Counter-duality

Coming back to worldbuilding.

Let's put all the detailed structural work surrounding geography, politics, sociology and such upon a shelf today and talk about "function."  The world is a setting where things happen, but the world is also a tool designed to be practical and useful for game purposes.  The goal is to get the world up and running so that it's applications can serve both the DM and the Players, and other aspects of the game aside.

As a DM, I need the built world to provide me with inspiration at a glance whenever I need it, specifically during the course of the game.  This means that if I look at a map, that map is constructed in a way that upon looking at it, answers to questions and possibilities emerge within a few seconds, leading me to present situations for the players that I may have had no thought of 60 seconds prior ... but which some part of the work and preparation I've done regarding building my world has just provided.

Let's take a familiar example.  A dungeon room is a highly recognisable D&D construct.  Most DMs, having the map of a dungeon at their elbow, can visualise a number of monsters that could be placed on the fly in that dungeon room; what they're doing in the room is fairly evident as well, since there are only a few things that a group of orcs, say, or an ochre jelly, can possibly be doing as the players arrive.  While the structure of the dungeon is limited, that structure provides a clear-cut functional purpose.  The players are here to fight, they're here to find things in the room, they're here to seek passage to the next room.

If I take a random dungeon map, say the sort that Dyson regularly creates, as experienced DMs we can reason easily what ought to be there and, as the game session begins and gets going, the shape of the walls, the small incorporated details, whatever beasties we've inserted and so on sets in motion a fertile degree of invention ... one that we're used to because dungeons are such a large part of our gaming experience.  Plock any dungeon graphic in front of a DM with a mere two or three years of experience and running a single session without notice is not a difficult task.

Unfortunately, DMs tend to rely so much upon dungeons that they gain little experience with other possibly functional locations.  For many, a town encounter fails to produce an adequate experience because there are NO comparable, useful resources on par with what a dungeon layout provides.  Likewise with a wilderness or an occupied rural landscape.  This disconnect occurs because such places are not structurally limited like a dungeon.  A village or a town dictates that virtually anything that's done will be observed by someone, since these places are full of people; and if the act is observed, it's bound to be reported.  Many players, comfortable with doing whatever they want in a dungeon, suddenly become stymied by the lack of "freedom" a town offers.

And that itself is a strange happenstance.  We might suppose that the dungeon is the constrained environment, but it's not.  The consequence provided by a dungeon is whether or not our side can win in a fight ... whereas the consequence in a town is usually the recognition that if the whole town turns out in force, we're definitely going to lose.  Let us fight 20 orcs and not a hundred guards.

Taking the wilderness, it's a question of exposure.  Fight those 20 orcs in a dungeon and afterwards we can spike the doors and make our retreat, confident that once we're outside the orcs will lose our track ... and if the DM isn't the sort to hurl wilderness encounters, or run a strictly wilderness outdoor adventure, we're "safe" as soon as we get outside.  But if, when we're outside, a monster of any size, and particularly of great size because the outdoors gives lots of room, attacks us while we're recovering, um, we're fucked.  Players who lack experience with long-term outdoor situations also lack knowledge of how to protect themselves, while DMs who also lack experience tend to think the only thing one can do is throw large beasties as encounters.

In short, a dungeon seems rich and full of possibilities, while other parts of the setting feel repetitive and the players excessively vulnerable.  In response, many DMs choose to discard any conflict in towns altogether, along with any use of wandering monsters in the wilderness.  It's simply easier to ditch these adventure ideas and get the players out to the dungeon, where the DM is happier and the players as well.

These are setting-function deficiencies.  Because DMs have never been taught or even seen another point of view, they tend to perceive every setting in terms of the dungeon's combat-puzzle-trap model.  Or they turn to the dualism that if the game isn't combat, it's role-playing ... so that town encounters become long drawn-out chat exercises, where most of the party has no idea what to say and everyone is worried that saying one wrong thing will land everyone in loads of trouble.  This IS possible; there's no pretending it isn't.  But likewise, it's just as possible to make one incredibly stupid move in a dungeon and be in loads of trouble.  It's only that most of us have seen what those stupid dungeon moves are ... whereas we have next to no idea what they might be in a town.

