More Lego

Watch this.  Do it at double speed, takes only 10 minutes.

Step one.  Establish a scale.  Don't base the scale on the size of lego figures; that would make the whole castle at the base no more than 25 ft. square.   Lego is designed to build vertically; we could argue that the horizontal scale is 3:1 the vertical; this would make the make the castle, oh, approximately 75 ft. wide and 42 ft. high.  Doesn't matter exactly what the scale is, however; each person's free to decide for themselves what the best scale would be.

Step two.  Weigh every piece.  Every kind of piece, I mean.  They don't weigh much, but a precise scale can be obtained ... or a large number of the same piece can be weighed together and divided by the number.  Lego names every piece, so a nomenclature exists — for all I know, it might be possible to get the amount of plastic necessary to make each piece.

One could possibly identify every piece's volume by sinking the pieces in water, but with surface tension you're bound to produce bubbles if you don't add soap or detergent to the water.  And again, you've got to work to get exact volume displacements for each piece.

Our best approach would be to clay up the hollow interior of each piece to determine it's water displacement as solid objects.  That is a step better.

Step three.   Okay, we have a scale and a weight for every piece.  By calculating the piece's displacement in water we know the specific gravity for each measure is 1.  This means we can calculate the weight of the piece, in our scale, if it were made of marble, granite, iron, lead, wood ... whatever.  That means we can get an near-enough exact weight of each piece whatever the material it's made from.

Step four.  Have the player build his or her castle in whatever way they want.  Record the pieces being used, so that an accurate accounting of total materials needed to build whatever the final product happens to be is enabled.  We know the volume of materials, so we can easily calculate cost of materials.

By establishing an amount of time needed to place each piece, we can calculate a building time also.  One fun way might be to time the player as he or she goes through the process, complete with puzzling out the design and reversing decisions made.  If the individual takes, say, two hours to assemble a unique castle of their own design, we can argue six, many nine months per hour ... 18 months to build, including making up the plans (the puzzling time for the player).   That's 4.5 days per minute.

And once paid for an built, if the character wants to make a change that involves dismantling any part of the castle, they can take their structure apart and put it back together ... at a cost of 13.5 days per minute.  Changes that merely add on can be calculated at 4.5 days per minute.

Of course, those are my numbers.  Someone else can charge 3 or 5 or 6 days per minute.  Or only a double time cost for dismantling, not triple.  Times can also be adjusted based on the amount of metal, wood, stone and what else is being used.

Step five.  Siege.  The enemy targets specific pieces in the lego structure, which are removed when hit.  Each siege engine is empowered to destroy a certain size and quantity of lego structure on each hit, depending on the material the lego piece represents.  Destroyed pieces are permanent; for replacement, see time and material cost above.

Conclusion.

Solves the siege problem.  Seems like a fun process for the player.  Can be used to build ANY structure out of ANY material.  The only serious issue I see is that once the structure is built, its plan has to be carefully recorded, with duplicates filed with the DM, before the pieces can be used to build something else.

I'd do a test run except, at the moment, I don't own any lego.

Ability Stats

My philosophy towards the wiki means that even mundane rules deserve attention ... even if everyone already thinks they understand the topic.  Thus, a page describing ability stats:

Tidied this up today, moderately adjusted the layout, added the example at the bottom and added a link.  If nothing else, the page serves as a collection of links to more important subject materials and perhaps an occasional clarification for a new player.

Takes time to write out this sort of page but I always feel the effort is spent well.

Dragon Turtle

Today's contribution.  The entire description fits into one image:

Disliking the traditional description of just another monster (JAM), I prefer to colour the dragon turtle as a sort of guru.  This way, the monster becomes the quest, as the players seek it out in order to discover the answer to questions that few left alive can answer.  The unpleasant journey then takes place to some dense river swamp at the edge of an ocean, most likely a place not easy to access.  Options include the southern coastline of Burma, the Amazon delta, the east islands along the coast of China ... even the Mississippi delta, a largely uninhabited place in the 17th century.  On the way, the party is warned to ask a "worthy" question.  Will the monster accept the approach of the players or won't it?  And if it doesn't, how nasty is that fight going to be?

It's good tension, and it easily sets up the next adventure as the immense turtle tells them the answer to the question ... with the possibilities that creates.

Exploring as a Player Character

The above combines the table entry for the "explorer" character background plus an additional description of how having an explorer as a progenitor has affected the player character's life before entering the game's campaign.  Thus the party meets Titus the 1st level fighter at a bar, it's assumed they hit it off and Titus asks to tag along with the general group.  I usually don't role-play this process because it happens so often in the game's progress that it's a little silly to keep playing meet-and-greet scenarios one after another.  This only wastes game time and the result's always the same.  I know situations arise when players decide to act "in character" and transform the first meeting into a game conflict, but that's a subject for another post.

