A Fungus Among Us

I'd been putting off writing for some time, because I couldn't think of anything to say that hadn't been said better already. Having received an unpleasant but prolific gift for my 41st birthday, however, I can comment on something relevant to D&D. 

A few weeks ago, a friend discovered a kitten under some industrial debris and texted me to ask if I wanted it. I didn't, particularly, but I promised to talk to my wife; when I did, she became giddy with excitement, and so the cat entered my house and I had to be nice to it. We did take it (or, I should say, her, the cat being female) to the animal hospital for a diagnostic, and she was pronounced free of parasites other than fleas, with which she was absolutely rife. The treatment for fleas was effective immediately; they dropped off overnight while she was confined to a cage. I had described the whole process in real time on a forum in which I sometimes participate, and one of the posters insisted, adamantly, that she be 'backlighted' (or 'blacklighted', I can't recall) for ringworm which, if present, would require a quarantine of two weeks. Although at this point I didn't quite know what ringworm was and put it in the same mental category as roundworm, tapeworm, and heart worm, I still put my trust in the veterinarian. I think I assumed, naively, that this was because the condition wasn't common in Japan; and for the past few weeks we have, stupidly, let her crawl all over us and sleep with us. 

I noticed my first spot a week ago while being swarmed with mosquitoes during a neighborhood shrine-beautifying event. Although mosquito bites normally disappear from my skin within a few hours, one spot seemed particularly tenacious. I thought it was strange, but didn't pay much attention until it became larger, more pronounced, swollen, and perniciously itchy. By the end of the week it had expanded into a bright red, puffy ring in the middle of my wrist. Then while showering I noticed an identical ring on my knee. Then another on my forearm, and on the opposite one. With the new one that appeared on my back this morning, I now have five total. 

Now, it is is my impression than in the West, skin conditions are generally perceived as ghastly. I've been careful to impress on the players in our campaign, for example, the extent of the terror fourteenth-century people feel toward leprosy, for example, quite often ostracising members of the community who might only have eczema, on the grounds that it just might be leprosy, which would mean the end of an individual's existence in society. Even now, at least among teenagers, there is a degree of ostracism associated with most skin conditions. In Japan, however, it's taken as quite normal; eczema and atopic dermatitis are omnipresent and death with by what amounts to a shrug of the shoulders. 

The environment is humid, particularly in summer, and fungal infections thrive. It's simply that they're not accorded any particular gravity. This cultural difference from the West is one to which my eyes have only now been opened. The best comparison that comes to mind is with the flu, which is no big deal in the US. It's similar in symptoms to the common cold, except that it's accompanied by fever and joint pain, and the treatment is basically the same: Rest, Vitamin C, hot tea, stay home if you can but work if you have to. In Japan, however, the flu is always called by its full name, influenza, and always pronounced in ominous tones. People are expected to wear surgical masks when going outdoors and are almost shunned in horror. This, I'm told, is because somewhere, at some point in history, someone died from the flu. Odd, I think, because gastroenteritis, of which I myself nearly died in my early 30s, has a much higher mortality rate, and yet is included in same sociolinguistic category as the common cold: kaze, which normally describes light ailments that are not life-threatening. 

I remember working on a translation of publicity materials for local hot springs with a Japanese translator; one bath was supposed to be good for what he directly rendered as 'skin diseases'. I pushed to have the phrase softened to 'skin conditions' on the grounds that Westerners wouldn't want to get into the water with people infected with contagious diseases. 

Knowing what I know now, I'd have left it as diseases and left it to tourists' judgment whether they wanted to get into the hot spring. 

In my aggressive search for information, I did see some sites that suggested ringworm can be spread in swimming pools and even house dust. I cannot vouch for the reputability of those sites, but I feel it is my moral duty to give as much information to the players in my campaign as possible, so that they can make informed decisions about whether or not they want to visit my house. 

