D&D and Me: Part 5 (Multiple Personalities)

[This is the fifth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time I talked about some of my earliest D&D characters and why I enjoyed playing them, including the very first time I played a woman.]


I’m not sure I fully understood it at the time I wrote the last installment, but, having had some time to reflect, I think that I probably have my good friend Tim to thank for having the courage to play a female character.  It’s one of the many things I have Tim to thank for: he also taught me more about how to be a good game master than anyone else.  Tim was never bothered by playing a woman, which he did fairly often.  I recall the exquisitely icy Toxana, a drow whose class I can’t recall, but who wielded a powerful +3 sword as well as a broom of flying.  And then there was the lithe and elegant Raeze Terpsichorean, who approached battle like a dance and just flowed from enemy to enemy, slicing as she went.  The thing Tim did that was so great was to play the women exactly as he did the men: there was never any juvenilia, never any “hey, look! I’m a chick!” ... it was just that, sometimes, he was a she.  No big deal.  Looking back on it now, I doubt I would have been comfortable enough to play a woman without Tim’s example.  But, after I took the plunge the first time, I was never hesitant about doing so again.

In the midst of all these nature-based characters, I was convinced, a handful of times, to play a fighter, one of the 4 core classes that I was trying to avoid because I naturally gravitated to the paths less traveled.  Both times I decided that, if my class had to be that vanilla, I would let my freak flag fly using my choice of race.  Once, for a morally questionable mission,¹ I played a half-ogre named Trask.  I desperately tried to embrace the “just turn off your brain and deal buckets of damage” philosophy, but I hated it so much that by the time he lost his lovely plate mail to the rust monsters outside the dragon’s lair, I didn’t really care any more.  I charged screaming at the dragon and was fried to a crisp.  I vaguely remember just shrugging and starting to plan out my next character.

There was also a short stint that we referred to affectionately as “the freak campaign,” where everyone (except our resident min-max-er, who of course played a human, because: no penalties) played a totally non-standard race.  Tim was an aarakocra (bird-person) named B’Gawk, my friend Marcus played a wemic (like a centaur, but with a lion instead of a horse), our other friend Carl played a bramble (tiny faerie creature covered with thorns), and I chose the alaghi, sort of a yeti-like creature.  His name was Gron, and he couldn’t really speak the common tongue, but he was perfectly happy to work for raw meat, and he was fiercely loyal to his comrades.  (In retrospect, I still should have been a barbarian.)  But, overall, I failed to make playing a plain fighter interesting enough to hold my attention.²

Anyway, after my happy, bright, nature-y phase, I went through a dark brooding phase.  Because: Batman.  I mean, seriously ... who doesn’t love Batman?  Even I liked Batman as a kid, and I pretty much hated all the popular superheroes.  But Batman got a pass, because being all wrapped in shadows like that while punching bad guys in the face is just plain bad-ass.³  And, honestly, starting with Batman can quickly lead you to the real dark and mysterious heroes like Phantom Stranger and Ghost Rider and Moon Knight and Swamp Thing and Ragman and Cloak & Dagger ... if you have a love of horror and a love of comics, there are plenty of characters waiting in that juncture to scratch your itch.  And why not carry some of that over to your love of fantasy?

For one of our “evil campaigns,” I played a sneering, ultraintelligent psionicist named Ravell, a salt-and-pepper bearded, one-eyed gray elf, who carried, among other things, a cloak of absorption and a carpet of flying, and who had inherited Toxana’s magic longword.  For another evil campaign, I was Galbraith, a wannabe necromancer who was an expert in anatomy and necrology, worshipped Mictlantecuhtli (the Aztec god of death), had the flaw of “insane babbling,” and was too low level to animate anything really useful, so my GM (the ever-excellent Tim again, as it happened) let him wander around with a small flock of undead chickens.  Then one day I was reading over someone’s shoulder while they played Arena and saw that one of the class choices was something called “nightblade”: apparently a cross between magic-user and thief.  I was very intrigued, but that kind of thing wasn’t really doable in D&D at the time:⁴ thus far in my gaming career, we’ve only gotten as far as 2nd edition.

Then along came something called the Player’s Option series and of course we bought them all.  The first book in the series, Skills & Powers, contained a character point system, including a way to trade in some of your standard class abilities for other things.  Strictly speaking, you weren’t supposed to be able to buy the abilities of another class, but we never paid any attention to restrictions like that.  My first attempt at the “nightblade” concept was a thief who gave up some of the less useful “thief skills” in exchange for a few choice wizard schools (probably just necromancy and illusion).  Thus was born Shan Blackmoon, probably the closest I ever came to an actual Batman rip-off.  He dressed all in black, could cast some spells—but only at night!—and could use his short sword just as well in total darkness as in full daylight (thank you, blind fighting proficiency!).  Worst of all, a previous injury (I think it was something like someone had tried to slit his throat once but he miraculously survived) left him with a rough voice and a hesitancy to show his lower face and neck ... so he talked exaclty like Batman, and he had the partially exposed face thing, just in reverse.  Still, I really dug that guy, even if I couldn’t really make the mechanics work the way I wanted.

