Using the Wilderness

In the dim hours of the morning, kimbo left a comment on yesterday's wilderness point-crawl post, one that has me thinking - specifically about this part:

"To find water, shelter, food for survival. Find a place (a path for an army to advance or bandit stronghold) or a thing (resources for exploitation), find someone or hide/escape. To get through it as fast, discreetly, safely as possible. To acclimatize or learn how to live in that environment. To hunt/trap to earn cash. To establish contact/trust with a group for trade, information or alliance."

I found this prescient, as I had just been working on road development for culture connected with tech-6 in which Wikipedia used the phrase, "communications, trade and governance . . ."  This is not so much coincidence as a firm grip on the principal issues involved.

I'd like to try and discuss kimbo's points one by one, as he's helped clarify some of my thinking on this.

Passing Through

As fast, discreetly, safely as possible.  I think this lends credence to that bugbear that's been hanging over me since 2011, what I've called wilderness damage.  This is a concept that I've smacked my head against on several occasions (last month in fact) only to find myself overwhelmed by the various elements of trying to track the proper amount of damage suffered by individual party members due to terrain, weather, habit, personal equipment carried and so on.  It is the last that proves the most difficult, as in truth each character has to be tracked separately based upon their decisions and level of response to the wilderness.  In structure this gets to be more and more like the problem of managing encumbrance, something very logical but which no player wants to deal with because of the bookkeeping involved.

My players told me frankly last session that they'd be happy to include encumbrance as part of the campaign experience IF it meant no bookkeeping.  They don't mind being slowed down or having a limit to how much they can carry - they DO mind having to track it from moment to moment.  But if I want to make an automated system that will track it for them, they're good with it.

Unfortunately for me, I have more than 1500 items that can be purchased and carried by players - and while I could limit the measured items to just a few (so that the odder stuff counts as 'no weight'), I'm a purist and that makes no sense to me.  The same thing is true with wilderness damage.  I keep thinking that if I don't take into account ALL the possibilities, then I can count on my players finding ways to circumvent any system I build.

I know the answer is to sit down with excel for a month or so and painstaking program a system for either wilderness damage or encumbrance (it could be done!), but I feel a sense of ennui every time I think of it.

I don't know how that die got in there;
they're just laying all over the place.

Still, the wilderness is dangerous - and not just when monsters are around.  If I ask the reader to limit equipment to what would be available for a post-Medieval culture and then send them off into a wild part of Oregon or the Black Forest without any expectation of meeting people/finding services at all, expecting that a good distance is covered, then it will take about a day to get injured to the point where something is bleeding, something is bruised or something is sprained or fractured.  There are dozens of ways in which the wilderness lies in wait to get us - and I know this because books about survival in the wilderness are page heavy and dense in content about all the ways we can die.  The book on the right only covers mountaineering.  There are countless other books that will describe our possible deaths from skiing and snowboarding, scuba diving, surfing, caving or ever being stupid enough to set foot on a boat.  Let's face it - the wilderness is dangerous.

Here's the first point, then: the wilderness is like a huge, natural trap.  It helps to think of a day's journey as walking along a dungeon hallway containing a trap: someone is going to get injured and take damage, possibly everyone.  We should accept that - so that when we think of going off road and into the wilderness, we should also be thinking, "How much damage can we afford to take today?"

Meaning that every other activity in the wilderness is obtained by spending hit points.  That's a little different from a dungeon, where a thief has a chance to see the trap coming.  In the wild, while the ranger might see said trap, chances are the mage, the cleric or the bard won't.  And since the wilderness isn't built out of comfortable, defined and stone-built lines, it's really easy for a character to think, "Oh, I'll just go the other way around this tree."

Treasure

To hunt/trap to earn cash.  This is generally overlooked, as the wilderness is seen or presented as just a big pile of nothing.  But this isn't true - players just don't think of all that wood standing around in the forest as being valuable because cutting it down and dragging it to market doesn't produce experience points.  Yet players will conscientiously skin a ferret-monster if it will yield 60 g.p. while standing amidst a million g.p. of untouched, uncrowned virgin forest beyond the Keep on the Borderlands with nary a thought.

Because players don't think in those terms; having to cut down all those trees and make coin out of it seems less like adventure and more like their day jobs.  It is sort of funny, however, that the resistance many of us feel towards being self-employed (gawd, I have to organize everything?) keeps the players from doing the same in game when all they have to do is speak the words and write down a few notes.

So putting aside traditional pursuits to gain wealth in the wilderness (starting a mine, running herds over rich green meadows, gathering fish in nets, etcetera), suppose we simply deal with the one 'earn cash' method that does appeal to players: finding the dungeon.

It's always assumed that the dungeon, when it is out there, is easy to find.  I'm as guilty as anyone as I too have grown up on concepts like The Caves of Chaos where obviously every resident of the keep knows where the caves are: "Here, let's go up onto the north wall, I'll point them out to you."  We treat the various dungeons of the game like Disneyland; it's surprising the local town doesn't have a brochure or a local shop where curios from the Caves can be bought cheap.  "Ah, this is a nice piece; a paladin brought this back after a fighter in his party had his head cleaved off by an ogre's axe - see, you can see the tear in the leather armor where the axe hit."  And so on.

Having to actually stumble around in the wilderness for days, even weeks, to find something that doesn't have a tour guide telling you about the place before you get there seems grossly unfair.  Find a dungeon on your own?  One the town doesn't know about?  Nonsense!

Yet it seems to me that players ought to accept a bad week of stumbling over tree roots, slipping off ledges and being carried down raging torrents before lucking out and finding a hole about four feet in diameter under a bush that leads them into an underground wonder.  This is just me.

Escaping

Hide/escape.  I must confess, I've never had anyone in my world propose rushing into the wilderness in order to escape pursuit.  But then, I haven't chased anyone out of town in a very long time.  Either the locals decide someone needs to die - and then in a very un-Hollywood way fail to give warning that it's about to happen by having hundreds of people stand in the street and give speeches - in which case the character is ordering a beer and gets a knife in the back instead; or the player characters are asked politely to leave.  In which case, they use the road.

My players tend to figure out almost immediately that they've done something wrong - just from knowing the difference between right and wrong.  Thus they usually think, "Wow, we just killed that guy without knowing who he is; maybe we should leave now."  Rarely are my players all, "Why, what did we do?" where it comes to having committed some atrocity that is likely to get them vilified by the locals.  I used to have players like that - but this isn't high school any more.

I think it might be fun to have the players escape into a desert or a forest.  Knowing what my players know, however, they'd have to be really desperate.

Finding Things

This is much more likely.

To find water, shelter, food for survival. Find a place (a path for an army to advance or bandit stronghold) or a thing (resources for exploitation), find someone.  This is much more likely.  I've already mentioned finding dungeons - but this is more of a McGuffin idea, where the one guy has to be located so that the next part of the campaign arc can be attempted.  About a year ago my players decided to slaughter a kobald village, just 'cause.  No problem.  They'd stumbled across the village on the way to the dungeon so they knew where it was.