The party knows already by this time that before Titus became a 16 y.o. fighter, he actually climbed aboard a ship and spent 28 months on a journey to [rolling randomly] the Spice Islands of the East Indies beyond Asia, an archipelago now called the Moluccas.  How randomly?  Suppose the players are in Europe; "exploring" assumes a far-off place that isn't well-known to Europe, so start with the oceans: north & south Atlantic, east & west Indian, Arctic, Antarctic ... and then count the Pacific in four quarters.  That's 10.  We roll the NW part of the Pacific, which we divide into five 15 degree latitudes, starting at the equator.  Getting a "1", we divide the nearest band above the equater into six 15 degree longitudes eastward from the tip of the Malay Peninsula, which divides the Pacific from the Indian Oceans.  We roll a "2," which gives us either the Spice Islands or the big island of Sulawesi.  Easy peasy.

Titus was there between the ages of 9 and 12.  He's been there, he made friends, he came back.  He has memories of that place, two thirds of the way around the globe.  With some charts, some money, a ship and a crew, and some friends, he'd know what to expect when arriving.  Not only has he been, but he spent years talking about it, he's read his progenitor's diaries, he's discussed the possibility of returning and he's studied navigation.  Titus is ready to go.  Someday.

Maybe he won't.  It's out of the die's hands, it's something for the player to decide.  He can adventure locally, raise the cash and increase that by thousands more.  Maybe the party's interested, maybe they're not.  Let's ask, what value does the effort have?  What does the party get out of it?  Numerous people know the islands, so "discovering" them is out.  What else is there.

Foremost, there's adventuring.  Side quests along the way, time spent, battles fought, treasure found ... the journey gives opportunities to meet new and interesting monsters.  This is obvious and, in truth, can be managed just about anywhere.  Why go to the Spice Islands when the Black Forest in Germany is nearby?

The islands are distant and although they're known, they're not well known.  There are many places nobody's been, and many products no one has discovered.  So there's mapmaking and there's trade.  Mapmaking can lead to accurate charts that are drawn, reproduced and sold to military, whaling and other trade captains all over Europe, for dear prices.  It's like inventing the first cellphone.  Moreover, going and seeing leads to writing it down in a book, or telling audiences in person, which is more money, notariety, status, the opportunity to meet the most important people in Europe and impress them with things they don't know and stories about the player character's immense bravery.  This leads to knighthoods, gifts of land, tens of thousands of gold for another journey (since the character has shown his or her mettle) and doors of all kinds being opened.

Regarding trade, any number of islands producing valuable spices, woods, dyestuffs and extracts for perfume do so as a market that's never been tapped.  The players can collect a cheap boatload of valuable something, and make a deal to ensure that the party, and only the party, is allowed to collect the goods from that place.  This means an arrangement to come back two years hence and pick up ten times as much cheap valuable somethings, which the natives are happy to collect over time, waiting for when the party will come back and re-acquaint themselves as friends.  I give you the real stories of Marco Polo's father returning to China and bringing little Marco along, or William Bligh visiting Tahiti with Captain Cook and then returning again himself some years later.  This means that when it comes time to collect all this lovely wealth from the Spice Islands, the PCs don't need to go themselves.  They need only send some associated member of the earlier, original crew as captain of the return expedition.  Only, we'd hope, this captain would do better than Bligh.

Further, upon returning to Europe, the party could offer the trading rights to a specific political entity.  In my game, in 1650, the Dutch have already beaten back the Portuguese and the English from the Banda Islands ... but the wider collection of islands in that part of the world would remain in dispute for the next 150 years.  So suppose the players return with charts of the Spice Islands, complete with the location of Dutch bases, and offer this to the English?  Suppose the players convince the English to send warships, and go along, and fight the Dutch?  It's possible.

'Course, the DM has to be able to run a thing like that.  The DM needs a good sense of geography, world geopolitics, how national entities react, how to make it possible for the players to succeed on a world stage and how to do all this without pre-determining what must happen, as a story narrative.  If we do it without a narrative, we just allow the players to fuck around in the East Indies, and see how it goes when they lead a war squadron against Dutch shipping, then we have no idea what's going to happen.  Depends on the choices the players make.  Depends on their skillset as players.  Depends on how strong we make the Dutch strongholds, or how flexible we are as a DM with the campaign going either way, because it doesn't matter to us which way it goes.  That takes skill as a DM.  It takes a positive philosophy as a game-runner.  It takes a vision that the game can offer people the possibility of doing anything — even allowing the players to take the East Indies from the Dutch and keeping it for themselves.  Because their battle plan made sense.

But I digress.

Having a background as an "explorer" is very unlikely.  It's a 1 in 50 chance, if the player even rolls on the right table.  There are six possible tables, so in reality it's a 1 in 300 chance.  It's worse if the character has a slightly above average constitution and it's no chance at all if the character's constitution is below average.  So what's the deal?  We're going to roll maybe 25 characters over five years of playing a campaign ... what good is it if no one ever rolls an explorer?

Part of the progenitor concept is that it defines many of the persons in the game world outside the players, without requiring that each activity be represented as a character class.  An explorer can be a mage, a thief, a bard, a monk, whatever ... because the action of "exploring" isn't the same as a collection of skills associated with a given class.  We can easily assign three skills in addition to a character's class, even if those skills are not normally a part of that class.  It's a way for an illusionist to be a navigator, even though none of the illusionist's normal track-skills include navigation.

