Magic in Xish

I'm sticking to the Vancian paradigm, because as I've said before that shit is a lot weirder in the source material than four decades of just being "the way magic works in D&D" can make it seem. But in the context of Xish, specifically, what is magic? And who are the people who use it?

One thing that gets lost in translation from Vance, at least in later editions, is that magic really seems to be a matter of just finding spells and reading them. At least in the first novel, which is all I've read, there's not much indication that "being a wizard" is an intense vocation that you devote your whole life to (by the second chapter, T'Sain seems to know as many spells as Turjan, despite having only been created in a vat very recently)... except in the sense that that's what it takes to actually gather together and find spells.

Because in The Dying Earth, magic seems to be as on the way out as everything else. There are only ~100 known spells, the rest having been lost to time. Anyone can learn a spell, because spells are just weird words on a page that imprint themselves on your brain until you cast it. But the people who actually know a lot of spells seem to be the ones who devote most of their life to tracking down moldering old books (or are rich and/or powerful enough to have people do it for them) - because it's not learning spells that takes efforts, it's finding the damn things to learn in the first place.

Of course, that's not quite the whole story. It's strongly implied in Vance that learning a spell is a physical process; he never really talks about "memorizing" spells, it's more like spells are something physically stored in your brain. They take up space in there. That's why you can only have so many ready to go at one time - there's just a hard physical limit. It seems clear that, aside from tracking down books, a large part of a magic-user's time would have to be training his brain to fit more and more spells in there. In D&D terms, gaining new "spell slots" really just means that you've managed to increase your brain's magical storage capacity. Which, again, in theory is something anyone could do - but it takes time.

So in Xish, that's what makes magic-users magic-users: they've devoted a significant portion of their life to finding and reading arcane texts, carefully studying them on the off-chance that there's a spell in there (as in Dying Earth, magic is rare, and the number of available spells is only a fraction of what it once was), and another significant portion to daily meditation and mental exercises so that you can actually memorize the spells you've collected. There is, otherwise, nothing to being a magic-user; there's no "gift" one has to be born with, though being particularly intelligent of course helps (i.e. having hight INT, thereby increasing experience as a prime req and/or granting bonus spell slots, depending on edition).

This especially works in older editions of the game, where the only thing actually tracked by numbers on your sheet is how many spells of each level you can memorize per day. The spells you actually have in your spell book are purely a function of in-game shit: i.e. finding spells to put in there. Nothing's stopping a 1st level wizard from writing Power Word: Kill down in his book; he just can't fit it into his noggin yet. 

Of course, on this paradigm it still seems as though everyone in the party could theoretically know at least a few spells: why couldn't a high INT fighter have a gander at his friend's spell book and memorize at least one or two, if there's nothing inherently special about being a magic-user?

Well, for one, wizards don't share. Every spell a magic-user knows is a jealously-guarded secret. After all - it takes a ton of effort to track down even the simplest spells. Remember: there aren't just scrolls floating around everywhere in this world, and there certainly aren't any fucking "magic shops" you can drop in on. There are a finite number of genuine magical texts out in the world, and most of them are already in some other magic-user's carefully-trapped collection. You really have to dig for that shit. Sometimes you have to do some unsavory things (in practical terms, the best thing to do as soon as you meet another magic-user is to kill him and jack his spell book). And now this meathead wants you to let him just read a couple of them? Fat fucking chance.

An upshot of this is that in Xish there are no fucking magical colleges or wizard schools. Magic-users don't even take on apprentices, because, again, you don't actually need someone to teach you how to use magic. You just need the spells. So any old wizard taking some young aspiring caster under his wing is just begging to get his throat slit in his sleep so the kid can raid his library.

The other main thing, and here I'm borrowing more from Lovecraft than Vance, is that learning magic ain't good for you. It's not shit man was meant to fuck with - no one even really knows where these spells ultimately come from, they're just shit written down in old books by guys that have been dead for who knows how long. And those guys don't seem to have had much idea where spells come from either. So whenever you memorize a spell - which, remember, means physically storing it in your brain - it's the equivalent of picking up some fungus you see lying around sometimes and popping it in your mouth. You just hope you're not poisoning yourself, but you don't really know. And in reality, you are. All magic-users are slowly going insane, because turns out you actually shouldn't ingest stuff you have no idea what it is or where it comes from.

