Helping the players out.

A couple forum threads about courtesy and status of PCs has provoked a bit of thought, which I'd like to share with my avid readers.  (Well, all few of you, anyway, even though I just went over 10,000 page views!)

In a lot of campaigns, the PCs are set up to be bumbling fools.  Even in the stereotypical "Dungeon Fantasy" games, with bog-standard cookie-cutter expectations players bristle if they don't find, too many GMs set them up to fail, socially.  Ignorant of customs the GM mentions only in passing if at all, ignorant of social cues and clues, a great deal of tension, angst and anger is often the result.

Now I think of all the customs and social cues I take for granted, as an American and lifelong New Englander.  You drive on the right hand side of the road, and you walk on the right hand side of the sidewalk.  The woman in the dark blue uniform, with a holstered pistol and nightstick, wearing a garrison cover and sporting a silver badge, is a police officer.  Someone dressed all in black, with a matching high collar with a small white rectangle in the middle, is a Catholic priest.  You greet newly met strangers with a handshake using the right hand, and "How do you do?" is a standard opening sally.  You cut meat at dinner with your knife in the right hand, transferring the fork back from your left to eat that meat.  You don't -- if you have pretensions to courtesy -- wear your hat indoors when visiting; you generally do keep your shoes on.

And so on.  So many of these cues are unconscious, reflexive and subtle that we only think about them in the breach.  So many of them are also deeply national or regional: not a single one I just listed pertains to traditional Arabic mores, for instance.

The way I see it, not even the best educated and informed among us are natives of the milieus most of us run -- or have worked out in realistic detail what all of the customs are -- and we don't have the level of immersion to notice what someone who isn't a 21st century Westerner gaming out of a comfy living room with a soft drink and a slice of pizza would. 

 There are any number of times where it's not merely the case that the PC should know a key bit of social/cultural information ("Okay, make a roll against your Savoir-Faire skill ... thankew") but would reasonably know it reflexively, and never normally botch or forget it. None of us need Savoir-Faire/IQ rolls to avoid spitting into open coffins, punching pregnant women in the bellies, saluting the dark skinned archbishop with "Yo, nigga," or failing to understand what the aforementioned blue-uniformed lady with the garrison cover, pistol, silver badge and nightstick is.

So I figure it's my duty to double-check when a player commits what I think is so egregious a social blunder -- well, short of the PC being portrayed as an ignorant lout -- that any informed member of the culture would reflexively avoid it, with a phrase along the lines of "You do understand that this is the Queen's throne hall, and her Chancellor is standing right behind you. Are you sure you want to do that?"

Tidbits: Undead Estate Law

I've spent a bit too much time in estate law, and a concept that's always tickled me is how sentient undead in a culture (beyond "Ahhh, it's a filthy necromancer, kill the blasphemer on sight!") would affect that.

At what point does a decedent's will kick in? When he dies? What if his corpse is walking, talking and plainly competent to make decisions? Does being a controlled thrall under the sway of a more powerful undead factor in, and if so, at what point can the court appoint a receiver or a guardian? (Is being a thrall a legally enforceable contract?) And if you rule that you lose control of your property the moment you die, how does that play in to resurrection/revivication magics or processes? Sorry, our kingdom is a constitutional monarchy with a disestablished church, and our probate laws can't take into account your theological differences between raising someone from the dead and raising someone from the dead as a vampire, Your Eminence.

Man, it isn't that the heirs of a dead millionaire would burn his body. It's that they'd burn his body before the flesh was cold, make the ashes into bricks, then blow up the bricks.

11 Odd Village Customs

(written for a competition on another site)

We gawked at the villagers, all in their best clothes, marching towards the field to the slow cadences of drum and pipes.  Dray rubbed the side of his head, looking as if he’d swallowed a bead of Dreamdrowse.  “Gwythar,” he muttered, “Am I still drunk, or did that old geezer really say they were all marching to ‘Judgment Day?’”

Me, I wheeled my mount around.  I’d heard it too, and if “Judgment Day” was in that bloody field, I was going to be galloping in the other direction fast as I could!

1) Strewing Day

Every year, on the festival of Barley Harvest (in the late spring), the village of Athelren holds a “hay-strewing” to fulfill the terms of a strange bequest.  Legend has it that a local woman left the field upon which the village’s temple to Ratri -- Goddess of the Shadows -- was built, so long as the villagers provided enough hay to cover the sanctuary floor on Barley Harvest, and did so within the span of an hour.  The reason for this odd condition is unknown, except for the jocular rumor that the woman was troubled by the squeaking of the congregants’ Darkday-best boots -- worn on the holiday -- on the basalt stones of the sanctuary!  An antique hourglass, fashioned of black walnut, is used to time the ceremony, and has a place of pride year-round in a niche behind the altar.

2) Judgment Day

Taking place a week before every solstice and equinox, the manors around the north Aldrya Valley hold local court.  Traditionally rotating around four of the central manors (Diamondblade in the spring, Redwave in the summer, Willowlight in harvest time and Moonfire in midwinter), this is far more ceremonial than a true criminal court, although locals lose little chance to daunt outsiders and travelers.  The people of each manor march to the host manor, led by two sergeants-at-arms bearing polished weapons and by two players with pipes and drum; behind them are two long garlands carried by the village youth -- flowers in season and greenery otherwise.  The stewards of the manors act as a collective court, ruling on disputes between residents of differing manors, as well as handling minor matters of hooliganism and vandalism.  After the court, a festive fair is held.

3) Chase Day

An old tradition in the village of Ambleside holds that the rich fields around the community used to consist of wastelands, scorched and ruled by a terrible dragon.  The mighty hero Princess Verella Waflo Elyanwe, bearing the great battlesword Meldil, is said to have driven the dragon away in a ferocious combat lasting hours, redeeming the land for the ancestors of the villagers.  In the second week of winter, the local church’s bell is rung continually for the three hours the battle was said to take -- to “keep the dragon away” -- and mock combats and tourneys of skill are held amidst the clamor.  One custom for Chase Day is for village maidens to dye their hair to ape the blonde Princess’ flowing tresses.  The festival is commemorated further in slang; someone who makes a great deal of noise in Ambleside is said to be “keeping the dragon away,” and any young woman who practices arms with the village militia is called a “Lightdancer” after the pseudonym Princess Verella is said to have used in her errantry career.

4) The Feast of Wine

Many villages in the uplands of the Mithlantra wine growing districts practice similar customs during the Feast of Wine, which happens in the fall when last year’s vintages are first broached.  Traditional line dances are performed, generally by competing teams wearing colorfully embroidered uniforms (aping the realm’s military dress of four centuries agone) that are passed down from parent to child.  Each team leader -- the team’s “Captain” -- wears a close-fitting cap, each fashioned from the fur of a different animal, after which his or her team is named.  Part of the festival involves the Captains having a dance contest of their own, using long poles with which they mimic the fighting style of a duelist in stylized, improvised battles.  The losing Captains must pay a forfeit of half a gallon of wine to the winner, and the losing team members traditionally each give a silver penny to be shared by the orphans of any dancers deceased in the last year.

5) Blessing of the River

Every spring, on the first Waterday after the ice breaks up on the Aldrya, the manors of the northern Aldrya Valley have this traditional ceremony.  Legend has it that a man fell into one of the creeks of the watershed and was set upon by leeches.  Fearing death, he prayed aloud to Wavedancer, spirit of the waters, who swept the bloodsuckers away with a wave of her hand.  As an offering, he is said to have broken a rich cake in his hands and scattered the crumbs on the water.  Each cottage provides a small cake or loaf of bread for Wavedancer on this day, which the head of the household breaks into one of the local streams; tradition holds that the stream into which a household offers a loaf will draw fish ninefold from it during the year.

6) Packet Race

Some of the finest tea in the world grows in the mountain country of Arsiriand.  The “first flush” -- the first picking in the growing season of the topmost inch or two of the tea leaves, both the sparsest take and the most highly prized of the season -- is picked in mid-spring, and the day this is packed sees this traditional race to the lowland trading stations.  Samples of the new tea is packed into quart-sized stoneware bottles, each handed to a fleet footed youth; depending on how high the village is up the mountainside, the race can be anywhere from three to ten miles long.  The first one to make it to the trading station with the bottle intact wins a coin of gold (generously provided by the tea trading compagnia) and is looked upon with great favor in his or her home village, especially as a marriage prospect.  It is considered very bad luck to interfere with a runner (or for them to interfere with one another).  One bottle is always set aside, and kept displayed in the village’s tavern with those of previous years as part of the historical record of tea cultivation.

