Although I’ve been DMing for thirty years now (albeit with a long hiatus during the D&D 2e era) and consider myself a pretty good DM (listen to the Icosahedrophilia podcast and judge for yourself whether I’m decent or deluded), I still appreciate a good collection of tips and tricks for DMs. Nowadays, I get most of those tips and tricks from podcasts and blogs—including Mike Shea’s Sly Flourish blog and daily Twitter tips. Therefore, I expected good things from his book Dungeon Master Tips, and although I tripped over a few grammatical and stylistic issues here and there, I wasn’t disappointed.

The book unfolds in three major sections:

• Build Your Story
• Design Fun Encounters
• Run a Great Game

I’ll make some comments about each section in turn.

Build Your Story. A DM who understands an RPG’s rules inside out but doesn’t give the players around the table (including the DM himself or herself) an opportunity to tell fun stories together will find himself or herself—and his or her players—frustrated. How can you enable great stories to emerge at your table? Following Mike’s advice in this section of Dungeon Master Tips will carry you a long way. Mike draws on the work of writers, creativity experts, and other great DMs to provide strong, simple advice that, if implemented reasonably well, should improve any RPG campaign.

Design Fun Encounters. Sometimes I fear that my encounter design threatens to grow stale or overly predictable. For a while now, I’ve used an encounter checklist similar to the one Mike offers in Dungeon Master Tips; mine was heavily influenced by “The List” presented in episode 37 of the Order 66 Podcast (another resource that I highly recommend). I particularly enjoyed—and hope that my players will benefit from—Mike’s advice regarding battlemaps and terrain features. However, the material that will make the greatest impact on my own encounter design is, hands-down, the advice on using minions and solo monsters. These are places where D&D 4e RAW don’t really quite work right, at least for the first wave of rulebooks, so I anticipate using some of Mike’s suggested house rules that I haven’t yet incorporated into my games.

Run a Great Game. I’ve done some of the things Mike suggests in part 3 for quite a while now. In particular, I really enjoy using props and other types of table dressing. If you want to implement Mike’s suggestion about timers, you can buy sand timers in a variety of durations from FRP Games, as I’ve done. In the matter of “table tools,” I’ve gone a different direction than Mike suggests. Instead of cheap table tools like pipe cleaners and index cards, I’ve chosen to invest in high-quality tools like Litko Aerosystems condition tokens and such—but I’ve played at tables where pipe cleaners or twisted wire with beads were used with great effectiveness.

I shouldn’t conclude this review without a word of praise for the half-dozen or so illustrations by Jared von Hindman. I don’t usually like a cartoony style for D&D art, but Jared pulls it off well, and somehow it really fits the DIY theme of the book.

I mentioned tripping over some grammatical and stylistic issues, and I seem constitutionally incapable of writing any review without mentioning such issues when they arise. Michael uses “they” and its variants as gender-neutral singular pronouns (“each goes off in their own previously unknown direction”). While I can accept this in theory, it grates on my ear, and Michael swings between singular “they” and expressions like “he or she”—I found the alternation distracting. Occasionally, the book exhibits inconsistent punctuation, as when the word “all-seeing” is hyphenated correctly in a paragraph on p. 23 but not in the subheading above that paragraph, or incorrect placement of punctuation. Also, for the sake of honesty, I must tell you that I did not like the layout, with its widely-spaced text and lack of paragraph indentation. Those conventions might work fine on the web, but they don’t translate well to a printed page.

Aside from those stylistic annoyances, Dungeon Master Tips is a great resource for all DMs, though less experienced DMs will find more value in it than old-timers. At $11.99 for 77 pages (including cover), the book costs less per page than a typical WotC softcover, and it’s worth it. I purchased the PDF version, and got all the goodies in digital form for just $7.99—a bargain, if you ask me. If I were rating this book on DriveThruRPG, I’d give it ★★★★ (it would rate ★★★★★ with more attractive layout and slightly more polished prose). Tell Mike that I sent you over when you purchase your copy.

When I wrote my recent post on Hebraic words in H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “The Horror at Red Hook,” I forgot to mention one other tidbit. In part V of the story, the narrator mentions a word written in “nothing less than the fearful Chaldee letters of the word ‘LILITH.’” In the wonderful Penguin edition edited by S.T. Joshi, Joshi provides the following footnote to the word “Chaldee”:

This is a reference to the script (a kind of hieroglyphics) of the ancient land of Chaldaea in southern Babylonia near the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Its capital was Ur.