I spent some of last night organizing the Scouting ability set for rangers - leaving some of the work undone because I find I'm spending too much time trying to hammer down every last detail.  I'm beginning to think the sage process needs some streamlining if I'm ever to finish it - meaning that some of the actual rules will need to be devised in game, where I can apply to the players for aid in deciding what the details should be.  Remember, always ask for help.

I'm hoping that sage abilities like scouting can enable players to survive in a very dangerous wilderness or locate water, shelter and food in a logical, in-game/setting driven manner without my needing to be in the loop as a DM.  I always prefer a random die roll based on a logical probability for deciding these things than by simply declaring that yes, there's a water hole or no, there isn't.  Then if the players have to find something or somebody, the actual distance is established by that thing or person being in a place that is obvious enough that the players can look at a map and decide the probabilities for themselves: "Ah, this hex between two highlands would probably be the best route for a clan or tribe in pursuing game, I bet if we venture towards it we'll find a trail that will lead us to a sizeable camp."

I know that most games have zero concept of this sort of thinking.  Most games absolutely need a Zeke to stand at the entrance, greet the players, go through the tourist schtick and wrap it up by reminding the players that keepsakes can be found at the gift shop.  As a DM I'm fairly tired of that method.  I use it occasionally, I always hate it and I always love it when the players circumvent me by getting their own ideas about things - which they will do only if they're encouraged to have ideas.

Yes, this will mean making mistakes and going to the wrong hex and then having to figure out they're in the wrong hex, spending an extra running climbing up the side of a mountain that leads to nothing except perhaps the view of another similarly possible mountain that might also be the mountain they're not looking for.  Yet this is how adventuring actually plays out.

Lewis & Clark never, ever had to back track.  Zeke told
them the way.

Getting Used to It

To acclimatize or learn how to live in that environment.  This is only possible if a party stays in the same place.  Abilities like scouting can help with generally living in a type of environment, of course, but to acclimatize to a particular wild the adventurers have to actually get to know the place through repeated journeying through the countryside until the rocks, creeks, hollows and heights become familiar.  As long as the players insist on adventuring somewhere new, they forsake the potential for calling a particular hinterland 'home.'

This is fine for most campaigns.  Unfortunately for me, though my players do tend to roost eventually (they're rewarded for it), they never think about learning to live in the hinterland.  Once they own their land their characters share the urban-mindset that the players have, since everyone I run has grown up in a big city.  Sure, the country is out there, it is good for camping . . . but even if they learn where the hollows and heights are, what are they going to do with that knowledge?  They just don't know.

Lack of imagination, I suppose.  They could use that back country the way Robin did, running into it and hiding while the Normans take wilderness damage until they have to retreat before finding themselves weakened to where a group of green-dressed peasants can take them.  However, players never seem to want to be Robin Hood in my campaigns, sitting out in the woods and the rain.  They'd rather be the Sheriff of Snotengaham . . . er, Nottingham.

Wilderness Grit

Dungeons are easy to describe.  They are built of straight lines, defined pathways, ceilings that are such and such a height and features that are substantially made.  Even natural caves have a 'constructed' feel, in that they are hollowed out of rock by a clear, understandable force.  When setting out to draw a map of a dungeon, those dark black lines defining the walls are reassuring, easily limited sets of choices for the players to make.

Compare this to the map of a forest.  It is easy enough to fill in a large hexagonal field with trees - but what does that really define, where player movement is concerned?  In dungeons, the players move in a straight line.  Dungeons are broken up by doors that require decisions.  Things differ from one room to the next.  But the forest is just . . . a forest.  Tree followed by repeated, dull, never-ending tree.

It is this lack of boundaries that makes the wilderness harder to run than the dungeon.  What does one do with the players?  We can't just describe the trees.  If the party finds a brook or an outcropping of rock, so what?  How can stumbling across a large, dead log compare to stumbling into an underground shrine or treasure vault?  We can describe the forest, fill it with descriptions of dry, ponderosa pine trees, their branches thin and scrawny for lack of rain.  We can describe a forest floor with wild blueberries, roses and hazelnut bushes.  We can describe the leaves as sounding like walking on cornflakes.  We can describe a carpet of pine needles a foot thick or an undergrowth that confounds movement like a choking mass.  We can make the players feel like they're in a forest - but that alone doesn't make for adventure.

That is why many DMs resort to reducing the wilderness to a point-crawl, in effect reducing the wilderness to a dungeon.  See, dungeons are simple to understand.  Dungeons are theatrical; all the action can take place on a defined stage, where all the players are contained in a very small space and are thus immediately accessible to one another - and to the events of the performance.  The space between dungeon rooms is immediate, explicit, limited in scope.  If a point-crawl can reduce the scattered, difficult to manage spread of the wilderness to something that can be shrunk to the size of an arena, then excellent, nyet?

Yet, for those who have tried this tactic arises the question: why not just run dungeons?  Why not reduce the wilderness one more degree to where it is a measurement of time between town and the dungeon's front door?

I have struggled against this option from the beginning of my gaming.  I feel intrinsically that the wilderness should be different - and I have written in that regard many times.

Recently, however, I've been working on this series of posts regarding primitive clans and that has highlighted the problem.  Perhaps the point-crawl - if there has to be one - could be more 'gritty.'  By getting a firm handle on what should be in that wilderness (more than just the features and the vegetation but the ground-level adjustments put there by humanoids as improvements, the business of wilderness travel could have a bit more guts to it than just finding things.

Part of what makes a dungeon so interesting is that features are clues that lead to puzzling out a mystery of what the dungeon represents and who (or what) is at the heart of it.  The wilderness has to include that same reasoning, making it possible for players to wonder who camps at this campsite, what these images mean on the walls of the cave and where does this trail go.

I feel I am onto something - and perhaps it will reveal itself a bit more when I move into the technical qualities associated with tech-6.

Tools, Treasure and Improvements in Tech 5 Culture

I'd like to finish my description of primitive culture, or tech-5, with this post.  I have three things to talk about: tools, treasure and improvements.

Tools & Treasure

Several members of the clan will carry a stone blade for cutting and general purpose work.  This won't be as sharp or as balanced as a dagger and probably half its length, so think of it as 1d3 for damage.  The primary weapon for most warriors will be either a spear with a stone head, flint axes or stone hammers, neither of which will be good for throwing (they will do full damage for these weapons, however).  Spears and javelins will be rare in desert cultures but there will be enough wood to make effective flint axes.  No one in the tribe will be armored in any way, including a lack of shields.

The density of population in these areas is so low (and most dangerous beasts as well) that there's no practical value in carrying a shield for months on end with the chance it might be used.  Even if armor could be made of leather, the same argument carries.  These are not peoples who gather together for the purpose of war; even interpersonal conflict is rare, usually occurring only when individual clans of separate tribes may chance to dispute over a campsite (more about that in a minute).