7) Binding Festival

This curious custom, now dying out except in a handful of villages in the Linaldan backcountry, is observed in the late spring.  Its ostensible reason, as far as historians believe, was to raise alms for charitable purposes.  The women of the village, on Lightday, will seize an unsuspecting (unmarried) man, blind him with a thick woolen cloth, and demand a forfeit of a coin to set him free; it is considered very poor sport to attempt to break free when surrounded.  The men, on the following day, practice the same bindings on unmarried women.  Those who lack coins -- or who do not wish to pay -- can pay a forfeit of a kiss to one of his or her captors, chosen blind and at random.  It is considered very unsporting for the kiss to last less than the time it takes to recite a brief prayer (30 seconds, about)!  The fun lasts until the village reeve blows an ancient horn, reserved for the purpose in the village tavern, at which time the village gathers for a feast and the collected coins are distributed to those who most have need of them.

8) Toasting the Trees

According to tradition in rural sections of the Aldrya Valley, the third Darkday of the new year is the coldest day on the calendar.  In order to preserve the fruit trees that are the agricultural mainstays of the district, toasts are drunk to their health on this day.  Villagers carrying lanterns and a jug of hard cider (generally provided by the orchard owners or local taverns) make the round of the manors’ orchards after dark.  The children -- who always find it a great treat to be allowed to stay up after dark -- run around screeching out traditional warding cries to fend off evil spirits.  At a designated tree in each orchard, a villager drinks a toast to the tree (often there is a traditional cup, saved for the purpose), wishing it good health and fresh life in the spring.  “Horn fill, horn pull / Give us two score bushels full!” is an example of the toast used, which varies from village to village.  Some villages are said to practice fertility rites after the toast, involving two young volunteers by the bole of the tree after the children have moved on to the next orchard.

9) Kandrice’s Day

“Two in front and two behind,
Wavering in storm and sea,
Lovers wish yourselves to be,
Sealed with tokens sure to find.”

This cryptic charge from the famed seer Sana Kandrice Ravenswing has been long remembered in her home village of Alfirin on the Warwik seacoast, provoking a custom even in her lifetime held around her birthday in late winter, which has spread up and down the coast within the province of Vindelka.  The young unmarried men of the village will spend weeks carving or scrimshawing elegant tokens out of shark’s teeth or bone, and the day before the festival cook them into fruit tarts or pastries.  These are all put on display at the church (or the common room of the village tavern) in groups of two rows of two.  The local maidens are encouraged to use traditional divination methods to discern which tart holds the token of the young man she most favors; these include the throwing of bones or polished rods, the dropping of candle wax drippings into cold water, casting aromatic herbs into flames and watching the smoke, and myriad other methods.  On the day itself, the young ladies each pick a tart, and it is said that the fates look kindly upon her marrying the young man whose token is within the tart she picks ... although a great deal of trading surreptitiously often takes place.  In any event, each group of eight -- the four young men baking the pastries in each double row, and the four ladies picking them -- are considered bound by the choices, almost as if they are kin, and can ask one another for aid or favors in the next year.

10) The Fire Dance

Held on the day before midsummer on the north Warwik coast, this fair is a joyous festival, marked with feasting, agricultural trading and gift-giving.  The cap of the festival is a traditional dance by the village’s seven best dancers.  Each one, a half hour after full dark, appear in a customary costume wrought of gull feathers, dyed in riotous hues and with a feather cape.  The dancers bear torches to the coastline (preferably on a cliff or other promontory, if available) and perform a stylized dance, all in a line, weaving between one another interchangeably while waving the torches around.  It is a dangerous dance, and part of the prowess of the performers is displayed by seeing how close they can come with their torches to one another without actually setting one another on fire.  The origin of the Fire Dance is believed to stem from the old suppressed custom of “wrecking,” where coast dwellers lured merchantmen into the rocks with false signals so that they might turn scavenger on the shipwrecked cargoes, but folklorists do well not to mention this to the villagers, who take strong offense at the suggestion.   

11) Graveyard Day

North Point is a veritable wasteland, thrust out into the sea and scoured by winds; it is a bleak and unlovely place, with only firs and spruces for foliage.  The only protected dell in the village is the local graveyard by the Manannan temple.  Every spring, on a day colloquially known as “Graveyard Day,” villagers come to plant flowers around the graves, and it has become something of a local competition amongst the schoolchildren, who “adopt” graves and turn them into veritable gardens.  A great deal of the children’s spare time is taken up with weeding and grooming the grave plots, a task not appreciated by a certain minority of the village folk, who believe the practice impious.

R-E-A-L-I-S-M: The Hated Word

"Realism" is one of the dirtiest words in RPG Internet discussions.  Has been for years.  D&D fanboys are especially touchy where it's concerned (understandably so, given D&D), as well as the various pedants huffily proclaiming that "fantasy" CAN'T be "realistic," and that we ought to be using "verisimilitude" or "emulation" instead.

(Whatever.  "Realism" is the word in common use.  When I addressed a condolence card to a friend who lives in the state southeast of mine, I didn't address it to "The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."  I mailed it to Rhode Island.  If you can't work with terms in popular circulation, the heck with it.)

So by this point I have a sticky response to the issue, which originates from a RPGnet discussion several years ago.  To wit:

Forum D00D: I think the real question here is, "why do you consider the mechanics nonsense"? We're talking an imaginary dwarf, with 100 imaginary hit points, falling off an imaginary cliff, taking damage that is, also, imaginary. If the designer finds it desirable that a character could fall off a cliff and survive, it will be so. If not, for whatever reason, it will not be. (The first mention of "but it's not REALISTIC!" gets you kicked. This is all *imaginary*, remember?)

If I had a dime for every time I've heard this over the last couple decades, I could pay all the bills this month.

Well, yes, it's all imaginary.  So why use cliffs, or indeed any recognizable terrain at all?  Why not adventure in big fluffy masses of amorphia?  Or just teleport to anywhere we want to go, and imagine it to be anything convenient to us?

Why should we use perfectly recognizable medieval weaponry?  It's imaginary, isn't it?  Don't limit yourself, hit the enemy with your kerfluffmezoz or your wheezimithuzit!

And since it doesn't have to make sense, we don't need to have these pesky movement rules, besides which we all want to be Matrixy and John Woo-esque, don't we?  Tell your DM that you're running through the air and phasing right through every intervening tree and foe to hit the Big Bad with your wheezimithuzit, and better yet you're doing it before he cut down your friend, because since it's all imaginary we don't have to use linear time either.

No, I don't care that I rolled a "miss."  Skill progression is one of those boring "realism" things, and I don't believe in it.  Let's just imagine that I hit the Big Bad whenever I need to, and for twenty-five hundred d8 of damage, too.  Encumbrance is boringly realistic too, so I’m ignoring it, and I’d rather imagine that my snazzy quilted vest protected me like the glacis armor on a T-72, please.

Alright, show of hands.  Why don’t we play our RPGs that way?

It’s called suspension of disbelief. We put our games into recognizable settings that mimic real life.  We use swords in fantasy games because we have the expectation that such milieus use swords, and those swords do the relative damage of a sword instead of the damage of a 155mm mortar shell because that is our expectation too.  Our fantasy characters wear tunics and cloaks, live in walled cities or sacred groves, and scale ramparts where the force of gravity pulls us downward, not pushes us up.  We have an expectation of how fast we can walk, how far we can ride, and how long we can sail.  All these expectations are founded in -- wait for it -- reality.

To the degree we ignore these things, just because, we lose touch with suspension of disbelief.  If the ten-foot-tall Big Bad hits a peon with his greatsword, we expect the peon to be in a world of hurt; we don’t expect the sword to bounce off.  If the party wizard shoots a fireball at the orcs’ wooden stockade, we expect that it might catch fire; we don’t expect the wall to grow flowers instead. 

And if an armored dwarf takes a gainer off of a hundred foot sheer drop, we expect to find a soggy mass at the base of the cliff.  We sure as hell don't expect a dwarf boinging around like a rubber ball, happily warbling, "Bumbles bounce!"

