Worldbuilding 5c: Hamlet

To reassure the reader, this is not the second in a series to be followed by "village," "town" and "city."  Like the thorp, the hamlet has no significant sub-facilities, so I'm treating it as a single amenity.  Be advised, this post won't be discussing a specific prince of Denmark.

Whether or not the reader chooses to employ the hammer-coin-food symbols I've been using for my maps, designating specific hexes as "kinds" can help in establishing where the players are or what they see.  My take simply lays out these hexes as a sort of flowing pattern, from scarcely populated regions to those that are densely populated.  I think this is better than determining which hexes are what by fiat, but it's better to do the latter than to make no designations at all.

Let's start with a typical type-7 hex.  If the designation "type-7" has rankled the reader and they'd prefer something more esoteric, let's call it "subsistence farmland."  Most of the hex is actually hinterland, with a small cluster of farms gathered around a stream bottom or artesian wells.  Each hex of subsistence farmland would as I said yesterday contain at least one thorp.  There wouldn't be any other services and as shown on the map by the lack of hammers, these particular thorps don't have a mill of any kind.

Chances are the residents wouldn't owe fealty to any lord.  My education tells me that the difference between a "villein" and a "cotter" is that the former is a serf tied to the land, while the latter is a squatter, who does not own the land being farmed (and is therefore not a "freeman") but yet successful survives as a farmer.  For reference, wikipedia makes no distinction whatsoever between villein and cotter, and seems to have no word for "person not under the heel of a lord who isn't in fact entitled to own land."  This is a case of someone thinking every human being fits into a box of some kind.  I assure the reader that millions of people through history have been too difficult to tax, because they chose to exist in obscure places.  I also assure the reader that many amateur historians are bound to think otherwise.

As such, I'm going to call these people living in subsistence farmland "cotters."  It doesn't matter if we call them "fleebsobs," as long as we understand their status.

Each season, these farmlands harvest a certain amount of food, store it in garners, from whence it's taken to a village of some kind and poured into the world's food supply.  The people are isolated, mostly friendly, no more concerned over bandits than the poor people of the American south were worried about Dillinger or Bonnie & Clyde, and probably willing to feed players out of hospitality or in exchange for a quite minor tool of some kind.

Let's look at a different sort of subsistence farmland.  As shown, there are two subsistence farm hexes (type-7) located along the big river that possess an extra hammer; while one type-7, located on a smaller blue line, doesn't have one.  The thin line is no more than a stream; it doesn't appear on a 20-mile map, so it doesn't get a bonus hammer.  Incidentally, any type hex on a river that appears on the 20-mile map gets a bonus hammer.

These examples of subsistence farmland also possess a thorp, but because they have sufficient water power, these thorps include a watermill used to grind grain.  Potentially, the mill could be applied to other manufactures, but it's not here, because these are only type-7 hexes.  The means is here, but the expertise is lacking.  The hexes are just too backward.  Still, it makes for a different kind of mindset than more backward places; and the mill is likely taxed, even if these cotters are not.

The reader might note that the type-6 hex shown has precisely the same hammer & food that these two type-7 hexes have.  What's up with that?  Well, hold your horses.  We'll get there.

This brings us to a different kind of type-7 hex, one that isn't a farm at all.  Where the inhabited hex occurs in mountains or stony land, we have a mining hex.  Here, the type-7 hex isn't awarded two food, it's awarded two hammers.  This designates a thorp with an ox tether, a mine and a waterwheel-sluice.  Potentially, the thorp might be at the end of a cart track or trail (or larger route), which would mean meagre services for carts and wagons (tools for fixing, probably not anything like an extra axle).

A similar type-6 hex, like the one shown, is awarded two hammers and a coin — the latter resulting from an obviously more important hex and therefore providing greater wealth than a mere type-7 mine.  The type-6 hex shown has a third hammer because it's located on the Rotilesti river, giving it a bonus hammer from waterpower.

So, this last image shows two possible type-6 hexes.  The mine-version includes a resident assayer (in a single-person "office," or hovel) to oversee the quality of ore, or it might possibly mean there's an open pit quarry here.  The ore is crushed by a mill, rather than merely sluiced as in a type-7 hex; there's a mule-skinner to manage work animals, a headsman to manage the operation, hauliers, several bunkhouses to keep them and a permanent stone kitchen to feed them.  This collection of buildings and yards is no longer called a "thorp."  It's called a "hamlet."

Now, "hamlet" is a loose term in the real world.  Like thorps, hamlets begin as little places (or evolve from thorps into little places) that refuse to give up the name as they transform into mighty cities.  Thus, we have Birmingham, Faversham, Burnham, Hamburg and so on.  Other names for "hamlet" include wick, catun, buurtschap, weiler, mezra, clachan and many, many others ... and all of these may be variously identified as villages, towns or cities, depending on how long the place has been around and the transformative nature of language being applied to multiple things.  As I wrote with the thorp post, I need a standardised word for a specific kind of habitation, to differentiate it from other habitations.  Hamlet is my chosen word for small not-quite-village sized habitations that occur in type-6 and type-5 hexes (the latter of which will be discussed another day).

Hamlets occur everywhere that's remotely civilised, even in densely infrastructured type-1 hexes.  For simplicity sake, let's call an agricultural-version type-6 hex just "farmland."  I trust that's not too confusing.  Farmland may or may not have access to waterpower — but whether it does not not, the hamlet in farmland will always have some kind of mill.  Where water power is unavailable, a windmill is substituted.  This is one important difference between farmland and "subsistence farmland."  The former may have a windmill.  The latter never will.

Historically, hamlets may emerge from thorps that grow as their usefulness increases.  Hamlets may also be founded at a stroke, as a group of pilgrims or settlers seeking independence.  They may also exist as the remnants of a village or town, where the hamlet is surrounded by the ruined remains of a larger, former habitation.  This can be found commonly in classical parts of the world like Anatolia, Greece, Italy or North Africa.  A hamlet might also cluster around a squire's house, a freeman who is less than a noble (and therefore not a manor lord), and yet act as a beneficiary or wealthy master.

Hamlets can form along roads, in bottom lands below mountains, upon a lake or coast ... in my game, anywhere that a type-6 hex occurs randomly.  Sometimes, this will mean a collection of farmland hexes such as the example above, or a single farmland hex apparently in the middle of nowhere.

Hamlets are not political entities.  They don't represent royal lands or manors, the residents aren't serfs, there's no single dominant individual who rules the place.  Even the example of a local squire doesn't provide for legal authority over the hamlet's residents.

At the same time, the hamlet isn't strictly an economic entity, like the thorp.  A larger number of persons dwell here, who are gathered together because they possess a similar tradition and outlook.  These are people who have bonded together, who share their harvest with one another in lean times, who trade with the outside as a single body ... and whose religious affiliations lack formal spiritual guidance.  Hamlets do not possess a church.  By definition, the presence of a church redefines a hamlet as a "village" ... but only player characters would take it upon themselves to build a church in a hamlet that has no expectation of developing the other qualities of being a village.  In the game world I'm building, the designation of "type-6" means no church, no priest and no deacon.  No religious hierarchy at all.  However, this doesn't prohibit the presence of informal spiritual guidance.  The hamlet may possess a shaman or a friar or nun acting on his or her own initiative.

Hamlets act somewhat as collectivised peoples.  By working together, they produce more free time among themselves; this allows homes that are better built than mere hovels, the development of simple masonry, carpentry, pottery and thatching.  Occasionally, some handicraft-making, such as baskets, farm tools, baked goods, quilt-making and such are collected and transported to small village markets.  The local mill may be used for fulling cloth and pressing wine and oil as well as for grinding flour.  None of these would reach meaningful proportions ... but players could expect to barter their town goods for rations, a serviceable pair of soft shoes or a hat.  Naturally the hamlet would also have a garner, several wells, a sawpit and so on as we've seen with the thorp.  In different parts of the world, this could be extended to polished spices, extracts like camphor and aloe, resins, local wine and spirits, embroidery and much more ... though it's understood none of these things would be available in large quantity; they'd only be enough for more than a few persons.

