Adventure Book Prompts

[James Talbot]

Doyou want to write in the adventure genre but need help conjuring compelling and adventure-packed stories and concepts? Sometimes reading simple story prompts is the easiest way to get those creative juices flowing.

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not putting this on your post bc i dont want to derail the point of cults in dnd being orientalist and such but i also hate cults in dnd and other media bc it completely misses how actual cults function and makes them a kind of campy ridiculous joke. which grinds my gears specifically. i think the idea that someone who falls into a cult is just as bad as the leader and just a Random Guy you can kill is sooooo gross BUT THAT IS ITS OWN CAN OF WORMS!

Oh for sure and I did mention that a bit further down in the reblog chain. But yeah basically cults in D&D are often just evil for the sake of evil, people don't join a cult in D&D world because they got lured in by a charismatic guy and slowly had their outside support networks eroded, they join a cult because they're Chaotic Evil and think the Chaotic Evil God kicks ass.

Which to be fair might be a degree of nuance that's too much to expect from D&D, but I think that lack of nuance is part of what's led to D&D becoming the heroic power fantasy game it is these days. Like, once NPCs don't actually have understandable human motivations for being evil in a world where Evil is a cosmic truth, they're basically just obstacles on the way to Heroism.

The Evil gods all say that if you behave in a cruel and selfish manner, you can have power both in life and in death. You get to bully and steal while you live, and if you live an Evil enough life you get to turn into a badass demon or devil when you die. Now what they don't tell you is 999/1000 Evil folks end up on the bottom of the pyramid and just end getting pushed around by the remaining one permille. But that's a problem for the other 999 cultists - surely you personally are the 1-in-1000!

To some extent the Good gods operate the same way because D&D has never had coherent systems of morality plus a lot of IRL evil ideas on the side of Good, but they're less likely to explicitly exploit and backstab their followers than to admit up front that you're still going to be one of the little people in Celestia and that's OK.

But in general yeah the "Church of Pelor" and the "Cult of Asmodeus" are structured identically. People turn to them for the same reasons, but have different opinions of which is a better fit for them personally depending on their individual tempernents. Cult in D&D just means the dedicated faithful of an Evil (or sometimes merely Chaotic) god.

it is also just fundamentally completely different from real world cults. dnd type cults are basically never a scam by some guy to get money and sex. The concept of a cult kind of has to take on a different meaning when there is a bunch of actual literal gods and demons and things with incredible, observable power. The archetypal dnd cult has mote in common with lovecraft type stuff than it does with mormons, and the stereotypical cultist probably has more in common with incels than they do with the victims of jonestown

Yeah, part of this I feel is due to the fact that cult as it is used these days has basically come to be applied specifically to alternative religious movements, when that wasn't the case historically. So you get a world which basically has polytheism as an objective truth in the setting, but people still use the term "cult" in a very modern way, to create a dichotomy between "our blessed church, their evil cult."

An interesting inversion of this would be RuneQuest, where the term cult is applied as it would have been historically, to denote the devotees of a specific god in a setting that is also polytheistic! So like. D&D's implied setting is polytheistic, but its polytheism is... Actually strangely Christian. Or at least on a surface level. So you have the Good Gods with churches, and the Bad Gods with cults. (This probably does not apply across the board, but I think as a generalization it would hold true.)

Anyway I don't really know what the point was. Oh yeah, D&D uses the word cult in a very modern way to denote the "other" religions, and the more you think about it the more hilariously transparent it is.

This is an incredibly good point. I was personally first introduced to the word cult not through learning about things like Heaven's Gate (though I did learn about that in school the next year) but through learning about Mithraism (the cult of mithras) and other "mystery cults" in roman religion, which were basically minority sub-sets of the general polytheism of the time, which were just more niche than some of the other gods, and I think D&D and it's imitators definitely lean into niche religion (but evil) for their own definition. Interestingly it is actually applied to Christianity at times! Some sources I've read talk about Lindisfarne having the cult of St Cuthbert. I think I've lost my point. Thank you for reading my ramble

Jumping off that note about how weirdly christian d&d religion is, I'd also like to point out how much the game's idea of "demon worshipping cultists" is influenced by the satantic panic, which was just starting to take over the American cultural zeitgeist around the same time that the game was coming together.

I've talked about this before, but there's almost a 1:1 relation between how d&d treats cultists and how "the satanist" existed in the imagination of late 70s early 80s middle America; A cartoonishly evil psycho who was continuously committing ritual sacrifice and purposefully malicious deeds in the hope of being rewarded by the dark powers (which totally existed and were a real threat to the godfearing populace).

I know it seems ironic now given how much d&d became a target of such moral panics only a few years later (which the d&d fandom embraced wholeheartedly for extra edginess cred) but the people who made the game were devout christians and churchgoers, and had much of their view on what evil was and how it looked informed by that particular worldview.

I'm going to keep most of my reasoning behind developing this system below the cut but I think we can all agree that D&D's combat can be painfully static. I love fight scenes but after going down a combined stage combat/ videogame boss design rabbit hole I've realized that one of the primary elements is missing from D&D's combat system, namely: Movement

From a mechanical perspective, D&D combat needs movement to break up the monotony of non-spellcater characters throwing punches at eachother until one of them drops, to introduce increased risk and randomness without damage-spike abilities.

From a narrative perspective, D&D combat needs movement to introduce tension and to help put character into day to day fighting beyond just flavor text. Likewise, fights that give different opportunities for movement will feel different from one another, making them stand out in the party's mind.

First and foremost I'm saving this for my own use; this is a good concept and I want to think about it for my own D&D-like. Ranged attacks have the same fundamental advantage in games which care about spatial positioning that they do in real life, e.g. making kiting a valid strategy, but melee is pretty core to the fantasy of the sword-and-sorcery genre and I've been wanting a solid niche for it since I read the article I just linked.

*In 5E, Dexterity already has a lot more functions than the other five abilitystats, especially its direct competitor, Strength. Given that you specifically highlighted non-Rogue melee as an area of concern, it seems a little weird to dedicate so much of this system to DEX mains.

*By making this depend on unmodified rolls, Press Attack is going to become somewhere between useless and a weird rider on crits toward the endgame, and Give Ground is... not going to render you invincible like I thought, because it doesn't actually prevent you from taking damage, but is still going to trigger literally every attack for DEX-maining characters after Level 8 or so. I feel like there's a better way to do this. Maybe literally just make Give Ground a reaction, and the attacker chooses to follow or miss? And Press Attack as an option on every successful melee attack (against a creature you can shove?).

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