I have been thinking about backstory in D&D lately. There were some remarks made regarding the Princes of the Apocalypse game I am playing in, and they set me to thinking. How important should backstory be in playing D&D? Well! I have thoughts!
1. The purpose of backstory is to shape how you act in the story. It explains the character's reactions, why they do what they do. That is how it works in fiction, where it shows why this character is the way they are; it works the same way in games, except there it guides the player in deciding how the character is going to act in the story. You don't need a lot for this - an outline, a few details. It's also something that is really only significant for the player - as much as you need to know to play the character. Maybe it comes up in the story, maybe it doesn't. Maybe your backstory is mainly to explain why you don't talk about your past. The short version is, backstory is a tool, for writer or player, to help shape the character, but it is always secondary to what the character does in the story itself.
2. Should backstories come up in the story? One of the remarks to set this post off was that a villain from a character's past was more interesting than a random monster. This is, in context, a very strange comment, since we are currently 9th level in an ongoing adventure, and we haven't had to deal with anything random since about 3rd level (a year and a half ago, more or less), but we'll pass that. The more general comment I have is that if the backstory is coming up in the story, then it is the story. Now: that can be a very good thing to build into the story - though it is mainly going to work if you have a session zero, and everyone participates. If you can build characters that have a pre-existing stake in the story, or the DM takes elements of the backgrounds of the characters and works them into the texture of the story - you have something, and probably something better than just dropping characters into the adventure. But that beginning stage is important. It avoids the dangers - the idea, say, that a villain from THIS character's backstory is part of the story, but not anyone else's; or maybe worse, that you spend all your time going around the table fighting the next character's childhood nemesis. Again - you can work this into the story if you do a session zero, if the whole group is in on the idea that one character's backstory matters, and so on - but it doesn't work so well in a more generic situation. It has to come up in the story, to work at all.
3. Along with session zeroes to work on complimentary backstories, I think backstory can enter a story easier in a home brew campaign than a published adventure. If the DM is making it up as they go - a series of situations, that aren't preset - backstory is a very good source of ideas for what can come next. Though even there - you would want to start working on this as soon as you can, so have a session zero, or at least push players to make characters that fit within the world of the story, so their backgrounds come up naturally. You still have the problem of why one character's backstory matters more than another, though there can be a lot of answers to that. And finally - if you work this way, you can make it so the backstory is, in fact, part of the story. I did some of this in my desert campaign - one character is a monk, who was a folk hero, who overthrew some kind of tyrant, and later, his monastery was destroyed, maybe in vengeance. That has come back - the party's enemies turn out to be working with another refugee from the monastery, and the two of them blame each other for destroying the place. But that means - the background element is in the story; it comes in from a different angle, so everyone has a stake in it; it is associated with other character's stories. And maybe most of all - in practice, interesting as this idea was as a way to move the story ahead - it was trumped by events in the story itself: the cleric was petrified! That is immediate, compelling and affects everyone in the party, and reminds us all - the story itself becomes what matters, in a decent campaign.
4. The fact is, unless you do the session zero, or some equivalent of to get the characters to fit the story - you don't need to worry too much about backstory. Backstories don't have to come up in the story that often, except as details about the characters, their motivations and so on. You probably should NOT use too many PC backstory elements, unless you have buy in from all the players, or set it up from the start. NPCs are different, though. I wrote about this way back when we were just starting with 5th Edition: how to use NPCs to drive the plot. I would still stand by most of that - PC backstories should be relatively open; they should not be determining the course of the plot - their actions in the story should determine how this story goes. If you need villains tied to the story, if you need to steer the story in a direction, you should use NPCs when you can - they can be focused on something outside the story (as it is occurring); they can have much more specific, narrow goals and motivations, that steer PCs toward the story the DM wants to tell. All that is true, now as much as then. I did this in the desert campaign, too - the party is working alongside a drow cleric, an archeologist type - and he is the one who brings in the plot twists I need, more than the PC's. If the PC's stories come up in the story - great; if not - I can still use elements from the NPC's background to steer the story around, if I have to. That's how I brought in the rival monk - tied him to the NPC's enemies, went from there.
5. All of this, I think, has become amuch bigger part of 5th Edition than it ever was before. It has become maybe - I don't want to say too important, but - it can be treated as being too important. There's a weird tendency in the modern game to make characters into bundles of background - they start up with the sense that they have lived these long full lives, full of adventures and traumas and Significant Events, that have somehow deposited them as first level clerics in this particular story, and that - all that background - continues to be the most important thing in these people's lives. That is very strange in a long, ongoing campaign, like this one. We have been playing it for a year and a half - we are 9th level - we are playing Princes of the Apocalypse, with its plot of literally saving the world from these elemental monstrosities - how can you still have people thinking that something that happened to them as children might be more interesting and important than this? This game has a massive amount of lore and history in it - the PCs have done all kinds of things, had all kinds of wild experiences, we have fought demons and devils, talked to liches and dragons, characters have come and gone and made weird deals with weird entities, in the game - how is anything outside the game supposed to be more interesting than what has happened in the game? People like to talk about immersion in a game, and lack of it - but this is one fo the most egregious lacks of immersion I can think of: to refuse to see the story you are IN. Especially something as epic as this one.
Now - all that changes when you are talking about first level characters (though even there, the backstory should not be more important than the story; but you might make your backstory be part of the story.) A session zero should work that way - to integrate those backgrounds, to make the story and backstories fit together. These characters setting out to Save the World should have some connection, some kind of connection to the world they are in - all that is absolutely the truth. But even there, at first level, you have not done much, and shouldn't try to make up too much in your past. And whatever happened in the past should quickly be eclipsed by what is happening in the present. Whatever your reasons for being there, once the story starts, that is going to put it in the background. The villains you encounter in this story are going to be more interesting than the villains from your past; you are very likely to experience things far more exciting, traumatic, horrifying, whatever than anything you could have survived as a non-PC. And not being able to see this, to think that something outside this world-changing story you are in is more important than it is - is a very strange thing to do.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Monday, December 30, 2019
Year End 2019
Hello world.
This has gone badly, huh? Here I started the year (or ended last year) talking about how I hoped to use this blog - and here I am, a year later and 3 posts later - what can I say? Life has, this time, complicated matters. Work has created odd scheduling issues that have made playing harder and more sporadic - which has spilled over into writing about playing, etc. Though last year we played plenty and I barely wrote anything, so I can't blame that. I can blame it for this:
Reviewing what we played last year I find:
• The Tomb of Annihilation game - mibght well be right where we left it. A couple more sessions - that has been very much neglected.
• The Waterdeep campaign - is right where we left it. We have a tavern, which we have cleaned out of its ghosts and squatters! what next?
• The Jungle Island game is right where we left it too.
• The Desert game, on the other hand, did go very well. A full on tomb raiding dungeon crawl, which ended with a wild fight with mummies and the like, then a rival gang of adventurers. The party is rich, though they have to move their ill-gotten gains to civilization. En route, they fought a gorgon, with dire results to the cleric.... This is the most likely of these campaigns to recover. It's got a great hook, it's got good characters and I even have a good idea how to proceed. This one should move ahead.
• Meanwhile, we have been playing in a Princes of the Apocalypse game at a game store for the last year and a half, still going strong, though sometimes going in circles. But it has been a success.
And this year, we have picked up a couple new ideas, though they have been marred by the reduced game time.
• The home brew city campaign - Waynesburg - generated a couple nice one off adventures ("The Bard's Pants"!), and now an ongoing mystery/adventure. That's worked all right, though it has been hard to maintain momentum, especially around the holidays. It has been interesting, a much more skill and talking based adventure, that I hope to maintain through the coming months.
• We started a campaign int he Saltmarsh area, out of that book - it was going all right, but ran out of steam, missing a month or so of playing... Scheduling has been a problem this year. Playing every other week instead of every week (unless something interrupts the weeks we would play) means it is very hard to have more than one thing going at a time. We could switch back and forth in previous years, and did. Now? we're stuck with one, really.
That is what it is. The only way to fic it is to find a better job.
In the meanwhile - once again, I do want to start using this blog. Writing something here. We talk enough about D&D; you'd think we could write something.
I also want to work on the World Anvil site: use it to build out the history and lore of our campaign world. Which, I confess, is a pretty generic world, but I made up the core sometime in the spring of 1982, so I am not going to apologize for it. What use it has, I don't know, but building it should help put the whole of it together in my head. Let's hope.
Otherwise? Another year - for all the gripes, we did play a lot this year, talked about playing a lot, continued to pump money into Wizard's fo the Coast and Wiz Kids and Paiso and whoever else is willing to sell me D&D related toys and gear. (Not to mention Papermate and Pilot and MMM and all the companies providing pencils, pens, paper, note cards... yeah.) So: the gaming vibe is still good, chez moi. I shall try, for my own satisfaction as much as the edification of the public, to post more here - we'll see.
Have a good new year anyway, gamers. May all your rolls be crits...
This has gone badly, huh? Here I started the year (or ended last year) talking about how I hoped to use this blog - and here I am, a year later and 3 posts later - what can I say? Life has, this time, complicated matters. Work has created odd scheduling issues that have made playing harder and more sporadic - which has spilled over into writing about playing, etc. Though last year we played plenty and I barely wrote anything, so I can't blame that. I can blame it for this:
Reviewing what we played last year I find:
• The Tomb of Annihilation game - mibght well be right where we left it. A couple more sessions - that has been very much neglected.
• The Waterdeep campaign - is right where we left it. We have a tavern, which we have cleaned out of its ghosts and squatters! what next?
• The Jungle Island game is right where we left it too.
• The Desert game, on the other hand, did go very well. A full on tomb raiding dungeon crawl, which ended with a wild fight with mummies and the like, then a rival gang of adventurers. The party is rich, though they have to move their ill-gotten gains to civilization. En route, they fought a gorgon, with dire results to the cleric.... This is the most likely of these campaigns to recover. It's got a great hook, it's got good characters and I even have a good idea how to proceed. This one should move ahead.
• Meanwhile, we have been playing in a Princes of the Apocalypse game at a game store for the last year and a half, still going strong, though sometimes going in circles. But it has been a success.
And this year, we have picked up a couple new ideas, though they have been marred by the reduced game time.
• The home brew city campaign - Waynesburg - generated a couple nice one off adventures ("The Bard's Pants"!), and now an ongoing mystery/adventure. That's worked all right, though it has been hard to maintain momentum, especially around the holidays. It has been interesting, a much more skill and talking based adventure, that I hope to maintain through the coming months.
