Learning Curve

With respect to yesterday's Q&A, my friend and I.T. was able yesterday afternoon to install Publisher 2007 on my Windows 10 operating system without difficulty.  I'm now able to access both programs and I can report that my ability to work on maps is fully restored.  I made adjustments and reworked a 20x40 mile area of Serbia yesterday without any difficulty at all, though the publisher file is 33,451 KB.  I'm most pleased.

I understand that it's surprising that I'm able to make publisher work at all with maps of this size.  A typical publisher file runs somewhere in the area of 150 to 1000 KB.  After a few tests last night, I'm confident that I could probably create files up to 75,000 KB, though I shouldn't have to.  I'm playing around with the benefits of this computer that I'm working on now.  My friend (he built the computer) demonstrated that it indeed has a ram of 32 GB, so all my publisher files run faster now than they did.  Those who give a $3 monthly donation on my patreon should find a pdf of a map on my site that I posted back in May 2022, rendered in 150dpi.  The pdf is somewhat better than the version blogger allowed.  Unfortunately, it was still to big to render in 300dpi.  We can't have everything.

I had to re-teach myself how to make maps the way I stopped doing in February last year.  Then, I got interested in working on the Streetvendor's Guide so I put those things down.  11 months is a long time to leave off on a project ... and there were a few glitches as I forgot how to do certain steps.  I stepped back about four months on the S.G. also, working on editing and the index for a time, as I was really stuck and blocked with the clothing section (now solved).  In the same way, coming back to serious researching and designing original content also involved the same re-learning curve that I experienced last night with the maps.  The reader can guess from the title that this is the subject of this post.  I promise, I'm going to come back around to character building soon.

No matter what sort of game preparation or worldbuilding we want to do, there are four stages of learning that we must overcome: (a) what do I want to achieve; (b) how do I achieve it; (c) how can I systematise what I want so that I can standardise the achievement; (d) how do I maintain trust and enthusiasm for the system?

For most, (a) is assumed to be the way the company does it, or even better, the way that a given creator did it once upon a time.  Rather than breaking new ground in the creation of a dungeon, for example, it seems easiest to follow TSR's method dating back to KOTB or White Plume Mountain.  This, at the same time, gives an answer to (b), as it's fairly plain that by drawing the dungeon this way, providing details of the rooms in this way, and ending the adventure how the template does it, more or less solves (b).

The real leap is (c).  This asks us not just to create one dungeon or one adventure, but to build a framework that tells us how to create and design multiple adventures that all fit the same general motif ... especially so that when we want to create a new adventure, we already know from the frame what adventure needs to be made next, and in what manner, that fills out our grand design.

The value of this is sometimes difficult to convey to the lay creator.  For a time, one that varies in length depending on the creator, the "freedom" of being able to do whatever seems good at the time beckons — and any infringement on that freedom is viewed with disdain or even hostility.  I remember being in that headspace, until late in my 20s.  "I'll just work on whatever seems good right now," was my thinking ... and I hear the echo of that from all sorts of writers, craftspersons, musicians and couples sorting out their marriages all the time.  "A plan?  A plan is what we make when we want to make God laugh."

The result, however, is a lot of wasted work that never sees the light of day, and the bitter exposure of too many failures.  I count all that in my past as a valuable learning experience.  No books or meaningful content came out of those years, but I did practice writing a lot.  And I did haul around a lot of that writing until I was forced to throw it out in self-defense.  Making a plan for the work we do isn't a straight-jacket; if that's how it feels, then we've either made the wrong plan, or we're still working through ambivalences about doing work.  A plan is an assurance that we're using our time well.  That everything we do has value.  That our vision has greater scope that "what feels good right now."  The pyramids cannot be built frivolously.  Or when the workers feel like it.  Truly monumental things need a monumental vision.

Therefore, progressing from (b), what we want, to (c), how do we get it, is a tremendous alteration in our thinking as creators.  It transforms what we want from, "We want what Arneson wanted," to, "We want to be better than Arneson."  That realisation has the effect of demoting our "hero" to our "mentor" ... though obviously my mentor isn't Arneson.  This transformation is positive; I'm quite sure that Arneson also wanted to be better than Arneson.

Being better means we can't just copy any more.  The template we've worked from isn't enough.  What's needed is a new template.  That's the crux of (c).  We're not just making scenes and places and characters now; it isn't just a bunch of parts that are shelved like books, ready to be pulled out individually and used.  We're moving from parts to a machine, one that incorporates the books as instrumentation, so that before we have to think about what part we need, the "machine" puts that part automatically in front of us.  Once the machine is built, we'll know how to turn it on, we'll know how to feed in data, and we'll get a result for that data ... but all the middle part ceases to exist for us, even if we're the ones that built the middle part.

I'll try this as a simple metaphor.  Let's say, we learn how to make a toaster and we go through the rigamarole to build the thing from scratch.  We design the components and assemble them painstakingly, fitting them this way and that, until we end with a working toaster.  And like any toaster, it works by putting bread in the top, pushing a button down and waiting for the bread to pop up.

After all that work, we can forget all about the machine itself.  We get up in the morning, put our toast in while thinking about the day ahead, get our toast out and butter it, eat and move on.  There's no need at all to think about the toaster itself any more.  Oh, sure, if the toaster breaks, we can fix it.  But thinking through all the middle part is discarded.  The toaster works.  It saves us time.  We can go and do other things.

My methodology for making maps is like the toaster.  I have a series of steps that I go through that can be done mostly without my needing to decide anything.  I do this, I do that, I follow each step, and presto, map.  No time is wasted wondering if this is working, or if it's put together right, or if the toast is going to taste good.  All that's been sorted.  The only cost is some of my time, which I can give when I don't feel especially creative and I just want to churn out some product.  It's more valuable than my spending time playing a video game, while providing about the same level of immersion.

(d) is the least esoteric about the above.  (c) is hard to envision because (d), having enthusiasm for the method, seems for most of us to be impossible.  As an example, I'll use my friend and I.T. guy.  Here's a brilliant, capable fellow, has endless knowledge of computer systems ... and like most of his type, has the expected server bank in his basement that would probably let him manage a satellite, if he could get one in space.  He stores my authentic wiki on it, as well as content for a wide number of other users.  This is one reason why I don't need to worry about someone trying to hack my wiki.  They'd have to hack him — and I wouldn't recommend it.

But he can't stop fiddling with things.  He and I have talked about it, and it's not a unique habit among his type.  For the most part, he's not improving anything ... he's just finding different ways to do the thing he's already doing.  Most of the time, this fails completely, and he has to make repairs to bring it back to where it was.  I'm certain he likes this process.  The effect is, however, that for all his ability, he follows his industry; he doesn't lead it.

Of course, there's no reason he should.  I only bring this up as a metaphor because there are far more dungeon masters in the world who are intentionally breaking their game worlds than making them.  They can perceive (c) for a time, building the "game toaster" as it were, but in the end they can't just let it be a toaster.  Though it works fine, they're always taking the toaster apart and fixing something that doesn't need to be fixed ... and though they spend an enormous amount of time doing this, in the end it never does more than make toast.  Meanwhile, the food processor doesn't exist at all.

Returning to my map-creating system this week, I felt zero inclination to "rebuild it and make it better."  I tried publisher on Office 365, it didn't work, I obtained my old publisher program on the new system and the thing I wanted to do was make a map in the same old way.  The results speak for themselves.  What's not understood, however, is the results don't happen if I'm not able to quiet the inner voice saying, they could be better.  Maybe they could.  But I don't want to get bogged down in (c).  I want to trust my system, and maintain my enthusiasm.  Then things get done.

