Sidequest: The 5 Sinful Books of the Covert Library

The library at the bottom of the city with no name has quartz walls. There are great stone tablets documenting the secret passages of the city, ancient vellum spell scrolls written in iron-rich blood, and foot-thick books with detailed records of open accounts going back centuries.

And in a small room at the back, there are the five books of sin.

(The dwarves have five big sins:

• sloth
• gluttony
• meekness
• deceit
• jealousy) 

The Books

The Unfolded Axe by Friedrich Folium

Friedrich was a dwarven paper-maker whose brother went to war and won glory for the family. No one cared about Friedrich’s paper-making, so he created a book that could be folded into any kind of axe. When folded, it becomes a magical +1 weapon, +3 against dwarves (1d8 or 1d6 damage). It is a book of JEALOUSY. The book is large but thin and made of cardstock and pulp paper.

An Autumn of Razors by St Vincenza de la Capitanio

Vincenza was a saint of the god of wrath. When she wasn’t allowed to rise to the top of the church’s hierarchy, she composed An Autumn of Razors as her suicide letter and threw herself from the top of the church into the courtyard. The high priest of the church read the book and was consumed by the swarm of leaves that burst forth. Vincenza was granted sainthood. The book hungers for more flesh, so it’s sin is GLUTTONY. (Dex save 13 or 1d8 slicing + 1d6 poison damage.) The book is chained down and is bound in wood and metal.

Silent Grammar by Duan Su Qi

The famous demon hunter Duan Su Qi captured Zagam, the demon of DECEIT, between two covers woven from the wool of the sheep of the southern realm’s God of Justice. After capturing Zagam, Duan Su Qi retired and lived a long and happy life. When the book's covers are open, the pages turn into Zagam, who is now free. Zagam can turn water to beer and is very friendly, waiting for the moment to turn on someone. The book is very thick and behind glass.

Elfin Truisms by Misozwerg the Scholar

Misozwerg was born crippled and often mocked by young dwarves. He grew to hate dwarven culture, and Elvin Truisms is one of his many attempts to undermine his race. It is written in the most beautiful poetry, and it tells of the joys of relaxation, individualism, and useless ornamentation. The book hums sweet songs (4d8 HP of sleep, and those affected can only be awoken by being dealt damage) and can slowly extinguish torches and small fires. It is a book of SLOTH. The book is small, thin, and green, and it’s wrapped in cotton.

The Door Into Somewhere, author unknown

The origin of this book is unknown. It is a book that is also a door. Its table of contents lists a number of locations it can take you to: a small tropical island, a silent deciduous forest, a cave overlooking a sparkling waterfall, or a rocky desert filled with chromatic sands. Those who use the portal find that there's no way back. It is a book of MEEKNESS. It speaks in a high, nervous voice, and it demeans itself and its powers. The book is huge and has a blue cover and smooth, cream-colored pages.

From P. Gasparis Schotti’s Physica curiosa (1662)

The Test

Young library assistants are put in the room of the five sinful books and told to guard them overnight. They’re locked in the room, told not to let anyone in, and warned not to touch the books. The door (which is also The Door Into Somewhere) is shut and locked from the other side.

They're provided with the following equipment:
dry cakes
honey
coffee
water
cards
dice
paper armor (14 AC+Dex, wearable by all)
sloth-fur caps
three each of swords, shields, warhammers

Throughout the night, five demons knock on the door.

Sloth: a cute, sleepy sloth looking for a place to rest; a PC who lets it in can roll an extra Hit Die during a short rest

Jealousy: comes in the shape of a man-sized rat who wants to read the books and elevate itself to manhood; the demon will hide the books away and teach the characters proficiency in Sleight of Hand

Meekness: asks for entrance in the voice of a child, a helpless bystander with no grand plans or designs; it will teach characters to be proficient in Stealth


Gluttony: comes in the shape of a pig-centaur who wants the characters’ food; a character who dines with the demon heals 6 HP

Art by Cathy Hannah

Deceit: comes in the shape of the head librarian to tell them the long night is over; it will let the characters out into the greater library

Characters who pass the test are made full librarians. Characters who fail are killed.

Wall: Why D&D?

This is probably as close as I'll ever get to a hot take, so here we go: D&D versus story games.

Origin Story

I didn't play any sort of extended campaign until my mid-20s, and that first long experience was a two-year love story with D&D 4E and with my DM, who taught me everything I know about awful moral quandaries as framing devices and character motivators.

Alas, over 7 years later, my DM has moved on to story games. I can play Fiasco with him, and even Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, but he'll never Master my Dungeon again. Still, I like to run ideas by him every now and then; his responses are gracious and helpful, but they often include something along the lines of, "You know, you could run this with [insert story game system." And it's true—I often could. So why don't I?