That there are a great many gamers who want their rule systems to reflect reality, rather than ignore it -- so that we find ourselves constantly sidetracked as to issues of WHY suchandsuch doesn't make sense, or because the GM has to explain how come the dwarf isn't a soggy mass -- ought be a surprise to no one.

Why is it such a surprise to you?

How To Fix Religion In Your Game

It's long been a truism that gamers dislike playing clerics.  Most clerical PCs are the result of "We have to have one of everything" / "We can't adventure without a healer!!!" mindsets.  The people who play them, more often than not, are the weary volunteers, the folk who showed up late when it came time for chargen, the ones who were bullied or browbeaten into it, the ones for whom it was Their Turn To Play The Cleric.

A couple factors go into this.  Some claim it's because the world is becoming atheist, but I don't buy that: certainly in America, the notion that religion is less dominant than it used to be would be farcical, and the trend from the 70s on forward -- the entire history of the hobby -- is for the United States to become more religious.  But there surely is a marked nervousness about the concept in RPG circles.

This is, in fact, nothing new. RPGs have always, generally speaking, sucked at depicting religion and faith. Part of this is the OD&D dungeon fantasy mindset, where it was important to know what level your cleric was, what nifty magical toys he had, and oh, of course, what alignment he was, but pesky things like doctrine, dogma and ritual practice were afterthoughts at best. I had more than one conversation in the Seventies with players of D&D clerics where they could rattle off all the stats and items, but were shaky on the names of their gods ... except that, of course, the anonymous gods in question were "Lawful Good!"  In the game that Gygax built, clerics were just a different type of fire support unit.

Beyond that, the bewildering array of deities most fantasy campaigns and settings had, combined with alignment, contributed to a bulletpoint view of religion. Sure, the Sea God's about water, uh-huh, uh-huh, and sailors worship him, uh-huh, uh-huh, and, like, dolphins are his messengers, uh-huh, uh-huh, and, well ... alright, alright, he's Lawful Good!  Okay??? Nothing about doctrine. Nothing about history. Is the clergy celibate? What does a wedding service look like? Are they in favor of slavery?

We never knew those things, and since there are twenty other gods, each with their sets of bulletpoints, we don't have any traction for what any other god is about either. Three gods, sure, we could get a handle. Thirty, and who can be bothered?  Nope: it comes down to "Bunsgrabber is the God of Partying Down.  His alignment is Chaotic Horny.  He is depicted as a young man with a great tan, wearing cutoffs of purest gold.  His priests always wear sunshades and strange caps with horizontal visors pointing backwards, and his High Temple is at the coastal fort of Lauderdale."

Beyond that, since there's a strong streak of distaste in some circles for any roleplay that gets in the way of tactical planning and execution, we can readily see where the conflict comes ... the more so in that cleric/paladin types in D&D and other such games are portrayed, more often than not, as humorless scolds blending the worst of medieval Catholicism and the Inquisition. Their faith never does seem to benefit the party ... the only impact it has is "Damn, we can't do X because the cleric will go into a tizzy."

There are ways to mitigate this, above and beyond the extensive advice I give in my Starting From Scratch: Faith Manages post:

* Slash the number of religions in your setting. By a lot. A half dozen is about what people can handle, at maximum.  Campaigns work fine with three faiths.  Or two.  Or even just one.

* Develop those religions. What do they believe ... comprehensively? What are their practices? How are they trained? What does the hierarchy look like? (And please, how about we not just parrot the Roman Catholic church?) Is there any similarity in temple architecture? What's their take on icons? Do they allow group marriages? Do they trouble over marriage at all? Give the players some meat to chew, here.

* Consider that in sharp contrast to how most GMs portray a polytheistic society -- as, in fact, henotheistic, where people worship only one god but ignore the others -- make it a genuine pantheon. It doesn't matter if I regularly attend services of the Sea God; if my daughter's getting married, I'm going to make sacrifice to the Fertility Goddess. I might recite a rote phrase to the Fire God when firing up my hearth. I'll surely sacrifice to the War Goddess before going into battle.

* Remember the posts where I talked about mages, and that the vast majority of them are going to be researchers, academics, in service, carrying out official duties and the like, as opposed to being enchanters doing nothing but churning out goodies-on-demand for PCs?  The same thing with clerics.  Priests should not be doing nothing but lazing on barcaloungers at their altars waiting to heal PCs.  They should be working on sermons and homilies, or in long prayers that can't be interrupted, or in the middle of holy ceremonies, or managing their parishes, or performing pastoral duties ... or off healing their parishioners.  (Seriously, I'm much more likely to have burned healing spells on my parishioner Rolf the carpenter, who just fell off the damn roof, or on his wife, who's having a rough time giving birth, or on their teenage son, who fell into the damn hearth and got badly burned trying to get Papa's supper going, than to be hanging onto them on the off-chance non-faithful adventurers wander by.)

* Turn off the god tap. Seriously, folks, faith ought not be a public utility. If you're not a worshiper of my god -- or at least pay lip service thereto -- my healing powers ought not work on you. If I'm a white light priest in a party of murderhobos, my powers ought not work at all. But, by contrast, if you roleplay some serious faith, perhaps the local priestess of the Fire Goddess should see that, and be more favorably inclined to you because of it. Give people some incentive to do this.  A character makes an act of devotion: attending a service, reciting prayers (the whole thing, not "My character recites the Creed of the Sea"), lighting devotional candles ... fair enough, the character gets +1 for the next important roll.

How To Do Your Own Age Of Sail

The Mayflower II, the only ship in this article I've ever been on.

To the verisimilitude fan, published RPG settings get a lot wrong.  I’ve ranted about this a fair bit, but there’s no example so stark and startling as how badly and consistently gamers get ships wrong.

You’re all gamers, and you know how seafaring in RPGs is depicted.  It’s right out of Hollywood movies of the 18th and 19th centuries, classic Age of Sail tech.  To a degree, this is understandable: medieval and Renaissance depictions of Arthurian and Biblical legends put folks in clothing, armor and weapons that would’ve fit in perfectly in contemporary culture.  Moreover, filmmakers have budgets, and cinematic ships are almost always drawn from the pool of replica Age of Sail vessels out there.

This is reflected in gaming: ships are often depicted as huge, with 19th century cannon, ship’s wheels, sleek keel:beam ratios and all the trappings of the Age of Sail.

But we do know a lot about those earlier vessels.  Want to do it right?  Ditch damn near every movie you saw.

* First off, ocean-going medieval vessels are small.  The largest of them topped out at 200 tons, their accommodations could charitably be described as “spartan,” and they weren’t overwhelmingly seaworthy.  They didn’t hold that many sailors, nor that many provisions – the navigational standard was to coast hop.  Check out some of these links for examples of cogs, and carracks, caravels and fluyts that replaced them in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance eras.  Take the Mayflower II above, a Renaissance-era fluyt.  Being a Plymouth-area native, I've been aboard her several times.  Imagining over a hundred passengers AND their livestock AND their stuff AND the crew on that teensy vessel, for two months yet in the North Atlantic autumn, just blows my mind.

* Secondly, the science of shipbuilding hadn’t evolved very far.  The fad for medieval European shipbuilding was for very high “castles” both fore and aft, quite suitable for the boarding tactics of the time and reminiscent of land fortifications, and which survives in the nomenclature of today’s “forecastle.”  As cannon became common, they got jammed onto these top-heavy ships in appalling numbers and in appalling sizes – stability calculations being centuries in the future – and as you can imagine, an all-too-frequent occurrence was overburdened ships just toppling over and sinking on the spot.  They were not all that seaworthy, and even with celebrated mariners like the Vikings, it's estimated that a full 25% of voyages out of the sight of land resulted in ship losses.

* Thirdly, they were a lot fatter than you imagine.  Remember that ship deck plan you downloaded from that gaming site?  It’s almost certainly crap.  The keel:beam ratio (translation for you landlubbers: how long it is vs. how wide it is) runs as much as 7:1, which is about what you expect for 1870s extreme clippers that couldn’t possibly carry armament or a military crew and could do only one thing well – sail in a straight line, very very fast.  I don’t say it isn’t useful to the designers of gamebooks, who can jam three grid plans of a 7:1 ship onto a single sheet of paper.  It just bears no resemblance to reality.