Certain persons in the clan would carry certain tools that would double as treasure (the weapons above would also be treasure of a sort).  This would include a steel and flint, drums, the clan's standard (which might be ransomed to the rest of the tribe or to any survivors), found mushrooms and any boats for fishing that may exist.  Beyond this, most of the tribe will carry a zahato, also called a bota bag or goatskin bottle (similar to a wineskin), the nozzle of which will be made from horn.  Some may carry hatchets made of bone (for cutting soft wood) or bone scoops used for digging.

The value of these things will be unremarkable.  A more valuable treasure will include the fur or buckskin that every member of the clan wears (desert clans will wear fleece gathered from killing wild sheep or goats), which will have some value when sold in bulk.  Some members of the tribe will carry gold, silver or copper nuggets, gathered from rivers (placer deposits) and sometimes beaten flat into rough jewelry.  As superstition and mysticism are central religious ideas, as mentioned by kimbo on another post, there would be a number of pieces that would be traded or possessed for purposes of enhancing one's social status or prestige.  This might be small idols shaped like people and animals, rattles, flutes made of bone (not especially musical), carved disks, attactive stones, crude cups, parts of animals (teeth, patches of hair, pieces of horn) and fairly anything else that might be imagined.  Most of these things would have moderate value if sold in the nearest market - but some would be very valuable to a collector in a part of the world far from where such objects could be found (said collectors would reside in places of exceptional tech level, where universities would be located).

Improvements

An 'improvement' is a permanent change on the wilderness wrought by the culture and there wouldn't be many of these.  However, as the clans would follow along behind wild herds or denude the immediate area of forage, there would be pressure to move from place to place, seasonally or sometimes over a period of years.

Certain tribes, made of a half a dozen clans or more, would occupy vast areas of the region and would travel over the same ground year after year, generation after generation.  As a result, a series of regularly used campsites would be used by these clans, sometimes once a year and sometimes only in years where usual food supplies were thin.  As the clan members do not herd or ride animals, nor employ vehicles, the only necessary path connecting these campsites would be a narrow trail.  As a trail like this would only be cleared at the convenience of the clan passing through, it may be difficult - even for a ranger - to follow the trail if individuals were unfamiliar with it.

In deserts, the 'trail' would be a series of recognized features in the distance or 'boundaries' made by the edges of stone or sand fields that must be circumnavigated to reach the next oasis or well.  A stranger that did not know yon pile of rocks was the best way towards a water source could wander in a desert until death while unknowing that life was a mere two miles to the right or widdershins.  Thus the importance of obtaining a pathfinder (possibly from a clan) who would know the way to go.  Such 'obtaining' might prove interesting when dealing with a close-knit culture that doesn't use or appreciate traditional wealth.

These routes or trails would be important improvements for these peoples.  The campsites above would be tailored year after year until they were quite comfortable.  Crude wells (little more than deep holes dug in soft earth, subject to regular collapse) and ditches would be redug, certain familiar trees used for building larger shelters for long stays and last year's growth would be cut down and cleared away to make a safe, open site.  Pits would be built of stones for fires and there would be existing tree stumps, logs and stones that would be used for sitting and work by a dozen generations.  The camps themselves would be picked for their defensive value, so that one side of the camp might be a defensive outcropping of rock, the edge of a cliff, a waterfall and pond (with fish!), a loop of river or a mound giving a good view of the surrounding distance.  Large flat stones may be employed (and improved over time) as slaughtering tables, tanning or speaking podiums for when whole tribes gather.

Each camp would have a feel of 'coming home' for the clan.  Each would be different in its own way - small and cramped or expansive and convenient for two or three tribes.  Where a 'settlement' appears on one of my maps, the 'campsite' is so convenient and practical that there is almost always a few clans spread within a dozen yards of one another.  This is an opportunity for boys and girls to meet (allowing crossbreeding between clans), share fetish articles and other treasure, trade for a better knife, compete in games of some kind, access the rare shamans and elect new tribal leaders.

Some camps would encourage some clan members with artistic skill to carve art into the stone or carefully paint stones protected by caves.  These artworks would develop a sort of fetishism of their own, so that specific campsites might be travelled to specifically to see these works - in the way of a primitive pilgrimage.

A party might come across one of these campsites - empty - and wait for months before a single clan showed up (though a clan might appear the next day, too).  If a clan has just left such, the locale will be denude of all forage and the hunting extremely poor - even a high level ranger will be hard put to come up with so much as a hare.  The food has simply been eaten, the herds driven further upstream or downstream by regular hunting.  The 'dead spot' may be as wide as ten or twenty miles, depending on the size of the clan and how long they remained in the area - remember, these clans would know perfectly well the location of every berry patch, every beehive, every nest, every good fishing pond and so on.

I think this experiment has been useful.  I have some ideas for posts in the immediate future that might prove valuable for most readers in helping describe for their players environments such as these mentioned above.

Clan Members

For those not following along, I'm writing a series of posts about clan members in a low tech culture, one where agriculture and even herding hasn't been developed.  This describes certain parts of my D&D world that are extraordinarily backward, on the fringes of civilization (see this map for areas colored in green).

In recent posts I've described some skills that the clan members would possess, enabling their survival and serving as a framework for sorting out duties for each.  I posited a clan of 30 persons, women and men, plus 4 unspecified children.  Below, I'll describe who each of these are (with as little doubling up in skills/roles as possible):

• Chief, the leader and the one who knows best what path to take from place to place; in most ways he would be the best forager and hunter.  He would also be the best pathfinder and best at finding shelter.
• Sub-chief, a quality warrior and leader of the hunting party or alternatively the member that would remain behind when the chief was gone for days on a hunt.
• Shaman, described here.  I'll assume that this is a moderately unusual clan and that it is lucky enough to have the tribal shaman travelling along with it.
• Standard bearer, a young and relatively ineffective warrior with combat experience and enough resolve to stand up if fighting starts.  Serves as a forager when the clan is not on the move.
• Mushroom hunter, the best judge of whether or not a mushroom is safe to eat and where mushrooms may be found; not a desert skill, so let's assume a clan in a boreal forest.
• Keepers of the flint (x2), two warriors who keep the flint & steel necessary to start fires.  One of these two may be able to make fire without tools.  One of these would join the hunting party.
• Old Dog (x2), old warriors (older than 50) best able to lead others back to the clan if they get lost, particularly if going out of sight of land due to weather when boat fishing (sea dog).  There could be three or four of these, but we'll say two.  One of them would likely join the hunting party.
• Watcher, a warrior, the most wary of the clan, the best able to avoid encounters with danger; this member would be solitary, keeping his attention (and ears) on potential threats to the clan.
• Clan drummer, a skilled worker, the most skilled with the drum, there to pass messages between different parts of the clan.

This leaves 19 unaccounted for.  Be sure that as I'm writing this I'm making every effort not to impose any classification where men may be better for a particular job than women.  We know this is usually the case in primitive cultures but I have no wish to perpetrate a requirement there - who says that hobgoblin women can't be more warlike and aggressive than hobgoblin men?  In any case, I leave this problem up to the reader.