Farmlands are no more xenophobic than subsistence folk.  They might be attacked and robbed, but it's unlikely in large part, particularly with those surrounded by civilised hexes.  The last example of the isolated farmland hex might be a bit more xenophobic than others — but they would probably welcome outsiders for the sake of the news they bring.  They would protest the permanent settlement of outsiders who failed to share substantially with the community, or who wore out their welcome by appearing too often while acting selfishly.  Players would need to make friends, not merely treat the hamlet as utilitarian ... keeping in mind that working a string of hamlets, each being isolated, could allow for much greater latitude for a party that didn't wish to commit.

Thus, for resupplying base goods, such as food and clothing, falling back to a hamlet might prove more convenient than retreating all the way to a town.  It also serves as a possible location in which the party migh, after building relationships, actively work to expand the actual infrastructure of the hex, promoting it to a type-5 and thence to an actual village ... with lots of possible base locations to choose from that would serve the party's needs.

For everyone out there, I appreciate your support of my patreon or for your input in the comments.  I have more things to write about worldbuilding and I just want you to know that I'll continue to make the material the best I can.

Worldbuilding 5b: Thorp

In structuring the game world, I need standardised words that describe a standard physical thing.  In the real world, a thorp might apply to half a dozen differently sized habitations, including a village, a hamlet, a farm or an estate.  This fluidity grows out of places having once possessed a small collection of farm buildings ... and as it grew, it resisted discarding the word "thorp" and continued using it.  A modern dictionary is concerned with defining all the possible uses of the term, but I am not.  I need a "thorp" to mean the smallest possible collection of buildings that serves as a "facility."  We discussed facilities in general with this post.  Going forward with part 5 of the series, we'll be discussing different facilities that become progressively more complicated.

A thorp has about 5-20 persons, who may be classified as rural workers who are not farmers — yet they largely exist to facilate farming.  The operation of a grain mill for example, or a "garner," which is a storehouse or a loft for grain.  Other facilities might be a sawpit, for turning lumber into planks, an ox tether for holding oxen for loading directly on their backs; a reliable well; or a boat dock if the thorp is located on a waterfront.  They usually include 2-4 hovels, or houses of about 225 sq.ft, made of whatever materials the area allows — wood, wattle & daub, adobe, loose stone & caulk ... whatever can be made with amateur knowledge.

This is just one kind of thorpe; others occur
wouldn't be seen on a map this scale.

Thorps are everywhere.  On the 6-mile map, they can be found at the end of a dead-end road.  All type-7 hexes will have at least one, sometimes two or three, spaced closely together.   There may be dozens in more populated hexes, but with the appearance of full-sized villages and country towns, thorps tend to balloon into hamlets or get swallowed up by larger places.

They have no political importance.  Any place large enough to have even a small group of elders would rate as a hamlet.  The thorp's purpose is largely economic.  They serve as places where a farmer, located too far from a market, can deliver their produce in exchange for pay or barter; the thorp then transships these goods along roads to a bigger centre for profit.  In turn, locals able to do so can pay to have their grain turned into flour, or buy flour outright from a mill; carters or wagoneers can fill water barrels for a return trip; hunters might use a thorp as a residence during the hunting season, making their camp adjacent.  Thus a thorpe may be surrounded by 5-20 tents representing seasonal occupants — the aforementioned carters, assayers, carpenters putting in their supplies for the next three months, mushroom hunters ... even a herbalist or a resident druid.

Player characters might do the same, making an acquaintance with the thorp's residence, setting up tents for their hirelings or henchfolk, then leaving behind tools and extra weight before plunging into the wilderness.  Players might even meet hunters and let the hunters lead them into the wilderness for some distance, as the hunters would know the country better than anyone.  This allows the players a reliable basecamp making plans and explorations.  They might even choose to gain permission from the thorp — which might be wholly independent or might technically belong to a minor lord — to build a permanent structure and storehouse.

It's necessary for me to point out that a thorpe like this could better serve the trope to which D&D normally assigns to a local tavern.  The thorp is literally on the edge of the wilderness; or located in areas where beyond a few farms, most of the countryside is untempered hinterland.  The woodsmen or hunters venturing inside aren't trading on rumours; they can literally take the players a half dozen miles into the wilderness, point at the edge of a mountain and say,

"Yep, pretty sure there's orcs up there.  None of us like to get too close; but poor Bertrand's body was found in the creek bed there, at the bend where that spur juts out.  See it?  We figure they made him carry his own goods that far, when they killed him and stripped his body.  He wasn't wearing shoes, and his feet were good and cut up; he must have walked three miles before they hacked him apart.  Corpse was clean, though ... layin' in that creek like he was.  If you all start climbing up to the top of that spur and then along it 'til you come to that cliff-face ... well, I wouldn't be surprised if you found a cave of some kind about there."

Moreover, if the party is of the criminal bent (and I don't make moral rules for my party's actions), they can probably handle a thorp as second or third levels, provided they pick their moment and there's none too many strangers around.  Potentially, they could pick a place with 12 residents, kill 'em off, ransack the habitation for at least as many coins as they'd find on a dozen wandering orcs, load up the oxen, mule, donkeys or perhaps even a cart that's convenient and just head off down the road.  Most likely, they'd have a day or two to travel before anyone saw what they'd done, by which time they could trade off their animals (which could be recognised), take a less-travelled road and find their way into some village before ever being suspected.  Players could hit two or three such places without getting caught ... by which time, the plundering wouldn't be worth it any more.  They'd have to look for something bigger.

There's no reason for a DM not to make thorps like this convenient.  Players can use them to spend money on resupplying (though they couldn't buy much beyond flour, meat, fire logs and other things associated with the professions named above), build up an association with locals and still participate in all the familiar parts of D&D that players like.  We wouldn't have to trade in "rumours," but in facts. The world becomes a lot bigger when we don't have to put the village right next to the monsters when we can put lesser stages of infrastructure in between.  Plus the thorp in on scale with lower level parties, unlike, say, a full-sized Keep.

Worldbuilding 6a: Functionality

Okay, I'm going to do a deep dive with this post, discussing methods to provide the game world with an overarching structure, regardless of the level of zoom.  Those readers who feel that everything should be "done on the fly," or who believe "the world doesn't need a structure because this is all fantasy," may feel free to stop reading now.

When I began mapmaking, I chose to use 20-mile hexes because the world is a very big place.  My informational maps were primarily of 1:4,000,000 scale or larger, loaded with cities and geographic features, but with 1 hex = 1 inch = 20 miles, the result is a lot of hexes that look like the one on the right.  Empty.  However, the commitment of making a map, and therefore the hexes (or the open space of that map, whatever form it takes) is a commitment that if the players enter that hex, I must use my imagination to put something in it.

If I'm running a game and the players enter this hex, I have some base information at hand.  I know the hex is in western Moldavia (of modern Romania); that it's on the border with Transylvania; that the Carpathian mountains run along the border.  It has this stream in it which the little "3" tells me carries about 30 cubic meters of water a second.  The stream may be wide, or deep; it may be narrower and fast-flowing, or slow-moving and wider.  It could be shallow enough to be walked across or 2 metres deep and only 4 metres wide, so that the players have to swim.  The map doesn't actually give me this information.  I have to draw on what I know of the geography of the area (which isn't, frankly, enough or even remotely "accurate") to run the players when they arrive in this place.

And keep in mind, within just 30 miles of this hex's center are 18 other hexes, most of which are also empty and just as vague.  I could concentrate on providing detail for these 19 hexes, but then my game world would only be 100 mi. in diameter.  Yes, I could run a campaign in such a space, but the campaign would necessarily be missing London, Paris, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Moscow ... not to mention other vast parts of the world the players might like to visit.  There are quite a lot of such places.  And though I've undertaken to map them, it's worth considering that of the above empty 20-mile hex, I have some 70,000 other like hexes.  Without about one-fifth of the world's area mapped.