• We started a campaign int he Saltmarsh area, out of that book - it was going all right, but ran out of steam, missing a month or so of playing... Scheduling has been a problem this year. Playing every other week instead of every week (unless something interrupts the weeks we would play) means it is very hard to have more than one thing going at a time. We could switch back and forth in previous years, and did. Now? we're stuck with one, really.
That is what it is. The only way to fic it is to find a better job.
In the meanwhile - once again, I do want to start using this blog. Writing something here. We talk enough about D&D; you'd think we could write something.
I also want to work on the World Anvil site: use it to build out the history and lore of our campaign world. Which, I confess, is a pretty generic world, but I made up the core sometime in the spring of 1982, so I am not going to apologize for it. What use it has, I don't know, but building it should help put the whole of it together in my head. Let's hope.
Otherwise? Another year - for all the gripes, we did play a lot this year, talked about playing a lot, continued to pump money into Wizard's fo the Coast and Wiz Kids and Paiso and whoever else is willing to sell me D&D related toys and gear. (Not to mention Papermate and Pilot and MMM and all the companies providing pencils, pens, paper, note cards... yeah.) So: the gaming vibe is still good, chez moi. I shall try, for my own satisfaction as much as the edification of the public, to post more here - we'll see.
Have a good new year anyway, gamers. May all your rolls be crits...
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Arts and Culture
I have been thinking a lot lately about how to use art and culture in D&D games. Or, maybe, in fantasy writing - but this has some of the same issues attached. World building, and what part the arts might play.
It should be there in D&D: there are whole classes built around art (bards), backgrounds (entertainer, at least.) And it you extend it to mean culture, in the sense of arts, technology, education and knowledge - even more elements of the game come in. The Sage - the Acolyte - the Guild Artisan - all do, or can, relate to cultural elements. How can it work? Part of what I am thinking about is the generic world building issues: what is the nobility system? what ranks are there, for real, in this world? What are the religions - not so much the deities, as the religions, the institutions, organizations, their sacred texts and images and how they function in the world? Technology - what is available? or maybe, what can you play with? Some of this, too, lurks in the corners of the game - gunpowder, notably, is one fo those things that is there to play with, though not quite part of the official game, quite - how do you deal with it?
I find this stuff much too fascinating. It can suck me up into wikipedia and YouTube and actual books to find out what happened in the world, so I can use that in a game or a story. Lately I have had a binge of obsession with art - painting, how it develops and evolves, the forms it might take, how it varies across a world. Which leads you to history 9leads me to history anyway): how did painting evolve? how was Italian painting int he Renaissance different from North European painting? how did influence flow? what subjects were common where? how did the markets work? There is a lot there to play with, even if so far all I have ended up doing is grafting real world trends onto a fantasy world. It's there. And then add other things - maybe technology - maybe printing. Where is this world technologically? do they use printing? what kind? woodblock? etchings? do they have moveable type? is it metal or something more fragile? is it common? where does it come from? Is this technology emerging in the core area of the game/fiction? or does it come in? (Like technologies imported from Asia to Europe, and vice versa.)
There are lots of stories there. How technology, or even just artistic styles or media are perceived. If someone invented moveable type, how would it be received? as magic? as something supernatural? how does it relate to the general perception of technology? How would all this change if it were imported from somewhere else? Somewhere friendly vs somewhere hostile? What if it was invented by someone dangerous? a strange cult? a political rebellion? someone magical? what if it was used to print propaganda for revolution or a strange religion or magical scrolls - how would that change it? D&D gives you additional questions - what if printing is associated with dwarves? gnomes? drow? githyanki?
The best version of this I know of is in Terry Pratchett - this is probably the major theme of his work after the late 90s: he played with it in the earlier books (Moving Pictures and Soul Music), then started to develop it with the middle Guards novels (Men at Arms, Feet of Clay), then seemed to take it as the major theme about the time of The Truth and Going Postal. It is very lovely: the good and bad of technology, the importance of where it comes from - things with dwarvish origin take different forms than other kinds of technology - who uses it. The spread of technology, the way it changes the dynamics between groups, countries and so on - all that is in there, and endlessly fascinating.
I like the idea, very much - it is something I want in D&D games I play in, especially if they are going to be made into campaigns, if you want some kind of real story arc. Especially set in cities. It is an opportunity - to play with technology; to play with different kinds of cultural ideas; to play with different art forms - music, theater, literature. It creates story opportunities - backstage dramas, lost manuscripts (think The Name of the Rose), lost artifacts of course (Indiana Jones), but even non-magical knowledge sometimes sparks that kind of story. Playing with technology, art, types of writing, suppressed literature or artworks creates chances - industrial espionage! secretly publishing banned books! art theft and the art market! Sumptuary laws! possibilities for blackmail, advertisement, slander; invention of newspapers, communication technology, etc, on and on. All this can take fairly standard D&D forms too - think, of all things, about A Night at the Opera - rivals for control of an opera company, and rivals for the love or a girl, clash , and one group proceeds to sabotage the other to force them to give in - right? Lots of derring do and hijinks and blows to the head and music, all of it while the show is in the process of going on - potential!
All good. I don't know quite what I want to do with this, but it is something I like. I like writing about it, so it crops up in stories a lot - but it could make some interesting game situations too. It also makes for interesting world building - a way to distinguish cultures (or the feel of places, cities or kingdoms.) I am thinking about that too. It is, in other words, another of the things crowding my brain that I should post about but haven't as much as I should...
It should be there in D&D: there are whole classes built around art (bards), backgrounds (entertainer, at least.) And it you extend it to mean culture, in the sense of arts, technology, education and knowledge - even more elements of the game come in. The Sage - the Acolyte - the Guild Artisan - all do, or can, relate to cultural elements. How can it work? Part of what I am thinking about is the generic world building issues: what is the nobility system? what ranks are there, for real, in this world? What are the religions - not so much the deities, as the religions, the institutions, organizations, their sacred texts and images and how they function in the world? Technology - what is available? or maybe, what can you play with? Some of this, too, lurks in the corners of the game - gunpowder, notably, is one fo those things that is there to play with, though not quite part of the official game, quite - how do you deal with it?
I find this stuff much too fascinating. It can suck me up into wikipedia and YouTube and actual books to find out what happened in the world, so I can use that in a game or a story. Lately I have had a binge of obsession with art - painting, how it develops and evolves, the forms it might take, how it varies across a world. Which leads you to history 9leads me to history anyway): how did painting evolve? how was Italian painting int he Renaissance different from North European painting? how did influence flow? what subjects were common where? how did the markets work? There is a lot there to play with, even if so far all I have ended up doing is grafting real world trends onto a fantasy world. It's there. And then add other things - maybe technology - maybe printing. Where is this world technologically? do they use printing? what kind? woodblock? etchings? do they have moveable type? is it metal or something more fragile? is it common? where does it come from? Is this technology emerging in the core area of the game/fiction? or does it come in? (Like technologies imported from Asia to Europe, and vice versa.)
There are lots of stories there. How technology, or even just artistic styles or media are perceived. If someone invented moveable type, how would it be received? as magic? as something supernatural? how does it relate to the general perception of technology? How would all this change if it were imported from somewhere else? Somewhere friendly vs somewhere hostile? What if it was invented by someone dangerous? a strange cult? a political rebellion? someone magical? what if it was used to print propaganda for revolution or a strange religion or magical scrolls - how would that change it? D&D gives you additional questions - what if printing is associated with dwarves? gnomes? drow? githyanki?
The best version of this I know of is in Terry Pratchett - this is probably the major theme of his work after the late 90s: he played with it in the earlier books (Moving Pictures and Soul Music), then started to develop it with the middle Guards novels (Men at Arms, Feet of Clay), then seemed to take it as the major theme about the time of The Truth and Going Postal. It is very lovely: the good and bad of technology, the importance of where it comes from - things with dwarvish origin take different forms than other kinds of technology - who uses it. The spread of technology, the way it changes the dynamics between groups, countries and so on - all that is in there, and endlessly fascinating.
I like the idea, very much - it is something I want in D&D games I play in, especially if they are going to be made into campaigns, if you want some kind of real story arc. Especially set in cities. It is an opportunity - to play with technology; to play with different kinds of cultural ideas; to play with different art forms - music, theater, literature. It creates story opportunities - backstage dramas, lost manuscripts (think The Name of the Rose), lost artifacts of course (Indiana Jones), but even non-magical knowledge sometimes sparks that kind of story. Playing with technology, art, types of writing, suppressed literature or artworks creates chances - industrial espionage! secretly publishing banned books! art theft and the art market! Sumptuary laws! possibilities for blackmail, advertisement, slander; invention of newspapers, communication technology, etc, on and on. All this can take fairly standard D&D forms too - think, of all things, about A Night at the Opera - rivals for control of an opera company, and rivals for the love or a girl, clash , and one group proceeds to sabotage the other to force them to give in - right? Lots of derring do and hijinks and blows to the head and music, all of it while the show is in the process of going on - potential!
All good. I don't know quite what I want to do with this, but it is something I like. I like writing about it, so it crops up in stories a lot - but it could make some interesting game situations too. It also makes for interesting world building - a way to distinguish cultures (or the feel of places, cities or kingdoms.) I am thinking about that too. It is, in other words, another of the things crowding my brain that I should post about but haven't as much as I should...
Sunday, January 6, 2019
10 of Waynesburg's "Best" Bars
Well, in hopes of getting this year started well - here's a post about the lovely city of Waynesburg.
1. The Dragon Inn - on the Riverside Promenade, in the Adventurer's Quarter, the largest, most notorious place in the Quarter, possibly the city. A vast complex - inn, restaurants, tavern - stables, outbuildings, secure rooms for let, etc. The main tavern, though, is dead center in the Quarter, and is always bustling.
2. Tommy's Tunes - on Alanis street between Falcon and Peregrine - an unassuming place that makes superb ribs and hosts nice low key musical performances. Sometimes, you will see someone famous, but most of the time, you will hear up and coming youngsters, looking for their chance.
3. Sookie’s Saloon - an eatery on the riverside promenade, not far from the Dragon Inn. The latter caters to any and all adventurers - Sookie’s tends to cater to a rougher crowd. Fighters, mercenaries, barbarians, knights - not entirely a dive, just a very manly and tough place. Thieves, wizards, bards, etc. tend to stay away unless they think they can win arm wrestling matches with stevedores.
4. Marlene’s - a massive, multifloor entertainment emporium down by the river in the Quarter, not exactly a brothel, featuring singing and dancing girls and “sophisticated” entertainment.
