tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232769120860134292024-03-08T00:41:40.115-05:00The Retired AdventurerJohn Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.comBlogger434125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-37409746777658084152024-01-16T11:51:00.001-05:002024-01-16T13:09:07.543-05:00The Tellian Sector: The Empty Synod<p>The Empty Synod looks around at the Imperium, at the galaxy, at its brutality and cruelty and waste and stupidity, and says "None of this is necessary. Everything could different. We can make it so." It embodies the forces of hope in a universe otherwise bereft of it.</p><p><b><u>What Does the Empty Synod Want?</u></b></p><p>The Empty Synod wants to overthrow the Imperium and replace it with a more just and effective society. It wants to liberate all the mutants and psykers from Imperial oppression and turn their talents to the benefits of all. It wants to genetically engineer and cognitive condition humanity to incorporate the best aspects of xenos and alternate forms of humanity while leaving behind its worst traits. It wants peace with all xenos where it is possible, and to incorporate their technology, insights, and worldviews into a greater galactic society. It wants to restart technological progress and unleash the power of artificial intelligences, human cognitive development, and cybernetic augmentation to exceed the height of humanity's powers during the Age of Technology. It wants to develop the human race's capacities to the point where it can ascend psychically en masse, master the warp, and challenge the gods. </p><p>The Empty Synod works on projects designed to further all of these goals, but its primary focus is on the overthrow of Imperial, Ecclesiarchical, and Mechanicus authorities in order to sweep away the forces that are mostly able to interfere with the rest of its agenda. Despite standing against the Ecclesiarchy, the Empty Synod avoids taking an official position on the deification of the Emperor, and it is not against leveraging the power of religious belief in its favour.</p><p><b><u>Who Are They?</u></b><br /></p><p>The leaders of the Empty Synod are known only by the collective title of the Eisholoi, "Those who move into wholeness" in High Gothic. Many are or were human, but some never were. Some may never even have lived. They are never seen in person. They can communicate with their key agents through mysterious, impossible means, and they muster strange and unknown powers to see their will is done.</p><p>Under them are the Epistatai (sing. Epistates) and Taxiarchs, the senior divisional leaders of the organisation. The Epistatai are usually embedded within the Adepta Terra or in remote locations within the Halo Stars. They lead research projects, divert Imperial resources and powers to the service of the Empty Synod, and collect intelligence to pass on. Taxiarchs are given broad geographic areas (usually at least one entire system) in which they are expected to undermine and attack the Imperium. These are the only ranks who communicate directly with the Eisholoi.</p><p>Each Taxiarch and Epistates is served by teams of agents who execute operations on their behalf, with the key division being those who know they work for for the Empty Synod (the minority) and those who do not. The former are known as "Hetaroi" ("Companions") while the latter are known as "Pseudophores" ("Lie-carriers") or simply as "assets".<br /></p><p><b><u>So What's the Plan?</u></b></p><p>The Noctis Aeterna has catalysed the Empty Synod into activating its Taxiarchs in the Cinders and the Wisp. With the severe degradation of the astropathic network and interstellar trade, there is a unique opportunity to break planets and systems off from the Imperium and use them as bases for future expansion. The Empty Synod has been expanding its control of Chartist shipping aggressively, trying to monopolize interstellar shipping in the Cinders so that when a few key systems fall to their influence, the rest will be forced to join up or be deprived of essential resources and the capacity to defend themselves.</p><p><b><u>Notable Activities</u></b></p><p><b>Exploring the Webway:</b> Many of the worlds of the Tellian sector had or have active gates to the Webway, the ancient Aeldari network for superluminal travel. The Empty Synod seeks to discover the locations of these gates, as well as the means to activate them, in order to use them for their own ends, both to circumvent eventual Imperial blockades, as well as to evacuate the populations of planets they will eventually control should the Imperium try to exterminate them. To aid with this, the Empty Synod actively seeks out items and sites of cultural or strategic importance to the Eldar, and returns them in exchange for knowledge of the Webway and the xenos' permission to use it.</p><p><b>Technical Power:</b> Archaeotech, xenotech, heretek, the Tellian sector is rich in all three, and the Empty Synod wants to discover and control as much of it as possible. They actively have teams scouting out old Varosi and other ancient sites; negotiating with Rogue Traders and xenos; and researching new avenues of development. They are particularly interested in technology that could fundamentally transform the balance of power between them and the Imperium.</p><p><b>Solomar Holdings:</b> Solomar Holdings is one of several front groups the Empty Synod has created in order to create the financial support they require, while inserting themselves into the vital arteries of the Imperium. Solomar is notionally a confederation of Chartist Captains (most have no idea they work for the Empty Synod) who trade across two dozen systems in the Cinders, with a focus on bulk staples (promethium, food, metals), weapons, and vehicles. While most other Chartist fleets have seen significant degradation of their transit capabilities since the end of the Astronomican, Solomar has not, and it has been using this advantage to aggressively grow. Its main rival across most of the Cinders is the Pratik Fleet, a Rogue Trader dynasty that is highly corrupt and unorthodox, but only in pursuit of its own power and wealth.</p><p><b>Mutant Militias:</b> The Empty Synod seeks to recruit, train, and arm extensive military forces from mutants, underhivers, heretical cults, and other outcastes in order to challenge the Imperium's military might. These groups are rarely under the direct control of Taxiarchs, but are supported and steered away from falling under the control of Chaos outright.</p><p><b><u>Allies and Enemies</u></b></p><p><b>Chaos:</b> The Empty Synod is not opposed to Chaos per se, but it sees it as simply the obverse side of the Imperium, each cultivating and reacting to the worst tendencies in the other. It discourages, but does not prevent, its operatives from drawing on Chaotic powers, and it periodically temporarily aligns with Chaotic movements but does not incorporate them into itself. The two Chaos-aligned groups the Empty Synod deals with regularly are the Black Dawn, a Nurgle cult, and the Joyous Ascent, a rogue psychic ascendance cult, but it is as likely to be fighting both groups as working with them.</p><p><b>Xenos:</b> The two most common xenos for the Empty Synod to deal with are the Mzod and the Aeldari, and it is widely believed that representatives of both species sit on the Eisholoi. The Empty Synod primarily deals with non-Craftworld Eldar, either Exodites who dwell on Maiden Worlds or the groups that continually inhabit the Webway itself. The Empty Synod studies Orks, and has occasionally considered weaponising them, but considers it too probable that they will escape control. It has occasional, often profitable, exchange with another two dozen more obscure species out amongst the Halo Stars. The Empty Synod is attempting to initiate contact with the Zul-Kan, but this has been unsuccessful so far.</p><p><b>Heretical Cults: </b>The Empty Synod supports and encourages deviant versions of the Imperial Creed, especially versions that soften the anti-mutant, psyker, and xenos positions associated with the baseline doctrine. It recruits extensively from such cults, and often provides them with secret support to help them undermine the Ecclesiarchy.</p><p><b>The Adeptus Mechanicus:</b> There is a vibrant, if secretive, backdoor trade of technical artifacts with the Adeptus Mechanicus through various front groups, combined with kidnappings, assassinations, and other subversions to obtain their technical expertise and move their attention away from the Empty Synod. If the Mechanicus found out that the Empty Synod uses silica animi, it would provoke a war between the two groups, a war the Empty Synod does not yet feel it is ready to wage. Instead, the Empty Synod uses the backdoor trade to win the Mechanicus' good will for their various fronts.</p><p><b>The Inquisition:</b> The Inquisition is aware of the "Conventus Vanitas", but the vast majority of its membership who are aware of them have been led to believe they are relatively mundane criminals and political reformers more suitably dealt with by planetary officials. The Empty Synod seeks to subvert a handful of the most radical Inquisitors to use their power on its behalf. A recent setback has been two Monodominant Inquisitors who have discovered the Empty Synod's existence and have formed an "Ordo Vanitas" to investigate further. Their working understanding is that it is some form of Chaos cult.</p><p><b>Infractionists:</b> Infractionists are often great recruits for the Empty Synod, though most don't go beyond being "Pseudophoroi", deniable assets. A handful of famous and highly skilled criminals are recruited to become Taxiarchs, where their skills at evading Imperial power are put to good use. Criminal gangs are an extremely common kind of front group for the Empty Synod to establish as a first approach to a new system.</p><p><b>Rogue Traders:</b> The Empty Synod is known to Rogue Traders as some sort of xeno confederation active in the Halo Stars, though the two groups primarily deal with one another through third-party intermediaries.</p><p><b><u>An Empty Synod Patron: Raskol Might, Taxiarch</u></b></p><p>Raskol Might is a former arch-criminal who is currently living under the false identity of "Samson Phunic", guildmaster of Solomar Holdings for the Bhadra system. He is the Empty Synod's Taxiarch for Bhadra, responsible for the subversion and eventual overthrow of Imperial governance of the system.</p><p>Might is legendary amongst infractionists for a series of high-profile frauds and heists two centuries ago that stripped hundreds of millions of gelt from the Globe subsector's nobility and clergy and diverted them to hundreds of thousands of underhivers. "The Great Nuust Giveaway", "the Qurmizi Ship Swap", and "the Hubris of Namar Pratik" are still studied by auditors and enforcers looking to piece together how he pulled them off. Many of his targets were later revealed to have gained their wealth through means so foul that the Inquisition was called in to punish them, the investigations sparked by Might's thefts.</p><p>Since that burst of activity, Might has periodically reappeared to groups of infractionists, offering them leads, plans, and resources to conduct some amazing heist or con themselves, though he quickly vanishes after the initial support, leaving the successful execution up to the groups he has aided. Many fail for their own reasons, but the few who succeed contribute to the legend of Raskol Might.</p><p>In his "Samson Phunic" identity, Might spends his days using his analytical skills to advance Solomar Holdings' interests in the Bhadra system. He has been in place for nearly a decade, slowly recruiting agents, calling in favours, and summoning old allies and proteges to gather around him, all while strategising about how to overthrow the system. </p><p>Recently, he received a communique: The time has come for Bhadra to fall.</p><p><b>Faction:</b> Infractionist (The Empty Synod)<br /><b>Duty:</b> Guildmaster (Might lives as the senior executive "Samson Phunic" at Solomar Holdings)<br /><b>Motivation:</b> Conflict (Might's goal is to undermine Imperial rule on Kangyur)<br /><b>Duty Boon:</b> Registered Trader (Might can secure trade records, passage on Solomar Holdings Chartist vessels, and can acquire anything for his agents from the Armoury section of the rulebook at a 30% discount)<br /><br /><b>Boons:</b><br /><i>Forger: </i>Might can, with a bit of time, create almost any document or authorisation needed.</p><p><i>Tentative Alliance: </i>Might is constantly favour trading via Solomar Holdings with various mid-level members of the Adepta; PCs can choose a faction before each mission and gain +1 patron influence with them.</p><p><b>Liabilities:</b><br /><i>Demands Discretion:</i> Might's name, and therefore patron influence, should only be invoked in front of people who are opposed to the Imperium's rule; Solomar Holdings's involvement should be kept far away from anti-Imperial activities.</p><p><i>Impostor:</i> "Samson Phunic" is a fake identity, Might is wanted in a score of star-systems under his own name. Avoiding connection between the two identities is highly important.</p><p><i>Overextended:</i> Might spends most of his days managing a business empire stretching across multiple planets and with interests in a dozen systems. He gives his teams a great deal of freedom and discretion, but also can't spend much time supporting them in the field.</p><p><i>(Raskol Might is the PCs' patron)</i></p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-36950316848969858482024-01-11T18:43:00.002-05:002024-01-11T18:43:30.032-05:00RIP: Jennell JacquaysJust publicly expressing my condolences to her family and friends on the recent passing of Jennell Jacquays, who wrote one of my favourite RPG campaign settings of all time: Griffin Mountain, in addition to a massive body of other work that very much laid out best practices in adventure, and specifically dungeon, design decades and decades ago. She had an incredibly ability to work through the intricacies of material in a way that made it tremendously concrete and practical without being overwhelming, one of my favourite examples being the various treasure maps, including fake treasure maps, that the caravan trader in Griffin Mountain can give the PCs. <div><br /></div><div>That's just one example from a truly massive and influential set of work that sprawls across properties and media-types, and that would be almost impossible to summarise effectively. She was one of the giants of this hobby, and it is worse off for having lost her.</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-40642782912783824692024-01-09T23:37:00.007-05:002024-01-09T23:40:02.068-05:00The Tellian Sector: Bhadra System<p><b><span style="font-size: large;"><u>The Bhadra System: Overview</u></span></b></p><p><span>The Bhadra system is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-type_main-sequence_star" target="_blank">K-type orange dwarf</a> located in the Cinders subsector of the Tellian Sector. It has three main planets and an asteroid belt. Kangyur is a highly-geologically-active temperate agri-world orbiting around 0.77 AU from Bhadra, while Kailasa is a geologically-dead colder hive world located 2.2 AU from the star. Bhadra Tertius is an uninhabited gas giant located outside of the asteroid belt.</span></p><p><span>Bhadra is a former Varosi system that was pacified in late M38 by the Imperial Fleet. At the end of pacification, the entire population of Kangyur and the system's central government was removed through the use of atomic bombardment, while Kailasa's government was replaced with Imperial collaborators drawn from collaborators amongst the traditional elites.</span></p><p><span>An Explorator Fleet was sent to investigate the post-atomic state of the world, and discovered the dranj fungus, which had flourished in the absence of human civilisation. This led to the chartering of several large corporations to fully exploit its potential, the same corporations that now rule the planet.</span></p><p><b><u>Kangyur</u></b></p>Population: 110 million (counting 3 million in orbital facilities)<br />Leader: Planetary Castellan Timon Arceaga<br />Government: Autonomous megacorporate protectorates under Imperial coordination<br />Capital: Vajra Station (orbital)<br />Stability: 80%<div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIQjW87uR3yLBbiCLxpWtox8nWp-uVg4zd-EfJh3IUrTiZUEoBnZ_FWqQJsDLBmDBOPxFizcTAvM99vzo8PuW4pV9Wp65bxD_udy1Pn7EkC_QscXmM46V4yJJqNUJ4hLEI4ozvv-srKQk-TueqHKLBlgTDNNyzMGJ6dfd4BuDccK6tz4zfJWotHhVv4m3C/s400/Kangyur.gif" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIQjW87uR3yLBbiCLxpWtox8nWp-uVg4zd-EfJh3IUrTiZUEoBnZ_FWqQJsDLBmDBOPxFizcTAvM99vzo8PuW4pV9Wp65bxD_udy1Pn7EkC_QscXmM46V4yJJqNUJ4hLEI4ozvv-srKQk-TueqHKLBlgTDNNyzMGJ6dfd4BuDccK6tz4zfJWotHhVv4m3C/w400-h400/Kangyur.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holo-Illumination of Kangyur (Bhadra Secundus)</td></tr></tbody></table><div><p>Kangyur is classified as an agri-world, but unlike most agri-worlds it produces very little food. Instead, the planet is dedicated to cultivating the dranj fungus and its promethium output. </p><p>Dranj is of unknown origin, though it is believed to be of archaeotech rootstock, perhaps mutated by radiation. In the presence of sufficient heat energy, the fungus converts carbon dioxide and salt water into large amounts of promethium (and several waste products that are easily removed during refining). After the extraction of promethium, older, less productive fungus deposits can be easily milled into a low-quality bioplastic feedstock suitable for civilian manufactures. </p><p>Dranj means that Kangyur alone produces hundreds of giga-tons of promethium per Terran year, at a lower cost than almost any other source, and can do so renewably for millennia to come, so long as water-ice comets are regularly diverted from Bhadra's Oort Cloud to replenish its oceans. This incredibly level of production is possible despite only 40% of all land area given over to it, though there is incredible pressure to expand production further into more marginal and dangerous areas.</p><p>The vast majority of dranj farms and promethium transportation infrastructure are owned by a handful of megacorporations who employ the bulk of the planetary population. Dranj farms are typically underground boreholes cut into the sides of the once-spectacular canyons and gorges that cover the planet, both to take advantage of cheap geothermal energy and to protect against the radioactive winds.</p><p><b><u>K</u></b><u style="font-weight: bold;">ey Locations</u></p><p><i><b>Dhawala:</b> </i>Kangyur's largest continent, its northern highlands are the centre of dranj production while its southern reaches are a radioactive wasteland primarily inhabited by small religious groups and ash waste nomads fleeing corporate rule.</p><p><i><b>Nyengchen:</b></i> The new gold rush is for territory in Nyengchen, Kangyur's southern continent. Previously unexploited due to geological instability and heavy radiation, the Imperial government has decided to resolve both issues by simply bombarding the landscape with comets, burying the problems under billions of tons of meteoric dirt and selling new stakes. Nyengchen's coastal settlements, home to many of the small, independent mining guilds and combines, are deeply opposed to this plan, while the megacorps are engaged in a range war further inland.</p><p><i><b>Varosi Ruins:</b></i> Most of Varosi civilisation's traces have been wiped out on Kangyur, but two ruined megacities remain, one on each of the two smaller continents. The ruins sprawl for thousands of kilometres, and at their highest points are over 5km tall, even in their ruined state. Dozens of small prospecting combines brave the radiation, toxic waste, and robotic defenders in exchange for lucrative contracts from the Adeptus Mechanicus, hoping to strike it rich by returning with still intact Varosi artifacts.</p><p><i><b>Vajra Station & Anchor Point:</b></i> The two ends of Kangyur's space elevator. Vajra Station is the "buckle" of the Glass Belt ring-garden encircling Kangyur's orbital equator. It is a large tiered conical structure with dozens of ships docked with it on any given day, sucking millions of tons of promethium into their holds. Planetary Castellan Timon Arceaga, as well as most of the Imperial bureaucracy and the military authorities, are based here, well-off planet.</p><p>Vajra Anchor Point is the heart of the planet's promethium infrastructure and its largest settlement (30 million). Built as a sprawling concrete and metal maze, it is split into concentric circles arrayed around the glittering black pillar of the elevator. The megacorporations and their shared institutions are headquartered here, and there is a decorum that keeps the open violence of the range war out of the city. It is the only truly urban zone on the planet, and many smaller businesses who serve the needs of the megacorps are based here.</p><p><i><b>The Glass Belt:</b></i> A set of linked cylindrical glass garden-stations that encircle Kangyur's equator, the Glass Belt grows almost all food eaten on Kangyur, and as much as 0.2% of the food Kailasa's hives require. It is a smuggler's dream, allowing all sorts of shuttles and ships to dock on the other side of the planet from the prying eyes of the Imperium at Vajra Station.</p><p><b><u>Major Institutions and Personnel</u></b><br /></p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">Political:</b> The Kailasan nobility want Kangyur as their own private colony to maximize their profits, while the Administratum just wants brutal efficiency and every ounce of promethium obtained as cheaply as possible. This puts <b>Castellan Timon Arceaga</b>, representing Kailasa's rulers, House Bagh-Nam, at odds with <b>Magistrate Octavia Prex, Tithe Prefectus</b> of the Administratum. She controls the Imperial Bank of Kangyur and the tithe-inspection system, while he dominates the Corporate Parliament through his control of the Kangyur Stock Exchange which assigns their votes. <b>Arch-Warden Kelsang Rowd</b> of the Adeptus Arbites serves as the third pillar of political control, using his arbiters to brutally suppress worker uprisings whenever the underpaid and under-equipped corporate enforcer squads find themselves unequal to the task.</p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">Economic:</b> There are three main megacorps who operate autonomous protectorates under Imperial license and dominate the planetary Corporate Parliament, then a band of approximately one hundred smaller companies who supply goods and services to them and have at least one representative in the Corporate Parliament, and then roughly two thousand small combines, guilds, contractors, and other economic production groupings that lack representation and survive providing services that larger companies ignore.</p><p>The megacorps are:</p><p><b>Stilgon Mining Enterprises: </b>House Bagh-Nam's state-owned enterprise, and the largest company on the planet. It subcontracts out dranj farming in its territory to small players in order to control the transportation infrastructure for promethium and set the bench prices at Anchor Point. It has extensive holdings in Dhawala, Gangschen, and Nyengchen.</p><p><b>Ranthar Nutritional Developments:</b> A front company for the Pratik Fleet, the most powerful Rogue Trader dynasty in the Cinders. The Pratiks ship in slaves and servitors from across their vast world-holdings to farm dranj on Kangyur, and are one of the few entities in the system powerful enough to challenge House Bagh-Nam. They are the primary offenders in the corporate range war, with corporate enforcers backed by the fleet's armsmen killing and intimidating the many small players to sell out to Ranthar.</p><p><b>Yan-Mesmer Industries:</b> The two smaller noble houses on Kailasa united to form a joint-venture, and then paid an obscene sum to have the Adeptus Mechanicus grant them access to cloning vats and genetic alterations. Most of Yan-Mesmer's dranj farmers are tailored clone-types only a blood sample away from being declared abhumans, and they kept on massive plantations in the hinterlands that they are forbidden to leave. The upper ranks are all "real" humans, mostly from Kailasa, as are their enforcer squads. Yan-Mesmer operates the largest water-based navy on Kangyur to ship its promethium, attempting to avoid Stilgon Mining's pipeline charges whenever possible.</p><p>Two other notable companies are considered to be contenders for a possible fourth megacorp:</p><p><b>Amalthean Logistics:</b> The Kailasan Ecclesiarchy's attempt to stick their nose in the trough that is Kangyur. Amalthean Logistics reinvests the tithes of the faithful of Kailasa and Kangyur into "rehabilitation" facilities for those undergoing periods of "spiritual struggle". In practice, this means they run dranj farms that are vast prison camps full of Kailasan underhivers rounded up in mass exactions. Amalthean Logistics also sells its services at neuro-conditioning, hypno-control and "faith-responsive pharmacological compliance" (addicting workers to drugs to better control them) to other corps.</p><p><b>Solomar Holdings:</b> A group of chartist captains who ship promethium off-world, Solomar Holdings is also a major importer of advanced technology that Kangyur cannot build itself, both from Kailasa and elsewhere. In practice, this means the vast majority of weapons more advanced than a stubber or grenade launcher come from their holds. They have also made some investments into mercenary companies as the corporate war has heated up. It's widely believed that Solomar is angling for an Imperial license so it can establish its own bench price for promethium, instead of having to deal with Castellan Arceaga's whims. Solomar's main representative on Kangyur is <b>Factor Raskol Might.</b></p><p><i>(Solomar Holdings is a front for the Empty Synod. It's the PCs' notional employer, and Raskol Might is their patron)</i></p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">Religious:</b> Kangyur's churches are the dumping ground for the Kailasan Ecclesiarchy's unwanted. incompetent, or unlucky priests. <b>Arch-Deacon Theophilus Manutius</b> runs Amalthean Logistics and has de facto control over the religious authorities on planet, though he is more fixated on making money than saving souls. This focus has led to the flourishing of numerous radical cults in the radioactive wastes of southern Dhawala, energized by a set of prophecies that the Cardinal of Bhadra has condemned. <b>Confessor Argus Boateng</b> has been sent out to investigate rumours that abhumans, mutants, and rogue psykers are being inducted into these cults, and to stamp them out if this turns out to be true.</p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">Military: </i>The Planetary Defense Forces is a procurement scheme to divert tithes and taxes into the megacorps' corporate enforcers, of whom there are between five hundred thousand and a million at a time. Most enforcers are nothing more than Kailasan underhiver who volunteered to avoid being drafted into more unpleasant duties and handed stubbers, clubs, and helmets. These are supplemented by up to a million mercenaries, mostly outsystemers, most of whom are engaged in the corporate war or mutant suppression actions. Should the planet come under serious threat, the Kailasan 3rd Reserve Army (a professional combined arms force of 10 million) would be moved onto the planet from their bases in Hive Chuan, supplemented by at least one of the Imperial Knight houses. Vajra Station with its valuable personnel, is protected by a regiment of ten thousand chem-mamluks provided by House Bagh-Nam and a further thousand or so arbiters. </p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">Criminal:</i> <br /><br /><b>The Gasrunners:</b> The biggest smuggling outfit on Kangyur, bringing in illegal goods, rogue psykers fleeing the Black Ships, and anyone or anything else who can pay. They are considered a necessary evil by most of the megacorps, who use their services themselves to gain an advantage over their rivals. They are led by <b>Yusufa One</b>, an escapee from the penal world of Last Woe.</p><p><i>(The PCs will be a cell of the Empty Synod deployed to Kangyur with the goal of liberating it from Imperial rule).</i></p><p><b><u>Kailasa</u></b></p><p>Population: 95 billion<br />Leader: Dame Soraya of Bagh-Nam, 43rd of her name, Countess of Bhadra, Marquessa of Kailasa<br />Government: Aristocratic autocracy<br />Capital: Hive Mei<br />Stability: 85%</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggqcYaQVvz7HNvXTQ7KiAYmR1QHC1v85ew3oKaSkur2qAgn7QCfAT6pBEfFnCQYdKUUZMkVtX9_GARzjzgsspIqW7iqsbwtm7h2A1EoabEOZ_kIpAXXmUK5hp7rWcYKxc6SB6FLWS8cQVAS41SZ_-lw42QrNr00G0VzVePqWDEdumGaidUJ_h1oL4hwxgu/s400/Kailasa.gif" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggqcYaQVvz7HNvXTQ7KiAYmR1QHC1v85ew3oKaSkur2qAgn7QCfAT6pBEfFnCQYdKUUZMkVtX9_GARzjzgsspIqW7iqsbwtm7h2A1EoabEOZ_kIpAXXmUK5hp7rWcYKxc6SB6FLWS8cQVAS41SZ_-lw42QrNr00G0VzVePqWDEdumGaidUJ_h1oL4hwxgu/w400-h400/Kailasa.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holo-Illumination of Kailasa (Bhadra Tertius)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Kailasa is a hive world, one of only a few in the Cinders, and just as importantly, it was one of the few Varosi worlds captured with the majority of its industrial base intact. This has blessed it with both extensive defenses and made it a major manufacturing hub for the subsector. While the Noctis Aeterna has brought a great deal of misery to the rest of the sector and the Imperium, Kailasa has profited off the misery of others. Its chem-mamluks, knight walkers, and soldiers go out to defend the Imperium, accompanied by usurers and war-profiteers ready to sell the products of its manufactoriums and the valuable promethium of Kangyur. The unpopular but powerful rulers of Kailasa, House Bagh-Nam, are rumoured to have struck dark bargains with shadowy forces to secure the safety and prosperity of their world while the rest of the Imperium burns.</p><p>Most of Kailasa's population lives in three great hives, Mei, Chuan, and Peng, that date back to the Varosi era, and are cut deep into three sweeping mountain ranges arrayed around the planet. In between the hives, another four billion citizens live in scattered freeholds associated with Imperial knight families, and serve to produce and maintain these famous weapons of war. The Adeptus Mechanicus also maintain a single protectorate deep under Kailasa's main ocean, in a vast crystalline dome known as the "Benthic Technika" where they help maintain Kailasa's comparatively sophisticated technological base.</p><p>Kailasa was recently rocked by the discovery and purge of a widespread Nurgle cult known as the "Black Dawn" that had built up a significant following in Hives Mei and Peng. While most traces of the cult were purged, at least two knight freeholds were corrupted, and their knights and manufactories removed from the planet before House Bagh-Nam could stop them. This has catalysed houses Yan and Mesmer-Inderio, its greatest rivals, to lodge complaints with the subsector governor on Nuust, hoping that it will lead to one of them becoming the new planetary governor.</p><p><i>(Kailasa won't be the main theatre of the campaign to start but will be lurking in the background as a problem to be dealt with.)</i></p></div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-25666654808026571482024-01-09T20:07:00.001-05:002024-01-09T20:07:13.713-05:00A Quick Answer: The Statisticians of Certainty<p> A couple of comments asked about the Statisticians of Certainty that I mentioned in the previous post, and why they wanted to travel to the future. Since they won't feature directly in the current campaign, it's easy for me to answer.</p><p>A bit of background: Between 2009 and 2012, I ran a series of linked campaigns using Dark Heresy 1e, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch which were all set in the Tellian sector. The Statisticians of Certainty, a Dark Mechanicus cult focused on time travel, were one of the main antagonists of all three campaigns, along with a Nurgle cult called "The Black Dawn", a psyker named "Nebruzon" who could copy his mind into other people to create a hive mind, and a guy named "Valentine Illst" who was essentially the last surviving Man of Gold and a perpetual, endlessly revived and sent to wage terroristic guerilla war against the Imperium by a rogue AI (my one-sentence write-up of his initial idea was "The Joker but a Cylon").</p><p>The first campaign was about the Statisticians getting ahold of a transmission they called the "Navigator of Possibility" (recorded on a big crystal that was dug out of the ground on an obscure planet) that would allow them to create and open up a portal to various possible futures. They wanted to open one up to a future in which the Omnissiah had returned and the goal of total knowledge of the universe had been obtained. The Navigator was a trap, of course. It had been sent back in time from a future in which humanity ascended as a race of psychic vampires, consumed all other sentient life in the universe, and was slowly starving to death as the universe wound down. The plan? Come back in time and cannibalize the past to keep on living.</p><p>The Dark Heresy campaign started off with a missing Black Ship that had been resdiscovered, now unresponsive to hails. The PCs were sent over to board it and investigate, and long story short, one of the Statisticians had taken over the ship and had harnessed six alpha-level psykers in storage as a battery to test-fire the gate. Many explosions ensued, a few psychic vampire escaped into our universe, but things ended up more or less safe for a while.</p><p>The Rogue Trader campaign focused on the Statisticians' second go at it, when they travelled to Black Atlantis (a giant psychically-active Dyson sphere) and tried to tap into the psychic potential guy of a guy trapped in a tomb for millions of years who my notes describe as "Nyarlathotep but 40K'd" to blast open the gate, this time thinking they'd try a different possible future. The Rogue Trader came in, blew up a bunch of their apparatus, and instead the gate they opened led to a post-universe where the Big Crunch was just completing, creating a black hole that sucked their entire fleet in (the RT crew got away in the nick of time). That was essentially the end of the Statisticians - sucked forward beyond time as we know it, to become raw mass for a future universe.</p><p>The third campaign was a Deathwatch campaign that mainly dealt with their allies' reactions to losing them. Valentine Illst in the second campaign had helped the SoC build the apparatus and find Black Atlantis so they could use it. The Deathwatch campaign had them hunting him down and _not_ killing him, because so long as they didn't kill him or allow him to kill himself, he couldn't reappear somewhere else, safe and sound and ready to cause more trouble. It was OK as a campaign, but I was kind of getting sick of how the core system struggled to represent characters as powerful as space marines, and I basically had to write macros of tactics for complex villains to make sure I would be able to challenge them.</p><p>I ended up stopping playing the d100 FFG 40K RPGs at that point, though I briefly toyed with running a Black Crusade campaign whose premise would be "You rescue Valentine Illst so he can get back to causing trouble".</p><p>Anyhow, so that's their deal. I threw a mention of them into the Tellian Sector write-up mainly as a shout out to all those campaigns and the many PCs in them. Great job guys: You prevented the psychic cannibalisation of the universe from happening, and contributed to the birth of a new one!</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-15468721131535381202024-01-06T16:39:00.005-05:002024-01-20T13:57:30.096-05:00The Tellian Sector in M42<p><i>I'm launching an Imperium Maledictum campaign to try it out before I review it. Overall, doing the background work for the campaign so far, it's been pretty easy, and basically feels like a cleaned up and simplified Dark Heresy. I'm setting the new campaign in the Tellian Sector, but now updated to the 42nd millennium. This is a background document for the campaign.</i></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b><u>The Tellian Sector: Overview</u></b></span></p><p>The Tellian sector is located at the furthest reaches of human galactic civilization, out on the cusp where the old <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Astronomican" target="_blank">Astronomican</a> met the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Halo_Stars" target="_blank">Halo Stars</a>, far behind the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Eye_of_Terror" target="_blank">Eye of Terror</a>. With the division of the galaxy by the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Rift" target="_blank">Great Rift</a> at the end of <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Dating_System" target="_blank">M41</a> it is one of the darkest and loneliest sections of <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperium_Nihilus" target="_blank">Imperium Nihilus</a>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAUIDkNdhBkz8a_4WJ9ANK8-XFnhNUTZefYn18RfFurIXsOWvvc97E-WspK8Bd-bWuc22snBTiLm9MEBQXkNdaIsPrEGl4GcKzB3XG3-T4TnDVEziMOhc-ermsabBpFhFvybN7JhfoAcxoswV3IFVMWahs7vJTXUho2PNhG5OmGdpWJg5Li_p7VPg3PZ_4/s2000/Imperium%20Nihilus%20-%20Marked%20Tellian.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2000" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAUIDkNdhBkz8a_4WJ9ANK8-XFnhNUTZefYn18RfFurIXsOWvvc97E-WspK8Bd-bWuc22snBTiLm9MEBQXkNdaIsPrEGl4GcKzB3XG3-T4TnDVEziMOhc-ermsabBpFhFvybN7JhfoAcxoswV3IFVMWahs7vJTXUho2PNhG5OmGdpWJg5Li_p7VPg3PZ_4/w640-h512/Imperium%20Nihilus%20-%20Marked%20Tellian.