The Road to Splashdown

Earlier today, I read Patrick Stuart's newest post 'Spider is a Mushroom Now', and immediately found I had to write something about it.

I recommend you read it in full: it's distilled Patrick, and it's set my brain on fire like nothing else has since Veins of the Earth.

In brief, it covers a lot of the sci-fi worldbuilding around the Avatar film series and its paramedia, and follows those premises where they lead, rather than compressing them into an unathorized Dances With Wolves remake.

In particular, he puts a lot of attention on Ey'wa, the planet-spanning fungus consciousness (oh, yeah, now I see why the creator of Veins of the Earth is into this), not just as the mandatory vague animistic deity for Cameron's noble savage blue cat aliens to worship, but as an agent with its own goals and means. While he doesn't mention it explicitly in the post, it's not hard to tease out an interpretation in which Pandora is, on the scale of deep time, a post-apocalyptic setting, the long aftermath of some great conflict or catastrophe in which psychic mushrooms were the ultimate winner: a million years after the zombie apocalypse, a new kind of life blooms again, even intelligent life which the fungus cannot directly control, so it establishes rules.

Remain close to nature, symbiotic, harmonious. Do not separate yourself from nature with walls of stone, or metal tools. It remembers a time when such things existed, and it won the war against them, but it might not win a second time against creatures already adapted to its spores, so best to prevent their creation at all.

Then, of course, the sky-people arrive from their distant star in vessels of metal, so separated from nature that they can traverse the void of space. They're here for the planet's natural resources (a room-temperature superconductor in the first movie, apparently later movies introduce Pandoran whale juice that makes humans immortal???? idk I never watched the sequels), but their presence makes everything much more complicated: not only does their technology tempt the Pandoran sophonts to abandon the laws of Ey'wa and separate themselves from nature for comfort and power (not exactly many takers in the first movie, but apparently later films introduce some breakaway Na'vi factions that take up human weaponry and rebel against Ey'wa), but the humans have also developed their Avatar tech: they can directly transmit one organism's consciousness into another kind of organism, and later films show the technology develop to the point that consciousnesses can be downloaded, cloned, and uploaded virtually at will. 

Not only does this enable the humans to send infiltrators among the Na'vi, but once the Pandoran sophonts learn about it, it raises a lot of very uncomfortable questions about the Na'vi's animistic religion, in which the souls of dead Na'vi find a kind of immortality within the Ey'wa supernetwork, and can even be reincarnated into new bodies later on. 

It's enough of a blow to any religion to discover that aliens (humans, in this case) are real, they've never heard of your god before, and they have weapons that can pose a serious threat to it... it's potentially fatal if it turns out that the primary promise of your religion, a kind of eternal consciousness and life after death, has been replicated by these aliens... but they're just making copies of the dead with no continuity. Blue cat aliens are not prepared for the teletransportation paradox.

So yeah, the humans gotta go. No making trade deals, no special exception to the Laws of Ey'wa so the Sky People can take the shiny minerals they want and then leave. It's an existential fight, one in which Ey'wa has the upper hand, because the other side hasn't realized the scale yet.

The humans think they're fighting a resource war. They laugh in their top scientist's face when she suggests that the natives' belief that their entire planet is a living superconsciousness might have some merit. They haven't even begun to suspect that Ey'wa is playing the long game: that the military losses the human resource extraction machine faces at the hands of technologically underpowered natives is only a tiny fraction of the force a planet-spanning superconsciousness could throw at them if it wanted to. Just token resistance, throwing expendable sophonts into the grinder so the humans don't start worrying that this is all too easy. 

Meanwhile, colossal quantities of Pandora's mineral, and later biochemical, bounty, are on express shipments back to Earth, the latter for the explicit and direct consumption of the human elite.

I can really only quote Stuart here:

Bits of Mycelial Web - if you are taking people and materials off Pandora and transporting them back to earth, surely no matter how careful you are, bits and pieces of mycelial web are going to be transported too? Maybe this doesn’t matter if the pieces are too small to ever come into contact with each other and too small to carry any ‘Eywa’ identity, but what happens if they do meet, and do start to grow in earths Anthrocene Environment - could there be a Hive Mind Plague on Earth? If a Hive Mind emerges on Earth, what would its character be?

She would be derived from whatever fragments of Ey’wa survived in the fungi, but much of her impression of sentience would be born from the human species – a much more cosmopolitan, technophilic, dominant species, which, unlike the Naavi, has not spent several millennia ‘living in balance’ with nature, but trying to control it. Shadow-Ey’wa might be a lot less pleasant to deal with than Hippy Ey’wa, and might also be more directly intelligent – having absorbed the knowledge of relentless centuries of human development. Imperial Ey’wa?

I rather prefer the interpretation that the Pandoran superconsciousness is only appears like a 'hippy' because it has already won millions of years ago: the fungus is, by its nature, imperial, it just operates on a longer timescale. But if it did replicate on earth, how much of the original personality, if we can speak in those terms, would survive? Would humanity influence it back? Could this potentially lead to a colossal, interstellar war between the two superconsciousnesses? Perhaps the original Ey'wa suspects it might lose this bout, but better that my daughter-clone should rule the universe than a bunch of monocorporal monkeys.

But of course, this interpretation is waaaaay off in deep future, just as Ey'wa's theoretical origins lie waaaaay back in deep history. In the near term, it's in battle with humanity's very own superconsciousness: the Resource Development Association megacorporation. I quite like the possibility of players in this kind of campaign coming to rebel against the evil, imperialist megacorporation (most players will, given the chance), only later discovering that this cycle has played itself out before, when the stars were different. That Lovecraftian vertigo on realizing one's place in deep time is really delicious.

Okay, But What About an Actual Campaign

Stuart outlines the basic premise of a campaign set in this interpretation of the Pandora setting and the outline of what kinds of scenarios we might expect to see, and I like it all so much I'm going to adopt it straightforwardly with a few tweaks.

First, I have no intention of setting mine in the actual setting of Pandora, reinterpreted or no. I simply have no attachment to the series, haven't seen any of it since the first movie, and don't plan to start now. I'd rather take these lovely worldbuilding ideas and use them to start from scratch. 

Second, I'm rather more inclined to play out a survival/first contact premise, rather than the more developed 'hive of scum and villainy' 'conjunction of worlds' premise that Stuart lays out in the specifics.

Third, I'll probably try to use a modified version of the Pathfinder 2e system for this one, where Stuart defaults to an unspecified OSR system. This is mainly out of convenience with finding players. 

