Quote from: Daztur;857256For envy that seems draconic again but I like simple greed better for dragons. Any other critters to fill that slot?

Perhaps a doppelganger or similar creature who desperately wants to be what it mimics but can never have their life because it can only look like them but not be them.

Quote from: rawma;857394Perhaps a doppelganger or similar creature who desperately wants to be what it mimics but can never have their life because it can only look like them but not be them.

That could work. Dopplegangers are a fun monster.

Hits the right mix of threatening and pathetic.

Quote from: Daztur;857256It's hard to make sloth threatening. Perhaps a giant whose very vast bulk is threatening?

What's a good monster to represent depraved indifference?

...Cthulhu?

The great old ones could rise up and devour the entire human race! But the stars aren't right. The great old ones enjoy their sleepy-time.
Not exactly faerie tale creatures though...


You could say angels represent a sort of depraved indifference in that they allow evil to exist in the world even when they have the omniscience to detect it and the omnipotence to end it, but then you're getting into some "fedora" territory there.

*edit*
http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/depraved-indifference/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_(deadly_sin)

The embodiment of sloth doesn't necessarily need to be passive, or inactive. It could be a monster that harms people indirectly through its careless and apathetic refusal to perform whatever important duty has been assigned to it, or a monster that emerges as the result of carelessness.

Quote from: Cave Bear;857402What's a good monster to represent depraved indifference?

...Cthulhu?

The great old ones could rise up and devour the entire human race! But the stars aren't right. The great old ones enjoy their sleepy-time.
Not exactly faerie tale creatures though...


You could say angels represent a sort of depraved indifference in that they allow evil to exist in the world even when they have the omniscience to detect it and the omnipotence to end it, but then you're getting into some "fedora" territory there.

*edit*
http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/depraved-indifference/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_(deadly_sin)

The embodiment of sloth doesn't necessarily need to be passive, or inactive. It could be a monster that harms people indirectly through its careless and apathetic refusal to perform whatever important duty has been assigned to it, or a monster that emerges as the result of carelessness.

Well it's well known that Cthulhu makes everything better: http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html

Lovecraftian fairy tales work quite well, see The White People by Machen for example (pre-Lovecraft but hits the same spot) so maybe that's something to work on.

Don't really like the idea of jerkass angels, it's be done to death. If they're going to be jerkass let them be jerkass in an interesting an novel way. Kind of like if you're going to have jerkass elves please please please don't make them be ecoterrorist elves who kill people for chopping down trees.

Quote from: Daztur;857538Well it's well known that Cthulhu makes everything better: http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html

Lovecraftian fairy tales work quite well, see The White People by Machen for example (pre-Lovecraft but hits the same spot) so maybe that's something to work on.

Don't really like the idea of jerkass angels, it's be done to death. If they're going to be jerkass let them be jerkass in an interesting an novel way. Kind of like if you're going to have jerkass elves please please please don't make them be ecoterrorist elves who kill people for chopping down trees.

Wonderful!
So you're right now you've got
Lust = Vampires
Gluttony = Wolves
Greed = Dragons
Pride = Hags
Envy = Doppelgangers
Sloth = Great Old Ones

Wrath is going to be easy. I want to see that one attached to some weak, piddling monster though. Not like Khorne and his chaos guys, like some little petulant guy. Maybe kobolds are wrath? Or gnomes? Or worst of all... kender (kender embody anger not by being angry, but simply by being. Their existence is what drives men to wrath.)

Quote from: Cave Bear;857569Wonderful!
So you're right now you've got
Lust = Vampires
Gluttony = Wolves
Greed = Dragons
Pride = Hags
Envy = Doppelgangers
Sloth = Great Old Ones

Wrath is going to be easy. I want to see that one attached to some weak, piddling monster though. Not like Khorne and his chaos guys, like some little petulant guy. Maybe kobolds are wrath? Or gnomes? Or worst of all... kender (kender embody anger not by being angry, but simply by being. Their existence is what drives men to wrath.)