And magic-users all know that, on some level. The first time you memorize a spell, it feels wrong; something's in your brain that's not supposed to be there. The guys who become magic-users are the ones who ignore that feeling and push on, gradually becoming used to it. But the average person who memorized a spell for the first time would nope the fuck out of the whole enterprise. So even if a magic-user was inclined to share spells with the rest of the party, chances are they're not interested anyway.

Xish New Users' Guide

I just realized I should probably recap what this setting is all about instead of just linking to older posts about it, especially since my thinking has developed and some things have changed since I wrote those. I also need to some sort of quick 1-2 page document that I can send players if I ever get a chance to run this thing again. So here I am, killing two birds with one stone.

THE SETTING

Earth, millennia from now. The sun hangs dim and red in the sky and most land has been swallowed by the oceans. Only a single large landmass remains: the continent of Xish. Technology and social structures have devolved to recall Dark Ages Europe, not that anyone living now would know what that is. Sorcery and all manner of strange creatures have returned to the land.

A handful of centuries prior to when the campaign takes place, the High Kingdom of Xish ruled over the continent and brought a measure of stability and security to the land. Now, that kingdom exists in name only: many of its great population centres have fallen to attack or starvation, and the ones that remain subsist effectively as independent city-states. Many of the great roadways have been lost to the ever-enroaching wilderness. Outside of the few pockets of a dwindling civilization, Xish is wild, dangerous, and littered with the ruins of a bygone era.

Within those pockets, the prevailing mood is one of doom. Mankind is on the way out, and everyone knows it. Some seek solace from this fact in decadence, mindless violence, or the pursuit of arcane power; other embrace it, by turning to one of the numerous apocalyptic death cults that have popped up in recent years. Some of these cults worship alien entities that have increasingly come to be regarded as gods; they are, at least, the closest thing the world now has.

CREATING A CHARACTER

Follow all rules and guidelines in the Labyrinth Lord core book, except for the following changes, additions, and clarifications.

 

STATS

Roll 3d6 for each, in the order listed on the character sheet. If the column you rolled contains no single score of at least 13 and/or contains two scores of 5 or less, you may (but don't have to) roll a new one. Anything else is a character that must be played for at least one full session, after which (assuming they don't die) you can choose to retire them, keeping in mind that your new character will not be "caught up on" any XP or treasure gained by the retired character. 

 

RACE AND CLASS

Remember: in Labyrinth Lord fighters, clerics, magic-users and thieves are all assumed to be human. Non-humans don't get a separate class: you're a halfling, not a halfling thief. Note that the non-humans do have certain minimum stat requirements.

Humans are either Xishan (pick a city-state to hail from, or you be from some minor village, or just an unattached wandering weirdo) or Skreelan (a nomadic barbarian from the island of Skreel, where the fearsome goat-man tribes also live). Skreelans can't be magic-users but this is otherwise just a flavour thing.

Clerics pick from the gods detailed in "Religion," below. They are not necessarily associated with any of that gods' cults; the only thing that unites all clerics is that they have been singled out for "the gift" by one being or another, generally for unknown reasons.

Magic-users cannot be lawful.

Dwarves and halflings are artificial humanoids, bred in vats by means of strange alchemical procedures. For centuries mankind has employed them as slave races: dwarves for mining and building, halflings for domestic tasks. Occasionally a master will free one or more of their dwarves or halflings, but even then they're likely to be kidnapped and enslaved by someone else if they're not careful. More often, they simply escape and pose as freed. There are a number of secret "freeholds," comprised of a few hundred to a thousand escaped dwarves and halflings, throughout Xish - more these days than ever before, now that the High Kingdom doesn't exist as a real entity and the individual city-states don't really have the resources to systematically hunt for and recapture freeholds like the old High Kings used to do.

Elves are enigmatic beings that spawn in the infamous Howling Wood, in northeastern Xish, and occasionally stumble out with only vague and jumbled memories of what goes on in there. They have a natural affinity for magic, and do not require a spell book. Instead, elves possess bizarre compartmentalized minds: the spells they have learned are stored, in full, in some alien and normally inert corner of their memory, to which they bring conscious attention in order to memorize spells as magic-users memorize them from their books.

Their presence is grudgingly accepted in Xishan society (in Skreel, both barbarians and goat-men will attack them on sight), thanks to a healthy respect for the Howling Wood's status as a A Place That Nobody In Their Right Mind Would Want to Fuck With. Some elves settle down, most take up lives as wanderers, adventurers, and thrill-seekers. Their motives and drives are obscure, most of all to themselves. All Elves are Chaotic.

