OMG! the SJWs! -- an immodest rant

"To find a scapegoat is to be spared, for the moment, any necessity for further examination of the facts or further thought."  -- Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday (1940)

We now interrupt your usual gaming blog for a rant.

I used to be active on a lively RPG forum; made a couple thousand posts, over several years.  It had light moderation – unlike the extremely and capriciously heavy-handed RPG.net, the leading one by volume – but a relatively sensible base of participants.  Unfortunately, it ceased to be sensible, and when it went off the deep end, I just got too disgusted to continue.

I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of the acronym, but SJWs – so-called “Social Justice Warriors” – occupy the imaginations of a great many Reddit and Twitter warriors, redhatters and MAGA-heads the Internet over, and their putative depredations are seized upon in obsessive frenzies as presaging (if not actively bringing about) the downfall of civilization.

Now yes: there are excesses.  Always have been.  Always will be.  However liberal I am, I am a white, male, Irish Bostonian raised Catholic in the 1960s.  The city in which I lived for the first ten years of my life was so vanilla that I was all of five years old before I saw my first black person.  I had no idea what a “queer” was, except that it was something Very Bad, and only exceeded on the scale of Badness by a “Commie queer.”  (Whatever that was.)  It is impossible for the canalization of the culture in which I was raised to have had no effect on me, deep down.

So I am faintly irritated by gender-neutral pronouns.  I think “defunding” the police would prove disastrous (not the least which that it gives the red-hatters a dandy political club).  The degree you could call me “woke” has its limits, and furthermore I don’t feel the need to apologize for being in the demographic I’m in any more than anyone else ought to feel like a second-class citizen for theirs.  I'm not enthusiastic about verbal "safe spaces," and I think "trigger warnings" are arrant nonsense.  I don't believe in Original Sin, even when committed by people of my gender or skin color.

But when I see a topic from the site owner titled “SJWs Declare All Fantasy Settings Bigoted,” my blood starts to boil, and however non-woke the statement “For Chrissake grow a pair!” is, that’s the one in my thoughts.  I’m not going to recap that sordid topic, but what set the idjit off was a tweet from no one in particular stating “Stop making fantasy settings consisting of clearly defined borders between ethnostates.”

Fair enough.  That’s an opinion, anyway.  I’ve certainly given mine on dozens of topics in this blog, and often strongly worded.  And if some cementhead went off and claimed that I’ve “Declared All Fantasy Settings” pretty much anything, in consequence, I’d think he was a lunatic.  Had I wanted to debate the subject -- which had gotten far, far out of hand by the time I read it -- I might have pointed out that the great majority of fantasy settings, in point of fact, do not abound with ethnic states, and that I haven't seen many maps with hard and fast internationally recognized borders.  I might have pointed out that the tweeter's further explanation opined that hard-and-fast national borders are an artifact of post-Napoleonic Europe (and how about we ask a Ukrainian or the citizen of any nation abutting China how sacred THOSE are, these days?), and that she made no actual assertions about bigotry.

Too late for common sense, in any event.  The day I saw that topic was the last day I was active on that site.  Unfortunately, this kind of Chicken Littleing is all too common in the blogosphere, however much it’s common for a red-hatter to shriek "OMG there's a SJW out there who said something I don't like, they must be stopped, America's freedoms are at threat, ahhhh!!!!"

About the worst example I can recall, though, ugh.  Several years ago, see, Paizo (the company that puts out the Pathfinder products, for those few unaware) decided they’d be a leetle bit more inclusive.  So in two of the books, among the quite literally hundreds of gamebooks they put out, they tossed in a couple of explicitly gay NPCs.  No Depraved Villain, no caricature, no La Cage Aux Folles over-the-top description, just folks.

And the Internet went BERSERK.

Dozens of forums.  Hundreds of topics.  Tens of thousands of posts.  All in a hurricane of angst over how the SJWs were pushing the GAY AGENDA!  And it meant that the gays were TAKING OVER!!!  And it just left me bewildered.  Excuse me?  How many gaming products have there been in the nearly half-century of the hobby?  How many explicitly hetero NPCs?  A hundred thousand?  A million?  Heaven knows; I surely don’t.

But I know this much: claiming that increasing the ratio of explicitly non-hetero NPCs in gamebooks to one-thousandth of one percent constitutes pushing ANYthing?  That isn’t merely lunacy.  That’s tin-foil-hat-to-thwart-the-Jewish-orbital-mind-control-lasers lunacy.

(And what is, dare I ask, the “gay agenda?”  Beyond “hey, we exist, and golly, wouldn’t it be swell if in our escapism every rare once in a while we ran into people who looked and acted like us, because 100% horny hetero male teenager Frazettaland is kinda boring?”)