4 persons of the 19 would be caretakers for the children, not limited to strictly babysitting but limited to practices like foraging or making things.  We can presume that these four - and the children - would always be within thirty yards of the camp or in the midst of the clan when on the move.

A little over half the remainder - 8 persons - would be primarily foragers or hunters.  We've already counted three persons in the above as members of the hunting party, so we might round out the hunters by granting them 1-3 warriors from the 8 described above.  The remaining foragers would be skilled workers, no more - where practical, most would probably be fishers.

Of the 7 persons left, probably 1 or 2 of them would be old or infirmed and unable to perform work.  They would be just active enough to take care of themselves, walk when the clan moves and find a little food on their own to add to the scant leavings they'd be able to get from the foragers (the rest of the clan would get first pick of the food that was found and the infirm would probably be the last to eat from the supply).  The infirm would likely live from successful hunt to successful hunt, creating its own health problems (too much meat) which their older or infirm systems may not digest well.  Let's say that our clan has 2 such individuals.

The 5 remaining members would be workers.  These would shape and repair tools and hammers, make clothes, tents, drums and nets, hammer together boats, carve fetish objects and generally improve the campsite area by digging out wells, gathering wood, building shelters, grinding down stones and performing most of the daily work-chores like cooking, cleaning and preserving food, creating paints, searching for lost children and so on.  Some of these things I haven't spoken about at all but I'll get to them.

This accounts for everyone.  If the party ran across this clan at a given time of the day, chances are that they would either:

• Be heard by the watcher and walk past the clan without seeing anyone, unless they stumbled across the actual campsite.
• Encounter the foragers, perhaps while fishing, with the chief or sub-chief in the vicinity, along with one keeper of the flint and an old dog.
• Encounter the hunting party, all warriors.
• Stumble into the mushroom hunter, an infirmed or the shaman, moving alone through the area.
• Find the campsite with only the caretakers and children present
• Find the campsite with caretakers, workers and children present.
• Find the campsite with caretakers, foragers, workers and children present.
• Find the campsite with everyone present.

The clan drummer or the watcher could be found in any of the above situations, alone or acting with others, most likely as foragers or hunters.

This list, at least, is useful for the campaign.  That's something.

Shamanism

I stumbled across the idea for shamanism a little more than a year ago when working on sage abilities associated with mushrooms and fungi (before I started putting these on the wiki).  Since, the idea of wild magic practitioners has been in the back of my mind . . . and lately it's obvious that for lower tech levels, I need a sort of clericish fighter (not multi-classed) that can fulfill the important role as clan-leader.

My original proposition was that a shaman could 'connect' with the subtle magical world (without spell-use) through the hallucinogenic effect of mushrooms:

". . . from hunted mushrooms, [the druid can] produce a powerful, chewable ball that will grant both hallucinogenic effects and the ability to see into the ethereal plain and speak with intelligent creatures there.  The practice requires the employment of a drum, rattle, gong or pipe, as well as a brief period of dancing and singing (10 rounds) following a hour of meditation.  Once accomplished, the druid is able to speak directly to a companion that has recently died but remains within the time span of being raised from the dead (a period of no more than 29 days).  The shaman may also ensure fertility in a woman for a period of one day or relieve a curse for the space of one week (without permanent effects) . . . Shamanism may not be practiced more than once per week and will drain 10% of the druid's maximum hit points."

I think in principal this still works, hallucinogenic included.  I think it might be expanded to include a wide range of hallucinogenic effects, including starvation, isolation, substances other than mushrooms, near-death experiences and anything else that might disrupt the traditional working of the mind.  Actual power gained would be limited in a number of ways.  Any effect that resembled a spell or cantrip would, by definition, be impossible through shamanism.  And I would like a precedent from some existing cultural tradition (the 'powers' I describe above - pregnancy and curses - have holistic traditions) associated with practiced shamanism.  I think it is all bunk, of course - but it is an important part of human development and if we are going to accept the existence of magic, I can make room for shamans in my world actually being able to do the things they promise.

On the fungi page linked, I defined shamanism as an expert-level sage ability.  That's higher than any of the other abilities I associated with tech-5.  I think this means that most clans would not possess a shaman - we might suppose that such an individual would be present at the tribal level (several clans together make a 'tribe', as clans get together at specific places and times to share knowledge, materials and mating practices).   It still means that the shaman would have to be part of one of those clans when they weren't actually meeting as a tribe.

We could define the chance of a shaman as 40 minus a d8 - and if the result is equal to or less than the number in the clan, it defines the clan as large enough to protect the shaman.  From there, we might propose a 1 in 2 chance that this clan, and not another large one in the tribe, actually has the shaman this year.

I feel once again I need to make a point about the practicality of defining a clan of persons to this degree.  After all, the party is just going to kill them all, nyet?  Yet I wonder if the party would be able to recognize that, after killing a random hobgoblin in the bush, that they would realized the individual was only collecting mushrooms for their clan.  If that hobgoblin turned up to have a flint and steel, would the players wonder how the remaining hobgoblins will light a fire that night?  Will the players look at the age of the hobgoblin and make a connection about this being the clan's best forager?  What if they find a drum - will they realize this poor dead fellow is also the clan's entertainer?  Will they feel bad about killing him?

I doubt it - particularly thinking of the semi-munchkins among my players.  They would probably enjoy the notion that the poor hobgoblin children will go to bed that night without the soft rattle of Uncle Ook's drum.  "Be good for them," they'd say.  "Toughen them kids up."

Nevetheless, I feel I'm on the edge of some discovery here - so we'll keep at it.  Even if it doesn't pan out today, I may have some epiphany five years from now and remember when I went through this experiment.

Distributing X.P. Among Clan Members

Rest assured, I'm coming back to the shaman and the clan.  I just want to take a little detour first.

On the tech 14 post, I included the table on the right.  Now I'm rethinking that table somewhat - not because there are too many levels at the high end but because the bottom end is light.  If I use the number as given, there's a high probability that my proposed clan of 25-40 persons won't have any levels in it at all.

That makes it boring for any party above third level.  What is perhaps a better way of doing it?

Way back in the day, I was playing with different kinds of leveled persons and seeking to develop a system that would tell me how much experience that persons of a given social status should have (to make a relation between age and level).  I imagined that individuals would draw up a certain number of experience per year.  Let's pull up the relevant table from that post and have a look at it:

old table, old colour scheme

Quoting from my old post,

An adherent would have the adequate skills to be leveled, without possessing extraordinary abilities; they would adhere to their class structure, serving as functionaries such as parish priests, city officials, laboratory workers and so on. A zealot would be an adherent who has adopted a particular political or religious calling. An adventurer would include persons who explore or who serve as freelancers. A celebrity, or hero, would be an adventurer who has had notable success. A title holder would include the nobility, or persons who have risen to the highest rank in their profession, such as admirals, bishops, marshals or guild masters. Finally, a liege would include masters of primary political divisions, of religious groups or class-based organizations.