This means the world is full of non-player characters who are explorers.  The players don't need to be an explorer themselves.  If they want this sort of experience, or to persue an exploring campaign, they need only find some fellow whose been to Patagonia or Zanzibar or the Marquesas Islands ... but who doesn't happen to have enough money for a ship or anything else.  Yet Isaac or Freida or Beverly has been to those places; and she or he has the needed skills, the past history of studying books and charts, the friends waiting for them in Patagonia or wherever, so that all this can be set up by making Beverly an associate follower-slash-associate of the party.  And once Frieda or Isaac has gotten the party in the door, then the NPC can go home, as a friend and future contact, and the party can play the part of Marco Polo on their own.

This logic applies to all the professions listed on the progenitor's lists, and many professions not listed there because they're too small a part to play to serve as a player character background.  This means that how a party plays the NPCs is a BIG PART of how my game world is organised.  These are valuable persons, and virtually inexhaustible, since I have many millions of established people living everywhere.  So if the player doesn't happen to have a skillset, that skillset is definitely waiting around to be hired and perhaps made into a friend.  It's a matter of approaching the NPC politely and reasonably, while making an offer that's as tempting to the NPC as it is to the player.

Exploring that possibility — the art of assembling people to perform great deeds — is the Holy Grail of D&D.   

Childhood

From the wiki:

To understand this part of the character's generation, the reader must start from the heading, Progenitors.  The progenitor is the player's father or mother, and where either are lacking, then the character's older sibling, uncle, aunt, or some stranger met on the street after the character's family died while the character was young.  Before the character could become a fighter or a thief or a druid, he or she had to grow up first; and how the character "grows up" is no more a choice of the character than it was for me or for anyone reading this.  I had an engineer as a father and a housewife as a mother, I grew up in a middle-middle class neighbourhood of white, white Calgary Alberta, without any rights or freedoms except those I could attempt once I was old enough to get out of sight from my parents, the pastor (of a church I didn't choose to attend) or any other authority figure.

I don't consider a player character should have it any different.  If one's father happens to be a rat catcher, then yes, your character will be taken along and made to set traps and lay out poison and hit rats with a club, in the meantime getting bit dozens of times and coming down with all sorts of diseases, which you survived because eventually you found the means and the mental acuity to make yourself into the proud, respected cleric you are today — a choice I do think the character is entitled to make because it was made after the character reached a quasi-level of maturity.  And for the record, I consider that age to be about 12 or 13 in a 17th century or earlier world.  My great-uncle Leo was a farmer outside of Forestburg, central Alberta; he got married at the age of 13 to my great-aunt Meri, in the 1920s.  My great uncle Irving also married at 13 to my great aunt Theodora, again the same age; while my great uncle Igan married my great aunt Anna when he was 12 and she was 14.  This was in the 1920s.  They were each given a farm upon marrying, a farm they managed without tractors, which they still farmed in the 1970s when I knew them and visited.

I make this point because in a cold, raw, make-your-own way world, people begin their lives young.  The player character is 9 when he leaves with his explorer father for some distant, strange part of the world aboard ship; the character is 7 when she helps her father rob graves; the character starts working as a miner at 6.  Nineteenth century literature is chock full of such examples.

I don't provide these backgrounds so the player can build a "story" around how the character got from then to now.  No.  No, we do not think of our lives as "stories."  We have stories about ourselves, but they're snippets and bits, or they're overarching simplifications that ignore the constant everyday changes and nonsense and things that don't fit conveniently into whatever else we do.  The rat catcher isn't a "story."  The rat catcher is a collection of memories, some good, some bad, some nasty, some frightening, some best forgotten ... and yes, some wedged into a tale told at a bar some night.  But mostly, it's about what the character can DO.  "Yeah, I've caught rats.  Big ones, black ones, ones crawling with maggots, inside walls, inside carriages and sewers, inside dead bodies.  You want a rat killed, I know how.  But I hate it.  I hate rats.  I could go the rest of my life without ever seeing one.  Filthy, revolting creatures.  I didn't become a cleric so I could go on hunting rats."

Character raised in a smithy walks into a smithy and feels at home.  Sees a porter wending way along a road and thinks, "Yeah, those were long days."  Meets an unemployed labourer and says, "Buck up, fellow; I was a labourer once.  Look at me now.  If I could do it, you can too."

It's a feeling for place, for a past, for a way of thinking, for things thought of with a cringe and things thought of sentimentally.  It's an underlay to the leveled character, making a distinction between the assassin raised in a gypsy camp and the assassin whose childhood days were spent watching swords being made.  Leaves a mark.  The work we were made to do as children makes us what we are — soft, hard, privileged, ignorant, worldly, entitled, miserable, grateful.

Enough

I'm so tired of D&D.

Seriously.  It's gotten very boring for me.  I just ... can't do another go-round discussion of what's a subclass of what, or yet one more nitpicking argument about encumbrance or the viability of 1979's bard character.  I don't care what Gygax said or wrote or believed, and I don't care what anyone else related to D&D has said or wrote or argued either.  I'm very tired of it.  I just want to put the whole thing down, turn my back on it and never talk about D&D again.  May I never hear the appellations "weapons speed," "2nd edition" or "game module" again.

