The Village of St. Chanan's

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

The Village of St. Chanan's

 

HISTORY

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

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

TODAY

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

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

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

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

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

CUSTOMS

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

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

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

 

LOCATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PERSONALITIES

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

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

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

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


ADVENTURE HOOKS

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

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

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

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

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

 

Designing A Fake Cult

As I’ve said before, RPGs generally suck at portraying religion.  My quote from seven years ago is that all most RPGs give us are variations of "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." 

Don't forget the cool outfits and at least one hot cult leader.

Then you have the bullshit concept that latter editions of D&D pushed that it's possible to be a legitimate cleric, with legitimate healing and blessing and clerical powers, just by hooking up with a "philosophical concept" – in other words, a cheapass dodge for players who wanted to have the cool powers without having to follow any of those boring roleplaying constraints, follow any doctrine or dogma they didn't write themselves, or take a stand on anything.  And this goes a fair bit back: a player in M.A.R. Barker’s campaign in the early 70s reported that how his fellow players handled the religion-soaked environment of Empire of the Petal Throne was to throw gold at the temples and otherwise ignore them.

So it was surprising when a forum thread asked how one would go about designing a fake cult in a fantasy setting, and so many of the posters reacted with shock and horror.  Impossible! they said.  Everyone would Know!  Nonsense, said I.

I don't see, for instance, a single bit of difference, observable to a casual onlooker, between a priestess waving her hands in the air, shouting "May the great god Mitra grant us light!" and the room filling with light, and a wizard dressed in clerical vestments, waving her hands in the air, shouting "May the great god Bunsgrabber grant us light!" ... and casting a light spell.  If the paradigm of the common folk is that the gods grant their priests supernatural powers, well, a wizard can wear pseudo-clerical vestments, stand in a "temple" and work supernatural powers.

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to turn undead?  Easy.  "The great god Bunsgrabber is not a *weak* god, and He does not cowardly hope that the Unlife will just run away!  This is how Bunsgrabber deals with the Unlife!"  Cue fireball hitting the zombie dead center.

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to heal people?  Easy.  For one, you deter the casual and the unfaithful.  "The great god Bunsgrabber is not a whore god like all the rest!  He grants healing only to His sincere worshipers!"  There in one fell swoop you take care of 90% of the supplicants.  For the handful you genuinely want to heal -- or the rich folk you want to think of themselves as True Believers -- just to make the scam look good, you invite them to drink from the Sacred Chalice upon which the Great God Bunsgrabber has breathed His mighty breath.  (Cue wind spell.)  That's the chalice you spike with a healing potion.

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to raise the dead?  Easy.  You don't.  "What is this blasphemy you speak?  Do you not know that the great god Bunsgrabber has vouchsafed your beloved dead a seat on His Great Comfy Waterbed, attended by the requisite seven Angels In Spandex?  How can you be so wicked as to wish them to return to this world of suffering and pot bellies?"

But, you say, how is the fake priest going to bless people.  Hm.  Pretty much the same as clergy bless people today worldwide, however much we have no objective proof that gods exist.  Nonetheless, billions of people seek out those blessings, and believe in their efficacy when they receive them.

But, you say, won’t the other gods object?  I don’t see it, myself.  The frequently parroted shibboleth of omnipresent, interventionist deities bears surprisingly little resemblance to common gameplay, even in D&D circles. Honestly, how often have you seen gods physically appear in your own campaigns?  And in how many campaigns are there two dozen, three dozen (... more?) gods?  How many schmuck peasants keep track of them all, and how would they do so in any event?  Not like they could try to pull up an article for Bunsgrabber on Wikipedia ...

And even so, speaking of that: here’s an example IN the modern age, where factchecking is at everyone’s fingertips.  Take a look at the whole Church of Satan deal and its offshoots.  Many really do believe in them.  Yet Anton LaVey said openly in The Satanic Bible that to a degree, it was all hooey: "Satan" really didn't exist as a real being, LaVey wasn't shy about admitting it, and all the mysticism and trappings LaVey put in the book was pretty much out of his entirely defensible position that mankind has a demonstrable love for mysticism and trappings.  A philosophical concept, huh?  Guess LaVey would've made it as a D&D cleric.  But I digress ...

Nah, this'd be a slam dunk in most any realistic fantasy setting.  (And if fantasy settings were somehow immune to grifters, how do thieves manage to survive?)

Tidbits: Game Of Thrones

And in another one of my rants from the forums ...

(ForumDood: Of course, the TV version decided to at least double the apparent size of it, AND make it scalable by random men with no particular training or experience scaling sheer ice walls of ridiculous height (LOL). Of course, the TV show also likes to show impossible castle/tower/city heights of crazy exaggerated height. "The throne room is a day's climb up...")

Well, but think about it.  If you follow Game Of Thrones, you just have to take suspension of disbelief and kick it into the holler.  Railroad very obviously didn't give a damn about logistics, distances, common sense or a lot of things.  

Gives a damn about the T-shirt sales, though, I bet!

