Stavanger's Initial Growth

Prior to this, in the posts about Haugaland and about West Rogaland, we've been talking about rural culture.  As Rogaland in general possesses a 5 development (dev-5), these are hunters living on clan lands without much technology.

Stavanger is an actual village, the only one in Rogaland in the year 892.  It is but 20 years old.  Already, it has jumped to a type-6 settlement ... but before we describe that, let's for a moment remember that it would have been a type-7 settlement for a brief while.

I hate that I keep having to explain this, but a type-7 settlement is the lowest form of settlement; a type-1 would be the highest.  Between 7 and 1, the characteristics of a settlement are modified, according to a complex scheme that does not only account for size, population and production, but also for what happens to be produced as a reference in my trade system, and the cultural development of the region.  The idea here is to unify the various worldbuilding systems I've been describing on my blog for a decade now: trade, my maps, my hex-generated infrastructure system and the late coming development/technology system.

[the 10th anniversary of this blog is in just ten days; say something nice]

To explain briefly about the map: Stavanger shows four food (bread slices) and two labor (hammers).  Because of the infrastructure number (type-6), the hex naturally supplies 2 food and 1 labor.  Note how Randa, with type-7, has no labor bonus.  Stavanger gets +1 food from the fish reference.  Note how Osthus, which is also type-6, but has no settlement, also gets a +1 food from a completely different fish reference.  Finally, Stavanger gets a +1 food and a +1 labor from being a type-6 "settlement," rather than a rural hex.

To get a sense of how Stavanger grew, let's go back to when it was a type-7 settlement, rather than a type-6.  It is a year or two after Stavanger was founded, say 874.  There are some 150 people living there.  What might that entail?  First, that food production is noteworthy; not just because the hex itself would likely be the most productive in Rogaland, but because tribute to the tribal chief and bartering would cause food to find its way to the region's center.  The requirements of the chief, the need to protect and elevate the chief's family, the conditions of Norway's climate and the associations between the chief and the population would result in the building of a long house, to shelter most of the people.  A warmer climate might have a scattering of huts, but this is Norway; it gets cold.

The present labor of more than 75 strong-backed residents would mean it could be a fairly substantial long house, large enough to house all of Stavanger.  The house would be near the water, as fishing is the primary occupation (note the fishing symbol, or trade reference, on the map above).  Inside and out, there would be areas for assembling raw materials, making tools and garments, tanning leather, carving, cleaning and drying fish and building primitive boats.  Many of the residents would be transient; paying fealty and tribute to the chief, seeking shelter when shunned by their clans, small nomadic groups stopping before moving on and, of course, the occasional outsider.  The clan leadership itself would be minimal; the "chief" would be a figurehead, but he or she would likely have no real power without strong support from the main body of villager leaders.

Not a very exciting place.  Or, rather, tremendously exciting compared to life in the forest.  It is all a matter of perspective.  From a player character viewpoint, if our party of primitive fighters were to show up, this is where intrigue would be found, with varying leaders pushing to have their agendas addressed, for their personal gain.  The party would enter this milieu with their own agendas, being pressed to make more friends than enemies as we role-played the game.

All right, it is 892 again.  Stavanger has grown to 553 people ... still a village, but too large for just one long house.  Let's say there are three of note and a group of lesser shelters, of the sort depicted above but more distinctly built about six feel below ground-level (with turf on top) and large enough for two or three families (we'll get to why in a bit).  The three noteworthy buildings are divided according to their occupations.  Most of the fishing folk dwell in one that is nearest to the shore where the boats are protected.  The hunting long house, or "lodge," is closer to the forest; and it houses the more powerful chieftain and more influential and official body of village leaders, or elders.  Finally, a third longhouse, less ornate and protective, shelters much of the common folk; and this house is the residence of Stavanger's shaman and small body of the shaman's personal servants.  People who cling to the shaman in order to have a place in the village hierarchy.

The amount of free labor is greater ~ thus we add another labor to the symbols shown on the map above.  That accounts for all the benefits Stavanger gets from being a settlement (remember, it got a +1 food when it was just a type-7 settlement, back in 874).  This labor is applied to more boats, more tools, the making of weapons to protect the chief and the region (stone-and-wood weapons), possibly crude armor (cloth and shields) and the collection of more raw materials.  Brush and other wooden enclosures, less sophisticated than a palisade, have been built along the forest to protect the village.  Most of the wood nearest to the village has already been cut down for firewood.  During the day, much of this labor is gone from the village; the hunters into the forest, the fishing folk out onto the water.  Only the children, the women and the shaman's followers remains (the shaman might disappear for days at a time, seeking mushrooms, herbs, a vision, whatever).

So we can see the evolution of the village.  If we started our game in 892, the players would never see the type-7, early Stavanger that was there before.  But we want to have some of it in our heads; so that we can envision where the residents came from, what they see as important, to them ... and where do they want to go in the future?  But we will get to that.

Okay, I mentioned that I would come back around to families.  I will; but I'm going to start a new post with it, to help maintain one principle subject per post.  I know that this is a tremendous wash of information for the reader, and that it can be overwhelming trying to imagine keeping all this in one's head.  Keep this is mind: we are not talking about rules.  We can simplify rules until the cows come home, but we're still stuck with the necessary proposition that creating a believable, fascinating world with depth is an unbelievable, monumental task ... one that, again, the official company simply ignores, pretending that every adventure can be made entirely out of stereotypes.

If we can see how the village of Stavanger works, we can put ourselves and our players into the place; and help them to walk around, watching the residents work, watching the interaction between the residents present itself ~ and understand what is important to these people.  What would change their lives?  What would they want?  How does the party fit into that equation.

Until the next post, then.

Codependency

The following sequence rose from events played between February 25 and 26, 2009.

In my last masterclass, I addressed the matter of players having to make up their minds how to interact with the campaign setting, and how the DM will be typically pressed to make this interaction happen for the players.  In short, the players want to adventure; and will wait for the DM to create the adventure for the players to run in, because this is easiest for the players.  Opposed to this, however, is the experience and opportunity that arises when the players do for themselves, even if doing for themselves is the harder option.  Good play calls for all the participants to dig in and work together to make things happen ... not when the DM provides for all the others, who then become hopelessly dependent on that DM.  Dependency is never a good thing.

This post is meant to address the contrary point of view, and how "doing for the players without waiting for the players" is easiest for the DM too.  In many ways, by creating the adventure from whole cloth, so that players know what is expected of them, makes everything easier for the DM as well.  Which is why DMs do it.  Nothing makes a D&D running go well like having the players be dependent upon our story, our plot twists and our moment-to-moment whims.

It will not be popular to say, but many of the substantial problems that arise in having ONE PERSON control all that is said and done at a game table for a bunch of people who are dependent upon that person's intentions to create, or not create, the adventure that is going to be run, arise from the same issues that we connect with codependency.  Role-playing is addictive; and while it is not a drug, I will rush to point out that the link explicitly states that codependency relationships can also arise from gambling, which is also a game, and the dysfunction that arises out of family relationships ~ which, incidentally, psychology invented role-playing in order to combat.

Which is to say that role-playing itself is not a bad thing.  It can be healthy, if approached in a healthy manner.  It is that healthy manner that promotes role-playing as a therapy.  We stress how every participant must learn to be responsible for themselves, and in their contribution to the general welfare of the relationship.  But when we say that the DM is responsible for everyone having fun at the table, ie., for the emotional state of other people; or that the DM is responsible to always say "yes" to player efforts at problem solving, ie., supporting and enabling the ability of another person to feel successful and validated; we are drifting dangerously into codependency.