Reminds me if my old kobold concept: they are the forgotten memories of dragons made flesh. When drqgons sleep they forget things and those memories are too potent to dissipate so they become kobolds.

Life is hard when your soul is the memory of torching a city and you`re three feet tall. Enough to fill you with Wrath.

This is an ambitious, and excellent, project.

For Envy and Pride, we should look at what the actual bad results are. What happens to a person who has too much Pride? What happens to a person who has too much Envy? Then we can think of a monster who's natural state matches that condition.

Quote from: RPGPundit;858147This is an ambitious, and excellent, project.

Well hitting 1,001 is something to aspire to more than a realistic expectation. As I get a bigger number I want to start getting a catalog of stuff like:
-Magical stuff, abilities and critters.
-Trained skills that protagonists possess.
-Interesting locations.

To use for eventual RPG fodder, as in "sure your character can try to do that but since nobody in 1,001 fairy tails even attempts to do that I'm not going to be arsed to write up rules for it."

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;858152For Envy and Pride, we should look at what the actual bad results are. What happens to a person who has too much Pride? What happens to a person who has too much Envy? Then we can think of a monster who's natural state matches that condition.

Will have to think on that, brain isn't being responsive.

For wrath I want to circle back to my idea of wrathful elves that I mentioned a while back in my first deadly sins post. Wikipedia mentions Dante saying that wrath is the desire for justice perverted which really struck a cord with me. When I think of perverted justice what comes to mind?

Ultima Online: way back when in the days of precasting (which must be brought back) the land was filled with battles between Player Killers (random murderers) and Anti-Player Killers (people who killed anyone tagged as a murderer). Interestingly people often hated the Anti-Player Killers more as in order to get more targets they used various tricks (jumping into people's spells etc. etc.) to get the game to tag various people as aggressors so that the APKs could then will them with impunity.

Elves are like that. They use misdirection, entrapment and extreme rules lawyering to trick people into breaking the Law, which then allows the elves to punish you, which is justice inverted.

There's also...

Freemen on the Land: conspiracy wackjobs who are convinced that the law doesn't apply to them because they wrote their names in call-caps or because they're a boat or something.

Except those kind of tactics work against elves. They try to trick people by convincing them that they've broken laws that don't actually exist but if you know the Law (especially all the technicalities) and stick to your guns the elves can't touch you since they're bound by the Law.

OK, on to the next story...

Fairy Tale 7: The Stolen Pennies

Parents give kid some pennies to give to the poor but the kid instead hides them in a crack in the floorboards so that he can use them to buy cookies later.

Then the kid dies (of course) and his ghost is constantly scratching away at the floorboards to get at the pennies. When the family figures out that happened they take out the pennies and give them to the poor and the ghost can rest in peace.

I like this one since it's small, simple and mundane but interesting. Adventures that are based on the PCs trying to lay ghosts to rest tend to be rather aggravating but if they're happening in the background in a low key way so that they don't DEMAND that the players fix them RIGHT now they'd be a cool little setting element.

Also this got me thinking about burials and how important they are for keeping undead away and the rest of the sacraments...

Sacraments

D&D religion is often annoying in that all of the ritual that's so important in real world religion is still just non-magical ritual and then a separate system of miracles get built up alongside that. To give real depth to a fairy tell setting you need to make the mundane magical, and a good way of doing that is injecting some magic into day to day rituals like the sacraments.

Let's hit them. There's seven of them so they're a good counter-part to the seven deadly sins monsters that we've been talking about.

Baptism: important to avoid dead babies turning into annoying ghosts. Also some monsters will treat the baptized differently (can smell them? won't want to touch them?).

Confirmation: I got nothing.

Eucharist: in Three Hearts and Three Lions the hero thinks about how it'd be a really good idea to receive communion before heading out into the chaos-haunted wilds without exactly spelling out how. Perhaps some time-limited 5ed-style Advantage against some magic?

