Agriculture Graph

When I started this process, I thought the layout was going to be nit-picky and arduous, but to tell the truth I'm rather enjoying it.  Most of this research was already done; so most of what I'm doing here is reformatting ... but I am finding that process more relational and comparative than the collection of notes that I have.  True, the notes are more copious, as is the source material for this.  But working on the charts has been fun.

Agriculture comes into existence with development 6; before that, it is technically "gathering," which is covered on the hunting page.  I have four more of these, before going back to my description of Stavanger ... but even then I have ideas for more visual aids on these same lines, that I look forward to working on.

I am experimenting with different backgrounds.  This seems too washed out for me; a more stark design is called for, but I haven't settled on what that would be.

Incidentally, when I do get to development 7 cultures, and that is in the future, I'll be expanding on all these pages and adding still new ones.  It's all very interesting for me; it locks together several juxtaposed pleasures: history, visual design, game play and worldbuilding, as well as raw creativity.

Hunting Graph

Like the fishing chart, we have the collection of building blocks for the wilderness, in which predatory hunting is the only "knowledge," participated in singly or in groups (such as by wolves or other carnivorous family groups).

Hunting expands technologies and that makes more building blocks at the very bottom level of development ... and that in turn changes when hunting is adjusted by the presence of archery, animal husbandry and agriculture.

I swear.  I'm showing these charts around to my immediate families and players and all I get back is a blank stare and a vague compliment.  I feel like Syndrome.

Fishing Graph

My biggest issue with the development system is keeping the content straight in my head, so that I can tailor changes that enter in with new developments.  Everything in the diagram above is related to just fishing knowledge ... though certain things throughout might be applied to other things, such as bows for hunting or boats for military raiding.  The goal here is only to provide a visual relationship between the actual technical knowledge, what physical things that creates, how that affects culture, what improvements exist, what trade references the improvements derive from and what building blocks are created by the composite of the above.

The table isn't complete, even for the development stages meant.  This includes merely that which I've been able to think of, or which was tagged by something I researched.  There's always room to add something else if the notion of it presents itself.

Just a quick run-down.  References are invented products that are integral to my trade system.  Hexes that serve as physical locations for the presence of these references are called "improvements" ~ which are a special form of building block, which I have been describing at length for many weeks now.  Improvements increase the amount of food, labor or wealth, as well as more esoteric things such as culture, health or happiness, depending on what the reference is.  Most hexes, regardless of possessing an improvement, will have some degree of food, labor or wealth production.  Improvements just improve that.

Building blocks largely derive from technology; but may potentially derive from anything.

Here I'm dividing "knowledge" from "technology" so as to distinguish what is known from what is built with that knowledge.

Finally, cultural aspects derive from the use of technology or knowledge.

Beyond this, I think the table above is self-explanatory.  Please do not hesitate to ask questions about it.

I plan to begin constructing tables like this for every type of knowledge that applies.  So far, apart from fishing, I have introduced hunting, meditation, agriculture, animal husbandry, archery, mining and the wheel.  I then intend to update these as I progress with development stages, while continuing to add more sources of knowledge.  So I have a job ahead of me.

I was originally trying to build the table above in excel; but it was simply getting visually out of hand.  I am hoping this more graphic example is clearer, more flexible and ultimately more readable by people who don't have the benefit of reading my thoughts.

Stavanger Development 6: Introduction

If you've not been following along with this series, you'll want to start with this index post, with a list of the foregoing content relative to what's written below.

I can't say how much readers would like me to continue expanding on the Stavanger village adventure, regarding the wolf, the Sand clan, the shaman and the chief.  If that's to your fancy, let me know and I'll write a post outlining the rest of my plans there.  If I had a prize to give, I could create some sort of challenge to come up with the best set of possibilities ... just now, I'm anxious to move on with the next part of my program.

The year is 1237.  The settled lands and population of Rogaland have expanded considerably over the past three and a half centuries.  Stavanger itself is now a town of 1,628 people.  The whole population of Rogaland has tripled, to over 3,900.  New clans have come into existence; old clans have expanded their importance.  Rogaland is now considered to have a development of 6.

How, I'll ask, should we contrast the above with the previous map?  It isn't enough to say there are more people, or that three and a half centuries have passed.  What exactly does that mean?  How has Rogaland changed?  What about it matters to us as DMs, and the way we're going to run this region?

These are questions I've been asking since 2015, that I've failed to succeed answering in two previous attempts. I have better answers now, from research that I've done, but the answers are deep, complicated and far reaching.  And this still isn't a land of complex development.  But the full measure of that will have to be managed at another time.

My starting place has been the technology growth itself, so I will start there.  In the past 345 years, Rogaland has developed agriculture; animal husbandry; archery; mining; and the wheel.  They did not invent any of these; but their use has spread into the region, so that these things are typical now, complete with social effects and the knowledge that comes with knowing how to do these things.

Let's look at these things one-by-one, starting with the old technologies of fishing, hunting and mysticism.

Fishing has changed.  Where once the settlers simply did their best to catch the fish that were there, using primitive boats, now the boats have expanded into Viking warships ... these, however, at least in Rogaland, lack good sailing technology.  Some adventurers from Rogaland have raided outwards in these last two centuries, but primarily the coasts of Denmark and northern Germany, lands that can be reached by coastal journeys.

Some old fishing grounds are played out.  However, better and stronger boats now enable the residents to reach further out from the shores, finding other fishing grounds in deeper water.  The old Stavanger fishing ground continues to sustain the population ... however, common practice now selects stocks, in order to ensure a larger stock of fish.  Inland, the widespread presence of the bow (see Archery, below) has resulted in widespread bowfishing ... which is now seen by some as a recreational activity, rather than the old desperate efforts to ensure food for the clans.  With agriculture (see below), food is plentiful; so some activities have taken on a new bent.

Hunting, for example, is not what it was.  There are still bands of pure hunters, particularly in the wildest areas, but far more meat is now obtained by professional hunters, who use the bow and improved techniques to track and kill game, which is then sold in the village of Treborg, in the northwest, or in Stavanger, or to some of the larger rural clans.

Hunting has developed a new purpose, as well: the importance of keeping wild animals from feeding on croplands, or encroaching on civilized areas.  These things combine to initiate the development of the ranger class, who operate as scouts and foresters, learning to know the wild and protecting civilized places from it.

Mysticism is a strange adjustment.  Rogaland has been declared Christian.  The Christian church of St. Svithun's was completed some 90 years ago.  But is Rogaland really Christian?  Or is that in name only.

My call is that the religion is meant to be Christian, but like most fundamentally pagan cultures, the old ways continue to possess the minds of the people.  This dichotomy is called "folk religion."  A certain class of persons in the region do believe in Christianity; but the majority hold onto their pagan beliefs, ideals and cultural touchstones.  Most in Rogaland will never have seen St. Svithun's Domkirke in Stavanger.  To them, it has little meaning in their lives.

At the same time, however, the shaman seeks to withdraw from this mix of expressions, seeking greater unity with nature and a more enlightened perspective.  This is the beginning of the druid class.

Agriculture is the most notable development.  It is hard to fathom what a game changer it is.  It greatly increases food supply and makes the population sedentary instead of moving.  This advances the permanency of housing; and the elaboration of rooms designed for different purposes within the house.  The year becomes cyclical based on the requirements of agriculture: planting, harvest, different crops grown at different times of year and so on.  The crops need tending, which creates a different social structure from the previous clan life. Where before, everyone shared, no matter who obtained the food, now the principle is everyone works for their share; those who refuse are exiled.  The need to control and manage labor creates a structure for controlling and managing disputes of all kind.  Division of fields creates notions of property and private ownership.  These are considerable changes guiding a culture than what we saw with Stavanger in 892.

