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Dungeonomicon

This is the third installment of our series exploring portions of the D&D experience that don't work at all, began with the Tome of Necromancy and continued with the Tome of Fiends. This work focuses on the most central of perplexing legacies: The Dungeon. We know you love Dungeons, but you probably have more than a little difficulty justifying them to yourself or to other players of the game.

Table of Contents:[list=1]Reply #, Contents

Social Structures in D&D

Base Classes (Monk, Assassin, Jester, Thief Acrobat)

Prestige Classes

Economics in D&D

Magic Effects

Life Under Ground

Dungeons

Language in D&D

Sample Adventuring Locations


Previous installments of this series include:

The Tome of Fiends
The Tome of Necromancy

Charactonomicon
"Honestly, I sort of expected my character to be more awesome than this."

Many character archetypes don't fit neatly into the pseudo-European-battlefield that D&D is often concepted as, but do fit squarely into the genre that Dungeons and Dragons has become. Most notably, the unarmored warriors, swashbucklers, and talkative heroes that are perpetuated in fantasy literature. They do have a place in the D&D setting, but they really haven't been done well in the D&D rules. This makes us very sad. What follows is a re-imagining of several classes that have been with us for over 30 years, but which don't have functional game mechanics in the modern era. Some of them (like the Jester) have never had functional game mechanics, while others (like the Monk) have been playable characters at various times but aren't now.

Our goal here is to make these archetypes playable in low-level environments and high level environments without the implementation of Easter Egg class features like DM pity. A monk is an integral portion of D&D, and there should be a way to participate in combats against monsters of your level other than the current standard:[list=1]

Massively underperform against enemies of your level.

Wait for the DM to recognize this as a systemic problem and throw in campaign specific treasure that will make your character awesome.

Use that awesome equipment to pull your weight with the other party members.

Why no Open Lock skills? Open Lock is a legacy skill that makes no sense. In previous editions of D&D, a Thief had an "Open Locks" skill and a "Find/Remove Traps" skill. In 3rd edition. Find/Remove Traps got split into Search and Disable Device. Disable Device is actually capable of bypassing any device or spell-based impediment, not just Traps these days. Heck, it even has bypassing a Lock as an example task! There's a reason that other D20 games have dropped Open Locks altogether, and we strongly support that decision. In that spirit, we've dropped the Open Lock skill from all classes in the Dungeonomicon, and suggest that you allow players to use their Dexterity Modifier in place of their Intelligence Modifier for Disable Device if they want to.

Base Classes

Monk
"I am a Grand Master of Flowers. You are not."

Fantasy literature's view of the "martial artist" has about as much to do with a real martial artist as its view of salamanders has to do with real salamanders. But let's face the facts: Monks are totally sweet. They flip out and kill people with their hands. A Monk does not practice any "real" martial art, we call those people "Fighters" – a Monk practices an entirely magical martial art that only works in areas where badgers can talk and winged horses can fly.

Every Monk follows a different martial path that involves jumping super high and having glowing things coming off of their hands when they perform their super moves. Some monks use weapons, but most just use their hands and feet to devastating effect. Some Monks shout the names of their techniques in battle to demoralize their opponents, others stay aloof and silent during even the toughest of challenges.

Alignment: Monks may be of any alignment. Really. If a bar brawl breaks out, some Monks will try to break it up, other Monks will join in. Whatever.

Races: Because the martial paths of a Monk embrace all manners of comportment, from Stoic Lawfulness to Boisterous Chaos, almost every sapient race has those who take up the monk's path. With its lack of emphasis on ranged weaponry, few of the slower races turn towards these magical combat styles, and halflings and dwarves rarely become monks. The discipline emphasizes physical strength as much as it emphasizes perceptiveness and inner strength, so orcs are as likely to become monks as Kuo-Toa are.

Starting Gold: 2d4x10 gp (50 gold)

Starting Age: As Monk.

Hit Die: d8
Class Skills: The Monk's class skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Balance (Dex), Climb (Str), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Escape Artist (Dex), Hide (Dex), Jump (Str), Knowledge (all skills individually) (Int), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Sense Motive (Wis), Spot (Wis), Swim (Str), and Tumble (Dex).
Skills/Level: 4 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Good (1/1), Saves: Fort: Good; Reflex: Good; Will: Good

Level, Benefit
1 Armored in Life, Fatal Strike, Willow Step, Fighting Style
2 Rain of Flowers, Abundant Leap
3 Fighting Style
4 Diamond Soul
5 Fighting Style
6 Walk of a Thousand Steps
7 Fighting Style
8 Immaculate Diamond Soul
9 Master Fighting Style
10 Leap of the Clouds
11 Master Fighting Style
12 Master of the Four Winds
13 Master Fighting Style
14 Master of the Four Seasons
15 Grand Master Fighting Style
16 Master of Diamond Soul
17 Grand Master Fighting Style
18 Perfect Mastery
19 Grand Master Fighting Style
20 Grand Master of Flowers

All of the following are Class Features of the Monk class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Monks are proficient with all simple weapons, as well any weapon defined as a special monk weapon, such as the sai, the nunchuka, the kama, the shuriken, and the triple staff. Monks are not proficient with any armor or shields of any kind.

Armored in Life (Su): A Monk has a special Armor bonus whenever they are not using armor or shields that he is not proficient in. This Armor Bonus applies against Touch Attacks and Incorporeal Touch Attacks, and has a value of +4. Every even numbered class level, the Armored in Life bonus increases by 1. If the Monk wears armor which he is proficient in (for example: normal clothing) that has an enhancement bonus, that enhancement bonus applies to his Armored in Life Armor Bonus.

Wilow Step (Su): A true monk does not seek to outrun the fist, but to anticipate it. If a Monk would be allowed to add his Dexterity modifier to a Reflex Save or Armor Class, he may add his Wisdom bonus (if positive) instead.

Fatal Strike (Su): A Monk has a natural weapon Slam in addition to whatever else he is capable of doing. As a natural slam attack, if he uses no other natural or manufactured weapons he adds his Strength and a half to damage and may make iterative attacks if he has sufficient BAB. If the slam is used with other weaponry, it becomes a secondary natural attack, suffers a -5 penalty to-hit, and adds only half his Strength modifier to damage. A monk's slam attack does a base of 1d8 damage for a medium sized monk and does more or less damage as appropriate if the Monk is larger or smaller than medium size.

Fighting Style (Su): At levels 1, 3, 5, and 7, the Monk learns a Fighting Style. Each Fighting style requires a Swift Action to activate, lasts one round, and is usable at will. Each Fighting Style must have a name (see Naming Your Fighting Style below), and provides two bonuses from the Fighting Style Abilities:

Fighting Style Abilities

• While Active, your Fighting Style provides a +4 Dodge Bonus to AC.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style provides a +4 Dodge Bonus to Saving Throws.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style forces any opponent struck by your slam attack to make a Fortitude Save (DC 10 + ½ your character level + your Wisdom Modifier) or become stunned for one round.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style allows you to make an attack of opportunity against any opponent who attacks you. This attack of opportunity must be a trip or disarm attempt.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style provides you with concealment.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style provides a +30' Insight Bonus to your movement rate.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style allows your slam attacks to ignore hardness and DR.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style provides any bonuses it gives to your slam attack to any attack you make with any weapon.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style causes your slam attack to inflict piercing damage and to inflict 2 points of Constitution damage.
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style causes your slam attack to inflict slashing damage and to reduce your opponent's movement rate by 10' every time they suffer damage from it. This movement rate reduction can be healed like ability damage (treating 5' of movement as 1 point of ability damage).
  
• While Active, your Fighting Style allows you to move through occupied spaces as if they were unoccupied and you provoke no attacks of opportunity for your movement.
  

Rain of Flowers (Su): Any time a 2nd level Monk inflicts lethal damage, he may elect to inflict non-lethal damage instead. Any time a Monk inflicts non-lethal damage, he may elect to inflict lethal damage instead.

Abundant Leap (Su): At 2nd level, a Monk's ability to jump is unbounded by his height. In addition, the DC for any jump check is divided by two.

Diamond Soul (Su): At 4th level, the Monk gains Spell Resistance equal to 5 + his character level. At 8th level, his soul becomes immaculate and his Spell Resistance improves to 10 + character level, and at 16th level he masters his diamond soul and his spell resistance improves to 15 + character level.

Walk of a Thousand Steps: Once per day, a Monk of sixth level or higher may activate a Fighting Style and extend its duration to 1 round/level rather than 1 round. Activating this Fighting Style is still a Swift Action. Other Fighting Styles may be activated during this period, though their duration is normally going to be only 1 round.

Master Fighting Style (Su): At levels 9, 11, and 13, the Monk learns a Master Fighting Style. Each Master Fighting style requires a Swift Action to activate, lasts one round, and is usable at will. Each Master Fighting Style must have a name (see Naming Your Fighting Style below), and provides two bonuses from the Master Fighting Style Abilities. When a Monk gains a new Master Fighting Style, he may replace one of his Fighting Styles with a different Fighting Style.

Master Fighting Style Abilities:

• While Active, your Master Fighting Style allows you to teleport yourself and everything you are physically carrying 60 feet in any direction as a free action usable once per round.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style provides total concealment.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style transforms your slam attacks into Force effects that inflict Force damage.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style affects any creature struck with your slam attack with a banishment effect that transports it back to its home plane unless it succeeds at a Will save (DC 10 + ½ character level + Wisdom Modifier). Outsiders suffer a -4 penalty to their saving throw. A creature so banished, may not return to the plane it was banished from for a year.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style forces any creature struck by your slam attack to make a Reflex Save (DC 10 + ½ character level + Wisdom Modifier) or be helpless for one round.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style provides you the effect of an air walk spell, and gives you a +20' Competence bonus to your speed.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style affects any opponent you successfully trip or bulrush with the violent thrust version of telekinesis, with a caster level equal to your character level. There is no saving throw against this effect.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style allows you to shoot fire out of your hands or mouth as a standard action. The fire can be shot out to medium range, requires a ranged touch attack, and inflicts 1d6 of fire damage per character level if it hits.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style causes your slam attack to inflict vile damage.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style forces every creature within 10 feet of you to make a Will save (DC 10 + ½ character level + Wisdom Modifier) or become panicked for one minute.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style affects any target you strike with your slam attack with a targeted version greater dispelling with a caster level equal to your character level.
  
• While Active, your Master Fighting Style causes 5d6 of Sonic damage to everything within 30 feet of you when you inflict damage with your slam attack against any target. You are immune to Sonic damage while your Master Fighting Style is active.
  
• Instead of gaining a Master Fighting Style Ability, you may choose two regular Fighting Style Abilties.

Leap of the Clouds (Su): At 10th level, the DC for any jump check is divided by 5.

Master of the Four Winds (Su): The Monk's breath of life is carried on the winds of fate. At 12th level, if the monk is restored to life, he doesn't lose a level for doing so.

Master of the Four Seasons: Time passes relentlessly in the world, but for a monk of 14th level, the change of seasons is as no change at all. He no longer appears to age, never accumulates any additional penalties for growing older and will never die of old age.

Grand Master Fighting Style (Su): At levels 15, 17, and 19, the Monk learns a Grand Master Fighting Style. Each Grand Master Fighting style requires a Swift Action to activate, lasts one round, and is usable at will. Each Grand Master Fighting Style must have a name (see Naming Your Fighting Style below), and provides two bonuses from the Grand Master Fighting Style Abilities. When a Monk gains a new Grand Master Fighting Style, he may replace one of his Fighting Styles or Master Fighting Style with a different Style of the same type.

Grand Master Fighting Style Abilities:

• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style makes you and everything you are carrying incorporeal, your slam attacks are incorporeal touch attacks.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style slows down time to the point where you can act twice each round, you do not gain an extra Swift Action during your extra actions.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style allows you to punch a hole through space and time, allowing you to open a travel version of gate with a slam attack.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style prevents all [Teleport] effects from entering or exiting within 1 mile of your location.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style causes your slam attacks to reduce the spell resistance of enemies by an equal amount to the damage the slam attack inflicts.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style forces every creature struck with your slam attack to make a Fortitude save (DC 10 + ½ character level + Wisdom Modifier) or die.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style affects any target you strike with your slam attack with a disintegrate effect, with a caster level equal to your character level.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style causes you to regenerate. You recover a number of points of nonlethal damage each round equal to your character level. Unarmed or Slam attacks inflict regular damage.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style forces any opponent you strike with your slam attack to make a Willpower save (DC 10 + ½ character level + Wisdom Modifier) or become feeble minded.
  
• While Active, your Grand Master Fighting Style affects every target you strike with a slam attack with the violent thrust version of telekinesis, with a caster level equal to your character level. There is no saving throw against this effect.
  
• Instead of gaining a Grand Master Fighting Style Ability, you may choose two Master Fighting Style Abilties.

Perfect Mastery: Once per day, a Monk of 18th level or higher may activate a Fighting Style, Master Fighting Style, or Grand Master Fighting Style and extend its duration to 1 round/level rather than 1 round. Activating this style is still a Swift Action. Other styles may be activated during this period, though their duration is normally going to be only 1 round

Grand Master of Flowers: At 20th level, the Monk becomes an Outsider, and immortal of legend. He gains the augmented subtype of his previous type, and has Damage Reduction of 20/Epic.

Naming your Fighting Style: Roll a d10, or choose an adjective, an animal, and a noun:
Adjective Chart:[list=1]

Running

Hungry

Angry

Naked

Drunken

Fortunate

Lazy

Swift

Powerful

EnlightenedAnimal Chart:[list=1]

Ox

Tiger

Dragon

Crane

Monkey

Turtle

Manticore

Serpent

Hummingbird

DemonNoun Chart:[list=1]

Fist

Stance

Spinning Kick

Attack

Technique

Style

Dance

Movement

Touch

Fu

Note from the authors: Feel free to add any adjectives, animals, or nouns that you want. There's no reason that your character's fighting style has to be called "Naked Tiger Stance" rather than "Astonished Centaur Defense".

Jester
"Well no, but if I was doing it to anyone else, you'd think it was funny."

To be a Jester is to see the joke in every tragedy.  For them, life’s a party, and most poor bastards are not invited. They live hard, play hard, and laugh hard knowing that at any moment their life might be cut short by an uncaring world.  Jesters may play at being buffoons, but each is a student of life and of people, and they understand not only what makes people laugh, but what makes them cry.  As adventurers, they often appreciate baubles and magical trinkets as much as anyone else, but their main goal is to have fun.  When fighting enemies, their sense of humor takes a macabre and dark turn, becoming cruel and vicious to better demoralize their foe. As followers of the Laughing God Who Has No Temples, they are generally disrespectful atheists who wander the world looking for excitement and amusement, righting wrongs or committing crimes as the mood takes them. . 

Alignment: A Jester may be of any non-Lawful alignment.

Races: Jesters appear in all cultures and all races have need of buffoons.

Starting Gold: 6d4x10 gp (150 gold)

Starting Age: As Rogue.

Hit Die: d6
Class Skills: The Jester’s skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Balance (Dex), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disable Device (Int), Disguise (Cha), Gather Information (Cha), Hide (Dex), Intimidate (Cha), Jump (Str), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Search (Int), Sense Motive (Wis), Sleight of Hand (Dex), Spellcraft (Int), Spot (Wis), Swim (Str), Tumble (Dex), and Use Magic Device (Cha).
Skills/Level: 6 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Medium (3/4), Saves: Fort: Poor; Reflex: Good; Will: Poor

Level, Benefit
1 Harlequin’s Mask, Ignore Components, Poison Use, Spellcasting
2 Laugh It Off 
3 +1d6 Sneak Attack, Power Slide
4 Jester’s Fient
5 Cruel Comment
6 +2d6 sneak Attack
7 Sight Gag
8 Low Comedy, Slapstick
9 +3d6 sneak Attack
10 Jack-in-the-Box King
11 +4d6 sneak Attack
12 Killer Clown
13 +5d6 sneak Attack
14 Annoy the Gods
15 +6d6 sneak Attack
16 Prat Fall
17 +7d6 sneak Attack
18 Last Trick
19 +8d6 sneak Attack
20 Eternal Trickster

All of the following are Class Features of the Jester class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Jesters are proficient with light armor but not with shields of any kind. A Jester is proficient with no weapons, but suffers no attack penalty for using a weapon with which they are not proficient or which is made for a character of a different size than themselves. Even, perhaps especially, improvised weapons may be used without the usual -4 penalty.

Spellcasting: The Jester is an Arcane Spellcaster with the same spells per day progression as a Bard. A Jester casts spells from the Jester Spell List (below). A Jester automatically knows every spell on his spell list. He can cast any spell he knows without preparing them ahead of time, provided that spell slots of an appropriate level are still available.
To cast a Jester spell, he must have a Charisma at least equal to 10 + the Spell level. The DC of the Jester's spells is Charisma based and the bonus spells are Charisma based.

Poison Use (Ex): A Jester may prepare, apply, and use poison without any chance of poisoning himself.

Ignore Components: A Jester may cast spells from the Jester list without using material components, regardless of whether they are costly or not. This has no effect on any spells that a Jester casts from any other spell-list.