5. Fool’s Gold - the best known and most successful of the many gambling joints along the Riverside Promenade.
6. Woodsman’s Tavern - this is the main tavern/inn in the Hill area - the same function that the Dragon Inn serves across the river
7. The Thirsty Scholar - in the Old City, just down the hill from the University of St. Michael, another long standing tavern, catering to scholars and sages, clerks and students, musicians and poets and adventurers alike. Unassuming place, but popular. Looked down on by the academic elite, the magicians and theologians and lawyers, but better for it. Used to be the hangout for the Orbius crowd, back before the troubles, and they still keep reminding people of it.
8. The Hand - another bar by St. Michael's, this one run for and by wizards, and notorious for its politics. Bans women itself, and is run by the worst elements of the wizard's guild, who gather there to scheme against any liberalizing forces at the University, the city, the churches.
9. Botticelli’s - a musical venue in the Old City, out by the wall going west; a big place that books popular acts and favors a certain degree of showmanship. Gets a rowdy crowd of students, clerks and local working class. Like Marlene's, not exactly a brothel, but things can get out of hand.
10. Breadstick Café - a music venue up on top of the hill in the Old City, still in business after the troubles, still going strong. Rather exclusive, snobbish, secretive, a place for old bards to sing ancient ballads to an extremely polite audience of connoisseurs. Healthy food, expensive wine, suspicious women who can probably cast Eyebite on you if you misbehave.
1. The Dragon Inn - on the Riverside Promenade, in the Adventurer's Quarter, the largest, most notorious place in the Quarter, possibly the city. A vast complex - inn, restaurants, tavern - stables, outbuildings, secure rooms for let, etc. The main tavern, though, is dead center in the Quarter, and is always bustling.
2. Tommy's Tunes - on Alanis street between Falcon and Peregrine - an unassuming place that makes superb ribs and hosts nice low key musical performances. Sometimes, you will see someone famous, but most of the time, you will hear up and coming youngsters, looking for their chance.
3. Sookie’s Saloon - an eatery on the riverside promenade, not far from the Dragon Inn. The latter caters to any and all adventurers - Sookie’s tends to cater to a rougher crowd. Fighters, mercenaries, barbarians, knights - not entirely a dive, just a very manly and tough place. Thieves, wizards, bards, etc. tend to stay away unless they think they can win arm wrestling matches with stevedores.
4. Marlene’s - a massive, multifloor entertainment emporium down by the river in the Quarter, not exactly a brothel, featuring singing and dancing girls and “sophisticated” entertainment.
5. Fool’s Gold - the best known and most successful of the many gambling joints along the Riverside Promenade.
6. Woodsman’s Tavern - this is the main tavern/inn in the Hill area - the same function that the Dragon Inn serves across the river
7. The Thirsty Scholar - in the Old City, just down the hill from the University of St. Michael, another long standing tavern, catering to scholars and sages, clerks and students, musicians and poets and adventurers alike. Unassuming place, but popular. Looked down on by the academic elite, the magicians and theologians and lawyers, but better for it. Used to be the hangout for the Orbius crowd, back before the troubles, and they still keep reminding people of it.
8. The Hand - another bar by St. Michael's, this one run for and by wizards, and notorious for its politics. Bans women itself, and is run by the worst elements of the wizard's guild, who gather there to scheme against any liberalizing forces at the University, the city, the churches.
9. Botticelli’s - a musical venue in the Old City, out by the wall going west; a big place that books popular acts and favors a certain degree of showmanship. Gets a rowdy crowd of students, clerks and local working class. Like Marlene's, not exactly a brothel, but things can get out of hand.
10. Breadstick Café - a music venue up on top of the hill in the Old City, still in business after the troubles, still going strong. Rather exclusive, snobbish, secretive, a place for old bards to sing ancient ballads to an extremely polite audience of connoisseurs. Healthy food, expensive wine, suspicious women who can probably cast Eyebite on you if you misbehave.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Adieu 2018!
Hello again. This is almost painful, posting here now. Looking back across the year: two years in a row I have begun the year with ambitious hopes for the upcoming - two years in a row, I have not accomplished any of it.
I take that back: hopes for the blog in the upcoming - that is what I have failed at. I have managed to play quite a bit this year: fairly regular sessions at home; I've joined a game at a game store, with some increased interaction outside the house - that has been good. We've put in a reasonable number of hours at the table; some of the home games have been a bit hit or miss, that could get better... But it's been a good year for playing.
For the home games - we were thinking about campaigns the other day - we currently have, what, going?
• Tomb of Annihilation, running online - which has a way of running for 3 weeks out of four, then disappearing for 3 months, as people have conflicts and such, and seem to struggle to get back together. But we did go up a river, fight various monsters, steal a shield guardian, convince a goblin queen that we were sent from the gods to make her their representative on earth, then head off into the jungle in search of - something.... It's been a while.
• Waterdeep Dragon Heist - we've played at that a few times, gotten to the point where we own our own tavern - it works all right.
• A jungle island campaign we started last year and played in spurts - this got interrupted, and in the interim, I got more interested in a desert campaign, so it has supplanted the jungle island one. But it is still alive, and able to be resumed at some point.
• A desert campaign, tomb raiding and the like - which is going strong at the moment. After crossing the desert, the adventurers have found the tomb in question, and have started raiding within. A dungeon crawl section of this campaign, though it has had a couple stages so far.
Besides this, we have played a few episodes in a couple things that might be a campaign if we played them more often. And we have been floating more ideas: a home brew city campaign, a new village campaign, a high level dragon hunt, among others. I'm not sure it's reasonable to keep anything like that many campaigns running at a time, but it would be nice to get some going. It's fun to shift gears once in a while - play different types of characters, different configurations, differing kinds of challenges. But as it is, we play enough, we manage to keep a couple things going - so it's all right.
Playing is good. And D&D development is not bad: I don't work as much on building campaigns and adventures as I should, but I do a fair amount of background building. And I write plenty - playing D&D has always hooked into fiction writing, and I have done plenty of that this year. So most of the things I hoped to do I have done. Just that none of it has made it to this blog. And too little of it has made it to the table, to be honest.
And so? while I will not be so bold as to promise or threaten or commit to anything like a post a month (let alone a post a week), or a video a month or anything wild like that - that is what I am after. To post things. To write about gaming - games, world building, ideas about D&D and other games - anything. Maybe even just comments on games - who knows. "Tangible form" - that is the key. Something in tangible form. One of these years I will manage it.
I take that back: hopes for the blog in the upcoming - that is what I have failed at. I have managed to play quite a bit this year: fairly regular sessions at home; I've joined a game at a game store, with some increased interaction outside the house - that has been good. We've put in a reasonable number of hours at the table; some of the home games have been a bit hit or miss, that could get better... But it's been a good year for playing.
For the home games - we were thinking about campaigns the other day - we currently have, what, going?
• Tomb of Annihilation, running online - which has a way of running for 3 weeks out of four, then disappearing for 3 months, as people have conflicts and such, and seem to struggle to get back together. But we did go up a river, fight various monsters, steal a shield guardian, convince a goblin queen that we were sent from the gods to make her their representative on earth, then head off into the jungle in search of - something.... It's been a while.
• Waterdeep Dragon Heist - we've played at that a few times, gotten to the point where we own our own tavern - it works all right.
• A jungle island campaign we started last year and played in spurts - this got interrupted, and in the interim, I got more interested in a desert campaign, so it has supplanted the jungle island one. But it is still alive, and able to be resumed at some point.
• A desert campaign, tomb raiding and the like - which is going strong at the moment. After crossing the desert, the adventurers have found the tomb in question, and have started raiding within. A dungeon crawl section of this campaign, though it has had a couple stages so far.
Besides this, we have played a few episodes in a couple things that might be a campaign if we played them more often. And we have been floating more ideas: a home brew city campaign, a new village campaign, a high level dragon hunt, among others. I'm not sure it's reasonable to keep anything like that many campaigns running at a time, but it would be nice to get some going. It's fun to shift gears once in a while - play different types of characters, different configurations, differing kinds of challenges. But as it is, we play enough, we manage to keep a couple things going - so it's all right.
Playing is good. And D&D development is not bad: I don't work as much on building campaigns and adventures as I should, but I do a fair amount of background building. And I write plenty - playing D&D has always hooked into fiction writing, and I have done plenty of that this year. So most of the things I hoped to do I have done. Just that none of it has made it to this blog. And too little of it has made it to the table, to be honest.
And so? while I will not be so bold as to promise or threaten or commit to anything like a post a month (let alone a post a week), or a video a month or anything wild like that - that is what I am after. To post things. To write about gaming - games, world building, ideas about D&D and other games - anything. Maybe even just comments on games - who knows. "Tangible form" - that is the key. Something in tangible form. One of these years I will manage it.
Sunday, September 2, 2018
10 Facts about Waynesburg
More setting notes: here are 10 things everyone knows about Waynesburg:
1) Waynesburg is the largest city north of the Kingdom.
2) There was 10 years of warfare and strife in the city, which left it devastated, but that was almost 15 years ago.
3) There are multiple sets of walls.
4) You can become fabulously wealthy there.
5) The Northflood river is navigable from the sea to Waynesburg and beyond.
6) There are elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and half-orcs living here, as well as a host of different human ethnicities - but not everyone gets along.
7) Fire spells will get you killed.
8) It has 3 or 4 different neighborhoods/wards/areas, which can be very different from each other.
9) Geronimo and Eugene are from Waynesburg, and still may hold power here.
10) The cemetery will get you killed, especially at night.
These are things almost anyone in or near the city will know. (Whether they are all true or not remains something of an open question.) There is, of course, plenty of other information, but it is more dependent onhow much you know about Waynesburg, or on who you talk to.
1) Waynesburg is the largest city north of the Kingdom.
2) There was 10 years of warfare and strife in the city, which left it devastated, but that was almost 15 years ago.
3) There are multiple sets of walls.
4) You can become fabulously wealthy there.
5) The Northflood river is navigable from the sea to Waynesburg and beyond.
6) There are elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and half-orcs living here, as well as a host of different human ethnicities - but not everyone gets along.
7) Fire spells will get you killed.
8) It has 3 or 4 different neighborhoods/wards/areas, which can be very different from each other.
9) Geronimo and Eugene are from Waynesburg, and still may hold power here.
10) The cemetery will get you killed, especially at night.
These are things almost anyone in or near the city will know. (Whether they are all true or not remains something of an open question.) There is, of course, plenty of other information, but it is more dependent onhow much you know about Waynesburg, or on who you talk to.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
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.
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.
Monday, August 6, 2018
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.
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.
Friday, April 13, 2018
Some Optional Rule Ideas
We have been thinking about house rules lately,rules and systems - I want to put them up here, as a reference.