Animal Husbandry, too, increases the food supply, adds to ideas of ownership and helps specialize part of the population as herders, fence makers, protective hunters, tanners, leather workers and butchers.  The proliferation of animal products increases the need to trade for other sorts of food, creating a bartering economy ~ where regular exchanges, rather than individual negotiations, are common.  We always provide a certain amount of eggs or milk through the year in exchange for our stipend of grain; such-and-such an amount of leather is always exchanged for this much fish; and regular tributes in foods and products are given to members of the community who have certain entitled positions.

Horses are raised for transport, but not for war (not yet), in some cultures associated with the wheel (see below).  Dogs as companions, (but not war dogs) with minimal herding skills,  are bestowed as puppies throughout the clans, sometimes between clans.  Buildings protecting and controlling animals (sheep, pigs, fowl, goats) create "yards" around houses, further enhancing the idea of privacy and ownership.  This privacy begins to disrupt clans, as immediate families become more precious than extended families.

Archery is practiced for a number of reasons; defense and hunting, yes, but also for sport and as a competitive activity.  Contests inspire seasonal festivals, supported by the agricultural cycle, as gatherings for mass consumption of food, or the effort needed to plant many fields, naturally bring whole communities together.

Mining encourages individualism, as single persons separate from the main community to seek gems, placer metals or ores that can be exchanged with foreigners in Stavanger.  This is a whole different economy; while the residents of Rogaland in 1237 have no need for such things, being unable to smelt metals, and seeing gems as merely objects, such things can bring in very small supplies of outside goods, which will be possessed by a few but not by the majority.  One fellow in a clan may have a sword or a metal-headed spear ... but most would be limited to wooden weapons.

The mule does not exist, but donkeys do; and primitive sluice boxes are within the ken of the region's development.  There are no laws that govern mine extraction or taxes, but little protection exists for prospectors who work alone in the wild.

The Wheel creates changes of its own.  Carts are built, causing the proliferation of cart tracks between close communities.  Being that Stavanger has no overland connection with any other village or town (Treborg is more easily reached by water), cart tracks are few.  Some would exist around both Stavanger and Treborg.  Carts are built by carters and wheelwrights, further increasing the barter economy.  The use of donkeys and horses to pull carts increases the transfer of materials and communication.  Along with better water craft, the region of Stavanger is more closely in touch, both within and without the community.

The region of Stavanger is not developed enough to have a monarchy ~ it is too primitive and rural to sustain a local lord.  Rather, it would be a tribute province of outside kings.  So long as a certain amount of tribute is produced each year, to be collected in Stavanger, the local customs and privileges would be more-or-less ignored.  There simply isn't enough wealth to encourage an outsider to more purposefully fleece the population.  Even the agriculture isn't excessive.  There are no kilns to make bricks and no central planning to create public buildings, like granaries.  Instead, it is a quiet, primitive country backwater, but obviously much improved these past three and a half centuries over what it was.

Building Stavanger with Blocks

If you've not been following along with this series, you'll want to start with this index post, with a list of the foregoing content relative to what's written below.

The next goal would be to create an urban map of the dev-5 Stavanger that we've described, made of building blocks, then apply some of those base needs that those blocks need in order to create player experience and adventure.  Remember: we're not making the town for its own sake, but as an interactive tool ... something the players can walk through and thus become invested.

Before getting into that, however [and sorry for the tease], I must address some relative points regarding scale and the actual town of Stavanger ~ because whatever system I might try to create, it is never going to reflect, or simulate the real world.

This is a google image of Stavanger's downtown, centered on the oldest building in the city:

Note how we're allowed to call the Norwegian name, St. Svithun's Domkirke, "Stavanger Cathedral," but
we're still required to pronounce "Qatar" as cutter.  Pedantry is inconsistent and stupid.

St. Svithun's Domkirke

According to my reading, the church was built between 1100 and 1150; with the principle architecture and towers in place by 1125.  It creates a problem for me that I'll address later, but that's not important just now.

The reader may recall that I had settled on a block size of 3.7 acres for my town map hexes ... and that has been a devilishly hard thing to conceptualize.  Thankfully, Google Earth has come to the rescue.  The circle above, centered on the cathedral, is a space of 3.7 acres.  Which is rather clear.

Additionally, I've come across this marvelous document, discussing (among other demographic things) the number of persons per housing unit in various cities, as well as the number of rooms per housing unit, in obscure places around the world.  I have come across several references to low density villages possessing four housing units per acre; and the document here gives me reason to settle on a convenient number of 2 to 5 residents per housing unit (as it gives data for very low development parts of the world, such as Gambia and Malaysia-Sabah.  It's not a fully reliable number, but it is ballpark enough that if I say that a primitive culture might have 32 to 80 persons per urban game block, I'm not utterly talking through my hat.  This may not matter to some, but it matters to me.

Okay, let's get around to mapping Stavanger.  I know this is the part that starts to get out of control.  Everything up to here is conjecture ... but we are, effectively, going to build an adventure, and we're going to need a map to do it.  I'll see if I can't give the reader some tools to handle the problems that arise in creating an interesting framework upon which to hang pre-made adventures and on-the-fly adventures alike.

Let's start by superimposing the map above onto a field of hexes:

Now, all the hexes are the size of "blocks."  We can decide from here how dense the village of Stavanger is going to be.  We know from the links, and other content that I've covered, that 225 people per block would be very dense; some of the blocks above, of downtown modern Stavanger, probably are that dense.  But our village will be a lot less so.  I've suggested that 32 persons per block would be the low end; that 80 would be high.  I've already described long houses in a previous post, saying that there are three in my Stavanger of 892.  We can say that those three each have 80 or so people; and then stipulate, say, the independent family dugouts have an average density of 32 per block.  And I said that Stavanger had 553 people.

That makes 13 blocks; 3 big ones and 10 smaller.  Good enough.  But where do we put them?  Randomly scatter them over the map?  That's a very poor idea; we have a map of an actual place.  We can do a little forensics and decide for ourselves how to arrange those blocks ~ and use some of what we already know about Stavanger to do it.

So here's Stavanger again, only now I've muted the real city so that I can label some of the local colour that we can take into account:

If this is your fantasy world, you can always take any real place from anywhere in the world and deconstruct that place a little.  That's all I'm doing here; I'm just taking advantage of the real Stavanger to create a fictional one.

I have no idea if the land between the lake (Breiavatnet) and the sea was swampy; but that seems likely, particularly as the modern images show the lake shore and the sea shore have both been encased by concrete.  I'm suggesting, then, that 0402 and 0403 are left empty ... except as places where fishing boats could be landed during the night, where they could take advantage of the tides (which are not a great change, but critical).  0402 could be a mud flat, barely a foot above sea level, which might rise enough to let the fishing folk ease their boats out in obedience to the tide.

The best access to both the sea and the flat would be 0301 ~ which becomes the future market, someday.  That's a good hex for the fishing folk's long house.  The hunter's longhouse can be nearby, where present government buildings are ... with fair access to the fresh water of the lake and the forest.  A grouping of lodges (the secondary density blocks) can encircle the hexes between these two longhouses and the forest, following around the edge of the lake.

The present location of the church (which will be built 200 years later) can serve as the shaman's longhouse.  The access to the sea is up to us.  We could stipulate that the mud flat extends into 0401, 0501, even 0601, cutting the shaman's house well off.  That could serve the shaman's purpose, however; the shaman is, in a sense, the balancing power against the hunters and chieftain, and certainly doesn't need access to the sea.  We can then stack the remaining lodges behind the shaman and have our village laid out (knowing why it was built that way).