I'm not imaginative enough to create 70,000+ unique hexes, or even to do a thorough job with just 1% of that number.  So my approach has been to construct a generation algorithm that might transform hundreds of low-detail hexes into higher-detail hexes, without my having to be exceptionally creative long-term.  I need only use common sense and some additional information gathering to complete the process.  The result transforms the above image into this:

The adjustment provides me with more information than previously, to use when the players enter the former 20-mile hex.  I've added in hills, low mountains and high ones, roads, villages, additional water courses and separated the hexes according to their "infrastructure" and therefore the amount of civilisation they possess.  I've also added symbols for food, labour and wealth, which clutter the map ... but they also provide immediate information for my creativity to hinge on while the party travels through the area.

Tazlau is rich; with a type-1 hex it's as civilised as nearly any place in the world (there are exceptions, but that's another post).  In that one hex, the landscape is heavily cultivated, the roads are patrolled, there's are seasonal fairs and a village market (though not a world-trade market), a library, a money lender, probably a castle, inns and perhaps even a bathhouse.  Zemes isn't nearly as wealthy, but it's still important; it has an inn and a forge, and a village market twice a week.  Tarcau has a village market only on Sundays, has no inn or forge, but has a "way station," a sheltered yard and kitchen-house where travellers can bivouac.  The roads have various forms but there's lots of them; it's easy to get around.  I can see where the wilder parts of the hex are, where some participate in mining or quarrying ... and I can see a collection of other villages outside the hex, giving our original hex character through its relationships with other places.

As such, during the game, my imagination has much more forage to feed it, at a glance, which is the reason for the preparation that goes into elaborating on the previous hex scale.  Yes, it remains true that a single type-5 hex, which appears in the middle of the above, is very like the type-5 hex next to it.  This one has a deep river in it, that gives it +1 hammer; and it has a road, while the next like hex does not.  And yes, the system is set to produce hundreds and hundreds of type-5 hexes, all alike, or nearly so.

However, they are only like other type-5 hexes.  They aren't like type-4s or type-6s.  And while the hex itself is the same, some type-5s are a comparative backwater to the surrounding hexes, while elsewhere in the world they are the most important hex for dozens of hexes in every direction.  Relationships really matter.

Still, I look at the type-5 image and again, I'm left to my imagination to put something in it.  I have three hills and a bit of another.  I have that road.  I have the three food, which tells me there's fields and livestock and eating.  The two hammers promise that the river has a waterwheel on it, running a mill.  There's probably a quarry here, providing stone for building in Tarcau, Zemes and Tazlau.  But these aren't D&D Adventure notes, are they?  They don't tell me the sort of things that player parties care about.  So why go through this generation at all?

To DM, we've got to have a dungeon master's sensibility.  Where other people see the symbol of a hill, I see wild, uncertain country, filled with various denizens who aren't passive farmers — or even intelligent.  Historically, as an area is developed, the unwanted original residents are steadily exterminated or pushed back into areas that are unwanted by settlers.  This type-5 hex, occurring between three fairly dense built-up areas, has had plenty of history to build up itself, only it hasn't.  Which means the wild areas of this hex are too stony for farming and too barren for herding; the forest and its layout is impractical for wide-scale logging.  In short, parts of this hex have turned into those places where the players can dig into and find all manner of strange things.  With 5,000 years of human habitation of some kind, there may be ancient Roman shrines or covered over burial grounds.  A battle between Christians and Arians may have taken place here a thousand years ago.  A wizard-hermit could easily have retreated to such a place; there might be a hidey-hole full of kobalds or goblins, living right under people's noses.

Perhaps a 30-acre area of dead, rotting wood is spawning the occasional giant bombadier beetle that staggers outwards into civilisation, with such incidents killing two or three people a year.  The pile has to be located and cleaned out; even in an area only three miles across, this could take a couple of weeks.  There may be as many as twenty beetles in such a place.  It would take a party with resolve, resilience, time ... who might care whether or not a few peasants die now and then.  Perhaps the local manor lords just don't care about such things, at least not enough to risk a few of their cherished soldiers.  And when the beetle lair is cleaned out, and some of the rotting field of logs is broken up and burnt, who knows what evil lays beneath, that caused the logs to cluster in just that spot.

Now, I've made this just now, as I'm writing the post.  I had an idea of what I'd write about, and that eventually I'd need an adventure, but I had no particular adventure in mind.  And the "evil beneath" thing?  Didn't occur to me until the last paragraph was nearly written.  But I think like a DM.  All the time.  I can always create some valuable horror that draws in the party, from habit if nothing else.

What matters to me is not the adventure, but the context the adventure occurs in.  I can make the beetle pile just as conveniently for the top map of this post, the single 20-mile hex.  But then, it's just an adventure that happens, that's completed and walked-away from.  But the same adventure in the context of the three villages of various importance, where there are quarries and somewhat backward farms, creates other consequences after the adventure occurs.  Very well, the beetles are dead; the pile is broken up; the evil is vanquished.  There's more left.  There are neighbours to inform; for surely the neighbours would be interested to know the story of something that's happened in their backyard.  The locals will be grateful that no more hapless hunters will have the flesh boiled from their bones; even the manor residents might take notice, offering gratitude, dinners — and the ever standard, "Since you were able to do that, I wondered if you'd be willing to do this?"

The structure and detail of the map provides a sense of why a particular adventure is important to the locals.  How it affects their lives.  Even if the players don't want to advantage of themselves of economic opportunities, the local NPCs have no such qualms.  These will have the players to thank.  These will be able to tell the players of other small problems they have.  Meanwhile, the players can't help but acquire a sense of place.  Even as they leave the area, because adventure pulls them elsewhere, they'll remember that dinner they had in the castle of Tazlau; and those beetles they fought near Zemes.  It's a much more durable memory than stumbling across beetles in the middle of nowhere, killing them and moving on.  Place gives personality; and personality gives significance.

Even as they travel through such a world, the players will find themselves recognising other map patterns and interconnections.  This place is not like that place.  And even, "Hey, we kind of like this place," with it's combination the players haven't seen before.  The kind of place the players may want to invest themselves.

This isn't going to happen just because we make a bunch of maps.  It won't result from a generation system or even a lot of detail.  The DM's got to know how to massage the information, how to use it to build not just an adventure, but a whole campaign.  I've said multiple times that the DM must know the world in depth, with a vision that lets the world feel real to the DM.  This is only part of the formula.  The DM's also got to transform that vision into the sort of movement that grasps the players by the short hairs and makes them pay attention.  In a way that doesn't disappoint, or make the players feel abused or micro-managed, AND provides for tremendous flexibility on the players' part.  For a DM with very little experience, this is like throwing a baseball through a tiny jiggling window 30 yards away, while aware that failing to do so might mean losing your job and your house, the respect of your associates and family, and a lifetime spent selling auto-parts at a store in a shithole town in Oklahoma.  You know, like a professional baseball pitcher feels.  All the time.

We get past this difficulty by knowing what disappointment looks like; specifically, what we mean by disappointment and how we did that last time, and every time before.  Or what "transforming a vision" means.  Many DMs don't even have a vision, much less the least concept of how to transform such a thing.  Where are the players' "short hairs" — what is that even talking about?  These things are necessarily express in fluid, abstract terms because they are ABSTRACT.  I can't tell you where your players' short hairs are, or how to grab them, because I'm not sitting with your players and running them.  All players are different and their short hairs are in different places.  And we pull them in a variety of ways.  I only know that if I were sitting with your players, running them, I'd have them sorted in my mind within an hour, setting up strategies in my mind automatically.  Just as every pitch a pitcher throws tells him something valuable and critical about the batter.  It can't be explained.  But the technique can be acquired.

How?  To begin with, by embracing at fundamentals of the game.  We appreciate why there's a necessity for preparation and thoughtful design — because it saves us time during the complex game while urging us towards greater inventiveness and intuition.  We take the unimportant stuff at face value, things like "what do hit points mean" or "what's my character's job," because we can waste decades debating this stuff while failing to advance one iota at the thing we're supposed to be getting better at: How. To. Run.  It shouldn't matter if the players are wizards, sorcerors or turkey farmers.  The fundamentals remain the same.  Tell me what you do — not what your character does, not your backstory, not what you think you ought to do or what you're worried about doing or even what you should have done.  That's all crap.  Tell me what you DO.    Right now.  And I'll tell you what happens and what you see.  And then you tell me what you DO again.  And everything else that results, that we don't have to think about, like what's the story and why are we here and what sort of game do I want to play and blah blah blah, will sort itself out without our needing to pay attention to it.