The ratio for medieval ships were much more often along the lines of 3:1, and even as chubby as 2.5:1.  This made for a craft that could haul more cargo, and could handle rough seas better, but it doesn’t look very 19th century.

* Fourthly, a number of innovations hadn’t yet been invented.  Smaller ships (such as cogs) were steered with tillers, just as you’d see on modern-day pleasure boats, or with large and inefficient steering oars.  This didn’t work very well when ship sizes grew, and the whipstaff was invented – only in the 16th century.  (The modern day ship’s wheel wasn’t invented until the 18th century.)  The familiar anchor shape you think of wasn’t invented until well into the 1800s: medieval anchors didn’t have shanks, and the arms were straight instead of curved.  Stern-mounted rudders weren’t common until well into the Middle Ages.  Teredo worms, barnacles and seaweed made short work of hulls, and a 30 year old ship was an old one.  (It took until the 1780s to work out the kinks of copper bottoming, and even there it upped the price of a ship hull SIXFOLD -- only the British Navy gave it a serious go.)

(By the bye, all of this refers to European seafaring, with which players are likely to prefer for aesthetic reasons.  Chinese and Arabic seafaring of medieval times were much more advanced.  South Asian shipbuilding had access to woods like teak, with superior resistance to rot.)

I’ll touch on pirate ships, a major topic of gaming sail.  Contrary to popular belief, there isn't a particular ship design called "pirate ship." Pirates used just about any hull they could get their hands on, although they favored sloops for their maneuverability, speed and ease of repair.  Far more often than otherwise, these ships were usually small.  This flies in the face of Hollywood, which favors large replica vessels and broad decks onto which you can pack a satisfyingly large cinematic battle as well as cameras and tech crew, but there you have it. 

As to that, Spanish treasure galleons were very seldom used as pirate vessels; they could pack a whopping lot of men, but they were ponderously slow and needed outright shipyards for maintenance, something unavailable to most pirates. When galleons were used by pirates were in full scale assaults by outright fleets, more along the line of amphibious invasions than the normal run of piracy, and those assaults were things of legend that happened once or twice a decade.

Deckplans?  That’d be a bit of a problem.  NO library will have deckplans for a 17th century ship or earlier smaller than a third-rate -- about the size and armament of a USS Constitution-sized heavy frigate -- for that matter: the earliest sloop deck plan that has been uncovered so far dates from 1717.  (If by some miracle you have a genuine deck plan for an earlier ship, Mystic Seaport researchers would love to talk to you.)

A book I own and strongly recommend is Deane's Doctrine of Naval Architecture, published by the Naval Institute Press. Sir Anthony Deane was a prominent naval shipwright of the 17th century, and the Doctrine was written at the request of his patron, Samuel Pepys (the famous diarist, who was at the time the First Lord of the Admiralty), to explain ship design and building to the educated layman.  Peyps was hoping to better inform the Parliamentarians of the day of the price of admiralty, y'see ...

Among other things, the book has exhaustive statistics of every ship on the Royal Navy list in 1670, and I mean exhaustive – I can crack the book open and give you for every possible rate (and where listed, for each one of the ships in the Royal Navy) the length and number of every single scrap of rigging, how much it cost to completely rig or provision the ship, how many guns and anchors they had, every possible dimension ... to a degree that would blow the mind of the most anal dungeonmapper alive.

In particular, using Deane's stats and given the range of guns found on pirate ships of the day, the heaviest pirate ships would be around 90' by the keel and 28-29' by the beam (for a 40-gun ship that could man around 200 men), and generally getting no smaller than a 4-gun smack that could man about 30 men and measure around 44' by the keel and 11-12' by the beam.

Adepts of the Doxology

“Are you alright, Sana?” I screamed, daring a glance back at the fallen wizard, that lizard of hers screaming like a tea kettle.  I didn’t hold out high hopes - that damn crossbow bolt was sticking IN her, and it sure didn’t look good.  For any of us - me, Dray, the four remaining sellswords, we were holding off Tellek’s band of renegades at the wall, and we’d done for a dozen of the bastards at least ... but there were a couple dozen more, and now they were pissed.

“Wolf Lord’s nut sack, here they come,” spat Dray.  I nodded and gripped my last two throwing knives, feeling in front of me to make sure the axe was there and ready.

S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!  The front wave was flattened, knocked down as if by Upuaut’s own scythe.  S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!  I stole another glance back, and there was Sana Avennia, staggering forward - that bolt still sticking out of her! - shaking her flail at the enemy line.  S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!  The bronze links rang in the night, and damn me for a civvie if it wasn’t a sweeter sound than temple bells.

“Eyes forward, Gwythar,” Avennia hissed, wiping the blood from her mouth with her free hand.  “We’re not done for yet, but neither are they.”  S-S-S-S-S-S-SHING!

ADEPTS OF THE DOXOLOGY OF SAN DESTINAKON

(NB: This is one of the wizardly orders from my campaign, which some people have found interesting and poached for their own.  For those of you scoring at home, "Fristles" are cat people, "Khibils" are fox people, "San/Sana" is a term of respect applied to scholars in general and wizards in particular, and the system information below pertains to GURPS.  Adapt as you wish!)

The Adepts practice animation and body control magics.  While the order does not discriminate, a preponderance are Fristles and Khibils, both races native to the desert home of the order.  Further, all Adepts carry bronze flails which they use as foci for their magics.  However, the Adepts can and do also use the flails as weapons, and are some of the most skilled warriors among wizards.

Their schola is in the far-off western desert of Mycretia, and most Adepts train there, making wizards of this otherwise useful and well-regarded order more uncommon the farther from there one gets; along the Talendic coast, Adepts come to parity with Wizards of Fruningen in numbers, while it is quite rare to find an Adept beyond the Pazidani Peninsula.  Adepts are schooled in a demanding and punishing regimen which includes a degree of mysticism and ascetic practices unusual amongst magical orders.  Privation, starvation and mortification are known to be part of the training.  Self-flagellation is a notable part of their practices, commonly employed when Adepts believe they have failed or faltered in a task through carelessness, clumsiness or inattention.  Nothing beyond rumors exists of the private rituals they undergo.  “Listening to the Wind” is known to be an element of meditation, although what that means is unrevealed.

What is known is that the last stage of the Adept’s training involves the feared Desert of Blood, ringed with cruel mountains, where he must survive naked – with only the bronze flail for a tool – for one month.  There, in a haunted land where the flow of mana is slight, is where Adepts learn to cope with weak or erratic mana flows; this also stands them well in enchanting magical artifacts, something at which the order excels.  Adepts who survive leave the Desert with a familiar, almost always a winged dragonet slightly smaller than a house cat, believed by observers to be sentient.

Symbol: A bronze flail.

Garb: Adepts wear robes in a diamond checkerboard pattern, usually in brownish and black colors: brown, bronze, umber, tan, brass and so on.  It is usual to wear a mantle which covers the shoulders.

Template: In addition to the Mage and College of Mage Templates:

    Advantages: Ally [Familiar, at least 10+], Flagellant’s Blessing [1], Language [Hrestoli, full written and spoken comprehension, 6] and 2 points chosen between: Better Magic Items [1], Controlled Cantrip [1], Elixir Resistance [1], Far Casting [1], Improvised Items [1], Mana Compensation [1], Mystic Gesture [1], Quick and Focused [1], Rule of 17 [1], Staff Attunement [1], Willful Casting [1].  Include to those in the base Mage Template: +1 to ST or HT [10], +1 to DX [15], Fit [5], High Pain Threshold [10], Rapid Healing [5].   

    Disadvantages:  Disciplines of Faith/Mysticism [-5], Vow [Keep cult secrets, -5].  Include to those in the base Mage Template: Chronic Pain [varies], Wounded [-5].

    Primary Skills: First Aid (IQ+0) [1], Flail (DX+1) [8], and at least fifteen spells taken from the following colleges: Animation, Alteration, Body Control, Enchantment, Movement (ML+0/-1/-2) [all @ 1 apiece].

    Secondary Skills: Include to those in the base Mage Template: Area Knowledge (Mycretia, IQ+1) [2], Religious Ritual (IQ-1) [2], Survival (IQ+1) [2], Theology (IQ-1) [2].