I'll let the reader think about that for a bit, while I go and make a map ... then we can get into further methods of sorting out our adventure building.

Building Blocks & Stavanger Index

The series on urban adventures and the description of Rogaland/Stavanger is getting so long that I feel I need to organize the relevant posts.  Read the posts from the beginning and bookmark this page.  Here they are (and I will expand the list as new posts are added):

Part One: Building Blocks

What Good are Town Maps? ~ Introducing why town maps don't deliver on all they promise regarding adventure support.

Putting Down Roots ~ How are towns formed; how do people and processes accumulate over time?  And what sorts of conditions create what kinds of towns?

The Steady Urban State ~ Misconceptions about how towns are laid out, discussing how money and labour divide the motivations and designs of one neighborhood from another.

Dogpiling ~ Why it is hard for players to adventure in a town, what makes a town especially dangerous and how a DM can circumvent those issues.

I'll Ask Again: What Do We Want a Town Map For? ~ What do the players want?  What informs them about how to see the environment, and what matters when it comes to adventure.  How time presents as a factor in town adventures, and how urban environments in real life defy our ability to effectively explore every nook and cranny.

How Much Can You Search? ~ What is an ideal scale for designing a map that will separate out the bits and pieces of how a player can search, given limitations on time?

Building Blocks ~ Defining a city block, both in terms of its size and why that size is the subject of study for urban planners.  What can we know about density and how can that knowledge inform our game design?

A Day at the Beach ~ An example of how a particular, obscure urban block can be expanded into a role-playing and adventure opportunity, just by knowing how the people in that environment live, and what they know.

We Know Already How This Works ~ Using city blocks as a tool, what are the four purposes that we should keep in mind when having a party hex crawl through a town, or through an game space?

One Block at a Time ~ A conclusion to the subject of building blocks, with what a designer should keep in mind.  Some examples of blocks, with the understanding that such a list could easily contain hundreds of possibilities.  My intention to keep expanding the list in the future.

Part Two: Building Rogaland

The Failed Plan ~ My original plans for explaining and expanding on my development-infrastructure worldbuilding concept, which I have tried before without success.  I had a new strategy, it got bolluxed by the death of wikispaces and now it is my intention to unveil the process piece by piece.  Includes a 6-mile hex map of Rogaland.

Haugaland ~ Introducing 5 development cultures (dev-5), starting with the NE corner of Rogaland. I discuss wilderness vs. rural lands, and how the wilderness can be subjected to a random die roll to create building blocks of adventure.  Relating the way adventures can be designed according to topography, terrain and relationships between wilderness and civilization, as opposed to whim.  Description of rural/wilderness blocks.

Making a Standard that Creates Distinctions ~ Further discussing how to breathe life into a low development culture, to make it into something that players would care about and feed adventures.  What makes this primitive rural clan hex different from a slightly less primitive rural clan hex?  How nuance is all important.

More About Rogaland's Dev-5 Culture ~ Describing the rest of dev-5 Rogaland, excepting the settlement of Stavanger.  How isolation creates separate entities that can, in turn, build conflict ... and that although different rural blocks may have similar characteristics, that does not mean that we can't invest those blocks with unique ideas.

Stavanger's Initial Growth ~ Describing a primitive settlement in a dev-5 culture, and how that settlement morphs over time to become slightly less primitive, with an influx of people and without any fundamental change in the environment, culture or technology.

Building Stavanger with Blocks ~ Once we decide to make a village map of Stavanger, how do we decide to lay out the various buildings?  This post gives a shorthand way of thinking it through.

Adding People ~ Buildings and even occupations are not enough. A settlement is made of people, who interact with each other, promoting group personalities and conflicts.

Bend Your Mind ~ Setting the mindset for building an adventure from scratch: what are we looking to achieve, how is the adventure going to make our players play, and what sort of motivations will the players uncover as they investigate the adventure?

The Village of Stavanger, 892 AD

Horik's Block ~ Introducing a short adventure surrounding the village of Stavanger as it existed in the year 892.  We meet the chieftain, Horik, and examine the benefits gained with Status.

Sand's Block ~ The players meet their family, and learn a little more about what's going on in Stavanger, and what is about to happen.

The Shaman's Block and More ~ A discourse on the wider Stavanger adventure, told from the perspective of the six principles of game feel, expanding on earlier posts discussing this idea.

The Town of Stavanger, 1237 AD

Stavanger Development 6: Introduction: An overview of what's changed in Stavanger with the introduction of certain technologies and culture, in the last 345 years.

More to come ...

Stavanger's Initial Growth

Prior to this, in the posts about Haugaland and about West Rogaland, we've been talking about rural culture.  As Rogaland in general possesses a 5 development (dev-5), these are hunters living on clan lands without much technology.

Stavanger is an actual village, the only one in Rogaland in the year 892.  It is but 20 years old.  Already, it has jumped to a type-6 settlement ... but before we describe that, let's for a moment remember that it would have been a type-7 settlement for a brief while.

I hate that I keep having to explain this, but a type-7 settlement is the lowest form of settlement; a type-1 would be the highest.  Between 7 and 1, the characteristics of a settlement are modified, according to a complex scheme that does not only account for size, population and production, but also for what happens to be produced as a reference in my trade system, and the cultural development of the region.  The idea here is to unify the various worldbuilding systems I've been describing on my blog for a decade now: trade, my maps, my hex-generated infrastructure system and the late coming development/technology system.

[the 10th anniversary of this blog is in just ten days; say something nice]

To explain briefly about the map: Stavanger shows four food (bread slices) and two labor (hammers).  Because of the infrastructure number (type-6), the hex naturally supplies 2 food and 1 labor.  Note how Randa, with type-7, has no labor bonus.  Stavanger gets +1 food from the fish reference.  Note how Osthus, which is also type-6, but has no settlement, also gets a +1 food from a completely different fish reference.  Finally, Stavanger gets a +1 food and a +1 labor from being a type-6 "settlement," rather than a rural hex.

To get a sense of how Stavanger grew, let's go back to when it was a type-7 settlement, rather than a type-6.  It is a year or two after Stavanger was founded, say 874.  There are some 150 people living there.  What might that entail?  First, that food production is noteworthy; not just because the hex itself would likely be the most productive in Rogaland, but because tribute to the tribal chief and bartering would cause food to find its way to the region's center.  The requirements of the chief, the need to protect and elevate the chief's family, the conditions of Norway's climate and the associations between the chief and the population would result in the building of a long house, to shelter most of the people.  A warmer climate might have a scattering of huts, but this is Norway; it gets cold.

The present labor of more than 75 strong-backed residents would mean it could be a fairly substantial long house, large enough to house all of Stavanger.  The house would be near the water, as fishing is the primary occupation (note the fishing symbol, or trade reference, on the map above).  Inside and out, there would be areas for assembling raw materials, making tools and garments, tanning leather, carving, cleaning and drying fish and building primitive boats.  Many of the residents would be transient; paying fealty and tribute to the chief, seeking shelter when shunned by their clans, small nomadic groups stopping before moving on and, of course, the occasional outsider.  The clan leadership itself would be minimal; the "chief" would be a figurehead, but he or she would likely have no real power without strong support from the main body of villager leaders.

Not a very exciting place.  Or, rather, tremendously exciting compared to life in the forest.  It is all a matter of perspective.  From a player character viewpoint, if our party of primitive fighters were to show up, this is where intrigue would be found, with varying leaders pushing to have their agendas addressed, for their personal gain.  The party would enter this milieu with their own agendas, being pressed to make more friends than enemies as we role-played the game.

All right, it is 892 again.  Stavanger has grown to 553 people ... still a village, but too large for just one long house.  Let's say there are three of note and a group of lesser shelters, of the sort depicted above but more distinctly built about six feel below ground-level (with turf on top) and large enough for two or three families (we'll get to why in a bit).  The three noteworthy buildings are divided according to their occupations.  Most of the fishing folk dwell in one that is nearest to the shore where the boats are protected.  The hunting long house, or "lodge," is closer to the forest; and it houses the more powerful chieftain and more influential and official body of village leaders, or elders.  Finally, a third longhouse, less ornate and protective, shelters much of the common folk; and this house is the residence of Stavanger's shaman and small body of the shaman's personal servants.  People who cling to the shaman in order to have a place in the village hierarchy.

The amount of free labor is greater ~ thus we add another labor to the symbols shown on the map above.  That accounts for all the benefits Stavanger gets from being a settlement (remember, it got a +1 food when it was just a type-7 settlement, back in 874).  This labor is applied to more boats, more tools, the making of weapons to protect the chief and the region (stone-and-wood weapons), possibly crude armor (cloth and shields) and the collection of more raw materials.  Brush and other wooden enclosures, less sophisticated than a palisade, have been built along the forest to protect the village.  Most of the wood nearest to the village has already been cut down for firewood.  During the day, much of this labor is gone from the village; the hunters into the forest, the fishing folk out onto the water.  Only the children, the women and the shaman's followers remains (the shaman might disappear for days at a time, seeking mushrooms, herbs, a vision, whatever).

So we can see the evolution of the village.  If we started our game in 892, the players would never see the type-7, early Stavanger that was there before.  But we want to have some of it in our heads; so that we can envision where the residents came from, what they see as important, to them ... and where do they want to go in the future?  But we will get to that.

Okay, I mentioned that I would come back around to families.  I will; but I'm going to start a new post with it, to help maintain one principle subject per post.  I know that this is a tremendous wash of information for the reader, and that it can be overwhelming trying to imagine keeping all this in one's head.  Keep this is mind: we are not talking about rules.  We can simplify rules until the cows come home, but we're still stuck with the necessary proposition that creating a believable, fascinating world with depth is an unbelievable, monumental task ... one that, again, the official company simply ignores, pretending that every adventure can be made entirely out of stereotypes.

If we can see how the village of Stavanger works, we can put ourselves and our players into the place; and help them to walk around, watching the residents work, watching the interaction between the residents present itself ~ and understand what is important to these people.  What would change their lives?  What would they want?  How does the party fit into that equation.

Until the next post, then.

More About Rogaland's Dev-5 Culture

I'd like to try and get this post squeezed in today before I have to go do something else ... so I'll give it a try.

On the right, we see the rest of Rogaland, as it appears in a stage of 5 development (or "dev-5").  Haugaland, that we covered in the link, is not shown, is attached to the upper right corner of the map.

With Haugaland, we can loosely divide the region, or tribe, into four parts.

The clan of Harald, at the top of the map, is off by itself, and from the type-7 hex, we see that it isn't any more than a very obscure enclave.

At the bottom of the map, the two clans of Verda and Orre form an enclave around the lake of Orrevatnet.  Again, both are type-7; we may assume they are interrelated and friendly, but that is not necessarily so.

Finally, in the middle, surrounding the mouth of the Bokna Fjord, the large circle of water that surrounds the islands shown, we have four clans ~ Randa, Osthus, Loda and Skuden ~ and one actual village, Stavanger.

We can see that it is the end point of a circle of communication, which we presume extends overland to Verda-Orre and up the shoreline to Haugaland, pulling the Land of Roga together.  Stavanger is the only settlement ... all of these other hexes are clan lands, without agriculture, where hunters are able to sustain themselves on the rich natural game, fish and other forage that exists.  There's nothing here, except for Stavanger, that is different from what we learned about Haugaland.

I want to stress that this is in our favor.  By designating these places as "not much," we don't necessarily make them cookie-cutter replicates of each other.  All it gives is a very definite sense of what players would find there if they went: foragers, who fish a little and hunt a little, living a subsistance lifestyle.  It doesn't say every hex is the same!  A hex could have a special shaman in it, or an object that could wash up on the shore in only this hex, that the players could only find if they chose to explore there.  We are freed, however, of having to invent a whole culture from scratch in every one of these places.  These are basically all clans belonging to the same tribe, with the same basic beliefs, the same anthropological social structure, the same familiar foods and habits ... and representing something to the players that can be embraced as a reliable consistency that can be banked upon, exploited, used as crutch or however the players want to see it.  There's a weakness in making everything staggeringly different; the inconsistency becomes a malaise, which the characters just don't embrace.  We've all created a bit of something we consider imaginative and ready for adventure, to have experienced players respond to with a shrug.

There is something comfortable about consistency that we should not discard, thinking that everything about the game world has to be jazz hands and sparkly fire streamers.  Players are going to grow familiar anyway ... why not make your preparation process as a DM a bit easier by giving the players a bit of what they want?

Let me step out of that argument a moment and bring up the fact that there are no type-5 hexes here.  Even the settlement of Rogaland is type-6.  Type-5 hexes in a dev-5 culture are rare.  We can imagine them as a sort of sylvan paradise; the atmosphere that is usually associated with the elven settlements of Lorien or Rivendell.  Places where we do not have merely common beauty, like an emerald-green forest or a field of flowers, but startling, eye-popping beauty, with waterfalls, or magnificent oak trees hundreds of feet high and a thousand years old.  Where the fish leap out of the ponds and into your bucket.  Where the water is so fresh that your grandparents can taste it.  These would be places of pilgrimage; where the tribe would gather once every five years, or where the tribal chieftain would be crowned.  And they would be places where rare herbs were found, where faeries would congregate and remain in contact with the common tribe.

Most of all, and I cannot stress this enough ... not every part of the world would be lucky enough to have such a place.  Rogaland does not.  And before we move onto where we describe Rogaland as a more developed culture, a type-5 hex will have a different meaning. In a more sophisticated culture, a type-5 rural hex won't be occupied by hunters and gatherers; it will be occupied by people who till crops for living, who grow things.  Whatever the hex was when the land was mostly empty will have been altered.  There may be a sylvan  hex-block in such a culture ... but it won't be the sort of sylvan hex that exists in a completely hunter-gatherer culture.

Too, there's nothing that says that a sylvan hex has to be associated with any civilization.  Just as an eradicator monster such as a lich or a beholder can wipe out all life in a hex block to make a home, a faerie culture can expand life, making an obscure sylvan hex block as beautiful as an eradicator hex block is ugly.  The key is to imagine that the world makes sense, then to set up those hex blocks in a pattern that evokes adventure, rather than crushing it.

I need to talk about Stavanger, but time is running short.  I can put it in its own post.  This will suffice for now as content.

Making a Standard that Creates Distinctions

Many of you, I know, are seeing your mothers today, but as a pater familias I am free from such things; so I am writing a post instead.

A little background: though if you are familiar with my systems you won't need this.  The map on the right shows the four clan lands of Haugaland, as it exists in a development-5 stage (which I am saying would be about 982 AD in my world.  Each hex is designated by a number, indicating how much of the hex is "civilized."  In this system, less is more, so that the type-6 hex is more civilized than the type-7 hex.  I have tried to reflect this by cutting away more natural vegetation with the type-6 hex than I have with the others.

The reader might think it was the fishing ground, indicated by the small fish in the water, that makes the type-6 hex more civilized.  In fact, it was just chance.  The values of the hex were determined by an infrastructure system that I use, that I will have to sort out in a wiki post; if you know nothing about it, you might start with this post.

My goal is to breathe life into these four hexes, and in such a manner that it sets a template for other hexes, with other landforms and climates, with other peoples, and with other levels of development ... and to create that template with one thing in mind: to feed the imagination.

