fairytale-fantasy lore of Cairn 2e, more detailed than the 1e backgrounds (or the Barebones ones, now). Like the 2e backgrounds, I want 20, each with a couple small tables to make the characters more distinct and provide some story sparks and setting detail, but for the early modern Eastern Europe of the Pale. Or for a slightly broader early modern, quasi-historical Eastern European setting, somewhere in the borderlands where the tsar's and sultan's (and maybe kaiser's) empires abut one another.

It's slow going, obviously. I have like nine other projects I'm working on and my day job etc. etc., excuses excuses. But I'm getting there! I have all 20 backgrounds planned out and at least partly written, and I've got a few complete enough to send out into the world and solicit input about. Specifically, these:

 

Background 1:

Arithmancer

You are a diviner, capable of peering into the mysterious workings of the universe through the magic of letters and numbers. You can read a person's future in their name or in a random verse of scripture. With access to your favored text, some means to write, and a minute to work in a safe place, you can obtain a one-sentence answer to any question about the future (the words, probably very cryptic, come from the Warden; interpretation is up to you). You're also unusually good at math.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Favored Text (see table)
• Quill & Ink
• Notebook (halfway filled already)

d6: What did you foresee that got you into trouble?

1. Pressured into giving the local lord good news despite seeing only dire omens, you skipped town before tragedy struck.
2. You predicted the birth of an illegitimate child that would lead to an inheritance dispute and tear a wealthy family apart. Every party involved—the cuckolded man, the pregnant wife, her paramour—is united on one point: You are a liar and a charlatan.
3. You correctly perceived that one business partner was cheating the other. You just didn't see the murder coming.
4. After you warned the townsfolk that the mercenary company passing through was going to pillage their homes, they tried to bar the mercenaries from the village. Which gave the mercenaries a pretext to stab a few people and pillage everybody's homes.
5. You foresaw a love match between the teenage children of two prominent families who've been locked in a bitter feud. The teenagers fell in love, just as you knew they would, but now everybody thinks it was only because you put the idea in their heads.
6. You didn't get in trouble with anybody else—you just determined that you would have to go abroad if you wanted riches. And you do.

d6: What book of scripture or occult wisdom do you most rely on for divination?

1. The Holy Bible, of course.
2. The Noble Quran, of course.
3. The Babylonian Talmud, of course.
4. The Mandaean Book of the Zodiac.
5. Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia.
6. The Sefer Raziel HaMalakh.

 

Background 2:

Armatole

You belong to what one might generously call a militia, although those who've been at the wrong end of your gun would call you a pandour or bashi-bazouk, not a militiaperson; your area of expertise is more thuggery than warfare. In any event, you're an irregular soldier of sorts, raised from the local population at the ragged margins of the empire to keep the tsar's or sultan's law in the absence of the army. Your loyalty to the distant throne and dedication to the law are both extremely suspect.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Flintlock Musket (d12, bulky)
• Cartridge Box (with 20 rounds)
• Not-Entirely-Uniform Costume
• Dodgy-Looking “Official” Papers

d6: Why are you not with your militia comrades?

1. Sent alone (or perhaps in a very small group) on a secret mission. Word of honor!
2. Last survivor(s) of a disastrous ambush, despite your valiant efforts. Word of honor!
3. Ordered to muster for a transfer to a different post, far from home. Had a better idea.
4. Called upon to make a suicidal last stand. Decided discretion was the better part of valor.
5. They turned bandit, those treacherous rogues, but you remained loyal.
6. You robbed a few measly travelers, and those treacherous rogues tried to turn you in.

d6: What special weapon are you carrying?

1. Flintlock Pistol (d10): You just can't have too many guns.
2. Karabela (d8): A sabre with an open crossguard and a handle in the form of a bird's head.
3. Yatagan (d8): A forward-curved war knife with no handguard.
4. Hirschfanger (d6): A straight-bladed dagger with an elaborate horn handle.
5. Warhammer (d8): A small but heavy beaked club for puncturing armor.
6. Arnautka (d12, bulky): A lavishly decorated, deadly accurate flintlock rifle. Attacks with this weapon against targets you can see are never impaired. (Replaces your Flintlock Musket.)

Note: All firearms require a full round to reload, unless noted otherwise. 

 

Background 4:

Dervish

You are a mendicant mystic, trying to approach God by virtuous living and ecstatic experience rather than by religious scholarship. Your faith, or your meditative practices, have unlocked marvelous powers—karamat—in you. (These do not take up inventory space, but only one can be performed, and only once, before you must rest; they otherwise function like Spellbooks. The Warden may allow you, or other characters, to learn additional karamat via long, dedicated study.)

Starting Gear

• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Tabarzin (d8)
• Beggar's Bowl
• Tall Felt Hat (petty)

d6: What karamat can you perform?

1. You have learned the power of folding up the earth, crossing distances without moving. As Teleport in the Warden's Guide (but cannot be destroyed).
2. You have uncanny authority over the natural world. As Control Plants and Control Weather in the Warden's Guide.
3. You have faculties of superhuman perception. As Arcane Eye and Hear Whispers in the Warden's Guide.
4. You can perceive and manipulate the thoughts of others. As Charm and Read Mind in the Warden's Guide.
5. You can cure the sick and heal the injured. As Cure Wounds in the Warden's Guide.
6. You are capable of extraordinary physical feats. As Haste and Leap in the Warden's Guide.

d6: How do you achieve ecstatic communion with the divine? (Spend a few minutes doing this while resting in a safe place to restore your ability to use karamat. This does not reduce your Fatigue.)

1. Dancing. Take a Wide-Skirted Robe (petty).
2. Singing. Take a Small Drum.
3. Composing poetry. Take a Quill & Ink and a Sheaf of Paper.
4. Painting. Take a Paint Pot & Brush and a Sheaf of Paper.
5. Chanting. Take a string of Prayer Beads (petty).
6. Meditating in silence. Take a Stone of Contentment (petty).

 

Background 8:

Exile

Not so long ago, all was right in your world; the fall has been precipitous, and sometimes it's hard to believe what a low condition you've been reduced to. Still, you're safe at the moment, if far from home, and you've been resourceful enough to get through worse scrapes than the one you're in now. Maybe you're at the start of a long, hard climb back to the position of privilege you were once accustomed to. Or maybe you'll make a new life in this wild new land.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern 
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Stylish Cape (petty)

d6: What manner of exile are you?

1. Censored Philosophe: Your radical politics or libertinous ideas scandalized your native society. Take a Cane Sword (d6; passes for a walking stick upon cursory inspection).
2. Dekabrist in Hiding: You took part in a doomed attempt to overthrow the tsar—or you're plotting one even now. Take a Bomb (d12, blast, 1 use).
3. Renegade Janissary: When the sultan disbanded your unit, most of your comrades were massacred. You escaped. You had to leave your musket behind, but you still have your blade. Take a beautifully ornamented Yatagan (d8) and a Cloak (petty) to conceal your distinctive tattoos.
4. Jewish Excommunicant: Your heretical theology or philosophy saw you driven from your community. You are truly alone in the world; take an easily concealed Overcoat Pistol (d8) for protection. Also take a Bullet Pouch (with 6 rounds).
5. Outrageous Poet: Once honored at court, you had to flee after insulting the sultan—or perhaps after seducing the tsarina. Take a Kamancheh (or roll on the Muzikant's table of instruments).
6. Disgraced Noble: Some affair of the heart or of honor back home left ruined lives in its wake, and your reputation in tatters. Take a Brace of Dueling Pistols (d8+d8, bulky) and a Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds).

d6: What potentially dangerous documents are you carrying?

1. A Notebook full of material that would shock the court, whether back home or here in the empire.
2. Indecent Correspondence (petty) from somebody who would surely faint if they knew you had it.
3. State Secrets (petty) from back home, or which might win you a pardon there if you could smuggle them across the border.
4. Plans (petty) for a novel invention that might revolutionize an industry or shift the military balance of power.
5. A Letter of Introduction (petty) to an individual in your new environs sympathetic to your plight or cause.
6. Bearer Bonds (petty) that you cannot redeem here but that could make somebody fabulously rich back home.

 

Background 13:

Muzikant

You might be known as an ashik, a kobzar, a klezmer, or by any of dozens of other names. Whatever people call you, and whatever you call yourself, you are an itinerant musician, an important carrier of news to remote rural areas as well as a beloved entertainer. People will pay generously to hear you perform, and you've learned a few non-musical tricks and talents during your years on the road.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Musical Instrument (see table)
• Letter Case

d6: What sort of music-making do you favor?

1. You like to lay down a foundational rhythm. Take a Plucked String Instrument like the saz, kobza, or bandura.
2. You always want to be the center of attention. Take a Bowed String Instrument like the violin, gadulka, or suka.
3. You love the haunting wail of pipes. Take a Set of Bagpipes (bulky) like the dudy, gaida, or parkapzuk.
4. You enjoy delivering a blast of fanfare. Take a Brass Instrument like the trumpet, sackbut, or serpent.
5. You prefer the mellow expressiveness of reeds. Take a Woodwind Instrument like the clarinet, kaval, or balaban. 
6. What instrument is more beautiful than the human voice? Take a Sachet of Herbs (petty) with which to make a throat-soothing brew.

d6: What useful skills or connections have you acquired during your travels?

1. You're pretty good in a fistfight. (Your unarmed attacks do d6 damage.)
2. There's always a local magistrate somewhere around the area who owes you a favor.
3. You're an incorrigible, and generally pretty successful, flirt.
4. You're familiar with local lore everywhere you go, including some hidden dangers and rumored treasures.
5. You've learned enough of the healing arts to bind wounds and make salves and poultices.
6. You always have a standing invitation to perform at one nearby castle or lordly manor or another.

 

Background 14:

Poyer

Like almost everybody else in the world you know, you are a humble peasant. You might be called peon, mujik, serf, dihkan, or seljak; it's all more or less the same, in the big scheme of things. Unlike almost everybody else you've ever known, though, you find yourself on the road, far from your fields, with coins in your pocket and a weapon in your hand. Your lord, if he could see you now, would strike you dead on the spot.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses) 
• Hatchet (d6)
• Bucket
• Rope (25 ft)

d6: What dramatic event uprooted you?

