Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Worldbuilding 4b: Mivior

"When a fighter attains 9th level (Lord), he or she may opt to establish a freehold.  This is done by building some type of castle and clearing the area in a radius of 20 to 50 miles around the stronghold, making it free from all sorts of hostile creatures.  Whenever such a freehold is established and cleared, the fighter will: (1) automatically attract a body of men-at-arms ...; (2) collect a monthly revenue of 7 silver pieces for each and every inhabitant ..."

— page 22, original DMG


This is the "End Game," a term I didn't hear until the internet.  Frankly, the idea made zero sense to me and to my early players.  If a zero-level character buys a piece of hinterland, and does nothing with it, including not "clearing it," and chooses to rent it to another character, does that mean the renter doesn't have to pay rent?  Obviously, it doesn't.  If an ordinary non-experienced tough in town can gather together a gang of ruffians; or a bandit can get a bunch of other bandits together — and neither has to do so much as nail two pieces of wood together, they why does a 9th level LORD or LADY have to build an entire castle before getting men-at-arms willing to follow his or her commands?  Aren't they following the individual, and NOT the land or the fortress?  And what does any of this have to do with the actual kingdom, which surely would have a say about who gets to build and who gets to demand rent from people residing on land the fighter doesn't own.  What if the character does some service for the state and the state decides to invest him or her with a title, and isn't "9th level"?  Does the king say, "Oh, I'd like to make you a minor baron, but oops, sorry, you're not experienced enough.  Come back later."

It's a kind of meta-game idiocy; one that I've always ignored.  ANY player, of ANY class, can become a lord, since it's not assigned by how much experience and what level you've maintained, but by BIRTH and MERIT ... the latter happening because of what the player does, not what the player is.  If a character has never shown any interest in politics, or a particular kingdom, or made any inroads with the local nobility, or has never done anything for the local authorities, then why should anyone suddenly decide out of the blue, "Oh, you're a 9th level lord!  Here, please take some of my land and make it yours, because you're just so delish!"

I've heard many people express the belief that the "end game" is so-called because it's where all the fun is taken out of adventuring and the character is ready for retirement.  Jeebus.

The end game is the beginning game.  It's the headspace the players should have from the start.  This doesn't preclude adventuring and going into dungeons, and all the things JB calls "recognisable" D&D ... but it DOES assume that these things are done with an end goal in mind: the acquisition of power, wealth, status, support followers and places on the map that are secure for the players.  I recognise that traditional D&D players are fascinated with two-dimensional hollow, toneless escapades into futile and aimless dungeons ... but it's that exact ideal that built the community wide response for MORE STORIES, BETTER STORIES, GREATER CHARACTERS, blah blah blah.

Characters don't need a "backstory."  The setting does.  Adventures don't need a "story."  The setting needs continuity, necessities, grounds for action, principles, a TRAJECTORY, a pretext telling the players what actions are called for and why they should do it.

But no one seems to know how to build a setting; hell, they don't even think a setting is for this.  They think a setting is a "game board," as Original Carl called it.  A thing to be used to tally how many days it takes to move from this dungeon to that dungeon.  So the reach has been for "stories" because it's something low-brow people (including those at the company) can grasp.

To try to explain an alternative, I'll be writing a series within this series, outlining a game world that isn't mine.  Thus explaining a series of possible wholistic campaigns providing a greater depth of play coupled with recognisable D&D.

First, we'll start with a region called "Mivior."   I'll be treating the map exclusively from a D&D perspective, to highlight themes of running a campaign game — and as such, any elements of the game Divine Right, where the map comes from, should be utterly ignored.  For example, for our purposes, we need to view mountains as impassable for an army of any kind, unless there's clear evidence on the map indicating a pass.  A small party could pass through a mountain hex, but with regards to invasion, mountains form a practical defensive barrier.

Please forgive my need to put numbers on everything, and for the difficulty in reading the numbers.  If you open the image in another window, you'll find it's large enough to zoom in, making reading easier; and I'll be putting blow-up shots of individual parts of the map throughout this post.

Let's start with an overview.  Mivior is a mountainous kingdom overlooking the ocean.  The Shaker Mountains form a backbone along the southern third, while Serpent Bay splits the northern third from the rest.  There are four cities: Colist, Boliske, Addat and Boran.  These are rated as to their defense and importance.  Colist is in a white hex, is the King's residence and is rated "4."  Boliske is rated 3, Addat 2 and Boran 1.

