A Conclusion to Worldbuilding

Having finished writing a brief description of 112 professional backgrounds, my thoughts are somewhat tangled.  The background generator isn't done, no not by a long shot, but it's nice to put this part of it aside and move onto something new.  I've approached the page these last two weeks by writing a set amount each day and being satisfied to see progress ... but I am definitely in that dark, dreary place where I'm far past being excited with the page and yet possessed by dispair that it will ever be finished.  As a designer, this is a terrible place to be.

My apologies for ceasing to write more on worldbuilding at this time.  My thoughts on the matter grew more and more disjointed as I ended up pursuing bits and pieces that interested me more than teaching the procedures themselves.  On some level I feel that, given a little time, I could probably go back to the beginning and do a better job describing the process overall.

Boiling it down to its key points, the reader ought to have a solid perception of the following points:

Know what the world is.  I mean this in a way far past the fact that there is a world, or even its topographical structure.  Making a world, any world, begins with the self.  How do I think the world functions?  How do I think it ought to function?  What are the obstacles dividing those two visions?  How do these obstacles manifest in the players' efforts to remake the world into how they think it should function?  Having a clear, concrete evaluation of these things is critical for building a game world that's going to be used for adventure.

For example, the most common perspective is to imagine a world full of fairly decent, fruitful people, which is also inhabited by many bad apples.  The difference between how the world functions, ie., with rotting apples, and how it ought to function is the removal of said bad apples.  The players therefore exist to remove bad apples.  If they do, the world becomes what it ought to be.

This is painfully naive and juvenile, but it's also highly tenable for anyone not especially familiar with the world — like children — who are seeking a simple, practical structure upon which to run a game world.  The adventures essentially write themselves, are easily comprehended, produce escapist results and — when the adventure is concluded — leave a feeling of warmth and accomplishment.  This feeling can also contribute to the death of a campaign, as it has a "finished" aspect that suggests, "Why not quit while we're ahead?", but this feeling can be overcome by quickly pointing out another really bad apple that needs removing.  One that's even worse than before.

[that creates an uncomfortable sliding scale, with every bad apple having to be more hideous than the last — which is economically unsound — but truthfully, most campaigns will die of their own accord before we reach the worst possible bad apple]

My vision of my world consists of a stupidly complicated humanistic existentialism, in which there are no bad or good apples, just circumstances which compel victims to become monsters, and that the idea of "how the world should be" is a deluded fantasy that leads players to commit atrocities themselves in the face of achieving goodness, while maintaining a suggestive impression that things ARE getting apparently better, even if this is a false impression originating with the players' personal sense of importance in a mad world.  In other words, creating hell while maintaining that this is what heaven actually looks like.  But this is me.  Running this kind of world demands the ability to create legitimate dilemmas while positively not leaving fingerprints on the evidence.  It's not for everyone.

Understand geography.  This does not mean reading a text book on the subject.  It means reading 30 textbooks on the subject, and then commentary on the text books, and then commentary on the commentary.  These books must describe physical geography, yes, and geology also, but what's wanted are books about political, historical and economic geography.  All these books exist.  And for many, they are dull, inflexible and hard to equate to gaming or why we'd want a map.

I wrote many posts emphasising the importance of this information and its application, and yet I think most people will never read enough of it to produce the tipping point of, "Ah, I understand, that's cool."  Which takes awhile.  Critically, understanding the Earth's appearance, structure and behaviour is a self-gift that keeps on giving, not only for role-playing but for every other aspect of life.

Understand people.  This means more than comprehending why and how they act as they do, or what they do, or when they've done it, or who's done what where ... though all these things are incomprehensibly helpful.  The larger goal is to study people in order to emulate what people do, as they do it, without judgement or refrain, since acknowledgement of all people means inhabiting the game world with people WE DO NOT LIKE personally.  Seeding the game world with people we don't like means, on some level, learning to like them ... and this, I've found, most game designers and runners won't do.

The common workaround is to represent unlikeable people as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, mostly as bad apples, and always as disposable.  Which definitely serves if it's your goal to write for television and Netflix, and especially Amazon prime, but which will disappoint people who — with all the world of things to choose to spend their time on, they've taken up fantasy role-playing games — have higher standards.  For a time, the cardboard apples seem to work ... but only for a time.

Of all the things that players like most about a game world, it's being surprised.  Interesting adventures and complicated situations can do that, but these things take enormous amounts of set-up and skull-sweat.  Geographical features and profound fantastical landscapes can surprise, but the more surprising they are, the less believable they appear, so that eventually such efforts produce a "ho-hum, seen it" effect.

People, on the other hand, especially people we don't like, present a never ending, vast wealth of potential surprising possibilities ... once it's understood how to fabricate them realistically out of whole cloth.  It's this immense capacity to surprise that drives the film, literature and personal stories juggernaut of human fascination — and as it happens, people we like have the LEAST possibility of surprising anyone by doing anything, except something bad, which we hate.

People we hate surprise us by doing something good ... which we as humans looooooooooooovvvve.  But they can't do something we love unless they're first presented, at length, believably, cruelly and positively as something we really, really, really hate.

This is the secret to writing.

It will take the reader the rest of his or her life to "understand people," so get on that.  It should keep you busy.

Village No. 2

The last village came together so quickly, the temptation is to adjust the table to ensure a few less cottages and hovels.  Making tables for yourself, you'll bump into that inclination constantly.  Experience teaches not to fiddle, but to trust one's instinct for the original numbers until getting a decent sampling of test runs, at least 20 or 30.  That's not enough work that we can't throw it away and start from scratch, if we feel that's needed, or that can't be let alone, since in the long run it will remain as a tiny aberration in the overall process.  As such, I'll go with the table as written.

I'll start with a real village this time, a place call Pufesti.  Three hammers, on the Siret River in Bukovina, eastern Romania.  The scale of the small map is 6.67 miles per hex; but obviously, like before, we want block-sized hexes, 435 ft. per hex.

Just as a 20-mile hex makes a group of seven "6-mile" hexes, we can continue that zoom further.  Zoom once to "2-mile" hexes (2.22 mi. diameter), zoom a 2nd time to "uberblocks" that are 0.741 mi. in diameter, and zoom a 3rd time to block-size (0.247 mi., or 435 ft.).  This translates to the same hex shown on the left to a 27-hex diameter area, as shown below.  First, with the old Pufesti hex & details showing:

And now with no background, with the circle indicating the location of Pufesti:

Essentially, all I'm doing is taking the old Gygax suggestion from p.47 of the original DMG:

Coming from mapmaking long before I started playing D&D, I read such snippets of possibility with considerable interest, finding ways to apply this idea in my own way.

As noted from the pictures above, we can see the small circle of Pufesti isn't a symbol that's markedly bigger than what a village might be; if anything, the tiny brown circle of Pufesti is smaller than the actual place.  Overall, I'm hoping this assembly of map scales and the use of hexes helps the reader comprehend a tactile sense of how big a 6-mile hex is, and how translatable this is to much bigger scales.  Remember, each of the 435 ft. block hexes above is only 81 combat hexes across — that's the size of the large partial black hex on this combat map:

Ah, okay, but we're here to generate a village.   We can start by assigning Pufesti an even 500 people, for simplicity.  Unlike our earlier example, Pufesti has 3 hammers, not 2; this means a few things are certain.  There's a town center but there's also a church; there's also a market, and there's a small bridge across the river.  Because there's some cottage crafting here, there's at least one group of cottages.  So before we start, we've already accounted for 105 people.  That's okay, we have plenty of room for others.

Laying out these places, arbitrarily laying out the village center and the bridge first (and giving no weight points to the bridge, but you may feel otherwise) we get the shown collection of places. I've adjusted the three incoming roads (later, I'll transform the colouring of these). They'll need to be tweaked as places turn up. The unfamiliar brown hex near the bottom of the map is the market, which is little more than an open dirt pad with pens for animals and a wall surrounding a few permanent buildings. I can't say my artwork here is astounding, I only want to get the point across.

The process works just as it did before.  The main question is, do we take another market if it shows up?  Do we take another village centre?  The answer is yes, if we can make it make sense, given the layout.  A second market must go next to the first; a second village centre can go anywhere.  Because of the size of the village, a second temple wouldn't make sense, unless this were a polytheistic region.  As it is, this is western Romania, so we'd expect to have only one church.

I'll repost the random table.  Whatever the results are, and should we later consider expanding the idea here into further details, one thing we must remember is that the table is made for us; we are not made for the table.  I don't recommend ignoring a roll, but occasionally there will be good reasons for deciding there are too many material yards or village centres.  Additionally, we should always strive to think of something new that can be added for later instances of using the table again.

Rolling, then, I get a "garden" between the village centre and the market.  This isn't the sort that people visit, but a space where vegetables and other intensive produce is grown; often such places were communal.  There's no reason not to locate this directly adjacent to the village centre, as "density" isn't part of the overall scheme — whereas food growth is essential.  A village isn't just a small town; it has different priorities, a different outlook.  Later, should the village grow into a town, where space may become a premium, the garden hex would be pulled out and townhouses or workshops put in its place.  But vegetable gardens are fine for a village.

Then we add another set of cottages between the bridge and the village centre (pop. 155) and we have a simple star.

In all honesty, the actual laying out of the hexes, even the upgrading of the weighted hexes around the outside, is quite simple.  I've built this nice collection of image hexe that can be turned this way and that to give some sense of shape and colour.  But the process of writing about the generation is losing my interest, fast.  Even though I haven't shown all the little symbols I made, I'm going to call the post at this point.  And I don't believe I'll make a third village [sorry], because I don't see it as adding anything new to the concept.

It's very simple from here.  What matters is building a believable, richly designed space for the players to occupy, going beyond every village being immediately associated with the inn, tavern and convenient market.  Make the players comprehend the feel of life here — try to shake them out of the complaceny so they stop taking your world for granted.  These are people living in this village, whose small problems may not be dungeon rooms or vast treasure hordes ... but they are potential companions for those dungeons.  There are youngsters here who want to learn, friends who want to feed the party and look after their wounds and hear their stories.  It's a place for the players to ground themselves, to identify as something worth protecting, and think whistfully about when everything in the dungeon goes sour.

I know that for many players, those who think the shallower the campaign, the better, this seems all maudlin and time wasting.  I assure you, it's not.  Dungeons are what you fight against.  Villages are what you fight for.

Generation: Village No. 1

So I had this idea.  Then I got busy, then I got back around to it ... and yeah, why do I have these stupid ideas?  Let's make this clear:  I'm not offering a practical way to worldbuild with this post, because I can attest from experience that it's NOT practical.  What I'm trying to do it give insight into my thinking process, to enable the reader to gain perspective.  

I didn't particularly enjoy this project.  II have no intention of taking it up for town and city creation.  Maybe someone else might ... but without better resources and the ability to draw, I found making representations of hexes very unpleasant.  What you're going to see should be taken as representational and NOT accurate in scale.

Starting with a generation table.  This one is tailored for a small village in a type-4 hex with two hammers.  Also, since there's no shoreline, there's no waterfront block.  The manor block is combined with the village centre.

I haven't tested this out yet.  I'm going to test it with this post and see how it goes; all I can offer is that I've made many hundreds of tables as a DM, giving me a sense for what a table needs.  I want this to be heavy on hovels and cottages, for those things determine when the village generation ends, when we've placed all the people.

We only need one temple block, so the table gives an alternative to the temple once it's generated.  I'm suggesting that for a small village, there's a good chance a temple won't be generated.  This doesn't mean there wouldn't be a local priest; only that the religious guidance in the community takes the form of a friar or a minister operating from a cottage, probably gathering the means to eventually build a temple.

I propose to make three villages, not necessarily all with this post.  I may leave off later villages for another post; each will require an augmentation of the shown table.  For the moment, I want to see how hard this goes.

Let's begin with a village "stub."  As shown on the map, we have a village centre already; if one occurs when we roll on the table above, that would be a second village centre block (with a very low chance of that).

Because we're starting with the smallest possible village, exactly 201 people, I'm not including a bridge block in the random generation above.  Instead, we'll suppose a stream so small that it can be easily crossed without needing a bridge.

The image shows the red-roofed bakery and the large manor house, the gallows platform and four cottages; effort has been made to make the ground look worn and muddy in places.  Not sure the effect works.

Naturally, the next block has to be placed somehow in relationship to the centre ... and here's what I propose.  Zooming out, with the map showing below, I've assigned "weighted" importance to hexes surrounding the one we have. 

Level ground adjacent to the village centre gets a "3."  Stream hexes, with their access to good water, get a "2."  And other hexes within two of the centre get a "1."

The total for all hexes showing is 32.  Of course, we could assign the numbers different, giving more stress to the river or counting all the hexes three out from the centre.  There's no "right" way to do this ... but by picking this method, I'm demonstrating how any method might work.

As I see it, the goal is to produce a pattern that creates the greatest amount of individuality.  We could have every added village block automatically attach to an existing hex ... but that's certainly going to make a dense clumping pattern for every village.  Remember, the distance across a hex is only 435 ft.  We can imagine the first immigrant watching the place where the squire or first residents chose to build their places, and then comparing what might offer personal opportunities for the new builder.  Keep in mind, too, that villages are NOT made as a body like a modern subdivision.  They form over a lot of time, with former fields and orchards being bought and then built upon.  Our random generation should reflect that.

So, counting each hex horizontally and then vertically, and using excel to generate a number between 1 and 32, I roll a "31."  This puts me two hexes straight south of the village centre.  Rolling a "09" on the percentile die, I get cottages.  Let me add those, and then adjust the weighted numbers for further generation.

It's like a separate little community.  Maintaining the new river hexes as 2 each, the cottage block adds +1 to each of those hexes that already had a weight.  This supports the idea of a continuity being created, without guaranteeing that one will.  Even if one does, we can imagine a path between the two existing hexes; that could be drawn in later to "fill out" the design once we know where everything is.

Let's count people.  The village centre block has 40 residents (going by the last post).   The cottages have 50.  That's 90 people accounted for.    Three more cottage blocks and we're done.  Meanwhile, weighted hexes add up to 39.  Now that we've provided some idea of how the weighting works, let me generate two hexes before updating the map.  I roll 1-39 and get "28," creating the bridge in the right-handed 4-weighted hex.  I roll a hovel block.  That's 70 more people; 160 total.  A single cottage block could end this.

Just for fun, we'll say that LOWERS the adjacent hexes with a penalty of -1 (who wants to live next to hovels?)  That lowers the total weighted hexes to 31 ... a roll on excel gives an "8," on the river right and above the village centre block.  I roll a 92, which is the temple.

Hm.  The temple block includes a cemetery, and that can't be built on a stream hex.  I thought something like this might happen.  Okay, we keep the temple and re-roll the location.  A "14" puts the temple immediately to the left of the village centre.  Good.  Let's put up what we have so far.

The temple is as important a block as the village centre, so it adds +2 weight to adjacent hexes and +1 to hexes two distant.   Rivers are always 2, regardless.

The temple hex added another 10 residents, which puts us at 170 total.  There are only 31 people to account for.

Yes, the village ISN'T a big place.  It shouldn't be.  When it comes to making a village of 500 people, obviously we'd just be getting started.  There'd be plenty of opportunity for rolling a yard or market block, which is why I'm keeping the likelihood of those small.  As it is, the market can be managed for a village this size in the village centre.  Anyway, let's keep going.

Total weighted numbers are 42.  Because of the temple mixup, better roll what we're placing first.  Oops, I get hovels.  Oh well, game over.  That's everyone.  I roll a "19" for location and that puts them beside the temple.

Not the prettiest little village in the world.  We remove the weighted numbers, add in a main road and a path to each hex (the temple sits amidst a lawn, so the many tiny paths to it aren't showing) and we have something of a settlement.  The next step would be to create a random generator for the adjacent "rural" hexes, a system that would work the same way.  Assume there's probably more than a few adjacent fields next to this set-up ... it wouldn't be right if I didn't get around to building that idea out, so rely on me to get there.

The main question remains, one that I've addressed before.  What use is this?  In game, I don't need a map so I can tell the players, "There's a small centre with four cottages and a manor house, while nearby are a collection of hovels.  Beyond the hovels, there's a group of better looking cottages; a road goes to it.  You came in by the west road; the road continues past the village to the northeast.  There's a temple and another collection of hovels on the other side.  The whole is surrounded by a bend in the river, but the village is recessed back from the banks.  It's a very small place."

Granted, the players won't have the tactile impression the above map offers, but do the players need it?

I can think of two situations where the above is useful.  The first would apply if the players decided to build here, or wanted to settle.  Choosing which hex to put a house, or where to build a fortification if the players were in authority over the region and liked this village.  After all, we can't see from this map where we are in the bigger picture.  Maybe this is the right distance from a big trade town or it's conveniently isolated.

The second might be a situation where some large-scale attack was taking place.  Consider: the hexes are 435 ft. in diameter.  That's 87 combat hexes.  Running all out, by my movement-stride system, a character with 5 action points can run 40 combat hexes, or 200 ft., in a combat round.  Imagine seven players, supported by 40 hardened semi-trained villagers, a la The Magnificent Seven.  Because the enemy might come from any direction, characters are posted around the village ... in the centre, by the temple, amidst the hovels and the cottages.  A first wave of raiders, 90 altogether, come from three different directions.  The mage by the temple sends a message spell, "HELP!  Fifty attackers!", as the balance is coming from the north.  The two players amid the cottagers decide if one of them can handle the 20 coming from the south, or if they should send one of the villagers with a message.  How long will that take?  How many rounds can one of the players by the cottages fight it out here, before running off to join the other fight?  If he or she has only 3 AP, that's only 24 combat hexes a round at the best of speed; the temple is 174 combat hexes away!  That's seven rounds to cover the distance.  Even longer if we don't want to go through that bit of "rural" country that's straight between the cottages and the temple.  Is that a forest?  A planted field?  An orchard?  We'd have to generate which.

There's a grittiness offered by a map like this, but ONLY if the exact space is measured.  Nothing annoys me more than being given a high quality artwork city map without a scale, or on a scale so big (1 inch = 500 yrds) that it's useless for the most important duty a map serves ... as a MILITARY strategy map.  I don't need a collection of tiny boxes and street names for gaming.  I need something that can serve as a grand battle map, into which I can fit little battle maps for individual fights taking place between villagers and townspeople against raiders or uprising citizens.

Okay, I need a break.  We'll do a bigger village with the next post.

Inventing Village Blocks

Okay, let's build a random generator.   This is going to be for laying out villages.  To help, we have this list of facilities to place.  My plan is to build a system that uses hexes, in the way I've described before, demonstrated here and also here.  Only, we'll try to do better than I did in 2018.

A "block hex" is 435 ft. in diameter, or 145 yards, or 132.588 metres.  In area, a block hex is 3.899 acres, or 0.006 sq.m., or 1.578 hectares.  Counting an extreme urban density for the medieval world is 40,000 persons per square mile, supposing a density of 10,000 per square mile puts 60 persons per block hex.  Therefore a village of 240 persons would have four "residence" blocks.  A village of 720 would have twelve.  This should be simple enough.

Note this village link on the wiki.  I worked on it today as a stub.  Be sure and read the details there; you'll need them for this post.

Okay, let's look again at those facilities available for villages, those in type-4 hexes:

From recent posts, and from the wiki, it's understood that a village not located on a river has 2 hammers and that one located on a river has 3 hammers.  Settlements may also be villages, depending on the size of the settlement, but settlements may also appear in any type of hex (though I haven't found one yet in a type-7 hex).  By my system, the only way a type-4 hex can have 4 hammers is if it includes a settlement.  There's no way for it to have 5 hammers (at least, not now; I may make a change in the future, but let's not think on that).

As per the wiki page, a village with 2 hammer is a "small village"; one with 3 hammers is a "large village."  The wiki explains the population generation for these.  A "settlement village" has a predetermined population, as the settlement link above explains.

Everybody in good and deep.  Excellent.

The next step is to make "block types."  For the record, I'm writing this post while solving the problem.

Residences.  The most obvious is a collection of houses, though finding a suitably archaic term is difficult — "neighbourhood" is 1620; "residential" is 1856.  Let's make two kinds of residential and call them "cottage blocks" (50 residents, 8 cottages) and "hovel blocks" (70 residents, 12 hovels).  Cottage blocks would be responsible for cottagecrafting that occurred.

Waterfront.  For this, we can gather together the boat dock, the quay and storehouses.  The quay is two or more boat docks, so we can toss that out ... unless we want to make a rural block with a boat dock in it.  Let's save that for later.  Let's option the public house to the waterfront, though this can only occur in settlement villages.  We can add the hostel also.  A hostel is a minimal wooden frame supporting a common room of bunk beds, a place for public washing, a hearth for cooking and warmth, plus and an exposed animal enclosure and a wooden shed for storage.  All this and an outhouse.  A small village is limited to one waterfront block, a large village can have two.  10 residents.

Yards.  This doesn't describe the space in front of a house, but a dumping site for materials, such as a log yard or a ship yard.  Believe it or not, the verb is "yarding" when describing the depositing of stores there.  We can start with the "farmer's yard," including garners and the granary, the grain mill, the shearing station, a windmill and a well.  We can scatter wells in several blocks.  Including two hovels plus living space in the mill, call it 20 residents.

We can make a second type of yard, the "material yard" that includes the sawpit, ox tethers, the carter post and again a well, the cloth mill and the wine press (or their local equivalents).  In a small village, run on wind power, in a large village, run on water power.  Likely a gong pit is tucked in somewhere, fifty or sixty yards at least from the well (and downstream, if applicable).  Again, 20 residents.

Village Centre.  Very easy: the bakery, the blockhouse, gallows, well and the gamewarden's house, clustered together with four cottages.  This ''village centre" has a compliment "market," which includes the area supporting the day market, the blacksmith, two wells and an inn, which only occurs with settlement villages.  The two would most likely be adjacent, but we might suppose they could be separated by one hex.  We'll get to placement of these blocks in time.  Packed a little tighter, 40 residents.  Limit of 1 per small village, 3 per large village.  There would only be one market block, with only 5 residents.

Temple Block.  Gravesites have been replaced by the cemetery, adjacent to the temple; the temple includes an adjoining cottage and well.  10 residents.

Manor Block.  This includes the manor, and with settlements two adjoining blocks of walled-in land.  The guardpost is located on the edge of the block.  One per village, regardless of size or type.  7 residents per 100 population.

Okay, altogether, we've identified the following blocks: cottage, hovel, waterfront, farmer's yard, material yard, village centre, market, temple and manor.  That's 9 types.

Let's add some more, not based on facilities.  If the village is adjacent to a river, it would have a ford, a bridge or a ferry, which would include a guardpost on the opposite side from the village.  Obviously, there's only one of these "crossing" blocks.

Because villages aren't "designed" so much as collectively joined together, we can break up the continuity of occupation by placing farms, primarily for market gardening and growing vegetables, though tilled land is an option.  If we want, we can distinguished "tilled" blocks and "garden" blocks.  To these, we can add "orchard" blocks.  We can also add a "village green" block that includes animal enclosures, a space used for meetings and mini-pasture lands.  Finally, we can include "natural" blocks, where the land hasn't been worked; this kind of place should have a high chance of including a pond, or some rocky feature that makes adaptation next to impossible, such as commonly occurs along the Mediterranean coast.  We could also think of places surrounding shrines or beautiful natural features, but let's leave these off our list for the present.

By my count, that's 15 block types.  As I see it, the next steps are to create a random table to generate blocks at different rates, then to make up rules about which must exist, and how random additional blocks are placed.  This, I believe, I'll leave for another post.

Worldbuilding 4g: Shucassam

It's been since February when I did the post about Muetar.  I always meant to get back around to this series within a series, but then I got pulled into other things.  However, there are a series of macrosubjects relating to culture that still need addressing where worldbuilding is concerned, and I'd be lax if I failed to do so.

With Immer we discussed the military tradition of a culture poised on the goblin frontier of Zorn; and with Muetar we discussed the manner in which tradition serves as a guiding principle underlying a culture's solidity.  Today we can talk about religion, which forms the fundamental tenets determining which characteristics and beliefs become traditions, and in turn strengthens the valuation of tradition in the minds of the people.

I know for a fact that many of my readers have chosen not to include religion in their game worlds — or they have committed to making religion an afterthought:  it's there, but the whole of it consists of occasionally performing a minor ritual and otherwise paying lip service to god who have no interest in day-to-day matters.  In many ways, this reflects the characteristic religions of high-brow classicism.  We have plain evidence of the temples, we know the Greeks and Romans performed sacrifices, and plainly religion was an important part of their lives ... but in their literature, Greco-Roman religion is a fictional shadow, at best.  The Hellenes and Italians did not commit themselves to teaching the people how to "properly" worship the gods, or condemn their fellow citizens for lapses in religious fervour, or write endless tracts nitpicking the characteristics of Zeus, Posiedon, Venus or Athena.  The Judeo-Christian Bible screeches for 700 pages about the people not obeying religious laws or keeping their pact with god, which in turn takes effort to justify god punishing the people, driving them into exile and then rescuing them again with superhuman figures.  There are no Greco-Roman equivalents to this thinking.