Attempt two was to do it the other way around: start with magic-user, give up a bunch of schools of magic (even the flashier ones like evocation—I wasn’t in this for the fireballs), and grab a bunch of thief skills.  This required taking a hell of a lot more flaws, so I decided this woman (my second female character, I believe) had been fathered by a demon or somesuch, so she had blue skin, red eyes, and a forked tongue.  I can’t remember if she had a tail or not, but probably.  Of course, I was essentially creating a homebrewed tiefling:⁵ tieflings probably existed by that point, but they were only in Planescape, and I don’t think we had bought that setting.  Certainly I didn’t find out what a tiefling was until a bit later, at which point I went, “oh, yeah ... wish I’d had that when I was designing her ...”  I can’t actually remember her name, except that I’m pretty sure it started with a “V” ... Valandria, maybe? Valestria?  Something like that.  Valandria-or-whatever-her-name-actually-was lived in Ravenloft, where she’d been raised by Vistani, and was used to hiding her demonic features, but, despite her appearance, she was actually quite gentle, and worked hard to overcome her cursed ancestry and the prejudicial expectations of strangers.

Of course, with today’s rules (5th edition), Shan would probably just be an arcane trickster (at worst a rogue assassin with a few sorcerer levels), and my Ravenloft waif would just be a classic tiefling warlock (or tiefling sorcerer—Strix from Dice, Camera, Action is a useful role model).  In fact, I recently(ish) did a sort-of-almost-recreation of / homage to my demon-girl for a one-shot run by my eldest: Sabina Zinkara was a tiefling rogue/warlock (inquisitive/Raven Queen patron) who fancied herself a bit of a detective.  But, back in those days, gluing together classes via Skills & Powers was the best we could manage.

Of course, in retrospect the Player’s Option series is sometimes referred to as “2.5e,” as it indicated an ackowledgement that the old edition wasn’t flexible enough and had too many restrictions.  Little did we know that a new edition was in the works, and a mere 5 years later, we had 3rd edition, with proper multiclassing, many fewer arbitrary limitations on race and class combinations, much more sane psionics rules, and a more consistent ruleset all around.  We were very excited for the new edition and my friend and ofttimes GM Tim—by that point the only other remaining member of the gaming group I’d originally joined—agreed to DM us through our first 3e campaign.  I was over my dark broody phase, and I wasn’t ready to go back to playing nature-bound characters,⁶ but I was still interested in going against the standard tropes.  I had bucked trends with druids and bards, by playing a psionicist instead of a wizard, and by trying to forge new classes out of combinations of two standard offerings.  What was left?  Well, I’d never played a monk ...



Next time: exploring 3e and the monk class, and even more things to thank Tim for.

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1 I’m pretty sure this was our trek to Dragon Mountain.
2 At least in 2e.  Fighters got cooler in later editions.
3 It also didn’t hurt that, via the pages of The Brave and the Bold, Batman introduced me to a lot of obscure superheroes, which is what I was really into.  See also part 1.
4 I mean, not really.  You could be a “magic-user/thief” if you were willing to be an elf—or could talk your DM into ignoring the race restrictions—but it didn’t really work that well, plus you were always at least 1 level behind everyone else.  Multiclassing in 2e sucked.  See also my History of Multiclassing series.
5 Although, honestly, I was probably more inspired by Nightcrawler, who was always my favorite X-Man.  I know Wolverine usually gets all the fanboy love, but I just always dug Nightcrawler.
6 Not then anyway.  I did so not long afteward though, with a class I built out of a heavily customized version of the NPC “expert” class, which I dubbed “naturalist.”

A nice break

Nothing much to say this week.  Half the humans in my family (apart from myself, of course) are off camping, and the other half and I just watched Bohemian Rhapsody, which we quite enjoyed.  Nothing else happening, really.  Hopefully a longer post next week.

Eldritch Ætherium I

"The Chase of the Black Beasts of Zephirus into the Caverns of the Demon King"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

So, I’ve been writing quite a bit more lately about my love of D&D and other gaming topics.  Of course, writing about music, and in particular my music mixes, is another of my favorite topics.  So why not combine the two and write about a gaming mix?