Anyway, deconstructing the fury of people when concepts they don’t like seep into their echo chambers has been done hundreds of times over by people smarter and more eloquent than I am: no need to batter you over the head with my fumblings.  

But I’ll say this much: don’t want LGBT NPCs in your gaming?  Don’t have them.  Want to have national borders based on race?  Meh, whatever.  Want your gameworld to resemble Frank Frazetta, circa 1975, where manly men rule the roost and the only characteristic of a Gurrrrl to which any he-man need pay attention is her cup size?  Keep that garbage the hell out of my own gaming, but whatever, suit yourself.  

See, for some odd reason, even if someone around his or her own gaming table uses elements or settings which I wouldn’t use myself or which conflict with my own views or beliefs, it doesn’t concern me.  Nor does it affect me.  Nor does it frighten me.  Gaming will not be doomed, the black helicopters won’t land in front of my home, and Big Brother isn’t staring out of my monitor at me.

And in like fashion, they're not coming for the cementheads either.  Something I will never, ever understand in my gut is what the reactionaries are so afraid of -- so much so that it's not merely that they don't want LGBT NPCs in their games, that they don't want female NPCs to be anything other than one-dimensional eye candy in subordinate roles, that they don't want race relations to be anything beyond the lawfulgood guys being able to kick the chaoticevil swarthy guys around: it's that it's intolerable to them that anyone else play differently, themselves.

Granted, so-called "Badwrongfun" is endemic in this hobby, but damn.  Why do the reactionaries need a scapegoat THIS badly?

Survival Game II: fantasy

Following the previous post, what would I go with for a fantasy character in terms of personal camping/trekking gear?

Well, okay.  Using my tweaks on GURPS weights for such things, and drawing on many decades of personal camping experience, I make the following assumptions:

* First off, that we’re talking an adult rather than a sixteen year old.

* Second, for encumbrance, I normally stick with the simpler multiples of ST used in earlier editions, but let’s assume standard 4th Edition Basic Lift for a character with average ST.  That gives a ceiling of 60 pounds encumbrance to stay within Medium Encumbrance.  This gives a -2 penalty to a lot of things like Stealth, Climbing, Swimming and the like.  ST 11 goes up to 72 pounds.  That’s the most I want a character to be hauling, and I’m not all that comfortable with even that much, on a route march by anyone who expects to be on top form for adventuring at the end of it.

* Third, that we’re not talking deep wilderness long-term camping, but that the PC is versed in basic survival techniques.  The character will run into the occasional farmstead that will sell food, and won’t need to hunt ... but knows wild mint and onions when he sees them, and has a notion which mushrooms are good to eat or not.  A half hour of forage in a forest will turn up stuff for the stew pot.

* Arms and armor: a rapier, scabbard for the same, leather armor covering torso and the head, belt knife and scabbard, a belt pouch.  Total weight, 19.3 lbs.  Add 3 lbs for clothing.  37.7 pounds left.

So, let’s go for a medium backpack, weighing 3 lbs and with a 40 lb carrying capacity.  To this, we add:

- 2-quart waterskin (4)
- steel firestriker and tinderbox (.2)
- 2 4" wax candles (.2)
- hatchet (2)
- 50' heavy twine (.2)
- personal basics (1; razor, soap, willow stick, linen roll for bandaging, that sort of thing)

All of this is pretty self-explanatory, or else explained in the previous post.  There’s a lot of space saving involved.  No whetstone; use a rock.  No axe, alas, but you don’t need to build a cabin, after all: get by with the hatchet.

For shelter and bedding, we add:

- light three-season bedroll (6)
- Forester tent (6)
- 30' jute rope (1.8)
- large sack (1)
- small sack (.5)

Yeah, I know, no mattress pad.  That’s what the sack is for, to use as what’s called a “browse bag.”  Spend a few minutes foraging for dried leaves, pine needles and the like.  Sift through them to sort out branches, lumps, rocks and vermin.  Stuff them into your large sack, and spread the sack out in your tent.  That’s what you roll your bedroll onto.  The small sack is what you stuff your spare clothes into, and that’s your pillow.  Yes, you will want a pillow, however buff and rugged you picture your character being.  (And, y’know, you have those sacks handy in case of loot!)

