DMing the Bible: Sometimes we sail

Introduction:
This week we move into the Noah sequence. Let me say a few things about the way I approach this text. This is a story, one that has important theological content, but a story none the less. I believe that having a Biblical faith does not require a literalist interpretation of these texts. I believe these texts resist such interpretation and therefor those who claim to be literalists are in fact selectivists (for more about this, consider reading this by Peter Gomes).
The Noah story gains meaning when moved from "history" to "myth." We can then consider what it is that the people who told this tale were trying to say about their God. Consider, briefly, another story about a world flood, the epic of Atrahasis. In this story the gods created humanity to do the labor the gods no longer wanted to do themselves. The people multiplied and became very noisy -- the gods could no longer sleep for all the ruckus. No matter what disaster the gods set upon the people in 1200 years they had shaken it off. The crankiest of the gods decides to flood where the humans live and kill them all, but a nicer god gives a heads up to a wise man to build a boat. When the flood commences the gods become frighten by the flood and hungry because the human sacrifices which had fed them were suddenly cut off. After the flood waters receded, the wise man emerges from his boat an offers a sacrifice. The gods are so happy with the meal that they make the man immortal. The decide they will never flood the world again, and are very cross with the god who did it in the first place, but to keep the human population in check they institute death in childbirth, barrenness, and infant mortality. What kind of gods are these? What kind of world does this story describe?
The Text:
Genesis 6:9 introduces the beginning of the priestly (p-source) flood narrative, and reintroduces us to Noah. We are told that he is a righteous man which would go along with what we learned about him in verse 8, that he had found favor in the sight of God. The world had become corrupt, even the earth was bent because humanity by-in-large was messed up. God resolved to wipe out the corruption of the earth and the people that caused it. God gives Noah precise instructions on making this ark. This boat would be roughly square or rectangular and would bear little resemblance to the stately craft this story usually calls to mind. God also gives clear instruction to preserve the multitude of creatures that God had created and declared "good." Now if you compare the instructional verses you will see what I mean about texts being resistant to literalism. 6:19 and 20 read, "And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive." If you read on into chapter 7 however you'll discover verses 2 and 3, "Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth." Noah gets the creatures and loads everybody onto the boat. Then the waters came and flooded the earth.
What theologically can we draw from this part of the Noah story? As compared to the world and deities described in the Atrahasis epic, this narrative tradition has a world that was created good and people that were created in the image of God and called very good. The God of these tales is one that demands justice and rectitude, and though corrective action needed to be taken (which caused God grief cf 6:6), planned ahead for the survival of life.
The Game:
Full Disclosure: I am not a boating person. I have lived in landlocked parts of the US my whole life and have only spent fleeting vacations on the shores of great bodies of water.
Recently I've been playing rather than DMing, and in a couple of the campaigns we've been playing long distances need to be traveled, sometimes by land and horse, and rarely the most efficient path took the party by boat. Mostly these trips were undertaken with the assistance of a loyal crew under hire, so role-playing decisions regarding the piloting of crafts was fairly limited. Once the party did have to sail a large pirate ship without NPC assist. The role playing sounded a bit like The Princess Bride, "Hurry up. Move the thing! Um ... that other thing. Move it!" Clearly we were not up to snuff on our nautical lingo, but I had a great time and I think these sessions were some of the most fun of that campaign.
I can't help but think of Noah when ever I look back on those sessions. Here is a man who (nominally) is living in what would later become Iran/Iraq; he was probably painted as a person engaged in desert climate subsistence agriculture. In this world there is precious little water, but one day God shows up and says I've decided that you should build a boat, fill it with animals, and sail it aimlessly for the better part of a year while I cover the face of the planet with water enough to drown all life. Of course you'd want to take on such an important "save the cheerleader" kind of mission for God, that doesn't mean that you know how.
One of the appeals of fantasy role-playing games is that through a group imaginative process people can take part in steering characters who can achieve and preform beyond the abilities of the players in their real lives. This means, in part, that the characters know things that the players don't. While this usually has little impact on game mechanics, it does hamper role playing from time to time. Players worry that they will be penalized for saying or doing the wrong thing because of their own ignorance. I would guess that most of our role playing groups do not have access to stores of naval information and marine strategy. So what do we as DM's do? Avoid ocean going adventures? Make sure there is always a crew hanging around? Here are a few humble suggestions:

