About a month ago I decided to give Dungeons and Dragons a try. Now, I have played a couple of RPGs (Role Playing Games) in the past, D & D one time while in the National Guard, and some futuristic game one time. Besides that I have played a lot of CRPGs (Computer Role Playing Games). The old D & D Gold Box games, Neverwinter Nights, Might and Magic, Wizardry, and of course Morrowind and Oblivion, two of my favorites. The cool thing about computer games is you can play them whenever you want, without having to round up a group of real people. The bad part is it’s still a game against the computer, with all its limitations of tactical thinking, and it doesn’t have a personality. And of course, good and bad, is that I have total control over all the characters in my party. I can guarantee I won’t fire off an area spell that takes out my own characters, or stumble into one. I also enjoy the books by R A Salvatore, and some others who write in this world. Some are world class, some are really bad. Avoid the bad and embrace the really good.
So I thought that playing real D & D, with real people involved playing other characters, might be good for the imagination. And was it ever. I started off one night at the local Gamescape at Tallahassee Mall, which has an open game night on Wednesdays, and made up a quick character on their computer. And then jumped into tthe new 4.0 rules, which were really beyond me at that moment. I was used to the old rules from the computer games, but found the at will powers to be a great improvement over the old 3.0 and 3.5. I really hated playing mage characters under the old rules, since once a wizard fired off his last magic missile spell he became a very weak and useless melee fighter. Now, with the at will powers, you wcan fire off magic missiles all the way to the grave. I learned very quickly that a good Dungeon Master (DM) could really make the game fun. He could make things occur that you didn’t expect, good and bad. And the game became both fun and humorous. Someone might throw a spell at the bad guys, only to have it miss and splatter a table all over the room. Or a player might swing at an Orc, and hit his compatriot standing next to him. On the second night I played a woman decided to fire a cone effect spell at the monsters, which wiped them out, while also taking out my character. She then decided to loot the bodies, including the one of the characters her boyfriend had played who had died the round before. Instead of helping the surviving characters fight the still extant monsters. Something that never would have happened in a computer game. Talk about a true mercenary.
Playing D & D with live people has worked beyond my wildest dreams. Seeing how people interact in this fantastic playground, how their own wants, desires and plans shape the adventure, has given this writer numerous ideas. I was going to base the third book in my Refuge series entirely on the campaign of the legions of the Earth people. Instead I have decided to split the book much as was done with Lord of the Rings. Part will still follow the campaigns of the legions, while the other will be the story of a quest to find the artifacts of the Gods, to keep them out of the hands of the evil bastards the Earthers are fighting. I will continue to play a D & D character through another round of encounters, using those interacts to come up with ideas to use in my work.
Dungeons and Dragons
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While vampires are the rock stars of the undead world, and zombies the everyman turned monster, and even mummies get some respect, ghouls seem to be the red headed stepchild of the monster world. A check of the movie databases reveal hundreds of movies about vampires made worldwide, zombies as the newest craze with scores of recent movies, and even mummies with movies in the double digits. I think there was one old black and white feature titled The Ghoul, and little else. It is the same in literature, with vampires commanding overwhelming attention and ghouls little if any mention. Robert E Howard seemed to like the idea of ghouls, featuring ghoul like creatures in several Conan stories, and Carter and De Camp placed them in at least one of the novels they wrote about the big Cimmerian. The ghouls in Howard were said to be stronger than human, with hair like wire, but they crunched satisfactorily when hit with a broadsword. There were also ghouls used in several of the old Gold Box D&D games, especially in sections that required the player to examine graveyards or deserted areas of town. Not all ghouls were stronger than human. Some were described as being weak creatures who overwhelmed their prey by force of numbers, sort of like zombies. Or, if the prey were dead bodies, there was no overwhelming necessary.
I guess one of the reasons for the dearth of ghouls in literature and film is the low threat level of the creatures. In most cases they can be avoided by not going into graveyards, especially at night, something most sensible people have no trouble doing. Or stay out of the haunted pass or woods that everyone in the area warns about. Vampires frequent clubs and dancing establishments, at least according to the movies, and zombies can come right into your yard and living room. No self respecting ghoul is going to be found in your yard unless you are throwing the mother-in-law’s body in the dumpster. Also, while vampires and zombies feed on the living, and mummies just kill the living out of sheer cursedness or out of revenge, ghouls are mostly carrion eaters. I mean they won’t pass up a meal if it happens to go walking by, but they prefer their meat tenderized through the process of decay. Hey, I guess whatever floats your boat.
I personally would like to see more of the ghoul. Not in my back yard, of course, but in the literature and movies of our time. It would be something different than the same old blood sucker or brain eater, even fresher than the much more sparsely done bandage wrapped priest or prince. Surely someone could come up with a good storyline that would fit with modern times. Maybe ghouls haunting the subways of New York or London, or people disappearing while walking by the graveyard of small town USA (you know, because there aren’t enough bodies being buried there). But I’m sure there’s an area waiting to be tapped by a person with the right imagination. So maybe another form of undead can join the ranks of the celebrated vampires and zombies.
Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge 