Worldbuilding 5a: Location, Location, Location

I have a post for 4f: Muetar, but for the time being let's skip ahead.  So far in the series, the emphasis has been on comprehending the world's macro-structure ... how geography and political/economic relationships are understood and expanded.  Let's zoom in a bit.

Recently, between writing about worldbuilding I've been involved in my own.  I hope to run D&D sometime in the next couple of months, after a very long hiatus.  We've all had our shots and we're hoping that Omicron is a "turning the corner" moment and not a prelude to something horrible.   Deaths all over Canada are dropping (157 nationwide yesterday) as are cases (7,184) ... so here's hoping that in two months we'll be back to where we were in June last year.

With the expectation of playing, I was able to procure a used table dirt-cheap.  This beauty is 90 inches by 42, is solid as a rock and has something of a medieval like motif on the surface.  I'll be trying to find space to varnish it this summer.  Unfortunately, I haven't any chairs.  We were able to buy a set on order at a fair price (ouch though, a bit), and we've been told it will be a month or two, with the transport back-up and all.  Which is fine.

Until recently, I've concentrated on mapping Norway, as the online party was there.  As things look now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to pick that campaign up again, as it's an enormous time expenditure and I'm working like a very happy dog these days writing.  That, incidentally, is why I've taken to blowing off a little steam about politics lately.  Don't worry, this is always going to be a D&D blog.

So, I've turned my attention to the party's home territory, which I last mapped about eight years ago.  My map-generation system has advanced since then, and so I'm starting an overhaul of the players' domains.  A little retconning, if you will.  This means the appearance of little villages and greater detail than the party's seen previously, plus a heightened inclusion of basic infrastructure.  I'm rather pleased by the results of this, actually, more than I expected to be.

[Yes, that is a framed Airboy poster in the background.  My first wife bought that, actually, in 1986.  Which makes the poster something like 35 years old.  A 12 by 17 inch version costs $35; I found someone selling the original for $225.  I doubt I'll ever sell it].

Without further ado, here's a rough generation of the area surrounding Kronstadt in Transylvania and the player's home territory ... namely, the town of Garalzapan and the surrounding hex.  Each hex of this map is 6.67 mi. in diameter, or about 10.73 km.

The map isn't intended to accurately reflect this part of modern Romania, though it lifts names casually even as this means shifting the actual town several miles from it's Earthly location.  For example, there really are towns named Miclosoara, Venetia and Tarlungen, and these are sort of where they ought to be, but not actually.  After many years of doing this, I'd rather build my own inaccurate but fantastical maps than use modern maps with modern features and modern populations.  I don't care about accuracy.  I care about providing a nifty setting for the players.

There's much going on here, lots of opportunities for adventure, but I'll start with the players' land and talk a little of the party's history.

The party acquired their parcel of land in Transylvania as a granted wish, following a very long campaign in which they returned a befuddled, lost-her-memory Greek Amazon demi-god to her people.  

They were asked where in the world they might want to settle down and "Transylvania" was agreed upon after a long discussion.  This gave them ownership of a piece of land about 2 miles square, but it didn't give them a "title."  That came later.  The party comfortably settled in, having made some enemies in their wanderings around the Caspian Sea, including the very powerful wizard who'd previously held the befuddled Amazon as a slave — and also an unknown enemy acquired by two players individually pulling the same identical card from a Deck of Many Things.  Yep, "enmity between you and a devil."

Now, people can badmouth the Deck all they like.  I haven't used it since that last incident, which was about 2008, but in my experience every time I've used it, players just can't resist.  Looking at the cards, the odds are very against the player — but that doesn't matter, because in gambling, the odds are always against the player.  That's how gambling works.  I've had many a player who refuses to draw; I would probably refuse to draw myself.  However, I've never had a whole party refuse to draw.  Invariably, one or two people decide to draw while the others state their resistance.  Then, as the draws are made, a doubter will suddenly change his or her mind.  Usually, good or bad results notwithstanding, three quarters of the party will usually draw.  The event, done once in a whole long-running campaign, is memorable and rather fun.  I'm always happy to pay out as a DM — though I've never had anyone draw the 50,000 bonus experience card.  I don't see how that would unbalance a game, so I'm fine with it.

So, the party.  They start roaming around, checking out their land ... and find a shrine in the forest about two miles south of their hastily structured settlement — really, not much more than an encampment.  I'm looking around at Romanian mythology and I find reference to "Xalmoxis" — variously with a "Z" or an "S" — that equates the Thracian god with the Celtic Dis Pater ... and whether there is a connection or not, I make the rather obvious leap that the coincidence is brilliantly on the nose.  Thus, the players discover the name of the shrine's patron, find a secret entrance under the shrine, walk right in, poke about, find a portal, and willingly choose to walk through it, having no idea where it goes.  Every player not having the enmity of a devil are refused by the gate; the other two are whisked away to the first level of hell.  There, though mortal, they're imprisoned and tortured.  Don't tell me I don't know how to make D&D fun.