Story games are beautiful little machines designed to create a certain type of story. Fiasco almost flawlessly creates a Coen-Brothers-style emotional noir. Apocalypse World creates tense moments of emotion in the face of oncoming adversity. Polaris carves out a chilling tale of aristocratic doom. Why not use these systems?

And let me say that I do play these games. I have tons of respect for them on a design level, on a play level—I'm so glad they exist, and I want more of them! Their powerful designs guarantee the sort of story they intend to make...

...and therein lies my problem with playing them a lot.

D&D A Picaresque Bildungsromantic Postmodern Neo-Cubist Fantasy Morality Play

When I say that most story games are made to create a certain kind of story, I mean that the rules in the game create strictures on a story level. Fiasco always has a certain number of acts. Apocalypse World has an intense and brilliant questioning structure that creates interdependence. And so on.

If players are unsure how to structure those acts and story beats—or even if they're good and practiced at it but just don't want to think about it—story games are the way to go.

But what if you don't want a structure imposed from the outside? D&D and its imitators are, as far as I can tell, devoid of large-scale narrative rules. They have rules directed toward individual, small-scale beats—inspiration in 5E, daily powers in 4E, and so on—but that's about as large as they go. What does this mean?

(Small interjection: I bet there's a neat argument to be made that spells like geas and other curses could be used to drive large-scale stories in a mechanical fashion, but I've never actually seen a DM use stuff like that, so I can't speak to it.)

Because of the lack of narrative rules, D&D can easily slip in and out of genres or eschew them entirely. And I'm speaking here of structural genres: picaresque romps like Don Quixote, postmodern ramblings like Ulysses, bloated serials like Lost, and more. Because of this lack of narrative impositions, D&D can feel much more like real life than a story game might; it can meander, it can quietly focus on relationships or internal striving, jump into intense action and leave back out, and meditate on unexpected change or death.

Which isn't to say that a story game can't do these things. In my experience, though, they haven't really done all of them.

A procedurally generated image by John Pound, which is also somehow a metaphor for the discussion at hand.

Choice Paralysis on the Plains of Hell

It's not that a lack of rules is always a good thing. I had planned for act two of my Wall campaign to see an increase in PC agency. They would no longer be newcomers, so they could enter the "domain" level of of D&D: making political alliances, choosing where to go, investing in a community, and so on.

And they hated it. It was the one time that they got together outside of the game to talk about the direction of the game. They made a clear and impassioned plea: we're not sure what to do, and it makes the game feel like a difficult slog sometimes.

So I changed things around. I was happy to.

But maybe things would have been different if D&D had a special set of Act Two rules that helped players through the process. Or maybe I should have invented them. I bet I could adapt 5E's carousing table so that every session started with a "what happened abroad" sort of thing.

The Purpose of Rules

I am in no way saying that any system or game is better than another. I always want more games—they all teach me to be a better gamer and help me create my own best game.

I do think it's interesting, though, that I've never played a game of Fiasco without explicitly using the rules—handing out dice, passing the turn, rolling on the Tilt table—whereas I've seen a number of games of D&D where a rule is never considered—where people just talk and consider, even moving outside of the "rule" that players only play their characters.

So I wanted to say that the argument of "D&D only has rules for combat so it pushes people toward combat" is totally bogus.  D&D 4E let me internalize a few combat rules so that I could forget about  combat and instead focus on the best way to embody my paladin of the goddess of lies.

And the Arbiter of Rules

Of course, the DM has the power to act as a filter of how many rules get utilized in D&D, and typing that out, I fear I'm leaning toward a "benevolent dictator" theory of gaming. Story games naturally have to develop rules for narrative direction once they start decentralizing the power of narrative determination.

The Campaign podcast has players stepping in as one-off characters that often become recurring, and lately (as of episode 56 or so), has the player/GM dichotomy breaking down entirely, with a split party GMed by two people, each of which is a character in the other half of the party.

Blurring those distinctions is something I'd like to see more of.

Sidequest: Beyond the Fiasco

After 24 sessions, the adventurers of the Wall campaign reached the bottom of the dungeon and, through a series of unfortunate choices spanning most of the campaign, opened the gate to Hell. It was a dramatic moment, and I wanted to use it to bookend what I considered the first act of the campaign.

I already had plans for the start of act two—the exploration of the fringes of Hell and the consequences of opening the gate—but I wanted something else in place in case the players went off in a different direction. Could I make a whole new dungeon in addition to all the planning I was doing for their time in Hell?

That's when it hit me:

Get the Players to Stock a Dungeon

I told the players that we'd have a session unrelated to our normal campaign. It was going to be a bit of a "breather" between acts, a light story game combining elements of Bully Pulpit Games's Fiasco and Flatland Games's Beyond the Wall.

