game – Dan Q

ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr

You’ve probably come across GeoGuessr already: it’s an online game where you (and friends, if you’ve got them) get dropped into Google Street View and have two minutes to try to work out where in the world you are and drop a pin on it.

A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.

Cheating at GeoGuessr

I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT¹, I pasted screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:

Conversation with ChatGPT. The human pastes two photos from Google Street View, and asks 'Try to figure out where these photos were taken and give your best guess.'. ChatGPT responds: Based on the architecture, street signs, and language used, these photos were most likely taken in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Here are the key clues: 1. Street Signs in Russian: In the first image, you can clearly see a street sign that reads "ГОРХОВАЯ УЛИЦА" (Gorokhovaya Ulitsa), which is a well-known street in the heart of Saint Petersburg. 2. Architecture Style: The buildings have that classic 18th–19th century European architecture with neoclassical and baroque influences, typical of central Saint Petersburg. Narrow streets, high windows, and detailed facades are very characteristic of this city's historic districts. 3. Language & Storefronts: There are Cyrillic characters on store windows and signs, further confirming that this is a Russian-speaking country. All signs point to Saint Petersburg, particularly a district close to the center—possibly near Gorokhovaya Street, which intersects with major roads and is near iconic locations like Nevsky Prospekt. Want help pinpointing a specific building or planning a walking route around that area? — ChatGPT confidently assessed the geographic clues, translated some text that it found, and eventually made a guess down to a particular street in St Petersburg.

That’s pretty spooky, right?

The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.

This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:

Another round with ChatGPT, during which it responds: This photo was taken in Bangladesh, and more specifically, it looks like a street in Narayanganj, which is a city just southeast of Dhaka. Here’s the breakdown of clues: 1. Language: The signs are written in Bengali (Bangla), the official language of Bangladesh. Words like "পপুলার মেডিকেল সেন্টার" (Popular Medical Center) and "স্মার্ট" (Smart) are in Bangla script. 2. Vehicles: The green auto-rickshaws (CNGs) and yellow cargo trucks are extremely common in Bangladesh. The design and paint jobs of these vehicles are specific to the country. 3. Local Clues: On the right wall, there’s a sign for “PZ International School” with a local Bangladeshi phone number. The overall environment — architecture, signage style, electric poles, street dividers, and the road's layout — strongly resemble those in urban areas around Dhaka and Narayanganj. 4. Urban Layout: The photo shows a divided road with moderate commercial development, which is typical of main roads in industrial or semi-urban Bangladeshi towns. If you want, I can try to pinpoint the exact intersection using some of the shop names or school signs — just let me know! — Again, the text recognition and translation capabilities of the AI were highly useful, but it was helped by architectural and cultural clues too.

This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.

But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.

GeoGuessr screenshot showing a guess in Dhaka being compared to the correct answer of Chittagong. — Don’t think I’d have done better, though.

Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a “send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra details to it).

And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning on the side².

The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.

What about other photos?

The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and other unsavoury types.

I wrote a prompt for gpt4o and put it to work:

1. Starting out easy

The Logos Hope docked at the Port of Spain cruise ship terminal, Trinidad & Tobago. — I took this photo from the balcony of our first hotel during Ruth and I’s trip to Trinidad & Tobago.

The AI guessed:

Location: Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English, indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of Spain’s known characteristics.

Coordinates: 10.6549, -61.5011

✅ That was pretty easy, to be fair.

2. A little more challenging

A squat neolithic stone circle with many stones (some might say an uncountable number). A dog pulls at her lead to follow one of her humans more-closely around it. — We have an annual tradition of visiting this particular monument.

The AI guessed:

Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom

Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle. These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.

Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731

✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.

3. Ramping up the difficulty

The AI guessed:

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken in Istanbul.

Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784

✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower³ was a nice move.

4. Okay, now hard mode:

Dan waves to the camera in front of a pleasure marina and revitalised docklands. — This photo is from 3Camp⁴ last year.

The AI guessed:

Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom

Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”) supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina. The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.

Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678

❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).

So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.

Footnotes

¹ And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out of a legitimate victory!

² I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)

³ Having visited the Galata Tower I can confirm that it really is pretty distinctive.

⁴ 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.

Giant strategy

White’s move. Mate in three. A giant chessboard is the perfect environment to teach a child some basic chess strategy, right?

Voice of America

In light of Trump’s attempts to axe Voice of America, because it is, he claims, “anti-Trump” (and because he’s so insecure that he can’t stand the thought that taxpayer dollars might go to anybody who disagrees with him in any way, for any reason), I’ve produced a suggested update to the rules of Twilight Struggle for the inevitable 9th printing:

Yet another blow to US soft power in order to appease the ego of convicted felon Donald Trump. Sigh.

It is as if you were on your phone

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Being on your phone all the time and while also not being on your phone all the time has never been more important.

“It is as if you were on your phone” is a phone-based experience for pretending to be on your phone without needing to be on your phone. All from the comfort of your phone.

Relax and blend in with familiar gestures and realistic human behaviour.

Pippin Barr

When I tried this fun and experimental game, I was struck by a feeling of deja vu. Was this really new? It felt ever so familiar.

Turns out, it draws a lot of inspiration from its 2016 prequel, It is as if you were playing chess. Which I’d completely forgotten about until just now.

It really is almost as if I were on my phone.

Anyway, It is as if you were on your phone is… well, it’s certainly a faithful simulation of what it would be like to be on my phone. If you saw me, you’d genuinely think that I was on my phone, even though in reality I was just playing It is as if you were on your phone on my phone. That’s how accurate it is.

Give it a go on your phone and see if you agree.

Rewilding Slay

I’ve been playing Sean O’Connor’s Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at “rewilding” the game world.

The rules of the game make trees… a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.

Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?

Lego: Zero Dawn

Except to children, I don’t really give Christmas presents to (or expect to receive them from) others any more.

But that didn’t stop my buying myself a gift of a particularly fun Lego set to build over the festive period (with a little help from the eldest child!).

Double Sausages

This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.

Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?

D20 with Advantage

Dungeons & Dragons players spend a lot of time rolling 20-sided polyhedral dice, known as D20s.

In general, they’re looking to roll as high as possible to successfully stab a wyvern, jump a chasm, pick a lock, charm a Duke¹, or whatever.

