D&D: The Adventure!! Boardgame

Not to put too fine a point on an individual's process, it might be postulated that a serious obstacle that stands in the way of an individual's creation of their campaign begins with having a "board game mindset," which assumes that in some manner the game must already exist as a complete object before the group is asked to sit and play. We're told again and again that individuals want to start their campaign, but "first I have to make my game world," which suggests the first step to D&D is creating the game board:

And this makes sense. We want the dungeon, the murky swamp, the joke tavern, the village, mysterious tower and ultimately the battle with the big bad, as we progress from the beginning of the adventure to its end... thus its natural to think of the progression in linear, boardgame terms. The dungeon is really nothing other than a battle map, which makes sense, since that's the source of D&D gestation. So when we sit to "create the world," we naturally fall into these sensibilities, those being the ones most familiar to those of us who were taught board games as children.

This is not much altered by the progressive D&D game, either. The side scroller is just the game path above depicted as a continuous revealing platform, while the running forward progress of the Witcher is just the side scroller turned 90-degrees. By an large, we're still talking about the path-driven board game, like that described above. The mind-set remains the same: the players need somewhere to go, something to encounter, information for them to uncover, obstacles for them to address, rewards for them to acquire. Whatever the sequence may be, it is a sequence, all the more so because the board game is the structure employed. That sequence may branch, but it can only do so into other sequences, before looping back to the main sequence: specifically, some destination that the boardgame-D&D world structure provides.

There are several presumptions built into this sequential model. First, that there's little reason to go back, unless it is to find the fork to another branch that we might have missed. This sequence is already known: we have discovered everything as players that the DM has placed, so that with the exception of places like Breezyvale Square on the map above, where we want to "trade or rest" as need be, other places like Darkhall Dungeon have served their purpose. To be clear, this isn't an issue with the process itself, this is merely to make the point that the value in the sequence is forward movement, not to create a world that itself provides a continously yielding space. Sequential spaces are "used up" and the players then move onto the next.

Additionally, forward movement presumes a destination that is, in some manner, predetermined. That destination might be hard, as shown on the map above (defeat the dragon, claim your glory) or it may be something soft that the DM hasn't yet determined, but can be invoked or made when the moment actually demands it. The destination itself then competes for the game's purpose moreso against the progress itself — and some players do prefer to invest themselves into the "moment" rather than the "point," as they personally view the world. Neither are wrong to do so; our intent is therefore merely to establish that a diamorphic structure is in play... one that is created by the sequential arrangement. We are moving forward, therefore we are either experiencing the movement for its own sake or for the thing it is bringing us toward.

We must understand, however, that however immediate the individual might be prone to view the game, eventually the destination is reached. That destination might be the fork that leads to other sequences, but that in itself is a destination. More commonly, however, the way that D&D is usually structured, the "glory" is out there, waiting... and that builds a third presumption about the boardgame's sequential progress: that success or failure at that specific point is expected, and far more likely success, since game modules and most DM-built adventures are created or selected to provide destinations the players can manage. The game's rush is therefore expected to coincide with this moment: the end of the perceived hero's journey, where the players overcome the last of the obstacles, kill the monster, gather the treasure and return to town flushed with success and an opportunity to buy a whole new set of toys... or, of course, to treat the boardgame as "finished," so the next board can be brought out and the sequence played again from the beginning.

It's therefore possible to see that the board depicted above is not just a joke, but a fairly reasonable simplistic descriptive of the game's pattern. Organised and played well, the paths can be fashioned in a squidgy enough manner that the board seems indistinct and uncertain; that the players don't feel as though they're on a board at all; that the board has a sufficient number of sequences that they can't really investigate them all and thus they don't tire of what's available. The lesser DM, of course, fails to offer the measure of variety that's necessary to make the game appear rich with variety; that DM sits down with the module and says, "Tonight, we're playing Jorgeblath's Tomb, because I've just bought the manual." But then, a great many people do view this game as fundamentally in the same category as pretty much any board game, so... heck, why shouldn't they approach it this way?

None of this says D&D has to be a railroad. The number of potential sequences, and the DM's power to adjust the sequences in a sort of "butterfly effect" pattern as the players make decisions permits the sequence to shift and adjust in accordance with player choices. It isn't a board game, after all, but a theoretical, non-corporeal construct that can be re-invented on the fly, so that characters that were expected to live can die, while other characters that are perceived as impractical somehow manage to survive. The die-roll structure permits this, so that instead of the fixed structure of game board paths, we can have something closer to that which was proposed by Zelazny's Roadmarks and thus taken up by any number of later science fiction universes where "time lines" proliferate or are closed off as the players do or do not take sequence paths.

But to advantage this kind of procedural flexibility, the DM really does have to get out of the "I'm making a board for my game world" mindset. The benefit of the "time line" approach is that perceived destinations can simply be thrown away by the DM at will as no longer necessary. The issue arises when the DM, having devised the game board and having in turn fallen in love with that "great scene where the party arrives at the Murky Swamp and meets the King of the Slimes," can't let go of the concept. They must, therefore, to justify all the work done, or maintain their relationship with the moment they imagine this being, hammer the Murky Swamp into the adventure between this point and that, forcing the players to enter it and play out the scene. That's where the DM's need to control the board becomes the deciding factor on what's happening or what's available to the players.

The example expresses why DMs should not attach themselves to moments or things that have gathered weight in the imagination. Most of the time, the scene only ends up disappointing the players, who aren't in love with it because they can't see point or the whole structure, or the DM is disappointed because the players haven't acting like they "should." Attachment is what creates the railroad. But that is another post (which I've probably already written).