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>The Tellian sector is a relatively new and small sector. It comprises only about a thousand settled systems under Imperial control, with all but the oldest and most developed systems dating about only to M38, about three and a half thousand years ago, and the majority of the smaller extractive colonies and agri-worlds settled within the past five hundred years. <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Explorator" target="_blank">Explorator</a> fleets from the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Adeptus_Mechanicus" target="_blank">Mechanicus</a> continue to aggressively probe for new systems, while the major hive planets export billions of workers each year to scrape out their resources.</p><p>Despite its remoteness, the Tellian sector is of great interest to the Imperium because of the relative abundance of <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Archeotech" target="_blank">archaeotechnology</a>, and though few would admit it, because of the abundance of xenotechnology that comes in through the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Cold_Trade" target="_blank">Cold Trade</a>. The Tellian sector is considered one of the best candidates to host an operational <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Standard_Template_Construct_(STC)" target="_blank">STC</a>, the holy grail of the Adeptus Mechanicus.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"><u>Subsectors</u></span></b></p><p>The Tellian Sector is broken into four major subsectors that are stacked into a cube roughly 1000 LY x 1000 LY x 1000 LY. These subsectors are:</p><p><b><span>The Globe (Rising Spinward):</span></b> A globular cluster that became the core of the Tellian sector, it was settled during the Great Crusade, nearly seven thousand years before the rest of the sector. The sector's highest levels of political and military authority emanate from it, along with power and wealth amongst the nobility. The most notable locations include the sector capital, <b>Tellian Secundus</b>, as well as the ancient Dyson Sphere called <b>"Black Atlantis"</b> of unknown manufacture. Approximately 40% of all of the sector's Imperial systems are in this subsector.</p><p><span><b>The Fog (Rising Trailing):</b><span style="font-size: medium;"> N</span></span>amed after the nebular drifts found throughout this area, this section was a frontier of the Globe brought into <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Compliance" target="_blank">Imperial Compliance</a> in M38. The majority of the hundred or so <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Aeldari" target="_blank">Aeldari</a> <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Maiden_World" target="_blank">Maiden Worlds</a> remaining in the sector are concentrated here, backed by the power of <b><a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Craftworld" target="_blank">Craftworld Som-Daven</a></b>. The Imperium mostly ignores them to focus on the <b>Zul-Kan</b>, a hostile xenos empire, with the Tertius crusade fleet of the <b>Brazen Spears</b> chapter (descended from the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Templars" target="_blank">Black Templars</a>) leading the fight. The Fog is also home to the first world with extensive archaeotech ruins discovered in the sector, <b>Ildonth</b>, which has become a penal world where slaves, <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Mutants" target="_blank">rad-mutants</a>, and <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Servitor" target="_blank">servitors</a> dig amongst endless fields of mud for glimmers of a former age's wonders.</p><p><b><span>The Wisp (Sinking Spinward): </span></b>A thin smattering of ancient stars stuffed full of tombs and ruins, the Wisp was only settled between M38 and M40. Nearly 5% of the Imperial worlds here are <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Forge_World" target="_blank">Forge Worlds</a>, and nearly a third of the subsector's other worlds feed their resources solely into them. <b>Levi's Iris</b> is a vast ringworld from the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Age_of_Technology" target="_blank">Dark Age of Technology</a> built around a black hole that serves as the administrative centre for the sector's tech-priests. The <b>Dour Guard</b> <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Marines" target="_blank">space marine chapter</a> (descended from the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Iron_Fists" target="_blank">Iron Fist</a>s), the second of only two chapters operating in the entire sector, stand by at <b>The Glare of Sebastus</b> <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Fortress-Monastery" target="_blank">fortress-world</a>.</p><p><span><b>The Cinders (Sinking Trailing):</b></span> The trailing spinward sector. It is full of renegades, heretical cults, <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Heretek" target="_blank">hereteks</a>, <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Psyker" target="_blank">psychic cabals</a>, prospectors, infractionists, xenophiles, twist-lovers, <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Rogue_Traders" target="_blank">Rogue Traders</a>, profiteers, <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Silica_Animus" target="_blank">abominable intelligences</a>, malign xenos, and other scum. Only about half of the 120 known worlds in this subsector are in the possession of the Imperium, and most were brought in during M41. Notable locations include the <b>Yellow City</b>, a vast stellar gantry run as a freeport for xenos and humans alike by mutants; <b>Bhadra</b>, where a recently discovered archaeotech fungus allows a single agri-world to produce 7% of the entire sector's <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Promethium" target="_blank">promethium</a> supply; and <b>Qurmizi</b>, a system lost entirely to the forces of the <b>Black Dawn</b> chaos cult.</p><p><i>(The Cinders is where our campaign will be set)</i></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b><u>Touchpoints of History</u></b></span></p><p><b>The Silver Banner Asuras:</b> A group of <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Silica_Animus" target="_blank">abominable intelligences</a> wiped out by the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Raven_Guard" target="_blank">Raven Guard space marine legion</a> during M30 at the <b>Battle of the Hollow Mind</b> where their Matryoshka Cog-Moon was destroyed. Known for harvesting humanity and other species' neural mass to provide themselves with processing power and using the bodies as <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Servitor" target="_blank">war-servitors</a>. Many ancient <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Hulk" target="_blank">space hulks</a> are the results of their work.</p><p><b>The World Rush:</b> The period between M38 and early M41 when most of the modern Tellian sector was conquered and colonized. This was driven by the discovery of the ruins of an ancient plasma reactor on the world of Ildonth that showed signs of being a first-generation STC product. In the course of three thousand years, nearly seven hundred worlds were brought into the Imperium, though most only became simple extractive colonies, research bases, or industrial worlds. Though a STC has never been discovered, a great deal of other archaeotech fragments have been, as have several <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Knight_Worlds" target="_blank">Knight Worlds</a>. </p><p><b>The Zul-Kan Crusades:</b> The Zul-Kan are a xenos race resembling a cross between owls and octopuses who control dozens of worlds at the border of the Tellian sector. Masters of gravitational manipulation, they appear able to hide many of their worlds from direct observation, and their home world has never been identified. Since late M38, the Imperium has been engaged in a series of inconclusive wars to find and eliminate their planetary holdings. Since <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Noctis_Aeterna" target="_blank">the failure of the Astronomican</a>, the latest crusade has been foundering and the Zul-Kan have taken the strategic initiative.</p><p><b>The Varosi Empire: </b>The Varosi were a rare survival from the Dark Age of Technology, forming a powerful human empire that was only brought into <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Compliance" target="_blank">Imperial Compliance</a> in M38. Much of the empire's former territory was incorporated into the Cinders and Wisp subsectors, and the root populations of these regions, including the nobility, are mostly converted Varosi.</p><p><b>The Cardinals' War: </b>The most significant religious conflict in the Tellian sector, this civil war between factions of the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Adeptus_Ministorum" target="_blank">Ecclesiarchy</a> was notionally about whether the Emperor had ever shed a tear without conscious intent, and practically about the supremacy of two cardinals for control of the sector's faithful and tithes. The conflict saw at more than a hundred minor sects declared heretical or schismatic across M40, but many escaped being purged and fled to the Cinders and beyond. Since the Noctis Aeterna and the weakening of the Imperium, many of these sectarians have been seeing explosive growth and are preparing to overthrow and replace the current Ecclesiarchy. </p><p><b>The Mzod Purges:</b> Originally declared a sub-sentient species of jellyfish-analogues, the Mzod are found on almost every world in the sector with large amounts of water. In mid-M40, they were discovered to be not only sentient, but powerful psykers and <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Genetor" target="_blank">genetors</a>. This led several planetary governors to try to eliminate them, but the Mzod released hidden caches of <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Orks" target="_blank">Ork spores</a> that quickly led to the planets being overrun by rampaging hordes. The Mzod are still hunted by the authorities, but much more carefully, and their "strandtech" biotools are perhaps the most common kind of xenostech circulating through the sector.</p><p><b>The Statisticians of Certainty:</b> A heretical sect of the Mechanicus who delved into temporal technology in mid-M41. They sought to travel to the future and return with advanced knowledge. They were discovered and destroyed by the Inquisition while operating in the Halo Stars just beyond the edge of the sector, but much of their forbidden knowledge is believed to remain scattered throughout datavaults in the Tellian sector. Many of the hereteks in the Wisp and Cinders derive from small remnants who escaped the purge. </p><p><b>The Great Rift:</b> The massive chaos rift opened twenty years ago and Imperial control of the sector has been in decline since. While the Astronomican was always dim and faded in the Tellian sector due to its position, its complete absence has led to a resurgence of the enemies of the Imperium. Through heroic efforts, the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Adeptus_Administratum" target="_blank">Administratum</a> managed to prevent more than two dozen worlds from apocalyptic collapses from disruptions to vital trade. After about a decade of chaos, contact has recently been restored with the rest of the Imperium and word has come to the authorities of an <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Indomitus_Crusade" target="_blank">"Indomitus Crusade"</a> that is being launched to reconnect the lost sectors back to <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Terra" target="_blank">Holy Terra</a>. </p><p><b>The Empty Synod:</b> Only recently identified by the Inquisition, the newest threat to the soon-to-be-resurgent Imperium is the "Empty Synod" or "Conventus Vanitas", a group of political malcontents, religious radicals, progress cult hereteks, psyker and mutant liberationists, and xenophiles who are infiltrating worlds and undermining Imperial control. High level reports claim that they are secretly run or supported by abominable intelligences, rogue psykers, and xenos of unknown origins, though it is unclear if the group is a Chaos cult or something even more nefarious at this point. The leadership of the group is believed to be based on a fleet hiding somewhere in the void between the stars in the Cinders. The Inquisition has formed a working group, the Ordo Vanitas, to stamp them out.</p><p><i>(The PCs are members of the Empty Synod)</i></p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-87939119632469449792023-12-08T13:21:00.004-05:002023-12-08T13:21:43.200-05:0040,000 Sectors: A Generator<p>I got Imperium Maledictum, the new Warhammer 40K RPG the other day. It looks good overall, I'll be writing a longer and more detailed review shortly. As part of my campaign prep for an upcoming test of the system, I decided to relaunch the <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-tellian-sector-returns.html" target="_blank">Tellian Sector</a>. To make it bigger, and represent the changes as 40K moves into the 42nd millennium and the <a href="https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Era_Indomitus" target="_blank">"Indomitus Era"</a>, I decided I would make an automatic sector generator. </p><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15GEAWydjJwXyNUl5OrA6dRUg22tivj5y/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=114903644882231386603&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank">Here it is, free to the public, as an Excel spreadsheet you can use yourself.</a></p><p>This is based off a heavily modded and "40K-ified" version of the Stars Without Number 1e planet generator. If you know fairly basic Excel (how the INDEX and RANDBETWEEN formulas work, specifically), you can mod it fairly extensively if you don't like the probability ranges I've assigned to various categories. </p><p><b>To get started:</b></p><p>1) Create a new worksheet and copy / paste the values only from columns L through X from the generator template worksheet to that new worksheet. </p><p>2) You'll want to insert two columns at the left-hand side and copy over the counters from columns J and K on the generator template worksheet so you can keep track of the rate of incidence of each item in each category. Be sure to make this a regular paste (not values-only) so it preserves the counter formulas in K</p><p>If you delete it, the counter formula is: =COUNTIF($[column letter]$[number of first row of column]:$[column letter]$[last row of column], [column letter and row number of the entry you want it to track). </p><p>e.g. =COUNTIF($F$1:$F$121, A2) tells Excel to count everything in column F between rows 1 and 121 that matches the value in A2 (which in this table is the word "Agri-World")</p><p><b>Expanding it:</b></p><p>All you need to do is select the bottom row of columns L through X on the generator template and drag them down until you have as many planets as you want. Nice and easy! It's Excel, so I recommend not doing more than about 10,000 at a time unless you've got a top of the line machine. Also, it's easier to handle certain later processes if you do smaller batches at once, so consider making each worksheet a subsector and then generating however many subsectors you want.</p><p>If you screw up the formula for any reason and need to rewrite it, all of the columns are basically filled with:</p><p>=INDEX($B$2:$B$101, RANDBETWEEN(1,100),0)</p><p>Where B2 and B101 are the 100 entries to the left in column B (Planet Type), and RANDBETWEEN generates a number between 1 and 100 and then grabs a corresponding row coordinate out of column B and INDEX dumps the value in that cell, e.g. "Hive World" into the formula's own cell.</p><div><b>De-duping the tags:</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This is one of those things where working in smaller batches will keep you sane. Writing a formula to de-dupe rows across three columns is kind of a pain, so you'll need to manually dedupe if any of the Notable Features tags are duplicates on a given planet. There are 100 possible tags, so you'll rarely run into dupes in small batches.</div><p><b>Organising planets into systems:</b></p><p>1) Starting from the first cell under "System", look at the number (n) in it, and count down (n-1) squares, deleting the entries in columns C and D ("System" and "Star Type" respectively).</p><p>Here's a picture of what that looks like once you're done:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjesRDhBE063lwGhgGFmvAG0Xha_8_BPDk7K4T42QoXFtMt_mTsb6AM-RVHF4J24wq-qb2wOweMBr3ZnaSjn6TYB8Af-YyZe4EQZJE1IrjQAPtqCnQJo9956vgqwHZKR2qABihsiKM4zkCRaGd-HnXC3PcVfNMZKCWsZOnkTdAUq1vZUtrqE_7Pjl3WPaL0/s735/40K%20Sector%20Conter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="606" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjesRDhBE063lwGhgGFmvAG0Xha_8_BPDk7K4T42QoXFtMt_mTsb6AM-RVHF4J24wq-qb2wOweMBr3ZnaSjn6TYB8Af-YyZe4EQZJE1IrjQAPtqCnQJo9956vgqwHZKR2qABihsiKM4zkCRaGd-HnXC3PcVfNMZKCWsZOnkTdAUq1vZUtrqE_7Pjl3WPaL0/s320/40K%20Sector%20Conter.png" width="264" /></a></div><div><br /></div>So you can see that there's a single system with 6 in the System column and an A in the start type with five blank spaces under it. All of the planets that are blank like that are in the same system.<div><br /></div><div>The numbers in the system column are generated by running a simple formula that divides 120 by a random integer between 12 and 120. The formula is here: =120/RANDBETWEEN(12,120)</div><div><br /></div><div>120 was selected as the numerator because it's the number of planets in my sample sector and the default for this generator. Just change that to however many planets you're actually working with. My recommendation is that whatever size you're working with, the minimum value for the random integer should be set up so that no more than 10 planets per system are generated, and the maximum value so that at least 1 planet is in each system. So if you had 10,000 planets, you'd go with a minimum value of 1000, and a maximum value of 10,000.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Making sense of things:</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This is also the stage where I recommend you look at the actual entries and make any manual changes you want. I typically use the counters at the side (it's why I included them) and use a Find/Replace to alter the cell colours: orange for ones I want to reduce, green for ones I want to increase. For example, if there aren't enough Agri-Worlds, I'll identify what I do have a surplus of that I don't want (say, Penal Worlds) and turn some Penal Worlds into Agri-Worlds. So long as you don't misspell things, the counters should automatically update.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Naming things:</b></div><div><br /></div><div>You'll want to delete the remaining numbers in the System column (column C), and start punching in names. I have not created an automatic name generator here because it would be convoluted and I've never really needed one myself. Once you have the systems named, go through and name each individual planet, station, etc. in column E</div><div><p>That's basically it.