A 'full set' of white polyhedral dice commonly-used by roleplayers - a D4, D6, D8, two D10s, a D12, and a D20 - sit half-submerged in a red liquid. — Submerging your dice set in the blood of a halfling is a sure-fire way to get luckier rolls.

Roll with advantage

Sometimes, a player gets to roll with advantage. In this case, the player rolls two dice, and takes the higher roll. This really boosts their chances of not-getting a low roll. Do you know by how much?

I dreamed about this very question last night. And then, still in my dream, I came up with the answer². I woke up thinking about it³ and checked my working.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
2	2	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
3	3	3	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
4	4	4	4	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
5	5	5	5	5	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
6	6	6	6	6	6	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
7	7	7	7	7	7	7	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
8	8	8	8	8	8	8	8	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
11	11	11	11	11	11	11	11	11	11	11	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	15	16	17	18	19	20
16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	16	17	18	19	20
17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	17	18	19	20
18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	18	19	20
19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	19	20
20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20

Table illustrating the different permutations of two D20 rolls and the “advantage” result (i.e. the higher of the two).

The chance of getting a “natural 1” result on a D20 is 1 in 20… but when you roll with advantage, that goes down to 1 in 400: a huge improvement! The chance of rolling a 10 or 11 (2 in 20 chance of one or the other) remains the same. And the chance of a “crit” – 20 – goes up from 1 in 20 when rolling a single D20 to 39 in 400 – almost 10% – when rolling with advantage.

You can see that in the table above: the headers along the top and left are the natural rolls, the intersections are the resulting values – the higher of the two.

The nice thing about the table above (which again: was how I visualised the question in my dream!) is it really helps to visualise why these numbers are what they are. The general formula for calculating the chance of a given number when rolling D20 with advantage is ( n² – (n-1)² ) / 400. That is, the square of the number you’re looking for, minus the square of the number one less than that, over 400 (the total number of permutations)⁴.

Why roll two dice when one massive one will do?

Knowing the probability matrix, it’s theoretically possible to construct a “D20 with Advantage” die⁵. Such a tool would have 400 sides (one 1, three 2s, five 3s… and thirty-nine 20s). Rolling-with-advantage would be a single roll.

'400-sided die' shown on Numberwang. — I don’t think anybody’s ever built a *real* 400-sided die, but *Numberwang!* claimed to have one.

This is probably a totally academic exercise. The only conceivable reason I can think of would be if you were implementing a computer system on which generating random numbers was computationally-expensive, but memory was cheap: under this circumstance, you could pre-generate a 400-item array of possible results and randomly select from it.

But if anybody’s got a 3D printer capable of making a large tetrahectogon (yes, that’s what you call a 400-sided polygon – you learned something today!), I’d love to see an “Advantage D20” in the flesh. Or if you’d just like to implement a 3D model for Dice Box that’d be fine too!

Footnotes

¹ Or throw a fireball, recall an anecdote, navigate a rainforest, survive a poisoning, sneak past a troll, swim through a magical swamp, hold on to a speeding aurochs, disarm a tripwire, fire a crossbow, mix a potion, appeal to one among a pantheon of gods, beat the inn’s landlord at an arm-wrestling match, seduce a duergar guard, persuade a talking squirrel to spy on some bandits, hold open a heavy door, determine the nature of a curse, follow a trail of blood, find a long-lost tome, win a drinking competition, pickpocket a sleeping ogre, bury a magic sword so deep that nobody will ever find it, pilot a spacefaring rowboat, interpret a forgotten language, notice an imminent ambush, telepathically commune with a distant friend, accurately copy-out an ancient manuscript, perform a religious ritual, find the secret button under the wizard’s desk, survive the blistering cold, entertain a gang of street urchins, push through a force field, resist mind control, and then compose a ballad celebrating your adventure.

² I don’t know what it says about me as a human being that sometimes I dream in mathematics, but it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given I’m nerdy enough to have previously recorded instances of dreaming in (a) Perl, and (b) Nethack (terminal mode).

³ When I woke up I also found that I had One Jump from Disney’s Aladdin stuck in my head, but I’m not sure that’s relevant to the discussion of probability; however, it might still be a reasonable indicator of my mental state in general.

⁴ An alternative formula which is easier to read but harder to explain would be ( 2(n – 1) + 1 ) / 400.

⁵ Or a “D20 with Disadvantage”: the table’s basically the inverse of the advantage one – i.e. 1 in 400 chance of a 20 through to 39 in 400 chance of a 1.

ARCC

In the late ’70s, a shadowy group of British technologists concluded that nuclear war was inevitable and secretly started work on a cutting-edge system designed to help rebuild society. And thanks to Matt Round-and-friends at vole.wtf (who I might have mentioned before), the system they created – ARCC – can now be emulated in your browser.

3D rendering of an ARCC system, by HappyToast.

I’ve been playing with it on-and-off all year, and I’ve (finally) managed to finish exploring pretty-much everything the platform currently has to offer, which makes it pretty damn good value for money for the £6.52 I paid for my ticket (the price started at £2.56 and increases by 2p for every ticket sold). But you can get it cheaper than I did if you score 25+ on one of the emulated games.

ARCC system showing a high score table for M1, with DAN50 (score 13012) at the top. — It gives me more pride than it ought to that I hold the high score for a mostly-unheard-of game for an almost-as-unheard-of computer system.

Most of what I just told you is true. Everything… except the premise. There never was a secretive cabal of engineers who made this whackballs computer system. What vole.wtf emulates is an imaginary system, and playing with that system is like stepping into a bizarre alternate timeline or a weird world. Over several separate days of visits you’ll explore more and more of a beautifully-realised fiction that draws from retrocomputing, Cold War fearmongering, early multi-user networks with dumb terminal interfaces, and aesthetics that straddle the tripoint between VHS, Teletext, and BBS systems. Oh yeah, and it’s also a lot like being in a cult.

Needless to say, therefore, it presses all the right buttons for me.

ARCC terminal in which an email is being written to DAN50. — If you make it onto ARCC – or are already there! – drop me a message. My handle is `DAN50`.

If you enjoy any of those things, maybe you’d like this too. I can’t begin to explain the amount of work that’s gone into it. If you’re looking for anything more-specific in a recommendation, suffice to say: this is a piece of art worth seeing.

Multi-Phase Maps in FoundryVTT

FoundryVTT is a fantastic Web-based environment for tabletop roleplaying adventures¹ and something I particularly enjoy is the freedom for virtually-unlimited scripting. Following a demonstration to a fellow DM at work last week I promised to throw together a quick tutorial into scripting simple multi-phase maps using Foundry.²

Why multi-phase maps?

