Worldbuilding 5d: Way Stations & Shrines

With Part 1, I spoke of the emergence of gong pits, cemeteries and granaries.  We can continue from there, but first we have to justify which of things things are to be found in which hexes.

Now, obviously, the reader can organise his or her world in whatever manner that works.  My preference is to have the world tell me what to find there, rather than the reverse.  This way, I'm not making up everything on my own ... I'm employing a semi-independent program that does some of the thinking for me, so I can apply my thoughts to other problems.  This saves me time and bends my will towards the world's logic ... which keeps me fit and trim where creativity is concerned.  That is, I avoid inventing the same arrangement set over and over.

So, let's look at a type-6 and a type-5 hex, in keeping with our earlier post about hamlets.  The two hex-types are nearly the same, except that the type-5 possesses three food as opposed to two.  Since the symbols reflect a (1,0) number system, "three food" is more than double "two food" (7 vs. 3 in a 10-based number system).  This increase may appear due to the small strip of blue stream flowing through the hex, but no; all this land is well-watered throughout.  The type-5 hex indicates irrigation, extensive well-building, reduction of vermin and the surrounding of fields with low walls and fencing to keep out larger grazing animals.  In turn, this assumes the presence of rat-catchers and gamewardens, who protect the crops and manage wilderness populations.

Thus, if the player characters want to advance a type-6 hex to a type-5, there's the program installed in the infrastructure.  Get ready for a larger movement of harvested goods, build wells and walls, lay out irrigation, kill rats and deer, build a bigger mill, enlarge the cemetery, hire extra gong farmers and rat-catchers ... and, probably, introduce a local constable to handle disputes over property, location of walls, drunkeness, poaching and so on.  AND then inspire, in part with the above and also with ingenuity, a lot more people to move to your hex.  Because more than anything else, a type-5 hex has more people.

Here we see a modification to the above, brought about by the presence of water power.  The left hand map shows a river, not a stream, flowing through the type-6 and type-5 hexes.  The stream doesn't increase the amount of food produced, but it does increase the infrastructure for both, by one hammer.  Again, because of the (1,0) number system, two hammers is three times as much as one hammer (3 vs. 1 in a 10-based system).  This means enough development to build more than one mill.  Extra mills can be used for pounding cloth, sawing wood, smashing minerals, working suction pumps for water supply, churning butter, even to press bellows for making brick.  None of these things on the type-6 or type-5 level are extensive enough to create trade goods, but the presence of such things on a very small, local scale, for the local residents, form the beginning of the village that appears in type-4 hexes and the handicraft industries that eventually manifest with real growth.

This adjustment to the hex's life pattern also draws more visitors from the outside, who collect taxes, observe the state of development and consider investing capital ... as well as those squires and church-folk whose interest in the area urges them to act as intermediaries, taking their cut each harvest season.  This encourages someone to found a way station in order to serve passers-by moving on roads or pathways through the region.

A way station is like a campground — except that instead of helping the visitors get in touch with nature, the station is designed to protect the visitors from it.  A space of an acre or more is cleared off and made into a greenspace, surrounded by a windbreak made of fencing, shrubbery and trees.  This break encircles the property, enabling entrance by a single gate, which costs 2 copper pieces to enter.  The station includes amenities like a well for fresh water, possibly a corral that enables animals to get exercise, cut firewood, fire pits, a privy and plenty of space to park a wagon.  These things resemble a campground in many ways.

The way station also provides player characters plenty of opportunity to meet other people, learn about distant places, exchange goods in barter, do good deeds, couple up with other persons moving in the same direction as protection, learn about the best routes for travelling to their destination and in general make friends.  A way station also makes a good jumping off point for the wilderness, as the surrounding region tends to be less inhabited than that surrounding a village.

Other additional amenities might also be introduced, such as an actual barn, a natural pool for fishing or a hot spring.  The way station's owners may have built a stone house with a large kitchen that enables visitors to sit, buy hot meals or drink ... and there may even be a stone cabin or two for those ready to pay extra money to sleep indoors, provided they arrive before the cabins are taken.  The residents might have local cheese, spirits, minor cloth goods or tableware for sale, just as we'd expect with a curio-shop located along tourist routes.

Players might consider buying out a place like this and running it themselves, or building a permanent residence adjacent or across the road.  The way station makes a good stub for eventually starting a village.  There's nothing to stop players from physically willing a village into existence, even if the type of hex hasn't reached type-4 level.  This is exactly how a settlement like Campulung forms: heavy investment, which by-passes spontaneous growth in favour of founding a village whole.  Campulung has 601 people and adds 1 food, hammer and coin symbol to the type-6 hex (which would normally have 2 food and 1 hammer).  Though water power is lacking, Campulung is surrounded by mountains and serves as a transshipment point for ore and founded metal.

Making a settlement, as opposed to an ordinary village, requires an unusual find or the introduction of some unusual good or service.  But this is something that has to be covered later, when someday I get around to talking about trade, references and their relationship to worldbuilding.  At the rate I'm going, we should get there sometime around ... June?

I can't really say.

The added presence of local clergy inspires a different sort of "facility," though we rarely think of it that way in our non-supernatural world.  A real world example would be Lourdes ... but on a much, much smaller scale.  A shrine is "a sacred or holy space dedicated to a specific deity, ancestor, hero, martyr, saint, daemon or similar figure of respect."  For you and I, we visit a shrine for the sense of place and interest it offers.  But it stands to reason that a D&D shrine located where anyone might visit could have incorporated some kind of magical quality, from which visitors could benefit.

I created the sage ability, Seek Shrines, for precisely this purpose.  In essence, I was thinking of hidden shrines in the wilderness, which clerics could locate by feel and signs that only they could interpret.  The ability encourages the players to "hunt" for shrines ... with a day spent in each 6-mile hex to first comprehend whether a shrine exists there, and then another 5-20 hours to find it.  Once a shrine is located, it's presence is permanent; and each day they come back to it, the characters are able to take advantage of the shrine — or glade, sanctuary or holy crypt.  The players could thus create a "shrine map" of the game world, which they could share with others or keep wholly to themselves.

At present, it occurs to me that more "common" shrines might occur in any hex with two hammers ... offering a much weaker but yet beneficial degree of magic.  These "monoliths" might provide a +1 morale for any town resident within 300 ft., or have a 1 in 20 chance of healing an injury ... for those of the same religion as the monolith, or perhaps limited to town residents and those able to understand the proclivities of demi-gods.  There might even be a 2% chance of bringing back the dead, within a certain time period of course.  The presence of literally a thousand monoliths scattered throughout the nearby gameworld could allow for really unusual gifts, like a one-time increase in knowledge, a one-time vision, a one-time rush of experience or anything else that would make a pilgrimage of hundreds of miles really meaningful.  We might even insist that to gain the benefit — a full level, say — the individual must go to a "starting point", walk the whole distance of 763 miles, forego wearing armour or carrying weapons other than a dagger, eat poorly, sleep outdoors without a tent and so on, with the possibility that the character would actually die making the attempt.  And still, if the character were to do it, circumventing wandering monsters the whole way, it would be both well-worth the gained level and memorable as an adventure ... particularly since each character could attempt it only once, and that the benefit would be greater for the 7th level trying to be 8th, than the 1st level trying to be 2nd.

I think that about covers it.