Microsandboxing

Someone asked a question about sandboxing on /r/rpg recently, and now I have the wilderness on the brain again.  I have some complaints about existing mapping doctrine.  In the standard ACKS doctrine, civilization is basically required to be mapped (for the domain game if nothing else), which is an awful lot of work for very little payoff because you're not adventuring there.  Really all you need is populations/market classes and travel times between points of interest in civilization, because the travel itself is minimally dangerous; random encounters are likely to be civilized folks, and there are roads and signs and farmers that you can ask for directions.  There aren't really any strategic choices to be made in civilized travel that benefit from the degree of detail that hexes bring.  Consequently, hexmapping civilization is a tremendous waste of time for the mid-levels, and frankly you could run a reasonable (simplified, population- rather than land-focused) domain game without it too.

In the West Marches approach, by contrast, civilization is left unmapped (which is great), but there is an onus to have functionally-infinite wilderness.  This likewise is neither efficient nor realistic.  It isn't efficient because anything that you build that the players never reach in the course of a campaign is probably wasted (sure, you can reuse it later maybe, but how many of us actually do that consistently?).  It also isn't realistic because civilization expands to fill the area that can support it.  The wilderness may be big, but there's always some civilization on the other side if you're willing to travel far enough (or lower your standards for civilization a little).

Ultimately I think the "non-state spaces" notion present in James C. Scott's writing (Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed) presents a promising opportunity.  Non-state space enclaves within a state are (relatively) tiny, self-contained wilderness sandboxes that are easily reached from civilization.  I've talked about Mount Rainier before, and it's a good example - one could easily take a couple of hundred square miles around a large mountain, map it in detail, fill it with hill tribes and yetis and a dragon or two, and have a small, self-contained sandbox.  There's civilization on both sides of the Cascade Range (well, if you count Eastern Washington...  I kid), but there's still wilderness in the mountains.  In the historical D&D context, Dearthwood from the City-State of the Invincible Overlord springs to mind.  It's a forest practically up against the City-State's gates, and it's full of orcs.  This is a classic non-state space, and would make a perfect tiny wilderness sandbox conveniently close to a large market.  That was probably the whole point of Dearthwood, from the very beginning (with the trolls of the Mermist Marshes, a little further away, comprising a higher-level microsandbox).  The Isle of Dread is another good example; it's big enough to play for a couple of sessions, like a good-sized dungeon, but it's bounded and therefore manageable.

Obviously the non-state enclave isn't the only type of wilderness.  Borderlands between civilized areas can be bigger, and then there are places like the Russian steppe and the American Old West that are just huge.  But these are unmanageably big, both to DMs who would use them and to players who would traverse them.  If I have learned two things from running the Megadungeon Full of Rats, it is that tightly theming can stimulate DM creativity but bore players, and that tightly-scoping is really important.  My initial intent with the Dungeon Dimensions was not a full-page dungeon of rats; it was many small dungeons, each tightly-themed and linked.  In retrospect, that might have gone better, but I got carried away with the first level.  I think loosely-themed, tightly-scoped, small-scale wildernesses offer a lot of opportunity in this regard.  Having two or three such microsandboxes available offers choices and ability to alleviate boredom with a particular theme by handwaved safe travel through civilization.

So what are some decent ideas for wilderness microsandboxes?  Big enough to take some time to explore, small enough to be manageable to DM and to be easily reached from civilization, and evocative?

• The Lonely Mountain
• Mirkwood
• Swamp of the frogmen
• Tropical island chain with walled port-city and cannibal natives in the uplands
• Wasteland
• Result of magical experimentation, Chernobyl-style
• Result of necromancer / ghoul infestation
• Fungal forest, as in the Grim Fist

Such wee sandboxes are also relatively easy to drop into an existing campaign.

Of course, there is the distinct possibility that this is what the actual practice of sandbox wilderness play has been all along, everyone knows it but doesn't talk about it much (because talking about the West Marches is much sexier), and I'm a little slow on the uptake where grand ambitions and practical limits are concerned.  Much as I learned in a recent Autarch thread on having players draw their own maps (or not, as it turns out...).  In which case, this is a perfectly useful post for the "OSR Lessons Learned" file [1][2][3].  In the same way that the typical, practical OSR dungeon is not Dwimmermount or Stonehell, the typical, practical OSR wilderness is not the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

The Wilderness Machine

Reflecting on my attempts to automate the wilderness (eg hexstocking), I realize that there was a failure of...  ambition, almost.  And definitely some failures of engineering, which made greater ambitions untenable.

If I'm going to automate, I should go whole-hog for a level of complexity which would be utterly unmanageable by a human, and design the system for that from the beginning, rather than just doing what a human DM would do given an abundance of free time and a dearth of creativity.  Does a submarine swim?

• Stock lairs in hexes according to terrain type.  Dwelling-type may be chosen from the random dungeon types table, if reasonable for monsters of this type to live in a hole in the ground.
• Actually, looking at the end of this where I'm considering migration, the more-correct solution is to start with an empty wilderness and run like 10 years of immigration and migration beforehand.
• For each lair, construct a "hunting range" of other hexes into which its monsters frequently wander.  Hunting range primarily based on monster speed, movement type, diet, and hex types.  Range concretizes some of Trilemma's nonmechanical difficulty elements.
• Sentient monsters taken prisoner can serve as wilderness guides throughout the range of their lair
• Monsters unlikely to pursue parties beyond the edge of their range
• Construct per-hex random encounter tables, based on the lairs whose hunting ranges contain that hex.
• Do not attempt to manually query these tables.  The user interface for this is "Machine, give me a random encounter for hex 0423" -> "Goblin warband from the village in hex 0625, with n champions, m goblins on wargs, 15kcp and a sword +1 interacting with 4 wild boars from lair in hex 0321".
• Actually though, I should drop lame-ass animal lairs and assume a reasonable, dense distribution of mundane wildlife (eg herd animals, normal-sized hawks, rats, ...).  If it isn't going to ever kill a wilderness-level PC, I don't need to track it as a monster.
• Favor monsters from lairs that the players have met before.  This both encourages narrative recurrence / campaign capital development, and is generally reasonable in terms of shared movement habits - if you reuse the same game trails and they reuse the same game trails, you're likely to run into each other again.
• Optionally, vary encounter tables with time of day, weather, season.  Bears hibernate in the winter, big cats hunt at dusk and dawn, giant bats are nocturnal, humanoids don't like hunting in the rain, ...
• Cut the day into 4-hour blocks - dawn (4-8), morning (8-12), afternoon (12-4), dusk (4-8), first watch (8-midnight), second watch (midnight-4)
• Likewise, vary probability of random encounter by individual hex, day/night, weather, season, ... instead of just terrain type.
• Manual update with results of encounter -> "goblin warband from village in hex 0625 destroyed"
• Monthly, check for monster migration. Monsters migrate based on monster-density in their hunting range, terrain types, season.  Monsters can also migrate in off the edges of the map (bounded area being simulated), and migrate off the edge of the map (though maybe known lairs do not migrate off-map).  Monsters less likely to migrate if they have a village, dungeon-lair, or lots of treasure.  Maybe also kill off some lairs during monthly rollover.
• Changing ranges might be a better approach, with lair migration only if no workable range is achievable that includes that lair hex.  On month rollover, greedy search from each lair for a set of hexes which generate an amount of population support sufficient for the lair and which minimize exposure to predation.  If no satisfying solution found, the lair migrates.  Perform updates in ascending order of speed; fast predators can reactively update their ranges in response to slow prey migration.
• Or each lair has a fixed amount of time/effort/utilization available to it, and this can be assigned to hexes to derive population support from them or to travel through them, with environmental factors and presence of predators making this less efficient.  Utilization of each hex also determines on a per-hex basis the weighting of the lair in that hex's random encounter table - you're more likely to have an encounter with wyverns in their hunting grounds than in the hexes under their flight path between hunting grounds and lair.  High utilization also means greater familiarity with the hex among captured sentients.