Animated battlemap which organically grows into a leafy flower over six stages. — For this demonstration, I’ll be using AtraxianBear’s Growing Flower Dungeon.

You might use a multi-phase map to:

Allow the development and expansion of a siege camp outside the fortress where the heroes are holed-up.³
Rotate through day and night cycles or different times of day, perhaps with different things to interact with in each.⁴
Gradually flood a sewer with rising water… increasing the range of the monster that dwells within.⁵
Re-arrange parts of the dungeon when the characters flip certain switches, opening new paths… and closing others.

I’ll use the map above to create a simple linear flow, powered by a macro in the hotbar. Obviously, more-complex scenarios are available, and combining this approach with a plugin like Monk’s Active Tile Triggers can even be used to make the map appear to dynamically change in response to the movement or actions of player characters!

Setting the scene

Create a scene, using the final state of the map as the background. Then, in reverse-order, add the previous states as tiles above it.

Not shown, but highly-recommended: lock each tile when you’re done placing it, so that you don’t accidentally interact with it when you mean to e.g. drag-select multiple actors.

Make a note of the X-position that your tiles are in when they’re where they supposed to be: we’ll “move” the tiles off to the side when they’re hidden, to prevent their ghostly half-hidden forms getting in your way as game master. We’ll also use this X-position to detect which tiles have already been moved/hidden.

Also make note of each tile’s ID, so your script can reference them. It’s easiest to do this as you go along. When you’re ready to write your macro, reverse the list, because we’ll be hiding each tile in the opposite order from the order you placed them.

Writing the script

Next, create a new script macro, e.g. by clicking an empty slot in the macro bar. When you activate this script, the map will move forward one phase (or, if it’s at the end, it’ll reset).

I find Foundry’s built-in script editor a little… small? So I write my scripts in my favourite text editor and then copy-paste.

Here’s the code you’ll need – the 👈 emoji identifies the places you’ll need to modify the code, specifically:

const revealed_tiles_default_x = 250 should refer to the X-position of your tiles when they’re in the correct position.
const revealed_tiles_modified_x = 2825 should refer to the X-position they’ll appear at “off to the right” of your scene. To determine this, just move one tile right until it’s sufficiently out of the way of the battlemap and then check what it’s X-position is! Or just take the default X-position, add the width of your map in pixels, and then add a tiny bit more.
const revealed_tiles = [ ... ] is a list of the tile IDs of each tile what will be hidden, in turn. In my example there are five of them (the sixth and final image being the scene background).

const revealed_tiles_default_x = 250;   // 👈 X-position of tiles when displayed
const revealed_tiles_modified_x = 2825; // 👈 X-position of tiles when not displayed
const revealed_tiles = [
  '2xG7S8Yqk4x1eAdr',                   // 👈 list of tile IDs in order that they should be hidden
  'SjNQDBImHvrjAHWX',                   //     (top to bottom)
  'tuYg4FvLgIla1l21',
  'auX4sj64PWmkAteR',
  'yAL4YP0I4Cv4Sevt',
].map(t=>canvas.tiles.get(t));

/*************************************************************************************************/

// Get the topmost tile that is still visible:
const next_revealed_tile_to_move = revealed_tiles.find(t=>
  t.position.x == revealed_tiles_default_x
);

// If there are NO still-visible tiles, we must need to reset the map:
if( ! next_revealed_tile_to_move ) {
  // To reset the map, we go through each tile and put it back where it belongs -
  for(tile of revealed_tiles){
    canvas.scene.updateEmbeddedDocuments("Tile", [ {
      _id: tile.id,
      x: revealed_tiles_default_x,
      hidden: false
    } ]);
  }
} else {
  // Otherwise, hide the topmost visible tile (and move it off to the side to help the GM) -
  canvas.scene.updateEmbeddedDocuments("Tile", [ {
    _id: next_revealed_tile_to_move.id,
    x: revealed_tiles_modified_x,
    hidden: true
  } ]);
}

I hope that the rest of the code is moderately self-explanatory for anybody with a little JavaScript experience, but if you’re just following this kind of simple, linear case then you don’t need to modify it anyway. But to summarise, what it does is:

Finds the first listed tile that isn’t yet hidden (by comparing its X-position to the pre-set X-position).
If there aren’t any such tiles, we must have hidden them all already, so perform a reset: to do this – iterate through each tile and set its X-position to the pre-set X-position, and un-hide it.
Otherwise, move the first not-hidden tile to the alternative X-position and hide it.

I hope you have fun with scripting your own multi-phase maps. Just don’t get so caught-up in your awesome scenes that you fail to give the players any agency!

Footnotes

¹ Also, it’s on sale at 20% off this week to celebrate its fourth anniversary. Just sayin’.

² I can neither confirm nor deny that a multi-phase map might be in the near future of The Levellers‘ adventure…

³ AtraxianBear has a great series of maps inspired by the 1683 siege of Vienna by the Ottomans that could be a great starting point for a “gradually advancing siege” map.

⁴ If you’re using Dungeon Alchemist as part of your mapmaking process you can just export orthographic or perspective outputs with different times of day and your party’s regular inn can be appropriately lit for any time of day, even if the party decides to just “wait at this table until nightfall”.

⁵ Balatro made a stunning map with rising water as a key feature: there’s a preview available.

Let Your Players Lead The Way

I’ve been GMing/DMing/facilitating¹ roleplaying games for nearby 30 years, but I only recently began to feel like I was getting to be good at it.

The secret skill that was hardest for me to learn? A willingness to surrender control to the players.

I’m a big fan of the Karma/Drama/Fortune (K/D/F) model for understanding resolution. My relationship with K/D/F is a story for another blog post, but I’ll use it as as a framework here.

Karma, Drama, Fortune

I could write a lot about the way I interpret the K/D/F model, but for today here’s a quick primer:

The K/D/F model describes the relationship between three forces: Karma (player choices), Drama (story needs) and Fortune (luck, e.g. dice rolls). For example,

When the lich king comes to the region to provide a villainous plot hook, that’s Drama. Nobody had to do anything and no dice were rolled. The story demanded a “big bad” and so – within the limitations of the setting – one turned up.
When his lucky critical hit kills an ally of the adventurers, that’s Fortune. That battle could have gone a different way, but the dice were on the villain’s side and he was able to harm the players. When we don’t know which way something will go, and it matters, we hit the dice.
When one of the heroes comes up with a clever way to use a magical artefact from a previous quest to defeat him, that’s Karma. It was a clever plan, and the players were rewarded for their smart choices by being able to vanquish the evil thing.
And elsewhere on their quest they probably saw many other resolutions. Each of those may have leaned more-heavily on one or another of the three pillars, or balanced between them equally.

