Dungeon Ecology

This is a roleplaying community blog post. 

‘Dungeon Ecology’ is a great concept. It is not only about the plants and animals to be found in a dungeon. It is about all the denizens of the dungeon and the sustainability of their lifestyles.

This is where realism has to go out of the window for 99% of those rpg dungeons to exist. This blog is an exploration of applying realism to the concept of dungeon ecology.

The primary question to ask is:

What is the dungeon for?

The correct answer is: 

For a gang of adventurers to go in there, dodge traps, kill everyone and steal whatever they can find. 

You would’ve thought people would give up having dungeons by now with all that going on. 

The ‘Why would a person want to live in a dungeon?’ Table

1-2 they are mad. 

3-4 they are a monster who cannot find anywhere else to live. 

5-6 some other really good reason. 

The ‘Really Good Reasons To Live In A Dungeon’ Table 

1 can’t find a way out.

2 nowhere else to go. 

3 born there. 

4 paid to be there. 

5 looking for something specific. 

6 is a dungeon builder. 

That’s enough of good enough reasons. 

Dungeon Ecology is about how it’s denizens interact with each other. It’s about their food sources and waste management. Lastly it’s about what they do to prevent themselves from going stir-crazy with boredom. Not very different at all from any urban environment. 

Most supplies and resources are not manufactured in the dungeon. They are imported into it. This relies on ‘Trade & Raid’ interactions with the outside world. 

Attaining necessary supplies requires at least one denizen dungeon dweller to have skills involved with successful raiding and/or trading with outsiders. 

What do dungeon dwellers have to trade with, in exchange for the supplies they require? 

From where do they go to acquire those supplies? 

Do they buy in bulk and stockpile sacks of dry grains or tins of pulses? Do they source fresh fruit veg and dairy products daily? 

It is useful to be aware we have grown up in generations of affluence the likes of which history has never seen. We have better diets and eat more regularly than did mediaeval kings. While we know it is not sustainable to continue doing things the way we inherited from the 20th century, it does not stop us from continuing that lifestyle regardless. One must surely wonder who are the real monsters.

Most dungeon dwellers, as with most people throughout history and even alive in the world today, are for most of the time hungry. Only wealthy people eat daily. Most people do not. That is the harsh reality of the matter. It is the social and living conditions to which people adapt. Malnourishment. 

Let’s face it; the adventuring party are probably only going in there at all because they are hoping to make some money so they can eat tomorrow themselves. 

Oh yeah there’s that undead warlord wearing a magickal doohicky to save the world from but you ain’t gonna want to do that on an empty stomach, surely? 

Next up:  What plants live in dungeons? 

Answer: Gross-tasting sprouts covered in psychotropic mold. Probably. 

Check out  THE +O+TH TUNNEL blog! 

 

GM Types

This is a roleplaying community blog post. 

Types of GM: The RailRoader

“For the good of the story...” 

“I own everything, even your decisions.”

Significant red-flag sociopathic, dominating personality.

The last time I encountered this guy several years ago online. 

I saw an online advert; 

“new players wanted for established campaign world.”

One of the players had quit and had left no forwarding information as to why he had quit. No mention was made of any other players. In retrospect I concluded they had already quit several weeks previously. The gamesmaster had been running the game regardless, using the player characters as NPCs to continue the adventure. 

So he was running that last remaining Player Character as an NPC ‘for the good of the story’. Fair play, He’s invested a lot of mental and emotional attachment, a lot of time and work into developing this adventure he wanted to see it through to its conclusion.

What he needed was another player to come in to play another character who it turned out was an NPC for the main character, who was now an NPC.

So we had a situation where the only existing player was playing a disposable NPC while the Gamesmaster was playing technically an NPC as a main protagonist.

That’s not a good situation for a role-playing group because it does not put the players at the heart of the action.

It delegates them to a secondary place to the NPC‘s which puts the gamesmaster in a situation of power and control.