Like most of the ideas I have, this one got shelved.  It isn't so much that it doesn't work, it's just that - like the clan experiment I'm playing with right now - it didn't consequentially add to the effectively describing my world in the actual game.  Still, it's sort of useful now, as I think I can adapt this to propose a different way of calculating out experience for each tech level.

Suppose I take the X.P. per year and multiply that by 0.2%, giving us this table:

new table, new color scheme.  numbers are rounded, so a zero indicated
may yet provide some experience over several years.

Then we can adjust the level form from titles designed for obviously higher tech levels and apply them to the sort of people that represent the clan.  Here's where I have to stretch somewhat, as I did not come up with these titles originally to apply them to very primitive cultures - so if the reader will forgive me, I'll drastically change some of the above.

The liege becomes the chief and title holders are shamans.  Celebrities and adventurers are those warriors in the tribe with varying commitment to wandering about on their own outside the immediate group.  The zealot becomes the aforementioned sea dog, the tribal drummer, the mushroom hunter and so on.  Adherents, then, are everyone else: the workers of the tribe.  I'll republish the table with the change in titles:

Better?

 

Obviously, no worker will ever reach second level.  Moreover, I've been holding back on a system idea I have for starting all untrained, inexperienced youths (age 14 and less) at -1500 x.p.  To get to be combat trained (something that affects morale) a non-level must obtain reach -1000 x.p. through combat or be rigorously trained by a fighter (a sage ability I haven't written/designed yet).  Individuals must gain that second thousand experience to reach 1st level (zero experience), where the players start their characters.

This means that in the above table, all the members of the clan would have to gain a base 1500 experience just to be leveled.  Since the maximum experience in a lifetime a worker would obtain on the table above would be 73 x.p., no worker can even be combat trained.

Our skilled worker (mushroom hunter) is limited to a lifetime maximum of 194 x.p..  Ordinary warriors are limited to 516 x.p.  The quality warriors could gain 1377 x.p., enough to make them combat experienced.  The shaman (who is a fighter, remember) could rise to 3,671 x.p. (making 1st level) and the chiefs are able to reach 9,789 x.p.  This just gets them to 4th level (subtracting 1500 x.p. off the bottom).

Of course, we could always play with these numbers, make them a central average, so that the young adult warrior could earn from 1-28 x.p. per year instead of 14.  This might enable 2nd level shamans, the occasional 1st level quality warrior and more combat trained ordinary warriors.  I'm working on a random table that would produce this sort of result.  Here are rolls for 10 quality warriors, 

And we could create some sort of random chance for a big bonus gain, so that we might actually get a combat trained worker, showing total x.p. based on their ages (with how much they earn at each age range for comparison):

Combat experienced warriors will have at least -1000 x.p.
Leveled characters will have 0 or more x.p.

The way I've designed it, being oldest doesn't necessarily mean the most experience.  H is 70 and yet has 674 x.p. less than E, who is a 1st level fighter.  Obviously, though, being younger than 26 is a serious handicap regarding experience.

I'm not entirely happy with the table above.  The original table concept from 2010 was based on the lowest level form getting 1 x.p. per day; perhaps that premise is too low for what I want to do with it now, and needs to be adjusted.  I'm good with the 1,500 x.p. needed for levelling; this has worked very well in play with my campaigners raising up followers and men-at-arms.

Anyway, just a bit to show where my head is.  I'll get back to the breakdown of the tech-5 clan with my next post.

T5: People & Abilities

I have no idea if anything listed below will actually become useful in my game.  At present, this post is going to apply more to the meta game - talking about D&D rather than designing it - than to my campaign.  Still, something might come of out of this . . .

I've been trying to get a better handle on tech 5 culture.  I would far rather be working on tech 9 or 10 culture, since that's where one of my parties is at the moment, but it's easier to start at the most primitive culture and work my way up, rather than try a stab at the middle.  As I progress through each tech, like I did with the descriptions I wrote for the blog, I can assemble more elements and features that help describe more precisely how that tech works.

The easiest way to express my thought process here might be to describe the tech-5 clan as a sort of anthropological experiment.  This is a single unit of 25-40 humanoids.  It might be humans, hobgoblins, gnolls, goblins - for this experiment it doesn't matter.  My purpose will be to break down the unit into its composite persons, skills, habits, effect on its environment and probable treasure.  Most every social aspect of tech-5 life will derive from this most common unit's normal daily life.

Demographics

To create the unit we should roll 5d4+20, giving us the range noted above.  Children, as I described on my tech 5 post, are discouraged - so our clan should include from 0-2 infants (age range 0-2), 1-2 children and 1-3 youths.  I'm defining the difference from 'child' to 'youth' in terms of their practically defending themselves, but if it makes the reader more comfortable, they might consider a 'child' someone between 3 and 7 and a 'youth' between 8 and 14.  I've been playing around with mortality rates of primitive cultures and I'm comfortable with the conclusion that more youths would be present than children due to the larger age range (7 years versus 5) and the likelihood that some youths might be collected from other clans defeated in battles or as foundlings (children being less likely to survive on their own).

As the reader can see, if I'm going to get this detailed about everything, then this is going to be a long post - or series of posts.

So, let's use convenient numbers near the average and say that our tribe has 34 members with 1 infant, 1 child and 2 youths.  This leaves 30 adult men and women.  I'm calling the ratio of males to females at 1.5:1 (there's an argument for this number but I'm not going into it now; the reader is free to do their own homework regarding primitive cultures) - so out of each 2.5 persons 1 will be female.  This makes 12 women and 18 men in our clan.

Incidental Skills

So what does each member of the clan do?  Well, I have a combination of my sage abilities and the actual tech levels to help break down that problem.  Let's start with skills or abilities that various members of the clan might have.  For no particular reason I'll start with incidental skills, those that won't define a specific 'role' that provides status.

These incidental skills include swimming, aiding rest, recognizing beasts and binding wounds - all of which I've covered on the wiki.   Although in my system characters gain these abilities through experience and levels, I've been careful not to define these things as dependent on level.  A 1st level character in my world begins with no experience and yet will have points in various sage abilities.  Therefore we can have ordinary persons who have no levels and yet have abilities. Obviously, these abilities are very limited at tech-5.

Not everyone in the clan will be able to swim.  The actual number will depend on how much water there is.  Desert dwellers will have no swimmers at all; a few may be able to paddle around in an oasis but chances are there'd be no reason to do so, since most lakes and oases in deserts are very shallow.  Infants and children who might swim naturally would forget the habit as they grew older.  On the other hand, in a boreal forest where crossing rivers or fishing is very common, as many as 1 in 4 persons may know how to swim.  Everyone would at least be able to keep their head above water well enough to be dragged across a watercourse without drowning (those who couldn't have already drowned).