We took the cat to the veterinarian again yesterday, and he fearlessly touched her with his bare hands and let her rub all over him. It seems to be okay if you wash your hands afterwards. He even said it's fine to let her sleep with us. In the meantime, I'm rubbing anti fungal cream on my five spots three times a day after washing them thoroughly. There is a treatment for fabric that includes spraying it with two different chemicals and wiping it down with a third just to make sure, and this is what we're going to do with all the dining room chairs, for example. The cat was given both oral and topical treatments--we have to massage her with cream and make her swallow half a pill every morning--and she's expected to recover in a week. Diagnosis is similar for humans, although because we don't have fur our spots will still be visible for a month or so. I can't go to the beach party looking like a leper. 

All this really impresses me with how inefficient are our standards of hygiene even in the 21st century. In the 14th century, living in close proximity to livestock and companion animals as so many people did, ringworm and other fungal infections, as well as myriad parasites, would have been ubiquitous. I live in a country and culture that prides itself on its cleanliness, and yet we succumb to infections like this, which make me afraid of my entire house and itch to an extent that my capacity to enjoy life is significantly reduced. Of course, the average medieval peasant would have been so covered with lice and fungus all the time that he wouldn't notice much difference. 

Which brings us to the paladin. 

The 2nd Edition Player's Handbook states that the paladin is 'immune to all forms of disease'. It says nothing about fungus, and as I've mentioned before, if she spends too much time in a wet saddle she'll end up with an itchy snatch. (This would amount to what, as children, used to call 'cooties'.) We'll also assume, for the sake of argument, that's she's usually got some lice. Perhaps not as much as the average Tom, Dick, and Beavis, but a few. Bear in mind that the medieval ritual of combing the hair was always done near a window, often with help so that the lice could be picked out one by one. 

In other words, the average person on the muddy, feces-and-offal covered street would be used to a fair amount of itching on a daily basis. Therefore the symptoms of fungal infections or parasites would have to be pretty severe in order for penalties to THAC0 and AC to apply. Anal fistula would certainly do the trick, though athlete's foot and cooties probably wouldn't unless they reached a certain severity. This could give our campaigning party weeks to treat the problem, or at least air the skin out enough to keep it from getting too much worse too quickly. 

These are all things the party should bear in mind, particularly now as the cold spell has ended and the humid summer will be soon upon them. A degree of circumspection should be applied when considering to walk about fully clothed in the rain, go for weeks without bathing, ride or wear armour for hours on end, and forego the price of a stay at an inn in favour of a straw bed where animals sleep, or an oily mattress in a roadside hospital. 

In the real world, we have a session scheduled for the 18th of this month. This morning we gave the cat a double shampoo before rubbing her down with the cream as usual, and we've done our best to decontaminate the house, but as I said, you use your own judgment. 

How I Use Modules

It's been difficult to build the motivation to post to the blog, but as we've got a session coming this weekend, I'm doing my best to cough up something.

When I look at the current page of this blog, which comprises perhaps the most recent ten posts, under each of them is emblazoned the discouraging words 'No Comments'. Oddly, when I look at the stats, I can see that people are clicking onto these pages from North America, a few countries in Europe, and even India on occasion. Although I do get feedback from the players in my campaign once in a while, most of the time I feel like I'm talking to myself. Perhaps the readers are largely just clicking here by accident and immediately leaving when they see there's nothing here that they want. Or they might actually be staying to read, even regularly, but without any feedback I have no idea whether they're thinking, 'Hmm, interesting, good stuff' or, 'Man, this guy's a yutz. Why does he waste his time?'

At any rate, here it goes. The topic on which I'm going to pontificate today is the use of modules. Not long ago my DMing hero decided to market a module on his blog, and there was mention that it was possible to interpret this decision as 'selling out', or in contradiction to his philosophy and approach to the game. Since our campaign just finished making an excursion into a module--rather waltzed over the tip of its dramatic iceberg and, after some bloodshed, dropped the whole adventure like a bad habit--I thought it would be a good place to look at how I personally use those dandy packets lazy DMs adore so.