1. You sheltered a fugitive from the “justice” of religious hatred. Now you are seen as halfway to being an infidel or heretic yourself.
2. Ruined by an unusually bad harvest, you sent your family to stay with relatives and went to seek your fortune abroad.
3. Bilked out of what little wealth you had by a charlatan, you followed him to seek restitution or revenge.
4. It came to you in a vision: You are destined for greater things than tilling the land for some rich man's profit.
5. You had a brief but torrid affair with somebody of a much higher social station. Their family would kill you if they caught you.
6. A nobleman sexually assaulted one of your family members. You struck him dead in a rage, and are now a wanted murderer.

d6: What token of home are you carrying?

1. The Holy Book of your faith.
2. A Pouch of Dirt from your fields.
3. A Sachet of Herbs (petty) from your kitchen garden.
4. A Charm (petty) containing a lock of a loved one's hair.
5. A Lucky Feather (petty) from your most beautiful chicken.
6. Your faithful Dog. No use in a fight, but has a good nose.

On Languages in RPGs

There was an interesting conversation the other day over at r/osr about using languages in a hexcrawl. One person dismissed the idea of languages as a part of resource management, on the grounds that they're both binary and inexhaustible—you either have a language or you don't, and once you have it, it doesn't even take up space or get used up the way torches and rations do. I took issue with the “you either have it or you don't” claim, though:

But language isn't like that, even if a lot of game rules (which tend to assume that players don't care about languages, but throw in some options just in case they do, or simply for flavor) treat it that way. Language is a medium of communication, but it's also a medium of culture.

You can have enough knowledge of a language to interact productively with speakers of that language (in trade or diplomacy or just asking for directions or whatever), but at the same speak time it in such a limited (or stilted, or archaic) way that you're marked as an outsider. Greater fluency, mastery of idiomatic expressions, etc. can set strangers at ease and dispose them positively toward you in a way that mere comprehension of their words never could. (And of course even in terms of simple comprehension, there's a continuum—you can have enough of a language to go shopping, make small talk, and flirt at the bar, but be completely out of your depth if you find yourself in court.)

Definitely agree that the use of “Common” plus a laundry list of racial languages in many games is almost pointless (or at least largely redundant to simple non-mechanical character background stuff, its only real purpose being to establish that, say, this dwarf is cool with elves in a way most dwarves aren't). If you want to make language interesting, you need to tailor it to the setting. All the characters' languages of origin are meaningless (unless they're also spoken in the setting, or unless all the PCs share a single foreign language, which they can then use as a sort of secret code in front of NPCs), but knowledge of local languages shapes not just their access to information but their access to social resources.

And then, of course, I kept thinking about it. And because I've been doing some Outcast Silver Raiders prep recently, I've also been thinking about medieval Scotland a bunch. The Mythic North is a pretty detailed setting, with a lot of NPCs from different cultural backgrounds, and the game does have explicit rules about languages (explicit in that PCs speak 1–4 of them, anyway; the specifics of which languages are available and how language barriers are adjudicated are entirely up to the GM).

What languages can I plausibly offer the players? What languages, and how many, would it actually be sensible and worthwhile to offer the players? And then what kind of useful conclusions can I draw about languages in fantasy settings more broadly?

 

* * *

 

COMMON LANGUAGES

“Common” means “shared,” but it also means “low,” “base,” or “vulgar” (“vulgar” itself being a bit of language terminology, originally referring to the “low” Latin of common people in the Roman Empire). In medieval Europe, the vast majority of speakers of these language are illiterate; it's possible that no written form of the language exists at all, and they certainly won't have any kind of “official” written form. There are wealthy and relatively powerful people who speak these languages, but they—the pre-Norman nobility, for instance—stand outside the new dominant hierarchy.

In the Mythic North, or any medieval quasi-Scotland, we have at least two common languages: English and Gaelic. The farther south you go, the more likely people are to speak English; south of the border, almost nobody speaks Gaelic. If English is your native language, Gaelic speakers probably reflexively mistrust you. The farther north you go, the more likely people are to speak Gaelic, and not far north of the border, there will be scarcely any native English speakers at all. If Gaelic is your native language, English speakers probably look down on you as being halfway savage.

This is a nice built-in engine of conflict. In a setting without outwardly obvious racial differences that people care about, this is the main vehicle for prejudice, whether negative or positive. Your characters are on one side or the other of this divide as soon as they open their mouths; everybody can tell (probably even if you're speaking another language entirely, just from your accent) whether you're Us or Them. It's also naturally balanced a bit in the Mythic North: In most of the setting's geographical area, English marks you as an unwelcome interloper, but in the one big city (where PCs might need to go to buy equipment, find work, hire retainers, etc.), Gaelic marks you as suspect (maybe a yokel, maybe a seditionist).

You might give players the choice of being a proper foreigner—German or Magyar or Italian—in which case they get a softer kind of negative prejudice from everybody; nobody sees them as Us, but nobody sees them as the most troublesome, acutely disliked Them. You might also expand the number of common languages: In 12th-century Scotland, for example, there were still native Cumbric speakers in the southwest (Hen Ogledd) and native Norse speakers in the far north. Doing so creates more work for you and more complexity for the players without much of a narrative gain, though. Maybe Gaelic speakers are better disposed toward Cumbric speakers than toward English speakers, but so what? It's not very different, outside of Hen Ogledd itself, from making the characters Irish (or Germans, Magyars, or Italians, for that matter). You can get as granular as you want, of course. Throw in Pictish, start breaking all five languages into dialects, etc. You just don't gain much beyond the first division, which ensures that, everywhere they go, the characters are either Us or some flavor of Them.

In any setting, having two different common languages in the campaign region creates affinities or the potential for conflict everywhere the player characters go. Having more than two common languages might be good for verisimilitude, but it doesn't really pay dramatic dividends, because in any one place and time, a language is fundamentally just marking you as some kind of Us (we ourselves, our kin, our allies) or some degree of Them (the enemy, the invader, the infidel, the stranger). It might shrink the area where any given character gets to be Us without making their home region a totally isolated island in a vast sea of Them, though.

 

ELITE LANGUAGES

These are shared languages among society's elite. Nobody who's a native of the campaign region speaks them as a first language (and perhaps nobody anywhere speaks them as a first language), but they are spoken by the authorities—in the case of the Mythic North, or pretty much any British setting post-Conquest, that's both the foreign lords who've conquered the realm and the clergy, foreign and native alike, who minister to it. Native people who have wealth, ambition, or unusual opportunities might have studied these languages; it's almost impossible to make the leap into the upper echelons of the rulers' society without knowledge of them.

There are exactly two of these in post-Conquest Britain: Latin, which is the language of the Church and most scholarship, and French, which is the language of court and of the Norman nobility more broadly. All clergy read, write, and speak Latin, and so does just about anybody with a good education. Not every noble does, but those with pretensions of being learned men or patrons of scholars surely do. Meanwhile, all nobles speak French, and nearly all of them read and write it as well. Anybody who deals with the nobility and their courts—many clergymen, lawyers, sheriffs, scribes, etc.—probably does too. Unlike the common languages, elite languages have at least semi-codified written forms (there's no Académie Française yet, but there are notions of what proper French is, and manuals for mastering it), and the elite are generally expected not only to read and write, but to do so well.

In a different context, of course (France itself, or somewhere like Switzerland or Aquitaine), French could be a common language too (and different forms or dialects of French could be common and elite in the same region). Latin has a more distinct position, as a kind of universal language across the entire European continent and as the working language of the Church (an institution that's usually hard to replace or recreate in trad fantasy settings). Unlike French, it's no community's native language, so speaking it with an accent, or even speaking it badly, doesn't necessarily mark you as an outsider in contexts where it's used.

A society ruled by foreign conquerors isn't going to feature in every setting, but it sure is a good premise for drama and intrigue (and there are lots of interesting historical examples to draw on: Arabic speakers in Iberia, Persian speakers in India, German speakers in the Baltics, Turkish speakers in the Balkans, French speakers all over the place). Likewise, you don't need the dead language of the bygone continent-spanning empire to remain in use as a vehicle for elite scholarship, international law, and religious organizations…but it's not a bad idea, right? A language with no native-speaker communities but that's widely used in elite (or professional) circles can also show up as the secret language of mages or alchemists, thieves' cant, the constructed language of a utopian society, etc.

 

ARCANE LANGUAGES

These are languages that people, at least in this setting, pretty much only know from books—but they're also the languages that a lot of the most important, informative, dangerous books are written in. Latin is similar in many ways (almost nobody learns it as a first language, and it's used more in writing than in speech), but it's also the working language of the Church, which gives it far greater importance than the others in mundane matters, but also makes it less mysterious. These are the languages of alchemical and hermetic texts, the languages of magic.

Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic all fall into this category in the context of medieval Europe. If there's a secret druidic language (and it isn't just Gaelic or Cumbric), it belongs here too. A generous GM will probably tilt things to make a PC's choice of one or more of these worthwhile. A preponderance of the musty old tomes they encounter should be in whatever arcane language(s) they know. Let them run into some Moorish travelers, some Norse warriors who speak a little Arabic or Greek from their travels, that sort of thing. Maybe let them take both Hebrew and Aramaic with a single pick.

In a setting less closely based on medieval Europe, arcane languages can come from distant foreign nations, from ancient civilizations, or from other planes of existence. They can be associated with divination, theurgy, and alchemy, as historical magical texts mostly were, but they can also cover advanced technology, demonology, psionics, kung fu, or whatever else you want.

 

EXOTIC LANGUAGES

This is pretty much anything else. For the Mythic North or a similar setting, Norse is probably the most sensible “exotic” choice (if it isn't a common language in some part of the campaign region, nor an arcane language written in magic runes or whatever); there are some Norse NPCs in the setting as written. As with making arcane languages useful outside of wizards' libraries, the GM should probably put a finger on the scale here. If a player took Italian, introduce some Italian mercenaries. If she took Hungarian, place a Magyar diplomat at court or wherever.