42 and a half years of this.  It was very cute when I was sixteen and arguing around a high school cafeteria table, but this idiocy has gone on way to fucking long.  Sorry.  Sorry, I don't want to rant.  I just want to break from D&D once and for all.

Mapmaking I'm down with.  The chairs I bought in November were finally delivered yesterday, nearly six months later.  I should be in a position to start running my roleplaying game (of no fixed moniker) in a month; my last actual running was eight months ago.  I haven't run a consistent in-person campaign since before covid.  Everyone I know except me and my partner have had covid, so on that front we're good to go.  The woman and I are, according to our doctor, in the "safe" category, should we get it.

With "the game" starting again, my direction for creativity and focus will change to those things the players need ... and in any case, I enjoy working on my wiki.  It reminds me of how and why I got into game design in the first place — not as a means to teach worldbuilding to readers, but to establish rules for my game world.  Not to reinvent the wheel, but to build a role-playing game that I'd love to play with people I love.  That's where my focus always needs to be.

I write because I love to write.  And I intend to write this blog.  But, alas, blogs are dying.  I've got to look for another means to reach people, since this one is getting thinner on the ground month by month.

I can't remember if I said so; I applied for a space at the Edmonton Expo, September 16-18, which I've visited twice before.  I'm looking forward to putting my menu for sale, and hopefully another project I'll have ready in the next two months.  My daughter is pushing me to read aloud some of my oldest blog posts, and then provide a retrospective as to whether or not I believe the same things I wrote 14 years ago.  I'm letting her pick the samples.  She hopes we'll have a bunch of these before September, so that we can tag them to a printed QR-code at the table when we talk to gamers at the con.  Seems like a good idea.  I'm even looking around for a cosplay designer to make me a monk's costume, so I can better get into the spirit of the con's culture.  Dressing up for a play is old hat, but this'll be the first time I've dressed up for a con.

Still working on the character generation page.  It rates at 127,355 bytes and there's still a long way to go.  To give a sense on that, the longest wikipedia page is, as I write this, 580,594 bytes.  I tried to see where my would rank, but the list provided only goes to the top 10,000 articles — no. 10,000 is 156,736.  I should meet that length in a week or two.

I know, strange things to talk about.  My head is going in so many places just now, as I puzzle out what I still care about and what I'm willing to consign my time towards creating.  I've thought about turning off the comments on this blog altogether; my daughter says not to do it.  I don't know.  I'm so tired of debate.  I don't want to talk about D&D any more.  Not the substanceless metagame, anyway.  It doesn't resolve anything, it doesn't convince anyone of anything, it doesn't make my game world or my players' experience better.

It doesn't belong here.  I've gotta write about other things.  I've just gotta.  To keep from going out of my mind.

Sorry if this makes this blog more boring for some.  I think there are enough people here to celebrate it.  In fact, I think I can hear the wind saying, "oh thank gawd ..."

The May Version

May 1st, and here's a map update of the 6-mile hexes in Romania ... now starting to edge into the Ukraine.  The size is getting out of hand; I had to shrink it to 83% to enable the program to create the .png file.  Best I can do at this time; I'll either have to manage the map size in some other way or begin publishing it in sections.

Be sure and have a close look at the swamp area in the lower right; not remotely an accurate version of the real Danube delta, but I enjoy the change as regards my own world.

Out of interest, I've removed the hammers, food and coins for this version.  I'm planning on changing the way those symbols are recorded.

Village No. 2

The last village came together so quickly, the temptation is to adjust the table to ensure a few less cottages and hovels.  Making tables for yourself, you'll bump into that inclination constantly.  Experience teaches not to fiddle, but to trust one's instinct for the original numbers until getting a decent sampling of test runs, at least 20 or 30.  That's not enough work that we can't throw it away and start from scratch, if we feel that's needed, or that can't be let alone, since in the long run it will remain as a tiny aberration in the overall process.  As such, I'll go with the table as written.

I'll start with a real village this time, a place call Pufesti.  Three hammers, on the Siret River in Bukovina, eastern Romania.  The scale of the small map is 6.67 miles per hex; but obviously, like before, we want block-sized hexes, 435 ft. per hex.

Just as a 20-mile hex makes a group of seven "6-mile" hexes, we can continue that zoom further.  Zoom once to "2-mile" hexes (2.22 mi. diameter), zoom a 2nd time to "uberblocks" that are 0.741 mi. in diameter, and zoom a 3rd time to block-size (0.247 mi., or 435 ft.).  This translates to the same hex shown on the left to a 27-hex diameter area, as shown below.  First, with the old Pufesti hex & details showing:

And now with no background, with the circle indicating the location of Pufesti:

Essentially, all I'm doing is taking the old Gygax suggestion from p.47 of the original DMG:

Coming from mapmaking long before I started playing D&D, I read such snippets of possibility with considerable interest, finding ways to apply this idea in my own way.