The Forester tent is the lightest tent there is, short of using shelter halves.  You can see from the illo how it’s set up; that opening’s about 3' high.  Part of your nightly routine will be to cut the poles and the pegs for it, but we’re just talking trimming saplings, and they don’t have to be dowel-true.   The Forester benefits from being outstanding in high winds, in trapping heat from a fire in front, and from being as good as any tent before the invention of mosquito netting in dealing with bugs.  The only serious drawback is space: it’ll fit two people only if they’re very friendly and don’t move much, you can't put much personal gear in it and still have room for YOU, and you can see that it isn’t the best option to slither out of in case of 3 AM monster attacks.

For extra clothing, we add:

- half-poncho, covering head, shoulders and upper chest (1.5)
- spare tunic (1)
- spare pair of wool socks (.2)

For cooking purposes, we add:

- wooden mess kit, with cup, small bowl and spoon in a fitted box (think bento box; 1)
- 2-quart pot (3)
- 1-pint pot (1)
- jar of cornmeal (1)
- 1-pint wine (1)
- jerky (1)
- ½ pint cooking oil (.5)
- box of cooking spices (1 oz ground mustard, 3 oz tea, 4 oz salt, total weight .5)
- ½ pint honey (.5)

The meal is for cooking pones, which can bake on a flat stone, or even in raked ashes from the fire.  Shave some bacon into the mix.  Haute cuisine it is not, but it’ll do.

In the field, you’ll be making a lot of stews in the larger pot.  (The smaller one is for tea and hot water for washing up.)  That’s what the wine is for, actually – tarting up your stew.  Ditto spices, and the honey’s for your tea, and energy.

The total comes to 36 lbs, leaving a little over a pound and a half left both for food from the nearest farmhouse (most of which you ought to have eaten on the spot, granted) and for little things you just want to have around.  A smoker’s pipe.  Those dozen porcupine quills that you’re sure you’ll need one day.  A religious amulet.

One consideration when it comes to weight, by the bye: GURPS has standard equipment modifiers for things like Cheap, Fine, Stylish, Rugged, Waterproofed, and so on.  One option is for lightweight gear.  It's not as sturdy, it's a good bit more expensive, but it's likely an option that you can at least try to talk you GMs into exploring.  Copper cooking gear's a good bit less durable than iron, but if you absolutely need to save a couple extra pounds ...

Obviously, all this becomes a lot easier with a party: only one person needs to carry the cook gear, after all, the mail coat, sword-and-board the heavy fighter totes is offset by the gear the party mage isn’t carrying, and a group that stands watches can either hotbunk in Foresters or haul a much larger multi-person tent.  A single donkey can reliably carry 100 lbs in rugged terrain for long-distance marches; a trained pack mule (much more expensive!) can manage twice that. 

And just as obviously, this load has to change with conditions.  A half-gallon waterskin won’t satisfy so much as a day of drinking requirements for hiking, and if you’re not traveling in an area with frequent streams, you need to carry a lot more.  (A week’s worth of drinking water, that approaches sixty pounds per person ... without factoring in cooking, washing, or how much more one consumes with strenuous labor or hot temperatures.)

The Survival Game

So ... the following scenario was propounded on a forum several years ago.  It’s based off of one of those post-apoc TV shows, where government, law and order has collapsed.  The two characters are military brats, the older boy sixteen, the younger girl fourteen.  They live in central Florida.  The closest surviving relatives are in Georgia.  They have what gear is in that upper middle-class home.  The food they have available is candy and 20 cans of Chef Boyardee, for which they somewhat imprudently traded dad’s shotgun.  Start walking.  (And by the bye, what gear do they take?)

Anyway, while this is out of the usual fantasy scope of my blog, herewith my answer (and obviously referencing other posts):

What the teen fashionista is wearing these post-apocs ...

First, a couple principles to consider.  You're not auto campers here.  You're backpacking teenagers, and you have to travel as lightly as backpacking campers.  Weight is your enemy, and bulk is your enemy.  Cans of ANY kind of food are far too heavy.  Here's a good test for you: get a backpack and load it as full of books as you can manage.  Hoist that on your back.  Pretty heavy, isn't it?  That's about 20-25 lbs max.  The backpacker's rule of thumb is that you should never carry more than 30% of your weight, and go-light backpackers seek to keep their packloads under 25-30 lbs.  I'd say that unless your character and his sister were on their high school cross-country teams, they oughn't be carrying much more than 60-70 lbs between them.

Second, this is survival here.  Your character absolutely needs to get that shotgun back, THE best close quarters weapon for the combat-inexperienced.  In a breakdown of civilization AND in the middle of settled country, you have to worry a whole lot less about whether you've got bleach to disinfect utensils than of whether the pack of looters the next town over thinks they can gang-rape your sister with impunity.  