I take exception with the "game board as initial model" structure because the inception tends to create too much board for the players to use, too soon. The DM who therefore begins the game with the mindset of, "I must create an adventure right off for the players before we can start" only invokes the latter attachment problem. D&D is not a complex piece of machinery that must be designed and built in toto so it can be checked for digression errors before it runs. D&D is a proposal that can be written by sketching out the first chapter and just seeing where it goes... not in the sense of a collaborative project, but rather, "Okay, there are goblins west of town... an owlbear to the south... such-and-such to the north... let's see where the party wants to go and then we'll just play it by ear; when something more complex is needed, we'll build it.

Sort of like loading up with all your gear in a Louis & Clark expedition (the DM too!), not knowing what's out there or what we'll need, but we're provisioned, skilled, capable, unafraid and we'll just adjust to whatever we uncover as we go.

Steps toward Immersion

I have been working on the Streetvendor's Guide for a little more than 18 months now.  I have completed 156 pages and have written something like 140,000 words.  I finished "wood" today, wrapping up incense as the last wood-based product.  I'm just getting started on paper and books.  I know readers must be tired of my talking about it, but it has been a pretty big part of my life for a while now ... and it's undoubtedly the largest single project I've ever embarked on in my lifetime.  So, with the reader's patience, I'm going to talk about it a little more.

The guide includes products of all kinds that physically existed in the time period between 1100 and 1650, all of them non-magical with two exceptions, because I just could not restrain myself.  The intent of the book is to provide information that ought to inform any dungeon master on how to create a more believable and immersive world, or rather, how to worldbuild in a realistic, practical way.

Most of those who play D&D only understand game's era through those things that can be imagined and understood in a direct, visceral manner.  They're not interested in sweeping generalisations about culture or technology, or who ran what kingdom or what peoples migrated wear.  To the actual people themselves, living in that time, little if anything seemed to change about them.  They did the work their ancestors did, they survived in the same manner, the momentary changes that did occur had little effect on their lives.  If we're going to comprehend how they saw the world, then we have to see the world in the material way they did.

For example, clothing was a deeply personal and practical aspect of daily existence.  A peasant rose each morning and put on simple garments made from wool or linen, materials that were affordable and durable. These clothes would be homespun and hand-sewn, possibly by a family member, reflecting the labour-intensive process of textile production. These were not just practical but also part of the peasant's identity, shaped by the availability of resources and local traditions. Their straightforward style remained largely consistent across generations, with minor variations in style influenced by local customs rather than sweeping fashion trends.

But we want to know, for the sake of understanding the world, where did the clothes come from?  How were things translated from field to fibre to cloth to pieces of wearable?  What sort of things were available, and what kinds of fabric?  How did one culture differ from another?  I could have written a history describing clothes and trying to connect these things together, but instead I've provided as much detail as possible for the clothes and provided a baseline for the reader to search for as much information as they could wish for ... as the guide's value is in describing what to search.

If the reader were to search for "medieval clothes" at this moment, most likely what would come up is an uncertain list of some vaguely recognisable terms, a few that were immediately familiar, and a great many that looked or sounded completely strange.  The first hurdle that any of us would have to overcome — me included, since I had to do it — would be to define a lot of terms.  Essentially, the most boring part.  This is the work I have done.  Flip through the pages on clothes and the reader will find a lot of things that are conveniently and simply explained, a simple system that explains what's more valuable than what, and a very convenient guide to how many more hours can be spent on google, youtube and chatg.

Okay, but why care?  I must admit, this one puzzled me for awhile too.  I had written a story and in it, I'd described the character's appreciation of a cup of coffee ... which I thought of as just a normal moment of a person doing a thing.  But I found that some readers really tapped into the visceral description of the moment, specifically describing their wanting to get a cup of coffee because of the short two-sentence passage.

After that, I began to notice that my D&D players cared about the colour of their imaginary gear, and about the nature of the food they were buying from the market, because I'd already taken the time to give separate prices for different vegetables, fruits, meats, breads and so on.  Why did it matter?  They couldn't taste the difference, and one would think they'd automatically just buy the cheapest type of food and save themselves some money.  But in reality, as they gamed and bought at the market, they'd ask each other what sort of food they should buy this time around, making jokes about not being able to eat another potato, not caring the least about what things cost — only what did they "feel" like eating over the next couple of weeks.

This began to connect with me.  If they cared about food, naturally they'd care about clothing.  And if they were going to farm anything, they'd obviously care about what they wanted to grow.  If I could have provided options for which kinds of inn they could stay at, instead of always proving the same basic McInn no matter where they went, surely they'd start to care about where they wanted to stay at night, or what sort of room they'd be comfortable staying in.  It wasn't that they didn't care about these things ... it was that, for decades of playing D&D, I'd failed to recognize that chain mail armour is always chain mail ... it's never four or five different visual kinds of armour that provides the same benefit, but offers the benefit of being personal.

I'd never minded if a player said they wanted to paint their armour green, or get a flag for themselves and put some motif on it; I assume people want to personalise their characters.  What is a backstory, if not a personalisation?  But most such things, including a backstory, are stagnant.  Once you've created them, or bought them, or designed your character's flag or whatever, it soon becomes stagnant.  It's nice, but as with most material things, it's momentary and in the long run, unsatisfying.  But there's something strangely different if the character's uniqueness can be expressed in a normal way, all the time, in a manner that doesn't annoy other players.  The flag, for example, has the potential of the character unfurling it before a fight.  The flag is a nice thing to have, but it's the unfurling that makes it meaningful, alive.  Saying after the combat, "I fold my flag and put it away," is so extraordinarily natural that it doesn't feel like the usual pretense that players adopt to feel their character's animation ... yet it does feel important and necessary, and therefore REAL.

