The Village of St. Chanan's

I am active on the RPG Pub, my gaming forum of choice.  There's a topic about usable gaming content in blogs, and I figured I'd take up the challenge and work something up.  So here 'tis!

The Village of St. Chanan's

 

HISTORY

St. Chanan’s is a sometime-castle, situated in a border hill country.  In the most recent war, it was invested by a force far greater than its lord and the inadequate garrison could withstand.  The attacking general ordered an immediate escalade, which was badly botched, and while successful sustained far too many casualties.  In any other war, between any two other nations, the ensuing massacre would have been a tale of horror on the lips of minstrels continent-wide; in this war, it was one of all too many.

Intending to render the fortification unusable, the raiders murdered almost everyone they could catch, pulled down the donjon, turned the villages in the valley into smoking ruin, and was about to start on the walls when they were recalled, leaving an empty shell save for the (however much looted) church in the courtyard.  The war has been over for three years now.  The castle was not reclaimed, what with the lord’s heirs carrying on a pitiless war of their own in the courts, over its possession.

TODAY

No one’s sure who made the suggestion, but the several dozen villagers who remained moved in within the walls, to what they now call St. Chanan’s, after the church to the Moon God that still – miraculously – stands.  The outer wall remains in usable condition, and the villagers live inside the towers.  Every day the villagers head out to tend their fields and herd the goats to pasture; every night they come back within the somewhat-dubious safety of the walls.  The fortification is not terribly defensible as it stands, but the towers themselves are fairly secure.  Should PCs find themselves inside, the dwellings within are furnished catch-as-catch-can, with furniture and goods either salvaged from the depredations in the area, or from the donjon itself – it’s by no means unlikely to find a rich, embroidered tapestry serving as a family’s quilt.

The border country was exhausted in the war, and with nearby towns razed and pillaged, St. Chanan’s has become a trading post.  Cross-border traders are treated with nothing beyond bare civility, but without trade St. Chanan’s dies, and they are not targeted.  The area marked with asterisks is where peddlers set up stalls or wagons.  A cut of all sales goes to the villagers, but they are more interested in goods useful to them than in coin, and are downright resistant towards gold, preferring to be paid in silver – gold is too easy to steal, they feel.  They are not very interested in things they cannot use, and offering them jewels, weapons or magical items in trade will fall flat (“Pretty necklace.  Can I eat it?  Will it plow a straight furrow?”), believing that they cannot resell such items without being cheated or robbed.

Beyond that, St. Chanan’s doesn’t produce much beyond local crafts, goats’ wool and goat cheese.  These are of good quality, and cheese is available in bulk – typically aged in caves, those weren’t pillaged by the invaders.  The local goat cheese is a white cheese similar to feta, and aged in large balls about 6" wide.  (They have thick rinds and will travel well.)

St. Chanan’s has no leader, and the villagers govern by consensus, meeting as needed.  They are otherwise a sober lot, and aren’t wont to chatter with outsiders without a good reason to do so – law and order has broken down throughout this stretch of the border, and strangers who aren’t obviously traders are suspected of being bandits until proven otherwise.

The fortress is built on a leveled-off hill.  It isn’t all that high – though it has good sightlines for the region around – nor all that steep, save for the bluff just north of the walls.  It has the one well, large and delved by a sorcerer in days gone by.  Travelers are welcome to camp inside the walls, in the center of the compound between the ruins of the donjon and the garden at #9.  The grass is cropped short enough to be unsuitable to feed mounts, however, although one can obtain hay from the villagers for about double the going rate.

CUSTOMS

The builders were pious, and sigils of the Moon God – a chevron of seven different phases of a moon – are over every stone doorway and the gatehouse.  The inner door of every tower has a niche with a devotional statue in it (only a few were desecrated), and locals touch their foreheads and lips to the statues when passing by.  It is an inviolable custom to have oil lamps burning below each statue, but also the source of much contention: a large sum of money dedicated in better days as an “oil fund” is administered by the priestesses of the Moon God, and felt by them to be beyond touching ... no matter how many villagers think there are far better uses for the money than to keep lamps burning beneath eighteen statues.

The villagers hold to several other folk customs.  Adults bear a small wooden or leather tube on their sashes, inside which is a ribbon embroidered with the words “If the Moon Lord does not keep the watch, in vain do mortal sentries do.”  The same phrase is painted over or etched into every lintel.  It is also the custom to ring bells in order to drive demons away, and to wear animal masks into religious ceremonies; a great grief to the villagers is that most of the elaborate carved and painted wooden masks they used to have were burned by the invaders.  Those who rely on crude workarounds feel an inchoate sense of shame (and no small amount of anger) out of the loss of their heritage.

The villagers frequently burn incense or potpourri in their tower dwellings, even down to sweet grass or foraged herbs if that is all they can get.  (They won’t discuss why readily, but in the aftermath of the massacre, the stench was so great that they needed the incense to be able to get a decent night’s sleep, and can’t collectively shake the habit.)  New scents are a trade good that interest them highly.

 

LOCATIONS

1) Blacksmith: Kenesh the smith (Smith-13) runs one of the two interior shops, and lives on the first floor as well.  A burly, easygoing man, he is a perfectly competent smith and a good farrier, but has no experience in armoury beyond knifemaking, forging arrowheads, and basic repairs.  One quirk of his is that he sings while he works ... constantly.  It is always verses from the locals’ epic poem (see #10), and to a tune he makes up on the spot.  Kenesh isn’t a bad singer, mind, but the habit does grate on some nerves.

2) Gatehouse: The gatehouse is in good repair save for the gate itself.  That was smashed by the invaders, and all repairs managed was to make it able to keep goats from straying out at night; it will not deter a determined assault for more than minutes.  The gatehouse remains well stocked with coal, sand (much cheaper and convenient than boiling oil) and weapons that the invaders were unable to cart away.  The invaders smashed the fortress’ artillery, but the villagers repaired two ballistae, one for each of the gate towers.  Not being siege engineers, the degree to which the reconditioned ballistae are safe to operate is anyone’s guess.

Four mercenaries live in the gatehouse, and serve as the village’s guard, keeping an eye on the traders, loitering around the compound during the day to give the illusion of it being patrolled.  The mercs are combat veterans (around 90 pts, on the average), but are either too old or too battered to serve in the line any more.  They are what the villagers can afford, and some locals grumble at scraping up the wherewithal for that much.  They are at least well-supplied from the stores in the fortress, with good swords and mail.  The villagers ignore the detachment as much as possible (the traders, at least, exchange greetings and news), and the mercenaries leave them be.  This is a decent retirement gig, and they’re disinclined to jeopardize that.  

Pereval is the leader of the unit, who call him “Sergeant,” a term at which he himself sneers.  He’s not yet old, and not yet crippled ... he’s just been in too many battles over too many wars, and is past it.  Pereval’s method of peacekeeping is intimidation, backed up by his glaring, orange-gold eyes; it is rumored that he has demon blood in him, something he carefully does not gainsay.  Of course, he talks a far better game than he can back up these days, but he is veteran enough to gauge the prowess of potential foes, and neither he nor his men fight with any degree of chivalry.  They will keep the peace within the walls, but aren't up for pursuing marauders who get away.
                                    
3) St. Chanan’s Church: While the invaders thoroughly looted this small temple, they shrank from destroying it.  The only remaining decorations are the padded kneeling cushions, overlooked by the invaders, and painted murals depicting the saint, purportedly the bodyguard of the Moon Lord as He walked the land.  (In fact, “St. Chanan” is apocryphal, and the organized authority of the moon faith does not recognize his existence.)  A tapestry from the old donjon now serves as an altar cloth, and services and ceremonials continue here.  It is also the closest the locals have to a community hall, and is used for meetings and gatherings.

Learned Elena Macardry is the embittered priestess (Theology-14, various scholarly skills/ Public Speaking-13, Physician-12).  Once the respected (and well-supported) chaplain of the castle’s lord, she heavily resents her now-straitened conditions.  While the villagers still support her out of piety, they do not love her, for she arrogantly treated them as simple clods who were beneath her before, and their memories are long.  No longer young, gone to fat, she is prone to rages and lashing out at everything – the tallow candles which replaced rich beeswax, the humble fare which replaced dainty imported viands, the traders still offering her books she can no longer afford to buy, old grievances both real and imagined ... and, secretly, the god she is sure betrayed her.  Only two teenage acolytes still serve her, and that for a roof over their heads and a decent meal – she has driven the others away.  The Learned is a lay priestess without supernatural powers, but is a skilled scholar and theologian, a good public speaker (when she doesn't lose it and harangue her congregants for their failings), and a fair physician.  