Moreover, as DMs want to stress the importance of role-playing in their campaigns (if they're the type), they will up the stakes with every conversation until we're at the baker's, ready to draw our swords while discussing the cost of a dozen biscuits.  Overmuch ballyhooing is the bread-and-butter to many a role-playing DM, struggling to assign tension and difficulty where, in fact, there ought to be very little.  Most conversation isn't, and shouldn't be, stressful.  It should be interesting, full of enlightening details and suggestions for social and status advance ... but my own experience has shown that even if my foot isn't on the gas, the player's will be automatically.  Time and again I've had to explain to players that nothing bad is going to happen if they trust someone.  This is clearly a taught habit, as multiple DMs in the player's past has taken advantage of the player's trust at every opportunity.

The approach to role-playing, again, pushes the players back to the dungeon — where they need only worry about bloodsucking monsters and insidious pendulum traps.  Thank gawd, we're back where things make sense!

Caught between the game being either a dungeon crawl or an uncomfortable chat with townsfolk, it's difficult for most to glance at a map like the one shown and come up with anything except, obviously, to visualise a dungeon located near Reni or Macin or Ibraila.  The rest is a smattering of places and names, without a sense of "D&D" going on.

I've touched on this element before, but it's worth repeating.  The dualism of the dungeon/role-play model is that BOTH place the player firmly in the passive role, waiting for the DM to do something that makes the game go.  The players wait for the next dungeon room.  The players wait for the other side to start the conversation that decides what the players will do next.  And the players, used to this functional structure, dutifully wait to be told what expectations have fallen upon them.  "I need YOU to go to this dungeon;  I need YOU to fetch this object to me; I need YOU to rescue the princess."  The players are a foil in the hands of the DM, who arranges the targets, or obstacles, for the foil to overcome, all the while being in full grip of the foil's handle.  The players get the delicious promise of being the tip, the part that actually touches the enemy; the part whose whirling around in the air feels exciting.  But all the while, the tip possesses no actual control; the control is in the DM's subtle wrist.

Plenty exist to argue this ought to be the case, both DM and Player.  Virtually every player has  experienced only this form of play.  And having had only one sort of experience, it stands to reason that players loving the game would argue against a change.  After all, they don't know what they'd be getting.

When I look at the map, I don't see a passive experience for the player.  Given sufficient wealth, time, freedom from responsibility, freedom from worrying seriously about death — all of which is the player character's perspective — I see a place where I can freeboot around as much as I please, witnessing and personally experiencing the local culture, making arrangements, bartering, intervening as I please against any wrong I see and always confident that my escape is assured ... as planning my escape comes before taking the hazardous step to intervene.  For every enemy I make I'll be sure to make three friends ... and if I am a player in this location where the DM is a fellow like myself, then I have every reason to believe my friends ARE friends, and not a trick of the DM who cannot keep his hand off the foil.  I see half a dozen opportunities in the map for plunder, investment, piracy, trade and settlement ... with plenty of wilderness to clear out mere footsteps from my front door.  That is, wherever I happen to put my front door, which might be anywhere.

Freed of the worry that I might say the wrong thing in a "gotcha" campaign — as these are just people and I've spoken with people all my life — and equally confident of defending myself in a wilderness, I'm not beholden to the DM's instigation of a pre-planned campaign ... nor do I have to approach the DM to beg him to run such and such a module because I'd like to run in it.  I will, thank-you, write my own "module" on the fly, because I think I can do a better job.

And taking the DM's perspective, all the opportunities I've just cited are there:  the little village run by an petty overlord, the lake monster that needs killing so the barges can roll past safely, the beach where the players can lie in wait for a small river craft to seize, the hamlet they can pillage before making haste to another part of the marsh, the dock they can have built, the smuggling in which they can partake, the bay where they can build their lair and so on ... and of course, if it's really necessary, the half-drowned dungeon they'll find somewhere in this part of the world.

The map gives me this; the little symbols on the map as well; the perspective of how a world works; and the readiness to let the players do as they like without arbitrarily restricted their behaviour on any account.  This is worldbuilding to me.  Every part of the human experience laid out, good and bad, with clues baked right into the design that I can see clearly and reveal to the players as they set out to explore.

SFB

What I'll do now is give an example of structure, function and behavior, which I did not do enough of in How to Run (so I was told).  Sometime I'll have to write an update of the whole worldbuilding section and do nothing but give examples for each point I was making.

I'm pushing the clock here, as I'm not going to write tonight like I should, but I'm going out to see the film Wonder Woman, which I hear is good to women.  I'm certainly hoping that it is.

Let's invent a basic dungeon room and then examine that room in terms of structure, function and behavior, to better understand how designing works.  People get quite muddled about this and, while not their fault, it is helpful to be clear about things.

