Worldbuilding 4g: Shucassam

It's been since February when I did the post about Muetar.  I always meant to get back around to this series within a series, but then I got pulled into other things.  However, there are a series of macrosubjects relating to culture that still need addressing where worldbuilding is concerned, and I'd be lax if I failed to do so.

With Immer we discussed the military tradition of a culture poised on the goblin frontier of Zorn; and with Muetar we discussed the manner in which tradition serves as a guiding principle underlying a culture's solidity.  Today we can talk about religion, which forms the fundamental tenets determining which characteristics and beliefs become traditions, and in turn strengthens the valuation of tradition in the minds of the people.

I know for a fact that many of my readers have chosen not to include religion in their game worlds — or they have committed to making religion an afterthought:  it's there, but the whole of it consists of occasionally performing a minor ritual and otherwise paying lip service to god who have no interest in day-to-day matters.  In many ways, this reflects the characteristic religions of high-brow classicism.  We have plain evidence of the temples, we know the Greeks and Romans performed sacrifices, and plainly religion was an important part of their lives ... but in their literature, Greco-Roman religion is a fictional shadow, at best.  The Hellenes and Italians did not commit themselves to teaching the people how to "properly" worship the gods, or condemn their fellow citizens for lapses in religious fervour, or write endless tracts nitpicking the characteristics of Zeus, Posiedon, Venus or Athena.  The Judeo-Christian Bible screeches for 700 pages about the people not obeying religious laws or keeping their pact with god, which in turn takes effort to justify god punishing the people, driving them into exile and then rescuing them again with superhuman figures.  There are no Greco-Roman equivalents to this thinking.

When the Christians first appeared in Rome, the locals shrugged their shoulders and treated them as just another cult.  Live and let live was the practice.  But the Christians weren't willing to live and let live, period.  Just like today, they made themselves an infernal pest, decrying pagans in the streets, screaming their superiority over others, insulting their neighbours and turning themselves into such hated persons that Roman audiences cheered when these arrogant, pissy, screeching bastards were thrown to the lions.  Naturally, the Christians learned zilch from this consequence, turning up the dial of hubris and self-importance to 11, calling the Romans "persecutors" [which is what the Christians did to get themselves chastised] and spinning the whole scenario into a martyrdom that's still believed, hook line and sinker, today.  After all, after the Christians won the cultural struggle, they carefully covered up their early behaviour in Rome like a poop in an apparently clean cat box.  Christians have likewise been screaming their innocence for the last 2000 years, right up to last week as evangelistic Republicans demanded to know who would think of the children in the case of Ketanji Jackson's nomination.

I know, I know.  This is the second screed I've launched against Christianity in the same number of weeks, but bear with me.  The tactic used by Christians to displace the previous existing Greco-Roman religion was REVOLUTIONARY.  It changed everything.  In the 4th and 5th centuries, Rome was definitely going down on account of the various tribal invasions from the east, but it only lasted as long as it did because of Christianity!  And when Rome did crash and burn, it was Christianity that sustained the long-standing Roman culture of laws and cultural practices.  It was Christianity that overcame and pacified the Franks, Lombards, Goths and Visigoths ... and later the Saxons and the Danes.  Christianity, as a single traditional framework, supported kings and popes in pulling Europe together and lifting them out of the Early Medieval "dark ages."  The only serious threats to Christian Europe in that period was another religion, a comparable religion structurally and economically, that exploded out of the Middle East and conquered vast regions and many distant peoples of African, European and Asiatic descent.  Without the consolidating power of Christianity, Charles Martel could never have pulled together a sufficiently sized coalition of forces to defeat the Moslems in 732.  Europe would have been overrun, converted to Islam and our history would have never been.

Depending on your point of view, that's a good thing or a bad thing.  Doesn't matter, it's what is.  My point is to demonstrate that religion is both a curse on thought and decency AND a force for defending thought and decency.  As a concept underlying world events, it's a spectacular game changer.  Deciding to empower religion in the game world provides opportunities to highlight events of great goodness and great evil.

Stepping back, however ... Shucassam.

It's clear from the layout that Shucassam is meant to be a desert country — dry, harsh, full of vast difficult to travel distances and even a border that doesn't make much sense.  The narrow string of hexes between Khuzdar and Zefnar on the Sea is clearly meant to indicate a caravan route; we wouldn't expect more than a few oases strung along that course.  At 40 miles a hex, the distance between Adeese and Zefnar is 560 miles ... 80 miles further than the distance from Riyadh to Mecca.

There's a connection between parts of the world like Shucassam and religion.  Has the reader ever contemplated how the world's Great Religions have all originated in hot, near-tropical climates?  Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and so on ... places with intensively hot climates.  The only notable exceptions is Confucianism; though arguably Protestantism, the offshoot of Christianity was definitely founded in a north temperate climate.  All the rest started where it was hot.  Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all moved north, so that they have representation in cold climates, but they started in the south.  Coincidence?

All religions are invented out of thin air ... and as such, they've used the creation out of thin air as a selling point.  It's called "having a vision."  Stuff pops into the mind, it sounds cool, has next to no connection with anything we knew before and so, must be from ... um ... a "higher power."  Yeah.  That's it.  Higher power.  Definitely not made up.

Having the time to make stuff up requires special circumstances.  For this, consider dates.  The fruit.  To grow dates, we surround them with manure in the Spring.  Camel manure works fine.  We watch for pests and diseases.  We need to keep weeds and turf away.  Camels are good for that too.  Date palms like dry soil.  Before they ripen, pluck half the fruit.  The result is nice, fat fruit.  The early dates we pluck, we plant.  That's it.  Very low effort.  One tree yields a hundred kg.

Eat a lot of dates in a very hot climate and you'll get high.  Not from alcohol, but from the sugar.  A date weighing 24 grams contains 16 grams of sugar.  100 grams of dates have 314 calories.  Dates and the date palm are mentioned in the Qur'an 22 times; dates nourish the land, dates are healthy, dates stave off the effects of poison, etc.  Mostly, dates enable people to be well nourished and sit around in a hot, hot sun and do nothing.  Nothing that is, except to think.

While cultures in the semi-tropics do suffer from a "work ethic," by Protestant standards, what they don't suffer from is a lack of food.  India does, but that's because India has so much food that it can support a billion semi-starving people.  When Siddhattha sat under his tree and invented Buddhism in the 5th century BCE., India did not have a billion people and it was drenched with food.  The land of milk and honey that produced Juddaism and the oases of Mecca and Medina that produced Islam where chock full of food.  These peoples didn't have to get up with the twilight every day and plow fields; they did not have to pick acre after acre of weeds, or struggle in the winter-time upon the harvests they made four and five months ago.  They were food-rich and time-rich ... and they dwelled in a place where moving about during the day is very, very unpleasant.  Even at night, the drop of 80 degrees fahrenheit makes life outside the tent so onerous that resting on sheepskin and woollen carpeting, where we talk and talk and talk to pass the time, seems more than practical.

Between the cities of Shucassam is nothing.  The land is hot and dry and only the very desperate spend any time in the open.  Merchants travel unmolested because who would rationally wait in this wilderness for a caravan?  To travel anywhere takes enormous amounts of time.  Time to sit, time to think, time to talk, time to consider the words of a conversation that took place weeks or months ago.  Time unending.  With nothing to do.

Getting on our knees five times a day gives a way to break up the long days.  Forcing ourselves to fast on Ramadan gives us something else to wrest our thoughts one month in the calendar.  Memorising the Qur'an seems like a thing to do rather than an impossible feat.  We, with our westernised expectations of time and activity, cannot imagine what it must be like to have this much time.

Religion is not merely giving the gods their due.  Much of religion is contemplation, deliberate asteticism, evaluation of self, the acquisition of patience and purpose, and of time — the long history of a hundred generations that lived in this same desert, in the same way that we do now, doing the same things, thinking the same things, facing the same difficulties.

This is the deeper strength of religious tradition.  Not that we obey the laws because they are moral ... but that we obey the laws because our ancestors did, and who are we to criticise our ancestors?  Without our ancestors, we wouldn't be here.  Religion binds us, not only as people living together and believing the same thing, but as generations of people who got us here.  They knew what they were doing.  They built everything we see.  Their collective wisdom far surpasses the voice of any single person alive today.  They made us.  They ARE us.

This underlying motivation potentially exists for every NPC in the game world.  It is the universal "story" that establishes the peaks and valleys of the game's narrative.  Setting a story of that kind in your game world gives depth and strength to every word an NPC speaks.  It provides argument, justification, drive and conflict between forces and entities that surround the players.  It's the wind, the sea, the land, the fabric of social discourse.

Include it.  

More of Romania Mapped

Personally, I don't need more than two people to urge me to throw out a map.  I learned in communications classes many years ago that for every person who writes into the editor, there's a hundred people with the same notion.  Of course, this is pre-'net; there are no letters, there are no editors ... and I'm sure the 1:100 ratio must be updated.  But enough of this line of thought.