Most people would have conceded defeat and shelved the project for lack of interest. Not this guy. His Obsessive score rates too damn high for that. 

It was when I realised this that I recognised the probable reason the other player had quit was to do with the gamesmaster investing more heavily into the story than into the players enjoyment. 

I suggested “Why don’t you start a new game with the new players?” He told me that would be happening later after ‘I’ have finished this story to its conclusion.

I mentioned I have no idea what my character was supposed to be doing as I had no leeway to make that decision for myself, or who these are other NPC’s / ex-PCs were in relation to my character. The Gamesmaster did not explain it to me. Simply that my NPC was a surprise element of an old adversary returned, to be thwarted by the main character before the build-up to the final scene. 

I was berated for not having read the backstory. I had read the games overview but I had not read the many excruciatingly detailed pages of previous adventure sessions yet. There are several hours of work to do in reading all that. I did not know if I wanted to heavily invest my time into this guys writing simply for the task of playing an NPC for a couple of scenes.

Bearing in mind I had been told my character had a specific type of task to do, which me made it feel like 

“Why not run that character as an NPC?” As I have not much if any at all player-input into that character anyway.

I did two sessions during which there was very little back-and-forth between myself and the Gamesmaster. 

I was expected to step in after he had finished writing a certain lengthy descriptive paragraph and complaining about how he was having to play everybody else’s characters because none of them have turned up this session either.

At that point I made the decision there are much better roleplaying groups and much better things to do with my time.

That type of gamesmaster is sociopathic. While it is admirable to invest a lot of focus and attention into the story, it’s also admirable to invest a lot of focus and attention into the people, the players who you are playing the role playing game with.

Sucking people in on the pretence that it’s a role-playing game only to dictate to them that they must write lines in your novel which you are writing anyway even without them, does generally tend to make people stop wanting to play with you.

We call them Power-Gamer Games-Masters. 

The mentality is such that if anybody is running a gaming group in the region and they find out about it, they will take over and assert their domination. They know the rules better than everybody else and their imagination is better than everybody else’s imagination. They tell other people what to think, what they must do with their characters ‘for the good of the story’.

They gravitate towards positions of authority. Games-mastering is a creative endeavour and does have a level of authority. 

However, authority is based on respect. Respect is earned. Respect is earned by respecting the people who you are involved with. 

When significantly high number of your gaming group drop out, not because they don’t want to play roleplaying games anymore, but because they do not want to play with sociopaths. That is when it is time to reassess the value of other people existing in the world and the relative value you bring to their lives. 

What happens with this type of Gamesmaster is social isolation further entrenches them towards their supremacy complex because it validates to them how everybody else is clearly in the wrong by not understanding their genius.

Such people are better off honing their skills by writing a masterwork of epic fiction which perhaps somebody might read someday. At the very least the time they dedicate to sitting in a room alone with a typewriter and their imagination cuts the rest of us a much needed break from having to deal with them face-to-face in a controlled environment. 

There are literally numbering into the thousands of people looking for role-playing gaming groups to become involved with.

A healthy ecology has biodiversity. Not all Gamesmasters are as the Railroader type. Because of their nature, you are likely to encounter these more often.

Attaining validation through critical control of those you seek validation from is abuse. 

Check out  THE +O+TH TUNNEL blog! 

 

ADDITIONAL 13.11.2022 

Since posting this blog I discovered the following relevant quote: 

“How are the Players going to do that? 

Thats not my job. 

That's their job. 

A lot of GamesMasters think of themselves as Story-Tellers 

but I prefer to consider myself a Conflict Designer. 

I create conflicts but I don’t need to know how the Players figure their way out of the conflicts. 

That is where the story emerges and that is their department. 

My job as I see it is to provide an objective, location, antagonists and time-limit. 

Players drive the action with their decisions. 

I never know what my players are going to do. 

Maybe they’ll kill the villain, maybe he escapes. 