Some might suppose that my goal is to codify the world so that every hex can be easily defined and recognized, like every other hex of that same type.  The is wrong thinking.  On some level, it almost makes sense: the world is very complex, so the solution ought to be to simplify it, in order that it can be quickly understood without much work.  However, that doesn't really make sense.  We're not making a wall out of bricks, where it is okay that every brick is the same. We are striving to make a living, breathing setting, with which the players will consistently interact with wonder, interest and ambition.  For that, we must not build a system of such excessive standardization that everything ends up being shades of lifeless grey.

We don't want to define the setting; we want to define HOW to define the setting.  What is it about the setting we should know?  And that the players will want to know?  What matters about the setting that deserves our attention.

Here's what I hope to have established so far: a 5-development region is the most primitive form of humanoid civilization that exists.  A 4-development region would be occupied by intelligent apes or other like organized monsters.  A 3-development region would consist of family groups in which bears, lions or other large carnivores would prey on a largely herbivorous population.  A 2-development region would possess lesser carnivores, with large, aggressive herbivores, like elephants, rhinocerous and moose being the dominant creatures.  A 1-development region would consist of large herds of passive wanderers, caribou, gnu, zebras, oryx and so on, where carnivores existed but were made irrelevant by the sheer mass of gentle mammalian herds.  And finally, a 0-develpment region would consist of non-intelligent life forms, mostly insects, endlessly preying upon each other in a hostile, unpleasant environment.

That primitive dev-5 humanoid culture is a hunter-gatherer culture, lacking virtually all technological progress.  Haugaland above is primitive Norway; there are Vikings elsewhere in Norway but they are not coming from here.  Supposedly, in 862, Harald Fairhair completed his conquest of Norway after a great victory at Hafrsfjord near Stavanger, but according to what I have this is a tale told four to five centuries later, wikipedia says Stavanger was not founded until 1125 (I date the place to the year of Harald's battle) and it is all historical falderal anyway.  No one knows for sure, and this is all for demonstration purposes anyway.  For our purposes here, we need only imagine that I'm describing some very primitive clans people living on the Haugesund Fjord.

A type-7 hex is, in addition, the least civilized of rural-form hexes, and therefore we have here three examples of the most backward rural cultures in the most backward of civilizations.  Everything from here is up.  Effectively, we are the warrior figure in the civilization game, without even a settler to build our first settlement with.

How, then, to make that type-7 hex in a dev-5 culture interesting?  Not just for Norway, but for every similar hex, anywhere in our world, from the northern tundra to a group of natives on an island in Polynesia?  What matters here?  Suppose we start a group of players here?  They couldn't be mages, rangers or paladins, or even thieves; thievery is possible, but these clans are based thoroughly upon a persistent sharing dynamic; it is doubtful that a thief in such a culture would live to become a player character.  There are shamans, but those are hardly clerics.  What weapons could they use?  What skills would they have?  Upon what would we base such an evaluation?

And here is where I used the base technologies as a framework for such functional questions.  The dev-5 culture has just three technologies: hunting, fishing and mysticism.  That's it.  Things like weapon-making, boat-building, monolith carving and such are amateur, handicraft skills ... that anyone learns to do, like an aboriginal making a boat from tree-bark.  It is not sophisticated boat-building.  The weapons are spears, stakes, clubs, javelins ... tools for killing animals and then re-purposed for killing other humanoids from other tribes.  There are no weaponwrights, no artisans of any kind, no persons who are professionals in a given field ... except, again, the shaman.  And there are very specific details about what the shaman does and what purpose the shaman serves - and this is definitely not the classic cleric/healer character.  It is more like a monk.

The technologies tell us also how these people get their food; "hunting" includes the process of gathering, or foraging, which I have built into the sage abilities system; actual foraging by peoples in my setting works exactly like that.  Some climates and terrains produce an abundance; some do not.  How much food is produced critically defines the nature and energy of the people.

Our next issue is to define what makes a "type-6" hex different from a "type-7" hex.  What is our logic here?  From what principle does the remaining description of the hex flow?  Remembering that this has to be a principle that can be carried into all other possible hexes, throughout the system, and all other possible levels of development.

My logic is that the land itself is what's rolled for when a random hex is determined to be a "type-6" as opposed to a "type-7."  Here I write of the land's shape and organization ... and to the degree by which a given culture is capable of using the land.  Consider this pile of rock from southern Spain, at a place called Ronda:

For the advanced moors who built the fortification on top of this bluff, it's a convenient bit of topography.  But for a primitive dev-5 culture, it is just a big impediment that has to be walked around.  So land-use and land-richness are relative to how much technological power a regon possesses.

For Haugaland in our year 982, the only thing that matters is how much food exists.  A type-6 hex produces more food than a type-7 hex.

And that would be enough for some designers, thinking that the amount of food alone is the distinction I seek, arguing that I am all about statistics and that statistics are boring.  But this is again wrong thinking, and serves people who will not go the extra step in their head in order to see the real point: why does a type-6 hex produce more food?  What is it intrinsically about the hex ~ that it is our responsibility as designers to designate ~ that makes the hex a better food producer?  That statistic is the clue that creates the structure that explains the statistic ... and this is something that I am seeing designers miss repeatedly when they set out to make a setting.

FIRST, there have to be factors about the setting that are measureable ... and THEN, that measurement has to be described and defined, both in terms of its merit and in its real world manifestation.  The merit of more food is that it creates more people, greater abundance of opportunity, a wider range of possible contacts and more reliable supply for characters adventuring in the world.  The real world manifestation is for us to see how a hex with more food looks to people who are there, who can distinguish it on sight from another hex where there is less food.  This visual appreciation then translates to the DM's efforts to explain why this hex is more relevant, interesting, or potentially threatening to the players.

Understand this and you will blunder less with your worldbuilding efforts and begin to design things that are functional, that encourage imaginative and immersive player behaviour.

What is our manifestation for these four hexes, then?  Consider: the type-7 hexes are less abundant, yes ... but they are remarkably more abundant than the wilderness hexes that have no occupation at all!  Comparatively, the type-7 hex certainly outshines the inconsistent grazing lands that have no type number.  Type-7 land must be at least rich enough to sustain a small band of 30-40 people indefinitely; these are not nomads.  There might be a wandering band of human nomads in the eastern reaches of Haugaland, as shown on yesterday's map, using up the game from one hex and moving onto the next; but that does not describe the type-7 clan represented here.

The type-7 hex is forage land ... which is what we might name the rural block it represents.  The residents forage and scavenge a subsistence food supply (there's none to share with others), gathering, collecting, fishing and occupying themselves with minimal hunting (relying on culling animals out of small local herds or relying on those that enter the hex from outside).  Their food resources consist of patches of harvested plants: seasonal berries and wild apples, mostly.  There are fish runs, notably the spawning period for salmon; late in the summer, there are places where bees provide honey; and there are bird flocks to feed on along the coast, again at certain times of the year.  The residents move from food supply to food supply with the season, squeezing out every calorie their lands can provide; and a 6-mile diameter hex is fairly rich if it can keep 40 people alive year round.

The forage land itself is full of steep drops, with difficult and uneven rocky terrain, stony or sandy areas that produce nothing, lifeless beaches, innundated bottom lands of bog and mud, high banks that deny easy access to algae-infested waters, and water courses marked by rapids and sharp falls (water falls are pretty but inconvenient to a hunter-gatherer).  Dense vegetation, brambles or briars provide more obstructions.  What trails exist are rough and tiring.  Passive wanderers are welcome, but carnivores and assorted vermin, like stirges or giant insects, and the occasion verminous creature from the sea, are all threats.