As a reminder, "structure," from the Latin structura, is the manner in which things are fit together, built, constructed, arranged or ordered, in the sense of how they are assembled and joined in order to create the bare bones of the project.  Thus, the structure of the room is as follows: the room's dimensions, the fabric from which the room is made, the contents of the room, the fabric from which the contents are made, the arrangement and dimensions of the contents and the physical relationship of the contents, from the point of view of the maker that is in a position to know every detail about the actual room.  If we wish, we can also discuss the manufacture of the room and its contents, since that is relative to the structural process.

So, we have a room that has been manufactured by two basic means; first, that an entity has constructed the room by excavating the stone and then finishing the room according to the premise for its construction: in this case, a room that is 20 feet by 20 feet, with a typical dungeon door in the centre of two opposite, facing walls, with a 9 foot diameter fountain in the middle of the room, upon a parquet floor.  The lip of the fountain is 2 feet above the floor and the centerpiece of the fountain is 6 feet above the floor.  The centerpiece is a basalt stone woman, dark violet in color, adorned with wings and a peasants dress, holding a small infant that is clearly not a human but is of an unknown humanoid race.  The fountain is powered by water pressure, through a drilled pipe that delivers natural water from a higher water source outside the dungeon, so that it runs continuously even at the present.  There are no other constructed objects present in the room that have come about as a part of the this entity's original design.

The second means of construction has been time, several hundred years, over which time erosion, pressure and perhaps seismic activity has caused the fountain to break, causing water from the fountain to stream continuously over the parquet floor, enabling plants beneath the floor to emerge through the floor's crack and steadily destroy the cohesiveness of the floor's tiles.  Since there is no sun, the plant life is little better than lichen, but endless generations of lichen have died and deposited compost upon the floor, so that now it is more plant and "dirt" than it is stone flooring.  In places the walls are cracked, showing dark gaps as thick as two fingers. As the fountain is still spurting water, through several cracks breaching the lip of the fountain, the floor is spongy and damp.  The fountain water is green and polluted with algae.  The odor is musty and foul with rotting vegetative matter.

Finally, a green water snake has somehow found its way into the room, where it resides most of its time living in the water, moving out of it to search for food in the way of insects that it can reach through gaps in the wall.  Inside the water snake is a poison sac.

This is the structure of the room.  Take note that we do not describe the manner in which any of the things in the room are meant to interact with the players.  These things are not part of the room's structure.

"Function," on the other hand, is the manner in which the structure does work, or the purpose of the structure, or the manner in which the structure is intended to interact with its environment.  Specifically, how does the room perform?  Why have we included it in the dungeon?  We're not making the room to satisfy the purpose of the entity that made it, but the purpose of responding to the players' free movement in the rigid structure.  Think of it in terms of why we make a car or why we make shirts for everyday wear.  The "why" is not part of the structure; the structure is an answer to the need, but these are not the same thing.

The function of the poison in the snake's sac is to find its way into the body of a player; so the snake is likewise intended to be put in proximity to the player in order to effect the transfer of its poison from sac to player body.  To accomplish this function, the snake is difficult to see among the polluted water of the well, which itself exists as the single enticing element of the room the players will feel compelled to investigate.  Once the players begin to move through the room, a sign of the water's movement should be suggested, or any other clue, that will induce a player to move close enough to the fountain to attack the player character.

In turn, the sponginess of the floor is there to discourage rapid movement by the players, so the amount of give in the floor should be emphasized to create doubt, suggest a trap, suggest that the mold growing on the floor among the lichen might be legitimately dangerous and that the floor itself might perhaps be alive or otherwise threatening.  A slower movement across the floor will cause a greater likelihood of players becoming interested enough in the fountain to investigate its contents.

Nonetheless, I need to emphasize at this point that while this is the purpose of the room, and the basic expectation of the DM as the designer, this does not describe the player's actual interpretation of the room nor what they will do.

"Behaviour" describes the range of actions and free movement of the user of the room, once the room has been presented for examination.  Behaviour consists of the user's actions, evaluation, investigation and manner when confronted with a structure and its function.

Depending upon their proclivities, a group of players may exhibit none of the expected responses to the floor, the fountain or the snake; they may frankly choose to examine nothing and to act in such a manner that the snake, and ultimately the function of the poison, is never engaged.

Behaviour can be reasonably accounted for and to some extent predicted by designers who are thoroughly engaged in the sphere of their design, but ultimately any function of any design can fail to meet those expectations as users have minds of their own.  The great struggle for design is to create functions that will produce instinctive, reliable, useful and effective behaviours in design users.  When the users fail to respond as expected, that is an error in design ~ and possibly in the implementation of that design, where it comes to the presenter.