History Nuggets of the City

Something I just dredged up the other night was this list, part and parcel of one of those large forum collaborative lists.  This one was offbeat history nuggets that you could toss in to your City De Jour to provide local color, and these were my contributions to the list.  Enjoy!

1.  Summers in the City can be very hot, and there are roofed-over viaducts, sunk halfway below ground level, linking many streets; these are walled with baked white clay from the river bank, and kept very clean as a rule.

2.  The City is home to the cult of a popular darkness goddess, and many businesses have hours deep into the night, because devout worshipers avoid stirring in daytime hours.  These businesses are marked with a silver medallion etched with a flaming candle.

3.  An old law, repealed nearly a century ago, required that all bricks bear the craft mark of the mason; the City’s buildings over a three century stretch can be reliably dated from the marks.

4.  The City is very old, and layer has been built on top of layer, raising the City at this point sixty feet above the surrounding plain.  Excavations for basements routinely break into ruins of earlier eras.

5.  A fundamental law is that no one can venture abroad after full dark without a torch- or lamp-bearer from the Linkmen’s Sodality, as well as having at least one person present with a bared blade.

6.  The City’s clock tower flies a green and gold streamer if the ruler is physically present in the City (not often; the nearest palace is ten miles away), and a plain purple streamer if a member of the ruling family is.

7.   All roads leading into the City’s main market square, as well as the first couple hundred yards of every road leading from the City’s gates, are especially wide.  The story is that during the Northwestern Rebellion two centuries ago, the rebels in the City held out for six weeks due to their ability to barricade the streets, and the ruler who rebuilt it swore she’d never let them do that again.

8.  The City has two principal market squares, North Market and Diamond Market.  They are in fierce competition, and partisan loyalties have arisen depending (in many cases) where your parents and grandparents shopped.  It’s not uncommon for family and friends of stall owners from one market to engage in petty spoilage and vandalism in the other.

9.  For the three years of the exile of the ruling family last century, the City’s mint produced silver pennies (thriftily enough) with dies of the previous ruler’s face, but defaced with a crude bar slashed across the dies.  Possession of coins of that period is just this side of illegal; flashing one is a well-known sign of anti-monarchical sentiment, and sending one anonymously to an aristocrat or government official a well-known warning to Beware.

10.  Many larger homes from last century have bricked-up windows, a relic of an unpopular “window tax” which assessed a surcharge for every dwelling with more than ten windows.  Some buildings from this era have extra-large windows, at a cost to the stability of the structure.

11.  Surviving wallpaper from five decades ago is flat white and hand-stenciled, a relic of an extortionate tax upon printed or painted wallpaper.

12.  From the point of an infamous massacre during the sack of the City four centuries ago, it has been considered very bad luck to bring dead bodies along any of the four main arteries entering into the market square.  Funerary processions go to tortuous lengths to avoid the route.

13.  Surviving wooden constructions from the City’s “colonial” period are uniformly a faded brick red, a dull blue-grey, a washed out golden-brown or a faint dove grey - relics, it is said, of the somber and austere religious beliefs of the day.  (In point of fact, the house painters of the day loved bright hues ... but over three hundred years, paint does fade.)

14.  Buyers and sellers in the market squares are champion hagglers ... but for some unknown reason, no one will haggle over barreled bulk beers, wines or spirits.

15.  Windowboxes for growing flowers is very popular in the City, and a complex “flower code” has arisen.  Connotations for certain combinations of flowers are well-known down to giving praise to the Gods for prosperity (rose, violet and marigold), prayers that a family member in military service will be safe (amaryllis, mayflower) or hope that a child will be conceived (morning glory, impatiens, poppy).

16.  The City stands at the confluence of three rivers, and has many bridges across them.  The bridges all are heavily overbuilt with water wheels for motive power, and craft shops taking advantage of the power fill every bridge.  In consequence, navigation both of the bridges and the rivers beneath them isn’t easy, and backups on both roads and rivers are endemic.

17.  Though the more squeamish and religious people disapprove, a custom predating the City’s incorporation allows shopkeepers to kill burglars on the spot, without recourse to the law, and display their severed heads outside of their shops as a warning to others.  There is no time limit to how long the heads can be on display, and some shops have century-old skulls outside.

18.  The City’s populace is hungry for gossip and news, and an informal cadre of town criers known as “Moontalkers” has arisen.  A Moontalker wears a distinctive green tabard appliqued with crossed trumpets in yellow, and calls out the news at any place where streets intersect.  People gather to listen, often blocking traffic, but while the Moontalker is speaking and wearing the tabard, his or her person is sacrosanct no matter what he or she says, a practice enforced by the mob.

19.  Although the City is the major port for the region’s thriving indigo trade, it is considered unlucky to wear the color blue; few natives dare to do it.

20.  All the City’s temples and churches, from simple shrines on up, have their main entrances face to the northeast, and in mimicry, many private buildings do too.  There are conflicting stories as to why this is, but the most prevalent one is that departing souls find that the most congenial direction to the Holy Mountain, far to the northeast.

21.  There are a welter of deities worshipped in the City, and they all have devout followings.  Between them all, festival days celebrated by one cult or another are prolific, involving parades, holidays, peculiar customs and observances, and as a result, not a lot of business gets transacted, and any business which can’t be concluded in a day can drag on a looong time.

22.  Mercantilism is strong in the City, and everyone belongs to a sodality, confraternity or craft guild.  The guilds run, and are in control of, all cultural, political and social matters, and all inns and taverns are affiliated with a particular sponsoring guild.  A citizen’s status is strongly bound to the prominence of his or her guild.  Foreigners who belong to no guilds confuse the locals, who are unsure how they fit within their tight notions of status and propriety.

23.  Graffiti is common in the City, and the walls of alleys and small byways are liberally festooned with poems, raucous exhortations to eat at this place or that, that Soandso is a bastard born or that Suchandsuch cheats at cards, and the like.

24.  There are no street signs in the City, but there are a dozen roughly defined districts, each associated with a particular animal.   A pictorial representation of the animal is etched, engraved or stenciled into buildings at every street corner.

25.  The City’s New Year is celebrated on the birthday of the eldest child of the ruler.  When the ruler dies, the date of the New Year changes, creating much confusion among outsiders in terms of fiscal and historical records.  This has been made worse on the three occasions in the last few centuries of a newly crowned ruler being childless; in such cases, the City enters an intercalary period, not part of any year, until the day when the ruler declares his or her heir.

26.  Although silting of the river delta has caused the City to retreat fifteen miles from the sea in the centuries since its founding, and the riverside wharves can no longer accommodate deep sea vessels, the City is legally still a “Port,” with a full raft of harbormasters, wherrymen, “harbor” pilots, nautical guildsmen and other officials.  Most of these posts are sinecures for the politically well-connected.

27.  The City also maintains a Swan Warden, who is entitled to four assistants and four guardsmen paid for at the City’s expense, dating back to the days when swans were game birds reserved for the ruler’s hunting.  Since the Swan Warden is formally an official of the Crown, the appointment continues to this day.  (For practical purposes, this is either also a sinecure, an honor for an important personage, or a method to create a minister-without-portfolio.)

28.  While the laws require that anyone casting a spell be a duly paid-up member of the College of Mages, that law was promulgated when the City was bounded by its original walls.  Despite the fury of the College officials, they have not yet succeeded in getting the law extended beyond the Old City to the new neighborhoods sprawling past the old perimeter.

29.  The City’s fishing boats are almost all brightly painted in all hues of the rainbow.  This dates from a celebrated boatwright of fifty years ago, who discounted by 10% all boats she made that the buyers agreed to paint in such schemes.  Her fishing boats were of unusual quality, and between satisfied buyers and those who wanted to claim that their boats were of her crafting, the custom spread and stuck.

30.  The City has a law restricting people who aren’t liveried guard or in the Kingdom’s military from carrying double-edged weapons over eight inches in blade length.  Dodges to get by this include swords with blunted blades, rapiers, foils, non-edged weapons, and single edged swords such as falchions and scimitars.

Medieval "Facts" Most Players Believe

Yeah, we know – or have a dim awareness, in any event – that gamers are misinformed, if not badly wrong, about many aspects of low-tech life.  And that's understandable.  People grab dice and come up to the table to play a fun game, not to become experts in medieval European culture.

Still, for those of you who appreciate verisimilitude – and if you've come this far in my blog without rolling your eyes and stalking off, you're likely among them – here are a few examples of what gamers get wrong.