But this only works if the player has some understanding of what a flag is beyond a line on a sheet saying how much the flag costs.  Having knowledge of what the flag is made of, and being able to have knowledge of how that material feels to the touch, or how heavy it is, or where it comes from ... produces a more tactile understanding of the flag itself in a way that D&D usually just doesn't offer.  It's always been assumed that it's having the flag that matters, not how it's used or how it affects the character's actions.

We are motivated by more than the things we want to stuff into our homes ... it is the way that we use up the products that make us happy, like the coffee in the morning and the last bit of ice cream in the tub before we go to bed.  It's the way the new washcloths feel on our face when we wash, compared to the old washcloths.  It's the painful reminder that cars need the brakes checked and the tires rotated from season to season, and how it costs us, even though we love our car.  And every little detail we can add to our fictional existence along these lines provides another thing for the players to consider when divesting themselves of coins in exchange for things.

I want us, suiting up in our clothes, girding on our armour, to have the same close personal attachment to the things we interact with as that peasant does in the example earlier.  But that's not possible if we don't know what clothes are, or how things are made, or where they come from.  It's not possible if we can't guess for ourselves that this item has a little drawer in it, or a top that flips up, or a wheel that's as high as our hip, or any other imagined detail that's been sketched out in a very large book with thousands of such details.

It's this sort of worldbuilding that I'm trying for ... the one that goes beyond making a map that says how many miles it is between the village and the dungeon.  I'm describing the worldbuilding we find in the books we read, where the character cuts the outer red waxy covering off his cheese, before carving off a cube and adding it to the crust of rye bread that he's bought that morning.

Obviously, we don't want this sort of description taking over the process of the game — it would be hell on a DM to have the players constantly remarking that their shoes are made of calfskin, not cowhide.  But there's nothing to keep the players from thinking about these important details when their not immediately playing, when they're carefully rewriting their characters and noticing how full of depth and feeling.  This lets them connect with their characters on a deeper level — and, in turn, creates a great deal more "world" for us to employ in strategising things that can matter in the future ... the macguffins we choose, the stakes the party can fight for and the subtleties about the players' characters that we can challenge or support.

The Guide is about understanding and envisioning the tangible elements of a richly detailed world.  By educating ourselves.

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.

Systems

"As a scientist, we have been embedded in A.I. ever since we could possibly use it.  We seek it out.  Because it makes our job easier ... because I have data that I'm swimming in.  I don't have the time or the energy to process it, to interpret it.  So you train A.I. to reduce the data, analyse the data, to find the cool stuff.  I do that while I'm sitting on a couch eating a twinkie.  This is what you want.  Plus, A.I. is all around us.  When you talk to Siri on your iPhone, there's not a human being in that exchange.  Siri tells you the fastest way to get to Grandma's house, through the traffic that just swelled up in the last few moments.  That's a form of A.I.

"A.I. beat us at chess.  A.I. beat us at Jeopardy.  No one freaked out and ran for the hills when that happened.  It only made headlines when A.I. figured out how to write your term paper.  Oh, then all the liberal arts folks, they pooped their pants!"

—  Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The desire to have mechanical systems at every tier in every subsection of play is a false god. Not every aspect of the fictional environment requires a stat, a level, a skill roll, a point-buy. For individuals who want to build the entire world based on points with a unified system mechanic, there already exists GURPS. There already exists HERO system. I do not require a system to determine the population of a town; I do not require extended mechanics to determine whether or not the neighboring barony is formulating a plot against PC ruler ...

"As for how to create geographies, ecologies, political factions, Gygax provides the most useful (if surreptitious) advice I could want: go research it. Use real world examples to model your fantastic world. I suppose some folks want a random table to generate faerie forests, goblin-infested mountains, and magical rivers. But if I am DM and God of MY world, I want a bit more control than a d20 roll on some table. I can decide the shape of my own coins, thank you very much.

—  JB of B/X Blackrazor

Yesterday, I encountered these two quotes about five minutes apart ... JB's first, then Tyson's.  I laughed when Tyson and Colbert laughed — and shook my head otherwise.  I use extended mechanics to determine the population of towns, and a great many other things.  I don't use them to determine the shape of coins, the existence of faerie forests and goblin-infested mountains, or to place magical rivers.  In large part, I fully agree with JB.  We use way, way too much effort to create tables about stuff in D&D that's utterly and completely meaningless to the running of the game.

But on another level, completely unrelated to the answer JB's giving on his blog to another reader, JB is wrong.  And he knows it.

The key word in Tyson's rant above is "data."  Data is hard information about something, and a game setting requires it.  There's the obvious stuff like hit points, spells, equipment, abilities, attacks, appearance, the presence of armour, weapons, magic, treasure, the actual existence of villages and towns and the roads between them, where food is grown even if we don't know how much, who's running the place, what limits there are for existant technology, does trade even occur here, the presence of factions and organisations, what gods exist, what they do, what they want and how much attention do they need to be paid.  There's the whole bestiary, the size of the map, why is this town even here, what happens if I attack an innocent baker with a sword, where can I get healed or my friend raised, what if I want to build a house, what if I want to do things regarding making magic or brewing potions that don't exist in the game world, and on and on.

JB's same comment also includes this:  "And yet mechanics ARE provided for those things [in AD&D] that need systems ..." and he includes these two words: "Magical research."