When the Christians first appeared in Rome, the locals shrugged their shoulders and treated them as just another cult.  Live and let live was the practice.  But the Christians weren't willing to live and let live, period.  Just like today, they made themselves an infernal pest, decrying pagans in the streets, screaming their superiority over others, insulting their neighbours and turning themselves into such hated persons that Roman audiences cheered when these arrogant, pissy, screeching bastards were thrown to the lions.  Naturally, the Christians learned zilch from this consequence, turning up the dial of hubris and self-importance to 11, calling the Romans "persecutors" [which is what the Christians did to get themselves chastised] and spinning the whole scenario into a martyrdom that's still believed, hook line and sinker, today.  After all, after the Christians won the cultural struggle, they carefully covered up their early behaviour in Rome like a poop in an apparently clean cat box.  Christians have likewise been screaming their innocence for the last 2000 years, right up to last week as evangelistic Republicans demanded to know who would think of the children in the case of Ketanji Jackson's nomination.

I know, I know.  This is the second screed I've launched against Christianity in the same number of weeks, but bear with me.  The tactic used by Christians to displace the previous existing Greco-Roman religion was REVOLUTIONARY.  It changed everything.  In the 4th and 5th centuries, Rome was definitely going down on account of the various tribal invasions from the east, but it only lasted as long as it did because of Christianity!  And when Rome did crash and burn, it was Christianity that sustained the long-standing Roman culture of laws and cultural practices.  It was Christianity that overcame and pacified the Franks, Lombards, Goths and Visigoths ... and later the Saxons and the Danes.  Christianity, as a single traditional framework, supported kings and popes in pulling Europe together and lifting them out of the Early Medieval "dark ages."  The only serious threats to Christian Europe in that period was another religion, a comparable religion structurally and economically, that exploded out of the Middle East and conquered vast regions and many distant peoples of African, European and Asiatic descent.  Without the consolidating power of Christianity, Charles Martel could never have pulled together a sufficiently sized coalition of forces to defeat the Moslems in 732.  Europe would have been overrun, converted to Islam and our history would have never been.

Depending on your point of view, that's a good thing or a bad thing.  Doesn't matter, it's what is.  My point is to demonstrate that religion is both a curse on thought and decency AND a force for defending thought and decency.  As a concept underlying world events, it's a spectacular game changer.  Deciding to empower religion in the game world provides opportunities to highlight events of great goodness and great evil.

Stepping back, however ... Shucassam.

It's clear from the layout that Shucassam is meant to be a desert country — dry, harsh, full of vast difficult to travel distances and even a border that doesn't make much sense.  The narrow string of hexes between Khuzdar and Zefnar on the Sea is clearly meant to indicate a caravan route; we wouldn't expect more than a few oases strung along that course.  At 40 miles a hex, the distance between Adeese and Zefnar is 560 miles ... 80 miles further than the distance from Riyadh to Mecca.

There's a connection between parts of the world like Shucassam and religion.  Has the reader ever contemplated how the world's Great Religions have all originated in hot, near-tropical climates?  Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and so on ... places with intensively hot climates.  The only notable exceptions is Confucianism; though arguably Protestantism, the offshoot of Christianity was definitely founded in a north temperate climate.  All the rest started where it was hot.  Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all moved north, so that they have representation in cold climates, but they started in the south.  Coincidence?

All religions are invented out of thin air ... and as such, they've used the creation out of thin air as a selling point.  It's called "having a vision."  Stuff pops into the mind, it sounds cool, has next to no connection with anything we knew before and so, must be from ... um ... a "higher power."  Yeah.  That's it.  Higher power.  Definitely not made up.

Having the time to make stuff up requires special circumstances.  For this, consider dates.  The fruit.  To grow dates, we surround them with manure in the Spring.  Camel manure works fine.  We watch for pests and diseases.  We need to keep weeds and turf away.  Camels are good for that too.  Date palms like dry soil.  Before they ripen, pluck half the fruit.  The result is nice, fat fruit.  The early dates we pluck, we plant.  That's it.  Very low effort.  One tree yields a hundred kg.

Eat a lot of dates in a very hot climate and you'll get high.  Not from alcohol, but from the sugar.  A date weighing 24 grams contains 16 grams of sugar.  100 grams of dates have 314 calories.  Dates and the date palm are mentioned in the Qur'an 22 times; dates nourish the land, dates are healthy, dates stave off the effects of poison, etc.  Mostly, dates enable people to be well nourished and sit around in a hot, hot sun and do nothing.  Nothing that is, except to think.

While cultures in the semi-tropics do suffer from a "work ethic," by Protestant standards, what they don't suffer from is a lack of food.  India does, but that's because India has so much food that it can support a billion semi-starving people.  When Siddhattha sat under his tree and invented Buddhism in the 5th century BCE., India did not have a billion people and it was drenched with food.  The land of milk and honey that produced Juddaism and the oases of Mecca and Medina that produced Islam where chock full of food.  These peoples didn't have to get up with the twilight every day and plow fields; they did not have to pick acre after acre of weeds, or struggle in the winter-time upon the harvests they made four and five months ago.  They were food-rich and time-rich ... and they dwelled in a place where moving about during the day is very, very unpleasant.  Even at night, the drop of 80 degrees fahrenheit makes life outside the tent so onerous that resting on sheepskin and woollen carpeting, where we talk and talk and talk to pass the time, seems more than practical.

Between the cities of Shucassam is nothing.  The land is hot and dry and only the very desperate spend any time in the open.  Merchants travel unmolested because who would rationally wait in this wilderness for a caravan?  To travel anywhere takes enormous amounts of time.  Time to sit, time to think, time to talk, time to consider the words of a conversation that took place weeks or months ago.  Time unending.  With nothing to do.

Getting on our knees five times a day gives a way to break up the long days.  Forcing ourselves to fast on Ramadan gives us something else to wrest our thoughts one month in the calendar.  Memorising the Qur'an seems like a thing to do rather than an impossible feat.  We, with our westernised expectations of time and activity, cannot imagine what it must be like to have this much time.

Religion is not merely giving the gods their due.  Much of religion is contemplation, deliberate asteticism, evaluation of self, the acquisition of patience and purpose, and of time — the long history of a hundred generations that lived in this same desert, in the same way that we do now, doing the same things, thinking the same things, facing the same difficulties.

This is the deeper strength of religious tradition.  Not that we obey the laws because they are moral ... but that we obey the laws because our ancestors did, and who are we to criticise our ancestors?  Without our ancestors, we wouldn't be here.  Religion binds us, not only as people living together and believing the same thing, but as generations of people who got us here.  They knew what they were doing.  They built everything we see.  Their collective wisdom far surpasses the voice of any single person alive today.  They made us.  They ARE us.

This underlying motivation potentially exists for every NPC in the game world.  It is the universal "story" that establishes the peaks and valleys of the game's narrative.  Setting a story of that kind in your game world gives depth and strength to every word an NPC speaks.  It provides argument, justification, drive and conflict between forces and entities that surround the players.  It's the wind, the sea, the land, the fabric of social discourse.

Include it.  

Worldbuilding 6b: Goals

Ian Danskin discussing Chris DeLeon:

"Sports and board games have rules, but video games have laws.  That in soccer, you don't touch the ball with your hands because you've agreed not to, but in Fifa [vg] you don't touch the ball with your hand because it's impossible.  There's no button for it.  So in a sport, you can do anything that is not expressly forbidden by the rules.  In a video game, you can't do anything except what is expressly allowed by the system."

In D&D, the "system" is the Dungeon Master.  The DM assigns rules to things, the rules act as a guideline to the players' choices, but the player also knows that if an argument can be made, the DM can be influenced to allow something to occur that is outside the rules.  If the DM allows it, the game being played is still D&D.

This is why there is no standard D&D game.  This is why we get hundreds and hundreds of game and rule variations, and this is why most people's campaigns never work.  The more a DM can be influenced, whether by arguments made by the players, or because a DM respects decisions and advice given by a company, the more actions are allowed.  As possible actions increase, especially when those actions require little to no effort on the players' part, the more broken the game becomes.  This is not a black-and-white measure.  We don't have "whole" and "broken" games.  We have hundreds of thousands of games incrementally occupying fractional spaces on a line between whole and broken.

Moreover, it's not just a matter of resisting influence.  "What" rules a DM defends, and what arguments he or she refuses to be influenced by, changes the players' willingness to play with that DM at all; and if no players will play, again, the game is broken.  So many of those fractional spaces are occupied by shitty, inflexible and wooden-headed would-be DMs.