Let's turn to some mindfuckery instead.  First, an image from the excel files I created between 2005 and 2007.  This file gives the latitude and longitude for every hex on my game planet, plus the highest and lowest habited elevations.  The data was methodically compiled from this site, located on the sidebar as "global gazetteer."

Pretty boring, eh?  The hex containing Turnu Severin is between 44.46°N and 44.74°N, and between 22.55°E and 22.92°E.   The other is between 22.93°E and 23.30°E.  Both are part of the "province" of Oltenia, with the upper hex containing some of Serbia.  Turnu Severin and Strehaia are "settlements."  Ring 157 is the number of 20 mile lengths from the North Pole; each ring, obviously, makes a circumference around the world.  Note the elevations shown: 75-1312 for Turnu Severin and 360-1010 for Strehaia.

I used this data to make this part of my 20-mile maps:

This is tilted on its side because it happens to fall very near the 30th meridian E., which requires that my map bends 60° so I can make a flat hexagonal disk rather than distorting it like a traditional Robinson's or Mercator's projection.  There's still a distortion, but this one works for me; anyway, we don't need to worry about that.

In the bottom left corner of each hex is the infrastructure number; in the upper right is the elevation.  The "75" corresponds to the lower elevation in the Turnu-Severin hex; it's also Turnu-Severin's elevation.  "425" is Strehaia's elevation.  The reader can discover more about the meaning behind elevations on my 20-mile maps, and my mapmaking approach, by reading this post from 2015.

While a hex doesn't correspond to a square, for the purpose of plotting hexes and settlements I treat hexes as squares anyway.  It's simply practical.  Let's take both the hexes above and see how they correspond to GoogleEarth, using the latitudes and longitudes I've listed.

There.  That's pretty engaging.  The four corners correspond to the latitude and longitude numbers.  I've removed the map labels to give a general sense of the terrain.  Of course, you can locate this on your own copy of Google earth by punching in the coordinates.  Only, be warned, the coordinates I have from Fallingrain.com are in decimals, while Google Earth records in hours, minutes and seconds.  I created a simple excel file that converts for me, so I can plot the corners of any hex from my excel document.

The above is what I've started to use to place hills, mountains, villages and some rivers in my 6-mile hexes.  Rather than get a general idea of the area, it became necessary for me to create boundaries to work from.  All the village names on my 6-mile map are actual villages and towns, and no where near the sum total that occur in the real world.  More on that later.

Okay, so, here's the same section that we've looked at as a 6-mile map, generated according to the system I've discussed and augmented with notes from GoogleEarth:

Fun, yah?  Sorry about the little white hex mid-bottom, this is the very edge of my map so far and I haven't determined the kind of hex that one is.  The rest of it is a trip.  Some of the above is fictional, though the names aren't; the hills and rivers don't exactly correspond to reality, and I'm okay with that.  The bend in the Danube (the huge river) is a little far south for the GoogleEarth map, and "too wide," but in fact it's representative in size and not intended to be dead accurate.  If I zoom in and make a 2-mile map, then the width of the Danube will be more accurate.

I count 11 towns and villages on the map, and 2 settlements.  That is a lot of damned places, and really, for a game world, TOO MANY to run.  Players would go crazy trying to remember the difference between Jignita and Jidostita, or keeping them all straight as to the order they occur when travelling along a given road.  As a DM, what do I need all these places for?  After all, could I seriously make them truly individual settings ... surely, they'd blend into one another easily.  Nor is it likely I could find more than a sentence on any one of them, except maybe the settlements.  So why?  Why include them?

Because, damn it, they exist.  Not only these, but dozens of others I didn't include; I cherry-picked which village name I'd take for each six-mile hex, usually from between 2 and 5 options.  I could dumb down the countryside for the players, but I'd be taking away from what's really there, and the fact of having to acknowledge that there's a shit-ton of people living in this small accumulation of hexes.  And, more to the point, this isn't even a densely populated collection of hexes.  The area in central Transylvania, that's crowded.

Why shouldn't the players feel confronted by a dozen villages?  I'd guess the whole 6-mile map I've made so far has about three to four hundred.  There are so many "runable" places that I could maintain a campaign in what I've done so far for at least a decade ... provided I could keep the players here.  And oh, just as an aside, I began laying out this map on the evening before February 9th, when I published this post.  That's not even two months ago.  Since that time, here's what I've accomplished.

Oh, and as a reminder.  If you want to see the map close up, left click it to expand it on blogger, then right click the expansion to open in a new tab, so you can zoom in and see the whole map clearly.

I'm laying the map out concentrically, moving clockwise around the outside, doing it now in two-hex pieces (like the two hexes shown above).  Thus I'm spiralling out, which is why the Danube River appears in three parts on the left, bottom right and right.  The overall map has poured onto four sheets, which need to be overlaid together to produce a whole; right now, the complete image is 17mb, because the detail is making my computer sweat.  Eventually, I won't be able to display the whole map in 100%, because it will be too big to load to blogger.

There are at least a dozen places where an interesting campaign could be set; my worldbuilding designs allow for the translation of hundreds of villages into moderate differentiations (which have an inn, whic have a way station, etc.).  And this is just a tiny part of my 20-mile game world.  If I keep going concentrically, I'll bump into the Black Sea, I'll expand south into Bulgaria and Greece, west into Hungary, and north and east into Ukraine.  Somewhere out there is the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Baltic Seas.  And there's really no part of it that I can't just keep adding to this map.  I have the preliminary work done, I have GoogleEarth and depending on the occupation of a given hex, I can add it to the map in between 30 seconds (a sea hex) and 25 minutes (an intensely populated multi-village and road hex).  Two hexes a day?  No sweat.  That's close to what I've been doing, plus a few days where I've dug in.

I'll make this a regular feature, updating the map what, once a month?

P.S.,

The nearly white hexes on the map that have no number or production are empty steppelands, too dry for cultivation and without the trees of other wilderness hexes that also don't have numbers.  All of these hexes are "type-8."

Projects

For those who might be wondering, yes, I'm still running a contest.  And yes, I'm still selling a menu.  If it seems I don't care about these things, because I haven't spent the last three-four months hammering away, marketing the products, even putting them on the site's sidebar, it's because I don't care.  Not really.  The menu is brilliant.  Everyone who's had it in their hands says so.  And the money for the contest sits comfortably waiting.  The contest reaches its deadline in 56 days, with the end of May 31.  There have been no entries yet.

Am I worried?  No.  Why should I be?  I'm not entering the contest, so the deadline means nothing to me.  And as I've explained, I can do far better with the menus selling them in person than I can do online.  In person, at a game con, I can easily get $70 a copy free and clear.  Online, I have to pay a third of that to mail it, with it being impractical to sell it for more than the $45 I'm asking.

This blog isn't about contests.  And even as I work on possible products to sell at a con, this blog isn't about products, either.  I am eternally grateful to those who committed to my kickstarter.  Thanks to you, I have menus I can move when I'm ready, I have excellent terms with a menu folder provider and I'm in great shape just as soon as we can move on from Covid.  Thanks to people who support my Patreon, I've been able to turn my offline writing job into a sustainable part of my life, so that every day I can get up, sit at my computer and work.  Of course, this means that some days I work for other people, but I can do it here.  I can drink my own coffee, I can monitor emails and comments, and I have no one physically looking over my shoulder.  I'm probably living in the best circumstances of my life right now, which is pretty amazing for someone who was living in the worst circumstances 3 years ago ... and with me transforming that circumstance, I must stress, during Covid.

This blog is about content.  Those who support me deserve to see that content as many days of the week that I can produce it.  I write as much as I can think to write, covering as many topics as I can think to cover.  I've come to see this blog as a "get my feet wet" process of book writing.  So far, it hasn't actually spawned any books in that regard, but ... I think it's going to.

Once upon a time, I lived my life way in the future.  Two, three years hence.  What I did today was a part of what I would have written in completion years from now.  Somehow, I've lost touch with that.  Oh, it's still here.  I've just forgotten ... exactly ... how to do it.  Too much living day-to-day, hand-to-mouth.

These last four months, writing about worldbuilding, feels like a dry run ... and at the same time, it also feels like a disconnected collection of thoughts stumbling in the dark, looking for a structure.  I keep thinking one's going to emerge, like Topsy ... but so far, not yet.

The contest, the menu ... these are things behind me.  They're done — though there were two pages I owed to the menu that didn't manifest, and that eats at me a little.  I do have to get on those.  Did some preliminary work.  Just ... got a little sick of writing menu items.  Anyway, it's in the back of my head.  I was saying, I'm thinking mostly right now of things in front of me.  Despite feeling good, being on my feet, unworried for a change, I'm not sure just now what I want to work on in the big picture.

If anything feels like it needs attention, it's committing myself to a game con that would present sometime post-October.  Something I'd need to sign up for in April.  Something in Canada would be easier, but I think with Patreon's support to date, I could do Chicago, Seattle, Denver ... maybe San Francisco.  I have to look into it.  If anyone has any idea of a con in your town, or near your town, that can boast at least 60,000 guests, let me know.  Not worth the travel time to go somewhere smaller.