Aiding rest would be something that was picked up by the more nurturing members of the clan, more probably women.  Binding wounds would be done with whatever came to hand - and arguably the members of a tech-5 tribe might be less susceptible to wounds (but I'm not going there for the game).  And recognizing beasts would be something people began to do as they got old.  Overall, the older a particular member of the clan was, the more likely they would be to have any of these skills.

Fighter Skills

Then we have a set of more defining sage abilities.  I've broken these down into their associated classes - but I wish to point out that the only 'class' that exists in a tech-5 system is fighter.   In every case for the below, the skill described is part of cross training, something that I've presciently had occur at random on my character background generator.

The most fighter-like of these abilities (beyond skills associated directly with the class, like proficiencies, strength, hit points, etc) includes standard bearing that I've described on the wiki and light fire - which I'm thinking deserves to be an amateur ability that fighters, paladins & rangers possess.  Hm, I may let druids light fires too.  Maybe.  It's harder than it sounds, requiring a flint, 'steel' and tinder - and we all know plenty of people who cannot start a fire with matches or a lighter.  I kind of like the idea of clerics, mages and bards having to wait for the fighter to get the fire started.

The standard being carried will likely be a very simple thing, but long enough for everyone to see.  It might be the dried carcass of an animal that proved hard to kill or the dress of a great warrior carried on a stick.  One person would be responsible for carrying this.  There might be only one or two flints and pieces of metal in the clan and specific persons would possess those.  Obviously, the flint and the steel would be treasure found on those bodies.

Druid Skills

Here are four skills that it would seem everyone might possess but which would, in fact, give one person or another a lot of status: detect land, mushroom hunt, locate self and locus infrastructure.

As tech-5 includes fishing, now and then a fishing boat will get out of sight of land - even if the participants would cling to land with all their might.  In such a case, those in the boat will depend most upon the 'sea dog' that possesses the greatest skill in getting them home.  I don't see the sea dog as a 'captain' - that would be too much infrastructure in the clan and it's likely that the chief might not even be out fishing when the danger arises.  Every skiff or boat, then, would have an eldest fisherman that acted as the group's sea dog.  There might be three or four of these in a clan and they'd all likely be older than 50.

The mushroom hunt depends on an individual being able to tell the difference between edible and dangerous mushrooms.  A clan may not even possess a member with this ability - but those clans that did would be better fed and probably bigger.  So we might say that the chance of such a person is 40 minus a d12 - if the result is equal to or less than the number in the clan, there is one person who possesses this skill.

Finally, the ability to locate self and identify the lay of the land is definitely a chieftain ability.  Robert Winston makes the point again and again in this series that the chieftain was the individual most able to locate food and lead the tribe; this makes knowing where one is in relation to things like the next probable camp or where we found food last near absolutely the province of the leader.  This is what makes a leader: knowing where we are.

Ranger Skills

I haven't even discussed these before - but this exercise is certainly helping me understand what a lot of those ought to be.  Some of these would also be possessed by the leader; but a few may be known by elders or by specific family heads (there would be about 5-10 groupings/families inside the clan, depending on the number).

Foraging - A substantial number would possess the ability to find vegetables, roots, fruits and nuts in the environment, by knowing where to dig, knowing what was poisonous and what the best source of food was (instinctive knowledge of calorie counts).  Most probably, this would be the five or six eldest members of the tribe.  The opening of this show is a good example, where a group of older women seem to be keeping a good find to themselves.  Foraging ability would double the amount of food normally found - or enable food to be found where inexperienced persons would starve.

Hunting differs from foraging in that it can produce no results for several days before yielding a great deal of food all at once - meat that must be eaten in a relatively short time or left to waste.  Where a clan relies heavily on hunting they can suffer from periods of starvation and an inadequate diet.  A select few from the tribe will be chosen as hunters and will be gone for days - these will typically be led by a sub-chief, or else the sub-chief will be left with the main group.

Pathfinding is a chieftain skill.  If the reader has ever found themselves in the bush and been forced to backtrack to find another route through, pathfinding would be the skill that made that less necessary in strange untracked areas - the person would just have a sense for which was the best way to go when attempting to cross a valley, desert or a river, climb, circumnavigate a feature, etcetera, in terms of distance travelled in a day.  We could call it an improved distance of 30% distance travelled over normal effort.

Sheltering chooses the best place to rest and avoid the elements.  It mitigates the effects of storms, lessens the chance of an encounter, locates the camp closer to fresh water, etc.  A person with this skill could tell from the lay of the land what the best place to shelter would probably be.  This is again a chieftain-type skill.

Make fire.  Different from light fire, this would be actually making the fire using dry tinder and friction.  One or two persons in the tribe would probably be able to do this.

Water discipline.  This is very important in desert cultures.  It is the skill of knowing when to drink in order to avoid dehydration; it is best to drink in steady amounts throughout the day and not waiting for thirst to force the person to drink.  This takes experience and skill and would probably be a chieftain skill, telling everyone in the tribe when to take a drink of water.  A few others may also have this skill.

Avoid encounter.  This might be a savant skill possessed by anyone in the tribe.  It is simply the ability to sense - by smell, detail or environmental features - that a particularly dangerous creature or monster may be in the vicinity.  This helps the clan avoid that creature.  The players may fit into this category, so that the avoid encounter ability would help the tribe avoid a confrontation with the party.

Bard Skills

Let me emphasize again that there are no bards, druids, rangers or clerics among the tech-5 clan we're describing.  Nevertheless, the creation of drums as instruments for the purpose of communication was common long before music became a thing, so I'm including it here.  I see drumming communication becoming a sage ability for bards, enabling signalling and communication between groups separated by distances up to 60-360 yards.  I know the movies like to make it distances of miles, but I don't see that working well for game purposes.  Perhaps I will figure out a way to measure the distance for different terrains and density of vegetation.

Cleric Skills

I'm going to end this post here without talking about the last ability on my list.  It is all wrapped up in religion and that's something I'd like to push into the next part of this series (yes, it's a series now) which will discuss the 'professions' of the clan.  I've already indicated what a lot of these would be but it won't hurt to sort them out and give the individuals titles.

After that I'll want to talk about improvements made to the land, tools and treasure.  Hope it all retains the reader's interest.

Don't Spell Nottingham With an 'S'

I dislike when players choose to give their characters silly or asinine names.  I remember the first group I played with included the names 'Ex-Lax' and 'Fruit of the Tomb' . . . and I have always been a snob about it since.  I feel that names like this cheapen the game and spoils the experience for everyone.

That said, I have an argument to offer against my own position.  In researching towns and cities in Great Britain of late (I'm planning to do the British map soon), I came across this:

"During the Anglo-Saxon occupation the town [Nottingham] fell under the rule of a Saxon Chief called Snot, when it became known as Snotengaham - "the homestead of Snot's people."  In 867 the Danish Vikings occupied the town and then in 1086 the Normans took control, dropping the 's' from the town's name."

Clearly, the good people of Nottingham felt the 's' cheapened the city and spoiled the experience for everyone.

