Making Rivers on Hex Maps

This post is so simple that it's almost cheating. In case you hadn't already thought of doing it, you can use the procedure outlined in my post on making paths through the wilderness to also generate rivers courses in hex maps. You can do this ahead of time or during play, as you prefer.

To make your rivers a little straighter, I suggest rotations of the d4 be to the second-next clockwise face that doesn't currently have a path on it (instead of just the next clockwise face, as per when you're creating paths).

I also suggest that any time you either generate something that looks absurd or that has 3+ streams flowing into a single hex, you make it a little pond or lake. Hexes adjacent to water-filled hexes count as having one stream flowing into them across the adjacent face if you're rolling for rivers. This will give you a handful of lakes and ponds of varying sizes.

I come from Canada, which has most (in the sense of a slight absolute majority) of the world's lakes,  so I always think fantasy maps don't have enough open bodies of water of significant size on them, but this is a bit of an idiosyncrasy. If you do this procedure a few times across the length of the map, you'll eventually end up with a nice hydrological basin with rivers and lakes all connected up.

Abolishing Money

I have to admit that I cringe a little whenever I see the substructure of the modern consumer economy replicated in settings where it is totally inappropriate, whether post-scarcity science fiction settings or fantasy settings that should by all rights be cash-poor economies founded on the ownership of real and movable goods. In particular, the abundance of cash, the commodity fetishism in trade systems, and the catalogue-like nature of gear lists all tend to be things that I wish it were easier to do without.

I don't blame game designers for putting these structures in, since they operate on an already-existing understanding of value, particularly cash. Getting cash is so much a part of modern existence that it can be placed into a game world as an obvious motivator for PCs to do things. This is true even in later editions of D&D, where the fungibility of cash is extended to magical items so that there is no discontinuity in the value of things. Unlike a lot of other people, I am not opposed to the purchase and sale of magical items, as I can't see a logical reason they wouldn't be absorbed into the economy, especially if they can be created in any sort of reliable way. I think that it's a natural extension of another problem, the abundance and value of cash, rather than the core of the issue itself. If you want to get rid of magical item shops, get rid of cash.

I think there are two possible ways one can go about this, at least if history and political economy are any guides. The first is a gift-based economy, the second is a debt-based economy. Neither is exclusive, either with one another or with a cash-based economy, so it you can experiment with overlapping them until you find the balance that best suits you. For the rest of the post, I'm going to discuss possible ways of using gift-based economies and debt-based economies in your games and settings.

Gift economies are oriented around the accumulation of social prestige by the production and distribution of goods. This usually takes the form of ritualised gift exchanges like potlatches whereby individuals or collectives (like families or tribes) offer gifts to one another under a principle of escalation, where simply meeting the gift given to one is insufficient for satisfaction - one is obligated to outdo the gift. Homeric and other ancient Greek literature is filled with these kinds of exchanges, though often the gift exchange goes beyond material goods into favours, services and quests. In societies where this kind of economic system is practiced, reciprocity is extremely important - individuals in the historical record have committed suicide over being given gifts that they felt could never repay.

There are a number of possible ways to make this work. The first is to play on the PCs' desire for respect from others. While not everyone has this motivation, many people do, and it's common enough that it forms a workable basis. PCs should understand from the get-go that they will receive items from others as gifts, and in turn will be expected to give items to others. Refusing to give something to someone who asks makes the PC look poor and weak, while giving gifts even when not request makes them look powerful and rich. If NPCs act appropriately based on PC choice here, one can get pretty far. You can tie this in with independence as well - PCs in gift economies who constantly take and never give will be seen as and treated as the dependents of the people giving the gifts to them. If they wish to become mature adults worthy of respect in the eyes of others, they must give far more than they take.

The second element is to give the PCs things that are not directly useful, but are valuable. For example, a PC probably doesn't need 20 blankets, so if they are given them as a gift, there's an obvious incentive to pare it down to a manageable number by giving them to others. Enforcing encumbrance, especially on highly mobile PCs without a home to store all this stuff at, will help them to decide what items are essential, which are useful enough to put up with the hassle of transporting, and which should be given away. Food items and other consumables are particularly common gifts in real gift economies, often combined with a cultural injunction to consume the items once given. Spoilage and rot encourage the PCs to then share the food with anyone they can and get gratitude for it rather than hold onto it.