Maybe they’ll live, maybe they’ll die. 

That’s up to them and the dice. 

So why plan further than the next session? 

If I did I might be tempted to steer the game toward my preferred conclusion. 

But I don’t want to do that. 

I want to be just as surprised as the Players.” 

Professor Dungeon Master, 

Dungeon Craft, YouTube

The Reviled Society, Part 1 (Ep.291) 

RPG types

 This is a roleplaying community blog post. 

“Sit ye around our campfire 

and listen to tales 

of wisdom and adventure.” 

Intone the sacred words through languages un-numbered and generations un-counted, ever since the dawn of time.

A very recent phenomena has emerged of the so-called professional GamesMaster who charges money to provide people the experience of playing a role-playing game.  

It involves the skills of painstakingly preparing a ready-made adventure and necessarily alienating from the group anybody who uses their own imagination beyond the remit of that pre-ordained adventure path. 

For decades, GamesMasters as part of a group have provided their service for free in the same way that players have provided their service to the GamesMaster for free.

The objective is to have fun creating shared storytelling adventures. 

This traditional type of GamesMaster generally does not railroad players along a predestined route, but rather works with the players desires for the greater good of the story itself. It involves the skills of improvised storytelling.

With the advent of the Internet and online gaming groups, studies were done into specific types of role-players. 

Within White Wolf’s World of Darkness game is Vampire and Werewolf. It was discovered all vampire fans want to be the gamesmaster because vampires are all about control, and all werewolf fans all want to be the players because werewolves are all about the pack. 

Conclusion: Different games attract different mindsets. 

When we take this awareness back to the original 1974 version of D&D which spawned the industry, we recognise the same difference between early edition and later addition of the rules. Those playing by first and second edition want to be part of a group of friends collaboratively sharing wonderful storytelling. Those playing by later additions prefer to be led by the nose without having to think much beyond puzzle-solving and vanity-valuing.

 

Because: We the old-schoolers with traditional community values are putting friendship before commerce. 

The question: 

Is a professional, paid gamesmaster going to give you a better experience than somebody who is a gamesmaster but does not charge money for it or feel the need to describe themselves as a professional for doing it? 

And the answer is: 

50 long and experienced years of No. 

It’s not fun because I’m paying to be told what to do. It’s fun because collaborative imagination is about freedom. 

Roleplaying is about creating a safe-space to enjoy that freedom. If you have to pay for freedom it’s not freedom. If you have to imagine what you’re told to imagine by someone who has already imagined it for you, it’s not freedom. 

Check out  THE +O+TH TUNNEL blog! 

 

what is BDSM

“Pardon the ignorance, but watta hell is BDSM?” anon

Bondage Discipline Deviation Domination Submission Sadism Masochism 

There are four primary and four secondary “roles” or “persona preferences” although  any school teaching only two (Dom and Sub) is immediately questionable as an excuse for abuse by people who don’t know what they’re doing and claim to be part of bdsm culture while debasing it. 

The four major are submissive dominant switch and brat. Switch can do either Sub or Dom depending on who they’re with and what the mood is. Brat is annoying attention-seeking attempting to convert their dom to a sub or their sub to a dom by undermining their authority, using anger reflex as a game to establish the partners breaking point and to encourage the partner to sexually abuse them violently which the brat believes they need for their own pleasure. It’s a different dynamic to a standard sub who is genuinely more submissive than a brat. 

The secondary four types are more rare and are more complicated, featuring a sub who wants to be a dom but isn’t/can’t, a dom who wants to be a sub but isn’t/can’t, a worse version of a brat who does not have normal social safety boundaries to limit their behaviour (which is what brats often attempt to become or at least appear to be) and a wider group called broken switch which doesn’t flow with the partner switch and causes glitches, hence the title glitch applied to them in some groups. 

My training in this is from experience and formal training from previous generations which were not dumbed down by the explosion of bdsm culture into public awareness and had to keep it more secret, long ago before the internet came along which assumes to have all the answers at the push of a button but generally doesn’t and is laughable with misinformation and lack of information. 

