World Description, part 1 of a billion

This is the beginning of a very long headache:

But it's also a template, one that can take us a long way.  We start with the policy of making individual parts, one at a time, so the pieces can be fit together into a structure.  Here I started with isolated farms and built towards a thorp, until I had enough to create the page above.  There are pieces that were bypassed along the way, but these can be managed too.  This is the power that a wiki provides: it keeps track of everything that hasn't been done yet, so I know my next steps as a designer.

I won't lie and say I wasn't challenged by the writing of the above page.  It's highly detailed and undeniably dry in parts ... but as a DM, the opportunities are there to take a simple bit of information and apply it meaningfully.  Meanwhile, it provides a transition between the "village" and the "dungeon" that's all at once familiar and yet mostly overlooked.  Of course the players should pass through an area of backwardness before getting truly into the wilderness ... but since there's a lack of how such places are formed, or what they find important, it's difficult for a DM to present it in game terms.

My goal is to provide a concrete example of worldbuilding posts I set out to write a year ago.  Here is where the people live, here's what their homes look like, here's what they do, here's how many of them there are, here's the size of the civilisation footprint.

The trick is to take this template and move forward with it.  Hexes only become increasingly more intricate and diverse from here.  Type-7 hexes are, by comparison, staggeringly simple.  But I'd like, imaginatively, to ultimately be able to define a whole city in these terms, not as a whole unit (which would be impossible), but by constructing the social strata out of which the city — and the realm — is built.  Not an easy task.  And I'm sure I'll take long breaks from it, as my motivation dries up.  I think, however, my readers have learned that tasks I leave eventually get taken up again.  And each time I come back around, I always have new ideas, new ways of looking at it, and new energy with which to work.

It just takes time to recharge my batteries on any given thing.

I'm quite sure that, for as long as this go-round lasts, my readers will be thankful for every bit and piece of this puzzle as it's created.

Defining Culture and Other Things

Five years ago, I wrote a series of posts using the game Civilization IV to describe a methodology for creating micro-infrastructure for the game world.  I wrote posts about food, production, workers and various elements hit upon by the Civ IV makers ... and admitted that other elements, like culture and health, were "problems" that I hadn't solved.

Some problems take time.

I have occasionally struggled with connecting my trade system to other systems that I've proposed, such as the infrastructure system or the more recent tech system.  I have made three attempts on this blog since 2015 to express the tech system as clearly as I can, but it turns out I can't even clearly explain it to myself.  It is a headache of the first order, no doubt about it.  In any case, those "never-too-much-economics" posts are part and parcel of the same problem.

In a sense, with far, far less relevance to the universe than anything Einstein did, I'm struggling right now to come up with a "unified world theory" that would pull these disparate parts of my rules together into a cohesive whole.  I'd like to write a little about that, then write a little about what "culture" might mean in a D&D context.

Here is my thinking, regarding the pulling of these systems together.  The trade system designates the existence of produced goods, tied to regions.  The infrastructure system breaks down a region into smaller and smaller bites, so that we can know the amount of buildings, roads, supplies or production a specific hex has, as small as we wish to go (though I limit my production measure to 6-mile hexes, it could go deeper). The infrastructure, then, could be used as a means to determine the exact points of origin for trade goods, from fish to iron mining to the making of clothing.

The infrastructure also includes a measuring system for available food, labor ("hammers") and wealth ("coins"), stolen from Civ IV.  This measuring system might be directly affected by the trade system, so that if a town produced, according to the trade system, "cheese," then the food supply in that specific town, in a given type of infrastructure hex (remember all those "groups" posts, from 2011?), could be increased because we have a trade reference from that town.

Okay, stay with me here.  This gets complicated.

If we add in the proposed tech system, then we know that a specific level of tech produces an availability of building types: granaries, harbors, theatres, forges, etcetera.  These buildings, then, could also be fit into the infrastructure framework, so that a Type-I hex, with a settlement in it, would mean that the specific building was present, IF the tech were sufficient and IF the circumstances (near the water, say) were right. Furthermore, if we want to steal further from Civ IV, then the improvements that arise from that game could be detemined, in part, by the trade system (which indicates that wheat fields or coffee plantations, whatever) are definitely present in the region's hexes, and in part by the tech system itself, which indicates roads, monuments, city walls, waterwheels and so on.

Those improvements and buildings, indicated by the tech and the trade system, then augment the infrastructure still further, telling us how much additional labor a waterwheel adds, or how much additional food a windmill adds, or how much additional wealth a market adds ~ adjusted according to a long-standing system that has already proven itself.

Places with higher tech will have universities, customs houses and banks, while places with lower tech will not.  These things, in their own way, will affect not only the description of the region and city, but actual details regarding how the city is structured and how that affects what the players want to do.