 

The module we recently bastardised is called The Village with No Name, and it's available for free download at http://www.dragonsfoot.org/fe/ along with a boatload of other modules. I'm going to go into a bit of detail about what I did with it, while mocking it just a tad.

 

I have never opened a module with the intention of running it the way its writers direct it to be run. I might have done when I was a young teenager first playing the game, if I had been aware of the existence of modules back then. As a jaded greybeard, I look at what the module is supposed to accomplish and think about whether the party is likely to find that their while. I then consider what minimal adjustments would be necessary to have the module make sense in the geographical and temporal context of my world. Lastly, I rummage through it to isolate any bits that are particularly interesting, at least as window dressing. Because most modules are a hodgepodge of tropes and cliches, this search is almost always fruitless, and I have to rely on actual history and  my own imagination to jazz it up.

 

Now, if I happen to find a module that I think has something to offer my party, I cut it up andmake paper dolls with it so that it can fit where the party is and what they're doing without appearing absolutely ridiculous. Sometimes this takes so much tweaking that the adventure bears scarce resemblance to the module.

 

The most annoying aspects of any module are immediately discarded. That includes the gaudy prose in which the descriptions are normally ensconced; treasure and weapons that couldn't possibly exist where the party is; the NPCs personalities and back-stories, which are invariably two-dimensional and derivative; and, usually, their names. (In the case of The Village with No Name, I kept most of the original names and just toned down the hyperbolic elements and gave the personages a bit of depth.)

 

The module's title itself is pretty ridiculous. The idea that 'the villagers never bothered to name it' is improbable though not, I suppose, impossible. Naturally enough, my party asked one of the villagers the name, and he replied that it didn't really have one. It's a bit of a stretch, but we could say that before the poll tax of 1377 not every locale had to be categorised and recorded. In this case, since the village straddles the border of Shropshire and Staffordshire, it might be recorded as Straddling East if finally determined to belong to the former, or Straddling West if the latter. This is of no great consequence, because they were able to find it easily enough with the help of the king's foresters, and at any rate they wouldn't have been likely to be particularly awed by mention of 'the village with no name'.

 

Map possessed by the party's paladin. The village would be in the Morfe Forest.

 

The characters, introduced on the second page of the .pdf, are: Galyn, the leader of the band of outlaws the party are supposed to face; Pilanor, a green-cloaked assassin who hangs out in the church; Feldryk, the parish priest; Vilnin, whom I couldn't help picture as a drunken and belligerent Rebeus Hagrid; and Burl, a fat, ugly, subhuman monster with a 'massive mace'. The module mentions about a score of outlaws without names; I gave them names on my record sheet as a means of keeping track of them and inspiring myself to run them sort of like people, which is surpisingly hard to do during the confusion of melee.

 So far, the best way I've found to keep track of that mess.

The outlaws are all carrying or wearing weapons and other items of value or power that could be found if the party had time to search the bodies after combat. Sometimes, they just have to run for their lives, and don't get the chance.

The idea of the module is that a band of outlaws, led by Galyn, have captured a village and are using it as their base of operations, to the horror of the people living in it. The subplot is that some of Galyn's gang are going to betray and assassinate him, and there's a bit about a special ring he's wearing, and the 'thinking' party are ostensibly expected to focus on that. Whether my party would been interested in doing or not, I cannot tell; they never made it that far. It doesn't matter whether I would have had Galyn killed by his own men nor whether Feldryk was actually a priest. The more powerful members of the gang were unreachable during the bellicose forays the party made into the village proper, and now they are long gone, having vacated the premises when they saw that a band of adventurers was making their stay in the village rather unfun.

They did encounter Vilnin, though his name never came up. The module instructs the DM to have this lone ruffian 'demand' the outrageous sum of '100gp' or attack the party. I did have him berate and attempt to intimidate the party, but he had to be drunk off his arse to do, and the party at that point was seven strong and fronted by a seasoned Danish mariner not likely to be intimidated by a loudmouth drunk. It did eventually escalate into a fight, but Vilnin wasn't difficult to take down in his condition. Having all the treasure the module gave him would have been a joke. Why would Galyn have even allowed him to keep it in a barn, the first building on the road into the village, instead of in a locked chest in deep in the gang's hideout? One of the party's henchmen greedily snatched up the earrings to sell to a local jeweler; whether I had endowed them with the magical properties suggested, the players will never know.