Here are Gygax's words regarding "Spell Research" (p.115):

"New spells might pose a small problem, as it will require some study on your part, but most of the burden can be shifted to the player. When desire to research a new spell is stated, inform the player that his or her character must carefully draft the details of the spell, i.e., you must have a typed copy of the spell in the same format as used in the PLAYERS HANDBOOK.  Only when this is in your hands should you consider the power of the spell. Meanwhile do not discuss the matter with the player — at least as DM to player; it might be necessary to take the part of a sage and discuss the spell with the player character, for example, but that is entirely different. Once you have the details of the spell, compare and contrast it with and to existing spells in order to determine its level and any modifications and additions you find necessary in order to have it conform to "known" magic principles."

This is not a "system."  This is an guideline for making an ad hoc arbitrary ruling, and in fact provides zero relevant useful detail giving aid to a DM, since "compare and contrast" are totally subjective.  It's plainly obvious that a new spell needs a level.  And that it needs a description.  But in no way does this above help with either of those two problems.

A system in game terms is a rule, mechanic or structure that governs how the game operates.  1.  The player makes a choice, decision or takes an action.  2. the current state of the game, such as positions of the game pieces, character statistics, resource quantities and status of objectives proscribe the consequences of the players actions.  3. the game's rules and mechanics are applied to the player's imput and game state; these rules govern how actions are resolved, what outcomes are possible, and what consequences arise from player decisions.

The rules govern this.  NOT the dungeon master.

If there were a "system" for spell research, then the DM would consult the rule written for the assignment of level and what the spell could do, and then a mechanic would be employed to determine how the player's state of game enabled the creation of that specific, potentially creatable spell.  IF the mechanic is a good one, then as the adjudicator I ought to be able to hand the rules and mechanics as written to the player on my right and have him or her read them off, so that everyone at the table could plainly see the answer to every question.

That's not what Gygax is proposing.  He's proposing that the DM is an entitled righteous dictator, whose final arbitration on every rule is his own, because there's no actual need to create a rule here, or a mechanic, because what the DM says is law.

Whether or not that's an appropriate attitude to have, or if the reader as DM feels this is true, is irrelevant to JB's point.  AD&D does not provide a "mechanic" for spell research, or any other form of magical research anywhere in the DMG.  Cost of research is arbitrarily determined because the nubmer of weeks the spell needs is arbitrary.  The cost itself bears no consideration from one spell to another, or one magical item to another.  No ingredient list for the materials that will be needed exists.  The manufacture of the spell or device is based on a "chance of success," which is arbitrarily assigned, intended to balance the process towards a percentage that is less than 50/50, with a ceiling success chance that's arbitrarily assigned at 50%.  The entire process promotes Gygax's personal biases against the players increasing their magical capacities, without any consideration at all that MAYBE the real difficulty shouldn't be time or money or the character's intelligence or the character's level, but actual game play that would take place that would give the character the RIGHT to create a new spell or the RIGHT to obtain a new magical item through research.  You know, the way the mage character has the right to cast certain spells in combat.

The whole four-page section is a testament to dreck thinking and self-appropriated bile as Gygax goes right up his own ass on the whole process.  And I don't really care if some other DM somewhere wants to prop up their game campaign with this entitled drivel ... it only matters to me in the context of this post that we understand that if an arbitrary decision must be made at some point along the process, it's not a GAME SYSTEM.

Going back to that list earlier on, regarding data.  Whether or not we generate it with a die roll, the actual population of a town — and if not the population, then the number of buildings, or what kind of buildings exist, or what services the town offers, or how long it takes to walk across the place, are all relevant details that the setting needs in order for the players to treat the town like a real place, know what they can do here, and more importantly know what they can't do here.  Someone or something has to generate this information.  And as someone who ran for more than 20 years before devising a system to answer these questions for me, I speak with experience when I say that I had to pull all this data out of my ass.  Because until I made a system that made it, that's the only place this data can be found.

This is what I think when I see JB write, "I can decide the shape of my own coins."  Yes, and I know from which place that decision is made from.

The shape of coins IS irrelevant ... at least, until one wants to install a monetary system where coin exchange matters, where different coins have different weights, where square coins with sharp edges will destroy your silken belt pouch, and where encumbrance matters.  I tried such a system.  Ran it for four years.  Gave it my all.  It sucks.  Unlike encumbrance, it's just a bloody nuisance.  The real world becomes civilised when they get rid of national currency, the schmucks.  So, sure, simple coin, one shape and size everywhere.  Done.

Still, I did the Tysonian experiment.  I didn't just assume.

It's easy enough for JB to scoff at extended mechanics.  He runs a rather direct and simple setting.  And it's just as rational for him to defend AD&D.  He hasn't been brutally deconstructing the original three books for the last 44 years.  And I'm completely on board with his beating the drum of AD&D to those who read his blog, because JB has lately become a believer in that edition whereas many others among his audience are not, and won't be, because like Gygax they've spent too many years going up their own ass.

But I have a much larger world, with much larger ambitions, and I'm not satisfied with a magic research system that asks me to "decide the shape" of it out of my ass.  I'm not satisfied with nearly any paragraph of Gygax's design.  And like Tyson, I am swimming in data, and demands on my time, and things I want to design and make available to the players, so they can read a gawddamned rule and throw it in my face any time I try to be arbitrary about something.

And if that means needing a damned system decide the population of a town in my game world, then praise be, fuckin' A, it's one less bloody thing I have to do before getting my teeth marks on a twinkie.  Because DATA is my nemesis.

Thinking back on those first decades of D&D, there's one thing I can pick out about being a DM that I absolutely hated.  It came up constantly, because I encouraged players to decide their own adventures, and because I embraced a philosophy that argued that if any person anywhere in the game world does or can do a thing, then damn it, the players ought to also be able to do it.  Start a colony in West Africa?  Gather labour and ship it to the new world?  Start a plantation on the Barbados and cut sugar to be shipped to Portugal?  Buy tools and take them to West Africa?