</p><p><b>Summary:</b></p><p>1) Open the sheet, and copy it</p><p>2) Copy and paste the values from columns L through X. Once you've done that, delete columns A through I.</p><p>3) De-dupe the tags manually.</p><p>4) Break the planets up into systems</p><p>5) Name the systems and planets</p><p>6) Fiddle with entries until you're happy</p><p>7) Remember to save your work!</p><p><b>A few notes on the Tellian Sector and this generator:</b></p><p>I intentionally left a lot of the tags more generic rather than less so you can mod them to your own taste. Some of the tags and such also represent my own interests in the 40K setting, and I encourage you to change them if you want something different.. </p><p>There's a lot of Xenos and Hereteks, comparatively low levels of Chaos, and no Necrons, Orks, Eldar, or Space Marines explicitly mentioned. I have small amounts of Eldar and Space Marines in the Tellian sector, but they're custom-placed by me rather than something I leave to a random generator.</p><p>There's also a fairly high chance of people having archaeotech levels of technology, and a lot of xeno collaborators because these are what make the Tellian sector an area of interest to the Imperium (for good or for ill).</p><p>Anyhow, enjoy! I don't care about copyright, credit, any of that stuff, so use it as you please.</p></div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-39932711272526398722023-03-08T00:31:00.002-05:002023-03-08T00:31:16.942-05:00What Have I Been Up to?<p>It's been a while since I've updated this blog, so here's a brief apology and explanation of what I've been up to instead:</p><p>I've been playing a bunch of 5e. Broad strokes, I'm in one weekly campaign, and one campaign that is going from biweekly to three-times a month. The former is Al-Qadim meets Dark Sun, the latter Dark Ages Arthuriana. I don't really love 5e as a system, and I'm skeptical of D&DOne as an improvement on it, but good groups can make even a mediocre system serve as the basis for a great campaign.</p><p>I was running a Pathfinder 2e campaign, but a leak in my upstairs neighbours' apartment damaged the computer I had everything written out on, so it's on hold until I can get it fixed. Unfortunately, the money that I would normally have to do so went to paying out of pocket for veterinary care for two of my cats, one of whom has cancer. The other one is fine, but was stressed out - possibly by her lifelong friend having cancer. It cost me CAD 1,200 per cat to sort this out. This all came right before Christmas and the time of year I have to renew everything from my license to car insurance to my healthcard, which meant I'm tapped out until April.</p><p>Pathfinder 2e is great, and very fun to run as a referee, but just complicated enough that when you lose all of your notes for it, it's a non-trivial cost to replace them. I have them backed up in the cloud, but a key encounter planning tool has a computer-specific cookie it uses in place of a login, and until I can get the computer fixed, it's inaccessible. </p><p>I will be running a game shortly. For the Arthuriana 5e campaign, we are doing character preludes where PCs take turns running sessions for the other players covering off one another's backstories. It's quite fun, basically a one-shot interlude. If you've never done it, it has the interesting side-effect of making PCs invest in one another' since you've got to plan an adventure based around someone else's backstory and then run it. I'm running a hunt for a white stag set in Scotland's Cheviot Hills where an aristocrat's bastard son will save the life of his older brother, the legitimate heir, and begin his journey to becoming a hero.</p><p>I also got a third cat, a now-eight-month-old kitten, a female ginger tabby (somewhat uncommon), the only survivor of her litter, who is a perfect blend of mischevious and good-natured. Her favoured class is definitely rogue, as her great delight is to run off with chopsticks, bits of paper, pieces of my wife's house plants (all cat-safe), stuffed mice, and other detritus making a sort of cackling trilling noise. She recently acquired fleas, despite being an indoor cat, and is undergoing her first course of flea killer. Here's a photo of the little trouble baby as she carouses in her pursuit of enough XP to get to level 2:</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidzDd5U6glxheSkat11_QjIb8uStQ7bAE79p1PXgMns7sCiL9BUWuz0aPH17zwa4xCCFuWGVV7R6_VD0HJp9cTA0TXe67I0TM7eX16wQtcGUJ4yswuV2olBY5C_a_UEz6cOEveMfVSHDoG8cfGlcdJoLq2fxC64wzzKGIrsgn6LT5LlQym3xL32-o5Jg/s2048/327964309_1529075434170491_8540419215802347839_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidzDd5U6glxheSkat11_QjIb8uStQ7bAE79p1PXgMns7sCiL9BUWuz0aPH17zwa4xCCFuWGVV7R6_VD0HJp9cTA0TXe67I0TM7eX16wQtcGUJ4yswuV2olBY5C_a_UEz6cOEveMfVSHDoG8cfGlcdJoLq2fxC64wzzKGIrsgn6LT5LlQym3xL32-o5Jg/w300-h400/327964309_1529075434170491_8540419215802347839_n.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ancestry: Goblin; Class: Rogue; Alignment: Chaotic Neutral</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>My upstairs neighbours (of the aforementioned leak) are also interested in playing "Dungeons and Dragons" at some point. I gave one of them my copy of Blades in the Dark to read over because I think it might be their speed, after my initial proposal to play <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/388252/Quantum-Starfarer" target="_blank">Quantum Starfarer</a> (an ultra-light version of Cepheus) was turned down. They're more interested in fantasy than in science fiction. They've never tried RPGs before, so I'm going to run an introductory game for them and their friends at some point this year. More on that when it happens.<div><div><br /></div><div>Lastly, I'm changing jobs. I've been extremely busy with work over the past year, which is one of the major reasons I haven't been blogging. I'm hoping the new job comes with an improved work-life balance which will allow me to blog more this year.</div><div><p><br /></p></div></div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-39191140836618466602022-06-05T21:17:00.002-04:002022-06-05T21:17:17.538-04:00Types of Terrain on Hex Maps<p>Someone on the OSR Discord server asked me to write this up in a blog post, so I thought I would talk a little bit about terrain for hex maps.</p><p>When I am creating hex maps for overland travel, I typically use 6-8 types of terrain so that I can assign them to a randomizer and have the PCs roll whenever I'm not sure what a given terrain type will be if I don't already know. The eight main types of terrain I use are:<br /></p><p><b>1) Blight </b><br /><b>2) Desert </b><br /><b>3) Forest </b><br /><b>4) Hills</b><br /><b>5) Mountains</b><br /><b>6) Plains</b><br /><b>7) Water</b><br /><b>8) Wetland</b></p><p>I sort the terrain into three categories based on ease of traversing it:</p><p><b>Easy:</b> Blight, Desert, Plains, Water (with watercraft)<br /><b>Difficult:</b> Forest, Hills, Wetland<br /><b>Impassable:</b> Mountains, Water (without watercraft)</p><p><b>Easy</b> terrain allows PCs to move through it at their normal movement (10km per 4 hrs of travel per the <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-procedure-for-exploring-wilderness.html" target="_blank">Procedure for Exploring the Wilderness Redux</a>). While following a path in easy terrain, you cannot get lost.</p><p><b>Difficult</b> terrain has PCs move through at 1/2 the normal rate (two travel actions must be taken to cross it). Paths across difficult terrain double your movement: It costs one travel action to move across the hex).</p><p><b>Impassable</b> terrain cannot be traversed unless the PCs <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2017/04/generating-paths-in-hexes.html" target="_blank">find a path across it</a>, and they can only traverse it in the direction the path does. Paths across water can represent significant shallows or fords or small island chains close enough to swim from island to island.</p><p>Within these terrain types, I aim for a certain level of variation based on what makes sense for a given area. In a setting based on Scandinavia (all the rage right now), a desert will be an alvar pavement, a forest will be mostly coniferous, and wetlands will be bogs. In a setting based on Nigeria, wetlands will be flood forests, a forest will be an acacia / peacock flower / long grass mosaic, and hills will be a classic West African highland rise. I don't bother to mechanise this fine a set of details.</p><p>I find this tends to incentivise looking for paths, especially when PCs want to cross formidable natural barriers like mountains or lakes.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-23804479680670075162022-02-20T00:14:00.001-05:002022-02-20T00:14:24.512-05:00Some Gnoll Opponents for PF 2e<p>The island of Ursino (not-Corsica) on Verra has a bunch of gnolls. The gnolls are cursed mercenaries who were brought in as exiles from the Temmeno Empire (the not-Ethiopian Empire) over a generation ago by the Banco di Asmodeo to exert the banks control over the island and beat back swarms of the undead. A few missed payments, broken promises, and angry contractual negotiations later, and they're now organised into roving bands threatening the inhabitants of Ursino and are looking for a way off the island to go back home. </p><p>These gnolls are sort of based off of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buda_(folklore)" target="_blank">buda</a> spirit from Ethiopia, tho' only very loosely, and with any anti-semitic elements totally scrubbed. Buda accusations IRL can be used for anti-semitic purposes, but are used more widely to handle breakdowns in social relations. For more see Hagar Solomon's book <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520219014/the-hyena-people" target="_blank">The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia</a>, Tom Boylston's <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/abs/from-sickness-to-history-evil-spirits-memory-and-responsibility-in-an-ethiopian-market-village/1BFFDE7E296208D5A9B75C492BC88758" target="_blank">"From sickness to history: evil spirits, memory and responsibility in an Ethiopian market village"</a>, and <a href="https://www.luminosoa.org/site/chapters/10.1525/luminos.44.f/download/1208/" target="_blank">this book chapter about a recent contemporary buda crisis</a>. The part that particularly interests me about budas is their use to express the anxieties of subsistence farmers about integration into the market economy, which is very on-theme with Verra's focus on the 17th century emergence of global capitalism in a fantasy context.</p><p>So these gnolls are bad people who have practiced cannibalism and been cursed by the Hidden God to take hyena features for it, one of a larger class of beast peoples originating in this way. They reproduce by spreading the curse - making other people eat dead bodies so that they in turn become gnolls. Ultimately, their goal is not to wipe out the inhabitants of the island or whatever, but to get a few ships and either the crews to operate them or knowledge of how to sail them themselves, and then to go home (where, truthfully, they will be no more welcome; the Temmeno don't want cursed cannibal mercenaries they've already exiled coming back)</p><p>There are three gnolls in Pathfinder 2e as it exists: one level 2, one level 3, and one level 4. I wanted PCs to be able to fight gnolls right from the start of the game, so I created a bunch of -1, 0, and 1 level gnolls, which will be especially helpful once the PCs hit levels 2-4 and I can send big hordes of the low level ones after them. I created these gnolls using the <a href="http://monster.pf2.tools/" target="_blank">PF Tools Monster Builder</a>, and I think there are a few typos where I forgot to change gear or names on powers, but the numbers should all be right.</p><p>So with that long introduction, here are some low level gnoll opponents for you to use.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj7agDbHapSocSX1hqTrh002fLYTHOqznjMpZWtDgDRiwc5cCX0KG-pYuxclk8Uf7VetAclmPXE8YPKC0bNlstqErmagm2js-fPS9lzxAe9gI5tBaZBS3EVd8CLOZzVDpwD8pb668I8kVx2NUq6SEISosaiyvVmxRKP21XSlnwvrB8F5YOf7ky5CvOiJA=s889" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="721" data-original-width="889" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj7agDbHapSocSX1hqTrh002fLYTHOqznjMpZWtDgDRiwc5cCX0KG-pYuxclk8Uf7VetAclmPXE8YPKC0bNlstqErmagm2js-fPS9lzxAe9gI5tBaZBS3EVd8CLOZzVDpwD8pb668I8kVx2NUq6SEISosaiyvVmxRKP21XSlnwvrB8F5YOf7ky5CvOiJA=w640-h520" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjJv0_sdJ7OegdxCR9d66qupicvoXDoc_eqPIvaRbAR4Grz_fRx-E3Xh4vG9MY8CxXUrTUbBojYlppi-kqbwSuI32EFckojk92pq6nyAfKFC2aHlGfPzlGOijEeofHei2X1u54JMQzp6Q9cAILDvB71J3zNJP6YzlN0YVXnD81udEpHjKYhdX3zUnq8A=s889" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="547" data-original-width="889" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjJv0_sdJ7OegdxCR9d66qupicvoXDoc_eqPIvaRbAR4Grz_fRx-E3Xh4vG9MY8CxXUrTUbBojYlppi-kqbwSuI32EFckojk92pq6nyAfKFC2aHlGfPzlGOijEeofHei2X1u54JMQzp6Q9cAILDvB71J3zNJP6YzlN0YVXnD81udEpHjKYhdX3zUnq8A=w640-h394" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgZkefMfAZru2xkoAuTrKlYUQc4MwArO2CrqphGesRhUrEZYR35-lf0iO1nmpy1tvqzvFtnYM24h1UUWbtaW_QRTHdVh5MRc03iOGC8IHSBxQK31W6fIs1vBSdOyOtjSm7p25nyT-U8bmpeXpu6GbYP6Nf1aDn9ow-X-whaVznHitrK0PSAX3e55ldoxg=s889" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="652" data-original-width="889" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgZkefMfAZru2xkoAuTrKlYUQc4MwArO2CrqphGesRhUrEZYR35-lf0iO1nmpy1tvqzvFtnYM24h1UUWbtaW_QRTHdVh5MRc03iOGC8IHSBxQK31W6fIs1vBSdOyOtjSm7p25nyT-U8bmpeXpu6GbYP6Nf1aDn9ow-X-whaVznHitrK0PSAX3e55ldoxg=w640-h470" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgEGU9sc3P5yrpcU0epLCVw7IXYmYbho8kqiheI-XpNx7h52ydyWMLeem5ilY3usC09LlvrYRXiOmqd3c1DrkywLvSpuCmKwBWlmwiFlzup2r7LcRUoDfxxBm1kYytnjrtG8_zulrSJm3cz9RhoIILztj-_sIRLT-ug_M2zk8Y0vJ1FK_6RoDfJ-pGRRw=s964" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="964" data-original-width="882" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgEGU9sc3P5yrpcU0epLCVw7IXYmYbho8kqiheI-XpNx7h52ydyWMLeem5ilY3usC09LlvrYRXiOmqd3c1DrkywLvSpuCmKwBWlmwiFlzup2r7LcRUoDfxxBm1kYytnjrtG8_zulrSJm3cz9RhoIILztj-_sIRLT-ug_M2zk8Y0vJ1FK_6RoDfJ-pGRRw=w586-h640" width="586" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgA5b3m-rj2KNrsjJbQuh7WQYzJ4uas3RuEqtab7srH47me5P0ITyl8SKeS9xmnT5litpRownQThF_IRrHm1QvdL_rKqMXDudvqkfwaV-7GFfhhdjwlX_7tWuvDPVTF07n0FlQBC57mRjnrKQOgED1QSiKGvnIex825kkGUA1ASzn-17kFbQFj_yEQVzw=s889" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="616" data-original-width="889" height="444" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgA5b3m-rj2KNrsjJbQuh7WQYzJ4uas3RuEqtab7srH47me5P0ITyl8SKeS9xmnT5litpRownQThF_IRrHm1QvdL_rKqMXDudvqkfwaV-7GFfhhdjwlX_7tWuvDPVTF07n0FlQBC57mRjnrKQOgED1QSiKGvnIex825kkGUA1ASzn-17kFbQFj_yEQVzw=w640-h444" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>Anyhow, enjoy!</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-48153355210339186472022-01-18T13:16:00.000-05:002022-01-18T13:16:01.497-05:00Openquest 3 SRD Released for Free<p> There is now a system reference document (SRD) available for Openquest 3rd edition. The SRD is free to download from <a href="https://d101games.com/product/openquest-system-resource-document/" target="_blank">this link</a>, and will eventually be hosted as a HTML document on the d101 Games website <a href="https://openquestrpg.com/2020/09/05/openquest-3rd-ogl-srd-will-be-hosted-here/" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p>I haven't had time to write an in-depth review of Openquest 3rd edition, but the changes are substantive and wide-ranging from the first two editions, and overall they are positive cointributions to the system. Openquest's 3rd edition keeps its place as one of my two favourite implementations of the Basic Roleplaying system (BRP) alongside Mythras. </p><p>Mythras appeals to the lover of crunch in me, but Openquest is an excellent, rules-light version of BRP that keeps many of the details that appeal to fans of BRP while simplifying and economising many of the rules that newcomers find fiddly. I think it's one of the best introductions to BRP that one can get. If you want a system that does not have levels, classes, or inflating HP, that makes combat feel deadly and exciting, and that sharply distinguishes between how different kinds of magic work, you might find the BRP family, and in particular Openquest, a product that appeals to you.</p><p>Along with the SRD, there is a <a href="https://d101games.com/product/the-lost-outpost-the-openquest-quickstart-rules-and-adventure/" target="_blank">free quickstart scenario</a> and rulebook that contains most of the rules (it leaves out some of the magic systems available in the main rulebook).</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-46894957544106108712021-12-27T13:35:00.004-05:002021-12-27T13:35:57.236-05:00Placing Locations in Hexes<p>Here's a simple and fast system for placing locations of interest in a single hex on a grid. I am assuming a four hour watch as the basic unit of travel movement. Hexes can be divided into six equilateral triangles, for anyone who didn't know that.</p><p>1) Number the six triangles of the hex in clockwise order starting from the top</p><p>2) Roll a d6 and a d4</p><p>3) The d6 determines which sub-triangle of the hex the location is in. The d4 determines how many hours of travel into that triangle the location is (4 is the centre).</p><p>Variant: You could use d4-1 if you prefer fewer things in the centre and more things by the edge.</p><p>That's it, that's the whole system. I find it very fast in practice, and you can use a simple notation in your key to track this that looks like:<br /><br /><b>AA:17 Haunted Castle (1:3)</b> </p><p>where "AA:17" is the hex coordinates and "1:3" is sub-triangle and hours of travel in.</p><p>When the PCs search a hex randomly, they either pick one of the six sub-triangles, or the referee can roll a d6 for which sub-triangle they search if they have no preference. I make each search take a single watch.</p><p>The speed really helps here with populating a lot of content into hexes.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-3195748382787875822021-09-01T16:51:00.002-04:002021-09-01T16:51:31.433-04:00Blogs on Tape Does the Six Cultures Essay<p><a href="https://blogsontape.paperspencils.com/" target="_blank">Blogs on Tape</a> recorded my <a href="https://blogsontape.paperspencils.com/2021/09/01/episode-106-six-cultures-of-play-by-john-b/" target="_blank">Six Cultures of Play article</a> for anyone who finds reading <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html" target="_blank">giant walls of text</a> difficult.</p><p>I've been featured three times previously on Blogs on Tape, all in 2018.