Mivior's "troubles," for all kingdoms have troubles, are defined by its "environs."  For this, finding Mivior within the bigger picture by looking here would be beneficial.  Mivior's boundaries include the Sea of Drowning Men; the border with Hothior to the east, defined by the Bad Axe forest and the Shaker Mts.; Trollwood, occupying the land route between the north of Mivior and the south; the deadly huge ancient dragon Urmoff, that rules over Serpent Bay and acts as a hazard to shipping; the Wetlands, in the middle course of The River Sullen, and The Breaking, a cluster of hills north of Addat.  Beyond The Breaking and the Wetland is the heavily forested kingdom of Elfland.  Each of these are an enormous headache for the monarchy, driving internal and external policy, demanding monies and resources, concerns the player characters would need to keep in mind wherever they may happen to be.  We want to dive into those "concerns" with this post — as these provide a playbook describing what the PCs can do to be useful to one side of each conflict or the other, to make themselves wealthy, to increase their number of experience, to make friends and enemies, to get rich and to set up those safe spaces mentioned earlier.

Let's examine the NORTH.

Suppose we define each hex as 40 miles wide.  This puts the edge of The Breaking a mere 25 miles north of Addat; the bottom green edge of Elfland is a little more than 100 miles away; the mouth of the Sullen is 45 miles to the east and the furthest land along the Sullen is 145 miles away (and above that are the Wetlands).  Trollwood is 100 miles away and Urmoff the Serpent is, well, close enough to sink any ship that puts to sea.

As designers, positing the existence of Urmoff, we need to half-way solve this problem for Mivior.  Eventually, the players could get to be high enough level to slaughter Urmoff and become national heroes, but starting at 1st level, that's a long-term goal to say the least.  Clearly, no one in the kingdom is strong enough to do so; for that to make sense, Urmoff has to be extremely powerful, effectively a double- or triple-dragon, 250 hit points, 150 ft. long, etc.  However, like any kingdom with an enemy it can't defeat, Mivior can pay a tribute ... and so, it's agreed that so long as Mivior agrees to provide a sufficient amount of what Urmoff wants — victims, magical essence, agreements to stay out of Serpent Bay, whatever — then Urmoff agrees to leave Mivior's shipping alone.  That still lets Urmoff destroy Hothior shipping, Shucassam shipping or Rombune shipping ... which creates international problems of its own, as these other kingdoms pressure Mivior to do something about Urmoff.  But it does alleviate one of Mivior's problems.  It's vessels can sail securely, and because they can, Mivior can yield much more from the sea than it's competitors.  Mivior, then, is the world's source for fish, shipbuilding, ambergris, crushed seashell and so on.

Addat's principle problem, then, is The Breaking.  As our maps shows this coloured brown, Mivior either can't control it or the land is so poor it's not worth the effort.  Thus the area is occupied by "barbarians," a general term we'll use for anyone not part of a kingdom.  These could be humans, orcs, orcs led by ogres and even ogre magi, whatever we wish.  But, looking at the whole map of Minaria, I suggest The Breaking isn't that significant a hinterland, and that anything truly threatening would also bother the elves of Elfland; so let's say it's a composite of disassociated orcish tribes, raising sheep and scrubby cattle, and forced to raid into Mivior lands whenever their food supply dwindles or they need weapons.  This creates an easy set of adventures for low-level players who set out to clear some of the nearer hills, defend hamlets and thorpes north of Addat ... or venture into the hills to make alliances, gather one or two tribes together and, Conan-like, lead the tribes to raiding Mivior's territory.  There's no expectation the players have to be on Mivior's side.

The trolls of Trollwood offer a deeper problem.  Their violations of Mivior territory are far more dangerous and severe; Addat can probably manage the west bank of the Sullen — which we can postulate is a deep, swollen river with undertows, and probably an estuary at the mouth in M05.  Mivior can build forts on the west bank along M02, M05 and M06 ... but protecting the east bank wouldn't be so easy.  No doubt, settlers eager for land are constantly trying to make a go of it on the east bank of the Sullen ... and are occasionally killed, eaten, the farms and animals destroyed.  Yet the trolls have no real desire to settle in the flatlands outside their forest.  Undoubtably, the lowlands of the Sullen are rich lands, and perhaps there's a monster fortress in  M07 or M09 that can provide shelter for refugees when the trolls decide to invade.  There might even be alarm arrangements to warn peasants that troll groups are on the move.

