North Wowotu Production, Part II

See Part I.

Close up visual available with this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North Wowotu Production, Part I

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

First, landscape.

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

I'll go through the placement of things now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That just leaves the sheep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue to Part II.

Improvements

Before we can sort out the placement of references for Wowotu, I'll need to explain improvements.  I've borrowed the term from the Civ-4 game; I have made my own alterations for convenience.  Improvements are basically the physical manifestation of a reference as it appears in a given hex.

Here is a table for the available improvements available with a Development-7 region.  More developed region would have a larger variety of improvements (as well as "buildings," but we'll get to those later).

I trust this is readable.  You'll have to click the picture; you might
want to save a copy so you can reference it as you read.

We have but six forms of improvement, but these should be sufficient for creating a respectable environment.  I'd like to skip over the "Notes" entry on the top line for the present, and dig into the material below with a short cautionary introduction.

An "improvement" is just that.  Hexes are improved when they have been made better by the inhabitants, beyond the usual, normal production.  Improvements do NOT describe an isolated, singular presence of a given good or resource, but rather an enhancement of that resource.

So, for example, if we have a reference for rice, this would mean we have a "farm" that produces the rice.  The "farm" here is a colloquialism.  Rice would surely be produced in many places, on many different ordinary, everyday farms, in every kind of hex, none of which would be classified as an improvement.  However, if we speak of a "farm improvement," we mean an area where the cultivation of rice is intensive and more highly productive.

It may have been inconvenient to choose to call intensive agriculture a "farm," given that the term also describes the usual presence of farms in virtually every rural hex.  However, I saw no other fit name for it.  If the reader likes, feel free to call it a "meta-farm." In any case, the term is strictly for the use of the DM; I would never have a reason to describe a given hex to the players by describing its structural details.  I would simply tell the players that there were a lot of farms in the hex, and that they were intensely cultivated.

Because of this, if the area has a mining camp for gold, this also does not mean that the only gold in the area comes from said mining camp; only that the majority of the gold does.  This is true for every product's reference.  The improvement system is merely there to provide a focus for various products, to the point where they are produced in a large enough amount that it is noticeable, and so that the food production, wealth, labor, health, happiness and culture can be measured, should the players wish to settle and build within, plunder or tax the region.

Improvement Details

Each type of improvement has four subcategories: description, placement and reference & effect.  The description is for the benefit of the players, giving the DM a general sense of the improvement's visual effects.  The placement indicates into what sort of hex the improvement occurs.  The reference field indicates what sort of reference is needed to enable the improvement.  If there are no crops are market gardening references, there can be no farm improvement in any of the region's hexes.

[This would not mean that there were no farms, no crops or no gardens.  The lack of a reference only means that there is no sufficient commercial value in what crops or gardens exist; what we call subsistence agriculture.  Therefore, there would be no intensive agriculture either, and therefore no improvements.  But there would still be inhabitants who would grow food for themselves]

Lastly the effect.  A farm adds two "food" to the hex.  The reader might recall from this post last month that a type-5 rural hex has a "natural" hex production of 1 food.  Add a farm improvement and this jumps +2.  In terms of raw food production, 1 food [binary numeral 1] is enough to feed 70 people.  3 food [binary numeral 111] is enough to feed 490 people.  That is a significant adjustment.

Likewise, the mining camp and the quarry each add 1 labor.  For this system, I am defining "labor" as an expression of the available labor resource that can be skimmed from the top of the working population.  A quarry improvement, for example, would probably employ virtually everyone in the hex.  The reader will remember from the last post that we had a population figure for the number of people in a given hex before carving the infrastructure into seven hexes.  Alas, I have no easy method for dividing the population as well ... we could come up with a number, but the reality is we don't need one.  We can guess the population by the amount of food available; or we can simply ignore the population and concern ourselves with what the players need.