The trick of running a game isn't found in understanding the underlying philosophy of the game's various terms — though I'll grant, that stuff is interesting and fun.  No, the trick is having an answer when the player says, "I do this."  That is, having an answer every time.  For hours at a time.  And then doing it again next week ... and being so capable of having an answer, that it doesn't matter what the action is.  Our goal is to rebuild ourselves so we can do that.  To prepare ourselves to do that.  To have tools, like the world we build, or the rules we engineer, that helps us give plenty of play while producing hard limits that deny players the ability to jack-ass their way out of a problem.  We have to think faster than they think.  In fact, we have to think faster than that, because we're staying ahead of four or five people, who all have more time at the table to sit and think than we do.  They can sit back, hand the reins to their fellow players and do nothing but think.  We can't do that.  There's no one to hand off to ... except our earlier selves, who were diligently creating answers and explanations and results for their actions to players who hadn't sat down yet.  Months, even years before they sat down.

So if I seem to get a little loony in my worldmaking, it's that these tools provide me with things I need in the middle of a game.  The only thing that matters to me regarding the game world is how functional it is, and how functional it makes me.

Fighting with Colours

Experimenting with colour changes:

Preferential in some ways; the wilderness stands out better, though it minimizes the appearance of the mountains when looking at the whole map.  Close up, the information is there:

The change was meant to make the more civilised areas more lightly coloured.  The problem is, as we go progressively towards wilderness, the colours get darker and darker (maintaining contrast), and the larger part of most maps are uncivilised.  The result is a dark map.  If I lighten up the wilderness, then everything else also has to be lightened in turn, and steadily the contrast between each level of hex diminishes.  It's tricky.

UPDATE:

From March 3rd, a newer version than last night (with slightly more map added):

Resurrection

This isn't a post about worldbuilding — but there will be more of those.

This is a post about the failure of art.  I once sat in on a film class years ago, because it used the same room as my Roman history course that came after ... and hey, I can write anywhere.  I knew the prof from several interviews I'd taken for the university newspaper the year before, when I was also writing reviews of the university drama department's performances.  He and I would have coffee occasionally, disagree with each other a lot and respect boundaries.  I was allowed to sit in his class, so long as I didn't participate.

He used to tell his students remorselessly that screenwriting was about hitting marks.  10 minutes in, the protagonist gets kidnapped.  30 minutes in and the protagonist meets the bad guy face to face.  37 minutes and the murdered girl's sister shows up.  That kind of thing.

I don't like this sort of writing; but I don't write screenplays, either.  In any case, a writer's got to have some idea of just how much dry oats the audience will eat before they're given a drink of water.  And how long it will be, again, before their mouths get dry.  Virtually everyone in the industry knows that if you can't hit these moments precisely, you have no fucking business thinking you're a screenwriter.  I say "virtually" because there's one class that don't have to play by the rules.

Recently, encouraged to do so, I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, from 2019.  I'm not going to say much; on the whole, Tarantino is a garbage director who over-embellishes cheesy pulp plots, catering to a congregation I don't have much use for.  Apologies to any of my supporters who feel that the sun rises and sets on Tarantino's work, and are rushing to remove themselves from my Patreon right now.  Let me help you.  'Course, if any readers out there don't support me and agree with me about Tarantino, throw me a buck or two.  I'm just your writing monkey.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hits no beats whatsoever.  I didn't find it a bad film.  I rather enjoyed it.  Not for the story or the characters, they were trash.  But because the film's setting and timeliness contained elements that roused memories of mine that were long forgotten.  There's a scene in the film when the sun is setting, and a montage of restaurants turning on their lights (1970 being a time when the lights were not left on day and night), producing a sudden, deep rising electrical thrum.  I remember the sound of that thrum.  It was dead on accurate.  Very cool.

To pull out another example, I also recently saw The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.  This odd film from 2018 is written and directed by the Coen Bros.  And then almost never hit their beats ... at least, not in the traditional order.  I don't care, personally.  Whatever they wanna do, I'll sit and watch it.  

I enjoyed the film, especially the first half.  There are parts I'll watch again.  There are parts I don't care if I ever watch again, and I couldn't honestly encourage others to watch.  The film comprises six stories.  1, 3 and 4 did fine by me.  2 was meh; 5 took a while to digest, but I found peace with it.  6?  Well ... no.  Not for me.  Too clever-clever.

My point is that films don't need to conform to specific rules and principles of writing ... but the rules in general should stand most of the time, because of what happens when talentless hacks ignore them.  And how much worse it is when talentless hacks manage to glom together 190 million dollars, so they can piss it all away.

Now, I'm going to put up some spoilers.  It won't matter that I warn you, because you're going to keep reading anyway, but it's considered impolite not to warn about spoilers when including them.  These spoilers will apply to two different films.  I will keep the spoilers as vague and indefinite as possible; and all spoilers apply only to the first 52 minutes and 50 seconds of each film, including the opening logos and credits.  One of these films was released in 1999.  The other, in December 2021.

I won't comment excessively on whether or not I liked the films, though as regards the more recent one, I stopped watching at 52 minutes and 50 seconds.  I don't give a fuck what happens after that, because I watched the first slightly less than 53 minutes.  I don't need to see more.  In any case, what follows are two timelines, comparing film A to film B, in terms of what happens when.

We'll start with the later film, film B.

11:46.  The new Morpheus reveals himself as Morpheus.

15:44.  The co-worker whose name I don't care about is sitting at the coffee bar with Thomas Anderson and sees Trinity, or rather, "Tiffany."

20:52.  Thomas Anderson finishes talking to his boss, Smith, and starts talking to his analyst, "The Analyst."

25:35.  While Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane sings White Rabbit, Thomas Anderson eats steak.

30:03.  Thomas Anderson talks to "Tiffany" about her kids and motorcycles.

31:47.  Thomas Anderson meets the new Morpheus in the bathroom; an immaterial action scene follows.

37:54.  Thomas Anderson talks with his analyst again.

40:39.  Thomas Anderson moves to step off his roof and is super-predictably stopped by Bugs.

46:33.  Thomas Anderson is shown the red pill.

52:50.  Neo is welcomed to the "real world."

Film A.

11:46.  Trinity tells Neo that "the answer is out there" at the club.

15:44.  Morpheus tells Neo that "there are two ways out of this building" over the phone.

20:52.  With his mouth melded shut, Neo is thrown onto a table by two "agents."

25:35.  Before showing him into the room to meet Morpheus in the flesh, Trinity tells Neo to "be honest."

30:03.  Neo, having taken the red pill, is moved to the next room and seated next to a mirror; the others move about getting ready to recover Neo's body.

31:47.  The mirror is taking possession of Neo's hand.

37:54.  Morpheus shows Neo through the Nebuchadnezzar for the first time.

40:39.  Morpheus turns on the television in the construct loading program and tells Neo that he's seeing "the world at the end of the 20th century."

46:33.  Neo is waking up, having "popped" because he's unable to accept reality.

52:50.  While fighting Neo in the training program's dojo, Morpheus tells him, "Don't think you are; know you are."

Pacing.  It is all about pacing.

The Work So Far

Feels a bit like I'm milking this, but I've had such positive respons for the maps that I feel it's useful to provide updates when they occur.  Now and then, I find some time to expand it, moving in a clockwise circle as I go.  This is the 6-mile map again: 6.67 miles per hex.

I find it easy to stare at.

The reader should be able to see now the density of Transylvania in the upper left, and the core of Moldavia forming on the right.  Muntenia's density happens off the bottom of the map, as the Danube River is approached.

For those who might see and wonder, the "3" that appears in the Shassburg hex was an accidental copied cell.  There's a "1" underneath the 3 that can barely be seen.  I've fixed it.