RELIGION

Most Xishans are functionally agnostic, but retain a healthy respect and fear for the beings others call gods. Worship of these beings is growing increasingly popular, however. Various cults are associated with each, and all are quite public these days; no one feels the need to hide cult membership from anyone. The most popular cults are those that tie their interpretation of the god's will to a theme of apocalyptic hopelessness.

The Skreelan barbarian tribes mostly worship old gods, with names and identities that would be at least vaguely familiar to a student of comparative mythology in our own time. Some point to the fact that there are no clerics of these gods (i.e. their worship never grants spells) as proof that they do not, in fact, exist, or at least that they have no power. Most Skreelans deny this, obviously, but as a result some tribes have turned to the worship of the very real Bone Jackson, god of the goat-men (see below).

(This is where a list of gods will go, but I'm working on fine-tuning the descriptions and adding a few new ones. When it's done, it'll get its own post, but in the meantime you can read my first write-up).

ALIGNMENT

Law represents a belief that humankind holds a privileged place in the cosmos and/or that civilization is necessary and that it's a bad thing that it's currently going to shit.

Chaos represents embracing the decline of humanity and recognizing how utterly inconsequential it is in the grand scheme of things. Certain beings are also Chaotic by nature; an elf or a goat-man wouldn't necessarily express its world view in the above terms, but just by existing it is a living manifestation of the infinitesimal importance of human beings in the cosmos. Magic is a Chaotic phenomenon in this sense, hence the restriction on lawful magic-users.

Neutral generally means you don't incline either way. Animals and beings with very low intelligence, unless naturally Chaotic, are neutral by default. Neutral magic-users are understood as struggling to maintain some sense of being disaffected by the irreducibly alien nature of the power they wield.

I'm still undecided as to how spells and items that affect specific alignments will work on this scheme. Most likely I'll just drop them entirely.

LANGUAGES

 

Whether you can read or write in the languages you know is a function of INT score, as per the table on the LL core book, pg. 7.

When it comes to picking bonus languages for high INT, use the following list. Languages that are known automatically (i.e. don't require the use of a bonus slot) by a particular races/class are indicated as such. Note that there are no alignment languages.

• Low Xishan is spoken, in various dialects, throughout the continent, the de facto lingua franca. Automatically known by all characters.
• Skreelan is the shared language of the barbarian tribes of Skreel, and has much in common with the brutal language of the goat-men (60% chance to make oneself understood to a goat-man who doesn't already know Skreelan). Automatically known by Skreelan humans.
• Vatspeak is not so much a full-blown language as something between a very complex dialect of Low Xishan and a "trade tongue," developed over centuries amongst dwarves and halflings, who know it automatically. Note that it still costs a full bonus slot for other races to know.
• High Xishan is the original of which Low Xishan is a distant and corrupted version; it's like the different between Old and modern English (i.e. without actually knowing the language there's no chance to do more than pick out what may or may not be some common words). Once spoken in all of the High Kingdom, it is now known mainly to scholars and a handful of nobles (mostly those whose families have lived in the old capital for a long time). It is exclusively a written language at this point, the specifics of pronunciation and such having been lost to time.
• Goat-man is the language of the goat-men of Skreel. 60% chance a Skreelan speaker can get the gist. Unlike Skreelan, it has no written component. 
• (I'll need a few more, but that's all I've got for now. This might also get its own post).

Phew! That's a bit long and unwieldy for a player doc, I might have to cut it down a bit. Hopefully it at least works as a blog post!

Xish 2.0

Here's a map:

The scale is 25 miles from one side of a hex to the other. It was originally 6 miles, but everything felt a bit cramped, and in my recent hex crawl reading I've come to the conclusion that the most straightforward procedure is 1 hex = 1 day's travel = 1 roll on the encounter table, and that means a larger hex scale. It also means the map can reasonably be keyed with just major sites/landmarks/notable features while minor encounters like monster lairs, smaller villages, etc. can all be handled with random tables. I do get the utility of having a key ready to go with things like "12 orcs in a lean-to," but in the end it doesn't seem particularly necessary.

While I was adjusting the scale I went ahead and rearranged some things and added a few regions compared to my original hand-drawn map. I may or may not add more cities (smaller settlements will be filled in on the level of the regional maps). I will definitely add more castles/towers/fortresses; right now I just have the obligatory necromancer's tower in the desert. The dungeon near the bottom of the Meethrep Forest where it borders the Painted Hills is, of course, the Crater of Termination.