Penance: some of the more goofball acts of penance demanded of people in Medieval history would be fun things to hit PCs with. "You can't wear shoes for a year! ESPECIALLY during winter!", stats for hair shirts, etc. etc.

Anointing of the Sick: wikipedia kind of merges this one with Extreme Unction and Last Rites. This sort of thing is VITAL for not being hit by angry undead. How often have you had PCs kill random mooks and just leave their bodies there and not even consider burying them let alone giving them burial rites? And you've never hit them with vengeful undead? Not once? Having a trade-off between spending time digging grades for dead bandits now vs. getting hit by annoying tunneling zombies later is exactly the kind of resource management trade-off that D&D needs as much of as it can get.

Holy Orders: basically turning people into priests. As I'm making even really basic rituals magical how I'd handle this on a class basis is dump all magic into the magic-user class and then have different ways of getting spells. Lawful: once you're ordained as a priest (or become a nun/monk/crazy dude in the forest) you can use Lawful magic. Lawful magic spells eat up a spell slot but can be used at-will as long as they're used in accordance with Law. For example you could have a first level spell called "Sacraments" that lets you perform the sacraments any time you want but eats up a first level spell slot permanently (or at least until defrocked). Think 3.5ed reserve feats. Lawful spells are gained by pilgrimages, relics, self-sacrifice, etc. Neutral: quid pro quo bargaining with the fae and talking animals. Think Elric magic but with more fish and fewer elementals. The spells use up a spell slot when you cast them but don't have to be "memorized" ahead of time (think 3.5ed sorcerers). Chaotic: binding asshole demons to your will. Basically you cast a spell ahead of time by binding the demons into an amulet, charm, gem, etc. and then let the spell take effect by letting the demon out of its prison. Slightly different fluff but mechanically the same as a standard D&D magic-user in that you prep spells ahead of time. Chaotic spells are powerful, but the demons like creatively interpreting your orders. You can dabble in different kinds of magic or focus on one but all of them basically come down to using your magic-user spell slots in different ways.

Marriage: this one is more badass than it sounds. I loved those old stories about the hero marrying the troll's daughter and the marriage making her cow tail fall off and become basically human. You get similar stories with selkies and other critters. It seems that marriage is Lawful enough to suppress the Chaotic nature of a lot of monsters, at least until you break your marriage vows and all hell breaks loose. Would be a lot of fun to have one of the best ways to deal with dangerous monsters be marrying them, which opens up all kinds of potential for fun drama.

Up next: The Hand with the Knife (the most D&Dish one yet!)

Fairy Tale 8: The Hand with the Knife

This is one of the tales that was cut from later editions of the Grimm fairy tales, which is a shame because it's one of the better ones.

Girl with three jerkass brothers has to go dig peat with a crappy shovel every day. Luckily an elf likes her and helps her by giving her a magic knife that can cut through anything, which she uses to cut peat really fast.

The brothers guess something is up and watch the girl and then imitate her knocking on the elf's hill to get the knife and then use it to cut off the elf's arm. The elf thinks the girl did it and is pissed off, The End.

Pretty simple story but the sad ending is pretty poignant. The one-armed elf who is angry at the girl who loves him would be an interesting NPC, as the story seems set-up to get even more tragic (perhaps the elf wants revenge on the girl and she's pregnant and the brothers are up to something with the knife...).

What else can we do with this one?

Vorpal Penknives

Interesting seeing something that's basically a D&D vorpal sword show up. Also interesting is that you mostly only think about vorpal swords being really good at lopping body parts off when really they're incredibly useful for all kinds of things (even cutting peat).

I guess vorpal swords are expensive enough that they don't show up to get used for all of the wonderful stunts things like bags of holding get used for so maybe have a vorpal penknife. Small enough that its combat use doesn't overshadow everything but so sharp that it can cut through anything and be used for all sorts of things by creative players.