Focus

Recently I came across a series of videos made by Tony Zhou, a filmmaker in Vancouver Canada, called Every Frame a Painting.  It is worthwhile seeing every video, even though as a filmmaker Zhou betrays his visual prejudices over theme/performance craft through his choice of directors (the same usual suspects that every visual film director adores).

For the record, I equate Wes Anderson's filmmaking (and the defense of it) with the same sort of crap that is today lauded as 'modern art.'  But enough said about that.

Amidst all the content I've just linked, I'd like to draw the reader's attention to a small part of a particular video.  I want to warn the reader: when I showed this to my players last night, they quite reasonably got so taken up with the nostalgic, effervescent context of the video that they completely missed the point Zhou was making.  Therefore, I recommend that the reader watch this three or four times, until they are able to forget the cartoons (which are wonderful, by the way) and concentrate on the film-making and design aspects behind these cartoons:



Allow me to write out the relevant part to my intended post:

Zhou:  "Discipline: the challenge and restrictions you set for yourself.  Like designing a character with no mouth.  Or no face.   Or using no dialogue except for this: [singing]  Because animation lets you do anything, you have to think about what you won't do.  And in Jones's case, there were lots of rules - about the world, the characters and their behaviour.  For instance, Bugs Bunny never picked a fight.  Somebody had to do this: [scene where Fudd sings 'Kill the Wabbit']  And only then would he [Bugs] fight back . . ."

I can't stress how important this is - and unfortunately Zhou, after giving two examples, fails to include a conclusion to the discipline argument in his video before getting caught up in a different subject, human behaviour.  So let me try to expand here.

Role-playing is exactly like animation in that there are no limitations except those we create.  The presence of magic, potential leaks from multi-dimensional planes of existence, potential character builds, the ideals of heroism overcoming adversity, wish fulfillment and players demanding that the world hold personal validation as more important than obeisance to rules all combine to subvert the fabric of our worlds to the point where the center falls apart and the whole campaign degrades into silliness and game death.  The only thing that holds the fabric of the campaign together is what the DM won't do when the players' behaviour comes into conflict with the world's structure.  If the DM is willing to bend that structure past a certain point in servicing the player's behaviour (or desires), the structure gives and the game breaks.

If you closely examine all the manifestations of role-playing game design, from independent efforts by single individuals to the repeated fuck-ups of WOTC, you'll find an underlying attempt to create limitations against things the designer feels has 'damaged' the original concept.  For example, the creation of the thief class that seemed to undermine the ideal of the "hero's quest," causing the thief to be redefined as a "rogue" in an attempt to make a heroic alternative out of something many people viewed as criminal.  It didn't help that many DMs found their worlds plagued by players who considered the presence of the thief class as tacit permission to behave like total assholes.

Because the rules structure is the most concrete part of the game, efforts to create limitations usually begin with individuals addressing themselves to that structure - when in fact the problem isn't in the rules it is in ourselves.  Chuck Jones in the above example doesn't need to redesign all of animation in order to create a particular change in his characters - he only needs to definitively limit himself as to what he will allow himself to do.

For example, from my own world.  Even though there are spells that are expressly designed to control character behaviour (quest, geas, suggestion, charm person, magic jar, etcetera), as a DM I won't blindside any player, ever, with one of these spells.  What do I mean by 'blindside'?  I mean that I won't have an NPC with such a spell cast it against the party in any situation where the party has not forewarned that a caster with this potential is present - so that the players have the opportunity to risk assess their continued efforts to achieve the goal in question.

Why this limitation?  Because the implementation of these spells against human beings SUCKS.  I don't care if the players blindside an NPC; I'm not invested in the NPC and I have lots to do as a DM if one of my NPCs is trailing along behind the party as a mind-dead puppy.  But if I do that to one of the players, the player is screwed.  They are invested in their character and it is way too aggressive an act by a DM to play the game that way.  Dumping a quest spell on a party sounds too much like railroading to me so I don't do it - unless the party willfully and stupidly walks in front of that train when they knew damn well it was coming.

Sure, this does give the players a slight advantage - but it also makes the players less threatened by my campaign.  It feels more 'fair' to them and gives them a stronger sense of being in control in my game.  I don't actually need to use these spells to give momentum to the campaign.  This means that when I want to drive my players to take a specific action, I have to mind-play them a completely different way than relying on a spell and a saving throw.

A similar argument underlies my refusal to employ ideas like alignment in my game.  It's lazy, it's anvilicious, it's aggressively controlling and it denies players the sense of being in control of themselves and their character motivations.  To get around the problems that alignment is supposed to solve (I don't really think that it does solve those problems but other DMs disagree), I've had to change the way I deliver my game and set up my players in the setting to reduce the chance of them acting in a "bad way."

For example, I don't have one person approach the party in the middle of nowhere, so I don't have that problem where I'm giving exposition and one of the players kills the expositor.  If the players are always approached from a position of strength (multiple persons, in a location where their characters could be trapped), the players will respond with respect and not stupidity.  I don't need alignment to keep my players in check; I keep them in check by making my world threatening enough that a foolish player can only succeed in losing their character.

By eliminating punishment for evil behaviour and rewards for good behaviour, replacing both with rewards for smart behaviour, I've gotten rid of the whole evil/good framework for character creation; this lets the players experiment and explore shades of grey in their behaviour rather than strict black and white - making their experience more meaningful and less constrained.  Being that I live in an adult world where I recognize that good and evil is a structured "us" and "them" routine we use to propagandize children and potential voters in political campaigns, I'd rather ditch it from my campaign for the sake of nuance, freedom, imagination and possibility.  Therefore, I don't play with alignment.

I recommend that the reader make a list of things they already won't do in their campaigns - and consider expanding that list with an eye to finding a more elegant way of solving the problem.  Just as Jones does when he decides to skip ordinary dialogue in a particular cartoon or minimalize his presentation to make it more effective and precise.  And watch the video again - because this is how all art develops its focus: by imposing strict, absolute boundaries on what the presenter is willing to present, then living up to those boundaries in a profound, more imaginative way.

The Genius of Peat and Gilkask

Let me start by apologizing.  My head space remains, for the time being, with the issue of tech levels and the changes that are growing in my head regarding the overall system.  Although I've finished an overview of those levels, I don't feel I'm done yet.  I hope the reader will indulge me a little while longer and let me go on talking about this.

After three weeks, let's come back around to the problem I presented with Gilkask, the city in the far north of Russia that I presented as a stumbling block.

I keep getting suggestions on what to do with it (some not publishable), most of them running like what Mujadaddy recently posted:

"The Brass King, a hobgoblin chief from a mining-tech-level area, has a fortified outpost, Gilkask, hidden deep in the tundra where his primitive cousins toil in open pits for the 'black fire'."