Broadly, here's how I would structure such a campaign:

Intro: 0 level

The players (all 0-level humans with an intended class and a background) meet for the first time in Cryonics. They're all some kind of specialist that have (for varying reasons) joined a long-haul mission to colonize a faraway planet: they're reassured about the incredible safety of the cryosleep technology and spaceflight as a whole, but even so, this mission carries a good deal of risk. Even in the best case scenario, they'll likely never see earth again - humans and technology go in one direction, go back in the other. And even if they do one day get to return to earth and see the improvements made to it by this mission, it's over 800 years each way: everyone they ever knew will be long dead (1). 

Give the players a little while to talk and get to know the people they'll be waking up next to in almost a millennium. Let the players talk about why they're here. Normal, happy people don't do this kind of thing!

Then time comes to enter cryosleep, and all goes dark. 

After a dark eternity, they wake up in hell. Their bodily extremities are still freezing, but their lungs are on fire. Flashing lights and klaxons overwhelm their senses. In front of them is some... thing.

Tall and bulky, but most certainly not human: through tear-streaked eyes, they can make out something chitinous and green... except it's not actually green. It's wearing fatigues.

They'll be quite surprised when it starts pulling bulky masks over their faces... and then all of a sudden they can breathe.

In the moments to come, they learn about what happened: their interstellar transport wavered off-course on approach to the primary colony site on this planet, and wound up making a catastrophic landing attempt at nearly the opposite pole from their destination. Almost everyone died, almost everything was destroyed. 

But in their attempts to make a landing, a lot of cryopods and equipment modules were ejected and landed in a fan along the colony ship's trajectory, and though many of these were smashed to pieces against mountains or fell into the depths of the ocean, a fair number actually made it through the fall partly intact and even maintained cryonics functionality using their backup fission reactors. Including yours.

Once the survivors of the main crash site got their bearings and established basic survival functions at their settlement, they started following transponder signals and rescuing other survivors as fast as they could.

In your case, that took about twenty years.

The beetle-like thing in front of you is a human being... or at least what twenty years on this planet have forced a human being to turn into, in order to survive long-distance journeys on foot across the planet's inimical surface. 

The only place in this hemisphere that gene-standard humans can breathe without filter masks is the wreck colony of Splashdown. And Colonel Maine -- again, the beetle -- is taking you there whether you like it or not. Not too many specialists of your caliber survived the crash, and that means he'll get a big payday for bringing you back.

That's the premise of the first, 0-level adventure: travel from your crash site to Splashdown, across an archipelago dense with jungles and swamps, interrupted by stretches of shallow ocean. Outrun, outwit, or fight the hostile wildlife. Make it to Splashdown in one piece.

Maybe there's a bunch of other 0-level NPC survivors in your cryo-cluster, and you've got to keep as many of the alive as possible too.

Mechanics

To change assumed settings so completely, we'll need to adjust certain mechanics.

Progression, Ancestry and General Feats

At the start of the campaign, all players begin as 0-level gene-standard humans. As the campaign goes on, those starting characters can be mutated and changed in different ways.

The first is by deliberate gene modification: a lot of the researchers and equipment on board the ship was related to bio-genetic modification research, and boy if the alien environment isn't just lousy with samples. In play, this is accomplished using PF2e's General Feats: instead of some of the General Feat options already available, a given player may choose to undergo an experimental genetic modification: this may allow them to more survive longer in the atmosphere, or to be able to metabolize local biomaterial and drink the water (albeit inefficiently, requiring them to consume larger quantities compared to regular food), et cetera. I'll need to create these feats.

The second is by wholesale mutation into something entirely non-human. This can happen under some conditions when a human dies in the not-Pandoran ecosystem but their body remains relatively whole and exposed. 

The psychic essence of the planet itself reaches out to you, and offers you another chance: to be reborn as part of itself, as something totally new, and live. Don't resist: take this planet's native ecosystem into yourself, and allow it to mutate you.

This results in far more fundamental and extreme changes than the gene modification: mechanically, this is a full ancestry change, mechanically, wiping away your previous ancestry feats (and general feats related to gene modification, if applicable) and giving yourself a whole new set of feats, reselected up to your current level.

This comes with several major advantages: for one, becoming a mutant directly allows you to breathe the planet's air without a filter, drink the water, and metabolize local biomass. At the same time, you lose the ability to survive in a human-standard atmosphere or metabolize regular food. You need a new kind of filtered mask in order to survive in a hermetic human settlement, and those masks are produced much less commonly and are harder to find and replace the filters for.

Then, of course, comes the fear, loathing, and discrimination that is laid on you by some other humans. Mutants tend to live in a small settlement just outside the regular human techno-city.

Many mutants keep the mystical aspect of this experience to themselves, though a handful have confided this to human leadership, who are extremely alarmed. Eventually, this will lead to many mutants worshiping the planet itself as a god, much as the native sophonts already do, a major challenge to corporate human hegemony.

Third: the native sophonts of not-Pandora. Though at the beginning of the campaign, humans won't know the local languages and vice versa (and some factions within the human leadership will expend a lot of resources keeping people convinced that the local fauna are not, in fact, sapient), it will inevitably eventually come out that communication is possible, and boy are those early conversations going to be awkward.

The exact path taken by inter-species relations from this stage forward will be extremely dependent on campaign specifics, but it's quite likely that interaction with at least some members of these other species will become relatively routine, and with that, the party may eventually come to include some of them, especially as players flow in and out of the campaign and player characters die.

Fourth: 'Avatars'. Because of course. Humans have developed the technology to implant the memories and consciousness of one being into another, and this only becomes more common as time goes on. The full implications of this is explored more in Stuart's original post, but it's by no means unexpected that, with time, the party could come to include human minds implanted in the bodies of local sophonts... or vice versa.

All these ancestry options will need to be detailed and statted up with their own feat selection. Nontrivial.

Logistics and Survival

Unlike a lot of PF2e games, this would be one in which the Survival skill is core, rather than an afterthought. We'll want to change the system's existing, but extremely lax rules for nutrition and water, which at present basically allows a party to carry weeks of food and water without issue. We'll make that limitation harsher. 

We'll also have to consider what kind of human-compatible food is even being produced here: are they hyper-processing the local fauna and flora to remove toxic components and bring out the nutrients humans need? Are they performing hydroponics with purified water and seed stores?

Modified humans that are able to metabolize local biomatter will be able to supplement their food intake by hunting or foraging on journeys, but they need to consume several times more than if they were eating earth food. Fully mutated humans who can no longer breathe an earth atmosphere are able to metabolize local biomatter without issue.

We'll also probably want to emphasize hexcrawl mechanics and random encounter tables for exploration and traversal throughout the setting. The restrictions this places on a party's chosen activities, especially if their goals are located further away from Splashdown, is going to motivate a lot of very fun planning and side-objectives. Yes, we want to investigate the cryo-cluster transponder signal over in the western archipelago, but it's too far for us to make it on foot and back without starving to death. This could be resolved by:

1) Turning more members of the party into mutants and new-genes and doing more foraging

2) Establishing friendly (or at least non-hostile) relations with the local sophonts, such that their settlements could serve as places of respite, trade, and resupply.