Oh.  I've been working on that Romania map.  Anyone want to see how far I'm getting?  Or are we all bored with that now?

One other thing.  I haven't worked seriously on the wiki for a few months now.  I gotta pick that up again.

Worldbuilding 6b: Goals

Ian Danskin discussing Chris DeLeon:

"Sports and board games have rules, but video games have laws.  That in soccer, you don't touch the ball with your hands because you've agreed not to, but in Fifa [vg] you don't touch the ball with your hand because it's impossible.  There's no button for it.  So in a sport, you can do anything that is not expressly forbidden by the rules.  In a video game, you can't do anything except what is expressly allowed by the system."

In D&D, the "system" is the Dungeon Master.  The DM assigns rules to things, the rules act as a guideline to the players' choices, but the player also knows that if an argument can be made, the DM can be influenced to allow something to occur that is outside the rules.  If the DM allows it, the game being played is still D&D.

This is why there is no standard D&D game.  This is why we get hundreds and hundreds of game and rule variations, and this is why most people's campaigns never work.  The more a DM can be influenced, whether by arguments made by the players, or because a DM respects decisions and advice given by a company, the more actions are allowed.  As possible actions increase, especially when those actions require little to no effort on the players' part, the more broken the game becomes.  This is not a black-and-white measure.  We don't have "whole" and "broken" games.  We have hundreds of thousands of games incrementally occupying fractional spaces on a line between whole and broken.

Moreover, it's not just a matter of resisting influence.  "What" rules a DM defends, and what arguments he or she refuses to be influenced by, changes the players' willingness to play with that DM at all; and if no players will play, again, the game is broken.  So many of those fractional spaces are occupied by shitty, inflexible and wooden-headed would-be DMs.

We're not done.  In my experience, the vast majority of DMs are persons who do not especially want the role — but who accept the role because of a group of people, these are the best person available.  Such persons are not as committed as other DMs, and in turn are eager to maintain the support and respect of their friends ... and are therefore highly subject to being influenced.  The same can also be said of many, many DMs who are simply weak people, who are needful of attention, who haven't the backbone in anything they do to stand up to the wants and demands of players with a negative answer.  Negative self-assessment runs rampant through the culture; there's no reason to assume that DMs automatically fail to suffer from poor self-esteem merely because they wish to be DMs.

So, on that line between whole and broken, we may suppose (without knowing) that the median among all DMs is considerable off-center, towards broken.  Given this, we may further suppose that among players, the expectation of the majority would be that DMs are, by and large, open to influence.  And further that DMs not open to influence are, post hoc ergo propter hoc, bad DMs.

Logically, therefore, most players out there looking for a DM wants one that can be easily influenced, with a reasonable expectation that the player will succeed in finding exactly that sort of DM.  With players wanting to influence, and DMs in turn being willingly influenced, most reports on the quality of a game are sure to be generally positive.  We won't hear the words, "I push my DM around and he likes it, so the game is great," but this is essentially the dynamic.

But we are here to speak of worldbuilding.  When discussing what rules a DM should embrace, we're confronted by several familiar arguments — and one of these says that the DM should be true to "reality."  As it happens, "reality" is the game world, not actual reality, but this nuance is often confused by the speaker.  Magic, hit points, bardic colleges, actual gods, the flail as a practical combat weapon, the presence of ring mail and many other things can be in no way confused with Earthly reality.  They are, however, perfectly realistic in the framework of the game, just as it's "realistic" in Monopoly that a house can be bought and erected before another person has time to move.  Or that it's equally practical to pile 60 armies on either Southern Europe or Yakutsk in RISK.  Why not?

If the DM uses "real reality" instead of "game reality" as a measurement, then he or she is bound to receive lots and lots of pushback from players on the basis that something isn't "true to life" and therefore ought to be changed.  Conversely, if "game reality" is made superfluid and simplistic, the DM will receive many, many suggestions from players on how to make it MORE fluid and MORE plistic. [er, sorry]

The world being built must find a path between extremes.  We don't touch the ball with our hands in soccer because we deliberately want to make the game harder for the players.  Of course they're able to pick up the ball.  Of course, if they were allowed to do so, "soccer," or "foot-and-hand-ball," would still technically be a game ... but would it be a good game?  The consensus is in that it wouldn't be.  "Keep-away" is sort of a version of foot-and-hand-ball and there are no international leagues for it.  I can't head down to the local community centre and sign up for a keep-away team.  Nor would I want to.  Nor would it make a particularly good spectator sport.  The art of using a body part to do something normally done by the hands would be lost.

There is a difficulty with explaining to people who don't understand how a role-playing game works, or why it works, why certain changes will break the game.  Especially any change that increases the survivability and ease of the game.  When one choice is overwhelmingly better than every other choice, "choice" as a game concept is effectively eliminated.  These were the problems inherent in the 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 systems.  Transforming game rules to an economic platform with a point-buy metric will always incorporate an interest in what powerful feats can be purchased most cheaply.  When every character class is awarded combat actions that function like spells, then every character is effectively a spellcaster, regardless of their class title.  Any single metric that's overwhelmingly used to make a system will simultaneously break the system by its lack of additional metrics.  These things are obvious to professional game designers ... and yet equally tempting to professional game designers, as they save SO MUCH WORK.  Designers crave fetishistically for the super-successful game that requires a minimum of effort to design.  It is their Holy Grail.

Such games appear, explode in popularity, make hundreds of millions for the designer ... and then vanish as the simplicity turns the game into a boring, hated, soon-to-be-discarded thing.  Anybody up for a game of Angry Birds?  How 'bout Farmville?

[Yes, yes, I know, I know ... people out there play Angry Birds every day.  They reach for it first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, and get in a few last games before lights out.  I know.  Fuck off.]

D&D works and endures because it consists of dozens of metrics spliced together, enabling uncertain but nuanced possibilities.  However, these metrics rely upon constraint, suppression and denial.  Like soccer, the players need to be able to act effectively, but not easily.  The combat system needs to be complex, bloated, difficult to interpret and expressly uncertain in what tactics work best against which monsters.  This disallows the players a feeling of safety or surety.  Of course players will hate it.  Players want to feel safe.  They want to feel sure.  They want the game world and the rules to be immediately comprehensible and solvable.  They will always argue and attempt to influence the DM in this direction.  It's so predictable it's laughable.

Tell the players they must choose three weapon proficiencies.  Make the penalties for a non-proficient weapon so onerous that the players will grumpily conform to the weapons they've chosen.  Listen to the players groan about how few weapons they get.  Listen to them hedge and haw about the cost of the weapons they really want, vs. the weapons they can afford.  Listen to them refuse to get weapons they can afford, then assign this as the reason why the system sucks.  Listen to them ask for more weapons.  Listen to them carp about a weapon that needs two hands, that disallows a shield.  Listen to them ask if they can use a two-handed weapon and a shield at the same time.  Listen to them argue why that should be allowed.  And so on.

But change the system to say that there are no proficiencies and that every weapon, regardless of type and form, causes 1d6 damage, and the complaints vanish.  Because it's easier.  Because there's no wrong choice.  We've given them one choice.  One choice, the "right" choice, is what they want.  Not because it's really the best choice, but because they're absolutely SURE that no one else is playing the system better than they are.  Or that there even is a better way to play the system.

Constraints, suppression and denial humbles the player.  Multiple system metrics which deny an obvious solution humbles the player.  As they should.  It's not a game if you can "win" by choosing the only option.  In D&D, the "lose" is conceived in the certainty players have that they're destined to choose the wrong option.  Most players do not look at their list of abilities and think, "What am I able to do?"  They look inwardly first, think, "What do I want to do?" — then looks through their list of abilities to see if they can do it.  When that list disappoints them, they look to the DM and ask, "Even if I can't do this thing, can I still do this thing?"  Whereupon the DM hears their desire, relates to the player, throws out the whole system and says, "Sure, I guess so."

If the DM says, instead, "Your character can do all these other things, why don't you try one of those?" ... the player looks at the character sheet, sighs inwardly that it's not nearly as good as what his or her imagination imagined, and grumpily say, "Well, okay I guess."  The DM hears the lack of commitment.  The DM knows this player shouldn't be here.  The DM habitually counts the players who are here and wonders for a moment if the campaign will survive if the player leaves.  The DM knows not to say any of this.  Instead, the DM tries to make the player's character sheet ability sound as impressive and exciting as possible, to "win" the player over to the side of playing by the character sheet.  The DM may even go as far as increasing the character sheet power by enough to impress the player.  And there we are.  The DM has compromised the DM.

Sometimes, I really wonder, why the fuck anybody plays this game.

On the surface, it's doomed.  As a teenager, playing this game with other teenagers, I loved the way the rules came together, the way the character sheets brutally limited the player's options, the way that succeeding eventually produced more options that allowed greater successes.  DMing, if a player asked to do any of the rule-of-cool dumbfuckery I hear from sites all over, I'd have laughed viciously in their face, told them "NO" in a cruel and patronising tone, and then taken steps to humiliate them repeatedly for the rest of the session by prefacing every ask of what the character did next with, "Oh, and no, you still can't do that idiotic rule-of-cool dumbfuckery."  Because I had standards.  Because I would rather have a player slink out in shame and mortification, with my laughter in their ears, than contribute to the regular kind of bullshit I see and read all over the internet.

