WfS ~ Ooredoo and Tech-6

At last, I'm ready to start forward again.  I'm going to be introducing a new region, Pangaran, that is tech-6. The first step is to identify Pangaran's relationship with Jawanda, as we want our world to fit together. Therefore, we start with this map:

Depicted: 18-mile hexes

I have reduced the scale of the above map to 18 miles per hex, in order to create a 90-mile separation between Ooredoo, an island at the edge of Pangaran, and Jawanda.  Thus the island is marginally close enough for a dangerous journey in a fishing boat, which we presume our party of fighters will try to accomplish, bringing them to this new place.

[as an aside, I have made the decision not to attach intelligence to tech levels after all.  I know this is something I discussed back with the first implementation of the system, but after all this is a learning experience.  I know some will miss this note, it was meant to be included in the last post, but I'm remembering to add it now]

I've made only a rough drawing of Ooredoo above.  I have a more detailed version in 6-mile hexes to present; I could have updated the map above with the map below, but I felt at this point it was a detail that wasn't really necessary.  The important point here is the distance between the two places.

Here is a 6-mile hex map of Ooredoo:

Depicted: 6-mile hexes

My goal here is to depict familiar hex-types as they manifest around tech-6.  The deserts have become dry, unproductive rifts and sinks, which still offer the potential of meeting monsters in the hills and back country, but which have little influence on the island's infrastructure apart from inconvenience.

I have also divided the island into two terrains.  On the west, a flat watered plain, with a base supply of 2 food.  Should I start describing that as '11' food? To emphasize I'm referring to the number of 1s in the expression and NOT the number of food?  This seems to be really confusing some people.

On the east, we have a dry hill-plain, hardly better than the best lands in the previous desert culture, with 1 food and 1 hammer per hex.  The type-7 hex around Sayur has precisely the same productivity that Ai had in Jawanda (our starting hex).

But does it?  Unlike Ai, Sayur produces cereals, vegetables and at least one type of livestock: goats, sheep or swine.  Reindeer is pretty much out, as this is still close to the tropics.  See the link for where I'm getting this from.  We can further identify these things, if we want, by defining cereals as maize, vegetables as sweet potatoes and even a specific kind of goat, sheep or swine ~ but the point is that the small amount of food production in Sayur comes from these things and NOT from hunting and gathering.

How is this different?  Well, archery is now a skill set that the locals have, so the population is likely to defend itself with bows rather than spears.  If attacked, an inhabitant of Sayur will likely run away, then return later with bow and try to chop the party down one by one from a distance.  This is a new mind-set.

As well, Pangaran in general has no religion.  They've abandoned mysticism, so they are largely a pragmatic sort, much like one would expect of frontier settlers.  These are hardened, rugged individualists, living more in families than in clans, as there is less need to depend on others in order to eat.  We defend better and our food supply is more secure and diversified, so we can afford to be in it for our personal gain.

Moving on to the type-6 hex surrounding Qimo and Raya Pos, we have again the same relationship as Bodo and Cai in Jawanda . . . except that now the increase in food supply creates the existence of fruit trees, which will be scattered along the heights above the sea, where they can catch the morning dew.  Both the cereals in Sayur and the fruit in Qimo enables fermentation, so drinking now becomes a thing to do.  Drinking brings the option of intoxication as well as other social problems.  Qimo does remain a transshipment point, like Eom and Guba before it, but now it has more interesting things to ship.

Turning to the other end of the island, the type-6 and better hexes produce a great deal of food: 111 food, so that instead of merely a large settlement, we have made villages of Tangarang, Umar and Vekasi.  The latter two of these, however, lack hammers altogether.  Obviously, this means the table I posted earlier today and which I have already linked with this post will need an adjustment (learning process), as these can't be "nomadic hunting and gathering" cultures.  I will adjust "subsistence farming" from 1 hammer to 0 hammers, fixing that hole.

The lack of hammers would indicate no animals, but we still have plenty of cereals, vegetables and fruits to supply a food source.  The population of Umar and Vekasi, both of which produce coins, is at least able to exchange food for bare necessities, such as the most simple of weapons, skins and the occasional maintenance of objects they have to pay to replace.  Life for these people is very primitive, but in a very different way that Jawanda: there are lots of people surrounding these two villages, 400-1000.  That's more than probably the whole region of Jawanda.

Tangarang is a little better off.  It has one hammer, gained from becoming type-5: but there is a lot of pressure put on that single hammer, so we can assume that a lot of extra goods must be brought in from outside to support the needs of all of West Ooredoo.  Still, none of these people are starving.  They are just living very simple lives.

For the time being, I think that covers it.  I'll make some rolls and determine that we have 1,301 persons in Ooredoo, in an area of about 12.3 hexes: about 105 persons per 6-mile hex.  This is much higher than the maximum should be for tech-6, which is around 49 per hex.  But Ooredoo is just a part of a larger region, so we can offset the density by adding additional hexes elsewhere.

I'll be taking a break from this for a bit, not producing another post tomorrow.  I have a general idea what to do next, but I want to contemplate that a bit, and see how this one plays.

