Mathetes to Diognetus Chapter 9 Part 2

In the 9th Chapter of his Epistle to Diognetus, Mathetes understands death as a natural consequence for humanity’s sins against God. This understanding, of course, comes from Judaism which forms the foundation upon which Christianity is established. In paganism, death is better understood in context of the person of Hades/Pluto, or whatever name the God of death in a pagan pantheon goes by. I mention the name Hades because not only is that Puto’s name under the Greek pantheon, but it was used by the Romans as the name for Pluto’s kingdom of the underworld.

Rather than a consequence of human sin, death is just the way things are in paganism. Pluto, being the God who rules the realm of death, is someone who needs placated so that one’s experience under his rule is tolerable.

Interestingly, the pace of the dead in Judaism — Sheol — is very similar to the Greek and Roman conception of Hades. Both are seen as being underground and dark. In fact, when Greek speaking Jews began translating the OT into Greek beginning in the 4th century B.C., they translated the Hebrew Sheol (שְׁאוֹל) as Hades (ᾍδης).

Given the focus on the undead within the Empire of this nascent campaign world, this suggests that the Empire itself is an extension of the realm of the dead. Hades has bled out onto the surface world and has been imposing its will upon the living. This, in turn, helps define a few things and raises a few questions:

• The Greek word ᾍδης suggests a name for the Empire — the Aidisian Empire or Aidisia.
• In certain applications of old school D&D play, the Mythical Underworld plays a large role in how dungeons work. Doors for PCs are all locked while they open easily for monsters. PCs can’t see in the dark (even with ultra- or infra-vision), while monsters can. As parts of the underworld are cleared out, monsters are replaced and even geography changes. The question becomes, how much of this reality bleeds out onto the surface world within the Aidisian Empire?
• Another question is the relationship of the Mythical Underworld, the person of Hades, and the God-Emperor of Aidisia. I am most tempted to understand them as three different entities. The Mythical Underworld is a manifestation of the Natural Order being corrupted by Chaos. Hades is a demon that has tempted humanity onto the path of Chaos. The God-Emperor has embraced lichdom through the influence of the demon Hades. In order to pay homage to early versions of D&D, this demonic version of Hades can be replaced with Orcus.
• Since the Mythical Underworld has such a significant influence on the Aidisian Empire, this suggests that it is easily accessed. The adventure trope of the Temple suggested from Mathetes’ description of idols being guarded from theft suggests that the primary bleed points of the Mythical Underground into the world at large are the pagan temples. This, in turn, suggests that every pagan temple has a dungeon complex underneath it.
• Finally, there is the question of what relationship the Artanian Church has to the Mythical Underground. Historically, Christianity met secretly in house churches and catacombs. In older editions of D&D, the end game involved conquering a piece of Wilderness and making it into the demesne of a PC. Would the “end game” of this nascent campaign world be to conquer sections of the underworld to be consecrated as safe havens for Artanians to congregate?

Reconsidering a Holmesian Dungeon

As someone who regularly suffers from Gamer ADD, I am occasionally reminded about how many projects I have left fallow over the years. One such reminder came  yesterday when Rob Conley of Bat in the Attic Games posted a set of S&W compatible rules  as a prelude for a project he is working on. In contemplating all the various things I have not managed to finish, the one I am most disappointed with is my version of Averoigne and its megadungeon, the Chateau des Faussesflammes. One of the reasons for this was that I ran into a problem of how to stock and handle what I envisioned as a dynamic and constantly changing dungeon.

As I have mentioned many times before, historically, I am actually more of a war gamer than a role-player. Recently, I have spent more time at the gaming table playing board games than RPGs. As a consequence, I was inspired to look at my version of the Chateau as if it were a board game rather than an RPG dungeon. What I came up with is a rather intriguing idea and I wanted to see if it was scalable.

Here is my thinking: the mega-dungeon in Holmes strongly suggests the Mythic Underground that many bloggers over the years have described when re-reading older versions of D&D; however, as I mentioned in this post on Holmes on Traps, the biggest danger in this Holmesian Mythic Underground is wandering monsters. My conundrum for years has been how to marry the best ideas of classic dungeons that have factions with the Mythic Underground with the dynamism of a dungeon whose main threat is wandering monsters. My answer was to make all the monsters a kind of wandering monster by turning the dungeon into a kind of board game for the Referee.

Let's begin with a really big dungeon. This is from Dyson Logos and he calls it The Deep Halls:

I haven't counted carefully, but I estimate that this beauty has about 150 rooms. According to older iterations of the game, approximately one third of these rooms will have monster encounters or 50.