In a generic sense, this is usually just a catch-all category for “my player has a concept that doesn't quite match anything in the campaign area” (or maybe “my player is determined to be a special, exotic snowflake”). You probably want enough “important” languages (widely spoken common and elite languages, plus arcane languages particularly relevant to certain adventure sites, necessary to learn spells, or what have you) that your players can't just take all of them from the jump…but not too many more than that. The rest can fall into this exotic, mostly decorative category—icing on the worldbuilding cake. You let your players know these languages aren't going to be super important, but then you treat them to the occasional little encounter where they do matter.

Session 0 Questions

 Poker Night (from A Streetcar Named Desire) by Thomas Hart Benton

Another post that's been done 10,000 times before, and better, but hey, I'm writing the list, I might as well post it. Somebody might find some use in it!

 

* * * 

 

LOGISTICS

• When do we meet? How often?
• Where? Same place every time?
• How long will each session be?
• Snacks/drinks before? After? During? Spend 15 (or 45) minutes shooting the shit or just jump straight into the game? Roll it into a dinner party?
• What if people can't make it? When should they alert the group? If people can't make it, should we skip that session, try to reschedule, or play without them? Is there a threshold (down one person, we go ahead; down two or more, we reschedule)? Do people want to play one-shots of other games, or with other characters, when we're short-handed?

VIBES

• What do we want from this game? What kind of experience does everybody want to have—is this about challenge, system mastery, self-expression, storytelling, some combination of these, something else?
• What tone do we want to strike? Gritty, serious, immersive, and earnest? Zany, ironic, humorous, and light-hearted? Something in between? Something else?
• Relatedly: What subject matter is too dark/serious (or just too uncomfortable) for the game? Does anybody want to veto any particular kind of content? My inclination is to include dark subjects (torture, sexual violence, violence against children, etc.) in the setting, as warranted, but not in the gameplay. You might have to bring a torturer or rapist to justice, you might interact with his victims, but we're not going to witness his crimes. Similarly, seducing NPCs is a classic RPG shenanigan, go nuts with that, but we'll always just tastefully “fade to black” before anything sexual happens. No sex among PCs. No game-mechanical incentives for PCs to pursue sexual relationships.
• Relatedly: How much conflict among PCs are you comfortable with? Should characters keep secrets from one another? Should players? Are conflicting agendas acceptable? My inclination, at least for a typical D&D-ish game, is that intra-party conflict should not go beyond PCs preferring different paths to similar goals. No highly antagonistic actions among PCs (sniping at each other and pranking each other is fine; robbing each other or physically harming each other is not).
• How should the game be structured—episodic vignettes, one continuous epic narrative, chapters of a story? How much narrative continuity do we want from session to session? Should we have a fixed length or clear objective in mind for the game, or just run with it as long as it's fun?
• Are we most interested in individual characters, a group or community, or the setting as a gestalt? How much character continuity do we want to have across the course of the campaign, if we're doing a longer campaign? (Will characters die often? Will they retire or become NPCs? Will we rotate PCs among a larger cast of characters?)
• Do we want the characters and adventures to be heroic, antiheroic, picaresque, or some combination of these?

SYSTEM AND SETTING

• How central to the gameplay do we want combat to be?
• How much mechanical customization and differentiation (i.e., “build optimization”) do you want for your characters? Conversely, how little thought and effort do you want to have to put into their creation and/or advancement?
• How comfortable are you with a lack of “balance”? Is it fine for some PCs to be have significant mechanical advantages over others?
• What game system do we want to use? Do we want to play it by the book, hack it from the jump, or play things by ear? 
• How much do you all want to collaborate in developing the setting and story? This could be “There's a world I invented with a bunch of stuff for you to discover” or “We make it up together as we go along” (canon vs. anti-canon). How much control do you want me to have over your own inventions (like character backstories)? How about the other players? Do I have, or does the group collectively have, a veto over stuff that doesn't “fit”?
• Roughly how long will the campaign be, and what should be the pace of character advancement (and what will advancement look like)?
• Are there particular themes we want the campaign to foreground, and if so, what are they?
• What kind of impact do you want to have, or to be able to have, on the setting?
• What campaign setting do we want to use, or what kind of campaign setting, if we're going homebrew?
• What kind of goals do you as individual characters and as a group have? How goal-driven should the gameplay be?
• How did or will the PCs meet? Why are you, or how do you become, allies? Why trust each other? 

d666 Mostly Obscure but Authentic Medieval Saints

 

 

You ever have a dumb little idea that you just feel inexorably compelled to follow through on? And in the course of following through on it, you make it much dumber and much, much bigger? This is one of those things.

I was doing some prep to run a little Outcast Silver Raiders, and I thought, Hey, it'd be good to pull together some information about medieval saints, especially ones important in Scotland and Northern England. And then I thought, Well, as long as I'm doing that, I might as well make a proper table of it and turn it into a blog post. And why do a d20 table when you can do a d66 table?

And why do a d66 table when you can do a d666 table? Saints, 666, har har har. Many hours later…

Here are 216 actual, honest-to-God saints (actually more than 216, because some of them are pairs or groups of saints canonized together) who were venerated in medieval Europe, with a strong bias toward Scotland and Northumbria (but lots of Irish, Mercian, Welsh, and other British saints mixed in, plus assorted saints with unusual names or epithets, and the namesakes of a lot of Gene Wolfe characters, and other folks I just took a liking to). I can't guarantee that all of these saints were really real (in fact, many were surely apocryphal or legendary or amalgamations of other people), but I'm 99% sure that medieval people thought they were all real, and many of them were especially venerated in Scotland and Northern England. (The most important saints in medieval Scotland are highlighted in gold; those especially important in the North are in red.) I believe all of these people were dead by the middle of the 11th century, so if you're running a campaign set in the British Isles after the Norman Conquest, this should be a pretty reliable resource (sorry, Wolves of God GMs).

I've included feast days for all of them and various other potentially interesting or useful details for some. The feast days are almost certainly mostly or entirely wrong, strictly speaking, what with the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and the relentless march of time and the dodginess of the sources I used (mostly Wikipedia and Catholic Online), but they're approximately right (like, most of them are probably within a week or so of being right, or in the right season, at least), and the objective here is verisimilitude, not perfect accuracy. After the table, there's a calendar, so your party marching around the Mythic North is never more than a few days away from one saint's feast or another, and you always know what festival the next town could be preparing for or recovering from.

Likewise, a lot of the info about specific saints probably isn't really accurate to the medieval period; I don't think the whole concept of patronage existed the same way it does now, and certainly a lot of the specific modern patronages didn't exist at all or weren't associated with these saints. But it might still be useful for flavor or to spark some idea for a quest or whatever!

 

* * * 

THE TABLE 

111: Abbán the Hermit (aka Abbán of Corbmaic, Eibbán, Moabba; feast day is October 27)
112: Abban of Murnevin (feast day is March 16)
113: Abercius Marcellus (aka Abercius of Hieropolis; feast day is November 4)
114: Abibus of Edessa (aka Abibus the New, Habib the Deacon; feast day is November 15)
115: Abdiesus (aka Hebed Jesus; feast day is April 22)
116: Acca of Hexham (feast day is October 20; major shrine in Northumberland)
121: Adrian of May (feast day is March 4)
122: Adrian of Nicomedia (feast day is September 8; “chief military saint of Northern Europe for many ages, second only to St. George”)
123: Agia of Hainault (aka Aye or Austregildis; feast day is April 18)
124: Agilus (feast day is August 30)
125: Agrippina of Mineo (no longer celebrated in Catholicism, but was back then; Orthodox feast day is June 23)
126: Aidan of Lindisfarne (feast day is August 31; evangelist to the Northumbrians and founder of Lindisfarne; major shrines at Lindisfarne and Iona)
131: Ailerán Sapiens (feast day is December 29)
132: Alban of Verulamium (feast day is June 20; protomartyr of Britain; patron of converts, refugees, and torture victims)
133: Alban of Mainz (feast day is June 21; invoked against hernia, epilepsy, and kidney stones)
134: Alchhild of Middleham (aka Alkelda, Alcelda, Alchhild; feast day is March 28)
135: Alcmund of Hexham (aka Ealhmund, Alhmund, Alchmund; feast day is September 7)
136: Alkmund of Derby (aka Alkmund of Lilleshall, Ealhmund, Alhmund, Alcmund, Alchmund; feast day is March 19)
141: Andrew the Apostle (feast day is November 30; major shrine in Edinburgh; patron of Scotland, fishermen, fishmongers, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, pregnant women, butchers, and farmworkers; invoked against sore throats, convulsions, fever, and whooping cough)
142: Anthony the Great (aka Anthony of Egypt, Anthony the Abbot, Anthony of the Desert, Anthony the Anchorite, Anthony the Hermit, Anthony of Thebes, Father of All Monks; feast day is January 17; patron of animals, skin diseases, farmers, butchers, the poor, basket makers, brushmakers, and gravediggers)
143: Appian (aka Amphian; feast day is April 2)
144: Balthere of Tyninghame (feast day is March 6)
145: Beatus of Lungern (feast day is May 9; depicted as an old man reading in a mountain cave or a monk fighting a dragon)
146: Bede the Venerable (aka the Father of English History; feast day is May 25; not formally canonized until the 19th century but widely venerated in Britain by the 9th)
151: Bega of Copeland (feast day is September 6)
152: Begga (aka Begue, Beghe, Begge; feast day is December 17)
153: Benedict Biscop (aka Biscop Baducing; feast day is January 12)
154: Benjamin the Deacon and Martyr (feast day is March 31)
155: Beocca and Hethor (feast day is April 10)
156: Billfrith (aka Billfrið; feast day is March 6)
161: Boisil of Melrose (feast day is July 7)
162: Boniface of Tarsus (removed from Catholic calendar in 1969 but used to be celebrated on May 14)
163: Bosa of York (feast day is March 9)
164: Caesidius (feast day is August 31)
165: Caraunus of Chartres (aka Caranus, Caro, Chéron; feast day is May 28)
166: Cassian of Tangier (feast day is December 3; patron of stenographers) 