4) Statue Seller: Industriously, Sabek (Merchant-11) salvaged numerous small statues and busts from the ruins, and peddles them as antiquities to credulous buyers.  Most are quite fine (barring the occasional chip, scratch or fracture), and a number are made of valuable materials such as porphyry, jadeite, alabaster and the like.  He emulates the perceived manner of the itinerant traders, and believes that he is a champion hustler.  The traders, in return, treat him with bemused condescension.

This shop, as well as #5 through #8, are exterior stalls, made of scrap wood and felted overhangs and drops.  The degree to which they’re open is weather-dependent.

5) Tailor/tentmaker: Melev (Sewing-14) is a young fellow, lean, pious, bespectacled and diligent, sure that if he just works hard and keeps on working hard, he will Get Ahead, and so be allowed to marry the agemate of his dreams.  While he sews the simple caftans, vests and peaked hats of the area, and will copy non-local garments if he’s allowed to take them apart for templates, where he really shines is in tentmaking, using felt from the goats.  Melev’s pyramid tents are sturdy, warm and shed water admirably – if you don’t mind the weight – and it only takes him a week to make one.  (However, the itinerant traders value his tents highly, and one might have to pay a surcharge to bump one in the queue.)  He will also add colorful abstract appliques or embroidery to the tents, and indeed works in one set up in this location.

6) Provisioner: Sonsy and middle-aged, Khautyn is the friendliest, most outgoing local the PCs might encounter, short of Kenesh.  She prepares sausages (Cooking-13, Merchant-12) from goats, from game the hunters bring in, and from other sources best left unmentioned.  The sausages are of good quality for what they are, and keep well on the road – the more sensible traders scoop up as many as she might have available.  If she lacks sausages, what she also has available in profusion is Good Advice, which she’ll dole out to patrons asked for or not.  Her eldest daughter Indigo is a goatherd, and the light of Melev’s (#5) eye, affections she reciprocates.

7) Leatherworker: Alpa is a slender young woman (Leatherworking-13, Artist/tooling-15), with fierce hawk-like features and an intense manner.  Her work is in saddle- and tackmaking, and she readily does repairs of trail gear, which occupies much of her time.  She can do other work – and does very nice tooling in abstract patterns – but only slowly, and the other calls on her time interrupt.  Apparently deeply affected by the burnings, she’s manifesting an odd syndrome: an inability to draw inferences or conclusions from a statement.  For instance, you can tell her, “I’m down to my last dozen silver sinvers,” but she won’t be able to get from there to “... and that means I can’t pay you much for the work.”  The other villagers are aware of the issue, and try to look out for her as best as they can; Khautyn the sausage maker especially will keep an eye out.

8) Cartwright: Labrys and his two teenage children (all that survived of his family) are kept busy repairing the wagons of the traders; he is skilled enough and honest that traders will stagger well out of their way to cadge a repair (Carpentry-14).  They are also available for general carpentry as needed, but if they’re otherwise idle, they’re busy making a wall-sided wagon, sturdy and sound.  (If the PCs need a wagon, the gang is within a day of finishing it, and while Labrys himself has no more use for gold than the average St. Chanan’s local, the traders will willingly take the gold and play middleman, delivering to Labrys such goods as he might find useful.)  Not quite to the point of sullenness in dealing with outsiders, the cartwright will only talk about business, and that in little more than monosyllables.

9) Several small canvas-and-scrap stalls are arrayed from here to the gatehouse, and reserved for villagers who have anything to sell: mostly produce, in season, but also cheeses, handcrafts, gathered herb bundles, and the like.  For anything that would be sold in bulk, the villagers negotiate directly with the traders.