</p><p><a href="https://blogsontape.paperspencils.com/2018/11/05/episode-4-tests-of-skill-and-tests-of-chance-by-john-bell/" target="_blank">Tests of Skill and Tests of Chance</a> [<a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2012/08/tests-of-skill-and-tests-of-chance.html" target="_blank">Original article</a>]<br /><a href="https://blogsontape.paperspencils.com/2018/11/11/episode-12-considerations-for-restocking-dungeons-by-john-bell/" target="_blank">Considerations on Restocking the Dungeon</a> [<a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2017/02/considerations-on-restocking-dungeons.html" target="_blank">Original article</a>]<br /><a href="https://blogsontape.paperspencils.com/2018/11/11/episode-20-layers-of-the-sandbox-by-john-bell/" target="_blank">Layers of the Sandbox</a> [<a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2015/07/layers-of-sandbox.html" target="_blank">Original article</a>]</p><p>Thanks Nick!</p><p>(Disclosure: Nick of Blogs on Tape and I are friends and have played games together off and on since 2012)</p><p>The summer has continued to be busy, especially as COVID-19 spreads rapidly through the poorest parts of the world, combining with natural disasters and political instability to create a great deal of work. I am delayed on both a response to questions and an article I hope to write at some point following up on the six cultures piece about Vampire: the Masquerade's influence on roleplaying. My apologies for the continuing delay.</p><p>At the same time, Blogger has decided it will not let me add more blogs to my sidebar (thus adding to a growing list of incapacities including my inability to comment on my own blog or anyone else's)? The backend of this blog seems to grow less and less functional over time. There are a number of interesting responses people have written to the original article on their own blogs, and I am thankful to everyone who shared it, commented, link to it, and so on, but there are two I'd like to point to in particular.</p><p><a href="https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Chiquitafajita</a> wrote an excellent three-part series using Lacanian psychoanalysis about the structure of desire in roleplaying games: <a href="https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2021/05/towards-better-critiques-of-games.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2021/06/critique-2-old-school.html" target="_blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/2021/06/critique-3-emergence-of-traditional-game.html" target="_blank">Part 3</a> It's a great use of existing academic tools for the analysis of literature (while critical of Lacan's version of psychoanalysis, I think CF is judicious in its use and doesn't rely on the most questionable propositions of the system).</p><p>Gus of All Dead Generations has also written the first three parts of a series outlining his beliefs about classic play, and how he wants to rejuvenate it. <a href="https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2021/06/classic-vs-past.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2021/07/classic-play-v-aesthetic.html" target="_blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Part 3</a>. I am looking forward to more.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-29730975771279233392021-08-04T11:41:00.001-04:002021-08-04T11:41:12.632-04:0030 yearsI picked up my first roleplaying game book in 1991, when I was eight years old. It was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, which as an eight year-old, I thought was some sort of complicated Ninja Turtle comic / choose your own adventure (CYOA) novel crossover. My family was on what I think was March break in South Carolina, and I convinced my father to buy it for me (the main indulgence my parents gave me as a child was books). I was very surprised, upon reading it in detail, that it was in fact a game book, not a comic or CYOA novel. <div><br /></div><div>In August 1991, I went to a flea market at the school across the street from my childhood home, and found my first set of polyhedral dice (now long lost), a clear orange set someone was selling off with the rest of their AD&D stuff. I bought them for $5, the entirety of my allowance at the time. Shortly after acquiring dice, I began running my first "campaign" with my friends, a mostly incoherent collection of combat scenes involving various characters we had all created battling the Foot ninja clan. I like to think I've improved slightly in the intervening decades.</div><div><br /></div><div>Overall, it's been a good thirty years of gaming. Here's hoping for at least another thirty.</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-10490986011296526292021-06-22T23:48:00.003-04:002021-06-22T23:48:50.471-04:00A Time Tracker For You<p>I am planning to respond to the comments on the <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html" target="_blank">"Six Cultures"</a> essay, but it's been a busy few months. I work for an organization that deals with international crises and you may have heard of a few going on lately. I have also recently been vaccinated and am trying to (safely) re-establish social connections with others and enjoy the great outdoors. I've also been doing (some) wedding planning since I am getting married next year. All of this has meant analysing why Reddit was mad or whatever has been a low priority, tho' I do intend to get to it before the end of the summer.</p><p>To tide everyone over, here is a time tracker I put together for someone who will be refereeing their first game sometime in the next week or two. They are setting it in Mystara and running through the B-series of modules supplemented by the Vaults of Pandius fan material and the Gazetteers. I like helping out new dungeon masters and referees, so I'm always happy to create these sorts of things and then share them in case others might find them useful.</p><p>Each instance of this tracker covers one day's progress, breaking it down into six watches of four hours each, and then each watch into 24 turns of 10 minutes each. It's meant to be used by the <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2013/03/roles-and-tasks-for-pc-groups.html" target="_blank">timekeeper</a> role, so I wrote my personal notes on lighting durations under the day-hex, but you can swap in your own preferences, obviously. Fairly standard stuff, but I hope you find it useful.</p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NSnUu0Z70ITvJTyVh1TKDM-8aVct_AIi/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Download link</a> (jpg)</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C3GMKb1MSa8/YNKslunaO7I/AAAAAAAACPc/y2rQRC2FpSUIApIeCs_JXd7DjyfkpT13QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1166/RA%2BTime%2BTracker.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="857" data-original-width="1166" height="470" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C3GMKb1MSa8/YNKslunaO7I/AAAAAAAACPc/y2rQRC2FpSUIApIeCs_JXd7DjyfkpT13QCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h470/RA%2BTime%2BTracker.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It even has a hex on it.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-62227937438247471692021-04-06T08:00:00.004-04:002021-04-07T10:46:27.361-04:00Six Cultures of Play<p>In this post I am going to present the taxonomy of the six main play cultures as well as a few notes about their historical origins. I am doing this to help people from different play cultures both understand their own values better as well as to encourage stronger and more productive cross-cultural discussion.</p><p>There are at least six main cultures of play that have emerged over the course of the roleplaying game hobby. There may be more: my analysis is mainly restricted to English-language RPG cultures, tho' at least three of them have significant non-English presences as well. In addition to these six cultures, there's a proto-culture that existed from 1970-1976 before organisation into cultures really began. </p><p>A culture of play is a set of shared norms (goals, values, taboos, etc.), considerations, and techniques that inform a group of people who are large enough that they are not all in direct contact with one another (let's call that a "community"). These cultures of play are transmitted through a variety of media, ranging from books and adventures to individuals teaching one another to magazine articles to online streaming shows. A culture of play is broadly similar to a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_of_practice" target="_blank">"network of practice"</a> if you're familiar with that jargon. </p><p>Individuals in the hobby, having been aligned to and trained in one or more of these cultures, then develop individual styles. I want to point out that I think talking about specific games as inherently part of some culture is misleading, because games can be played in multiple different styles in line with the values of different cultures. But, many games contain text that advocates for them to be played in a way that is in line with a particular culture, or they contain elements that express the creator's adoption of a particular culture's set of values.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><b><u>The Six Cultures</u></b></h2><h3 style="text-align: left;">1) <b>Classic</b></h3><p>Classic play is oriented around the linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two "fairly". This is explicit in the AD&D 1e DMG's advice to dungeon masters, but recurs in a number of other places, perhaps most obviously in tournament modules, especially the R-series put out by the RPGA in its first three years of operation, which emphasise periodic resets between sections of the adventure to create a "fair" experience for players as they cycle around from tournament table to tournament table playing the sections.</p><p>The focus on challenge-based play means lots of overland adventure and sprawling labyrinths and it recycles the same notation to describe towns, which are also treated as sites of challenge. At some point, PCs become powerful enough to command domains, and this opens up the scope of challenges further, by allowing mass hordes to engage in wargame-style clashes. The point of playing the game in classic play is not to tell a story (tho' it's fine if you do), but rather the focus of play is coping with challenges and threats that smoothly escalate in scope and power as the PCs rise in level. The idea of longer campaigns with slow but steady progression in PC power interrupted only by the occasional death is a game play ideal for classic culture.</p><p>This comes into being sometime between 1976-1977, when Gygax shifts from his early idea that OD&D is a "non-game" into trying to stabilise the play experience. It starts with him denouncing "Dungeons and Beavers" and other deviations from his own style in the April 1976 Strategic Review, but this turns into a larger shift in TSR's publishing schedule from 1977 onwards. Specifically, they begin providing concrete play examples - sample dungeons and scenarios, including modules - and specific advice about proper play procedures and values to consumers.</p><p>This shift begins with the publication of Holmes Basic (1977) and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1977), before eventually culminating in AD&D (1977-1979) and the Mentzer-written BECMI (1983-1986) line. Judges Guild, the RPGA, Dragon Magazine, and even other publishers (e.g. Mayfair Games) get on board with this and spread Classic norms around before Gygax and Mentzer leave TSR in late 1985 / early 1986. Judges Guild loses its license to print D&D material in 1985, and the RPGA's tournaments have shifted away from classic play by about 1983. Most of the other creators at TSR have shifted to "trad" (see below) by the mid-1980s, and so the institutional support for this style starts dries up, even tho' people continue to run and play in "classic" games.</p><p>Classic is revived in the early 2000s when the holdouts who've continued to play in that style use the internet to come together on forums like <a href="https://www.dragonsfoot.org/" target="_blank">Dragonsfoot</a>, <a href="https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/index.php" target="_blank">Knights and Knaves Alehouse</a>, and others, and this revival is part of what motivates <a href="https://osricrpg.com/" target="_blank">OSRIC</a> (2006) to be released. NB: This is the only name in this essay where it's not an autonym used by the practitioners themselves, tho' Gus L. of All Dead Generations is interested in many of their ideas and does call his own style <a href="https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/p/the-classic-dungeon-crawl-theory.html" target="_blank">"Classic"</a>.</p><p>One weird quirk of history is that people who were trying to revive classic in the early 2000s are often lumped into the OSR, despite the two groups really having distinct norms and values. Some of the confusion is because a few key notable individuals (e.g. Matt Finch) actually did shift from being classic revivalists to being early founders of the OSR. Because both groups are interested in challenge-based play, even if they have different takes on challenge's meaning, there are moment of productive overlap and interaction (and also lots of silly disputes and sneering; such is life).</p><p>This intermingling of people from different play cultures who initially appear to be part of the same movement but turn out to be interested in different things is pretty common - story games and Nordic LARP go through a similar intermingling before they split off into different things (more on that in a sec).</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">2) <b>Trad</b> (short for "traditional") </h3><p>Its own adherents and advocates call it "trad", but we shouldn't think of it as the oldest way of roleplaying (it is not). Trad is not what Gary and co. did (that's "classic"), but rather is the reaction to what they were doing.</p><p>Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM's. If you ever hear people complain about (or exalt!) games that feel like going through a fantasy novel, that's trad. Trad prizes gaming that produces experiences comparable to other media, like movies, novels, television, myths, etc., and its values often encourage adapting techniques from those media.</p><p>Trad emerges in the late 1970s, with an early intellectually hub in the Dungeons and Beavers crew at Caltech, but also in Tracy and Laura Hickman's gaming circle in Utah. The defining incident for Tracy was evidently <a href="https://dnd.dragonmag.com/2019/10/23/from-the-creators-unraveling-ravenloft/content.html" target="_blank">running into a vampire in a dungeon</a> and thinking that it really needed a story to explain what it was doing down there wandering around. Hickman wrote a series of adventures in 1980 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(module)" target="_blank">the Night Verse series</a>) that tried to bring in more narrative elements, but the company that was supposed to publish them went bust. So he decided to sell them to TSR instead, and they would only buy them if he came to work for them. So in 1982, he went to work at TSR and within a few years, his ideas would spread throughout the company and become its dominant vision of "roleplaying".</p><p>Trad gets its first major publication articulating its vision of play outside of TSR in Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu (1981), which tells readers that the goal of play is to create an experience like a horror story, and provides specific advice (the "onion layer" model) for creating that. The values of trad crystallise as a major and distinct culture of play in D&D with the Ravenloft (1983) and Dragonlance (1984) modules written by Hickman. TSR published Ravenloft in response to Call of Cthulhu's critical and commercial success, and then won a fistful of awards and sold tons of copies themselves. </p><p>Within a few years, the idea of "roleplaying, not rollplaying" and the importance of a Dungeon Master creating an elaborate, emotionally-satisfying narrative had taken over. I think probably the ability to import terms and ideas from other art forms probably helped a great deal as well, since understanding trad could be done by anyone who'd gone through a few humanities classes in university.</p><p>Trad is the hegemonic culture of play from at least the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and it's still a fairly common style of play. For an example of a fairly well-thought through style of trad by someone who's been influential on the last 15 or so years, check out <a href="http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/p/an-rpg-lexicon.html" target="_blank">S. John Ross's RPG Lexicon.</a> </p><p>Both of the next two styles emerge out of problems with trad, especially the experience of playing Vampire (a tradder-than-trad game in its authors' aspirations), but the details of that are larger than this essay can contain so I'm just going to mention it and leave it for another time.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">3) <b>Nordic Larp</b></h3><p>This is again an autonym. The "Nordic" part is more about origins and mass of the player base than a true regional limitation of any sort. The "Larp" designation is part of the name for reasons that are unclear to me, even tho' its ideas started in tabletop roleplaying, and its philosophy and aspirations are realisable in tabletop games just as much as in dress-up games. (Edit: Spelling it as if it wasn't an acronym is a shibboleth of Nordic Larp, so in keeping with the autonym principle I've edited it to follow that convention when referring to the culture, but kept the activity as LARP)</p><p>Nordic Larp is built around the idea that the primary goal of a roleplaying game is immersion in an experience. Usually in a specific character's experiences, but sometimes in another kind of experience where player and character are not sharply distinguished - the experimental Jeep group often uses abstract games to affect the player directly. The more <a href="https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/" target="_blank">"bleed"</a> you can create between a player and the role they occupy within the game, the better. Nordic Larps often feature quite long "sessions" (like weekend excursions) followed by long debriefs in which one processes the experiences one had as the character.</p><p>Embedding the player's character within a larger story can be one way of producing vivid, absorbing experiences, but it's not necessary and may even interfere with pulling it off (especially when done badly). Nordic Larp players emphasise their collaborative aspects, but when you drill into this, it's a rejection of trad's idea of a single DM-auteur crafting an experience, and the collaboration is there in service of improving immersion by blending player and character agency more thoroughly.</p><p>I think LARP conjures up images of people doing fantasy cosplay, and there are sometimes elements of that in some Nordic Larps, but I actually think the trend has been away from fantastical games to scenarios and set-ups that are closer to real life since it allows the incorporation of modern architecture, technology, and other details from the real world to facilitate immersion.