211: Cathan (feast day is May 17; once very popular in western Scotland)
212: Catherine of Alexandria (feast day is November 25;  depicted breaking the wheel, with a sword, with a crown at her feet, among hailstones, with a bridal veil and ring, with a dove, surrounded by angels, with a scourge, with a book, and/or in an argument with pagan philosophers; patron of unmarried girls, apologists, potters, spinners, archivists, dying people, educators, girls, jurists, knife sharpeners, lacemakers, lawyers, librarians, libraries, maidens, mechanics, millers, milliners, nurses, philosophers, preachers, scholars, schoolchildren, scribes, secretaries, spinsters, stenographers, students, tanners, theologians, haberdashers, and wheelwrights)
213: Cedd of Lichfield (aka Cedda, Ceddus; feast day is October 26; brother of St. Chad)
214: Ceolfrid (aka Ceolfrith, Geoffrey; feast day is September 25)
215: Ceolwulf (feast day is January 15)
216: Chad of Lichfield (aka Ceadda; feast day is March 2; brother of St. Cedd)
221: Christina of Persia (feast day is March 13)
222: Colmán of Lindisfarne (feast day is February 18)
223: Columba of Iona (aka Colmcille; feast day is June 9; first evangelist in Scotland; founded the abbey on Iona; many Scottish clans claim descent from his followers, and Clan Malcolm/Clan McCallum is named for him; patron of bookbinders and poets)
224: Columba of Sens (feast day is December 31; portrayed as a crowned maiden in chains, with a dog or bear on a chain, holding a book and a peacock's feather, with an angel on a funeral pyre, or beheaded)
225: Concordius of Spoleto (feast day is January 2)
226: Congar of Congresbury (aka Cumgar, Cungar, Cyngar, Concarius; feast day is November 27)
231: Conran of Orkney (feast day is February 14)
232: Conval (feast day is September 28)
233: Corentin of Quimper (feast day is December 12; depicted in episcopal attire, with fish)
234: Curetán (aka Curitanus, Kiritinus, Boniface; feast day is March 14; invoked against leprosy)
235: Cuthbert (feast day is March 20; patron saint of Northumbria; depicted as a bishop holding a second crowned head in his hands, sometimes accompanied by seabirds and animals; died on the same day as his friend St. Herbert)
236: Cyprian the Magician and Justina (removed from Catholic calendar in 1969 but used to be celebrated on September 26)
241: Daniel the Stylite (feast day is December 11)
242: Darerca of Ireland (feast day is March 22; sister of St. Patrick)
243: Demetrius of Thessaloniki (aka Demetrius of Sirmium, Holy Great-Martyr Demetrius the Myroblyte; feast day is October 26; major military saint, patron of soldiers, Crusaders, agriculture, peasants and shepherds, winter, snow, and cold)
244: Dingad of Llandingat (feast day is November 1)
245: Domnina of Anazarbus (feast day is October 12)
246: Domnina of Terni (feast day is April 14)
251: Domnina, Berenice, and Prosdoce (feast day is October 4)
252: Domninus of Fidenza (feast day is October 9; depicted as a soldier, with dog, cup, and palm of martyrdom; invoked against rabies)
253: Donald of Ogilvy (feast day is July 15)
254: Donnán of Eigg (aka Donan; feast day is April 17)
255: Dorcas (aka Tabitha; feast day is October 25)
256: Dotto (feast day is April 9)
261: Drostan (feast day is July 11)
262: Dryhthelm (aka Drithelm, Drythelm; feast day is September 1)
263: Duthac (feast day is March 8; “St. Duthac was greatly venerated in Scotland and his memory is still preserved in variations, in the names of places and organisations, including Kilduthie, Arduthie near Stonehaven, and Kilduich on the Loch Duich”)
264: Eadberht (feast day is May 6)
265: Echa of Crayke (feast day is May 5)
266: Egbert of Rath Melsigi (aka Ecgberht; feast day is April 24) 

311: Egino (feast day is July 15)
312: Elpidius the Cappadocian (feast day is September 2; represented by a vine in leaf in winter)
313: Eosterwine of Monkwearmouth (aka Easterwine; feast day is March 7)
314: Epiphanius of Pavia (feast day is January 21)
315: Epiphanius of Salamis (feast day is May 12; depicted holding a scroll; associated with iconoclasm)
316: Erbin of Dumnonia (current Catholic feast day is January 13, but it was celebrated on May 29 in the old Welsh calendar)
321: Eunan (aka Adomnán or Adamnán of Iona; feast day is September 23; biographer of St. Columba of Iona and historian of the Picts)
322: Fergus (feast day is November 27 or September 8; supposedly used to be November 18 in Scotland)
323: Fillan (aka Filan, Phillan, Fáelán, or Faolán; feast day is January 19 or maybe February 13 locally; according to legend, he put a geas on a wolf that killed the ox he was plowing with, forcing the wolf to plow his field; “credited with powers such as the healing of the sick and also possessed a luminous glow from his left arm which he used to study and copy scripture in the dark”; relics include an arm bone, the Mayne, a crozier, the Quigrich or Coygerach, which was supposedly present at Bannockburn, and a bronze bell, the Bernane; patron of the mentally ill)
324: Firmus and Rusticus (feast day is August 9)
325: Fulgentius of Ruspe (feast day is January 1)
326: Gaudentius of Novara (feast day is January 22)
331: Georgia of Clermont (feast day is February 15)
332: Gerasimus of the Jordan (feast day is March 5; depicted taming a lion)
333: Guibert (aka Wicbert; feast day is May 23)
334: Herbert of Derwentwater (feast day is March 20; died on the same day as his friend St. Cuthbert)
335: Hilarion of Thavata (aka Hilarion of Gaza; feast day is October 21; depicted with scroll and monastic habit; venerated as model monk)
336: Hilda of Whitby (aka Hild; feast day is November 17; depicted with a coiled snake or ammonite, the crozier of an abbess, and a model of Whitby Abbey)
341: Himelin (feast day is March 10; depicted as a pilgrim, with a staff, or ill in bed)
342: Hyacinth and Protus (aka Protus and Hyacinth; feast day is September 11)
343: Ia of Cornwall (sister of Erc mac Dega, aka Erc of Slane; feast day is February 3)
344: Idus of Leinster (feast day is July 14)
345: Iwig of Wilton (aka Iwi, Iwigius, Ywi of Lindisfarne; feast day is October 8)
346: Irenaeus of Lugdunum (feast day is June 28)
351: Irenaeus of Sirmium (feast day is April 6)
352: James Intercisus (aka James the Mutilated, James the Persian, Jacob the Persian; feast day is November 27; patron of the deaf)
353: Jason of Thessalonica (feast day is July 12)
354: John of Beverley (feast day is May 7)
355: John the Dwarf (aka John Colobus, John Kolobos; feast day is October 17; patron of dwarves)
356: Jonas of Bobbio (aka Jonas of Susa; feast day is June 28 in Scotland…maybe)
361: Jonas of Demeskenyanos (feast day is February 11)
362: Julia of Corsica (aka Julia of Carthage, Julia of Nonza; feast day is May 22; patron of torture victims; invoked against pathologies of the hands and the feet)
363: Julius the Veteran (feast day is May 27)
364: Kenneth of Aghaboe (aka Canice, Cainnech, Kenny, Canicus; feast day is October 11; patron of the shipwrecked)
365: Kennocha (feast day is March 25; particularly venerated around Glasgow)
366: Kentigern Mungo (feast day is January 13; founder of Glasgow: “on the spot where Mungo was buried now stands the cathedral dedicated in his honor…a great center of Christian pilgrimage until the Scottish Reformation”; patron of salmon and those accused of infidelity; invoked against bullies) 

411: Kessog (aka Kessag, Prince of Cashel; feast day is March 10; depicted in a soldier's habit, holding a bow bent with an arrow in it)
412: Lelia of Limerick (feast day is August 11)
413: Leocadia (feast day is December 9; depicted with a tower, to signify that she died in prison)
414: Liborius of Le Mans (feast day July 23; depicted with pebbles on a book, a peacock, and episcopal attire; invoked against calculi, colic, fever, and gallstones)
415: Loman of Trim (aka Lommán mac Dalláin; feast day is February 17)
416: Lucian of Beauvais (feast day is January 8)
421: Machar (feast day is November 12)
422: Macrina the Elder (feast day is January 14; mother of Basil the Elder, grandmother of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Peter of Sebaste, and Macrina the Younger)
423: Macrina the Younger (feast day is July 19; patron of virgins, monastics, theologians, educators, and students of scripture; older sister of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste)
424: Máel Ruba (aka Máelrubai, Maol Rubha, MoRubha, MaRuibhe, Malruibhe, or Rufus; martyred on April 21, but Scots kept his feast on April 27; “after St. Columba, perhaps the most popular saint of northwest Scotland”)
425: Magnus of Cuneo (feast day is August 19; depicted as a soldier bearing a banner and the palm of martyrdom; patron of pastures and livestock)
426: Mamertinus of Auxerre (feast day is March 30; depicted exhorting monks, lying on a mat in his cell before his death)
431: Mammes of Caesarea (aka Mamas, Mammas, Mammet, Mema, Mammès, Mamante, Mamés, Mamede; feast day is August 17; child martyr, depicted with a lion; patron of babies who are breastfeeding; protector of sufferers from broken bones and hernias)
432: Marnock of Kilmarnock (aka Marnocus, Marnan of Narnach, Marnanus, Marnocalso, Ernin; feast day is October 25; “a strong cult of veneration developed for Marnock after his death, particularly in the region of the Scottish Borders”)
433: Margaret the Virgin (aka Margaret of Antioch, Margaret of Antioch in Pisidia; feast day is July 20; depicted, in the West, slaying a dragon, and in the East beating a demon with a hammer; patron of pregnant women, nurses, peasants, exiles, the falsely accused, the dying, kidney disease)
434: Maruthas of Martyropolis (feast day is December 4)
435: Maxentius (feast day is June 26)
436: Menas of Egypt (aka Mina, Minas, Mena, Meena; feast day is November 11; depicted with his hands cut off and his eyes torn out, with two camels, or as a young knight with a halberd)
441: Merryn (aka Modwenna, Monenna; feast day is July 6)
442: Mildburh of Wenlock (aka Milburga, Milburgh; feast day is February 23; patron of birds; “said to have had a mysterious power over birds; they would avoid damaging the local crops when she asked them to […] syncretized with a pagan goddess…chosen to fill the role of grain protectress in Shropshire when the ancient pagan protectress could no longer be venerated”)
443: Mildgyth (aka Mildgytha; feast day is January 17)
444: Mildrith of Thanet (aka Mildthryth, Mildryth, Mildred; feast day is July 13; depicted as a crowned princess, with an abbess's crozier and hind)
445: Mirren of Benchor (aka Mirin, Merinus, Merryn, Meadhrán; feast day is September 15)
446: Modan (feast day is February 4)
451: Molaise of Leighlin (aka Laisrén or Laserian; feast day is April 18)
452: Moluag (aka Lua, Luan, Luanus, Lugaidh, Malew, Moloag, Moloc, Molluog, Molua, Molvanus,  Murlach; feast day is June 25; invoked against madness)
453: Monan (feast day is March 1; follower of St. Adrian, who sent him to the Isle of May, where he “exterminated superstition and many other crimes and abuses, and having settled the churches of that island in good order, passed into the county of Fife, and was there martyred; being slain with above 6,000 other Christians, by an army of infidels who ravaged that country in 874”; had a shrine at Innerny, in Fifeshire, where his relics were famous for miracles)
454: Moses the Black (aka Moses the Strong, Moses the Robber, Moses the Egyptian; feast day is August 28)
455: Nathalan (aka Nachlan; feast day is January 19)
456: Nectan of Hartland (feast day is June 17)
461: Neot (feast day is July 31)
462: Nicetas of Remesiana (feast day is June 22)
463: Ninian (aka Apostle to the Southern Picts, Ringan, Romanus, Rinian, Trinian, Ronian; feast day is September 16; associated with a magical or heavenly bell, the Clog-rinny or Bell of St. Ninian)
464: Orontius of Lecce (feast day is August 26; depicted in episcopal attire, smashing pagan idols at his feet)
465: Osana of Howden (feast day is June 18)
466: Oswald of Northumbria (feast day is August 5; depicted as a crowned king, carrying scepter, orb, ciborium, sword, and palm-branch and/or with his raven) 