I do this by reminding myself for a time that however complicated or difficult this seems at present, I'm practicing.  I'm giving my trust to the system and letting myself adapt to it.  Take the Streetvendor's Guide and the manner in which clothing is discussed.  One serious problem came in describing a specific item of clothing — say, a tunic.  A medieval-Renaissance tunic is what we'd call a shirt.  It has many different shapes and forms, and can be made in every cloth under the rainbow.  My guide provides descriptions for thirty cloth varieties.  If I give space in the guide to every possible make of tunic, I won't have space for all of the clothes that are available.  Plus, this is a problem that's going to come up when I have wooden items can can be made of twenty kinds of wood, or metal items that can be made with twenty kinds of metal.

I had to step back and think about how to manage this.  Tunics appear in every part of the world, but they're not made of the same cloth in every part of the world.  Most clothing made in north temperate climates, speaking for the time period and not post-Industrial times, are made of wool.  North temperate describes Britain, Scandinavia, the Baltic Lands and Russia.  Even colder climates require furs, and that's a whole section separate from cloth.

Most clothing made in south temperate climates — France, Germany, northern Italy, the Slavic lands, Russia in the summer — is made of linen.  That made in subtropical lands — Ottoman, Persian, South Asian — is made of cotton.  And where silk is common, certain kinds of clothing are made from that.  I realised that the solution was to define what the tunic was in different parts of the world ... and then give the name for that thing as it's given in different parts of the world.  Thus, if we want to price a cotton tunic, it doesn't have a European name because at the time, it wasn't made in Europe.  A cotton tunic is a gomlek or a kurta; a linen tunic is a cotte, as it was called in those parts of the world where it was worn — and it's longer than a tunic, reaching to the knees.  A silk tunic is a hanfu.  The finished list looks very odd to the Western eye, but it's accurate.  All I need do is provide rules (which was always intended) to teach the reader how to price a cotton hanfu, or a woolen cotte, or a linen tunic, if that's what they want.

But I'm not used to this thinking.  It's taken time to bang my brain into thinking in this format, using items whose names are utterly unfamiliar to me.  Pursuing them, describing them, I can recall each item being worn in various films.  The Chinese emperor at the end of Mulan is wearing a "changshan," though I wouldn't have known that's what it was called without this work.

To get used to this, to think in this frame, I have to practice at it.  And reassure myself that with patience and familiarity, it'll come naturally.  I have faith that it will, because I've been here before with difficult things and it always does.  But if we don't stick with it; if we don't wrestle through it for as many weeks or months that it takes, we don't get any practice at practicing things ... and we never learn how to beat the learning curve.  For anything.

I adapt more quickly than most because I've forced myself to adapt many times.  The first few times is a real bitch.  This is what I was doing in the late 80s, as I started to pursue problems like trade and deeper worldbuilding into my game system.  Took 15 years to codify my trade system.  Yet I've accomplished 85 pages on the Streetvendor's Guide in just 7 months (discounting my time off to think).

I remind myself that it took something like 30+ people to put together Tasha's Cauldron, with text equal to about half the size of my proposed Guide.  I'm doing all the writing for this by myself, with one artist for support.  There's just the two of us.  It took the company something like two years to produce Tasha's dreck.  If it takes me until next January to finish the Guide, I'll have accomplished a miracle.

D&D Reno Videos

Like everyone else on the internet, now and then I watch one sort of reno video or another, with this fellow being my favourite.  Judging from the comments, these are popular not only with those in the trades, but very often with men in their 70s and 80s, who I should think pine for the days when they could walk casually on beams thirty feet over the ground.

And this gets me to thinking.  D&D perhaps needs these sorts of videos.  Of course I know we have this sort of thing, and sometimes content like this, but it's not really, um, working on a D&D design, is it?  Mostly, it's either a sort of purposeless artistic exercise, or filler commentary on half-considered themes, but we're not watching a person work on their game world in the way we watch someone building their house.

I try to imagine filming myself building an excel table, or filming myself actually writing the Streetvendor's Guide in real time, and it suggests something as interesting as watching the grass grow, or paint dry.  The process is painstaking, time-consuming and not very productive over an hour time frame.  I did do something like this, and wasn't pleased with the result.  Recently, though, I acquired the GeForce experience screen recorder and have been playing around with it a bit.  My daughter and I tested it on a let's-play video that she's in the process of editing now ... I'll provide a link when it's available.  I could be recording myself writing this post right now, which could be an interesting experiment.  Not your usual youtube fare.

The next thought that leaps to mind would be the 6-mile maps I had been posting earlier this year.  That's a bit difficult because I'm working on two different incompatible computers at the moment.  I have one that has Office 11, which I use for work content, and then this that I'm working on now that still uses Office 7 ... which my maps are made on.  I haven't tried moving them over to publisher 11, though I suppose that's an inevitable experiment I'll have to take up some time.  My previous experience with later publisher programs — 2016 I think it was — suffered in that the program ran so slow that my map files were impractical on account of being too big.  I'd change a line and have to wait 30 seconds for the program to catch up.  I haven't examined this newest version, and that computer is a lot more powerful than any I've ever had, so maybe things would work out all right.

One issue is that I normally work on a two screen desk top.  I'd work on three screens if I had the table space.  The screen capture can only grab one screen, so I'd always be doing something off camera ... which might work all right, I'd have to experiment a little and see.  Stuff could be pulled over the main camera, but that would slow down the work I was doing in order to shift windows around.  Could work though.  Can't know without trying.

Returning to the Streetvendor's Guide, that's quite tempting.  There's a lot going on there.  Besides actually describing the object, along with research (though I'm having to depend a great deal on chatGPT to have anything to say about clothing articles, there's such a dearth on the net), there's calculating the price from my excel trade table — which might sound strange to a lot of people who could reasonably wonder why I don't just pull numbers out of my ass.  I am trying to produce a consistency, however, though there are problems.

If you must know, it's like this: 

Let's take silk and wool both have a price based on the availability of fibre, cloth and tailoring.  My price table, however, is designed that if you're in China, the price of silk will be much cheaper than wool, whereas if you're in Scotland, the reverse is true.  But I can't turn out a Streetvendor's Guide price for every part of the world.  It wouldn't even look well to provide multiple prices for any given object (say an "eastern" price, a "western" price and a "tropical" price.  Honest, it may sound like a good idea, but in practice this would look confusing and awful.

Therefore, I have to obtain an approximate "standard" price that, unfortunately, attempts to reckon with people's prejudice of what the price of wool compared with the price of silk "ought" to be.  I've chosen Venice as the base location of my pricing table; for the economic system I'm running, it's more or less central to everywhere, having easy and quick access to the Black, Red and far Mediterranean Seas.  As a choice, it's not perfect ... but ah well, there's no such thing as perfect.  And since the content, in all honesty, is competing with those who are pulling numbers out of their ass, it'll do.

All the same, it seems a very nitpicky way to go about things, but I like it and there are other benefits.  If I adjust the price of something for some reason — let's say sugar — that adjustment will automatically correspond to scores of other products.  For this reason, while you may have seen a price for something on various teasers I've put up, that's really just a placeholder.  The real price isn't absolutely established until all the prices are fixed.

I could have fixed the prices first, then written the book ... but as I've learned through researching the products, it's better to fix the prices one item at a time.  As I learn about that item, I have a better idea of how to calculate the price.  It's slow, it's methodical, but I stand by the results.