When the DM knows who the players are going to talk to, and why, and what's going to be said, because that is the way the adventure goes, this removes everything else, the "unexpected," from the equation.  This shrinks the problem of managing the players' motivations and probable actions to a framework that most DMs can handle.  It is especially necessary for new DMs, who are hardly able to handle even this much interaction ... which is why "story-telling" DMing is presented as the best, more rational way to play.  Because it is easiest.

This is not the hall the players would see; it's a town hall from Passau,
a like town to the one the players were in, built in the 14th century.
Impressive, no?  Imagine how it was to the medieval eye.

Let's take an example from the campaign we left at the end of the last post, Who is Responsible.  The players have learned that to become guards protecting a merchant's wagon train, they must be bonded by the merchant's guild.  To be bonded, they must find a merchant to stand up for them.  And because they don't know any merchants, two players, Tiberius and Joseph, have decided to go where the merchants are: the merchant's guild.

And just like that, I'm in a trap.


continued elsewhere ...
This is the first of two such posts I will be writing in the month of May for the Tao's Master Class blog, where the rest of this post can be found. Examples on the Tao of D&D blog can be found here and here.

To see the rest of this post, you must pledge at least $3 to my Patreon account. This will enable you to see all material to date on the Master Class, but it will require that you wait until June 1st to see the content. Because it is difficult to keep track of who is donating $3 to me each month, I am no longer accepting small direct donations for the Master Class blog.

More About Rogaland's Dev-5 Culture

I'd like to try and get this post squeezed in today before I have to go do something else ... so I'll give it a try.

On the right, we see the rest of Rogaland, as it appears in a stage of 5 development (or "dev-5").  Haugaland, that we covered in the link, is not shown, is attached to the upper right corner of the map.

With Haugaland, we can loosely divide the region, or tribe, into four parts.

The clan of Harald, at the top of the map, is off by itself, and from the type-7 hex, we see that it isn't any more than a very obscure enclave.

At the bottom of the map, the two clans of Verda and Orre form an enclave around the lake of Orrevatnet.  Again, both are type-7; we may assume they are interrelated and friendly, but that is not necessarily so.

Finally, in the middle, surrounding the mouth of the Bokna Fjord, the large circle of water that surrounds the islands shown, we have four clans ~ Randa, Osthus, Loda and Skuden ~ and one actual village, Stavanger.

We can see that it is the end point of a circle of communication, which we presume extends overland to Verda-Orre and up the shoreline to Haugaland, pulling the Land of Roga together.  Stavanger is the only settlement ... all of these other hexes are clan lands, without agriculture, where hunters are able to sustain themselves on the rich natural game, fish and other forage that exists.  There's nothing here, except for Stavanger, that is different from what we learned about Haugaland.

I want to stress that this is in our favor.  By designating these places as "not much," we don't necessarily make them cookie-cutter replicates of each other.  All it gives is a very definite sense of what players would find there if they went: foragers, who fish a little and hunt a little, living a subsistance lifestyle.  It doesn't say every hex is the same!  A hex could have a special shaman in it, or an object that could wash up on the shore in only this hex, that the players could only find if they chose to explore there.  We are freed, however, of having to invent a whole culture from scratch in every one of these places.  These are basically all clans belonging to the same tribe, with the same basic beliefs, the same anthropological social structure, the same familiar foods and habits ... and representing something to the players that can be embraced as a reliable consistency that can be banked upon, exploited, used as crutch or however the players want to see it.  There's a weakness in making everything staggeringly different; the inconsistency becomes a malaise, which the characters just don't embrace.  We've all created a bit of something we consider imaginative and ready for adventure, to have experienced players respond to with a shrug.

There is something comfortable about consistency that we should not discard, thinking that everything about the game world has to be jazz hands and sparkly fire streamers.  Players are going to grow familiar anyway ... why not make your preparation process as a DM a bit easier by giving the players a bit of what they want?

Let me step out of that argument a moment and bring up the fact that there are no type-5 hexes here.  Even the settlement of Rogaland is type-6.  Type-5 hexes in a dev-5 culture are rare.  We can imagine them as a sort of sylvan paradise; the atmosphere that is usually associated with the elven settlements of Lorien or Rivendell.  Places where we do not have merely common beauty, like an emerald-green forest or a field of flowers, but startling, eye-popping beauty, with waterfalls, or magnificent oak trees hundreds of feet high and a thousand years old.  Where the fish leap out of the ponds and into your bucket.  Where the water is so fresh that your grandparents can taste it.  These would be places of pilgrimage; where the tribe would gather once every five years, or where the tribal chieftain would be crowned.  And they would be places where rare herbs were found, where faeries would congregate and remain in contact with the common tribe.

Most of all, and I cannot stress this enough ... not every part of the world would be lucky enough to have such a place.  Rogaland does not.  And before we move onto where we describe Rogaland as a more developed culture, a type-5 hex will have a different meaning. In a more sophisticated culture, a type-5 rural hex won't be occupied by hunters and gatherers; it will be occupied by people who till crops for living, who grow things.  Whatever the hex was when the land was mostly empty will have been altered.  There may be a sylvan  hex-block in such a culture ... but it won't be the sort of sylvan hex that exists in a completely hunter-gatherer culture.

Too, there's nothing that says that a sylvan hex has to be associated with any civilization.  Just as an eradicator monster such as a lich or a beholder can wipe out all life in a hex block to make a home, a faerie culture can expand life, making an obscure sylvan hex block as beautiful as an eradicator hex block is ugly.  The key is to imagine that the world makes sense, then to set up those hex blocks in a pattern that evokes adventure, rather than crushing it.

I need to talk about Stavanger, but time is running short.  I can put it in its own post.  This will suffice for now as content.

Getting Organized

While I'm organizing what next to show on the blog, for those who are looking for some simple points on how to build adventures, I suggest watching this video all the way through, whether or not you have ever heard of the video game, the Secret of Monkey Island:

The savvy reader will have noticed that I am behind on two promises: that the podcast did not come out this last Sunday, and that I did not write a masterclass post and get it up yesterday.

I had some things get in the way of life on the weekend and it put me behind on both of these things.  I am, admittedly, behind. I now strongly feel that it was a mistake to even think of setting the podcast up on a schedule, which I'm going to ignore going forward.  The podcast will be in place when I'm able to apply my brain to it.

The masterclasses are trickier; but I have promised that I will do two per month and I certainly will.  I'm just a little squeezed.  I should have the first of them up tomorrow, if I have to suspend the campaign early Thursday in order to do it.  I should be fine, however.

One thing about being a creator, we have to create when we're in a head space to create.  If I had set the podcasts to all come out starting the beginning of July, I could have easily hit that mark: and understand, that is how television and film does it.  They do not cut product days, or the day of, a product being aired, unless they're being run by idiots, or it is some temporal show like the news or a talk show.  And those things have hundreds of people who can be counted on to make stuff come out right.  Not just me.