 

The monster Burl is described as 'the size of a house, standing 7' tall with shoulders nearly as wide', and one suspects, or at any rate I do, that that description wasn't proofread before publishing. As wide as he is tall? What is he, a gelatinous cube?

 

The module has the ruffians playing cards, but as this is unlikely in 14th-century England ours were playing dice, and not gambling nearly as much money. Their weapons and armour are all of local and unspectacular origin. With particular attention to Burl, the module reads:

Burl sits and watches the melee with passing interest for a full round before draining his drink, rising to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, grabbing his mace and attacking the nearest PC with a roar of battle lust.

Not something PCs are going to notice. They'd be too focused on the enemy directly in front of them. I might say instead, 'It occurs to you that the gelatinous cube with the mace the size of a tree is headed toward you. If you have to roll a new character, I'm sorry'. Even converting this Burl's stats into 2e terms, they're still unreasonable: STR 19, 24 hit points. Considering the attack bonus for strength and brawn as well as the mere weight of a 'massive mace' crashing down with the force of gravity behind it, our paladin, bard, and mariner would be three mushy piles of guts and brains. Planning for gratuitous treasure in the unlikely event the party survived wouldn't have been much compensation.

But after doing away with Vilnin, my party weren't stupid enough to traipse into a public house and start a fisticuffs, and I didn't expect them to be. As a 'thinking party' of a quite different sort, they played the situation much better: They had some henchmen find out who the village chandler was and buy up all the pitch they could, then set the pub on fire and knocked off the outlaws as they staggered outside. They may not have plundered the booty the gang left on the tables, but they captured the five panicking horses tied up outside, which were probably worth more.

There was no solving of any mystery. My party weren't going to care about backstabbing within the outlaw gang, much less attempt to put a stop to it. There was a bit of intrigue at first, but after that it was just hack and slash: The paladin read the priest's aura and decided he was corrupt and she wanted nothing to do with him. (It should go without saying that I had no itention of decorating Feldryk's office with a shelf of books with titles like The Beginner's Guide to Pious Practices listed on page 10 of the module. The 1980s North American self-help craze hasn't come to medieval Shropshire, and  besides, books in the Middle Ages were kept in locked chests, not on shelves; and this DM would be a tad less blatant in dropping hints about a priest's authenticity. Whether he was a real priest or not isn't actually something that would have been relevant; even if the party had defeated the gang, if they hadn't killed Feldryk, I would have had him do everything in his power to get away from the party, not continue to plague them in future adventures.)

The thing is, there were three PCs, plus a handful of jakeys from the Quattforde alehouse who happened to be taken in by the paladin's charismatic recruitment speech--the survivors became her henchmen later, but in the first foray into the village they were merely roustabouts--against more than a score of professional scallwags. Before burning down the pub, they had already got into a skirmish outside the church, and the peasants (whose existence is noted nowhere in the module, but they would have had to be there for the village to function) helped them get away before the gang could call for reinforcements. In retaliation, the outlaws went on a murderous spree, trampling the crops, burning down the cottages and orchards, carving up the men and doing to the women what one would imagine them doing to women. When the party came back after hiding in the woods for a day, they couldn't very well ask the torched corpses for help.

Once the PCs and their henchmen--two of whom had been slain at this point--destroyed the public house and stole the horses, they had what they thought was the best they could hope for, and they headed for the hills. At the end of our last session, the party found themselves well west of the Clee Forest, ready to do something completely different. Galyn's (or Feldryk's) gang would have abandoned the village, its most important resources used up or destroyed, and gone to evade the law in some other land, leaving the remaining buildings to be shrugged off and marked down as a ghost town by the 1377 tax collectors.