A successful design, one that produces the behaviour desired, relies considerably upon the presentation of that design, in the form of marketing, awareness, description, ease of use, user trust and a whole lot of other factors which can sink a perfectly viable design through mishandling of the user's experience.  Therefore, once structure and function have been determined, it is up to the designer to evaluate the behaviour of the user in order to return to the drawing board and come up with a better design and a better function in order to relate better to the user's expectation and probable interest.

There.  That should be pretty clear.  Structure.  Function.  Behaviour.  Your world relies upon you understanding these three elements, making them fit better together and having a clearer idea of how the best possible function, supported by the best possible structure, produces the best possible user behaviour.

This isn't a new problem.  Every design company in every field of endeavor, from battleships to fidget spinners, works tirelessly on making the computation between these three elements come out exactly right.

Notes on Stavanger's Economy

A very long time ago, I wrote a series of posts that I called "never too much economics."  I have to apologize to start: if you have not followed past posts I have written on hex generation, economics and my trade system, I'm going to lose your attention very quickly.  There's nothing I can do about that.  I have been working on this method for logically calculating the structure underlying any part of my world, very large world that it is.  The work shown today represents just a few hours of work for this particular region in my game, that created for the Juvenis campaign.

I'm going to use some of the details of that post in order to address this map:

This is a part of my larger game world expanded from 20-mile hexes to 6.67-mile hexes (6-mile for short), using a hex generator I've talked about on my blog before ~ though not for a long time.

The map shows production for food, hammers and coin, similar to the same measurements for the old game, Civilization IV.  Five years ago, I defined one food as sufficient to feed 167 persons at a minimal rate of sustenance, a very unpleasant 1,700 calories per day.  We may assume that is for any period, as we're not actually measuring the weight of food, only its consumption vs. its production.

Back in the day, I also wrote that a hex with two food symbols showing should be read as the binary number "11" ~ which would be 3 in the base-ten system.  A hex with three food symbols showing would equal the binary "111," or 7 in the base-ten system.  Thus, three food showing will feed not 500 persons, but 1,167.  The greatest production on the map above is the hex surrounding Stavanger, showing a loaf and two slices, or "1111111," or 127 in base-ten, enough to feed 21,167 persons.  That's not bad, but the county of Rogaland, depicted above, has a population of 25,627.

How much food is showing, in base-ten numbers?  I may have miscounted, but I get 392 food altogether, enough to feed 65,335 people.  That is, at sustenance level.  That 1,700 calories is fairly low, so we can double that amount for the people around Stavanger and still have enough food for export.  This makes sense.  Norway is a relatively rich country, with productive forests, plenty of water, excellent soil (where there is soil) and a relatively low population.  It ought to be an exporting region ~ even if it is only enough to feed 7,040 persons at a comfortable 3,400 calories a day.  There are many more people than that in the world.

The coins showing work the same way as food.  The number of coins in a given hex show an exponential progression, so that the hex with Stavanger in it would have 63 coins (binary 111111). Altogether, the region shown has 115 coins - so Stavanger by itself represents more than half the total wealth of the region.  This, too, makes sense.

My post on coins argued for a fixed rate of 2,500 g.p. per coin showing, with the understanding the the principle of money is that it flows through the hands of people on a continuous basis.  In effect, I argued, this would mean that the total income for all the persons in the region would be three times the actual physical wealth ~ arguing for a low velocity that would correspond to a 17th century world.

I'd like to deviate from that old number, however, as it was based on an ill-proposed Player's Handbook reference.  I should be able to do better.  For this, I'll turn to my trade tables, specifically the list of goods and services that are produced in Rogaland.

As it happens, Rogaland has a very poor collection of references for my trade tables:

That is a very sad collection of things. Clearly, the encyclopedia I drew from did not have much of a description for Stavanger ~ but the trick is not to rush forward and change it, because that seems best, but to presume that the region is economically depressed, regardless of how much food it produces or the number of people.

At present, my overall trade numbers (subject to change as I add more regions) indicate that one reference is worth 941.18 gold ounces, or 7,647 gold pieces per reference.  Since the total value for Rogaland is only four times that, or 30,588 g.p., it is plain that the number per coin shown on the map is going to be less than 2,500.  30,588 divided by 115 equal 265 g.p. per coin.