</p><p>Nordic Larp's first major publication that I know of is the very self-conscious <a href="http://mikepohjola.com/turku/index.html" target="_blank">Manifesto of the Turku School</a> by Mike Pohjola in 2000, and I think the early community is in dialogue with the Forge crew, tho' the two groups have very different ideals of play. By 2005 you have specific groups like <a href="http://jeepen.org/dict/" target="_blank">Jeep </a>developing these ideas, and in 2010 you get the publication of the <a href="https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Nordic_Larp_(book)" target="_blank">Nordic Larp book</a>. Nowadays there's also <a href="https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Nordic_larp" target="_blank">a wiki</a> and <a href="https://nordiclarp.org/" target="_blank">an official website</a>. </p><p>Nordic Larp is the part of roleplaying that seems to receive the most grants and funding for academic study. I'm never sure why, tho' I suspect some of it has to do with the interest in commodifying LARP ideas to create immersive entertainment experiences for tourists at mega-resorts in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Cooperation_Council" target="_blank">Gulf Cooperation Council</a> countries. I'm not going to link to any specific individuals connected to Nordic Larp who have jobs there to avoid doxing private individuals, but they exist (please don't dox anyone in the comments, either).</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">4) <b>Story Games</b></h3><p>Again, an autonym. Most people who dislike them call them stuff like "Forge games" or "post-Forge indies" after <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php" target="_blank">the Forge</a> indie RPG forums. "Indie RPGs" was a term for these at one point as well, but I don't think it was particularly distinctive or edifying, and evidently neither did the adherents to this culture since they mostly abandoned it. Here's a <a href="https://axthetable.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/the-origin-of-the-term-story-games/" target="_blank">post</a> discussing the origin of the term "story game" from Across the Table.</p><p>The Big Model is notoriously obtuse and post-Forge theory has a lot of ideas I strongly disagree with, but I think a fair characterisation of their position that doesn't use their own terminology is that the ideal play experience minimises <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance" target="_blank">ludonarrative dissonance</a>. A good game has a strong consonance between the desires of the people playing it, the rules themselves, and the dynamics of the those things interacting. Together, these things allow the people to achieve their desires, whatever they may be. <a href="http://big-model.info/wiki/Incoherence" target="_blank">"Incoherence"</a> is to be avoided as creating "zilch play" or <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18707.0" target="_blank">"brain damage"</a> as Ron Edwards once called it.</p><p>The story games crowd, to their credit, is willing to be very radical in terms of techniques towards that end - both the mechanics proper and the development of positions (story gamers often call them <a href="http://big-model.info/wiki/Creative_Agenda" target="_blank">"Creative Agendas"</a>) like "narrativism" are meant to produce consonance and avoid dissonance on as many levels as they can picture it happening.</p><p>Story games starts with Ron Edwards in 1999, when he writes <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/system_does_matter.html" target="_blank">System Does Matter</a> and sets up the Forge. By 2004 you have the <a href="http://indie-rpgs.com/_articles/glossary.html" target="_blank">Provisional Glossary</a> and <a href="http://big-model.info/" target="_blank">the Big Model</a>, and one million arguments on the internet about what is or isn't "narrativist" and how much brain damage RPGs are causing, etc. The Story games forums themselves are founded in 2006 as a successor to the Forge. For the past decade, the big cluster of story game design has tended to orient itself around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_by_the_Apocalypse" target="_blank">"Powered by the Apocalypse"</a> games patterned after or building on Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker.</p><p>BTW, if you want a great example of someone applying the cultural norms of story games to a game that was written to be played in a trad way, <a href="https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2021/02/18/the-sacrament-of-death/" target="_blank">The Sacrament of Death</a> by Eero Tuovinen describes his experiences doing just that.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">5) The <b>OSR</b> ("Old School Renaissance / Revival") </h3><p>Yes, it's this late in this chronological listing. And yes, the OSR is not "classic" play. It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition. </p><p>The OSR draws on the challenge-based gameplay from the proto-culture of D&D and combines it with an interest in PC agency, particularly in the form of decision-making. The goal is a game where PC decision-making, especially diegetic decision-making, is the driver of play. I think you can see this in a very pure form in <a href="https://www.bastionland.com/2016/01/choices-and-consequences-pick-or-push.html" target="_blank">the advice Chris McDowall gives out on his blog</a> for running Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. </p><p>An important note I will make here is to distinguish the progressive challenge-based play of the "classic" culture from the more variable challenge-based play of the OSR. The OSR mostly doesn't care about "fairness" in the context of "game balance" (Gygax did). The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players.</p><p>The OSR specifically refuses the authoritative mediation of a pre-existing rules structure in order to encourage diegetic interactions using what S. John Ross would call <a href="http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/05/deadly-goobers-hollow-points-another.html" target="_blank">"ephemeral resources"</a> and <a href="https://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-invisible-rulebooks.html" target="_blank">"invisible rulebooks"</a>, and that the OSR calls <a href="https://d66kobolds.blogspot.com/2021/03/play-worlds-not-rules-design-challenge.html" target="_blank">"playing the world"</a> and <a href="https://friendorfoe.com/d/Old%20School%20Primer.pdf" target="_blank">"player skill"</a>, respectively. Basically, by not being bound by the rules, you can play with a wider space of resources that contribute to framing differences in PC agency in potentially very precise and finely graded ways, and this allows you to throw a wider variety of challenges at players for them to overcome. I could write an entire post on just what random tables are meant to do, but they tie into the variance in agency and introduce surprise and unpredictability, ensuring that agency does vary over time.</p><p>I tend to date the start of the OSR from shortly after the publication of <a href="https://osricrpg.com/" target="_blank">OSRIC</a> (2006), which blew open the ability to use the OGL to republish the mechanics of old, pre-3.x D&D. With this new option, you had people who mainly wanted to revive AD&D 1e as a living game, and people who wanted to use old rule-sets as a springboard for their own creations. 2007 brought <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/64332/Labyrinth-Lord-Revised-Edition" target="_blank">Labyrinth Lord</a>, and the avalanche followed thereafter. The early OSR had <a href="http://grognardia.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Grognardia</a> to provide it with a reconstructed vision of the past to position itself as the inheritors of, it had distinct intellectual developments like <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/dungeon-layout-map-flow-and-old-school-game-design.168563/" target="_blank">"Melan diagrams"</a> of dungeons and Chris Kutalik's <a href="http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html" target="_blank">pointcrawls</a>, and I would say it spent the time between 2006 and roughly 2012 forming its norms into a relatively self-consistent body of ideas about proper play.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">6) <b>OC / Neo-trad</b></h3><p>This is the only one of the terms that isn't fully an autonym, tho' "OC" can be appended to a "looking for game" post online to recruit people from this culture consistently, so it's closer. I also call it "neo-trad", firstly because the OC RPG culture shares a lot of the same norms as trad, secondly because I think people who belong to this culture believe they are part of trad. You also see this style sometimes called "the modern style" when being contrasted to the OSR. <a href="https://imbrattabit.wordpress.com/2019/12/09/what-does-it-take-to-be-a-neotrad-role-playing-game/" target="_blank">Here's an example of someone who calls it "neo-trad" elaborating a very pure vision of the style</a> (tho' I disagree with the list of games provided as examples of neo-trad at the end of the article). On Reddit, "OC" is often called "modern" as in "the modern way to play" or "modern games".</p><p>OC basically agrees with trad that the goal of the game is to tell a story, but it deprioritises the authority of the DM as the creator of that story and elevates the players' roles as contributors and creators. The DM becomes a curator and facilitator who primarily works with material derived from other sources - publishers and players, in practice. OC culture has a different sense of what a "story" is, one that focuses on player aspirations and interests and their realisation as the best way to produce "fun" for the players.</p><p>This focus on realising player aspirations is what allows both the Wizard 20 casting Meteor Swarm to annihilate a foe and the people who are using D&D 5e to play out running their own restaurant to be part of a shared culture of play. This culture is sometimes pejoratively called the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/b5qdi0/the_tyranny_of_fun/" target="_blank">"Tyranny of Fun"</a> (a term coined in the OSR) because of its focus on relatively rapid gratification compared to other styles.</p><p>The term "OC" means "original character" and comes from online freeform fandom roleplaying that was popular on Livejournal and similar platforms back in the early 2000s. "OC" is when you bring an original character into a roleplaying game set in the Harry Potter universe, rather than playing as Harold the Cop himself. Despite being "freeform" (meaning no die rolls and no Dungeon Master) these games often had extensive rulesets around the kinds of statements one could introduce to play, with players appealing to the ruleset itself against one another to settle disputes. For the younger generations of roleplayers, these kinds of games were often their introduction to the hobby. </p><p>I think OC RPG emerges during the 3.x era (2000-2008), probably with the growth of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Greyhawk" target="_blank">Living Greyhawk Core Adventures</a> and the apparatus of "organised play" and online play with strangers more generally. Organised play ended up diminishing the power of the DM to shift authority onto rules texts, publishers, administrators, and really, to players. Since DMs may change from adventure to adventure but player characters endure, they become more important, with standard rules texts providing compatibility between game. DM discretion and invention become things that interfere with this intercompatibility, and thus depreciated. This is where the emphases on "RAW" and using only official material (but also the idea that if it's published it must be available at the table) come from - it undermines DM power and places that power in the hands of the PCs.</p><p>These norms were reinforced and spread by <a href="http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=h4t8tjktvj6abbev8ipav61bj0&" target="_blank">"character optimization"</a> forums that relied solely on text and rhetorically deprecated "DM fiat", and by official character builders in D&D and other games. Modules, which importantly limit the DM's discretion to provide a consistent set of conditions for players, are another important textual support for this style. OC styles are also particularly popular with online streaming games like <a href="https://critrole.com/" target="_blank">Critical Role</a> since when done well they produce games that are fairly easy to watch as television shows. The characters in the stream become aspirational figures that a fanbase develops <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction" target="_blank">parasocial relationships</a> with and cheers on as they realise their "arcs".</p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><b><u>No Quizzes, No Buckets</u></b></h2><p>When I first presented these on a forum, someone joked that I ought to create a quiz for people to determine which culture they belonged to, but I'd rather not. Truthfully, I think most individual gamers and groups are a blend of cultures, with that blend realised as an individual style. The play cultures are more like paradigms - they cohere at the level of value and reflection on what "excellent play" could mean (put more formally, they share <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telos" target="_blank">teloi</a> of play). To be a part of a play culture is in some sense the capacity to recognise when someone else is playing in accord with a set of values you share with them.</p><p>My main purpose in the above taxonomy is to help people better understand that there are distinct paradigms of play that esteem different things, tho' they can be sutured together (with all sorts of fun results) in concrete situations. I doubt this list is exhaustive, and there are probably cultures I've left out as well as ones that are yet to emerge. The purpose of the list is mainly to briefly illustrate that there are many different values of play, and to discuss the logic animating some of the more well-known ones.</p><p>The original purpose of this essay was to talk about OC roleplaying, since I think it's the least well-characterised out in the wild, and most characterisations are relatively pejorative (see the above "tyranny of fun"). There also tends to be a lot of confusion between people working within the paradigm of OC and trad, since they often use the same terms to refer to very different things. </p><p>Also, without wanting to be a jerk, OC roleplaying tends to be the default paradigm of new players coming to the hobby through streaming, and thus has the largest group of people who are low-skill and ignorant of the history of roleplaying. I'm hopeful that articulating their values and relation to the larger hobby will encourage them to develop OC roleplaying culture in interesting and robust ways, while also steering them away from arrogance about the universality of their vision.</p><p>I am hopeful that the above taxonomy will help people to apprehend and navigate the differences between cultures and styles rather than constantly running into dead-ends as it turns out that the baseline assumptions about play that one is working from simply aren't shared with one's interlocutor(s).</p><p>I unfortunately can't respond to comments on the blog directly, so if people leave comments or questions about the above taxonomy, I will collect them up and respond in a blog post.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-89055388767960638942021-03-19T08:00:00.003-04:002021-03-19T08:00:00.532-04:00[Revew] Downcrawl and Skycrawl<p>I picked up <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/278571/Downcrawl" target="_blank">Downcrawl</a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/328583/Skycrawl" target="_blank">Skycrawl</a>, both by Aaron A. Reed. My overall evaluation of both is quite positive, tho' I expected not to like them when I first ran across their descriptions. A key source that gave me enough information to decide to buy them was <a href="http://downcrawl.textories.com/" target="_blank">this extract of the core Downcrawl mechanics</a> that Reed makes freely available. I suggest you go read it to make up your own mind.</p><p>Downcrawl is 59 pages long, and contains rules for generating and administering an Underdark campaign built on point-crawl principles. The PCs move in abstracted journeys between "volumes" (collections of related sites) with tools for both generating complications and encounters on journeys, and for generating volumes, sites of interest within them, and their inhabitants.</p><p>Skycrawl is 75 pages long and uses the same basic system with a few tweaks and adaptations to generate and administer a campaign set in an endless expanse of aetheric-sky pocked with small floating islands. The islands serve the same role as "volumes" do in Downcrawl, tho' there is an additional mechanic to represent the islands moving around over time.</p><p>The journey system in each involves accumulating a resource known as "tack" through various activities (both abstract downtime activities and adventures) which combines with accumulated rumours (that the referee creates and hands out to players). The abstraction is such that most journeys, unless something goes very smoothly or very wrong, will produce 3-5 encounters moving between volumes or islands. The systems sit at a nice mid-point where they're not just "plan out three encounters and have them happen along the way" - PC choice matters - but they're also not so granular that you need to draw out the exact route that PCs use to get from one spot to another.</p><p>Both systems work using principles and formats taken from Powered by the Apocalypse. I'm not a great fan of the what I think is the modern format of PbtA "moves" where they are presented as self-contained boxes that begin with the conditions of their invocation, and the order to enact each procedure is either nested in another box or must be determined through careful reading. </p><p>With both PbtA games more generally, and specifically with Downcrawl and Skycrawl, I would prefer the addition of a visual element to the boxes that distinguishes top-level procedures (one that are not typically called as a consequence of another procedure) from procedures that are nested within others.</p><p>Downcrawl's moves are a little easier to parse of the two because most of the procedures for travelling are listed on separate pages from one another, or at most, a procedure and its most commonly called sub-procedure are on the same page (pgs. 10-15). Skycrawl's moves (pgs. 16-20) are a little more jumbled with several small moves hidden at the bottom of the page and referring to things that require one to flip pages to sort out. In both cases, the complexity is kept in hand well enough that some careful study will bring the relations into clear view, but for me it took reading Skycrawl's moves about three times before I started to understand firmly what move gets invoked when.