So if you're in this party, go ahead and spend the money on the Tao Jumpstart Proposal. When the module you get hits you in our campaign, it won't look anything like you imagine.

The Drain

This is just my experience as an over-thinking introvert and not every single DM will be able to relate, but I'm sure that not a few find the task absolutely exhausting.

 

After every session, my voice and nerves are shot. I've just spoken nonstop for five hours, which is more than speaking than I do all week in total. I try to be concise, of course, for the benefit of the players, but I often end up giving long answers to questions and anyway must provide quite a lot of description and information just to move the game along. This isn't difficult if I psyche myself up to it with lots of espresso and the music of Arany Zoltan, but when it's all over I feel like a sponge that's been wrung out.

 

It precludes doing much else on weekends, and especially anything having to do with human contact. Even speaking to my wife doesn't come easily, but she understands and tolerates my monosyllabic responses at times like this. Socialising is out of the question.

 

For example, I have a neighbourhood obligation on Sunday nights which I'm inclined to cancel on the days we play, even though it's several hours after the session has ended.

 

I bought a house in a village in Japan, where neighbours are closely knit and expected to all do their part in the community. The man who lives across the creek could hear me practising the flute in the morning and decided that, for the upcoming lion dance that takes place around the district next month, I could apply my efforts to the traditional Japanese transverse flute. All the non-elderly men in the village participate. It would have been bad form to refuse, so each Sunday evening I faithfully show up to practise from the hours of six to nine, which in actuality amounts more to drinking beer and engaging in that sort of crude banter normally known as 'guy talk'. This past weekend we prepared the straw sandals we have to wear, and practised for a total of five minutes the entire night. Such is human relations.

 

Doing this after D&D, however, would amount to an overdose of humanity. Normally, it takes at least as many hours to recover from playing as I've spent playing.

 

The thing is, the event is coming soon and the men want to get in as much practise as possible. I'm going to attempt doing both this coming Sunday. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to D&D more than to practice.

 

It's worth it, of course. Introverts are capable of being as jovial and boisterous as extraverts; we just need a long time to recover afterwards. I'm not sure I'll get that this time. It will be interesting to see what condition I'm in by Monday.

The Party's Current Predicament

This is a continuation of last week's post about the legal system, primarily to give the party some additional background information that would come in the course of conversation with those 'agents of the law' in whose care the party now find themselves.

 

It was asked, when one of the party interrogated certain villagers about the foresters and received the answer that they hadn't had anything to do with the foresters hoped they never would, why this was. It may be helpful to remember that in the modern world, poor people in any urban ghetto would answer the same about the police.

 

The king's foresters are there to catch and punish commoners with the temerity to poach. The king owns the forests and decides who can hunt there. He might hunt with his own party, or grant limited hunting rights to those he favours, or grant a local lord 'full warren', which is tantamount to giving that lord his own private forest. Other than that, no one is legally allowed to hunt there. Catching smaller game, such as birds and coneys, would likely result in a mere fine, but killing anything large, such as a deer, is punishable by hanging.

 

All of this is not merely because the king is greedy and cruel. (He is, but that's rather beside the point.) This is an integral part of the medieval English legal system, and is in place because the scarcity of food in general makes it a status symbol, with big game at the top. The bulk of commoners' sustainance comes from what they can produce themselves, which is mostly grain, with a three- to six-fold yield on seed the best they can hope. Civilisation is surviving by a very slender margin.

 

Currently, the foresters have sheltered the party in the cylindrical keep where they take their meals and watch over the woods from a high place when they're not out patroling. The foresters are sympathetic to adventurers because adventurers can perform a public service that legal and resource constraints preclude the foresters doing themselves: Hunting down and getting rid of outlaws. The foresters would certainly appreciate this, and offer the party a place to recover spend the night.