3) Acquire forms of transportation that can make it through the thick jungle more quickly, while carrying more weight, or both. Or figure out reliable sea and air travel to bypass the jungle completely. Guess who has millennia of experience doing just that...

It may be a good idea to plunder the UltraViolet Grasslands book for caravan and exploration mechanics. Frankly, this whole setting would make for a good UVG campaign, but I'm more likely to find players for PF2e, so there we go.

Alignment Chart

Wait a hot second, what do we need an alignment chart for? PF2e Remaster completely removed alignment, didn't it? Why are we adding it back?

Mainly because, as I pointed out several years ago in Down With the Law/Chaos, alignment is actually a really neat tool if your setting does actually revolve around the conflict it models. And our setting very much revolves around the conflict between humanity/technology/dominion and the natives/symbiocity/harmony.

The player characters would start out Unaligned, and as they learn more about the alien world they're stranded on, they can develop a point of view and eventually a set alignment.

For the time being, I think we can make do with a single axis: Dominion vs Harmony. All the nuances and subtleties of morality can be left off the scale.

That said, I am tempted to add an Idealist/Pragmatist axis on top of it: very on point for a scifi game.

Fire and Guns

While fire isn't unknown on our not-Pandora, it's certainly less common and harder to produce: something-something non-reactive gases, something-something high proportion of CO2, something-something. 

One side effect of this is that firearms don't work nearly as well as they do on Earth: they'll fire, but they're much less powerful, delivering less force at lower ranges. Guns adapted for the not-Pandoran atmosphere tend, by great coincidence, to have performance characteristics similar to early modern gunpowder weapons which PF2e models: they fire more slowly, are more cumbersome, and take dedicated expertise to use well. 

Just like that, melee weapons and bows are looking like pretty good options, aren't they? Especially since they don't immediately give away your location to every hostile lifeform in a mile.

Magic

I've left off talking about the elephant in the room for quite a while. How, exactly, do we fit magic into this setting? We've managed to justify melee weapons being relevant in the 2Xth century, but what about literal magic spells?

To that I will answer: Psychic Mushrooms.

Or, if nothing else, it means that we have to curate the PF2e class list to emphasize the more relevant options and remove the ones that don't quite fit.

PF2e does have, for example an Intelligence-based caster called the Psychic. I didn't put them on the class list for my last campaign, but they make perfect sense here: we can probably remove wizards and sorcerers, but maybe we can leave Witches (their familiars being weird intelligent animals with crazy powers?) and we're definitely keeping druids. Not sure about bards. 

At some point after the zero-level adventure, when the party is getting set up in Splashdown, a combination of weird experiences and testing will reveal that they've developed some strange powers, seemingly related to the strange magnetic and biological phenomena of the planet.

This isn't a hard sci-fi game, I'm pretty satisfied with this answer.

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I think that's where I'll end today. This idea's got good legs, and as I'm looking to form a new tabletop group in NYC right about now, this might be just the right kind of neat premise to start with.

If you liked this post, be sure to follow the blog so you see the next one! Until next time, have a great week.

Footnotes

(1) In Avatar, Pandora orbits around our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri A, just over 4 light years away. Lucky humanity, finding a life-bearing planet and a room-temperature superconductor on literally the closest place outside of our solar system! But I'm inclined towards larger distances and larger timescales: this isn't humanity's first rodeo when it comes to colonizing an exoplanet, perhaps even a life-bearing one, though this may well be the first planet humanity in this setting encounters with preexisting intelligent life.

State of the Blog Year 7

 Well, this is a bit awkward.

Content

I only published one (1) singular post this year, Brief Thoughts on Fantasy Monotheism. It was a short, mostly stream-of-consciousness pondering of a model of fantasy divinity that better merges Standard Fantasy Polytheism with Big Centralized Church in a way that allows a lot of the broad tropes, stories, and dynamics people want out of both of those, while at the same time opening new and more detailed possibilities by making this model explicit and visible to the players.

There were some aspects of this idea, as I noted in a comment, that I forgot to even mention in the post itself, so I regard it as somewhat incomplete, and I may return to the topic at some point to flesh it out further, possibly revamping my old Shrines and Saints system (the more I think about it, this remains one of my best ideas that I've never fully executed on. I might need to port this to PF2e).

Since this is rather thin on the ground, I might as well list some of the blog posts I started drafting, but never finished:

Some Early Thoughts on PF2e and the Old School and Fleeing in Pathfinder: A pair of posts I've been writing and rewriting periodically since I started playing PF2e: there's a lot I love about the system, but there are holes in it, especially around parts of exploration and fleeing from combat, that cry out to be filled: with that, I could see myself running a somewhat trimmed-down version of the system for an old-school style game.

Worldbuilding: The Transmigration of Souls: A fragmentary exploration of what exactly an angel, devil, demon etc *is* in terms of fantasy metaphysics. Not quite sure what direction I was going with for this one.

What is a Goblin, Anyway? Monsters as Statblocks vs Play Patterns: Following a disagreement with JB from B/X Blackrazor (though I have no idea where to find that argument now) a reflection on AD&D monsters and how we can interact with them as statblocks or as play-patterns+flavor, and what these different approaches imply for your game.

The Warlock: Mercenary, Company Man, Vassal: Inspired by a Pointy Hat video, an exploration of different ways to imagine the 5e Warlock as a fantasy archetype, tracing source inspirations from the medieval witch to Dr. Faustus, to Daniel Webster and The Devil, to Elric of Melniboné and Harry Dresden, showing how the notion of what a 'pact with dark powers' even means and implies, metaphysically, changes a lot with cultural assumptions, and we can play with these possibilities in fantasy RPGs. 

Whence the Bandit?: A draft I've been coming back to repeatedly for over a year now, but which I can never get right: intended to be an exploration of historical banditry as a social phenomenon and significant literary portrayals, from Water Margin to The Count of Monte Cristo. The poverty of the fantasy bandit as a trope or archetype is, in my opinion, rooted in the cultural distance to this phenomenon, such that it's been totally flanderized and nearly worthless, but we can recover it with some reading and re-energizing of the concept.

Diagnostics

In spite of posting almost nothing this year, the one post I did write is... one of my most popular posts to date? I haven't been checking my stats lately so I didn't notice until I sat down to check, but I haven't gotten a post this widely-read since Ship of the Damned, which was published four years earlier. 

My stats also show that the blog received 103,000 reads in the last 12 months, making this by far my most-read year. The vast majority of these views are concentrated in my old, top posts, with Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse continuing to be my most popular post by a country mile.