</p><p>It's only a small usability detail, but it's also my most serious gripe with the book, which I think speaks more generally to how useful and well-done both books are. </p><p>The encounter procedures in both books are capable of producing highly varied results, using small nested tables built off a single roll of 3d6, with each die determining an aspect of the encounter. The tables proceed from general to more specific, more abstract to more concrete, and the examples under each result (typically four per) are a good mixture of inspiring and straightforward. </p><p>The tables are set up so that they are meant to be used during play, rather than generating random encounters ahead of time, so a referee will need to be comfortable with improvisation to make the most of them, and you'll want to note any unusual results beforehand and ensure you have suitable monsters prepared.</p><p>Each book contains a different alchemy system. In Downcrawl, you're mixing up harvested fungus to produce various drugs and potions, while Skycrawl has you gathering magical sediment that also serve as the main form of transportable wealth. Both systems seem set up to basically have one or two players who are really into them, while they can mostly be ignored by everyone else (Skycrawl says this explicitly). It's worth reviewing both systems before play and deciding what kind of magnitudes and powers you want to give these potions and drugs, since they're suggestive, much like the monsters.</p><p>I haven't had a chance to playtest either yet, but I will say that these books passed a very important pre-playtest threshold, which is that they made me want to use them in a game. I'm tempted to adapt them to Openquest (the new 3rd edition just released to backers - a review forthcoming once the first round of backer revisions and errata is incorporated into the text) and run a short Downcrawl campaign as soon as I can free up the time to do so.</p><p>Once again, I'd recommend checking out the extract above before making up your mind to purchase these. If you do like one, you'll probably like the other, so I'd recommend getting both at once.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-49173974207304025122021-03-16T19:33:00.000-04:002021-03-16T19:33:08.467-04:00Some Suggested Reading<p>I've been keeping myself busy in quarantine during 2021 by reading academic papers.</p><p>Here's a few papers about games that I've found interesting recently:<br /><br /><a href="http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/67/115" target="_blank">No One Plays Alone</a> (Bateman, 2017) about communities of player practice<br /><a href="http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_19.pdf" target="_blank">Towards a Theory of Choice Poetics</a> (Mawhorter, Mateas, Wardrip-Fruin, & Jhala, 2014)<br /><a href="https://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~carette/CAS761/Understanding%20PCG-A%20Design%20Centric%20Analysis.pdf" target="_blank">Understanding Procedural Content Generation</a> (Smith, 2014)<br /><a href="http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/13/19" target="_blank">Player Types: A Meta-Synthesis</a> (Hamari & Tuunanen)<br /><a href="https://www.kmjn.org/publications/PCG_CHI13.pdf" target="_blank">Design Metaphors for Procedural Generation in Games</a> (Khaled, Nelson, & Barr, 2013)<br /><br />And one that isn't directly about games but bears on the issue of choice:<br /><br /><a href="https://deontologistics.co/2018/02/18/ofta-cognitive-economics-and-the-functional-theory-of-stress/" target="_blank">Cognitive Economics and the Functional Theory of Stress</a> (Wolfendale, 2018)</p><p>I'm not rereading this, but it's an important, short paper about contemporary game design theory which I've talked about <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-long-narrative-anti-narrativism.html" target="_blank">elsewhere</a> that I strongly recommend if you're at all interested in designing games:</p><p><a href="https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf" target="_blank">MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research</a> (Hunicke, LeBlanc, & Zubek, 2004)</p><p>Right at the start of the year, I read this book, which I found to be excellent:<br /><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/games-9780190052089?cc=ca&lang=en&" target="_blank">Games: Art as Agency</a> by C. Thi Nguyen<br /><br />Also, check out these two videos by Nguyen that explain elements of the book and combine them with social epistemic analysis: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW0eYuxl6tc" target="_blank">Games, Public Policy, and the Pandemic</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUSLF60rPtI" target="_blank">Why Games are Good but Gamification is Terrible</a>)</p><p>I've put Brian Sutton-Smith's <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005815">The Ambiguities of Play</a> on my to-read list, since he's the guy who first coined the idea of a "play culture", a term I've used a lot over the past decade and a half, but haven't actually started it yet. It's more strictly about play than games (an important distinction!) but I'm hoping there's some good stuff in there.</p><p>In other news, I am currently in two D&D 5e games. I don't love 5e, but the groups are good. One is the same group that I'd been playing 3.x with since early 2018, just switched over to 5e. The other one is a long-running group (20 years) that I've temporarily joined.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-51667313644434944602021-03-10T18:19:00.003-05:002021-03-10T18:19:31.972-05:00Digestive Cookies and Barbie ClothesI was talking with<a href="http://dungeonantology.com" target="_blank"> Jojiro of Dungeon Antology</a> yesterday about designing dungeons for 5e, and while doing that I used the terms "digestive cookies" and "Barbie clothes" and then had to explain them. I thought I might as well share them for others to use.<div><br /></div><div><b>Digestive Cookies</b></div><div><br /></div><div>A digestive cookie outside of games is a something that looks delicious but is actually good for you. In a game, it's a small interactive element presented as a problem even tho' there is no actual risk, the purpose of which is to cultivate useful habits in low-risk situations.</div><div><br /></div><div>That sounds confusing but I think it's can be illustrated clearly with a few examples.</div><div><br /></div><div>1) An ancient mural is covered in dust that obscures its subject. The PC is tempted to clean it off and reveal what's underneath because it's a mural (PCs love murals). After they move to do so, you say something like "This will require touching it with your bare hands, are you sure?" and then after a moment's panic or so, if they still wipe it off, you reveal that there was no trick or poison or anything. </div><div><br /></div><div>2) There is a loose cat doing something adorable nearby (cats are great when you haven't prepped anything). The PCs stop and interact with the cat for a moment, and you're like "It seems hungry and dirty". The PCs debate a few options before realising the cat is not their responsibility, at which point it wanders off.</div><div><br /></div><div>3) The PCs are in a dungeon and there is a two foot wide crack in the earth giving off vapours. You ask them how they plan to cross it, and each person takes a turn describing how they get across. When one of them is going across, the notice a gleam down in the steam. If one of them is brave enough to reach down through the vapours into the crack, they can pull up a single gold piece.</div><div><br /></div><div>These are all very minor, somewhat silly examples, but they inculcate a practice of interaction with the environment and serve as minor opportunities to demonstrate bravery, a command of salience, and provide a moment of characterisation. Digestive cookies almost always appear in "empty" dungeon rooms in a Gygaxian sense, tho' they're also quite common in city adventures. They usually serve as a good opportunity to convey atmosphere at the same time as they make the environment interactive beyond a strict matrix of challenge or risk.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Barbie Clothes</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Barbie clothes are mechanically-meaningless cosmetic rewards you can give players, sometimes in the form of loot, sometimes in the form of scars or other changes. A cloak that billows in a cool way, or an eyepatch with a design etched in silver, or a beautiful but near worthless vase or a title of nobility that conveys no real power or authority or wealth are all types of Barbie clothes.</div><div><br /></div><div> Once, in a campaign, a PC got sprayed with an alien acid, and even after the wound was healed, the flesh on his chest was translucent. Another got his skin burnt off and wore a silver skin-tight nanosuit as her new flesh. That's Barbie clothes. I think they achieve their greatest effects when they are used to soften a PC failure, or when they incentivise PC action (perhaps the cloak is on a statue in the dungeon that they have to loot it from).</div><div><br /></div><div><b>5e Dungeons</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This all came up in the context of talking about 5e dungeon design, as mentioned above. I'm currently playing in two 5e games (and am shortly to join a Swords and Wizardry game as a PC to keep my old-school cred intact). Because of the centrality of combat to the pacing of 5e dungeon exploration, I think 5e dungeons need a lot more "empty" rooms where there are various kinds of environmental interactivity that don't deplete resources or force agonizing decisions. Barbie clothes and digestive cookies are two ways (of several) that I introduce that interactivity without simultaneously slowing everything down with resource attrition.</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-55958593000215160712020-12-30T14:49:00.002-05:002020-12-30T14:49:27.800-05:00Trapplications IIFive years ago, I wrote the original <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2015/02/trapplications.html">Trapplications</a> post. After years of updating it based on use, it's time to present the more streamlined version I've adopted. This version is better for stocking and restocking dungeons, while also remaining usable in play as a "wandering trap" table.<div><br /></div><div>To recap: To use this table, you roll 2d6 and 1d6 at the same time and the results determine which entry on the grid occurs. If using it during play, I roll about once per 10-minute exploration turn because it's easier to remember to do it that way. If I'm using it for stocking, I roll it once per room, and then once more per room every time I restock the dungeon, and occasionally for corridors with prominent room-like features.</div><div><br /></div><div>The big update is the categories for the 1d6. I redesigned them because these ones are easier to understand and less work to create than the old set, with a clear progression in proximity, danger, and imminence between the three options on the table, and the need to only create 3 columns of content instead of a full six.</div><div><br /></div><div>They are now:</div><div><br /></div><div><b>1 - Null</b></div><div><b>2 - Null</b></div><div><b>3 - Null</b></div><div><b>4 - Signs</b></div><div><b>5 - Danger Zone</b></div><div><b>6 - Trigger</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Null"</b> results mean nothing - no trap, no problem. These results help with stocking by ensuring that some rooms lack traps. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Signs"</b> means indirect signs of the trap's operation - corpses strewn around, poison darts littering the floor, the sound of grinding gears or whirring blades far ahead. The intent is that they can be spotted ahead of the trap being an actual danger.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Danger Zone"</b> means one or more PCs find themselves in the area of effect of a trap that has not yet activated. When stocking, it means that trap has an area of effect that one can enter into without automatically triggering the trap. If the PCs freeze in this state they'll be fine, but the challenge is to extricate themselves without triggering the trap (perhaps by dismantling or jamming it?).</div><div><br /></div><div><b>"Trigger" </b>means that a trap triggers or is about to trigger with a PC in its area of effect. When stocking, it means a trap that can't be noticed through passive observation until it's triggered (a careful search of the area might reveal it ahead of time). </div><div><br /></div><div>I tend to make the entries here the actual triggers of the traps, even tho' this will require a bit of adaptation if you're using it in play when the specific object isn't necessarily present. Reusing triggers for traps helps PCs learn what kinds of things in this dungeon are likely to be dangerous and gives them an extra chance to avoid them, while also bringing a certain conceptual coherence to the traps.<br /><br />The probability here is that 50% of rooms will have traps, and only 1 in 3 traps will immediately trigger without warning, which I think is frequent enough to be dangerous but not frequent enough to slam a halt on exploration. I recommend attaching "Trigger" results to interactable objects whenever possible<br /><br />If you feel that's too many, I'd use a d8, push "Trigger" to 8, "Danger Zone" to 7, "Signs" to 6, add a "Broken" column at 5, and leave the rest as nulls. That reduces the number of traps that are difficult to discover beforehand to 12.5%.<br /><b><br />"Broken"</b> implies a trap that's been activated and not reset, or that has broken down from age. Broken traps are a great way to telegraph that there are traps around, and create a sense of danger without actually requiring time to resolve in any detail.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's an example of this larger table:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t4Z68s2tK_k/X-zYqy0QCcI/AAAAAAAACME/HXrvZCmA0kkGss8jcv7UdhoO68i_cjQzACLcBGAsYHQ/s1365/New%2BTrap%2BTable.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="1365" height="140" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t4Z68s2tK_k/X-zYqy0QCcI/AAAAAAAACME/HXrvZCmA0kkGss8jcv7UdhoO68i_cjQzACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h140/New%2BTrap%2BTable.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Happy new year!</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-70257432031636656902020-12-14T09:00:00.001-05:002020-12-14T09:00:05.068-05:00Brief Pandemic Update<p>My offline 3.5 campaign shifted online in April and then came to an end in late August with a TPK and will be rebooting as a 5e game sometime in 2021. I've been invited to the same group's alternate 5e campaign, and will be joining sometime in January 2021. </p><p>By request of several PCs, Verra is on hold until we can launch it in person (so probably spring 2021). I am floating the idea of an online Planescape-themed Pathfinder 2e game with some people on a private Discord but am currently experiencing some difficulty writing an inspiring campaign pitch for it.</p><p>I work for an organisation that does education reform and health education in low and moderate HDI countries, so as you can imagine, the past year has been a somewhat busy time for us, exacerbated by staff burnout as they go through lockdowns and quarantines, and the bulk of my writing energy during the pandemic has been going to that situation. I am a graphomaniac (a compulsive writer) so there is some leftover energy even after that, but then socialising is almost entirely text-based at this point as well, other than the occasional video call.<br /><br />Therefore, it's been a perfect storm to keep the blog quiet - my gaming has been very minimal since August, and I haven't had much time or energy to write outside of work and the occasional email or Discord chat with friends. I wanted to make a short post to let people know that the blog is not dead, and will probably become more active in 2021 as my gaming picks up again. </p><p>I'll try to get some updates in over the holidays as well. I've been thinking a bit about how Openquest is an ideal game for running a Bloodbornesque game because the active defense and short list of possible attack moves in combat match up well to creating the sort of dynamic, mobile combat that game aims for. I think with a few tweaks to the spell system, the inclusion of guns, and a modification of the basic weapons and armour list, you could probably put together something that captured its feel very well. More on that some other time.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-17893938019224396462020-11-17T15:16:00.001-05:002020-11-17T15:16:27.445-05:00Using 2d4 for Hit Locations in BRPI haven't yet, but I'm going to experiment at some point with using 2d4 for hit locations in Mythras. It has seven results on a bell-curve, to match up with the seven hit locations of a character. I think you could use this to emphasise armouring certain parts of the body that are likely to be the target of strikes, without requiring a full suit of armour. <div><br /></div><div>I think this might work particularly well in games where you wanted a gladiatorial feel where a combatant has one armoured arm and leg, but it could also work in a campaign where characters were scavengers who needed to eke out combat with only a few scraps of armour. I also think this is probably easier for people who have trouble remembering the d20 table from Mythras to keep in their heads as well.<div><br /></div><div>For the system I'm thinking of, you'd decide at some point before a fight which side of a character is "dominant" (the right side in right-handed characters), and thus is more likely to extend towards the enemy at any given point. The other side is the "trailing" side.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then, the distribution would go:<br /><br /><b>2 - Trailing Arm<br />3 - Dominant Arm<br />4 - Head<br />5 - Chest<br />6 - Abdomen<br />7 - Dominant Leg<br />8 - Trailing Leg</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This would make wearing a helmet and cuirass (chest and abdomen-covering) particularly valuable since about 62.5% of all hits would land on one of these three locations. This would direct most strikes to the centre line of the person. The dominant side is more at risk (25% of all hits go to it - 12.5% to the arm and the same to the leg on that side) thus motivating the next heaviest armour to be placed on it. The trailing side's limbs each only have a 6.25% of being hit, representing them being both mobile and placed furthest away from the attacker. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>If anyone has experimented with this, I'd love to hear about it. Otherwise, I'm currently on hiatus from roleplaying and when I do start up again it'll be as a PC in a 5e game, so it'll probably be in 2021 at the earliest before I can test it out.