511: Oswine of Northumbria (aka Oswin, Osuine; feast day is August 20)
512: Ouen (aka Owen, Audoenus; feast day is August 24)
513: Palaemon (feast day is January 11)
514: Pantaleon (feast day is July 27; depicted with a compartmented apothecary's box and a long-handled spatula or spoon; patron of physicians, apothecaries, midwives, livestock, and lottery winners; invoked against headaches, consumption, locusts, witchcraft, accidents, and loneliness)
515: Patrick (feast day is March 17, of course; sister of St. Darerca; supposedly born at Old Kilpatrick, at the western end of the Antonine Wall)
516: Patroclus of Troyes (feast day is January 21; depicted as a warrior pointing to a fish with a pearl in its mouth; invoked against demons and fever)
521: Paul the Simple (feast day is March 7)
522: Paulinus of York (feast day is October 10)
523: Peter of Rates (feast day is April 26)
524: Philogonius (aka Filogonius, Philogonus, Philogonios; feast day is December 20)
525: Quirinus of Neuss (feast day is March 30 or April 30; depicted in military attire, as a knight with lance, sword, and hawk, with a banner or sign with nine balls; invoked against the bubonic plague, smallpox, and gout, afflictions associated with the legs, feet, ears, paralysis, ulcers, goiters; skin conditions, and diseases affecting cattle and horses; patron of animals, knights, soldiers, and horsemen)
526: Rudesind (feast day is March 1)
531: Rufina and Secunda (feast day is July 10; depicted as two maidens floating in the Tiber River with weights attached to their necks)
532: Rule (aka Regulus; feast day is October 17; said to have brought St. Andrew's bones to Scotland)
533: Rumon of Tavistock (aka Ronan, Ruadan, or Ruan; has various feast days, but his translation is celebrated on January 5)
534: Sabbas the Goth (feast day is April 12)
535: Samson of Dol (aka Samsun; feast day is July 28)
536: Sarbelius and Barbea (feast day is January 29)
541: Serenus the Gardener (aka Serenus of Billom, Sirenatus, Cerneuf; feast day is February 23; patron of gardeners)
542: Servulus of Rome (feast day is December 23)
543: Severian of Sebaste (feast day is September 9)
544: Severian of Scythopolis (feast day is February 21)
545: Sidonius Apollinaris (feast day is August 21; notable poet)
546: Sidwell (also known as Sidwella, Sativola of Exeter; feast day is August 1)
551: Simeon the Holy Fool (feast day is July 1)
552: Sulpicius the Pious (feast day is January 17; patron of priests who come to the vocation late in life and patients with pains, gout, or skin conditions)
553: Talarican (aka Tarkin, Talorcan; feast day is October 30; probably Pictish)
554: Taneu (aka Teneu, Thenew, Theneva, Tannoch, Thaney, Thanea, Denw, Thenewe, Thennow, Denyw, Dwynwen, Thametes, Thameta, or Thenelis; feast day is July 18; mother of St. Kentigern Mungo)
555: Tatberht of Ripon (feast day is June 5)
556: Ternan (aka Torannan, Bishop of the Picts; feast day is June 12)
561: Thea and Valentina (feast day is July 25)
562: Thecla of Iconium (feast day is September 23
563: Thecla of Kitzingen (feast day is October 15)
564: Theodore Stratelates (aka Theodore of Heraclea, Theodore of Arabia; feast day was February 7; depicted as a warrior, with spear and shield, or as a civilian; patron of soldiers)
565: Theodore of Tarsus (aka Theodore of Canterbury; feast day is September 19)
566: Torquatus of Acci (feast day is May 15) 

611: Triduana (aka Trodline, Tredwell, or Trøllhaena; feast day is October 8; principal shrine was at Restalrig, now part of Edinburgh, but she also had a significant pilgrimage site, St. Tredwell's Chapel, on Papa Westray in the Orkneys)
612: Tryphon, Respicius, and Nympha (used to be celebrated together on November 10; Tryphon is depicted with a falcon and is patron of gardeners and winegrowers; invoked against rodents and locusts)
613: Turibius of Astorga (feast day is April 16)
614: Ultan of Péronne (feast day is May 1; brother of Sts. Fursey and Foillan)
615: Ultan the Scribe (aka Ultan of Ardbraccan; feast day is September 4)
616: Ursinus of Bourges (feast day is November 9)
621: Ursus of Aosta (feast day is February 1; depicted as an archdeacon with a staff and book, bearing birds on his shoulder, wearing fur pelisse in a religious habit, striking water from a rock, or giving shoes to the poor; patron of children who die before baptism; invoked in childbirth and against faintness, kidney disease, and rheumatism)
622: Ursus of Solothurn (feast day is September 30)
623: Valeria of Milan (feast day April 28; depicted with Sts. Vitalis, Gervasius, and Protasius, being beaten with clubs; invoked against storms and floods)
624: Valerian of Abbenza (feast day is December 15)
625: Victorinus of Pettau (feast day is November 2)
626: Victor the Moor (aka Victor Maurus; feast day is May 8; depicted being thrown into a furnace, roasted in an oven, or trampling on a broken altar)
631: Vodoaldus (aka Voel and Vodalus; feast day is February 5)
632: Walpurga (aka Walburga; feast day is February 25, but the translation of her relics on May 1 was also widely celebrated)
633: Werburh of Chester (feast day is February 3)
634: Wigstan of Repton (aka Wystan; feast day is June 1)
635: Wihtberht (aka Wigbert; feast day is August 13)
636: Wilfrid of Hexam (feast day is October 12; depicted baptizing, preaching, landing from a ship and being received by the king, or engaged in theological disputation, with his crozier near him and a lectern before him)
641: Wilfrid the Younger (aka Wilfrith; feast day is April 29)
642: Wilgils of Ripon (aka Wilgisl and Hilgis; feast day is January 31)
643: Wulfhad and Ruffin (feast day is July 24)
644: Wulfram of Sens (aka Wulfram of Fontenelle, Vuilfran, Wulfrann, Wolfran; feast day is March 20)
645: Wulfric of Holme (feast day is December 9)
646: Xanthippe and Polyxena (feast day is September 23)
651: Xenia the Righteous of Rome (aka Eusebia; feast day is January 24)
652: Ymar of Reculver (feast day is November 12)
653: Zacchaeus of Jerusalem (aka Zacharias; feast day is August 23)
654: Zamudas of Jerusalem (aka Zambdas, Zabdas, Bazas; feast day is February 19)
655: Zeno of Verona (feast day is April 12; depicted with fish, with a fishing rod, or with a fish hanging from his crozier; patron of fisherman and newborns)
656: Zosimus of Rome (feast day is December 27)
661: Zosimus the Hermit (feast day is January 3)
662: Æbbe of Coldingham (aka Tabbs; feast day is August 25)
663: Æbbe the Younger (aka Ebbe, Aebbe, Abb; feast day is April 2)
664: Ælfflæd of Whitby (feast day is February 8)
665: Ælfthryth of Crowland (aka Alfreda, Alfritha, Aelfnryth, Etheldritha; feast day is August 2)
666: Æthelwold of Lindisfarne (feast day is February 12)

 

* * * 

 

THE CALENDAR

January 1: Fulgentius of Ruspe
January 2: Concordius of Spoleto
January 3: Zosimus the Hermit
January 5: Rumon of Tavistock
January 8: Lucian of Beauvais
January 11: Palaemon
January 12: Benedict Biscop
January 13: Kentigern Mungo
January 14: Macrina the Elder
January 15: Ceolwulf
January 17: Anthony the Great; Mildgyth; Sulpicius the Pious
January 19: Nathalan
January 21: Epiphanius of Pavia; Patroclus of Troyes
January 22: Gaudentius of Novara 
January 24: Xenia the Righteous of Rome
January 29: Sarbelius and Barbea
January 31: Wilgils of Ripon

February 1: Ursus of Aosta
February 3: Ia of Cornwall; Werburh of Chester
February 4: Modan
February 5: Vodoaldus
February 7: Theodore Stratelates
February 8: Ælfflæd of Whitby
February 11: Jonas of Demeskenyanos
February 12: Æthelwold of Lindisfarne
February 13: Fillan
February 14: Conran of Orkney
February 15: Georgia of Clermont
February 17: Loman of Trim
February 18: Colmán of Lindisfarne
February 19: Zamudas of Jerusalem
February 21: Severian of Scythopolis
February 23: Mildburh of Wenlock; Serenus the Gardener
February 25: Walpurga