I'm inclined to think most of these views are bots of some variety, particularly since one of my views from the last 24 hours supposedly originated from 'perplexity.ai'. In all likelihood, a lot of undisciplined web scrapers are crawling the blog and providing phantom views to posts.

That said, there are hopefully some new, actual human readers in the crowd and I do invite you to introduce yourselves in the comments!

Away From the Blog

I know I said this last year, but good goddamn this has been an eventful and busy year for me. I don't even know where to begin, so let's start at the end. 

As of a couple weeks ago, I finally finished my MS degree and have now moved out of Chicago to Manhattan, and will soon begin a job search in earnest, along with searching for a new, in-person tabletop group. Earlier in the year, I became a great deal more involved with my local software meetups and open-source communities, and have now spoken several times at meetups and small conferences. I spend a good bit of my time these days contributing to an open-source black hole simulation codebase (I'm not an physicist, just a code monkey helping them optimize it). I also got involved with a group of academic sleuths, helping them to detect and publicize scientific frauds and developing software to help them do it. 

In all the commotion, role-playing fell by the wayside: I did complete my PF2e game this spring as expected, though I had to rush it with less time than expected and it ended up being quite railroady, which I regret. I ran a couple pick-up sessions this summer for colleagues at my internship, and for my little cousins, all in PF2e. I had intended to at least run a couple small sessions this fall, but the final quarter of my MS proved to be far too busy.

Hopefully, I'll be back to regular play at some point in the coming year, which will get the blog juices flowing again. 

One other obstacle to the blog is that I'm increasingly writing elsewhere on other topics, mainly on software on my personal site and on scientific topics on a substack (though I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the platform and may move that somewhere else in time). I started this blog and a lot of my internet presence kinda-pseudonymously, but I'm no longer bothering to keep these separate, so have at the links. The software stuff is a lot of inside baseball, much of it talk transcriptions, tutorials, and reference material rather than more accessible introductory stuff (though I am currently writing an introduction to scientific Python and high-performance computing patterns that I will publish on my personal site, if that's the kind of things that tickles your fancy).

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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to regular readers and commenters gyrovague and D-Skelector, and to new commenter Dave Bloodaxe! I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful new year!

Brief Thoughts on Fantasy Monotheism

It had not been my intention to leave the blog fallow for almost six months after its five year anniversary. However, heading into my graduate degree, job search, and preparing to move house, it's fallen by the wayside. 

Actual gaming, however, has not. A week and change ago I finished my Pharos campaign in Pathfinder 2e, all fourteen sessions of it (yes, scheduling students continues to be a challenge). I come out of it still very much liking PF2e as a system, and wanting to use it a good deal more in the future. It fits the 'modern, character-centric action-fantasy OC-style game' niche very well, far better than my past forays into D&D 5e, and I trust that it will continue to be my accessible, mainstream game of choice through which I can seduce new players into other systems. 

I have other thoughts on PF2e and the effects of not having solid rules for fleeing combat on player choice and exploration, but I'm going to let those simmer a little longer. 

Today, a brief worldbuilding consideration: how do we square fantasy pantheons with monotheistic churches?

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When it comes to depictions of organized religion in fantasy, I find myself pulled in a couple directions. 

First, modern d20 fantasy games tend to assume a large, non-exhaustive pantheon of gods with varying domains, which players don't necessarily need to have any particular attitude towards, though they can choose to focus on one, and generally need to if they're a cleric (but generally not if they're a paladin, in modern games). This trope descends primarily from depictions of the Greek and Roman pantheons, as well as treatments of pagan religions in pulps like Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. 

On the other hand, the large, monolithic capital-C Church, primarily related to the real-world Catholic church, especially through depictions in literature and film from Dracula (via Abraham van Helsing and through him the OD&D Cleric) to anything set in the Spanish Inquisition. Depictions of this church in a given fantasy campaign can range from central to distant, staunch allies or corrupt villains, but there's just the one, with schisms and factional differences generally pushed to the side. 

It's not very easy to square these two tropes, but by the gods people have spent ages trying. 

I tried to do it in my Pharos campaign with the Concordance Church (not to be confused with that other thing from Pathfinder lore I know nothing about), a unified institution on the small, isolated island of Pharos wherein each of the Gods of the Inner Sea have their own shrine and priesthood, sharing a big tent and working intermittently towards shared goals. It was a rather hacky solution, which didn't fit neatly into the campaign and generally caused confusion more than it simplified things. 

These thoughts were kicked off by re-reading Monte Cook's Ptolus, which also tries to square this circle. In that case, the eponymous city is the center of a powerful regional church of the totally-not-Catholic variety (instead of a cross, it's an ankh!) dedicated to Lothian, while also featuring an entire district dedicated to the patchwork worship of gods large and small, from the tavern-church of the god of drink to the squalid, unmaintained temple of the rat god. 

It's a valiant and effortful attempt, but ultimately not one that really resonates with me, and since I may be trying my hand at running another Ptolus campaign in the future, it's something I wanted to figure out early. 

I haven't seen this particular depiction of a fantasy mono-church before, so here goes the idea:

The church/temple as a unified intermediary between the gods and mortals.

To fall into the hands of even a good god is a terrible thing. Even the best and most compassionate are distant. They fight battles on fronts that mortals can scarcely imagine, work toward ends hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and see the efforts of a single mortal as parts of a whole tapestry, not their individual struggle. For a mortal to dedicate their life in the service of such a being requires selflessness and faith very few can mach, and many are broken in the attempt. 

And of the gods which are not actively good, or are actively evil, let us not speak. 

Nevertheless, the gods in ancient times made great demands of the people who would ask them for safekeeping, aid, or power. They would demand children for lifelong service, warriors for their holy wars, and sacrifices to appease them, perhaps all in one. The aid of the gods was essential, but the price was high. 

And then, one day, there arose a new church, created by some founder-saint of your choosing. It was not dedicated to any single god, but neither was it some expertise in comparative religion. It was an institution built to shelter mortals and intercede with the gods, not one person or one family or one tribe or one nation at a time, but for all mortals, even those who were not aware of its existence. 

It was a radical, revolutionary thing. One of the more rash gods probably smote this founder-saint in a very dramatic fashion. But with time and effort, it worked. It gained enough lay adherents and wise priests, and it was able to bring many gods, not all of them but a great many, to the table, and spoke to them with one voice. 

It sought to standardize, collate, and order the workings of religion. It brought together the many rites and rituals and doctrines of the gods in one place, translated and discussed them, and made use of that knowledge. It made legible and transparent what a god could offer to members of the church, and what could be demanded in return. It even brought suit against some of the gods, before the eyes of their divine peers, for wrath wrought upon the innocent, for covenants broken, and excessive cost demanded in service and sacrifice.