They march gigantic armies across continental distances without giving the slightest thought to how long that actually takes or the logistics train one needs.  They have twenty guys actually capture and HOLD Winterfell, even when that force could be rolled by local peasants with hunting bows and grain flails and Northerners aren't described as being cowardly bunnies.  Why the North needs to conquer King's Landing (thousands of miles from their center of supply) is never adequately explained, when they just need to hold the Neck.  There's not enough game in all that ice and snow to feed Mance Rayder's army, not by a factor of 50.  100 grain wagons a day to alleviate the hunger in King's Landing?  Never mind the distance from Dorne to KL (which makes the notion absurd on the face), a city that size polishes off five hundred tons of food per day.  (And a little slip of a 10-year-old who's just had her ribcage caved in takes out an undead giant?  The Mother of All Critical Hits, to be sure.)

And OMG, the Wall.  I would cheerfully undertake to defend the Wall with 200 guys against the massed armies of all the world.  They can starve below while we drink tea and play pinochle, because that's a formidable technical climb for expert mountaineers (and where in the merry hell did the wildlings get that expertise AND the steel crampons?), and with the level of exhaustion that would involve, one ten-year-old with a good head for heights and a baseball bat could deal with everyone who made it in a quarter-mile's worth of wall.

Sport in campaigns

(Trust me, this will get to roleplaying.  Bear with me.)

Following the exchange with one of my kind readers in the previous post ... I joined an APBA dice baseball league in 1981.  For those of you unfamiliar with such sports simulation games, there are companies – most notably APBA and Strat-O-Matic – that every year put out a set of cards, based on their private algorithms, that seek to duplicate the performances of individual players from the previous season.  This is primarily done with baseball, which lends itself well to the approach, but has been done for other sports – you use dice and charts to determine the results of individual plays.  Some play solitaire replay seasons with the original teams, but the league I was in had the players draft new teams, and we’d keep them year after year, drafting new players and holding trades and suchlike.  I took over my team in mid-season that first year after another player dropped out.

Anyway, Jim was one of the managers.  He also happened to be an Empire of the Petal Throne GM who decided to base his team on Tekumel and out of Jakalla – the so-called “Jakalla Saints” – and did a good bit of roleplaying during his games.  The crowd would chant "Vimúhla!  Vimúhla!" – the “evil” flame god of the pantheon – if a pitcher was doing poorly and about to be pulled, and instead of placing players on waivers, Jim would say that they were impaled on one of the three impaling stakes in center field, pour encourages les autres.  (M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel is not your bog-standard D&D "lawfulgood" setting, not by a long chalk.)

I was charmed – go ahead, say it, you know you want to – and the next season moved my team into one of the cities on my gameworld.  The "Warwik Dragons" were born, playing in the city's gladiatorial arena (thus insuring short porches down the foul lines).  A PC wizard begged to be added to the team's staff, so Larindo the Witherer became (then as now) the Team Necromancer, who helped out materially when I made a waiver wire pickup.  The cards were based on the previous season of play, and in 1980 J.R. Richard – a star pitcher for the Houston Astros – was having a magnificent season before he had a stroke.  He would never pitch in the majors again.  

So, while in 1981 Richard's card was excellent, we all knew he was damaged goods, and the Jakalla manager cut him during the stretch run for a prospect.  I promptly picked him up off the waiver wire.  Since Richard had been "impaled," Larindo reclaimed the body and raised him as a zombie during a gaming session (which took some doing, since creating Unlife within the kingdom's boundary was illegal) for the team.  The following quote during an APBA match was repeated down the seasons:

    JR's Zombie:  "I ... pitch ... good.  I ... live ... again?"
    Warwik Manager:  "No, sorry, J.R., you're still dead."

PCs have attended games down the years (matches are social register events), and one got singed for being too close to the edge of the outfield wall, which erupts in a sea of magical flame every time the Dragons hit a home run.  Anyway, I was in the league until 1988, when I moved out of the area ... but I did win the championship that season, with the best record in league history (50-14), averaging ten runs a game, and racking up the single most dominant game imaginable (27-0, where my starting pitcher, the aforementioned Nolan Ryan, pitched a one-hitter; those readers who are baseball-conversant will understand how mindshattering that is).

For other sports on my gameworld?  Shinny's also a popular game in winter time: in effect early pond hockey.  There’s also a sport, not for the faint of heart, played by rock trolls.  Since they’re pretty much RuneQuest trolls, they play Trollball, and at least one party has seen a Trollball match.  Freaked the party pacifist out, too, especially when one enterprising troll spiked the “ball.”  (No, I’m not explaining further – look it up!  Consider yourself warned.)

So, given that mortalkind is given to sport, I’ve done up other sports.  Village football’s a favorite, and soccer is as low-tech as it comes – one just needs goalposts and a leather ball.  Warwik City, in Byzantine fashion, has “factions” operating out of the gladiatorial arena, competing not only in arms but in racing, athletics, martial arts and, well, baseball – the standings for the combined sports are the talk of the town, as well as a major venue for betting.  The party's about to be in an area where the local popular sport is a type of polo, played on sleeths (riding lizards that pretty much have the size, configuration and gait of Star Wars taun-tauns), and using effectively lacrosse sticks. 

Heck, if we stick to Tekumel, there's a custom known as Qadàrni, where a full-scale battle is held to settle a score, satisfy a point of honor, or adjudicate an intractable dispute or legal case.  The competitors can be any entity – private individuals, clans, temples, societies, and even political polities.  Honor demands that the sides start (nominally) even, and it gains little honor if one’s forces are known to be a great deal more capable than their foes.  Cheating, treachery or otherwise dishonorable acts are not allowed.  Such a battle begins at dawn and takes one hour, or when one side is either disabled – or slain – to a man or concedes.  These matches are major spectator sports, and occasions for a great deal of gambling.

Adding sport to your setting gives just that extra bit of local color, and also serves to divide locals into factions that have nothing to do with the hoary old RPG classics of religion and race.

Tidbits III: Convert-sations

This may just be me, but I've never considered converting supplements to the system I use from a system I don’t the horrible, barely-possible chore a lot of gamers think it needs to be.

I'm not a RPG rookie, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to pick up a game, thumb through the rules, and figure out quickly enough what means what.  "Might 80" means you're a strong dude, "6th Circle" means you can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan, "Evocation of Violet Tumescence" appears to be the system's list of temporal spells, and "21 XYW" means you're an outstanding fireballing pitcher with control issues ...

(Oh, wait, I just lapsed into APBA baseball speak.  Anyway ...)

Converting this isn't tough.  I know, in GURPS, what a strong dude looks like: he's got ST of 13-15.  I know what someone who can kick the ass of anyone not named Conan looks like; we're talking maybe 350-400 pts.  I know how to make up a wizard with a good command of temporal spells; that'd be a dozen Gate spells, say.

(Alright, I might need to take some time to replicate a 21 XYW pitcher.  Hrm.  The guy led the league in ERA that season by a giant whopping margin, as well as strikeouts/inning, but he also led the league in wild pitches by nearly twice as many as the 2nd worst.  In short, you're screwed if he hits you with a thrown missile, but he's not the most accurate guy in the world.)

I refuse, and always have refused, to worry about whether I get the equivalencies "exactly" right.  The guy who wrote the original supplement isn't running the adventure, I am.  If the original NPC could beat down three starting characters in that system 75% of the time (not that anyone's particularly run the numbers), and the eventual NPC in my system could do it 50% of the time, who's to know, and who's to care?

What would be my favorite setting?

One that feels genuine.  I got tired decades ago of the JRRT-standard Shining City In A Sea Of Empty that seemed so beloved of setting designers: you just cannot have glittering civilizations that give way to hostile wilderlands and howling orc hordes a bow shot from the capital's walls.  I don't want a terrifying war fleet without the maritime infrastructure to support it, or jackbooted legions without the secure farmlands to feed them, or hundred thousand person cities in the middle of a desert with no particular sources of food, water or trade.  I don’t need Good! Vs! Evil! to be the motivating factor behind every international, intraurban or internecine dispute; good old human motivations will do nicely.                   

One that isn't set up as a Potemkin front for the care and feeding of PCs. If there are five wizards in town, they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the PCs to put in enchantment orders.  I'm happy to see one working for the Baroness, one working for the town's richest merchant, one playing communications relay for the national military, and one being a drunkard no one with alternatives trusts any more.  (The fifth one can fit them into her schedule, sure, if they pay her enough to bump the waiting list down a bit.  They're cool with her being an earth specialist whose work is mostly in creating and shaping stone, right?)  If it's a 500-person town, there isn't unlimited gold available to buy the party's loot, and the townsfolk are only interested in buying things they can actually use.  Why would the local knight want to empty his treasury to buy that magic sword?  He's got a perfectly good one already, and he's got bills to pay, retainers to feed and the annual taxes to cough up.

One that isn't set up as a Potemkin front to oppose the PCs:  The party was trying to break into this three-story building that housed a jeweler.  Not someone who stashed the Crown Jewels, not a great enchanter, just a small-town jeweler.  And there were no windows or chimneys in the building.  No magics for light or air circulation.  No explanation as to where the smoke from lamps went.  No windows-but-heavily-barred.  No rhyme or reason, no sense to it.  No rationale beyond "haha, this building is designed to thwart PCs and force them to do a frontal assault during business hours."  (You may safely conclude that I was done with the campaign after that session.)

One with detail work in the right places.  I don't need the full gamut of combat stats and skills for the twenty lead figures in the royal court -- what are the party's chances of dueling the palace chamberlain, unless she’s really the Big Bad?  I don’t need a trap on every chest and every cabinet in every room of the palace -- good grief, the chambermaids and scullions will all be wiped out by Saturday -- and I don’t need detailed maps of the dwellings of the blacksmith and the chandler and the apothecary.  Put that work into the NPCs (and the items) with whom the party interacts at that level.

One where “it’s magic” isn’t the blanket excuse for everything. You won’t let me snuff the Big Bad or whack out her minions with no more effort than a snap of my fingers just because I say “I’m the hero,” would you?
 

Filing off the serial numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

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

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

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

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

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

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