I don't want to deliberately pick on Mujadaddy here.  The description above would work as an adventure.  I wouldn't use the descriptive 'black fire' - all the creatures in my world are intelligent enough to know what coal is: a rock that burns.  Fire is orange and yellow in every part of my world, it doesn't burn black; even the coal itself is not black when it's hot, so on the whole the description doesn't make sense.  It's exactly the sort of 'rule of cool' faux-fantasy cheeze-speak that every DM feels defines the emotional feel of their world . . . but I think it is horrible, awful schlock that only cheapens a campaign into the realm of kiddie fare.  I'm quite happy to call it coal and to have the creatures who dig it out of the ground call it coal, too - because the tension and depth of my world does not rely upon giving coal a descriptive fantasy face-lift.

I'm building up to a post on self-discipline: that I am bound by the rules I assign to my world and that the world gets better because I have to stretch myself to obey those rules.  In the case of Gilkask, I've posited that the tech level ought to be 5.  This means that the settlement must obey the precepts established by a tech 5 culture - that all cultural associations are nomadic in form, that settlements are impermanent (and cannot, therefore, be 'fortified'), that higher tech practices such as agriculture and founding cannot exist, etcetera.  And because of previous rules I've set up that I am also bound to follow, Gilkask also has a population of 6,500 and it also produces coal - not because I say it does but because the city it is based upon, Norilsk, actually produces coal.

I realize it is very difficult to make many understand why this is important.  Part of the fun for me in building my world this way is that I learn - on an intrinsic, ground level - how the world works.  Prior to my discussing this part of the world (see the map), I'm prepared to believe that none of my readers had the least idea of the existence of Norilsk, its coal deposits or its geographical situation.  How, may we suppose, do I know these things?  I know because I began at one point in the world and I steadily made my way outwards until I set myself to learn everything there was to know about all the places in Krasnoyarsk Krai, where Norilsk is.  Once I learned, I adapted the territory into my world and mapped it, drawing out all the lakes shown in the map - lakes where right now people live, fishing there and watching their children skip rocks.  I didn't choose which hexes would be civilized and which would not - the rules I designed for building my world based on more research did this for me.  All I did was follow those rules to make the lay out shown on the map above, a map that revealed itself to me as I made the map, having no idea ahead of time what that revelation would be.

This is why I love to map-make so much.  Because the process is an investigation and a revelation, step by step, hex by hex, conglomeration by conglomeration.  I live in continuous fascination and awe of the profound circumstance of the world as it presents itself to me, as each new part of the world comes into being.  I'm not inventing my game world as much as I am channelling it - and in the process, letting it change me and my preconceptions again and again.

Norilsk doesn't come from my imagination.  It's a real place.  I feel that if I'm going to apply my imagination in changing its existence to one populated by nomadic hobgoblins, I should try with all my might to retain the flavour of the original.

Let me put that another way.  Rather than fabricating yet another cheesy cliche of a fortified mine, I'm using the whole world as a crutch for my imagination - forcing my imagination to adapt to the world rather than making it adapt to my imagination.  I want Norilsk, Gilkask, to live up to something really different and interesting, something more than just another humanoid king on another pile of rocks in another part of my world.  Gilkask has to be more special than that.

This is why the peat-for-coal suggestion works so well.

On the Stumbling Blocks post, kimbo made the suggestion of replacing the coal mined at Gilkask with peat.  I like this for a number of reasons - first of all because the Tunguska region, where Gilkask is, does produce peat.  It is indigenous to the area.  Peat and coal are both fuels so there is a continuity there.  And peat is easily dug up by nomadic tribes, who do use it for fuel because it is convenient and practical - particularly in areas where wood fuel doesn't exist or where wood is often too frozen to burn (seen pictures of the taiga in winter?).

So imagine Gilkask as a sort of drifting settlement of tents that does not exist in exactly the same spot from month to month, but does orbit a large peat moss lowland, usually near the large lake (Pyasin).  Each year, two hundred clans or so follow herds down the Yenisey river valley until they reach Garka.  Shown by the route drawn, these clans travel east from Garka along the shore of the lake (Vodokhran) to where they can cross over a stone plain to the next lake (Keta) . . . then down river to Gilkask.  It is a difficult route, 160 miles, but it is well-traveled and the huge fields of peat are worth the trip.

Why not simply continue down the Yenisey and come at Gilkask from the north?  Because past that grey line at the top of the map there are gnolls, the Samoyads - and travelling through their lands is dangerous for hobgoblins.  So they travel the route their forefathers took.

Once in Gilkask, they dig up several years supply of fuel, enough for their family; all around them are thousands of tents from other clans, all doing the same.  There are fights, blood feuds, exchanges of brides and tales of far away lands.  There are high clans, low clans, outcasts, clans of impressive age and size - and of course many single families.

Some will arrive in the spring and make their way out in the autumn, with just enough time to get out of the hills so they can winter on the Yenisey in Garka.  Others will be moving into the valley in autumn with the intention of wintering there, until they can get their supply ready in spring.  On the road, there will be clans moving in both directions.

I wonder if the reader can see how this makes a far more interesting adventure for the players.  Rather than one static location - Gilkask - there's a whole process of finding their way up from Garka to the peat fields.  If they don't want to be killed by thousands of hobgoblins, they must find a way to disguise themselves and maintain the disguise; or they must somehow justify being there.  Their reason for going to the fields could be a number of things.  They need the peat as an ingredient for a magic item.  They wish to start a war between the hobgoblins and the gnolls, urging one or the other side to attack across the border.  They are seeking a specific hobgoblin who happens to be journeying along the route because this is the year he goes there with his clan.

Most of all, this makes Gilkask unique.  There are no other huge hobgoblin marches; no other arctic tent cities of this magnitude; no other 'peat fields' of extraordinary activity; no comparable places where the presence of thousands of passive hobgoblins might yet worry the few gnolls who watch that frontier (offering another interesting backstory).  By obeying the restrictions of the tech 5 design, I have a far more interesting framework for running a profound adventure than just another mining outpost like so many outposts in so many sci fi/fantasy stories.

Technology Map for 5, 6 & 7

Green = tech 5.  Blue = tech 6.  Purple = tech 7.

I don't know if I'll do this again for higher tech levels - it takes a lot of time.  But I did want to play a little with the map, just to highlight at least some of the pattern the tech level ideal makes.  Obviously, the above means that most of what's shown is a tech level higher than 7 (except, of course, places where desert exists, appearing white on the map).

Alexis' Whole World (so far)

Ages ago, in 2011, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I published a map of my world, completed to that time.  I've tried to update that map, but blogger didn't have the memory to let me post a decent image that big.

But they just recently changed their formatting with pictures, so I've put this together, hoping it would fit on the blog.  It does!

99% of my present completed world, on one map
(a few edges are cut off)

Such fun.

A fairly decent, albeit blurry version of the map can be seen on the wiki, by clicking the map there.  I simply haven't the computer power to produce a map of this size any clearer than this - with it being 20mb in size.  It does look infinitely better on the blogger than it does opening it in your browser.

I wish the reader could see the map as I see it.