A couple of the terrain symbols may not be obvious, and/or their names may not indicate what they are. The Hanging Man Valley is badlands (I actually used Hexographer's "broken ground" symbol, because the badlands symbol just looks like desert). The Redcap Forest is a fungal forest.

The map changes have necessitated a few conceptual changes. Originally, Xish was conceived of one of the islands of a small chain of islands, the rest of the Earth having been swallowed up by the oceans by now (to refresh: this is a "dying Earth" scenario, where the campaign world is our actual Earth however millions of years into the future, where its time is almost up). Now that it's a lot bigger, that's no longer tenable, so Xish is the name of the last continent. In this sense, I am now straightforwardly ripping off Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, down to the name of the last continent starting with a "z" sound. Call it "an homage."

Other islands referred to in previous write-ups are still there, they're just actual small islands off the coast of Xish now: Skreel (renamed from Skarshex or some dumb shit like that), where the barbarian humans and goat-men live; and the Isle of Akrillug, named for the god-being that lives there after having destroyed all its inhabitants, not to mention all plant and animal life, as detailed here.

I'll give a rundown of the different regions in another post, or maybe each region will get its own write-up with an outline of a few points of interest. At this point, some I have a really good idea about, and some I don't. And with that deeply insightful note on my creative process, I leave you.

Let's Try This Again: Return to Xish

Alright, so last time I recommitted to updating regularly, I managed seven posts. Let's see if I can make it to eight this time before abandoning everything for another nine months!

This time, believe it or not, I'm not even introducing a brand new setting idea.

This post got me thinking a lot about my creative process. In the post HDA describes feeling stuck with his Shadows of Annwn setting, because the strong theme leads to a difficulty in coming up with ideas that fit, and thus it's actually easier to come up with ideas for a looser, less-defined setting like the Pathfinder game he's currently running.

At first I thought that might be true of my own attempts at developing D&d settings as well, but after thinking about it today I realized I actually sort of have the opposite problem. The first setting I ever wrote about, back when I was still just guest-posting on HDA's blog, was pretty thematically strong, and I (mostly accidentally, I think) managed to capture everything I like about pulp fantasy old-school D&D weirdness.

I have creative ADHD, as the two of you who actually read this blog know, so I quickly began to flit from idea to idea - but almost every idea I've ever had could, with a little modification in some cases or almost none in others, easily work in Xish. Everything I would want to do with an old school D&D game is in roughly the same thematic pocket, and all I'm doing when I come up with other settings is taking ideas that should go in that first setting, where I presented those themes best and strongest, and putting them into a diluted, half-assed version.

Not to mention, I actually did a lot of work that first time around. Somehow I managed to sustain myself through: drawing up a world map, with keyed hexes for a few regions and all the major cities and some major feature locations placed; a rough idea of all the political divisions; the first few levels of a megadungeon that actually has a reason to be there; a bunch of random encounter tables for wilderness and dungeon; in-world justifications for why the fuck elves, dwarves and halflings are there; a rough idea of all the major races and NPC players; a bunch of interesting (or at least semi-unique) gods and cults, etc. Maybe that's not a lot from the perspective of someone who's actually productive and focused, but it's a lot for me. Why go through all that shit again with something new?

I've also actually run the fucking thing. Not a lot, but I had a more or less regular weekly campaign going with some friends over Roll20 for a few months. Eventually it sort of morphed into us just doing Tegel Manor (which I plopped down close to the Crater of Termination and which a couple of the PCs from that game currently own), but they explored a good chunk of the first couple levels of the Crater and some of the surrounding wilderness. I got a pretty good hands-on idea of some things that worked and some that didn't.

So I'm going to try to rein myself in and focus on one fucking thing goddamn it, and it's going to be Xish. I've been reading a lot of old hex crawl settings (mostly Wilderlands and the original World of Greyhawk folio) and reading a lot about hex crawling in general on the OSR blogosophere, so I'm going to work on that aspect of things for a bit. Maybe do up a proper map in Hexographer or something. Then I can collect together the scattered notes, keys and tables I have so far, and start expanding on it. I'm not going to commit myself to focusing in on any particular things; I got this far by just iteratively building on stuff that caught my interest at any given time, and that's what I'll keep doing. Maybe a bit more organized.

Anyway, expect some posts on that shit soon, hopefully.