 

They would not, however, be likely to spare any food if the party happen to run short of rations at this point. The continuous cold snap that still delays the onset of spring weather has meant that the fields have barely thawed, preventing farmers from plowing them, and preventing what few seeds they have planted from growing. People are living on their grain stores, with crafty merchants hording supplies and illegally speculating on the prices. The town authorities are insisting on the prices set by the Assize of Bread and Ale, which means many bakers cannot afford enough wheat for their product. Tension has been mounting in town as the bakers threaten to go on strike, which would bring activity to a halt across the countryside.

 

When we left the party, they had just found their way through the wilderness and back toward the foresters' tower--they had got lost during the night, but in daylight the paladin's trained bird was able to spot the tower from above and guide the party to it--after a sleepless vigil huddled around a fire without shelter. The party sagely concluded that the outlaws wouldn't venture into the woods to track them in temperatures that cold, and were able to keep a fire blazing and not actually freeze to death, but they will have frostbite. They will have lost some HP because of it. (And get XP for the loss. Perhaps they'll consider purchasing gloves, overcoats, blankets, bedrolls and a tent--or perhaps they won't, considering how much the encumbrance would slow their travel; at any rate, they will have learnt something from it.)

 

Now it remains for the party to determine their next move. For the moment, they are safe, and could probably make use of the foresters' shelter and fire for several days before being asked to leave; but they will be hungry, and supplies are dwindling.

Law Enforcement

In our last session, the party came up against a troupe of outlaws who had seized control of a village and were using it as their headquarters to waylay, rob and murder travelers. The party received information from the king's foresters who, recognising them as adventurers, advised them that they would be within their legal right to apprehend the outlaws, the implication being that there would be no legal repercussions if the party went so far as to slay them and claim their property, even without waiting for the coroner to arrive. In this context the sentence, 'We're not officers of the law' was uttered, and so it seems some background on the way the law is enforced in our campaign world is in order.

 

There aren't 'officers of the law'. The closest thing medieval England has to a police force is the town watch, a handful of men who do their best to stay awake through the night and take appropriate action in emergency situations. There are only a few of them to patrol an entire big town, and they're responsible not only for making rounds to check for burglary and violence, but also to watch for fires and look out over the town walls in case of an invading army. For the rest of the time and for all other purposes, and for every purpose in the case of rural areas, communities are responsible for their own 'policing'.

 

Each free male, on reaching the age of twelve, is required to be sworn into a tithing, a group of ten households headed by a chief tithing man; the tithing reciprocally enforces obedience to the law among its members. If someone in the tithing is accused of a crime, the rest of the tithing is responsible for bringing him to justice (perhaps turning him in to the local bailiff or gaoler, or to the lord's retainers if they live on a manor). If they fail to do, they stand to be fined for more than they can afford to lose.

 

On a manor, disputes and trials are overseen by the manor court, in which the lord is often judge and jury with the power to execute those found guilty. Death by hanging is the most popular punishment--with drowning typically preferred if the accused is female--for all sorts of offenses from theft to murder. The only other common punishments are fines and being placed in the stocks. Incarceration is very rare, and grisly punishments like burning at the stake or being drawn and quartered are reserved mainly for extreme cases of religious heresy and high treason, respectively.

 

In a town, there are usually one or more magistrates, men of good standing selected by the king to act as judges in criminal matters.

 

Fines for such things as starting a fight vary by locality, always with heavier fines for drawing blood. In any case, anyone who witnesses an act of violence or theft is expected to raise the hue and cry, a signal to all in the vicinity to rush to help apprehend the perpetrator. The sound, whether made vocally or with the aid of some instrument, would be known and recognised by all who live in the area. There is a fine for failing to raise the hue and cry, as there is for failing to respond to it. All free men keep some form of arms depending on their status and what they can afford; they are required by law to be able to defend themselves and their country as well as arrest criminals when necessary.

 

In cases where the accused remain at large, they are generally given three chances to appear in court. If they fail to appear, they are declared outlaws the fourth time and can legally be beheaded on sight.
 