Another way of dealing with this is specialisation of function. This is extremely common in groups with specialised religious and technical personnel (priests and smiths). One gives gifts to the specialist even when one doesn't require their services, so that when you do need them, you are a high priority (for magical healing, for getting a new sword, etc.) over everyone else making the same request.

The third element is to emphasise the distance between barter and gift-giving. In gift economies, barter is usually reserved only for complete strangers and antagonistic groups. By insisting on a barter-like exchange in societies like this, you are telling the other person "You are a stranger, possibly even an enemy, in any case certainly no one with whom I can have a relationship with". Gift-giving is a fundamentally temporal relationship. It says "We have known one another long enough to trust and care about one another, and will continue to do so in future". To reinforce this, recurring NPCs to exchange goods with are key. PCs in a gift economy should belong to a community, whether a tribe, manor or village, with recurring individuals who they can develop these kinds of relationships with.

The game mechanical tools you need to track this are varied. I encourage the use of something like a dice map to determine what any subgroup within the overall community the PCs belong to has at hand at any given moment. My own nomad starting gear dice map and nomad family generation dice map are intended for just this purpose.

Debt-based economies are somewhat similar to a barter-economy, but often involve a formal tracking system that allows for temporal distance between one side of the exchange and another. In the real world, our modern debt-based economy relies on credit scores, loans asset to liability ratios and other complex financial tools to track how much one is indebted to others, how likely one is to repay the debt, and when one must repay it. In ancient times, this took the form of a centralised tracking authority, often the servants of a king or local warlord, who operated a common market to which various individuals and groups would come to obtain goods like metal tools or weapons, livestock, seedcorn, luxuries, etc. that they couldn't produce themselves. Usually this is combined with taxation in the form of labour, where individuals who use the common market must offer compensation for it to the authority, though sometimes goods may be exchanged instead as well.

Without claiming to be an expert on it, I'm given to understand that Mesoamericans and Mesopotamians both used variations of this system, as did medieval manors for their internal peasant economies. In this kind of system, the PCs bring back the haul from their adventures, hand it over to middlemen, and in exchange have an open line of credit for the goods they want without ever touching money. The reliability of this system requires the trackers to be upright and honest, which may or may not be the case. The debt-based economy still avoids cash, and leaves PCs relying on barter whenever they are dealing with situations outside the market operated by the authority. There may even be multiple such markets in operation by different authorities which they must deal with.

This kind of debt-based economy requires a home base the PCs return to, or at least a site for a market which will recur in the game. It also requires some sort of enforcement mechanism, either guards or magic or something else of similar threat, so that PCs don't simply break its laws constantly by taking what they want and fudging the records. Otherwise, I think this system is similar enough to modern ones that PCs will have an easy time figuring it out.

What Can You See When You Look Around?

This is a dice map for when your PCs are riding across the Plains of Kadiz and they stop and suddenly say "What can we see around us?" This dice map answers that questions. You use it in the typical way, dropping a bunch of dice on it and seeing where they land. The map has a little arrow pointing north so you can orient where everything is, or you can just treat that as "ahead of the PCs" if you prefer. You can find the explanations of every landform and type on this dice map on Wikipedia.

Linear features like eskers, canyons, draws and rivers are extended in the directions that the hex segment is, so that esker in the bottom right corner of the dice map runs east-west.

The numbers on the dice for the hex segments convey magnitude. For linear features like eskers or scarp or canyons, treat it as the number of kilometres they extend. For things like meadows and boreal forest, it's the number of square kilometres it covers. For things like smoke or game or sinkholes, it's the number of those things that appear.

If a die comes up "1", then the terrain features it lands on are impassable, even if they're good ones like eskers, draws or meadows, and must be circumvented (requiring skill tests as the referee considers appropriate). Meadows in the Dawnlands catch fire pretty regularly, alvar may be too broken for horses or men to cross safely, the river can't be forded, the forest is too thick to get through, draws may be at risk of an avalanche, and eskers may be treacherous footing whipped by the wind, etc.

If the PCs aren't in any special kind of terrain, the most common kinds of terrain in the Dawnlands are polje and chalk heath.

Exploring the Isla de Naufragio

So last week the PCs got started on their exploration of Isla de Naufragio. I finally got around to drawing up some additional handouts to further help clarify and define what people do.