With a per capita income of only 1.19 g.p. per person, we have to wonder how anyone can afford to buy books and statues from the party for 1,750 g.p., as recently happened in the campaign.  I admit, that is a problem; but I paid out that money before making the above calculations.

We can push the velocity of the money in the region by 1, to a total of 4, then presume that the total income of the region passes specifically through the hands of the merchants (along with the upper class, the nobility and the hoi polloi, as detailed in my original post).  If the merchants represent 0.1% of the total population, this makes the average yearly income for a merchant in Stavanger (they would all be in the trade town) a total of 1,190 g.p. per year.

We can also assume an accumulation of wealth, arguing that gold (and everything else that doesn't spoil) is steadily mined and added to the system, where it spreads outwards in the form of trade and ultimately collects in the hordes and savings of people.  We might argue that if 2% of the total coins in the world is irrevocably lost to monsters, lost hiding places and being sunk in the sea every year, then there is something like 51 years worth of accumulated gold pieces in the world (at that point, loss more or less equals production).  That is more than enough for an apothecary to dig into their accumulated 56,000 g.p. of wealth to buy something very special.

This could mean that the monetary assets for Rogaland are considerable, even if much less than other regions with far more references to goods, services and manufacturing.  Like any good economist, it depends on how we propose to juggle the numbers.

I think I would want to create additional regions, then spread the income over several regions and not just use Rogaland as an isolated measurement.  I'd argue that the loss of coin from the system was higher, just to reduce the pure wealth available.  I think a combination of factors could lead to a better approximation.

What we want, of course, is to be able to identify the wealth produced by a specific hex, giving us a number as to how much coin is a) regularly flowing out of that hex, if the player wishes to start a venture of some sort, and b) how much gold is buried in the hex, in terms of plundering it from monsters and/or dungeons.

This lets the gold of the hex determine how much product is sold in Stavanger, if the party decides to go fishing or lumberjacking, rather than trying to figure out specific production figures for every imaginable sort of product.  The player spends x time in this forest, which produces y amount of money per year for z number of people (determined by food supply).  This makes a very simple calculation for how much money the player can make from time spent, without the fuss of guessing how much fruit or flax or feldspar a given hex can produce.

Finally, I come to hammers.

I am at a loss here.  My old thinking has one primary problem: the system does not generate what sort of buildings have already been created, or what has been done with the hammers generally in the last 750+ years of Stavanger's existence (founded 862).  If we are only talking of the hammers being used for civic improvement, then they are only available to those who actually control the hex.  If so, I can safely ignore them for the time being.

I would like another value attached to the hammers, however ~ a problem I haven't considered for a very long time and thus also a problem I have distance on.  Since I've only rediscovered the problem in the last couple of days, I haven't even begun to solve it.

What I'd like is some meaning that is applicable to player characters at any point.  It could represent the amount of labor in the area, available or otherwise.  It might somehow represent the present existing infrastructure, but I'm not sure how.  It is easy to add it all together to get the size of Rogaland's military, the work force directly under control of the upper classes or even the amount of original created artwork that can be found (related to the bard).  I just need to think about it.

Commodities List Part II

Well, I ought to finish this list.

Alchemy:

Alkali: bitter salt, sal ammoniac, soda ash
Black powder: Greek fire, fireworks
Cosmetics
Dyestuffs: carbon black, catechu, henna, indigo, madder, murex, ocher, more
Medicinal plants and drugs: bromine, healing earth, iodine, nutgall, perilla seed, santonin, senna, tonic, more
Ink
Lamp oil
Lye
Perfume: attar of roses, civet, lotus, musk, more
Pitch
Poison
Paint
Soap (including borax)
Sulphur (refined)
Vitriol
Wood alcohol

Yes, I know, not the list you were hoping for. These are the main chemicals produced in actual reality, which were not invented in the 20th century…so obviously none of the polymer group is included.

Most campaigns wouldn’t allow black powder; I accept that it can be pretty useful and that it could spoil a campaign. The best use I think comes from putting the black powder into a small, tied bag, upon which is then cast a fire trap spell. The bag is then tossed into the middle of a group of humanoids, using an audible glamer, causing the bag to make a definite clinking sound. Money! The humanoids open the bag, setting off the fire trap, which sets off the black powder…boom!

Remember, anything that can be used by the party can also be used by the DM.

Building materials & stoneware

Bricks
Cement
Ceramics: earthenware, pottery
Enamelware
Faience & majolica
Glassware
Ivory carving
Jade carving
Lacquerware
Masonry
Porcelain
Quicklime
Sculpture & statuary
Tiles

Strictly speaking, ivory is not stoneware…but it has more in common with that than anything else, so I include it with this group.