And then you feed the machine a big-ass hexmap, press go, and run an illegible Western Marches, where regions emerge from complex monster behavior over varied geography but don't have names and don't stay the same.  A really illegible approach would do away with hexes entirely, and make rollover a continuous rather than discrete process, but that's a lot more annoying for a computer (you can only approximate continuity, via very granular time or space), and this is probably crazy enough already.

The obvious question is "would this be fun to play in?"  And that I do not know.

Game Trails

Speaking of wilderness navigation again, one handy feature definitely worth considering in otherwise-trackless wilderness is game trails.

It's not much, but it's better than nothing

Game trails are paths produced by wildlife between sites that they commonly frequent, typically including lair, water source, and feeding grounds.  This, combined with their relative ease of traversal, make them a wonderful feature for adventurers.  If you're lost and dying of thirst, you can follow the trail and hope you get the water end instead of the lair end.  If you're in good shape and looking for treasure, you can instead look for the lair end.  Additionally, the trail's usual denizens tend to leave spoor - shed fur in the spring, droppings, chewed up trees, footprints, and suchlike.  This is a great opportunity to drop clues about what's living in the area.

Mechanically, following a game trail has the same effect on wilderness movement speed as a road (though they are much too narrow for wheeled vehicles, typically single-file, and may wind instead of running straight), but doubles (at least) the chance of a random encounter per unit time, with the odds heavily weighted towards the trail's creators.

A minimal game trail generation algorithm would probably take each lair on a hex map and link it to its nearest water source.  If we're willing to complicate things a little more, flying monsters do not leave trails, and arboreal / brachiating monsters may or may not.  Burrowing monsters that can rely on groundwater, like giant ants, probably don't either, nor do sealed or undead monsters that do not hunt (ghouls probably do, though), nor do aquatic monsters.  Social or sentient monsters with multiple lairs in the area may produce linked trail networks between their lairs.  Predatory monsters may also link their trail networks to the trail networks of their prey species.  Depending on the scale you're using for wilderness movement and the monster density of your hexes, the details of trail network structure may be irrelevant - I could see having a "game trailed" modifier for hexes, which when traversed give the party the choice between fast, risky movement and slow, safer movement.  On the other hand, game trails are likely to be relatively safe from non-monster natural hazards, at least compared to bushwhacking - nothing's going to build a game trail over a quicksand pit.

Never Show Them the Map

I was thinking about why wilderness play is sort of boring, and one of the conclusions I have reached is that showing your players your ground-truth hexmap of unexplored wilderness areas is an incredibly bad idea.  I'm not talking about the secret DM layer where you keep your monster lairs - I'm talking about just terrain.  Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I'm going to talk about it anyway.

One of the exciting things about dungeoneering is opening a door into the unknown.  The potential for death and treasure is clear, and maybe there will be some curious or exploitable feature.  Maybe on the other side is a portal to hell, a shaft descending in darkness to the 6th level of the dungeon, or the hall of the mountain king.  The gradual construction of a player map, which can be exploited to circumvent lairs and reach desired destinations with minimal risk, is a satisfying activity.  In OSR systems where there is not much system-mastery to be had, world-mastery can fill the same role, rewarding players for their attention to detail and their skill.  Additionally, when players keep their own map, they necessarily end up a little uncertain about it, and this adds to tension.

Given that this works well in the dungeon, why don't we do it in the wilderness?  Notably, a number of very successful wilderness adventures and settings actually have given players a blank map and said "have fun filling this in".  The original Wilderlands of High Fantasy did this way back in the 80s.  The player map was a central feature of the widely-imitated Western Marches campaign, and Pathfinder's popular Kingmaker adventure path did the same.  In these cases, the hexcrawl is actually a crawl, with decisions along the way forced by lack of information.  By contrast, in my attempts at wilderness campaigning with a high-detail ground-truth hexmap, typically the party looks at the map, calculates an optimal route, deals with any random encounters along the way, and arrives at their destination.  Rations are laid in with perfect accuracy, so logistics are almost never an issue; hunting and foraging never occur, and resting only results from forced march.  The travel becomes interactive, nonlinear, only when the party fails a navigation roll (an exceedingly unlikely occurrence when you have two characters with Navigation, although re-reading the rules it looks like multiple characters with Navigation don't stack, but Navigation and Explorer do stack so it works out about the same), and the satisfaction of exploration, the joy of discovery, never occurs.

Alexis very accurately expresses this major source of discontent with my last campaign in his book:

A mistake I made many times as a young DM was in recognizing, unfortunately, a common pattern.  If I made the party aware of a place that contained something valuable, they would, most times, unquestioningly march out and get it.  My campaigns rushed from target to target, and as I assigned each target, the next sessions would become lamentably predictable.  I began to feel trapped in my own campaigns.  After a time this became quite dull...  Parties are more interested in and involved with targets they cannot see...  If the party is told where to go, they will go there.  But if the party is told only that the destination is 'nearby', they will go everywhere.

There is also an anachronism argument to be made, that accurate mapping and surveying techniques were not developed until the early modern period to assist the developing European states in clearly delineating their territory into legible administrative districts.  I think the realism concern is less important than the excuse to drop stylized, dubiously-accurate maps with crazy sea monsters on my players, with hopefully hilarious results.

On the flip side, running wilderness navigation is hard.  You do not have the structure of the dungeon, and your extensive experience in indoor spaces, to help you.  My earlier interest in mountain peaks and smoke visibility were part of an attempt to build usable language and conventions for wilderness exploration play (in the way that "You open the door, and see a 30x30 room with a door in the opposite wall, containing five gnolls" is clear and actionable. "You are in gently-rolling forested hills, on a narrow trail; from a treetop, you can see a mountain range to your west and multiple columns of smoke to the south.  The sun is low in the sky to the west, nearly touching the peaks" is a little less useful; it does not present an obvious menu, other than "make camp"), but I recognize now that without concealment, without prolonging wilderness travel and making it interactive, there can be no fun in exploration and such conventions and language are useless.

On further reflection, I guess what I'm really aiming to do is to turn the wilderness into the megamost dungeon.  The megadungeon structure is sort of dumb and deeply unrealistic, but it works.  A lot of the things that make good megadungeons work really well (multiple paths, varying danger levels, factions, restocking, path reuse, too-big-to-clear) actually make more sense or are simply unavoidable in the wilderness, but for the most part we've (well, I've at least) failed to put it all together properly.  I've failed to see the dungeon for the trees.

ACKS and the Open Table

I have been thinking lately that there is a contradiction, a tension, in the way that we play ACKS (and probably in other OSR games as well).  The two competing modes of play are the open-table game and the domain game.  The demands on the structure of the game that each imposes are inimical to the other.

The open table more-or-less requires episodic play.  It's possible to run a coherent non-episodic game with an unreliable cast, but it's a lot of work.  Beyond the Black Gate suggests a number of approaches to episodic play - relic retrieval, monster hunting, and the megadungeon.  Justin Alexander cites the megadungeon as his path back to open-table gaming.  The Western Marches, long the canonical 3.x open-table game, actually has a lot in common with the megadungeon.  It has the same difficulty gradients, hidden treasure rooms, high lethality, unclearability, and internal logic one would expect of a megadungeon.

These styles of play (except for the relic retrieval) are well-designed for denying players their impersonal resources.  In both the megadungeon and the Marches, mercenaries are inviable due to morale concerns (it's considered suicidal to go there and you can't hire), and establishing anything resembling a domain is impossible due to the unclearability / restocking property.