Presuming your house has ample camping gear, this is what you take:

* Axe - THE indispensable survival tool.  Yes, this is heavy, but if all you bring is a hatchet, you'll be POed you didn't have an axe.  3 lbs is about the lightest you should manage; 5 lbs is about the maximum you can handle.  You're a sixteen year old chopping down saplings, not a 230 lb lumberjack felling old growth trees a yard wide.  (Bring that 1-lb hatchet too, though.)

* Knife -  The camp knife you want is out of the kitchen, a good strong filleting knife.  Never mind the "survival knives" you see out there, which are perfectly suited to dressing alligators or stabbing looters (or would be, if they didn't usually have stupidly thick hilts), but are piss-poor for basic camp tasks: for those, you'll either want a lighter knife or a hatchet.

* A compact first-aid kit, no more than a half pound.  Definitely bring that medical tape, because it has many more uses than medical.

* If your home has camping gear, you have 10x10 blue plastic tarps.  Cut some poles, rig one with rope, that's your shelter.  2 lbs, about.  Yes, a tent would be better shelter.  No, you don't want one, for two reasons.  First is you can't afford the extra weight.  Second, most factory-made tents these days require factory-made poles to pitch (and the "popup" ones that don't are pretty fragile).  Third, you can't afford to have to fiddle with zippers when the marauders come at 3 AM.

* Clothing: Leave cotton behind.  The reason *why* is that cotton (unlike wool) is a terrible insulator when wet, and Florida's not notably dry.

* The classic RPG standard is to carry 50' of rope, but that's rather a lot: about half that will serve your needs.  Carry a spool of heavy-test fishing line, a small ball of string, and a small spool of copper wire, which take up little room and fulfill various camp needs.

* Cooking gear: You don't need a kettle and you can't afford the weight.  Boil water in your pot.  You do need (a half-pint of concentrated) detergent, but not for the clothing ... it's to wash your cook gear, because mishaps there will mess you up a lot faster than dirty undies.  You'll want a quart-sized pot and a small skillet, minimum ... and two pots, really, if you can manage it.  (One cooks your meal, the other heats water for washing.)  Bring a couple of those thin nylon scouring pads.  A pressed tin bowl apiece and a tin camp cup will suffice.

* Food: The one spice you'll need is salt: clean out a secure plastic jar (like a cold cream jar) and fill it up.  You'll want some sugar too, for energy, about the same amount.  The camp drink for backpackers is tea: a single tea bag can make three cups easily.

* Foam mattress pads:  You're teenagers, and you don't need anything more for your sleeping bags.  Avoid air mattresses; if they're heavy-duty enough not to be easily punctured, they're too heavy for you.  Bring a couple small sacks that can be stuffed with your spare clothing for pillows, and those sacks might be useful.

* Small stuff: waterproof matches, needle and thread, two lighters, a penlight, a few cyalume sticks.  A few plain 3" wax candles have many invaluable uses, not the least of which is light and heating when you don't dare have a full-scale fire (pour some sand in a tin can, put the candle in the sand, there's a lamp).  Melted wax makes good emergency sealant for a tarp or a poncho.  By the way, bring a poncho apiece; you'll absolutely want those.  Bring a compass and a road map -- never mind topo maps, which unless you're skilled at orienteering won't do you a lot of good.

* I'm not counting it against your weight, but if you've got a kid's dirt bike (bicycle, not motorized), you can rig it to carry gear.  It wouldn't be too heavy or awkward to carry in a pinch, it'd be available if you needed to get somewhere fast, and it can go most places you can.  I'd avoid an adult's ten-speed; more fragile, harder to maintain.

Let me go through the list:  axe (5 lbs), hatchet (1.5), knife (.5), multitool (1), first-aid kit (.75), 2x sleeping bags (5), 10x10 shelter half (2.5), 4x plastic tent stakes (.25), 2x foam mattress pad (1), titanium 3-piece ultralight cookset (2 pots, 1 skillet, .5), 2x titanium sporks (2 oz), 2x titanium mug (.25), 2x titanium bowl (.5), ½ pt detergent (.5), headlamp (3 oz), mini hiking binoculars (1), 4x spare wool hiking socks (.5), 4x spare wool shirts (2), 30' high quality nylon rope (1.5), spool high test fishing line (.25), 2x poncho (.5), miscellaneous equipment (2).

That's just short of 28 lbs, half of your capacity, right there, and you can see a bunch of stuff you'd like that isn't there.  This also presumes that your parents were backpackers, not auto campers, and had very expensive ultralight gear.  This also presumes you're cooking over a campfire instead of bringing a camp stove and fuel, a task that rookie campers usually botch.

