Holy Mountain Shaker and the Dream of Exploration

Whenever I heard people talk about Holy Mountain Shaker, they seemed to converge on the same conclusion-- that it's a beautifully illustrated, well-written, and competent adventure which strains against the terse OSE house style. Rip to the others, I said, because I'm different. I love a countrycrawl, a regioncrawl, an advanced take on the pointcrawl. So I picked up the adventure and ran it, and found that I had those exact issues. But Holy Mountain Shaker is really good! And its exploration procedure feels like a stepping stone on the way to some new authoritatively great exploration procedure that marries the grandeur of vast settings with the problem-solving of the dungeon game. A review of sorts follows.

I initially imagined each region would be analogous to investigating a cluttered dungeon zone, but often it's less clear what "signposts" there are to show what to investigate. In a dungeon chamber you might see a bed, a cauldron, and an ivory idol, so you can be pointed in your inquiry-- you can look under the bed, jump in the bed, feel along the headboard, or even just give it some comprehensive investigation. Holy Mountain Shaker tends to order discoveries by saying that initial exploration of a region finds one or two points of interest, and further exploration finds one or two more. This works okay, but often means players are just committing themselves to exploring because they know it's how they advance, but without having a clear idea of what they're doing. There are points where they have more concrete choices that feel better, like choosing between wandering a temple complex and exploring the pillared thoroughfares that outly it.

In my Holy Mountain Shaker game, the party was usually just exploring-in-general, and because exploring takes two watches and therefore has two encounters, it's a lot of time spent without a concrete sense of the characters' doings. I appreciate that the module can let people just sort of meander into finding more interesting sights, because the regions are awfully large and strange, but my advice for similar works would be to create weenies, something to draw the eye for every apparent point of interest and route out of the region. After the game ended, players said that they were often confused about where points of interest were in relation to each other. This feels like it's kind of the point-- there's something appealing about wandering lost in a limestone cave complex until you find a dragon skeleton, an abandoned marvel hidden by the labyrinth. Hearing from my players that they didn't like this part makes me want to figure out a better way to convey the feeling. I'm convinced the Holy Mountain regioncrawl has a lot of creative potential, but on this point I want to work on unlocking it. 

The procedures could be a little clearer, e.g. how does exploration(!!!) work? We know it takes two watches to "explore a new path or region", and that exploring a region (usually) reveals a point of interest, while more exploring reveals a second one. I found I kept going back and forth between making it take two full watches to find one point of interest or to full explore the region, essentially giving one point of interest right away and saving more for more later watches spent exploring. Especially when you’re required to rest every three watches, progress wasn't exactly slow but it did necessitate a bit of busywork that didn't usually result in interesting resource management or tension. One sentence of explanation could have gone a long way.

Each region can be categorized by how its points of interests relate to each other. Most regions have features with indistinct relationships, which makes sense for the size and complexity of the zones, but it's also common for features to be nested. For example, a region's description gives a staccato list of a lake, an island, and a temple. From context you're supposed to infer it's a temple on an island in a lake. I messed up and put the temple on the shore. You have to study the whole region carefully. Sometimes the party will emerge from a secret door into a specific point of interest, so you don't always get to warm up by going from the outside in. If you misplace a point of interest, you might leave the place it's supposed to be oddly bare-- in my example, the temple is supposed to house a potent and clearly-meaningful artifact, but in my confusion I realized the party had explored the temple already so I improvised another structure on the island where the temple was supposed to go and put the artifact there.

Speaking of this artifact, it's a great example of how the module gives this great depth of detail. On a skim, you might see the robots and fish people and bottle mummies and think this is something of a blown-up funhouse dungeon, but while its mixed-up strata of civilizations is intentional haphazard, the result of cosmically bubbling up with the god fish that sustains the dungeon, there is real purpose to everything you find. The island temple contains a secret door that leads down to an ancient meteorite with a handprint that contains a magic chime. The people who worshipped the god fish in ancient days used it to calm calamities and avert natural disasters, a perfect function for the dungeon itself, which is constantly wracked with earthquakes and avalanches. When the PCs returned to town and showed the magic chime to the priests, it felt so obvious that this was some gift of fate, a divine purpose that blessed the party's expedition. One player remarked that the temple was "obviously" a plot-essential area and mused that they must have sequence-broken the adventure a bit by getting the chime before actually learning about it. But in fact every hidden area is like this! The chime and the temple are special to the world-- they have a past and a purpose. They are not special to the game-- examples of a dozen locations that evoke wonder, provide challenge and reward, and communicate the mountain's character.