The first part is this: to create a compendium of rules. we have talked about things we should try, but have not implemented much of it, partly because when you are playing, you have to have fairly stable sources for the rules. Rules shouldn't change on the fly. They can change - but when possible, the changes should be put into tangible form, for future reference. This is probably something important, as we start playing more and more - to get a compendium of material related to our games together in one place. Some of the posts I started doing this winter were aimed at that - to get a kind of background document together,about the setting. That bogged,but it's still there, and moving - what's here is more complicated than anything I would put together for the table,but it is the base. Or will be, once I do it some more.
Anyway - this is for house rules and optional rules. Things we want to do in our games, apart from the regular rules; as well as which optional rules we want to use. So - get to it. I will explain the rules, an add notes on their purpose.
1. • Fighting Style: Fencing
If you are wielding finesse weapon(s), and wearing light or no armor, you may add your intelligence to your AC.
- I liked 3.x's duellist prestige class - the rapier wielding specialist, that kind of thing. This is basically that rule - I think this fits the style. I am not sure if this is balanced completely - though it seems to fit he frameworks the game already has - similar mechanic to unarmored defense fo monks or barbarians.
2. Standing from prone provokes an attack of opportunity.
- I have been harping on this for 3 years - I don't know if this needs to be very complicated. The main reason to get this inhere is to make knocking people down more valuable. Half movement penalty can be relevant, but not often enough (in combat) to make knocking people down a strong option. At least that I have seen. There is logic to it too - it's not easy standing up with someone whacking at you.
3. Add Healing word to paladin spell list.
- This may or may not matter, but I like it. It feels right from a flavor standpoint - why shouldn't paladins be able to shout at their allies and heal them? Paladins ought to shout a lot. Apart from that, at low levels,at least,paladins feel -hamstrung. They have a lot of real power, but other than boosting attacks, they seem constrained - everything is an action. Adding this might gve them a bit more flexibility.
4. If a creature attempts to interact with an object not on their person, you may use your reaction to attempt to prevent whatever action they are trying to do. This imposes a strength or Dexterity check against theirs. (Both parties may choose the ability.) In case of ties: if the object is in either character’s space, they win; if it is not in their space, the status quo remains in place.
- This is tentative - I don't know how well it works, or even if it is necessary to make a rule of it. Again - this is to make actions like disarming someone more valuable. If anyone can just grab an object sitting on the ground, the value of disarming becomes entirely a function of where you are in the initiative order. So - give someone the chance to block someone else trying to grab such an object. This seems like it would work.
These are optional rules from the DMG, which we haven't used,but should. Putting them here is to make sure everyone understands them at the table:
1. Disarming - make a weapon attack vs DC = strength or dex; success disarms the enemy. Disadvantage vs 2-handed weapons; dis- or advantage if you are a size smaller or larger.
- I think we have used this before - this is a way to keep the rule more handy than the optional section of the DMG. Also, obviously,becomes more important combined with the pick up rule above...
2. Overrun - Strength vs strength (size gives advantage or disadvantage), and success moves the enemy and lets you move through.
3. Shove Aside = like shove, but move to the side, at disadvantage.
4. Tumble - same as overrun, but with Dex (acrobatics) vs dex.
- I'm less convinced of this - from a simulation standpoint more than the rules. This is up to others.
5. Hitting cover: if the attack roll would have hit the target without the cover - have ti hit the cover. If a creature provides cover, the creature is hit; if an object - the missile is in the cover.
- we are lax about the cover rules - a creature should be able to provide cover for another creature. we should use those more - if we did, this would be important, I think. There should be some of these things.
6. Morale - DC 10 wisdom saving throw - if lower, run if they can, surrender if they can’t.
- this is useful too. I have done things like this in fights - though making it up on my own. Usually better to use a rule that exists - they have thought these things out more than I have.
And finally - this is a idea about systems for tracking limited actions during encounters. Basically - give everyone a set of markers for different kinds of actions - when they do these things, they toss one into the pot. When they get them back (long rest,short rest, etc) - they get one back. These are the main types of actions I can think of, and ideas about the kinds of tokens to use for them.
1) Spells: use poker chips - colors per level. When you cast one, you put the chip into a pot. When you get them back (from an arcane recovery, a rest, using a different resource, like sorcery points), you take the chip back.
2) Class features:
(A) most of these should use dice (some literally are dice, but dice work for most. Any token could of course. there are a LOT of these, so dice could run into problems, given the number of dice already on the table.) These include:
- Barbarian Rages
- Cleric Channel Divinity
- Druid wild shape
- Fighter superiority dice
- Monk Ki points
- Paladin channel divinity
- Sorcerer points
(B) Some would work better with other means:
- Second Wind & Action Surge are single use abilities, so would be better served with tokens or chits
- Paladin Lay On Hands is more complicated, as they are not limited by their uses but by the number of points to use. Chits, again, would probably work better.
- Might also be true for ki and sorcerer points
3) Racial Features - these are best represented by some kind of token - a toy or something.
- Dragonborn Breath
- Goliath damage reduction hit dice
- Half-orc relentless endurance
- Maybe eladrin fey steps?
- Maybe gith psionics?
4) Hit Dice: probably best representing with chits - like the ones in those Dungeon Command type games! which I have plenty of...
The first part is this: to create a compendium of rules. we have talked about things we should try, but have not implemented much of it, partly because when you are playing, you have to have fairly stable sources for the rules. Rules shouldn't change on the fly. They can change - but when possible, the changes should be put into tangible form, for future reference. This is probably something important, as we start playing more and more - to get a compendium of material related to our games together in one place. Some of the posts I started doing this winter were aimed at that - to get a kind of background document together,about the setting. That bogged,but it's still there, and moving - what's here is more complicated than anything I would put together for the table,but it is the base. Or will be, once I do it some more.
Anyway - this is for house rules and optional rules. Things we want to do in our games, apart from the regular rules; as well as which optional rules we want to use. So - get to it. I will explain the rules, an add notes on their purpose.
1. • Fighting Style: Fencing
If you are wielding finesse weapon(s), and wearing light or no armor, you may add your intelligence to your AC.
- I liked 3.x's duellist prestige class - the rapier wielding specialist, that kind of thing. This is basically that rule - I think this fits the style. I am not sure if this is balanced completely - though it seems to fit he frameworks the game already has - similar mechanic to unarmored defense fo monks or barbarians.
2. Standing from prone provokes an attack of opportunity.
- I have been harping on this for 3 years - I don't know if this needs to be very complicated. The main reason to get this inhere is to make knocking people down more valuable. Half movement penalty can be relevant, but not often enough (in combat) to make knocking people down a strong option. At least that I have seen. There is logic to it too - it's not easy standing up with someone whacking at you.
3. Add Healing word to paladin spell list.
- This may or may not matter, but I like it. It feels right from a flavor standpoint - why shouldn't paladins be able to shout at their allies and heal them? Paladins ought to shout a lot. Apart from that, at low levels,at least,paladins feel -hamstrung. They have a lot of real power, but other than boosting attacks, they seem constrained - everything is an action. Adding this might gve them a bit more flexibility.
4. If a creature attempts to interact with an object not on their person, you may use your reaction to attempt to prevent whatever action they are trying to do. This imposes a strength or Dexterity check against theirs. (Both parties may choose the ability.) In case of ties: if the object is in either character’s space, they win; if it is not in their space, the status quo remains in place.
- This is tentative - I don't know how well it works, or even if it is necessary to make a rule of it. Again - this is to make actions like disarming someone more valuable. If anyone can just grab an object sitting on the ground, the value of disarming becomes entirely a function of where you are in the initiative order. So - give someone the chance to block someone else trying to grab such an object. This seems like it would work.
These are optional rules from the DMG, which we haven't used,but should. Putting them here is to make sure everyone understands them at the table:
1. Disarming - make a weapon attack vs DC = strength or dex; success disarms the enemy. Disadvantage vs 2-handed weapons; dis- or advantage if you are a size smaller or larger.
- I think we have used this before - this is a way to keep the rule more handy than the optional section of the DMG. Also, obviously,becomes more important combined with the pick up rule above...
2. Overrun - Strength vs strength (size gives advantage or disadvantage), and success moves the enemy and lets you move through.
3. Shove Aside = like shove, but move to the side, at disadvantage.
4. Tumble - same as overrun, but with Dex (acrobatics) vs dex.
- I'm less convinced of this - from a simulation standpoint more than the rules. This is up to others.
5. Hitting cover: if the attack roll would have hit the target without the cover - have ti hit the cover. If a creature provides cover, the creature is hit; if an object - the missile is in the cover.
- we are lax about the cover rules - a creature should be able to provide cover for another creature. we should use those more - if we did, this would be important, I think. There should be some of these things.
6. Morale - DC 10 wisdom saving throw - if lower, run if they can, surrender if they can’t.
- this is useful too. I have done things like this in fights - though making it up on my own. Usually better to use a rule that exists - they have thought these things out more than I have.
And finally - this is a idea about systems for tracking limited actions during encounters. Basically - give everyone a set of markers for different kinds of actions - when they do these things, they toss one into the pot. When they get them back (long rest,short rest, etc) - they get one back. These are the main types of actions I can think of, and ideas about the kinds of tokens to use for them.
1) Spells: use poker chips - colors per level. When you cast one, you put the chip into a pot. When you get them back (from an arcane recovery, a rest, using a different resource, like sorcery points), you take the chip back.
2) Class features:
(A) most of these should use dice (some literally are dice, but dice work for most. Any token could of course. there are a LOT of these, so dice could run into problems, given the number of dice already on the table.) These include:
- Barbarian Rages
- Cleric Channel Divinity
- Druid wild shape
- Fighter superiority dice
- Monk Ki points
- Paladin channel divinity
- Sorcerer points
(B) Some would work better with other means:
- Second Wind & Action Surge are single use abilities, so would be better served with tokens or chits
- Paladin Lay On Hands is more complicated, as they are not limited by their uses but by the number of points to use. Chits, again, would probably work better.
- Might also be true for ki and sorcerer points
3) Racial Features - these are best represented by some kind of token - a toy or something.
- Dragonborn Breath
- Goliath damage reduction hit dice
- Half-orc relentless endurance
- Maybe eladrin fey steps?
- Maybe gith psionics?
4) Hit Dice: probably best representing with chits - like the ones in those Dungeon Command type games! which I have plenty of...
Monday, February 12, 2018
Bayport Neighborhoods
[Well - good intentions or not, I have fallen behind - but not fatally! Let's get back at it, shall we?]
Bayport: let's pickup more or less where we left last time. This time, a quick (I hope) tour of Bayport's neighborhoods.