Right now, I have what most people would consider a ridiculous amount of free time at my disposal; but I'm also working a physical job that tends to wreck me the day of working, so that it isn't until the next day that I'm ready to be productive.  And I have stretched myself very thin, with many projects on the go.  I'm solving that by trying to better organize my time and putting it where it is most important.  I know that the people who support me enough so they can read the masterclass were just as pleased to see the content I put up last Sunday about Haugaland.  I didn't expect that post to run as long as it did ... but once I got started, I found I had a lot to say.

I want to write a follow-up post to that; and get the podcast edited; and write the masterclass post; and finish running my online campaign this week; and write some of my book, that I picked up briefly last week; and spend some time with my partner tonight; and be in a fit state of mind for work on Friday.

Everything is fine; please bear with me.

Why I Will Never Be Mainstream

A week ago, a reader by the name of William made an astute observation, regarding me and my place in the world.  He said,

"The stuff you cover on this blog is unique and deeply fascinating, but not remotely mainstream. The people I've recommended you to see your blogs talking about economic statistics and tune out immediately, missing all of the juicy, innovative stuff that I wanted them to see. It makes ME feel like the weird one for enjoying it so much."

And he's absolutely right.  I'm not mainstream. And it's a headspace I've tried to accept for some time.  Just as anyone who writes wants to be seen as an important voice in *whatever* ... I'd like to be an important voice in RPG table-top game design.  And it is to that end that I've written most of the stuff that I have.

The reason I am not mainstream is not, however, because I talk about economic statistics or various other off-the-beaten path subjects that would make a typical D&D player's eyes turn glassy.  The deeper reason, I am sad to say, would remain even if I suddenly turned my back on some of my principles and started producing, say, one module after another.  I'll try to explain.

We are all sold on a certain marketing premise, which makes itself heard quite often: that 5th edition is what "all the kids are talking about," to quote William, and that, of late, Dungeons & Dragons is enjoying a huge revival, which is transforming family gaming across the country.  The message being sold is that D&D is accessible, and to play, all you really need to do is to start playing, and learn by playing it your way.  All in all, there's a terrific enthusiasm at play in the present media blitz, as article after article emerges in the mainstream that D&D is an all-round, favorable, wonderful experience for everyone who gets involved.

And it might be, for hundreds of thousands of mainstream players, certainly more than I'm ever likely to reach with my little blog and my little book.  Ignoring me, however, as I'm barely a blip ... there yet remains a fly in the ointment of all this positive balm.  Apart from the mainstream media, there are quite a lot of sites, both official and unofficial, which focus upon one unremitting dialogue:  How to Play?

Because there seem to be an awful lot of voices who seem to be struggling with the game.  To the degree that even the official company who owns the game has needfully set about using their flock of hired actor-DMs to make videos on techniques, concepts, game preparation and how to manage rules.  There also seem to be a lot of people in forums who ask questions like, "Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?" or making statements like, "I'm at a loss at how to run my players and I don't know what to do."  In fact, the presence of such expressions is so common that I'm fairly certain that the reader here is not in the least surprised, or feels that I am cherry picking among the many comments made about D&D.  The sense of uncertainty is pretty consistent, everywhere we might look.

Because of this, I am more or less of the opinion that a lot of people struggle with how to run the game.  It is one of the reasons why I was able to so successfully sell dozens of copies of my book to people at Game Cons who had never heard of me, cold, in less that five minutes usually, despite the book costing $30.  The only reason we did not have more sales was because there really weren't that many straight-up DMs who were at there.  Most of the people we talked to, who didn't buy, were players.

Because people do struggle with how to run the game, I think that most DMs have a dialogue in their minds, which most do not share ... and I think the theme of that dialogue is doubt.  I think a lot of DMs who come off as excessively sure of themselves are compensating; and that a lot of DMs who are definitely not sure of themselves are quite afraid of the possibility that they will never be able to really do this.  I think that people who DM for a longer period of time eventually devise a strategy that is, at one time, more or less willingly to accept that they not be great, but that they do pretty well.  The doubt is still there; but it's controlled.

It's like the dialogue most of us have established about drinking alcohol.  We know it is fundamentally bad for us; but we reason with ourselves that if we don't do it that often, or we don't drink that much, or we don't lose control of ourselves, except on very specific days that are set aside for losing control of ourselves, and we don't get into a car afterwards, then drinking alcohol is fine.

But then we meet that person at a party who states rather coldly, when offered a drink, "I don't drink."  And there's something about that which bothers you.  It seems judgmental.  It seems to be saying that maybe our arrangement with drinking alcohol is a bit of a self-delusion. That maybe we aren't fine.  That maybe we really ought to stop drinking.  Understanding, of course, that we don't really want to stop drinking.  But the doubt is there; and we're upset now.  Because we had this thing under control.

So we have a lot of really smart, really capable DMs, who realize there are issues surrounding their role-playing games, associated with rules, preparation, concepts and techniques, but who have gotten comfortable with their games, and the way they play, and the various methods they've settled on with how to manage players and promote fun and build their game worlds.

And then here I come with my 22-part series on how a D&D game actually works, or my 9-part series on how the cities in your game are a joke, or my big book of why everything you're doing as a DM isn't advanced, and bang, I'm the guy at the party who won't drink when he's offered a beer.

Worse, it's not an if-maybe-might-be thing with me.  I am definitely smug about my not wanting a beer, and I am definitely saying that you're a goddamn drunk, and that all this shit you've been telling yourself about the great world you run is completely crap, because I've spent a lot of time studying and creating in this game and it is really fucking hard not to look at the immense amount of work that I can dance in front of your eyes while telling you you're an alcoholic.

And that is why your eyes glass over.  Because all at once, you realize you've been half-assing this thing for years ... that you've been getting away with the world you have because the players, thankfully, happen to be lazier than you are ... and your response to that is to ...

HATE me.  How could you not?  Jeez, seriously, how could you not?

But you've got to get your sense of control back; you've got to be able to go back to your game and feel, like before, that you're definitely a good DM.  You've got to downplay those economic statistics and all that excessive map-making; you've got to laugh and joke that the wiki even exists; you've got to pick any page from the city posts and yuck it up with you friends ~ "Fuck, look at what this dumbfuck is doing."

Because anything else might mean that ... I'm right.  And that there is a lot of work in front of you.  A lot of work.  And that's ... that's just not going to work with your lifestyle.

So fuck Alexis.  Fuck him.  I hope he dies.  Or at least just goes away.

Making a Standard that Creates Distinctions

Many of you, I know, are seeing your mothers today, but as a pater familias I am free from such things; so I am writing a post instead.

A little background: though if you are familiar with my systems you won't need this.  The map on the right shows the four clan lands of Haugaland, as it exists in a development-5 stage (which I am saying would be about 982 AD in my world.  Each hex is designated by a number, indicating how much of the hex is "civilized."  In this system, less is more, so that the type-6 hex is more civilized than the type-7 hex.  I have tried to reflect this by cutting away more natural vegetation with the type-6 hex than I have with the others.

The reader might think it was the fishing ground, indicated by the small fish in the water, that makes the type-6 hex more civilized.  In fact, it was just chance.  The values of the hex were determined by an infrastructure system that I use, that I will have to sort out in a wiki post; if you know nothing about it, you might start with this post.

My goal is to breathe life into these four hexes, and in such a manner that it sets a template for other hexes, with other landforms and climates, with other peoples, and with other levels of development ... and to create that template with one thing in mind: to feed the imagination.