Metalwork:

Smelting
Alloys
Brass
Pewter
Pig iron
Metalsmithing
Engraving
Minting
Jewelry (includes lapidary)
Brassware
Bronzewares: bells, cannon, statuary
Coppersmithing
Goldsmithing
Silversmithing
Precision tools
Ironmongery
Armor
Tools
Weapons
Leadsmithing
Pewterware
Tinsmithing

Massive section, and the most complicated. That is because iron ore is made into pig iron which is made into ironmongery which is made into tools which is made into armor (yes, I consider armor a tool). Each step modifies the price, so that the price of armor is based on the availability of toolmakers, who depend on the availability of blacksmiths producing ironmongery, which depends on the availability of smelted iron, which depends on the availability of ore.

Good thing most of that is common.

A similar pathway has to be followed for copper ore smelted into brass alloy, smithed and then made into tools and precision tools. But I will be going more into all of this later.

Crops:

Anise
Cacao
Cardamon
Cereals: barley, gram, maize, millet, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, teff, tucusso, wheat
Chamomile
Cinnamon
Cloves
Coffee: coffee, chicory, harari
Coriander
Cumin
Ginseng
Ginger
Groundnuts
Hops
Licorice
Nutmeg
Oilseed: cottonseed, linseed, mustard seed, poppyseed, safflower seed, sesame, sunflower seed, tamarind seed
Paprika
Pepper
Pulses: alfalfa, castor beans, chickpeas, clover, flowers, fodder, hay, lentils, peas (dry), soybeans, vetch
Saffron
Tumeric
Sugarcane
Tea
Tobacco

I decided to lump all the cereals together because, basically, most cultures just eat what is local. Later I did the same with fruits and vegetables. It’s true, one type might be worth more than another, but for the purposes of the game, it just made sense to assume that if the players were in Norway, the bread would be made of oats, and if they were in Ethiopia, it would be made of teff. This is especially true of fruits and vegetables, which do not transport well in a medieval setting.

Fruits & vegetables:

Citrus: citrons, grapefruit, lemons, limes, mandarin oranges, oranges, tangerines
Orchard fruits: apples, apricots, blackberries, cherries, currants, juniper berries, grapes, peaches, pears, plums, raspberries, strawberries, whortleberries
Tropical fruits: avocadoes, bananas, breadfruit, cantaloupes, dates, figs, guavas, loquats, mangoes, olives, papayas, pineapples, pomegranates

You can argue about whether or not a particular fruit is tropical or temperate (orchard), but I don’t really care. You organize them however it suits you.

Tubers: arrowroot, potatoes, sugarbeets, sweet potatoes, tapioca, taro root, yams
Vegetables: asparagus, beans, cabbages, cucumbers, eggplants, garlic, lichee nuts, lily roots, melons, mushrooms, onions, peas, peppers, radishes, rhubarb, tomatoes, turnips, watermelons

Treenuts: almonds, betel nuts, carobs, cashews, chestnuts, coconuts, filbert nuts, hazelnuts, palm nuts, pistachios, tung nuts, walnuts

Some of these groupings may seem strange to you. That is because the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization) does not include potatoes with “vegetables,” yet does include watermelons, which are clearly fruits. That is because the organization of fruits, nuts and vegetables is dependent on the manner in which the crops are grown, NOT in their biological classification. Since I am using FAO statistics for my production numbers, I have simply adopted their methods.

Livestock & animal products:

Camels
Cattle: buffalo, cows, water buffalo, yaks
Dogs
Donkeys
Elephants
Fowl: chickens, fighting cocks, cormorants, ducks, geese, turkeys
Goats
Griffs (hippogriffs, that is)
Horses
Leopards
Mules
Rabbits
Reindeer
Sheep
Slaves
Swine

Bear paws
Bristles (from pigs)
Wax: candle & beeswax, vegetable tallow, ozocerite (which is a mineral, but fits here)
Honey
Horn
Ivory
Ostrich feathers
Sea Ivory (walrus, narwhal, whale tooth)
Tortoise shell

Pretty straightforward. The list above doesn’t quite include it all, but other creatures, such as griffons, oliphants and so on can be extrapolated from the above group.

And yes, I include “slaves” as “livestock.” I’m really not hung up on the fearfulness that some seem to have about the prospect of slavery and culture. It had been going on for 10,000 years and I think the prospect of having slaves is as relevant to fantasy as the prospect of owning a twenty foot high oliphant.

Fish:

This is a long list. It is as long as references I have found for each of these different creatures or products:

Fish: anchovies, barbel, bonito, bream, carp, catfish, cod, crabs, crayfish, cuttlefish, eels, flatfish, flounder, gudgeon, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, lamprey, lobster, lungen, mackerel, mullet, navagu, oyster, perch, pike, roach, salmon, salon, sardine, shark, sturgeon, tilapia, trout, tuna, vogla, whitefish
Fish fins
Seaweed
Sponges & sea slugs
Turtles

Like fruits and vegetables, I would assume the culture would eat whatever fish was local. Quite a number of those listed are extraordinarily local.

As I said, I don’t have to adhere to these groupings. I could break them down, work out a specific trading model for any one of them and add it to my system.

The problem with that is that my system is huge as it is, and I’m not anxious to make it more complicated.

The file which has all these references listed is an excel file with 14 pages. It’s 4.3 megabytes in size. So while I would love to send a copy to people who requested one, that might be difficult through email (but not impossible).

I don’t really care about the copyright on this. It’s useless without further development (adding in those parts of the world not yet added) and without the table that follows it.

I just can’t reproduce it here, except in a lot of sections. To give you an idea, I’ll take part of one table, the one that lists off the trading cities in the “organized” part of my world. Please note that I have done very little to edit these. I am reproducing them as they appear on my computer…some of the figures are in red or pink, indicating that these are not finalized numbers:





















This looks like a lot of work, but it wasn’t put together in a weekend. It was built up over a period of about seven years, since 2001. I have completely reorganized it twice. I never want to have to do that again.

You may also see that it is impossible to define geographically some of these areas. Some are historical, such as Terra Scania, part of Denmark in 1650. But other parts, such as the first one on the list, Altslok, do not exist on Earth.

This is because I made a decision years ago that in any part of the world where humans numbered less than 1 person per square mile, that area would be occupied by non-human races: orcs, goblins, dwarves, elves, what have you. Since my population figures depend on the spread of human beings in 1650, that means vast areas of central Russia and Turkestan are occupied by non-humans, particularly Siberia.

Altslok, for example, corresponds to four earth-territories. The first is an area of Kazakhstan formerly called East Kazakhstan (which I call Croft). The others are three parts of Siberia: Gorno-Altaysk (Roth); Khakassia (Khath) and Tuva (Tuvath). Together these are arranged along the Altai Mountains, comprising a Dwarven Kingdom: a civilized, densely populated island of civilization amid orcs to the west, haruchai to the south and east, and hobgoblins and bugbears to the north.

I remember what these territories are and where they are because I have another huge table, called “Cities”…from which I extrapolate the population figures noted here. You’ll see that Altslok only has two primary markets: Croftshelm and Bokoth. The products of both Roth and Croft are together gathered at Croftshelm before they are traded outwards; because war cannot go on always, I have a world where orcs trade with dwarves—although tensions are necessarily a part of such arrangements. The limits in trade are indicated by the “1” which appears beside both Croftshelm and Bokoth.

Not like Archangel or Astrakhan, just below. Both relatively small populations, but profoundly important trading cities.

I could spend a long time just talking about the kingdoms…and I will, but not now.

Mostly I want to end this by pointing out that the table is extensive. This should provide some evidence of that.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions. I can’t remember to explain everything.

To Make a World

I remember that the time between playing D&D and running D&D took, for me, about six weeks. In those days we all took a shot at the game; it was comparatively simple for anyone to run, as the campaigns were all hack and slash. Even the modules were that way. My first game had been Labor Day weekend, 1979, a few days before I began high school. By Christmas I was deeply into the game.

I remember trying to explain it to my parents, who had always been board game fanatics; but this game made no sense to them. How did the rules work? How could you tell who had won or who had lost? I remember one fateful evening I made the mistake of trying to run my parents in an adventure…which was disastrous. Generationally, there was no common ground there.

The first “world” that I ran was really a hodgepodge of other worlds, things that my friends and I had agreed on. But being a geographical freak (I could name all fifty states and their capitals when I was 7), I was anxious to try a hand at my own world.

For reasons that any 15 year old boy would understand, I was infatuated with John Norman’s Gor novels…this long before the world of Gor had been grafted onto a BDSM fetish group. I liked the structure of the world, with cities, culture, monsters, political relationships and adventure. The slavery thing was somewhat secondary to my purpose—nice for the books, but immaterial for D&D.