You'd think with behaviour like that, I'd have trouble getting players.  You'd think, with my being contemptuous and bullying, that no one would ever play with me.  As it happened, the reverse was true.  Instead of losing all my players, I gained more than I could handle.  Because I bullied out all the riff raff, and never the serious players who wanted to approach the game as I saw it, serious players flocked to play with me.  My players would hear others say, "The game I'm in is so stupid!  Everyone farts around and no one gives a shit what they're doing."  And my players would answer, "Fuck, man, you've GOT to come play with Alexis.  Alexis is the bomb, man.  He's fucking psychotic.  His game is the best thing you've ever seen!"

And when I'd humiliate someone, and they'd rage quit and leave, all the other players would say, "Fuck him.  Fuck that noise.  Glad he's fucking gone.  I take a battle axe as my proficiency."

You get the players you cultivate.  I wanted to cultivate assholes like me, who loved the game, who didn't want "easy", who loved that there were fifty types of weapons to choose from and only eleven character classes.  When I said, "No," they made a new plan.  They changed it up.  They played like their lives depended on it.

My offline players still play this way.  People shout.  I mind fuck them with a dilemma or a consequence and they call me names.  I say I'm playing and they're always there.  They tell their jobs that they can't work and they tell them why.  They make time.  They love it.

But they wouldn't if I made it easier.  The "hard" is what makes it great.

In worldbuilding — and I guess this hasn't been much about worldbuilding — the world has to be as hard as the rules.  It has to maintain a character that won't roll over and play dead.  The authorities have to wield authority; the villains have to be truly spine-chilling.  The monsters must be DEADLY.  The world must be too big to fathom or navigate.  There must be many friends, many enemies and there must be both an unease AND a certainty about which is which.  The rules must be fixed and the DM should never, ever compromise about anything or any part of the game world.

So make the game world well.  Make it solid.  Build it to last.  Build it to intimidate ... and enjoy that the players are intimidated.

Worldbuilding 5j: Country Towns

Whether or not the reader chooses to go the route I'm taking, i.e., building a thorough generated world that goes on and on, I encourage creating as much distinction as possible between one habitation centre and another.  All towns are not the same!  Some are frenetic, some are sleepy, some are old and staid, others are new and bursting with energy.

On the whole, I've decided to classify my world's common towns into three forms, occurring in type-3, type-2 and type-1 hexes.  These forms are "country town," "artisan town" and "commercial town."  Commercial towns are filled with middle-tier entrepreneurs buying and selling goods accumulated from others.  Artisan towns make things; they're Medieval industrial centres.  Country towns are of the "third rank," being inactive, tranquil places whose defining qualities are administrative.  Yes, there's some manufacture, and yes there's some commercial taking place ... but these things are happening on such a small scale compared to first rank and second rank cities and towns that country towns are still essentially self-governing.

That is, most of the decisions are still being made by local authorities, without much intercedence by provincial lords or monarchs.  Wealth is generated by agriculture; from this, the authorities skim payments in the form of taxation, returning writs, farming payments of fee (food turned over to the local noble), selling offices, presiding over the marketplace, holding land, issuing by-laws, wielding a minor degree of judicial authority ... which minor authorities gain while being ignored by the greater authorities elsewhere in the realm.  A small stipend is sent up the chain, but most of it remains in the local lord or lady's hands, to be spent as they will.  Ultimately rents contribute more income than taxes, creating payments that are not sent upstream into the general coffers of the realm.

In this environment, a wealthier class dwells in "messuages," a dwelling house with outbuilding and land assigned to the owner's use for various applications — tanning, perfuming, quarrying, raising horses and so on.  These messuages are dispersed over a wide area and not contained by a town wall, allowing the residents to be "part of the town" while according a considerable autonomy.  Paths and roads wind through the "suburban" dwellings towards a central "main town," with this arrangement being different from the semi-clustered and relatively smaller village.  A country town has a population of anywhere between 500 and 2,000, though in and around 1,000 is most common.

The inner center is marked by two-story houses, usually half-timbered, workshops, commercial buildings such as a public house, a bakery, an inn and a blockhouse for a small constabulary.  Adjacent to this center is a large bare area for the by-weekly market and stockyards, with areas for temporary pens to be set up ... and near the market is the "demesne," consisting of the lord or lady's messuage, potentially complete with small moat, tower or low walls.  A legitimate noble dwells here, most likely a baronet or baron, very rarely a count, though such persons are most likely represented by a bailiff or steward.  Attached to the demesne is a barracks with the noble's retainers, including a hayward and a reeve to manage the fields and enforce the noble's authority.  Unlike the village, the local authority has almost entirely fallen out of the locals' hands.  There is still a town council and elders, but these gather to decide how best to put their requests to the noble, not to pass edicts.  Townspeople do not regain their power again until the election of a burgher and the presence of a town hall, which occurs when manufacturing expands the country town into an artisan town.  We'll talk more about that another day.

The best times for the residents are market days.  Games and contests (not jousting, but things like apple bobbing and blind man's bluff) are complimented with opportunities for public bathing and eating rare foods — sometimes offered as free samples or gifts on holy days.  The noble might lay out a meal once or twice a year.  Younger members of the town might steal away into the bushes surrounding the town's centre, especially in the summer.  In winter, there may be no market days for two months at a time, since there are no products to sell and the weather may be onerous to potential customers, particularly those from outside the town.  This suspension is broken by feast days like Christmas, Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday.

A "bailiff's court" is held on market days; often called a "three weeks court," because it meets only every three weeks.  The bailiff adjudicates disputes, orders payments that haven't been made, consigns individuals to the town stocks if need be, and holding others for final judgment by the lord or lady if torture or death is commended.  One or two cells may exist in the demesne, but often those awaiting judgment are confined in an outdoor gibbet or weighed down with shackles and chains, making flight from the town very risky and impractical.  Everyone outside the town, encountering a stranger dressed in heavy chains, would have no reason to trust such a person as anything but a deserving criminal.

No house or building could be built, nor sale of land made, without approval of the bailiff and, by extension, by the local lord or lady.  The players would find it difficult to "move in" to such a place without having first established a positive reputation through service or action of some kind.  Nonetheless, they would find it more comfortable than a village, with more to buy and with greater opportunities to acquire good labour.  Setting themselves up with a sizable messuage, then hiring a steward to look after the day to day, the party could provide a reasonable regular income for themselves while continuing to adventure — along with a sound, strong place in which to store goods and hoard some of their wealth.

Here, then, is a break-down of the facilities to be found in a type-3 hex, where a country town exists:

Everything on the list above would exist in a country town, many things in multiple numbers.  For example, there'd be more than one bakery, more than one temple and probably more than one religious group (though the secondary group would be no more than 3-8% of the whole).  A waterfront would have 2-3 quays, creating a wharf and adding warehouses.

I've changed "modest temple" to "lower temple;" this is a one-room worshipping space relying on an adjacent house and outer building for tools and seasonal materials.  The "middle" temple takes these and puts them in one building, so that the priest lives in a back room with an attached kitchen and yard for a dairy animal, chickens and workspace.  A cellar stores food and offers room for church stores, festival clothing and other items, wine, host and so on.

But as before, I'll be writing overview posts for most of these things that I haven't touched upon yet.  For those unable to search a dictionary, a "glebe" is a piece of land forming part of a clergy's benefice ... essentially, land the cleric is able to work or give to others to work.  This can be managed however the local priest sees fit, as it's his or hers, to raise money for use as charity, improvement of the parish or otherwise to exploit in an unbefitting (but all too common) personal manner.

Until the next post, then.

Worldbuilding 5i: Making and Marketing

It can be understood that wherever there is money to be made, there's a clever group of people who want it all, and thus take steps to seal off others who might want some for themselves.  The notion of a "guild" was to establish that these people are permitted to make a thing and sell it, within our controlled system, whereas those people were not — no matter how well they knew their business.  This gave the guilds a monopoly over their own product, at least for those places within their reach ... that is, within the cities.

Guilds sprang up all over Europe, with each controlling various manufactures over small or large areas.  A tinsmithing guild might control all the smithies in one village or small county; or a plutocracy of individuals might unilaterally agree to set prices in dozens of places at the same time.  These agreements and monopolies would expand and ebb with the centuries, as various guilds would rise and fall, with their influence being disrupted by war, plague, famine and of course the death of those with the wisdom to manage large complex webs of control.  Smashing shops, destroying raw materials and made goods, even burning fields or driving out farmers were recognisable tactics.  After all, it's often better to burn a competitor's tailored goods, if it makes the ones we sell more valuable.  Think of it as the "Goldfinger" theory of economics, albeit on a small scale.