Harlequin’s Mask (Ex):  As long as a Jester’s face is painted, masked, or adorned in the manner of a harlequin or other comedic figure, he is immune to compulsion effects.

Laugh It Off (Ex):  Fate protects fools and little children, and Jesters certainly adopt the role of fools.  At 2nd level, a Jester may add his Charisma modifier as a morale bonus to his saves.

Power Slide (Ex): If a 3rd level Jester takes damage from an attack, he may allow herself to be flung backwards , thereby lessening the impact. He may make a Balance check with a DC equal to the damage inflicted and if she succeeds, he suffers only half damage. This is a skill check, not a Saving Throw, so abilities such as Evasion do not apply. He is moved away from the source of damage by 5' for every 5 points of damage (or part there of) negated in this way. If there is not enough space for him to move, he suffers a d6 of damage for each square not moved. If he passes through an occupied square, the Jester would have to make a tumble check to avoid attacks of opportunity.

If this ability is gained from another class, then the Jester may choose to increase or decrease the total distance moved by 50% (so a Power Slide that negated 12 points of damage can cause him to move 5’, 10’, or 15’ at her choice). 

Sneak Attack (Ex): At 3rd level, a Jester gains the ability to make sneak attacks as a rogue would. At 3rd level, his sneak attacks inflict 1 extra d6 of damage, and this increases by 1d6 at levels 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19.

Jester’s Feint (Ex): At 4th level, a Jester learns to shock and unnerve his enemies by throwing unexpected objects at them.  At a swift action, he may toss a brightly colored object in the square of an enemy with a Sleight of Hand Check opposed by the enemy’s Spot check.  If it succeeds, the enemy is denied his Dex bonus for the Jester’s next attack.

Some Jesters use objects with magical or alchemic effects that act in an enemy’s square to use with this ability, while others use colored balls, fruit, pieces of cloth or scarves, or other cast-off materials that fit the requirement of being brightly colored. Wealthy, desperate, or foolish Jesters sometime used coins or gems.

Cruel Comment (Ex) At 5th level, the Jester has learned to say extremely funny but hurtful things about others. As a swift action, the Jester can make a Bluff check opposed by the target’s level plus Charisma check. If the target fails this check, he suffers a -4 to attack rolls, saves, and all other checks.  This effect lasts 3 rounds.  This is a language-dependant ability.

Sight Gag: At 7th level, the Jester may apply the Silent Spell and Still Spell metamagics spontaneously to his spells, but only if he casts them as full-round actions.  This ability only works with spells on the Jester list, and it does not increase the spell’s level or slot used.

Low Comedy (Ex): By using this ability, a Jester of 8th level or higher can double the armor check penalty of an opponent within 50 feet that he hits with a ranged touch attack. Using this ability is an attack action and counts as a thrown weapon. The penalty can be restored to its normal value with 10 minutes and a bar of soap.

Slapstick (Ex):  At 8th level, any successful sneak attack also inflict a -2 Dex penalty to an enemy for one round.

Jack-in-the-Box King (Sp):  Twice per day, a 10th level Jester may use fabricate or major creation as a spell-like ability, but only if he is constructing weapons or traps.

Killer Clown (Ex):  At 12th level, so long as he meets the requirements of his Harlequin’s face ability, the Jester can make a special Intimidate check as a move action.  If successful, this check causes the enemy to suffer the panicked condition for a round per Jester level.  This is a mind-effecting fear effect.

Annoy the Gods (Su):  As world-class pranksters, Jesters must learn to avoid the curses and transformations of enemies with a sense of humor.  Any time a 14th level Jester has spent at least one round as the victim of an effect that could be removed by a break enchantment effect, the effect is removed.   

Prat Fall (Ex): At 16th level, any time a Jester strikes an enemy with a sneak attack, the Jester can make a free Trip attack that does not provoke an Attack of Opportunity.  This ability cannot be used on any one enemy more than once a round. The Jester may not be tripped if this fails, and it may be used with ranged sneak attacks. The Jester may substitute his Dexterity modifier for his Strength modifier for the opposed test to trip his foe.

Last Trick (Su):  At 18th level, the Jester can turn even his death into a joke.  Any time the Jester is killed or knocked unconscious, one of his spells known is cast as if it were spell in a contingency effect.

Eternal Trickster (Ex)  At 20th level, the Jester can become a personification of the Laughing God Who has No Temples.  While meeting the requirements of his Harlequin’s Mask ability, he does not age and is under the effects of a mind blank effect.

Jester Spells:
0th Level: Alarm, Detect Magic, Detect Poison, Grease, Unseen Servant, Ventriloquism.
1stLevel: Fire Trap, Glitterdust, Magic Mouth, Misdirection, Pyrotechnics, Reduce Person, Sleet Storm, Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter, Teleport Trap, Touch of Idiocy.
2nd Level: Baleful Transposition, Explosive Runes, Glyph of Warding, Rage, Rope Trick, Secret Page, sepia snake sigil, Unluck.
3rd Level: Feeblemind, Minor Globe of Invulnerability, Modify Memory, Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound, Nightmare, Servant Horde, Shrink Item.
4th Level: Globe of Invulnerability, Greater Glyph of Warding, Insect Plague, Persistent Image, Sword of Deception, Symbol of Weakness, Tree Shape, Wood Rot.
5th Level: Bigby's Interposing Hand, Energy Immunity, Eyebite, Repulsion, Screen, Symbol of Insanity, Telekinesis.
6th Level: Creeping Doom, Insanity, Refuge, Symbol of Sleep, Symbol of Stunning, Temporal Stasis.


Assassin
"I kill people. Individually, you are a person. Collectively, I think you count as people."

An assassin is a master of the art of killing, a vicious weapon honed by experience and inclination to learn the myriad ways to end a life.  Unlike common warriors or rogues, an Assassin does not study various fighting arts or muddle his training with martial dirty tricks, he instead studies the anatomy of the various creatures of wildly different anatomies and forms of existence, and he uses this knowledge to place his blows in areas vital for biological or mystical reasons.  Stealth and sudden violence are his hallmarks, and various exotic tools and killing methods become his tools.

While most societies consider assassination to be a vile art, or at best a dishonorable or unvalorous one, the reasons that drive these killers vary.  Cold-hearted mercenaries share a skill set with dedicated demon-hunters, differing only in the application of their skills.  Only the most naïve student of ethics believes that all killing is evil, or that nobility cannot be found in a mercifully quick death.

Alignment: An Assassin may be of any alignment.

Races: any

Starting Gold: 6d4x10 gp (150 gold)

Starting Age: As Rogue.

Hit Die: d6
Class Skills: The Assassin’s skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Balance (Dex), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disable Device (Int), Disguise (Cha), Gather Information (Cha), Hide (Dex), Intimidate (Cha), Jump (Str), Knowledge (all) (Int), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Search (Int), Sense Motive (Wis), Sleight of Hand (Dex), Spellcraft (Int), Spot (Wis), Swim (Str), Tumble (Dex), and Use Magic Device (Cha).
Skills/Level: 6 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Medium (3/4), Saves: Fort: Good; Reflex: Good; Will: Poor

Level, Benefit
1 Poison Use, Death Attack +3d6, Personal Immunity, Spellcasting
2 Uncanny Dodge, Death Attack +4d6
3 Hide in Plain Sight, Death Attack +5d6
4 Cloak of Discretion, Death Attack +6d6
5 Traps, Trapmaking, Death Attack +7d6
6 Palm Weapon, Death Attack +8d6
7 Full Death Attack, Death Attack +9d6
8 Nerve of the Assassin, Death Attack +10d6
9 Improved Uncanny Dodge, Death Attack +11d6
10 Skill Mastery, Death Attack +12d6
11 Poisonmaster, Death Attack +13d6
12 Personal Immunity, Death Attack +14d6
13 Exotic Method, Death Attack +15d6
14 Personal Immunity, Death Attack +16d6
15 Killer’s Proof, Death Attack +17d6
16 Exotic Method, Death Attack +18d6
17 Death by a Thousand Cuts, Death Attack +19d6
18 Mind Blank, Death Attack +20d6
19 Exotic Method, Death Attack +21d6
20 Killing Strike, Death Attack +22d6

All of the following are Class Features of the Assassin class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Assassins are proficient with all Light Weapons, as well as simple weapons, repeating crossbows, and hand crossbows. At first level, an Assassin gains proficiency with one Exotic Weapon of her choice. Assassins are proficient with Light Armor but not with shields.

Spellcasting: The Assassin is an Arcane Spellcaster with the same spells per day and spells known progression as a Bard, except that he gains no more than three spell slots per level. An Assassin’s spells known may be chosen from the Sorcerer/Wizard list, and must be from the schools of Divination, Illusion, or Necromancy.
To cast an Assassin spell, she must have an Intelligence at least equal to 10 + the Spell level. The DC of the Assassin's spells is Intelligence based and the bonus spells are Intelligence based.

Poison Use (Ex): An Assassin may prepare, apply, and use poison without any chance of poisoning herself.

Death Attack (Ex): An Assassin may spend a full-round action to study an opponent who would be denied their Dexterity bonus if she instead attacked that target. If she does so, her next attack is a Death Attack if she makes it within 1 round. A Death Attack inflicts a number of extra dice of damage equal to her Assassin level plus two dice, but only if the target is denied its Dexterity Bonus to AC against that attack. Special attacks such as a coup de grace may be a Death Attack. Assassins are well trained in eliminating magical or distant opponents, and do not have to meet the stringent requirements of a sneak attack, though if a character has both sneak attack and death attack, they stack if the character meets the requirements of both. As long as the victim is denied their dexterity against attacks from the assassin during the study action and the attack itself, it counts as a death attack. An Assassin may load a crossbow simultaneously with his action to study his target if he has a Base Attack Bonus of +1 or more.

Personal Immunity (Ex): Choose four poisons, an Assassin is immune to all four of those poisons, even if they are made available in a stronger strength. At levels 5, 7, and 12 the Assassin may choose one more type of poison to become immune to. At level 14, an Assassin becomes immune to all poisons.

Uncanny Dodge (Ex): Starting at 2nd level, an Assassin can react to danger before his senses would normally allow him to do so. He retains her Dexterity bonus to AC (if any) even if she is caught flat-footed or struck by an invisible attacker. However, he still loses her Dexterity bonus to AC if immobilized.
If an Assassin already has uncanny dodge from a different class he automatically gains improved uncanny dodge (see below) instead.

Hide in Plain Sight (Ex): A 3rd level Assassin can hide in unusual locations, and may hide in areas without cover or concealment without penalty. An Assassin may even hide while being observed. This ability does not remove the -10 penalty for moving at full speed, or the -20 penalty for running or fighting.

Cloak of Discretion (Su):  At 4th level, an Assassin is protected by a constant Nondetection effect, with a caster level equal to his character level.

Trapfinding: At 5th level, Assassins can use the Search skill to locate traps when the task has a Difficulty Class higher than 20.
Finding a nonmagical trap has a DC of at least 20, or higher if it is well hidden. Finding a magic trap has a DC of 25 + the level of the spell used to create it.
Assasins can use the Disable Device skill to disarm magic traps. A magic trap generally has a DC of 25 + the level of the spell used to create it.
An Assassin who beats a trap’s DC by 10 or more with a Disable Device check can study a trap, figure out how it works, and bypass it (with her party) without disarming it.

Trapmaking:  At 5th level, the Assassin learns to build simple mechanical traps in out of common materials.  As long as has access to ropes, flexible material like green wood, and weapon-grade materials like sharpened wooden sticks or steel weapons, he can build an improvised trap in 10 minutes.  He can build any non-magical trap on the “CR 1” trap list that doesn’t involve a pit.  These traps have a Search DC equal to 20 + the Assassin’s level, have a BAB equal to his own, and are always single-use traps. He may add poison to these traps, if he has access to it, but it will dry out in an hour.

Full Death Attack: At 7th level, if the Assassin studies an opponent to perform a Death Attack, she can make a full attack during the next round where every attack inflicts Death Attack damage as long as the target was denied their Dexterity bonus to AC against the first attack in the full attack action.

Skill Mastery (Ex): At 10th level, an Assassin becomes so certain in the use of certain skills that she can use them reliably even under adverse conditions. When making a skill check with Climb, Disable Device, Hide, Move Silently, Search, Spellcraft, Use Magic Device, Use Rope, or Swim, she may take 10 even if stress and distractions would normally prevent her from doing so.

Palm Weapon (Su) At 6th level, the Assassin learns to conceal weapons with supernatural skill.  Any weapon successfully concealed with Sleight of Hand cannot be found with divination magic.

Nerve of the Killer: At 8th level, an Assassin gains a limited immunity to compulsion and charm effects.  While studying a target for a Death Attack, and for one round afterward, he counts as if he were within a protection from evil effect.  This does not confer a deflection bonus to AC.

Improved Uncanny Dodge (Ex): An Assassin of 9th level or higher can no longer be flanked.  This defense denies another character the ability to sneak attack the character by flanking him, unless the attacker has at least four more levels in a class that provides sneak attack than the target.  If a character already has uncanny dodge (see above) from a second class, the character automatically gains improved uncanny dodge instead, and the levels from the classes that grant uncanny dodge stack to determine the minimum level required to flank the character.

Poisonmaster: At 11th level, the Assassin learns alchemic secrets for creating short-term poisons.  By expending an entire healer’s kit worth of materials and an hour of time, he can synthesize one dose of any poison in the DMG.  This poison degrades to uselessness in one week.

Exotic Method  At 13th, 16th, and 19th level the Assassin learns an exotic form of killing from the list below.  Once chosen, this ability does not change:

• Carrier: Three times per day, the Assassin can cast contagion as a swift action spell-like ability. 
  
• Poison of the Cockatrice: Twice per day, the Assassin can cast flesh to stone as a swift action spell-like ability. 
  
• Killer Faerie Arts: Twice per day, the Assassin can cast polymorph other as a swift action spell-like ability. 
  
• Proxy Assassin: Twice per day, the Assassin can cast summon monster VII as a spell-like ability.  This effect lasts 10 minutes. 
  
• Death By Plane Once per day, the Assassin can cast plane shift as a spell-like ability. 
  
• Dimesional Rip::  Once per day, the Assassin can cast implosion as a spell-like ability.  The duration of this effect is three rounds.
  
• New School:  The Assassin may now choose spells known from a new school.
  

Killer’s Proof (Su): At 15th level, the Assassin learns to steal the souls of those he kills.  If he is holding an onyx worth at least 100 GP when he kills an enemy, he may place their soul within the gem as if he has cast soul bind on them at the moment of their death. 

Death by a Thousand Cuts: At 17th level, the assassin has learned to kill even the hardiest of foes by reducing their physical form to shambles.  Every successful Death attack inflicts a cumulative -2 Dexterity penalty to the Assassin’s victim. These penalties last one day.

Mind Blank (Su): At 18th level, the Assassin is protected by a constant mind blank effect.

Killing Strike (Su): At 20th level, the Assassin’s Death Attacks bypass his victim’s DR and hardness.

Thief Acrobat
"They put their safe on the ceiling, it's like they wanted me to take these scrolls."

While the common rogue is a thief, con-man, and scout extraordinaire, the thief acrobat is a highly trained specialist in the art of housebreaking and feats of dexterity and acrobatics.  As an adventurer, they are masters of negotiating difficult terrain and situations with flair and panache.  Masters of athletics and gymnastics, they hone their art to a level that seems to be magical to the initiated. Most use these skills to gain the easy score or poorly defended hoard, but some take up the life of an adventurer as a chance to test their purely mortals skills against the world full of magic and supernatural creatures.   

Alignment: Any.

Races: Any

Starting Gold: 4d4x10 gp (100 gold)

Starting Age: As Rogue

Hit Die: d6
Class Skills: The Thief Acrobat's skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Appraise (Int), Balance (Dex), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Craft (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disable Device (Int), Escape Artist (Dex), Hide (Dex), Jump (Str), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Search (Int), Sense Motive (Wis), Sleight of Hand (Dex), Spot (Wis), Swim (Str), Tumble (Dex), Use Magic Device (Cha), and Use Rope (Dex).

Skills/Level: 6 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Medium (3/4), Saves: Fort: Poor; Reflex: Good; Will: Poor

Level, Benefit
1 Acrobatic Flair, Trapfinding, Pole Jump 
2 +1d6 Sneak Attack, Evasion
3 Sure Climb, Kip Up
4 detect magic, Grapple Line
5 +2d6 Sneak Attack, Rapid Stealth
6 Mercurial Charge
7 +3d6 Sneak Attack, Unsettling Choreography
8 Improved Evasion
9 +4d6 Sneak Attack, Athletic Cascade
10 Skill Mastery 
11 +5d6 Sneak Attack, Aggressive Stealth
12 Dedicated Evasion
13 +6d6 Sneak Attack, Power Slide
14 Shadow Tumble
15 +7d6 Sneak Attack
16 Death From Above
17 +8d6 Sneak Attack
18 Supreme Skill Mastery
19 +9d6 Sneak Attack
20 Supreme Evasion

All of the following are Class Features of the Thief Acrobat class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Thief Acrobats are proficient with all simple weapons, as well as the sap, the shortsword, the whip, the bolas, the long staff, and the shuriken. Thief Acrobats are proficient with light armor but not with shields of any kind.