The encounter table has a very important detail. On a roll of 6 to 9 on 2d6, you encounter a region-specific monster or event. But on later rolls once that event is dealt with, you instead hint at or foreshadow undiscovered features, driving play to constantly shift. Because you roll for an encounter on every watch, this keeps things moving nicely. More often than not, your initial exploration of a region starts off by introducing its dangerous inhabitants, and later exploration yields more clues and sense of place, with the occasional threat still lurking in potential.

The d20 minor treasure table you can use to add minor trinkets and magic items is very good for punctuating the little spaces you improvise. Often the players will find some area that feels like it should have something in it, and sure enough you can always ensure it does.

Resting every third Turn feels weird. It makes sense that you'd want to take a break after four hours of clambering up rock shelfs, but in the real-world that might only have been fifteen minute ago.

Many hazards and events may delay you by like 1d6 Turns. This is weird to introduce when you're adjudicating exploration in two-hour-long increments. Surely the DM will consider ignoring a 20-minute delay when you're tracking time in 240-minute increments, right? Sometimes it's relevant, like if it draws the attention of a monster or something, but it feels weird if the PCs are frequently getting submerged in avalanches of gravel and rubble, digging each other out, and carrying on without issue more than once. This gets more awkward in the conclusion of the adventure, where the dungeon is collapsing totally. You roll on a cascading collapse track, with unique events tied to each region, and it feels really cool in aggregate. There is serious tension in whether the PCs will be able to escape, and they don't have time to rest, so every 1d8 damage from rock shrapnel threatens their odds of making it out. The problem is that I as the DM have to roll on the collapse event chart literally like 36 times in a row. The players made no decisions except to keep going during this time, and many of the table results, such as tremors kicking up dust clouds that make ranged attacks slightly harder, didn't affect their situation. They knew that if they rested or explored or did anything else but keep trying to leave, they were toast. It's a great event to play out in concept, but it would have been cool if the players were faces with interesting navigational hurdles as the dungeon collapsed rather than hearing me try to put some mustard on the fourth description of hairline fractures or momentary tripping hazards.

After the game, we mused about how the dungeon would be different if you were exploring it for simple treasure-hunting reasons, and there was no ticking clock, only discovering that there was a source to the dungeon and its hazards when they happen upon it. Certainly players would be more likely to fully explore regions, and you'd want more gold (criminally little treasure if you want to level up) and more consistent encounters with monsters. My players were surprised to learn that they had only passed through like a third of the dungeon's regions, and indeed it almost feels like the god fish, the dungeon's endpoint, was placed to be easily located relatively early.

A final consideration that stuck out to me in running the module was the difficulty of the monster encounters. If you follow the level suggestions for PCs, make sure they have a large party with appropriate magic items. At the end of the first session, my party faced a numerically superior troupe of water wights, who have almost as much HP as the average PC of their level and a potent stunning attack. The death of one PC as the rest were set to flight was dramatic, but posed an interesting problem for the rest of the adventure. One moderately bad fight at 6th level can injure the party sufficiently that it kind of "needs" to leave the dungeon and take several days off, but the ticking clock of the module doesn't allow this. Of course we're all pious OSRheads here, but if the party ever fails to avoid a fight in a mid-level OSE dungeon like this, they're likely expended for a very long time. I don't know that this is a particular fault of the module-- it's fun to see reskinned monsters that aren't often used, like the rhagodessa or the giant sturgeon-- but it's definitely a problem I'll ponder for my own future works.