March 1: Monan, Rudesind
March 2: Chad of Lichfield
March 4: Adrian of May
March 5: Gerasimus of the Jordan
March 6: Balthere of Tyninghame; Billfrith
March 7: Eosterwine of Monkwearmouth; Paul the Simple
March 8: Duthac
March 9: Bosa of York
March 10: Himelin; Kessog
March 13: Christina of Persia
March 14: Curetán
March 16: Abban of Murnevin
March 17: Patrick
March 19: Alkmund of Derby
March 20: Cuthbert; Herbert of Derwentwater; Wulfram of Sens
March 22: Darerca of Ireland
March 25: Kennocha
March 28: Alchhild of Middleham
March 30: Mamertinus of Auxerre
March 31: Benjamin the Deacon and Martyr

April 2: Appian; Æbbe the Younger
April 6: Irenaeus of Sirmium
April 9: Dotto
April 10: Beocca and Hethor
April 12: Sabbas the Goth; Zeno of Verona
April 14: Domnina of Terni
April 16: Turibius of Astorga
April 17: Donnán of Eigg
April 18: Agia of Hainault; Molaise of Leighlin
April 22: Abdiesus
April 24: Egbert of Rath Melsigi
April 26: Peter of Rates
April 27: Máel Ruba
April 28: Valeria of Milan
April 29: Wilfrid the Younger
April 30: Quirinus of Neuss

May 1: Ultan of Péronne
May 5: Echa of Crayke
May 6: Eadberht
May 7: John of Beverley
May 8: Victor the Moor
May 9: Beatus of Lungern
May 12: Epiphanius of Salamis
May 14: Boniface of Tarsus
May 15: Torquatus of Acci
May 17: Cathan
May 22: Julia of Corsica
May 23: Guibert
May 25: Bede the Venerable
May 27: Julius the Veteran
May 28: Caraunus of Chartres
May 29: Erbin of Dumnonia

June 1: Wigstan of Repton
June 5: Tatberht of Ripon
June 9: Columba of Iona
June 12: Ternan
June 17: Nectan of Hartland
June 18: Osana of Howden
June 20: Alban of Verulamium
June 21: Alban of Mainz
June 22: Nicetas of Remesiana
June 23: Agrippina of Mineo
June 25: Moluag
June 26: Maxentius
June 28: Irenaeus of Lugdunum; Jonas of Bobbio

July 1: Simeon the Holy Fool
July 6: Merryn
July 7: Boisil of Melrose
July 10: Rufina and Secunda
July 11: Drostan
July 12: Jason of Thessalonica
July 13: Mildrith of Thanet
July 14: Idus of Leinster
July 15: Donald of Ogilvy; Egino
July 18: Taneu
July 19: Macrina the Younger
July 20: Margaret the Virgin
July 23: Liborius of Le Mans
July 24: Wulfhad and Ruffin
July 25: Thea and Valentina
July 27: Pantaleon 
July 28: Samson of Dol
July 31: Neot 

August 1: Sidwell 
August 2: Ælfthryth of Crowland
August 5: Oswald of Northumbria
August 9: Firmus and Rusticus
August 11: Lelia of Limerick
August 13: Wihtberht 
August 17: Mammes of Caesarea
August 19: Magnus of Cune
August 20: Oswine of Northumbria
August 21: Sidonius Apollinaris
August 23: Zacchaeus of Jerusalem
August 24: Ouen 
August 25: Æbbe of Coldingham
August 26: Orontius of Lecce
August 28: Moses the Black
August 30: Agilus
August 31: Aidan of Lindisfarne, Caesidius

September 1: Dryhthelm 
September 2: Elpidius the Cappadocian
September 4: Ultan the Scribe
September 6: Bega of Copeland
September 7: Alcmund of Hexham
September 8: Adrian of Nicomedia
September 9: Severian of Sebaste
September 11: Hyacinth and Protus
September 15: Mirren of Benchor
September 16: Ninian
September 19: Theodore of Tarsus
September 23: Eunan; Thecla of Iconium; Xanthippe and Polyxena
September 25: Ceolfrid 
September 26: Cyprian the Magician and Justina
September 28: Conval
September 30: Ursus of Solothurn

October 4: Domnina, Berenice, and Prosdoce
October 8: Iwig of Wilton; Triduana
October 9: Domninus of Fidenza
October 10: Paulinus of York
October 11: Kenneth of Aghaboe
October 12: Domnina of Anazarbus; Wilfrid of Hexam
October 15: Thecla of Kitzingen
October 17: John the Dwarf; Rule
October 20: Acca of Hexham
October 21: Hilarion of Thavata
October 25: Dorcas; Marnock of Kilmarnock
October 26: Cedd of Lichfield; Demetrius of Thessaloniki
October 27: Abbán the Hermit
October 30: Talarican 

November 1: Dingad of Llandingat
November 2: Victorinus of Pettau
November 4: Abercius Marcellus
November 9: Ursinus of Bourges
November 10: Tryphon, Respicius, and Nympha
November 11: Menas of Egypt
November 12: Machar; Ymar of Reculver
November 15: Abibus of Edessa
November 17: Hilda of Whitby
November 18: Fergus 
November 25: Catherine of Alexandria
November 27: Congar of Congresbury; James Intercisus
November 30: Andrew the Apostle

December 3: Cassian of Tangier
December 4: Maruthas of Martyropolis
December 9: Leocadia; Wulfric of Holme
December 11: Daniel the Stylite
December 12: Corentin of Quimper
December 15: Valerian of Abbenza
December 17: Begga
December 20: Philogonius
December 23: Servulus of Rome
December 27: Zosimus
December 29: Ailerán Sapiens
December 31: Columba of Sens 

Premature Antifascism Redux

The DTRPG thing that happened a few weeks ago has since sunk beneath newer waves of controversy and internet turmoil and far-right activist chicanery, but I keep thinking about it. It touched a nerve with me, obviously, provoking me to bleat (or skeet, if you insist, you degenerates) more in one thread than I think I'd done in all my prior days on Bluesky. I've since lapsed back into relative social-media quietude, but I keep thinking about punching Nazis (and being told not to).

As I said then, I don't think it's crazy for small businesses to err on the side of caution in cases like this (I'm also sympathetic to itch.io in their recent mess; of course they could have communicated better and more promptly, but when somebody threatens essentially to cut off your revenue entirely, what can you do?). It is plausible, in these benighted times, that you might be brought up on terrorism charges, or God knows what else, for having committed (or abetted, or financially benefited from) “hate crimes against Republicans,” never mind that they aren't in any sense a protected class. Hate crimes against Christians, maybe. Against white people. Who knows!

At any rate, I stand by the rest of what I said too. DTRPG's defense of their actions was weaselly and dishonest, pretending that the preface to Rebel Scum was far more violent and inflammatory than it actually was. “We didn't want to get sued or prosecuted for hate crimes,” unfortunately, would be a valid position; these are bad times. But pretending that the whole thing was obviously dangerous and unhinged and beyond the pale sidestepped the real question. Another comprehensible response might be “We personally thought that the level of vitriol in this material was more than we were comfortable with.” Hard to argue with a personal opinion, right? And I'd rather have seen that answer than a dishonest one. I still wouldn't have liked it, though.

The crux of the issue, and the question they dodged: Is it time to take a stand against fascism, and if so, what does that look like? If not, when is the right time? Does it ever come? (The corollary, of course: Can you talk about it on the internet? Hopefully, yes, as long as you keep everything vague and hypothetical.)

* * *

It's easy for me, a semi-anonymous schmuck with a blog that 40 people read, to call for people to be ready to man the barricades. People whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff from their small-business storefront? I understand why they'd prefer to keep a lower profile. But I think there's a broader cultural phenomenon at play here, something that's not easy to grapple with.

If you’re anything like me (i.e., the kind of nerd who’s been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War since he was a child), you are surely familiar with the concept of “premature antifascism.” In case you're not, though: American leftists who had gone to Spain to fight for the democratically elected government between 1936 and 1939 got tagged with this label even as, during the Second World War, leftism and antifascism were partially rehabilitated. The Soviet Union was an American ally and we briefly thought—or asserted to the public, at any rate—that communism was A-OK after all. But we still didn't trust people who'd been sympathetic to communism even back when the mainstream of American opinion leaned more toward sympathy with fascism and Nazism.

Somebody whose principles or internationalist political allegiances are stronger than his conformism and willingness to just do whatever his government tells him, right or wrong, is a problem. Somebody willing to break the law, whether for the purposes of revolutionary terrorism or good old American nonviolent civil disobedience, is a problem.

To wit: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, when would be appropriate? We have the old “would you kill baby Hitler?” conundrum, of course. Nobody could believe how dangerous this baby would become; you'd be seen as a monster. But forget baby Hitler. What's the youngest adult Hitler you could step out of a time machine to bump off and not be tarred as a cold-blooded killer and commie terrorist? In 1940, sure, you'd be a hero—if you could get away alive. Even just two years earlier, though, in 1938, you'd be a much more ambivalent figure. Maybe it was for the best, people would say, but assassination? How uncivilized. What about 1933? What about 1928? You'd hang, of course.

We can't really talk about political violence, of course. I'm not going to propose that anybody break the law, and I'm certainly not going to propose that anybody do harm to anybody else. But we can at least talk about how we find ourselves in a cultural moment that demands ideological purity in art, but excuses the gravest moral cowardice in our real-world politics. And I don't mean the way we self-interestedly tiptoe around these real-world questions (and delist shit we might get sued or deplatformed over). I mean the way our ostensible opposition party dismisses everything the government does as a “distraction” while taking no action, the way our supposedly liberal media flatter our would-be dictator and downplay the enormity of his actions.

Meanwhile, art that asks people to sympathize with or identify with people who are morally compromised or who have done, or are planning to do, terrible things has never been met with more discomfort, even outright hostility. Each of us wants to believe that we're pure and good and uncompromised and would never countenance doing awful things nor admit any kind of ambivalence about the cause of righteousness. And yet here we are, watching the country sink into Nazism, and our resistance is haphazard, bewildered, ambivalent. Many people—many of the same people who want our movies, our games, our literature to outline a black and white morality, to present only flawless, pure-of-heart protagonists, are also dismayed that fascist politicians should be harassed in public or that awards shows taking blood money from war criminals should meet mild, measured censure.