Trapfinding: At 1st level, Thief Acrobats can use the Search skill to locate traps when the task has a Difficulty Class higher than 20.
Finding a nonmagical trap has a DC of at least 20, or higher if it is well hidden. Finding a magic trap has a DC of 25 + the level of the spell used to create it.
Thief Acrobats can use the Disable Device skill to disarm magic traps. A magic trap generally has a DC of 25 + the level of the spell used to create it.
An Thief Acrobat who beats a trap’s DC by 10 or more with a Disable Device check can study a trap, figure out how it works, and bypass it (with her party) without disarming it.

Acrobatic Flair (Ex): A Thief Acrobat may move her full movement while using the Tumble or Balance skill without suffering a penalty or increasing the DC of her check.

Pole Jump (Ex):  If holding a pole, spear, staff, long staff, or other pole-like object in both hands, a Thief Acrobat can add twice her reach to her final distance moved during a Jump check, and in this instance her jump distances are not limited by her height..   

Sneak Attack (Ex): At 2nd level, a Thief Acrobat gains the sneak attack ability as a Rogue. Her sneak attacks inflict an extra d6 of damage at 2nd level. This damage increases by 1d6 at levels 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19.

Evasion (Ex): If a 2nd level Thief Acrobat succeeds in a Reflex Save to halve damage, she suffers no damage instead.

Sure Climb (Ex)::  At 3rd level, a Thief Acrobat gains a climb speed equal to half her land speed.   

Kip Up (Ex): At 3rd level, a Thief Acrobat may stand up from prone as a free action that does not provoke an attack of opportunity.

Detect Magic (Sp): At 4th level, a Thief Acrobat may use detect magic at-will as a spell-like ability. A Thief Acrobat may use her Appraise Skill in place of her Spellcraft in order to glean additional information from her detect magic.

Grapple Line: At 4th level, a Thief Acrobat becomes a master of using grapples and grappling lines.  By firing a missile weapon designed as a grappling weapon at an unoccupied square and doing at least 1 point of damage to an object filling that square (wall, ceiling, statue, etc) or a securely affixed object (ceiling post, small statue affixed to floor, etc), a Thief Acrobat can run a rope from his current potion to that location as a full round action.  He may then use this rope to make Balance or Climb checks as normal. 

Weapons designed as grappling weapons have a simple pulley and loop attached at the end and are balanced for this modification, and have at least a 50’  length of strong thread running through it and connected to a rope so that it can be pulled through swiftly.  They cost an additional +1 GP each (ammunition costs as much as normal weapons), and suffer a 5 ft reduction in range increment.  Many grappling weapons are made out of adamantite in order to better penetrate hard materials like stone.

Athletic Cascade (Ex): At 9th level, if a Thief Acrobat moves before making an attack, for the purposes of flanking she may count any square she has moved through as threatening an opponent, in addition to the space she is actually attacking from. In this manner, she may even flank with herself

Rapid Stealth (Ex): At level 5, the Thief Acrobat does not suffer the -10 penalty to Move Silently or Hide for moving at her full normal speed. She still suffers the normal -20 penalties to hide and move silently for running or fighting if she performs those actions.

Mercurial Charge (Ex): At level 6, a Thief Acrobat need not move in a straight line to charge, nor must she charge the closest available space. She still may not move back on herself during a charge, and her charge move still ends as soon as she threatens her target.

Unsettling Choreography (Ex): A Thief Acrobat of 7th level is adept at making other creatures fall down, and may use her Dexterity Modifier in place of her Strength modifier when making a trip or bullrush attempt.

Improved Evasion (Ex): When a Thief Acrobat of 8th level fails a Reflex Save to halve damage, she takes half damage anyway.

Skill Mastery (Ex): At 10th level, a Thief Acrobat is able to take 10 on any Appraise, Balance, Disable Device, Jump, Hide, Move Silently, and Tumble checks even in stressful or dangerous situations.

Aggressive Stealth (Ex): A Thief Acrobat of 11th level does not suffer the -20 penalty to Hide or Move Silently checks for running or fighting.

Dedicated Evasion (Ex)::  At 12th level, a Thief Acrobat gains the ability to evade with almost supernatural skill.  As a standard action, she can add her Thief Acrobat level as a Dodge bonus to her Reflex Saves and AC for one round. 

Power Slide (Ex): If a 13th level Thief Acrobat takes damage from an attack, she may allow herself to be flung backwards , thereby lessening the impact. She may make a Balance check with a DC equal to the damage inflicted and if she succeeds, she suffers only half damage. This is a skill check, not a Saving Throw, so abilities such as Evasion do not apply. She is moved away from the source of damage by 5' for every 5 points of damage (or part there of) negated in this way. If there is not enough space for her to move, she suffers a d6 of damage for each square not moved. If she passes through an occupied square, the Thief Acrobat would have to make a tumble check to avoid attacks of opportunity.

Shadow Tumble (Su)::  At 14th level, a Thief Acrobat has learned to tumble through the Plane of Shadow. She may make a tumble check with a DC equal to 10 plus five for every square she wishes to pass through another plane of existence. Intervening terrain, even walls of force have no effect on movement through the plane of shadow. The Thief Acrobat's total distance moved does not increase, no matter how much of it may be taken through the plane of shadow.

Death From Above (Ex):  At 16th level, the Thief Acrobat has learned to used the energy of a fall to devastating effect.  If the Thief Acrobat can fall at least 30’ (by falling from a height or by using a Jump check) and end in her enemy's square, any attacks made at the end of that fall do triple damage. Sneak Attack is not multiplied in this way.

Supreme Skill Mastery At 19th level, a Thief Acrobat is able to take 20 on any Appraise, Balance, Disable Device, Jump, Hide, Move Silently, and Tumble checks even in stressful or dangerous situations, and does not take twenty times as long as usual for taking 20.

Supreme Evasion (Ex):  At 20th level, a Thief acrobat takes no damage from any effect requiring a Reflex save.

The Economicon: Making Sense of the Gold Standard:
"100 pounds of gold for a house? How does anyone make rent without a wheelbarrow?"

Since time immemorial, D&D has used the "gold piece" as its primary currency. It is apparently a chunk of reasonably pure gold of vaguely standardized weight that people use fairly interchangeably in different cities populated by different species. In the bad old days, each gold coin was a tenth of a pound, which was hilarious and inane. In the current edition, each gold piece is a fiftieth of a pound. That's 3.43 gp to the Troy Ounce, which means that in the modern economy, each gp is about $171 worth of gold. Obviously, gold is significantly more common in D&D than it is on Earth, gold is also undervalued because its status as a currency standard drives it out of industrial uses and causes inflation. Further, populations in D&D are orders of magnitude smaller than they are in the real world, so the gold per person is higher even with the same amount of gold. So the gold piece is massively less valuable in D&D economies than it would be in Earth's economies.

Nonetheless, things are really expensive in D&D, and the high price in gold means that there's a distinct limitation of how much wealth can be transported by any means available. The economies of currency transaction are actually so unfavorable that currency as we understand the term does not exist. Things don't have prices or costs – all transactions are conducted in barter and a common medium of exchange is heavy lumps of precious metal.

Wish and the Economy

An Efreet can provide a wish for any magical item of 15,000 gp or less. A Balor can greater teleport at will, but can only carry 30 pounds of currency while doing so. Even in platinum pieces, that's 15,000 gp worth of metal. The long and the short of it is – at the upper end of the economy currency has no particular purchasing power and magic items of 15,000 gp value or less are viewed as wooden nickels at best. You can spend 15,000 gp and get magic items, but people in the know won't sell you a magic item worth 15,001 gp for money. That kind of item can only be bought for love. Or human souls. Or some other planar currency that is not replicable by chain binding a room full of Efreet to make in bulk.

Powerful characters actually can have bat caves that have sword racks literally covered in 15,000 gp magic items. It's not even a deal because they could just go home and slap some Efreet around and get some more. But even a single major magic item – that's heavy stuff that such characters will notice. Those things don't come free with hope alone, and every archmage knows that.

Wartime Economies Make for Shortages:

Many people wonder why a masterwork dagger goes for more than its weight in gold. That's a pretty valid question to ask; certainly I'm not going to attempt to justify the 600 gp price tag on a masterwork walking stick – that's just an example of simplistic game mechanics run amok. But to an extent the crazy prices can be justified by the fact that every settlement in every D&D world is on a war footing all the time. The idea that Peace is somehow a natural state is a fairly recent one, and based on the frequency of wars all over the world – it's obviously just wishful thinking anyway. War is the default position of every major economy in the world, and that means that weapons have an immediate, and desperate, clientele. Iron is still relatively cheap, because you can't kill people with it right now, but actual weapons and armor are crazy expensive.

That doesn't explain the fact that the PHB charges you over a quarter Oz. of gold just to get a backpack, and it doesn't explain the fact that the markup on masterworking a buckler is the same as the markup on masterworking a breastplate – that's just a game simplification that makes no real-world sense. But it's a start.

Coins are Big and Heavy
"How many boards could the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?"

From the standpoint of the adventurer, the primary difficulty of the D&D currency system is that the lack of a coherent banking and paper currency system means that there are profound limits to what you could possibly purchase even with platinum. But the currency system hurts on the other end as well. Untrained labor gets a silverpiece a week. That's 500 copper coins a year, which means that no matter how cheap things are they can only make one purchase a day most of the time. That's pretty stifling to the economy, in that however much gets produced, noone can buy it. Demand, from the economics standpoint, is strangled to the point where large production outputs don't even matter (remember that in economics Demand doesn't mean "what people want", it means "what people are willing and able to pay for", so if the average person only has 500 discreet pieces of currency per year, that puts an absolute cap on economic demand, even though the people are of course both needy and greedy enough to want anything you happen to produce).

What's worse, those coins are heavy. For our next demonstration, reach into your change drawer and fish out nine pennies. That's a decent lump in your pocket, neh? That's about one copper piece. Gold pieces are smaller (less than half the size, actually), but weigh the same. D&D currency, therefore, is more like a Monopoly playing piece than it is like a modern or ancient coin. There's no reason to even believe these things are round, people are seriously marching around gold hats and silver dogs as the basic medium of exchange.

Now, you may ask yourself why these coins are so titanic compared to real coins. The answer is because having piles of coins is awesome. Dragons are supposed to sleep on that stuff, and that requires big piles of coins. Consider my own mattress, which is a "twin-size" (pretty reasonable for a single medium-size creature) and nearly .2 cubic meters. If it was made out of gold, it would be about 3.9 tonnes. That's about eighty-six hundred pounds, and even with the ginormous coins in D&D, that's four hundred and thirty thousand gold pieces. In previous editions, that sort of thing was simply accepted and very powerful dragons really did have the millions of gold pieces – which was actually fine. Since third edition, they've been trying to make gold actually equal character power, and the result has been that dragon hoards are… really small. None of this "We need to get a wagon team to haul it all away", no. In 3rd edition, hoard sizes have become manageable, even ridiculously tiny. When a 6th level party defeats a powerful and wealthy monster, they can expect to find… nearly a liter of gold. That is, the treasure "hoard" of that evil dragon you defeated will actually fit into an Evian bottle.

There are two ways to handle this:[list=1]

Live with the fact that treasures are small and unexciting in modern D&D.

Live with the fact that characters who grab a realistic dragon's hoard become filthy stinking rich and this fundamentally changes the way they interact with society.

But once you accept that the realities of the wish based economy, you actually don't have to live with characters unbalancing the game once they find a real mattress filled with gold. That's not even a problem once characters are no longer excited by a +2 Enhancement bonus to a stat or a +3 enhancement bonus to Armor. Which means somewhere between 9th and 13th level it's perfectly fine for players to find actual money without unbalancing the game. Really, you can stop worrying about it.

Bad Money Drives Out Good: The Penalties of Paper:

People from the modern world are generally pretty perplexed by this idea of handing back and forth actual metal as a medium of exchange. It is an undeniable truth in our lives that the idea of currency is just that: an idea. As long as whatever I'm trading for goods and services can be traded for goods and services, it doesn't actually matter if the exchange commodity has any ascribed intrinsic worth. Paper descriptions of value or even ephemeral electronic representations are not only adequate, they're convenient. But more than that, using valuable commodities as a medium of exchange inhibits the growth of the economy. As long as a certain portion of the wealth is locked up in currency, the economy is strangled coming and going: not only is there a completely arbitrary limit on how many goods and services can be exchanged (the gold supply), but there is also a limit on the kinds of industry and artistic expression that can occur (in that if you use gold for anything but currency you're actually shrinking the money supply and producing negative GDP).

So… you're going to solve that by instituting a paper-based exchange system where initially the paper is exchangeable for gold and that eventually gets phased out when the Plebes realize that handing actual gold back and forth is inconvenient and dumb, right? Wrong. Remember that this is the Iron Age, and people haven't invented Nationalism yet. The cornerstone of the Greenback currency is a belief in the nation that prints it – and nations simply don't exist. You've got empires, and you've got kingdoms, and you've got tribes, and you've got unincorporated villages… and that's it as far as civilization goes. When you look at a map in D&D and a colored region has a name on it, that's the name of the region. Possibly it's even the name of some guy in the region. The point is, that it's not a country in the modern sense of the word, so if some new guy walks in who's bad enough the next cartographer will put his name on the region instead.

And that means that "The Full Faith and Credit of the Kingdom of Daxall" is worth precisely nothing. And while King Daxall can, through force of arms, take all the gold away from all the peasants and get them to trade pieces of paper for goods and services in its place – noone will actually believe that the paper is currency. They're literally trading promises by King Daxall that he'll let them have their money back if they leave town. And since the serfs can't even leave town, even that promise is meaningless to them. A serf accepts paper for goods and services only because he'll be beheaded if he doesn't. The black market value of these pieces of paper is pretty close to zero. Worse, nearby governments will see this as a blatant attempt to sequester all the gold in King Daxall's pants and will probably declare war (in addition to the fact that noone outside the reach of King Daxall's pikemen will accept Daxall Dollars).

Powerful Creatures Have a Powerful Economy:

The amount of gold it takes to get anywhere as a land lord is very large. The question that arises then, is why awesome architecture exists at all. It's a valid question, the listed costs to put things like pit traps and thrones made of bone into your dungeon are stupendously large and actual magical swag can be made available for much less than that. The answer is that:[list=1]

People don't actually pay all that gold to have their homes remodeled (see the peonomicon below).

Powerful artificers and adventurers don't even want your gold. If something has a value of 100,000 gold pieces, it can't be purchased with gold pieces at all – because that's an actual ton of gold that you'd have to plop over the counter and the merchant you're dealing with won't take your money even if you have it.

Here we're going to be focusing in on

• Gems
  
• Souls
  
• Concentration
  
• Hope
  
• Raw Chaos

Gems: Truth or Dare:

Gems are, to the vast majority of participants in the economy, pretty much worthless. A 500 gp diamond is pretty much the same as a gold piece to someone who intends to purchase things with a value of 1 gp or less. And of course, there are a lot more individuals out there who will stab a peasant in the face for a diamond than a gold piece. So why does anyone care?

Well, two reasons: the first is the obvious one that gold is extremely limited in what it can possibly purchase. A +2 sword is worth your weight in gold. Not its weight in gold, your weight in gold. It seriously costs over 166 pounds of gold, and that's just not reasonable for most people to put into their pockets. So people interacting with even the shallow end of the magic trade need there to be some crazily expensive items that have no purpose save to look pretty and be exchangeable for other stuff. But unlike our world gems actually have real value as well: as the fuel for powerful magics.

On Earth, the only reason that a diamond is expensive is because there's an international organization called DeBeers that seriously has actual assassins that will shoot you in the face if you try to sell diamonds for less than the price they've determined that they're supposed to be sold for. D&D doesn't have that kind of armed monopoly to maintain gem prices, but it does have the fact that people continuously use up gems for spells like raise dead and item creation and the like. So the fact that you can use ruby dust to make continual flames that you can turn around and sell as Everburning Torches means that ruby dust will continue to have value as long as people value light.

The D&D rules actually only go into the spell component uses of a handful of gems, but rest assured that all the rest are similarly useful when we get into the ephemerals of item creation. A lot of those "components" that cost piles of thousands of gold pieces are actually just piles of gems. Onyx keeps its value based on the needs of necromancers, but amethyst is just as needed to bind illusion magic into a cloak. The exchange rate between gems and magic items is in no danger of going anywhere. Minor magic items and gems are traded avidly by shopkeepers, adventurers, and even powerful outsiders and wizards.

But even so, gems can be simply acquired by the very powerful. The realities of the wish based economy ensure that gems can simply be obtained in large numbers by anyone who really cares enough to dedicate a conjured earth elemental to collecting them. Magical items that cannot be created with the application of spells (that is, magic items valued at more than 15,000 gp) cannot be purchased on the open market with mundane currency, not even gems. That isn't to say that you can't cheat a goblin out of a staff of power with some shiny rocks, you totally can (heck, you could also stab the goblin in the face and take that staff of power), but doing so is not considered a "fair trade" and requires a bluff check on your part.