Well, all this sounds a little crazy.  It might be interesting to watch me produce an hour of writing video, though I can't imagine who, besides the four people reading this, could conceivably care.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  I do wish someone would, as Saturday's the day after tomorrow, and I haven't got anything to put there yet.

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide.

I am Not in Your Box

Of late, I found the following description of me by Ruprecht on Venger Satanis' blog (found while ego surfing ~ how else?).  He's defining a "Law DM":

"Works hard to develop and codify every possible aspect of the world prior to the game. Example The Tao of D&D who wrote a book about how much hard work should go into preparation."

Wrong.  Completely wrong.

Inevitably, when someone describes what I'm doing with my wiki, they oversimplify to the point of error.  I am not working hard to develop and codify every possible aspect of my game world.  That would be a very stupid thing to do.  Had I a thousand years to do nothing but add to my wiki, from awaking to sleeping, I would not be able to codify "every" aspect of even a small part of my game world.  I don't remotely imagine doing any such thing.

I am codifying aspects of play that are like to give rise to argument or boredom.  That is all.

People argue about how combat works and why it works.  So I'm codifying that.  People argue how abilities and skills work.  So I'm codifying that.  People argue about where monsters come from or what they're capable of doing.  People are vague and frustrated when they don't know where they are or what they can do once they're located there.  People view the world as a gray sludge if every town is the same.  People get bored if the character they're running is exactly like their former three characters.  So where these issues arise, as part of game play, I am codifying in order to heighten and strengthen the game experience, while ridding the moment-to-moment play of as much conflict as is possible with the few decades I have left.

Ruprecht also gives this definition, for a "Chaos DM":

"Appears to do minimal work prior to the game preferring seat of the pants play at the table. Example D&D With Pornstars who wrote more than one module based on tables and things to do at the table to keep things moving."

I guess it's okay to continue to use a liar, a braggart, an apparent abuser and user of women and an internet troll as an example of "chaos."  I can't let that ride.  But ...

As far as I'm concerned, I do "minimal work" when I am DMing.  It is just that I hold myself to a higher standard than the kind of ass-crack product that other so-called lazy self-justifying sluff-merchants consider "minimal."

95% of my game play in any given session is fully and completely by the seat of my pants.  I don't know what any of my NPCs are going to say, because I don't know what questions the players are going to ask.  I don't know what the monsters are going to do when a fight breaks out, because I don't know where the players are going to stand or how they're going to approach.  Just as the players have to play by the seat of their pants because they have no idea what's happening next, I have to play by the seat of my pants because I don't know where the players are going to go or what they're going to decide to do.

Since I play a completely open, non-structured form of play, in any given moment I don't know if a group of players in a town are going to gear up and head for the hills, attack a small crew on the dockside and steal a boat, hammer on the door of an apothecary and ask for information about some concept they heard from some other game that I've never considered, or what.  It stuns me that other DMs don't get this.  I don't know what the players will do next.  How can I know?  I can't read minds, they're not pre-sharing information with me and most of the time, a plan gets presented to me five minutes after the player has concocted it.

Does that mean, because I'm a "Law DM," which is a total bullshit term, that I can tell the players, "Oops, I never thought you would do that, let's adjourn for the night and I'll have something ready for you next week"?

NO, it does not.  It means I've got to dig in and have about twenty logical and rational answers to their rapid-fire questions RIGHT NOW, no waiting, not if I want to keep my game going, and whatever people think, the time I've spent making rules for nutritious food just isn't going to help.  There are too many things that can happen at a game table for anyone to account for them all ahead of time, and that is always the way it is going to be, no matter how many decades I spend writing rules.

And still, people who want to oversimplify DMing, just don't GET that.  And I don't know why.

Or perhaps it is because guys like Venger, a self-declared "Chaos DM," immediately rush to some tiny-brained pre-moduled piece of shit no matter what the players say or do or ask or want information for.  I think that's it, personally, and the reason I think so is because I have played as well as DMed, and I got very, very tired of asking questions that didn't get me answers, or information that wasn't forthcoming, or actions that I tried to take that were stymied by a great fat module that got stuck in my face by a DM who was playing by "the seat of the pants."

Any idiot can run a game world this complicated by the
seat of their pants.

This "seat of the pants" bullshit is rife throughout the table-top game world and is always the go-to argument for every DM who hasn't got something prepared ~ but of course argues that this is fine, because they don't "need" preparation.  Except that they always have a module in front of them, or their world is so flimsy and ramshackle that if a town consists of more than two boards nailed together I haven't seen it yet.  It is easy to play by the "seat of the pants" if the game world is so mickey mouse that the DM thinks it's fine so long as all the merchants are long-winded bores who want to haggle over every product, while all the quest-givers are unbelievably powerful and insistent and won't be put off, no matter what the players want to do.

Yeah, because "seat of the pants" really means, "I haven't got something, so play this that I've got."

But take the time to create a substantive world, one that gives endless inspiration to the PLAYERS, so that they can make up their minds what to do from hundreds of potential choices, that I'm prepared to run no matter what, and right now, off the top of my head, because I live and breathe my world ever gawddamned day like it's a real place, rather than as a monopoly game that I put on the shelf for a week while I do some other fuck thing that has nothing to do with the game because "I don't prepare, I run by the seat of my pants," then clearly I'm the stiff, crusty, inflexible person who dimly thinks it's possible to make a rule about every detail in a world as big as the Actual Earth.

Excuse me if I call bullshit on this one.

Because bullshit is what it is.  Vengers site chews a bunch of shit about what kind of DMs there are, quoting Jeff Reints' old crappy post on the subject and other base theories.

Well I'll tell you what sorts of DMs there are.

Good ones.

And everyone else.

The Hater's Game

Compare the following.  First, this description of dungeon mastering from the 5th Edition DM's Guide, p. 4, Introduction:

"The Dungeon Master (DM) is the creative force behind a D&D game.  The DM creates a world for the other players to explore, and also creates and runs adventures that drive that story ... A Dungeon Master gets to wear many hats.  As the architect of a campaign, the DM creates adventures by placing monsters, traps and treasures for the other player's characters (the adventurers) to discover.  As a storyteller, the DM helps the other players visualize what's happening around them, improvising when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected."

And now, another definition, from the 1st Edition DM's Guide, p. 7, Preface:

"When you build your campaign you will tailor it to suit your personal tastes.  In the heat of play it will slowly evolve into a compound of your personality and those of your better participants, a superior alloy.  And as long as your campaign remains viable, it will continue a slow process of change and growth.  In this lies a great danger, however.  The systems and parameters contained in the whole of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons are based on a great deal of knowledge, experience gained through discussion, play, testing, questioning and (hopefully) personal insight."

Interesting.

The replacement of the 2nd-person "you" with the 3rd-person "DM" is telling.  The 1st Edition introduction doesn't talk at all about the DM or the adventure.  It talks about systems, about what the author tried to include, about boundaries to put on the party and what not to allow the party to do.  And again, it talks about "you," not some amorphous "the DM."

I had to find a comparison paragraph in the Preface that I could match up with the 5e DMG, and it still doesn't.  The 5e DMG uses a lot of verbs to describe what the DM does.  The DM creates (used 3 times), runs, gets, places, helps and improvises.  These are all connected directly to the DM and what the DM does is written in every sentence.

The 1e DMG uses two verbs, build and tailor, and only in the first sentence.  The rest is about what happens after the DM acts.  The campaign evolves, continues, changes, grows.