Some might suppose that my goal is to codify the world so that every hex can be easily defined and recognized, like every other hex of that same type.  The is wrong thinking.  On some level, it almost makes sense: the world is very complex, so the solution ought to be to simplify it, in order that it can be quickly understood without much work.  However, that doesn't really make sense.  We're not making a wall out of bricks, where it is okay that every brick is the same. We are striving to make a living, breathing setting, with which the players will consistently interact with wonder, interest and ambition.  For that, we must not build a system of such excessive standardization that everything ends up being shades of lifeless grey.

We don't want to define the setting; we want to define HOW to define the setting.  What is it about the setting we should know?  And that the players will want to know?  What matters about the setting that deserves our attention.

Here's what I hope to have established so far: a 5-development region is the most primitive form of humanoid civilization that exists.  A 4-development region would be occupied by intelligent apes or other like organized monsters.  A 3-development region would consist of family groups in which bears, lions or other large carnivores would prey on a largely herbivorous population.  A 2-development region would possess lesser carnivores, with large, aggressive herbivores, like elephants, rhinocerous and moose being the dominant creatures.  A 1-development region would consist of large herds of passive wanderers, caribou, gnu, zebras, oryx and so on, where carnivores existed but were made irrelevant by the sheer mass of gentle mammalian herds.  And finally, a 0-develpment region would consist of non-intelligent life forms, mostly insects, endlessly preying upon each other in a hostile, unpleasant environment.

That primitive dev-5 humanoid culture is a hunter-gatherer culture, lacking virtually all technological progress.  Haugaland above is primitive Norway; there are Vikings elsewhere in Norway but they are not coming from here.  Supposedly, in 862, Harald Fairhair completed his conquest of Norway after a great victory at Hafrsfjord near Stavanger, but according to what I have this is a tale told four to five centuries later, wikipedia says Stavanger was not founded until 1125 (I date the place to the year of Harald's battle) and it is all historical falderal anyway.  No one knows for sure, and this is all for demonstration purposes anyway.  For our purposes here, we need only imagine that I'm describing some very primitive clans people living on the Haugesund Fjord.

A type-7 hex is, in addition, the least civilized of rural-form hexes, and therefore we have here three examples of the most backward rural cultures in the most backward of civilizations.  Everything from here is up.  Effectively, we are the warrior figure in the civilization game, without even a settler to build our first settlement with.

How, then, to make that type-7 hex in a dev-5 culture interesting?  Not just for Norway, but for every similar hex, anywhere in our world, from the northern tundra to a group of natives on an island in Polynesia?  What matters here?  Suppose we start a group of players here?  They couldn't be mages, rangers or paladins, or even thieves; thievery is possible, but these clans are based thoroughly upon a persistent sharing dynamic; it is doubtful that a thief in such a culture would live to become a player character.  There are shamans, but those are hardly clerics.  What weapons could they use?  What skills would they have?  Upon what would we base such an evaluation?

And here is where I used the base technologies as a framework for such functional questions.  The dev-5 culture has just three technologies: hunting, fishing and mysticism.  That's it.  Things like weapon-making, boat-building, monolith carving and such are amateur, handicraft skills ... that anyone learns to do, like an aboriginal making a boat from tree-bark.  It is not sophisticated boat-building.  The weapons are spears, stakes, clubs, javelins ... tools for killing animals and then re-purposed for killing other humanoids from other tribes.  There are no weaponwrights, no artisans of any kind, no persons who are professionals in a given field ... except, again, the shaman.  And there are very specific details about what the shaman does and what purpose the shaman serves - and this is definitely not the classic cleric/healer character.  It is more like a monk.

The technologies tell us also how these people get their food; "hunting" includes the process of gathering, or foraging, which I have built into the sage abilities system; actual foraging by peoples in my setting works exactly like that.  Some climates and terrains produce an abundance; some do not.  How much food is produced critically defines the nature and energy of the people.

Our next issue is to define what makes a "type-6" hex different from a "type-7" hex.  What is our logic here?  From what principle does the remaining description of the hex flow?  Remembering that this has to be a principle that can be carried into all other possible hexes, throughout the system, and all other possible levels of development.

My logic is that the land itself is what's rolled for when a random hex is determined to be a "type-6" as opposed to a "type-7."  Here I write of the land's shape and organization ... and to the degree by which a given culture is capable of using the land.  Consider this pile of rock from southern Spain, at a place called Ronda:

For the advanced moors who built the fortification on top of this bluff, it's a convenient bit of topography.  But for a primitive dev-5 culture, it is just a big impediment that has to be walked around.  So land-use and land-richness are relative to how much technological power a regon possesses.

For Haugaland in our year 982, the only thing that matters is how much food exists.  A type-6 hex produces more food than a type-7 hex.

And that would be enough for some designers, thinking that the amount of food alone is the distinction I seek, arguing that I am all about statistics and that statistics are boring.  But this is again wrong thinking, and serves people who will not go the extra step in their head in order to see the real point: why does a type-6 hex produce more food?  What is it intrinsically about the hex ~ that it is our responsibility as designers to designate ~ that makes the hex a better food producer?  That statistic is the clue that creates the structure that explains the statistic ... and this is something that I am seeing designers miss repeatedly when they set out to make a setting.

FIRST, there have to be factors about the setting that are measureable ... and THEN, that measurement has to be described and defined, both in terms of its merit and in its real world manifestation.  The merit of more food is that it creates more people, greater abundance of opportunity, a wider range of possible contacts and more reliable supply for characters adventuring in the world.  The real world manifestation is for us to see how a hex with more food looks to people who are there, who can distinguish it on sight from another hex where there is less food.  This visual appreciation then translates to the DM's efforts to explain why this hex is more relevant, interesting, or potentially threatening to the players.

Understand this and you will blunder less with your worldbuilding efforts and begin to design things that are functional, that encourage imaginative and immersive player behaviour.

What is our manifestation for these four hexes, then?  Consider: the type-7 hexes are less abundant, yes ... but they are remarkably more abundant than the wilderness hexes that have no occupation at all!  Comparatively, the type-7 hex certainly outshines the inconsistent grazing lands that have no type number.  Type-7 land must be at least rich enough to sustain a small band of 30-40 people indefinitely; these are not nomads.  There might be a wandering band of human nomads in the eastern reaches of Haugaland, as shown on yesterday's map, using up the game from one hex and moving onto the next; but that does not describe the type-7 clan represented here.

The type-7 hex is forage land ... which is what we might name the rural block it represents.  The residents forage and scavenge a subsistence food supply (there's none to share with others), gathering, collecting, fishing and occupying themselves with minimal hunting (relying on culling animals out of small local herds or relying on those that enter the hex from outside).  Their food resources consist of patches of harvested plants: seasonal berries and wild apples, mostly.  There are fish runs, notably the spawning period for salmon; late in the summer, there are places where bees provide honey; and there are bird flocks to feed on along the coast, again at certain times of the year.  The residents move from food supply to food supply with the season, squeezing out every calorie their lands can provide; and a 6-mile diameter hex is fairly rich if it can keep 40 people alive year round.

The forage land itself is full of steep drops, with difficult and uneven rocky terrain, stony or sandy areas that produce nothing, lifeless beaches, innundated bottom lands of bog and mud, high banks that deny easy access to algae-infested waters, and water courses marked by rapids and sharp falls (water falls are pretty but inconvenient to a hunter-gatherer).  Dense vegetation, brambles or briars provide more obstructions.  What trails exist are rough and tiring.  Passive wanderers are welcome, but carnivores and assorted vermin, like stirges or giant insects, and the occasion verminous creature from the sea, are all threats.