The balance point varies by group and can change over time, but crucially it doesn’t neglect any one of the three aspects.

Disbalancing drama

For most of my many years of gamemastering, I saw my role as being the sole provider the “drama” part of the K/D/F model. The story comes from me, the choices and dice rolls come from the players, right?

Nope, I was wrong. That approach creates an inevitable trend, whether large or small, towards railroading: “forcing” players down a particular path.

A gamemaster with an inflexible and excessively concrete idea of the direction that a story must go will find that they become unable to see the narrative through any other lens. In extreme examples, the players are deprotagonised and the adventure just becomes a series of set pieces, connected by the gamemaster’s idea of how things should play out. I’ve seen this happen. I’ve even caused it to happen, sometimes.²

Flowchart for the quest "Expedition to the Lonely Mountain: an adventure for 14 first-level characters, one of them a halfling and the rest of them dwarves." Shows a linear, non-branching flowchat: birthday party; accept quest; captured by trolls; rescued by wizard; meet elves; get weapons; captured by goblins; rescued by wizard; wolves; rescued by eagles; giant spiders; captured by wood elves; escape by river; lake town; climb mountain; meet dragon; trick dragon, learn weakness, steal treasure; dragon attack. — What if Bilbo and his party escaped from the wood elves by land, heading directly East to Erebor instead of via Esgaroth? What if he failed to determine Smaug’s weakness, or chose not to steal from him? What if the dwarves successfully fought off the goblins and didn’t need rescue? The difference between an adventure *story* and an adventure *game* should be that in a game, nobody – not even the author – can be certain ahead of time of the answers to all the questions.

A catalogue of failures

I’ve railroaded players to some degree or another on an embarrassing number of occasions.

In the spirit of learning from my mistakes, here are three examples of me being a Bad GM.

Quantum Ogre

Scenario: In a short-lived high fantasy GURPS campaign, I wanted the party to meet a band of gypsies and have their fortune told, in order to foreshadow other parts of the story yet to come.

What I did: I pulled a quantum ogre (magician’s choice) on them: whether they travelled by road, or water, or hacked their way through the forest, they were always going to meet the gypsies: their choice of route didn’t really matter.

Why that was wrong: I’d elevated the value of the encounter I’d planned higher than the importance of player agency. The more effort it took to write something, the more I felt the need to ensure it happened!

Two things I could’ve done: Reassessed the importance of the encounter. Found other ways to foreshadow the plot that didn’t undermine player choices, and been more-flexible about my set pieces.

Fudging

Scenario: In a Spirit of the Century one-shot an antagonist needed to kidnap a NPC from aboard an oceanbound ship. To my surprise – with some very lucky rolls – the players foiled the plot!

What I did: I used a fudge – an exploit based on the fact that in most games the gamemaster controls both the plot and the hidden variables of the game mechanics – to facilitate the antagonist kidnapping a different NPC, and adapted the story to this new reality.

Why that was wrong: It made the players feel like their choices didn’t matter. I justified it to myself by it being a one-shot, but that undermines the lesson: I could’ve done better.

Two things I could’ve done: Used the failed attack as a precursor to a later renewed offensive by a villain who’s now got a personal interest in seeing the party fail. Moved towards a different story, perhaps to a different element of the antagonist’s plan.

Ex Machina

Scenario: In a long-running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st edition!) campaign, a series of bad choices and terrible luck left the party trapped and unable to survive the onslaught of a literal army of bloodthirsty orcs.

What I did: I whipped out a ~~deus~~ spiritus ex machina, having a friendly ghost NPC basically solve for them a useful puzzle they’d been struggling with, allowing them to escape alive (albeit with the quest truly failed).

Why that was wrong: It deprotagonised the adventurers, making them unimportant in their own stories. At the time, I felt that by saving the party I was “saving” the game, but instead I was undermining its value.

Two things I could’ve done: TPK: sometimes it’s the right thing to allow everybody to die! Pivot the plot to facilitate their capture (e.g. the arch-nemesis can’t solve the puzzle either and wants to coerce them into helping), leading to new challenges and interesting moral choices.

Those examples are perhaps extreme, but I’m pretty sure I’ve set up my fair share of lesser sins too. Like chokepoints that strongly encourage a particular direction: do that enough and you train your players to wait until they identify the chokepoint before they take action! Or being less invested in players’ plans if those plans deviate from what I anticipated, and having a convenient in-party NPC prompting players with what they ought to do next. Ugh.³

The good news is, of course, that we’ve all always got the opportunity for growth and self-improvement.

Scan from the D&D 5e adventure book "Descent into Avernus", showing a linear progression from the Dungeon of the Dead Three to The Low Lantern to Vanthampur Villa. In each case, player motivation is supposed, e.g. "The characters confront another of Duke Vanthampur's sons", "the adventurers attack her villa", etc. — In my defence, many *professionally published* adventures are a series of scenes connected by the assumption that the author knows exactly how the players will proceed from each. These don’t teach gamemasters how to handle any deviation: no wonder we don’t learn not to railroad!

The self-improvement path

I’ve gotten better at this in general over the years, but when I took over from Simon at DMing for The Levellers in July, I decided that I was going to try to push myself harder than ever to avoid railroading. Simon was always especially good at promoting player freedom and autonomy, and I wanted to use this inspiration as a vehicle to improve my own gamemastering.

What does that look like within the framework of an established campaign?

Photo with narrow depth of field, showing a tabletop roleplaying game. A grey plastic minature of a dwarf with a battle axe faces off against a large red minature of a dragon. Beside them, two glassy red six-sided dice and a similarly-coloured twenty-sided die can be seen. — Some days, a critical hit is just enough. Other days, you should’ve just stayed at the inn and got drunk. This third-party photo is copyrighted with all rights reserved; not under my usual license.