This is not accidental.  Episodic play starts to get really weird when you add domains and mercs, mainly due to time, continuity, and boundary conditions.  If you're not at a session and they elapse a month of travel time, do you need to pay your mercs their monthly wage?  Does your domain generate income?  If the next party is totally separate, maybe not, but what if someone who was at the last session (and acquired XP and treasure, and whose 'timeline' was advanced that month) is at the next session with you?  If another party accidentally leads a goblin army back to your domain during a session where you're not present, what happens?  In strict episodic play, it's very easy to handwave a character's absence for a month, but in the domain game, time and continuity are both sort of important.

My conclusion from this, then, is that we have another subtle shift in play in B/X and its derivatives.  Not just within the rules, but within the structure of the party and the game.  At low levels, when you're dungeoneering, open table works fine.  You can swap out players and characters and it's all good.  Expeditions to the dungeon and back are only a day anyway.  When you start doing wilderness adventuring, continuity and time become more important, because you start accumulating mercenaries and expeditions get longer.  Switching to the relic retrieval and monster-hunting episodic modes mentioned above can keep a wilderness-level game open for a while, but disparities in level and personal power will begin to emerge between reliable and unreliable players, and continuity and time headaches will start to accumulate if mercenaries are in use.  It might be sensible to fork the game at this point, with reliable wilderness players who are accumulating mercenaries splitting off to form their own game with a separate, coherent continuity from the continuing open table game.  It seems like such a "forking" measure would be nearly necessary by domain level.

ACKS, for its part, does not make running an open table easy even at low levels.  The primary offenders here are the market rules and henchman wages, which require timekeeping from 1st level (though I suspect that many a henchman's monthly wages have gone unpaid and unnoticed in my games in the past).  The spellcaster repertoire-swap and spell-learning times also encourage timekeeping.

At the end of the day, I might just be disillusioned with both open table's continuity and timekeeping issues and the domain game's paperwork, though.  I keep trying to run open tables at around the wilderness level and they keep being pains in the ass.  I'm sorely tempted to try falling back to a small, reliable party of 2-4 players for a wilderness-level game.

Unpleasant Weather

I am dissatisfied with existing weather-generation systems for RPGs of D&D's ilk.  So I built one!  Note that I am not a meteorologist; this is intended to be a simple system which generates 'close enough' results for gaming purposes, not a high-fidelity weather simulator.

In any given day, the weather is in one of three states: high pressure, low pressure, or in flux.  High pressure is clear, unseasonably cold, and dry; low pressure is unseasonably warm, wet, and cloudy, sometimes with light rain or snow, or afternoon thunderstorms in the summer.  Flux occurs during the transition between the two and is stormy and windy, with heavy clouds.

On day 0, roll a d6.  One through three, the weather begins as high pressure; four through six, it begins as low pressure.

Each day of normal weather, roll a d8.  On a 1-7, the state remains the same; if it was high pressure today, it is high pressure tomorrow, and if low pressure today, low pressure tomorrow.  On an 8, a front rolls in tomorrow and the state changes to flux.  The front is detectable some hours in advance, as winds pick up and clouds are visible moving rapidly from the horizon.  After 1d3 days of stormy flux, the pressure switches; if it was high pressure when the one was rolled, it is low pressure after the flux, and if it was low pressure, it becomes high pressure.

Weather typically blows in from the west on worlds where the sun rises in the east (at least in my experience), unless there are mountains in the way.

This satisfies several design goals.  First, it is more-or-less consistent with real-world experience in several ways.  If the weather was cool and dry today, it probably will be tomorrow, but sometimes you get violent storms and things change.  Weather is also in expectation stable for about a week, which is more-or-less accurate for the microclimate in which I find myself living.  Things average out to moderate weather, but the result is never just "lukewarm and boring" ("Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.").  Second, it does not require a table lookup or percentile roll, nevermind several.  Third, it does not go into unnecessary detail; three states are easy enough to remember and sufficiently different for gameplay purposes.  Fourth, it is easy to tweak to suit local conditions.  You could vary the die size rolled based on stability of various types of air masses (ie, maybe during a high pressure you roll a d10 but during a low pressure you roll a d6, so warm air is less common and marked by more frequent storms).  You could make a 2 through 4 on the d8 "precipitation and no change in dominant pressure" during a low pressure.  You could vary the pressure change probability seasonally, so during summer you use a d12 instead of a d8, leading to less frequent storms and better adventuring weather.  You could change flux duration, add minimum times between fluxes, or any number of other minor tweaks.  Much as one might build a random encounter table for the Valley of Storms, so one might alter the weather parameters.  None of that extra complexity is necessary to using the core of the system, however.

By contrast, 3.x's weather system fails in all of these regards.  It fails to make weather today relevant to weather tomorrow; the only consistency comes from the fact that "normal" (ie, no-op) weather is probabilistically dominant.  It requires a percentile roll and table lookup, sometimes followed by another percentile roll.  It expresses its temperatures and wind speeds in terms of degrees and miles per hour, which are hardly practical units for adventurers to measure in the field - one might argue that the intent is to use the temperature categories, but when you start adding things like Heat Wave and "temperature drops x degrees at night", it becomes fairly clear that you're supposed to be tracking it numerically.  Finally, its ultimate sin (and a telling reflection on 3.x's design philosophy) is that the effects of the weather are expressed purely in terms of combat (and perceptiony skill checks, but those are almost inevitably just a precursor to combat).

Sure, weather does effect combat, sometimes in unexpected ways.  The English won the Battle of Crecy in part because the French (well, Genoese mercenary in service to the French) crossbowmen had wet crossbowstrings due to an earlier downpour; while the English longbowmen had unstrung their bows, the crossbowmen had not (perhaps were not able to due to the construction of their crossbows), and so were unable to offer more then desultory fire.  Alright, in lousy or just humid weather crossbows take a -4 to hit, bows a -2, and thrown no penalty (assuming visible targets otherwise within range).  Shorten encounter distance during precipitation or fog by a small constant integer factor.  If the ground's muddy or snowy, speed is reduced and attempts to knock people down are easier.  Alright, done with effects of weather on combat. 

On to the fun stuff!  Effects of weather on exploration.

During a high pressure, seeing distant smoke is relatively easy, while during a low pressure it is more difficult because the humidity keeps the smoke down.  During flux, spotting smoke is nearly impossible due to wind dispersion and precipitation, and building a fire in the first place is going to be difficult.  Cloudy or stormy weather may make identifying one's mountaintop reference points more difficult if the peaks are above the clouds.  The party's mercenaries are probably none too happy about the extra maintenance they will need to do on their gear, and cold, soggy (or worse, moldy) rations add insult to injury - while hardly a calamity, a penalty to any morale roll provoked during wet weather may be in order.  Speaking of which, wet weather might render some rations inedible, forcing a reevaluation of the supply situation (likewise in hot weather, the water supply becomes less stable).  The effects of heavy rain on the wizard's spellbook are potentially punitive; also true for the party mapper.  Heavily-burdened mounts, pack animals, and especially carts may become hopelessly mired in mud or deep snow, and in general overland movement rate will suffer.  Precipitation can wash away or obscure tracks while it is falling, but after it stops the mud and snow take and hold tracks, making tracking easier.  If you like, say that mud persists for one day per day of rain.  If some sort of endurance system is in place (next post, perhaps), wet weather makes it harder to keep warm, both because you get soaked and because there is little dry fuel for fires.

In other words, adventuring in persistent rain is not a good time.  Probably the only good reason to do so with all other things being equal is a situation in which you are operating at a disadvantage in an area occupied by strong and coordinated resistance, where the shortened encounter distance means you can close with and defeat in detail enemy detachments before help can arrive.  Flying predators (eg wyverns) might also be effectively grounded by a powerful storm, or impeded by low-visibility conditions like fog.  Ambush predators might have their lairs flooded out or otherwise damaged by storms and be forced out into the open (conversely, flooded streams and rivers might be effectively impassable; sufficiently powerful floods might alter the flows for some time, or carve new watercourses, rendering maps out of date).  Humanoids are likely to try to stay in shelter during storms, while some monsters may prefer to hunt in the rain.