A single village or type-4 hex, with all of 2 hammers, hardly matters in the grand scheme of things ... but larger entities can nevertheless benefit from such minor players, especially when there are hundreds and hundreds of villages.  The largest problem is that a village, with minimal roads, transport and sitting out in the back country, suffers somewhat from a lack of materials.  The women's fingers may be nimble, but they need cloth to sew garments.

The solution was called the "putting-out" system.  A guild capitalist would provide the raw wool, cotton, silk, metals, clay, sand, woods and so on, making deliveries of these things to the crafters, who would transform these raw materials into clothing, tools, masonry, pottery, furniture and so on.  And because the crafter would become dependent on the merchant providing the raw materials, the latter could impose conditions of how hard the crafter worked while charging the crafter for the materials in a way that would create debt slavery.  This was done perniciously in a culture that had no laws to protect the crafter from such vampires.

Some manufactures cannot be easily done on this scale.  Paper-making requires a large mill, many workers and an abundant and organised supply of linen and cotton rags.  Mining is likewise a big scale operation, as is metallurgy.  The seasonable managing of logging industry, or fulfilling masonry contracts, requires a very organised system of transporting enormous weights of materials.  A small group attempting to manage operations of this size could easily fall into debt ... and in this case the "putting out" came in the form of credit.  Again, the guild merchant could then skim off the top, benefiting from the industry, while foreclosing on everything if the debt wasn't paid.  This is more or less still how things are done today.

Often, the rough work is done in backwaters and then finished in towns.  A village might make pottery, but the ordinary pottery would be transported into a larger center (a "settlement) to be painted or glazed.  Pieces might be made in a village, like angles, nails, thread, twine, wrapping and raw cloth, which would then be taken to the next step elsewhere.  Again, this is still what's being done today, only on a global scale.

As I described earlier, in a type-4 village this work would be done in individual homes.  Such places would need a steady source of heat in the winter to ensure constant labour, so a proper hearth should be present — well removed from flammable materials that might be part of the manufacture.  Jobs that needed a bellows or larger space, such as shoeing animals or making horse shoes, would require an attached outdoor enclosure.  Anywhere indoors would need a good source of cheap light, so glass windows would definitely exist ... though not very large, just 9 inches across.  The workbench would always be immediately under the window, so the light could be used.  With many materials, working by candlelight would be too dangerous.  Remember, the artisan would buy the raw materials; if the materials were destroyed and no product left to sell, the guild merchant lost nothing; but the crafter would be eternally in debt afterwards.  One fire was disastrously risky.

On the whole, these made items would never be sold by the Guild Merchant in the village.  More money could be obtained from a larger town or city ... so the "market day" I discussed on the village post would not include these crafted articles made locally.  And because the village is not a "market center," as I define it, the actual available things that can be bought are locally-produced, locally-controlled products: cereals, vegetables, fruits, treenuts, furs, animal feed, straw, raw fibres, livestock, eggs, honey, wooden planks and so on.  Because baked goods must be eaten the same day, a baker can successfully locate in a hamlet or a small village, but the number of goods and their kind will be limited, just like your local modern bakery.  If you're not there by eleven in the morning, most likely the loaves you want are already sold.

As such, we're talking about a "Town Market" for food items and a "Stockyard" for animals.  We have the baker as mentioned, the granary and maybe some very fundamental amateur crafts like a parasol, a child's doll or a "toy," being no more than a simple carved animal.  A coastal village reasonably supports a small fishmonger.  A cobpipe is also likely — but nothing at all on a greater scale than this.  A player party shouldn't expect to find rope, weapons, clothes, vehicles or vehicle parts, not even a saddle or a bit, though if it's horse country, a riding horse is probable.  Players need to comprehend that a village is not the local convenience store.  If it makes no sense for a farmer-labourer-villager to possess such a thing, why would they have it in stock?

Suppose, however, that the players ask one of the local tailor crafters to make a shirt.  From what would he or she make it?  The material is all committed to the guild merchant's expected return; and so is all of the crafter's time.  Three hours to make the player's shirt, even if the fabric is provided, means three hours less time making the guild merchant happy.  And it's this latter that really matters, not the opportunity to make one shirt for some fly-by-nighter who will be gone forever once the shirt is done.

Now, point in fact, there is an opportunity for the player to become the guild merchant.  The present supplier has to be bucked out of town, as a monopoly is being threatened, but a strong party should be able to handle a bunch of toughs who show up to reassert the former merchant's control.  Plus, the players could choose some village so out of the way that even a supplier isn't to be found.  Crafters could be shipped in with the right enticements.  They could also pick a craft in which the existing merchant isn't engaged.  He wants textiles, but we want to make, oh, clocks or musical instruments.

Meanwhile, it's an easy way for the players to get into "business."  They don't need to be around full-time, they can run their credit however they like, it makes them members of the community and they have a potential source of steady income without achieving name level.  This is something a party could start doing at 1st level, if they were careful about what craft they inserted and where they did it.

Very well.

I have a few things left to describe for 2 hammers.  I think the reader understands what a "shearing station" is, or an irrigation pump.  The former includes a clensing dip, some skill at managing sheep and the apparatus for collecting and redistributing the wool to a buyer further up the chain.  The latter is a small mill for hauling water out of a river and pouring it into an irrigation ditch, which then transports water throughout extensive fields.  These things are interesting in that they exist, but there's little to say about them.

The "hostel" is more involved ... but I'll leave this off until writing a post about roadhouses and inns, which both occur with three hammers.  Now I can set about updating the wiki page and approach the next size of non-settlement habitation, the "country town" that occurs with the type-3 hex.

Worldbuilding 5h: Buildings of Worship

The Reader seems to understand that tackling a game world on this level has more to do with understanding how things work than with providing a lot of details.  For example, I don't need floorplans of quays and storehouses to make use of these things in my game world.  I don't need stats for the gong farmer who might attack the party in the dark, thinking they're bandits.  I don't need fifty village street maps for fifty villages.  I don't need the squire's family tree drawn out to know he has one.  Misconceptions about what "worldbuilding" is lie behind the failure of designers to produce something deep and complex.  There's some idea going around that the actual "building" part requires tables, pictures, plans and excessively gritty details ... when in fact, what's needed is knowing how a shore front or a transshipment point works.

The actual layout can be scrawled out in five minutes during the game, while the players watch (as we're getting rid of the screen).  When I do this, I draw a box and say, "This is the storehouse."  Then I draw a crooked line.  "This is the water line; there's a quay and this is another quay."  Then I draw an oval next to the quay.  "Here's the ship.  What do you do?"  The players don't give a damn that the ship doesn't look like an actual detailed ship plan for a one hour adventure, with my taking 8 hours of fastidious work to make it look "real."  It's as real as it needs to be in the player's heads.  They only need to know where the ship is.  The rest we can play without pictures.

For me, this is the real "tradition" that underlies D&D thinking.  You tell me your mage wants to be a "Moon Witch."  I say okay.  Then we figure out what that means as we go along.  We don't need 55 pages in a splatbook telling us the 32 kinds of moon witch your character can be.  It's just a waste of our time.

Because I get asked endless questions by players about everything, I've given considerable thought to everything — as is evident in this string of posts.  With each conceived thing, such as the present list of facilities, I'm on the hook to discuss what that thing is.  The answers rely considerably upon research, but let me explain something about D&D.  We will never find all the information we need, because the answers being given out there in the world are not tailor-made for people who are interested in a space where people can walk through and take action there.  Where it comes to details about a "simple village house of worship" in the 15th century, we can find examples; but we won't learn how the church residents were organised or what their jobs were at that time.  We might find a few tiny details about how these churches were planted, but those details won't be sufficient for D&D.  Therefore, we have to understand something very well.

Worldbuilding is fictional design.  By necessity, we have to sit back, close our eyes, consider everything we've been able to learn from research and then tailor make the remainder out of whole cloth.

So as I approach the subject of village churches, mosques and temples, understand that I'm talking about D&D, not the real world.  Perhaps some expert knows the truth about the interactions between church leaders and their authorities or congregations, but I don't choose to become a similar expert.  For one thing, the next facilities post has to be about making and marketing in the period, so I can't waste my whole worldbuilding verve on religious edifices alone.

And hell, what difference does it make anyway?  I run a game world where the gods are real, where they fight one another for every believer because another believer is what makes them a wee bit more powerful ... and so the religious systems in my game world are built by people who have actual, physical proof of the existence of these gods.  This makes a religion in my world NOTHING LIKE the real world, which must run all it's services on faith and little else.  There was a Martin Luther in my world, but the 95 theses he hammered on his door absolutely did not include the argument that by faith and faith alone did one know God.  He knew better.

Because of this competition, a type-4 village has only one church, mosque or temple.  More developed hexes have sub-cultures, and therefore sub-temples, with certain religions being tolerant of others.  The hard and fast rule, from Medieval history, is that the least tolerant church or religion is Christianity.  The most tolerant is ... Islam.  Go figure.

I've been meaning to write a post about the development of religion in the game world, but I keep putting it off.  I shall have to get on that this week; in the meantime, let's limit our interest to the building itself, its inhabitants and its function.