Well: I ensure there are clues (usually three of them!) to point the players in the “right” direction. And I’ll be on hand to give “nudges” if they’re truly stuck for what to do next, typically by providing a “recap” of the things they’ve previously identified as hooks that are worth following-up (including both the primary plotline and any other avenues they’ve openly discussed investigating).

But that’s the limit to how I allow Drama to control the direction of the story. Almost everything else lies in the hands of Karma and Fortune.

Three-frame captioned screengrab from Community Season 5 Episode 10 (Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). Abed is sat amongst his dungeon mastering supplies. "South? You could go South," he says. He pulled out an thick binder and slams it onto the table. "I've generated some details about the surrounding area," he adds, flipping it open to show it full of notes. Beneath, it's captioned "eye contact intensifies". — Let all gamemasters strive to be as prepared as Abed.

Needless to say, opening up the possibility space for my players makes gamemastering harder⁴! But… not by as much as I expected. Extra prep-work was necessary, especially at the outset, in order to make sure that the world I was inheriting/building upon was believable and internally-consistent (while ensuring that if a player decided to “just keep walking East” they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world). But mostly, the work did itself.

Because here’s the thing I learned: so long as you’re willing to take what your players come up with and run with it, they’ll help make the story more compelling. Possibly without even realising it.⁵

"Roll Safe" image meme showing a black man with his finger to his temple, indicating he's had a bright idea. The image is captioned "Players can't derail your plot... if your plot isn't on rails". — This tip brought to you from the Department of Splitting The Party Before They Think To Do It Themselves.

The Levellers are a pretty special group. No matter what the situation, they can always be relied upon to come up with a plan that wasn’t anywhere on their DM‘s radar. When they needed to cross a chasm over their choice of one of two bridges, each guarded by a different variety of enemy, I anticipated a few of the obvious options on each (fighting, magic, persuasion and intimidation, bribery…) but a moment later they were talking about having their druid wildshape into something easy-to-carry while everybody else did a group-spider climb expedition down the chasm edge and along the underside of a bridge. That’s thinking outside the box!

But the real magic has come when the party, through their explorations, have unlocked entirely new elements of the story.

Player-driven content

In our campaign, virtually all of the inhabitants of a city have inadvertently sold their immortal souls to a Archduchess of Hell by allowing, over generations, their declaration of loyalty to their city to become twisted away from their gods and towards their mortal leader, who sold them on in exchange for a sweet afterlife deal. The knights of the city were especially-impacted, as the oath they swore upon promised their unending loyalty in this life as well. When the fiendish pact was made, these knights were immediately possessed by evil forces, transforming into horrendous creatures (who served to harass the party for some time).

Pile of old papers with handwritten notes, including ingredients for a high fantasy "dream machine". — Every party’s got a character who pores over the textual detail of every prop⁶, right? Or is it just every party that includes JTA as a player?

But there’s a hole in this plot⁷. As-written, at least one knight avoided fiendish possession and lived to tell the tale! The player characters noticed this and latched on, so I ran with it. Why might the survivor knights be different from those who became part of the armies of darkness? Was there something different about their swearing-in ceremony? Maybe the reasons are different for different survivors?

I didn’t have answers to these questions to begin with, but the players were moving towards investigating, so I provided some. This also opened up an entire new possible “soft” quest hook related to the reason for the discrepancy. So just like that, a plothole is discovered and investigated by a player, and that results in further opportunities for adventure.

As it happens, the party didn’t even go down that route at all and instead pushed-on in their existing primary direction, but the option remains. All thanks to player curiosity, there’s a possible small quest that’s never been written down or published, and is unique to our group and the party’s interests. And that’s awesome.

In Conclusion

I’m not the best GM in the world. I’m not even the best GM I know. But I’m getting better all the time; learning lessons like how to release the reins a little bit and see where my players can take our adventures.

And for those lessons, I’m grateful to those same players.

Footnotes

¹ I’m using the terms GM, DM, and facilitator interchangeably, and damned if I’m writing them all out every single time.

² A gamemaster giving all of the narrative power to any one of the three elements of K/D/F breaks the game, but in different ways. 100% karma and what you’ve got is a storytelling game, not a roleplaying game: which is fine if that’s what everybody at the table thinks they’re playing: otherwise not. 100% drama gives you a recital, not a jam session: the gamemaster might as well just be writing a book. 100% fortune leads to unrealistic chaos: with no rules to the world (either from the plot or from the consequences of actions) you’re just imagining all possible outcomes in your universe and picking one at random. There’s a balance, and where it sits might vary from group to group, but 100% commitment to a single element almost always breaks things.

³ A the “lesser sins” I mention show, the edges of what construes railroading and what’s merely “a linear quest” is a grey area, and where the line should be drawn varies from group to group. When I’m running a roleplaying session for my primary-school-aged kids, for example, I’m much more-tolerant of giving heavy-handed nudges at a high-level to help them stay focussed on what their next major objective was… but I try harder than ever to encourage diverse and flexible problem-solving ideas within individual scenes, where childish imagination can really make for memorable moments. One time, a tabaxi warrior, on fire, was falling down the outside of a tower… but his player insisted that he could shout a warning through the windows he passed before landing in flawless catlike fashion (albeit mildly singed). My adult players would be rolling athletics checks to avoid injury, but my kids? They can get away with adding details like that by fiat. Different audience, see?

⁴ A recent session took place after a hiatus, and I wasn’t confident that – with the benefit of a few months’ thinking-time – the party would continue with the plan they were executing before the break. And they didn’t! I’d tried to prep for a few other eventualities in the anticipation of what they might do and… I guessed wrong. So, for the first time in recorded history, our session ended early. Is that the end of the world? Nope.

⁵ Want a really radical approach to player-driven plot development? Take a look at this video by Zee Bashew, which I’m totally borrowing from next time I start running a new campaign.

⁶ You know what I miss? Feelies. That’s probably why I try to provide so many “props”, whether physical or digital, in my adventures.

⁷ The plothole isn’t even my fault, for once: it’s functionally broken as-delivered in the source book, although that matters little because we’ve gone so-far outside the original source material now we’re on a whole different adventure, possibly to reconvene later on.

Icebreakers – Heraldry and Compairs

I’m in Amsterdam for a meetup for my new team at Automattic.

When we’ve not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we’ve been doing a variety of activities to help solidify our new team’s goals, priorities, and expertise: y’know, the normal things you might expect on a company away week.