Imagine ourselves coming in from the west, into harbor. What do you see? in the distance,north and south, you see hills, but between, you see mostly flatland, with the city itself in the middle. The city as such is bounded on the north and south by canals and fortresses, but these run through fairly low land - maybe artificial hills for the forts. On the north side, however, there is a hill rising fairly sharply a couple hundred yards from the northern canal and a few hundred yards inland. The hill is fairly high in itself, but stands out prominently in the surrounding flat. It runs a good mile or so north-south - about half the total width of the city. The rest of the city is mostly built on lowlands, a lot of it reclaimed from the sea. (And surrounded by dikes and canals, to protect it from the sea and rivers.) All of it - the hill and lowlands - is covered with houses,most fairly old, ut a lot of newer, usually shabbier houses, especially in the south. Right now, let's take a quick tour of the major areas of the town.
1. The Old Waterfront:
The area by the sea, in the north, is the old Waterfront This is the first area to be reclaimed from the sea, a couple hundred years ago. It's bordered by the Magnus Canal in the north and east (where it breaks the waterfront from the higher ground beyond) and the Grand Canal in the south. This is the old port, and still a thriving seaport. The edge of the land is what you would expect - docks, warehouses, boathouses, workshops. Around it are the places catering to the sea trade - more warehouses and workshops and storage, plus inns and taverns and bars and restaurants, some shabby, but some quite posh - and much more besides. It is a mixed bag: large guild houses, ship owners’ houses, trade houses, commodity exchanges, banks, expensive hotels; innumerable dives, bars and flophouses, houses of ill repute, gambling joints, packed tenements. Ship owners mix with laborers and beggars, thieves and merchants. It has always been like this - in these boom times, it is three times as full. The neighborhood is built around one or two broad streets, designed for transportation - Water Street especially, running north-south, and Main and Pine streets, running east-west. These are wide enough for wagons and traffic - they are connected by a warren of alleys and side streets. The large houses are usually on the large streets - the back streets and alleys are slums indeed. Most of the buildings are a mix of stone, brick, mud bases and timber tops - all materials are easily obtained in this area. Buildings are crammed in tights, tops over-leaning the streets, and in recent years many new structures have been erected on top of the old, a kind of vertical shanty town. It is, of course, a fire trap, but there is a lot of water close at hand - and windmills and other pumping devices scattered around that can save the city from the worst dangers of fire. (And of flood, which is equally terrifying here.) This land is all reclaimed, some of it landfill - it is shielded from the sea by dikes, which are very effective - but nothing is perfect. Heavy seas can top the dikes and put it all under water. There are underground structures here - tunnels, cellars - usually framed and bricked in, lined with stone - but all susceptible to flooding. There are many dangers here. That obviously includes the people - there is a lot of money in the waterfront district but it is cheek by jowl next to the thieves and beggars and clip joints, and the old, big money is sometimes as dishonest and ruthless as any pickpocket. This is the most dangerous part of town, the closest thing it has to a traditional thieves quarter - even if a lot of the thieves are in the employ of "honest" trading firms.
2. The Old Downtown:
This is is on the east side of Magnus Canal, along the base of the hill. This the oldest part of town, where the early villages were built (they were waterfront before the canals were built and land drained), and where the first pieces of a town were built. This is a typical medieval town - narrow streets, houses built close to one another, stone and brick below, wood tops, jettied floors and so on. This is all above sea level, and is quite stable, physically. It is dominated by three main north-west streets: Canal street runs at the edge of the canal, a wide street, built for traffic, with room for wagons, and lined with warehouses and shops, more like the waterfront than the rest of the downtown area. East of this, the hill rises steeply, 20-30 feet, some of it quite sheer (though there are houses clinging to the edge). Broad street runs along the top of this ledge - this is the business center fo the hwole town, lined with shops and good hotels and banks and large trading houses and so on. The hill continues beyond Broad street, through an area that holds many of the towns large institutions - cathedrals, the university, and so on. Center street, near the top of the hill, is the demarcation for the downtown - it is more residential than the places lower down, but still features many inns and taverns, shops and stores and so on. This neighborhood generally is more prosperous and respectable than the waterfront, but it is, still a commercial district, and Bayport is a seaport - and a boom town - so it shares much of the atmosphere of the waterfront, albeit more respectably,and with better guards. It is easy for almost anyone to move through this part of town - thieves, adventurers and the like - there is ample employment for such characters here, there are many sketchy forces in the area - the thieves' guild is active, and as everywhere, the line between honest and dishonest commerce is blurry and often ignored. Still: this is the center of the city, the respectable center of the city. It is well protected by the town guards, at least well patrolled. There is a lot of pressure to expand the new population into this area - indeed, many of the old houses near the canal (row houses, town houses and the like) have been turned into tenements - but there is also resistance. Above Broad street there are places that have been opened to the newcomers - but also places where the old families have refused - and fight back against anyone who tries to turn an old house into a tenement. This creates a lot of tension. This creates a fair amount of violence at times.
Physically, this district is built on the side of the hill, steep in some places, less so in others. It is,though, an area dominated by large a number of large buildings - guild houses, churches, large private residences, the university, and so on. The regular buildings are also probably larger than in the waterfront - though the same style: stone/brick for a floor, then (usually) wooden upper floors, often jettied over the street. This part of town also features fairly significant few underground structures - a well made sewer and drainage system; tunnels, pipes, cellars and so on, not all of them well documented. There are large crypts under the city; during some of the past wars, refuges were dug under the city, some secretly, some less so - some have been sealed up; some are still connected to th sewers or the known underground. It is complicated.
3. The Old Hills:
This is the area at the top of the ridge, east of Center street. High Street and Ridge street are the main streets up here - High running more or less on the crest, and Ridge running on the edge of the steep drop to the east. This is a very old part of town, the first expansion of the ancient village, originally a place for small farms and estates. It shows its past - larger houses, many of them all stone, separate, sometimes even walled in, with small yards and fields and orchards. These old houses aren't entirely free of the doubling population of the city - many of them have been subdivided into tenements and rooming houses and hotels and taverns - but not as many as below Center street. There are also a number of old estates that are owned by rich merchants or companies, who have turned their outbuildings into factories or shops, or barracks for their workers and soldiers - this cause s a fair amount of distress among the old timers. Still - this is fairly safe, maintains as much of the illusion of the old ways as they can, the idea of a genteel neighborhood outside a bustling port city. But this is maintained at great cost, and not very well - and often by having private mercenaries patrolling the place, harassing anyone who doesn’t seem to belong. There is also the simple fact that even the rich people living on this hill owe their wealth to the trade of the city - they are part of the less reputable places, like it or not. Given that the richest people in town these days are not always the most ethical - there can be plenty of excitement up here.
5. The New waterfront:
Now we move south again, south of the Grand Canal, and split in half by the Harbor Canal. The canals and extensive dikes in this area were completed in the early 1500s, and the land south of the canal basically constructed fro scratch. This area is laid out on clean grids and dominated by row houses, some of the stone/wood construction used in the older parts of town, but others made all of wood. Once this was respectable and quiet - but it has filled up since the boom started, and is now a fairly rough part of town. The area is dominated by the port on the west, and by the Marina, in the middle, opening off the north side of the Harbor canal - a large anchorage, generally used for smaller craft, but itself a very busy waterfront. South of the Harbor canal is another large area, a shipyard, where most of the city's ship building occurs. The shipyard, in particular, gives the area around it a more stable, working class atmosphere - it is less transient than the old waterfront, or the new waterfront by the sea. The area between the canals, then, tends to be more dangerous, with plenty of vice to go around.
6. The Outer lowlands:
This refers to the areas south of the Grand Canal, and inland from the Marina, as well as everything inside the Fort Canals that ring the city. This area is very mixed - much of it was just drained marshland before the boom, though these areas have been developed since - though usually small,flimsy wooden structures, built as fast as possible. Indeed, much of this area could be called a slum - at least a shantytown. There are, however, other kinds of structures in this area - before the boom, there were farms and factories out here - obnoxious ones like tanneries and breweries, as well as mills of various sorts. There are large groups of windmills out here - used to pump out the drained land, used to power mills and so on. As people moved into the area,it created tension, competition for the land - a number of windmills have been taken over by people looking for housing, sometimes legally, sometimes squatters. This creates tension - and the city itself is nervous about who is here, as the canals and dikes and windmills are essential tot he survival of the city itself. (Especially these low lying areas.)
There are similar areas north of the hill - though these tend to be built on land that was in fact land before the drainage process started. This is an even more important area for wind mills - many of which line the northwestern highland, where they get the full benefit of the sea breezes. In this part of town, the mills are often connected to the underground - sewers and drainage tunnels - and can be the entry point for dangerous creatures coming into the city. This kind of intrusion is a source of great anxiety, and creates plenty of employment for adventurers willing to track down monsters in the sewers.
We can end there. Coming up - Demographics! some important locations and landmarks! and hopefully, a map!
Bayport: let's pickup more or less where we left last time. This time, a quick (I hope) tour of Bayport's neighborhoods.
Imagine ourselves coming in from the west, into harbor. What do you see? in the distance,north and south, you see hills, but between, you see mostly flatland, with the city itself in the middle. The city as such is bounded on the north and south by canals and fortresses, but these run through fairly low land - maybe artificial hills for the forts. On the north side, however, there is a hill rising fairly sharply a couple hundred yards from the northern canal and a few hundred yards inland. The hill is fairly high in itself, but stands out prominently in the surrounding flat. It runs a good mile or so north-south - about half the total width of the city. The rest of the city is mostly built on lowlands, a lot of it reclaimed from the sea. (And surrounded by dikes and canals, to protect it from the sea and rivers.) All of it - the hill and lowlands - is covered with houses,most fairly old, ut a lot of newer, usually shabbier houses, especially in the south. Right now, let's take a quick tour of the major areas of the town.