10) The Moon and Goat: The settlement’s tavern has a crudely painted sign depicting a goat taking a bite out of a moon.  Its interior is a jackdaw’s mix of furnishings from the old donjon and crudely fashioned tables and chairs from scrap wood; the bar itself is the high table from the old Great Hall, of wrought mahogany and baroquely carved.  It would be worth a great sum if it hadn’t been cut in half, lengthwise, for the purpose, and the usual reaction of traders seeing it for the first time is a pained groan.  (They groan a fair bit harder upon hearing that the rest of the table was chopped up for firewood and table legs.)  The Goat is a relatively convivial place, where the traders take their meals and swap tales of the road.  Any villagers patronizing it of an evening are likely to have a looser tongue than usual.

The story above is divided into living quarters for the proprietor’s family, as well as four small private rooms for rental.  Only two have windows – arrow slits, really – and all are equipped with rope-frame beds with mattresses stuffed with goat’s wool, nightstands, water jugs and chamberpots.  Simple locks (+2 to pick) were salvaged from elsewhere within the fortification.  There is a small copper bathtub, but hauling and heating water takes some doing, and baths are pricey.  

The fare is relatively simple: goat cheeses, goat stews with root vegetables, sausages, barley flatbreads.  The one leavening in the mix is that the hill country produces culinary herbs in profusion, so the stews are well-seasoned, and they can be seasoned to taste if the tavernkeeper is warned in advance.  Barley beer and herbal teas make up the great majority of the drinks; wines and spirits must be brought in, and at a stiff premium.  Stews are served in stoneware bowls salvaged from the donjon, and eaten with the flatbreads – the bowls were once valuable, with fine glazes and decorative scenes – but are chipped and cracked from constant tavern use.  (If magically repaired, they could fetch a fine price.)

A couple times a week, locals provide entertainment.  Instrumentalists include goat-skin hand drums, wooden flutes, and a fretless five-stringed instrument resembling a guitar.  Otherwise, there is an epic poem revolving around the heroic deeds of the locals’ forebears.  Most villagers have memorized some of the poem, and a couple pride themselves on knowing all of it: there are over ten thousand verses, and getting through it all would take months.

Beyaza is the tavernkeeper (Innkeeper-13), a quiet middle-aged woman with a talent for unobtrusiveness and blending into the background.  She will tend to a customer’s needs with little comment, and respond laconically and evasively to questions.  Her family are cooks and servers, and in case of any trouble, the one closest to the door will slip out and – in order – roust the mercenaries in the gatehouse, the blacksmith, and any other villagers available.

Talo has rented one of the rooms for a couple months now.  He dresses simply, openly carries long knives (Knife-15), and is a short, wiry fellow with abrupt, jittery mannerisms.  Talo doesn’t have any visible profession, isn’t interested in work, but pays his tab every week in good silver ... or else goes out to the traders’ row and buys something the tavern could use in lieu of the same.  He’ll engage in jocular, neutral conversation, but reacts angrily to any personal questions, including when he’ll move on (“None of your damn business”) or whether he intends to stay indefinitely (“You hear me the first time, pal?”).

11) Ruined Donjon: What’s left of the donjon is a stub, consisting of the first story – the rest of the rubble was sold off as building stone and carted away.  The practical villagers use the ruin to pen up their goat herds during the night, toss them garbage generated within the compound to eat, and use the droppings to manure their fields.  The goats are used for dairy and their wool, and excess kids are slaughtered for meat.

12) Garden: The broad oval space is a tightly landscaped community garden, where the locals grow vegetables and herbs.  There is barely enough space to walk between plots, and the villagers are intolerant of outsiders breaking the perimeter (fenced by large stones from the donjon).  A couple youths bearing switches are tasked with keeping goats and other draft animals out.  The fortification’s well is at the southeast corner.

PERSONALITIES

The villagers generally have a reasonable spread of crafts (generally at skill -12/-13), for PCs who want to avail themselves of the same: basket weavers, tapestry/quiltmakers, charcoalers, cheesemakers, fletchers, brewers.  They’re usually willing to hire out for it, as long as it doesn’t impede the work of herding or farming.

Bekova (Area Knowledge/Crossbow-16, Survival/Traps-14) is a representative hunter and trapper, who brings in meat for the locals, and trades hides and furs to the itinerant peddlers.  She is lean, quick, good in the field, a crack shot with a crossbow, and mingles as little as possible.  All know that she’s the one to speak to as far as knowledge and conditions of a 15-mile diameter area around St. Chanan’s, but pinning her down is hard, and she’s seldom interested in dealing, unless a party has magical aids to hunting they can offer her.