This was dangerous work. High priests in those early days served for life, and had shockingly short tenures. But over time, it became normal. The gods adapted, and so did mortals. The church did not stretch to every part of the world, and not every god was a member in good standing (far from it!), but it was large enough and had enough sway that even those who were not members had to pay attention. 

This leads to all the interesting complications you would expect. When all the complaints and demands of vast and varied peoples need to be boiled down into a single proposal for the year or season, how do you prioritize things? Who can you possibly trust to perform that work, and to bring it to the table? What kind of corruption can fester when there is a near-monopoly on the production of miracles? What new errors and disasters can come when the gods act through intermediaries?

Interest groups form. Committees for and against the flooding of a great river, cults championing the gods of winter and twilight against day and summer. A county whose repeated demands for the eradication of a plague have gone unheeded starts causing trouble at the conclave and threatens to secede from the church. Was this the fault of a bureaucratic mixup? A petition dropped in favor of other interests? Or perhaps were the gods just not listening? What would be worse? 

There are evil gods at the table too, and not everyone knows how to feel about that. Platitudes about the devil you know are a lot less convincing when the Tongue of Asmodeus is in the room playing literal devil's advocate while everyone else is trying to stop a war. 

Then there's all the other gods. The ones who aren't members in good standing, yet still very much possess divine power and can demand sacrifices and service in exchange for their favor. Some regions where they hold sway and the local population is too scared or proud to join with the church. Influential clerics within the church striking out on their own and taking a small cult with them. Every so often, a god will join or leave, and it's always a big event. That's how you get isolated cults out in the mountains or hidden in cities. Not all of them are evil or even harmful, but they're all trying to deal with the divine on their own terms, for their own needs, and are willing to dedicate themselves far more intensely in order to ensure someone listens. They just need to do this out of common sight, or else face censure. 

And there's no denying that there are big benefits for the gods who join as well. Yes, they must submit to the will of their 'peers' and descent to barter with mortals, but they find great stability in exchange. All of a sudden, sacrifices and songs and rituals are being conducted in their name, in strict accordance with their desired doctrine, in regions where they might have never performed a single miracle, by people who a few generations ago did not know they existed. It flows in like clockwork, and the demands upon them in exchange are predictable and stable from year to year. 

It's extremely messy, and I love that. I think this manages to simultaneously:

•     have the big, monolithic church which can be the source of crusades and inquisitions and corruption as well as organized faith and charity,
•     involve many fantasy gods of varying domains and morality,
•     invite interesting human elements instead of flattening them, and make room for a wide variety of possible adventure hooks

It also evokes, at least as far as my knowledge of ancient religions go, more of the spirit of how actual ancient pagan religious systems worked. The Greek and Roman pantheons are the core inspiration for these fantasy pantheons, but they worked rather differently than imagined. You don't become a priest of Jupiter just by devoting yourself at some point and staying there, it was a whole career progression, and you'd be just as likely to spend time with responsibilities over a general sector, such as the declaration of peace and war, as to spend your days organizing the temple of a particular god. 

I think I'm going to use this concept for my next d20-style fantasy game, whether it's Ptolus or something else. I think it's got great potential!

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State of the Blog Year 6

Thus have we reached the 6th anniversary of A Distant Chime! On to the reflections. 

Content

I wrote only 13 posts this year, the same as 2022 and a bit less than in 2023. Most of these posts were AD&D session reports or playtest notes for the House of Pestilence. Now that I'm running PF2e as my home game, I've fallen off the habit of making session reports, largely because I conceive of this blog as a space for discussing old school games first and foremost, and I just don't feel such a strong urge to blog and record games when they're not old school. Granted, I also just graduated and am in the process of getting a masters' degree, so I have considerably less free blogging time than I used to. Nevertheless, I do occasionally get a spark of creativity (or obsession) and write something that isn't a session report.

Highlights for the year:

The biggest without a doubt was Village on the Borderlands Review: C'mon Man!, in which I reacted to the fracas at that moment around Mark Taormino's module and its caustic critical reception. Sitting at some 11k words, I believe it is the single longest post on this blog by a considerable margin, and I wrote it all in a mad rush just as I was unexpectedly moving house. I stand by every word of it. 

In World Without Fire, I elaborate a concept for a campaign based in a world where humanity is unable to create fire, driving dependence on sentient flames, like ancient pagan gods, in order to survive and thrive. 

In AD&D Session 9: Return to Castle Xyntillan, I brought my then-current campaign and my old CX campaign crashing back together. It was very nostalgic for me, and I think the players also had fun. 

In Draft: Simpler AD&D Psionics Rules, I put forth a basic rewrite of the mechanics and flavor of psionics, with plenty of gaps left to fill. 

Diagnostics

Blogger tells me that the blog has seen 52k views, more than the year before despite lower density of overall posts. I've also seen 38 comments, mainly driven by the Village on the Borderlands review, which is by far my most popular new post. Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse remains my most viewed post of the year and overall. I really had no idea that would be what people found this blog through! 

Presentation

I rarely advertise posts outside the blog anymore. I suppose it ain't broke, so I'm not fixing it. 

Index

The blog's index is presently... 4 years out of date. I'll probably get around to fixing it up later. 

Away From the Blog

As with last year, it's been a busy and eventful year for me, but I've managed to keep up a more-or-less weekly game for parts of the year. Though I didn't blog about it, I was quite happy this summer to have multiple games with my uncle and little cousins, playing PF2e. I came into this hobby on my own, so it's nice to introduce and teach the new generation. I expect my current PF2e game will last through spring, after which I will be moving and will need to find an entirely new group. I may also end up reviving Cascabel, the setting of my AD&D campaign, but running it in a old-school-ified hack of PF2e, as I outlined in The Pathfinder Megadungeon. That remains in the future, though. 

I can't believe it's been a year already, but I'm also quite happy to note that my submission to the NAPIII contest came in 2nd, considerably better than I had hoped amid the stuff competition. Last year, I also teased that I was working on another module, Three Lives in the Crystal Pyramid of Xeen-Thoth. Development on that actually got quite far, but in the absence of a group I could use for playtesting (now that I'm running PF2e instead) and everything else keeping me busy, I'm afraid it's fallen by the wayside. I am, however, working on a short (unplaytested) AD&D module for another contest, which I'll need to finish up in the next week. 

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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to Man of the Atom, D-Skelector, gyrovague, and Sully, I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful New Year!

Mini-Thought: Blind Retreat

My current schedule doesn't leave much room for blogging, though I am running a regular Pathfinder 2E game that I'm quite enjoying, and which I will reflect more deeply on wrt to the old-school in the future. 