As the books have no map, I pieced together the locations of Ar, Koroba, Thentis, Tor, Port Kar…and the islands of Tyros and Cos, along with the northern lands, the southern steppe, the great Thassa, the Sardar Mountains and so forth. If you’re familiar with the books you know these places—you may not have a visual image of the lay of the land. I still do, in my mind’s eye, although I lost my original map literally decades ago.

I ran Gor for about a year…without much success, as my players had not read the books and for them the city names were just names. More than that, being used to complex maps of the Earth, I could not help noticing that my designed Gorean world was somewhat lacking in details. What it amounted to was a few lines and a few groups of mountains, with cities spackled all around, all hundreds of miles apart. I could fill up the spaces with names of plains, forests, rivers and such, but these were just names as well. The adequate information to explain away those gaps just didn’t exist in the books. I’d have to somehow invent them on my own…and to do that, I might as well just start fresh with an original world.

I had available a pre-made world that I could buy from TSR, the company that sold D&D originally. But that wasn’t interesting. My interest in maps and geography demanded that I make my OWN world—which would, I thought, be tailored to whatever campaigns I wished to run.

I sketched out a plan on six maps, based on the concept of a large, central sea surrounded by arable lands—and beyond, inhospitable desert, mountains or snowfield. The farther one trekked from the sea, the less hospitable the environment, the exact nature dependent on how far from the equator one was. Thus, political structure was dependent on control of the sea and access to other markets.

I ran this world for almost four years, up until 1985. Generally, as a D&D world, I’d say it was as successful as most I’ve seen. I was involved quite a bit with various role-playing conventions that occurred in the city, and for a time I made a little money designing original “worlds” for other DMs who admired mine and wanted something similar. I carefully drafted and sketched out the mountains, rivers and forests of these worlds in a style similar to a 16th century cartographer, and sold them for a $100 apiece. I’d ask if they wanted a single continent, a group of islands, deserts, mountains—similar to the structure of a Civilization IV world. Each 24x30 inch map typically took about four evenings (24 hours) to draw.

My own world, of course, was six of these maps. Most players didn’t have the money to pay me for more than one sheet; altogether I did about six different maps for people, two for which I never received payment. I was doing it for “friends”…so I didn’t ask for money up front.

My reasons for giving up on my second world were this: I simply could not present the world as real. No matter how I tried, in reality my players could not help thinking of each city as just “the city” or each forest as “the forest.” It did not matter that the cities had names like “Forcrest” or “Juba”…the names did not convey identity. I would have to describe the huge port city of Forcrest as a kind of London, or the jungle city of Juba as being similar to Delhi. The jungle itself would have to be described as being like India or Africa. Or the vast eastern desert being like the Sahara. In short, I needed examples from the real world to make my world “real.”

Whereupon I realized that solution to this was to simply adopt the real world as my D&D world.

The idea was not embraced immediately. Most players feel that somehow an original world lends itself to a greater mystery, or that the real world is so suffused with tiresome reality that it cannot be “magical.” But as a dungeon master, the benefits of choosing to run using the real world as a template were immediate.

I did not need to limit the world to its actual condition, after all. Magic could continue to exist, non-human races and monsters could exist in whatever degree I wanted, history could be rewritten. What I gained in return were thousands of ready-made maps in whatever scales might be available at the local library, along with detailed floor plans for world-wide structures; complex mountain systems with easily identified river networks which made—by example—geologic sense. And finally, when I told a party that they had just arrived in London, there was no need whatsoever to describe the culture to them; it was immediately absorbed. They knew what the people would be like and what to expect.

My first plan set the world in 1500; later, when I decided I would rather have a somewhat settled New World, I changed that to 1650. The world is not what it was in 1650—I have made plenty of changes. In other ways, it is very similar.

And detail? Rather than twenty or thirty cities, as a typical D&D world might have, my world contains more than forty substantial settlements in Wales alone. All with histories, street names and family titles. And I have never run a party in Wales. I have been running the real world as D&D since 1986, and have not remotely used all of it. The campaign I ran up until 1996 went from Yugoslavia to Spain, to West Africa, the Caribbean, to Ireland and then back to Portugal. My present campaign began in Russia and has moved down through Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania. The party goes where it wants and I have the world ready to greet them.

And now there’s the internet. If I need a picture of a particular group of mountains or a forest or wherever, I have tourist photos and I have Google Earth. I have weather data coming out the yin yang. I have everything I need.

As such, my world has become a very complex place. Just the sort of place where I feel at home.