This creates an interesting back and forth for these lands.  The players can try to set themselves up as local "troll-hunters," providing reassurance to a group of farmers they're paid to protect.  At the same time, fighting trolls and gathering money is a great way to accumulate levels 4 to 7.  The players might even venture into Trollwood itself, in quest for some "troll-protecting amulet" that the trolls have hidden, or to release some underdark enemy from the mountains south of The Stone Face, the seat of troll power — svirfneblin, say; someone the trolls can manage but will take a year or two.  Keep in mind, Addat and Mivior would love to make those lands east of the Sullen productive, as it would increase their exports and provide more food for their people, increasing their overall population and thus helping create a bigger army and other fortifications to fight off the trolls or use in their disputes with Hothior or abroad (Mivior occasionally takes part in foreign wars, after all).  A group of players might be exactly what's needed to "get the ball rolling" in Mivior's favour, by helping Mivior get a better foothold on its own territory.

North of Trollwood, there are barbarians in the Wetlands too.  These are too far to practically raid into Mivior proper, but The River Sullen is an economic route between Ider-Bolis of Elfland and Addat.  The eighty mile stretch of slow water surrounded by bogs and fens (a northern marsh rather than something like a bayou) makes barges vulnerable to masses of tribal groups in skiffs with spears.  These wetlands are divided by the hills ("the High Marches") surrounding The Invisible School of Thaumaturgy ... but perhaps the tribal raiders trade whatever they find with the mages there.  An agreement to pole a barge upstream and fight off raiders could lead the players from Addat into the mysterious lands of the School; this being a group of active and well-meaning scholars ... but we can discuss them another day.

Elves drift down the river and into Addat, so there's plenty of opportunity for these to give information to the players, to explain the troubles going on above and give the players an opportunity to be forewarned and forearmed.  It's up to the players to look over the geopolitical landscape and try to solve the problems themselves ... assuming, of course, that they're not hopelessly traditional and vacuous with regards to their gaming motives.  It's up to us to lead them a bit by the nose, having others suggest how the players can play their part in the grand schemes of other persons ... and hope the players decide they can "do better" with these problems than NPCs.

Moving onto CENTRAL Mivior.

Our goal is to create interesting, unique parts of the world that offer novelty for the players.  "Boran on the Moor" gives us a great inspiration: M13 and M15, shown as clear hexes on the map, are not rich farmlands or pastures, they're unproductive moors, like those in western Ireland or in Brittany.  The Shaker mountains force Boran's attention on the sea, and we can imagine the moors are located above high, rocky cliffs, blasted by severe storms that strike the west side of Mivior from Serpent Bay south.

But remember, the Sea of Drowning Men is Mivior's best friend.  Tribute transforms Urmoff into a kind of ally, while providing Mivior with riches.  I choose to see "The Shining Isle" of Boliske as a facetious play on words; the isle itself is likely rocky and as pleasant as Scotland's Hebrides.  But Boliske itself might be virtually impregnable, an excellent refuge for Mivior privateers, private vessels paid to attack non-Mivior shipping and bring it home.  The "shining" is therefore the piles of glistening booty stolen from ships and brought to Boliske, the most hated fortress outside of Mivior.

Meanwhile, the capes in M10 and M15 might drive truly daunting storms into the gullet of Boran, challenging the survivability of the town and limiting its residents.  Here's a scene from 1970s Ryan's Daughter to give a taste of what the storms might be like.  Parts of the world like this would get rich with "wrecker gangs," plundering ships that would founder on the rocks, detailed in novels like Jamaica Inn or in Stan Rogers' delightful The Wreck of the Athens Queen (sorry about the last, it requires a Canadian or a Mainer to understand the lyrics).

Therefore, though Boran or Boliske offer something of a claustrophobic campaign, with short journeys into the wild Shaker Mts. (where a few trolls may be found from Trollwood), there's opportunities for the players to be granted a smashed ship to plunder, a survivor to provide some tale to be told, a chance to become a privateer for Mivior ... even a chance to explore the small woodland north of Boran, fight some wolves or a Banshee, and get a sight of Serpent Bay — and perhaps of Urmoff himself, a terrifying prospect.

The "Shaker" mountains may indeed shake.  There may be a convergent boundary between lithospheric plates, creating very deep water along Mivior's coast and earthquakes up and down the mountains, like those occasionally experienced by British Columbia and especially Alaska.  We could roll 3d6 each game day, with three sixes offering an earthquake of 6 or more on the richter scale within 1 to 100 miles of the party.  That would certainly shake up a campaign.

And the SOUTH.