In addition, many D&D worlds posit the existence of magic gems, which can be used to make magic items, increase personal power, make a snazzy grill with the bottom row made of gold, and all kinds of stuff. In addition to getting hot women to ask you to smile, these magical gems are magical and are actually considered fair exchange in the near-epic economy. You can't wish for Eberron Dragonshards or Planescape Planar Pearls, so those things have real value to Efreet and other creatures participating in the Big Pond. Rules for using magic gems appear in the Tome of Tiamat.

Magical Currency

Souls: The souls of powerful creatures are trapped in gems and the trade in them is brisk on the outer planes, especially in the planar metropolis of Finality on Acheron. Once a soul is in a gem, the gem itself is of little or no value, but the soul goes for 100 gp times the square of the CR of the creature whose soul is trapped (see Tome of Fiends for more information on the use of souls).

Concentration: Ideas take form on the outer planes, and really pernicious or stellar ideas can be so powerful that they take a while to form. In the before-time, they can be found as an amber-like substance that is extremely valued on Mechanus, and by extension every single other outer plane as well. Concentration is actually made out of ideas, and while it looks like a solid object it is actually a liquid that flows so slowly that you could watch it for a year and only a Modron could tell you have far the flow had taken it. A pound of concentration goes for 50,000 gp to an interested party, and can be used in magical crafting by those with the patience to learn its secrets (see Book of Gears for more information on the use of Concentration).

Hope: Hope is funny stuff, it has lots of inertia, but those who carry it are not weighed down in the least. It has mass, but not weight. Even the smallest piece of Hope sheds light like a daylight spell (the effective spell level for this effect is 7, and Hope can overcome almost any darkness). Hope is measured in kilograms rather than pounds, and a kilo of Hope goes for 100,000 gp to those who want it, and it can be used in magical crafting (see Tome of Virtue for more information on the use of Hope).

Raw Chaos: The plane of Limbo is filled with possibility and change. Usually this manifests as a continuous creation and destruction that is awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Sometimes, for whatever reason this possibility doesn't become anything, and just stays as Raw Chaos. Raw Chaos can have any dimensions and any amount of mass, but from a practical standpoint you either have it or you don't. If you have Raw Chaos and someone else doesn't you can give it to them, and it is generally considered good form for them to give you magical items or planar currency worth 200,000 gp in exchange. Raw Chaos can be transformed into magical items by those with the correct skills (See Tome of Tiamat for more information on the use of Raw Chaos).

The Service Economy: The Profession Rules Don't Work

The profession rules make us sad. Very sad. Which is unfortunate, because almost everyone in the entire world who isn't an adventurer apparently lives and dies by these things. While the powerful adventurers go off into the planes and exchange Raw Chaos and the Souls of Champions for powerful magical items and favors, your average orc is running around delivering halfling food or joining the army of a powerful warlord for little bits of metal. When the players begin their adventuring careers, they'll be caught up in this economy as well. And even if they eventually become powerful enough to purchase mighty rods with planar currencies they might still be intimately involved in it – as one of those mighty warlords who throws out tiny pieces of metal to orcish warriors and starting adventurers.

Here's the deal: if your character is a Sailor, that's character flavor. It's not a major portion of your character's power and we really are willing to just give it to you. Having a profession is like knowing a language: sometimes it will come up and sometimes it won't. In that spirit, we suggest that Profession cease being a ranked skill altogether. Just like people don't make "speak dwarvish" checks to have words come out of their mouth, characters should not have to make "Profession: Barkeep" checks to successfully sit behind a bench and hand people ale.

People who have a profession don't make checks to make money, they get a wage if they happen to have a job. The wage will depend on what kind of work they are doing (so no, you can't put 10 ranks into Profession: Janitor and be better paid than the magistrate). Characters are assumed to make a wage approximately similar to the one in the table below if they are working and have an appropriate professional skill. DMs may allow a character to put two ranks into a single Profession skill and be a "master whatever".Such characters may be able to boast about their skills or perhaps even make more money. The important part is that this means that you can find really good scullery maids who don't have a +5 BAB. Young children can often be drafted to do grown-up jobs, and need only be paid 1/10th the normal rate for whatever it is that you have them doing. Child labor is cheap, but in some ways you get what you pay for and children may become distracted or sick before completing important or dangerous jobs.

Professions and their Pay Scale:

Profession  Wage/Week

• Acolyte 5 GP+
  
• Alchemist 10 GP+
  
• Artisan 5 GP
  
• Bartender/Innkeeper 15 SP
  
• Barrister 8 GP
  
• Butler 2 GP
  
• Clerk 3 GP+ (includes more influential administrators)
  
• Cook 1 GP
  
• Courtesan 5 SP+
  
• Farmer 5 CP (Farmers also feed themselves)
  
• Fisherman 3 SP
  
• Groom 1 GP
  
• Guard 15 SP+
  
• Laborer 1 SP (note: this means no profession at all)
  
• Laborer, Skilled 2 GP
  
• Librarian 3 GP
  
• Janitor/Maid 8 SP
  
• Military Officer 5 GP+
  
• Miner 2 GP
  
• Porter 6 SP
  
• Runner 1 GP
  
• Sage 10 GP+*
  
• Sailor 2 GP
  
• Scribe 2 GP
  
• Servant 8 SP
  
• Shepherd 2 SP
  
• Smith 15 GP
  
• Smith, Master 150 GP
  
• Soldier 15 SP+
  
• Tailor 1 GP
  
• Teamster 2 GP
  
• Torturer 2 GP
  
• Valet 15 SP
  
• Wage Mage 10 GP+
  

+: Some professons are actually dependent upon class level and abilities. A 1st level Wage Mage commands a wage of 10 GP a week to sit around and cast 1st level spells and cantrips from time to time, but a 12th level Wizard would command an earnings per week so large that most kingdoms find it more expedient to simply make such magicians part of the government.
*: Any skilled profession that is based on one of the ten Knowledge skills in D&D is a Sage, and is not handled with the Profession skill at all. An Architect does not have "Profession: Sage", he has Knowledge: Architecture and Engineering. The pay scale of a Sage of any kind is extremely dependent upon his skill results. A character with four or five ranks in a couple of knowledges might pull down 10 GP per week, but a character who can regularly make a DC 30 check in any subject no matter how arcane can pull down the big bucks. Assuming of course that he can find someone that actually needs his services.

Just because you selected a profession that makes a lot of money doesn't mean that anyone will hire you. Generally only relatively organized areas actually have economies that even can hire Butlers and Clerks. But just because there is work available in an area doesn't mean that there's work available for you. Even in major cities there aren't a whole lot of jobs for a clerk or a barrister, so the competition for those jobs is pretty stiff. Prospective employers are fairly choosy about who they select for such employment, and they'll usually go to guilds (whose reputation is on the line every time they vouch for someone) or their own aristocratic family members rather than hire some random Half-Orc who claims to have the requisite skills.

Running a Business

The rules presented in the DMG2 for running a business make us very sad. Apparently the best way to make money is to run a shop out of a shack in the woods and pour money into it until noble djinni are teleporting to your door to hand over large gems for whatever the heck it is that you're selling. That doesn't make any kind of sense at all. We propose instead that the costs and benefits of running a business should be kind of comparable to those of working for a wage – since it is essentially exactly the same thing. What we're looking for is rules for running a business that aren't so obviously abusable over time, and which reward various business models rather than finding the killer app that makes the most money (the Shop as it happens) and just using that over and over again.

Capitalization

First off: the thing where in the basic DMG2 rules you can capitalize over and over again forever and have the profits go off towards infinity is as abusable as it is dumb. So the very first change that needs to be made is the divine decree that you can't do that. In fact, the concept of recapitalizing just wasn't handled well there at all. It takes money to make money, but investment is not a ladder where you set money on fire until the pyre lights the heavens ablaze and gets you epic items in parcels like clockwork. Instead, starting a business venture costs money – we call that initial capitalization. That's a one-time cost and the only way you can spend it again is if you start up a second business. After that, you have to supply one-third of the business' expected earnings for each month up front, we call that operational capital. If your business is still running at the end of the month, you get that money back (in addition to the earnings themselves), but if the business venture folds or you get driven off by rampaging monsters, or business events cause the venture to make no money for a month – that operational capital is gone and you're out a pocket full of shells.

Initial capitalization isn't any cheaper in the wilderness than it is in a big city. Actually, it's more expensive because you have to get goods shipped out into the wilderness to get the whole thing off the ground – and the wilderness in D&D is dangerous and teamsters make 2 GP a week each in compensation for that fact. Operational capitalization is cheaper in the wilderness, because expected earnings are less and therefore 1/3 of those earnings is also less. Yes, this means that business owners normally go to the city to conduct business, where there is a whole governmental apparatus to facilitate business dealings and a steady parade of caravans and ships to bring your product or service to the world. The only reasons that anyone does their business outside of major cities is because some particularly risky ventures can only be done far from town (for example: a Larvae Orchard is a high-risk, and therefore high profit enterprise, but it can only be located in the Wastes of Hades).

Risk

Risky business ventures make more money. But they also suffer catastrophic mishaps more often. That's what makes them risky. They are not simply an increase to the multiplier on the profit check, because that just makes you more money because player characters don't start businesses that aren't going to have positive profit checks. Maintaining a Risky venture involves you having more challenges to maintain your business – which in a roleplaying game like D&D means essentially that you spend more adventures maintaining your business and therefore spend less adventures looting other peoples' dungeons. The extra profit you make from the risky business is offset by the extra challenges you need to overcome. Essentially, taking on a risky business is just like getting the gold from your encounters before you go adventuring.

Risky businesses have a CR and a frequency. The DM is encouraged to send additional problems your way at roughly the frequency of the risk factor, and the ELs of the problems thrown your way should be roughly the same as the CR of the risk factor. Risky businesses also make a lot more money – roughly the value of an "average" treasure of an encounter of a CR equal to the risk factor every interval of time equal to the risk factor (see the DMG, p. 51). So an onyx mine that had a risk factor of 5/4 months would generate an extra 400gp per month (1600 gp/4) and be plagued with an EL 5 encounter roughly 3 times a year. It's just that easy.

Not all shops are the same. If you're selling burlap clothing, the profits are going to be small and ogre bandits won't even try to take all your stuff. If you're selling weapons of war or magical materials, then you can bet that those ogre mercenaries are going to be a little bit more interested. If you're running a more valuable business (that is, one which makes more money), the villains of the D&D world will come to take it from you – the risk factors adjust themselves pretty much automatically when your business improves, making this approximation amazingly accurate in addition to simple.

Resources

Resources are like Capitalization that you get to keep. While the presentation in the DMG2 is essentially "something that makes it harder to turn a profit on your business", the fact is that what they actually are is your own private dungeon. While the full rules for actually building your dungeon are going to have to wait until Book of Gears and the advanced crafting rules, for now we're going to assume that the prices in the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook hold up (and yes, we know how silly that is, but we haven't written anything better yet). Essentially, this means that your business needs to be housed in a building or ship, or cart, or dungeon of some kind. Bigger, more high-scale business ventures are going to need to be housed in more expensive surroundings. That sounds bad, but remember that when business events and risk factors happen to your business, they happen to your business, which means that if you have a ship or a tower to hold your stuff in, you actually get to use it when it gets attacked by gnoll pirates.

Keep in mid that if a business is booming, it may require more resources to house. A shack is all well and good if you plan to sell a couple of pots a month, but if you want to move inventory you've got to have inventory. And that means you need a place to show that inventory. Practically, that means that your projected profits (before calculating Risk-based Profits), can't ever exceed 1/10th the value of your business' resources. Of course, some businesses can only exist with large amounts of resources backing them up. And that's fine, since you really only get the benefits of large resources in large urban areas, this means that in general there are a lot of services that can be found in the big city that can't be found in smaller towns. Which is exactly what you'd want, right?

Growing the Business

Characters may outgrow collecting melloweed from the Bane Mires. The occasional hydra they have to defeat to get the goods just doesn't challenge them anymore, and the gold the whole thing takes in every month just doesn't seem worth the hassle. When this happens there are two options: franchise the operation, or grow the business up. A business can be expanded to a larger operation by investing in the next level of resources (causing it to be eligible to make more profits), or by taking on higher value/risk goods and clients (causing the risk factor to increase and profits to increase as well).

Franchising a business simply involves starting up a second (or third) business in another location. Resolve it as a whole new business.

Profits

So how much money do these things make? Well, in addition to Resource Limitations, there are demand limitations. That is, the amount of money that people can spend on your goods and services is proportional to how much money they have – larger communities can spend more money than can smaller communities. The maximum profits per month of any venture are based on the total population that business serves. If you compete with other businesses providing the same goods and services, simply divide the region's population according to market share before you determine maximum profits.

Population Size / Gold per Month

• 20-80 – 4 GP/month
  
• 81-400 – 10 GP per Month
  
• 401-900 – 20 GP per Month
  
• 901-2000 – 80 GP per Month
  
• 2001-5000 – 300 GP per Month
  
• 5001-12,000 – 1,500 GP per Month
  
• 12,001-25,000 – 4,000 GP per Month
  
• 25,001-100,000 – 10,000 GP per Month
  
• 100,001+ - 60,000 GP per Month
  

Remember that while this determines the maximum profits, there's no guaranty that your business will actually do as hoped. Things don't always work out as planned, and many business plans aren't good. In order to make your business succeed, you'll have to make a Profit Check. Actually making the projected Profits is a DC 20 check. Every point you fail that DC, reduce your income by 5%. For every point you exceed 20 on your Profit Check, add 5% (essentially this just means that you make a 5% return for every point of Profit Check you make).

The Profit Check itself is simply a straight ability check, using your choice of your Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma. Some of the modifiers to Profit Checks from the DMG2 are appropriate, others are not. For your convenience, we're replicating the entire chart with all the needed modifications:

• Owner has appropriate Profession Skill  +1
  
• Owner has two appropriate Profession skills +2
  
• Owner is a member of an associated guild +1
  
• Owner spends less than 8 hours per week assisting business operations -8
  
• Owner spends more than 40 hours per week assisting business +1
  
• Business is considered a Monopoly +10
  
• Business is an Oligarchy +4
  
• A Business Partner aids during the term +2
  
• Specialists are on staff +2
  
• Previous Profit Checks "Failed" -1 per consecutive check below 15.

Command Economies

Sometimes your "business" is actually just that you run a country, or a guild, or a church, or a criminal organization, or a mercenary command. Or whatever. The point is that your job is to run things, and people pay taxes (or tithes, or protection money, or whatever the kids are calling it these days) to you to make sure that you keep running things in a manner that doesn't involve them being stabbed in the face. The amount of lucre you can squeeze out of these situations has nothing to do with your skill checks or capitalization – you're essentially stealing from these people so the amount of money you can crank out of them depends largely on how much you're willing to squeeze them and how many people you are squeezing. Taxing a group of people can generate as much money as running a business serving them would. Your "business" in this case is "not stabbing them in the face".

You can be senselessly wicked and punitive on a population and make twice as much gold, but your subjects will hate you. You can also simply sack a region, making ten times as much gold, but driving the remaining population away as refugees. Lawful creatures (such as Hobgoblins and Dwarves) are more likely to pay taxes or save money and taxing or looting them is worth twice as much. Especially impoverished regions (such as one which has labored under a cruel governor for a long time) are worth half as much or less.

Bringing the World out of the Dark Ages

It is historical fact that you can take a ridiculous and crumbling imperium with serfs and horse-drawn carts managed by a tyrannical and squabbling aristocracy and boot strap it into being a technologically sophisticated global power that can win the space race and such in a single generation even while being invaded by an evil and genocidal empire. The people at the top don't even need to be nice or sane, they just have to understand that economics is an entirely voodoo science, and the limits of production can be broken by thousands of percentage points by getting everyone to buy on credit, work on projects that people looking at the big picture tell them to work on, continuously invest in productive capital, and believe in the future.

Right. That's called Communism, and it ends the dark ages immediately even if it isn't run well. Presumably if it was being run by Paladins who actually radiate goodness and Wizards who are inhumanly intelligent and can cast powerful divinations to determine projected needs and goods could be distributed to the masses with teleportals – it would work substantially better. That sort of thing is not outside the capabilities of your characters in D&D. It's not outside the capabilities of the people in the village your characters are saving from gnollish invasion. It's not even technically complicated. But it isn't done.

Partly it isn't done because we're playing Dungeons & Dragons, not Logistics & Dragons. While it is true that you can fix the world's ills in a much more tangible fashion by industrializing the production of grain and arranging a non-gold based distribution system such that staple food stuffs are available to all, thereby freeing up potential productive labor for use in blah blah blah… the fact is that to a very real degree we play this game because telling stories about slaying evil necromancers and swinging on chandeliers is awesome. But the other reason is that the society in D&D really isn't ready for a modern or futuristic social setup. Noone is going to understand how they are supposed to interact with Socialism, Capitalism, or Fascism, things are Feudal and people understand that. Wealth is exchanged for goods and services on the grounds that people on both sides of the exchange aren't sure that they would win the resulting combat if they tried to take the goods or wealth by force of arms.