So it is harsh.  And it lends itself to adventure, somewhat ... but only in the loosest terms.  We have a role-play event where the players meet the clan, and some moment where the party encounters a wolf or a bear, or perhaps loses their footing on a trail and has a bad fall, but we're not talking truly exciting.  It is more interesting to imagine a party staggering around in the hexes outside of the lands of the Vormed clan, being thankful to find at least this much civilization, at last.

The type-6 hex must differ; and in my imagination, it does.  As a block title, we might call it fruitful land ... featuring wide, natural meadows, springs of fresh water that supply clear ponds and lakes, surrounded by low banks giving easy access to the water.  The rivers run slower, there is less wild water, and in many of these the fish feed all year long on the bottom.  Animal trails are more numerous, as the ground is less sloped and easier, while wild oats grow along the river banks, providing greater sustenance to herds, which produce more offspring.  The meadows are filled with flowers, granting more sustenance to the bees, which produce more honey and enable more fruit on the trees.

Without any change in the technology, the residents of fruitful land have less arduous journeys to make across their lands; they have more time to make structures that are more permanent, tan leather, make clothing, improve the strength of their spears or other tools.  More food means they have food they can bury for winter, or store in carved gourds.  Non-food producing labor is comparatively abundant, thus the little hammer symbol in the hex.  The open land makes it easier to clear out predators, so that it is even friendlier for herds to congregate.

It is less harsh.  The residents are happier, better fed, potentially stronger but on the whole, more willing to share with outsiders.  And all this we can surmise from reading the actual landscape of Norway (there would be many different nuances to this if we were describing these two hexes in a Russian steppe or on the edges of a jungle in central Africa), applying it rationally and building up two different schemes for life based on nothing more than a measure of privation.

In turn, a type-5 hex would have even more abundance than a type-6.  What would that look like?  How would you describe it?  I have described it, and we will certainly get there ... but I want to get the reader's imagination functioning.  I want the reader to seek out a book or two about anthropology, or hunter-gatherer societies, and wrest your brain out of the "everywhere is a bland fantasy setting" framework and into something far more concrete and applicable to the human experience, yours and mine.  Envisioning a field full of flowers, that the party encounters upon stumbling out of a deep wilderness, where they have almost died, is far more arresting to the imagination than another tiresome description of perfect elves in perfect elf costumes.

Haugaland & Hex Types

The various sorts of building blocks I described in the post, One Block at a Time, need to fit into appropriate places; there's no logic to a careenage that's no where near the water or a beastland that is adjacent to a hex where a quiet family clan resides.  I recognize that some world designers will think the latter is "kewl," but in fact it is pretty stupid and obviously geared to teach players that the world they're running through makes no gawddamn sense at all.

To that end, I've started defining hex "types," based on vegetation and circumstance.  I include a list of what I have so far at the bottom of the post, but I want to stress that all this work is in progress and therefore should not be considered complete.  "Complete" is something that would come from a lot of work.  At present, I'm concerned with demonstrating how a hex type or a building block ought to function, rather than creating a list of building blocks that would be useless if we did not know how to put them together.

Let's look at the northern part of Rogaland Dev-5, that I introduced with this post.  I've come across the name Haugaland, but now that I'm being watched by a resident of the actual Rogaland, I hesitate to say this is what this region is called in the actual world.  I'll just say this is what I'm going to call it for my world (and let's just assume this is always the case):

There are not many hex types that I've defined that fit the area ... and that's a good thing.  We want a lot of distinction, but we want the distinction to be in the nuance.  For example, the Erfjord, Vormed, Sand and Sauda clans all occupy coastland hexes, they are all arable, and they are all borderlands.  Remember, none of these are "villages;" they are likely a single long-house with a yard and everyone sleeping together, as this is Norse culture.

All the hexes are watered, but they are not all "well-watered," which includes only that area along the river (which is called Sundalslagen and is flowing through a valley that doesn't exist, because it should actually be flowing south of where the Vormed clan is, but it doesn't matter because it's my world and I'll stop bringing this up now).  Here's a table listing these hex types and others that I've developed so far:

The four clans exist on the map above because my infrastructure system put them there, the same system that I've pushed on my blog for years.  I'm simply using that infrastructure to say, "These are hexes where a deliberate effort has been made to transform verdant land into arable land.  The rest of the map is, by my reckoning at least, "verdant."  I want to stress the distinction that verdant does not mean a land of tremendous abundance, but rather a land with sufficient vegetation that it will support a herbivorous, and therefore a carnivorous, population.  The mountains of Haugaland aren't anywhere near as green as the watered lands of the Sundals river, but they are covered in lichen and short grass and they do support a population of wild goats and reindeer, and presumably a wide range of sizeable common monsters that an area such as a wasteland would not would not support.

[Just a note about "deadlands" that were described in the One Block at a Time post ~ I've separated this into the two kinds of hex above; an eradicator land would occur in either kind of hex, barren or waste, but a beastlands hex would only occur in a barren hex; just the way I see it].

The hex type is meant to be a useful short hand.  The blocks we should expect to see on the map could include, according to hex type:

• Arable.  Boat yards (if there was any boatbuilding, which there isn't), careenages (there would be one for the Erfjord clan, since there's access to fish), fishing huts (all of the clans fish, though the Erfjord clan does better), hut villages (none of the clans, as there's no settlement in Haugaland) or a sacred place (which we could say occurs with a 1 in 6 frequency).  Rolling dice, I find none of these clans are organized around such a place; but as a DM, if I had a reason, I could hand one over to any of them. Sauda, for example, which will eventually become a village.
• Borderland.  Earlier, I mentioned only one block that might apply to the borderland, that being the hunting camp; however, hunting camps are organizations of professional hunters, something that arises from a more sophisticated culture.  Represented here are four small clans, of about 30-90 people each, which we could think of as the Haugaland Tribe.  There are no professional hunters, and won't be until this region develops above its present state.  All we can say about these being borderlands is that they're fairly vulnerable to outside attack by who knows what.
• Coastland. Again, everyone is on the coast; but the fishing ground by Erfjord makes that hex unique.  I want to stress that the boats used by the inhabitants here are not viking ships!  They are not even sailing vessels, but rather primitive boats that are safe only to travel in coastline hexes.  There are viking ships in Norway at this time, but not here in my Haugaland; there isn't even a nearby market where one could be purchased and no training for any of this population in how to mange such a vessel.
• Verdant. There are lots of grazing lands, literally every other hex on the map apart from the four clan hexes.  The best hunting is bound to be along the well-watered hexes beside the river, but as my version of Rogaland has only grazing lands, the hunting is only fair.  Good enough to sustain the small population inhabiting Haugaland (using the food as a guide, about 140).

As the reader can see, from this I already know a huge amount about Haugaland, from just a few easy to fix details.  It wouldn't be hard to build an adventure that would fit the circumstances.  But since I did say that 1 in 20 grazing hexes would be a barbaric village, why not roll to see where those villages might be?  I'll even go one step further and make a suggestion for what they could be, based on the version of Norway I've imagined for my world, one in which gnomes, halflings, stone giants, trolls and kobalds inhabit.  We won't include any killer frogs; that lair, the one investigated by the online party, is near Stavanger.  I'll roll for half-hexes on the border but not for the line of hexes right on the bottom of the map (though they are eligible).  I also won't roll for the mostly empty hex on the far left, directly west of the Vormed clan.  I count 30 possible rolls.