The easiest example is the Christian church, since I know it best and have had much personal experience with its doings.  I was raised Lutheran, though I no longer believe in its teachings, or that of any religion.  Unlike a rabid youtuber atheist, however, I concede that the advancement of religion and it's function were necessary for the advancement of society and civilisation, though not in the interpretation of the Bible as a "moral document," which it most definitely is not.  Were I to find myself in a church, I would attend the service respectfully, I would sing the hymns when appropriate, kneeling and praying when appropriate, and I would smile and greet the minister and others without creating an incident.  I would not stay longer than strictly necessary, however.  I bring this up to explain where I come from with regards to religion.  I have studied theology and can defend it; I find large parts of its thinking process fascinating and worth deconstruction; but I don't believe in it as a faith.  I don't really care who does, however, unless they take it upon themselves to sell me their religion.  This is where things get sticky with me.

The purpose of the Church is to bind the community together.  The duties of the pastor or priest are to do more than deliver a good sermon and overlook the proceedings of the service.  A pastor attends his or her flock, daily, addressing their physical and emotional needs as best one can.  Much training in being a pastor involves speaking with the devout and people like me with RESPECT, something rarely found or understood among Pentacostals or Evangels, who don't receive practical training and are therefore in it for the power, the prestige and the money.  An excellent example of what it is to be a parish priest can be found in the 1978-81 humorous British series, Bless Me, Father.  Here's an example of the show dealing with the supernatural from a church perspective.

Members of a small temple include the priest, potentially a curate, which is a sort of apprentice priest (and not, as Gygax thinks, a member senior to a priest), a housekeeper and a caretaker, called a verger.  Here's a nice story from Somerset Maugham about a verger, from the 1950 movie, Trio.  The verger segment starts at 02:41.

Most likely all these people are kind, friendly, generous and most often interested in strangers, particularly if they're of the same religion.  It's their business to bring in new blood ... and an outsider's contribution to the collection plate is always welcome.  Perhaps it's my personal view on things, but in part it's my experience as well.  A church leader is always looking for people to lead, and wisely does not seek to turn away anyone and make enemies.  Religious strife only occurs when each side of the matter simply refuses to be patient and respectful.  The Spaniards would have done much better for themselves in the Netherlands if they hadn't been so bloody minded about their Catholicism.  The same can be said about the Protestants in Ulster, the Protestants in Scotland and the Protestants in the American colonies.  It's the confounded way people have sometimes about insisting that their answers are the "right" answers, coupled with the like resistance of other peoples who are just as certain and inflexible.

In any case, these larger contentious religious warring peoples can hardly be found in the rustic setting of a back-country village church.  Let the people of Florence battle in the streets; let the rivers in Paris run with Huguenot blood; let some pigheaded heretic scream epithets in Zurich, Geneva and Prague.  This village is none of those places ... and so, "You're a moslem, are you?  Why, what a strange person to have come around here.  Have you had your dinner yet?"

It isn't that I'm naive.  Rather, it's that I believe the earnestness of a religion depends upon its proponents — chiefly, what they think they have to lose if they concede a little ground.  The Count of Wittembourg has taxes and land to gain if he switches to the Protestant church, while the Emperor of Austria and the Pope in Rome have something to lose if he does.  A demand is made, followed by an insult, followed by further demands and threats and raising of armies ... much more of it for the sake of which hands the peasant's coins fall into rather than the fleshiness of bread and the bloodiness of wine.  But we say its the latter because that makes us sound so much holier than a grubber of Mammon, which the Bible plainly counsels against.  After all, the Bible clearly counsels in plain Hebrew, Greek, Latin and so on that killing the Ammonites is absolutely in the cards.  Thus, Ammonites, Saxons, what's the difference?

The country priest has a slice of mutton to lose and the company of a traveller to gain.  So the exchange rate plays much better towards complaisance and beneficence ... provided the traveller doesn't remain and import too many of his or her "kind."  Whereupon everyone gets ridiculous because that fundamental principle, "The Priest is there to bind the community together" gets threatened somewhat.

There's a reason my game world takes place in 1650.  Just prior to that date, Europe had ruthlessly decided to test the theory that the musket and the sword are stronger than faith (and the desire for money and power), only to find it piles up a lot of dead and fails to settle anything.  The Spanish have withdrawn from the part of the Netherlands that doesn't like them, European Catholicism has decided to be more tolerant, the border with the Ottomans is in a relative state of peace ... and while peaceful co-existence doesn't reign everywhere, it is a brief period of concluding that winning through trade, nationalism and education is perhaps a better tactic.  England drags its feet on this for another 10 bloody and annoying years, but 1650 is nevertheless on the cusp of the Restoration.  It is a time that suits me.

Listen, I should talk about the church building, but I think we'll let that go until I get into hexes with 3 hammers.  There's a lot to say about that, enough for a whole other post.

I'll finish by saying to my Patreon supporters, thank you for your support and your input in the comments.  I have very much left to say about worldbuilding, though I must also take some time out to discuss some other things this week and the next.  Rest assured, my patience and commitment to this series remains intact.

Lego and D&D

My grandson reaches the age of 18 months today, which is the sort of thing that reminds us of our youth and other things in the realm of shoes and ships and sealing-wax.  Across the neighborhood is a quaint little shop I dodged into a few days ago that sells Lego by volume ... and,  as it happens, is a bit of a Lego Mecca in Western Canada.  The owner possesses a few fellows reminscent of Jack Black in the film High Fidelity, only as a Lego nerd rather than with music.  Pleasant, playful, definitely the place where I'll go to build up a suitable Lego pile.  No rush, of course ... I have probably another two years or so, I should think.

My original Lego ended up in my daughter's hands years ago, going out the door with her.  So whether or not I collect another set, the grandson won't grow up bereft of the toy.  But truth, there's no such thing as enough Lego.

It's a small shop, not much room for wandering, but as I took it in I made several connections that are worth discussing on a D&D blog ... since unquestionably Lego was a gateway drug that prepped me for D&D.  I'll explain.

Because I'm very, very old, the bulk of my childhood experiences with Lego consisted of various shaped bricks and nothing else, as "sets" that included plans to make a pre-determined object, like fork lifts, police cars, tractors, helicopters and so on, did not become a thing until after 1975.  I was eleven in '75.  The first really big impressive themed object was the 493 Space Command Center, which emerged in 1978, by which time I'd moved on from Lego to other occupations.  I remember feeling at the time that the Set idea was a bad one ... which suggested that a great many children were far too creatively challenged to make their own stuff.  The outpouring of sets that followed and continues to this day seems to confirm this.  I have images of parents writing to Lego with remarks like, "I bought your product for my children, but they don't know what to do with it.  Can you please send ideas?"

For my friends and I, Lego was a group activity.  My friend Neil had well over 15,000 pieces of Lego and so his basement would draw us in every few weeks, especially in the winter.  We'd sit around building different objects, teaching each other how to follow and repeat our builds.  Redesigning objects and improving on previous designs was a large part, with most of us keeping blueprints for tanks, houses and planes in our heads.

Unlike board games, Lego was a co-operative group activity, which usually included a pre-planning period in the first half hour as we decided what we would make together.  Thus we built space stations and airports, towns, armies, navies and so on, with each person in the group having their preferences.  An agreement would be made on who was to build the con tower or the aircraft carrier — with the usual fights and settlements that nine y.o.'s experience.  Essentially, we were teaching ourselves how to act as designers working towards a common goal ... a goal that didn't exist except to us, as there were no sets to tell us what a spaceport should look like.

These experiences are probably the reason why I am so fucked up as a designer of D&D.  The pattern that enabled Lego to expand its customer base to non-creative children looks quite like the same that eventually crippled D&D.  Given an opportunity to make a world from scratch and have it be whatever we wanted, instead we were given modules ("sets") that told us what the world should look like, severing the creative backbone of thousands of potentially inspired children.  Today, every time I approach the game from the standpoint that it ought to include worldbuilding elements like theatres, universities and other cultural aspects, I'm sure to hear from someone crying out that "traditional D&D" doesn't include these things.  After all, where is the module where the players become world-class performing artists, or transform a village into a town, or become shipping magnates?  The modules don't exist, because such things don't include dungeons and ten-foot-poles.

Of course, there are the rare brilliant psychopaths who recognise the value of Lego for its stop-motion potential, or those who buy the sets to get the special bits and pieces that are only available through the sets, but for every one of these there are 200 Lego Death Stars sitting in corners gathering dust in some kid's room, that asked for just enough effort to put the thing together — and now that it is, why would we ever take it apart?  There's always more money in selling objects to people who want to be told "what to do," than there is in a pile of bricks with no plan.

If there's an underlying message behind the worldbuilding posts I've been churning out for months now it's this: the setting is rich with profound, highly variable opportunities.  Making the whole game about a dungeon and a place to go where we buy stuff for the dungeon is a pathetically narrow perspective on something where, literally, anything can be tried.  All that I'm saying only sounds weird because I'm the only person saying it.  I seem to be the only person willing to run it.  I've never been satisfied with being told how to put my bricks together.  Seems to me, so long as I have bricks, I can make a lot more things than the company remotely imagines.

