The Borrowed Book

Well - three months have passed... I wish I could say I have been so busy playing and something that I couldn't find time to blog - that would be a lie. What might be worse is that I have had two or three posts percolating in my head for a while, but just haven't had the energy to put them down. Sad. But this is not a post about sadness, this is a post about a game we played a while back.

I've been wanting to work up games in urban settings - we've managed to play a few bits in cities through the years - I should name the games we play. The Bard's Pants! Where in the World is Narvy? Trolls in the Sewer! Those are all urban adventures, a couple different kinds - The Bard's Pants was a kind of infiltration game - a trio of lowly thieves were tasked with breaking into a house and retrieving the pants a bard had left behind, preferably without being spotted. They did it - it was great fun! Where is Narvy was a different group of characters, three "detectives" sent from somewhere far away to Waynesburg to track down Narvy, a prodigal son, a university student gone bad. They came to Waynesburg and had to track Narvy down there - they did, eventually, and now they are about to find out why he went missing. Well - that's where we left the story a year and a half ago. Trolls in the sewer had the plot you would expect, and was more of a combat oriented game. Anyway.

This year, I conjured up another one - a heist scenario. Something simple - we have never really played a heist game, and were not sure how well it would work, so I made a very simple one. Used the three thieves from the Bard's Pants - gave them a simple assignment, involving breaking into a warehouse. The story was: an old man died, an old collector of stuff; his family removed all his belongings and stuck them in a warehouse until they could go through them and see if he had anything valuable; he may or may not have owned anything valuable - but when he died, he had a very valuable book, locked in a chest in his flat. None of his relatives know about it, but another old book collector does. The old man did not own this book - he borrowed it - but his relatives don't know that, either. The other book collector needed to get it back before they found it - he hired the adventurers to retrieve the book from the warehouse without letting anyone know that it was ever there. I wanted a simple McGuffin, something that would not really tempt them to steal it, but could give them something to think about if they wanted to, so a strange printed book it was - it worked out pretty well.

So they set about the task. I kept it simple - I set up the locations, the warehouse and the shops around it, drew some maps and set up the likely figures they could find, tried to just describe it, and let them figure out how to get in. They latched on a couple ideas - one, to rent space in the warehouse to case it, then come back and find the book; the other to go in through the sewers which connected to spaces under the warehouse. They did both - cased the place, making up an elaborate story about a traveling magic show; then sneaking in through the sewers and cellars at night. They knew there was a trap door from the cellars to the warehouse - they did not know it was chained down! That led to some scrambling to figure out how to continue, and some shenanigans inside. But in the end, they accomplished the mission without getting caught or starting a fight or anything. Success!

This was, I will say, a complete blast. We played it in three sessions. The first one was outstanding - it felt slow when we were playing, since they spent a lot of time talking in circles, coming up with elaborate schemes to get in, then after a lot of them, going and interacting with people at the warehouse, at neighborhood merchants and passers by, with a bookseller who could explain the book they were supposed to be retrieving. It felt slow, but it was also a huge relief - just walking around, talking to people, being able to spin yarns and characters on the spot, spill exposition and history, have them make up their own schemes and personae and all the rest - it was a joy. 

The second session didn't go as well. One of the players kept falling asleep - that didn't help. they also kept splitting up, one or two of them going off on their own, so there were quite a few times I'd end up running something for 1 or 2 people for half an hour, then switch to the other one, with the others left out. That can be a problem, and probably worse when their missions are as open ended as they were - the second session was mostly exploring around the warehouse, looking for secret entrances and so on.

But the third session made up for it. They made their final plan, then went in through the sewers, they found the door locked - it took a while to figure out how to get it open. Once they did, they found themselves in the warehouse along with the guards and some fops having a party. They snuck around and bluffed the guards and managed to get the book and run, though one fo them was trapped in the place. But he played drunk, and the guards were pissed at the partiers so they ignored another drunk, so he was able to get away without making trouble. Success!

It makes me want to resurrect the more elaborate urban adventure we started last year. (Where in the World is Narvy?) I find it very refreshing to have to interact with a city - as DM, it's great fun, though a ton of work - creating settings, people, events, and so on, then playing these things. It is a very welcome relief from the more common dungeon crawl style game we tend to play. Being able to devote the session to talking, planning, sneaking around, doing things, learning things, whatever it is, without fighting everyone, is a great relief. It's different, a different way of thinking, and it helps, it's good for you. It in inspiring - it makes you want ot find other ways to play in different kinds of games.

All right: I will end this with a few observations on running this kind of scenario. Not htat I am an expert - but I noticed these things:

1) For a heist game, you have to build a situation that let's you play this way. It has to be simple, flexible, and you have to build the setting, the place. The goal, the location, the obstacles have to work together, and they have to be flexible enough to accommodate what the players come up with. You have to create the problem for them to solve. This one was very simple - but I think you can scale it up, in size and complexity, with some practice. 

2) In the game itself - you have to find ways to keep pressure on them. This one did bog down, as they planned and replanned and planned again - you have to come up with ways to keep things moving. At some point they have to act. I didn't worry about it too much here, but a more trying heist needs to have some kind of ticking clock, for the players as much as the characters.

3) You have to be flexible with rolls. We went a long way in this game without making any rolls, especially the first night - but sometimes you have to make checks. To make this kind of game work, you have to be flexible sometimes. This was quite explicitly not meant to turn into a fight - they would have been obliterated by the people in the warehouse if it came to swords, anyway. But I think there are ways to do this. In this case - when the rolls went bad, I escalated the stakes, rather than starting a fight. I brought the guards down to where they were, so they had to do something to hide better; I brought the whole party down (party in the sense of booze and women and drunken aristocrats), which added lots of possibilities if they blew some more rolls. I also made a point of trying to play the guards - the drunks, the ones who were on duty and annoyed at the partiers, and so on. The goal should be to make the players come up with something to avoid trouble - make up a story, do something fun or daring, run, anything. They were pretty good at this.

(This is something of a pet peeve, by the way. In too many games, non-combat rolls tend to be far more consequential than combat rolls. I mean - you blow a stealth roll, and that's the end of trying to sneak past the guards; someone blows a deception roll and the bad guys know who you are and Roll Initiative! It bugs me. It means attempts to avoid combat all too often end up with a single point fo failure - with way too many chances to fail, since every character in the party ends up rolling that stealth or deception roll. There has to be a better way - ways of escalating, ways that players can try to recover from a bad roll. Otherwise, you just aleways end up fighting. That's fine when you want to fight, but not when you don't)

4) I should add that I can see places where you might want to bring in ideas from other games (besides D&D). Call of Cthulhu's pushed rolls are a pretty obvious way to address my previous point, say. Or bringing in ideas from other heist games, where you can retrofit - where you can say (or at least roll) That you have some object you didn't think of until then. On the principal, say, that the characters are smarter about this sort of job than the players - so if it makes sense that they would have thought of it ahead of time, let them have it. One of the players here realized he should have gotten some pine tar (or similar substance) before coming in - would I let him add it? Sure! It made sense - it is something the character would have thought of before. I think this kind of scenario rewards flexibility all through.

All right. That was that. A very enjoyable outing, one I hope we do more of. 

World Anvil

I have been playing with World Anvil this weekend. I like it very much. World Anvil is a world building site - a database for world building for games or fiction, that allows you to create and track information about your world, and then present it in various ways to others. you can get a lot of use out of it without paying a penny - though the paid versions offer some very appealing features, and aren't all that expensive. I am likely to ante up for at least the first level of it.

There are plenty of places to find reviews (that one is on Nerdarchy): I want to write more about how I use it and what I wish it could do. Which might be best read as, what I haven't figured out how to do yet - it is fairly extensive, with lots of interrelated pieces and templates, that are sometimes hard to fit together (at least in the 4 days I've been using it.) I think it is a very useful resource, though, and am probably going to start digging into it hard.

It works very well at what it does, I think. It is a fine way to organize material and present it. The templates for different pieces of the world, types of information - people, places, organizations, etc - are full of options, collecting what you need to describe those pieces. Some of it is obvious - some of it works as a spark, to think about the elements you need. Ticks and quirks and tone of voice and date and conditions of birth for people; coinage of the realm, founding date, judicial systems and so on for countries or organizations. A lot of these are sparks to think through story elements - they are very useful. There are lots of options, but they are easy enough to figure out. It is possible to put down a pretty basic record, too, and come back to add what you need.

Where things get complicated is in how the different types of records relate to one another, and how they display. The software publishes its information in a Wiki-like format - but doesn't always quite seem to follow the flow I would like. The best example I can see is with a country or city. You can enter a place as a physical place, a "location" - Lenay, say; and you can enter it as a country, which is called and "organization" - The Kingdom of Lenay, for instance. Both types of record collect a lot of good and useful information - but as nearly as I can tell, they are both published as separate pages. What I would want would be one page that could present at least an outline of all of it - the land and people, weather and conditions, the history and politics and cultural factors, the people associated with it, all one one page. (At least outlined on one page, like Wikipedia itself.) To be fair - this strikes me as something that is probably possible with some advanced settings. I might have not figured it out yet. But it's odd, and so far creates some complication, I think.