I got three.  Of course, this is pretty simplistic.  Any one can write "gnomes" on a map and it hardly counts as an adventure!  Though, to be honest, that's what I've seen on a lot of maps these past ten years blogging.

What it does is give us a few blocks to build with.  We can decide that the gnomes are friendly, that the party has to make contact with the Vormed clan, make friends, get a Vormed fellow to lead them to the gnome village.  The gnomes are perhaps a bit aggressive, as they're not too fond of the human incursion that has incurred in the last two centuries, but with a little live and let live the party can convince them that they're need to find the kobald village in the mountains is crucial.  We can say at this time the players know nothing about the trolls.

Eventually, the gnomes lead the players over the pass and down to the kobalds; depending on the adventure we have in mind, this might lead to a parley, in which the kobalds reveal the trolls and the true presence of the Mcguffin or whatever we choose to base the adventure on.  Or it might be a slogging fight, where the kobalds are led by a troll, who escapes, and must be followed, leading the party to the troll village ...

I've added a roll to barbaric villages for my own purposes, which declares that 1 in 20 of these is a dungeon.  Now, if my whole world were just Rogaland, than I would probably make the kobald village a dungeon, and the troll village a dungeon as well.  But I have a gargantuan world, with 40,000 verdant hexes ... I can afford to spread my dungeons thinly.  Besides, I like outdoor fights in monster villages.  They can be hard scrabble for the players and it still ends in a potential heap of treasure.

I have more to say about Haugaland, but this is enough for now.  We'll pick up with more discussion of the sort of blocks that make up the clan-lands of the region.

What to Do, What to Do

Video game characters don't have stats.
They don't breathe.  They don't clean up.
Makes everything a very simple game.

I'm writing this in answer to a player ~ but to be honest, I don't think it will be of much use outside of my campaign.  That is because, for most players, being of low-level isn't a thing, running out of spells and hit points isn't a thing, running out of healing isn't a thing, lacking magic isn't a thing, encumbrance isn't a thing, bad rolls and character death isn't a thing, heat stroke isn't a thing, exhaustion isn't a thing, dehydration isn't a thing, having to manage details isn't a thing, etcetera.  All the things that happen in real life that aren't things that matter in a D&D world makes me wonder why characters have stats at all.

It is the end of a battle and there are just a few creatures still fighting your party, while your character is past the point of effectiveness.  Perhaps your low level mage is out of spells, or out of healing; you've thrown your last dagger or you're grimly hanging onto it.  Your fighter is a hit point from death.  You're out of this fight and you know it ... yet your friends are still at it, and a bad roll could kill one of them.  You want to help.  You just don't know what you can do.

I'd like to make a few suggestions.  Some your character can do without preparation, and some things need to be set up in advance the next time you're in town.

For example, have a few flasks of distilled beverage or strong ale.  If you're past worrying about the fight, it won't hurt to get a bit flushed ~ you're not going to need that attack die anyway, not now.

You can get some of the hirelings or followers to get out of the fight; they're just NPCs, and it won't hurt if they pull back and let the main characters mop up.  Don't want some man-at-arms to catch a mace two rounds before the fight ends!  They've done well; call them off the line, tell them to rest, tell them to drink from this flask and lift their morale; they've done their job and they can stop. Won't hurt to role-play a little and commend them, and help build their loyalty.  After all, you're their boss.

As long as the fight's over, remember that there's a lot to be policed.  Roll the dead into a pile.  Gather up any weapons you can reach, or pick up the backpacks that were shucked off at a moment's notice and get them together in a pile, preferably near the door you're going to retreat through, or advance through.  If necessary, assign a guard to watch it.  Outdoors, get on it and gather some of those animals that have been left to the side, or jumped from in the fight.  Those have got to be caught and brought back around.

Also outdoors, it wouldn't hurt to start clearing the ground to make a fire and a camp, if it's plain half the party will need to rest once the encounter is done.  Gather some firewood.  Find food.  Get out your water flasks.  Sometime in the near future I am hoping to install some dehydration rules ... so for gosh sakes, hydrate!  Cool down a little.  You're tired.

Underground, make some light; or find the lantern that's been set down, or the torch that's been in the hand of your lead fighter this whole time, and relieve the fighter of carrying it.  You can always add illumination ~ everyone knows you're here now, so there's no need to play it coy.  Get the room as brightly lit as you can, so when the search begins for secret doors, treasure, whatever, and when the bodies are being triaged, everyone can see clearly.  Obviously, rifle anything that's dead ... but it doesn't hurt to get things ready for use, like make-shift stretchers, bandages, picks and tools, manacles if anything is still alive ... take a few minutes and get stuff ready.

You can always walk on ahead for a few dozen yards, checking out a tunnel or carefully examining for traps.  Yes, that's a risk if you're low on hit points, but if you're drunk enough you might survive that trap.  Surely, you're not going to run into much that hasn't already run away from the fight or into it.  It doesn't hurt to carefully look around the next corner.  Keep a mirror for that if it makes your mage feel better.

If nothing else, you can keep up the chatter. The party may be fighting zombies or something non-intelligent, but a little anthropomorphized insult can't hurt.  "Come on, you beetle you.  You think you're gonna take us down?  Not in this lifetime!"  If you can't actually hurt something, or risk being hurt, you can always taunt.  Particularly the more intelligent creatures a few rounds before they actually go down. They might get mad enough that the DM has them lose their shit and get cut down in the process.  Could happen.  Depends on what you say.

There's really a lot to do. You could, you know, rest.  Fighting is hard work.

I'd like to build into the system an overheating feature for combat, so that having to rest was a thing; where deliberately holding yourself back from combat, when you weren't needed, was a good strategy for when the front line has to fall back and rest.

But we need rules for that, and as I am often told, rules are a bad thing.  Rules don't make anything fun.

Somehow, being able to fight or role-play incessantly, without limitations, without drawbacks, without consequences, without an evaluation of success vs. failure, sounds unbelievably boring, and anything but fun.

UPDATE.

The player thought I was kidding.  I am not kidding.

The Failed Plan

Back in December I had a plan.  I was working on the development-infrastructure system, which has been floating around the blog now for two years, in the hopes of building a demonstration that would more clearly reflect what the system could offer in terms of world design.

My plan was to create five versions of the county of Rogaland, the provincial unit of Denmark & Norway in which the online players are adventuring.  In my world, I had determined that the actual development of Rogaland was 9 ~ which is hard to explain, since most readers here don't have enough experience in history to compare the number, or even the link, to anything in their experience.  Worse, the link calls it "technology 9" rather than "development 9," which I adopted after it was determined that readers bristled at my use of the word technology in this manner.  And that was fair.  We don't have to go into it.

For clarity's sake, a development of 9 would be a fairly backward culture for the 17th century.  Most of the things that were present in the rest of the world would be rarely seen and treated with some disdain, just as many people in backward parts of the United States continue to treat books as a bad idea, unless it's the Bible.  Most concepts, such as things we'd identify with the Enlightenment, would be alien. The people of Stavanger in the 17th century were barely out of the 10th; though Christian in name, most of this was a sort of "folk Christianity."  The idea of established churches and priests, the habit of reading and writing, and the widespread use of metals was something of a new thing.  These things were common in other parts of the world, but not in a backward, far to the north fish port like Stavanger.