In order to make this work like a board game I need to have it look like a board game, so I added a hex-grid:

This grid provides almost 200 spaces. The idea here is to place tokens on this board that represent monster encounters. They exist on a grid so that they can move during the adventure from one hex to the next, with each hex being about 30 feet per side and thus easily moved through by just about every monster that might inhabit a dungeon. In order to give myself enough room to maneuver these tokens, I arbitrarily decided to place one token in about every four hexes:

This provides 45 monster encounters. This is close enough to the traditional 50 to leave it at that, or one could have five set-piece encounters that exist in specific rooms that never move. Now, here is where things get interesting. Forty-five divides nicely by 3 giving us the ability to divide the monster encounters into three different factions:

When stocking a dungeon this way, one really doesn't have to stock the dungeon at all. Sure, you have to make notes about room characteristics and various kinds of traps, but there really is no need to place any monsters at all (again, unless you are married to the idea of set-piece encounters and then you only have to do up to five). What you do need is three lists of 15 monster encounters representing the three factions and a wandering monster list.

So here is how it works:

Every time a wandering monster check is triggered (either by a loud noise like combat or simply time spent in the dungeon), roll your favorite type of die to check if a wander monster shows up. For the purposes of this example, let us use a d6:

• On a '1' move one blue token one hex.
• On a '2' move one red toke one hex.
• On a '3' move one green token one hex.
• On a '6' a wandering monster rolled up on the WMT appears in the hex the players are currently in.

Alternatively, a 1-3 indicates how many tokens to move one hex. Regardless, which token to move and where is entirely up to the whim of the Referee. For example, in the middle of the second row there are a blue and green token in the same room. I would most likely move those closer to each other at the first opportunity.

This leads us to one of the more interesting facets of this idea: when two tokens of different factions end up in the same hex, they get to fight. This leads to a noise encounter that the PCs get to investigate or ignore at their leisure. In the meantime, one your tokens comes off the board and you make a note about bodies being strewn about the floor.

Here is the part I personally like best: when the PCs enter a hex with a token or tokens, they get to have a monster encounter. At this point one of the 15 monster encounters can be randomly assigned to that token. In other words, every monster encounter is as much a surprise for you as it is for your players. If the players prevail, that encounter is marked off the list and the token is removed.

Once the players have wrecked havoc,  you have a very tangible and tactile way to restock the dungeon: place new tokens according to the way the dungeon currently looks. New factions can suddenly make their move to gain territory or one faction can bolster their territory as they have been left unscathed by the activity of your PCs. Or whatever.

While this may seem to be a bit of a headache at the table, I don't believe it to be overly complicated and it incentivizes wandering monster checks, something I know I am guilty of not doing enough (partly because nothing happens most of the time). Using this idea, something happens most of the time, even if the PCs are unawares.

What really attracts me to this idea, however, is the level of danger that gets placed on every wandering monster check. Not only could a monster get spawned from the WMT, but one of the regular monster encounters of the dungeon could come investigating the noise being made by the fighter trying to open that locked door.

Turning Reskinned

Let me start by saying that this post will fly in the face of today’s perceived dichotomy between Christianity and science; however, as I have stated many times, this is a false dichotomy. Not only have Church Fathers throughout the ages supported scientific study and a cultivation of the mind, but modern science and the scientific method are children of the Christian world view — one needs the orderly universe created by the Trinitarian God that is not full of divine beings in order to believe that it can be predictable and reliable enough to observe and test.

It is only when one tries to answer such questions as Who is God? and What is the meaning of life? with science that one runs into a conflict. Such questions are rightly left to theology because science cannot answer them without abandoning the scientific method and becoming a faith unto itself.

With that preamble, let me call your attention to this video, which is rare footage of an oarfish in the wild (fast forward to about the 3:30 mark to get a good look):

Although this deep water fish looks tiny in the video, the reality is that these fish can be anywhere from 15-56 feet long. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that the oarfish is the source of various sea serpent stories from times of yore. As can be seen from the video, the reality is much less frightening than humanity’s ability to imagine the monstrous.

This got me thinking about a way to re-skin the concept of Turning. While the origin of the mechanic is the image of Van Helsing keeping Dracula at bay with a cross, another way of understanding the mechanic is akin to the video above — stripping away the monstrous imagining of humanity to reveal the mundane reality.

I come to this from the perspective of both the classic D&D trope of the (Chaotic) Wilderness vs. (Lawful) Civilization as well as the idea that monsters are sin personified. In a world where sin becomes manifest as all the dark imaginings of humanity from myth and story, the Christian (as the champion of Lawful Civilization) becomes the mechanism by which the Chaotic Wilderness is tamed by revealing the mundane by stripping away the demonic.