Rome had steam engines. Actual difference engines that propelled a metal device with the power of a combustion reaction through the medium of the expansion of heated water. Really. They never built rail roads because slaves were cheaper than donkeys and the concept of investing in labor saving devices was preposterous. In D&D, the idea of having an economy based around trust in the government and labor/wealth equivalencies is similarly preposterous. It's not that the idea wouldn't work, it's that every man, woman, and child in society would simply laugh you out of the room if you tried to explain it to them.

The Thermodymaninomicon: The G of Life Continues:
"Seriously, this cave is a mile below the surface, what do they eat?"

When you drop an egg on the ground, it breaks. But when you drop a broken egg it doesn't reform a perfect shell. That's entropy baby, the simple fact that it requires energy inputs to maintain an open system, and a closed system only degrades over time. If there is to be Life, let alone civilization, there has to be some way of getting energy into the system. For the surface worlders, that's not even a problem: the Sun shines energy down on the surface all day. But for those who live in the dark realms: be it sewers, the ocean floor, or the classic dungeon complex; there has got to be a source of energy in the D&D world that just doesn't exist in ours. You don't see lush forests in marine trenches because the energy inputs just aren't there. But in D&D neither the ocean floor not the underdark is a desert – it's a vibrant ecology. Here's why:

Those whacky Mushrooms

Ask any DM what people eat down there in the Underdark and they'll probably say "Mushrooms" because it is a well known fact that mushrooms are a fungus and not a plant and they don't need sunlight to grow. What they do need, however, is a source of chemical energy. That can be dead bodies or um… otherwise digested material, sure, but it still has to come from somewhere. When fungus grabs some organic material and converts it into more fungus, that's an inefficient process. You actually have less energy worth of fungus than you had energy worth of whatever it was that the fungus was eating.

Don't get me wrong – edible fungus will happily consume things that are inedible (like woodchips) or even poisonous (like waste) and turn it into something you can eat. It just won't make something out of nothing. So mushrooms are an excuse for why Underdark dwellers have something to eat if and only if there is some other way that energy is coming into the system. It could be anything really, just as the trees will turn useless sunlight into tasty peaches, the fungus will turn useless chemical waste into delicious mushrooms. But while mushrooms can handwave the problem of converting energy that you can't use into energy that you can, they don't explain how that energy gets in to the Underdark in the first place.

Portals

The Inner and Outer Planes are infinite in scope, and don't follow the same thermodynamic constraints as Prime worlds do. A portal to the plane of Fire simply heaps energy into whatever cavern it happens to be in, which is like having a little sun right in your closet. Plants and algae can use that energy input to grow, and ooze monsters can eat those plant and civilizations can eat the ooze monsters. As long as those portals stay open, energy can keep entering the system even underground.

Magic Deposits

Magical locations exist all over the place in the D&D world. Some of them are on the surface, and these become fairy rings or magical castles, or whatever. The point is, almost all of them are put to use, because even the ones in deadly jungles or on top of treacherous mountains simply are not hard to get to. One teleport and you're there. But the world isn't flat (unless you're in Bytopia or the Abyss), and actually there's a lot more volume of the planet that's under the ground than there is on the surface. And that means that the vast majority of magical locations are underground somewhere.

If you consider that in the D&D world, magic is approximately as important as the Sun is to life on the planet, that means that a significant amount of the total energy inputs in the system are underground to the exclusion of being above ground. The underdark has irregularly spaced Nausica-style gardens down there that are supported by magic upwellings. Each of these locations is massively more productive than a field or forest above ground of similar size, and the immutable fact that the surrounding territory is lifeless barren stone causes fights over these locations to be extremely brutal.

Subduction

The world above is filled with living things, and even in D&D the vast majority of living things die. When living things die, they leave behind a body that other living things can eat. Some of this actually gets eaten, while other bodies end up sinking into the land. In our world, the organic material sucked into the ground eventually becomes fossil fuels, but in D&D there's actually stuff down there that will eat it. This is a relatively minor input into the dungeon eco system, but it essentially means that there aren't any oil deposits to be found in the D&D world.

The Bionomicon: Biodiversity in Top Predators:
"Where do all these monsters come from? How do they persist generation after generation?"

Resources are limited, and thus only a finite number of creatures can be supported on any particular diet within any area. D&D has a biodiversity that would make a modern ecologist sing and dance – Greyhawk has every single species that Earth has, and then it also has thousands of additional monsters, many of which are technically top predators. That's hard to manage. Remember that to support a single top predator requires a huge amount of energy inputs.

The Chicken and the Egg:

In our own world, the question of the chicken and the egg is one put out mostly to confuse the very young. It actually has a definitive answer, the egg came first. It doesn't even matter where you draw the line as to what is a chicken and what is some other creature, because wherever that line is drawn, the creature in question was first an egg and its own parents were not chickens. But in the D&D world, that's an open question because a lot of creatures are made rather than born and appear in the world fully formed. Golems simply don't need a stable pool of Golems in order to maintain genetic diversity. They don't even have genetic diversity.

Lots of other creatures in D&D reproduce in a completely magical way. Demons simply spawn out of flaming pits of rebirth, Aleaxes are created from the fact that a god got spent some divine focus (it comes somewhere between "Place Papal Magnet" and "Earthquake" I think), and chimeras are assembled out of parts by mad wizards.

Small Isolated Populations are Bad:

Bad things happen to a species if there aren't many instances of them in the world. Cheetahs can all accept skin grafts from each other and are all weak to the same diseases. Seriously, all cheetahs could go extinct next year, their existence is that fragile. In D&D there are numerous species that are less well represented in the world than cheetahs, so why don't they have the same problems?

Truth be told, some of them do. Many times a dungeon will contain a "unique monster" that the player characters will go and kill. That's an extinction event right there. There will be no more generations of "five armed fire troll" once you kill Togor the five armed fire troll. But some of them do not, and the reason is that D&D has a wealth of completely magical ways to keep a lineage from drying up. Even if a creature can't find a mate of its own kind anywhere in the world, there's always the planes and the realms of sorcery. An Archon or Devil can provide a means for any creature to create a new generation. In doing so, the new creature is sometimes pretty much indistinguishable from its mortal parent, and sometimes it shows up as a half-whatever. The point is, noone has to be doing anything particularly weird for the world to have half-fiend dire tigers in it. Which is a load off our minds, because the D&D world does have half-fiend dire tigers in it.

We Eat What We Like:

It has been noted by many an observer that actually humans are a top predator themselves, that it takes nearly 20 years for a human to grow to full size, and they're only 70 kilograms at that point. Thus, the concept of a creature persisting on a diet of human flesh is pretty much absurd. Especially if it lives in an out-of-the-way area like a mountain top or the bottom of a forgotten cave, there's just no way that something can live on manflesh alone.

Some monsters however, get the vast majority of their sustenance through magical means and only need small influxes of real food from their human food. The classic example, of course, is Vampires. They consume much less in food energy than they use up in maintaining their undead existence. Most of their energy is actually siphoned off the negative energy plane, and the drinking of human blood is just a symbolic evil act that they need to perform in order to keep that juice flowing. Similarly, mindflayers are sustained not by the nutritive value of brains, but by their own psychic powers. They need to eat the brains of intelligent creatures to keep their psychic powers sharp, and they need their psychic powers to be sharp in order to survive day to day without eating enough calories to keep themselves alive in the normal way.

Secondarily, lots of creatures have a perfectly fine diet of normal food and simply happen to attack and eat humans if they encounter them. A gelatinous cube, for example, lives just fine off of the lichens and offal that it scrapes off the walls and ceilings with its passing. But it certainly won't turn down a meal of 70 kilos of meat if it comes to that.

Empirinomicon
"What difference does it make? We're just going to kill them anyway…"

The Underdark is filled with empires. It is notable not only that there is civilization down here at all, but that there are actual empires. There's enough space for there to be tribes of creatures that people can unite as part of their nation-building exercises.

But more than that, these disparate tribes are more different than any group of humans have ever been one from another. While there is only one race of humans on Earth, there can be literally dozens of races in a single cavern settlement in a D&D world.

The Myconids: Apathy Writ Large

The Myconids don't need anybody, have no enemies, and don't care what you do. The first appearance of the Myconid empire was in an adventure otherwise filled with hostile evil humanoids, with the concept being that the Myconids were completely indifferent and would actually return aggression with aggression or soft words with a weird hallucinogenic telepathic mind-meld. The theme was that the Myconids were there as some sort of bizarre intelligence test for your players – if the players "figured out" that they could get past the Myconids without resorting to conflict the adventure would be easier and otherwise it would be more difficult.

But the years have passed by, and Myconids are no longer the new kids on the block. Players actually know where they stand with Myconids, and subsequent attempts to write adventures with the same setup have had to make up entirely new Neutral monsters to fill the same role (like the desmodu and their stupid Buck Rogers style fighter planes).

The Myconids have a pretty good world conquest strategy. They don't need anything at all to reproduce themselves and they don't really have to interact with the economies that the other races have bought into. They have an army of the dead and huge piles of crazy potions that they make free of course, but they aren't even interested in fighting the other races. The extent of the Myconid empire and population is limited by the farthest reaches of their mushroom fields, which simply grow a little every year. Eventually the Myconids might push the limits of their fields into areas other races intended to use, and then the Myconids will go ape and start throwing armies of zombies and themselves (every Myconid is completely replaceable) at whatever is in their way – but for now they just hang out and groove on the telepathy spores and share their dreams.

The Aboleth: Inheritance of the Memory Fish

The signature ability of the Aboleth is that they remember everything that was known to any creature they eat. There's no game mechanics for that ability, it just happens. And while Aboleth can create layered full-sensory illusions whenever they want, and dominate enemies, and turn humanoid opponents into lame deep one clones, the memory devouring ability is the really memorable one. It means that Aboleths remember intimate details about ancient events that go back to the very origins of the Aboleth race, and it means that Aboleths have access to all kinds of special magical sites and gadgets that are not available to other races.

The D&D world is filled with weird one-off locations that under certain circumstances do potentially awesome things. Over the course of their adventuring lives, a party of adventurers is liable to encounter several of them;  and the Aboleth remembers all of the ones found by any of the adventurers that it or any of its ancestors back to the beginning of time ever ate – which is a tremendously large amount. So any Aboleth plot is going to be facilitated by magical architecture and supernatural convergeances that happen once every hundred years and all kinds of crazy crap. Aboleth periodically plot to take over the world, and otherwise they pretty much sit and fester at the bottom of the nastiest, stinkiest pools in the Underdark.

Keep in mind that even by itself, an Aboleth is badly under CRed. They have actual dominate with a pretty decent DC and they aren't half bad in combat. Also, they have long duration images available as spell-like abilities. So any Aboleth area is going to be covered in layered illusions. If an Aboleth attacks, chances are that it's going to have several turns of doing pretty much anything it wants as the PCs sit shell-shocked on the other side of an illusory wall.

The Illithid: Slaves of the Elder Brain
The illithid have a bad reputation among the other sentient races: the mind flayers see them as food, and most races take offense to that viewpoint. It should be the fuel for a war of extinction on the illithid race, but three things protect the illithid as a race: each is a powerful artillery piece surrounded by hordes of charmed minions; the race is led by powerful elder brains who are each the equal of a powerful sorcerers; and they make good neighbors…. that’s right, they’re good neighbors. 

Each mindflayer can potentially control a small army of charmed slaves, can defeat a small army with their powerful stunning blast ability and resistance to magic, and can negotiate any conflict into peace with the ability to telepathically communicate and read minds, but their best ability is the ability to plane shift.  As a race that can naturally use this ability, they can hop between planes and be within five miles of any location that they can imagine on their own plane or any other.   This key fact means that when they go rampaging for brains and slaves, they not only do it in some place far from their home, but they might do it on some other plane entirely.  Due to the fact that few races can mount an extraplanar war, the flayers generally are too far and too difficult to find to ever face retaliation for their acts. Because of the limits of their travel ability, the mind flayers will clear and patrol an area about ten miles from their home, removing any potential threat and keeping dangerous predators away.  In this way, they can return to their homes in relative peace, and by scrupulously not preying on their neighbors, they avoid any retaliation on single illithid walking home.  Add in their mind-reading and telepathy ability, they are naturally suited to making mutual defense pacts with nearby races so that they can establish a peaceful dominance in their own territory.   

The fact that every mind flayer enclave is controlled by a powerful elder brain is another fact that makes their enclaves safe and their culture vital.  As a powerful, but generally stationary creature, it has every incentive to make its home as well-defended as possible, drawing on its own powers to equip its home with wondrous architecture and traps befitting a powerful sorcerer (or psionicist).  Add in the hordes of slaves and the illithid themselves, this means that even moderately-sized enclaves can bring to bear enough force to make taking the city an extremely unprofitable enterprise.

One final note about the illithid: as planar travelers with an innate ability to travel to any plane, they often gain access to technology and magic from cultures beyond counting.  While the mind flayers are geniuses in their own right, they often store knowledge of these devices in the minds of their slaves, a practice that leads them to losing that knowledge when hunger or carelessness takes that slave away.  Even so, expect the average illithid to be a font of secrets dredged from dozens of extraplanar cultures, its home filled with odd artifacts and devices culled from those far-off places. If their own powers and hungers weren’t so great, they might even be drawn to the exploitation of this knowledge.  Luckily for the races of the worlds, the mind flayer’s total confidence in their own abilities and need expend time feeding on difficult-to-acquire fare makes them ignore all but the most obviously useful things stolen from other cultures. 

Progenitor of the Gith
"I’ve spent five years as a slave to brain-eating geniuses, fighting every day in the pits for their amusement, killing beings culled from dozens of planes.  Do you really think this crap impresses me?"

The Illithid are slavers extraordinaire, masters of the mind control and capable of traveling far in their search for slaves.  To escape their clutches, one must become a creature as powerful as them, and some do so by absorbing the ambient psionic radiations of their cities and becoming a more than mortal creature.  In this way, the Githzerai and Githyanki earned their freedom, and this route is still open to those willing and capable of surrendering their essence in exchange for communion with the Astral Plane.

Prerequisites:
BAB: +4
Race: Human.
Special: Must have spent at least five years as a slave in an illithid city.

Hit Die: d8
Class Skills: The Progenitor of Gith’s skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Balance (Dex), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Handle Animal (Cha), Hide (Dex), Intimidate (Cha), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Profession (Wis), Ride (Dex), Search (Int), Sense Motive (Wis), Spot (Wis), Survival (Wis), and Swim (Str).

Skills/Level: 4 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Good (1/1), Saves: Fort: Good; Reflex: Good; Will: Good

Level, Benefit
1 Thoughtful Warrior, Endurance of the Mind
2 Ideas Made Form
3 Movement of the Mind
4 Astral Strike
5 Native of the Silver Sky

All of the following are Class Features of the Progenitor of Gith class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency:  Progenitors of Gith gain proficiency in the composite long bow, and gain no armor proficiencies.

Thoughtful Warrior (Sp):  At 1st level, a Progenitor gains the ability to cast daze, mage hand, and feather fall at will as a spell-like ability

Endurance of the Mind (Su): A Progenitor has likely been mind blasted and charmed many times in his life. If he is currently the subject of an ongoing effect that allows a Willpower save, he may retest that saving throw every round. Success is treated as if he had passed the initial Willpower save.

Ideas Made Form (Sp): At 2nd level, the Progenitor gains the ability to cast clairaudience/clairvoyance and shatter at will as a spell-like ability

Movement of the Mind (Sp): At 3rd level, the Progenitor gains the ability to cast dimension door at will as a spell-like ability.

Astral Strike (Sp) :  At 4th level, a Progenitor can cast Telekinesis at will as a spell-like ability.

Native of the Silver Sky (Ex): At 5th level, the energies of the Astral Plane now bolster the physical form of the Progenitor, and he gains becomes an Outsider native to the Astral Plane and he gains Spell Resistance equal to his character level +5, a +4 armor bonus to AC, and the ability to cast plane shift twice a day as a spell-like ability.
If he breeds with a githzerai or githyanki, any offspring will be of that race.

The Drow: A Higher Technology Setting
Everyone knows that the dark elves are hardcore.  Even in the bad old days of DnD’s conception, dark elves were “mirror matches” to the party with class levels of their own, crazy magic items of their own, and good tactics.  The real question is: “why are the dark elves so hardcore?”  The answer is simple.  Dark elves are living at a higher technology level than the rest of the DnD world; their society only exists because, as a society, they cheat.  Rather than grow food like surface races, they eat magic mushrooms as the basis of the food chain, they enslave other races for menial positions rather than work, and rather than mine or gather their own resources, they take them from other races.  They don’t even have to work that hard on defense as Underdark caverns are naturally easy to defend with small numbers of troops stationed at chokepoints

This means that your average dark elf has free time to spare.  While some take that time to indulge in the pleasures of their society, most dark elves are the products of a very odd world view: if only dark elves are your peers and everyone else is a slave, then the only real power worth having is power over other dark elves.  That being the case, this means that dark elves have both the free time and the inclination to attempt to enslave each other all the time.  This breeds great internal strife with each noble house being an armed camp designed to use stealth, power, and manipulation in order to both resist the efforts of other dark elves and attempt to enslave them.