Worldbuilding 5d: Facilities

"Facilities" are spaces, stations and establishments that serve a particular purpose — that is, they facilitate a purpose.  This is done for clients, members, associates, supporters and investors, among others.  Facilities include taverns, inns, blacksmithies, guard houses, barracks, wet markets, stockyards, theatres, dockyards, auction houses, schools, law courts, arsenals, churches, gong pits and many, many other places.

On the whole, in the source material, these places are treated like convenience stores or background scenery.  Little or no attention is given to the underlying sense of such places or their fundamental place in the social strata.  Yet each of these places have to be supplied, staffed, protected, maintained, patronised and respected ... or else they cease to be, eliminated by competition or incompatibility.  None of these things are easy to achieve.  Proprietors keep these places alive through sweat and experience, or through the influence and goodwill they receive from locals.  Some facilities are merely a front for much larger organisations, starting with guilds and consortiums and reaching upwards through the upper classes and nobility.  Every person connected with a facility is someone's relative, someone's friend — and potentially someone's puppet.  All existing facilities trade on these relationships, and their presence in the community, to receive favours and influence decision-making, either on a local, regional or immeasurable scale.

By treating them as mere boxes with signs and faceless, nameless clerks who take the players' money and return goods like a medieval fantasy Starbucks, we divorce ourselves from understanding how the macro-society functions.  Each facility, after all, is a pool of money.  Some are small pools, some are large ... but every pool has its hold over some part of the game world.  By understanding how the pools work, and how the money is shared around, we see who are the masters in a community and who are the slaves.

This aspect of worldbuilding is kicked aside, however, because the players are viewed eternally on the "outside" of things.  They are foreigners, strangers in this town, without friends or allies, without the understanding of how things work around here or even the right clothes to wear.  Presumedly, the players will be here today and gone tomorrow, wisps of smoke without leaving even a memory behind.  That's how the game functions in the minds of many, many designers, writers, content creators and pundits.

As a result, whatever work we do to give the game world flesh on its bones, the face of the game world is empty and lifeless.  Every NPC is depicted as a cheat, a pawn or as chattel.  All NPCs serve only two purposes:  to facilitate the exposition or to block the player's purpose.  Anyone else can be discarded as decor, a pleasant collage of painted figures meant to decorate the scene.

In large part, this is understandable.  There are many difficulties to being a dungeon master.  Knowing what an innkeeper's life is like, or what matters to an apothecary with regards to business, or what palms must be crossed with money in order to maintain a functional brewery are not in the wheelhouse of the average 12-year-old DM — and since a 12-y.o. is the measure for what designs rise to the level of publication, the argument is eternally, keep it simple, stupid.  As such the main of us never paused to consider the deeper matrix underlying the daily happenings surrounding a keep, beyond the immediate flimsy woodenness of the characters with which the keep was stocked.  That was good enough.  Hell, it is good enough, for most people.

Conflict, however, is built from various starving factions competing for dwindling materials, which describes every aspect of a pre-industrial world.  "Dwindle" is the watchword for the region's food until the next harvest, which made harvest time very happy in the face of abundance.  Dwindle is the watchword for the small market when a counted-upon ship fails to come in because it was plundered by pirates, or the coin that's left to pay the soldiers when we're thousands of miles away from home and there are no ATMs.  No resource in a fantasy world ever achieves "enough" for very long ... and there's a serious group of serious people who are ready to use serious methods to keep what's left out of everyone else's hands.  No scheme or subterfuge is off the table.  So facilities getting what they have is only half the battle; the other half is keeping it out of the grasping hands of those who want and cannot pay.

This plays out in a continuous drama recognisable from 20th century gangster films ... only the  gangsters are dressed as city guards and church officials, high-minded nobles and as always, guildmembers and tradespersons.  Stealing off the carts of others is de rigueur; crippling an excellent silverworker's hand is perhaps a necessity of our staying in business.  This is why it's necessary not to stand alone, to have friends, to pay tithes and tribute: because if we pay it willingly, our enemies don't have to cut our hearts out to get it.

Some would rather believe the world was not like this once upon a time.  That, for example, the burning of witches, who happened to be recent widows of rich husbands, whose money went to the church responsible for describing them as witches, is an outlier.  Not business as usual.  Certainly not indicative of a general mindset.  No, the common people wore flowers in their hair, and played with animals, and sang nice madrigals together.  They weren't anything like those terrible people in Shakespeare, Chaucer or Grimm's Fairy Tales.  Those were just stories.

I don't ask the reader to undertake making this change in their game worlds ... but if a new angle on what the players can fight for is sought for, here it is.  Protection is a racket.  And everyone needs a little.

Worldbuilding 4f: Muetar

What with everything going on, it's a good time to write about government and authority in the game world.

Many DMs don't like to consider the subject at all, wishing their worlds not to be tainted with ideology and moralism.  At the same time, most DMs casually use non-player characters in authority as leverage to force the players into adventures and other actions.  We're familiar with the trope of players standing before a king promising, a la Conan, riches if the party saves his daughter from the terrible cult, while implying prison and execution if they don't.  But that isn't the sort of authority this post means to address.

Large-scale entities, like kingdoms, provinces and even cities, rely upon a shared identity among their citizens.  This identity is accumulated over history through heterogenous occupations, like farming or seafaring; or through moments of crisis, like a war or the act of rebuilding after an invasion, a flood, an earthquake; or through a shared religious belief; and most importantly, through shared tradition.  Tradition describes the sense of possession a population feels with regards to their place of origin ... specifically, the sense of home.  This is our city, our land, our country, our people.  And we know who belongs within our corner of the world by how we eat, how we raise our families, how we wear clothes ... and outsiders are those who don't live by these things, or recognise their importance ... to us.

Now, within our shared community, each person has his or her portion, according to his or her role — and these roles are also defined by tradition.  The baker is entitled to the baker's portion, along with the city guard, the laundress, the accounts clerk and the beggar.  The portions aren't the same; and in many cases the stake controlled by one may be seen by others as more than appropriate, while our own may seem less ... but in a community defined by tradition, we don't choose the manner in which our share is allocated.  Time, and history, and circumstances choose it for us.

Why does this matter for our D&D world?  It's because the players are, in many ways, the anti-traditionalists in the mix.  The fly in the soup.  First, because by definition of the game, they owe no fealty to anyone, not even the monarch of the land in which they were born, because the players don't feel this fealty — and the game doesn't expect it of them.  In addition, because the players are creatures of the 21st century, with a 21st century viewpoint, where traditionalism has either been abolished or weaponised through the media.  We can't live comfortably in a 15th century world because it rankles our liberal sensibilities ... and here I mean "liberal" in a sense that applies to every person not now living in a completely subservient culture.  What we perceive to be "oppression" is a hysterical joke compared to the ordinary, accepted shared traditionalism of the fantasy world's time period.  We, as products of our time, naturally chafe against the principles upon which earlier periods were founded.

Which helps explain why some players insist on viewing the time-travelling element of returning to an earlier time like a sort of Disneyland of freebooting murder and rampage ... because the lack of infrastructure and media made it possible to raise an army, slaughter a town, carry away the loot and get away with it.  More than that, such persons were often praised and delivered social status, in the way we might put a corporate raider's name on a stadium or a city art gallery, no matter how many innocents they worked to death in however many hidden, obscure sweatshops and slave mines.  Why shouldn't players see the game's backdrop as a legitimate shelving of liberal sensibilities in order to wallow in a little good old-fashioned bloody pillage and slaughter?  "After all," says one, "I've got a shift tomorrow with my supervisor Bob, the prick, that I'm not looking forward to.  Why shouldn't I massacre some fictional peasants?  They'll suffer a lot less than me in my nine-to-five under Bob."

We can't imagine the isolation that earlier cultures accepted as a norm.  We might want to ignore it, and all the foundations of traditionalism that sustained it, pretending our fantasy worlds can be as liberal and socially minded as our present one — where the players live — but there is no logic that can explain how people who can't read, who don't have the time to travel by foot, and couldn't travel very far if they tried, are able to perceive the world in any sense beyond "us" and "them" ... this being the only safe way to view the more primitive medieval world.