Dastan is the local cunning man, a masterful forager, and the one to go to for medicinal herbs (Magery/1 (ceremonial), Naturalist-14, Herbalist-15).  He is a sardonic, sometimes sarcastic aging fellow with little tolerance for fools, but is one of the only villagers willing to take gold or valuables as payment.  Dastan also has magical powers on the hedge-witch level, mostly in simple illusions, communing with animals, finding lost items and minor scrying, but doing so takes a lot out of him.  The locals hold him in a superstitious awe, for they fear his curses.

A representative trader is “Master” Argelle (Merchant/Intelligence Analysis-14, Fast-Talk-15), who passes herself off as an alchemist, selling a medicinal tonic of her devising. Argelle’s Famous Tonic is touted to help what ails a person (although she doesn’t make specific, explicit claims that might come back to haunt her) and to promote general health and growth.  Her sales patter is masterful, entertaining and popular, and her demeanor is warm and caring.  Argelle runs a circuit, moving around the region in a loop taking about a season; she stops here at St. Chanan’s to rest up for a week at a time, not being as young as she used to be.  The Tonic is bitter herbs and honey with a stiff alcohol content, but her real purpose is as an agent of one of the warring border nations, scouting around the area, and bearing confidential messages for the nation’s intelligence apparat.


ADVENTURE HOOKS

* There are credible rumors that the war is about to resume.  Having accepted a few too many of those otherwise unsellable pieces of jewelry, weapons and magical trinkets, the villagers seek to hire the party with them as short-term mercenaries to stiffen the defenses.  The value of the goods they offer are roughly twice what the going rate for the mercenary work would be ... if the party survives to cash them in.

* One of the heirs approaches the party.  There’s been nothing to indicate that the secret vault beneath the donjon was ever found, either by the invaders or the villagers.  The heir is sure there’s portable treasure in there, and is willing to hand over a blueprint of the donjon indicating the right spot for a 50:50 split of whatever’s found.  How the party pulls it off is their business.  (How they will manage with the fact that the heir doesn't have an undisputed legal right to the goods, and that the other heirs will be on the warpath if they find out, is also their business.)

* The lawsuit’s been settled; the castle has a new legal owner.  While the new Lady of the manor wants to get her fief in order and is not unwilling (within her finite means) to help the villagers rebuild, they are all squatters and she wants them out of the fortification.  She offers to pay the party well to drive them out and keep them out until she and her entourage arrive.  A city-bred agent of the Lady will travel with the party to do the talking, and will prove supercilious and dismissive of “country folk” and their customs.

* A villager is dead certain that one of the party was in the attacking force that torched her home, laughing as her screaming family burned to death inside.  She means to make certain the PC is dead ... as cruelly as possible, however she can manage.

* A band of slavers/bandits thinks St. Chanan’s would make a very handy base of operations, and that they can just scoop up traders.  They’re either there and in control when the party arrives, or strikes when the party is there.

 

Filing off the serial numbers

1) You discover a human skeleton, one hand wrapped around a shining spear with a brilliant silver head -- plainly magical -- the other grasping a crumbled ball of deerhide. What's left of his clothing is badly raked and bloodstained, and one leg stretches out at a very unnatural angle. A moldy backpack is nearby, but not much in it is intact, although you find a hunting knife and matching hatchet that’s only slightly rusted and a handful of slightly tarnished silver pennies. Not too far away is the skeleton of a mountain lion. Unfolding the ball of deerhide, there are crude letters written in charcoal on it. "Hey stranger," it reads, "Being of sound mind and bust legs, I will all to whatever finds me.  Gods hope it ain’t no orc.  I gots the creetur what got me.  Hope I died game.  Buy the boyz down at the Post a drink on me. Anyway I am dead.  Yours, Hatchet Nath."

2) A vast crashing upslope ... and the startling sight is of a person screeching and waving a big sword, chasing a large bear, both whom dash past you without a second glance. Even more startling is about a half minute later, when you see the bear chasing the person back uphill!