We're not done.  In my experience, the vast majority of DMs are persons who do not especially want the role — but who accept the role because of a group of people, these are the best person available.  Such persons are not as committed as other DMs, and in turn are eager to maintain the support and respect of their friends ... and are therefore highly subject to being influenced.  The same can also be said of many, many DMs who are simply weak people, who are needful of attention, who haven't the backbone in anything they do to stand up to the wants and demands of players with a negative answer.  Negative self-assessment runs rampant through the culture; there's no reason to assume that DMs automatically fail to suffer from poor self-esteem merely because they wish to be DMs.

So, on that line between whole and broken, we may suppose (without knowing) that the median among all DMs is considerable off-center, towards broken.  Given this, we may further suppose that among players, the expectation of the majority would be that DMs are, by and large, open to influence.  And further that DMs not open to influence are, post hoc ergo propter hoc, bad DMs.

Logically, therefore, most players out there looking for a DM wants one that can be easily influenced, with a reasonable expectation that the player will succeed in finding exactly that sort of DM.  With players wanting to influence, and DMs in turn being willingly influenced, most reports on the quality of a game are sure to be generally positive.  We won't hear the words, "I push my DM around and he likes it, so the game is great," but this is essentially the dynamic.

But we are here to speak of worldbuilding.  When discussing what rules a DM should embrace, we're confronted by several familiar arguments — and one of these says that the DM should be true to "reality."  As it happens, "reality" is the game world, not actual reality, but this nuance is often confused by the speaker.  Magic, hit points, bardic colleges, actual gods, the flail as a practical combat weapon, the presence of ring mail and many other things can be in no way confused with Earthly reality.  They are, however, perfectly realistic in the framework of the game, just as it's "realistic" in Monopoly that a house can be bought and erected before another person has time to move.  Or that it's equally practical to pile 60 armies on either Southern Europe or Yakutsk in RISK.  Why not?

If the DM uses "real reality" instead of "game reality" as a measurement, then he or she is bound to receive lots and lots of pushback from players on the basis that something isn't "true to life" and therefore ought to be changed.  Conversely, if "game reality" is made superfluid and simplistic, the DM will receive many, many suggestions from players on how to make it MORE fluid and MORE plistic. [er, sorry]

The world being built must find a path between extremes.  We don't touch the ball with our hands in soccer because we deliberately want to make the game harder for the players.  Of course they're able to pick up the ball.  Of course, if they were allowed to do so, "soccer," or "foot-and-hand-ball," would still technically be a game ... but would it be a good game?  The consensus is in that it wouldn't be.  "Keep-away" is sort of a version of foot-and-hand-ball and there are no international leagues for it.  I can't head down to the local community centre and sign up for a keep-away team.  Nor would I want to.  Nor would it make a particularly good spectator sport.  The art of using a body part to do something normally done by the hands would be lost.

There is a difficulty with explaining to people who don't understand how a role-playing game works, or why it works, why certain changes will break the game.  Especially any change that increases the survivability and ease of the game.  When one choice is overwhelmingly better than every other choice, "choice" as a game concept is effectively eliminated.  These were the problems inherent in the 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 systems.  Transforming game rules to an economic platform with a point-buy metric will always incorporate an interest in what powerful feats can be purchased most cheaply.  When every character class is awarded combat actions that function like spells, then every character is effectively a spellcaster, regardless of their class title.  Any single metric that's overwhelmingly used to make a system will simultaneously break the system by its lack of additional metrics.  These things are obvious to professional game designers ... and yet equally tempting to professional game designers, as they save SO MUCH WORK.  Designers crave fetishistically for the super-successful game that requires a minimum of effort to design.  It is their Holy Grail.

Such games appear, explode in popularity, make hundreds of millions for the designer ... and then vanish as the simplicity turns the game into a boring, hated, soon-to-be-discarded thing.  Anybody up for a game of Angry Birds?  How 'bout Farmville?

[Yes, yes, I know, I know ... people out there play Angry Birds every day.  They reach for it first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, and get in a few last games before lights out.  I know.  Fuck off.]

D&D works and endures because it consists of dozens of metrics spliced together, enabling uncertain but nuanced possibilities.  However, these metrics rely upon constraint, suppression and denial.  Like soccer, the players need to be able to act effectively, but not easily.  The combat system needs to be complex, bloated, difficult to interpret and expressly uncertain in what tactics work best against which monsters.  This disallows the players a feeling of safety or surety.  Of course players will hate it.  Players want to feel safe.  They want to feel sure.  They want the game world and the rules to be immediately comprehensible and solvable.  They will always argue and attempt to influence the DM in this direction.  It's so predictable it's laughable.

Tell the players they must choose three weapon proficiencies.  Make the penalties for a non-proficient weapon so onerous that the players will grumpily conform to the weapons they've chosen.  Listen to the players groan about how few weapons they get.  Listen to them hedge and haw about the cost of the weapons they really want, vs. the weapons they can afford.  Listen to them refuse to get weapons they can afford, then assign this as the reason why the system sucks.  Listen to them ask for more weapons.  Listen to them carp about a weapon that needs two hands, that disallows a shield.  Listen to them ask if they can use a two-handed weapon and a shield at the same time.  Listen to them argue why that should be allowed.  And so on.

But change the system to say that there are no proficiencies and that every weapon, regardless of type and form, causes 1d6 damage, and the complaints vanish.  Because it's easier.  Because there's no wrong choice.  We've given them one choice.  One choice, the "right" choice, is what they want.  Not because it's really the best choice, but because they're absolutely SURE that no one else is playing the system better than they are.  Or that there even is a better way to play the system.

Constraints, suppression and denial humbles the player.  Multiple system metrics which deny an obvious solution humbles the player.  As they should.  It's not a game if you can "win" by choosing the only option.  In D&D, the "lose" is conceived in the certainty players have that they're destined to choose the wrong option.  Most players do not look at their list of abilities and think, "What am I able to do?"  They look inwardly first, think, "What do I want to do?" — then looks through their list of abilities to see if they can do it.  When that list disappoints them, they look to the DM and ask, "Even if I can't do this thing, can I still do this thing?"  Whereupon the DM hears their desire, relates to the player, throws out the whole system and says, "Sure, I guess so."

If the DM says, instead, "Your character can do all these other things, why don't you try one of those?" ... the player looks at the character sheet, sighs inwardly that it's not nearly as good as what his or her imagination imagined, and grumpily say, "Well, okay I guess."  The DM hears the lack of commitment.  The DM knows this player shouldn't be here.  The DM habitually counts the players who are here and wonders for a moment if the campaign will survive if the player leaves.  The DM knows not to say any of this.  Instead, the DM tries to make the player's character sheet ability sound as impressive and exciting as possible, to "win" the player over to the side of playing by the character sheet.  The DM may even go as far as increasing the character sheet power by enough to impress the player.  And there we are.  The DM has compromised the DM.

Sometimes, I really wonder, why the fuck anybody plays this game.

On the surface, it's doomed.  As a teenager, playing this game with other teenagers, I loved the way the rules came together, the way the character sheets brutally limited the player's options, the way that succeeding eventually produced more options that allowed greater successes.  DMing, if a player asked to do any of the rule-of-cool dumbfuckery I hear from sites all over, I'd have laughed viciously in their face, told them "NO" in a cruel and patronising tone, and then taken steps to humiliate them repeatedly for the rest of the session by prefacing every ask of what the character did next with, "Oh, and no, you still can't do that idiotic rule-of-cool dumbfuckery."  Because I had standards.  Because I would rather have a player slink out in shame and mortification, with my laughter in their ears, than contribute to the regular kind of bullshit I see and read all over the internet.

You'd think with behaviour like that, I'd have trouble getting players.  You'd think, with my being contemptuous and bullying, that no one would ever play with me.  As it happened, the reverse was true.  Instead of losing all my players, I gained more than I could handle.  Because I bullied out all the riff raff, and never the serious players who wanted to approach the game as I saw it, serious players flocked to play with me.  My players would hear others say, "The game I'm in is so stupid!  Everyone farts around and no one gives a shit what they're doing."  And my players would answer, "Fuck, man, you've GOT to come play with Alexis.  Alexis is the bomb, man.  He's fucking psychotic.  His game is the best thing you've ever seen!"

And when I'd humiliate someone, and they'd rage quit and leave, all the other players would say, "Fuck him.  Fuck that noise.  Glad he's fucking gone.  I take a battle axe as my proficiency."

You get the players you cultivate.  I wanted to cultivate assholes like me, who loved the game, who didn't want "easy", who loved that there were fifty types of weapons to choose from and only eleven character classes.  When I said, "No," they made a new plan.  They changed it up.  They played like their lives depended on it.

My offline players still play this way.  People shout.  I mind fuck them with a dilemma or a consequence and they call me names.  I say I'm playing and they're always there.  They tell their jobs that they can't work and they tell them why.  They make time.  They love it.