I framed it as a chance for the players to all be Dungeon Masters for a session: they would make characters based on classic villain archetypes and tell the story of their quest for villainous power. 

I presented them with a drawing of a ship, telling them that it was a hulking vessel floating in an infinite sky. (I'd been hearing a lot about Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams from a friend, and Gus L's HMS Apollyon setting is always in the back of my mind.) The system I threw together gave us factions, locations, and treasure hoards, all in service to the fantastic apocalypse that Fiasco is so good at structuring.

It worked exactly as I planned. After the game, I was left with a mysterious ship filled with alchemical smokestacks, a poisoned swamp, a porcelain Frankenstein, and killers made of lead. I fast-forwarded things about a hundred years so that the players would still have a few surprises when their Wall characters ended up there, and boom, a waiting dungeon with the players as my abettors.

The Rules

Ahead of time, draw the outlines of your future dungeon on a piece of paper. No fine details are necessary—just some borders and an explanation of what it is (caves, a castle, inside the shell of a giant turtle, etc).

When the session begins, there is no DM. Each player gets a character sheet, either randomly or by choice. No repeats are allowed. See below for the full class list, but here's an example:

Trapster
All who wander the earth face barriers, and even the most blessed and the most protected are harmed by cruel fate. You seek to emulate this process. Everyone has a weakness, and you seek to know them all so that you can stymie, capture, or kill them. All the while, you wait for the inevitable trap that the world has set for you.

1d6	Why does weakness disgust you?							The player to your right...
1	Your parents were cowards.							...was allied with the affected person or organization.
2	You were betrayed by a partner.
3	A mechanical accident killed a companion.
4	You were the victim of an uncaring government.
5	Medicine couldn't save your sibling.
6	Your enemy escaped justice.

1d6	What kind of tools do you favor?							Add
1	Spikes and spinning blades.							A trap-filled hallway to your workshop.
2	Automatons of all shapes and sizes.
3	Spring-loaded flingers.
4	Mazes and mirrors.
5	Restraining chains and glue.
6	Fire.

1d6	Who is your greatest prisoner?							Add
1	The one who rejected your love.							A prison further beyond your workshop.
2	Your doppelganger.
3	An angel.
4	The greatest hero of your people.
5	A giant monster.
6	A monarch.

Each player rolls for the first section and works out the details of their connection with the player to their right. Then everyone rolls for the second section and gets to add something to the dungeon map. The same goes for the third section.

Each player can have one mulligan, choosing a result from a single section instead of obeying the die roll.

After characters are created, an index card is placed in between every player. This index card is populated with objects, locations, or needs as per normal Fiasco rules, and the rest of the game is played out as a typical Fiasco session. Use your favorite tilt table.

Here's a printer-friendly document with all the classes along with object, location, and needs tables. 

Sexing the Illusionist

Our session included a face-changing illusionist, an alchemist with an army of lead people, a master of fish, a fine china golem, and a warlord named Pussywillow. Because this is Fiasco, everything ended in an explosive cinnamon apocalypse (a mishearing of "imminent apocalypse" that was too strange to let go). The fish-master's swamp was poisoned and irradiated with magic. I couldn't ask for a better dungeon.

(The session featured the campaign's only sexual encounter, which was deemed mediocre by all involved.)

The void ship after our first session.

Handling the Transition

A month and a half passed in real life between the dungeon-making session and the arrival of the adventurers from Wall. A century had passed on the ship, though:



When the characters arrived on the ship, the effects were exactly what I wanted: a little bit of amazement, a little bit of fear, and some excitement regarding checking in with the players' evil characters. It was the best kind of metagaming: the players knew the gist of the dangers inside the ship, but I gave them clear signals that some time had passed, so their knowledge wouldn't keep them safe from surprises.

Sidequest: How to Live Like a Dwarf, or, Dwarven Hold 'Em

I've long been enamored with Patrick Stuart's "a city without a name." A few sessions into the Wall campaign, I realized that there were no dwarven PCs or NPCs in Wall, and I knew it was my chance to mix Stuart's heavy metal, constantly fighting dwarf city into my own campaign.

It ended up being part that, part 30 Days of Night, with the dwarves building a circle of fortresses on the melting edges of the world's Antarctic continent. During the 28-day darkness, sloth demons rise from the snow and ice, and only the dwarves keep them from corrupting the rest of the world.

As is maybe appropriate, the background stuff I developed for the dwarves resembled an iceberg: the players only discovered the tiniest bit, seeming generally uninterested in the snow and ice. I blame the Minnesota weather.

So I repurposed everything into a standalone story game, How to Live Like a Dwarf, or, Dwarven Hold 'Em. It's a game about keeping and discovering secrets while keeping demons at bay.