I’ve talked before in this series about my discovery of Shards of Eberron, albeit briefly.  Here I was buying a D&D setting book—already somewhat of a rarity, as I’m by nature more of a mechanics nerd when it comes to D&D supplements¹—and there’s a CD in the back of it.  Why is there a CD in the back of my gaming book?  Was it perhaps supposed to be a CD-ROM (those were all the rage at the time), with some maps in PDF format or somesuch?  No, apparently it was a music CD.  But why would I need music to go along with my D&D game?  It just didn’t make any sense.  Until, you know, I actually played the damn thing.

I was blown away.  I mean, sure: I was familiar with the concept of playing music in the background while you gamed.  Some people have a fondness for “Carmina Burana” or other Da Vinci Code-style music.²  Others swore by Wagner.  But, you know: either way, that’s opera.  I don’t do opera.³  And, anyhow: I just didn’t see the point.  I don’t need music for my gaming.

But this ... this was something else.  It was orchestral, and cinematic, but definitely not opera, nor even classical.  It was like the soundtrack to an epic fantasy movie that hadn’t yet been made ... maybe never would be made.  This was the epic fantasy movie that stars you and your pals, which is why you’re playing D&D in the first place.  You’re creating an awesome story, and, dammit, why shouldn’t that story have a soundtrack?  I was so enamored by Shards of Eberron that I immediately went out looking for more music just like it.

Which is where I hit a bit of a dead end.  At the time, there just wasn’t that much going on in this area.  I found V Shane, who did music and sold it via whatever the early-aughts equivalent of DriveThruRPG was.  Eventually I stumbled across Midnight Syndicate, because they had the grace to put out an album specifically named Dungeons & Dragons ... a bit on the nose, perhaps, but it had some great tracks.  Mignight Syndicate, of course, is a prolific band, and there were dozens more albums in their back catalog, but none really had the same vibe as their D&D-focussed album.  Most of their music, as well as that of fellow “dark ambient” artist Nox Arcana,⁴ is more in the “dark and spooky” vein.  Now, some of that stuff can be good for gaming music, but not all, by a long shot.  So selections from Nox Arcana and those tracks from Midnight Syndicate not off Dungeons & Dragons will be a bit more rare here.

In fact, Shards of Eberron and Dungeons & Dragons together provide 40% of the tracks here on volume I, though I managed to bring that down on future volumes.  As you may know (or at least could guess), gaming music has gotten much more widespread now: the rise of D&D actual play (in both streaming and podcast form) means there’s a much larger market these days.  But, at the time I developed the first volume, those two sources, plus the odd track here or there from V Shane, were most of what I had.

Of course, I could come up with a few other options.  Back on Mystical Memoriam I talked about my discovery of zero-project, an Internet artist from (probably) Greece who has some great cinematic music.  On that mix, I was mining their Fairytale album; here I move on to Fairytale 2, which is somewhat similar to Evil Dead 2 in that it’s not quite a remake and not quite a sequel, but somehow a little of both.  Again, not all the tracks are great, but they hit it pretty hard when they hit it.  And of course there’s Dead Can Dance’s epic Aion, which I originally talked about way back on Smokelit Flashback II.  Much of that album has a Renaissance faire vibe to it, which means that it features a lot of music with medieval origins, or at least medieval tendencies.  And if you don’t make the connection between Renn faires and playing D&D, then I doubt much of what I have to say here is going to help you out.

So nowadays I enjoy using music while playing D&D, although I have to say that you can’t make a proper mix out of it in that context.  See, when you’re actually gaming, you want to have different playlists for different moods: one for traveling, one for being in town and visiting shops or inns, one for pitched battle, one for exploring spooky underground caverns, etc.  But those sorts of playlists don’t make good mixes: too samey.  For a proper gaming mix, you need a mixture of proper gaming music.  So I don’t use this mix to actually play D&D to.  But I love to listen to it while I work on D&D-related projects: world-building, rules tweaking, and so forth.  It always puts me in the perfect mood to create fantasy goodness.

For this mix, as with Classical Plasma, I tried to arrange the tracks in an order that would tell a bit of a musical story.  As gaming music is almost entirely instrumental (except for a few “wordless vocal” tracks, and there’s not even any of those on this volume), I’m once again stumped for a volume subtitle, and reduced to gluing various bits of song titles together.  This time around I really embraced the potential silliness that can result from this practice and produced my longest subtitle so far:⁵  “The Chase of the Black Beasts of Zephirus into the Caverns of the Demon King.” Let’s follow the journey, shall we?

“Cut to the Chase” is the opener of Shards of Eberron, and I thnk it makes a great opener here.  It builds for a bit, but pretty quickly gets to a point where you feel the scope and drama of an epic adventure.⁶  From there to “Troubled Times” by Midnight Syndicate, which further sets the tone that something dramatic (and possibly just a bit spooky) is coming.  Then we visit Amber Asylum’s “Black Lodge,” which has a feeling of marching off to battle.  This is a long song, and it gains more dark, creepy overtones as it plunges steadily forward.  Then back to Dungeons & Dragons for “Beasts of the Borderlands,” another track that gives that sweeping, epic fantasy battle feel.