And this is all saying nothing of freak weather like lightning storms or tornados or blizzards!  This is bog-standard mundane weather that anyone hiking in the woods (or to and from class) in temperate climes will get to deal with sooner or later, and yet it already introduces quite a few things for PCs to consider during their forays into the wilderness (especially if the wandering monster table varies with weather).

And now I'm off to go bicycling in the cold drizzle...

Where There's Smoke...

there's probably sentient life, but maybe just a forest fire.

In any case, in a Western Marches-esque game, smoke might be a Big Deal.

In the first case, the PCs see a column of smoke in the distance.  If there are several such columns and they're in the right direction, they could be coming from $HOMETOWN.  In this case, they're a good way to find your way home when lost in the woods (if the weather conditions are cooperative).

If there are fewer columns, or they're in places the PCs might otherwise not expect, this is probably a good way to locate native encampments, for whatever purpose one might choose (avoidance, trade, raiding, &c).

And a single plume of smoke is likely a campfire with attendant small party of sentients who might be met on even terms...

And now we come to the second case: what's good for the PCs is good for the monsters.  A fire might keep the cold and the wolves at bay, but bring the goblins a' calling...  The campfire becomes a resource/risk management decision, especially if you (say) reduce natural healing rates when sleeping in the cold.

On Terrain and Scale

I read an interesting wargaming post last week, which combined with recent consideration of wilderness games has caused me to reconsider the importance of wilderness terrain.  In previous campaigns I have been guilty of speaking primarily in biomes; you're in a desert, or a swamp, and maybe there's a multi-hex feature like a river but for the most part sub-hex detailed terrain has not made it from my brain to the players.  This is problematic.

Part of it is probably a scale problem, and part of it is an improvisation problem.  Obviously I cannot reasonably subhex-map every hex through which the party passes; as a result I must improvise and then record those improvisations for later consistency (hills don't tend to just disappear).  But improvisation is difficult when one lacks a good sense for the thing one is improvising; I suppose this is probably why Tao does research the way he does.  This task is made more difficult by man's alterations; how common are glades in pristine woodlands?  What does unaltered topograhy look like, without roads carved through it and sections flattened?  I honestly don't know.

The problem of scale is that I don't really know how big things are in terms of six-mile hexes (~24 square miles).  Fortunately google maps can help with this one a little.  Turns out the parts of Pittsburgh with which I am familiar, centered somewhere between Downtown and Oakland, fit right about in a six-mile hex.  Frick Park to Downtown (or "dahntahn", as they say) is about 5.8 miles on foot.  The literal topographical Squirrel Hill is two or three miles across, and something like a mile and a half north-south, rising to a height of about 350 feet over the nearby lowlands. A bit of a ravine (now highway) separates it from another similar hill to the south, and another ravine (now train tracks) separates its western edge from a (possibly artificially) flat area of University of Pittsburgh to the west, to the north and west of which is another hill of similar size.  If we figure each of these hills is 3-4 square miles, we can fit six or eight of them in a single "hills" hex, with watercourses, smaller hills, and flat areas in between.

In conclusion, compared to the relative walking range of the average semi-sedentary college student, six-mile hexes are big.

For another point of reference, the portion of Mount Rainier which is permanently snow-covered is about 35 square miles, or a hex and a half.  The Wonderland Trail, which forms a ring around Mount Rainier, is 90 miles long; assuming something like 20% backtracking (possibly a bit low), that's about 12 hexes of distance, sufficient to enclose a ring five hexes across (including the hexes containing the trail).  Most of the campsites on the trail are between 3000 and 6000 feet of elevation, while the mountain's summit is around 14000 feet of elevation, so there's an average gradient of about 4000 or 5000 feet per six miles within the ring.  It looks from the google maps that the foothills radiate another couple of six-mile hexes beyond that ring.  Further, it takes most groups who hike Wonderland about ten days, which is fairly close to what ACKS would predict for a heavily-encumbered party on well-maintained trails through hill terrain.  The PCs, of course, will be lacking in the trail department, and as a result may also suffer penalties for being in forested terrain in addition to hills...

In conclusion: Mountains are big!  I will never again be afraid to take a hexmap and plop down a big zone several hexes across labeled "Mount ???".

Mountains are also useful because you can see them from a long way away.  For the sake of simplicity of mental arithmetic, let's say you're looking at a mountain which is 10000 feet taller than you.  Sqrt(10k) is 100, plus a negligible amount for your height, times 1.22 means you can see it from 122 miles away, or 20 6-mile hexes (given no other mountains in the way, or, as happens more often in Seattle, atmospheric interference).  Obviously you would need to be closer to identify the mountain as Rainier, and not every mountain is as big as Rainier, but if you're in the suburbs of Seattle on a sunny day (ha!) you can use it to get your bearings pretty well.  This nicely addresses one of my issues with running a Western Marches-style game where the players don't get to see the hex map - how do you provide meaningful landmarks?  There are only so many times I can describe "a peculiar tree" or "a big rock that looks like a thing" before I will start to forget what they mean - single-hex visibility landmarks do not seem like a scalable solution across large numbers of hexes.  But big, recognizable mountains, which my players can name...  those sound workable.

Aaaand now I want to go hiking.

Trilemma

Holy cow.  Ars Ludi linked to Trilemma yesterday, and this guy knows what's what.  Good posts I've read so far:

• Useful Dungeon Descriptors accurately expresses my difficulties with random room contents tables, and takes a clear stance in favor of informed dungeoneering and informative dungeon design.  Monstrous Effects on Terrain applies the same ideas to the wilderness.
• Non-Mechanical Difficulty Levels for Monstrous Threats, the post originally linked by Ars Ludi, provides a good explanation of why my players feared wyverns so terribly, as well as a good mental framework for making things scarier then their raw numbers would otherwise indicate (or less scary, I guess, but why would you want to do that?  Oh right so elephants aren't CR7 or whatever, and to explain why commoners can safely keep cats as pets).  Reminiscent of Traveller's per-species reaction roll tables.  This whole schema, and particularly Cohesion, seems perfect for differentiating the otherwise forgettably-similar low-level humanoid species.
• Gameable Campaign Capital provides a useful taxonomy for understanding and perhaps encouraging player investment in exploration-driven campaigns.  As a concept, it may help explain the failure of the ACKS game when we introduced new players (too much reference buildup in the world and among the old guard, which held no 'currency' with the new players).
• The whole Dirty Dungeon concept, which Trilemma mentions here and here, is intriguing.
• How Far Can You See on a Hex Map? is useful for the obvious reasons, if fairly easily derivable.

Also, not exactly useful but entertaining: apparently the 2012 ACKS game had a lethality of somewhere between 100 and 125 milliWhacks for PCs (I figure somewhere between 16 and 20 total sessions and about 4.5 players on average), and somewhere closer to 250 milliWhacks for henchmen.  ACKS: About As Deadly As Fiasco, Unless You're a Henchman.

In any case, more fodder for wilderness campaigning and always good to find a vital blog to read.  Sort of a breath of fresh air from outside the OSR, really (disclaimer: this is not an attempt to define the OSR, but more a statement that I do not get the impression that Trilemma identifies as Of The OSR).  He seems very well-rounded, taking what is worth taking from both storygames and the Old School.

State of the Gamist, September 2013

Still kickin'.  Had fun at DragonCon, but was also somewhat disappointed with the panels (almost to the point of writing rebuttal posts).  Mostly done travelling for a while, but travel time expenditures have been replaced with girlfriend time expenditures (less billable, but more enjoyable).  No gaming to speak of outside of Natural Selection 2 (at which I am bad) and Dwarf Fortress (at which I am less bad).