Here are the rules:

Dwarves live in a city in a mountain at the bottom of the world. This city is never named because no one is allowed to find it. Every day, they celebrate their skills and seek to discover the gifts the gods left them. These secret gifts give them great joy, so they like to keep and reveal their own secrets as well. Every night, they keep the demons of hell from escaping their prison at the center of the world.
 
A single game of The Secrets of Dwarves reflects one day-and-night cycle in their nameless city at the bottom of the world.
 
Goal: To end the game alive, with at least one of your secrets revealed and at least one secret still secret.

Art by Kevin Budnik.

Character Creation

Dwarves have built their society around seven Virtues:
 
GROOMING (beardcraft, accessorizing, bespoke, make-up, tattoos)
DRINKING (ale-guzzling, shots, keg stands, drinking games, leading rounds)
CRAFTING (stonecraft, jewelry, wood carving, sculpting)
STRENGTH (lifting, throwing, pulling, pushing, wrestling)
POETRY (family sagas, slam poetry, doggerel, song)
DIVINING (finding ore, finding water, casting runes, telling fortunes)
ROMANCE (mostly indescribable)

Assign your Virtues a number, 0-6. Each number can only be used once. A higher number indicates greater accomplishment and more likelihood of success.
 
The values assigned to Grooming, Drinking, and Crafting are public. The others can be hidden.
 
Create two secrets. One is potentially revealed by winning a contest related to a Virtue of your choosing. One is potentially revealed by losing a contest related to a Virtue of your choosing.
 
Lastly, choose a gender for your dwarf. This is kept secret; it is your most delightful secret and will be revealed only to the dwarves you marry. Possible genders are nearly limitless, but here are some options: agender, androgyne, bigender, boy, demiboy, demigirl, female, gem, genderfluid, gendersmash, girl, intergender, man, male, metal, nonbinary, pangender, polygender, woman, rock

Round One

Characters are celebrating the night’s victories and the day’s marriages. In round one, each player must challenge one other to a contest in a Virtue of their choice. The oldest player goes first. Play continues to their left.
 
Both players roll a die and add their skill number to the roll. The higher result wins. The characters receive appropriate tick marks in the “wins” and “losses” columns of their sheets. Any applicable secrets are revealed.
 
Example: Hrothgar High-Rock has the secret, “Pinkie finger of left hand is an immaculately constructed prosthetic,” and that secret is only revealed on a loss of a Crafting contest. Jillian the Hammer-Headed has the secret “Can sculpt lead like water” that is only revealed on a win in a Crafting contest.
 
Jillian challenges Hrothgar to a Crafting contest. They plan to make busts of each other. Jillian rolls a 5 and adds their 3 Crafting for a total of 8. Hrothgar rolls a 4 and adds their Crafting of 1 for a total of 5. Hrothgar loses, and both dwarves reveal a secret.

Round Two

Night falls. The demons are here. Each player, in turn, adopts the identity of one of the manifold beasts of hell, starting with the player who went last in round one. Demons need a realm of origin, terrifying features, and at least one name.

Each demon chooses one dwarf to challenge. The demon chooses which Virtue will decide the challenge, and it has a 6 in that Virtue. The dwarf may recite the tales of as many of their wins as they’d like, regaling the demon with how they were achieved. This wins are “bid” on the battle.
On a win, the dwarf gains a number of wins equal to the number they recited plus one as their listed deeds are amplified by besting a demon. Also, secrets may be revealed depending on their conditions.
If the dwarf loses, there are a number of potential consequences:

• The wins they recited are converted to losses. They gain an additional loss as well.
• If the dwarf has any unrevealed secrets, the demon may demand it reveal one if it so desires.
• If the dwarf recited wins and they’ve already revealed both of their secrets, that dwarf is killed. However, it destroys the demon as well, overcoming it with the power of their deeds.
• If the dwarf did not recite any wins and has already revealed both secrets, the dwarf is killed, and their body is tainted by their cowardice and inhabited by the demon. It will rise in 24 hours as an unholy thing.
• A secret may be revealed if it matches the condition of the loss. This happens after the fight is concluded but before the dwarf dies, if applicable.

After all demon challenges are completed, the night is over.

Round Three

Living dwarves return home. They must bring any corrupted and possessed compatriots with. These dwarves are ritualistically slain, and the player of the slain dwarf must distribute their losses to the other dwarves, using each loss to cancel out one win.

Once this grisly duty is completed, dwarves with wins may propose marriage to any other dwarf. The two must discuss the terms of their contract, including property ownership, sexual allowances, and so on. If they come an agreement, they are bound forever. They reveal their genders to each other, each gaining an unrevealed secret (their spouse’s gender).
 
Once the marriages are finalized, the players may drink. Those characters with at least one of their secrets revealed and unrevealed are seen as successful within dwarven society.

A full PDF (including character sheet) is available here.