There is also the question of what I want to do with it. The problem there is that I have way too much information to do anything simple with it. Getting what I want in there (assuming I can decide what I want and don't want) is a daunting task. There's also the problem of how to split information up. I have been doing this for 35 years, both for D&D and for writing. There's a lot of material, and it falls into both categories - fiction and game material. There is a lot that is only really applicable to writing; other that is applicable to games but not fiction; some that is different. Pieces can get moved around, characters and situations reused or changed. I want to be able to put the game material out where others can use it - but I also want to organize the fictional material. This is a good way to keep it all straight - but using it for both games and stories might just make it more complicated.

That's my problem, I suppose. And it's a problem created by the fact that this is a very useful piece of software, something I am eager to use to organize both D&D campaigns and fiction writing. So - I am very happy to have finally gone on the site and started playing with it.

The Deserts

Let me comment a bit on the Desert campaign I am running. It is a fairly shameless bit of orientalism: deserts, middle eastern and North African settings and weapons and so on - I don't know how to get around that, but since all of D&D is a pastiche of old books, I'm not sure there's any reason to try. Try not to insult anyone, on purpose or by accident, and keep the old books close at hand, I guess...

That said: what is this place? It's a very large desert, basically the big empty place in the dead center of the map on this page. It's kind of an upside down North Africa: an ocean bounding it (to the south, here), with a strip of relatively fertile land by the sea, mountains behind that, and then a great vast waste, bounded in the north by more highlands, that separate the desert from the more temperate lands to the north and west. There is civilization all around the desert - and quite a lot of traffic through it, caravans, nomadic herdsmen moving from oasis to oasis, well traveled trade routes and so on. There are resources in the desert - salt and other minerals - so a fairly thriving economy, though one that seems to disappear into the vastness of the wastes. The desert is a typical desert, not an undifferentiated sea of sand (though some areas are): ridges and hills, mountains, depressions, plateaus, and so on; there is water, but it can be hard to find. It is all hot and dry, and moving through it requires planning - there are a lot of ways to die.

We have just started playing, the PCs are in the foothills of one of the mountain ranges, looking for lost tombs, with a drow archeologist who has taken them on as his protectors. As I mentioned before, I expect to keep the "plot" of the campaign fairly loose - probably arranged around tomb raiding (Mummies!), but able to go anywhere. A series of shorter missions, really - find a tomb here; explore a ruined castle there; visit a town or city somewhere else; cross the desert, thwart a villain, etc. I hope that means they will end up traveling all around the desert - one of the features is that you are likely to move around a lot, if you are adventuring in the desert, moving back and forth between the wastes and towns, north and south, east and west, etc. I hope.

The desert is surrounded by mountains and civilization. So - some of the places of interest: in the north, the desert is bounded by mountains and a river - the Little Dragon mountains and river, something called Dragon Lake - and Greyhawk, imported directly from the old books, placed here. This is a fairly prosperous area, though it is far enough south to be fairly hot and dry. The city is old and large, and has the feel of a city on the edge of two cultures - like in the Balkans, or southern Russia, Turkey and Greece. It is a major trade center, being tied to the desert caravan routes and to rivers flowing west, the Makeesa, which flows to the Greatflood, which flows to the sea.

To the west of the desert are mountains - the Fire Mountains prominently - a high, forbidding range. On their northern edge are the Sapphire Hills, which are the center of a large dwarven kingdom, and a human country called Ritmark. In the eastern foothills of the Fire Mountains (the western edge of the desert) is the city of Phoenix - ancient and mysterious, with strong links to the mountains and the desert. And on the south-west edge of the desert is a vast high plateau called the Dead Lands: this is a completely barren, desiccated, unlivable place, though it might be the stronghold of the Githyanki, on the material plane.

South of the desert are the Altas mountains, and south of that the Southern Ocean. These mountains rise fairly high in places, and stretch across most of the southern coast of the continent, west to east. The strip between the mountains and the sea has a very pleasant, Mediterranean style climate - this is where most people live. There are several cities along the coast. The largest of these are Al Aben and Arcabar, major ports, surrounded by farmland and other resources, sustaining significant city states. Al Aben is further west, larger, more open, more of a trading center, both across the sea, and into the desert - indeed, it is a major terminus for the desert trade. Arcabar is to the east, smaller, more sheltered, especially on the land side, and somewhat more hostile. It is a notorious haven for pirates, who have deals with the legitimate government, and can be a dangerous entity at times. Around them, are numerous other towns, small counties and principalities, more or less independent and prosperous.

At the eastern end of the Southern Ocean, a vast river flows in from the north-east. This ends in a major delta, which has been civilized for millenia. The premier city here is Xandria,a sprawling port city, an ancient power. Up the river are a number of other cities, some very ancient, some very large. All of this area,not surprisingly, has an Egyptian cast to it. And south-east of this is a large Peninsular or Isthmus which itself is nothing but desert and coastal settlements. But that is not where this campaign is going. And on the east of all of this are the Dragon Mountain - a vast range, running north south, and dividing all this area from lands to the east.

All of these southern cities have been there for 1000s on 1000s of years - this is where civilization began. (Human, at least.) They have risen and fallen through the years - there have been great empires - the Black Empire, which originated in fact in Phoenix, and spread back to the east, run by religious fanatics using monstrous armies and magic to conquer all. They eventually collapsed, and were followed by centuries of smaller empires and kingdoms that eventually fought themselves into fragments. All that happened 2 or 3 thousand years ago. Another wave of conquest came from the cities south of the deserts about 500 years before the present - conquering the southern lands, then crossing the desert and invading the north and west,sparking a century or two of warfare that went back and forth across both the deserts and the north, leaving its own traces. The last hundred years or have been relatively quiet -
trade has replaced warfare as the primary means of interaction between the desert cities and the rest of the world, and the various kingdoms and city states of the region have developed individually. There is, in fact, a lot of trade between these places and the north and west - though this is the kind of trade that is, itself, often as much a form of war as not.

That is the setting, ver roughly. It is ancient; it has been conquered and reconquered dozens of times over 5000 plus years; it is very active, in that there are constant connections between these places and other parts of the world - though the distances and the emptiness of the space between helps mask that. The southern cities are rich and powerful; they are, for the most part, open to trade, so they welcome outsiders; and there is all that empty land to move around in - which provides opportunities for evil. Plenty of places for monsters and villains to hide.

Campaign Ideas Existing and Theoretical

[After another inexcusably long absence - try t again! As this post will imply, I have not been completely idle in the interim - but I have not put anything up here. Well - keep trying; someday the habits may take.]

I am thinking about campaigns I want to run, and why.

I am currently n the middle of two campaigns, which have been making at least some progress:

1) The Dragon Turtle Island campaign - offshoot of last summer's enthusiasm for Tomb of Annihilation jungles, pirates and Chult - one group of adventurers, headed for Chult, got sidetracked into an archipelago where their leaders were shipwrecked and captured, so they had to find them. This is going al right, if slowly - landing on Dragon Turtle Island, working through kobold lirs, mountains and caves, jungles, etc. It is building to a fairly well defined adventure path - a point to return to.

2) Desert Campaign - started up recently. This is much looser, a group of characters, wandering through a desert, fighting bandits and thri-keen and the like. It has gone pretty well, I think - couple interesting set pieces, some environmental challenges. I foresee this one staying fairly loose - more like a series of smaller expeditions, that might have some overall arc, but are mostly just connected by the setting and whatever characters and situations come up in play.

3) Back when I was posting here, I put up a few notes about 2 big cities, Waynesburg nd Bayport. We even managed tp play a couple scenes in Bayport, as we as developing some ideas for Waynesburg - though without getting to the point of rolling any dice. I like these settings very much,and want to play them - but they are hard to get started with, and frankly, I doubt I'll pt too much effort into them, as long as I have the two campaigns above running. I like those adventures,like the characters involved - it's hard to move way from them.

4) But that doesn't stop me from thinking about it - I've got a town that is a promising setting. I call it Hegelburg, but you could probably call it Generic Fantasy Town Setting. Two things mark it - it is right in the middle of everything, and has no strong specific flavor (unlike some of the locations I've developed for inthe past: cities, the south seas, the deserts, Lenay, with its political background, and pirates lurking on the coasts, and so on); and it is a place that has been int he middle of every war fought in this area in the last 1000 years. So it is full of ruins, new and old - a classic D&D setting.... But the fact is: it's another place I am not likely to develop much for, as long as the desert ad south seas stuff is running. Those work - it's hard enough keeping two separate campaigns afloat; I don't know if I can do more.