A gallon of water weighs eight pounds.  A can of Chef Boyardee ravioli weighs a pound.  If you're planning on defending yourself, a Remington 20 gauge shotgun weighs over six pounds, and a box of shells weighs a pound more.  Carry just two gallons, carry that shotgun and 25 shells, carry just nine cans of ravioli, and you have weight for NOTHING else.

This is a challenging scenario, especially for kids unused to roughing it on this scale.

Player Agency

"No sweat.  We're the PCs, right?  Of course we got this!"

Once upon a time, in a MMORPG in which I spent far too many years, there was a scenario revolving around the “Griffin Sword” – a legendary artifact around which the fate of the world revolved, etc etc.  Several dozen players were wrapped up in the scenario for many months, jumping through many prescribed hoops to do so.  Ultimately, the good guys won, involving the permanent sacrifice of a few.  Ave atque vale.

This is where it becomes a cautionary tale.

Several years later, management in their infinite wisdom decided upon “Griffin Sword Saga II.”  Lo and behold, the Sword was returned, this time in several pieces, and setting deity vs deity and player vs player – with the “evil” group seeking to reunite the pieces and forge the sword, and the “good” group seeking to prevent this.

I hated it.

For one thing, the scenario was heavily based around the city that was the game’s RP epicenter.  There was no neutral ground – you either were part of the “Dark Alliance” or the opposition ... or else you were on the firing line between the groups.  Being friendly with both sides was difficult at best, eventually impossible.  Constant PvP, constant betrayals, constant backstabbing ... and the scenario was a constant presence.  There weren’t many days off.

For another, there was next to zero player agency.  As with the worst brand of OSR dungeon crawls, what gimmicks the players tried didn’t matter worth squat: unless the right person made the right guess at the right time, when the GMs running the scenario wanted them to do so.  (If no GMs were watching -- a common occurrence in MMORPGs, after all -- then failure was automatic, and gimmicks pointless.)  

Nor did much of the "plot" solve anything.  There was a great deal of figure-this-out so that the players could move on to figure-that-out, interspersed liberally with find-the-dingus so that ... the can could be kicked down to the next stretch of make-work-for-the-sake-of-making-work.

Finally, I was the last of the original questers.  I was very bitter that all that sacrifice and hard work came to nothing, meant nothing.  It didn’t help that one of the characters sacrificing herself the first time around was my character’s mentor, her daughter my character’s one-time wife ... and that the player herself had died at the age of 40, just a couple years before.

And Round II lasted for FOUR YEARS.

Four years.  That’s forever for a plot arc in tabletop.  Online, that’s an eternity.  Very few of those who were in at the start were still in the game at the end.  Burnout was endemic, real life friendships ended, the city that was once a haven for roleplay was a smoking, depopulated hole in the ground.  I don’t even recall how the scenario ended, but there sure wasn’t any sense of triumph.  Just exhaustion, ennui ... or people having long since left the game for greener pastures.

Several of my blog posts give my philosophy on GMing – what to do, what not to do.  But the first and foremost rule remains: we should all be doing this to have fun.  And the keystone of this is player agency.

More than anything else, I feel this is why people roleplay.  So very many of us have little agency in our real lives.  We do what our bosses tell us to do, how they tell us to do it, when they tell us to do it.  The clerk or the manager shrugs and says that it doesn’t matter what reason you have for not having done X or having X documentation in your hands: without it, your request is rejected, so sorry.  Cast a vote for national office, and you’re just one ballot among millions.  The rent just got doubled, pay it or leave, we don't care.   Our ability to change our zero-tolerance world isn’t often more than trivial: to dye one’s hair, to get that tattoo, to wear a black top instead of a white one.

(Spiffy.  We’ve struck a blow for freedom and individuality.  Just like all the hundreds of thousands of other people who’ve dyed their hair turquoise.  Go us.)

Only yes: in a RPG, you get to change the world, in ways great and small.  You get to defeat evil.  You get to right wrongs.  You get to punch out the opposition.  You get to save lives.  Your choices matter.

A GM in for the long term cannot, cannot, must not ignore this.  If the players can’t make real choices which lead to meaningful, lasting outcomes ... that’s how you turn an eager group into a “meh” group, sitting back and waiting for you to pull the puppet strings.

How best to do this?  Less storytelling: to the degree they are a passive audience, the players lack agency.  Sometimes they make boneheaded decisions.  Let them make them all the same.  Less fudging: if you’re tweaking the action to produce the “right” results, the players lack agency.  Sometimes they roll critical failures.  Sometimes the bad guys roll critical successes.  Let them cope with it.  Less Mary Suing:  If the Awesome NPCs are bailing them out (or calling the shots), the players lack agency.  They ought to be doing their own problem solving, and if they’re not good enough to cope, the adventures need to be less strenuous.