Elves are Grigori

The Grigori ("Watchers") show up in a lot of Biblical apocrypha like the Book of Enoch and (in more detail) in the lesser-known Book of Giants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Giants. Although in the Bible (book of Daniel etc.) "Watchers" seems to just mean angels, in the apocrypha it gets used a lot to mention the more horny angels who father the Nephilim and teach man things things he Was Not Meant to Know. IIRC God gets pissed off at them and binds them under the Earth.

This lines up with some bits of folklore about elves:
-Some folklore (which I like) says that elves are the angels who stayed neutral when Satan revolted against God, which fits with the more dickish Grigori who aren't full-on demons.
-Falling in love with human women (like in this story) matches stuff about the Nephilim in the Genesis and elsewhere.
-The Grigori are bound under the ground and folkloric elves are often subterranean. In this story the elf seems stuck under the ground and can't get out but can only stick one arm out.
-Forbidden lore.
-For the half-human kids (Nephilim) you can draw on stuff like The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.

Also you can link in the more modern fundie concept of Territorial Spirit who are demons who each have influence over certain bits of territory and who can be fought with Spiritual Warfare. Elves seem like they're be a lot more locally-based and territorial then demons hanging out in Hell.

Up next: The Twelve Brothers

Quote from: Daztur;858320For wrath I want to circle back to my idea of wrathful elves that I mentioned a while back in my first deadly sins post. Wikipedia mentions Dante saying that wrath is the desire for justice perverted which really struck a cord with me. When I think of perverted justice what comes to mind?

Yeah the wrathful Elves are I think the best example out of this so far.

Fairy Tale 9: The Twelve Brothers

This is a weird one.

There are twelve princes and the queen is pregnant. The king says if a girl is born he`ll kill all of his sons. So the queen tells the boys to hide in the woods and that she`ll signal them when the baby is born.

It`s a girl so the princes decide to live in the woods and kill any girls they meet. The princess eventually finds out she has brothers and goes into woods and meets one.

She talks her way out of getting killed and agrees to do all the housework in their cave and proves to the brothers that she`s their sister.

Things go well until she picks twelve flowers which are really her brothers which makes them turn into birds. The only way out of this is to not talk for 12 years.

So she decides to stay in a tree. A king meets her and decides to marry her. Her mother in-law bad-mouths her and because she can`t speak to defend herself her husband plans to burn her at the stake.

Then at the last minute the 12 years run out and her brothers become human agan and everything gets explained and her mother in-law gets thrown into a barrel of boiling oil and poisonous snakes and everyone except her lives happily ever after.

OK, first of all WTF? there so much stuff that gets thrown in here without any explanation. Why is the king so randomly murderous? Why does picking flowers turn people into birds? Why do kings keep on marryng random mute girls they find in the forest (this happens again and again in fairy tales I haven`t got to yet)? Why is being mute important for breaking curses? Why put poisonous snakes and boiling oil in the same barrel? Wouldn`t that kill all the snakes?

Anyone have any explanation for any of this?

This got me thinking about the nature of fairy tale kingship and Korean geomancy. Bear with me here, I`m going somewhere with this.

Way down in the hyeol

If I understand pungsu jiri (Korean feng shui) correctly, the earth itself has chakra points from which gi (qi) flows. Building your house on these is generally a good idea (the first Korean geomancer directed a temple-building project to harness the gi of the entire nation, which is a lot more badass than finding the best place to put your sofa).

HOWEVER, if bad stuff goes down on top of a hyeol it gets corrupted and becomes a fountain of bad mojo until it gets cleansed.

OK, let`s translate this into fairy tale terms. The king is the land and the land is the king. This is central. A king`s castle is then a fountain of good mojo that sustains the land and keeps Chaos at bay. The king has an instinctual knowledge of what happens around his castle and limited power over his land (think the king and the jewel of Amber). By hunting and patrolling the borders of their land, the king can push his civilizing influence into the surrounding wilderness.