I volunteered to lead the initial session on our first day with a couple of icebreaker games, which went well enough that I’m inclined to share them here in case they’re of any use to you. The games we played are called Heraldry and Compairs. Let’s take a look:

Heraldry

I was looking at the coat of arms of Noord Holland, the province in which Amsterdam lies, and thinking about all the symbolism and propaganda that’s encoded into traditional heraldry, and how much effort it takes to decode it… unless you just, y’know, guess!

Per pale or and azure; I a lion rampant gules, armed and langued azure, II seme of horizontally placed billets or, two lions passant guardant in pale of the same. The shield is crested by a coronet of five leaves or. ²

I asked each participant to divide a shield into five quadrants and draw their own coats of arms, featuring aspects of (a) their work life, (b) their personal life, (c) something they value, (d) something they’re good at, and (e) something surprising or unusual. I really wanted to keep the time pressure on and not allow anybody to overthink things, so I set a 5-minute timer from the moment everybody had finished drawing their shield outline.

Then, everybody passed their drawing to the right, and each person in turn tried, as best they could, to introduce the person to their left by attempting to interpret their neighbour’s drawing. The known categories helped to make it easier by helping people latch onto something to start talking about, but also more-challenging as people second-guessed themselves (“no, wait, maybe it’s sailing you’re good at and guitar you play in your personal life?”).

Six hand-drawn sketches of heraldic coats of arms by six different Automatticians. Ballpoint pen on paper. — This wasn’t about artistic skills; it was about getting people to talk to one another. Which is for the best, given my (lack of) artistic skills.

After each introduction is made, the person being introduced gets to explain their heraldry for themselves, congratulating their introducer on the things they got right and their close-guesses along the way.

It’s sort-of halfway between “introduce your neighbour” and “pictionary”. And it worked well to get us warmed-up, feeling a little silly, knowing one another slightly better, and in a space in which everybody had been expected to have spoken and to have made a harmless mistake (everybody managed to partially-interpret a shield correctly). A useful place to be at the end of an icebreaker exercise is left with the reminder that we are, after all, only human.

Compairs

Next up, we played a game only slightly inspired by witnessing a game of Mr and Mrs the other week³. I threw together a Perchance (which, in the nature of such things, is entirely open-source and you’re welcome to adapt it for your own use) that generated a series of randomly-selected pairs of teammates and asked a question to differentiate the two of them.

Screenshot of the game asking: "Gareth vs Dan (Travel category): Who's taken the longest boat ride?" — Some of the questions were gentle, but solicited a reasonable amount of guesswork alongside a modest amount of deduction.

Participants other than the two shown on the screen were challenged to guess the answer to the question. Sometimes the questions would have a definitive answer, and sometimes not: the joy was in the speculation! “Hmm, I know that Dan’s done quite a bit of globetrotting… but could he actually have travelled further East than a colleague who lives much further East than him?”

After a few seconds to a minute, once their colleagues had settled on an answer, the people listed on the question were encouraged to make their own guesses. Usually they’ll have a better idea as they are one of the data points, but that’s not always true!

Screenshot of the game asking: "Michal vs Raja (Code category): I can't remember whether I need aria-label or aria-labelledby. Who can tell me?" — A handful of questions were even tangentially work-related. Who is the accessibility Web expert in our team, anyway?

There’s no points, and you can play for as long as you like so long as it’s long enough that everybody gets at least one turn, so it’s a good “fill the rest of the time slot” game. It follows Heraldry moderately well as an icebreaker double-feature because the former is firstly about learning things about one another (and to a lesser extent guessing), and the latter is about the opposite.

I came out of both games knowing more about the humans behind the screens in my new team, and it seemed to open up the room for some good discussions afterwards, so the social lubricant effect was clearly effective too. If you give them a go or adapt them into anything else, let me know!

Footnotes

¹ Our absent colleague instead had to tower over us on an enormous projector screen.

² The red (“gules”) upright (“rampant”) lion in the coat of arms possibly comes from the heraldry of the city of Gelderen in Germany, but once part of the Dutch Republic. The lions striding (“passant”) to the left (“to dexter”) but turning to face you (“guardant”) come from the arms of Fryslân (Friesland), and its rectangles represent the districts of Fryslân. Aren’t you glad you asked.

³ Also known as The Newlyweds Game after the US game show of that name and basically the same format, Mr and Mrs is a game in which a (typically newly) married couple are asked questions about one another and their lives together which they answer separately and then those answers are compared. This induces a reaction of compersion when they’re “right” and in-sync and when the couple disagree it results in amusement. Or possibly divorce.

A Proper Cup of Tea

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Terry Cavanagh

This “choose your own adventure”-style game about making the perfect cup of tea is just… excellent.

If you lack the imagination to understand how a game like this could have dozens of possible endings, you desperately need to play it. My favourite path so far through the game was to add a teabag, then hot water, then remove the teabag, then add some milk, then add a second teabag, then drink it.

Genuinely can’t stop laughing at this masterpiece.

My Favourite Video Game Easter Egg [Video]

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My Favourite Video Game Easter Egg

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Spoiler: it’s Alorik’s crystal ball in Ultima Underworld II.

This blog post is also available as a vlog: why not watch & listen to me as I demonstrate my favourite video game Easter egg!

Ultima Underworld II

My favourite video game Easter egg is found in Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds¹.

Released early in 1993 after missing a target of Christmas 1992², it undersold despite being almost universally well-received by reviewers³.

Composite of PC Zone's review of Ultima Underworld II, overlaid with their final score: "94%: Just go out now and buy it, okay." — I don’t know how print magazine video game reviews read today, but back in the early 90s they seemed to be frivolous and flippant approximately 100% of the time.

Developed by Looking Glass Technologies, it used an enhanced version of the engine they’d used for the game’s prequel a year earlier⁴.

The engine is particularly cool for it’s time; it’s sometimes compared to Wolfenstein⁵, but that’s not entirely fair… on Wolfenstein! The original version of Underworld‘s 3D engine predated Wolfenstein… and yet supported several features that Wolfenstein lacked, like the ability for the player to look up and down and jump over chasms, for example.

Screenshots of the same piles of bones and detritus in Ultima Underworld I, seen from two different angles. — Move around and you’ll see the 3D walls shift to your new perspective, but you’ll always see the same side of the 2D objects on the floor. Turn as you might, you’ll never see the back of that skull!