So, the 6th level party rushes about getting knowledge of where they are, obtains some help from two well-connected Transylvanians, a cleric and mage, get boosted to the outskirts of the City of Brass and manage to rescue their friends ... while unfortunately fumbling a +2 spear into the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness.  The Druid has not forgotten.

Escaping hell (they were in the suburbs, after all), they make it out onto the surface ... in the frozen waste of the upper Pechora River, as it happened.  I rolled randomly.  It took some effort to get home, during which time the players acquired about a level and a half, growing to 7th-8th level and acquiring a pet mastodon, of all things.  When they got back to their land, after 18 months being away, they found the valley laid waste and their followers huddled in Kronstadt.  A large contingent of goblins, supported by a squad of drow elves, had fortified themselves in the mountains.  The party raised an army, with help from their earlier contacts in the Transylvanian court, and that led to the battle that's been posted in full on this blog.

That battle took something like 9-10 sessions to play out.  Something like 700 combatants took place and we played the whole combat out exactly as we would any other combat, without shortcuts or single rolls for whole units of men.  And yes, this means my personal combat system of stunlocks and full tactical movement.  The party LOVED it.  I gave them several opportunities to simplify the combat if they wished, since I didn't right forcing them to play it all out, and they unanimously refused to reduce the complexity.  The battle ebbed and flowed with spectacular magnificence, complete with moments of unbelievable luck (both good and bad), ingenuity, bravery, sacrifice and yes, player death in some cases.  Two of the dead were not raised, one because they chose to start a new character and the other because the resurrection survival roll failed.

As the party did the deed with the help of a small contingent from the court and a larger contingent from a neighbouring Lord, observations of the party were made and it was decided they were a good group to provide some strength to Transylvanian's eastern border.  The party decided the mage Garalzapan (now 9th level after the treasure boost from the war) was their "leader," so he became "Baron Garalzapan."

The little symbols on the party's hex deserve a little explanation, so here goes.  I've discussed this before, at enormous length, so I'll skip over much of the explanation and only provide an update for where my thinking has brought me so far.

The white "3" means this is a type-3 hex.  The three bread slices indicate that the food raised within the hex will sustain 490 persons yearly.

The two coins represent a production of 210 g.p., from goods and services, meaning that general wealth accumulates by that amount yearly; with a 1% per month wastage, resulting from damaged property, hoarded material and coins that are simply lost, accumulation ceases to increase after 7.92 years ... so that in "liquid" terms, the hex has about 1,663.2 g.p. in circulation (this counts c.p. and s.p. also).  With a typical medieval velocity of 3, the transactional value of this money is 4,989.6 g.p.  An estimated 2% of this capital flows through the player's hands each month, in taxes or in services, or 99.792 g.p. per month.

Folks can quibble about the logic of this, but it's a fantasy game and I don't care.  It's a satisfactory number and it works as a system.  So pfffffffft!

Now, "hammers" have always been a problem, but at last I have a solution for these.  They represent a series of thresholds for the presence of various physical forms of infrastructure.  Without digging into it too obsessively just now, 3 hammer symbols indicate 7 "hammers," which indicates that within the hex there's a windmill (if there were a river it would be a watermill), a well large enough for a village, sign posts, a public storehouse, a bakery, a way station (like a protected walled campground), a sawpit where wood can be purchased, a local shrine (not the one to Xalmoxis), a stone quarry, some mining, a stone gatehouse, a barracks with posted soldiers, a chapel, a gallows and a carter post (from which goods are regularly transported to Kronstadt for a fee).  Some of these things were built by the players but if not them, then private citizens have added these features.

I'm tweaking a system that allows bigger settlements, like Kronstadt or Sankt Georgen (note the specialised black town symbol as opposed to the brown one for country towns and villages) to count the hammers of surrounding hexes, enabling big centers to accumulate infrastructure like regular festivals and fairs, castles, theatres, bath houses, courthouses, arsenals, bardic colleges, hospitals, auction houses, observatories, banks, cathedrals and more.  Such a system would allow me to glance at the number of hammers on the map and know immediately whether a particular settlement had an inn, a monastery, a garrison, a money lender and so on ... dictated by the place's location in relation to other large built-up hexes, not just its own.  Thus, where the population is really dense, even an opera house is a possibility.  My game does take place in the 17th century.

Okay, we're going to talk more on this map, but this is enough of an introduction for now.  I'll expand the map a little more and we'll get down to players moving through the setting it represents.