By my philosophy, but the standard I held myself to, I had no right to stop my players from doing these things, if that's what they wanted to do, and that is what they DID do.  They were free to travel to Guinea because it existed in my very large game world.  They were free to start a plantation because hundreds of other rich Portuguese persons were doing the same.  They were free to buy slaves and take them to the new world, because there were hundreds of others who were also doing this, it being the 16th century in my game world at that time.  They were free to claim land in Barbados, because others were doing so.  They were free to work their slaves to death because that was in no way unusual or regarded as unacceptable by any authority existing at that time.  They were free to pack the sugar aboard their vessel and sell it in Portugal at a fabulous profit.

It was not my right as a DM, as I perceived then, and as I perceive now, to judge my players for their actions, or take action as a DM that brings unwarranted consequences that should fall on my players while not falling on tens of thousands of other persons doing the same thing in the same time in the same places.  It was my part as a DM to enable the players to enjay the game as they wanted to enjoy it, to make use of the setting as they felt it should be used, to advantage situations that they felt best suited themselves and so on.  My part was to build the world, describe the events as they unfolded, invent consequences that had nothing whatsoever to do with moral judgments, and answer any question the player asked in a spirit of reasonable, rational non-interest with respect to the game settting, which I veiwed as a reflection of the real world at the time.

What I hated was that so much of the time, I was unable to answer questions the players had, because Gygax's perception of how D&D should be limited was no fucking help to me whatsoever.

It never occurred to Gygax that my players might do the things they did, or want to have things that didn't exist in the original books pages, or take part in activities, such as TRADE, that Gygax and the whole bloody crew at the Dragon Magazine turned their collective noses up in the air about.  I could run the game, but if the players didn't want to spend all their time in a dungeon, and I didn't make them, then there were no fucking "systems" at all, for anything.

AD&D, as written, is a myopic, ignorant, useless piece of trash where it comes to setting building.  And during those early years, when Gygax and crew could have been giving their effort towards expanding the game past the dungeon ... they spent all their fucking time masturbating and making dungeons.

It's a sore point.

Those readers here know what I did.  And quite a lot of you here are grateful that I did it.  I intend to go on doing it.  Lately, some group of toxic assholes (really, go look up their names) invented a piece of A.I. that's probably the most useful thing that's ever been designed for my setting creation — specifically because it answers questions, in seconds, that I don't know how to answer.

And what's best about it?  (a) isn't located in my ass; (b) isn't arbitrary or subjective; and (c) it doesn't care what I ask, or how many times I ask it.  It's beautiful.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

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

Ohio

There are drawbacks to having the real world as a background, that emerge in strange ways.  For instance, as I calculate the price of cacao, sugar and spices for the Streetvendor's Guide, I'm reminded that these goods existed only because it was necessary to force slave labour to do work that paid labour resisted.  Life on a tropical plantation hung by a thread, and only those who could not escape did that work ... and died doing it.  And for that reason, the inclusion of sugarcane in a fictional world is suspect.  We might imagine some sort of creature that's designed to cut cane without having being made to do so ... but that was the solution Roald Dahl tried in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Which hasn't aged well.

I've been faced with another similar, and somewhat deeper problem today.  DM's Escritoire has requested a map of the Columbus city area of Ohio ... and the first question that arises, before anything can be done about making the map, is who lives there.

That's complicated.  In the real world, in the hundred years before my game takes place, 1650, the Iroquois had forced the Wyandot Hurons south into Ohio.  But a few centuries prior to that time, there'd been a peoples whose disappearance remains a mystery to this day.  This was the so-called Adena culture, that became progressively more advanced between 600 and 1200 AD, only to vanish.  By the time Europeans arrived, even the natives in the area could not explain the gigantic mounds the Adena built, or what happened to the Adena people.

Now, I've explained that in my game world (though I'll give more detail here), sometime about 6500 years ago, elvish tribes began to move south from Alaska until they settled in the area between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.  They called the land there Beleriand.  They made friends with the human natives and began to share their technology, which dated as far back as before the last ice age, between 25 and 21 thousand years ago.   My elves arrived on earth from another plane of existence 2-3 thousand years before that.  But I digress.

This means the elves that exist in my world would have known the Mound peoples of Ohio.  They would have a complete history of these people, would know who they were and why they scattered into the wilderness ... but then, would they have scattered?  Would that have been necessary?  And if it wasn't, wouldn't those mound peoples still exist when the Europeans came?

It's a fictional world, so of course I can say that's how it is.  I can say the Mound peoples did not die of the plague (if that's what it was) or the destruction of their land ... instead, for another 400 years, they grew and became even more civilised, so that there's a sort of Edgar R. Burroughs culture of natives in the heart of Ohio and stretching outwards into Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.  I could say the mounds have become great stone temples, that there are cities of a size to rival those of the Aztecs and Incas, with roads, great military might and ambassadors that have travelled all the way to Europe to speak with monarchs there.

But I could also say that the Mound peoples turned to evil and dark magic, that they were influenced by dark elvish envoys who sought to destroy the elvish Kingdom of Beleriand and that after an immense war that took place around 1200, hundreds of thousands of the Mound peoples were wiped out ... and that is why we know nothing about them.  And in the meantime, there are still drow elf shamans wandering the woods of Kentucky and Ohio, seeking to gather allies, to strengthen their will and to destroy the good elvish kingdoms upon the continent.

Either narrative would work pretty well.  In fact, a blend of both narratives could also work.  There still is a Mound culture, but it's been poisoned from within and Beleriand holds councils every season to decide if this is the year of the rooting out.  Of course, that year arrives when the player characters do.