3) There's a human head, at ground level, in the middle of the trail. Only it still seems attached to a living body, but ALL you can see is the head ... buried up to the chin.  The person sings out to you, cheerfully, as if lacking a care in the world.

4) The hamlet -- there were only a few homes -- was attacked and burned out yesterday, it seems. Pretty much everything portable was looted. There are no survivors, save for a child who's something like six or seven, numbed and mute with the things the child saw.

5) You encounter a small tribe of backcountry hunters, who despite a significant language barrier, have indicated that the hunting is good, that they're settling down for the evening, and you're invited to dinner. If you accept, there's no chicanery or ill-intent, and there's a pleasant feast and some singing (it turns out that you know a couple tunes in common, even if you have different words for the lyrics). When you wake up in the morning, you're informed that your own contributions to the feast require recompense.  You are now married to this cute nubile teenager (of your preferred sex, at least) over here, huzzah! Glowers and snarls are the result of any reaction on your part short of unqualified delight ... ("You turn down this gift, they'll slit you, me, Caleb and the horses from crotch to eyeball with a dull deer antler!")

6) Your path takes you through a sacred burial ground of the local indigs, where their deceased are exposed on platforms for so-called "sky burial" with their weapons and treasured possessions.  Frontier rumor informs you that your presence here is sacrilegious, but tall defiles make going around difficult, and near-impossible if you've got mounts.

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

Now.  While this could be the start of a list of interesting wilderness encounters (and it comes from a forum thread of the same), the punchline is that I took the inspiration for all of them from a TV movie I saw in my youth: Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford as a mountain man in the Rockies in the mid-19th century.  Something of a labor of love on the part of Redford and director Sydney Pollock, it’s very evocative, well-done, and faithful to the hardships great and small of wilderness life.

It also had a bunch of pretty nifty “encounters,” which happened in the order I’ve put them, and drove a fair bit of the plot.  #6 set up this next encounter:

7) Your path takes you back through that sacred burial ground, a few days later ... only there’s a new addition.  A necklace and other trinkets, all of which you know full well: you gave them to the teenage spouse you acquired in Encounter #5.

This turns out about as well as you’re imagining it did.  Cue the plot of the whole rest of the movie.

Unless your players saw the movie (and the oldest of my players was 7 years old when this movie aired in 1972) you could just about run those encounters straight and they'd never know the difference.  The way #6 actually spun out in the movie is that Jeremiah’s asked to lead a cavalry detachment to Point B, the way goes through the burial ground, Jeremiah knows that it’s a bad idea, knows that the Crow will take deep offense, but the cavalry officer is insistent and wants to waste no more time breaking trail around the site.

Easy enough to file off the serial numbers, though, which the encounter as depicted above does.  And for what movie or book couldn’t you do that?

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.

NPC of the Day: The "errantry kids"

So ... I've been having private runs for my wife's powerful wizard-princess for a few years now.  One of the customs of the elven empire in which she now lives is "errantry" -- in your youth, you get together with your best buds and go wandering about for a season or two, all under assumed names like "Snowviolet" or "Morningstar" or "Nightflame," and Do Worthy And Good Things, only traveling with what they can carry and accepting no pay for their deeds.  While the tales have it that people on errantry are fighting dragons and battling for the rights of the downtrodden, the elven empire has secure internal borders and good government, and the authorities aren't crazed about young folk wandering across into the truly scary lands beyond them.  So, for the most part, those on errantry wind up teaching schools, helping farmers bring in the crops, building barns and the like ... which is rather the true lesson behind it all.

Some folk make errantry their life, and indeed go out to take on monsters and warring against the over-mighty.  As far as the rest goes ... well, sometimes the teenagers get uppity and want to go out too.  So Princess Elaina, with some restless teens on her own estate, decided to do the local landowners a favor and announce that she was leading a pack of teenagers out on errantry for two summer months: who was in?  Well, damn near everyone, but in the end, she set out with thirteen.  And, much to their dismay, led them to the task she'd already arranged in advance -- helping a village heavily damaged by the spring flood to rebuild.