• Go on and buy the book: Wizards of the Coast is like a benevolent, but demanding god. There are so many great resources out there, so many pretty books and tiles and miniatures. But they are so very costly to own. However, if you anticipate spending much time on boats, the Stormwrack resource may be a wise expenditure of thirty-five bucks. Share relevant passages with your group, learn new things...educational and fun!
• Cheat, a little: If the point is to challenge players to the point that they no longer want to play, by all means do exhaustive research into vessel construction and navigation and require that they come up with realistic role playing. If, on the other hand, the point is to have fun and enjoy one another's company, you may choose to let "Hurry up. Move the thing! Um ... that other thing. Move it!" suffice for genuine docking procedure.
• Give them the tools: I have long loved the folding boat, a wondrous item in the DMG. I'm gaga for mounts that can shrink to statuettes. What if there was an artifact level item that had some of the elements of the folding boat but was also crewed by departed sailors. An interesting plot twist would be if these sailors are there by some kind of evil magic, then using said vessel would carry some kind of karmic penalty. One the other hand, this might be a little like an afterlife for sailors faithful to a certain god who after death continue to sail in the god's service on behalf of special chosen types.

Facebook

I have been cajoled and harangued into signing on with face book. You can find me there, though, if you've found me here you're likely to get more attention (as my friend Ryan says, I'm just saying).

Fight Club

So, clearly I was far far away from the civilized world in 2000 when the movie Fight Club was released. By the time I came back I knew enough to realize that I had missed something important, but didn't do anything to rectify the situation until this past Sunday evening.

This film is clearly one of the important films of the decade, and if you have missed it so far...go confess it to one of your friends who will help you out. You will find yourself watching it over and over again, and each time you will see something new.

Oh, btw, bring your brain -- there are plenty of scenes with guys beating the living snot out of each other and that is interesting, but that is not the major focus of the film.

Dming the Bible: PCs from beyond the Prime

Introduction:
The text for this week moves us from the genealogies of chapter 5 and into the Noah narrative of chapter 6 (which we will in theory cover next week). This prologue to the flood provides us with many bizarre details that interestingly enough get skipped by those who believe in the literal truth of the text.
The Text:
Genesis 6 opens with the natural result of all those generations having other sons and daughters. The world is beginning to feel full and there are a rather lot of unnamed women running about. Characters known as the sons of God decided that they would make swell wives. Now we can't be very sure who these sons were, whether they were human beings of great renown or holiness ( both things that might have resulted in appellation of the title) or spiritual beings who were actually the children of God and some mate (some in early Israel assumed that the Canaanite goddess Asherah was God's wife). This latter belief would not have been out of place in the ANE or even out of place well into the common era. The world was full of the unexplained and mysterious; it seemed a reasonable bet that the world in which we lived was full of supernatural agents who influenced the world and our lives in ways beyond our control. The gods of all the surrounding cultures got married and had children, some of whom had relationships with mortal men and women. In verse 4 we learn that the name of these half-breed children, Nephilim. The Nephilim were great warriors and legendary heros. Verse 5 says that people were getting pretty wicked, and the badness level was particularly high for a world of our size. Some have suggested that one of the signs of this depravity is the tale of the Nephilim; that the mixing of supernatural and human stocks was an affront to the natural order. In this story, however, there is no indication that the Nephilim were anything other than important and noble characters.
The world was getting it's wicked on, and that was something that irritated and angered God. Verse 6 tells us that God was sorry to have made humanity, "it grieved him to his heart." God resolves to wipe out humanity along with everything else. Then God remembered that he kinda liked Noah (who we'll talk more about later).
The Game:
In campaign settings like Forgotten Realms, the gods and goddesses are near-by, active in the world and meddlesome in the affairs of mortals. In addition to the recognized gods and goddesses there are a host of other spiritual beings (extra-planar creatures). Like in our text today, a world brimming with such creatures would inevitable spawn races of hybrids: in game terms, the elemental Genassi, the Aasimar and their lower planes brethren the Tifling.
I have been playing an Aasimar in a long ranging campaign in the Forgotten Realms setting, so I for the first time have been thinking about these races and how I would run them as a DM. The first consideration is, how weird are they: Planetouched characters are not all identical, like mutt puppies the various lineages show up differently in different individuals. ECL is your friend (and while it may not be the player's best friend it can be helpful to them too) use the ECL to determine how unexpected or odd the character should seem to the general populace. A character with and ECL of 1 will seem much more tame to NPCs than would an ECL 3 or 4 character. The second consideration is, how many are there: Is your party made up of planetouched, are there two or three, just one? The more planetouched you have in the party the more of an acceptance problem they're going to have, but it's a fabulous opportunity to move play off the prime. However if there is only one character, chances are that even if the evil wizard could spell her to some other plane, you're not going to want to run a single player adventure while everybody else gets bored and looses interest.
A third consideration on a more adventure writing note: maybe it does mess with the natural order of things. An interesting story line might involve PC's being asked by one god to keep other planar or spiritual beings from fiddling with a particular population and making more planetouched. Another story line might see the characters protecting infant or childling "Nephilim" from angry or regretful deities.