There are only a few situations in which the players would need to know the exact number of quarry workers present: a) if the players wanted to start a quarry, in which case the number is what the players want to hire; b) if the players want to kill everyone in the quarry as an encounter, in which case most of the workers will run away and we only need to know how many might fight back; and c) if the players want to hire quarry workers and have come to a quarry to buy them.

The last is easiest.  We simply list 1 labor as 14 workers and have done with it.  How many would fight the party if they attacked?  About 14.  The bigger numbers, and their families, don't matter.

More than half of these 14 would be laborers hoping to get a job, or recently injured and laid off.  A few might be disgruntled, poor laborers (remember this post?).  If we want, we could use a general roll, like 4d6 (average 14) to get a changeable number.

All this means that I will have to change my hiring rules at some point, but that's also a problem for another time.

Placing Improvements

Okay, let's say we're going to put the gold reference somewhere on our rough map of the Port Tethys-Avalon district.  Here's the map again:

The improvement table says that a mining camp, where gold is produced, is placed in a rural 7 or 6 hex (type-7 and type-6).  It also says, "Balance random preference for less dense hexes."  Type-7 are less dense than type-6, so we want to roll randomly in a way that will favor the former over the latter.

There are fourteen type-7 hexes and ten type-6 (take note, even the sliver of land occupied by the two type-7 hexes east of Avalon would still have room for a gold mine).  If we give 2pts for every type 7 and 1pt for every type-6, we can roll a random number between 1 and 38 to determine where the gold ends up.

Here we come to the note at the top of the chart.  Basically, it says that rather than assign only 1 hex per reference, if it is possible, we should assign two.  These two references will not end up in the same hex.  I proposed this because it seemed cheap to plunk a single reference into a wide area, such as the district above.  Two references are far, far more interesting; and in the case of gold, each will add the prerequisite labor to the hex where the reference ends up.

If it turns out there is only a single hex of type-7 or type-6 in the region (and some of my regions are very, very small, equalling as little as one 6.67 mile hex on the above map), then only one hex is designated by the reference.  If there were no type-7 or type-6, then the reference would go into the hex most like the appropriate hex.  This means that yes, a gold mine could end up in the middle of a city, if that city comprised the whole region and had a gold reference.

There are different ways we could roll 1d38, but I'm going to use excel.  Counting the hexes from top to bottom, with each column from left to right, the possibles are, in order, 7-7-7-7-6-7-7-7-7-6-7-6-6-6-6-7-6-6-7-6-7-7-7-6.  My rolls are 24 and 26.

This puts the gold references in hex 1007 and in hex 1103 ... a good distance apart.  Avalon has good access to 1007, but 1103 is more than 25 miles away (assuming hex 1104 is rough hill-country and impractical for cart and wagon travel).  It is only 18 miles away from the manor house in 0804, which is only 15 miles from Port Tethys.  The journey, then, to Port Tethys is only 8 miles greater than it is to Avalon.  On the other hand, the coast in hex 1304 is only 12 miles away from 1104.  Perhaps the gold is shipped to a rough dock, with a protective blockhouse built just above the beach.

It is up to us.  We can put that gold mine anywhere in the hex, moving it closer to the water or closer to Port Tethys (within the six miles or so leeway the hex allows).  We can use this information to add character to the district; that blockhouse and dock could be an adventure, as the characters are hired to protect the gold or steal it.  In my open game, that is up to the players.  In any case, where we put the road will have an influence over a lot of things.

AND, we haven't placed our other references.  Where are the limestone and salt quarries?  Where are the four sheep pastures?  Remember, we had two references for sheep. What about the rice?  Rice requires a lot of water ... wherever it goes in this arid country, we'll have to create an extensive sink and probable lake to account for the cultivation of that grain.  How the two placement hexes line up on the map is bound to create a river for us, or two isolated oases.

This is the genius of the system I'm building.  We choose the references, splat down land and towns, easy peasy.  Then the infrastructure system builds a dart board for us; then as the references strike the dart board, the world evolves into focus. Thereafter, we simply juggling the facts to make sense of the semi-random placement (remember, we're controlling the placement to fit a certain hex type), to make the world real and purposeful.

Afterwards, we can calculate how much wealth, labor, and food we've created ... then establish the health and happiness of the region, as well as it's culture.  The more the pieces fit together, the more real it becomes.

Just think: all this, and the rules and adjustments change radically when we try this with a Development-8 region.

Expanding Wowotu

To begin, here is an update of Wowotu's full infrastructure, shown on the right.  I have adjusted the color scheme, so that hexes without any infrastructure, regardless of terrain, are now grey in color.  Settlement hexes are rich green, non-settlement plains are a pale greenish-yellow and hills are a slightly greenish-brown.

Because of terrain and distance, Wowotu is broken into five districts, departments, provinces or counties, whatever nomenclature we might choose.  I'd like to add the infrastructure numbers for each district:  Port Tethys-Avalon, 147; Nagoya-Fenris, 57; Cork, 40; Hoth, 12; and Sarai, 8.  This is a total of 264.

This would be a higher number if the settlements were not constrained by terrain, and could spread their influence more easily.  However, whatever the infrastructure, the population total would be static; basically, infrastructure measures communication, not population.

Still, we can now divide the population by the infrastructure: 39,166 by 264 equals 148 people per point of infrastructure.  This is something we want to keep in mind as we build the hexes.

Next, let me admit that I don't intend to expand the whole map into 6.67-mile hexes.  I could do it, obviously, but it would take time away from my actual world and it isn't necessary to make the point I want to make.  So I'm going to show the Port Tethys-Avalon district, partly because it's the largest and partly because it is the most isolated.

This does create a dilemma, regarding the references that I had the readers choose.  Normally, I would make the whole region, then randomly distribute the references among the possible appropriate hexes where said reference could occur.  For example, mining camps, where we would find iron and gold, occur in type-6 and type-7 rural hexes.  So after expanding the whole map, I would add up all the possible type 6 & 7 hexes, roll randomly and place the gold or iron reference.

Here, I'm going to place all twelve references in the Port Tethys-Avalon district.  This is not too many for an area of this size; most of my game's regions of this size have at between 20 to 40 references.

Okay.




Yes, I know, not very exciting.  But nonetheless, the system gives some structure to the hex surrounding Port Tethys.  Remember, there are nearly 12,000 people in this hex alone.  The settlement itself accounts for most of that; type-"2" indicates that Port Tethys is a commercial city, so right off we can put the two market references chosen by the readers in place.  Avalon won't come close to this.  Port Tethys would have a repair shipyard, even if there were no shipping reference; but the readers did designate a ship yard so the city does build ships.

The other type-2 that we generated is a rural hex; and as it happens, consists of a manor house with a small village surrounding it; and knowing it exists, we can give that village a name (I'll just go ahead and call it Rainus.  There's a 1 in 4 chance of it possessing a shrine ... which it does!  We're on our way.

Past that, we should hold off on guessing where the other references will go.  We only need to know for the moment that the type-5 rural hexes are occupied by grouped freeholder farms (no lords on that land), while the type-7 hex is a marginal area with isolated homesteaders.

I'm going to leave off now, and get into all the delicious grittiness after.  It has taken a long time for me to write this post. I'm going to finish by giving the numbers (but not the terrain, I'll add that again with the next post) for the rest of the Port Tethys-Avalon District).  Just for consideration.

The grey would be an arid, near-desert wilderness.

A Bigger Hex into Smaller Hexes

The 2nd-stage process of expressing infrastructure is one that modifies this single hex:

Figure A

Into these 7 hexes:

Figure B

And specifies what those hexes are.  Somehow, that number "10" needs to be distributed into the seven hexes, so as to breath life into our empty hex.

I have discussed this process, but I'm not content yet that I've gotten the message fully across.  Therefore, I'd like to pause before continuing with Wowotu and discuss a part of this process in detail.

Let's assume for a moment that we're looking at the hex before Avalon was founded, before any people settled there.  At that time, the hex would be completely wilderness.  Rather than an infrastructure of "10," the hex would have an infrastructure of "0."

If that were the case, then each of the seven hexes inside the hex above would be a "type-8" hex.  Type-8 means wilderness; no meaningful player-race civilization exists.  This would be a place for monsters.  Feasibly, there might be a kobald village, but we don't account for that except in game play; as far as our map is concerned, a type-8 hex is adventure country.

For civilization to exist, we need an infrastructure of no less than "1."  As can be surmised from the earlier Wowotu post, this would likely be a hex somewhat distant from a city or a town, or perhaps in a hex adjacent to a village.  That "1" infrastructure transforms only one of the seven-hexes in Figure B from a wilderness hex to a civilized hex.  The other six hexes of what was Figure A would still be wilderness.

That new civilized hex, created from our "1" infrastructure, would be a "type-7" hex.  Let's assume for the moment that instead of having a "10" infrastructure as shown, Avalon has but 1.  As the settlement is the most important hex among the seven, our type-7 hex would be 0203, where Avalon is placed.

This single hex in the wilderness, with Avalon, would be what I am calling a "type-7 settlement" hex.  I wrote a post last month about type-6 and type-5 settlement hexes.  Type-7 is even smaller.  Here is my description for a type-7 settlement hex, for a Dev-7 region:

A lot of meat there, but we are still talking about a 6.67-mile diameter hex with about 150-200 people in it, about 5-6 per square mile.  Mostly empty.  And surrounded by six similar hexes that would be even more empty.  Basically, the frontier.

Now, if the Avalon hex in Figure A had a "2" infrastructure, what would that mean?

The most obvious answer would be that there were two hexes that were occupied, both type-7.  One of these would be the Avalon hex, and one of them wouldn't.  The other hex wouldn't necessarily be adjacent to Avalon; it would be located wherever the land was best.  One thing about the other hex, though, it wouldn't be a settlement hex.  It would be a "type-7 rural hex."  What would that look like?

Now, this would also a description of the Avalon settlement-hex, outside the actual village, if the Avalon village were a type-7 hex (it isn't, we're just pretending here).  The table above describing Avalon needs the countryside description as well, as the type-7 settlement obviously does not occupy the entire hex.

I'll stop the reader here, however, and point out that a "2" infrastructure wouldn't necessarily mean two type-7 hexes.  It could mean a single type-6 hex instead.  How does that work?

Let's have a look at this table, which at first glance will seem a trifle confusing:

Figure C

The column on the left indicates the infrastructure number.  I have only included the table up to an infrastructure of 6.  The whole table goes up to a total of 448.  At 448 infrastructure and above, every 20-mile hex (figure A) is made up of seven type-1 hexes.

The Base cost shown under each type on the table above indicates how many infrastructure are needed to make that hex.  If you look at the two rows that list an infrastructure of "2", you will see that one alternative would be 5 wilderness hexes (type-8, no cost) and 2 type-7 hexes (cost 1 each).  A different alternative would be 6 wilderness hexes (still no cost) and a single type-6 hex (cost 2).

A type-5 hex costs 4 infrastructure; a type-4 hex costs 8 infrastructure.  And so on.

Okay, apart from some questions, we can move onto to figuring out the rest of Wowotu's infrastructure and start carving up the larger hexes into little ones.

P.S.,

The table for type-7 rural hexes notes that a mining camp might exist in the hex.  This is where we would potentially place our references for gold or iron (salt and limestone are quarries, not mines).  However, type-7 rural hexes are common.  We would want to randomly distribute the two references among all the type-7 hexes in Wowotu, once we knew where they appeared.