I would recommend this module to anyone fond of adventures with a relentless but well-considered focus on exploration, knowing that the DM's old duties of improvisation and knowing when to ignore a step or two in a procedure will go a long way. Despite describing in detail my sense that the core procedure of Holy Mountain Shaker just isn't right yet, I and my players enjoyed ourselves, and it feels like many of the best moments were elevated by the great content of the book, not merely the joy of friends playing a game. To my knowledge, author Luka Rejec has published a few more works, but perhaps nothing that could be said to be a progression from Holy Mountain Shaker. That's something I'd really like to see. A luminary like Rejec must constantly be honing his thoughts, and I bet that if he does something else in the vein of Holy Mountain Shaker, it will be something even more special.

This ends the review. This begins the creation of a symbolism and vocabulary to chart Holy Mountain Shaker-style regions.

After the second session, I got tired of misplacing landmarks and made little diagrams for each region (see top of article). A region is a box in the diagram, with circles representing points of interest, which get squished together or put inside each other to show adjacency or nesting. I put little arrows into or out of a region to show connections to other regions, and if there's a point of interest at these connections it makes a semicircle on the border. Then I just use some dungeon map shorthand I know and like. An "S" in a wall indicates a secret route, a keyhole signifies a locked route, and so on. The chart I made up for Holy Mountain Shaker was just for practice-- you could check and see that the actual dungeon isn't laid out like that. But I don't think you necessarily want to make a big huge chart connecting all of these regions up. An advantage of the regioncrawl is that you can batch information, only dealing with one region at a time. It could be handy to have the diagram in a region's spread, perhaps even as a watermark, for quick reference.

Region Types (By arrangement of points of interest within them)

- Homogenous (no points of interest)

- Martini (exactly one point of interest which can be circumvented.)

- Meatball (two or more points, all can be circumvented)

- Bullseye (each point of interest within all previous, in the sense that you first have to go into one, then the next, and so on. The points can be circumvented by staying at the margins.)

- Checkpoint (points of interest must be entered in sequence to traverse the region.)

Additionally, we observe that most regions will have general contents outside any major points of interest. Perhaps the region is a jungle, and you want to note what happens if you climb a tree and look around, or maybe you want to say there's inhabitants that will seek out and interact with the PCs.

Some Point of Interest types

- Tower (disconnected from other points of interest, freely avoidable.)

- Hidden (no apparent sign of it, thus avoided unknowingly by default)

- Nested (full contained within another point

- Bridge (cannot be accessed except by two or more points of interest.)

- Locked (cannot be entered without special means)

- Vestibule (serves as a connection between regions. To get from one to the next you must enter the vestibule)

- Edged (other points are defined as being on an edge or outskirt of this one. You can go between them without passing through space in the general region)

In general, define a point of interest by its default state. A tower could move and sit on top of another point of interest, becoming nested. A hidden route may reveal that a vestibule is not the only way from one region to another. Define points of interest for ease of reference when you're coming to grips with a region. Don't insist on terminology if you can communicate these basic facts easily in other ways

Finally, a prompt generator for making Holy Mountain Shaker-style region. I've added a spark table pulled straight from Loch and Louis' monster generator. This machine doesn't generate weenies for you or anything, so consider using a spark from each point of interest to come up with one. I balanced the number of routes on the assumption that you might already be coming into it from another already-generated region-- generally there should be no dead-end regions and all should have 2+ connections.

Epic Cycles and Epicycles

 Preliminary matter one- Recently I've felt a little pressed by my current schedule. Not stressed out really, and actually getting to do a lot of enjoyable and enriching things. Even so, I haven't been able to write, blog, draw, and such quite as much as I would like. Therefore, I will be trying to do more blogging at work, which means I will be laying out the simpler posts like this one on my phone. Please excuse any idiosyncrasies of presentation.

Preliminary matter two- Grace of the blog Choir of Fire recently left the Discord platform due to that company's perfidy. While we all respect that, I'd like to take a moment to express the hope that she will make another blogpost soon so we can all read it, and wish her luck in finagling a way to comment on such posts.

"It is a well-known tendency in tales that are popular and long re-told for them to be enlarged, until they become ‘cycles’, taking up or being linked to other stories with which they at first has slender connexions, or none at all. One of the methods used in this process is to provide the original hero with a son, either a newly invented one, or a character in another story. In either case the son will tend to have similar adventures, with variation, to those of the father.”