So it is harsh.  And it lends itself to adventure, somewhat ... but only in the loosest terms.  We have a role-play event where the players meet the clan, and some moment where the party encounters a wolf or a bear, or perhaps loses their footing on a trail and has a bad fall, but we're not talking truly exciting.  It is more interesting to imagine a party staggering around in the hexes outside of the lands of the Vormed clan, being thankful to find at least this much civilization, at last.

The type-6 hex must differ; and in my imagination, it does.  As a block title, we might call it fruitful land ... featuring wide, natural meadows, springs of fresh water that supply clear ponds and lakes, surrounded by low banks giving easy access to the water.  The rivers run slower, there is less wild water, and in many of these the fish feed all year long on the bottom.  Animal trails are more numerous, as the ground is less sloped and easier, while wild oats grow along the river banks, providing greater sustenance to herds, which produce more offspring.  The meadows are filled with flowers, granting more sustenance to the bees, which produce more honey and enable more fruit on the trees.

Without any change in the technology, the residents of fruitful land have less arduous journeys to make across their lands; they have more time to make structures that are more permanent, tan leather, make clothing, improve the strength of their spears or other tools.  More food means they have food they can bury for winter, or store in carved gourds.  Non-food producing labor is comparatively abundant, thus the little hammer symbol in the hex.  The open land makes it easier to clear out predators, so that it is even friendlier for herds to congregate.

It is less harsh.  The residents are happier, better fed, potentially stronger but on the whole, more willing to share with outsiders.  And all this we can surmise from reading the actual landscape of Norway (there would be many different nuances to this if we were describing these two hexes in a Russian steppe or on the edges of a jungle in central Africa), applying it rationally and building up two different schemes for life based on nothing more than a measure of privation.

In turn, a type-5 hex would have even more abundance than a type-6.  What would that look like?  How would you describe it?  I have described it, and we will certainly get there ... but I want to get the reader's imagination functioning.  I want the reader to seek out a book or two about anthropology, or hunter-gatherer societies, and wrest your brain out of the "everywhere is a bland fantasy setting" framework and into something far more concrete and applicable to the human experience, yours and mine.  Envisioning a field full of flowers, that the party encounters upon stumbling out of a deep wilderness, where they have almost died, is far more arresting to the imagination than another tiresome description of perfect elves in perfect elf costumes.

Haugaland & Hex Types

The various sorts of building blocks I described in the post, One Block at a Time, need to fit into appropriate places; there's no logic to a careenage that's no where near the water or a beastland that is adjacent to a hex where a quiet family clan resides.  I recognize that some world designers will think the latter is "kewl," but in fact it is pretty stupid and obviously geared to teach players that the world they're running through makes no gawddamn sense at all.

To that end, I've started defining hex "types," based on vegetation and circumstance.  I include a list of what I have so far at the bottom of the post, but I want to stress that all this work is in progress and therefore should not be considered complete.  "Complete" is something that would come from a lot of work.  At present, I'm concerned with demonstrating how a hex type or a building block ought to function, rather than creating a list of building blocks that would be useless if we did not know how to put them together.

Let's look at the northern part of Rogaland Dev-5, that I introduced with this post.  I've come across the name Haugaland, but now that I'm being watched by a resident of the actual Rogaland, I hesitate to say this is what this region is called in the actual world.  I'll just say this is what I'm going to call it for my world (and let's just assume this is always the case):

There are not many hex types that I've defined that fit the area ... and that's a good thing.  We want a lot of distinction, but we want the distinction to be in the nuance.  For example, the Erfjord, Vormed, Sand and Sauda clans all occupy coastland hexes, they are all arable, and they are all borderlands.  Remember, none of these are "villages;" they are likely a single long-house with a yard and everyone sleeping together, as this is Norse culture.

All the hexes are watered, but they are not all "well-watered," which includes only that area along the river (which is called Sundalslagen and is flowing through a valley that doesn't exist, because it should actually be flowing south of where the Vormed clan is, but it doesn't matter because it's my world and I'll stop bringing this up now).  Here's a table listing these hex types and others that I've developed so far:

The four clans exist on the map above because my infrastructure system put them there, the same system that I've pushed on my blog for years.  I'm simply using that infrastructure to say, "These are hexes where a deliberate effort has been made to transform verdant land into arable land.  The rest of the map is, by my reckoning at least, "verdant."  I want to stress the distinction that verdant does not mean a land of tremendous abundance, but rather a land with sufficient vegetation that it will support a herbivorous, and therefore a carnivorous, population.  The mountains of Haugaland aren't anywhere near as green as the watered lands of the Sundals river, but they are covered in lichen and short grass and they do support a population of wild goats and reindeer, and presumably a wide range of sizeable common monsters that an area such as a wasteland would not would not support.

[Just a note about "deadlands" that were described in the One Block at a Time post ~ I've separated this into the two kinds of hex above; an eradicator land would occur in either kind of hex, barren or waste, but a beastlands hex would only occur in a barren hex; just the way I see it].

The hex type is meant to be a useful short hand.  The blocks we should expect to see on the map could include, according to hex type:

• Arable.  Boat yards (if there was any boatbuilding, which there isn't), careenages (there would be one for the Erfjord clan, since there's access to fish), fishing huts (all of the clans fish, though the Erfjord clan does better), hut villages (none of the clans, as there's no settlement in Haugaland) or a sacred place (which we could say occurs with a 1 in 6 frequency).  Rolling dice, I find none of these clans are organized around such a place; but as a DM, if I had a reason, I could hand one over to any of them. Sauda, for example, which will eventually become a village.
• Borderland.  Earlier, I mentioned only one block that might apply to the borderland, that being the hunting camp; however, hunting camps are organizations of professional hunters, something that arises from a more sophisticated culture.  Represented here are four small clans, of about 30-90 people each, which we could think of as the Haugaland Tribe.  There are no professional hunters, and won't be until this region develops above its present state.  All we can say about these being borderlands is that they're fairly vulnerable to outside attack by who knows what.
• Coastland. Again, everyone is on the coast; but the fishing ground by Erfjord makes that hex unique.  I want to stress that the boats used by the inhabitants here are not viking ships!  They are not even sailing vessels, but rather primitive boats that are safe only to travel in coastline hexes.  There are viking ships in Norway at this time, but not here in my Haugaland; there isn't even a nearby market where one could be purchased and no training for any of this population in how to mange such a vessel.
• Verdant. There are lots of grazing lands, literally every other hex on the map apart from the four clan hexes.  The best hunting is bound to be along the well-watered hexes beside the river, but as my version of Rogaland has only grazing lands, the hunting is only fair.  Good enough to sustain the small population inhabiting Haugaland (using the food as a guide, about 140).

As the reader can see, from this I already know a huge amount about Haugaland, from just a few easy to fix details.  It wouldn't be hard to build an adventure that would fit the circumstances.  But since I did say that 1 in 20 grazing hexes would be a barbaric village, why not roll to see where those villages might be?  I'll even go one step further and make a suggestion for what they could be, based on the version of Norway I've imagined for my world, one in which gnomes, halflings, stone giants, trolls and kobalds inhabit.  We won't include any killer frogs; that lair, the one investigated by the online party, is near Stavanger.  I'll roll for half-hexes on the border but not for the line of hexes right on the bottom of the map (though they are eligible).  I also won't roll for the mostly empty hex on the far left, directly west of the Vormed clan.  I count 30 possible rolls.

I got three.  Of course, this is pretty simplistic.  Any one can write "gnomes" on a map and it hardly counts as an adventure!  Though, to be honest, that's what I've seen on a lot of maps these past ten years blogging.