BUT if tragedy strikes the royal family or if the king loses his way this mojo becomes corrupted and the land becomes twisted and Chaotic.

This also works the other way, bad things happening in the land twist the king`s mind and pushes him into madness and evil. This is partly why so many fairy tale kings are such aasholes.

Also royal corruption can be cleansed but this is hard. It often requires bizarre conditions or strange quests, which explains by suitors have to do all kinds of crazy shit in fairy tales.

The role of the queen is important here too. The king`s rule is a marriage to the land so the queen is a stand-in for the land. Perhaps this is why what appears to be the main way that kings find brides it to stumble across random women while out hunting. Have to develop this more, but it`s a start. If the queen is the land at least as much as the king, you want a badass queen who can survive in the land.

But still, what the hell is up with the flowers and the barrel full of fried snakes?

My only idea is the sister passed to the other side of the mirror and on that side all people from the real world are represented by things like flowers so you can screw with them while on the far side of the looking glass.

Up next: Riffraff and an inventory

Fairy Tale 10: Rifftaff

The German title of this story is Das Lumpengesindel which is by far the best thing about it.

A bunch of talking animals stay at an inn and rip off the innkeeper and do stuff like fill his eyes with eggshells. Not really much for me to work with here.

So let's do an inventory:

Magical Acts
-Turning people into frogs.
-Turning frogs into people by keeping your promises to said frogs.
-Taking living people to heaven.
-Spending 12 years not talking in order to break a curse.

Magical Creatures
-Many, many kinds of talking animals.
-Subterranean elf.
-The Virgin Mary.
-God.
-Spectral(?) black cats and dogs.
-Guilty ghost.

Magical Items
-Vorpal knife.
-Key to the doors of heaven.
-Chimney that constantly drops skulls and other body parts.
-Annoying bed that runs around.
-Magical(?) scissors that let you cut things open without waking them up.
-Lilies that are actually your brothers so if you pick them your brothers turn to birds and stay that way unless you stop talking for 12 years.

Magical Locations
-Heaven and its many rooms.
-Harmless hats and dogs.

Trained Skills
-Iron heart-band installation and removal (necessary to prevent hearts from bursting with grief).
-Making your voice softer by eating chalk.

Misc Nifty Stuff
-Children being kidnapped at birth by the Virgin Mary and raised in Heaven.
-Kings constantly marrying mute girls they find in the forest.
-Serial disappearance of royal children at birth leading to accusations of cannibalism.
-Crazy kind saying that he'll kill his 12 sons if he has a daughter instead of a thirteenth son.

That's some weird shit there.

Up next: Little Brother and Little Sister.

Quote from: Daztur;857258Fairy Tale 6: The Nightingale and the Blindworm

Pretty simple little animal fable. The nightingale and the blindworm have one eye each. The nightingale one from the worm to have a matching set for a wedding and then won't give it back so the blindworm gets eternal vengeance by eating nightingale eggs.

OK, what can we do with this one?

Fairy Tale Social Combat

During the first fairy tale I touched on the importance of oaths and how important it is to keep them while in the second instead of lying to the mouse the cat uses half truths to weasel out of its promise.

So, fairy tale people don't lie. Or if they do people see through their lies easily (unless they're written down, it seems much easier to lie in writing).

Fairy tale people don't break promises. Or if they do they suffer terrible consequences for breaking their promises (as in the thousand and one stories where someone promises to not open that one door or that one box etc.).

Hitting players with those (NPCs that almost always know when they're lying and curses for oathbreaking) and you get some interesting fairy tale behavior in response. Not honesty, fuck no, but instead technically true deception and weaseling out of promises with pedantic rules lawyering. Or cursed PCs. That's very in-genre too.

I'm going to do this in my next campaign. Sounds fun. What I like most about it is that the actual content of what people say matters, right down to the exact weasely phrasing. Too often the specific content of what people say  in "social combat" gets glossed over, this brings it back into focus.