- Tolkien, commentary on Beowulf translation, line 734

d8 Signs of Epicycles

1. Filling Time, like taking a siege that takes ten years and trying to show what happens during that time
2. Explaining, like taking a siege that takes ten years and establishing a clear reason it takes so long.
3. Duplication (doublet), the same event happening twice or more, often with variations. May be a character'a offspring going on to do the same things as their parent. May be that secondary takes on the same event "misunderstand" the primary event's purpose.
4. Implantation, an interesting story being fit into the broader narrative
5. Revision, taking an event and negating or explaining it away. May reuse a character or place's name, or give a new one, to cover a seam. Could explain old mythology's elements into a new mythology's milieu. Could simply make a good event now bad or a bad event now good.
6. Squeezing, fitting extra material into what would naturally be a constrained space, like fitting many individual stories of a hero's duels into a space of a single night
7. Recasting, altering a character or place's nature. Like making a god into a wise man or a warrior into a monster. Possibly inconsistently applied, leading to contradictions with invite later explainings-away
8. Exaggerating, taking a notable trait and running with it. A strong man becomes the strongest man possible becomes an impossibly strong man. May later be recast or explained.

In The King of Golden Mountain, a wealthy merchant loses everything to catastrophe. He meets a old man in a field who promises him great riches in exchange for the first thing that brushes his leg when he gets home, to be given over in ten years' time. Thinking of his dog, the man regrets that he will have to give the pooch up but feels compelled because he has two infant children to provide for, and so he agrees. Of course, when he arrives home he finds his son taking his first tottering steps to brush his father's leg and give him a hug. A few weeks later, the father finds chests of hold in his attic.

As the boy grows up, his father spoils him, knowing that he doesn't have so long to live. He lets the boy take sips of his liquor, climb trees instead of go to school, and never punishes him for lying or fighting. Eventually the town priest intervenes, and tries to teach the boy letters and responsibility. After the boy starts to show signs of reform, the old man appears to him one day and offer him a pair of dice. The old man explains that they are loyal dice-- when you say "show me six" they will come up with sixes, and when you say "show me ones" they will come up with ones. The boy is impressed, and shows off the dice around town, using them in bets to win treats and coins. The priest calls the boy into the church one day and explains that gambling is wrong. The boy argues that when one has something really special, one has to put it to use. He rolls the dice, but no matter how many commands he gives or how the dice bounce, they don't obey him. The old man's magic can't enter the church, and so the priest convinces the boy to get rid of the dice and focus on his studies.

The boy's sister, meanwhile, is always kept on the up and up. The father ensures she learns the ways of beauty and society, and can't resist fostering her love of merchant's figures and healthy curiosity. When she is off marrying age, the local lord takes a shine to her and asks the father if a match can be made. The father is thrilled, the daughter is thrilled, but on the day of the wedding she is warned by a servant that the lord has been married six times before. The daughter, reasoning that seventh time pays for all, resolves to see how married life goes, and sure enough the lord is deferential and polite, charming and considerate, but always very secretive. He sometimes goes off on long journeys, leaving her all alone. Before he goes, he says that she has liberty of all his house, save the room in the top of the tower, and entrusts her with the keys of the house. While he is away, she looks through the rooms and finds in each a great treasure-- gems, antique instruments, fine armors, rouges, and fruits.

Curious what prize could possibly be so fine as to exceed these, she opens the door at the top of the tower. Blood runs down the stairs, staining the hem of her dress. Six dead wives hang on hooks. The daughter slams the door shut and locks it again, and notices at last that the key itself is blood-stained without remedy. She hears her husband returning unexpectedly, and when she goes down to greet him, the lord asks if she has been in the room he forbid her. As she is about to answer, blood drips down from the steps onto his head. As he looks up, she runs out of the house and screams to the townspeople who gather in confusion. She says the lord has killed all his wives, but arrives and says she has gone mad. The daughter holds up the key. When the people see its bloodstain, they round on the lord, tear him apart, and give the castle and its estates to the daughter as the rightful heir.