The Joy of Calendars

I was asked on a forum once whether (among my many other cultural game fillips) I utilized IC calendars.  Good heavens, all the freaking time, was my response.  Since my gameworld isn't a one-dimensional save point between dungeon crawls, seasons happen.  High holy days happen.  Traditional village celebrations happen.  Lunar phases happen.

The party might pass through a village where the locals aren't ready at the drop of a silver to cater to their needs, because it's the day of the midsummer Fire Dance festival, and everyone who isn't wearing a costume and capering on the cliffside is a spectator cheering the dancers on.  (Plenty of free ale and festival eats, though!)

It does make a certain sense to hire an orc as your "Green Man" ...

The party might be looking forward to the high holy day of the state religion,  nine days from now, when people wanting to undergo vision quests in the precincts of the High Basilica have unusual success in seeing the path.  

(They'd also better plan on about twenty thousand pilgrims hitting town a few days beforehand, and every inn and tavern space booked up.  This would also be a factor in large-scale seasonal trade fairs, celebrations of the monarch’s birthday, and all manner of predictable events of which the locals would take advantage.  I once lived in proximity to New England’s regional fair, which takes place over two weeks and three weekends, it’s sited in a small city, it averages almost a hundred thousand visitors a day, and homeowners within a half-mile make hundreds of dollars a day selling parking spots.)

The party might be hellbent on getting down to Veredar Island NOW, because the monsoon season's kicking off down there in three weeks, and even with a weather mage witching the sails they'll be cutting the timing fine.

The party might be hoping for a moonless night to make that strike, and the scholar with the ephemeris knows the next one is four days from now, but the next one beyond that is fifteen days down the road.  (Hope she made the roll by enough to know that Rosverando's Comet is due to hit perihelion fourteen days from now, so they better not dawdle.)

And the party might want to pitilessly kill every damn partying local blowing a vuvuzela underneath their inn window ...

All this is fixed; I run a sandbox.  Part and parcel of that is I don't throw in bullshit "coincidental" monsoons/eclipses/full moons just to provide random extra obstacles to the party.  I don't see why a group can't plan carefully to deal with seasonal/meteorological/celestial factors just as readily as they plan for fortifications, the strength of oppositions, the power of sorcerers, or any other such "traditional" wargaming-style complication ... and I don't see any reason NOT to hose a party that can't be bothered, the same way I wouldn't take it easy on a party that attempted a frontal assault against suicidally heavy odds.

Hard to create?  Not at all.  There’s going to be a spring planting festival: damn near every culture has one.  There’s going to be a harvest festival: damn near every culture has one.  There’s going to be a holiday celebrating the founding of the nation.  The ruler’s birthday will likely be a holiday ... and not only has more than one culture used that day to designate the new year, some of them have trouble in how the change to a new ruler upsets the bookkeeping!  Your religions will have holidays.  There’ll be the commemoration of a great battle.  (A number of nations commemorate great defeats!) A major athletic festival like the Olympics or the Kentucky Derby.  The traditional day every year when new apprentices are taken, or the knightly order elevates new knights, or annual quitrents are due, or the Blessing Of The Fleet takes place, or last year's wine is broached.  

Heck, one of the oldest known ongoing holidays is Lanimer Week in the town of Lanark in Scotland, which grew organically from the town being granted royal city status 900 years ago, a condition that the local merchants ceremonially inspect the boundary stones on that date each year, and celebrations springing up from that.  Or the town where I grew up, which has an annual celebration at the beginning of May based around the running of the herring.  (I am not making this up.)  Come to that, said town had an annual ritual as late as the 1980s where the selectmen would walk the bounds of the down, touching up the paint on the carved boundary stones.  This involved some measure of bushwhacking, with many of the stones being in forests or marshlands ...

So come up with a couple a month.  This is far from over the top; England celebrated 33 “saint’s days” before the UK’s holiday schedule was settled in the 19th century.  Plenty of online lists of such holidays and how they were/are celebrated – just file off the serial numbers and you’re good!

Story vs Setting!

Something one runs into a fair bit in Internet discussions is using fictional works in compare-and-contrasts with gaming settings and setting design.  A hallmark of such discussions is a bizarre tendency of people to try to justify this element or that.  The twists and turns folks would make to concoct rationales to explain (for instance) the utterly implausible astrophysics of Joss Whedon’s Firefly setting were a wonder to behold.  For some odd reason, few of them listened to Whedon’s own explanation – “Science makes my head hurt.”