DMing the Bible: This guy begot What's his name

Introduction:
Ah, the begots...the foil of so many readers, the bane of study, the bore of the book, in this installment of DMing the Bible we're going to tackle all the first testament genealogies in one extravaganza blowout. While the modern reader may skip over these texts whenever they appear (and they appear with frequency), to the communities that handed done these texts first in oral then in written form they represented important, crucial information about who they were as a people and about their relationship to the land and to God.
The Text:
The genealogies in question begin at the end of Genesis 4, dominate Genesis 5, pick up again after the Noah narrative in Genesis 10 and 11, and are featured in Genesis 36, Exodus 6, Numbers 26, etc. Being able to claim connection to people in generations past imparted a bit of power to the present generation. The genealogies may well have been used by people in the ANE to establish legitimacy for office holders, or as a kind of calendar to track the when of seminal stories. They also held the people together, and, because so many places shared the names of important people in the lists of ancestors, held them to the land.
In the ANE, staying close to the land, having claim on it, was important not just for property reason. It was believed that gods had specific portfolios that applied not only to their domains (sun, fertility, harvest) but also to geographic regions and specific peoples. Therefore to lose one's connection to important ancestors meant not only losing claim on property or political office, but being disconnected from your god. Thus the genealogies in the First Testament carry not just political or chronographic information but theological information as well.
A prerequisite to any claim an individual could make power was a pedigree that demonstrated a god's involvement with your family. In the Bible this use of genealogies is used by the author of Chronicles. These books sought to show God's direct involvement with the history of the people of Israel, and the large sections devoted to lineages were included to show the deep connection between God, the land, and the people. This would have been especially important for the residents of Judea recovering from the shock of Babylonian Captivity.
The Game:
Biblical Genealogies kept the people of Israel connected to each other and to God. The people drew power (political, religious, personal) from the names of their ancestors. In the realm of D&D, player characters usually have to stand on their own two feet when it comes to claims of power. However I can think of a couple of ways to use this idea of pedigree= power.

• Ancestral Knowledge: lately I have become miffed with Bardic Knowledge, it seems to grant the Bard too much information too easily without any requirement that the Bard be able to show a clear connection to the source. If however the player could roll an ancestral knowledge check, then the character will mystically recall some forgotten lore that was known by a relative, now deceased. Clearly this wouldn't be an option for changelings and orphans who don't do research to discover their roots.
• V.I.F.: The very important family might be a feat that could be picked up first level, it would provide a +1 intimidate, +1 diplomacy, + 2 to two of the following Knowledge : Local, History, Nobility, Religion. When playing in the ancestral stomping ground these bonuses are increased by 1.
• Blood of Heros: This would be particularly the case for characters that wield an ancestral weapon, Characters who can trace themselves back to a particular hero gain bonuses in combat that make their opponent more likely to surrender or run away. This trait only works if the bad guys know anything about the legend of the heroic ancestor.