“Games about punching Nazis are good, but when you start to talk about punching Nazis in real life, you've crossed a line” is a morally deranged position. In make believe, we should be comfortable trying on all sorts of positions (we murder and steal on the regular, in TTRPGs). It's in real life that we need to draw a line.

Skills: Who Needs Them?

Is there anything interesting left to say about TTRPG skills? Probably not. But sometimes the brain itches, and writing down a bunch of stuff that other people have said a million times before, but slightly different this time, scratches the itch.

* * * 

Imagine five people: three athletes, a generic fantasy adventurer (a fighter, maybe), and a regular schmo.

Our athletes are an endurance runner, a weightlifter, and a baseball player. We're going to ask all five people to try their hands at the athletes' sports: they're going to run a marathon, lift an extremely heavy object, and play in a baseball game. And we're going to think about how to represent this in a roleplaying game.

Consider the marathon first. This is something with a low barrier for entry and an almost infinite number of grades of success. Let's assume that all five of our participants can run; it's probable that, given enough time, all five can run (or “run”) the whole marathon. It might take Joe Schmo 12 hours, but he'll get there. Our marathon runner should probably post the best time of the five, and Joe should probably post the worst, but a substantial degree of uncertainty is reasonable. The marathon runner might have trained hard for this but just not be built for it, whereas the adventurer might, despite never having trained for a marathon specifically, have developed tremendous distance-running skills while fleeing gelatinous cubes and the like. The weightlifter is probably much more fit than Joe, but she doesn't necessarily run well. Maybe she pulls a hamstring halfway through the race and has to limp across the line last.

Lifting weights (or heaving a fallen pillar out of the party's path in a dungeon, perhaps) is totally different. It's a strict binary: each person can either do it or they can't. Success might come with costs (a hernia?) and failure might be particularly drastic (crushed to death?), but the weight either is gonna get lifted or it isn't. The professional weightlifter's training will ensure that her technique is good, and she'll be most likely to avoid injury; the baseball player, who probably lifts weights frequently as part of his training, will also have good technique but probably doesn't have the same maximum capacity. If the weight is significant enough to pose a real challenge for the weightlifter, Joe and the runner won't be able to budge it, and the ballplayer and adventurer are likely (if somewhat less likely) to similarly just not be able.

Finally, we send them into a baseball game. Again, the level of challenge could vary quite a bit, and there are many grades of success (from just putting the ball in play to getting a base hit to hitting a home run). Any of these people might have some amateur baseball experience, but assuming that our pro ballplayer is good, and assuming the level of competition is enough to challenge him, the bar for any level of success is extremely high. The ballplayer himself might strike out on three pitches; it happens frequently enough. The other four are very likely to strike out, although the adventurer's combat-honed hand-eye coordination might give her a better chance to put the ball in play, and the weightlifter's massive strength might help her muscle a hit out of the park if she does manage to make contact.

* * *

Now, what the hell kind of RPG skill system is supposed to represent all of this? These are three challenges that, in 5E or any D&D-based system with a similarly stripped-down skill list, are likely to be represented by an Athletics check. If we have a system that doesn't lock certain skills to certain attributes (e.g., my trusty Stars Without Number), we might get a little stat-based variation (using CON bonuses for the marathon, STR for the weightlifting, and STR, DEX, or maybe even WIS for baseball). But how can the same flat skill bonus apply to all three?

Said flat skill check works passably well for the marathon, at least for separating the pros from the schmo. A d20 check isn't ideal—creating enough separation between Joe and our endurance runner that there's only a 2.5% chance of the former beating the latter requires giving the runner a bonus advantage of +15 (and that 2.5% chance is still pretty excessive)—but a 2d6 system will handle it easily with some comparatively small bonuses. Of course, if we only have a single Athletics skill, moving to 2d6 won't make the runner meaningfully better than our other pro athletes, which is weird, but we'll come back to that.

The skill check doesn't work so well for weightlifting. Even if we create the same kind of skill gap (Joe only succeeds 10% of the time; the weightlifter only fails 15% of the time), that's weird. This doesn't feel like something where everybody should be balanced on the razor's edge between success and failure. Sometimes, doing something difficult is a matter of raw aptitude. Training and experience might give you a slight edge and a lower chance of disastrous failure—you know just where to grip for maximum purchase, and you're not going to throw your back out in the attempt—but in the end, you're simply strong enough to lift that heavy thing or you're not. When games call for skill checks in situations like this, they probably just…shouldn't. Dragging that stone pillar out of the doorway simply requires 14+ STR. Maybe you can substitute something else (weightlifting experience? being a dwarf?) for one missing attribute point, maybe you can make an Athletics (or similar) check to see whether you injure yourself, but just doing the thing is a binary.

And baseball? It doesn't seem like a normal set of dice is going to be able to model how hard it would be for an untrained amateur to, say, hit a major-league slider. Nobody does that, not even the best amateurs in the world, until they've seen a few dozen in the minors, at least. So now even our 2d6 skill system is under some strain. If an untrained, physically average person in one of the XWN games (-1) goes head-to-head against somebody with maxed-out skill (+4) and the maximum stat bonus (+2), there's still ample room for an upset—a roll of 10, 11, or 12 by the amateur will beat snake eyes from the pro, for instance. Even in Traveller, where the untrained penalty is harsher (-3) and there's no hard cap on skill level, our pro needs a total DM+7 just to be guaranteed not to lose a contest—which is more than a starting character can have, and that in a game where starting characters are mid-career professionals and further advancement is slow and difficult.

* * *

Now, do we really need our TTRPGs to be able to model the difference between an average person and a top-tier professional baseball player? In a literal sense, no—when are our characters ever going to play pro baseball?—and metaphorically, probably not, because the literally one-in-a-million talent of an MLB player is a degree of aptitude games don't need to encompass (even if they need better granularity than “nobody can ever have better than a 95% chance of doing anything, or less than 5%"). But something like this comes up pretty frequently, especially in games with non-fantasy settings. The difference between a trained pilot and somebody who's never been in the cockpit, or between a university-educated physicist and a high school dropout, or between a professional programmer and somebody who's never touched a computer? Pretty vast!

Traditional skill checks work for feats like the marathon: anybody can attempt it, but physical aptitude and training go a long way toward making high-level success possible. Simple ability checks (or ability gates, even, without a roll) work for feats like weightlifting. Either you can, or you can't. For this third category, in which people are trying to do things that are challenging for them, in spite of their extensive experience and training, and would be simply impossible for an untrained person, who wouldn't even know how to approach the problem (or what button to push, as it were), we might have to combine the two types of check, and conceptually separate skill from training. You need training to even undertake the challenge; your skill determines the likelihood that you succeed.

Now, it's not completely impossible that an untrained person could fly a jet, or a spaceship. Maybe they've seen other people do it enough to have a rough sense of how it's done, even without any training. Maybe they should, as in Traveller, face a steep penalty instead of being locked out of the skill entirely. But is that penalty determined programmatically? Is it something you put in the rulebook? (E.g., Program is -5 for untrained characters, Pilot is -3, Surgery is -4, etc.) Don't characters with different backgrounds and experiences have an argument for different modifiers? If you're a soldier who's deployed from a dropship a hundred times, you probably have better odds of piloting one than a farmer who's never even seen a spaceship, even if neither of you formally has either training or skill.

And, again, there's that problem of too-general skills. Advocates of skill systems often say they help to define and humanize a character, but any system that makes a marathon runner, a weightlifter, and a baseball player mechanically identical—and equally good, or nearly so, at one another's sports—isn't doing a great job of defining and personalizing its characters. Then again, does anybody want to go to the level of GURPS (or even further) in terms of granularity? If we start splitting piloting into myriad sub-skills (sailboats, large merchant ships, helicopters, fighter jets, space shuttles), we run into the problem that any given character's skills are useless (or at least not optimally useful) 99% of the time, unless the GM finesses everything to make sure there's always a sailboat or helicopter handy.

There's a great, and reasonably popular, solution to all these problems and more (like the weirdness of level-based skill advancement, wherein a character crosses some abstract experience threshold, and poof, now somehow instantly knows how to do new things, potentially including things they got no new training or experience in). Ditch specific skills, let players define their characters' expertise narratively (via “backgrounds” or similar), and work out the numbers by some combination of negotiation, consensus, and GM fiat:

• “I used to be a shuttle pilot, so I don't think it'd be a huge stretch for me to figure out piloting this fighter, given there's no immediate time crunch or danger."
• “Remember when we did a bunch of climbing down in the catacombs a few sessions ago? We learned a lot from that, and climbing this ivy-covered wall seems to be more straightforward than that was.”
• “Naah, I don't think a few hours studying at the local library was enough to substantially deepen your knowledge of arcana.”

Of course, I get why major (or “major”) publishers rarely present games like this—a mass-market game needs to cater to all players, including those who can't abide by loosey-goosey rulings and those who don't trust their fellow players with this kind of freedom—but for a home game, with the right players, it works like a charm. And yet the dream of a perfect skill system persists, even in the sparsely populated and OSR-inclined backwaters of the blogosphere and Reddit.

It should be robust, yet lightweight. Flexible, yet a vehicle for deep character personalization. Suitable for a simulationist approach, yet not excessively granular. I look forward to reading about it! I'm sure as shit not going to come up with it myself.

Season of the Itch

"Arabs in a Cave by the Sea" by Mariano Fortuny Marsal

It's officially summer, and I hereby declare that summer 2025 is going to be the season of me actually committing to a bunch of game jams. I'm starting strong, hopefully, with a last-minute entry to JAM THIS ALBUM! Vol. 3, which is all about making TTRPG stuff inspired by music or music inspired by TTRPG stuff (folk music being the specific theme for this volume). Having scribbled a bunch of ideas in my trusty old GM notebook over the past couple weeks that sketched out some vague kind of content inspired by this longtime favorite of mine, performed by Savina Yannatou and Primavera en Salonico, I whipped them into a kinda sorta hopefully playable condition last night and this morning.

I swear I'll do the others in a more timely fashion. Most of them, anyway.