I did this cheat sheet for the pack, which is far preferable to doing up individual NPC sheets for what is, after all, a group of relatively nondescript teenagers.  It summarizes their race, age, manor of residence, parental background, a couple key skills, and (teenagers being teenagers) whether they particularly Like! or Dislike! those cute kids of the opposite gender, that being in terms of GURPS Reaction Rolls (high is good, low is bad).

The three for which there's scarcely any info are from Elaina's own manor, so I didn't particularly need cheats for them.  But for a pack of NPCs, for which nonetheless you need to RP them and come up with a personality trait or two, this is a good approach and doesn't take all that much work.

Doan want no time travel, no sirree

Our-modern-selves-popped-back-in-time-or-into-fantasy-worlds is a staple of gaming.  I was once asked how I’d handle being popped back into 1915 Germany.

My answer?  Get to the United States as soon as humanly possible, where I would die a very, very rich man.

I'd start with placing bets on the outcomes of the next couple World Series (I know the Red Sox win both), parlay that into the 1916 presidential election, change my investments into war industries in time for April 1917, then bet on the 1917 and 1918 World Series (the White Sox and Red Sox win, respectively) before placing a bet on the date of the Armistice. In the meantime, I win bets on the outcome of the National Hockey Association season in 1915 (Ottawa Senators), 1916 and 1917 (Montreal Canadiens), while the Toronto Blueshirts win the first NHL season in 1918. I get the hell out of Dodge and onto a remote Vermont farm in time for the 1919 influenza pandemic, win bets on the next few presidential elections, ride RCA in the stock market until my eyeballs fall out, and cash into gold holdings in early September, 1929.  Yes, I know the Great Crash was at the end of October, but there was some yoyoing before it, and I don’t want to be caught leaning the wrong way.

[Good call, just having looked it up.  The highwater mark of the NYSE was September 3rd, and the market started declining after, and cratering on the 18th.]

I promptly shift that gold to a secure trust based out of the Bank of Montreal (which off the top of my head I know survives to the present day) by no later than the summer of 1932: I forget exactly when Roosevelt made private holdings of gold illegal, but it can’t have been long after he was elected, so getting that gold to Canada (which never banned private ownership of gold) is crucial. Off to the races.

This is all information I know off the top of my head, and that might be critical: I'm minded of how Heinlein depicted time traveler Lazarus Long, who studied assiduously the time of his far-off youth -- the Kansas City and America of the time between the end of WWI and the beginning of the Depression -- preparatory to a long visit, only to be wrongfooted when he overshot and landed in 1916 in the run up to the United States' entry into the war. 

What's that you say?  Not very heroic?  I'm supposed to hang AROUND Germany?  Adventuring?? (shudders)  Even if we were, say, Americans, and therefore from a "neutral" country, it would be difficult to pass for Americans:

* Even if we were 1910s antiquarians, we wouldn't have a smooth, natural command of then-prevalent idiom.

* Our knowledge of current events would be scanty at best - quick, without looking it up, what were the top local issues in your city and state in February 1915? Who was your governor? Did the community in which you live even exist?

* Our knowledge of pop culture would be worse; how many of us could name, let alone hum, five popular songs from the 1910s? Who were the stars of your local baseball team?  What’s playing at the local picture palace?  Fair enough, a couple of you might recall that Birth Of A Nation, the most famous film of the silent era, was released in 1915.  Can you name any other film from 1915?  (No surprise if you can’t: Birth Of A Nation outgrossed the next ten films combined, tenfold.)

* Most damning, our knowledge of current technology is scanty. Off the top of your heads - by way of example - how many of you know how to start a 1915 model automobile?  This is an interesting scene in Heinlein's book about Lazarus Long going to the past and needing to start a car, with all the switches and settings one had to work in 1916.  I'm minded of my maternal grandfather -- born in 1902, three years before Heinlein -- telling me that horses and buggies were still making business deliveries well into his adulthood in our mutual hometown, Boston's immediate southern suburb ... and his wonder at having lived to see moon landings, supersonic transcontinental travel and computers.

(Or even pretty low-tech technology.  Long years ago, before Yankee magazine turned into a travelogue for rich people, its letter column encouraged entries -- and featured at least one a column, with accompanying illos -- based around "What's this weird farm implement I found in the barn?"  And the editor would reply, "Yeah, that's a potato dibber, and this is what it was for, pre-mechanization.")