1. The Old Waterfront:
The area by the sea, in the north, is the old Waterfront This is the first area to be reclaimed from the sea, a couple hundred years ago. It's bordered by the Magnus Canal in the north and east (where it breaks the waterfront from the higher ground beyond) and the Grand Canal in the south. This is the old port, and still a thriving seaport. The edge of the land is what you would expect - docks, warehouses, boathouses, workshops. Around it are the places catering to the sea trade - more warehouses and workshops and storage, plus inns and taverns and bars and restaurants, some shabby, but some quite posh - and much more besides. It is a mixed bag: large guild houses, ship owners’ houses, trade houses, commodity exchanges, banks, expensive hotels; innumerable dives, bars and flophouses, houses of ill repute, gambling joints, packed tenements. Ship owners mix with laborers and beggars, thieves and merchants. It has always been like this - in these boom times, it is three times as full. The neighborhood is built around one or two broad streets, designed for transportation - Water Street especially, running north-south, and Main and Pine streets, running east-west. These are wide enough for wagons and traffic - they are connected by a warren of alleys and side streets. The large houses are usually on the large streets - the back streets and alleys are slums indeed. Most of the buildings are a mix of stone, brick, mud bases and timber tops - all materials are easily obtained in this area. Buildings are crammed in tights, tops over-leaning the streets, and in recent years many new structures have been erected on top of the old, a kind of vertical shanty town. It is, of course, a fire trap, but there is a lot of water close at hand - and windmills and other pumping devices scattered around that can save the city from the worst dangers of fire. (And of flood, which is equally terrifying here.) This land is all reclaimed, some of it landfill - it is shielded from the sea by dikes, which are very effective - but nothing is perfect. Heavy seas can top the dikes and put it all under water. There are underground structures here - tunnels, cellars - usually framed and bricked in, lined with stone - but all susceptible to flooding. There are many dangers here. That obviously includes the people - there is a lot of money in the waterfront district but it is cheek by jowl next to the thieves and beggars and clip joints, and the old, big money is sometimes as dishonest and ruthless as any pickpocket. This is the most dangerous part of town, the closest thing it has to a traditional thieves quarter - even if a lot of the thieves are in the employ of "honest" trading firms.
2. The Old Downtown:
This is is on the east side of Magnus Canal, along the base of the hill. This the oldest part of town, where the early villages were built (they were waterfront before the canals were built and land drained), and where the first pieces of a town were built. This is a typical medieval town - narrow streets, houses built close to one another, stone and brick below, wood tops, jettied floors and so on. This is all above sea level, and is quite stable, physically. It is dominated by three main north-west streets: Canal street runs at the edge of the canal, a wide street, built for traffic, with room for wagons, and lined with warehouses and shops, more like the waterfront than the rest of the downtown area. East of this, the hill rises steeply, 20-30 feet, some of it quite sheer (though there are houses clinging to the edge). Broad street runs along the top of this ledge - this is the business center fo the hwole town, lined with shops and good hotels and banks and large trading houses and so on. The hill continues beyond Broad street, through an area that holds many of the towns large institutions - cathedrals, the university, and so on. Center street, near the top of the hill, is the demarcation for the downtown - it is more residential than the places lower down, but still features many inns and taverns, shops and stores and so on. This neighborhood generally is more prosperous and respectable than the waterfront, but it is, still a commercial district, and Bayport is a seaport - and a boom town - so it shares much of the atmosphere of the waterfront, albeit more respectably,and with better guards. It is easy for almost anyone to move through this part of town - thieves, adventurers and the like - there is ample employment for such characters here, there are many sketchy forces in the area - the thieves' guild is active, and as everywhere, the line between honest and dishonest commerce is blurry and often ignored. Still: this is the center of the city, the respectable center of the city. It is well protected by the town guards, at least well patrolled. There is a lot of pressure to expand the new population into this area - indeed, many of the old houses near the canal (row houses, town houses and the like) have been turned into tenements - but there is also resistance. Above Broad street there are places that have been opened to the newcomers - but also places where the old families have refused - and fight back against anyone who tries to turn an old house into a tenement. This creates a lot of tension. This creates a fair amount of violence at times.
Physically, this district is built on the side of the hill, steep in some places, less so in others. It is,though, an area dominated by large a number of large buildings - guild houses, churches, large private residences, the university, and so on. The regular buildings are also probably larger than in the waterfront - though the same style: stone/brick for a floor, then (usually) wooden upper floors, often jettied over the street. This part of town also features fairly significant few underground structures - a well made sewer and drainage system; tunnels, pipes, cellars and so on, not all of them well documented. There are large crypts under the city; during some of the past wars, refuges were dug under the city, some secretly, some less so - some have been sealed up; some are still connected to th sewers or the known underground. It is complicated.
3. The Old Hills:
This is the area at the top of the ridge, east of Center street. High Street and Ridge street are the main streets up here - High running more or less on the crest, and Ridge running on the edge of the steep drop to the east. This is a very old part of town, the first expansion of the ancient village, originally a place for small farms and estates. It shows its past - larger houses, many of them all stone, separate, sometimes even walled in, with small yards and fields and orchards. These old houses aren't entirely free of the doubling population of the city - many of them have been subdivided into tenements and rooming houses and hotels and taverns - but not as many as below Center street. There are also a number of old estates that are owned by rich merchants or companies, who have turned their outbuildings into factories or shops, or barracks for their workers and soldiers - this cause s a fair amount of distress among the old timers. Still - this is fairly safe, maintains as much of the illusion of the old ways as they can, the idea of a genteel neighborhood outside a bustling port city. But this is maintained at great cost, and not very well - and often by having private mercenaries patrolling the place, harassing anyone who doesn’t seem to belong. There is also the simple fact that even the rich people living on this hill owe their wealth to the trade of the city - they are part of the less reputable places, like it or not. Given that the richest people in town these days are not always the most ethical - there can be plenty of excitement up here.
5. The New waterfront:
Now we move south again, south of the Grand Canal, and split in half by the Harbor Canal. The canals and extensive dikes in this area were completed in the early 1500s, and the land south of the canal basically constructed fro scratch. This area is laid out on clean grids and dominated by row houses, some of the stone/wood construction used in the older parts of town, but others made all of wood. Once this was respectable and quiet - but it has filled up since the boom started, and is now a fairly rough part of town. The area is dominated by the port on the west, and by the Marina, in the middle, opening off the north side of the Harbor canal - a large anchorage, generally used for smaller craft, but itself a very busy waterfront. South of the Harbor canal is another large area, a shipyard, where most of the city's ship building occurs. The shipyard, in particular, gives the area around it a more stable, working class atmosphere - it is less transient than the old waterfront, or the new waterfront by the sea. The area between the canals, then, tends to be more dangerous, with plenty of vice to go around.
6. The Outer lowlands:
This refers to the areas south of the Grand Canal, and inland from the Marina, as well as everything inside the Fort Canals that ring the city. This area is very mixed - much of it was just drained marshland before the boom, though these areas have been developed since - though usually small,flimsy wooden structures, built as fast as possible. Indeed, much of this area could be called a slum - at least a shantytown. There are, however, other kinds of structures in this area - before the boom, there were farms and factories out here - obnoxious ones like tanneries and breweries, as well as mills of various sorts. There are large groups of windmills out here - used to pump out the drained land, used to power mills and so on. As people moved into the area,it created tension, competition for the land - a number of windmills have been taken over by people looking for housing, sometimes legally, sometimes squatters. This creates tension - and the city itself is nervous about who is here, as the canals and dikes and windmills are essential tot he survival of the city itself. (Especially these low lying areas.)
There are similar areas north of the hill - though these tend to be built on land that was in fact land before the drainage process started. This is an even more important area for wind mills - many of which line the northwestern highland, where they get the full benefit of the sea breezes. In this part of town, the mills are often connected to the underground - sewers and drainage tunnels - and can be the entry point for dangerous creatures coming into the city. This kind of intrusion is a source of great anxiety, and creates plenty of employment for adventurers willing to track down monsters in the sewers.
We can end there. Coming up - Demographics! some important locations and landmarks! and hopefully, a map!
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Bayport Geography
The city of Bayport is a seaport, located between the mouths of two rivers, the Willow and the Barnet. The Willow flows down from hills in the north, the Barnet from the south - the area between the hills is a large low floodplain. The Willow river drops abruptly from the hills, which are higher and harder in the north. The break with the plains is sharp, marked by cliffs and waterfalls, and the highlands are rough and wild, heavily wooded and dangerous. The southern side of the plain rises more gradually to the hills, which are marked by a line of chalk downs. These too rise steeply, especially where they abut the ocean - straight cliffs rise from much of the southern coast. Inland, they are less dramatic, with the alluvial plains rising to meet the higher land.
The flood plain is just that - low and wet, fertile and green, criss-crossed by many small rivers. This is particularly marked to the south, where the web of waterways converge near the Barnet river. The plains stretch for many miles east of the city (and the bay that gives it its name), slowly rising to the east, though largely a mix of ridges (sometimes rocky), and lowlands,some quite marshy, for a long distance inland. It is good land, though, a mixture of forest and farmland, interspersed with lakes and rivers and streams. 30-40 miles inland, the plains merge into the range of hills north and east of the bay, forming a saddle between higher ground north and south.
People have lived here since time immemorial. There was a ridge near the mouth of the Barnet river, and that is where people settled, on this higher ground, above the river mouth, tide flats,and small anchorages. A handful of other small settlements appeared in the area, mostly further inland where there was some dry ground, but none of them grew beyond small farming hamlets for a very long time. But people did move into this area - migrants from further east, occasional adventurers, looking for land to claim for their own. Slowly the farming villages grew, and as they did, they interacted with one another, and goods began moving up and down the rivers,and that is what made Bayport important. Local trade developed; then trade with towns and settlements on the Bay and Sea - Bayport was at the mouth of the rivers,and Bayport was the best harbor on the open water. Time passed; outside influences formed the area - southern invasions, Viking raids, orc raids from the hills, the development of countries, like Lenay; Bayport became a significant town and seaport.
It led to major changes in the land. The land near Bayport was mostly wetland - but as the town grew, farmers began to drain the wetlands, building dikes and canals, and reclaiming the land for farming. In time, this reached the town, as well. By the end of the 1300s, there were significant drainage systems in the hinterlands; the town began working on similar same projects. They built dikes around the tidal flats and along the edge of the Barnet river, they dredged the anchorages, they started filling in the old flats, to create stable land for building. They built a series of canals to drain and protect the dry land. They dug underground tunnels and canals to drain the higher ground, preventing erosion, and moving both fresh and dirty water in and out of the city. They built windmills to operate pumps to move water in and out of the town. By the time they were done, they had turned the last couple miles of the Barnet river into completely man-made canals, they had created large areas of landfill, mostly in the south, where the town could expand, they built large ports, they built a massive shipyard, and they surrounded the city with canals in the place of walls, for defense. Much of this as built to support the first major international sea-going boom in the late 15th century; it laid the ground work for the explosion of traffic in the early 17th.