Yet this is a dynamic that must be understood in order to provide a sense of verisimilitude for the players.  On the one hand, we need them to relate to the setting; on the other, we need the setting to be frank and honest with the players.  This game world operates according to principles and belief systems that are recognisable to the players, but distasteful as well.

Consider, for example, the matter of privilege.  Search privilege on the modern internet and we find ourselves challenged to find a real definition beyond, "It's something some people think they have, which they ought not to have, as it's a very bad moral sense of entitlement."  That's it.  We won't find an explanation for how modern privilege is structured, or how it's sustained, or who has it legitimately, even though it's expressly obvious real privilege exists for certain people who have it.  Instead, the internet approaches the subject by putting its fists in its ears and shouting na-na-na-na as loudly as it can.

Privilege is based upon three factors.  We start with privilege of movement, that defines whose allowed to go where; those without privileges are shut out, or denied passage, or literally imprisoned in one capacity or another.  A serf was considered tied to the land by the feudal system, a tradition that maintained its authority effectively until the rise of towns.  Formerly, if a peasant left the land, there was no place to go — except to another collective, whose inhabitants didn't eat and didn't dress like us, nor us like them ... so even a better landlord wasn't an option.  With urbanisation, however, came a tradition based on money and skill; if a peasant could reach a town, and find work there, then he or she might find an authority who would swear that yes, the peasant had managed to remain in this town for a set period of time, abolishing that peasant's fealty to his or her former lord.  [Though, let's be honest; we really mean HIS former lord, as it was virtually impossible for a single woman to travel or find work in a town, without falling under the authority of some man.  But let's not get into that.]

We grant the players privilege of movement because they're players.  It's hardly ever discussed; the players aren't expected to possess patents, which are open letters or official documents granting permission to do something, such as walk freely on a road, buy property, build a house, have a particular name and so on.  If we had such an expectation, the DM would rightly conjure them instantly out of thin air; instead, we pretend that such game settings don't need patents, that peasants and merchants were free to wander as they choose, like a family of four going to see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.

The privilege of action limits our freedom to make use of things; in the modern world, this means things like driving cars and flying planes, where and how to shoot guns, and how much ordnance we can legally buy.  In the medieval tradition this also applied to weapons, and strange to us most persons were denied the use of the halls of power for their benefit.  Even if they somehow had the money — and having money was a red flag that drew institutions dedicated to take it from them — they couldn't hire a lawyer to have their day in court.  Pre-16th century, persons might not have the privilege of speaking in court at all, even as the ones being charged; they were at the mercy of voices who had privilege, who could say what they wished, and decide fates without the victim's say.  That's the world that was.

Persons had to be recognised by a guild before they could open a shop in a town; and recognised by the lord if they attempted to do so in the country.  Freedom was something that was granted according to our role, our place in the tradition, our permissions to act as we were expected to act, as our ancestors acted and as our peers allowed.  We could not just do whatever we liked.

Again, we overlook this because the players need a considerable latitude if they're going to accumulate money and freely pursue their ambitions.  The mere presence of a rude patrol demanding to know the player's business is seen as a violation of the player's freedom to act as gamers.  Yet the institution of this very thing is a terrific way to smarten up a party towards recognising the world is against them; that privilege and freedom is something they don't have, but which they'd like to sincerely acquire, and right away.  Take away something the players take for granted and watch them move to get it back, so they can once again take it for granted.

The privilege of association reflects some of what we've already said.  The freedom to enter a place, or be considered an institutional member of a place, is part and parcel with being allowed to speak and relate to persons of equal status and importance.  But not being allowed to communicate with even a courtier, much less a noble or a monarch; or not being able to force our enemy into court, even though he or she is plainly a villain; is a grinding, frustrating experience.  We take it for granted that a reporter can approach the most important political leader in the country and ask a question; but we're speaking of a medieval setting where the reporter can be executed, forthwith, for daring to speak any words at all to the lord or monarch, without formal express permission to do so first.  And remember, this punishment can be very painful, it can be wide-reaching into our family and associates, for it's based upon the whim of someone with privilege, who has the power to act brutally and stop our power to communicate or be recognised.

We can hardly conceive of such a thing; and so, for the game world, we pretend it doesn't exist.  We pretend the king is a chuckling, lackidaisical fellow, who has the time and inclination to chat up a few adventurers and confess his troubles — that he would bother to explain his or her self, ever, for the sake of looking good in front of the media.  There is no media.  There's no written word, and no literacy with which to read it.

The invention of the printing press took 60 years to create the kerfuffle of propaganda in 1520s Germany surrounding the defense of Martin Luther vs. the Pope.  The result was a steady escalation of destruction and violence as various entities fought over the privilege of enforcing silence and obedience over the privilege of stirring resentment and aiming it at an enemy.  Neither side cared much for ordinary people ... though many millions of all sorts of people, privileged and unprivileged alike, were massacred in the century and a half of war deciding which privilege would have its triumph.

I expect the reader knows which did.

Okay.

Let's summarise this and move forward.  Society is held together through different types of tradition, which includes religion and shared historical experiences; and some persons of that society are alloted certain amounts of privilege, according to where they're allowed to go, what they're allowed to do and whose ear they're allowed to address.  Within this structure exists the players.  The players begin at first level with what privileges we allow; and seek to obtain privileges we withhold, if we choose to include withheld privileges in our setting.

From this, we can understand that the strength of a city, a province or a kingdom depends on the wherewithal of its citizens to support their own tradition.  In a merciless setting where the weakness of a given entity is certain to be exploited, Machiavellian-like, by stronger, more rigid states, we must permit that any weakness the entity feels within itself must be as brutally cut out as a foreign power would do, if that weakness were allowed to fester.  Therefore, if I'm a magistrate, and I wish my city to live, and I know that fighting in the streets would permit an enemy to march in and easily overcome my city at a loss to us all, I should feel no compunction at all not to hard-heartedly and ruthlessly exterminate every enemy of the city I can, no matter how many innocents are also callously killed along the way.  After all, if this city gets attacked by an outsider, the outsider won't care how many innocents are killed.  Why should I?

This kind of world represents a game puzzle for the players.  Do they join in?  Do they fume against the system?  Is a better system even possible?  And if so, how?  Where could it exist?  And to what extent?  Are we talking a whole province, a valley, or just within the confines of my own castle?  And how much challenge would exist if my castle, with its liberalism, was to be perceived as "weak" by my neighbours?

These are substantive, long-term fundamental brain-twisters that a lengthy D&D campaign can offer; the sort of troubles that sustain the players' awe and immersion, for these things do not only apply to the game setting, but to the real world as well.  How my player acts becomes a reflection of who I am, and what I believe, and what I'm ready to fight and die for.  And when my player acts expediently, because it seems the necessary thing to do, my knowing that I made that choice at that time, with those consequences, has the potential to prey on my imagination because the player character is still alive, still participating in the online campaign, still subject to the consequences of that action.

It is vastly easier to be a murder-hobo when the player character will be discarded for another next week, when we get together to play some other role-playing game.  Or some other adventure.  Where the moral slate is conveniently wiped clean.

Let's look at Muetar.

While Hothior is the financial center of the continent, astride the combined land and sea trade, Muetar is the continent's military center.  Like Germany, it's surrounded by enemies on every side.  Every boundary represents a danger, from every direction.  Yet in compensation for this, Muetar is the richest and most powerful state, for it has the resources and the cultural stability it needs to fight a war in every direction, for as long as it must.

Consider.  A war with Muetar cuts off Hothior's inland trade, devastating its commitments and manufacturing.  The country has grown fat and dependent on Muetar's production of foodstuffs, facilitated by two great rivers and by what we should assume are expansive wheat fields growing upon well-watered flat plains.  The sheer quantity of food in Muetar assures a fast-growing, hearty population ... whose social tradition is built upon the toiling, resilient practices of farmers.  Every corner of Muetar is farmed in the same way, by the same culture ... thus the people of Plibba identify with the needs of the distant Basimar, and the reverse also.

