Tag: DnD

My favorite monster

DnD

Do you play Dungeons & Dragons? I do. I may have mentioned it once or twice before. I’m in the process of getting ready to play D&D with my friends in person in three weeks or so and that’s why I found myself in Guardian Games today. In-person D&D requires physical props, minis, and dice. Don’t they? Sure they do.

They have a much more limited selection these days than I remember from the past. For one thing, they’ve removed the used modules and rulebooks. I was looking forward to going through the used bins. I was hoping to find some old copies of modules I could read, nostalgize (that’s a new word; I just made it up) and maybe incorporate into my campaign. Guess there’s still DM’s Guild for that.

They had a huge display case just for dice. I must admit I am a bit of a dice goblin. There were dice there that were amazing and I am not going to mention what made them amazing because I still might buy them just to show off to my other players.

And they had a decent selection of miniatures, including a line of mini monsters that were using the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons artwork. And, again, seeing them gave me a huge dose of nostalgium (it’s a word now; that’s how language works, deal with it). I love those old janky designs. The rubbery long-nosed trolls. The dog-faced kobolds before they became li’l dragonkin. The propeller-tailed rust monsters. The dookie-shaped ropers. Love, love, love.

Elsewhere in the store they had some modern, 5E designs for miniatures. I was looking for dragons. Several dragons are the big movers and shakers in my world, and I’d love to have them represented in my next session. I was particularly looking for a big angry black dragon. For some reason, I’ve always loved the design of the black dragon; they have those cool forward-pointing horns. In AD&D they were straight and pointy; modern designs have curved but still forward-pointing horns.

And that led me, nostalgalisticaly (it’s a word and the meaning is clear from the context, admit it; as long as you understand what I’m saying it’s a word) to thinking about monsters that I love, monsters I always include in my games for one reason or another but mostly because I just dig them. Black dragons; the very first dragon I ever used in a game was a black dragon, spitting acid, coming out of a swamp to attack the party.

Kobolds. I love the old school ones and the new school ones. If I need a mob that’s got low hit points but attacks in large groups, I don’t go goblin, I don’t go orc, I go kobold. I’ve pulled lore from all over the place for the canonical kobolds in my game.

One bit that came from earlier editions is that they will involuntarily switch gender in instances where their colony is threatened, in a similar way that some amphibians do in nature. I had an NPC kobold early on, Azak, who the players met in the middle of their change, so I tried to consistently refer to them with neutral pronouns. Not sure the players noticed but it was a touchstone for me. They weren’t trans in the way people are trans; they were literally undergoing an environmentally-forced gender change. I’m glad the players didn’t kill them and their friend Tuud. I’d love for them to make a return, if I can find the right story beat for them.

One other monster that I have fond memories of fighting is a troll. My first best AD&D character, “Griffon” Gondolin, elven thief (not Rogue, not back in those days) had a reputation for doing ridiculous damage when backstabbing, and the first time he killed a monster in one turn, it was a troll. The other party members rushed in to burn the pieces and prevent the troll from regenerating, but it was the twin blades of Griffon that took it down to -10 HP. Fun times.

AI is for shitposting

Tech

I’ve discovered the best use of generative AI, and that is trolling my D&D players.

OK, well, not trolling so much as giving them lore dumps, NPC images, and in-universe books and letters that would take me far too long to write and make interesting and unique. As long as I curate the images, and only share them privately to my players with the caveat that they’re possibly plagiarized from actual art so don’t post them on the world wide web, I think I’m on ethically-safe ground.

Why is that a concern of mine? Well, Molly White has done a much better job of going over the pros and cons of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) recently but here’s my take: most of the companies and organizatoins that are creating these LLMs are just scraping vast amounts of data off the open internet, without regard for consent of the writers, artists, and musicians. Also without much regard for the actual truth value of the information that’s out there, which means any repsonse (I hesitate to call them “answers”, because they’re not, except in the broad sense of being an answer to input) is not vetted or measured against the question “is this information true?”

AIs like these machine-learning models are just spicy autocorrect; they don’t “know” anything about the topics they put together responses for; they’re just putting words together in common and statistically-valid ways. And the image generators are essentially forging new images from bits and pieces of actual creative artist’s work. And in both cases, they don’t reference their sources; all the ones I’ve dealt with just phrase their responses in the most chirpy, confident manner. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking the response is based on factual knowledge; they’re not, every answer has to be checked before anyone relies on it. Taking that extra time to vet the information renders any time-savings almost moot.

But as long as someone goes in with that awareness, and aren’t relying on ChatGPT, Copilot, or Google AI or any of them for authoritative true statements, they can be quite clever and fun. Which leads me back to my original point.

Here, I made two robots create a song that is now canonically sung by bards of the city-state of Kopno’domas, jewel of the Sunset Coast. I give you “The Ballad of the Red Elves Invasion“.

Last session, my players were trying to make sense of a jar of rust-red sand they found in a dungeon, and an NPC they showed it to mentioned remembering a song about an invasion of Red Elves from a red plane of existence. My players joked that they didn’t want me to sing, but instead I opend a tab to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, gave it a simple prompt “Can you write a song in the style of a bardic ballad about an invasion of the red elves?” and it spit out these lyrics:

In a time of peace and gentle grace,
When meadows bloomed in fair embrace,
From the north there came a chilling breeze,
Whispering tales of looming seas.

In shadows deep, ‘neath moonlit skies,
The Red Elves marched with crimson eyes.
Their armor gleamed like blood-stained gold,
With hearts as fierce as legends told.

From forests dark and mountains high,
They came with neither hue nor cry.
The silent specters of the night,
Their power known, their presence fright.

Through village lanes and cities bright,
They cast a veil of endless night.
With blades that sang of ancient strife,
They sought to drain the realm of life.

The farmers’ fields, the merchants’ wares,
Were left to ruin, in dire despair.
The children’s laughter turned to cries,
As hope was choked ‘neath reddened skies.

Yet in this darkest, dire hour,
There rose a hero with a power.
A bard whose voice could quell the storm,
With melodies that hearts transform.

He sang of courage, valor, truth,
Of ancient oaths and warriors’ youth.
His words like fire, his notes like steel,
Awoke the land, made spirits heal.

The people rallied to his song,
Their fear dispelled, their hearts grown strong.
With every verse, with every rhyme,
They turned the tide, defied the time.

The Red Elves’ might began to wane,
Their cruel command, their ruthless reign.
For music’s magic, pure and free,
Restored the light, reclaimed the sea.

And as the dawn broke clear and bright,
The Red Elves fled into the night.
Their legend told in mournful tune,
Of how they met their fate too soon.

So let this tale be known to all,
Of how the brave can never fall.
With song and heart, with courage bold,
The land was saved, the story told.

I shared it with my players and we had a laugh. This morning, I discovered Udio, another generative-AI site that uses prompts to generate music and songs, so I fed in the lyrics above, with the additional prompt of “a song about the invasion of the Red Elves from outer space set in a fantasy world, defeated by an incredible bard” in the folk style, and that’s what it came back with. It’s probably using samples I don’t recognize… and yet, it’s fun and I enjoyed making (“making”) it and enjoyed sharing it with my players.

Now, I need to write some songs for other lore dumps I can give to my players…