From there there’s the transitional medieval street-performer vibe of Dead Can Dance’s “The Garden of Zephirus,” and then the long, meandering “Lost Map” from V Shane, which is pretty much just what it says on the tin.  Once we get off the map, we go “Into the Dungeon,” of course, for some echoey, cavernous exploration music.  Which makes a beautiful transition into the underwatery, midnight-zone feeling that Reef Project is putting out in “Deep Mysteries.” That inevitably brings us to “The Lower Dungeons,” where the foreboding of the previous few tracks seems to burst into actual danger.  The tolling of the bells is pretty standard, but I consider it a bit impressive when you can turn in a tune fueled mostly by electric guitar that still somehow fits a fantasy soundtrack.

From there we slow it down a bit by letting Midnight Syndicate take us out of the dungeons and into an “Ancient Temple,” and then Nox Arcana takes over to guide us down, down, into the “Crone’s Caverns.” Things are sounding pretty dour and the outlook seems bleak at this point, but then zero-project gives us “The Defeat of the Demon King,” which makes it all okay again.

It’s mostly downhill from there.  There’s brief detour through the brightly-coloured Coraline-chaos that’s represented here by “Wybie,” then a final bit of relaxtion as we bask in the approval of Kitaro’s “Heavenly Father.” Finally, the reprise of “Cut to the Chase” reminds us that, while the journey may be over for now, new adventures await tomorrow.

Eldritch Ætherium I
[ The Chase of the Black Beasts of Zephirus into the Caverns of the Demon King ]

“Cut to the Chase [Main Theme]” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Troubled Times” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Black Lodge” by Amber Asylum, off The Supernatural Parlour Collection
“Beasts of the Borderlands” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“The Garden of Zephirus” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Lost Map” by V Shane [Single]
“Into the Dungeon” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Deep Mysteries” by Reef Project, off Aquaculture
“The Lower Dungeons” by zero-project, off Fairytale 2
“Ancient Temple” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Crone's Caverns” by Nox Arcana, off Grimm Tales
“The Defeat of the Demon King” by zero-project, off Fairytale 2
“Wybie” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Heavenly Father (Tenchi Sohzo Shin)” by Kitaro, off Silk Road I [Soundtrack]
“Cut to the Chase [Reprise]” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]

Total:  15 tracks,  71:55

Other than the sources I’ve mentioned thus far, there’s the one track from the Coraline soundtrack, which is really best suited for Phantasma Chorale, where it features prominently, but I thought this one track worked well here.  Amber Asylum has been seen before on Shadowfall Equinox I and II, but their Supernatural Parlour Collection works a bit better here.  Also featured on SfE2, as well as on Paradoxically Sized World II, Reef Project provides background music for underwater documentaries, which works perfectly for spooky, echoey sequences in gaming.  And, finally, Kitaro isn’t really known for epic fantasy music, but still his Silk Road suite occasionally comes close.  Designed as the background music for a Japanese documentary series way back in 1980, I think it’s one of Kitaro’s few albums that deviates from the meditative into a more dynamic, almost navigational feel.  It felt like an appropriate tune to help us wind down to the end of this epic journey.

Next time, we’ll celebrate the season with some more autumnal ambience.

Eldritch Ætherium II ⇒

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1 In proper gaming jargon, one would say I’m more of a crunch guy than a fluff guy.

2 To be fair, Hans Zimmer was still a year or two away from writing the soundtrack for The Da Vinci Code at the time, so “Carmina Burana” was still the go-to piece.

3 For a fuller discussion of this anti-preference of mine, check out Fulminant Cadenza.

4 Fun fact: Nox Arcana founder Joseph Vargo was a former producer for Midnight Syndicate.  This probably explains any similarities between the two.

5 A record which it will hold until we get to Eldritch Ætherium III.

6 You may also recognize it as the theme for Dice Camera Action, if you’re into watching D&D actual play.  As I theorized before, I’m pretty sure the Wizards of the Coast folks just don’t want to pay any royalties for music at this point.

Another proud father moment

Tonight my youngest told me her idea for what I believe is her first D&D character.  She will be a white-haired elven ranger with pink armor and a bow.  She likes bows, apparently ... my daughter that is, not her character.  Well, both, I suppose.  She’s getting to the age where she’s ready start playing—I suppose that, instead of finding myself a new gaming group, I’ve been breeding one.  But I’m cool with that.

My favorite part was that she had already concocted a backstory, which she described as “kinda dark.”  Remember the days when you had to explain to people what a backstory was?  Apparently kids these days are just picking it up on the streets.  I blame the Internet.

A longer post next week.