Like Hothiar, Immer too is dependent upon Muetar.  Immer is a cold land, lacking in easily grown food, and equally lacking in the rich literary establishment that grows fruitfully in places where much of the population can occupy themselves with research, philosophy and inventiveness.  Muetar's food supply ensures that many specialised professions will sprout like grapes on a vine.  Immer may have the most elite and experience soldiers in the world, as I explained earlier, but Muetar can put more soldiers in the field than any other, with better equipment and available resources.

Should the goblins of Zorn, the dark green entity atop the map, choose to raid into Muetar, they will find themselves crossing the river "Deep," or forced to round Lake Carth, many miles from their homeland.  Once they cross the Deep, the lands around Basimar are very unlike home ... a rural land with no place to hide, in which their presence is recognized by farmers and shared in every direction.  

And when the goblins are forced to retreat by the armies of Muetar, they will find the Deep at their backs.  I'm sure many goblin armies have been slaughtered on the Deep's left bank, encouraging the goblins of Zorn to raid, but never to commit.  Though I don't doubt that the small forest of Tanglefoot has numerous expatriated goblins within.

That leaves Pon and Shucassam.  Pon is a hodgepodge kingdom; we've spoken very little about it, since it's far from those places we've examined.  The kingdom is made of three parts: the Mountains of Ice, the Border Forest and "The Scab," a hilly scrub-land.  The peoples from these parts are very different from one another, with different expectations and different traditions.  As a kingdom, it lacks the cohesion Muetar possesses ... so although Pon is highly defensible due to its geography, it is really three kingdoms bound together.  Alone, it can never be a real threat.

Shucassam is a southern, desert kingdom ... and though it shares a long border with Muetar, much of Shucassam's claimed land is desolate and dry.  At 40 miles a hex, Adeese and Khuzdul are 280 miles of desert from Beolon and Yando.  And between is the Stubstaff Keep, a Knights of Malta like entity that must be overcome before Muetar can be truly challenged.  The distances are simply impractical; the supply lines too long; the needed water not available.  Shucassam needs a considerable motivation to join in a war against Muetar ... which, as we've seen, is in nobody's interest.

Still, two or three of Muetar's neighbours wouldn't hesitate to join should Muetar begin a war ... and as with Germany, this would mean a war on two, even three fronts (since there are no Alps to protect Muetar's southern flank.  And so, a contented peace develops, as the people of Muetar occasionally flex their might knowing they habitually keep five enemies at bay.  Their tradition is to be ready for war; to expect war; and yet to be completely sure they will win any war that happens.  For they are one people.  One single culture.  A culture not based on exploitation, like Hothior; or upon aesthetic resilence, like Immer.  The people of Muetar are not petty raiders, like Zorn; or discordant malcontents, like Pon.  Nor are they fat olive oil-and-date merchants, like the people of Shucassam, lolling around in their hot climate through the long days.  No, the people of Muetar are creative, active and industrious ... and whatever happens, the day will come, they know, when they will rule the world.

For everyone out there, I appreciate your support of my patreon or for your input in the comments.  I have more things to write about worldbuilding and I just want you to know that I'll continue to make the material the best I can.

Berridge House

Start with an upscale three-story inn upon Ladybridge Avenue in the city of Trosk, a generational, sprawling lot called The Berridge House.  The streetlevel floor offers a block-stone facing; the floor above a mixture of broken stone and mortar.  The top floor, made of solid wood, hangs out into the street over our heads, shading our shoulders from the sun.  From here, we climb the inn's porch and poke our heads inside.

Though an upscale guesthouse, this is no 21st century hotel.  Instead of a palatial foyer, we find ourselves in a cramped, narrow passage ending in an iron grate.  This passage is as long as the walls are thick.  The floor is cold, paved stone.   Behind us, the inn's entrance door, though open now, is ready to be barred shut ... and all around is gloom lit by an oil lamp sitting on the ledge of a small window by the grate.  From long experience with these places, the fellow in our party who keeps the purse will be at the fore.

Behind the window is a tiny office, where sits a bored clerk on a stool, scratching out the day's accounts.  He looks up, sees his new guests and out of habit begins to prate out the costs of rooms and services in the inn.  Here they are, for the benefit of the reader.

We agree to two private rooms, cramped though they may certainly be — we don't expect to stay long.  Quietly our bargainer slips four gold coins into the clerk's hands, our down payment for the night, and the clerk pulls a twine that starts a dim, clashing chime.  Moments later, a guard with keys appears, and the clerk tells him that we're to be led to our two private rooms.  The guard grunts assent, opens the iron grate and permits us passage into the bowels of the inn.

Now, with an inn that's been improved by a dozen generations, suffering fires, town sieges, peasant uprisings and plagues, its natural that within these walls there are rooms ... and there are rooms.  Our bargainer gains the attention of the guard at the stairs that will lead us upwards and puts a silver piece into his hand — to ensure we get a room that's 8x7 and not 8x6; or a room nearer the front of the building and further from the stable; or a room that's on the second floor and not the third, if that's our taste.  The guard contemplates us, measures our apparent worth in his eyes, and tromps up the stairs.  We follow.

The Berridge is the epitome of a crooked house, with crooked halls and crooked walls, which we clamber through like rats, rubbing our shoulders on either side of the stairwell and corridors above.  The guard shows us a room, which does well enough for two of our party.  We're told there's only one other room in the inn of this size that's not taken, and it's on the third floor.  Two of us remain, shuffling into our room, while the guard mutters some directions on where we can obtain services, and describes the route we'll need to follow to find the tavern and kitchen.  Then he leads our friends upstairs.

First we notice the room's windows: there are two, eighteen inches apart.  Each is six inches wide and nine inches high, with brown glass that lets in enough light to see the room ... and not much more.  Surely too small for even a halfling thief to crawl through; but thankfully, the windows are hinged so we can open them and look out.

The wooden pallet — little more than a shelf — is a comfortable 42 inches wide and nearly six feet long.  This includes a canvas mat, three inches thick and nearly conforming to the dimensions of the bed; this mat is stuffed with wool, feathers and gawd knows what else, but as we press down on the padding, it's surely more comfortable than the ground under a camp tent.  We decide if we should sleep together, or if one should take the mat on the floor while the other sleeps on the pallet.

Since we intend to remain in Trosk for some time, and commit to meeting and greeting persons here, we admit we'll need a bath.  This requires that one of us — me, I suppose — return downstairs the way we've come, turning left, going down another half-flight of stairs and informing the laundress that we wish to take a bath.  She informs me that there's hot water ready for two, so I ask her to prepare two baths and send a messenger up the stairs to my room.  Through habit, and there being no door numbers, I tell her its the second door on the left, beyond the first turn to the right, on the second floor.  The laundress sends a girl and I bend down to remove my shoes.

Some minutes later my friend and I are freshly lathered in hot water, in separate tubs, while our two remaining companions fume beyond a hanging, waiting for us to finish and for new water to boil.  This is not so long.  My tub-mate decides on a massage while I get dressed, as it's my intention to speak with the innkeeper.  This takes some time.  I try the front clerk, who suggests the kitchen, which I find by chance after trying several passages ... mostly by following my nose.  The tables in the kitchen are empty, for there's no food to be served for two hours I'm told.  Fresh bread is baking in an unseen oven and I'm directed further on to the tavern, to find the innkeeper.  Here I'm disappointed again, for I learn that he's purchased two sides of hog that haven't been delivered and he's gone to see why.  So I stand at the bar and pay for a pint.

... and here we must stop, for the description of the tavern must wait for another day.

Gaps

Coming off a rush of work, I can breathe air again ... and since I haven't posted since last Tuesday, I feel ready to shove something onto the blog.  In the basket, I have in mind that post about Muetar, and a post about "facilities" and micro-worldbuilding.  However, these seem like too much work for this particular Sunday, so I'll write another post about mapmaking.