A very simple principle is at work: the goal of an author isn't to provide a RPG scenario, it's to tell a good story.
 

"So how do we load those 80 ton rocks again?"

We can all agree, I believe, that Lord of the Rings comes up more often than any other fictional work in terms of compare-and-contrast.  This always amuses me, because there's no frigging way in Hell any tabletop group would follow that script:

* Let me get this straight: you're putting together a party of nine questers upon which the fate of the world rests.  So you pick the best wizard available, check, and the best outdoorsman alive, check, and three other pretty dern good warriors, check.  And then you saddle them with four 1st level types with no skills to speak of save for eating and smoking, each of whom is as big as your average seven year old?  FAIL.

* And, being stuck with the useless little worms, you're tolerating them being in battlelines?  FAIL.

* What do you mean, you're worried about one of the high level types getting uppity and seizing the Ring if the hobbits aren't along?  (Quite leaving it unsaid that the easiest way to seize the Ring is to disembowel the Ringwearer, from behind preferably.)  And in general, we don’t want the Ringbearer – or anyone else – putting the damn thing on?  Ever?  Great.  Got some smiths there, Elrond?  Awesome.  Seal the Ring into a 2" cube of iron.  Can't be worn, can't be seen directly, less corrupting, can toss the sucker into the Sammath Naur all the same.  It's not that it'd weigh any more than Sam's collection of cook pots.  (A shade over two pounds, actually.)

* By the way, if you're going to be sneaky and create a diversion, do it from the damn start.  You never have Aragorn with the party to begin with.  You send him straight to Gondor, wearing an ersatz One Ring on his finger, and claiming to be the new Ringlord.  What, it isn't as if Sauron wasn't going to plaster Minas Tirith anyway.

* Of course, it might not get that far, because if Sauron's not a complete idiot, he doesn't have the Nazgul riding around hissing "Bagginssss ... ?" at local farmers.  He has them ramrodding every orc in the Misty Mountains to turn the Shire into a smoking desert to find that sucker, because he knows it's his point-failure source, and that's the War of the Ring right there.  (Yeah, yeah, I know.  Sauron is arrogant and all of that.  But he's not a complete idiot -- look at him using cat's paws like Angmar and misdirection like "The Necromancer."  He knows it's possible for him to lose, big.  His boss did.  HE did.  Twice, even.  Airy complacency makes no sense.)

* But if you don’t, and you follow the script somewhat, well.  At some point, the survivors of your party have two options:

    (1) “Okay, guys.  The McGuffin that the fate of the world hinges on is across the river there, with two pretty unskilled hobbits.  They’re still in line of sight of us, and we’ve got a couple boats left.  Those are the guys we need to shepherd and save. And hey, there's no opposition to fight through over there.  Let’s go.”

    (2) “Okay, guys.  There are two more hobbits out there, in the hands of a freaking company of pretty tough orcs.  Other than we’ve been traveling together for a while, we have to concede they’re not remotely important in the grand scheme of things.  And the orcs have a considerable head start on us.  (Y'know, the orcs that outnumber us about thirty to one, and whom we'd have to wax to get the hobbits back.)  But let’s go anyway.”

    You know, and I know, that not one party in twenty would go for #2.

And so on.  But JRRT wasn't concerned with the same things tabletop GMs are.  He didn't give a damn about niche protection.  He didn't give a damn that he had demi-gods and newbies in the same group.  He didn't give a damn about giving his PCs equal face time.  His bad guys and NPCs were there to further the plot, not to act logically, in their own best interests, or naturally.  His good guys didn't have a third-person omniscient perspective.  Everyone interacted with one another, spoke to one another, as he saw fit.  As a world designer, Tolkien was a derned good philologist.

The same can be said of most fictional works.  (Well, perhaps not the philology part.)  David Eddings’ Belgariad?  His parties faff around all the time, often ignoring or flouting any previous character development or their professed strategies of the previous chapter/scene, just so Eddings can get in some snappy one-liners.  Baroness Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel to a close parallel of Silver Age supers, where the good guys won with deuced good British pluck, planning and luck, and almost no one ever seriously considered slitting the bad guys' throats.  (Having read all thirteen SP books, I'm struck by the fact that Orczy played out the events that bequeathed the word "terrorist" to our language, punctuated by years of violent convulsion and warfare, without depicting a single on-screen violent death.)  Marion Zimmer Bradley only late in her career bothered much with consistency -- and only then under the heavy pressure of her vocal fanbase -- having written in a prior afterword that she was far more interested in the immediate narrative needs of her plot than in agonizing over a ride from Arilinn to Hali requiring four hours in one book and four days in another.  Examining all the ways the Potterverse makes little sense is a field of literary exegesis all its own, and the rebuttal that JK Rowling was more interested in writing entertaining children's books than in creating a milieu which would survive being picked apart of hundreds of thousands of nitpicking adults tends to fall on deaf fanfic ears.