Taverns: The standard fantasy RPG tavern is a large, large place.  It’s full of travelers, the common room seats a hundred or so, and there are several floors of guest accommodations above: it really marries our 21st century expectations of a large modern restaurant with the Marriott or Hilton. 

This just isn’t often the case in the medieval period.  Taverns seldom had much in the way of short-term accommodations – separate “hostelries” did that, which were basically glorified boarding houses.  Deep into the 19th century, most were relatively small, neighborhood places that might seat a couple dozen people and had very limited wares: you ate a chunk of bread and whatever was in the stew pot, and you drank the house beer or ale, or an overpriced bottle of wine, and that was where you and your neighbors often went for dinner.  With a deep unwillingness to waste food that couldn't readily be preserved in any event, the tavernkeeper would have the grub on hand she expected to use, and a large group of travelers would have her either frantically dicing potatoes from the root cellar into the cauldron or scrambling to the neighbors for extras ... which would come to the travelers at a large markup.

In early modern England, due to unforeseen consequences of a law, any homeowner could open a "beerhouse" out of his or her home, upon paying two guineas for a license.  The law was repealed twenty years ago, but the remaining license holders were grandfathered, and there are still a couple spots left where the neighborhood "tavern" is no larger than a sitting room, with a couple kegs of booze around.  I read an article on one that was even done on the honor system, more out of tradition than anything else -- the elderly lady whose family ran it for a couple centuries died ten years ago, and her non-resident granddaughter and heir still lets the community keep it up.  This sort of informal arrangement was common in medieval times, and there were shopowners who'd set up a barrel of brew in the evening, put out a few stools, and played barkeep for a couple hours.

Literacy: Gamers badly underestimate medieval literacy rates.  In the countryside, sure – people in medieval Europe were 90% illiterate and up.  In the towns, however, 50% literacy wasn’t at all uncommon, and the totals went up with the artisan classes and higher.  The two key elements were Gutenberg and the Reformation, during and after which the ability to read the Bible was considered crucial.  (Writing, however, was another matter, and many a Renaissance peasant could read but not write.)  In other areas, especially in China, literacy was also prized and relatively common.

The whole fighting-men-don't-need-to-read-that's-for-clerks riff is an inaccurate, modern-day revisionist view of the western European Middle Ages much beloved of Hollywood and fiction.  What, the western Europe that included cosmopolitan Italy and Spain?  The one where noble-born trouveres were filling France with tales, poems and song?  The one where young nobles were raised to have numerous "accomplishments" – to know how to dance, write poetry, play a musical instrument?  Not really a bunch of unwashed barbarians, folks.

Off-the-rack: This didn’t really exist; if you wanted clothes, weapons and the like, they were made to order, and took about that much time.  Artisans would have sample displays of their wares – say, for instance, a silversmith with a row of spoons, each with a different decorative pattern – for buyers to choose between.  They also often had waiting lists, so that new custom-fitted suit of armor?  Yeah, you might be cooling your heels in town a couple months there.  The armourer needs to finish the three jazerans for the men-at-arms of the countess – the one whose patronage he's had for five years now, and hopes to have for many years after the pushy adventurers he's never seen before are long gone.

Food and drink: “Iron rations” and “waterskins” are staples of character sheets, and it’s presumed that PCs do well on them for long adventures.

First off is salted meats. That's great for shipboard and military life, where you have dedicated cooking teams with cauldrons and the ability to boil out the meat for an half hour or more, which is about what salted meat takes to become edible. Most adventurers don't carry cauldrons around and often have limited supplies of fresh water needful for boiling or soaking.  (Smoked or jerked meats are more of a pain in the neck to produce, considerably more of a pain in the neck to produce in bulk, and don’t keep nearly as long.)  I once took a bite out of a piece of salt cod, to see if it was really inedible without boiling.  Trust me -- * gag cough gag * -- it is.

Second is hardtack. This is really ironhard, and requires soaking or pounding to make it at all edible; pull it out of your backpack and take a bite, and you’ll chip teeth. It keeps forever – there was a bit in the paper last year about a researcher eating some preserved hardtack made for the US Army during the Civil War – but it really doesn't save all that much in the way of space over buying a loaf from a farmwife every day of march, and the older it gets, the more it gets infested with weevils.  This’ll do adventurers no harm, but the players might be a bit creeped out.

Third is water itself.  Beer, ale and wine were as common in medieval Europe (as was tea in the East) as they were because drinking the untreated water was a sure road to cholera and other nasty diseases.  Unless you were filling your waterskins from a mountain stream, you were taking a big chance.  And even there ... my favorite camping guidebook has an anecdote from one of the authors of drinking from a cold, refreshing mountain stream in the Arizona desert, and happening to glance upstream to see some buzzards.  Investigating, he found a dead horse, smack in the middle of the stream, a couple hundred yards up from where he drank.

Fourthly – and something gamers usually slough off – food was routinely adulterated.  Hardtack needed to be baked at least twice, and often wasn't, which sharply reduced its shelf life and durability.  Bakers were often brought to trial, not so much for cutting their flour with sawdust, pipe clay or fuller's earth, but by doing it in such amounts as to be impossible to turn a blind eye.  Meats ... well, let's just say you'd need a strong stomach to read about all the things that were done to them.  The party relying on "iron" rations might well find, two weeks from civilization, that their rations are no good.

Finally, the diet just sucks.  No green stuff, no vitamins – a party eating nothing but that junk for a month is going to be less than 100% when it comes to fighting.

Travel times:  Thirty miles a day is a number used frequently in gaming books ... that being the short-term forced march capacity of a military unit in top condition, with a supply train, in good weather, over good modern roads or flat terrain, and not paying a whole lot of attention to flank security.  For adventurers, it's not true.  Horses don't, contrary to most beliefs, make long-distance overland travel go particularly faster – it's that riding on horses tires the travelers out a great deal less.

For another thing, medieval roads almost uniformly sucked.  Full of mud, filled with ruts and holes, indifferently maintained when they were maintained at all.  (Look, if your countryside is constantly plagued by orc bandits, do you think that the road crews are magically safe?)  Rivers didn't come with convenient bridges, spaced a few miles apart: they came with the occasional ferry, for which you might have to wait a good hour for the bargemen to finish their lunch on the other side and pole back, presuming you don't have to march ten miles out of your way upriver to the next one.  (And presuming you know where the next one is.)  Strong, large bridges are creations of large kingdoms with complete control over their lands, silver to burn, and the peace and stability to use it.  (The aforementioned orc bandits not existing, y'see.)

10-15 miles a day's considerably more realistic.

Guilds:  I touched on this in an earlier post, but your average gamer, raised in a largely meritocratic Western democracy, has a mental image of a medieval guild that more or less squares away with modern-day trade unions.  (It's okay.  The origins of the trade union movement, coming about in societies deeply hostile to unwashed craftsmen exerting economic power, sought legitimacy by claiming descent from those guilds.  They weren't historians either.)  This was not close to being the case.  Medieval guilds were part of the civic power structure, they were there to ensure that the guys already on top of the food chain stayed there, and they were notably hostile to threats to their power.  Membership was very restrictive, they got many laws passed to squish outsiders, and they had quite a few anti-competition/innovation rules to prevent journeymen from getting a leg up on the others; enforced hours of operation, hiring limits, a ban on new techniques.

Starting From Scratch (pt VI)

The Dessert Menu

So here we are at the end of the series -- for now, anyway -- and it struck me to include a menu of miscellaneous tips to make the startup a bit easier.

The first is, I find, crucial: save everything.  This won't pay off in the short term, but it will in the long term.

I have a folder in front of me, a battered old thing labeled "Old Adventure Stuff."  Random notes and scribblings, cheat sheets for enemy hordes, maps, clipart, adventure writeups, notes players have slipped me, town handouts, mercenary companies, TOOs for set-piece battles, descriptions of books.  There's an excerpted scene I wrote from a play (the group were masquerading as actors, and I evilly forced them to read through the scene), there's poetry I wrote for divination purposes, there are lists of pirate ships.  The oldest slips in there are notes I scribbled during workbreaks in the mid-80s.  Thirty years on, it's about two inches thick.