But I did have a quick, totally untested thought on the subject of fleeing and retreating from combat—PF2e having no such system and the designers seemingly being hostile to the idea entirely is one of the enduring obstacles to running PF2e in an old-school fashion. 

If, in the middle of combat, one player expresses a desire to retreat, this will often lead to an argument, breaking the flow of the game and bringing what should be a tense fight to a screeching halt. If such a situation arises, consider doing this: immediately call an end to out-of-character discussion and instruct all players to decide, on their own, whether they should retreat, and to pass that decision to you in a hidden note. Then continue the combat as normal. At the top of the next round, the players who decided to retreat have done so, if they are able. 

I like this outline of a process because it invokes the chaos of battle and the fog of war; you don't always have total understanding of what your allies are doing, and you also don't have the ability to convince them to stand fast the moment they start to waver. Unit cohesion is determined by factors off the battlefield, and the degree to which player characters act in unison should also, in part, be a matter of player cohesion. 

Is this anything?

The Pathfinder Megadungeon

You've been down underground for days. 

When your party's thief said she smelled some gold down that dark corridor, you said it was a bad idea. You were low on food, water, and light already, and your pockets were already almost full with what treasure you could carry. Why test your luck any further? Why tempt fate?

The rest of the party decided to go along, though. Instead of treasure, you found a pit that deposited you all three floors deeper. Without a map showing the way out, running and hiding from the monsters that stalk its corridors, you've been out of food for days, and the waterskins are down to their last dregs. 

Then, from around the corner, voices. Orcs, lesser servitors of the minotaur king that rules this level. Your party sets upon them from surprise, and loots the bodies. Flasks of lamp oil, good. Food, better. Water, best. And maybe, just maybe, this crudely-scratched piece of tree bark is a map. 

It's a playstyle that might feel weird and alien to lots of gamers today, but that kind of scenario, in which the challenge of a dungeon is not just to clear it, but to survive it, goes back to the earliest days of adventure gaming. It's a fantasy that leans less on heroic action, and more on a kind of survival horror. You want to change your fate and become something more, and for that you need magic and gold. There's gold in the dungeon. But there's monsters in the dungeon, creatures that will drag you into the dark and eat you if you aren't careful. If you want to fight those, you need equipment and power. Magic and gold would be great for that. Where can I get some of that? Oh. 

This was a style of play exemplified by the megadungeon: an adventure site that was not meant to be cleared out in a single expedition, or even a handful, but which you could keep coming back to again and again, growing ever more powerful and going ever deeper. Dozens of levels, hundreds of rooms, with monsters that repopulate and move between delves, so large that it can never be fully cleared. 

As the fantasy adventure game met new audiences and changed, that survival horror aspect got outcompeted by heroic fantasy, largely centered around combat, with lots of character customization. That's how you start with game where character creation is two choices, six numbers, and some equipment, in which combat is much more zoomed out, and fifty years later wind up with Pathfinder 2nd edition, in which your character is developing constantly as you level and highly detailed combat is the core of the game. 

But despite that change in the major systems and assumptions of play, the appeal of the megadungeon has never really gone away. Though they went out of fashion for a while, people never really stopped publishing them, and the standards for sheer size seem to just keep increasing, from the ~1500 rooms of Stonehell to the over 2000 rooms in the Halls of Arden Vul. Outside of old-school and indie publishing, megadungeons came back into the limelight with an official megadungeon for 5e, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, in 2018, and the Abomination Vaults adventure path for Pathfinder 2nd edition. 

Since I'm in the process of switching my home game from AD&D 1st edition to Pathfinder 2e, at least for the coming year, I have something of an interest in exactly what makes a megadungeon and how one might work in newer systems. 

But there's more to a megadungeon than just putting a lot of rooms together. In particular, the feel of the megadungeon, the sense of exploring something vast which you might never be able to fully map, of planning expeditions, of possibly getting lost and needing to survive instead of win, is something which arises from the interaction between the rules of the system and the form of the megadungeon.

This is a sense which implementations of the megadungeon in more modern systems don't capture. Since I've been playing it with my little cousin lately, I'll use PF2e's Abomination Vaults as the core example, using the lens of rules+form to explore the differences and how one might create this same feeling in modern systems. 

Rules

First, what kind of rules assumptions am I talking about?

Looking at AD&D, we can see several elements which come together to create an adventure focused on exploration and survival, namely:

• Logistical Limitations: essentials such as food and water are heavy, carrying capacity is limited, light sources are similarly heavy and limited. Cleric spells (light, create water, purify food and water, create food) can pick up some of the slack, but only in a limited capacity at lower levels. A 1st-level cleric's light spell lasts only 10 minutes longer than a torch, and is competing with cure light wounds and detect evil in spell preparation. If your cleric dies, you'd best have enough of these supplies in hard form to get out of the dungeon...
• Pressure: mainly from random encounters in both the dungeon and the wilderness (with the latter often being deadlier!), combined with a very low rate of natural healing (1hp/night of rest) drives players to get as much as possible done in as little time before returning to the safety of the town. Resting in the dungeon, when possible at all, is hazardous. 
• XP Source: gold for xp encourages players to seek out treasures, following treasure maps and rumors, in order to get a smuch treasure with as little combat as possible. While combat does award XP, it's more of a consolation prize, not enough to motivate the players to seek fights on their own. 

Contrast with Pathfinder 2e:

• Logistical Limitations: While characters are limited in terms of how much Bulk they can carry, the limits on food/water and light are negligible. With 1 week's rations being a Light bulk item, a player can carry 70 days of food in a single Bulk slot (I assure you, 70 days' worth of food does not weight 5-10 pounds!). A day's water is likewise a Light bulk item, as is a torch (still lasting 1 hour, but costing only 1cp), but the real kicker is light: the light spell is a cantrip, whose effect lasts an entire day, can be recast at will, and sheds the same light as a torch. 
• Pressure: is effectively nonexistent by design. The rulebook seems to contain no guidance as to random encounters in the dungeon, and only very brief mention of them in the context of wilderness exploration. Abomination Vaults mentions the possibility briefly, but doesn't provide a mechanical framework for this, instead making it one more plate that an ambitious GM can try to keep spinning, but not part of the core experience. In the absence of an actual random encounter rate as opposed to GM fiat, these encounters lose their value in providing pressure, doubly so because combats aren't really a source of pressure in PF2e. The game is balanced such that the results of most combats are generally predictable, so unless you fill your encounter table with a bunch of severe and deadly encounters, it's going to add time to your session without adding tension. On top of that, hit points in PF2e comes back very easily, and the game assumes players enter each combat with full or nearly full hp. 
• XP Source: XP comes primarily from combat, with overcoming a trap provides 1/5th as much XP as a combat of the same level, and awards for completing objectives making up a similar minority. Players are actively incentivized to fight, rather than to avoid unnecessary fights and pick their battles. 