The westerlies hit the west shore of Mivior so hard that Colist has to be on the eastern side of the Mivior peninsula.  I choose to see M26, M30, M32 and M33 as mountains, though it doesn't show on the map, because it would have been difficult for the artist to insert them.  The forests of M22 and M26 therefore are have dense, massive trees, like the old growth of the Olympia Peninsula, in Washington state.  Colist, comparatively, is a sheltered rock shelf, highly defended, ridiculously wealthy and protected by a massive fleet.  Anything can be bought in Colist, though it's hard to access from the rest of Mivior.

East of the Shaker Mts. are five blank hexes, hemmed in by the border of Hothior and the Bad Axe forest.  This plain depends on the sea for its access, as the Shaker Mountains limit the practicality of a road between the plain and Colist ... and that makes it vulnerable to Hothior, who'd like to take the plain from Colist.  However, Hothior's own imperialist intentions are marred by the tangled Bad Axe forest; with a name like "Bad Axe," we can assume it's not army-friendly.  It's not the "Easy Walk" forest.  So, with both entities hamstrung in their control, we should assume the land has been fought over dozens of times ... and that the people are ethnically a mixture of Miviorians and Hothiorians.  No doubt, internally, the people have little love for one another.

An area like this makes difficult campaigning for players who like clear-cut goals and easy wins.  Both kingdoms claim the land; both are equally balanced in the claim and neither are certain to hold the land, even if they do succeed in winning a victory this time around.  The plain itself has no rivers that appear on the map; but we know from our frontier post that scores of little rivulets must pour down from the Shaker Mts. into the sea.  That's important.  Rivers, even small streams, carry down placer deposits, make good farm and pastureland — and create strong, stable ethnic groups.  A war might break out between Mivior and Hothior only every 20 to 50 years ... and meanwhile, this plain gives excellent access to both kingdoms, the sea and much of the wider game world.  In some ways, it's a better place to settle than anywhere around Addat or Boran.  Despite the threat of Hothior, it's generally safer.

I hope that from this the reader can see how the LAND drives adventure, through the way that different parts create troubles and impossible solutions for the inhabitants.  The players are asked not to wait for 9th level!  To roll up their sleeves and get involved, to attack the problems as they see fit, within the restrictions provided by their level, the local agendas and the limitations on local imaginations.  The DM is responsible for outlining these troubles, but not providing solutions.

... and still, that doesn't keep us from having the locals do the stupidest thing possible, to help convince the party that they can do better.

9 comments:

  1. This is great stuff, Alexis. I have a post on "adventure design" that's scheduled to go up tomorrow morning, and this kind of post is Exhibit A in why folks are too often putting cart before the horse. To steal a paraphrase: "it's about the WORLD, stupid."

    I will say: while this kind of re-purposing (re-designing) of fantasy maps for coherence, consistency, and "reality" is great, it wouldn't seem to help as much with folks using...for example...real world Europe. After all, there's no "ElfLand" or "TrollWoods" on MY map of France, nor is there a 150' dragon ruling over Puget Sound or Lake Washington (though I suppose if one were to be so placed, his lair of fantastic wealth could be on Mercer Island...).

    Is it just a matter of devil-may-care attitude when it comes to assigning locations for beholders and packs of displacer beasts? Just toss it, modify to fit the new variant wrinkle and keep building?

    I suppose it's just "that easy." But something nips at the back of my mind about that particular approach. Like I'm missing something here that is going to derail all the careful attention to coherent world design if I don't step lightly.

    Is that just paranoia?

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  2. I've explained before: adjusting European populations for cities that haven't be founded, and therefore popululations that haven't accumulated, I assigned an arbitrary threshold of 1 person per square mile as "whether the region was populated by humans or not."

    As a result, parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland are populated by Gnomes, Halflings and Elves ... as I wanted Scandinavia to be "character friendly regions." Large parts of Africa, Persia and Turkestan are populated by orcs, gith and ogrillon, which I call "haruchai." Most of Russia is non-human, and is variously gnome, elven, dwarf, ogre, orc, haruchai, goblin, hobgoblin, norker, xvart and bugbear, among other races. And YES, there's a part of Scotland, Argyll County to be precise, that I assigned to silver dragons, to account for England's penchant for dragon heraldry and St. George.