Time passes, and despite knowing the boy's days are numbered the father grows to love him. Eventually he admits to his son the fate set out for him, but the boy is not put out. He has the priest bless him on the day before the deadline, and sits in a salt circle in the field. When the old man arrives, the boy and the father launch into a legal case arguing that the wizard has no right to take him. The old man launches an argument of his own, and eventually they all concede that while the wizard can't take the boy against his will, still the father has given him up, and so they settle that the father will set the boy in a boat, let him float into the sea, and let God and fortune give him what fate they may. True to form, a great wave sinks the boat, and the father mourns a long time.

What he doesn't know is that the boy survives. He wakes up on the shore of a beautiful country, with stately villages and rich fields, but no people at all. Eventually he finds a vast palace richer than even the pope's on a golden mountain, and in the center of it is a small green snake, which tells him that it is a princess under a curse.  The snake claims that its mother was once the lady of golden mountain, and guardian of its best treasure-- the waters of life. A giant demanded the waters from the snake's mother, but she refused. The giant knew that the waters redeemed the body if given in love but were useless if stolen, so in anger he killed the snake's mother and put the land under a curse, that would last until someone suffered pain equal to a jilted heart's pain without complaint. The snake has been here ever since that day.

To break the curse, it says that he must stay in the palace for three nights and never say a word. The boy agrees to undergo this trial. On each night, grim ghosts appear in the palace and beat the snot out of him, but he doesn't utter the slightest sound. Upon the sunrise after the third night, the princess returns to her true form but finds the boy comatose and dying. She pours the water of life over him, and he awakes fully healed. There is much rejoicing, for all the people of the land are back, and the princess marries the boy. Together they have a son, his fortune far exceeds even his wealthy father, and he rules with a humility and wisdom seldom seen in those who suffered so much in youth.

One day, the boy (now a king) becomes homesick. He wants to return to the land of his birth and see how his family is getting on. When his wife (the queen) hears this, she grows pale. When he describes his homeland, she recognizes it as the same country from which the giant who killed her mother and cursed her came from, and where he returned to after casting his spell. But seeing how sorrowful for homecoming the king is, she gives him a magic ring. She says he could use it to go anywhere just by taking it off, turning it, and putting it back on. She gives her blessing for him to go home, but bids him not summon her or her son to that land. The king agrees, and using the ring's set procedure, arrives outside the town of his birth. The men at the gate don't let him in. They can't believe a king would travel alone, and so assume he is a modish rogue or sinister fashionista. So he finds a shepherd and trades clothes with him so that he can fit in, and he enters the town that way. When he meets with his parents, they cannot believe that this man is their son, who drowned so long ago, until he shows  them a certain mark he had born since birth. But even then they doubt that he is a king because his clothes are so shabby, so he uses the magic to call his wife the queen and their young boy. His parents believe his story at last, but the queen is so angry that when next they sleep she steals her magic ring from his finger and uses it to bring herself and her son back to the kingdom, stranding the king with no idea of how to get back. For all that he once wished to return to his old home, he lost the new home where he was powerful and rich.

With no recourse, he wanders in vain hope of finding his kingdom, when one day he finds three giants arguing about how to split their father's estate. It is composed of three items-- a cloak that can make you invisible, a pair of boots that cover seven leagues in one stride, and a sword that magically cuts off everyone's head but the wielder's when she says "everyone's head but mine." Seeing the king, they agree to force him to divvy up the items, and if any of them dislikes his choices, they can simply crush him. The king, having no choice but to agree, asks to try out the items first, starting with the boots. But the eldest giant refuses to let him near the boots in case he tries to run away. They allow him the cloak, keeping an ear out for any escape attempt, and he finds it works marvelously. He takes up the sword, gives it a few practice swings, and says "everyone's head but mine." Stepping around the head of the eldest giant, climbing over the head of the second, and stepping over the head of the third, he straps on the boots and runs, never stopping until he finds the golden mountain.

When the king finds his home, he keeps his cloak about him so nobody can see him. He learns there is a great event at the palace, a wedding celebration for the queen and her new husband. His faces screws up with rage and he sneaks into the palace. Sure enough, there are all the nobles and rich people, eating and drinking and toasting the health of the newlyweds. The king stands behind his traitorous wife, and whenever she is served wine he drinks, and whenever she is served food she eats, until she is so deprived and confused that she shrieks and runs into a private chamber. The king follows her and finally removes his cloak, berating her for leaving him behind. She cries, and he walks out into the hall to dismiss all the guests. No one believes this fierce man in a shepherd's clothes is really a king, so they unite to throw out what they take for an armed maniac. The king curses them and, holding the sword out, says "everyone's head but mine." All at once the palace is as desolate as when he first found it, and he alone is master of the golden mountain.