Worldbuilding 5g: Docks, Quays & Storehouses

I understand that it seems I'm splitting hairs, but D&D is a game of descriptions and players interacting with stuff ... as such I feel that details matter.  Whatever a thing might be, there are always iterations of that thing that describe a progressive development: hovels are distinct from square houses, long houses, hall houses and merchant houses.  These in turn are distinct from manors, mansions and palaces.  Understanding that not every house is the same expands the DM's repetoire for discussing the layout of a property, a street and a section of town.  The same is true for any facility we might discuss.

For example, I included a "boat dock" as a facility appearing in a type-7 hex with one hammer, but I didn't discuss it because the map I'm working from lacks navigable rivers, lakes or seas.  What exactly is a "dock" ... as opposed to a "quay"?  What does one provide that the other doesn't?  If the players were to build the former, how much would it cost as compared to the latter?  The answers explain why one is available with 1 hammer and the other requires 2.

Excuse me a moment, but I must talk about the word "quay.".  It's an unfortunate word in the English language, as it looks like "kway" but it's pronounced like "key."  Turns out, the spelling quay begins in the 1690s, post my game word ... prior to that, it was spelled "key" or "keye," as it's pronounced.  This word originates from the French word quai, for sand bank, which is why islands in the Caribbean were called keys, because for two hundred years these were used to load and unload ships in  part of the world where no proper port was available.  Hwearf in Old English and werf in German were used similarly in the Baltic and North Seas to describe the Frisian and Danish isles, among others, which were banks where ships could tie up.  In America today, "wharf" is used rather than "quay," but originally the word described more than a place to tie up ... it also meant a shipyard as well as a dockyard.  I could use "dock yard" as a replacement for quay, but this would confuse it with dock; I could spell quay, "keye," but this is sure to confuse players, so I'll continue to use the anachronistic "quay."

So.  No matter what I call what, confusion will reign if definitions are not imposed.  As such, going forward with ship services, I will use the following designations:

A dock is a wooden platform built on wooden pilings that extends outwards from a piece of land.  Due to the limitations on how deep the pilings can be dug in a pre-industrial world, a dock is limited in width to 12 ft.  A dock will service ships with a draft up to 10 ft.  A wider dock needs to incorporate stone in it's construction, whereupon it becomes ...

A quay is a predominantly stone platform that extends outwards from the shore, sometimes incorporating some wood framing or ledges, but not necessarily.  The water beside a quay is deep enough to enable ships with a draft of up to 20 feet to "park" adjacent to the structure.  Quays usually include a storehouse.  If multiple quays are strung together, the whole is called ...

A wharf, which extends along a shoreline, forming a harbour, which describes the enclosed water surface and not the wharf's servicing area — though this distinction is usually overlooked.  A "port" describes the combined harbour and wharf together.  Wharfs can also be described as the "docks," but this is a misnomer.  Wharfs generally include warehouses as well as storehouses.

Wharves occur with 3 hammers, which isn't on our facilities table yet but it's convenient to touch on them now and expand later with another post.  

Please understand that I recognise this isn't "correct" ... but equally I'd argue there is no such thing.  The designations are merely for game convenience, not because I give a damn what a dock can be or is or any other such thing.  The same issue applies when I make a distinction between "storehouses" and "warehouses."

Docks.  We might freely assume that the number of hammers AND the type of hex (7 through 5) indicates how many docks a hex includes.  One hammer and a type-7 dock equals a thorp and therefore has one dock.  Add another hammer to a type-7 hex, which can only occur with a settlement, and we have two docks.  The type-6 hex gets a bonus dock over the type-7, two docks with 1 hammer and three docks with 2 hammers, and the type-5 gets an additional +1 dock in the same fashion.  This may seem unnecessarily finicky, but the presence of multiple docks, and how many, would be something that mattered to the players ... and it would give them some idea of the size and importance of the backwater they're approaching from the water.

Docks can provide services to players, though clearly I need to write rules for how many boats occur per hex and presence of hammers.  A nominal fee of 1-2 c.p. would be charged for tying up, with an understanding that at certain times of the day non-ownership of a dock might mean casting off because the dock is needed for transshipment of other vessels.  Not sure how that would work also, but it would mean that a compliment necessary to untie and put off from the dock would be a day-and-night necessity, else the local laws may enable the boat to be impounded, i.e., taken over by other sailors and held until a penury fine was paid.

I can't say for sure, but building a dock would probably be simple enough, with the coast determining it's length (and possibly local ordinances as well) and therefore it's cost and time to build.  I daresay a 2nd level party could easily afford it.   I think the length of the dock would be limited to a water depth of oh, say, 15 feet?  Needs research.  Incidentally, a "dock post" is a single piling pounded deep in the sand; it's sufficient to hold a boat, but it would require another boat for unloading and loading of goods and passengers.  It would also put the boat at risk during a storm, since the piling is necessarily close to the shore, provides none of the protection a dock would and might swing the boat into the shore, sinking it.

Overall, docks can stand up to most storms, short of a strong gale or a storm.  Wrecked docks retain their pilings, so that only the upper part need rebuilding. 

A shack can be built on top of a dock (remember, 12 ft. wide surface of indeterminate length).  Someone could build this of stone or brick but that would seriously compromise the dock's ability to stand up in a storm.  In general, a shack couldn't practically consist of much weight in its construction, nor in how much storage it provided.  How much, again, would probably require some research ... which doesn't seem necessary until the day a player asks me.

Quay.  This is an oblong extension of stone blocks, broken stone pieces, filling, sand, wooden framing, paving stone and mortar reaching out far enough that a really big ship can pull up to its side.  The support for such an edifice requires a village-sized habitat, thus its appearance with a base type-4 hex.  Because of its construction, a quay will stand up to a hurricane.  A quay can be built so as to shelter a ship, but this is rare because the business of manuevering a big ship behind a quay in a busy port is impractically onerous.  Usually, in a storm, ships put out to sea rather than remaining tied up ... there are many harbours that will provide excellent protection to ships on the water, so that escaping to open sea is unnecessary.

A type-4 village has one quay.  Type-6 and type-5 settlements with 3 hammers have quays (not shown on chart yet), but again, only one.  A type-4 with 3 hammers has 2 quays, or effectively a small "wharf," and those with 4 hammers (settlements) will have 3 quays.  Better type hexes obviously have larger wharfs with shipyards and other support buildings.

Quays can provide other services for players, namely storage which we'll discuss later and the opportunity to register at the port, provided they have the necessary sage abilities and ship type.  Once again, they can't leave a ship at a quay with the expectations that other ships will want to load and unload.  A quay has a large flat area where hundreds of tons of goods can be temporarily stored as it comes off a ship or is put on ... and these goods can be sold on the quay, removing the need for the players to drag it into an actual market.  Buying on the quay usually requires guild membership and the permission to buy specific goods as they roll into port.  In the meantime, the quay has guards that can be hired to protect goods that can be left in place for a day or two before it's moved off the quay into town, or onto a ship ... and these guards are bonded, so that loss of the goods would fall to the bondsman and not the owner.  Again, this is a benefit for those who have guild standing.

Quays are public features, so individuals cannot build structures upon them.  However, quays do include storehouses, and these are also for hire.

Storehouse.  Again, we must make a distinction between "stores" and "wares," and which kind of house is build to preserve them.  For the record, stores can be stored in warehouses, and wares can be stored in storehouses, but this doesn't make wares stores nor stores wares.  I want to be clear.  "Stores" are quanties or supplies of things that are kept for the day when they are needed — either for maintenance or during a crisis.  Empty water barrels are stored so they can be filled and rolled aboard ship when needed.  Ropes, nets, masts, planks, mortar, canvas, shot, tools and so on are kept for when these things are needed in repair.  Sand is kept in case of fire.  Food can be stored in a storehouse, but usually this is kept in "garners" or "granaries," which we earlier designated as places to store foods.  Storehouses tend to contain non-edible dry goods.

"Wares," on the other hand, are items that are specifically stowed away until they're sold.  That is, any sort of manufacture or valuable commodity, things that don't accumulate sufficiently until a hex accumulates 3 hammers.  Thus, not appearing on our list yet.

Storehouses tend to be smallish and narrow, about 12 by 20 ft., and 8 ft. high ... with multiple storehouses standing in a line on larger wharves.  Incidentally, this is the length of a standard modern shipping container and about 45% wider.  If there are multiple storehouses, each will house specific collections of items.  Storehouses tend to be half-timbered, with a six-foot high 6 in. deep mortared wall with a wooden framed rafters and roof.  A little pitch saturated as much as possible with sand can be spread atop a roof and won't burn easily, but some places will use green wood for the roofs, replacing them seasonally; still, the stuff inside a storehouse is potentially quite flammable.  On the whole, storehouses aren't locked (locks actually being quite rare even as late as the 17th century, and non-existent as late as the 15th) or even guarded ... but quays are often in some kind of service day and night, so there are plenty of torches and lanterns burning, not to mention local dockworkers and gangers (supervisors) around to notice a door being opened.  Plus there's not much inside to steal, as it's either heavy, takes time to find amidst the tangle or is quite cheap to buy.