Like any heavily-automated wartime culture, the dark elves spend considerable resources on weapons research, espionage, and cultural misinformation. This means that every noble house or other organization is constantly looking for an “edge” in their dealings with other dark elves and other races.  This leads them to kidnap experts from other races, engage in spell research, experiment with weird magic or exotic technology, forge partnerships with magically or technologically-advanced races, and otherwise do whatever it takes to grow in power.  In any particular drow city you can expect to see dozens of competing forms of magic, odd inventions ranging from mechanical limbs to powered gliders, exotic troops like demon-bred orcs or elite espionage races like skulkers, and constructions with magical architecture or resonances.  Since every drow is attempting to master his peers, these magics and technologies are tightly controlled, meaning that when the individual or organization that controls them is killed off, these secrets are often lost, meaning that any particular drow might be using relics from a previous generation (that he may well lack the ability to understand or reproduce).       

Other races in the Underdark realize that the dark elves truly only want to control each other, so they allow the occasional resource and slave raids of the dark elves. They know that the dark elves are ill-suited to any form of large-scale conquest due to their particular style of command, so placating the drow is often the best way to conserve the resources of your society.  Since the other Underdark races tithe goods to the drow and the drow are smart enough to see the value in trade relationships, Underdark races of note are allowed to use dark elf cities as major trading posts between their own kind and other races. The dark elves see all races as being underneath them, so as long as the other races show deference to them and bring in a profit in trade, they allow this enterprise to continue.

The average drow city is thus a hornet’s nest of power, full of indolent, wildly dangerous, and spoiled aristocrats. Even the lowliest of drow lives in a level of luxury suitable to the most powerful of nobles on the surface, and each one of them has reached adulthood in an atmosphere of distrust and manipulation with the weakest dying early.  As individuals this makes them powerful and cruel, but as a race it keeps them inwardly looking and less of a threat than more ambitious warrior races, a fact that actually prevents other races from gathering their forces and destroying the drow outright.   

The Eye Tyrants: Lingering Hatred
Beholders are among the most magically capable of races; this is a fact that’s well accepted.  So why don’t they own everyone? They can charm people at will, kill people, inspire terror by turning people to stone or just inspire terror with real magical fear.  Even the lowliest beholder can attempt to destroy the world one ten foot cube at a time. 

The truth? Beholders are paranoid jerks.  Beholders recognize that they each have the ability to destroy each other with at least four different effects, and they also have to live with the fact that any beholder can charm his lessers and betters if he happens to get the jump on them.  This means that, as a race, the beholders are like gunslingers from the American Old West.  They know that to associate with any other beholder is to risk disintegrate or charm rays in the back with the winner taking the loser’s treasure and slaves.  Actual beholder meetings involve both parties agreeing to aim their anti-magic rays on each other, and only then can negotiations or exchanges can take place. This means that actual organizations of beholders are practically impossible as life breaks down as soon as you can’t cover all your enemies in your anti-magic eye (with many eyes, they can spot ambushes by thralls pretty easily, so it's only your peers you fear).

That still doesn’t explain why beholders don’t go on bloody rampages on the surface races. The reason is simple: longbows.  The average beholder is a tough customer that can expect to wreak a bloody swath of destruction if he chooses, but he’s painfully weak against long-range weapons.  Any race with even a passing knowledge of the beholders knows that they charm people, so they also know that killing the beholder frees the slaves.   This is why the beholders prefer underground areas.  With ranged weapons blocked by the limits of doors, walls and corridors, beholders can reign as kings in underground or indoor environments.

While the Spelljammer universe posits “nations” of beholders held together by racial hatred of other beholders and everyone else, this is really a fallacy.  Racial pride or nationalism come to far seconds when you realize that beholder nations are actually held together by single individuals who routinely charm every other beholder on their ship and force them to “play nice” with the other beholders.  Any “Hive” metaphor talking about beholders actually talks about the layers of charm effects building a top-down command structure where the Queen controls everyone, then the second-in-commands has control of everyone else in order to serve as secondary leaders but unable to defy the Queen. Like other kinds of dictatorships, killing the leader figure causes the nation to fall apart into bloody factions headed by second-in-commands attempting to assert control of the others, and these power plays work through the bonds of charm effects and personal charisma.  Some Hives are actually controlled by a racial variant called a Hive Mother, but these creatures are merely biological extensions of relationships that already exist within beholder society.

The Kuo-Toans: Opportunities Slip By

The Kuo-Toans are extremely aware that things used to be pretty awesome if you were a Kuo-Toa, and now they suck. They are actually a deep ocean race and they don't live in the ocean at all anymore. That's because long ago they lost a war to the Sahuagin. And they lost it badly. Now they live in pools of water that often as not are fresh water in the bottoms of caves, and they hate it here. The lack of pressure and salinization of the water makes the Kuo-Toans unhealthy and uncomfortable, and they end up stinking of rotting fish as their skin becomes diseased and crumbly.

Every generation of Kuo-Toa is a little sicker than the one before it, and everyone understands and accepts that the race is dying out. Every Kuo-Toa expects the future to be worse than the present, and the Whips (the Clerics of the Kuo-Toa) do nothing to forestall that process or convince their people otherwise. Legends say that the Great Evils they left behind at the bottom of the seas will eventually return to destroy the whole world, but only once they've successfully fed them with enough of the misery of the Kuo-Toan people. Noone in Kuo-Toa society wants to become a leader, because the world will become even more unpleasant every year and the leaders are always blamed. A Kuo-Toa gains a position of leadership when the old leader is finally killed and eaten for failure and the Whips draw lots for who has to be the next leader. Most Kuo-Toans believe that these lots are fixed in advance, and they're right.

Despite the utter hatred that all Kuo-Toans hold for all other races, they are perfectly willing to trade with them. The Kuo-Toans are badly out of their element, and need nutritional supplementation from far away just to survive. They need to receive goods from the Drow, and they know it. They hate the Drow, as they hate everyone, but that doesn't stop them from trading. The Kuo-Toans understand that the Aboleth know where every single one of their spawning pools are and that only laziness on the part of the Aboleth has left the Kuo-Toan people with any territory at all. Still, they wait in the darkness for the cataclysm to come that will put them out of their misery and slaughter all the other creatures of the land and the sea. Their one hope is that just before the last Kuo-Toa is finally slain, that they will see with their own eyes the horrible vengeance wreaked on the other empires.

Bonus Class: The Monitor
"In time… even the sun will die. Until then… I shall content myself with your demise. "

Kuo-Toans are a depressing group to hang with at the best of times. Their relentless downbeat attitude can turn even the most festive of occasions into a dirge. But perhaps the most depressing of all Kuo-Toa are the Monitors. These monks of Kuo-Toa society are dedicated to a strict regimen of martial training and meditation on the complete futility of all things. Discussions with Monitors have been known to drive even other Kuo-Toa to suicide.

Prerequisites:
Skills: 9 ranks in Balance
Feat: Multiattack
Alignment: Any Evil.
Special: Must have at least one Fighting Style class feature.
Special: Must be trained in the Kuo-Toa Monasteries.

Hit Die: d8
Class Skills: The Defiler of Temples' class skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Balance (Dex), Climb (Str), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Escape Artist (Dex), Hide (Dex), Jump (Str), Knowledge (Religion) (Int), Knowledge (Dungeoneering) (Int), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Sense Motive (Wis), Spot (Wis), Swim (Str), and Tumble (Dex).
Skills/Level: 4 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Good (1/1), Saves: Fort: Good; Reflex: Good; Will: Good

Level, Benefit
1 Fighting Style, Armored in Life, Powerful Observation
2 Strike the Intangible
3 Master Fighting Style
4 Wait for Death
5 Master Fighting Style
6 Depressing Monologue
7 Master Fighting Style
8 Sticky Hands, Apathy
9 Grand Master Fighting Style

All of the following are Class Features of the Monitor class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: A Monitor gains no proficiency with any weapons or armor.

Fighting Style: The Monitor gains a Fighting Style as a Monk at first level.

Armored in Life: Levels of Monitor stack with levels in Monk for the purposes of the Monk's Armored in Life ability.

Powerful Observation: A Monitor adds his class level as a bonus to his Spot and Sense Motive checks.

Strike the Intangible: At 2nd level, a Monitor gains the ability to strike the invisible creatures he can see. His natural weapon attacks can hurt incorporeal and ethereal targets without a miss chance related to intangibility.

Master Fighting Style: At 3rd, 5th, and 7th level a Monitor gains a Master Fighting Style, as a Monk.

Wait for Death (Su): A Monitor looks forward only to death, but this can be a very long wait indeed. A Monitor of 4th level does not age, sleep, need nutrition, or breathe. Furthermore, a Monitor of 4th level no longer loses hit points when he has 0 hit points or less.

Depressing Monologue (Su): Any creature that speaks to a 6th level Monitor for more than five minutes must make a Willpower Save (DC 10 + ½ hit dice + Charisma Modifier) or be affected by abject despair and curse of crumbling conviction.

Sticky Hands (Ex): A Monitor of 8th level makes great use of sticky Kuo-Toa secretions and gains a +4 bonus on Disarm tests, whether he is the attacker or the defender.

Apathy (Su): At 8th level, a Monitor is able to draw upon supernatural reserves of ennui and ambivalence, rendering him immune to mind affecting effects.

Grand Master Fighting Style: At 9th level, a Monitor gains a Grand Master Fighting Style as a Monk.

The Troglodytes: Persecution Complex

Everybody hates Troglodytes. Everybody. They don't necessarily do anything that horrible in the scheme of things, they just happen to stink so bad that they can cause other races to collapse from nausea. So while the dwarves have a very complicated relationship with the hobgoblins where they have long periods of intermittent strife punctuated by flourishing trade relations and shared artistic histories and stuff – the dwarves literally don't have anything nice to say about the troglodytes at all. Their entire history with the Trogs is one where sometimes they fought and sometimes they didn't fight. There's never been real peace between the Troglodytes and anyone. That's hard on a culture, and their isolation has made them intensely barbaric and xenophobic by the standards of any other race. Troglodytes can't even use the other races as slaves, and open lines of communication do not exist so the Troglodytes can't trade captives back to other races for concessions on the bargaining table. There isn't even a bargaining table at the end of any conflict.

So if you get captured by Troglodytes, you're going to be eaten or sacrificed to their dark gods. The Troglodytes literally have no other use for captives. So the only reason for any of the other races to surrender to Troglodytes is if they think there is a chance they will be rescued. Troglodytes themselves will generally not surrender in battle because they believe that other races will treat them the same way that they treat others.

A natural result of all this, is that the Troglodyte tribes are much lower tech than the rest of the setting. They have no trade in equipment or ideas with the other races, so the only steel equipment that Troglodytes have is what they looted off of fallen enemies. Most troglodyte weapons are just sharp rocks. Troglodytes can be useful to a campaign because they have a legitimate reason to still be "cave men" even while the rest of the world is putting together portal highways and overshot water mills.

The Lexiconinomicon: Things to Talk About

Language in D&D
"Does anyone speak 'Roper'? Anyone?"

The default languages of Dungeons and Dragons (Goblin, Halfling, Giant, Common) assumes a certain level of racial tribalism, where a village is normally expected to be a "Halfling village" or a "Gnoll village", and that was the presentation of the D&D world – in 1977. The AD&D Monster Manual talked about villages of Orcs or Goblins, and you could seriously count on your fingers the number of races that shared living space, and many of those "races" were just leveled versions of normal humanoids (flinds and lizardkings, for example).Thirty years have come and gone since those bad old days, and the modern presentation is much less "genetically isolated tribes" and much more "mixed species regions". Today when an enemy village is written up it has bugbears and orcs, and grimlocks and all kinds of crazy crap in it.

But the languages haven't changed, even though the presented social setup no longer supports that paradigm. A child grows up speaking whatever languages they happen to be exposed to, so when the Orcs were living on their own it was pretty reasonable for the language spoken by Orcs to be a different one from the other tribes and to be identified simply as "The Language that Orcs speak" or simply "Orc". But if any more complicated social system or demographic distribution is posited, that no longer works at all.

Regional Languages:

The attempt to put Regional Languages into the mix has been a dismal failure. As anyone who has attempted to follow the Forgotten Realms language "system" can attest, that's something that you really have to put up the little finger quotes when you talk about it. A Regional Language is just a tribal language that at some point in time became influential enough that everyone in a region adopted it. That means that a Regional Language actually is "Orcish" – it just means that the Orcs of that region kicked enough booty that everyone ended up learning Orc, and then in subsequent generations everyone spoke Orc and didn't even think that was weird. Heck, there might not be any Orcs in the area anymore. But everyone in that area will still speak Orc.

Pidgins: Common and Undercommon
"Orc take sword. I own sword. I tell you. I want sword. Orc give sword. I get sword. You tell orc."

Common is not technically a language, it's a linguistic construct called a Pidgin. A Pidgin is a linguistic amalgamation that combines elements from several languages and has an extremely simple grammatical structure with no iterative capability. Whoa that's a lot of six-dollar words! The point is that all this stuff with relative clauses and structured inheritance that makes D&D rulebooks read like a legal document is completely absent from a pidgin.

Pidgins form when people from different groups come together for trading purposes. So in the Underdark, Pidgin is pretty much just an extremely simplified version of the Drow version of Elvish. They trade with everyone, and speak in "Tourist Speak" where they speak very loudly and slowly in Drow and everyone has pretty much figured out what that means. Above ground, Common is mostly composed of the Halfling language, with a few loan words from other cultures thrown in.

The only reason that Common and Undercommon stay relatively static in D&D is because the people actually doing the trading are crazy long lived and do the trading everywhere. The big traders in the D&D economy are not those stupid caravans who wander around full of swag. No, it's Wizards and Outsiders who teleport expensive and wondrous stuff all over the planet. The reason why you can get a cup of coffee or a bolt of silk in your otherwise European villa is because people with teleportation are moving goods all over the place. So people who speak Common actually do share a common trade language with people clear on the other side of the planet. And they might not even know who the wizards in question are.

Interesting side note: People who grow up speaking a Pidgin as their only language actually speak a Creole, which is a real iterative language just like any other that is made out of the words of the original Pidgin. Human cultures in D&D apparently default to Common as their primary language. That means that humans presumably speak Common as a language rather than as a pidgin. So the Wizards and Shadow Caravaners come to Human settlements from time to time and regard human speech as being filled with vulgar crazy-talk. The words are all there, but they have extra prepositions and jumble all the thoughts into single sentences.

Language System I - High Fantasy
In the true High Fantasy setting, there are three languages on your continent, and no "Speak Language" skill.

Firstly, there is Common, which is what everyone speaks. Maybe people from far away speak a foreign, incomprehensible tongue, but it's foreign and incomprehensible and your characters don't speak it just because you an Intelligence of 12.

Secondly, there is The Old Tongue, which isn't spoken much, but is used in ancient writings and prophecies and such not. You can't have a speak language for this, to read it (or understand it), you need Decipher Script. This is what Decipher Script is for, since ancient script is generally in The Old Tongue. If you are a big bad ass elf you show off your many ranks in Decipher Script by peppering your speech with Old Tongue terms. If anyone asks, The Old Tongue is so complicated, full of subtle meaning and generally awesome that it can never be used for reliable communication.

Thirdly, there is The Dark Tongue, which is just like The Old Tongue from a game mechanical standpoint. To speak The Dark Tongue, you take The Old Tongue, change every other vowel into a hard consonant (a->k, e->t, i->p, o->g, u->ch, y->q), and all of the pauses (') become glottal stops (`). If you are a member of the evil political party, you pepper your speech with Dark Tongue words and phrases to prove how cool you are.
Ex.: L'rihylya'anyur cescelenti -> L`rphylqa`knychr cesctlentp

The High Fantasy language system is about what you get from books like Shanarra or the Wheel of Endlessness cycle. It's also really easy, which is why it is in use by lazy authors. It also has the advantage that the Decipher Script skill has an obvious and explicable use (which let's face it: in standard D&D it does not have, even deciphering magical writing is a Spellcraft check). People pretty much talk in English except when it's plot important that they be incomprehensible and everyone knows where everything stands. It's even less realistic than the basic rules, but it's closer to a lot of the important source material.

Language System II - Remotely Realistic
Each major cultural group (e.g. Europe, China, India) has a language which they will call, more or less, "Classical" (e.g. Latin, Classical Han Chinese, Sanskrit, respectively.) This is the language that people will use for writing, it is also the language of discourse for travelers and the like. Classical is the only language with a meaningful written form, although you might find some scribbled notes or poems (e.g. the Golliard Poems, found at Carmina Burana) in a local, or vulgar, language. There are also pre-classical writings (e.g. Greek, Cuneiform, not to mention Old Slaan and Aboleth) which you will need Decipher Script to read.

You may or may not have mystical languages (Terran, Aquan, Celestial, etc.), if you do, it might be a good idea to have one of those serve in place of classical for one major cultural grouping or another. To save yourself trouble, assume that your world contained four great civilizations - Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western. Each of these civilizations left behind a classical language, which is used for academic and administrative discourse in that region.