By the mid 1500s, the city had taken on its current (1610s) form. To the west is Horseshoe bay - chalk cliffs to the south, granite hills to the north, and beach, marsh and farmland - and the city - between. The city is bounded north and south by large canals and fortresses. Between, the western edge is almost all port - docks and slips for ships on the water; a strong dike protecting the city (which is very low on the waterfront), with warehouses and all the usual waterfront buildings on land. The old part of town rises on a hill, half a mile or so inland, separated from the waterfront district by the Magnus Canal. The ridge rises quickly, a steep bluff a few yards inland from the canal, the hill rising less abruptly beyond that. A series of streets run lengthwise (north/south) on this hill, and others go up the hill east/west - most of these start at the top of the bluff, though; on;y a couple come down to the canal. North of the ridge,the land drops gradually to the northern canals - a lot of this land is open, used for pastures, with lines of windmills built in exposed areas. South of the hill, there is another large canal, the Grand Canal. South of the Grand Canal, almost all the town is built on landfill, with many canals interspersed throughout the city. Finally,south of the city, beyond the southern canal, the land starts to rise - to farmland southeast of the town, and to steep chalk cliffs southwest, along the shore.
The flood plain is just that - low and wet, fertile and green, criss-crossed by many small rivers. This is particularly marked to the south, where the web of waterways converge near the Barnet river. The plains stretch for many miles east of the city (and the bay that gives it its name), slowly rising to the east, though largely a mix of ridges (sometimes rocky), and lowlands,some quite marshy, for a long distance inland. It is good land, though, a mixture of forest and farmland, interspersed with lakes and rivers and streams. 30-40 miles inland, the plains merge into the range of hills north and east of the bay, forming a saddle between higher ground north and south.
People have lived here since time immemorial. There was a ridge near the mouth of the Barnet river, and that is where people settled, on this higher ground, above the river mouth, tide flats,and small anchorages. A handful of other small settlements appeared in the area, mostly further inland where there was some dry ground, but none of them grew beyond small farming hamlets for a very long time. But people did move into this area - migrants from further east, occasional adventurers, looking for land to claim for their own. Slowly the farming villages grew, and as they did, they interacted with one another, and goods began moving up and down the rivers,and that is what made Bayport important. Local trade developed; then trade with towns and settlements on the Bay and Sea - Bayport was at the mouth of the rivers,and Bayport was the best harbor on the open water. Time passed; outside influences formed the area - southern invasions, Viking raids, orc raids from the hills, the development of countries, like Lenay; Bayport became a significant town and seaport.
It led to major changes in the land. The land near Bayport was mostly wetland - but as the town grew, farmers began to drain the wetlands, building dikes and canals, and reclaiming the land for farming. In time, this reached the town, as well. By the end of the 1300s, there were significant drainage systems in the hinterlands; the town began working on similar same projects. They built dikes around the tidal flats and along the edge of the Barnet river, they dredged the anchorages, they started filling in the old flats, to create stable land for building. They built a series of canals to drain and protect the dry land. They dug underground tunnels and canals to drain the higher ground, preventing erosion, and moving both fresh and dirty water in and out of the city. They built windmills to operate pumps to move water in and out of the town. By the time they were done, they had turned the last couple miles of the Barnet river into completely man-made canals, they had created large areas of landfill, mostly in the south, where the town could expand, they built large ports, they built a massive shipyard, and they surrounded the city with canals in the place of walls, for defense. Much of this as built to support the first major international sea-going boom in the late 15th century; it laid the ground work for the explosion of traffic in the early 17th.
By the mid 1500s, the city had taken on its current (1610s) form. To the west is Horseshoe bay - chalk cliffs to the south, granite hills to the north, and beach, marsh and farmland - and the city - between. The city is bounded north and south by large canals and fortresses. Between, the western edge is almost all port - docks and slips for ships on the water; a strong dike protecting the city (which is very low on the waterfront), with warehouses and all the usual waterfront buildings on land. The old part of town rises on a hill, half a mile or so inland, separated from the waterfront district by the Magnus Canal. The ridge rises quickly, a steep bluff a few yards inland from the canal, the hill rising less abruptly beyond that. A series of streets run lengthwise (north/south) on this hill, and others go up the hill east/west - most of these start at the top of the bluff, though; on;y a couple come down to the canal. North of the ridge,the land drops gradually to the northern canals - a lot of this land is open, used for pastures, with lines of windmills built in exposed areas. South of the hill, there is another large canal, the Grand Canal. South of the Grand Canal, almost all the town is built on landfill, with many canals interspersed throughout the city. Finally,south of the city, beyond the southern canal, the land starts to rise - to farmland southeast of the town, and to steep chalk cliffs southwest, along the shore.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Bayport Intro
During the "present" of the campaign (roughly 1610-20, "Common Time" - CT, dated from the creation of the kingdom of Norland - another post is surely called for explaining the kingdom of Norland,and why they got to establish what was common time...), Bayport might be the most important city in the north. This was not always the case - until the 1590s, Bayport was a modest, if prosperous, seaport on Horseshoe Bay at the eastern edge of the Viking Sea. But then, in 1593, George Blighton had Duke Frederick IV of Regelsburg murdered, and claimed the Duchy for himself. This touched off war - war that lasted almost a decade, pitting Regelsburg against everyone - free cities to the north; Kingdom to the south. Regelsburg, however, neatly straddled the Great River, and during the war was able to stop trade fro north to south dead. The cities of the north (Waynesburg and Hillsburg, Dassal, Farmington) scrambled to find new trade routes - and one of these was overland to Bayport (200 odd miles west of Waynesburg), and thence by sea to the wide world. It was a difficult route - overland, and over hills (no rivers connected the areas), through land barely tamed - but the distances proved to be manageable enough to allow the trade to go through. And the rewards for getting goods to Bayport were immense - it connected the north to the rest of the world again.
That made Bayport exceedingly rich. Bayport had been a seaport for as long as ships were sailing the ocean (about 200 years), so they were ready to carry this new trade, and quickly established their dominance. Lenay also benefitted - they were a shipping power as well, and had a navy on hand to protect their ships - but even they had to move goods through Bayport to get to them Waynesburg. For a decade, the river was closed to significant trade - by 1605, it was open again, but by then, the overland routes were very well established, and Bayport was able to hold on to much of the trade it had taken. It's ships sailed everywhere - to the Kingdom, of course, to Vinar, but also past Vinar to the Southern Ocean, where they could trade directly for the tropical goods so much in demand: sugar, coffee, spices, tobacco. And they did not limit themselves to carrying goods back north - Bayport merchants established bases in the southern ocean, where they were able to trade extensively through the region, far to the east, to the great desert cities, all through the south, the Jungle Continent and so on. They traded in commodities not allowed in the north - slaves; drugs. All of this made the trading companies immensely wealthy and very powerful. Some of them, as strong as entire countries by themselves.
All this brought gold pouring into Bayport,and with it, people, to sail and build the ships, and to provide everything the sailors needed, the merchants wanted - there was money and work for everyone, at a time when many other cities were falling apart - and so Bayport grew at a tremendous pace. They crammed into its waterfront districts; some built around the edges of the city; the ones who had the means, moved into the old town, filling all of it up. They came from everywhere - so Bayport became a cosmopolitan city, full of every ethnicity, and every intelligent race that could get along at all. They also brought all the problems that boom towns have: crime, strife - all those people brought their grudges and rivalries and wars with them, lawlessness, license - whole chunks of the city became red light districts, thieves quarters, overnight. It never seemed to blow up - probably because the sea was always there as an outlet: tensions got to high, you committed a crime that made you a target, you could find a berth on a ship bound for Norwich or Vinar or San Marcos or Chult and your troubles were over. The sea drew off political ambitions as well - why make trouble in Bayport when you could steal an island or half a continent somewhere in the south? More than one Bayporter found themselves a count or duke or grand Vizier off in the far corners of the world.
But it created a city that bubbled with opportunities. It started to draw adventurers the way Waynesburg always had - men and women who knew they could find work with their swords and spellbooks in the city - and who knew there were riches to be found in the city itself. Like Waynesburg, it was an exciting, lucrative place in itself, and the portal to even greater adventures. Just as adventurers in Waynesburg could always head into the hills to take out an orc or goblin lair, so could you here - the hills and forests were only 5-10 miles away, almost wilderness. The sea was a frontier, and the road to a frontier - to the untamed parts of Lenay, Wingmar - as well as the whole wide world. Bayport, by the 1610s, had the reputation Waynesburg had had for ages - if you were a young, ambitious fellow, good with a sword or your wits, with no obvious place for your skills at home, go to Bayport, and it would all be up to you.
That made Bayport exceedingly rich. Bayport had been a seaport for as long as ships were sailing the ocean (about 200 years), so they were ready to carry this new trade, and quickly established their dominance. Lenay also benefitted - they were a shipping power as well, and had a navy on hand to protect their ships - but even they had to move goods through Bayport to get to them Waynesburg. For a decade, the river was closed to significant trade - by 1605, it was open again, but by then, the overland routes were very well established, and Bayport was able to hold on to much of the trade it had taken. It's ships sailed everywhere - to the Kingdom, of course, to Vinar, but also past Vinar to the Southern Ocean, where they could trade directly for the tropical goods so much in demand: sugar, coffee, spices, tobacco. And they did not limit themselves to carrying goods back north - Bayport merchants established bases in the southern ocean, where they were able to trade extensively through the region, far to the east, to the great desert cities, all through the south, the Jungle Continent and so on. They traded in commodities not allowed in the north - slaves; drugs. All of this made the trading companies immensely wealthy and very powerful. Some of them, as strong as entire countries by themselves.
All this brought gold pouring into Bayport,and with it, people, to sail and build the ships, and to provide everything the sailors needed, the merchants wanted - there was money and work for everyone, at a time when many other cities were falling apart - and so Bayport grew at a tremendous pace. They crammed into its waterfront districts; some built around the edges of the city; the ones who had the means, moved into the old town, filling all of it up. They came from everywhere - so Bayport became a cosmopolitan city, full of every ethnicity, and every intelligent race that could get along at all. They also brought all the problems that boom towns have: crime, strife - all those people brought their grudges and rivalries and wars with them, lawlessness, license - whole chunks of the city became red light districts, thieves quarters, overnight. It never seemed to blow up - probably because the sea was always there as an outlet: tensions got to high, you committed a crime that made you a target, you could find a berth on a ship bound for Norwich or Vinar or San Marcos or Chult and your troubles were over. The sea drew off political ambitions as well - why make trouble in Bayport when you could steal an island or half a continent somewhere in the south? More than one Bayporter found themselves a count or duke or grand Vizier off in the far corners of the world.