Spent some time this last week hunting typos in the final Domains at War: Campaigns draft, though (and was pleased by the fact that dwarven crossbow-cavalry ride mules).  Then the Wilderlands bug bit me again, but upon further examination I realized (again) that the Wilderlands are just too big and inconsistent for my liking.  Resolved to run an ACKS-ified Western Marches-esque game in the near* future instead ("civilization" being a place akin to Roman Germany or Roman Britain at Hadrian's Wall, with a wilderness of vikings and giants and naked berserker Celt-orcs to the north).  Started design work on the Mother Of All ACKS Scripts to aid in this endeavour.  Further updates forthcoming as actual work is completed.

"World creation, has begun..."

* Part of me knows that this is completely the wrong approach, and that I'm falling into the over-prep trap.  So I guess I'll just have to set really aggressive deadlines for myself (or be contented with building an awesome tool and never actually using it to run a game).

Games I Want to Run After Graduation

This post differs from previous "Games I Want to Run" posts, in that instead of contemplating what system to use, I can happily say that ACKS will likely be the weapon of choice for considerable future gaming.  Instead, setting is the primary question.

So I think there are three main settings which have my attention currently, and which seem to have a tendency to recur in my thought even over the course of years.  Those settings are Midnight, the Western Marches, and the Wilderlands.  There are some interesting commonalities here.  All three settings are pretty wilderness-focused; in Midnight, the wilderness is where you are safest from Izrador's law, while in the Wilderlands and the Marches, it's where the adventures are and an obstacle to be traveled through.  All three are also fairly unforgiving; there are Dangerous Things in the world, and they want to eat you.  In both of these regards, all three are well-suited to ACKS.  Midnight might get a bit funny with the economics, but the others would work quite well.

As for the particular instantiations of the three, I'm thinking a Wilderlands campaign that starts with the sprawling dungeons beneath the City-State (inspired by Hill Cantons and kjd-imc) at low levels and gradually extends outwards into the wilderness towards classic Wilderlands locations like the Caverns of Thracia, Modron, and so forth, naturally all interpreted with a fair degree of creative license.  For example, the word Modron, for me, is reminiscent of these guys, so I get mechanical vibes.  In my Wilderlands, Modron is a mostly-human city which became a haven for heretical dwarven machinists cast out of Thunderhold.  They turned it into the Clockwork City, complete with Rhodes-style defensive clockwork colossus watching the mouth of the Roglaroon, but tensions between Modron and Thunderhold remain high.  Haghill sounds to me like it's ruled by a lawful (evil) hag countess who has sworn fealty to the (likewise evil-side of lawful) Overlord.  And so forth.

For the Western Marches, I've been working on a Vikingy sandbox in the same model on-and-off in a number of systems over the last couple years.  It would be interesting to run, but I feel like I missed my chance, and now it would likely be held up against Skyrim due to similar themes.  So I might hold off on that one for a while longer...

And finally Midnight.  Always tricky, Midnight.  But Alexander Macriss made an interesting note during this interview, that ACKS' default setting is very much a 'crumbling empire in decline' sort of place, which reminded me of an idea I had for Midnight some time ago - run it at the end of the Third Age, with events in the campaign leading up to the Last Battle and the (probable?  certain?  prophesied?) defeat of the armies of men, elves, and dwarves before the Night Kings and their orc hordes.  Start with hunting spies and cultists in the cities and their dungeon lairs, then move out into the wilderness in pursuit of orcish warbands and marauders.  Finally, come domain-time, move into the political realm, try to maintain cohesion among the allies while ousting plots among the nobility and preparing for all-out war.  Or fall to darkness and perhaps become a Night King yourself...  Come the Last Battle, many PCs would probably die fighting, but ACKS' hench focus would leave a goodly cast of mid-level heroes to flee into the woods to fight in the Fourth Age, in a world that the players once shaped.  Retaking parts of the Fortress Wall or fighting in the ruins of Nalford is more meaningful when these were places you once ruled.  Player investment in the world across the gap of catastrophe.  And of course, there's always the possibility that they might win...  but victory is temporary, for how can you kill a god?

Also convenient about Third Age Midnight (Dusk?) is that events are in motion which are not immediately threatening to the PCs, whereas in the Fourth Age, it can be hard to generate sensible events without necessarily crushing the PCs beneath a pile of orcs.  There is the problem of foreknowledge, though - if you tell your players "We're playing Midnight in the Third Age, leading up to the fall of the world to darkness as the ending of a chapter of the game", they're going to act very differently from "Sure there are rumors of the Dark God stirring in the North, but nobody takes that seriously.  Every other time he's invaded, we've pushed him back; we'll do it again if we have to.  In completely unrelated news, the Prince has disappeared recently."  Also challenging to mix the sort of inherent plottiness of "Izrador is coming" into a sandbox game; could prep it as a timeline, or use some sort of world engine to track the progress of his agents and react to PC actions (philosophical question - if you build a world engine with a finite-time convergence property, is it railroading?).

Of course, the syncretic approach is also an option.  An icebox where the PCs may accidentally awaken the Shadow in the North gives a sort of poetic justice to it, since it puts partial responsibility on them, or a game set in part of the Fortress Wall focusing on wilderness expeditions into Izrador's lands leading up to the war would work well too.  Viridistani invasion could serve much the same function in a Wilderlands game, as a catastrophic event which shatters much of the social order and redraws borders.  I guess that's something to consider, too - even if the PCs in a Dusk game do manage a feat like killing the Night Kings at the Last Battle, there are orcs enough for everyone, and there will be cleanup operations and reconquests for years to come.  Combining all three would be even better, but would probably require some custom setting work (and it's hard to justify a megacity + underdungeons right on the northern frontier).

Anyway, fun stuff to think about.

DM Shortage

Well, it turns out there are a bunch of other interns (and even some full-timers) at my current place of employment who want to game, and while I'm not the only DM in town by quite a way, I am the only one advertising "seeking 1-2 more players".  To the point where I now have about 10 potential players, and only one of me.  So I've been considering a few options:

• Fork a splinter group.  Take on 1-2 more players, and get one of my current players (maybe?) to DM a second game at some other time for the rest.  Problem: convincing someone else to DM.  A similar approach would be co-DMing, but the same problem presents itself (along with a host of new ones unique to two people having full authorial license on the same world).
• Blow some of them off.  Problem: people don't get to play, and I might not get to play with some fun and clever people worth gaming with.  I remember being rather intimidated when Jared joined us for Traveller last spring, but that all worked out quite well.  This is related to the selection problem; given six candidates, who do you take?  We could spend half the summer running test games with people before we had enough data to choose...  I guess the proper old-school approach would be to let the dice decide, right?
• Rotating death.  When you die, you go on the end of the queue of waiting players.  When someone else dies, if you're at the head of the queue you come in with your backup character per standard henchman or reserve XP rules.  For this to work, I think two sessions per week would have to be the norm (minimally), and I might have to crank up lethality.  Clever play would then shaft all those waiting, though, and it would badly screw my current players who didn't sign up for that.
• Trial by combat, with the last five players standing winning the right to game.  Problem: I have little confidence that my current players would make the cut, and I kind of like them.  Also there might be legal issues with this approach.
• The Western Marches or cloud approach.  I've really wanted to try this one for a while, and never had either the playerbase or the free time to support it properly.  Now I do...  but I'm not sure how well it would work out in a partially-civilized setting like the Shieldlands.  Then there are issues with how to handle my current three 'core' players; they seem unlikely to take being downgraded well (though they do have certain advantages like the +3 shield, and having cornered the henchman market of Deal...).  There's also the question of "just how much time do I want to spend doing prep work per week, and how many nights a week do I want to eat pizza?"  I guess I could provide when I'm available, set a max party size and a rule of max of one or two sessions per week per player, and see what they come up with, as well as a party-shuffling rule like that used in WM to keep things from settling into me running two games for disjoint sets of players.

Pleh.  In Ben Robbins' words, "Fear the social monster" indeed.