But hey, look, what if I succeeded in convincing the locals that I was, truly, an Ami?  Great, now if I'm foolish enough to stick around for too long, I get interned when the United States declares war on the German Empire ...

Scenarios They HATED

Every now and then it suits to put your PCs, if it can be managed, into a visceral hissing rage.

By way of example:

Champions campaign. The good guys are confronting the Big Bad in a hostage situation. Megaton is a known psycho and serial killer, and his particular power is an enormous point blank eruption of energy; Human Bomb-like, if you will. He has this sweet little blonde seven year old girl securely under his hand.

Anyway, the PCs negotiate to save the girl and the other hostages, and Megaton lets them go, finally starting to shove the little girl at them, saying "And here, you can have her too ..."

*** BOOM ***

... and Megaton vaporizes the tyke's head, the gushing torso stump flailing towards the party, splattering their costumes with gore. He's smiling like a Cheshire Cat as he finishes his sentence "... what's left of her. I recommend cutting her up for bouillon." * POOF * Big Bad teleports out.

The press and police are freaking out, the other kids are screaming, the girl's mother is howling ... and the players are all hissing, out loud, their faces contorted with fury.

The old ultraviolence, if used rarely and judiciously, sure packs a wallop.

===============  

Next General Player Hissing moment.

Here I had, for lack of a better term, an all-evil group; not just an edgy one, plain old full of predators. An old player was free on the all-evil night and wanted to come back to the campaign ... playing her old goody-two-shoes elven minstrel. So I thought about it some, and here's what I came up with: the elf's sister is a wild psi talent, was kidnapped, and ranged Laurelin from about a thousand miles away with a psychic "Helphelphelp!" Laurelin hires the blackguards to help.

Anyway, they follow the trail to a small time slaver in a port town, a genial old duffer who admits to buying Lindel from a kidnap ring, then reselling her to a caravan trader headed into the barbarian outback. Only then with a few mugs in him he cheerfully said how he'd never had himself an elf virgin before, recounted in obscene detail about the many times he and his men had raped her before selling her off, and finished up with ruminating about how she was probably the sex toy for the entire barbarian tribe by now. Hey, didja hear dat them Wolf Tribe warriors are hung as long as me forearm? 'Tis true, mates, I seen 'em meself!

Now having issues about rape in RPGs, I had never in any of the players' memories (nor, indeed, in the dozen years I'd GMed up to that point) thrown it in as an explicit element. Well, they were doing the hissing thing, and Laura herself was a fine shade of purple. They kidnapped the slaver later on that night, and for about 45 minutes of game time tortured the hell out of the fellow, leaving the still-living husk on the wharfside for his friends to find in the morning.

They seemed well satisfied in their retribution, and more was to come ...

Need a quick scenario?

One of my weapons is a magnificent book: the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Now I'm a folklorist generally, which is why I got the book, but I realized that it's a terrific tool for gaming. Alright, let me open the book to a random page, five times. I'm going to take the first motif listed on the second page revealed:

* Egg curing. This is a folk medicine technique wherein an uncooked egg is rubbed over the patient's naked body. If used to dissipate fever or evil curses, the malady is supposedly sucked into the egg, and it's then buried in a stream.  (I'd wager that it'd be bad to cook the egg and eat it.  Something might be made of that.)  If used for diagnostic purposes, the egg is split open and examined by a haruspex.

* Moonstone. An examination of the folkloric properties of moonstone; its divinatory properties, that in some cultures it brings good luck, that in others it brings terrible luck if it isn't your birthstone.

* Soul-bird. A bird born in the forest at the same moment an infant is born, and the fate of the one depends on the fate of the other.

* Lauma. The New Guinean belief that a soul leaves a man at death and has an independent existence thereafter, something that can also happen temporarily, causing illness in the living person.

* Eagle dance. An Indian dance mimicking an eagle's flight, often associated with weather or battle magic.

There. Anyone who can't whip up an evocative scenario incorporating all of those elements isn't trying hard.

(The book's out of print, but you can find it in abundance on Amazon for as low as $8.  That's less than you'd pay for a hamburger at a restaurant these days.  Heck, you can even find the 1949 edition for sale.)