WfS - Closing Up Tech-5

If you are new to this series of posts (WsS stands for "a world from scratch"), see the first in the series and work forward chronologically.

Now, a few housekeeping chores.  First, let me post an image from the Civ IV universe, dictating the base production of hammers, food and coins:

I've been reading the productive parts of the desert as "plains-flatland," but others may not concur with that.  No matter.  I don't expect anyone else to run things as I do.  The main thing is that the above template will work for most climates and features.  These are the 'base-line' productions, to which more production is added with type-6 hexes and better.  Speaking of which, I'll post this second guideline, which I've been describing with the previous posts:

Thus, if the flat land plain starts with 1 hammer and 1 food, then the type-7 hex will show that; the type-6 hex will then add a food and the type-5 hex both a food and a hammer.

The above should make something else abundantly clear.  If we consider a flatland/river hex, running across from desert, that is supposed to indicate a floodplain, with three food and one hammer.  Remembering that three food is seven times the amount of one food on the chart, this means that a type-7 hex in a floodplain is massively more productive; a type-6 hex on a floodplain would have five times the production of the type-6 hex we posited in the desert.

Therefore, when we talk about a richer, higher tech level country rushing next door to seize the goods, we're not talking about travelling to a poor country like Jawanda.  We're talking about the next hex over, where the amount of food produced is vastly more abundant.  A single hex could produce more food than all of Jawanda put together.  But this will become more evident as we move forward.

I've added a series of products that a tech-5 area ought to produce.  It should be noted that all techs above tech-5 would also have the technology to fish, hunt for furs and so on, but it might be interesting if we concentrate these references on tech-5 cultures and say that higher techs, though they may produce some of these things, will prefer to concentrate their hammers on other, more worthy products.  It is really up to us.

I think that covers tech-5 for the moment, except for one addendum.

I haven't yet talked about the great monoliths that a tech-5 culture might produce: Stonehenge in Britain, Altamira in Spain, the collected heads of the Olmecs or Easter Island (from which we stole one) and so on.  I'm not sure how to determine when one of these should exist, or even where.  I'm still thinking on this.  Surely, they would have to be insanely rare, perhaps one or two truly immense ones per continent.

Take note that monoliths, both great and small, can exist in high tech cultures; they're just not as celebrated ~ or perhaps they are celebrated, but by a select group of fanatics.

Whatever the case, we say good-bye to tech-5.  When I take up this series again, we'll begin on a tech-6 culture, across the water and about 100 miles to the north.  I'm just doing the work to get ready for that; I have Friday and Saturday off, so I'll be working during those days while watching over the online campaigns.

A World from Scratch ~ Stretchy Minds

Begins the next step in our world-building experiment.

I've started by expanding the region, adding in a second valley, the Hatafi, with a type-6 and a type-5 hex, as well as enough desert to further isolate the region to separate it from the rest of the unknown world:

Take note that as these hexes are only 6 miles across, we've not represented a very large area yet.  The whole map expanded above would still easily fit into an area about the size of Rhode Island or about 1/5th of Wales.  Presumably, the deserts will continue to extend outwards, though that isn't important just now.  It is enough to know of their location.

Before I get to details about the Hatafi valley, we want to explore the difficult business of naming things.  So far, I've deliberately named only the habitable settlements and the intermittent rivers.  We have more work to do.

We can spend a lot of time talking about Typonomy, the process of naming things, including all sorts of interesting angles like how names change over time and how names eventually stick, but I'd rather not sink into that subject just now.  The problem with creating a fantasy world is that everything has to be named and coming up with names is a troublesome thing.  It is probable that there are so few settlements, villages, towns, nations, rivers, mountains, bays and so on to be found on fantasy maps because of the simple pesky problem of having to invent so many names.  I suggest stealing names from very old books, from technical treatises on things, from actual maps (using street names or very small places that aren't well known to your players) and so on.  I once named all the planets in a traveller-type world that I ran once from Xenophon's Anabasis, so that all the planets had either Greek or Persian names.  Worked great.

For now, we certainly want to concentrate on the largest features: we can use the river names to identify the two valleys, so we needn't be concerned with that.  But the rivers divide the desert into three parts, while of course the whole region needs a name.  And the sea as well.

In my usual world, I have the benefit of using names that are already familiar.  Here, we want to pick names that will be easily remembered and will convey a certain amount of verve and size.  The deserts should be threatening.  The sea should reflect the love that most sailors feel for it; and the region should be prestigious and a little awe-inspiring.  Three expectations upon which we are sure to fall short, but let's give it a try anyway.

I've been playing with shadowed text to give some names more stand-out appeal; I find territory names in particular seem to get lost on my maps.  I've used Jawanda as the region name: three syllables are common where regions are concerned, particularly in regions without the suffix of "land" or "-ia", which will often extend a name to four syllables.  I felt four syllables gave enough love to the sea, which stands out because it is the only name with four syllables.  And regarding the three deserts, the actual names will probably be forgotten, but the players will remember that one is cliffs, one is a sand sea and one is a desert.  This tagging helps.