The 5e introduction spends its time talking about what an adventure is, what things are, what the DM gets.  It never talks about cost and it never talks about change.  It is static.  It is these things we are telling you.

Whereas the 1e preface talks about what things require, what they limit and balance, and ultimately where it can all go wrong.  It talks about this on the first page.  Six paragraphs in, Gygax is warning that a mutable system means it can all go wrong and fast.  In the paragraph above, he lays it straight.  This is not going to be easy.

And it wasn't.

Consider the words, "In the heat of play," and how divorced they are from virtually anything you will read in a rule-book nowadays.  Gygax is remembering his wargaming days, his Chainmail days, the sessions where fights broke out and people hurled dice and threats at each other.  He's telling us, the reader, that the forge of play is going to make our game better.  The phrase, "evolve into a compound," is a weaponsmith's, the metallurgist seeking the right mix, so that it can be hammered and beat on the anvil to produce the best metal.  Those elements are our personality and our best participants.  Not players we "help," but players who, along with ourselves, found together to make the best alloy.

It is right there in his 2nd paragraph.  Inferior DMs and Players do not make good games.  A good game is not created, it is forged in fire and anger and hard work.  Nothing is guaranteed.  You've got to work.  You've got to discuss and play.  You've got to test and question.  Hopefully, he says, you have insight.

Why "hopefully"?  Why toss in that possibility that you won't have insight?  Why doesn't he just pat you on the head, like 5e does, and assume you can do it, without ever giving you reason to doubt?

Gygax isn't selling something.  He's saying, "Life is pain.  Anyone who says differently is selling something."

And this, I think, is at the core of everything.

2nd edition and everything afterward ~ no, scratch that, because I think it started even while I was still playing D&D in high school.  The modules and other like role-playing games that were published tried to sell an idea that "anyone could do it."  It is splashed all over the 5e DMG.  This book will help you.  As a DM, you get to wear many hats, like you've won a prize.  Want to invent a world?  This book helps you "nail down a few important details," like it's something you can sluff off in an afternoon, no problem.  Your world is a place where you can escape.  You don't have to memorize this book.  Swear to gawd, it says right here, "Being the DM should be fun."

Why?  Why should it be fun?  Because, as the 5e DMG says, "Focus on the aspects you enjoy and downplay the rest."  See?  This isn't about you and your players working together, this is about you slacking off when you don't give a fuck and just doing what feels like a laugh riot.

This guy made a game.

I want to emphasize something.  Try to imagine I'm writing this in giant letters written on a mountainside, so I don't have to spend the next 14 years carving.  5th Edition was the culmination of player advice being given to the company, which the company dutifully included in the book in order to please the fan base.  5th edition did not invent this perspective on the game.  The disgruntled, unhappy part of the fanbase, those fans who felt dissatisfied with the game as it was, those who had the will and the motivation to complain, built this system.  Those people that Bav called the 10%.  The loud chorus that declared their appreciation for 5e, because they hated old D&D as it was.  Essentially, if you're playing 5e, you're playing the Hater's Game.

Gygax takes time and effort to make it perfectly clear that no, not everyone can be a DM.  You can try, but be warned.  These are dangerous waters.  You're going to fuck up.  You're going to have to work.  There's heat and lots of hammering ahead of you.  And a lot of sweat.  It is going to be a bitch to bring this sucker home.  And you might never do it.  Be warned.

The Hater's Game says, "Hey, woah, slow down there.  DMing should be fun.  You don't have to work that hard, man.  You've got the books, don't you?  If something happens, well, shit, it's your world.  Just ... make something up.  Improvise.  Fuck, dude, what's with all this danger bullshit?"

One is truth and one is evasion.

One is your parents telling you as a child, "You lost.  If you want to win next year, you'll have to keep practicing."

The other is your parents telling you, "You did great!  You tried your best.  You have nothing to be ashamed of!"

It isn't even that there's a black and white line between "yes you can" and "no you can't."  That's a grey, grey line.  With a lot of work needed over here and time spent practicing over there, with things inside us to overcome and books to read, not to mention figuring out just what "insight" is.  But however grey the line is, there is definitely a tipping point that DMs reach where they realize, "No, I was not cut out for this."

In my opinion, that tipping point comes just at the moment when the DM realizes what it is we mean when we say, "this."   Effectively, the actual whole and complete picture of what it really means to be a DM.  It takes time to get there; and a lot of that time is spent wallowing around and scrambling ~ and then the sun comes up and the whole vista of D&D reveals itself as one immense picture.  For a moment, we stare at it, taking it all in.  It's ... it's huge.  It's just so fucking big.  Big and beautiful ... and scary.

And DMs divide themselves into two kinds of people.  One hesitates, blinks, feels a moment of lightheadedness, then picks up a pair of heavier gloves, hefts the forging sledge up on their shoulder and starts down into that enormous valley.

And the other shakes their head and says, "No fucking way," and promptly goes back the way they came.  The sun sets and leaves the familiar way in the dark and for a few years, the backpeddlar furtively pokes around at shit before deciding, "You know, this is kind of a waste of time."

I believe that 5th Edition, the Hater's Edition, deliberately caters to the backpeddler.  And the company went along because they realized that the DM with his hammer wasn't going to need the company anyway, not after they'd seen Shambhala.  So the Company and the Haters made a marriage and 5th Edition is the rough beast offspring that came out.  And we have be vexed to nightmare by the rocking cradle.

The Steady Urban State

The above is a screenshot from a two-part Polish youtube video, quite obviously describing the Galician town of Cracow as it once appeared (Galicia is in south Poland, east of Silesia and bordering on modern day Slovakia).  I post it to denote the openness of the city's layout, even within the walls, as shown in the video.

I have another example, much more descriptive and in depth:

Granted, the model and presentation is out of another time, circa 1950s and 60s, but the detail rendered here is archeologically and academically supported, which is a rare thing on the internet.  Note how much open space exists: farmland, grass for forage, space for play and gathering, trees, trampled ground isolating the town industries.  Compare this with a crammed generation product that I linked a few days ago, or with George RR Martin's 2012 popular depiction of King's Landing:

Did not do the fucking research.

The above is so ridiculously out of keeping with reality that it makes the traffic/supply problems of ancient Rome look ideal in comparison.  I've seen the bought version of this map; there's no green space inside the walls, which would mean that every gram of food would have to be brought into the city every day to feed the enormous population.  If you consider that the walled city of Constantinople had access to water on three sides, while King's Landing hasn't enough enough waterfront to fill even one side, no doubts the streets and houses in the center of this town have long ago been abandoned for lack of provisions.

And this is my subject today.  The reader may remember that in my last post, Putting Down Roots, I talked about how accumulation and assembly of towns occurred organically, due to the nature of the terrain, access to water, a need for defense and so on.  The principle applies inside the city as well. Cities were not, as they are now, built a neighborhood at a time, with every house the same and the roads carefully designed for the suburban commuter.  A system which, incidentally, is already starting to break down, even though it has been in place only fifty years (watch this whole video, it is well worth the time and it will reshape your thinking).

If the food comes in by the docks of the urban center, the population will naturally gravitate towards the docks, in order to have access to the best food ... and take advantage of the continuous demands for labor that a dock will provide.  A new ship may arrive any day; and though the wharf may be ready with an established labor force to unload a ship a day, what will then do when three or five ships all come in at once?  Hire temporary labor, of course ... so that poor people will drift to the town's port on the off-chance that they will work one day in seven, enabling them to survive.