But they wouldn't if I made it easier.  The "hard" is what makes it great.

In worldbuilding — and I guess this hasn't been much about worldbuilding — the world has to be as hard as the rules.  It has to maintain a character that won't roll over and play dead.  The authorities have to wield authority; the villains have to be truly spine-chilling.  The monsters must be DEADLY.  The world must be too big to fathom or navigate.  There must be many friends, many enemies and there must be both an unease AND a certainty about which is which.  The rules must be fixed and the DM should never, ever compromise about anything or any part of the game world.

So make the game world well.  Make it solid.  Build it to last.  Build it to intimidate ... and enjoy that the players are intimidated.

Worldbuilding 5i: Making and Marketing

It can be understood that wherever there is money to be made, there's a clever group of people who want it all, and thus take steps to seal off others who might want some for themselves.  The notion of a "guild" was to establish that these people are permitted to make a thing and sell it, within our controlled system, whereas those people were not — no matter how well they knew their business.  This gave the guilds a monopoly over their own product, at least for those places within their reach ... that is, within the cities.

Guilds sprang up all over Europe, with each controlling various manufactures over small or large areas.  A tinsmithing guild might control all the smithies in one village or small county; or a plutocracy of individuals might unilaterally agree to set prices in dozens of places at the same time.  These agreements and monopolies would expand and ebb with the centuries, as various guilds would rise and fall, with their influence being disrupted by war, plague, famine and of course the death of those with the wisdom to manage large complex webs of control.  Smashing shops, destroying raw materials and made goods, even burning fields or driving out farmers were recognisable tactics.  After all, it's often better to burn a competitor's tailored goods, if it makes the ones we sell more valuable.  Think of it as the "Goldfinger" theory of economics, albeit on a small scale.

A single village or type-4 hex, with all of 2 hammers, hardly matters in the grand scheme of things ... but larger entities can nevertheless benefit from such minor players, especially when there are hundreds and hundreds of villages.  The largest problem is that a village, with minimal roads, transport and sitting out in the back country, suffers somewhat from a lack of materials.  The women's fingers may be nimble, but they need cloth to sew garments.

The solution was called the "putting-out" system.  A guild capitalist would provide the raw wool, cotton, silk, metals, clay, sand, woods and so on, making deliveries of these things to the crafters, who would transform these raw materials into clothing, tools, masonry, pottery, furniture and so on.  And because the crafter would become dependent on the merchant providing the raw materials, the latter could impose conditions of how hard the crafter worked while charging the crafter for the materials in a way that would create debt slavery.  This was done perniciously in a culture that had no laws to protect the crafter from such vampires.

Some manufactures cannot be easily done on this scale.  Paper-making requires a large mill, many workers and an abundant and organised supply of linen and cotton rags.  Mining is likewise a big scale operation, as is metallurgy.  The seasonable managing of logging industry, or fulfilling masonry contracts, requires a very organised system of transporting enormous weights of materials.  A small group attempting to manage operations of this size could easily fall into debt ... and in this case the "putting out" came in the form of credit.  Again, the guild merchant could then skim off the top, benefiting from the industry, while foreclosing on everything if the debt wasn't paid.  This is more or less still how things are done today.

Often, the rough work is done in backwaters and then finished in towns.  A village might make pottery, but the ordinary pottery would be transported into a larger center (a "settlement) to be painted or glazed.  Pieces might be made in a village, like angles, nails, thread, twine, wrapping and raw cloth, which would then be taken to the next step elsewhere.  Again, this is still what's being done today, only on a global scale.

As I described earlier, in a type-4 village this work would be done in individual homes.  Such places would need a steady source of heat in the winter to ensure constant labour, so a proper hearth should be present — well removed from flammable materials that might be part of the manufacture.  Jobs that needed a bellows or larger space, such as shoeing animals or making horse shoes, would require an attached outdoor enclosure.  Anywhere indoors would need a good source of cheap light, so glass windows would definitely exist ... though not very large, just 9 inches across.  The workbench would always be immediately under the window, so the light could be used.  With many materials, working by candlelight would be too dangerous.  Remember, the artisan would buy the raw materials; if the materials were destroyed and no product left to sell, the guild merchant lost nothing; but the crafter would be eternally in debt afterwards.  One fire was disastrously risky.

On the whole, these made items would never be sold by the Guild Merchant in the village.  More money could be obtained from a larger town or city ... so the "market day" I discussed on the village post would not include these crafted articles made locally.  And because the village is not a "market center," as I define it, the actual available things that can be bought are locally-produced, locally-controlled products: cereals, vegetables, fruits, treenuts, furs, animal feed, straw, raw fibres, livestock, eggs, honey, wooden planks and so on.  Because baked goods must be eaten the same day, a baker can successfully locate in a hamlet or a small village, but the number of goods and their kind will be limited, just like your local modern bakery.  If you're not there by eleven in the morning, most likely the loaves you want are already sold.

As such, we're talking about a "Town Market" for food items and a "Stockyard" for animals.  We have the baker as mentioned, the granary and maybe some very fundamental amateur crafts like a parasol, a child's doll or a "toy," being no more than a simple carved animal.  A coastal village reasonably supports a small fishmonger.  A cobpipe is also likely — but nothing at all on a greater scale than this.  A player party shouldn't expect to find rope, weapons, clothes, vehicles or vehicle parts, not even a saddle or a bit, though if it's horse country, a riding horse is probable.  Players need to comprehend that a village is not the local convenience store.  If it makes no sense for a farmer-labourer-villager to possess such a thing, why would they have it in stock?

Suppose, however, that the players ask one of the local tailor crafters to make a shirt.  From what would he or she make it?  The material is all committed to the guild merchant's expected return; and so is all of the crafter's time.  Three hours to make the player's shirt, even if the fabric is provided, means three hours less time making the guild merchant happy.  And it's this latter that really matters, not the opportunity to make one shirt for some fly-by-nighter who will be gone forever once the shirt is done.

Now, point in fact, there is an opportunity for the player to become the guild merchant.  The present supplier has to be bucked out of town, as a monopoly is being threatened, but a strong party should be able to handle a bunch of toughs who show up to reassert the former merchant's control.  Plus, the players could choose some village so out of the way that even a supplier isn't to be found.  Crafters could be shipped in with the right enticements.  They could also pick a craft in which the existing merchant isn't engaged.  He wants textiles, but we want to make, oh, clocks or musical instruments.

Meanwhile, it's an easy way for the players to get into "business."  They don't need to be around full-time, they can run their credit however they like, it makes them members of the community and they have a potential source of steady income without achieving name level.  This is something a party could start doing at 1st level, if they were careful about what craft they inserted and where they did it.

Very well.

I have a few things left to describe for 2 hammers.  I think the reader understands what a "shearing station" is, or an irrigation pump.  The former includes a clensing dip, some skill at managing sheep and the apparatus for collecting and redistributing the wool to a buyer further up the chain.  The latter is a small mill for hauling water out of a river and pouring it into an irrigation ditch, which then transports water throughout extensive fields.  These things are interesting in that they exist, but there's little to say about them.

The "hostel" is more involved ... but I'll leave this off until writing a post about roadhouses and inns, which both occur with three hammers.  Now I can set about updating the wiki page and approach the next size of non-settlement habitation, the "country town" that occurs with the type-3 hex.

Worldbuilding 5h: Buildings of Worship

The Reader seems to understand that tackling a game world on this level has more to do with understanding how things work than with providing a lot of details.  For example, I don't need floorplans of quays and storehouses to make use of these things in my game world.  I don't need stats for the gong farmer who might attack the party in the dark, thinking they're bandits.  I don't need fifty village street maps for fifty villages.  I don't need the squire's family tree drawn out to know he has one.  Misconceptions about what "worldbuilding" is lie behind the failure of designers to produce something deep and complex.  There's some idea going around that the actual "building" part requires tables, pictures, plans and excessively gritty details ... when in fact, what's needed is knowing how a shore front or a transshipment point works.

The actual layout can be scrawled out in five minutes during the game, while the players watch (as we're getting rid of the screen).  When I do this, I draw a box and say, "This is the storehouse."  Then I draw a crooked line.  "This is the water line; there's a quay and this is another quay."  Then I draw an oval next to the quay.  "Here's the ship.  What do you do?"  The players don't give a damn that the ship doesn't look like an actual detailed ship plan for a one hour adventure, with my taking 8 hours of fastidious work to make it look "real."  It's as real as it needs to be in the player's heads.  They only need to know where the ship is.  The rest we can play without pictures.