The result is pretty clear from the design of Abomination Vaults: while it is widely acknowledged as a difficult adventure, specifically in the combats it presents, it is still an adventure in which going room by room through each level and clearing it is the intended mode of play (it does mention in a sidebar that you should keep the dungeon active by having different monsters move in, but this has no mechanical support and thus is clearly not a design priority. Plus the big bads of the various levels clearly aren't going to respawn). 

Form

Now let's examine the form of the megadungeon and how it interfaces with the rules assumptions earlier:

First, a megadungeon's size just plain means it takes a while to cover ground, especially if you want to move slowly enough to map it out and search for traps. Every hour is another torch gone, a few more chances to get ambushed by something nasty, a little bit closer to running out of food and water. 

Every intersection is a choice: explore on, hoping you find some reward, or turn back to safety, not risking what you've already found. Caution vs greed. Some elements from earlier dungeons, which never really caught on, add a chance of getting lost or even getting dropped into a lower level of the dungeon, forcing you to look for a way out. 

At the same time, the reactivity and repopulation of the megadungeon, means that you probably aren't going to clear a whole floor, let alone the entire thing, so in each delve you must to bypass dangers you already know are there but couldn't clear out entirely, in order to get to the deeper floors where the good loot is. 

In PF2e these don't really hold. Food, water, and light are much easier to come by and weigh or cost little, treasure isn't difficult to remove from the dungeon once you've acquired it, and even a low-level PC can easily carry much more than they can expect to need. In a dungeon filled with level-appropriate encounters, there's not as much reason to be cautious, especially when fighting is the best way to reach the next level. There's no incentive to skip a floor, trying to get better loot and risking more difficult challenges: the risk and the reward are the same thing. 

And, lip service to restocking aside, the dungeon is clearable, it's just a matter of how many times you need to return to town to do it. If that wasn't the case, you could very easily end up with parties sticking around at a given floor, farming trivial encounters until they stop being worthwhile, and only then going down to what are now easy fights. This may also be why Abomination Vaults introduces milestone leveling instead of the default combat xp, to keep the players going deeper. 

Rampant Speculation

Does this mean you can't have that kind of megadungeon experience in PF2e? I don't think so, but it does men you need to rethink the form of the megadungeon, since the rules have changed as well, in order to recapture that experience. 

In particular, you would need to create new sources of time pressure and threat pressure. Just adding more wandering monsters doesn't work for the reasons listed above: combat is the reward, attrition of hit points is quickly remedied, and attrition of survival resources like food and light doesn't really come up. 

It might be heavy-handed, but my mind goes to a dungeon which is only 'open' for a limited time. Whether it's a magic portal that only opens when the stars align (the 'secret realm' trope from cultivation fantasy could be a reference) or just a physical door in a mountainside that opens and closes on a more-or-less predictable interval, the PCs are on the clock: get in, find treasure, fight monsters, accomplish objectives, and then... well, the door is going to close in an hour, and it'll probably take you forty minutes you get back. Do you push your luck, explore just one more room? Or do you hightail it back?

You'd need to calibrate this a bit, but so long as the PCs can get a lot done (but not everything they want), you push them to map and learn the layout of the dungeon so they can get to places quicker, make it less viable to take on every encounter they come across, and encourage them to make their own priorities and think in terms of expeditions, instead of just moving from room to room and knowing that their character sheets will carry the day. 

And if they get stuck inside... well, they should have plenty of supplies stocked up, right? Maybe they took the time to prepare a hidey-hole in advance, or they were able to find some kind of friendly sanctuary in the dungeon... or something that only looks like a friendly sanctuary. That's when the map is going to come in handy. Frankly, giving the opening and closing time some unpredictable variance, as little as ±1d6*10 minutes, could be great at creating situations like these and make the players nice and paranoid. 

That's not a bad thing, by the way. A paranoid party is an engaged party. So long as they have space to relax and prepare during downtime and they're greedy enough that they paranoia isn't all-encompassing, it's a great place for the players to be emotionally. 

Also, if they can't go to the dungeon anytime they please, this creates a framework for downtime activities 'what will I do until the dungeon opens again?' which gives more significance to the rules for earning income and crafting. It also makes the idea of rival parties and other factions trying to explore or exploit the dungeon more feasible, especially if you get multiple people camping at the entrance waiting for it to open, a wonderful opportunity to make colorful NPC parties and have lots of inter-party drama. 

Rules Changes

In addition to using the built in Proficiency Without Level rules to make the power curve flatter, you may also consider certain rules changes:

Logistics

1 day's water should weight 1 bulk

1 week's rations should weigh 1 bulk

Healing

Treat Wounds: takes 1 hour and can be performed every 6 hours, instead of 10 minutes/1 hour

Continual Treatment can be performed once per hour

The Battle Medicine feats and the Legendary Medic feat remain unchanged. Healing from a night's rest remains unchanged. 

Random Encounters

Make random encounters in the dungeon part of the core. Provisionally, a 1 in 6 chance of an encounter every 10 minutes with a table containing something like this distribution of encounter threat:

1: Trivial (or non-combat)

2: Trivial (or non-combat)

3: Trivial (or non-combat)

4: Low

5: Low

6: Low

7: Low

8: Moderate

9: Moderate

10: Severe

You may also consider placing hazards on the random encounter tables, though these would have to be hazards that could feasibly appear anywhere in a given dungeon level/area (and could feasibly not trigger or be detected the first time the party moves through it). I like how PF2e's hazards have unified statblocks like creatures do, but the standard ones presented in the book don't often grab my attention as centerpieces of whole encounters on their own. 

Having some random encounters be combinations of creatures and hazards could also work. 

The aspect I'm not sure how to address is light. We could make torches more expensive and remove the light cantrip, but that feels hacky. Given how many PCs already have low-light or darkvision already, it may be better to leave this part as is and instead make this a factor in random encounters. Maybe having a light active makes more dangerous encounters more likely? Or perhaps we take a page out of AD&D and have the presence of light influence the starting point of combat encounters. 

Finally, you might consider making the Refocus action take 1 hour instead of 10 minutes as well. 

Movement Speed

PF2e does actually have rules for how far you can move in a dungeon, as well as the exploration activities you can perform while doing so. However, the movement speed is quite fast, basically assuming the party's speed in the dungeon is the same walking speed as when they are traveling in the wilderness. 

This can be fixed pretty easily by reducing speed in the dungeon. A 10-fold decrease would get you to 200 feet (40 5-foot squares) per 10-minute turn, about double what an AD&D party could expect, but probably still in a reasonable range. This will affect how large you choose to make your dungeon maps. 