I think, however, that Joshi has misunderstood Lovecraft’s reference to the “Chaldee” language. While the ancient Sumerians did use pictographs in the earliest stage of their writing, I know of no scholarly convention of referring to those pictographs as “Chaldee.” The pictographs “soon” (over the course of a few hundred years) gave way to cuneiform, which is not really a kind of hieroglyphics. But I don’t think this is what Lovecraft means by “Chaldee.”

In nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars used the word “Chaldee” to name the language that we now call “Aramaic.” If you doubt this, search Google Books for “Chaldee” and notice that virtually all the results from 1850 to 1950 are for Biblical Hebrew lexicons (dictionaries). Evidence that Lovecraft used “Chaldee” in this way comes, perhaps, from his reference to “Chaldee letters” (my emphasis). In Mesopotamia, cuneiform symbols were generally logographic (one glyph represented one word) or syllabic (one glyph represented one syllable or phoneme). The scribes of Ugarit, a city on the Mediterranean coast, did use a cuneiform alphabet, but this was very unusual; in easter Mesopotamia—Sumer, and later Assyria and Babylon—syllabic cuneiform prevailed.

Based on usage at the time and the reference to “letters,” I suspect that Lovecraft meant Aramaic, not Akkadian or some precursor thereof, when he referred to “Chaldee” in “The Horror at Red Hook.” If so, I take this to be one of those “spoof moments” where Lovecraft takes something utterly mundane and tries to make it frightening, as he does in “The Hound” by italicizing the words “in the Dutch language.” There’s really nothing particularly fearsome about Chaldee (Aramaic) letters; they’re the same letters in which modern Hebrew is written (or, rather, printed and typeset, as distinct from Israeli cursive). So if you’re brave enough, if you can handle it without going completely mad, here’s what Malone saw:

לִילִית

The horror!

My favorite edition of Lovecraft’s stories is the three-volume Penguin series edited by S.T. Joshi; the second volume bears the title The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (Penguin, 2004) and contains the story “The Horror at Red Hook,” which inspired this post. I like this edition in part because of Joshi’s informative endnotes, but even these falter when Lovecraft starts using Hebrew words that Joshi (or his sources) do not recognize.

The relevant passage appears in part IV of “The Horror at Red Hook” (p. 128 of the Penguin 2004 edition):

The writing was in red, and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic enough. One frequently repeated motto as in a sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:

“HEL • HELOYM • SOTHER • EMMANVEL • SABAOTH • AGLA • TETRAGRAMMATON • AGYROS • OTHEOS • ISCHYROS • ATHANATOS • IEHOVA • VA • ADONAI • SADAY • HOMOVSION • MESSIAS • ESCHEREHEYE.”

In endnote 37 on p. 427, Joshi reproduces, with some comments of his own, Lovecraft’s personal “translation” of this “incantation,” which Lovecraft had reproduced from another source (see Joshi’s footnote 36). Lovecraft correctly understood most of the entries in the list, and Joshi’s notes correct a few of Lovecraft’s misunderstandings. But both Lovecraft and Joshi seem stymied by a few of the entries (all this comes from notes on p. 428):

• VA — Lovecraft wrote, “I give up. Can’t make head nor tail of it.” Joshi did not comment.
• SADAY — Lovecraft wrote, “Saday is another term beyond me …” Joshi did not comment.
• ESCHEREHEYE — Lovecraft wrote, “Eschereheye stumps me again—it being only a guess of mine that the barbaric word involves the Greek meaning in a line or in a row.” Joshi added, “HPL appears to be referring to the word scheros (found only in the dative case, scheroi: ‘in a line, one after another, uninterruptedly, successively’), but it is unlikely that this is a proper definition of the word in the incantation.” Joshi offers no corrected explanation himself, though.

I’m not quite sure what to make of VA either, though I suspect it may have entered the list at some point as a mere copying error reproducing the VA of IEHOVA (itself obviously the Latin precursor to the much later spelling “Jehovah”).

Saday, however, is no mystery at all to a Hebraist; it undoubtedly reflects the Hebrew word shaddai, usually translated “almighty” in modern English Bibles, as in the compound divine name El Shaddai or “God Almighty.”

Similarly, Lovecraft went astray on ESCHEREHEYE by seeking a Greek precursor, when Hebrew holds the real key. In a famous scene in the Hebrew Bible, Moses asks for God’s name, and God responds, “I am what I am.” Quite apart from the images of Popeye that always intrude when I hear this statement, the Hebrew phrase is pronounced ehyeh asher ehyeh. ESCHEREHEYE in Lovecraft’s incantation seems pretty clearly to derive from the last two words of this phrase, run together, and if translated into English would mean “what I am” (or “what I AM” if you’re trying to be pious).

So there you have it: learning Hebrew can help you read Lovecraft more skillfully. Do you think my classes will now show an enrollment spike?