A good sub-dom relationship is about trust, and exploring oneself by shared activities in those roles - everything in it is about trust, and exploring the self and the other person. 

A bad sub-dom relationship is non-consensual and/or does not respect the need for trust at the heart of the relationship. 

Unfortunately the excuse for abuse which is assumed by abusers who latched onto bdsm as an arena to get away with it does put many people off the whole concept of exploring the many rituals involved. 

The exploration of pleasure mixed with pain to heighten sensory awareness and exploration of a lucid state of consciousness is intense and requires downtime as it can be exhausting. Care is always the keyword. The states explored of offering stability for inner trauma is preferable than the creation of trauma through misguided use of bdsm. 

It’s one of many facets of sexuality. Personally having been through a lot of bdsm culture I prefer the spiritual focus of tantric sensuality than what I find to be wild teenage fantasies for disfunctional adults. 

You will not find a more detailed overview of what bdsm culture is elsewhere in the internet nor from most practitioners you ever meet, than the words you have read here. 

These however are merely words. In my safe room you will not speak unless in simple honest direct answer to a question. The purity and intimacy of silence is a part of the methods I prefer and will reveal deeper and more passionately aspects of yourself not available during the distraction of human language structures. 

It most certainly is not simply “porn” although it can play it’s part. 

It’s a whole-lifestyle culture. 

The discipline aspect can involve for example diet for sexual health, exercise regime, many activities outside of the bedroom for the strengthening of the people individually and the relationship. For example visiting romantic locations and betterment of the individuals such as art galleries, museums, education, etc, to strengthen self discipline as a reflex with encouragement by the partner, new experiences for broadening perceptions and horizons, expanding the self. 

Knowing what you are doing is the domain of the dom. 

Trusting the dom to be caring even in any physical emotional and mental punishment necessary to instil a structured stability without it becoming excuse for abuse, is the domain of the yielding submissive who typically lacks self discipline and structure in their life. 

For many people bdsm means sexy lingerie, blindfolds, handcuffs and crappy spanking paddles from adult toy websites, vanilla and manila forms of kink.  

For some it involves more extreme experiences for instance kidnap and torture and other fetish fantasies, of which there is a vast range imaginable. 

Dolaucothi Gold

The temple of stars is amazing.

It is not a natural cave; it is a mine, made by Victorians, using child and adult labour; people who only one hundred years ago saw one day sunlight in a week, working in terrible and dangerous conditions. A child would hold a metal spike taller than himself, while an adult hammered it with a sledgehammer. They did this by the light of one candle. The rock is shale, containing quartz, which contains trace elements of fools gold (iron pyrite) and a tiny amount of gold. Where water has found its way through cracks over the millennia and into the quartz, cavities which grow naturally and where volcanic gas which has been released into fissures in the shale, where the quartz has grown over millennia; here the quartz is discoloured with orange, the rust from the iron. Little flecks of pyrite and occasionally gold, find their way down stream. I imagine the original discoverer found a heap of the stuff along the edges of a spring stream meandering through the forest. 

After a day of hammering into the rock, dynamite was placed inside the hole. All of these were exploded after everyone had left the mine for the night, long tapers lit from a distance. That night, the dust settled inside the mine and the next day, instead of making holes, everyone would load the rubble into metal train carts, push them - a ton of metal and a ton of rock - outside the mine so it could be panned using troughs of water. The whole site is in a sunken valley because the romans heard from the stone age tribes that there was gold here, and they stripped the mountain down into a pit. This is the working theory until in 2010 a French team of archeologists discovered antler scrapings inside one of the mines, which means that not all of the mines were made by Victorians using dynamite or Romans using the slower method of heating and cooling the rock with fires and water until it cracked from the quick change in temperature; thus burning up all the local forests. 

