Exploring as a Player Character

The above combines the table entry for the "explorer" character background plus an additional description of how having an explorer as a progenitor has affected the player character's life before entering the game's campaign.  Thus the party meets Titus the 1st level fighter at a bar, it's assumed they hit it off and Titus asks to tag along with the general group.  I usually don't role-play this process because it happens so often in the game's progress that it's a little silly to keep playing meet-and-greet scenarios one after another.  This only wastes game time and the result's always the same.  I know situations arise when players decide to act "in character" and transform the first meeting into a game conflict, but that's a subject for another post.

The party knows already by this time that before Titus became a 16 y.o. fighter, he actually climbed aboard a ship and spent 28 months on a journey to [rolling randomly] the Spice Islands of the East Indies beyond Asia, an archipelago now called the Moluccas.  How randomly?  Suppose the players are in Europe; "exploring" assumes a far-off place that isn't well-known to Europe, so start with the oceans: north & south Atlantic, east & west Indian, Arctic, Antarctic ... and then count the Pacific in four quarters.  That's 10.  We roll the NW part of the Pacific, which we divide into five 15 degree latitudes, starting at the equator.  Getting a "1", we divide the nearest band above the equater into six 15 degree longitudes eastward from the tip of the Malay Peninsula, which divides the Pacific from the Indian Oceans.  We roll a "2," which gives us either the Spice Islands or the big island of Sulawesi.  Easy peasy.

Titus was there between the ages of 9 and 12.  He's been there, he made friends, he came back.  He has memories of that place, two thirds of the way around the globe.  With some charts, some money, a ship and a crew, and some friends, he'd know what to expect when arriving.  Not only has he been, but he spent years talking about it, he's read his progenitor's diaries, he's discussed the possibility of returning and he's studied navigation.  Titus is ready to go.  Someday.

Maybe he won't.  It's out of the die's hands, it's something for the player to decide.  He can adventure locally, raise the cash and increase that by thousands more.  Maybe the party's interested, maybe they're not.  Let's ask, what value does the effort have?  What does the party get out of it?  Numerous people know the islands, so "discovering" them is out.  What else is there.

Foremost, there's adventuring.  Side quests along the way, time spent, battles fought, treasure found ... the journey gives opportunities to meet new and interesting monsters.  This is obvious and, in truth, can be managed just about anywhere.  Why go to the Spice Islands when the Black Forest in Germany is nearby?

The islands are distant and although they're known, they're not well known.  There are many places nobody's been, and many products no one has discovered.  So there's mapmaking and there's trade.  Mapmaking can lead to accurate charts that are drawn, reproduced and sold to military, whaling and other trade captains all over Europe, for dear prices.  It's like inventing the first cellphone.  Moreover, going and seeing leads to writing it down in a book, or telling audiences in person, which is more money, notariety, status, the opportunity to meet the most important people in Europe and impress them with things they don't know and stories about the player character's immense bravery.  This leads to knighthoods, gifts of land, tens of thousands of gold for another journey (since the character has shown his or her mettle) and doors of all kinds being opened.

Regarding trade, any number of islands producing valuable spices, woods, dyestuffs and extracts for perfume do so as a market that's never been tapped.  The players can collect a cheap boatload of valuable something, and make a deal to ensure that the party, and only the party, is allowed to collect the goods from that place.  This means an arrangement to come back two years hence and pick up ten times as much cheap valuable somethings, which the natives are happy to collect over time, waiting for when the party will come back and re-acquaint themselves as friends.  I give you the real stories of Marco Polo's father returning to China and bringing little Marco along, or William Bligh visiting Tahiti with Captain Cook and then returning again himself some years later.  This means that when it comes time to collect all this lovely wealth from the Spice Islands, the PCs don't need to go themselves.  They need only send some associated member of the earlier, original crew as captain of the return expedition.  Only, we'd hope, this captain would do better than Bligh.

Further, upon returning to Europe, the party could offer the trading rights to a specific political entity.  In my game, in 1650, the Dutch have already beaten back the Portuguese and the English from the Banda Islands ... but the wider collection of islands in that part of the world would remain in dispute for the next 150 years.  So suppose the players return with charts of the Spice Islands, complete with the location of Dutch bases, and offer this to the English?  Suppose the players convince the English to send warships, and go along, and fight the Dutch?  It's possible.

'Course, the DM has to be able to run a thing like that.  The DM needs a good sense of geography, world geopolitics, how national entities react, how to make it possible for the players to succeed on a world stage and how to do all this without pre-determining what must happen, as a story narrative.  If we do it without a narrative, we just allow the players to fuck around in the East Indies, and see how it goes when they lead a war squadron against Dutch shipping, then we have no idea what's going to happen.  Depends on the choices the players make.  Depends on their skillset as players.  Depends on how strong we make the Dutch strongholds, or how flexible we are as a DM with the campaign going either way, because it doesn't matter to us which way it goes.  That takes skill as a DM.  It takes a positive philosophy as a game-runner.  It takes a vision that the game can offer people the possibility of doing anything — even allowing the players to take the East Indies from the Dutch and keeping it for themselves.  Because their battle plan made sense.

But I digress.

Having a background as an "explorer" is very unlikely.  It's a 1 in 50 chance, if the player even rolls on the right table.  There are six possible tables, so in reality it's a 1 in 300 chance.  It's worse if the character has a slightly above average constitution and it's no chance at all if the character's constitution is below average.  So what's the deal?  We're going to roll maybe 25 characters over five years of playing a campaign ... what good is it if no one ever rolls an explorer?

Part of the progenitor concept is that it defines many of the persons in the game world outside the players, without requiring that each activity be represented as a character class.  An explorer can be a mage, a thief, a bard, a monk, whatever ... because the action of "exploring" isn't the same as a collection of skills associated with a given class.  We can easily assign three skills in addition to a character's class, even if those skills are not normally a part of that class.  It's a way for an illusionist to be a navigator, even though none of the illusionist's normal track-skills include navigation.

This means the world is full of non-player characters who are explorers.  The players don't need to be an explorer themselves.  If they want this sort of experience, or to persue an exploring campaign, they need only find some fellow whose been to Patagonia or Zanzibar or the Marquesas Islands ... but who doesn't happen to have enough money for a ship or anything else.  Yet Isaac or Freida or Beverly has been to those places; and she or he has the needed skills, the past history of studying books and charts, the friends waiting for them in Patagonia or wherever, so that all this can be set up by making Beverly an associate follower-slash-associate of the party.  And once Frieda or Isaac has gotten the party in the door, then the NPC can go home, as a friend and future contact, and the party can play the part of Marco Polo on their own.

This logic applies to all the professions listed on the progenitor's lists, and many professions not listed there because they're too small a part to play to serve as a player character background.  This means that how a party plays the NPCs is a BIG PART of how my game world is organised.  These are valuable persons, and virtually inexhaustible, since I have many millions of established people living everywhere.  So if the player doesn't happen to have a skillset, that skillset is definitely waiting around to be hired and perhaps made into a friend.  It's a matter of approaching the NPC politely and reasonably, while making an offer that's as tempting to the NPC as it is to the player.

Exploring that possibility — the art of assembling people to perform great deeds — is the Holy Grail of D&D.