But it created a city that bubbled with opportunities. It started to draw adventurers the way Waynesburg always had - men and women who knew they could find work with their swords and spellbooks in the city - and who knew there were riches to be found in the city itself. Like Waynesburg, it was an exciting, lucrative place in itself, and the portal to even greater adventures. Just as adventurers in Waynesburg could always head into the hills to take out an orc or goblin lair, so could you here - the hills and forests were only 5-10 miles away, almost wilderness. The sea was a frontier, and the road to a frontier - to the untamed parts of Lenay, Wingmar - as well as the whole wide world. Bayport, by the 1610s, had the reputation Waynesburg had had for ages - if you were a young, ambitious fellow, good with a sword or your wits, with no obvious place for your skills at home, go to Bayport, and it would all be up to you.
Monday, January 8, 2018
Waynesburg - Intro and Map
Waynesburg is an adventurer’s paradise. It is the largest city of the north, the center of the northern culture, the great magnet of the region, for everyone. Waynesburg is located where the Great River flows out of Lake Byron - it is a perfect site for a trading town, and has always been settled. There are stories of a major settlement there as far back as the great legendary war between the elves an the drow. (Though if that is true, those wars leveled it completely.) There have been villages and towns there as far back as anyone can know, as far back as the early days of the kingdoms in the south. No one can say how many times it was destroyed and rebuilt in the dark ages, but it was always rebuilt, and finally blossomed into a major, and permanent, town in the days of the wars of Unification in the south.
In those days, streams of refugees from the wars sought refuge in the north, and many of them settled in and around the junction of the Great River, the Northflood, and the lake. By the end of the wars, the village had become a significant town, with a name and the beginning of fortifications. Wayne himself - one of the heroes of the wars, a member of the exiled royal family who eventually returned and unified the Kingdom - built fortifications, built a road around the rapids on the Great River, and gave the place its name. Within a generation, his fortifications had grown into a strong set of walls - from then on the city only grew. The northern lands were settled and civilized, with Waynesburg as their core. As minerals and other resources were discovered in the even wilder country north of the city, it grew even more powerful as an economic center. It became the anchor anchor for the political north against the occasional adventures of the south - when kings and dukes grew violent and ambitious, this is where their enemies fled; when orcs and barbarians threatened, this is where people gathered to defend themselves. It was a violent time - but the town grew nd prospered in spite of all.
In time, it out grew it's place as a frontier town, though it never shed its reputation. Parts of the city were, mostly, pacified, but much of it remained as lawless as ever. A reputation as a frontier can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. A reputation for danger draws men who wish to fight again (or with) that danger - so it remains dangerous. These days, you might say that Waynesburg is a kind of artificial frontier - certain parts of the city remain mostly unpoliced, as if to keep a supply of mercenaries close for the inevitable feuds that arise, and for the periodic troubles on the real frontier. But that won’t get in our way: that is what makes it paradise for those seeking adventure.
In those days, streams of refugees from the wars sought refuge in the north, and many of them settled in and around the junction of the Great River, the Northflood, and the lake. By the end of the wars, the village had become a significant town, with a name and the beginning of fortifications. Wayne himself - one of the heroes of the wars, a member of the exiled royal family who eventually returned and unified the Kingdom - built fortifications, built a road around the rapids on the Great River, and gave the place its name. Within a generation, his fortifications had grown into a strong set of walls - from then on the city only grew. The northern lands were settled and civilized, with Waynesburg as their core. As minerals and other resources were discovered in the even wilder country north of the city, it grew even more powerful as an economic center. It became the anchor anchor for the political north against the occasional adventures of the south - when kings and dukes grew violent and ambitious, this is where their enemies fled; when orcs and barbarians threatened, this is where people gathered to defend themselves. It was a violent time - but the town grew nd prospered in spite of all.
In time, it out grew it's place as a frontier town, though it never shed its reputation. Parts of the city were, mostly, pacified, but much of it remained as lawless as ever. A reputation as a frontier can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. A reputation for danger draws men who wish to fight again (or with) that danger - so it remains dangerous. These days, you might say that Waynesburg is a kind of artificial frontier - certain parts of the city remain mostly unpoliced, as if to keep a supply of mercenaries close for the inevitable feuds that arise, and for the periodic troubles on the real frontier. But that won’t get in our way: that is what makes it paradise for those seeking adventure.
Friday, January 5, 2018
Setting Sail
On a recent journey, several adventurers went ashore to feel the sand under their feet and solid ground. Camped at the base of a small cliff they heard sounds coming from a nearby sea cave that seemed to still have a source of water flowing out of it, even with the outgoing tide. Intrigued by the curious mixture of splashing and dripping within, they decided to investigate. Mostly, they were natural sea cave sounds, but amid them were what sounded almost like fish flopping on the rocks.
Exploring within, they encountered six sahuagin and narrowly escaped with their health intact. They also discovered signs of a greater complex further inside the cave, but escaped to get help before exploring it. On reaching Port Nyanzaru, they reported what they had found, and a party was gathered to return and explore the site, dealing with any hostile sahuagin as necessary to secure the safety of the island as a waystation on the way to Chult.
Monday, January 1, 2018
2018 Gaming Resolutions
Welcome to 2018, New Year's Day. As good a time as any to try to renew my attention to this blog - yep. I did this last year laying out goals - the goals I had for this blog got nowhere, but the rest?
Playing more? I moved, and yes indeed, I play a lot more. We have had some trouble getting a campaign established, but we have managed to play regularly - D&D and other games alike - so I have to take that as a win.
As for D&D - I did manage to run through the fire giant lair I referred to; I have worked up chunks of the jungle/south seas adventure, and played some of it,though it has been a bit hit or miss. That is all. I have not been able to turn any of this into anything tangible- but I created enough material around them, it is not off the table.
As for the background stuff - developing the world: I have continued working on that, as I have for decades. Some of this is quite tangible - lots of maps and such - some of it less so. But all of it is there. The problem with this is that it is all in my head, on my computer, or arranged in piles around the houses - I need to do something else with it. we'll be back tot his point...
As for blogging - no, fraid not. As for audio-visual - no, again. As for writing? yes - I have done a lot of that this year, though somehow managed not to finish a thing.
This is where I hope to change, and this is the whole of this year's resolutions. The general stuff - continues, take most of that stuff as ongoing... Keep playing. I have one campaign in decent shape; I hope to find one or two more that I can run - and hope I can get someone else to run, so I can play too (D&D specifically). Keep writing and all the rest. But specifically:
This year I am going to try to use this blog to start putting the background work - world building, especially, but dungeon building and the rest - into a tangible form. Published here, basically. I will set myself this modest goal: to post one piece every week related to the world building. Maybe sometimes something about other things - D&D theory or reports or observations or whatever - but something. And specifically, at least one post a week about the D&D world. Something - a post about a location; a piece of history; something about monsters or races or classes in this world; maybe something about its culture. One a week - I should be able to do it: I have a ton of material to use.
It's a modest goal, but it's a goal, and if I do it, it would generate 2/3 as many posts as we have managed in 7 years on this blog... It's not been that I don't do the writing - it's that I haven't published it (even in this kind of forum.) Time to start changing that.
Playing more? I moved, and yes indeed, I play a lot more. We have had some trouble getting a campaign established, but we have managed to play regularly - D&D and other games alike - so I have to take that as a win.
As for D&D - I did manage to run through the fire giant lair I referred to; I have worked up chunks of the jungle/south seas adventure, and played some of it,though it has been a bit hit or miss. That is all. I have not been able to turn any of this into anything tangible- but I created enough material around them, it is not off the table.
As for the background stuff - developing the world: I have continued working on that, as I have for decades. Some of this is quite tangible - lots of maps and such - some of it less so. But all of it is there. The problem with this is that it is all in my head, on my computer, or arranged in piles around the houses - I need to do something else with it. we'll be back tot his point...
As for blogging - no, fraid not. As for audio-visual - no, again. As for writing? yes - I have done a lot of that this year, though somehow managed not to finish a thing.
This is where I hope to change, and this is the whole of this year's resolutions. The general stuff - continues, take most of that stuff as ongoing... Keep playing. I have one campaign in decent shape; I hope to find one or two more that I can run - and hope I can get someone else to run, so I can play too (D&D specifically). Keep writing and all the rest. But specifically:
This year I am going to try to use this blog to start putting the background work - world building, especially, but dungeon building and the rest - into a tangible form. Published here, basically. I will set myself this modest goal: to post one piece every week related to the world building. Maybe sometimes something about other things - D&D theory or reports or observations or whatever - but something. And specifically, at least one post a week about the D&D world. Something - a post about a location; a piece of history; something about monsters or races or classes in this world; maybe something about its culture. One a week - I should be able to do it: I have a ton of material to use.
It's a modest goal, but it's a goal, and if I do it, it would generate 2/3 as many posts as we have managed in 7 years on this blog... It's not been that I don't do the writing - it's that I haven't published it (even in this kind of forum.) Time to start changing that.
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Storm King's Sandbox
What DM David said about Storm King's Thunder:
Here, the sandbox portion of Storm King’s Thunder fell flat. Once the adventure showed the menace of the giants, it left characters with no clear way to meet the threat. Instead, the characters could only run errands until they reached the adventure’s true start. The errands suffered from such weak hooks that DMs either needed to completely rework them or to face players dutifully following a course because the adventure expected it.Sadly, true.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Campaign Building
Interesting article on Creating a Player-based Tomb of Annihilation campaign. I thought it was particularly interesting in light of the work we've been doing this summer to accomplish the same end.
They take a more structured approach, but it feels like they had the same idea. It was also interesting (even if it doesn't surprise me totally) that their characters preferred pirates and tomb raiding, or a pulp-driven plot line.
It did raise a few thoughts. With all the work we've done, there is something to say for codifying it into a more useable form. Take the random thoughts and ideas and structure them into something that will have substance in game form.
I feel like we've done a lot of the work they talk about doing, but it is still somewhat shifting and formless. It feels like we would benefit from a similar approach. The advantage we have is that we've been asking the questions and discussing them. We've done the groundwork, but not resolved the details.
Perhaps we should try do that... but what questions would we ask? and what consensus would we find?
They take a more structured approach, but it feels like they had the same idea. It was also interesting (even if it doesn't surprise me totally) that their characters preferred pirates and tomb raiding, or a pulp-driven plot line.
It did raise a few thoughts. With all the work we've done, there is something to say for codifying it into a more useable form. Take the random thoughts and ideas and structure them into something that will have substance in game form.
I feel like we've done a lot of the work they talk about doing, but it is still somewhat shifting and formless. It feels like we would benefit from a similar approach. The advantage we have is that we've been asking the questions and discussing them. We've done the groundwork, but not resolved the details.
Perhaps we should try do that... but what questions would we ask? and what consensus would we find?
Thursday, August 3, 2017
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
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.
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.
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