Alignment: another view

Not long ago another member of our role playing group and contributor/co-founder of stupidranger.com, Vanir, submitted an article about alignment (you can read it here). Vanir's article is well reasoned and entertainingly written, but I simply disagree. As a player and as a DM I find the alignment system in D&D to be helpful and enjoyably complex.
As a game system, D&D allows for many types and levels of play. Some of the most basic levels focus on broad and sweeping categories, campaign plots are simple, easily discerned (though perhaps challenging to carry out), and require little in the way of difficult choices. This is where many of us began as players and DMs. As we age, and in theory mature, we see that the world is not nearly as simple as we once thought. I call this the DC-Marvel shift, but that's the subject of another article. If this new understanding of the world doesn't send us into escapism, we are likely to include this more nuanced side of life in our role playing and in our characters.
Nuanced Characters rely more on shades of meaning than on broad categories. Some would say that the alignment system prevents nuanced characters. I say the way some people play alignments didn't mature with the rest of them. It's not the system (remember the system allows for many levels of play), it's the people. Consider this: in our real life world, many people rely solely on the good-evil spectrum when identifying someone's personality. In the D&D universe one would never consider having only one alignment.
There are many many ways to be Lawful, Ethically Neutral, Chaotic, Evil, Morally Neutral, and Good. When building a back-story I would urge players to discern carefully the alignment position, to determine what about this character's philosophy of life leads them to this or that alignment. A player might play six Neutral Good characters in a row and they might all have slightly different moral priorities. A character's alignment is a tool to be used for better role-playing; it is a precision instrument, not a sledgehammer. Thinking critically about a character's alignment before the game even begins can go a long way towards warding off metagaming and broad performances.
For my part, I hope that alignment sticks around for a long long time, and I also hope that the core rule books remain sufficiently vague on their behalf.

Also Check Out: Hero Builder's Guidebook. This work contains helpful chapters about adding nuance to the character creation process and demonstrates beautifully the "there are many ways to play each alignment thing" I was trying to describe above.

New Irking trend

Well not so much a new trend, as one that has recently begun to irk me. Churches that don't update their websites with important information regarding things like service times.
Carson and I have been trying to attend St. Paul, a UCC church in Pekin, IL for several weeks ...mostly it was our own faults that we hadn't attended, but the one Sunday we have our act together I checked the website at least six times (so there would be no mistakes). The site (an official site, as far as I could tell) said the church had two services one at 8:15 and one at 10:45 with church school in between.

We arrived at the church in plenty of time for the 10:45 service only to discover that the church has changed to having a 9:00 service with church school to follow. We snuck out of the church so as to avoid having to explain the problem. I don't feel people need to call to check out information that is published online on an official site.

Yes, I know that by in large church websites are maintained be volunteer amateurs. Yes I also know that if we had sucked it up and talked to someone at the church they would have been made aware that two of the most coveted church goers, the young couple first time visitor, had been unable to worship with them because their website has bad intel. Ouchy.

We still plan to attend worship at St. Paul's but I can imagine others who would simply move on to another congregation that demonstrated an understanding of how people my age seek out information.