Warehouses, on the other hand, include guards both inside and outside, have two floors, have no windows (which seems to confuse players who want a way to break in) and are often packed in such a way that even if a group were to get inside and kill the guards, it would take half an hour to find the "key stone" box before the goods can be wedged out of place and shifted out the door.  And, once again, people constantly moving about the docks.  Warehouses are typically twenty ft. square, 16 ft. high, and built in blocks of two — with "streets" between them and plenty of stored water in case of fire.  Warehouses are often separated from the water by 40 to 60 ft., which although makes it a longer distance to carry, helps serve as a firebreak in case either the ships or the warehouses catch fire.  Warehouses with copper fireproof roofs may appear in type-1 hexes; those are the ones to steal from, if a party gets ambitious.

Seems enough for now.

Worldbuilding 5f: Cemeteries, Gallows & Guardposts

Sorry to plow straight into this subject again, but really, there's no good time to discuss it.

Returning briefly to our earlier discussion of the dead, a hamlet designates a small area, most likely out of the way and high above the waterline (as learned from experience), as "gravesites" for their ancestors.  If the bodies are meant to be left out there in perpetuity, then likely they'll be grouped according to family and then clan.  On the other hand, many cultures would bury a body in a manner that let the earth reclaim the flesh and leave the bones. 

Such burials included a "marker" so the descendents could find the bones again, clean them and store them elsewhere ... and as in the picture, these bones weren't necessarily laid out so as to distinguish one person from another.  In some cultures, that didn't matter.

For the purposes of cultural development of villages over hamlets, I'm granting crypts, cemeteries and catacombs equal status.  A cave will serve as a crypt; several caves make a catacomb.  It really depends on how long the village has been around ... some villages have existed for thousands of years, reaching back into the time of Rameses.  I'm suggesting, then, that a hamlet leaves its buried bodies in the ground, scattered in groupings on a hillside, or in a glade; and that a more sophisticated approach carefully preserves the bones in a dry place, or defines a piece of land rigidly as a cemetery — deciding who and who cannot be buried there.  Obviously, the local priest decides, as the matter of burial is left to the professionals.

Now, long ago I proposed that a body not given a proper burial — presumedly as the clerical ability and in the appropriate place — would rise as the undead.  I'd like to amend that for the sake of the model I'm building.  To maintain the body in a state of grace after death, it must be buried according to some procedure, not necessarily provided by a classed cleric (the sage ability is sufficient).  To rise as undead, the individual must have spent a "questionable" life.  That would describe any and all player characters who have brought about the death of intelligent beings, for the record.  Most living persons wouldn't qualify, having been rather weak, cowardly, gentle persons who spent their lives farming and, in many cases, died too young from disease or in childbirth.  Still, there's an argument to be made that it's easier to raise undead from a disorganized gravesite than it is from a church-organised cemetery or crypt.  That is, unless the crypt is especially organized to house the bones of criminals, blasphemers and the like.  That kind of crypt would be a very, very easy place to raise undead from ... and the criminals must be buried and re-buried somewhere.

Just one last foreshadow on this subject; there is such a thing as a "necropolis."  This is literally a "city of the dead," where so many bodies are buried that all living persons have abandoned the area.  Necropoli have been built specifically in desolate areas, or upon destroyed cities that were never rebuilt, waiting there to be found by a group of hardy adventurers.  The only reason I bring it up is because these, too, must exist somehow due to an infrastructure number — i.e., a number of hammers.  Since hammers accumulate in very populated areas, and necropoli don't, I haven't quite figured this out.  I suppose some kind of designated hitter — er, populated area — will define an existing necropolis such and such a distance away.

Let's put down the dead and move onto the not-quite-dead-but-soon-to-be-made-so: the gallows.  This is a convenient word to describe a collection of articles, not always ending in death ... for example, the gibbet, the breaking wheel, the flogging post, the burning post (you know, for witches), the block for chopping heads and the ordinary, far-less-lethal village stocks.  These items take the place of rational, reasonable jurisprudence ... and which particular object depends upon the area's culture, religion, climate, degree of education and year-to-year level of violence.  The more war a culture experiences, the more likely the repercussions for stealing a chicken will have a more ... mm, final solution than we might find in quaint quiet backwaters, particularly in colder climes when having another set of hands to cut wood makes a people more forgiving.  In southern climes, where you can get through the winter on no wood at all, people seem to be more ... dispensable.

There are other reasons harsh punishments were popular.  The Spanish occupying the Netherlands had a considerable hate on for their subjects, and thus the breaking wheel was a popular choice.  A patrol could happen by, grab an accused seditionist, drag him or her to the nearest wheel laying on the ground — and once the victim's arms and legs were broken, the patrol could hoist the sufferer into the air and leave him ... and damned would be anyone who dared bring him or her down.  These were harsh times.

This seems an odd "facility," but it nevertheless serves a purpose.  The maintenance of law and order is central to civilisation, and as we collect people together there is a greater need for it.  On the other hand, law courts and lawyers are in rare supply in large hamlets and tiny villages, so we must turn to other means ... and as a matter of policy, the locals are given to understand the exact circumstances under which each kind of available device can be used — for example, what's appropriate for stealing a chicken.

It does well for players to see the device and learn precisely what gets them there ... because if the whole town decides the right circumstances have occurred, ALL of them will help.  For one thing, it makes a different kind of Sunday, and anything different is good.  For another, the best way to soothe one's conscience after a trial in the village stocks is to watch someone else get theirs.  Call it motivation.

Plus there's always the possibility someone is getting theirs as the players arrive.  There would be one person in the village, an executioner ... only no one knows for certain who he or she is, as a hood is worn for that purpose and the executioner never speaks.

Another thing that can turn up in a large hamlet is the guardpost, which is essentially a hovel and a raised platform, from which a single guard can look down and see that all is right.  The guard is the final word on disturbing the peace and breaking the law, just like an old west sheriff ... but in this case the guard isn't a "shire reeve" — that's actually a different post.  In this case, the guard is a simple constable; there to keep the peace, settle disputes and forward any serious infractions of the law to the local elders and priest of the temple, if the place is large enough.  In a type-5 hex with two hammers, it isn't; but in a type-4 with a village, yes, there's a temple.  The compass of authority in the town is the constable, who is the eyes and ears of the elders, who turn to the priest for advice.  If a matter turns out to be something not local, the local squire might be consulted, and word sent to the nearest noble to send a troop, who then move in unilaterally to deal with it.  Such cases include widespread heresy or an uprising ... including a refusal to pay taxes.  Otherwise, not much can occur to get outsiders involved.

Should the players make a pest of themselves, likely they'd be gone before a troop could arrive.  As such, members of the town will join in and help the constable.  Rest assured, it won't be the film High Noon.  The locals aren't soft.  Many of them have joined together to rid the village of wolves and other vermin, participated in hard brutal sports such as wrestling, fisticuffs and tossing heavy objects ... and participated in honour killings as well, not to mention the foregoing executioner.  Add to this a few who have gone abroad, seen battle and come back.  It's a bone of contention with me, where players assume rural folk are weak, 2 h.p.-bearing easily killable wimps, but the idea is just the sort invented by suburban mamma's boys without rural relatives to visit.  Country people in my youth were hard; and were nothing compared to their fathers and grandfathers, who grew up on farms without electricity or tractors.  A 14th to 17th century farmer, especially in honour-cultures like the Irish, the Scots, the Slavs or the Italians, would have given a 4th level PC as good as he or she could take.  It's a misnomer to assume these people can't fight, have no experience, next to no skills and therefore a dearth of hit points.  That's the ignorance of someone who grew up in a pretty house with sidewalks, thinking the whole world is paved or covered in mowed grass.

Well, I've got a long way to go.  We'll take these three at a time I suppose.

We're Not Just Mustard Farming Now

Just dropping a quick post this evening, as I've spent some time creating an establishing page on my wiki.  There are too many things now for me to keep track in my head — thus the need to build this table:

Sorry about the colour, but every reference on this table ultimately needs its own page, so the text is in wiki-links' red.  The page gives an explanation for how the table above works.  With my next post, I expect, I'll be addressing a number of facilities mentioned here, merely expanding my earlier notes with some things.

It should be obvious from the above that just with the bare bones of a game world that gets no more complicated than a rustic village, we have 32 spaces and settings — though some of these are merely different forms of the same thing, such as a gravesite and a cemetery, or mills for cloth vs. mills for grain.  Still, we've merely scratched the surface.  More hammers and more civilised hexes are sure to drown us in possibilities ... I can't say entirely that I look forward to creating a wiki page for each and every one of these, specifically discussing how they work and why they should matter to a player.

Speaking for myself, I'm finding this progress very promising and beneficial.  I'm most pleased that I finally have a template on which to establish the game world's structural layout on both a rural and urban level.