This resource map is for the assessor, Eugene. His job is to find resources on the island. He and Lt. Peter Gabriel, the expedition leader, get to decide how hard Eugene is going to look, and if anyone is going to accompany him. Whenever they enter a new hex, Eugene can pick up as many dice of whatever type he wants and drop them on the map. The total on the dice is the number of hours he's out there searching continuously for resources. The things the dice land on are what he finds.

Cotton, Cocoa and Citrus are the three vegetable resources, Gold, Silver and Salt are the three mineral resources, and Coney Burrows, Turtle Nests and Macaw Nests are the three animal resources. If the die lands on any of these, Eugene's player's job is note it down so they can claim an XP reward for it. Springs are not resources but are handy for water.

Some of the hex segments are good, some are bad, and some are neutral time-wasters. Good hex segments include placer streams, quartz veins, carcasses, guano deposits, flocks overhead, deadfalls, isolates and seedlings. Get six of one type of these, and you can trade them in as counting for a full "resource" of the appropriate type. There were originally going to be "salt licks" on here as well but I forgot to write them down and filled the spaces with "Nothing" instead, so mineral resources are a bit rarer, which is fine.

Paths are good in that they point to a path to an adjacent hex, in addition to any the surveyors find (more on that below). The direction of the hex segment is the direction the path goes.

Stuff like sore feet, sunburn, and insect bites tack on extra time. They roll an extra d6 for each one and add that many hours on.

Random encounters are random encounters off Random Encounter Table A. Accidents involve saving throws against damage. Monster Lair, Weird Location and Ruins are all special incidents, of which I have a number planned.

So I split the difference here in the two approaches I recommended when making this random encounter table. This will be handed off to the ranger who is the expedition's guard at an appropriate moment next session. Random Encounters A is the basic wildlife of the Isla de Naufragio, which the PCs will get a sense of next session. Random Encounters B is special encounters, which the PCs will gradually fill in the details of, either by having to roll on it (for example, when Eugene stumbles into a Monster Lair, Weird Location or Ruins, or when the surveyors get something unusual) or by discovering information about the island's monstrous inhabitants from other sources.

This is the surveyor's tables. I originally had a rigid schedule of 12 hours to survey, but I thought that was boring and I wanted to increase the players' agency here. I have two surveyor PCs, and one colours in the map (just as one of them in game is working as the cartographer) while the other rolls. Terrain tells you what type the hex is, pathways tells you where you can go out of the hex from, and landmarks help you avoid getting lost. Each roll requires 4 hours of work in game, and rerolls on landmarks and pathways are allowed by paying the time again. Unusual means a special location of some sort. For terrain, it could be a geyser field, a lost city and its suburbs, tar pits, etc. For landmarks, it could be a tower, a giant set of dragon bones, a flaming pillar, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't have the hardcopy map of the island that the surveyors are filling in or the minimap of the encampment set-up that the quartermaster PCs drew, or Lt. Peter Gabriel's schedule for the expedition, since they're all at the apartment we play at, but I'll grab them once this whole thing is done and stick them up here.

A Dice Map for Creating Nomad Families

Here's a link to the full-size image (imgur.com).

I used the hex dice map template from rolang.com to create this.

For the Kadiz nomads of the Dawnlands, it may be useful to read this to figure out how their kinship system works.

I'm sure most of you know how to use a dice map: Grab a handful of dice, drop them onto the sheets, and read the results. Dice that land on hexes are relatives, with the number on the die being the number of that type of relative you have. Keep that d20 away from the "wife" hex (You can read that as "spouse" if you have women players, obviously). Dice that land on resources give you that number of resources, 

A few notes:

Adoptees include catamites if you want them.

Allied septs are members of the same clan as your family.

Artisans can be weavers, tanners, smiths, etc.

Battle Magic is a number of points of magnitude in battle magic, and can be chopped up between multiple spells or pooled into one extremely high magnitude. Someone in the clan knows the spell at this magnitude and can teach you it.

Bull priests are priests of the Celestial Herd.

Enemy septs are members of the same clan as your family.

Gnostics are people trained in sorcery. 

Grandfathers and grandmothers technically include great uncles and great aunts.

Healers know the Healing skill and probably some healing magic.

Notable Ancestors are usually dead, but well known enough that non-relatives know who they are.

If a die lands on Reputation as..., the number indicates how many members that reputation applies to.

Shamans are people who are bound to daimons. 

Wolf Priests are priests of the Wolves of the Earth.

If anyone has any questions, ask them in the comments!