The same is true of the gate through which most of the agricultural produce arrives, or the fringes of the toolsheds and mills, as shown in the Birmingham video.  The poor will flock in whenever something unusual happens ... a caravan arriving, the first cartloads of grapes at harvest time, the slaughtering of the spring lambs, the aftermath of a storm blowing in from the sea or a fire that has engulfed a city block ... like the people picking garbage as shown at the end of this piece of Ron Fricke's Samsara.

The above video showing all kinds of modern urban cultures.  The key factor here is money: which we should clearly see as acting on an urban environment in two forms.  We might describe these forms as "kinetic money" and as "potential money."

The garbage pickers, for all the unpleasantness of it, are participating in the kinetic form: the acquisition of money, the environment that makes the transfer of money possible (in its absolute lowest form, as people sustain themselves with refuse that can still be made useful), and what we would think of as being paid for labor in a traditional sense.  Farming, whether through garbage or growing things in the field, is kinetic.  Money is moving from one person to another, or from the environment into someone's possession.  In order to get money, the population of a town moves towards those places where the movement of money allows some sort of acquisition.

Potential money looks like this:

This is also from Samsara ... here, the money just sits.  The owners of these towers and flats are also in the business of accumulating money, but in a different part of the city than this place, where it is stored.  We can think of potential money as stored money, the same way that potential energy is stored energy.  As you stretch an elastic between your fingers, you "store" energy into the elastic, where it remains stored until you release the elastic, at which point the potential energy becomes kinetic.

When a riot occurs in a city, we have the same sort of mechanical framework in place.  The buildings above are raided, pillaged and burned, becoming a different sort of garbage pile for the raiders to pick over.  If an urban environment does not sufficiently provide enough kinetic money to exist in the system, increasing the potential collection of money, sooner or later those people without money or food, who are starving anyway, will force that potential to become kinetic.  Sooner or later, you will have to release the elastic band.

This is a good way for you to view the raw, thrumming energy that exists behind the veneer of houses and streets that form the city.  It isn't necessary to go so far as creating city-wide violence every time you want to create an in-city adventure for your players.  The transfer of potential money to kinetic money goes on all the time, on a small scale: robbery, muggings, forced prostitution, kidnappings, isolated murders (even between rich people, trying to get each other's potential money), witch burnings to place the victim's money into the pockets of the church or the authorities and so on.  And the reverse also happens, the daily efforts to ensure that potential money remains potential: clubbing poor people in the streets, enslavement and deportation for debt, free food, lands open to common settlement, restoration of prostitutes to their families, anything that will keep the population passive and happy to do little more than pick over garbage.

If we're going to make a city map that means something to gaming, we need to take these two things discussed above into account.

That the city has to exist as a much more open environment than we suppose, with gardens and fields that may exist even inside the city walls, where food can be grown inside the city, not only for siege purposes but also because the loss of an occasional apple is a good thing for the passive steady state that keeps the urban system from collapsing in riot.  Free space gives employment, it gives room to breathe, it makes for a happier population and it provides a valve for change, where a former field can be turned into another neighborhood, until such a time as the city needs to extend beyond the walls so that more fields can be incorporated into the system.

This ideal lasted until the industrial revolution, when labor took a whole new form and what made the system stable was a whole new environment: one where materialism brought new pleasures, where many more jobs could be sustained in much smaller spaces, where the accumulation of kinetic wealth could enable the tight, packed-in cities with which we're much more familiar.  Without the industrial revolution, without factories and mass transport, cities could not sustain so many people without the need of a lot of space.

This space made contentment possible; life was still hard for the poor, who could steal an apple but might spend three days in the stocks for it (which gives another escape valve for hatred and anger, directed at a prisoner instead of the authorities).  But the hard life was sustainable for those better able to make use of the shifting, changing, seasonal job market.  You might be a temporary day laborer, barely surviving, but with the right attitude you might be the temporary laborer who found a permanent job once some more trusted fellow was injured or killed.  There was room for advancement, for change, for luck, if you found some opportunity in that city that was missed.  So you wandered the streets, looking, looking, adventuring even, ready to turn to even crime if it could be made relatively safe and sustainable.  Which is what we'll look at with our next post.

Cleaning Up the Invented Region

Sigh.

I've been at the mercy of a virus since December 1; on my days off I fight it back and it comes back on me as I start working again.  I don't know what it will take to kill this thing.  So I haven't written today, because I've been crashed.

Details need managing, however, so I'll get them managed.  First, the image on the right shows the invented map so far.  It need one more highland and three more references.

Also, the poll has closed.  It wasn't that helpful; people were drawn to virtually every settlement.  Port Tethys made a surge at the end to become the city.  Cork barely managed to be one of the two towns.  Unfortunately Avalon, Nagoya and Ferris ended up in a three-way tie for six votes each.

I could just roll randomly, but where's the fun in that?  So I'll ask a skill-testing question, the answer to which can't be found on the web.

In my book, How to Run, what feature did I add to every chapter heading, and what was peculiar, or "wrong," with that feature.  First person to answer right gets to pick the town.  And in turn, you can also give a name the region.

I really respect that no one felt the need to give a silly name to any of the settlements.  Well done and much appreciated.  I've never enjoyed the need to mock the game.  Perhaps that is because in my first campaign, the asshole player ran a character named Exlax, whose henchman was Fruit of the Tomb.  Though it might be that I've never found this particular brand of humor to be very funny.

I can't help noticing that readers isolated every settlement.  Interesting, since it was done as a group effort.  I could see that some did it intentionally, deliberately cutting off a pre-existing settlement with water or highlands.  Overall, it gives a kind of continuity to the region.  The long inlet offers tremendous access to the sea and communication, though each individual town lacks a close, productive hinterland (except that Fenris is on a fairly open plain, even if the last highland is plonked on one side or the other of the place).

Just a reminder that none of the references has been placed.  They are just shown on the map as a convenience; we're going to shift them around later.  Any of the settlements shown might become the second market.  Port Tethys, as the largest settlement, will certainly account for one of the markets ~ though Serai or Hoth might be the other one, even though both are firmly established as villages now.

So, I'll sign off.  I do intend to deal with the next part, though likely not until Thursday or Friday, after I've finished my work-week and I'm more fit.

50 Monsters ... Bleh

50 Monsters.

More accurately, 50 wiki pages of monsters, because I'm not counting cases where I created both the ordinary and giant version of monsters (three types of crocodile), I'm not counting extra links to describe the details behind devils and demons and I'm not counting the dragon posts at all that began this recent effort, for the merest OCD reason that they're not in order and therefore they don't count.

Nor am I counting work I didn't do at all, for it should be noted that Tim has contributed work on firenewts, floating eyes, giant frogs, large frogs, huge frogs, killer frogs (though killer frogs are appearing in my online Juvenis campaign, Tim went with a traditional description) ~ so many frogs! ~ gargoyles, gelatinous cubes, hyenas, moas, ostriches and rheas.  Ozymandias has hunted around for a wide variety of very helpful pics.  It has been a great effort.

The hardest moment came when I was sent this link related to Pathfinder.  The sender's motive was meant to be encouraging, but I have to admit that I'm simply not capable of producing this degree of content: I don't have the resources and I don't have this much help.  As such, seeing it laid out, then comparing it to my meagre effort, is somewhat soul-crushing ... I can only sustain myself by seeing that pages like this description of the bedlam are filled with such gobblydegook and functionality references that the actual content is tedious and arcane ~ unless you happen to play pathfinder.

I want to believe that the material I'm producing is both accessible and suggestive, even if you don't play my system or don't play at all.  I couldn't even steal from the Pathfinder source ~ I did a listing on black pudding and there was nothing in the Pathfinder version's "ecology" that wasn't basically described in my original monster manual from 1979.  That's not much forward development.

Here I hesitate.  I'm not certain I should bring up this next point; it smacks of self-importance and egotism, of which I'm accused all the time and which I don't wish to confirm.  But the way I feel about that huge Pathfinder wiki ~ is that how the Gentle Reader thinks about me?  Am I, well, not exactly crushing souls, I haven't created that much content, but am I undermining your desire to work on stuff?

Okay, you'll jump down my throat and tell me "fuck no," and believe me, that's a good thing.  But I know how I felt after I saw that Pathfinder wiki and it was totally a sense of "oh gawd, why am I even bothering."  It was three or four days before I could get myself to work on another monster, and then only because I said I'd do 50 before I quit ~ and shit, if it didn't happen that the last two monsters were a demon and a devil.

I could have done something else, a caribou or a coffer corpse, something beginning with C, to satisfy my OCD.  But I meant to go through the monster manual before doing other things (though I cheated and added the giant bat).  I could have done two demons, but I had planned to do one type of multi-type monsters like demons, devils, dragons, giants and such, though I meant to do all the versions of the natural multi-types, like beetles, bears, snakes, etc.  For whatever loony, mentally bastardized reason, I found myself sitting at 48 monsters, with Demon and Devil in front of me, this miserable doubt cast by the Pathfinder wiki kicking me in the face and I just felt ... bleh.

It's been tough finding the motivation to dig through the demon and devil and make sense of those types, to give them character and motivation, and to get out of the doldrums of "just another monster."  I'm glad I did, I'm glad I had the source material, I'm glad people liked the work (the wiki numbers were really high) and said as much.  So great.

It isn't that unfair for me to ask if others have had this experience with me ... or, obviously, with everything else that's out there in the universe, encouraging you not to work on your world because why, jeez, what for, it's all be done already, even if the doing was kind of rotten.  Why do all that work just to repeat work that's already been done?

I guess, for me, it at least teaches me something.  It at least creates a problem that I can solve and learn about things in the process of solving.  But gad, yeah, sometimes it just feels like I'm a little flea picking at the skin of a dog that's going to scratch me onto a carpet just before the vacuum of Mrs. Nature rolls over me.

Well, fifty monsters.  Yay.  Sort of.  I could probably do another one.  A displacer beast is fairly straight forward.

A World From Scratch ~ Valley of the Djombo

Copied from the last post.

Expanding the map from our last post, we want to stay within a couple of boundaries.  My measuring stick for the tech system was based on simple population density.  Tech-5, I wrote, consisted of regions that had a population density of less than 160 persons per 20-mile hex.  Since we're working in 6-mile hexes, that number is reduced to only 23 persons.

This seems absurdly low, but we are talking about the extreme low-side of civilized culture . . . and these numbers easily correspond to large parts of the world four hundred years ago.  Odd as it may seem, the density we've established so far for our map indicates an all-too-crowded space.

So far, I've given ranges for population.  Let's nail those numbers down, rolling 60 inhabitants for the original hex, containing the settlement at Ai, and 150 inhabitants for Bodo-Cai.  This gives us a total of 70 per hex. That is too high for tech-5.

Therefore, let's isolate our starting area, drowning it in with a hinterland that is much greater in area.  Since this is a desert, obviously we want mostly desert hexes ~ but we also want to remember that the Djombo river starts somewhere and goes somewhere.  I never did give the direction of the river ~ but we'll say it is flowing towards the bottom of the above map.

To bring our density down below 23, we'll need six more hexes.  I propose this:

Even though we're just making this up as we go along (I'm not making any random rolls, I'm just putting in hexes where they feel good, as I know this is what most world-makers do), we want to pay attention to ratios.  Obviously, we can just go ahead and plunk in as many number six hexes as we want to, but eventually that kind of thinking is going to make a uniform, unvarying and dull world.  The key to different adventures and different experiences is to create extreme inconsistencies ~ by working towards an ascetic design here, full of self-discipline, we can look forward to letting ourselves off the chain further on.

We can keep adding to the map, naturally ~ but we want to keep to the ratio above for now: for every occupied hex, 0-2 hinterland hexes (with no number showing); and for every four hexes of habitable hexes (those that potentially produce food), 6-10 desert hexes.  If this was a boreal region, we'd replace the desert with inaccessible swampland, unproductive tundra, rock-strata mountains or snowfields.

We've extended the intermittent river off the map, through the desert; there's nothing odd about this.  Remember, the river itself does not produce food: the soil the river flows through does.  Where the river passes through a non-producing desert, we may imagine a canyon, areas of bare rock, barren or sterile silicate sands or unfruitful gravel.  We are identifying habitable areas as hexes with relatively productive soils, and we are identifying those that actually produce food by giving them a number.

Let's move forward and add three more hexes to the map:

Here I am more or less keeping to the ratios I've just described, adding a desert hex, a water hex (sea) and a hex that is both desert and habitable.  I want to discourage the reader from thinking that a 6-mile area has to be homogeneous in its terrain or vegetation.  The type-7 hex I've created here doesn't need a big spread of hinterland, since for food they have the sea.

I could have designated the hex as a type-6 or even a type-5 ~ in which case it would make sense to increase the habitable coloring to match the increase in population.  I felt, however, it would be more instructive to indicate an access point on the coast that is not a port.  After all, we are talking only a population of 210 persons in the interior; hardly enough to make a port worthwhile. Therefore, the little settlement of Eom (65 people) is nothing but a little fishing village.  Fishing, some readers will remember, is available at tech-5.

This, incidentally, is also the reason why Eom doesn't get a coin.  I've established that type-7 hexes aren't big enough for even the minimum of commerce (the party would be a rare exception); a hex on the sea would have to be at least type-6 to generate such interest.

Eom does have one industry that a tech-5 culture would also possess: boatbuilding.  Not ships, mind, but simple fishing boats, the sort that are safe for travel up to, we might stipulate, a distance of three water hexes.  These boats would be crafted from a hard-wood that grows in the small area where the Djombo river flows into the sea, at the point where the fresh-water table is just a few inches below the surface.  Anywhere around Eom, it is possible to dig down a few inches into the soft earth and find fresh water.  This sustains the trees, which in turn sustains just enough boats for a small village like Eom to use for fishing.  Likely, there is one family within the clan that is dedicated to making and repairing boats.

The sea hex is not technically a part of the region ~ but it is productive, in the same way that an unoccupied hinterland hex is productive.  In hard times, boats would have to go out to the more open sea to enable a catch; and of course those boats would sometimes be lost if a storm came up and it was too far to come home.  As well, the deeper sea might produce less overall fish (who tend to shoal in shallower waters), except that a great fish may occasionally be caught, providing many days of food for the whole settlement, or a great fish may sink the fisher's craft.

Now, let's talk adventures:

• The journey to Eom itself is an adventure.  It may even be something that a few residents of Ai do every year as a religious ceremony (remember, mysticism is also available at tech-5). The party is therefore encouraged to go to the sea, obtain a vessel of seawater with a live fish and a basket of clam shells to bring back to Ai for the making of jewelry.  The continued survival of the fish (which need not be a big one) might be seen as a good omen ~ and obviously the more salt-water brought back, the longer the fish will survive.  Eom might be a source of gourds in which the fish and the water could be carried.
• The party could contact a boatbuilder in Eom who could build a vessel for them.  There is a world out there, after all, and perhaps the party would like to see it.  We might stipulate that it is well known that there is an island culture somewhere "out there" that is more technologically advanced that the region we've depicted (tech-6!).  What might that hold for the party and where, precisely, is it?  It would be too easy to simply say that one of the Eomites know ~ perhaps they've seen the island, once, but they're not sure they could find it easily and they can't just abandon their responsibility to the settlement to find food.  So no, the party cannot hire a fisher as a guide.  But they could collect hides, spirit gum, fresh meat, honey or other products from the interior and use these to encourage a boatbuilder to make them a craft.
• Where before we had just one desert hex, now we have eight of them.  Whereas one might have the dungeon we discussed in the previous post, there might be something else out there: a small desert village of humanoids who have, themselves, a hidden, fertile little valley, who do not trade with the "civilized" parts of the map that are shown.  We wouldn't want to put it on the map, but we might have a group of orcs or some such attack a pair of hunters.  Too, we could put a shrine out there, one that was built by the Djombo Valley people but was covered by sand and lost.  It could be sought out and restored to the people, winning the party great prestige.

This is going to go on.  I don't see any limitation to how many posts I could write along these lines.  I'm finished with my day off, however, so I may not write another of these until Friday.  Please keep the comments coming.  If I know what the readers like about what I'm doing, I can concentrate more energy towards those things.

A World From Scratch ~ A Bigger Place

Following on the previous post, let's add another hex:

I've made one aesthetic change, by drawing in a bit of green where occupation has taken hold.  All the other changes have to do with the hex added on the bottom, marked "6."  I haven't changed the tech level, here; we are still in tech-5.  But the level of settlement has increased from a seven to a six, remembering that the most dense hexes have low numbers, "1" being the most civilized.

The six-level hex has a number of new features.  The most noticeable is that I've added an intermittent river, of the smallest possible size.  This is nothing more than a dry-bed stream that fills with water three or four times a year, depending on rain occurring in mountains that ~ as of yet ~ are an unknown distance away.  The hex also has two population centers, each of which could be termed a clan.  There is more food here and there is a new symbol, a gold coin.

A type-6 hex is considered to be advanced in a number of ways.  To begin with, it receives a bonus food, in part because there are two centers but also because the hex itself clearly has more food (else a greater number of people would not be living here).  Some readers may remember that I read the number of food as a binary number: 2 food showing on the map equals "11" in binary, equal to 3 as we would normally express it.  Therefore the type-6 hex has three times the food that the type-7 hex has.

This is not due to the stream; a type-6 hex may exist without the need for a stream, due to a number of factors, including ground water that is easily accessible, a particular kind of vegetation, the breeding grounds for migratory animals, particularly birds.  The hex may also be a travel route for migratory animals.  In any case, the inhabitants have learned how to exploit the benefits of the hex and have increased their number.  With three times as much food, we may assume there are three times as many people here: perhaps 90 to 200.  This is large enough to be deemed a tribe.

Note that the number of hammers has not changed.  This is because no special industry has been created.  While the hammers described the necessary activities of the community to maintain itself in the type-7 hex I described in the last post, the hammers in the new hex still describes that maintenance.  There is more maintenance, but the sum of maintenance to population hasn't changed.

This brings us to the coin.  Some will remember that Civilization IV gave a gold coin for hexes with rivers in them ~ I am simply continuing that process here.  The river, however intermittent, represents a tremendous adjustment to the community.  Water will flood, bringing an explosion of plant growth, which may then be gathered with less work ~ and some of it may be traded away, to persons up and down the stream bed, which forms a natural road through the desert.  Thus, without being specific about how much money actually exists, we can be sure the money's presence has produced a "building" ~ we'll call it an outpost.

An outpost isn't a market; there is virtually nothing here that can be bought, except for food, skins and some wooden products, such as can be made from willow branches and rattan.  We might have other things that are washed down or revealed with the river's flooding: placer deposits of copper, gold or silver, perhaps salt that accumulates when the river dries, perhaps gums and aloes that don't require agricultural know-how to exploit.  These products don't produce a plethora of buyers, obviously; just the few who will come through, collect four to six months of accumulation in exchange for a little metal, a few trinkets, some housewares and perhaps a few other things to make life easier.

Now, before we get to the party's experience, let's give a few names to things.  This gets complicated, so we apply easy to understand labels that will allow us to communicate.  We don't want fabulously difficult labels, so let's keep it simple:

There, this is beginning to feel normal.  Our players come from the little settlement of Ai, which we'll say occupies a lush little gorge some seven miles north of Bodo.  Bodo is a large clan settlement on the Djombo river bed and the secondary settlement of Cai is its satellite.

Let's have a look at the adventures we can offer now:

• Presuming the party has made a bit of a name for itself in Ai, gone out into the unoccupied hex to the north and come back with food and skins, perhaps they can now take the skins they've collected to Bodo, where they can be traded for spears with metal heads, a small shield made of leather and willow branches, then sit in a mgahawa ~ a drinking bar ~ where they can have lightly salted fruit juices, just the thing on a hot day when one is going to relax. Here they can meet a merchant who will offer to buy as much leather skins as they can provide in the next four months.
• Or they can learn that there is an old man in Cai who once entered into the desert, top left, and found a series of buried tombs and catacombs, but he could not carry home all the gold himself.  He is the only person the party has ever seen who had a gold necklace as wide as a person's wrist, so he would seem to know of what he speaks.  He cannot make the journey himself, but he says to take little birds in a cage; when the birds die, the party will know they are very close to the catacombs.
• We might have a flood that occurs while the party is there, offering more water than the party has seen in their lives ~ and encourage the party to stay long enough to see plants bloom and give forth seeds; which can then be carried back to Ai to see if they can be made to spread in that valley.  While a sort of agriculture, it is minimal at best, and certainly what a neolithic culture would have done.  This may lead to a number of things the party can do to enhance the Ai and make themselves more important.
• They may be asked to sort out a dispute, being outsiders; they may be allowed to demonstrate their cleverness by coming up with a solution that would enhance their status in Bodo and Cai.  Perhaps they might become "Those people from Ai," who are greeted as friends whenever they return, perhaps to be given an important role in expanding the economy of the whole region ~ even being made part of Bodo's tribe and encouraged to marry and rise as war chiefs.

There is always a tendency to think the game is about finding the dungeon, and of course that option exists. But there is status, too, to be gained, the respect of others and authority over them. Wealth is not a question of how much one owns, but how one's personal wealth compares to the wealth of the system.  In the closed system above, great wealth is fairly easy to obtain.  What's more, we might imagine that these two hexes are separated from the rest of the world by a hundred miles of empty desert, a long, long way for a single merchant and two camels to cross to collect a little salt, hides and gum.

Yet obviously, we are not done.  I will be returning to this, to expand our little world farther.

A World From Scratch ~ Sign Posts

For the moment, let's dispense with my world-making apparatus, as it is mostly a lot of detail designed to use the Earth as a template.  We don't need that.  We can start a sandbox world with a minimum of effort, one that will carry through a couple of runnings.

And let's keep it very simple.  I've been thinking a lot on the tech level concept I proposed eighteen months ago . . . so let's say that the world we're building allows for a tech-5 culture.  That means technologies associated with hunting, gathering, living in the wilderness, fishing, crude boats and technology so low that the only class our characters can take is fighter.  But no matter, we don't need real players, this is theoretical.

A tech-5 culture is very low density; we may depend that this will be in a boreal or a desert environment.  I'll choose desert.  Suppose we start with 6-mile hexes.

I'm getting a little fancy with the design, but let's not worry about it.  Here we have a triangular world just large enough to walk across in a day.  There are two kinds of terrain/vegetation represented: the darker, yellow hex is pure desert, lacking any sort of water or plant growth.  The remaining two hexes are a bit more lush, like this:

So, the first thing we want to do is to establish that someone lives here.  We'll want the bare minimum of settlement.  I rate settlements on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being the most intensive possible, so we'll have a size-7 settlement: between 40-80 persons.  We'll add a little 7 to the map; and we can add a little circle to establish the exact location of the settlement.

This makes the two like hexes distinct from one another.  One is "civilized," or perhaps better described as occupied.  The other, which we can call a hinterland hex, is not.  Our few citizens are much more familiar with the nearer, occupied hex . . . but they would be somewhat familiar with the other.

They would be less so with the desert.  It isn't productive and it is dangerous for a number of reasons.  There might have been forays into the desert, to make sure it is all desert, but by the time our characters come around, that would have been well-established.

Of the two productive hexes, the nearer one would be more intensely exploited.  Let's introduce some of the features I've used for defining hexes in the past: food and hammers.

Why one hammer and one food?  I'm basing this on the Civ IV game.  An unexploited, productive dry plain starts with one hammer and one food.  We can think of this as a hex that provides for someone, but is minimally developed.  It has some development, however ~ the hinterland hex has the same potential as the occupied hex, but as it isn't occupied, we don't make note of that potential.

Okay, what does the food and the hammer mean?  Well, the food we've talked about in the past; we can keep it simple by saying it provides enough continual food for the settlement clan, but no more.  Because we are talking a tech-5 culture, none of these people are farmers or herders.  They are much more the level of tribesmen, occupying a sufficiently food-dense space, with a producing water well (not large enough for an "oasis" as we usually imagine them).  They live on honey, bush tucker and occasional animal kills, with a wide range of scavenging.  This is desert, so there's no water for fishing (even though that's available with tech-5).

I've been thinking about this constantly while cleaning and making dough this past week.  I think we can establish hammers as indicative of specific social features/buildings/services without needing to calculate their existence.  The hammer in this case, in this tech-level, would be a "camp."  It represents the industrial culture that is making tools, weapons, leather from the animals killed, redigging the water well and similar activities.  All that work counts as a "hammer"; which, like the food, is just enough to support the clan's needs.

From this, we can now propose three straightforward adventures:

• Go out and get food.  The members of the party, using the bare minimum of weapons (no metal!), are sent into the hinterland to forage around for an animal kill.  The bigger the better. Bringing back meat will do more than feed the village, it will give the party prestige in the eyes of the clan, so that they may be given special privileges, such as bodyguards and even, potentially, the decision-making right for the whole clan.
• Take a group from the clan and try to establish a second clan in the hinterland hex (making it into an occupied hex).  This requires finding the water source, potentially fighting non-meat producing animals, maybe even a small, unknown humanoid group, creating further prestige by promoting natural population growth (and the right to procreate from every woman in the clan).
• Investigate the desert.  Who knows what might really be out there?  Virtually anything, really, which might be very hard to kill with ordinary wooden weapons.  But then, the reward might be a treasure trove of ancient metal weapons, unimagined tools for the tribes' use, perhaps something that might change the clan's destiny.

And there's a start.  We can move on from here, and I mean to . . . if this post gets any response.  I hope that I've helped the gentle reader to understand that a vast amount of information can be interpreted out of a few sign posts.

Rest

I should write something.

Of late, I've been hacking at a number of different projects, none of which are getting done.  I've left off the bard sage abilities, catching my breath on those; I'm digging a bit at Iceland but not going at it full bore; I've been working out the sea distance trade routes for the islands of Britain but those are a huge bitch (many, many trade towns) and it is going slowly; I've left off the writing of pages about weapons and armor on the wiki [finished the armor at least] ~ and, I've been working on my book.

This last has been the priority and as of a few days ago, I solved a HUGE problem with a late in the book climax that has been bugging me for a year.  Swear to gawd.  A year.  More about that in a moment.

I want to explain, first, that not finishing things does not need to be a crippling disease.  One of the reasons why the various features about my world or my writing gets done is because I haven't "quit," I've taken a rest.  I read around the 'net and I seem to find that people believe that if they don't start a project, work on a project, then finish a project, all in one grand push that lasts for weeks, then they've failed and they quit working on the project forever.

That just doesn't make sense.  We have to pace ourselves.  We have to expect, ahead of time, that we're going to put down the project that we're working on, deliberately, with the expectation that we'll pick them up in a few months or even a year from now.  Some projects take years.  The trick isn't to bury ourselves in a succeed-or-die mindset, but to prepare the project in a way that it CAN be put down, when we're ready to rest.

Rest is vitally important.  Rest gives us time to think about what we've done so far, to appreciate the work we've done, to address issues that are making the project difficult or ~ after a fair time has past ~ to re-evaluate the structure and intended function of the project.  What will it accomplish?  Is it the best we can do?  Are we going about it in the most efficient way possible?

I will be honest.  Those first few days of returning to a new project are difficult.  The immensity of the project, the feeling that it can't be finished, the sense of not really remembering what was going on when we were working on it before, these things can be daunting and it can overwhelm us.  My present book has been like that, but more about that in a moment.

The trick is to go at it slowly, in bits and pieces.  If all we can take is ten minutes of the project we put down last summer, then ten minutes it is.  Maybe tomorrow, or Friday, we can look at it again.  Maybe for twenty minutes.  Sometimes, it is just a matter of looking over what we've done ~ and remember that we DID that.  WE did.  We need to remind ourselves of our accomplishments.

After a few rough goes, a few tries, a glimmer will arise about the project; a memory of what we liked when we first started at it.  Soon, there will be a little leap in our hearts, a little excitement . . . and soon enough, we'll find ourselves working away at the project again, vigorously, wanting to work on it with the same intensity that we did all those months ago.  And the work will fly forward again, doubling in size . . . and we'll recall that experience when we apply ourselves to some other project we put down a long time ago.

This is how things get done.  Not all in one try, but in many tries.  In spurts and gobs, just like you won't manage all the orgasms you'll have in a lifetime in one afternoon.

I'm sorry.  I couldn't get that metaphor out of my mind once it got in there.

Just now, the Fifth Man is like that.  A year ago, you wonderful readers helped me in a very troubled time and I promised you a book.  And there is a book coming . . . in spurts and gobs.  I've been reworking the language of the preview I sent out in late April of 2016 ~ which now seems like a long time ago.  The writing, well, the writing has needed some work, but on the whole I am pleased with the structure and the characterization.  Mostly, I've been working on the beginning again because it helps to keep the whole book in my mind, not just what's left to make.

I wish I could think of a way to reassure those who supported me, that I'm not going to disappear or declare that the book is off.  I'll pay everyone back first, before I do that.  Since it is easier to just write the book, that's what I'm doing.  I don't hate this thing, not yet (though it always gets there, I'm afraid; that's the business).  I'm happy with it.  I'm going to be very happy when it is done.

I'd like to find some way of proving that it is being written that doesn't include actually putting up the content somewhere.  That would make me feel better; would make me feel that people who supported me were comforted in the knowledge that support wasn't in vain.  I continue to think about how that might be managed.

Good.  Post written.  On to some other project.