To bring this home, I had planned to design a map and description of Stavanger as a development-9 region.  But I also had a plan to design Stavanger as a development-8 region, as a development-7 region, as a development-6 region and as a development-5 region.  I hoped that by remaking the same province over and over, I would show how each development level would create a markedly different cultural and structural setting, which could then be made to apply as a background for role-playing and adventure.

My ambitious plan was to make these five versions all ready, and then post them one after another on five successive days.

In December, I was putting the plan in place.  I had worked out the kinks for development 5, 6 and 7, and was working on 8 ... but I was finding the challenge fairly steep.  As each layer was built, it complicated the project, as each earlier layer had to be updated in turn.  Fishing at dev-5, for example, would work differently for dev-6, and differently again for dev-7.  With each new layer, the differences multiplied in number, as it became more and more difficult to keep the big picture clear in my head.

But, no worries, I thought.  The restaurant where I work was going to do a remodelling in late February.  I would have three weeks of time all to myself.  Until then, I would just gather information and when the break came, I'd use the time to bring it all together.  I was champing at the bit to put the information up; I was leaking bits and pieces and the new year came on.  I anticipated wildly the week when I would start putting up those posts.

And then ... just before the break, wikispaces, my wiki host, announced that it was ending its website.  And although I had until July, supposedly, to move the wiki, my unease about the certainty of that resource suddenly became my only concern.  As a result, I burned those three weeks, and six others besides, moving more than 1,100 pages, with more than 5,000 links that had to be changed.  Not only did I not work on the development project ... I put so much distance between putting down the project and picking it up again that I now feel staggered at the idea of producing five versions of Rogaland all in a single week.

I felt bitter, and angry ~ and yet I kept my silence about the plan in the hopes that I might still put it up as I had originally planned, perhaps in July or August.  But truth be told, I would rather spend that time working on the Fifth Man.

I haven't talked about the Fifth Man in a while.  The note on the sidebar remains, quietly stabbing me in the side every day, though I haven't updated it since June of last year.  Speaking of things that distance has made difficult to access; but I think about the book nearly every day.  In my mind, I have solved some troublesome aspects that would have weakened the latter third of the book.  I think, to be honest, that it will be a better book for the distance I have gained on it.

My plan is to pick up the book sometime this week.  It will be slow progress to start.  I need to familiarize myself again with several passages; I hope I can keep the continuity straight. I have had to admit that only eight of the podcasts have proven workable for this first season. I am sorry Vlad, and sorry Archon ... I think the conversations were good, but having to do the interviews over the Skype phone, and not through the computer, did not make a good sound quality.  A better technician might be able to save them.  I'm inadequate.  I just don't know enough about Audacity or sound.

So, once the podcasts are done, and there's a lull before I start the second season (which will be coming), I'm going to work on my book, and not on making some grand splash with the development system.

I will, I think, continue to make five versions of Rogaland.  But I'm going to release them without a schedule, when I feel ready to move on.  And if, doing it that way, it turns out that I reach a point where I can't finish, that's too bad.  The book really is more important.  I owe it to a lot of people besides myself ~ and to tell the truth, my soul will be better off when it is behind me.

The post, One Block at a Time, gives most of the information I need to work up a dev-5 version of Rogaland.  I'm not going to work on arranging those details in the right order tonight; I have to go crash soon so I can work in the morning.

However, I am going to post a map of Rogaland that I made five months ago.  It is a "6-mile hex map," built out of my more commonly posted maps of the world.  The link shows the older version of this map; I tried some new ideas in design, to make something that would have a deeper, visceral impact:

I think the reader might appreciate this somewhat.  The notion is that the unshaded map would be the county of Rogaland as it existed in the year 892, just twenty years after Stavanger, the only village, was founded.  Stavanger is a village, the only settlement in the region, with a population of 553.  In 892, there is only one economy: fish.  If the reader looks carefully, three small fish symbols can be seen on the map; these are the places where fish congregate, what I called "fishing grounds" in the One Block at a Time post.

The white names on the map ~ Erfjord, Skuden, Orre and so on ~ are not villages, they are clan names. It has bothered me for some time that there is no proper, elegant way to label hexes on a hex map; unlike a squared map, a grid with letters and numbers like "G4" isn't possible.  But the idea of naming hexes after the primary clans appeals to me.  Clans become towns and the name remains.

What I like about the above mapping system is that it gives me the precise edges of treeline and occupied land, however small the latter might be.  I'm not bound by the shape of the hexes. The trees can pour up into valleys between the mountains, which are variously upland heath (pale green) or rocky tundra (grey).  The distances ~ one hex = 6.667 miles ~ are isolating enough that it is easy enough to imagine various clans coming into conflict over raw hunting ground.

The total population is a mere 1,349.  Those clans are not very large.

Remember what one of the blocks I included in the One Block at a Time post: grazing land, that was wilderness and possessed inconsistent hunting.  And 1 in 6 grazing lands, I wrote, would contain a barbaric village.

Every hex on here without a clan name is a grazing land.  And many of those may be occupied by kobalds, froglings, fur-covered gnolls ... perhaps even a clan of trolls.  Who knows?

Authentic RPG Podcast, With Becky Hamilton

Sunday night and I am due for a podcast.

I haven't spent as much time flogging these as I ought to have done.  They've been a challenge throughout this year, but I am making headway and I think this does represent a unique experience; today I've tried to do something really different.  I've put up a podcast about role-playing games with someone who has had a minimal amount of experience.  As Becky Hamilton said to me, off mic, she's heard of these things but she hasn't had any personal association with them.

Through the podcast, I try to explain role-playing to Becky, rolling with the answers she gives and striving to present game situations as they might occur.  Becky is quick-witted, clever and a fast learner, enabling us to cover a lot of ground in just one short podcast.

Give her some support, all.  And for anyone living in Toronto, Becky and her partner are looking for a D&D game to join, as noobs.  Help her out if you can.

I am pretty sad about the numbers on these podcasts.  I guess I'll never been as amazing as Matthew Colville.

One Block at a Time

With this post, the theoretical agenda I had with building blocks comes to an end.  Having established what they are, and what purpose I imagine they'd serve, the goal now is to define the individual blocks, one by one, so that they can be put together in a serviceable framework.  Yet I have just a few more points to make.

Most importantly, that the building blocks concept does not apply only urban settings.  The construction of a rural or wilderness setting can benefit in the same way ~ particular features or miniature landscapes, each offering its own source for adventure, specific use to the player, resident effect and game advantage, so that hundreds of blocks of every kind can be plugged together as components in a working machine.

Look at a common complaint with regards to world building.  The world is too big; none of us have time to build the multiplicity of details that a world demands; we can't make all of the towns on the map to the right, we can barely hope to make just one of them in an orderly, useful way.

If, in our imaginations, the goal is to scratch out an accurate map for each, then yes, it's impossible.  If we think we're going to detail every resident, and every job and purpose they serve, it's true, we might as well quit.

But if our goal is to say of the village of Ostrich, the residents respect quiet, book-learned people, and have a book fair once a month, and that the chief scholar in the village has unexpected knowledge of rare tomes, then we have already made the whole village for the purpose of our game ~ provided we know what that knowledge is, what books may be purchased at the fair and what means these books and knowledge has together of inspiring the players to pursue a particular unlocked adventure, which may never have been known if the players had not chosen to search the village of Ostrich.