Treasure XP

The biggest overhaul, and possibly the most important, would be reinstating xp for gold. On the one hand, this would be relatively easy to implement, since PF2e has a working economy in which gold can buy all sorts of items and services, along with guidelines as to how much treasure, in cash and equipment, a party should earn by each level. 

On the other hand, Pathfinder 2e's economy actually values the gold piece quite highly, and it takes 1000 gold pieces to make a single Bulk. A single PC can hold the party's entire cash earnings in a single Bulk slot until 8th level. As a result, the weight of cash is not going to be a logistical limitation like it is in AD&D. 

You could choose to drop this element, or try reintroducing it, perhaps by making 1 Bulk equal to 100 gold pieces instead of 1000. Alternately, you may choose to make your treasure heavier, but this can come across as contrived. Or you may just choose to award your cash in copper and silver most of the time. 

Dungeon Design

Some further considerations about building a dungeon for this style:

You may consider making a dungeon whose deepest levels cannot be accessed so quickly

You may consider making dungeons sparse rather than dense. Stonehell, for example, is a very dense megadungeon, the entire things is pretty much contiguous. For our purposes, something a bit more like Rappan Athuk, with individual dungeon areas separated by longer passages which are not mapped out in detail. If they're big enough, you can combine this with the fact the dungeon opens and closes. Make the deeper levels, or a level containing something very desirable or strange, far enough from the entrance that the PCs will have to stay in the dungeon while it is closed: this can be a phase shift in the course of a megadungeon campaign. I seem to recall Dungeon Moon had an approach like this. 

I also quite like the teleportation nexus in Abomination Vaults. That dungeon isn't big enough, in spatial terms, to really merit a network of teleporters, but we can extend the concept: let players find a teleporter nexus in the early levels, and then need to reactivate the portals, each of which is located well into their respective levels. For bonus points, make the unopened portals unstable rather than just boringly inactive, so they can occasionally find a portal whose other side they've never located is open, and they have the choice of going in to see what's on the other side and possibly get in way over their heads. Even better if, occasionally, creatures from the other side can come into the nexus...

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World Without Fire

There's a persistent myth about the indigenous people of Tasmania, to the effect that their isolation from the Australian mainland caused their technology to deteriorate, eventually to the point where they were unable to produce fire. Early colonial accounts describe Tasmanians carrying 'fire sticks' with them, using them to light campfires instead of producing fire on-site. 

Turns out, they knew how to make fire just fine (as the linked article above points out, some of those same colonial accounts contained extensive interviews describing Tasmanian methods of fire production), it was just inconvenient. Tasmania is cold and damp, with average summer highs around 70 Fahrenheit, and in the colder and wetter seasons it's a much better use of time and energy to link fires rather than start each one by hand. 

But this just now got me thinking about a world where this wasn't the case. A world in which humans could not produce fire on their own, as before Prometheus stole it from the gods.

Consider your usual fantasy world: ancient empire of high magic, great catastrophe, contemporary people picking their way across the ruins of a society greater and more terrible than themselves, all that good stuff. 

Now, consider that your great catastrophe resulted in the elimination of mortal fire. Whatever fires exist at that moment must be protected at great cost. Lighting new ones is only possible only by taking an existing fire, setting something alight, and journeying with it. Source fires would be like pagan gods, jealously protected within temples and fed with fuel and given offerings that please them. You might find a fire honored at the heart of a powerful city state, tended by many priests, or kept by a small cult in an isolated cave. 

Let us take it one step further and suppose that not all fires are alike. In fact, they're sentient, and some are sapient. Some dumb, some smart, some destructive, some mild, some powerful and some weak, with varying temperatures and natures. 

Perhaps they have varying aptitudes as well. One fire might be suited to the hearth, possessing a gentle and far-reaching warmth. Another is friendly and variable, suited to cooking, or another might possess the intensity and intelligence needed to forge metals. A proper fire is almost certainly necessary to do things like create potions or magic items. 

Just another step further: just as humans can no longer create their own fires, neither can fires expand without limit anymore. A great and old fire can split itself many times, enough to light the hearths of an entire city, but a young fire, or else one that has been starved or otherwise injured, can only light a handful of child fires. It can no more start a forest fire than a person could physically stretch their body over the same area. 

This results in a world in which fire is rare, precious, and a constant concern. Settlements in our world are built around water, but in this world they would also be constrained by the presence of old and friendly fires. Sources of natural or magical fire would also become incredibly important. Why does that drakencult have so much influence? Because their god can make fires wherever it wants! Why do people live on the slopes of an active volcano? Beside the fertile soil, because it's an endless source of powerful, albeit violent and demanding, flames! Facing an extinguished source fire, communities will devote themselves with new fervor to a god who can grant them a new, warm flame, or they might turn to infernal forces which supply them with a cold fire that burns anything other than silver. 

As you might expect, this requires some trimming of standard inventory and character options. No fire spells! No flametongues! Take flint+steel off the equipment list, and torches/lamps are probably far more expensive. Summer is the go-to adventuring season, and anyplace cold and dark is bound to be filled with treasures nobody has looted yet. 

Some other considerations: fires can die by starving, suffocating, drowning, etc, but they can also go mad. An unleashed flame will spread rapidly and violently, and destroy itself in the process. Otherwise, a child fire cannot set anything alight by itself: it can deal damage and create heat, but not ignite. Some fires need alternative fuels, or need certain things for their magical properties to shine through. Some just like certain offerings, and make their cooperation contingent on proper obeisance. An exotic fire might burn stone, water, precious metals, etc. 

Sources of magical fire with varying properties include: volcanoes, burning gas pits, dragons, fallen meteors, the grace of a particular god, a contract with a devil, capturing or killing a solar angel, and more!

In such a world, it would also be necessary to explore new sources of both light and heat: bioluminescence and other heat-producing chemical reactions could be part of standard kit. 

Some adventure hooks for this kind of setting:

• Your wizard is getting up in levels and wants to start making their own potions and magic items. They need a powerful and exotic flame for this purpose, so venture out into the world to locate the viridian flame that burns in the gaseous heart of a poison swamp!
• The source flame has been stolen from the temple in the dead of knight by a treacherous priest! If the source flame goes out, the entire city will be endangered and the temple's influence will blow away like dust in the wind. Of course, even if you recover it, there's no reason to just give it back right away...
• A young dragon has been spotted hunting in the nearby mountains where no dragon has been known to dwell before. If you can capture and subdue it now while it is still young, you can use its destructive and rampant flame as the basis of a powerful military organization, or try to tame it into a magical forge-fire. 
• A child of fate has been born nearby, in whose body dwells a magical flame. They can cast fire magic and have great advantages when dealing with other magical fires! Keep the child safe, or try to capture them and take this power for yourselves...