A complication that allows many criminals, particularly criminal bands, to remain at large and unpunished, is the practice of maintenance, whereby lords protect their criminal retainers. Our trial session gave the party a taste of this system when a knight hired them to investigate a different group of bandits; the knight was on a quest to make maintenance illegal. As it stands, the law is very selectively enforced, with those who lack political power keenly aware of their position; and corruption is rife.

 

The question was asked why the foresters themselves don't carry out justice, or at least help the party and claim part of the reward. The answer is that the king has appointed them to patrol his forest and hang poachers, not to risk their lives confronting dangerous bands of outlaws. Even if they wanted to join the party, the king would not be pleased if they abandoned their duties to do--and the political consequences would be particularly messy if the outlaws are under a lord's protection.

 

Finally, to expand on the foresters' mention of not needing to wait for the coroner: The coroner (from the Latin corona, 'crown') is an officer of the king who is supposed to be present before justice can be carried out. The coroner's duty is to assess the value of man's assests to determine what portion of his property should go to the king. As common law already allows for the lord or householder to claim the belongings of anyone who dies on his property, and death sentences pronounced on manor courts already ensure that the lord of the manor will receive the man's best beast, the coroner is necessary to make sure the king gets his due. When outlaws are apprehended, citizens are supposed to wait a maximum of forty days for the coroner to arrive, but this is often flouted when the situation is extreme.

 

Thus, the party are currently in that most coveted position of adventurers: They can kill people and take their stuff. 

Specific Injuries

I wiped out on my bicycle yesterday morning and suffered an abrasion somewhat mitigated by formerly sturdy trousers sacrificing their right knee in my defence. Since this happened midway between home and campus, I thought it would make more sense to continue onward and stop into the campus dispensary as soon as I arrived, rather than return home and probably not find a bandage big enough. Besides, I reasoned, the campus nurse worked at a primary school before; she'd probably dealt with hundreds of skinned knees.

 

So I ambled in, a bit worse for wear, only to find a sign on the nurse's door saying she was off for the day. 

 

Sometimes it's quite easy to use the minor inconveniences of real life as inspiration for the game. Simply by amplifying the severity of the wound and removing the recourse to modern antiseptic methods, the treatment of hit points lost in battle can become an adventure in itself.

 

I once heard, incidentally, that once that a man in New York City skinned his knee on the sidewalk and contracted something resembling ebola, but I prefer to think that this is a literal urban legend. On the other hand, I've also heard that Henry V took an arrow to the face during battle and his surgeons successfully removed it. Just to one side of his nose, if I remember correctly.

 

Here in the comfort of my office all I had to do was splash some peroxide on my knee and beg a bandage from a colleague's first-aid kit. Today I'm almost normal.

 

We tend to gloss over a lot of the combat injuries because they're a logistical bother, but the spreadsheets used in our campaign do have spaces to record scarring and maiming. This doesn't quite match the spirit of the original rules. The 2e Dungeon Master's Guide spells out its comic-book style approach to deadly combat in a wee section entitled 'Specific Injuries (Optional Rule)':

 

The AD&D combat system does not call for specific wounds--scars, broken bones, missing limbs, and the like. And in most cases they shouldn't be applied. Remember that this is a game of heroic fantasy. If characters were to suffer real-life effects from all their battles and combats, they would quickly be some of the sorriest and most depressing characters in the campaign world. It's hard to get excited when your character is recovering from a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder suffered in a fall off a 15-foot wall. It is not recommended that characters suffer specific injuries. In general, stick with the basic pool of hit points.

 

Right, because the game is so much more convincing and engrossing when we put ourselves in the place of Gumby superheroes who bounce back from all sorts of damage, rathern than real men who value their blood and limbs enough to try their damnedest not to lose them. 

 

In particular, the assertion that seasoned fighters would be 'the sorriest and most depressing characters in our campaign world' seems to assume that even if we allow specific injuries to PCs, we have to keep all of our NPCs Gumbies. I can't speak for anyone else, but I might find it difficult to repress snide remarks if I played in what was supposed to be a medieval world and didn't see people missing eyes, ears, hands, and legs with some frequency. It's the same school of thought that removes characters' needs to eat and excrete, or even makes death less than permanent. Are none of the people in our fantasy world supposed to wrinkle and grey as they age, either?