</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-44142386176345004102020-09-29T12:15:00.004-04:002020-09-29T12:15:46.477-04:00Last Chance for the Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter<p>The <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/645319106/openquest-3rd-edition" target="_blank">Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter</a> is in its last 40 hours. The PDF + POD coupon level is super cheap, at around 12.85 USD at current exchange rates. If you haven't tried Openquest before, I would suggest picking it up while you get the chance (I am not being paid or otherwise compensated for this post; I don't have an "affiliate link" or something to click on; I think I mainly bring grief rather than pleasure to the creator's life; I am doing this because I like the game and want to encourage others to discover it).<br /><br />Openquest has always seemed to be criminally underrated and ignored as a game despite being one of the most mechanically straightforward versions of the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system that runs Call of Cthulhu, Mythras, Runequest and other games. It's been around for over a decade now, and I'm really amazed more traditional players disgruntled with D&D & Pathfinder's moves towards superheroism haven't converged on Openquest. </p><p>I think Openquest sits at a really sweet spot between the possibilities of "trad" and "OSR" styles of play, and I've used it for both successfully. Because of the variety of options for magic, it's considerably easier to "tune" it to run either high magic fantasy and low magic fantasy settings that diverge from D&D's baseline. The lack of exploding hit points means that even very weak enemies remain potential threats for much longer than in D&D. The focus on skills and the lack of classes means that a wider variety of character concepts are playable than in stock D&D. It's also humanocentric by default, which I tend to prefer in my fantasy games.</p><p>Anyhow, if you haven't previously checked out Openquest, I strongly recommend you do, and this <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/323276912086013429/4414238617634500410#" target="_blank">Kickstarter</a> is a good chance to do so very cheaply.</p>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-23898124502484435812020-07-24T16:08:00.002-04:002020-08-07T14:32:19.066-04:00A Brief Response to My Last ArticleSorry, for some reason my ability to comment on my own posts has been missing this past month and a half, possibly due to Blogger's new interface. I'm still sorting out the details.<div><br /></div><div>Rather than leave people hanging, I thought I'd respond using my ability to post.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pilgrim's Procession said:</div><div><div><i>Very interesting, if a bit problematic. Perhaps a little too protestant for a game set in fantasy italy. Placing legalistic religions (most notably Judaism, and ostensibly Catholicism) in league with devils and Pantheistic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) in league with demons seems a little over the top. As a protestant I'd agree that these are false philosophies, but it seems a little rude.</i></div><div><i>(I hope I haven't misunderstood you, please forgive me if I have)</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>My inspiration for these was mainly various controversies surrounding Augustinianism in Christianity, rather than to draw parallels between other religions and the positions of the devils & demons. The Augustinian focus is probably what you're picking up as Protestant here, tho' I personally am more familiar with the Catholic and secular philosophical legacy of his work than the Protestant reception.</div><div><br /></div><div>Angels are broadly <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonaventure" target="_blank">Bonaventuran</a>, a robustly mystical late Augustinianism. You can read his mystagogical work "Journey into the Mind of God" <a href="https://www.discerninghearts.com/PDF/Bonaventure%20Journey%20of%20the%20Mind%20Into%20God.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. I think you could also portray them within the normative theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, particular its mystical tradition as expressed by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia" target="_blank">Philokalia</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>The other thing I'd emphasise is that there are multiple churches in Verra following the angelic account of the Hidden God. There are equivalents of Catholic, Calvinists, and Hussites mapped out in setting as major religious factions, and all associate most strongly with the angelic hierarchy. Most of the Sufi equivalents in setting are also associated with the angelic hierarchy.</div><div><br /></div><div>The devils are inspired by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_command_theory" target="_blank">divine command theory</a>, and a very loose reading by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Dionysius_the_Areopagite" target="_blank">Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsilio_Ficino" target="_blank">Marsilio Ficino</a>, both of whom emphasise the majesty of God and His distinction from His creations. I also took a bit of inspiration from the Islamic folk tale where Shaitan's sin is to refuse God's command to bow before Adam and to insist that it is only correct to offer obedience to God. </div><div><br /></div><div>(Fun historical fact: Pseudo-Dionysius invented the word "hierarchy". Giorgio Agamben writes about how this goes from a theological to a secular concept in <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=16145" target="_blank">The Kingdom and the Glory</a>)</div><div><br /></div><div>The demons are basically a mishmash of all of the above with the neo-Platonic concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henosis" target="_blank">henosis</a> and some of the claims of libertinism made against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpocrates" target="_blank">Carpocratians</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borborites" target="_blank">Borborites</a>, and other early antinomian sects.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyhow, I hope that clears things up. My own religious upbringing is as a neo-Thomist Catholic, tho' I am an atheist currently and have been for several decades.</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-31803703876031881832020-06-30T01:39:00.002-04:002020-08-07T14:33:18.451-04:00Angels, Devils, and Demons in VerraOne of the things that will feature quite a bit in the Verra campaign are devils and demons. The sovereign of Urbino (fantastical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsica#Middle_Ages_and_early-modern_era" target="_blank">Corsica</a>), the island the campaign is starting on, is the Banco di Asmodeo (the Bank of Asmodeus), a fantasy parallel to the real <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Saint_George" target="_blank">Bank of St. George</a>. The paramount god in Verra is the Hidden God, a fantastical parallel to YHVH, so I thought it was probably worth explaining why and how demons and devils have cults of worshippers and what those worshippers think they're getting.<br /><br /><b>Angels</b><br /><div><br /></div><div>Devils and demons in Verra are basically an alter-angelology to the traditional angels. The angelic and devilish hierarchies each claim to be the true messengers and interpreters of the otherwise inscrutable will of the Hidden God, and that the other side is deeply mistaken, to the point of near-blasphemy. </div><div><br /></div><div>Angels stress the goodness of the Hidden God's will, both in Its role as the determiner of what is good and in its role as the force that actively realises that goodness in conjunction with the free will of sentient beings. While bad things might happen to people, these are part of a larger, indescribably complex, plan for realising the maximal goodness of the world. </div><div><br /></div><div>They also believe that what the Hidden God finds "good" is univocal with, or roughly equivalent in meaning to, what an ordinary speaker means by the term. So long as one faithfully believes in the Hidden God and tries to follow and realise its desires as communicated by its church (which church is a difficult question the angels refuse to answer), one is guaranteed salvation.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Devils</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Devils disagree, obviously. They believe that the power of the Hidden God is not constrained by mere mortal conceptions of "goodness". Good and evil are terms that mortals apply to try to rationalise the Hidden God's divine will-to-power, an insult to Its omnipotence and omniscience. The Hidden God is "good" insofar as it determines utterly what is good simply by willing it, without reference to fleeting mortal illusions about what that might look like. </div><div><br /></div><div>In fact, devil theologians hold that God's goodness is not necessarily comprehensible to mortals, and that what they call good are at best superficial conjunctions with a deeper, more comprehensive, and more worthy notion that exists within God's mind. The best mortals can hope for is to follow God's commands (as transmitted by the devils) whether they understand them fully or not. To obey these commands is the surest route to salvation, while refusing them is a guarantee of damnation.<br /><br />The devils see themselves as taking God's night-inscrutable desires and translating them into senses comprehensible to mortals, which they structure as laws, agreements, contracts, and other strictures which bind mortals' behaviour. Most mortals will of course fail to uphold the law that allows them even the briefest and most superficial alignment with God, and thus will be damned. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Without devilish intervention the only punishment the wicked dead receive is separation from God for eternity, but this is too abstract for most mortals to serve as an adequate incentive. So the devils take on the onerous duty of punishing them in more vivid ways that terrify them into obeying the will of God. They see the angelic hierarchy as shirking their duty to God in this respect, and are appropriately contemptuous of them for it.</div><div><br /></div><div>In addition, the devils must ensure that this system of rules is truly effectively sorting out the wicked who deserve damnation from the innocent who deserve salvation, and thus must often tempt mortals to disobey the same system that they ultimately enforce.<br /><br />Angels and devils fight one another in the spiritual realm, not in warfare but in complex theological confrontations taking place in synods called by one side or the other. While the angels win slightly more of these synods and councils than the devils do, the devils remain a significant minority party and their prerogative over the damned is unquestioned and frankly, unwanted, by the angels.</div><div><br />The devils are led by Asmodeus. His most prominent cult is the Banco di Asmodeo in the Broggian city-state of Gorga, which uses debts, contracts, wages, taxes, and other financial mechanisms to create an economic system for regulating lives. The cult believes that the organising logic of what some future philosopher will call "capitalism" is the earthly representation of the sublime nomological structure that best aligns humanoids with God's will. They are most certainly cruel, but each cult member - typically chosen from the most elite families in Gorga - knows that what they are doing is God's will, and that they will be rewarded for their service with salvation.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Demons</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Demons believe that the separation between the Hidden God and Its works is a paradoxical illusion - how could a ubiquitous being not be found equally in every object that exists? Moreover, God is omnipotent and capable of changing anything and everything at each and every moment. Therefore, everything they desire, everything they do in pursuit of those desires, must possess the Hidden God's sanction, and in fact, be a part of the Hidden God Itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>The demons assert that "good" and "evil themselves are inadequate terms for the Hidden God's will - that a being capable of anything and knowing everything must know both everything called "good" as well as everything called "evil", and clearly it must encompass the power to do both, and much more. In fact, insofar as the Hidden God encompasses all possible things within itself, it must necessarily be both good and evil. </div><div><br /></div><div>The demons are content therefore, to act on their desires, which are intense, and insatiable. If God did not want them to, It would simply sate the urges that drive them to do horrible things, or stop them from accumulating personal power, or it would never have allowed them to exist in the first place. Within this, a particularly powerful subset of demons are actively interested in seeing where the limits are on what God will allow them to do, and consider themselves explorers of possibility. </div><div><br /></div><div>While this is often as horrible as one might imagine, the most notable example of a demon and its cult in Urovia is Demogorgon. The Demogorgon cult claims that the arch-demon will transport the soul of any of its worshippers to a paradise it has built to store them upon their deaths. Thus, true believers can commit whatever blasphemies and crimes they please against the laws of God and country without consequence (and it encourages them to exercise their imaginations). So, while their cult is small and disorganised, outlawed in every place that knows of its existence, Demogorgon's followers tend to be particularly malign, committed, and willing to give their lives to advance the cult's goals, secure that they will go to paradise after death.</div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323276912086013429.post-73538035097631724612020-06-20T08:30:00.001-04:002020-06-20T08:30:05.673-04:00Orcish Genocide and the Reaction Roll<div>No mechanic can prevent people who are committed to playing orcish genocide, but I do think that one of the reasons it has remained a constant problematic possibility within D&D is the abandonment of the reaction roll</div><div><br /></div><div>The reaction roll is a useful tool that pushes many potentially violent encounters to at least start off nonviolently. Without it, experience shows that many referees, especially newer ones, will default to encounters that are automatically hostile. </div><div><br /></div><div>This automatic hostility then has to be rationalised, and the intellectual prop that is leaned on to explain it is "racial alignment", one of the stupider notions ever to occur in the game. "Racial alignment" as a concept, in turn, is shaped to serve this need and becomes ever more rigid and universal.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eventually, you end up with nonsense like "all orcs are innately evil" with some shady reasons why, mostly either racist 19th-century biological nonsense or the same thing but with "magic" in place of the actual "race science". In-game, this translate to the orcs show up, automatically attack, and get killed by the PCs without remorse over and over again. </div><div><br /></div><div>Throwing out the reheated "race science" is a good start - you can simply have some orcish polities that encourage selfish, cruel and violent behaviour and focus in on these as the source of antagonists without needing every orc everywhere to sign off on this behaviour (even within the polity itself!). This opens up some interesting and fun strategic options beyond orcish genocide. </div><div><br /></div><div>But, this change won't make much difference without some mechanical supplement. Saying "Not all orcs are bad" but still having every orc who appears in-game automatically charge in to slay the PCs just means that the PCs will nod their heads at how enlightened they are while still committing orcish genocide. This still represents an imaginative failure, but one the PCs can't really be blamed for.</div><div><br />One mechanical supplement that I think can help people break out of this rut is consistent use of the 2d6 reaction roll, or a similar kind of check of attitudes at the start of the encounter adapted to whatever system. This system should be set up (and is, in most old school versions) so that a simple failure doesn't lead to automatic hostilities (that is, there should be at least one unfriendly-but-not-trying-to-kill-you state). </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the functions of rules is to define the incidence of various possibilities. A rule or mechanic where the rest is that the vast majority of the time the enemy will not immediately charge to attack is far more useful for shaping PC behaviour and opening up possibilities beyond mass murder than simply verbally rejecting the bioessentialist fluff is. </div><div><br /></div><div>In my old Necrocarcerus campaign, the PCs at one point encountered some Inhumanoids, which are basically vat-grown cannibal soldiers who are brainwashed into serving their evil creators. Necrocarcerus parodies regular D&D tropes, so Inhumanoids basically dial-up all of the bioessentialist / evil magic nonsense about orcs to 11. </div><div><br /></div><div>But, in the sessions where the PCs were dealing with them, I just consistently rolled for reaction rolls every time the PCs encountered a group of Inhumanoids. This resulted in far more positive encounters with the Inhumanoids (thanks to some good rolls) than I would have ever planned, and more importantly, the possibility of positive encounters incentivised the PCs to adopt a strategy that didn't require them to kill more than a handful of Inhumanoids at the very start. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the PCs gave a performance to an indifferent group of Inhumanoids, who shifted to being friendly since they'd never heard music before. They kidnapped him, he gave the performance of a lifetime to distract the entire Inhumanoid guard force, and the rest of the PCs used the distraction to steal the nuclear reactor fuel they were there for.</div><div><br /></div><div>All of this was emergent, rather than planned, of course, but I think that without the reaction roll system working its magic, this adventure would have turned into a fairly typical "orcs in a hole" murder march.</div><div><br /></div><div>So in brief, while changing fluff to avoid regurgitating inane 19th-century nonsense is good, and worth doing, using mechanics like the reaction roll or similar mechanics that interrupt the automatic leap to hostility are actually just as important for getting to a kind of play that offers more options than just murder simulation.</div><div><br /></div>John Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318244888477546773noreply@blogger.com2