The map itself does not matter.  The many residents of Ostrich do not matter.  What matters is what the village directly offers to the players, and what the players may need do to possess that offering.  Surely, if we think in building blocks ~ concrete, incremental pieces, and not esoteric impossible to define grand concepts ~ we can build as large a world as we have the patience for.  It is easier to make a Millenium Falcon out of Lego than it is out of wood.  Compare for yourself:

True enough, we have to invent the blocks first; we don't have a thoughtful, supportive company that knows how to make the blocks for us, telling us how to put together the blocks to make things we like.  We only have the sandbox of game design.

My plan is to start working on building blocks and posting them, over time.  I expect to start with an overview for my own use and then to build this overview into a long series of wiki-posts.  The blocks will fit into the overarching development scheme that I was building up for and had to shelve when the wiki had to be moved.  At present, I can only offer a taste.

Although I've defined an urban block at 3.76 acres, rural blocks would be dealt with as larger hexes, 305 acres apiece, or 2,737 acres, with commensurately longer search times.  Wilderness blocks might be bigger than that.

Let's start with some wilderness blocks:

• Deadlands: non-arable land that is insufficient for supporting higher life forms, due to a lack of water (deserts), useful soil, plant life (arctic snow fields) or because the area was so overgrown and infested (deep jungles) that most natural creatures are unable to dwell there.  The hex would be inhabited by non-intelligent vermin, mostly insects, arachnids, reptiles, amphibians and animated plants, perpetually feeding off one another. 1 in 20 deadlands might be a beastland.  1 in 400 deadlands might be an eradicator land.
• Beastlands: similar in nature to deadlands, but spawning wandering destroyers, such as cockatrices, gorgons, shambling mounds and the like, creatures able to survive for long periods in deadlands but prone to wander out in search of more interesting food or to slake their malevolence.
• Eradicator Lands: blasted deadlands, where the natural verminous population has been exterminated by a despotic, deeply malevolent entity, such as a lich, beholder, evil dragon or being of like power.
• Fishing Ground: literally an area of sea or lake, where fish congregate in abundance due to natural conditions.  Boatmen from nearby villages strike out for such hexes in order to improve their catch.  In terms of my reference/trade system, such places would exist in any province that possessed a fish or natural sea product (seaweed, slugs, sea ivory, turtles, etc.).  Most likely it would be far enough out that good boats were needed.  Technically the sea hex would be wilderness, because no one would live there; but encountering other fisher folk would be common.
• Grazing Land: arable lands lacking civilized infrastructure, where common pasturelands provide reasonable sustenance for herbivorous wanderers (mostly mammals), but where the hunting is too inconsistent to encourage human settlement.  These areas tend to exist in large forests, where civilization has not penetrated due to lack of interest, poor climate or simply distance.  1 in 6 grazing lands will support a barbaric village. (see Hunting Lands, below)
• Barbaric Village: odd humanoid and non-humanoid monster races who have constructed obscure, non-political communities in distant places unpatrolled by civilized culture.  These villages might be fairly developed, with agriculture or even metalworking and scholarship, depending on the intelligence of the builder, or they may be quite backward.  Some may be friendly; most will not.

Some rural blocks:

• Hunting Lands: naturally occurring rich pasture lands, offering provender to large herds, particularly in areas where there is some, but little civilized presence.  The area should be counted as a reference for game meat, animal skins, or any animal product (horn, bone, ostrich feathers, tortoise shell, etc.).  Each such hex should represent one reference, that being the primary trade item for residents in that area (they all eat the meat, but preserve the bone, or the hides, or whatever, depending upon their tribal skill).
• Hunting Camps: a more highly developed rural outpost, in which professional hunters, rather than tribal units, organize hunting parties that may range throughout the block or into adjacent wilderness lands, to acquire the most food each season.  Would-be rangers often train in hunting camps; use of the bow is a prerequisite for training as well.
• Stock Ponds: small naturally isolated ponds, often all or partially spring-fed, which have been stocked with fish and managed carefully in order to produce large yields.  Always for private use, but poaching is common as the stock pond doubles the chance for fishing.

And finally, some urban blocks:

• Hut Village: primitive dwellings forming a settlement, semi-permanent in structure, clustered in an area that provides better than subsistence living.  Often within Hunting Lands or with close access to same.  Often, huts will be interspersed with nomadic tents; much of the population at any one time will be transitory, remaining for a few weeks or a season before moving on.  Known not to offer services, but willing to barter with friendly outsiders, exchanging raw materials and food for metal objects and cloth.
• Fishing Huts: similar to a hut village, but with lacking a nomadic element due to its location upon the water and the presence of a constant, reliable food supply.  Buildings more permanent in design.  Necessarily adjacent to a careenage in most cases.
• Careenage: already discussed at length.  Provides minor repairs for incoming boats, no presence of rigging or sailcloth.  Always associated with a coastal settlement.
• Boat Yard: replaces careenage; almost always occurring in a natural harbour; otherwise, upon consistently calm shorelines, protected by reefs.  Major repairs possible to hulls, rigging and sailcloth available; can be contracted for designing boats.
• Sacred Place: includes sacred groves, caves, isles, vales, mounds and other like geographical features that focus natural clerical, druidic or magical energy (wild magic).  Such areas are usually surrounded by open land that serves for festivals, contemplation and rest, and are marked by monoliths.  Monoliths are rock cuts, cairns, columns, geoglyphs and the like, commemorating events, ideas, persons or divine figures.  Most monoliths are similar in design to others of the same culture.  1 in 100 monoliths will be a megalith, an immense, unique structure worthy of a pilgrimage (Stone Henge).  Monoliths and megaliths provide culture.

This does not begin to cover all the possible blocks I hope to eventually shape ... and the list does not conform to my description of what each block should provide for the players, as noted in my post, We Know Already ...  But it is a start.  We always have to start somewhere.

A New Player Wanted

I have just learned that one of the players on the Juvenis Campaign has to drop out of the game.  Is there anyone who would like to step in as a player?

I warn you, this is not an easy commitment to make.  It requires someone who seriously has time during the day ~ at the moment on Wednesday and Thursday ~ who can keep watch on the campaign continuously, jumping in to respond immediately once something has happened.  Any one person who cannot keep up drags the whole campaign down ... and that just doesn't work.

It also requires someone who can express themselves in words.  Who can write as much as is needed to make their point clear.  It requires someone who can read well, who can interact with others in a positive, friendly and supportive way.

It requires someone who can handle a lot of rules and see that as a good thing.

It requires someone that the party is going to support.

It requires a person who won't be mired in old thought processes, in old ways of thinking, in prejudiced ideas of what D&D is.  My game is deliberately experimental, because it stands as an example for hundreds of readers who are reviewing, learning and stealing concepts from the ongoing game.

It requires a willingness to be publicly seen, examined and spoken about, after the fact.

That is a tall, tall order.

I have room for One person.  If two people really impress me, I could expand the size of the party to five.  But waiting on five people is even worse than waiting on four.

Anyone who already supports me on Patreon is bound to be given first priority.

I am sorry for how egotistical this post makes me sound.  Trust me: it is the present party I am most concerned about.  They have worked, strived, fought for the game they are right now enjoying; they deserve to play with the best.  So you will have to be among the best.

Your chances are best if you're sure these people wouldn't last
24 hours in the wild.