What it does is give us a few blocks to build with.  We can decide that the gnomes are friendly, that the party has to make contact with the Vormed clan, make friends, get a Vormed fellow to lead them to the gnome village.  The gnomes are perhaps a bit aggressive, as they're not too fond of the human incursion that has incurred in the last two centuries, but with a little live and let live the party can convince them that they're need to find the kobald village in the mountains is crucial.  We can say at this time the players know nothing about the trolls.

Eventually, the gnomes lead the players over the pass and down to the kobalds; depending on the adventure we have in mind, this might lead to a parley, in which the kobalds reveal the trolls and the true presence of the Mcguffin or whatever we choose to base the adventure on.  Or it might be a slogging fight, where the kobalds are led by a troll, who escapes, and must be followed, leading the party to the troll village ...

I've added a roll to barbaric villages for my own purposes, which declares that 1 in 20 of these is a dungeon.  Now, if my whole world were just Rogaland, than I would probably make the kobald village a dungeon, and the troll village a dungeon as well.  But I have a gargantuan world, with 40,000 verdant hexes ... I can afford to spread my dungeons thinly.  Besides, I like outdoor fights in monster villages.  They can be hard scrabble for the players and it still ends in a potential heap of treasure.

I have more to say about Haugaland, but this is enough for now.  We'll pick up with more discussion of the sort of blocks that make up the clan-lands of the region.

The Failed Plan

Back in December I had a plan.  I was working on the development-infrastructure system, which has been floating around the blog now for two years, in the hopes of building a demonstration that would more clearly reflect what the system could offer in terms of world design.

My plan was to create five versions of the county of Rogaland, the provincial unit of Denmark & Norway in which the online players are adventuring.  In my world, I had determined that the actual development of Rogaland was 9 ~ which is hard to explain, since most readers here don't have enough experience in history to compare the number, or even the link, to anything in their experience.  Worse, the link calls it "technology 9" rather than "development 9," which I adopted after it was determined that readers bristled at my use of the word technology in this manner.  And that was fair.  We don't have to go into it.

For clarity's sake, a development of 9 would be a fairly backward culture for the 17th century.  Most of the things that were present in the rest of the world would be rarely seen and treated with some disdain, just as many people in backward parts of the United States continue to treat books as a bad idea, unless it's the Bible.  Most concepts, such as things we'd identify with the Enlightenment, would be alien. The people of Stavanger in the 17th century were barely out of the 10th; though Christian in name, most of this was a sort of "folk Christianity."  The idea of established churches and priests, the habit of reading and writing, and the widespread use of metals was something of a new thing.  These things were common in other parts of the world, but not in a backward, far to the north fish port like Stavanger.

To bring this home, I had planned to design a map and description of Stavanger as a development-9 region.  But I also had a plan to design Stavanger as a development-8 region, as a development-7 region, as a development-6 region and as a development-5 region.  I hoped that by remaking the same province over and over, I would show how each development level would create a markedly different cultural and structural setting, which could then be made to apply as a background for role-playing and adventure.

My ambitious plan was to make these five versions all ready, and then post them one after another on five successive days.

In December, I was putting the plan in place.  I had worked out the kinks for development 5, 6 and 7, and was working on 8 ... but I was finding the challenge fairly steep.  As each layer was built, it complicated the project, as each earlier layer had to be updated in turn.  Fishing at dev-5, for example, would work differently for dev-6, and differently again for dev-7.  With each new layer, the differences multiplied in number, as it became more and more difficult to keep the big picture clear in my head.

But, no worries, I thought.  The restaurant where I work was going to do a remodelling in late February.  I would have three weeks of time all to myself.  Until then, I would just gather information and when the break came, I'd use the time to bring it all together.  I was champing at the bit to put the information up; I was leaking bits and pieces and the new year came on.  I anticipated wildly the week when I would start putting up those posts.

And then ... just before the break, wikispaces, my wiki host, announced that it was ending its website.  And although I had until July, supposedly, to move the wiki, my unease about the certainty of that resource suddenly became my only concern.  As a result, I burned those three weeks, and six others besides, moving more than 1,100 pages, with more than 5,000 links that had to be changed.  Not only did I not work on the development project ... I put so much distance between putting down the project and picking it up again that I now feel staggered at the idea of producing five versions of Rogaland all in a single week.

I felt bitter, and angry ~ and yet I kept my silence about the plan in the hopes that I might still put it up as I had originally planned, perhaps in July or August.  But truth be told, I would rather spend that time working on the Fifth Man.

I haven't talked about the Fifth Man in a while.  The note on the sidebar remains, quietly stabbing me in the side every day, though I haven't updated it since June of last year.  Speaking of things that distance has made difficult to access; but I think about the book nearly every day.  In my mind, I have solved some troublesome aspects that would have weakened the latter third of the book.  I think, to be honest, that it will be a better book for the distance I have gained on it.

My plan is to pick up the book sometime this week.  It will be slow progress to start.  I need to familiarize myself again with several passages; I hope I can keep the continuity straight. I have had to admit that only eight of the podcasts have proven workable for this first season. I am sorry Vlad, and sorry Archon ... I think the conversations were good, but having to do the interviews over the Skype phone, and not through the computer, did not make a good sound quality.  A better technician might be able to save them.  I'm inadequate.  I just don't know enough about Audacity or sound.

So, once the podcasts are done, and there's a lull before I start the second season (which will be coming), I'm going to work on my book, and not on making some grand splash with the development system.

I will, I think, continue to make five versions of Rogaland.  But I'm going to release them without a schedule, when I feel ready to move on.  And if, doing it that way, it turns out that I reach a point where I can't finish, that's too bad.  The book really is more important.  I owe it to a lot of people besides myself ~ and to tell the truth, my soul will be better off when it is behind me.

The post, One Block at a Time, gives most of the information I need to work up a dev-5 version of Rogaland.  I'm not going to work on arranging those details in the right order tonight; I have to go crash soon so I can work in the morning.

However, I am going to post a map of Rogaland that I made five months ago.  It is a "6-mile hex map," built out of my more commonly posted maps of the world.  The link shows the older version of this map; I tried some new ideas in design, to make something that would have a deeper, visceral impact:

I think the reader might appreciate this somewhat.  The notion is that the unshaded map would be the county of Rogaland as it existed in the year 892, just twenty years after Stavanger, the only village, was founded.  Stavanger is a village, the only settlement in the region, with a population of 553.  In 892, there is only one economy: fish.  If the reader looks carefully, three small fish symbols can be seen on the map; these are the places where fish congregate, what I called "fishing grounds" in the One Block at a Time post.

The white names on the map ~ Erfjord, Skuden, Orre and so on ~ are not villages, they are clan names. It has bothered me for some time that there is no proper, elegant way to label hexes on a hex map; unlike a squared map, a grid with letters and numbers like "G4" isn't possible.  But the idea of naming hexes after the primary clans appeals to me.  Clans become towns and the name remains.

What I like about the above mapping system is that it gives me the precise edges of treeline and occupied land, however small the latter might be.  I'm not bound by the shape of the hexes. The trees can pour up into valleys between the mountains, which are variously upland heath (pale green) or rocky tundra (grey).  The distances ~ one hex = 6.667 miles ~ are isolating enough that it is easy enough to imagine various clans coming into conflict over raw hunting ground.

The total population is a mere 1,349.  Those clans are not very large.

Remember what one of the blocks I included in the One Block at a Time post: grazing land, that was wilderness and possessed inconsistent hunting.  And 1 in 6 grazing lands, I wrote, would contain a barbaric village.

Every hex on here without a clan name is a grazing land.  And many of those may be occupied by kobalds, froglings, fur-covered gnolls ... perhaps even a clan of trolls.  Who knows?