The team’s expertise and code would eventually be used to produce System Shock in 1994. The team’s producer, Warren Spector, would eventually draw from his experience of the Ultima Underworld games when he went on to make Thief: The Dark Project and Deus Ex.

But the technology of Ultima Underworld II and its prequel aren’t as interesting as its approach to storytelling and gameplay. They’re:

real-time
first-person
non-linear
fantasy roleplaying games

This was a highly innovative combination⁶.

Highlighted part of the Designers Notes, reading: "We feel that one of Underworld’s strongest features is its capacity to generate situations and strategies that we did not script, but that arose from the scenarios we created. For example: Suppose there’s a Despoiler daemon guarding the key to that door. Maybe I should come back when I can take him hand-to-hand … or bring up my picklock skill … or throw this sling stone at him, see if he’ll chase me … or maybe I can sneak past him — how good is a Despoiler’s eyesight? And can he swim …" — *Underworld II* encourages lateral thinking and provides multiple solutions to many challenges, perhaps best-described by this section in the Designers’ Notes page at the back of the manual.

What’s being described there is what we’d now call emergent gameplay, and while it wasn’t completely new in 1993⁷ it was still uncommon enough to be noteworthy.

The Easter Egg

The Ultima series are riddled with Easter eggs, but my favourite is one that I feel is well-hidden, beautiful… and heavily laden with both fan service and foreshadowing!

Screenshot showing a frozen fountain in an icy realm. — The third of the interdimensional planes the Avatar visits in the game contains a city frozen solid by the Guardian’s magic.

To find the Easter egg, you must first travel to Anodunos. This city was once the capital of a tropical city-state which had become allied to the Guardian, the the principal antagonist of Ultima VII through IX.

Box art showing a hero dressed in leather armour wielding a staff with a glowing tip in a frozen cave. — The original box art for *Underworld II*, painted by Denis Loubet (who’ll draw your RPG character for you if you like!) showed the Avatar in the ice cavern, wielding an important late-game artefact.

After the city’s major, Beatrice, attempted to put an end to the red titan’s growing demands, the Guardian cursed the city fountain to radiate out a magical cold that eventually froze the entire settlement under a cave of ice.

Screenshot of the conversation interface as Dan talks to a ghost called Beatrice. — Mayor Beatrice lives on here, as a ghost. While she’s a great source of information about the ice caverns as a whole and has information highly useful to the primary quest, that’s not the thing we’re interested in right now.

On the Eastern bank of the city’s river we find the remnants of the workshop of the magician Alorik, and in it – if we look in the right place⁸ – a secret door. We can’t open it though: unusually for a secret door in this game, it’s locked.

Looking at a blank patch of wall in a frozen room, the player is told "You see a secret door." — In the original, unpatched release of the game, you couldn’t even cast the “open” spell on it to unlock it: the only way through was to use a powerful late-game spell like “portal” to teleport to the other side.

I didn’t even find this chamber on my first playthrough of the game. It was only on my second, while using the Map Area spell to help me to draw accurate maps of the entire game world, that I found the room… and even then I spent some time hunting for a switch on the “outside” before eventually giving up and teleporting into the secret room.

An open secret door (the one from before, but viewed from the other side), and a thrown switch. — Once you’re on the other side, there’s a switch. I guess it’s a Alorik’s panic room?

There’s valuable treasure here including a sceptre of mana restoration, a “grav” runestone (probably still easier to get than the one at the Scintillus Academy), but what’s most interesting is the crystal ball, which the player can look into to see a vision of another place and, in the case of this orb, another time.

The first time you look into it, you’re told:

You see yourself striving against the forces of Mondain and Minax in the lands of ancient Sosaria.⁹

Mondain and Minax are the antagonists in Ultima I and Ultima II. We’re seeing the earliest parts of the player character’s adventures.

In the game: looking into the crystal ball. — It’s long been argued that the “Stranger” – the protagonist of *Ultima I* through *Ultima III* – is a different person to the Avatar of *Ultima IV* but I feel like this vision is canonical proof that they’re supposed to be interpreted as being the same person…

If we look into the crystal ball a second time:

You see yourself climbing to the peak of Olympus Mons on the planet Mars.

This is a reference to the plot of Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams… which is a… weird choice of game to reference.

In my mind, a more logical leap forward in time might have been to jump to Ultima IV¹⁰, in which the protagonist first becomes the Avatar of the Eight Virtues and the Hero of Britannia. Martian Dreams is… a sequel to a spinoff of Ultima VI. So why pick that?

Screenshot from Martian Dreams showing Dr. Spector. — Little-known and oft-forgotten, *Martian Dreams* is apparently nonetheless a source of pride for the real Spector.

Martian Dreams starts with a friend of the Avatar’s from Earth facilitating the Avatar and their companions to set out on an adventure to the planet Mars. That friend is called Dr. Spector, obviously named for Warren Spector, who helped develop Ultima VI and, of course, this game. This usual choice of vision of the past is a cryptic nod to the producer of Underworld II.

Let’s look again:

You see yourself in the Deep Forest, speaking with the peace-loving simian race of Emps.

This one’s a reference to Ultima VII, the game whose story immediately precedes this one. The Deep Forest seems an strange part of the adventure to choose, though. The Avatar goes to the Deep Forest where, via some emps and then a wisp are eventually lead to the Time Lord¹¹. The Time Lord provides a whole heap of exposition and clues that the Avatar needs to eventually close the Black Gate and win the game.

Tardis noises intensify.

Do these references serve to hint that this crystal ball, too, is a source of exposition and guidance? Let’s see what it says next.

You see yourself peering into a crystal ball.

I remember the moment I first saw this happen in the game: serious chills! You’ve just found a long-lost, centuries-buried secret chamber, in which there’s a crystal ball. You peer into it and observe a series of moments from throughout your life. You continue to watch, and eventually you see yourself, staring into the crystal ball: you’re seeing the present. So what’s next?

Frame from 1984's The NeverEnding Story, showing Atreyu seeing the prophetic painting that shows the beast he's about to meet. — Alorik’s crystal ball from *Ultima Underworld II* and the mural of G’mork from *The NeverEnding Story* totally have the same energy.

If you look again, you’re asking to see… the unwritten future:

You see yourself winding a great war horn in the throne room of Castle British.