As noted from the pictures above, we can see the small circle of Pufesti isn't a symbol that's markedly bigger than what a village might be; if anything, the tiny brown circle of Pufesti is smaller than the actual place.  Overall, I'm hoping this assembly of map scales and the use of hexes helps the reader comprehend a tactile sense of how big a 6-mile hex is, and how translatable this is to much bigger scales.  Remember, each of the 435 ft. block hexes above is only 81 combat hexes across — that's the size of the large partial black hex on this combat map:

Ah, okay, but we're here to generate a village.   We can start by assigning Pufesti an even 500 people, for simplicity.  Unlike our earlier example, Pufesti has 3 hammers, not 2; this means a few things are certain.  There's a town center but there's also a church; there's also a market, and there's a small bridge across the river.  Because there's some cottage crafting here, there's at least one group of cottages.  So before we start, we've already accounted for 105 people.  That's okay, we have plenty of room for others.

Laying out these places, arbitrarily laying out the village center and the bridge first (and giving no weight points to the bridge, but you may feel otherwise) we get the shown collection of places. I've adjusted the three incoming roads (later, I'll transform the colouring of these). They'll need to be tweaked as places turn up. The unfamiliar brown hex near the bottom of the map is the market, which is little more than an open dirt pad with pens for animals and a wall surrounding a few permanent buildings. I can't say my artwork here is astounding, I only want to get the point across.

The process works just as it did before.  The main question is, do we take another market if it shows up?  Do we take another village centre?  The answer is yes, if we can make it make sense, given the layout.  A second market must go next to the first; a second village centre can go anywhere.  Because of the size of the village, a second temple wouldn't make sense, unless this were a polytheistic region.  As it is, this is western Romania, so we'd expect to have only one church.

I'll repost the random table.  Whatever the results are, and should we later consider expanding the idea here into further details, one thing we must remember is that the table is made for us; we are not made for the table.  I don't recommend ignoring a roll, but occasionally there will be good reasons for deciding there are too many material yards or village centres.  Additionally, we should always strive to think of something new that can be added for later instances of using the table again.

Rolling, then, I get a "garden" between the village centre and the market.  This isn't the sort that people visit, but a space where vegetables and other intensive produce is grown; often such places were communal.  There's no reason not to locate this directly adjacent to the village centre, as "density" isn't part of the overall scheme — whereas food growth is essential.  A village isn't just a small town; it has different priorities, a different outlook.  Later, should the village grow into a town, where space may become a premium, the garden hex would be pulled out and townhouses or workshops put in its place.  But vegetable gardens are fine for a village.

Then we add another set of cottages between the bridge and the village centre (pop. 155) and we have a simple star.

In all honesty, the actual laying out of the hexes, even the upgrading of the weighted hexes around the outside, is quite simple.  I've built this nice collection of image hexe that can be turned this way and that to give some sense of shape and colour.  But the process of writing about the generation is losing my interest, fast.  Even though I haven't shown all the little symbols I made, I'm going to call the post at this point.  And I don't believe I'll make a third village [sorry], because I don't see it as adding anything new to the concept.

It's very simple from here.  What matters is building a believable, richly designed space for the players to occupy, going beyond every village being immediately associated with the inn, tavern and convenient market.  Make the players comprehend the feel of life here — try to shake them out of the complaceny so they stop taking your world for granted.  These are people living in this village, whose small problems may not be dungeon rooms or vast treasure hordes ... but they are potential companions for those dungeons.  There are youngsters here who want to learn, friends who want to feed the party and look after their wounds and hear their stories.  It's a place for the players to ground themselves, to identify as something worth protecting, and think whistfully about when everything in the dungeon goes sour.

I know that for many players, those who think the shallower the campaign, the better, this seems all maudlin and time wasting.  I assure you, it's not.  Dungeons are what you fight against.  Villages are what you fight for.

The Biggest Page

I apologise.  I owe the reader two villages and I'm acutely aware of it.  However, in my free time I'm also working on my D&D wiki ... the recent work upon which this post discusses.

One thing I adore about working on a wiki is that slowly, steadily, the hundreds of pages of random notes and ideas I have pours steadily into this one source.  The process is normally slow and requires much deliberation and reworking of the idea, to make it comprehensible and of value.  Yet I don't tire of the process, so I don't worry about it's chronological aspects.

A practice that I follow for existing content is to use the "random page" feature to bring forth posts that need editing and rework.  This dredges up pages from the nether regions and puts them to the fore of my attention.  Part of this process is to commit to the page when it appears — and not merely click the random button again for a page that's more "fun."  Nope, gotta fix the page as it appears, no matter how unpleasant that prospect is.

Some months ago I promised myself that when the Character Background Generator rolled into view, I'd make a written version of the excel file, complete with tables.  Well, the day came on Friday afternoon ... and for three days, I've been working on it.

No, the wiki-version of the Generator isn't done.  It isn't even close to done.  It's 80,000 characters, which averages to better than 1,000 characters an hour for the last 72 hours (the number of hours it's been between starting and writing this paragraph).  It's now the longest page on the wiki.  I am just at the point where the next section will be generating the character's secondary skills and social heritage ... and this, my dear readers, is a deep, deep well of a process.  Deeper than most realise, since the version most have seen is the 2012 version of the generator ... whereas I'm working from the unfinished, never revealed 2019 version.  And later on in this process, I'll be writing completely new content for the source material from 2012, which is woefully out of date for my campaign.