Gods and Seasons, Part 4 - Winter

(The final part of a four-part series; part 1, part 2, part 3)

Winter gods and their months:

The Keeper - The excess of the harvest runs dry, and the nights grow long and cold and dark.  This is the Month of the Keeper of Secrets, a pale, black-robed god with only one eye, and patron of black magicians and dabblers in forbidden lore.  In ancient days, the Keeper ripped out his own eye and set it in motion about the world, that he might see all that transpired below.  This is the origin of the moon, known as the Keeper's Eye, and in the Month of the Keeper, the moon is full and open for an entire month (the normal waxing and waning is believed to be the Keeper sleeping and waking).  The Month of the Keeper is a time of dark magic and evil spirits, as the winter solstice occurs.  People stay indoors and often construct folk-wards about their doors and windows to keep evil spirits out.  Festivals of the Keeper are forbidden in civilized lands, but are still practiced by witch-covens in the country, and often entail animal or human sacrifice.  Contests of riddles, however, are traditional during this month.  Temples of the Keeper are not unheard of, being usually located in large cities, and often his priesthood is comprised of spies and assassins.  Their temples are not allowed to exist out of goodwill, but because their priests are useful or feared.  He also has some worshippers among the nobility, where secrets are power, and naturally among magicians.

The Elder - The winter grows colder, with snow piling up and raging, icy gales.  This is the Month of the Elder, an emaciated, white-skinned god with icicles in his beard, and the patron deity of sailors, the sea, cold, the old, and the dead.  During this month, sailors are forced into port by the weather, and so it is a time of relaxation for them; they pay homage to the Elder to avoid his wrath, and to the Traveller to guide them.  Festivals of the Elder often entail storytelling contests about the hearth, both tales of elder days and tales of the sea.  The Month of the Elder is also a time for veneration of one's ancestors.  In ancient days, the Elder sought to cover the world in ice, but he was slain by the combined power of Warrior and the Reaper, and now is the god of the dead as well.  The icy and dead Elder stands in opposition to the firey and hearty Smith on the Great Wheel.  Priests of the Elder are often old sailors rendered unfit for duty, and he has shrines along the coast.  It is also not unusual for temples of the Elder in large cities to be responsible for the disposal of bodies, and to maintain extensive catacombs.

The Savage - As the saved harvest runs low in late winter, men may turn to unspeakable acts of savagery to feed themselves.  This is the Month of the Savage, when raiders and bandits often attack.  The Savage is depicted as a great muscular barbarian with a great axe and scalps upon his belt, and is the patron of berserkers, vikings, cannibals, the violently insane, and primitive tribesmen.  The Month of the Savage is a harsh time, and he is a terrible and forbidden god, and so there are no festivals during this month in civilized societies.  Among societies where he is worshipped, festivals of the Savage tend to involve raiding and pillaging nearby settlements.  The Savage stands across from the Warrior on the Great Wheel, and sects dedicated to the two often fight during this season.  Most temples and priests of the Savage are present in tribal societies, though some decadent societies may also use temples of the Savage as gladiator stables.  Many bestial humanoid races claim descent from the Savage.

Gods and Seasons, Part 3 - Fall

(Part 3 of an ongoing series - Part 1, Part 2)

Gods and months of fall, in order:

The Trickster - The beginning of the fall season signals the end of the summer wars, with shifting territorial boundaries and shifting alliances.  This is the Month of the Trickster, a shapeshifter goddess usually portrayed as a masked woman, and a patron of thieves, diplomats, and dishonest merchants.  Festivals of the Trickster are often masquerades for the nobility, with contests of acrobatics, pranks, and petty thefts among the commons.  The Month of the Trickster coincides with the fall equinox, and so the powers of illusion and enchantment wax strong.  It is forbidden to punish a man for theft during the Month of the Trickster, though he may still be jailed and held for judgement during the Month of the Reaper.  The Trickster stands across from her elder brother the Traveller on the Great Wheel, as many thieves end up on the road, and many travellers are thieves.  The Gnomes are the chosen people of the Trickster, who she gifted with quick wits and a penchant for illusion.  Priests of the Trickster are rare, and her temples few, except among the Gnomes, and few of her human worshippers would admit to it if asked.

The Reaper - In mid-fall, the harvest comes in, and the weather begins to grow cold.  This is the Month of the Reaper, a multi-faceted god depicted as a dour man with a scythe and scales, whose domains include justice, honesty, commerce, the harvest, and preparation for the cold winter to come.  He is a patron of merchants and judges.  The Month of the Reaper is a time of hard work for the peasants as they try to bring in as much of the crops as possible.  For the nobility, the Month of the Reaper is for gathering taxes and resolving disputes.  Festivals of the Reaper are usually fall markets late in the month, where people trade their harvests and wares.  During the Month of the Reaper, it is also traditional to judge and punish those who committed crimes during the Month of the Trickster.  The Reaper stands opposite the Maiden, with harsh justice against hopeful innocence and reaping against sowing.  Priests of the Reaper serve as judges, and are permitted even to judge and punish the nobility from their marble courthouse-temples, located in large cities.  These temples often maintain constabulary forces as well.

The Drunkard - The excess of the harvest which cannot be saved must be eaten, and so the Month of the Drunkard is a time of hedonistic festivities.  The Drunkard is depicted as a fat man with a flagon in each hand (or sometimes a court jester), and is the patron of revellers, beggars, brewers, and winemakers.  After the trying Month of the Reaper, the Month of the Drunkard is a welcome return to festivals, celebration, and leisure before the winter truly sets in.  In addition to the expected drinking contests, oaths and boasts made in the Month of the Gallant are called to term during this month, and their makers often shamed and ridiculed.  It is customary to give to the poor in the Month of the Drunkard, and the fall tourneys are also held during this time.  The Drunkard stands opposite the Gallant on the Great Wheel, simple pleasures and ease against heroic ambition, yet the same disregard for consequences.  There are few open priests of the Drunkard in all but the most decadent lands, but many large cities have organized 'congregations' of beggars who worship him.  Many gambling halls, taverns, and houses of ill repute also bear his sign above their doors.

(To Part 4)

Gods and Seasons, Part 2 - Summer

(Part 2 of an ongoing series - Part 1 here)

The summer gods and months:

The Sage - With the summer solstice, the power of light magic peaks during midsummer, ushering in the Month of the Sage, a goddess depicted as a white-robed, wizened woman with a book.  The Sage is the patron of many practitioners of magic, particularly oracles, as well as those who value learning and planning.  In a lesser guise, due to her presence at the beginning of the war season, she is a goddess of strategy  also.  Festivals of the Sage are often contests of poetry and the recitation of epics, but are more subdued than the festivals of many gods.  During the Month of the Sage, the destruction of books, scrolls, and other inscriptions is forbidden, and mortal sages are often treated as protected as well.  The Sage is across from the Keeper on the Great Wheel, representing the duality of knowledge, that it can be used for good and evil, and of knowledge versus secrets.  Priests of the Sage are learned scholars who maintain her temple archives, often located in the great cities.  The Elves are the chosen people of the Sage, blessed with long lives, long memories, and a talent for magic.

The Smith - In the height of summer, the world is rendered hot as a foundry.  This is the Month of the Smith, a god depicted as a burly, grey-bearded blacksmith with hammer in hand, and the patron god of skilled craftsmen and engineers.  This month is a time of sieges, when engineers build and deploy fearsome siege weapons, and the defenders reinforce their walls and dig deep.  Festivals of the Smith are competitions of craftsmanship, with craftsmen presenting their greatest works of the last year to their lords to win his favor.  Craftsmen also traditionally choose apprentices during this month.  The Smith is opposite the Elder on the Great Wheel, representing the duality of fire and ice, as well as aged strength against aged decreptitude.  Priests of the Smith are rare among humankind, but common among his chosen people, the Dwarves, who learned their skill in steel, fire, and stone from him.  Many a human blacksmith keeps a shrine to the Smith in his forge, though, or wears his symbol on a necklace.