 

At the start of our game plenty of the characters have rolled the loss of fingers and other appendages from accidents before the game even started. (One of the most heroic characters we've had in the campaign, in fact, began the game having lost half of his right hand in his father's shop, and in at least one combat, this turned out to be a blessing: Having been forced to learn to use his sword left-handed, he had the literal upper hand when storming a castle and fighting its defenders up a spiral stairway.)

 

It should make perfect sense that if characters have lived through enough combat to have attained a considerable level, they should be scarred and limping from previous injuries. Unfortunately, we haven't yet had a character live past his early twenties. When they've been hit hard enough to receive a permanent scar or broken bone, they're usually dead. Surviving long enough to evince serious battle wounds, then, should be something all players should aspire for their characters to achieve.

Dealing with the Inevitable Data Loss

Our last session was the first one in half a year, and I was rather pleased with the relatively low number of mistakes I made. There were certain things that I should have played up more. The paladin's search for ailing people to heal, for example, should in retrospect been much more fruitful; any medium-sized town should have a visible marginalised leper population as well as a goodly portion of its citizens maimed, infested, or scrofulous. Aside from that, though, the party ended up pursuing some information that I was just making up as I went along, but that could lead to an actual quest I had hoped to eventually use at some point. It was something that I imagined would take place at the opposite end of the shire, but could conceivably take place, in some form, closer to where the party now find themselves.

 

In the interim, though, I've had two USB teeth go bad on me in the space of a week. With the help of recovery software, I was able to get back most, but not all, of my D&D material. I had foolishly saved it all to the same place, which I carried in my pocket to work on here and there whenever I had a free moment. Apparently USBs aren't meant for repeated rewriting. On the other hand, most of the really important information was already printed and filed in a series of doorstop-sized binders: Adventures, Goods and Prices in Shropshire, House Rules, and the largest of all being an overview of the world with geographic and demographic information as well as the most useful charts and a collection of NPCs that might appear. Since some of this now only exists in hard copy, it should eventually force me to rework some of it from scratch.

 

I'm more chagrined about having lost my latest research paper, an analysis of the treatment of dialect in Japanese translations of The Canterbury Tales, but I've got several pages of poorly-written notes from which to reconstruct that, too.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh told a story of the Buddha and some of his monks meditating in the forest, when a man came frantically toward them asking if they'd seen his cows. All of his cows had run away, and he said he was going to die if he didn't find them. They said they hadn't seen any sign of them, and suggested the man look in another part of the forest. After the man had gone, the Buddha turned to his monks and said, 'You all are very lucky--you don't have any cows'.

 

I still think it's a good idea to have multiple backup copies, but I've realised that I have enough in my head to run a fairly decent session without much of anything. The world in which we play is very much alive to me; I have a clear picture of the layout of the land, the cultural zeitgeist, the way people talk and act, what they are likely to do or beleive, and what they are capable of. I can see the forest landscape before the advent of most modern species of evergreen trees, when the only squirrels were red and livestock were much smaller than now; I can smell the linen-encased bodies at a time when only monks and the rich bathed more than a few times a year, the interior of inns and alehouses where body odour mingles with manure and mud tracked in from the street and stale beer and dog piss mixed into the old rushes strewn about the floor; I hear the strains of lively tunes, the shouting, bickering and laughing of voices in the market, and the overwhelming quiet of a countryside before electricity. I know what the food tastes like because I prepare it in my own kitchen. And I can almost feel the wonder, credulity, and desperation of a people who knew almost nothing about how nature or the human body functioned, for whom alchemists could certainly turn lead into gold, sorcery was real, foreign lands were peopled with antipodes and cynocephali, and all manner of beasts and demons lurked around the corner.

 

That's enough for a capital game, I'd say.