So, I'll be adding to the page for awhile.  I ask the reader to view it, to come back here and discuss anything that seems odd to read or any spelling/grammar errors that aggravate.  I don't mind being edited or encouraged to do a better layout with this sort of thing.  There are some changes to the bigger hair/eye colour tables that I'm undertaking.  I want things to be better.  It's only that I've been working at breakneck speed on the material and in some cases I made a few bad early choices.

Well, that's all.  I'll get back to the villages.  I'm just focused elsewhere for a little while.

Generation: Village No. 1

So I had this idea.  Then I got busy, then I got back around to it ... and yeah, why do I have these stupid ideas?  Let's make this clear:  I'm not offering a practical way to worldbuild with this post, because I can attest from experience that it's NOT practical.  What I'm trying to do it give insight into my thinking process, to enable the reader to gain perspective.  

I didn't particularly enjoy this project.  II have no intention of taking it up for town and city creation.  Maybe someone else might ... but without better resources and the ability to draw, I found making representations of hexes very unpleasant.  What you're going to see should be taken as representational and NOT accurate in scale.

Starting with a generation table.  This one is tailored for a small village in a type-4 hex with two hammers.  Also, since there's no shoreline, there's no waterfront block.  The manor block is combined with the village centre.

I haven't tested this out yet.  I'm going to test it with this post and see how it goes; all I can offer is that I've made many hundreds of tables as a DM, giving me a sense for what a table needs.  I want this to be heavy on hovels and cottages, for those things determine when the village generation ends, when we've placed all the people.

We only need one temple block, so the table gives an alternative to the temple once it's generated.  I'm suggesting that for a small village, there's a good chance a temple won't be generated.  This doesn't mean there wouldn't be a local priest; only that the religious guidance in the community takes the form of a friar or a minister operating from a cottage, probably gathering the means to eventually build a temple.

I propose to make three villages, not necessarily all with this post.  I may leave off later villages for another post; each will require an augmentation of the shown table.  For the moment, I want to see how hard this goes.

Let's begin with a village "stub."  As shown on the map, we have a village centre already; if one occurs when we roll on the table above, that would be a second village centre block (with a very low chance of that).

Because we're starting with the smallest possible village, exactly 201 people, I'm not including a bridge block in the random generation above.  Instead, we'll suppose a stream so small that it can be easily crossed without needing a bridge.

The image shows the red-roofed bakery and the large manor house, the gallows platform and four cottages; effort has been made to make the ground look worn and muddy in places.  Not sure the effect works.

Naturally, the next block has to be placed somehow in relationship to the centre ... and here's what I propose.  Zooming out, with the map showing below, I've assigned "weighted" importance to hexes surrounding the one we have. 

Level ground adjacent to the village centre gets a "3."  Stream hexes, with their access to good water, get a "2."  And other hexes within two of the centre get a "1."

The total for all hexes showing is 32.  Of course, we could assign the numbers different, giving more stress to the river or counting all the hexes three out from the centre.  There's no "right" way to do this ... but by picking this method, I'm demonstrating how any method might work.

As I see it, the goal is to produce a pattern that creates the greatest amount of individuality.  We could have every added village block automatically attach to an existing hex ... but that's certainly going to make a dense clumping pattern for every village.  Remember, the distance across a hex is only 435 ft.  We can imagine the first immigrant watching the place where the squire or first residents chose to build their places, and then comparing what might offer personal opportunities for the new builder.  Keep in mind, too, that villages are NOT made as a body like a modern subdivision.  They form over a lot of time, with former fields and orchards being bought and then built upon.  Our random generation should reflect that.

So, counting each hex horizontally and then vertically, and using excel to generate a number between 1 and 32, I roll a "31."  This puts me two hexes straight south of the village centre.  Rolling a "09" on the percentile die, I get cottages.  Let me add those, and then adjust the weighted numbers for further generation.

It's like a separate little community.  Maintaining the new river hexes as 2 each, the cottage block adds +1 to each of those hexes that already had a weight.  This supports the idea of a continuity being created, without guaranteeing that one will.  Even if one does, we can imagine a path between the two existing hexes; that could be drawn in later to "fill out" the design once we know where everything is.

Let's count people.  The village centre block has 40 residents (going by the last post).   The cottages have 50.  That's 90 people accounted for.    Three more cottage blocks and we're done.  Meanwhile, weighted hexes add up to 39.  Now that we've provided some idea of how the weighting works, let me generate two hexes before updating the map.  I roll 1-39 and get "28," creating the bridge in the right-handed 4-weighted hex.  I roll a hovel block.  That's 70 more people; 160 total.  A single cottage block could end this.

Just for fun, we'll say that LOWERS the adjacent hexes with a penalty of -1 (who wants to live next to hovels?)  That lowers the total weighted hexes to 31 ... a roll on excel gives an "8," on the river right and above the village centre block.  I roll a 92, which is the temple.