Thinking about these campaigns, though, I notice things about myself. What draws me to them. Such as:

1) I like sandboxy places. I am more interested in the settings, usually, than the adventures, or the stories. I almost regret the way the Dragon Turtle campaign has gone - it has a clear mission, and though it has been slow in developing, there is a clear destination, a clear adventure path. Sooner or later, this is going to be a dungeon crawl - in a way it has been, with a crawl through level 1 - kobolds, giving way to a crawl through the jungle, leading to crawls through various lost cities and tombs and temples and shrines. But all this means that the idea of exploring this island, and the islands around it, is somewhat lost. The problem is, when I try to develop it, I am almost as fond of sand boing s when I am running it. I make up yet another band of goblins or pirates or something, with another strange relationship to the main plot, instad of populating the mai dungeon. A sad state of affairs.

The desert campaign, on the other hand, is not like that. Even as goals emerge, I see them as looser - sending characters off into the wilds, but in a way that lets them go lots of places. The characters contribute to this - they are more integral to the setting, backgrounds matched to the desert, races and such given as much flavor as I can find. It is set up to allow that open endedness.

2) I also like to find specific ways to play. In the Waynesburg adventure that has been developed at some length, if never played, the characters have been heavily thought through, looking for their place in the city. That is one way. One thing that would get me to play the Village setting might be to be able to start up a band of adventurers from scratch, with specific means of creating characters. Roll 4d6, write down the results in order, and decide on the characters to make with those numbers. At least if this can fit the setting (which they should: Generic Fantasy Setting!) I like to find characters - sometimes at least.

3) I should note this, too - that I lke t find an element about the setting that makes it unique. So - two urban campaigns, but they are in very different cities. Bayport is a boom town - grown three or four times in 20 years, center of trade, a port, packed and dangerous in the way new cities are. While Waynesburg is an old city - one that wa, in fact, devastated by war 20 or so years ago - whole sections of the city are empty, or as wild as any frontier; others, though, are prosperous and safe - it is all crammed together. Same with towns - we were playing in Lenay, and though those adventures shifted off to fairly straight dungeon crawling, the setting as a whole is marked by its politics - the missing king, the increasingly disunified and tyrannical barons and court, the breakdown of law and order, emerging as wide spread outlawry inland, and pirates trying to gain footholds on the coast. Hegelburg, meanwhile, I would imagine as a place that has been ruined by wars,a nd is in some stage of recovery. But the past ruination, the ongoing weak law and security (more than the battles among power factions) is what marks it. And so on.

4) There is another point I have to make: I would love to play in some of these settings - but it seems clear to me, that if you want to play a certain type of story, the best way to do it is to run it. There re characters and settings that are too closely associated - my Bayport campaign has suffered because the character who is most suited to it is mine,and I can't play her there.... But most fo the time, there are ways to make it work. If you find a style fascinating, a setting, a set of problems, you should run them. Most players will adapt; the easiest way to address their longings to play different styles is for them to run.

And so on. I do with that I could find more games to play in. Besides these, we have an online game going, and a game at a game store - these are fun, but the game store, especially, feels very much like what we have always done, or like the games I played in college. Murder hobos on parade! with occasional ill timed reminders that someone wrote "Lawful Good" on their alignment line. I would love to find a more intrigue based game - mysteries and puzzles, maybe; different settings. It would be good.

Locations and Overview

The setting for this adventure is the Southern Ocean, specifically the western reaches of this ocean. The Western Ocean [for lack of a better name - hey: it's an accurate description at least!] lies west of the main continent. The mainland ends about 30 North, and directly south of the land (which extends, then, a couple thousand miles to the east) is this Southern Ocean.

The country dividing these two oceans is Vinar. Vinar is a peninsular, south of the inland sea where The Kingdom is (United Kingdom of Norfolk, Wessex and Suffolk, to the lawyers; The Kingdom to everyone else). The Kingdom is north and west of this inland sea - Vinar is to the south. Vinar itself is a mountainous land, with a range of very active volcanos down the far west coast, and a somewhat older range in the east. Between these ranges (that both run roughly north/south) is a high, dry plateau, mostly grasslands, famous for its cattle and horses. North and south of the highlands are fertile seacoasts, lands of hills and vines and olives and so on. Vinar as a whole is a united country in name, with a king - though in practice it is dominated by its great lords, with regional power bases. Culturally [since I am unimaginative and lazy and when in doubt, steal what I can from reality or elsewhere], Vinar is Iberian - mostly Spanish, probably some Portuguese in the south. So names in this area, and in the southern islands, tend to be Spanish in form.

Vinar, I say, is a peninsular, extending into the Western ocean, with the inland sea to the north [another thing I've never come up with a name for], and the Southern Ocean to the south. East of Vinar are a number of other countries, principalities, Duchies, the odd Kingdom - they have names like Ottovilla, Pallas, Olivo, etc. Directly south of the mainland, in this eastern direction, are a group of islands generally called the Shackled Islands - these are various sizes, some quite large, with varying degrees of civilization and political independence. They might be quite interesting, but that is not where this story is laid. South from these islands is the open ocean, for the most part. And east, rather east, is a long desert coast, that itself is interesting, but not part of this story.

Due south of Vinar, and to its west, are the islands we care about. Go far enough south south west, and you hit another continent, known, at least to clueless northerners, as the Jungle Continent. It is vast, mostly unexplored, and the northern parts, lying close to the equator, are very mountainous, volcanic and covered in jungle. It is indirectly relevant to our story, but we can leave it for now. Between this continent and Vinar lie a large number of islands. One is very large - 7-800 miles north to south, a few hundred miles wide, also volcanic and jungle covered - the equivalent, really of Chult in the Forgotten Realms. [Id say this is a strange coincidence that I invented this place and Ed Greenwood invented Chult, but since it is basically the Yucatan with the connections to the rest of north and south America submerged, coincidence might not be the word.] We will get there - though since someone else is doing the work of filling in Chult, I am quite happy to use what's in the book for this game.

The other islands are somewhat more important, at least in terms of defining what this part of the world works like. This entire area - from the Jungle Continent north to Vinar - is right on the edge of a couple plates: it is a ring of fire indeed. The continent, "Chult" and Vinar are all volcanically active - so are many of the islands between. And no surprise, then, that this whole spread of islands are called the Fire Islands. Within the Fire Islands, there are more divisions - people usually refer to four chains making up the Fire Islands:

The Barrier islands are the farthest west and north - they are smaller, scattered, forming a small crescent almost due west of Vinar. They are populated, but not heavily - many islands are either unpopulated, or left entirely to the natives, who have been living there for centuries, or millenia; areas that have been encroached by northerners or easterners are still small settlements, modest plantations, forts towns. Though like almost all of the Fire Islands, they are infested with pirates.

The Pirate Islands are located east of the Barriers and "Chult", directly south of the western part of Vinar. They have earned their name. Someday I will attempt a history of these places - the gist of it is that for the last century or two, these southern islands have been doing booming business in spices, coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco; there are also large gold, silver, diamond mines on "Chult" and the Jungle Continent. All these goods, so valued in the north (and the east, where several large cities and kingdoms thrive as well) need to be transported, and the ships transporting them make fine targets. Pirates have thrived in these islands, and have given them their name. The actual vehemence of the pirate enterprises may wax and wane, along with their level of political organization - but they are a constant presence. They are not the only presence - countries, like Vinar and Pallas and the Kingdom make claims on some of these islands, maintain fleets of official vessels and try to uphold the law - but none of these forces can eradicate the pirates, and most of them have long since stopped trying, completely. Pirates work with "legal" forces in various ways, making deals, striking alliances - it is all gray.

There are three or four islands here that are worth mentioning. First - San Marcos - this is located directly east of "Chult", and it is the closest thing to a complete pirate haven. The city of San Marcos is virtually run by pirates, a pirate council, which maintains peace on this island, and deals, almost like a government, with the outside world. Second, Isadore - this island is directly east of San Marcos, and is the closest thing to a stable law abiding place. It is owned by Vinar, specifically, the Count of Isadore, who in fact appoints a governor to run the place. The current count is named Govina, and stays int he Vinari capital enjoying his wine; the governor is named Falconi, and is a fairly competent and respected man. His power is concentrated in the northwestern part of the island, around the city of Porto Ringo; the larger city of Isadore, in the south east, is mostly run by a council of lords, appointed by the governor, or local merchants, or guilds, or the church. This island is fairly stable, but all this country is wild, and there are plenty of places along its coast for pirates to hide in. Third, is Barracuda Island, south of Isadore - it was once like San Marcos, a pirate city, though for a while it fell under the power of one pirate Madame LeTour - she provoked a war among the pirates and was chased off, leaving the island under the uneasy influence of Isadore and barely hidden pirate captains.

Finally, far south, directly east of the Jungle Continent, are the Forbidden Islands - so called because they have probably the most active volcanos of this very volcanic region. They lie near the equator, are covered in jungle, and have an evil reputation as the center of much of the slave trade, which unfortunately flourishes throughout the Southern Ocean.

And that is that. Here is a map, or the sketch of a map. The colors represent at least rough outlines of terrain and some of the civilization: brown and orange represent mountains and hills. Blues are usually rivers. Pink is for political boundaries. Yellow are trade routes, by land or sea. Red dots are cities and towns (though they are rather imperfectly marked.) All of this is bounded in the south by the equator, more or less; I think the northern edge of the map is around 35 degrees north.

Early Thoughts on New Campaign

I have to start with an apology. I started out the year full of ambition - full of gaming plans, ideas, hopes - both for playing and for writing. Instead? well - tell the truth, I haven't been all that far off in the real world. We have managed to play - not as steadily as we'd like, but close to what we managed at the end of last year. I've run - the fire giant lair, anyway. Ive been plugging away at developing other campaigns, and developing the world. A lot of that can end up in stories, instead of games - but that's fine. So the beginning of the list has gone all right. But the bottom - blogging? audio-visual? no nothing like that; the opposite of it. And that tends to undermine some of the things I have done - it is fine to work on building adventures and writing stories, but if I never get them even finished enough to put on blog, where does that leave me?

So - sorry about all that. And now, let's start trying to fix it. Let's start by thinking about a new campaign.

With Tomb of Annihilation coming in the fall, with its lost world setting - it is tempting to start setting up a new campaign, that can get us there. The book/adventure path is set in Chult, the jungle island south of the Forgotten Realms usual settings - which for once is almost perfectly congruent with our home brewed world. And perfectly congruent with the ideas I have had for adventures. I have been jonesing for pirates for a while - in the past, I tended to set those stories in the north, up with Lenay and Bayport and such. Thats good, but you want buried treasure and shipwrecks and pirate towns and maroons, and that stuff tends to work better when people don't freeze to death after 15 minutes in the water. So tropics, you know. I'd never worked much on the southern parts of my world in the past - the last couple years, I have. Last fall I used the south seas as setting for another stab at Nanowrimo - hitting my marks even! (though not coming close to the end of a story). It's been in my mind for a while, and an official adventurer path is perfect.

So what now? We've started the process, putting together ideas for what to play, for characters - I have been working over the setting, filling it in, trying to make the whole Southern Ocean feel real. So what I am going to try to do here, now, is start putting these things up, where we can use them as resources.

(Though doing so points out the fact that I have never actually put together any kind of document on the rest of the world, that any other person could use. I've been building this world for 35 years - I should share some of it.)

Anyway. Start here - the general idea of the campaign is this: Characters go south, into the islands south of the mainland, west of the southern ocean. These islands are tropical - running roughly 30˚N to 10˚N (there is a vast continent, full of jungles and mountains south of the islands) - most volcanic, some of them still active. In the middle of this - extending north from the southern continent - is a big island that is almost identical to Chult - jungles, volcanos, lost and mysterious interior, etc. The idea is, the Characters come into this area, for whatever their reasons. Whatever their purposes, they are somehow washed up in an archipelago west of this Chult-like island. Maybe they are shipwrecked - maybe they have been shanghaied, who knows - they have to work their way across these islands, then over to "Chult" in time to start the official adventure path.

I'll come back to this. Thoughts on who the characters are, details about the setting, and so on. But I want to get it started and I want to start writing about it as we go.

Gaming Ambitions for 2017

Welcome, 2017. I want to write a bit about things I want to do this year, related to gaming. Always optimistic, but I think circumstances may make more of this possible this year: it is something to aspire to at any rate.

1. The obvious thing is the play. Online, in person, the usual suspects, and if possible, getting involved in other games - anything. This as player, DM, both, either - just being involved in games, more often - as close tsoweekly as possible - is going to make my life a good deal happier.

2. I specifically want to run. I have three adventures pretty well worked out in my head - I have to get them on paper (or the computer) and run them. I've talked about these enough: there's the Fire Giant thing we've been poking at the last couple months, with the Bono/Inky/Milo party... There's a pirate/jungle adventure I have been working on, and have a good deal of material for... and I want to redo the House on the Cliff adventure for 5th edition. Some in person, some online - work out which is convenient, and get on with it.

3. Related to that - I want to develop these adventures, and try to turn them into something concrete. Into artifacts (as they like to say) - to write them up and put them in a tangible form, that can be shared. I would like to get into the habit of doing this - not just with my ideas, but other people's. Work on publishing (however modest an audience we might have for these materials.) The act of creating them is the goal - anything more is gravy.

4. I also want to develop the world of our games. I have been playing for 35 years and almost from the beginning, I started making up a world to ply in. I have a ton of material - maps and stories and history and social and cultural essays and information - that I have never quite managed to get from my head (and my computer and piles of paper) to somewhere other people can use them. (Other than a few posts here.) I want to do this partly just to get it into tangible form, to have done something - but also to make it possible to develop it, as a group. For all the info I have, the world is bigger than my ideas of what is in it - it would work better if we could all work on it together. Whether adding areas to the core - developing areas I have done nothing more than drawn and named - or filling in what's there - the more the merrier, I think.

(I was thinking about this playing Storm King's Thunder: I don't care much about the Forgotten Realms - I mentally translate all those published worlds to my own, fit the towns onto my maps, or - sometimes - just tack their maps onto my maps.) Doing that could help us get this game going - but only if you can build up some kind of world of your own that you have some investment in. I need to get this thing into a form that can, in fact, be worked with...)

5. I definitely need to blog more. I have to get a post in here every month at least - every week if I could... at some point, it might be worth changing this to something more public, too - linking out and interacting with other blogs. Maybe not this one, since this tends to be rather insular, a conversation about how to play, specific to what we are playing - but something like it. But to do that, I think I need to have the material, and keep producing material... We'll see. But I still need to write here more.

6. I would like to try to get some kind of audio-visual thing going. A podcast, a video blog, something - whether conversations about the game, or gamecasts, or something else. This is another thing I don't quite think I'm ready to unleash on the wide world, but I want to start doing something like this. Figure out the logistics, the technology, figure out what you have to do to make these things good - and practice them.

(This is one of the areas where work is not helping: because things like that do come up there - but the material is so mind-numbingly awful, and the kind of hypercriticism that has become the norm is so maddening, doing some kind of presentation at work ends up not teaching you to speak in public, but making the thought of speaking in public horrifying. Every time I do something like that, I think about what I want to be talking about, and it drives me nuts. So I have to find a way to start doing those things on a topic that interests me. Like - D&D!)

7. Finally, I need to write. Obviously, some of this is included in the comments above - I need to write up adventures, write up the world (in a shareable form), write for the blog - but I also have to write fiction. I always have, of course - but I have to do two things I have not done: 1) I have to actually finish something - this would be a miracle... 2) I have to do it more openly. NaNoWriMo did this - talking about my project and others was very satisfying - and very helpful in keeping the story moving forward. I didn't finish it, no surprises there, but I passed 50,000 without rewriting it four times - that's a step in the right direction all my itself. So - in short: I want to work on stories - and talk about them, both the writing process and the actual stories. (This, I should say, also relates the world building, since I am mainly talking about fiction set in this D&D world.)

And that is it - for now anyway. I could be really ambitious, start talking about all the things I want to do: Build Models! Publish! watch more video stuff! get involved in other people's games! - but that might be a bit much. If I can do the 7 things above - not well, or bringing anything to a conclusion, just doing them - that will be an excellent start, something to build on...

Adventure Ideas

I have a couple, though they need some work. I have ideas for a dungeon crawl involving giants - well suited for the Bono/Milo/Inky crew, a bunch of bruisers as they are... I have some ideas about setting it up that I have to work on as well. I was thinking you could do a lot of background stuff by making up Information Cards - 3x5 cards with a fact or event or rumor or whatever written on them. You collect a bunch of them, then pass them out, when characters do something - when time passes, or they roll a check, or they look for something or ask a question. I think adventures turn into campaigns, and build character personality and so on by building the world around the adventure - building that stuff out is a way to do it. Though in the end - it's all to get that bunch to go fight giants and monsters and whatnot...

Another idea, that might work nicely on Roll20, would be a maritime adventure where everyone starts with Nothing. Basically the idea is - the PCs are all locked in the hold of a ship. They could get there different ways - maybe they are prisoners; maybe they are stowaways. They could be prisoners of pirates, they could be pirates themselves, they could be passengers on a ship, etc. The idea though would be that the ship they are on is taken by pirates - then caught in a storm, and abandoned by the crew, leaving the PCs trapped in the hold/brig etc. With no gear, no tools of their own, etc. They would have to get out of the hold, deal with whatever is left on the ship, maybe get to shore before it sinks, etc., while collecting the equipment they would need to operate.

That would be the starting point: once underway, it could stretch out into a full maritime themed adventure. Fighting pirates and sea creatures, searching for the people who locked them up maybe, getting involved in whatever intrigues they find. I think it has potential...

Adventure Outlines

One way to use this blog is to work out the background to actual adventures we manage to play. Given schedules and such, actual game time can be scarce, and when we have it, we're likely to want to get into the meat of the adventure when we can. Fighting, exploring, doing stuff - reasonable enough. But this is a good forum to work on the rest of the campaign - to use real world downtime to build out the glue for the adventures we are playing.