    I don't consider it "devil-may-care"; I consider it a careful rendering of Earth history, slotting in other races into those places where humans didn't much care to go by the 17th century. There's a lot of empty planet, yuo know. As far as beholders and displacer beasts, well, the former is an underdark creature, and a genius one, so such a creature can thrive anywhere so deep down that the postman won't ring once, never mind twice; and a displacer beast is just another savanna creature roaming 6 million empty square miles of Africa or the Caatinga in Brazil.

    So yeah. Just fit in the new variant wrinkle and keep building.

    I don't think it's paranoia so much on your part, JB. You have a strange resistance to things that don't fit some previously invented frame for D&D that you no doubt designed when you were much, much younger than you are now. For some reason, you feel that Old You is absolutely wiser than Present You, and Present You seems rigorously bound to making Future You obey the same premises, evidence be damned. All it all, it feels like an awful lot of baggage you've decided to carry around.

    You could just put some of it down.

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    Replies
    1. That’s fair (maybe?)…at least with regard to the “paranoia” or, rather, worry that I’m going to screw something up.

      I AM more trusting of Present Me…but Old Me was right about O So Many Things (once upon a time). I mean, Old Me IS how I got to Present Me, right?

      [jeez…what a stupid justification. Sorry!]

      RE: Your Method

      Ok, that’s, frankly, brilliant. I vaguely (maybe) remember you mentioning this once before. So: adjust population centers for time period, then put “non-human regions” in areas where humans aren’t. That’s easy-peasy. Would places that have low populations in the 17th century (or whenever) but that have large pops and cities NOW be suggestive of places that can support large humanoid populations?

      I’m actually using 19th century pop figures for my campaign because that’s the earliest I can go for the Pac NW. However, there are a LOT of areas that weren’t developed until railroads and highways made them feasible to reach. Not sure if this can be considered analogous but it seems obvious that if there are people there NOW, then it always had potential.

      Or did it? Before portable refrigeration and highways, semi-trucks full of groceries simply couldn’t reach places to feed folks. Maybe a cutoff date for populations based on the advent of frozen veggies?

      Just spitballing.
      ; )

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  3. Numerous large Siberian settlements existed prior to 1900, when most of Russia, including lands west of the Urals, never mind the east, were virtually entirely an agricultural economy. Famous examples include modern day Yakutsk, the Minusinsk Basin, the Kuznetsk Basin and much of the Yenisey and Ob River settlements, like Omsk and Krasnoyarsk.

    With regards to the populations I rate these places having in my game world, less than 2 million for all of Siberia, compared to nearly 34 million today, I'm safely within a margin of self-sustaining cultures, using the same valleys and places of settlement.

    But it's not "brilliant." It's plain as day for anyone who's studied geography from a young age, who thinks the problem through from the base materials and who trusts books. I'm not a genius, I'm EDUCATED.

    Which - if you'll forgive me - the obvious flaw in your justification. A single "Old You" is NOT how you became Present You. You became Present You through thousands of Present Yous, steadily carved out each day. And as such, any "Old You" that's thousands of Present Yous old is almost certainly pretty stupid, and not worth listening to.

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  4. So when we are introducing a party to Mivior, is it necessary to explicitly lay out this detail? Or should most of it come out through the game as they move around the area, speaking with locals, running afoul of polities, that sort of thing?

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  5. Shelby,

    In answering your question, suppose you start a group of characters in Boran on the Moor. You roll up their stats, including their AGES, and by AD&D none of them are younger than 15. Now, they've grown up their whole lives in Boran; they've taken part in Wrecker Gangs (the film Ryan's Daughter depicts children taking part), they've heard the men talk about Urmoff since their infancy, and through their training they've been filled with stories about Elfland, evil Hothior, the terrible trolls of Trollwood - with some of these stories designed to scare the bejeebus out of them, and some designed to make them good Miviorians.

    With such a childhood and progression into becoming classed persons, how much about this do you think they ought to know? Very little that I've said, apart from underdark places in Trollwood or perhaps the actual tribute paid to Urmoff, wouldn't be public knowledge.

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  6. That makes sense to me. Thank you.

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  7. As your resident Mainer (when I was working in Toronto a few years ago when a colleague learned I was from Maine he told me, "Well, you're basically a Maritimer then.") I feel obligated to provide a translation of at least first few lines of The Wreck of the Athens Queen:
    We were drinking down to Reedy's house when first we heard the blow.
    It seemed to come from Ripper Rock, so boldly forth to go.
    And sure enough the rusty tub could just be barely seen.
    As her stern was high up in the air, we made out Athens Queen.
    Oh, the lovely Athens Queen.

    ReplyDelete

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