Part of that means coming up with a meaning for culture.  It's too important to skip over, as the creation of culture by a civilization, particularly as it advances, should be there to define everything about the player's experience as they walk down a street in Paris as opposed to a street in Stavanger.  That has to be measured: and the presence of a measure for culture taken from Civ IV is too damn enticing to ignore.  We have all these marvelous figures to tell us how much culture a specific place creates, due to the presence of its buildings, products, tech and so on ... all that is needed is a meaningful description for what this "culture" actually means concretely.

Not an easy fix.  I've been climbing over Wikipedia for several days, following one link to the next, from culture to social norms to meta-ethics, looking for something that defines the difference between how people with high culture think vs. what people with low culture think.

Fundamentally, humans are ruled by a reward system, which itself is buried in the physical mesolimbic pathways in our brains, something we can't do anything about.  As a species, we are driven towards pleasure and away from fear ... so that culturally, as we've advanced, we've done our best to build systems that contain fear while providing as much pleasure as possible.

Where pleasure is provided only to a few, the system eventually collapses under violence perpetrated by the many, whereupon it is either replaced by a similar system that temporarily provides pleasure for the powerful, or a better system that provides pleasure for a larger proportion of the population.  See, the key to the balance isn't to eliminate misery, it is to reduce the number of miserable persons to a level that they can't meaningfully threaten the number of persons who are living with a tolerable level of pleasure plus those that are living with a lot of pleasure.

This is the "bread and circuses" equation, that says that if we provide nominal pleasure to the miserable, in the form of something that distracts them a little while, they will concentrate on their small amount of pleasure long enough that they won't feel the need to rise up and kill all of us who are enjoying massive amounts of pleasure all the time.

Therefore, I think I've hit upon the fundamental definition of "culture" in the measurable sense is that it establishes the amount of social control in the region.  More coliseums, more theatres, more religion, more of anything that is properly defined by the Civ IV structure, less random misery and street-chaos by the population.  We don't need to make the population happy, just complacent, rewarding them with small amounts of pleasure for obeying the law, paying their taxes, fulfilling their duty by fighting for the monarch, turning in anyone conspiring against the state and resisting any desire to change their lot in life.

Thus, the higher the amount of culture, the more viciously and coldly will come down the deadly hand of social control on the hapless player character who stupidly flaunts the law, supposing that everyone here will find it "cool" or "edgy" to speak ill of Queen Juliana the VII.  That may play out in the sticks, where people are miserable, but not here in this Type-I, Tech-13 city where we all LOVE her.  In fact, I don't think we will even give you a chance to apologize.

That doesn't give me an incremental scale, not yet ... but it does provide a framework from which I might evolve an incremental scale, given time.

Anyway, this is what I'm working on right now.  It is bound to spawn all kinds of interesting posts.

Groups

Okay.

Suppose you want to create a generation machine to determine what a hex contains: people, monsters, topography, vegetation, defenses, dungeons, what have you.  You could put together a simple linear table that would have a list of results: on a d100, a 01-03 indicates a single dwelling, a 04-06 indicates a thorp, a 07-09 indicates a hamlet, and so on - the DMG proposed just such a table.  The number of results could be increased well past 100 possibilities, by having the list on a d1000 or even a d10000.  Just creating 10,000 possible results could take some time.

But suppose you would rather have the results appear more towards a bell curve: upon 3d6, some kind of settlement could occur upon a 10 or an 11, while pure wilderness would occur upon a 3 or an 18 ... with varied gradients appearing with other numbers.  The avid creator could try 3d100 or 3d1000, assigning results according to the bell curve as desired.

It would be nice, however, if the bell curve could depend upon some central theme, and that the theme would give us a sense of the hex contents, as well as the purpose the hex serves in the greater picture of the generated wilderness ... after all, we are not merely generating one hex, but potentially hundreds, and it would be nice if somehow the generation thereof produced a cohesive result.

Very well, let's try something simple.

Suppose we take a hex, and we carve it up into seven smaller hexes, like so:

There's nothing at all unusual about this picture.  For game purposes, its usually assumed that the blank areas between the hexes are 'covered,' and that the hex pattern is an identifying convenience.  We can see that seven hexes fit inside the first hex, and that these seven hexes could be considered zones A to G or 1 to 7 ... or Alpha-Bravo-Charlie-Delta-Echo-Foxtrot-Golf if you like.  For the moment it doesn't matter.  For the purpose of this document, I'm more concerned with the designation between the large, greater hex and the seven lesser hexes within.  I could go with greater and lesser, but for greater clarity I'm going to go with Senior and Junior.  Thus, there is one Senior hex and seven Junior hexes. 

Suppose we then define each junior hex as one of two things: habitable or non-habitable.  For our purposes, we can say habitable is arable and easily accessible - so fields, meadows, well-watered flats, glades, what have you.  We can then consider non-habitable as rocky, dangerous, overgrown, flooded or filled with sand dunes.

We can then postulate that any of the seven junior hexes is either 'H' or 'non-H' ... and this gives us a number of base possibilities equalling 2 to the 7th power, or 128.

Not a huge number.  Moreover, I must argue that the actual number of possibilities is much smaller ... but let's leave that go for the moment.