So this weekend: the party went back into the mine, from above this time - found an old pit, an open shaft, with tunnels and works leading down into the mine from the other end from the main entrance they used before. They descended, and then found 3 ogres (or an ogre and 2 half ogres), accompanied by a flock of flying kobolds - they defeated this lot fairly easily. They got a wand of magic missiles from one of the half ogres, then found a stash of stuff the ogres had been keeping. They found a treasure pile with 1500 or so coins (30 pounds, more or less), plus various objects. They also found human parts, though nothing recognizable. They headed into the mines, but were confronted by a black pudding that they saw first, so they decided to go out the way they came.

That's where we left it - and probably fairly complete unto itself. They still have options - to keep looting the mines, if they were of a mind to continue; or to go back to town and get their reward (assuming they can convince the family and/or the law that they have the leg of Black Bart.) Or - other possibilities, depending on what they have a mind to do.

In general - there are many stories lurking in this area: the pirates could use dealing with, and might be at Clamdigger Cove. There are factions in the area who would be trying to get a strong party like this one is proving to be to help them with various schemes - from fighting pirates to fighting each other. The pirates themselves are always looking for men. And the general lawlessness of the area would encourage new groups of monsters to infest the place. Once word gets around that someone has killed off the orcs living in the mine, there are likely to be other monster groups looking to give it a try for themselves.

You Are Here

Today I want to recap the situation of the adventure, and add in some of the background we glossed over.

You are, currently, on top of the hill above the mine, having just finished off the hill giant that was lurking up there. You have come back to the mine looking for Black Bart (or Black Bertrand - different people have used both names). He is a notorious highwayman who recently robbed the stage, and killed Trevor McGuffin, a wizard from a good family. His family rewarded you for returning a magical dagger (a family heirloom, worth more to them than its value), and offered a reward of 500 Pounds (GP) if you can get Black Bart. [No matter what I said up there, that's what they offered you.] They only offer this to you - they tell you this is between you and them, because you have proved your trustworthiness by returning the dagger. Meanwhile, there is a public reward of another 500 pounds for Black Bertrand (who is the same person the man who robbed the stage these weeks back), dead or alive. The law hints they'd rather have him alive; the family does not care - if he hangs or takes a sword, it's all the same to them. They also tell you that if you find anything else belonging to Trevor, you can keep it - they tried to stop him from going off to be a magician, but he didn't listen, and look what it got him.

Also, while you were in town, Sister Claire declared that since she had enough money, she was going home. Presumably you urged her to stay and get Black Bart, but she was insistent. However when she tried to find a boat to sail to Sidney, you found out that the last boat to leave harbor, the Beauclair, was taken by pirates. The crew and passengers slaughtered, according to the 2 survivors who came in, though it's not clear if they actually saw this. This is the closest the big pirate ships have come to the coast and all the other sailors are keeping to port until someone finds them. That is the responsibility of the king and his men, everyone says, but the king (or the regent) doesn't seem interested in the pirates. Much dissatisfaction in Whelker's Deep. This keeps Claire around, though she is dropping hints that she might head off cross country after all at some point.

You decided to look for Black Bart up at the mine, since that is where you found the dagger and so on. You hire 2 more men to come along, Angus and Bill - [if you have backstories for them, we should add them.]

You head out - on the way you meet 2 men who tell you Black Bart is definitely not in Clamdigger Cove - they have just been therem half thinking of the reward themselves... So you cut cros country, on a path Angus knew, to the mine.

And so - at the present moment - you are on top of the hill with a dead Hill Giant on your hands. Up here above the river, you are in moorland - hills, large, flattish ridges, all bare, covered ingrass, some shrubbery, a very few trees. This rises as you move inland from the sea - the hills in the distance get higher. There are small streams running here and there - and of course the larger river valley below you. Up here, you can see the undulations of the land. And you might also see something like smoke from half a mile or so away on the moor.

Keeping the Peace (Or Not)

I was reading this story a couple weeks ago, about ways to keep the murder hobos at bay in D&D. I've thought about that before - we've touched on some of the things that handle it - so I thought I'd write about it.

The game has taken a couple approaches through the years. The linked post notes a few. The game discussed in the post - The City State of the Invincible Overlord - did it by giving almost every NPC adventurer levels - not to mention deals with Orcus and such. here's also a link to a post about a couple Gary Gygax designed towns with legal and social systems intended to hold the characters in check. In later editions of D&D, things changed to steer PCs away from evil - limiting alignment, things like that... Or the way 4E just scaled everything to match the Characters - so in a 10th level adventure, you would run into town guards with an AC 26. That kind of thing strikes me as nonsense (and typical of the ways 4E obliterated any kind of actual world building) - 5E certainly seems to have adapted things like the flatter bonuses ("bounded accuracy") to address that. (A nice exchange about this is in the comments...)

I worry about this myself sometimes. Both questions in DM David's post: how to stop characters from going on a spree; and how PCs are supposed to relate to the general public in these worlds. But I don't think the problems are all that hard to solve. You can see it by reversing the terms: how do you stop an NPC party from sacking a village? that's what PCs are for! And that would work the other way. We've talked about this - PC's are not the only adventurers in the world. They are always a subset of the set of adventurers. I think PCs would be exceptional in their world, but not unique. From the start, they are probably tougher than most of the public - but there are always a few people around who are tougher than they are, and wherever they are, they are almost certainly not the only people at their approximate level. As they rise - maybe they become the strongest people in an area - but their presence there draws other adventurers, draws attention. If they start to abuse their power - what happens? Probably they get away with it, in the short term - the way the Orcs get away with their depredations, the way a dragon gets away with his - but they draw enemies worthy of them, by virtue of their actions. Just as an evil NPC party would draw PCs to fight them.

Still: for most campaigns, I think, PCs are probably going to fit, more or less. Take an example - the Clamdigger Cove/Dwarf mine adventure. How do PCs fit into this environment? This is a dangerous area - but it's a fairly low level danger. it's a relatively barren stretch of coast, rocky, with few inlets, with moors coming fairly close to the coast, making this uninviting for farmers - there's not a lot of people hanging around, not a lot of wealth in circulation. That makes it uninviting for powerful groups - inviting for less powerful groups. The threats out in the wilderness are significant for low level characters - orcs and goblins and bandits and so on, scaling up to ogres, giants, probably trolls - but not much more than that. The civilized population is similar - if you explored the towns and settlements, you would run into some character classes - but about the level of the monsters. The bandits and smugglers you are likely to find are 2L, 3L - not much more. I think that context provides the balance against PCs (or NPCs) getting out of hand - if the PCs decided to sack Whelker's Deep, they would find enough opposition to make it very hard, at mid-level anyway. By the time they could start to wreak real havoc, a couple things are going to come into play - on one hand - this part of the world simply doesn't have enough wealth to make it worth their while to lay it waste. And second - if they got the idea, they would start to draw opposition from people their own size.

Some of this dynamic was at play in the story of Clamdigger Cove - the idea that it was sacked by pirates gave it a couple features. I suppose the shameful truth is that it let me clear all the civilians out so I didn't have to run them just yet - but that's only part. But it also helps create the balance in the place: it creates that power vacuum, a place where crooks and monsters can operate - but it does it in a context where you know there are forces out there strong enough to wipe a town off the map. But those forces are absent for now - creating a place where low level PCs or bandits and crooks or monsters can hang around - but carefully. It should work like that - to offer a setting for adventuring that people can operate in, but with the awareness that there are bigger, stronger, darker forces just out of sight. And if you do something that attracts attention - get too rich, too powerful, or start behaving too badly - or in some cases, too nobly - you will start to draw those people in.

I think this sort of thing works even more clearly in larger towns and cities - we haven't really played in those kinds of places, but it would be fun to try. But it does require a lot more attention to these questions. First - the larger the town or city, the more adventurers there are going to be, and the more range of levels. A place like Whelker's Deep might not have anyone more than 5th or 6th level, and they are probably running part of it - but a large city can have anyone. You walk into a bar in Waynesburg and order a drink, see a tough looking old guy at the end of the bar with a longsword and the long bow and leather armor, and you think, A Ranger! but you don't have a good way of telling, at a glance, how much ranger it is - maybe he looks 5th level - maybe more or less - but the truth is, there's not going to be a huge difference between a 7th level ranger and Geronimo, Aragorn, Simon - and people like that might just turn up at the end of a bar in Waynesburg.

And more than that - most businesses anywhere are going to have muscle on hand: the owner might have a level or two, or be a veteran soldier (thus a Veteran in 5E terms) - or they might have a couple retired soldiers or rangers or such on staff. Or they have a deal with their neighbors, a neighborhood watch type thing. This is all more true in cities, and especially in the adventuring quarters of cities. In those kinds of places: bars and inns and businesses are even more likely to be owned by people with levels; to have guards on hand; to have powerful friends. They are also going to be more likely to be associated with a group - owned by the thieves guild; or paying protection to the thieves' guild. Or a member of the merchant's guild - which is almost certainly going to provide its own protection. Finally - in a city, especially in a pleasure quarter of some kind, the sheer number of establishments is going to serve to keep a kind of balance in operation. A fight starts, and everyone is going to come out into the street to watch the fun - so fights stay contained, or the mob takes out anyone who goes over the line.