In this model, there is no "common" that is spoken by commoners. The tongue of the ancient Dwarvish Empire will be spoken by everyone in the Northern countries who is educated, but the uneducated commoners will speak all kinds of crazy local tongues (Wenn, Lapp, Prussian, etc.) and you may well have to turn to magical translation or local educated characters (such as the town wizard or a local aristocrat) in order to get your point across to the Plebes. This closely approximates the position that Latin had in medieval Europe or the position that Han Chinese had in medieval China.

Spellbooks
"Warning: may contain Explosive Runes."

Long ago, a spellbook was an actual magical object. Magic Users could pop their book open, rip pages out and blast the contents out as magic scrolls. Their very method of spell preparation was to open this pile of dangerous magic items and concentrate on creating copies of the scrolls in their minds to be released later on as powerful magic. For those of you who are new to 3rd edition, that statement seems pretty weird, because it doesn't work that way at all anymore.

Using Other Peoples' Spellbook

You can pick up some other guy's spellbook and prepare spells out of them once you've deciphered the spell in question. The DC isn't even hard – it's only 15+Spell Level (and you can take 10), so a high level character can't even fail. And by a "high level character", I actually mean a first level character if he has an Int Bonus of at least +2, which he does. With the extreme ease of using other peoples' spellbooks, one is tempted to ask why anyone ever makes a full scale copy of a spell – that's crazy expensive.

The answer, of course, is that they don't. In reality all spells copied by powerful wizards are created with the secret page spell. That spell allows you to "hide" whatever is on a page with any writing you want – even (specifically) spells. So the "fake page" is actually part of a spellbook, and the "real page" is probably just doodles of horses or tallies of wins and losses in Backgammon. Secret Page comes online for Wizards at level 5, so any Wizard of even modest power should be able to construct spellbooks in hours rather than days for zero gold pieces.

If you want, you can "master" another wizard's spellbook, at which point everything in it becomes just like you wrote it. The DC is 25 + Spell level

Getting by Without a Spellbook

People often assume that wizards carry their spellbooks with them at all times and that taking these books away from them will cripple their character beyond redemption. For low level adventuring wizards, this is essentially true. But for high level Wizards and wizards who don't adventure, nothing could be further from the truth.

Copies of spellbooks are astoundingly expensive – but once characters enter the fabricate or wish economies of the upper levels, that cost is either meaningless or can be bypassed entirely (thanks secret page). Any decently high level wizard may well have dozens or hundreds of copies of that precious manuscript. That's why characters with a Wizard Mentor can copy spells for free – the high level wizard literally just hands them a copy of any spell they figure out how to master.

Arcane Magical Writings

As written, a Wizard can learn a spell from any spellbook page or scroll she has deciphered. Deciphering a page or scroll is a spellcraft check that, among other things, tells you whether it is arcane or divine. That means that under the rules as written, a Wizard can take Cleric Scrolls and copy them into her spellbook and then they become Wizard spells of the same level. Honestly… most DMs will not let you do that even though the PHB is extremely specific that that is exactly what you can do. But if it's really important to you to learn Cleric spells, you still can.

Many DMs put in the additional restriction that to learn a spell it must be Arcane, or even that it must be a Sor/Wiz spell. That's actually fine, because the world of D&D includes Nagas, who cast Cleric spells as Sorcerer spells. They can make scrolls (or you can make a scroll with a Naga), and then you can learn those precious Cleric spells if you really care. Chances are, though, that you don't care. Clerics are much better than Wizards in every single aspect of their characters except in their spell-list. And while there are certainly some gems on the Cleric list as far as spells go, chances are if you wanted to build a character who casts those spells you'd be better off having been a Cleric in the first place. Have better hit points, Saves, and BAB. So while learning Cleric spells is probably a pretty stupid goal, it is definitely achievable no matter how strict your DM is.

Well, the weekend came and went and the new boards aren't up. So we decided to drop this on the "old boards" anyhow.

Next up: either the...

Tome of Virtue (Good, Upper Planar Adevnture, Divine Power)
Tome of Trees (Bards, Spirits, Fairies, Transitive Planes, Plants, Enchantment)
Book of Gears (Constructs, Vermin, Artificers, Crafting, Item Creation, Illusion)
Races of War (Fighters, Mass Combat, Advanced Combat, Humanoids, Powerful Playable Races)
Tome of Tiamat (Dragons, Evocation, Magic Locations, Elementals, Monster Advancement)

Any thoughts on which it should be?

Improved Unarmed Strike doesn't... work. Like at all. It is our intention to remove it from the game completely, because the things it does aren't good. They aren't even comprehensible. Just looking at the contradictory Sage answers on decisions on what is supposed to happen when you have IUS and are transformed into a T. Rex is enough to make me catch on fire.

The game can handle people having slam attacks, but people being entitled to "unarmed attacks that count as manufactured weapon attacks and natural weapon attacks and count as both unarmed and armed" is something noone needs. That was just a bad game mechanic. We are indeed replacing it with a natural weapon slam.

klode_me]How come it is a supernatural ability?

Cheers
klode_me

Despite the fact that Jet Li really could punch through a concrete wall when he was 12 and he's trained in Chinese Opera rather than Kung Fu, Combat there is a substantial resistance to people being able to do good things with their fists if magic is not involved. Giving martial artists a "magical martial art" that makes them able to do level appropriate things is something that people seem vaguely OK with, while a substantial number of other people are in some way offended by the idea that people could fight level appropriate combats.

If you're 11th level, and your schtick is punching people, you need to be able to punch out a Bulette. ou need to be able to do this reliably, and potentially several times a day without assistance. That's what being 11th level means. And discussions have shown that if you make the guy's "punching people" attack into a "magical ability" more people are able to accept it for whatever reason.

It's not actually important. If you prefer a les-magical monk, you can shunt some of the abilities from Su to Ex. Honestly, antimagic fields come up so infrequently that it generally doesn't even matter. We made them Su rather than Ex only because more people seemed to prefer the class that way. If you prefer the class with more Ex abilities, than obviously moving them back is no p wrote:

Drunken Hummingbird-Fu.

For the WIN.

With so much interesting material, it is hard to decide where to comment first -- it's a bit like trying to figure were to start on a desert buffet.

K]The source material for the social setting of D&D is not Hans Christian Andersen, it's Homer's The Iliad and Caesar's The Gallic Wars. In the backdrop of early historical empire building, crimes that modern humans shake their heads at the barbarity of are common place – wrote:

The source material for the social setting of D&D is not Hans Christian Andersen, it's Homer's The Iliad and Caesar's The Gallic Wars. In the backdrop of early historical empire building, crimes that modern humans shake their heads at the barbarity of are common place – even among the heroes. D&D at its core is about breaking into other peoples' homes, possibly killing the residents, and taking their stuff home with you in a sack. And in the context of the period, that is acceptable behavior for a hero.

One other period where this type of behavior seems accepted is during the expansion of empires into weaker, "less advanced" territories.  Or, in other words, colonial periods.  As long as your behavior overseas (or across space if you're playing Spelljammer or in other planes if you're playing Planescape) brings in a constant flow of money and goods, and does not undermine the authority of central government, there may not be a lot of questions asked, no matter how you behave.

k]So… wrote:

So… you're going to solve that by instituting a paper-based exchange system where initially the paper is exchangeable for gold and that eventually gets phased out when the Plebes realize that handing actual gold back and forth is inconvenient and dumb, right? Wrong. Remember that this is the Iron Age, and people haven't invented Nationalism yet. The cornerstone of the Greenback currency is a belief in the nation that prints it – and nations simply don't exist. You've got empires, and you've got kingdoms, and you've got tribes, and you've got unincorporated villages… and that's it as far as civilization goes. When you look at a map in D&D and a colored region has a name on it, that's the name of the region. Possibly it's even the name of some guy in the region. The point is, that it's not a country in the modern sense of the word, so if some new guy walks in who's bad enough the next cartographer will put his name on the region instead.

And that means that "The Full Faith and Credit of the Kingdom of Daxall" is worth precisely nothing. And while King Daxall can, through force of arms, take all the gold away from all the peasants and get them to trade pieces of paper for goods and services in its place – noone will actually believe that the paper is currency. They're literally trading promises by King Daxall that he'll let them have their money back if they leave town. And since the serfs can't even leave town, even that promise is meaningless to them. A serf accepts paper for goods and services only because he'll be beheaded if he doesn't. The black market value of these pieces of paper is pretty close to zero. Worse, nearby governments will see this as a blatant attempt to sequester all the gold in King Daxall's pants and will probably declare war (in addition to the fact that noone outside the reach of King Daxall's pikemen will accept Daxall Dollars).

Well, actually, paper money (called bank notes for a reason) were first issued by, well, banks, not central governments, usually as a result of a shortage of metal to make coinage.  Since metal isn't that valuable in D&D economies, I could see bank notes being issues based on gems or megical materials or magic items.  It doesn't have to be in everyday use for it to be valuable for big ticket purchases after all, it just needs to be accepted by the major traders and merchants.

And while I realize you are stipulating an Iron Age culture, most D&D societies seem to have elements from more sophisticated societies mixed in.  And while paper money is historically a later thing, a form of letter of credit, the giro seems to date back to at least the first century AD.  It seems to me given the long-lived entities and their powers of revenge, an inter-planar system of private banks capable of issuing their own notes might emerge to make it easier to move wealth around.

Oh, were I the man who invented the slow clap.

But I am not.

Well done, K. Well done indeed. I'd like to see Races of War next. While I don't agree with everything you've said, you've presented a well-thought out, funny, and generally GOOD argument that doesn't only present some of the problems in 3.5 E D+D, but actually tries to fix them.

Well done indeed.

Oops, double post!

Awesome stuff once more, K, though I have to ask: who writes these? Normally I'd assume it's you, but you keep using words like "we" and "us," which has gotten me fairly confused.

Edit: Oh, and I'm voting for Tome of Trees.

K]The first paper money, not to be confused with contracts and promissary notes (which date back to the Babylonian days or before), date back to the 900s in China and were indeed issued by the government as a method of holding on to the metal supply. This "flying money" was pretty unpopular because people didn't really believe it had value.

OK, you have me there, but that still doesn't explain why the high-end magical economy isn't using letters of credit and similar instruments for expensive purchases. Teleport makes the whole idea much wrote:

Question: Can a monk select the same bonuses from the Fighting Style Abilities list twice in the same Fighting Style?

No. There's no restriction against that happening, it's just that the "same effect" rules for magical effects makes it not apply. We left it like that because we wanted the Monk to have the option of having a lot of little powers instead of a couple of bigger powers.

But we aren't allowing Monks to double up on the same abilities because it's boring. A +32 Dodge bonus isn't likely to unbalance a Monk who is high enough level to have a Grand Master Fighting Style. But it's not really very exciting for acharacter to have a single moderately big bonus as their only trick. The lack of offensive powers at that point would make them an unexciting one trick pony.

Awesome stuff once more, K, though I have to ask: who writes these? Normally I'd assume it's you, but you keep using words like "we" and "us," which has gotten me fairly confused.

The same writing crew that brought The Wish and The Word. It's 2-man team, the other guy answers the questions on another board.

I laughed, i cried, it moved me K.

I only wish there had been some real PrCs in there. The rest of it was phenomenal. The PrCs were mostly jokes making fun of various aspects of the current (or previous incarnations) of the game. Elothar was horribly funny, i'll admit, and the Seeker of Lost Wizard Traditions digging out a bunch of 2nd edition-like effects was classic.

But come now, i don't want 44 squares of Fireball, i want 33000 cubic feet of fireball, and be forced to solve the fluid dynamics differential equations for how much it should bubble if it goes off in a hallway with cross-sectional area 100 sq. ft. to see if the smarty pants wizard who thought he was out of reach by one square actually gets burned! (True 2nd ed story - the square approximation is actually off sufficiently much that the mage sizzles because of a 'bubble' effect if he stands in the center of the corridor - though we gave up long before rigorously solving the math). And only 44 squares, come now, bursts expand in *all* directions, there's a lot of volume unaccounted for there.

Kidding aside, this is a tremendous amount of work. Thank you.

The next thing i'd like to see is a combat system that actually works in 3 dimensions rather than just 2. In lieu of that, i'll take whatever is ready next. =)

K]Heh. I'm glad you liked it. The Seeker and the Ninja of Gax actually use rules from 1st edition AD&D. That restriction about not being able to hold your breath for five extra minutes if you want to spend three rounds teleporting yourself 5 feet - that's from the AD&D Oriental Adventures Ninja.

I knew i recognized that from somewhere. Got to dig those books out of boxes one of these days.

Heh. I'm glad you liked it. The Seeker and the Ninja of Gax actually use rules from 1st edition AD&D. That restriction about not being able to hold your breath for five extra minutes if you want to spend three rounds teleporting yourself 5 feet - that's from the AD&D Oriental Adventures Ninja.[/quote]
I knew i recognized that from somewhere. Got to dig those books out of boxes one of these days.

To be honest though, giving out volume-based burst spillover would be unbalanced because almost all enemies are standing on the ground - which in turn means that almost all fireballs would extend an extra 5' in every direction (well, 5.1984 feet, but you get the idea). It's one thing to let people use the old crazy rules, it's quite another to allow people to drive so far into crazy tpwn that tey become the mayor.

=)

But seriously, finish these tomes, collect them and publish, i'm there. Best rpg value i could possibly get, and having a nice hardcopy is priceless.

Man, why is everyone so excited about Tome of War?! Book of Gears, all the way! Every single time you referenced that non-existant book, I wanted to look it up.
A very good read. Very applicable, too, as my players are hunting down Khyber dragonshards and I'm doing my damnedest to make sure it feels like a plausible Place as opposed to a cliché Crawl.
Has anyone else remarked that your PrCs seem rather overpowered? Not a litte bit, but very very much so? Are they balanced against a standard other than already-published material?

Has anyone else remarked that your PrCs seem rather overpowered? Not a litte bit, but very very much so? Are they balanced against a standard other than already-published material?

People mention that from time to time. The answer is yes and no. We don't balance things to previously published prestige classes (especially not to previously published Fighter and Rogue prestige classes), but we do balance things to previously published material. Specifically, we try to balance things to the Challenges presented in the Monster Manual.

The Elothar Warrior of Bladereach, for example, is designed to have a fighting style that can allow him to stay apace with monsters of his level. When he first gets his ability to move and strike with two longswords, he's already a 7th level character. So at that point he needs to be doing that to Spectres, Medusa, and Remorhaz. Honestly, his fighting style, while awesome, is a little weak. Not until he gets to 8th level and is expected to be taking on Behirs and Dark Naga, is his ability to move and make a meaningful two-weapon attack at the end a decent fighting style - because at that point he can use it to flank with Tommy and allow Sneak Attacks. Even then, the Elothar Warrior of Bladereach doesn't perform terribly well.

just wondering, it doesnt seem like it takes u very long to produce these things, how do u do it so quickly and so well

Well, we've spent a lot of time arguing about D&D, so big chunks of these are essentially just rehashes of discussions from D&D discussion boards. But really it's just because we have two talented hacks and we divide the project up every couple of days based on what part we each feel like writing about. When one of us hits a stumbling block, we just hand the section over to the other author and power through another section.

K]Wrong! Killing all the goblins isn't just an Evil act, it's unthinkable to most D&D inhabitants.

I disagree strongly on the latter portion of that statement. It doesn't take much to stir people to take action--even despicable actions such as murder--in fact, all it takes is a charismatic leader. Scratch that, all it takes is a man in a labcoat. The Milgram Experiments --I think that experiment eliminates the need to further develop the argument, so I'll save bandwith and stop here.

As far as I can recall, genocide and slaughter have occurred over territorial disputes (religious differences have also spawned slaughter, too) as often or more often than for reasons of vengeance/justice. And if you ask me, retaliation of the sort seems at the least slightly more morally digestible than killing your neighbor because you like the view he has better. Ideally though, your average person won't grab a pitchfork and slaughter everyone who ever wronged him and his family. But, not everyone acts ideally, and there certainly exists a prevalence of mental disorders rendering an otherwise seemingly normal person quite capable of murderous intents.

I guess my point is, that I agree that ideally a community would seek to defend itself from a raid rather than mobilizing to wipe out the group who attacked the community, and that community would ideally not raise its following generation to slaughter those who wronged the community. History, however, is rife with instances of such wholesale violence, so I'm not going to even begin to cite examples for the contrary--I'm sure you can find numerous accounts for every tribe, civilization, community, etc. throughout history.

If such raids proliferate to become "a part of life," then I would expect it to have social ramifications. If it's not just a single raid as discussed above, a community likely will begin to attempt to train itself and its successive generations to defend the settlement. People would build walls (and likely multiple walls) around their communities, like the burghers did in the mid-to-late Middle Ages (in Europe). If those raids are conducted on people traveling from community to community, or those who wander outside the confines of the community--because, let's face it, even without a wall, it's much more tactically sound to attack a small group of people outside their own community than to attack a populated settlement--then there appears a need and a demand to protect travelers. And who can provide that protection? Armed men and women, that's who. And who can provide their wages? Ahh, the rich, the DnD Aristocrat.

Continu wrote:

I'm not familiar enough with the sections on running a business in the DMG2, so I can't make a reasonable comment on it, or your thoughts upon it.