But still, people try.  You can explain until you’re blue in the face that the approximate weight of those massive stone blocks those trebuchets were launching in Return of the King would be over ten times heavier than the heaviest projectiles ever fired out of the largest 20th century artillery ever built ... and about five hundred times heavier than the heaviest projectiles fired out of the largest trebuchets ever built on Earth.  “Peter Jackson just wanted a cool visual” doesn’t seem to penetrate.

But but but ... what do I NAME it??

 Running out of names?  Not remotely close.

First off, Wikipedia is your friend here, and all you need to do is (for example) pull up a list of provinces of Moldova.  Hm, I see on this page a list of all the municipalities down to the village level, all 1681 of them.  Must be able to find some interesting names to call that random village in the middle of nowhere.  I think I'll call it Vranesti (a teensy village on the Romanian border, as it happens).

Beyond that, look.  English language naming conventions are pretty simple: so many placenames are composites.  My area seems to have an obsession with “-field,” for instance: Greenfield, Springfield, Northfield, Westfield, Deerfield, Ashfield, Pittsfield, Hatfield, Sheffield, Brimfield, Sandisfield, Plainfield, Middlefield, Enfield, Litchfield, Chesterfield, Bloomfield, Mansfield, Suffield, they’re all municipalities. † (Heck, for all I know, Vranesti means “Eastfield” in Romanian.)  

For the record, Vranesti's sole landmark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A number of random name generators you can find on the Internet will throw such composites at you, but you can do it yourself.  Just close your eyes, turn around, point outward, open your eyes.  What are you pointing at?  Great, do it again.  There’s your composite name.  “Blueblanket,” alright, fair enough.  I missed pointing at my cat by inches.  The village of Bluecat?  Okay.  Not exotic enough?  Fair enough, let's let Google Translate render "Bluecat" into Romanian, say: "Pisica Albastra."  

Want a different route?  You have famous people in your gameworld, right?  Name something after them.  There are towns near me named for renowned Colonial and RevWar figures: Washington, Amherst, Otis, Monroe, Hancock, Adams, Boylston, Warren, Webster.  Some enterprising Aquilonian colonists must have founded a “Conanburg” or three, and I bet Gondor has a “Bagginstown” by now.

For people?  For starters, I don't feel the need to come up with a unique name for every NPC I've ever created.  I’ve made up, as is the case in the real world, a list of common names, both female and male, and at this point I've got variant lists for different cultures.  About five or six names in each list are the very common ones that are my world's equivalent of "Joe" and "Mary," 25 are pretty common, 70-75 are uncommon, and about 150 are unusual but not unheard of – the moral equivalent of "Xavier" or "Clarinda."  I keep a chart where if I use a name as a throwaway during a session, I rotate between the four sections, then strike it out ... obviously, I have multiple lines through Columns A and B!  

(The practice has given rise to a catchphrase: "Nath, Naghan, Larghos and Ortyg," being among the most common male names in my world, has come to mean a bunch of faceless mooks.)

Yes, this means that long-term players encounter the same name for key people more than once, but I don't think they're entitled to find this any more jarring than that they happen to know multiple people -- or have multiple relatives -- named "Anne" or "Bob."  It certainly isn't any weirder than that the lead long-term characters of my first and second wives are named "Elena" and "Elaina" respectively, and that the character of my IC-fiancee in a LARP was “Elana.”  Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Surnames?  If you need them, you've got various routes.  You already have your given names down, right?  So there are patronymics: Verella Elainasdaughter.  Pick a half dozen clans for that local village, and your NPC is from one: Verella Waflo.  Or a descriptive English composite from above: Verella Goldhand.  Or else a geographic name: Verella of Redwave.  Or an occupational name: Verella Smith (well, her father is one of the world's best armourers, at least).  Short of "Verella Hey You," that covers the bases.

Finally, just pick up a foreign dictionary.  I've had Finnish:English, Sanskrit:English and Gaelic:English ones for decades for just this purpose.  I don't even worry about finding the meaning of a word.  Hm, I think I'll call this rare find the "Tome of Sellainen."  And this is so much easier now with the Internet – no need to BUY a book for the purpose.


† - None of these are as much as 45 minutes drive from where I sit.  Some are in the Berkshires, on mountainsides ... seriously?