In all this conjecture, however, I have a problem.  I have no legitimate name for these Mound peoples.  The name we use, Adena, was assigned by a white person whose property a mound was located.  There is an argument that "Adena" is a corruption of "Eden" ... and it's completely true that Victorian Englishmen were willing to slap a Biblical "Eden" label on just about every place with green grass.  It's not a native name.  We have no native name.

Moreover, any change of history, anywhere in the real world, is suspect from a political perspective, in this age where all peoples invest so much in their heritage and cultural background.  In making the people of Michigan's upper peninsula non-human, I risk offending thousands of Odawa and Ojibwe peoples.  If I invent a Mound people culture, giving it a name that I like, I risk offending Hurons and other peoples in Ohio and the other states mentioned.  None of this is an issue if I run a game world like Greyhawk ... but if I transform native Ohioan culture into something that's more Asian or European than legitimately North American, I'm easily in the dog house of dozens of politically-minded historians.

Which puzzles me, to be honest.  I'm not pretending to create actual, real history.  It's not like people are going to suddenly believe there were elves in Missouri in the 4th millennia B.C.  My creative ability just doesn't have that kind of reach.  I can hardly threaten anyone with my fiction, least of all a tribal culture getting government money in Michigan, Maine or Ohio.  Yet here we are.

But ... the first problem is making a map of Ohio and having a way to name things.  That's the real trouble here.  We have no proper name for the Mound peoples.  We could posit that they built some elaborate settlement where Columbus stands today, but what in hell did they call it?  Submuloc?  How bad a joke is that ... and yet it's not a bad, alien sounding name.  Suppose I do this with every midwest city and town, but in every case I replace u's with o's and reverse c's and b's.  That makes the town's name Socmolob.  Which is also not a bad, alien sounding name.

Oh, the troubles of creativity.

I was a fan of Burroughs as a kid.  Tarzan was always stumbling out of some jungle into a spectacular, implausible Oriental-like city, with spires covered with gold ... and there's a legitimate fantasy element there.  Putting such a place on the forested, rivered plain of Columbus sounds like a good idea ...

The Weeds

One thing about dedicating myself towards pure game design, I find myself getting into the weeds with the content I'm creating.  Having completed, sufficiently for now, a page on type-7 hexes, I considered those pesky red links that appear on the wiki, indicating there's no page to visit yet.  Before going ahead with further descriptions of facilities, I should address those.  After some thought, I decided the "settlements" page was very sparse, and that the 6-mile Hex Map page could definitely use developing.

With both, the difficulty of those subjects quickly become apparent.  Using a blog post about settlements I wrote some months ago, I built this settlements page on the wiki.  On the surface, it looks fairly short, but the issue is that to describe what I do, I have to invent a number of terms, and then explain what those terms mean.  I'm never completely sure I'm being understood, which makes me anxious.  Explaining even very simple arithmetical formulas can easily confuse a reader, so that I find myself becoming desperately pedantic, without knowing if that approach even works.

As such, I hated writing the wikipedia page.  I hate the page itself.  I know of no simpler way to describe what is, for me, a very easy process ... but that's because I built it to serve myself.  Then again, it makes sense to describe my approach as best I can, since others could and probably will benefit from it.  Still, it's not nearly as fun as writing a page about gong pits.

With the settlements page behind me, I undertook the 6-mile map page.  This was absolute hell.  It requires a lot of different pictures showing lots of different bits of information, all of which has been collected and built since twenty years ago, which I haven't had to explain to anyone, ever.  There's something exposing about not only explaining what I do, but why it's the right thing to do.  I find myself getting defensive and there's no reason for it; yet this is partly the effect that the internet has on all of us.  We're doing something that no one else, anywhere, is doing, and yet we feel we have to defend it because we know there are voices out there who are ready to cry out, "Stop doing that!  It's bad!"  For reasons.

Fitting the various images with the text, to make it look accessible ... well, it looks good on my monitor.  I use a zoom of 110%, so that letters appear on my desktop rather small.  If I push the view up to 150%, the pictures jump all over the page and it looks like crap.  I have no solutions for that.  I would have it that wikimedia would let the text be adjusted by the reader without adjusting the size of the pictures; if someone knows how to do format that, let me know.

I have a characteristic that says if I'm going to get into describing something, I should describe it all.  This is not always a good thing.  It's like describing a fictional character's clothes by getting into how the buttons were sewn into the character's waistcoat.  Still, with mapmaking, it feels like skirting over an issue is going to leave the reader going, "Where the fuck did that come from?  I don't understand why he decided to do this ..."

There's no winning, I suppose.  Chances are, I've forgotten to explain some part of the process along the way and I'm going to get the response anyway.  These are, after all, only a first draft.  I can make them better.  Though I need some distance.  I've stopped editing anything I created in the last three months.  It's just better if I edit that same content as much as a year later, when like a reader, I have no idea what I meant.

Well.  I need to do a post about rivers, but I'm going to kick that can down the road awhile.  Two of these explaining technique posts are enough for now.  I'll be happy to dig into a page about something as simple as cloth mills.

World Description, part 1 of a billion

This is the beginning of a very long headache:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thorp

This.

I'd imagine this would drive many traditional D&D players crazy.  They'd see the rigidity of the concept as incredibly limiting, though obviously it's anything but.  Whereas we're usually given a rough population figure, say either 20-80 people or fewer than 20, here we have detailed numbers that dictate a thorp might have anywhere from 3 people to 38, accounting for things that might exist.  No river, no dock, no mill.  No trees, no sawpit, no woodcutters.  Hell, no farming, no anything, except perhaps a well.  One that's natural, of course.  No point in sinking a well if there's no one around to draw water.