As far as using metal coins go, and attempting to transport them, you've neglected at least two very important possibilities: Heward's Handy Haversacks and Bags of Holding. Adventurers, at the very least, could transport vast sums of metal currency. However, I agree that at a point, coins become less than ideal for purchases. The Epic Level Handbook makes a few suggestions, most of which don't have to be restricted to epic-level play. First among them are favors. By that I mean, paper notes worth a favor from an institution, power structure, or great figure. For example, one could trade a favor for a True Resurrection (which requires a 25,000 gp material component on top of the standard costs for a minimum 17th level character casting a 9th level spell) for a suit of +5 full plate, or a +3 weapon--and you'd have change left over. I think even the core DMG mentions something about bank notes to represent money, and gems are described as a convenient substitute for hauling around piles of coins.

A bank need not be a material plane concoction; in fact, I think a bank that can produce bank notes would likely be a planar invention that may have been built on a material plane. But, that strays too far from what is conceived as "standard" DnD and thus what is central to the discussion. Go back to the aristocrats. One of them could easily expand his lands to gain income via the same methods over a much larger area. The feudal system acts even more like a pyramid scheme, with the lord or king at top. Each vassal skims off the top of the profits raked in by the vassals beneath him. Eventually, one gets rich and recognized enough that merchants and other come to posit their gold in his coffers in return for bank notes equal to the worth of their investments. Throw in interest rates and all that bank-stuff, and you've got yourself an institution that can, after all, back its own paper note.

Gems do have an intrinsic value. A lot of them are spell components as you've said. But just as in the real world, there is a demand for precious, shiny things. Granted, average people don't have the same buying power that many of us do today. But some people do. DnD nobles don't seem to resemble their real-world contemporaries in that the term "chair" as the head of a company derived from the fact that medieval lords were often the one person who had a chair to sit in during meetings in his home. People are going to want gems to decorate things, to make jewelry. Maybe gems are part of the raw materials used in crafting magic items--it is, after all, a staple of fantasy for magic swords and the like to be gem-encrusted. In short, not my strongest point, but gems are ample substitutes for gold.

And if it's of any consequence, I remember reading (I believe either in the PHB or the DMG) that the DnD economy is silver-based, not gold-based. If so, that would likely spur the demand for a bank/moneychanger even more than reasons I've tried to postulate.

Despite all this thinking, the economy in DnD boils down to a system much like hit points. It ain't perfect, but it strives to maximize simplicity while still making an approximation of the real-world phenomenon it represents. If you ask me, the issue derived from how the economy of DnD works based on the craft/profession skills and NPC wages takes second seat to, how does the economy function with adventures recovering valuable lost relics from lost treasure hordes and subsequently liquidating these artifacts and piles of coins in the local economy?

Continued. . .

As far as biodiversity goes, biologists estimate our world's speciation to be about 2 million on the low end. Other estimates go much higher. I haven't counted, but I'm going to estimate there are less than a 1,000 "monsters" available in DnD sourcebooks. Plenty of those monster entries are extant animals, insects, and the like; so, those should already be accounted for in the world's biodiversity and don't cause much of a problem. Many entries are Outsiders, meaning they (likely) eat at a whole 'nother restaurant. Plenty of others are constructs (they don't eat, let alone breathe), plants (photosynthesis helps, even if the monstrous versions are carnivorous, too), or Undead (according to the Libris Mortis, some of them do in fact eat, but iirc they do not require food on the same order of magnitude that the living do). Some monsters even use alternate food sources; the Xorn, for example, eats precious metals or minerals. Dragons, as I recall, can even digest treasure if the need arises. Other entries are sentient races capable of cultivating their own food. The end result, is that all the monster entries available for v.3.5 represent a fraction of one percent of the world's total species. I don't think that's going to have a major impact on a DnD world's ecosystem.

Even as top predators, I can't imagine these monstrous beings throwing the ecosystem too far out of whack. You may be on to something, yes, that adjustments need to be made to our standard conceptualizations of a working ecosystem. The fact remains, however, that just like this is Dungeons & Dragons, not Logistics & Dragons; the system is Dungeons & Dragons, not Flora & Fauna. I think all that's really necessary is to realize producers and first-order consumers tend to outnumber the higher-level carnivores that prey upon them. When they don't, the predator species dies out almost completely, followed by a boom in the first-order consumers, followed by a boom in the population of predators, followed by a decline in the first-order consumers, and then a decline in the predators, and so on; it's a cycle, look at graphs of the populations of snowshoe hares compared to lynxes in a region to see a visual.

Oh, and don't forget, competition begets biodiversity. So, if these monsters are competing, there's even more reason for there to exist different species. If there are too many predators to be supported, then that's when such predators become likely to prey upon sentient beings and alternative food sources. If there aren't enough predators, then the lower-level consumers flourish. The bottom line: you don't have to retool DnD too much to establish a believable ecology, because the way it works by default provides what adventuring and versimilitude require.

I think that's everything I feel like addressing for now, though I have a feeling I've forgotten a few points I intended to make.

Bob, the thing is that Aristocrats don't own anything. Noone owns anything because property righs aren't guaranteed by anything. If some guy announces that he owns a piece of land and wants people to pay for hunting or travel rights across it, he needs to be a bad dude who can actually beat up people who attempt to use that land without his permission. Thereisn't a national authority that will back up the rights of investors to evict tresspassers.

An aristocrat doesn't have the military oomph to beat a caravan or a hunting party. For him to collect rents or fees from that land, therefore, he has to appeal to another authority that does have that military power. The whole idea that property rights are somehow inviolate, that's completely modern, and totally wrong. Property rights are respected only because it's in the modern social contract. The ancient social contract didn't have that - so landlords collect rents and fees only by force of arms.

So an aristocrat can collect money only on the authority of "My dad is a powerful wizard, and if you don't bribe me, I'll ask him to set your whole caravan on fire." That's it. And honestly, that doesn't mean that he controsl anything. Aristocrats only make money as the face men for extortion rackets and gifts from wealthy and influential family members. If an aristocrat attempts to have soldiers to collect those duties for him, he just invited an armed force to occupy his lands and take money from people - they'll take his money and take over in a snap.

Nasty brutish and short. That's life in the D&D world. There is no contract law, there is no big government that ensures the smooth transition of wealth and power from hand to hand according to lawful contracts. Even in Lawful societies, command goes to those of "merit" where merit is defined as "the ability to beat the crap out of anyone who says otherwise".

The economic cycles you are familiar with simply don't apply. The black hat and cane millionaire simply cannot exist in the D&D world.

BobtheMighty: I'll leave everything else to K, but the biology i can handle. (For the curious, i'm a PhD student in Evolutionary Biology interested in macroecology, diversity patterns, and morphology. I have worked on Deep-Sea biodiversity before.)

Deep-Sea diversity: Its actually quite diverse. Not quite comparable with a tropical reef, but beats virtually any other shallow marine habitat. At least at bathyal depths. Abyssal diversity is hugely depressed. The pattern of diversity with depth is unimodal with a peak in the lower bathyal (around 3000m) and a long tail on the shallower end.

The energy supplying virtually all of this diversity is still solar. Phytodetrital material sinks through the water columns (during which its remineralized by bacteria - an exponential decay process) and is thought to be the primary source of food material to most of the deep-sea. (The crash in abyssal diversity is arguably attributable to severe resource shortage - food gets so scarce that populations fail to support each other. Recently Rex et al. (2005 in American Naturalist) proposed that most abyssal biodiversity was a sink effect with a lower bathyal source, maintained by a flow of propagules from the lower bathyal. Very few species (in a number of faunal groups, including Gastropods and Bivalves) are thought to have sustained populations in the abyss. (Obviously, bacteria and interstitial organisms like nematodes are probably still doing fine).

Cold Seeps and Hydrothermal Vents do provide areas where chemosynthesis is the primary energy input, but these are relatively small isolated communities, usually much smaller than the average apartment bedroom. This is not a major source of energy for the Deep-Sea, just a localized supply to specific communities that grow up around them. Such locations are also incredibly rare.

Most deep-sea organisms are also much smaller than shallow-water equivalents, with a few notable exceptions (Giant Squid, Giant Isopods). The few instances of gigantism are highly mobile organisms which in some instances are known to have huge geographic ranges. (Individual isopods cross the atlantic from off Cape Cod to off Cornwall potentially multiple times per year).

Thus we can draw two conclusions: (1) Geothermal energy is not going to be sufficient for the standard dnd underdark environment - its too infrequent and small in scope. Further, it doesnt correspond to any of the known underdark areas (and at this point they've detailed quite a few), and would require organisms specially adapted to processing sulfur compounds. (2) Most underdark organisms should be much smaller than any surface 'equivalents', and those that are large must be continuously moving in search of new food resources. Clearly, this fails to describe anything with permanent settlements (with the possible exception of Illithids).

Total Biodiversity:
The OoM estimates for earth's biodiversity are as follows: Mammals 10^5, with over 1/4 of those being bats. Fish (Teleosts) 10^6. Insects 10^7, and thats probably being a little generous. Nematodes 10^8. Bacteria 10^9. Of those, only mammals include any top predators on land, and most mammals are not predators at all. Further, most predators are small, very few are large (tigers and bears being the large end of predator size).

(Top aquatic predators include sharks, some fish, and a variety of invertebrates - but many of these are rather small since the community they are a top predator in has no organisms larger than your hand other than them).

1 billion species, when 99.99% of them are bacteria, isn't saying much. There are maybe a few 100 thousand species with backbones, most of them are small. Very few of them are larger than humans, and most of those already appear in the monster manual. (Admittedly, there is more than 1 species of whale and so forth, but meh). I would put the number of organisms with backbones weighing more than 100kg in the 100s, and most of those are aquatic (whales and sharks most likely). Few organisms without backbones get that large (the Giant Squid being the only animal i can think of offhand) because of energy constraints and the physical demands of being large.

So the dnd monsters really do suppose a very strange ecosystem dynamic. They're introducing a lot of large predators into the system. This does require explanation.

Competition does not beget biodiversity. Two perfect competitors (require all the same 'resources' for a broad definition of resources) cannot coexist in the same environment for long. One will outcompete the other and drive it to extinction. Basic ecological theory. Rather, the more ways there are of avoiding competition, the more species there can be. Competition along one niche axis just applies a pressure to both species to diverge in how they use that resource, and partition that axis so that there is minimal overlap. Competition can drive evolution, but it does not increase biodiversity per se. (Ultimately, biodiversity is a function of the amount of energy available, the amount of boxes (distinct ways of living) into which that energy is partitioned, and so forth. It has nothing to do with the characteristics of the organisms except that organisms evolve into those 'boxes'. (This is an iterative process - obviously the existence of some organisms provides for the existence of some boxes, but its not an infinite generating sequence because energy is reduced every step removed from direct energy input you get. Species must maintain sufficient population size to breed and not suffer the deleterious effects of inbreeding.)

Speaking of reduction in energy - thats why canabalism doesnt work. Digestion requires energy, and is not perfect. Thus energy is lost (not released by digestion) and used (to digest) when consuming anything. A species whose primary food source is itself goes extinct quickly. This is why external energy input is needed - any closed ecosystem (no external energy supply) is doomed to running out of energy.

"Even as top predators, I can't imagine these monstrous beings throwing the ecosystem too far out of whack."

Thats the thing, i can't imagine them doing anything but, and my training is mostly as an ecologist. Top predators exert huge impacts on their environment - humans are only the most gratuitous example, eg Pisaster (a starfish) completely structures the NW coast's (of the US) intertidal ecosystem all by itself. And it gets to be about as big as a soccer ball.

Just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean anything. You aren't even an expert in the field, and i'm not convinced my opinion holds much weight. But it certainly has more evidence behind it. My best guess is that over-saturating the world in top predators leads to an "everything you know is wrong" result in what ecologies are like. What i can't imagine is what these ecosystems *should* look like, because they're going to be so alien compared to real world ecosystems as to make extrapolation virtually impossible.

The problem is that D&D is entirely different history in a number of ways, one such way being that an individual is capable of single handedly defeating an army. If there were people with such power in the 10th century I should think it would have changed society considerably.

The concept of character level just changes everything. Needless to say military power was very important to maintaining stable societies and whatnot throughout history but in order to establish dominance you'd need a large number of people, you'd need those people to know how to fight or have the capability of training them to do so, they need equipment, they'd need food, they'd need a lot of things. In D&D the most important thing to establishing power is being high level, and to a lesser extent being a spellcaster. If you're a 17th level Wizard, the average character level is 2, and the highest level character in the region is a 15th level fighter then, well, if you want to be king you can do it, it's not like the current king's 15,000 troops can stop you and you'll be more useful to society than him anyway due to your superhuman skillchecks and spellcasting ability.

My vote goes to Races of War. I'd like to vote for Tome of Gears, but we really need a fighter fix, done the K way.

K]if it's really important to you to learn Cleric spells, you still can.

I don't quite get it, could you explain this in a bit more detail? I'd really love to have a few of those nifty Cleric and Druid spells for my wrote:

I have a question (and a second depending on how you answer this): Are those classes actually meant to be used? And if they are, ARE YOU SICK IN THE HEAD!? 22d6!? Are you trying to break dms or something!? *sputters and dies*

Yeah I feel like all seven kinds of stupid now. I didn't bother to read the class (I'm very lazy) and saw "22d6" and suddenly my cranium and my ass switched places. My apologies, but I do have to ask are any of those classes/prestige classes meant to be used or are they all jokes?

myusernameis]Yeah I feel like all seven kinds of stupid now. I didn't bother to read the class (I'm very lazy) and saw "22d6" and suddenly my cranium and my ass switched places. My apologies, but I do have to ask are any of those classes/prestige classes meant to be used or are they all jokes?

What's the big problem with 22d6 in any case? An 11th level wizard can do that without waiting a round. It's only 77 average damage wrote:

The Assassin's Death Attack has a number of advantages and disadvantages vs. Sneak Attack.

Drawbacks:

• You don't do any damage until the second turn.
  
• You can't get Death Attack from Flanking.
  
• Yoy can't split your DA between targets within a round, if you drop your opponent, all subsequent attacks against other enemies are normal attacks.
  
• If you have a lot of other damage bonuses (strength, magic weapons, prayer, your attacks net less damage over all.
  

Advantages:

• If you are using a weapon smaller than a greatsword and don't have a big strength bonus, you pull slightly ahead on damage.
  
• You can use your DA on opponents outside of 30 feet.
  
• If you are ambushing your opponent, you can get your whole DA on the first turn they know that combat is happening.
  
• Your DA can be used on constructs and the like without a wand of golemstrike.

So if you are up against a group of several enemies, or your position is being overrun, DA really sucks. If you are sneaking around on a building top and have a crossbow, DA is very very good. It's different than Sneak Attack without being flat inferior in the way that Sudden Strike is.

I would have two questions:

1) The fighting style ability requires a swift action to activate. Could you use a move or standard action to activate another fighting style ?

2) You assumed that according to the CR system a character should be 50/50 against a creature with a CR equal to his character level. Could you explain this in a little more detail please? One method to determine the appropriate challenge for a single character that was used in many groups I played was the following:
A good challenge (read 20% resource loss) for a single character is one that earns him the same amount of XP that he would have gained for overcoming a good challenge in a party of four. According to the table in the DMG this is typically true for a CR=cl-4. That would mean, that a challenge with CR=cl amounts to the top end of the very difficult challenges for a single character. This would seem quite consistent (except at low levels) if party power would scale linearly with the number of members, which I think is not true although the experience awards rules suggest it. That said, it would not change your balance argument. Where as with your "measure" the martial classes would underperform, while the casters would just do it right probably, with the measure above, the martial classes would perform more or less right, but the casters would overperform now.

No problem. A party of adventurers is supposed to take on an encounter with an EL = their level and triumph with minimal expenditure of resources. They are supposed to take on an encounter with an EL = Level +4 and have a 50% chance of losing. Every time you double the number of monsters, they count as an EL 2 higher than their CR. Every time you halve the number of players, they count as being a party 2 levels lower. An NPC is considered to be a CR equal to his level.

So a single 10th level character is counted as a "6th level party" for purposes of defeating challenges. If he goes up against himself (a 10th level NPC), that's considered an EL 10 encounter, which is 4 levels higher than his "party level" and he is supposed to have a 50/50 chance of victory or defeat (unsurprising considering that it's the same thing on both sides). Now, supposedly, all the CR 10 challenges are only situationally superior to one another, so if you tried this with every other CR 10 encounter, the character would still win about half the time over all.

So supposedly, a 10th level character will have a 50% chance of winning if you throw them against a random CR 10 encounter. Don't try this in an actual campaign, because the campaign actually ends when the whole party dies, but for a thought experiement on writing balanced material it's pretty decent.

Reasonable argument. The only part I do not quite get is the bold one. Is there some statement in the DMG that translates "very difficult" into "50% chance of loosing" that I missed (page?)? Otherwise it comes down to the same measure I use, except that up to now I considered the equivalent odds for "very difficult" to be lower than 50/50. Your way seems of course to be the only way to make sense of a character challenging "himself" (although I always considered the CR=cl for NPCs to be to high when you consider single martial characters against a party of four, which kind of closes the circle) .