Immediately and right off, we can consider the best possible arrangement to be where every junior hex is H.  That provides the most arable land and the greatest food production ... and the greatest ease of travel.  Roads are cheap to build and cart-tracks are everywhere.  We can assume that such an area is well-watered, and probably that there is some kind of significant conglomeration of people.  How significant would probably be determined by the amount of arability in adjacent hexes - for now, let's just say that any hex that is all arable contains a Town ... which would be 1 in 128 hexes.

Now suppose we look at groups (or 'groupings,' as opposed to 'patterns') where just one junior hex is non-H:

Odds are 7:128 of getting just one non-H hex, but there are only two possible groups... and the group on the left (A) is six times less likely to occur than the group on the right (B). Consider what either might mean.

For that, I propose that any 'habitable' might be a designation used properly just with humans; if there's going to be a dungeon, or some dangerous lair, or some evil element in the senior hex, its going to be in the black patch above.

Consider that for Group B three of the junior hexes are removed from the non-H hex, so that they can be protected by those three hexes that are adjacent.  Of course, the next senior hex over might be filled with non-H hexes, but let's disregard that.  Group B is at least somewhat 'gathered' together, in that there is a central region that can be protected and even be considered almost as good as lacking non-H hexes altogether.  A good sized village or small town can easily be imagined to fit here.

But Group A is a mess.  The central non-H hex dominates the senior grouping, disrupting communication between H hexes across from one another.  Surely this must indicate some unique situation: perhaps a holy religious centre, or a reclusive fortification, surrounded by cliffs or swamps.  It's hard to imagine anything but rough hamlets surrounding the central hex.

Let's move onto hexes where two junior hexes are non-H:

Odds here are 21:128, but in fact there are four possible patterns.  Turn them around however you wish, the groups only occur as above.  From left to right, call them A, B, C and D.

A & D are notable in that the non-H hexes are adjacent, creating larger dangerous regions.  Group D especially reduces communication between two of the H hexes, suggesting those hexes might be arable, but backward and probably poorer.  Group A allows for the greatest conglomeration of good transport and land ... in that way, it offers the best opportunities for a good habitation.

Group B has four hexes gathered together, so that might be a village, but at least part of the senior group would be represented by some sort of backward sort, cotters and rustics reached by a somewhat dangerous road, beset by two areas from which bandits or who knows what else might emerge.  Group C could be some sort of pass, or perhaps a ford along a dangerous river (the black areas could be swamps along a river coarse), making it an important military post, or transshipment point.

After all, the black areas may not be woods, swamps or mountains at all: they could represent an ocean or a lake.  There are many possibilities.  Thus Group C could be Corinth, an isthmus between two seas.

Let's continue; you'll certainly be getting the idea now.

These are very common, with odds of 35:128.  If we go with the proposals advanced so far, we have to presume that none of these would possess anything like a major town.  Group A (left to right again) would maybe have a 500-person village ... the rest would be occupied by hamlets or thorps.  Perhaps where three good hexes came together you could put a hamlet of 50-200 people, and where two came together, a thorp of 20-80.  Thus Group A would have a village, two hamlets and four thorps; Group B would have a hamlet and four thorps; Group C would have three thorps, as would Group D; Group E would only have two thorps, as well as Group F.

Both Groups E and F feature hexes that are completely removed; any such arrangement would probably indicate some kind of border or boundary, potentially one for language and culture as well as for political authority.  A road through such a group would be rare.

At any rate, you can see how the conglomeration of good hexes affects the overall picture to the positive or the negative.  Once the arrangement is identified as being a mass of wilderness, or civilization, the logic of what should occupy the hex - and even the adventuring within - becomes evident.  And this is with just two options.  Suppose you were to designate the junior hexes with three possible results for each, rather than two - well, the possible arrangements would soar to 2,187.  There wouldn't be any point in that, however, unless you could define what all those permeatations meant ... and once again, that could take some time.

But you could establish the meaning of any combination - so that even if you designated a junior hex could be either friendly humanoid, enemy humanoid, deserted or with a big bad (4 to the 7th power, 16,384 possible combinations), then even if you couldn't predict every possibility, you could look at two adjacent hexes and know what was there.  And where to take it with a session should the party enter the senior hex.

Oh, I should post the remaining possible groups.  Those that remain are just negatives of those above:

Incidentally, I stumbled across this idea tonight, as I was conjecturing how to design a hex-filling generator, and I thought I'd go ahead and write a post about this in the hopes of inspiring some further advice.  To me, it seems a good way to build a strong bell-curve to construct a randomized world.  Yes, I have presented the above discussion as though the groups might be isolated.  I recognize that an expanse of differently generated hexes should create patterns that would go beyond just the junior hexes.  Moreover, you could easily tweak the pattern by having H hexes turn up slightly more commonly than non-H hexes (or the reverse), changing the amount of tweak for one continental area vs. another (Europe vs. Africa).

It is just the kernal of an idea, I think.  It needs a grander, unifying approach.