You can recycle these.  One of those notes from the 80s I never did use, until I pulled it out about six years ago, and it turned out to be crucial.  The castle design you use with your party next month may turn out to save you time with another one five months -- or five years -- from now.  Beyond that, since I run a sandbox campaign, there are just times when I prepare materials that just don't get used.  The players pass on going into the ancient ruins?  They stay in the city, so they never encounter the bandit gang?  They decide not to split the party and stick instead to Strongpoint B, so the key NPC who assaults Strongpoint A never gets used?  Don't growl in frustration and tear those up -- stick them into the Old Adventure Stuff folder.

(Another benefit to Saving Everything: something I've been making a habit of doing since damn near Day One is keeping copies of PC sheets.  This not only has helped with "Damn, Bob, sorry, I forgot my sheet today, do you have a copy?" but for my own reference to remind myself of what characters can do, when I'm doing adventure prep.  But the biggest benefit?  Let me throw you a quasi-hypothetical -- "quasi" because it actually did happen in my campaign.  Let's say that while you're in the middle of GMing, you need to come up with, on the spot, a NPC necromancer who (a) is something of a good guy, and in particular (b) is anti-slavery.  And just your stroke of luck, someone played one once.  Hey look, you have Larindo's sheet in the Old PC Folder: got the guy's spell list and everything.  And you remember how John played the fellow: a bit on the bombastic side, loves sports, and just a touch unlucky at times.  Great!  You're good to go.  I do this sort of thing a lot -- never mind the genuine achievement PCs can manage -- and out of the city my current group's running in, the list of one-time PCs in NPC roles includes the Queen's husband, the Grand Master of the mages' guild chantry, five (!) innkeepers, a ship captain, the mages' guild Apprentice Master, a provincial ruler, a wino, four young nobles in the jeunesse doree, an ambassador, three parish curates, a legion commander, a crime boss, two alchemists, a dancer, two financial magnates, and the aforementioned necromancer.  Waste not, want not.)

The second, a tangential item, is to put mook NPC lists up on your computer.  I've got an example on the right, of a well-connected gang of thugs one party had to deal with.  Most of it is, of course, system mechanics, but there are a number of symbols and abbreviations which tell me race, background and other key bits of info, and moreover there's a line or two on each that personalizes them.  Not a great deal, but enough to make them more than faceless red shirts.

This is the third iteration of, roughly, the same bunch.  I've changed the names, fiddled with some of the weapons, fiddled with some of the descriptions.  The players never knew, and it took me all of ten minutes to do that much.  The more you do this as word processing files, the more you can play with it at will.  And, after all, a gang or a bandit band does have some of the same archetypes: the leader, the sullen lieutenant who'd like things rougher/kinder than the boss, the friendly fellow, the psychopath, the one who knows just enough magic to get in trouble, the heavy hitter, the wannabe with more balls than experience, the sneaky skirmisher, the committed one, the coward.

The third is this: unless you really get off on it, and you've got the spare time to do it, don't put in more detail than your players will be enthusiastic about.  A run sticks out in my memory of a GM who, when our party was taking a trip on a ship, insisted on reading out the curricula vitae of every damn member of the crew, down to the scullion and the bilgesweepers.  I wasn't the only player with glazed eyes, fifteen minutes into his recitation, because I really only care about the NPCs with whom I interact (quite leaving aside that I ought not be hearing about the details of NPC lives when there's no realistic way for me to have known them!).  I've known GMs to give loving details about the furniture in rooms, describe in minute detail the different fabrics and styles of bodyguard garb, insist on pointing out how many tiles of which color and pattern are on that floor there.

There are several reasons why this is a no-no for startup campaigns.  First off, you don't want to bore your players out of the gate, and this style will do just that ... even if it wasn't the case that a lot of players just want to know who to whack and what the loot is.  Secondly, it builds a lot of delay into run sessions, not only in all the descriptions, but in players assuming that there's a reason why you're so intent on telling them the exact style of the inlays as well as the woods being used.  It's very difficult to get players away from the sidetrack once they've convinced themselves that it's a key plot element ... why would you have mentioned such a seemingly trivial detail otherwise?

Fourthly, steal liberally.  There are a lot of excellent materials out there from a lot of companies: Columbia Games' Harn and Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder, whether or not you're a fan of the Harnmaster or D&D systems (and I'm most certainly not), both have published excellent setting works.  There are also websites full of free stuff you can use -- lythia.com (which has Harn fan material and hordes of small villages statted out -- the map that's the artwork on the first Medieval Demographics post is an altered one from that site) and santharia.com are two of my favorites.  Just change names, file off the serial numbers, and you have heaps of NPCs, businesses, customs and plots to use in filling out your setting.   

Fifthly, I have a handful of bulletpoint questions concerning your setting to consider, which will both spice things up a bit and suggest upcoming plots.  To wit:

    * What are the races/nationalities/factions the locals hate, and why?

    * Who's the regional overlord?  

    * What's the big nasty event three years ago the locals just do not want to talk about? 

    * Who's the most infamous bandit leader/pirate king in the land?

Finally, in a startup campaign, you just don't have the prep time to waste.  Even in the low-key startup setting I recommend, there are still the dozen or so businesses to create in that small village ... the dozen key NPCs, some background detail on the region, the exact particulars of the first adventure, setting details about the world, its religions, its customs, those strange weird animals ... all of it.  You've gotten all that done already?  Very industrious of you, but much Sooner than Later, your players are going to be washing the muck of their home village off their feet, and head for the Big City.  That's some serious prep work: not a dozen NPCs or a dozen businesses, but a hundred or more.  If you've got the spare time early on, might as well get started!

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

Starting from scratch (pt V)

The Main Course

Alright ... so you’re writing your first adventure.  Awesome!  There are some principles you should keep in mind:

* Format.  Something that might help you is the Darlington format I cite in this post.

You need a hook (why the players want to do this), a problem (what is it that they’re supposed to do?), complications (why it won’t be easy for them to do it), resolution (what does solving the problem look like?) and fun stuff  (silly bits that will churn up the mood if things get too serious). 

All this is important; if you’ve got a party of newbies, you want to give them a reason to come back.  If you’ve got a party of veterans, you want them to think you’ve got what it takes to GM.

* Knowledge.  Know what your characters can do.  If possible, have copies of the character sheets.  One thing I do is to put together a quick-reference cheat sheet (an example at right) of the PCs, their key stats and combat info, and such advantages and disadvantages that might impact play.  It’s a problem if you design adventures that can only be solved through skills the PCs lack, or if you hinge your plot on solving a difficulty that a skill or spell you forgot can easily circumvent.  (That being said, those skills and spells are there to solve problems.  The result of a rogue who never gets to use her burglary skills is a grumpy player.)

* Time Management.  You’re creating a setting ... an entire world.  Even on the low-key scale I suggested in earlier installments of “Starting From Scratch,” you’ve got a lot to do.  So, rather obviously, you don’t want to spend twenty hours penning an adventure.  That’s a pace that’ll have you burning out quickly, even if you don’t have to hold down a job, raise a kid, get through college or pay attention to a SO or spouse.

So let’s keep things simple.  Don’t put a trap on every door.  Don’t create a magical item for every mook guard.  Don’t develop more information for NPCs than will really be needed ... you don’t need a full character sheet for each of those guards, you don’t need combat stats for the village schoolteacher.  Don’t spend all your time planning for the players to advance through the castle gate, when they might cross you up by going over the wall, or by bypassing the castle altogether.  Which leads to ...

* Options.  My opinion is colored in that I run a “sandbox” campaign, where – within reason – I let players go where they want and decide what they want to do.  The opposite way of doing so is a “railroad” campaign, where the GM wants the players to handle a problem in one particular way, and will go to some lengths to cajole, manipulate or (if need be) force them to do so.   I dislike railroad campaigns.  I want my choices to matter.  And your players likely will too.

So think about this some.  Your players just need to get past that door, huh?  A railroad campaign might require them to pick the lock, and if they don’t have a locksmith, tough.  Me?  Well, doesn’t some guard or steward have those keys, and how do we get them off of the person?  Is there a ceiling crawl space?  Can we break down the door without too much noise?  What side are the hinges on?

This often requires a nimble mind, because I guarantee that you can’t figure out every option beforehand.