Hm.  The temple block includes a cemetery, and that can't be built on a stream hex.  I thought something like this might happen.  Okay, we keep the temple and re-roll the location.  A "14" puts the temple immediately to the left of the village centre.  Good.  Let's put up what we have so far.

The temple is as important a block as the village centre, so it adds +2 weight to adjacent hexes and +1 to hexes two distant.   Rivers are always 2, regardless.

The temple hex added another 10 residents, which puts us at 170 total.  There are only 31 people to account for.

Yes, the village ISN'T a big place.  It shouldn't be.  When it comes to making a village of 500 people, obviously we'd just be getting started.  There'd be plenty of opportunity for rolling a yard or market block, which is why I'm keeping the likelihood of those small.  As it is, the market can be managed for a village this size in the village centre.  Anyway, let's keep going.

Total weighted numbers are 42.  Because of the temple mixup, better roll what we're placing first.  Oops, I get hovels.  Oh well, game over.  That's everyone.  I roll a "19" for location and that puts them beside the temple.

Not the prettiest little village in the world.  We remove the weighted numbers, add in a main road and a path to each hex (the temple sits amidst a lawn, so the many tiny paths to it aren't showing) and we have something of a settlement.  The next step would be to create a random generator for the adjacent "rural" hexes, a system that would work the same way.  Assume there's probably more than a few adjacent fields next to this set-up ... it wouldn't be right if I didn't get around to building that idea out, so rely on me to get there.

The main question remains, one that I've addressed before.  What use is this?  In game, I don't need a map so I can tell the players, "There's a small centre with four cottages and a manor house, while nearby are a collection of hovels.  Beyond the hovels, there's a group of better looking cottages; a road goes to it.  You came in by the west road; the road continues past the village to the northeast.  There's a temple and another collection of hovels on the other side.  The whole is surrounded by a bend in the river, but the village is recessed back from the banks.  It's a very small place."

Granted, the players won't have the tactile impression the above map offers, but do the players need it?

I can think of two situations where the above is useful.  The first would apply if the players decided to build here, or wanted to settle.  Choosing which hex to put a house, or where to build a fortification if the players were in authority over the region and liked this village.  After all, we can't see from this map where we are in the bigger picture.  Maybe this is the right distance from a big trade town or it's conveniently isolated.

The second might be a situation where some large-scale attack was taking place.  Consider: the hexes are 435 ft. in diameter.  That's 87 combat hexes.  Running all out, by my movement-stride system, a character with 5 action points can run 40 combat hexes, or 200 ft., in a combat round.  Imagine seven players, supported by 40 hardened semi-trained villagers, a la The Magnificent Seven.  Because the enemy might come from any direction, characters are posted around the village ... in the centre, by the temple, amidst the hovels and the cottages.  A first wave of raiders, 90 altogether, come from three different directions.  The mage by the temple sends a message spell, "HELP!  Fifty attackers!", as the balance is coming from the north.  The two players amid the cottagers decide if one of them can handle the 20 coming from the south, or if they should send one of the villagers with a message.  How long will that take?  How many rounds can one of the players by the cottages fight it out here, before running off to join the other fight?  If he or she has only 3 AP, that's only 24 combat hexes a round at the best of speed; the temple is 174 combat hexes away!  That's seven rounds to cover the distance.  Even longer if we don't want to go through that bit of "rural" country that's straight between the cottages and the temple.  Is that a forest?  A planted field?  An orchard?  We'd have to generate which.

There's a grittiness offered by a map like this, but ONLY if the exact space is measured.  Nothing annoys me more than being given a high quality artwork city map without a scale, or on a scale so big (1 inch = 500 yrds) that it's useless for the most important duty a map serves ... as a MILITARY strategy map.  I don't need a collection of tiny boxes and street names for gaming.  I need something that can serve as a grand battle map, into which I can fit little battle maps for individual fights taking place between villagers and townspeople against raiders or uprising citizens.

Okay, I need a break.  We'll do a bigger village with the next post.

Inventing Village Blocks

Okay, let's build a random generator.   This is going to be for laying out villages.  To help, we have this list of facilities to place.  My plan is to build a system that uses hexes, in the way I've described before, demonstrated here and also here.  Only, we'll try to do better than I did in 2018.

A "block hex" is 435 ft. in diameter, or 145 yards, or 132.588 metres.  In area, a block hex is 3.899 acres, or 0.006 sq.m., or 1.578 hectares.  Counting an extreme urban density for the medieval world is 40,000 persons per square mile, supposing a density of 10,000 per square mile puts 60 persons per block hex.  Therefore a village of 240 persons would have four "residence" blocks.  A village of 720 would have twelve.  This should be simple enough.

Note this village link on the wiki.  I worked on it today as a stub.  Be sure and read the details there; you'll need them for this post.

Okay, let's look again at those facilities available for villages, those in type-4 hexes:

From recent posts, and from the wiki, it's understood that a village not located on a river has 2 hammers and that one located on a river has 3 hammers.  Settlements may also be villages, depending on the size of the settlement, but settlements may also appear in any type of hex (though I haven't found one yet in a type-7 hex).  By my system, the only way a type-4 hex can have 4 hammers is if it includes a settlement.  There's no way for it to have 5 hammers (at least, not now; I may make a change in the future, but let's not think on that).