So putting it together - I think that is how you can make this work. Especially in cities, though the same principals work outside cities - though probably a bit slower, and maybe more predictably. So start with the basics: why don’t PCs (or NPCs) go on killing and robbing sprees? Well -

1) sometimes they do - but see below.
2) in a city there are always people around - and in a city with adventurers, there are always people around ready to fight with you. If you start a fight, you will attract attention, and people may jump in, especially if things start to spread - if you start killing people, they are likely to do something to stop the killing.
3) in a city with adventurers and regular instances of violence, bars will have guards - most shops will have guards - if not by themselves, they will be part of guilds and the guilds will have guards. And in an area with thieves, the thieves guild will provide security. You should assume, in a big city especially, that bars and inns and brothels and gambling houses are owned by the thieves guild, or someone who had a deal with the guild. You should assume similarly than any merchants will have deals at least with their merchant guild, and possibly with the thieves guild. Etc.
4) Plus there is always the fact, in cities at least, that you don't know who you are talking to. It might be as simple as someone who looks like all the other 3rd level rangers or fighters, but it really 10L; it might be more deadly - someone who looks like a common thief or low level ranger who is actually a 12th level Bard; a common prostitute who is really a 7th level sorcerer. That kind of thing. This is, I think, far less likely to happen outside of cities - I'll come back to that...
5) The point is - if you start acting badly, you will draw attention - low level at first, but higher if you prove too much. And - as the threat or reward scales, so would the level of attention. If you start taking out the thieve's guild lieutenants, their hired killers will come after you; if you steal a vorpal sword, you will get attention from the kind of people who think they deserve a vorpal sword.

Now some of this changes in smaller towns, or outside of towns. But a lot of the principals are the same. Even in small towns, or rural areas, there will be others who can fight - even small towns will have guilds; anywhere with large landowners, there will be men at arms, to keep the peace (or maintain control). In frontier areas, things start to go back toward what they are like in cities - there will be even more adventurers around. There will be significant monsters, who may have dealings with whoever lives there. That dirty old prospector might be a 10th level fighter. That sort of thing. And drifting through it all, you will have powerful factions or people - take Clamdigger Cove again - isolated and barren as it might be, it is a nice harbor, and the offshore waters are thick with pirates, pirate hunters, all sorts of things. And any of them could turn up at any time. You could find some poor sap washed up on the beach, and think they are a lowly smuggler, an unlucky fisherman - but they might be part of a pirate crew. And the rest of the pirates might be looking for them. Or a naval ship. Or they could be an adventurer themselves, separated from their party - and the rest of the party might be looking for them. Being too quick to resort to violence can have consequences...

On Motivations and Rewards

Some thoughts on rewards and motivations. The question starts with this: why should the party go off to some dark hole in the ground to fight goblins and orcs? And second - when they do - what should they get out of it? What can they get out of it?

I can think of three answers to this.

1) They go for the treasure. This is the simple answer - straightforward: they go because they expect to profit. And they do profit. That's kind of how we have always played - you fight things for the rewards, straight up - XP and GP. Magic. It's simple, logical enough, practical enough, but it does have drawbacks - it can become abstract: what do you do with your gold and magic? assuming lots of it gets handed out. And it warps the world around you - here's first edition Leif, with 193,685 GP - what's that - two tons of gold? You either ignore the facts or you invent an elaborate society that can accommodate a bunch of people shlepping around 2 or 3 tons of gold. Or you invent credit and banks and checks and the like, the way the real world did. That is - if you're going to play wealth and power, you have to figure out how it fits in the world - and you're off #1 whether you want to be or not.

2) Personal motivation. Backgrounds help with this. But this also gets to what I think is an important part of this problem - it's like this: why would some character go on some kind of high risk expedition without any idea what they are going to get out of it? Well - the truth is - because it's what they do. Why do adventurers go on adventures? because they are adventurers. But what this is doing, I think, is moving the question back a level - why is Bono heading off into the wilderness to kill stuff? because he's an adventurer - he heads off into the wilderness to kill stuff. The question is - why is he an adventurer? why does he do this? That's where the backgrounds come in what made these people adventurers? Maybe it's simple - they want power and money and women and castles; maybe it isn't simple - they want vengeance on the southern lord who drove their family off their land and left them impoverished and desperate in a foreign country. Or specific - they want to find the 6 fingered man and kill him. The idea is that these background motivations are ends, ends that provide short term motivations. To do those things - get wealth, power, vengeance, liberate their homeland, become king - they need to become strong. They become strong by adventuring - so in the present, they go off and kill orcs. The best thing about this is that it can go either way: thinking of backgrounds as motivations to take up adventuring keeps you moving through the normal run of dungeons and such; but the specifics of the motivations remain in the back of your mind. You fight orcs and you look for clues about the 6 fingered man. You break up a smuggling ring and win the approval of some merchant who can help you reestablish contact with your home town. You drag off a chest full of coin, which you can use to buy land and some cows. Etc.

3) The World’s Motivations. This is related to the others, but oriented toward the overall setting. For adventurers it might be straightforward - you're being paid to clean out a next of monsters and made the river safe again. But that second part is the world's motivation. That motivation (cleaning out monsters, say) can exists regardless of the character's interest. Now, it might be the character's motivation too - a paladin righting wrongs will share the desire to destroy the monsters - but it's still outwardly directed, and the character's motivations don't matter. The PCs can share it or not - they might be doing it for the money (and XP and such), but there is another motivation at work as well - which, against regardless of the character's commitment - is going to have further repercussions on the story. To be sure - if the characters don't share the broader goals, you have to find their reasons as well - so this is usually grafted onto the first two - but it still shapes the way the campaign goes.

So: when building an adventure, I think you can use any of these. Though all require some work and thought, to make them become important. For #1 - you have to have an economy. You have to understand the economy and work on making it all fit. That means - you have to think about how much gold or magic is in circulation, and how much of out might accumulate in some old mine or crypt. And you have to have an idea what happens if a party finds 10,000 GP somewhere - what are they going to do with it? I don’t just mean, how do they get it out of the place - I mean - how do they use it? what can they buy? That kind of thing.

Same with personal motivations, though this is clearly more in the hands of the player. You should have these built ahead of time, and keep them in mind. Granted, they may often be superfluous to the adventure at hand - but they should still be there - at some level the characters should be thinking about how this adventure is going to serve them in the future. Maybe it just makes them stronger and richer - maybe it takes them a tangible step closer to something they want. The more of that you can work into the game, the more interesting it becomes.

Finally - Campaign Plots and the like are worth keeping in mind. Maybe in the large sense (whether in an ongoing storyline, or just in terms of building the world around individual adventurers), but even in the smaller sense. If you can make one adventure feed into another - create situations that generate more trials for the characters, more challenges, opportunities and so on - that will help build a better world, a more engaging campaign. Even relatively loose links from one dungeon to the next give the game texture, make it better.

Party Building

I want to run an adventure, set in Lenay, on it's south-east, across a large bay from the city of Bayport. I see this starting in the same place we started in when we played in July - with a bit more detail. WE start in the town of Whelker's Deep, on the coast; this is 5-6 miles south of Clamdigger Cove, which has been sacked by pirates, and is now something of a lurking place for various bands of troublemakers - smugglers, pirates, orcs and goblins and kobolds, wandering monsters, bandits, etc. The part can meet at something called the Gypsy Arms, just outside Whelker's Deep, a little inn, and go from there.

What I want to do now is start to put a party together, so we can be set up to play when I get up there again. So I hope we can pick characters and work out their backgrounds, and so on, before we start to play. (If I could find a way, I'd try to play some non-combat stuff now, over the internet - not sure it works, but who knows.) Anyway - I'd like to set up characters now; work out backgrounds, and so on. For a couple reasons - to start thinking about D&D and see if there are ways to advance campaigns remotely like this - that's part of it... but also to get the party set up. People can use what characters they want - they don't have to be the same ones we played in July (though if you want to, go for it; those characters all hit second level, so I can see it...) But I know that one we put together kind of quickly, and with limited rules, so other characters make sense.

I want to set up the party ahead of time, with some care. I want to come as close to everyone playing one character as possible - and try to make it so everyone is playing the character they want to play. I am trying to make this more of a role-playing and exploration type of adventure (though with plenty of mayhem - I'm inclined to make it a dungeon crawl), and that works better with fewer characters and without multiple characters. And - if we all decide what we want to play ahead of time, we can figure out how to balance out the party if we need to. No harm in adding an extra character or two - someone playing two, or adding an NPC or so - but this is easier if we decide what we want, then fill in the blanks. So if we get a thief, a fighter, a barbarian and a wizard, we'll know we need an extra cleric - but better to add an extra cleric than to saddle someone with a cleric because they picked last...