North Wowotu Production, Part II

See Part I.

Close up visual available with this link.

Now the reader can see that I've reduced the sizes of the references, adding additional icons for labor, food and wealth.  There are only six hexes on the map that generate "wealth."  All the references on the map generate "income," but we can see that as money that must needs be poured back into the system, to maintain the roads and move the goods and buy outside products, etcetera.  "Wealth" is categorized here as "disposable income," or money that can be used for unusual purposes beyond an ordinary budget and expenses.  This money can be given to expanding education or development, used for war, or it can be used to line the pockets of the local lords.

I haven't calculated if there is enough food to feed the population.  However, I could calculate it, fairly easily, but I did that with another post once and got little response.  Truth is, food is a changeable element.  We can establish how much food is needed to feed how many people a diet of 2,200 calories a day, but people can live on less and be malnourished, with shorter lifespans, and people can certainly live on more.  Food won't be distributed evenly, whatever our calculations ... the more important thing here is to see how much food would be available if an army chose to plunder a location, or how much must be shipped out of a hex during that time of the year when it is harvested.

This is pretty much it, for the moment.  I think I am going to talk about other things for a while; I'm working myself into doing the podcasts, which at the moment is getting me to research about how people respond to people and what are good strategies for encouraging communication.  That's where the Simon Sinek video came from, for instance.

I am going to come back around to the infrastructure and development concept: but surely this experiment has proved something.  I took a group of perfectly random answers from 12 different people, and produced a completely workable landscape that is the equivalent of any fantasy map that is out there, doing nothing but tracing through the logical effects of terrain, vegetation, the placement of the settlement and the sort of products that might exist.  With any other group of products, with a different collection of terrains or vegetation, signifying a different climate, we could obtain a positively, identifiably different habitat, based mostly on what the inhabitants do, as opposed to where the inhabitants live.

I hope that many of you have learned some lessons, that you've had your eyes opened to why most game maps fail utterly to move your players and what can be done about it.

I hesitate to say this, but ... the reader knows I don't actually have to spend this extra time making a game map I'll never use, for the sole purpose of spending many hours presenting the case, and then painstakingly teaching it.  But I do it for my own self-aggrandizement, for the sake of causing others to view me with respect, and because I sincerely want your worlds to be BETTER worlds.  I want you to stop trailing after the miserable, established, old crappy way of doing things and realize that there is room to design better structures, better systems and elaborate upon better ideas.  Please understand me when I say, to hell with the OSR.  The Renaissance was nice and all, but it wasn't about doing things the old way, it was about taking the old ways and using them as a jumping off point to change the world in a million different ways.  We didn't get Rome from the Renaissance.  We got the Enlightenment, which brought the Industrial Revolution and all of this wonderful health and existing possibility that we have today.

So let's stop putting old D&D on a pedestal.  Let's make a better, greater D&D, let's do it ourselves and let's stop waiting for someone else to do it for us.

Oh, and if you could ... support my Patreon.  That would be nice.

North Wowotu Production, Part I

Above, the reader will find that I have added all the various reader-chosen references to the map of what I'll start calling North Wowotu.  The location of the references was determined randomly, according to arbitrary designs I've created for designating where a particular type of reference might appear.  Some features of the map were done according to my whim.  Someone else might have drawn the roads in a different way, or the lake in a different way, but the important thing to remember is that it doesn't matter.  What matters is that we get a collection of details that form an interesting framework for running adventures.

First, landscape.

I made anything with a type-5 hex or better into lowland, though there are hills all around.  The hills are black, the type-7 hexes almost hills and the type-6 hexes lower still.  The desert areas beyond the hills in the upper right are gray.  There is a ridge that runs down the middle of the district, with two gaps on either side of the wilderness hex at 0805.  To clear up the map a little, I have reduced the "hex type" number to a "- x" after the hex location number.  As in, "0806-5" for a type-5 hex.

I'll go through the placement of things now.

Port Tethys is the only settlement hex of type 1, 2 or 3, so all the heavy manufacturing has to go there, the shipbuilding, the tools and the two market references.  Let me remind the reader that although "Rainus" has a little white circle, it is technically a "rural" type-2 hex.  The circle is a private manor village, not a public village like Avalon or a public city like Port Tethys.  Go to Rainus and you will get harassed by the local Reeve.

The farms for rice were placed in a random hex of type 5 or better.  As they came out next to each other, I added a lake, to account for the water that rice needs.  The lake then makes an obstacle for any good road to Avalon - it would need a bridge to cross the river to the sea, and why do that when sea travel between Port Tethys and Avalon is so easy?  So there is no easy foot access from one part of the district to another.

The gold and iron went into random type-7 or type-6 hexes.  The limestone and salt went into random type-6 or type-5 hexes.  The logic is that since stone is needed for building, a settlement will be built nearer to it; and conversely, randomly placed stone should be nearer to a settlement.  Here, we see that one limestone was very close to Port Tethys and one was nearer to Avalon.

I decided that since the gold in 1103 was closer to the "Manor" in 0804 than to Avalon, that the Manor actually controlled the gold and therefore the road should go in that direction, along with the close iron.  The other gold goes to Avalon.

Hosiery is a handicraft, so it can be made at a manor estate ... I rolled randomly and it ended up at the Manor rather than Rainus.  The salt in 0807,

Both salt references ended up on low land sea hexes, so I assume it is being made from the sea.  Salt is not a "heavy" production, like ore or stone.  It can be hauled on donkeys, mules or in carts - so it is better to haul it to Rainus than up and over the hill to Avalon.  It can be carried to the lake, boated across, then taken along the road towards the market.  The salt in 0406 can be hauled across the bay.

That just leaves the sheep.

Now, there are two kinds of roads.  A thicker line and a narrow line.  The thick line is a road made of ground stone and broken pottery laid over of clay.  This is a Dev7 region, so we shouldn't expect better than that.  The narrow line is a cart track, with two hardened ruts.

Throughout the map the reader can see round red dots.  These are carter posts, which work like medieval truck-stops.  Carter posts may be continuously occupied or not, or seasonally occupied (Wowotu might have a short, wet, unpleasant season, justified by the rice production).

Gold needs a heavy road because any shipment would be rigorously defended, and would want a good, wide passage to ensure a minimal likelihood of ambush.  Iron needs big wagons to haul ore.  There are no iron foundries anywhere in North Wowotu, so the best is a few smithys that would exist at Port Tethys.  Most of the ore is shipped out of the district in raw form.  Limestone must be treated the same way.

Sheep, however, can be driven, and the low-weight fleece can be transported on carts, so they only need cart tracks.  Pastures, where sheep are raised, occur in rural 4, 5 or 6 hexes.  There might be good forage where the rice is raised, but the land there is used for rice and the sheep are not welcome.

All told, there are four half-references that ship to the Manor, four that ship to Rainus and four that ship to Avalon.  Port Tethys accounts for 11 half-references (the markets, the shipbuilding and the tools are each a full reference).  And ultimately everything has to go through Port Tethys, to be sold or exported elsewhere.

So we have a demonstrable economy, which in turn describes the local politics clearly.  It tells us why the roads exist, what to expect to meet upon them and where the influences of local patrols and interests are placed.  It gives us a good social reference for what it is like to be a salt-digger in 0406 vs. one in 0807, and what it is like to be a sheep farmer in 0504 vs. one in 1102.  We have four wildernesses for players to investigate, ranging from a little hex near town to a big pile of nothing at the northern border.  That gives something for characters of widely different levels to cut their teeth on.

The next step is to calculate labor, wealth and food to the map ~ which I shall try to have up later today.

Continue to Part II.