A lot of what is called ‘indigenous British woodland’ is all around the region now including surrounding the mining camp. It is now made of a few corrugated tin buildings from world war two housing the visitor center and Victorian machines. It is crazy seeing these machines, painted with thick layers of rustproof paint the same as the sheds, but still operable using hand crafted components. The age of industry which seems ridiculous considering that we now know how to make free energy devices, although mostly everyone is still using the civic grids because all of that can be capitalized on very easily. 

For ten tons of rock, there is one ton of quartz - and from all of that, the average was enough gold to make 1 ring. It is now regarded as insanity by most people because the energy spent to get something which has only the value we assign to it, which is a lot of money to the rich, a lot of respect from energy healers, and not really very much at all by any of the people whose lives were dedicated to getting the stuff for their bosses to sell. 

The temple of stars is what has happened since the mines were re-opened and then closed again a hundred years ago. What happens inside the cave, is water comes down through tiny fissures in the rock and a curious life form i can’t remember the latin word for it, a hybrid between lichen and moss, grows. It covers the ceiling not only with a pale green creamy softness, in paths between the dark rock; but it also extracts and collects the fools gold, perhaps even the real gold, on its tips where their weight brings them to dangle off the plant, but they stick too well for the water to knock them off when it eventually drips down. After at least a hundred years, there are only a few patches of it growing. To touch it with your fingertips destroys it instantly, it takes many human lifetimes to create even the temple of stars as it is. Beneath it, with a dozen visitors shining miner helmets up onto it, with heavy lights on top of their heads; the gold reflects against the light, through the water; and because every sparkle of it glows, the stone looks pitch black even against the lights. It is really beautiful, and it does not come out very well at all on camera. I did not have my camera with me :(

For me, the most exciting thing of all was, while staring at the ceiling, tasting the drip of water which inevitably found its way onto my lips, into my mouth open in amazement, feeling the ancientness of the whole place - i am still integrating cave-man mentality, the hardness and oldness of stone, the experience is shamanic, going below the earth, into the mother. I saw three tiny worms clinging to the ceiling. The largest was a cm long. They are white but translucent, i guess they are parasites of some type. Their bodies contained two tubes, not quite from top to bottom of each worm, which were light brown the same colour as the mud brought down by the water over the centuries, to help hold the lichen-moss stuff in place; and in the centre of their body is a strip of gold (iron pyrite probably). Their bodies filter the elements they eat; and like us, they pass out mud much more easily than metal, which is stored and which ultimately causes us to mutate; usually it makes us sick and kills us, we use turmeric to detox from metal-build-up. In petrochemical environments where we handle plastics and metals, breathe it in, wash ourselves in metal and petrol based bleach; we build up a lot of this stuff in our bodies over a lifetime. It causes alzheimers etc. Nitrates in food and all those additives, its all shit. In the worms lifetime, it shows how much it builds up in their bodies. They were beautiful too, a strip of gold in a semi-transparent, white leech thing wriggling across the temple of stars. 

The woman who gave the guided tour around the caves, it being the day before halloween, was dressed in a red devil costume although with pointy horns and ... now  I remember her as holding a lantern like the Hermit in the Tarot, although she was not actually holding a lantern so much as telling us how switch on the damn heavy battery packs and lamps on the heads of our mining hats. It being Wales and all... a woman dressed in red leading a troupe into the dark caves of Wales, where her hoard of gold lays buried... the imagery is too good not to mention. 

Me... I prefer redstone. 

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/dolaucothi-gold-mines/

I would like to thank my son's friends dad who, recognizing us from the school, asked if we would like to go with them on a halloween trip. I left the village two or three months ago for a medical interview in Carmarthen... before that I left the village (night of my mates gig in Carmarthen) two years ago... Since becoming pedestrian my finances have picked up, my anxiety has massively reduced, I have quit coffee, basically I have quit stress-now-culture-of-immediacy. Panning for flecks of gold was not about greed so much as therapeutic.