In Which I Ramble on About What's Wrong With RPG Social Mechanics

Social Combat is really a terrible term, isn't it? It frames social interaction in precisely the wrong way, as an attempt to force someone to do someone to do something they don't want by talking at them. Anyone who's been involved in an online debate knows how hard that is to do so it often feels artificial and then it leads to other problems. Either it's something that players can do to NPCs and the NPCs can't do back which just seems unfair or it's something NPCs can do to PCs which is just annoying ("nope, sorry you can't do that, the NPC convinced you not to!") and leads to annoying behavior on the part of PCs ("Oh no! Someone is TALKING TO ME! Quick! Help! Hit them with an ax before they hit me with a mind whammy!").

In response a lot of the OSR just says, "screw that" and runs things mostly freeform. Which is a good idea. No rules are better than bad rules. But often good rules are better than no rules. What would good rules for RPG social interaction be?

First reframe things. Don't think of things as a combat, think of them as haggling. It's not a "duel of wits" it's two used car salesman swapping cars and trying to get one over on the other. The PCs want an NPC to do something for them (join them, not eat them, give them information) and the NPCs want something in return (not getting killed, money, food). Most NPCs are dicks and want to drive really hard bargains. Maybe the right haggling rules could be framed around that?

I think making lying hard (NPCs are really good at detecting outright lies) and making oathbreaking risky (brings down curses on your head) would work well with social mechanics based on haggling since the PCs couldn't just promise a pack of lies each time, they'd have to be clever and you could have the same kind of cleverness on the part of the NPCs.

Then have social skills not be stuff like "diplomacy" or "bluff" but rather be things like:
-Know Lies.
-Smell Fear.
-Hear the Heart (corny name, will have to think of a better one, but the idea is that when someone talks about the one thing they desire most of all, you know that they're talking about the one thing that they desire most of all).
-Oath Pact (you're good at making two-way oaths that bring down especially nasty curses if someone breaks them outright).

Basically mostly stuff that gives you more information that helps you in social interaction rather than stuff that does your social interaction for you.

OK, then on the NPC side of things don't give them stats based on how easily they can be pushed around, give them stats based on what they want and on how badly they want it.

For example a goblin whose desires are:
-Not Being Killed.
-Being Treated With Kindness.
-Peanuts.

Is going to be a whole lot easier for PCs to manipulate than a giant king whose desires are:
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.

It also makes specifics matter. RPGs are always better when the specifics matter.

Perhaps as a general framework, the rules for deciding "does the NPC agree to what the PCs are telling them to do" is counting up how many of the things the NPC wants the PCs are offering them minus the number of desires the NPC would have to go against to provide what the PCs want and then as a general rule of thumb if the number is positive the NPC goes along with it. With perhaps modifiers for the PCs going really above and beyond to fulfill a desire (giving the goblin a literal building full of peanuts instead of a bag) or if what the PCs want in return is especially onerous even if it doesn't directly clash with one of the three desires.

So for example, if the PCs are dicks to the goblin it'll get its back up (conflicts with its "Being Treated With Kindness" desire) but the goblin is pretty easy to manipulate if the PCs are smart enough to pick up on clues like its stomach mumbling. With the giant PC, the PCs start in a hole because of his desire for "The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell" so they'll really have to tap dance just to get to zero and have the giant let them go in peace and simply offering the giant food or money won't cut it no matter how honey-tongued the PCs are since the giant doesn't especially want those things.

A bit skeletal now, but I think it could be pretty functional if fleshed out. Would perhaps be the sort of rule that'd work better if the PCs don't know it exists.

Up next: the Stolen Pennies.

OK, that's the best one so far, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm going to need a couple days to mull over it.

The rest of them up until here? You can easily do it with other systems, in fact cursing the oathbreaker is an explicit rule in at least one system I can think of, LotW.