Come around the end of day, I'm not up much for D&D rocket-science, so I pick tasks where the skull-sweat's done and I can plug-and-play build.  This describes the map generation I've been describing for awhile now.  The generation system was hard, with a lot of contemplative design involved, but the build itself has unexpected moments, includes an easy creative element and is pleasantly satisfying.  So it's easy to plug away at it for an hour here, a half-hour there, and let the general picture take form.  Here's where the 6-mile version is now (complete with extraneous, bothersome notes):

When you're working on something like this, write your notes directly on the work; think of it like scaffolding that you put up around the building during the construction process, knowing that you'll inevitably pull it down at the end.  If you're keeping too many notes on pieces of paper or in other windows, you're only increasing the number of times you're being distracted while working, undermining your general creative flow.

As the map unfolds, I've recognised a creative stage that's occurred for me many times before, and that's partly what this post's about.  See, in the beginning, there are doubts about the methodology as I begin to apply it.  Plus there's a stage of adapting myself to the method.  For instance, remembering to draw in the streams and add the hills and include the borders, as well as the extra little villages and then the roads, plus the hex numbers and oh, the hammers and food and coins.  At first, I forget something or put the wrong figures in, or forget to set up the background guides so the numbers fit consistently ... and this means going back over and over to fix and add and fix and add.  Which can be frustrating.

This can be a threshold to get past — as for a time we can believe our mistakes prove the fault of the method or vise versa.  This may cause us to step back and re-evaluate the method, either wasting our time doing that or even dismembering a perfectly good method by inventing reasons not to like it.  This thinking can stymie forward progress for years.

So, when encountering the frustration, I tell myself I'm in the "educating myself" stage and keep moving forward — knowing, as I do, that if there IS something wrong with the method, this will become self-evident, inevitably.  Perhaps I will have gone down a long road before that happens, but in fact I'm gathering knowledge as I go ... so if it IS the wrong road, I know exactly why.  I'm not guessing.

I'm pretty much through this stage, however.  Oh, I'll go on making small mistakes and fixing them, that happens forever with slightly diminishing frequency.  The stage I'm reaching now is quite different.  The above indicates the expansion of thirty-five 20-mile hexes ... and the process is beginning to set in as a routine; meaning that I'm less and less moved by each new hex as it's added.

Anyone who's settled in to create a megadungeon knows this feeling.  There's an uncomfortable growing feeling that "sameness" is becoming an issue.  In my case, because the world's being generated from a complicated series of templates, it has to be remembered that sameness is an expected consequence of the world itself being, well, very much the same over large areas.  If the reader has a strong familiarity with places like Nebraska, upper Sweden, central Spain or most places, they should know that the scenes don't markedly change over mere 20 mile distances.  The changes that exist, if they exist at all, are tiny and subtle, which can kill motivation over the long haul.  That "wow, this really looks good" feeling dissipates as the creator's thoughts turn to, "Sigh, all right, one more hex."  Inevitably, this becomes, "I'm done, I think, for awhile."

At the speed I'm mapping 6-mile hexes, I could literally spend the next ten years sketching out Europe.  The map on the right, the base 20-mile hex sheet map that the above is from, has more than a thousand hexes.  Imagine how long this alone would take.

The combination of apparent pointless repetition and impossible-to-achieve scale provides a devastating combination, axing the wherewithal to keep going ... which is why most creators don't.  They let the size of the project infringe on the enjoyment of carrying forward, thinking the goal is to "produce" rather than to "experience."

I suppose I'm lucky that it's the latter with me.  I started this post by saying that I find the mapmaking calming and satisfying at the day's end.  Adding one bit after another created the big sheet map in the first place, and the other 75 sheet maps like it.  Time lets us accomplished many things ... particularly as we stop being conscious of that time.  When we let it work for us instead of against us.

Comprehending this, we see life in a much larger sense; we stop worrying about a particular day or how much time was lost in a given week.  One week is merely a part of five hundred weeks, or a thousand weeks ... they don't matter in and of themselves.  With all the weeks left to go between the reader's present age and when they reach my 57 years ... there's so much that can yet be accomplished.  So don't worry about it.

Of course, if you are my age, then ... if I can make plans for the next 20 years, without worrying about the reliability of those plans, you should be able to as well.  You've lived long enough.

But ...

Let's put all that away and address a different bug.  Which isn't one.

With reference to my roads & routes page, take a look at some of the results I'm getting for a backward part of Wallachia.  As an explanation, the large white numbers are just the infrastructure totals for the 20-mile hexes underlying this map.  As I work, I go back and forth between having the background showing in the Publisher program as I work, and it's helpful to always have these numbers showing when laying out roads.

There are several places where routes on the map end, without making a connection.  This is intentional.  Since by the generation method, each 20-mile hex is responsible for its own roads and routes, and since priority for those go to the most important adjacent hex ... sometimes, a minor hex will build a route to the end of that hex, which the next hex over fails to connect, because it's priorities are more important hexes.  Thus, we get a situation like the one below.

To the right of Brebu, there are a cluster of hexes in the upper right of the picture.  These had a total infrastructure of 19 (number not showing, because I don't need it on the top map any more), with a group of type-5 hexes.  By the routes page, this meant it only has 4 outgoing roads; and since two adjacent hexes had an infrastructure of zero (being all mountains), the 19-pt. hex could afford to lavish routes into Brebu and south to Tiparesti and the group of hexes marked "12" in the pic.  Granted, not great routes, but routes nonetheless.

Unfortunately (if you look on the top map of the post), that 12-pt. group is surrounded by hexes that have 115, 108, 61 and 56 infrastructure ... and it too is limited to only four routes.  So it can't afford to send routes to that 19-pt. group.  The result?  A broken road, divided by a 6.67 mile gap, or one "6-mile" hex.

Is it a bug?  On the surface, we tend to think so, because we imagine that someone would have come along and fixed that gap by now — which is fair.  So far, I've failed to explain that every hex is connected by a kind of route not shown: a "path," which my wiki defines as

"very uneven, narrow routes over a hard clay surface and are impassable to carts. Mounts must be ridden single file. The width is typically between 4 and 6 feet wide. Surfaces are covered with roots and scrub, with brooks and rivulets that must be jumped. There are occasional places, every few miles, where the path squeezes between trees or rock outcroppings."

Which means there is a route over that gap, the path described.   The upper route is a "cart track," while the lower is a "dirt road."  Presumedly, there are depots between the two ends, that really only need to be occupied for about 4-6 weeks a year, during the harvest season.  At that time, some farmers from the north bring their produce south to the depot, where they sell it; then their produce is loaded on animals and transshipped to the south road head and parked at another depot ... where it's loaded on carts and wagons for shipment further south.

But that doesn't answer the question, "Why doesn't someone just complete the road?"  Well, because it's barely used 11 months out of the year.  We know that, because the combined infrastructure is only 31 pts., and much of that looks to other hexes, such as the routes to Brebu and Tiparesti.  Only 1/7th of both hexes is really concerned about that broken route, which only represents a total infrastructure of 4.42.  And really, the connections means less to the southern link than it does to the northern one.

We live in a car-focused infrastructure system, which means everywhere must have a road ... but much of North America didn't have that as recently as my father's generation.  By 1995, every shitwater town in Canada and America was replete with three or four gas stations, Burger Kings, McDonalds, Tim Hortons and what else ... but even I can remember a time from my teens when "gas alleys" didn't exist at all in towns with as many as 10,000 residents.  Imagine what it was like in the 17th century, when my world takes place, or the 14th and 15th centuries, when most people set their D&D worlds.  A lack of services is NORMAL ... something we don't even think about as we include an inn in every village, along with a blacksmith, an apothecary, a jeweller and a grocer selling weapons and armour, for lawd's sake.

Even in Europe, large parts of the game world ought to be completely devoid of the most basic services, including a tavern or even a rentable bed.  Here I'm saying that even roads are a luxury.

And if the players feel they can use their coin to build a road, picking from a dozen disconnected but potentially linked ends, all the better.  It's one more thing for them to spend their money on, isn't it?  And make the world a better place.  And build some contacts with an area.  And some credibility and status.  Yes?

Which I've argued is the reason for building a deep and varied world, with lots of weird "irrational" bits in it.  Because "gaps" are opportunities ... and in a believable world, there are always gaps.