Thus, when a party encounters a group of zombies which are successfully Turned by the party’s cleric, the supposed undead (rather than running away) are revealed to merely be dead bodies, carvings on a wall or an unusual shadow cast by torch light; however, lower level clerics are unable to completely convince or control the dark and fallen imagination of either themselves or their party members. Thus, the zombies will eventually return until such time that the cleric can “destroy” them by having faith in the God who declared His creation very good.

The cleric, in other words, becomes the video camera that reveals that ancient seas serpents are actually oarfish.

One interesting consequence of this re-skinning is the possibility with such a set-up that the Mythic Underground and the Dungeon-as-semi-intelligent-NPC are actually creations of our own making — manifestations of our own sins and fears.

Some Under-Appreciated Mythical Geography

Last month, Beedo of Dreams of the Lich House mused about Mythic Geography for FRPG settings. I have been meaning to muse myself on the subject, but life has delayed this endeavor until now.

Several of the examples that Beedo uses to make his point are (of course) from mythology — especially those most readily familiar like those of the Greeks and the Norse. As evocative as those might be, I think a particularly useful and suggestive mythical geography that gets discounted either out of hand or out of ignorance is that of the Old Testament. Take a look at this popular imagining of OT cosmology:

Note that it is easy to see with this image how both Tolkien's Undying Lands and Lloyd Alexander's Summer Lands can be reached by the right kind of sailing ship — sail the Waters above the Firmament and you might reach the Heavens.

These same waters might be used to sail to the stars and the planets surrounding them. One might have to climb the Pillars of Heaven to set sail, however. The Underworld is well represented by Sheol; however, there is a secondary, potentially more frightening area — the Abyss. What strange creatures lie within the waters at the bottom of the Pillars of the Earth? 

For those that wish to follow in Beedo's footsteps and expand the Mythic beyond The Dungeon, I invite you to consider the imaginings of the writers of the Old Testament. You might be surprised at how rich an imagination it is.

Meditating on The Mythic Underground

One of the more interesting aspects of OD&D, as interpreted by various corners of the OSR, is its portrayal of the Dungeon as the Mythic Underworld. For those unfamiliar with this particular theme I suggest Philotomy’s musings on the subject here. I, myself, have played with this interpretation in my own musings about the Holmes Basic Edition here and here.

In the classic mythological trope, the hero finds it necessary to descend into the Underworld in order to obtain something vital in order to achieve their overall quest. This could be information, an item, a skill or even a person. The hero emerges, changed and readied to take on the rest of their quest.

D&D (particularly in its B/X form) emulates this trope very well. The early levels of character development occur primarily in the Dungeon, where they obtain magic items, maps and experience. Once they reach 4th level or so, the characters emerge ready to take on the rest of their quest — explore and tame the Wilderness in order to build a stronghold.

I mention this, especially my own musing on the Holmesian version of the Dungeon (an ever-changing and unconquerable place that is almost a character unto itself), because Christianity takes this classic tale of the hero and turns it on its ear. Christ — the hero figure of the Christian story — does not descend into the Underworld in order to gain some special object or skill. He descends into the Underworld in order to conquer.

Greek Shorthand for Christ Conquers

For He crushed the gates of bronze and shattered the bars of iron — Psalm 107:16 (cf. Isaiah 45:2) 

For as Jonah remained in the belly of the sea-monster for three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be in the heart of the earth for three day and three nights. — Matthew 20:14 

In the body He was put to death, in the spirit he was raised to life, and, in the spirit, he went to preach to the spirits in prison. — 1Peter 3:18-19

In other words, the implied pattern of dungeon-delving in context of the Christian story is not just exploration, but restoration. This flies in the face of the Mythic Underground as understood by Philotomy and my own understanding of the Dungeon in Holmes.

Given that I am very interested in a Holmesian Underworld as well as playing in a Christian context, I have been trying to meditate on how to reconcile these two divergent views of the Hero and the Underworld. Part of my thinking in this direction is inspired by the general move that the OSR has made in recent months toward the Weird.

In a world where the Dungeon is a semi-intelligent and ever-changing NPC (Holmes), it makes sense to understand that part of this change can be imposed. What if, when a level or a sub-level of a dungeon were cleared (and thus restored) or otherwise "rescued" that it physically moved from the underworld to the surface world? In context of a dungeon beneath a city, these dungeon levels could be additional neighborhoods that spring up. In context of a dungeon in the wilderness, the levels could be ruins restored to full functionality. The more of the dungeon that is restored, the more Civilization takes root and the more Wilderness (whether on the surface or in the underworld) retreats.

The Dungeon would then change in response to the foray by the adventurers. Either the next level could "move up" or another level or sub-level could spring up in its place. Thus, the semi-intelligent and ever-changing Dungeon of Holmes can actually play a vital role in the context of the Christian hero story.