The Warrior - As the season of war draws to a close, savage last-ditch engagements are fought as sieges are broken and castles fall.  This is the Month of the Warrior, a scarred and tired god in scratched armor and armed with a pike, who is a patron of peasant warriors and those fighting to protect their homes.  Many peasants pray to him to protect their crops and livestock from armies, and it is terrible luck to kill civilians during his season.  The festivals of the Warrior in peaceful lands are contests of skill of arms with blunted swords, as well as archery.  In war-torn lands, festivals of the Warrior are instead cease-fires where opposing sides gather food, entrench, and rest, or sometimes even mingle.  The Warrior is opposite the Savage on the Great Wheel, representing the choice inherent in the use of force, between protection and destruction.  It is said that the Warrior is the elder brother of the Gallant.  Most priests of the Warrior are old peasant soldiers who took up the cloth, and they are often drafted to serve as leaders of peasant formations.  There are also a few knightly orders dedicated to the Warrior, and they are dedicated to helping commoners rather than the pursuit of glory common among the knightly orders of the Gallant.  They often maintain refugee camps and hospitals in areas of war and serve as neutral brokers of peace.

To Part 3

Gods and Seasons, Part 1 - Spring

During the course of thinking about my not-Western-Marches setting, I did a little contemplating of deities and time.  I'd like the passage of in-game time to be a relevant factor; wandering through the wilderness in the winter means you might get caught in a snowstorm, but you can also cross that annoying river because it's frozen over.  That kind of thing.  I've also become discontent with the Greyhawk pantheon, so I decided to come up with my own; I decided to build a pantheon comprised of gods representing archetypes rather than properly-named gods, much as with the Seven in Game of Thrones / Song of Fire and Ice.  As I was working on it, I realized that linking the two might not be a terrible idea, with the mortal world passing closest to each deity's place in the heavens once a year.  So, behold, a combined calendar and pantheon!  I've decided to use a 336-day year, with 12 months of 28 days each (corresponding to 28-day moon cycles) for the sake of simplicity.  Thus begins a series of posts with each season's deities in order.

Spring:

The Traveller - In early spring, as the snows finally begin to melt, travel between towns resumes.  This is the Month of the Traveller, a god depicted as a weather-worn older man, and the patron of pilgrims and hunters.  Festivals of the Traveller often involve footraces, though races by horse or sail are not unheard of.  During the Month of the Traveller, it is forbidden to deny a traveller hospitality, for the Traveller himself has been known to walk the earth during this season.  The time of the Traveller is a superstitious one, as the equinox means that mysterious forces wax powerful during this month.  The Traveller stands across from the Trickster on the Great Wheel, and is her elder brother.  The clergy of the Traveller typically walk the roads, guiding flocks of pilgrims; when they become old and infirm, they instead tend wayside shrines.

The Maiden - Plants begin to grow again in mid-spring, and the first crops are planted, signalling the Month of the Maiden, the fertility goddess.  The Maiden is depicted as a young woman with flowers in her hair, and is a favorite deity of farmers and women.  Festivals of the Maiden tend to be centered around dances and the blessing of crops.  The Maiden stands across from the Reaper on the Great Wheel, representing the duality of youthful innocence and hardened suspicion.  Priests of the Maiden are always female, and usually reside in small towns, where they bless crops and serve as midwives and healers.  The Halflings are the Maiden's chosen people, forever innocent and fertile, and known also as the Maiden's Children; as with the children of many maidens, though, it is uncertain who their father is, as they take after both the Travller and the Gallant, and both gods look kindly upon them.

The Gallant - With the planting done, the preparation for the summer campaigns begins.  This is the Month of the Gallant, depicted as a young knight in armor.  The Gallant is a patron of knights and heroes, and favors all who are bold and audacious.  The Month of the Gallant is a time of boasts and oaths for the coming summer, and is a time when young men are stirred to action, both taking up arms and wooing ladies fair.  Festivals of the Gallant are raucous affairs of feats of strength, drinking, and boasting.  The spring tourneys also take place during this time among the nobility, with the selection of squires often occurring as well.  The Gallant stands opposite the Drunkard on the Great Wheel, as they are sides of the same coin of youthful recklessness, and oaths uttered in the Month of the Gallant are brought to task during the Festival of the Drunkard.  Proper priests of the Gallant are few, though there are several knightly orders dedicated to him who tend his temples and shrines, which are often located in perilous places.

To Part 2

Damage Hurts: A Comparative Study

Sometimes it's good to get back on the player side of the table and in the player mindset (while I didn't DM anything long-term last semester, I also only DMed rather than playing).  Something that has struck me about playing Traveller in comparison to playing D&D / Trailblazer / d20 in general is that in Traveller, Damage Hurts.  Damage in Traveller is applied to the recipient's physical ability scores, with according loss of carrying capacity and bonuses to skills.  You can sustain Endurance / Constitution loss pretty easily, since it's not used for all that much except carrying capacity and resisting poison (most of the time...), but once you start to lose Dexterity and Strength, it really starts to hurt.  If you were to put it in d20 terms, it would be like taking penalties to attack, damage, and skills after you take about a third of your HP in damage.

This makes combat a much bigger deal than in d20, because you might be able to handle two real combats before engaging in a third would be suicide.  Arguably, Traveller's healing and armor systems are designed to compensate for this; after-combat first aid can restore a good chunk of the damage taken after each combat, provided that you have good (and lucky) medics, and high-grade armor can take much of the sting off of most attacks, since it provides a direct damage reduction-type effect to all attacks.  Military-grade combat armor, in particular, makes Drew's character more-or-less impervious to small arms fire (DR 14 against ~3d6 damage from an unskilled shooter with a rifle yields average damage of 0), but the rest of us have armor in the 5-8 range, and between 20 and 30 'hit points' of physical stats, so we can each take somewhere between 4 and 10 hits from a rifle before dying - but we'll be rendered combat-ineffective by penalties long before that happens.

In D&D, on the other hand, this reduction in combat effectiveness as a result of damage just isn't a thing.  If you've still got 1 HP left, you act without penalty.  In D&D, reduction in combat effectiveness is handled via negative status effects, buffs wearing off or being dispelled, or similar.  D&D characters have enough hit points to avoid serious risk of death in most fights (under standard 3.x encounter balance after about second level, anyways), so the trick becomes to wear down their resources over many fights so that when they get to the Boss, they're actually threatened.  D&D characters beyond low levels have a wide variety and a huge volume of spells, magic items, and special abilities to supplement their HP which are what is really being worn down during iterated combats.

The real point here, though, isn't to just state these differences.  The interesting part is the differences in play-style which these different resourcing schemes generate.  In Traveller, we seem to try to avoid every avoidable combat, because if we're torn up from an avoidable combat and happen on an unavoidable one, then we're really badly off.  In (modern editions of) D&D, this is less of an issue because you have a relative abundance of resources, and combat is often lucrative - that's another point of some difference from Traveller, where "post-combat loot" is very rarely a thing.

This has come to my attention because I've been looking at hacking a system for the Western Marches style game that I am bound and determined to try running eventually; the idea just won't die.  A Traveller core is tempting, because it's a nice simple system with a lot of flexibility, but D&D is familiar to more players and more crunchy in the resource management...  and it permits two fights in a row without a serious chance of death.  The conclusion, then, is that if I want to use Trav as a core, I need to make good armor or good healing pretty available; of these, I feel that armor is preferable, since then you do get a really gradual diminishing of capability.  However, enough post-combat healing that people aren't just toast after a lucky hit or two would also not go amiss.  On the flip side, I think Trailblazer's short rest half of HP healing is just too much; it removes the last vestiges of HP as a resource to be shepherded, unless I start rolling for random encounters every time PCs decide to take a short rest, which seems...  over-zealous.