For me, this is the real "tradition" that underlies D&D thinking.  You tell me your mage wants to be a "Moon Witch."  I say okay.  Then we figure out what that means as we go along.  We don't need 55 pages in a splatbook telling us the 32 kinds of moon witch your character can be.  It's just a waste of our time.

Because I get asked endless questions by players about everything, I've given considerable thought to everything — as is evident in this string of posts.  With each conceived thing, such as the present list of facilities, I'm on the hook to discuss what that thing is.  The answers rely considerably upon research, but let me explain something about D&D.  We will never find all the information we need, because the answers being given out there in the world are not tailor-made for people who are interested in a space where people can walk through and take action there.  Where it comes to details about a "simple village house of worship" in the 15th century, we can find examples; but we won't learn how the church residents were organised or what their jobs were at that time.  We might find a few tiny details about how these churches were planted, but those details won't be sufficient for D&D.  Therefore, we have to understand something very well.

Worldbuilding is fictional design.  By necessity, we have to sit back, close our eyes, consider everything we've been able to learn from research and then tailor make the remainder out of whole cloth.

So as I approach the subject of village churches, mosques and temples, understand that I'm talking about D&D, not the real world.  Perhaps some expert knows the truth about the interactions between church leaders and their authorities or congregations, but I don't choose to become a similar expert.  For one thing, the next facilities post has to be about making and marketing in the period, so I can't waste my whole worldbuilding verve on religious edifices alone.

And hell, what difference does it make anyway?  I run a game world where the gods are real, where they fight one another for every believer because another believer is what makes them a wee bit more powerful ... and so the religious systems in my game world are built by people who have actual, physical proof of the existence of these gods.  This makes a religion in my world NOTHING LIKE the real world, which must run all it's services on faith and little else.  There was a Martin Luther in my world, but the 95 theses he hammered on his door absolutely did not include the argument that by faith and faith alone did one know God.  He knew better.

Because of this competition, a type-4 village has only one church, mosque or temple.  More developed hexes have sub-cultures, and therefore sub-temples, with certain religions being tolerant of others.  The hard and fast rule, from Medieval history, is that the least tolerant church or religion is Christianity.  The most tolerant is ... Islam.  Go figure.

I've been meaning to write a post about the development of religion in the game world, but I keep putting it off.  I shall have to get on that this week; in the meantime, let's limit our interest to the building itself, its inhabitants and its function.

The easiest example is the Christian church, since I know it best and have had much personal experience with its doings.  I was raised Lutheran, though I no longer believe in its teachings, or that of any religion.  Unlike a rabid youtuber atheist, however, I concede that the advancement of religion and it's function were necessary for the advancement of society and civilisation, though not in the interpretation of the Bible as a "moral document," which it most definitely is not.  Were I to find myself in a church, I would attend the service respectfully, I would sing the hymns when appropriate, kneeling and praying when appropriate, and I would smile and greet the minister and others without creating an incident.  I would not stay longer than strictly necessary, however.  I bring this up to explain where I come from with regards to religion.  I have studied theology and can defend it; I find large parts of its thinking process fascinating and worth deconstruction; but I don't believe in it as a faith.  I don't really care who does, however, unless they take it upon themselves to sell me their religion.  This is where things get sticky with me.

The purpose of the Church is to bind the community together.  The duties of the pastor or priest are to do more than deliver a good sermon and overlook the proceedings of the service.  A pastor attends his or her flock, daily, addressing their physical and emotional needs as best one can.  Much training in being a pastor involves speaking with the devout and people like me with RESPECT, something rarely found or understood among Pentacostals or Evangels, who don't receive practical training and are therefore in it for the power, the prestige and the money.  An excellent example of what it is to be a parish priest can be found in the 1978-81 humorous British series, Bless Me, Father.  Here's an example of the show dealing with the supernatural from a church perspective.

Members of a small temple include the priest, potentially a curate, which is a sort of apprentice priest (and not, as Gygax thinks, a member senior to a priest), a housekeeper and a caretaker, called a verger.  Here's a nice story from Somerset Maugham about a verger, from the 1950 movie, Trio.  The verger segment starts at 02:41.

Most likely all these people are kind, friendly, generous and most often interested in strangers, particularly if they're of the same religion.  It's their business to bring in new blood ... and an outsider's contribution to the collection plate is always welcome.  Perhaps it's my personal view on things, but in part it's my experience as well.  A church leader is always looking for people to lead, and wisely does not seek to turn away anyone and make enemies.  Religious strife only occurs when each side of the matter simply refuses to be patient and respectful.  The Spaniards would have done much better for themselves in the Netherlands if they hadn't been so bloody minded about their Catholicism.  The same can be said about the Protestants in Ulster, the Protestants in Scotland and the Protestants in the American colonies.  It's the confounded way people have sometimes about insisting that their answers are the "right" answers, coupled with the like resistance of other peoples who are just as certain and inflexible.

In any case, these larger contentious religious warring peoples can hardly be found in the rustic setting of a back-country village church.  Let the people of Florence battle in the streets; let the rivers in Paris run with Huguenot blood; let some pigheaded heretic scream epithets in Zurich, Geneva and Prague.  This village is none of those places ... and so, "You're a moslem, are you?  Why, what a strange person to have come around here.  Have you had your dinner yet?"

It isn't that I'm naive.  Rather, it's that I believe the earnestness of a religion depends upon its proponents — chiefly, what they think they have to lose if they concede a little ground.  The Count of Wittembourg has taxes and land to gain if he switches to the Protestant church, while the Emperor of Austria and the Pope in Rome have something to lose if he does.  A demand is made, followed by an insult, followed by further demands and threats and raising of armies ... much more of it for the sake of which hands the peasant's coins fall into rather than the fleshiness of bread and the bloodiness of wine.  But we say its the latter because that makes us sound so much holier than a grubber of Mammon, which the Bible plainly counsels against.  After all, the Bible clearly counsels in plain Hebrew, Greek, Latin and so on that killing the Ammonites is absolutely in the cards.  Thus, Ammonites, Saxons, what's the difference?

The country priest has a slice of mutton to lose and the company of a traveller to gain.  So the exchange rate plays much better towards complaisance and beneficence ... provided the traveller doesn't remain and import too many of his or her "kind."  Whereupon everyone gets ridiculous because that fundamental principle, "The Priest is there to bind the community together" gets threatened somewhat.

There's a reason my game world takes place in 1650.  Just prior to that date, Europe had ruthlessly decided to test the theory that the musket and the sword are stronger than faith (and the desire for money and power), only to find it piles up a lot of dead and fails to settle anything.  The Spanish have withdrawn from the part of the Netherlands that doesn't like them, European Catholicism has decided to be more tolerant, the border with the Ottomans is in a relative state of peace ... and while peaceful co-existence doesn't reign everywhere, it is a brief period of concluding that winning through trade, nationalism and education is perhaps a better tactic.  England drags its feet on this for another 10 bloody and annoying years, but 1650 is nevertheless on the cusp of the Restoration.  It is a time that suits me.

Listen, I should talk about the church building, but I think we'll let that go until I get into hexes with 3 hammers.  There's a lot to say about that, enough for a whole other post.

I'll finish by saying to my Patreon supporters, thank you for your support and your input in the comments.  I have very much left to say about worldbuilding, though I must also take some time out to discuss some other things this week and the next.  Rest assured, my patience and commitment to this series remains intact.

Worldbuilding 5g: Docks, Quays & Storehouses

I understand that it seems I'm splitting hairs, but D&D is a game of descriptions and players interacting with stuff ... as such I feel that details matter.  Whatever a thing might be, there are always iterations of that thing that describe a progressive development: hovels are distinct from square houses, long houses, hall houses and merchant houses.  These in turn are distinct from manors, mansions and palaces.  Understanding that not every house is the same expands the DM's repetoire for discussing the layout of a property, a street and a section of town.  The same is true for any facility we might discuss.

For example, I included a "boat dock" as a facility appearing in a type-7 hex with one hammer, but I didn't discuss it because the map I'm working from lacks navigable rivers, lakes or seas.  What exactly is a "dock" ... as opposed to a "quay"?  What does one provide that the other doesn't?  If the players were to build the former, how much would it cost as compared to the latter?  The answers explain why one is available with 1 hammer and the other requires 2.