So ... what’s that first adventure?  If you took my advice in Part III and have a party of teenage friends from the same village, you’ve got a classic ready-and-waiting: the party was out on a picnic/hunting frolic/visiting the next village over, and they saw a large pall of smoke over the homestead ... Dashing back, they find that a bandit/mercenary/orc raid came through, torching a third of the village, kidnaping some folk, and stealing anything they could usefully carry.  At least one PC has had his home torched; at least one PC has had parents killed.  Anyone who could meaningfully resist the bandits was killed or wounded.

So ... it’s up to the teenagers to save the critically wounded, organize the bucket brigade for the cottages that might be salvaged, and to chase after the bad guys to get revenge.  They’re going to be outnumbered, possibly badly.  They might have trouble overtaking the bandits, considering that the only mount left is the donkey that was out in the fields grazing.

The bandits will have some classic tropes: the brutal leader who rules through fear (and who is too tough to take on in a straight fight except through luck, guile, magic or treachery), the lieutenant who thinks he should be in charge, the bandit with a severe attack of conscience, the bandit from three villages over who was given the choice between crime or death, the insane torturer who’s devoted to the leader and loves to hear victims scream, and the enemy of the torturer who’s no goody-two-shoes but doesn’t care for purposeless cruelty.

Loot?  Well, you don't want your players to get rich too fast, and bandit gangs aren't wealthy (if they were, they'd retire!).  So you'll likely get what's left in their pockets after that last key debauch -- just a handful of coin, if that much -- and what trade goods they haven't ruined or spoiled.  But the key bit is in scrounged stuff.  Mounts are expensive, and the bandits will have them.  (Of course, this can get the PCs in trouble, because the mounts are certainly stolen from elsewhere, and some rich merchant four adventures down the road might recognize his favorite dappled gelding -- why, the PCs must be Those Bandits!)  The bandits will have weapons in good condition, and bits and pieces of armor in mediocre condition, which the players could use or sell off.  The leader might have some fine pieces of jewelry -- keeping in mind the aforementioned former owners -- and will certainly have the best weapon.

Have at it!

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

Starting from scratch, pt IV

The Appetizer Round

In my last installment, I promised that in this one I'd get to the New Campaign's first adventure.  Alright, that turned out to be a modest fib.  Before I do that, I want to talk about how to play NPCs.

What I am is a method actor; I put myself into the shoes of damn near every NPC.  Part of this is acting like real people do, and not like faceless red shirt existing only to provide unyielding opposition towards the PCs, or speaking like a pompous 50-year-old college professor.  If the words in your mouth sound stilted and wrong, it's probably because they're coming off stilted and wrong.  Beyond that ... 

1)  Real people don’t fight to the death en masse; it’s an enduring military truism that a force sustaining 25% casualties will probably break, and a unit sustaining 50% casualties will almost certainly break.  Many systems have morale rules ... use them!  If they don't, fake it.  Let's say a low roll means an individual will surrender or bug out, a high roll means he's holding the line.  Add simple modifiers where appropriate -- if the other side's got a Conan-type who's covered in the blood of the NPC's comrades, if the NPC's side has a strong leader rallying the troops, if there's a hereditary enemy involved.  It's easy to figure out.

2)  Real people don’t stolidly respond “I dunno” to a PC’s questions; most everyone knows something, or think they do, or at the very least will shoot their mouths off to appear that they do.  Not even a dumb mook wants you to believe he’s a dumb mook.

3) Give every mook, and I mean every mook, one or two personality traits.  “Old Jon” is a stereotypical sailor in a red striped shirt, always with a concertina or a dirty bottle of rum, and is always willing to help newbies learn the ropes.  Larghos has an odd cowrie shell charm he claims came from his “mermaid wife” and protects him from drowning.  Natyzha abandoned her home and family for the sea due to crushing debt and means never to return.  There are user-submitted sites full of lists of folks like that, and automatic NPC generators on the Web that can do that much too.  It really helps, it doesn’t take much work, and you can easily recycle the lists.  The first time you see a mook go down in a battle, and another screams and runs and flings himself on her body sobbing, well ... the PCs might finish them off anyway, but many of them will pause and reflect.

4) As far as the mechanics go, acting is like any other skill ... you get better by practice.  I do a lot of different voices, and it’s to the point where I can voice several different NPCs sequentially and folks can distinguish them easily, but I’ve had a lot of years of practice at it.  It’s pitch, intonation, cadence and the use of idiom.  Heck, it doesn’t take more to establish a very formal, snooty, upper crust NPC than to use a measured, even tone and decline to use contractions or slang!

5) On the female front ... I speak with a somewhat modulated, quieter voice and employ some body language, but of course my female characters come out as contraltos; I’m not descending to Betty Boopesque caricature.  That being said, the problem of most male GMs nervous about portraying women might be not so much that they come off as creepy or whimsical, but that they're convinced they are out of self-consciousness.  My advice is not to worry about it.

6)  Stick in a viewpoint NPC.  I've editorialized about it in this blog post, which pretty much covers it.

And with that out of the way, I seriously will put the dinner on the table next time out.  Promise.

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

Starting from scratch, pt III

Setting the Table

I can’t quite call myself a “zero to hero” partisan.  To a large extent, being a GURPS GM mitigates against that.  In stark contrast to many a game system, beginning GURPS characters can be competent in a number of skills, or very good in one or two.  It takes a pretty high level of tactical idiocy for a beginning party in GURPS to get rolled by a handful of mook spearmen.

But that doesn’t mean a GURPS fantasy campaign can’t start low-key.  A game setting I admire is Columbia’s Harnworld, which is the closest I think the hobby’s ever going to get to an honest, accurate, gritty representation of medieval life.  Harn keeps beginning equipment sparse, coinage scarce, social mobility low and introductory adventures very low key indeed ... a scenario where the payoff is the price of a single new sword is considered pretty decent for newbies in Harn.

And that’s the way to go, I believe.  Start a party dripping with gear, start them off rescuing the Kingdom from certain destruction against the Hordes of Evil, where do you go from there?

So ... in my campaign, I start players off with 500 silver sinvers.  That’ll get you a broadsword, a suit of cuirbolli armor, the equivalent of a riding mule, some camping basics, and that’s about it.

But you could get even more restrictive.  Remember that small town I suggested as a starting point in the first SFS post?  Use that, and that’ll help solve a classic problem with new campaigns: why are all these people adventuring together, and how do they get together in the first place?  The quandary leads to sorry-ass cliches of the You-All-Happen-To-Be-In-A-Tavern type.  They were lame in 1975, and they’re full of dry rot today.

Instead, make the party members townies who’ve known each other all their lives; this cuts short the usual angst over how these disparate people get together and why they’re supposed to trust one another.  The party members reflect the demographic: teenagers eager for Adventure.  You’ll have the children of hunters, skilled in the wild and used to privation; the herbalist’s apprentice, who knows a good bit about healing; the son of the village’s wacky eccentric scholar, who turns out to be a mage; the granddaughter of a retired long-term soldier, who taught her little girl something about battle; the altar boy or girl who serves the village priest, and whose simple and deep belief has caused him or her to be touched with the fingerbrush of divinity ... Enforce the paradigm.  This is the type of character they’re permitted to take, period.  They likely know a great deal about one another, and the gestalt works a lot better if they do.

Indeed, it’s an excuse to cut back on initial equipment further. It’s not a rich village, and the players aren’t going to be outfitted with much: hunting bows, slings, boar spears, leather jerkins and caps for armor (maybe), belt knives, camping gear.  One or two might have Grandmother’s sword off of the mantlepiece.  Horses represent significant material wealth, and it’s far likelier that they’d get away with an ornery pack-donkey at best.  Magic?  Alchemicals?  Hah.  Lily’s been made to help compound in her mother’s shop since she was old enough to work a pestle, so she’s got a few packets of useful herbs.  Clots wounds, reduces fevers, put a pinch of that in a fellow’s mug and he’ll be out cold in a half hour, that sort of thing.  (Never mind that pack of spices ... the trail cooking will actually be tasty for a few weeks!)

It also gives you an excuse to keep skill levels down.  However naturally talented, someone whose healing skills come from holding towels for the village midwife just is not going to be an expert surgeon.  However physically gifted, a teenager whose combat skills come from the retired one-armed soldier putting her through her paces a couple times a week after the farm chores are done is not going to be outdueling warlords any time soon.

And that’s how the table is set for the group’s first adventure.  I’ll get to that next installment.

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions