Techs Living Side by Side

Each time that I make noises about regional tech-levels, I find myself facing the same bugbear: that the existence of a higher tech level will force a confrontation between one region and the next, for no other reason than the disparity between tech levels.  If we have swords, then we must attack the next region over that has only spears.  If we have the benefit of courthouses, organized religion and the alphabet, then we must immediately attack those regions that do not have these things.  This is an imperative . . . and there are many readers who find themselves asking, over and over, why wouldn't this happen?

What keeps the tech areas from bleeding into one another?  How do two different tech areas exist alongside each other, or trade with each other?  How does that work?

I'm quite sure that the reason this is a mystery is based upon the more dramatic instances of historical emigration.  Europeans encountered primitive peoples living in Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific and began a conquest that was greatly enabled by a superior technology.  So it is assumed that if we have a superior technology, we will certainly rush in and take land away from those who have an inferior technology, yes?

Sort of.  It is interesting to note that these indigent peoples who were eventually conquered were discovered three hundred years before most of the actual conquests took place.  For a hundred years, the Dutch, English and Portuguese existed as nothing more than outposts in Africa, India and the Far East, even though they had vastly superior weapons and social organization.  What they did not have were numbers.  Therefore, until the industrial revolution made mass production possible, it was more practical to trade with backward regions than to attempt conquest.  Most of the actual conquest of Africa and Asia did not begin until the early 19th century, post the Napoleonic wars.

There are exceptions, of course.  India was greatly occupied by Britain in the mid-18th century, but only with the aid and benefit of the local Rajahs, who saw their own way to power by supporting the British.  More than half the subcontinent was still under strict native control in the year 1800.  South America is a better example, as the Spanish began smashing apart the native regions almost at once ~ but then, these regions were greatly under-populated compared to Africa and Asia.  More to the point, South America had vast, unexploited resources, untapped by the natives, which served as an encouragement to conquest.  Most of the resources in Africa and Asia were already exploited.

The same can be said of the United States, which had a motivation to take away the lands of lower tech societies because those lands were of great, unexploited value.  Australia's conquest of the interior was quite different, given that most of the interior was uninhabitable and undesirable.  Thus, while the American natives were exterminated or pushed out as soon as the higher tech Europeans arrived, the Australian natives experienced a longer period of co-existence because they did not have anything the Australians were inclined to take ~ whatever the disparity in tech levels.

Those parts of the world that did not have meaningful resources of any kind were left virtually untouched until the 20th century.  Even though the British had gunboats, rifles and pistols, they did did not set out to exterminate the native Inuit in the 19th century because there was no reason to.  In fact, there are no examples of acquisition or massacres by Europeans of Inuit in northern Canada and Greenland, as there are in southern Canada.  Because the resources just aren't there.

As far as persons of different tech levels living side-by-side, I'm surprised that readers can't see the more obvious examples, those staring them right in the face.  The depressed regions of West Virginia and Kentucky have existed right alongside Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia for two hundred years . . . yet the disparity between services in Maryland and southeastern Pennsylvania and West Virginia are still pronounced.  Even the present day existence of computers and other technological innovations are sadly lacking in places like Tucker or Randolph counties, in the mountainous part of the state.  How is it that the "invasion" of tech industry and social progressiveness hasn't caused these places to universally adopt ideas like free abortion, embraced homosexuality or social liberalism?  Why are the hospitals of depressed areas not of a quality of hospitals in New York or San Francisco?  How is it that these places of greatly different tech-level co-exist side by side without one bleeding into another?

If we remove the communication of instruments like the internet, television, radio and the telephone, taking us back to the 1870s, how much more backward is West Virginia compared with Washington?  How is it that most people living in Washington city can read but most in Huntington West Virginia cannot?  How can universities exist in Boston and New York but there are no great Universities in Morgantown or Charleston?  And if we go back another century, to the time before the revolutionary war, how is it that there are Europeans living in Bucks County in Pennsylvania but there are none living in the Appalachians?  How is it that these Europeans exist side-by-side with the vastly inferior tech people of the interior?

With the last post, I was asked about foreigners arriving in the fictional Jawanda interested in trading for slaves.  I would ask in response, why would they go there?  I've described the total population of the represented Jawanda being about 700 persons, scattered over an area the size of Rhode Island (about a fifth of Wales).  How rational is that?  It costs money to build boats and fund soldiers to go get slaves.  Would it not make more sense to bypass Jawanda and go to another place with more food production and more people?  There are no accounts of Europeans landing on Greenland's shores and seizing Inuit to be slaves on plantations in America.  Certainly, it would have been easy to conquer the Inuit.  Why did they not do so?

There are also parts of Africa ~ the depressed coastlines of Mauritania and Rio de Oro ~ that waited until the 19th century to be "conquered" by Europeans.  Actually, the Europeans just showed up, pointed guns and were allowed to do whatever they wanted.  But it took four centuries after the discovery of these lands for outsiders to bother.  Until then, Rio de Oro was nominally under the authority of Morocco.  And how did they interact with their overlords?  They paid tribute in the shape of salt, skins and gums, in exchange for food.  Just as I've described.  And they did so for centuries, without the higher tech Morocco culture bleeding into Rio de Oro and Mauritania to any extent at all.

Because there were no meaningful resources!  This is what readers just cannot understand.  You cannot propose a motivation to conquest if there is nothing of value to take from the conquered region.  Do you imagine that Europeans want to live the hard, unforgiving life I've described as the existence of Ai, Bodo or Cai, in the interior of Jawanda?  Have we not already learned that white people in America do not want to take the jobs that illegal Mexicans are willing to perform?

Even if we handed Jawanda over to a higher tech region, lock, stock and barrel (though none of these things exist in Jawanda), the region would be abandoned within a year and the natives would move right back in.  The higher tech skills of Europeans did not enable Jamestown, Port Royal or any of the other failed first colonial attempts on the American seaboard to survive ~ because Europeans just weren't strong enough or willing enough to survive in that kind of harsh, untouched wilderness.  It took time and effort to remake even a golden land like America into a comfortable place to live: this still hasn't been done with the parts of the world that I am describing as tech-5.

This is what readers just won't get.  These tech levels do not exist arbitrarily.  They exist because the region itself, without the modern measure of information exchange, won't support a better tech level.  Even if a better tech level is right next door.

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 Kind Request

Of late, I cannot help noticing that many of you are enjoying the content of this blog.  While there is no immediate danger of the content ending, not while I am employed, I must ask the gentle reader a direct question?

What is this blog worth to you?

If you really like this blog, and what I've being writing about and doing, let me remind you of my patreon account and encourage you to donate $1, $5, $10 or more to what you consider to be a worthy cause.  And as always, thank you for reading this blog, for contributing to this blog with your comments and for all your emotional and confidence-giving support for these last months during my unemployment.

Right now, I need bus tickets to get to and from my job, and I am flat broke until my first paycheque.  Thought I should mention this.

Patreon's timetable processes donations in two days time, otherwise not again until the 1st of June. Forgive me please, but time is a factor.

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.

Such Fun

Rest assured, I do intend to continue the World from Scratch posts ~ but meanwhile, I'm going to post what I've been wasting my time doing.  Well, it is better than playing video games ~ though it really is a sort of video game on its own, since the results are substantially random.  Here is a 6-mile map of southern Norway, from Tonsberg to Stavanger:

6.67 mile hexes, approx. 140 mi. x 200 mi.

Now, it would be very difficult to explain the color scheme, as it adjusts for climate, vegetation and type of hex, 1 to 8, as I have been explaining.  The bottom is dominated by green, the gentle reader will note, but this turns to taupes and tans in the upper right.  The indistinct dividing line marks the change between warmer, wetter forests and colder tundra forests, what the Koppen Climate Classification calls "cbf" and "dbf."  Research is a wonderful thing.

As a hex becomes more civilized, it drifts from green (or tan) towards greenish yellow, yellow and then white.  There is only a single type-1 hex in this whole map: the town of Stavanger.  Oslo, or Christiania as it was called once, is just off the top of the map on the right.  The area around it will be very dense, the equivalent of several Stavangers.

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.

Warning Buoys

"I would actually agree with most of his points if you wanted to play an old-school, high-lethality, players vs. world, DM as an objective referee style dungeon crawl. However, most of them can be safely ignored if that's not the specific game you want to run."

Adam McCabe, from Reddit

Let me be forthright in writing that this is not an attack or a rant on McCabe himself or on the Reddit community.  That was addressed in the last post.  Rather, this post is intended to highlight only two words that appear in the above text: "safely ignored."

I have never thought that anyone who ignores any part of this blog does so at their peril.  I think that the entire blog may be ignored quite easily without any potential for injury, loss of life or even the burden of emotional pain.  It may be that a reader would miss an opportunity byignoring this blog, but so long as the reader continues to read something, I feel confident that any notion that appears on this blog will eventually make its way into the noggin of any self-educated person to the point where it cannot be ignored.

Nor have I considered that someone might give advice to someone not to read this blog by proclaiming that it is safe to do so.  I would expect someone to say, "Don't read this blog."  I would not expect someone to argue, "It is safe not to read this blog."

The explanation for this is not far afield.  We live in an advertising world that seeks to make the act of reading a specific, paid-for product so vital as to make the claim (in so many words), "That you may NOT safely ignore this!"  If you don't watch the news, if you don't take our word for it, if you do not attend our meetings, if you do not buy our product, then doom and gloom will certainly be the result.

From that, it is easy to designate everything else in the world that a person might read as safely ignored.  Along that vein, I can state with certainty that the writings of John Stuart Mill may be safely ignored.  Personally, Mill is one of my favorite writers, a genius of such remarkable insight that much of modern law, jurisprudence, politics and communication is based upon his writings . . . but since virtually no one I meet in the common world even knows who J.S. Mill is, apparently it is quite safe to ignore him.

It would be equally safe to ignore the play Coriolanus by Shakespeare.  It is never a play that people quote, it never comes up as required reading in a university course, it is never presented by anything but off-off-Broadway and, in fact, most people are not only utterly unaware of the existence of the play, they have no idea that Coriolanus was a man, a general, a remarkable politician who once saved Rome, etcetera, etcetera.  Plainly, having lived most of their lives without having any idea of this, the written play can be quite safely ignored.

In fact, we can make this argument over and over, right into perpetuity.  We need not confine ourselves to the limitations of artwork or intellectual discourse.  If we give it a little space, we may include entire nations in our list, bordered regions like Angola, Kiribati, even Ecuador.  Yes, there exists the possibility that we may meet someone from one of those places, or that someday we may be asked to do a job that will exploit the people or resources from such a place, but we are in a state of such enlightenment in the West that it is certain we can merely pass by such knowledge with a mere flip of the consciousness, obliterating them out of existence even as we shuffle money from there to here.

That is because knowledge, unlike a rapidly passing car and our spatial relationship to it, the curb and the speed with which we are crossing the street, very rarely has the opportunity to break bone, smash flesh or otherwise render us unconscious or dead.  True, the steady onslaught of a particular kind of ignorance, such at that which leads inevitably to war or the damnation of millions of souls through mass execution and death, will have consequences for those who are not wise enough to avoid the path of destruction.  But the connection between the warning of such events and the events themselves is so vague, so riddled with misinformation, so tremendously difficult to understand for the ordinary citizen who just wants to get their latte and start work without being yelled at by their boss, that it is easy to decide that such connections do not, in fact, exist, or that consequences are inevitable, or that misery is something that no amount of knowledge can sidestep. This is easier to believe, "safer" in many respects, since setting out each day with the awareness that it is up to all of us to acquire knowledge to make the world a better, more decent place to live, with less chance for misery in the long term, is a burden of proportions far too great for the mass of people to bear.

Let us remember what we all got into this life to obtain.  From the beginning, we were weaned onto a tit that promised to sustain us so long as we took the time to suck it ~ and from thence we have steadily moved from tit to tit, sure in the knowledge that there will always be another one there, presented right before our face by someone, with exactly the consistent sweetness that we were promised from the first time we pursed up our lips and got started.

And if that sweetness should fade, or come on too strong, or in any way deviate from our expectation, and if the presenter of the tit should hesitate, or waver, or in any way inconvenience us with its uncertainty, then it is only right that we should declare that situation reprehensible, intolerable, incredible in its moral perversity and deserving of the highest opprobrium that we can muster.

Anything else ~ and everything else ~ that does not fit the description of a tit can, without the need for evaluation, be safely ignored.

Alright Advise [sic]

If this had not made the top ten list last week, I would not be posting this ~ but I am tickled at the response that reddit gives to my 8 Tips That Will Let Any Idiot Improve Their D&D Game:

My favorite is the commenter who feels that I don't like D&D.  I love the affirmation that implies: that someone who doesn't approach a complex, difficult and largely obscure and socially fringe game the same way as "me" must be someone who hates it.

Obviously, people who "hate" the game do not comment on it, they don't blog about it, they don't offer advice in any way except to say, "Stop playing that fucking retarded game."

I have, from time to time, tried to make friends on reddit, tried to bring attention to the blog on reddit or otherwise use reddit for dialogue . . . but this is the sort of response I always find.  I presume these people actually play RPGs.  I can't imagine what sort of play they indulge in ~ undoubtedly something a long, long way from my perspective.  I'd like to say there is room for all of us under the great big shelter of the gaming tent, but frankly, no.  In gaming terms, they're as relevant as the jet trail left behind the mechanical marvel that is flight.  They think they're part of the experience, they make an extravagant, expressive impression, which widens and widens until it ultimately just goes away.

Ah well.  I thought the reader might enjoy seeing how disappointed the greater community is with your choice of posts.

Confirmation

Very well.  For those who may doubt the veracity of my continuing to work on my book, The Fifth Man, for which I created a Jumpstarter campaign in February of 2016, I can offer confirmation of the existence of the book and of my efforts in the way of Ozymandias of Crossing the 'Verse, who is a regular contributor to the comments on this blog.

I have sent Ozymandias a copy of the book thus far: 49,000 words of third draft, 30,000 words of second draft and another 20,000 words of the completed first draft.  Let me be clear: there is a book.  I'm not just farting daisies.  And there will be a finished, published novel when, I am sorry to say, I'm satisfied with the writing.

But I have been in a state of increasing angst for many months now as the length of time between the Jumpstarter and the finished book has widened, as I am deeply conscious of having taken money from good, wonderful people without being able to give them a damn thing to show for it. For that reason I sent Ozymandias, someone I have never met in person, but whom I trust implicitly, a copy of the book thus far so that someone, someone, can come online and say yes, the book exists.

I am tremendously gratified by this.  A part of my concern has been laid to rest.  I hope that the reader who has helped me, who has stood by me, who has stepped up to support me, who has gone the best measure towards helping me go on and move forward, will feel gratified as well.

Thank you to all.

The Good Fruit Grows on the High Branches

I've now been posting the Campaigners comic for two months and the honeymoon is definitely over.  I don't mean that I'm done with posting.  I'm working on the comic every day.  Rather, I mean that the sense of it being something weird and profound with every comic I post has greatly diminished.

Some of you, I'm sure, have encountered this feeling.  The first dozen or so posts on a blog are a huge thing.  We find ourselves checking for comments every five minutes and wondering who will think it is the most amazing thing they've ever seen, expecting something big to come out of every post.  At first, that is.  Then, gradually, if we keep at it, the process of posting and checking the post becomes a routine.

With the comic, my first few weeks were spent in the height of anticipation.  The time between comics felt like a long time, as I anxiously waited for the moment when I would be able to post a new one.  But that feeling has gone now.  Now, it feels that the comics are barely up at all before it comes time to post a new one.  Whereas before there was no sense of missing a deadline, because I was ready to work on comics that would be coming out weeks and weeks after the one I posted today, now it becomes more and more evident that the train I'm on is moving faster and faster while I'm creating slower and slower.

This is what everyone experiences who sets a target for producing work.  Even as the regular practice of creating and setting a quality standard imposes itself, so does procrastination.  A day goes by without working, then another day, then a comic is posted and we remind ourselves, "Oh shit, I better make something right now.  I don't want to have to be putting in work last minute!"

But we know that day is coming.  At least, if we don't sort ourselves out and behave responsibly.

Just now, I'm not worried about getting comics out in time.  I still have a back-log that will keep me going a couple of weeks (which is down a long way from when I was five weeks ahead) ~ but I live in fear that I will get stuck for a joke.  And that is what this post is really about: writing jokes.

The one thing I don't want to do is get into the habit of creating what I call "low-hanging fruit."  I'll give an example from the Dragon Magazine #191, having found an archive just the other day:

This comic is an absolute piece of shit.  First of all, it's sexist.  Second, its a pathetic cliche, which itself started as a fabricated urban myth that got picked up by television and then repeated many, many times.  Everyone asks for directions.  I know this, because I am asked for directions very often.  So it doesn't even ring of truth.  Finally, for some reason, even though the cliche makes an argument that men are the stupid ones, the woman is made out to be embarrassed by the dialogue.  For fuck's sake.

Pillsbury, the author of this dreck, had a month to come up with this.  For fuck's sake.  I wish I had a deal to draw comics for the front-line magazine in the game culture, so I could phone in a decades-old joke.  This is the worst kind of low-hanging joke to reach for; it only requires watching reruns of old Johnny Carson shit and stealing from it.

But, sadly, there were many people ~ boys ~ who laughed at this.  Some of you, just now, smiled.  Low hanging fruit is out there, people use it and make a career out of it, just like Johnny-fucking-Carson did, as everything he spewed out for decades was stolen from the generation before him.

The same Dragon issue had three other comics: I'll post them together:

These are three jokes written by three different people.  Yet they're really just the same joke.  They are all three anachronisms.  Take something modern, slap it into the fantasy realm, point at it with an image and then have someone say something perfectly ordinary that is only funny because it's a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than a fantasy existence.

Bleh.  

Yet again, some of you smiled.  That smile is worth deconstructing, because if we're going to tell jokes, we ought to know a little about why they work.

First of all, we smile or laugh in part because we know it is supposed to be funny.  The joke is framed as a comic and for that reason we are given the cue to a certain type of behavior.  Those pathways have already been driven into our brains by a million comics that we read when we were soft, easily persuaded children at a young, easily impressed age.  As such, even by the time we get old and jaded, we can still relate to the format even if the actual joke itself is trash.

Secondly, jokes are built on the unexpected.  The joke I put up last night, the latest comic that can be found on the sidebar, is built on three unexpected results, one after another, only the last two of which are actually funny.  I'm going to spoil the comic now, so if you haven't read it, pause here.

First, we don't expect the adventure to work things out with a succubus and get married.  But the better twist is the pun based on a common phrase that parents use to describe other people's children (a cliche).  It works, because the cliche doesn't carry the joke, the pun does.  This is then followed by the double-entendre regarding baby-sitter fees.  If you don't see the entendre, think about it.  I did.  It took me an hour of patient thinking to nail down that joke.

Jokes work best when they confer fridge logic: when the joke isn't completely gotten on the first try.  This is what I aim for: a joke that has to be mulled over, where the whole joke isn't evident at once.  The British culture is brilliant at producing comedians who do this naturally, which is why I watch far more British comedy than North American.  There used to be a fair Canadian culture that produced this kind of humor, too, but that has been gone for more than a decade now.  Sadly, the best Canadian humorist working right now (obviously, in my completely non-humble opinion) is Katherine Ryan ~ and she abandoned North America for Britain.

Searching for that unexpected twist is the difficult part of writing humor.  If I have a favorite for this, it would be Jimmy Carr, who is a class by himself.  Here is the sort of classic twist he has the habit ~ meaning something he does so regularly that I am in awe ~ of producing:

"If only Africa had more mosquito nets, then every year we could save millions of mosquitos from dying needlessly of aids."

That is 21 words.  And in it he sets up the standard patter of NGOs asking for use to care and be concerned, only to slap us down.  The writing in those 21 words is so tight, most people I know won't realize it.  Look at the word groups in the one sentence:  "If only Africa" (the set up), "more mosquito nets" (the standard NGO request), "then every year" (building the immensity of the cause), "we could save" (the heart of the pitch, lulling us to expect the usual end of the sentence), "millions of mosquitos" (mid-twist, where it should be millions of people), "from dying needlessly of aids."  Bang.  A four-word punchline.

You can see Carr deliver the joke if you're willing to sit 1 minute and 10 seconds through this toxic bullshit.

I dream of writing like this.  If you haven't seen Jimmy Carr do stand-up, go look for him on you-tube and be ready to laugh very, very hard: because he is not like American comedians.  He doesn't spend three hours setting up a joke.

Time and time again, I find myself thinking up the low-hanging fruit for a comic and then I tell myself, "No, you can do better.  You can definitely do better.  Then I think for a few hours, or days, and slowly hammer out the difference in my head between what counts for low-hanging fruit and what doesn't.  And I live in fear that, in the end, after too much time, I will drift into that because I have burned out on writing things that are actually funny.  And I will know that people will smile and laugh anyway, because ~ hopefully ~ by then they will be trained to know that I'm funny, even when I am not.

That is why so many comics, both mainstream and internet, limp on for years long after they've ceased to produce anything noticeably clever.  Because, once, they did.  And as humans, if once a dry well had water in it, we will keep going back to that well over and over, hoping that one day we'll look down into the hole and water will be there.  It takes a long, long time for us to stop doing that.

Reverse Sides

Let's try a thought experiment.

Instead of the usual game, we'll have the players run a group of humanoid monsters located in a subterranean lair.  We can call them "orcs," but any group will do.  We'll assign two adult males, two young males, three adult females and four children to each player ~ and we'll say that orc children grow quickly enough that these children are all mobile on their own, though we could force one of the females to be burdened with an infant if we wanted.

We'll start by assigning each individual hit points and combat abilities according to their status.  Each player should then designate one of their adults (male or female) as a "leader."  Then one of these leaders can be designated the "chief."  Orcs don't usually have stats, so we can forego those, making the character creation fairly simple.

Now assign some weapons and have the characters pick ten pieces of basic equipment for each adult and each young male ~ no more than two weapons, a suit of armor, and 7 pieces of whatever else they feel they'll need (including a shield), but with this limitation.  It has to be something made without an industrial or academic process.  No metal, no alchemy, no poison, no magic, no unusual tools, etcetera.  If we want, we can argue that one of the weapons each orc has was stolen from the outside culture, so they can have a sword or an axe.  Treat each article of clothing as a separate piece, so most will just wear a hide shirt that reaches to their needs.

We will also make one stipulation.  The orcs have two picks.  Without these picks, they wouldn't have been able to dig their lair out of soft rock.  So they'll need those.

Good, now ask them to make their lair.  They have to create tunnels that connect certain necessary points together: a breeding place for young (orcs are birthed from mudpits), a food-producing chamber (fungus or whatever other imaginary food can be grown underground), a place for each orc to sleep, a place to eat, a place for tools to be made, a pen for animals and one or more entrances to the outside.  Give dimensions that these rooms have to be to support the lair's food/shelter needs ~ such and such an amount of space per inhabitant.  Then limit the distance of connecting hallways to 10 feet per person.  The animals can be whatever exists in a dungeon environment that we feel can be reasonably domesticated (lizards, salamanders, weasels, carnivorous apes, worgs, whatever we want).  Fit the number of animals to the space you'll let them build.

Give the players time to draw out the lair.  While they're doing so, explain that they won't be able to carry weapons and wear armor all day long, for months and months of non-fighting time on end, so they will have to store these somewhere that they can be reached in time of crisis.

Let the players devise any crude traps they want to create, giving a 35% roll per trap set of the trap going off, potentially killing one of the members of the tribe.  Make sure that the players understand that any trap in a commonly used corridor (the shortest distance between any of the above required places) will mean a 1 in 10 chance of killing a random resident, from child to chief, because of its ill-considered inconvenience.  Remember, too, that the traps have to be fashioned from ordinary goods.  No complex rock digging, however - we're talking soft rock and the orcs only have picks.

Still, they can make pits with logs over them for daily use and fill the pits with offal or spikes (since wood is easily obtained from outside).  They can make rope from the fibres or sinews of animals that will make springs and stuff.  They can make doors of every variety.  We might want to limit them to a set number of traps, perhaps five, ten or fifteen.  Of course, anything really vicious will start to take its toll on the population of their lair, so they'll think twice about really deadly things.

Good.  Now, give the players a bunch of gold and silver coins, with jewelry and gems.  Give them each a minor magic item.  Once again, point out that they can't carry any magic weapons with them all the time.  They'll need both hands to work.  Have then show where precisely all the money is hidden.  Let them be as precise as they want about hiding it, so long as they keep to the rules of no special means that can be made from the tools they have.

Finally, have the players identify where their orcs are at a given time of the day.  Stipulate that such and such many have to be tending the food making, the animals, the children, maintenance on the tunnels and tool fashioning.  Tools are always breaking and need to be remade.

Now, attack the lair.  Use the players' own characters.  We could create some of our own.  We may want to pick ogres or giants as our humanoids if the players are high level.  Have the players defend the lair with their humanoids while the DM attacks the lair with the adventurers.

If the orcs (or whatever humanoids) are easily killed, or if the treasure is found easily, find some way to penalize the players.  Get them to talk about how they could have done better.  If we want, we can hinge the player's success as orcs to how much experience the players' characters get at the end of the session.

Our goal here is to demonstrate that if the players had to play orcs all the time, they would be a lot smarter about where they stored their goods or how difficult it was to get into their lair.  Even the weakest humanoids could create insanely difficult lairs for a player to break ~ and the above experiment could demonstrate to players and DMs alike what to build and how to break it.

This is the sort of thing that provides empathy for both sides, player and DM alike, while vastly expanding the possibilities of presenting the game.