Let's have a close-up of the Hatafi valley, adding the production (which does not show on the map above).

The type-6 hex we know: this is like the Bodo-Cai hex on the Djombo river (note that you're already becoming familiar with these names, though I just invented them last week).  Falou and Io are much like Bodo and Cai, representing a similar outpost.

The type-5 hex is a different animal.  First, it produces the same amount of food as a type-6 hex, so we would expect it to have the same number of inhabitants.  No, actually.  The type-5 hex is more densely populated, outstripping its food supply on account of the specialists that have occupied the hex.  These are represented by the second hammer, meaning that a type-5 hex is three times more mechanically productive than either a type-6 or type-7 hex.

It would be easy for us to simply make the food supply equal the population ~ playing god, as it were.  But I remind the reader that some places should have a food deficit.  This encourages a change to the status quo, giving a particular region character and creating need and tension.  What can the type-5 inhabitants do?  If they take from the other, lesser, hexes, than the people in those hexes will starve.  And they can't eat hammers.

They can send forage parties into the unoccupied hinterland hexes, which can allay the food issue somewhat.  They can also count on a portion of the greater population living on 1700 calories a day or less, slowly starving, in order to enable the more productive inhabitants to thrive.  More importantly, they can trade their production for food from the outside, perhaps from that tech-6 entity that I spoke of with the last post.

However, the tech-5 culture can't support trade; they don't have the education to build vessels to import goods, or even use domesticated animals, as that is a tech-6 ability.  These are very, very simple people.  They understand fishing, hunting and mysticism, and that is all.

Productively, however, they know how to dry meat and skins, they know how to collect and tan leather, they know how to build boats.  These things can be collected and transferred to vessels from more complex societies who will bring food for exchange.  This is the simplest economy. Guba isn't a market place, but it is a transshipment point.  This is why the number of coins does not increase, even though trade occurs here.  The trade is not for durable wealth, but for wealth that is quickly lost.

Incidentally, some might suppose that the river should bring Guba one coin and that the river should bring another.  I have chosen to follow the original system from the Civilization IV game, where either a river or a coastline increases the hex's number of coins, but not both.  This is a good thing, I think, because we don't want to drench the countryside in excessive coinage.  If the connection between river and sea is that important, the hex will be a type-4 or better, and that in turn will increase the number of coins a hex has [but this is for later].

It is unlikely that most readers' worlds will include a place as primitive as Jawanda.  Nonetheless, I want to make it clear how such a backward part of the world would function, without most of the services that D&D players take for granted.

I have just one more thing to add before I can put tech-5 societies to bed: and that is the technology of mysticism.  I have written about this a few times, specifically here and here.  Therefore, let's not concentrate on what mysticism is.  It is a belief system and certainly doesn't fit into the scheme of food, coins and hammers.  But following the path of Civ IV, it does invoke the existence of a monolith of some form: a cairn, an obelisk, a monument and so on.  We might include any number of possible variants, from the large stone heads of the Mayan culture to Easter Island.

We can suppose that a tech-5 culture would celebrate such a thing, where a higher tech might see it as just a curiousity.  This is how I like to see it.  If we imagine a giant stone head (Moia) at Guba, perhaps 13 feet high, this could be a central dominant image in the whole culture of Jawanda.  Those natives who have seen the head, have touched it, might be changed; they might have the benefit of a +2% to their experience gained for all of their lives.  They might fight at +1 to hit and damage when defending the hex surrounding Guba against outside invaders.  They may be prepared to throw themselves in desperate, self-sacrificing attacks that might repel enemies.

And then we can say that no one from a more advanced culture would have these benefits, because they were from an advanced culture.  For them, the Guba Head would just be a large block of carved stone, nothing more.  They have lost the sense of mysticism, or wild magic, that makes such dedication to a monolith like this have meaning.

Adventures?  I can think of several.  But I think at this point that I should encourage the readers to come up with a few of their own.  Try to stay within the scheme I've offered thus far.  DON'T add additional materials, personages, ideas or technologies that don't already exist.  Don't suppose a great leader, a great medicine man, a soldier or any single individual because the social structures needed for these things hasn't been invented by this culture.  There is no monarch, no right of heredity, no cleric, no soldier (the idea of combat training doesn't exist), no charismatic entity of any kind.  The adventures need to be about survival, obtaining food, seeking information, fighting off dangerous animals, exploring deadly, lost deserts, communicating with outsiders who are easily more deadly than our party of only fighters, who cannot imagine armor, missile weapons and so on.

It is hard to think on this level of adventure, but give it a try.  I expect that most of you will fall short, but it isn't necessary that you succeed in this.  It is necessary only that you stretch your ideas outside of the bounds of what you've been thinking makes an adventure thus far.  We want the title of this post to be what you have.

A World From Scratch ~ Valley of the Djombo

Copied from the last post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, let's talk adventures:

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

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

A World From Scratch ~ A Bigger Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World From Scratch ~ Sign Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From this, we can now propose three straightforward adventures:

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

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