DMing the Bible: Party Murder

Introduction:
While much is made in popular theology about Adam and Eve and the incident in the garden, the story does not, in fact, introduce human sinfulness into the Biblical narrative. The story we're talking about this week does. In this issue of DMing the Bible we will look at the story of Cain and Abel in greater depth and then talk some about party relationships.
The Text:
Genesis 4 continues with the Yahwist account (the j-source) of the family of Adam and Eve, this time focusing not on the parents but on the first two sons Cain and Abel. Cain is the first born, and shares in Adam's work with plants and agriculture; the second son Abel keeps the livestock. This is a fairly typical distribution of labor for inhabitants of the ANE.
Though God has not laid out a system of recommended giving (as will happen, at great length, in Exodus), Cain and Abel both come to make a gift to the Lord. The both bring gifts from their particular trade. Now when I was a kid in Church School, this story was illustrated and told with great frequency. The story and the pictures always showed Cain, almost Neanderthal in appearance, carelessly dropping of the rotten remainder of his crop (which were usually illustrated as new world crops like tomatoes and corns, but I digress). Clean, blond, somewhat frail, almost radiant Abel comes skipping along with the very first lambs of his flock. The suggestion in these tellings was that Cain and his offerings were clearly inferior to Abel and the offering of the lambs. The story doesn't paint such a clear picture. Abel did bring from the first of his flock, but the text merely tells us that Cain's offerings came from plants. Further it suggests that Cain cam first to make an offering, and Abel's gift was made in imitation. This is not all that surprising when one considers the meaning of their names: Cain calls to mind human creativity, Abel means "shadowy" and "nothing."
It is not clear why God accepts the Abel's offering and not Cain's. Biblical scholars and interpreters through the ages have offered several possible reasons: Abel's sacrifice really was better than Cain's, in later Israelite ritual animal sacrifices are preferred to vegetable, God favors the younger sons in most Biblical tales. The reason is less important to the story than simply that things have been tipped off kilter.
Cain is understandably upset, God has chosen his younger brother over him. God talks to Cain suggesting that the door to acceptance is not yet closed; look at the wording in verse 7, "If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well , sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it." Cain has an opportunity to do well, but God does give warning about what a bad choice will bring. The way sin is described in this story it is lying in wait on the doorstep like an lone roller skate looking for chance to trip you when you're already late. God holds out the possibility that Cain doesn't have to fall for it, and if he doesn't the world would be set right.
As we know it doesn't happen, Cain lures Abel out to the fields and kills him. From this point on in the Bible there in no sibling relationship that is free of tension.God asks Cain where Abel is, and Cain responds with the classic line "I don't know; am I my brother's keeper?" Cain, who had turned the disappointment of his relationship with God outward and onto his brother, is now claiming that Abel and Abel's life and accomplishments mean nothing to him -- that they have no bearing in his life. God knows too well where Abel is and what the consequence or Cain's activity will be. In this case, God is not the punishing agent. The ground is turned against Cain, and so he can no longer stay and be a farmer. Cain says the punishment is too heavy, leaving the land he knew, and being removed from the land meant separation from God. Cain was afraid anybody who met him would kill him (we'll talk about this when we get to Sodom and Gomorrah) but God makes it so that people who meet Cain will know he's connected and cannot be killed indiscriminately.
The Game:
PC parties are often strange things. They are cobbled together of different characters with different skill sets, different races, different values, and different gods (sometimes even different pantheons). Yet this group are not just traveling companions who may bid one another adieu at any time, they are supposed to be a team. Teams in general can pull together and work towards a common goal. All these differences can lead to conflict in a party, and that tension has to work itself out eventually. As a DM you have a chance to provide opportunities for inner-party conflicts to be worked out in such a way that the characters are closer at the conclusion. Here are some suggestions:

• Well that's one thing we've got: The chaotic evil fighter and the lawful good cleric can't agree on much, but they can agree that the demons that are taking over the town are bad. Keeping players focused on places where most everybody agrees might help to bridge some of the gaps in the team building process.
• We call that Improved Critical: Each character has a place to shine (assuming a well balanced party). One way to keep characters from each other's throats is making sure that each character gets a chance to show their usefulness to the party and their competence in general. This is particularly helpful in getting evil characters not to kill off the good ones.
• All Aboard! Express to Therapy: Yes, railroading players is not a good thing, it frequently backfires and annoys players. But, if you were to do it in a limited way...like in dreams or in the dungeon of a mad, but beneficent wizard. It may give a player character or two a chance to work out whatever needs working out. Dream sequences work particularly well between sessions.

They went and killed each other anyway. Well, don't you feel a little like God. What happens now?

• Res and repeat: D&D can at times make death seem cheap; for moderate level parties True Res is not that difficult to come by. This solution gets your plot back on track but ultimately sets things up for a bigger confrontation later.
• Time to Depart: The dead character stays dead or doesn't, but either way the killing character(s) are cast from the party. Your players can introduce new PC's as you see fit and now you have a handy new villain to reintroduce at some later date. The exiled PC's player may be helped to stay involved in the game if you allow a little input about what that character does next.

Quiz results are fun

My Inner D&D character:

After analyzing your answers with state-of-the-art medieval fantastic psychology profiling tools, Dungeon Mastering is confident that your inner D&D character is a Chaotic Good Halfling Rogue / Bard!

Thanks to Stupid Ranger for pointing this quiz out. You may go here to take it yourself.

All in all I am not that surprised with this outcome. Look a little later on for an article about alignment -- in my way of thinking I usually lie a little more neutral than chaotic. I couldn't point specifically to where I am like a Halfling, but it doesn't strike me as totally wrong. The least surprising part of these results is the Rogue thing. There is something in me that seems to gravitate that way. The last three characters I have played were rogue-like characters (even the cleric I'm currently playing has a prestige class that allows her to fill in as the party's rogue).