Out of the silence, the old man walks, applauding the king's bloody work. The king is so surprised, he doesn't try to cut off the old man's head. Instead, he falls to his knees and weeps, finally realizing how horrible his deed is. The old man shrugs and offers to bring life back to the golden mountain, to furnish it with farmer and millers and shopkeepers and soldiers and many other people, so that the king won't be alone. In exchange, the wizard wants to take one of the wedding guests of his choice. The king doesn't want to see the bodies of the people he slew, so he agrees, but weeps anew when the old man grabs the king's son, hiding beneath a table. It explains that "everyone's head but mine" of course excluded the son because a child belongs to their parent until they are grown. The king looks about for salt to make a circle, but it is all clotted with blood. He looks for a priest to bless and save his boy, but the priest is dead. Finally, he takes up his sword, thanks the old man, and says "everyone's head but mine." He kicks the old man's head aside and embraces his son, and they set about clearing the blood from the palace.

People come again to the golden mountain, but they are not wholesome folk. The old man's power cannot resurrect the dead. Instead, it brings grim ghosts to haunt the land, horrifying and threatening the king, who tells his son that  the boy must go, for while the old man cannot take him the father did give him up, and though he wishes he could keep the boy with him, the deal, once made, is binding. The boy tells his father that he will journey down through the cellars and caves of the palace to find the waters of life to bring back the people, and that he will suffer pain equal to a grieving parent's without complaint to break the curse of the old man's deal.

He wanders through dark and cold chambers, and though he expects the grim ghosts to arrest him, they never do. He is scared and lonely, and often cold and numb. He wanders for so long that he fears he will never find the well or the exit. He fears he will die in the maze of darkness. Sometimes he imagines that he sees his mother or hears his father calling. He does not give complaint. One day, quite by accident, he finds the well from which the water of life is to be drawn. Happily he retrieves a saucer of the water and starts back, but by mistake spills it all before he can return. After a second attempt also fails, he soaks the water into his shirt, drinks some of it, and carries two saucers. When, by accident, he finds the sun, he emerges to find the palace of the golden mountain a ruin. While he wandered, many years passed. His father grew old and died, his land went fallow and then to waste, and everything was as the old man had foreseen. He cries, and the tears which held the waters of life spill onto the ground, and the grim ghosts are banished, and the land once more comes to life. The boy's father, tempered by sorrow, returns to him. His mother, sorry for her own mistakes, is back. The people of the land, full of penitents for doubting the appearance of the king when he had suffered so much for a princess who herself looked like a mere serpent, are all returned to him, ready to learn and love and mistake and joke and do all the things of living.

THE END

Please feel free, if you should wish, to copy the story and add a few epicycles of your own, or do a similar exercise for a story that you enjoy.

British Manor Generator/Evil Manor Generator

 After reading Seed of Worlds's review of the book Fief, I knew I had to take a look. I've been on a British and French medieval history kick after starting Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which you used to see quoted periodically on Skerples's blog.

William R. Shepherd

To try to get to grips with the institution of the manor, I started playing around with making a generator, listing out the people of such a place. Like Fief, it would primarily be thinking of Norman-style manorialism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with some digressions. I knew this level of index-style detail was not particularly gameable, but I figured it would be fun to put together and would probably help me internalize what I might otherwise have skimmed.

However, on my GLoG server we sometimes talk about a hypothetical campaign where there's at least one castle in every hex, what it would look and play like, and how the challenges of adventures in that setting may differ. Regalia of Oversights and Oubliettes suggested that this tool could be useful for such a situation, so I've decided to provide two versions of the generator-- one that's faithful-enough to the numbers found in Fief, as well as a few other sources, and one that can stand in for the manors of bad guys and wrongos, your orcs and thatchers and all them.

Thanks as ever to Spwack for his wonderful generator tool.