Everyone has a reason to be here.  Thus, if the players are here, they know what those reasons are ... and the very nature of the thorp defines what benefits the players might derive.  They can barter for food here.  They might be able to catch a boat here.  They can get a sack of grain turned into a sack of flour, all at rates far below city prices.  The party can make arrangements to bivouac here with their tents, more assured than usual that they won't be harassed.  They can make friends here; find a servant here, if there's a youngster older than 14 who's desperate to get out and see the world, all moon-eyed at these players who've been to the big city.

It's a useful place.  And they're scattered all over.  If I go back to the original sentiments for this blog, it's a place that offers the players the opportunity to build something.  Not that they should assume the locals are pushovers, just because they're isolated.  Any one of these might be an ex-soldier, whose seen and done things the party hasn't yet.  It's not a good idea to push around strangers.  You don't know where they've been.

For me, I like seeing the hammer concept come together.  Collect the individual parts, fold them together and create a thorp.  Collect more parts and make a hamlet.  Collect more and make a village.  Keep going, right up until we're building palaces.

Hope I can do that.  Some of these descriptions are really going to tax my imagination.

Whole Facilities List

I've finally complete this page:

Personally, I consider it a work of absolute genius ... remembering that every facet of the page depends upon a random generation determined by my infrastructure distribution rules, which in turn are entirely developed out of information on encyclopedia-determined towns and cities, systematically calculated population figures and a distribution of "settlements" that I apply according to GoogleEarth, not my own reckoning.

Thus, the whole system builds and functions spatially in the setting without my personal intervention.  I build as the numbers tell me.

Fantastic.

The World Turtle Bears the World

I know my readers have been waiting.  Forgive me for a little preamble first.

Sterling, I got the book.  I picked it up from my mailbox just before heading out today, so I've been able to glance through it and read your kind letter.  My grandmother was also a schoolteacher.

After not driving for 20 years, my partner Tamara has spent the time since the relax of Covid here in Canada chasing all the details that would let her regain her driver's license.  This involved communicating with the Michigan bureaucracy, where her last license was issued, getting Alberta to believe Michigan, retaking her learner's license test, taking driving courses to invigorate her driving habits, taking the test twice and passing, as of Thursday six days ago.  Tamara was anxious to get a car as soon as possible, so the last days have been filled with a visit to the bank, arranging financing, finding a car and then buying one, which we did yesterday, amid a rather ludicrous car price inflation that's ongoing.  We got a good deal on a Ford Edge.  Today, we took it out for a five hour drive around outside the city, visiting a provincial park and regaining some of our skills (driving comfortably in a new car for Tamara, navigating for me).  Once upon a time I had an interest in being a navigator for a rally car, but no opportunity to pursue that ever emerged.

Tomorrow, I'll be getting a full analysis from the lab for my yearly checkup; I've had to wait two months for an appointment.  It's possible I have a hernia; that's added to the list of other old man diseases I might have.  No biggie, but it helps fill up the week.

Then, Sunday, on the 14th, Tamara and I will be getting married.  We've been together continuously since March 30, 2002, so it's going to be a very simple ceremony.  We have the license, there's no need for a blood test and the arrangements have been made.  Just one more thing on my plate.  Otherwise, it's been work, exercise and juggling advice about cars, marriage brokers and other minor details.  This is why I haven't undertaken the post I promised.

Gee.  I hope I remember what I was going to talk about.

Looking around for a neutral example to discuss, to kick off a campaign description, this comes from  the one drive page from the Blue Bard, discussing Geoul.  I plan to discuss it out of context; if you'd like it IN context, read as much as you can.  It's time well spent.

"Bablemum, the great sultanate of the utter south has long been protected from its arch enemy, the Society of the Jaw: this by virtue of powerful leaders and, according to common myth, a seldom spoken of secret organization known as the Esoteric Order of the Twilight Princess.

"You live well, plying your trade and making reasonable money. But recent years have brought unrest to your heart and you begin longing for something more.

"Inquiry and risk draw you south, across the Six Kingdoms, to the quaint, hibiscus shadowed lanes of Geoul. Geoul is an ancient town of vineyards, scholars and painters, and there you receive your initiation into the Esoteric Order of the Twilight Princess -- hopeful that your new title "Secret Master" will begin your path to greater things. But shortly after joining this secret society, the building you were initiated in burns and the man who inducted you, a Master Elect of Nine named Nihs'Lohc, vanishes without trace."

I said with the last post that you'll decide the life the players will live ... here, they're being told that they're an initiate, which brings responsibility and awareness of a JOB the players will have in the campaign.  Succeed, and they're doing what's expected of them.  Fail, and there will be consequences.  If the EOTP works like most like orders, don't expect a lot of gratitude for doing their job.  That's why we're initiating them in the first place.

This sets a powerful tone for the engagement of the players, one utterly different from the one I set in my world, but NOT wrong.  This is important.  When I said that the campaign needed an ethic, I absolutely did not say it had to be my ethic.  Here is an ethic.  Here is a path to greater things (not necessarily known to a mere initiate).  Further, here's personal responsibility.  Their mentor, the guy that got them here, disappears and leaves them to bear up on their own.  "Get with it soldier.  Don't fuck up."