Games I Want to Run, Part 2

So the votes are in among the options I posted here, from three players from last semester.  One vote of "Fields of Blood would be cool if you can fix the caster issues, but Western Marches would also be badass", one vote of "Fields of Blood would be awesome if you added rules for fighters training units and such, but Wilderlands / episodic would be awesome too", and one that was primarily for Wilderlands.  This input leaves my predicament ultimately unsolved...  but that's OK, because the purpose of asking for feedback wasn't to resolve it, but to get some thoughts from third parties.

So...  Fields of Blood got a good bit of support, but it was all predicated on shrinking the strategic advantage casters get as a result of FoB's increased scales.  First, I'm not sure that's doable; non-casters have no equivalent to spells to be researched, nor an equivalent to items to be created, and they just can't do the strategic-level movement and reconnaissance that teleport and scrying permit.  Craft Fortification, letting individuals boost unit training rates, Command as a class skill, and solo missions into enemy territory are all well and good, but I really don't think it's fixable.

There's also a kind of timing problem - I don't know how long Tim's current campaign is going to run into the semester.  If it runs long, then FoB might end up starting up towards the end of the semester, and then I foresee it dying on Thanksgiving and Winterbreak.  Since FoB would require a lot of work to prep, that would be kind of a shame and a waste.  The episodic structure of Wilderlands would be more likely to survive this kind of thing - as long as I keep a one-adventure buffer prepped and ready to go, Wilderlands could almost be run on a spontaneous basis.  Tim also mentioned today that alternating DMing / co-DMing would make everybody's life a lot easier; as it stands, we have more players than a single DM can run a game for.  Having two DMs who kind of work in parallel, allowing players from the other game into their own game would allow each of them a little more slack.  There is much potential here.

Finally, Western Marches.  I had an epiphany last week, which was kind of disappointing to me...  It was prompted by an observation Ben Robbins makes in the last post in his Western Marches series.  To quote:

You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s nothing compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that they could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern.

 So: to capture the awesome that was WM, I'd need to have a big playerpool with multiple groups.  This means that I can't run WM during the summer; there just aren't enough people around.  Likewise, to run it as well as possible, I'd also need to have multiple, competing groups meeting regularly at different times.  This implies that I'd need to have a couple nights free a week to run games for different groups...  and I don't see that happening during the semester.  So there is basically no time when I can run it.  After college, I imagine I may have trouble finding a playerpool of sufficient size...  so I think that's a dream which may never come to fruition.  Saddening, but I'm going to keep it in the back of my brain nonetheless in case an opportunity presents itself (say, spring of senior year maybe).

So, conclusions:  Wilderlands it is for the parts of next semester when I'm not playing in Tim's game (I don't think I'll be able to commit to both running and playing regular games, and I really want to finish Fjolkir's grudge against the dragon).  Now the task becomes tweaking Trailblazer for the episodic style of play, studying the setting, and coming up with good hooks and opposition.

Games I Want to Run

I have an awesome problem going into next semester: there are more games that I want to run than I could possibly actually run.  So I'm going to toss them up here and see if I can get some feedback.

The first I've been considering is Fields of Blood.  For those unfamiliar, FoB is a sourcebook devoted to letting players rule and run realms under D&D3.5.  As far as setting goes, I'm considering a Norse / Germanic / Northern European land of Black Forests and grim peaks, where the cunning nibelungen dwarves of Niflheim can craft whatever you desire for a dread price, and the Fey Folk of the woods are dying out as the power of the realms of men waxes.  To the north is the Grey Sea, and to the south lie the Howling Hills of the wulfen beastmen.  The realms of men are fractious, tenuously united beneath a High King, but with each of the noble houses scheming for its own advantage.  Notable source of inspiration of the Song of Ice and Fire, as a lowish-magic northern European highish-lethality setting. The PCs enter this milieu as landless humans, disinherited second or third sons of minor lords, minor knights, upjumped peasants, highwaymen on the run, that kind of person, probably around 8th level, and proceed to carve out lands and titles for themselves.

The advantage of the FoB approach is that it solidly grounds the PCs in the gameworld.  Their actions have consequences, and there are incentives for involving themselves in local affairs.  They take squires, lead crusades, hold castles, marry ladies fair or strapping young knights, and have children who grow to be the next generation of PCs.  On the other side of the same coin, though, is the necessity of a well-detailed setting for the PCs to go conquer, as well as the addition of an extra 'realm layer' of mechanics for me to keep track of and prep.  I also expect that balance issues may be magnified in FoB as compared to 3.5; a 9th-level wizard can decimate an army with fireballs and teleport out if things are going badly, while a 9th-level fighter simply can't, to say nothing of realm-level capabilities like scrying and other powerful divinations.   Timescales are also a problem; time in FoB is measured mainly in weeks.  Casters gain here, as well, from the increased availability of time for things like spell research and item crafting; fighty-types have no similar 'downtime'-burning mechanics.  Finally, it isn't very flexible as far as player availability goes; if the General of the Armies can't make it to one session, you're kinda hosed.

The other approach I'm considering inverts these advantages and disadvantages.  I found a used copy of the Necromancer Games version of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Campaign Setting, and want to run an episodic game set there, played in the open-table style.  Basically, play would be divided into short, one-session adventures, corresponding to a single episode of a TV show or a single short story in an anthology.  I intend to draw on the Thieves' World anthologies and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar anthologies for inspiration (though I should probably also read up on Conan as well).  A typical session runs as follows: I prep a hook and a session's worth of opposition.  Players show up, with veteran players assisting new players in rolling up characters at an established 'baseline' level (probably in the 4th to 6th range) while I do a little more prep.  The Heroes assemble in a seedy tavern in the City State of the Invincible Overlord, get their hook, and go do their thing (along the lines of the Beyond the Black Gate post linked above with the word episodic).  The session ends with them back where they started, but richer and more experienced.  XP is awarded by the numbers, so players who show up more often tend to level faster.  I'm considering using one of the old-school "Spending GP on ale and wenches gets you XP" rules so that leveling doesn't end up being terribly slow (13 encounters per level is a few too many for me...).

The open-table part comes in with the easy entrance and exit of PCs; if you have a new player (or if somebody dies), they get a new character.  If somebody decides not to show up one day, no big deal; larger shares of loot for everyone else (if they survive).  If somebody decides never to come back, it's bad, but the campaign goes on.  This allows new players to 'dip their toes in', so to speak, without committing to spending n hours a week on the game.  This style of play also saves me prep time; prep consists of rolling up a random objective, assembling some opposition from one or more monster manuals, and embellishing as I go.  This style of play has another advantage, in that it parallelizes well; if I need a week's break and I know another decent DM (and I dare say that I do), I might be able to hand a week's session off without giving away any big secrets or burdening them with a huge amount of work.  Heck, I could even alternate weeks of DMing (or, better yet, roll each week for who's DMing), and play in the campaign on my off-weeks.  There are two obvious disadvantages here, though: the first is the inverse of FoB's boon, namely that the PCs are terribly disconnected from the world.  They're itinerant sellswords doing dirty work for gold, not holding castles and leaving grand marks on the world.  The second disadvantage is of down-time; with no standardized (and probably not even any specified) amount of time between episodes, item creation and spell research suddenly become hugely ambiguous.  I'm considering turning item creation feats into 'per-episode' resources; for example, Brew Potion might, at the beginning of each episode that you show up for, let you roll up 2d4 random potions that you brewed since last episode.  You get 'em at no cost, but they spoil at the end of the episode.  Scrolls could work similarly, but wands would be much trickier; perhaps a variant of Crafting Points as a per-episode resource would work.

The third and final option that I've been tossing around for a year and a half now is to run a derivative of Ben Robbins' Western Marches campaign.  This, however, would be a ton of work for me, and I like the Wilderlands as a setting well enough to run that instead.  Then there's the other crazy option, which is to run Fields of Blood in the Wilderlands, but then I lose the flavor that I want in FoB and have to put up with the craziness of the Wilderlands.