Tidbits: The Evil Prison

For my own part, I hate the "Everything Evil Has To Be Dressed In Black, Sporting Spikes, Dripping Ichor and have Grimdark Names" cliche.  I've liked to have Evil High Priests be genial old duffers, who beyond the necessity of sacrificing your souls to their dark gods see no reason to be cruel, discourteous, or stingy with their tea and cucumber sandwiches.  After we're done torturing you to death, sir, are there next of kin to whom you'd like your remains sent?

Your Evil Prison, therefore, shouldn't be a Gothic hellhole situated on a windswept crag in the ocean.

I'd name it something like Hollybrook.  The grounds are verdant and lovely, filled with stately trees and floral arbors.  The walls are of a pleasant cream-yellow stone quarried nearby, and the attendants – tall and handsome to a one, with open, broad smiles – are clad in robes of matching hue.  It is true that smoke billows from the chimneys no matter the season, but it is always the pleasing scent of wood smoke ... however much no lumber deliveries ever seem to be made.

Indeed, no deliveries of any kind – of provisions, of supplies – are made to Hollybrook. Only the prisoners ever come – in the bright cream-and-crimson lacquered carriages that are the familiar symbol of the prison throughout the Kingdom.  Sometimes they're even seen again, their gaze hollowed out with enduring horror, as they haltingly stumble through the riven shards of their lives.  But of what goes on behind the sun-washed walls of Hollybrook, no one has ever said.

The Gaming Store is DOOOMED!!!

I've lost count of the "OMG the FLGS ‡ is DOOOOOOMED!!" forum threads I've seen over the years. I saw them in amateur press compilations as early as the late-80s. 

Most of the rants stem from the writers’ favorite local outlet closing shop, and the rest base theirs on their FLGS undergoing one or more of the following trends which – in their sole and exclusive opinion – disqualifies the FLGS from being a "G":

* Those Damned Kids And Their Card Games;

* The clientele is full of people younger (or older) than the poster likes ... too many (or not enough) piercings, tats or black clothing? Lowlifes or fuddy-duddys, the lot of them;

* It doesn't stock a high enough percentage of the Right Games: too many of those stupid small-press games that waste space (if the poster doesn't play those), too much of that "corporate" swill (= any game that gamers outside of Internet forums have heard of, if the poster doesn't play those). None of that Warhammer crap (if the poster doesn't like the 40K crowd) ... etc etc. Nothing too old (if the poster only wants the Latest Edition of Everything) ... or with lots of bins of dusty – and heavily discounted – antiques (if the poster isn't a treasure hunter);

* It doesn’t have a large gaming space, for which the owner will never harass the players to buy things or put themselves out in any way, such as explaining to curious customers what we're doing or which game we're playing. The priority, of course, should be for the Right Games; or

* The counter help doesn’t have encyclopedic knowledge of the pros and cons of every item in the store / the owner doesn’t seem to be all that interested in RPGs, as opposed to Those Damned Card Games.

Toss in a healthy dollop of “OMG the Internet/Amazon is eating everything,” and there you go.

I'll throw an anecdote out there: as of 2014, of the five FLGSes I knew of in Metro Boston in 1978, each and every one is still in business. Have they changed over the years? Well, for one thing, they weren't 100% tabletop RPG outlets in 1978 either any more than they are today. The Games People Play in Cambridge was principally a traditional "game" store, then as now: fancy chess sets, cribbage, backgammon, card games, puzzles. Strategy and Fantasy World in Boston (the current Compleat Strategist) was heavily into board wargames: SPI and Avalon Hill games, that sort of thing. Hobby Bunker in Malden was (then as now) heavily invested in miniature wargaming. And so on.

Come to that, I've never seen a store that was a tabletop RPG outlet and nothing but. They've always had some other serious focus: SF/fantasy books, hobby modeling, wargames, comics books, miniatures, Eurogames, board games, computer games, CCGs, even radio-controlled thingies.  Something.

And gaming stores went out of business in the 70s, and in the 80s, and in the 90s as well. The RPGs/bookstore I first bought Fantasy Trip?  Spike McPhee's iconic Science Fantasy Bookstore, and it was priced out of the Harvard Square market by 1988. The FLGS in the town I went to college in 1982? Out of business two years later. Its replacement? Gone by 1989. (I don't remember its name, but curiously enough, I do remember that the partnership that owned it styled themselves "World Domination Enterprises.") The two FLGSs I first patronized when I moved to Springfield MA in the late 80s?  The Tin Soldier in Court Square was out of business by 1990, Dragon's Lair in East Longmeadow was out of business by '95.  The big box bookstores like Borders and Media Play that had large RPG sections?  Well, we know what happened to the big box bookstores.  This has always been a volatile business, the more so in that many of them were established by fans, not by businessmen.

The first two trends?  I’m bemused, remembering some history.  If you’re younger than fifty you wouldn't remember, but turn the clock back, and all the FLGSs we've known and loved were Friendly Local WARGaming Shops. The cutting edge companies filling their shelves were SPI and Avalon Hill, the games people talked about were Diplomacy, Kingmaker, Napoleon At Waterloo and Tactics II, the bookracks held dozens of illustration books so as to accurately paint your military minis in proper period fashion, and the featured magazines were Moves, Strategy & Tactics and The General.

And man, were those wargamers pissed at us. Their cozy little world, and their FLWSs, were invaded by a horde of geeky kids blathering on about elves and alignments and orcs and dungeons and lawful good clerics with +3 holy maces of defenestration.  Those Damned Kids weren't the least bit impressed by (or interested in) the oldbies' encyclopedic knowledge of the Peninsular Campaign or the order of battle at Gettysburg, they couldn't care less who Charles Roberts or Jim Dunnigan were, and within a short period of time, the wargamers slunk away in a collective huff. The owners of the shops saw there were heaps of money to be made off the backs of the RPGers and converted to suit.

That's the bottom line: these brick-and-mortar stores are no more our permanent, exclusive clubhouses than they were of the wargamers we supplanted.

Now, sure: there are plenty of reasons not to patronize a FLGS.  I actually happen to agree with most of them.  I can get a far larger selection, significantly cheaper, purchasing online.  I game out of my comfortable, quiet apartment, set up the way I like, playing the hours I want, rather than at rickety game store tables, subject to the store noise and wanderers interrupting us, dependent on the store hours and the goodwill of the owner, and with (understandable) pressure to Buy Stuff.  I can find players, on the rare occasions I solicit them, from online bulletin boards and game finders, without the dogeared notices on FLGS corkboards that never actually have worked.

But that’s just me.

Because the real subtext to "The gaming store is DOOOMED!!!" is that "The HOBBY is DOOOMED!!!"  Which is even sillier than the first premise.

 

‡ - "Friendly Local Gaming Store," a widely-used acronym standard to such discussions, for those of you scoring at home.

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.

Mariners' Quarter II

Sign of the Melting Block:  This old time ice selling family business has recently been taken over by Shalla Luathaich, the grand-niece of the proprietor, who has retired to the countryside.  In reality, “Shalla” is the priestess Tantra, cleric of Mallia – the dread goddess of disease – who with her three acolytes sacrificed Shalla and her grand-uncle, forged the right papers, and plan to use this business to spread disease throughout the Old City and the ships leaving for foreign ports.

Venturers’ Guild Hall:  This five-story wood-and-stucco building houses sailors and harbor pilots; fishermen have their own Guild and are not welcome here.  Non-able seamen are discouraged from hanging around save for entrepreneurs or sea captains hiring for voyages (and pay a fee to the Guild for the privilege).  Membership costs a gold sovereign, which is taken out of the wages of a sailor’s first voyage.  The annual tithe is 15 silver sinvers or 10% of a sailor’s wages (whichever is higher), and that too is deducted from seafaring pay; captains who mislead the Guild in order to mulct this are harshly treated if caught, and blackballed on a second offense.
                           
On the first floor is a large lounge where captains and officers gather, and where a large cork board tracks known shipping.  There is an administrative office, where a wall covered with cubbyholes hold messages for passing vessels.  The Guildmaster’s office is comfortable and kitschy, with the walls covered with nautical bric-a-brac, there’s cabling instead of moulding, and so on.

Most of the second floor is taken up by a meeting hall where Venturers can hold rallies, and there is a separately run teahouse on the 2nd floor balcony upon which the sailors take tea and shoot the breeze.  

On the third and fourth floors, low cost (and mediocre quality) food and beds for seamen are available barracks style.  Supervising the barracks hall is Salty Leofri, a former bosun’s mate.   The fifth floor has modest “lockers” for long service mariners, with room for a bed, table, chair and seachest and not much more.  Notables include:  

Seldon val Troon, Dorval’s half-brother, is the Guildmaster, a position of enormous political influence and the reason why the val Troon family have plucked this plum.  Seldon is a qualified captain, but has his post far more for reasons of politicking than any other, and he is quite good at it.  A lean, hearty man who loves life.  He asserts his title for all its worth in public politicking, but never here or among his guildmates.

Nath “Hawkeye” val Troon, son of Seldon, is the chief harbor pilot.  In this post through nepotism, he is tolerated largely because pilot posts are seen as sinecures for elderly do-nothings and because Hawkeye is a genial, popular man with a reputation as a bladesman, and puts less work than he could into administrative duties (in consequence, the master piloting logs are indifferently kept). 

Cap’n Dolan Hide is the cheerful, swarthy son of a Lohvian merchant and a veteran bladesman, well off enough that he sails because he wants to do so.  He cons the Windrose, a 70' fast schooner outfitted for the tea trade and noted for being weatherly.  The Windrose sports no visible cannon, but her swivel guns shoot lightning, not bullets.

Gwythar the Knife is Dolan’s first mate, a giant of mortalendic blood. He is a skilled helmsman, but an unbelievable knife thrower, one of the world’s best.  He is festooned with knives, several enchanted and all Very Fine quality.

Vangar and Varko are twin brothers who own the Sea Lord’s Confidence, a 250 ton roundship.  They take turns as captain and helmsman, and it is difficult to tell which is which; they are both equally humorless and taciturn.  The Connie is a once-renowned sailer that was poorly repaired following a grounding, and a good bit of rot has set in. 

Shena of Seahill captains the Black Risslaca, a shallow draft sideboard schooner with four sweeps designed for inshore and reef work.   The Risslaca is a jumpy, persnickety ship requiring an attentive, attuned helmsman, which Shena is.  She won’t do a knowingly illegal act (emphasis on the “knowingly”) such as smuggling or drug running, but she also asks few questions.

The Trefoil Herb:   Neysa is a fairly prosperous elven blood herbalist.  She has two assistants who spend their time compounding preparations in bulk for the quarter’s physicians.  She is painfully aware her husband Lodos happens to be the Commodore of the Brotherhood of Renders (the great pirate cabal); they are separated and on poor terms.

The Sisterhood of Sublime Mercy Orphanage:  This orphanage hosts several dozen children at any given time, and has a sour reputation in the neighborhood.  The Sisterhood apparently believes in hard work for their charges, claiming it will teach them useful trades and a work ethic, and operates a nearby sharpener and brickmaking factory.  They claim (not completely inaccurately) to place children in fosterage on suburban farms and in apprenticeships in the city, and hotly and persistently maintains their innocence of any wrongdoing, while maintaining (also not completely inaccurately) that they teach the children to read, write and cypher.  More sinisterly, however, Mothers Mellindra and Yhantse sell a steady percentage of the better looking or stronger children as slaves to illicit buyers.  They have onsite a half-dozen scum guards (deliberately picking handsome, innocent looking ones) to help keep the children in line and discourage questions. 

Tyraesa Square:  This large public square in the northwest of the quarter has a weathered sandstone fountain so old the features of the person memorialized are no longer discernable; it is jocularly called “Old King Log” after a notoriously inept monarch of three centuries ago.  The wide base of the fountain is the source of public drinking water for the poor.  The square is also a popular venue for minstrel performances and street theater.

Dock Square:  This square is somewhat out of the way, and peopled by the lower-class district residents, the fishing trades, and the down and out.  Outsiders – the Town Watch included – will attract scrutiny, and may be harassed by local youths and wannabe thugs.  There are a number of pushcarts selling various ready-to-eat foods, which is ignored by troopers as long as the thoroughfare isn’t blocked. 

Mariners' Quarter:

(A previous version of this was up on another website, but I thought people might like to see it here: a few useful and occasionally quirky businesses for a hardbitten, somewhat poor seaport waterfront district.  Enjoy!)

The Sea Gate:   This imposing gate is of carved and polished black granite.  Open from an hour before sunsrise (or high tide, whichever comes first), closes at sunsset.  The guards take bribes to open the Gate from known captains swearing that they need to set sail during the night; those not so well known or in ill favor are well-advised to tie up at South Wharves instead.  No tolls are charged; outgoing wagons are tariffed at East Gate, but not at the Custom House proper; this is a long-held and jealously guarded perk of the Old City merchants. The Gate mounts a six-pounder culverin and two swivel guns in each of its two towers, more to keep merchants and dockworkers in line than anything else.

Barracks, Admiralty Guard:  A full company of Royal Marines is stationed at a barracks adjacent to Admiralty House, with two squads on continuous guard.  The Admiralty Guard is a much-prized post awarded only to elite Marines, and they take a great – and arrogant – pride in their posting.  The five-story tall dedicated naval aerodrome is at the southeast corner of the building, which fouls the sightline of the main wall tower just behind and has caused considerable friction between the powerful Admiralty and the Town Watch.   The Navy’s three precious scout airships are stored here for swift communication at sea, although Marshal Korak contemplates moving one to Thevelin.   

The Commandant of the Guard is Lady Danay Mayfern, a legendary ex-ranker knighted by the Crown for numerous deeds.  The (true) rumor is that she is secretly a Deep Grey Shadow warrior.  The Guard is under the nominal command of the Grand Admiral and is not under the Port Commandant’s authority, which has led to much friction in the past; Kyra Danay is a skilled enough politician to keep all sides as tolerably contented as may be. 

North Wall General Store:  Julian Maligor runs this busy corner store built against the city wall (and for which ample monies are paid for the privilege).  He is one of Keva One-Eye’s lieutenants and runs the district’s drug smuggling business for the Thieves’ Guild; two buyers make arrangements with incoming vessels, three distributors broker the smuggled goods, and Julian has two button men who serve as muscle.  Julian himself is short and fat, and lecherous almost beyond measure – he will always find time to take a lady in the backroom to “pay down” a drug debt, and any absences he has from the front during business hours is almost certainly connected with backroom gruntings.  Opium is sold legally; illegal moondust can also be had.

The Woflo Inn:  Caters to the buccaneering and smuggling trades, and thereby watched by the Guard and under the protection of the Thieves Guild.  Funny business is not long tolerated, even if the loyal clientele permitted the same.  The innkeeper is Grace Waflo – the family name is spelled differently – a winsomely pretty redhead in her early twenties who took over the inn from her sister; she is still feeling her way around keeping the itinerant clientele in line, lacking her sister’s awesome powers.  She and her husband Artaz (a lampmaker in the Firewalkers’ District) have two small children, Daisy and Els.  The barkeep is Jurgin, an ex-adventurer with a strong lecherous streak. Notable in the district for the best stews in the Old City.  The inn has ample room for guests, as well as two separate escape tunnels from the basement into the sewers. 

Keva One-Eye, who has the district concession from the Thieves’ Guild, has a backroom set aside for her uses.  Her lieutenants are Jakaesa, who brokers smuggled goods through a cell of buyers, one of longshoremen and one to launder through legitimate businesses; Layco, who runs street crime in the district, with two loan sharks, a fence, two burglars, two pickpockets and three button men; and Julian.  Keva herself has two guards. 

The owner’s older sister, Princess Elaina Waflo Elyanwe, is a elemental wizard of tremendous renown; she married into the Vinarian Imperial Family, served a term as an Intermediate Master, and was one of the great heros of the Battle of Veredar Island in 4506.  She is fanatically devoted to her family and the well-being of the Woflo, and can bring immense resources to bear to protect it.  Her bodyguard Sir Kardo is a famous ex-pirate, and she often travels with an honor guard of Vinarian Imperial Marines. 

Temple of Manannan (St. Taria’s): This small temple of the Sea Lord caters to the fisher folk and downtrodden sailors.  The exterior is of plain wood planks with a granite foundation, topped with a modest whitewashed steeple.  The glass windows are purple with age and unadorned.  A small (but sweet toned) bronze bell tolls for services and at the loss of a ship or a congregant.  There is a modest herb garden with benches set up for meditation, and a long-ago filled cemetery.

Sanctuary:  Scallop shell sconces created from translucent alabaster add to the small passage between the doorway and the chancel.  Wistful paintings of sea scenes border the whitewashed walls of the sanctuary.  The pews are of simple woods (salvaged from derelict ships), although lovingly kept, and the dark blue wool aisle runners are new; space in the sanctuary prohibit the pews from making a complete circle around the altar, as is customary.  Streams of blue and green light inside bathe the nave from a stained glass window set behind the altar.  The altar itself is of plain oak, although it is covered with a beautifully embroidered altar cloth.

The curate, a retired lobsterwoman herself, is Mother Ginevra Harlo.  Her clerical powers are modest, but she is a no-nonsense priestess with a core of flint inside, and works tirelessly for her flock without questions or misgivings about the Sea Lord’s will.   

There are two teenage acolytes, and the three live in modest quarters behind the downstairs parish hall.  The hall itself is oversized, and Mother Ginevra runs a soup kitchen mid-afternoons for down-and-out locals (augmented by castoffs from the area inns, since St. Taria’s is underfunded, save for occasional donations from Princess Elaina), all of whom are known to her.  St. Taria’s is a good place to hire common sailors and fishers, if not of the quality one would get at the Venturers’ Guild.  Available prayers: Minor Healing, Restoration, Bless, Exorcism, Divination.

Tavern, no sign:  Under a tenement block, Camibel and her disabled orcish-blood husband Elerek run this plain but clean tavern for the fishing folk and longshoremen.  Their tavern is unlicensed and illegal, and they are under threat to be shut down.  The Thieves’ Guild has offered to smooth their way for “consideration,” and are ramping up the pressure.

Sign of the Fuming Gate:   Incongruously enough, this is actually the local whale oil and coal seller, Dorinda the White.  The long ago hostel of a monastic order of the Fire God, this building was empty for years before becoming a flophouse, and now taken over by Dorinda, who wanted to expand her business from formerly cramped quarters.  She considers the sign a terribly funny joke, and hasn’t yet realized the consequences of poking fun at a notoriously grim fighting order; their first salvo is that she is under a Curse from an unamused priest.

Brothel, no sign:  Even in the loose Mariners’ District, the brother and sister team of Dachel and Keraera draw a great deal of fire.  Locally born to now-deceased fishermen, they are notorious for doing anything with anybody (or with any prop) in any combination, each other included.  Their sign was torn down and their establishment has been repeatedly vandalized. 

The Compass Rose:  The faded relic of an earlier, more prosperous era, the Rose is the largest public bathhouse in the Mariners’ Quarter.  The exterior is carved sandstone, now weathered and crumbling, the interior of glazed (and chipped) azure and white blue tile.  There is a large warm water communal bath, smaller communal baths for men and women, a steam room, a salt water bath, and two private tubs (a third is damaged and out of commission) for groups of up to four.  There is a 10% chance that any given bath is out of order on any given day.

Cooper:  Domeneka Lekarsi is a dour, skilled cooper, one of the few Mistress Race trolls in the Old City.  Much of her business involves repair work for barrels (her prime location hard up against the Sea Gate as a boost); however, with an eye towards an coin, she also sells watered wine and beer for the dockworkers, drovers and Sea Gate guards, however much illegally.

Winedark Venturers’ Bank:  A modest blue granite building houses this local bank (unconnected with the Venturers’ Guild, and in a lengthy lawsuit over the name).  Winedark is the institution of choice for many of the poorer people of the district.  Drained by the lawsuit, undercapitalized and with a number of risky loans outstanding, the bank is secretly on the verge of failure.  Well-respected "Old" Aleman is still the nominal head of the institution, but his grand-nephew "Young" Aleman and his three cousins operate the bank.  They are increasingly desperate for a quick fix, but fear a bank run if word gets out of its near-insolvency.

Tea Merchant:  Mikoguchi hi Lanta blends and serves out bulk tea to the district’s inns, taverns and general stores, aided by her eight energetic children (all, she boasts, by different fathers).  She will sell retail, but will gouge anyone save for the apothecary Neysa, whom she credits with alchemical beautification potions.  The shop carries Golden Zorca blend tea.

Do we *really* need art in gamebooks?

When we buy a gaming product, we make an investment. They cost a fair bit of money now (especially with core rules, which can run into the hundreds of dollars), and playing a game system means choices that can last decades, involve hundreds of hours of work, attract or drive away fellow gamers and affect the product lines upon which you spend money. Anyone who makes this decision based on the Überkewlness of the cover art is a complete moron. This is like deciding what kind of TV to buy based on how awesomely the manufacturer's carton is painted.

Quite aside from that I've seen more published products – my own included – marred by lousy interior art than enhanced by it, the incredibly busy interior graphics of a lot of products are just plain visually jarring ... between pseudo-medieval fonts, pictorial watermarking, sepia-toned inks.  I'm 54 years old, and visual razzle-dazzle akin to Myspace page layouts just puts me off.

And the ultimate insult is they make me pay a premium for all this crap.

I would seriously respect a major publisher that went back to softbound books, two-color plain covers, no interior art ... and that they would thereby sell their stuff for three-quarters the industry standard.

Sorry, these are books. With words. 95% of the information in these game products are verbal. Using words. This isn't World of Warcraft, and it isn't a console game, where visuals are integral to gameplay and can't be divorced from it. These are printed rules which would convey pretty much the same information if they were 100% graphics- and illustration-free.

But, after all, the "non-verbal" gamers (which in terms of tabletop seems quite an oxymoron to me, but whatever) have had things all their way for quite a few years now. Gamebooks are jammed cover to cover with pretty graphics, full color interior art, lavish borders and all manner of glitz. Just on a lark, I used a converter to strip a couple PDFs down to plain text ... and got as much as a forty percent reduction in page length.

Possibly you're comfortable with paying for a hundred pages of padding in a corebook. I sure as hell am not, and in the industry these days, only one of us is getting what he wants.

Let's take one of my pet peeves, the Serenity RPG.  It uses eight pages, a 20th of its page count, on full-color production stills of the principals of the Firefly crew.  What you learn is that (for instance) the actress Gina Torres (and by inference, the character she plays) is black, the actress Summer Glau isn't (ditto) and the actress Morena Baccarin is dusky skinned and of some other racial stock (more of the same).  Its applicability to gameplay I leave to you to imagine.

Hm, I have a copy of the Star Wars RPG here.  Now each and every page has inch-plus-wide margin graphics which mimic a wristcomp or something of the sort, and represents about a seventh of the available space for text. Want to know how much space that ate up? Fifty-four pages, about.

Now I’ve been told that, for vague and poorly articulated reasons, RPG gamers “need” there to be tons of art in gamebooks.  But strangely enough, the vast number of non-RPG publications in our culture – the ones marketed to grownups, anyway – are devoid of both.  Let's look at the first five books on my bookshelf:

Shanteys of the Seven Seas, by Stan Hugill. No interior illos. The only graphics are the first bars of many of the shanteys, done up in musical notation.

The Koran - Heck, illos are downright impious as far as a Muslim goes.

Collected Verse by Rudyard Kipling. Nope, no artwork here.

The Civil War, by Shelby Foote. There are, occasionally, maps of key Civil War battles.

The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau. A center section of maps.

Shall I keep going? More of the same, and the illustration rate drops dramatically when you get to fiction books. So could someone tell me: why is it that poets, devout religious practitioners, folk musicians, Civil War historians and social scientists can manage perfectly well without a quarter of their books being taken up by pretty pictures ... and it's believed that RPG gamers no longer can?