And finally - I also kind of want to try to work out more of the background details of things, both the characters and the setting. even if it's just at the level of the old days in Waynesburg and Farmington, I want to try to relate where characters are from to where they are - involve them more in the world, etc. Backgrounds have some promise on this - and it's something we could work out ahead of time and online like this. (Here, through Facebook, email, IM, something.) It's also (and this might be very metagamy, but I don't care) a way to know how to pull the characters into the adventure - the kind of characters people play might change the purpose of the adventure - I haven't done this in a long time, and I don't trust myself to come up with a hook impromptu....

So I think this is what we need to do before hand:

1) Decide what we are playing - name, class, race, and so on.
2) work out backgrounds from the game - pick them, and the details (bonds and flaws and so on), etc. (These can be expanded maybe, if people like.)
3) add some additional background details related to the setting - where people are from, how they got to Whelker's Deep, and why they're sitting in this tavern with these other people.

For the third: I think we want to decide where our characters are from, broadly speaking; this information could lead to benefits or disadvantages - I'll try to note some as I think of them. Options might be:
1) strictly local - somewhere within 20-30 miles of where they are. This might give you extra knowledge about the area - might also give you enemies or entanglements to complicate matters. This is stuff to think about, I think.
2) Somewhere in Lenay, but not local - west coast, highlands, far south, capital city - again, this might let you know things; might create ties and so on - some of these details might fit with the book's bonds and flaws and such too.
3) A neighboring area - such as Oceanside (to the south) - or Bayport or its environs (to the east) - maybe the fjords and high mountains to north of the bay, etc.
4) Somewhere more remote - Waynesburg or Hillsburg maybe; the southern Kingdom; the south seas.

Again, these choices can influence the specifics of the backgrounds.

And so, this is an example - this is the character I want to play, with this kind of info built in:

I will play Bono - human, male, fighter. He has a soldier's background; he's from the west coast of Lenay. He is a pole-arm specialist. Basic story is - he was a soldier in some lord's army; but as Lenay's troubles mounted (the king is being held for ransom abroad; his brother is raising money to ransom him - or maybe not - and causing unrest), this lord's force broke up. Bono headed to the east coast to establish himself as an independent adventurer.

That's the basics, and the starting point.

First Try - Comments on Adventure Building

I've said a couple times, that 5th Edition seems to be built around the idea of exploring. That kind of play requires a good deal of preparation - but the effort is rewarded by a more interesting and varied style of play. You could get away with winging it in 4E - pick a map, and a set of encounters and challenges, and roll the dice. The actual combat was a pretty good war game - but it started to feel barren after a while. Looking at this version, reading through the Starter Set (skimming it anyway), this version looks like it offers a richer experience, if you do it right.

I've been thinking about the mini-adventure e played when the basic rules came out - thinking about how it could have gone, or how you would develop it, if you were making a full fledged adventure out of it. What we did itself was pretty basic - more combat than not, but with some other bits mixed in. A couple "skill challenge" type things (crossing a ruined bridge), some interaction with NPCs and monsters - the combat worked fine; the other stuff... It was promising, though it showed what was missing. As soon as we start playing non-combat activity, you start to notice all the ways you could be doing it right. I suppose the trick is to do the prep work first.

So let’s go through what happened - and look at what was really happening, and how you could prepare for it.

We started in a bar - just a bar. The old timers asked for news - asked if we’d heard anything about Stan and Ollie, a couple adventurers who might have wandered down into Clamdigger Cove, a town that had been laid waste by pirates some time back, and was now something of a trouble spot. We didn’t knopw anything, but of course we headed off that way.

This stuff was all off the cuff, and did its work that way - but it would have been better with more prep. (And remembering how to play; stuff comes back to me after the fact sometimes, which doesn’t help.) Starting with the PCs - who are we? Where are we? Who do we think we are, and where do we think we are? We didn’t have to think about that at all with 4E - we didn’t do it all that explicitly back in 82 when we started, but it appeared quickly - the names of towns; the names of bars in towns; some kind of lines on a map to show us where we were. The characters we ended up playing a lot quickly took on personality. You need some of that - you need to at least establish who the characters are, where they are, and have an idea of what they know, as background information. Now - it’s easy enough to assume that PCs are strangers in the area where they start adventuring - but they still should know basic things. You have to think of the intros - like in the Starter Set - you're hired to bring a wagon of stuff to a town to meet someone. You don't have to know much more - a kind of orientation to your base, an idea about where you would be going... In our case - the PCs should know that they are not too far from the Ocean; that they are in a hilly country, hills running down to the ocean, sometimes in steep inlets from the sea. They might know at least general information about pirates and such - though how much might depend on where they are from. The players can decide some of that - But it’s something to think about.

Anyway - the party set off toward Clamdigger Cove. On the way, they ran into a bunch of goblins at an old tower; then a couple gnolls at a ruined bridge. Then, after some more walking, they came to the town. All of this, I think, went about the way it should - the party’s purpose was simple (get to the town), and these were just some random encounters and challenges along the way. A bit more geography and scenery would help, but that always helps...

In town - the first time, we spotted something in the water, and went down - found a body. There were a number of buildings standing by the waterfront - we explored, killed a couple stray kobolds, then stayed the night. In the morning, we started prowling around - ran into a couple orcs. Then explored a bit, and ran into a gang of kobolds - had a big fight - and called it a night. We then went back to the tavern, or the town (or both) - disposed of the body we found (Ollie, I guess), and got a reason to go back to Clamdigger Cove. So back to the tavern - picked up a new party member and bought some potions - and headed out. Another encounter on the road, and back to town. This part could have benefitted from more clarity on the situation, though again, it worked out all right - the situation isn't all that complicated - ruined town, wandering troublemakers, etc.

Back in town, this is where preparation would have made the most difference. What we did - we looked around, found a dead orc on the side of a hill, then spotted some people in the buildings where we had been the day before, so went down and dealt with them. They talked - cagy conversation about stuff and money, that was interesting enough, though a bit too tentative - followed by the arrival of a couple orcs with a prisoner. A fight - we killed the orcs (though had to cure up Rosco from 0 twice to do it) - then noticed the sailors running away. In their haste they dropped a chest into the water - they rowed away, leaving you with the chest, full of some kind of treasure. Hooray! You are rich!

Okay. In principal, this is all right (and worked for the extremely basic purpose we intended.) But it also has the seeds of a much better encounter. What needed to happen to make it really work? Well - 1) I think where it could have been interesting would be to have things to find in the town. I needed to prepare the town - draw at least a general map - decide what the condition of the place was. That’s important here - the idea is, the town had been raided some time back, much of it burned, with a couple areas still standing - the waterfront; probably the church, maybe a couple other stone buildings. The party should have been able to move through the town - check out buildings - and find things: monsters, refugees, interesting detritus, and so on. As well as dealing with hazards and traps - floors on the verge of collapse; unsprung traps; that sort of thing. What they found - could constitute this adventure, or could point them to another adventure - pointing them to a full kobold or goblin lair, say, that they would go and clear out. Or provide information about the pirates, or smugglers, or someone else, who have been using the place for nefarious purposes.

2) on the waterfront - what actually happened? The conversation worked okay in principal, though again - planning out the nature of the encounter more would have helped. So what happened? And what was actually going on? Or should have been going on? You went into a building - you met 3 sailors. The sailors were - I think (though I couldn't make up my mind at the time) - deserters from a smuggling boat. They stole some booty - they came here, hoping to meet a Halfling (whom they had never met) who had promised to buy stuff if they had it. As it happens, Clamdigger Cove is used these days as a drop off/meet up point for various shady characters. So - they saw the party, saw a Halfling, and wondered if this was the fence - they tried to find out (while the party tried to figure out their angle) - they were mostly convinced you weren’t the fence when the orcs arrived. So the party fought the orcs, and the sailors waited to see what happened - they probably hoped everyone would die, but figured when you took out the orcs that they were next, so headed out to sea - a bit too hastily, as it turned out. As for the Orcs - they had Stan in hand; he had begged for his life by promising to take them to someone who had lots of money - he led them here, hoping his friends could rescue him, or, if the orcs won, they’d let him go, because he helped them get rich. Something like that. This part - other than having a clearer idea of the backstory of the Orcs and Stan, and maybe some ideas about how to tie this story to further stories - is straightforward enough.

The point of all this is to think about how the game should play. I think this version is set up to encourage more of this kind of interaction, exploration, etc. - the combat rules are simplified, combat itself runs fast - fights are resolved quickly and easily. They don’t seem to have the self-contained heft of 4E. And the higher lethality of the game makes it wiser to do more thinking - skulking about - trying to skirt fights, solve problems, find things. So building these kinds of adventures - like what this could be: a mostly abandoned and ruined town, used by various factions as a kind of meeting place, maybe, with wandering monsters and the like still hanging around, as well as hints for other adventures - makes the most out of the game.

Remembering how to do all that - and then doing it - is the next step.

