Worldbuilding 5c: Denizens

Before getting onto the main post, here's the 2-mile map as it looks after today.  I had plenty of time to work on it, but not so much tomorrow or the day after.

Changes include: (a) adding a coin to village/town hexes, so Garalzapan's hex gets three symbols/7 coin x35 after all; (b) drawing a cart track to all type-5 and better hexes, and a cart path to all type-6 hexes; and (c) creating a "hamlet" of 80-120 people for all type-4 and better hexes.  The vast majority of the map consists of wilderness, though much of it should be termed "hinterland" — land under a warden of some kind, used as a resource for woodcutters, game hunters, mushroom hunters, pig herders and for general foraging.

I don't need all of it for this post, so let's take out a section near the bottom:

When I rolled Sankt Georgen, as explained yesterday, the entire infrastructure was generated into the single hex.  Quite unusual, a 1 in 64 chance.  Works rather well for this post, however, since the 1,131 person town is a sort of Keep on the Borderlands.  Within this region, it's an outpost of workshops and handicrafts, fulling wool, cutting timber, making furniture, raising pigs and tanning pigskin.  The river isn't large enough to float logs downstream, but logs are sawn and shipped out.

For the time being, however, let's forget the town and concentrate on "recognisable" D&D.  We're a party and we've arrived in Sankt Georgen.  Four miles to the southeast we can see a big ol' mountain, and a string of mountains extending in a line beyond.  There's a stream about five meters wide flowing through town, shallow enough we could cross it without getting our knees wet — but quite cold.  It's May, the beeches and oaks are in full leaf and the ground beneath the trees is so well tailored by centuries of woodcutters and charcoalers that all is grass and crocuses.  We're assured that the land isn't wild at all for the first four or five miles, and that if we stay on the path, there's enough traffic and patrols that we needn't worry about bandits.  Most of the carts coming down along the path have nothing more valuable than building stone — but we're also assured that along the streambeds in the bottom valley, lucky prospectors have found deposits of amethyst and, in the river muck, lumps of amber.  If we want to try our luck.

Now, what happens?  The party decides to load up and head out in a totally random direction; and as the game setting is intended to making things interesting, we traditionally put a group of something in their way (some kind of Caves of Chaos), which they can kill as a foreplay to getting treasure.

And from the look of the land, it appears we have few options except to do that.  Don't get me wrong; I'm definitely not above running this kind of adventure ... in fact, it makes a good first adventure for an early party with no previous setting experience.  But it's also the very least we can provide, setting-wise, for the players.

We can do much better.

Keep in mind that this little area, 18 or so miles by 12, is fundamentally no different from a whole country like Immer, Hothior or Elfland.  The people and creatures living here have problems, they have issues with each other, they have ambitions they'd like to achieve and those ambitions conflict.  The party has the same potential I've been describing all along: the chance to dive in, lend somebody in this setting a hand, fix some problems, enable some ambitions and set themselves up as important persons or establish a place of safety.

The problem with the traditional adventure isn't that it, itself, is wrong or that it doesn't work to keep the players entertained ... it's that ordinary adventures are addictive.  Problem-solving and addressing local issues in order to get ahead in the community is a murky, taxing, often thankless task.  Bashing goblins on the head with a stick is easy.  Once players adjust to the game reality that death is going to occur occasionally, and that it doesn't matter because new player characters are an inexhaustible resource, then ho hum, they don't care if they die entering another dungeon, so long as the game doesn't ask for much.  For player to give more, they've got to be motivated off the proverbial module-upholstered couch.

Look.  Players want more.  But they don't know what "more" looks like, because forty years of adventure padding and cheesy role-play overlay has convinced them the couch is as good as it gets.  "Meh, it's not great, but it's so-so fun and anyway, it's just a game."  As such, players have to be moved.  Roused.  Incentivized.

Pissed off.

And look at all that big, empty landscape.  What can we put out there that's going to make the players sit up and take notice, get interested and feel some enthusiasm.  What can we put out there that's really going to get under the players' skins?

That's what we, as dungeon masters, have to figure out.  We can decide what setting has a dungeon in it, and maneuver the players towards it ... and count on them to follow the clues like a sober alcoholic promised a drink once picking through garbage for cans first.  Or we can cure the poor soul, inventing something better than alcohol.  This is, after all, why alcoholics fight so hard to stay sober ... because after a time, they begin to realize the alcohol — however bad they want it — really isn't all that great, while the benefits of sobriety, such as having a life, prospects, comforts, health and so on, are worth the fight.

But, no, not an easy fight.

Suppose the players decide to make the cart path even safer for the carters bringing stone into Sankt Georgen.  Bandits, as we said, aren't a problem ... but as they head up the route, they can see places where carts have fallen off the path.  They can see dead animal carcasses fifty, a hundred feet below.  They learn from the carters that yes, no bandits, but every few months, an owlbear roams along the road, coming across the carts one by one until half a dozen or more carters are killed.  Moreover, many of the carters and the quarry workers are wage slaves to merchants in Sankt Georgen.  Most came out here because, in the rock of these mountains, there are seams of rhodonite; most quarriers hope and pray for the day when a few large rhodonite stones will free them from their bondage.  Meanwhile, those who might try to escape have no place to run to ... and yes, there are goblins in these mountains.

Perhaps they could try to escape, if there were armed guards to help them.  But where would such workers find such a party of well-meaning souls, in these mountains.

After all, what use could a party possibly find for a group of grateful, free, experienced miners and quarriers, who are used to cutting rock and spying valuables in it.  There are certainly no other rocks to mine or examine in this valley surrounded by hills and mountains, where other gemstones are said to exist.  Certainly it's not worth following up the legends of some of the quarriers that there are goblin placer diggings in the mountains, where they search for amber — and that if these diggings could be found, and taken over, by workers who knew how to work those diggings, why, everyone could get rich.

But, hey.  What are they going to eat?  And what enemies are we going to make in Sankt Georgen?  And there are patrols.  And we don't have a clue where the goblin diggings are, or even if they exist.  Sure, we're up for hunting around for an owlbear, maybe, though we're only first level ... but we don't want to make any enemies, do we?  No, it all sounds like a lot of work and risk and problem solving.  Just give us a dungeon.  We'd be happy with a dungeon.

It takes time and work as a DM to create situations the players can recognise as opportunities.  The scenes have to be crafted.  The way the dead animals down below look.  The crosses on the side of the road.  The episode where the players actually save a cart from sliding off the edge.  The generosity of the miners, slaves though they are.  Their stories.  The attitudes of their handlers, and the laziness patrols that half-heartedly "protect" the road against owlbears.  Each part is a carefully designed puzzle that plays the player's heartstrings like a lyre.

This isn't an easy skill for a DM.  Takes time.  Takes a conscious understanding of how players — even very lazy, selfish players — don't like to see unfairness or indecency.  'Course, if you have players who love to wallow in those things, um, turn everything around and set the players up to push the cart and the carter over the side.  Either way, moral or immoral, there's always a way to tease a player into doing what they think is right.

The setting is an empty slate that gets filled by little notes and places as the players wander about and meet the people and creatures within.  In the valley above, there are prospectors, hermits, criminals, escaped wage-slaves, hidey-holes, hunting parties, a druid or two that knows everyone and everything, ruins and discarded equipment, Ottoman spies, zealots and aesthetics, woodfolk, at least one ranger, half a dozen mercenaries down on their luck, a greenhorn hunting for gems and who knows what else.  They're all wandering around and they all have problems; they all have dreams and they're all ready to fight or follow a party wandering through looking to make something of themselves while hoping this animal trail leads to an actual dungeon.

After all, maybe there isn't one.