As per the wiki page, a village with 2 hammer is a "small village"; one with 3 hammers is a "large village."  The wiki explains the population generation for these.  A "settlement village" has a predetermined population, as the settlement link above explains.

Everybody in good and deep.  Excellent.

The next step is to make "block types."  For the record, I'm writing this post while solving the problem.

Residences.  The most obvious is a collection of houses, though finding a suitably archaic term is difficult — "neighbourhood" is 1620; "residential" is 1856.  Let's make two kinds of residential and call them "cottage blocks" (50 residents, 8 cottages) and "hovel blocks" (70 residents, 12 hovels).  Cottage blocks would be responsible for cottagecrafting that occurred.

Waterfront.  For this, we can gather together the boat dock, the quay and storehouses.  The quay is two or more boat docks, so we can toss that out ... unless we want to make a rural block with a boat dock in it.  Let's save that for later.  Let's option the public house to the waterfront, though this can only occur in settlement villages.  We can add the hostel also.  A hostel is a minimal wooden frame supporting a common room of bunk beds, a place for public washing, a hearth for cooking and warmth, plus and an exposed animal enclosure and a wooden shed for storage.  All this and an outhouse.  A small village is limited to one waterfront block, a large village can have two.  10 residents.

Yards.  This doesn't describe the space in front of a house, but a dumping site for materials, such as a log yard or a ship yard.  Believe it or not, the verb is "yarding" when describing the depositing of stores there.  We can start with the "farmer's yard," including garners and the granary, the grain mill, the shearing station, a windmill and a well.  We can scatter wells in several blocks.  Including two hovels plus living space in the mill, call it 20 residents.

We can make a second type of yard, the "material yard" that includes the sawpit, ox tethers, the carter post and again a well, the cloth mill and the wine press (or their local equivalents).  In a small village, run on wind power, in a large village, run on water power.  Likely a gong pit is tucked in somewhere, fifty or sixty yards at least from the well (and downstream, if applicable).  Again, 20 residents.

Village Centre.  Very easy: the bakery, the blockhouse, gallows, well and the gamewarden's house, clustered together with four cottages.  This ''village centre" has a compliment "market," which includes the area supporting the day market, the blacksmith, two wells and an inn, which only occurs with settlement villages.  The two would most likely be adjacent, but we might suppose they could be separated by one hex.  We'll get to placement of these blocks in time.  Packed a little tighter, 40 residents.  Limit of 1 per small village, 3 per large village.  There would only be one market block, with only 5 residents.

Temple Block.  Gravesites have been replaced by the cemetery, adjacent to the temple; the temple includes an adjoining cottage and well.  10 residents.

Manor Block.  This includes the manor, and with settlements two adjoining blocks of walled-in land.  The guardpost is located on the edge of the block.  One per village, regardless of size or type.  7 residents per 100 population.

Okay, altogether, we've identified the following blocks: cottage, hovel, waterfront, farmer's yard, material yard, village centre, market, temple and manor.  That's 9 types.

Let's add some more, not based on facilities.  If the village is adjacent to a river, it would have a ford, a bridge or a ferry, which would include a guardpost on the opposite side from the village.  Obviously, there's only one of these "crossing" blocks.

Because villages aren't "designed" so much as collectively joined together, we can break up the continuity of occupation by placing farms, primarily for market gardening and growing vegetables, though tilled land is an option.  If we want, we can distinguished "tilled" blocks and "garden" blocks.  To these, we can add "orchard" blocks.  We can also add a "village green" block that includes animal enclosures, a space used for meetings and mini-pasture lands.  Finally, we can include "natural" blocks, where the land hasn't been worked; this kind of place should have a high chance of including a pond, or some rocky feature that makes adaptation next to impossible, such as commonly occurs along the Mediterranean coast.  We could also think of places surrounding shrines or beautiful natural features, but let's leave these off our list for the present.

By my count, that's 15 block types.  As I see it, the next steps are to create a random table to generate blocks at different rates, then to make up rules about which must exist, and how random additional blocks are placed.  This, I believe, I'll leave for another post.

Two Studies

After working straight through, 10-11 hour days, I took up the mantle of addressing the wiki again, which I haven't done since January.  Rewrote nine spells yesterday and then addressed the elaboration of two sage studies that haven't gotten much love since their proposal.  That's how it is with a lot of work I create.  While inventing the idea is necessary, there's often a very long hiatus before I come around to fleshing out that idea.  Especially with things that don't resonate with players.

Here are the two elaborated sage studies, Mammals and Motivation.

Essentially, the first provides the skills on how to become Princess Mononoke, while the second provides how to become Jenghis Khan.  Obviously, the many links must someday be translated into pages and rules, but for now this is enough for the player to make an informed choice and for me to work from the base material and expand it, should the player want to pursue these studies.

There are many other studies that still deserve attention, but I also have scores of other things altogether to do.  There is never an end, but I work with a mindset that everything gets done eventually.  Keeps me going.