To save Britannia in Ultima Underworld II, the Avatar needs to exploit symmetries implicit in The Guardian’s spellcasting to travel to eight different parallel worlds, find a place from which His power stems, dispel it, encase themselves in a shell of basilisk oil-infused magic mud, immerse themselves in lava to bake it on, find a magic sigil, consume a djinn… it’s a whole thing. But ultimately it all leads to a climactic end scene in which the Avatar raises a horn retrieved from the Tomb of Praecor Loth and blows it to shatter a dome of blackrock.

Under a starry sky, a blackrock dome grows green cracks and shatters. — Blackrock’s really heavy, right? I’m not sure that shattering it *above* the building you’re inside is wise.

If you happen to find this clue on your first playthrough, it’s helpful exposition.

But that’s the end of this game, right? How can we possibly peer into the orb again?

You see yourself sailing through majestic pillars cropping up out of the sea, on a voyage of discovery.

What’s being described there is the opening scene from the next game in the series, the as-yet-unreleased Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle!

Ultima VII Part 2 introduction, showing a boat sailing through an icy sea corridor towards two serpent pillars. — *Serpent Isle* begins with the Avatar and their companions sailing out to some special pillars in pursuit of a bad guy.

This vision is a teaser of what’s to come. That’s just… magical, for both the character and the player.

The character uses fortune-telling magic to see their future, but the player is also seeing their future: if they’re playing Ultima Underworld II at or close to its release date, or they’re playing through the games in chronological order, they’re in a literal sense being shown what comes next in their life. That’s really cool.¹²

Let’s look again:

You see the obscure form of an old and dear friend, as he sacrifices his life for the good of all.

Some time after the party arrives on Serpent Isle, the Avatar’s companions are possessed by the Banes of Chaos and go on a murderous rampage. Later, there’s a ritual that will save the world, but at the cost of the death of one of the heroes. The Avatar is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, but in the end Sir Dupre takes his place, unwilling to live within himself after seeing the carnage he has wrought.

Sir Dupre says "I cannot live with the shame of the deaths I have caused... If I can redeem myself by becoming the required martyr, so be it!" — The death of Sir Dupre, who first appeared way back in *Ultima II*, is somewhat undercut by his resurrection in *Ultima IX*. But perhaps you’ll let me pretend for a paragraph longer that *Ultima IX* doesn’t exist, okay?

At the end of Serpent Isle, the Avatar is plucked out of space and time and deposited into Pagan, The Guardian’s home base. The plot of Ultima VIII and Ultima IX revolve around the Avatar working to return to a radically-changed Britannia, attempting to fight The Guardian and bring to an end the Age of Armageddon, and ultimately merging and become one with Him before vanishing completely from the world.

An ankh symbol picked out in the constellations. — I don’t disagree with how *Ultima IX* got to where it was going, but I don’t like the route it took to get there. Or the hilariously-terrible bugs.

Which is why it’s perhaps quite fitting that if the Avatar in Underworld II looks into the orb one final time, they’re told…

You see nothing.

That’s it. That’s the end.

The end of the vision, certainly, but also: a vision of the end.

Depending on how you count the Ultima games¹³, this is the 13th of 17 in the series. We’re approaching the final chapter, and this Easter egg foreshadows that finale.

I feel hugely privileged that I got to experience it “organically”, by accident, as its authors presumably intended, back in 1993. But it also makes me happy to be able to share the story of it with you¹⁴.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you might enjoy watching the vlog version of this post, through which my enthusiasm for the topic might be more-palpable.

Footnotes

¹ I’ve doubtless mentioned Ultima Underworld II before: for example both it and Ultima VII, as well as NetHack (mentioned elsewhere in this post) made it into my 2007 list of top 10 computer games that stole my life.

² The release was delayed owing to testing revealing just too-many bugs, the penultimate of which was squashed on 18 December leaving just one more that the team couldn’t reproduce until the New Year

³ It suffered perhaps for the time of year it was released, but perhaps also for the fact that 1993 was a big year for video games and it was competing with The 7th Guest, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Return to Zork , Myst, Disney’s Aladdin and, of course – later in the year – Doom.

⁴ Director/designer Paul Neurath apparently sang the praises of his team for improving texture mapping and viewport size constraints, and he’s right: they’re a huge improvement on Underworld I‘s. Neurath would later go on create the crowdfunded “spiritual successor” Underworld Ascendant, which was critically panned, which just goes to show that sometimes it’s better to get a tight team together and make it “until it’s done” than to put your half-baked idea on Kickstarter and hope you can work it out what you’re making before the money runs out.

⁵ Like Wolfenstein, the engine uses a mixture of software-rendered 3D (for walls and furniture) overlaid with traditionally-produced sprites (for characters and items).

⁶ All executed over a year before the release of the very first Elder Scrolls game. Just sayin’.

⁷ That king of emergent gameplay NetHack was showcasing emergent gameplay in a fantasy roleplaying game way back in the 1980s!

⁸ An interesting quirk of the game was that if you turned the graphics settings down to their lowest, secret doors would become just as visible as regular doors. If you’re sure there is one but you can’t quite find it, tweaking your graphics settings is much easier than casting a spell!

⁹ Do you like the “in the style of Underworld II” scrolls I’ve used in this post? I’ve made available the source code you need if you want to use them yourself.

¹⁰ Ultima IV is my personal favourite Ultima game, but I see the argument of people who claim that Ultima VII is the best of the series.

¹¹ The Time Lord turns up throughout the game series. Way back in Ultima III, he appears in the Dungeon of Time where he provides a clue essential to defeating Exodus, and he appears or is referenced in most games from Ultima VII onwards. He doesn’t seem to appear in Ultima IV through Ultima VI, except… in Ultima IX, which wouldn’t be released until six years after Underworld II, it’s revealed that the Time Lord is the true identity of the seer Hawkwind… who provided the same kind of exposition and guidance in Ultima IV!

¹² How did the Underworld II team know with such certainty what was being planned for Serpent Isle? At some point in 1992 project director Jeff George left Origin Studios and was replaced by lead designer Bill Armintrout, and the role of producer was assigned to… Warren Spector again! For some time, Spector was involved with both projects, providing an easy conduit for inter-team leaks.

¹³ How you count Ultima games and what specifically should be counted is a source of controversy in fan circles.

¹⁴ I’m sure many people reading this will have heard me talk about this particular Easter egg in-person before, over the last couple of decades. Some of you might even have heard me threaten to write a blog post about it, someday. Well: now I have. Tada! It only took me thirty years after experiencing it to write about it here, which is still faster than some things I’ve blogged about!

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