I said that you'll decide the monsters that will try to kill the players, and where they dwell.  What is the "Society of the Jaw"?  Do you think it's solved by one adventure?  By a string of adventures?  This is an arch enemy to a great sultanate.  Whatever The Jaw is, there are members in every village; in every round table; secretly camped near every military post; in elaborate tunnels under every city quarter; attached to every priesthood ... indeed, hiding under a lettuce leaf in the players' garden.  The Jaw are everywhere ... and they are the players' deepest, darkest nightmare of an enemy.  No where is safe, and no one can be trusted.  There are no "adventures."  There is a continuous, fluid power struggle that moves seamlessly from day-to-day.  Victories are as momentary as keeping back the tide; defeats are the smashing apart of age-old institutions and whole cities.  The moment the party finishes off the "big bad" in his lair, which they've spent twenty sessions getting to the bottom of, they must dodge an assassin's knife seconds before they learn that all this effort has been taken to kill a mere lieutenant.  There is no final victory, no final end to some episodic adventure.  NO, there's life.  Theirs, the world's, the battle to defend what's good, and their will to go on.  That is all.

I said that you'll decide what's real and what lies the players will be told.  Do the players really believe that these quaint, hibiscus shadowed lanes are what they appear to be?  Are they so foolish to think that the vineyards, scholars and painters are merely what they look like?  What is this entity they've been drafted into?  Are they truly the enemy of The Jaw?  Or ARE they The Jaw?  Do they know?  They cannot know.  They must decide on the evidence before them, from running to running, whom they really serve ... and what might be the true nature of what these beings pretend to represent.  They're not granted the luxury of absolute knowledge about right and wrong.  No one is.  For all they know, they're serving the enemies of Bablemum, and not it's protectors; for all they know, they're comfortable with that.  Perhaps there's no good reason to defend Bablemum at all.  In any case, it's up to them to decide.  This is THEIR life.  THEIR loyalties and actions.  THEY must choose the best path for themselves ... while always being careful what they trust.

After all, I said that you'll decide why all the things in your world live and what they want and what they'll die to defend — except the players.  The players are hurled into this maelstrom without guides, without assurances ... unless as a DM you're stupid enough to give it to them.  As DM, you hold the key to your setting.  The PLAYERS must find their own key, to unlock how to survive the DM's setting.  This is the game.

Let me draw on another quote from the Blue Bard.

"Here, you can see a fleshed version of the Country of Ormolu (formerly known as Wardale) and the city of Sanctuary that abuts the Marches. A good deal of player time has been spent in this vicinity, investigating the ruins of Copper Grove, exploring the Misthalls and Amharc Mountains, braving the crags of Geir Loe (the great peak that overshadows Sanctuary) and striking out on perilous missions into the march land."

I wrote with the last post, you need a place for the player characters to start.  Here it is.  And on the surface, suffering from the mindset with which D&D has poisoned you, you foolishly look at the above description as a series of "adventures."  But is it?  Are there any words in the above that state clearly that there's been an end to any of these activities?  Does "investigating the ruins" state clearly that the ruins have been cleaned out, or that the investigation is closed?  Is there no more exploring of the mountains and crags left to do?  Are "missions" a short hand for "adventures," with a beginning and an end, or are they in fact just temporal raids in an ongoing, potentially life-long operation where a thousand raids would still not clean out every villain, monster and demon from these awful places?

It depends on how you see it.  The "adventure" model is a stupid child-like perception of social realities ... the sort of thing that we watched naively when we believed that once the cops arrested the drug dealers that "closed the book" on drug crimes for good.  Nothing ENDS!  And why should it?  Why shouldn't another visit to the Copper Grove or Misthalls reveal yet one more secret, one further deeper undiscovered place, one other game changing fact that obliterates all our foregoing preconceptions?  Would you care as a player?  Would the ennui of knowing that you'll never kill every last orc, or root out every last evil treant from this forest, or kill the last city rat, sour your desire to play D&D?  Not me.  Not any serious player I've ever encountered.  Imagine bringing out another orc and have the players cry, "But I thought we killed the last one!  This sucks!"  More likely, "O gawddamn, another?  All right, I'll kill it ... you get the next one."

The mountains, the ruins, the halls and the march lands are always there, always ready for another sojourn, as soon as we recoup, attend to a few matters at home, clean out the chicken coops and whatever.  This makes sense in the game world.  The problems don't just go away.  They're not just solved.  At first level, they're surface problems ... but as the players go deeper, they find their original perspectives adjusted; they realise the orcs are just dupes, that the real evil is something worse ... until later on they realise how unsophisticated and artless was their earlier comprehension.  These initial problems are just turtles standing on the backs of turtles ... and it's turtles all the way down.  What really makes the world turn; what really drives the model; that's yet to be known.  But when it is learned, wow.  It'll blow the players' minds.

Yes, I'm saying that if you think you know what the ethic of my game world is, that's only because you've only played or seen the surface.  There are things about my world that I've never told anyone.  And they're BIG.

I said that as a DM, the monsters need to have their own agendas and things they'll die for.  They are alive, too.  And they're just as annoyed at these players that keep returning and making trouble as anyone.  You can't keep going back to the same mountains and ruins forever without someone powerful deciding that's it for you.  Sure, in the beginning you're a pest.  You're a tiny chigger draining your little bit of blood off the immense body whose existence you can't imagine.  But you take enough blood from that body ... you get big enough to get noticed, and felt ... something gargantuan and fast moving is going to slap you so fast and hard you won't know your body is about to be paste across the surface flesh of that being.  That's the game too.  If a DM isn't keeping one arm tied behind his or her back.

Sooner or later, the plundered become the plunderers.

Now.  If you want further explanation, and examples, you'll need to ask a question.  I understand this just fine, down to the bottom turtle.  If you want to understand it also, you'll have to tell me what you don't understand, so I can help you.  And everyone else reading this.

​

A Conclusion to Worldbuilding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the secret to writing.

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

Village No. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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