XP Notes

I noticed something about the XP values of monsters based on templates today. That was bothering me a bit - I was trying to figure out the relative power (and thus XP value) of a Lich. The rules are clear enough (though the devil's work to find, sometimes): an NPC counts the same as a Standard Monster. A Template - lich, vampire, mummy, etc. - turns the Standard Monster into an Elite Monster. But looking at the numbers - a 15th level magic user turned Lich, therefor, would be worth 2800XP. That seemed awfully low. So I decided to test it - run a lich up against a party (Theresa, Fighting Eagle, a bunch of NPCs, a bit lower than the real party would be), just a straight fight, nothing fancy. The results? a very close thing, but the party beat it - a very close thing: 2 of 6 down, 2 more in single digits, 5 or 6 using healing surges and potions - though the cleric still had cure spells, so they were probably going to live anyway... (Though I missed a couple of the lich's powers - this could have been a monster win....)

Those aren't results you would expect from a 2800 XP monster. The Kuo-tao we fought with the lower party were worth 3100XP - parties are different than individuals, but still, 2800 should be in the range of that lower party - the usual high level party can take out those monsters (a fire giant is 2000, for example) without working up much of a sweat. (Well, fighting fire giants, I imagine they would perspire a bit.) This test party was lower, but still comparable - why was this so hard? and if it is this hard - what kind of XP should it be worth?

I found the answer: I looked up the DMG's rules for generating NPCs. They are quick and dirty rules - "only give them the thins you'll need to run them in an encounter or an adventure." In practice it means - don't list every feat and stat and skill and magic item they have back in the vault - reasonable advice. But it also means - a noticeably limited set of powers. This is what an NPC gets:
1 at will
1 encounter below 11, a second if over 11th level.
1 daily, 2 if over 21st level
1 utility, 2 if over 11.

And that explains the XP value. This might not make much difference for mid-level NPCs - but it's rather striking how much that costs you for a 16th level magic user. Who gets:
3 at wills
4 encounters
3 dailies
4 (I think) utilities

Playing that version of the Lich creates a much more dangerous foe. The results above - are about what you would expect from a comparable solo monster - an adult red dragon (15th level solo monster - 6000XP.) I verified it, sort of - played the Lich from the monster manual, against the same party - they took it out without much trouble. Took a lot of damage, used up some daily and encounter powers - but none of them were bloodied, let alone zeroed, none of them used any healing (other than a Temporary HP buff at the beginning) - the issue was never in doubt. That is what I would expect - 14th level elite for the default, 16th level elite for the template - without all those spells, it would be a far tamer thing.

Now - the question might be - should you play the Lich from the book, or should you play it as a full blown Character, with all those powers, plus the Lich template? I would assume, that's not a hard question to answer. It would seem to me, if you are going to fight a lich, or a death knight, or something like that, you are going to want an opponent that offers a bit more resistance than 5 kuo-tao or a fire giant with a hell hound. Those are fun things to fight, but they are not a Lich. Fortunately - from what I see - you can work out the XP fairly easily - for something like that, I would just treat it as a Solo Monster that easily enough - the numbers, and the strength, seem to work out about right.

And finally - I will vent a bit. I seem to find a lot to complain about in 4th Edition - and so much of it is this kind of thing. The DMG offers guidance in how to create a quick and easy NPC - fair enough, and useful, and most of the time you probably do want to be able to knock an NPC out in 10 minutes - and you can do it with those rules. But sometimes, you will want an NPC who is just as full a challenge as a PC. And a Lich? why would you want anything else? If you are trying to beard the monster in its den especially - you expect the thing to be waiting for you (basically) - certainly as a DM, I would think, you would plan to have the thing lying in wait. Now - the rules make it simple enough to do this: the lich template works quite well on top of a full character - but the XP guidelines are nowhere near right for something like that. And I have not found anything that indicates how much XP a full PC would be worth... so I have to make an executive decision, as it were. But it annoys me how often I find something in DD4 that is like this - weakened - reduced - simplified. "You're doing too much work" says the DMG about NPCs, starting them out or fully equipping them - fine advice for generating a couple thieves in a barroom somewhere, but for the leader of a rival party? head of a pirate band? as lich? Have these guys ever played D&D? have they ever made a dungeon? Maybe I am unique (though if I am, so is everyone I have ever played the game with), but especially with the Big Bad Monsters, building them out, the whole mess - stats and powers and magic items and treasure and where they got it and how they plan to use it, is a major part of the appeal. Certainly, in the past, fighting liches, it was clear enough that the DM had built the thing out completely - and why would't you? you want to make that kind of adventure an event, at some level - and that needs a worthy monster.

Okay. But I'll say it again - it is depressing to think of the things the current version has taken away. This probably comes up more with PCs - the condition of hybrids, say... But I find it comes up as often with monsters and combat (going either way) as with PCs. Like this - the way the NPCs the DMG would generate are stripped down so much. The things dragons (say) can't do - from the old Aura (ancients still have it, but they're the only ones) to the spells they use to have. Obviously the lack of high stakes magic items, like a vorpal blade. And just simple things, like the removal of the old "threatening reach" - not being able to take an opportunity attack against something a square away (but in reach). Man. They are changes I don't really understand - all they do is flatten the game. Flat is not really what I want.

Lich Hunt

The idea here is to have a lich take over a school of magic - this you get battles against novice magic users, plus the lich and his henchmen. If this is something like a university, you could also have bands of clerics or monks associated with the rest.

Being undead, the Lich would also be protected by swarms of undead.

Plan - would be for multiple people to work up pieces of the adventure. Some of the pieces you need are:
- encounters with the magicians
- the battle with the Big Bad Lich himself
- possibly a battle with a gang of clerics or similar types
- lots of undead
- encounters outside, on the approach
- random encounters with monsters who use the opportunities created by the lich and his works.

Doing this as a team effort has a lot of advantages - from the obvious division of labor to the way it lets parts of the dungeon contain surprises.

We need to work out a backstory and setup. We need to work out a way into the adventure.

On Preparation vs. Improv

The biggest thing I noticed from the games we played this Christmas, is that to change the style of the game, we would need to build adventures in advance. I don't think that is necessary to play - the fact is, DD4 is an excellent miniatures war game, and one of the things that makes it work so well is that it is very easy to set up a combat encounter. You take a map, you add up an appropriate group of monsters, you write down stats and roll initiative and play. It's easy to set up - the encounters themselves are fairly easy to play (at least we've been doing it long enough that it's not too hard to run) - if you choose a decent array of monsters and an interesting map, the fights themselves are usually relatively challenging and fun... I admit - I played war games before I played D&D, and have always liked those kinds of games as much as anything - I could do that forever without minding it in the least. It really is a robust system - part of what makes it easy to work with is the fact that, once you've played a bit, there's not a lot of difference between 3rd and 12th level games. There's not a lot of difference in the flavor or mechanics of playing higher level characters - you have a little more variety in your powers (and the monsters' powers), the fights last a bit longer, but you basically do the same things. All of which means you can keep playing, at whatever level you want, without really changing much.

The problem is that that is leaving out an awful lot of what makes D&D D&D. Most of the character development stuff, the role playing, the world building - the sense of a narrative, of continuity from encounter to encounter. Combat D&D is fun - but it feels like you are playing it out of a box, every time - years of playing the same characters, and they still feel more like game pieces than people. Not to mention the fact that we are leaving out whole chunks of the game itself - I mean, that last adventure is the first time, I think, any one of us has used a ritual!

One thing our attempts to change things around shows, I think, is that to make a more varied campaign, to create a strong narrative sense (which, ultimately, is probably the most important element in the full D&D experience), you have to set up the adventure in advance. We need to build dungeons. They could be dungeon crawls, outdoor adventures, towns, even just series' of combat encounters - but they need to be linked before the fact, the seams and connections have to be built. I don't think this is too hard to do - it just has to be done. I think a lot of the pieces for something like this are there already - rivalries with NPCs, encounters with a couple likely factions - Drow, Githyanki, giants and trolls - which might be working together or could be rivals themselves... Some of the relationships are already there - though to play them effectively, we do need to plan out how they work. That was the biggest problem with the things I tried to do - I didn't quite know where things should go. Actions should have consequences, but I had no idea what sort of consequences should come from any kind of action.

That's one thing we would need. Another is a bit more attention to the environment - obstacles and traps and whatnot, not to mention simple things like distance, time, etc. Moving from place to place, what kinds of challenges emerge - I think I can imagine what sort of things would do this. Like in the encounters we placed - if we played the process of getting from the river crossing with the giants to the cave with the Githyanki (follow the river? follow the giants? follow a road?), we could have worked in a number of things - more obstacles, traps, more encounters, as well as keeping closer watch on things like healing, daily powers and so on. I can imagine, after the fact, how all that could have been turned into a campaign - the trick now is to imagine how to turn it into a campaign before we play.

One more thing - I think the designers of the game meant it to work like this. I think they designed the game to work out of the box, to be scalable, modular, to allow players to use it strictly as a miniatures game. They also gave rules that you can use to do something else with - I can't say, even now, how well they work... Of course, earlier versions were built even more explicitly around the idea that someone would be preparing adventures ahead of time and running them - I suppose that hasn't changed. Just that the miniatures game has been built into the game at its core.