Next up is the Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam 2025 (I did actually do this one last year). After that, the classic TTRPG One-page Dungeon Contest Jam, the Summer LEGO RPG Jam (which I meant to do last year), the FIST Anniversary Jam, and the Build a Better World TTRPG Jam. There are a bunch of others that are tempting (a poetry-inspired jam!) but I'm just gonna commit to these five for now and we'll see how good I am at actually cranking finishing what I've started. Other than the OPD contest, I actually have my plans for all of these pretty well drawn up already.

Six jams in three months. Easy! One down already! 

Dumping on Daggerheart

Hey, everybody else is doing it! (Or praising it. Mostly praising it, actually.)

I know, Mom, “everybody else is doing it” isn't a good excuse. And Daggerheart obviously isn't and wasn't meant for me. It's not fair for me to critique something that I wouldn't otherwise look at just because everybody else is talking about it, and be like, “I don't like this.”

It's kind of an interesting exercise, though. I collect a lot of TTRPGs, but my collection is very heavy on apples that haven't fallen far from the B/X tree and loosey-goosey narrative stuff. Other than my old D&D 3.5E books, the crunchiest thing I own is probably…Numenera? Star Trek Adventures? (Maybe Stillfleet, but I haven't really dug into that one enough yet to know.)

Anyway, it's interesting to look at a game that's very much not My Kind of Thing. I can poke around for bits and pieces that I do like, and I can also interrogate what it is about This Kind of Thing that just doesn't do it for me.

On that note, why not just dive into the two biggest things that turn me off about Daggerheart? (They're closely related to one another, hence both at once.)

* * *

First thing: It's very clearly aimed at 5E players. Second thing: It's very clearly meant to support a 5E-like ecosystem of player-oriented supplements.

I'm looking at the SRD, but I've watched people flip through the book, and it's laid out similarly. It's an all-in-one document; they're not doing the PHB/DMG/MM thing, thank goodness. The layout is player-oriented and the mechanics are character-forward. Right from the jump, page 4, immediately following the obligatory explanation of what an RPG is and what kind of RPG Daggerheart is: STEP 1. Choose a Class and Subclass.

There are nine classes. They're based on “domains” that form a tidy little wheel. They're largely familiar D&D classes, similar to what's in the 3E or 5E PHB, except that instead of Paladin and Fighter we have Guardian and Warrior, and instead of Cleric, we have Seraph. There's no Barbarian, Monk, or Warlock.

It seems like it must have been intended to make converting a long-running 5E campaign to Daggerheart feasible, but despite copying a bunch of latter-day D&D's peculiarities, it changes enough, both in terms of the class list itself and the mechanics, that that process wouldn't be smooth or easy. (Kind of a bait-and-switch for 5E diehards.)

They've copied about 80% of D&D's character-creation homework. Bards buff their allies via magic songs (or poetry). Druids are shapeshifters. Rangers have animal companions (via a subclass). Rogues can sneak attack for massive damage. Sorcerers are innately magical, whereas wizards are bookish nerds. This stuff might all be second nature to us now, but if you can step away from your knowledge of D&D, it's not self-supporting. None of this makes a lot of sense, and some of it makes none at all, except that, well, that's how D&D is.

The treatment of druids is particularly annoying to me. How did this extremely culturally specific priesthood get turned into a generic fantasy character archetype? And why do they all have the ability to shapeshift into animal forms? Yeah, it's pretty ubiquitous now (thanks, World of Warcraft), but it's a whole-cloth invention of D&D. Why reproduce it here?

And then, on the other side of the coin, why replace the nice, generic Cleric with the culturally specific (i.e., hyper-Christian) Seraph? Where did this come from? Why, in a meta-setting with no other cultural specificity, have we baked into the core rules of the game the notion that all gods, everywhere, are Judeo-Christian? I hate it!

Somewhat relatedly, and perhaps uncharitably, I hate absolutely everything about the domains. A nonagonal version of the MTG color pie underpins all the supernatural powers in the universe? I dislike neat and tidy mathematical magic systems and cosmologies in the first place, but I also hate (returning at last to my second gripe) how nakedly commercial this is.

The nine adjacencies in the color pie create the nine base classes, but there are 27 more pairings just waiting to be named and marketed, and that's just up until they let you double down on domains, or have tri-domain classes, or add new domains or God knows what else. And there are subclasses, too! There's a bottomless well to go back to for character options to sell to players (a market that's what, three or four times larger than the market of GMs?).

The nice way to look at this is that it supports a rich community and secondary market for fanmade content and homebrew, but four decades of living under capitalism have ground my rose-colored glasses to dust and instead I just see a bunch of sockets for FUTURE PRODUCT. Yes, they're a nice indie press, they're not Hasbro, it's a by-gamers, for-gamers kind of enterprise, and yet it still feels like it was built as an armature to plug PRODUCT into first, a game-mechanical structure second, an appealing meta-setting not at all.

And hey, as long as I'm being petty and negative, please forgive an old English major some snooty contempt for bad writing: The names of the domains are a crime against language. This is the foundation of the whole character system and basically the whole game universe (or metaverse), and it's just a bunch of random words! They are all nouns, but that's literally the only thing they have in common. Some are concrete objects that people might wield (blade, codex); others are, or could be, concrete, but aren't implements (bone). Some are abstract personal qualities (grace, valor); others are abstract concepts that people do not personally possess (arcana, splendor). Sage doesn't make any sense at all; they don't mean the plant (although I guess somebody could wield that), and everything else here is a noun, so they probably don't mean “wise,” which leaves us with sage as in “wise person.” How the hell is that a domain? Why not “sagacity”? There's also “midnight.” What was wrong with “night”?

I can't overstate how much this turns me off. True, most people don't care about words, but the kinds of dorks who buy TTRPG books aren't most people. Some of us care about words a lot, and the lazy artlessness of the domain names makes me feel like none of this was meant for me (which, again, in fairness, it wasn't). There's no poetry here, no mystery, no sense that anybody thought long or carefully about how any of the game's systems and structures would interact with its settings and lore.

I'll jump ahead here—we'll never get through character creation at this rate—to note that the game's central resolution mechanic suffers from the same writerly carelessness. The whole “roll 2d12, matching dice crit, add or subtract d6 for advantage/disadvantage, player or GM gains metacurrency depending on the result” thing is solid. But “duality dice”? “Hope and fear”? Why? What do these terms have to do with anything?

I'd love it if there were some kind of cosmologically relevant yin and yang thing going on here, if balance were important and maybe hoarding too much of one metacurrency was a bad or risky thing (good way to get characters to spend the stuff). I'd like it if these things connected to the domains in any way. I'd like it if they seemed to have anything to do with…anything.

Nope. It's just (approximately) 50/50 that something good happens or something bad happens. Of course our elfgames are all about random generation that could be boiled down to flipping coins at the end of the day, but the feeling of, “Ah, I rolled badly but because this is something I'm good at, I get a partial success instead of an out-and-out failure” is strong and reinforces a sense of connection to the character. Having this mechanic just randomly, metronomically award the PCs the good metacurrency or the GM the bad one seems like a missed opportunity to me.

* * *

But surely I like some of it, right? Definitely! This post is long enough already, so just some quick hits:

• The system integrating hitpoints, incoming damage, armor, defense, etc. is great. Sounds like it went through a lot of iteration during the beta, and it came out all the better for it. Shares some relationships with Panic Engine systems (Mothership, Cloud Empress)—light damage that's easy to shrug off eventually adds up to serious injuries, and armor is extremely important. The way armor works here adds some active player decision-making, which is always a big plus.
• I don't love the thematically weak metacurrencies, but I do like the way the GM gains a bit of the “bad” one whenever the party rests. It's a simple, elegant way to put pressure on the party to push their luck and keep moving, especially if you have players who find resource tracking a chore.
• Folding CON into STR and dividing DEX is good. We've all read 30 different blog posts proposing it; it's nice to see games actually doing it (but renaming almost all of the core stats, in a game that in most other ways refuses to leave D&D's stylistic shadow, is annoying).
• The section about playing a wheelchair user is great. It's thorough and explained well, it offers a nice template for homebrew content giving characters integral equipment or unusual movement abilities, and it's undoubtedly infuriating to the worst people on the internet.
• The frog man is EXTREMELY cute. There are some things about the heritage system I don't like (too many of the ancestries are, again, just carbon copies of familiar stuff from D&D, like tieflings and dragonborn, and the community side of things is undercooked), but I will forgive you a lot for the sake of an adorable little frog man. This is practically the one thing I've seen of Daggerheart's meta-setting that actually makes me want to play the game.

I've watched people page through the ancestry section, which is chock-full of wonderful, diverse sketches. Credit where it's due: In contrast to the FUTURE PRODUCT GOES HERE feeling of the domains, classes, and subclasses, the ancestries are very generous. Because I am an inveterate hater, of course, I still have two gripes: The “generic modern fantasy grab bag” nature of the ancestries and the sketchy, underdeveloped quality of the communities contribute to my feeling that the game has no character and no strong identity. And the lead concept artist apparently wanted flipping through the ancestry sketches to feel like “messing around in a character creator,” which…ugh. God save us from the videogamification of TTRPGs (and everything else).

* * *

So Daggerheart isn't for me. No big surprise there; it wasn't aimed at me. I'd happily play it, though, and I found plenty to like about it mechanically, things to borrow or iterate on. I also think I learned a little about what makes a game appeal to me and what doesn't. You can sell me on a game that isn't my usual jam by presenting it in a compelling way. And an uninspiring presentation is going to put me off a game even if it's full of mechanics I find intriguing.

I can't untangle what I don't like about Daggerheart from the fact that it's so squarely aimed at 5E players and videogamers. The strong effort to make it appealing to a couple related products' large audiences is totally reasonable, and I'm sure that the folks who made it this way did so because they themselves are huge fans of 5E and BG3. But I can't see that affection. Maybe it's my own cynicism, but this looks like a commercial product to me, not a labor of love.

Even if it is, is that so wrong? Of course not. It's good that people can make an honest living designing (and illustrating, editing, publishing) games. But one of the things I love about indie games, as I wrote in that diatribe linked above, is the sense of contact with somebody else's personality, with originality, with creativity, with the odds warts and bumps of a singular human mind. I want auteurism. I see some of that in the rules of Daggerheart, but I see scarcely any traces of it in the presentation.