Excuse me a moment, but I must talk about the word "quay.".  It's an unfortunate word in the English language, as it looks like "kway" but it's pronounced like "key."  Turns out, the spelling quay begins in the 1690s, post my game word ... prior to that, it was spelled "key" or "keye," as it's pronounced.  This word originates from the French word quai, for sand bank, which is why islands in the Caribbean were called keys, because for two hundred years these were used to load and unload ships in  part of the world where no proper port was available.  Hwearf in Old English and werf in German were used similarly in the Baltic and North Seas to describe the Frisian and Danish isles, among others, which were banks where ships could tie up.  In America today, "wharf" is used rather than "quay," but originally the word described more than a place to tie up ... it also meant a shipyard as well as a dockyard.  I could use "dock yard" as a replacement for quay, but this would confuse it with dock; I could spell quay, "keye," but this is sure to confuse players, so I'll continue to use the anachronistic "quay."

So.  No matter what I call what, confusion will reign if definitions are not imposed.  As such, going forward with ship services, I will use the following designations:

A dock is a wooden platform built on wooden pilings that extends outwards from a piece of land.  Due to the limitations on how deep the pilings can be dug in a pre-industrial world, a dock is limited in width to 12 ft.  A dock will service ships with a draft up to 10 ft.  A wider dock needs to incorporate stone in it's construction, whereupon it becomes ...

A quay is a predominantly stone platform that extends outwards from the shore, sometimes incorporating some wood framing or ledges, but not necessarily.  The water beside a quay is deep enough to enable ships with a draft of up to 20 feet to "park" adjacent to the structure.  Quays usually include a storehouse.  If multiple quays are strung together, the whole is called ...

A wharf, which extends along a shoreline, forming a harbour, which describes the enclosed water surface and not the wharf's servicing area — though this distinction is usually overlooked.  A "port" describes the combined harbour and wharf together.  Wharfs can also be described as the "docks," but this is a misnomer.  Wharfs generally include warehouses as well as storehouses.

Wharves occur with 3 hammers, which isn't on our facilities table yet but it's convenient to touch on them now and expand later with another post.  

Please understand that I recognise this isn't "correct" ... but equally I'd argue there is no such thing.  The designations are merely for game convenience, not because I give a damn what a dock can be or is or any other such thing.  The same issue applies when I make a distinction between "storehouses" and "warehouses."

Docks.  We might freely assume that the number of hammers AND the type of hex (7 through 5) indicates how many docks a hex includes.  One hammer and a type-7 dock equals a thorp and therefore has one dock.  Add another hammer to a type-7 hex, which can only occur with a settlement, and we have two docks.  The type-6 hex gets a bonus dock over the type-7, two docks with 1 hammer and three docks with 2 hammers, and the type-5 gets an additional +1 dock in the same fashion.  This may seem unnecessarily finicky, but the presence of multiple docks, and how many, would be something that mattered to the players ... and it would give them some idea of the size and importance of the backwater they're approaching from the water.

Docks can provide services to players, though clearly I need to write rules for how many boats occur per hex and presence of hammers.  A nominal fee of 1-2 c.p. would be charged for tying up, with an understanding that at certain times of the day non-ownership of a dock might mean casting off because the dock is needed for transshipment of other vessels.  Not sure how that would work also, but it would mean that a compliment necessary to untie and put off from the dock would be a day-and-night necessity, else the local laws may enable the boat to be impounded, i.e., taken over by other sailors and held until a penury fine was paid.

I can't say for sure, but building a dock would probably be simple enough, with the coast determining it's length (and possibly local ordinances as well) and therefore it's cost and time to build.  I daresay a 2nd level party could easily afford it.   I think the length of the dock would be limited to a water depth of oh, say, 15 feet?  Needs research.  Incidentally, a "dock post" is a single piling pounded deep in the sand; it's sufficient to hold a boat, but it would require another boat for unloading and loading of goods and passengers.  It would also put the boat at risk during a storm, since the piling is necessarily close to the shore, provides none of the protection a dock would and might swing the boat into the shore, sinking it.

Overall, docks can stand up to most storms, short of a strong gale or a storm.  Wrecked docks retain their pilings, so that only the upper part need rebuilding. 

A shack can be built on top of a dock (remember, 12 ft. wide surface of indeterminate length).  Someone could build this of stone or brick but that would seriously compromise the dock's ability to stand up in a storm.  In general, a shack couldn't practically consist of much weight in its construction, nor in how much storage it provided.  How much, again, would probably require some research ... which doesn't seem necessary until the day a player asks me.

Quay.  This is an oblong extension of stone blocks, broken stone pieces, filling, sand, wooden framing, paving stone and mortar reaching out far enough that a really big ship can pull up to its side.  The support for such an edifice requires a village-sized habitat, thus its appearance with a base type-4 hex.  Because of its construction, a quay will stand up to a hurricane.  A quay can be built so as to shelter a ship, but this is rare because the business of manuevering a big ship behind a quay in a busy port is impractically onerous.  Usually, in a storm, ships put out to sea rather than remaining tied up ... there are many harbours that will provide excellent protection to ships on the water, so that escaping to open sea is unnecessary.

A type-4 village has one quay.  Type-6 and type-5 settlements with 3 hammers have quays (not shown on chart yet), but again, only one.  A type-4 with 3 hammers has 2 quays, or effectively a small "wharf," and those with 4 hammers (settlements) will have 3 quays.  Better type hexes obviously have larger wharfs with shipyards and other support buildings.

Quays can provide other services for players, namely storage which we'll discuss later and the opportunity to register at the port, provided they have the necessary sage abilities and ship type.  Once again, they can't leave a ship at a quay with the expectations that other ships will want to load and unload.  A quay has a large flat area where hundreds of tons of goods can be temporarily stored as it comes off a ship or is put on ... and these goods can be sold on the quay, removing the need for the players to drag it into an actual market.  Buying on the quay usually requires guild membership and the permission to buy specific goods as they roll into port.  In the meantime, the quay has guards that can be hired to protect goods that can be left in place for a day or two before it's moved off the quay into town, or onto a ship ... and these guards are bonded, so that loss of the goods would fall to the bondsman and not the owner.  Again, this is a benefit for those who have guild standing.

Quays are public features, so individuals cannot build structures upon them.  However, quays do include storehouses, and these are also for hire.

Storehouse.  Again, we must make a distinction between "stores" and "wares," and which kind of house is build to preserve them.  For the record, stores can be stored in warehouses, and wares can be stored in storehouses, but this doesn't make wares stores nor stores wares.  I want to be clear.  "Stores" are quanties or supplies of things that are kept for the day when they are needed — either for maintenance or during a crisis.  Empty water barrels are stored so they can be filled and rolled aboard ship when needed.  Ropes, nets, masts, planks, mortar, canvas, shot, tools and so on are kept for when these things are needed in repair.  Sand is kept in case of fire.  Food can be stored in a storehouse, but usually this is kept in "garners" or "granaries," which we earlier designated as places to store foods.  Storehouses tend to contain non-edible dry goods.

"Wares," on the other hand, are items that are specifically stowed away until they're sold.  That is, any sort of manufacture or valuable commodity, things that don't accumulate sufficiently until a hex accumulates 3 hammers.  Thus, not appearing on our list yet.

Storehouses tend to be smallish and narrow, about 12 by 20 ft., and 8 ft. high ... with multiple storehouses standing in a line on larger wharves.  Incidentally, this is the length of a standard modern shipping container and about 45% wider.  If there are multiple storehouses, each will house specific collections of items.  Storehouses tend to be half-timbered, with a six-foot high 6 in. deep mortared wall with a wooden framed rafters and roof.  A little pitch saturated as much as possible with sand can be spread atop a roof and won't burn easily, but some places will use green wood for the roofs, replacing them seasonally; still, the stuff inside a storehouse is potentially quite flammable.  On the whole, storehouses aren't locked (locks actually being quite rare even as late as the 17th century, and non-existent as late as the 15th) or even guarded ... but quays are often in some kind of service day and night, so there are plenty of torches and lanterns burning, not to mention local dockworkers and gangers (supervisors) around to notice a door being opened.  Plus there's not much inside to steal, as it's either heavy, takes time to find amidst the tangle or is quite cheap to buy.

Warehouses, on the other hand, include guards both inside and outside, have two floors, have no windows (which seems to confuse players who want a way to break in) and are often packed in such a way that even if a group were to get inside and kill the guards, it would take half an hour to find the "key stone" box before the goods can be wedged out of place and shifted out the door.  And, once again, people constantly moving about the docks.  Warehouses are typically twenty ft. square, 16 ft. high, and built in blocks of two — with "streets" between them and plenty of stored water in case of fire.  Warehouses are often separated from the water by 40 to 60 ft., which although makes it a longer distance to carry, helps serve as a firebreak in case either the ships or the warehouses catch fire.  Warehouses with copper fireproof roofs may appear in type-1 hexes; those are the ones to steal from, if a party gets ambitious.

Seems enough for now.